Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
AI Policy-Making in Service of Humanity: From Davos and Washington DC to Riyadh with Manail Anis Ahmed
What if our approach to AI and technology development is overlooking the most fundamental human value – dignity? In this thought-provoking episode of Poets & Thinkers, we explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, global policy, and human-centered technology with Manail Anis Ahmed.
As a global citizen who has shaped educational institutions in the Middle East and led AI policy research, Manail brings a unique cross-cultural perspective that challenges Western-dominated tech narratives.
Manail is adjunct faculty in Biotech Entrepreneurship at Johns Hopkins University, expert on education, technology & society, and contributes to the AI Governance Alliance at the World Economic Forum.
Manail takes us on a journey across continents, revealing how different societies are navigating the AI revolution through their unique cultural lenses. She unpacks how Saudi Arabia’s rapid transformation of women’s workforce participation offers surprising lessons for the West, and how technology workers in Africa are demanding dignity in the digital economy. Throughout our conversation, Manail makes a compelling case for placing human dignity at the center of our technological future.
In this enlightening discussion, we explore:
- Why technology development needs to prioritize dignity over innovation
- How the Global South is being exploited in AI development while being excluded from its benefits
- What Saudi Arabia's approach to women in the workforce teaches us about structural change
- The natural connection between women and entrepreneurship that venture capital overlooks
- Why "people, planet, and profit" must expand to include resilience and prosperity
Throughout our discussion, Manail articulates a powerful critique of hyper-capitalism and technological determinism. The United States, once the model for prosperity, now shows concerning signs of social fragmentation as its middle class splinters. “We are so insistent on protecting the right to innovation that we forget to protect the right to dignity,” she observes, providing a cautionary tale for developing nations tempted to adopt Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality.
As we navigate the future of humanistic business leadership, Manail suggests moving beyond profit-first thinking toward resilience and context-specific prosperity. The fundamental question becomes: how can we build systems where people and societies don’t just function but truly thrive, while preserving our planet? The answer may determine whether our technological future enhances or diminishes our humanity.
Topics
00:30 - Introduction to Manail and her background as a global citizen
02:50 - Teaching responsible AI at Princeton and how it connects to entrepreneurship
10:40 - Manail's work with the Center for AI and Digital Policy
13:50 - The World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance and "Inclusive AI"
16:00 - How workers in the Global South are exploited in AI development
18:40 - The emergence of an African technology workers alliance
21:00 - Balancing rapid AI deployment with thoughtful regulation
23:00 - How the U.S. model of unbridled entrepreneurialism led to social fragmentation
28:00 - Saudi Arabia's structural approach to enabling women in the workforce
33:20 - Manail's experience creating liberal arts and business education in Sa
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Welcome to Poets and Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with Manal Anis. Manal is an AI, emerging technology and society expert. She specializes in facilitating engagement around these issues among classrooms, communities and governments. She advises business leaders and global governments on digital public infrastructure and is adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University.
Speaker 1:Last year, I invited Manil to speak to the teams in my Princeton summer program. Her impressive personal journey and her thought-provoking insights were really inspiring for the students and myself, so I wanted to have her on the show to share her insights at the intersection of artificial intelligence, global policy and human-centered technology. As a global citizen, manal has helped create the first liberal arts college for women, as well as the first business college based on the American model in Saudi Arabia. She also led research at the Center for AI and Digital Public Policy in Washington DC. I love that. Manayil brings a unique cross-cultural perspective that challenges Western-dominated tech narratives, which is both refreshing and critical to make conversations around these topics more nuanced and inclusive. If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast. Now let's jump into the conversation. Manayil, where does this podcast find you?
Speaker 2:So currently I am based in Bryn Mawr, pennsylvania, and operate from the East Coast.
Speaker 1:Great, and maybe to just give people a sense for who you are, why don't you take a moment and introduce yourself a little bit about your story, what it is that you focus on now, and then we'll jump right into the many questions I have for you.
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. So I think at this point in my career, I really think of myself as an convener, so I'm someone who brings together people in classrooms, communities, boardrooms, government offices to try and think about the human and social impact of technology. And I am really a global citizen. I was born in Pakistan. I spent my childhood in Saudi Arabia and spent a substantive amount of time working there as an adult. Both my degrees, my higher education, have been from the United States, from some excellent institutions in the United States, and now I'm affiliated as adjunct faculty with a couple of different institutions in the United States also.
