Every trend comes with a ticking clock.  It may feel inevitable, but its days are numbered.  This too shall pass. 

Consider the Preppie/Yuppie trend that defined contemporary culture in the 1980s.  It was cultivated in the late 1960s by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon.

What an act of sedition this was.  Just as the "counter culture" was installing it with Maoist ferocity, these kids were imagining a trend that would be counter veiling in every way.  Hippies and politicos might be bend on constructing a world that was egalitarian, communitarian, anti competitive, experimental and innovative.  Preps and yuppies didn't care.  They were individualistic, mainstream, upwardly mobile, competitive, conspicuously consuming, status conscious, conventional, and conservative.

As cultural observers, as Chief Culture Officers, we want this warning early.  To know in the late 60s what would happen 20 years later, we would have been as gods.  Actually, we would have been time travelers.  We would have found ourselves surrounded by people making life bets on the current trend, even as we knew better.

This is tough luck for the CCO who also knows that the 80s regime would be repudiated in its turn by the 90s.  Poor CCOs!  They can't ever commit to the moment.  They see how arbitrary and unnecessary is the "inevitable."  Not so much gods then as those ghosts in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire.  If they haven't seen it all before, they soon will.

The question: is there a trend that feels inevitable at the moment but is beginning to lose its purchase on (and in) our culture.  I think one candidate could be the local movement. 

This came up as an assumption of the 1960s when people scorned corporate farms and went back to the land to grow their own.  Local food networks have flourished ever since, thanks in part to Alice Waters (Chez Panisse), Jessica Prentice ("locavore"), Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon (The 100-Mile Diet), and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle).  The local movement has changed restaurants, markets, farming, and manufacturering.  It has changed what and how we eat.  It has transformed the lawn of the White House which thanks to the Alice Waters now sports a vegetable garden. 

Why do I think this might be passing?  I have very slender evidence.  I did an interview with a famous chef a couple of months ago, and it was clear that he had completely "moved on."  For most of us, the idea still hums with a little something, something.  It is odd and interesting.  It is engaging and endearing.  It still feels like it belongs.

But what I heard in the voice of this chef was utter disinterest, and the conviction that the idea was well and truly over.  This is a great moment for the anthropologist or the CCO, to hear someone talk about something in a way that says that its cultural potency is over.  It doesn't mean that a mass redefinition is upon us or even that it will arrive anytime soon.  But it does mean that its possible to think of the trend this way.  And this strikes with the power of revelation.  Wow.  We find ourselves gasping with surprise.  It's possible to be dismissive about something some many people care so deeply about?  Wow.

This isn't so much "proof of concept" as "proof of death of concept."  The idea that had captured our enthusiasm is shown to be just another idea.  We can see it without it's charisma attached.  (It's a little like that moment when we fall out of love with someone who has dazzled us.  Suddenly they are just another person.  Wow.  Really?)

The first condition of concept death has been satisfied.  Someone has seen through it, someone highly placed and influential.  They have stripped it of its charisma.  And now the second condition of death-of-concept can be set in train.  The diffusion wave can launch.  And for all we know its building even now.  This creek bed looks dry enough but well up the mountain there is perhaps a consensus gathering.  The smart CCO instructs his or her organization to "get out of way" and with any luck everyone is up and out of the way before the new is upon us.   

Yes, I know, the local movement is attached to other powerful trends, especially those that now seek to protect and repair the planet.  But this is always true.  All trends have friends in high places.  There are threats and dangers everywhere.  Other trends wait their opportunity.  Or it may be that what kills the movement is not a competitive idea.  It may simple too small an idea to sustain our interest.  It is, after all, mostly about "no."  And ideas that are mostly about "no" tend to leave as quickly as they come.  We like "no."  We like "limit."  But we don't like them for very long. 

Now it's time to keep an eye out for other faint signals.  Like this one from yesterday's Wall Street Journal in a treatment of Lynden B. Miller, one of the reigning designers of the public garden.  The WSJ says Miller "has little tolerance for fads such as gardens composed entirely of native plants."  And it quotes Miller as saying, "There's a big vocal movement but I do not feel pressured.  I will not be pressured."

