Archive for Dynamism watch
Catch and release, diffusion style
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Yesterday, at Truetalk, Tom Guarriello did a great reconstruction of
what it’s like to ride the diffusion curve.
He gives us an insider’s view of that human impulse for coolness, the one forces innovation through the system, turning something that is new and tantalizing into something that is tedious and laboriously obvious.
Tom’s phenomenological exercise also shows one of the impulses that makes our culture stream with change, the way we all contribute to the formation of a world that is never still.
Georg Simmel would love this piece. Dude! Beauty!
References
Guarriello, Tom. 2008. Adopt early, adopt often. True Talk. July 17, 2008. here.
Assumption hunters, a new consulting business?
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What is the most vexing problem in management today?
Next to setting our objectives, running a tight ship and meeting our numbers, I would argue that it’s watching out for the blind side hit.
By blind side hit, I mean the kind of thing that Google did to Microsoft, that Barak did to Hillary, that hip hop did to Levi-Strauss, that Snapple did to Coca-Cola.
Watching for blind side hits is difficult because it means knowing our assumptions. And this is hard because assumptions are not for knowing, they are for making. For instance, in the late 1980s, I don’t think anyone at Coke believed that a new brand could use the Mom and Pop corner store as a platform from which to stage an industry coup. I mean, get real. The Mom and Pop store was too small, too quirky, too amateur. Right? Wham! By the time, Coca-Cola understand what had happened to it, Snapple had stolen a march on the market.
The trouble with assumptions is that they are by definition invisible from view. (That’s why we call them "unknown unknowns.") We hold ideas about the world without full awareness of what these ideas are or how they make us vulnerable.
Oh, I hear a voice of skepticism. Smart companies and gifted managers ferret these assumptions out. I mean, isn’t that why we go to conferences? Well, sometimes. But did management find them soon enough? And did management discover all of them. Is there, somewhere out there on the far, invisible horizon, a tsunami headed our way? Sorry, but the bad news these days is always and unequivocally, "yes." Somewhere, way out there, there is an innovation that is eventually going to turn our business model upside down. It’s not a question of whether, it’s just a question of when.
So what to do. How about, for starters, this three step "assumption hunting" process?
1) ferret out the assumptions. Hire someone to go through the operation of daily business and capture every assumption. Philosophers are quite good at this. Anthropologists are very good at it. This is after all the way they study culture, which is, by and large, a set of assumptions that helps us think and act fluidly precisely because we don’t know we are making them.
2) identify the parts of the world that could present challenges. Figure out just what the challenge is and when and how it will "come ashore."
3) Keep watch with a big board. In effect, what we are doing is "sunsetting" our assumptions with a view to discovery when they reach they end of their useful lives.
If I were Pine and/or Gilmore, I would write the book, get on the lecture tour, build the consulting company, and make a fortune. But hey, reader, feel free.
Explanations
I took this photo with my iPhone, now equipped with a special feature (OS 1.1.7) that allows the camera to capture never-before-seen assumptions "on film." This particular assumption is large and powerful, and we were lucky to bag it. The boys in the lap are giving it a once over now.
Follow up
Those of you are wondering what happened yesterday when I was waiting for royalty at PJ Clarke’s in NYC. Nothing. But our guest didn’t show. I guess if you’re royalty, you’re allowed. Andrew Creighton (McCann Canada) and I took the opportunity to reinvent the universe over a couple of beers.
Odyssey or Arc
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In the Times today, David Brooks describes a new life stage, the
one that stands, he says, between adolescence and adulthood. Odyssey,
he calls it.
Odyssey is a time of upheaval and uncertainty, a transition phase. Patterns do not form. A sense of direction is hard to come by. Things seem suspended.
Most of all, the Odyssians experience a kind of fluidity.
Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
[...]
The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.
Social life is fluid. There’s been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers. Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.
I don’t doubt that Mr. Brooks is on to something. But I do wonder whether the things he attributes to the Odyssey phase of life, the uncertainty, indeterminacy, and fluidity, are not true of all the stages of life thereafter. Isn’t this just another way of talking about the dynamism that has descended on us all?
Mr. Brooks says it is "possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years." But exactly. Living in a cultural and political regime that turn on a time, occupying industries and corporations that may or may not be around in 5 years from now, vulnerable by international politics and globalized economies that can intrude at any moment, boomers don’t need to be paragons of empathy to know what it’s like to be an Odyssian. They live this condition most all the time.
I have great respect for Mr. Brooks, but on this assignment I couldn’t help wondering, "Where is Virginia Postrel when you need her."
References
Brooks, David. 2007. The Odyssey Years. The New York Times. October 9, 2007. here.
The corporate “bow wave” problem, aka the Postrel effect
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This morning I came down I-95 headed for JFK airport and my flight to
Mexico City. I passed Stamford, all it’s buildings (UBS, etc.) pressed
up against the highway like ponies at feeding time.
And I was thinking
we don’t love the corporation for its own sake. It’s not
intrinsically better as a form of organization. It’s just better than
the alternatives.
But this organizational form has very distinct problems, and it finds itself perpetually uneasy. The problem is that the better the corporation becomes, the more difficult it makes the world. As it gets swifter, smarter and more adaptive, it creates a world that becomes every more dynamic. (And the farther behind the mark falls the public sector, not for profit, organization.)
The corporation pushes the world to become more testing. In the process, it pushes itself systematically to the edge of its own incompetence. There are moments when it looks like absolute gains are possible. The telephone, computer, email, the advice of Peter Drucker or Tom Peters. Any one of these promises an opportunity for the corporation to pull ahead, to win a lead, to get "on top of things." But of course as every corporation uses its new advantage, it recreates a world beyond its grasp.
I am not sure what to call this problem. I was thinking of something like "The Problem of the Perpetual Last Mile (aka the Postrel Principle)." Or the "bow wave effect (aka the Postrel Principle)." The subtitle I choose to honor Virginia and Steve Postrel, two of the people best positioned to help us understand the problem. (See Virginia’s The Future and Enemies for essential reading on the problem.)
Any and all suggestions gratefully received. Maybe I will think of something on the way to Mexico City.
References
Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies. New York: The Free Press. [this may be imprecise in some of its particulars, I am sitting in an airport lounge, book title and author's name are correct, though.]
France at the intersection of anthropology and economics
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First, the economics:
In France,
- economic growth has fallen well below other industrialized nations
- the economy tumbled from 8th to 19th in national rankings of gross domestic product per head (over the last 25 years)
- youth unemployment stands at 22%
- France is the only eurozone country that has not reduced the financial weight of the state over the post 10 years.
- Government spending (54% of GDP) is among the highest in the world.
- The public sector employees 1/4 of the labor force
- State borrowing accounts for 66% of GDP. (The service charge for this debt is 40 billion euros.)
- France’s share of world exports fell 5% in the period 1999-2005.
- Morgan Stanley calls France the "New Sick Man of Europe"
Now the anthropology:
Last week, doing ethnographic interviews in Paris, I was told several times that the French are "equal."
To an outsider like me, this is improbable. Certainly, equality is there in the model of social democracy France has embraced. Yes, the French are equal before the law and their God. And yes, equality is there in the commitment to "egalite" that survives the revolution of the 18th century.
But evidence of inequality is everywhere. Indeed, the French insist on differences of class, status, wealth, power, and several kinds of capital.
Respondents would not to be dissuaded, and I got to thinking how it is the French might be said to be "equal." Here’s my guess, and it’s only a guess.
European hierarchies in the medieval and early modern periods used a relatively simple system of status marking: the notion of relative fineness. Those who ranked high exhibited fineness in their clothing, their food, the manners, their speech and their very bodies. Those who ranked low exhibited a relative coarseness in clothing, food, manners, speech and bodies. I will spare you the details except to say that fineness was finally a matter of intellectual, aesthetic, almost spiritual disposition. High standing people could make fine distinctions. Low standing people could not.
At some point, France constructed an idea of itself, its culture, its collectivity that broke with this longstanding historical convention. In France, according to this convention, everyone was capable of discerning and exhibiting fineness. Especially, in the domain of eating, food, cooking, cuisine, here the French were one. The table was the place were fineness was identified, discussed, shared, prized and that was just for starters. The main course had yet to come. (The democratization of fineness extends beyond food, of course. It is there in the language itself, which is why the lowliest clerk at the Tabac is entitled [obliged!] to sneer at our high school French.)
There was some period in which culture and economy worked hand in glove. Discernment and taste were national exports. Industries based on discernment and taste flourished. Wine, food stuffs, perfume, handbags, scarves, watches, and clothing brought in a fortune. The language itself exported well.
The grandeur that was the culture that was France…this was accessible to the rest of us, miserable cretins living in the far provinces. Everywhere in North America, there were little shrines everywhere, "French restaurants," we called them, places where middle class families could go to glimpse for a moment, to taste for a moment, what France had created with its national accomplishment. French restaurants were draped in seriousness and heavy red curtains. They were staffed by men with deep knowledge and great courtesy. The food was heavy and ornate. Tables groaned Silver, plate, and crystal. The whole thing was well off the Paris standard, of course, but obeisance was called for and obeisance was paid.
And some few years ago, we North Americans decided we couldn’t care less. Several culture trends made this restaurant and many of the exports of France look suddenly too…too. We decided that formality counted for less than informality. We shifted from ceremony to spontaneity as our preferred cultural mode. We gave up solemnity for something more winning and cheerful. We abandoned heavy foods for something lighter and more "fun." Most important, food became a place to experiment, and now the French looked, even after nouvelle cuisine, positively hide bound.
Bad for France. But not, one would have thought, intolerable. If France were committed to the creative destruction that most Western economies and cultures take for granted, this should have been a simple matter. Accept your losses, make your accommodations, and move on.
But in France this was not simple. It would have meant compromising the beautiful idea, the magnificent theater of French life. (And this is very beautiful indeed. Even the smallest details of the built world exhibits the French faculty for fineness. And you find yourself thinking, "ok, this is what it looks like, when everyone in a culture, over a very long period, cares about design and execution.")
