Living in More Than One World

I’ve decided to relaunch my blog by commemorating the 30th anniversary of the release of Declaration of Independents, a compilation of independent label rock music that I co-executive produced with Steve Leeds, now of Sirius satellite radio. It was the only album on the label we co-owned, Ambition Records. Declaration was one of the first compilations of its type, fittingly released on July 4, 1980. We licensed 13 songs from small labels nationwide, by such artists as SVT (from San Francisco, with Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna), Bubba Lou and the Highballs (also from San Francisco), Robin Lane and the Chartbusters (Boston); Kevin Dunn (Atlanta; with a highly original electronic version of Chuck Berry’s “Nadine”); Pylon (Athens, Ga.; their cut “Cool” was co-produced by the band and Dunn); The News (Rock Springs, Wy.), Luxury (Des Moines) and Ragnar Kvaran (Ann Arbor). There were also several cuts from Washington, D.C., area artists: Razz (with Tommy Keene), Tex Rubinowitz and the late Root Boy Slim; and two from Springfield, Mo., Jim Wunderle and D. Clinton (Donnie) Thompson, one of the most phenomenal roots-rock guitarists, then and now. It was distributed in the UK by Stiff Records, then at or near the height of its fame. The amazing cover art (you can get a basic idea of it from a 2008 Wilfully Obscure blog post) was by Steve Byram and David Gambale. The musician associated with the LP who arguably became most successful, Ben Vaughn, didn’t even play on it. He designed Ambition Records’ logo, in his other capacity at the time as a graphic designer. Steve Leeds, Ben and I remain friends, but I’ve lost touch with most of the artists, and would love to hear from them, if any see this post. And if you enjoyed the album, it would be great to hear from you.

As someone who teaches grad school (if only one semester a year), I was quite interested to read about the array of online ventures that are trying to provide new models for higher education in Anya Kamenetz’s September 2009 Fast Company feature, How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. While some of the innovations revolve around major universities putting their content online for the outside world (besides online learning initiatives available to their own students), the article demonstrates that there is not one particular model that is winning out for how people who are not on a campus will take advantage of online learning. One thing that is clear is that only a select group of people can pay the eye-popping tuition prices of some our universities. If there is a way to receive, if not the exact experience someone would get by spending four years at Harvard, Stanford or similar schools, but something similar at a greatly reduced price and other barriers to entry, an educational revolution would be possible. If prospective students can mix and match course content from a number of top professors and universities, our whole idea of what it means to be highly educated will change. If this can be accomplished at no cost, or a relatively inexpensive cost, there will be unlimited opportunities for for-profit and nonprofit organizations to apply not only the tools we have now, but those that will be developed in the future. Also check out the sidebar, 5 Startups to Watch, with thumbnail descriptions of 2tor Inc., EduFire, Grockit, Inigral and Knewton. What will happen if schools as we currently know them don’t fully adapt to the new technological possibilities? If that is the case, there is the chilling prospect, Kamenetz writes, that they “will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores.”

The week is moving fast. It’s already Wednesday. But if you haven’t already done so, check out USA TODAY’s handy First Monday: New in business TV, DVDs, magazines, books. This runs on the first Monday of each month, and it’s a fun and informative feature to look at either in print (where it takes up the entire third page) or online, with the added value of links. I always enjoyed when I got the opportunity to write for this page when I worked at USA TODAY. It provides readers with quick and useful scans of upcoming things that should be on the radar screens of business people. It also deserves an audience beyond the business world. The August 3 page includes the book 1000 CEOs, with “brief biographies, career trajectories and pullouts of each executive’s traits, practices or words of wisdom.” The films featured are the advertising documentary Art & Copy, and Julie and Julia, based on Julie Powell’s hit book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. One of my favorite features each month is What I Read, in which an executive details what he or she is reading, and a bit about their reading habits. The spotlight here is on E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, CEO of HarQen. Her three favorite books: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Good to Great by Jim Collins and Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister. The “5 Questions” this month features Bill Roedy, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks International. His response to what makes his network a good ambassador for American culture abroad: “We have 150 channels in 168 countries and our audience, primarily young people, wants to be connected. Our goal is to be both a medium of cultural exchange and a unifying force by integrating global and local culture.”

If you like lists as much as I do, you’ll be kept busy for a long time perusing the 100 Most Creative People in Business on FastCompany.com. It’s an intriguing mix of executives, designers, writers, directors, academics, artists, musicians and more. Although a number of names were familiar to me, many were not. The thumbnail descriptions are to-the-point and informative. Beyond a quick education about people who are doing cool, useful things at a high level, it provides many role models who demonstrate what’s possible by stretching our knowledge, imagination and abilities. When you see the list, you’ll recognize names, companies, products and services that have enriched your life in one way or the other. Obviously such a list is quite subjective, and bound to be confounding to some people. But it provides tremendous food for thought and makes for compulsive clicking and reading. A sampling of people and their rank: #1 Jonathan Ive, #4 Reed Hastings, #13 Stella McCartney, #22 Damien Hirst, #35 Peter Senge, #40 Neil Gaiman, #49 Tyra Banks, #68 Zaha Hadid, #83 Brian Eno…you get the picture.  A neat value-added feature is a page of links for top ten creative people by industry, e.g., Movies and Television (#3, JJ Abrams), Sports (#5, Shaun White), Health Care (#1 Melinda Gates), Architecture (#4, Rem Koolhaas), the Web Business (#5 Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), Music Business, (#2, Tim Westergren of Pandora) and so on. Fast Company knows it can’t please everyone. Their suggestion is to “Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.”

For an insightful British take on education in New York City and elsewhere, see Off to School, on Economist.com. The Economist’s education correspondent uses the occasion of chairing an education conference in New York City to also visit various schools there and in nearby Newark, NJ. There are some quotes from an interview with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and a visit with a TFA alum to speak to current TFA teachers at a Bronx middle school. In Jim Collins’ recent Inc. magazine interview, he called Kopp “my entrepreneur for this decade.” He continued, “Her organization is truly an entrepreneurial creation that is out to utterly transform education. It’s taking an entrepreneurial, let’s-do-something approach to tackling a massive social problem.” Last year, I saw a dynamic presentation by Elissa Clapp, Teach for America’s Senior Vice President of Recruitment, at the Drucker Global Symposium, in Claremont, California.
The piece in Economist.com is divided into four days (so far, anyway); three for school visits and one for the conference itself. Besides the visit to the TFA teachers in the Bronx, there are also reports on the Bronx Lab, a transformed public school that is mainly run by TFA alums, and two private schools; one relatively new (Claremont Prep) and one 130 years old (Fieldston). The next day moves on to Newark, and schools operated by KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), a charter school organization started by two TFA alums. The reports from Newark and New York City paint a hopeful yet challenging picture for the future of education in the United States.

Many of us will have to become more entrepreneurially-oriented as we move deeper into the 21st century. In that spirit, be sure to check out the April, 30th anniversary issue of Inc., especially for the highly informative interview with Jim Collins. Jim is well-known for his books Good to Great and Built to Last, and he wrote the forewords for Peter Drucker’s Management: Revised Edition and The Daily Drucker. He references Drucker in his interview, which is about the state of entrepreneurship, and especially the entrepreneur, in the past, present and future.

There are lots of other things worth reading in this issue and on the magazine’s website, including The Business Owner’s Bookshelf, a list of 30 books that should be helpful whether or not you own a business, or think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Drucker’s The Effective Executive is one of the recommendations, along with other such varied fare as Collins’ Good to Great, Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start.