UAW’s President Bob King added, “I hope people look at the auto industry as a model of what should be happening across America. Here’s government and management, business, labor and community all working together and look at the results; everybody is further ahead.”   I also never thought I’d hear such a positive report from America’s autoworkers.

I grew up in Detroit, a child of the UAW and proud of it in my youth!  My father worked for Chrysler for more than 30 years and my mother was at GM almost as long. Yet by the 80s, I was in public relations in New York, representing  industry consultants Oliver Wight Companies  http://www.oliverwight.com/ and publicizing their books about the rise of quality control on production lines and why Japanese automakers understood it and Detroit’s corporate arrogance was in the way.

I’m still sad that it took bankruptcy to get Detroit’s Big Three back on track, especially since their troubles so heavily devastated my hometown.  But I hope you’ll take a moment to look over the CBS story at http://bit.ly/zSseg6  and hear the resounding agreement from managers and employees:  Detroit’s auto industry has made a dramatic U-turn and is coming back. It’s a reaffirmation of the triumph of quality and teamwork.

Yet that day we all knew that part of our strength was the ability to trust our vulnerabilities and celebrate the risks we were taking in challenging times.  We also toasted our past victories and laughed together at the joy of being so fearless* that day.

Throughout the holidays, I have encountered equally courageous and innovative leaders from all sectors — corporate America, non-profits,  cooperatives , arts organizations and unions (I recently joined the National Writers Union in time for its 30^th anniversary celebration) and government.

No one knows yet what 2012 will bring, but I hope all those courageous leaders  across the country with bold new ideas and the willingness to take risks will take us in the right direction.  Maybe it will be you!

* I salute my friend Jacqueline Wales for launching an event to celebrate and encourage  “fearless” women leaders! (www. fearlessfactor.com/)

Bill didn’t quite reach his goal – it was difficult to get many of the parts he needed to replace.  However he did get the engine purring again and the chassis rebuilt and with some help from my other brother Gilbert, he started driving it that way to local car shows, with a photo display of the new auto from the family archives.  It was a big hit.  The public flocked around his exhibit and the family had fun getting pictures taken driving the sparkling new chassis around the neighborhood. He’s talked to many reporters and finally a story appeared last month in Tech Center News with an interview with both brothers. On a trip home last month, I helped him submit a photo and story to a local newspaper. Who knew that his passion for cars – a common pastime in the Motor City—would make him such a big hit with other car lovers.

The ’29 Chevy was purchased new by my Uncle Joseph Lehotan while an employee of General Motors. He retired after about 35 years.  My brother has a great photo of my Uncle Joe in front of the car with my mother, my Aunt Amelia and my Uncle John – all GM employees.  Those four relatives together represented about 130 years of devotion to the building of General Motors products.

A little research showed that Uncle Joe paid a total of more than $600 for the car from a Detroit area dealership and borrowed $509.40 on a chattel mortgage to afford it. During the depression, my uncle sold the car to his father Joseph Sr., who worked with former United Mine Workers America president John L. Lewis in East St. Louis, Illinois. The car was eventually brought back to Michigan when my grandparents bought and relocated to the Vassar family farm in 1935, one of many Slovak families to settle in that area. For the next 15 years, the Chevy was the family’s main car and was also later used as a utility vehicle on the farm until it was finally stored in the mid-50s.  When my Uncle Andrew passed away several years ago,  Bill bought it from the estate with the intention of restoring it.

Bill is proud to be sharing both his family’s long, devoted work history with General Motors and 82 years of family ownership and caring for their 1929 Chevrolet.  How great that often recognition comes just from pursuing the things we love most!

Maberry began with an anecdote about a pivotal moment in his youth.  A librarian who had become a mentor during his teen years introduced Maberry to the famous science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.  It was on Maberry’s 14^th birthday and Bradbury told him the most important advice he could give him is that a writer “writes” and that “if you learn the basis of writing you should be able to write about anything.”

Mayberry took those words to heart.  While he is best known for thrillers like Ghost Road Blues, the first of a trilogy of supernatural horror novels, he has written for many formats and genres, including plays, lyrics, poetry, fiction, non-fiction and comic books – and loved it all. He’s even written for the Burpee Seed Company on how to plant a seed.

He succeeds by getting up early and writing up to 10 hours a day and is currently under contract for a series of bioterrorism thrillers for St. Martin’s Press.  The first three books have been optioned for television and the latest, The King of Plagues, just came out this spring to rave reviews.

Above all, Mayberry urges other writers not to undervalue their talent, but to find agents and editors they admire.  He told the audience that there’s a mindset that many writers get into that says “artists are not good at business” and he challenged the audience to refute it.  His business secret?  Just do the necessary homework in the form of solid research before you send out a query, whether it is to an agent or a magazine editor, and query more than one at a time.  When he is trying to place an article, he will pitch any publications that might be able to use it.  Finally, he follows up with a phone call.  When he was looking for the right agent, he did lots of homework before inviting the person he wanted out to lunch to discuss how they could do business together.   He landed one of top agents in the country before he had his first bestseller.

You can read more about Maberry’s books, read interviews on his blog or order his latest thriller The King of Plagues at www.jonathanmaberry.com.

Yet another week passed before a different pharmacist finally filled the prescription by contacting the insurance company directly and then informed me that there would be no refills because the Doctor had not checked the refill box.  I again called my Doctor’s office and was told that was just an oversight and if they would only call her, she would tell them just that.

The idea of possibly going through another week of frustration led me to complain to a friend, who suggested I use the small local pharmacy in my neighborhood instead.  He had been using them for years.  What a difference!  There was only one pharmacist to deal with and she was calm and friendly, not hassled and brusque.  When I explained the situation and the need to get in touch with my Doctor’s assistant, she smiled and promised to call the next day.

Sure enough, the refill was ready for me when I returned the next afternoon.  No problems.  When I asked why I was being charged full price again for the prescription since I had paid the deductible in the first transaction, this pharmacist suggested that my insurer must have a yearly deductible; since I had filled the prescription originally in December and it was now January, they could charge me again.  I called the insurance company and found out she was right.  It was a costly education for me.  Still, it was easier to swallow when it came with such a pleasing change of pharmacies and experiences.  It also reminded me that small businesses will always triumph if they provide superior customer service!

Both films have had difficult marketing challenges and have heroically innovative Directors whom anyone could learn from.  Lucy Walker, director   of “Waste Land” jokes that it is a movie about garbage, “but if you ask the publicist, it’s about the   transformative power of art,” she told the New York Times in an interview near her home in Venice, California http://nyti.ms/hpNFPb.

In fact, “Waste Land” is about the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, set against the backdrop of a massive garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro. She confesses to having little in the way of an awards marketing budget, and said the prize money the film has won on the festival circuit or through auctioning the artist’s work has gone back to the catadores, or garbage pickers, the film focuses on.  A British filmmaker, Ms. Walker is appealing to the British Film Council, and does get some glittery perks, such as access to screenings at the Soho House in Los Angeles and a party in New York given by the designer Diane von Furstenberg.  She also has several other high-profile fans.

Josh Fox, the director of “Gasland” runs a small downtown theater company in New York.  He has been on a nationwide grass-roots tour for his film, which investigates hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), a drilling process that pumps water and chemicals underground to extract natural gas.  The film explores the charge that it results in environmental and health damage. He is driving his film to screenings at theaters, community centers,  Environmental Protection Agency offices and schools, sometimes sleeping in his car.  According to the New York Times, Mr. Fox does have the backing of HBO, which showed his film last year, but most of the financing for his tour comes from foundations and none is earmarked for awards season campaigning.  In fact, the one reliable source of publicity for the film is from its critics in the oil and gas industry. Mr. Fox hopes that protests in the form of attack videos will help the movie.

When you watch the Academy Awards on Feb. 27, remember to pay attention to the documentary film category.  After seeing their trials and victories close up in Los Angeles, I really enjoy their moment of glory. And if you are in the Brooklyn area, come to the screenings at Brooklyn College Student on Campus Road and East 27th St.  The Screening of Gasland is on Wednesday, Feb. 23rd at 7 pm.  More details are available on the Sustainable Flatbush website at www.sustainableflatbush.org.

According to Tierney (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16tier.html?_r=1&ref=science), psychologists at Harvard used an iPhone ap called trackyourhappiness to contact people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

According to the researchers, “we developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.”

In fact, as the researchers elaborated,  “…whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else.”  In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

One of the researchers, Matthew Killngsworth,  saw evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering.

These findings seem to be in keeping with religious and philosophical admonitions to “be here now,” notes Tierney.  He also quotes William F. Buckley Jr.’s saying that “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.

So what’s the lesson in marketing?  One logical conclusion is to stay focused on your goals and don’t get distracted by the stream of bad news.  I talk with entrepreneurs daily and many successful ones tell me they avoid the news and naysayers and focus on their own companies.  In my own business, I use the Ditmas Park Workspace in my Brooklyn neighborhood when I need to be productive.  The offices  don’t have either a radio or TV set and that  allows me to cut down on distractions and stay focused on my projects.  I find that it is easy in such a quiet space to get “in the zone” or fully concentrated on the task at hand, and the result is that I’m very happy and productive!

“Be here now” seems very wise news for survival in today’s business world, indeed.

Finley writes that that the film challenged his assumptions about what form a new and improved Detroit ought to take.  “Our version of renewal comes in billion-dollar packages funded by big sugar daddies,” he says in the column. “So I rolled my eyes at first when a young artist told (host Johnny) Knoxville, ‘Detroit doesn’t need a savior. Detroit doesn’t need a big box store.’ That’s the difference in mindset between the corporate class and the creative class.”

Listening to the artists in the film (you can view part one online at http://www.palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit)  reminded me of my own “urban pioneering” days in the East Village and Midwood, Brooklyn as a young freelance writer and aspiring off-off Broadway actress. I was in love with the history of the city and the spirit of adventure in creating new institutions, including a food coop,  along with my fellow artists and entrepreneurs.

It is wonderful to see that same excitement in Detroit’s younger generation as they dispute the idea that Detroit is ugly and dead – just as my generation of artists disputed the death of the East Village and joyfully snapped up decaying old Victorians in Brooklyn.  In my own family, I always admired how my niece, who died much too young, refused to abandon her neighborhood Methodist congregation Mt. Hope in northeast Detroit, even after all her friends and family moved out to the suburbs.  At the memorial for her this past weekend, the family learned how much love she shared with current members of the congregation as they told how wonderfully she managed the thrift shop and how much they enjoyed her flute solos during services.

I’m so glad I read my hometown paper on the flight back to New York. I caught up on a new spirit of hope at a time when most of our cities now face huge budget gaps and need that jolt of creativity, instead of anger and backlash. Amazingly, our young artists/entrepreneurs seem determined to reinvent the world through their own fresh eyes and I’m betting they are right! 

It was only a matter of time before I found a topic stirring enough to justify querying the media when I attended a networking event and was inspired by the speaker, Kate Gaffin, founder of Connecting to Greatness.  WomenEntrepreneur.com recently published my article “ Networking from the Heart” (you can read it in their  archives at http://bit.ly/bsTT2L )  This triumph reaffirmed to me  that I was ready to resume the freelance writing I had abandoned for quite a few years.

I also recently reconnected  with some writers in my Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park who were  starting a writer’s support group to encourage each other to stay committed. I use the group as a sounding board for my blogs,  as well as for feedback on my latest freelance ideas. I am also excited by their creative talent. Tim Sheard, who writes great mysteries (http://www.timsheard.com/LennyMossNovels.html),  also told me about a special writer’s workspace  just a block from my apartment where I could meet more writers and rent a desk when I wanted a quiet place to get inspired.  You can find out more about it  at http://www.ditmasworkspace.com/

During this difficult economy, I urge everyone to explore your passions outside of your business or full-time career. Don’t give in to the fear and gloom out there – look for the creative ways you can expand your business, your skills – and your life!  And, by the way, look for the talented writings of Tim Sheard, Stacey Browne and Dania Rajendra.

As I watched it recently on PBS, I thought of the lingering hardships in this economic cycle and wondered how many brilliant works of art, new inventions or breakthrough ideas are out there waiting for the dreamer to take a huge economic risk in this stagnant economy.

I remain hopeful that the solution to our present malaise is a new wave of innovation, ready for launch, including creating new green products and industries to fight global warming – and new ideas for solving the lingering environmental impact of disasters like the BP Oil spill. I only hope those young innovators have the courage of Frank Capra.

There’s another message in this film.  It was about a young woman reporter about to be fired by her editor as they streamline staff during hard times – she dreamed up a story about an angry common man threatening to jump off a building on Christmas eve and presented it to her editor as her parting shot.  He loved it, even when she admitted that she had invented John Doe, but argued he would be easy to find – she was right.  The movie’s ultimate theme was that people needed to reach out to their neighbors during the depression and help each other – and the result was a political movement of “John Doe” clubs, making sure no one was battling joblessness or foreclosure alone.

It’s a message that is timeless and I wanted to share it again.  Thank you,  Frank Capra, for sharing your serious side.