Small Businesses Are the Backbone of our Global Economy

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Whether you want to listen to the podcast or read the transcript, the interview conducted by Brian Kenny, host of the official podcast Cold Call produced by Harvard Business School and brought to you by the HBR Presents network, with Harvard Business School professor Len Schlesinger is worth exploring further.  Why?  Here's a snippet from the interview:

The reality is there’s this standard political logic that says that small business is the backbone of our economy and it’s the one thing in this world where all politicians don’t agree about what day it is. They all agree about this. We know that 68% of the American public actually dreams about owning a small business and we know that 93% of the American population thinks it’s important to support small business, but they don’t. And so the interesting question for us is given the failure rates of small business and the difficulty in getting small businesses to scale, the question is, whose responsibility is it to support that activity and where are there pockets of excitement going on? 

Discover which company hit it out of the park as a corporate initiative representing the best performance of any of the constituencies trying to address that (the small business growth] issue.

The $500 million bet on small businesses -- who made it?