Todd L. Pittinsky: An interview by Bob Morris

Todd L. Pittinsky is Professor of Technology and Society at SUNY Stony Brook and a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. He was previously Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he served as Research Director for Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2001, he launched the Allophilia Project (www.allophilia.org) to understand and advance the positive attitudes people can have for groups other than their own; that is, attitudes that go beyond tolerance to proactive engagement, enthusiasm, support, and enjoyment.

Todd is the author of Us Plus Them: Tapping the Positive Power of Difference, co-author of Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family, editor of Crossing the Divide: Intergroup Leadership in a World of Difference, and co-editor of Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders: Enduring Challenges and Emerging Answers. Published widely in scholarly journals, his work has also been profiled in The Economist and the Boston Globe and has been cited in Science, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio.

Todd received his BA in psychology from Yale and his PhD jointly from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Science and Harvard Business School. Pittinsky has worked for leading technology companies, including Netscape and Opsware, and consults to organizations in the for-profit, nonprofit, and government sectors, including the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the World Bank, and Ford Motor Company. Pittinsky can be reached at todd@pittinsky.com.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing Us Plus Them, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?

Pittinsky: Hands down my family—my parents. Like so many of their generation, they did so much with so little. I sometimes walk by the house I grew up in and am amazed at how they filled such a small house with so much that was fun and interesting, all the while working middle class jobs. Later, as I grew up, my three brothers were a big influence. Sibling influence can be profound and is too often overlooked.

Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development? How so?

Pittinsky: Two mentors of very different sorts. James Levine for believing in me and giving me a job at the Fatherhood Project that allowed me to stretch and grow. Richard Hackman for modeling excellence and coaching graduate students like me on how to get closer to it.

Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow. Please explain.

Pittinsky: There were four actually. Lightening had to strike four times for me to realize there was something brewing out there. First, studying for PhD qualifying exams, I was given a mountain of papers to read about group relations and, to a tee, they all discussed prejudices as prejudgments—could be positive or negative—about groups but then—in every single case—quickly went on to discuss only negative prejudgments and negative attitudes toward “others.”

The second time was when I was writing a paper and was looking for a word for the positive attitudes members of one group have for the members of another group. And while I could come up with a great number of negatives, when it came to the positives—there were none. In the end, I had to write out “the positive attitudes that one might have for a group to which one doesn’t belong.” Imagine having to keep repeating such an awkward expression for something so simple and worthwhile.

Third, my colleagues and I had run an experiment designed to get groups to really like each other. It didn’t work and we just couldn’t figure out why. We kept going over the experiment piece by piece and finally we realized that the measure of group attitudes we were using was one that was available and well-tested—but it measured animosity and dislike. Surprise—in our experiment, there wasn’t much animosity and dislike to start with!

Finally, I was working in Silicon Valley, in a company which, like many companies, had a lot of departments—silos, really—which weren’t collaborating as they hoped. I was working on internal customer service. Well, the original protocol included negative rating of other groups—say, frustration with the marketing department. If you were really delighted by the marketing department or enthusiastic about it or proud of it—even though you weren’t in that department—there was no way to say so using this protocol. That was something I quickly remedied in the survey design, which had wonderful effects on the organizational culture. People could finally see the functioning—and not just the dysfunction—as normal.

So it took a while for me to see the pattern, the thread—when we talk about groups, we talk about the negative—and to see that there was a whole lot that needed to be understood about positive attitudes for the members of other groups. So it took four times, but I got there.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

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

www.allophilia.org

Us Plus Them

How to craft a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath

Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Chip Heath co-conducted by Lenny T. Mendonca and Matt Miller. It was featured in The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete interview, check out a wealth of free online resources, and learn more about the firm, please click here.

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The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.

The ability to craft and deliver messages that influence employees, markets, and other stakeholders may seem like a mysterious talent that some people have and some don’t. Jack Welch, for example, created ideas that inspired hundreds of thousands of GE employees. But many other leaders are frustrated to find that key messages sent one day are forgotten the next—or that stakeholders don’t know how to interpret them.

Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has spent the past decade seeking answers to that question. His research has ranged from the problem of what makes beliefs—urban legends, for instance—survive in the social marketplace of competing ideas to experiments that show how winning ideas emerge in populations, businesses, and other organizations. Earlier this year Heath published his findings in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written with his brother, Dan, who founded a business that specializes in this very subject.

