Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility, and Globalization

The Small Business Dream

According to Citibank, 73% of small business owners would start their business again and 64% would recommend entrepreneurship as a career to their children.¹

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” In Washington, DC these days, there is one more certainty to add to the list—government gridlock. In 2011, as the world watched, the U.S. government took the global stage in a spectacular display of dysfunctional stalemate, as Democrats and Republicans publicly squabbled about the right way forward to increase the country's debt limit and prevent the superpower from defaulting on its loans. Not surprisingly, citizen confidence in and approval for government politicians seemed to be in a freefall. According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, approval for Republican congressional members had sunk to 28 percent; Democratic congressional approval wasn't much better at 33 percent; and Obama himself was not immune to the damage, with just 45 percent of Americans approving of the President's performance at the time. As one self-described Republican voter from Utah so eloquently put it, “They're [the Government] screwing up right and left.... All they're doing is arguing among themselves and not getting anything ...