Creativity = Freedom

Dave writes:

This blog has covered many topics. It began around ideas of economic development and Richard Florida's creative class. But what it really is about is empowerment. It's not lifehacking or productivity enhancement or even social media technology. It's how we, knowledge workers, more accurately web workers and other members of the creative classexperience to gain a greater degree of influence over our lives, our work, and our communities. I'm not sure how to brand that or define that as enough of a niche to turn this into a blog with thousands of subscribers, but my dream is that my own journey here can serve as a helpful guide to others who may feel that a part of their dissatisfaction in life is that they need to Escape from Cubicle Nation, but don't know where to start or what to do. The journey begins within and is not necessarily an escape, but a discovery.

The prisons of the industrial age can no longer contain us. How do you cope?

Comments

[john trenouth]

It seems to be common place to equate freedom and creativity in the context of companies and work environments.

However, when the context of discussion becomes countries or cultures, the discussion often turn into unchallenged hype and political correctness.

China and India are two very easy examples. The hype is that they're going to take over the wold. And the political correctness is to not talk about the incredible degree to which their cultures squelch risky, establishment threatening, intellectual freedom (the kind of freedom innovation really needs to take root).

Is it the case that questions of individual freedom are not as relevant at a national level as they are at smaller organizational levels??

[hayden fisher]

America remains the quintessential example of freedom and the City shining on the Hill. Fortunately, our light has shined brightly on many other places as well and the hill has become less hill and more hump; but America nevertheless remains on the perch. And it's because we celebrate freedom in all its forms and expressions. No wonder we're the most creative place on earth. Then again, think about the people who ended up here. Many of them were eccentric non-traditional folks who didn't fit the status quos of their times and got shipped off to explore "the new world". They endured the voyage and left everything to become pioneers. Waves of immigrants followed them to strike out courageously to find opportunity in a new land. And America has cared for the world with the same passion ever since. So people here and abroad can knock the USA until the cows come home but, bottom line, there's a certain spirit and SOUL here that exists nowhere else. Our cultural DNA is fundamentally different.

Less big box operations and more small collaborative companies will become the norm going forward. Last week I personally launched a new law firm with a vision to be very different and, as chance and a curious wandering mind would only have it, a coal-mining and energy company that similarly shares equity and opportunity with the operators who make it all happen. We nabbed this opportunity and kept it away from a big mining company who would have sucked profits for themselves and left the operators with more business as usual. I think we'll be much more efficient, productive and profitable as a result. But, bottom line, this approach reflects the coming trend and we'll see a lot more of these kinds of operations and less big box ones in the future. We have a restaurant group formed under the same vision that should be operating by the end of the year. That's how the creative class creates the broad and shared prosperity, by empowering the doers and helping to create and share opportunities.

[Michael R. Bernstein]

Hayden, there are a few things you're overlooking:

1) We are currently engaged in a massive experiment in self-sorting that is concentrating the innovators in fewer locations. This has good effects on national innovation levels, but the places these folks are leaving are not able to tap into the economic benefits. This does not bode well for long term social stability, and we risk a huge reactionary resurgence.

2) Small collaborative companies are indeed where it's at right now, but even as this approach has leaked into the general economy from technology startup culture (including the equity sharing you mentioned) that same sector is now engaged in the beginning stages of recentralization at the infrastructural level. Increasingly, the base requirements for innovation in this space include massive scalability to cope with unexpected success, as well as broad-and-deep proprietary datasets that can be mined for hidden value. I fully expect the wider economy to follow suit over the next decade, and the large infrastructure providers will try to push the smaller companies running on their platforms into being little more than sharecroppers.

3) Cultural risk-avoidance comes in many forms. Regulatory barriers have shaped innovation in ways most people (most especially the legislative bodies that enacted those regulations) don't really understand.

3a) Example:Sarbannes-Oxley has raised the cost of being a public company to the point that a company with less than ~$100 million in revenues can't afford it. This means that many fewer technology companies are filing for IPOs, and instead are seeking to be acquired by larger, already-public, companies (this is in part what is driving the recentralization). Note also that Sarbannes-Oxley solves the wrong problem by guaranteeing income for the large accounting companies that failed spectacularly in cases like Enron.

3b) Second example: We have deregulated the marketing of pharmaceuticals to the public while retaining the regulation of drug testing. Combine this with the regulatory capture of that testing by the large pharma companies. This results in plummeting innovation as R&D budgets shrink and are focused on generating mere variations (and combinations) of existing drugs instead of basic science, and the dollars taken from R&D (and more) are used for marketing instead. Meanwhile the high costs of testing are maintained as barriers to entry for small innovative companies. I fully expect to see human trials of drugs migrate completely outside of the US both as a cost-cutting measure and to enable earlier testing of drugs not actually shown to be safe yet, and for far more drug 'recalls' like Vioxx that never should have been approved in the first place.

4) I think that there may be a DNA component in our national personality, and stubbornness is part of it. Specifically, a tendency to stick with the creed you were raised in no matter what external pressures (up to and including pogroms, genocide, the Inquisition, etc.) are brought to bear, instead of assimilating/converting. Note that mere reason doesn't even register on that scale. This, I think, goes some way toward explaining why so many Americans today don't believe in evolution. I leave it to you to estimate the effects of widespread willful ignorance in the face of plain facts on long term innovation in the sciences.

[jason]

EACH year you work past the age of 55 you trade 2 years of life span. This chart came directly from a secret insurance document I acquired while working at NASA. It clearly shows why companies don't mind delaying your retirement. The longer you work the sooner you die and the less benefit checks they have to pay you. For instance, Boeing employees retiring at the age of 65, only received 18 monthly pensions checks on average, before dying half way through their 66th year. The longer you work the shorter your life. For example in this chart http://marketingmakesmoney.com/work-longer-die-younger.htm if you retire at the age of 56 on average you live past 83 (27 years of fun). However if you decide to work longer for example, and retire at the age of 63, you only live 7 more short years till about age 70. Just after I put this on the net my contract mysteriously ended.