Originally, I uploaded the photo with nothing but the title and it received several hits. Managing Change is a hot topic these days and I wrote a short paper about it for a course. I will go ahead and share the conclusion with everyone online…

Technology advances continuously over time. In the last decade, the flattening of the world brought people to a new and accelerated way of doing things. Face-to-face communication reduced significantly with the rise of internet and wireless technologies. For many, the new technologies are hard to cope with. In order to lead organizations into the future, leaders must study emerging technologies ahead of time and identify the technologies that would leap their organizations forward. Implementing new technologies in an organization usually require significant change in organization and its culture. Organization cultures take a long time to develop and will take a long time to change. To understand how people will resist change and know how to transform their fear of change into a thrive for success, leaders must apply change on themselves and think about the organization as a whole using systems thinking. They will set an example for their subordinates and reduce some of the cultural resistances and obstacles to change. The change implementation must be tailored to the organization and suitable to its culture. These are essentials for successfully transforming organization cultures into the future.

I wondered how the Arab world uses the internet and wanted to spot interesting facts. I collected and analyzed the data from the Alexa page rankings. I calculated the rankings giving more weight to websites that were ranked higher more often.

The Data

* Data was current as of July 22, 2008.

Interesting Facts

• All 18 countries have Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, & MSN in their Top 10
• Google is #1 in 14 countries (7 of them are localized)
• Yahoo is #1 in 3 countries
• Facebook is #1 in Lebanon
• Google France is in the Top 4 for Algeria, Morocco, & Tunisia
• Facebook is not in the Top 10 for Algeria, Libya, Oman, Syria, & Yemen
• YouTube is not in the Top 10 for Tunisia
• kooora.com is in the Top 10 for 7 countries
• Wikipedia is only in the Top 10 for Lebanon
• Google is localized for 8 Arab Countries
• Lebanon is the only country that has political websites in the Top 10

The Rankings

1. Google*
2. Yahoo!
3. Windows Live
4. YouTube
5. MSN
6. Facebook
7. Maktoob
8. Rapidshare
9. kooora.com
10. PerfSpot

* Includes localized Google websites

I happen to watch the first one that came out last year before the hype started. It caught my attention because,

1. it was not in formal Arabic (fus7a) which was burnt by all the Mexican series broadcasted over the years.
2. it was something I could relate to coming from a similar culture.

Today, a total of 5 Turkish series broadcast on Arabic satellite channels. It will probably spread like the Mexican series in a few years. Where is all the Arabic production going? Where are the writers and directors? It would be nice to see Arabic works that could compete with these dubbed series.

Every year you hear about people’s different new-year resolutions. It became a habit more than anything. I for one never really thought of one. Maybe I’ll do it this year for a change. What do you think about these resolutions? Did you achieve the goals that you set? Did any affect your life?

In February 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik eL Hariri was assasinated on When a massive bomb explosion hit his motorcade in Centeral Beirut. The city he spent most of his later years trying to rebuild. He was a great loss to his people. May god bless his soul and reveal the truth.