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Fostering creativity from the top down … and the bottom up

In another week, a new era will begin in the United States. When Barack Obama is sworn in as president next Tuesday, most Americans will likely be hoping that our economy, international relationships, educational and health systems, environmental policies and transportation system will all improve.     

 On top of that, a lot of us will be looking for signs that our professions are priorities for elected leaders – and worrying when we don’t hear our own trades mentioned in the grand plans.

Well, no president, governor or mayor can have public-policy goals on everything from dental hygiene and dog-toy manufacture to baking and bicycle repair. But they often do try to affect the larger sectors those occupations belong to, such as health care, the chemical industry, food production and green business.

Arts and culture, on the other hand, have a legitimate gripe with government. Many leaders never seem to think about culture at all, much less regard it as an essential part of our economy and social infrastructure. When any do give it thought, they tend to see it as merely a factor in areas of larger concern – education or tourism, for instance – rather than as another kind of major system without which our nation could not function.

The truth is, no nation can function without arts and culture, for the very reason that so many other aspects of our lives depend on it.  What aspects? First and foremost, the arts are a medium of information crucial to the ongoing national dialogue required by a democracy. Think about it: We all glean ideas and facts from books, television, movies and videos, music, art and photography, plays and dancing (with the stars or without) and we talk about them with our families, friends and co-workers. They help us create emotional and social bonds, one-on-one and in big groups, from the Jane Austen Society to the Deadheads. They move us to take interest and take actions, just as news stories do. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” anyone?

They also provide the best, most effective basis we have for communication with other countries and peoples, promoting empathy and understanding through shared emotional experiences.

And they offer the most indelibly memorable and enjoyable means of teaching information and critical thinking that humans have yet invented, as increasing educational studies show.

Arts and culture also represent a huge portion of the economy – $166 billion of it, to be exact. According to Arts and Economic Prosperity III, a study released two years ago by Americans for the Arts, those billions sum up the economic impact of just the nonprofit arts. Try to imagine how much greater that figure would be if commercial arts – galleries, Broadway tours, rock-band concerts, CD sales, Hollywood movies, network sitcoms – were factored in, too. 

Arts and culture have always deserved better representation in government. For a nation with so much depending on those industries, it’s hard to justify having cabinet officers and secretaries for commerce, transportation and education, but none for culture.   

Fortunately, our next president does at least have a policy plan for it – or did when he ran for the office. Obama’s arts and culture plan spells out a number of his intentions, including reinvestment in arts education and cultural diplomacy, creating affordable health insurance for artists and supporting the NEA.

But local officials across the country may have some explaining do if they don’t start including arts and culture in their own agendas. Though they can grow in scope to represent a nation, individual artists and arts and cultural groups almost always begin locally, serving the immediate community with enriched lives, jobs, tourist dollars, more effective schooling and growing prestige.

 That’s why it’s strange to find that, here in economically staggering Cleveland, where the arts remain close to a $1 billion-per-year industry, the mayor’s plan for next year includes no mention of arts and culture at all. Read Frank Jackson’s Urban Agenda 2009 and see for yourself.

How many more American communities and leaders are like this one?

Really new ideas will save us

The blogosphere is buzzing about the vice-presidential debate last night. Somewhere in the District of Columbia, and among worried constituents at home, congressional legislators continue to agonize about the threat of another Depression. Like Cleveland’s Council of Smaller Enterprises, local chambers of commerce are probably polling their members to find out where they stand on propping up Wall Street when their own small businesses are teetering.

Let’s face it – no one really knows what to do. Our leaders and lawmakers and candidates and economists are guessing. Some people sound smarter than others and some have relevant experience with money, markets and the dismal science, but there are so many factors in play right now that no one can claim to have the solution to our financial crisis.

Talk about Hail Mary passes – the whole country is muttering a rosary’s-worth of oh pleases while waiting to see where the bailout ball, er, bill, lands.

As co-owner of one of the smallest small businesses in America and someone who will take creative risk-taking over conventional wisdom and stasis every single time, I have to say this:

It’s time to cut the crap and start using our brains here. No reflexive bailout is going to do any real good – the problems are too tangled and ingrown for a double-dip ice cream cone to make them all better. Not doing anything won’t work, either - that’d be like knowing you have an aggressive cancer, but deciding to sit still and just let it sort itself out.  

The fact is that the current administration isn’t smart enough or inventive enough or responsible enough to come up with the innovative strategies we need to rid ourselves of the rotten parts in our financial structure while saving what deserves saving. All we should do right now is help the banks just enough to keep them standing until the next president can collect the best creative brains in the country and start designing a real plan to change the way America’s money is handled. 

I’m not the only one who thinks so.

But I haven’t heard anyone else say that the plan the next administration and Congress devise needs to be  revolutionary. It needs to replace our corrupt and collapsing financial sector with a carefully structured, but imaginative framework of policies supporting not just institutions or the greedheads who run them but, most all, the regular citizens who depend on them.

It needs to create a banking culture that invests in community development by helping individuals, small businesses, neighborhoods and towns get on their feet and stay there. 

