UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

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.

I have come to realize that Kissinger is a figment of a marketing machine: identified as a “wise” Harvard academic by Nelson Rockefeller, brought to full Technicolor fame by President Nixon, Kissinger was identified as a diplomatic genius due to where he worked, who he worked with, and the way he spoke. A virtual Chance, the character in the classic Peter Sellers film, where a dunce of a gardener is perceived through a weird set of circumstances to be a wealthy captain of industry, whose every word is doted on.