Anthony Bourdain is a hero of mine. An anti-hero who through transparency, honest opinion, and self-effacing truths, points out a plan for the road less travelled. Bourdain’s irreverent, vice-laden history, sudden plucking from the kitchen bowels of  NYC, and gradual shift towards international enlightenment, is gut-punching inspirational.

Growing up outside of New York City I was enamored with the old-school lower east side musician-artist-poets who scraped by through odd jobs, wits, and selling everything they owned. Every chance I had I’d scramble downtown (or to Hells Kitchen), to seek them out, to soak up their vibe, and to learn there were many more paths in life than the straight and narrow one.

Bourdain is one of these folks all grown up, and not only did he survive, he’s thriving. I don’t think he’s an anomaly, he made an effort and chose a good turn in the road. There are bunches of these old-school NYC underground peeps, doing their thing, sticking it to the man, and flying under the radar. Their turns have been less fortunate, but no less enthralling or insightful.

Bourdain mentioned in his live performance at the Chicago Theatre this past Saturday that his success was both a mix of luck (for which he is extremely grateful) and determination (he worked hard to publish the book that opened the door to all else), but his plan is mostly accidental. He knows his current situation is magical, and he’s milking it for all its worth; without pretense, and with ample glee.

During the show Bourdain told a great deal of behind the scenes stories that were funny and expectedly harsh of his fellow TV foodies, but there were a few aspects that struck me solid. What set with me the most was his yearn to share his own experiences with the hope to influence the greater good. It’s micro-buddhism in a way, maybe a distant cousin. Here’s a person that walked a path, made a decision to alter the path, and from the alteration found a new appreciation for the people of the world AND a need to share that appreciation so that we too can learn to do so as well. That’s profound. He’s my hero.

Here are a few pearls I gleaned from his show:

Keeping It Real
Always on the mind of the underground folk, the pain in life is finding the balance between passion and success. Nobody from the underground wants to be a sellout. But what does that mean? Should we all look to the Dischord house as the beacon of truth? Bourdain seems to have had this internal twist and awoke with a new objectivity. “Was smoking crack keeping it real? Was selling books on the street for dope keeping it real?” He’s doing the best he can to keep a good thing rolling, and within it he’s found a concerted balance between his personal goals for the show and finding the angles to help pay to reach them. “Yes, we have product integration, you’ve all seen that, that’s how we can keep making the show…but I also have total creative freedom.”

Subvert McDonald’s
Discussing his role as a father to a 3 year old Bourdain suggests there is no beating the ubiquity of McDonald’s through rationalization. He cynically suggest we wean our children from Ronald’s grasp by injecting fear into the experience. To speak of Ronald is hushed tones just within earshot of our children as an evil character who kidnaps children. To take an old and grime-laden scrubby, dip it in chocolate, wrap it in a McDonalds’ wrapper, and leave it on the counter for our kids to find. “That’ll stop their craving.” Though he’s being incite-ful, he’s not wrong. If parents are going to fight to keep their kids away from fast food they need to find clever ways to counter the fast-food impulses that weed their way into the minds of babes.

Steps For Peace
Bourdain ran through a list of behaviors he wishes more Americans followed when traveling abroad. He carefully noted that before he was hired to do his first show he barely traveled at all. That at the start of his travel career he looked at the catalog-type tourists with disdain, and that now he wishes to rescue them from the bull-horn tour-guide, to set them free into the hearts of cities where tourists fear to tread. Here’s his list:
- Be grateful. Having an American passport is a gift, our ability to travel is extremely fortunate.
- Be polite. We are representatives of our country when we travel, show your best face.
- Dress appropriately. When visiting holy sites, make sure you dress accordingly, no bikinis.
- Show a little respect. Don’t demean the citizens of the country you are visiting, they’re more like you than you think.
- Get the customs right. Learn what’s appropriate and do it.
- Accept meat and liquor from strangers. Be open to meeting people, don’t shut yourself off from the culture. The best experiences will happen through the graciousness of people.
- The Grandma rule: accept the food and no matter what, eat the meal and tell the host that the food was delicious.