Speaker 2:So I really think of myself as a global citizen and therefore I feel I have an obligation to disseminate knowledge and information globally. It's been a wonderful career.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and leading up to the recording, we talked about how you've really been on quite a number of stages just the last few months as the AI everything.
Speaker 1:Discussions are happening all over the world and people try to make sense of them both in government and in corporations, so I'm actually really excited to have this conversation with you and hear your perspective of what you've seen in all of those places and then your vision for that, Before we dive into those things. We first met when you actually came to my summer program that I teach at Princeton and where we work with entrepreneurs, startup teams and help them figure out how to turn their ideas for impact into ventures both for-profit and non-profit ventures and I was really glad that we got to have you come in and talk about AI and the responsibility that comes with this technology and the responsibility that comes with this technology. So I know you also were involved in creating and teaching the first ever responsible AI course at Princeton, so maybe you can talk a little bit about your general perspective of AI, the responsibility that comes with that and how it connects to entrepreneurship and company building.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I'm very happy to Thank you for asking and thank you for having me on the summer program for entrepreneurs at Princeton. It was a real pleasure to come in and talk to these brilliant young minds about the human and social impact of technology, the overarching impact right. And so AI becomes a really wonderful and useful starting point for these discussions, because we're still in the hype cycle, believe it or not, for AI, a couple of years and more after the public launch of ChatGPT. But also, just to trace back sort of my activities and affiliation at Princeton, what the university has been very prescient in noticing is the sort of enormous amount of public interest in AI. We find ourselves in a time where most of us above a certain age were not educated in anything remotely related to computing, to data science, to linguistics, to psychology, to neuroscience, and given that AI combines all these fields, I think there's been a gold rush toward education on these topics. So the Community and Regional Affairs Office at Princeton, which runs a wonderful program called the Community Auditing Program, invited me to design and teach their first ever course on responsible AI, and this is a course that's meant for adult learners living within a 50 mile radius. It is not for credit. They pay a nominal fee and they don't do any homework, which makes it very challenging to teach right, because you don't have a lot of time to kind of lay out an incredible foundation. You have to be quick and nimble on your feet and you have to very effectively deliver some useful information and also help participants build a framework for how to think about technology and how it impacts them on a very human level.
Speaker 2:So that was the first Apple Responsible AI course in the community auditing program that I taught at Princeton. This was a remarkable success. Enrollments were unprecedented. Usually they'll get a small class of people together, but it was over 100 people that enrolled in the first iteration and the interest was so overwhelming that the community auditing program then decided to run a second iteration of this course. So the first course that I taught was titled Responsible AI, and the second course was even more kind of demystified for the general public and that was called AI for Humans. And my learning experience through these two opportunities was that the vast majority of people are curious, they're interested, they want to be involved in the technology conversation and they feel that they have been shut out and they want to find a way in, because, after all, we are interacting with this technology, you know, 24-7. So why do we not have a say in it? And this opacity is a problem. So how do you contrast that to teaching students?
Speaker 2:Going back to the summer program for entrepreneurs at Princeton. That was a different kind of opportunity, equally wonderful, because these are brilliant young minds who have a great deal of adeptness with technology. They're digital natives. They think very differently from me, for instance. I was coming of age, I was in college, when hand-sized cell phones were becoming commercialized, had my music on cassette tapes and then CDs and then hard drives and now streaming right.
Speaker 2:So our generation has spent the most amount of money transferring our music through these platforms, and it's a facetious example but it's very telling of the kind of amplified, very quick cycles of change that we've been through, technologically speaking. But undergraduate students who are aspiring entrepreneurs have come to age in a very different world and so on some level there is a great deal of technological determinism, right. Everything that happens must happen with the use of social impact of the technology, but rather to give them a macro view of the ecosystem that they live in and to show them that there have been recent cycles in history where things have happened without these technologies relationships, how this has impacted human development, how this hyper extractive age that we're living through kind of commodifies and monetizes every single breath that we take and how, by default, we are bringing young people into the world to kind of assume that this is normal right. So it's you know briefly, it's been wonderful and thank you so much for having me in the classroom.
