Creative Class

Rapidly improving and expanding network computer technology is a key reason why workplaces today are shifting fast toward more mobile and flexible environments. Reflecting upon events of the past week, I think there is another massive revolution in workplaces still to come.

The Obama campaign demonstrated the potential of computer-facilitated personal networks to bring about change. Through Facebook and MySpace, along with websites like YouTube, supporters connected with independents and people who were potential supporters, creating a viral-like marketing campaign. People found numerous different ways to connect and spread a message. Obama rode this 21st-century communications revolution to victory – it was not a machine to build and control, but rather energy and ideas to harness.

As corporations relax their rules about “who can be doing what on their work machine when,” a new generation might just use the myriad communications options available to do something fantastic. When corporations “let go” they might find they can hitch themselves to something amazing.

Imagine a global corporation – maybe a software company or an accounting-consulting firm – in which people at all levels and positions could interconnect and network together, and then solve problems together. A company with an internal intranet containing an internal Facebook, blogs, work logs, etc. fully searchable by anyone else in the company. Perhaps employees anywhere in the world could connect in any way they needed to: video conference instantly from their laptops, or leave video messages for each other.

If all the talent in the company could connect easily, that could bring enormous innovation acceleration. Problem solving could be far more efficient. Maybe David in the office in Singapore has already solved a problem now facing new person Carly in the office in Boston? What if Carly could type in a few key words and learn that David dealt with the same issues last month?

While I’ve heard of companies trying to better connect their workforces through intranet applications, I haven’t heard of too many turning all or most of the process over to all employees, especially the younger generation (but please comment and tell me who is doing this if you know).

The first company that achieves this extreme interconnectivity would instantly have tremendous leverage against competitors from an enormous boost in productivity and innovation.

Obama was the first major politician to grasp the potential, and harness the power, of youth and technology – and just look at how far ahead it put him. He left the best late-20th century political machine in the dust (the Clinton camp) and made McCain look like a relic of the 1950s.

So-Flo, which stretches from Miami to Orlando, west to Tampa, and along two northern offshoots to Gainesville and up the Atlantic coast to Jacksonville, is the seventh-largest mega-region in North America and the 15th-largest in the world, home to 15 million people and $430 billion in economic activity each year. Click here for more.

In the wake of financial turmoil, the globalization of research goes on. IBM is set to open a major new research center in China, while Microsoft plans three new research centers in Britain, France, and Germany. The global serach for talent continues. My hunch is that the combination of financial and economic instability plus immigration restrictions will make the U.S. a slightly less attractive or viable location for global talent. Even though the effect is likely to be modest, companies will continue to redeploy where the talent is or wants to be.

Less than two weeks ago, I attended the Inc. 500 Conference at National Harbor in D.C. and heard Newman’s Own co-founder A.E. Hotchner deliver a speech full of wit, stories, and great insights about business and the idea of a human sector.

Less than a week ago, Hotchner’s partner and the company’s namesake, Paul Newman, died at the age of 83. Newman & Hotchner’s experiences with their Newman’s Own venture is worth looking at as this venture is likely to be his greatest legacy.

Newman’s Own’s legacy has been built through the great charity and direct help that it has produced (nearly $250 million donated so far), but more importantly for being an early, prominent success case of passionate, creative social entrepreneurs in action – putting a great product based on value into the marketplace in order to promote positive social change.

When Newman and Hotchner launched Newman’s Own in 1982, I don’t believe social entrepreneurship was in widespread use and was not being taught on college campuses. Today, the field is growing fast for two reasons: 1) demand for meaningful work and impact by creative class and younger works, and 2) the huge market of need that still exists among all of our economic plenty and government largesse.

Below are some excerpts from a long obituary by Lynn Smith at the LA Times. The entire piece is worth reading; Newman, an average kid from the Cleveland suburbs grew into a fascinating man whose path through life is worth remembering and sharing. It truly highlights the power of creativity applied across many sectors and a lifetime. Enjoy – and go buy some Newman’s Own sauce or dressing or cookies in Newman’s honor! From the LA Times:

Since the 1980s, Newman had devoted more time to Newman’s Own, a food products company he founded as a lark that grew into one of the nation’s largest charitable organizations. The company, which produces all-natural salad dressings, popcorn, sauces and lemonade, has turned over more than $250 million in after-tax profits to hundreds of groups, including his own Hole in the Wall Gang camps (named after the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy”).

