I am in London this week, giving talks on Chief Culture Officer.
We will resume our regular broadcast schedule next week when I am back in the US.
Thanks for your patience.
This morning went straight from St. Paul’s Cathedral across the Thames to the Tate. Doctors say I’ll be fine.
There’s a nice moment in Holson’s recent article on Ann Coulter.
Coulter sends her drafts out to a small circle of friends, and there is one reaction she particularly prizes.
“Whenever I have hysterical messages on my answering machine telling me not to release my column, I think, ‘This is going to be a good one,’ ”
And this tells us she is, to use the handy anthropological term, a trickster. The first order of business is a reaction. Preferably outrage.
And this puts Coulter in a camp with Sarah Silverman, Tom Green, Sacha Baron Cohen, and even Johnny Knoxville. Perhaps also Nick Denton.
Anthropologists like tricksters because they operate as culture detectors. When Sarah Silverman says something outrageous, it is outrageous because she has broken a cultural rule. These rules are normally embedded in social life and deeply assumed by cultural actors. They become visible more in the breach than the observation.
So it is far to say that tricksters create a substantial social good. They help surface things that would otherwise remain obscure. But we should also note that for many Americans even a few second of a Sarah Silverman routine is vivid proof that American culture is in a tailspin. Between them these tricksters are responsible for creating as much horror as illumination. Which is, I guess, where Coulter comes in. If Cohen beards the Right, Coulter provokes the Left. And thus do the tectonic plates of ideology move ever farther apart.
Tricksters, can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
References
Holson, Laura M. 2010. “Ann Coulter: Not Done Yet.” The New York Times, October 8 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/fashion/10coulter.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss (Accessed October 27, 2010).
Kornfeld, Leora (2002) "The Teletrickster’s Way: Transcending the Rational and Reconstituting Media Discourse," Trickster’s Way.Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 3. Available at: http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/trickstersway/vol1/iss1/3
Last month, Tony Blair’s memoirs hit the book store.
Almost immediately some copies got reshelved.
A Journey got moved out of "Politics" into "Fantasy."
Into "Fairy Tales."
Into "Horror."
Into "Dark Fantasy."
Into "Crime."
As political protests go, this is something for nothing.
A lively and effective point is made at no cost.
Someone need only pick up the book in one section and move it to another.
Those who dislike Blair have made a point. In a public place. At no real expense. And at no risk. (Moving books between sections isn’t actionable. Not even in Britain.)
And of course, none of this is possible without the new media. Someone created a Facebook group called "Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops" and in almost no time it had 13,000 members.
"A Journey" cost Blair months and months of difficulty to write. It cost agents, editors, and publishers fair sums to bring to market. And all the protester needs to do is to walk the book from here to there. The gesture is easy. The coordination effortless. The point quite damaging.
But of course in a democracy we don’t want to police debate by costs of entry. We don’t want opinion confined by the obscurity of speaker or the expense of the media at his/her disposal. But it is not always pleasant to see what surfaces in public discourse now that there is virtual no barrier to entry. (Me, I think, Blair is probably an honorable man who served the British body politic at some personal expense. We vilify or mock him at our peril. Unless of course we don’t mind driving honorable people out of the political pool. We may not like Blair, but there’s a good chance we will hate the alternatives even more.)
But there is a cost here that’s not obvious. It is the intelligence with which the gesture is conceived and the skill with which it’s executed. And in this case, no complaints. The idea of reclassifying Blair’s book was fun, interesting, witty. It found a way to use the structure of the bookstore, and to the extent it mirrors the categories in our head, the structure of thought, to make a point. Well done.
Of course, the bookstore and those categories were just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity. And I don’t remember this happening before. So the anti-Blair campaigners get credit for the act of intelligence with which they saw what they could do.
Wit gives message a certain credibility. To be sure, it’s not exquisitely clever, but it is much better and more winning than graffiti scrawled on posters. And this gives it a place in discourse. People note it. The Times writes about it. I blog about it.
Even in the "wild west" of the new media, we earn our way in. And in this case, we earn our way in by grasping the structure of our culture and the opportunities it opens up.
Look, there’s a bookstore.
Look, they shelf books by category.
Look, some of these categories capture what I think is true about this book.
Something for nothing. But not something out of nothing. We have to know our culture to make it speak.
References
Enrich, David, and Paul Sonne. 2010. “Bicycle Mischief Targets Barclays.” wsj.com, September 18 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858304575498031387359768.html?KEYWORDS=barclays (Accessed September 19, 2010).
A couple of days ago, in the WSJ, I noticed an ad for Chevron. They claimed to be getting out of the dirty energy business into the clean energy business. The other day I was surprised to see that Nike Plus has embraced a new model that dispenses with one of their revenue sources, the chip.
Nimble business are learning to abandon the existing business model before someone rips it out from under them.
This marks a move away from the literalism of capitalism. The old corporation was founded to make a particular widget and these widgets came to define this corporation’s essential concept of itself, its identity, sometimes its very soul. People who made heavy equipment saw themselves (sexist language warning) as "tractor guys forever." A company like this might branch into monorails, say. But they were unlikely ever to contemplate book binding.
