Archive for August, 2008
Brands Behaving Well
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When brands are behaving well, it’s because they have found a way to capture the meanings that work best for the brand.
Sometimes, these meanings come easily. All we have to do is to push off against our chief competitor. For Apple, this meant taking aim at Microsoft. For Google, this meant taking aim at Microsoft. We might say that Microsoft has been one of the great brand builders of our age.
The Apple post: When Apple decided to use Intel chips, the agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, knew what to do. Treat this as Intel’s liberation from all that is dull and tedious about the world of Microsoft. Since the writing of this post, we have seen the PC vs. Mac campaign, TBWA/Media Arts Lab, roll out to spectacular effect. Here too Mac is hip and interesting, and PC dull, stodgy, and clueless. In a sense, Apple built it’s brand merely by being what Microsoft was not. (See the post here.)
The Google post: Google has had this advantage, too. "Don’t do evil," the words of the corporate slogan meant, really, Don’t be Microsoft. But when I wrote this post, the bloom was suddenly off the rose for the Google brand. In effect, Google was suddenly discovering that not being Microsoft was not enough. It was now obliged to make it’s own brand meanings. (See the post here.)
The Rachel Ray post: We have lots to learn about branding from celebrities. If only corporate brands were so responsive, so charismatic. In the case of Rachel Ray, we have another case in which brand building is mostly a matter of pushing off against the competition. In this case, it meant not being Martha. Talk about an easy target. Martha Stewart is famous for being status conscious, status anxious, particular, bossy and self important. Along comes a woman like Ray who is casual, relaxed, forgiving, and goodhearted. You might say she had found her Microsoft. (See the post here.)
The Volvo post: But sometimes we have to make brand meanings the old fashioned way. We have to earn them. We don’t have a competitor to push off against, we have to start from zero. In this post, I look at Volvo and an ad by Euro RSCG, that figures out the things the brand can and should stand for. In the case, the most precious things in a man’s life: his daughter. And it captures this daughter in her most precious moment. And there is suddenly an arch. All that is precious about the daughter comes to reside in the brand capable of protecting this preciousness. This is meaning manufacture of a powerful kind. (See the post here.)
The Old Spice post: Once we decide that we are going to search out meanings for the brand, there are millions of choices. We have an entire culture to draw upon. In this case, we look at two men’s colognes both of which have fallen from fashion. Their meanings passed their "best by" expiary date and it is now time to start again. Both perfumes are struggling to come up with new meanings. Aqua Velva is looking in the wrong place. Old Spice, drawing upon the characteristically brilliant work of Wieden + Kennedy, is looking in the right place. In this case, they are drawing upon the irony created in the 1990s and the distance with which Gens X and Y now treat old fashioned kinds of masculinity. The brand is current once more. (See the post here.)
The HP post: In this case, we see the brand attempting something pretty daring in the field of meaning manufacture. HP attempts to claim the best face of the future, the notions of dynamism and responsiveness. I was unkind to HP’s meaning making efforts in the last section. In this case, I think they get things right. Hats off to the agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. (See the post here.)
The Coca-Cola Company post: I was unkind to Coke in the last section, but here I think they show what they can do. This ad, by Foote, Cone & Belding, New York, captures one of the most resonant themes in contemporary culture, self-transformation and women’s empowerment. This is a sensational "connect" with meanings that matter. Coke is of course an interesting case study for anyone interesting in branding. After all, this is the company that managed to turn sweet, brown water into a sign of America. Now that’s meaning manufacture. But the corporation has been uneven in brand building. Coke was smart enough to hire the likes of Sergio Zyman and Mary Minnick, and stupid enough to let Daft fire the Atlanta marketing department at a critical time. (See the post here.)
The Starbucks post: This post was about a funny little accident that gave Starbucks an opportunity to connect with the social networks and one of the great cultural trends of our time. Let’s call the latter the "kindness of strangers" trend. (See the Tag, We’re It link at the bottom of this post for more on this trend.) Anne Saunders is VP of Global Brand Strategy at Starbucks gets the credit. This ends up as a useful play on the networking theme, and as we now know, this is the great Tsunami now running through the world of marketing. (See the post here.)
In sum:
Brands behave well when they are smart about the meanings they create for themselves. The trick is to discover which meanings, in which form, and how best to communicate and claim them.
Sometimes, meaning making is made easy by the competition. Microsoft make things easier for Apple and Google. Martha Stewart made things easier for Rachel Ray.
Sometimes, the brand has to make meanings by its own efforts, and in the case of Volvo, this meant going out, doing the research, building the strategy, and capturing the meaning "safety" in the form that matters most.
There are lots of other meanings to work with:
HP claimed dynamism.
Coke claimed women and self transformation.
Starbucks claimed the generosity of strangers.
Well behaving brands can claim any numbers of meanings.
Brands Behaving Badly
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I am working on a way to draw together the pieces of this blog. Here are the posts that fall under the theme Brands Behaving Badly. This post is an overview, a meta-post, as it were.
The Sony post: brands being vertically consistent. This post shows Stringer saying one thing and Sony doing another. In the old days, this was fine. CEOs and PR machines would pump out message that didn’t always square with what was happening on the shelf. In a new brand era, consumers expect a consistency. If you are going to talk it, you have to walk it. Plus, there is a strong sense that CEOs craft the company, not just the vision statement. Especially in an era of Steven Jobs, Jeffrey Immelt, Richard Branson, and A.G. Lafley. (See the post here.)
The HP post: brands being horizontally consistent. This post shows that an HP ad promises a brand new approach, with no evidence that there is hardware or software. This is a return to the old days in which the product was one thing and advertising something completely different. I like the idea of making new brand meanings to crawl out of the commodity basement that now threatens personal computers, but the meanings can’t just sit on the surface of the brand. They have to be "built inside." (See the post here.)
The Yahoo post: brands telling their story. Yahoo has bags of talent. In their time, people like Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Joshua Schacter, Jeff Weiner, Usama Fayyad, Jeremy Zawodny, JR Conlin, Bradley Horowitz, and Marc Davis. It has many great products: Delicious, Flickr and Fire Eagle. But these vital parts of the brand proposition never seem to get branded with Yahoo. Naming is a complicated business, but when we are busting with talent and ideas, we want the brand to get its share of the credit. We want the parts of the brand to create value for the whole of the brand. (See the post here.)
The Wal-Mart post: climbing the value hierarchy. In the early days, Wal-Mart could win by beating everyone at the price game. Pile em high, sell em cheap. And it worked. But now Wal-Mart dominates retail so thoroughly that growth is possible only if it begins to climb upwards into more premium markets. And now it really has its work cut out for it. Now it is playing a real branding game. Not a moment too soon, Target has been playing this game for some time. Now Wal-Mart must actually know something about consumer preference, and now it must be able to track sudden changes in this preference. (See the post here.)
The Coca-Cola post: speaking of consumer preference, this post is about the consumer sending Coke a message, and the way Coke responded. It’s not often that consumers get to say what they want this clearly. The old Coke would have treated this as an aberration. But the new Coke is learning what it is to live in a market with lots of competitors and lots more choice. We might think they would take this "message in a bottle" a little more seriously. This is the new name of the game. (See the post here.)
