Creative Class

As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the third installment in a four-part series that talks about embracing design-shop approaches to problem-solving and how that means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work. Part One. Part Two.

REVOLUTIONARY CHAIR. Design consultancies value and encourage abductive reasoning alongside deductive and inductive reasoning. Bill Stumpf, head of a Minneapolis-based design shop, and Don Chadwick, head of a design consultancy in Santa Monica, Calif., designed the award-winning Aeron chair for Herman Miller.

Stumpf and Chadwick had lots of detailed consumer research from which to apply inductive reasoning — and robust sets of design principles to consider deductively. But their reasoning processes went well beyond the inductive and deductive: They imagined what a chair of the future could look like and how that chair could change the way users would think about office chairs forever.

Could they prove any of it in advance? No. In fact, when users first saw the chair, they gave it a decidedly chilly reception — but only because it looked like no other chair they had ever seen.

WINNING SENSIBILITY. In short order, users warmed to the Aeron chair because Stumpf and Chadwick had indeed created a product that no consumer could have described — but that met their unarticulated needs and sought to trump anything on the planet. It turned into the best-selling office chair of all time and a must-have for even the fanciest boardrooms, despite coming with a price tag double the prevailing level of a high-end ergonomic office chair. And it won, among other accolades, an award for the best design of its entire decade.

None of this would have happened without the design-shop sensibilities that fostered Stumpf and Chadwick’s abductive reasoning.

Source of Status
The primary source of status in traditional firms is the management of big budgets and large staffs. When executives have the occasion to boast about themselves, they tend to refer to the number of people for whom they have direct responsibility and/or the bottom line that they deliver each year — for example, “I run a 5,000 person organization, and our bottom line this year will be $700 million.” And of course, bigger is always better!

In a design consultancy, the source of status and pride derives from solving “wicked problems” — problems with no definitive formulation or solution and that have definitions open to multiple interpretations. This reality is confirmed by the appearance of the office of any star designer: Desks, credenzas, and shelves are covered with the “best” designs — the ones that solve the most difficult design challenges in the most elegant fashion.

Designers become known for their great solutions, whether the Apple mouse, the Bilbao Guggenheim, or the Nike swoosh. These designers enjoy the highest status inside their firms and across their industries. As a consequence, everyone in the design field seeks to earn status through tackling and solving wicked problems, not administering the biggest budgets or the highest number of people.

Dominant Attitude
The dominant attitude of traditional firms is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of decisions. The common argument is, “We can only do what we have budget to do.” If only budget constraints could be relieved, these managers seem to imply, so much more would be possible.

As a result, budget constraints are the reason why a product’s packaging is cheap-looking, or a product is late to market, or its range is too narrow. The budget — arch enemy of the traditional firm manager — simply makes it impossible to do any better.

Next week, the fourth and final installment of this topic which talks about constraints and rewards in design…

Do you agree with the dominant attitude in design firms as described here?

A new, international version of the popular board game ‘Monopoly’ is out next week.

The new version of the game has 22 international cities included. The most heavily represented nations are (drum roll please!) – Canada and China. Three cities each from each of those two nations are among 22 selected by more than five million fans of the game who voted online for the best cities.

Of these, Montreal received the most votes and will be paired with Latvian capital Riga as the most expensive property group on the board. Next in rank are Capetown, Belgrade, and Paris. Last-placed of the 22 was Poland’s Gdynia and no German, Indian, Russian, or Scandinavian towns made the list.

Click here to see if your city made the cut. What cities do you feel are missing from Monopoly’s new international edition? Which places would you include?

George Anders of the WSJ has an interesting piece on how innovation-dependent firms are attempting to extend the longevity innovative capacity in their researchers. According to Anders, Northwestern Prof. Benjamin Jones has found that, “Innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle.”

The article explains that Jones examined biographical data of 700 Nobel laureates and well known inventors of the past century and found that, in the early 20th century, leading innovators averaged slightly more than 36 years at the time of their greatest innovation.

In more recent decades, innovation from those under the age of 30 (think Brin and Page of Google) has become more common. This is because there have been many ‘booming’ fields over the last few decades that have been wide open to innovation and pioneer exploration.

Occasionally, Mr. Jones says, booming new fields “permit easier access to the frontier, allowing people to make contributions at younger ages.” That could account for the relative youth of Internet innovators, such as Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen and Messrs. Page and Brin. But “when the revolution is over,” Mr. Jones finds, “ages rise.”

