By the time students finish college, they’re in their mid-twenties; some already have graduate degrees, and a large number are married. “All this changes the mental ability of the individual,” Shainberg reasoned. “They’re much more mature; they’ve got more life experience. Innovation is all about finding ideas.”
Innovation often depends on having a different perspective. Perspective comes from experience. Real experience also typically comes with age or maturity. But in Israel, you get experience, perspective, and maturity at a younger age, because the society jams so many transformative experiences into Israelis when they’re barely out of high school. By the time they get to college, their heads are in a different place than those of their American counterparts.
“You’ve got a whole different perspective on life. I think it’s that later education, the younger marriage, the military experience—and I spent eighteen years in the [British] navy, so I can sort of empathize with that sort of thing,” Shainberg went on. “In the military, you’re in an environment where you have to think on your feet. You have to make life-and-death decisions. You learn about discipline. You learn about training your mind to do things, especially if you’re frontline or you’re doing something operational. And that can only be good and useful in the business world.”
This maturity is especially powerful when mixed with an almost childish impatience.
Since their country’s founding, Israelis have been keenly aware that the future—both near and distant—is always in question. Every moment has strategic importance. As Mark Gerson, an American entrepreneur who has invested in several Israeli start-ups, described it, “When an Israeli man wants to date a woman, he asks her out that night. When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. This is actually good in business. Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”[70]
For Amir, as for many other conscripts, the IDF provided him with an exciting opportunity to test and prove himself. But the IDF offers recruits another valuable experience: a unique space within Israeli society where young men and women work closely and intensely with peers from different cultural, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds. A young Jew from Russia, another from Ethiopia, a secular sabra (native-born Israeli) from a swanky Tel Aviv suburb, a yeshiva student from Jerusalem, and a kibbutznik from a farming family might all meet in the same unit. They’ll spend two to three years serving together full-time, and then spend another twenty-plus years of annual service in the reserves.
As we’ve seen, the IDF was structured to rely heavily on reserve forces, since there is no way for such a small country to maintain a sufficiently large standing army. So for combat soldiers, connections made in the army are constantly renewed through decades of reserve duty. For a few weeks a year, or sometimes just a week at a time, Israelis depart from their professional and personal lives to train with their military unit. Not surprisingly, many business connections are made during the long hours of operations, guard duty, and training.
“Every five years Harvard Business School hosts a class reunion,” says Tal Keinan, an Israeli HBS grad. “It’s fun. It helps keep your network intact. We spend two days visiting with classmates, sitting in lectures. But imagine a reunion every year, and that it lasts for two to four weeks. And it’s with the unit you had spent three years with in the army. And instead of sitting in lectures, you’re doing security patrols along the border. It nourishes an entirely different kind of lifelong bond.”[71]
Indeed, relationships developed during military service form another network in what is already a very small and interconnected country. “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. Like Jon Medved, Vardi is one of Israel’s legendary business ambassadors.
Vardi says he knows of Israeli companies that have stopped using help-wanted ads: “It’s now all word of mouth. . . . The social graph is very simple here. Everybody knows everybody; everybody was serving in the army with the brother of everybody; the mother of everybody was the teacher in their school; the uncle was the commander of somebody else’s unit. Nobody can hide. If you don’t behave, you cannot disappear to Wyoming or California. There is a very high degree of transparency.”[72] The benefits of this kind of interconnectedness are not limited to Israel, although in Israel they are unusually intense and widespread.
Unsurprisingly, the IDF has many things in common with other militaries around the world, including equally grueling tryouts for their elite units. However, most of the other militaries’ selection processes differ in that they must choose from among volunteer recruits. They are not able to scour the records of every high school student and invite the highest achievers to compete against their most talented peers for a few coveted spots.
In the United States, for example, the military is limited to choosing only from among those potential recruits who express interest. Or as one U.S. recruiter put it, “In Israel, the military gets to select the best. In the U.S., it’s the other way around. We can only hope that the best choose us.”[73]
The American military goes to great lengths to seek out the best and hope that they may be interested in serving in the U.S. military. Take the United States Military Academy at West Point’s freshman class each year. The median grade point average hovers around 3.5, and the admissions department can rattle off all sorts of statistics to quantify the leadership aptitude of its student cadets, including the number who were varsity team captains in high school (60 percent), who were high school class presidents (14 percent), and so on. And the admissions department keeps an extremely comprehensive database of all inquiring prospective applicants, often going back to elementary school. As author David Lipsky writes in his book about West Point, Absolutely American, “Drop a line to West Point in the sixth grade and you’ll receive correspondence from admissions every six months until you hit high school, when the rate doubles.” Approximately fifty thousand high school juniors open West Point prospective files each year, which culminates in a freshman class of twelve hundred cadets. At the end of the five-year program, each graduate has received an education valued at a quarter of a million dollars.[74]
But even with extraordinary outreach efforts, like West Point admissions, a number of the senior leaders of the U.S. armed forces are frustrated that they cannot gain access to the academic records of a broad cross section of Americans. And without that access, they cannot target a tailored recruitment pitch.
A conversation with an American military man underscores the economic value of the Israeli system. Colonel John Lowry, a marine infantry officer, joined the Marine Corps after high school and has been in active duty or reserves for the past twenty-five years. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and went on to climb the corporate ranks at Harley-Davidson, the multibillion-dollar premium motorcycle manufacturer. He did so while fulfilling his commitment to the reserves, serving stints in the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, and, prior to his business career, Operation Desert Storm. Lowry commands one thousand marines and travels to various reserve bases across the country for two weekends each month, in addition to annual month-long call-ups. Lowry also helps oversee a number of Harley factory plants and manages about one thousand employees.[75]
74
David Lipsky,
75
Information from this passage is largely based on an interview with Colonel (res.) John Lowry, general manager at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, November 2008.