"Ｔhe business of unemployment is the business of us all"

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,

I want to begin by thanking President Tadashi TAKIZAWA, Chancellor Toshiaki KOUSO and the Dean of the Graduate School of Global Studies, Daishirou NOMIYA - together with the Faculty of Sophia University - for having chosen to award me with this honorary doctorate this evening.

I am very honored and also extremely humbled as I have been told that I am the first Arab to be recognised in this way.

Any contribution I have made to culture and education, to addressing global poverty and unemployment and to fostering co-existence and peace among religions has been greatly inspired by the founding fathers of our great university, with their determined pursuit of research from a global perspective into the problems that confront humanity.

I spent two happy years here at Sophia University – an experience that I cherish. It laid the foundations for my heartfelt admiration for Japan.

And Sophia championed values – simply but wonderfully summed up in the words: “For others, with others”. These generous values, now more than ever, are relevant to our new graduates, to the business leaders who will employ them and to the complex and challenging world we all live in today.

For we, the alumni of Sophia, are privileged to have an education that equips us to compete and succeed in the jobs market. But tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions, are not so fortunate.

They want to work but, through no fault of their own, they cannot find a job. Because they are unemployed, they cannot put food on their family’s table. They see their children wake up hungry in the morning and go to bed hungry at night.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

That is why I want us to focus today on what I call “the Business of Unemployment”.

I postulate that unemployment – if it is to be eliminated - has to be treated as if it were itself a business.

And responsibility cannot be left to the state alone, however benevolent. The private sector has a duty to play the lead in finding and implementing this solution – making the eradication of unemployment a business problem, requiring a business solution.

In line with this thinking, I have long believed that every CEO actually has two responsibilities – two jobs - not one.

The first is to lead his business sustainably, profitably and in harmony with all the stakeholders.

The second is to help his community to help themselves, in a sustainable manner. I have simply reconciled these two responsibilities into one by embracing the fact that the community is an equally important stakeholder in the business.

That is the sort of entrepreneurial thinking we must nurture if we are to create job opportunities and income and hope for our neighbours.

Big problems require bold solutions.

And can there be any better way to put into practice Sophia’s traditional belief in the fundamental unity of the human race?

But, a new graduate may reasonably ask, what can I do as an individual to make a difference when the world is on the razor’s edge of recession?

I am sure that would have been my fear – if I had not been able to learn from my two role models: my father – and Toyota.

My father taught me an important lesson in running a business: never to forget that life is not just about you – it is about what you can do for others.

From Toyota, I learnt not just to have respect for everyone, but to aim for continuous improvement in how our business works and in what it can achieve.

Back in 1955, when my father first entered into a partnership with Toyota he started with a very small business – a family business, as it still is today. He managed to sell just ten Land Cruisers in an entire year. To make matters worse, all these Land Cruisers were returned a year later by unsatisfied owners! Not the beginning you hope for.

But my father never gave up. He battled through all the crises. Together we have grown ALJ into the world’s largest independent distributor of Toyota and Lexus, with more than 12,000 employees in twelve countries.

He did it. You can do it.

But, when you do, never forget that making a profit is only the first chapter in the corporate story. Equally important, our companies should always look for ways to help societies help themselves, in a businesslike – and therefore sustainable – way.

Above all, today this means marching into battle against unemployment. The world in general, and the Middle East in particular, faces spiralling unemployment. At around 15 per cent – or 20 million people - our region has one of the highest jobless rates in the developing world.

It is made worse, much worse, by one of the world’s highest population growth rates. Each year, another six million able bodied young Arabs enter the labour market.

If unemployment is not tackled sustainably, the Middle East will have 50 million men and women without work in less than a decade. They will want the dignity of work and they will not tolerate the indignity of being out of work.

That is the scale of the problem that threatens to eat away at the foundations of our society.

What is the solution? You cannot treat unemployment simply as a social problem because no government has the resources – the hard cash – to buy its way out of the problem.

Nor can you turn a blind eye to unemployment and pretend it is not there. That is the wishful thinking, the abdication of responsibility, which provoked the Arab Spring – those momentous changes sweeping the Arab region from Tunisia to Cairo, to Bahrain, to Libya, to Syria and to Yemen.

The Arab Spring simultaneously raised great hopes but also an uncertain future for young people in our region. Where will their job opportunities come from?

Time and again, we have seen governments around the world treat joblessness as merely a social problem. We have seen them spend billions of dollars, even trillions. But, when you look at the results, you see the shortcomings of this “top down” approach.

Too often it is wasteful because it is government spending divorced from the business process. That is like opening a factory without first establishing a marketing discipline, in order to relate what is produced to what the market actually wants.

The result of top down theory can be described as production for warehousing rather than for consumption. Its benefit is transitory - not sustainable - because it fails to meet a market need. It is supply for which there is little demand and thus it fails to make a profit and pay its way.

The price of failure is paid not only by the taxpayer but by the jobless man or woman who, at the end of the process, still has no long term employment, no income to rely on, no food for the family.

