UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

In business today, everyone wants metrics. Prove to me with mathematical precision that the initiative you want to undertake will work. Will generate high ROI. From day one.

Sorry to rain on the fairy tale, but there is no such thing. Not if you want to grow, to innovate, to build an enterprise that takes the world by surprise, by storm, while everyone else is playing around with cookie cutter, paint by numbers, spreadsheet business strategies.

America is the oldest enduring republic in the world. And the finest. By a mile and a half.

Its greatness has been driven by many, sung and unsung, rich and poor, black and white, men and women. But by none more so than by its soldiers of war and its army of entrepreneurs.

I remember the sleek black limo gliding through the wrought iron gates of the Bel Air mansion known to the Hollywood crowd as Playboy West.

I was arriving to spend a day talking business with Hugh Hefner. It turned out to be a far more complex and darkly intriguing experience than I expected it to be.

Attend a class at any business school in the world and you will hear professors waxing poetic about concepts for new businesses. Ideas that can’t miss. The next Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

But what these blackboard entrepreneurs miss is that their recipes for success must be validated by a filter most of them discount or detest: the risk taking capitalists who reach into their bank accounts and back the shots in the dark with the money they need to make it to market.

Against the backdrop of Egypt in revolt, Iran eager to fire missiles at democracies everywhere and North Korea playing chicken with nukes, my thoughts turn to economics, to entrepreneurialism, to what made America the shining beacon for the world and what will– what must– keep us there.