The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen, Gotham Books, 272 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, May 2012, ISBN 9781592407101

For an average-sized book, there is a lot within this one. From the title, one might expect sociological research on trends in organic food, or an analysis of a health food business and how they became successful. While it certainly has traces of those things, it is so much more.

This book is by and about a man named Will Allen, who grew up around farming, played professional basketball, managed a chain of restaurants, was an executive for Proctor & Gamble, battled cancer and a lot of discrimination and racism along the way, and returned to his life’s passion and roots in farming to help the health, economy, and lives of many people.

During Allen’s succession of career changes, from Disco owner to P&G exec, he was continuously involved in farming, from his back yard garden, to starting a farmer’s market co-op, to eventually buying a number of greenhouses and forming the company Growing Power, which is now a leader in the field of urban agriculture. Growing Power grows and sells produce, fish, and eggs locally, and educates others on its processes. It teaches people and businesses how to grow their own food, and how to grow it better than what’s commonly available in stores. Speaking to the importance of that work, Allen states:

If we are to make farming a profession that young people want to enter, we need to create new models for growing and distributing food that are both emotionally satisfying and economically viable. We have to be guided by the principle that small is beautiful.

And as convenience continues to propel businesses such as fast food restaurants and corner stores forward, the quality of food and our health is at stake. Again, Allen focuses on young people:

Our current generation of young people rarely eat fresh foods, don’t know how to grow or prepare them, and in many cases, can’t even identify them. They have become entirely dependent on a food system that is harming them.

I believe that equal access to healthy, affordable food should be a civil right—every bit as important as access to clean air, clean water, or the right to vote.

The Good Food Revolution is the kind of book you just can’t put down, rich with personal stories, and full of insightful lessons about business and life that transcend the food industry. There are fundamental lessons in Allen’s work that all leaders can learn from. Certainly, we can’t all grow food, but every leader can look at their business for the true human value that exists within it, and think about ways to spread that quality for the benefit of others.

The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change by Jason Jennings, Portfolio, 256page, $26.95, May 2012, ISBN 9781591844235

The once vital Main Streets of America are all but out of business, boarded up or filled with antique stores shopping the delights and detritus of another era. Jason Jennings visits the main street of his own abandoned hometown at the beginning of The Reinventors to use it as a metaphor for “what will happen to you, your job, and your business unless you become a reinventor completely committed to constant radical change and growth.”

Jennings’ previous books, Less Is More, Think Big, Act Small, It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small … It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow, and Hit the Ground Running all made a case for business agility in one way or another. This new book does so as well, and then takes it one step further by stressing the need for business model agility. According to a 2010 IBM Global Study:

It turns out that 67 percent of worldwide leaders think their current business model is only sustainable for another three years, while another 31 percent believe their current model might have as long as five years.

So The Reinventors should find a home on many executives’ desks, as the time is now to begin the process of serially reinventing your business, to highlight companies that are good at it, and to teach other leaders how to master the skill. The history of business has always been one of churn, of quick rises and dramatic falls, and smart leaders know that they are but temporary stewards in that history and must transition their companies through that change.

Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we’d better do it quickly.

If you made it though the recession with your job or business intact, everything may seem more stable now that you are on the other side of it. But remember that the world under your business is still silently shifting, and you are going to have to shift with it. Jennings is not going to give you a new business model to do that with in this book, but he will teach you how to figure it out for yourself, how to be more aggressively innovative, how to become a serial reinventor.

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth & Karen Dillon, Harper Business, 240 pages, $25.99, Hardcover, May 2012, ISBN 9780062102416

Clayton Christensen is a business theorist who, in 1997, wrote the renowned Innovator’s Dilemma which introduced the idea that most well-established companies are overtaken not by behemoth competitors but by “disruptive” innovations that rise up and cut down giants in part because the giants were oblivious to the threat, and/or unable to invest in new emerging technologies. Christensen is also a dedicated professor at Harvard Business School, and describes himself as “a father and grandfather with a deeply held faith.” This book is a commingling of Christensen’s passions, but always returns back to the theories he has spent so many years studying and teaching in business courses.