Am I being fair? Look at the sky-high jobless figures in country after country and judge for yourself.

Eight years ago, I thought it was time to try something better, in a very small way. I started with the idea that we should turn the pyramid upside down – and start at the level of the individual, not the bureaucracy. Or, as the playwright Arthur Miller put it: “See it human”.

Next, I thought we should treat unemployment as if it were a business. This means creating a framework in which companies are incentivised to create jobs and eliminate joblessness because they can make money out of it. Or, at least, pay their way.

I was encouraged by the fact that this approach had already succeeded in health care, where the achievements of commercially run hospitals convinced most of the sceptics that business methods could achieve social goals.

So what are the main pillars you need to build an unemployment business? I think there are seven:-

• First, you operate at local level – a village, a town a sector of a city.
• Second, you help individuals living there without work to see what sort of job can realistically suit their wishes and needs.
• Third, at the same time, you explore with local businesses what skill shortages are holding back their expansion.
• Fourth, now you can start to marry local demand with local supply, to the benefit of all parts of the local community.
• And, fifth, to make it happen, you put in place a local delivery network – online as well as a physical office – staffed by business professionals. They are selected because they are skilled at organisation and at managing projects to train people for work. And it is not training in general: it must be specific training for specific jobs available at the end of the process. We label this: “Training ending in employment”.
• Sixth, you enable the unemployed with “soft loans” (not the usurious “loan shark” variety or where the candidate is burdened with the standard needs of collaterals). The cost of such loans is recovered when the unemployed candidate becomes productive.
• Finally, remember this is a private enterprise business. We benchmark our local managers against the results we expect them to achieve and we incentivise out-performance.

At the end of this full development cycle, we deliver employment that is both self-starting and self-sustaining. This is because it operates at ground level, matching real needs of individuals with real needs of businesses and providing the training to make it all possible.

Bear in mind that a business is based on the availability of suitable labour as well as the availability of finance. If one of these is lacking, you cannot generate economic growth.

Well, that is the theory. But how has our Business of Unemployment worked out in practice?

We started small. Very small.

In our first year, 2003, we started with just two job creation officers – me and my executive assistant - and our target was to encourage and train ten - just ten - unemployed Saudi Arabians to become taxi drivers. We lent them the money to acquire a taxi each – “soft” loans, but not loss-making loans.

When this modest experiment worked well, it sparked interest from both companies short of trained labour and individuals without jobs. So we said: “Let us expand the service.”

We had no grand plan. We simply grew organically, as a business does.

Our two job creating officers have grown to 500, in 20 branch offices. Our ten jobs in a year became 10,000, then 20,000. Then last year we created 45,000 job opportunities for young men and women in Saudi Arabia and this year we are on target for 52,000.

We have helped 190,000 men and women to find training and work in Saudi Arabia alone. We have branched out into Egypt and Syria, where our Unemployment Businesses already cover their costs.

We have moved into Turkey and Morocco. Next may be the UK – it’s not just the emerging markets that have a jobless problem.

Now ALJ Community Initiatives not only creates jobs and training in industries ranging from health care to car maintenance, but also helps close the gap between university education and private sector requirements; provides micro-finance; encourages young people to start their own small business; and helps housewives to make the transition from aid recipients to producers.

By the year 2016 our goal – ambitious but attainable – is to reach 500,000 job opportunities annually.

What this experience tells me is that when you embark on a voyage of discovery, you don’t know where it will take you. Yet that is no reason not to set sail.

As Sophia graduates, you too are innovators, entrepreneurs at heart, sailors on the sea of discovery. You have the capacity to challenge the status quo; the integrity, I am sure, to build social responsibility into business models; and the opportunity to inspire others to drive not just small incremental change but great transformational change too.

As the latest products of Sophia’s education, it is through your accomplishments that Sophia’s great contribution to society will be not just continued, but amplified.

And when you are confronted by cynics, as you will be, take strength from the words of GB Shaw. He said to the cynics: “You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

You are entering a world of work that is both in trouble and in transition.

It is in trouble due to the lapse of judgment and moral values to blame for the financial meltdown. It is in transition due to China, Russia and India ending decades of isolation and releasing three billion people into the free market economy.

Coping with the stresses on financial and natural resources from an aging and growing global population, with increasing expectations for a better life, presents seemingly insurmountable challenges.

But when I reflect on the truly amazing things which have been accomplished just in my lifetime, I’m optimistic that your generation will not only find solutions to the problems inherited from my generation - but you will also discover new opportunities for progress in a better and more inclusive world.

I am encouraged now to end my thanksgiving speech on a poetic note, in the words of Rabindranath Tagore:

"I slept and dreamt that life was a joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy."

And

"For others, with others" – forever.

The journey of service is long and much progress has been made. But most of the road remains untraveled. As you begin your part of the journey, the future is yours and your future can be bright.

Seize the moment, for yourself and for society.

Thank you and good luck to you all.