This might be an opportune moment to broach the subject of “Right Livelihood.”

Presently, millions of American white collar and blue collar workers have lost their jobs or have been forced to accept shortened work weeks.

Millions of gainfully employed citizens count themselves among “The Working Worried.” They live with the very real possibility of being sacked at a moment’s notice.

Thousands of young college grads are forced to boomerang back to their parents’ homes and take marginal jobs.

Even Warren Buffett (“America’s Greatest Investor”) lost nearly 60% of his investors’ premier stock portfolio in Berkshire Hathaway.

And we all know what the collapse of the housing and financial markets means to the Boomer’s retirement plans. The silver-haired generation will be fool’s gold geriatrics.

So consider this:

Post World War II American Industrial Capitalism is over. It was an amazing ride but it is now kaput. The financial elites on Wall Street, in restricted corporate boardrooms and behind closed Congressional doors, simply robbed shareholders, bondholders, and worker pension funds of their accumulated wealth.

Think GM, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Standard & Poors, Moody, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, etc., etc., etc…

Everyone who was anyone inside the financial community knew what was happening but simply did not care to go public. It was too lucrative to just follow the herd — off a cliff. That was what confused and confounded Alan Greenspan, the once-venerated chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. He could not imagine in his wildest dreams that the pillars of the establishment would let the system collapse. But if you read too much Ayn Rand in your youth and don’t talk with anyone except those in your select clique for 50 years, you become a dangerous relic of the past.

Essentially, the American government has made a group of inside interests too big to fail. That is the rationale for the mega-trillion dollar bailout, courtesy of the American taxpayer and foreign stakeholders, of our treasury debt.

And it’s probably true that there was no other choice than to fork over our nation’s wallet to well-heeled muggers. The alternative was a probable global Depression.

The more obvious lessons of our ongoing tale of financial woe are:

• Establishment elites pursuing lives of “Wrong Livelihood” made out like bandits.


• The proverbial little guy has lost his inflated stake in both stock and housing markets.


• The system cannot seem to self-correct its most obvious blunders.

I often feel like the kid who yelled out “The Emperor is naked!” The facts are obvious to all in their pink splendor.

Our national debt — including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare and Medicaid, government pensions, bum mortgages and derivative swaps, credit card debt, student loan debt, and interest and principle on official national and state debt before the current meltdown — is many times the size of our real productive economy. Our kids and grandkids are going to hate us.

So, where does this leave a creative person?

Actually, it leaves us surprisingly well off compared to most wage earners.

Money was never the key motivator in our lives. We set up small businesses and took day jobs so we could paint, make films, strut on stage, write, perform, and compose music, create on the computer, write plays and screenplays, design all and sundry sorts of things and experiences…

I recorded the following interviews with eight “Maine Originals” six or seven years ago — while 9/11 was still fresh in our national psyche. The tagline for the series of vignettes is “Creative lives linked to land, sea, and community.”

That is about as good a definition of “Right Livelihood” as I’ve seen. The people who were profiled inspired me to try in my own way to contribute to civil society’s long-term prospects.

The voices that you hear in the links below just might ignite your own originality. If the current state of our nation’s finances and frayed social fabric has a bottom line, it might be this:

We need practical visionaries to create new and resilient American Dreams — the old ones are falling of their own accord into the dustbin of history.

Here are two web links:

http://www.creativeledgestudio.com/maineoriginals/originals.html

http://www.creativeledgestudio.com/maineoriginals/

On June 8, 2008, I posted a surprisingly prescient blog entry titled Finessing A Recession. It was a muted, mildly upbeat musing on what looked like the beginning of a major recession.

As a longtime student of financial markets and a reluctant realist (are there any other kind?), I tried to put a positive spin on an economic system on the brink of spinning out of control.

Because the United States is an essentially commercial country founded on a perennial optimism about the future of the human condition, there is a social taboo in business circles about offering warnings of impending doom. This genuinely separates us from our European and Asian cousins who are heirs to static social systems and endless wars with neighboring nations.

