Global talent will make you better

Working with global talent will make you better at what you do, because insight is driven by diversity. It will also redefine what privilege means.

I get it: your gas prices went up (although the photos people keep posting are lower than pre-war in California). The Pentagon just asked the White House for another $200b of your tax dollars (twice as much as the total cost of food stamps). Your airfare for spring break is expensive.

But I work with 500+ Sri Lankans at Oceans. Sri Lanka, like much of the developing world, doesn’t have their own oil or a massive strategic reserve. They have already initiated mandatory gas rationing via QR code and even/odd license plate days to avoid queuing behaviors.

Next up, we expect rolling power outages that not only affect every aspect of their daily lives but specifically their ability to do the jobs that earn that money to pay for gas. And for everything else, which will now become increasingly expensive as the importation process slows. It is not hyperbolic to predict that some people will die from the ripples of a war that America started on the other side of the world.

For most Americans, the war is an inconvenience; in other places, it is a devastation.

I spend a quarter of my time in Sri Lanka, because our team deserves a leader that works alongside them. Normally at this time of year, I’d be flying over to sprint on our next set of objectives and to get ready for Avurudu/Puthandu, the Sri Lankan New Year. But with Qatar airspace closed and dwindling fuel supplies, there is a very real chance that I would get to Sri Lanka but not be able to get back. And so I’m home in San Diego, safe and sound.

Oceans is fortunate. We have cash reserves and a business continuity plan that will allow us to continue our service uninterrupted. We are conserving by choice, as a civic obligation that will help Sri Lanka stretch its fuel supplies as long as possible; offline trainings are moving online, coworking spaces are being set up with UPS backups to deal with power outages. We’ll be fine.

But as an American, and alongside our hundreds of clients, I’m being reminded about my own place in all this. I’m thinking about the conservation that I should be making a daily part of my life, not just during a war; I spent an hour today optimizing some of our household operations to reduce our footprint.

If business is the process of profitable problem solving, inviting in the challenges of the wider world is directly accretive to our ability to be good at business. When you hire global talent, you get exposed to circles far beyond your own, with unique circumstances, challenges, and solutions.

When Brooks at Cheers writes about working with Anjalie, he talks about how she has broadened his perspective; Cheers hyperscaling growth isn’t an unrelated fact. Good leaders are not just of the world but IN the world. Not just their world, not just posting pictures of gas prices at their pump, but recognizing just how much further this all goes.