The Vine

Two talks from the recent TEDGlobal conference set the broader context of this topic perfectly. Both are highly recommended.

Ethan Zuckerman points out that even as the web makes our globe increasingly interconnected, most of us still source information and ideas from people who are just like us. (And he offers some suggestions and tools for how to change that.)

Matt Ridley demonstrates how, throughout history, the meeting and mating of ideas has massively accelerated productivity and innovation. As he puts it, more tantalizingly, this is what happens when ideas have sex.

Jonah Lehrer’s latest blog post, The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs, brings this all into a modern business context.

In a 2007 study at Columbia University, executives were invited to a cocktail mixer and encouraged to network with new people. The vast majority of participants even declared that their primary goal was to meet “as many different as people as possible” and “expand their social network.” Not surprisingly, however, birds of a feather drank together. Investment bankers clustered with investment bankers, marketers with marketers, and so on. According to the researchers, “the only successful networker at the event was the bartender.”

To demonstrate the tangible benefits of a diverse social network, Lehrer cites a separate study by Princeton sociologist Martin Ruef. Interviewing over 700 Stanford Business School grads who had gone on to start their own business, Ruef noticed that most of these entrepreneurs had very homogenous networks—but a small subset had significantly expanded their circles.

“They didn’t just hang out with colleagues and close friends,” Lehrer writes. “Instead, [they] maintained a large number of ‘weak ties’ with people at different companies and from different backgrounds. Their social networks were varied and undirected, full of surprising interactions and ‘informational entropy.’ These entrepreneurs made a habit of hanging out with people who told them unexpected things; they chatted with acquaintances and struck up conversations with random strangers.”

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When Ruef analyzed the innovation levels of all the subjects (measured by patents and trademarks, with bonus points for entering an unexploited niche or pioneering new marketing methods), he found that those with wider networks were three times more innovative than their narrower peers.

By interacting with a wider range of contacts, they were exposed to a wider range of ideas and what Lehrer calls “non-redundant information.”

He concludes:

There is something unsettling about Ruef’s data. We think of entrepreneurs, after all, as individuals. If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. It’s also why we invest in the meritocracy: We believe that we can identify talent in isolation.

But Ruef’s analysis suggests that this focus on the singular misses the real story of entrepreneurship. Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts – we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a vast network.

If you don’t already have a “collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances” feeding you unfamiliar facts, you might want to think about cultivating one.

Congrats to our friend Steve Gross, who in 2008 put a charge into The Vine—first by getting us all dancing onstage, then with his stirring talk about the healing properties of joyfulness and play.

Grossie was recently honored with the 2010 Ruffled Feather Award at the Plymouth Rock Comedy Festival. The award recognizes the achievements of those who have positively “ruffled the feathers” of the world: socially, emotionally and optimistically through the use of humor and creativity.

A social worker by training, Gross founded Project Joy (now Life is good Playmakers) in 1989 as a nonprofit organization using play to strengthen and heal children whose lives have been deeply impacted by trauma. He and his team have just returned from Haiti, where they trained and equipped Haitian community leaders and childcare workers in the art of Playmaking.

“We understand the neurophysiology of trauma, but oftentimes we don’t understand the neurophysiology of joy and love,” Gross said. “Disaster response focuses on the negative. I’m not saying you ignore that. But what you pay attention to grows. If you work with children and all you talk about is fear, loss and sadness, and you don’t try to tap into joy you’re never going to help them heal.”

Kudos to you, Steve. We’re proud to call you our colleague and friend.

For people wondering what The Vine is all about, our website and other materials will tell you the story, background, characters, who-what-why, beliefs and purpose statements.

But if I had to distill it down to its core, the reason we began holding these gatherings (and now this online forum), it would be this:

Inspired people create inspired places. And vice versa.

