Social Media, Creativity and Innovation in Canada

I was watching the Lang O’Leary exchange last night from my comfy berger chair with my laptop connected to a twitter tool – when I heard the CEO of the Canadian Business Development Bank — discuss the dismal failure of small and medium sized businesses to innovate and it dawned on me that I could be facing a tough market for a long time simply due to the prevailing Canadian business mindset which is very conservative and risk adverse. As a single entrepreneur, I am not going to be able to shift that anytime soon. I did not do the survey or write the report that says Small & Medium sized Canadian business gets a D for Innovation. The fact that we are ranked 14 out of 17 worldwide for our lack of creativity and innovation is however, shocking. “Yikes”, I said outloud. The cat jumped up. I almost dropped my laptop. Could it be that bad? Way worse than what I had thought but totally in line with what a good friend, who works with Google insiders, said to me some time ago about the state of Canadian business – “They are doomed on their own local markets, if in the next 5 years, they don’t get connected with their consumers online”.

While Marketing is an integral part of business- its first role being to determine if there is even a market for a product – it never fails to amaze me the number of businesses who still think that they can rely on word of mouth as a viable long term strategy for marketing their product or service in a high technology city, province and nation.

Technology of course is the most innovative of industries as it relies on that “analytical computing machine” which has now connected the entire globe in a web of communications. Technology, Communications and Media have now merged in cyberspace and for the most part small Canadian businesses are nowhere to be seen along the information highway (remember when we actually called it that here in Canada?) while the virtual social media space is becoming more and more crowded with consumers, your friends, family and business associates, all piling on in search of information on health, wealth, love and stuff to buy – Canadian businesses are nowhere to be found….not in search, not in the social networks. They are lucky if they have a website, out of date, static, boring with a contact phone number.

I have been blogging on this topic for some time now. In fact, over a decade ago I was in much the same position trying to sell business owners on the idea of having a website. At the time they could see no advantange to cutting print costs or being found on the new medium of the internet. It was a hard sell. Much the same as it is today.

Now that a business should have their marketing focused online you would think that the need for those who are creative thinkers, indeed the creative class would to be embraced, employed and hired to work with them to create a new level of productivity and success. Sadly small businesses are missing in action and if you are tying to secure work a larger client make sure that you have a freshly minted undergrade degree in marketing from a University which did not even touch on social media or have you study the history of media aka MCLUHAN in Canada. Even though creativity (dare we say ART/Apple) and TECHNOLOGICAL (electronic/MS) innovation has transformed BIG business culture over the last three decades, heaven forbid they actually hire someone with the knowledge, skills and experience of this history who could base their innovative marketing strategies on the nature of media, someone who could engage in the type of experimentation needed to sail the uncharted waters that are the sea of Social Media.

With a virtual “tsunami” of tools, apps, methods, numbers, metrics, stats, strategies available today where even medium-sized businesses think that being creative means having a personal facebook account with pictures of the last party you went to or a blog filled with some sort of trivia that reminds one of a content farm.

Feeling depressed about the D GRADE Canadian businesses got on innovation, I googled for a quck fix – the phrase “quotes on innovation” for something positive and the search engine pulled up, guess what? — Quotes on Creativity and Innovation. It seems you cannot have one with out the other. Duh? And yet time and time again I am smacked down for being too creative and too innovative…

So while I stuggle to “sell” the idea of social media to small and medium sized business in Canada at least I now know who is to blame for the conflict. It is not me..it is not my problem, I have an ART SCHOOL Education, I know how to innovate, how to problem solve, how to imagine, how to visulize, how to be flexible, be open, be transparent, be engaging. The problem lies with the make money mindset that has no idea how to connect with consumers in the 21st Century when their is an oversupply of goods and a lack of attention from consumers who are now in control!

This time, I am on the side of the banks. While I may have very little capital in the bank since no one wants to fully engage me to execute any serious social media in Canada — they preferring to sit on the fence and watch their customers disappear down the information highway instead….I will do as I have done for decades now. I will ride out the wave working remaining in the moment of the NOW Revolution of Marketing.

It may be too much to ask for a “standard” small business to innovate on its product offering…but it would be nice if they had the vision to innovate in when it comes to their marketing strategy. Same old product, new way to market and sell it. Now there is an idea.

