Monthly Archives: January 2009

reinventing the corporate war room

You have seen these rooms, I'm sure.  The corporate War Room is festooned with hundreds, sometimes thousands of images and broadsheets.

Let's say that task at issue is to "rethink the car."  The war room will have pictures of sea gulls, box cars, LA from a traffic helicopter, the Sydney Opera House, a suburban garage, the Delorean, the beach at Nantucket, the Ford F-150, sheep out standing in a field, experimental aircraft from World War II…that sort of thing.  The broadsheets?  They report brainstorms in point form.  

The motive is admirable.  To good effect, the corporation trades in the literal and the linear. But sometimes it needs to embrace the figurative and the simultaneous.  It needs to "think outside the box".  That's when everyone files into the war room.  

But there are problems.  First, what about that metaphor?  I can hear Jerry Michalski snort, "war room?  Next you'll be telling me your customers are 'targets'."  But I think we know what's going on here.  Any time the corporation feels obliged to do something lateral and imaginative, it issue a metaphor that says, "Dude, this stuff is deadly serious."  

The second problem is that War rooms for all their seriousness are amateurish.  Images curl. The bright plastic push pins pop out.  Thing overlap and disappear.  It's enough to provoke a visit from the Mike Ditka who lives in all of us: "You've got crap all over the place!"  The idea that organizes these ideas is something like "look, we did this ourselves.  We have posted all of our best ideas, our favorite inspirations, it's all here waiting to happen." 

Too often it doesn't happen.  And sometimes we wonder.  Is the War Room designed to get the world into the corporation?  Or is it a kind of "lock box" designed to keep things under lock and key once they get there.  Sometimes, the war room feels like "contents under pressure" to be opened only with "extreme caution!" 

Lorenzetti murals Palazzo Pubblico, Siena In a more perfect world, the war room would look like the inside of the head of someone who is really smart, really imaginative person, Henry Jenkins or John Deighton, say.  We would enter it as it stumbling upon a Victorian labratory, images and analysis flying (thanks to the wonder of pneumatic tubes!) hither and you, order and emergence in perfect proportion.

And that got me thinking.  Who could reinvent the War Room?  I came up with two candidates.  I am soliciting any and all suggestions, dear reader.  A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon a place at Stanford that sounds just about perfect.  The Stanford Strategy Center.  This appears to be the work of Michael Shanks, Tim Burns, Douglass Carmichael.  

Here's what they say about themselves:

Stanford Strategy Center is an initiative to create an environment designed to enhance discussion, strategic planning and collaborative decision making around matters of common and pressing human and international concern.

We start from the experience that strategic conversations in major organizations tend to be narrow in focus and unhistorical in framing. Our initiative has two key aspects:

    • to bring together in conversations those whose professional focus is on key issues and those whose humanistic study might provide valuable knowledge – from history, philosophy, literature, archaeology …
    • to provide a rich surround of supporting images and artifacts – a room, real and virtual, that provides participatory access to an archive of discussions set in context of themes, trends and narratives drawn particularly from the Humanities and Arts.

We are developing principles and practices for open, extended and iterative conversation that will inform more effective action in and around matters such as environmental change, energy issues, new media and technologies, the global market, sustainable planning and design, local democratic agency.

My second candidate is a firm called Toniq.  Cheryl and Craig Swanson have this brilliant way of canvassing the world, discovering the ethnographic and anthropological truths out there, and bringing them back into the corporations in images and sounds that are exquisitely chosed and organized.  This really does feel like being in the head of someone very smart because, well, Cheryl and Craig are very smart.  Why we don't turn over our War rooms to the Swansons is a small mystery.  Here's a bigger mystery: why is Toniq not better known. Talk about a secret weapon.  These people are the difference between good marketing and bad marketing.  

If one of the objects is to make the capitalism more porous, to help corporation inhale understanding and exhale intelligence, war rooms need fixing.

References

For more on the Stanford Strategy Center go here

For more on Toniq, go here

Acknowledgements

I am obliged to say that I know Cheryl and Craig Swanson.  I think I'm being objective, but you should know that there is the possibility of a conflict of interest.   I don't know anyone at the Stanford Center.  