Unwilling to see researchers at peak productivity for only a small part of their careers, tech companies are fighting back in a variety of ways. At microchip maker Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, executives are pairing up recent college graduates and other fresh research hires with experienced mentors, called “craftsmen,” for intensive training and coaching.

This system means that new design engineers can become fully effective in three or four years, instead of five to seven, says Taylor Efland, chief technologist for TI’s analog chip business. Analog chips are used in power management, data conversion and amplification.

At Sun Microsystems Inc., teams of younger and older researchers are common. That can help everyone’s productivity, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for the Santa Clara, Calif., computer maker. Younger team members provide energy and optimism; veterans provide a savvier sense of what problems to tackle.

The article goes on to provide more examples from firms dependent on innovation for continued success and their efforts to extend the “innovation life cycle.”

Of course, the piece also sites some examples of “older” innovators that buck Prof. Jones research findings, citing domains where expertise is so specific that it takes a decade or more to truly understand the nature of the problems to be solved and opportunities to be chased.

Does your firm get most of its innovation out of younger or older workers? Does this free or constrain talent?

What about you? Has your innovative capacity increased with age and experience or decreased? For your current field, do you need years of experience before you can innovate?

Canada is upping its game in the global competition for talent, liberalizing immigration for students and skilled workers. As the Globe and Mail reports, the country

is creating a new fast-track immigration route for skilled foreign workers and students who’ve already proved employable in Canada: an effort to prevent an erosion of talent as global competition heats up for higher-value labour.

Unlike existing programs, the Canadian Experience Class immigration stream will make work experience in this country a key criterion for vetting applicants. It will also allow temporary foreign workers and students living here to apply from within Canada rather than having to leave first. It’s expected to grant permanent resident status to 12,000 to 18,000 economic immigrants in the first year, a figure that’s forecast to rise to 25,000 annually over time …

The goal is to improve the quality of immigrants and retain the most valuable workers and educated students: arrivals who’ve already proven they can integrate into society and meet labour market needs. “If we’re going to compete internationally for the best and for the brightest, we need to improve the way that we attract and retain those who want to work in their fields and contribute to Canadian society,” federal Immigration Minister Diane Finley explained.

In Flight, I argued it would be just these sorts of incremental improvements in competing for global talent – by Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and northern European countries, as well as the ability of the BRICs to lure back emigres – that could begin to undermine the U.S. lead in global talent. And with the situation in Iraq, the sub-prime meltdown and credit crisis, not to mention a watershed election, the U.S. seems incapable of addressing this issue.

Do you think the U.S. will be able to turn the corner on this one, or will some combinations of other nations inexorably undermine its long-standing talent advantage?

It probably feels about as good to be a banker today as it did to be running an Internet startup back in the day. That is, until the other shoe drops. Yves Smith reports on the ennui engulfing this season’s technique-arbitragers, finance professionals with “a narrow skill, like being able to structure CDOs…unable to land jobs” in the imploding financial services industry. Reports indicate that half of the people working in debt sales, trading, or research in NYC at the beginning of 2007 will be fired at the end of the year or won’t get a bonus. For fans of Leveraged Sell-Out and the Banker Method, this is not good news.

The similarities are not lost on those of us who participated in the technology tomfoolery in the early to late 90’s, where those who could hand-code HTML had a skill they could trade – albeit for a very brief period – for 80 large and on-site espresso. Smart people understand the half-life of the trix-y things they know, and act accordingly. Those that miss the phase shift take a more stable job or shift careers, leaping from the back of one hungry crocodile to the next like Pitfall Harry. A few even become entrepreneurs. Some follow the heat and light elsewhere, “…moving west or to Europe, including Russia, or to Dubai” according to Jeanne Branthover, managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search.

Technique without creativity is a commodity, and all that this entails. What’s of interest to me is the crucial intermingling between technique and creativity, and how people use the current foundation of technical work as a mechanism to learn, incorporate, and innovate. There are heaps more places to do that then ever before. It’s a spiky world. Where will innovation in the production of complex, mission-critical software applications, energy and the environment, or finance happen next? I suspect that innovation will go where the people go.

What’s creativity and what’s technique in your line of work? When will the particular tricks-y things you do become automata, or simply routine knowledge that represents the ticket to entry? If the talent in your industry goes elsewhere, will you switch locations, switch industries, or stay put?