Yes, yes, I know, its a different domain.  But here again is that sturdy, unstudied, disinterest in the trend that matters so deeply to others.  A flat denial.  An "I don't care what you say about it, it just doesn't matter."  Oh, this inflicts a terrible wound.  No trend survives it.  The zealots will protest their outrage.  The trend itself will struggle onward.  But the everyone else knows that this can only end badly.  And it's time for the CCO to construct an exit plan and when necessary to issue his or her most useful advice: "Get out of the way." 

References

Kaufman, Joanne.  2009.  She Creates Urban Edens.  Wall Street Journal.  October 20, p. D9.

Post script:

I don't honestly think the local movement is done for.  It just played out that way when I wrote this up.  My objective was to show that we want to see through current trends. 

Friendster!  Remember that?  Me neither.  It came.  It triumphed.  It completely disappeared.  Innovations like Facebook, on the other hand, go from strength to strength. 

It's the job of bloggers, planners, designers, and cultural creatives of every kind to have a look and take a guess.  What is wheat and what is chaff?  What will endure and what will pass?

I'm on record as saying that Second Life was not worthy of the hype.  I did my due diligence.  I wandered the pricey real estate, and came to the conclusion that Second Life was "vapor ville."

MIT colleagues like Beth Coleman and Ilya Vedrashko begged to differ.  They could see something here that would endure.  Well, we have data in hand.  They were right and I was wrong. 

Here's what Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News said recently:

So how are things going? Since Second Life launched in 2003, users have spent a total of 1 billion hours "in-world." User hours grew 33 percent year over year to an all-time high of 126 million in the second quarter of 2009. The average Second Life resident spends 100 minutes in-world per visit. The in-world economy grew 94 percent year over year from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009.  So, pretty darn good. Back in the real world, Linden Lab has seen revenues continue to climb and is now profitable, Kingdon says. The company doesn't disclose revenues, but one analyst has estimated they will be about $100 million in 2009.

Yes, these numbers come from Linden Lab and, yes, they may be unreliable.  But I think it was Clay Shirky a couple of years ago who objected to Linden Lab numbers, and I am certain they don't want to go through that again.  These numbers are likely sound.

Two facts jump out.  1) that visitors are spending 100 minutes in-world.  This is an absolute stunner.  This metric suggests residency, not tourism.  2) Linden is profitable.  Profitable?  Profitability is so rare in this world, as O'Brien points out, it counts almost as an eccentricity. 

Clearly it's time to examine my assumptions and look again.  What is it that is keeping people in place for 100 minutes?  When I wandered around Second Life a couple of years ago, I stumbled into many worlds: Alice in Wonderland gardens, clothing stores, S&M parlors, people struggling to sustain intelligent conversation, unconvincing dance clubs.  Which of these has flourished?  Perhaps all of them have and Second Life has added up many little worlds into a going proposition.

One of the key indicator must be the economy that grows so relentlessly.  What are people buying and selling?  What value is being created and exchanged?  This might be a place to start.  Anyone who has been to Second Life lately is encouraged to give us the benefit of their experience.  Sing out. 

References

O'Brien, Chris.  2009.  Twitter, meet Second Life.  Mercury News.  October 10.  here. 

Jay Leno's show is doing so badly, it is now seen to endanger the health of NBC.  This is failure of an almost epic scale.  People are using language like "complete calamity" and "utter disaster."

And it tells us that the strategists at NBC miscalculated badly. 

Let's suppose that they thought to themselves, "American culture has fragmented beyond all expectation." 

And let's suppose they followed up with, "the way to speak to this culture diversity is with diversity.  Let's revive the variety show." 

It's a little like the Long Tail argument: if a fragmented marketplace, the smart thing to do is to own the pipeline.  As long as you carry everything, in the manner of an Amazon or a YouTube, you don't have to worry about fragmentation.  Build a variety show: you've got something for everyone. 

