It must be Christmas.  The house is filling with catalogues. 

One of them is from Saks.  It’s called “Beach wear” and it features a model who is painful thin in a couple of shots.  She can’t weigh more than 100 pounds and because she is model-tall, she made me wince a little.   (It reminded me of that line from the movie Notting Hill.  Like Julie Roberts’ character, this girl looks like she has been “hungry for a decade.”)

We use ourselves as instruments.  And when we wince at a photo and when we are surprised by this reaction, we’ve been put on notice.  Something is changing.  A new expectation, a new standard of thinness, is taking up residence in us.  And because we pride ourselves on having relatively ordinary tastes, we know that what is happening to us must be happening to others.  Our culture is in transit.  We are rethinking ideal weights and what models should look like.

The old line was you couldn’t be too rich or too thin.  But in the last few years we have heard a protest come from inside and outside the fashion industry.  The incidence of bulimia and other afflictions have caused some to accuse the fashion world of manufacturing misery.  Silvia Lagnado noticed that only 2% of women believed they qualified as beautiful.  And from this came the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.  It’s not hard to see some of the things that are moving us to rethink ideal weights and what models should look like.

What a perfect little problem for a Chief Culture Officer.  The questions are straightforward.  When did we begin to rethink ideal weight?  Who and where are the early adopters?  How fast is this change moving?  What are the things that drive?   Is it moving across the world uniformly or does vary according to region, age, income, etc.  We need a model and some data, and we need to work with the problem until we get to know what it is as a problem.  And then we are in position to say to Saks or any given client, “for these purposes, this is the sweet spot.  Model weight should fall in this range.”

I wonder if one of the trends that matters here is a certain retreat from American extremism.  In the old model, America the plentiful, the one that celebrated the sheer scale and abundance of the American success story, everything drove to the extreme.  No one could be too thin.  No cars could be too large.   No teeth could be too white.   No lifestyle could be too lavish.  In the 1950s we were all Texans.  (I am of course exaggerating for effect.  I’m a Texan too.)

And now that the American dream is looking for ways to mediate and moderate itself, it may be that lots of decisions must now be made as judgment calls.  And in that event, we need someone who is prepared to say what the middle is and where the tails now are.   After all, if we leave the decision on “how thin” to the fashionistas, some of them of them are likely to create a catalogue that does not merely fail to sells clothing.  They are going to create a catalogue that does damage to the brand.  As in “Ew, Saks is a slave to fashion and they use slaves of fashion as their models.”

As America continues to change, more and more decisions will call for judgment, not extremes.  Call it Aristotle’s golden mean, call it Goldilocks’ preference, new rules will perhaps apply.

I was reading Katie Welch’s RT of a Seriouseats post about a Japanese restaurant.  What’s interesting about the restaurant is that it serves you what the last patron ordered.  It’s a kind of circle then.  You eat according to the tastes of the last patron.  And your choice defines what appears on the table of the next patron. 

It’s a funny little experiment.  And it reminded me how much we like things that happen in controlled accidents.  It posits a social interlinking, the cooperation of strangers.  And it makes us go “hmm.”  (See the post on culturematics below.)

Then I fell to thinking about being in a supermarket recently and listening to a mother interrogating her child.

She wanted to know that Bobbie wanted.

And because Bobbie was, like, 4, he really didn’t know what he wanted.

His mother pressed on. 

"Do you want the red one?  Or the green one?  Bobbie, listen to me.  The red one or the green one?"

Mom was insisting that Bobbie make a choice.  It sounded like cruelty.  But of course it isn’t.  It’s the way we rear our children. 

Because making choices is the way you are inducted into our culture and it is a good deal of what you do as a member of this culture.  (Assuming you have the good fortune of a disposable income.)

By our choices, consumer, spiritual, political, shall you know us.  It is the way we find, fashion, express and constantly tune selfhood. A good deal of our ideology of selfhood is tied up in the possession of preference and the exercise of choice.  (See Virginia Postrel’s excellent Substance of Style for more on this theme.)

Unlike most American social scientists, I actually believe respondents when they say these choices are meaningful and constructive of who they are.  Most intellectuals are way too skeptical to fall for that one.  You see, they have identity claims of their own to think about.  And believing the respondent on this one has the potential of making you look like a fool.  Better that you protect yourself from ridicule than make contact with the culture in which you are supposed to be expert.  (Bitter, oh, a little.)

Being a culture of choice has its consequences.  This is one of the reasons a single brand can generate so many SKUs (Stock Keeping Units).  It’s why in some restaurants people are expected to order off the menu…the better to show their individuality.  Even the exquisite choices of a large menu would be confining in a world where selfhood really flourishes (aka California).  Yes, it can look a little silly, and especially when it comes to tormenting Bobbie it can look a little cruel, but it is the way we do things.  It our thing.  Cosa Nostra. 

Back to that Japanese restaurant. It’s good fun.  It makes our meal a surprise.  It creates a little machine for making disorder out of order.

But I wonder if it isn’t also a little troubling, evidence perhaps of a cat amongst the pigeon. 

For we take these truths to be self evident:

that identify and selfhood matter

that identity and selfhood are about having preferences

that preferences are expressed, enacted, sharp-ended through choices,

I choose therefore I am.  (Or as I think Virginia puts this, “I like this, I’m like this.”)

So what does it mean that we are now prepared to forsake choice for accident.  (Check out the culturematic posts for more evidence of our love of accident.  I am not just resting this argument on a retweet about an ancient post about a single restaurant.  Honest.)

Accident might be the enemy of individualism.  If we are forsaking choice, we are forsaking the very apparatus we use to craft the self.  No?  Clearly, accident is better than ennui but I can’t help wondering whether it isn’t also the end of empire, a certain cultural regime that is.  If we cease making choices might we not begin to grow ever more faint, ever more Cheshire.   What happens to our individualism without choice?

Or maybe, and this is the more interesting anthropological possibility, we are finding new ways to invent the self.  It’s less about the choice we control and more about the accident we embrace.  And that would be really interesting. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Culturematics: a device for making culture in two easy steps.  This Blog.  here.

McCracken, Grant . 2009.  Culturematic, media and marketing.  This Blog.  here.

Postrel, Virginia.  The Substance of Style.  On Amazon here. 

See the Serious Eats post here. 

When Rosie O’Donnell attempted a variety show recently, some thought, “this could work!”  Perhaps the best way to speak to diverse audiences on TV was to take a “pipe line” approach.  Lots of acts.  Something for everyone.  Ed Sullivan all over again.

And then of course Rosie tanked.  And people said stuff like, “well, it’s Rosie.  I mean, she’s difficult.  She antagonizes.  Really, she was the worst possible choice.  For variety, you need to go broad.  Rosie just wasn’t broad enough.”

But now Jay Leno’s variety show is tanking, too.  Clearly, the problem with Rosie’s show wasn’t Rosie.  Apparently, broad isn’t working either.

So what’s the problem exactly? 

