Wow, there’s going to be a lot of talent in the room.  People are signing up for the boot camp and I am impressed.

To take just one example, Cheryl Swanson will be there.

Cheryl runs a firm called Toniq and she’s a wonder, a veritable fountain on insight and ideas.  My wife recently did a project with her and came away shaking her head.  "You say something to Cheryl, and boom, she has all these ideas."

Having Cheryl in the "class room" is going to a little intimidating.  Same for Paul Melton and Richard Shear. These people know our culture.  Indeed, they know things I can only guess at.  More to the point, they have worked in and with this culture.

This will make the boot camp more a collaboration than people listening to Grant McCracken, and that’s as it should be. Everything that’s happen in the last 20 years in our culture tells us that the old model is dead.  The days of a passive audience listening quietly to a guru holding forth are gone.  

My job is to lay out a structure, offer an anthropological overview, and some starter ideas (see below).  We will as a group build the rest.  My hope, actually my only hope, is that we will treat this boot camp as a collaboration in the best Harvard Business School, "let’s-solve-this-problem-together" tradition.  We will build it together.  In the immortal words of Field of Dreams: "if you build it, they will come and built it some more."

I’ve been working on the first section of the boot camp this morning.  (I am in Seattle, staying at the Sorrento Hotel.  Perfectly charming place, complete with its own "night school" intellectual salon.  Hat’s off to Barbara Malone.)  Section 1 of the boot camp will open with an overview of American culture.  It will offer these five "portraits:"  (Give or take.  We will see how it looks when I have it completely sketched out.

1. the deindustrialization of food: roughly, how we got from Tang and TV dinners in the 1950s to artisanal bread and chocolate in the present day.  (This is our chance to see one big fat trend supplant another in our culture)

2. homeyness, rules for making the American home and family.  (This is a chance to see one of the oldest pieces of American culture.  This is what I call "slow culture" in the book.  It’s the kind of thing that gets ignored when what we know about culture comes only from cool hunters.  It also gives us a chance to look at the context with which brands, products and services must work if they are to "take" in American markets.)

3. the great room: the renovation of the American home.  (This is is the big culture movement that transformed the domestic space and it gives us a glimpse of how homeyness is being transformed by new forces in in American culture: feminism, new child rearing, American individualism, the "baggier" family, the celebrity culture, and, yes, artisanal chocolate again.)

4.  cloudy selves and cloudy groups.  This looks at how the digital world and new media have changed the way we act as individuals and as groups.  We are more messy and more multiple.  In know this sounds a little abstract.  Believe me, it’s very straight forward.  And I believe it contains secrets needed to master new media marketing and the new branding.  Here we are looking at what I believe are the most profound cultural effects of the digital revolution.)

5.  the gift economy.  The old world and logic of capitalism (the tit for tat exchange) is being challenged by a new approach to business.  In this new model, the corporation is obliged to create value and release it into the world.  Only if and when the consumer embraces it as content and distributes to network members does it return as value to the corporation.  This is the outcome of the more participatory consumer, the rise of cocreation, the advent of the more porous corporation, the effects of the new dynamism of our culture.  This is the cultural context, most broadly put, is the new context in which the corporation must learn to live if it is to flourish.

Whew, and that’s just section one.  (Maybe, I’ll take out a topic or two.)  The idea here is to cast the net wide and give us a ball park in which to work.  The subsequent sections will be how to monitor our culture has it continues to change, how to act on it, how to act in it, how to make the create in the subtitle of Chief Culture Officer, "a living, breathing corporation."

There’s a chance that this is going to be a thrilling engagement: a chance for smart people who get culture and who work with culture to work together and build new understandings.  There were moments at the University of Chicago when the debate was so charged and so interesting everyone came away with the sneaking suspicion that Anthropology in America had changed that afternoon.

I won’t insist on this grand comparison.  We will be more playful and more companion than anything that happens at the University of Chicago.  But I am thrilled the idea that this boot camp might be the place where the state of the marketing art changes.

I hope you will join us.  

The fear is that there will be an asymmetry 

participative as the HBS classroom