Resetting a Creative Economy :: Richard Florida

Richard Florida | Author, Who’s Your City? and Director, Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Founder Creative Class Group
Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the ‘Best and Brightest’. He is author of the best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which was cited as a major breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review. His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns, such as BMW, and are being used globally to change the way regions, nations, and companies compete. He is founder of the Creative Class Group and has also been recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation. He is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

• Every single human being is creative.
• The real challenge of our time is figuring out how to harness that creative energy so that creative furnace inside of each human being is growing.
• The social categories we impose on ourselves [race, religion, gender ,etc] undermine creativity.

The Great Reset

• The most important event of our time is collapse of our financial institutions.
• We are living through the most momentous opportunities in human history.
• It’s not a depression, recession, crisis or panic… it really is a reset.
• We are in a resetting point.
• “It’s a raw emotion reset…”
• This thing we are going through won’t be over in a day… don’t believe the hype.
• The underlying shift we are going through is one of the largest in human history.
• We come here because we intuit this change is going on and that our society, economy and culture are changing in the most fundamental ways.
• We see these trends and evolving patterns in our own ways.

The Old Order

• Human beings have generated economic wealth throughout all human history.
• We originally used natural assets by doing agricultural work.
• We then began to build factories that were fueled by our labor.
• The move from an agricultural to industrial society was massive and led to two great depressions, two world wars, and the development of work unions.
• We built the “great golden age of prosperity.”
• People could earn a living by doing hard factory work.
• The change we are going through is bigger than that.
• Just having great farms and having people working in factories isn’t enough.

Rise of the Creative

• A growing number of people no longer work in factories, they are working with their minds.
• We’ve shifted into a knowledge economy… an information age, a post-production era.
• What binds us together and makes us human is our shared creativity.
• We stand on the shoulders of giants.
• We cooperate and collaborate, and we have a storehouse of creative history and a future.
• The economic crisis grew a creative economy.
• The creative communities grew up in the shell of an old order.
• The old order is crumbling. The first place it fell apart was in popular culture.
• Movements of racial equality, the student movement, etc. in the 60s were a giant temper tantrum as society unleashed pent up creative energy that was being held back by the system.
• The legacy of the 60s is places like Silicon Valley.
• It gave rise to new ways of working and innovating.
• In the 80s and 90s, working and living became more blended.
• We created whole new sectors and the creative sector became the leading sector.
• The creative economy generates 50% of the income in our society.
• Our whole way of life ended in October of 2008.
• We used to have the notion of the “American dream”.. suburban house filled with material possessions.
• The problem with the “American dream” is that the demand for material goods continued to grow.
• People questioned this way of life.
• 60% of Americans said they’d like to like in a walkable neighborhood.
• The way we live our lives is completely different.
• In the old order, people not only got wealth from working in factories, they got purpose and meaning through institutions… schools, churches, etc.
• So much meaning in that old order was channeled through material possessions.
• We are moving from a material stage to a new age of post-materialism.
• Our confidence and trust in every kind of institution is being annihilated, [business, presidency, media, etc].

How do we engage people in a creative economy?

• We talk about creating good jobs in America. We talk about getting manufacturing back in our country.
• Why?
• We should be actively creating opportunity for people.
• The creative class are in good shape.
• We have 65 million people who serve us every day who make ½ of what factory works make and a 1/3  of what creatives make.
• We turned factory jobs into good jobs and built a society out of them.
• Every community has to make a commitment to bring creativity and innovation into factory jobs.
• Eliminate gross income inequality.
• We need to create a new kind of society for true creativity.
• Give people the right to use their talent and creativity to live the life they truly desire.
• We’re not after more material wealth, it doesn’t fill the void.

Purpose and meaning in our new creative economy come from three core things:

1 – Meaningful work

• Human emotional happiness requires more than money.
• People want to do meaningful work – work that challenges and engages, and working with teams we resonate with.
• We want have control of the terms of our work.
• Give people the freedom and flexibility to do their day-to-day work.

2 – Social Relationships

3 – Community

• Communities we can resonate with are important.
• People need to be in a place in a community that they love.
• How do we provide purpose and meaning in your community?
• How do you find the place for you?
• The place we live is the hinge point of the creative age.
• We used to say: “We’ve gone where the company has sent us…”
• It’s not companies that move the economy… cities do.
• You create something new through community.
• A community is where different people and different kind of activities are going on.
• Cities turn out trends and new ideas.
• It’s not companies, it’s our communities.
• We don’t ask people what they do, we ask where the live.
• Its the places we live that create meaning.

The cities where people are most effective do two things.

1 – They are open minded, diverse and tolerant.

• They let people find their place for them.
• They are open to everyone.

2 – They are increasingly livable and invest not only in historic, cultural assets; they preserve their natural environments.

• We are living through the most transformative moment of our time.
• If we look down deep and work now, we can begin making great communities that make great people.
• We can build something that is truly remarkable.

We should pair our talents with our burdens.

For more in this, check out Richard’s latest book, The Great Reset.