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Start-Up Nation
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Start-Up Nation (2011) (edit title/settings)

The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

by Dan Senor (Author) (edit contributors)

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START-UP NATION addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel-- a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources-- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable... read more

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Describes how Israel, a small nation surrounded by enemies, succeeded in being one of the countries that most stimulates entrepreneurship and has the highest number of companies on Nasdaq besides EUA & Canada.

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  • ““A hybrid is like a mermaid: if you want a fish, you get a woman; if you want a woman, you get a fish.””
    Ghosn
  • “The key to the model would be that consumers would own their cars, but Agassi’s start-up, called Better Place, would own the batteries.”
  • ““Look, we doubled our economic situation relative to America while multiplying our population fivefold and fighting three wars. This is totally unmatched in the economic history of the world.””
    Gidi Grinstein
  • ““In two days in Israel, I saw more opportunities than in a year in the rest of the world,””
    Paul Smith
  • ““Israel is quite the opposite of a uni-dimensional, Jewish country. . . . It is a monotheistic melting pot of a diaspora that brought back with it the culture, language and customs of the four corners of the earth.””
    David Mc Williams
  • “As we will show, it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.”
  • ““We are rapidly becoming the fat, complacent Detroit of nations,” says former Harvard Business School professor John Kao. “We are . . . milking aging cows on the verge of going dry . . . <and> losing our collective sense of purpose along with our fire, ambition, and determination to achieve.””
    John Kao
  • “According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth.”
    Robert Solow
  • “According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth.”
    Monitor Group
  • “word—chutzpah is “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.””
  • ““We don’t cheerlead you excessively for a good performance, and we don’t finish you off permanently for a bad performance,” one air force trainer told us.”
    Israeli Air Force Traineer
  • “Indeed, a 2006 Harvard University study shows that entrepreneurs who have failed in their previous enterprise have an almost one-in-five chance of success in their next start-up, which is a higher success rate than that for first-time entrepreneurs and not far below that of entrepreneurs who have had a prior success.”
  • “to create a true culture of innovation, “fear of loss often proves more powerful than the hope of gain.””
    Dov Frohman
  • ““The IDF is deliberately understaffed at senior levels. It means that there are fewer senior officers to issue commands,” says Luttwak. “Fewer senior officials means more individual initiative at the lower ranks.””
  • ““The whole country is one degree of separation,” says Yossi Vardi, the godfather of dozens of Internet start-ups and one of the champion networkers in the wired world.Read”
    Yossi Vardi
  • ““The military gets you at a young age and teaches you that when you are in charge of something, you are responsible for everything that happens . . . and everything that does not happen,” Lowry told us. “The phrase ‘It was not my fault’ does not exist in the military culture.””
    Col. John Lowry
  • “Explaining away a bad decision is unacceptable. “Defending stuff that you’ve done is just not popular. If you screwed up, your job is to show the lessons you’ve learned. Nobody learns from someone who is being defensive.””
    Yuval Dotan
  • “THE STORY OF HOW ISRAEL got to where it is—fiftyfold economic growth within sixty years—is more than the story of Israeli character idiosyncrasies, battle-tested entrepreneurship, or geopolitical happenstance.”
  • “All countries have problems and constraints, he told us, but what’s striking about Israel is the penchant for taking problems—like the lack of water—and turning them into assets—in this case, by becoming leaders in the fields of desert agriculture, drip irrigation, and desalination.”
    Ricardo Hausmann
  • “Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything.”
    Yakov Mozganof
  • ““For us in the Soviet Union,” Sharansky explained, “we received with our mothers’ milk the knowledge that because you are a Jew—which had no positive meaning to us then, only that we were victims of anti-Semitism—you had to be exceptional in your profession, whether it was chess, music, mathematics, medicine, or ballet. . . . That was the only way to build some kind of protection for yourself, because you would always be starting from behind.””
    Sharansky
  • ““One or two generations back, someone in our family was packing very quickly and leaving. Immigrants are not averse to starting over. They are, by definition, risk takers. A nation of immigrants is a nation of entrepreneurs.””
    Gidi Grinstein
  • “Israel became the only nation in history to explicitly address in its founding documents the need for a liberal immigration policy.”
  • “A reform happens when you change the policy of the government; a revolution happens when you change the mind-set of a country. I think that Bibi was able to change”