Good theory can help us categorize, explain, and most important, predict. People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past. … This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

How Will You Measure Your Life is populated with personal anecdotes—the fates of famous classmates, the progress of Christensen’s career, his motivations as a family man, his numerous health challenges—that lead back to business theory as a way to guide others to better decision-making. Treat your life, Christensen says, to the same careful planning you would your business in order to avoid some of the catastrophic events that can happen to companies when they don’t develop a deliberate, yet agile, strategy.

• Beware of the emergent strategy. Serendipity should play a role in all strategy.
• Define your purpose. “Without a purpose, the value to executives of any business theory would be limited.”
• Allocate your resources in a way that aligns with your purpose. In other words, you are what you do, not what you mean to do.
• Set your metrics: Christensen says “the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”

It’s May, and all around us our children, our friends’ children, our nephews and nieces, our grandchildren are graduating from school. Heading out in to a world that is their oyster, but could also be their undoing. Clayton Christensen’s new book, How Will You Measure Your Life, would make a perfect gift, and will help direct their decisions and steer their moral compass as they set out in the world.

Yesterday, Stephen Shapiro was in town for our private LeaveSmarter event, sponsored by BMO Harris/M&I Bank and Whyte Hirschboek Dudek. His talked focused on ideas from his recent book, and 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award winner for 2011, Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition.

According to Shapiro, the main problems we have with being innovative, is how we think about things, the kind of questions we ask, and what we already know about the challenges we face. Here’s a clip from his talk that gives examples of this:

Following this, Shapiro states that asking the right questions, looking at similar problems but that occurred in different situations from our own, and thinking calmly about those situations, can have a markedly successful effect. From Einstein to everyday people, his book offers great examples of how people have found solutions that were truly great, and how we can do the very same thing.

Unleashing the Creative Reservoir: The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited by Richard Florida

“A new social compact—a Creative Compact—can turn our Creative Economy into a just and Creative Society, in which prosperity is widely shared. While driven and shaped by economic logic, the key institutions and initiatives of the future will be shaped, as they always have, by human agency.”

Build This: Your Culturematic Laboratory by Grant McCracken

“Ruled by pragmatism and play, your laboratory is fast becoming the place you come to look out into the future. This the bridge from which you can look at your possible outcomes, examine your range of options, think about how to think the future.”

The Shattering: How We Get From Where We Are to What and Who We Need to Be—A Non-Illustrated Guide to Becoming Honest by Erika Napoletano

“The Shattering is the moment where everything familiar slips away. Our protective facades of familiarity spontaneously combust and we shun faith, deny comfort. We’re left voiceless regardless of our need to scream. We tread water in an ocean filled with every brilliant memory of what was only moments ago.”

Let’s Make Leadership Real Again by Mike Figliuolo

“What has happened to leadership? With all the crises and challenges we face and the increasingly risk-averse environment in which we operate, leadership has become generic, ephemeral, and bland. We have devolved from leaders into managers. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper said it best—you manage things, but you lead people. The problem is we’re no longer leading.”

The Face-to-Face Manifesto: Back to the Future by Ed Keller & Brad Fay

“The fact is that online social networking is no substitute for the power and impact of face-to-face communications. Real world conversations—most of which take place face-to-face—are still the dominant mode of communication, and they are the most trusted and persuasive.”

Rebooting America’s Innovation Engine: Using Jugaad to Innovate Faster, Better, and Cheaper by Navi Radjou

“The motto ‘innovate or die’ held true for American firms in the 20th century. In the 21st century, ‘innovate faster, better, and cheaper—or die’ will be your new mantra. Indeed, in today’s hypercompetitive, über-connected, and globally integrated economy, you need to crank out new products faster than you can spell ‘R&D,’ or else your customers will switch their allegiance to more agile rivals.”

Micah Solomon follows up his book Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit, a book he co-authored with Leonardo Inghilleri, with a new book written just by him, titled, High-tech, High-touch Customer Service. Taking some of the core values of good service and applying them to the increasing level of technology that’s involved in our interactions, Solomon tells stories and shares insights about best practices in this constantly changing, yet fundamentally human business landscape we exist in.

I sent Micah a few questions after reading the book, and his answers are below. Not only will you get a taste for some of the ideas in the book, but also the breadth of Micah’s knowledge and experience. He built his company on principles of service, and was recognized not only by his customers for this, but also by many authors who have used his business and ideas as benchmarks of quality. Read on, and follow-up by checking out his books.

