Archive for March, 2008
Here’s an excerpt of an interview where I discuss some of my favorite Midwest cities – from Dayton to Pittsburgh – by Tracy Certo of Pop City and Soapbox:
Help me better understand the connection between living in a
powerful mega-region like Chi-Pitts but in a city in that region that’s
in transition.
Chicago’s growth really sucked up all of the services and
headquarters functions and lawyering and financial and accountancy that
used to be done in the Detroits, the Pittsburghs, the Cincinnatis, the
Akrons, the Toledos. Chicago has become in a way the business and
financial center for the Chi-Pitts regions, and it’s become
extraordinarily expensive.
So, one can make quite a nice life in a Cincinnati if they find
ways to connect to that Chi-Pitts mega region. The places in the mega
region that are really at an advantage are places like Ann Arbor. So,
the college towns in that mega region have a particular advantage.
How can a city in this mega-region, like Cincinnati,
Detroit or Pittsburgh, better compete in the global economy? Is it a
matter of amenities or mindset or both?
First of all, I
think they all have this great advantage, in a nearly 2 trillion dollar
mega region which is one of the most innovative on the planet. They’re
also close to the second largest mega-region on the planet, the number
one in North America which is the Bos-Wash (Boston-Washington). The
question is how do they want to compete?
I was just in Cincinnati and in Dayton, another city I love.
They’re historical centers of innovation, every one from steel
innovation to aluminum innovation, to electronics, to the Wright
Brothers, to the car. This is one of the greatest innovative and
entrepreneurial centers in the world. They have probably one of the
greatest clusters of universities, in the history of the planet.
They’re producing phenomenal talent, but unfortunately, that talent
leaves. So, in Rise of the Creative Class, I said the one thing that it needs to become is more open minded and tolerant. It needs to be more diverse and inclusive.
Some of that’s happening in certain parts of the region. More
foreign people are moving in, though not enough, in the Cincinnatis and
Pittsburghs. They’re becoming more open minded to the gay and lesbian
population, though by no means, not enough. I don’t think it’s a
question of making jazzier restaurants or hipper bike trails. I think
it’s a question of being more open-minded.
Another
thing the region suffers from is really poor leadership. And I think
the reason that is, it really bears the imprint that as the economy is
changing to newer things, away from manufacturing, the leadership still
reflects that top-down, vertical, 1950s organization mentality so you
get these conflicts between old-style democratic political machine and
business-led organizations. Those conflicts become very dysfunctional.
I think one of the other things is that if older cities could achieve
better leadership, leadership that was more in tune with the future.
We were working with 30 community catalysts in greater Dayton a
couple weeks ago and I was blown away by what’s happened in downtown
Dayton. It’s a more interesting and exciting place, filled with arts
and restaurants and renovated houses and buildings. But too how these
thirty catalysts, black, white, young, old, Hispanic, Latino, how much
they cared about making their city better. And I think that’s the kind
of thing you see in parts of Ohio and Illinois, there’s this incredible
sense that people care, and I think unleashing that energy in people is
really key.
The rest is here.
The New York Times reports (h/t: Alison Kemper):
New York officials have long taken pride in the city’s status as a global
gateway. But lately, senior executives of some of the country’s biggest
corporations, like Alcoa, have been complaining that American immigration
policies are thwarting New York’s ability to compete with other world
capitals.Every big employer in the city, it seems, can cite an example of high-paying
jobs that had to be relocated to foreign cities because the people chosen to
fill them could not gain entry to the United States.In Alcoa’s case, one of its chief financial executives, Vanessa Lau, who is
from Hong Kong, is working from the company’s offices in Geneva when she should
be at headquarters on Park Avenue, according to Alain J. P. Belda, the chairman and chief executive. … “In a company like ours, we have people moving all over the place all the
time,” Mr. Belda said. “This visa situation is causing difficulty.” …“New York’s ability to compete with London, which has much more open
immigration, or with the emerging financial capitals in Asia and the Middle
East, depends on mobility of talent, both in terms of new and current
employees,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the [Partnership for New York]. “What people
miss is, New York’s standing as an international capital of business and finance
depends on the professionals within these companies being able to come to New
York to be trained and groomed for leadership positions around the world.” …“The whole visa situation was one of the biggest reasons that I took the
job,” Mr. Gaur said in a telephone interview from London, where he is a senior
project manager for the British bank. “I didn’t want to keep going through this
uncertainty — it’s just a nightmare.”