A question

TypePad is driving me crazy.  What's a better blogging system?

soap opera redux

Jen and barb A web "reality series" called Mom Life launched this week.  It's sponsored by S.C. Johnson and by Kraft.  As nearly as I can see, it consists of 4 minute episodes in which Jen and Barb interview an expert on matters useful to a homemaker with shots of household life thrown in for good measure.

Here's how they describe the show online.

Each episode features life in the trenches of motherhood with a funny take on the Mommy Life from two real moms who riff on everything from career to husbands to disciplining kids, along with straight on camera discussion of the daily issues, challenges, and joys of motherhood. Real life from real moms.


I am not the intended viewer.  And these are early days.  And there are moments (see "inspire me") where the enterprise appears to take on bigger issues.  Still, it's hard to see what the sponsors are getting for their money.  

The migration of marketing on line opens up breathtaking vistas.  But mom life is inert.  There isn't anything charismatic or especially winning about Jen and Barb.  There's nothing imaginative or creative about form or content.  There's no evidence of cocreation.  Those of us do household ethnographies know how much talent there is present in "mom life." Couldn't some of this be tapped.  But no, nothing effervesces.  At some point, you find yourself wondering whether someone decided to put Sam Mendes' vision of middle class life online, minus the tragedy and recrimination, of course.  

To put this is the language of marketing, it's very hard to see that there are any meaning being made.  I mean that's what sponsors normally get for their money: meanings. The brand is augmented.  The consumer comes to understand something about the what, the how, the tone, the character, the cultural resonance of the brand.  But here the brand seems merely to be standing awkwardly by as Jen and Barb demonstrate that journalism should probably be left to the professionals.  

See the site here

References

Wong, Elaine.  2009.  Kraft, S.C. Johnson Sponsor 'Mom Life" Web Series.  BrandWeek. January 29, 2009. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Paul Snyderman for the head's up.  

John Updike, American anthropologist

Updike as a young man Novelist John Updike died on yesterday at 76. While anthropologists slept, he captured American life.  While intellecuals scorned the middle class, he paid attention.  


It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century […] that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work [the "Rabbit" series], Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.  [Kakutani]


References

Kakutani, Michiko.  2009.  A relentless Updike mapped America's mysteries.  New York Times. January 28, 2008. 

For the Wikipedia entry on Updike, go here.

Not so much mad as just really pissed off

Trust me II Trust Me premiered last nght.  This is the new show from TNT starring Erik McCormack and Tom Cavanagh. 

The first charm of this show is that it does not indulge in caricature.  The last time TV presumed to offer us a glimpse of the world of advertising, it lead us straight into the delirious world of Newton Minow and Sam Mendes  

Mad Men gives as advertising as the dystopic industry that produces the "waste land" of American culture.  Both the culture causing and the culture caused are supposed to be shallow, manipulative and craven.  This is the US as given us by Mendes in American Beauty and more recently in Revolutionary Road. This is Pete Seegar's Little Boxes.  This is brahmin scorn affected by John Kenneth Galbraith.

But Trust Me offers another view of advertising.  Yes, it is "rounding" to suit the genre.  These characters are not fully developed.  Their emotions are a little bit predictable.  Their flaws a little too much paint-by-number.  But this is the way cable worked its revolution.  It's does not do nuance in the round-about but in the straight away.  It builds characters over several weeks and seasons.  

And that's the thing.  TV got better.  Thanks to HBO, the cable revolt and the network response there are now several shows that raise the standard, including a diverse set of offerings: The Closer, Fringe, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Life on Mars, The Wire, Ugly Betty. Indeed, TV is getting good enough that it might triumph over the movies and if I were NetFlix I'd be nervous about the prevailing trend.  

My point and I do have one: the "waste land" view  of America is wrong.  To support this argument, we may read into evidence the current TV Guide.  It's can't have been a wasteland. Something grew.  Out of commerce culture came.

References

Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1958. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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

Minow, Newton. 1961. Television and the Public Interest. An address delivered 9 May 1961, National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Thompson, Robert J. 1996. Television's Second Golden Age. New York: Continuum.

