CASE STUDY #2: PARTNERSHIP FOR LEBANON AND CISCO SYSTEMS
Southern New Hampshire University

Introduction
In 2006, President George W. Bush solicited the help of US Businesses to help with the rebuilding of Lebanon after the war and the Partnership for Lebanon was formed to consolidate efforts (Jamali, 2011). The multi-national partnership was an effort to aid the people of Lebanon in rebuilding their quality of life by, “expanding the reach of education and workforce training, creating jobs, building out the country’s technology infrastructure, and connecting communities and government” (Cisco, 2007). Salam Yamout from Cisco was appointed as the project manager for the PFL, placing Cisco at the head of …show more content…

Clearly, successful projects need leadership, and those leaders need to challenge the status quo and have vision beyond the day to day operations. It would have been easy to focus on the successes of the PFL project and even congratulate themselves on the tremendous success of the program up to that point, but Yamout and Akiki had the vision to look forward and consider the long term success of the program and determine what it would take for the program to be successful for decades to come. How often do people lose sight of their short term and long term goals when bombarded by the challenges of the everyday? How easy would it have been for a single company to redirect focus on the stateside economic issues during that period? But, having a team of companies collaborate to progress the program forward helped to solidify the success of the PFL. Without question, good leadership was the cornerstone of the PFL success, but multi-company engagement gave the project the needed resources to reach the levels of success the program had. The concept is summarized quite nicely by Avina (2013) when he explains the benefits of multi-company collaboration to maximize impact:
First, joint collaboration amongst many companies allows a blending of core competencies which track important national goals and aspirations.