Winning the global war for talent

Robert Guest

Business Editor

The Economist

3 reasons why we no longer live in caves

• Technology

• Trade

• Mobility

Imagine a world without disruption

• A place where you don’t have to worry about the unsettling effect of new ideas

A tale of two migrants• Surojit SarkarVirologist? Sounds like terrorist

• Mohamed AlbornoEntrepreneur? No, thanks

Come to Canada to work

Canada-a magnet for talent• Canada’s foreign-born population has risen from

4.5m (16%) in 1990 to 7.2m (21%) in 2010• Half of immigrants have degrees; only 21% of

native-born Canadians have• 85% of immigrants become citizens

Alberta-an electromagnet for talent

• Not only Canada’s energy capital

• Also a mini-United Nations

• 2 fastest-growing metro areas in Canada are Calgary and Edmonton

Not everyone approves• Alberta has “joined a global underground railway trading

in human misery”...• “We’re becoming the Dubai or Saudi Arabia of the north,

not only because we have oil, but because we’re abandoning real immigration in favour of using an exploitative guest worker program to fill our most menial and undesirable jobs.”

Gil McGowan, president, Alberta Federation of Labour

Canucks, meet CNOOC

Canada fears foreign control of “strategic assets”

• CNOOC/Nexen• Petronas/Progress Energy• BHP/Potash

But protectionism has costs• Mexico bars foreign investors from the oil

business • Its national oil firm, Pemex is “horribly run”-

according to its own director

• Starved of capital, between 2006 and 2011 Pemex drilled 18 wells in deep waters; Brazil’s Petrobras drilled 101.

The flight of the renminbi

Not all networks are digital

• Immigrants bring connections

• Why does this matter?

Emerging markets are where the growth is

• China and India offer Western firms glittering opportunities:– To sell goods to the new middle class– To use Chinese imported parts and Indian

services to make Western products more competitive

Members of the new middle class want to buy Western products

• Chinese consumers admire Western brands• Tiger mothers trust Western food safety

(“In China, you pray that your breakfast milk has cows’ urine in it, because every other adulterant is worse.”)

But emerging markets are tough to crack

• Why does it take 4 days to move a truckload of beer 500km in West Africa?

The key to doing business in emerging markets

• Hire immigrants

• Chinese and Indians who have studied or worked in North America act as bridges

• They know the customs

• They know whom to trust

A mobile world is a smarter world

• Mobile people spread ideas across borders

• Those ideas are mixed up and recombined in millions of hyperconnected brains

• Which generates more innovation

Conclusion• An aging society is good-it means we’re not

dying young• In the future, a nation’s influence will depend on

whether people want to live there• Canada is “rather cool”. Can it stay that way?