Sponsored by Behance, a kind of New York-based industry association for creatives, and coolhunting.com, a website that has built a massive online following by aggregating cool stuff, the idea is to ask successful creative people to explain how they get things done — in the complete absence of any precedent or structure.

The lineup ranges from Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, a global nonprofit that functions as a kind of venture capitalist firm for social start-ups, to Ji Lee, the creative director of New York-based Google Creative Lab. (He’s the guy behind those white speech bubbles that cropped up on billboard and poster ads all over the world a few years ago.)

We’re also hearing from  Scott Thompson, the designer of the Obama campaign’s new media strategy, and Seth Godin, marketing blogger extraordinaire and author of business bestseller the Purple Cow. (For the session on Thompson, Obama’s new media guru, check out my Twitter feed here.)

Oddly, the organizers decided to dispense with time for questions, which is of course disappointing to a journalist. It’s also a bit weird, given the line-up are all people whose success depended on others’ participation and ideas.

However, the caliber of the people presenting just about makes up for the lack of interactivity.

Right now, the two guys who founded Threadless are explaining their working process.

Threadless is a company that uses opensource design to develop new T-shirts. Graphic designers email designs to the company, which means new T-shirt designs can go up on the site every week. A client selects a design; the company prints it and mails it to them. The company has been around for about nine years. It is now a multi-million-dollar going concern.

The guys who founded it are two designers named Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell. Standing at the podium, both sport the ubiquitous Brooklyn-creative uniform – skinny jeans, running shoes and T-shirts.

“From 2000 to 2004, we had no idea what the potential would be,” explains Nickell. “I did not take a penny of any sale that came in, we used every penny to develop t-shirts.”

By 2002, they started building websites for clients—but didn’t leave their jobs to build Threadless. “2002 was where I came in,” explains Kalmikoff. “I was laid off, so I decided to come and work in their offices. We worked for every agency and our focus in working on Threadless was twofold – to keep it going, but also to show to clients that we could use Flash. It became our working model. So for the entire time it was just this fun personal project for everyone involved.”

“The site was 100% reactive to what the community wanted,” says Nickell. “If people were saying, ‘you should print on this T-shirt, not this T-shirt,’ then we’d do that, no questions asked.”

“We didn’t need Threadless to do anything for us,” Kalmikoff goes on. “It was basically just serving this small group of people, with no client and no clear-cut consequences. So we learned to be 100% reactive to our own ideas.”

Says Nickell: “I am a web designer, but with Threadless, I found I had to make T-shirts. Initially, I didn’t know where to find a printer. So I just opened up a phone book and found a local printshop. I had to learn how to print T-shirts, process credit card orders, and so on.” The basic principle: if you don’t know how to do something, work it out.

“I became a web designer to showcase my print work, and everyone said, that’s a great website and nobody commented on the print work,” says Kalmikoff. “Part of me learning how to be a web designer was tackling O’Reilly and HTML books. I had no idea what I was doing. That was my Friday nights and Saturday nights: working. There was a period of time where it was important to me to just work it out. It was important to figure this out or go back to agency hell — and I wasn’t going to do that.”

In January of 2004, the pair fired all of their clients. “We needed to do something because we were competing for our own time,” says Kalmikoff. “We’d had a bad experience with a client so we fired everyone. We gave the good ones to our friends who were starting small things — and then went out on our own.”

“So we were asked to go to MIT to speak — we were seeing a significant revenue stream coming in and realizing this is something we could actually do for the rest of our lives,” says Nickell.

“We were expected to give a presentation, which we didn’t know,” says Kalmikoff. “The MIT guy told everyone what we did, which was helpful, because we didn’t know what it was. We didn’t try and look for answers — we fell into it. We were doing crowd-sourcing and applying these web 2.0 principles just because it made sense to us. We just rocked it— and it happened to coincide with what was going on.”

