Please come have a look at my latest post at the Harvard Business Review Blog, The Conversation. Click here.
I am trying to think through the argument made by Simon Reynolds in his new book Retromania.
Here’s the graphic I used.
Also please come have a look at the post I put up yesterday on Psychology Today. It’s about an anthropological oddity, that we should buff and polish every aspect of the social self except the voice.
Considering how much time and money we spend on hair, skin, teeth, clothing, scent, fitness, we ought to be working our voices like topiary.
I am now blogging for Psychology Today. And my first post is up. You will find it by CLICKING HERE.
It’s about a new hand gesture that I see people doing. I call it “The Polish” because it looks like the gesturer is polishing the air. Please have a look and let me know what you think.
Leora Kornfeld, Research Associate, Harvard Business School
Backgrounder:
The Minervas were created to encourage people to ask cultural questions and craft cultural answers.
Winners so far:
Juri Saar (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Reiko Waisglass (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Brent Shelkey (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Daniel Saunders (for the “JJ Abrams vs. Joss Whedon” contest)
Tim Sullivan (for the “Karen Black vs. Betty White” contest)
Lauren LaCascia (for the “Showtime vs. USA Networks” contest)
Diandra Mintz (for the “Showtime vs. USA Networks” contest)
Mark Boles (for the “Antique Roadshow vs. Pawn stars” contest)
Indy Neogy (for the “Nordic Noir” contest)
Judges so far:
Debbie Millman
Pamela DeCesare
Dan Formosa
Tom Guarriello
Scott Lerman
Richard Shear
All of the above are from the SVA branding program.
Also:
Rick Boyko, Director and Professor, VCU Brandcenter
Schuyler Brown, Skylab
Bryan Castaneda, Attorney At Law
Ana Domb, C3, MIT
Mark Earls, author, Herd
Brad Grossman, Grossman and Partners
Christine W. Huang, PSFK, Huffington Post and Global Hue
Living in Connecticut, you begin to master the subtleties of the world of the high-end automobile.
I don’t own one of these magnificent machines. But of necessity I have become their student.
So today, on the way to lunch, I was impressed to see a luxury car I did not recognize. On closer scrutiny it proved to be a Lincoln. ”Wow,” I thought, “they finally got something right.”
Cars represent an interesting chapter of the designification of America (by which I mean the new sophistication in matters of design that has comes to virtually every category of consumer good). They went from terrible to something less disagreeable and in some cases to something close to splendid.
Ford let the way here with success stories across their line of automobiles. All but the Lincoln that is. These have remained really horrible. Tone deaf. As if somehow, someone at Ford has taken the Lincoln line captive, perhaps casting it into a deep sleep preventing any participation in the design thinking revolution.
So I was thrilled, finally, to see a Lincoln that didn’t suck.
I asked the owner, “Hey, when did this come out?”
He looked at me with surprise and said, “This car is 10 years old.”
Ever think about making yourself really, really useful?
Here’s your chance.
Mariko Christine, a friend of a friend, is setting up the first Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab in Cambodia. The Lab exists to develop products/technologies/solutions for the BoP (base of the pyramid / rural poor). Mariko works for IDE, an international NGO. The Lab has support from the Stanford DSchool, MIT DLab, IDEO, among many other leading organizations and funders.
Mariko is looking for a Fellow to help launch the lab. It’s a one-year appointment. The Fellow will lead the design of and guide the research process for innovation projects. The Fellow will need practical social science and research expertise, and the ability to use design thinking to create tangible solutions to real-world problems.
Here is the “call for application” for this amazing position:
FELLOWSHIP:
Social Science Fellow – Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab
Interested in leading ground-breaking research in the developing world? Passionate about designing extremely affordable innovations to tackle problems that are of life-and-death importance?
We are building the first Human-Centered Design Innovation Lab in Cambodia. And we need you to help us launch it. IDE is looking for a social science expert (anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc). We seek a design-thinker, with 2-5 years practical experience in design research methods including research planning, field work/interviews/observations, and synthesis into design opportunities. You will be the lead social science and research expert on a multi-disciplinary team, based in Phnom Penh for a 1-year Fellowship.
This is an opportunity to work on real-world problems alongside a close-knit, diverse, and top-calibre team. You’ll wear many hats, including that of a coach, to grow HCD in Cambodia. You’ll conduct ground-breaking research within the Cambodian culture in order to turn the findings into tangible interventions that improve the lives of those who need it most.
Here is the British Prime Minister on a cause of recent mayhem in Tottenham and elsewhere.
“At the heart of all the violence sits the issue of the street gangs. Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes.
“They earn money through crime, particularly drugs and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader.
“They have blighted life on their estates with gang on gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders.
“In the last few days there is some evidence that they have been behind the coordination of the attacks on the Police and the looting that has followed.”
I expect Cameron is right about gangs as a cause of chaos. I also suspect that quite ordinary people got caught up in the event. And in this case the PM ought to be talking to Mark Earls.
It may be a two-stage kind of thing. Gangs ignite the occasion, supplying a license for unlicensed behavior and a tipping point. (See Bill Buford’s wonderful book Thugs on the first theme, and Malcolm Gladwell on the second.) That’s stage 1. Then comes stage 2, as “ordinary” people find that their moral tolerances and social understandings are suddenly “reset” by what the gangs have done.
