Bureaucracy: Cross-Cultural Administration

[The "Bureaucracy" correspondence begins on July 23rd. Begin there for context and continue on.]

Abdullah O’Rourke writes:

As the son of an expatriate Irishman married into a Saudi family of Bedouins years before things turned fundamental in our Kingdom, I grew up learning of the bureaucratic perils of:

Cross-Cultural Administration.

Insh’Allah, you have to know that we in the Empty Quarter were once a nomadic people, bound only by the wind, the sun and the shifting desert sands. And then the black pearl of Oil was discovered and the Americans came with their wildcatting ways – and then the British with their colonial ways – and then the Sa’udis with their family ways. (For, don’t you know, we are Saudi Arabians now, but we are not all Sa’ud – a difference.)

There was room, in the beginning, for all three. The Americans built their little enclaves of Southern California suburbia and laid-back administration. The British set up their hidden stills and class-based middle management. And, as long as the income rolled in, the Sa’udi family was content to build their capital in Riyadh, separate from the worker bees and, since their power was based on royalties, becoming ever-more royal themselves.

As for the Yanks and Brits: sure they despised and contradicted one another, but there was so much moolah to mulch that they squashed it between their expat toes like jellyfish on the beach and just spent more moolah to cover up the inconsistencies in everything from bookkeeping to equipment quality standards.

Oi, but the greed of some a the Oil Giants stepped onto the Kingdom’s black pitch shores and threw it all off-kilter. When the infamous Oil Embargo of the 1970s occurred, the Oil Giants took a gander at the Sa’udi indignation over Israel’s once-again-we’ve-beaten-your-pants-off performance against her neighbors in the Yom Kippur War (never mind that the Sa’udis weren’t too friendly with those neighbors either) and the Oil Giants converted the Embargo into a giant Cash Cow.

At that point, King Faisal noticed that his indignation still only owned a pitiful percentage of that Cash Cow and started buying back some of the “Arab” oil producing company from the Americans and British. The goal was to reach the 51% mark, which happened sometime in the mid-1980s. By that time, though, Faisal was assassinated by a disco-loving nephew and the other Sa’udi family members failed to catch on to where the real royalties were buried: not under the desert sands, but in the offshore refineries that the Oil Giants still possessed – elsewhere.

But that’s a different story. What happened as part of this history is that the Kingdom realized that it did not know how to run its own business: everything was handled by Brits and Yanks – or “Other Arab” expats trained in Brit/Yank yank-both-ways-at-once ways.

So it came to pass that, as the Kingdom gradually came to own its own resources, someone – we’ll call him the “Prince” since there were 70-odd Sa’udi princes to choose from – the Prince proposed that “Why don’t we show the Americans and the British, arrogant bastards that they are, that we can use traditional Middle Eastern administrative techniques to run our chief national resource, the Petroleum Industry.”

Huzzah!, went the cry around the campfires. (Well, truly, it was more of a Laa, Insh’Allah, pass the hummus around the air-conditioned banquet tables of the Riyadh Palace, but . . .) We shall build our bureaucracy on our native standards!

Not to put it too delicately, but our native standards were Bedouin and, love my grandfather’s tribe as I do, organization is not our focus in life. Ask a man for charity – it’s yours. As a woman with your dying wish to raise your children – she’s their mother. Fly a falcon, cross the unmapped desert, drive a hard bargain in the souk – come to visit Bedu-land.

Sit at a desk and push a pencil –

I, personally, leave it to my Paki houseboy. He is educated, he is polite, he has patience. He is, in short, not a Bedouin.

Which is not to say that the Kingdom lacked for Middle Eastern administrative role models. The Ottoman Empire had ruled over us all for half a millennium – but that memory was too recent, many of our grandfathers having still the scars from Turkish boots along their spines. Besides, when Ottoman administration had really worked, it was the result of their policy of putting foreign administrators over us: mainly Mediterranean Jews and Balkan Christians. So, while Israel’s economy was the success story of the Middle East, there were few followers of the Koran looking towards Jerusalem for role models.

“Egypt!” the Prince decided. “Egypt was the Cradle of Civilization – the oldest continuous government – the oldest continuous government administration – indeed, Egyptians have administered their country continuously from the time of the Pharaohs, through the Greeks, Romans, Arabian, Ottoman, British and now, again, Egyptian rule.”

Egypt. Our role model.

And so, in the emerging affirmative action program of let Saudi Be Saudi, the Kingdom imported Egyptian consultants and their administrative models and their business standards, and we became...

A twelve thousand year old bureaucracy.

Yes, the one fly in the ointment, donkey in the stable, fox in the henhouse and other abominable clichés of glitch that, Insh’Allah, it became our fate to experience was the sad old cliché that: Just Because It’s Always Been Done That Way Doesn’t Make It Good.

Egyptian administrative techniques had been founded twelve centuries ago – outliving even their ancient Chinese contemporaries. But, if you look at history, you’ll see that once Egypt developed its Pharaonic (rhymes with “ironic”) administrative bureaucracy, it stagnated at that same place for ten millennia until the Alexander the Great brought in Hellenic energy and innovation – until Egyptian bureaucracy infiltrated their ways and dragged them down to a standstill until the next conquerors, the Romans, roamed in. And then the Arabian jihad and . . .

And we invited them in.

Sp, please, come and visit: In this corner, you’ find an American “manager” who knows his techno-duties and doesn’t understand people. In that corner a British ex-sergeant major runs “his” sand niggers about as he sees fit – no matter what anybody else needs, asks for or expects. And, in every office, you will find a taste of old (Old, OLD) Civilization administration, slowly clogging our arteries with the Bureaucracy of the Ages.

The Cube responds:

Abdullah, your “note” is practically a book, but The Cube is familiar with the practice of cross-cultural bureaucracy: at a recent multinational corporate gig, in Atlanta of all places, an American consultant was advising Dutch corporate management on how to implement a Japanese manufacturing system – at our cross-border plant in Mexico. I truly think the African influence is under-represented.