Earlier this week at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, I was the keynote speaker at the second annual Conference of Women@theFrontier founded by Susan Fonseca-Klein, also founding architect of Singularity University, an interdisciplinary university based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley whose mission is to educate and inspire leaders to address humanity’s grand challenges.

There was huge attendance and great panelists, including Lt. Col. Jackie Parker, the first woman Air Force pilot to attend U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California; Francine Gordon, a celebrated executive coach and organization consultant in the Valley; Sandra de Castro Buffington, the director of Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S); Courtney Macavinta, the Co-Founder of The Respect Institute and Joy Buolamwini, a 21 year old Computer Science major at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

From trench warfare to power: Women@theFrontier is a great expression and reminds us of pioneers on their journey west in the 19^th century, and that the feminist movements of the 20^th century have helped women conquer new territories and affirm their rights. But I also like to go back to the actual etymology of the word “frontier,” as I did during my keynote. The word “frontier” comes from an old French word that designated the front line of an army organized to stand up to an enemy. As people would organize to defend their country, the word ended up meaning the borders between states. In the 21rst century, Women@TheFrontier, must not only have to stand up to prejudice, discrimination and inequality, but also to their own fears of getting out of their comfort zones. They must use the considerable amount of power they have secured over the last fifty years. As Gloria Feldt says in No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power, which I discussed a few months ago: “By far the most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers and with the intention sufficient to transform society’s major institutions once and for all.”

The power of empowering: Today, younger women can build up on this history and move on from corrective and defensive activism (addressing inequalities of all types) to transformative initiatives. The demographic in education plays in their favor: The male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57 – almost an exact reversal of what it was in the sixties. Women “are shaping the Internet” using the Web not only as consumers, but also and more generally as a productivity and networking environment. Bolstered up by their experience in removing barriers for themselves, they now have the ability to remove barriers for everybody.

The power of women has scaled tremendously. During the conference, Sandra de Castro Buffington explained how she leverages the power of the entertainment industry to improve the health and well being of individuals and communities worldwide. The energy of 21-year old Joy Buolamwini is definitely “without borders,” with already multiple initiatives under her belt (from building technological tools for the Carter Center to helping in the fight to eradicate blinding trachoma in Ethiopia to leading a software teaching initiative for the Zambian Institute for Sustainable Development).

“Women are at the forefront of developing solutions to the world’s greatest challenges,” said Susan Fonseca-Klein. “W@F is an opportunity to showcase leading women creating positive change, global in reach and exponential in impact, leveraging technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The capacity for and effectiveness of change grows exponentially as more and women come together. Women leaders build the basis for repeated multiplication and pervasiveness. For example, think of the way my friend Sramana Mitra is democratizing entrepreneurship education with her 1M by 1M program!

Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant founded the 1M by 1M(One Million by One Million) program, “a framework for Capitalism 2.0,” she says, and which she “envisions as a distributed, democratic capitalism.” Here is what this means: Not everybody can, or even needs to, come to Silicon Valley to create a company. There are creative entrepreneurs everywhere in the world, and they can succeed from virtually any place depending on the nature and the scope of what they undertake or on their own definition of success. Yet, where can they get accessible economic development tools? In other words, how can entrepreneurship education be democratized? Sramana’s 1M by 1M (One Million by One Million) brings a solution.

Startup America and Startup Anywhere: Check out the 1M by 1M program: While different countries and regions have started thousands of initiatives to rekindle the economy through innovation and entrepreneurship, one of the most critical needs is ensuring that entrepreneurs do not waste time and energy reinventing the wheel, or money they may not have in MBA programs or expensive consultants. The 1M by 1M program provides all the basics to start on the right footing at virtually no cost: “We offer a case-study-based online educational program, video lectures, and methodology, online strategy consulting at public and private online roundtables, as well as introductions to customers, channel partners and investors (pre-seed, seed, angel, VC, bank, alternative financing). The public roundtable is a free program accessible from anywhere in the world. The rest of the services are for paying members only.” The $1000 annual fee grants paying members unlimited usage of the service (just don’t abuse the system!). For a full explanation of why Sramana created  this program, also consult this video.

