of leadership experience and technical knowledge is ideal for creating new companies. Although the program has produced only about 650 graduates in thirty years, they have become some of Israel’s top academics and founders of the country’s most successful companies. NICE Systems, the global corporation behind call-monitoring systems used by eighty-five of the Forbes 100 companies, was founded by a team of Talpions. So was Compugen, a leader in human-genome decoding and drug development. Many of the Israeli technology companies traded on the NASDAQ were either founded by a Talpion or have alumni situated in key roles.
So the architects of Talpiot, Dothan and Yatziv, vigorously reject the criticisms. First, they argue that the interservice competition for Talpions within the IDF—which at times has had to be settled by the prime minister—speaks for itself. Second, they claim that the Talpions easily pay back the investment during their required six years of service. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the two-thirds of Talpiot graduates who end up either in academia or in technology companies continue to make a tremendous contribution to the economy and society, thereby strengthening the country in different ways.
Talpions may represent the elite of the elite in the Israeli military, but the underlying strategy behind the program’s development—to provide broad and deep training in order to produce innovative, adaptive problem solving—is evident throughout much of the military and seems to be part of the Israeli ethos: to teach people how to be very good at a lot of things, rather than excellent at one thing.
The advantage that Israel’s economy—and its society—gains from this equally dispersed national service experience was driven home to us by neither an Israeli nor an American. Gary Shainberg looks more like a sailor (of the compact, stocky variety) than a tech geek, perhaps because he is an eighteen-year veteran of the British navy. Now vice president for technology and innovation at British Telecom, he met us late one evening in a Tel Aviv bar. He was on one of his many business trips to Israel, en route to the gulf—to Dubai, actually.
“There is something about the DNA of Israeli innovation that is unexplainable,” Shainberg said. But he did have the beginnings of a theory. “I think it comes down to maturity. That’s because nowhere else in the world where people work in a center of technology innovation do they also have to do national service.”3
At eighteen, 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 Organisation 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
By the time students finish college, they’re in their mid-twenties; some already have graduate degrees, and a large number are married. “All this changes the mental ability of the individual,” Shainberg reasoned. “They’re much more mature; they’ve got more life experience. Innovation is all about finding ideas.”
Innovation often depends on having a different perspective. Perspective comes from experience. Real experience also typically comes with age or maturity. But in Israel, you get experience, perspective, and maturity at a younger age, because the society jams so many transformative experiences into Israelis when they’re barely out of high school. By the time they get to college, their heads are in a different place than those of their American counterparts.
“You’ve got a whole different perspective on life. I think it’s that later education, the younger marriage, the military experience—and I spent eighteen years in the [British] navy, so I can sort of empathize with that sort of thing,” Shainberg went on. “In the military, you’re in an environment where you have to think on your feet. You have to make life-and-death decisions. You learn about discipline. You learn about training your mind to do things, especially if you’re frontline or you’re doing something operational. And that can only be good and useful in the business world.”
This maturity is especially powerful when mixed with an almost childish impatience.
Since their country’s founding, Israelis have been keenly aware that the future—both near and distant—is always in question. Every moment has strategic importance. As Mark Gerson, an American entrepreneur who has invested in several Israeli start-ups, described it, “When an Israeli man wants to date a woman, he asks her out that night. When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. This is actually good in business. Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”5
For Amir, as for many other conscripts, the IDF provided him with an exciting opportunity to test and prove himself. But the IDF offers recruits another valuable experience: a unique space within Israeli society where young men and women work closely
