The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is. The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and that the talent of a particular person must mesh with the capital structure of his or her time if major success is to result... The main enduring insight... is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability... In reality the complementarity concept is easier to work with and also more fruitful for thinking about policy implications or for that matter the implications for management or talent training.  Success is fragile but foster competing cultures based on clusters of talent motivated by rivalry and emulation. Don't filter out the eccentrics or the risk takers. It's still a good book and a fun book.

The rest is here. I concur. I think it is the best of Gladwell's books, actually. And he handled himself very well with Matt Lauer this morning.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt counters the notion of the long tail (via Whimsley):

although the tail is very interesting and we enable it, the vast majority of the revenue remains in the head. And this a lesson that businesses have to learn. While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is. a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, responds noting the "irony" that:

a very short Head of Long Tail aggregators: Amazon, iTunes, Google and their kin dominate their markets to a blockbuster-like degree.  ... [N]ew research from McKinsey suggests that this sort of radical inequality is increasingly the norm as markets get more networked. "Powerlaws do imply wildly unequal distributions of money, power, celebrity and everything else." So much for "democratization." And it's not just companies. The Long Tail - the powerlaw created by network effects - may be creating super-celebrity,

Whimsley concludes: "There's more, and he holds on to some of his assertions, but basically, it's all over for the long tail."

We have been looking closely at the geography of creative industries and occupations. You get exactly this pattern of a big fat huge head (that is extreme geographic concentration in two super-celebrity markets - New York and L.A.), a dramatic fall-off after that, the emergence of one or two specialized nodes (Nashville in music, D.C. in media, Las Vegas in dancers, and so on) and then some gentle dispersion among much smaller centers in the tail. We see this pattern of a biruficated, barbell-like spatial structure popping up in the geography of these and other creative industries and occupations. More to come...

The relationship between our personalities and our choice of locations is one of the hottest topics for understanding cities and urban areas. A new study in Psychological Science shows the connection between psychological "temperament" and migration. Not a psychology expert myself, I consulted with Cambridge University psychologist, Jason Rentfrow co-author of a path-breaking study of personality and place.

As Rentfrow explains, the concept of temperament comes from "developmental psychology and is generally regarded as the inherited." They appear early in life and serve as the foundation for personality. In other words, they are the aspects of our personalities that are tied most closely to our genetics. There are three kinds of temperament - activity, sociability, and emotionality - and the study looked at the effects of these types on who was likely to migrate and where.

The study shows that temperament or personality influences whether someone moves, how frequently they move, and the kind of place they move to. Highly sociable people are the most likely to move, and they are more likely to move to urban areas than rural areas. The study suggests one explanation may be that urban areas have more people and therefore provide sociable types with more opportunities to meet and mingle with others. People with an active temperament were more likely to move, and to move more often.

I asked Rentfrow for his thoughts on the possible relationship between active temperament and open-to-experience people. My interviews with creative-class types reflected a preference for activity or "energy" often combining an intellectual energy with a need for outdoor activity as well as for street level cultural activity. He responded that "being open and curious involves having an active imagination. And physical activity is sometimes required to satisfy intellectual activity. "

The study is here.

While of great interest today, the discussion of design in business is hardly a new phenomenon. In a 1965 speech at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Hugh DuPree, one of a troika of DuPrees who presided over the company for half a century, described how his family went about connecting business with design. In the process, they transformed Herman Miller from a tiny failing residential furniture manufacturer to a paragon of American design:

"Design is an integral part of the business. The designer's decisions are as important as those of the sales or production departments. It is his responsibility to recognize needs and solve them in his own way. There is no pressure on the designer to modify design to meet the market. Sales and Manufacturing have a responsibility to feed back to Design information that helps the designers to define the problem.

"But the designer decides how to use this information.... We decide what we will make. If the designer and management like a solution to a particular problem, it is put into production. There is no attempt to conform to the so-called norms of public taste, nor is there any special faith in the methods used to evaluate the buying public. Our designers must not be hamstrung by management's fear of getting out of step. All that is asked of the designer is a valid solution."