Very few businesses or entities, including the government, will influence people’s quality of life (for better or for worse) quite like community development. The places we create will either enhance or diminish the innate human desire for a sense of community and interconnectedness—to one another, to the built environment, and to the natural environment. Place affects people. People affect place. And so on.

From what people tell me (maybe they’re just being nice), The Vine has inspired quite a few of you over the years. The Pumpkin Festival collaboration between Newland Communities and Life is Good has raised nearly $1 million for children in need. The Ratkovich Company, moved by Dave Eggers’ unforgettable talk in 2007, built the 826 LA tutoring center in Echo Park. Actress/playwright Claytie Mason and musician/performer Rebecca Jackson have joined forces to create “The Wind and Rain,” a theatre piece hailed as “lovely, lethal and lyrical” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

And yet as much as The Vine may have given its members over the years, I can safely say you’ve given us more in return.

The circle continues.

Jeremy Rifkin—economist, prolific author, and advisor to EU governments—offers this fascinating and promising view of a possible future.

As he reasons: If empathy is wired into our biology, and technology is fostering a new global awareness and identity, isn’t it possible to rethink the human narrative as a single race writ large in a single biosphere? (Witness, for example, the rapid worldwide outreach to Haitian earthquake victims.)

The cynical response would be to brush this off as Pollyanna, a well intentioned but sappy notion a la Esperanto and “We Are the World.” After all, scientists, philosophers and theologians have been exploring and debating the root of human nature for millennia, and yet we still fight wars.

But that would be missing the point. What Rifkin does so effectively here is help us see who we are—and who we might become. It’s well worth contemplating.

We’re excited to announce the next two offerings in The Vine’s ongoing salon series (with more in the works for Spring ‘11). Attendance at both will be limited to 50 participants. Registration is here.

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SEPTEMBER SALON: SEEING WHAT’S NEXT
Dev Patnaik, Jump Associates
Thursday • September 16, 2010 • San Mateo, CA
Workshop 11:00am – 5:00pm, Reception 5:00–7:00pm
Fee: $395, includes program materials, lunch and reception

This is not a new cycle. This is a new order. And the surest way to see the new opportunities that lie ahead—and move toward them with confidence—is through empathy, creativity and execution.

Jump Associates is one of the world’s leading growth strategy firms, helping companies (Nike, Target and GE among them) navigate uncertainty, create new businesses, and reinvent existing ones. And they especially like big, ambiguous challenges—the kinds of things you don’t know how to face, but can’t afford not to. Now they’re turning their considerable brainpower to the future of housing and community.

Jump founder Dev Patnaik is the author of Wired to Care, named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009. If you saw Dev’s keynote at PCBC, you got just a taste of what we’ll cover in this much deeper—and more hands-on—dive.

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OCTOBER SALON: IS AGRICULTURE THE NEW GOLF?
Hart Howerton Planners & Architects
Thursday • October 28, 2010 • Fairfield, CA
Workshop & Tour 10:00am – 5:00pm
Reception & Farm-to-Table Dinner 5:00–8:00pm
Fee: $395, includes program materials, lunch, reception and dinner ($345 without dinner)

“Only 17 percent of people living in golf course communities play golf more than once a year. Why not grow food?”

Andrés Duany first posed that question, and now the innovative thinkers at Hart Howerton are making it happen in a remarkable project that combines new development, existing agriculture, and new models of public/private collaboration. The answer turns out to be an intriguing glimpse into a possible future of life in America.

Combining new development with existing agriculture brings promise as well as pitfalls. The team behind Solano County’s Middle Green Valley Specific Plan and its successful public/private partnership will highlight lessons learned for anyone interested in the revitalization of local agriculture—built upon complementary development models for landowners, developers, designers, land use specialists, regional agencies, and financial institutions.

A fabulous Farm-to-Table evening event showcasing many of the products of the local foodshed will conclude the day.

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The Vine 2010 Salon Series is sponsored by Target

Speaking of New Yorker covers, this week’s is particularly apt.

