I spent last week in Italy (Milan and Naples) launching the The Start-Up of You there. It was my second visit to the beautiful country. Some quick impressions / thoughts:

Unemployment / career anxiety in Italy. I was told 1 in 3 young people are unemployed in Italy right now. Young people are feeling like they need to break into the “digital economy,” not work in a legacy manufacturing industry. Meanwhile, a lot of the historic craft businesses are struggling, and the entrepreneurs there are trying to figure out how to survive in a global economy. Apparently, many entrepreneurs in the north have been committing suicide for fear their businesses were going under.

Crisis? What crisis?! There was much talk in Italy about the economic crisis. But the effects of the crisis were not visible to this tourist. By contrast, when I was in Greece, people in Athens would tell me about the economic crisis and then I would look around and see trash piled up on the sidewalk corner because the garbage men were striking. I’d see taxis all parked in a parking lot because the taxi drivers were striking. I’d see government workers all congregated on the main square because the government workers were striking…so yes, there was indeed a crisis. There are serious economic challenges throughout the Europe and in Italy, per the previous point, but if you just look around, Milan seemed positively tranquil. People seemed happy. Society was functioning fine. This is not a scientific way to assess an economic situation, but the “look around” litmus test should not be dismissed as irrelevant, either.

Culture matters. A surprising number of Italians proactively told me that Italian culture hinders entrepreneurial thinking. For example, the mindset that gets fostered when kids live at home with their parents into their early 30′s. Or the overall view on failure. Essentially, the themes of my post Culture Matters to Entrepreneurship. It’s striking how universal these cultural challenges seem to be around the world.

Buffalo mozzarella. Especially in Naples, the bufalo mozzarella blew my mind. Again. So good.

Thanks to our very energetic publisher Egea for hosting my visit!

It was my first time to the region and my time in Doha was all too brief, but I will share a splattering of thoughts:

• The people of Qatar I met were friendly, hospitable, ambitious, and keen on continuing to improve their country. The world cup arrives in 2022. That event creates a natural timeline by which they want to achieve big things before they enjoy the global spotlight.
• The talking point within Qatar that I heard a lot is that the country needs to become a “service economy.” They are also looking to foster entrepreneurship in order to diversify their economic base.
• By day, the Doha skyscrapers juxtaposed next to the desert landscape looks bizarre. And because of the heat, no one is walking on any sidewalk…anywhere. By night, with the buildings lit up, the landscape takes on an alluring, Vegas-like quality. And with the cooler evening breezes, the foot traffic on sidewalks picks up to a normal pace.
• When I sat down to lunch with some local businesspeople from the region, I asked where everyone was from. I should have known better. Apparently, it’s easy to tell someone’s home country by how they wear their hijab (headscarf). As it was explained to me, Saudis wear a red patterned hijab. Omanis wear a hat, no scarf. Qataris fold their hijab a certain way; folks from the UAE fold it a different way. Walk down the street of Doha, and you’ll see all kinds of hijabs.
• Doha’s critics say the city is trying too hard to be like Dubai: too many sky scrappers, too many five star western hotel brands, a national airline in Qatar Airways too hell bent on being more luxurious than Emirates. Doha strives to be better than Dubai on these fronts but isn’t, they say. By forcing an apples-to-apples comparison, Doha gets relegated to second class, instead of a place like Muscat which aspires to be something different. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with this view — I’ve never been to Dubai nor spent serious time in Doha. I’m simply repeating it because I found it interesting in terms of how a city’s identity gets constructed vis-a-vis another city’s.
• When women are covered up except for their face, it makes the face the singular signal of beauty. There’s nothing else to go by. I saw many beautiful faces.
• I flew Emirates, SFO-Dubai and then Dubai-Doha. I loved that the ceiling of the plane turned into a star-filled sky during sleep hours. Also, the window shades opened/closed electronically, and they were all shut automatically during sleep hours. (It’s annoying when someone leaves the window shade open and sun creeps in when you’re trying to sleep.) The weakness of Emirates (in my brief experience) was around staff friendliness. The flight crew just didn’t seem as uniformly professional and friendly as a Cathay Pacific or Japan Airways crew, for example. I wonder if the diversity of the flight crew on Emirates matters in this regard. The four Emirates flights I took were multi-ethnic to an extreme degree; when they announced the languages spoken by the crew, I truly had never heard of a couple of the languages. I love diversity generally, but for within crew maybe the cultural differences translate into inconsistent hospitality styles. The person serving food approaches the relationship with the passenger differently than the person handing out customs forms. On a 16 hour non-stop flight, these little things become a little noticeable.

