The elements of surprise

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After a decade of organising Dubai Summer Surprises and the Dubai Shopping Festival, Saeed Al Nabouda, CEO of DSS and DSF, talks about the challenges of coordinating the 72-night event.

What does your role involve on a day-to-day basis?

Being CEO of Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) and Dubai Summer Surprises (DSS), my job consists of making sure the vision of the Supreme Committee is realised. These events are always getting bigger and better, and we have to make sure we keep exceeding expectations. We can only do this by fuelling the team with excitement, making sure they continue to build on the success of previous years.

The success of the event depends on different levels. One level is the team itself, where we have to make sure everyone realises their potential. Another level is working with the strategic partners - the sponsors, the media and even the different government departments, who are the stakeholders in this event - by constantly being in touch with them, taking their feedback, and keeping up-to-date with what's happening.

I'm the single man accountable at the end of the day, if anything goes wrong. And if anything goes right, that's down to teamwork.

So it's your neck on the line if anything goes wrong - how do you cope with that responsibility?

It's not just my neck on the line; it's the reputation of the whole city. The event has been running for a decade now, and if anything goes wrong it will harm the reputation of the city, not just an individual.

Of course, this has never happened - and it won't happen - because we are up to international standards when it comes to health and safety and so on. And culpability is there - whatever we claim, it's not just a good tag line. It's what we translate eventually into reality, whether it's "One world, one family, one festival", for Dubai Shopping Festival or "Big fun for little ones" or "Miles of smiles" for DSS.

We promise big things, but we deliver an even bigger reality - bigger events, bigger projects. That's how you exceed expectations.

How long have you personally been involved with the festival?

I've been on the team from the beginning. I joined the team that first put the concept of Dubai Summer Surprises together. So I've seen it grow over the years. It's very satisfying to have seen it evolve over the last decade. It's been quite a journey.

The way it's evolved, not one of us that was part of the original team could have believed it would grow as big as it has over the last 10 years. But we all had the passion to make it happen, because that was the goal, the challenge.

Everybody was saying that the winter festival was a success because the weather's better and we have everything in our favour, but with [the summer event], everything was against us and we still made it happen. Everyone was very sceptical about the success of a summer festival, but we were very clear about the vision.

How many events are going on as part of the festival this year?

We've got around 200 events - I've stopped counting now - and we work with hundreds of suppliers to make them all happen.

We also take some of the projects in-house. These are the spice that we add to the overall event. In a way, we are an event organiser. We are facilitators and marketers.

How do you choose the various suppliers to partner with?

I think we are blessed simply by being in Dubai. We have events management companies here that are branches of some of the big international companies. They've been bringing big international events to Dubai, so they have the know-how.

It's a matter of being clear about what you want and what you expect, but it's also about teamwork - we have a saying in Arabic, "One hand doesn't clap", so I cannot blame the suppliers if something doesn't go right - I didn't brief them right, I didn't help them enough from my side. As long as there's collaboration and communication and both sides know where they stand, there won't be a problem.

We've never had a problem in the past. We are always aware of what we want to begin with and I always tell the supplier that, "my team is an extension of your team - make sure they're tuned in and aware", because once you move from a concept on paper to a reality, it is always totally different - there are always things that haven't been taken into consideration.

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