But it's not clear that this logic works on TV, or in other cultural venues.  Didn't someone try to put Rosie O'Donnell in charge of a variety show?  And it didn't work there.  It appears to be failing in the Leno case as well.  (This is a useful second test, because Leno is bland and uncontroversial as Rosie was provocative.  His failure says, perhaps, it's not about the host.  It's about the format.)

In point 1 of the previous post, I was trying to figure out what works in a fragmented culture and I found myself arguing that what we want is the mesmerizing and the place we find the mesmerizing is not the show that has "something for everyone."  It's in the show that is unbelievably particular, that appears to speak to no one at all. 

For no good reason, I was thinking yesterday about that weird "learn to paint" show on public broadcasting by the guy with the fro.  It turned out to be one of the great hits of the 1990s.  And I was talking to someone at AIGA about the unexpected success of the Antiques roadshow. 

Both these shows are mesmerizing.  You can enter the room when someone is watching them, and they may not see you.  Certainly, if I am watching AR, I have no idea where I am.   Natural disasters can take place around me.  Empires can come and go.  I'm watching some 45 year old women shyly describe how she found this lamp in her attic.  "I think I might be Dutch," she says.  Fascinating. 

And what makes these cultural productions mesmerizing remains to be seen.  But I think it's something to do with how fantastically particular they are.  They are in fact anti-variety.  They are not built to maximize interest, or extend the reach of the show.  They are exactly what they are, and for some reason, they act like a Zeno's paradox that takes out of the here and now into…  Well, we don't really know where they take us.  We just know we like going there. 

We may take this as yet another indication of the death of the mass culture and mass markets, I guess.  But who knew this is where we would end up.  Interesting. 

References

Carter, Bill.  2009.  Debate Over Effects of Leno's Show.  New York Times.  October 11. here.

A friend asked me to come talk to his organization.  But first he wanted to know what I would say. 

Here's what I told him.

Bartholomew (not his real name)

I'd love to come work with you.

As an anthropologist, here are a couple of things I am looking at.  (Not a comprehensive list).

1) the new diversity of outlook, interest, taste and enthusiasm. 

We were once a monolithic society, relatively speaking.  Now we are badly-herded cats.  The question for senior management: what does this do to your business model? 

How can the corporation be many things to many people?  How do we change our media, our messaging, our meaning making…now that we are no longer broadcasting with a bull horn.

A couple of days ago, I did a piece on the "culturematic" as a way to make culture.  And it has since occurred to me that this might be what we now do instead of big, fat, mass marketing campaigns.  In the place of Unique Selling Propositions, fired often and loudly at a mass market as if from a cannon, we are now inclined to create engagements in the form of experience, applications, and stories that are little, funny, charming and often a little odd.  This is what we appear to like, not big fat messages but cultural materials that are quirky, anti-authoritative, adventuresome, participative.  (We saw this anti-modernist sensibility come up in the 1990s as one of the ways a generation defined itself.  Now it seems to be going wide.) 

This new sensibility, this new grammar, looks like a great way to work with, to speak to, diverse markets.  We like it for its own sake, but it is also adaptive.  It works when the old grammars fail.

2) the new flight from function to value

I've been working with companies that are climbing up a value hierarchy, from the creation of products that solve a problem or perform a function to bundles of value that supply a deeper, richer order of problem solving.  These companies, located in diverse industries, are climbing a value hierarchy, from the simple and the functional to the more complex and less literal.

Some of this is driven by the arrival of new commodity competitors who can imitate the lower order function without being able to grasp or deliver the higher order stuff.  Climbing to the upper reaches of the value hierarchy is a way to protect markets and keep customers. 

And some of this is driven by a new approach from the likes of P&G.  In his book Gamechangers, Lafley asks us to dolly back from a narrow view of the consumer to a portrait that is richer and more nuanced.  The corporation is still supplying utility but it does so less to help the consumer accomplish "brighter whites" and more to help her address questions like "how do I make this household work." 