His real-life role as a philanthropist began just before Christmas 1980 when he and his friend A.E. Hotchner made a batch of salad dressing in a bathtub to bottle for friends.

Newman was as much a perfectionist about his cooking as his art, friends said. “He knew the exact amount of fat that goes into the perfect hamburger,” Stern said. “In his salads, he sliced the celery the exact width.”

In restaurants, Newman was known to ask for olive oil, vinegar, chopped celery, salt, pepper and mustard to make his own dressing. On one occasion, when waiters at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills wouldn’t comply, he took the salad into the men’s room and washed the dressing off. “They brought the stuff he wanted, and he made the dressing,” Stern said.

Newman told reporters he never imagined the dressing would be sold nationally, but after the Christmas leftovers were given to gourmet shops, the lark became a challenge.

When it became clear the dressing could make a profit, especially with his face on the label, Newman decided to give back some of what luck and the world had given him.

Newman and Hotchner wrote witty labels to go with the company’s motto: “Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good,” which later became the name of their book that describes their adventures in business.

The company grew to produce many products, including popcorn, salsas, pasta sauces, marinades and Woodward’s “Old Fashioned Roadside Virgin Lemonade.”

In 2006, he opened Dressing Room: A Homegrown Restaurant to benefit the Westport Country Playhouse, one of Newman and Woodward’s favorite projects.

As a result of his business success, Newman donated more than $250 million to 1,000 groups, including the Scott Newman Center — devoted to anti-drug education — and several Hole in the Wall Gang camps, designed for children with life-threatening diseases, with locations in France, Ireland and Israel as well as the U.S. Every summer, Newman stayed at the original camp in Ashford, Conn., where he told ghost stories and staged shows with other celebrities for children who knew him only as the face on the lemonade carton.

“If I leave a legacy,” he said in 2006, “it will be the camps.”

This year, he turned up at a meeting of parents and children at the first camp and reportedly said: “I wanted to acknowledge luck. The beneficence of it in many lives and the brutality of it in the lives of others, especially children, who might not have a lifetime to make up for it.”

Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with his conclusions, this essay by John Gray of the London School of Economics in today’s Globe and Mail is a succinct statement of the deep issues confronting the American political economy.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onward, and of the Soviet Union … Despite its insistent exceptionalism, the United States is no different. The Iraq war and the credit bubble have fatally undermined U.S. economic primacy. The United States will continue to be the world’s largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of the U.S. financial system …

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In the United States and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of U.S. power that is under way is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support the United States’ overextended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side effects … A U.S. retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China’s rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will U.S. weakness embolden them to assert China’s power, or will China continue its cautious policy of “peaceful rise”? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the United States at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with the United States an impotent spectator.

Outside the United States, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalization will undermine the country’s central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in the United States’ comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history’s biggest bubble, U.S. political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that U.S. global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where the United States is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

The ultimate outcome of this ongoing financial crisis will be a new and different geography of capitalism – within nations and across them.

How does stuff like this make it into the newspaper …

Writing in the Toronto Sun, Sue-Ann Levy weighs in on Toronto’s new economic development initiatives, claiming that:

“But after some questioning, it became pretty clear that Build Toronto has creative guru Richard Florida’s finger prints all over it, not those of the blue-ribbon panel members.”

I guess I should be flattered by my influential “fingerprints,” but I’ve not had a single conversation with anyone inside or outside of city hall about these new initiatives. So it’s a real puzzle to me how they could have gotten there.

And Levy shows a disturbing disregard for factual evidence when she writes that:

“… Toronto is not a world-class city. Even Tel Aviv has us beat by a long shot. I was absolutely amazed at how cosmopolitan that city has become during my recent trip to Israel. Istanbul, Turkey, as I discovered, is also open around the clock.”

Say what? There are many, many empirical rankings of world cities. In writing the Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? my research team and I looked over a whole slew of them to gauge how Toronto and other Canadian cities measure up. Tel Aviv certainly has great cosmopolitan energy, and Istanbul may stay open 24 by 7, but Toronto is way ahead of either as a center for business and talent – ranking roughly among the world’s 10 to 12 most important global cities.

