Free Start-up Nation by Dan Senor

military could benefit from some kind of 360-degree evaluation during the promotion
     board process for officers. Right now in our system the incentives are all one-sided. To get promoted, an officer just has
     to please more senior officers. The junior guys get no input.”
    The conclusion Oren draws from displays of what most militaries—and Fred Kagan—would call insubordination is that the IDF is in fact “much more consensual than the American army.” This might seem strange, since the U.S. Army is called a “volunteer”
     army (not unpaid, but in the sense of free choice), while the IDF is built on conscription.
    Yet, Oren explains, “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. . . . The Israeli army is more similar, I would imagine, to the Continental
     Army of 1776 than it is to the American army of 2008. . . . And by the way, George Washington knew that his ‘general’ rank
     didn’t mean very much—that he had to be a great general, and that basically people were there out of volition.”
    The Continental Army was an extreme example of what Oren was describing, since its soldiers would decide on an almost daily
     basis whether to continue to volunteer. But it was a “people’s army,” and so is the IDF . As Oren describes it, like the Continental Army, the IDF has a scrappy, less formal, more consensual quality because its soldiers are fighting for the existence of their country,
     and its ranks are composed of a broad cross section of the people they are fighting for.
    It’s easy to imagine how soldiers unconcerned with rank have fewer qualms about telling their boss, “You’re wrong.” This
chutzpah
, molded through years of IDF service, gives insight into how Shvat Shaked could have lectured PayPal’s president about the difference between “good guys
     and bad guys” on the Web, or how Intel Israel’s engineers decided to foment a revolution to overturn not only the fundamental
     architecture of their company’s main product but the way the industry measured value. Assertiveness versus insolence; critical,
     independent thinking versus insubordination; ambition and vision versus arrogance—the words you choose depend on your perspective,
     but collectively they describe the typical Israeli entrepreneur.

The People of the Book
     
    Go far, stay long, see deep.
    —O UTSIDE
MAGAZINE
     
    T HE ELEVATION OF L A P AZ, B OLIVIA , is 11,220 feet and El Lobo is one floor higher. El Lobo is a restaurant, hostel, social
     club, and the only source of Israeli food in town. It is run by its founders, Dorit Moralli and her husband, Eli, both from
     Israel. 1
    Almost every Israeli trekker in Bolivia is likely to come through El Lobo, but not just to get food that tastes like it’s
     from home, to speak Hebrew, and to meet other Israelis. They know they will find something else there, something even more
     valuable: the Book. Though spoken of in the singular, the Book is not one book but an amorphous and evolving collection of
     journals, dispersed throughout some of the most remote locations in the world. Each journal is a handwritten “Bible” of advice
     from one traveler to another. And while the Book is no longer exclusively Israeli, its authors and readers tend to be from
     Israel.
    El Lobo’s incarnation of the Book was created in 1986, Dorit recalls, just one month after her restaurant opened. Four Israeli
     backpackers came in and asked, “Where’s the Book?” When she looked mystified, they explained that they meant a book where
     people could leave recommendations and warnings for other travelers. They went out and bought a blank journal and donated
     it to the restaurant, complete with the first entry, in Hebrew, about a remote jungle town they thought other Israelis might
     like.
    The Book predated the Internet—it actually started in Israel in the 1970s—but even in