What we are seeing here is a fundamentally new answer to Theodore Levitt's classic marketing question: "what business is our you in."  The corporation is less about USPs and more about life solutions. 

3) the new inscrutability of change. 

No sooner do we get a fix on what people care about than they change what they care about.  Our culture and our markets are in constant churn.  New developments sweep through us like storms off the North Sea.  To manage in a world as dynamic as this, we need to improve our meteorology.  We need a "big board" that identifies what changes are coming, how quickly we can expect them to arrive, and what to do when they get here.  We also need a deeper understanding of American culture.  In sum, we have to start doing future gazing as a discretionary activity, and we have to stop doing it as an intuitive process.  Time to get serious, systematic and disciplined.  Otherwise, life in the corporation becomes a matter of struggling to recover from the latest "blind side hit." 

4) the breakdown of the old asymmetries

This asymmetries made some of us culture producers and some of us culture consumers.  We are all producers now.  The question is how the [organization] aids, enables and variously participates in this ferocious new culture.  Part of the answer here is knowing it with a depth and subtlety that enables it to supplement, shape and direct the "raw feed" of the web world.  Some people are using the word "curator" here.  Personally, I think this is (if we are true to the metaphor) too passive a model.  We need something much more "engaging." 

Taken together, these four issues show us a corporation that is entertaining into an era where it must perform a higher-order of problem solving simply to dispatch the usual business of business.  No, it's not rocket science.  It's more complicated than that.  (See Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind as the go-to text on the new complexity in business.)

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Grant

Post Script

I will be in Memphis this weekend at the AIGA Make-Think Meetings.  Please drop by and say hello if you happen to be there.

Then it's on the San Francisco and next Thursday at noon about 10 of us will be meeting at a bakery downtown.  Send me an email if you are around and feel like joining us. 

When the Wall Street Journal reported that Conde Naste was closing Gourmet Magazine, it gave a chart suggesting that all the magazines in the CN stable were losing money.  But a single competitor seemed to buck the trend.  Saveur is actually prospering.

I asked Pam, my wife, about the difference between Gourmet and Saveur.  She said Saveur is about the culture of food: people, restaurants, trends, cuisines, celebrity foodstuffs, generally speaking.  Gourmet is more about the food of food: recipes, techniques, procedures.

And by this reckoning, the fall of Gourmet and the rise of Saveur is perhaps not mysterious.  After all, in prosperous America, people are cooking less.  They are eating out more.  And they are ordering in, or bringing in, more and more. 

Pam was recently looking at stoves and the sales person said of a particular stove,

"Oh, you don't want one of those. That's a trophy stove."

"What's a trophy stove?" she asked.

"Oh, you know, it's for one of those beautiful kitchens where all they do is boil water and order in." 

These families don't care about recipes as they used to.  This is increasingly a black box technology.  We don't actually need to know how "cooking" happens.  This will be accomplished by someone else somewhere else. In the language of a corporation, these families are "outsourcing" the food function.  (Even as they are "in sourcing" the fitness studio and the movie theater.) 

As is often the case, American culture is moving in two directions (at least for those with incomes to manage it.)  People know more about food and they care more about food, but they are spending less time working with food.  It's a tasty little morsel of a paradox.  (Watch for coverage in the pages of Saveur.)

Post script:

I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but when I interviewed him a couple of months ago, Mark Miller, the formative American chef, and the man responsible for the American passion for Southwest cuisine, appeared to be telling me that Americans continue to be more in love with the idea of cuisine than it's reality.  This would say that Americans actually love reading about food in Saveur more than they do preparing it from a recipe from Gourmet.  (And not only because they are so very time poor.)  And this would give us another explanation for the rise of Saveur and the fall of Gourmet.  Devout apologies to Chef Miller if I misrepresent his opinion here. 

Feel like coffee? 