What I like about this program:

Its “weapon of massive reconstruction” optimism:  As Sramana puts it: “It is the entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs alone, who wield the most potent weapons of mass reconstruction. To build markets; to build nations; to build worlds.” One million by one million makes one trillion of whatever currency, and even if it is as hard to represent as one terawatt, it expresses the human power to change the world for the better — and create jobs.

Its pragmatic “virtual incubator” approach: Sramana has spent years talking with entrepreneurs, capturing their stories. Some of her stories she shares in her books*, but hundreds more are available as case studies from which entrepreneurs can learn. Innovative ideas evolve with time, but business model innovations come at a much slower pace – and the principles for capital efficiency, effective bootstrapping, customer validation, and positioning are not going to change overnight. The 1M by 1M program is a virtual and scalable incubator that can help scores of entrepreneurs get their act together at a low cost and in no time, wherever they are located in the world.  As a virtual incubator, 1M by 1M supplements physical incubators and has partnerships with a few of them already, as well as with corporate sponsors. For example, in March, 1M by 1M announced that it was working with Microsoft on their India Startup Challenge — with Microsoft BizSpark offering $100,000 in total grant to four startups with winning ideas in the Cloud & Mobile categories.

Its inclusiveness: Physical incubators, even the largest, can only host a limited number of companies, which means that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are on their own for all sorts of reasons. 1M by 1M doesn’t have to select or exclude entrepreneurs to function, and thus can accept companies regardless of their prospective TAM or the speed at which the business will grow. Small niche businesses are the economy operating system of the world, and yes, any small business owner can benefit from being trained. As a matter of fact, the program heavily focuses on bootstrapping and leadership (something useful to entrepreneurs with larger ambitions, anyway). 1M by 1M is a fully international social network of entrepreneurs (they only have to be able to speak/understand English). Changing the world for the better is a collective effort, where each entrepreneur defines his/her vision of effectiveness, while benefiting from sharing lessons learned.

Conclusion: Read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and a few other good books, including the ones that Sramana wrote, and join 1M by 1M. It’s a great way to start off, even if you have the type of business or you are in a place that allows you to apply for a physical incubator (in such case, you will benefit from this incubator even more!).

* Books by Sramana Mitra:

• Entrepreneur Journeys Volume 1
• Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction (Volume 2)
• Entrepreneur Journeys v.3: Positioning: How To Test, Validate, And Bring Your Idea To Market (Volume 3)
• Entrepreneur Journeys v.4 : Innovation: Need Of the Hour (Volume 4)
• Vision India 2020

Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, the co-founder of Fast Company, is about transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself. Now, where do you start? Not from a vacuum: the times for dreams of starting from a clean slate and building up utopias are long gone. So, be practical. Yet adopting a middle-of-the-road approach can only make you shrivel up into mediocrity. So, be radical, i.e. proceed from what the roots of your company are, from the raison-d’être of what your industry is, and find the wellspring of all information – others. Everything is here, around you, for you to reinvent yourself as an innovative executive, as a purpose-driven entrepreneur, as a movement leader. In a nutshell, be practically radical, i.e, find solutions. Taylor quite relevantly reminds us of one of the best Clintonian piece of advice: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

While the notion of “disruption” remains a pervasive marketing catchword, what I like most in this book is the idea that innovation stems from what I would call “constructive subversion,” which was also the underlying theme of Mavericks at Work that Taylor co-authored with Polly LaBarre. When the know-it-alls perceive the world from their allegedly expert standpoint, they show a strong propensity to downgrade novelty into a French expression, calling it “déja vu.” Creative minds reverse perspectives and look at a familiar situation as if they had never seen it before. They experience the “Vujà dé,” “a strange term” Taylor says, that may be attributed to various people (he mentions Tom Kelley, Bob Sutton and George Carlin). It refers to the old rhetorical device of re-arranging syllables of a word or words in a sentence (metathesis) that French people ultimately named verlan in 1950, and that became the language of the immigrants and the working class of the Parisian suburbs.