But I think that has to change. Especially if we are a big corporation. To survive in a really dynamic marketplace, we have to be prepared to reinvent ourselves very substantially. That might be the only path to survival. So the corporation can no longer say, "we’re in this business." The best it can hope for is, "we’re in business."
Even Theodore Levitt’s famous dictum, "What business are you in?" is beginning to feel a little literal. He asked this question of the people who owned the trains. When they came up with the wrong answer ("the train business?"), the Professor was obliged to chide them, "You are in the transporation business."
Yes, Levitt helped them out of the literalism, but "the transportation business" is still too narrow. Even this larger idea is too small.
The trouble here is that it is a deep familiarity with one particular industry or sector that makes some companies so good at what they do. The devil is in the details, and these companies know the details all the way down to the nitty gritty. This matters a lot less now that so much is outsourced, but this problem remains a problem. And I intend to set it aside.
I think every company has a purview. This is the part of the world that’s visible while it gets on with business as presently defined. (If we make heavy equipment, we can "see" monorails. Bookbinding, probably not.) The corporation doesn’t act on everything it sees in this purview but it has this ambit or peripheral knowledge. The purview is all the knowledge the corporation ends up knowing in order to know things it really needs to know about. Whew.
The trouble with the purview is that it may be partial but it’s just so very available. Indeed, the purview may even masquerade as a comprehensive view of the world. In any case, this is where the average corporation is going to go looking for new opportunities when it is having second thoughts about its present ones.
Bad luck. The purview is spectacularly partial knowledge. Nothing appears here unless it happens to be near useful knowledge. Or let’s put this another way. The corporation is a kind of glass bottom boat. It makes a window on the sea. But what gets into this window depends entirely on proximity. The new opportunity, the new industry, may well not be visible from here.
We know that there are very good reasons for the corporation to have something like a 360 degree view of the world. After all, blind side hits can come from anywhere. To pick them up early, we need to be looking everywhere. But now it looks as if there is a positive reason to have a comprehensive view of the world. Only this will guarantee that we see all our options in the event that we will have to up and suddenly change our stripes.
And this will take a Chief Culture Officer and a big board.
References
Levitt, Theodore. 1986. Marketing Imagination, New, Expanded Edition. Free Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer. Basic Books.
A couple of days ago, I speculated on why LeBron is so hated by some sports fans.
I suggested that he’s become a target for our animosity for athletes who sell their talents to the highest bidder.
Here is James’ answer to the animosity. With the help of Nike, and Wieden and Kennedy, he gives us a brilliant video and asks,
"What should I do?"
Some of the answer he contemplates: admit that he’s made mistakes, give us a history lesson, tell us how much fun we’ve had, and "have my tattoos removed" (image).
Poignantly, we see James in an empty room for his Hall of Fame induction and he asks, "should I really believe that I’ve ruined my legacy?"
It’s an effective piece of advertising. It makes you feel his pain. At the penultimate moment of the ad, James looks into the camera and you can feel his sincerity.
What’s clever about the spot is that it drives us towards an answer for this question. We end up thinking, "Well, James has the right to do whatever he wants to do. Fans have the right to be unhappy. But finally, we don’t have the right to say where he plays or finally who he is."
And this means the ad turns, almost inaudibly, on the cry of individualism. This is one of the bedrock convictions of our culture: that the individual has the right of self-determination, of self definition. It’s not for elites to tell us who we are. It’s not for ethnic groups, local communities or corporations. It’s not for parents. Nor for teachers. And it’s not, James is pointing out, for fans.
We honor this individualism much more in fact than in theory. But once you see it as a cultural value, you see it everywhere. Just the other day I found it in Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive.
Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from the changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you.
This is a compelling spot because it resorts to one of our foundational ideas. In the face of this value, we defer. Yes, we may resent James for having betrayed Cleveland. But we find this truth to be self-evident: the individual has the right of self determination.
Does Nike intend this message? I think they did. Davide Grasso, the VP of Global Brand Marketing, says the ad is meant to "amplify LeBron’s voice. We’re celebrating his courage to forge his own journey even when others may have disagreed with his decision. It’s this Just Do It spirt that defines LeBron and Nike as we strive to inspire all young athletes."
This is the hymn of individualism, note by note.
References
See the Rise video here http://bit.ly/cIlbuE
See the Nike Press Release (source of the Grasso quote) here http://counterkicks.com/2010/10/25/nike-lebron-rise-campaign-press-release/
Grove, Andrew S. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. Crown Business. Location in Kindle text, 201.
Thanks
Henri Weijo for remembering the post and sending me the clip.
The corporation is very good at problem solving.
Next to getting things done, this is what it does best.
The trouble is the problems are getting tougher.
This is exactly what we would expect. After all, the world is speeding up. Most corporations expect to reinvent themselves continually, and they do. This is what it is to live in the world that Tom (Peters) built.
In the event that someone missed the news, the business presses put us on notice with titles like "Faster," "Blur," "Out of Control," "Blown to Bits" "Fast Forward," "Creative Destruction." We are learning to live with dynamism.
Please have a look at my little model above.
I believe we’ve spent most of the last 20 years learning to live with life at (C). This is where problems are difficult but not intractable. They test our systems and our assumptions, but with a concerted effort we can put things right. Often the corporation will call in the consultants, send everyone off to a brainstorm or two, and search it’s soul until old models and assumptions are unrooted, and a new approach is put in place.