I am using a machine metaphor (“reset”) rather than at a viral one (memes, contagion), etc. because the second group, ordinary people, are not in fact “infected.” Which is to say they are not taken by the virus.
They choose to follow the influence of the gang, to give themselves to the moment, and their willingness to follow and to give is itself shaped by social conditions, ideas, movements, in sum, the culture in place at the moment. And that means of course that the PM should be talking to Russell Davies.
Just so long as he knows we have trained professionals standing by.
References
Buford, Bill. 1991. Among the Thugs. London: Secker and Warburg.
Earls, Mark. 2009. Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. Wiley.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2002. The Tipping Point. Back Bay Books.
I was astounded recently to see a Pepsi ad that shows Santa on vacation somewhere in the Caribbean. There he is in a Hawaiian shirt, dancing in the sand, surrounded by noisy, happy sun-seekers. The tune is Montell Jordan’s new jack swing staple from 1995, “This is how we do it.”
Santa orders a Pepsi at the bar and the bartender says, “I thought you had a deal with . . . you know.” Santa replies, “I’m on vacation! Wanna have a little fun!”
In the history of cheeky ads, this is perhaps the cheekiest.
Leo Reynolds is interested in letters, numbers, circles, and circles in squares (among other things). And when he finds one of these, he takes a photograph.
Reynolds’ Flickr photostream stands at 83,470 photos. (To take this many photos we would have to take a photo every hour of the day for 9 years.)
But it’s not volume. It’s subject matter. What Reynolds especially likes, apparently, is repetition that creates diverse sets of the same thing. This gives him sameness and difference in roughly equal proportion
In this post, I offer an anthropological account of the entrepreneur, challenging the model proposed at TEDxOxford by Marc Ventresca of the Said business school. Please come have a look.
The new film, Another Earth, is about the sudden appearance of a new planet, floating in the heavens, not very far away (as pictured).
It is, apparently, a second earth that duplicates our own. They call it Earth 2.
“Who is your other you?” the film asks.
Once more popular culture, drawing from string theory, among other things, contemplates transformational options and multiple selves.
But it is not just popular culture that cares about the theme. It turns out the writer, star, and producer, Brit Marling, began her professional life as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
So she knows a thing or two about multiple selves and alternate realities.
Of course, Marling’s earth 1 (investment banking) and her earth 2 (Hollywood) are not duplicates. Being a citizen in good standing in both of them takes an unusual person, real transformational range, and a daunting act of reinvention.
It’s kind of wonderful that after Marling made the transition she wrote this filmic Valentine to alternate realities and the process of moving between them.
References
For more on the theme have a look at my book Transformations
Ooph. To be standing in the intersection, when the new comes roaring through. My hat, pipe and papers all went flying.
I finally, belatedly, got my invitation to Google + and I have been fiddling with it.
On first glance, it feels like an elegant restatement of the social media proposition.
Indeed, it so simplifies and clarifies that it may actually claim a “late adopter” advantage, forcing on Facebook and Twitter what Veblen once called “the penalty of taking the lead.”
The fun of being on Google+ as the moment is that it is filled with people doing “edge finding,” trying to figure it what it is, how it works, what you can make it do.
Please come find me there. And if you need an invitation, send me an email at grant27@gmail.com. (But I think by this name the gates may be open, no invitation required.)
USA Network is an answer to the question: what would TV look like if it were made by women? It is more emotionally interesting, more socially complex, more embedded in the world. It’s about character, and, yes, characters, and, here and there, it’s now in danger of jumping the shark.
If there were any doubt about the USA Network contribution to TV, it was removed by the recent launch of Necessary Roughness (Wednesday 10:00). This follows in the tradition of Fairly Legal. Both feature women as professional mediators who step into conflict and make talk do the work of confrontation. Good writing flourishes. Good acting flourishes. TV gets better.
But there is trouble. Just as USA Network goes from strength to strength, some of the workhorses are failing. I looked in on Burn Notice and Royal Pains this week and both are in danger of turning mechanical. The formula is showing. Disbelief is getting harder to suspend. In Royal Pains we can now see plot points coming a long way off, and the moments of urgency (a medical crisis of some kind) are now entirely paint by number and they leave this viewer wondering if I’ve got time to go make a sandwich. Burn Notice is still worse. The music comes up and people spring! into! action!, yelling, shouting, and blowing things up. And I think, “oh, definitely. I have time to make a sandwich and a blended beverage.”
This is perhaps a programming problem. Perhaps there is a constituency that will not tune in unless they get high drama and big explosions. They will sit through the dialogue and character(s) development, but that’s not why they’re there. You need to blow stuff up.
So now the creative challenge for CEO Bonnie Hammer is this: how to combined old-fashioned TV with new-fashioned TV in a manner that pleases the traditional constituency without making a more sophisticated constituency roll their eyes and think about sandwiches. One solution perhaps is to somehow make the drama and dialogue more seamless, to make them interpenetrating. Otherwise the action feels like a commercial break (and in a sense it is).
But not to worry. Suits (tonight on USA Networks at 10:00) is flat out wonderful. It is crafted, embedded, and (so far) unformed. And the performance by Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross has on several occasions left me speechless. Actually, it moved me to say to Pam with muttered astonishment, “is this kid good or what?” To which she replied, if memory serves, “Amazingly.”
Ok, so we need some dialogue coaching at our house. Or we can just keep watching USA Network.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. The Hammer Grammer: how to make culture. This Blog. Aug. 31. Click here.
