Author: Dean van Leeuwen

Migrants: Economic Meltdown or Boon For Your Business?

Posted on January 30, 2019January 14, 2026 by Dean van Leeuwen

Demographics is the quantifiable study of populations based on factors such as age, race, sex, economic status, level of education, income level and employment, among others. It’s typically one of the slower moving forces of change, but as we look to the near future, demographics will become the most potent force of disruption.

Demographic changes are impacting all level of talent acquisition, succession planning, age and gender management and availability of labor. Many near-term demographic changes will challenge business leaders and HR professionals to the full and require them to think carefully through the strategies and policies they develop and support. The big five demographic issues facing today’s business professionals include the impact of globalization, an aging workforce, growing gender and cultural diversity, the impact of migrant workers and managing multi-generation teams (in particular the integration of Gen Y). An aging workforce and migrant workers will have the most significant effect although it is the integration of Gen Y that usually gets the most attention. This focus needs to shift especially in Europe and the US where a tsunami of demographic changes is starting to crash on the shores of the largest economies.

Between 2025-2030 the global workforce will decrease by 12 million workers per year. Much of this impact will be felt in an aging Europe, in particular, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, France and Belgium. A seismic demographic shift of retiring workers has the potential to collapse each of these economies. Over the next 15 years, Germany alone will lose almost 30 percent of her workforce as 8 million workers retire. Italy will lose over 20 percent, Greece, Spain and Austria will each lose between 15-20 percent; and France, Belgium, Netherlands Switzerland’s workforces will all shrink too. Of the large EU economy’s only the UK’s workforce will grow due to more liberal migrant policies.

But as the growing sentiment against migrant workers increases the UK may find its borders closing too. The impact of this across Europe will then be catastrophic. Migrant workers provide a genuine and necessary source of low and high skilled workers. Business leaders and in particular HR professionals need to be lobbying for greater access to migrant workers, here is why.

Today as millions of desperate people flee the ravages of civil war, drought and regional unemployment a “migration crisis” has become headline news and a political hot potato. US-presidential wannabe Donald Trump talks about building a wall and the World Economic Forum ranked large-scale refugee flows amongst its top-5 global risks for 2016. Concerns about economic migrants and civil-war refugees are an ax to grind for the leave-EU movement.

Migration is as normal for humans as the air we breathe. Humans are obsessed with seeking better pastures. It is hardwired within the survival of our species. Extra-terrestrial migration to Mars will happen this century, and while we may look in wonderment at the technology that gets astronauts to Mars, humans will be fulfilling the very same need our ancient ancestors felt when they trekked north branching out from the cradle of humankind in Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking back over the ages, it’s clear that homo sapiens have not only survived but thrived because of their ability to migrate and more importantly take the knowledge they have and use it to adapt fit in and shape the new surrounding environment rapidly.

One trend we can be sure of is that migration will increase as the world’s economy becomes more connected, and environmental and demographic demands bite. Mass migration, from rural-urban areas and from dearth economies to those with more relative abundance will be a central theme played out during the first half of the 21st century.
Migration is a hugely emotive subject, but it need not be. Scientific studies are beginning to supply very factual answers and they reveal that many fears and wide-spread apprehensions do not hold up to examination. “Concern about immigrants falls sharply when people are given even the most basic facts,” says Peter Sutherland, the UN Special Representative for migration.

So, what are the facts?

The media spotlight is on the millions of Syrians fleeing the now ravaged landscape that they love. In 2015 over a million desperate people from Syria fled to Europe, and nearly 4,000 died trying to escape their war-torn country for a better life. This statistic includes the young Alyan Kurdi who drowned wearing his favorite “mystery space riders” t-shirt. Alyan’s who’s likeness to my own son is so striking that it leaves a sickening pit in my stomach and rips through my heart. For had my wife and I not hit the citizenship jackpot we too could have found our dreams washed up on a Turkish beach. Images of a gentle policeman carrying the sleeping angel of Alyan were flashed around the globe. But his tragedy is just a small part of a bigger picture. 240 million people worldwide are international migrants. Refugees account for less than 10% of that total.