The New York Times post: One of the ways to connect with consumers is to help them create content. This has been the big revolution driven by the emergence of social media and social networks. Every consumer is now building a bigger network. And to sustain this network, they need to create and x content. Smart brands are making themselves useful. They know that helping the consumer make content for himself helps him make value for the brand. In this post, I look at an odd case in which the New York Times actually decided to destroy consumer content. Proving once more perhaps that you cannot teach the grey lady new tricks. (See the post here.)
The Microsoft post1: I used to be a Microsoft loyalist. And then I got whammed by spam. For some reason, Microsoft thought this spam was my problem. Enter Google who found a way to fix the problem. This is not just about a better value proposition. This is about finding a way to get rid of "value tax." Spam was a value tax on email. Features that I couldn’t find or couldn’t work were a value tax on my cell phone, my software, my hardware. One of the ways of creating value is by getting certain product features and deficits out of the way. The iPhone is everyone’s favorite case in point here. And so it should be. It creates all the features I want in exactly the configuration that makes them most useful and most accessible to me. Oh, well, this is turning into a post of its own. In this present post, I was merely noting that eBay could go the way of Microsoft if it didn’t devote itself to a value tax reduction strategy. (see the post here.)
The Microsoft post2: And this brings us full circle on the Brands Behaving Badly. After all no brand has behaved quite as badly in our time as Microsoft. And in the case of this post, we look at the behavior of the new head of Microsoft now that Bill Gates has returned. In the place of this slightly nerdy guy with the big glasses, we have a first class bully. A man who apparently said of Eric Schmidt, head of Google, "I am going to f*cking bury that guy." (see the post here.)
In sum, brands should reflect
1) what CEOs say and do (Sony),
2) the real product and service offering (HP),
3) the whole story of the brand (Yahoo),
4) a passage up out of the commodity basement into the value rich heavens (Wal-Mart),
5) a respect the consumers’ wishes when they find a way of signalling these wishes (Coca-Cola),
6) a respect the consumers’ content when they find a way of creating this content (The New York Times),
7.1) a way of getting rid of value taxes that stand between the consumer and the value created by the product and the consumer (Microsoft).
7.2) a regard for the marketplace as something that creates value for everyone, not just the corporation in a narrowly defined game of zero sum bullying (Microsoft).
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Wordle.net for the image.
My heroes
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I gave a talk a couple months ago at Ideo and for some reason I decided to "dis" everyone.
Not anyone there. I’m not a complete idiot. Ideo is of course a brain trust, and a gift to ethnography, anthropology, innovation, creativity.
I did let fly at many of the pretenders in these fields.
And the crowd was not amused.
They assumed, I think, that with every act of criticism I was anointing myself as the one, true authority in matters of marketing and branding. (I had assumed they knew that this sort of thing is for a Canadian constitutionally impossible.)
But I do dis people, and for all my Canadian reticence, I dis often and with enthusiasm. On this blog, I’ve had a go at Kevin Roberts, Sir John Hegarty, Chris Anderson, Jerry Zaltman, Clayton Christensen, Clotaire Rapaille, James Surowiecki, to name a few.
This sort of thing raises a question: Who do I like? It is easy to be critical, but unless you like someone, well, you’re merely nay saying and this is easy and empty.
So here’s a few of the writers and thinkers I like. I am a big fan of Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind. This is a book that resists the BIG PRINT tradition of business publishing, according to which any business book should consist of one idea, exhibited in the title and on the flap of the book jacket, with the rest of the book devoted to shamelessly repetition and lots of examples. The Opposable Mind is both an argument for and a demonstration of, um, what shall we call it, a small print approach to business discourse.
More broadly, I like the tradition created in Chicago by Lloyd Warner after World War II. This was a time when people from industry and the academic world met to solve problems. I put the following people in this tradition, though it is not clear whether and how they worked with Lloyd Warner: Syd Levy, Irv White, Phil Kotler, John Sherry. As a graduate of the University of Chicago, I put myself in this tradition.
There was something reckless and joyful about the work Warner and colleagues did. They appeared to hold that being smart and well informed was the due diligence. What didn’t work we could take down, and try again. This made marketing a restless, experimental, iterative enterprise. The idea was to fail early, often and informatively.
There are several communities that appeal to me. I am giving a few names for illustrative purposes. Please think of these names not as an exhaustive list, but a representative sample. If I have missed your name, for God sake, don’t hate me. Just send me an email. And shame on me.
1) The "interpretive" business school community: John Sherry, Rob Kozinets, Susan Fournier, Russ Belk, Alan Middleton, Doug Holt, David Mick, John Deighton, to name a few.
2) New media: Clay Shirky and others in the ambit of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University; Henry Jenkins and others in the ambit of the Department of Comparative Media and C3 at M.I.T., David Weinberger and others at the Berkman School at Harvard, to name a few.
3) Design world: Diego Rodriguez, Bob Sutton, and others at the design school at Stanford, Michael Beirut, William Drentell and others at Yale, Debbie Millman and others at SVA, to name a few.
4) Planning and creative communities: Boy, there are too many people to know where to begin. Oh, alright, Russell Davies, David Armano, Dino Demopoulos, Faris Yakob, Brian Collins, to name a few.
5) Journalism: Jon Fine, David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Virginia Postrel, to name a few.
6) Marketing thinkers and practitioners: Seth Godin, Thomas Davenport, Johnnie Moore, John Grant, Tom Guarriello, Tom Peters, Jim Collins, Nick Hahn, Sergio Zyman, Tom Asacker, to name a few.
7) Other: Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, Sara Winge,Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Zolli, to name a few.
Ok, so the next time I criticize someone, you’ll know I do not imagine myself the one and only. There are lots of people working this ground. I am grateful to them all, named and not named.
References
For more details on Lloyd Warner, see my blog post here.
The review of Kevin Roberts here.
The review of Sir John Hegarty here.
Acknowledgements
To Wordle.net for the image.
Brian Collins: design genius
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For power, elegance and strategic perfection, how about the icon from wecansolveit.org? We read it as "we" but something tugs at us. There is an anomaly here, and it takes a moment to see that the "w" is actually an "m" turned upside down. We issues from me. We transcends me. Brilliant.
I was pleased to see that this is the work of Brian Collins. Hats off ot Mr. Collins. I was at a dinner party on Saturday night, and to our surprise, everyone agreed that Brian wrote the best status lines on Facebook. Hat’s off for these too. I recommend you find Mr. Collins on Facebook and befriend him. The status line was never so well designed. Plus it nice to keep the company of genius even if it’s only online.
References
For more on We Can Solve It, go here.
Topic stack # 1
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I’m suffering an accumulation of post ideas and I want to enter the new school year in a state of administrative grace. Help yourself.
1. A Reality TV show of your very own
Your own Reality TV show, but you get to keep the humiliation to yourself. German firm makes it possible for people to submit pictures of themselves, and have others comment. Thanks to my old friend Alan Middleton for the head’s up. here.
2. Design and design gods at Yale
Here’s a course taught by Michael Beirut and William Drenttel at Yale. Not sure when it is taught next. I would love to sign up.