Whew! We’re good for 6 months.
Now is the time to prepare ourselves for living at (D). This is where the world inflicts upon us a blind side hit so grievous that we feel exactly like the quarterback who was just visited by a defensive end weighing 260 pounds and travelling at ten yards a second (over 40 yards). The coach asks "How many fingers?" The QB replies, "let me get back to you on that one."
We are now much better at opposable problem solving and creative thinking. We are better at collaboration, brainstorms and skunk works. We are better at "thinking outside the box," and a host of other cliches.
But we have gone a long way to go. The thing about (D) is that we have to think our way out of confusion. And the only way to do that is to embrace assumptions we know are wrong. And to put these assumptions into constellations we know are wrong.
We are terraforming. We are creating a great mass of bad ideas as a platform on which to create some good ideas. ??? (D) is now beginning to look more like (C). Eventually, this will give way to (B). And eventually, for a brief while, we will be at (A).
Now it used to be enough to build our new systems when we got to D. But it’s clear, I think, that we need a faster response time. We need a team of people who spend their professional lives creating new models, lots of new models, so that if and when the corporation finds itself at (D), it’s got alternative ideas at the ready. By this reckoning the corporation will now constantly entertain many visions of itself, so to protect against against intellectual stasis that comes from (D).
This Special Teams unit doesn’t have to have the perfect answer. (Guess who spent too much time watching football yesterday? How bout them Browns?) But it has several possible models, each of which is far enough along that the corporation can be returned to (C) and retrieved from the wilderness and the horror of (D). The trouble with (D) is that there is no platform. There’s just chaos. And failure.
Installation of new models, that’s another model. Someone from the Special Teams unit will suddenly appear at our desk. The conversation will go something like this,
"Oh oh. Special Teams. You people are never fun."
"We just want to put a new model in places. Not to worry. Won’t take long. You know, the way we’ve been thinking about product innovation? Ok. Here’s the new model. And you know the way we distinguished between the collaboration and competition? Big change there. Here’s the way it works now."
Remember when we used to terrify one another with stories of how the Japanese could re-engineer a product line with almost no downtime. That’s what we are looking at here. A kind of corporation reprogramming that can be made to happen almost in real time.
Technical change will continue to speed up. Cultural changes will continue to speed up. The corporation is going to have to make ready. It’s going to take on new order of intellectual difficulty. It’s going to need a new order of intellectual power. And, yes, it’s going to need a Special Teams unit.
References
Brown, Tim. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperBusiness.
Champy, James, and Nitin Nohria. 1996. Fast Forward: The Best Ideas on Managing Business Change. Harvard Business Press.
Cowen, Tyler. 2004. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton University Press.
Davis, Stan, and Christopher Meyer. 1999. Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy. 1st ed. Grand Central Publishing.
Evans, Philip, and Thomas S. Wurster. 1999. Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy. 1st ed. Harvard Business Press.
Foster, Richard, and Sarah Kaplan. 2004. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market–And How to Successfully Transform Them. Reprint. Crown Business.
Gleick, James. 2000. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. 1st ed. Vintage.
Grove, Andrew S. 1999. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. First. Crown Business.
Handy, Charles. 1995. The Age of Paradox. Harvard Business Press.
Handy, Charles. 1991. The Age of Unreason. 1st ed. Harvard Business Press.
Kelly, Kevin. 1995. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World. Basic Books.
Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press.
Martin, Roger L. 2009. Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. Harvard Business School Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Cultural Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peters, Tom. 2006. Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. DK.
Peters, Tom. 1988. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution. Harper Paperbacks.
Please have a look at my blog post at The Conversation at Harvard Business Review.
It’s about the cultural lessons to be extracted from the Fall season of TV.
There were 17 new shows with 58 shows returning.
Please click here.
We have two winners for the latest Minerva essay contest.
Lauren La Cascia and Diandra Mintz.
Hearty congratulations to them both. Here’s the question Lauren and Diandra took on.
The Essay question:
The Preamble:
The Big C, the new show starring the deeply talented Laura Linney gives us a glimpse of what is now possible on cable. It resembles a second show on Showtime, Weeds.
Together these shows give us a glimpse into the Showtime thinktank. (One of the principles, apparently: let’s see what happens to suburban living when we mix things up.)
There is a another experiment at work at USA Networks, from which a string of hits has recently issued (Burn Notice, Psych, Royal Pains, White Collar). (One of the principles, apparently, stay as far away from the suburbs as possible.)
The question:
1. Compare and contrast Showtime and USA Networks. Identify the grammar or algorithm that produces the shows in question. (Consider my "suburb" reference a hint, but merely one very rough indicator of the possibilities. Please do feel free to contradict me.)
2. What larger cultural significance do you attach to the fact that these two approaches to making TV now exist? Did they exist in the 20th century. Why do they exist now?
Conditions:
Fewer than 1000 words.
point form preferred.
points for being crisp and clear.
Contest winners
Contest winners will receive a Minerva (as pictured) and a place on the winner’s list.