I’m going to be in the Bay area for the third week of October (12th to 17th).  I am hoping to meet up with readers of this blog. 

There are a couple of opportunities:

1) I’m talking to a Policy class at the School of Information at Berkeley on Monday (12th) about how a CCO or a CCO approach can serve not-for-profits and governmental organizations.  (I will be drawing on my work for museums and public education, chiefly.)  I’ll be arguing that the profit and the not for profit worlds are tunneling towards one another.  Now that Lafley has broadened the context of how the corporation thinks about consumers and markets, the not-for-profit world is poised to supply a still broaden frame.  NFPs can help the corporation identify how and where to create value in the gift economy.  I will also be talking about ethnography as a method for discovering culture and about culture has the larger (largest?) strategic frame within which to think about policy decisions.

2) I’m talking to the Marketing and Consulting Clubs at the Stanford b-school on Tuesday (the 13th).  In this case, I’m going to be sketching what a CCO is, why a CCO matters, and encouraging Stanford students to think of it as a career possibility.  (This will be my opportunity to ask students why almost nothing of the popular culture they know so well is represented in bschool curricula pretty much anywhere in the US.  Not to be a trouble maker or anything.  Honest.) 

3)  Thursday (the 15th) is my “off day” and I am hoping that I can get together with anyone who feels like getting a coffee on a kind of “likemind” basis: just a casual get-together with whomever shows up to talk about whatever comes up.  If anyone feels like meeting up, please let me know. 

4) Friday (the 16th) and Saturday (17th) I will be at the Planningness 2009 meeting organized by Mark Lewis.  I’ve been looking forward to working with planners since I started consulting many years ago.  This, finally, is my opportunity.  I will be talking about the Chief Culture Officer idea, in this case talking about the tactical issues and specifically how planners can use the CCO and the CCO approach as a way to shape senior decision making.  Mark has organized this event as a series of workshops.  So this talk will be less about the CCO proposition as a proposition and more about how to make it work.  Less propositional, and more strategic/ tactical.

There are places in Planningness available.  For more details, go here.  As to the other occasions, space is limited by the classrooms in which the talks will take place.  Send me an email and I will see if I can smuggle you in!  grant27[at]gmail.com.

Robert Seidman thinks Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (Fridays on Fox) will not survive.  It is, he says, unmistakeably done for. 

I think I know why.  Ours is a transformational world, and to that extent Dollhouse should speak to us. 

But there are two kinds of transformation: involuntary and voluntary.  We hate the former.  We love the latter even more.

Which transformation is Dollhouse about?  It's about a woman (Eliza Dushku, pictured) trapped in an endless series of involuntary transformations. A mysterious corporation wipes her soul, inserts a new persona, and hires her out.  This is the stuff of our worst realities and dreams.

The trouble is not that we can not identify with "Echo."  The problem is we can identify too well.  We too have  been the captives of forced transformations, and it gives us no comfort to see someone else endure this horrible condition. 

I hate to be a know-it-all, especially with someone as smart and culture shifting as Whedon, but I told you so.  (Specifically see pages  253-273 of Transformations for an account of how voluntary transformation works and pages 236-253 for an account of involuntary transformation.)

I can't help feeling that if Fox had had a Chief Culture Officer it might well have spared Wheedon and itself this unhappy end. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: managing identity in contemporary culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Seidman, Robert.  2009.  Say Goodbye to Dollhouse, part II: The DVR number won't matter.  October 3, 2009.  here.

Perhaps as a reply to the TV show that now holds the community college up to ridicule, Kay Ryan, the US poet laureate, has this to say:

“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds,” said Ryan. “I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.”

I've blogged about the new "idea intermediaries:" Pip Coburn (pictured), Jerry Michalski, Brad Berens, Tim O'Reilly, Faith Popcorn, Noah Brier, Sara Winge, Bob McBarton, Piers Fawkes, to name a few.  These people have revived the Salon.  Actually, they've improved upon the Salon.  They manage to make themselves a kind of Constantinople, a place where many worlds meet. 