And finally, not a wisdom, but a great presentation technique…

Turn On The Lights, Open The Floor
At the end of his monologue, Bourdain turned on the house lights and opened the floor to questions. He spent the last 20 minutes of his stage time fielding and answering questions from all over the theatre. Some were about Zamir, others about favorite foods and places for the best street food. My favorite was when someone asked how often he become sick from eating all the new foods. He honestly answered, “About 75% of the time I’m a little sick, but not always sure if its the food or because of my alcohol intake. If anything I spend a little more time on the [toilet]…but nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Thanks Anthony for keeping it real.

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UPDATE!

The video of my presentation was made available to the public. You can see it and the rest of the presentations from the event over on Smaller Indiana. I’ve embedded it below. If it loads slow, head over to the Smaller Indiana site.

Find more videos like this on Smaller Indiana

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I was honored to be one of the presenters at the first Ignite Indy event put on by Pat Coyne and Smaller Indiana.

There will eventually be a video of the entire event, but I thought I’d do my best to recreate the gist of my presentation here as a screen cast. If you have any questions on my presentation please feel free to contact me either by leaving a comment below.

Thanks!

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At first it seemed so convenient and full of instant gratification to buy music online, or even from my phone. I’ve been purchasing music via online download almost exclusively for the last four years. This was fueled in part by my green side telling me I’m saving on packaging materials and the transport of the product, and also by the fact that I had moved away from my favorite record store in Chicago.

Recently, I began to feel more disconnected from the music I’ve purchased. I missed checking out the album art, the process of browsing in the store and the recommendations you can get from shop employees. I had also read two blogs posts that got me thinking about buying vinyl again – this one about digitial readers and this one about tactile user experience. So, I broke my digital download streak and headed to LUNA in Indianapolis, an actual bricks and mortar shop.

The last time I had been vinyl shopping, maybe one out of thirty records offered a free digital download with purchase. But this trip, they filled the shelves. How awesome is that? You get the quality of vinyl, plus the ease of a download to enjoy the music the way we do – on the go, in the car, on our phone and iPods.

I am fascinated by this idea of combining old and new school. This movement toward vinyl+digital manages to satisfy the collector and the demand of current market trends. It forgoes forms that are often treated as disposable. Vinyl is typically bought for keeps, cds or other formats less so. How many people do you know who ditched their cd collection after downloading all of the music to iTunes?

Think of the other creative products that could benefit from a similar melding. I would love to see books go the same route. As a former bookseller, I personally had a hand in preparing hundreds, maybe thousands, of mass market books for the incredibly shameful practice of pulping (which is no different than the fiasco of H&M over disposing unsold goods, rather than donating them). That doesn’t even include magazines, which suffer the same fate when they languish on the newsstand. When a product is seen as so disposable by the very publishers of the material, it begs the question: Isn’t there another way?

What if publishers offered a free audio download or ebook version for your choice of electronic reader with the purchase of a hardcover? We can apply it to magazines as well. In bookshops and newsstands, we want glossies to thumb through. Maybe the shop could carry a few copies to browse and then serves as an access point to buy a digital version. With a year subscription, give readers a monthly online version that includes all of the ads and short articles, then provide one annual, high quality print version. Think coffee table book with the best articles and photos of the year, the features that merit a second look.

Despite declining sales in multiple sectors of the music industry, vinyl actually showed significant growth in 2009 according to statistics released by Nielson. Whether other products adopt this model remains to be seen, but there is a lesson to be learned from the vinyl+digital movement.  There’s always a fresh outcry when magazines and newspapers fail. Who really wants to see the end of print? Or the disappearance of music and book shops? Consumers still crave these spaces where we can engage with products, rifle through them and talk with proprietors who know the products well. And we will spend dollars on the products that fit with our lifestyles, that come in the form we want to consume. If you’re in an industry with shifting markets, can you find a way to please our nostalgia and modernity at once?

If you’re active in social networks, you know this type of person. The one who tweets pictures of food and posts about their meals on Facebook. For us foodie/photo types (I’m including myself here because I’m very guilty) there’s a website built specifically with us in mind. Welcome to the scene Foodspotting, the social network for sharing sightings from your favorite eateries, markets and watering holes.

