Finding Global Talent
During the .com boom 52% of technology and IT start-ups – silicon valley style – were created by foreign-born nationals. 26% of ALL start-ups in the U.S. are created by foreign-born nationals. People from China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and well…everywhere, have been coming to the U.S. for the promise of an excellent education and the freedom of entrepreneurship.
Yet the U.S. has adopted a policy of sharply curtailing the issuance of H1-b Visas to stay and work in the U.S. Over the past decade the U.S. has reduced the H1-b quota from 195,000 to 65,000, a quota that was exhausted in 2010 before the year even began. By the end of 2009 more people had applied for Visa applications than were available for the entirety of 2010.
President Sebastián Piñera of Chile is offering $40,000 to people who are willing to come to Chile and start a business. Singapore is offering up to 4:1 in matching funds for entrepreneurs who come and create businesses. Meanwhile the U.S. is making it increasingly difficult and onerous to come to the U.S., stay in the U.S., and create new businesses. And so brilliant people are flocking to these inviting countries, as well as simply taking their excellent U.S. educations back to their home countries instead of staying in the U.S. to build jobs, innovation, and economic wealth.
Start Up Visa is trying to help change that.
Read MoreThe Innovation Midwife
AMA Corporate Learning recently surveyed over 1100 senior managers and executives on the topic of leadership succession planning and discovered only 14% described their organization as properly prepared to confront key leadership loss, and over 80% said they were either “somewhat prepared” or “not at all prepared.” In the case of Steve Jobs, confidence appears reasonably high that Tim Cook is prepared to lead Apple through Jobs’ health break. Yet, 14% nationally reflects a pretty sad confidence level in our leadership pipeline.
I’m reminded of the development culture at U.S. Cellular which dictates the both/and equation when it comes to business results. In their culture a defining metric of goal success is both achieving the business objective AND developing people in the process. The goal is considered incomplete if you ink a deal but the people growth component isn’t there. There is a clear expectation that business drivers include the people development part. Because people aren’t assets, they’re well…people. As Jonas Ridderstrale likes to say, “If you are doing your job as a leader you shouldn’t be needed.” What he means is that if you stock the organization with both high-will ecosystems and high-skill individuals and collaborators, you won’t be needed. The point at which the leader makes their most valuable contribution is to be the midwife of innovation. The leader acting as innovation midwife cannot possibly provide the answer or prescribe the insight, since that approach lacks the originality of the democratic process, and isn’t born from the mind of the contributor. In this capacity, the innovation midwife plays inquisitor – asking the kinds of honest probing questions that yield the birth of ideas.
And there’s another role for the midwife – finding the home and support for the idea. At the same time the innovation midwife is coaxing powerful new ideas into the world, she has to also be finding those sponsors and champions within the organization who are willing to nurture, feed and shelter these ideas so they can become big enough to surprise the world. To quote Ridderstrale again, the TBUS (Time Between Unexpected Surprises) is shrinking every day.
Read MoreMillions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why
“Play that is directed by the child, not the parent, is the key to cultivating curiosity.” – Todd Kashdan
This evening I was treated to my 7 year old son playing the piano – not the pounding childish make-noise kind, but nor the rote practice kind assigned by music teachers. And I take nothing from either version of playing the piano – both quite valid in figuring out this instrument. But he worked the piano in a moment of utter focus finding melodies he invented. It was nothing Mozart-like of a young prodigy, he was simply exploring the piano in a very present and exploring way – finding rhythm and notes on his own. He’s never had piano lessons beyond watching and listening to my own piano tunes I learned long ago. It was just simple curiosity about what the piano sounds like.
When we are in a curious state, we ask probing questions, read deeply with intent, manipulate and examine objects, and persist in activities and tasks which we find both challenging and stimulating. Todd Kashdan has conducted studies with his colleagues which demonstrate that curious people tend to become more curious over time (curiosity breeds curiosity) and ultimately find greater enjoyment and even live longer too.
Study after study reveal that true and lasting competitive advantage comes from having talented and engaged people. The surest way to wither your sense of engagement is to curb your curiosity. Curious people are more competent, knowledgeable and expert. Not only that, curious people have stronger relationships, more physical and mental resilience, and even cultivate a stronger sense of meaning in their lives.
So when we are trying to find more “engagement” in our work, or as a leader cultivate that high level of engagement, there are three clear variables. First, the right people; then those people in the right seats; and doing what they are good at and love. Those three components to engagement look like this:
- Recognition of Role: Everyone must have a clear understanding of what role they play in the larger context of the organization. Demographic studies suggest this demand started in earnest with Gen X, and now Gen Y pretty much refuses to be part of a work environment that isn’t entirely transparent.
