One might expect <a
href="http://www.startupnationbook.com/"Start-Up Nation: The Story
of Israel’s Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business
school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan
Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in
the U.S. Federal Government.
These backgrounds give a clue that Senor and Singer aim beyond
questions of how to be a successful entrepreneur or high-tech
executive. In fact, their book is a serious investigation of the
social, historical, and psychological traits that produce
extraordinarily creative people–and significantly, creative people
who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the
potential to change the world.
The book has garnered a fair amount of news coverage, but still not as
much as it deserves, in my opinion. It took me only about three hours
to read, and I highly recommend it as a refreshing–but not
necessarily reassuring–perspective on a country that is profoundly
misunderstood and misrepresented by media outside its diminutive
borders.
In this blog I’ll summarize the traits that that the authors find make
Israel a successful incubator for innovation, distinguishing between
traits that other countries can emulate and traits that seem uniquely
embedded in Israel’s historical and geographic circumstances.
Finally, as I usually do in these book reviews, I’ll lay out three
observations that came to my mind while following the authors’
argument: the importance of hard data, flipping axioms, and the
creative role government can play.
Israel’s stunning performance in world markets is beyond argument. The
country lists more companies on NASDAQ than India, Japan, South
Korea, Singapore, and all the countries of Europe–combined!
(I originally included China in this list, but that was based on
outdated information: it now has a lot of high-tech companies, as you
can see from the comments at the end of the blog.)
Venture
capital flows into the country. It’s often noted that technically
trained Israelis emigrate, but less often reported that many of them
return and spectacularly exploit their international connections. And
because investment is based on technical progress instead of clever
financial book-keeping, Israel has weathered the current recession
with some decline in revenues but not a single bank failure.
Start-Up Nation claims to reveal the reasons behind the
success of this country that not so long ago was considered a victim
of quasi-socialist stagnation and crippling costs related to war and
violence. Some of the authors’ observations have been made
before–such as the importance of forcing young people to take serious
responsibility in army service, and the value of accumulating highly
trained immigrants from Russia and other places–but these
observations have previously been oversimplified and leave out what
Senor and Singer consider crucial inputs. Start-Up Nation not
only tries to restore the proper balance and show traits from a more
productive perspective, but integrates them into a comprehensive
picture of a churning economy.
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Traits that other countries can emulate
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Traits unique to Israel’s history and geography
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The importance of hard data
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Flipping axioms
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The creative role government can play
Traits that other countries can emulate
Although Israel has special advantages, some of the elements to which
Senor and Singer trace its innovativeness can theoretically be
achieved elsewhere. Briefly, these are:
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A loyalty to the entire community that goes beyond personal success.
The authors point out that, for all of Israelis’ notorious
fractiousness, they expend enormous effort helping total strangers.
All of Israel is a single team, even a single family. (Obviously, this
family feeling does not extend to non-Jews.) Israeli entrepreneurs who
give talks abroad often play up the strengths of their country as well
as their company. -
A sense of dissatisfaction. To innovate, one must be convinced that
things are not good enough the way they are now. For Israelis, this
drive for change has both Biblical and more recent historical roots,
but technology provides a new arena rewarding hopes for improvement. -
A Do-It-Yourself approach to technology, which perhaps is one
manifestation of the afore-mentioned innate dissatisfaction. The
authors report that equipment purchased by the army is always being
tinkered with. The same interest in taking things apart and
jerry-rigging them extends throughout the culture. -
A culture of challenging authority. The authors point out that this is
a deep cultural value (and like many before them, trace it partly to
the Jewish intellectual tradition), one that is particularly hard to
foster in countries with controlling regimes. -
A determination to succeed against all odds. Countries that get
complacent and rest on their laurels–as most observers think North
Americans are doing–eventually lose their privileged places. The
authors highlight fascinating stories of Israelis keeping up
production in the face of war, and of cheerfully taking on seemingly
impossible challenges. -
Interdisciplinary agility. Israelis tend to learn many skills–partly
to survive in the armed forces–and to form companies closely linking
people with different areas of expertise. In an age where many
challenges require mashups between disciplines, this imparts a strong
advantage. -
A tolerance for failure. Like the Silicon Valley, Israel is a place
where someone can start a company, manage it through bankruptcy, and
then pick up to start another company. A single failure, the authors
