9th and Irving Berlin

Okay, the restaurant wasn't at 9th & Irving, but Monday was a nice night and I wanted to use the pun. Unfortunately, the location of the dinner was not Muni-adjacent but still in the vicinity of the ball park and scheduled just before game time which made traffic and parking a nightmare. After over thirty minutes of circling, I almost bailed and went home.

I received an e-mail via my cousin Clark to an informational dinner presented by the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. The Berlin-School is a very cool, and very elite, MBA sort of program for creative professionals. The creative industry—advertising, publishing, video gaming,and other new media—is very different from typical industries and requires a different skill set, market/economic understanding and brand organizational psychology for success. Not to mention, one needs to be a talented creative person from the start.

The Berlin School is a unique program providing a CEO-level of education for creatives who are tops in their field, but not necessarily in positions of senior leadership. The education offered by the Berlin School bridges the experience and talent gap between being a good producer (i.e. one who creates something) and director to becoming a good business and industry leader.

I don't design or write professionally any more (blogs, freelance articles, and personal designs notwithstanding), and I do not work in a creative industry, so the program does not particularly apply to me (or rather, I am not in a position to apply to the program), but it was an exceptionally inspiring experience to hear about this program and its participants.

Without getting into too much detail, the program covers nine pillars of success over 18 months, meeting for two weeks every quarter in different cities around the globe. The Berlin School of Creative Management is, obviously, based in Berlin—a city which has successfully and creatively reinvented itself and continues to be a fertile garden for innovation and creativity.

If you are remotely engaged in a creative field, give their Web site a look. It is truly inspiring.

But the best part about the dinner at Zuppa, other than it being comped, was the company. We were a small band which made conversation more intimate. I met some wonderfully interesting people from a LeapFrog designer, to an Copy Director for an ad agency, to a leader at OpenTable.


Which brings me to my new best friends: Craig and Jocelyn Mangan. Clark, the cousin in Germany and Managing Director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, was friends with Jocelyn when she lived in Nashville and once recommended me to her for a gig at Open Table. It turns out that Jocelyn and I have several friends in common from her CitySearch days in Nashville. She is recently wed to Craig, whom I found to be entertaining and entirely engaging.


Chatting with these two made my night, and it turns out they live just two blocks away from my apartment. I hope to spent some quality time with them again soon. And all this talk of creativity and careers has got me re-examining my life and my career goals. I already have my masters, but I am not working in that field. Those skills are highly useful in my current endeavor, but it is not the Archivist/Reference Librarian at Pixar University that I had hoped for. On the up side creative side, I have three or four articles coming out in the next Nfocus, and they have added me to the masthead as the "west coast correspondent." I'm actually rather giddy to receive the new issue.

Clark hosted a similar Berlin School dinner in Nashville last month—Clark wrote for all the major outlets in Nashville at one point or another and his event had a considerably larger set of participants—which was written up in the June (Steeplechase) issue of Nfocus (I was a hat judge for the magazine in issue).

A shout out and thank you to our Berlin School host Ben Lorch. And shouts to Craig and Jocelyn in the 'hood. Dinner and drinks soon.