THE VISIONARY & THE FUTURIST

American Demographics, Oct 1, 2004

Trying to attract the biotech engineer by offering everything from cash incentives to latte bars, that's not going to work. "It's not sufficient to go after just the high-end workers, just us," one of these engineers once told me. "In order to attract people in general, and especially people from foreign cultures and foreign countries, all classes need to be welcomed and to feel actively engaged in a place, because that's when a community is created." He went on: "People like us [referring here specifically to Indian-born engineers] want to live in a community where there are lots of immigrants of lots of classes and lots of skill-levels, from all walks of life. We want thriving churches and restaurants, music and groceries, schools where kids can meet other kids. We don't want to be seen just as a group of software engineers - that's elitist and racist at the same time - we want everyone welcomed." That's probably one of the most telling things I've ever heard in years of focus groups. If you build it - the community, the place - they will come. And they will stay.

ZOLLI: It seems as if the creative class is linked to the dematerialization of the economy, to the rise of design and brand experience and critical business issues. But we can't dematerialize the economy forever. What is a healthy balance between cultural creatives and people filling other roles in the economy?

FLORIDA: Good point. But as a visit to any garbage dump will show you, the economy is still truly material. The distinction between a material and dematerialized economy is, I think, a false one.

Think about this. My father worked for decades in an eyeglass factory, where everyone made things with his - and they were all men - hands. Labor-intensive, physical products. Now, if you look on the street these days, more people wear eyeglasses than ever before. Not just that. There are more cars, more fridges and more stoves. Collectively, we have so much stuff we can't figure out where to put it all.

The fact of the matter is that the people who make those things have changed: factories like the one my father worked at have become more automated and productive. And, as my years at Carnegie Mellon taught me, the workforce driving those factories is no longer always a blue-collar worker like my dad, but often people who write software code. You'll see my point in a second, I think.

More than 10 years ago, when I was writing on the revitalization of Midwestern industries, I visited I/N Tek, a cold-rolling steel mill that makes steel coils without a single human being touching them. Twenty years ago, there would have been hundreds of men touching and molding and shifting and moving the steel. Where had all the people disappeared to?

The manager of the plant told me that, now, the men sat in air-conditioned booths listening to Miles Davis and watching computer screens. This factory is a "living laboratory," his words, where workers, researchers and engineers work together to automate, monitor, improve and motivate the production process.