The problem is that Leno’s show sprang from automatic thinking.  It said, “Well, if our culture is fragmenting, let’s turn out TV that’s got something for everyone.”   Mass marketers found an excuse for more mass marketing!  Of course they leapt at it.

Automatic thinking is often stupid thinking, and this is especially moronic.  It manages to forget much of what we know about the world.   Like the fact that viewers are getting better at watching TV.  Like the fact that culture is getting better at culture, as Emily Nussbaum noted recently.  Like the fact that we are increasingly intolerant of bad TV unless its actually Slanket bad. 

And that’s the trouble with variety.  It is simple minded where we are smart.  It’s undiscriminating where we are exacting.  It jovial where we are skeptical.  The trouble is that it is various where we now prize a point of view.  Jon Steward is about everything in the world (or at least in the news), but this variety is always examined from particular point of view.  Each news story is not there to cover off another constituency but to exclude all other perspectives except Stewart’s own. 

It’s not a bad idea to have a pipe line.  It’s not wrong to embrace variety.  It just can’t look like variety, a bundle of diverse elements tossed liked a salad.  We are happy to consider everything at once but only from a single point of view. 

Jay Leno is worth talking about here.  After all, we know that this guy was once the comedian’s comedian.  When David Letterman was still funny, he told us that Jay Leno was his hero.  Then Leno dumbed himself down to make himself the king of late night.  He turned cerebral Jack Parr’s invention into the tele-visual equivalent of Ambien.  Jay’s being doing variety for years.

The old variety needed a genial host like Ed Sullivan.  The host was the common ground, the circus net, the continuity, the trusted supplier.  But new viewers don’t need these qualities anymore.  They much prefer someone with a brain used to sharpen a single point of view.  We may or may not embrace the point of view.  We may actually dislike the point of view.  But without it, the show in question turns to pointless, irritating mush, a exercise in the exhaustingly obvious.  (Think about the medical dramas before and after House.  Think of detective dramas before and after Homicide: Life on the Streets or perhaps something earlier.) 

This doesn’t seem like a fabulously complicated or original act of media criticism, except that it appears not to have occurred to anyone at NBC.  This brain trust doesn’t know the new truth of marketing.  Mass marketing is over.  Agreeable marketing is over.  Inclusive marketing is over.  Variety as variety is dead.  You are now particular or you’re a bore. 

References

Nassbaum, Emily.  2009.  When TV became art.  New York Magazine.  December 4.  here.

Technorati Tags: Jay Leno,slanket,NBC,marketing,programming,culture,TV,late night,Emily Nussbaum,Jack Parr,variety

“I phoned him multiple times.”

“The building has multiple exits.”

Not so long ago, the “multiple” in these sentences would have read “several.”

“I phoned him several times.”

“The building has several exits.”

Somehow, while we were not really paying attention, “multiple” stole into our language and displaced “several” in a bloodless coup. 

The question is why.  I think we can blame police language, as in the “victim was shot multiple times.”

And I think we know what’s happening here.  Police spokespeople like to dress their remarks in extra dignity and they do this by reaching for their “best” vocabulary.  People become persons or perpetrators.  Guns become firearms.  And they are not fired; they are “discharged.”  The victim has multiple wounds.  It just sounds more official, more commanding, more large and in charge.  Don’t worry.  Your city is safe with us. 

In the case of “I phoned him multiple times,” the speaker signals a certain impatience.  As if there is an absolute limit to the number of times we should have to phone someone and that limit has been reached.  Damnit! 

Why should we want to sound more official, more in control?  Why should we want to sound more bureaucratic.  Especially when the rest of the culture is becoming both more informal and more playful.  Why, exactly, would we want to resemble police spokespeople.  I have no answers here.  Only vexing, cultural questions. 

When I am at the post office in my little town in the Connecticut (and I’ve been there often the last couple of weeks), I notice that when my turn comes and I step up to the counter, the person behind me in line vectors off to the side so that they can see the postal employee serving me. 

In fact, I think they are actually staring at the postal employee.  I am not sure what the motive is, but some of these people give off a tang of self righteousness.  It’s as if they are insisting on their right to see and be seen. 

They must see the transaction happening at the counter because, hey, it’s standing between them and service.  So they have to make sure it’s all going to plan.  They want to scrutinize the postal employee in case they are slow or incompetent.  And I think some people come to the post office with the assumption that things will go badly, that the place is a ship of fools, a den of incompetence. 

And post patrons need to be seen because, well, this is America and we will be eclipsed by no one.  We will not wait quietly well someone dares waste our time.  We will be counted.  We will be seen.  That’s where that self righteousness comes in especially, as if people are saying, “Don’t you know who I am?”  Because we are not just time poor, we are time proud.  No one is going to waste our time.  That would be diminishing and Americans will not be diminished.

The contract of American life is that we will be given our due, that no man or woman can make plausible and enduring claims to be greater than ourselves.  Oh, someone might flash by in an expensive car.  We might even accept this as a legitimate act of superordination with our own fleeting envy or admiration.  And certainly certain groups systematically find themselves on the short end of the bargain.  Esteem is withheld from people of certain ages, classes, genders, and ethnicities.  But by and large and in principle, every American has the right to acknowledgement and respect uneclipsed by anyone else.  You may not be serving me, the notion seems to be, but by God you will not neglect me. 

So why would anyone imagine that the Post Office was a place likely to deny this fundamental right?  Is it because it’s a big bureaucracy that provokes this suspicion?  Is it because it is a government institution?  Is it because the post office is a place that threatens someone to make us all submit to the tyranny of rules that constrain what we can or can’t send through the mails?  Is it that in an age of Etsy customization, we are obliged, with some exceptions, to use uniform stamps in uniform denominations?  Talk about being elipsed.  Why, the place feels like a conspiracy designed to drive us into eclipse and perhaps obscure our very selfhood!  The nerve.  Don’t they know who we are?

It’s lovely to see the way postal employees solve this social problem, by narrowing their focus so that it’s a tiny field occupied only by them and the person at the counter.  They have found a way to shut out the presumptuous next in line.  And sometimes, I like to prolong this delicious bond by asking time consuming questions like, “Do you have a 63 cent stamp?  What about a 64 cent stamp?  Ok, what about…”  Just kidding.  I wouldn’t dare.

  One symptom that identifies kids on the Autism spectrum is the flapping of hands.  Kids with Autism and Asperger’s flap their hands a lot.  It’s their way of combating commotion in the world. You see, these kids have an order disorder.  Their world is a sensory and conceptual salad.  Flapping reproduces in their hands what’s happening in their heads.  It’s a distress flare, an act of protest, and the “handiest” way to will “all that” away   

Which brings us to Monk, the USA Network series that ends tonight at 10:00.  Monk is the defective detective par excellence.  He is imperiled by germs, dentists, sharp or pointed objects, milk, vomiting, death, snakes, crowds, heights, mushrooms, elevators and blankets.  No trace of Noir tough guy mastery or heroism here.  Monk is self absorbed, vulnerable, and, yes, clueless.  Noir detectives take on bigger themes.  The world for Monk is all about Monk.  (I know the show says he has OCD.  But anyone who knows anything about autism knows this character rides the spectrum like someone in a Neal Stephenson novel.)

