What kind of dough gets your vote?

Barack Obama had some words for me last night.

He said, “We measure the strength of our economy, not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business.”

A little later, he spoke to me even more directly. “And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business or making her way in the world, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman.”

He was speaking to you, too. For eight years now, we’ve all seen our economy turn into a feudal system where the resources and the future belong only to a tiny number of extremely wealthy, privileged people.  These people – the heads of major corporations, scions of rich families, big donors and personal friends of the politically powerful - have gotten richer and richer from insanely outsized salaries, golden parachutes, enormous bonuses, stock options and personal and corporate tax breaks while millions of ordinary people have tumbled into financial uncertainty or poverty.

To George W. Bush and his cadre, it has been more important to indulge the pathological greed of already moneyed people than to help the working poor and middle class keep their jobs and be able to afford food, heat, transportation, medical care and education.  This policy, if you can call it that, doesn’t make sense even for the rich – who will work in their industries and provide their services if everyone but them and their friends is too sick or unschooled or immobilized by gas prices to hold down what jobs remain? 

Obama has it right. The vitality and success of America come from its grassroots, from the creativity and initiative of its individual citizens. And all that has been largely ignored and neglected for eight years in which catastrophic wrongheadedness and decline have brought America to the brink of what, with all the home foreclosures and bank failures, has looked at times more like the coming of another Great Depression than a recession.       

So when Obama says he wants to eliminate the capital-gains taxes for small businesses and start-ups that create the high-paying, high-tech jobs that offer one of our nation’s best hopes for a prosperous future, I don’t just hear an idea that would help me keep Geniocity.com alive and growing. I hear a change in the wind, a hint that everyday Americans may once again, in time, be able to thrive and realize their best ideas and dreams through their own hard work, no matter who they are or how modest their circumstances.

For two terms now, Bush’s actions have said “let them eat cake.” John McCain wants to stay that course. But Obama wants to make it possible for each of us to make a better loaf of bread and own the bakery that produces it.

Can we afford to vote for anyone but him?

An increase of pie

When I first got the idea for Geniocity.com, I was pretty strictly focused on figuring out exactly how I should set it up to answer what I saw as urgent social, media-industry and individual-consumer needs. It didn’t occur to me until later, when I was trying to find the best way to describe the project to friends and colleagues in my community, that they might perceive my embryonic company as competition. 

That made me uneasy. The whole point of Geniocity.com has always been to encourage a force for good – creativity – that can and does benefit all of us in every way relating to quality of life. It’s never been about stealing business from other news outlets or arts- and innovation-related enterprises.

But I’ve noticed, over my many years of writing about the arts, that creative-community reaction to any new organization always breaks into two camps: those who fear and resent the upstart because they think it will make the slices of economic pie smaller for everyone; and those who welcome the addition because they think it will stimulate community interest in, and demand for, creative services, thus expanding the size of the pie.

I’m a fervent believer that more services mean more pie, especially because knowing you’re not the only business in town keeps everyone in the local industry alert and striving to improve. And that serves the community.    

But I still find myself taking pains to make sure that the local creative cohort understands that Geniocity.com will fill an available niche, not one that’s already taken. 

The major daily paper reports what happened yesterday; the alternatives report what there is to do this week. Geniocity.com is about the world of tomorrow being developed right now.  The community papers and magazines and TV stations focus on the local and regional. Geniocity.com plans to cover what’s going on in brains, labs and studios around the world.

Though we sell creative work, as do many galleries and stores, the types and sources of our merchandise will be increasingly different from other shops. And perhaps more important, Geniocity’s pro-creative mission means we’ll constantly try to develop collaborations with other organizations that will help all of us.

I guess I say this to reassure myself as much as my community colleagues, because I’m determined that Geniocity will do well by doing good. I think that’s the only way to do well. Call it big-pie-side economics.

Fear and Loathing in the Age of Internet Technology

I wish that Hunter S. Thompson had lived long enough to write a book about the dark reality of digital electronics. I can’t help but believe that the author of “Hell’s Angels” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and a bat-winged flock of other bizarre, crazed, depravity-saturated fantasy exposes on contemporary life wouldn’t have richly appreciated the psychosis-inducing torments of, say, server crashes or attempting to sign up for online ad service.

