Product Description

In 2004, Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, the world's leading foundation for entrepreneurship, published a groundbreaking essay with a radical premise: that Americans literally have no conception of the secret that truly underlies our economic success, and that for the United States to survive and continue to lead the world's economy, it is imperative we learn to understand and employ that secret.

The secret that has led the American economy to become the world's strongest? Our unparalleled skill as entrepreneurs. As Schramm compellingly shows in this sweeping manifesto, entrepreneurship alone—not anything else—can give America the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower. Not technology, since everyone now has the same technology, or access to it. Not education—we are years behind other nations in this area. Not basic manufacturing, long since moved overseas from the United States. And not capital markets, now truly global entities.

Drawing on detailed research conducted by the Kauffman Foundation and on his decades of experience as an entrepreneur himself and as a leader and mentor to other entrepreneurs, Schramm persuasively demonstrates in detail what this entrepreneurial imperative means for the way we run universities and foundations, lead companies, make personal job decisions, and even conduct our foreign affairs. The Entrepreneurial Imperative will change not only the way our government, corporations, and nonprofits operate, but also our day-to-day lives as working Americans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #374178 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060841638
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"[The] one book that lays out.why entrepreneurship matters. The Economist didn't call Schramm the "evangelist of entrepreneurship" for nothing. (-Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed )

"Reading The Entrepreneurial Imperative it's hard not to like Carl J. Schramm. [A]n optimistic cheerleader for American capitalism." (-Stephen Wolter, Corporate Report Wisconsin )

"As Carl Schramm argues . in The Entrepreneurial Imperative, no country has mastered innovation and entrepreneurship as effectively as America." (-The Economist )

"[E]ssential reading to understand and prepare for our personal lives and the future." (-Steve Forbes, CEO and Editor in Chief, Forbes )

"Schramm unlocks the key to growth. . . and roots it in the American spirit inside us all." (-Scott Cook, founder of Intuit )

"[E]ssential reading to understand and prepare for our personal lives and the future." (-Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's and author of Copy This! )

About the Author

Carl J. Schramm is president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, a world leader in advancing entrepreneurship. Trained as an economist and lawyer, he has founded companies in the health care, finance, and information technology arenas. He is a Batten Fellow at Virginia's Darden School of Business and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Customer Reviews

Getting The Facts and the Arguments Wrong
I was one of the first people to rush out and get this book. I assumed that a book written by the President of the Kauffman Foundation would have important insights into entrepreneurship. Boy, was I wrong!

The book is riddled with inaccuracies. For example, it says that only Israel is a more entrepreneurial country than the United States when the Kauffman Foundation's own research shows only a middling rate of entrepreneurship in the U.S., below that of Peru and Uganda of all places.

In another example, the book says that the current period is the most entrepreneurial in U.S. history, when, in fact, rates of entrepreneurship in the U.S. have been declining for decades.

But it is not just the facts that are a problem. The book's arguments are flawed too. The idea that U.S. foreign policy should focus on entrepreneurship smacks of the 1950s argument that "what's good for General Motors is good for the country". That seems naive, at best.

Similarly, the book is critical of US technology transfer operations. However, we would be hard pressed to improve a system that gave us a company like Google. Dr. Schramm should read the history of Stanford's involvement with Google before he criticize American universities' technology transfer operations.

Finally, the tone of the book is grating. It is both a polemic for entrepreneurship and a PR job for the Kauffman Foundation. Had I wanted that, I could have saved my money and read the materials that the Foundation gives away for free.

Incorrect, Ignorant, Procelytizing
I bought this book because it appeared on Economist's list of recommended books. This was a mistake.

This book is written as a pamphlet, and its central theme is the glorification of American Enterpreneurial Capitalism. It is all about American self-glorification.

Unfortunately, this book is a poor pamphlet. Worse, it has got many of its facts plainly wrong. It is amazing that the CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest supporters of entrepreneurship research in the US, would be so ignorant of basic research facts, as well as of economic growth in general.

The book defines entrepreneurship as "the process by which one or more people undertake economic risk to create a new organization...". Entrepreneurs, then, are people who take risk to create new organizations. So far so good. Too bad that this definition is not actually used in the book. Only 7 pages later, Schramm states that "Entrepreneurship is a mindset." It is unfortunate that this seems to be the definition that he really uses throughout his book.

A "mindset" is an infinitely pliable definition. Indeed, Schramm appears able to see this "mindset" whenever he so chooses and not see it when he does not care to. Sometimes Schramm's "entrepreneurship" appears to be best described as innovation. In other times he appears to refer to plain initiative, as in the case of those early "entrepreneurial" American university presidents Schramm appears to admire (now, how many new organizations did UC Berkeley president Daniel Coit Gilman start, and how much economic risk did he undertake during the process?).

Schramm reveals some of his ideological undercurrents by stating that there is only one country on this planet more "entrepreneurial" than the US. You guessed it: Israel. According to Schramm, Israel is the most "entrepreneurial" country on this planet.

Too bad that available data on new business foundings, new business ownership, and nascent entrepreneurs does not support Schramm's contention. Much of this data his own foundation has helped create.

It is also astonishing how Schramm ignores some 25-odd years of research by suggesting that "entrepreneurs" are special people who are distinctively different from the mainstream population. Schramm would be well advised to publish his discovery, as he seems to have succeeded where hundreds of researchers have failed over 25 years.

Schramm's argument rests on a few key premises: (1) America is the best country on this planet (except perhaps Israel); (2) American "Entrepreneurial Capitalism" is the best economic model there is (Schramm's model is, in essence, one of uninhibited market capitalism with little or no regulation and minimal government); (3) America should actively export this model to other countries so that World Peace would become possible. This is breathtakingly ideological and naive, given, e.g., the disaster USA has recently inflicted upon Iraq.

The closest equivalent of Schramm's economic model appears to be late 19th-century US. At least he does not hide his admiration of the robber barons of that age.

He gets too many facts wrong to list them all here. He maintains that America invented entrepreneurial capitalism. I wonder if he is familiar with the history of 18th and 19th-century England. Similarly, Tim Berners-Lee might be interested to learn that Americans invented the internet.

As an economist, Schramm comes across as surprisingly ignorant of mainstream economic growth theories. As his pamphlet is all about the creation of economic wealth, it is surprising that productivity does not feature anywhere in his story.

So, how good is Schramm's model? Schramm might be surprised to learn that in Sweden, whose 'socialist model' Schramm surely despises, a child born into low-income family is much more likely to advance to a higher income class during her life than is a child born into a poor family in the US.

In other words, to realize the 'American Dream', so extolled by Schramm, he would be well advised to move to Sweden.

In summary, this book is a waste of time and money. It is not a good source of facts, it does not accurately describe the entrepreneurial phenomenon, and it does not even begin to uncover the factors underlying economic growth.

Great Philosophy on Entrepreneurship!
The author states several instances throughout history that have shaped the way American entrepreneurs differ from other entrepreneurs, and how the fate of America rests in the hands of those in control of the abilities given to the individual entrepreneur.