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Your new book focuses on customer service within today’s technology-influenced marketplace. Of all the ways customers have changed of late, which did you find the most striking?

Micah Solomon: I identify six key trends in customer service expectations in High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service. One that’s especially important for businesses to be aware of is this:  Customers now expect personalized, aggregated information—instantly.

Those are a lot of ugly, multi-syllabic words, so let me set the stage with an anecdote.  The battery died recently on my aging Volvo, and with it I lost the stations that had been preset into my car radio. After driving around a few days manually selecting the stations I generally listen to (more or less just one station), I found myself irritated to have to dig up the ancient instructions on how to set a station into memory. I found myself thinking, “Doesn’t my car know I want this station as a preset? I mean, I listen to it every day—it should be inviting me to add it to a ‘favorites list’ or some such.”

But my car was manufactured in 2004, and, of course, cars didn’t “think” that way in 2004. And neither did consumers. Believe me, customers think that way now: They expect devices—and companies—to, in effect, say, “Mr. Solomon, I note that you’ve been listening quite a bit to your local NPR station. Care to have me memorize it for you so you’ll not have to fumble for it when you’re negotiating a difficult turn?”

To get a sense of how deeply customer perspectives have changed, look around. With the advent of mobile computing, a traveler can get all the answers on her iDroidPhoneBerry® that the concierge or bellman or neighborhood know-it-all used to parcel out at his own rate and with varying amounts of reliability: What’s a good Italian restaurant within walking distance? What subway line do I take to Dupont Circle, and which exit is best from the station? My plane just landed—in this country, do I shake hands with those of the opposite gender?

While this bears some resemblance to the model in place only a few years ago—settling into a hotel room, pulling out a laptop, fumbling around for an Ethernet cable, trying to figure out how to log on to the hotel’s network—there are real differences. Specifically, the better aggregation of information. Surfing the net—going out on a net-spedition to look for stuff seems like too much work and too big a time investment for today’s customers. Today, customers expect technology to bring an experience that is easier, more instantaneous, and more intuitive. They want to type or thumb a few keystrokes into Hipmunk—which lists travel options along with warnings about long layovers and other agonies, and shows hotels with precise proximity to your actual destination, or GogoBot, where your own Facebook/Twitter pals have already rated potential trips for you, or of course TripAdvisor, with its user-generated ratings of nearly everything in the world of travel—and have the information they need served up for them concierge style based on their IP address or satellite location and other useful clues.

A study by Accenture showed a manifestation of this trend: Customers in a retail situation often prefer to look to a smartphone for answers to simple product questions rather than working with a human clerk. The smartphone answers just seem to be faster and more accurate and sometimes, sad to say, come with a little less attitude. (Of course, you never get the heights of extraordinary service, either, from a smartphone, which is a lot of what I help companies with in High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service and in my speaking and consulting on customer service.)

What do companies need to watch out for if they’re trying to use social media to deliver, or be responsive with, customer service?

Micah Solomon:
1. Remember the parable of the unzipped fly.
One of the first secrets in dealing with social media feedback is to reduce the need for it by making sure your customers know, as directly as possible, how to reach you. Thinkabout it this way: If your friend saw you had your fly undone, or spinach between your front teeth, would he tweet about it? No, he’d quietly tell you. (And if nobody tells you all day when you’re fly’s unzipped, it’s proof positive that you have no friends!)  Use the same principle to your advantage here. Why should customers address issues to you indirectly via Twitter or their blogs when they can use email, the phone, or a feedback form on your website and know that it will be answered—immediately?

With their round-the-clock access to the ‘‘airwaves,’’ make sure that the first impulse of customers is to reach you—day or night. Have ‘‘chime in’’ forms everywhere; it’s like building escape valves for steam into your machinery.

2. Avoid the fiasco formula: a digital stitch in time…
Can you spell F-I-A-S-C-O? The formula is: Small Error +Slow Response Time =Colossal PR Disaster. That is, the magnitude of a social media uproar increases disproportionately with the length of your response time. Be aware that a negative event in the online world can gather social steam with such speed that your delay itself can become more of a problem than the initial incident. A day’s lag in responding can be too much.

3. Lie back and think of England: Digital arguments with customers are an exponentially losing proposition.
It’s an ancient and immutable law: You can’t win an argument with a customer. If you lose, you lose directly; if you win, you still lose—by losing the customer. But online, the rule is multiplied manifold because of all the additional customers you’ll lose if they catch sight of the argument. So, you need to learn to lie back and think of the future of your company, as Victorian women were told to ‘‘lie back and think of England’’ to help them endure their marital duties. (There is a lot of lying back and thinking of England involved in doing your social media duties.)

4. Avoid the Streisand effect.
When someone attacks your business online, you may be tempted to call your lawyer, or otherwise try to intimidate the offending poster into removing the post.  I’d think carefully before doing that. The reason? Your reaction will tend to bring excessive publicity to the issue. There’s even a term for this: the Streisand Effect, named after Barbra Streisand, who sued a photographer in a failed attempt to remove a photo of the singer’s mansion from the California Coastal Records Project, a strategic backfire that resulted in greater distribution of the photo than would have happened before.

At the very least, threatening your customers does nothing to reduce the damage—and is very likely to backfire. Look at this hilariously written backhanded ‘‘retraction’’ by a restaurant guest under legal threat, and think if coercing a customer into such a response really serves your business. [This is an actual example, except for some altered identifying words.]

I earlier posted a review on this website and was threatened with a lawsuit by an attorney representing ‘‘Serenity Cafe´. ’’ In response, I’m hereby posting my retraction:

In retrospect I really should have said ‘‘To me, the ‘‘line-caught rainbow trout’’ tasted like farmed fish because it was almost flavorless and it looked like farmed fish because it was the wrong color and crumbly.

Perhaps it was indeed wild trout that just spent too long in the freezer . . .’’ and I should also have said pertaining to the chicken that . . .’’this chicken seemed to me like frozen tenders because it was the size, shape and texture of large pieces of solid plastic.’’ Treat your customers right, or else.  And don’t expect to be able to intimidate them into submission.

Technology is enabling customers to do more things themselves (check out, etc.). While these types of services can be of benefit, what are companies learning about service in the process?

Micah Solomon: You’re absolutely right: The self-service revolution is growing in power every day. Self-service includes touchscreen kiosks on cruise ships that help you find your way back to your room, airline passengers printing their own boarding passes at home, and, of course, Web-based e-commerce and the smartphone revolution.

Self-service, however, is at its heart customer service, which means it needs to follow the rules of great service design, or it risks alienating every customer who comes in contact with it. Here are my principles of successful customer-oriented self-service:

1. Anticipatory customer service is the ultimate goal.
The ultimate goal of self-service should be the same as in all customer service: You should strive for what I call anticipatory customer service. Anticipatory customer service is a level of customer service magic that actually binds customers to you and builds brand equity for your company. In both face-to-face service and self-service, this means anticipating customer requests before they even express them — or in some cases, are aware of them.

Aim for the classic goal the Ritz-Carlton articulated — to address “even the unexpressed wishes” of its guests — and you’ll be on the right track. Happily, self-service is likely to be anticipatory by its nature because of its ability to accept unique, customized input from the customers themselves, and smart self-service design can further enhance this.

The most brilliantly implemented self-service helps suggest choices and behaviors in an intelligent manner. Think of IBM’s technology in dressing rooms that suggests complementary ties based on the sportswear you’re trying on, or amazon.com letting you know what customers like you ultimately ended up buying. Gmail warning you that you’re sending out an email that lacks an attachment, when you’ve typed in the body of the email, “attached is.”

2. Customers need a choice of channels.
A choice means they choose, and you respect their decisions. Customers shouldn’t be calling your contact center on the phone only to be told, “You really should go to the website for that.” There’s a reason they called you on the phone, so talk to them. Just as maddening, there’s one upscale hotel chain that continually sends me emails every time I’m about to visit one of their properties, urging me to use automated kiosk check-in upon arrival. I ignore the emails, arrive at the hotel, go to the front desk, and am told, “You know, you didn’t have to come up here. You could have used the kiosk.” But I want to be checked in by a human. It’s a central part of the hospitality experience for me as a guest. And the choice should be mine.

