Start-Up Nation By Dan Senor and Saul Singer

The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

Nov 16, 2009

Authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer pose the question: How does Israel, a tiny, nascent country surrounded by enemy states, thrive economically?

It’s hard to find a book endorsed by Meg Whitman, Tom Brokaw and George Stephanopoulos but Start-Up Nation is so well researched and written it would be difficult to find anyone who wouldn’t love this non-fiction gem.

Authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer pose the question many of us have about Israel: How does a tiny, nascent country surrounded by enemy states with few natural resources thrive economically?

It’s a multi-pronged answer the authors present with a combination of deftly crafted anecdotes and personality profiles juxtaposed against some inarguable facts and statistics.

Hyper-networking

Here’s a typical excerpt from Chapter 4: "The social graph is very simple here.

At 18, Israelis go into the army for a minimum of two to three years. If they don’t reenlist, they typically enroll at a university. “There’s a massive percentage of Israelis who go to university out of the army compared to anywhere else in the world,” said Shainberg.

In fact, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 45 percent of Israelis are university-educated, which is among the highest percentages in the world. And according to a recent IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, Israel was ranked second among sixty developed nations on the criterion of whether “university education meets the needs of a competitive economy.”

Though the book is thoroughly indexed and includes pages of notes, it is not written as a narrative textbook. Instead, Senor and Singer try to get to the heart and soul of the issues using the facts and statistics only to support the savory anecdotes.

Israelis are What Many Americans Used to Be

The Israelis are gritty, educated and entrepreneurial. They are realists yet dreamers. They are tightly knit yet willing to work with anyone who has skills and a dream. They are grounded in ancient tradition yet embrace cutting-edge technology. And as necessity is the mother of invention, the Israelis have to continually come up with new ideas just to survive the onslaught from their neighbors.

The book leaves the reader constantly turning pages looking for that next insight, the next laugh, the next eye-opening statistic.

Twelve Uses Unique Publishing Philosophy

I’ve done countless book reviews and I can’t remember mentioning a publisher but this one struck me as unusual. According to its Web site, Twelve was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Start-Up Nation fits the bill.

(Dan Senor, adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has been involved in policy, politics, and business in the Middle East. Senor’s analytical pieces are frequently published by the Wall Street Journal; he has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, and Time.)

(Saul Singer is a columnist and former editorial page editor at The Jerusalem Post. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Moment, the New Leader, bitterlemons.org (an Israeli/Palestinian e-zine), and the Washington Post's international blog, "PostGlobal".

The copyright of the article Start-Up Nation By Dan Senor and Saul Singer in Business Books is owned by Vince Lovato. Permission to republish Start-Up Nation By Dan Senor and Saul Singer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.