"ABSOLUTE CONTROL." Hugh and his father, DJ, and brother, Max, believed the role of designers was to create "valid solutions," while the role of sales and manufacturing was to provide feedback that would help designers define problems, and the role of top management was to protect the designers from the rest of the company: "In our company, the designers receive and depend upon feedback from Sales and Manufacturing, but they report only to top management."

This philosophy follows from the initial edict of the first designer Herman Miller hired in 1931, Gilbert Rohde: "The designer was to retain absolute control over the production of his creations. The manufacturer would not be allowed to change the mechanics or appearance of a design to the slightest degree."

The DuPree approach could be seen as the second broad model of modern management. The first can be credited to Frederick Taylor and Alfred Sloan. Taylor was instrumental in bringing science to the field of management with his time and motion studies in the early 20th century. Sloan was the legendary CEO of General Motors who helped establish the notion of modern professional management in the U.S. consciousness.

PRECIOUS RESOURCE. Thanks to Taylor and Sloan the business world saw that the role of senior management was to manage with dispassion and analytical rigor. The second model can be credited to early proponents such as Herman Miller all the way through to players such as Apple Computer.

This model brought the understanding that the modern analytical management of Taylor and Sloan should be supplemented with the artistic and creative sensibilities of designers such as George Nelson, Charles Eames, and David Kelley. In this second model, the role of senior management was to protect these precious designers and incorporate their thinking into the corporation's decisions.

To DuPree, what exactly was this magical thing called design that required protection and that only designers could do?

"Designing then is a basic activity. It comes to grips with the very essence of a problem and proceeds to develop a solution organically, from the inside out, as opposed to 'styling' which concerns itself largely with the distinctive mode of presentation or with the externals of a given solution. The design activity is based upon an understanding of the intrinsic principle of a given problem and its solution."

CREATIVE TEMPERAMENT. To DuPree, designing clearly is a fundamental way of thinking; a different way of thinking-what we might call "Design Thinking"-than either that of stylists or salespeople or manufacturers. Stylists think about making things pretty, while salespeople and manufacturers think about making things profitable.

While defining his top management role centrally as protecting and exalting the designers, Hugh DuPree was not completely unconflicted about his life with designers: "Like it or not, designers are important; indeed, vitally essential for the success of a business enterprise." "Like it or not" - an interesting turn of phrase that was perhaps a product of one too many conflicts with his indispensable but dictatorial designers!

But did his model, which had great designers protected by inspired senior executives from philistine line managers, take hold across the U.S. economy and have the effect he sought? By his own assessment: Definitively not. "American industrial programs of planned obsolescence have set up an industrial complex geared to producing waste, and a society trained to accept it." Already by 1965, DuPree witnessed the scourge of drab, uninspiring products dominating the industrial landscape that was a mere minor foreshadowing of the world to come.

TIME TO INTEGRATE. The DuPree design model worked for Herman Miller, thanks to the commitment of the DuPree family. However, to the extent that DuPree's assessment is correct, the model didn't take hold and produce the desired outcome across the economy. So we must consider the possibility that if Design Thinking is critical, maybe restricting it to designers and protecting them from business people is not actually the most productive avenue to pursue. Perhaps eliminating the need for protection by turning business people into Design Thinkers would be more effective.

While for its time, the DuPree family design model was highly advanced and visionary, it is time for a third-generation management model. Rather than supplementing modern analytical management with design sensibilities, it is time to integrate design into management practice. The job of executives isn't to protect designers from line management, but to help line management become Design Thinkers. It is time for the management discipline of Design Thinking.

To create a Design Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm's product means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an emotional and psychological level. It must also create a culture in which line managers are not satisfied with merely serving customers, but insist on delighting them and making them feel the company is their partner, friend, and confidante.