Monk has an eye for detail and a need for order.  And criminal investigation is a kind of gift for him.  It’s an act of restitution from the world, an act of apology for being so refractory, so difficult.  Crimes introduce a highly managed form of disorder, perfect for sorting.  And crimes submit with great grace to “solving.”  People can be arrested.  Laws applied.  Sentences passed.  And, clank, a fantastically clear outcome: someone goes to jail for 917 days. (“Why can’t they round?” Monk wonders.)  Monk can never make everything in the great noisy world orderly, but a murder?  Dude! That is so easy.

So tonight, if you are not in a mood to add to the disorder of the world, you know, at a noisy restaurant or an energetic dance club, how about staying home and watching the last episode of Monk?  I suggest blanket and a cat.  Cocoa possibly.  It will be a small, tidy evening, perfect for celebrating the departure of our imperiled king of order.  Don’t forget to flap your hands good bye. 

References

Cowen, Tyler. 2009. Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Dutton.  here

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  The Monk in Nous.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of …  June 25, 2004.  here

Ok, here’s your assignment.

Have a look at the YouTube video here.

And decide.

Is it:

A. satire (shameless and savage)?

B. genuine (and a great example of “don’t try this at home” folk advertising)

Report back. Marshall the evidence.  Bang out an answer.  Limit is 200 words.  Smartest, funniest answer gets a copy of Chief Culture Officer and my undying admiration. 

Learning to detect real ads from faux ones?   A life skill, surely.

Conditions:

No searching around on line.  There is an answer there.  Dooh! 

Acknowledgement

Thanks for Leora Kornfeld for finding the video.

Chief Culture Officer is formally being published today.

Prepublication sales have been strong. We got to #2900 on the Amazon rankings and now hover around #25k.  

With an excerpt in Ad Age and a guest post in the Harvard Business Review and several interviews, profile has been building. We got a starred view in Publisher's Weekly.  I have given CCO talks in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Detroit.  I will be on the road most of January doing the same.  The Ning site is up and running. GrantMcCracken.com is in place.  The social media machinery is cranking up. 

Several people have made heroic efforts promoting the book.  A special thanks to Brad Berens and Howard Goldkrand for the astuteness of their advice and the generosity of their contacts.

I am asking you, dear reader, if you would stand up and be counted.  For a slender book, Chief Culture Officer has surprisingly grand ambitions.  It hopes to remake capitalism.  It hopes to change the face of the corporation.  It hopes to make our culture more interesting, inventive, and explosive.  

None of this is going to happen unless you are prepared to act as a booster and a buyes.  At risk of sounding like a PBS funding raising drive, please pick up the phone or click right here.  Consider buying copies for your clients and your patrons! (It makes a lovely Christmas, Hanuka, Kwanzaa gift.  I know this because everyone in my family is getting one.)

And now a small gesture of reciprocity (in this the new gift economy.

Long term readers of this blog will have watched while I struggled to formulate the ideas now appearing in published form.  They will remember when I made a call for anyone who knew agents and publishers in the publishing world.

It was frustrating trying to get momentum.  The fact that I had recently moved from Canada meant that my connections were especially modest.  

I learned that the right proposal was key for my hopes of finding a publisher, but I wasn't sure how to write one.  In the interests of helping other writers who are trying to "break into the biz," I am appending the proposal that helped win me a contract at Basic Books.  

I should say this is not the first edition, but the sixth.  My editor, Tim Sullivan, made several suggestions…several times.  (Once the proposal gets you in the door, it becomes the chief instruments with which your champion introduces the idea of the book to his or her colleagues.  Hence the revisions.)  

I should also say that the book changed substantially in the writing.  So what follows is only the most approximate guide to the contents of the book.  But it will give you an idea of what a proposal can look like.  

Chief Culture Officer

How to create a living, breathing corporation

A proposal

CONTACT:

Grant McCracken

grant27@gmaill

© Copyright 2008 Grant McCracken

[ page break here]

Table of Contents

Table of Contents. 2

Overview.. 3

Outline. 5

Biography: Grant McCracken. 9

Markets (and their metrics). 10

Competition, inspiration and precedent. 12

Marketing and promotion

Sample Chapter

2.1  Dan Wieden for Nike [see a post last week sometime for this chapter]. 19

Overview

Levi-Strauss missed the hip hop trend.  As rappers adopted baggy pants and gangster bling, Levi’s remained above the fray.  It cost the corporation $1 billion.  Afterwards, a team member complained, “Who knew baggy pants were a paradigm shift?”[1] 

Culture is an essential piece of the intelligence an organization needs in a turbulent world.  And you’d think we would have found a way to “factor it in” to the decisions make by an organization.  This has not happened.  Most C-suites (the managerial team made up of the CMO, CFO, CIO and CEO) are out of touch with culture.  They cannot factor in culture because they do not have an expert in the field. 

That’s not to say they don’t try, but organizations are reduced to several expedients.  They rely on an advertising agency, a designer, a consultant of some kind, or a cool hunter.[2]   In the worst case, someone says, “Let’s see what the intern thinks.”  (Now a million-dollar decision rests on a 20 year old.)

None of these strategies is sensible.  The corporation cannot hire in (or farm out) its cultural intelligence any more than it can surrender financial decisions to a visiting bookkeeper.  Some things are too important to be left to outsiders.  Some kinds of intelligence must be integral to the organization.   

That’s what I want to do with this book: invent an office and an officer—the Chief Culture Officer, the one person who can guide an organization’s efforts in decoding and using both trends and deep culture. 

We know why culture is missing from capitalism.  Adam Smith removed it.  He said, “To understand this thing called a market, we need two parties, engaged by interest, in an act of exchange…and that's all.  The social and cultural context we can leave aside.”[3]  It was a liberating idea, but a partial one.  We have been trying to recover from its partialness ever since. 

Smith’s ideas sufficient in the 18th century seemed to lose their candle power as markets shifted from a producer focus to a consumer focus, from supplying “needs” to supplying “wants.” Economic actors appeared driven by something larger than self interest.[4] 

Culture, though, never went away.  How could it?  Ironically, it was capitalists who addressed the culture deficit, smuggling it back into the pursuit of markets and profits.  The newspaperman Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) talked not about interest but interests.  The president of CBS, William S. Paley talked about taste.  Charles Revson of Revlon wasn’t interested in “interest” at all.  Something more was animating markets, he thought.  “In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”[5]

These capitalists were quietly, unofficially restoring the thing Smith had excised.  After all, to talk about taste is to talk about culture.  It is culture that informs the eye, supplies the imagination, and shapes desire.  It is culture that says what a “person” is and the ideas of gender, age, status, ethnicity, beauty, personality, and emotion we use to classify any particular person.[6]   Culture is the Platonic cave containing the “originals” from which our thoughts and feelings spring.  In the practice of capitalism, merchants cultivated an idea of culture and a way round Smith. 

