Progress only in failure

Willing to Fail or Succeed

Risk requires that we be willing to fail as well as succeed, to be wrong as well as right. Risking failure is the doorway to consciousness, the anthem of our humanity. And while it may look to the observer that we have learned to trust ourselves when we put our call in the public eye, we have, in fact, begun to trust something deeper, more mysterious and powerful, which in turn frees us to act in ways that may seem foolish, even foolhardy, to others.

Marjory Bankson
Source: The Call to the Soul

Innovation

Highland Park UMC and CitySquare

News of the creative, innovative partnership we've just forged between CitySquare and Highland Park United Methodist Church has spread everywhere in Dallas, it seems. 

Everywhere I go, people ask me about the partnership.  And, I'm more than happy to talk about it!

Paul Rasmussen, Senior Minister at HPUMC, has become a trusted friend and ally to me.  I'm grateful for the creative space that Paul forms everywhere he goes!  And, needless to say, everyone at CitySquare is encouraged by the new connection we enjoy with HPUMC!

Here are some of the reports (forgive the redundancy!):

·         White Rock/ East Dallas Neighbors Go

·         BubbleLife:

o   Park Cities

o   Lakewood

o   Preston Hollow

o   Uptown

·         KRLD Radio Interview with Mitch Carr

·         The Dallas Morning News

·         My Sweet Charity

Pretty paper. . .

Failure as necessity

Courage

To Live Courageously

Courage is exhibited when someone strikes out into unfamiliar territory where few if any have yet gone, and helps pioneer a new way of working and serving. [They] blaze new trails despite what everyone else around them is doing, and whether or not others join, they do what they see is right, at whatever sacrifice. When someone lives originally and courageously, it inspires others to examine their own lives and actions and find within themselves the courage to follow their own original paths.

Dave Smith

To Be of Use

Innovation

The urban ability to create collaborative brilliance isn't new.  For centuries, innovations have spread from person to person across crowded city streets.  An explosion of artistic genius during the Florentine Renaissance began when Brunelleschi figured out the geometry of linear perspective.  He passed his knowledge to his friend Donatello, who imported linear perspective in low-relief sculpture.  Their friend Masaccio then brought the innovation into painting.  The artistic innovations of Florence were glorious side effects of urban concentration; that city's wealth came from more prosaic pursuits:  banking and cloth making.  Today, however, Bangalore and New York and London all depend on their ability to innovate.  The spread of knowledge from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader is the same as the flight of ideas from painter to painter, and urban density has long been at the heart of that process. 

The vitality of New York and Bangalore doesn't mean that all cities will succeed.  In 1950, Detroit was America's fifth-largest city and had 1.85 million people.  In 2008, it had 777 thousand people, less than half its former size, and was continuing to lose population steadily.  Eight of the ten largest American cities in 1950 have lost at least a fifth of their population since then.  The failure of Detroit and so many other industrial towns doesn't reflect any weakness of cities as a whole, but rather the sterility of those cities that lost touch with the essential ingredients of urban reinvention. 

Cities thrive when they have many small firms and skilled citizens.  Detroit was once a buzzing beehive of small-scale interconnected inventors--Henry Ford was just one among many gifted entrepreneurs.  But the extravagant success of Ford's big idea destroyed that older, innovative city.  Detroit's twentieth-century growth brought hundreds of thousands of less-well-educated workers to vast factories, which became fortresses apart from the city and the world.  While industrial diversity, entrepreneurship, and education lead to innovation, the Detroit model led to urban decline.  The age of the industrial city is over, at least in the West.

Edward Glaeser,

Triumph of the City, pp.8-9

Cities

Echoing antiurbanites throughout the ages, Mahatma Gandhi said that "the true India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its 700,000 villages" and "the growth of the nation depends not on cities, but [on] its villages."  The great man was wrong.  India's growth depends almost entirely on its cities.  There is a near-perfect correlation between urbanization and prosperity across nations.  On average, as the share of a country's population that is urban rises by 10 percent, the country's per capita output increases by 30 percent.  Per capita incomes are allmost four times higher in those countries where a majority of people live in cities than in those countries where a majority of people live in rural areas. 

