Monthly Archives: January 2008

Great rooms all over the place

Open_kitchen There was report yesterday in The Telegraph reporting the "death of the dining room."

More than a half million dining rooms will be demolished in Britain next year, and Halifax Home Insurance believes the dining room may have disappeared completely by 2020. 

In North America, we think of this as the rise of the" great room,"a topic we have treated in this blog a couple of times.  A vast transformation took place in our domestic world, and it reflects I think changes in how people work, how they eat, and how they interact as families.   

In particular, open kitchen is the material manifestation of feminism.  Women complained that the dining room made them servants in their own home, obliged to leave their guests and ferry things to and from the kitchen, charging through heavy doors, turning their backs on the festivities and otherwise obliged to absent themselves from the occasion. 

The open kitchen also suits new models of parenting.  Americans are inclined to raise their kids in a way that privileges emotional and physical freedom over ceremonial perfection.  From this point of view, the dining room was always a problem.  It insisted that kids be formal, still, observant, when their natural condition, especially in an over stimulating America, was more active and spontaneous.  The great invention of the new kitchen is the island at its center.  Kids treat this as a planet around which they orbit during meal time.  Less confined, they are more agreeable.  More agreeable kids make for more agreeable parents.

For both these public and private purposes, the open kitchen was an important step for the North American home.  I have once or twice looked for the figures and couldn’t ever find them.  But they must be astronomical.  The money that North Americans spent and will spend to open their homes must many hundreds of millions. 

But to see this development at work in the UK is much more remarkable, I think.  After all, the hold of Victorian propriety, the notion of the dining room as an important ritual location of family life, the belief in formality as a necessary coin in the social economy, one would guess that these are still more active in the UK…or at least not so steeply in decline as they are in the US. 

Research I did last spring suggested that the open kitchen is not just an enthusiasm of the British, but may now be seen in Germany, Belgium, France (a little less), and Poland.  This suggests either that there are non cultural forces at work here, or that there is a pan-Western cultural trend under way. Certainly, this would be consistent with the shift we see in the world of photograph where the portrait has given way to the more spontaneous action shot. 

The new orthodoxy discourages us from making even very tiny generalizations.  This means that observations about pan-Western culture should be laughably out of bounds.  But I am always surprised how little interest my respondents have in the new strictures of academic discourse.  It doesn’t matter how much I scold them, how often I give them the gospel according to Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, they just go right ahead and remodel their kitchens.

References

Borland, Sophie.  2008.  Open-plan living leads to death of dining room.  The Telegraph.  January 29, 2008.  here.

Kron, Joan. 1983. Home-Psych: The social psychology of home and decoration. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.

Further reading:

Ames, Kenneth L. 1985. Why Things Matter. The Material Culture of American Homes. Unit 1 ed. Philadelphia: produced for The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum.

Ames, Kenneth. 1992.  Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Carlisle, Susan G. 1982. French Homes and French Character. Landscape 26, no. 3: 13-23.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1992. Coal stoves and clean sinks: Housework between 1890 and 1930.  American home life, 1880-1930: A social history of spaces and services. editors Jessica H. Foy, and Thomas J. Schlereth, 211-24. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Denby, David. 1996. Buried Alive: Our children and the avalanche of crud. The New Yorker LXXII, no. 19: 48-58.

Doucet, Michael J., and John C. Weaver. 1985. Material Culture and the North American House: The Era of the Common Man, 1870-1920. The Journal of American History 72: 580-587.

Dugan, I. Jeanne. 1997. Someone’s in the kitchen with Martha. Business Week July 28, 1997: 58-59.

Foy, Jessica H., and Thomas J. Schlereth, editors. 1992. American home life, 1880-1930: A social history of spaces and services. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Gowans, Alan. 1986. The comfortable house: North American suburban architecture, 1890-1930. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Laumann, Edward. O., and James. S. House. 1970. Living Room Styles and Social Attributes: The Patterning of Material Artifacts in a Modern Urban Community. Sociology and Social Research 54, no. 3: 321-42.

Monkhouse, Christopher. 1982. The Spinning Wheel as Artifact, Symbol, and Source of Design.  Victorian Furniture: Essays from a Victorian Society Symposium. editor Kenneth L. Ames, 155-72. Nineteenth

Plante, Ellen M. 1995. The American kitchen, 1700 to the present : from hearth to highrise. New York, NY: Facts on File.

Pratt, Gerry. 1981. The House as an Expression of Social Worlds.  Housing and Identity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. editor James S. Duncan, 135-80. London: Croom Helm.

Rapoport, A. 1969. House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Thompson, Eleanor McD., editor. 1998. The American home: material culture, domestic space, and family life. Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum.

Vickery, Amanda. 1993. Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751-81.  Consumption and The World of Goods. editors John Brewer, and Roy Porter, 274-301. London: Routledge.

An open letter to Doug Liman

Doug_liman I was sad to see, in the recent New York Magazine treatment of Doug Liman, a note of agony.  Liman talks about his new film, Jumper, as something that "completes my sellout trilogy."  He calls Swingers, his first film, "the one film that was truly not a sellout."  Liman believes that Mr. and Mrs. Smith cost him his "indie credibility." 

There is something faintly old fashioned about this agony.  From an anthropological point, I can’t help feeling like I am looking at a little bit of New York history, an artifact of a time gone by.  What we are hearing in Liman is the modernist insistence that the world must be dichotomized into art and commerce, that those who make one can’t make the other, that art is necessarily worthy and commerce necessarily craven, that credibility goes to art, condemnation to commerce.  Those who engage in commerce instead of culture are "selling out."

From an anthropological view, this concept was installed with special virulence in popular culture sometime after World War II.  Any one who made culture for commercial purposes (art directors, copywriters, TV producers, Broadway producers) were filled with self reproach.  It was customary for ad executives to let you know that they were "working on a novel," lest you imagine that they took advertising seriously.  The wonder is that Manhattan turned out so much brilliant popular culture, when so many of its meaning makers were so conflicted, so self hating.

But there it is, the modernism was clear on this: culture that comes from commerce was compromised, bad, dirty and wrong.  From an anthropological (aka, a Martian point of view) it was an amazing vital and formative cultural construction.  And it exists still.  It torments still.  When Liman talks of "selling out" for making films that have entertained millions, it is virulent.

But here is the post modernist view.  (I wonder if we shouldn’t call this the "past modernist" view, because when we wish to say "not modern," we don’t necessarily mean what "post modernism" has come to mean.)  There are two ways to make the case.

First, culture that comes from commerce has got steadily better.  This says the "art vs. commerce" argument was wrong.  People insisted TV was a waste land from which nothing good could ever come.  And of course, now we watch The Wire, Six Feet Under and other HBO productions with the conviction that its pretty good indeed.  Even the major networks now turn out great work, as I think Raines, Life, 30 Rock demonstrate. This evidence is extraordinarily damaging to the "art vs. commerce" argument.  Good work should never have come to TV or Hollywood, if the dichotomy were real.  (See the work of John Carey, Tyler Cowen, John Docker, Steven Johnson, D.L. LeMahieu, and Robert Thompson, as below.)

Second, we are coming to see that art and commerce are not mutually exclusive, that it’s ok to do both.  This argument accepts the original argument: art is better than commerce.  But
it says that we no longer have to choose.  People who do one can do the other.  Specifically, people who do commerce can still do art. (Actually, it might be that the argument still works when transposed.  It may well be that those who do art can’t do commerce.  That would be agonizing…but it is a topic for another post.) 

When Elvis Mitchell asked Steven Soderbergh what he was thinking as he prepared to make his movie Out of Sight, Soderbergh replied:

If you blow this, you will be doing art-house movies for the rest of your life and that’s as bad as doing big budget things.  I wanted to do both.

