Omnipreneurship

An Organized Approach to Living A Life of Meaning

Amr Al-Dabbagh

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501146275
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

An omnipreneur takes an entrepreneurial approach to every aspect of life—work, family, community, health, finances, spirituality, and more. CEO, past government official, and philanthropist Amr Al-Dabbagh shares his leadership model for using omnipreneurship to improve our lives and our world.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

The search for meaning; a definition of “omnipreneurship”; why entrepreneurship needs rethinking; why omnipreneurship works; an introduction to the three principles, five values, and ten “golden rules”; what you will learn in this book

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We all have a burning desire to find meaning in our lives. We seek to know why we’re here and what our higher purpose is. But that search can be derailed by the pressures to snare the best job, get that promotion, be seen as a success—and thwarted by a modern world that is often confusing, frustrating, even frightening. Where do we turn for meaning when all that “noise” drowns out what is truly important? How can we pursue that quest when we feel conflicted about our goals and powerless to effect change?

It’s no wonder that meaning is so hard to find. We live in an era in which it is too easy to become emotionally adrift and morally compromised—a time when it’s easy to become cynical and disengaged because every day, ignorance, greed, and lust for power compete with creativity, intelligence, and goodness. We want to be effective at what we do, yet we feel overwhelmed by a world we can’t control. The result? We work and live out of balance with our true goals and values.

I think another reason we feel so fragmented is that we tend to think of our personal lives as a set of distinct, separate chapters. We measure our lives in chronological “seasons”—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle and old age—thinking that we are supposed to accomplish different things at different phases. And we divide our activities among work, community service, citizenry, and family, as if each had nothing to do with the others. This fractured approach to life keeps us from making our biggest impact every day in our short, precious lives.

Today, to achieve our biggest dreams and get where we want to go, we need a structure. We need an ethical, behavioral, and managerial backbone that is easy to remember, a solid support to keep us strong and help us attain our goals. If we want to change the world, we need an approach that integrates all that we care about.

We need omnipreneurship.

WHAT IS OMNIPRENEURSHIP?

Developed over the past thirty years, omnipreneurship is an approach to building a meaningful life. It comprises three principles, five values, and ten “golden rules”¹ that apply equally to every realm of activity, whether you are operating in business, the public sector, the nonprofit world, your family, or your own personal world. With omnipreneurship, you can achieve meaning across all the arenas of your life.

Why do I call this approach “omnipreneurship”? Though I passionately believe in the fundamentals of entrepreneurship—starting something, gathering the resources to make it grow, and being responsible for its success—I think the term entrepreneurship has been hijacked. It’s been devalued by an ever-narrowing definition that focuses on starting an innovative business and quickly harvesting personal profit. It’s become much too narrow a concept to meet the needs and challenges of the world today.

Omnipreneurship is a much larger, more encompassing concept.

Think of what we most admire in leaders who are paradigm-breakers—people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Richard Branson. These are disruptive innovators who invert existing paradigms, delight whole new worlds of customers, and even open up new industries. And they have a set of admirable characteristics—pluck, competitiveness, a willingness to take risks, imagination, hunger, creativity, and, most important, vision. What if we released that spirit of entrepreneurship from its shackles and applied all those admirable characteristics in a much bigger way to everything we do? What if, instead of just having entrepreneurs concerned only with business, we had a world full of “governpreneurs” who applied their great entrepreneurial skills to public policy; “philanthropreneurs” who did the same with charitable organizations; “familypreneurs” who looked for new ways to support their families; and even individual “preneurs” who applied a set of the best entrepreneurial characteristics to the ways they conduct themselves in their own lives and careers? The omnipreneur is someone who can master “preneurship” in all aspects of life, though not necessarily immediately or simultaneously.

Omnipreneurship extends “preneurship” in several new directions at once. I believe that the strategies and skills needed to accelerate success and live a life of meaning should belong to everyone—not just people in business, but also workers in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropists, public servants, people of faith, and family members.

In short, omnipreneurship is an entrepreneurial approach for every aspect of life. And personally, I’m trying to become the best omnipreneur I can be.

OMNIPRENEURSHIP: THE PROOF

This book presents a complete methodology that I’ve tried and tested in all my endeavors for three decades. The approach I describe began developing under the guidance of my father many years ago, but I’ve codified it only in the last five years. In the interim, I’ve tested the omnipreneurship approach over and over, and I’ve found that it applies to all walks of life. This book will provide you with plenty of examples of how it works, but here are a few quick brushstrokes:

• • •

In Business: My father started our family’s company in 1962. His first business was an egg production farm. While I was in high school, I became increasingly interested in his work. He wanted me to go to a good college abroad, but I wanted to learn from him and become a successful businessman like him. So one day, I insisted on going with him to the office. It was then that my father decided it was time for me to become serious about the business, and I got a crash course. The company wasn’t immediately profitable—in fact, things were tight, and we had to manage cash flow pretty closely. We nearly lost our shirts in a few businesses, as you will read in the pages that follow.

But today, by following the principles, values, and rules of omnipreneurship, Al-Dabbagh Group is successful. The holding company and its subsidiaries currently employ tens of thousands of employees in more than sixty countries around the world. We aim to be ranked among the top twenty wholly owned global family businesses by 2020.