I’m not a money or a policy expert, but here are the needs I see:  

Jobs – There aren’t enough good ones. So small businesses, especially the creative kind, need to be encouraged as much as big businesses. Why not expand micro-loans into programs of graduated loans that lend entrepreneurs increasing amounts as they pass certain business-growth milestones? Like those combined college programs that invite a qualified student to earn a bachelor’s and an M.D. without having to go through the med-school application process, a graduated-loan program could select entrepreneurs in the idea stage and move them through growth stages with money and mentoring until their businesses reach pre-determined goals and can operate independently. Unlike venture-capital companies, these programs would aim to help start-ups that would probably always be small, but would also be stable local employers.

Homeownership – There’s nothing wrong with every American wanting to own his or her own home.  Homeowners create community stability, maintain their properties better than renters, have stakes in the future of their neighborhoods. The real-estate industry just got criminally greedy about making money off people’s housebuying impulses. So why not take a similar graduated approach to homeowning? Just as leaders in Paducah, Ky., did, local governments and banks all over the U.S. could offer rundown or foreclosed properties for free or very little to artists and other entrepreneurs who agree to make improvements in exchange for ownership. As these properties appreciated – and in Paducah, they have – whole neighborhoods would improve and become magnets for desirable economic activity such as shops, restaurants and small businesses that employ the residents. And along with creative approaches to bringing homeownership within reach of lower-income people, let’s make sure banks strictly observe the proper standards of income and collateral that regular home-loan applicants should have to meet before they get any money.

Education – We’re going to have to make sure that communities – and thus the larger economy – have the human capital they need to engender creative businesses and provide the skills, knowledge and ideas that all community activities and systems require. How do we make sure that all people get good higher schooling and training and the chance for productive, self-supporting lives?  Maybe financial institutions should offer student loans that don’t have to be paid off in cash. What if students got money for college or vocational training from the same banks that offer graduated loans to small businesses? The banks could let students work off their loans during or after college by serving as apprentices to those same small businesses. The businesses would get skilled, low-cost employees as part of their loan programs, students would repay loans with their labor while gaining hands-on experience and resume credits, and the banks would get an accelerated return on investment in the last phases of the graduated-loan program as the apprentices allow the small businesses to thrive and pay back the banks sooner.

Let’s not come out of this national financial disaster with only a patched-up system and the same old mindsets to show for it. Maybe my creative ideas won’t work. But somebody else’s will.

What do entrepreneurs and other creative people want?

Now that we’re all about to embark on the final sprint of the presidential-campaign marathon, maybe it’s time to figure out what we want from the next four years. 

I mean, if you were choosing a job or a school or even a new car, you’d determine what characteristics or features you wanted in it, right? Then you’d compare your list to the available products or services and decide which one gave you the most good stuff with the smallest number of problems.

So let’s do the same for 2009-12. Let’s make a list of results we’d like to see over the next four years. Then each of us can decide which candidate or party or platform plank seems most likely to bring those things about.

What do entrepreneurs want? We’re creative people, in our way - risk-takers, builders, maybe even visionaries of a sort. We don’t sit around and wait for someone else to wave a wand and make things better. We take action ourselves. Our motivations vary, but all of us want to have some control over our own destinies, persuade the world that we have something desirable to offer and make a living in the process.

What would make our lives and businesses better? I have the floor, so I’ll start, but don’t hesitate to add your comments.

My list begins with peace. We’ve got to have it to save lives, save money and rebuild our relationships with the other nations of the world. Our safety, quality of life and our economic survival depend on it.

Next, I want revolutionary change in the fuels we produce and use and in the way we treat the environment. One cannot happen without the other. We need viable solar and wind power now – they’re the only energy sources that are both limitless in supply and completely nonpolluting. And we need to take other steps to reduce global warming and assure clean air, water, soil and habitats for ourselves and all living creatures forevermore. Who are these people so obsessed with money, so afraid of change and so stupidly heartless that they don’t care that they’re poisoning their own children and wrecking the world? Government and industry must change or they will have no natural resources or human markets left. (And I don’t foresee cockroaches purchasing plastic packaging and SUVs.)

Logically, then, I also want governments, foundations, venture capitalists, universities and any other underwriters of enterprise to invest a great deal more in R&D, especially in very early-stage ideas and enterprises that might help us all out of these terrible messes we’re in. Far too much money goes to conglomerate business that is deeply invested in the status quo, not to mention cavalier about laws and regulations, ruthless about cutting and outsourcing jobs, unfairly price-supported and tax-loopholed and winked at by the enforcers of our supposed antitrust laws.

If we’re going to have more entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and other creative people coming up with better ideas, processes and products for us, we have to have a far better educational system. It has to be one that no longer reflects the outmoded values and needs of the 19th or even the 20th century, but one that rejects rote, assembly-line teaching and testing and embraces creative thought, experimentation, discussion, critical evaluation and equality of opportunity for every person regardless of gender, race, socioeconomic status, religion, medical condition or any other such factor. All who can think are needed to improve this world and every last one deserves the proper preparation.

And while I entirely support freedom of religion as ensured by the Constitution, I also want freedom from religion in government. Our science, our art, our educational, health and political systems have been hostages of idiosyncratic beliefs – and aggressively controlling believers - for far too long. Religions are not the sole proprietors of morals and ethics and it’s time all of our laws reflected the right of individual Americans to live and work unmolested by the spiritual dictates of others. There can be no intellectual freedom where a theocracy rules or an Inquisition lurks – no matter what religion the theocracy and Inquisition represent.        

These are the Big Five, as far as I’m concerned. They’re going to steer my vote in every election from now on, just as they steer my actions as a human being and businessperson.

So let me ask again: What do you want for your next four years?