I saw a dandy presentation in Boulder by Steve Clouthier.

It had a strange structure. Steve began with one image and stayed with that image for the entire 40 minutes of his talk.

When he wanted to make specific points, he would drop down on to one of the sections of this image, and an entire world would open up.  Finished there, he would climb back up to the entire image.

Steve’s presentation was given as if from Google Maps.  He was working from 31,000 feet.  When he needed to give us a finer view of his topic, he would drop down into it.  And then return.  

What I liked about this was that it broke from the seriality of a Powerpoint presentation.  You know, the one that forces us to move from slide to slide…and away from the "big picture."   

The image shows me giving a talk at MIT.  I am projected my talk as a tree diagram using Mind Manager.  This approach is a little like Steve’s.  It shows the entire argument at any given time.  And this allows the viewer to go back through and check all the subarguments, test the argument in it’s entirety.  It also has the advantage of tattooing passages from the image on my very bald head.  I am happy to serve the argument any way I can.

There are small and large advantages to the simultaneous view.  In certain liberal arts circles, the idea is to "release" the argument, using powers of evocation as much as denotation.  Arguments that are designed to unfold in this way are not well served by simultaneity.  Indeed, simultaneity is a little too effortful and obvious.

But this style really works in business schools and other institutions that prize themselves on clarity. This was one of the things I noticed moving from the Museum world to the Harvard Business School and then back to the Liberal Arts at McGill. In Museum circles, it is perfectly okay to speak discursively. And no one ever asks for clarification, as if this was perhaps a confession of intellectual insufficiency or just a matter of being a little obvious.

But at Harvard there was no shame at all in asking people to restate some part of the argument. The person making the request would almost always then look away and listen to the restatement with the utmost care. No shame at all. I guess you couldn’t ask for this sort of thing indefinitely without throwing your intellectual abilities into question.  But once or twice a session was perfectly ok.

And that’s, I think, because every argument is not so much an evocation of theoretical verities, niceties, or, indeed, advances, but a little machine.  And the listener was entitled to the specs for this machine. And a demonstration of how it works.  

At McGill, once more in the embrace of the liberal arts, I was returned to the world of the argument as flight of the pigeons. One turn over the audience and everyone pretty much knew what you meant.Specific details and propositions were entirely up to the listener. Nothing so obvious as restatement was ever permitted. I mean, really.

But there is another reason, I think, to encourage the use of Steve’s approach.  (The software in question, he tells me, is Prezi.) Seriality assumes an attention span, and I haven’t had one of those for some years now. And it’s not just me, I don’t think. How many of you "come to" in an auditorium thinking, "oh damn, what is this talk about again?" The great thing about simultaneity is that you don’t have to ask this question.  It’s all up there on the screen.  

Simultaneity is good for the big picture and it’s good for scrutinizing the finer points of the argument. And it’s a good way to deal that problem that some of us have with that…er…what was I saying again?

References

See more on the software in question here.

So I am in the United lounge at La Guardia (sp)  the other day.  And I hope to use the wireless system there.  And for a moment it works.  

T-mobile at my disposal.  

Not really.  I can’t make contact.  

And then, I can’t get out.

Mr. Impatient business man, I revert to my wireless carrier of choice, AT&T 

But T-Mobile won’t let go.

In fact, I can’t "get out" and make contact with AT&T because T-Mobile insists I must be trying to talk to it.

"You talking to me."  It is very like a scene out of Taxi Driver.  I am now in the hands of a maniac.

Normally, bygones would be bygones.  But no.  Every time I look at the little line of icons on Google Chrome, the place normally occupied by the Google M (for Gmail) is now occupied by that funny purple icon (as above).  

T-Mobile, to make absolutely clear that it is really very badly behaved has commandeered even the icons that once belonged to Google.  

Google, bless them, signed on to the digital world by saying "don’t be evil."  

Apparently, T-Mobile never got the memo.

This reads: "There is no greater beauty than that of."  So close to illumination and then..new sidewalk!