Contest judges
Rick Boyko, Director and Professor, VCU Brandcenter
(Mr. Boyko recused himself because on of the essay contestants is a VCU student)
Schuyler Brown, Skylab
Bryan Castaneda
Ana Domb
Mark Earls, author, Herd
Brad Grossman, Grossman and Partners
Grant McCracken
Christine W. Huang, PSFK, Huffington Post and Global Hue
Steve Postrel
Previous Winners
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?)
Essay answer by Lauren La Cascia:
“You’re my livestock,” he slurs menacingly as the camera shows the victim’s silent screaming behind the cell glass.
In this first episode of Oz in 1997, a homophobic white supremacist repeatedly rapes and uses a Bic pen to brand a swastika on his cellmate’s buttocks after lights out. With the scene, HBO introduced its version of “original programming” to audiences—in both the unique and primary sense—forever changing television. It debuted the omniscient narrator, point of view camerawork, violence, hard language, male frontal nudity, drug use, homosexuality, mature content and veritè grittiness—all tropes usually reserved for cinema. Sex and the City and The Sopranos followed quickly, making clear HBO’s version of television meant new and different. And successful: once HBO proved risk-taking led to commercial and critical reward, Showtime followed their lead, first rebranding with the “No Limits” tagline in 1997, then launching the groundbreaking Queer as Folk in 2000.
Showtime is still applying cable’s “Is it new and different?” litmus test to great effect. Examining their current line-up, one can verify the shows have no obvious forerunners; imagined (Dexter), implausible (Weeds) and genre-blending (The Big C), the network has no trouble devising kooky premises and giving characters a long leash. This license allows shows to create themselves organically, to build long arcs while still delivering each week, to shock by exploring paths broadcast never could. On another level, Showtime’s thesis reveals a connection to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: to shred any idealized depiction of small-town American life left and expose the alienation, standardization and soullessness pervading actual existence. It finds the bizarre and alien—a drug-dealing mom, a serial killer who kills serial killers—contending always that uncanny inner lives belie generic exteriors.
If Showtime is about invention, USA Networks is about reinvention—of the police procedural, the medical drama, the spy thriller. Its programming has definite roots: Psych is made possible by Sherlock Holmes and the kitschiness of Columbo, while Royal Pains seems ripped from the headlines with the death of Michael Jackson highlighting concierge medicine; if Burn Notice is a hybrid of MacGyver and the Bourne franchise, then White Collar’s premise is a straight rip of Catch Me If You Can. By piggybacking off a lineage, USA wisely increases appeal. By executing their versions so well, they maintain broad acceptance and court more discerning segments. The retail industry coined the term “masstige” to illustrate this sweet spot between mass and prestige; USA is the Target of basic cable.
All the mainstream-cool shows in USA’s line-up offer a fresh take on classic escapism. Like much of the screen storytelling from the last century, concepts are built around idiosyncratic personalities barreling through implausible scenarios. The shows read as fiction, acted by “real characters,” and, in fact, two of their keystone programs—Burn Notice and Psych—have led to spin-off novel series, so easy is the leap from viewer to reader. Taking a cue from riskier programs pioneered by non-ad-supported channels like HBO and Showtime, USA’s update comes in execution: the in situ production design’s look and feel, better camerawork, well-researched stunts that border on just possible, witty quips we’d never be able to think of in the moment. The marinated slices of Miami or the Hamptons impart reality even to locals, and it’s this legitimacy that keeps the shows believable even if they aren’t probable. If Showtime is new and different, then USA is familiar but different.
The sturdiest common ground Showtime and USA share is in their mutual fascination with new beginnings: a cancer diagnosis is dropped on Laura Linney, Mary-Louise Parker’s husband dies, newly ex-spy, Jeffrey Donovan, must adapt to his burning, a confidence man is reborn on the straight and narrow. This need/desire of protagonists to reinvent themselves seems especially modern. Recent events, though, have necessitated adaptation at speeds and to degrees historically reserved by Industrial Revolutions and Iron Ages. Our concept of entertainment, too, likes characters to adjust as we have—to quickly-eclipsed digital advances, to terrorism, to economic slides, to mega natural disasters. The stories reflect our dynamism and explore what it means to survive financially, physically, professionally and emotionally in these times. We love seeing the steps and missteps taken to acclimate, the humor people can find in it all, the heartbreaking undercurrents as they beat back gloom. They thrive like phoenixes, whether criminal (Dexter, Weeds, Royal Pains, White Collar), cancer patient (The Big C) or hedonist (Californication).
In contrast, the latter 20th Century was static: the markets only went up, there was no lengthy war, kids were bored and television followed a formula. Sitcoms from the 1980s, in particular, dropped us into this familiar territory in medias mes. Full of stereotypes, programs didn’t require set-up or denouement because the concept stayed largely the same throughout: the Facts of Life girls never leave Eastland in Peekskill; the cast of Friends never changes apartments. Most of these beloved characters would fail in the wild like creatures bred in captivity. So inflexible were these sitcoms that sometimes entire shows had to be spun off to accommodate developments, like The Cosby Show’s begetting of A Different World as Denise heads to college; others died entirely trying to explore new directions, like The Brady Bunch, which couldn’t even accommodate the addition of another character, cousin Oliver. Of course execution matters, but it’s difficult to imagine a successful show today unable to handle such minor tweaks.