3. Self-service needs to offer the customer escape hatches.
Such as:
• When you end your FAQs and similar self-help postings with, “Did this answer your question?” contemplate what should happen if the customer’s response is, “No, it didn’t answer my question.” In my opinion, it should be a response of, “I’m so sorry, we obviously have room for improvement; click here and a live human being will assist you.” Or, “If you would like a phone call from a human, please enter your number here. When we call, our humans will have a complete record of your query/issue and its failed resolution, and we will make it right.”
• Automated confirmation letters need to come from, or at least prominently feature, a reply-to address. When huge companies send confirmations that end with “Please do not reply,” it’s a kiss-off. When smaller companies do this, they just look ridiculous.

Either way, it can lead customers to desperation. The asymmetry defies our human desire for reciprocity: The company is sending you a letter, but prohibiting you from writing back.

4. Self-service can’t be set and then forgotten.
It’s an endless work in progress. Things change. Things break. Self-service needs to be monitored and reviewed regularly, or it may do you more harm than good.

5. Usability is a science that needs to be respected.
Reinventing the wheel as far as usability is self-defeating: Usability is a well-tested science, yet people keep trying to wing it. For example, why do people hate — truly love to hate — IVRs (telephone interactive voice response)? In part, because so many companies ignore or try ignore the rules of usability for such systems. For example, most people can’t retain in memory more than 30 seconds of information at a time, so an IVR with more than 30 seconds of options or information is just going to confuse customers.

There are similar hard-and-fast rules about how many menu items a customer can remember, yet some companies mangle their application of this rule by loading up each option with suboptions: “For Office A, Office B, or Office C, press 1.” That one single suboption actually demands that the customer remember four things: three departments and the menu number.

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Micah Solomon is a customer service, hospitality, and marketing speaker, strategist, and author of the new book, High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service.

➻ This week’s links are about transition and change, but we begin with something that won’t change—the need for real human interaction—and Ed Keller and Brad Fay’s column in the USA Today on how Facebook can’t replace face-to-face conversation.

It is easy to see Facebook’s success as a sign of dramatic change—in technology and in human relations. But a deeper look suggests that Facebook’s rise is merely Exhibit A of a much larger truth: Our modern society is not providing people with the human connections they crave, and online social networking is a rather poor substitute. [...]

Social media has helped us rediscover the power of “social.” But the richest social gold mine is literally right under our noses: in the word-of-mouth conversations that happen in our kitchens and living rooms, next to the office water cooler, and on the sidelines of youth sporting events. These are the places where we actually live our lives.

Facebook is a fine way to find long-lost friends and exchange tidbits of information and recommendations. But if we want to promote real change—as in our politics, public policies and cultural behavior—it’s best we do it face to face.

If you’re interested in more on this topic, Keller and Fay have a wonderfully researched and well written book coming out later this month that explores and celebrates the social nature of human beings entitled The Face-To-Face Book.

➻ Pulling the lens back to view the ways in which nations interact, let’s head over to the Wall Street Journal and visit with Ian Bremmer, author of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in A G-Zero World. Hi thesis is that The Future Belongs to the Flexible.

In the years ahead, forget about much-discussed artificial groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the so-called “Next 11″ (N11), a roster of potential powerhouses that includes Turkey and South Korea but also political powder kegs like Pakistan, Nigeria and Iran.

In our emerging G-Zero world, with no single power able to set the agenda, the winners and losers of the next generation will be determined not by the rubrics of the moment but by how well and often they are able to pivot.

If you do head over to the original article, you’ll also find a 10 minute interview he gave to WSJ‘s John Bussey. Good stuff, all.

➻ As we leave the Wall Street Journal, let’s turn to a fascinating piece in n+1 by Alexis Goldstein about Leaving Wall Street itself.

Wall Street is not a collection of 1 percenters maniacally laughing at the 99 percent they have crushed under their boot. No, Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn f***-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

I am far from the only Wall Street employee ever to feel chewed up by the system, even as I worked to perpetuate it. Another ex-Wall Street employee described feeling like a “hyper-specialized pawn” who “worked all the time with little control” of her life, and “little personal satisfaction at the end of the day.” I, too, felt manipulated, and why shouldn’t I? That was the game, after all. I felt overworked, demotivated, and I was clearly doing nothing to help the world.