You are many hundreds of miles from Vancouver.  

You are in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of road so desolate it feels like something out of an X-Files episode. (Cue the X-Files orchestra for a few bars of that eerie theme music.)

There’s a mining camp at one end of the road and a mining camp at the other.  Most everyone here get an hourly wage. And the wage is generous.  These rough necks are paid like princes.  They start high.  (Who would come to this god forsaken place otherwise?)  And because there is nothing much to do here, they work extra hours most days and most weekends.  Add "time and a half" and "double time," and it’s not long before these people are worth a bundle. 

Periodically, they head for town.  For most the destination is Vancouver, many hundreds of miles away.  Guys, they are mostly guys, will hitchhike for a while. And they take buses when they must, and eventually they say, "F*ck it, I’m buying a car."  And they do.  They buy a Buick with all the trimmings.  And away they go.

The trouble is, the guys have been drinking since they left camp and by this time they are often blind drunk, so, well, it’s not uncommon to come off the road and wrap the Buick around a tree.

And here’s the weird part.  The guys don’t get the Buick fixed.  They just keep going.  What they have done to the Buick captures what they will do for the remainder of this trip to Vancouver and for the duration of their stay there.  

The "skid row" in Vancouver is there to greet them.  The card sharks, hookers, and bars are seasoned tourist professionals, skilled at various kinds of value transfer.  It will take a couple of weeks.   But eventually our guys will wake up in a gutter without a dime.  

And here’s the other weird part.  They will brush themselves off, and go back to the hinterland.  Some will do this many times over several decades.  Which is way there are so many cars rusting on the roads of the interior of BC.  

From an conventional point of view this is deeply irrational behavior.  Why endure the privations of life in the bush, and the exertion and the danger of this kind of labor, unless you are going to keep some part of what you earn? Surely, the point of coming here is to earn your way out.  Not to spend your way back in.  But the hinterland is a prison to which inmates keep returning by choice.  In a sensible world, people would come here just long enough to make enough to buy the motel, dry cleaning store, or bowling alley that will release them from wage labor forever.  But no, they take their stake and they squander it.  These guys seem bent on destroying wealth.  

Which brings us to Pirates.  I know you were waiting for the Pirate passage.  I’m reading a nice little book called And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis.  Here’s a passage.

After his raids, Captain Morgan and his men would sail to Port Royal to whore and drink and spend their money.  The more carelessly they could rid themselves of their gold, the happier they were.  "Wine and Women drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of them became reduced to Beggary," reported pirate chronicler Charles Leslie.  "They have been known to spend 2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night…"  Morgan "found many of his chief officers and soldiers reduced to their former state of indigence through their immoderate vices and debauchery."  Then they would pester him to get up a new fleet for further raids, "thereby to get something to expend anew in wine and strumpets."  (location circa 664 in the Kindle version of this book)

Which brings us back to British Columbia, and an aboriginal practice called "potlatch" when rival communities would take turns dumping Hudson Bay blankets and other valuables into the Pacific ocean.  One of the explanation for this practice is that it is undertaken as a very deliberate act of wealth destruction. ( I don’t know the literature here as well as I should so I am penciling these data in provisionally.)

This destruction of wealth is a wonderful thing.  Wealth for miners, pirates, and perhaps aboriginals is charged with potentiality.  To keep this wealth is to do its bidding.  Once you’ve made a small fortune in a logging camp, some convention says, you must leave the hinterland, pay that motel, and "start a new life."  Which these loggers and miners devoutly do not wish to do.  Hence those trips to town.  These loggers are fighting demon wealth.  

Our loggers, miners, pirates (and aboriginals?) are defending their way of life.  They are destroying the money that threatens it.  They can see the potentiality of all this wealth, they can feel the cultural instructions embedded in it, and they are damned if they will give in it.  Better, easier, truer to their life missions, to piss this money away.