- Executable Talent: Show up with the skills yo. This is part talent selection, and part talent development. Every organization and leader must create an environment where curiosity and intellectual growth is expected.
- Passionate Commitment: Parts 1 and 2 are important but for full engagement, a passionate belief about what the team, the function, and the organization as a whole is trying to do remains paramount.
Two out of three of the above is nice but insufficient. Someone with skills who lacks belief in the mission is a flight risk. The most intolerable might be the prima donna who refuses collaborative efforts. As John Tucci, CEO of EMC says, “I have taken very talented smart people who did not play on a team and shown them the door.”
Understanding context, building skills, and being passionate aren’t easy to have on a consistent and thriving basis but maybe the key is simply to remain curious.
Here’s a tip that really works. When trying to build new knowledge, or figure out how to connect with someone who might be on the opposite side of your viewpoint, ask a simple open question that mines what they know about. This works on almost any topic – vegetarianism, the Iraq War, whether we should renew our catering contract, whatever… Ask something open and probing, for example, “Help me understand why being a vegetarian (buying from a particular vendor….whatever) is the best choice for our community (our company, again whatever the topic).” If asked in an honest inquiring voice, you are more likely statistically to be viewed as empathetic and even intelligent in your curiosity. Stay open, be curious, enrich your life.
Read MoreThe Red Velvet Rope Policy – Choose your Customers, Find your Vision
When your by-product becomes your product we have lost our vision. Money is a by-product. Your product is what you can give to the world.
- John Hope Bryant
Ever heard of the Red Velvet Rope Policy? Ask Michael Port about being particular about who you decide to work with. That is – the practice of aligning your business core competence with the customers you can best serve while simultaneously growing your own capabilities. It’s about not allowing the customer to wag the company. So choose carefully who you choose to do business with for both competitive competence building and depth of relationship.
I encountered this in spades yesterday. We had an interview with Michael Byrne, CEO of Linfox, the largest logistics company in Australia. Check this out: in about 2003 they made a concerted decision to selectively decommission 2/3 of their customers. That’s right, they consciously chose to let go about two-thirds of their customers over time, because they didn’t fit the vision of what Linfox intended as its own design, future and core competence. In some instances customers may have asked Linfox to sacrifice service integrity to ensure delivery of goods, or maybe some customers were trying to redirect Linfox into business areas they didn’t feel they wanted to build market share or product expertise. They probably suffered dearly for this noble decision right? Wrong. They tripled their revenue while gaining significant business capability.
I’m not done. Linfox is a logistics and freight business – a trucking business. their primary overhead and environmental impact is around fuel and energy use so it stands to reason that the pursuit of profit and market share might motivate them to marginalize their emissions concerns. Not so. They now teach eco-driving for their truck drivers, capture facilities rainwater runoff for re-purposing, build libraries in India, pursue zero emissions, and are leading safety initiatives in Australia instead of waiting for government mandate. That’s right – these initiatives aren’t to be legally complaint, they are all to do good, while doing good for their business. The community wins, and the environment wins, all while building the conscionable company – which becomes then the killer talent attractor. Think about it. What kind of company do you want to work for?
Read MoreLeading Global Innovation and New Market Opportunity
So much has been written about Leadership. We try to find a universal theory. There is none. The condition changes. The context changes. Some things stand out for that emerging context that most leaders have to pay attention to. Practice them. Inspire others, develop others, and multiply others.
- Ram Charan, March 2010
The context is indeed changing, and rapidly. As recently as just 2004 barely 20% of companies had adopted corporate-wide functioning offshoring captive strategies to leverage that promise of low-cost labor sourcing of services and technical expertise to not just Chindia, but Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and other global talent pools. (Arie Lewin, ORN). But yet “Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low-cost brains. Instead they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation. They are redesigning entire business processes to do things better and faster… Forget about flat – the world of business is turning upside down.” (The Economist, April 2010)
That’s right – EMC learned this lesson years ago when they opened a technical facility in India and immediately offshored/insourced the more rudimentary and mundane tasks that the U.S. engineers didn’t want. You can guess the Indian engineers were frustrated, annoyed, and characteristically weren’t so inclined to give the discretionary, passionate effort to their work to build measurable difference. (Gebauer/Lowman)
So what to do? There are several stances an organization can take in recognition of the ability to globally-source innovation, and leveraging emerging available markets:
Find new audiences: C.K. Prahalad dedicated the last decade or more of his life to the cause of gestating innovative products and services at the Base of the Pyramid and serving through capital mechanisms the largely un/under-served billions at the BoP. Rapid prototype products and services and serve these markets.
