Sheikh Hamdan Highlights Economic Resilience: What It Means for Businesses

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
It's the Morning Drive, Dubai's economic resilience is the headline of our next topic. And what that means for business, hopefully we can get to the bottom of that word. So if you've been tracking the latest updates from Dubai media office, the city's economic engine has just received a massive booster shot. His Highness, the Crown Prince, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has officially reviewed the Department of Economic, Economy and Tourism's updated strategy. And it's a pretty clear directive. So the upshot is inject hyper speed into the D33 agenda to double Dubai's economy ahead of schedule. So this comes right after billions of dirhams in economic stimulus and a total kind of AI driven digitization mandate.
And it's a new roadmap that is explicitly engineered to slash corporate friction to protect the private sector and to shield global supply chains from market headwinds. His Highness also highlighted the economic resilience as Dubai pushes ahead with its accelerated plans. What does this all mean?
Joining me in the studio to consider what resilience actually means for business today, and a lot more, is Ramki Jayaraman. He's a managing partner at Synarchy Consulting, and is in the studio. Good to meet you.

**Ramki Jayaraman** (1:31)
Tim, pleasure meeting you.

**Tim Elliott** (1:32)
Good to have you with us. Welcome to Mira Business FM. D33 targets are ambitious, but this latest review by his Highness, Hamdan, signals a shift from planning to hyper accelerated execution.
He's also highlighted economic resilience as a key priority. We hear the word resilience all the time. I'm a little bit befuddled by it. I'll be completely honest because it's slightly overused. What does corporate resilience actually mean, Ramki, for a business operating in Dubai today?

**Ramki Jayaraman** (2:08)
Tim, pleasure to be on this show today.
When I see this perspective of leadership of Dubai, and specifically that you quoted Dubai Media Office, what Excellency Sheikh Hamdan was trying to do was, resilience to Dubai is just not about survival. It's all about trying to build an aftershock of what has happened recently in terms of building new models of business, and then therefore how government can reduce friction, how do you build policy, and then aid that growth of business. That's when it's coming. It's a much larger mandate beyond just survival. That's how I look at resilience today.

**Tim Elliott** (2:49)
It's a whole new way. I think the encouragement seems to be, get on with it, a new way of looking at things. It's that kind of go for it mentality.

**Ramki Jayaraman** (2:59)
It is very true because let's kind of unpack what our context of resilience used to be, fairly a defensive concept, say 10 years ago. It's all about trying to understand what might go wrong in the context of a business continuity or business leaders. 10 years ago, you talked to a CEO, what would resilience mean? It's all about trying to plan for a backup, insurance, business continuity. That could be the kind of thematic decade before. But today, we operate in such a very volatile environment. Disruption is happening across not just geopolitics, but also from a technology disruption that we're talking about.
So here we're talking about resilience in a context where we're going to be in the disruption, in it.
So if we're in it, we need to have a mechanism. How are we going to navigate towards building a new way of operating model? That's how I see my resilience today, not a textbook, not a document, which typically used to be a case of a business continual plan. We've heard about all this 10 years ago saying business continual plans. I'll try to activate a resilience plan if and after shock happens. But today, what businesses are trying to address are exactly what leadership is trying to do from Dubai perspective is, this uncertainty is going to exist. So we go coexist with that disruption. So when you coexist in that disruption, it's how am I going to plan as a business owner myself and as we advise business owners, how do you then navigate through these uncertainties is that new definition of resilience as a strategy, not as a risk management function.

**Tim Elliott** (4:36)
So resilience used to be about how we withstand pressures, and it's now about how we withstand and deal with those pressures. It's become another stage. I mean, you mentioned a word there that 10, 15 years ago, had you mentioned in a business context, disruption, that was, no, no, no, don't upset the flow, but disruption is now an accepted mode of way we operate in business.

**Ramki Jayaraman** (5:05)
I think the way I look at resilience, today's context, Tim, would be, it's out here, right?