Once “rocking it” started to coincide with major success, the pair were confronted with one of the toughest aspects of building out a successful start-up — scaling their growth. “We were a real company and we were starting to grow faster than we could keep up with ourselves,” Nickell says. “We had a Christmas sale, and we sold so many t-shirts we were needing a month to fill orders. We said to ourselves: if our sale is this successful, we need to be set up to ship those orders. We didn’t want to just outsource everything.”

“Along the way we realized — we had to peel off portions of our jobs that would fill other people’s full time jobs,” says Kalmikoff. “We weren’t answering customer service emails anymore, we were like, hey, let’s hire people to deal with that. So, basically at this point we had maybe twenty people, maybe a little bit less – things were getting busy but we did try to keep it simple.”

“We were always in this mindset of: we can do it, just figure it out. Our fulfilment software in our warehouse – we wrote it ourselves, and we figured out ways to do things that are just not the way things are done,” says Nickell.

Their biggest hitch was in their initial phase, after they had fired their clients. “When we fired all our projects and clients,” explains Nickell, “we started up another bunch of websites – a music site, a drinks-recipe site – a bumper sticker company…”

“We thought we’d focus on Threadless full time but then we started sprouting up other companies — we had too large ambitions.”

“We were in client mode,” Kalmikoff explains. “We couldn’t stop – we felt we couldn’t just focus on one project. We were saying, we’ve got all this great time on our hands, so hell, let’s crowdsource everything.”

The positive of that, Kalmikoff goes on, is that a couple of projects failed. “When you are working on your own projects, failure is awesome … you realize you got checkmated and you learn so much. Learning from failure is such an important thing. So don’t be afraid going out on a limb on certain projects.”

Ending off, Kalmikoff throws up a slide entitled “How we roll now.”

“In 2006, we took a minority investment because we were making a lot of money and weren’t able to keep the business going without crushing under our own weight,” he explains. “Our investors bought in to us and we benefited from all their expertise. There’s a lot of things we have done since. Our first CEO stepped down as CEO, which was a realistic decision. It made sense to bring in a CEO, VP of operations and marketing—the kind of people who belong in a company our size”

That said, says Nickell, Threadless is still a scrappy company. “We need to remember how we worked in 2004, 2002—and remember how we got it done. So just figure out what you need to do and go ahead with it. Don’t debate. Figure out what is realistic to do, don’t overthink or overnegotiate, just do.”

Ending off with such a simple message shouldn’t obscure the point of this conference:  the plain hard work that goes into making something new and innovative take off.

The Threadless guys’ success, for example, clearly required an obsessive-complusive personality; the willingness to work on weekends; an openness and flexibility to their customers; and that fearlessness that accompanies all successful entrepreneurs.

Milling around at lunch after the Threadless session has wrapped, it occurs to me this conference is kind of like paradise as envisioned by Richard Florida. I’m surrounded by a sea of artfully mussed moptop hair, fauxhawks, stapled-up tapered jeans, and suit-and-sneakers combos. It’s the creative class on steroids.

Though the variety is fun and refreshing, I can’t help but ask myself why every human ‘tribe’, no matter their focus, orientation, or, in this case, strong commitment to individual expression, eventually develops its own “rules” — its own costumes and codes of conduct. Why does every graphic designer in Brooklyn have to wear skinny jeans and Converse sneakers? Second thought: figuring out how and why those codes happen, would probably make a great Malcolm-Gladwell-style anthropological business book.

Such thoughts aside, though, the overall tone is relaxed, open and friendly. And the speakers, to date, aren’t trying to be anything other than who they are: people who’ve decided they prefer working for themselves to working in an office, and have made a real success of it. As the cliche goes, they’re living their dream.

For those who have long wanted to bust out of the cube farm, but aren’t quite there yet, the formula is apparently pretty simple. (At least, if this group of speakers is to be believed.) Be true to yourself. Find a world and community whose codes and costumes work for you. Work like crazy. (Emphasis on the last point.) Eventually, you’ll hit on a way to make your head and your heart work in tandem. You’ll make some money.

And if you’re really obsessive compulsive, like the Threadless guys, you might even end up with a multi-million dollar company.