So, regardless of any former experience, become an immigrant within your own turf: what you will see will shape how you change, and where you will look will shape what you see. You will make Providence (RI) a safer place with Dean Esserman, rejuvenate the Swiss Swiss watch manufacturing industry as did Lebanese Nicolas Hayek who co-founded the Swatch Group – while resurrecting Omega - or redefine the standards of service for Internet retail (even those of you who believe you know everything about Tony Hsieh, read Taylor’s visit to Zappos‘ headquarters as a … cevino – verlan for novice). The language of innovation recombines known syllables to create new emotions: “the most enduring source of competitive advantage is for emotionally charged employees to capture the emotionally drained customers.”

This book is remarkably well organized in three sections (transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself), each subdivided into three chapters, with each ending chapter reading as a collection of five takeaways: Five truths of corporate transformation, Five new rules for starting something new, Five habits of highly humbitious leaders. Each section can be read independently. Yet, albeit permitting an à la carte study, the entire book is compelling because of the underlying consistency of the message. Will you ever be able to transform your company or shake up an industry if you have all the answers? At best, you will just be a prefab manager in a prefab company in a prefab world speaking a prefab language in the midst of prefab people living their prefab lives… You will never even think of the hidden geniuses around you or around the world at large, and you will never have the “million-dollar idea to attract ideas” that enabled Reed Hastings of Netflix to improve the company’s recommendation engine by an order of magnitude. “The real genius of leadership today is knowing how to move forward when you and your senior colleagues don’t have all the answers — devising ways to uncover the most powerful ideas in the most unexpected places, even if those ideas come from outside the organization.”

So, be ambitious, yet remain humble, and become “humbitious,” and look at your company as a community where “everyone is in charge.” Tellingly enough, the penultimate chapter of the book ends with the Threadless phenomenon. Ultimately, modern leaders could be imaginative curators who make everybody shine.

The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, Why the future of business is sharing, “the Mesh is the new way of doing business.” It is made possible by the increasingly sophisticated understanding of consumers’ behavior patterns, as well as multiple technologies that matured over the last fifteen years, ranging from RFID, broadband management, GPS-enabled mobile web devices, to social media networks or data processing.

Described in chapter 1, “Getting to know the Mesh,” the Zipcar experience provides a foundational example from which Gansky presents the “Mesh business” that has fleshed out over the last ten years. It is defined through five main attributes:

• Shareability: Products or services can be shared within a community (whatever it is);
• Advanced Web and mobile networks, and information infrastructures: They allow real-time tracking of what is shared;
• Immediate availability: Users can access the shared goods wherever they are physically;
• Evangelization through social networking: Happy users spread the word about their experience;
• Global service networks: Any Mesh service can come with a network of ancillary services through partnerships.

Gansky ends up adopting/adapting the technology definition of mesh networks: “A mesh describes a type of network that allows any node to link in any direction with any other node in the system.”

The advantages and the meaning of the Mesh economy are spelled out throughout the following eight chapters for both the users and the providers of Mesh services. The on-demand availability of physical goods creates a new type of cooperative and trust-based environment as well as, ultimately, a cultural shift that points toward the new aspects of our liberal economy. This includes:

Usage-based consumption models: Why not take advantage of shareable goods when they are easily available? How many cars do we really need in a family? Do we need to buy new clothes all the time? Why not swap children’s clothing and toys through ThredUp, for example? The Mesh economy provides us access to many goods while sparing us from the constraints and superfluous expenses of ownership, as well as the depreciative process of accumulating things. The throwaway economy is disappearing quickly.

Global anti-waste approaches:  While many anti-waste measures in our life are still primarily corrective, the Mesh is designed to structurally reduce the amount of garbage in the first place. Continued participation in the Mesh requires goods that hold up to repeated uses, i.e. that are durable and reparable. On the production side, this entails demand-driven and tightly integrated distributed supply chains that also provision “reverse supply chains,” as the goal is not only to sell products, but also to repair them or recycle and “upcycle” parts.