I am not an economist. I do not know the techniques, standards, and theories of behavioral economics. That said, I know that actions speak louder than words.

There has been a lot written about the ‘collapse’ of the U.S. financial system due to the current credit crisis – with pundits, economists, politicians, and others pointing fingers and claiming their ideologies and policy explain why the U.S. is ‘bankrupt’ and doomed. There has been a lot of ink and electricity spent pushing these theories.

Regardless of all the talk and prose, Warren Buffet, the greatest capitalist of all time, put down $5 billion today on the U.S. financial system when he invested in Goldman Sachs. He also has the right to put down another $5 billion over the next five years at today’s prices.

Yes, his deal is a sweetheart deal, but investors like Buffet build wealth and strengthen the economy in times like these. GS, the best brand in the financial world, is paying a big price for Buffet’s brand and knowledge, but it sends a clear signal: the smartest institutions and people are moving forward as hot air blows from Capitol Hill, newsrooms, blogs, and press conferences.

Yes, these times are difficult and there is pain to be doled out, but panics and bailouts are part and parcel of the great engine of economic and social change known as capitalism and have been a regular occurrence in the U.S. since Hamilton’s time. There will be regulatory and institutional tweaks in the coming months and years, but that is how the system functions.

The warrant portion of the Buffet-GS deal shows that the Oracle of Omaha views five years as long-term. How long do you think it will take for this mess to sort itself out? Or are you part of the ‘end of the world’ chorus?

Frank Moulaert and Allen John Scott’s 1997 work Cities, Enterprises and Society on the Eve of the 21st Century: A State of Knowledge makes the point that there has been a general shift in the way we look at the city. We’ve moved from the notion of the city as a reproduction of the labor force to a notion of the city being a productive force of its own. While they warn us against over-simplifying that shift, they note it as an important one and so do I.

In my post on House music and Chicago, there was a comment by Felix saying that he had gone to the city to find some vestige of the music’s history but could find none, but that he “walked around listening to Mr Fingers on my headphones…that was almost enough.” He makes an interesting point. There is something to be said about that special feedback loop – listening to the products of a city in the city that produced it – that is so revealing. A city’s music is like it’s signal to the world. When we talk about a city being “put on the map” so-to-speak by an artist or a song, we’re really saying that the world responded to that signal in a way that valorizes that place. When an artist is propelled from the local to the international level, by representing their home it’s like that locality is also made international.

And so the opening lines of this review of the latest offering from Toronto artist Kardinal Offishall spoke to me, specifically as someone born and raised in the GTA, and even more specifically as someone raised in the GTA’s urban music scene. The writer captures something that I also observed in listening to the album and being from the city. As an urban music scene, we have been working toward the international level of respect and recognition for some time, but Toronto’s productive forces are so unique – from the physical geography, to the cultural demographics, to the nightlife. We permit and respect and resolve so many cultures within the city that the signal we put out can often be misunderstood as noise. Perhaps understandably so – complex productive forces wouldn’t necessarily create a product that is simple to understand. It would take time to make intelligible. After listening to that album though, I couldn’t help but smile and feel very well represented. In simple choices of diction, lyrics, collaborators, etc. Kardinal made an album that could only come from a Torontonian and one that radiates with locality at an international level. After working at it for over 10 years, it seems like he’s made something of a signal from the city’s noise. We’ll see if the world responds commercially.

Can you identify the artistic products of your city through the dull hum of the homogenization of popular culture? What is distinct about them with respect to the locality and its productive forces? What does it take to get a local scene’s signal out to the world? How do you keep it honest with respect to that locality?

And now, as always, some music.

Paris is tops; London, next; with Barcelona in third. Berlin. Amsterdam. Munich, Stockholm, Prague, Rome, and Athens round out the top 10 European city brands, according to this new ranking (via Planetizen).

What do you think?

A new global poll finds that:

All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain. In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

“Large numbers of people around the world clearly like what Barack Obama represents,” GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller said. “Given how negative America’s international image is at present, it is quite striking that only one in five think a McCain presidency would improve on the Bush administration’s relations with the world.”

More here. Is anyone really surprised?