There are only two options here you either adopt social media or you are swept away. Time waits for no man or woman. Above us is the global connected techosphere where the big boys play. Learn the rules of the game and pay to win Canada. FYI, the name of the game is not HOCKEY – forget the pre meditated brain injuries in this game it is all about BRAINS, Creativity and innovation!

Watching Richard Florida at The GREAT RE…

Watching Richard Florida at The GREAT RESET book launch at Rotman School

Just got my copy of the GREAT RESET by R…

Just got my copy of the GREAT RESET by Richard Florida. Looking forward to reading it on my flight to AB to meet with a new client. I will post my feedback on Richard’s link next week. In the meantime check this out.

My Summer Saga I Pad Mega Media Adventure

“Well I actually think, behind the crisis is, the kind of the inflection point or the transformation point. If you look back at the two previous crises, and I’m actually writing a book on this, it’s called The Great Reset, hopefully you’ll invite me back to talk about it when it comes

out in April or May. But if you look back on previous crises, they’ve always been associated with the rise of new economic systems. So, the crisis of 1873 was associated with the rise of the first industrial revolution, and it gave rise to the second. The crisis of the 1930s was the rise of the second industrial revolution and these big steel companies and auto companies, and then we figured out how to make the society work.

This is really a crisis, not just of the financial markets and wanton spending and too much credit, it’s a tectonic crisis that’s associated with the rise of a new economic order.” – Richard Florida from HP interview today ……   http://bit.ly/cJXu5J

It has been 4 months and the Crisis to which Richard speaks above has become for me – an ongoing EPIC adventure akin to that of Don Quixote.

Love the media in the Don's hand, is it a long poking ipad thingy?

Armed with an Ipad, in the Spring I set out to take my business of sales and marketing consulting to the next level only to find myself filled with the creative angst of the Shakespearean query:  ”To Be or Not to Be?”  which played out in spades over the spring and summer on a number of different levels with a number of different clients and their needs, wishes and demands. If I had the time or inclination to write down all the bizarre and laughable details it would be too much to believe, so allow me to speak in the sweeping terms of the times in which we live – and say that I have been off tilting at the windmills which represent old media vs new media while at the same time poking away at the Creative vs the Scientific, parrying between Male vs Female ways of thinking, engaging in left vs right brain processes and finally, lunging at LIFE and DEATH.

It all began April 20th with the BP fiasco which for me resulted in a long mediation on Modern Art and the Death of Culture

Google death of culture and see who else has taken this subject on...

And so it was that I sashayed into a self interest course over the summer on “How to Die Well” thinking not of myself or those who I know but rather of our Culture as a whole, our Western culture which is now experiencing a deep grief and inability to come to terms with the loss of so much human, animal and plant life on daily basis due to its terrible inbalance which no man can correct. Indeed is seems that such a thing is impossible this late point in the game of western lifestyles, business practices and modes of thinking. I hoped for some reason to gain insight into what words I might be able to offer in the face of this ongoing  crisis. What ensued was a deep and often dangerous one sided discourse on life and death in the 20th Century lead by a leading expert who had failed to factor in …as they all seem to do….the effects of Media on the one hand and the natural balance of Life on the other which left me wondering, as usual, if my $50,000 art education investment was ever going to bear any fruit other than making me, once again, the OUTSIDER that Colin Wilson describes in his non fiction book on Artists.  Further, It left me grieving for the days when people still knew who McLuhan was in Canada. The expert heading up the session had attended Harvard and has worked in big Canadian Hospitals assisting over one thousand people in the face of their death. Still, like a fish in water what he was not aware of the environment that he lives – the Electronic Environment that McLuhan wrote of and how it that changed everything about our culture – including our response to Death and Dying…

As an artist, I have long embraced the concept that my Western Euro-Centric culture is on its death bed, a simple study of the works of the poets and painters shows this as a fact. What we see now are the final death throes of the demise of all our existing cultural institutions. For those who went to art school and studied the history of art this is not a new concept by any means. The absolute terror that this expert had seen over and over again by those facing death was the result of the TOTAL oblivion of their cultural memory which was delivered by the mercenary armies of the print bastards – armies who wiped out European Pagan and sacred culture and left all remaining scared of its monsters and demons and hungry ghosts and severely disconnected from any form of collective memory of ancestory in a matrix of disharmonic time which pits one race against another…

At one point the questions was posed as to why we were so terrified and disconnected when confronted with our own death or that of our family or loved ones. I tweeted out the word: “ARMIES”.

