Mayor Gavin Newsom

The mayor came to our Social Enterprise class last night. The mayor! And when I say "class," I mean 25 students, not 300 students. He spoke to us about the initiatives he's put in place to reduce poverty in San Francisco. The model meshes well with the topics we are discussing in the class. Social Enterprise (as we're defining it) is the intersection of public, private and social sector motives...what you often see expressed as "doing well by doing good."

I won't go into all of the gory details about what the mayor and his staff have done, but suffice it to say they are holding themselves accountable, holding their non-profit and philanthropic partners accountable, and holding the beneficiaries of these programs and services accountable. Those are not easy tasks, especially if you consider that he has to do all of it within the confines of the political and government systems. And he has not fallen prey to the pitfalls of his predecessors - he has not let big problems discourage him. Rather, he and his staff have found ways to distill the issues, break them down into digestible pieces, and make incremental plans to address them. What this means is that he rarely engages in rhetoric, and instead grounds his words with facts and statistics.

He has a fairly irreverent and self-deprecating personality, which I'm sure has served him well in his business and political careers. He told us that he has no fear of failure whatsoever, and really only fears success. I would assume that to be unusual in the political arena. He seems impervious to the musings of the press and the blogosphere, but knows exactly what they are saying about him. He is frustrated that they focus more on his personal life and appearance than they do on his initiatives, but such is life for a young and brash politician.

For anyone out there that is a fan of the now-defunct television show "Arrested Development," know that the mayor bears a striking resemblance (in appearance and in voice) to Will Arnett, the actor who plays Gob Bluth on that show. It is a distractingly uncanny similarity.