Creative Class

I’m always amazed at the number of bikes on the road in Toronto where cycling plays a major role in commuting and getting around. Now the Big Apple wants to get into the game.

Cyclists and pedestrians never quite imagined it this way, but maybe there is a use for all those cars after all. The city is planning to remake seven blocks of Ninth Avenue in Chelsea into what officials are billing enthusiastically, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the street of the future. The most unusual aspect of the design, which will run from 16th Street to 23rd Street, is that it uses a lane of parked cars to protect cyclists from other traffic. It does this by placing the bike lane directly next to the sidewalk on the western edge of Ninth Avenue, which is the left side of the street for those facing north, in the direction of traffic. The plan also takes a lane from cars, creating more room for pedestrians and for the bicycle lane. …Next to the bike lane, which will be 10 feet wide, will be an eight-foot section of pavement that will act as a buffer, with plastic posts and large planters to keep cars from entering. The parking lane will be to the right of the buffer zone, and beyond that will be three lanes for traffic.The result will be a barrier of parked cars between cyclists and moving vehicles.

More here.

Business Wire reports on a new survey of the creativity gap in U.S. workplaces.

At a time when many economists and futurists are pointing to creativity and
innovation as one of the cornerstones of U.S. competitiveness in the years
ahead, a new survey finds that, while an overwhelming majority of American
workers believe they are instinctively creative, fewer than two in three think
they are tapping their creative capacities on the job.

The survey, commissioned by the Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic
Development Authority (FCEDA), host of the 2007 National Conference on the
Creative Economy in October (www.creativeeconomies.org), and conducted by Ipsos
Public Affairs, found that 88 percent of U.S. workers consider themselves
creative. But when it comes to creativity in the workplace, just 63 percent said
their positions were creative, and a comparable 61 percent thought similarly
about the companies for which they work.

This “creativity gap” – the disparity between the creative resources available and
those being employed – can be an important indicator,
experts say, in determining how well American companies are preparing for a
future U.S. economy that will rely on creativity and innovation more than ever. …

The survey found that most workers put a high premium on creativity at work.
Seventy-five percent of respondents thought their employers valued their
creativity, and even more telling, one in five (21%) said they would change jobs
in order to be more creative at work even if it meant earning less money.
Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed indicated they would move if it meant
being part of a more creative community. This was especially true of younger
workers ages 18-34 (37%).

Yahoo News and AFP report the findings from a new study of quality of life around the world (hat tip Dean Alexander):

Nordic countries take the greatest care of their environment and their
people, according to a ranking published on Thursday by the publication Reader’s
Digest. Finland comes top of the 141-nation list, followed by Iceland, Norway and
Sweden, and then Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and Australia. …The United States comes in 23rd, China 84th and India 104th.

The ranking combines environmental factors, such as air and water quality,
respect for biodiversity and greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as social
factors, such as gross domestic product, access to education, unemployment rate
and life expectancy. The statistical basis is the UN’s Human Development Index and the
Environmental Sustainability Index drawn up by Yale and Columbia universities
and the World Economic Forum.

European countries — again, led by Scandinavia — also top the Reader’s
Digest assessment of 72 cities for their quality of life. The criteria for this
include public transport, parks, air quality, rubbish recycling and the price of
electricity.

The winner is Stockholm, followed by Oslo, Munich and Paris. Asia’s mega-cities fare the worst. At the bottom is Beijing, preceded by Shanghai, Mumbai, Guangzhou and Bangkok.

These rankings seem to jibe with the ones our team did for Flight of the Creative Class. I can’t seem to find a link to the original study. Please let us know if you locate a link.

This is just one of the many reasons I love Toronto.

For the next 11 days, Swintak (above) will be holed up in an abandoned
building at a municipal waste disposal site in the Toronto portlands
infusing a forlorn dumpster with a veneer of luxe. “A little
bit of beige, some white,” says Swintak, running a hand along the
glassy shellacked inner walls of her eventually posh receptacle. When
it’s done, a suite of rosewood furniture, multiple-hundred thread count
sheets and a two-item room-service menu will give the outsize garbage
can a sheen of the luxurious. The notion? A boutique hotel for
one night only in an alley behind a Burger King at College St. and
Spadina Ave. The installation is part of Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s
freshly adopted, all-night chaotic art spectacle on Sept. 29 from 7:03
p.m. to sunrise.

Read the whole story here.

That’s the “tool” Jack and Suzy Welch advocate for managing creative people in their recent Business Week column.

