Egyptians: Born to Be Inefficient?

I don’t believe that people are genetically disposed toward certain personal characteristics. Despite stereotypes that claim otherwise, I’ve never seen scientific evidence suggesting that any race is biologically lazy, emotional, good at math or dancing, organized, disorganized, intuitively sporty or entrepreneurial. Sure, the customs, the priorities, or the history of a given culture can bestow its constituents with these traits. Cultures that place a premium on education coupled with self-discipline might produce more than an average number of engineers, doctors, and physicists, while those whose traditions value physical movement as an important part of social participation might turn out singers, dancers, and men and women with an ear for rhythm. But this is upbringing, not genes. Nurture, not nature.

Having these views, why did I find myself surprised last week to stumble across a heated debate between two coworkers about how to make the AUC Press warehouse function most efficiently? Let me backtrack for a moment and note that AUC Press is, in my opinion, run with extraordinary efficiency by Egyptian standards. The director sits in the center of a web of command with one thread connecting him to the head of each of the departments (promotion, production, sales, editorial, accounting), who in turn hold threads linking them to their underlings, each of whom is saddled with a set of non-overlapping responsibilities. Yes, there are times when the web falls apart and department heads lose track of what’s going on beneath them. There are lapses in the carefully constructed checks-and-balances system that result in slip-ups like the one last fall, where hundreds of gold-foiled invitations to a prestigious literary award ceremony were mailed with ‘Please RVSP’ written on them. But occasional mistakes can happen in the best-managed businesses, in America as well as here.

So why the caveat ‘by Egyptian standards?’ The purpose of tacking on this modifier is to suggest two things: first, that Egyptian businesses in general tend not to be run efficiently, and second, that because it is in Egypt, AUC Press faces obstacles that companies located in other countries don’t.

Egyptians like to dance, but can they get things done?

As to the first point, it is a fact corroborated by experts and anecdotal experience alike. Transparency International ranked Egypt 105th in its corruption perceptions index for 2007, tied with Djibouti, Bolivia, and Burkina Faso and just above Eritrea and Rwanda. A simple trip to the visa office to extend my visa last October turned into a two-week process involving six separate visits and hours of waiting around in a hot, crowded room while the bureaucrats on the other side of the windows shuffled papers and drank tea. My boss long ago stopped going in person to renew his driver’s license, since without an insider contact it can take days, and on top of that foreigners are often charged exorbitant renewal fees for phony traffic violations; now he has an Egyptian friend who works at the licensing office do it for him.

As for the second point, the Press’ location within the greater framework of the Egyptian business world means that, whatever its own successes, it is limited by the failures of the companies around it. The cream-colored paper used to print novels in other parts of the globe because it’s easier on the eyes isn’t available here, so the Press is stuck with regular white. The laborious censorship screening that imported books undergo at the clearinghouse in Alexandria often delays their arrival in Cairo by weeks, and sometimes without a phone call from the director to a well-placed official they would be held up indefinitely. Four-color printing presses don’t exist in Egypt, so color pages must be printed on less sophisticated single-color presses or sent abroad. The list goes on.

When it comes to business, ‘Egyptian standards’ mean delays, complications, and poor-quality products, the results of a poisonous blend of corruption, mismanagement, and weak infrastructure that plagues many developing countries. Yet to lay the blame wholly on these three factors suggests that what exists here is a situation of otherwise competent people unable to overcome the hurdles imposed on them from above. But the problem runs deeper than that, extending beyond a few wrenches thrown into the wheels and cogs of daily operation to what seems like a fundamental lack of the very concept of efficiency. Which is why I was so surprised to find two of my Egyptian coworkers arguing about the best way to organize the books in the AUC Press warehouse. Is it better to do it by ISBN number, or to forget ISBNs and create a grid mapping the entire facility so that books don’t need to be shifted every time new titles arrive?

I can see pros and cons to both options, but that’s not the point. After having almost convinced myself that I was on the wrong side of the nature vs. nurture dispute and admitted that Egyptians might, in fact, be inherently inefficient, I find myself back where I started. No, they’re not innately, biologically inefficient, they’re just the products of a profoundly inefficient culture.