Although the Industrial Revolution and globalization has lifted billions of people out of poverty, it has not been able to create enough jobs where there are people in need of work. This forces people to leave their families, cultures and countries they love to find work elsewhere. I have first-hand experience of this. For I too am an economic migrant who left South Africa to take advantage of the globalized world we live in albeit I was fortunate to arrive in the UK on a jetliner and not a waterlogged sinking dingy.

Migration is a profoundly human characteristic, one that has strengthened our species, ensured our survival and allowed humankind to prosper. However, today people who need to migrate are hindered by artificial boundaries of national borders and the castrating fears that an influx of refugees and migrant workers will mean less work for those already here. More crime and social strife is a growing perception.

Reality reveals a very different picture. Immigrants contribute massively to growing an economy’s GDP. Germany’s premier Angela Merkel is no saint, she knows the positive impact migrants will offer her aging and shrinking population. This is why Merkel agreed to allow a million migrants into Germany. Falling fertility rates and a retiring workforce mean that by 2050 Germany will drop from being the most populous European country to third. France too is shrinking, and Italy is already classified as “old” demographically with more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 20.

It is difficult to assess the practical impact of a migrant workforce in the EU due to the freedom of movement allowed within member country borders. However, Giovanni Peri a professor at the University of California, conducted a study of non-EU member Switzerland as at times different parts of the country have allowed free access to EU workers. While the workforce grew by 4 percent, he discovered that wages for natives did not drop and that educated Swiss people enjoyed wage increases for jobs that involved supervising the newcomers.

Besides, Peri’s studies of US-migrant workers concluded: “Immigrants expand the US economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment and promote specialization, which in the long run boosts productivity.” The big concern of anti-migrant movement is that migrants crowd out the native workforce pushing up unemployment. Peri found no evidence, in the short or long term to support this position. In fact, he calculated that native workers in the US were better off as a result of migration with average wages boosted by $5100 between 1990-2007, a quarter of the wage increase over this period.

A study by the UK Migration Advisory Committee undertaken in 2012 concluded that migrants from within and outside the EU “who have been in the UK for over five years are not associated with the displacement of British-born workers low-skilled migrants also do dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs” which natives do not want. Economic and social added value is not restricted to low-end workers, highly skilled migrants reduce chronic labor shortages in essential sectors such as healthcare, education and IT.

Immigration is also good for the Treasury. According to recent trends, the UK should conservatively expect 140,000 net immigrants a year for the next 50 years. Doubling this number would, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, cut government debt by almost a third, allowing for the reduction of taxes or improvement and extension of existing services. On the contrary, stopping immigration would up the debt by nearly 50 percent. The current UK government speaks of reducing immigration and balancing the books at the same time, but they can not do both.

Benefiting from benefits is often seen as a reason to limit migrants. But because most migrant workers are younger on average, research shows they bring in education and skills paid for by their native countries and return home before they become a drain on social security. “On purely economic grounds, immigration is good for everyone,” says Douglas Nelson of Tulane University in New Orleans, “The overwhelming majority of research finds small to no effects of migration on employment and wages.”

Professor Ian Goldin, director of Oxford University’s Martin School, a world” leading center of pioneering research for a sustainable and inclusive future, confers. “More people expand the economy,” he says. “A study by the International Labour Office for the UN found that because people are moving from where they cannot work productively to where they can, for every 1 percent increase in a country’s population caused by immigration, its GDP grew between 1.25 and 1.5 percent.”

The World Bank estimates that if immigrants increased the workforces of wealthy countries by 3 percent, that would boost world GDP by $356 billion by 2025.
And if global leaders were bold enough to remove the artificial barriers of their national boundaries, migration could have a massive effect. The combined analysis of several independent mathematical models suggests removing border boundaries would increase world GDP by between 50 and 150 percent.

The problems and challenges with migration are therefore not economic, but instead, they are exacerbated by ill-informed perception, untruths spread by fear-mongering politicians wilfully riding a wave of growing nationalist sentiments and the social realities of integrating people from different cultures, with different languages and different ways of doing things. Immigrants can put pressure on local communities and this is often where the pressure points and unpopular feelings are found rising. Sudden and high arrivals of migrants can strain schools, housing and other services in the short-term. “That is what people tend to see,” says Goldin.