Buddy was completely taken back, shocked at the single keyword  which escaped my mouth like the a bird eating a small seed, quickly. The word came at him from what he thought was left field and he dismissed it as having no relevance to the rest of the conversation. All I can say is you cannot study the Media Theory of McLuhan for over 10 years and not know his theory on print and its relationship to citizen armies. If McLuhan is dry then try Bob Dobbs and the  ”Print Bastards”. Same difference.

Greatest Salesman who ever lived!

http://bit.ly/ccDw4h

The theology holds that “Bob” is the greatest salesman who ever lived, and has cheated death a number of times. He was famous for his SubGenius publication, SubGenius Pamphlet #1 (a.k.a. “The World Ends Tomorrow And You May Die”) (1979).

Whatever. If looks could kill I would have obliviated after that word “ARMIES” flew out of my mouth. From there on in I was cut off from an opportunity to expound on McLuhan or Bob Dobbs and had to listen instead to hours of discourse on Beuwolf, which incidently had been required reading prior to class.

I had googled the word Beuwolf and done the wikki check and found that it was some old english manuscript which made my hair want to fall out at the very thought of reading it so I got the equvilent of the Coles notes, reading the kids version which I picked up at Indigo. Before the class I scanned the book and looked at the pictures.

Shortly after my word was dismissed the history lesson began. I soon revealed my ignorance of British history by saying I did not know who Cromwell was. Back in my room later on I googled: Citizen armies on my IPAD and landed on the page below. The image says it all but the page honors McLuhan. DUH. Somewhere in a past I recall that I actually made an animated short on this concept — it is in storage somewhere…. Someday when I retire from this rat race or the world becomes truely aware of the environment in which we exist – and no, I do not meant the toxic slug of the old captains of industry — I will digitize my animated short and post it online…for now it is enough for you to study this picture and visit the link.

The Death of Western Culture

http://byronik.com/diss08.html

Creative mindset/billion dollar thinker Mashup

Map of the creative mind above

http://bit.ly/R5DTV

Now….about your mindset ….check out this website if you want to try to figure out how your mind set might appear. Then ask your collegue, client, boss, wife, partner or lover to map theirs and see if they are a “match” with yours. Simple eh? oh yeah, baby….just BOGGLES my mind!

Defining the Creative Class thru the Creative Process of “fitting in”

It certainly has been a while since I have had the time to blog on Creativity. I find that new clients consume so much time and energy at the start of a new relationship.  For me, learning what the client wants and how they want it done is all consuming. It involves that process of undergoing a whole new learning curve: the how “to fit in” part. A whole new relationship is formed. It is kinda like falling in love – one has to have a great reserve of emotional intelligence to deal with the “Great Expectations”  – as one undergoes a mutual exploration of strengths and weaknesses. This is especially true in sales where the expectations after hiring are very high and you are kinda sorta expected to deliver on them immediately even though you have yet to learn how the client wants things done, never mind the new script, new presentation, new words, new stance, new research to be assimulated and insights to be gained and then delivered – OR the creative ideas that you throw out as a matter of course, which may or may not be found acceptable to your new partner as you struggle to position yourself in their eyes. In this scientifically based world there are such high demands on deliverables  (shareholders), I should know by now that most only pay lip service to the creative process…

Yes, I have been buzy with a new client. At the same time I was working on a project for another.  Time has slipped by. I managed to slip in the odd tweet  – as microblogging is so 140 characters. Blogging requires more thought, planning and time.

