Page 305 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

CHAPTER 11

Bringing It Home: Fostering GCC

Awareness in the Head Office

INTRODUCTION

In a 2007 survey, 50 students on an Ivy League campus were asked
to identify what a set of international abbreviations stand for. The
university is home to one of America’s top five business schools,
and the bulk of the randomly selected participants were students of
management. Nearly everyone, as expected, could correctly say
that the “EU” stands for the European Union. About 90 percent rec-
ognized the “WTO” as the World Trade Organization. Far fewer
could identify what “OPEC” and “ASEAN” precisely stand for,
although their links to oil and to Asia were understood somewhat
better. When asked about the “GCC,” awareness was extremely
low. Less than 10 percent of students at this Ivy League university
could link “GCC” to the Gulf Cooperation Council and to the six
up-and-coming economies of which it consists. 1
Despite the economic importance and commercial potential of
the GCC, awareness of the region remains low. Had a similar survey
been conducted among senior managers at leading global firms,
awareness would likely have been better, but not stellar. To be fair,
the very term “GCC” did not exist until the early 1980s, and the com-
mercial relevance of the region is relatively recent. Many senior

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