According to their site “Foodspotting is a visual local guide that lets you find dishes instead of just restaurants. It’s powered by Foodspotters, who can share their food photos and expertise while building a rich collection of foods and where to find them.” When spotting a new food or drink, you upload a picture and tag it with a category and restaurant. Food posts can be “wanted” or given a blue-ribbon “nom.” It is optional to post to twitter or automatically check-in via foursquare.

Why sign up for another social network? I thought I was done with any new profiles for a while, but couldn’t resist this one. For me, food is social, best shared in person or at least digitally, and many of us are already addicted to inflicting our food pictures onto the web. The future of the network promises food scavenger hunts and special awards for Foodspotters that post the most sightings of a particular dish.

One feature that holds particular promise is that dishes can be listed in Guides, and anyone can create them. Think “Best Brunch in Anytown” or this actual featured guide –“What to Eat at SXSW 2010 .” It even has a list of where SXSWers can eat for free. How cool/useful is that?

I do hope in the future they add a home-cooked category. I’ve already seen people tag an item with something like “my house.” This is bound to increase if the network grows, and if the site is really about the dish more than the restaurant, why not?

(the below is a guest post by Nena Johnson, Public Programs Director of Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture)

Our industrial food system is broken.

It’s a pretty dramatic statement, I know, but in my job it’s one I hear almost every day.

Consider a few of the facts:
2009 brought us hundreds of millions of acres of farmland planted in commodity crops (76 million in soy beans, 85 million in corn), furthering the monoculture death grip of agribusiness on American farmers.  Land prices, particularly in the Northeast, have skyrocketed out of reach for most producers, leading to permanent loss of farmland in the service of suburban sprawl. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) continue to dominate the animal agriculture landscape with almost all of the 10 billion animals raised and slaughtered for meat in the US every year spending their lives on a factory farm.  Finally, and perhaps most distressingly, according to 2007 Ag Census data (the most recent census data available), less than 6% of American farmers are under the age of 35, while more than half are between 55 – 74 years of age. We’re losing farmers and their expertise at an alarming rate, and the current state of American agriculture stacks the obstacles to starting or transferring a farm enterprise to the rafters.

There’s no magic bullet to fixing the food system.  A problem with so many distinct pieces needs just as many creative solutions.  Luckily for us, the tide is turning – the last six years or so have given rise to a new kind of food activism. Consumers want to know where their food comes from and who produced it; farmers markets are continuing to pop up in communities around the country; school gardens can be found in cities and suburbs all over; urban farming (growing food in community gardens, on rooftops, on fire escapes) has emerged as a powerful movement; backyard chickens (legal) and rooftop beehives (almost legal) thrive in Brooklyn; and beginning farmers – young people in particular – are appearing on the scene.

(Farm Manager, Jack Algiere, leading a greenhouse workshop at this year’s Young Farmers Conference by jordanstudio.com)

It’s this last piece that interests me the most.  Even with the economic odds stacked against them, young farmers continue to dig in season after season in growing numbers, and they are producing delicious food.  What should seem entirely daunting to anyone starting a new business – prohibitive land costs, difficulty accessing markets and non-existent distribution channels – isn’t keeping these folks at bay. In the words of Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, young farmers are uniquely equipped for the environmental and economic landscapes of the 21st century because, “they are not afraid of complexity.”  It’s complex thinking that has been mandatory for successful farming for 10,000 years – only in the last few decades have the likes of pesticide-resistant corn and ag subsidies simplified things. Successful small-scale, sustainable farmers have to be scientists, stewards, philosophers and inventors. This new wave of agriculturalists comes to their work with degrees in the sciences and the humanities, along with a great interest in learning from the old (Sir Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner) and the new (Eliot Coleman, Joel Salatin).

