Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

Oil is finished, he said; it may still be coming out of the ground, but the world doesn’t want it anymore. More importantly, Peres told Ghosn, it is financing international terrorism and instability. “We don’t need to defend against incoming Katyusha rockets,” he pointed out, “if we can figure out how to cut off the funding that launches them in the first place.”

I decided that the most important thing to do was to figure out how to take a single country off of oil

From the age of zero we are educated to challenge the obvious, ask questions, debate everything, innovate,” says Mooly Eden, who ran these seminars.

of loss often proves more powerful than the hope of gain.

He was the world’s most famous living Israeli, an erudite two-time prime minister and Nobel Prize winner. At eighty-three years old, Shimon Peres certainly did not need another adventure.

asynchrony . . . [such as] a lack of fit, an unusual pattern, or an irregularity” have the power to stimulate economic creativity.19

judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, “challenge the chief” is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a rosh gadol mentality.

Rosh katan behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using

This maturity is especially powerful when mixed with an almost childish impatience.

evident throughout much of the military and seems to be part of the Israeli ethos: to teach people how to be very good at a lot of things, rather than excellent at one thing.