say, gives the entrepreneur a high chance of succeeding at the next
venture. Even in the military, people are rewarded for tackling
problems with creative intelligence–not so much for the ultimate
success or failure of the attempt. -
Providing young people with arenas to exert responsibility. In Israel,
of course, this arena is its unusually unhierarchical armed forces
(and people who don’t do army service, such as Arabs and the
ultra-orthodox, miss out on critical experiences). But other countries
could find other ways to challenge youth in situations where taking
charge is a must and where results really matter. -
A fruitful mentoring relationship between venture capitalists and new
entrepreneurs. Injecting money into new ventures (as so many
countries do) is not enough; the managers must be guided through the
shoals of financial, technical, and human resource challenges. Israel
set up a unique program called Yozma in 1993 to bring
together all the necessary elements. -
Government policies friendly to startups. Israel has a decidedly mixed
history here. Even after making a historic turn away from government
control and toward a free market, its environment is most helpful to
computer and high-tech companies. There are certainly innovations in
many other areas–notably agriculture–but the authors say these
fields encounter hampering regulations. -
A truly open-arms approach to immigrants, who bring not only fresh
perspectives but a high tolerance for risk. Once again, of course,
Israel’s liberal attitude toward immigrants applies only to Jews (and
a lot of haggling goes on around deciding who qualifies). Even for
Jews, it can take a long time to assimilate waves of newcomers and
turn them into productive employees. But countries that don’t make it
easy to set down roots suffer economically. Short-term foreign workers
never form the sustainable innovative institutions that can be planted
by truly committed immigrants.
Traits unique to Israel’s history and geography
Israel also possesses unique traits that the Senor and Singer draw in
to explain its entrepreneurial success. No other culture has undergone
thousands of years of persecution culminating in genocide–nor should
that be a necessary price. But it’s amazing how Israel has turned its
liabilities into assets, and these lessons can be inspirational for
people suffering in other parts of the world.
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The country’s regional isolation (boycotted by all its neighbors) and
its small size has forced it to think internationally from the start.
Israelis are also avid travelers, gathering up experiences that allow
them to think creatively. -
Demographic diversity is another trait that has many negative
repercussions, but that the Israelis have also mined for its
strengths. New ideas always seem less odd in a culture where one has
to get along with different types of people. -
A long intellectual tradition encourages a love of learning that
extends to worldly accomplishments (although I have to point out that
the same tradition contains many rabbis who railed against the study
of mundane things); just as important, it encourages students to
examine and re-examine every idea from new points of view–effectively
making them ask constantly what would result if something obvious were
not true. I will explore this intellectual attitude in the
section Flipping axioms. -
The tight-knit society leads to a situation where “everybody knows
everybody” and one can easily find the right mix of staff for a new
company. (I wonder whether this cliquishness extends far beyond the
economically dominant ethnic group–the Ashkenazi Jews, who trace
their ancestry to Northern and Western Europe.) -
The constant existential threat posed by attacks and bombings call for
hair-trigger creativity. It’s worth noting here that the authors
present Israel’s response to war and terror in a consistently heroic
light (along with recognition that they sometimes screw up). But the
authors note that every engagement is followed by an assessment to
determine what could have been done better. -
The small size of the population (further reduced, as I noted earlier,
by deferrals for the religious and for Arabs) forces each army recruit
to take on responsibility right away.
The importance of hard data
At this point I will delve into some more subtle threads that I see
running through the book.
The first is the importance of accumulating evidence to build a case
for change. Two incidents from the book illustrate this nicely:
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Israel’s Intel facility, which invented the historic 8088 (and would
later invent the Core 2 Duo) faced its biggest uphill battle when it
approached its parent company to propose the principle behind the
Centrino. Senor and Singer note that Israeli staff flew into Intel
headquarters insistently to talk about the advantages of the new
design–and seemed to deal with management resistance by increasing
their own pressure. But it’s important to note that they accumulated
data to prove the superiority of the design. Mere persistence
would probably not have carried the day. -
An Israeli company called Fraud Sciences pitched a system for
identifying untrustworthy customers and vendors to a manager at
eBay. The manager was adamantly unwilling to believe that this tiny
group of developers could do a better job than all of eBay’s experts,
and the founder of Fraud Sciences was not a good salesman. Luckily,
eBay had a low-risk, low-cost way to test the start-up: eBay would
give information about one hundred thousand customers to Fraud
Sciences and compare their analyses to eBay’s analyses as well as the
subsequent history of those customers. Fraud Sciences passed the test
with flying colors and ended up being bought by eBay. There was no way
even the most determined cynic could argue with the facts.