This may be the only Western culture in which the phrase "creative destruction" is fully paradoxical. All of us balk for a moment at the phrase, but the French, I think, must just shake their heads and say, "no, it’s creative or it’s destructive." This is a culture that approaches perfection, and for a world like this all of the things that make other Western economies go, innovation, responsiveness, competition and innovations, these, in France, are wrong. These contradict the the French style of life.
The English could invent punk because there wasn’t very much to keep them from the aesthetic violence it required. The Germans could rebuild the nation state because all it demanded of them was that they tear down a place stinking of cabbage and soft coal. Americans could push us all down the bobsled of post modernity because all it meant was surviving the the bouleversement of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.
But the French, for them change must feel lapsarian, a fall from an exquisitely accomplished grace. The rest of us blunder from a uncertain present into the maw of a chaotic future, but then as one of my French respondents said, "it’s not like you’ve got very much to lose." The French, you see, pay dearly for change, and sometimes they just can’t bring themselves to budge.
References
Thornhill, John. 2007. Not working: why France may find its social model exacts too high a price. Financial Times. April 16, 2007, p. 9.
Scitovsky, dynamic design, and the Frankfurt shower head
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In The Joyless Economy, Scitovsky observed a problem in the consumer society: that the pleasure of ownership turns to mere comfort.
Here’s an example. We give up our Ford Focus and buy an Audi. We are immediately impressed by how much more fun it is to drive the Audi. It is better engineered, better built. But it is not very long before we forget the Focus. And eventually we come to take the Audi for granted. Our pleasure has turned to comfort.
I am a little suspicious of the argument as a general proposition. I own things that continue to give pleasure long after purchase. I love my ThinkPad. I love my new pen, a Parker Jotter (pictured). Inexpensive, a little inelegant, old fashioned, it is the perfect implement for the hard working ethnographer (and a lot likes its owner). I’ve had my Jotter for several months now and if anything I grow more fond of it.
(Scitovsky assumes that the meanings of the object are only those created by marketing and that these wear away with ownership. But we know perfectly well that our possessions take on new, more personal, meanings, and that good marketing "scores" them precisely so that they may do so. When this is the case, the first pleasure ownership is augmented by second and subsequent pleasures.)
But Scitovsky is on to something. I now live in a free standing house much roomier and better appointed than the little condo I had in Montreal. I have ceased to note the difference and no longer treasure more room, a back yard, the ability to walk to the Long Island sound. This pleasure has turned to comfort. My present cell phone is much better than my first cell phone but I do not give it credit for the difference. Pleasure is merely comfort.
And this brings me, of course, to the shower head of my room at the Hilton. For reasons of its own, it delivers an inconsistent temperature. Sometimes, the water is much hotter than I want. Sometimes, less. Generally, it circulates gently up and down this narrow range, but occasionally it spikes high, and I have to be quick about getting out of the way. (This turns out to be good training for the rest of the day.)
Now, I am pretty sure this is an accidental product feature. The water system of the hotel must deliver water at many temperatures to many rooms, so variation is inevitable. But this does have the effect of gently changing the temperature, and giving me the pleasure of reentry. As I return from too warm or too cold to "just right," I have the opportunity to appreciate "just right" all over again.
And I wonder of this is not a way of solving the Scitovsky problem. Could we build variation into product formula in order to remind the consumer of what they liked about the product in the first place?
Clearly, it doesn’t make any sense to hobble our Audi for some purposes that we might be reminded of its "go fast" ability in others. And indeed we don’t have to. Traffic congestion takes care of this. Variation is naturally occurring.
Similarly, I don’t want my Parker pen to skip periodically that I may reminded of its ability to write smoothly. But it might be possible to build in a shifting center of balance so that the pen feels differently in the hand from time to time. This would help remind me of how well it is designed. (Naturally, it should also be possible for me to lock in or release this ability as I want.)
I know that some companies are thinking about how they can allow the consumer to change the formula by, say, twisting the bottom of a can. But what I like about the Frankfurt shower head is precisely that my intervention is not required, that variation happens on its own.
I can see designers perhaps rising to this opportunity. After all, we do sometimes come to take for granted their best work. Work in a little variation, and we are returned to our first reaction of awe struck wonder. What designerly ego could resist this opportunity?
We could see a time when a variation cycle is a standard feature of design, and something we go looking for. (Of course, some will want something that remains precisely what it is and not another thing.) But on balance, I think variation might be the coming thing, and it represents a new challenge for the designer, yet another consideration that must be factored in. (Note to self: ask Holly Kretschmar at Ideo if there’s anything like this in the works.)
Ours is a culture that embraces variation, variety, change and even discontinuity. Sometimes this mean we prefer things to remain precisely what they are. But there will be moments when this immutability will make brands and products seem tedious and a little repetitive, as if they insist on making the same joke over and over again. Static products may eventually appear stingy and withholding. These will be products to avoid, for they do nothing in the face of the Scitovsky effect, blithely allowing pleasure to disappear into comfort.
References
Scitovsky, Tibor. 1992. The Joyless Economy. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
