Do we seek to enshrine in perpetuity in the Middle East the violence, inequality, instability and desperation that characterizes today? If that is our goal, we should continue along the path of time-tested, centralized solutions that maintain the status quo. Or are we ready to do something about meaningful change other than lament its absence? Citizens in the Middle East are dissatisfied with their governments' initiatives to solve problems and improve lives. In many cases this dissatisfaction has resulted in upheavals by and/or increasingly oppressive measures by the governments. The only constant? Instability. Decentralizing the issues and problems to the stakeholders helps solve these problems and avoids the dreaded "we know better", approach of centralized authority or outsiders. Developing decentralized solutions requires an organized bottom-up process of stakeholders who would rally around a set shared of values and goals. The shared values and goals will help ensure that the majority are "moving in the same direction". This approach is longer, more painful and time consuming. However, in contrast to other solutions, the results are sustainable. Many solutions to the world's problems defy solution because no one has the answer, or conversely, too many people proffer too many answers. There are answers to what appear to be intractable problems in the Middle east. This is good news. It is the bottom-up approach to listening ---- and it has succeeded worldwide in the private sector, the realm of profits and government. I have devoted my working life to these solutions and can attest to that. The question is not about whether the answers exists. They do. It is whether leadership, in its many factions, languages, parties and families, has the willpower to allow those solutions to implement themselves.
About the Author: Sa'ad Allawi has been making the American workplace more productive for 40 years. He has done so by listening and forging consensus among everyone in an organization. He gets everyone to, "buy in." Mr. Allawi has done this job as the co-founder and chairman of the board of Performance Logic Inc. His experience, by a coincidence of time and place, has been primarily in health care, working for NextEra, a consulting firm; chairing the provider practice of William M. Mercer, the world's largest benefits consulting company, and; directing operations improvement practice for APM, a leader in healthcare consulting. Outside of healthcare, Mr. Allawi, a native of Iraq and mechanical engineer (Thermodynamics and Nuclear), was the director of business development for AI industries, the largest private Kuwaiti conglomerate. He worked for McKinsey and Co., the world's premier global management consulting firm, providing services to Fortune 100 companies and public sector organizations. Earlier, he worked for CA Parsons, a turbine generator manufacturer, and was a section leader for MW Kellogg, petrochemical design-engineers. Mr. Allawi served on the advisory boards several healthcare, consulting, and technology companies, and advised the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, on private-sector development in Iraq. He is the author of numerous white papers and 20 articles on healthcare management entities including Healthcare Forum, Clinical Laboratories Management Review, Viewpoint (Marsh and McLennan Companies Quarterly), Business Quarterly (University of Western Ontario), Hospital Marketing and Public Relations, and Healthcare Productivity Report. Mr. Allawi co-authored 100 Top Hospitals, a study that has become the national benchmark for gauging hospital performance. He authored a chapter of Redesigning Healthcare Delivery, by Boland Healthcare, entitled "Applying Performance Engineering to Healthcare Organizations." Mr. Allawi, past President of a Rotary chapter, received a bachelor of engineering in mechanical engineering, with a concentration in thermodynamics and nuclear, from Liverpool University. He holds an MBA from Columbia University, School of Business, with a specialty in Operations Research and International Business.