Please come have a look at my latest post at the Harvard Business Review "Conversation."

I look at American Express's new innovation in the tourism space.  

With the Nextpedition, AmEx appears to be taking a Culturematic approach, removing the predictable and adding in surprise.

This approach to tourism actually goes beyond customization and give us an experience we don't know we want...until it arrives "just in time" and serves to delight us.  

See the post by CLICKING HERE.

My local library recently did a sleep over.  Not for local kids.  But their toys. 

Brilliant.  Here, I thought, was a brilliant little Culturematic to change the way people, and especially kids, thought about their library.

Please come to HBR and see the full essay.  Click here.  

Please come have a look at my essay on (what I take to be) a new profession for people educated in the humanities and social sciences.

I am arguing that they can serve as "assumption hunters."

Please come have a look.  You can find the essay by CLICKING HERE.

In Boston this January?
Come sit in on my course.
Here's the outline.

MIT CMS.S62
Special Subject: Comparative Media Studies
Time Machine: Building a model for predicting culture
Grant McCracken
Wed-Thu, Jan 18-19, 25-26, 1-2, 03-05:00pm, 4-231

Pre-register on WebSIS and attend first class.
Listeners allowed, space permitting
Prereq: Permission of instructor Qualitative and quantitative skills.
Level: U 3 units Standard A - F Grading Can be repeated for credit

As our culture becomes more diverse and changeable, cultural prediction becomes more urgent and difficult. The point of this course is to build a model for making predictions. We will proceed in a practical way, taking on "real world problems." How quickly could we have seen the influence Alice Waters and Chez Panisse were to have on American culture? Could we have predicted a shift in Hollywood that demoted the likes of Schwarzenegger and promoted the likes of Michael Cera? To build the model, aka “big board” or “time machine”, we have to solve theoretical and methodological problems: what is the unit of analysis, what are the best markers of adoption, what are the best metrics, how can we make and monitor predictions, how can we represent data according to best “infographic” practice? To my knowledge, a model like this has no precedent. Think of the course as something out of the early Soviet space program. The engineering will be dodgy. Failure is not unlikely. The process will be messy and frustrating. But the outcome is sure to be illuminating and instructive. Plus your heroism is guaranteed.
Contact: Grant McCracken

Here's my recent post on the HBR website.  

It's about a clever renovation at the St. Regis hotel.

This is, I believe, a great example of creating innovation through a knowledge of culture and a shift in perspective.

See the full text by CLICKING HERE.

I really love people who tweet from inside an event.

Here, first image, is someone tweeting from inside a visit to the printer. (Read from bottom to top.)  

[I apologize for the quality of this image.  I am using Skitch and WordPress, and this appears to be the best I can do.  Click on the image for clarity.]

Confined to 140 characters, a tiny keyboard, and the discomfort of texting while waiting and standing, this can't be ethnographic in any conventional sense.  But what it lacks in cultural background, it makes up in vividness and emotion.

Here, in the second image, is "Johann Gutenberg" reporting the frustrations of having to sit in a meeting that presumes to rally the troops with vapid, brainless generalities.  As Johann reminds us, it's like being forced to witness the death of your own intelligence.  

Working in the moment has a certain heroism.  'Johann" is acting as a kind of war correspondent, bravely posting under fire, vulnerable to discovery at any moment. 

"This close to heckling."  Brilliant.  

How many millions of times has this impulse gone repressed in corporate America. Well, why just corporate America?  Educational, medical, governmental America, too.  There is no shortage of stupid people keen to colonize our consciousness with their personal limitations.  

In a more perfect world, we would know who WWGD really is.  (I am betting he or she is not really a 15th century goldsmith, not unless someone got their time machine working.)   We would also know the person who staged the Sales 101 meeting.  The light of public revelation can sometimes discourage stupidity.  Not always but sometimes.

I believe Twitter sprang from a technology designed for emergency personnel, people who needed to send tiny messages in the heat of the moment to solve very immediate problems. But it is learning to serve other purposes, and in some cases, and the right hands, it becomes a new observation platform for the study of American culture.

My wife works at a place called Sterling Brands. Recently, the company next door, a fashion merchandizer, left some mannequins by the freight elevator.  

In no time at all, Sterling people had "liberated" the mannequins, spirited them into the office and pressed them into service.  They dressed them, reassembled them, animated them, reassigned their identities, and generally made them live.  The office bloomed with good ideas.

CLICK HERE for the way I wrote this up for the Harbard Business Review Blog.  

These mannequins worked as a kind of culturematic for Sterling.  They served as a spontaneous experiment.  No one could say ahead of time what people would do with these mannequins or the kinds of interactions and provocations they would create.  But stuff happened.  Creativity flowed.  The intellectual and the social capital of the firm grew.  The mannequins proved amazingly productive of meaning...considering the fact they just stand there.

The cancellation of the NBC show Prime Suspect is a puzzle worth working on.

There are three good reasons why the show should have succeeded.

1) It was really good television, with writing, acting and work so good that Pam and I just looked at one another after one episode, and said, "Wow."

2) It had a British precedent, starring Helen Mirren no less.  This served as a kind of trans-Atlantic proof of concept.  These British shows are not always reliable but they help suggest that a show can work...because it has worked. 

3) It had an American precedent.  The cable show The Closer worked roughly the same territory (female officer endures hostility of male colleagues before solidarity is established) and it won a large and devoted audience.

So why did Prime Suspect not flourish.  Who or what killed it?

There is some suspicion that the problem has to do with our sexism, and more specifically our reluctance to embrace the lead character (as played by Maria Bello).  

One internet observer said that the entire show was killed by Bello's choice of headgear. In his opinion, the thing that killed Prime Suspect was the hat.  

