Why the main character of my book isn't a company, but a country.
For years, I was asked in keynotes for my best example of an engaged organisation. One day I answered honestly. The best example I had ever seen was not a company at all. It was a country, an emirate to be precise. The more I sat with that thought, the more convinced I became that Dubai deserved to be more than an example. It became the main character of my entire book.
Because none of this is a coincidence. I believe it comes down to three things. Very strong leadership, demonstrated by the rulers of this country, genuine examples of "Sheikh CEO." A purpose to be a hub for leadership and talent, and a global model for excellence and innovation. And genuinely clever marketing, observing how Dubai does it is a masterclass in PR on its own.
Where the openness actually comes from
It is not a recent invention. As early as the 1960s, Sheikh Rashid was known for engaging with ideas and people far beyond his own circle, forging real ties with the foreign merchant communities who were settling here. In 1966, he donated land in the heart of Dubai for the construction of St. Mary's Catholic Church. That was controversial at the time. Some feared it would threaten local traditions. He made clear that intolerance was not going to be the answer.
But he also drew a line. When tension flared between different communities, he shifted the focus to a shared identity. Everyone was a welcome guest, and foreign politics would not be played out in the streets of his city. Openness, yes, but never at the cost of pulling the fabric of the place apart. That balance still holds. Cultural expression stays flexible and celebrated here. A small set of values, safety, mutual respect, no imported conflict, stays completely fixed. Most friction anywhere happens when those two categories get blurred.
An almost impossible mix, that somehow works
On paper, the maths do not look promising. A local population under 10 percent. Expats who originally only planned to stay a few years. A multicultural middle layer that barely understands each other half the time. A huge blue-collar workforce holding much of it together physically. As the saying goes, it always seems impossible until it is done.
And somehow, it works. What I find genuinely inspiring is that Dubai took that complexity and, instead of flattening it, built an identity out of the mix. It is not perfect, nowhere is. But it functions, and what strikes me most is that here it is the government setting the pace on innovation, while elsewhere it is usually the private sector showing government how it should be done.
Why other countries are starting to look here
The UAE counts close to 200 nationalities living and working side by side. Western organisations are still largely struggling with diversity. Dubai has found a formula that works, and the research backs it up, diverse organisations, managed well, consistently show higher engagement.
There is also a quieter shift happening, one I think other countries could genuinely learn from. For years, expat families sent their children back to the home country for secondary school, and even more so for university. That is changing. The universities here have become genuinely excellent, and more young people are choosing to study in the UAE and then build their careers, and eventually their whole lives, here. That is a real building block of a society, more than any skyline.
I can say this from close experience. Our own two children, both strong students who could have studied anywhere in the world, chose to go to university here. They are also growing up inside our family business, picking up more about culture, negotiation and leadership from working alongside people from thirty different backgrounds than any MBA could ever teach them.
The lesson is not to copy Dubai's demographics. It is to copy its willingness to design for plurality rather than uniformity, while still being very clear about the few things that are genuinely non-negotiable. Taking something the rest of the world sees as pure complexity and turning it into something exceptional, that is about as Dubai-it as it gets. It is also, in the end, why I wrote a whole book about it.
This piece draws on a longer conversation I had recently with Emirates 24/7 for their Dubai-it series, profiling residents on why they choose to live and work here.