FOLLOW THE TRAIL. It must create an operating environment by which line managers experiment with new ways of delighting the customer, realizing fully that some new ideas will fail, but that in failing these efforts have valuable benefits. Even failed experiments help convince customers that the company is aiming high, and the feedback will help them come up with newer, better approaches. In this operating environment, line managers will view customers as people with whom to prototype and test new ideas, as colleagues in innovation, sitting on the same side of the table.

The great firms of the 21st century will be those that recognize the goal isn't to supplement analytics with design; it is all about integrating design and management. Everybody with an ounce of sense and a checkbook can supplement. Only those with passion and courage can and will integrate. And those who integrate should whisper a "thank you" to the DuPrees who blazed a path that made the notion of integration a true possibility.

Originally published in BusinessWeek.

As U.S. cities compete for the title of "Greenest" and vie to attract green industry, Portland State University is launching an initiative to use the city as a laboratory for sustainability studies. Portland was recently named America's most sustainable city for the second year by SustainLane. PSU hired noted Dutch urbanist Wim Wiewel as its president this year, and the city as laboratory may be the first fruit of his administration.

While I was looking this up online, I came across a link to Paul Hawkin's great piece on cities as environmental assets. Here's a key line:

Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country.

The lost decade is often talked about in Japan. From 1990 to 2000, the Japanese economy was stuck in the aftermath of a burst housing bubble and the inability to channel investment into the "next big thing." Of course that was the Internet. Today the U.S. is in a similar situation. We are in a post-housing bubble, a credit and banking crisis. We also face the difficult choice of figuring out the next big thing to invest in. If we miss it or do not get it right we will be Japan in the 1990s and Germany, Singapore, China, and Denmark will lead the next economic expansion. Where to put the money? The answer is simple - it's The New New Deal. The Obama administration has a chance to set America on the right course. The question is... will it?  Will they cave in the old New Deal (bail out the auto industry) or can they embrace the New New Deal? What is the New New Deal? According to Jefferey Sachs:

The latest issue of Dwell Magazine looks at one of America's first (and often considered the most successful) urban renewal projects. Detroit's Lafayette Park, now undergoing a subtle transformation as a new wave of residents including Keira Alexandra and Toby Barlow settle in, remix the past, and make the place their own.

Given the uncertainty looming with the likely restructuring of the automotive and manufacturing base in this area, it's encouraging to see a vibrant and stable cooperative community within the city that has endured the region's many changes over the last 50 years. And, who knows, what comes next may in fact be orchestrated from this place.

As we sit and watch the crisis in global capitalism, it's obvious that governments are sticking their hands deep into the global economy and various national economies. The U.S. government is taking stakes in major financial and insurance firms, becoming partners (in all likelihood) with Detroit, planning major stimulus packages, bailing out over-leveraged homeowners, and planning increased/new regulations on everything from CAFE standards to 401K management.

For entrepreneurs, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Entrepreneurs and venture investors and lenders are unlikely to get much support from policy makers and elected representatives as those political types look to support/consolidate their power through their new corporate partners and other bailout recipients. In fact, policy actions, from bailouts to government/corporate ties, will likely hurt entrepreneurs going forward. The irony, of course, is that growth and innovation will come from new and growing firms, not badly damaged and slimmed down corporations, unions, and low-income homeowners.

Unfortunately, a new report on entrepreneurship in the U.S. from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor was released this week and it is not very sunny. The report is full of interesting information information (yes, the U.S. still exhibits high rates of entrepreneurship, albeit slowing) and for the first time GEM has looked into minority entrepreneurship in the U.S. The report is worth checking out.

One way of ensuring that the entrepreneur is kept at the center of our economy is by supporting entrepreneurship education. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend a positive, future-oriented event on Capitol Hill presented by the Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy Group. (A negative, old economy event was also occurring as the Big 3 and their cronies were on the Hill asking for $$$.)

