Well, it worked
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.
We will have participants from Google, Coca-Cola, and Harvard Business School will be there. We will have people from small marketing houses, big agencies, new brands and old, consulting giants, design houses (large and small), web aggregators, and new media shops.
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!
Let’s say we are a luxury car company. We’re doing a year-end review of marketing. We’re looking at everything, including person who supplies the “voice over” for our ads.
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.
PBS has "must-see" viewing tonight. (It’s on at 11:00 on my PBS station in NYC. Check the PBS Independent Lens website here for local listings and more details.)
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.
The CCO boot camp happens this Saturday in New York City. Be there or be square.
In the morning, we will be looking at American culture.
Specifically we will be looking at 5 revolutions in American culture.
- American food
how we moved from Tang and TV dinners in the 1950s to artisanal bread and chocolate now.
- American home
how we moved from homeyness to the great room now.
(strange as it is to believe, celebrity culture is a factor here).
- American selves
how we moved from having single selves to multiple selves now.
- American communities
how we moved from accidental connections to social networks now
- American economies
how we are moving from (Adam) Smithian economies to gift economies
In the afternoon we will look at how the CCO puts the corporation in touch with American culture. More details to come this week.
My hero in all of this is Edward Tufte who has taught a one-day design course all over the world. I hope the boot camp will do for culture what Tufte does for design.
We have some very talented people attending. The discussion is going to be interesting and fun. The play book for the CCO is going to get richer and more detailed.
We have a few spaces left. Please come join us.
I know you have watched something on USA Networks. After all, its a hit machine. It has given us Burn Notice, White Collar, Royal Pains and In Plain Sight.
Bonnie Hammer (pictured) is the woman in charge. Ms. Hammer has a formula and I accepted this as the secret of her success.
But a couple of days ago, I was thinking about these programs and I noticed a similarity I had not seen before
See if you do too.
Burn Notice is about a former spy who has been booted out of the intelligence community and must now rely on his best friend, his sometime girl friend, and often his mother to continue in a low rent of espionage.
Royal Pains is about a doctor who was drummed out of his prestigious job as a New York City surgeon and must now rely on his brother, his girlfriend and a rich fella to eck out of living as a concierge doctor, low rent medicine indeed.
White Collar is about a jewel thief who has been fished out of jail by the FBI and can now do nothing on his own without the approval of his handler. He still gets up to crime but it’s now a far cry from the old days of a glamorous thief.
In Plain Sight is about a woman who works as Witness Relocation sheriff and because she, her mother, her sister are emotional train wrecks of one kind or another, she manages only with the help of her long suffering partner, her boss, her secretary and her boyfriend.
See a pattern? It is most clear in the case of the first three shows. A man riding high is brought low. He now survives by dint of his wits and only because he relies on people he never relied on before. This man is now thoroughly enmeshed in a small group of friends and relatives. Without them he is nothing.
Ok, let’s say you’re Monni Adams, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Professor Adams is famous for having detected and then explained patterns in Indonesian textiles. Explain, please, why this new pattern is so much in evidence in these USA Network shows.
What is happening in American culture that might help explain this new vision of our masculinity? After all, American culture has long been home to a notion of the unconstrained, rogue male. Consider all those tradtional TV heroes and movie stars, men who answered to no one. Why a new pattern? Why an enmeshed male?
Usual rules apply. Best answer gets a copy of Chief Culture Officer. Forgive me if I am a little slow getting to my "grading." It is easier to stage these contests than to adjudicate them.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. The Hammer Grammer. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. August 31. here.
