Creative Class

This blog has discussed happiness in a few posts (here and here). We came across this column by Jonathan Clements of the Wall Street Journal titled Nine Tips For Investing in Happiness. Clements writes, “If you want to be happier, forget spending dollars — and focus on how you spend your time. Sure, a bigger house and a fancier car might briefly put a smile on your face.Yet academic studies suggest that simply amassing more stuff won’t bring a permanent increase in your happiness.”

Here is Step 4 from the piece;

“Keep your commute short. Moving into a ritzy neighborhood would be even more harmful to your happiness if it means a longer commute.

It turns out that commuting is one of life’s least pleasurable activities. While we’re usually pretty good at adapting to hardships, it’s hard to adjust to commuting because it is so unpredictable. One day, you will breeze into work. The next day, you will sit steaming in traffic for 45 minutes.

To make matters worse, a longer commute means less time for leisure. And the research says we enjoy leisure more than work.”

Some of the other steps are easy (eat a good meal) while others are a bit more complicated (get married). In all, an interesting look at influences on happiness and a few of them appear to be place related.

According to the Economist Magazine, Winston Churchill said, "the empires of the future will be empire’s of the mind." And so begins the new Economist Survey of Talent. The first article is available to all online and is well worth the read.

Here is a snippet…

"But a large and growing number of businesses outside the tech
industry—from consulting to hedge funds—also run on brainpower. When
the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a provider of business research and executive education based in Washington, DC,
recently conducted an international poll of senior human-resources
managers, three-quarters of them said that “attracting and retaining”
talent was their number one priority. Some 62% worried about
company-wide talent shortages (see chart 1). The CEB
also surveyed some 4,000 hiring managers in more than 30 companies, and
was told that the average quality of candidates had declined by 10%
since 2004 and the average time to fill a vacancy had increased from 37
days to 51 days. More than one-third of the managers said that they had
hired below-average candidates “just to fill a position quickly”. The CEB found, too, that about one in three employees had recently been approached by another firm hoping to lure them away."

Is your company seeing this landscape? Fighting battles to attract and retain talent? Has it been successful?

In late Septmber, Yahoo opened up its headquarters and businesses to a bunch of hackers from around the world. Yahoo charged the hackers with hacking Yahoo services and products over a 24 hour period. Moreover, the company plans to continue to do this going forward.

The overall winner, determined by a quick huddle of judges after the demos was a hardware/software combination device stashed inside a woman’s handbag. The handbag hackers were three women who came in for the event from New York — here is their website.

This story is interesting in that it confirms the importance of corporations looking for creativity influences from the outside (whether customers, partners, or activities in other markets). Many firms have been doing this for a long time, Yahoo, according the the WSJ, has had hack days for years, but this was the first one open to ‘outsiders.’

From the Yahoo Hack Day Website, “As we said going in, we didn’t know what was going to happen at Hack Day. We never do.” Does your firm or organization undertake ‘open activities’ where the outcome is unknown? How often are you and your colleagues ‘unleashed’ from your normal activities and encouraged to ‘hack’ your business?

YouTube Videos promoting one’s hometown are not just for grassroots rappers in places such as Carrboro, NC. (see Its Carrboro). Music industry giant Moby has a new song and video titled New York, New York and they can be heard and seen here. (Hat Tip, Perez Hilton).

Also, Apple’s podcast directory lists a series called Immigration Tales, with Victor Cajiao. So far it has six episode’s — the first being Victor’s immigration tale — he came from Cuba. Other tales in the series include Elsie from El Salvador and Bart from Poland. Could the next Andrew Grove be on there?

Pui-Wing Tam of the WSJ wrote a really nice piece highlighting some cases of tech entrepreneurs who recently moved to the Bay Area in order to grow their businesses more effectively. The article underscores the benefits of certain locations for certain industries and talent (LA for film production, Memphis for music, etc). From social networks and financing expertise to sales and infrastructure, certain places have unique advantages regardless of communications technology advancements. (Hat tip to Sherkhan K.)

From the October 5th piece,

“Matt Sanchez was just the kind of entrepreneur that the new wave of the Web boom was supposed to spawn: one untethered by geography, able to locate his company anywhere there was broadband Internet connection and a good idea.

