I've blogged about the new "idea intermediaries:" Pip Coburn (pictured), Jerry Michalski, Brad Berens, Tim O'Reilly, Faith Popcorn, Noah Brier, Sara Winge, Bob McBarton, Piers Fawkes, to name a few.  These people have revived the Salon.  Actually, they've improved upon the Salon.  They manage to make themselves a kind of Constantinople, a place where many worlds meet. 

I was talking to Pip yesterday and we started chatting about his lunches.  He invites around 12-16 people from thither and yon.  Some from the capital markets.  Some not.  Usually, the meal takes place in a Indian buffet restaurant in mid-town Manhattan.  It takes about an hour.  People chat about whatever takes their fancy. 

I met Esther Dyson at one of Pip's lunch.  Wow.  We talked about her training in the Russian space program.  I wasn't sure what to say when my turn came.  I'm never sure what to say, and, I mean, Russian space program, come on.  Finally, I blurted out, "I have three cats."  Esther was impressed by this.  I could tell by the way she arched her eyebrows. 

Pip was telling me about his most recent lunch.  He watched as a new visitor, a first-timer, tried to "talk business."  He left, Pip said, with a tiny cloud of confusion over his head.  All anyone wanted to talk about was ideas and stuff.   What was the point of a business lunch if not business?

There is the informal but powerful rule that says no one may do business on these occasions.  You come for the sociality, the conversational and the ideas.  And that's it.  Still less can Pip himself use these lunches for profit or power.  He understands that the moment he breaks this rule he loses his power as an idea intermediary.

So let's review.  Pip gets to make the invitations, book the restaurant, and pay for the meal.  It's not a lot of time and money, but it is an odd investment when we consider that he gets no return.  It gets odder still when we consider that Pip is prohibited from asking for a return.  Pip makes this investment with the certain knowledge that he cannot leverage it.

We are at the moment undergoing a sea change.  We have two economies running at once, the newly arrived (or returned) gift economy and the still resilient good economy.  This good economy was described by Adam Smith.  It presupposes a direct exchange.  In the good economy, we calculate whether and what to give by calculating what we expect to get.  We prefer it when exchanges take place instantaneously, in a known (and the same) currency, as value passes from hand to hand, with the deal (and the relationship) not just completed by the exchange, but extinguished by it. 

The gift economy has a different logic. In this economy, Pip takes value (the cost and effort of the meal) and releases it into the world.  It will, probably, someday, in some form, return to him.  But at the moment of the planning and the doing, none of this clear.  The rules of the game say he must be contented with the intrinsic satisfaction of lunch with friends.

Pip says he actually prefers this approach.  He doesn't want to think about "what's in it for him."  He likes it when this lunch feels like "a free lunch."  It sounded almost chivalric, the mission that can only succeeds when one's heart is pure.  Less grandly, it  sounded like the code of the Renaissance gentleman, the "liberality" with which worldly wealth is shared.  It even sounded like the the Big Man model that once operated in the Pacific (and may still.) 

But of course we know that things will return to Pip.  His reputation will be augmented.  Blog posts will be written about him.  (For what that's worth.)  He will blink a little brighter on his profession's radar and when deals are done, his liberality will come back to him. 

But two things.  I believe him when he says that his motives are disinterested.  What returns to him is the accident of these lunches not their intention.  Two, he has no way of calculated exactly when, how, in what form and in what measure value will return to him.  And this means that his calculations are now just so much guess work. 

We didn't actually get this far, and I hope one of these days to interview him for the Ning website, but I suspect that there is a "reckless act of generosity" rationale at work in Pip's life.  And we know that this idea is alive and formative in our culture now.  We may put this down as yet another of the many reactions against the Smithian regime and the rise of markets as a regnant social form. 

But knowing Pip as I do, my guess is that he likes the gift economy because, first, it is fun to release value without a destination or a purpose, and second, because he likes to activate the Pachinko machine of contemporary culture.  Not knowing whether and how things will return to him, far from being a troubling new reality, is indeed much of the fun.  All Pip can know is that value he releases will have a wild ride of it.  This value will ricochet in transit, enlisted unsuspected and unsuspecting partners.  It will be lost many times before it's found.  I think all of us, and not just Pip, find something sublime about this randomness.  And sublime randomness ceases to be random and starts getting, well, it starts getting pretty interesting.

Before you know it, your life is, as Max Weber liked to say, "reenchanted."  Gift economies exhibit accident with purpose.  Randomness with pattern.  Anonymity that inclines to  intimacy.  Calculation that gives way to whimsy.  Maybe.  Pip is perfectly capable of speaking for himself and I will let you know if and when he decides to write up how and why these lunches work.  Your comment, please.

Last note

I have started a Ning network for Chief Culture Officer.  (There didn't seem to be any point writing a book about how to create a living, breathing corporation that did not itself live and breathe in some way.)  Please come and sign up, if you're interested. 

Here's the drill as I understand it:

1) go to Ning.com

2) join the Ning network (this gives you access to all the communities on Ning)

3) search for Chief Culture Officer

4) Join Chief Cuilture Officer.  This should be straight forward. 

5) If you need my approval, send me an email at grant27[at]gmail.com and I will sign you in.

6) See you there. 

I was watching Stephanopoulos yesterday morning and I saw this IBM ad. 

And I thought, "hey, I've seen that guy somewhere before."

And sure enough, he's in a Castrol Motor Oil ad.

I think it's the same guy, right down to the wrinkles in his forehead. 

Does this matter? Maybe what happens in an ad for Castrol Oil stays in an ad for Castrol Oil.  Or do actors have "transmedia" properties?  Do they carry anything with them between ads?

Here's what the "meaning transfer" theory says.  This actor helped create meanings for Castrol Oil.  And in the process, some of that meaning took up residence in him.  And it's still there when he does the IBM ad.  And this means it plays havoc with the IBM ad...and perhaps the IBM brand.

Once you've played a crazy, dip stick wielding elf, you are less credible as a pious MD in a lab coat.  We are unmoved when you say, "we would see the patterns in your medical history."  (It's probably just rank prejudice but most of us believe elves are not all that good at finding patterns in medical history.)  The ad ends with "Let's build a smarter planet."  Again, we are disinclined to believe that elves care about a smarter planet.  It's just not an important life goal for them. 

To make matters worse, this "smarter world" series of ads from IBM has presented people in the ads as IBMers.  Indeed, the penultimate lines of this ad are, "That's what I'm working on.  I'm an IBMer."  I am pretty sure no one wants to go there.  Thinking with your dip stick?  Not an IBM specialty, I shouldn't think.  

Casting an ad has its own challenges, I'm sure.  And no one wants to say that no actor should ever do more than a single ad or that this actor should be jammed into the same role in every ad they do.  On the other hand, perhaps its makes sense to suppose that actors come trailing meanings and observe what these meanings might be.  This after all the very process by which celebrity works in our culture.  (Russell Crowe comes to each new role trailing not merely his fame, but the very particular roles that have made him famous.) 

I know what some of you are thinking.  "What does this matter?  This casted ad is dead or dying.  In 36 months, old media ads like this IBM example will be completely obscured by new media approaches.  Surely the new model is one in which consumers are drawn into an experience, engagement, conversation, interaction, cocreation with the brand as a result of a stream of alerts and invitations that come to them through blogging (blogging?!?), twitter, apps, games, websites, short messages and tiny bursts of data."

This argument is a powerful one, and much of its will come to pass.  But the new marketing that rises on the back of this new media will fail unless it learns the old rhetorical arts of persuasion, unless it masters the manufacture and management of cultural content through the strategic selection and combination of cultural meaning.  This remains the most powerful way brands take on certain kinds of foundational meaning.  Conversation and cocreation supply something essential, but it is a "sufficient" essence not a "necessary" essence.

We have been at the old media approach to marketing since the end of World War II (at least).  When I was in Arizona last week I had the inestimable honor of having a meal with Sidney Levy, the man who wrote Symbols for Sale in 1959.  This is perhaps the first formal recognition of the cultural outcome of all that Mad Men activity we now know so well from Matthew Weiner's AMC series.  All that furious creative activity in Manhattan, wreathed in smoke, soaked in Scotch, was something more than a hard sell.  It had a purpose: to endow goods with meanings.  Those philandering, back-stabbing executives had a goal: to "build" brands.  The fact that they were also selling snake oil does not mean that they were not using the rhetorical devices of the visual artist and the poet...often in ways more imaginative and constructive than contemporary artists and poets could imagine.  (This was a magnificently shared creative process, perhaps not so much crowdsourced as groupsourced, and in any case quite distributed and superbly emergent.  See particularly the way 1950s ad men and women across many agencies helped create the cultural significance of the cars of the period.)

Here we are some 50 years after the publication of Symbols for Sale, and it is still possible for this now venerable world of advertising to make errors of the order of an actor allowed to "smuggle" meanings from one ad into another. Just when the ad biz is having to learn to defend itself from the young turks and new media, it continues to demonstrate that it rises to self knowledge and discipline only with the utmost reluctance.  Perhaps all that Scotch and nicotine did more damage than we knew.

References

Levy, Sidney J.  1959.  Symbols for Sale.  Harvard Business Review. Volume 37, Issue 4, pp. 117-124.

Levy, Sidney J., and Dennis Rook.  1999.  Brands, Consumers, Symbols and Research: Sidney J. Levy on Marketing. Sage Publications.  (contains Symbols for Sale)

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Meaning Manufacture.  An anthropological approach to the creation of value.  Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 175-191.  

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick.  Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 53-90.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Melanie Wallendorf for the opportunity to visit the Eller College of Management.  It was really fun.

The culturematic is a device for making culture. 

It has two steps.

Step 1

Think up a pretext.  It will usually start, "what if I…"

Some examples:

What if I ate all my meals at McDonald's for a month?

What if I swam across Connecticut using local swimming pools?

What if I reached out to and visited every Grant McCracken [insert your name here] in the tri-state area [insert your region here]?

What if I made recipes from Julia Child's cookbook for a year?

The topic should make us smile, cock our heads, rub our chins, and go "hmm."

Step Two:

Now, play it out.  Visit all those people with your name in your neighborhood.  Swim all those swimming pools. 

And write it up.  Blog it.  Tweet it.  Write a book.  Do a documentary.  Take the artifact that comes from this artifice and release it into the great stream of popular culture.

How does the culturematic work?

To be honest, we're not entirely sure.  We have the boys in the lab working on it pretty much around the clock.  Here's are some of the possibilities.

1) Culturematics give the world small and manageable proportions.  We no longer need to write (or read) about everything, or even about one big thing.  We have reduced the world to a tiny set.

2) Culturematics produce easy culture. There aren't many Grant McCrackens in the tri-state area, and I'd be very surprised if there were any systematic connections between us.  The fun will come from showing how little we have in common.  No heavy lifting required by the author or the reader.  There's no danger we're going to find ourselves grappling with big questions.  This is frothy culture. 

3) The products of the culturematic are not merely small and easy.  They are also animated like a Koi pond or a pocket watch.  Some gentle, intelligible event has been put in train.  Charming interactions will ensue.  We are eager to see how things will turn out.  Culturematics make a world that's diverting.

4) Culturematic devices are quirky.  I think I took the idea of swimming across Connecticut from John Cheever.  It made for a wonderful short story because the idea is so very strange.  Imagine treating discontinuous pools as if they were one body of water!  Imagine saying we had "swum" Connecticut?  It's all so very arbitrary.  Why swim?  Why Connecticut?  Why bother?  It is the quirkiness of the things produced by the culturematic that captures our attention.  "Hmm," we say,

5) These culturematics produce a small, likable episode in the life for the writer and the reader.  Someone has to go to McDonald's for a month.  And we get to go with them.  When someone takes their meals from Julia Child from a year this must give continuity to the year.  The episode is an arbitrary event with an arbitrary interval.  It's continuity without cost. 

6) We do hope that along the way, some larger issue will swim up and dignify the proceedings with a certain contemporary relevance.  Looking for one's name sakes give us the opportunity to dwell ever so fleetingly on questions of identity.  The McDonald's stunt (sorry, I can't think of the guy who staged it, and I'm on the plane.) gives rise to thoughts of diet, obesity, and wellness in America.  To satisfy condition 2, we don't want extended treatments or very deep thoughts.  But the occasional resonance doesn't hurt. 

It is possible event to stage these artifacts for commercial purposes.  As when the philosopher Alain De Button spend a week as writer-in-residence at Heathrow.  It was very good publicity for all concerned.  And I deeply hope some airport would so engage me.  Perhaps a bus station is a little more my speed. 

I am not sure what it says about us that so much culture is being produced by these devices.  Surely, it has something to do with the fact that we are so multiple, so changeable, so unpredictable.  Culturematics make the world a little less …  The boys in the lab are still looking for that last word.  Watch this space. 

But, listen, please consider creating your own culturematic.  And please keep us posted on the outcome. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  Transformations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

For more on Alain De Botton's experiment, go here. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Craig Swanson for the Alain de Botton reference.

No one is talking about it, but what's happening to journalism may some day happen to higher education.

It's not too early to look down the road.

Tim Sullivan and I were chatting about the options the other day and I came away with this rough sketch of a radical scenario: the university continues as a center of knowledge production, but ceases to matter as a center of knowledge distribution.

Let's assume the following.

1) that there is easy access to information and knowledge, thanks to internet access. 

2) that educational resources online will get better.  (See, for instance, the open course ware at MIT.)

3) that people are getting better at assimilating data and mastering knowledge by their own effort.

4) that as people continue to move from a passive to an active model of engagement, they may prefer to learn through self instruction. 

What's doesn't shift in this scenario is accreditation.  We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. 

Then the question becomes:

5) what's the best way to do accreditation?

The English universities are a useful indicator.  Traditionally, they forgave the separation knowledge acquisition from examination.  The universities allowed the student an extraordinary latitude.  If a student could pass her exams, it didn't matter if she had spent all her time in the college bar.  She was good to go.

We could use a model of this kind.  We would leave it to students to prepare their own programs of education, to gather on line with whomever they found interesting and useful.  They could indeed spend several years in the bar of their choice.  What awaits them is a small committee of smart people with credible credentials who travel their locality, assessing intellectual ability, power and skill in argument, the ability to inquire, to marshall the data, to build the case, to respond to rebuttle, and to otherwise make their way from less knowledge, understanding and wisdom to more knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. 

Students in self instruction will have to decide whether they are ready to sit their exams.  They will visit the accreditation website occasionally and examine the oral exams and written ones.  They ask themselves, "Could I handle questions of that order?"  And if they think they can, they book an appointment, pay their fee, and wait for the examiners to swing back through town.

A world of several degrees may be replaced by a world of many levels.  We can expect the degree world to look like a ziggurat.  Students will work their way upwards, eventually find their natural location in the sweet spot between the prized and the passable.  Perhaps we can do this in the manner of a Judo studio.  It will be a matter of belts.

Who should staff these committees?  How about journalists, people who know a thing or two about inquiry, building arguments, and acquiring knowledge. 

References

For a glimpse of some of the educational resources on line, go to the Online Degrees Hub here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tim Sullivan, editor at Basic Books, for the conversation from which this blog post comes.  He is not to be held responsible for anything written here. 

The magnificent image, if you see one, was taken this summer in Turkey by Paul Melton.  Good, or what?

Any corporation can be forgiven being a little anxious these days.  Everyone's confidence is being tested. 

I interviewed Debbie Millman over the weekend, and she helped me see an unexpected connection between this confidence and the brand.

When the corporation loses it's nerve, it ceases to take chances.  It begins to white-knuckle its way through the world.  It begins to lean towards stasis.  The consumer may too.

Debbie sees a value cascade at work.  In the positive version of this cascade, confidence begets confidence.  The confidence of senior management becomes a confidence in the corporation.  This in turn becomes a confidence in the brand.  And this in turn becomes a confidence in the consumer.  Confidence ends up as a part of the augmented brand.  But only if it is there in the head and heart of the senior manager. 

The negative version of the cascade is, well, what you would expect.  The senior manager loses his or her nerve.  This carries into the brand and this carries into the consumer.  In effect, the consumer is infected by failing confidence of the corporation. 

Whoa, Nelly.  This is a radical proposition.  It has several implications.  One of them is that if corporations want consumers to start spending again, they have start spending too.  More to the point, the corporation has to begin acting like there is a future in the future.  Because here, as in so many things culture, wishing makes it so.  Economies, like cultures, have a performative quality. 

References

See Debbie Millman's website here.  Recording of the interview to follow here or on Ning for Chief Culture Officer.

Post Script

Thanks very much to all of those who voted yesterday.  (Polls are still open for those who haven't yet.)  It looks like we had around 140 votes with a dead heat between Covers 1 and 2.  I will keep you posted on the outcome.  A decision has to be made soon!

Could you help me choose a cover for Chief Culture Officer?

Cover 1

Cover 2:

Cover 3:

 

Thanks for your help.

Please feel free to live comments and suggestions.

This is Cambridge, Massachusetts, one rainy autumn afternoon in 2005. 

Fantastic?  Or totally spectacular?  You be the judge.

It was created by Burak Arikan and Ben Dalton at MIT's Media Lab.  It designed to show the color of clothing in motion in the many neighborhoods that make up Cambridge.

Arikan and Dalton rigged up cameras, capture color data and converted it to this astonishingly useful piece of data visualization.  

To be fair, Cambridge is not the most fashion forward place in the world.  Indeed, I have seen people on the MIT campus who look as if they just walked out of explosion at Goodwill.  I'm not talking hipster refusal of mainstream fashion.  I'm talking completely random.  This is a wonderful thing from an anthropological point of view but somewhat at odds with the clothing conventions that rule our world.

So the Chief Culture Officer may not care about these data as data.  The Arikan-Dalton visualization will matter more as proof of concept.

And what a concept.  Imagine an Arikan-Dalton machine in all the neighborhoods we care about in all of the cities we care about (London, Paris and Tokyo, at a minimum).  A real time feed of essential cultural intelligence delivered in a form that allows for effortless pattern recognition. 

Well, you don't have to be a CCO.  Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, should have an Arikan-Dalton machine.  If only to observe the effects of the Fall issue.  She could watch colors she had blessed suddenly begin to infuse the city center and then ripple out into the suburbs.  She could watch them leap from country to country.  She could begin to experiment, using data vastly more accurate than feedback from the industry. 

What if we were American Apparel or J. Crew?  Wouldn't the likes of Dov Charney and Mickey Drexler want an Arikan-Dalton machine on the wall of their trend rooms?  Indeed everyone in the design world, architecture, branding, interior, product, would want one of these machines.  So should every school and studio of fashion and design. 

An Arikan-Dalton machine would matter especially to the CCO because the CCO knows that colors spring from culture.  They do not coming spinning out of the fashion industry at random.  They emerge as the logic of our culture works itself out out, sometimes mysteriously, through the choices of the fashion industry.  The Arikan-Dalton data are not only color and movement.  They are culture effectively, very cleverly, coded as color and movement.

The CCO knows this: there is no sudden, dramatic change in color trends that is not driven by some shift in culture.  This makes the Arikan-Dalton machine an early warning machine.  The ADM (the Arikan-Dalton machine) tells us that a change must have taken place.  And then allows us to track the change as it moves from city to city, from early adopter to late adopter, from the urban center to the hinterland.  Now we can send in the researcher for a qualitative examination of "what the hell just happened out there."  It will raise questions like "That's weird.  Paris didn't bite," or "Wow, that little town in Brazil just started 'broadcasting' in fuchsia!"  This is the kind of data that will send us off in pursuit of still better data.  The ADM creates data that takes us towards knowledge, then intelligence, then strategy.  It's the beginning of wisdom.

The benefits of the ADM are broader still.  It would allow us to watch our culture as a living, breathing, organic thing, bound together by meanings in motion.  It would show us our miraculous society of strangers as we enter into, or refuse, the new trends, the fleeting consensus, the rivers of briefly shared meaning, that run through us, and make us briefly up. 

References

For more details on the ARM, go to Visual Complexity here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

Manuel Lima and his site here for curating this work.

Ben Malbon for pointing me towards Lima's work at Visualcomplexity.  If you are interested in this kind of thing, I recommend following Ben on Twitter at "bbhlabs." 

Clarification

I don't actually know the time period over which the Arikan Dalton data was collected in Cambridge.  I bet it was longer than a day.  (I was using my poetic license, recently renewed.)  Hopefully someone will clarify. 

Last night I got to hear Joshua Onysko, the founder of Pangea Organics.

In some ways, Joshua is a standard-issue entrepreneur: curious, durable, ambitious, practical, experimental, relentless, result-seeking, a man in constant motion. 

His career began with a book about soap.  Joshua went to dinner with his mom and the book was just sitting there.  So he made some.  Just to see.  (Entrepreneurs prize the art of the possible above the art of the profitable.)  Joshua went off on a world tour, to India, Nepal, Tibet, Kashmir, Brooklyn, New Orleans.  And then home to Wyoming where he made more soap.  Another great loop: Oregon, Bellingham, Alaska, Yukon, Denver, Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Thailand, Cambodia and then home to the same destination: soap.  Eventually, with the help of IDEO, Joshua was producing the line of products called Pangea Organics. 

People like Joshua are the shock troops of capitalism.  They have a vision which they relentlessly turn into enterprise, into action, into a company that scales up.  But to capture the full difficulty (and value) of what they do, we need a different metaphor.  Entrepreneurs are the performance artists of capitalism.  They do things the market has never seen before.  And if they catch the moment, they can actually change the market.  Joshua is doing that now. 

Usually, this is where a Venture Capitalist (or large corporation) steps in and relieves the entrepreneur of his or her accomplishment.  It's like that Roller Derby move where people pull upside you and lift you off the floor by your elbows.  Your skates no longer touch the deck.  The VC lavishes you with blandishments.  He offers sums that take the breath away.  All entrepreneurs say "no" at first.  But the offers get larger and more dizzying.  Until the entrepreneur says "geez, what's not to like.  What could be wrong with having many millions of dollars and the rest of my life ahead of me?"

But Joshua is not interested in the usual life trajectory of the entrepreneur.  No, he is intent on the reformation of capitalism.  He wants to change the way we think about products, packaging, manufacture, retail, consumption, and the planet.  (Some Pangea products have seeds embedded in the packaging…to make the garbage bloom.)

In a sense, Joshua is exercising the advantage of his generation.  My generation (boomers) tend to see the world as a series of discrete episodes.  What happens here doesn't have any necessary connection there.  My generation can see consequences but we tend to think of them as capital letters joined by little arrows: A > B.  It's clear that Joshua thinks more in terms of concatenation, where events run in all directions at once. 

So Joshua turns out to be a double entrepreneur.  He thinks about all the things that make up enteprise, all the things that have to happen for a start-up to start up.  But this is merely "booster rocket one."  Then he starts thinking about all the things the start-up can make happen beyond the narrow scope of its enterprise.  This is concatenating capitalism, as ripples carry the influence of Pangea out into the larger world, our broader culture, changing how we do business, how we consume things, how we organize effort and outcome. 

The event was organized by AIGA's Metro North.  (To declare a conflict of interest, I should tell you that this chapter is organized by my wife, Pamela DeCesare.)  The Metro North board took Joshua to dinner afterward.  He said in passing that he's now looking for "patient capitalists."  And I sat there thinking "Ok, now he's going to teach capital to dance to a new tune." 

It is the genius of capitalism that it is so very pliable.  It doesn't really care about the details, just so long as interested parties can engage in transactions that work to their respective advantage.  Indeed, it has conventionally preserved that brilliant act of reduction that Adam Smith accomplished in Wealth of Nations.  It removes from consideration everything extra-transactional, all the cultural, social, political, ecological factors coming in and going out of the transaction.  All of these were, in Kuhnian terms, extra-paradigmatic.  The model didn't include them.  It didn't need to know about them.  Onyesko and the double entrepreneurs appear now to be reinstalling these factors, making them visible, thinkable, calculable, perhaps even manageable.  The world wrought by single entrepreneurs was pretty astonishing.  The one being produced by Joshua Onysko and the new entrepreneurs is going to be very interesting indeed. 

References

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. 

Thanks to Scott Lerman of the Metro North board, you can see Joshua's talk here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Cheryl Swanson of the AIGA Metro North board for organizing the talk. 

Thanks to Amy Domini for several conversations which helped prepare me to understand Onysko's enterprise.

I have worked with Paula Rosch several times over the years.  So when I sat down to think about who was acting in the capacity of an unspoken Chief Culture Officer, she came to mind.

I asked Paula if she would sit down and tell me about how she helped make Kimberly-Clark a living, breathing culture, and she produced this fascinating document.  Here are some of the highlights that await you.

•    Paula is the inventor on record for some 80 patents.  We talk a lot about innovation these days, but not so much about innovators.  They remain unsung heroes.  Paula is one of these.

•    Paula’s contribution to KC’s cultural knowledge came in part from her use of “Scouts.”  Scouts, by Paula’s definition, are “behavior leaders who intuitively model new shifts in human behavior years and even decades before the mainstream population.” She looked at

“how [Scouts] lived their lives, using those observations to develop hypotheses and push them as far out as possible – allowing a lot of hang time in the abstract until the right insights and models come together to be translated into product, including serendipitous bits and pieces, all these merging together to hone in on the idea.”

•    Wow, that’s my reaction.  Wow and then some.  Some part of the genius of good product development process is captured here.  How we find new ideas and then hold them in a loose constellation until the right pattern can form.  It’s a fantastically difficult process, this is.  It’s a process of thinking everything all at once and “roughly” until some combination arrives to bring everything into sharp focus.  Wonderful.

•    But not always appreciated.  K-C’s was a traditional culture. Sometimes creativity and culture was said to be “soft.”  I have heard this from several unsung heroes.  Those who don’t understand the process call it an impressionistic, intuitive, somehow female undertaking.  Which means that the unsung hero has to do something very difficult in an environment that is sometimes laced with skepticism and sometimes hostility.  Being creative in the presence of people who are resistant, this is one of the double binds that confronts the culture creative, the CCO.

•    But at some level KC knew it needed Paula and people like her.  It was a company in transition, moving from a paper to a consumer products company.  It is impossible to climb this hierarchy from functional products to richer value propositions without cultural advice.  And that’s where Paula came in. 

•    The still larger context is the business model that the corporation had created for itself.  And as Paula notes, this was something dedicated to creating a few, massively successful products.  These days we are seeing some corporations generate many, smaller offerings in order to see what works in an inscrutable world.  (“Fail early, fail often to succeed big” being the new mantra for some.)  And this new model is I think more responsive to the spirit of creativity that Paula brings to the corporation. Paula also experienced a siloed KC, and here too there are new models of the corporation promise to make the corporation more porous and more participative. 

•    Paula notes the sensation many of us have when we return from a culture seeking (Paula’s “Scouting”) expedition.

“There is a huge universe of behaviors, practices, beliefs, insights, and attitudes – human culture – but only a small percentage of them are allowed inside the corporate doors, usually not the most portentous ones but the most easily workable.  I remember I would be so exhilarated when I would do innovative consumer or Scout research – anything was possible, until I re-entered the cement atrium of the corporate building, understood the challenges of selling new insights, and felt the air leak out before I passed the security desk."

•    Finally, Paula changed the culture at KC.  People there now routinely use language, processes and techniques she introduced.  And she continues to serve as a valued consultant. But she didn’t stay.  And this is surely one of the most urgent orders of business before the corporation now.  How to recruit people like Paula, and when you are lucky to come upon someone of her extraordinary talents, make her a permanent, honored member of the corporation.   I think people like Paula were once the badge of a corporation that was making an effort, taking a risk.  I think it’s fair to say she is now as essential to those who serve in marketing, finance and technology.  You have to have a Paula, and this means doing whatever it takes to keep her.  She is the new face of the living, breathing corporation.  And if you have a “Paula” as good as Paula, well, dude, move heaven and earth to keep her.

So, without further ado, I give you Paula’s characteristically illuminating answers to the questions I sent her.  Good reading!

Note:  I left K-C in January of 2001, so my notes represent my experiences there from 1978-2000.

1) What was your role at Kimberly-Clark?

a) I was a product developer for 22 years, the first few years as the consumer needs champion on teams that developed and introduced improvements to HUGGIES® diapers.

I was fortunate to have a special assignment not long into my career – that of developing K-C’s first Innovation Fair.  Research and Engineering had a year-old program called “Innovation Time”, allowing individuals the time to work on new ideas that might be good for the company but were outside their specific assignments.  The Innovation Fair rounded up these ideas and presented them to potential sponsors.

I mention this because this was a pivotal learning opportunity for me.  Developing the Fair – a “product” in itself – and helping the participants to pull prototypes and communications together for an audience, just jumping in to this effort and figuring it out as we went along, taught and prepared me more for product development and entrepreneurism than any other experience. 

I spent the rest of my K-C career in advanced product development or new business identification, usually as a team leader, and sometimes as what Gifford Pinchot called an “Intrapreneur” – a corporate entrepreneur, driving new products from discovery to basis-for-interest to commercialization.  It’s the nature of many companies to prematurely dismiss ideas that represent what the world might want/need 5, 10 years out and beyond in favor of near-term opportunities – the intrapreneur stays under the radar, using passion, brains, intuition, stealth, any and every other human and material resource available to keep things moving.  It helps to have had some managers that often looked the other way.

Many years ago, Rose Moss, a good friend and associate of mine (www.rosemosswriter.com), gave me a wonderful expression for the nurturing of new product concepts: “Socialize the idea.”  This is the perfect mantra for the Intrapreneur. Like an infant, one initially shields and protects the idea, exposing it gradually and appropriately so the world begins to know it and it begins to know the world, and they begin to accept each other.  

b) During the years I was at K-C, the company went through a transformation from paper company to consumer products company (see Good to Great by Jim Collins).  These were great times for learning and redefining (for example, the role of consumer advocate and product developer had been relatively undefined.  I got to assist with this effort. There were product developers there older than I who just “got it” and did it, without acclaim.  These are my own role models and unsung heroes).  The frustration of this transformation came in trying to move beyond an objective, manufacturing mindset into a more subjective, applied consumer view. It was easy for some to make this leap, more difficult for others.  But this is where I began to carve a niche for myself.

c) More than any other category, my work in the Infant Care category had the most significant impact on the company.  Early on, I provided the product development and consumer leadership for the introduction of HUGGIES diaper improvements.  Later, with my teams, I conceived and championed the development of HUGGIES Baby Steps, Huggies Supreme, and Huggies Storytime® disposable diapers, Huggies Little Swimmers® disposable swim pants, and Good-Nites® sleep shorts.  I am the inventor-on-record for nearly 80 patents for these products (as well as other branded K-C products).

My job assignments as new product team leader were broad.  For example, “Identify a new-to-the-world product for the infant or child care categories.”  The vision, research strategy, and process largely were up to me and my co-workers. 

I always started with a practice of articulating a new, divergent frame of reference for looking at the problem.  Talking with and observing people, particularly behavior leaders (Scouts) and how they lived their lives, using those observations to develop hypotheses and push them as far out as possible – allowing a lot of hang time in the abstract until the right insights and models come together to be translated into product, including serendipitous bits and pieces, all these merging together to hone in on the idea.

I was fortunate in that I was able to establish some credibility early on, with successful product improvement work and the Innovation Fair, and acquired the sponsorship of some senior management, which brought me a lot of freedom not often allocated to someone in my position.

2) What were some of your favorite accomplishments?

a) The incredible network of diverse, brilliant, creative individuals that has been my privilege to meet and work with, inside and outside the company.  Not my accomplishment, but certainly my favorite.

b) Participation and leadership in the definition of the Role of Product Developer.

c) That, beyond new product introductions, we – the circles of insightful people with whom I worked – actually did change the culture within, changing the processes by which we uncovered new opportunities and developed them.  And we changed the language.  I am not sure how well the insights underscoring these changes are understood, but it is rewarding to see the influence.

d) Huggies Little Swimmers was my favorite “intrapreneurial” effort.  While it was off strategy for corporate new products because it addressed an existing category rather than new-to-the-world, I was able to find senior level sponsorship for the idea with the personal care sector.  I had passion for the concept, so I moved along with the project.  I had senior support and budget now, but a team of only two, including myself. So we launched what I call Stone Soup product development – make what you are doing stimulating, fun and worthwhile so people are excited to get involved.  Again, many people looked to make a creative contribution.  They needed to be shown appreciation and respect for the effort. 

We did have an item – a very cool foam pen that represented the project logo – that became a badge of honor that you were part of the work.  So interesting – people yearn for creative involvement. 

What was a team of two became an unofficial team of probably 50 or more, all of whom played a huge role in the success of what became a new business that met K-C’s challenging requirements in size and profitability. As for their managers – they made a point of ignoring that some of their deputies’ time was getting sucked away for Little Swimmers (senior level support and endorsement is critical for new product development – it keeps doors open).  And working with babies who were finally had a garment that would allow them entrance into public swimming pools – parents with babies back then will understand)… Just too much fun.

e) The Development of the Scout behavior philosophy, especially as applied to new personal care products.  This was the greatest opportunity I had to really use my Scout and behavioral innovation processes in very deep ways.  The result was a new product line that was never developed – too different than the normal corporate brands in concept and manufacturing – but that offered the broadest, highest tests scores seen in the personal care products industry until that time. 

3) Tell me something about what I am assuming was an engineering, male, Midwestern culture inside K-C while you were there.  What were your observations?

a) First of all, like many companies, K-C was large enough to have several sub-cultures.  Rather than “engineering” and “male” (I knew and depended on many innovative engineers and men!), I think a homogeneous, linear thinking culture focused primarily on the bottom line best describes the operating culture I knew.  Some might object, but I am speaking from a creative’s perspective.  Some observations I had about the culture at different points in my career?  

• That there was a low threshold for and buy-in to diverse and alternative thinking.          

• That “creative” means frivolous and feminine, even when its results are delivering millions a year in operating profits.   

• That hiring/promoting the familiar can produce a homogeneous environment and philosophy (and in this case, representative of Midwest culture you mention).  

• That personal creative excellence, intuition, chutzpa and passion often translate into “management problem”. 

• That the culture, while it tolerates the alternative and creative mindset, it doesn’t embrace the richness of opportunities it can offer.

These were generally the positions of some who might have felt threatened by processes they weren’t comfortable with.  BUT, I worked with scores of people who intuitively recognized good ideas and knocked themselves out to be involved and make them successful, whether they were officially on the team or not.  There is a human drive to be creative and people want to be involved.  You do need to remember to say “thank you.”

b) Part of the Fortune 500 culture was the commonplace objective that each new product needed to deliver at least $100 million in manufacturer’s sales.  Being able to manufacture it on existing assets was also an common, unspoken criteria (if the objective didn't start out this way, it became a key consideration once the opportunity was defined).  Smaller and niche opportunities were discouraged, even if they delivered a high level of operating profits.  New processes and machines were risky – what if the business failed?  Some new businesses did fail, and if clearly understanding the reasons is not always pursued to its fullest extent, the fear of new business risk remains intact. 

c) The Midwest culture – along with fewer women in the professional workplace in my early years – also impacted who led projects and how the marketplace was viewed.  Interestingly, when I started at KC, most of the product developers and decision makers in the Feminine Care department were men.  They developed a product that met the needs of many women, but called it the Kotex® Heavy Duty Tampon – why not just call it the Die-hard battery of tampons!  Try finding a woman to put that on the grocery conveyer!

4) What were some of the frustrations you experienced during your career at K-C?

a) I think I shared a huge frustration with others:  that there was a threshold of tolerance for creative insight and expertise beyond which one’s observations and ideas are dismissed as insignificant and even non-essential.  There is a huge universe of behaviors, practices, beliefs, insights, and attitudes – consumer culture – but only a small percentage of them get inside the corporate doors, usually not the most portentous ones but the most easily workable.  This actually became more common later in my career. I would feel exhilarated after doing innovative consumer or Scout research – anything was possible, until I re-entered the cement atrium of the corporate building, understood the challenges of selling new insights, and felt the air leak out before I passed the security desk.

b) Secrecy, in communications both outside and within the company.  It just shuts down intellectual and creative transfer of any kind, and sets up mistrust. 
 
c) The role and function of Product Developer:  this was an undefined role in my early years.  Product developers had been typically under-valued because managers “don’t know what they do so we don’t know how to evaluate them.”  It was a handful of product developers in the early 80’s, myself included, who took on the job of defining the role and determining the performance parameters, using as case studies how the successful entries of products like Huggies were actually products of insights into consumer behavior and intuitive design, in addition to the materials and engineering skill.  This effort morphed into a corporate product development training program that became a model for the other disciplines in the corporation.  Product Development suddenly was the cool job to have.  We developed our own identity as Product Developers and gained intellectual influence and personal and professional identity with it.  So this frustration was turned into a happy ending, a group accomplishment of which I am very proud. 

d) After successfully developing Little Swimmers by begging and borrowing and luring help, it set the expectation that I should do that for my next project.  Somehow I had gained the tag of “individual contributor”, most likely because I worked without an official team on Little Swimmers.  But if teams were being provided for other projects, why not to mine?  I once heard an interview with film director Robert Altman on NPR – that each time he produced and succeeded, the critical bar was set higher and the expectations for his next project were raised.  Although I don’t pretend to be in his creative league, his comments struck home.  But as usual, I managed to round up a project posse.

As a senior product developer, and in the role of “intrapreneur” on Little Swimmers, I wore all the hats, technical and consumer, including hand-making many of the prototypes, making test product in machiladoras in July, performing materials testing, as well as the concept and positioning development work, consumer evaluations, whatever it took, taking the product through quantitative and volumetric concept-and-use testing and Basis For Interest.  When it came time for evaluations, the senior technical people who were my peers (PhD “Fellows”) did not regard the work as technically sophisticated enough for recognition or promotion in those ranks.  Since I was working for a senior business manager on the project, I didn’t have a technical champion for support.  I was caught in the middle.

There was simply no career path for the very senior level, creative, prolifically successful entrepreneurial product developer with a broad consumer-culture view. Business and Technical management were inappropriate (too right brained for me and actually took one out of the product development role), nor was the Fellow path appropriate (more for the highly technical).  I didn’t fit either path (this was true for other senior level product developers).  If my unique – and successful – methodologies and insights had been met with a broader willingness to understand, that might have offered some sense of fulfillment.

e) The silos of R&D and of Marketing. 

5) Favorite inspirations

a) Buckminster Fuller, particularly in the book, The Best of Friends.  In describing his friendship with Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi, he used his same theories of geodesic dome construction, and set me off on the value and practice of triangular and 3D thinking in so much of my work.  Kleenex Ultra facial tissue was a direct result of this influence.

b) My “super” Scout network.  For their ability to let go of convention and be innovators and agents of real behavioral change.

c) People-watching in general, including eavesdropping.  Just trying to observe without mixing myself up in the situation. The best source of inspiration and ideas.

d) Dan Endres – one of my unsung heroes at KC, who retired several years before I left K-C.  He was a passionate pioneer and advocate for environmentally sustainable products and practices, and an outstanding product developer.  I had good supporters, but Dan was my only true mentor.

e) Great natural beauty – big water and big mountains – the most inspirational, developmental, and productive conversations I have had were during walks near water and mountains.

f) The New York Times.  I’ve read it every day for decades. Every day I find something to use or store away for later when I need a missing piece.

g)  Street wandering throughout the world. 

h) My Uncle Art – I was totally intrigued by his behavior and interests and somehow understood him as a “Scout” even when I was a kid – though I didn’t have a word for it then.  But he became the platform for the theory.  

i) Julia Child (and the diverse food universe in general) – her trilling voice commanding “Saaave the juices!” taught me that any little detail can eventually be the missing piece to the puzzle.  It’s all good.

j) My husband Frank and his passion for innovators in music, literature, sports – culture!

6) What were some of your strategies and tactics?

a) After a few project successes, they begin to think that you might be on to something!

b) Personal traits – I was well-liked, had a sense of humor, appreciated and recognized people’s help, had vision and passion which transferred to the teams I belonged to. 

c) I did stay under the radar.  My bosses always knew I was doing some kind of research, some of it “stealth” research.  I was selective about what I reported, but always reported relevant progress (“Socialize the idea!”).  By the time it was “safe” to lay out the vision/product, I was pretty far along and had a good amount of data.

d) The company never understood Scouts, just that I used them, who and whatever they were.  Going off to Seattle, Cambridge, etc., doing research, ideations and workshops with Scouts (both consumer Scouts and my “super” Scout network), etc., gave me the environment and companionship I needed to pull visions and opportunities together.  While it was often a challenge to communicate insights when I went back, I always returned with stronger vision, direction, and motivation.

e) I walked the walk.  The subjects I talked about, the books I read, the people I came to know, the experiences I sought in my personal life, all had the trappings of “future”.  So it made some sense that I might be the one to understand the future. 

f) I filled my office with products, pictures, packages, prototypes, everything that could relate to the project and from which I could draw inspiration and connections.  But that also encouraged people to stop in and talk, check out what I was doing, and share some ideas.  When I was working on personal care products, people would stop by the door just because it smelled so good – product buy-in via aromatherapy!  Stone Soup product development.

g) I had faith in my own unique abilities. I focused on what I saw was happening to people and their lives, and translated that into good products.  In the end, I left because I couldn’t bring in as much of the outside culture as I wanted.  I wanted to do more of it, trying to capture as much of the outside culture as I could, with as many categories as I could, push my own capabilities.

7) Final Thoughts

I am not sure that companies should recruit and keep individuals like a Paula Rosch.  Perhaps individuals like me belong on the outside of corporations.  I found my corporate career accomplishments and experiences immensely satisfying, but I do enjoy operating in my current, broader environment.  I may be even more effective, bringing a breadth of consumer culture insights to a diverse group of clients who somehow mix it all up and create something more unique than if they had followed an internally resourced program.  I hope so.

___________________________

For more information about Paula or to get in touch with her, see her website "Paula Rosch, Ideas that Grow" here.

It's fashionable to say "really?" in a new way.

The old way of saying "really?" meant (roughly)

Wow, that's interesting.  Thanks!

As in:

"Did you know the Pittsburgh Pirates are the worst team in Christendom?

"Really!"

The new way of saying "really?" means (roughly),

"That's what you're going with?  I wouldn't have made that choice.  I wonder if you're an idiot."

As in:

"I'm thinking about moving to Connecticut."

"Really." 

The first really is using spoken with the upward lilt of a question.  The second really usually comes with an emphatic downturn in tone.  (It's heavy with scorn.)

I'm not sure when this new really arrived.  Certainly, a tipping point came when Saturday Night Live began running "Really?!? with Seth and Amy."  Phrases dream of this kind of exposure.  To be blessed by Lorne Michaels.  To be lifted out of the obscurity.  "Really" went big time.

But it's not enough to be elevated by Lorne Michaels.  A phrase doesn't flourish unless it speaks to something in our culture.  And that's the question: what does the sudden popularity of this little phrase tell us about ourselves?

Well, certainly, it's a way of saying "you're a moron" without have to actually say "you're a moron."  But this isn't new.  Americans are always eager to pass judgment on one another's intelligence.  Especially if they can do so without provoking a brawl.

The new really doesn't just judge the speakers' intelligence but also their judgment.  As in, "I saw what you did there and frankly…"  This carries with it the still deeper implication, one that says, "We are all working from the same rule book.  So I know the options you had at your disposal.  And, frankly, you choose badly." 

And this raises an interesting possibility: that we are moving to a different kind of social order.  (I just know someone is going to leave a one word comment to this post: Really.)  Are we moving from a "first-really" to a "second-really" society.

In the "first-really society," we expect other people to be surprising, perhaps even inscrutable.  We don't know what they are thinking.  We don't presume to know their options or to second-guess their choices.  This is because in the first-really society, we don't share a rule book.  We may have a rough idea of what others are thinking, but not much more. 

The US has traditionally been a first-really society.  Because Americans have always been diverse, it's tough to make assumptions about who the other is.  Americans are pleased to be credulous.  We are happy when astonished.  This is part of the point of the exercise, part of the pleasure of living in a world that is dedictated to experiment, audacity, and dynamism.  You just never really know.  Americans are more interested in authenticity and spontaneity.  A first-really world suits us. 

In a second-really society, people are scrutable.  Traditionally, second-really societies are ritualized, hierarchical, court societies.  Everyone knows the rules of the social game.  They are watching one another play their assigned parts.  Everyone's "on the same page."  Britain has always been a "first-really" world, especially when compared to the US.  In most social situations, the British are in a position to second-guess a social choice.  (But, of course, they do not say "really."  They only think it.)

So the question is this: is the US moving from being a first-really society to a second-really society?  Is it moving from a place that is reckless in its curiosity and credulity to one that is much more mapped and scrutable?  Is this US a more knowledgable, shareable social world?  Perhaps we now more alike, better able see the choices others make and pass judgment.

I will leave it to readers to weigh in on why this might be.  Here are a couple of possibilities:

1) that our absolute sense of expansion is diminishing.  Frontiers, most of them anyhow, are disappearing.  We are losing the sense of America as a place that grows boundlessly and recklessly.  The rise of China and India takes away America's heavy-weight crown as the most ferociously expansive economy.  Except in the digital domain, Americans feels like a more scrutable place.  Maybe.  (I'm trying this one on.)

2) that America is less diverse from an immigration point of view.  Our strangers are less strange to us.  We can made assumptions about a shared rule book.

3) that Millennials, to the extent one can generalize, were perhaps more completely socialized than previously generations.  It's possible that they have a rule book previous generations did not.  Boomers and Gen Xers both cultivated a sense of the wilderness of the world.  (Very different wildernesses, to be sure.)

4) that everyone is better at culture, more nimble, better at empathy, less alarmed by difference.  We are citizens of many worlds.  We do not share a single rule book.  We have access to many rule books.

Your thoughts, please.

References

See Seth Myer and Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live here.

Anthropological dreams are made of this: helping Disney and Marvel manage their rapprochement.

Nothing short of heroic effort will do.  Disney is, after all, a pretty good marker for all that is mainstream about American culture.  Marvel is, by deliberate contrast, darker and less predictable.  One corporation turns in towards the gravitational center of our culture.  The other prefers to plot a course for the margin, for the uncharted, for the unknown.  I mean, this can't be a match made in heaven.  It's going to be tricky, complicated and, possibly, agonizing.

Right?

No, actually.  Stan Lee, god of the comix world, says the "synergy" between the two companies is "perfect."  And The Economist says a clash of cultures is unlikely.

Disney is no longer the control freak it was under its former boss, Michael Eisner.  His successor, Bob Iger, has turned out to be a relatively hands-off boss, with the Pixar acquisition a model of the sort of treatment Marvel can expect.

Hmm.  I wonder if it's not too soon to go leaping to conclusions.  It may well be true that Disney and Marvel will not suffer cultural differences of the big C kind.  The center-periphery distinction matters less and less.  Both parties have decoded the other.  So Disney and Marvel may occupy different cultural trajectories, but they need not be prisoners of their strengths.  What will vex and potentially undo this marriage is not the culture "out there," and their relative locations in our culture.  It's the culture "in there."

This is culture of the little "c" variety, the ones that define the corporate culture.  These are subtle and powerfully different.  Some are merely "tomato" and I say "tomaato," that sort of thing.  But others are fundamental differences of concept and problem solving.  These sound little but in the press of everyday work, they add up and occasionally tip over.  The difference between the two corporate culture is a little like the differences between the operating system of a PC and Apple.  Not so very different, but when you are working on the fly annoying as the dickens, and sometimes just completely wrongfooting. 

The differences of the corporate culture are subtle and deeply embedded.  Indeed they are so deeply buried they are impossible to see.  You cannot see them just by looking, anymore than you can work out the grammar of a speech just by speaking. 

No, the thing to do is send in a team for anthropologist who will dig out these assumptions, logics and subroutines (to say nothing of the mixed metaphors) and (wait for it) build a translation table for the two companies. 

Think of us as ferrets, but think of us.  Tom Guarriello, Mary Walker, Steve Portigal, Cheryl Swanson (for all of whom I speak without permission), and yours truly are standing by. 

References

Anonymous.  2009.  Of mouse and X-Men.  The Economist.  September5-11. p. 71. 

There are many apps for Twitter (Seesmic, etc.), but Tweetie is a thing of beauty.  As Brian Chen says,

Tweetie's interface is so clean you would think it came straight out of Apple headquarters.

The Windows world is clamoring for a PC Windows version of Tweetie, but it doesn't look its going to get one.  When Chen ask Loren Brichter about it, he said.

I’m a Mac and iPhone kind of guy, so probably not.  My philosophy has always been to build things that I would use myself.  If I start using Windows,or Linux or Android or the Pre for that matter, on a day-to-day basis, then yes, I’ll absolutely want to bring Tweetie over to those platforms.  Chances look slim though.

I wonder if this is culturally telling.  In another time, a guy like Brichter might be expected to pursue the Windows market.  That was name of the game.  Maximize your audience.  Grow the business.  Scale up.  Cash out. 

It wasn't just the name of the game.  It's the very logic, the deep presumption, of capitalism.  You were in it to win it.  The point of the exercise was to seize and then exploit opportunity.

But Loren sings a different song.  It sounds like he's happy to work to the limit of the world he cares about…and no farther.  He builds things he will use himself…and not otherwise.  It would take an extended interview to capture his motives in full.  (And it may just be that he does want to have to program for the Windows world.  And who could blame him for that?)  But it may be that he doesn't care about growth.  He is not looking for economic triumph.  He is looking for sufficiency. 

Will we see more of this?  I think we might.  We have a generation or two in place who are not much interested in the individualism that is red of tooth and claw.  They are happy to do well, but not less interested in "succeeding wildly."  They are looking perhaps for that sweet spot between too little and too much, between the privations that forces you to live at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and the surfeit of wealth that forces you to worry about how big the yacht should be. 

Well, we have had people who entertained this view for many years (and many generations).  I am wondering whether this group is growing.  Is this position less minor and more major?  Does it now have a shot it someday become the majority opinion?  This is where anthropology is obliged to hand things over to sociology.

As people seek intrinsic rewards over extrinsic rewards, this trend must grow.  After all, programming for Windows will take almost all the pleasure out of Brichter's work.  He will make much more money, but the cost will be high.  And that is surely one of the shifts going on here.  People like Brichter are measuring career objectives in a more complicated way, not just by wealth, but by satisfaction, bliss, colorful parachutes and other metrics. 

But there may also be a new idea of scale here.  "Good enough" and "just enough" are ideas we see breaking out all over.  Perhaps they are career and business objectives as well.  There is something happening here.  Or not.  What do you think?

References

Chen, Brian X.  2009.  Hands-on: Tweetie for Mac Shakes up Twitterverse.  Wired.  April 20, 2009.  here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Craig Swanson for telling me about Tweetie.

I spend the day in a room with the senior managers of a mid size company. 

It was interesting to see how many of their problems are not paradigmatic problems: issues you can get to the bottom of with due diligence, the right data, the application of hard thinking, and the customary approach.   

No, many of the problems these people are dealing with have an air of indeterminacy.  This is pre or post paradigmatic thinking.  It's hard to know exactly what the problem is.  It's tough to know which terms apply, how best to frame the issues, what the best perspective is.  In other words, this is not processual thinking.  This is developmentl, demanding, and entirely intellectual.

And poof, goes that favorite distinction between theory and application.   This work in industry is abstract, self scrutinizing, reflexive and foundational.  And this says, I think, that industry thinkers have an urgent need to the calm and resources of an academic setting.  They need moments of problem solving when they don't need to have an answer by the end of the business day.  They need to practice a little more intellectual "catch and release," when you form ideas and throw them back to see if they will ever return as plausible solutions.  They need to canvass their options more widely.

What they need is a sabbatical.  If youth is wasted on the young, sabbaticals are wasted on the academic.  I don't doubt that academics need them.  But I do think that industry types need them just as much, perhaps more.  The university needs to see these executives as their own Haley's comets, people who pass through the university world every 3 or 5 or 7 years before setting off again for another lap in the deep space of managerial experience. 

When does some university step up and make this possible?  This is a huge opportunity to change the fundamentals of executive education.  It is also a possibility to recruit a new group of alums. 

When does some corporation step up and make this possible?  As it is, every corporation is dangerously close to burning through its human capital as a result of over use and the failure to give respite.  When you think about how expensive it is to find the right person, to make them a full and useful member of the corporation, surely a sabbatical investment is merely good sense. 

But this is about something more than just protecting the resources of corporation.  It is also part of the process of equipping the corporation with people who have the resources and presence of mind to wrestle well with the most pressing problems at hand.  What's it worth when senior managers making their most important distinctions better?