This is I think the signature of our postmodernism, that conviction that we will not submit to the tyranny of dichotomous categories, that we will not submit to choosing between art and commerce, that we want both.  The post modern self is a voracious creature.  We want everything on offer.  Now.  Ours is a time of expansionary individualism.   

This is not to say that there are not moral issues here, that we are not obliged to think about the kinds of value that different kinds of film-making creates, that we are not obliged to choose with care.  It is merely to say that the art-commerce dichotomy is now an exhausted cultural artifact, a moral antique. 

References

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fishman, Steve.  2008.  The Liman Identity.  New York Magazine. January 21-28, 2008, pp. 36-41, 124. http://nymag.com/news/features/42823/

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  New York: Riverhead.

LeMahieu, D. L. 1988. A culture for democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

Acknowledgments

To Eunice Hong and The Brown Daily Herald  for the photo above.

Tim O’Reilly, now shall I compare thee to a city state

City_state Once it was enough for a corporation to make widgets.  Now it must also make ideas.  Especially if it wants to keep making widgets. 

Capitalism was once ruled by a rough and ready, mechanical, pragmatism.  No pointy headed people need apply.  Now ideas are the first order of business. And this gives advantage to the people with higher degrees from Stanford.  I give you the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 

Let’s put this another way.  Capitalism used to belong to the guys who stole lunch money.  Now it’s much more likely to belong to the kids who surrendered it. 

We have lots of institutions that make ideas.  Universities, institutes, laboratories, for instance.  And we have institutions that see to the dissemination of these ideas: books, magazines, and conferences used to serve nicely. 

I can’t be the only one who has noted a change.  Call it the conference that isn’t a conference.  Take the Foo Camp invented by Sara Winge and Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Publishing.  This appears to illustrate that famous William Gibson line about the future being badly distributed. Foo Camp appears to bid (dare?) the future to "assemble here."

There is the Andrew Zolli’s PopTech, and TED founded by Richard Saul Wurman.  There is SxSW and Burning Man.  There is Dave Isenberg’s F2C, Jerry Michalski’s retreat, and Pip Coburn’s dinners in NYC and SF.  There is Russell Davies’ Interesting2007.  There is Piers Fawkes at PSFK.  I think Roger Martin is doing something like this in the context of a business school. 

None of these are conventional approaches to the convention.  I haven’t done my homework here, but I expect all of them exhibit have the structural properties: relatively egalitarian, more interested in expressive individualism than instrumental individualism, more concerned with intrinsic more than extrinsic rewards, suspicious of power and rank asymmetries, playful, dramatic, less interested in intellectual due process and more interested in the counterexpectational, the ad hoc and the improvisational. You have to be nimble witted to take advantage of these things.  And you come away more nimbly witted still.

But the thing that really strikes me is that these exercises are so person centric.  Almost always there is someone at the center of things, duly humble, not an all imperial, but there nevertheless, initiating, organizing, enabling, sustaining.  What’s odd about this is that not so very long ago, this task of bringing people together used to belong to institutions working out of the routinized logic of their role in the world.  These institutions are falling silent, even the very great ones seem to be somehow displaced in the larger, idea production, scheme of things.  It is as if knowledge and knowledge makers now gather at the behest of individuals not institutions. 

This makes me think of city-states for some reason.  I can’t say I know very much about city-states but here’s what I think I know: that they are exercise in "order-out."  The city-state exists in a larger domain that is relatively chaotic.  It creates order, most intensely within the walls of the city proper, but also in the concentric rings that run out into the ever more lawless countryside.  Nation-states, on the other hand, are "order-in."  There is an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order, and the domain of order they make possible. 

I think Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp is order-out.  At the center of a Foo camp, knowledge gathers.  (There’s a book to be written about these people, O’Reilly, Winge, Zolli, Wurman, Isenberg, Michalsky, Coburn, Davies. Who are these people?  And who is going to organize the meta-foo camp that brings them all of them together?)  And then it begins to filter out into the provinces, the places the future is reluctant to go.  It is carried by simple monks and not so simple courtiers, people who have had a chance to glimpse the glory of this order or that court, and laden with its intellectual riches, go out into the world. 

It’s a medieval model, no? (I know next to nothing about the period, so I proceed with caution.)  And the question is why this order-out model should now be flourishing when indeed we have magnificent post-monastic institutions in place, richly founded, magnificent in their gravitational powers, indubitable in their authority.  In the words of Max Weber, the great scholar of the modern world, "What gives?" 

The answer has got to that the knowledge produced by these events is newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Big institutions can’t produce this kind of knowledge because they are predicated on another model of knowledge, one that is, for all the many things it does well, inclined to grind fine and slow, and mostly slow. 

In the Foo Camp and its many counterparts, we are looking at an adaptive response to a world that is itself newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Large institutions are being in the words of Thomas Kuhn, "read out" of the field.  The knowledge required of a liquid world must almost necessarily come from liquid events, the only places, we now suspect, that liquid knowledge and news of the future now consent to gather. 

References

O’Reilly, Tim.  2007.  Foo Camp Takeways.  here. 

Wikipedia entry on Foo Camp here.   

Acknowledgments

To The Airfields for the image above.  See their website here. 

ethnography meets brainstorming (going Israeli)

Img_0090 Jan Chipchase and I were chatting by email and I was telling him about my ethnography course at MIT.  (Honestly, I’m not sure he cares, but he is a fellow anthropologist and I thought it might interest.)  I was saying that I labored this week to persuade students that the corporate world, so forbidding and apparently immutable from the outside, is actually always "a work in process."

This image shows a note I wrote to myself on the board and "china historian" refers to Joseph Needham who said the history of thought is actually the history of people thinking, and that’s the notion I wanted to get across, that at any given time the corporation is being driven by ideas that are themselves driven by many things: intellectual fashion, the best efforts of senior management, the ideas of Tom Peters, the demands of the Street, the corporate culture, the opportunity of the moment, the company’s place on its critical path, to name a few.  In any case, the corporation is entirely different from the University where occupants may change but the form remains pretty much the same.  In the corporation both form and content are open to constant reworking, as these ideas come and go, as consultants, even ethnographers, offer up new compelling concepts.

This means that when we are working up our ethnographic conclusions and beginning to contemplate our recommendations, we are free (and forced) to cast the net very wide.  We are talking in this course about a reinvented PBS, and I said, as an example, that we should consider even recommending that the subscription model at PBS creates more problems than value, and that PBS should consider doing ads of a conventional kind.  People looked at me like I’m nuts, a point well taken.  At this point in the idea generating process, we are obliged to go a little nuts, and canvas all ideas, even implausible ones.  The idea is to work from a large, imaginative, and relatively fearless  set of options.

Naturally, the consultant who always comes back with crazy ideas is not long for this world, but every consultant is obliged to give crazy a chance to happen in the idea generating process.  Or she is not doing her job.  After all, the corporation is prepared to change itself altogether.  It is always asking Theodore Levitt’s question, "what business are you in".  And it is sometimes prepared to answer this question with bold departures from present idea and practice.  (Consider AG Lafley’s contribution to P&G, Jeff Immelt‘s to General Electric, Gertsner’s to IBM).  The corporation runs on new ideas and every project is an opportunity to canvass these. 

The other thing I was trying to communicate was the importance of brainstorming "like Israelis."  (My assumption is that Israelis understand better than most of us that invention is a responsibility to be seized and exercised constantly in a world that’s got more menace than momentum, that they engage with this collective invention with a certain intensity.)  I had the feeling that discourse at MIT is more a matter of cool assessment, that students operate more like intellectual snipers, picking off offending remarks from a great and disengaged distance.  What is missing is that all-in intensity that characterizes a good working session inside the corporation.