At some point during another amazing Time Kode party last Friday, I was struck by the dance floor. No, I didn’t fall over, but I had a thought – as DJ’s, our job is to create the atmosphere that activates the space such that people participate in it. When we consider the way in which the pub or club has become the gathering ground for young urban creative class 20-somethings/30-somethings, how significant is the music that they want to hear to the spaces they want to be in? Participating in public space has something of a performative value – this discourse of performance in space has been in motion since Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology defined human existence as fundamentally social in the Discourse on the Inequality of Man. and was brought to bear on the phenomenon of the 20th century city by Richard Sennett’s seminal 1974 work The Fall of Public Man. The dance floor is an interesting and practical kind of metaphor for the public space in which we perform and individuate.

Sennett was among the urbanists who contributed to 2007’s The Endless City, one of the most powerful and comprehensive books of comparative urban study that I’ve ever seen. They do not, however, profile Sennett’s home city of Chicago. Nor was youth culture and music on the researchers’ radar. If it was, they might have thought to include The Chi. Other than New York, there are few other cities in North America, or anywhere for that matter, that have made as strong an impact on youth and music culture worldwide as Chicago has. It was from there that House music would make its way into the world.

Edward Soja comments in his opening essay “The Urbanization of The World” that:

An important starting point in looking at the changes that have taken place within urban regions over the past 30 years is what Mike Davis recently described as the mass production of slums. The expansion of urban poverty has made ‘extended’ slums and burgeoning informal economies a distinctive feature of both the urbanization of the world and the globalization of the urban.

Nowhere is the concept of mass slums more poignant than in Chicago’s north and south sides. The Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green houses are infamous even as they come down. The Chicago Housing Authority’s position on integration in the 50s led them to create one of the most severe black/white housing divisions that the U.S. would ever see. Those projects would also be the breeding ground for one of the most robust and influential informal economies of musical ideas outside of New York’s 5 boroughs.

While in Comiskey Park they were literally blowing up dance records, in a south side club called The Warehouse, dance music was reinventing itself and creating a new context for the dance floor. Revealing the world beat that would turn the UK upside down between ‘88 and ‘91, and changing the way we dance forever are no small innovations. As the homes and communities that birthed House come down, we should ask ourselves: How have the peripheral effects of space contributed to mainstream culture? In the discourse that Hope VI has initiated about dispersing or concentrating poverty, without defending the terrible conditions that places like Cabrini-Green subjected its residents to, it’s important to consider what else we’re concentrating and dispersing as well. How can we appreciate the innovations coming from a space and its productive forces while simultaneously condemning that space?

Also, how important is the nightclub/pub to the young professionals? How much does a city’s musical profile affect your impression of it? How important is it to you that you can go out and dance?

And now, as always, some music.

In the Financial Times, investment strategist, Byron Wien argues that despite many assests, America’s decline will not easily be reversed.

America’s decline has been a long time in coming and will not be reversed quickly, if it can be reversed at all. To do so will require exceptional leadership from the next president, since some aspects of life in the US may get worse before they get better …Last year I gave a talk about America having reached its economic peak. I pointed out that England peaked in 1912 and life in the UK was still quite pleasant so I was not too worried about my own country having begun a gradual decline. At the end, a young man approached the podium. He told me he had been reading my work for two decades. I thanked him and then he said: “One thing you should probably know is that Holland peaked in 1617 and life over there is still pretty good also.”

Status symbols are important. They’re a shortcut to letting everyone know how important we are.

When someone is rolling in their $200K 8mpg Italian supercar or hanging in their 15,000-square-foot crypto-Tuscan crib, they’re making a statement that they have money to burn.

So what’s going to happen when waste is out and green is the new cool?

Is there going to be a mass movement to smaller, more efficient cars and homes? This might be a struggle, because it would mean a fundamental shift in how we spend our money and are perceived by others.

I’ve been trying to figure how this will play out. Perhaps our new status symbols can be compact, efficient, and green… as long as they are very expensive. (Blue jeans are hip, as long as they cost $300.)

What do you think? Will people willingly downsize their lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint, if it means appearing less important and elite? Will there be new indicators of social status, other than a big house and an expensive car? Could it be the start of a movement towards qualitative values like creativity, and away from today’s worship of wealth?

It’s conventional wisdom that smart people (or smart women) are having fewer kids. But according to this report (h/t Kevin Stolarick), that may be old news. Here are some key findings:

• Highly educated women (those with a graduate or professional degree) had the highest level of “current fertility” – that is, babies born in the last year.
• More than half of recent mothers (57 percent) are working.
• About one in five women age 40-44 were childless (nearly twice as high as the level 30 years earlier).
• Among recent mothers, more than a third (36 percent) were separated, widowed, divorced, or never married.

Read the press release.

“Anyone who is predicting the decline of big cities has already met their spouse.” Read more here.