Dear Saudi Friends

A few months ago, last time I was in Riyadh, I had this experience. It wasn’t meant to be an experience but sometimes findings are where you don’t expect them. I was in Riyadh and I saw on the map that the ministry of investment was not too far from my hotel. I thought I should take the chance to go and drop my resume.   I remember standing there looking at this big building, gathering my courage, telling myself I can do this. Once I was inside, I told a gentleman who was just walking by what I wanted and he told me where to go. I got lost a bit, but eventually found this young man at this desk. He was chatting with another young man, but they interrupted themselves to see what I wanted. I told them I was French, living in Dubai. I told them I wanted to drop my resume in case they needed someone. He said OK but he looked unconvinced. I got a copy of my generic resume out and I started highlighting a few parts here and there, the parts that were most interesting to them. ...

A few months ago, I had this meeting with this lady at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. It was an informal meeting. I had traveled all the way from Dubai, this road I don’t like to drive. I was sitting in her office, the lady was really nice. We were chatting. I was telling her where I was coming from professionally speaking. And she was telling me, showing me actually, what she was working on. And I remember thinking “This ain’t right.” We had a brief chat about it, she didn’t seem that open to feedback, I was not in the mood to insist. Oddly though, throughout the conversation, the thing I mentally kept going back to was the dress she was wearing. We were a regular week day meeting in her office and I remember she was wearing the kind of dress that I would have felt comfortable going to a wedding with. Yet there didn’t seem to be plans for a reception that day. I have kept thinking about that dress, about what it said about the times we live in. When I was a child, there was this...

There quite obviously is a battle going on, battle of the Titans, Saudi Arabia and UAE vs. Qatar and Turkey. As an observer, I see how this is now taking shape. People in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now organizing a response. Fighting back on the Turkish talking points, fighting back on Al Jazeera. If that is the strategy, let me tell you, as a communication professional, I think that this is a battle nobody will win. It will turn into something like a “he said, she said” thing, it will become messy, or boring, and in the end, nobody will win. Not the right approach. Allow me to tell you what I think would be the right approach. Let’s go back in time. You remember the debate between Kennedy and Nixon? Was that debate about ideas, about talking points? It certainly wasn’t. There was a young bright suntanned president with a bright smile, a pretty wife and cute kids. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The sun. And then, there was the moon, Richard Nixon. Electors we...

About three years ago, after considering starting a green consultancy, I decided to get to the bottom of why there was so much Saudi-shaming globally. The market was not ready for my green dreams and it seemed like an equally interesting challenge to understand Saudi Arabia’s image problem at an intimate level and to come up with a strategy to solve it.  Over the course of those three years researching Saudi Arabia’s image, I have touched on many topics, placing myself at the level of what non-insiders know because that is where most people are. The strategy of the PIF is one of those topics. It’s actually surprisingly not a topic that was until very recently extensively covered in the media. We non-insiders actually know little about the strategy of the PIF. Over the course of the last three years, I heard about Softbank and WeWork, about some renewable energy projects, about investments in the Silicon Valley, Twitter, a dog-walking app. And then these days, I heard abou...

A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a Saudi. He is one of those Saudis who went abroad to get a top education, and upon returning to Saudi, he certainly did well for himself, working both for the private sector and for the public sector, building a network of high-level contacts. I was trying to convince him to put me in touch with a minister he knew, a minister several people had told me to get in touch with. Things didn’t go as I was hoping on that front, but the conversation was still very interesting. The general topic of the conversation was Saudi Arabia’s strategy to change its global image, the very topic I have been working on for over 3 years. On this topic, this Saudi man expressed in clear terms things I had already heard here and there before. To tell you the truth, the conversation took a hectic turn. I must admit, sometimes I lose patience when I am facing men who think they have it all figured out, when I know they don’t. The man...

I guess that by now it has hit us all that we will all be going through some kind of containment in the next few weeks. Hard containment or soft containment depends on the circumstances but as more countries are implementing restrictive measures (you know sh*t is hitting the middle-eastern fan when you read bars and cafes are closing in Lebanon), it’s probably safe to assume we should all be looking for things to do at home. I am not sure this is entirely related but over the last couple of weeks, two Saudis have asked me for recommendations of French movies to watch. I have the feeling a lot of you, dear Saudi friends, are movie buffs and I guess Hollywood gets most of your attention there, but I was quite pleased to hear French movies are all somewhere on your mind. So I racked up my brain and came up with... The ultimate list of French movies Sorry, I am probably overselling this here, they are just movies I have enjoyed watching over the years, movies I would ...