A little news item that caught my eye: Junior Achievement conducted a poll among 1000 students between the ages of 12 and 17 and asked them to pick their most admired entrepreneur from a list of famous ones (all US based). And guess what, Steve Jobs was top of the list, way ahead of Oprah!
This poll is both fascinating and frustrating. It is amazing that Steve, nerdy though brilliant, outshone 'traditional' celebrities. He is an entrepreneur (and design genius) who became a celebrity instead of an entertainment celebrity who used his/her fame and fortune to build a business. And even more interesting is the fact that a third felt he made a difference in people's lives and a quarter felt he made the world a better place - and these are among the qualities that they most admired about him. Wealth and fame were way down the list. Steve Jobs as a do-gooder is unusual image for most techies, which leads to one of the frustrating things about this poll: the pre-selected list of entrepreneurs. It would have been interesting to see how Bill Gates would have fared in this poll. Apart from creating the Microsoft behemoth (the 'evil empire' bit is softening a little with competion), Gates continues to help improve the lives of people in a major way - but do teenagers know about it?
You can read about the poll here - there's not much to it, but it raises all kinds of interesting questions about the impact that iPods and iPhones (and maybe Macs too) have had on teens' worldview. But the good news is that JA is focused on teaching entrepreneurship to teens and is one of the handful of organizations (check out this previous post for another one) using business training to boost academic performance. What I find encouraging about all this is that so many teenagers are drawn to entrepreneurship, not just celebrity, which bodes well for more innovation and risk-taking in the future. Who'd have thought that the iPod could inspire so much by being the coolest personal music player ever?
No comments:
Post a Comment