Enlarge the image and you’ll see that each person is plugged into his or her own private world of headsets—except the for the ones who are trying to get their attention: the musician, the protester, the soapbox guy, the (Barney-costumed) leaflet distributor, and the baby.

Calls to mind the great quote from Herbert Prochnow: “A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.”

It’s not an indictment of cities.

It’s a commentary on us.

As a parting thought…if I may attempt to wrap the themes of “city” and “community” into a shameless plug for PCBC…I’m hoping to catch up with many of you in San Francisco next week, where our own little community will most assuredly not be lonesome together. See you soon.

Inspired by Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 New Yorker cover, Hugh MacLeod offers this astute commentary and cartoon (click to enlarge) on parochialism.

“It’s often tempting to mistake the tiny little world you currently live in, with the big ol’ world you actually live in. We all do it to some extent, our brains are simply not big enough to take in everything this planet has to offer. I’ve lived in many worlds that are just as myopic as any in Silicon Valley. The New York advertising world. The UK wine trade. The blogosphere. You probably have, too.

My pet name for this human phenomenon is ‘Microcosmosis’. Confusing one’s own little patch of ground with reality etc.”

No one sees the nuances of culture quite like the native who returns after spending time abroad. Peter Hessler brilliantly captures this experience in a funny and fascinating piece for The New Yorker (free subscription required to access the article). Witness too David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Jonah Lehrer, writing for McSweeney’s on the cognitive benefits of travel, helps explain the neuroscience behind why this is so.

New research indicates that getting away, regardless of where you go, stimulates creative thinking. It allows us, as Proust would say, to “see with new eyes.” This is because when we’re in our day-to-day environment, we tend to contemplate our circumstances in concrete, fixed ways. Problems that seem close, whether physically, temporally or emotionally, have a way of constricting our thoughts and limiting our range of potential solutions.

Conversely, the experience of travel—of escaping our familiar environment and all of the associations that we attach to it—frees up ideas and possibilities that we’d previously (and unconsciously) suppressed.

Lehrer writes:

“The experience of another culture endows us with a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings.

Seasoned travelers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realize that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This, in turn, allows them to expand the circumference of their ‘cognitive inputs,’ as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses.

This increased creativity appears to be a side-effect of difference: we need to change cultures, to experience the disorienting diversity of human traditions. The same details that make foreign travel so confusing—Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me?—turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we’re less insular. We’re reminded of all that we don’t know, which is nearly everything; we’re surprised by the constant stream of surprises. Even in this globalized age, slouching toward similarity, we can still marvel at all the earthly things that weren’t included in the Let’s Go guidebook, and that certainly don’t exist back home.”

Lehrer suggests that we are an innately migratory species. According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation, the large majority of trips over 50 miles are non-business, ie they’re taken by choice. So why is it we’re voluntarily subjecting ourselves to cramped airplanes, long security lines, surly TSA agents and lousy food?

“We travel because we need to,” he concludes. ”Because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.”

Photo credit: danorbit

Jessica Hagy nails it yet again.

Funny how a throwaway line can be so empty and so loaded at the same time.

This’ll get you thinking twice the next time someone asks how you’re doing. (As one of her readers comments, “Fine is the little sister of shitty.”)

Jessica will be speaking at PCBC in June btw. Twice actually. See here and here for details.

George Casey, one of the sharpest and most knowledgeable minds in real estate, observes an interesting—and, I think, encouraging—trend among builders emerging from the housing meltdown.

Eschewing the long-established tradition of naming companies after their founders, we’re beginning to see builders instead defining themselves by the product they create. (And when your product is as emotionally resonant as home and community, I would argue that’s a wise move…especially if your name happens to be Petkoski. See below.)

George writes, “[These] new businesses have a unique and one-time opportunity to name themselves whatever they choose. In doing so, the founders have the chance to impact what people think about that company (and what that company’s future employees think about the company and themselves) for a long time to come, even before they create or sell their first product.”

