Now, second, for a brief account of a couple of days we spent in and around Cairo. The main reason I was in Egypt was to do a talk at the American University in Cairo (AUC), organized by Professor Ali Awny of the John D. Gerhart Centre, part of the Onsi Sawiris School of Business. I have been privileged to serve on his advisory board for some years.
But, with AUC having ensured we got to visit the extraordinary new Grand Egyptian Museum on Saturday, 31st January, our second hosy – the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies (ECES) – kindly organized an early morning visit to the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx on Monday 2nd February.
And that visit produced this Substack post, built around a couple of images I had conjured in advance using Artiphoria. Here’s one of them, using the golden, C3PO-like robot I use as my avatar there – and, increasingly, in many slide presentations.
As I was creating it, I thought the robotic Sphinx was a bit of a stretch, heresy even, but then as we arrived near the rock-carved ceouching wonder (the nearby Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the original Seven Wonders of the World still extant), I spotted (and walked back to photograph) a sign advertising phaoronic virtual reality:
Since we are on an historical wavelength here, I should mention that one reason I had wanted Elaine to accompany me on this particular trip was that her father, Dr (George) Stanley Waite, born and raised in Barbados, served for six years in North Africa in WW2. Here he is at a medical station somewhere in Egypt, fifth from the left, front row. He was shipped out there shortly after marrying Elaine’s mother, Margaret, and then didn’t see her for six years.
I enjoyed the AUC and ECES sessions immensely. On one day, at AUC, I talked to a series of different groups through the days, with faculty members, students people from the business community, including a couple of chief sustainability officers. I was intrigued to hear the summary of the Center’s work by Kareman Shoair, senior research manager.
At the ECES event, moderated by ECED director Dr Abla Abdel Latif, whose corner office overlooking the Nile was itself a wonder, I spoke alongside two panellists, Dr Ahmed N. Tantawy, senior advisor to the Minister of ICT and founding director of the Applied Innovation Center at MCIT, and Tarek Osman, author and EBRD’s senior political counsellor for the Arab world, Tarek Osman. A YouTube record of the session can be found here.
Something that Dr Abla said to me after the session stuck in my mind – has subsequently provoked a big jump (I think) in my thinking. Over the weekend I have been working on a new quarter of scenarios, the Domino Scenarios, exploring what leadership will mean in a world where parallel realities are behaving like strings of domino tiles.
Where small changes in one part of the system can cause massive shifts in the system as a whole. I have now built the scenarios into my presentation for Istanbul, the Global Leaders Summit, this coming week, so more on that later.
On my second day at AUC, I spoke in a fairly large lecture theatre, hosted by the Gerhard Center and the Onsi Sawiris School of Business. The session was introduced by professor Ali and moderated by Kareman Shoair. Lively discussion afterwards with the audience, which I very much enjoyed, and met some fascinating people once the session closed.
Then we headed back to the Westin to collect our bags and head for Alexandria, the subject of the third and final post in this series.
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