MGT 833, Designers Designing Design. 2 units. This course offers students the opportunity to be design clients, and to acquire the skills and experience necessary to use design to shape and manage products, programs, initiatives, and campaigns. Two working designers will explore design as a methodology, a way of working in modern organizations — corporations, foundations, magazines, schools, even cities. Beginning with an overview of contemporary “design thinking,” the course will survey far-ranging examples where design has been used as a means of innovation, change, message, and influence. Cases will include corporate, retail and non-profit identity; content-rich media and editorial projects; and social and political initiatives. Weekly assignments will involve writing design briefs for real world projects, considering strategic goals, organizational strengths, and consumer and public need. The course combines hands-on exercises, lectures, readings, and cases. Guest lecturers will include well-known designers, as well as clients involved in live cases.
3. Wendy’s and the "meatatarian" philosophy.
In this ad, a guy and a girl are eating at a restaurant. The girl offers the guy a bite of her salad, and he says, "no, no, thank you, I’m a meatatarian. I only eat meat and bacon. You know, meatatarian. It’s a personal choice." This gets a version of "guy humor" that is much practiced but completely unstudied in the social sciences. One of the keys to have it works is the delight guys take in faux sincerity…as a way of mocking people who are earnest where they are, um, jocular. This is contemporary culture generating itself. There are vegetarians. They are much scorned by mainstream males who think them precious and self absorbed. Along comes a creative team and, hey presto, new term, and a small ripple in our culture. This term is sure to become a "clam," a fragment from commercial culture that gets pressed into service in daily life.
See the ad here.
4. Michelle Obama was perfect last night
I watched the Fox news coverage. Williams and Barnes thought Obama did a good job. But Wallace, Kristol and Rove thought her talk was study in missed opportunities. I disagree. Yes, Obama could have offered more issues. But this was not the moment for issues.
I was reminded of the advice on public speaking that you start a teaching job. In that first class, your students are not going to hear a word you say for the first 2 or 3 minutes. That’s because they are "taking a reading" in that odd and interesting way that humans do. They are sifting through the verbal and nonverbal signs. They are not listening to content. They are trying to figure out who you are. There is a Canadian phrase for this (perhaps it’s American, too): They are "sussing you out."
And I think this is what Americans were doing during Obama’s talk last night. They were "sussing." Much of what we hear about Barak Obama says that people are unprepared to take him at his word, to accept the appearance for a reality. He is "other" in several ways, and this means simply that Americans an extra long sussing period before we are prepared to start to absorb content.
Think of it as a kind of instinctual due diligence. We just have to log those sussing minutes, perhaps hours, before anything else can happen. So the beginning of a conference is exactly the time to let the sussing begin, and a talk like Michelle Obama appeared designed for precisely that. No content, because by and large we weren’t to (or for) content. But lots of cues and clues, lots of the verbal and nonverbal stuff we need for the "sussing" process. Rhetorically and strategically, this talk was perfectly on target.
5. News of a radical new experiment in anthropology.
This blog is interested in the Human Terrain experiment taking place in Iraq right now. Anthropologists are famously unhappy about the use of their method for any practical purpose. As a result of which, the field is now so removed from application it has become something like a museum piece. But Montgomery McFate, David Kilcullen and the people serving in the Human Terrain program are reinventing the field in difficult circumstances, and we can take for granted that already the field is beginning to change. There is for instance something interesting about the idea, below, of the "professional counterinsurgent." The mind bends and then it boggles. We shall have to wait to see learnings filter back into the field. In the meantime, here are a couple of words on and from Kilcullen.
David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army officer, now seconded to the United States State Department. He earned his Ph.D. studying guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia and East Timor. He is the author of Twenty-eight Article, a practice guide for junior officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kilcullen calls it "conflict ethnography."
- The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional
counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and
interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in
which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow
a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close
reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in
no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and
cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a
participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface
differences between our societies and these environments (of which
religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and
cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on
their own terms.
References
Anonmymous. n.d., David Kilcullen. Encyclopedia Entry in Wikipedia. here.
Kilcullen, David. 2006. Twenty-eight articles: fundamental of company-level counterinsurgency. here.
Kilcullen, David. 2007. Religion and Insurgency. Small Wars Journal Blog. May 12, 2007. here.
Welcome Deep Glamour
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Virginia Postrel has just launched a blog called Deep Glamour. Her partner in the enterprise is Kate Coe. Find Deep Glamour here. Everyone here at This Blog says "Bon Voyage, Virginia and Kate!"
Mouse trap, or new developments in Siamese economics
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Molly, my cat, has had a really exciting summer. First, the mice. We live in an old house with lots of crevices and crannies, and mice whistle right in.
As the nights have got a little cooler, there’s a new generation out there who’s experiencing "chilly" for the first time, and several have decided to relocate to that lovely big warm wooden box at the end of the garden. Our house.
Molly waits for them just at their favorite entry point. Right to the side of the stove. She sits there for hours, and when her patience is rewarded she comes up stairs to share her good fortune with Pam and me.
She doesn’t mind that we’re sleeping. She gives us plenty of time to rouse ourselves, hurling the poor wee mouse up in the air repeatedly till we do. For the next 40 minutes or so, roughly the period 3:20 to 4:00 in the morning, it’s kinda like our pet has a pet.
Molly follows the mouse. She noses the mouse. She exhorts the mouse. But most of all she shares the mouse. I think she feels Pam and I have been so generous with her, it’s only fair.
The other big news this summer for Molly has been the introduction of canned food. She used to eat dry food only but we decided that something meatier was called for. Something, say, like Purina Pro Plan Selects Classic Adult Natural Turkey and Wild Rice Entree Plus Essential Vitamins and Minerals with Real Turkey as the Number One Ingredient! Huge hit. I am the keeper of the can, the human who knows the art of opening. And Molly takes new precautions, now marking me across the shins anytime I’m in the kitchen. I mean, what if she had to find me in a crowd of balding, middle-aged anthropologists? Better safe than sorry. Mark him once. Mark him twice.
I feed Molly a couple of times a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. I open the can. I take out half a serving and place it in her dish. I set the dish just in front of the stove in the kitchen. Molly chows down with gusto. (Dry food. Girlfriend, please.)
Here’s what’s odd. I’ve noticed that the first serving disappears almost immediately. The second, the evening serving, that often gets left. There could be lots of explanations for this. Molly is probably hungrier in the mornings than in the afternoon. She’s breaking a bigger fast.
But I don’t think that’s it. No, battling a cold the last few days as giving me a chance to see Molly in action. Keeping her vigil by the stove through the night, and there sitting beside her always was her half finished meal. Finally, it hit me. She isn’t neglecting that afternoon meal. She’s using it as bait. She uses it to send a message to those mice in the field. That big wooden box isn’t just warm. Good eats, too! Peckish? Perhaps you’d like some Purina Pro Plan Selects Classic Adult Natural Turkey and Wild Rice Entree Plus Essential Vitamins and Minerals. with Real Turkey as the Number One Ingredient! Pull up a chair! Come on down!
What a clever little creature. Molly forgoes one meal to make another. But mice are vastly more than meals for her. They are opportunities to exercise her hunting skills, an entertaining nocturnal diversion, and, perhaps most important, a way to entertain Pam and Grant. In Molly’s economy, mice have high value and diverse value. When she treats her dinner as bait, she engages in a process of value conversion. She turns mere food into real fun not to mention a lovely gift for Grant and Pam.
Image: Molly and me about 3 years ago when she wasn’t many months old. Boy was she tired.
how to think like an anthropologist
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I came across this passage the other day. It’s Ian Watt discussing Cervante’s Don Quixote.
