LinkedIn, that repository of self-aggrandisement, is never short of metaphors and symbolism linking sporting achievement with business success. Long posts boldly declaring How improving my golf swing made me a better CEO, or Why heli-skiing in the Himalayas can kick-start your Q2 sales are as common as they are irrelevant.
Not that lessons from the world of sport are entirely without merit when it comes to business. Successful sports coaches can occasionally offer relevant leadership advice, with former England cricket captain Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy perhaps the gold standard, more than 30 years since it was first published. Then again, Brearley is also an exception that proves the rule: he initially eschewed a professional sporting career to pursue doctoral studies in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
The recent Winter Olympic Games, held in Italy, and football’s African Cup of Nations (Afcon), hosted by Morrocco, were also instructive in the way that they highlighted the potential power of national diasporas, an area where sport has long been well ahead of the game. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu, born and educated in the United States, has been widely criticised for turning her back on the US to represent (and win medals for) China, her mother’s birthplace. At Afcon, almost 30 per cent of the 664 players representing the 24 teams were born in Europe. Equatorial Guinea’s 28-man squad included 19 players born in Spain.
For China, Gu brought almost guaranteed success. In Italy, she won a gold and two silver medals: a decent return on the 6.6 million US dollars she was reportedly paid by the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau last year (a sum that was shared with fellow US-born Olympian figure skater Zhu Yi). Senegal, which won Afcon, will also be happy with its decision to field players from the diaspora, not least as the winning goal in the final against hosts Morocco was scored by French-born Pape Gueye.
More than money
If sport long ago recognised that diasporas represent an untapped resource of talent and, often, know-how, business has been far slower to act. The World Bank put remittances to low- and middle-income countries at 685 billion US dollars in 2023, more than three times global foreign aid and, in much of the Reinvantage region, far larger than inward foreign direct investment. Tajikistan receives diaspora cash worth nearly 45 per cent of its GDP. Kosovo, with roughly half its working-age population abroad, has built a construction boom on euros wired home from Switzerland and Germany.
But in large part, remittances do little more than facilitate consumption. A new car, a refurbished kitchen, occasionally a small business. The cash moves but the knowledge, contacts and ambition mostly do not. That is the real waste, and the real opportunity.
Sport understands this instinctively. FIFA’s Player Eligibility Rules exist precisely to help national associations cast their nets wider, and the results (not just at Afcon) speak for themselves. The logic transfers well to commerce. A diaspora engineer at Google or Microsoft is not merely an émigré with a foreign passport. They are a node in a network, a credible advocate and a potential investor who already understands the culture they would be investing in, something no amount of due diligence from a private equity office can replicate.
The exceptions prove the rule
A handful of countries have grasped this. Estonia’s small but hyper-connected diaspora of digital entrepreneurs and policy thinkers scattered across Europe and North America helped shape the e-governance thinking that now serves as a model from Singapore to Tbilisi. The Indian tech diaspora wired Silicon Valley into Bangalore so thoroughly that the relationship no longer resembles a brain drain, but rather a distributed research arm.
Armenia’s FAST Foundation has made a start at channelling its enormous global diaspora (some seven to ten million people, against a home population of barely three million) towards domestic tech investment. Ukraine offers the most striking recent case. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the diaspora swelled by an estimated six million people. Rather than simply mourn the loss, diaspora-linked venture funds began routing capital back into Kyiv’s tech sector during the war, not merely in anticipation of its end. People with roots there took risks that outsiders simply would not.
Governments elsewhere in the region have mostly watched from the sidelines. Georgia has some 700,000 nationals living abroad, about a fifth of its population, concentrated in Germany, Greece and Russia, but has a returnee programme that amounts to little more than a well-designed brochure. Uzbekistan talks up diaspora investment but has yet to build the legal and financial scaffolding to make it credible. Even countries with relatively sophisticated investment promotion operations such as Poland and Czechia have been slow to treat their diasporas as anything other than a source of wire transfers.
Scotland’s Global Scots network, launched in 2001, built a directory of influential diaspora figures willing to mentor, invest and open doors for domestic businesses. New Zealand’s KEA does something similar, and credits those connections with helping its tech and agrifood industries punch above their weight internationally. Neither programme required vast public expenditure. Both required only that someone in government decided the diaspora was worth the bother.
That, in the end, is probably the sticking point. Diaspora engagement often falls awkwardly between ministries, and in countries where mass emigration carries a whiff of national failure, celebrating those who left can feel politically uncomfortable. It need not. Eileen Gu did not need to live in China to win medals for it. Pape Gueye had never played a minute of domestic Senegalese football before scoring the Afcon winner. The geography matters less than the connection. Business could do with learning the same lesson.
Photo: Dreamstime.
