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...