Don Quixote’s adventures in his second expedition usually follow a pattern of action that in itself is very simple: a visual stimulus; a misinterpretation of the stimulus by Quixote in terms of his chivalric compulsions; a realistic correction by Sancho Panza, overridden by his master’s complacent imaginative expertise; a challenge; a battle and its result; and a conclusion, in the form of a highly entertaining discussion between Quixote and Sancho, that the reader gets into the habit of eagerly awaiting.
What he means is:
In the second expedition, Don Quixote’s adventures have a simple pattern: something happens, Quixote misinterprets it in his chivalric way, Sancho Panza corrects him, Quixote objects, a battle ensues, discussion follows, the reader is pleased.
Never mind. It’s possible his editors at the Cambridge University Press insist that prose meet air pressure guidelines issued by the Press. Or perhaps this sort of thing now comes from Brussels.
What I like about Watt’s remark is how effectively he takes us to the heart of Cervante’s enterprise. He gives us the form behind the text, the hidden structure of the story. This is precisely the sort of thing we do not see at first. And we look to someone like Watt to see through the surface of the text to pattern from which it springs. (Let me say Watt does this brilliant well and I hope he will forgive my impertinence.)
This is what anthropologists are for. They look at cultures, not at texts. And when they make themselves useful, it is because they can "see into" the cultural thing (a movie, a celebrity, a brand, a trend, for instance) and say what makes it what it is. They are looking for the essentials that define it. For instance, they are trying to say as clearly as possible who John Cusack is as an actor, so that they can say, as clearly as possible, how he differs from, say, from any of the actors who starred in The Usual Suspects (Kevin Spacey, Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro). Is this useful? If you are casting a Hollywood movie, it is, I believe, very useful. Art depends upon it. Commerce depends upon it.
Now, you would think this would be a pretty simple statement of what anthropology is, but I must tell you that I am almost the only anthropologist who believes it anymore. This is because most of the field has fallen under the dark spell of the continental philosophers, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and under this baleful influence they sleep. Every so often they rouse themselves to write an act of moral, political or epistemological self recrimination, and persuaded that the old kind of anthropology is indeed unlawful and unclean, they return to their fitful, tortured slumber.
But wait, before they go, they will sometimes leave us prose like this:
It thus relativizes discourse not just to form — that familiar perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention — that conceit of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse — that desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist alike; nor even to history and ideology — those refuges of the hermeneuticist; nor even less to language — that hypostasized abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to discourse — that Nietzschean playground of world-lost signifiers of the structuralist and grammatologist, but to all or none of these, for it is anarchic, though not for the sake of anarchy but because it refuses to become a fetishized object among objects — to be dismantled, compared, classified, and neutered in that parody of scientific scrutiny known as criticism. (Stephen Tyler, ref. below, quote from The Bad Writing Contest, ref. below)
Not everyone is prepared to suffer the concussive effect of these grenades. Denis Dutton held a bad writing contest in the 1990s. (Tyler won 2nd place in 1997.) And Professor Dutton had this to say about another winner:
Thus in A Defense of Poetry, English Prof. Paul Fry writes: “It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptuality.” If readers are baffled by a phrase like “disclosing the absentation of actuality,” they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor showing off.
Anthropologists, when they bought the continental lie, took up showing off in a big way. To be honest, there was much else to do. Anthropology was pretty much extinct. Anthropologists could no longer make assertion about the world. The long trek started by the likes of Morgan and Spencer in the 19th century was over. The field was now just so many skateboarders working on their Ollie. (And let me reassure Dr. Tyler that I mean this impertinence with near Victorian sincerity.) As a result, anthropology is in a bit of a shambles and those who would borrow from anthropology must choose with care. (Think of this as the last helicopter out.)
Let’s say this as a minimum. Anthropology looks for the core of the thing, it’s defining characteristics, it’s essence. And this means usually a set of propositions that together make an argument which may then be judged as a whole and by its parts. This sounds a little general, I’m sure. Have a look, if you wouldn’t mind, at my post on the "artisanal trend" for a case in point.
No, it isn’t perfect. Yes, I am sure it generalizing in a way that offends the delicate sensibilities of the postmodern anthropologist, but then it doesn’t pretend to be anything but a provisional way of looking at things, altogether risible where it not so very much better than nothing (and delirium). This anthropological approach is rough and ready. It intellectually opportunistic, slapping together concepts and insights like a Thor Heyerdahl hoping for landfall soon, because, let’s face it, this implausible floating machine isn’t floating very much longer. But that is the point of the exercise. We are not seeking perfection. We are seeking to construct an idea just robust enough to get us from confusion to clarity. Once we get there, it can gracefully decay on the beach for all we care, the object now of nothing more than touristic curiosity. "TThey got here on that?" (I am assuming that most of the readers of this blog are themselves creatures who live by their wits, that they are people who are constantly being asked to come up with a provisional, "actionable" way of looking at things often by lunch time and more often right now.)
Were my account more learned, elegant, sophisticated, it would look exactly the classic liberal arts notion of the "argument." And it is I think just entirely astonishing that anyone should now be called upon to describe what an "argument" is. I mean, really. To walk away from the intellectual machinery (if you will) that brought us the magnificent ideas that make us possible, it’s really, well, just bizarre. I picture Watson and Crick sitting at the Double Eagle pub in Cambridge. One of them reaches into the envelope that contains the grainy X-ray and our first glimpse of DNA. The other say, "so what do we have?" The reply, "Oh, geez, I can’t tell. You know…. Couldn’t be. F*ck it. How about another pint." For all of its vaunted philosophy, the postmodernists’ repudiation of clarity was every bit as cavalier as this." (Impertinence to Watson and Crick devoutly regretted.)
It makes me think of a conversation I had with a student at McGill. I was a guest lecturer in her class, and after I finished speaking, she asked a question. Well, no, not a question, really. She raised a number of issues in a manner so, well, allusive that it wasn’t clear what the issues were. And there were lots of issues, it turned out, and after awhile….I didn’t know what to think. You can imagine me with my swiss-army-knife practicality, this was frustrating and I asked, please would she clarify?’ She took this as clearance to do another couple of laps around the airfield. And a barrel roll or two. But no, no question. My patience (to say nothing of Dutton’s "natural humility") began to wear a little and I said, "I’m sorry, what is the question?" As she set out on another lonely journey, it became clear that for this student of the new liberal arts, illumination came from many remarks heaped upon a rhetorical bonfire out of which sparks must eventually fly penetrating and illuminating the mind of the listener. But not me. Not my mind. No, the only spark coming my way was a dismal one: she was actually incapable of asking a question, that she was a captive of the sleeping kingdom.
The point of every formal intellectual exercise is to decide what the question is, to survey the answer "options," to refine or reform the questions where necessary, to work out our propositions and refine and reform those too. This is what Western thinkers are so very good at. This is precisely why Western thought managed, in the notion of Levi-Strauss, to escape circularities and insularities of "wild thought" and find its way to ideas that were ever more transparent to a reality. And this of course is the first principle of post modernism, that there is no real real, everything is constructed, idea is everything. To think that this "discourse" is largely composed on a computer which is if nothing else, a demonstration of the ability of IBM labs to make electrical charges dance with unfailing precision on the head of a pin, well, it’s sad and strange. And it does make you wonder about issues of "fitness for office." This creatures of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences, should we not take the university away from them? Pay them off if need be. But for God’s sake, send them home. They have wrecked the liberal arts. They have made it near impossible to study contemporary culture. This is to say they have imposed opacity at two of the places we hope for light.