I watched a great video hosted by HP the other day on the Creative Class with, who else?  Richard Forida. This is the video link for it.http://bit.ly/8OP5W – although it seems to be having a java script error for me this evening…if it does not work try this one, all audio,  all Richard…http://bit.ly/d0Qwk

The video is excellent. In it Richard speaks to an American from BIG IDEAS about the Creative Class. Basically, Richard keeps saying to the American,  “…. up in Toronto we are doing this or we are doing that…to encourage the development of the Creative Class….” This is is such a paradigm shift for us “not so confident” Canadians when it comes to innovation. But hey, Richard says we are now living in a POST AMERICAN world. Love that post modern….a whole new school of thought. We are so used to visiting our “American cousins” in order to find out what is happening in the area of innovation. It is a complete flip -peroo…of course, Richard is an American but hey, Toronto is his City and the party does not start till he shows up. http://bit.ly/6rtd2O. Richard says Toronto is “LIKE A GIANT POST GRADUATE CENTRE”  (And to think, I never even graduated from Art School…never mind University…I took off in search of what else….a more stimulating location…another culture…)

In addtion, to the video there is this article on the Creative Class posted at the HP page….from Trump’s School of Wharton

Overview

The term “creative class” does not refer to art school graduates working day jobs in coffee shops. And while it does include creative pros, such as art directors and designers, the “creative class” is more than a creative department. It’s what social theorist Richard Florida describes as “people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.”

The Creative Class in the ‘New Normal’ Engaging the Client

According to Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind, creativity is something that can be learned and enhanced. “Companies can actually enhance the creativity of their people. And leadership can do a lot of things to create a creative culture – one that encourages people to take risks and find creative solutions. It requires encouraging experiments and lessons from failure. Employees should be encouraged to take risks, and know that it’s ok to fail as long as you learn from this.”

Adam M. Grant, professor of management at Wharton and an organizational psychologist, says, “Most creative professionals have a particular end user in mind.” Often the end user is a client of the business, he says, but the end user could be a coworker or anyone else who uses the product. “When you connect creative professionals to the end users,” says Grant, “when they hear the needs those end users have, that encourages the creative professionals to empathize with the end users and find practical ways to help them.” The satisfaction gained from finding a solution to the end user’s problem is often a reward unto itself.

But making that connection isn’t always easy. According to Grant, a lot of creative people don’t get to see the impact of their work or meet the end user. And that’s unfortunate. He offers an example from the technology realm. “If I am designing software programs, one of the things I need to do is gain an understanding of the user’s perspective, watch how they use software and tailor my design to how the end user actually works. But a lot of organizations don’t establish that connection between employees and end users.” Establish that connection, he says, and designers will add value by creating more useful products.

Open Innovation and Technology

Professor Wind adds that a great deal of a company’s creative class innovation may come from the outside. “You realize from the beginning that not all ideas will come from inside. So you open yourself to the outside – including customers – in solution design.” He calls P&G a pioneer in open innovation. “They get about 50% of their products from outside P&G. It used to be much smaller. Even with a 9,000-person R&D group they could not deliver the innovations they needed.”

Wind points to another example of open innovation, this one in advertising: “Look at what’s happening in user-generated content.” Wind says that the most effective TV commercial of the last Super Bowl was the ad for Doritos, which was developed by consumers. “This came from a culture of innovation,” he says. “The more you create such a culture, the more you engage customers in the solution, then the higher the likelihood of coming up with more valuable solutions to them and to the company as well.”

Innovation in technology is especially important in the U.S., says Wind. “We historically believe we have the dominance in R&D and innovation. But we’re losing that dominance. In China and India they are developing sophisticated high-tech products. Singapore has a government office of creativity. It focuses on innovation, communication and creativity.”

Identifying and Optimizing Creative People Creative people breathe life into their organizations. They inspire those around them. So, how can management learn to identify and tap an organization’s creative problem solvers? According to Darren Rowse, vice president at blogging network b5media, highly creative people display a number of traits – curiosity, for one. Creative people tend to ask how, why, and what if? Creative people tend to confront challenges, not run from them. They believe that no challenge is too big to be overcome. And creative people persevere. When the going gets tough, creative people keep going.

Rowse and other creative professionals believe that smart managers should look for these traits among their people. When creative people are identified they should be given more opportunities to solve problems. Whether making difficult tasks easier, dangerous jobs safer, or complicated programs simpler, creative problem solving can add value to practically any organization, especially today.

According to Adam Grant, “We’re moving from an information age to a conceptual age. We need more creative professionals who can identify new problems and solve them in ways that haven’t been considered before. “Research by Teresa Amabile at Harvard and Sigal Barsade and Jennifer Mueller at Wharton shows that positive emotions can drive creativity. Enthusiasm and excitement often drive good ideas; these emotions make us more cognitively flexible. We tend to make more connections between different kinds of ideas, and see things from different kinds of ideas, and see things from different angles.”