I was able to leave once I decided that my happiness was more valuable than money.

Goldstein is now a member of the Occupy movement.

➻ Julia Novitch had a really intriguing interview with Elihu Rubin at the Design Observatory yesterday about Public Space and the Skills of Citizenship, which brings us back again to the power of real human interaction and the continued importance of place in our increasingly digitally connected world.

We live in such a media-saturated age, especially in the devices so many of us carry around. We’ve lost touch with the idea that urban space is itself information technology. Urban space is media. Not just the architecture, but the sounds of the city, the smells of the city, the rhythms of the city—that’s so much media. In my view, it’s a richer media than anything else that could be piped into our headsets or handsets, and I think that Occupy [Wall Street] helped people realize that again. Even though Occupy in New York was completely wired—there were people typing away in the media booth all the time—I think it also suggested a rediscovery of urban space as media and our openness to it. [...]

Social norms are being rewritten as people walk down the street sending text messages or listening to things in a headset. I think of Hemingway and others in Paris—they write, they paint, and then where do they go? They go to the public house or the cafe because that is their social media—that is their social network, and the technology for it is the café. It’s a piece of information technology, and it functions in that way. Today, it’s so much different. It’s lovely to keep in touch with friends in these different ways—Facebook and the like—and we know from places where it’s been activated politically how potent it can be. People point to Tahrir Square in Egypt as being a place where social media helped to catalyze a very physical revolution. But it really has changed forms of sociability immensely. People are choosing to use the technology of the phone handset to stay connected to a world in which they’re more comfortable, as opposed to opening themselves up to encounters, experiences and visual sensations that exist in the city itself. So I send my students off on urban drift. That’s taken from the 1950s French art group, the Situationists, who would roam around Paris en dérive—on drift—which is a willful, active disorientation in order to begin picking up the social material of the city. I do that because I think we gain a lot from this active disorientation. Our tolerance for getting lost and disoriented is waning. We have all the maps on our phones now. Yes, there’s uneven access to this information, but it’s becoming more and more pervasive across many different class groups—so that you’re always getting where you want to go. You already know where you want to go, as opposed to discovering new things.

You could say the same thing of how we move around the Internet, how we consume news and other media. It’s great to have so much information at our fingertips, but if it’s completely reinforcing your established position, if we never leave our ideological and aesthetic homes, we run the risk of intellectual agoraphobia.

➻ The power of place and strength of cities bring us to our last link of the day, from Richard Florida and Business Insider, about how It’s Up To The Cities To Bring America Back.

The real key to unleashing our creativity lies in humanity’s greatest invention—the city. Cities are veritable magnetrons for creativity. Great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs—the Creative Class writ large—have always clustered and concentrated in cities. Deeper in our past the concentration of people in cities not only powered advances in agriculture, but led to the basic innovations in tool-making and the rudimentary arts that came to define civilization.

The past century or so was a giant step backward on this score. Once-great cities became veritable hostages of the old industrial order, which put housing and cars before people, spurred suburban sprawl, emptying many cities in the process, and then promoted faux urban renewal around white elephant sports stadiums, convention centers, Disneyfied malls, and now even casinos.

But cities are coming back, fueled by the mass migration of talent and creative people. The nerdistan model of high-tech suburbia (Silicon Valley, the Route 128 beltway) is shifting towards urban tech as young engineers, innovators, and venture capital have started flowing to places like downtown San Francisco and New York, inner city Boston, and London and Berlin. The reason is simple: real cities have real neighborhoods. They are filled with the flexible old buildings that are ideal for incubating new ideas. They are made up of mixed use, pedestrian scale neighborhoods that literally push people out into the street, cafes and other third places, encouraging the serendipitous interactions, the constant combinations and recombinations that result in new ideas, new businesses and new industries.

Some may call this a pipe dream of an out-of-this-world urban creative utopia. I assure you it is not. It is already emerging in the here and now, powered by the very logic of our rapidly evolving knowledge economy.

A revised and updated version of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class will be releases in June by Basic Books.

➻ If we can just piece it all together and catch the light like a stained glass window.