This rehabilitation of Smith’s ideas continues by fits and starts.  We dolly back from interest to taste, and from taste to intellectual stop gaps of every kind: demographics, status, psychographics, lifestyle, personality, motivation, decision making, information processing, and attitudes.  All have been proposed as way to understand the secrets of the economy.  The business literature of the 20th century is littered with Eureka proposals, but from an anthropological point of view, all swap one partial view for another.

Patiently, culture waited for its apotheosis.  But there was always a newcomer, elbowing it out of the way.  “Objectives!” said Drucker.  “Quality!” said Deming.  “Reengineering!” said Hammer and Champy.  “Excellence!” said Peters.  “Strategy!” said Porter.  Always a new business guru arrived, bearing capitalism’s next fix…and a shiny new toy to mesmerize the C-suite.[7] 

Poor culture.  Excised by Smith, scorned by academics, eclipsed by business book thinkers, it was driven from view.  Were it not so useful to working capitalists, it might have disappeared from capitalism’s self concept altogether.  There it was, always invited to the party, but, no, never allowed to dance.

That’s the point of this book.  The corporation is now unprotected from the blind side hits that come from culture.  Our culture moves with trends.  These used to look like breakers off Waikiki, rolling into shore at regular intervals, enormous and well space.  Anyone with their wits about them could see a new trend and anticipate its movement.  Now trends come in all sizes from all directions.  Their duration and intensity is hard to anticipate and the costs of failure are high.  Quaker bought Snapple for $1.7 billion.  When they discovered that the brand had been abandoned by popular culture, they sold it, three years later, for $300 million.  A CCO would have saved Quaker $1.4 billion dollars.[8]

More important, the corporate America cannot see the opportunities culture opens up.   The solution is simple.  To the CEO, I say, appoint a Chief Culture Officer.  To those preparing to become a CCO, I say.  “You can do it.  I can help.”

Chief Culture Officer is a “big idea” business book.   And culture is a very big idea.  We think of it as the ocean floor, unknown and neglected, but for all that still 70% of the planet’s surface.  Chief Culture Officer can change the way the corporation understands consumers and navigates markets. 

And not a moment too soon.  It’s not as if capitalism doesn’t care about culture.  This is why Intel appointed Paul Otellini their CEO and Sony, Sir Howard Stringer.  But to get this right, the corporation will have to do more than shuffle the C-suite.  It will need to appoint a CCO.  Most of all, it will have to read this book.[9] 

Outline

Chief Culture Officer has 9 stories to tell. 

Section 1: CCO

1. Being Steve Jobs

According to the business press, the corporation sometimes depends on virtuosi of taste, someone who knows what consumers are thinking, where culture is going.  Thus does it lionize Steve Jobs at Apple, Richard Branson at Virgin, Martha Stewart at Omnicom, Les Moonves at CBS, and Sean Combs at Bad Boy Entertainment.  Without them, the argument goes, these companies are disoriented and in peril.  I beg to differ.  I believe these virtuosi are neither mysterious nor irreplaceable.  I believe what they do for the corporation can be done by a Chief Culture Officer.  For illustrative purposes, I will examine the contributions made by Steve Jobs, Mary Minnick and Geoffrey Frost to Apple, Coca-Cola and Motorola, respectively.

2. CCO at work

There are many virtuosi at work and they give us a rough idea of what the profession of the Chief Culture Officer will someday look like.   In this chapter, we will look at the work Dan Wieden did for Nike.  We will look at the slogan “Just Do It” as a clever cultural intervention, the spot called “Tag,” as something that resonates with the social networks that technologies like Facebook make possible.  We will look at the work of Lance Jensen for Volkswagen and specifically the ads called “Pink Moon” and “Synchronicity.”  Jensen found resonances with a difficult new cultural form even as it continued to form.  We will look at the recent work of Alex Bogusky for Microsoft, specifically the Seinfeld spot and the “I’m a PC” campaign.  Using culture, Bogusky gave Microsoft a way to tunnel out of its hated citadel.  Finally, we will look at the revolutionary work by A.G. Lafley, the CEO of P&G.  I believe this work as brought every packaged good company to the verge of hiring a CCO. 

Section 2: What a CCO needs to know

3. What a CCO needs to know (about culture in general)

How do we turn houses into homes?  How and why has the status of the pet changing in our world?  How do social networks rewire traditional culture?  To use a too mechanical metaphor, culture is the infrastructure of thought and feeling in our world that shapes how we think and feel.  It is most important to discriminate between “culture above” and “culture below.”  The former is all the fad and fashion that pours through our culture at any given moment, the hottest celebrities, the latest slang, the current bands, the movies that qualify as “hits.”  The CCO needs to have a rough idea of what the latest thing, and why it, and not something else, should have come swimming up out of the great churn of contemporary culture.  But more important is “culture below.”  They are the deeper aspects of culture, the tectonic plates that give us foundation and continuity.  (This is the stuff cool hunters and mavens do not know.)  This sort of thing is much less fashionable, but, as I say, more foundational. 

"Culture below" is, first, the foundational ideas we use to lump and split the human community.  In that corny old idea of the Hippie be-in.  Everyone stands in Golden Gate Park, all distinctions deliberately erased that all men and women might be rediscover one another as equals.  The rest of the time we are inclined to see differences, using ideas of class, gender, race, hipness, ethnicity, occupation, lifestyle, age, to group and distinguish as we go.  These ideas are always fluid, subject to negotiation, performance and proof.  But in the present day, they are especially open to various and disputed readings.  Some cultures are monolithic, well defined, relatively still.  Ours is various, very various and increasingly so.  “Culture below” is, second, the distinctions by which we lump and split time and space, the spiritual, natural, and urban worlds.  This is the grid for everything else, as it were.  ”Culture below” is, third, the beliefs, values, and assumptions, the evaluative ideas with which we produce and read social behavior.  Some cultures prize the individualistic, others something more collectivistic.  Some prize the “this worldly,” others prize the “other worldly.”  And so on.  “Culture below” is, fourth, the various codes, language, nonverbal language, material culture, with which messages are sent and received in our culture.  Simplifying a little, we could say culture is, first, the map of meanings with which we define and apportion our world.  Second, it is the machinery for meaning making with which we communicate within this world.  This sounds complicated and difficult.  And that this first responsibility of this book: to demonstrate that there’s nothing daunting here.  “Culture below” is merely the ideas and the machinery that make it possible for us to watch prime time TV.   

4. What a CCO needs to know (about our culture)

No book can offer an exhaustive account of America culture.  But 20 years of careful study puts me in a position to give a detailed account of diverse particulars: the cultural logic of the American home, celebrity culture, the preppie revolution in the 1980s, winged cars in the 1950s, the “alternative” revolution in the 1990s.  More exactly, I can say why Two and A Half Men is a hit, why Arrested Development was a failure, now consumers will react to the current downturn in the economy, what is driving the artisanal trend in food and hospitality, and why rapper Lil Wayne is the prince of the new “gift economy.”  I can give a cultural account of the drop in crime in the American city that the challenges the account given by Steven Levitt.  I have lots of work to draw on here. 