The Obama pattern

Obama_dancing Last night was the first time in a long time a President danced in public without having to issue himself an immediate pardon for his crimes against, well, style, grace and the dignity of the office. 

Presidents don't set the tone the way monarches once did, but this President has the potential for being deeply transformative of American culture.  Obama could change not just the things we care about, but the way we care about them, not just the things we do but the way we do them.

It's too early to tell what cultural differences the Obama pattern will bring. But you can already feel some changes, can't you?

As I was arguing a couple of days ago, 30 Rock feels like it will have to reinvent itself.  It can't be the "comic resistance" anymore.  

The other show that feels like it may have lost its way is 24.  This show seemed to go out of its way to make Guantanamo Bay look like a summer camp.  And those days are clearly over.  

There are also a couple of newscaster who are looking, you know, a little "lite."  If the President is going to usher in a new era of intellectual seriousness, well, there are a couple of newscasters who are going to look, er, "under resourced."  And I am not talking about Lou Dobbs.  Ok, I am, but he's not the only one.  All boats must rise with this tide.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kay Hymowitz for the idea

When did the President lose his drawl?

Obama

Was it just me or did President Obama lose his drawl?

You know that way he had during the campaign of hitting the word hard in the first syllable and then letting up as he approached the end of the world.  Kind of like a fade jump shot.  In like a lion and out like a lamb.  

But in his speech today, and hat's off to the President and his writers for inspired and inspiring oratory, he seemed to giving each word the same emphasis right the way through.  

The office makes the man?

European intellectuals salute the new President

Obama treatment for adam smith II

Obama treatment for emile durkheim

Obama treatment for matthew arnold

Obama treatment for georg simmel

Obama treatment for castiglioneu

References

Thanks to Paste Magazine and the Obamicon.me website here.

Revolutionary Road, cultural cliche?

Revolutionary road @ Dreamworks I haven't seen Revolutionary Road and now I'm wondering whether I want to.  

The film is taken from a novel by Richard Yates. Here's what Yates (now deceased) said about his novel:

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties  


And this is a way of saying novel bound itself to one of the great cliches of the period.  If this was a desperate period, it is partly because intellectuals, academics and novelists had closed ranks and declared middle class life a kind of wasteland.  

It's hard to calculate the damage done by this cliche.  To be sure, the 50s had a certain sturdy confidence, momentum, brio.  And by this reckoning, the "conformity" argument may be seen merely as a useful corrective and a minority opinion.  By the fact of the matter is that this treatment of American culture helped create self loathing and confusion.  

References

The quote above is from the Wikipedia website for Richard Yates here.

Allsop, Kenneth. 1964. The Angry Decade: a survey of the cultural revolt of the nineteen-fifties. London: Peter Owen Limited.

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

Dickstein, Morris. 1999. Leopards in the Temple: The transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kammen, Michael G. 1999. American culture, American tastes: Social change and the 20th century. New York: Knopf.

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

Riesman, David. 1964. The Suburban Dislocation.  Abundance for what?  And other essays. David Riesman, 226-57. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.

Susman, Warren I. 1984. Introduction: Toward a history of the culture of abundance: some hypotheses.  Culture as History: The transformation of American society in the Twentieth century. Warren I. Susman, xix-xxx. New York: Pantheon Books.

Whyte, William H. Jr. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.


Post script.

It's worth noting that this is director Sam Mendes' second go at the theme.  He is responsible for American Beauty.  

Calling all documentary filmmakers

RCA TV from Eric's Vintage TV website Roughly one month from now, on February 17, the world of TV is going digital.  This will have several effects.  Here's one I didn't think of:

As consumers upgrade, they will be looking to ditch their old sets and few will be discarded properly.  "There will be a disposal problem," predicts Rob Enderle, principal of Enderle Group, San Jose, Calif.  TVs, he says, will be dumped all over the place.  

Wow, the mind's eye does the rest.  Old RCAs sitting forlornly beside a post box. Those wainscotted cabinets (room for a turntable and a wet bar!) materializing in the middle of a WalMart parking lot. Rabbit ears and aerials all over the place.