  • “The future of the region is going to depend on our teaching our young people how to go out and create companies.”
    Fadi Ghandour
  • “In the best-selling book Built to Last, business guru James Collins identifies several enduring business successes that all have one thing in common: a core purpose articulated in one or two sentences. “Core purpose,” Collins writes, “is the organization’s fundamental reason for being. <It> reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work . . . beyond just making money.””
    James Collins
  • “Collins describes Israel’s core purpose as “to provide a secure place on Earth for the Jewish people.””
    James Collins
  • “A global 2008 survey by Scientist magazine named two Israeli institutions—the Weizmann Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—as the top two “best places to work in academia” outside the United States.”
  • “Thomas Friedman put it, “I would much rather have Israel’s problems, which are mostly financial, mostly about governance, and mostly about infrastructure, rather than Singapore’s problem because Singapore’s problem is culture-bound.””
    Thomas Friedman
  • “agriculture is “ninety-five percent science, five percent work.””
  • “The study found in Israel a relatively unusual combination of cultural attributes. One might expect that a country like Israel, where people are considered individualistic, would accordingly be less nurturing. Personal ambition might be expected to conflict with teamwork. And one would also anticipate that such a type A–driven society would be more hierarchical. In fact, Israel scored high on egalitarianism, nurturing, and individualism. If Israelis are competitive and aggressive, how can they be “nurturing”? If they are so individualistic, how does that reconcile with the lack of hierarchies and “flatness”?”
  • “George Bernard Shaw wrote, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.””
    George Bernard Shaw
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.
    Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers
  • Israeli attitude and informality flow also from a cultural tolerance for what some Israelis call “constructive failures” or “intelligent failures.” Most local investors believe that without tolerating a large number of these failures, it is impossible to achieve true innovation.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • “The goal of a leader,” he said, “should be to maximize resistance—in the sense of encouraging disagreement and dissent.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • army—Israelis learn that assertiveness is the norm, reticence something that risks your being left behind.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • “When [entrepreneurs] succeed, they revolutionize markets. When they fail, they still [keep] incumbents under constant competitive pressure and thus stimulate progress.”
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • Which may explain why, in addition to boasting the highest density of start-ups in the world (a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis),6 more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • From the age of zero we are educated to challenge the obvious, ask questions, debate everything, innovate,” says Mooly Eden, who ran these seminars. As a result, he adds, “it’s more complicated to manage five Israelis than fifty Americans because [the Israelis] will challenge you all the time—starting with ‘Why are you my manager; why am I not your manager?’
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • Dov Frohman, the founder of Intel Israel, later said that to create a true culture of innovation, “fear of loss often proves more powerful than the hope of gain.”14
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • Large organizations, whether military or corporate, must be constantly wary of kowtowing and groupthink, or the entire apparatus can rush headlong into terrible mistakes. Yet most militaries, and many corporations, seem willing to sacrifice flexibility for discipline, initiative for organization, and innovation for predictability. This, at least in principle, is not the Israeli way.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • “All the experts,” Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said, “are experts on what was. There is no expert on what will be.” To become an “expert” on the future, vision must replace experience.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

Scott Thompson looked at his watch.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Part I: The Little Nation That Could
Chapter 1: Persistence
Chapter 2: Battlefield Entrepreneurs

Part II: Seeding The Culture Of Innovation
Chapter 3: The People of the Book
Chapter 4: Harvard, Princeton and Yale
Chapter 5: Where Order Meets Chaos

Part III: Beginnings
Chapter 6: An Industrial Police That Worked
Chapter 7: Immigration
Chapter 8: The Diaspora
Chapter 9: The Buffett Test
Chapter 10: Yozma

Part IV: Country with a Motive
Chapter 11: Betrayal and Opportunity
Chapter 12: From Nose Cones to Geysers
Chapter 13: The Sheikhs Dilemma
Chapter 14: Threats to the Economic Miracle
Conclusion; Farmers of High Tech

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Oxford PPE UA Amp P Political Economy. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Dan Senor (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

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Publication Date: 2011
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Page Count: 336

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