Why America leads tech business – for now

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :10/12/2007 07:34:54

The United States may not be more creative than any other nation, but its three essential ingredients – faith, energy, and the courage to fail - characterize our enterprise culture.

By John O’Hanlon

Ayn Rand, one of our tutelary heroes, has been accused of taking a hard line, rather to the right of Rumsfeld, but she got one thing right. Capitalism, American style, need make no apologies of principle. We may have taken a few shortcuts along the way, been careless of our environmental heritage and failed to deliver a just society, but two central pillars of business remain strong. One, any individual can rise to influence and wealth through his or her own efforts; two, the wealth created by our entrepreneurs and corporations has worked toward the greater good of our citizens and the world.

Of course there are a million exceptions and failures: the point is that there does exist a set of values that works in practice. Greed is not good, but prosperity certainly is. If the economy is doing well then there’s more cake to slice up for every individual that contributes to it.

For our great global brands, the record is out there, and let’s not go into the merits of Coca Cola or Ford. They are our monuments. But since I started writing on business twelve years ago, the landscape has changed. Silicon Valley has given us a different kind of business model, and it’s a lot less dependent on the old financial institutions and the labor ethic that drove the old economy.

We do things faster

Corporate governance in the USA is slowed by red tape just as much as any place in the world, but we have an impatience with delay that sometimes gets us branded as rude when we fail to respect the rituals of other cultures but which often gives us an edge in business.

Ramesh Johari, assistant professor of science and engineering at Stanford, is atypical as a university teacher. Of course it’s no way to run an academic institution but is it altogether a bad thing when final year students cut their exams because they are setting up a company?

There’s a culture of creativity there, he says, citing the example of his colleague B J Fogg who, recognizing that the most effective persuasive technology of 2007 has been Facebook, set up a course on the psychology of the site. “People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world,” said Fogg. The course was approved within weeks, and it’s being taught right now.

That simply is not how universities normally behave. But it’s an illustration of how Stanford has been able to incubate innovation, says Johari. “That culture of creativity is what enables our students, once they leave Stanford, to bring creativity into the job they do on the outside. Before they even begin to create value for that company the culture of creativity is instilled in them.”

There’s a loop of funding and an IP loop that makes Silicon Valley quite unique…

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