Sam Blatteis has impacted tens of millions of people by building relationships at the intersection of high tech and public policy in the Middle East. His work, from education to security, will impact digital economies for decades to come. Having studied military strategy at IWP towards the beginning of his career, Sam is now the CEO of The MENA Catalysts, where he creates high-powered government relationships providing market access for global high-tech companies exploring, entering, or expanding in the Gulf economies, for instance, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
From military strategy class to consulting strategy
Sam took one class at IWP, but he remembers vividly – Military Strategy with General Walter Jajko. Like so many IWP students, he was studying at night while researching at the Institute of National Strategic Studies.
Rewind the tape going back 25 years, IWP was a different place when Sam studied there, but he enjoyed studying with a practitioner – “Someone who seemed to have lived ten lifetimes in one.”
Of General Jajko, Sam said, “He was amazing. He made me think about how leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.”
Although consulting strategy and military strategy are different on the surface, Sam appreciated the “idea of bringing a range of different unconventional tools and capabilities to the forefront of your work. It was helpful to have a nonlinear approach and know how to develop a whole-of-organization strategy to achieve your objectives.”
Sam remembers reading many books for the class: “I think I cultivated an even deeper passion for reading in that class: To be able to travel across space and time and talk across the centuries to people – it opened your mind!”
Soon, Sam was appointed one of the founding members of the public policy practice for the Middle East at Deloitte.
Building high-tech relationships
Sam helped grow the Middle East Public Policy Strategy practice at Deloitte from two to about twenty people in two years – much more rapidly than anyone had anticipated. He was promoted twice in four years.
His next role was at Google, where he served as Head of Government Relations and Public Policy for the Gulf Countries. There, he put into practice a holistic strategy: “Adopting a whole-of-organization approach can be so much more impactful than doing things on one’s own. When I brought marketing, engineering, research, and leadership together to the front lines, we began to move the heavy machinery of government, and alter the future, today.”
In this role as Google’s “diplomat,” first for the Gulf countries and then for the whole Arab world, Sam impacted people across the Middle East. His work with Google-Global and U.S.-allied Gulf security services actually helped save many lives.
Blatteis led and implemented a campaign to embed computer programming into the curriculum for high schoolers and to make computer programming as popular as reading, writing, English, and math in the UAE capital. He oversaw, in cooperation with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s Court staff, the training of nearly all of the Abu Dhabi public and private school ICT teachers on how to teach coding to people with no background in coding at all. The result was it would benefit over 250,000 young people and inspired the involvement of four Abu Dhabi cabinet-ranked equivalent ministers.
He was the Google project lead to transform a small teacher community center into a Google Innovation Hub in the poorer Northern Emirates for 2,500 teachers and 47,000 students. He worked diligently to make the Internet more accessible to Arabic speakers.
“Don’t shoot down Google balloons!”
Sam shared with us one of the “more normal” stories from his adventures with Google: On his first day, he was told that Google had launched hot air balloons around the earth to bring WiFi to remote areas. Sam was asked to notify the civil aviation authorities in the Gulf countries about these balloons and persuade them not to shoot them down.
What this looked like in reality: Sam would knock on the door of an aircraft control tower and explain that he worked for Google. The aviation official would be surprised to see a human appearing in person from Google. Sam would tell them about a balloon that would enter their airspace within 72 hours and ask for overflight rights, and for them to leave it alone, but this was just the beginning.
Many of the winds in the Mediterranean flow from West to East and would continue to blow the balloons East over Iranian airspace before reaching the Sub-continent. There is a carveout in Iranian sanctions to talk to Iranian civil aviation authorities about overflight rights. With Google and U.S. legal approvals, Sam had to explain to the Iranians that Google balloons were coming through and ask them not to neutralize them. It went all the way to the Supreme National Security Council because they had never had such an issue. Luckily, there were no rocket launches at Google’s products.
The MENA Catalysts
After leaving Google, Sam started his own company to develop special legislative tracking and government relationships for global high-tech companies expanding in the Gulf monarchies.
“If you are going to start a company, it helps to do it in an area where you have been a client – and where you know what works and what doesn’t,” said Sam. “I set up a team of implementers and doers –We have gotten 14 social media and video game apps of publicly traded companies unblocked in the Middle East, in cooperation with local law enforcement.”
Sam’s work is spurring innovation in the Arab world and will impact Middle Eastern economies for years to come.