So how do we help them on their way? Education, support and community-building.  Educating beginning farmers has become a popular vision for many agriculture-related advocacy and non-profit organizations.  The USDA will grant $19 million in 2010 for such programs. At Stone Barns, we’re focusing on young farmers in particular because in our region, the vast majority of new farmers also happen to be young (between 21 – 40 years of age).  That age group implies that many of them have no farming heritage – they’re completely new to the work. With so many farmers either aging out or losing their land, no one is around to pass on traditional knowledge to these up-and-comers, and they need very basic training to start: what to look for when leasing or buying land; what to plant when; the mechanics of basic farm equipment, etc.  Within the technical training, however, it’s imperative to encourage networking, so that beyond workshops and conferences, young farmers have peers to turn to for advice – as well as to remind themselves that they aren’t alone in their work.  We’re calling the result of this community cultivation the Virtual Grange – a place where young farmers can converse with each other and with leaders in the field.  We’ve kicked off this initiative gently as a listserv and Twitter feed, but as our participant roster grows in the years to come, so will the range of expertise that Northeast young farmers can call upon as they build their agricultural enterprises.

Outside of education and advocacy work, how can you support young farmers? Buy your food from young farmers. Subscribe to their Community Supported Agriculture projects (CSAs). If you have a little land – in your backyard or back forty – think about having a young farmer put it into production.

Hopefully, young farmers (wave after wave) will be growing the food you eat for a long time to come. Without them, we’ll have no choice but to rely on the broken system we’re trying so hard to dismantle now. Putting aside the environmental, nutritional, and social impacts of that system, we can all agree that its food – once it finally makes its way to your plate – just doesn’t taste as good.

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Follow Stone Barns and the Growing Farmer Initiative on Twitter: @stonebarnsYFC and join our Google Group: SBC Growing Farmers.

Find young farmers in your area by visiting Serve Your Country Food, a project of the Greenhorns.

Image credits:  All images for this article were created by jordanstudio.com.

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FTC Disclosure: Jason Moriber of Wise Elephant received a modest honorarium for a presentation he gave at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture on December 4th, 2009.

What Pizza Can Tell Us About the New Economy
(Totonno’s, Great Lake, and Domino’s)

(image: timkang on Flickr)

Totonno’s is one of the first (and best) “New York Style” pizza places in the US. Founded by Anthony “Totonno” Pero in Brooklyn NY in 1924, Totonno was the original pizza-maker at his friend Genarro Lombardi’s grocery store in Little Italy of NYC.  Due to the incredible demand for these pizzas, Genarro opened the now the famous Lombardi’s Pizza in 1905. When the subways arrived in NYC, Totonno went out on his own, all the way down to Neptune Avenue of Coney Island.

NOTE: A the time of this writing, the shop is closed due to a fire, it’s expected to open again “soon.”

A vital aspect of Totonno’s, beyond the deliciousness of the pies, is the way he chose to run the shop: it opened at 3pm, they made a certain amount of pizza dough for the day, and when it ran out they closed up shop, no matter how long the line of potential patrons remained. The business did not go out of business, nor did it balloon into a national brand (which seems to be the progression of most food enterprises these days). The place has remained  a vibrant business for nearly 100 years, buzzing along merrily. They made the pizzas fresh, clients were happy, the owners were happy, a nice balance.

Recently the New York Times ran an article (and a blog post) about a new pizza place in Chicago that rang familiar to the Totonno’s lore, Great Lake. (It also reminded me of Lucali and DiFara, but Totonno’s is the best example).

At Great Lake, a professional couple quit the rat race and opened a small pizza shop with a simple mission in mind; be friendly &local, offer a hand-made & affordable product, and have the business itself be manageable & productive enough to live comfortably. The place sits 14 people, does not deliver, and is only open 4 days a week. Their goal is to run a business that balances life with business, a place you can enjoy working for, all while providing a high-quality and affordable product. They make the pizzas fresh, clients are happy, the owners are happy, a nice balance.

For all the MBAs out there, yes, the above examples could fall into the economic rule of scarcity, but it doesn’t appear that these proprietors thumbed through economic models to determine their business goals.