Marketplace-driven overhead reduction principles: Remember the noise ten years ago about how Internet was removing the middleman and how we were entering the disintermediation age (strikingly enough, a word that was coined in the sixties and originally referred to the ability for consumers to invest directly in securities)? This is actually happening. Tellingly, to defend itself in 2008, Prosper, a p2p financial company, had to argue that that it was not a bank, but a marketplace, which the SEC’s investigators admitted. Great news. Structures do not build the economy, consumers do… and they do so precisely in a marketplace where they expect transparency.

My summary: The Mesh, a consumer-driven free economy: Mesh businesses address people and send them recommendations and/or advertizing messages based on their personal behavioral patterns: that’s why they are winning at a fast pace. While traditional liberalism mandates the right to undertake from the entrepreneur’s standpoint and is predicated on mechanisms pushing products to consumers, the Mesh liberalism factors in the consumers’ pull and their ability to transform any company into a service company delivering services to which they may or may not subscribe, depending on the quality of the offering and assistance they get.

Netflix slayed the “movie dragon,” because consumers are the ones who make or break companies (more so than ever). They are free social animals, choosing with whom they interact and to whom they want to listen, and are moving away from business institutions that do not hear their conversations. In many respects, the world of the Mesh is the expression of a consumer-driven free economy as well as the market incarnation of Rousseau’s social contract “by which every person, while uniting himself with all, shall obey only himself and remain as free as before.

A very interesting book, which also includes an extensive “Mesh directory.”

Thanks to Seth Godin for attracting my attention to this book!

Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events that can either traumatize and send us into dispiriting limbos or, instead, move us forward. The latter definitely illustrates the early life of Nilofer. A Muslim girl born in Mumbai who followed her mother to the United States when she was five, she was culturally destined to become the lovely wife of (preferably) a rich man.

The tale of two worlds: Nilofer’s mother came to the Silicon Valley after she divorced her husband in India. In order to make a living to support her children, she decided get a degree in respiratory therapy. Nilofer saw her mother become a student – a great role model in a way. Yet, it’s a case when role modeling doesn’t necessarily mean that much. Nilofer’s mother worked out of necessity and not for self-development or accomplishment. In other words, she stuck to the culture in which she was born; as a result, she did not inspire her own daughter the way she intended, and the relationship between mother and daughter turned into a dialogue between the deaf when the time came of discussing the terms of Nilofer’s arranged marriage.

Nilofer had graduated from high school and just started Community College. She did not have an issue with the arranged marriage itself, and she had no interest in a cultural rebellion. “I knew,” she says, “that it was my responsibility to accept an arranged marriage. My mother had made many hard decisions to raise us. I always felt a combination of debt and gratitude, and my assigned cultural role was to get married in such a way that it would dowry-wise take care of my mother.” So what went wrong? One day, Nilofer, coming back from school, found her entire family (uncles, aunts, and cousins) in the midst of a sort of pre-Nikah party celebrating the fact that a contract for the arranged marriage had been completed. Everything would have been fine, except that when Nilofer asked her uncle if the contract arranged for college for her, he responded that her mother didn’t want to put the topic on the table. Being raised in the US, Nilofer asked to simply add this clause in the contract. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. After a few days of fighting, Nilofer realized that her threat of leaving the house wouldn’t sway her mother. So, she packed books and clothes in boxes and moved away — and was disowned: ” I no longer had a family;  I no longer had a culture. I no longer had a community,” Nilofer says.

Alea jacta est (The die has been cast): Such a defining moment comes by chance or mishap. It’s an inflection point on the road of your personal history, a sudden discovery that shatters your world and creates the acute sense that you must act quickly. Had Nilofer ever dreamed of moving out and settling into the tiny space she was given as student body treasurer? Obviously not: but she recognized that, while her mother had power because she owned her community, she herself had the power to negotiate because she was a valuable commodity. She saw two choices ahead of her that had never materialized before – one safe, the other unknown – and chose the uncharted road. In that act, she unwound her personal destiny from her cultural and family identities, and placed it into her own hands.

