Comments on: Michael Eisner and culture

By: Obafemi Kasumu

Obafemi Kasumu — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:12:47 +0000

I would like to contact Mr. Michael Eisner on behalf of the less priviledged and suffering children of the Republic of Benin in West Africa whose voice cannot be heard due to the fact that they have no access to the internet and no education at all to start with. My direct phone is + 229 97 17 40 50

By: Christopher Obafemi Kasumu

Christopher Obafemi Kasumu — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:10:09 +0000

By: Tony Liccione

Tony Liccione — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:20:45 +0000

I have a sports marketing proposal that I have concerning a sports trademark which I own and I wish to present my proposal to Mr. Michael Eisner. Mr. Eisner has acquired the Topps US trading card company and is bringing back for all to enjoy ‘Bazooka Joe’…..What I have may bbe of great interest to hard working Mr. Eisner and I would like his address and fax# to present him with my proposal! Thank you and I hope someone can help me with my request. Sincerely, Tony Liccione, anthonyl71@aol.com

By: Mary W

Mary W — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:52:23 +0000

Heh. Eisner’s answers sound like what I’d expect to hear from most CEOs, alas.

In this time of the Long Tail and the nichefication of society, staying in touch with “culture” (broadly defined) actually requires more thought and effort than it did during the times of mass media, when you could read a handful of nationally ranked newspapers and magazines and feel assured that you “knew what was going on” in the world.

I can’t help but think that some of the negative responses to “keeping in touch with popular culture” stem from the old perceptions of “high culture” versus “low (popular) culture,” when pop culture was seen as what the rubes did — ie not of interest to educated, important people. Like many other old either/or distinctions, that one is breaking down in a big way.

By: Daniel Rosenblatt

Daniel Rosenblatt — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:36:09 +0000

A possible defense of Eisner would be to note that boomers have a lot of money–being in touch with them in the kind of introspective/intuitive way Eisner claims would therefore be useful even if it implied being generally a bit out of touch. This would work better if most marketers were interested in a much younger demographic–but maybe not Disney: I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of parents of young children, the primary consumers of Disney products, are boomers, or at least were for most of the last 20 years. So Eisner’s response could well have described the basis of his own successful practice without being generalizable to other fields.

By: german dziebel

german dziebel — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:37:20 +0000

For academic anthropology, culture has long been a symbol and substance of the discipline, rather than a raw objective reality. Ignoring the culture can therefore also be an informed (meta)cultural decision leading to the establishment of a new “living” cultural start-up. This is something we anthropologists can learn from corporate America. Meanwhile anthropology has to become part of any business curriculum just because it’s the only source of instant strategic and managerial insight that a corporation can get almost for free.

By: srp

srp — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:33:04 +0000

I think Grant’s persistence on this subject is starting to make an impression on me. Should we give MBA students and managers “cultural homework?” As one of those people who tends to ignore a lot of the mega-popular stuff like American Idol or Lindsay Lohan (although I’ve been known to watch Dancing With the Stars), I sometimes feel like there is a tradeoff between being informed about interesting (to me) stuff and being “in touch” with the currents of popular culture. Maybe if we tell people they have to do it, it’ll be classified as “work” rather than goofing off and will get taken more seriously. On the other hand, I’m not sure a dutiful look-in to cultural phenomena conveys the same understanding as spontaneous immersion and enjoyment.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:23:51 +0000

Of all the 20th-century age cohorts the baby-boomer generation is the most complacent and self-obsessed, IME. One would be a very rare baby-boomer, and an even rarer boomer-CEO, to take serious cognizance of the culture of the cohorts before or after the boomers. It is telling that the person who best understood the MTV Generation and Generation Y was Florence Skelly, born three decades before the boomers.

By: Donald A. Coffin

Donald A. Coffin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:31:27 +0000

Ah, if Eisner is 65 now, then he was born in 1942 (if I can still do arithmetic). The conventional dating of the “baby boom” generation is those born between 1946 and 1964. So Eisner is not a member of the “baby boom” gerneration. He’s one of the rarities, born during WWII. The period from 1933 to 1945 was a long “baby bust” period.