What if the New Economy (which I define as the Lace Economy) is about balance, a market correction pulling the economics of abundance (Free, or Freemium?) away from the revenue-less precipice and towards a method of fairness and sustainability? It appears these newly hatched nodes of the New Economy might be less focused on wealth creation (a buzz term of the past decade) and more about finding the balance between work & life. This could be a way to rebuild the middle markets (middle-class, goods and services). This could be a way out of the recession; new businesses that create and promote fair priced and well-made goods and services managed/run by  balance-minded owners/proprietors.

Domino’s Pizza, through their newest advertisements, is letting us know they are hip to this shift. They’ve changed their recipe! Instead of TV ads displaying you the customer (and their delivery driver) all smiles within the vestibule of your front door, they show us their kitchen, their offices, their sensitive human-side. They are providing us an entrance into their world through an apology for how bad their pizza has been and offer a correction to make it better. They are identifying the real people who make the pizzas (sort of ) while telling us they will now focus on the flavor, to essentially make a better, more genuine product using “real cheese” and other (ideally) real ingredients.

From a marketing perspective, the larger business has taken up the vibe of the New Economy as a method to prove the genuine goodness of their product, to show its value as crafted by hard-working empathic souls who care more about the quality of the product than the cost. The success of this method will be whether this message resonates with their market and/or if it gains them new customers. In Domino’s model, it always seemed to be about price and convenience and not about the flavor or quality of product. None of the small pizza shops I’ve mentioned are about price or convenience; there are always long waits for the products and at a much higher price than a Domino’s pizza. How can smaller shops compete with a big enterprise like Domino’s? They don’t. They don’t need to, they wont.

What’s the answer then for those of us not interested in opened a pizza joint? The opportunities of the New Economy lie somewhere in between these two business approaches. Businesses that will thrive in the New Economy will offer genuine products and services that engender a business/life balance while offering great value and relative convenience. If that sounds right to you, you’re on the crest of a new wave, OR, if we look at Totonno, the wave has been here for over 100 years, but maybe now is the best time to ride it.

Where the Work will be: The End of the Middle, the Rise of the Middle

For small, entrepreneurial, creative and passionate business the marketplace has been hit hard to the point of evaporation. To succeed in the downturn many businesses have shifted focus, either through hyper-specialization, or by the opposite, seeking new and larger markets.  The recession has caused a repositioning of businesses to the polar edges of a marketplace scale.

This lines-up with the new communications trends we’re witnessing. Instead of developing products and then pushing them to the marketplace, the new path is to be engaging, seek resonation, and offer products in response to the available markets, altering them organically as these markets change.

This uncovers the current hard truth. There are two, near-term, definable markets to develop or market your products and services to:

1.    Low-cost, scalable, products crafted to be attractive to the largest possible market.
2.    Highly specialized products that can be marketed at the highest possible price to a very small market.

There is no middle market. It’s been plowed away, and most likely been driven over to the low-cost model. There are some pillars of the middle (large appliances, insurance coverage, office computers), but they are few and stand out. This makes for a simple, yet undiversified marketplace.

The question is whether you seek your fortune and livelihood with the known, or seat yourself past the visible horizon at the place where you’ve calculated the market will arrive. What will that market be?

(I envision the marketplace as a landscape washed away by a flood. The middle is vacated into a depression, spotted with pillars, the high and low are mesa’s to the right and left.)

Conservatively, if you were a Wise Elephant client and you asked me what I think you should do I’d say, “If you’re not currently doing either of the above, the sensible first step is to reframe your business to match one of these two paths. Re-angle what you’re doing to cater to either (if not both) of these markets. Plant your flag.”

Aggressively, if you asked me the same question, I’d say, “Keep this framework in mind, know that it is always changing, and be prepared for the long haul. Get aggressive with your communications and listen very closely to what your market is telling you, engage and react. Be fluid with your products, but keep your goals intact. Surf the wave.”

Another way, Platforming
Businesses that could react to these trends have leapt over the empty middle entirely and built platforms to connect the markets. Through mergers and acquisitions, clever branding and product management, and a knack for selling to market anxiety, a handful of companies have prospered. The names should be familiar, Google (Adsense), Apple (iPods to servers), Comcast (service bundles to networks), Volkswagen & Toyota (family cars to luxury cars), ExxonMobil (petroleum to natural gas) these companies straddled the gap, offered products and services to both ends of the spectrum without having to drop down into the depleted middle. The middle reaches up to meet them. You could decide to take this path in your own business, to reach out and build partnerships, to collaborate more, to use this platforming technique to straddle the markets and thrive.