Gay Pride Parade in Toronto….”a leading indicator” of an emerging Creative Culture

That old “creative” State of Mind…Art vs Science…the big picture

Read this blog yesterday entitled

Richard Florida state of mind

Radicals and bankers both think Richard Florida is talking to them

By Mike Smith

http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=172223

It got me thinking…then in the evening before going to my bed I did my “motivational” reading cause it is so tough being a creative being in a world where the scientific class rules with its rational state of mind….by the time I finished reading my motivational read I not only felt a whole lot better but I felt that the author had replied exactly as I would if I had not read his brilliant insight first.

Let me being with a summary Mike’s blog and then reply to it by copying/quoting the author of “ZEN and the ART of making a Living”. Mike, of course both BANKERS and Radicals both think Richard Florida is talking to them for ” Talent makes Capital Dance” .  And the word is capital, my friend. The world is dominated by capitalists. Scientifically based capitalism…not natural capitalism…..that is a whole different ball game. Nevertheless lets strip it down to the fact that ideas drive innovation, as Richard also says and without the creative idea or in-spiration you ain’t got nothin” but the same old same old and who is investing in that these days?

oh, yeah, everybody around the globe…you say. Richard says “The task ahead of us,” he tells the group, “is reinventing this system for mobilizing human intelligence, human talent, human creativity.” At first Mike responds with his heart and is game. Then he begins to play the game of anaylsis paraylsis. His rational left brain kicks in and he starts to get cynical and critical and plays the game of either/or either globalization or no globalization. He gets negative.

I recall looking up the source of the word globalization some weeks back only to find the Wikki saying that the idea of such has been around since the time of the Romans. Seems he is also stuck on the word WEALTH. Well, could we just flip into a bigger left brained mindset and use the word abundance or would that take us to the edge of the slippery slope of creativity where there is an abundance of ideas and the idea that our sole purpose is to CREATE. Shockin eh? Big picture thinking…reminds me of art school days/daze where we would debate endlessly the different  philosophies like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness vs Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged….yada..yada…

At that point Richard says…“What if we began to value the 45 per cent of people in Canada in what we call the service economy?” asks Florida. “How do we turn those jobs in coffee shops and nail salons into creative, collaborative jobs?”This gets Mike going again…an interesting idea…but what is the answer?  He states “I don’t know. Maybe someone could point me toward the session on prevention of union busting?” BAM, we are Back to the future rationality of the science of politics…

Me, I go off into a day dream about Zen monks and mindfullness. Clearly I could not debate Mike on his disillusionment for Richards “capital-C Creatives”  idea – although I know only too well where he is coming from. I am glad, however, that he appreciates the fact that Richard has opened the doors of perception, albiet the gates of HELL for some,  for that is the role of the creative mind. “To wake people up”  if I can qo with McLuhan’s definition of the artist.

Let me now share the ‘irrational” creative state of mind response that resonated with me at the end of another money grubbing day. It resonated like a gong at the end of a good meditation session.It is from the book ZEN and the Art of making a Living” by Laurence G. Boldt

“The Natural Art of Human Living”

The Great German author Thomas Mann wrote “Art is the spirit in matter, the natural instinct toward humanization, that is toward the spiritualization of life” Mann’s conception of art as a natural instinct toward humanization, or spiritualization, provides a bridge uniting the fine and the practical arts, the spiritual life with the art of creative living. The impulse to humanize, the movement “toward the spiritialization of life” is the origin of art, the progenitor of all that is noble in the creative arts, in science, in humanitarian service, indeed, in all fields of endeavor.

This conception unites the work of Gandhi with the Japanese tea ceremony, this mission work of Albert Schwietzer with Mozart’s Magic Flute, Navaho sand painting with the great cathederals of Europe , the work of Mother Teresa with that of Albert Enstein with that of the anonymous but devoted local elementary school teacher. All of these are art because they spring from what Mann calls the “natural instinct toward humanization” Setting aside for the moment the issue of the relative merit of these or any other works of art, we can recongize this natural impulse as their common origin.

Following your natural instinct toward humanization is the road to your art, your life’s work. This is another way of saying, “Follow your Bliss”. While we tend to think of art as something for the privileged few, Mann’s conception recognizes art as the natural expression of our humanity. As such, art is not exceptional, but ordinary. In many traditional cultures, it was expected that all people were, or ought to be, artists. In regaining our naturalness, we regain our humanity and our art.

