Dear Saudi Friends

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...