For Nilofer, reinventing herself was not so much an act of mutiny or even of provocation (in fact she was sure that her mother would change her mind) – as it was the instinctive acknowledgement that the world exists beyond one’s doorstep. Nilofer worked her way through college for ten years, landing jobs at Apple, GoLive Systems, and Autodesk. I found interesting that, as soon as she completed her MBA, she named her consulting firm Rubicon Consulting (a company she ran successfully for ten years). She is now onto her new venture, also quite significantly branded: Innovative Cultures & Kicking Ass.

From the science of automata to love stories with androids: Think about Wilhelm Schickard’s “calculating clock” in 1623 and, almost two hundred years later, of Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computer, the difference engine, and about the many inventions in between: Pascal’s Pascaline (1642), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner (1672), the dozens of mechanical calculators that were built during the 18th Century, or Jacquard’s automatic loom. Starting in the 17^th century the word “automaton” (which means the ability to act or move of one’s own will in Greek) became a household term among scientists and philosophers, as well as entertainers throughout Europe – and a cause for endless marveling in the 18^th century. While Leibniz, inventor of calculus, described the soul as an admirable “spiritual automaton” in his Théodicée, Jacques de Vaucanson (1709 –1782) and Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790) fueled the imagination of kings and queens as well as of laymen with their humanoid automata. Few of them still work, but you may want to take a look at the tympanum player by clockmaker Peter Kintzing (1746-1816), or take a few minutes to watch Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s marvels: the Musician, the Scribe and the Draftsman (start at the 6^th minute if you are in a hurry).  Automaton fantasies spread throughout the 19^th century, inspiring countless writers and composers, until Villiers de l’Isle Adam popularized the term “Andreid” in his story Tomorrow’s Eve (1886). In it, a love-sick aristocrat, Lord Celian Ewald is close to committing suicide at the time he visits an American inventor called Edison — who exhorts him to wait for twenty-one days and meet the ideal artificial woman.

2010: The most complex android automaton today: Alexander Pushkin: Forget about all the computerized predictable robots of today and take a look at an amazing, non-computerized, and non-predictable piece of art, Pushkin:

Almost 37 inches tall and weighing 122 pounds, Pushkin blinks and breathes as he hand-writes and signs one of 1,458 poems with his Caran d’Ache pen. Here is an automaton in the grandest tradition, with extremely smooth and refined movements, yet considerably more complex than all historical automata combined. It’s also an android in a most beautiful tradition, as the founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1827), now writes for eternity illustrated love verses. That’s where the innovative uniqueness of Pushkin lies:  while all automata so far have only offered predefined sets of words and drawings, Pushkin composes hundreds of different, sensical poems (with a drawing corresponding to the theme of each one) — a level of combinatorial intelligence hardly imaginable in mechanical computing.

No wonder the project took seven years to complete! It’s not a surprise that it propels its designer, François Junod, an already celebrated automaton maker from Sainte-Croix (in the heart of watch-and clock making country between La Chaux-de-Fonds and Geneva) to the top of the automaton artistic medium. François has pushed the limits of the genre thanks of his outstanding knowledge of micro-mechanics, his deep personal artistic creativity and culture, but also his ability to attract talents, such as Thomas Ortlieb, Nicolas Court, Fabienne Roth and many others, who were indispensable to complete such a daunting project. It was not only a huge task to custom-create almost 4,000 components (along with some of the instruments to build them), it was even more challenging to address a host of application issues, ranging from the size of these components to the impact of their mass with a 2 micron precision requirement.

Pushkin, who died after challenging Georges d’Anthès to a duel, has resumed a new life in Sainte-Croix. People came to admire the latest Swiss marvel evolve and improve; many journalists sent him emotional goodbyes as he left the country, carefully dismounted. Gerald Cordonier, a journalist for 24 heures even followed to the “virgin woods of young America.”

