Everywhere we turn, we hear about the rise of China and the likely prediction that its shadow will soon eclipse the American Dream. I don’t know about you in regards to your kids, but I’m VERY concerned about my daughter’s future. It’s that deep concern that drove me to write a children’s book to encourage kids to think like entrepreneurs.
I just recently read Reed Hundt’s In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship where he warns Americans that creating a culture of entrepreneurship is the only hope for America’s economy. He says:
The only adequate response to rising Asia lies in the cultural reform that will vastly increase entrepreneurship. Leaders need to encourage broader (more markets) and deeper (more entrepreneurs) new initiatives without knowing what specific results will follow. They need to focus on architectural changes that support the culture of entrepreneurship. Then American society will see the creation of start-up technological companies in more numbers and in more markets—because increases in scale (bigger efforts) and scope ( more fields of endeavor) of entrepreneurship are required to meet the challenge of rising China. Entrepreneurial firms will stimulate, aggregate, and replicate the unpredictable creativity that lies in everyone. Acting formally or informally together, individuals will make new goods, services, markets, and jobs that are no more imaginable today than eBay or Amazon was before it started. While the Chinese ruling elite try to copy the American economy of the past, American citizens should change their economy, and export their “new new things” to China. –p. 58
He goes on to say,
[Entrepreneurship, American Style] is also the only viable choice for the American economy, because it already comprises too many markets, and each has too much complexity, for a top-down, centralized authority to implement a detailed plan for job creation. –p.58-59
His call to action:
American policy should be to intensify and amplify a culture of entrepreneurship to create and capture value in the future in ways scarcely imaginable in the present.
The government cannot order people to start new firms. No technology can send them through a production line. No leader can describe the thousands of new firms needed by Americans. The culture, however, can produce a great upsurge of entrepreneurship, as occurred in the 1990s.
It is not enough for just our business & political leaders to figure out ways to create a culture of entrepreneurship to face rising China. We need to also look to the parents & teachers raising and educating the next generation of American leaders if we are truly to succeed at creating a culture of entrepreneurship and surpassing our Asian competition. The children are our future. It is our only hope.
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