But I think we have moved beyond this.  Hats may be "unfeminine."  They be "unflattering." But they are not a deal breaker.  Viewers, and critics, are larger, less sexist, than this.  

In a nice essay, Melissa Silverstein suggests another reason.  She wonders whether American viewers are not yet ready for "a female character that is not 100% likeable. No matter how far we have come on TV with female characters we still are not there with having women who are not likeable."

This could be right.  Refusing to be entirely likeable is an act of self authorship.  The sexist model says that women should conform to social expectation whatever that expectation is. To refuse this is to exercise a self determination some viewers might find threatening.  

But there's another possibility, and that's that Prime Suspect didn't work because the Bello's character didn't care what we thought of her.  Detective Jane Timoney gives off what I now think of a very New York quality: as if to say, I am who I am and if you don't like it, too bad. This is sometimes offered belligerently by New Yorkers, but more often it comes across as the sober understanding that not everyone is going to like you, and while you wish that were otherwise, hey.  ("Hey" is the New Yorkers all-purpose word, and here it means, roughly, there are things in the world I can change, and things in the world I can't, and this is just one of the things I can't change.  It's a kind of resignation.)  This is unexceptional claim when made by a male New Yorker.  In a sexist culture, it is something else when made by a woman.

To be sure, this is a little like the likeable problem but it's a more radical proposition.  Not being entirely likable means that I harbor a quality or two you don't like.  Not caring what you think means that I don't care if none of my qualities appeal to you.  This self position is, for the purposes of this show, radically feminist to the extent that it says "social expectations and the sexist model are a matter of indifference to me.  I've moved on."

This is even more radical than the image of femaleness we are going to get in the forthcoming movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  This woman presents herself in a post-sexist language (tattoos and studs and haircuts) but she is engaging sexism by resisting it. The Bello/Timoney performance cuts itself away from the old regime.  It leaves the debate. And this is a more radical gesture, a more damning, refusal that any tattoo or stud. And this is to say that Bello/Timoney took up just about the most radical feminist one can take. Perhaps it's not surprising that Americans were taken aback.  All of us are post-sexist to some degree.  Only a some of us are post-sexist to this degree.

We have a series of experiments at work in our culture, as our best actresses take on roles and use them as laboratories of a kind.  "Can I be like this?" the actress asks. "Can/should/will women be like this?" everyone wonders.  And Prime Suspect gives us an answer.  Eventually our culture will catch up to Bello/Timoney.  At the moment she is ahead of the curve.   

Resolved: that big companies are better at innovation than small ones

PRO

Schumpeter in the Economist reports new research on innovation and the corporation, specifically the work of Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute

Mandel proposed three explanations for the big corporation as an engine of innovation:

1. The best path to economic growth is the creation of a new product category or operating system. Only big companies, like Apple and Google, can create these. (Plus, small companies may or may not be able to live in the shade of these giant oaks.)

2. Big companies do better in global marketplaces.

3. Only large companies have the scale to address big problems, and many of our our current problems are big problems (education, health care, environment).

Schumpeter adds three more:

4. Big companies have the resources to find and afford the best talent.

5. Big companies are learning to be more porous and more nimble.

6. Big companies now come scaling up out of small ones at a ferocious pace. Some of them remember their origins. They get large without growing out of their smallness.

CON

As Schumpeter notes, conventional wisdom holds that large companies are too slow and clumsy to be creative, that small is beautiful.

Indeed this wisdom is so conventional we tend more to assume than prove it. I wish I could recite all the evidence that supports the CONTRA case.

The only thing I can report is that several people inside the corporate and consulting world have told me how deeply frustrated they are by the corporation’s inability to innovate.

Indeed, to judge from these unscientific results, this is now a critical moment in the history of the corporation. Some few years ago (less than a decade) the corporation decided that innovation was the thing and it devoted itself to centers, institutes, laboratories, skunk works and a range of strategies and tactics meant to deliver innovations out like a major leaguer firing sunflower shells round the dugout.

Many corporations are now on notice: innovation is much harder than it looks. Much, much harder despite vast amounts of money and managerial initiative.  

A truth is dawning:

that the corporation can sometimes act like a gravitation field from which new ideas and products cannot escape. Someone has great ideas. Entire teams can have great ideas. But the corporation itself acts like a dark star. It does not create alternatives to itself. It consumes them.

How we do innovation in the corporation must remain high on the todo list for 2012.

Some time ago, I was trying to think about the structural effects of the digital age.  

What happens to our sense of self, I wondered, now that we have access to new media and new networks?

I came to the conclusion that selves were becoming "cloudy."

The world rewarded me with a stoney silence.  

No one, apparently, was prepared to buy the idea.

Fair enough.  You win some, you lose some.  I bow to the world's judgment.  

But today I came upon J. Andrew Hickey's post entitled The Information Generation.  

I was immediately taken by this remark:   

Then again, maybe I am too “connected”. Half of my daydreaming is spent in my head, the other half online. To an outsider – typically someone over forty – it must look strange. Blue links highlighted. Flashing windows. Twenty tabs open. Music playing. Headphones on. Lukewarm coffee on desk. Occasionally, I feel less like a person, and more like an amoeba that feeds on tweets, notifications, and followers.

Fair enough.  Not a "cloud" then, but an "amoeba."  What matters is some way to capture the new distributedness, porousness and malleableness of the self.  

For more of Hickey's very thoughtful contemplation of what it's like to live in a digital age, CLICK HERE.

The magnificent image is called Radio Silence.  It's made by Tatiana Plakhova.

For my thoughts on the "cloudy self," CLICK HERE.