We just celebrated thirty years of lectures in Stanford by French Academician Michel Serres (left with Robert Harrison on his right). The party was organized by Audrey Calefas-Strebelle at the residence of Brigitte et Jean-Louis Gassée in Palo Alto, and included very closed friends of Michel, celebrated philosopher (and also from the French Academy), René Girard and his wife, Martha Girard.

A major European philosopher, Michel Serres is also a mathematician and is famous for his courses on the history of thermodynamics, as well as a number of other sciences. A real “Troubadour of Knowledge” (to use the American title of his 1991 book called Le Tiers-Instruit in French) is a staunch proponent of inter- or cross-disciplinarity in education, because the fusion of traditionally separate domains often fuels innovation (think of the very concept of biomedical engineering, for example). An encyclopedic mind, who can tell you better than just about anybody else in the world why music is at the origin of sciences in his lecture about the education of Orpheus, Michel lives in sync with today’s realities and trends. He is able to comment on small events with humor as well as discuss the value of alternative currencies within local communities.

I can only advise that you read more about Michel Serres. There are dozens of great resources on the Web, in French of course, but also in English. I am lucky to have been one of his students at L’Ecole normale supérieure. He is an amazing mentor who cared for his students — and one who actually believes in what he advocates. In the mid-eighties, at a time when it was downright odd for a woman in Academia (in France for sure, but also in the US) to start a high-tech company, he was one of the rare persons who thought that it made sense. But then again, few people have the wisdom and instinct that comes from understanding so many facets of knowledge. If you understand French, listen to this very interesting conference he gave in 2007 for the 40^th anniversary of the INRIA: “Les nouvelles technologies nous ont condamnés à devenir intelligents!” (”New technologies have compelled us to become intelligent”).

Here are additional pictures of this great evening: Nilou Farzaneh, Bernard Gallet, Martha Girard, Jean-Louis Gassée, Audrey Calefas-Strebelle, Brigitte Gassée, Geraldine Gallet, Guillaume Lebleu with René Girard, Samia Kassab with René Girard.

Many of the above + Romain Serman and his wife Laura.

Matthew is part of a new breed of business innovators that I call urban arts entrepreneurs.  This group combines fervent advocacy for the arts and passionate community activism with a strong business sense; they dedicate their lives to impacting specific urban geographies, bootstrapping complex partnerships between heterogeneous entities – local government officials, businesses, institutions, financiers, artists, arts organizations, community organizers, and influencers of all types. Just like most entrepreneurs, urban arts entrepreneurs start with limited resources, and create a “product” for people to enjoy or a service that serves a specific need.  It’s a huge task, and given that they can’t afford an armada of employees, urban arts entrepreneurs must wear multiple hats and show an exceptionally broad spectrum of competencies. The minute you get that, you won’t be surprised by the amazing complexity of their personal trajectory.

The making of an urban arts entrepreneur such as Matthew is by no means a linear process. It starts with a deep love for the arts and personal artistic talent. Matthew was classically trained in trombone and voice, went into musical theater and performed with high level amateurs and semi-professional troupes starting at a young age. Such experience as a practitioner is a plus if you want to directly or indirectly manage artists — individual contributors with their own strong ideas. Now, managing people requires more than just empathy. You also need leadership, a natural talent that Matthew had, yet was considerably strengthened at a college of his own choice, Deep Springs College, a small organization whose goal is to prepare its male students for “a life of service.” You also need a serious cultural and liberal arts background, something that Matthew acquired at Harvard where he selected to major in philosophy – while remaining very active as an artist.

Where do you go from there? Matthew decided to move from the East Coast to Seattle, with two goals in mind: land a day job and pursue his performance work. And he did both. His day job was at Microsoft, as a Program Manager for embedded systems (incidentally, Matthew’s hobby since he was a kid was to write code…), and he continued to work both as an artist and as a production coordinator and consultant to arts organizations… Until he felt frustrated as he kept on witnessing arts organizations facing the same structural problems over and over again. So he decided to create a business incubator for arts and entertainment groups, uniting his passion for business and the arts. He started the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) on 12^th Avenue in Seattle in 2002, that provided a common infrastructure — “like an operating system,” Matthew adds — where people were able to share space, personnel and other commonly needed resources to lower overall costs, creating efficiencies of scale by satisfying the needs of several small organizations with a shared infrastructure. The organization presented hundreds of shows of all types in the course of the six years of its existence.