Of course, people don’t just know how to do brainstorming.  I had to learn.  What made me think they would be any different?  But brainstorming is a messy process, and that makes it hard to teach.  There are some rules of order, I guess.  Let me see if I can sketch them briefly.  First rule: talk flat out, don’t censor.  Second: play well with others, don’t compete.  Third: ignore the bad ideas, they will go away on their own.  Fourth: build on the good ideas, wherever they come from.  Fifth, tag the good ideas with a little phrase that secures its place in the discussion and makes reference easy.  Sixth, keep putting the good ideas into new configurations.  (I like to glance at the person who’s idea I am referencing…to acknowledge the debt.)  Seventh, came at it till the group eventually finds a configuration of existing and new ideas that looks like the right way to think about the problem.  Eureka.  Your work here is done.   

We are building a kind of air space.  Ideas are noted and tagged but kept ill defined.  The air space is porous.  New ideas are welcome.  Old ideas free to leave.  And this air space is dynamic.  No necessary relationships between ideas are specified.  We are being deliberately vague because this "problem set" will be reconfigured several times before our work is done. 

To mix my metaphor, ideas swim up. (Oblige me if you would, and swap air for water, and yes, ok, water for chocolate.)  Ideas are moving, the good ones ascending, growing in power and complexity as they go.  Ascent is consent.  Ideas rise if and only if the group find them interesting and useful, find them things they like to think.  And it’s very like the way thought happens in the head.  Sometimes the group knows it has an idea before it knows what this idea is.  It can sense the idea moving.  People exult in this moment.  Eyes shine, bodies move, people lean forward. It’s really fun.  (You know who is good at this is Susan Abbott.  I worked with her on a P&G project and she was just brilliant at it.) 

Academic discourse tends to be more "stand and deliver," more free standing, less cooperative.  Everyone takes away what they will.  It’s ok if at the end of the class you are obliged to say that the sum of the conversation is less than the whole of the conversation.  Many of the moments of illumination are assumed to happen "in head," not "in class."  Indeed, many "serious thinkers" think this process is insufficiently, er, serious.  Real thought should happen inside the head.  Anything that happens in public circumstances is a degraded currency.  In a sense, academics are engaged in a private harvest.  Good ideas occur but they occur privately and they are not shared except to trump an opponent or make a show of one’s intelligence.  Academics cherry pick their own and other’s best ideas…silently.

I am not share where I learned this.  I am certain that one of my instructor’s was Denise Fonseca and Charlotte Oades of the Coca-Cola Company.  I may owe a debt to JWT where I remember doing lots of projects.  I have seen Faith Popcorn give permission for brainstorming to take place.  And I’m not sure how. Bill O’Connor is very good at it and again I’m not sure why.  In his case, it is something to do with intelligence and courtly grace.  All of this is to say, that there are secrets here.  Some people who just seem to make it happen.  In a perfect world, you would have all of these people in to speak at a class.  And as that’s not practical, someone should interview all these people and see if they can capture what is going on.

In sum, ethnography depends upon the exercise of a creative intelligence and a strategic one.  (I haven’t really had a chance to talk about the latter.  Another post, perhaps.)  And that means it has to be built into the classroom that offers ethnographic instruction.  Otherwise, the ethnographer really is engaging in a brute empiricism.  All they can offer are video clips and lively descriptions of "what people told me."  This is a corruption of the method, and it is precisely the matter with a lot of the ethnography on offer in the commercial world. 

Brand Multiplicity

Img_0057 Martin Bishop very kindly left a comment on my blog yesterday.  Here’s a portion:

It’s interesting that you select the Axe and Dove teams at Unilever as good programs. They’ve been innovative, for sure, but the fact that they’ve operated so independently has created a brand/corporate reputation issue for Unilever.

When Dove launched its campaign against beauty ads, critics pointed out that this message was absolutely incompatible with Axe’s misogynistic ads. To quote from an op-ed: "A Company’s Ugly Contradiction" in The Boston Globe:

"Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads exhort boys to make ‘nice girls naughty.’ … Unilever is in the business of selling products, not values, and that means we, the consumers, are being manipulated, no matter how socially responsible an ad seems."

I think this is a cautionary tale suggesting that renegade activity should have limits and that some corporate oversight is essential.

I am grateful for Martin’s comment and I love the imagination and intelligence in evidence on his blog.  But this sort of thing makes me deeply uncomfortable.  From an anthropological point of view, I believe that brands are obliged to be responsive. This is what makes them vital and interesting from a cultural point of view, and, we hope, from a competitive one.  Brands and corporations should be multiple.

There are two points to make here. 

First, I think, it’s not for us to say what Unilever can and can say when it makes an ad for Axe.  To be sure, there is nothing quite so obnoxious and in the wrong circumstances dangerous as a teen age boy.  But it is the job of the marketer to find out what animates the consumer, the meanings at work in his life, to discover his "mattering map."  And Axe campaign does this very well.  We don’t like it.  Too bad.  We are not the arbiters of teen boys or American corporations.

Second, we cannot demand consistency from Unilever in its marketing and branding efforts.  It is going to speak in several languages.  It is after all operating in an increasingly diverse society and several markets.  Consistency would blunt its marketing efforts.  More to our point, consistency would blunt its responsiveness. 

Here’s what I think.  We can’t refuse Unilever the right to make an Axe campaign without giving someone the right to refuse Unilever the right to make the Dove campaign. If we can say "no" to a sexist campaign, someone can say "no" to a feminist one.

Nothing should be foreign to brand.  As I was trying to argue a couple of days ago in the Kleenex post, we are seeing brands get more adventuresome in the meanings they are prepared to cultivate and embrace.  This means that brands are becoming more like other cultural producers, movie makers, poets, writers.  There are some standards here, and perhaps stricter ones that those that constrain the movie maker or the poet, but we are nowhere near these standards in the case of the Axe ad.  To use the language of the Elizabethan court, the Axe ad may be treated as a "thing indifferent."

This is precisely what is wrong with the authenticity argument now being promoted by Gilmore and Pine.  In fact, brands have no native voice.  They may have a brand heritage.  Some brand meanings may come more easily than others.  But there is nothing a brand must say, and nothing, within limits, it mustn’t say.  Brands are designed to be exemplars of responsiveness.  This means we may not insist on what they "really" mean, or what they "must" say.   The very point of the exercise, as this is carried forward by branding, marketing, capitalism, and a dynamic society, hangs in the balance. 

For some reason, we feel free to let fly when talking to a brand.  We say things we would never dream of saying to a movie maker or a novelist.  (And this is interesting.)  But I thought the thing we liked about capitalism is that it is responsive.  In some sense it does not care what received convention says.  It is quite prepared to trumpet new body types if there is an audience for this argument.  It is this aspect of capitalism that so serves the cause of liberty.  It is this aspect of capitalism that has helped it produce the plenitude, the blooming diversity of our contemporary world.   The brand must be multiple because increasingly that’s what the world is. 

References

See Martin’s blog "Brand Mix" here.

Gilmore, James and Joseph Pine.  2007.  Authenticity: what consumers really want.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. At Amazon.com here.   

Postrel, Virginia.  1999.  The Future and its Enemies: the growing conflict over creativity, enterprise and progress.  New York: The Free Press.   At Amazon.com here.

Explanations

Got the image shooting my iPhone outside the window of Amtrak on the way to Cambridge.  I call it "brand migrating."  No, not really.   

The Huffington problem: saving innovations from their early adopters

Iphone_2 Saturday, I bought an iPhone. What does that make me?  A really late adopter.  The last to know.  Very late to the party.  Malcolm Gladwell has a term for people like me but he’s too polite to use it. 

I am stunned at how intelligent the iPhone is, and I retired my Sony Ericcson W810 with no regrets.  In fact, the SE was so bad at the things the iPhone does well, I am thinking of giving it a ritual burial in the back yard, a technological exorcism, as it were.  I want to make absolutely sure it has no residual hold on me.  (Digital residue being the worst possible thing.)