More specifically, Two and A Half Men is a meditation on the way we think about gender and the reformation in ideas of maleness and femaleness that have taken place in the last few years.  It's a long and detailed story, but we could say that many men decided that in the face of feminist complexity, it was simpler if they presented themselves as a big, dopey Labradors, friendly but not especially bright.  (We could see this coming in the TV show Home Improvement.  It approaches its apex in the new Gary Unmarried.)  It was a trade-off of a strategic kind.  Men were prepared to give away some of their credibility as social actors in return for the right to ignore some of the new rules of gender now in place.  A new diplomatic agreement had been arrived at.  Two and A Half Men is an interesting contribution to the debate.  "Charlie" is the original Labrador, craven, self interested, unapologetically appetitive.  But he is also witty, socially adroit and capable of small traces of extra-Labrador decency.   Somewhere in the “funny” here here is a cunning and successful piece of cultural machinery. 

5.  What a CCO needs to watch for

Several forces are reshaping contemporary culture: 1) a rising tide of cultural sophistication (Jenkins, Florida), a steady improvement in culture (Johnson), 3) new, easier, cheaper technologies of production (Bolter and Grusin), 4) social software and social utility that allows for collaboration (Shirky).  5) a relative decline of the influence of both the mainstream and the avant-garde and the explosive growth of market and cultural niches (McCracken).  Corporations are now obliged to participate in culture in a way never before required.  It is also called upon to share intellectual capital (Locke, Levine, Searls, and Weinberger, Weinberger, and Lessing).   It now must find its way in a “gift economy.”   This means releasing intellectual property into the world without any assurance of immediate return. (I like to think of these as “flights of value” in which exchange is no longer “direct” but now “generalized” and circular (Sahlins).  This sort of thing goes against the instincts of the corporation.  In sum, it may well be that there are new economies in the works, or at least new rules.  The corporation will find these innovations difficult.  It is now obliged to flourish in a culture and a commerce that is increasingly participative, exuberant, decentralized and dynamic.  In this new world, a CCO is not an ornament for the C-Suite but a necessary condition of the corporation’s survival.[10] 

Section 3: How to be a CCO

6. Listening posts

The CCO is obliged to cover a lot of water front.  Listening posts exist in the form of events like SxSW, Pop!Tech, Burning Man, TED, and the less formal gatherings staged by Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, and Tim O’Reilly.  There are the magazines that serve the same purpose: Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, I.D., Fast Company.  CCOs need websites like Core77 and bloggers like Russell Davies, Eric Nehrlich, Sarah Zupko and Virginia Postrel.  A CCO should also have a personal network of gifted respondents who can report on what is happening in the diverse provinces of contemporary culture.  I will the story of my friendship with Dave Dyment, a record store owner.  A CCO should participate in the networks that have emerged on their own.  Facebook, Shelfari, Ning, Vloggerheads, all make it easy to construct these networks and to find them.  In a perfect world, we would also build our own information-gathering devices, including a “big board.”[11]

By the 1990s, I became clear to me that there was a gigantic hole in my knowledge of popular culture.  I didn't really know anything about popular music.   To make matters worse, this was the era of the Pixies, Nirvana, and "alternative" music.  Some popular music was deliberately unpopular.   It was clear I needed a crash course.  As it happened, there was a little record store in my neighborhood (the Danforth in Toronto) and I just kind of threw myself on the mercy of one of the guys who worked there. Dave Dyment was superb, giving me things to listen to, drawing me out, leading through the history of popular music from Robert Johnson to Black Francis.  I like this story because it says frankly no one knows about contemporary culture because it just “comes to them.”  There is no such thing as “naturally hip."  (The hipster pretends otherwise of course, and we catch him in an act of what Castiglione called sprezzatura, the trick of concealing art with art.)  The point of this story is to say there is no shame in not knowing about contemporary culture.  Like any other body of knowledge, it is something to be learned.   

7. The “me” in method: CCO as instrument

The CCO must be a miracle of empathy, capable of imagining what is happening in contemporary culture without bias.  The CCO must be prepared to admit ignorance and ask naïve questions.  Learning about contemporary culture calls for a brute curiosity and the willingness to look a little clueless.  In this section I will talk about ethnography, the anthropological method for asking questions.  We will also talk about the “tool kit” of ideas that help spot the patterns to be found in contemporary culture.  The CCO must also have a high tolerance for complexity, ambiguity and contradiction.  Where once contemporary culture (aka the “mass culture” of the 1950s) encouraged a certain simplicity of approach, rewarding those prepared to “keep it simple, stupid,” now advantage goes to those who have a talent for managing paradox, contraction and noise.[12]  Finally, we will talk about the theories and methods of culture that are now in circulation but that do not work.

8. Building a “culture in here” that’s responsive to “culture out there”

A corporation can put itself in touch with contemporary culture by appointing a CCO.  In a more perfect world, it would make everyone in the corporation better at reading culture.  (If anthropology is too important to be left to the anthropologists, culture is too important to be left to the CCO.)  In other words, we need to put the culture inside the corporation in touch with the culture outside the corporation.  There are many ways of doing this.  For instance, we can ask every member of the corporation who has a natural enthusiasm (Jazz for one person, fusion cooking for another, Goth novels for a third) to listen on behalf of the corporation and report back.  Clearly, it’s not enough that people merely read more foodie magazines.  We need to train them so that they were now prepared to spot the changes.  And once everyone is playing a deputy CCO, we will want them to meet for “brown bag” lunches so that the person following Jazz can compare findings with the person following fusion cooking.  (What happens in one cultural domain often has resonances in another.)  The stock guru Peter Lynch likes to present himself as a guy who can spot investment opportunities while walking through a hardware store.  Appropriately trained, every member of the corporation could exercise this alertness all the time.  There are many benefits to this sort of thing.  One of them is that it gives the corporation a way to acknowledge parts of the employee that are now unacknowledged (and perhaps even frowned upon).  It encourages the corporation to engage (and, we must hope, reward) the “whole person.”  In the form of their innovation center called Clay Street, P&G has found a way to engage people for things not originally contained in their job description.  Apparently, this has an animating effect on corporate life.  Better actually than obligatory soft ball games. 

Section 4: CCO in practice

9. A day in the life of three CCOs

This chapter illustrates a day in the life of a CCO in a big corporation, a small start-up and a not-for-profit. 

10.  A day in the life of three C-Suites

This chapter illustrates the deliberations of three C-suites, now that there is a CCO in place.  I will look at a big corporation, a small start-up, and a not-for-profit. 

