We Wish You a Pleasant Plight

Few days ago I was watching a Youtube video of a young Saudi engineer who was addressing a distinguished audience at the lately established King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He spoke about his dream and gave an excellent heart-touching speech and to make it even better he used Martian Luther King's famous words "I have a dream". His dream, as a proud Saudi, is that Saudi Arabia be ahead of the world and leads it in technology, research, and science. As a Saudi my self, I admired that engineer ambition and determination to change the world starting from his own country.

As I write this topic though I am in Ad Dammam airport waiting for my domestic flight to Madinah which was scheduled to take off two hour earlier with no clue or a word from anyone from the authorities about how long we are going to wait and why the flight is delayed. (The flight was delayed for 6 hours and we had to cancel our trip)

This is just one of the nightmares many of us face and at this time I don't have ambitious dreams, I just want to wake up from this nightmare and all the other that keep repeating since as long as I can remember. The most repeating nightmare we see everyday is on the streets while we are driving along with reckless drivers endangering our lives and theirs. What's troubling about this is the fact that these incidents keeps repeating and this indicates trouble for the future of our country because these nightmares are the results of malfunction of the country system.


Before our dreams can come to reality, we must prevent our nightmares from coming to reality. To leave Nightmare Land and go to Dream Land, there are few facts that we need to confront:

WE ARE in Nightmare Land. This simple truth is overlooked by many people because they are too optimistic and want to skip all the hard work of building the right environment for change. I am not pessimistic about the future but I believe we must not see the glass half full nor half empty. We need to see it half full AND half empty because being truthful to ourselves is the starting point.

Every thing lies on Leadership leaders in every organization must exemplify true leadership. Leaders must cast the vision and lead to the vision, and work the vision. This fact is too critical because without a vision we are headed to nowhere and direction to somewhere worth going is more important than speed. Leaders must fully understand that they are leading the organization's most valuable asset, that is people. People is what make an organization what it is and it is the leaders' responsibility to make these people great for the organization to be great.

Greatness is not a destination greatness is a process, a way of life, that is being shared by the majority. We can't be great with few individuals wining the noble prize for instant. We can't be great with a single dead. We are only great by moving from good to better all the time. This process of continuous change is a huge challenge. It is flight that usually turn into a daunting plight but the latter state is what makes it worth traveling.

As a country and individuals we ought to start the journey to our greatness, our countries need everyone of us greatness for it to be great.


With that I leave you, not wishing you a "pleasant" plight.