All in all, big thanks to my hosts in Qatar for the opportunity to meet and share ideas, and I look forward to getting back to the region soon to spend a more significant chunk of time.

I spent last week in Athens, Greece. It was my first time to the country. I didn't have time to make it to the islands, but I did have time to meet many students, NGO leaders, and businesspeople in Athens. Some assorted impressions and lessons.

1. History. Seeing the stadium that hosted the first Olympic games; seeing the place where Socrates was forced to commit suicide; seeing where a stage play was first performed; learning about the numerous English words and images (like the logo/insignia of pharmacies) that have their origin in a Greek god or Greek word…Athens really is the birthplace of western civilization and western democracy. 

The Parthenon and related antiquities are well-kept outside, and an architectural wonder of the world, obviously. Inside, the new Acropolis museum shows off many other sculptures and art. Christopher Hitchen wrote a piece in Vanity Fair a couple years back (which I happened to read in the Best American Travel Writing of 2010 that I brought along on my trip) about the musuem. He covers the dispute over the British Museum holding various Greek art that ought to be in Athens. Hitchens thinks it's an outrage–though, to be fair, issues of national sovereignty over long-ago stolen art is a tricky one. Missing pieces notwithstanding, Hitchens raves about the new Acropolis museum. I generally don't like museums, but I'm with Hitchens on this one — the facility does a splendid job at showing off the millenia-old history of the country.

2. Athens beyond antiquities. Besides the Acropolis, there isn't a ton to do or see in Athens. There's plenty of traffic and pollution, meanwhile. While the Acropolis sitting up high is always a sight to behold from wherever you are in the city (especially at night when it's lit up), I wouldn't say the city built for Athena is especially stunning in the 21st century.

3. Motivated students. I wasn't dealing with a representative sample of the population, that's for sure, but the several hundred students who I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking to seemed driven to take control of their future, innovate, and overcome the massive economic challenges facing their country. With youth employment soaring (40% according to some numbers), the savvy students are aggressively trying to build a career without relying on the usual industries (e.g. government) or strategies. That's the good news.

4. Brain drain risk. But the potentially bad news is that these savvy students might not stay. I gained no great insight into the macroeconomic situation in Greece — and I didn't have much insight to begin with. But an observation I did have is around a long-term risk more significant than the country's debts: the possible population brain drain of the students mentioned in point #3. Many smart young people are thinking about leaving the country; they told me so themselves. There's a self-fulling dynamic here. If the smart people perceive there's no future for them in Greece, then they leave, and when the smart people leave, there really is no future for the country. It needs to find a way to keep them. 

The common approach elders take to keeping talented youth in a country is appealing to notions of civic duty and national pride. That's one approach. But a grittier entrepreneurial approach is to focus on the business opportunities that are the flip side of societal problems. If taxi drivers strike constantly, why not start Ubercab for the businesspeople of Athens? Maybe not a great business idea, but it's an example of emphasizing practical self-interest over high-minded ideals when urging the best and brightest to stay.

5. Labor strikes. There are strikes every day in Athens thanks to the severe government cuts that are part of the austerity measures. Garbage men were on strike–so garbage was piled high on every street corner. Public transit and taxi drivers went on strike–so nobody could get around. Archaeologists and museum security guards went on strike–so nobody could go to museums. Tax collectors and government officials went on strike–so nobody could use basic government services. Apparently, daily strikes have been going on for about two years, and are now a certain occurrence. There's a web site in Greek that each day shows who is striking and for how long–it's become a must-read in Athens. Everyone I spoke to about the strikes agreed that the protesters were against the austerity measures, but were not for any specific alternative approach.

6. U.S. Diplomats and local staff. Once again, I was super impressed with the quality of the U.S. diplomats (who helped host me in Athens). The foreign service officers and the local staff they hire are truly a cut above your average federal government employee. I was also honored to spend some time with the American Ambassador to Greece and participate in a reception at his residence. What a challenging and exciting post right now. Again, just impressive all around.

7. Building entrepreneurial communities. A question we were batting around at dinner one night was how certain places (like Athens) might become hotbeds of entrepreneurship. I've thought a lot about this question over the years, particularly when I wrote an article on how Boulder, CO became a start-up hub. One point I make in the article–it's really Brad Feld's point, as he is a thought leader on the topic–is the need for leadership from individuals within the community. Not government officials, but private citizens who step up and try to galvanize the community to support the entrepreneurial process.

But the leadership or entrepreneurial push can't be momentary in response to a crisis. It has to be enduring. In Boulder, Brad's been there for more than a decade, and it's only in the last couple years that the city has emerged on the national map as a viable place to do a company. Leadership is needed over a long period of time; as Brad says, it's a 20-year journey. Government programs are prone to lose patience with programs that don't produce immediate gain; start-ups rarely produce immediate gain no matter how you measure it. It's another reason why governments cannot provide the long-term leadership necessary to drive entrepreneurial activity. (I'm fascinated to watch for how long the Chilean government funds Start-Up Chile.) In any event, for a local entrepreneur to be a true leader in the entrepreneurial community, it does seem like s/he needs to commit to leading/organizing/rallying the troops for decades, not years.

8. Being abroad. I hadn't traveled outside the U.S. for more than a year. It was great to get back out there. Though I had to camp out in my hotel room for a majority of the time, being out and about for meals, walking through Munich and Frankfurt airports, seeing the International Herald Tribune on Athens newsstands–these little things were enough to trigger the high one gets from being in a new place. And it's an energy that endures even when you return home…

Steven Johnson, author extraordinaire, is moving from New York to the Bay Area (at least for a little while). Here's one of his reasons:

And then there's the passage of time. Another old friend — my oldest, in fact — wrote an email to me after I told him the news of our move. We've both been in New York for two decades, and we are both watching our kids growing up at lightning speed. "Change like this slows down time," he wrote. When you're in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate — was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving — figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment — means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.

So that is why we are moving: for the natural beauty, yes, and the climate, and the Bay Area tech scene, and the many friends out there we haven't seen enough of over the past twenty years. But more than anything, we're moving to slow down time.

I recently spent a long weekend in Las Vegas. The buffets were outstanding, the weather warm and pleasant, and the hotels stunning. (I hadn't been there in probably 10 years — a lot has changed.) But the main reason Las Vegas was a surprisingly relaxing city to spend time in is because it is a city that's authentically unauthentic.

When you visit New York City, you worry about whether you are being a tourist, about whether you are doing as the locals do. Same with visiting Paris, Rome, London. But in Las Vegas, everybody is a tourist. Anybody who's not a tourist works in the tourism/hospitality industry. There is no real thing. It's fake all the way to the bottom. The very idea of a sprawling, water guzzling city that sits in the middle of barren desert is too absurd to take seriously.

There was no sin for me in Sin City, but I still found it a nice place to spend a few days in the winter to overeat, have my photo taken in front of the Effiel Tower, walk the strip, and lie by the pool.

China is building 100 new airports by 2020. By the time that’s all done, 1.5 billion Chinese will live within 90 minutes of an airport.

That's from this review of the forthcoming book Aerotroplis: The Way We'll Live Next, which looks interesting.

The book's premise is that future cities will be built around airports as opposed to the other way around:

What rules in today’s globalized economy is accessibility and speed, and modern airports are its fastest connection points—the physical embodiment of our increasingly e-commerce-driven world. Yes, the vast bulk of trade still goes by sea, but already one-third of its value travels by air. Indeed, the value of air cargo has grown more than four times faster than global trade over the past several decades.

And more:

“Individual companies don’t compete. Supply chains compete. Networks and systems compete.” Soon to join that global competition are planned mega-airports/cities right out of the Kasarda playbook: the “aerotropolis emirates” of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, where ambitious monarchs are “playing SimCity for real”; and South Korea’s stunning New Songdo City, a metropolis built around an airport built on a man-made island—a “pocket Manhattan” designed to rival Hong Kong for the cargo connectivity to mainland China that it offers the world economy.

The co-author is Greg Lindsay, who writes about "the intersection of transportation, urbanization, and globalization." For one article he wrote, Lindsay spent three continuous weeks in airplanes or airports.

As someone who has spent too much time looking up UPS and FedEx cargo routes and international commerical flight routes, and spent too much time perusing the message boards of flyertalk.com to read about airport lounges, mileage programs, and the business prospects of the new SFO-ZRH non-stop — I am looking forward to this book!

(On a related note, I reccomend this USA Today Twitter feed for the latest airline industry news.)

Last year I began writing a novel as part of NanoWrimo. The opening scene: a washed up management consultant walks into LAX and sits crosslegged in front of the international departure board, letting his eyes rest on each exotic destination.

Alain de Botton, in an interview on LATimes.com, talks about how airport departure boards light up our imagnations:

Airport departure boards help to put us in touch with the idea of alternatives. They make us think that right now, somewhere on the other side of the globe, very different things are happening. They do that very basic task of the places of travel: jolt us into remembering that the world is stranger, more exciting, more various than we imagine it when we are in familiar surroundings, and in danger of boredom and routine.

Next time you're in an airport, stop at the departure board and take a minute to contemplate the possibilities. It's my favorite thing to do in airports.

Jay Kirk's good travel essay on Rwanda last year in GQ captured one hard-to-describe benefit of traveling:

…There is no other place on earth where you can visit mountain gorillas one day, discover the true cosmic dimensions of the banana the next, feel haunted and overwhelmed and harrowed to your very brink, and for the same price of admission, feel more awake than you have ever felt.

Maybe it’s the cold bucket of history over the head. Maybe it’s the collective effort of everyone around you to stay conscious, the shocked look of so many people who are still just waking up from the worst nightmare of their lives to realize that, yes, it was all for real. And while it’s true that you may question whether or not you were fully awake before you got here, you will also probably spend an inordinate amount of time trying to lull yourself back to sleep, wherever you can find alcohol, because part of you will realize that being awake, really awake—well, it’s just not in your nature. That is, if you’re like me and you hail from the land of the Xbox, and you’ve become accustomed to—even begun to desire—the substitution of the virtual for the real, you probably prefer the dream to the directly experienced. But no matter how stuck you are in your digital simulator, however “experientially avoidant” you may be (as I was recently diagnosed by a cognitive-behavioral therapist), you will not remain immune to this odd sensation of waking up in Rwanda to discover, however disconcertingly at first, that not only do you have hair growing out of your arms, but your body also appears to possess these extra dimensions you had not taken into account of late. That you have been going around for some time a mere half-awake version of yourself. Just as you now realize that all along you’ve been eating these things that bear only a half-awake resemblance to a banana. And this is because, in Rwanda, a banana possesses at least seven dimensions, whereas in America, like most everything else, you get two at best.

The reason why travel is exhausting is because hyperawareness of surroundings and self is exhausting — and that's the mode you fall into when traversing foreign lands.

I loved the opening of the article:

On our seventh day in Rwanda…on yet another devastated dirt road winding through yet another breathtaking landscape, Darren informed us that the hair on his arms appeared to be growing much more quickly than usual. Not an alarming rate, but still, more growth than he'd ever noticed back in Los Angeles.

He put an arm between the front seats of the Land Rover so we could see for ourselves. Ernest and I agreed: His arms looked ape-y. One expected to be changed by travel; one looked for little symptoms in oneself, signs of alteration, but did this count as a valid transformation?

Ernest had never heard of such a thing. Once, he’d had a client who’d come all the way from Australia just to punch a mountain gorilla in the face, but nothing quite like this.