There are significant differences in the relative value of the arts and in the quality of their execution. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained in the recognition of the one impulse that gives rise to all the arts. Major or minor, epic or commonplace, the arts are works of the spirit. They are acts of love that unite and “spiritualize” our lives. On the other hand, Leonardo da Vinci said “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art”, no matter the virtuosity of the technique employed. All true art ought be celebrated for the sake of impulse to humanity that gives it birth. This impulse is itself the art, it is what makes life worth living and more, than that, a thing of wonder, glory and splendor. (…..or as the dadaist said: “Every thing I spit is ART”…………..)

In their contemplation, the genuine arts call out our humanity. If we study the arts with a view toward recognizing the underlying patterns, the ever-recurring Universal archetypes they evoke, we cannot help but recognize that the GROUND FROM WHICH THEY EMANATE IS THE UNIVERSAL GROUND OF BEING, in which man, the earth, the universe and all things reside. The Ever Becoming of this Being – the grand play of creation in which we are privileged to participate -is itself the Great Art to which all of the lesser arts point. As the sunlight reflects and recalls the Sun, so the radiance of the arts reflects and recalls the Great Art of Infinite Being, Ever Becoming Naturally. “

So be it. Mike if you want an image on that cosmic concept check out my website www.hiddenground.net. Maybe next year I will be lucky enough or privileged enf or have a JOB enf that allows me to attend Creative Spaces and Places. Here’s looking at you kid….

I am deep into reading on Toronto becomi…

I am deep into reading on Toronto becoming a world class creative city…Double Whammy….I am actually listed twice in the creative classes Once as an artist, since I was knee high to a grasshopper…drawing, painting, film, video and animation and once as a “high end Sales Professional” . The second occupation is on Richard’s list of cultural creatives and follows my own reasoning. Forced to give up making a living at classical animation as the internet rose up and devoured it…I figured that what both making art and selling good stuff had in common was a creative way of thinking in which one was most def an “agent of change” Check this link for Toronto’s cultural city plan http://bit.ly/135cQw

I am trying to warm up to the idea of wr…

I am trying to warm up to the idea of writing on creativity NOW…reading some online stuff and looking at tweets on the subject…it is a tricky subject cause everyone is an artist these days but no one wants to think creatively cause it is still too ‘out there”. Having been a creative all my life I find that the “creative class” as defined by Richard Florida is being bashed. BTW, he is moving to Toronto to teach at U of T! http://bit.ly/B5wAZ I just ordered his book “Whose your City?” I guess it is clear that Toronto is Richard’s!

The TO Post article writes, “In his most recent book, The Flight of the Creative Class, Mr. Florida foreshadowed his move to Toronto by pointing to all the American scholars who were drifting to Canada and Western Europe where he says better government-funded research opportunities are offered”. I guess not too much has changed since I wrapped my head around this issue over a decade ago…when I emerged as an up and coming Canadian Animator…creative still means access to some sort of funding in order to be so. It used to the the Church and then the state and now…it is still the government of Canada and Europe. In America creative is an online start up. I still think the most creative types today can be found in business.

McLuhan, our U of T CommuncationsTheory Guru defined the artist as being one who “wakes people up” to the present moment of what is happening right here and now! An agent of change. A change miester…these days that creativity of the moment appears in new online applications like Twitter and Face Book not in some painting or drawing or installation. Creativity in the way in which we connect online socially is the hottest NOW thing! It is the reason I choose this blog format. I can type short like a tweet or long like a blog..I am not confined by the layout of my blog…

About his search for a home in Toronto Richard says “When touring Toronto’s neighbourhood’s in search of his new home, Mr. Florida said he acknowledged high market prices, but his theory maintains that to an extent, it’s worth investing in expensive housing within a city’s core to avoid long commutes.
“It’s important not only as fuel costs rise, but also time costs rise. Do you want [people] spending two or three hours commuting when they could be spending that time thinking and being creative?” he said.
Here, here, that is exactly what I am doing in this August long weekend, sitting in my home office at about mid town Toronto chilling above the Caribana madness, thinking and being creative!

Richard Florida Welcome to Toronto!