Edward Glaeser

Triumph of the City:  How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter,

Greener, Healthier and Happier,

page 7

Embrace the city. . .

American history and psyche has been shaped by a bias toward all things rural. 

Cities are usually seen as negative. 

The country regarded as positive. 

Whatever your point of view (I prefer cities!), the essential role of urban centers, culture and economics in shaping life, health and progress is simply undeniable.  Especially important is the role of dense population centers in creativity and entrepreneurial breakthroughs.  Our needs in today's shrinking, complicated, interdependent world argue for more density, for greater proximity. 

Edward Glaeser would agree.  Consider his evaluation of cities and our future as a nation.  Let me hear your reactions. 

America’s Revival Begins in its Cities


December 30, 2010
by Edward Glaeser
Boston Globe
Published in the Harvard Kennedy School journal

DURING ECONOMIC downturns, we begin to fear that we are entering a permanent period of decline. But we can avoid that depressing prospect if we recognize that a revival will not come from federal spending or another building boom. Reinvention requires a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship, which can emerge from our dense metropolitan areas and their skilled residents. America must stop treating its cities as ugly stepchildren, and should instead cherish them as the engines that power our economy.

America’s 12 largest metropolitan areas collectively produced 37 percent of the country’s output in 2008, the last year with available data. Per capita productivity was particularly high in large, skilled areas such as Boston, where output per person was 39 percent higher than the nation’s metropolitan average. New York and San Francisco enjoy similar per capita productivity advantages. Boston also seems to be moving past the current recession, with an unemployment rate well below the national average of 9.8 percent.

Since 1948, the national unemployment rate has exceeded 9 percent only one other time: the grave 1982 recession. During the 1980s, we looked at Japan and saw an economy that seemed to be surpassing our own. Today, we watch with unease as China surges.

Yet American decline is not inevitable. During the 25 years after 1982, our real gross domestic product increased by 3.3 percent per year, which was also the rate of growth during the quarter century before 1982. Our post-1982 growth involved massive economic restructuring. Manufacturing employment fell by 39 percent from its peak of 19.4 million jobs in 1979. The 1979-2009 manufacturing decline was more than offset by the 126 percent increase in employment in “professional and business services” and the 184 percent increase in education and health jobs.

Boston provides a model of how cities can foster such transformations. In the 1970s, Boston seemed headed for the trash-heap of history. Manufacturing jobs had vanished, and social chaos ensued. But Greater Boston experienced three great decades, as a former industrial hub became a capital of the information age. Our area’s high levels of productivity reflect the value of ideas that are made in Boston.

To succeed in the future, the country needs to produce a stream of new ideas, like personal computers, Facebook, and steerable catheters. We must produce goods and services innovative enough to command the high prices needed to cover high labor costs.

Such breakthroughs rarely come from solitary geniuses. The movie “The Social Network” hints at the messy, interactive process that created Facebook, which now has over 500 million users and is valued at about $40 billion. Mark Zuckerberg benefited from being surrounded by smart peers, whose ideas about social networking helped his company get started.

The roots of Boston Scientific reveal a similarly collaborative process that started in the basement of a Belmont church. The brilliant inventor (and spiritualist) Itzhak Bentov created a steerable catheter, catering to the demands of Boston’s medical community. Boston connected Bentov with John Abele, who brought his business vision, and later connected Abele with other partners, who helped him create a medical innovation behemoth.

Cities have long enabled economic creativity. Detroit in 1900 looked a lot like Silicon Valley in the 1960s, with an entrepreneur on every street corner. In that urban hotbed, innovators like Ford and Buick and the Fisher Brothers supplied and financed each other — and borrowed ideas freely. The urban edge in engendering innovation explains why globalization and technology have made cities more, not less, important. The returns to being smart have increased, and humans get smart by being around smart people in cities. While all workers in the Boston area benefit from the region’s human capital, the flow of knowledge seems strongest in the dense clusters of Boston and Cambridge.

