Creativity: One more natural resource we’re destroying?

If you can read, you must read this by the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. Is creative cannibalism really where we want to go? And if the answer actually is yes, how long before we eat ourselves into an extinction of imagination?

Journalists need Creativity 101

Peter Friedman’s blog post yesterday on this site  about how well law school prepares people to be lawyers got me thinking about how well journalism school  - and journalism itself – prepares and encourages people to be good reporters, opinion-writers and editors. 

My own experience of journalism school was perhaps unusual – the curriculum was designed to cover the basics of news-gathering and -writing, media law and analyzing statistical surveys, along with photography and layout for those interested, but because I was preparing to be a theater critic, I found I had to essentially construct my own course of study. There were no classes that really delved into the evaluation of creative work or that examined the purpose, ethics and goals of  criticism, much less any that offered regular opportunities to practice the craft of reviewing.

Perhaps because I took an unusual path within  my profession, it seemed to me that the standard curriculum did little more than indoctrinate students in a rote style of newswriting and narrow categories of  news coverage that the business had adopted generations ago and that had slowly hardened into a kind of industry-wide arteriosclerosis that kept journalism from significantly changing and adapting along with the times. There were, to quote a Paul Simon song, “no times at all – just the New York Times.”    

Like law schools, apparently, J-schools also seem to attract people as professors who have very little real experience of the trade. Many of my own teachers were either theorists who examined the media’s effects on society rather than how to put out a great newspaper or nuts-and-bolts newscraft instructors who had left the profession years earlier because, apparently, they weren’t much good at it.  

And like the law, the journalism industry itself has been run largely by people rewarded for sticking with business as usual, rather than being notable innovators or even just good managers.

Journalism doesn’t prepare its practitioners to be managers; it simply moves reporters or ad salesmen or production folks into higher positions, to deal with people and administrative tasks when their skills lie in digging up information, scribbling, hustling ad space or designing pages. Lacking any real training in their new power jobs, they often resort to copying the older editors or managers around them, perpetuating bad leadership habits and old, entrenched ideas of what a news publication should be. That some good managers emerge is evidence of natural individual talent rather than an astutely planned and run system.

I suppose the status quo becomes gospel in any industry, but it’s particularly inexcusable in a business that’s supposed to be all about what’s new. In medicine, they say “Physician, heal thyself.”  In journalism, it ought to be, “Editor, broaden your own darned mind – or you’ll never get your readers to broaden theirs.”

Imagination and creativity have to be encouraged in both the newsroom and the  J-school classroom. Students must be shown how to think differently, to try new approaches with every story and every photograph or video; editors must stop copying other publications’ tiny steps forward and boldly experiment, not just with the individual elements of news publishing ,but with the concept of news itself, and let their staffs come up with fresh ways of communicating information.

My guess is that, right now, the J-schools are actually ahead of the industry on this.  With young, electronics-savvy students  flowing into their programs, many schools have embraced the Internet as the primary medium of the news and are investing in the state-of-the-art equipment and spirit of re-invention with which they need to explore this new frontier, while the economically ravaged professional news industry struggles to overcome its own ossification and get up to speed before it truly and finally dies of shortsightedness, cowardice and a dangerously low idea count.  

Someone – I think it was a character in the Steve Carell movie, Dan in Real Life - once said, “Love isn’t a feeling – it’s an ability.” I would say the same thing about creativity - and journalism needs to develop it.

If we change venture capital, can we create a better economy?

I’ve been saying for a year or more now that venture capitalists and other funders of start-up companies have developed such extreme tunnel vision about what kinds of enterprises are good to invest in that, these days, they’re looking at the future through a  pinhole. 

In my post of June 16, I focused on the me-too narrow-mindedness of Ohio and particularly Northeast Ohio, where government money, venture capital and incubator services are available only to entrepreneurs who want to develop and manufacture biomedical and computer technologies – and mostly in large amounts that funders hope will beget enormous returns in very short order.

