USA Networks goes from strength to strength.

In March, the network had scored its 11th straight quarter as the nation's top-rated cable outlet—averaging 3.2 million viewers in prime time, the biggest audience ever in cable.  (Johnnie Roberts, Newsweek, ref. below)

Every parent company wants a child like this.

Of all NBCU's properties, including the namesake broadcaster NBC and its Universal studio, USA has become the biggest earner, delivering roughly $1 billion in profits last year.

This can't happen without someone smart and creative in charge.  That someone is Bonnie Hammer.  

Since [Hammer] took over in 2004, USA has produced a string of hits: Burn Notice, about a spy who's been fired; Psych, about a crime-solving police consultant who pretends to be psychic; In Plain Sight, focusing on a U.S. marshal aiding people in the witness-protection program.

Hammer's success raises an urgent question: how in the dickens does she do it?   TV is littered with failures. Hammer appears to be batting around .800.  What's the secret?

The great thing about Hammer is that she actually has an answer.  An lot of creatives demur, giving us answers that are vague and self celebrating: "Oh, it just comes to me," or "What can I say, pure intuition!"

Not Bonnie Hammer.  She knows how she does it.  And she's prepared to say how she does it.  Good news for the anthropology.  Hammer has put her creative process under glass.  It's our job to see if we can divine the Hammer grammer. 

In his excellent Newsweek article, Johnnie Roberts says,

Before Hammer's arrival, USA was the television equivalent of a potluck supper, a hodgepodge of reruns and castoffs. Driven by her unique show-selection technique—a process she refers to as the "brand filter"—USA has been transformed into a cohesive collection of character-driven shows that are resonating with viewers, and advertisers are in hot pursuit. [...] The USA tag line describes its strategy: "Characters Welcome."

Hammer's secret, then, is "brand filter."  And what is this, exactly?  Roberts says,

Today when considering scripts, Hammer and her team ask a routinized series of questions: Does the show have a fun sensibility? Does it have a "blue sky" tone of hopefulness? Does it revolve around an "aspirational," if quirky, lead character with a moral and ethical center? Potential shows are scored based on how closely they match these dictates; only high scorers make it on air.

The USA show Monk was already in place when Hammer arrived.  And we can guess that it  gave Hammer a precedent and a guideline for that "quirky, lead character."  Monk helped to expand what counted as quirky on TV.  Shaloub's character is not merely "colorful."  He is afflicted, irritating even when endearing.  Monk gave Hammer room to work.

The Burn Notice character is trapped in a limbo, dependent on a friend, a girlfriend, and his mother.  This "quirky" departs nicely from the steely eyed, iron jawed model of competence that TV espionage prefers.  The Psych character is an early Jerry Lewis with a brain, an intertextual trickster who japes and goofs.  His "quirky" is kinetic, hyperactive tom foolery.  In In Plain Sight, the hero is, by turns, grouchy, rueful, and imperious.  This quirky charts new ground for a female lead.   Monk made many things possible.  Hammer is exploring the options.

Notice how unthreatening Hammer's quirky is. I was in Saratoga this summer with friends (thank you, Craig and Cheryl Swanson), and we were accosted by a small, energetic man who shouted historical declarations and theatrical possibilities at us.  Our first reaction to fear for our lives…and then our wallets.  Eventually, we saw this guy was no threat to anyone.  "What a character." someone said.  "Character" is what we call people who are odd but not dangerous.  Hammer keeps quirky civilized.

There's a second way Hammer manages quirkiness.   Her characters are never exposed to real peril or emotional darkness.  Despair is not allowed at USA Networks.  This is the oldest bargain in American television, but it has been challenged recently by shows like The Wire and The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Hammer will have none of it.  Thus does her " blue sky" condition operate to keep her "Monk" license kept from running amuck (amonk).

"Fun sensibility" feels a little vaque.  All of Hammer's shows have this sensibility, but they depart so thoroughly, it's hard to know exactly what fun sensibility is.  Perhaps, this too is a boundary condition.  It says that while Hammer and company are attending to other matters, they must be careful not to  compromise the entertainment value of the project.  It guarantees, a certain animation or froth that "keeps the thing light."  Perhaps what fun delivers is fresh. 

On the last two qualities, the moral and the aspirational, I'm less clear.  Does "aspirational" mean that we want to be like these characters?  Does it mean that these character aspire to something else in life?

It seems to me these character are a little anti-aspirational.  They seem to me to endure a certain status immobility.  They are content with their place in life.  Naturally, they work their allowance.  They occupy their worlds with a certain intensity.  There is lots here that is "excess to requirement," but nothing that resists, protests or looks to transcend their lot in life.  Perhaps I'm missing what is meant by "aspirational."

On the moral center, I'm still less clear.  Monk is so preoccupied with his own special code that  morality doesn't seem to have much to do with it.  The Burn Notice guy seeks justice for himself.  Other kinds of justice come a distant second.  The In Plain Sight hero pursues a private morality, and the Psych character couldn't care less.  But again, perhaps I'm missing something. 

There are things about Hammer hits that are not anticipated in her code.  In Plain Sight makes a playground of the tensions and ambivalences of witness relocation.  There is also a dysfunctional family played really well by Leslie Ann Warren, Nichole Hiltz, Cristian de la Fuente and work life played really well by by Fred Weller and Paul Ben-Victor.  These together with the remarkable Mary McCormick give In Plain Sight a richness that makes The Closer look increasingly palid.  I am not sure what we would need to add to the Hammer grammer but let's leave that for the moment. 

Psych really is all about the cultural referencing.  As I argue in Chief Culture Officer, popular culture was once thoroughly cowed.  It was low culture and it knew it was low culture.  Quoting that was for high culture, for the arts and letters, for serious people doing lofty things.  I'm not sure when this changed but now popular culture routinely references itself. Consider Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons, NCIS, ESPN Sportscenter, to name a few.

The Psych guy has turned the subreference from an aside into the very source of the dynamism of the show.  Otherwise, Psych is exceedingly thin, a boys own, Hardy Boys adventure with not very much to show for itself.   Perhaps intertextuality, to give it its fancy name, needs a higher profile in the Hammer grammer.

Burn notice is interesting, I think, because we watch the character struggle with a world that it disorderly and uncontrollable.  His fate is being decided by forces and people larger than himself.  But in every episode, he finds away to overcome by "tacking" together friends and family.  He is a kind of a social McGyver (even as he acts as a technical McGyver as well).  This collaboration doesn't do anything to reconcile him to his girl friend and mother.  These relationships remain "spring loaded." 

The Hammer grammer or brand filter calls for characters who are quirky.  Thus does she explore the new latitude, or plenitude of our culture.  It also calls for a blue sky condition and a fun sensibility.  Thus does she manage quirky and prevent it from going places TV still generally does not go.  Finally, Hammer aims for character made engaging by their aspirational and moral qualities.  

This gives us a useful grammer for making culture.  But as we have seen, there are a couple of other things that Hammer appears to be doing but not acknowledging.  At the risk of presuming, we might add to the Hammer grammer the following: intertexuality, springloaded relationships, social richochet, a feeling of unpredictableness, plus a big dollop of great writing and great writing.  There is also wit and cunning at work.  (In one episode of In Plain Sight, the office staff gives an impromptu party for Mary to celebrate her engagement.  My wife noticed that one of the balloons in the back ground read "Get Well Soon.")  All of these need to be factored into our grammer.  I mention them almost in passing.  If I weren't sitting in a hotel room, I would dwell more carefully.

Grammars are like algorithms.   We need to test them, test them and test them.  More data, more editing.  More data, more refinement.  But clearly Hammer is closing in on a way to think about what works on TV, and our culture.  More to the point, she is demonstrating with hit after hit that this is not some mere academic imagining.  These ideas work.  The grammer is refining. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Available for preorder at Amazon.com here. 

Roberts, Johnnie L.  2009.  Bonnie Hammer's Hit Factory: Inside USA Network's winning streak.  Newsweek.  July 11, 2009. here.

Thanks to Kenn Taylor for giving me the head's up on Roberts' excellent article.

What was he thinking?

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, criticized Obama's approach to health care,  and called for a private sector approach.

Let's do the cultural math and establish how Mackey damaged the brand and took money out of share holder's pockets.

1) Whole Foods is part of a larger food revolution.

2) the food revolution is part of a larger cultural revolution/social movement.

3) this revolution seeks a "kinder, gentler" universe in which the individual is less exposed to randomness and cruelty.

4) health care reform is designed to make the world less random and cruel.  That's what Obama's reforms are for. 

5) he who attacks this health reform movement attacks the "kinder, gentler" proposition.

5) he who attacks the "kinder, gentler" proposition attacks the cultural revolution/social movement.

6) he who attacks the cultural revolution/social movement attacks the food revolution.

7) he who attacks the food revolution attacks Whole Foods.

And so it follows that when Mackey offered his opinions, he inflicted damage on the brand and the share holder.  If only he had a Chief Culture Officer. 

References

Mackey, John.  2009.  Op Ed Essay.  Wall Street Journal.  Aug. 12.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Available for preorder here.

Palmer, Alex.  Whole Foods Attempts to Quell Boycott Cries.  BrandWeek.  Aug. 24.  here.

Why is the HBO's True Blood so successful? 

A month and a half ago, Bill Carter of the Times charted its amazing rise.

In the three episodes measured so far this … season, “True Blood” has amassed viewer totals that any network, including broadcast networks, would be excited to own.

And today, here's what we heard from Robert Seidman on his TV By The Numbers blog:

[T]his week [True Blood] is up to 5.3 million.  Last week [it] scored 4.46 million so the week-over-week growth is almost 20 percent.  In two years of the blog, I’ve never seen any show with this sort of momentum.

This is good news for HBO.  The last couple of years have been trying.  The Chris Albrecht era that launched The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Six Feet Under is long gone (as is Albrecht).  Showtime, a competitor, openly refers to HBO as HB-Over.  HBO needed proof that it remains a vital force.  It needed a hit and now it has one.

This is where an anthropologist perks up.  If HBO can create something that flourishes in contemporary culture, it suggests that someone there gets our culture.  A hit series is our chance to put an ear to the ground.  How does the culture creator explain the hit he's created?

Alan Ball, the show creator, says the "elemental" reason True Blood works is this: "Women love the storytelling and the romance, and men love the sex and violence."

This can't be it.  If only because it commits Ball and HBO to a clueless generalization.  (I mean, have we not transcended these gender stereotypes?  Josh Friedman said it was tough to get emotion and dialogue out of the female writers for The Sarah Connor Chronicles because "they just wanted to blow shit up."  Especially, one guesses, stereotypes.) 

Ball is more illuminating when he says the vampire literature that inspired him was "exciting and sexy and violent and romantic" and “authentically Southern, not cartoon Southern [with] elements of the Saturday matinee serial…‘Tobacco Road'…big gothic romance, and even social satire.”

This is better.  But not perfect.  It helps illuminate the form Ball gave True Blood.  But not its content.  I mean, why vampires?  Why did this prove so successful?  (We're not the only ones to wonder. When Michael Lombardo, the president of programming for HBO, first heard the proposal for the show, he said, “A vampire show? Really?”)

Fifty years ago, vampires were an embarrassing remainder of the Victorian era.  Vampires were wan and overwrought, moody yet completely predictable, always on the verge of camp that was more likely to be funny "ha ha" than funny "Sontag." Vampires were too theatrical to be convincing, drama kings who'd somehow missed the memo on "cool."  The full light of modernism drove vampires to their crypts.  The rational, routinized world kept them there. 

Til now.  Now of course they're everywhere.  Anne Rice gets a great deal of the credit.  Take a bow Stephenie Meyer.  Joss Whedon had the brilliant idea of dropping vampires into the sunniest of places (small town California) and the least dreadful of institutions (high school).  Vampires now walked the land. 

So what's the drill?  Er, what's the thrill?  I once did an interview with a vampire.  And it's worth rehearsing here.  I did the interview in Goth bar in Toronto in the 1990s.  The "vampire" was in his late teens.  He wore a velvet cloak, a ring with a little coffin on it, high Doc Martins (20 hole), black lipstick, eye liner, dyed black hair and a bottle of something red and viscous around his neck.   Let's call him Jeff Brinsindun. 

When I asked him to describe his appearance, Jeff said he was trying to look like an Edwardian gentlemen, and then he proceeded to call his look both "medieval" and "Victorian."  In the course of the interview it became clear he did not know the meaning of the word "sensual."  (He seemed to think it means "sensitive.")  So the historical markers and even the stylistic adjectives had to be read as approximate.  Jeff was proceeding with a certain semiotic latitude, evoking "another time" when men could dress extravagantly and with verve.  And wear eye liner. 

Jeff wanted to make something very clear for starters.  He was not a vampire.  And the bottle around his neck?  Not blood, ok?  Just so we're clear.  And Jeff did not drink blood.  He did not bite people.   He did not expect to live forever.  I took the news bravely.  Not a vampire.  Roger that. 

No sooner had Jeff sworn off vampiric attributions, he began to invite them.  He told me he thought it was "interesting" that he had never liked the light of day, that he would like to sleep in a coffin, that he wished he owned a Victorian house with velvet curtains. But he was not a vampire, okay?  Okay. 

The strategy was clear.  Jeff was smart enough to see that any explicit claim to being a vampire must meet with ridicule.  Better, then, to repudiate the claim up front and then sneak back into it by implication. 

You could see why he was prepared to take the risk.  There was clearly something rich and interesting about being a vampire.  As Jeff described it, it was not so much a case of giddy dress-up as a great transformational vehicle.  Dressed this way, Jeff got to be creatures, feel sensations and entertain scenarios otherwise inaccessible to him as a fast food clerk living in his parent's basement.  Kitted out as a vampire, Jeff was more powerful, more jaded, more passionate, more enabled, more dangerous and more…more than he could otherwise have been.

The historical references are a little sloppy, I think, because Jeff (not his real name, but of course I knew you knew that) wanted access to the great sweep of history, to romantic figures of every period, to the powers of drama and darkness wherever they were extant.  This is an experiential version of transmedia.

And then there is the real transmedia, those wellsprings of the vampire's tale, the folklore, the comic books, novels old and new, the TV shows, the various movies.  This experiential modality is filling in and building out.  The more the merrier, as far as Jeff is concerned.  What does not strain our credulity makes him stronger.  This is a genre that feeds on multivocality and intertexuality.  All the noise in the signal turns out to be the stuff of the signal. 

A lot has changed since I did this interview, a lot of vampires under the bridge, so to speak.  Jeff was an early adopter, a brave experiment, one of the shock troops who made the world ready for vampires to follow.  Much less danger of ridicule these days.  No, these days, I expect, chicks dig it.  Chances are Jeff must these days work hard to distinguish himself from all those poor, tortured, souls moping about out there. 

Alan Ball says his vampire narrative is "exciting and sexy and violent and romantic."  This is a way of saying it's versatile, that it conjoins things that doesn't always go together.  Ball says there is even satire on offer. Which makes this a cultural invention that can do both engagement and disengagement at the same time.  There's no cost.  There's no trade off.  There is, it turns out, nothing Aristotelian about vampires.  They can do X and not-X with equal ease.  Shape shifters all. 

And still don't think this is it.  We have to go a little further.  And I am tempted by an outlandish notion that would take us much further.  I think we are enamored of vampires because they are so much like celebrities.  Vampires and celebrities are at once a mythic presence in our lives and, increasingly, a lot like us.  We admire their powers, but vampire/celebrities are flawed and often tragic, and perhaps, on second thought, perhaps we are better to keep our distance.  Vampires feed on us.  They grow large on our admiration.  But we feed them only to discover that we remain "little people,"  that what we give to them, they end up somehow taking from us. 

I don't know.  It's a bit strained.  And I will leave it to my gifted readers to see if they can't supply intellectual triage and save this argument.  I mean a robust version of this argument might explain why we care about vampires now.  They are perhaps an extension, an exploration of our celebrity culture.  Just a thought. 

References

Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carter, Bill.  2009.  With a Little "True Blood," HBO is Reviving its Fortunes.  The New York Times.  July 12, 2009.  here.

Jenkins, Henry.  2007.  Transmedia Storytelling 101.  Confessions of an Aca/Fan.  March 22.  here.

McCracken, Grant. 2008.  Transformations: identity construction in contemporary culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. here.

Seidman, Robert.  2009.  True bloody momentum for True Blood: 5.3 million and another record.  TV By The Numbers.  August 25.  here.

Taylor, William C. and Polly LaBarre.  2006.  Mavericks at Work.  New York: HarperCollins.  (For more on the Albrecht years at HBO)

A lot of people ask questions on TV.  Most of them do it badly.

David Letterman keeps up the long standing tradition established by Johnny Carson.  He is unapologetically incapable of curiosity.  A stream of people pass the portals of Late Night and we are none the wiser.  No good questions are asked.  Good answers tend to be accidental. 

While in Saratoga this weekend, Pam and I stayed with friends and got to see Costello's new talk show called Spectacle in which Costello does extended interviews with a remarkable diversity of musicians (from Lou Reed to Rufus Wainwright).  It runs on Sundance. 

Costello is intelligent and well informed.  His questions are thoughtful and well chosen.  He exhibits the humility required of a great interviewer.  (He shows none of the reluctance to shut up and give over that tortures most Charlie Rose interviews these days.)

Five or ten minutes into this sort of thing and I had to put my hands on my knees and take deep breaths.  I mean, it was dizzying.  So much data.  So much complexity.  I actually had to pay attention.  But once I got the hang of it, it was a great, spectacular, pleasure to behold. 

I couldn't help wondering whether this is precisely the process by which popular culture gives up the adjective and becomes culture plain and simple.  (And interesting to note that Elton John and David Furnish play originating producers here.) 

Let's add Costello to our list of people to whom the CCO (Chief Culture Officer) will sometimes want access.  This will usually be a matter of asking an  assistant to fetch the appropriate episode of Spectacle.  But for the executive with really deep pockets, a personal audience is perhaps not out of the question.  Costello appears to be a citizen of all musical worlds.  An hour in his presence could be a fantastically efficient way of solving certain CCO problems.  (And of course it would be a story to dine out on indefinitely.)

References

Ryzik, Melena. 2008.  Is it a Talk Show if the Host Sings?  New York Times.  November 28. here.

The mind boggles.  Wal-mart apparently decided to copy Girl Scout cookies.  C.V. Harguail (pictured) was the first one to raise the alarm and the reaction online and off has been tsunami-like. 

What a public relations nightmare!  A big corporation attacks the revenue stream of a distinguished not-for-profit community group…that represents decency, the American way and little girls?  Oh, good one.  It looked almost like Wal-Mart had decided on a potlatch destruction of goodwill and social capital.  "Goodwill?  Goodwill?  We don't need no stinking goodwill."  (As Bob Sutton points out, Wal-Mart is an organization that proves to be increasingly goodwill intensive.  Someday its going to need goodwill the way aluminum smelting needs power.)

Now, surely several people inside the corporation took a look at this and thought, "Ok, this is a really bad idea."  Nobody needs a Chief Culture Officer to spot an idea as bad as this.   No, the reason Wal-Mart needs a CCO is because it needed someone inside the corporation with enough power to intercede.

Bad decisions in the corporate world take on a certain momentum.  People start to say, "well, if lots of others think it's a good idea, who am I to object?"  It's almost as if a consensus begins to form around the bad idea, and allowing it to pass more swiftly through the intestinal track on its way into the world.  (Sorry about the metaphor.)

Wal-Mart needs someone in the C-suite that culturally sophisticated employees could reach out to.  It needs someone in the C-Suite who can hear the whistle blowers blowing.

References

Harquail. C.V.  2009.  Wal-Mart Knocks Off the Girls Scouts.  Authentic Organizations.  August 3.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Available for pre-order from Basic Books here.

Sutton, Bob.  2009.  Wal-Mart and Girl Scout Cookies: Thin-Minty Gate.  Work Matters.  August 13.  here.

Paul Snyderman was kind enough to write me a couple of days ago:

His question:

Grant,
 
Like so many other things in the marketing research world, I've gotten as many explanations of "co-creation" as there are people that I've asked.
 
Your blog item about the Snapple commercial notes the co-creation "peg" – which makes all the sense in the world.  But, most of the explanations – and their associated methods – of achieving co-creation sound more like having the target customer "design" the promotion.
 
It seems that you're describing a process by which the target customer has such an authentic affinity for the advertising, that the ad has even greater effectiveness for the viewing target, and also the level of emotionality results in the target promoting the brand or the ad to others.
 
So, [...] what's the deal?

My answer:

Paul, for me cocreation is a matter of creating something in the product that so appeals to the consumer that this consumer wants to pass it along to others for his or her own purposes.  I see an ad I love, I sent it to you.  I do something for the brand in question obviously, but I also do something for my own standing in the world.  I am seen to be (or I hope I am seen to be) the kind of guy who can identify good stuff, who passes it along in the manner of an early adopter, who creates a little cultural capital for himself by associating myself with the ad. 

At the base of this version of cocreation, I am an economic actor who is incented by the quality of the ad and or product to pass knowledge of same along to friends and strangers.  My "fee;" an augmentation of my standing in the world. 

There is a more elaborate argument here, one that talks about the fact that for many people especially more junior generations, the social network is crucial as a source of life partners, business partners, social standing.  And these networks are mushroom like, hydraulic in a manner of speaking.  These networks wither and die unless they are constantly fed, and when I send an ad through my network I sustain it. 

What I hadn't guite seen before is that this ties back to the quality of the ad, and not in just some general sense, but in some more particular one.  And this is why Google can't make ads.  Only very talented advertising people can.  And their source of value here comes from their mastery of the social and cultural details with which they make the ad richer, more engaging and more endearing. 

As usual, everything comes back to this for me.  

Best, Grant

Post script

There is an idea struggling to break free here, and I haven't quite identified it.  Paul will no doubt do this for me.  He's very smart.  But I think it helps me see something about the agency model that can perhaps serve as part of its defense in this perilous times: that agency people, especially planners and creatives control an essential technology, a knowledge of the fine details, one might say, the secret details of social life and our culture, and that these fine and secret details are an essential part of the process by which the ad creates value for the brand and the client.  Thoughts only.  Thank you, Paul!

This month Town and Country shows Milla Jovovich sporting an Oscar de la Renta silk-satin gown with beaded strap ($4890.00). 

Maxim shows her removing a tank top by Enza Costa (price unspecified). 

It is one of those glorious moments when two parts of our extended, dispersive culture wrap around and touch.  Glorious and rare.  Surely, this is the first time anything featured in tony Town and Country has appeared in laddish Maxim.  The wonder is that Jovovich has range enough to appear in both. 

Are there any other actresses in Hollywood with this range?  It's not acting range, exactly.  Something more like cultural range or cultural mobility.  Who, do you think…and why? 

That's the narrow question.  The broader questions: are we less siloed than we used to be.  Does every actress have more mobility than before?  Is something happening at Town & Country?  Your thoughts, please.

References

Carone, Patrick.  2009.  Milla Jovovich: Uncensored & Undressed.  Maxim.  September.

Larocca, Amy.  2009.  Milla Jovovich: Styles that last.  Town & Country.  August.

My dad was a printer.  Occasionally, he'd look at our newspaper with a "loupe," a magnifying glass.  Printers use loupes to examine the dots that make up the letters on a page.  At this level of detail, you can't see words, sentences, or headlines.  Just dots.

I was reminded of loupes a lot when working in the museum world.  This institution likes to look at the world very finely indeed.  Curators corps spend their careers examining small bodies of evidence ever so carefully.  The museum likes the loupe's eye view. 

This spells trouble when the museum engages in public education.  The museum curator wants to talk about subtle variations in the chair design in Concorde, Massachusetts in the period 1743 to 1760.  The museum visitor wants a bigger picture.  She wants to know how chairs tell the story of, say, children and child rearing in 18th century New England. 

The loupe-eye view also spells trouble when it comes to finding someone to run the institution.  To have authority within the institution, the Museum Director often comes from the curatorial ranks.  Darn!  We are asking the master of the fine detail to become the champion of the big picture.  (Or we could adapt Isaiah Berlin's language: We are asking a hedgehog to become a fox.)

So it was a pleasant surprise to hear the new Director at the MET, Thomas Campbell, say the following.   

Whether it's the grandeur of the Assyrian Reliefs room we have right above the end of the Great Hall, or the Temple of Dendur, or the dugout canoe we havee in our Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries–the second you start imagining what they were originally made for, what went on around them, it's exciting.  You can practically here the sound of skin drums, or human sacrificies, or see the studiolo of a Renaissance connoisseur. 

This is the bigger picture we need from a curator.  This is the sort of thing that brings in the public.  Yes, certainly, from the curatorial point of view, it errs in the direction of a romantic vision, inflaming the imagination, dramatizing the collection, embracing the cinematic.  But exactly.  As long as the MET is a public institution, it cannot please merely its curators and collecting elites.  It must also speak to the rest of us. 

References

Mead, Rebecca.  2009.  Renaissance Man.  The New Yorker.  July 27, pp. 52-59, p. 57.

David Weinberger tells the story of Jake McKee, the man who taught Lego how to have a conversation with its consumer. 

It turns out McKee supplied a crucial piece of Lego's cultural intelligence.

Now Jake is gone from the company, and Lego has become an excellent example of how to be a clueless, frightened laughingstock. A 14-year-old user used Legos to create a stop-motion homage to Spinal Tap, which Spinal Tap projected in concert and wanted to include in its DVD. Lego refused to give permission. As a company spokesperson said: “…when you get into a more commercial use, that’s when we have to look into the fact that we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.”

Weinberger asks, "How customer unfriendly can you get? You sell us something that enables us to create what we want, and now you say you get to control what we create?"  Indeed.

And it made me think how much the cultural sophistication of a corporation, in this case, its ability to create Cluetrain conversations, can depend on a single person.

In Chief Culture Officer, I use the example of Geoffrey Frost.  Frost joined a Motorola in 1999.  The company was in steep decline, losing billions each year.  Frost found a way to launch a new handset called the Razr.  Sales were projected for 2 million.  By the end of 2005, Motorola had sold 20 millions.  By the end of 2006, 50 million. Tragically, Frost died in 2005 and Motorola was thrown violently from the Cluetrain.  It seemed incapable or unwilling to find a successor for the Razr or for Frost, and by 2007 it was losing money again.  By 2008 it was wondering if it should sell it's cellphone business, and by the end of the year CEO Zander was out. 

It is wrong to paint figures like McKee and Frost as heroic figures, the only ones who get what is happening in the cultural world outside the corporation.  It is wrong to rely upon a "great man" theory of history. 

Isn't it?  Maybe not.  The corporation is so clueless, not just about conversation but about the full spectrum of opportunities and dangers that spring from culture, that sometimes it really does depend on a single individual.  The people come, they flourish, the corporation gets culture, the corporation flourishes.  They go, and it is as if the corporation is suddenly unplugged from culture.  The bridge is gone.  The descent is swift.

Let us sing the praises of unsung heroes.  They create extraordinary amounts of value.  They protect us from acts of trademark self destruction. 

References

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, and McKee Jake. 2009. The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition. Anniversary Edition. Basic Books.  Available from Amazon here.

McCracken, Grant. 2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  Basic Books.  To be published this December 1.  Available for preorder from Amazon.com here.

Weinberger, David.  2009.  Lego hops off the Cluetrain onto the tracks in front of it, wondering what that increasingly loud sound could be.  Joho the Blog.  August 13.  here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the head's up.

Sitting on stage next to his executive producer Matt Damon, Howard Zinn offered this account of his HBO documentary called The People Speak.

We didn't want to hear the words of people in the White House, we wanted to hear the words of people picketing the White House: agitators, antiwar protestors, the socialists and the anarchists, in other words, the people who gave us whatever liberty and democracy we have in this country.

"[T]he people who gave us whatever liberty and democracy we have in this country"?   Wow, what a howler.  No serious historian could say such a thing.  Eric Foner, for instance, might well agree with some of Zinn's politics.  I am guessing he would be horrified by this remark. 

It is one thing for Zinn to make an idiot of himself, but quite another to make an idiot of the celebrity sitting beside him. And we must wonder what Matt Damon thought he was doing associating himself with this sort of thing.  Unless of course, he actually believes it.  In which case, he needs a short course in American history.  And not from a documentarian like Zinn.

References

Berman, Marc and Alan Fruktin.  2009.  TCA 2009: Matt Damon 'Speaks" at History's Showcase.  July 30. here.

Foner, Eric. 2008. Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Second Seagull Edition, Volume 1. Second Seagull Edition. W.W. Norton & Co.

Foner, Eric. 2004. Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Volume 2. 1st ed. W. W. Norton.

I had the honor to share a panel recently with Jean Chatzky, author and journalist.  She knows about money, Jean does.  That's her beat, money and finance.  And it turns out she looks a little like Alice in Wonderland.  How apt.  How poetic.  Can there be a better metaphor for the world of money now?  Think of Jean as our Alice. 

To encourage the metaphor, Jean came to the panel bearing Dodgsonian (Carrollian) puzzles, including this stunner.  Apparently studies say we spend a credit dollar more easily than we do a debit dollar and a debit dollar more readily than a cash dollar.  And this strikes at the heart of the economics paradigm.  Economists rely on the idea that that all money is created equal. 

Certainly, we have heard evidence of this before.  Zelizer's work at Princeton on earmarking is an examination of how the categorization of value can change the value of value.  And my favorite example: a couple of years, the Canadian government tried to roll up the Baby Bonus it created after WWII.  It wasn't much money, about 14 dollars a month.  But there was a great outcry because many households treated these 14 dollars differently from the rest of the dollars in the household budget. (Roughly: they belonged to women who had license to spend them on discretionary purchases.)

Generally, though we treat these as exceptions, as events that occur on the margin of the economics paradigm, as anomalies with which we can live, as differences that make no difference theoretically.  And maybe this is right.  (But what if it isn't?) 

The liberating thing about value as money is that it's "colorless."  It carries no meaning.  When value is "at rest" in this way, it is culture free, non denominational, undeclared, so to speak.  It will become cultureful when used to buy a Hummer or a Prius.  But for the moment it is value free.  All units of value are the same.  (Until they aren't.)

I have been tracking the stories about the rise of negotiating over prices (aka haggling).  This was a fixture of market economies until the installation of the fixed price.  Certainly, haggling was allowed at tag sales and farmer's markets.  But these too were exceptions that proved the rule.  Mostly, we think that prices should be fixed, and anything else is unseemly and unduly complicated.  (And we persist in thinking this even as digital technologies threaten to make fixed prices the antique of another age.)

Haggling appears to be on the upswing.  Apparently, it is now possible to haggle at places like Nordstrom and Best Buy.  Really.  I have no personal data here because Canadians do not question prices.  (We would rather pay too much than risk being identified as a "trouble maker." )

So what is going on with money?  It's behaving in new ways on both sides of the buyer-seller divide, becoming more meaningful, cultureful even when in storage.  Or maybe this is just noise generated temporarily by our Wonderland economy.  Perhaps  the conventional idea of value is perfectly safe, fixed at anchor even when driven about by high winds and water.  On the other hand, if even this is in play…

References

Carroll, Lewis (aka Charles Dodgson). 2005. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Old LandMark Publishing.

Noguchi, Yuki.  2009.  Haggling Picks Up Steam During Recession.  NPR.org. August 10.  here.

Zelizer, Viviana A. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.