Richard Eames
Daily Star staff

Less than 48 hours after arriving here from the United States, Orlando Taylor was finding Lebanon quite an eye-opener.
“Before you come to Lebanon, you don’t hear about the positives,” Taylor said. “You don’t see the potential for growth, or the potential for investors to do joint ventures a few years down the road.”
Taylor is one of almost 40 MBA students from the MIT Sloan School of Management who visited for three days last week and have now moved on to Amman and Cairo to round out a 12-day regional tour.
The Middle East trip is intended to give students a look at different economies and a chance to make contacts as a possible prelude to doing business here later. The school is organizing other trips this year to Argentina and Brazil, China and Scandinavia.
MIT business students had visited Lebanon in 1998 and 1999, and this year’s group was the largest yet. Talking to some of the students, it seemed timing had something to do with the popularity of this year’s trip.
“The Middle East is at a potential turning point, with peace looming on the horizon,” said Gwendolyn Hasse. “It’s a very exciting time to be around here. It’s a critical point, and a good time to make contacts.”
The MIT group includes more than 12 nationalities. Alonso Botero from Colombia, who has a Lebanese brother-in-law, was visiting Lebanon for the first time.
“It’s different from personal travel, because you have a chance to meet a lot of people, and in greater depth,” he said.
The schedule included a meeting with Prime Minister Salim Hoss, a lunch sponsored by the American-Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, and visits to companies such as Solidere and the Dalia milk factory in the Bekaa.
Frenchman Denis Sedes, another MBA student, spent time in Bosnia two years ago and was interested in getting to grips with another reconstruction story here.
“Lebanon is a country that’s being rebuilt, and it’s very interesting to see how they’re coping, because it’s not a usual situation,” Sedes said. “You have to try to understand what happened and what to do now.”
Sedes also said he had been sold on the Middle East idea by the trip’s organizers.
These included Hala Fadel, who was born in Lebanon, lived in France and worked for Merrill Lynch in London before enrolling in the MIT program.
Fadel, who is specializing in entrepreneurship and high-tech management, said she will probably stay in the US or go back to France after she graduates next year. Returning to Lebanon would be more of a longer-term option, she said.
Lebanese MIT alumni include professors at the American Uuniversity of Beirut, a civil engineer, an investment banker and also Kamal Hayek, the new head of the IDAL agency that promotes itself as a one-stop shop to assist potential foreign investors in Lebanon.
These and other alumni are members of the MIT Club of Lebanon, which hosted last week’s trip, including a dinner held on Thursday night, at which Economy Minister Nasser Saidi spoke to the current crop of MBAers.
Saidi discussed a number of internet and technology-related projects in Lebanon and invited the MIT students “to join a small country with high human capital potential,” perhaps by spending a few months here on sabbatical to help carry these projects out.
The students asked Saidi about access to venture capital funding in Lebanon, the possibility of Middle East countries cooperating in areas such as
e-commerce, and what Lebanon could offer investors that other countries in the region could not.
The “why Lebanon?” question was perhaps also on the minds of the AUB students attending a presentation on Friday morning led by Ken Morse, director of the entrepreneurship center at the Sloan School.
Morse and some MIT students discussed venture capital and start-up companies in an upbeat tone and gave the audience plenty of food for thought.
“Sales are the most important thing in building new companies, and most MBA programs don’t teach enough of it,” Morse said.
He also urged students to get as much real-world business experience as possible, to be ready to be unusual, take risks and possibly fail, to be willing to leave a large company for something else, and “don’t ever join a company where the CEO doesn’t love customers.”
Although it’s too early to measure concrete results of MIT’s visit here, the whistle-stop tour might have given hope to some of the next generation of Lebanese entrepreneurs. The can-do message wasn’t lost on the Lebanese students and faculty.
“One of the main problems here is a loss of confidence, which is becoming pervasive, but the young students have not been hit by this awful bug yet,” said Fadi Tueni, who teaches an MBA course on venture capital at AUB and attended both the dinner and Friday’s presentation.