My father, the son of Italian immigrants, never made it to high school, instead taking a job in a factory at the age of 13 to help support his family. He rose to supervisor, and on the few times he took me as a young boy to see his place of work, on Saturdays when the factory was running overtime, I would be captivated by the humming machinery. He would see my wide stare and say, "Richard, it's not the machines and technology that make this factory great. It all depends on the knowledge, intelligence and creativity of the people who work here."
I recalled those Saturdays recently when I had my hair cut in Toronto. It turned out that the hairdresser, a stylish young man in his late 20s or early 30s, was once a resident of Birmingham, an upscale suburb of Detroit that I knew well because my wife lived there when we met.
Without thinking, I said, "My wife used to get her hair done in Birmingham; what salon did you work in?"
"I wasn't a hairstylist then, man. I worked for General Motors," he said.
"Really?" I said, trying to dig myself out of a hole. "What plant did you work at?"
"Plant?" came his reply. "I didn't work in a factory — I'm a mechanical engineer and I worked on new product development."
My jaw dropped. This man had quit a high-paying job in a good company so he could cut people's hair. He had left the creative class because it wasn't creative enough for him and had gone into a service industry to express his creativity.
The point of retelling this story is not that his current line of work is better than his old one; it's that we need to expand our view of what good jobs can be and how to create them.
In North America, people who are employed in fields considered part of the creative class — science, technology, arts, culture, entertainment and professions — account for 35 to 40 per cent of the work force and produce more than half of all wages and salaries. But here's the rub: It's not enough to try to boost this creative economy just by increasing the pool of engineers and scientists, filmmakers, entertainers, media types, financial professionals and scientists.
The most overlooked — but most important — element of my theory and of the creative economy itself is that every human being is creative.
One of the great fallacies of modern times is the idea that creativity is limited to a small group. Most people, the belief goes, don't want to be creative, couldn't do it if asked and would be uncomfortable in an environment where creativity was expected of them.
This is false. Creativity is a virtually limitless resource that defies social status. I saw this in the 1980s in my studies of high-performance Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda.
Years ago, Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the great electronics company, laid down the real competitive challenge facing the world. Western factories had started out with better technology, better-trained engineers and managers and more aggressive chief executives. The key to Japan's success, he said, lay in mobilizing the knowledge and intelligence of its factory workers. The rest is history.
Yet our society continues to encourage the creative talents of a privileged minority. We systematically neglect the creative potential of the 60 to 70 per cent of the population that lies outside a narrow view of the creative class. There are fewer and fewer rewarding jobs for people without college degrees. This amounts to a huge inefficiency in our system for harnessing creative energy and turning it into wealth and productivity capacity.