Do the creatives in
an organization need special handling? In a word, yes. Leading people
who often don’t think of themselves as employees of anyone or anything,
let alone followers embedded in an organization consisting of levels,
layers, and moving parts, is about as far from Management 101 as you
can get. In fact, it’s an art, drawing on all sorts of soft skills,
like empathy, an ability to nurture, and ad hoc psychological
counseling. But what a mistake if you lead creative people from your
heart and stop there. Managing creative people also requires—it even
demands—a measure of authority. Nothing heavy-handed, of course. You
don’t want your resident out-of-the-box thinkers running for the exits.
With their fresh ideas and unique perspectives, they can be, and often
are, the reason for breakthrough products and new ways of working, and
even the impetus for whole new businesses. Still, creative people must
know that boundaries and values exist, and they have to respect them.
Because if they don’t, creative people have a way of going off the
rails—and taking the workaday core of the company with them.

Read the whole thing here. Do you agree or disagree?

Berlin now boasts eye-catching modern architecture, a thriving contemporary art scene, a
boom in design and concept stores, and serious global gastronomy. It’s also a bargain: Luxury hotels are among the cheapest in Europe, and an
ice cream cone that costs $5 in London is $1 here. As Mayor Klaus Wowereit says: “Berlin is poor, but it’s sexy.”

Quite a quite from a mayor. Check out the story in Business Week.

The US housing crunch has gotten a lot of ink. But according to this report in the Economist, housing prices may be even more out of whack in other countries around the globe.

The S&P/Case-Shiller national index,
the best gauge of American house prices, peaked last year after rising
by 134% in the previous decade. France, Sweden and Denmark have all had
booms of similar size. In Britain, Australia, Spain and Ireland, the
ten-year increase in house prices has been even larger. If America is
staring at a nasty housing crash, what does this say about the fate of
frothy markets elsewhere?

Betsy Donald came to visit us at the Prosperity Institute. She’s doing incredible work on creativity in the food industry. Not just celebrity chefs but across the food supply chain.  So today on the plane from Toronto to Iowa I was more than pleasantly surprised to find this New York Times article on the great Alice Waters, who is worried because:

true, radical change — a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth — is
simply not coming fast enough. … A revolution in how we eat means respecting food and the people who produce it, she said. In her world, every aspect of this revolution, be
it related to agricultural policy, the environment or obesity, must begin with a plate of lovely, locally produced food and work backward from there.

According to a Census survey from 2004, with a population of 227 million over the age of 15 in the U.S., almost 79 million of those people (35%) did not work for the prior 4-months.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census just released it’s report Reasons People Do Not Work: 2004.

From the report:

At even the busiest times, a large number of working-age people in the United States do not have or want jobs. Whatever the state of the economy, many people, even those who want to work, have been outside the workforce for long periods of time. Whether their joblessness is brief or extended, nonworkers constitute a large and important pool of human resources. Much research has been devoted to studying the characteristics and behavior of workers. Less is known about nonworkers. This is the second report that uses data from the nationwide Survey of Income and Program Participation SIPP) to fill some of the gaps in this knowledge. It examines several key characteristics of nonworkers, the main reasons they do not work, and some of the connections between their characteristics and their reasons for not working.

Retirement (38 percent) and school attendance (19 percent) were the most commonly reported reasons. Chronic illness or disability was the main reason for almost 1 in 7 nonworkers (15 percent). Taking care of children or others accounted for 13 percent. Around 6 percent cited an economic reason for not working––about 2 percent were on layoff, and 4 percent were unable to find work. Approximately 2 percent reported a temporary injury or illness as the main cause for being out of  work. The remaining 7 percent either were not interested in working or reported an “other” reason.

It’s clear that the number of people actively looking for work is related to current economic conditions.  When times are difficult, many people give up and just stop looking for work and are then no longer counted as "unemployed".  Understanding everyone who is not currently in the workforce is a more meaningful undertaking.

The importance of understanding that every single person has creative potential and that ways to tap all that potential will be the true source of competitive advantage is reinforced by this study.  As my colleague in Sweden, Charlotta Mellander, points out, the real challenge is making jobs and occupations rewarding enough (and not just with money) so that people choose working over not working.

posted by Kevin Stolarick

According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Louisville’s past was built on race horses, bourbon
and baseball bats, but the city is staking its future on Somali Bantu
and other immigrants flocking here from across the globe. As neighbors
like Nashville join a national wave of cities drafting ordinances
designed to repel many foreigners, Louisville’s business and political
leadership is working aggressively to absorb immigrants.

In speeches, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson champions
the city’s immigrants, whom he calls “internationals.” In each of the
past four years, he has handed out “international awards” to
individuals, companies and organizations working to integrate and
improve the lot of newcomers. “Communities that embrace diversity are
going to be the most successful,” says the mayor, who has been at the
city’s helm for most of the past two decades and avoids distinguishing
between legal and illegal immigrants.