Dubai makes happen what postcolonial could have looked like with Dr Palash, Faisal Kapadia and James sing together at the #Expo2020

Expo2020Dubai is a revelation for its concerts, that are live!

Folks with fractured resumes and lives, tell good stories and make for good writers.

Immersion totally into life is a prerequisite to write. I am amazed at writers who write purely from imagination.

Talking to an ex-cop Hindi speaking Uncle on Mohammed Rafi made me tearful in the quotidian food court.

‘Halaat bure hotein hain par log naheen’

A sense of continuity since 2009.

Walking around the souks in Muscat, Nizwa, Sur or Salalah one normally comes across small and medium enterprises everywhere. The heart of the Omani economy is the small businessperson who meets quotidian concerns in the economy. In the backstreets of Ruwi, on Honda Road in Muscat is an example of the eclectic character of the traditional SME space in Oman. The computer retail and repair shop rubs shoulders with an engineering consultancy to an ethnic South Indian eatery.

All over Oman, the dominant category of business is one which does not have much bandwidth as the focus on the everyday makes the case for innovation hard in the western epistemic sense of the term, however everyday as a site of negotiation to survive is also innovation, the Omani way. How innovation is framed in the Omani SME context needs to be anchored in the local history and culture. SMEs in Oman are family owned and multigenerational hence innovation in the conventional sense might seem problematic. Hence innovation needs to be communicated as resilience for the SME rather than a fancy jargon.

SMEs in various parts of Oman have a variegated spectrum of anchor industries to service from Oil & Gas to the restaurant sector. SMEs are not a monolith and innovative interventions would need to map as per outcomes desired. The fragmented nature of the SME also needs innovation to realize economies of scale with each SME plugging in a specific node in the value chain, including retaining In Country Value as a part of localization requirements. The economies of scale through the innovation glue will factor in the pace and the cultural instincts of the SME community in Oman which is of glacial place but of solidity.

I would really suggest my country men to tone down their acerbic nationalism when overseas as if things were that great back home you would not have applied for the PhD here, funded by local taxpayers right?

Practice gratitude, loyalty is not defined by your travel document.

theory is for research papers not for transgenerational migrants such as me! It’s lived experience as we live fragments in many places in an archipelagic manner (hat-tip to Prof Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Ari Gautier !)

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My theory of change is anchored in the ‘jobs to be done’ approach, solve immediate problems but operate at a different scale and velocity to build options for the future

ESG is the flavor of the season, post Glasgow where it has transitioned from regulatory to risk to climate (sorry cash) resilience with the key to access to climate finance. At the grave risk of green washing, ESG has been the favorite hot expert title on LinkedIn, with each one a freshly minted ESG expert with little appreciation for the intellectual genealogy of the term from CSR to SROI to Impact Investing to Triple Bottomline to Sustainability. ESG or Environmental, Social & Governance is a meta-framework meant to capture non-financial risk with a multiscale import, as it works both top down and bottom up with global scales of compliance jostling for competition with local politics. ESG as a global ethical barometer is driven to tick box measures and standardized aggregated metrics for rating agencies, gives the impression of being politically aloof, masking its origins in ecological and social justice for communities located at various places, nested within scales of Global Production Networks (hat-tip to Prof. Neil Coe, my Labour Geography teacher).

The problem with non-financial disclosure it that it is non-financial, with no clear translation of E&S risks to the bottom line. There are academic researchers who attempt to build in the E&S Risk to the balance sheet, however the alphabet soup of GRI, TCFD, SASB and BSR add layers of complexity which add to the paper trail. The datafication imperative of ESG couples it to the digitization agenda. But data is good for evaluating performance, however culture as a local determinant is hard to quantify.

ESG needs to ground itself in local realities of workers’ rights and environmental loss. People work within local laws, although global SA8000/RBA standards help express worker voices. Worker collectives take audit findings to take companies such as Dyson to court in the UK, by workers. Local politics adds teeth to the global ESG regimes. Many Malaysian suppliers have been banned from exporting to USA and Canada over forced labor complaints.

ESG should be taken as dynamic toolbox to solve problems taking up from the notion of dynamic materiality to solve business issues, rather than an embellishment. ESG from a ‘Jobs to be Done’ approach compels the paradigm to think beyond green washing. Materiality thresh holds for ESG risk, brings the skin back into the game, as the woke millennials feel for brands who take care of their workers, even if companies do not. The CFO will care for the quarterly numbers.

The ability to hustle is the key skill set without stopping an entrepreneur brings to the table. A thick skin is a part of the process.

The difference between a content writer and a consultant is the value that the ‘content’ or insight that it creates. Every academic think that the transition to the consulting private sector is easy, there is the hidden transcript which is not considered in the transition.

Consultants take work as an extreme sport.