Monthly Archives: September 2006

Time-lapse Beijing

Software_park_1 I am now in Beijing.  And yesterday, I had a chance to participate in the local version of a traffic jam.  I can now say that I have experienced the international traffic jam at several of its locales: Mumbai, Moscow, and now Beijing.  How miserable, a waste of time, money and the ozone layer.  How shall we fix this?

I was driving back to the hotel around 7:00.  Just the right time to see exhausted moms and dads making their way home in one direction passing, in some cases, their own children, beautifully dressed,  going out for a night on the town.

It was dusk, always evocative, and the city had an anguished beauty.  Glimpses of life on this outdoor patio and that factory compound coming at me with force, like a recollection from my  deep past but of course it manifests itself in circumstances that tell me that the sensation MUST be illusional (if not delusional).  Strange, someone else’s nostalgia.  Jet lag, it’s a very odd thing.

I have been coming to China for 20 years.  When I first arrived, the hotel experience was strange.  I would place an order for breakfast with room service, and eventually some guy would show up with a toaster, a piece of bread and a look of confusion.  He knew something was required of him but he wasn’t sure what.  Within 15 years this exercise in amateur theatre had been replaced by note-perfect hospitality.  I mean really perfect.  And this trip, evidence of the transformation continues.  This hotel (the Shangri-La) is actually better than perfect.  Everything from service to design is superlative, much better than anything I have ever seen in the West (with one or two exceptions).

So it 20 years, this Westerner has had the opportunity to watch China move from a country struggling to catch up to a country that may now be poised to pull ahead.  Yes, the Shangri-la is a hotel with Western connections.  Yes, hotels are not the best place to judge larger patterns of change.  (And surely an anthropologist of all people should know this.) 

But in an imperfect world, we take any measure that presents itself, and by this measure, China is now finished with catch-up and will someday begin to pull away.  This is a country moving at time-lapse speed.  It won’t be long, perhaps, before it passes us and disappears into the future.

References

The building pictured is from the software park in Beijing.  It was taken through a taxi window.  Hence the patina on the window. 

Why I just bought a nightlight

Night_light As you read this, I am winging my way to China.  Yesterday, I had to decide what to take with me.  I decided on a night light.  (Not the one pictured.  That’s a file photo.  I got a rabbit.)   

For me, the toughest part of the travelling to new time zones is sleep management.  In Russia, my body refused to adjust and I largely went without.  Sitting in a 100 degree Kruschov kitchen, trying to conduct an interview, with a skeptical client and a bewildered respondent, in the teeth of near absolute jet lag, this will not stand as my happiest memory of the ethnographic experience. 

This time I am hoping my sleep cycles will be more cooperative.  But here’s the problem.  If I get off cycle, it’s very hard to stay asleep once I fall asleep. Especially if I need to get up in the middle of the night.  Chances are, I won’t remember where the bathroom is, and chances are I will have to turn on a light to find my way…and, forgive me, my aim.  This is bad.  Dosing  yourself with light is a good way to return to wakefulness. Now all hope of sleep is gone. 

Thank god for illuminated rabbits.

As to posting, I will if I can.  Please forgive periodic shortages of copy and taste. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Advice to a young consultant.  This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  June 20, 2006.  here.

Advent of an era? Corporate America finally gets contemporary culture?

Freston Abstract: Freston got his job as a CEO of Viacom because he was deeply informed about contemporary culture and lost it because he was not informed enough.

The whole essay:

Corporate America doesn’t get it.  It has never got it.  And until yesterday this didn’t seem to matter.

Then the Chairman of Viacom fired the CEO of Viacom, and Tom Freston was out of a job. 

This might herald a shift in corporate American.  I think it is now possible that that not knowing about contemporary culture is now a career liability for the senior manager and a problem for the corporation.

My first proposition is, I think, pretty clear.  Corporate America doesn’t understand contemporary culture.  There are lots of examples.  Gatorade buys Snapple after the  trend has passed.  (Three years later, it sold Snapple at a $1.3 billion loss.)  Levi-Strauss missed hip hop and lost $1 billion in sales.  There are lots of examples of corporate America making bone headed moves because no one in senior management has a clue what is happening in music, film or culture. 