We looked at all 3,708 companies listed on the TSX, NASDAQ and S&P 500 indexes at the end of May 2008. Of these, Bloomberg established that 719 companies were around at the end of 1990 when the initial investment was made. A total of 40 companies (5.6%) gained enough to turn your $1,000 original investment into more than $50,000 from the end of 1990 to May 31, 2008. Four companies reached the $200,000 level, enough to finance more degrees than a thermometer.

The following table lists companies, their index and industry and the value of your 1990 $1,000 investment at the end of May 2008. As you will see, nine of the top 40 companies were Canadian. Sino Forest came in as number one and Canadian Natural Resources to the number four spot. Of the total, only 68 companies actually lost money and 88 lost money after inflation is taken into effect. The TSX, DOW, S&P and NASDAQ exchanges returned $6,073, $7,129, $6,033 and $7,208 for your initial $1,000 respectively.

As such, an interesting investment to consider is the Horizons BetaPro NYMEX Oil Bear Plus exchange-traded fund (ETF). Listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canada under the symbol HOD, it double shorts the price of oil, i.e. tracks “two times (200%) the inverse (opposite) of the daily performance of the NYMEX light sweet crude-oil futures contract for the next delivery month.” In the U.S., there is the UltraShort Oil & Gas ProShares ETF, which “returns 200% of the inverse of the performance of the Dow Jones U.S. Oil and Gas Index.”

The double-short oil ETFs let an investor short the oil sector without the hassle of an actual short trade on futures contracts or oil stocks (or buying put options). One can sit on the ETF position in a non-registered account or even a registered retirement account for as long as it takes, without the bother of margin calls or time decay.

That will come in handy. If oil spikes up more from here, one can just wait it out – although the paper loses could easily tally 20% to 30% given the volatility and leverage at work. Longer term, however, as the price of oil normalizes, the same volatility and leverage should erase the losses in short order and go on to provide some nice gains. Actually, as part of one’s strategy, it’s tempting to consider averaging down on the double-short oil ETFs if oil prices shoot up again from current levels. Disclosure: I own HOD (as of today).

Take the conviction displayed by Nandu Narayanan, manager of the top performing fund in Canada: CI Global Opportunities Fund. It’s up 102.1% over the past year. That’s an amazing gain for a period when stock markets have been floundering. But Narayanan runs a hedge fund and as one might expect, he’s up so much because he’s short securities hit by the subprime crisis, such as asset-backed commercial paper and subprime loans.

Narayanan is a top-down investor who saw the mess coming. In fact, he had his positions in place quite a while ago and has had to endure poor returns for two years before seeing a payoff: his fund lost 3% in 2006 and earned only 0.9% in 2005. “The fact that we did not make money … did not change our view,” Narayanan told a reporter a few months ago. “So we kept these trades on, and finally it’s beginning to pay off.”

But do your homework. That’s how one gets not only conviction that can stand up to the challenges but also is more likely to be right than wrong.

• 92% of consumers have a more positive image of companies that support causes they care about (2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey)
• 73% of women and 66% of men are more likely to buy a brand that gives back to the community (HQ’d Pollara, 2007)
• 77% of university graduates consider a company’s commitment to society when determining where to work (2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey)
• 72% of employees wish their employers would do more to support a cause or social issue that they care about (2006 Millenial Cause Study)

On the other hand, we’ve found that even large corporations don’t have the time or budget to improve the impact of their programs.

In response, we recently developed a series of on-site 1 day assessments to help corporations increase the value of their investments in the community. Each assessment focuses on an aspect of community investment that we believe has greatest potential for leverage including recruitment and retention, marketing, and partnerships with non-profits.

Our goal is to help identify areas where corporations can get the most leverage with the smallest investment of time and money.

A key learning here is that community investment, an area that I beleive has tremendous business value, is still very under-resourced and under-priroritized.

Also along the state-owned enterprise theme, the Financial Times has an interesting article on the strong performance of some of China’s state-owned enterprises, and how some of these organizations are moving beyond Beijing’s control.