The YES Group, led by the Aspen Institute and the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, presented a new policy paper/action guide on entrepreneurship education for policy makers. They also convened a great panel discussion with education committee staff from the Senate and House and  introduced some great young entrepreneurs from low-income areas in the U.S. who highlighted what a difference entrepreneurship education can make in the lives of at-risk youths.

The YES Group sees entrepreneurship education as a key to solving the costly high school drop-out crisis in the U.S. and also creating a generation of entrepreneurs to spur the U.S. economy and lower poverty rates. The most interesting thing I heard was that out of the millions of students in HS and junior high in the U.S., only a small percentage have access to any entrepreneurship/financial education. Only nine states have formal legislation that promotes entrepreneurship education.

So while we have this rising tide of government intervention in the economy, let's ensure that we support entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship education. Only entrepreneurs can ensure the long-term growth of our economy.

BTW, for a little Canadian flavor, check out the VeloCity Residence at the University of Waterloo. The residence hall is a web/mobile media incubator for entrepreneurially minded students. I recently exchanged emails with one of their first residents and they have some great things going on. It is a great model for entrepreneurship education at the post-secondary level.

In a little more than a few months the world has changed more than one can remember: A financial collapse with a slice of Wall Street gone. Impossible. A governmetn bailout of - would you believe- Wall Street. Paulson arguing that regulation is needed to stabilize the financial system. The global economy in recession, and it seems like it's not the garden variety. It could be a depression. The election of the first African-American as President of the United States and an eoch changing shift in the electorate. The auto industry on the brink of bankrupcy. Birmingham, Alabama bankrupt. One does not know if we should buy on a rumor, sell on a hunch, or hunker down and hold. The markets are always looking forward and what they seem to be indicating is that we are now in for and have been in a bear market for most of the past decade. On average, these last 15 years or so we have a new administration that is likely to reside over a depression, bear market, major industrial bankrupcies. Welcome to the Global Economy.

I am sick and tired of people using "Detroit" as a euphemism for the Big Three. Listen to GM chief Rick Wagoner:

"This is about much more than just Detroit... It's about saving the U.S. economy from a catastrophic collapse."

Detroit didn't cause the auto crisis. Out of touch Big Three management did. For all its problems, Detroit - the city and the region that is - has assets and capabilities that go far beyond the Big Three. It has cutting-edge automotive design and technology, a broad-based supply infrastructure, great universities, a top-notch design community, a terrific airport, and perhaps the most incredible musical energy on the planet. The city and region can reinvent and rebuild but only by shucking off the dead-weight of the Big Three. And it is a shame for people to keep denigrating the city by invoking its name as a substitute for the Big Three.

Kathleen Pender asks: "Are you an idiot to keep paying your mortgage?" in light of the new homeowner bailout plan which offers to refinance loans that are at least 90 days delinquent. She quotes financial planner, Peter Schiff who:

predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.  "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford." ... Schiff predicts that loan agents "will be cold-calling people trying to get them into it. Just like they encouraged people to overstate their income to get a bigger loan in the first place, now they will encourage them to understate their income to qualify for a smaller loan."

Felix Salnon adds:

if you can get your principal reduced by hundreds of thousands of dollars just by quitting your job for a few months, that's a deal which makes a certain amount of sense. It's a pretty perverse incentive for the government to give you, but that's the hand that millions of Americans are now being dealt. And it's entirely the fault of the people who dreamed this scheme up.

Add to this the additional perverse incentives of an auto bailout and the opportunity costs of more (very limited) resources wasted.

The way out of the crisis is to: a) reduce the price of over-priced assets, b) weed out inefficiency in existing sectors and eventually upgrade them via creative destruction, c) invest in new infrastructure that can stimulate the rise rise of new industries. What we're doing now is worse than forestalling the inevitable and even of pouring good money after bad - we are throwing away precious capital that is key to building a viable future.

While I know that Richard is the official "Global Trends" guy around here, I hope that he won't mind my pointing one out; if not a trend, a global synchronicity at least. In two of the world's great cities - Toronto and Rome - disagreements in educational policy have led to strike situations.