Wasn’t Alcoa once a Pittsburgh companny? And didn’t somebody once write a book about this, while Times columnists were out extolling the virtues of the wondeful, interconnected, flat world. Hmmmmmm….
Dean Dad is an academic and blogger who’s just read Who’s Your City? He’s well-aware of the trade-offs between the energy of spiky places and the lower living costs and availability of academic jobs in other areas.
Any advice on where he should go – or how to manage these trade-offs?
Dean Dad writes:
The conceit of the book seems to be that once you understand what goes into
making an area hot or cold, you can use that information to locate yourself
where the action is likely to be. Better life options, real estate appreciation,
and general coolness await those who correctly spot the next Seattle. To that
end, the book includes a series of (admittedly nifty) maps, and several top-five
lists broken down by stage of life and sexual preference …As an academic, though, there was something both
frustrating and troubling about the whole enterprise. As Florida acknowledges in
passing, certain professions aren’t particularly place-specific. Education,
health care, and law enforcement, for example, can be found pretty much anyplace
you find a significant number of people. In higher ed, below the superstar
level, many of us take jobs where we can find them. When a relatively flat
national market confronts a ’spiky’ economic landscape, you have a choice: have
decent purchasing power in an out-of-the-way or out-of-fashion place, or
struggle mightily somewhere where other people are in hot industries. Buy in a
cold area, or rent in a hot one.The top R1 universities can pay top dollar to lure
superstars despite the price of housing in, say, Berkeley. But that’s a very
narrow segment of the higher ed market, even though it gets most of the
attention. Community colleges, for example, can be found in all sorts of
communities, both hot and cold. And most of them define part of their mission as
serving the community in which they’re located.If the community seems to be in decline, should
part of the mission of the cc be to facilitate individual escape? Given
Florida’s correct insight that age-based losses are hard to recoup, doing right
by individual students could have the unintended side effect of hastening the
decline of the service area. That’s a tough sell to local taxpayers. “Help us
drain this festering craphole of young talent!” It doesn’t look good on a
billboard.That’s not Florida’s fault, of course. But the
idea that you should simply go where the action is strikes me as impracticable
for most of us in higher ed, and of dubious wisdom even for those who could. In
my grad school days, I was physically close to a great deal of sophisticated
culture, but couldn’t afford almost any of it. Ever since, I’ve been a little
skeptical of the idea that it’s ‘hot metro region or bust.’ Given the income
scale non-superstar academics face, it seems to me that there’s something to be
said for the cheaper regions. And that would be true of any industry in which
paychecks tend to be modest. Being house-poor (or apartment-poor) in a hot area
renders you unable to take advantage of most of what makes it hot.Without quite meaning to, I think Florida walked
directly into a really fundamental dilemma: the economic world is spiky, but the
nation-state is flat. The two don’t play well together, and higher ed is just
one sign of that (and a minor one, at that). Self-help is fine, but those best
situated to take advantage of it need it least. There’s a much bigger issue at
hand here. I’m glad Florida did so much to outline the problem. I just don’t
have a clue how to solve it.
DD makes two very important points here. The first one is micro – where
should I go? The second more macro – this spiky world thing is a big
problem, how do we collectively deal with it.