 

Biography for Grant McCracken

Research Affiliate, Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

[put email and phone number here]

Past Positions

·          Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Chicago

·          Visiting Scholar, Cambridge University

·          Director, Institute of Contemporary Culture, Royal Ontario Museum

·          Visiting Scholar, McGill University

·          Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School

Publication

·               7 books:   Culture & Consumption I (1988  Indiana University Press)

The Long Interview (1988 Sage)
Big Hair (1995 Penguin Canada)
Plenitude (1997 Periph. Fluide)
Culture & Consumption II (2006 Indiana University Press)
Flock and Flow (2006 Indiana University press)
Transformations: Identity construction in contemporary culture (IUP 2008)

·               German, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese translation

·               Best Paper Award, Journal of Consumer Research

·               blog: http://www.cultureby.com, 1100 entries, 1.4 million words, 6500 comments, 1.6 million views

Media Coverage

·               Oprah Winfrey, NY Times, LA Times, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Time, Washington Post

Speaking Engagements

·         PopTech, Fuse, iMedia Financial Services Summit, Global Business Network, Innovent Seminar (Nokia), Trend Watch (Nike), DMI, MSI, AIGA, ESOMAR, ICA, MITC3, Harvard ExEd, Smithsonian

Advisory Boards

·         Boston Beer Company, IBM Personal Computing Division, IBM Social Networking Advisory

Clients

·          Ameritrade

·          AT&T

·          Campbell Soup

·          Chiat Day

·          Chrysler

·          Coca-Cola Co.

·          Diageo

·          Eastman Kodak

·          Ford Motor Co.

·          HP

·          IBM

·          Kellogg’s

·          Kimberley Clark

·          Kraft

·          L’Oreal

·          McDonalds

·          Merck & Co.

·          Miller Lite

·          NY Historical Society

·          Nike

·          PBS

·          Procter & Gamble

·          Quaker Oats

·          Radcliffe College

·          Sesame Street

·          Subway

·          Timberland

·          Timex

·          Unilever

·          Winterthur Museum

Markets (and their metrics)

Market 1: Culture creatives

This book started as an aside.  I was giving a paper at the American Institute of Graphic Designers.  I used the phrase “Chief Culture Officer” casually, as an illustration.  Afterwards, at the cocktail hour, people kept coming up to me and said, “Now I get it.  That’s what I want to be when I grow up!  A Chief Culture Officer!  How do I do that?”

Designers would make great CCOs.  So would any “culture creative.” And there are many of these:  graphic designer, advertising planner, creative director, marketer, advertising executive, Hollywood studio head, film director, film writer,  magazine editor, journalist, industrial designer, comic, brand manager, public relations executive, clothing designer, TV producer, politician, agent, TV writer, retail designer, retail buyer, game creator, web designer, new media content creator, corporate strategist, interior designer, blog writer, trend watcher, real estate developer, or brand designer.  (Richard Florida says there are 38 million culture creatives in the U.S.[13])

Chief Culture Officer creates a new rung on the corporate hierarchy and it gives the young culture creative something to shoot for.  More important, it elevates the work of every creative in the corporation.  Cultural creatives are eager for their professional apotheosis.  Happily, they buy books.

Market 2: Generations X and Y  

Generations X and Y treat their knowledge of popular culture as a badge of pride.  It’s one of the ways they define themselves.  Imagine their surprise when they discover that this is not a study taken serious by higher education or the professional schools.  Chief Culture Officer honors this enthusiasm.  It gives them a professional opportunity to put their knowledge and expertise to work in the world.  (Generation X is about 51 million people.  Generation Y is about 75 million. )

Market 3: Baby Boomers  

Many Baby Boomers believe our culture has gone to “hell in a hand basket,” that it no longer makes sense.  Chief Culture Officer reveals the system in the noise.  It allows a generation to get back in the loop.  (There are 85 million boomers.)

Market 4: the passionate general reader

There are several books that would help us understand the puzzles and dynamism of our world.  Steven Levitt gave us the economist’s view in Freakonomics.  Malcolm Gladwell gave us a sociological view in the Tipping Point.  I believe the general reader is keen to hear the outlook of an anthropologist.   Chief Culture Officer will offer the general readers a glimpse of anthropology at work in the creation a new species of administrative life.  More than that, it will offer a kind of handbook, a Rosetta stone, the secret decoder ring, as it were, with which to think about contemporary culture.  This market includes the readers of The New Yorker (1 million), The Atlantic Monthly (.5 million) and The Wall Street Journal (about 2 million.)

Market 5: the business press reader

I can’t find any numbers here, but there is a substantial world of managers alert to new books that give them a strategic, tactical and competitive edge. 

Market 6: Deans at Business schools, Design schools, Law schools and Medical schools

There is a hole in the American curriculum.  Higher education has no formal way of understanding the role of culture in business, design, law or medicine.  The deans who manage professional schools make up a small audience.  But I think it’s fair to say that would make powerfully influential “early adopters.”  A book called Chief Culture Officer creates a new apical destination in the professional world.  When nervous parents ask, “But what can he do with a degree in English?” the decanal replay now can be, “But, Madam, he can become a CCO.” 

Market 7: If this is a recession

Many people sit out a recession by going back to school and getting another degree.  I would like to sell this book as the “home study” version of same.  Teaching yourself to be a CCO is a great way to prepare for better times.  
Competition, inspiration and precedent

Bolter, J. David and Richard Grusin.  1999.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Collins, Jim.  2001.  Good to great.  New York: Collins.
Deming, Edwards.  1982.  Out of the Crisis.  Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Drucker, Peter.  1954.  The Principles of Management.  New York: HarperCollins.
Florida, Richard.  2002.  The Rise of the Creative Class.  New York: Basic Books.  
Friedman, Thomas 2005.  The World is Flat.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 
Hammer, Michael and James Champy.  1993. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.  New York: Harper. 
Hamel, Gary and C.K. Prahalad.  1994.  Competing for the Future.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide.  New York: New York University Press,
Johnson, Steven.  2005.  Everything Bad is Good for You.  New York. Riverdale. 
Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne.  2005.  Blue Oceans Strategy.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 
Lafley, A.G. and Ram Charan.  2008.  The Game-changer.  How you can drive revenue and profit growth with innovation.  New York: Crown Business. 
Lessig, Lawrence.  2008.  Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.  New York: Penguin. 
Levitt, Steven. 2006.  Freakonomics. New York: William Morrow. 
Levitt, Theodore.  1983.  The Marketing Imagination.  New York: The Free Press. 
Locke, Christopher, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger.  2000. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.  New York: Basic Books. 
Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman.  1982.  In Search of Excellence.  New York: Harper Business.
Porter, Michael.  1980.  Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors.    New York: The Free Press. 
Senge, Peter.  1990.  The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization.  New York: Doubleday.
Shirky, Clay.  2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  New York: Penguin. 
 
Chief Culture Officer is a big-idea business book in the tradition of Christensen, Collins, Deming, Drucker, Hammer, Hamel, Kim, Lafley, Levitt, Peters, Porter and Senge.  It aims to change the theory and the practice of capitalism, the way corporations do business, and the intersection of culture and commerce in our world.  It has no precedent in the publishing world. 