In Toronto, from the Globe and Mail:

The campus was a ghost town yesterday, the first day of the strike by contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate students, with classes for more than 50,000 students cancelled and pickets letting cars onto university grounds only every few minutes.

There are no plans to resume negotiations.

Christina Rousseau, chair of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, said the striking workers are waiting for a signal from university administrators that they are ready to return to talks.

“Right now the ball is in their court,” she said. “We feel it is their turn to make a move.”

The university has offered a 9.25-per-cent wage increase over three years. A university spokesman said the administration is willing to go to binding arbitration.

The workers have asked for a two-year contract with a wage increase of 11 per cent over that period. The demand for a two-year deal is part of a broader strategy by CUPE Ontario to co-ordinate bargaining on all Ontario campuses in order to gain leverage at the negotiating table.

And in Rome from the BBC:

Sleeping bags in lecture theatres, lessons in parks, people wearing plasters on their faces. They are just some of the ingredients in Italy's hugely divisive row over education.  The sleeping bags are being used by students, who have taken over a number of buildings. Lessons in some places are being held in parks, as classrooms are occupied, and the plasters are the symbolic sign of the "cuts" the students and staff are protesting against.

But these are not just isolated protests by a few disgruntled hardliners.  A number of recent marches in Rome have attracted up to half a million demonstrators.  Seasoned Italian commentators say they are the biggest in 15 years.

The protests are not just for university students. Secondary school teachers and pupils are also on the streets, as their slice of the education budget comes under threat as well.  The government is pushing its reforms because it believes universities and schools are inefficient and producing lacklustre results.

I also did a little bit of Facebook reconnaissance and found popular groups for and against the strike in Toronto, while Italy Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini's page has been flooded with comments from young people on the situation.

While both are complex and ultimately different situations, one of the few comparables is popular support: In Rome it is overwhelming, while in Toronto it's very divided. With starkly different political climates, I can't speak on how well this bodes for either side, but it will be interesting to see how both situations are resolved. They each represent what the prospective futures of significant numbers of young people within their respective regions will be like. In turn, this will ultimately affect the overall prosperity of the regions.

And now, as always, some music.

Scientific American says the quant revolution in finance bears part of the blame for the crisis and it's time for new and better models of the way the world really works (via Mark Thoma).

These lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos were the ones who both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them... Without the formal requirement to maintain debt ceilings and capital reserves, the commission had freed these firms to police themselves using risk tools crafted by cadres of quants ... For its part, the quant community needs to undertake a search for better models—perhaps seeking help from behavioral economics, which studies irrationality of investors’ decision making... These number wizards and their superiors need to study lessons that were never learned during previous market smashups involving intricate financial engineering...

Maybe. Adding behavioral assumptions is a nice tweak, but it won't remedy the fundamental flaw of this kind of approach. The number wizards need to do much more than read and quantify history. The problem is that that quants and much of modern economics for that matter have neglected the systematic study of economic transformation. What's needed goes far beyond more historical and behavioral data points. Concretely this would mean building on the fundamental insights of Darwin, Marx, Schumpeter, and Jacobs to create a real scientific understanding of how economies grow, evolve, generate crises, and restore themselves. There are very, very few economists or social scientists that are willing to take on these big questions. And to build these models will not only take big thinkers, but reasonably large and stable teams of theorists, economic and financial historians, computer scientists, data-base experts, and others. It's what we're trying to do here at the Prosperity Institute, and I'd encourage others to join in.

Had a great chat with BusinessWeek's Mike Mandel this morning on the crisis, its geography, and what to do about it. Then I came across this post by Nouriel Roubini (via Naked Capitalism).

With consumption being over 71% of GDP a sharp and persistent contraction of consumption all the way through at least Q4 of 2009 implies a more severe recession than otherwise... To bring back the household savings rate to the level of a decade ago (about 6% of GDP) consumption will have to fall – relative to current GDP levels – by almost a trillion dollar.

