BONUS | Dr. Talal Abu Ghazaleh - The Godfather of Arab Accounting (with Rouba Zeidan)

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization(TAGORG)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/talal-abu-ghazaleh-organization/


Talal Abu-Ghazaleh:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talal-abu-ghazaleh-95b298/
Joa'an Abu Ghazaleh:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joa-an-abu-ghazaleh-701a9788/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)


Welcome back for another bonus episode of Count Me In. For
today's conversation, we're going to hear my co-host Rouba Zeidan
conduct a very special interview with the godfather of Arab
accounting. Let's listen in now. 


 


Rouba: (00:22)


So hello, this is Rouba Zeidan. Tonight I have a very, very
special guest, Dr. Abu Ghazaleh, who's an accountant by
profession and one of the greatest and most influential minds in
the Arab world. He's a graduate of the American University of
Beirut, which is a pride for a Lebanese, or for someone with
Lebanese origin like myself, but you also had honorary degrees
and PHDs from various other universities throughout your career.
You've also been honored by numerous diplomatic figures and
presidents throughout your life. You also have a very
longstanding series of friendships with the likes of Kofi Annan
and anymore. You're major advocate of intellectual property,
education, knowledge, economy and information technology. And
you're known for your forward-thinking business projects and
ideas and the Arab world and globally. So, one of your
universities in Jordan, actually has no testing. In order to
graduate, you just need to innovate as a student, which we found
quite interesting. How do you feel the educational system in the
region is working to promote and encourage innovation in young
minds? 


 


Dr. Talal: (01:31)


You may be surprised, or you may know more than I that this is
not a unique problem in this region. It is international. I was
invited by Harvard university, Columbia, and MIT, to make public
speeches and I told them, that it is unfortunate that these great
institutions who are supposed to be the best in the world, have
made themselves redundant. Because what they do is still what was
happening in the “Kuttab” (an old-fashioned method of education
which used to be prevalent in the Arab world). They used to in
“Kuttab” sit on the ground. Teacher, books, lectures, exams. The
exams are for testing how good is your memory. How much do you
remember of what we taught you? This is the same now in Harvard
or any great university, not just in this part of the world. And
we produce job seekers by giving them certificates that they are
good at remembering what they were taught. It's a test of “Hifth”
(memorization in Arabic) how good you are at remembering what we
have taught you. Incidentally, I don't remember anything I
learned at school or at university, and a great school and a
great university I went to. I don’t remember anything. Because
they used to teach us what is the highest mountain in the world?
What is the longest river? what is the oldest city? Information
now that it is a pity to use and dwell on, on our memory space,
instead of using our memory space for useful thinking and
production. Now I don't remember anything and unfortunately our
part of the world, because it follows the American and the
Western culture in teaching, is in the same way. I believe it's
time. And I told everybody that it's time for universities to
realize that, in the fourth of revolution, the industrial
revolution, what is needed is innovators and not graduates who
are job seekers. Why? Because an innovator, sets up the business
and employs others. Our current job seekers, they go around
looking for jobs, like I did. I applied when I graduated to
something like 700 schools and companies to work. I got 500
refused. Not interested. I don’t have experience. We will look
you up once we review, etc. and 200 even ignored my letter. 
I keep these letters for memory to teach myself, I keep reminding
myself. I keep them in a luggage bag. And I carry them wherever I
travel. If I change locations, like I did to Canada or to Cairo
or to Amman. When I move from place to place, I move this bag.
Why? Because it is a good reminder that a university degree is
useless. Even at the time when I graduated in 1960, there were
people who were making money and had no degrees, and making
successes, who had no degrees. And as I said in my speech today,
that a job prevents you from being poor, but it also prevents you
from becoming rich. That is a fact. Now, our educational system
is very wrong. Basically, because, sorry, look at, doctors. A
doctor will not give you a medicine without examining you. In
schools, we treat all brains with the same medicine and there are
no two brains which are equal. This is what the scientists tell
us, every brain is different. And how do you feed my body, as my
body needs, but when it comes to my brain, which I think is more
important than my body, you feed the intelligent, the idiot, the
slow thinker, the very fast thinker, the man with the critical
mind, the man who is lazy, we feed them the same education. The
president of Harvard, former president of Harvard said, “The
Tsunami of modern education, this Tsunami is going to wipe all
schools and universities who do not adapt to the needs of change
in the knowledge age. Now, that is why the leadership of change
in education shifted from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia,
whatever, France, to the Scandinavian countries. Finland today is
the leader in innovating education and they are now realizing it
now and implementing in many, schools. First, the decision now is
that there is no government education organization. It's not the
business of government to teach and they are moving all
government education to private sector. Number 2, the private
sector should not teach you. Their job is to make sure that you
know how to learn. Not to be taught. To learn, you learn what is
suitable to you, what is adaptable and convenient for your brain.
So we have to realize that in the knowledge age where the only
source of income and wealth is through knowledge creation and
that's why at the Talal Abu Ghazaleh College for Innovation,
which I think is the first in the world, not only in the region,
there isn't any college in the world which says, I don't examine
you to graduate. You have to submit an acceptable innovation, not
just any kind. And we know because we are the largest and the
leading intellectual property company in the world. We know what
makes an innovation. So, you have to invent something. And invent
doesn't mean that you have to do something new. Any change to
your mobile, in size, in design, in numbers, in program, is a new
invention. That is what the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) says, one which board I served, as an expert.
So therefore, what we need now is to invent in order, to make
this movement of progress in the right direction. There is no
place in the future for anything except innovators. And when I
say innovators, I mean every individual. The telephone operator
can innovate. A painter innovates. Innovation is any addition or
change or improvement that has value and is ‘commercializable’.
It can be commercialized. And that is what we do. So, what we do
in our company, and this gives us an added value is in this
school, we test your invention and say, great, this is an
innovation. Then we can register it and protect it for you as an
intellectual right for the student, for their own right. It’s
their ownership. Then comes a third stage, the commercialization
of inventions. We help to put them, we help them to...