It is a documentary film maker's dream come true.  And a nice way to offer us a contemplation of the transition from old media to new media, recycling, the ceaseless turnover of technology,and the relentless pace of change.  There's going to be old tech everywhere.  It's found film. "Poignant," "stirring," "deeply troubling."  Are these not the adjective that every documentarian wants attached to her work?

Obama's White House wants to postpone the transition date.  But if this doesn't happen, filmmakers have 36 days to collect crew, book equipment, and max out credit cards.  And we will see you at the award ceremonies.  

References

Hein, Kenneth.  2009.  The Winners and Losers of the Digital Transition. Adweek Media.  January 5, 2009, p, 21.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Eric and his website on Vintage TV sets here.

Yahoo?

By most accounts, Carol Bartz is a sensational senior executive.  And there is no doubt that she will do great things for Yahoo where she was appointed CEO yesterday

But is she well rounded?  Does she have that deep knowledge of consumers, markets and culture she needs?

There's not much in the way of reassurance in Bartz's bio.  Here's what BusinessWeek says about her:

Carol A. Bartz has been Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Autodesk, Inc., (a supplier of computer design tools) since April 1992. Ms. Bartz served as President of Autodesk, Inc. from April 1992 to September 1996. Prior to that, Ms. Bartz was with Sun Microsystems from January 1983 to April 1992, most recently as Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations. She has been a Director of Cisco Systems Inc. since November 1996 and Autodesk Inc. since 1992. She has been a Director of Network Appliance Inc. since September 1995 and serves as a Member of Compensation and Nominating Committees. She has been a Director of BEA Systems Inc., since November 1995 and serves as a Member of Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committees. She serves as a Director of The New York Stock Exchange. She served as a Director of Airtouch Communications Inc., since February 1994 and was a Member of the Compensation & Personnel Committee. She served as a Director of Cadence Design Systems. Ms. Bartz received a B.A. Degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

In short, Bartz is a Valley girl, a Silicon Valley girl.  She is pretty much all tech.  Christa Quarles, analyst at Thomas Weisel, sees a problem.

The most glaring deficiencies are that she has no consumer or Internet or advertising experience.  The question is whether she will bring someone is who can fill those deficiencies. 

Running Autodesk did not take a deep knowledge of culture, but Yahoo is another matter.  It may well be that her "real" assignment is to execute the sale to Microsoft, but if she is in this for the longer haul, a question may be asked, is Bartz ready for this new order of problem solving?  Can she solve the narrow marketing and broader cultural issues with which Yahoo is now confronted?  

But of course, it may be that she will hire someone to address these "deficiencies," as Quarles calls them.  On the other hand, I wonder if these deficiencies do not actually describe the most urgent parts of her assignment.  These "deficiencies," the things she does not know, the problems she has never had to solve, these might fairly be said to be her job. 

It's as if we are looking at a reverse mirror image of Terry Semel, the former Yahoo CEO.  If Semel didn't ever seem to grasp the industry, it's not clear that Bartz grasps more than the industry.  Partial is always a problem.  And when you are up against nimble, gifted competitors like Google, partial is a tragedy.  

References

Helft, Miguel.  2009.  Former Chief of Autodesk Takes Reins at Yahoo.  New York Times. January 14, 2009. 


OSCAR AWOL!

Shohreh-aghdashloo (1) What do Oscar winners think when they lay down to sleep?  In a world that's fickle and filled with critics, they might well think:  

"They can never take this away from me."

Well, that turns out to be wrong. Apparently, they can take your Oscar away from you. There is a story in the present issue of Entertainment Weekly that dares to second guess Oscar choices.

It strips Renee Zellweger, Roberto Benigni, Tommy Lee Jones, and Geena Davis and gives their Oscars to Shohreh Aghdashloo (shown), Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, and Frances McDormand.  

I am filing this under new and worrying developments in popular culture.  I thought popular culture didn't ever scrutinize itself.  That's Henry Jenkins job. Popular culture embraced that modernist convention, once done, done for.  As Faulkner might have said, in popular culture, not only is the past dead, dude, who remembers?
  