• • •

In Government: The last place most people expect to see entrepreneurial principles at work is in government. Government is usually the antithesis of entrepreneurship—hidebound, unimaginative, and bureaucratic. But if you open it up, bring in entrepreneurial principles, and run it in the same way that you might run the most disruptive start-up, you can achieve change in quantum leaps.

Consider what we accomplished in the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), where I served as the governor from 2004 to December 2011. At the time I came into the office, the country was not one of the top competitive investment climates in the world, at least compared to places like Singapore or the United States. (In 2005, it ranked sixty-seventh on the World Bank’s global Ease of Doing Business scale.)

At SAGIA, we saw an opportunity to add value for companies that might want to set up business in the Middle East. We aimed high; we launched a plan we dubbed the “10x10” initiative, a program of economic reforms with the goal of making Saudi Arabia one of the top ten most competitive investment destinations by 2010 (we just missed that goal, coming in at number 11). We got to that spot by applying the principles, values, and rules of governpreneurship—from the manner in which we hired, developed, and managed talent, to figuring out new ways to delight stakeholders, to inventing ways to attract investors without having to pay them to come on board.

• • •

In Philanthropy: Our family business, as you will learn, is founded on the principle of giving. In 2001, Al-Dabbagh Group created Stars Foundation in order to transform the lives of disadvantaged children and their communities around the world. Stars focuses its activities on four main categories—health, education, protection, and WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), responding to the enormous need that still exists in the world today.²

To date, Stars Foundation has already helped improve the lives of millions of children in all corners of the globe, but we don’t sit on our laurels. We originally set out to transform the lives of 20 million children and their communities by 2020 but, applying an omnipreneurial approach, we decided to massively scale that ambition by initiating new, independent, and complementary entities that would focus on increasing our impact. So we created the annual “Philanthropreneurship Forum,” which brings together the best minds in the philanthropic and NGO worlds. We established a nonprofit entity in the United States called Philanthropy U, and joined hands with the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to introduce a nonprofit education initiative, Philanthropy University (www.philanthropyu.org). Philanthropy University offers a free set of online courses designed to equip the world’s NGOs to make their maximum impact. While Philanthropy University is not a degree- or diploma-granting program and learners are not entitled to college or other academic credit, we offer the “intellectual philanthropy” of the best experts and practitioners in the nonprofit arena in the hope of expanding the reach and effectiveness of millions of NGOs around the world.

• • •

In Family: In his late sixties, my father began to suffer the effects of Parkinson’s disease, so he passed the reins of the company to me. As he grew older, one of my father’s chief concerns was keeping Al-Dabbagh Group going. Having built a large and successful company over the course of many years and brought wealth to our very large, extended family, he worried that things could fall apart over time. (He was right. In fact, the vast majority of family businesses never last beyond the third generation.³)

My father understood that the first generation’s focus on income generation can be lost in the second generation’s interest in lifestyle, and finally the third generation’s complete loss of the original generation’s ambitions. “The first generation makes the business,” he would quip. “The second generation milks the business, and the third generation auctions the business.”

The question for him was this: How could he ensure that future generations would be responsible stakeholders and uphold the principles of giving and earning on which the company was founded?

To make certain that our family would be among the small percentage to make it beyond the third generation, my father created what he called the “Family Protocol” to govern relations among the second generation and beyond who were the future stakeholders of the giving and earning principles. The Family Protocol is a twenty-four-chapter book covering a comprehensive range of issues that deal with the grassroots causes of why family businesses move from making to milking to auctioning. We also set up a club of family members—a stand-alone organization, run like a little company, that makes sure the family follow the principles, values, and rules of omnipreneurship. The results? People in the club are not just engaged in the giving, earning, and sustaining principles of the family business, but are also doing amazing things in the world, from earning their degrees as doctors, to building businesses, to volunteering all over the world with NGOs supported by Stars Foundation.

• • •

In My Personal Life: When I was a teenager, I liked to draw pictures of my goals—a house I would like to live in, for example. I still have some of those drawings, and several of those dreams have become manifest. (I’ve always been very conscious of my ambitions, and I’ve found that visualizing what I want comes pretty easily.)

In 1994, when I was twenty-seven years old, I learned about living strategically in a more disciplined way, as I’ll describe in chapter 3. For now, let me just say that I began organizing and fine-tuning goals for ten different areas of my own life in an omnipreneurial way. In my life plan, every criterion represents either giving, earning, or sustaining or, indeed, a combination of all three. The finest balance is struck when these three principles come together in each category. The power of the Life Plan I present in chapter 3 is its balance. Who wants to wake up one day to realize that they’ve neglected something as important as family, community, or health? Omnipreneurship is working for me.

In short, I have road-tested the omnipreneurial approach I present here in a wide variety of arenas. I have tested the principles, values, and rules of omnipreneurship with the greatest leaders around the world, including well-known people in governments and academic settings as well as CEOs and leaders of NGOs who work every day to alleviate the suffering of children. I know for a fact that omnipreneurship works to make a difference, in both small and enormous ways, every moment of every day.

PRINCIPLES, VALUES, AND THE TEN GOLDEN RULES

At its core, omnipreneurship is about principled leadership. For that reason, it’s powered and infused by a set of three guiding principles, five overarching values, and ten “golden rules.” These principles, values, and rules are all part of my integrated, organic, omnipreneurial approach to work and life.

The three main princi...