The creative economy: Arts in the City make businesses thrive

Capitol Hill Arts Center was a success. The biggest problem the organization ended up encountering is that it didn’t own its building, which placed it in a strange paradox.  The existence of Capitol Hill Arts Center had changed the surrounding real estate, making it more desirable, evidenced by private developers advertising CHAC as a perk in their marketing pitch to sell commercial real estate. But when CHAC was offered an opportunity to extend its lease, Matthew tried to purchase the building to capture some of this value—but the owner of the building didn’t want to sell. That’s when Matthew realized that as an urban arts entrepreneur, he was, in reality, in the real estate business, and that the model of CHAC could be extended to be relevant for public policy making and neighborhood real estate development. There was a paradox: while arts businesses are not large money-making operations, they create opportunities for other businesses around them to make money based on their work, and public support.

This conundrum spurred him to work with the County’s cultural development organization to rally a large movement of artists, real estate developers, lawyers, companies and business owners to show up at City Hall demanding that the City start thinking of the development of the arts, entertainment and culture in a different way. At the request of Seattle’s City Council, Matthew helped form an advisory committee on urban planning and cultural districts. “It had become clear to me,” Matthew adds, “that understanding the relationship between the private and the public sectors was key, and we had to demonstrate that investment from the public sector leads to an increase in value on the private side. In this situation it becomes the responsibility of local government to channel this increased value into the public good.” While Matthew had experimented in many different industries and businesses, he commented wryly to me: “It also became obvious to me that I needed to get an MBA to learn what other people already knew about this economic relationship and what I could learn from them.”

As a result, Matthew graduated with honors from The Wharton School last May with an MBA in Real Estate and Finance, and has started his new company, QBL Real Estate. The name may sound like a cabbalistic file extension, but its purpose is to focus on the needs of arts/entertainment organizations, artists and cultural/community space developers as well as the role of the arts in enlivening business districts and revitalizing neighborhoods. His clients include, among others, the City of Ottawa, the City of  Austin, the Kimmel Center of the Performing Arts (Philadelphia) and King County’s Cultural Development Authority. In the video below (about 40 minutes – Matthew being introduced after 6 minutes), he discusses the quantifiable impact of culture on the value of private real estate and the positive outcomes for communities at large.

What is remarkable about this video to me is how Matthew translates his unique perspective on the role of the arts into a prescription for downtown urban development as a whole — arts-related or not. He is able to apply principles from economics, geo-spatial theory, business strategy, creative economy and other diverse fields. To me, this is Matthew’s true value-add, and that of many entrepreneurs: they are synthesizers.

Cities and neighborhood can benefit from the holistic approach that Matthew brings, as well as his passion and determination to solve the recurring question of the role of the Arts and culture in our society. A brilliant speaker about the role of culture in downtown business districts, real estate financial models, cultural economic development policies and the changing face of corporate philanthropy, Matthew is also hands-on as a consultant. Ultimately, he believes that the social value of public goods such as schools, parks and (of course) cultural institutions cause a corresponding increase in surrounding real estate prices. It is clear after talking with him that culture will be a key part of future urban economic development practice, as well as an essential tool for the savviest real estate developers to positively impact communities both socially and economically.

