(Seoul, South Korea) What attracts global talent?

One facet of Singapore’s economic strategy is to attract bright global talent to live in Singapore, creating a resource-pool that attracts companies. These are the people who have the option to work in Hong Kong, New York, London, San Francisco, or any city of their choice. I have met some of such people who chose to move to Singapore. Singapore appeals to them because it has the allure of Asia but the comfort of a familiar language and institutions. It is this “Asia-lite” factor that draws them. Singapore should emphasize this factor as a competitive advantage. I use “global talent” instead of “foreign talent” in my analysis for the most part to emphasize how this talented pool can be comprised of Singaporeans or foreigners.

A schoolmate of mine, born in East Europe, chose to move to Singapore. A brilliant student, she worked in London over the summer and has an offer to return to her employer there. As someone who does not speak an Asian language and has never been to Asia, Singapore offers a good opportunity to explore a different world. The combination of English as the lingua franca and the exoticism of Southeast Asia attract her. At the end of her summer, she had her employer to transfer her to Singapore.

Last week, I talked to the CEO of Infosys, Gopalakrishnan, and we discussed Infosys’s attempt to attract foreigners to work in India. He suggested that the familiarity of the institutions left behind by the British was a major factor in their success with attracting foreign workers. During my first time working in China, I had to overcome cultural hurdles in my daily interactions and realized how important a familiar working culture is to being productive and happy. Singapore provides foreigners with the comfort of familiar institutions and work culture, easing the transition process for those coming to Asia.

This “Asia-lite” factor, the combination of differences and similarities, is a unique selling point. While good infrastructure, favorable tax benefits and a safe living environment definitely aid in attracting global talent, they do not constitute a sustainable competitive advantage as they are replicable. Cities can enhance their hard infrastructure more easily than their soft infrastructure. Beijing, Hong Kong, London…etc. all did it.

(Havana, Cuba) Finding comfort…

In discussing global talent, the foreign versus local talent debate has to be addressed. This issue inevitably draws rancor from the local population. I believe the problem is not so much “foreign talent” moving to Singapore, but the benefits that are lavished on them to attract them here. The following issues have to be addressed in devising a “foreign talent” policy:

1. If Singapore believes that foreign talent being in Singapore has spillover effects that benefit Singaporeans, these effects should be quantified to determine the economically optimal level of subsidies needed to attract the appropriate level of such talent.

2. Singapore needs to be more discriminating in separating top-tier global talent from middle-tier global talent. The former is a scarce resource that Singapore (and any country) lacks and which provides spillover benefits to local Singaporeans. The latter is human resource that can be developed in Singapore. Bringing in the latter simply increases competition for locals who can fill the job, thus depressing their wages. I suspect that the policy to educate students from China and India in Singaporean universities is too focused on the latter group.

3. If Singapore can develop a unique selling point vis-à-vis competitor cites (i.e. Asia-lite brand or something else), we need not worry about pt. 1. If Singapore is unique in a way that appeals to “foreign talent,” we should be able to attract them without providing lavish benefits. Instead, we can even make them pay for the privilege of living in Singapore. Urban economics shows that people are willing to pay for the higher costs of living in certain US cities (vis-à-vis suburbs) because of attractive consumption and production agglomeration economies (think of this as the “X-factor” of the city).

(Beijing, China) Strategy: Creating options with the hand you were dealt

The Obama campaign is of particular interest to me because of the strategic innovations his team made. The verdict is still out on whether these new strategies were effective but it is fair to say that they were innovative approaches to campaigns that normally take an overly-conservative approach.

1. Create new markets

Traditional wisdom holds that the winner captures the median voter. While still pursuing that strategy, Obama’s team also attempted to create a new pool of voters: they focused on increasing turnout among youths and first-time voters (or lapsed voters).

On a related note, Obama’s team was effective with using new “distribution channels” such as online media in reaching voters. While previous campaigns have tried this, I suspect that the success of Obama’s team in using web outreach is not so much because of greater familiarity with web technologies, but because this was closely integrated with their strategy of increasing turnout. Past candidates faltered in doing these not because they failed to understand web outreach methods, but because they realized that their target audience was best reached through traditional methods.

2. Resource advantage translates into strategic options

In crafting a strategy, Obama’s team took advantage of their overwhelming resources to craft a “many routes to victory” approach. They could have flooded a few battleground states with intensive advertising but instead adapted to their cash-rich circumstances by adopting a superior strategy.

3. Identifying the correct opportunity

The discipline which Obama’s team had in sticking to the “Change” mantra was amazing. However, their team might find themselves having to cycle through mantras if they had not stumbled on the correct theme of the current election cycle right from the start. Strategy is built on identifying opportunity in an accurate manner. His team correctly realizes that this election was dominated by discontent with the past eight years of Bush’s administration.

It is admissions season and helicopter parents and their wards have descended on Penn’s campus. At the Penn bookstore, I saw one parent and his two probably middle-school daughters fingering the Wharton logo on a sweatshirt. The parent said, “if you go here you get to burn dollar bills.” I am concerned with what parents teach their children these days.

(Niagara Falls, USA)

This is my first post regarding the upcoming US election. Despite my relative silence on the topic, I have been following the news religiously for the last two months. As an international student with an international perspective on the US election, I have been loathe to discuss the elections with most Americans for whom my concerns as an “outsider” is something they see as irrelevant at best and unpatriotic at worst.

I talked to the cab driver who took me from the Philadelphia airport back home last Friday evening. He was an accountant from Ethopia. He now works as a part-time cab-driver and plans to obtain a degree so that he can take the CPA and practice as an accountant. He asked me to explain the current financial crisis and whether the Federal Reserve’s injection (or bailout if you prefer) would solve the current crisis. Aside from the already difficult job of explaining what drives the crisis, I relished the challenge of trying to explain the impact of the injection in terms he can appreciate as he did not have grounding in the language of economics.

As we reached the university’s campus, our discussion turned towards the upcoming elections. He was for Obama, seeing in him an expression of what was once the American Dream: anyone could come here and find opportunities and freedom. He was angry and echoed the views of many from outside America. He said “if Obama was White, he would have won the elections by now.” I politely disagreed with his sentiments and pointed out how the US at its core is conservative—particularly in the South and Midwest. However, I cannot help agreeing in part with his viewpoint as I recall the allegations of Obama being a Muslim. The implied message in those slurs is that being Muslim is tantamount to being a lesser being. I have met people even on Penn’s campus and elsewhere in the US who associate Islam with terrorism.

Across the political aisle from my Ethopian driver was a friend I met last night for drinks. He is a former Penn student from Texas and calls himself a true patriot. He plans to vote for McCain. He does not trust Obama. He claims that Obama is disrespectful to the President’s office in visiting Germany during the election cycle, that Obama in attending  Jeremiah Wright’s church disqualifies him as a worthy presidential candidate, and how Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance with his hand over heart.

I was shocked. Here was an intelligent and well-educated friend who believes all these. It shows the deep divide within the US, and between the US and the world. Disagreeing with Obama on his policies is definitely acceptable, but to question a presidential candidate on grounds of patriotism scares me. I did not want to get into a political argument but added that as an international student, I look forward to an American president who believes that the power to impact the world comes with a responsibility to it. I look forward to a president who believes in serving the American people, but who also believes in the common humanity of all mankind. I look forward to Change.