Speaker 1:The way we try to approach entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial responsibility right, because entrepreneurship has been probably the largest force for cultural socioeconomic change and that responsibility is a big responsibility. And while it's very exciting to think of building companies, deploying technology, raising lots of money, making lots of money, which are all sort of worthwhile pursuits in themselves kind of, but not in the larger context, as you were pointing out, and so I think you did a phenomenal job creating awareness and also giving some practical tools in how to think through that responsibility. Certainly, I know that that's sort of underlying all of your work now. Those frameworks are essential as we navigate more globally now this massive transformation, because it's not just a technology transformation, it's really, I mean, turning most things that we know on its head. It's one of the reasons why I started this podcast to explore how do we lead into and then through this future, Because I think a lot of it will change In terms of that.
Speaker 1:How do we deal with this massive transformation? I want to ask you a little bit about the work that you did when you led a research group, which was, I believe, in DC, that was focused on AI and policy, if you want to just maybe talk a little bit generally speaking about that work. I also, if you want to just maybe talk a little bit generally speaking about that work, I also know that you contributed to the AI Working Group at the World Economic Forum. So maybe just generally how do you think about policy, how we need to deal with this massive transformation on that level?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Thank you for asking the Center for AI and Digital Policy. I consider that my intellectual home in the United States, and I feel like when I entered the world of policy and responsible AI, that was the place where I found my bearings. This is a non-affiliated, non-partisan, non-profit center, mainly for education and advocacy. They only take money from foundations. They are not funded by corporations, and one of the very impactful things that they do is, every year, they publish a report called AI and Democratic Values, and this is really an inspired idea, right? Because what they're saying is well, countries all around the world are making digital policy.
Speaker 2:Ai is a huge component of that policy and of almost every national development strategy.
Speaker 2:Globally are they doing this with a view to fundamental rights, and so, to the extent that we can assume that democratic values are universally held it's not always true, but let's assume that I feel that this is an invaluable contribution because it's reminding people, as you focus on human and social development in your respective contexts, don't forget that there are people living in these countries who have inalienable rights that we must all protect.
Speaker 2:So I have so far contributed to two iterations of the AI and Democratic Values Index the one for 2022 that was published in 2023, and the one for 2023 that was published in 2023 and the one for 2023 that was published in 2024. It's an institution that I consider filled with my mentors, and I greatly admire their work, and I encourage everyone, especially those who are interested in gaining an education around the issues of fundamental rights with regard to technology. I encourage them to look them up, because their training programs are absolutely free, and so my leadership of a research team at the Center for AI and Digital Policy actually stemmed from the fact that I first enrolled as a student in one of the programs, was enriched by a wonderful education and was later able to apply for a position as a team leader for a research team, the other question you asked. I'm sorry, you had one more question I forget.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was about the World Economic Forum AI working group that you contributed to and just your perspective on that. And then I have some follow-up questions, maybe the first one I can just ask in context of that, which was where do you think governments are getting it right currently? Because we're still in a very nascent state. But, as you said, it is so critical that this is happening, and has been happening, of course, leading up to this moment. So maybe we'll connect the two, because the World Economic Forum just passed, so getting your perspective is very timely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, another fantastic question. Thank you for asking. So in January, at the annual forum in Davos, they launched a report called Blueprint for Economies, and the theme of that report was inclusive AI for the rest of the world, right. So now the World Economic Forum has something called an AI Governance Alliance, and I'm a member of that working group. They have worked in previous editions on reports about technology development, so from a tech company's perspective, about technology deployment so this is from a business and procurement perspective and about technology governance so this is from a legal and policy perspective.