Perhaps we, dear viewers, have sophisticated or writers have exhausted all the iconic sitcom premises, but the old constructs seem unforgivably juvenile now. As viewers, we’re like middle-aged men who’ve finally started dating our age. And what a golden age it is. The modern situational comedy/dramedy has been redefined to include more complex, sticky and unpredictable situations. Unafraid of actual character development, writers reject the use of two-dimensional archetypes and trust viewers will join them in exploring the unchartered. Unfailingly, this new covenant between writer and viewer has brokered great television. Perhaps we all were branded in that opening episode of Oz, held in TV’s thrall since.
Essay answer by Diandra Mintz
The male and female fantasies of breaking traditional mores and what it means to be extraordinary.
Algorithm
Woman + composed suburban lifestyle + unexpected tragedy out of her control + newfound self-sufficiency + unorthodox redemption = Weeds, The Big C (Showtime)
Man + remarkable talent + fall from grace + sidekick who tempers and fuels man’s efforts + unorthodox redemption = Burn Notice, Psych, Royal Pains, White Collar (USA)
Ordinary vs. Extraordinary
Showtime gives us ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances. Nancy and Cathy are going about their lives when they suffer sudden and unexpected setbacks. They seem in no way equipped to deal with tragedy and yet their underlying resilience shines through. Conversely, USA portrays extraordinary people living in ordinary circumstances. Each protagonist possesses an innate talent honed over time through discipline and practice. Standouts in their fields, the men are resourceful and cunning when necessary to come out on top — with their wit and charm in tact.
Gender
There is a marked difference in the protagonists’ gender on each network that is echoed by the gender of the shows’ creators. Showtime’s programs are led by women both on and off-screen, while USA’s programs star men and were created by men. Furthermore, the role of gender is complicated on both networks as each protoganist’s progression is threatened and frustrated by the presence of the opposite sex.
On Showtime, the women have been in some way failed by the men in their lives and seek to take matters into their own hands. The women must overcome the shortcomings of the men who continue to surround them.
Self-Sufficiency
At the end of the first episode of The Big C, Laura Linney’s character pours her heart out to an unseen companion: “I’m warning you that this laughter might turn into a sob in a second.” With a wider shot, the companion is revealed to be her dog. Even if they want a shoulder to cry on, the women make do on their own, demonstrating self-sufficiency.
USA’s protagonists are cushioned by the presence of sidekicks. The sidekick serves a variety of purposes in each program, but across the board the most important task is keeping the main character grounded. At moments when the leading male may seem too quirky or start to veer off plan, the sidekick is there to reel him in and reinforce an objective.
Aspiration and Identification
Not just any actors, Linney and Mary Louise Parker are accomplished actors in their own rights. They made names for themselves long before Showtime came calling. Both actors have the clout to carry a show and the ability to engage an audience on the small screen over the course of an entire series.
In a different vein, relatively unknown actors portray the protagonists on USA series. The actors are good looking enough to be realistically desired by the opposite sex, but not too good looking as to alienate the same sex from identifying with them. In this regard, the shows take a step back from focusing too tightly on the main character and open up to the ensemble cast.
Echoes of the 90s
The programming on Showtime is an extension of an approach seen on the small screen in the form of Twin Peaks (1990-91) later in the decade on the silver screen in American Beauty (1999). David Lynch’s television series asked viewers to take a closer look at suburban life. Below the guise of a smooth veneer, character flaws bubble to the surface. The difference now, in 2010, is that we are painfully aware that things are not what they seem. Bubbles have burst and dips are doubling and we are ready to examine the traditions and ideals that have become cumbersome. While Parker and Linney’s faces are familiar, just as familiar are the darker underbellies exposed in the storylines. As a culture we are re-educating ourselves on what it means to be satisfied.
USA’s programs echo another sentiment of the early 90s represented in the television series MacGyver (1985-92). MacGyver followed ever-resourceful secret agent Angus MacGyver as he solved problems with nothing more than his scientific know-how and ability to improvise with everyday common items. When put to the test, the protagonist comes through no matter what it takes — a mantra especially relevant today when we are recalibrating our lifestyles and learning how to do more with less.
Earned Success and Everyday Heroism
In an era moving past reality television when just about anyone could get their fifteen minutes by being in the right place at right time, the programming on USA and Showtime reflect the common desire to see earned success. As a culture we have moved beyond ascribed fame and fortune and instead hold earned heroism in higher regard. We leap to hear the stories of everyday heroes like Chesley Sullenberger and Jaycee Dugard, who have each signed movie and book deals respectively. We understand that success won’t be handed to us, and there is an inherent value in what is rightfully earned.
USA and Showtime have defined algorithms that resonate with an audience that values the talented and irrepressible spirit. When the chips are down and our flaws are showing, there is the hope of an underlying resilience that will come through in the end. Just test us.
Congratulations to Lauren and Diandra.
I am not a gifted conversationalist.
I carry on every conversation as if it were bomb disposal.
One false move. One stray remark. And it’s all going to end in free fall.
This must be why I’ve always thought that social actors should have a "prompter" the way actor actors do.
You know, for those awful moments when we don’t know what to say.
The prompter would, er, prompt us.
"Say ‘I love your dress.’ No, dress!"
