Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response?

[Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a feeder program to prepare college students to work for them, so they recently established software institutes in the Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, both in the coastal city of Weihai. That’s where Symbio is about to establish a new development center. Says Hsu, who grew up in San Francisco: “Other companies have university partnerships; we run the university departments.”

This isn’t something Symbio undertakes lightly. “We’re a human potential factory. We’re in the talent management business,” says Hsu. “In the next couple of years the companies that win will be the ones who manage talent the best.”

The Chinese have an abundance mentality, a positive outlook for their long-term future. Not only are they doing business successfully today, they are investing in building a generation of leaders for tomorrow. At the same time, western companies are shedding jobs and looking to outsource jobs and import labor to meet the needs of the moment. The west isn’t going to lose its edge because of quarterly profit outlooks, it is going to lose it because it lacks the vision to see the future and the audacity to put itself at the center of it!

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