CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

I am about to head downtown to the Smithsonian Native American Museum in New York to kick off the annual Christmas Native American art show. Some of the most talented Native American jewelers, potters, fashion designers and painters have traveled to NYC from all over the country to sell their art. If you are in New York–or Washington DC since there is a market there as well–go. 

http://nmai.si.edu/artmarket/

This is a great opportunity to get acquainted with a small, creative art market that has a fanatic following and is just now going global. I know because I am a collector myself. Japanese and German art collectors have been buying Native art for decades but on a small scale. Once that scale takes off, look out…

http://www.darrylandrebeccabegay.com

http://www.chavezstudio.com

http://www.ravenweaver.com

http://www.mateoromerostudio.com

Nothing proclaims the growing importance of creativity and design to entrepreneurship than the move of RISD president John Maeda to the key Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins where he will become the first Design Partner. At the same time, John will chair the Design Advisory Board at eBay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSG3J01nILc&feature=youtu.be

From Airbnb to to Kickstarter to Youtube, a growing number of startup founders have a design/arts background that provides the skills and values to start new companies. Knowing what is meaningful to people, reframing what is conventional, playing to reach unexpected outcomes, scaling creativity to actual creation–all these skills come out of an education based in art, music, liberal arts and creativity in general. John has understood this for many years and has been a proponent of STEAM, not just STEM.

One of the great challenges ahead to to recreate venture capital itself using the tools of creativity and design. The old portfolio approach of backing many, many startups with the hope of one or two breaking out is ridiculously inefficient. VCs typically have a 5%-10% success rate. Applying the creative competencies of design to early startups could raise that startup success rate to 50% or 60%. And that could have a major economic impact on all of us.

Good luck John. Brilliant move.

Creativity is extremely hot as an existential issue–we, as individuals want to increase our creative capacities–and as an economic issue–the economic value of creativity is increasingly important. So here is my list of the best books on creativity that I’ve read this year.

Mea Culpa, I wrote one of them precisely because of creativity’s crucial role in society. So let’s start with that (yes it’s a bit weird).

1) Creative Intelligence.  It offers five creative competencies–Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting (Scaling)–that individuals and businesses can learn to increase their creative capacity or CQ, creative intelligence. The message is that you can train to be creative. The book describes a new entrepreneurial “Indie Capitalism” rising out of creativity and innovation. With great stories about the Rolling Stones, the CIA and eating monkey brains. 

2) Zig Zag by Keith Sawyer. A terrific 8-step process to boost your creativity by the modern pioneer in creativity research. Sawyer, a jazz pianist, psychologist and professor, provides very specific things we can do in our daily lives to make us more creative. (How to become an expert in 20 minutes–and then create something new). Great stories about Judy Blume and others living a creative life. From the author of Group Genius.

3) Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley. Excellent suggestions on building your confidence in being creative by two brothers from IDEO. David is a founder of IDEO and the extraordinary Stanford D-School. Tom is the author of The Art of Innovation. Powerful examples from IDEO and the D-School of using Design Thinking exercises to learn how to become more confident in being creative. Building your creative muscle.

4) The Business Solutions to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick.  The inability of Social Innovation to scale limits its significance. Here is a book that shows how to scale water, housing and other projects to make a difference. Polak offers specific ways of building billion dollars businesses to work inside the Bottom of the Pyramid, involve the people and move them out of poverty. A realistic model that scales. Great.

5) Rotman on Design, edited by Roger Martin and Karen Christensen. Much of the best writing on Design Thinking is in Rotman Magazine, put out by the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Former dean Roger Martin has been a key leader in promoting Design Thinking for innovation. The articles are business-based, brilliant and deeply useful. Many of the best creatives in the world wrote the pieces. Get it.

6) What Money Can’t Buy by Michael J. Sandel. This is an extraordinary book that talks about the line between what money can buy and what money can’t buy and how we are blurring it all the time. 21st century capitalism is all about taking what money can’t buy–your private information on Facebook or Google, for example–and transforming it into what money can buy, through advertising. Here is a philosophical reading (smooth reading) of that critical social and economic process. And maybe how we can stop it.

7) Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. OK, it first came out in 1997 but you should read it again. The first time you read it for the notion of Individual “flow.” This time read the section on Florence and how cities and class and culture act to promote creativity. It is about social flow–engagement–and critical to understanding creativity in social media. And important in understanding how cities can promote creativity. Why New York is hot and Paris is not.