You often see people who have run out of things to say. Or you see people who have been driven back on the cliches.
Yesterday, thanks to fresh ethnographic wedding data from Tim Sullivan, I was tweeting about "Woo girls." These people are really running on empty. They are defined (perhaps unfairly) be the predictability of the things they say and the sounds they make. Indeed, these women are now the targets of TV satire. These women really need prompting.
Bar tenders are astoundingly good at creating and managing conversation. It is an unofficial part of their job description. I have sat with lots of them as they told me how they can see a twosome or a party of 4 coming undone. Their job is to intervene and reanimate the conversation. They supply this service so routinely we might as well call them emergency personnel standing by.
I’ve always felt that brands could and should get in on the act. After all, they are often keenly interested in the outcome of the event in question. Carbonated soft drinks are largely about making the effervescence of the product the effervescence of the event. Successful social events are good for the brand. The Coke brand is well served when things go better with Coke.
I have pitched more than one client on the idea that we could use cell phones to drop conversational prompts into social situations. If people wanted to, they could sign up for text messages and they could then speak the message that appeared on their phone. It would by funny and fun, and it would remove chuckleheads from harm’s way.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was to hear about the Conversacube. This is invented by Lauren McCarthy. This is how McCarthy describes her invention
The Conversacube is a small box meant to form the centerpiece of any conversation situation. The box sits in the middle of all conversants, with one face facing each person. Each outward face of the box has a small screen and a microphone embedded just inside. As the conversation progresses, each person is personally prompted with directions or lines to keep the conversation running seamlessly with minimal awkward or uncomfortable moments. The microphones monitor audio levels of each participant and the cube responds accordingly, adjusting prompts to enliven, mediate conflict, or balance conversation as necessary.
Brilliant or what? Marketers, start your engines.
References
Anonymous. n.d. "Woo girl" defined. Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo+girl
A clip from How I Met Your Mother "Woo girls at the bar" http://fliiby.com/file/124875/35932da1l8.html
More details on the Conversacube and Ms. McCarthy here http://conversacube.com/
The misery at the Tribune continues. It stands accused of having created a frat house atmosphere.
David Carr of the New York Times reports an event that took place at the beginning of the regime of Randy Michaels, Tribune CEO. Shortly after his appointment, Michaels ran into several colleagues at the Intercontinental Hotel.
Carr gives us starkly different versions of what happened next.
After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.
“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Mr. Michaels, who otherwise declined to be interviewed, said through a spokesman, “I never made the comment allegedly attributed to me in January 2008 to a waitress at the InterContinental Hotel, and anyone who said I did so is either lying or mistaken.”
A clear case of "He said, He said." The accusation is detailed. The rebuttal is precise and emphatic.
Now, if we were Cal Lightman, the character on Lie to Me, modeled on the psychologist Paul Ekman, we might well have an opinion about which of these parties speaks the truth. But there is also an anthropological approach to the question.
I am not insisting on this interpretation. I am suggesting it. The reader may decide whether it is plausible as a way of assessing what may have happened that night at the Intercontinental…or not.
It is not a precise science, this sort of decoding, but here goes. There is something about the way the accuser describes the occasion that carries a certain plausibility. "Here was a guy…" We can hear the astonishment. A CEO offering to pay for nudity. In front of peers in a public place. With someone known to the peers. Astonishment becomes dismay, dismay becomes horror. This is not merely a description of the event. It is a record of it. The accusation doesn’t merely assert evidence. It contains evidence.
My argument: some accounts may be judged plausible because they carry traces of the event they report. And I think this record does. I believe we can feel something of the event. I believe we can hear the speaker’s emotions in the moment. I believe we can see the social event coming undone. I believe the event left an impression on the accuser and this impression has been transferred to his accusation. I believe the Intercontinental event left traces. Not in the physical world, but in the emotional one, I believe.
Let us make the argument negatively. If the accuser were lying, I think his account would be more descriptive, more informational. It would not carry these emotional and social data. Of course, gifted liars might be expected to reproduce emotional and social data in order to create plausibility. But they would have to be very gifted liars indeed to capture the emotions of the moment and the shambles of the event. The thing is most people aren’t sentient enough to fake this kind of emotional and social data. We just don’t understand our emotional and social lives that well.
Anyhow, you be the judge. Which of these accounts of the event do you find more compelling? Please let me know. (Tom Guarriello is my advisor in matters psychological. I’m hoping he’ll let us know what he thinks.)
References
Carr, David. 2010. “At Sam Zell’s Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture.” The New York Times, October 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media/06tribune.html?_r=3&ref=business (Accessed October 19, 2010).
Fantasy Football now entertains 27 million people, playing an average of 9 hours a week, in an industry valued at around $800 million. (All numbers are pretty much surmise. See references below.)
It reminds me of the Dole plantation story. Apparently, Dole would create a lot of juice while canning pineapples, and then just throw the juice into the ocean. Someone had the wit to say, "er, could I have that?" Mixed drinks and the International House of Pancakes would never be the same.
Professional football was throwing off lots of numbers. At the end of any given Sunday, it was possible to discover not just the points scored by every team, but the yards gained by every back, the number of interceptions thrown by every quarterback, the number of sacks recorded by every defensive end. (In American sports, everything gets counted.)
These numbers were being tossed into the ocean, as it were. Someone (Bob Winkenbach, to be precise) said, "could I have those numbers?" and he turned one real league into a virtual league…and an industry worth $800 million.
Fantasy football fractures league play into individual player stats and these are welded into new bundles to be "owned" and managed by the sports fan. It is a little like an exercise in string theory. It asks what if these 30 players played not for their respective teams but together on one of these limitless Fantasy teams. There are many, many thousands of teams in Fantasy football. There are many alternate realities there. We are effectively testing the alternate Sundays of a Randy Moss or a Brett Favre.
This is how ferociously inventive our culture is. We can recycle the "waste products" of existing cultural productions into the stuff of entirely new cultural productions. (Thus did Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel make theater out of people reading the autobiographies of celebrities.) We know practice a kind of cultural alchemy, creating one thing from another, and extracting new value in the process.
We know that this is driven by a deeper culture trend, our wish, in this case, not merely to be passive sports fan but actually to act as owners and managers. Ours is an expansionary individualism. Now province of experience can be denied us. Nothing we find curious or engaging anyhow. And we get the usual tensions as noted in the Fringe post of a couple of days ago. Fans now find themselves torn between rooting for Favre as a Viking and against him because he is owned by a Fantasy league competitor.
It’s astounding that Winkenbach thought of Fantasy football. To fracture one reality and to build many other realities out of the pieces. Genius, really.
References
Anonymous. n.d., Fantasy Football. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(American)
Bulmash, Greg. 2010. Fantasy Sports: The original social network. A Powerpoint deck on Slideshare. Aug. 19. http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/rtc123/fantasy-sports-the-original-social-network.
McCracken, Grant. 2010. Something out of nothing. The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. May 17. http://cultureby.com/2010/05/something-out-of-nothing-cultural-alchemy-in-a-celebrity-culture.html
Shontell, Alyson. 2010. “Fantasy Football Is An $800 Million Industry, But Who’s Profiting?.” Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/fantasy-football-is-an-800-million-industry-but-whos-profiting-2010-9 (Accessed October 18, 2010).
Yesterday I accused boomers of being out of touch with contemporary culture. I am right in this accusation, but I am wrong to be scornful.
The fact of the matter I am a boomer and I would be out of touch were it not for the fact that I am an anthropologist charged with the study of contemporary culture.
For some (and only some) purposes, we are most sentient about contemporary culture in our teen years. Not me. No, I managed to pass through my adolescence without learning very much about contemporary culture at all.
Oh, I had heard popular music and I watched TV And I had one friend who was a gifted blues guitarist and another who started one of Vancouver’s early Punk bands. But somehow none of this made much of an impression.
It was as if I was living in a bubble. I am not sure what I was thinking but I was not thinking about culture. (I do remember complaining to the blues guitarist that contemporary music didn’t have enough words.)
It wasn’t until I took a job as the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture that I began to get a clue. It was clear that I couldn’t run an ICC unless I had one, a clue that is. Research assistants Jeff Brown and Nick Harney, sat me down and took me through the culture of the moment. Together we created an exhibit on teens called "Coming of Age in the 1990s.
This means that I began to know about culture because someone paid me to learn it. This has not happens, I dare say, to many other boomers, so they can be forgiven having lost touch. They should be expected to have lost touch.
Since then I have studied culture for my own purposes and for various clients. Mark Earls and I did a fantastic ethnography of "cocktail culture" in Boston and New York. A great florescence has happened here and I have missed it entirely had a spirits company not paid me to go have a look. I have interviewed factory workers in the deep south, construction works in the North east, amateur investors in Kansas City, new media users in San Francisco, bar patrons in Chicago and London, photographers in Paris and Moscow, and householders in Belgium, China and Singapore.
I spend my professional life being pushed out of ignorance and being forced to notice that the world has changed. For a guy who came of age in a bubble, it’s been a really useful experience.
So I am wrong to sneer at boomers. I am wrong to be accusatory.
And this raises the question: how to get boomers back in the loop.
Post script
We are adding a new name to our blog roll. Please welcome Ruby Kariela. Ruby is 10 and I believe this makes her the youngest ethnographer working today. I like to think of her as "reporting from childhood" but she will have her own way of describing what she does. Please visit her blog at here.
I believe boomers have broken out of orbit. They know less and less about our culture.
As managers, they continue to make decisions that guide the corporation. Some of them go so far to insist that their detailed knowledge of the Kenny Loggins songbook and Law and Order episodes is quite enough to help them steer the corporation through the meteor field of contemporary culture. (Block that metaphor!)
But they are wrong. Boomer culture must not be mistaken for contemporary culture. (It is a diminishing subset.) Boomers are badly informed.
How do I know? I have a test.
Entertainment Weekly recently published a Power List that shows the "50 most powerful entertainers." If we look at the top 10 people in this list, there’s no real cause for alarm.
1. Johnny Depp
2. Lady Gaga
3. Oprah Winfrey
4. Simon Cowell
5. Will Smith
6. Robert Downey Jr.
7. Sandra Bullock
8. Ellen DeGeneres
9. Leonardo DiCaprio
10. Eminem
A boomer will recognize all the names on this list. But unless they are stealing cultural signals from their teenage sons and daughters, they will be a little vague on three names: Lady Gaga, Simon Cowell and Eminem.