The Well-Shaded Middle
There are many passionate and creative entrepreneurs who believe in the middle. The problem is the middle market now exists on the floor of the gap, a cavern. To the left is the low-market; to the right is the high-market. The walls are steep. It’s an unbalanced landscape of sellers (many) and buyers (few). Metaphorically, the platforms are shading this gap, depriving new businesses from much needed sunlight to grow. These factors create a very demanding environment; the weaker ideas fail quickly.

This “natural” selection is producing solid, slow growth businesses that are built to last and are focusing on the basics. The Slow/Local Food movement is one burgeoning new business model that is rising from the floor. A premium for health and body nourishment (including spiritual, as places of worship are building new models too) is another. They are a renewed form of utilities and will one day be just as important to our mass-market daily lives as electricity, heat, and hot water. (I read recently Walmart is seeking to get into the local food movement.) I define this new shift “The Lace Economy.” (my earlier post here)

(New businesses are being built on the bottom of the middle market.)

It could take decades to rebuild the middle to the levels the low and high markets have attained. Or the wall-banks could erode and re-level the landscape. Either way these new middle-businesses are steered by passionate people, egalitarians and entrepreneurs alike, even in the face of the current uneven odds. To them the joys of their passion trump any short-term gains.  They are in it for the long haul.

(As these businesses grow, the middle marketplace will grow, attracting new participants from the high, low, and pillar markets, evening the field.)

Where to find work/clients in 2010
If you can mitigate the risks, I suggest diving into this gap, and from the dusty bottom build a business. The middle-market is being recreated on the bottom-floor, and by getting in now you will be part of the wave and be carried up with it. You’d be part of a movement that re-creates long-term stability while extending the marketplace to include increasing numbers of participants, both buyers and sellers. Noble, but risky, and insecure.

Building up your business at the middle will be too risky for most, especially if business has been down and reserves have been depleted. In this case there is a deep requirement to focus on the two current markets and the companies building the platforms that straddle the middle. Seek out contacts within these spheres and position (develop) your services to meet their needs. Focus your attention on these known markets, and if time allows investigate new opportunities within the new middle. The middle is vibrant, and seductive, and you should put some attention there, but know it’s a long-term investment.

We at Wise Elephant wish you much success and luck in the New Year. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

We are now entering the Lace Economy (exiting the Web + Bubble Economy).

The Lace Economy is both a fine-tuning of our networks and relationships, and a demand for services and products that are well crafted, genuine, and trend towards supporting the local and regional.

Fine Tuning:
New networks are being amassed through a mix of web-based tools (Facebooks, LinkedIn) and traditional channels (networking, associations). These form into a tangled, limitless, and underproductive web. Though there is an intoxicating excitement in the chaos of tangled relationships, the ever-increasing girth of networks makes these connections fragile and meaningless. In the Lace Economy, networks will be filtered, gathered and sewn into manageable, identifiable, and productive patterns.

Genuine:
Branding, advertising and communications will continue on a shift away from “attraction” towards “resonation.” Bright, shiny, and flashy objects might gain immediate attention, but a real resonation through matching specific ideas, services and products to the desires and needs of a market will lead to sustainable and genuine relationships. Opportunity will arrive through resonation.

Local & Regional:
The first wave of this Fine Tuning and Genuine is appearing within local and regional movements, primarily through food and craft. The slow-food, farmer’s market, and quality handmade trends point to an audience making purchases of well-made, well-crafted, nourishing, and sound products and services. Restaurants, as well as consumers, are seeking local produce to influence and boost their menus. Farmers in turn are supplying diverse regional specialties in opposition to the cookie-cutter flavors found in national chain restaurants and blanket-marketed by national brands. “You can only get it here,” will increase.

