Middle East Businesswomen Get a Step Up

Sana Abdeljalil, 26, a slight, fine-featured graduate student in common law at the Faculty of Legal, Political, and Social Sciences in Tunis, Tunisia, had just five minutes to make her presentation.

She stood before the room in the Fuqua School of Business, hands folded, poised to perform just as she'd rehearsed in the mirror the night before at the Washington Duke Inn, which is home, for now, to all 22 participants in Fuqua's business internship program for Middle Eastern businesswomen.

The month-long intensive program, a collaboration between Emory University, Duke and the U.S. Department of State, is designed to prepare these women for internships with Fortune 500 companies in the U.S.

A computer presentation about one's company to the class was among the first, and most stress-inducing, of the group's assignments.

"At five minutes, I cut you off," Mark Brown, director of Fuqua's management communications center, told the class. "Five minutes! Time is money!" If so, thought Abdeljalil, she would gladly pay for a few more minutes. In 10 tries, she'd yet to keep the speech under five minutes in perfectly pronounced American English, her third language (of five), and Brown was sure to cut her off. 

Brown had stressed to the class the importance of time in American business culture; "Things move very quickly. You have to prepared. You might be in a meeting, and the boss might say to you, 'Tell us about your project.' You might have five minutes. Or three minutes. Or just one. You never know. So you have to be able to make your points quickly and clearly."

The "clearly" part, Abdeljalil knew, was every bit as important as the "quickly" part. To do this, you needed a "road map," as Brown called it, a way of guiding your listener along. And you needed to make a connection with your audience -- to make your message relevant.

You might, like Samayah Al Jassim, 23, a Kuwaiti presenting on Lucent Technologies, "connect" by asking a question: "Who here is interested in cheap international phone calls?" Or conjure a recognizable image, like Rabab Al Lawati, 25, a Lebanese woman interning at Nike: "You know the swosh, no? Do you want to know the story behind it? Good, I will tell you. "

Everyone knew the swosh, of course, but who knew Coudert Brothers LLP, the law firm where Abdeljalil would be working? This was the challenge. To a rapt audience, Abdeljalil recounted the unusual history of the Coudert brothers themselves, sons of the great patriarch Charles Coudert, who, after failing in an attempted coup of Napolean, narrowly escaped the guillotine and emigrated to New York.

"This year, Coudert Brothers is celebrating its 150th anniversary," said Abdeljalil, "because they are survivors!"

Applause filled the room.

The women in the room were all, in a sense, survivors, all highly driven, all succeeding against the odds. An Arab Israeli and two Palestinian women said that while they miss home, they're relieved to be able to move around worry-free. For three Iraqi women in the class, acceptance to the program was a much-needed respite from bombs and gunfire.

One day in April, during her lunch break at the Ministry of Industry in downtown Baghdad, Saba Al-Khudairy, 27, was reading Al-Sabah, one of the many newspapers to spring up in the wake of Saddam's removal, when she came across an ad for the program. "I said to my friend, 'That's me!'" she recalled. "But I didn't have much hope for it."

Weeks later, Al-Khudairy received a phone call from AMIDEAST, a non-profit group sponsoring the program, asking her to come to an interview at the Convention Center in the heavily trooped Green Zone.

"I was scared to go there. There are bombs all the time for that place. And if anyone will know I am going to work for American company, it will be bad for the family. Some of my friends said, 'You are going to work for the Americans? What are you doing?'

"But I have to try anyway. I went to the Convention Center. I had to pass seven security checks. Then, I met two nice people who asked me why I think I am so special that I should be admitted to this program, which has such a long queue of applicants. I said, 'Well, I am the most ambitious.'"

Program Background Duke's Fuqua School of Business and Emory University's Goizueta Business School have developed this unusual program in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State's Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX).

A total of 42 young Middle Eastern businesswomen are attending one month of classes at either Duke or Emory before advancing to three-month internships in Fortune 500 companies throughout the United States.

The participants, who represent Algeria, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, arrived at Fuqua Wednesday, Aug. 4. Working with the Fuqua faculty, they will study Western business culture and practice, leadership development, women in business, finance, accounting, marketing, managerial effectiveness and information technology.