They will have imperfect knowledge. The signature of imperfect knowledge is first emotional and then linquistic. When asked, "So have you heard of Eminem," the boomer will protest too much (i.e., defensively) with "Sure, I have." But the real give-away is always the admission of scant knowledge. As in, "Sure, I have. Isn’t he the one who…" Let’s agree. Imperfect knowledge is insufficient knowledge. It is not nearly ehough to make the corporation culturally alert.
So the report card here is something like C+ with a sternly worded note to parents that reads, "Bobbie Boomer must try harder!"
The situation gets much worse when we turn to the second list contained in EW, the 40 under 40. Here the top ten are:
1. Sam Worthington
2. Daniel Radcliffe
3. Taylor Lautner
4. Jaden Smith
5. Robert Pattinson
6. Orlando Bloom
7. Shia LaBeouf
8. Tobey Maguire
9. Hayden Christensen
The only certain knowledge here is Tobey Maquire and possibly Orlando Bloom. (Hayden Christensen should be here, but he seems to keep a low celebrity profile.) There are several soft spots. ("Robert Pattison, isn’t he like that Vampire guy?") And there are several complete blanks. Again unless they are stealing signals from their kids, boomers have never heard of Jaden Smith or Taylor Lautner.
Now, let’s be clear. Entertainment Weekly does not canvas the bohemian fringes of the film world. They are our pretty much our "magazine of record" when it comes to contemporary culture. For anyone with managerial responsibility to know only two names with certainty, well, that’s a problem.
The letter grade here is D and the note reads, "Please make an appointment to see me. I am beginning to see that letting Bobbie out of Junior High was a terrible mistake."
I’m not saying boomers should be forced to submit to show trials or forced exams. But I am saying that there is something odd about giving power to people who do not have reliable access to one of the streams of intelligence on which competitive success depends. I keep waiting for Gens X and Y to establish a Fifth Column in the corporation, to band together to and fight as one. Sorry, wrong movie.
I believe Buzz Word Bingo gets things started. It is a covert activity with which Gens X and Y agree to observe and comment on the cluelessness of the corporation. If there are other practices out there, I would love to hear of them.
The other question is how to bring boomers back into orbit. A subscription to Entertainment Weekly is a good place to start. This is a natural undertaking for Executive Education courses. Thoughts on our options here would also be welcome. That D can be improved.
References
Anonymous. 2010. “THE POWER LIST.” Entertainment Weekly, October 15 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20432613,00.html (Accessed October 14, 2010).
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Basic Books. At Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Chief-Culture-Officer-Breathing-Corporation/dp/0465018327.
Acknowlegments
Thanks to Hiten Samtani with whom I have been talking about the problem.
If you’re fan of the show, you know Fringe (Fox, Thursdays, 9:00) can be fiendishly interesting.
One of the pleasures of the show is the performance of Anna Torv (pictured).
Torv’s character Olivia exists in two, parallel worlds. So Torv must play Olivia twice. She must be the same person in both worlds, but the viewer also needs to see small, and telling, differences.
Managing two identities in this way makes the actress a little like the audience. Many of us are called upon to manage several identities at once. The differences can be small, but they must also be telling.
Torv was recently asked about playing the same person twice. You can hear in her answer some of the difficulty of the task. But you also hear her voice some of the advantages of the postmodern self, the ability to slide across perspectives, to see oneself with new clarity.
Anna: I was so excited when it first came up, and then we’ve kicked in. I haven’t really had the chance to play the Ultimate Olivia properly for herself. It’s been our Olivia, thinking that she’s the Ultimate Olivia. Then, the Ultimate Olivia pretending to be our Olivia. It’s been a little bit tough to work that line. What has been interesting is how clearly I am now seeing Olivia, which I don’t think you get to do. You don’t get those opportunities where you actually get to step back and look at a character from a different perspective while playing her. Each of them has their own impression of the other that they haven’t met really properly.
So, it’s been tough, but fun. The differences are subtle there. They both ended up in the same job. They both ended up to the point where they even had the same partners. It’s just gentle little shifts. It’s been fun. I think all the guys that have had that chance would say the same. It’s been so fun to play on the other side, which does feel like, “Wow, this is a completely different energy.” Then, I get to pop back. I’ve loved it.
Those who have not seen Fringe might want to have a look. Bill Gorman, at TV By The Numbers, said today the show’s in peril.
References
Gorman, Bill. 2010. “Will Fringe Or Lie To Me Be Cancelled Or Renewed?.” TV By The Numbers. http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/10/12/fox-fringe-new-season-same-bad-choice/67591 (Accessed October 13, 2010).
McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Identity-Construction-Contemporary-Culture/dp/0253219574/.
Radish, Christina. 2010. “Anna Torv Interview FRINGE Season Three.” Collider, October 13 http://www.collider.com/2010/10/13/anna-torv-interview-fringe-season-three/#more-54255 (Accessed October 13, 2010).
Imagine this.
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 they 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. They 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.
post script:
This post was erased by the Network Solutions debacle. I just retrieved it from Gmail.
post post script:
Mercedes made John Hamm the voice of the Mercedes ads.