So you have Larry Webb starting The New Home Company, and Tom and Caroline Hoyt considering renaming McStain as The Sustainable Neighborhood Company or something similar. But my favorite is Bill Petkoski, who’s in the process of forming The Cottage Home Company, an infinitely more graceful name than Petkoski Homes, had he chosen that option. (No offense, Bill, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)

Now granted, these examples are anecdotal evidence, not proof of an industry sea change. Skeptics might point out (rightly so) that a name is nothing but a thin veneer of paint if the company’s underlying values and behavior aren’t aligned.

But don’t underestimate the psychology of a name. I think George nails it in the opening sentence of his blog:

“Names are important. What we call ourselves and what others call us helps to define who we are and what others perceive us to be. They can also influence what we become in the future.”

If that’s true, then I consider it a good start that these builders are stamping their values, not their egos, on their companies.

[ NB: There's an interesting parallel in the social, political and cultural factors involved in the naming of public housing projects. David Lancaster points us to an article here, another example that names do matter in more than cosmetic ways. ]

Bicycling Magazine has published its list of the top 50 bike-friendly cities in America.

Kudos to Vinester Nate Garvis’s hometown of Minneapolis, which received the #1 ranking.

And I can’t resist bragging on my college town of Davis, California—a city that boasts more bikes than cars—which was awarded the top spot in the under-100,000 population category.

It came as no surprise to yours truly, who spent four years cycling to classes, football games, bars, you name it. (Although to be honest, it had more to do with poverty than purity.)

Photo credit: Bright lite photos

Here’s an interesting pair of perspectives on rational and irrational behavior…and the merits of each.

First, Anaiis Flox shares a vulnerable, heartfelt account of mismatched expectations — the inherent conflict between (her ex-boyfriend’s) rational, ordered, cultural norms vs. (her own) irrational, messy, spontaneous desire. What begins as a relationship story is ultimately a profound commentary on what it means to pursue a life of meaning and purpose.

In her words, when you challenge the conventional order of things, when you make “irrational” choices with your career or your life:

“They’ll say you’re crazy. They’ll say, ‘I wish I could be as impulsive as you are,’ and that you should grow up. Life isn’t like that – there are norms, you know. There are ways to do things. You don’t talk to people at the security line at the airport. You get through it as fast as possible, go to your gate, wait for them to board you, sit down and be quiet. You go to your job, bust your ass, go home, change, go to some social thing, entertain the same questions, go home, watch bad television and do it all over again. Polite, proper, efficient. That’s life, right? Then you get old and maybe play some golf, then you die.

Fuck no.

The only way to remember who you are is to refuse to let anyone or anything dictate what you want. I write to share my triumphs and defeats and to remind you that wanting something other than herd-like, soul-crushing monotony is not only natural, but necessary.”

Still, we can’t all skip off to Provence to paint and sketch and journal. Someone needs to keep the trains running on time. To that end, Seth Godin makes a compelling case for being rational about when—and when not—to be rational.

He points out, “If you’re running Adwords on Google, I hope you’re making rational decisions based on clickthrough and conversion. On the other hand, were you rational when you fell in love? Did you do the math? Medical analysis?”

“There’s room for both rational and irrational decision making,” he concludes, ”and I think we do best when we choose our path in advance instead of pretending to do one when we’re actually doing the other.”

In some ways I’m an unlikely advocate for the irrational life. I live in the suburbs. I work for The Man. I have two young children and I instinctively, unwittingly feed into the “stranger danger” mentality.

But if barreling as quickly and mindlessly as possible from point A to point B is considered rational rather than robotic…and getting sidetracked by conversation and connection with (gasp!) strangers is considered irrational rather than human…

Then give me irrational every time.