It would be helpful to see how my pre-meltdown advice looks in a post-meltdown world. Here is a link to the initial blog entry:

http://www.creativeledge.com/blog/2008/06/finessing-recession.php

What follows is a short updated summary of where things are now and might be headed:

Realize that all economic downturns eventually bottom out and things get better. History suggests that most down economic cycles take anywhere from two to seven years to run their course. Ironically, it is at the point of maximum pessimism where the real opportunities are often found.

Leopold Engleitner is the world's oldest known male Nazi concentration camp survivor whose experiences have been documented in the award winning book and film Unbroken Will.

For refusing to join Hitler's Army, Leopold Engleitner, an Austrian born in 1905, was interned in three of the most infamous Nazi Concentration Camps in Germany. His refusal to sign a simple declaration denouncing his religion and swearing his allegiance to the Reich put him in a collision course with Nazi Germany that nearly cost him his life. His iron will and his determination to stand up for just principles have become a role model for all. An old tattered suitcase became a symbol of hope for a long and impossible journey back home. At his release, he weighed less than 62 pounds, but today at the age of 103, he still lives to share his story of optimism.

Fresh from his lectures at Harvard University and in Florida, Leopold Engleitner will be visiting Los Angeles and appearing at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (May 14 and 24) the Moorpark College (May 22 and 23), UCLA (May 20) and the Lammle's Sunset 5 Theatre in West Hollywood, where his prize-winning documentary Unbroken Will and his 2006 USA Lecture Tour film will be screened from May 15 to 21, 2009 at 1:00 PM, 4:30 PM, 7:30 PM, 10:00 PM.

These excellent articles covered his first event on May 4, 2009 at Harvard University:

Holocaust survivor, 103, tells students of resisting Nazis
The Boston Globe

Oldest living Holocaust survivor speaks at Harvard
The Harvard Gazette

For further information please visit www.unbrokenwill.com.

Our times and our selves are defined by conflict.

We are highly evolved mammals with big brains that can do the most ethereal abstract mathematical reasoning, produce masterpieces of music and art, envision astounding future possibilities — including our own mortality.

Still, we are sensate and aggressive creatures who crave the tactile intimacy of our clan and fear outsiders — and will not hesitate to violently attack perceived strangers.

This issue of Views From CreativeLedge explores the tension between our conflicting human tendencies to create and collaborate or to kill each other and destroy the hard won achievements of human culture.

In a world that has witnessed between 119,000,000 and 265,000,000 state-sponsored homicides (depending on who is doing the counting) between World War I and the present, this is not an academic question.

Below you will find an array of web links to stimulate your thinking and to constructively engage your community wherever you find it.

Perhaps the most compelling quote on the subject of overcoming our conflicted nature is from Charles Darwin:

“In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have always prevailed.”

Sung Park of Umagination Labs recently spoke at MIT Sloan School of Management about effective techniques for coming up with innovative ideas. His engaging presentation offers creative ways to approach the brainstorming process. Take a look:



Thanks to Ted Chan of 2bl.org for the tip.

By Ted Chan, MIT Sloan School of Management
2bl.org

Pricing a creative product is one of the great challenges in life, and is itself an art form. Getting it right requires an understanding of finance, behavioral economics and social psychology. Pricing contains a number of paradoxes that can prevent you from maximizing your profits. This article provides some food for thought as you consider how to price and market your good.

1. Pricing at 00 and 50 is the only option for luxury goods. An experiment performed in an art studio revealed that high-end art with prices ending in 00 and 50 sold far better than anything with other numbers. Art is an acquisition where people want to feel they are buying quality rather than getting value. Ninety-nines and 95s are good for conveying value and might be effective for lower priced goods such as mass market clothing, simple prints or small photographic works.


2. Understand your costs. One thing I’ve noticed about creatives is that they think very little about costs. Paints, materials, packaging, transport, framing and just about everything else you can think of are expensive. There’s also overhead — a studio, electricity, display space rental and cost of sales. Don’t forget studio fees as well. It’s important to lay out the costs of the entire ecosystem when assessing what price point is sustainable for creating quality art work.