I was talking to Pip yesterday and we started chatting about his lunches.  He invites around 12-16 people from thither and yon.  Some from the capital markets.  Some not.  Usually, the meal takes place in a Indian buffet restaurant in mid-town Manhattan.  It takes about an hour.  People chat about whatever takes their fancy. 

I met Esther Dyson at one of Pip's lunch.  Wow.  We talked about her training in the Russian space program.  I wasn't sure what to say when my turn came.  I'm never sure what to say, and, I mean, Russian space program, come on.  Finally, I blurted out, "I have three cats."  Esther was impressed by this.  I could tell by the way she arched her eyebrows. 

Pip was telling me about his most recent lunch.  He watched as a new visitor, a first-timer, tried to "talk business."  He left, Pip said, with a tiny cloud of confusion over his head.  All anyone wanted to talk about was ideas and stuff.   What was the point of a business lunch if not business?

There is the informal but powerful rule that says no one may do business on these occasions.  You come for the sociality, the conversational and the ideas.  And that's it.  Still less can Pip himself use these lunches for profit or power.  He understands that the moment he breaks this rule he loses his power as an idea intermediary.

So let's review.  Pip gets to make the invitations, book the restaurant, and pay for the meal.  It's not a lot of time and money, but it is an odd investment when we consider that he gets no return.  It gets odder still when we consider that Pip is prohibited from asking for a return.  Pip makes this investment with the certain knowledge that he cannot leverage it.

We are at the moment undergoing a sea change.  We have two economies running at once, the newly arrived (or returned) gift economy and the still resilient good economy.  This good economy was described by Adam Smith.  It presupposes a direct exchange.  In the good economy, we calculate whether and what to give by calculating what we expect to get.  We prefer it when exchanges take place instantaneously, in a known (and the same) currency, as value passes from hand to hand, with the deal (and the relationship) not just completed by the exchange, but extinguished by it. 

The gift economy has a different logic. In this economy, Pip takes value (the cost and effort of the meal) and releases it into the world.  It will, probably, someday, in some form, return to him.  But at the moment of the planning and the doing, none of this clear.  The rules of the game say he must be contented with the intrinsic satisfaction of lunch with friends.

Pip says he actually prefers this approach.  He doesn't want to think about "what's in it for him."  He likes it when this lunch feels like "a free lunch."  It sounded almost chivalric, the mission that can only succeeds when one's heart is pure.  Less grandly, it  sounded like the code of the Renaissance gentleman, the "liberality" with which worldly wealth is shared.  It even sounded like the the Big Man model that once operated in the Pacific (and may still.) 

But of course we know that things will return to Pip.  His reputation will be augmented.  Blog posts will be written about him.  (For what that's worth.)  He will blink a little brighter on his profession's radar and when deals are done, his liberality will come back to him. 

But two things.  I believe him when he says that his motives are disinterested.  What returns to him is the accident of these lunches not their intention.  Two, he has no way of calculated exactly when, how, in what form and in what measure value will return to him.  And this means that his calculations are now just so much guess work. 

We didn't actually get this far, and I hope one of these days to interview him for the Ning website, but I suspect that there is a "reckless act of generosity" rationale at work in Pip's life.  And we know that this idea is alive and formative in our culture now.  We may put this down as yet another of the many reactions against the Smithian regime and the rise of markets as a regnant social form. 

But knowing Pip as I do, my guess is that he likes the gift economy because, first, it is fun to release value without a destination or a purpose, and second, because he likes to activate the Pachinko machine of contemporary culture.  Not knowing whether and how things will return to him, far from being a troubling new reality, is indeed much of the fun.  All Pip can know is that value he releases will have a wild ride of it.  This value will ricochet in transit, enlisted unsuspected and unsuspecting partners.  It will be lost many times before it's found.  I think all of us, and not just Pip, find something sublime about this randomness.  And sublime randomness ceases to be random and starts getting, well, it starts getting pretty interesting.