Speaker 2:And what they realized, I think, is that there was no mention here in these conversations about the larger world. So we're focusing to a great extent on the Western industrialized context, which builds the technology, has the money to acquire the technology to some level not nearly enough, but to some level understands the technology. But where's everyone else? And they call it the global South, but it's actually the global majority. Yes, the rest of the world, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the Inclusive AI Working Group that produced the Blueprint for the Economies of Intelligence was working on this very topic, and so my contribution to this report is to stress once again the human and social development angle. Computing infrastructure or a data infrastructure, or a model development infrastructure, or even a model borrowing and deployment, translation and deployment infrastructure? Are you talking about upskilling the people who are impacted by this, and impacted in various ways, not just as users or consumers, but rather as what they call the toilet cleaners of the internet? Right, the people who are actually putting in the human feedback to clean the language models, to take out the graphic images, to take out the offensive references and to present a model that is somewhat sanitized from a Western spec.
Speaker 2:So, many layers of complication here. Easier said than done, right, this is very hard to explain, and it's not just that these concepts are complicated, it's also that it is in the interest of the large, mainly American tech companies to pay people in post-colonial countries like Pakistan and Kenya 50 cents an hour to clean the models. And the fact that they're providing these jobs even at this subpar, subminimal wage is a boon for these economies, because otherwise these workers don't even have that. So who is going to be the person to get up and say this is wrong? Aside from the psychological damage that's being caused to these people, it's also a question of livelihood.
Speaker 2:And here we are in the industrialized West, sitting in our comfortable offices, comfortable studios, oralizing, holding forth on these issues. These are complex issues, so I think the report tries to tease that out a little bit. But I think the report also needs to be very rightly so. It needs to be action and outcome oriented, and so the report talks about how there are human capital development strategies that can be deployed by these countries to build out technologies that are both useful to society but also dignifying human life. And, to answer your question, who's doing this?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a bit early to say. But very recently the technology workers in the entire continent of Africa have launched an alliance where they want to start insisting on better pay, they want to start insisting on better working conditions and by default I think I haven't seen this stated anywhere I think they want to start seeing the principles of Ubuntu, which is humanity and kindness, being deployed in the development of that technology. So this movement is strongly supported by many of the very outspoken technology, I would say, moral leaders. You could also call them pariahs in the United States, but you know, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. We'll see. We'll see where it goes. I'm very, very hopeful for Africa.
Speaker 1:I had not heard about that, but it sounds like exactly the kind of initiatives that are so important to not only launch but also give airtime and talk about, because you know, this is not the first time at least not in technology development that we're dealing with very similar issues. But certainly I think the scale and the speed and the potential impact, both positive and negative, even if it's unintended is much graver probably than most of the technology shifts that we've seen and lived through so far. You know it's part of the conversation I have with almost everyone so far who has been a guest on this podcast is how do we account for this a little bit more proactively than we used to? Right? Because the specifically pushed by, you know, the US-based tech companies, this whole move fast and break things attitude has globally gotten us into a lot of trouble, and if we want to use and harness this technology and its impact for good and for the good of all of humanity, then we got to be more mindful and we need to bring more voices to the table and also acknowledge that you know we've not necessarily done it well enough in the past, right? So thank you for sharing that. That's a that's a really great example of you know what all we need to consider and how you know we can make sure that more people and more voices are being heard.
Speaker 1:Going into a little bit more of this conversation, I want to. I want to ask your perspective on how leaders and I'm probably going to specify business leaders and governmental leaders how do we balance this? On the one hand, massive speed and deployment. It's happening. It's almost to the point where we can't stop the rollout. But on the other hand, we need to have the conversations and even you know conversation about regulation and thoughtful and mindful regulation. What do you see, what do you hear? And also, what is your own perspective on how we balance the two? I deliver economic prosperity and we let this technology roll out, but also make it so that it actually is a net positive for the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for asking that question. That is the conversation we need to be having, right? Is, how do you actually come to a point where you fix things? And I'd say that there's two ways to look at it. There's probably a sort of inducement way to look at it, so you know what are the positive externalities of doing something right, and then there's a sort of fear-mongering way of looking at it is you know, if you don't comply, then you will be in.