I think the book shows its worth right
here in the way DD frames his own location problem. I wrote the book
not just to illustrate the spiky world but to give people – like DD – a
framework with which to understand it, think it through and make the
best possible decision. There is no one best solution, only a series of
real tradeoffs – that DD identifies – facing all of us. I, btw, was in
a very similar place as DD twenty or so years ago during my PhD program
at Columbia. I never, ever thought I would leave NYC. But I went to
Buffalo, then Columbus and then Pittsburgh, spending more that two
decades essentially moving for work. My grad school associates who
refused to move from NYC and turned down jobs at midwestern
universities made a different decision and mainly moved out of
academe. And after more than two decades studying and also living
through these locational tradeoffs, I believe a book like this one was
very much needed. Honestly, it seems like DD – as frustrated as he may
be – has used the book more or less exactly as I had hoped.
The second issue, the macro one, I also
tackle in the book and have been discussing here. Try as we might no
individual – and no city – can “solve” the spiky world problem. This is
a national -no, at bottom, it’s a global – problem. On this level the
book serves as a wake up call: it’s goal is to get beyond flat world
mythology and encourage economic and policy-makers and all of us,
really to look at the world as it actually is. Left to its own devices,
I argue, the world is only going to get spikier. The ambitious and the
resourceful may be able to navigate this spiky terrain, but many, many
more will become stuck. This will lead not just to rising economic and
geographic inequality but rampant political polarization, a greater
cultural divide, increasing fear and anxiety, declining social cohesion
and greater political and social instability. How do we deal with it?
We build institutions to pump up the valleys – this is a core mission
of the Prosperity Institute, and we are working closely with the
Province of Ontario and Toronto region to develop mechanisms to do just
that. If mayors and local leaders are aware of it, why are national and
global leaders literally asleep?
Back to the main point: Anyone have some practical advice for Dean Dad?
Track Ball of Truth tells of the journey:
How did it end up that I was geeking out around the LucasArts facility
in the Presidio in San Francisco rather than working there?
Tell us your story.
This occurred to me when I was taking a picture of the bronze Yoda statue by
the front entrance, the only sign that a ton of really cool jobs
working on the next Indiana Jones and Star Wars properties were on
site. Only real geeks know that Lucas Arts moved whole hog from
Skywalker Ranch and other locations to a nondescript but beautiful
section of the Presidio.
People end up living where they are via three routes: accidentally, intentionally, and indirectly.
Accidentally: most people in the US simply live where they grew up
because it’s familiar, family and friends are close by and it is so
easy to piece together an existence from all that familiarity.
Intentionally: at some point early in their lives, some people say,
look, I want to live/work/go to school there and then they make it so.
Indirectly: some people follow a job, a spouse or a passion that limits
where they can live, and the choice is just fallout from that initial
decision. There are few nomads, other than those required to be so due
to their job (military, sales, corporate execs, etc.).
As I travel around the U.S. to places I’ve always wanted to see, I play this
game in my head of trying to figure out how people who live there came
to live there. I’m in San Francisco now and my feeling is that there is
a greater proportion of intentionals here than in other places. It’s
the same vibe I get from immigrant and transient-heavy DC. Maybe it’s
because both are creative class meccas, granted of different flavors.
Richard Florida, who studies these issues, has a new book out called “Who’s Your City?” I haven’t read it yet, but it deals with this kind of thing.
Given my job, DC is the obvious choice for me and I realize now that I
figured out where I wanted to live and what I wanted to do at about the
same time. I wanted to go to college in DC but was stuck in NY for
financial reasons. But I made sure to go to grad school inside the
Beltway. Thinking these things through paid off very nicely for me. I
would recommend to any high school student that he/she factor location
into the college decision. College location feeds into social and
business networking quite heavily. Yes, you can get a job in Miami
after colleging in Seattle, but it’s swimming upstream. And above all,
don’t let your location just happen, because these things tend to get
locked in after a while. Someday, you might look at that Yoda statue,
or the dairy farm in Vermont, or a restaurant in New York, and get
pissed that you’re just a visitor.
