In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have o

In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the format could be found.) One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.