Some of this is due to the appalling illiteracy of the business school.  Most b-school faculty are stuck in a time warp constructed out of Bob Seeger’s CDs and the Die-Hard retrospectives.  Not so the b-school students, most of whom have a clue.  There are no courses on contemporary culture and the marketplace (unless Rob Kozinets is teaching a course at York I haven’t heard about).  There are no courses on the theory and method with which one read contemporary culture. 

This was seen to be OK.  Then Redstone fired Freston.

My second proposition, that the firing of Freston is a leading indicator, this is less clear.  Here’s my argument.  Tom Freston began his professional life as an ad guy.  Ad guys are generally pretty well informed about contemporary culture.  (Ad guys are the way the corporation "cheated" on this issue.  As long as the agency knew what was going on, it didn’t have to.  This was foolhardy but possible in the early days.  But now that the corporation is an innovation machine, and now that contemporary markets and cultures constantly interact, it is, as a policy, still less well advised.)

On the strength of the ad work, Freston became a founding member and head of marketing of MTV: Music Television.  Eventually, he rose to become the head of MTV Networks.  I think there is a chance that it was this deep training in contemporary culture that qualified him for the job as CEO of Viacom. Freston’s reputation grew.  The WSJ calls Freston "a man long regarded as one of the most successful executives in the entertainment business."

So what brought him low?  Why did Redstone fire his mighty CEO? Comments circulating in the business press (some of them from Redstone in the FT) suggest that the reason has to do with Viacom’s failure to acquire MySpace (which went instead to News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch). This seems a little unfair.  At the time, as I recall, everyone thought News Corporation paid much too much for MySpace.  Only now (following a deal with Google) are people now insisting that Freston was outplayed. 

In sum, Redstone hired Freston because he knew a thing or two about contemporary culture and its markets, and fired him because he did not know enough to spot the MySpace (and social networking) opportunity. 

Now there is no question that Redstone continues to play the diva on this issue.  Anne Thompson in today’s Hollywood Reporter makes this clear, quoting Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen who says: "The change is unexpected and not likely to be well received by the Street or the creative community."

Still and all, there is perhaps a "pattern recognition" moment.  It may be that Freston got his job as a CEO because he was deeply informed about contemporary culture and lost it because he was not informed enough.

There is a still deeper, and more chilling pattern here: that senior managers will have a brief window of culture competence. Without constant refitting, this competence may expire, as when an executive of one technology (Freston as a TV executive) is supplanted by the rise of a new shift in contemporary culture (social networking) enabled by a new technology (the internet).

Maidment pointed out in Forbes today that Wallstreet

has not been over-enamored with traditional media’s attempts to come to terms with the media consumption of the iPod generation.

 

Could this be because the managers of tradition media don’t actually know very much about the media consumption of the iPod generation.  When do we put this right?   When does the corporation get in touch and build a system for staying in touch?  Naturally, this will happen when senior managers decide that it is in their best interests that it happen.  Perhaps the Tom Freston story will sound an alarm.

References

Chaffin, Joshua.  2006.  Freston removed as chief of Viacom.  Financial Times.  September 6, 2006, p. 1. 

Karnitschnig, Matthew.  2006.  Ouster of Viacom Chief Reflects Redstone’s Impatience for Results.  Wall Street Journal.  September 6, 2006.

Maidment, Paul.  2006.  Why Viacom can’t win.  Forbes.com media newsletter.  September 6, 2006.

Thompson, Anne.  Par’s Grey loses patron: shake-up unsettles studio regime.  The Hollywood Reporter.  September 6, 2006. 

Ethnography in extremis

Fabulous_dames_at_the_pontiac_cafe Chicago may be the best place on earth to do ethnography.  People are forthright, smart, clear, and exact.  No posturing.  No carrying on. They give us flinty clarity funded by personal, intellectual, and emotional depths and generosity. 

I loved the Los Angeles interviews of the week before, but, as we know, most Californians are a work in progress (several works in progress), so answering simple questions with perfect clarity can be tough for them.  I noticed that my notes of the interviews have lots of arrows, the usual sign of linear-defying complexty that makes the ethnographer’s life interesting but more difficult.

It is not impossible to imagine why Chicago was the place where anthropology made it’s first splendid efforts to make itself useful in the marketplace. This is where Lloyd Warner, Syd Levy, Irving White, Philip Kotler (Gods, all) got down to business. 

