Documenting Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s Roles at the United Nations in the service of humanity

AMMAN - Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Publishing proudly announces a new publication entitled “Talal Abu-Ghazaleh: A World Leader in Business Serving Humanity through the United Nations”. The book is a powerful testimony to the lifetime achievements of Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh in the service of humanity, in particular the Arab world.

The book presents in impressive detail Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s decades-long dedication to work with the United Nations system in a productive and sustained collaboration to foster development and empower people around the world to live with dignity.

The book has been written by Mr. Sarbuland Khan, a retired senior United Nations official who, together with Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, was critically instrumental in bringing about a breakthrough in relations between the United Nations and the global private sector: launching a productive partnership in development. This cooperation, with all its challenges, seems natural and self-evident now. But it required years of determined and sustained efforts on both sides in which Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh played a decisive leadership role, so convincingly brought out in the book. Indeed, with his incredibly broad range of skills, interests and pragmatic passions – from classical music to accounting and finance to information technology to quality education for all - Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh has served as a perfect partner for the United Nations system.

The book vividly portrays through its survey of numerous initiatives and projects, Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s unique ability to not only articulate a vision and talk about challenges and opportunities but actually make things happen. According to another great visionary, Thomas Edison, “Vision without execution is hallucination”. Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh never wastes his time and energy on illusions, hallucinations, empty laments or dreams divorced from reality. As the book shows, he doggedly perseveres in realizing his vision, against all odds, doubts and often resistance and outright sabotage, until he achieves clear and tangible results.

One of the most impressive and consequential of Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s lifetime achievements is his seminal contribution to bringing the benefits of the information revolution to all of humanity and especially to the underprivileged people of the developing world. As documented in the book in detail, as early as at the end of the last century Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh clearly saw the immense potential of information and communication technologies, including the Internet, and the emergence of a new knowledge-based world economy. He also witnessed a large and growing gap between the emerging digital economies of the developed countries and the majority of humanity living in the developing world for lack of access and education. This new digital divide between the rich and the poor presented a titanic challenge, and there is nothing in the world to better mobilize and focus Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s mind and energy than a challenge of truly global dimensions.

The book highlights Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh’s leadership role in bringing together the international community – first, the global business through his leadership role in the International Chamber of Commerce, and then going truly global by engaging the United Nations System – in meeting this challenge. The reader will find numerous documents – resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, working documents of the United Nations ICT Task Force and the Global Alliance for ICT and Development – presenting the evolution of international efforts to harness the benefits of the information revolution for all of humanity. Particularly illuminating is the story of the continuing evolution of Internet governance, in which Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh played a pioneering role, both in terms of inspiration and of defining the detailed technical parameters of an effective governance system.

“Talal Abu-Ghazaleh. A World Leader in Business Serving Humanity through the United Nations” will provide the reader with unique insights into the advent of productive cooperation between the global private sector, the civil society and the United Nations, and the visionary and effective leadership of Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh in this grand endeavor.