He notes that the crisis will be longer and deeper than virtually anyone thinks. But why?

The reason is becoming clearer and clearer every day. The crisis is at bottom the crisis of Fordism. It emerged around housing - the single family home, the pivot point of Fordist consumption. It's not that the technology and idea-driven creative economy is not productive, it's that our complex financial system in effect over-allocated the fruits of that productivity into the old cornerstone of the Fordist economy. Instead of creating new demand for technology or better health care or new energy or flowing into savings, that productivity translated into increased demand for housing.

So the current bailouts are fundamentally flawed. Propping up the housing-auto nexus of Fordism will only forestall the inevitable. Bailing out homeowners will only essentially handcuff them to their homes, leaving them paying out huge shares of income on housing and housing-related goods and making it impossible to achieve the mobility so many will need to locate economic opportunity. On a social level, it will keep pouring good money after bad, leaving us wrapped up in the old Fordist economy, unable to generate the demand for or the savings needed to generate the new system architecture and infrastructure required to reset the economy on a new and hopefully more sustainable growth trajectory.

The only way out of the crisis is to simultaneously create demand for and investment in these new areas, in part by massively reducing the amount of consumer spending on the old house-auto nexus.

So any government investment should do the reverse of the current bailouts. Instead of propping up these older sectors artificially it should aggressively seek downward adjustment in their costs, perhaps by investing in efforts to increase the efficiency and management of housing and reduce the costs of cars, energy, and mobility. Fiscal stimulus should also focus on the growth sectors of the future. In my mind, this turns on five interrelated factors:

1) Revolutionize the housing delivery system - More rental less ownership; better construction and management, creation of new housing delivery and management systems which allow for flexibility required to shrink the journey to work and allow people to move more freely as their job, career, and lifestyle prospects change.

2) Transform transportation - Everything from more energy-efficient cars, market pricing of roads and highways, to mass transit, high speed rail, and increased reliance of bikes and walking (especially as the journey to work can be shrunk via more flexible housing tenure).

3) Alternative energy - Moving out of the carbon-based economy, shrinking energy costs, and creating new areas for investment.

4) Revolutionize the human capital system - Economists agree this is the key to long-run growth. Currently we waste more of it than virtually any other resource. We need to massively invest in human talent and creativity on a mass scale. This requires an individually oriented, creativity enhancing (as opposed to creativity-squelching). This means moving well beyond schools to flexible, tailored approaches to creative development, including a massive commitment to early childhood and fundamental from-the-ground-up remake of our educational system.

5) Any solution has to do three interrelated things - It must encourage new investment, the creation of new technologies and enterprise, and accelerate creative destruction. To do so, it must shrink the overall costs of the housing-auto nexus, freeing up capital and demand that can flow into new areas as well as increased savings. It must increase investment in and demand not just for technology but for human development, health (holistic and other), and for experiences more broadly.

Problem is: We're doubly handicapped in getting from here to there. For one, we remain locked in Fordist mindset which sees the problem as how to reset the old housing-auto nexus. It is too early in the transformative process to perceive the full contours of the new, emergent system and to identify the core investments with real precision. Compounding this is the limits of extant theory. Economics in its current guise overvalues simple micro-models based on the efficient allocation of market systems. Of course some economists have junked this, most notably the new empiricists who believe the answer is to be found in improved models and better data. The real issue is that we lacked theoretical understanding of the dynamics of capitalist economic crises and transformation - modern-day, scientific frameworks and dynamic models based on the broad kinds of understanding advanced by say Schumpeter and Marx. This is not just an academic point; it is a terrible handicap in understanding and dealing with the current crisis and and evaluating alternative paths out of it.

The sooner we dump the talk of the bailout and get on with understanding and building the sustainable economy of the future, the better.

A turbulent economy can generate some "creative destruction" in your career path. The best thing that ever happened to me was the dot-com I worked for going bust in 2001 and that sector staying weak for long enough that I moved on and considered all possible industries. Where I am now turned out to be a much better fit.

