This, fellow patriots, is precisely the attitude that frustrates me. The fact is, in boating parlance we are a speedboat, with a small crew capable of taking on all comers if only we have the confidence to accept it and get on with it.

Take China: it currently sends one million students to university each year, is building the equivalent of a new power station weekly and is set to overtake the US as the most powerful economy in the world. We may think of China as a supertanker, but it sees itself as a speedboat, so what hope do we have?

Actually, I believe there is a great deal of hope - if we drive our economy and our public and private sectors hard in the pursuit of excellence, taking calculated risks along the way, without the constant fear of failure that underpins supertanker thinking.

I'm proud to be Scottish and proud that we Scots led the world during the Enlightenment. I also believe we can lead a new enlightenment. To do so we will need to be bold, belligerent and ballsy - messing around the edges will see our boat well and truly sunk, whereas invigorated, dynamic public and private sectors can see us lead, not follow, other nations.

This will take collective responsibility - it's not only up to politicians, businessmen, educationalists and trade unions; we are all responsible. It is hard to mobilise that collective will to get things done with an urgency that will seize Scotland's opportunities. I know from experience that this urgency can be injected, but I have also seen the frustrations as the system holds up that dynamism. In my opinion, this is not deliberate, but it does result in taking the least risky, slow-moving path of change. This is not good enough for anyone in Scotland, whatever their political hue.

This is not all about the public sector - our private sector needs to up its game, look outwards, drive international business and build big sustainable businesses. We are more than capable of doing that, as RBS, Scottish and Southern Energy, HBOS and Jim McColl's endeavours show. But we need to do far more.

For me, that's about collective engagement: delivering tomorrow's leaders today through a vibrant education system that caters to individual need, not collective paranoia over exam results.

I am apolitical. Frankly, most of the political parties seem to have good, sensible ideas. But my worry for Scotland is a political stalemate after the election that puts our speedboat into reverse. That would confine our nation to second-class citizenship for years to come. We cannot accept that.

For the sake of informed debate, let me lay out a few, I hope, challenging thoughts, many of which I hope will be built upon at a forthcoming dinner we are hosting with HBOS in Glasgow.

The absolute competitive advantage of any business, government or nation is very clear to me: people. If you have well educated, motivated people with a can-do attitude, the chances are you will win.

Our biggest threat in this respect is the not in education, employment or training (NEET) issue. Some 20% of our kids are checking out of education because it bores them rigid. Unless we address this, 12,000 to 15,000 children every year will be signing up for a lifetime of unemployment. This is a disgrace. I believe that if we gave a small group of people - and I could name them all - the applicable 20% of the education budget, they would deliver for those kids. Why not? If the system stifles delivery, free it up.

And whilst on the subject of education, how about judging university personnel against pupil success and applied research outcomes, instead of rewarding them according to the number of research papers they write?

We need more vibrant new businesses that will sustain themselves and grow beyond the critical start-up phase. Again, there is an answer - the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust is arguably the most efficient business builder in the world, so let's park £100m of Scottish Enterprise's annual budget there. Sticking with Scottish Enterprise, let's double the Careers Scotland budget and get those highly trained, dynamic careers officers in our schools and businesses making dynamic links between young people, necessary training and business and public sector demand.

Let's agree to place some very large bets on Scotland's future. Let's invest a minimum of £500m per annum in each of the following sectors: biotechnology, renewable energy, tourism and financial services. None of this requires more money for Scotland; it requires the re-allocation of existing funds. I'm not saying it would be easy, nor am I saying these are all the right answers. What I am saying is we need to be courageous for Scotland to succeed - same old same old with change on the margins will take us nowhere fast.

And as we consider Scotland's challenges, we should pause to recognise just how relatively easy they are. Two of the most impressive men I have ever met were confronted with two of the biggest challenges their countries had ever known. One succeeded, the other is well on his way to doing so - Nelson Mandela brought peace to a divided nation, whilst Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is successfully rebuilding a nation following 100 days of genocide that killed one million people. Their humility knows no bounds, nor does their unbridled ambition. We can all learn from them.

To quote George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."