Richard Florida, Second Interview, by Bob Morris

Richard Florida is author of the global best-sellers, The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City? A more recent book, book, The Great Reset, explains how new ways of living and working will drive post-crash prosperity. Other works include The Flight of the Creative Class and Cities and the Creative Class. His previous books, especially The Breakthrough Illusion and Beyond Mass Production, paved the way for his provocative looks at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy.

Richard is senior editor for The Atlantic and a regular CNN contributor. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The Globe and Mail and The Harvard Business Review. He has been featured as an expert on MSNBC, BBC, NPR and CBS, to name just a few. Richard  is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Previously, Florida held professorships at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT. Florida earned his Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research provides unique, data-driven insight into the social, economic and demographic factors that drive the 21st century world economy.

His latest book is The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited: 10th Anniversary Edition–Revised and Expanded, published by Basic Books (June, 2012).

Here is an excerpt from my second interview of him.

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Morris: To what extent is The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited a sequel? To what extent does it plow entirely new ground?

Florida: A great deal of the book has been rewritten or rearranged—this is not so much a revision as a full-blown revisiting of the original book. My team and I brought all the statistics up to date, provided new ones, and incorporated a decade’s worth of new research. I took advantage of the opportunity to address my major critics, too. Finally, there are five completely original chapters, covering the global effects of the Creative Class, quality of place in our cities and suburbs, the widening—and increasingly damaging—role of class and inequality in society, and the political challenges and opportunities that the rise of the creative class represents.

Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing the book? Please explain.

Florida: One big insight is the worsening inequality and underlying class divide that plagues not just nations but cities and metro areas.  You can see it in US cities and metros and also in London and even in Toronto where I now live.  That said, the rise of the creative class and post-industrialism needn’t exacerbate wage and income inequality. In fact, the wages and salaries for working and service class members are higher in metros with greater concentrations of the creative class.  Interestingly enough, the US is something of an outlier when it comes to post-industrialism and inequality across the advanced nations. In many of them, especially in Scandinavia and North Europe, post-industrialism and the rise of the creative economy has been accompanied by higher living standards and far less inequality that in the US.  In the revised edition, I look in detail at inequality across US metros. I find that the class divide accounts for about 15 percent of income inequality, a significant amount for sure, but more is at work. Income inequality across US metros has a lot to do with entrenched poverty, race, weakened labor unions, and an unraveling safety net than it is the result of the Creative Class’s relative prosperity. The solution, in other words, isn’t to roll the Creative Class back—it’s to lift up the classes that aren’t doing as well.

Morris: To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from what you originally envisioned?

Florida:  Books always turn out different than expected. When I started the idea was to update the data (which was ten years old) and revise and update the existing chapters.  But that’s where my research and thinking took me.  I certainly did not expect to write five entirely new chapters The whole issue of the creative class going global and the need to include more data and information on the creative class around the world; and also widening inequality and the growing class divide – those are things that needed to be treated in detail.  The last chapter – “Every Single Human Being is Creative”— discusses the need for a new Creative Compact based on harnessing the creativity and talent of every single human being. We are at such a critical turning point: our society is changing as fundamentally as it has since the shift from agriculture to manufacturing. The old industrial order of relentless production and consumerism, of brute growth, has proven itself unsustainable; it’s left us with a degraded environment, a broken financial system, and a sclerotic political culture. We have an incredible opportunity to remake ourselves in a better way—for maybe the first time ever, to align human and economic development. But to do that, we need to create new institutions that will both help to develop and utilize everyone’s innate creativity.  It won’t happen by itself, and no Invisible Hand is going to guide it.

The University of Chicago economist Raghu Rajan said it well: “The advanced countries have a choice. They can act as if all is well except that their consumers are in a funk, and that ‘animal spirits’ must be revived through stimulus. Or they can treat the crisis as a wake-up call to fix all that has been papered over in the last few decades.” I’m trying to sound that wake up call.

Morris: Please explain the reference to “the key underlying forces that have been transforming our economy and culture” for several decades.

Florida: Our economy is shifting from an industrial to a post-industrial basis—our most valuable products are no longer the natural resources we scour out of the ground, or the durable goods that we manufacture in factories but the things that spring from our creativity: software, movies, medicines, applications. Human beings have always been creative, of course, but now creativity itself—“the ability to create meaningful new forms,” as Webster’s Dictionary has it—is what powers our economy.

As creativity has become more fundamental, it’s given rise to a whole new social class that works in creative fields (the sciences, education, medicine, technology, media, the arts). Many of them have embraced a new ethos and a new set of meritocratic norms that in turn have shifted our whole society.

If anything Creativity is an even more powerfully transformative force than it was a decade ago. The Creative Class has come through the last decade—and through the economic crash of 2008—stronger and more influential than ever.

Morris: In your opinion, why have we not as yet unleashed “that great reservoir of overlooked and underutilized human potential”?

Florida: If a third of our most fortunate workers belong to the Creative Class, the other two great classes are not faring anywhere near as well. The working class, our blue collar sector, has lost a third of its members in just the last decade—it represents just 20 percent of the workforce today, about the same share that farmers held at the turn of the last century (they are less than one percent of the economy today). About half of the workforce belongs to the Service Class—the people who serve our food, cut our lawns and our fingernails, take care of our elderly. Most of them are paid terribly and there are very few opportunities for advancement.

Class and geography have a huge impact on your destiny in the US—if your parents don’t have good jobs and good educations and you live in a state that has a smaller Creative Class share, the odds are that you’ll be poorer, travel less, and receive a worse education than your peers in more creative states. That’s not snobbery or elitism—that’s just statistics. Poorer states have shorter life expectancies too—there is more smoking and obesity, more gun violence, and worse health outcomes across the board.