We now see data-crunching brought right into the development process,
as with a process called “predictive drug development” practiced by
the Israeli company Compugen.
Flipping axioms
I mentioned before the oddly subversive style of the Jewish
intellectual tradition. I call it flipping an axiom: find the key
trait that holds back change–a trait that no one has challenged
before because it seems unassailably true–and ask “What would happen
if it were false?” This is a kind of non-Euclidean geometry of
thought. Two examples of this thinking at work in Israel include:
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The Centrino project at Intel, mentioned in the previous section,
required overturning a tautology accepted throughout a whole industry
and customer base. The problem they were facing was that increases in
chip speed led to increases in heat dissipation. Laptops with advanced
processors could not be designed because the build-up of heat would
destroy them.So the Israeli team asked: what if we sped up processing without
increasing clock speed? To give an indication what a radical thought
this was, consider that U.S. Intel management rejected the idea
because they had build their entire marketing strategy around clock
speed. Clock speed had become the universal measure for computer
performance. The Israelis threw out the assumption, found a solution,
and sold it to management–and the world. -
Start-Up Nation begins appropriately enough with the
well-known innovator Shai Agassi, who wants to create a network of
battery replacement stations to support an infrastructure of electric
cars. The basic elements of the plan had all been thought up by auto
manufacturers already and rejected as unfeasible. But Agassi found a
promising way to cut through the difficulties (although it has not had
a chance to be tested yet in everyday use).The key to Agassi’s thinking, as presented by the authors, was to
assume that cars had to stop using fossil fuels. The world is
running out of them. Agassi rejected other options such as hydrogen
and hybrids, so he decided cars must be electric around the
same time manufacturers decided they must use gasoline
(although other options such as ethanol are also being explored).
Taking electric cars as an axiom, Agassi found all the other
propositions to make cars work.
The creative role government can play
I’ll end by exploring the positive role of government in Israel.
Entrepreneurial government is just as important as entrepreneurial
business–but it must do different things. In this regard the Israeli
experience matches up somewhat with the positive role Nandan Nilekani
proposed in Imagining India, which I reviewed
a few months ago.
In the early years, the Labor government kept a firm hand on the
economy. The authors suggest that this worked well in the Israel of
the 1950s and 1960s, an underdeveloped country needing obvious
infrastructure investments. When the country reached a higher level
calling for more complex economic relationships, the socialist bent
became dysfunctional. (Many economists have found similar trajectories
in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.) It was time to retract, so to
speak, to permit more creation.
The authors enthusiastically endorse the Chicago School shock
treatment carried out by the right-wing Likud government that took
over in the 1970s. They don’t mention the troublesome income gap
created by this turn to the markets, but it does seem to have
unleashed the innovative capitalism that has made Israelis relatively
affluent for their part of the world, and an attractive location to
work for Jews as well as non-Jews from elsewhere.
The government doesn’t make direct investments, but to some extent it
chooses winners–hooking them up to external investors–through the
Yozma program mentioned earlier.
Like all governments, Israel promotes R&D through the military.
But it provides on particularly interesting kind of government
incubator: Talpiot, an intensive multi-disciplinary training program
for promising young recruits.
Talpiot looks over the entire eligible high school population and
aggressively encourages applications from the people it believes will
make the most creative problem-solvers. It puts them through basic
training as well as a technical academic program, and assigns them
quickly to real-life problems. The training goes on for forty-one
months, and the recruits are required to stay in the military for six
more years.
Most Talpiot graduates leave the armed forces when their required six
years are up, and this is seen as a strike against the program by its
critics. But the authors point out that these highly trained, highly
practical experts go on to apply their skills in private industry, so
the government has effectively provided an elite corps for the
country.
Israel certainly faces problems that technology and organizational
savvy cannot solve. But its political, economic, and cultural
successes have made it a model for other developing countries–none
more than the Arab nations, who are trying to emulate it in many ways.
Start-Up Nation is surprisingly broad and deep, for such a
short book. I’m persuaded that it has unraveled many of the mysteries
behind Israel’s business success. And it does its best, in a very
uncertain world, to suggest how both Israel and other countries could
replicate that success.