But two years after the Yale University electrical-engineering graduate and two friends formed VideoEgg Inc., Mr. Sanchez found that he was spending more days in Silicon Valley than at the company’s New Haven, Conn., headquarters. So, in December, he and four employees packed up a 12-foot U-Haul van with their servers, whiteboards and desktop computers and moved West. Since settling into an airy office in San Francisco, the Web-video-technology company has snagged some venture funding, hired an additional 22 people and signed deals with Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit and Internet firms such as Bebo Inc…

The start-up influx is helping to revitalize Silicon Valley. Many of the new companies are moving into offices that had been left empty by the tech bust of 2000. They are also ramping up their hiring and creating jobs. Mobius, for instance, now employs 14 people in its Sunnyvale headquarters, up from one a year ago. Overall, 278 companies in the San Francisco Bay Area got either first-round or seed financing in 2005, up from 250 in 2004 and 216 in 2003, according to research firm VentureOne. The start-ups have also fired up the tech social scene — Meetro founder Paul Bragiel recently helped to launch a bowling league for start-up executives, for example — that helped to incubate so many companies and contacts during the 1990s dot-com explosion.”

An insightful piece from a few weeks back titled A Single Girl Tries Global Dating from the Wall Street Journal. Author Dana White shares her recent dating experience and explores her mating market; comparing both to those of her grandfather’s era. According to White,

“My grandfather Randolph, born in 1896, knew something about the world. So when he spied a black and white couple walking hand in hand in Charlottesville, Va., in the mid-1980s and remarked, ‘They will always live on an island and you can’t live life on an island,’ I took note.

Well, grandfather, here I am — living on an island, literally. I’ve settled into a new job in Hong Kong, a mini, mountainous Manhattan in the South China Sea. People of every race, ethnicity and nationality freely intermingle here. The mixing of the matchmaking market has gone global…

People of every background seem to find common ground here. Often conversation begins with commiseration — for instance, over the ordeal of small, closetless apartments. But there is more to friendship and intimacy than strangeness and difficulty. I’ve worked in the U.S. and in Asia. I’ve traveled from Beijing to London. And I speak four languages (not all well, admittedly). I am far more likely to be attracted to someone who can understand my experience and share my interests, and I am more likely than ever before to meet such a person while living an expat life. Here, where nearly 4,000 corporations base their regional offices, I have a decent chance of finding him — or at least I’ll have fun looking.”

White’s piece highlights one of the ideas behind my next book — which is about how people pick the places they live and why that’s the single most important decision they’ll ever make.

BTW, if you’d like to share a story or two of your own describing how you chose your location and how it has changed your life, please do — here is the blog entry where I ask for your help in compiling stories for the new book. Thanks again for your help.

Interesting piece, The Measure of Creativity, by Huib Schippers in The Australian explores the role and measurement of creativity and arts in the Australian economy. Here are a few selections,

“The arts are hardly a fringe sector. Cultural industries (as they have been effectively promoted by the Queensland University of Technology) are increasingly taken into account in policies at all levels, especially since the publication of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (hyped, but not entirely without merit). For music alone, the Music Council of Australia estimates a total annual turnover of more than $7 billion, or 0.75 per cent of gross domestic product. This means that if we all decided to stop learning, playing and listening to music for a year, the entire country would slide into recession.”

“But we also have much to bring to research in other disciplines, which increasingly acknowledge creativity as a key force, and often find contemporary, digital or web-based research outputs more appropriate than paper-based ones. Integration of image, sound and text is becoming the norm in an increasing number of innovative research projects and doctoral submissions, and not only in the arts. Research outputs on DVD-ROMs or wikis are rapidly gaining ground.

At worst, these new formats take advantage of a lack of an established tradition of academic rigour; at best, they integrate image, sound and words into inspiring narratives and convincing arguments, leading to significant insights into creative processes and their relationship to the outside world.”

I came across these maps of creative workforce, innovation, entrepreneurship, housing values and other key dimensions of America’s new economic geography. This great data has been put together by the Kansas City Fed.

According to their site, “The regional asset indicator project provides new, forward-looking metrics which regions can use to better understand their economic assets and to help inform private, public, and non-profit regional development strategies. These metrics may also be of use to researchers who explore regional attributes and growth. Indicators for the five main categories will be posted on this web page as they become available.”

Great news out of the Bay Area. According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s public schools will receive $50 million exclusively for the arts thru 2014. Prior to the new plan, “The school district provided no funding for art supplies and materials,” and art classes and exercises were ad hoc at best.

Chronicle writer Nanette Asimov desribes the planning and funding of the comprehensive strategy. Here is a taste,

“With city money available at last, the new plan is intended to transform the district’s spotty arts offerings into a creative program available to every student in every school.

‘This is life and death — the difference between hope and no hope,’ said the district’s artistic director, Susan Stauter, who helped develop the plan. ‘It’s about equity. Every child — no matter which school they attend, which neighborhood they live in, or how active their parents are — needs their creative voice nurtured and developed.’

The Master Plan makes San Francisco a rarity among California school districts, few of which have comprehensive arts programs for their students.”

Congratulations to the students, citizens, and leaders of San Francisco and also to the economy of region as it will benefit from the creativity the new Master Plan unleashes.

(posted by Rod)