This is why I’m so passionate about the need for change—for a new Creative Compact, as I put it, that will do for our own epoch what the New Deal did for its own generation.

Morris:  What are the defining characteristics of the Creative Class?

Florida: I define the Creative Class by what people do—by the kinds of jobs they hold. What I call the Super-Creative Core of the Creative Class are scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the thought leadership of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion shapers. I define the highest order of creative work as the production of new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful—such as designing a consumer product, coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many situations, or composing music that can be performed again and again.

The Creative Class doesn’t just solve problems—it finds problems that we didn’t know we had. It invents the iPod and then it figures out a better way to organize its music library—and to combine it with a telephone, and an e-book reader while giving its battery longer life.

Beyond this core group, the Creative Class also includes “creative professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries, such as high-tech, financial services, the legal and health professions, and business management, who engage in creative problem solving. Creative Class people are smart and skilled; they’re often (but not always) highly educated. Three quarters of degree holders belong to the Creative Class, but less than 60 percent of the Creative Class has degrees.

I talk a lot about “creatifying” jobs that are not considered Creative Class, but could be, such as retail sales. With the addition of creativity such jobs can become more productive and earn higher and higher salaries.  Services can be creatified too, as their providers become more entrepreneurial.

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Richard cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

http://www.creativeclass.com/

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/

To read the complete second interview, please click here.

To read  my first interview of him, please click here.

To read my review of his latest book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited: 10th Anniversary Edition, please click here.

Here is the New York Times August, 2012 Hardcover Business Books Best Sellers List – Steve Jobs, still #1

Here is the August, 2012 Hardcover Business Books Best Sellers List.  Steve Jobs still sits atop the list.  I presented this early this year at the First Friday Book Synopsis, our monthly breakfast event in Dallas.  If you have not yet read it (it is a big book!, but very much worth the read), you might want to check out my synopsis of the book, with audio + comprehensive handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

We have presented #s 1,2, 3, 4,10, & 13 at our monthly event.  Although, #3, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, has now been pulled by the publisher from sale for some flat-out made-up and plagiarized material.  (I wrote about this in this blog post:  Jonah Lehrer Lied to Us All, and this is Why that Matters).

There are always books about finances, the economy, personal finance, that don’t quite fit “what we do” at the First Friday Book Synopsis.

And, as I always mention, this is my “favorite” best sellers list, because it (usually) comes out only once a month.  A weekly list can be too easily swayed by bulk purchases, or brief publicity efforts.  The monthly list seems to get us closer to our desire to know what might be a little more “lasting.”  Although, as always, there are not-quite-great books that make such lists, and there are some great books that never make it.  (Bob Morris has eloquently explained this to me, and he is right about this).

Here’s the August, 2012 list.

1	STEVE JOBS, by Walter Isaacson.
2	POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg.
3	IMAGINE, by Jonah Lehrer.
4	THINKING, FAST AND SLOW, by Daniel Kahneman.
5	MOBILE WAVE, by Michael Saylor.
6	PRICE OF INEQUALITY, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
7	UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, by Edward Conard.
8	TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER, by Dave Ramsey.
9	$100 STARTUP, by Chris Guillebeau.
10	4-HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferriss.
11	HOW WILL YOU MEASURE YOUR LIFE?, by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon.
12	YEAR UP, by Gerald Chertavian.
13	GREAT BY CHOICE, by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.
14	LEAN STARTUP, by Eric Ries.
15	CHARGE, by Brendon Burchard.

 

 

Google Discovers (Rediscovers) Soft Skills – These Simply Cannot Be Ignored

(Thanks to Tom Pearce, from iLead, for putting me on to this.   The article actually came out back in Spring, 2011.  But, I suspect, we all have things to learn, to change, and then do).

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Here’s the big mistake.  Companies have bought too fully into the “leave them alone” approach.  But, leaving people alone does not actually bring out the best in people.  People do not do really well without help and encouragement.  Google has now set this “discovery” into policy.

Call this the old “soft skills vs. hard skills” spectrum.  And, I think this approach at Google sort of views it this way – hard skills are assumed, but soft skills have to be constantly attended to…

In Adam Bryant’s Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss (New York Times – a really good article!), we read this:

For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“Took an interest.”  That’s really it – take an interest.

Consider the Olympics.  Watch the interaction between athletes and coaches.  Do you think these coaches interact, have input, take an interest?  You bet.

What Google did was boil this approach down to eight good “behaviors.”  These are behaviors – things leaders/supervisors/managers actually do!  The New York Times has it in a great graphic, with brief description/elaboration (click here), but here are the eight:

The Eight Good Behaviors

#1 – Be a good coach
#2 – Empower your team and don’t micromanage
#3 – Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being
#4 – Don’t be a sissy:  Be productive and results-oriented
#5 – Be a good communicator and listen to your team
#6 – Help your employees with career development
#7 – Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
#8 – Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

And – Three Pitfalls of Managers

#1 – Have trouble making a transition to the team
#2 – Lack a consistent approach to performance and career development
#3 – Spend too little time managing and communication

So, here’s the takeaway to me.  Managers have to view their team members as people.  Real people.  With human needs, who want to be noticed and treated as human beings.   It reminds me of the great quote from Paul Hawken, quoted in Encouraging the Heart by Kouzes and Posner:

“We lead by being human. We do not lead by being corporate, professional, or institutional.”  (Paul G. Hawken, founder, Smith and Hawken).