But Friday I did an interview that earned, I submit most humbly, a place in the record of methodological difficulty.  From a sensory point of view, it was a full contact event and not even the hurricane that awaited my landing and return to New York City has been able to shake the memory.

I agreed to meet a nervous respondent in a public place.  This is always a bad sign, isn’t it?  But the topic was money, and when the topic IS money, we are deeply nervous about our privacy.  Who is this person who says he’s an anthropologist?  Why must he interview me in my home about money, stock, bonds, investments, capital markets, financial planning, and my future?  I don’t think so!  Americans, generally speaking, would rather give you a detailed account of their sexual escades at Studio 54 than supply so much as the current balance of their checking account. 

Fair enough.  We meet under the Damen stop on the Blue line that sits, wooden but sturdy, smack up against the second story windows of Chicagoans who can’t believe they didn’t notice those tracks when they rented the place. 

The "meet" takes place, and by this times the language of American spy novels feels ever more appropriate, at an open air bar, the Pontiac Cafe (as above).  Open air in case I make any "sudden movements."  Open air incase in case I "try anything."  In an open air bar, help can be summoned in the event that the anthropologist goes completely berserk and begins to ask questions about one’s 401K.

The Pontiac Cafe is a study in badly managed commotion.  First, there are the trains that arc through the heavens above us briefly to stop at Damen before heralding the one true armagedon with their departure. And of course the bar has a sound system that competes with all the sound "out there" in Chicago the way a household furnace competes with winter on those few occasions that your Dad will actually allow you to open a door.  The sound system will never win, but this does not mean it will ever stop trying.  Then of course there are all the peace keepers and EMS personnel who work ceaselessly to make Chicago one of the noisest places on earth.  (Chicago, the city that works you over.)   It’s as if everyone has decided to memorialize the stock yards with sounds that express and inflict misery. 

But that’s not all.  The pit pull who has been amiably sitting beneath the table beside us  has slipped his leash and is wandering the bar in the hopes someone will surrender burger and fries at the approach of some thing so fearsome.  I would be happy to do this but I actually don’t have anything to surrender, except of course my dignity, and this I give up straight away with a look of alarm that tells everyone that I believe myself to be in the path of harm’s way.  (So much for the spy motif.)

I would take my complaint up with pit bull’s owner but I can’t help noticing that she has dyed a leopard skin pattern onto one half of her head, in pink.  Master of the semiotics of the world of goods that I am, I feel quite strongly that this means she will respond to my plea for pit bull constraint with the suggestion that I go "fuck myself," and this will occasion a visit from the pit bull who will prosecute the argument less tenderly. 

Happily, the respondent is an extraordinarily interesting guy who, under the cover of the noise of peacekeepers and the anxiety induced by attack dogs, offers exact details of his investment activity and so the job gets done. 

And from this and other interviews, there emerges a picture of the investor.  The client wants to know why he is not acting like a rational, maximizing, "economic man."  Asking an anthropologist this question is liking a statitician what the best approach is.  The answer from both of them is, always, "well, it depends."  In this anthropological case, it depends on what you mean by "rational," "maximizing," "economic," and "man."  Unlike the economist, the anthropologist posits a creature who is complex, various and multiple.  This creature has many plans, fitful frames with which to define value and strategy, and a variety of ways of getting on with it.  All of this is rational.  But there is never a single right path. It is for high flyers, those creatures of the higher sentience, by which I mean of course the analyst, to crunch through to the one, best course of action.  The rest of us have many ways of thinking and acting in a rational way. 

Thanks god this is so.  Who would hire me otherwise?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rachelle Bowden for the photo of two people on the patio of the Pontiac Cafe from her rachelleb.com website here.

Blogging mechanics

Kitten_1 Every post is a bet.  We have only so much time to write the thing.  So we want to choose our topic carefully. 

Today, I invested in a topic that did not pay out, that I could not "bring home."  Bad luck.  I have 9 minutes before I do my next interview. 

This means I am out of luck unless I am prepared to lower my standards and that phony post modern strategy, writing about the difficulty of posting.  Novelists and film makers are shameless when it comes to this strategy.  And with this post, I  join their shameful ranks.

The other strategy, and this one is ancient and well tested: pictures of kittens!  This one shows a kitten that lives at the bottom of my sister’s garden in Vancouver Island.  She tells me that the Pig has been awarded honorary kittenness and is included in most play activities. 

Ok, have to go.