Speaker 2:Let's take the example of the United States, which, for both of us, is our adopted home. I love the United States, I'm very happy to be here, my children are getting a wonderful education that is funded by my taxpayer dollars. So you know, clearly, the system works and it's wonderful and we have a fantastic quality of life. But increasingly, in the United States, what the entire world has been noticing is that this very large, the world's largest and most prosperous middle class is now starting to fragment, right, so some of us are climbing up into what I not just I many other thinkers have referred to as the top 10%. Right, so we're climbing into the upper middle class with a view toward joining the elite, the social elite, the intellectual elite, and, on the other hand, there's a massive proportion of the middle class that is dropping below and, in terms of social mobility, going downwards into a lower socioeconomic class, which means economic hardship, which means a lower quality of life, which means underfunded schools and school districts and just a lower standard of living in general.
Speaker 2:Now we have to ask ourselves how is it that the US, which has been the model and the shining beacon for the rest of the world for human and social prosperity, how is it that it is slipping into these conditions? And the answer is very simple the very thing that made the US great, which is this entrepreneurial spirit. When it is left unchecked and unbridled and when there are no safeguards built in with human and social welfare, it has slipped into this right. This is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world, because of course you want to encourage entrepreneurialism, of course you want to encourage people taking risks, taking initiative, building businesses, creating jobs, creating employment, promoting prosperity, but do you want to do it at the expense of human and social welfare?
Speaker 2:So the examples of this and they're prevalent, right, you don't have to look very far is that the family system in the United States is unsupported. The country does not incentivize to any great extent even a nuclear family system that can take care of and raise young members of society, and therefore you find single parents of either gender, usually. To a great extent, this correlates to low-paid or underpaid minimum wage jobs. We're living through times of an affordable housing crisis in the United States. There's not enough units, and the units that are available are unaffordable for anyone making a minimum wage, so that doesn't tally up right, and so what you're finding is social fragmentation of a kind that we've at least in my generation, we have not witnessed in the US, and this is coming from a country that, post Second World War, was the beacon of hope and the home of all the innovators, all the scientists, all the entrepreneurs, scholars, artists, poets, thinkers from the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:It's only within a couple of generations that we've witnessed this very steep decline. Right, and we don't have to look too far to see why this is happening. It's because we favor corporations over individuals. It's because we are so insistent on protecting the right to innovation that we forget to protect the right to dignity. Now, I'm not saying that we become Europe, because Europe has its own problems, right, europe sort of regulates first and innovates later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can speak to that part.
Speaker 2:There you go, and it's a wonderfully humane place, I understand, but not technologically or economically very vibrant, and that welfare state system that is meant to ensure human dignity is coming under strain. And now we see how the outbreak of those symptoms are in the form of people choosing certain kinds of fundamentalist, sort of regressive governance and individuals. How is this a lesson for the rest of the world? It's a wonderful lesson for the part of the world that I come from, which is the larger Middle East right, the predominantly Muslim world. So Middle East and South Asia South Asia being my country of region of birth and citizenship and the Middle East being my adopted home in terms of my professional life, for whatever reason, perhaps it's because, in this linear development of capitalist systems, that part of the world lags behind the US, if that's the view you want to take of history, because you can also take a cyclical view. If you take a linear view these countries have not quite figured out how to be hyper-capitalistic, and so one of the things for countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia is that there are fairly regressive structures in place, where women don't leave the house, they don't go to work, and Saudi Arabia has been a massive runaway success story because in a matter of five years they have taken women's economic participation in the workforce from something like 18% to something like 36%. It's staggering, right, and it testifies to the power of structural change. But they are also starting to struggle, right, because they've put in place these wonderful systems where each time a child is born to a Saudi family they have free medical treatment. It's on the state. Their education, their schooling, from K through 12 and into university, is the responsibility of the state. They've put in place very strict anti-sexual harassment laws just before they started mandating Saudi women to get into the workforce, so this becomes an enabler. They remove the restrictions on women's mobility, so in terms of the right to drive, or the right to go to work, or the right to travel, leave the country, et cetera, et cetera. So they've done all these wonderful structural things.