For sure, he would have relished the terrors of tech-based entrepreneurship.  Fear – and coping with fear through sheer, substance-induced, firearm-wielding recklessness – figured big in much of Thompson’s oeuvre. There are few software bugs, file-eating viruses and lousy navigation set-ups he wouldn’t have solved with a handful of peyote buttons and a handgun fired into his own hard drive. So imagine what he would have done with site development, Power Point presentations, blog software, offshore tech support, frozen screens, lost Internet connections and code.

 I like to.  That would be an e-blast, indeed.  

I’m not endorsing his illegal excesses, of course. Just sympathizing with what drove them.

Now, I’ve always explained to my kids that courage doesn’t mean being unafraid – it means doing what must be done even though you are afraid. And being an entrepreneur means being afraid all the time , except when you’re on a momentary manic high because somebody finally returned your phone call or in a deep, leaden, lasting La Brea Tar Pit of a low because you’re alone, broke and trapped in a Doomsday business machine of your own creation.

Ah, creativity. Hunter Thompson was creative. He created his own feral brand of journalism. He also created brilliant trouble and there was no mess so enormous that he couldn’t fuel himself up and drive over it in a hallucinatory frenzy of bravado.

That’s how it feels when you’re the head of every department in your business start-up and you have no experience with half of them and you can’t get it all done properly even putting in 20-hour days and 7-day weeks and you have to walk up to complete strangers and convince them in 10 seconds that your idea is more exciting than sex itself and you’re pretty damn sure they won’t believe you but you have to accelerate off the edge of that psychological abyss over and over in your trashed little 4-cylinder ego made of hope and absurd enthusiasm and all you can do is wave your hat and scream yee-ha! all the way down like Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.”

And Hunter Thompson didn’t write “Dr. Strangelove,” but I bet he wished he had.

He died Feb. 20, 2005. Three years and one week ago, Thompson’s ashy remains were scattered all over his Woody Creek, Colo. homestead by a cannon, to the accompaniment of sparkly fireworks and a whole lot of drinking.  He was an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, making strangely stylish opportunity out of disaster his whole life long. And he did it all, I feel safe saying, without once having to decipher site traffic reports. Lucky man.

Brown study = creative play

Well, let’s let Cleveland sit on its hands and ruminate some more while the rest of the world moves ahead with creative thinking and action.

A few days ago, I discovered a place that effervesces with creativity of a sort that may sound frivolous, but actually matters tremendously. I was walking around Brown University in Providence, R.I., one of several college stops I made during a trip to New England last week. 

Despite a nearly 250-year history and its membership in the august Ivy League, Brown has, I think, remained just outside the spotlight relentlessly focused on Harvard and Yale universities. Like a middle child less noticed than the two other sibs flanking him, Brown has been sandwiched between those attention-grabbing, rival schools and perhaps overlooked by a lot of us. 

In a way, that may have helped: Perhaps because it’s been spared all that celebrity, Brown doesn’t seem to have the ponderous self-importance or the quasi-religious reverence for its own traditions and myth that public awe engenders in so many respected institutions. And maybe that’s why Brown also seems freer to experiment with what kind of institution it is. 

The school’s open curriculum is a reflection of its pervasive sense of fun and intellectual space, offering students the right to study anything they want, unrestricted by required courses. But It’s more the unofficial stuff, the quality of campus life there, that makes me think Brown may be fostering the joyful inventiveness and unimpressed-with-itself humor that entrepreneurship and other significant creativity depend on:

A tour of the campus revealed, for instance, a residential quad where a statue of Caesar Augustus lost its arm to a falling tree in a hurricane years ago. The students who lived there took possession of the bronze limb and it’s now passed regularly among their several dorms – whichever residence has the arm gets to program activities in the quad that month. One of the events they host in the spring includes putting tarps down over the entire quad and turning it into a giant Slip ‘n Slide.

Like many young people at other colleges, Brown students dress up their campus statues in costumes, paint campus fixtures for special events and hold campus-wide scavenger hunts. But they also drape their buildings in sheets and project movies on them.  They climb and play hide ‘n seek in a big, fascinating art installatiion made of woven tree branches, an installation the student body demanded be kept even after part of it was damaged in a storm and the university wanted to take the whole thing down. They circulate news about upcoming events by printing it on fliers that they then place on the cafeteria tables like mats, so students can read, eat amd learn. (Journalism industry: Take note.) 

