Entrepreneurial Imperative: How America's Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World (and Change Your Life) »

Carl J. Schramm is president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, a world leader in advancing entrepreneurship. Trained as an economist and lawyer, he has founded companies in the health care, finance, and information technology arenas. He is a Batten Fellow at Virginia's Darden School of Business and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2004, Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, the world's leading foundation for entrepreneurship, published a groundbreaking essay with a radical premise: that Americans literally have no conception of the secret that truly underlies our economic success, and that for the United States to survive and continue to lead the world's economy, it is imperative we learn to understand and employ that secret.

The secret that has led the American economy to become the world's strongest? Our unparalleled skill as entrepreneurs. As Schramm compellingly shows in this sweeping manifesto, entrepreneurship alone—not anything else—can give America the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower. Not technology, since everyone now has the same technology, or access to it. Not education—we are years behind other nations in this area. Not basic manufacturing, long since moved overseas from the United States. And not capital markets, now truly global entities.

Drawing on detailed research conducted by the Kauffman Foundation and on his decades of experience as an entrepreneur himself and as a leader and mentor to other entrepreneurs, Schramm persuasively demonstrates in detail what this entrepreneurial imperative means for the way we run universities and foundations, lead companies, make personal job decisions, and even conduct our foreign affairs. The Entrepreneurial Imperative will change not only the way our government, corporations, and nonprofits operate, but also our day-to-day lives as working Americans.

Publishers Weekly

Entrepreneurship is the hammer that Schramm wields, and everything looks like a nail. He calls the freedom to start one's own business key to the nation's survival, "the only uniquely American resource at our disposal" and "the only answer if we hope to continue to thrive." Schramm makes a solid case for emphasizing entrepreneurial thinking and policy; he notes that globalization has stripped away any U.S. advantage in technology, education and manufacturing, and argues that big companies must remodel themselves after technologically savvy startups. But as with any monomaniac, his rigidity is hard to take seriously. ("Aren't there other solutions?" he asks on the book's first page, answering: "No.") His "sweeping manifesto" rails against bureaucracy, the Small Business Administration and "big business, big government, and big labor." Some readers will raise eyebrows at his take on entrepreneurship's role in democracy's rise, at his rant about antibusiness attitudes in the academy or at his contention that "entrepreneurship must be the basis of our foreign policy." Schramm may be right in insisting that only entrepreneurial capitalism "will allow us to continue to enjoy our standard of living," but his perspective is too narrow to draw in many people who don't already share it. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.