Speaker 2:But then they're also witnessing a decline in rates of marriage, they're witnessing an uptake in single parenthood, they're witnessing migration into the cities. So this host of problems, you know it's a mixed bag and it comes together. And so this is a wonderful point to stop and say, because you have the economic power to dictate the kind of technology that you buy and deploy economic power to dictate the kind of technology that you buy and deploy that. You should use that power to ensure that the technologies that you're bringing in are fit for purpose and socially beneficial and good for society. So you know, I mean there's many ways to do this, there's many ways to think about it, but I think ultimately it boils down to intellectual capacity and political will, what these countries are interested in doing. I certainly think they have a bright future. I think there's a lot of smart, young, prescient people running these countries and I hope and pray that they find a different way.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting, you know when you just walk through both parallels, but also the differences. You know across certainly some of the most impactful economic and cultural zones in the world and how you know, especially the examples you gave from Saudi Arabia and you know bringing driving that cultural structural change. And read also in the US right, and we've seen it in Europe, and I love the perspective of pausing right, because it's not an either or it's not a binary directional decision. It's really a matter of what do you see as the highest order priority which I think you pointed out now a few times and I want to kind of tease that out is really dignity for individuals and then as a collective, for society and for the world we live in, and then balance the rest around it. Right, and that balance also has to be organic in some way because it needs to respond to what's happening over long periods of time. But it is really what I find a really optimistic narrative that sort of counterbalances this hyper-capitalistic narrative where, well, when it comes to capitalism, for some reason we forget the entrepreneurial paradigm of continuously wanting to improve. Just when it comes to hypercapitalism, we suddenly forget that there might actually be a better way and that we typically approach any problem we face with that entrepreneurial spirit. It just comes down to you know what is the highest order value we're striving for.
Speaker 1:So I love that you gave some really concrete examples of what you've seen and experienced and where things could go. I want to switch gears, but it's sort of related to what you just talked about with regards to some of the big transformational changes you've seen and been part of actually in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, when I was reading up on all of your work that I wasn't familiar with, I realized that you were deeply involved in creating not just one college program, but actually two. One was the first liberal arts college for women in Saudi Arabia Arabia is what you helped create and then the second one was a new college for business, both, of course, incredibly interesting and impactful projects to be involved in. So I would love to tell me and ask a little bit more about that and how it has shaped you, and also, especially I'm interested in how does this kind of shape into a vision for a future of leadership, because to me that the Venn diagram of those two circles overlapping is really interesting.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm so glad you asked. That has been possibly the most impactful phase in my career so far and I feel so lucky to have gotten the opportunities that I did. So I'll backtrack a little bit and tell you a couple of different stories to put this in context. The first is that I benefited from a wonderful liberal arts education here in the United States at Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and feel very lucky and privileged to have had that experience. It was another alumna of Swarthmore College from the class of 1960 who had been invited by the daughter of the late Queen Effat of Saudi Arabia to help establish the first liberal arts college for women in the country, and it was established in 1999. So in 2009, when I was invited to become the director for curriculum, this was the time at which the college was transitioning to university status, so it had to create three separate colleges from pre-existing departments and programs. It had to create three separate colleges, and those colleges were a College of Business and Entrepreneurship, college of Humanities and Social Science and a College of Architecture and Engineering. There was also a mandate to create a Research and Consultancy Institute where they could house and commercialize all the wonderful research that their faculty and students were doing so. That was the opportunity that presented itself to me fairly early in my career, in 2009.
Speaker 2:And I moved. I was a newlywed and my husband and I moved to Saudi Arabia a mere three months after we got married in Pakistan. Now, the remarkable thing that I found in Saudi Arabia, even though I had grown up there as a child, we had lived in a very expat-oriented community. I had gone to a British school which is why I sound the way I do and we didn't really quite understand how the country worked until I moved there as an adult. The first thing I realized is that any organization in Saudi Arabia that employs more than 50 women is mandated by law to have a nursery and daycare on campus. So as I moved to Saudi in the first year of my marriage and very quickly became pregnant with our first child, our daughter, I was in the wonderful position of, very soon after giving birth to our daughter, of being able to take her to work with me, and the same thing happened three years later when our son was born.
