A beginning

I am the editor of the Corridor Business Journal, a weekly business paper covering the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids Corridor in Iowa. I came to the paper after years as a news reporter at the daily in Cedar Rapids, writing most recently about arts and entertainment. Partly because of the need to give myself a crash course in business thought and theory, and partly because I needed to fill space, I decided to review a business book each week. While a week isn't enough time to read even the most bulletpoint-laden book, I have gleaned enough from my purposeful skimming to learn a lot about business.

I have found that the books I've enjoyed most are those that transcend the bounds of the typical Eight Steps to Soar Like an Eagle and Manage your Nestlings for Success. From Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat or Freakonomics from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, these books all seem to point to a new, deeper way of looking at the world. Seeing things only from a business perspective, or only from the point of view of the arts, is to miss the big picture.

So, after thinking on all of this for a while and coming no closer to consolidating it into a new worldview, I decided to do what everyone else seems to do: I started a blog. The major impetus for this comes from Richard Florida, whose work may well be seen as an umbrella of sorts over this whole mess. Florida is coming to town to lecture, and I had the opportunity to interview him. The unedited transcript is here. Tomorrow I'll get the chance to hear him speak a couple of times, ensuring at least one more solid post here. From there, who knows where this will go.