Is this wise?  Is it healthy?  Certainly, it opens up vast new journalist territory.  We could now second guess pretty much everything: elections, playoffs, the Booker, wars, the stock market.  And certainly it plays to the multiplicity theme we like so much these days.  But it seems a little stingy.  And, yes, impertinent.  Just who do we think we are?  

That's it, isn't it?  It's all about who we think we are.  There was a time when we worshipped celebrities as if they were Gods.  Did anyone think about taking away Katherine Hepburn's Oscars?  (Just try it, buster.)  I bet the thought never occurred to anyone.  But these days, celebrities, they exist at our sufferance, they serve at our pleasure.  The imperial actor has been eclipsed by the imperial fan.  

Reference

Anonmyous.  2009.  And the Oscar Should Have Gone to…  Entertainment Weekly.  January 16, 2009.  pp. 28-38 

You say ‘content,’ I say ‘composition’

Someone on Twitter recently defined himself as a "word herder."

"Clever," I thought, "but wrong."

Bloggers and twitterers are not herding words.  We are choosing words and combining them. And in a more perfect world, we would take inspiration from those who are good at this very difficult task.

I have two candidates for our admiration.

Leah Greenblatt offers this review of Contra by Vampire Weekend in a recent Entertainment Weekly.  Notice the "slaphappy dazzle" of her prose.

With the band now a known quantity, sophomore album Contra inevitably lacks the slaphappy dazzle of breakout singles like ”A Punk” and ”Oxford Comma.” Still, the album, recorded in Brooklyn and Mexico City, stays largely faithful to the sound they’ve built, with the international-groovy experiments of Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel still clear signposts — Simon’s almost glaringly so. On summery first single ”Horchata,” singer Ezra Koenig gets drunk on multiculturalism, (loosely) rhyming the Mexican rice beverage of the title with ”balaclava” and ”Masada.” If the lyrics sometimes seem to showboat their 10-carat educations (look, Ma, three continents!), the music remains happily inclusive: somewhere between limbo contest on the lido deck and cocktail hour in Cape Cod.

And here David Denby of The New Yorker write richly and admiringly about Avatar even as he exposes its weakness.

Science is good, but technology is bad. Community is great, but corporations are evil. “Avatar” gives off more than a whiff of nineteen-sixties counterculture, by way of environmentalism and current antiwar sentiment. “What have we got to offer them—lite beer and bluejeans?” Jake asks. Well, actually, life among the Na’vi, for all its physical glories, looks a little dull. True, there’s no reality TV or fast food, but there’s no tennis or Raymond Chandler or Ella Fitzgerald, either. But let’s not dwell on the sentimentality of Cameron’s notion of aboriginal life—the movie is striking enough to make it irrelevant. Nor is there much point in lingering over the irony that this anti-technology message is delivered by an example of advanced technology that cost nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce; or that this anti-imperialist spectacle will invade every available theatre in the world. Relish, instead, the pterodactyls, or the flying velociraptors, or whatever they are—large beaky beasts, green with yellow reptile patches—and the bright-red flying monster with jaws that could snap an oak. Jake, like a Western hero breaking a wild horse, has to tame one of these creatures in order to prove his manhood, and the scene has a barbaric splendor. The movie’s story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end between ugly mechanical force and the gorgeous natural world goes on forever, but what a show Cameron puts on! The continuity of dynamized space that he has achieved with 3-D gloriously supports his trippy belief that all living things are one. Zahelu!

Surely, this is another relationship to establish between the old and the new media, that we the noisy rabble may take guidance from our betters.

Reference

Denby, David.  2010.  Going Native.  The New Yorker.  January 4, 2010.  here.

Greenblatt, Leah. 2010. Vampire Weekend. Entertainment Weekly. January 15. p. 72. here.

Note: this post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of last year.  It is reposted December 24, 2010.  

Transformation, new key concept for 2009

Bruce nussbaum As the author of a book called Transformations, I was very pleased to see that Bruce Nussbaum has declared Transformation the new "key concept of 2009" and a successor to Innovation.

