Saturday, December 23, 2006

Powerful Tunisians

Recently I’ve started interfacing with more Tunisians living in North America, thanks to a government sponsored venture. I was amazed to notice how numerous and widespread are the experts, the decision makers and the reseachers in this continent.

To cite some examples..

We have two in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA.

We have some in Intel, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, and Motorola, Cisco, few of these hold management position.

We have gazillion Tunisians at Nortel Networks and Alcatel, with few at the manager level but many in key engineering positions.

In the Academia, literally every university in Quebec has 2 to 4 TN professors, with one serving either as a Dean, Vice Dean or Head of a department. Elsewhere in North America, we have high ranking professors in lots of universities, to name few, New York, Carnegie Mellon, Urbana, Georgia Tech, UBC, Waterloo, UCSD, and many others.

In the banking sector, we have a high ranking official at American Express, and few others at Chase, First Boston Credit Suisse, HSBC, BMO Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank.

In the Government sector, we have virtually 3 to 4 Tunisians in every ministry of the government of Canada, however none that I know of, hold a senior management position, as Government policy does not - actively - promote diversity. In the US government, I don’t think we have any, but I may be wrong.

I’m sure there are many more, like doctors, lawyers, etc, as I will probably never know all of them. There is also the diaspora in Europe which is probably as powerful as that of North America.

Let’s imagine for a second these fellow Tunisians - or at least a nucleus of them - get together in a room (real or virtual does not matter) and agree as a group (not as individuals) on a roadmap to promote investment, improve cooperation with the West and expand exports with/from the Republic. After all, that’s how Jews got organized: Lawyers, Doctors, Real Estate managers, Traders, got together, formed a lobby and started influencing American Policy and contributing massively to their homeland, though they’ve been around way before us.

I know it’s tough, but it’s doable, ...it's really time to wake-up, think as a community and put the country first.

God Bless The Republic.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I do not agree.

These people are not “powerful Tunisians”, as you said.

They are just “skilled Tunisians”.

Only few of them have management and leadership positions (inside their corporations).

Few of them are decision makers. Few of them are entrepreneurs.

Now I agree, that there is a need to bring all these people together ; to act as a group to better influence important people, institutes and corporations and improve things in Tunisia.

Unity, Organisation, Networking .. are important to achieve this objective.

But how will push the start button ?

1:51 PM  
Blogger Skan! said...

i totally agree with saied's comment,
for example , one of the most Powerful Tunisians in the world is Tarak ben ammar , and he is less skilled than hundreds of other tunisians in International Firm ;o)

3:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Totally agree with Saied, we need an organization, and networking.

3:51 PM  
Blogger Napo said...

@saied et al. it's a matter of perspective, i didnt indicate what kind of power as of yet. It could be money power, influencal power, lobbying power, technological power...knowledge power, any power.

Homnestly, the ones i hear of are quite involved in their organization...but again i don't know all of them

These tunisians do have the power in their own organizations, and when you speak of IBM or Cisco, we're talking about involvement in the decision making of billions of dollars in asset allocation. I never said Tarek bin ammar is not an influencal person, i do not recall he lives in North America, though.

Anyhow, good to see you coming by guys, cheers.

4:06 PM  
Blogger The Ibn Khaldun Institute said...

The Tunisian Community Center:
http://www.tunisiancommunity.org

11:30 PM  

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