#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:

Social entrepreneurship is mindset that can be applied to any sector.

A More Detailed Exploration:
Are you as fascinated with the rise of the concept called “social entrepreneurs” as I am? It seems like in the past few years, more people have begun to identify themselves and others with this label – almost like a new fashion brand.  Just as you may have noticed being a startup or entrepreneur is quite the thing these days, you’ll notice being a “social entrepreneur” will turn even more heads.

[If you happen to be someone who views her/himself as a social entrepreneur, I would highly recommend you read Brian Reich's advice to you. It's timely and very appropriate.]

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Just back from a trip to Rome, Italy, I was floored by the unparalleled wealth of artistic talent and expression the city harnessed across two and a half thousand years.

Touring the Vatican St. Peter’s Basilica and its Sistine Chapel was an especially mind-blowing experience.

I kept thinking what back then were the unique circumstances that enabled this tremendously beautiful body of work? Did they see it for what it is to us today? And would we be able to create similar genius if we tried?

Clearly, Michelangelo painting his Sistine Chapel frescos today would have a decidedly different outcome compared to the genius beauty he created back in 1508 to 1512.  (Oh, if Michelangelo is too dated for you, who among us doesn’t wonder how Paul McCartney’s 60′s Beatles era genius squares with his 9/11 Freedom song out in 2001. But let me not digress ; -). Conversely, today’s great industrial design – let’s say of Apple’s Jonathan Ive genius – would have been impossible to conceive in 16th century Rome.

In other words, yes, universal artistic genius is subject to its unique time, place and circumstances.

Which brings me to our own now, here, our current environment.

For instances, do any of today’s *early 21st century* consumer digital devices and their designs count as art? If so, will any of them be considered of timeless artistic appeal in, let’s say, another two and a half thousand years from now?

To be sure, back in Michelangelo’s 16th century most art was commissioned by a few to elevate a few and typically tied to a single theme (i.e. religion). Today art is largely created by anyone for anyone, no longer limited to a canvas or church walls, instead feeding off of constant reinvention – one marketing-driven consumer *revolution* at a time.

Over the past weeks, much has been written about the late Steve Jobs and his impact on popular culture. If anything, we seem generally certain, the work that Steve accomplished jointly with Jonathan was pretty darn genius.

Whether in 4511 it will pass Michelangelo-level muster, let’s see.

For now to us anyway it is – well – insanely genius art!

I recently attended a management conference held at the Park Plaza Hotel.  You know, the Park Plaza on Wall Street – in Berlin.

The Park Plaza on Wallstrasse – a month ago when I was first sent the event details, I was struck by the presence of two such iconic big-money New York names in a Berlin address.  That didn’t prepare me, though, for the wall covering I found behind the desk at  reception:  a larger-than-life photograph of three businessmen reaching skyward in ecstasy, as money rained down upon them – their faces equal parts surprise and delight.

Although there’s nothing subtle about the image itself, I was at a complete loss as to exactly what message this curious choice in wall covering was intended to convey – and now, a week and a half later, as current events conspire to make it a more unfortunate choice with each passing day, it only baffles me more.  A playful and self-deprecating comment on unfettered capitalism that went a bit too far?  Not likely, given the German aversion to playfulness and self-deprecation.  An earnest and aspirational celebration of undeserved and amoral corporate profit?  Not likely, given the German aversion to undeserved and amoral corporate profit.

No, it remains a complete riddle to me, the image on this wall.  I mean, are we expected to read something into the fact that these are US dollars (and not Euros) raining down on these supposedly European businessmen, or is that merely the result of using a US stock photography service?  Or a more interesting possibility: are the three masters of the universe  depicted here intended to be American?

As you can see, I’ve thought about this a bit – and here’s another (at least partial) explanation I’ve come up with: the hotel happens to be in Mitte, a former Jewish ghetto in the former East Germany that’s since become maybe Berlin’s most expensive real estate, home to not only a thriving art gallery scene but also to a thriving  internet startup scene (the local Groupon clone down the street was recently acquired by Google, and the online audio hosting company around the corner has become a Berlin startup media darling – complete with an investment from noted technology visionary Ashton Kutcher.

So maybe that’s it – and maybe that’s also why this image feels like such a throwback to the late 90′s (in fact, it would be hard to think of a more loaded image to represent the high-water mark of a good old-fashioned US-style tech bubble than this).  In the end, though, I’d like to think that as remarkable as it is, the interior design of this one particular hotel reception desk is an anomaly – a blip.  I’d like to think that the admirable aspects of the German character written about so well by Michael Lewis in his recent Vanity Fair piece on the country’s exposure to the US and European sovereign debt crises will also come in handy here in Berlin – as the city navigates its way through an increasingly frothy startup market.

It was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

It’s been a few weeks now since the local elections here in Berlin – elections in which the Pirate Party won almost 9% of the vote, enough to help unseat Angela Merkel’s state coalition – and you can still find a few leftover Pirate Party election signs here on the streets and sidewalks.

Take, for example, this specimen I came across on Frankfurter Allee the other day.  As an American for whom the the term ‘grassroots‘ has gradually become almost completely devalued (the result of  having been appropriated a few too many times by a few too many well-established mainstream political interests), I found this sign remarkable.

Spray-painted and stenciled, obviously homemade, yet in support of a political party capable of impacting elections in the capitol city of the most powerful country in Europe…  It occurred to me that this sign (literally sitting  among some tufts of grass, no less) is what ‘grassroots‘ really looks like.

But what of this term ‘pirate‘?   While the official Pirate Party platform includes support for net neutrality, free public transportation and the legalization of marijuana, the traditional meaning of the term ‘pirate‘ in the context of the internet has had to do with something else completely: the free sharing of intellectual property such as music, films, and software in violation of existing copyright law (in fact, the Pirate Party has hosted servers for one of the most popular bit torrent tracking websites: the Pirate Bay).

So being a pirate is a Bad Thing.  Right?

When it comes to technology start-ups, the answer would seem to be not necessarily:

• Going all the way back to 1996, the TV adaption of the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer was titled “Pirates of the Valley“
• A year ago, Michael Arrington of  the popular technology website techcrunch.com wrote a piece equating the term ‘pirate‘ with the term ‘entrepreneurial‘.
• More recently, when it came time for Google to chose a venue to announce the imminent appearance of their Google Voice service here on European shores last month, they chose a new start-up/entrepreneurial conference being held in Köln.  The name of this conference?  The European Pirate Summit.
• There’s now even a paperback out there entitled “The Pirate Entrepreneur: A Pirate’s Guide: ‘How to be Wildly Successful in Business‘” (ordering yourself a book from Amazon on how to be a pirate strikes me as possibly the least pirate-like thing a person could do – but hey, that’s just me).

Yep – in fact, the internet is awash with a growing  number of pirate-entrepreneur analogies these days.  It would appear that  just as the term  ‘grassroots’ has been co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended in the US, the term ‘pirate’ is in the process of being co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended here in Europe….

The announcements today (October 4th) coming from Cupertino’s giant didn’t make everyone smile -most did not get what they expected.  It was a tough first presentation for the new Apple CEO – the first in the era after Steve Jobs – and he really might have wondered if he had raised the bar high enough.

But why should he?  Apple continues to sell the current iPhone 4 briskly and is moving strongly into new markets like China.  So the company is focusing on more efficient and stable production conditions and the optimization of international sales.  And what could be more needed than a “World Phone”, a phone running all international mobile network standards and providing ultimate flexibility?  Not only for customers, but also for their retail chain.  Simply put, one model to be sold worldwide.  A producer’s dream coming true…

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