The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

Every month of this year, PolitiCole is using this space to rally Bahamians living abroad (starting in America) to find out their hopes and plans for their native Bahamaland.

NAME: Lars Minns, 41, from Nassau

Time in the United States

From school (St Augustine’s College) ‘til now, 1995 to present ... so that’s almost 21 years I’ve lived in the United States. I moved to the greater Washington, DC, area after college, spent seven years there and then moved down to the Atlanta area, and I’ve been here for the last 11 years.

Education and career

I studied Business Management at Hampton University in Virginia and then moved into Talent Acquisition and Sales for a fairly large company. I worked for smaller, boutique companies until I moved to Atlanta which afforded me the opportunity to work for two major players (in their respective industries).

I ran talent acquisition for a number of divisions at The Home Depot, and now I’m the Head of Talent Acquisition for Mercedes Benz USA.

The daily job

Mercedes Benz, historically, has been a low turnover environment, until 2015, when the company decided to relocate its corporate headquarters down to Atlanta. We are now redefining what our employment brand is to be, commensurate with what the company’s brand is and, in so doing, attracting a work force that resembles what our product lineup and our overall customer experience strategy will be into the future.

We have a long-term vision to 2020. Our ultimate strategy is to be the number one luxury automaker in the world and that means catapulting BMW – they’re ahead of us by a significant margin at the moment – and to bypass them we not only have to attract a different workforce and mindset, we have to make sure we’re thinking differently as the automobile experience starts to change with new automobile buyers.

I also get into a lot of policy rewriting, rebuilding of our culture, rebuilding what the future for Mercedes Benz will be. So, my core function is centred around talent acquisition, but the expanse of the role takes me into quite a bit of human resources and human capital strategy development.

Thoughts of returning to The Bahamas

I did seriously consider moving back to The Bahamas. It was after several years of working in the United States. I think one of the things you eventually arrive at, depending on your field, is that working in the United States is great, you get incredible exposure, but a lot of the things that you would like to do seem to take a bit longer because there is a more robust structure here as opposed to at home.

In the United States you are learning and relearning, as opposed to home where the education flight is a lot shorter. As you learn the industry that you’re in, that industry is quickly changing; there’s a constant state of change in the United States and I think at home it’s a bit more static.

In the end, I didn’t return; the level of exposure in the United States is just too great. Shortly after I had done some soul searching, it dawned on me that it wasn’t that I was in the wrong place to enhance my career, it was perhaps because I was using the wrong plan. And as a result I really made it a point to focus on what it meant to really embrace this US experience, whether lifestyle or career, and ultimately start setting some new objectives for what I wanted.

Once I became clear on that, I realised that staying in this first world was more important to me than rushing home.

And that would be the advice I would give anyone: take full advantage of any opportunity you have in the United States. Industries are always in a state of change. The tide rises very quickly here, and as the saying goes, as the tide rises, so do all the boats ... or something like that.

Taking first world

America back to third world Bahamas

I don’t think you can do it in a conventional way, and it won’t happen right away.

We Bahamians who live in the United States or abroad, we should think of how we can create an information source of some sort that we then supply to our colleagues back in The Bahamas, so that if they have various industry questions, issues or dilemmas, they have a source they can tap into.

And I don’t agree that we should rely on another entity like the government to help us operationalise that. I don’t think we should look to those who live in The Bahamas to come to seek us. I think we should be reaching across and extending that hand first.

I’m not at all of the opinion that you have to physically be there to make The Bahamas better. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we believe that you have to live in The Bahamas to add value as a Bahamian. In fact, this is where I challenge the theory of the ‘brain drain’; I don’t think it’s a drain at all.

I think what we haven’t done is found a way to gain access to what still is ours. I’m still a Bahamian and I think we have to continue to create some outlets; the accountability falls on me as well. I should be constantly thinking of how to create a mechanism where Bahamians anywhere can benefit each other.

American or Bahamian?