3. Avoid double marginalization with downstream sellers. Something that isn’t even understood well in Fortune 500 companies is transfer pricing. Double marginalization is the concept that if you overcharge your downstream sellers (distributors, such as art resellers and studios) they will charge a price that is sub-optimal to the end consumer. This means everyone’s profits will suffer, and your art will be less price competitive. A better way to approach the problem is to figure out with your downstream seller what the optimal price would be to the end buyer, and create a revenue split that you think is fair.


4. For some goods, raising prices may increase demand. An example was a brand of fountain pens in Britain that raised prices and expected a drop in demand. However, demand actually increased for their high-end metal and wood pens. Demand decreased for their plastic pens when they raised prices. This is likely to be true with many luxury and creative goods where perceived quality is more important to a buyer. It’s really important to study what matters to your customers.


5. A higher price impacts those who enter your network. For service businesses, a higher price signals exclusivity and can act as a gatekeeper to ensure high quality. For instance, a millionaire dating service that charges men $25,000 for an annual membership will keep poor college students out and attract women who are pre-qualified to be interested in meeting such men. This applies to creative services or networking groups as well. Be wary of anything that’s free. You often get what you pay for in terms of the quality of the constituent base.


6. Luxury goods are not just about conspicuous consumption. People once thought that luxury purchases were related to the desire to show off conspicuous consumption. A more nuanced understanding includes self-perception and milestones. The feeling of “I can buy this, I’ve made it” is also a key part of the luxury good purchase. Make your high end customers feel that way and you will be in better shape.


7. For gift items, a low price may not be desirable. One must think carefully about the purchase process for their goods. When giving a gift, a low price is not always desirable. This is the case in Asia with alcoholic beverages often given as gifts, such as scotch and brandy. People generally know the prices of these goods, and pricing your brand/goods higher may actually increase price. This, of course, implies that pricing information would be assumed to be available to the gift receiver. If you own an art studio, this especially applies when a millionaire brings his rich boyfriend/girlfriend in searching for a gift!


8. When you do put things on sale, 30% saturation is about the max. With sales, too much removes the perception that a buyer is getting a good deal. Research at MIT indicates that above 30% “sale saturation” in your store or website removes the effectiveness of this sale topic.


9. When pricing, give three options. Many interesting studies reveal that adding a ridiculous third option can make a second option more appealing. Originally, the Economist sold an online subscription for $59, and print/online bundled subscription for $129. The split in sales was about 40% for the $59 online subscription and 60% for the $129 subscription. They then added a $129 print only subscription option. You would think that it the new split would be 60% online, 40% for the bundle and zero for the print only. Instead, zero picked the print only, but 80% bought the $129 option.
   
   Another example is adding an extremely expensive (2x or 3x) third option that is only slightly better than the second option. This leads users to choose the middle option rather than the cheapest option, leading to significant increases in revenue. This is a common strategy for companies like HP and Xerox to get you to move up from a low-range product.

Ted Chan writes his own blog about social entrepreneurship and economics at www.2bl.org. He can be contacted at tedchan@gmail.com with any follow-up questions.

The birthplace of the American experiment was on the rocky coast of New England. It is a place of mercurial weather, merciless gales, treacherous rock ledges, pea-soup fogs, and snug harbor communities.

Many of the people who gave us our durable democratic form of government and a spirit of innovative enterprise were fishermen and mariners. Remnants of this traditional self-reliant and self-confident seafaring Yankee culture are still found in Maine.

This post is inspired by my decade-long connection to the Pine Tree state. The following items are intended to remind Americans that we have a long history of building durable and beautifully designed structures that manifest genuine integrity and creativity.

In many the ways, the profligate waste, shortsightedness, and national incompetence of the last 20 years is an historical anomaly. We can choose to revisit time-tested traditional and progressive American mindsets and verities in new ways.

It is there that we will find the will and ways to innovate and grow our still great nation out of its current trajectory of political malaise and economic decline.

In these turbulent days, it is important to recognize that our country has survived hard times before because her citizens rose to the challenges and did what needed to be done — creatively.