Before you know it, your life is, as Max Weber liked to say, "reenchanted."  Gift economies exhibit accident with purpose.  Randomness with pattern.  Anonymity that inclines to  intimacy.  Calculation that gives way to whimsy.  Maybe.  Pip is perfectly capable of speaking for himself and I will let you know if and when he decides to write up how and why these lunches work.  Your comment, please.

Last note

I have started a Ning network for Chief Culture Officer.  (There didn't seem to be any point writing a book about how to create a living, breathing corporation that did not itself live and breathe in some way.)  Please come and sign up, if you're interested. 

Here's the drill as I understand it:

1) go to Ning.com

2) join the Ning network (this gives you access to all the communities on Ning)

3) search for Chief Culture Officer

4) Join Chief Cuilture Officer.  This should be straight forward. 

5) If you need my approval, send me an email at grant27[at]gmail.com and I will sign you in.

6) See you there. 

I was watching Stephanopoulos yesterday morning and I saw this IBM ad. 

And I thought, "hey, I've seen that guy somewhere before."

And sure enough, he's in a Castrol Motor Oil ad.

I think it's the same guy, right down to the wrinkles in his forehead. 

Does this matter? Maybe what happens in an ad for Castrol Oil stays in an ad for Castrol Oil.  Or do actors have "transmedia" properties?  Do they carry anything with them between ads?

Here's what the "meaning transfer" theory says.  This actor helped create meanings for Castrol Oil.  And in the process, some of that meaning took up residence in him.  And it's still there when he does the IBM ad.  And this means it plays havoc with the IBM ad…and perhaps the IBM brand.

Once you've played a crazy, dip stick wielding elf, you are less credible as a pious MD in a lab coat.  We are unmoved when you say, "we would see the patterns in your medical history."  (It's probably just rank prejudice but most of us believe elves are not all that good at finding patterns in medical history.)  The ad ends with "Let's build a smarter planet."  Again, we are disinclined to believe that elves care about a smarter planet.  It's just not an important life goal for them. 

To make matters worse, this "smarter world" series of ads from IBM has presented people in the ads as IBMers.  Indeed, the penultimate lines of this ad are, "That's what I'm working on.  I'm an IBMer."  I am pretty sure no one wants to go there.  Thinking with your dip stick?  Not an IBM specialty, I shouldn't think.  

Casting an ad has its own challenges, I'm sure.  And no one wants to say that no actor should ever do more than a single ad or that this actor should be jammed into the same role in every ad they do.  On the other hand, perhaps its makes sense to suppose that actors come trailing meanings and observe what these meanings might be.  This after all the very process by which celebrity works in our culture.  (Russell Crowe comes to each new role trailing not merely his fame, but the very particular roles that have made him famous.) 

I know what some of you are thinking.  "What does this matter?  This casted ad is dead or dying.  In 36 months, old media ads like this IBM example will be completely obscured by new media approaches.  Surely the new model is one in which consumers are drawn into an experience, engagement, conversation, interaction, cocreation with the brand as a result of a stream of alerts and invitations that come to them through blogging (blogging?!?), twitter, apps, games, websites, short messages and tiny bursts of data."

This argument is a powerful one, and much of its will come to pass.  But the new marketing that rises on the back of this new media will fail unless it learns the old rhetorical arts of persuasion, unless it masters the manufacture and management of cultural content through the strategic selection and combination of cultural meaning.  This remains the most powerful way brands take on certain kinds of foundational meaning.  Conversation and cocreation supply something essential, but it is a "sufficient" essence not a "necessary" essence.

