Opportunism
How to Change the World--One Idea at a Time
By: Shraga F. Biran
Published: January 2011
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0-374-17578-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-17578-8
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"Opportunism is an approach to life that seeks to combine the elements of time, place, and initiative to as to dismantle an already existing set of circumstance and reassemble them in a new way, to combine them with new and hitherto unknown elements. Opportunism is fatalism's opposite: it can generate unexpected results", writes founder and owner of top ranked law firm in Israel, Shraga F. Biran and Co., Shraga F. Biran, in his visionary and yet very pragmatic book Opportunism: How to Change the World--One Idea at a Time. The author describes how the underutilized concept of opportunity contains the underpinnings of a new social and legal framework, that transforms opportunity into a tangible asset that constitutes real wealth itself.
Shraga Biran understands that opportunism has long been considered a negative concept, filled with connotations that are often shady and even dishonest. The author takes that idea to task, and replaces those older views of opportunism with a fresh, positive, and democratic principle of opportunity as a benefit to all. For Shraga Biran, opportunism is both realistic and pragmatic in its approach to the world. Since a number of possibilities always exists, and the outcome not preordained by events, opportunism opens up exciting value building ideas to anyone. Opportunism operates on the twofold basis of objectivity and subjectivity. The objective side includes empirical facts and circumstances, while the subjective element depends on how people utilize those tangible facts, events, and real world conditions. The brief, shining moment, when the individual sees and acts upon the possibilities and potential in those conditions, is when opportunity is created.
Shraga Biran (photo left) provides a strong overview of the nature of opportunism, and in effect, develops an entire new concept of opportunism. The author explains that opportunism is also a theory of opportunity that leads to social and economic renewal that benefits all of humanity. Opportunism is also a dynamic concept that involves change, reform, and transformation instead of continuity and the status quo. Creative thinking and innovation go to the core of opportunism, rather than being a result; they are a root cause. Opportunism goes far beyond initiative and and invention, but these two ideas are part of the opportunity process. For the author, the very populism and democratic nature of opportunism, as ideas that can be seized and acted upon by anyone, give the concept a universalist and inclusive value. Shraga Biran then describes how to protect this new form of wealth, as an end and asset in itself, and not simply a process or conduit to wealth. This change in thinking forms the transitional basis for an entirely new legal, social, and economic system and mode of thought.
For me, the power of the book is how Shraga Biran develops and articulates the important new societal, economic, and legal theory of opportunism. The author provides a complete background of what the new paradigm of opportunism means, and then describes how it works to transform the way people think about new ideas, intellectual property, and the nature of what constitutes wealth itself. Shraga Biran supports his concept with a compelling assessment of how innovation and opportunity, as well as entrepreneurship, are the new wealth supplanting the traditional measures of capital value. Social and intellectual capital have overtaken the concept of of physical asset based wealth in the twenty-first century. The author provides the intellectual background to this profound change society, law, and economics.
I highly recommend the intellectually satisfying and idea transformational book Opportunism: How to Change the World--One Idea at a Time by Shraga F. Biran, to anyone seeking a fresh and original analysis of the transition from an asset based wealth system, to one where intellectual capital and entrepreneurship represent the true wealth of an economy. The author describes how and why this intellectual property, which forms real wealth, changes societies, and how to protect the ideas in the hands of the opportunity seizing the opportunity.
Read the society and economy changing book Opportunism: How to Change the World--One Idea at a Time by Shraga F. Biran, and discover how if given chance, opportunism has the power and the potential to enhance society, build companies, and enrich economies in new and exciting ways. Opportunism is an idea whose time has not only come, but represents a critical path to creating real wealth now and in the future.