To counteract this, governments need to use their immigration induced tax windfalls “to manage the costs and reduce pressures on local communities.” It’s not an insignificant challenge, but it can be done. Since the 1990s, 155 million Chinese have migrated from the countryside to cities for work. “This shows it’s entirely possible to build new homes for hundreds of millions of migrants given a couple of decades,” says Goldin.

Business leaders and HR professionals particularly those in Europe need to get behind the migration movement. Nomad living is inherently part of who we humans are. Millions migrated to the Americas in the 19th Century and built one of the world’s greatest superpowers. The economic benefits are clear. There is a deep-rooted irony in Donald Trump’s wall to keep out migrants. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that “diversity is the engine of investment. It generates creativity that enriches the world.”

More diversity and creativity is precisely what businesses of the future need to be more competitive and successful. As we venture into this new world and the realities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution emerge before us, countries and companies that embrace diversity will indeed emerge stronger than those that close themselves off. Migration is here to stay, we should welcome it and the travelers who make long journeys with open arms. Companies should do everything possible within their charitable, CSR initiatives and strategies to make the transformation from migrants to active economic workers as smooth and harmonious as possible. The future of many western economies depends on this.

Why do we Believe Things Are Impossible?

Posted on January 18, 2019January 14, 2026 by Dean van Leeuwen

There are good reasons in believing that some things are impossible, especially when they’ve been built into our societal or organizational psyche.

Greg Satell, an unconventional thinker, explains, “We spend a good portion of our lives learning established models. We go to school, train for a career and hone our craft. We make great efforts to learn basic principles and are praised when we show that we have grasped them. As we strive to become masters of our craft, we find that our proficiency increases, so too does our success and status. A new idea, whether it be a scientific principle or an operational model, gains power through its capacity to solve problems. As it proves its worth, it gains acceptance and becomes established.”

Achieving the impossible therefore requires challenging established paradigms and principles that are generally well accepted. This is not an easy task because as we learn and experience behaviors, they become hardwired in our brains through a process that neuroscientists call Hebbian plasticity. The expression “neurons that fire together wire together” is attributed to neuropsychologists Donald Hebb and Carla Shantz. The phrase essentially explains the chemical reaction that goes on in our brains as we learn.

Over time, specific neurons become associated with each behavior, emotion and feeling. Alvaro Pascual-Leone another neuroscientist, gives a brilliant analogy in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, in which he compared the brain to a snowy hill in winter: “When we first go down a hill in a sled, we can be flexible because we have the option of taking various paths through the soft snow each time. If we begin to favor certain paths, they become speedy and efficient, guiding the sled swiftly down the hill. Changing these paths becomes increasingly difficult, as we literally become stuck in the ruts that we create.”

Human behavior and thoughts operate on the same principle. Our behavior creates preferred chemical pathways in our brains that eventually make these behaviors so efficient that they are difficult to change, we become “stuck in a rut.”

The difficulty, therefore, in going against the grain to prove the impossible possible, is that the resulting behavior threatens to upset the applecart of accepted wisdom and places in question the validity of the paradigms that have given power and prominence to the establishment.

Hence, people on quests get a lot of pushback. The reason why few people or organizations embark on quests is that they are hard strategies that involve breaking down and unlearning established paradigms and then rewiring the brain to change behaviors.

Essentially, when you embark on an organizational quest, you need to rewire the way parts of your organization thinks! But as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Organizational models work in much the same way. In 1975, Steven Sasson invented the digital camera. Kodak was his employer at the time; however, his bosses who apparently felt the new paradigm offended their senses of the world, told him that that camera would never see the light of day. Sasson believed that two million pixels would be capable of competing against 110 negative film. His first digital camera produced only ten thousand pixels, so the quality was not great.

Executives asked when digital would compete against film, so using Moore’s Law, which predicts how fast computing technology advances, he estimated 15 to 20 years. “When you’re talking to a bunch of corporate guys about 18 to 20 years in the future when none of those guys will still be in the company, they don’t get too excited about it,” said Sasson in an interview with the New York Times. Unable to shift with digital photography Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

In a world of disruptive change, embarking on quests as a core strategy is imperative for success and competitive advantage because: firstly, the rewards are massive when you are at the forefront of creating a new paradigm; and secondly, if you do not, you will be disrupted by someone else who figures out how to make the impossible possible.

A quest by its very nature is worth making the necessary sacrifices to rewire behavior because people become passionate about the meaningful difference it will deliver.