Source innovation for your existing audience: It may be more accessible than you think. Consider InnoCentive whose mission is to “harness collective brainpower around the world to solve problems that really matter.” Innocentive operates as as an inverted eBay, offering puzzles and real-world problems from companies around the world with hard cash rewards. Think you can solve how to virtually verify plastic product package sealing? Or provide a metric for how to evaluate the effectiveness of an R&D facility? Or even (yes!) help the Gulf Coast respond effectively to an oil spill problem? Sign up, solve the puzzle and get paid. Some of the best minds around the glove are wrestling with these problems from their homes and offices and work groups and getting rewarded by the companies and people in need.
I know it sounds daunting, but consider this: whether you are a mid-America regional bank manager, or a small business developing killer web apps, you can both leverage the mechanisms of innovation AND find new markets for your existing business. Doing nothing, or sticking to your knitting is not an option. Market niches are temporary, and the world is abundant with talent and opportunity.
Read MoreTo Find Innovation, Start with your own skill, love and purpose
In late 1953 the Swanson brothers had a glut of turkey. They were turkey wholesalers and had overestimated the market. So now they had 235 metric tons of turkey riding around the U.S. in refrigerated rail cars and the executive team was wondering what to do. Can’t you just imagine the CFO showing charts of what it cost to have all those turkeys rolling around on refrigerated rail cars per day?
Gerry Thomas, a sales executive at Swanson, had just seen what Pan American airlines was doing with compartmentalized in-flight food offerings. He and the executive team at Swanson coupled this notion with Clarence Birdseye’s new flash freezing technique, and then added the catchy product label “TV Dinner” that fit beautifully with the cultural explosion of television. Their great market opportunity was the eight million moms who were joining the workforce after WWII, who were also enjoying an abundance of electrical home appliances like ovens, refrigerators, freezers, and of course televisions.
Swanson prepared to sell five thousand units the first year. They sold ten million at .98 cents each. Big hit, and now you understand how the intersection of technology, inspiration, marketing and resources made it happen. But does that formula work again today in 2010? Here’s the difference now:
Resources are scare, not abundant: From water to textiles to lumber, the availability and premium placed on the natural resources we use to create the consumer products and comestibles are in high demand and, in the case of fossil fuels and water particularly, are increasingly precious.
Talent is global, not local: Historically if you had a local workforce that was obedient, diligent, and brought expertise and skill to bear executing on top-driven strategies, you had competitive advantage. The future is most certainly now in terms of the ability to connect need with a globally-dispersed labor force - highly talented, motivated, and comparatively cheap by U.S. standards. And all connected by the cost of the internet, $0. The skilled talent, regardless of source, is indeed not free, but increasingly anything function that can be routinized, and reduced to if=then equations which bracket to a correct answer, can also be automated. Consider telemedicine, the in adsentia health care solution to everything from fast, cheap review of MRIs, mammograms, and all manners of diagnostics. You get an X-Ray in the afternoon in Illinois and the scan is reviewed by a U.S board-certified physician in India, and returned overnight – or even immediately – over the web.
Innovation is democratized, not top-driven: No longer can firms rely on the the wisdom of a handful of insightful strategists at the top of a pyramid, when meanwhile companies like Rabobank or Best Buy are doing a better job of catering to customer need by creating mechanisms to actively listen to, and incorporate the interests of customers, and know-how of line personnel.
People are creative and expressive, not compliant: Pick your muse on this but currently I’ll take Sir Ken Robinson right now, who is on a crusade to persuade people that by pursuing their passions, they will make greater contributions, build community value, and importantly find fulfillment in their endeavors. In his book, he profiles Matt Groening (created the pitch for The Simpsons on the spot in a meeting), Mick Fleetwood (bailed on high school at 16 to be a jazz drummer in London), Gillian Lynne (deamed an underachiever until enrolled in a dance school), and many others, who eschewed the proper ‘safe’ advice of elders, or were recognized by mentors for who they were, to pursue their passions to great ends.
Technology is still changing: Rapidly too. Too rapid to adequately understand the implications. Try this for analogy: “If you’re not shocked by quantum theory, you don’t properly understand it.” – Neils Bohr Or to wrestle with the power collaborative technologies, try this fun video.
The point is this: You don’t need to be up for the challenge of constantly creating magnificent products and services that the world suddenly realizes it has been missing for fulfillment (think iPad right now). The iPhone didn’t exist 5 years ago and now you need one. Think rather, what am I good at, Love to do, and provides purpose and meaning in my life and the lives of others. Focus on that and you will give meaning and value to the world and to yourself.
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