Leadership’s Future: More Talent Drain, But Not All
by Miki Saxon
Last week we looked at the talent being lost as a result of profiteering by for-profit trade schools and colleges. But what of American talent graduating from America’s top schools?
We know that America needs talent. We need talent in all walks of life; we need talent at every level of business, but some of our best talent is being lured away by Asia, Inc.
The lure is coming from Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other Asian corporations; they are successfully recruiting, wooing and hiring the best and brightest at top tier business schools all over the country.
“There is a sense that the center of gravity is shifting,” says Julie Morton, Booth’s associate dean for career services. … “This has never really happened before, except in little spurts, where you have a fairly large group of talented, recent MBAs asking for assignments in China, Vietnam, India,” says Jeff Joerres, CEO of global staffing firm Manpower. Adds Richard Florida, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management: “I don’t think many of us thought Asia would become the destination for top Western talent—but it is.”
Part of this shift is recession driven, but the ‘shifting center of gravity’ is cause for concern.
It’s not that the skills and knowledge acquired from international work isn’t valuable, of course it is, but it means that talent is lost to America for the next five years, give or take, when we need it most.
Additionally, foreign students are returning home to found companies, rather than staying in the US. That isn’t comforting considering that immigrant entrepreneurs founded 25.3 percent of the U.S. engineering and technology companies established in the past decade, according to a 2007 study from Duke University.
A bit of recession silver lining comes in the form of B-school grads taking an entrepreneurial path when they can’t find a job.
And there is a bipartisan (believe it or not) effort to gain talent by creating a “founder visa,” a two-year visa for any immigrant entrepreneur who can secure $250,000 in capital from American investors. After the two years are up, the person could become a permanent resident if his or her business has created five full-time jobs in the U.S., raised an additional $1 million, or hit $1 million in revenue.
But they are a long way from passing the legislation.
I find it sad that amidst all the rhetoric and hand wringing our so-called leaders in Congress do little-to-nothing—usually in the service of lobbying groups or an inflexible ideology that sees only the past and has little concern for the future if it involves change.
Image credit: budgetstoc on sxc.hu