For decades, the American dream has meant white picket fences and endless suburbs. But the ideas created in dense metropolitan areas power American productivity. We should reduce the pro-homeownership bias of housing policies, such as the home mortgage interest deduction, which subsidize suburban sprawl and penalize cities. We should rethink infrastructure policies that encourage Americans to move to lower-density environments. Most importantly, we should invest and innovate more in education, because human capital is the ultimate source of both urban and national strength.

As we grope towards a brighter future, we must embrace our cities, and invest in the skills that are central to their success.

Edward Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Govern­ment and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, both at Harvard Kennedy School.

Student apathy and national leadership. . .

Here's an interesting op-ed essay from Thomas Friedman that appeared last weekend in The New York Times.  As usual, Friedman presents a unique take on the failure of American public education and the place of the nation in world affairs as a result.  Tell me what you think.

We’re No. 1(1)!

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 11, 2010

I want to share a couple of articles I recently came across that, I believe, speak to the core of what ails America today but is too little discussed. The first was in Newsweek under the ironic headline “We’re No. 11!” The piece, by Michael Hirsh, went on to say: “Has the United States lost its oomph as a superpower? Even President Obama isn’t immune from the gloom. ‘Americans won’t settle for No. 2!’ Obama shouted at one political rally in early August. How about No. 11? That’s where the U.S.A. ranks in Newsweek’s list of the 100 best countries in the world, not even in the top 10.”

The second piece, which could have been called “Why We’re No. 11,” was by the Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson. Why, he asked, have we spent so much money on school reform in America and have so little to show for it in terms of scalable solutions that produce better student test scores? Maybe, he answered, it is not just because of bad teachers, weak principals or selfish unions.

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

There is a lot to Samuelson’s point — and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown. . . .

To read on click here. 

On "staying foolish". . .

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become…stay hungry, stay foolish.

Steve Jobs

Creativity and context

Came across an informative article in Fast Company on the d.school at Stanford University on the very morning I prepared for a trip to Stanford to work with the creative folks who lead this special, creative laboratory!  I'm making the trip with partners from PepsiCo.  It appears that we will be present for the official opening.

Our design challenge is just how to best use the 90 minutes we will stop at each summer lunch feeding location on our mobile delivery routes this summer. 

What should we bring to the children and their communities besides the food that will be delivered daily? 

How do we maximize the impact for the overall good and growth of the children? 

Should be an interesting experience.  The report below makes it clear that my quick trip won't be a waste.  See what  you think.

11 Ways You Can Make Your Space as Collaborative as the Stanford d.school

BY Linda Tischler

The Stanford d.school, which opens officially on May 7, is a space whose design has been refined over the course of six years to maximize the innovation process. Every wall, every nook, every connecting gizmo, every table, every storage cabinet, has been created with a grand, collaborative vision in mind.

Nice for them. But what about the rest of us, out here in standard-issue cubicle land? Are we all destined for subprime collaborative work lives because our office spaces and furniture are so numbingly left brain?

Not so, says George Kembel, the executive director of the school. Even if your company doesn't have a few million to throw at making your space more innovation-friendly, there are things you can do to optimize what you've got. The d.school team sat down and brainstormed 11 great ways to transform your digs into a little hive of bubbling creativity--or at least a place that manages to capture the occasional good idea.

To review the most interesting list of ways to make your space radically collaborative click here.

Green is now!

The New York Times published an extremely interesting story about non-profit organizations and the arriving "green" economy.  In many ways, non-profits are leading the charge with groundbreaking moves. 

Here's a taste of the story:

Nonprofit Groups Spin Off Green Ventures
by Sally Ryan
October 28, 2009

Sweet Beginnings, a line of urban honey and natural body care products, is part of a growing trend among small businesses: for-profit ventures spun off by nonprofit groups that teach skills for green jobs. Mario Casasnovas was on the green roof of the Bronx County Building a couple of weeks ago, remembering the flowers there in the summer and offering some tips about handling the sedum that is the main plant on the roof.