So I was pretty elated to read yesterday’s New York Times story about venture-capital investments being way too big and too often going to the same kinds of companies. Maybe if the money-people start realizing that many worthwhile start-ups of all kinds can be successfully and profitably nurtured with smaller investments and longer, more organic development processes, they’ll get more creative and we’ll start seeing communities gain the business diversification and full use of human capital that are the keys to sustainable economies of all sizes.

After all, farmers know it’s vital to diversify their crops. Why don’t venture capitalists get it?

A refusal to succeed

Fittingly, it was an education story that got me thinking about this.  The piece by Sam Dillon in yesterday’s New York Times was about Arne Duncan,  the Obama administration’s education secretary, wanting to push the reset button on failing schools by closing them down and starting them over – a tactic he used as CEO of the Chicago municipal school system.

The story ends with a quote from Bryan Hassel, an education consultant:

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said. “But as a nation, we’ll never have the capacity to do this work successfully until we make the commitment.”

Hassel’s words struck me, because I had never chanced to think of change in these terms before – that commitment is the heart of deliberate change.

And that’s the reason why so many people fail to be creative, because creativity is the result of deliberate change and deliberate change means hard, determined, don’t-give-up work.

It’s so easy to be inert. And fatalistic. And hopeless. It doesn’t demand anything of you except to stay slumped at your desk or on your couch and do as you’re told. Being inert also gives you permission to crab about what’s wrong as much as you want without actually trying to solve any of the problems that bug you. And if you ever go so far as to attempt a little creative change, inertia allows you to give up easily and say you knew all along it wouldn’t work.

I live in a city and state where inertia is the perpetual Zeitgeist. There are plenty of creative and committed individuals here, trying in their one- or few-person ways to transform the place into the vital, prosperous, exciting region they see in their dreams, but the prevailing mood is one of defeat.  We are resigned, here, to our loserhood. In fact – heresy alert! – I think we enjoy it.

Because it means we don’t actually have to collectively get up off our large butts and do something. What would be the point? We’re losers and nothing we do will ever change that. Loserhood is our brand and we’re perversely proud of it. We don’t demand the best of our leaders or schools or communities because we don’t want to ask the best of ourselves – which is to make hard decisions, stick with them and labor ceaselessly until we get the right results.

I guess we’re too scared and lazy to do that. So, apparently, Duncan and Obama are going to have to reinvent America without us. Well, so what? Every sturdy, beautiful, redone house needs a basement drain. We’ll be happy to take that role so we never ever have to climb the stairs.

You might say we’re so convinced we’ll fail that we’re … committed to it.

Photo by Kat

Getting a Big Bang out of creativity

This is great timing:  In the wake of the May 15 release of the new Tom Hanks movie, Angels & Demons - whose wildly imaginative plot  (based on the book by Dan The Da Vinci Code Brown) involves CERN, a real-life, European particle-physics laboratory featuring the Large Hadron Collider – the New York Times has a story about the National Ignition Facility .

No, it doesn’t mass-manufacture car start parts. This NIF place is … well, it sounds even more like Technicolor science fiction than Brown’s fantasy version of CERN. It’s a football-stadium-sized building filled with mirrors and crystals and dedicated to figuring out fusion.

Fusion is the Holy Grail of energy production. Some 20 years ago, a couple of scientists claimed they had created “cold fusion” in a bottle, which might as well have been cold tea in a bottle for all the fusion it actually represented, and after being discredited and generally reviled by their peers, they slunk away into obscurity and are probably selling miracle wrinkle creams somewhere today. 

But on goes the quest to fuse simple atoms into more complex atoms and release astral amounts of clean energy. (Does clean mean no radioactivity or just no carbon? Someone should ask, don’t you think?)   So over the last 12 years or so, about 10,000 people out in Livermore, Calif., have spent $3.5 billion creating this huge House of Lasers in hopes of smashing some hydrogen atoms together, making helium and thus allowing us to keep all the lights blazing in our houses and our thermostats set on a comfy 72 for all eternity. 

This is not to scoff.  Most people never thought they’d be able to have person-to-person conversations through a black box on the wall or see live people moving around in a studio  - or on the moon! – through another, bigger box in the living room. Or  have the power to annihilate a whole city with a single bomb.  Maybe the darned NIF thing could work … just not like The Bomb, let’s hope.  

