Dan Singer - Start-up Nation

Started as a one-year experiment, the program has been running continuously for thirty years. Each year, the top 2 percent of Israeli high school students are asked to try out—two thousand students. Of these, only one in ten pass a battery of tests, mainly in physics and mathematics. These two hundred students are then run through two days of intensive personality and aptitude testing.

Once admitted into the program, Talpiot cadets blaze through an accelerated university degree in math or physics while they are introduced to the technological needs of all IDF branches. The academic training they receive goes beyond what the typical university student would receive in Israel or anywhere else—they study more, in less time. They also go through basic training with the paratroopers. The idea is to give them an overview of all the major IDF branches so that they understand both the technology and military needs—and especially the connection between them.

Providing the students with such a broad range of knowledge is not, however, the ultimate goal of the course. Rather, it is to transform them into mission-oriented leaders and problem solvers.

This is achieved by handing them mission after mission, with minimal guidance. Some assignments are as mundane as organizing a conference for their fellow cadets, which requires coordinating the speakers, facilities, transportation, and food. Others are as complicated as penetrating a telecommunications network of a live terrorist cell.

But more typical is forcing the soldiers to find cross-disciplinary solutions to specific military problems. For example, a team of cadets had to solve the problem of the severe back pain suffered by IDF helicopter pilots from the choppers’ vibrations. The Talpiot cadets first determined how to measure the impact of the choppers’ vibrations on the human vertebrae. They designed a customized seat, installed it in a helicopter simulator, and cut a hole in its backrest. Next they put a pen on a pilot’s back, had him “fly” in the simulator, and used a high-speed camera inserted in the backrest hole to photograph the marks caused by the different vibrations. Finally, after studying the movements by analyzing computerized data generated from the movement information in the photos, they redesigned the chopper seats.

Assuming they survive the first two or three years of the course, these cadets become “Talpions,” a title that carries prestige in both military and civilian life.

The Talpiot program as a whole is under Mafat, the IDF’s internal research and development arm, which is parallel to America’s DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Mafat has the coveted and sensitive job of assigning each Talpion to a specific unit in the IDF for their next six years of regular service.

From the beginning, the hyperelitism of the Talpiot program has attracted critics. The program almost didn’t get off the ground because military leaders did not think it would be worthwhile to invest so much in such a small group. Recently, some detractors have claimed that the program is a failure because most of the graduates do not stay in the military beyond the required nine years and do not end up in the IDF’s senior ranks.

However, though Talpiot training is optimized to maintain the IDF’s technological edge, the same combination 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 IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook , Israel was ranked second among sixty developed nations on the criterion of whether “university education meets the needs of a competitive economy.” 4

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.”