Brown students can invent their own majors – and do, like the young woman who combined studies in physics and religion in a concentration she named “The Search for Meaning.”  The university is further encouraging intellectual and artistic exploration with a recently created dual program that lets students enroll simultaneously in Brown and the nearby Rhode Island School of Design and earn a degree from each.

All this information came from a highly articulate student tour guide, a young black woman from Ireland who is an opera singer and who plans to double-major in music and economics because her advisor recognized that she had a “computational mind” and urged her to take some math courses, she said.    

Curiosity and ideas are being let out of the cage at Brown, where young people enjoy something beyond the common cycle of intense academic grind, binge-drinking and pranks. They’re discovering their own larky, constructive power of invention – and we’ll all be the better for it.

Not taking no

Would you speak up? My head is ringing and I’m not sure if it’s from the profound silence out there or from being struck a heavy blow by irony.

On Friday, I urged the citizens of Greater Cleveland to join me in putting together a summit for everyone who wants to end the poor leadership, personal greed, dithering, apathy and cowardice that’s killing our city and find specific ways to change our collective fate right now. The only way to make that change is to get all the individuals here with creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and backbone to come up with cut-to-the-chase solutions to our many problems.

And the response was … nothing. Nothing at all. Are you all holding still as rabbits in your decimated, foreclosed neighborhoods, hoping your house isn’t next? Are you too busy wringing your hands over your disappearing jobs to write in? Maybe you’re all caught up in car repairs from driving down one of our many cratered roads or petrified over the start of another academic year in our impoverished, pathetic, dangerous inner-city schools. Or perhaps you’re just wide-screened, SUV-ed, overfed and oblivious in the outer-ring suburbs, where the only action Cleveland’s ugly demise inspires from you is a yawn and another bite of cheesecake.   

After a week of seeing firsthand how entrepreneurs, businesses, government, educators and artists have transformed the major cities of the American Northeast into handsome, thriving metropolitan areas over the last couple of decades, I’ve come back home wondering what happened to the creative and political will that Northeast Ohio must have had a century – even half a century – ago.  

I know some of it still exists among the arts community and the science and technology industries and in certain pockets of certain other sectors.

I know some members of our community have rigorously investigated what can be done for our city and have spent years making sure that needed changes took place. But they can’t save this place alone. They can’t do it with only a couple of brave, competent elected officials, with only the usual overtapped circle of philanthropists, with only a very few imaginative and dynamic big-business and civic leaders.

The truth is, most of the people “leading” Greater Cleveland have squandered the public’s energy, concern and resources by talking too much, by lacking the nerve to try bold, inventive strategies and by failing to act quickly and decisively.  Consequently, we’re all deflated. We’re all frustrated and depressed.

But we can’t just throw up our hands and most of us can’t just move away. Our community is our business, literally and figuratively. We’re the ones who have to do something about it and the first thing to do is to get together and choose our priorities.

Think this sounds like that whole Northeast Ohio Voices & Choices, interview-all-the-citizens thing conducted by the Fund for Our Economic Future that evidently resulted in nothing? Wrong. We already know what problems need to be tackled. What I’m talking about is holding an open public meeting where the people who live here map out a plan – actual, realistic steps – for getting needed changes made.

What steps?

Creating action groups of citizens and area professionals - not the same old authorities -experienced in fields such as education, urban planning, arts and design, environment and finance to figure out better, faster ways to get us a rehabilitated lakefront and public school system, a pro-creative business environment, and an exciting, attractive city infrastructure. 

Identifying which leaders are doing nothing, naming others who could do a better job and then publicly supporting those people as hires or appointees or election candidates. 

Devising a strategy for closely scrutinizing the work of elected officials and reminding them vocally and constantly that we demand certain results.

Insisting that laws be enforced requiring derelict property owners to fix up their property or be thrown in jail.

Starting a mass volunteer program of people willing to go out and clean up, paint, fix, decorate and landscape – or tear down and plant – whatever crumbling structures or lots aren’t privately owned.

