Dan Senor > Quotes

“A reform happens when you change the policy of the government; a revolution happens when you change the mind-set of a country.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Four guys are standing on a street corner… an American, a Russian, a Chinese man, and an Israeli…. A reporter comes up to the group and says to them: “Excuse me…. What’s your opinion on the meat shortage?” The American says: What’s a shortage? The Russian says: What’s meat? The Chinese man says: What’s an opinion? The Israeli says: What’s “Excuse me”? —MIKE LEIGH, Two Thousand Years”
― Senor, Dan, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a rosh gadol—literally, a “big head”—and those who operate with a rosh katan, or “little head.” Rosh katan behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“A 2006 Harvard University study shows that entrepreneurs who have failed in their previous enterprise have an almost one-in-five chance of success in their next start-up”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Dov Frohman, the founder of Intel Israel, later said that to create a true culture of innovation, “fear of loss often proves more powerful than the hope of gain.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“You rarely see people talk behind anybody’s back in Israeli companies. You always know where you stand with everyone. It does cut back on the time wasted on bullshit.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Cái mới không phải lúc nào cũng tốt hơn cũ,nhưng ít nhất dòng chảy của những ý tưởng tươi mới cũng giúp hạn chế sự lão hoá của đầu óc giới quân đội, thường là hình phạt cuối cùng cho chiến thắng và là nguyên nhân thất bại trong tương lai.”
― Dan Senor , Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth.22 It’s the only proven way for economies to consistently get ahead—especially innovation born by start-up companies.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“At the heart of this combined impulse is an instinctive understanding that the challenge facing every developed country in the twenty-first century is to become an idea factory, which includes both generating ideas at home and taking advantage of ideas generated elsewhere.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“In Israel’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session whereby everyone in the unit—of all ranks—sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield or around the world.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“The cultural differences between Israel and the United States are actually so great that Intel started running “cross-cultural seminars” to bridge them. “After living in the U.S. for five years, I can say that the interesting thing about Israelis is the culture. Israelis do not have a very disciplined culture. From the age of zero we are educated to challenge the obvious, ask questions, debate everything, innovate,” says Mooly Eden, who ran these seminars. As a result, he adds, “it’s more complicated to manage five Israelis than fifty Americans”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“the “edge of chaos.” They define that edge as “the estuary region where rigid order and random chaos meet and generate high levels of adaptation, complexity, and creativity.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“George Bernard Shaw wrote, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”4 While”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Judaism, Johnson continued, “managed the delicate balance between both—giving equal weight to individual rights and collective responsibility.” This was “very rare and difficult, and constituted one of the Jewish people’s greatest achievements.”
― Dan Senor, The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World

“Người Israel đã nắm được quy tắc phượt toàn cầu một cách quyết liệt hơn bất kỳ một quốc gia nào khác, đó là: đi thật xa, ở thật lâu, và nhìn thật kỹ”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Doubt and argument—this is a syndrome of the Jewish civilization and this is a syndrome of today’s Israel.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“in this country there’s an unwritten social contract: we are going to serve in this army provided the government and the army are responsible toward us….”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“You can tell a lot about a society based on how [its members] refer to their elites. Israel is the only place in the world where everybody in a position of power—including prime ministers and army generals—has a nickname used by all, including the masses.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Alex Vieux, CEO của tạp chí Red Herring nói với chúng tôi rằng ông đã có mặt ở "hàng triệu hội thảo về công nghệ ở nhiều châu lục. Lúc nào tôi cũng thấy người Israel như Medved đang diễn thuyết cùng với những đồng nghiệp từ nước khác. Những người khác luôn giới thiệu về công ty của họ. Những người Israel luôn giới thiệu về đất nước Israel.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Dan Yakir is a scientist at the Weizmann Institute who manages the FluxNet research station at Yatir. He says that the forest not only demonstrates that trees can thrive in areas that most people would call desert, but that planting forests on just 12 percent of the world’s semi-arid lands could reduce atmospheric carbon by one gigaton a year—the annual CO2 output of about one thousand 500-megawatt coal plants. A”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“In the IDF, there are even extremely unconventional ways to challenge senior officers. “I was in Israeli army units where we threw out the officers,” Oren told us, “where people just got together and voted them out. I witnessed this twice personally. I actually liked the guy, but I was outvoted. They voted out a colonel.” When we asked Oren in disbelief how this worked, he explained, “You go and you say, ‘We don’t want you. You’re not good.’ I mean, everyone’s on a first-name basis…. You go to the person above him and say, ‘That guy’s got to go.’… It’s much more performance-oriented than it is about rank.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Judaism and Israel have always cultivated “a culture of doubt and argument, an open-ended game of interpretations, counter-interpretations, reinterpretations, opposing interpretations. From the very beginning of the existence of the Jewish civilization, it was recognized by its argumentativeness.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“The two real fathers of Israeli hi-tech are the Arab boycott and Charles de Gaulle, because they forced on us the need to go and develop an industry. —YOSSI VARDI”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Dadi Perlmutter recalls the shock of an American colleague when he witnessed Israeli corporate culture for the first time. “When we all emerged [from our meeting], red faced after shouting, he asked me what was wrong. I told him, ‘Nothing. We reached some good conclusions.”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

“Sharon Geva, a historian and the author of Women in the State of Israel: The Early Years, told Haaretz,”
― Dan Senor, The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World

“Even after World War II ended and the Holocaust became widely known, Western countries were still unwilling to welcome surviving Jews. The Canadian government captured the mood of many governments when one of its officials declared, “None is too many!” British quotas on immigration to Palestine became increasingly tight during this period, as well. For many Jews, there literally was no place to go.13”
― Dan Senor, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle