Tom Guarriello warned me.

When I asked him to recommend an American team to a new arrived Canadian, he said.

"well, you could root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but they are going to break your heart."

And sure enough, after a strong beginning, the Pirates are fighting for last place.

Loosing is pretty much what we do.  In the words of Luke Cypers, we have a chance at

16 straight losing seasons, matching the 1933-48 Phillies for the worst streak in major professional sports team history. Last year the Bucs lost 95 games. Before that, 94, 95, 95, 89, 87, 89, 100 … And that's just this decade. Every baseball prognosticator projected the Pirates would fail to reach .500 again this season.

But what if we've got this all wrong.  I wonder if we should take a page from Leonard Cohen and think of the Pirates as beautiful losers.   Not for us, anything so vulgar or gauche as a championship. I mean, winning is so obvious, so bereft of subtlety, so shrill.  

We play artisansal baseball. We make our wins in very small batches.  This is handmade baseball.  Bad to a purpose.  Sure, we could do the vulgar, crowd pleasing thing, but, really, wouldn't that be a distortion of our game, a compromise of our aesthetic, a corruption of what we stand for? 

References

Cyphers, Luke.  2009.  That was then, this (sigh) is now.  ESPN the Magazine.  May 27, 2009.  here.

What is a C-Suite? 

It's the place senior managers gather to deliberate. 

It's the place where the most pressing decisions are made.

What's the metaphor that best captures the C-suite?  Is it the bridge of the ship where pilots and "captains" gather intelligence and issue orders.  Is it a conning tower, the place from which the corporation can examine the horizon, looking for opportunity and danger?  Is it a kind of court room, where grave men and women gather to deliberate.  Is it a citadel, the place where beleagured managers retreat for refuge from all those "stake holders," people not just holding stakes but brandishing them?

All of these metaphors are apt.  But how's this for perfection?

All of the data from all the different sensors in the aircraft are fused.  The F-22 has one big display in the middle of the cockpit, so you are kind of sitting in the middle of that display, and all of the sensors run on their own.  And tracks show up all around you, 360 degrees, and all of it in color.  So the red guys are bad, the green guys are good, and the yellow guys–we don't know who the yellow guys are yet.  So without the pilot doing anything, you have this 360-degree picture of the battle space around you.  With the F-15, you might be able to achieve this level of awareness.  (Corcoran as quoted in Bowden)

Bowden offers a wonderful review of the F-22 in the March Atlantic.  This is a plane surrounded by controversy, and there are those who wonder whether the F-15 isn't plenty.   Bowmen begs to differ.  The difference between the F-15 and the F-22, he says, is the difference between the earliest personal computers, the ones you controlled with written commands, and the new ones, the ones that respond to "point and click."

This too is metaphorically useful.  The current C-Suite is cumbersome in just the manner of these early computers.  What is called for are streams of information that are so beautifully organized that their significance is visible at a glimpse.  What we want is a visual array identifing opportunities and threats in real time, where to see the data is to know how to act upon the data.  What we have instead is a place where the data is flawed, too often forced through the sieve called a spreadsheet, and the levers of action are limited and flawed. 

So a thoroughgoing retrofit is called for.  The C-Suite can not serve the corporation in its present condition.  It is yesterday's technology.  I wonder if someone somewhere is working on this.  It is a daunting challenge.  Indeed, it's a much larger intellectual and technical challenge than anything mastered by the F-22.  The data streams that we must feed into the 360 C-suite are many and various.  Much of what we need to know, especially the cultural matters, don't have metrics representing them.  And the decisions we must make are not so straightforward as chasing down the enemy. 

[Mixed metaphor advisory!] 

The good manager is a little like LeBron James, keeping several possible outcomes in his or her head at once.  Indeed, the American corporation is so fantastically complicated and it must be primed for so many, radically different outcomes, that the good manager must keep several models of the same corporation in mind.  This model must be fitted with a variety of opposing assumptions and the ability to leap between alternatives.  (It's enough to make an airman's head spin.)

Good luck, then, getting everything on a single screen.  Good luck finding all but only the right data streams.  Good luck finding the levers that will operate on the world with exactly the right interventions in exactly the right moment and exactly the right place. 

In my dream world, this is a job for the Santa Fe Institute.  Smart people in the desert.  Don't we know that this is a very good way to solve big problems? 

References

Bowden, Mark.  2009.  The Last Ace.  The Atlantic.  March.  p. 67. 

I'm doing a project on the future of food, fitness, sociality and spirituality in America.

This morning, I interviewed a planner in the ad biz.  We were yakking away on the phone and towards the end of the hour, I noticed something odd. 

The planner was giving me credit for her ideas.  And I was giving her credit for my ideas.

You know, the way people do.  "I think you're on to something there."  "Well, as you say, the thing that matters here is …"  "I loved that thing you said about …"  We were using these stock phrases of acknowledgment…except we were actually referencing our own ideas.  We were swapping credit.

Normally, of course, I'm a selfish son of a bitch.  I dislike sharing.  What's mine is mine.  Oh, and what's yours is mine.  What I can steal, I will steal.  Shamelessly. 

But in this case, sharing proved charming and productive. 

From an anthropological point of view, this reciprocity, plain and simple.  Gifts have power.  They oblige us to reciprocate (Mauss, Sahlins, below).  In the case made famous by Levi-Strauss, when we trade glasses of wine at a French bistro, nothing has changed.  We both still have a glass of wine.  But something has changed.  We are a "we" where before we were strangers.* 

But there was nothing zero-sum about this credit swapping.  It proved generative.  When my expert gave me credit for her ideas, I felt honored.  So honored, I became more active in the conversation.  So active, I became more productive.  So that the idea I returned to her was better, I think, than the one I would have had in any case.

Now, in a sense, this is merely what we hope for in a brainstorm.  The rule is that we must not contradict or jam the contributions of other people in the brainstorm.  In order to "get to 'yes,'" we tell everyone to say 'no' to 'no.'  (See my post, below, on the instruction I got from Denise Fonseca on brainstorming.)

But when we are swapping credit, we are not just staying out of one another's way.  We are not encouraging by not discouraging.  We were gifting one another with our ideas. 

And that seems to me another order of engagement. 

If we occupy an innovation economy, and if this innovation economy will, under the pressure of new media and new markets, become a gift economy, this gifting in a brain storm deserves closer scrutiny. 

Totally, I really like you're going with this.

References

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1971. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Reissue. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  Idea generation: the M&Ms way.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 08, 2004.  here.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Transaction.

Footnote

* I know a cynic would say we were engaged in a kind of survival strategy.  If I say my idea is your idea, it has a much stronger chance of serving the conversation and remaining in memory, your memory.  This may sometimes be true but in the case of this conversation, given the purpose of the conversation, neither of us needed to care whether the idea survived in memory. 

Product placement is the shameful secret of the marketing world.  More important, it’s a stain upon popular culture. 

I have railed against it in these pages, but really who cares. 

So I was very pleased to hear Advertising Age, in the person of Larry Dobrow, take umbrage. 

Thanks to lead-footed marketers who believe that product integration is their secret weapon in the jihad against time-shifting, I’ve become inured to it.

I no longer think there’s a way to do production integration effectively, try as every piece of programming on Bravo and the Extreme Remorseless Unrepentant Home Makeover-type shows may. I’m not so sure it doesn’t do more harm than good.

Well said, Mr. Dobrow.  Let us put this idiot idea out of its misery.

References

Dobrow, Larry.  2009.  Is it time to put an end of brand integration.  Advertising Age: Madison and Vine.  May 21, 2009.  here.

I managed to step on my old Kindle, and I was delighted to move up to the Kindle DX.  Here’s what Amazon says about it:

Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines

Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback

Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots

Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images

Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging

More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books

Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns

Read-to-Me: With the new text-to-speech feature, Kindle can read every newspaper, magazine, blog, and book out loud to you, unless the book is disabled by the rights holder

Large Selection: Over 275,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available

Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Sounds great?  And it is.  But there is a giant hole in this product, one that puts the Kindle DX out of step with the technological and the cultural moment.

Kindle DX is bad at new media.  You can’t capture your comments.  You can’t port passages or note to Delicious or Google Bookmarks.  You can’t send passages to friends or your blog.

What happens on your Kindle stays on your Kindle.  The Kindle is a sink hole, as if destined to make sure that our choices can’t travel through the digital world.  They can’t gather (or become) social capital.  They can’t help locate and augment our identities on line, our nodes in our networks. 

Gasp.  Kindle is old model, old order, old media.  It’s just a better book.  But it doesn’t create, augment, or distribute content.  It’s wireless in the good sense but it might as well be wireless in the bad sense, i.e., incapable of locating itself or us in the digital world. 

Wow, A.O. Scott made me laugh out loud this morning.  In his review of Angels & Demons, he takes aim at the author from which the project springs.

I have not read the novel by Dan Brown on which [Angels & Demons] is based. I have come to believe that to do so would be a sin against my faith, not in the Church of Rome but in the English language, a noble and beleaguered institution against which Mr. Brown practices vile and unspeakable blasphemy.

Dan Brown is a terrible writer.  His redemption: a story line so "high concept," bad writing didn't matter.

I was sorry to see Ron Howard and Tom Hanks participate with Mr. Brown.   It would take an alchemist, I thought, to turn this project into something good.  And The Da Vinci project just isn't any good.  It isn't as bad a film as Brown's novel is a novel, but then Howard and Hanks have talent. 

That Howard and Hanks took on the Brown project wasn't a surprise.  They are populist in the best sense of term, uncompromising in their commitment to accessible film making.  I am sure they were thrilled the project came to them.

And I understand that, badly written or no, a novel as popular as The Da Vinci Code would have to become a film.  And I understand that after the success of The Da Vinci Code (with a gate over $700 million), a sequel was unavoidable. 

But I can't help feeling that Hanks and Howard have paid dearly for their Dan Brown complicity.  They have sinned against Hollywood.  And that's not easy. 

References

Scott, A.O. 2009.  Holy Mystery!  Mayhem at the Vatican.  The New York Times.  May 15, 2009.  here.

The season finale of Fringe this week did well, with 11.2 million viewers and a 4.5 share.  This show by Abrams grapples with the complexity issue we addressed last time. 

Says Abrams,

“I just got tired of hearing people say to me, over and over, ‘Yeah, I was watching it, but I missed one, I got really confused, and I stopped watching it.'" (in Itzkoff)

As Itzkoff of the Times says,

[Fringe] is also Mr. Abrams’s attempt to rectify the narrative (and viewer attention span) problems he faced on previous shows and to synthesize the many lessons he has learned from them into a series that is both complex and accessible, and that is capable of arriving at a determined conclusion over an undecided number of episodes.

To be sure, Fringe is delicious in the way X-Files used to be, and I use the same ritual for both, curling up with the cats on the couch, bravely prepared to being scared witless.  Eventually of course X-Files became arcane.  It was harder and harder to follow the plot "line" and I felt torn between bothering to put in the time and the belief that really it just didn't matter.  Talk about suspending the suspension of disbelief!

The early days of Fringe has the same quality of a single show, with its own self contained universe, a wonderful little world, 60 minutes all to yourself.  And then increasingly an over arching narrative began to creep in and I thought, "oh know, it can't be long before we get a visit from the 'cigarette smoking man'."

Here's the bargain I have for Abrams.  As an active viewer, I am prepared to follow you anywhere you want to go in the course of 60 minutes.  In exchange for which I beg of you this: don't ask me to follow these complexities from show to show.  Don't give us an over-arching narrative.  You can stage any complexity you want as long as it does not live on to torment us.  If it was good enough for the Outer Limits, its good enough for us.

I would be pleased to hear of a television project that managed to introduce an embracing narrative without losing control of the narrative.  But my guess is all meta-narrative eventually turns into kudzu (the import from Japan that has overwhelmed great portions of the American southeast).  You let that meta-narrative in anywhere, and brother, it's going to end up taking over everything. 

References

Hibberd, James.  2009.  Finale ratings: 'Fringe' and 'Biggest Loser.'  The Live Feed.  May 13, 2009.  here.

Itzkoff, Dave. 2008. “Complexity Without Commitment.” The New York Times, August 24 here. (Accessed May 12, 2009).

Wikipedia on kudzu here.

Yesterday, Tim Sullivan and I met to toast the completion of the manuscript for Chief Culture Officer.  It now enters the production tunnel and I will capture only glimpses of it until it appears, officially, in hard covers, in the fall.

And this is when the doubts begin to form.  What mistakes did I make?  What did I over-argue?  What will come back to haunt me?

These doubts spring from two motives: vanity and scruple. 

Vanity asks whether I have made myself look like any idiot.  (I know many critics will hope so.) 

Scruple asks whether I succeeded in transcending my interests and prejudices.  C.I. Lewis argued that investigators have taken,

"[a] tacit oath never to subordinate the motive of objective-truth seeking to any subjective preference or inclination or any expediency or opportunistic consideration."  (in Haack, below)

Those who embrace post-modernism will laugh at this.  Objectivity is an illusion, they say.  Opportunism is inevitable.  Power is the prime mover, the sufficient explanation. It's a very fashionable argument…and now of course the very rocks on which anthropology has impaled itself.  (For myself, I accept we cannot be fully objective.  I also believe that not bothering to try turns scholarship into cant.)

My vulnerability on this issue is complicated by the fact that this book was written over three months, and therefore in haste.  When you are writing virtually "in real time," you reach for the handiest ideas, and these are almost certainly the ones you hold dear for reasons of "inclination" or "opportunism."  (I said some things not because I believed them to be true but because I wanted them to be true.)

The particular argument I worry about is the one that says that contemporary culture is becoming more complicated, more rich and more nuanced.  Did I assume this too hastily?  Do I have a leg to stand on?  (I've been making the argument since 1997.  Perhaps I am a little too invested in it.) 

In the book I rehearse the arguments (or at least the proofs) from Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson.  I quoted the latter as saying,

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.  But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.

I read the career of David Milch into evidence, especially the writing he did for Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Deadwood.  I noted these recent words of praise by Poulsen for the Fox series The Sarah Connors Chronicles which he described as “a deeply felt and artfully imagined drama with so many unexpected gifts that it’s often hard to believe you’re watching broadcast television.”  

But now that the manuscript is closed, really good stuff is now popping up everywhere. James Poniewozik interviewed Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof and solicited these very useful comments:

[Lindelof] For me certainly, the big game-changer was Myst. There's a lot of that feeling in Lost. What made it so compelling was also what made it so challenging. No one told you what the rules were. You just had to walk around and explore these environments and gradually a story was told. And Lost is the same way. The problem on Lost has always been, no one has told the characters what to do. If you're on Grey's Anatomy, every episode starts out with a patient coming in–you know what you have to do. If you're on a cop show, your lieutenant calls you into his office and tells you what you have to do; in a law show, your client comes in. On Lost, our characters would be sitting around on a beach if we didn't create stories for them, and [like Lost] videogames don't have "franchises" unless you're a spy or something. Grand Theft Auto is the same way. It's more about the exploration of the environment than a self-contained conflict.

Cuse: We also felt that since Lost was violating a lot of rules of traditional television storytelling, including having a large and sprawling cast and having very complex storytelling, we felt that videogames were one model that showed that if audiences get invested, they love complexity. In fact, the more complexity the better, and the challenge of that complexity was an asset as opposed to a liability. Those are the games that people actually respect, you know?

The career of J.J. Abrams offers useful supporting evidence.

Over the past decade Mr. [J.J.] Abrams, 42, has helped pioneer a storytelling style that demands total commitment from audience members, requiring that they keep up not only with complicated single-episode plotlines (can a time-traveling castaway alter past events to help himself in the present?) but also with fiendishly intricate narratives (how did the Oceanic Six [in Lost] get off their mysterious island, and how might they get back?) that can take an entire season — or seasons, plural — to play out.  (in Itzkoff, below)

Very well.  There is some evidence for my argument.  But it looks as if this issue may be at issue.  More on the theme and the show called Fringe tomorrow. 

References

Haack, Susan.  1998.  Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 7.

Itzkoff, Dave. 2008. “Complexity Without Commitment.” The New York Times, August 24, here.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, Steven.  2005.  Everything bad is good for you.  New York: Riverhead.

McCracken, Grant.  1997.  Plenitude.  Toronto: Periph. Fluide.

Poniewozik, James.  2007.  Lyst: Cuse and Lindelof on Lost and Videogames.  Tuned In Blogs.  Time.com.  March 19, 2007.  here.

Poulsen, Kevin.  2009.  Urgent: Save Sarah Connor Chronicles From Termination.  Wired.com.  May 4.

See the interview of Milch by David Thorburn in the MIT Communications Forum speaker’s series called Television in Transition.  See especially Milch’s account of his work on Deadwood.  It begins at the 17:55 mark.   The video is here. 

According to Bill Gorman and Robert Seidman at the  indispensible website, TVbytheNumbers.com, the show Howie Do It is the least DVR’d show for the week for adults 18-49. 

Oh, the shame of it.  I wonder if this will become a new measure of ignominy, certain proof that a show has missed the beating heart of contemporary culture.

We can't tell whether this metric says that the Howie Do It audience doesn't have a DVR or can't figure out how to use it.  (The haters will insist on the latter.) 

But either way, it's not good.  These days there is no stigma more damaging than the one that attaches to the non-digital.  This really is a world detached from contemporary culture and now spinning out of orbit into, block this metaphor, the icy reaches of deep space.  More bluntly, all audiences are not equally welcome.  In the non-digital case, there will be many advertisers who don't want them, and there will be some networks don't want the advertisers that do.  As DVR adoption rises, this measure will become ever more damning. 

But on closer scrutiny there is a strategic question here.  Does NBC say, listen, here's proof we should axe the show.  The demographics are antediluvian. 

Or do they say, "well, this may not be the most sophisticated audience on the planet, but at least they watch the ads"?

No doubt, they will say both: the latter for public consumption and the former inhouse. 

References

Gorman, Bill.  Howie Do It is the Least DVR'd Show For the Week.  May 6, 2009.  here.