Here’s a fantstic video introducing Youngme Moon’s soon to be published Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, which is described as “a book about realizing the true meaning of a word that has lost all meaning.” (An excerpt can be downloaded here.)

Dr. Moon is an award-winning Harvard business prof whose marketing courses are among the school’s most sought after. She makes a compelling argument that in many product categories, competitive differentiation no longer exists. Or, to be more precise, the distinctions are so nuanced and insubstantial that they’re no longer perceived by consumers.

Product proliferation has not led to product diversity, but rather the opposite: Sameness.

She writes, “[A]s the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness.” (Well of course our homes are different…our elevations are Northern Tuscan!)

When this happens, “[T]he category has reached the point where it is possible for product heterogeneity to be experienced as product homogeneity. Which is not to say that the distinctions between products are not real; it is simply to say that they are real only in the same way that synonyms have discrete connotations.”

Moon likens this to a competitive treadmill—a cycle wherein businesses are, unintentionally and unknowingly, running a race to nowhere.

“In category after category, companies have gotten so collectively locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become.”

If the book is as thoughtful and insightful as its preview, it’s well worth ordering. I did.

Hat tip to Amie MacPhee for calling our attention to Coolhaus, a mobile purveyor of architecturally inspired ice cream sandwiches.

Coolhaus is the brainchild of food architects (”farchitects”) Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, who bought and renovated an old mail truck found on Craigslist. Decked out in chrome rims (or Rem’s, ha ha), a pink top, and a fold-down bar and table, the truck regularly appears at Los Angeles area events and festivals, drawing crowds by tweeting its locations to followers (a la the famous Kogi BBQ truck).

Their menu is an homage to modern architects, featuring selections like the Frank Behry, Mies Vanilla Rohe, Richard Meyer Lemon, and Oatmeal Cinnamoneo.

The marketing and merchandising are extremely clever, to be sure. But underneath it all, what appeals most to me is the simple pleasure of people flocking to the ice cream truck — a grownup reincarnation of one of childhood’s most enduring memories.

This is no accident; Coolhaus is a product with social engagement baked in. When describing the company’s core characteristics, the website declares Coolhaus to be “a thinker about reclaiming public and urban space for eating and gathering.”

And when the eating and gathering involves something as decadent as what you see here, we say all the better.

NB: There’s a great firsthand account of the Coolhaus dining experience here. And more photos here.

Congrats to The Vine’s indispensable adviser, supporter and friend Sandra Kulli, who was selected to give an audience talk at this year’s TED conference. Served up in four-minute (tightly monitored) segments, it’s no easy feat to communicate a message that is at once substantive, focused and crisp.

In this very short window, Sandra took us on a Pecha Kucha-inspired photographical tour of the 17 homes she’s lived in throughout her life.

Sandra is a connoisseur of, among many things, places and books. And so, while narrating the slides, she paired each location with a favorite book that reflects the spirit of that particular neighborhood, city, or in some cases stage of her life.

The presentation was every bit as thoughtful and moving as it sounds. (In just four minutes!)

We’ll post the video once it becomes available. For now, enjoy Sandra’s booklist.

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• Toby Israel — Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places

• Merry Ovnick — Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow

• Richard Louv — Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

• Sunset Magazine Editorial Staff with Cliff May — Western Ranch Houses

• Lucy Lippard — The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

• Allan B. Jacobs — Great Streets

• Karen Stabiner — Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day

• Witold Rybczynski — A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

• Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz — The Daring Book for Girls

• Dave Isay — Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

• Ray Oldenburg — The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores…and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

• Gordon MacKenzie — Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace

• William H. Whyte — The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

• Reyner Banham — Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

• Adah Bakalinsky and Larry Gordon — Stairway Walks in Los Angeles

• Romy Wyllie — Caltech’s Architectural Heritage

• Rachel Herz — The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell

• Sarah Susanka — The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live

• Clare Cooper Marcus — House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home

• Stanley Kunitz — The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

• Frederic Morton — Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914