The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not SVB Financial Group.
We’ve
always been of the opinion that it is the extraordinary people who drive
economies, not those that are at the average. We needn’t look any further than
the U.S.
to understand that, despite educational marks in math and science on average well
below some of our global competitors, our economic engine has been the dominant
force in global GDP for more than half a century.
A
good part of this is cultural. Just as a company of all “B players” will
consistently beat firms with all “A players" if they have a stronger
corporate culture, economies will perform similarly. There is, however, one
additional element and that is what I think of as six-sigma leadership. These
are people whose skills and vision are so far off the averages that they not
only transform their own business or political environment, but they alter
cultural dynamics well beyond their own discipline.
So
what are the attributes of these six-sigma people? Here are some examples.
World leaders were aghast when George Washington declined the mandate to lead a
new American monarchy as King of the United States. Business leaders were appalled
when Henry Ford offered his workers the then unheard of salary of $5 per day.
When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates envisioned a computer in every home and office,
the established lions of data processing at IBM, Honeywell, Burroughs and
Univac thought it was a joke.
The
U.S. has always been a magnet for six-sigma people. As we wrote in our piece Immigration by the Numbers (psst…we need at
least another 20 million) in April 2006, “Consider a place that for three
hundred years has attracted the most aggressive, creative, hungry risk-takers
from every corner of the earth. Is it any wonder that Americans work with a single
minded focus on their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness?” There is a
reason that Andy Grove came to the U.S.
when he escaped from communist Hungary
in 1956. When Google founder Sergey Brin’s parents sought refuge from anti-Semitism
in the Soviet Union, his father, a math
professor, had only one destination in mind.
Last
week the Senate passed a bill that would increase the fees for temporary H1-B
visas issued to employees of companies with more than 50 percent of their U.S.
staff from foreign countries. The fee increase will be $4,000 to $4,500 per
worker according to an article in the Wall
Street Journal. We confessed to being puzzled by the idea. It can’t be to
raise revenue since the number of visas is so small that the amount would pale
in comparison to the leviathan $1.5 trillion budget deficit. The only other
logical motivation is protectionism.
One
way to think about the legislation is as a tariff on human intellectual
capacity. This reminds us of tacking import duties on products that we decide
are undesirable or that compete with domestic manufacturers. Sugar is a good
example. High sugar tariffs block cheap imports and indirectly subsidize
inefficient U.S. producers. The ultimate economic cost is borne, of course, by
consumers.
This
type of protectionism is common in the Third World.
The reason that Brazil had very high tariffs on computers in the past was to
protect an emerging computer industry from competition. Their goal was to
relieve the tariffs once the domestic industry was well established. By inadvertently
limiting the application of new technologies throughout the economy, the real
impact of restricting competition for domestic computer companies was to retard
development, reduce growth and slow innovation.
In
a similar fashion, the new “duties” on these knowledge workers will deprive us
of smart, productive resources and make us a little less efficient, a little
slower to make progress and a little less competitive with other economies
around the world. I suppose the “industry” we are trying to protect are workers
that are the product of our domestic education system. With teachers’
creativity constrained by smokestack era union work rules, our public education
system is producing graduates that would struggle to compete on an
international level.
From my view, the bigger worry is that because of higher visa fees we are missing out on those six-sigma people who will
not have the opportunity to work here and hopefully stay here. With our economy struggling to find purchase on an
upward slope, we need them now more than ever.
The views expressed in this column are solely
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or Silicon Valley Bank, or any of its affiliates. This material,
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