8) In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. Yes, this is really old–1933 but I use portions of it in my class at Parsons. Tanizaki talks about how we really we engage with objects and takes us into a conversation about aura. This is critical in an age of social media and the network of things. Tanizaki shows us the emotional content of engagement when he talks of opening the traditional Japanese rice pot, the aroma, the look and feel of the rice, the connection people have to their food, their place, their lives. It’s not about algorithms, its about what is meaningful to people. 

Read the Financial Time’s Edward Luce’s insightful piece on the failure of MOOCs and the need for Liberal Arts to foster innovation and jobs in the US. Brilliant. The MOOC movement is falling apart because its pedagogical premises are false. It transmits data in a 19th century methodology through a 21st century delivery system. We focus on the delivery when it is the skill set and value systems in education that are key to raising our creative intelligence.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/141591a0-5399-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2lczTmcTe

In the US, IT jobs are crashing but creative work is soaring. We need to move away from an exclusive focus on STEM towards a Humanities-based education fostering creativity. Progressive education–Montessori, building with blocks, John Dewey, learning by doing, not memorizing, is the future. 

Henry Ford is famously known for increasing the wages of his employees by asking his business critics who do you think buys Ford cars. Consumer demand is crucial to economic growth and that demand depends on people getting paid reasonable wages.

In one of my recent classes at Parsons, a student from Asia said “in America, you are able to sell McDonald’s hamburgers for $1 and cheap clothes at WalMart because you pay people such low wages they need government assistance to buy food or get medical care.” It was shocking and true. 

It is one thing for corporations to cut back on wages during times of recession but it is entirely another when they are making good profits.

http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-employee-food-drive-2013-11

Companies ranging from WalMart to Boeing are focussing only on shareholders, not employees, in their business models. The consequence is a very weak recovery from our deep recession, with most people still behind even though we’ve had great profits for years now. 

http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2022269425_jeffjohnsonopedboeingunion18xml.html

It’s time to share the wealth being generated with stakeholders, not just shareholders. It is the only way to boost demand in the economy and get people to buy more. And it is the only right and moral thing to do. And yes, economics is about relationships, not simply markets.

You won’t find it in the stats but “real” New Yorkers, born and bred are talking about the end of New York’s great 20-year run as a fantastic metropolis.  These New Yorkers have lived through the good and the bad times and have a deep sensitivity to change. And what they feel these days scares them. It scares them because they feel the vibe of the bad days, the days of danger and chaos, the days before Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. 

In the subway, there are days when nearly every car has someone harassing you for money. On the street corners, there are times when you can’t walk two blocks without someone getting in your face with demands for money. There are more people sleeping in the subways stations, more urine and feces on the ground. There are more people living on the sidewalks who are off their medication, shouting angrily, waving their arms. More people sleeping in ATM spaces. There is more petty theft of iPhones and handbags, more stealing in clothing stores, more subway trains being held because of “incidents." 

And there is a more sotto voce conversations being held about this growing dangerousness among New Yorkers who worry whether we are heading back to the bad old 70s and 80s when the streets were unsafe and the politicians unwilling to do what was necessary to make them safe.

Of course, all this is happening at a time when New York politics is changing. A new, progressively liberal mayor has been elected to replace an old, progressive mayor. Ironically, many of the people who voted for this progressive mayor are the ones now worrying about the rising danger in the streets and subways. They want to believe that the issues of inequality and housing will be tackled in the years ahead but see with their own eyes what is happening to the cityscape as the political transition takes place.  

They worry about strikes that could cripple the city–as they did in the past. They worry about harassment in public places being defined as free speech–as it did in the past. They worry about ineffective policing that allows petty crime–as it did in the past. They worry about neighborhoods declining–as they did in the past.

New Yorkers feel the change and worry about it. Cities rise and fall over time all the time, NYC included   It’s glorious entrepreneurial startup drive will come to an end. The revival of neighborhood after neighborhood in Brooklyn and Queens will go into reverse. The beacon drawing so many from Europe, Asia and Latin America–as well as from all over the US–will dim. Unless the current trends are reversed, New York will be over.

Two articles, one in the online Politico and the other in the Wall Street Journal, reinforce my belief that a new kind of antiestablishmentarian centrist-populist-capitalist politics is being born in the US. I first began to talk about this trend in my book Creative Intelligence because the young entrepreneurs out of Brooklyn, Manhattan, San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Chicago and elsewhere in the country, the new makers of the Maker Culture, baffled me. They were intensely capitalistic, in the sense of wanting to set up their own companies and build their own networks and organizations, but were profoundly anti Big Business and anti-globalization. Their focus was on hyper-local, community, and making profits to support their like-minded community. Kickstarter was at the heart of this new capitalism. 