Important Points:
-    The Lace Economy will reward and invite ventures that foster uniqueness and offer quality
-    Individuals will no longer be caught in a web; they will spin their own tightly knit lace of relationships, both real and virtual
-    There will be a deeper reliance on strong partnerships and trusted collaboration
-    Shift from blanket “wide net” approach to specificity in messaging and markets
-    Markets will seek well-made, well-crafted, nourishing, and sound products and services
-    The immediate shift is a turn towards the local and regional

The Lace Economy has arrived. The grass roots are strong, and national brands, such as Starbucks (locally branded shops), and media outlets such as AOL and Yahoo (local news sites) and the New York Times (local neighborhood blogs), have already begun to interpret and act on the data. This shift is not an about-face from where we’ve been, it’s a fine-tuning of what we have into something genuine with a greater value.

Intelligence has a diminished bearing on economic prosperity. Employers are shedding workers by the price-tag regardless of merit, experience, or potential. If business revenues fall off a cliff the first instinct is survival, not productivity. This opens the door to a renewed emphasis on “Creativity,” which implies less investment in goods, and more emphasis on making something from nothing. Call it “Doing.” In our new economy either you do something that resonates, or you don’t.

The type of information within traditional newspapers no longer offers a foundation, or antidote, to economic turmoil, defeat or underemployment. The last bastion where newspaper-type information survives is within banking and investments, it’s always been a necessity, and The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg continue to prosper. But “news” for the sake of broadening our horizon, adding to our intelligence, as found in the New York Times, or Denver Post, Philadelphia Inquirer? What for? Once our economy hit the wall our attentions sought useful, short-term, solutions, antidotes and answers (call them bits). These bits could be drawn from all over, no longer requiring a centralized newspaper to deliver them. Google stepped in with a platform to match this need.

Still, even with Google’s services, we continue to realize the futility of “news” as the primary intelligence we rely upon to succeed. More jobs are lost and businesses close regardless of how much we are learning through traditional channels. That’s not the fault of the newspapers, or is it? Should newspaper have changed their model to provide the news in a more useful manner to their audiences to help us make better decisions about our economic survival (as they promise to protect us from the wrongdoings of government)? Maybe, but what seems to have happened is we shifted our behavior to find what provides us with truly useful information while allowing us a little levity about our circumstances. Gawker gains traffic on The New York Times by magnifying the absurdity of our surroundings (the Onion too). HuffPost provides intelligence from “Doers.” Reality TV keeps on trucking. (What would I do without Anthony Bourdain!)

Most importantly, we held up a collective mirror and invested our lives within Social Networks. We are sharing and displaying our “Doing,” investing these doings into our lives. If the newspaper, our former intelligence-leader, can’t offer us the information to support us, then we’ll find this information where it lives. Via Social Media we search through our lives, whether it’s Reality TV, Facebook Newsfeeds, or Twitter conversations, to find the right answers, and are attracted to the individuals who are “Doing” things; making their prosperity by creating it versus earning it.

Through this search we hope to find a new path to survival/success, a new foundation. We need new information, the type newspapers don’t currently provide.

(Image on home page from USDA Forestry Service)

Mayor James M. Baker of Wilmington DE, speaking at the GCECS2009 this past Tuesday, made a striking point. To paraphrase he said: This isn’t a recession. It’s a total collapse, a time for a restructuring.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but a restructuring of how you run your business might be the necessary medicine, especially for creative professionals, small businesses, freelancers, etc. (Huge companies are making deep changes as well, Eli Lilly, Conde Nast to name two, but it’s the smaller operations that are bearing the brunt of the recession.)

Many creatives I speak with are hunkering down, keeping a low profile and plan to wait for the good times to return. It’s a coping mechanism, sure, but the recession’s symptoms might last years. Can you hunker down for that long? Should you?

I’m with the Mayor. I think its time for us to rethink our plans, to accept that the market has totally shifted, to reach down to our bootstraps and pull ourselves up and out of the old market and into the new one. I think the only productive way out of this era is to get re-creative. This includes trying new business models, collaborating with peers (and even former competitors), and most importantly identifying and acting upon new opportunities NOW, not waiting for gigs to arrive, and to even create them for yourself.