Marketing and promotion

My website, The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, contains 1.4 million words in 1100 posts, 6500 comments from readers, & 1.6 million page-views. 

 
Media Connections
 
list the people you know in media here

Speaking

Show that you have spoken widely
 
Endorsements

mention the people who might be persuaded to write blurbs for the book.

[1] Espen, Hal. 1999. Levi’s Blues. New York Times Magazine. March 21, 1999: 54-59, p. 56.

[2] “As hip as it was, as exciting as it was, very few people were able to monetize anything that came out of that [cool hunting],” [Irma] Zandl explains.  “People were fed this line that if the cool hunter found it, then six months from now you would have a rip-roaring business.  And I think a lot of people got burned by that.” In Grossman, Lev.  2003. The Quest For Cool. Time Magazine. Vol. 48: September 8, 2003. 

[3] Forgive my daring paraphrase.  In Smith’s own words: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.  We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”  Smith, Adam.  1776/1904.  The Wealth of Nations.  London: Methuen, p. 44.

[4] Braudel, Fernand. 1973. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800.  translator Miriam Kochan.  London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, editors. 1993. Consumption and the World of Goods. London:  Routledge.   Bushman, Richard L. 1992. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.   Carson, Cary, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, editors. 1994. Of Consuming Interests: The style of life in the Eighteenth century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.  McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[5] For Lord Northcliffe’s approach, see Carey, John.  1992.  The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939.  London: Faber and Faber, p. 6.  For Paley’s approach, see Kammen, Michael.  1999.  American Culture, American Tastes: Social change and the 20^th century.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 43.  I cannot find a respectable source for the Revson quote. 

[6] “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.”  Geertz, Clifford. 1979. From the Native's Point of View: on the nature of anthropological understanding.  Interpretive Social Science. editors Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan, 225-241. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 229.  Kroeber, Albert L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions. New York: Random House.

[7] Drucker, Drucker, Peter.  1954.  The Principles of Management.  New York: HarperCollins.  Deming, Edwards.  1982.  Out of the Crisis.  Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.   Hammer, Michael and James Champy.  1993.  Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.  New York: Harper.   Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman.  1982.  In Search of Excellence.  New York: Harper Business.  Porter, Michael.  1998.  Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors.  New York: The Free Press. 

[8] Deighton, John.  2002.  How Snapple Got Its Juice Back. Harvard Business Review, January 2002, pp. 47-53.  Deighton, John. 1999. Snapple.  Harvard Business School Case Study. N9-599-126. July 8, 1999: 1-17. 

[9] “Through most of Intel's history, every new product followed a simple pattern: the engineers figured out what was possible and then told the marketing department what to sell. The company understood the importance of consumer focus groups, and employed ethnographers to study how people use computers, but their influence was minimal before Mr. Otellini took charge of the chip-making division. ‘We turned the process on its head,’ he said.” Rivlin, Gary and John Markoff. 2004. Can Mr. Chips Transform Intel? New York Times.  September 12, 2004.  “When the Welsh-born stringer became Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO in 2005, he pledged to make the company ‘cool again.’”  The revolution has failed.  “[Stringer] bristles every time he gets the question: Why can’t the Japanese electronics giant be more like Apple.”  Edwards, Cliff, Kenji Hall and Ronald Glover.  2008.  Sony Chases Apple’s Magic.  BusinessWeek.  November 10, 2008, pp.  48-51, p. 48. 

[10] Bolter, J. David and Richard Grusin.  1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.  Florida, Richard.  2002. The Rise of the Creative Class.  New York: Basic Books.  Jenkins, Henry.  1992.  Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.  New York: Routledge.  Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide.  New York: New York University Press.  Johnson, Steven.  2005.  Everything Bad is Good for You.  New York. Riverdale.  Lessig, Lawrence.  2008.  Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.  New York: Penguin.  Locke, Christopher, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger.  2000. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.  New York: Basic Books.  McCracken, Grant.  1997.  Plenitude.  Toronto: Periph. Fluide.    Sahlins, Marshall.  1971.  Stone Age Economics.  Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.  Shirky, Clay.  2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  New York: Penguin.  Weinberger, David.  2003.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web.  New York: Basic Books. 

[11] McCracken, Grant.  2006. Flock and Flow: predicting and managing change in a dynamic marketplace.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 117-131.

[12] Handy, Charles.  1994.  The Age of Paradox.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press.  Martin, Roger.  2007.  The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 

[13] Florida, Richard.  2002. The Rise of the Creative Class.  New York: Basic Books.

Pam persuaded me to watch the HBO documentary on the Mumbai massacre, Terror in Mumbai.  It is an astonishing piece of film making, and highly recommended.

There are two moments that jump out anthropologically.  The teens who come to create terror at the Oberoi hotel are for a few minutes stunned by the scale of the place, its luxury of its appointments, the size of the computer screens.  We can hear their handler in Pakistan trying by cell phone to talk them out of their astonishment and into action.  "Throw a grenade," he says.  "Just pull the pin."  But the kids are simply witless.  As products of the slums of Pakistan, they have never seen anything like this before.

In a sense, the unimaginable objects of the Oberoi "jam" their powers of action, indeed their very powers of observation.  This is how much our "perception" of the world depends on our "conception" of their world.  Here conception equals ideas in the mind and prior acquaintance in the world. 

Novelty is fine if we have fair warning.  We build a category in the mind, and when the novelty strikes us in the world, we are ready.  If we haven't any warning, that's ok, too.  Eventually, our exposure to the new will leave an ever larger "dint" in consciousness.  We will build a category out of sheer exposure.  Now we can see what we are looking at, and act on it.  We have been astonishment proofed.

A second moment shows astonishment on the Indian side.  As another group of teens burst into the railway station and begin firing, security forces installed there come to see what the commotion is.  And it's entirely clear what the commotion is.  There are kids with guns shooting and killing people.  But the security guys can't believe their eyes.  And they can't rouse themselves to action.  Some run away.  Other just stand there with their mouths open.  (Eventually, with great bravery a couple throw themselves into action.  One dies as a result.)

This shows no lack of courage.  It shows is a lack of training.  There is no precedent in conscious.  With its sound and horror, this event is too much for them.  The guards have not been proofed against astonishment. This is one reason military people are so very carefully trained.  With training, they have a category and a precedent.  Now it is possible to tell what they are looking at.  They can commit to action even when everything is strange.  Training prevents them from being taken captive by astonishment.

I think astonishment must have been at work when that couple stepped into the White House without invitation.  I expect some security guy looked at the tall, slender, elegant and very blond half of the twosome and thought, "hmm, she's gotta be ok." 

This guy had two categories at war in his head.  One was marked "trophy wife."  The other was marked "terrorist."  And given the architecture of these categories, there is no way the person who belongs to the first category can possibly belong to the second.  In this man's head, in our culture, these two categories are so defined as to be mutually exclusive.

We say things like "expect the unexpected."  But this is just brave talk.  We can't expect the unexpected, and not just for logical reasons.  We can't imagine that an elegant trophy wife is a terrorist because the categories in our heads will not allow us.  In this case, it doesn't really matter who good the training is.  That women gets to go pretty much any where she wants. 