“The roots from the clover,” a weed, “tend to wrap around the roots of a sedum,” he said, nine floors above the Grand Concourse, near Yankee Stadium. “You’ve got to be careful not to pull out the sedum with the clover.”

Mr. Casasnovas, an employee of SmartRoofs L.L.C., was doing routine maintenance on the vegetative roof, which his company installed in June 2003. The company, based in the Bronx, is one of the few green roofers in the New York metropolitan area. But what makes SmartRoofs even more unusual is that it is part of a tiny but growing trend among small businesses: for-profit ventures spun off by nonprofit groups that teach the job skills necessary to join the nascent green economy.

SmartRoofs was developed by the nonprofit group Sustainable South Bronx, which also runs the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training, one of the country’s first efforts to train people for green-collar jobs. The program now trains more than 60 low-income workers each year, using funds from a variety of sources, mostly outside government.

Only a handful of these small businesses exist across the country. “These social enterprises are early adopters of green industry,” Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, chief executive of Green for All, a national organization working to create green economic opportunities in disadvantaged communities, said via e-mail. “These ventures are paving the way for mainstream business to integrate the concept of green jobs into everyday practices.”

Read the entire report by clicking here.

Reactions?
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Ownership

I love this story from Kevin and Jackie Freiberg's great little book, Guts! Companies That Blow the Doors Off Business-As-Usual (2004):

When a Southwest gate agent in Austin, Texas, was approached by a very distressed customer who spoke only Spanish, her willingness to think like an owner may have saved the man's life. The customer was on his way to Houston for a kidney transplant, and he had mistakenly gotten off the plane in Austin. The gate agent spoke Spanish, too, and she was able to figure out that not arriving in Houston early the next morning meant that he could lose his chance to get the kidney. She knew there were no more commercial flights from Austin to Houston that night, but she remembered that Mark Robbins, an Austin ramp agent, was a private pilot. In entrepreneurial fashion, she explained the customer's predicament to Mark, who flew the man to Houston that night. And the gate agent went along for the ride, knowing the customer would be more comfortable having someone else with him who spoke his language. No call was made to the CEO or anyone else to ask permission. The two employees simply handled the customer's problem, knowing that the company would support them. . . .

Great breakthroughs and extraordinary acts of service usually happen out on the radical fringe of a clearly defined boundary (pages 86-87).

I really believe that story illustrates how to manage for impact and success. What works in business also works in community development.

Community members who have little to offer but their time and smarts can and do make a huge difference when they are trained and set free to serve our "customers." And, it is the same with our employed staff.

Much to think about here.

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Ideas, change and patience

Years ago a wise person impressed upon me the truth that funding follows people and ideas. Relationships and clear thinking often combine to create the resources necessary for change and renewal.

Still, this wisdom lacks one other element that, when present, usually seals any deal designed to make things better. Simply put that element is time.

Good ideas and strong friendships or working relationships mature over time. Neither is automatic.

U. S. Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the "nuclear navy," put it this way:

"Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience."

Change usually occurs when people are determined to "stay at it."

Discovery, Progress & Imagination

Walter Isaacson just published a new biography on Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Likely a must-read.

Isaacson is CEO for the Aspen Institute and a member of the Board of Tulane University. During a presentation at the university back in March, he said this about Einstein:

"His slow ability to learn how to talk meant he thought in pictures. He thought in images. He thought imaginatively. All the great Einstein breakthroughs are not done by really hard applications of hard mathematical equations but by imaginative thought experiments."

It works this way in every field, it seems to me.

Progress occurs, breakthroughs happen when people are allowed to see new visions, dream new dreams, work on new ways of looking at old problems and experiment with their understanding of reality.

While there may be security in the "hard math" approach, advances come when we allow ourselves and our partners to "see" the future and its ever expanding possibilities.