Commonly referred to as a Baby Boomer, my father was born in rural East Texas and was groomed to become as William Whyte noted in his 1956 classic, an "Organization Man." Back then and through the 1980’s, towns and the people who lived in them were made and broken by the companies they worked for.
Though rare today for a single company to maintain such overwhelming influence over a community, we see remnants of that era in places like Alcoa, Tennessee, where corporate founder Alcoa remains dominant. Back in East Texas, the town of Lone Star - my dad's old stomping grounds - leaned heavily on Lone Star Steel for its existence. In 2006, LSS was sold to US Steel. Under new management, the area's steel industry continues to serve as one of the area's most important employers, though not as grand as in its heyday.
Long before Alcoa and Lone Star Steel, the Pullman Palace Car Company created the little town of Pullman, just south of Chicago. That was in the late 1880’s. Towns such as Durango, Colorado and Gary, Indiana soon followed and it seemed that eventually half of the United States was comprised of towns run by one corporate entity or another. Through the years, other companies, such as Walt Disney (Orlando, Florida), Hershey Chocolate Corporation (Hershey, PA) and Imperial Sugar (Sugarland, Texas) adopted the template for their own use. And for a very long time, they garnered quite a bit of success in doing so. Then along came computers and globalization, airplanes, telephones and the internet… and things began to change. As competition and technology bore down upon them, individual companies lost their hold and whole industries began to influence where people chose to work and the economic development term “clustering,” was born.
Clusters arose in unlikely places. Silicon Valley arose from the need for IT folks to cluster and eventually, they clustered in Austin, Texas too. Elkhart County, Indiana...with its long Amish heritage and its background producing musical instruments, it transitioned into the automotive industry and became known as the RV Capital of the World with 50% of the world's production taking place there.
All ideas have their time in the sun and even the best have a downside, as Austin discovered and the citizens of Elkhart are learning first hand today. A lack of diversity can kill a community. Just ask Indiana, which is experiencing an unemployment rate so high that then-candidate Barak Obama felt a need to schedule a campaign stop there last year.
The Rise of the Creative Class
A few years ago, Richard Florida wrote a book called “The Rise of the Creative Class.” By the time the book hit the shelves, we had already experienced Austin's dot.com bubble… and watched it burst. If you looked around closely enough, you didn’t need anyone to tell you that people who create for a living were going to change the world, although it was kind of nice to have someone summarize what the rest of us knew was happening, but just didn’t know what to call it. Currently, there are more than 40 million Americans – over a third of our national workforce – who create for a living.
Today, the “creative class” is influencing how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper, or cease to exist, and even which cities will grow, wither and die. This “creative class” comprises a variety of fields, from engineering to biotechnology to theater to computer science, to education and architecture. The creative class works in small towns and big towns, in big cities, on farmland and near pastures. Mostly they work where they want to live, not the other way around. Book-ending the Baby Boomers and born between 1982-2000, the new millennials embody the essence of the “creative class.”
Tech-savvy and independent… this new worker is about as far away from being an “organization man” as East Texas is from Asia. Limited only by technology, academic attainment and their own imaginations, they aren't waiting around for someone else to tell them where to live and work. They are making the world their “company town”
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For information about Information Technology or Business Management courses offered through the Business and Social Sciences Division: E-Business Web Developer Certificate Network Administrator Certificate Network Engineer CertificateMarketing Certificate
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Upcoming Events & Other Resources
Entrepreneurships Institute
Inaugural High Tech Conference and Career Fair at LSC-Montgomery September 24, 2009, 2pm-7:30pm http://lsc-montgomeryhightechconference.wikispaces.com/
SCI-TECH Education for Tomorrow Alliance EfTA needs you to make SCI://TECH, one of the largest regional science fairs in the nation, possible! Hundreds of judges meet one-on-one with students to evaluate their projects, and you don't have to be a scientist to encourage these aspiring young people...although we always welcome those too!
South by Southwest (MUSIC & TECH FEST) http://sxsw.com/home
Austin’s hey day as king of the dot.coms may be long gone, but she is still queen when it comes to cool. Nothing is more about what is happening right now than South by Southwest. "In its 22 years, SXSW has grown from a tiny music festival in the Texas capital into a massive, unavoidable media beast that reflects, discusses and showcases trends in culture and media but also often creates them." Event is held annually each March.