Actually, there is nothing irrational about this behavior.  It has a job to do and it does well.  But there is no economic model that came help us retrieve the rationality of this behavior, I don’t believe.  To do this we need to look beyond "rationality" narrowly defined, beyond "interest" and "benefit" as it is usually construed. We need to capture the culture that supplies the meanings that shapes the lives that demands the destruction of wealth the results in all those rusted Buicks.  There’s a method to the madness.  In fact, it isn’t madness.  

Indeed, under carefully scrutiny a lot of economic behavior, even the b to b variation thereof, is not fully rational.  But when the economists find things that do not find the paradigm, they insist these are "irrational."  Um, but surely there is a grey area in between.  That economic actors are not rational doesn’t mean that are irrational.  The trouble is that the idea of rationality is so narrowly defined is to leave much of the human experience out of account.  It is true that actors are sometimes not rational but they are almost never not interested.  They are always driven by an idea, a concept, a preference, an "interest," and almost always this idea, concept, preference or interest comes from culture.

So when Adam Smith excises culture from the proposition in a sense he assumes what he means to prove.  And he leaves us with a model that can’t explain new Buicks any more than it can rusted ones.  I mean if transportation is the object of the exercise, there’s an awful lot chrome that doesn’t seem germane.  And no, we may not put the model on life support by evoking status competition and conspicuous consumption.  Nice try, Mr. Veblen but there are so many more cultural meanings besides status at issue in any give Buick that you did not so much rescue the model as cleared the way for a more thorough going assessment of its insufficiency.  

I guess this post is my way of saying there is a lot of learn from loggers, miners and pirates.  It’s just so very difficult to get them to come in for guest lectures.  

This reminded me of being on the Toronto Subway just after a Blue Jay World Series win. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, sharing the car with12 other people, also minding their own business.  This is a Toronto thing.  

When suddenly this guy, a Jamaican Canadian to judge by his accent, leapt up and began to berate us.  

What is the matter with you people?  You just won the World Series for crying out loud!  The World Series!  And you’re just sitting there.  What does it take to get you people out of your seats?  

We just sat there, blinking at him with confusion.  And stayed in our seats.  Even with encouragement, we would betray no happiness. 

Naturally, there were some Canadians somewhere carrying on with reckless, unreserved abandon.  But the statistical average is probably closer to what we say in the subway car.  World Series win.  Who hoo.  

This is a long standing problem for Canadians.  And it’s a vexing one.  You don’t have to be Emile Durkheim to observe that emotion matters when it comes to nationhood.  Truly, sometimes it matters too much, and produces the murderous episodes.

But more often it is the standard, necessary stuff of nationhood.  Collective matters are marked by collective enthusiasms and accomplishments, and these are marked by big, broad, unstinting expressions of shared emotion.  

I leave you with the question posed by the Jamaican Canadian: what is wrong with my home and native land? 

I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got 80 people in a room in NYC to talked culture, about being a Chief Culture Officer and showed them 320 slides over 6 hours.

Dreary?

Tedious?

Just not very interesting?

I am probably not the most credible source, but I think it went really well. 

The audience was really listening. Questions and comments were superb.

The evaluations coming back are really positive, including "It was worth the trip from Amsterdam."  That’s a good sign, right?

So we have proof of concept and want to stage the thing again relatively soon. It sounds like there may be interest in Austin, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, possibly.  We shall see.  

And then it was straight out of the Boot Camp classroom onto the train to Providence.  We did ethnographies on the street, in book stores and in coffee shops.  Then to Cambridge, Boston and Jamaican Plains.  Then we came back to New York City talking to people upscale bars in Soho and speakeasy places and other bars in Brooklyn.  I’m sorry not to have posted for the week. But it really was that absorbing.  It was 16 hours a day flat out.  

I can’t talk about the details.  But what made the week especially interesting was a really smart client and his consultant, also very smart.  The model was roughly: client at the center, his consultant in tight orbit and me in a looser orbit.  Data poured in from the outer ring.  Intelligence radiated out from the inner ring.  It’s a good way to study culture.  And, man, are things in play out there.  

