NEW ORLEANS—It’s difficult to nail down the last time this antique city was considered cutting-edge.  Was it the 1850s, when a coffee-shop owner invented the Sazerac cocktail? Or perhaps the 1940s, when a teenager named J.M. Lapeyre invented the automatic shrimp peeler?  Whatever the answer, New Orleans was not exactly defined by its spirit of innovation in the decades preceding Hurricane Katrina. But the flood that changed everything two years ago has changed that, too: Today, by accident and by necessity, this city is awash in ideas—the new and the ambitious, the au courant and avant-garde, the idealistic and the slightly nutty.

SUNSET over New Orleans from the deck of the Canal Street ferry. --LOS ANGELES TIMES PHOTO BY SPENCER WEINER

                The New Orleans public-education system, long considered one of the most ineffective in the nation, has been revitalized with a grand experiment in charter schools—more than half of the city’s public campuses are charters, the highest percentage of any major metropolis.

                The city housing authority hopes to transform the shuttered St. Bernard projects, once one of its most notoriously violent properties, into something akin to a public-housing country club, with two 18-hole championship golf courses and a 45,000-square-foot YMCA.

                Environmental groups have swept into New Orleans, preaching, for here, a rather exotic gospel of green building and solar power.

                Local reformers have pushed for important changes to government entities such as the public defender’s office (each defendant is now assigned to one lawyer, not just to the office in general) and the tax assessor’s office (voters in November decided that the city needs one assessor, not seven).

                Then there are the inventions. Elizabeth English, a Harvard-educated engineer and architect, is perfecting a method to retrofit shotgun houses with Styrofoam foundations. There will be fewer flooding problems, she figures, if the houses of New Orleans can float.

                “The old ways of doing things clearly haven’t worked,” said English, a professor at Louisiana State University.

                English’s floating-house concept lacks both funding and the blessing of government. But hers is not the only long shot. No one guarantees that amateur inventor John Knost will see the groundbreaking for the floodwall he designed in the den of his French Quarter apartment. Nor are city officials knocking down the doors of the San Francisco architectural company that has proposed lining New Orleans’ shores with huge “sponge combs”—caterpillar-like things filled with baby-diaper lining that would expand when wet to block flood waters.

                For some locals, however, it’s enough that the city is reveling in a new spirit of innovation.

                Sean Cummings is a New Orleans native who is directing one of the area’s most plausible big ideas—a riverfront revitalization project sponsored by the city agency he heads, the New Orleans Building Corp. If Cummings has his way, the project could include a number of modern buildings that would soar beyond the city’s architectural traditions.

                Cummings believes that post-Katrina New Orleans has a chance to reconnect with the spirit of experimentation that defined it in the early 20th century, when Louis Armstrong was redefining music and a Tulane-educated engineer named A. Baldwin Wood was inventing the water pumps that would revolutionize modern flood control.

                Back then, Cummings said, New Orleans “was an early adapter, a creator, a first.”

                “Then, about 80 years ago, it became this very insular community,” he continued. “And postcatastrophe, there’s a temptation, even a natural reaction, to recoil and fear the new. Well, quite honestly, that’s the medicine that this patient needs.”

                Many people pushing for change here acknowledge that New Orleans—with its economic problems, dysfunctional bureaucracies and recent reluctance to embrace change—has a long way to go before it is seen as a reliable incubator of the new.

                They also acknowledge that the most crucial innovation—that is, protection from a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of more than 155 mph—has not yet been dreamed up, and perhaps never will be, despite renewed federal efforts to beef up the city’s flood control system.

                But they also can sound giddy that they have a shot to rethink a major American city.

                “Those of us working in bigger-picture stuff feel like we’re making the model not only for the country but for almost the entire world,” said Beth Galante, local director for Global Green USA, a nonprofit organization that is building an environment-friendly affordable-housing project in the Lower Ninth Ward.

                “Sure we could be wiped off the face of the earth this fall,” she said. But in the meantime, she said, “We are focused on adapting.”

TWO YEARS AFTER KATRINA

NEW ORLEANS—It’s difficult to nail down the last time this antique city was considered cutting-edge.  Was it the 1850s, when a coffee-shop owner invented the Sazerac cocktail?

Piece by piece, devastated buildings find new life

Brad Guy, an architect and researcher at Penn State University, is an advocate of “deconstruction”—not the thorny literary theory, but the idea of carefully taking apart buildings and making the component parts available to builders.

A second line of defense

Before Katrina, John Knost hadn’t really invented anything—unless you count the foam insulation he stuck on the edges of his apartment’s metal spiral stairs. They keep visitors from bruising their heads.

Down by the riverside

Developer Sean Cummings envisions miles of parks stretching along the East Bank of the Mississippi River.

The Great Propagandist

PROPAGANDA is in bad repute, it has been so for a long time. Thanks to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Lenin, principally, it has also taken on a sinister ring.

A strong foundation

EDUCATION Secretary Jesli Lapus wasn’t lying when he earlier declared that the opening of classes was generally smooth and peaceful. But he wasn’t giving us the entire panorama either.

Legacy: A sense of history

Sometime last year in 2006, there were two pieces of good news that may have gone unnoticed, but which greatly benefited the poor people of the world. And it is not about what the world’s richest nations have decided to do to help the situation on global poverty. Rather, it is about the personal philanthropy of the two richest men in the world: Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

A Harvard Management update classic: Get your new managers moving

When Jacqueline Lopez arrived for her first day on the job as a new program manager at Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, Jessica Rocha, her boss, handed her a calendar bursting with meetings.

Dot-com pioneer

Julia Theresa Yap has witnessed the growth of Pacific Internet Philippines from a pioneering Internet-service provider (ISP) in 1996 to the largest independent Internet communications service provider in the country today.

Winning: Weed out bad apples before your business rots

Q: How do you weed out the bad apples in an organization? David Michalek, Bartlett, Illinois                 

A: Start by putting down the pruning shears and picking up a buzz saw.

Look, nothing hurts a company more than when the bosses ignore, indulge or otherwise tolerate a jerk—or two or three—in the house. Such latitude undermines organizational trust and morale. Without those, the competitive linchpins of collaboration and speed are just plain harder—not to mention the fact that jerks take the fun out of work.

About face

In an industry dominated by multinational players with unlimited advertising budgets and sleek corporate images, an upstart local cosmetics firm is giving the giants a run for their money with its no-frills products and relying mainly on word of mouth to capture the loyalty of beauty-conscious clients all over the world.

Talk is cheap, so why do they prefer costly bullets?

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Decades of applying various forms of dispute resolution to various facets of American life—from neighborhoods and workplaces to conflict and judicial processes—have helped the US maintain its social fabric, political liberalism and religious and ethnic plurality in the racially sensitive aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the nation’s emblems six years ago.

The Filipino intellectual

THE Russian language has a special term for the intellectuals: a member of the intelligentsiya—intelligentsia—the most intelligent, “intellectual,” or highly educated segment of society especially interested in the arts, literature, philosophy and politics. But flattering as the characterization is, anti-intellectuals are not impressed; in fact, they are so annoyed, if not downright hostile, that an intellectual would not proclaim himself, and, if he did, chances are he’s not. It remains for society to call him so, either as a compliment or honest recognition or as a condemnation.

RP must learn from Vietnam

OUR country can learn a great deal from Vietnam, particularly in how our neighboring Asean state successfully revitalized its moribund economy starting in 1986, and powered ahead with an average annual growth of 8 percent to earn the admiration of the global business community while simultaneously reducing poverty incidence, thus achieving the seemingly elusive goal of sustainable economic growth and equitable income distribution. 

WHAT TO SAY WHEN IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON

IT’S a reality of modern corporate life that you have to say goodbye more than a few times as you advance in your career. And often, despite your best intentions and efforts, the legacy you leave behind is a mixed one.

Woman on Top

LAND Bank of the Philippines president and CEO Gilda E. Pico is a true banking veteran, having worked in the industry for 40 years in which 25 years were devoted to LandBank.

The subprime sinkhole

TAHER AFGHANI was working for discount retailer Target Corp. near San Francisco when friends told him about the riches to be made in California’s Mortgage Alley.

An election nightmare

I WAS quite awake when I had this nightmare last week: Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and Jose Rizal ran in a senatorial election: Rizal ran second to topnotcher Aquino, albeit by a slight margin. The distance of 85 years between their death did not make the result, much less the election itself, improbable to the Commission of Elections (Comelec), which has a well-deserved reputation for improbability.

As always, a tough balancing act for the Secretary of Finance

Note:  This is a condensed transcript of the discussions at a recent Quijano de Manila symposium at the Cherry Blossoms Hotel, Manila. The resource person, Finance Secretary Gary Teves, fielded questions from senior journalists led by the QMS moderator, Adrian E. Cristobal.

A Ceo’s Six Steps To Effective Feedback

Delivering feedback is among a manager’s most important tasks, yet many managers struggle to do it fairly and consistently, and—above all—in a way that drives improved performance. In the chapter on people development in his recently published book, Lessons on Leadership: The 7 Fundamental Management Skills for Leaders at All Levels (Kaplan, 2007), Jack Stahl, CEO of Revlon and former president of Coca-Cola, proposes a six-step model to make the feedback process easier and more effective.

Five questions with Richard H. Axelrod, coauthor of You Don’t Have To Do It Alone

Getting others involved in the work you’re responsible for is the essence of management. But what distinguishes the best leaders is how they attain that involvement. Requiring participation is easy enough. But compliance does not equal engagement.

The Coach … as businessman

Joel Banal’s life has always revolved around basketball, from playing collegiate ball for Mapua and amateur basketball in the MICAA and the national team to his pro stint in the PBA, and finally moving on to coaching, where he also made his mark both at the professional and collegiate level.