Oh, but there’s me on my hobby horse again. Sorry. Grant, dude. (And I know you inner ear supplied this, but popular culture species this particular vocalization of "dude" as an extenuated, falling U, the entreaty U, let’s call it.) All I mean to say here is that for our purposes anthropology operates like a glass bottom boat. (I know. I know. Enough with all the helicopters, airfields, kingdoms and now, geez, glass bottom boats! Dude! I am hoping you issued your own "mixed metaphor advisory" a couple of hundred words ago. Apply and use snow chains for remaining paragraphs.)
But in the spirit of intellectual opportunism, glass bottom boat is apt. Before the act of anthropological analysis, the object of our interest is obscured by a shifting surfaces and refracting light. After our analysis, it is evident, there, clear to the eye. Sure, there may be something illusory about this clarity, but anything is better than an English professor showing off. (Because finally he knows what the pragmatist lives by, nothing comes of nothing.)
There I go again. Sorry. Here’s what I want to say. To think like an anthropologist, it is necessary to observe the world as carefully as you can. (Use "noticing" as a key work on this blog for more on this step.) And then it is to decide what we might say about what we think we see. And it is then to proceed with the construction of several propositions as a kind of scaffolding of the most general, powerful and clear things we think we can say about the topic at hand.
The argument is propositional and segmental. It is made up of working parts any one of which may be scrutinized and in the popular phrase "swapped out." There is always a calculation being performed as the argument is being worked and reworked. Does this particular intellectual intervention succeed in fixing the part only to ruin the whole. At some point, we may have to decide the thing is a mess. "Put the argument down and walk away."
There is always also Kuhnian grounds for starting again. Because there may be something in our "problem set" that that doesn’t quite make sense, an anomaly that resists our explanatory scheme. And if we stop and honor it, that is to say, if we stop and think the things that make it clear instead of anamolous, this can reconfigure the explanation altogether. And often of course this comes all of sudden, as if done by elves while we sleep. Suddenly, we get it. (See Kuhn’s wonderfully clear idea of paradigms and anomalies in The Structure of Scientific Revolution.)
But it’s not only anomalies that must be honored. The ordinary, run of the mill, data at hand must be honored too. We must resist the temptation to haul out our favorite explanation because, in that wonderful phrase, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But not to us. No, we intend to find the hammer assumed by these nails. Or invent it, if it does not exist.
But we are responsible not just to the data, anomalous or standard issue. We are also in possession of a set of things we think about the world. These are assumptions but because we have used them over and over and tested them over and over, they have a better-than-assumption status. Of all the ideas we have ever thought and used, these are our favorite, the ones with the greatest wattage. But of course, any given project will serve as an opportunity to rework even these.
Then comes a bit for clarity. We go back and remove everything the reader doesn’t need to know or hear. This is a "signal to noise" issue. The more content we can take out of the signal, the clearer we make it. This notion of parsimony was long ago abandoned by English professors because otherwise ollies are out of the question. And in a more perfect world, more sincere world, I would go back and clear up this text, and give it clarity and bullet points and all the things our clients demand of us. I would particularly remove all the taunting of the postmodernists, because, really, who cares? I know I don’t.
References
Dutton, Denis. The Bad Writing Contest. here.
Tyler, Stephen. 1986. Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document. in Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. University of California Press.
Watt, Ian. 1996. Myths of Modern Individualism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Clarifications
For more on the English Professor’s Ollie, see the Wikipedia entry here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jonathan Feinberg and his fine program Wordle at Wordle.net for the opening image.
Me feeds (and the law of return)
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I got an email from FedEx this morning, one of those cheery little notes that corporations are always sending us. It seemed to me to missing something: a list of the packages I’ve recently sent by FedEx.
Hang on, you will say, you sent the packages. Surely, you don’t need reminding. Actually, I do. Increasingly, my existence is governed by the law of return, the cultural version of which reads, roughly, what does not return to me is gone forever.
At the end of the 1990s, when capitalism was in one of its manic phases, I was sent to help out as a financial services company wooed clients on a tall sailing ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. Acting as a kind of social scientist deck hand, my job was to offer the anthropologist’s view of what capital is, so to make my employer seem magnificently well informed about the world of commerce.
It was a tall ship but not a very big ship and I was surprised to discover that we shared the deck with a camera crew who appeared to want to shoot every thing all the time. This mystery was dispelled when at the end of every day, a magnificent and well oiled meal behind us, we were bid to sit and watch a video of the day’s proceedings. There we were on a boat watching a video of ourselves on a boat. I mean really.
"Oh, God," I thought, "this is going to be one of those narcissistic deals where self absorption competes with self congratulation." But in fact it turned out to be fascinating. And I remember thinking, "so that’s what happened this morning." Because by that time, morning seemed quite a long way away…and not just because Bacchus, god of wine, had taken us captive and ferried us a very long way away. After a day of lively conversation and the visual feast called the Mediterranean, the morning was a distant shore, and this video message-in-a-bottle turned out to be interesting and strangely useful. I kept thinking, "so that’s what happened this morning."
I have seen the law of return in other contexts. And it’s now become a kind of bee in my bonnet. So that when I had the very happy opportunity to talk with a big sneeze in the newspaper world, and we fell to talking about what the newspaper of the future should look like, I found myself arguing that the custom newspaper should include "feeds on me." (Bacchus was sitting at this table too.)
Me feeds should remind me of emails I’ve send, people I’ve met, projects I’ve started or matured, packages I’ve sent. Mostly, I will greet this stream with the baseball-card mantra of boyhood, "got it, got it, want it, got it." But sometimes, I’ll go "oh." Sometimes, this data stream will be an opportunity, maybe my first opportunity, to see a pattern forming, a way my life is changing.
Otherwise, frankly, and this may just be the cold medicine talking, life is a bit of a blur. Unless I hear from myself from time to time, well, feelings get hurt and communication breaks down. We have long accepted that the corporation is a scattered network of actors, agencies, projects and values. And surely it’s time to say the individual is structurally almost precisely the same. Scatter, once the delicious attribute of old fashioned blondes, now belongs to us all. If this is the model for contemporary selves, me feeds are not just useful but necessary.
And I think me feeds might be the secret utility of things like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. These are widely touted as ways for us to reach out and make contact with others, to build a network with the new technologies. Thus the terms "social computing" and "social utility." But in my experience, the fact that Facebook makes it easy for me to keep track of someone I’ve met at a conference takes it significance not so much from the fact that he and I become active penpals, but from the me feed reminder Facebook sends me a) that I have met the guy at all, 2) roughly who he is, 3) roughly where he is. I see his status update once or twice a week streak across the bottom right hand corner of the screen and think, "oh, right, him. Nice guy. Oh, right, telecoms. Oh, right,…" A small part of the knowledge network I have in my head is illuminated. If telecoms were the only thing I cared about, this would be redundant. But because it is, distantly, one of many things I care about, this is a useful reminder…literally, forgive the sophomoric word play, a re-mind-er.
The digital devices designed to help us keep track of our activities and contacts and values (Stephen Covey, etc.) all seem captive of the modernist conceit that time is an arrow and the self must be aerodynamically fashioned to keep pace with same. To do lists and agendas are always forward looking. Inevitably, there are traces of the past, but this software is never designed to serve this up to us. It’s as if we see the past as completely past, what’s done is done.