"Innovation" implies changing what is. "Transformation" implies creating what's new. That's what we need today, a huge amount of totally "new."

Nussbaum and I don't quite mean the same thing by "transformation." My book is about how individuals change themselves.  He is talking about corporations, organizations and societies.  

But I expect there are structural similarities. 

1) new notions of structure

1a) as a result of transformational activities, the contemporary individual builds a complicated, messy selfhood.  As one of my respondents told me, "I like to think of myself as a cheap motel.  There are lots of people living here, not all of them on speaking terms."  If once we thought about the self as something with a certain structural clarity, now we don't.  So the selfhood built by 19th century Victorians and 20th century modernists, these now look overdetermined and way too simple.

1b) corporations and societies have their own, new and growing, multiplicity, as they admit more people and more functions, and as they acknowledge a complexity that was always there in any case.  The contemporary corporation is a marvel of complexity, as is the contemporary world.   Now we expect our larger units of organizations to depart from the command and control chart.  It's a flatter world and a less boundaried one. The division of labor and the distribution of power is less clear.  (The office of the Mayor of New York City, Michael Blumberg, is sometimes used here as a case in point.) 

2)  how to we manage this new kind of complexity

2a) there is a sort of just in time quality. Personal lives have taken on an improvisational quality.  We don't have standing roles and objectives so much as we engage in an ongoing process of informed, and we hope inspired improv.

2b) Corporations too.  In the last 20 years we have seen the death of long range planning and the five year plan.  Now we look to complexity theory, sense and respond models.  This is one of the reason that power is more distributed.  Key decisions must sometimes be made on the spot by the personnel in place.  Sending things up the hierarchy and waiting for their return would take too long.

3) So how does the "executive" (decision making) function work now?

3a) This is the big challenge for individuals and it reguires new powers of pattern recognition, the ability to skip from one interpretive frame to another, a willingness to see where the world has changed and the new responses that are called for (even when it takes us out of our "comfort zone")

3b) go figure.  It's identical for the corporation.  Only the nouns have been changed.  Thus: This is the big challenge for the corporation and it reguires new powers of pattern recognition, the ability to skip from one interpretive frame to another, a willingness to see where the world has changed and the new responses that are called for (even when it takes us out of our "comfort zone").

References

Nussbaum, Bruce.  2008. "Innovation" is Dead.  Herald the Birth of "Transformation" as the Key Concept for 2009.  Nussbaum on Design. BusinessWeek.  December 31, 2008.  here.

Nussbaum, Bruce.  2009.  The Transformation Conversation.  Nussbaum on Design.  Businessweek.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  here.

Ugly Betty, Tina Fey, and the cultural mechanics of comedy last night

30 rock II W.C. Fields said

The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh.  I know what makes them laugh but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.

This is funny because it's "so true."  But it's only true for a second.  

We do know why comedy is funny.  Most of it anyhow.  It's funny because it breaks cultural rules.  Most of the time, things aren't funny unless they are fresh, unless they depart from our culturally formed expectations.  

Take Dave Chapelle's "baby in the ghetto" as a case in point.  We don't expect to find babies in the ghetto on a street corner in the middle of the night.  We don't expect them to be dealing. We don't expect them to be bad tempered.   

See also Billy Crystal's Buddy Young, Jr. (Mr. Saturday Night) who keeps asking, "Did ya see what I did there?" to make sure we get the cultural mechanics of each joke.

Mostly, comedy is "fresh" or it is nothing at all.  And it is fresh because it violates our understanding and expectation.

Which brings me to episodes of 30 Rock and Ugly Betty last night.  The former is now reeling from the Obama victory.  From it's inception, it was an ideological redoubt in the Bush's presidency, a battle cry, the comic resistance.  And now, well, victory is cruel and the show now looks over pitched.

But that's not the real problem.  Tina Fey engaged with Peter Dinklage and there were lots of possibilities here but the script went straight for the Fey's favorite (only?) narrative arc: that she's bad with men and screws up even the most promising relationships.  We can see this one coming a long way off.  Which means that not only does it not defy expectation in any general way, it really doesn't defy expectation within the little "genre" established by 30 Rock.  