Those are just a few ideas. The point is, ordinary citizens can accomplish a lot of they band together in big numbers, demand to be heard and take positive action. Voters are especially influential with the elected crowd.

And it won’t be enough simply to demonstrate and shout for change. We have to be willing to come up with our own creative solutions to our problems. If anyone were going to do it for us, our city wouldn’t be going down the drain.

So let’s get busy. Please share your thoughts. Readers in other places are welcome to join the local discussion here on Geniocity.com – let us know what’s working in your hometown. Soon.

End this failure of imagination and courage

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. – My feet really hurt. So do other parts of my anatomy, including my brain.

I’ve been traveling around the Northeast all week by car, alternately staring out the window of a blessedly fuel-efficient hybrid car at our national network of interstate highways and walking until my shins throb through New York City, Providence, Boston and Hanover, N.H. 

Perhaps to those who inhabit those places on a regular basis, the signs of our current economic malaise are manifest. To me, coming from what Forbes magazine recently called one of America’s fastest-dying urban areas, each of the East Coast metropolitan areas looks like a new and shining Emerald City compared to Cleveland.

I’ve been thinking and writing about Cleveland’s failure to thrive for nearly 17 years now, both as a journalist and as an artist. Along with countless other Greater Cleveland citizens and civic leaders, I’ve hypothesized and analyzed and admonished and prescribed until I’m blue in the face and spirits. I’ve even started a business in hopes of changing both Cleveland and the world for the better. 

And still my adopted hometown continues to crumble and sink, in spite of many people’s nearly superhuman efforts to find or make solutions to its appalling problems. The trouble is, the Clevelanders with imagination and guts generally have little money or power. And most of the ones with money and influence have greed in place of vision and guts.

They care only about controlling their little patches of turf, about getting re-elected, about promoting their own enterprises, even at the expense of the public good. Politicians or philanthropists, tycoons or trustees, they’re all too busy protecting their personal empires to embrace bold ideas, make bold decisions and bring about big change. 

We get the leaders we deserve, right? Whether by ballot or by civic indifference. So Cleveland, I have to conclude, simply lacks the will to alter its doom. Depressed, dulled, fatalistic – whatever. We give up.

Can that be true? Are there really only a few fighters in this city willing to try something vividly new in spite of the political do-nothings and stick with the struggle until the new thing really happens? Do the rest of us have the courage to elect the kinds of leaders that have transformed Chicago and New York and Providence in recent years or decades and then support them? Can we say no to the cartel of old, traditional power-brokers in business and party politics and take control of our own welfare and future?

We can. And what we need first is to look around and see who we are – the individual citizens with the brains and heart to see a better future and to insist that we reach it. We need a summit.

All of us - employees, small-business owners, family people, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, laborers, union members, techies and scientists, office workers, retirees, even leaders dissatisfied with where the current leadership has dumped us – need to come together to meet and hear each other, choose a few ideas that will change Cleveland significantly and commit to making them happen. Starting now. Right now.

The lakefront? The educational system? The reuse or resale of foreclosed homes and the repair of infrastructure? Whatever you think must be done to turn Cleveland around right now, post your ideas in comments on this blog or send them to carolyn@geniocity.com.

Enough of aimless talk and shrugging defeatism. The wrong people have been charting our course. All of us need to revolt against this terminal inertia and spinelessness and despicable self-interest and save our city. Wake up. Stand up. Write in.

Live from New York

NEW YORK, N.Y- If you need any reminders that entrepreneurism is flourishing in the United States, all you need to do is stroll down a sidewalk in this city and do a visual sweep from pavement to sky. 

At your feet, you find an endless array of wares – of dubious or divine provenance – spread on blankets or tables by people willing to worm their way into business through whatever tiny opening they can find; at eye level, you see the uncountable grocery stores, restaurants, gift shops and other small ventures of America’s newest and hardest-working arrivals; and everywhere above them, towers filled with enterprises of all sizes and kinds, an architectural timeline of success past, present and future.

The contrasts are amusing, but instructive: You can’t be afraid to start low, work hard and dream big. If the guy selling little sculptures – made out of metal nuts and screws – at a ratty folding table between Central Park and the Plaza Hotel is brave enough to pin his future on his own sheer doggedness and the whims of tourists, how can any of the rest of us fail to believe that we can make our own ideas work?

