Strategic Entrepreneurism

Though I am waiting to get my hands on the book Strategic Entrepreneurism in which Jon B. Fisher discuss about key issues for startups in the New Economy, but just noticed this article reprinted from the book on Sandhill. This is a small representation (though good to read) where Jon seems to have made an honest attempt to touch the American Education system which is state of crisis.

I would like to agree with Jon here as I truly believe that education is an important tool that helps you to broaden your worldview. Mahatma Gandhi once said “There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.” Further he opined “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Hence it’s of key imperative for education system worldwide to ensure sustainability as it is the benchmark for any fundamentally strong economy or country, and we cannot make an error to derail this. As the repercussions of this error could be strong and lets all face it’s an error creeping into the American Society. “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” – Mahatma Gandhi.

So now not going much into the details or more quotes here is Jon’s article:-

It used to be that the state of the American education system was something you could often hear lamented in the teachers' lounge, but not very often in the board room.

Who could blame entrepreneurs for placing education low on their hierarchy of concerns? From Gates to Zuckerberg, the list seemed only to be growing longer with names of impressive people who had proven education irrelevant to their successful quest to change the world. That is, until now.

Entrepreneurs have recently started to stand up and take notice of a new era upon us, an era in which the next great commercial successes will be in industries like energy and power. Here the breakthroughs will be highly technical in nature and will be attained only by people with genuinely superior expertise and ingenuity in their fields.

There certainly won't be any shortcuts in this new model. To be sure, the days aren't gone in which a dropout can change the future of business with a line of computer code. But increasingly the success of American industry--and indeed, the fate of the world’s future--depends upon training and educating people who have the skills to crack substantially more complex codes of science and engineering, such as how to harness nuclear energy, how to deliver clean energy and how to desalinize water, to name just a few.

In other words, the rules for success in industry are changing to depend far more heavily on our education system, which was once the finest in the world, but is today on the brink of collapse.

We must restore our American universities to world leadership, as they participate in the battleground for our industrial preeminence in the 21st century and beyond.