There were some good moments in this episode, and Pam and I shouted with laughter in a couple of places.  "Jack" is funny because we can't tell which way his madness is going to take him.  And jewels like "Was that the subjunctive?" demonstrate how rich and interesting is the comedic and intellectual territory Fey has opened up.  But unless she saves her own character, we cannot forgive her.  When it comes to comedy, Americans are remorseless.  

The theme of Ugly Betty last night was Betty's having to choose between career and family.  Fashionista, please.  This theme is tired on all counts: culture, genre, and show. It's a tired theme in American culture.  It's there in The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty, the show, can't leave it alone.   Early warning is the death of comedy.  We don't want to know where we are headed.  Call us addicted to novelty.  Call us obsessed with the shock of the new.  But this is a show about fashion, which isn't anything if it isn't a departure.  

References

The Fields quote is from Purdon, J.J.  2009.  As Oscar Said [a review of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorhous Quotations].  Times Literary Supplement.  January 2, 2009, p. 30.  emphasis iin the original.

Local Motors: a glimpse of the future?

Is this a glimpse of the future?

Detroit without Detroit?

Detroit de-troited?

Local Motors outsources the design task (in this case to Mihai Panaitescu), builds variations on to a single chassis (in this case from BMW) and invites consumers to come to the plant (in Massachusetts) and help build the car.

Customization, local content, consumer participation (aka cocreation), these things are now happening everywhere in Western economies.  But it looked as if certain industries would remain locked in the old world of mass and mono manufacture.  Any industry that is capital intensive, constrained by government requirement, and engaged in a complex production process…surely this would continue to make product the old fashioned way.

Enter Local Motors

In the FAQ, Local Motors asks this question:

How does Local Motors intend to build and sell cars?  Doesn’t this cost hundreds of millions of dollars?

Their answer:

To compete with the major auto manufacturers, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. However, we do not intend to compete with them in terms of size or mass appeal. Our focus is specifically car enthusiasts and design lovers. We intend a simpler product and a lower volume. You might ask then why customers will pay for that simplicity, and we would answer that the specialized local nature of the business is meant to make up for that differentiation. We are ALL ABOUT bringing the fun of cars back to people’s hometown. Think of Micro-Beer for cars or Organic Food markets. What would you pay more for: a generic beer purchased at a 7-11, or a custom Micro-Brew? Where would you rather shop: an Organic Food Market with local produce, or a Supermarket Chain? The products at these types of local places are simpler and created with less manufacturing complexity, though they cost more because they are special and lower volume. Therefore, we do not intend to create a large OEM only to sell cars through dealerships. Volume is not our thing.

The strategy here is interesting, micro manufacture, niche markets, branding by location, making locality the basis of product variation.  It’s all about going intensive where cars have traditionally been extensive.  "Volume is not our thing."

The FAQ then asks:

How will Local Motors sell cars?

The answer:

Cars will be sold from specialized facilities distributed across the United States. These local facilities will not only stimulate local economies, they will be a source of pride for the entire community.

Local Motors will create an aspirational experience of scarcity driven demand whereby the local factory will create a Wonka-like fascination with its products and methods. Not only will it sell its cars, but it will sell the experience of people being able to visit and watch their car being "born."

Now, the factory, long the guilty, throw-a-tarp-on-it, or at least put it on the edge of town, is now one of the sites of meaning manufacture.  Whether Local Motors can actually capture Wonka-like fascination remains to be seen, but perhaps for car enthusiasts and design lovers, this is not so hard.  In any case, the process of meaning manufacture is as different here as is the process of physical manufacture.

Clearly, an exercise like this still takes lots of capital.  But this model of car making feels like a return to the early days of the auto biz. When the game was played locally, by small players, with a massive amount of tinkering, and lots of participation from the owner.  What an interesting experiment.  The old dog learns new tricks.

References

For the Local Motors website, go here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alan Moore for telling me about Local Motors this morning.  See Alan’s website here.

Note: This post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of last year.  It was reposted Dec. 24, 2010.  Apologies to those who left comments.  Those are long lost.  Sorry!