But as Baudrillard might say, directionality is over, We are no longer heading in a single direction, not as groups, not as individuals. In a more perfect world, the new technologies that promise to save us from the noise and confusion will do so by being a little less modern and a little more reflexive. What we want is that electronic equivalents of the appointments secretary who has the soul of an archivist and can be relied upon to remind us about "the time you…" What the technologies are always is giving us is "reminders" of the agenda kind when what we need is reminders of the historical kind.
It is, in a manner of speaking, an "attention trust" issue. As I understand it, the people who stand for this issue, say, "listen, each of us has the right to own and control the disposition of our attention on line." And I guess I am arguing that there is a variation on this theme that says, "we need to own and control our attention to the extent that we get better at capturing and replaying a record of where that attention has been." Otherwise, it isn’t clear that our attention belongs to us. It just begins to fade away.
I know that this proposal will be attacked as an instance of Lasch’s notion of a culture of narcissism. Tom Wolfe’s "me decade" will be evoked. So will the famous me routines by George Carlin and Robin Williams, to name just two. But I am not arguing that me feeds are intrinsically interesting, merely that they are useful. All this networking, all this communication node to node, the one party we sometimes neglect is our selves.
References
With all due apologies to the state of Israel which has first dibs on the Law of Return. See the Wikipedia exposition here.
a note from my doctor
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How to win by studying culture
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A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with Scott Berkun and the results are up at the Harvard Bublishing.
Scott is the best-selling author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine and on National Public Radio. He is a recurring expert on the 2008 CNBC TV Series, The Business of Innovation.
Here’s the interview:
How to Win by Studying Culture: An Interview with Grant McCracken
Bloggers run into trouble when they forget writing can be more than monologue. To help balance my own echo chamber, I’m seeking out the smart and the savvy for interviews (aka, dialogues). First up is author and anthropologist, Grant McCracken. I’m a fan of his blog, where he writes fun missives that blend pop culture, storytelling, business theory and anthropology (start with Aftermath or Voice Over. His is a voice I wish I’d discovered long ago.
1. What do you think executives and middle managers in business should know about anthropology? If you could add any required course to MBA programs, what would it be?
Anthropologists specialize in the study of culture, and culture matters in marketing because it supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in America. How consumers see the product, the service, or the pitch, these are largely shaped by the culture in their heads. The marketer who understands this culture has an advantage. The marketer who understands culture very well has an extraordinary advantage.
This reminds me of a course I gave at Coca-Cola some years ago for a group of summer interns. One of the students was a Harvard Business School student. He was an arrogant kid and he started the course in a deeply skeptical frame of mind. He wasn’t buying what I was selling. But as the course went on, he seemed to come round and see the value of studying culture.
I didn’t realize how much he had converted until we held a little graduation dinner for the class. He ended up sitting beside a high ranking marketer at Coke, and for reasons of his own, the marketer decide to ask the HBS student a patronizing, "so what did you do in school today" kind of question.
The HBS kid looked at him coolly and said, "If you understood this method, you would own your market." "OK, then," I thought to myself, "the kid’s on board." The good news is this kid now holds one of the big jobs in marketing today. And, yes, I take full credit. (I am of course kidding about the credit. This kid was (and is) massively talented and unstoppable.)
If I could add an MBA course, I would call it "Anthropology and Ethnography In Business," and it would lay bare the culture that shapes how consumers think and feel and how culture determines what they want. It would teach students how to do "ethnography" which is the method anthropologists use to study culture, and in our case to extract the parts of the culture that matter so that these can be built into product development, innovation, promotion, advertising, direct marketing, digital marketing, new media, and the rest of the marketing package.
2. Corporate PR departments often talk about their "company culture". What can leaders do to create a positive or creative culture in their organizations? Or is it something that only evolves from the personalities of the people hired into the organization?
There are two cultures at issue here: the one the consumer occupies and the one the corporation builds for itself. And, yes, anthropology is keenly interested in corporate culture. One of the ways to think about this problem is to think about the difference between the cultures of Google and Apple. The first is messy, multiple, bottom up, and incredibly innovative. The second is orderly, focused on Steve Jobs, top down, and incredibly innovative.The point being that there are lots of ways of making a corporation work.
And what I think everyone is now trying to have it both ways. We want to be maximally messy and multiple to be really responsive and harvest lots of good ideas AND we want to be elegant and perfectly defined as things work their way to market so that what goes to market is everything the consumer wants in exactly the form and function the consumer wants without a single extra thing.
As usual, we are asking the corporation to be X and not-X, but the magic of the corporation (and the thing that makes the corporation the best problem-solving machine we have at our disposal) is that it can be all things to all people. Anthropology can help here because it understands that the intelligence of this complicated creature exists not just in the formal procedures and divisions of labor of the organization, but in also in the less official ideas and practices that make up the corporation. Once again, anthropology is about culture, but in this case the culture is the particular ideas and practices of a particular organization. Anthropology can help senior managers re-engineer their organizations.
3. There is currently a backlash, which I confess I’m fond of fueling, against the use of the word innovation. These days the word is often used to signify creativity, even if no creativity is actually supported in the organization by the people using the word. Have you seen this phenomenon, perhaps with words other than innovation?
Yes, we do have a tendency to over-correct in the corporate world. It was exactly right to see that the world was becoming more dynamic and unpredictable from almost every point of view. Technology was changing at light speed. Consumers were diversifying. Channels were in an uproar. The promotional world was being rearranged. Markets were churning. It was like someone had put us on "spin cycle." We were right to say, "OK, darn, this means we need to be ready with a new order of creativity and preparedness."
But of course this can’t be the only thing a corporation does. Some of the gurus make things worse by saying stuff like "everything you know is wrong." This helps them sell books and get consulting gigs. But really, it creates a kind of problem-solving hydroplaning that is bad for business. Put this another way, when it comes to gurus we may be a little too responsive. The trick is to take what we know with us as we enter the new world. It’s complicated engineering. We have to decide what stays and what goes. It is easy sometimes just to start again. But then we get the backlash you are talking about.
This is one way anthropology can serve the corporation. Hire someone to go in and document all the assumptions at work in the corporations, the official ones and the unofficial "this is just the way we do things" assumptions. And then see which of these needs to change now that there is a new idea in town like "innovation." The point is not to dismantle ideas unless they stand in the way of what the new idea is. We don’t want to forget what it is we know, the knowledge we have build up of our markets and our industries over many years of expensive trial and error.
Want more interviews instead of monologues? Or know an interesting voice you’d love to see in this space? Leave a comment.
Again, you can see Scott’s blog here.
Thanks to Nathanial B for the photo. See the phone in its original Flickr context here.
Brand triage: a tale of two perfumes
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Old Spice was so scorned a few years ago I once heard it referred to as Old Mice. Aqua Velva was actually worse. The idea of perfume for men was just so terribly naff.
Scorned as artifice in the 1960s, as middle class in the 80s, and as earnest, clueless, and irony free in the 1990s, these brands were in free fall. (Our cultural concepts of maleness were under reconstruction, and brands were struggling to stay in touch.)
Both brands are now struggling to make a comeback, and together they serve as a nice case study in matters of meaning management.