The SE did one thing well.  It took miraculously good photos.  There were times when I wanted to crawl into the world so pictured and just stay there.  Apparently, this isn’t possible.  (Product feature idea?)  But the SE was bad at capturing numbers, delivering email, managing calendars, delivering music, and otherwise making itself useful. 

The SE was an exercise in claustrophobia and bean counting.  The iPhone makes it really easy to capture data. Now I get the point of a touch screen alphabet.  It allows for a bigger screen, a better speaker and an astoundingly better interface.  There is something visible, accessible, conceptual about this phone that 10 years of cell phone use had not prepared me for. It’s miraculously good.   

The question is "what took me so long?"  My wife has owned an iPhone for months and she loves it. Friends rave about it.  But I would not budge.  The problem, I think, is that for me Apple products have an air of specialness about them.  I don’t resent this air.  I just feel that it doesn’t belong to me.  I prefer to think of myself as a "plain style" kind of guy. (This may be a way of saying "I’m special" because, "behold, I am not special."  It wouldn’t be the first time a social vocabulary has coded "x" as "not x."  Protestants, they’re just plain sneaky.)

This suggests a massive marketing problem for Apple.  What makes the iPhone thrilling for its present constituency proves off putting for the rest of a muchlarger market.  This is not a technological chasm, to use Moore’s language.  It is a cultural chasm. 

So Apple is working on repositioning itself, right?  No.  The present campaign, the one that shows Microsoft and Apple as two men on a sound stage, this actually exacerbates the problem.  The execution is fine.  The ads plays perfectly.  The Apple guy is unassuming, unprovocative, likeable, more or less Canadian,in point of fact.  His opposite, the Microsoft guy, is an obnoxious, self centered blowhard.  And a lot like me.  Well, no, it’s not that I identify with the Microsoft guy.  It’s that I can’t imagine being mistaken for the Apple guy.  That’s just not me. 

I had a go at this issue some time ago, while contemplating the problem that Prius has in this regard.  There is a slightly holier than thou quality to the Huffington crowd and this has the effect of discouraging the very adoption they wish to inspire.  So we might argue here, as I did there, that Apple has been taken hostage by its adopters.  We are, in other words, wrong to think that there is a natural momentum to adoption as things pass down the diffusion stream.  In point of face, there is a chasm here that must be finessed. 

The question is whether there might be a Diderot effect to this purchase.  Will the symbolic meanings of the iPhone creep into my sense of self, and gradually set in train a sense of transformation.  Watch this space.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  The Prius Problem.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.   here . 

C-Schools: further thoughts on branding, creativity and education

Dsc00079 My post on Friday brought some interesting comments, on line and off. Vincent LaConte chasened me for ignoring his program and I stand corrected. 

IIT was quietly initiating this d-school/b-school/c-school "experiment" in a Mies-ian basement in the 1950s.  […]  [W]e’re still the only place in the US where you can get a double masters in design AND business, not some watered-down hybrid of the two.

Katarina Graffman pointed out the St. Martins College "design laboratory," which is described as 

a creative bridge between education and the commercial agenda of industry, consultancy and business.  It is a design studio housed in the busy and vibrant atmosphere of Central Saint Martins Innovation. The Lab draws on some of the most able and multi-talented of recent graduates from University of the Arts London courses at all levels.

Graduates are employed as part of a creative team of designers in a managed, project-orientated, studio environment.  They work on commercial briefs with real deadlines, real fees and a wide range of clients with whom to negotiate and inspire.

Projects are in key areas such as branding & communications, product design, interiors and trend forecasting, or any combination of these.  Designers work in collaboration with clients as enablers, strategists, leaders, implementers and team players.  They are employed as creative thinkers who can translate concepts into realisable solutions while challenging and initiating change in the real and digital worlds.

Charles Kouns described his Creative Brand Management program at the VCU. Kouns did a review of MBA programs, discovering that creativity was un(der)represented in the curriculum, that marketing profs did not grasp the concept of branding, and that programs treated branding in an old fashioned way.  He says, "I came away thinking that most mba programs taught students how to be mechanics, not inventors." 

Kouns is too diplomatic to put it this way, but I couldn’t help thinking that the problem here is the David Aaker model of branding which continues to hold sway in the b-school world.  What is missing in the b-school approach to branding is a feeling for the real sources of innovation: culture, trends, meanings, new markets, shifting concepts, new patterns.  There can be no real creativity in the corporation without a mastery of the creativity in our culture.  For most b-schools, this culture might as well be on Mars. 

Three things about Kouns’ approach impressed me. 

First, he cares about politics.  He struggles to teach students how to "manage idea through many layers, steps, political landmines, etc. in order to protect the integrity of the idea and thus give it the best chance of having an impact in the marketplace."  My hero here is the now departed Geoffrey Frost, the man who could play the culture at Motorola like a violin.  Let’s face it, being creative in a  Left Bank, cold water, 5 floor, walkup, garret is easy compared to being creative in a group, to a strategy, on a deadline, within constraints.  Too often we sneer at politics as something that is done by handlers after the fact.  Why not build it in to the moment of inspiration?  (For the ethnographer this means being as much attention to the client and the corporation as the consumer.)

Second, Kouns cares about financial education. This is another place that creative types are inclined to treat market, corporate and investment realities as someone else’s problem.  It feels good to sneer at these issues as somehow beneath us, but it is largely because creatives don’t "get" business, that they are marginalized in the corporation and excluded from the C-suite (as in CEO, CIO, CMO, etc.).  Says Kouns, "it would be great to turn out students who had a balance of creative driven brand experience as well as financial know-how."

Third, Kouns comments on the skunk works approach to creativity, where a group inside a corporation works according to its own agenda, communes with its own gods.  He notes the case of AXE deodorant team which became a "renegade group" inside of Unilever.   We need to know more about how skunk works are created and protected. 

And this raises an interesting problem.  Some of the best "schools"of creativity, strategy and innovation are inside the corporation.  If someone were just finishing an MBA or a design program, and looking for "higher education," he or she could do worse than to spend a year or so at a corporation that really knows what innovation is. 

Graduate education in the corporate world: the good "programs"

IDEO
Axe team at Unilever
Nike
P&G
Wieden & Kennedy
Naked
Dove team at Unilever
Google
IBM (Gaven Heaton, nominating)
Cranium
Jones Soda
Motorola (in the Frost era)

[what others?]

Graduate education in the corporate world: the struggling "programs"
Motorola (in the post Frost era)?
Apple?
Microsoft

[what others?]

I would love to hear your suggestions, online or off.

Clearly, this is a job for someone with lots of time and data. BusinessWeek rates B-schools program, and it cares about the innovation economy.  I wonder if it would take a whack at this problem, and identify the best corporations that do what b-schools now fail to do, teach the art and science of creativity and innovation in the branding world. 

Find more on the St. Martins’ program here.

Postscript:

Ville directed me to the Lockheed Martin page on Skunk Works.  Here’s a passage from the section  "How the Skunk Works Got Its Name."

When Kelly Johnson brought together a hand-picked team of Lockheed engineers and manufacturing people at Burbank in the wartime year of 1943, each team member was cautioned that design and production of the new P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter must be carried out in strict secrecy. No one was to discuss the project outside the small organization, and team members were even warned to be careful how they answered the telephones.

A team engineer named Irv Culver was a fan of Al Capp’s newspaper comic strip, "Li’l Abner," in which there was a running joke about a mysterious place deep in the forest called the "Skonk Works." There, a strong beverage was brewed from skunks, old shoes and other strange ingredients. Johnson’s organization operated out of a rented circus tent next to a plastic manufacturing plant that would produce a strong odor which permeated the tent.

One day, Culver’s phone rang and he answered it by saying "Skonk Works, inside man Culver speaking." Fellow employees quickly adopted the name for their mysterious part of Lockheed, where the new jet fighter program was brewing. "Skonk Works" became "Skunk Works." The once informal nickname is now the registered trademark of the company: Skunk Works®.

Find more from the Lockheed Martin web here. 

TV reinvented

The_wireThe episode of The Wire last night returned the series to its customary form.  The opening treatments were a little disappointing, and it looked for awhile as if the choice to make this season turn on the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun might have been a bad idea. 

But last night we could see The Wire do what it does best, bring together four structural elements that have the effect of creating a vivid anticipation and the arresting question, "what the hell happens now." 

The Wire brings together the following elements:

1) There are many parts.  the police, journalists, politicians, drug dealers, unions, neighborhoods.  Each part has its own parts. 

2) These parts are in the words of Weinberger "loosely joined."  What happens in one community will have deliberate and accidental effects in all the others. 

3) These communities are filled with life-like people whose behavior cannot be predicted.  (Bunk and Jimmy last season were the fastest of friends.  They are now estranged.)

4) Sometimes, one or two of these people will engage in acts of provocation that must have big structural effects.   Spoiler alert! Last night for instance Jimmy decided to fake a serial killer.  A journalist faked a quote.  (So we get some weird and unlikely reciprocity: what Jimmy, a police, did will have consequences for the world of journalism.  What the journalist did will have consequences for a particular police.)  A gang leader awakened a gang killer once retired and moved away, and now destined to return. 

We are returned to the edge of our seats!  We know something big will come of all of this, but because there are so many moving pieces, brought into so many unpredictable relationships, filled with people who will continue to act unpredictably and provocatively, it is impossible to imagine the end of the season.    

It is thrilling that TV should play host to this much indeterminacy and complexity.  It is thrilling to see that David Simon has invented a non-genre: the police anti-procedural.

References

Weinberger, David.  2002.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined.  New York: Basic Books.   

b-school + d-school = c-school?

Berlin_school_i The business school is broken.  If the first business of business is innovation, the first task of management reinventing the corporation continually, the first order of problem solving broad and powerful pattern recognition, the "b-school" will not serve us. We know at a minimum that b-schools do not confer the cultural literacy, the intellectual foundations, or the conceptual tools that capitalism now prizes and requires. 

There is evidence of experiment, the design school at Stanford, the integrative program at the Rotman school, the Wieden + Kennedy 12 school, the Miami Ad School, associated with Crispin Porter + Bogusky), and the VCU adcenter.  Somewhat more whimsically, Russell Davies and I have proposed innovations, with Russell founding the Account Planning School of the Web and me contemplating a Blogger’s Business School (XBS).  (We are still waiting for the $240 million we need to get these started.)

So it was with real interest that I discovered an education enterprise: the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. 

By bringing together top creative executives and international leadership experts, the Berlin School will pave the way for new standards in communication and leadership, fostering global discourse on creative leadership in entertainment, journalism, media, advertising and marketing.

At its heart is the Executive MBA in Creative Leadership, an 80-day part-time program comfortably spread over 18 months, taking place in Berlin with study trips to Chicago, New York and Tokyo.

Berlin_school_ii_2 I don’t know if it’s any good, but it is an interesting experiment.  But they have some heavy hitters including Sir John Hegarty, Nina DiSesa, David Droga, Stefan Sagmeister, and creative participants  from India, Brazil and Japan.   

The danger is that this will be another jolly club, where pals appoint pals, and the odor of self congratulation extinguishes the possibility of fresh thinking. Creatives may have the Canadian problem I was talking about this week: people who are brilliant as individuals and small groups working in agency circumstances find themselves diminished by still larger groups and the scale, to say nothing of the pretensions, of university life. 

I guess the real challenge is how you get the academics and the creatives to play together  This is not a famously productive relationship and it will take some  tremendously good mediation to make these two parties mutually useful, let alone mutually inspirational.  No one has a Rosetta Stone for these two communities, and it is hard for me to imagine an ExEd program that manages to install a linga franca even over 18 months. 

The other challenge is building cultural literacy into this program.  Executive Education programs are great place to do this.  Building in study trips to Chicago, New York, and Tokyo, this is a very good idea.   But the bschool is resistant to taking popular culture seriously, and unless the creatives come well armed with this cultural intelligence , it can’t see how it can be made a part of the program.  And in my experience, creatives are better at figuring and refiguring contemporary culture than they are at thinking about in a systematic way.  I could be wrong.   

Still every new model is useful, an inspiration or an object lesson, valuable learning while Russell and I await our $240 million. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  The Bloggers’ Business School (XBS 1).  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Canada, The Martin paradox, and the Opposable Mind. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  here. 

An Ethnographic Report

Those interested in the ethnography I am posting for my MIT students can find it at Slide Share here.  It should be remember that this report is now almost 10 years old, but it will give you a rough idea of what a report of ethnographic data can look like. 

Thanks to Stephen Cox for letting me know about Slide Share.   

The MIT ethnography course: my “pilot fish” model

Mit_ethno_lecture_slide_iiEditorial note: blast and damnation, this post was written yesterday for posting yesterday.  But I saved it in TypePad as a "draft" and not a "publish now."  Here it is as a "publish now."

I am working on my notes for the MIT ethnography course that begins tonight.  Here’s one of the slides I’ll be using.

Most of this I have done before in one form or another.  I’ve done ethnography training for the Marketing Science Institute, the Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup, Merck, and Kimberly Clark.  So I have a handle on this, I guess you’d say.

The first rule of rhetoric (and marketing): know your audience.  And in this case, I am not talking to managers and marketers.  I am talking to MIT students in the 20s and 30s.  People on the verge of making career choices.

For this group, I have additional arguments to make.  First, I want to suggest that ethnography can be a great day job, the thing you do to earn enough money to do something else.  This might be filmmaking, poetry, fine art collecting.  In my case, I do it to fund my anthropology.

And, as I have argued here before, it consulting serves in a couple of ways.  It pays me well enough to free up chunks of the year for research.  But it also gives me data and understandings that work their way into my research. 

I have to be careful not to violate my confidentiality agreements and I take these seriously.  The moment the corporation believes you are "reselling" its data, that’s the end of your career as a consultant.  The corporation is right to be vigilant on this point, but it is smart enough to see that I represent a peculiar bargain.  Because I spend half the year doing my own anthropology they actually get two days for the price of one, the day they pay for, and the day I have spend working on my own.  That anthropological research is frequently the source of the insight they most prize.     Two-for-one, it’s a bargain.  And it is a distinctly better deal than hiring a consultant who does not ever engage in intellectual development but instead exhausts his or her resources by taking on too much work. 

I like to think of myself as a pilot fish.  When I work for the corporation, I share it’s interests.  No, actually, to do good work, I believe I am obliged to identify deeply with the interests and objectives of the corporation and then to cease doing so when the study is over.  It’s a little like being an actor.  For the run of the play, you are that character.  The moment it’s over, you’re not. 

Pilot fish, unless I am mistaken, are fish that attach themselves to sharks, feeding as they feed.  And that’s what I am doing as a corporate consultant.  I am directed by corporate intentions.  I am consonant with corporate objectives.  And if I get this right, I feed as the corporation feeds.  But I am, at any given moment, a free standing entity,  capable of independence, of navigating on my own.

I am beginning to think that I am a pilot fish not just in my consulting life, but in the academic world as well.  Because 20 years of living outside the academic world, no longer a full time and tenured member of staff, this has caused me to rethink what I think, how I think and the objectives of my thinking.  I have fallen out of step with most anthropologists.  This pleases them, no doubt, because the majority of them think commercial work is done at the bidding of the devil.  This is their "take" on what I do. 

I have to say, as my little career pulls away from the world that is academic anthropology, more and more I find myself staring at a community of extraordinarily confining orthodoxy.  There are a couple of verities for clan anthropology, and pity the poor bastard (that would be me) who departs from them.  And I am left with a puzzle: how can a social science committed to a honest, open discourse manage to produce so little intellectual variety? It looks very much as if the experts on orthodoxy are actually the victims of orthodoxy.  And it does no good to say, anthropologist, heal thyself.  They would if they could but they can’t, apparently.  A culture has taken them captive.

So if I have something new (for me) to bring to this course, it is my opportunity to encourage these students to think about ethnography consulting.  As I way to fund their own ethnography, or that career in kite construction they have always hankered after.  Ok, got to go.  I am trying to think of a way of putting more of the course on line.  If anyone knows how to import powerpoint presentations into a TypePad blog, please let me know. 

anthropology and the new branding: Kleenex for good and bad

Kleenex This is a small note of appreciation for the Kleenex "let it out" ad now running on television.  You may have seen it.  It features people weeping copiously in public. 

Now, this is the last place you would expect a brand to play.  Big emotions?  In public?  People losing control of the feelings?  In public?

Something in the culture of marketing balks at this.  Emotions in advertising were supposed to be upbeat, cheery, and peppy.  That’s why we have been forced suffer all that "fun in the sun" advertising. Addled icons like The Doublemint Twins, the forced good humor of a family drive to Knott’s Landing, the spectacular gratitude that came from discovering just how much fun to operate a George Foreman grill, these were the emotional orthodoxies of the advertising world.  Negative emotions were forbidden.  The culture created by capitalism was thin and risible. 

Plus, something in the culture of marketing balked at associating the brand with something it couldn’t "own."  What marketers really wanted was the Unique Selling Proposition, the one functional utility the brand possessed over all others.  People crying in public?  Who could own this? 

We can imagine the contest that took place within the agency (JWT, New York) and the brand (Kimberly-Clark).  In the old days, "let it out" was an impossible marketing proposition and even today it remains a struggle.  So hat’s off to the agency team and the marketing group.  Hat’s off, specifically, to Walt Connelly, Toby Barlow as executive creative directors, Jim Carroll as art director; Richie Glickman as creative director/copywriter, all of JWT New York.

The fact that "let it out" appears in this campaign tells us that marketing is becoming a little more anthropological.  Brands are listening to their publics more closely. They are taking in aspects of the human experience more broadly.  They are playing back things that have a little more narrative or at least dramatic oomph.  They are now prepared to send their brands up the value hierarchy.  They are making themselves partners to larger, worthier undertakings than fun in the sun.  (See for instance the work done by Done on the ideas we have about beauty and bodies.) 

Here’s text I found on the letitout.com website.

Why do people keep things bottled up inside?
It makes no sense. Nothing good comes from that.
With that in mind, we invite and encourage you to let it out.
Let out your tears, your joy, your anger, your frustration, your laughter and even your snot.
Why?
Because you’ll feel better.
How do we know?
Because we recently went across America and watched all kinds of people let out all kinds of stuff.
Some of those moments ended up on tv.
Others are right here for your viewing pleasure.
So go ahead, check them out — then let it out™.

Ok, let’s stop right there.  Apparently, KC has trademarked "let it out."  And this is proof that the corporation and marketing still has a lot to learn.  When you seek to make cultural meanings part of the brand proposition, you are a guest in someone’s house.  The moment you start stuffing the silver into your pockets, that’s when we’re going to ask you to leave.

You can find the Let It Out website here.   

So you’d like to study ethnography at MIT

Img_2616 I am teaching a course on ethnography this month at MIT with Joshua Green, and I thought This Blog readers might be interested in what the course looks like.  Feel free to read along.  The course runs for the next 3 weeks and students present their findings January 31st.  I will be posting observations from the course over the next few weeks. 

Course Outline for Week One

IAP Qualitative Research Workshop

Joshua Green and Grant McCracken, C3, Comparative Media, MIT

Class 1:

January 16, 2008

Overview: 

We have chosen to set this methodology course in the demanding context of a real world study.  Students will be asked to master the ethnographic method even as they use it for a practical purpose.  Our topic is whether and how the Public Broadcasting System may embrace new media.  Specifically, can PBS use the new technologies for production, communication, interaction and networking to change what it is and how it connects with its audiences?

We say "whether" because you might decide, on the completion of your study, that PBS is perfect just as it is and that there is no "new media" option that makes compelling sense.  This is a legitimate alternative.  The other extreme is to suggest that the new media option is grounds for a reinvention of PBS, that no program should remain unchanged.  This too is a legitimate alternative.  Or you may choose something in between.

The point is that qualitative research, done well, opens up the problem-set in all directions.  We will expect you to ride ethnographic data thermals up to the intellectual jetstream, canvass the possibilities, intellectual, strategic and tactical, and return to earth with a very particular set of conclusions and recommendations. Your final assignment will be the Powerpoint/Keynote deck you present on March 31st. 

Qualitative research projects of an ethnographic kind in industry (not for profit and for profit) happen very quickly.  Many of them go 14 days start to finish.  Lucky you.  You have an extra week.  In the next three weeks, you must get from "Ok, tell me what ethnography is, again?"  to a finished presentation.  Consider this your amazing race.

We are assuming that students will make up in intelligence, imagination, enterprise and opportunism what they lack in prior acquaintance.  We are looking for bold solutions.  We are not going to be exacting about the details.  This course is not an exercise in methodological orthodoxy or processual exactitude.  Wow us with your conclusions and we will take for granted that you did your due diligence, ethnographically speaking.  (Good work is otherwise impossible.  We will hear the voice of the viewer in your recommendations.)

In this first week, you will get your introduction to the nuts and bolts of research design and ethnographic method.  You will meet your team and you will begin to think about which respondents you should be talking to, what questions you will be asking, what your intellectual and strategic horizons will be, and the schedule you will need to design to get the team to March 31st.  This is the last day of class. And it is the day on which your team will present.  We are hoping to have several distinguished judges to evaluate your work.  Our Harvard Business School judge just signed on.  We hope also to have someone from PBS.

Objective:              Ethnographic Methods, philosophies, methodologies and principle
                                   Preparing for your PBS ethnography

Readings1:            McCracken, Grant.  1988.  The Long Interview.  Thousand Oaks: Sage.    Chapters   1-3.

Readings2:            Sunderland, Patricia and Denny, Rita.  2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research.  Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, Chapters 1 and 3.

Assignment:

Step 1.  Watch 3 hours of PBS programming.  Identify the programming concepts at work here, the audiences to which PBS wishes to speak, the voice(s) in which it speaks, the tone(s) it takes, and the several ways it engages PBS viewers.  Note that we are not going to talk about one substantial part of the PBS enterprise: children’s programming.  Doing ethnographic interviews with kids is a highly specialized art within the ethnographic practice, and we cannot reasonably hope that you will master it.  So restrict yourself, please, to adult programming.

Step 2.  Contemplate the new media revolution that has taken place in the last 15 years.  Think about how television has changed, both network and cable, the rise of the internet, the emergence of new opportunities for interaction and customization, the disintermediation of markets and cultural institutions, the changing role of the expert and authority in general, the arrival of new social networks, and the ways in which these several revolutions have changed the way the viewer sees him or her self, television, knowledge, information, learning, sociality, community, imagination…you get, the idea.

Step 3. Intersect step 1 and step 2.  There will be many intersections between the PBS proposition, past, present and possible and the new media, past, present and possible.  What we will be doing for the remainder of the course is to gather the ethnographic data and perform the ethnographic analysis that tells us which of these intersections will be most compelling as a future for PBS.

Class 2:

January 17, 2008

Objective:              Ethnographic Methods, strategies and tactics
                                   PBS prep: Identify your team, your respondents, your schedule

Reading1:              McCracken, Grant.  1988.  The Long Interview .  Thousand Oaks: Sage.  Chapters 4-7.

Readings2:            Sunderland, Patricia and Denny, Rita.  2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer    Research.  Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, Chapters 4 and 5.

Assignment:

1) Do a 90 minute interview with a perfect stranger.  Follow the reading to perform the 4 steps of the ethnographic interview.  Tape the interview.  Listen to the interview.

2) Continue working with your team, identifying respondents, preparing the questionnaire, and making ready for your PBS research project.  You should have a full schedule in place that brings you out with a complete Powerpoint/Keynote deck ready for presentation March 31. 

3) Start your interviews.

4)  Keep thinking about the three steps of the assignment for Class 1.  This is our core question.

The image above

This is a 1930s airplane that appears  in relief on the outside of what used to be the main post office in Toronto.  The building now houses the Raptors.  (No parallels to the aerodynamic properties of this course are promised or implied. )    

Canada, the Martin Paradox, and The Opposable Mind

Martin_paradox_as_a_4_part_table_ve I was in Toronto yesterday doing ethnographic interviews on the topic of Canada and Canadianness.  One of my respondents was Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Part way through the interview, Martin identified a paradox.  He noted that Canadians who are creative and free thinking as individuals can become dramatically less creative in groups.  Let’s call this the Martin paradox.

You might say that this is paradox describes all cultures.  Doesn’t group-think crush creativity everywhere?  Don’t ideas suffer "death by committee" in all countries and economies.  Well, no.  I have seen Americans be sensationally creative in groups.  I have seen The Coca-Cola Company and IBM roll out ideas effortlessly.  That Canadians are not creative in groups, this may be a special national characteristic. 

Or, we might be wrong on the first proposition, that Canadians are especially creative as individuals.  But the anecdotal evidence here is strong.  I give you James Cameron, Martin Short, Malcolm Gladwell, Isadore Sharp, Jim Carrey, Lorne Michaels, Don Tapscott, Tim Bray, James Gosling (inventor of Java), Eugene Levy, Douglas Coupland, Matthew Perry, John Kenneth Galbraith, Hayden Christensen, Nelly Furtado, William Gibson, Rachel McAdams, David McTaggart (co-founder of Greenpeace) Michael Ondaatje, and of course Jason Priestley. It’s as if Canada generates a net surplus of creativity, enough indeed to help fund big chunks of American culture.  (Or maybe of course Canadians go south to escape the group effect.) 

We may take Martin as a good example of a creative Canadian.  He attended Harvard College and the Harvard Business School.  He remained in Cambridge to help build Monitor from a small company to a large one.  While running the Rotman school of Management, he finds time to produce a stream of articles and books.  He was coming north to Rotman just as I was going down to HBS, and I worried that this creative individual might be set upon by Canadians in groups.  But it turns out this guy is bullet proof and now threatens to reinvent b-schools, capitalism and Canada all at once. 

Opposable_mind Martin gave me a copy of his new book, The Opposable Mind, which I read on the flight home from Toronto.  It’s good.  Friends of this blog will have noticed that I am usually unkind to books in the business literature category.  I have drubbed Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne, Lovemark by Roberts, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and the ideas of Zaltman, Rapaille and Sir John Hegarty.  I have even dared challenge Freakonomics.  I am, by this reckoning, a tough audience, but The Opposable Mind impressed me. 

A skeptic might say I am going easy on Martin because I have met him, because he is a Canadian (and there is Canadian mafia), and/or because he gave me a copy of his book.  May I reassure you that there is no Canadian mafia.  Furthermore, I have met, worked with, and deeply admire Zaltman, so personal acquaintance has no sway. And if you think my good opinion can be purchased with a free book, well, I wonder if we should step into the corridor and discuss this further.  (This is the Canadian version of Honi Soit qui Mal Y Pense. Or, as we might call it in honor of the national sport, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense on ice.) 

The argument is, as I understand, it is that exemplary business leaders

have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads, [and that they are] able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.  (6)

Martin calls this process, "integrative thinking."  He argues that great managers are

born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension, [which tension can be used] to think our way through to a new and superior idea. (7, italics in the original)

There are two things I particularly like about the book.  The first is that it gives us a license to embrace complexity.  We all know that the business world is rippling with new and powerful intellectual challenges.  I am just finishing a project for a large corporation and I have listened to middle and senior managers talk about a world almost liquid with change. The C-Suite seems to have a revolving door, competitors are inscrutable, new technologies unpredictable, cultural trends relentless, consumer taste and preference dynamic.  Blind side hits just keep on coming.  As one respondent put it, things change so fast, the contract "is dead on day 2."  Another said her world was all "turbulence and blur."

What we need in such a world are ideas that are both more powerful and less monolithic.  We need a new order of subtlety and nimbleness.   The nice thing about the Opposable Mind concept is that it allows us to come to terms with complexity, to endure tension, to harvest contradiction.  The usual business book is trying to make complexity go away.  This book says there is no one idea that will return to the world to order.  But there is a process with which we can learn to live with what Martin calls the "staggeringly complexity" of the new business environment. Martin says beware the easy answer, the single model, the cheap dichotomy, the false opposition.  Expect the world the resist comprehension, and learn to work with its complexity.

The second thing I like about this book is that I think it sets an important precedent for the world of the business book.  We know what b-books look like.  Characteristically, they are one-idea exercises, which idea is trumpeted from the title, adequately captured by the cover flap, and ground out with no real depth or subtlety in 200 pages of example and repetition. Which is another way of saying that the business book suffers the same problem as business.  It is wedded to a model of intellectual production that seeks out big, bold monolithic ideas and sticks with them.  B-books are so undeveloped intellectually that one suspects that what the author is really doing is building a consulting platform, and he or she is afraid that real detail will preempt all those lucrative contracts. 

There is something insulting about this withholding.  It is true that business books are read by business men and women who are driven by a 60-70 hour week and a horrific set of conflicting demands on their time.  But I am not sure this means we need to patronize them with a kind of "big print" approach to theory and discussion.  After all, these men and women live in a very testing intellectual environment and some of them are rising to the occasion by developing new intellectual capacities.  (Those who came to business and marketing because it’s "not exactly rocket science," well, I think they know their day is up.)  An evolutionary imperative is making managers smarter and it might be time for the publishing world to catch up.

Certainly, we know from the work of Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson that popular culture is ceased dumbing down and has started smarting up.  Network and cable TV now assume a viewer who is capable of richer, more nuanced stories.  The couch potato is now assumed to have a head and a heart.  Let us take for granted the business reader has a brain.

That The Opposable Mind is produced by the Harvard Business School Press, and specifically Jeff Kehoe, is a good thing.   After all, HBSP has the bully pulpit and to be honest it has in its time produced one or two books in the Keep It Simple model.  If HBSP is rising to the intellectual occasion, we may be looking at a rising tide that will elevate the entire industry. 

Ok, back to the Martin paradox.  Wouldn’t it be elegant if the Martin paradox can be illuminated by the Martin model?  Can we use the Opposable Mind to understand the Canadian inclination to be creative as individuals and uncreative in groups. 

It is a workable argument, I think.  One concept of Canadians is that they are products of contraction and complexity.  They come from a world of two founding cultures (the famous "two solitudes") for which integration is always sought.  Two cultures and languages have given way to many cultures and languages as the multicultural experiment continues.  Canada has licenses new comers with the right to keep and cultivate their differences.  This means that for every cultural characteristic that might serve as a national identifier, there is another that contradicts it.  Take as one case in point, Toronto as a city animated by the "tension" between Methodist Scots who made it Canada’s second city (after Montreal), and the Italians who arrived after World War II to save them from culinary, fashion, social and emotional inadequacies. 

Canadians must also endure the fact that they are practice a communitarian capitalism, that they insist on a tall poppy individualism, that they are both aggressively egalitarian and aggressively hierarchical.  There are really lots of contradictions swimming about here, and I think the people who rise in a world like this are people who are good at surviving and managing complexity.  The fact that Canadians generally are uncomfortable with the "imperial self" that is sometimes popular south of their border gives them a certain perspectival flexibility, let’s call it.  The ones who flourish are precisely the ones who use these complexities as a staircase with which to climb to acts of integration and creativity.  (The relationship between integration and creativity needs more careful examining than I can give it here.)

So it works.  The Martin model helps illuminate the Martin paradox. What about the other way round?   Does the Martin model help us understand why Canadians cease to be creative when in groups?  I’m not sure.  I haven’t finished the book.  My guess is that what is happening here is that Canadians suffer here from the devotion to consensus. Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to agree.  Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to approve.  One of the things I love about Americans is their pragmatism.  You will be hammering away at a problem in a boardroom and it becomes clear that we are not looking for a consensus, we are looking for something that is "good enough for television.  Let’s get on it." 

As I recall from my museum days in Toronto, it was customary to watch people withdraw their compliance and it was customary for people to sniff their disapproval.  Again, in the American case, people pursue the thing much less personally, and are inclined to go with things that are responsive to the opportunity…even if they are not especially consistent with one’s own preferences.  Finally, Canadians believe their is a null space to which a committee, an institution (and their nation?) can retreat, a place of no decision and no momentum.  For most Americans, this is intolerable.  In American committee meetings there is a unspoken but deeply shared understanding.  We are going to decide on something, and we are going to act on it, it’s just a matter of what. 

In Canadian groups, contradictions live and they have the power to derail things.  Which is to say the Martin model cannot take effect.   These Canadians cannot escape their contradictions.  They cannot integrate.  They can ascend to higher plane of generality, a richer synthetic moment of creativity.  Canadians in groups become the victim of their differences while as individuals they are the beneficiaries of these differences.  Or, to put this another way, the integration that Canadians do so well as individuals is denied them in collectivities. 

Anyhow, check out The Opposable Mind.  It’s really interesting.

References

Martin, Roger.  2007. The Opposable Mind.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. here at Amazon.com.

Adam Smith and the American corporation

Adam_smith That brilliant Scottish idea, the one that accomplished something like an intellectual miracle, and stripped away all things the rest of the world, and the whole of the world, took for granted. 

It said all of the sociality that is present to the creation of any social moment, the existence of prior understandings and connections and an assignment of status according to who owns what to whom as established by kinship, clan or hierarchy, or some other social overlay–all of this we can set aside. 

For this thing called a market, we need only posit two parties, as unattached atoms, engaged only by their interest, and only for the duration of this exchange of value.  That’s all.  They will have social connections, they will be something to someone for some purposes, and they will be this over time and space, but in this thing called a market, they are atoms with interest transacting.  C’est, as the French say, tout.  (Sorry. I was in Montreal all day.)

It was a simplifying idea, and a liberational one.  It released the world from cultural constructs and social elites, and it made the world responsive to what people wanted in spite of social assigned standing, status and desire.  It enabled a world that was responsive, not to what people were supposed to want, but what, for better or worse, and often worse, they did want.  (I will tell you in confidence that I am the only anthropologist on the face of the earth prepared to make this argument.  Where I see liberation and transparency,  they see alienation and anomie.  To which I say, freedom is grueling difficult and only people with tenure think otherwise.) 

And as bad as this ever was (this uncontrolled wanting), there was now at least a certain transparency.  This world was not a reflection of the interest of elites or the imaginings of culture.  It reflected, in an unsentimental, unmediated way, what people were actually willing to pay for.  In a marketplace society, the truth will out.  Elites and received wisdom, these get the Sicilian salute.  (A mental picture of which, please insert here.)

My point and I do have one.  I just finished a round of ethnographic interviews in a large and influential corporation.  The question was how to bring the corporation into a better alignment with the world out there.  (Sorry, I can’t be more specific and honor my oath of confidentiality.)  (It went well, I think.  I was impressed with how well I did.  It turns out I  make a very good ferret.  If your organization needs to take another look at some aspect of the how the corporation works relative to the world out there, call me.)  The thing that impresses me as a result of this research is the possibility that the Scottish idea might be for some corporate purposes ill advised. 

Take for instance the churn in the c-suite.  [C-suite means the offices occupied by the CEO (chief operating officer), the CIO (chief information officer), the CMO (chief marketing officer), the CSO (chief strategic officer), and so on.]  People are now in place on average about 20 months.  And this is the reason that more and more CMOs , for instance, come with "their people" attached.  They do not meekly accept the agency with which the corporation is dealing.  No, they have a standing relationship with an agency of their own, and they bring this with them.  After all, they only have 20 months to make a difference.  The clock is ticking.  Getting to know the incumbent agency will cost them 6 months of their precious allottment.

Ok, so what if we take c-suite churn seriously.  I wonder if it says that the real center of gravity has moved from the corporation to the C-suiters as they move from gig to gig.  If indeed the corporation responds to change by streaming c-suiters through upper management, what is the unit of analysis, where is the real seat of decision making, what is the real locus of continuity?  It isn’t, or might not be, the corporation. This is now streaming with change.  It’s a box of bees.  It is no longer the Romain outpost of order. 

The real locus of governance and continuity is the c-suiter, that itinerant man or woman, traveling from corporation to corporation.  And this means that agencies and consultants and all of the rest of the traveling retinue on which the corporation depends, should establish its first loyalty to the CMO and only then to the corporation.  I don’t know.  It’s a thought only.  But my notion and I do have one, is that as the corporation responds to dynamism it is going to change shape and form, and the locus of some things is going to shift. 

Just to return to the Scottish idea.  It says that corporation will transact episodically and fitfully, as and when it discover the best clients and partners.  (This is a fiction of course, but a deeply useful fiction.  For most purposes, the corporation is economic corporation to corporation and for some purposes, supra-economic within the corporation.)  And these connections between corporate agents will become more and more instantaneous and less and less enduring. Certain continuities will be impossible to sustain.  If they are to exist, and its a fair question whether they must exist, they will have to exist outside the corporation.  Continuity will have to live in networked relationships between players who are in a sense in constant transit, migratory and in motion, and more actual for some purposes, between engagements than within them.

It may be that the corporation is obliged to decide that to be fully responsive to dynamism, it can’t afford certain continuities and is then obliged to farm these out and make them resident in professional communities that exist in orbit outside itself.  Ok, you can see I’m struggling.  When people start repeated themselves, they are looking for the thread, and clearly I haven’t found mine.  But something is shifting, and the corporation, for so long the great "city states" of capitalism, enduring and magnificent, perhaps they will in respond to the market place by seconding some of their essentials to the world out there.

This would be another way of saying that networks so dominant in personal matters may be poised to transform even the institutional world. 

A last point

Just a note on a national difference.  I am on the train from Montreal to Toronto as I file this post.  (There is something completely thrilling about being able to get a wireless connection on a train.  I can’t say why.  There just is.)  And at 4 hours the trip is roughly like the one from New York City to Boston.  But here’s the difference. On the American trip, the wait staff feed you alcohol as if it were a  medical responsibility and a matter of some urgency.  Triage!  (In point of fact, they are softening you up for their tip.  So it is not so much as social gesture, as an economic thing.  And this is fair…and of course the reason the Acela is perpetually in the read.) 

On this trip to Toronto, however, they are much more abstemious, as if there is a good chance that any given passenger might be called upon in an emergency to operate the train and, well, it’s probably better if each of us has a clear head.  And this refusal to lead the wine flow with Dionisian (sp?) generosity is a bad thing because I believe there are few things so charming as being intoxicated on a train that is traveling at speed.  I can’t say why.  This is an enduring truth.  It’s there in Aristotle somewhere.  You can look it up.   So I am as I write this suffer a small degree of alcohol deprivation and I am sure it shows in my prose.  But hey, it could change.  The stewart might bring more wine.  And just as I wrote this last sentence, I swear to God, the steward came by and told me that he would be back with more wine.  I am, I guess, jonesing pretty bad and, ok, most visibly.