In  sense , this cohort is anti-political. Young, able to build their own institutions and entrepreneurial, these men and women face away from the political system because their see no role in it. They hate it.

But what if a “radicalized center” begins to speak for them and to them? What is someone like Democrat Elizabeth Warren decides to run for the President in 2016–or even Bruce Springsteen-loving Republican Chris Christy?

Opposing both the Tea Party and Occupy but sharing their anti-Washington and anti-Big Business perspectives. this new movement is just taking form in time for the 2016 Presidential elections.

Check out this piece:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/wall-street-elizabeth-warren-president-2016-elections-99697.html?hp=t1

The other story, The Radicalized Center, by Gerald Seib, is in the WSJ today –which I can’t link to because I get the FT, not the WSJ–so check that out if you can.

One thing to keep in mind–this growing maybe-movement is not against capitalism but FOR capitalism–startup, entrepreneurial capitalism. Practically all policy and regulation and money  in Washington focuses on promoting Big Business, Big Agriculture and Big Banks. What if the focus were on creating NEW, smaller companies (where all the job growth is)?  What if we had Kickstarter Capitalism in America?

Two of the smartest design people I know, MOMA’s Paola Antonelli and Parsons’ Jamer Hunt, have joined to create the first honest discussion of the relationship between design and violence. You just have to get involved because it is so good, so smart and so important.

http://designandviolence.moma.org/about/

Design has almost always turned a blind eye to its important role in destruction–even creative destruction. As a profession, it is almost always liberal and optimistic, which is why I am drawn to it. But as a result, Design does two things–First, it ignores whole categories of designed objects and engagements that it defines as “brutal” such as beautifully designed hunting rifles, knives and pistols (such as the  Barreta).

And second, it ignores war. In a sense, Design is pacifist, without decline itself as such.  Yet we all know that Design plays a critical role in combat and warfare, from objects such as the AK-47, the stealth jet fighter and the drone; to engagements, such as asymmetrical warfare, and the blitz;  and to the combination of product and engagement, such as the carrier task force or cyberwar. 

When I was covering Design and Innovation at BusinessWeek, I periodically tried to do stories on military design and hunting to no avail. Couldn’t get it through my editors. “That’s not what we mean by Design,” they said.

So I stand in wonder at this new initiative by Paola and Jamer. It will involve dozens of people over many months and produce an exhibition for MOMA and for all of us.

Here’s Paola explaining it:

 http://vimeo.com/75599754

 Facebook has growing problems with framing its engagement with customers. This is very important. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/02ec9e24-41a0-11e3-9073-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl&siteedition=intl#axzz2jFDKrkJK

The latest quarterly results show two big trends:

1- Younger tens are tuning out to Facebook and using it less. My guess is that they are moving to chat apps on their Androids and iPhones.

2- The average Facebook user clicks on an ad once a week. This is being lauded by founder Mark Zuckerberg as “a great sign that people are finding ads useful.” Really? They click on an ad ONCE a week and that’s considered a success? 

What do they actually buy?  How long do they linger? And why–again–only once a week? What are the measurements of this deeper, longer engagement? 

Framing your engagement with customers is key to business success in this world of social media. It is is one of the key Creative Competencies. Facebook needs to get it right.

Mike Mandel at the Progressive Policy Institute has new data which shows that cities and localities with lots of new tech and iT jobs have bounced back faster and better from the Great Recession than  other parts of the US. This is a big plus for Richard Florida’s argument that the Creative Class is a key generator of economic growth and higher incomes in cities.

http://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013.10-Mandel_The-PPI-Tech-Info-Job-Ranking.pdf

The PPI data shows that startups and entrepreneurship are key to generating high-paying jobs. Policy-makers and the business press tend to focus on big business and finance but the important action lies elsewhere. 

The polity implications are important. Much more effort has go to into supporting new companies. This includes finance (bolstering crowd-funding, improving the archaic venture capital business), regulation (cutting it for startups and new companies) and education (university campuses are cheap platforms for generating innovation and new companies). 

Check out the list of counties that have the most tech/it new job growth. California leads, of course, but Brooklyn makes the top 25 list and there are surprises in between.

Great job Mike!