Aqua Velva is now running a campaign that features fathers and sons playing catch in the back yard, and the slogan "Men Get It."
This is actually a pretty good time for slogans. Home Depot uses "You Can Do It, We Can Help" which still strikes me as a masterpiece. (I believe The Richards Group gets the credit.) Someone is using "You, Happier" which is pretty good.
There is lots of good work a brand can treat as precedent: Live in your world, play in ours (Sony Playstation), Rip. Mix. Burn. (Apple), Impossible is nothing (Adidas), Just Do It (Nike), Obey Your Thirst (Sprite), Think outside the bun (Taco Bell), So where the bloody hell are you? (Australian Tourist Commission), You are now free to move about the country (Southwest Airlines), to name a few.
"Men get it." This is not very good. First, the "best before" date is just now expiring on "get" as a metaphor for comprehension. Second, the second meaning isn’t really a meaning so much an imperative, an ill mannered imperative at that. Slogans are not supposed to shill. That’s the rule.
Old Spice on the other hand, this is Wieden and Kennedy at their effortlessly capable best. Here is Bruce Campbell for Old Spice making fun of the style of speech that afflicts some men when they are trying to be especially manly. Here is Will Ferrell (as Jackie Moon) wrestling with the metric system in that "ofter wrong, never in doubt" gender performance that many men have made a stock in trade (cf. Ron Burgundy). Here is Neil Patrick Harris as a "former make believe doctor" making fun of the puffed up authority that afflicts some male doctors (and not just on TV). "Chronic body odor ruins lives!"
It’s as if Wieden and Kennedy just decided, listen, the idea of masculinity in our culture is under construction. There are lots of ideas and none of those ideas is now regnant. What we do know is that there are several choice ideas of masculinity in the bow wave of contemporary culture. These ideas are discredited and ludicrous. And this makes them easier targets.
But it raises a larger problem. What happens to contemporary culture when we run out of these semiotic "remainders"? This advertising campaign, as clever and interesting as it is, is running on ideas that have entered their twilight. It won’t be long before Will Ferrell and Neil Patrick Harris’ characters have jumped the shark. And where do we go from there? We will have run out of shared ideas, and it is hard to imagine an advertising industry or a popular culture thereafter.
References
Glenn, Blake. 2008. Pass the Doogie. Brandweek. August 11, 2008, p. 33.
What happened to our magnetic north? on the decline of the avant garde
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Phil Sheridan offers a new point of view on the music industry. He rehearses the things the music press has always said about the music industry; that it is tone-def, greedy, payola ridden, crass, manipulative, and exploitative.
And then he offers this stunning change of heart:
we owe the vile and disgusting record industry a lot more than it’s popular to admit. … [T]here is a certain value in having a structure in place that more or less served to discover and develop talented music artists.
I guess this was foreseeable. In an era of plenitude and the long tail, of a music scene with literally hundreds of musical forms and millions of musical producers, the very structure of "music world" has changed. Where once there were the studios who played bank and gatekeeper (supplying capital in exchange for the right to choose) now we live in a world with millions of acts and tracks. In this windstorm of creative possibility, the old regime looks a little less draconian. And the practical question rises: could there be talents on the order of Dylan, Morrissey, Morrison, Hendrix, Johnson, or Rogers Nelson who will never find the light of day. In this context, the likes of Ahmet Ertgun and Seymour Stein look less than robber barons and more like talent dowsers we can no longer live without.
This doesn’t take anything away from the imagination and daring Sheridan exhibits when he writes such a piece. The alternative music press has it’s orthodoxies and this was one of them, no sympathy for the devil. Commerce corrupts. Business is bad. F*ck the man.
But what is really striking about the piece is the second half. Sheridan reviews an interesting case: The Clash v. CBS Records. The argument is intricate but the upshot is clear: The Clash would never have written Complete Control has CBS not tinkered with Remote Control. Sheridan summons comparable evidence from the careers of the Kinks, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Wilco and the Wrens.
Rock ‘n’ roll needed something to rebel against, Whether that was a stifling ’50s mainstream culture, a disastrous war in Vietnam or the record industry itself was immaterial. Without an evil, oppressive establishment, rebellion is just so much jerking off.
This goes to a deeper, culture problem. A lot of creativity and cultural innovation in our world was predicated on a contest between the center and the margin, mainstream and avant garde, middle class and artist class, age and youth, privilege and risk, tedium and imagination, orthodoxy and departure.
But things have changed. (How much it has changed and precisely why and where this change has taken place I leave to more contemplative circumstances (and bloggers).) Generalizing a little, we can say that the center now has some of the creativity and risk taking capability of the margin, the middle class sometimes is an artist class, and that increasingly the culture of capitalism beats the drum of innovation so insistently that privilege, tedium and orthodoxy have gone to the margin and all of us must hew to the cause of risk, imagination and departure.
The anthropological problem is simple: what differences does this difference make to our culture? If creativity no longer comes from an avant garde, one of the great tectonic structures of our culture has changed.
Maybe this is one of those differences that doesnt make a difference. I mean, really, does it matter where creativity comes from. Does it have to come from a contradiction between insiders and outsiders? Isn’t cultural innovation innovation whatever its origins? Who cares if the location of creativity has changed.
I think it does make a difference, and we can see everywhere in our culture. Sheridan is raising the issue for the world of music. He is right to ask "Without a them, who is us?" Certain fundamentals of the musical identity are now at issue.
There was something clarifying about outsider status. The avant garde represented a fairly simple operator, to use the language of James Boon. When all other inspiration and orientation failed her, the artist could say at least, "I am not what the insider is." Now that this "true north" of the avant garde compass has failed us all, certain matters of cultural orientation are not clear.
Take the case of Stephen Soderbergh. He now alternates between mainstream movies (the Oceans franchise) and arthouse picture (Che). Here’s a guy who once had to choose between alternatives. Now he is free to mix and match. I wish I knew his work better, but it seems as if each new project is either one or the other. In a more perfect world, the two impulses would comingle in the same film.
Take the case of poor Thomas Frank who with each new book continues to thrash about in search of his oppositional opportunity. The outsider status is no longer filled with that bracing certainty that made alienation a point of principle, a badge of pride. It’s as if that gravitational field that once held the alternative at an appropriate distance from the mainstream, close enough to mock and cavil, far enough show its difference, has let go. The Thomas Frank capsule tumbles into space.
Take the case of Millennials. Everyone insists that this is a quiescent generation. (I haven’t any reliable ethnographic data so I can’t speak from the anthropological record.) We might actually say that it is the death of the old polarity that makes this so. Youth culture no longer needs to set itself in opposition to an adult culture to mark its difference, to win for itself a platform from which to make its own decisions. Every individual millennial is free to make his or her own departure.
The cultural standing of African Americans is changing at light speed. This might be the last generation that can claim to speak with an outsider’s advantage and authority. And what happens then?
We think about how much of our culture has come from film makers, intellectuals, the next youth generation, the African American community. What happens when the cause and the very grammar for this creativity falls silent? What will we do without a magnetic north?
References
Sheridan, Phil. 2008. Sympathy for the Devil. Magnet. No. 79. Summer. p. 128.
Aftermath
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The corporation contains two different creatures. It is two different creatures. I got to meet both of them this week.
I was talking to a guy who does marketing research for a big brand. He said, dismissively, "
"We no longer collect any numbers. Things change too fast. We don’t know what to measure. We do ethnographies and stuff…to find out what’s going on out there."
Last night I was talking to a graduate of the Sloan business school at MIT. He doesn’t think about something unless he’s got the numbers.
It’s weird. It’s seems to me that the corporation is becoming more quantitative and more qualitative. Senior managers are getting more and better training in metrics. And they are (for some purposes) now in possession of more and better data suitable for "crunching." On the other hand, the role of concept people, the quantitative creatures, grows ever more important. Corporate wayfinding and innovation are otherwise unthinkable.
The continental drift continues. The qualitative and the quantitative are two solitudes, they are Snow’s two cultures. And it remains fashionable to take sides. The numbers people sneer at the hopeless imprecision of a world without numbers. The concept people believe that anyone who waits for the world to manifest its intentions in numbers will have waited too late.
The world loves to organize itself on this distinction. The bschools are sold on numbers. I watched management at the Harvard Business School vote for still more math. You could almost hear the collected faculty exulting. "That’ll show em!" And I thought to myself: "you have just made this place even more monolithic. And HBS is supposed to be the manager’s school!"
And of course on the concept side, there are people who are hostile to numbers and to the deeply grounded thinking that numbers make possible. This group likes to flit from "creativity" to "innovation" to "getting in touch with their feelings." Can it be surprising that managers think, "Good lord, you want me to trust the fate of the corporation to Peter Pan, to a person who thinks it’s attractive to be all creative and crazy and out of touch with the world."
Finally, of course, this is an empty tribalism. Really, in their heart’s of hearts, everyone knows you use numbers when you can, and concepts when you must. Numbers when possible, concepts when necessary. Which is another way of saying, more qualitative, more quantitative, all the time.
Concept to the rescue. Is there a way to think about the qualitative and the quantitative so that they are not mutually exclusive categories?
Is this a center-periphery relationship? Deep inside the corporation and high up in senior management, the corporation thinks in numbers. On the edges, out "there" where it makes contact with dynamic taste and preference, it thinks in words, imagines, metaphors. We could evoke a Medieval concept of physiology and say that the corporation (the body) is qualitative in its the organs of apprehension, and quantitative at the seat of comprehension.
Oh, but I’m quite sure someone can do better than this. And someone’s going to have to. As the corporation is obliged to become more qualitative and more quantiative, we need to come to our senses. I mean, comes to our wits. No, our senses. Yes, our…
Interesting2008 New York
Posted by: | CommentsInteresting2008 New York is set for September 13. I went to the London version last year and found it extremely, er, interesting, unlike anything, any conference, I’d ever seen.
I am reposting my thoughts on the London event, below.
References
For Rick Liebling’s thoughts, go here.
For the Interesting2008 New York website, go here.
The post below in it’s original context here.
Reinventing the conference, blogger and new media style
This is Russell and Arthur Davies, father and son, outside Conway hall, site of Interesting2007. The quietly charismatic servant of ceremonies and his son, the latter in this picture graciously standing in for the rest of us, our hand in a bag of crisps, playing shyly to the camera, pleased to be included, living this brief moment in the protected space of a congenial world. (Russell will so hate this metaphor, more on that later.)
I participated with trepidation. Russell was clear. No talking, he said, about anthropology, economics, branding, marketing, blogging, creativity, culture, or commerce, and so removed all my usual crutches, obsessions, and the very parachute I like to wear while public speaking. Kindly, he suggested I talk instead about my Oprah episode and it turned out pretty well. Clever Russell.
My first guess on why Interesting2007 was going to work (if it worked) was that everyone in the room was drawn from one of the creative industries (design, planning, art, advertising, film making, and so on). This means that everyone in the room at Conway Hall was good at metaphor capture and pattern recognition.
So you could talk, as Adrian Gunn Wilson did, about how to cut wood, and the audience was bound to help themselves to that and much more. The details themselves turned out to be flat out interesting and the room fell into a state of silent absorption. And the metaphors were everywhere, including the very big piece of wood on which Adrian cuts wood. I forget what he called it, but it’s huge and well scored and serves as the platform for the undertaking. It stabilizes the piece of wood that’s being chopped. It absorbs the blow of the ax. It catches the ax as it completes its arc and especially when it misses its mark. This is what we used to call an "agency," I think. It is strange and horrible to look at. Yes, quite like an agency.
My second guess was we were looking at the reinvention of the conference. Many cultural artifacts that have been dislodged by our new world. Our world has been decentered, flattened, destabilized, distributed, and made participative, anarchical, elite indifferent, cloudily networked, self organizing, and concatenating. So it’s natural that we’re having to rethink entertainment, information, elites, experts and especially speakers. Who now wants to sit in a room and hear someone hold forth? Certainly, there are a couple of people who we would like to hear speak in this way. But how often do they turn up to the conferences we go too? Mostly what we get is two things: 1) badly concealed self advertisement, and 2) a view of the world that means to be comprehensive but proves to be alarmingly (and unwittingly) partial.
Conferences used to create value by giving us the benefits of a sorting exercise. The organizers would choose experts and the experts would choose topics and treatments. We the audience would undergo edification mixed with a couple of moments of epiphany (with the opportunity to build networks over drinks). The trouble is we are now fantastically good at sorting for ourselves. What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker. What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways. (Interestingly, some presentations were overformed by their very effort to be underformed. This happened when you could see that the presenter was deliberately casting a topic or treatment against mainstream type, as it were, the better to claim a quirkier credibility.)
Put us on the Kauffman continuum, the one that arrays the world between fixity at one end and chaos at the other, and it turns out that we most of us have paddled our way away from fixity towards chaos, and now tread water here in rougher, whiter waters with no discernible effort or difficulty. Experts be damned. We can read the world quite nicely on our own, thank you very much. It doesn’t have to be very fully formed for us to "get it." (It was fun listening to Johnnie Moore on this theme, and a pleasure to meet this fella in real space and time.)
Clever Russell. To forbid the recitation of what we think we know for things that are interesting, this is a good way to oxygenate an occasion with things that are less formed in just about the right measure. Less formed, and more charming. There is something "nice" about things that offer the world up all in the jumble and leave us to think what we will.
Now, someone is bound to say that this is merely the planning world, in the person of Russell Davies and conference attendees, discovered the well established truth of post modernism, that the world is now a thing of perfect incoherence, that the architectures of knowledge, the consistencies of culture, the thematicness of contemporary life, these have all collapsed, and that Interesting2007 was in fact merely an exploration and a demonstration of same.
Wrongo! What collapsed was mostly the intellectuals’ favorite interpretative frames. Naturally, this made it look like the sky was falling. Naturally, because they are intellectuals, they worked very hard to make their problem our problem. But the rest of us, those of us who actually make and manage meanings in the world know the truth of our present condition, and this is that if you have the right powers of metaphor capture and pattern recognition the world is still a relatively intelligible place. The things to remember is that the coherences are multiple, the interpretive frames many and conflicting, and the world changeable and fluid. And when all of this is true, then not only is the sky not falling, but Red Lions Square and Conway Hall when filled with speakers by Russell, is a very interesting place to be.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bowbrick for the photo. (More photos by Bowbrick here.) Thanks too for his support of Interesting2007
To Johnnie Moore for interesting thoughts. See Johnnie’s website here.
