Last night I met my family for dinner at a popular but unusually empty
Cambridge restaurant. Earlier in the day the
government announced another 651,000 jobs lost, and there was a
lot of dire economic language around the table: "complete collapse,"
"breadlines," "16% unemployment."
It was a bleak conversation, but I think there are economic snow drops appearing this spring -- signs of new, different growth:
WhiteHouse.gov -- Our president is speaking to us directly. You don't have to be part of the establishment to get unfiltered information from the government. Everybody has equal, if not perfect, information. Best of all, there's a growing expectation of such transparency. With the White House blogging, we increasingly expect corporations, non-profits and branches of government to do the same.
Twitter -- Conversation is public and connected. This puts everybody on equal footing. You don't have to live in Silicon Valley to know what the most successful entrepreneurs of our time are thinking. They tell you publicly. Companies with tons of money have a harder time selling their bad products, and companies with far less money can sell good ones.
HubSpot -- Marketing budgets are no longer barriers to entry. It used to be that if you had a promising new business, you had to spend tons of money to get your message out and build scale. Now you don't have to do that. Anybody with a quality product or service can use inbound marketing and a simple set of tools to compete with the big guys. (Check out this marketing roi page for two studies that spell this out analytically.)
These stories are all exciting because they're giving creative individuals power -- power that is being use to solve problems, to remake industries like transportation, apparel, and finance and, slowly, to rebuild our economy.
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