A number of companies and industries will do some restructuring over the next few months, both shedding some workers but also potentially hiring others as they refocus. In case you end up with the opportunity (whether forced or not) to consider new career and employment possibilities, here are some helpful issues to ponder from a recent CBC website article:

Tips on finding a great place to work

The article mentions several top Canadian places to work and how they live up to these above standards. For example, at pharmaceutical giant Nycomed's Canadian operation:

The company's permanent employees have access to $3,000 a year in post-secondary tuition funding or $5,000 for post-graduate studies. Last year, about 30 percent of the company's employees took advantage of this perk.

Being encouraged and supported to grow your knowledge and skills is a wonderful workplace benefit that also can provide new options in times like these.

And, in these turbulent times, a great place to work also offers some job security as those companies tend to outperform rivals:

Companies on the Great Place to Work list outperform standard stock market indices by a factor of two to three," Jen Wetherow, the institute's director, said. "Their results are above average."

What will be interesting this economic cycle, and something I'm actively trying to monitor, is which employers stick with plans to create better, more effective workplaces as productivity enhancing tools and means to better attract and retain talent. I'll also be looking to see if talented people continue to keep criteria like those on the list above in mind. So far, intriguingly enough, I'm hearing affirmative from both camps (particularly in the accounting / finance / consulting sector).

Toronto's ongoing creative transformation is coming more fully into view. This week saw the opening of Frank Gehry's newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario.

(Photo via AGO).

I was there for the opening (full disclosure: I serve on the board) and the building is beyond spectacular in the way it activates the art, stitches together old buildings and reanimates old spaces, and relates to the messy urbanist neighborhood which surrounds. Here's what the NYT has to say;

Frank Gehry has often said that he likes to forge deep emotional bonds with his architecture projects. But the commission to renovate the Art Gallery of Ontario here must have been especially fraught for him. Mr. Gehry grew up on a windy, tree-lined street in a working-class neighborhood not far from the museum. His grandmother lived around the corner, where she kept live carp handy in the bathtub for making her gefilte fish. Given that this is Mr. Gehry’s first commission in his native city, you might expect the building to be a surreal kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through the architect’s subconscious. So the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened to the public on Friday, may catch some fans of the architect off guard.

Rather than a tumultuous creation, this may be one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs. It is not a perfect building, yet its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure. And its interiors underscore one of the most underrated dimensions of Mr. Gehry’s immense talent: a supple feel for context and an ability to balance exuberance with delicious moments of restraint. Instead of tearing apart the old museum, Mr. Gehry carefully threaded new ramps, walkways and stairs through the original. As you step from one area to the next, it is as if you were engaging in a playful dance between old and new.

But that's not all. Earlier this month, Toronto's Artscape unveiled its transformation of Toronto's old street car repair barns into an urban park plus work-live space for artists and creators.

(Photo via Blog TO)

The project is an amazing example of creative, sustainable, and inclusive adaptive reuse. Rana and I were blown away when we saw the project as host of its opening night. The Globe and Mail reports:

The reinvention of the old Toronto Transit Commission streetcar-maintenance sheds in the St. Clair-Wychwood area of the city will banish forever your spontaneous, ill-considered desire to damn all urbanity ... [T]his is a chance to feast on a version of urban heaven, a wondrous, hybridized redevelopment of something that had been left for 30 years to die a slow death. The Artscape Wychwood Barns, which open to the public this week, give us a new kind of temple in which art, community and urban agriculture are allowed to happily conspire ... This is not to say that the barns will replace such major destinations as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum ... The compelling city allows for an intermingling of all creative players. And it's that potent mix which inspires us to stay.

Exactly. Artscape founder Tim Jones likes to say the city's ongoing transformation involves the simultaneous recognition of the need both to put creativity on display and to more fully engage creativity at work. These two projects are part of that unfolding process to celebrate and harness creativity in a sustainable and inclusive way.