Angels & Demons endowed the collision of matter and antimatter with bomblike properties that the CERN folks have been quick to pooh-pooh for the public’s peace of mind.  If we can believe them – and, presumably, we can, because France and Switzerland, whose mutual border CERN straddles, have not exploded – we can probably believe the NIF.

So while we’re waiting for Livermore, Calif. to ignite  - in a good way! – let’s amuse ourselves by finding out the difference between CERN’s real science and the Hollywood drama of A&D’s spectacularly ruptured heavens. First question: Does antimatter produce an anticlimax?

Jazz aftermath

Some other people’s takes on the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival: the New York Times‘ Jon Pareles on the music and the mood;  Rolling Stone’s view of the fest’s rock-and-roll; and the Times-Picayune’s Jaquetta White on the size of the crowds JazzFest drew in this recession year.

Is there a doctor (of sociology) in the house?

Convulsions. That’s the only word I can think of to describe what the United States is going through now. 

And what’s causing them? People have focused strictly on an economy that’s pumping ever more weakly, but we have a wide array of symptoms: a rapidly deteriorating skeleton of steel and concrete structures; ruined or exhausted resources and compromised defenses; an obesity of wealth aggravating a flesh-eating poverty; an educational nervous system whose synapses aren’t firing. And now a painful rash of failing newspapers, inexorably spreading. 

This last is becoming agony for us journalists, for whom every sale or closing is like losing a family member to some horrible pandemic. A story in TIME online predicts more deaths and soon.   

I can’t believe these problems are unrelated and I suspect that money is not the real root cause, though it’s certainly a factor. What we need is a differential diagnosis.

What could account for all these ills? Could it be our attitude?

Yes, I’m suggesting that the U.S. has a psychosomatic problem – and psychosomatic doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real, just that they started in our heads.

Look at where those heads have been: For decades now, Americans have been absorbed with amassing personal wealth and spending it ostentatiously, needlessly, on unwholesome toys and pursuits, from SUVs and multimillion-dollar homes to environmentally destructive industrial products and practices. Until recently, the majority of us have voted for leaders who ripped away regulations, encouraged overdevelopment, neglected schools and food safety and the health-care system, turned corporations loose on the public like strep colonies in a neonatal ward, ignored – even defied – the warning signs of a dying  planet and a sickened generation of children and kept indulging the rich while depriving the poor.

Why did we do it? Why didn’t we invest our obscene incomes in better education and medical services and more nutritious food? Why didn’t we clean up the air, water and soil and the stupid, polluting cars and industries that poisoned them in the first place? Why didn’t we insist that our leaders accomplish these things?

And why are we letting our news organizations go under?

Apparently, because we enjoy being rich and not thinking about anything but our own comfort and fun. Or because those of who weren’t rich so wanted to be that we were willing to let the wealthy do as they pleased, in hopes that one day, that would be us. Only now – irony of ironies – we are all becoming the poor and afflicted that we didn’t used to care about.

And I wonder if, at long last, we’ll change our attitudes. Electing Obama was a tremendously encouraging sign that Americans at least wanted a new economic strategy for our nation. But I’m looking for a different sign, now. The one I’m hoping to see will show that we care about more than our own wallets, that we care what’s going on in the world and demand the most accurate information about it that’s humanly possible to provide.

If the last major newspaper dies, will Americans suddenly discover that they miss the on-the-ground, eye-witness, reliably researched news they used to get from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and all the other papers that invested money from subscriptions and advertising in huge networks of skilled reporters and editors? Or will our society just blow the whole thing off and contentedly derive its impressions of the world and what’s happening in it from YouTube and the aimless minutiae of Twitter?

Americans can’t run their country without dependable daily news and news organizations can’t produce that news unless Americans are willing to pay for it.  Foreign correspondents and  Capitol Hill reporters – and all the people who make professional-quality print, radio, TV and even online news possible - represent enormous amounts of ability, training and experience. If they can’t get paid for their work, they can’t do it at all and their skills will disappear from our society. And then we will become a nation of people without a clue, unable function and ripe for takeover by whatever oppressor wants power over us.

