Monica Harrington

A few weeks ago, just before traveling to South America, I watched Eliot Spitzer and Paul Krugman on the Bill Maher show each make the case for why America’s economic hopes rest on tech. It was interesting and informative television – what a great guest pairing – but I came away more than a little nervous about how much the people who are working so hard to focus America’s hopes and aspirations on tech really understand about tech and the people who work in it.

As a journalism grad who wandered into the tech world almost by accident more than 20 years ago, and has since worked often with world-class innovators at companies large and small, here are the nine key points I think policy makers and pundits need to grasp:

1) Successful high tech innovators and leaders don’t think in terms of “hiring American” because experience has taught them that in a global competition, groundbreaking talent and ideas can come from anywhere. In most leading tech companies, from the time you’re a junior product manager or junior developer, you work in teams with people from around the world– an experience that profoundly changes your perspective. As a Microsoft Word product manager more than 20 years ago, I was working regularly with teammates from many different geographies and cultures – including Europe, South America, Russia, South Africa, Israel, and India – all in an effort to eventually launch a product that would be #1 in the world. Tech people learn early that smart people and ideas can come from anywhere and that the ingenuity and creativity so often credited to “American technology” often comes from non-Americans.

2) Technology investors and innovators make decisions on people, technology trends, and market potential and they will recruit and locate talent wherever they can build strong teams. For a long time, this mostly meant having a central location and gathering people to a physical place. Valve, which was founded in Kirkland in the mid-90s, was able to produce a debut game that became #1 in the world in part because of the way we hired and gathered talent – from anywhere and everywhere if we thought they would add value to the company. Within a couple of years, we pulled talent and technology from across the country and around the world – including Australia (Team Fortress), Canada (CounterStrike), Ireland (HVOC physics engine), England, and even Grand Cayman. Because of technology advances, companies can now hire and build world-class teams in many different geographies at once. Google, Microsoft, HP, and Facebook are building teams around the world and in each others’ backyards. The people who want to build barriers to tech companies hiring the best talent from around the globe don’t grasp that the issue now for key roles isn’t between bringing a foreigner here or hiring an American; in many cases the process has become hiring or acquiring core people wherever they are - or want to be - and doing additional hiring around them.

3) America has the lead in the technology race in large part because of previous investments in higher education and basic research -- which attracted smart, ambitious people from around the world. That edge is eroding. We haven’t expanded higher ed capacity nearly enough to keep up with population growth – which crowds out foreign-born students -- and we’ve been cutting back on investments in basic research, which previously fueled major advances in the high tech industry (including the Internet and microprocessor).

4) Technology Innovators typically don’t think in terms of “jobs” – for themselves or the people they work with – instead they think in terms of tackling interesting problems and opportunities in unique ways and surrounding themselves with like-minded, passionate people. Jobs can result, but I don’t know anyone who thinks of starting a tech company in terms of “job creation.” Part of this is that on the frontiers of high tech innovation, you don’t come up with a vision and then hire people to carry it out. You develop a vision as part of a team and you build toward that vision together, understanding that you’re in a world-class competition against other smart teams. The traditional lines that often divide management and employees don’t map to the model for how high tech companies actually build and deliver breakthrough products.

5) An understanding and even curiosity about math and science is essential for success in many tech fields, and right now our K-12 education in math and science is a miserable failure. In a key test measuring math and science understanding among 15-year-olds from 30 countries, Americans placed 17th in science and 24th in math.

6) We have always been a nation of immigrants – and the number #1 source of current US immigration, legal and non, is Mexico, which placed dead last (#30 out of 30 countries) in the test above for BOTH science and math understanding. Hopefully, the people reading this post can do the math for themselves regarding what that might mean in terms of America’s long term prospects as a leader in tech.

7) For a lot of reasons, technology is fundamentally a male-dominated industry. While it’s great news that more American women are going to college, the reality is that few women lead in technology-related fields. The shifting gender demographics in college and the work force have important implications for our ability to lead in tech moving forward. (And as a woman, yes, I wish the situation were different.)

8) According to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year, less than 40 percent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution and in a related survey of people from 34 countries only Turkey scored lower. Evolution is not just the central organizing principle of modern biology, it’s become a critical foundation for advancements in agriculture, food safety, medicine, conservation, and many new computer technologies. It becomes much harder to foster technical innovation in new areas when so few of us – including key policy makers - are able to grasp a core scientific theory that has proven over time to be so predictive and powerful. (It’s interesting to think how many of the people who will be getting the H1N1 vaccine don’t believe in the underlying science that made it possible.)

9) Standards for high office are often embarrassingly low at a time when America’s leaders need to navigate tough policy issues in the world of global tech. Extreme political polarization has many negative consequences. Regardless of how they feel about other issues, tech innovators get that business and technology are inherently global –and found it baffling and troubling that so many of their fellow Americans were ready to support a first-time governor who’d only recently been issued a passport and had never previously demonstrated an interest in or even curiosity about global affairs.

Monica Harrington was formerly chief marketing officer for Valve and Picnik. She now does strategy and communications consulting for business and nonprofits, and blogs at Social Innovation Perspectives. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.