on my right, samuel allen, the chief executive of john deere. his full bio is in your material. to his right, hall sirkin, managing director of the boston group and then to the far right, dave thompson, chief executive of orbital sciences. i'm just going to give a little bit of introduction. the title of our session is "competing around the world." i would suggest this is a particularly fluid time to be trying to address this question. just to sort of frame it, on the positive side some of might have seen a recent article in "american interest." it makes the argument the u.s. is poised to become an export powerhouse, notes since the end of the recession exports have accounted for fully half of total u.s. economic growth. so the rather weak recovery that we've had would is been positively anemic without the strong growth on the export side. and he notes that the obama administration surprisingly appears to be on track to -- even starting from the depressed face of 2009, there were very few economists thought that was achievable. so barring a real down tun, that number gets hit in

this on my right samuel allen t chief executive of john deere, his full bio is in your material. i'll do brief introductions. to his right is hal sirkin, the senior partner and managing director of the boston consulting group, doing a lot of work on the manufacturing sector. and then to the far right, david thompson, chief executive of orbital sciences who was introduced by chairman hawkberg at the previous speech. i'll give introduction. the title of our session is competing around the world. and it will focus largely on how the united states and u.s. companies are doing in the competition for international markets. and i would suggest this is a particularly fluid time to be trying to address this question. just to sort of frame it on the positive side, some of you might have seen the article in the american interest by tyler cowan, economist at george mason university. it has a lot of attention and makes the argument that the u.s. is poytzed to become an export powerhouse. notes that since the end of the -- or since the end of the recession, exports accounted for fully half of

on my immediate right, samuel allen, who's the chief executive of john deere. full bio is in your material, i'll do brief introductions. to his right, hal circumstancen who is the senior partner and managing director of the boston consulting group, and then to the far right david thompson, chief executive of orbital sciences who was wonderfully introduced by chairman hochberg to start the previous speech. so i'm just going to give a little introduction. the title of our session is "competing around the world," and it will focus largely on how the united states and u.s. companies are doing in the competition for international markets. and i would suggest this is a particularly fluid time to be trying to address this question. just to sort of frame it on the positive side, some of you might have seen the recent article in the american interest by an economist at george mason university. it got a lot of attention, and it makes the argument that the u.s. is poised to become an export powerhouse. notes that since the end of the -- since the end of the recession expo