I am hoping that one of these days, the client, the consultant and I can give you a fuller glimpse of how this worked. 

The room will fill with cultural references: Quaker, Snapple, Facebook, Obama, PepsiCo, Peter Arnell, HBO, Burn Notice, 30 Rock, the revenge movie, the new "enmeshed" male, Adbusters, David Hassellhoff, Chris Hughes, Claudia Kotchka, Silvia Lagnado, Paula Spear, Preppies, how restaurants form, how Frank Black became Hootie and the Blow Fish, among other things.

We will be talking about empathy, ethnography, noticing, forecasting, brain storming, presentation strategy, scenario building, to name a few.  But most of all we will be talking about how a CCO (Chief Culture Officer) can learn about culture, deliver it to the corporation, make it part of the corporation, and in the process, make the corporation something living and breathing.

Best of all, (because who wants to listen to me talk for a day) this will be a full collaborative undertaking.  With all the talent in the room, it is sure to be a dazzling conversation.

There are a few places left.  Come join us!  

The room is filled with around 25 people.  This room is mostly Boomers with 8 Gen Xers and 4 Gen Yers (aka Millennials). 

“I say we stay with John-Boy,” says the most powerful person in the room.  There is a pause as other Boomers nod their heads sagely.  Richard Thomas has been the voice of the brand for many years. 

But Generations X and Y are thinking, “Who the hell is John-Boy?”  They don’t say anything.  Then the penny drops.  “Oh, they must mean that guy Richard Thomas.”

Their confusion is forgivable.  Richard Thomas starred in a TV series called The Waltons, a show that ended in 1981.  That’s almost thirty years ago.   The oldest Generation Xer was 20 in 1981, the youngest was born that year.  No member of Generation Y was watching TV in 1981.  For Generation Z, Richard Thomas might as well be a Martian.

For half the room, Richard Thomas is just “some guy.”  Actually, he’s just “some guy” for half the country.  Certainly, it’s true that Boomers buy most of the luxury cars in this country, but this will not last.  And in the meantime, we have 3 generations listening to a voice that means nothing to them. 

And this is just odd.  As these markets mature towards the age and income, the corporation insists in addressing them in a voice they do not recognize. 

I believe this problem plays out in the corporate world several times a day.  Boomers make choice that work for their culture, for the world they know.  And the other half of the room (and the market) is left to wonder, “Who is the hell is John-Boy?”

The John-Boy problem is bigger than it seems.  The American corporation is not just bad at youth culture, it’s out of touch with a good deal of the American world.  It doesn’t have any real feeling for the ethnic variety of America, the alternative and indie movements, the constant ebb and flow of lifestyle, the churn in the sports world.  What is happening in the world of music, film, sports (post arena), art, and social media?  For that matter, what is happening in the kitchens of the American heartland?  Even this is changing.  Even this is mysterious.

The corporation needs to know.  It’s not enough to bring in the cool hunters and trend consultants.  These people have no vested interests.  Frankly, they disdain the corporation for being clueless.  No, the corporation need its own internal brain trust, stock of knowledge, and enduring mastery of American culture.  Anything else is just guessing.  And guessing is something the corporation is not allowed to do.  

It’s a documentary called Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness.  Melville Herskovits (1895-1963) established the African Studies Center at Northwestern, the first at any American university, and he wrote The Myth of the Negro Past, which help re-defined black history. 

Harvard history prof, Vincent Brown, calls Herskovits the "Elvis of African-American studies."  (Coincidentally, this wins our "best metaphor" award for Winter 2010.)  

Here’s what the Independent Lens says about the Herskovits accomplishment: 

When a white, Jewish intellectual named Melville Herskovits asserted in the 1940s that black culture was not pathological, but in fact grounded in deep African roots, he gave vital support to the civil rights movement and signaled the rise of identity politics. 

Pictured: Vincent Brown, Professor of History at Harvard and project advisor, Christine Herbes-Sommers, Executive Producer, and Llewellyn Smith, Director and Producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness.