Anthony Bourdain is a hero of mine. An anti-hero who through transparency, honest opinion, and self-effacing truths, points out a plan for the road less travelled. Bourdain’s irreverent, vice-laden history, sudden plucking from the kitchen bowels of NYC, and gradual shift towards international enlightenment, is gut-punching inspirational.

UPDATE!
The video of my presentation was made available to the public. You can see it and the rest of the presentations from the event over on Smaller Indiana. I’ve embedded it below. If it loads slow, head over to the Smaller Indiana site.

Find more videos like this on Smaller Indiana
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I was honored to be one [...]

At first it seemed so convenient and full of instant gratification to buy music online, or even from my phone. I’ve been purchasing music via online download almost exclusively for the last four years. This was fueled in part by my green side telling me I’m saving on packaging materials and the transport of the product, and also by the fact that I had moved away from my favorite record store in Chicago.

If you’re active in social networks, you know this type of person. The one who tweets pictures of food and posts about their meals on Facebook. For us foodie/photo types (I’m including myself here because I’m very guilty) there’s a website built specifically with us in mind. Welcome to the scene Foodspotting, the social network for sharing sightings from your favorite eateries, markets and watering holes.

There’s no magic bullet to fixing the food system. A problem with so many distinct pieces needs just as many creative solutions. Luckily for us, the tide is turning – the last six years or so have given rise to a new kind of food activism.

A vital aspect of Totonno’s, beyond the deliciousness of the pies, is the way he chose to run the shop: it opened at 3pm, they made a certain amount of pizza dough for the day, and when it ran out they closed up shop, no matter how long the line of potential patrons remained. The business did not go out of business, nor did it balloon into a national brand (which seems to be the progression of most food enterprises these days). The place has remained a vibrant business for nearly 100 years, buzzing along merrily.

For small, entrepreneurial, creative and passionate business the marketplace has been hit hard to the point of evaporation. To succeed in the downturn many businesses have shifted focus, either through hyper-specialization, or by the opposite, seeking new and larger markets. It’s a repositioning of businesses to the polar edges of a marketplace scale.

We are now entering the Lace Economy (exiting the Web + Bubble Economy). The Lace Economy is both a fine-tuning of our networks and relationships, and a demand for services and products that are well crafted, genuine, and trend towards supporting the local and regional…New networks are being amassed through a mix of web-based tools (Facebooks, LinkedIn) and traditional channels (networking, associations). These form into a tangled, limitless, and underproductive web. Though there is an intoxicating excitement in the chaos of tangled relationships, the ever-increasing girth of networks makes these connections fragile and meaningless.

Intelligence has a diminished bearing on economic prosperity. Employers are shedding workers by the price-tag regardless of merit, experience, or potential. If business revenues fall off a cliff the first instinct is survival, not productivity. This opens the door to a renewed emphasis on “Creativity,” which implies less investment in goods, and more emphasis on making something from nothing. Call it “Doing.” In our new economy either you do something that resonates, or you don’t.

Mayor James M. Baker of Wilmington DE, speaking at the GCECS2009 this past Tuesday, made a striking point. To paraphrase he said: This isn’t a recession. It’s a total collapse, a time for a restructuring. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but a restructuring of how you run your business might be the necessary medicine, especially for creative professionals, small businesses, freelancers, etc.