In the early eighties, a Chinese pair of figure skaters, Yao Bin and Luan Bo, kept failing (sometimes miserably), regularly finishing last in international competitions – the 1980 World Competition in Dortmund where the audience laughed at them, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo… They did improve somewhat every year (it seems that when they first showed up on the world scene, they had learned their moves from pictures only), but there was no way for them to catch up. Yet, as embarrassing or even humiliating as such experiences may have been, they resulted in phenomenal feedback and stimulus to action. Yao Bin became a coach, and, as early as 1999, his pair of skaters, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, won a Silver Medal in Helsinki at the World Championships, having already impressed audiences at their first Olympics in 1998 in Nagano (where they finished fifth). Since then, the couple’s career has been a series of successes culminating in the Vancouver Olympics with a Gold Medal.  A huge success for Yao Bin, who also coached the Silver Medalists and the couple in fifth place. As a Chinese proverb goes: “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.” 

Tamara Moskvina, arguably one of the most successful coaches in the history of pair figure skating, said in a 2003 interview, ”we [Russian skaters] are so successful because we have developed traditions and because we work in the same manner as we have in the past.” This may have been true. The lesson that entrepreneurs may want to take from the history of Yao Bin could be slightly different, however. In addition to demonstrating that failures are only steps towards success, his career shows that the “same old ways” don’t work endlessly and that traditions are secure only inasmuch as there isn’t somebody around who wants to tear them apart to reinvent the future. Listen to the journalists who (courteously) commented the 1984 short program of Yao Bin and Luan Bo. Clearly, they didn’t envision that China’s “developmental stage” would be so short !

(Incidentally, Chen Lu was the first Chinese to win an Olympic medal – Bronze- in 1994 in Lillehammer).

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Alain Calefas, Serenity Valley founder, with Michel Serres at DBF, a networking organization for French entrepreneurs, on November 2, 2009. That day, Alain Calefas was interviewed by Jean-Louis Gassée (who co-founded DBF in 1994).

Alain Calefas graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique, arguably one of the most elitist schools in Europe. To get in, you have to excel academically – period. But when you combine intellectual acumen and a desire to live life to the hilt, you have Alain Calefas. His first passion was Marine Engineering, so from Paris, he went to Berkeley – and fell so much in love with Northern California that he stayed… To accommodate this passion as quickly as possible, he decided to manage two “boulangeries,” a fairly novel idea at the time (in the mid-eighties, the Valley was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today in the food department). But granted, the enterprise wasn’t really scalable. So, reason winning over passion, Alain went back to Europe where he headed innovation and strategic investments at Rhône-Poulenc for four years. “A great experience,” he says, yet frustrating at times. No matter how hard large corporations may try, the truth of the matter is that you can’t generate inventors by simply asking people to become ones.” But you can always reinvent yourself and that’s what Alain did at a time he was on track for prestigious corporate positions. 

So Alain went back to the sea and, finally, ended up on the firm land, discovering as many did in the early nineties the complex rubble of the ex-Soviet Union as well as the places of his ancestors, realizing through rich personal experiences that whatever you do, what matters is the quality of the relationship that you build with people. In fact, “I really understood that despite my natural bent towards science and high-tech, people are what mattered the most to me.” So when he came back to Paris, he created a variety of businesses that went well, bars, restaurants, and even a clothing store. Living in Paris again, though, made him miss his favorite place: Northern California – and he moved back in 1997. High tech was booming, but this time, what he wanted most was a place to settle and he bought 65 acres in Pescadero, which he transformed into a spectacular botanical garden and one of the most remarkable places you can imagine to host events (from business retreats to weddings) just on Silicon Valley’s doorstep:  Serenity Valley.

Business retreats often take us to great resorts, yet sometimes so far away from home that they often feel like just another business trip. Worse, these places are sometimes so abstractly international, with the same types of lithographs on the walls, the same style of furniture, the same manicured patches of garden that nobody looks at, that nothing stimulates the brain. So business retreats are just business as usual, or the nicest entertaining events a “unique” experience that clones the previous one and foreshadows the next. Oppositely, Serenity Valley is a phenomenal expanse of nature where ecological balance means what it is, an ever-changing dynamics that fosters the ability for people to rebuild and reinvent themselves, without straining themselves. The ability to breathe is sometimes the first step to be able to think!

Incidentally also, when your host has traveled the world, is an amazing connoisseur in food, wines and art, it’s an out-of-this-world experience to just be next door.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis