Why aren't there more leaders like Jomaa?

So the chase for Jomaa has ended with the man joining Juniper. The networking vendor has made a shrewd choice, especially in the light of the current climate where a number of multinationals have sought to appoint Saudi general managers for what I’ve been told are political reasons. Is the Saudi IT landscape moving in the right direction when it comes to leadership? Or is today's current political landscape influencing decision makers in Europe and the US as they look to develop their Kingdom-wide operations?

While I’m not one to care about nationality, I do miss Dubai for one reason – the quality, professionalism and talent of many of the people there. There’s very few executive management here who seem to have learnt the job from the bottom up; one name that comes to mind is quite possibly the best Saudi GM I know, Oracle’s Abdulrahman Al Thehaiban, who started off as a sales exec and worked his way up to VP.

While Abdulrahman has worked for most of his life with a multinational and has had Oracle’s culture engrained into himself and his team, I’m not so sure of others. Jomaa is another example of a man who knows his trade like the palm of his hand. A natural salesman, Jomaa knows his technology, his channel, and his customers. Contrast this to one rival’s strategic director who only learnt how to use a computer recently after joining a consulting firm (believe it or not, this person heads up his company’s smart cities division, and has been tapped to develop the vision for Saudi’s future economic development).

The question is, does the IT industry have the leadership it so desperately needs? Are end users and channels being given the helping hand they want to take them to the next step of development? I had a very interesting email from one HR exec recently in essence admitting that his firm, a very large multinational here in Saudi, that appointments are still made on connections rather than on merit.

As a person who’s been through the whole drawn out saga of talking to a multinational, I can say that it’s a process of frustration and incomprehension. A lack of professionalism pervaded the whole HR process, and in the end I got the feeling that it was all about the relationship rather than quality and abilities especially when I looked at CVs of some of those I’d be working alongside. As for follow-up from the GM? Forget it!

Do you have the same feeling? Or am I being a cynical journalist? I’d like to hear your views on the ability or lack of in the MNC space, and how your recruitment process went. Please do shoot me an email, as I’d like to hear from you.