Israel Blog - Day 5 - "The Cultural Issues Behind Innovation"

Speaking of business legends, one of my all-time favorites is Clint Eastwood. In "Heartbreak Ridge" he plays a crusty old Marine Recon Gunnery Sergeant, Gunny Highway. His most memorable line from the movie (doesn't he always have a most memorable line in his movies?) was "adapt, improvise, overcome." In trying to square away a Recon Platoon in need of serious help, he adapts, improvises and overcomes, and ultimately they do too. As a former Marine I know that Marines do, in fact, adapt, improvise and overcome, and have been doing so very successfully for 235 years now (as of November 10). Happy Birthday Marines! Semper Fi.

This brings us back to The Start-Up Nation. The authors, Dan and Saul, try to figure out what the magic formula is; why Israelis seem to take to innovation and accept risk more readily than people from other successful nations like China, Korea, Japan and Singapore. They end up concluding that universal military service has something to do with it, but, more importantly, Israel's approach to military leadership is key. They push responsibility down to the very lowest levels. Lieutenants and Captains own large chunks of responsibility and accountability, and all the junior leaders down to the last private are encouraged to think and challenge, rather than accept and obey.

This is unlike leadership in some military organizations, which stereotypically run very top-down and rigid. But many very successful militaries, particularly the Marines and Special Forces, place a heavy emphasis on leadership and performance at all levels, so this all came as no surprise to me. Adapt, improvise, overcome could not sound more natural.

Another Book!

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, discusses cultural issues as they relate to performance in different tasks, and one of the most interesting ideas he discussed was rice paddy management!

According to Gladwell..."the impact of a cultural legacy of working on rice paddies is really the underlying factor" [behind much of their success]. One chapter starts with the Chinese proverb: No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich. Simply put, the harder and smarter you work on a rice paddy, the greater the output. In Western agriculture, you increase output by purchasing more land, or replacing labor with technology. Growing/harvesting seasons are short, whereas rice paddies are grown/harvested for most of the year. (1)

While we want to avoid oversimplifying a complex issue, one can readily see how a strong cultural emphasis on hard work, high detail orientation and perfection, in which failure is a terrible thing and something to be avoided at almost all costs, might serve a company well in developing the best semiconductor manufacturing in the world. However, it may also discourage anyone from trying something new and difficult.

Dan and Saul, in their book and in their talks this week, came back to the willingness of young Israelis to take risks and think big, learn from mistakes and try again. Combined with some very intelligent approaches to identifying and intensively training their brightest young students in special Military programs, this seems to result in a steady stream of new ideas and bold attempts to turn these ideas into reality.

Thus concludes our trip. John and Roger are sitting in the Tel Aviv airport waiting to board the midnight flight back home, thinking about the great people and ideas we were exposed to this week, and glad we got to share a little bit about it with you.

(1) Beckford, Mark. (2010, Jan 28). Rice paddies and culture (Next Billion web blog). Retrieved from this website. (2010, Nov 19).

Important Disclosure: The content of this posting is informational in nature and is based solely on the author's opinion. The reader should not assume that this serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment, tax, accounting, and/or legal advice.

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