In July 2007 Chip Heath spoke with Lenny Mendonca, a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Matt Miller, an adviser to McKinsey; and Parth Tewari, who was then a Sloan fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, about the key principles for making an idea “stick” and how executives can use them to communicate more successfully. The conversation took place at Stanford.

The Quarterly: Let’s start by defining success. What is a sticky idea?

Chip Heath: A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes something about the way they think or act. That is a high standard. Think back to the last presentation you saw. How much do you  remember? How did it change the decisions you make day to day?

Leaders will spend weeks or months coming up with the right idea but then spend only a few hours thinking about how to convey that message to everybody else. That’s a tragedy. It’s worth spending time making sure that the lightbulb that has gone on inside your head also goes on inside the heads of your employees or customers

The Quarterly: Give us an example of a sticky idea.

Chip Heath: John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising—the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM—he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas – ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths – survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post,BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. He has co-authored two books with his brother Dan: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Lenny Mendonca is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, and Matt Miller is an adviser to McKinsey. The co-authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Parth Tewari, who helped initiate and shape this interview. Tewari recently left Stanford to become the India director of TechnoServe (a nonprofit organization that helps create business solutions to fight poverty), where he is using these ideas to shape his communications.

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.

“Every company is running for office. To win, give the voters what they want.”

Alan M. Webber

The title of this post is one of the 52 “truths for winning at business” that Alan M. Webber discusses in Rules of Thumb, published by HarperCollins (2009). Here is a composite of brief excerpts from the book.

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So what do American voters want?

I’d start with the most fundamental of all qualities: Americans are uniquely practical. We want things that work…We Americans pride ourselves on our ability to get things done. We do what it takes to make things happen, and we want products and services that do the same.

The second fundamental American attribute is adaptability. Among all nations in the world we are unique in our steadfast belief that everything, including ourselves, can be made better…

Third, we Americans have always been obsessed with innovation. What’s new, what’s next, what’s never been done before – these are intrinsically American concerns…

What do voters want from our companies?

We want things that work. We want to be able to make them work better. And we want to find things that both work better and are innovative. Three qualities that aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re mutually reinforcing.

Have you got what the voters want?

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Alan M. Webber is an award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist. In 1995, he co-founded Fast Company magazine with William Taylor. In 2000 the magazine was sold to Gruner + Jahr. Last year Webber stepped down from his full-time editorial responsibilities, but has retained his title and contributing role as founding editor.

Previously, Webber was managing editor and editorial director of the Harvard Business Review. Stone. In addition to Rules of Thumb, he co-authored Changing Alliances and Going Global. His articles and columns have appeared in The New York Times Sunday magazine, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

He cordially invites you to visit his website.

For those who love to play with words….

The Washington Post‘s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an axxhole.
3. Intaxicaton: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting intimate.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

 

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

Jonah Lehrer on how to reduce stress with science

Jonah Lehrer

In the August 2010 issue of Wired, Jonah Lehrer asserts that “stress doesn’t kill us – but it makes everything that does kill us much worse.” In the article that follows, Lehrer explains how to reduce stress with science. To read the complete article once it is accessible online, please click here.

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Make Friends: “Social relationships are a powerful buffer against stress. In fat, several studies in Europe and the US have found that people with fewer friends and family members they’re close to have significantly shorter life expectancies.”

Drink in Moderation: “While the moderate consumption of alcohol might reduce the stress response, blood alcohol levels above 0.1 percent – most states consider 0.08 the legal limit fir driving – trigger an automatic spike in stress hormones [and convince your body] it’s in a state of mortal danger.”

Get Enough Sleep: “Recent studies have found that even a single night of insufficient sleep…triggers an automatic spike in stress hormones.” The result is increased stress and insomnia.

Don’t Fight: Recent and extensive research (on baboons) by Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky suggests that human beings as well as baboons with a less aggressive personality (i.e. “the ability to walk away from a provocation”) have much more stable relationships.

Confront Your Fears: As one research study of Norwegian paratroopers reveals, there was massive stress prior to and then following their first jump but over time, after repeated jumps, “they showed elevated levels of stress hormones only while in midair.”