I have the privilege, and I underscore ‘privilege’, of holding two passports. It is truly a privilege. And I say privilege because I left home too early to vote. So the first time I voted was when I became a US citizen. I voted in the election that led to Obama’s inauguration. That was probably the most exciting election in America ever ... perhaps in the free world.

Will you ever return to The Bahamas?

I think I would move back after I’ve retired; I’d love an opportunity where several months are spent in The Bahamas and several months are spent in the United States.

I think we live in such a transient world today that that’s possible. I’d love to explore that at some point. But, as for moving back where I am fully grounded in The Bahamas, I do believe that there would be some level of sacrifice I’d have to make and I don’t know that that’s realistic for me at the moment.

I have a (Bahamian) wife, Moya (nee Adams, a graduate of St John’s College) and three kids. I think the responsibility of providing a family structure lies ultimately within the nuclear family. So the thought that I need to move home to prop up the structure of my family ... I don’t buy that argument and I would challenge anyone on it.

When I lived in the DC area, there was some family support, my wife’s family was there, but I always believed that regardless of where I lived I wanted to be self-sufficient. Regardless of how small New Providence is, which is where I would more than likely reside, I don’t know that I would rely heavily on my family.

I want to make sure that my children (Landyn, 10, and two boys Latham, 8, and Lian, 6) understand that it’s my responsibility to raise them. There would be great benefits in having family nearby, but my chief task is to lead my family and rear my kids. And I enjoy

doing that. I truly enjoy doing that without having the crutch of an extended family arrangement. And it helps that my family (in The Bahamas) would be willing to travel to us too, for vacation, and spend time with us here.

The children sometimes ask about living in The Bahamas. I explain to them what that would mean and what sort of sacrifices would have to be made. The soccer academy my son loves and the running programme my daughter is a part of, those opportunities won’t exist in The Bahamas the way they do for them here today.

So I think they walked back from the ledge on that.

Following Bahamas news

I read The Tribune quite a bit. From time to time, I’ll plug into NB12’s YouTube channel as well. I do like an eclectic view of news in The Bahamas because I think that opinions do matter ... and perspectives.

As for memorable headlines, the upcoming election is big. The way The Bahamas has decided to position itself and chosen to spend capital funds does stand out. For obvious reasons, the crime rate certainly stands out. Unemployment doesn’t seem to get talked about enough. And that seems a bit odd, because that’s always a key statistic for any country that considers itself burgeoning.

I do think there needs to be a clinical look at that to make sure that the information isn’t just anecdotal or knee-jerking. Unemployment has everything to do with the crime rate.

Big picture view of

The Bahamas

The first thing that comes to mind is that we have a country that doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of direction. And I want to be very delicate, because it’s a bit unfair for someone not living in The Bahamas to be too opinionated.

I want to be very fair to the people who are in fact working very hard to lead the country. But, from where I sit, having been given the luxury of providing an opinion, I would say that we have very little direction, or, there is very little commitment to the right direction. And that’s rather important because the generation margins are getting larger as you move down the generations.

The millennial generation is very, very large, globally, and will continue to get larger. When you start thinking of the country’s direction and how that direction is relevant to millennials, there’s a serious, serious problem. Until we start engaging them differently, as opposed to being very static with our approach, the future of The Bahamas becomes dim ... because whatever they are today is what we are tomorrow.

I’ve never been a youth soapbox guy but I will tell you that when you look at the movements in the world economy and how companies are positioning themselves, including my company, it is all predicated on what the millennial generation does ... the now 18- to 34-year-olds.

The value in

older leadership

I think we need an experienced individual who can use history to their advantage, but also someone who is contemporary enough or broad-thinking and forward-thinking enough to say “you know what, we should break some paradigms here and try some things that we haven’t tried.”

Our problems, the lack of vision, etc, are Bahamian problems. As much as we’ve held the line politically, this is a unique opportunity for all political parties to solve this; this is where greatness can emerge.

We have to tackle the problems regardless of who’s in the front and who’s in the back. And the wisest amongst us will take that stance.

If you are a Bahamian living in the United States, please write in via email to nburrows@tribunemedia.net or Facebook to

be interviewed.