Speaker 2:So what I realized is that in Saudi society, a lot of these young women that were getting permission from their families because it is a very patriarchal society. They were getting permission from their families to come and study at the undergraduate level in this first liberal arts college, for women were normally first finishing high school, getting married, having a couple of babies, and then, when it was considered that they had done their duty, so to speak, they were enabled to come and get their education at the university, bringing their babies with them, and I found this a wonderfully humane idea and a great workaround around the patriarchy. So I experienced this personally. The other thing I experienced is that that long ago so this is now already 15 years ago and Saudi Arabia now, for the last five years, is being heralded as this great social experiment in modernization and you know, it's really emerged on the world map as a very interesting, sometimes questionable, but fascinating case study for how societies can transform. 15 years ago already, they were putting in place systems, processes, policies that would help them, enable their women to enter the labor market in a formal way. So all of the programs that they were developing were developed, for the most part with American higher education support, but again tailored to fit the local context. Very prescient. The other thing that the country was doing meanwhile is two years ago. Many have heard of this.
Speaker 2:Claudia Golden, the economist from Harvard and MIT, I believe, won the Nobel Prize in Economics and she won this prize on the basis of her work that she did very early on in her career. That talked about the sort of productivity ramifications of women's economic participation and the necessity for legal and structural support. We didn't see a lot of that implemented in the US. So equal work for equal pay in the US is still a battle. There is no such thing as federally mandated maternity leave in the US. Right Now, in 2025, this is still a thing. In addition to democratic backsliding, we're also having massive backsliding of women's rights and you know, on some level you're penalized if you want to have a family in the United States at this time. Economically, you're penalized and therefore disincentivized. But the Saudi Ministry of Labor and their Ministry of Economy and Planning 15 years ago, were soliciting her advice and that is the advice that they used to build out their model for women's economic participation. So now, five or six years ago, when women suddenly the restrictions on economic and personal mobility of women were removed and they were suddenly encouraged to enter the workforce and start becoming fully productive members of society, there were already systems and structures in place to support that. So that's just one example of how policymaking is a very effective tool for social change. And I'm not saying that the country doesn't have problems. It is riddled with controversies and complexities, but this is one of the things that I think they get right.
Speaker 2:Moving on, after spending about five years with Effort University again a real privilege for me I was approached by Babson College in Wellesley, massachusetts, because they had been invited by the Saudi government to build the first standalone American-style college of business and entrepreneurship in the country. They were looking for someone like me who understood the context, who had an American higher education, had a Muslim background, understood the culture and so on and so forth. So that became my next long-term employment opportunity and once again, it was very impactful because what we started realizing when we started putting in place and then marketing these MBA programs in business and entrepreneurship is that everyone in their sort of early mid-career who wanted to enroll in these programs were either newly married or heading towards a long-term partnership or having young children or thinking about having young children. And so what was it that the university, that the institution, could do to support their personal journey as they embarked on this professional and academic endeavor. The idea of family support, the idea of social and structural frameworks that enabled people not just to have dignity but to thrive and to flourish this was very important. The other thing that was very important is understanding the context.
Speaker 2:Now, in the US, it's kind of a fly by the seat of your pants. You know bootstrapping. Show up with what you have build, what you have in hand, and you'll fail a couple of times and then you'll succeed. Well, who is the demographic that can do this? It's kids out of college, right, because they're not supporting a family. They can couch surf, they can move around to where the opportunities are. They have little to lose.
Speaker 2:In a much more traditional context, like Saudi Arabia, entrepreneurs are people who are usually taking family money to consolidate investments, and so when they build something, they don't want to bootstrap, they want to invest, and when they invest, they want to ensure returns. So one of the things that they do is they invest heavily in sectors that they know are already successful, and these are mainly service-oriented. So, given that the innovation environment as we know it is nascent, there's not a lot of manufacturing there, maybe downstream products from oil, petroleum, so plastics like those, but not a whole lot in terms of nanotechnology or anything like that. Their business models are different, their product and service orientation is different and their expectation of returns and their timelines for return are quite different. So, again, hugely instructive in terms of the American model of bootstrapping is not the entrepreneurial model that works everywhere. And in fact, now that one looks around, one finds that societies all over the world are traditional societies. So if there is resources consolidated in the hands of feudal leadership or tribal leadership or political leadership, then those are the wellsprings of those resources. And in order to make that look like an American entrepreneurial model, you're going to have to change the social and governance structure. Is that really possible in a generation? So those were kinds of the lessons that I learned.
