America turned 250 this month. The Australian Financial Review marked it by calling seven Australian leaders who built their careers there and asking what they made of the place. The answers were warm. Jennifer Nason arrived at JPMorgan in 1987 and retired this year as the firm's global chairman of investment banking. She called the US, in her words, "the best place to put a marginal dollar." Andrew Liveris ran Dow Chemical for fourteen years. Michael Silverton runs Macquarie Capital from New York.

All Australian. All exceptional. All there, not here. The case for America is not in dispute. It holds 4 per cent of the world's people and produces a quarter of its output. It counts 59 of the world's hundred largest companies. California alone would be the fourth-largest economy on earth. The country rewards risk, forgives failure, and cheers the person having a go. Nason's word for it was the puck. She always felt she was on it.

We should admire that, not resent it. The appetite for scale, the depth of capital, the permission to be ambitious out loud. These are real advantages, and anyone advising on a board or building a company should study them closely. But a quieter fact lies beneath the celebration. Australia grew these people. We educated Nason in Melbourne, Liveris in Darwin, and Wolfers in Sydney. Then we watched the most ambitious version of each of them get built somewhere else. The talent was Australian.

We tell a comfortable story about this. We call ourselves the lucky country, and usually forget that Donald Horne meant it as a criticism. His point was that Australia was a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck. Luck was the thing we had instead of ingenuity.

Sixty years on, we still lean on what is in the ground and what is on the land, and we still export the people who might have built the next thing here. The startup world understands the risk. We have learned to fund a clever idea, back a founder, and celebrate a unicorn. But competing seriously means competing across the board. In the depths of our capital markets. In advanced manufacturing. In energy. In the growth capital that turns a strong Australian company into a global one before it lists in New York.

A country that only backs ambition at the seed stage is still training talent for export. The hardest part is cultural, and it is the one our work constantly runs into. Justin Wolfers, now at Michigan University, framed it sharply. Australians treat sport the way Americans treat commerce. We give sporting ambition unconditional permission. We reserve suspicion for the commercial kind. We will carry someone off the field on our shoulders and question the same drive in a boardroom.

None of this makes the American model one to copy wholesale.

The AFR spoke to people who won there, which is its own kind of sample. The same country has a seven-year gap in life expectancy between its richest and poorest counties, and a debt pile now larger than its economy. Strong returns for elites are not the same as a good society, and several of those leaders said so themselves. So the question is not whether America is impressive. It is.

The real question is whether we want the most ambitious people to build here, or whether we are content to keep producing them for export. That is a decision about whether we treat people who try to win at business the way we treat people who win for the country. It is a choice, not a shortage of talent. Just take a look at Global Australians celebrating international Australian talent from a variety of sectors.

Who is asking that in your boardroom and across your C-Suite?