Meditate: Extensive research suggests that “even a short training session in meditation can dramatically reduce levels of stress and anxiety. “
My own take on this point is that, at least once or twice a day, it is a good idea to take a brief “time out” from tensions and pressures: calm down, relax, take a few deep breaths, and envision an especially pleasant scene (for me, walking along a tropical beach). I always feel refreshed and usually energized after these brief moments of decompression.

Don’t Force Yourself to Exercise: “While exercise is remarkably effective at blunting the stress response, at least for a few hours, this effect exists only if you want to exercise in the first place.” Otherwise, those who force themselves to suffer through exercise will nit reduce their stress level; on the contrary, they may exacerbate it.

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To learn more about this subject, here are links to two of Lehrer’s blog posts:

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/03/commuting.php

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/04/stress_and_sadness.php

To check out several videos during which Robert Sapolsky shares what he has learned about stress, please click here.

Who is Jonah Lehrer? “I’m a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. I graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. I’ve written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. I’m also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio’s Radio Lab.”

Interview: Richard Florida

Richard Florida is the author of several global best-sellers: The Rise of the Creative Class, The Breakthrough Illusion, Beyond Mass Production, The Flight of the Creative Class, and Who’s Your City? In his latest book, The Great Reset, he explains how new ways of living and working will drive post-crash prosperity. Florida is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a regular columnist for The Globe and Mail. He has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The Harvard Business Review. He has been featured as an expert on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR and CBS, to name just a few. He has also been appointed to the Business Innovation Factory’s Research Advisory Council and recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation. Florida’s ideas on the “creative class,” commercial innovation, and regional development have been featured in major ad campaigns from BMW and Apple, and are being used globally to transform the way regions and nations do business and “reset” their economies. He is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness, demographic trends, global trends, economics, prosperity, competitiveness, and disruptive growth as well as cultural and technological innovation.

Morris: For those who have not as yet read The Great Reset, what is a “Reset”?

Florida: Economies and societies invariably remake themselves in the wake of a crisis. It’s a necessary component of rebound and recovery. Outmoded industries and tired consumption habits make way for new goods and services, new careers and forms of employment, and population realigns itself in the landscape. All these developments are connected to lifestyle changes.

Morris: In which specific ways are economic systems “embedded within the geographic fabric” of a society?

Florida: Many ways. I have always argued that the place and geography has a significant impact on economic systems. With this Great Reset, we will see an even greater emphasis on place – more specifically the rise of the mega region, which are new and incredibly powerful economic units. No longer will we focus on the city versus suburb but on how to increase our connection to our respective mega regions. Worldwide there are just 40 significant mega regions, which are home to 1/5 of the world’s population, 2/3′s of the globaleconomic output and 85% of all worldwide innovation. The rise of vast mega-regions such as the corridors stretching from Boston to New York and Washington, D.C., which will intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city did during the First Reset and suburbia did in the Second.

Morris: Where were the most significant consequences of the First Great Reset in the 1870s? And of the Second Great Reset in the 1930s?

Florida: Each of the previous two Resets were actually vibrant periods of innovation. Inventors and entrepreneurs rushed to fill the voids left by struggling industries with new ideas and new technologies that led to new forms of infrastructure like railroads, subways, and highways systems. All of that innovation powers economic growth. The First Reset saw power and communication grids and streetcar and subway systems spread across the country, speeding the movement of goods, people, and ideas. This was the era of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, after all. The Second Reset brought huge developments in media, mass-produced consumer goods, and the role of large corporations, when companies like IBM rose to prominence and when what was good for General Motors was good for the nation. It also saw the rise of a suburban, mass-consuming nation.

Morris: In Chapter Thirteen, you discuss Toronto. Why do you think this city has “tremendous upside potential coming out of the current crisis”?

Florida: I’m convinced that Toronto has a tremendous upside potential coming out of the current crisis. It won’t topple New York or London as a financial center, nor will it dethrone Los Angeles as the international entertainment capital, but with its large and stable banks, numerous knowledge-based industries thriving in the surrounding mega-regions, and an increasingly diverse population, it will gain ground. And with employment opportunities in the largest centers eroding, it can make a big move on top global talent. It stands as a model of an older, once heavily industrial Frostbelt city that has not only turned itself around but continues to grow and thrive.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

You are cordially invited to check out the wealth of resources at http://www.creativeclass.com/.