Speaker 2:But ending this very long-winded answer with the answer to your question how do these two things interact? Including women in the workforce and setting up supportive structures and frameworks for entrepreneurship go hand in hand. Because one of the things that we realized I work sort of pro bono. I devote my time to something called the Standard Chartered Women in Technology program in Pakistan, because I'm a great supporter of women in my home country and because I think they're brilliant, and all it is is a lack of resources and support.
Speaker 2:What I have found working in this program is that women are essentially entrepreneurs. Right, they work with the resources at hand, they create something out of nothing. They are fantastic stewards in terms of ecological stewardship, financial stewardship, and they're also natural born kinkeepers. So they keep the family together, they bring the community together, they provide the first aid and the ongoing support, they raise the children and take care of the aging parents, both their own and their husbands. There's a lot of complementarity between being a woman and being an entrepreneur, and so why not support them at the point that they are already so effective? And that would be my message to all communities right, it doesn't matter if you have strict gender segregation. Provide that support to women entrepreneurs as you build separate institutions for them. It doesn't have to be a mixed gender model for you to deploy human capital coming from women would fully agree.
Speaker 1:And then you look at the very low single digit percentage amount of venture capital, for example, that goes into women founders, right, and because the data is, on the flip side, very clear in terms of the success rate of women-led companies women founded and women-led companies both actually is significantly higher than their male counterparts.
Speaker 1:So it's just one of the things that this made me think of, amongst many other things.
Speaker 1:So thank you for sharing this and I think it's extremely insightful, especially also because I think it challenges and hopefully for everyone who is listening and watching it challenges a lot of the very kind of narrow narratives that we typically are exposed to in the entrepreneurial, you know, corporate corporate world and tech world.
Speaker 1:Certainly, and it's it's probably a good segue into the last bigger question I had for you, because, you know, one of the reasons I'm exploring in this podcast the future of what I call humanistic business leadership is because I think a lot of the playbook that has worked so far, pretty much since the Industrial Revolution, is no longer working and has to evolve, and I believe that, both in terms of geography and cultures, but also in terms of the disciplines, the answers for what the future looks like it has to look like, will not come from the traditional Western-dominated industrialization playbook and business schools essentially. So I want to ask you, especially the way you were exposed to both, you know the policy side as well as a variety of different cultures, cultural leadership how do you envision the future of business leadership? What does the future look like, and what skills do governmental leaders need to build in order to lead into that future and then, of course, prosper in that future?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think, for any clue as to what the future of business should look like, we should look back toward the establishment of ESG and triple bottom line criteria. So at some point, you know, miraculously, as a human race, or at least as a Western industrialized human race, we recognize that it can't just be profit, it has to be people, planet and profit. And I think we need to iterate that and take that a step further and say that, in addition to people, planet and profit, how are we planning for resilience so that we can have prosperity? And prosperity can mean different things. In a Western industrialized context, it may mean degrowth, it may mean toning down the hyper-capitalistic instinct and pulling up the standard of living of those who are being left behind.
Speaker 2:In middle-income contexts like Pakistan, it might mean providing support to the women entrepreneurs who, because it's a post-colonial country, an excellent education, speak English very well, travel and integrate globally very easily, to give them that extra bit of support. And in other, more impoverished contexts such as, you know, honduras or Bhutan, which counts its success in terms of gross national happiness, those criteria are different, so it's not one size fits all. We certainly know that Prosperity is a term that applies everywhere. So what's not one size fits all? We certainly know that Prosperity is a term that applies everywhere. So what is it that can build in resilience so that economies and societies, people, not just function, they thrive, and that ensures that we're not denuding the planet to the extent that it becomes unlivable? It's not that difficult.
Speaker 1:I want to end it just here, because that's such a perfect statement and there's probably a whole conversation that we might need to have on how we get there and also the factors that contribute to it being, on the one hand, so simple, and, on the other hand, we're doing globally and collectively, we're doing a lot of things that actually move us away from that vision, and there's a whole conversation to be had, probably, about human nature and the paradox in human nature.
Speaker 2:Well, that's why you're called Poets and Thinkers, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:So I want to thank you for this super insightful conversation. Thank you so much, and we'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:Okay, Thank you Ben.
Speaker 3:All right, that's this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets and Thinkers. If you liked this episode, okay, thank you, ben.
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