But maybe Americans won’t say “good riddance” when the news disappears. Maybe they’ll realize they need it back. I’m waiting to see. … with the journalistic defibrillator paddles in my hands.

We have to solve the property problem

If ever a city needed to get creative fast, it’s Cleveland. We need some top legal, financial and business minds to lock themselves in a conference room with proven idea people and not come out until they have a workable strategy for untangling Cleveland from the poisonous spider’s web of mass home abandonment and foreclosure described in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine story .

I’m thinking a streamlined legal process. Nimble public-private partnerships.  Mandatory jail time for nonresident property owners – be they bankers, mortgage brokers, developers or landlords – who neglect their properties and cheat  their buyers and renters. Heavy damages, too, so there’d be money for the city to repair or demolish those houses. And incentives for responsible people to buy, fix up, and live for a long time in, the salvageable homes.

This real-estate disaster is Cleveland’s Bay of Pigs, its Black Plague, its Apocalypse. And it hasn’t descended on us from out of the blue – it started a long time ago and is simply getting much worse quickly. For decades, our leaders haven’t done enough. And now, there isn’t going to be much of a city left if we don’t hurry.

So I’m not kidding: If Cleveland’s and Cuyhoga County’s political, business, law and creative leadership will do this much - select and invite the best minds from these national sectors - I’ll book the room and pay for all the pizza. Cleveland’s strangling in its own sticky mess. Let’s set it free.

Are you inexperienced? Maybe more creative, too

Here’s one of the best and simplest explanations I’ve found for why so few people in positions of authority have any creative vision about their own areas of expertise: They know too much.

The December 2007 New York Times business story by Janet Rae-Dupree, which is what that link will lead you to, notes that as people get crammed full of the history, methods, myths, attitudes and common wisdom that study and personal experience bring them in the course of a career, they lose the ability to see anything in their fields with unschooled eyes.

It’s like trying to appreciate written characters purely as geometric shapes and patterns once you’ve learned to read -  it’s pretty much impossible not to recognize the words.

And that’s the best reason I can think of for 1) bringing in idea people from other departments or disciplines to help organizations – or even individuals – reimagine themselves, and 2) rotating staff into unfamiliar jobs or projects every so often, even briefly. A fresh view leads to freer thinking and new ways of doing.    

Too many industries – including my own, journalism – simply look within their own circle for answers to their shortcomings and failures and get old, worn-out copies of copies of copies of once-original ideas. Maybe what we need is a new profession – call it change agency or, as Cynthia Barton Rabe suggests in the story, “zero-gravity” thinking - whose smart and creative practitioners get paid simply to walk into situations they aren’t familiar with and tell the residents what they see.

I think it should be an iron-clad part of their contracts that whoever hires them has to act on their advice within three months.

Photo found in darkmatter’s photostream on flickr

Top photo found in superrine’s photostream on flickr

Can you like money and help others, too?

Speaking of doing well by doing good (as I was last time):

There’s an essay in Tuesday’s New York Times by Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser addressing the idea that’s currently in the air about social entrepreneurship, to wit: Is making money for investors a for-profit corporation’s sole legitimate aim or is there something more it should try to accomplish, such as making the world a better place?

After explaining the recent history of this question and quoting people from each side of the issue (Bill Gates and the bleeding hearts, Milton Friedman and the ruthless profit maximizers), Glaeser comes down firmly in the middle, but he does make an important gesture of respect toward creativity and innovation:

“I certainly agree with Friedman that traditional corporations have one overriding moral obligation — to fulfill their fiduciary duties and maximize shareholder wealth. Yet I’m also a fan of organizational innovation, which makes me a little more enthusiastic about the idea of experimenting with new legal entities with more complex objectives.”

Hear, hear. The plan for Geniocity.com is all about helping society through services and goods that also earn serious profits, allowing us to do even more for society and and earn even greater profits. It’s never sounded like a confused or conflicted mission to me. I think it makes perfect sense and I’m hoping more and more people will start feeling the same way, especially since we all can now see the disastrous effects of unrestricted greed on the economy, our quality of life and our nation’s financial security.

Read Glaeser here and see what you think.  

     or? and?