The Quality of a Great Leader: Seek Amazing Quests

Posted on November 1, 2018January 14, 2026 by Dean van Leeuwen

During a sudden downpour in 2012, Paul Cummins sought refuge in a public library. He explored the archives and came across wills written by soldiers fighting in the first world war. One written phonetically, captivated him.

Paul is dyslexic and the phonetics made it easier for him to read. He realized that it was the will and last testament of a woman who had disguised herself and gone off to fight and make the ultimate sacrifice in the trenches. A phrase: “Blood swept lands and seas of red where angels fear to tread” shot out. Paul was overwhelmed and it made him think about the war’s massive death toll. There were 888,246 British and Commonwealth fatalities during World War One.

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Fueled with a crazy idea, Paul embarked on an audacious quest to create nearly a million handmade ceramic poppies – a lone ceramics guy who became a real leader with a vision that inspired thousands of volunteers to help make an impossible vision possible.

Quests Are Part of Every Culture’s Folklore

Since the dawn of civilization, quests have been a driving force behind humankind’s’ progress. Take JFK’s moonshooting quest; or Nelson Mandela’s and Martin Luther King’s noble quests for all persons to be free regardless of color or creed. But consider too the Polynesian islander in a dug-out canoe who one-day said: “Let’s go that way!” No one had ever been that way before. No one even knew what existed that way. Quests are amazing, they overcome the impossible, are open to anyone and they change the world.

Why Are Quests Important in 2019?

We are living through revolutionary times. Every 150-200 years forces of progress collide. You can see these disruptive periods in history: The Age of Enlightenment, The Renaissance, The Age of Discovery and The Industrial Revolution; when everything changes. The same is happening now.

At Davos, the World Economic Forum called our current age: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Not to knock them, but they could have been more creative – we are living in the Age of Quests. Never before have so many doors of progress opened up in the fields of science, health, engineering, education, entertainment and space travel. Perhaps the defining quest of our age will be a human colony on Mars. But you do not need to travel to the red planet for your own quest. Explore any of the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and you will discover a multitude of questing opportunities awaiting real leaders. When leaders get these four qualities right, amazing results happen, as Paul’s quest demonstrates:

Is There a Better Way?

Paul Cummins left the library asking: Is there a better way? – To commemorate a century since the start of WW1. He devised an inspired solution: A ‘sea of red’ ceramic poppies, filling the moat around the Tower of London. “Ceramics are transient and fragile, like we are” says Paul in an interview with the Guardian. “They feel part of our very humanity. Societies have always been carbon-dated by their ceramics and pottery. I settled on poppies because of their color and links to war remembrance.”

An Inspiring Destination

The goal: 888,246 ceramic poppies created and planted before 11 November 2014. There was no ambiguity and his quest was crystal clear.

Paul Cummins is a ceramic artist. He lives in Derby, UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. He is also the creator and mastermind behind the internationally acclaimed ‘Seas of Red’ installation at the Tower of London, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War. His story illustrates why quests are so important as you lead going into The Age of Quests.

Challenging The Impossible

Making nearly one million ceramic poppies is an immense undertaking. Paul wanted the poppies to be individual, like every soldier. So, the ceramic flowers were lovingly handcrafted. But Paul operates alone out of a small studio. He needed an army of supporters to craft the 3,500 daily poppies required to meet his quest’s target and deadline. Plus, his quest required a poppy planting odyssey. It was calculated that one person working on their own would take three and a half years to plant all the poppies. In the end, 300 artists worked day and night for a year crafting the poppies; and, over 27,000 people volunteered their time planting, and ultimately removing, the scarlet sea of remembrance.

Delivering Meaningful Benefits

Quests require innovations. Paul devised a revolutionary way to fund his quest and the sale of poppies raised over £10m for charities. Perhaps the greatest achievement though was the estimated five million people who came in person to pay homage, and for a time, the installation was the most viewed photograph on Google.

So, what can you take with you as you look towards 2019? Today because of breakthrough technologies, anyone anywhere, with a radical idea, leveraging the power of social can embark on a meaningful quest. It’s never been easier to make a real difference in the world. Few leaders think in terms of their business and quests. The great ones like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Paul Cummins do it intuitively and they achieve remarkable results.

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