How else did Central Park and the Plaza get built?

As an entrepreneur, you tend to look for inspiration constantly just to get yourself out of bed in the morning. New York has plenty to offer, in spite of its gross-out excesses on both ends of the economic spectrum, because it takes real courage and resourcefulness just to open an ice-cream shop or a salon in this city of a million competitors.    

If people like that think they can succeed, the rest of us had better quit doubting and get busy. 

  

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Going in for time out. This last year has proved to me that entrepreneurship not only has its ups and downs, but its ins and outs, too – literally. For one quarter of the year, I’m out buzzing frenziedly around the landscape at constant meetings and gatherings, and for the next, I’m locked in my office for weeks at a time slaving alone over administrative and planning chores.

I feel like some species of arctic fly that suddenly emerges when the temperature rises above freezing, hysterically rushes around eating/mating/building/reproducing for three months and then abruptly vanishes into a preoccupied, twilight isolation under the tundra for the rest of the year. 

Come to think of it, that’s sort of how everyone in Cleveland lives, entrepreneurs or not. 

But even if it’s the norm around here, it’s not what I’d call a balanced regimen of activity. So, to even things out, I’ll be taking a little break from blogging this next week. You’ll hear from me – just not every day. And maybe before I return to the full-time gig on Monday, Aug.18, I’ll have rediscovered what the roses smell like. Or the moose. We arctic flies have to take what we can get.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Do the best you can. Why aren’t I farther along? It’s bad enough that I flagellate myself with that question nearly every minute of the day, but hearing it implied by other people is much worse torture. 

What do they think I spend my 19 daily waking hours doing – making decorative strings of paper clips? I don’t expect them to know everything that goes into starting my business, but I guess I do expect them to give me a little credit for working hard and dealing with endless minutiae and frustrations. For making do with very limited resources and few hands. For urging myself on even when I’ve exhausted my strength, sense of humor and confidence.

Should I be flattered that they evidently thought I could turn my idea into glory in a few months or totally flattened by their disdain for my actual, small-but-hard-won accomplishments? 

I don’t know, frankly. My usual reaction kind of morphs from shock and dismay to depression, anger and stolid resignation. I’d like to explain to every one of these self-appointed judges just exactly what I have to cope with to keep this project moving forward, but that always sounds to my ears like excuse-making. So I end up numbly forging on, doing the best I can.

It’s all I can do. I’m not perfect, my start-up isn’t perfect, the world isn’t perfect. The people who find me and my efforts insufficient aren’t perfect, either. So, for them, here’s the truth: Warren Buffett hasn’t adopted me yet, so I’m breaking my back and emptying my pockets to give this idea of mine an earthly, working form. It isn’t gorgeous or fancy yet, but the frame is up. It’s as good right now as I can make it right now.

And that’s going to have to be good enough until I can make it better. Detractors? Please help or get out of the way. This entrepreneur will thank you, whichever choice you make.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

The creative art of science.  What would imaginative people do without their basements and garages? Those have been the home birthing centers for many a band and handcrafted chair. But geniuses of technology, mechanics, engineering and design like to hang out there, too. 

And here’s something useful for all of them: GarageInventorLive.org. I saw part of this organization’s debut Tuesday when its founders launched their nonprofit, Cleveland-based creation with a conference called “Reinventing ‘Made in U.S.A.,’ “ held at Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center.

The collection of speakers, including members of NASA; funders; and engineering, manufacturing, marketing, commercialization and legal experts, were there to offer know-how and reinforce GarageInventorLive’s message of dedication to helping inventors figure out how to develop their ideas into products and sell those products to industries and a public that need them.

The point of all this, as GarageInventor’s mission statement explains, is to encourage American ingenuity and manufacturing and make the nation more economically competitive. The organization plans to offer inventors and contract manufacturers a “supply chain” of assistance and advice on invention development, commercialization and marketing.

Started by Mary Kaye Denning with help from Dick Clough, the dean of Cleveland’s marketing industry, GarageInventorLive.org sounds as if it could become a significant champion for the cause of creativity. So all you weekend tinkerers and sci-tech start-ups, take heed: This might be a resource that you need.  

And when you have your cool, wizardly products developed, give me a call. There might be a place for what you make in The Geniocity Shop.