Astonishment is a symptom that the categories in our heads have ceased to function.  And without the smooth and unwitting operation of these categories, we are open mouthed and in the extreme case incapable of action.  That at the limit is what culture is for.  As the supplier of the categories in our heads, it is the supplier of an orderly perception of the physical and the social world.  Thus does culture make the world make sense. 

References

For more details on Terror in Mumbai here

 Ever since the downturn, some have asked to expect a nuclear winter in consumer markets.  Consumers, they argue, will consume different and spend much less.  Our free spending ways are over.

I disagree with this argument.  If nothing else, it reflects the paucity and the modesty of the social science we have created to understand who consumers are and why they consume.  

I wrote a piece yesterday for the Harvard Business Review blog which argued that when we look at the deep structural inducements for consumption, there are several reasons to believe that consumers will return from this downturn to once more party like it's 1999.  The link is below.  

It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that the new book by Lee Eisenberg is germane here.  Have a look at This is Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What.  

References

Eisenberg, Lee.  2009.  This is Shoptimism.  New York: Simon and Schuster.  The Amazon.com order page is here.  

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Why American Consumers Will Spend Lavishly Again.  Harvard Business Review Blogging Network. November 24.  here.  

Ad Age is publishing an excerpt from Chief Culture Officer today.  It's here.

And I'm giving a public talk in NYC in a couple of weeks.  Hope you'll come listen.  It's free.

Here's the event:

Monday, December 7, 2009

CHIEF CULTURE OFFICER: Today’s necessity for successful companies

Sponsor: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Time:  6:30 p.m.Venue:  The Rose Gallery

Address:  41 Cooper Square, New York City

Info:  Free.

Contact  (212) 353-4195

When it started four years ago, Futures of Entertainment (FoE) was grappling with wild problems.  Everything seemed hard to think. 

What was social media?  What was trans-media?  What was blogging and (later) tweeting?  It wasn't just that we didn't have the answers.  It was hard to prosecute the argument.

Every so often, we (or at least me) would have to go back and ask, "Ok, what's the formal definition of that term again."  It was like learning to ride a bicycle.  You would make a little progress and then suddenly forget even the fundamentals and come crashing down.  They were very wild problems indeed.

Four years later these are tame problems.  We have thought about them, and with them, often enough that the sheer difficulty has come out and what remains is the mobbing up. 

Well, no.  That's too simple.  What's still not clear is the practice.  How you make culture, communities, media, marketing out of these things, that remains to be seen.  How we answer these questions will be very interesting indeed. 

We heard David Bausola talk about what I came to think of as his story engine, aka Purefold.  He has found a way to source things from the web and use them to craft narratives.  We could use David's story engine as a kind of identity engine.  We can be any of the people he sources from the world, surrounded by the what, the how, the when and the where he sources from the world as well.  It's a fabulous culturematic, a fantastic "what if" machine.

Ken Iklund described his scenario game called World Without Oil, World Without Oil, the massively collaborative online “historical pre-enactment” of a global oil crisis.  Jedidiah Jenkins gave us a glimpse of the work he is doing on Invisible Children in Africa.  Victoria Jaye showed us how transmedia was transforming the BBC.  Dan Goldman discussed how he means to transform the world of comics.  Stephen Duncombe told us about transmedia during the New Deal.  Paul Dalen shows what it is to manage musicians in the digital era. 

It didn't matter who you listened to.  Just about everyone was remarkably interesting.  And it didn't matter who you talked to during the break.  Shuffle the deck as you will, there wasn't a
dud in the group. 

The organizers were kind enough to devote a session to Chief Culture Officer and that was fun.  The crowd seemed to lean in and listen hard.  A good sign with a group this discerning.  I couldn't help feeling that I was seeing CCOs everywhere.  Certainly, most of the graduates of the MIT program could claim a shot at this title. 

David Spitz looked like a guy who has built himself a fast track.  Here's how he is described in the FoE catalogue:

As Director of Business Development for WPP, David works with parent and operating company management to drive partnerships, investments and new product offerings in the areas of digital marketing and analytics. David joined WPP in 2005 as part of the group’s MBA rotation program, holding operating company roles with WPP’s Ogilvy and Mediaedge:CIA units prior to joining the corporate strategy and business development team in 2007. Before WPP, he was a management consultant with Deloitte’s Media & Communications practice. David has a BA from Princeton, MS from MIT (Comparative Media Studies) and MBA from Columbia Business School.

Mauricio Mota comes to FoE most years and more and more seems to be a CCO for some part of Brazil.  Here's the way the catalogue describes Mauricio. 

Maurício Mota is Chief Storytelling Officer and co-founder at The Alchemists Network, a Transmedia Storytelling ThinkDO Tank based in Rio de Janeiro and LA. Before founding The Alchemists he was involved with branded entertainment and advertising companies where he worked for clients such as Danone, Unilever, Nokia and other important local brands in Brazil. The Alchemists’s main objective is to incite a shift in the content and storytelling landscape by applying the concepts found in Jenkins’s Convergence Culture for brands, networks and education. Working with him on the initiative is Mark Warshaw (former Heroes’ Transmedia Director). The Alchemists initiative takes the form of a blog, workshops, consultancies, transmedia productions and an IPTV show. They are also involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at MIT, and Maurício was responsible for bringing to C3 the first sponsor companies from outside the US.  Maurício started his career as an entrepreneur at age 15, when he developed Autoria, the first Storytelling Game in Latin America, based on a PhD thesis about Roleplaying Games. He launched the game through his first company, and in two years it was applied in over 4,000 schools, sold in stores all over the country and is being used as an innovation and creativity tool by companies and institutions including the United Nations, Kraft Foods and TV networks.

Lara Lee wowed us by dispatching tricky questions effortlessly.  Her bio:

Lara Lee is a principal at Jump Associates, a growth and innovation strategy firm based in San Mateo, Calif. At Jump, she leads the firm’s brand community and sustainability practices and is a member of the executive management team. Named one of BusinessWeek’s top 25 “Masters of Innovation,” Lara is a frequent speaker at business, sustainability and marketing forums, most recently presenting at the Sustainable Brands ’09 conference, the Marketing Science Institute’s “New Art & Science of Branding” conference and the International IDSA conference. Additionally, Lara’s commentary and writings on sustainability, marketing, and business strategy have appeared in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Forbes and The New York Times.  Lara has over 20 years of corporate experience in strategy, marketing, finance and general management, working around the globe with Fortune 500 organizations. Prior to Jump, Lara was VP of Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson, leading a division that included experiential services, a new business incubator and the company’s online presence. Over 14 years at Harley, Lara developed numerous self-funding marketing programs, served as founding director for the company’s ground breaking museum, launched a rider training business, and led a diverse set of community building programs to attract a new generation of riders, especially women. Lara holds dual master’s degrees in business administration and international affairs from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree in Chinese language from Brown University.