Excerpt from The Entrepreneurial Imperative

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We Already Think This Way

This book attempts nothing less than a sweeping manifesto—one that will hopefully help change the way both government and corporations work and also the way we live our daily lives. In this sense the ideas advanced here may appear radical. When you dig into them, however, you will find that they naturally build on who we are as Americans and what we believe.

Entrepreneurship is a mindset. Indeed, some studies indicate that a large percentage of first-graders show all kinds of signs of creativity and innovation but that our school systems drill this out of students through a system of learning that presents a correct way—meaning only one way—to do and think about things. As a result, the natural impulse of children to be entrepreneurial is dampened.

The trick is to educate and encourage the largest number of people to feel comfortable with the notion that they can start a business, control their destiny, and contribute to society through their innovation and hard work. This is more common than you might think. At any given time, 15 percent of the population is running their own companies. Our goal should be to make starting a business as common as getting married or parenting.

Reaching that goal involves teaching the importance of entrepreneurship in our schools. As part of the curriculum, as early as high school, students should know that at some point in their lives starting a company is a very real option. And even if they don't start a firm, students should know that they will have a role to play in keeping big companies entrepreneurial and in helping government assume a role supportive of entrepreneurs.

On one level, it appears that to meet the future we need sweeping reform of how we live and work. But on another, it is simply a call for us to return to what made America successful in the first place.

This country was founded on the principle that a new economy must be formed, one in which only the efforts and responsibilities undertaken by individuals would determine their future. This freedom of self-determination spawned an extraordinary culture of work. This work ethic has always been part of America. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, for example, both expressed their belief in a national economy centered on appreciation, diffusion, and implementation of technology. To succeed in the coining age of industry through the exploitation of that technology, education-indeed, practical education in the sciences and "manual arts"—would be important to the new republic.

Every citizen would have the chance to be the next John Fitch, who developed the steamboat. Believing that hard work holds the key to controlling your destiny is a very successful way to live your life. The work ethic engendered by individual freedom and social mobility may be the most important reason behind America's economic evolution.

What is perhaps most interesting about the American work ethic is that it is most threatened when we become too comfortable. Our economic security is best served by economic discomfort. Whereas others might see the ultimate goal of a successful economy as insulating individuals from the insecurity that accompanies economic dynamism, it is this very insecurity that moves the economy at its core and enhances economic security. Yes, new companies and new technologies constantly displace the old, causing temporary hardships for those inside the established firms. But the net result is that our economy as a whole is stronger for it. (This theme will play itself out repeatedly in the pages ahead.)

One nation that outperforms the United States in any measure of entrepreneurship is Israel. When its just-retired chief scientist, Dr. Orna Berry, recently visited the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, I asked why her country is so entrepreneurial. She replied that Israel is, as a political and cultural matter, unavoidably insecure, and, in her words, the discomfort of this insecurity leads her nation to a life of innovation, creativity, and economic entrepreneurship as a means of controlling its destiny. Discomfort—and it may be intellectual discomfort—is the source of all entrepreneurial activity.

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