If I had made a different career choice and was successful, maybe I would have ended up at a West
Coast entertainment or tech company. Growing up in the Shire made this
difficult (especially for laying the ground work for comp sci or
anything artistic) but not impossible. I could see an alternate
timeline where that did happen: I would be slaving away on animation
shots for the upcoming Star Wars movie, halfway through my 30s,
unmarried, wondering if what I was doing was truly meaningful and if
life had more to offer. All geek and no life makes the Trackball a dull
boy.
So how did I react when I saw Yoda and realized that I
was on the outside looking in? I took his picture, with my kids in it,
felt a little sorry for the people inside (I’m not kidding it was a
beautiful day and I was on vacation) and moved on with a big grin on my
face. I mean, I was standing right outside a geek mecca! Awesome! I
score major geek points.
This blog has covered many topics. It began around ideas of economic development and Richard Florida’s creative class. But what it really is about is empowerment. It’s not lifehacking or productivity enhancement or even social media technology. It’s how we, knowledge workers, more accurately web workers and other members of the creative class experience to gain a greater degree of influence over our lives, our work, and our communities. I’m not sure how to brand that or define that as enough of a niche to turn this into a blog with thousands of subscribers, but my dream is that my own journey here can serve as a helpful guide to others who may feel that a part of their dissatisfaction in life is that they need to Escape from Cubicle Nation, but don’t know where to start or what to do. The journey begins within and is not necessarily an escape, but a discovery.
The prisons of the industrial age can no longer contain us. How do you cope?
London Heathrow opened a new terminal this week. I love this quote from Saturday’s Globe and Mail, “Until now, that is. Heathrow’s controversial new Terminal 5, which opens to passengers on Thursday, is supposed to put a shiny gloss on the airport’s reputation by relieving some of that congestion. The fat lady hasn’t lost weight, but she has bought a bigger dress.”
The Queen gave it her official blessing. Italian Stone Floors, open airy terminal, 4.3 billion pounds on the buildout. What do you think?
Zak writes, correctly, that I am not the anti-Friedman:
Many have read Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World is Flat.
I’m sure to many, like myself, it was an eye-opener to global
competition. He described how a McDonald’s restaurant was outsourcing
even the drive-through order taking out of the U.S. Friedman described
how India had taken advantage of the Y2K software refactoring to train
its software professionals and compete against the U.S. for future
software contracts. There is much, much, more to the book, all
describing outsourcing and global competition. A new book though, explains there are some buckyballs or spikes to this flat perspective of global competition, and even living. What does your city say about you? describes the new book, Who’s Your City?
Richard Florida explains that yes, Friedman is correct that with
today’s technology, you can live anywhere on the planet and essentially
telecommute to your coworkers. However, despite this flatness,
professions have developed critical mass in certain cities. Nashville
- music, Los Angeles – film, New York – finance, and so on. To have a
splash in a profession, you need to be physically located within that
critical mass.
Exactly.
The greater Denver metropolitan area scores highly on a new set of
rankings my team and I compiled based on the five major stages of your
life. Denver itself ranks in the Top 10 places for young professionals.
And Boulder ranks in the Top 5 smaller regions for single college
grads, young professionals, familes with children and empty-nesters.But there is an even bigger economic factor that bodes well for the region’s fortunes. With nearly 4 million people and $140 billion in economic activity, it ranks as one of the top dozen mega-regions in the United States. In
fact, it’s one of the 40 leading mega-regions that power the entire
global economy.
The rest is here.
Best Book to Help You “Find Your Happy Place”
An engaging and thoughtful new perspective on the meaning of home in a
country that seems to be on a ceaseless quest for upward and onward
mobility. –Anne
Who’s Your City? by Richard Florida
Just heard that Amazon.com has named Who’s Your City? to its Best of the Month list (Seven on the Side) for March (h/t: Sean Ammirati, Bill Bishop).