UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

I don’t think there’s any question that Steve Jobs is the greatest CEO\entrepreneur of all time.

Yes, Gates, Rockefeller, Kroc– these guys were all wonders in their own right, who lived and worked in another dimension. But Jobs’ ability to create, execute and create again, to rise, fall and return greater than he was in each previous incarnation– all of this makes him the best the world has ever seen. For the US, a national treasure.

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.

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.

In conversations over lunch, in media interviews, in discussions with so many with whom I come in contact over the course of a business day, I find myself–for the first time in my life– having to defend America.

The other night, I heard a Columbia University professor bashing capitalists as greedy pigs the nation would be wise to banish from our shores.

Does he know they created the endowment that pay his salary? Does he care? Should we confuse him with the facts?