Of all the hot-button topics in today’s political climate, immigration is arguably at the top of the list.
On January 10, more than 100 CEOs of prominent businesses, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, signed a letter to Congress asking for legislation that would enable Dreamers — undocumented immigrants protected under the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival) — to continue to live and work in the US.
DACA is not the only immigration program top of mind right now for US business leaders. The H-1B Visa program, a law that enables employers to hire foreign workers for specialized occupations, is also under scrutiny by the White House.
For Mike Grandinetti who serves as CMO and chief strategy officer for the data storage and management platform, Reduxio, the H-1B Visa program offers US startups an invaluable resource that plays an integral role in his hiring strategy — the ability to hire from a diverse talent pool.
“If you think about how complex the world is today, and how quickly information is coming at us, you need people with multiple perspectives, multiple viewpoints, multiple sets of experiences to provide a holistic view of what’s really happening in the world,” says Grandinetti.
According to the CMO, he is a big believer in diversity — gender diversity, age diversity, country-of-origin diversity — because the best solutions are created when you have diverse teams. Grandinetti says the best ideas he has seen typically do not come from a single person but are a mashup of ideas that came from multiple people.
“One of the initiatives I’ve been very satisfied to be involved with for a long time is something called the Hult Prize,” says Grandinetti. “The Hult Prize is where Mr. Hult, whose name is on the Hult International Business School where I now teach, gives away a million dollars every year to the winner of the Global Social Entrepreneurship competition.”
Grandinetti says when he coaches teams during the competition, he gives them all one piece of advice: The most diverse team is going to win.
“What you often wind up with is a lot of people who want to work with the people they’re comfortable with — people who speak the same language, they come from the same country, whatever it may be. But every year, the team that wins is the most diverse team.”
Grandinetti knows what he’s talking about when it comes to building winning teams. Last October, Reduxio was awarded a MarTech Conference Stackie Award for its visionary marketing organization stack. (Full disclosure: the MarTech Conference and Stackie Awards are hosted by MarTech Today’s parent company, Third Door Media.)
In a release announcing award winners, MarTech Conference Chair Scott Brinker said Reduxio’s marketing model had implemented new organizational structures and processes, new skills and talents and a new management approach to operating in a fast-paced digital environment.
Today, Grandinetti explains why diversity is at the core of his hiring strategy and shares his concerns around the current anti-immigration sentiments playing out on a national level.
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