René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Just returned to Bangalore from the highly inspiring EO (Entrepreneurs’ Organization) conference in Lisbon. During transit in Frankfurt I bought the newest issue of Germany’s leading news magazine “DER SPIEGEL” with the expected article on Germany’s problem of “brain drain”, i.e. qualified Germans leaving the country to seek for better opportunities abroad.

I say “expected article”, because I got interviewed for this story around three months back and in addition got chased for the respective photo-shooting through the streets of Bangalore. And I feel humbled that the published story even begins with featuring me and my rationale as the prototype for this rampant phenomenon which is doing Germany as a whole certainly no good. But reality bites and the article makes a well researched case on the broader picture. Funnily, my favorite publication “The Economist” has a parallel coverage in its current issue on exactly the same topic, too: 144,000 Germans have left the country last year, 128,000 have returned, with the balance a loss.

What is more, there is an asymmetry between the level of qualification between those who return as opposed to those who quit which tends to reinforce the drag on the economy further. With the other exemplary cases of German emigrants in the article, our motivation can be indeed well summarized with “I have enough”. Exactly this was my reason to quit the country three years back when I was deeply appalled by basically everything. I had enough of the government, economy, society, gay marriage, politics, bureaucracy, depression, a climate of envy, obsession with Nazi-past, …, you name it. With my favorable situation to travel to my old home country once a month, I have developed a more benign view, realizing that the famous grass is not always and everywhere greener on the other side. Yet, that revelation cannot mask the prevailing structural problems that haven’t ceased to exist in Germany.

As the article rightly quotes me, I was and I am still thrilled by the vibrant pulse of Asia, and the opportunities in India in particular. And my response to the question if I could imagine coming back to Germany for good was: “Hardly, because what is happening in India at the moment, is just the beginning.” Funnily, in the same edition of the SPIEGEL, there is also a story of Thomas Friedman, author of “The World is Flat”, visiting Berlin and being desperate how slow Germany was. He did not even manage to send out an urgent e-mail. His hotel did not have internet, neither had the publishing house Suhrkamp where he was presenting his book. I feel it’s worth mentioning Mr. Friedman in this context as the phenomenon he describes with the “Flat World” and Bangalore at its epicentre constitute very much the particular attraction for me to move to the “Silicon Valley of Asia” instead of, say, Mountain View, California.

After three years, I feel that I have found a bit more of a balanced view than in the beginning. A view which also strongly resonates with the many great discussions I have had with my fellow entrepreneurs during the last days in Lisbon: In the nutshell Germany need a culture of entrepreneurship which would require quite a shift in current conventional wisdom: That labour is not a scarce good, but the driving force of and for a dynamic economic momentum. That with the existing issues, we don’t constantly need “more of the same”, namely government programs, tax increase and another expansion of the state sector, but we need exactly the opposite with less of all that. And finally the insight that what people do and what they work is part of the many choices we fortunately possess in order to be true masters of our destiny.