We have been at the old media approach to marketing since the end of World War II (at least).  When I was in Arizona last week I had the inestimable honor of having a meal with Sidney Levy, the man who wrote Symbols for Sale in 1959.  This is perhaps the first formal recognition of the cultural outcome of all that Mad Men activity we now know so well from Matthew Weiner's AMC series.  All that furious creative activity in Manhattan, wreathed in smoke, soaked in Scotch, was something more than a hard sell.  It had a purpose: to endow goods with meanings.  Those philandering, back-stabbing executives had a goal: to "build" brands.  The fact that they were also selling snake oil does not mean that they were not using the rhetorical devices of the visual artist and the poet…often in ways more imaginative and constructive than contemporary artists and poets could imagine.  (This was a magnificently shared creative process, perhaps not so much crowdsourced as groupsourced, and in any case quite distributed and superbly emergent.  See particularly the way 1950s ad men and women across many agencies helped create the cultural significance of the cars of the period.)

Here we are some 50 years after the publication of Symbols for Sale, and it is still possible for this now venerable world of advertising to make errors of the order of an actor allowed to "smuggle" meanings from one ad into another. Just when the ad biz is having to learn to defend itself from the young turks and new media, it continues to demonstrate that it rises to self knowledge and discipline only with the utmost reluctance.  Perhaps all that Scotch and nicotine did more damage than we knew.

References

Levy, Sidney J.  1959.  Symbols for Sale.  Harvard Business Review. Volume 37, Issue 4, pp. 117-124.

Levy, Sidney J., and Dennis Rook.  1999.  Brands, Consumers, Symbols and Research: Sidney J. Levy on Marketing. Sage Publications.  (contains Symbols for Sale)

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Meaning Manufacture.  An anthropological approach to the creation of value.  Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 175-191.  

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick.  Culture and Consumption II.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 53-90.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Melanie Wallendorf for the opportunity to visit the Eller College of Management.  It was really fun.

The culturematic is a device for making culture. 

It has two steps.

Step 1

Think up a pretext.  It will usually start, "what if I…"

Some examples:

What if I ate all my meals at McDonald's for a month?

What if I swam across Connecticut using local swimming pools?

What if I reached out to and visited every Grant McCracken [insert your name here] in the tri-state area [insert your region here]?

What if I made recipes from Julia Child's cookbook for a year?

The topic should make us smile, cock our heads, rub our chins, and go "hmm."

Step Two:

Now, play it out.  Visit all those people with your name in your neighborhood.  Swim all those swimming pools. 

And write it up.  Blog it.  Tweet it.  Write a book.  Do a documentary.  Take the artifact that comes from this artifice and release it into the great stream of popular culture.

How does the culturematic work?

To be honest, we're not entirely sure.  We have the boys in the lab working on it pretty much around the clock.  Here's are some of the possibilities.

1) Culturematics give the world small and manageable proportions.  We no longer need to write (or read) about everything, or even about one big thing.  We have reduced the world to a tiny set.

2) Culturematics produce easy culture. There aren't many Grant McCrackens in the tri-state area, and I'd be very surprised if there were any systematic connections between us.  The fun will come from showing how little we have in common.  No heavy lifting required by the author or the reader.  There's no danger we're going to find ourselves grappling with big questions.  This is frothy culture. 

3) The products of the culturematic are not merely small and easy.  They are also animated like a Koi pond or a pocket watch.  Some gentle, intelligible event has been put in train.  Charming interactions will ensue.  We are eager to see how things will turn out.  Culturematics make a world that's diverting.

4) Culturematic devices are quirky.  I think I took the idea of swimming across Connecticut from John Cheever.  It made for a wonderful short story because the idea is so very strange.  Imagine treating discontinuous pools as if they were one body of water!  Imagine saying we had "swum" Connecticut?  It's all so very arbitrary.  Why swim?  Why Connecticut?  Why bother?  It is the quirkiness of the things produced by the culturematic that captures our attention.  "Hmm," we say,

5) These culturematics produce a small, likable episode in the life for the writer and the reader.  Someone has to go to McDonald's for a month.  And we get to go with them.  When someone takes their meals from Julia Child from a year this must give continuity to the year.  The episode is an arbitrary event with an arbitrary interval.  It's continuity without cost. 

6) We do hope that along the way, some larger issue will swim up and dignify the proceedings with a certain contemporary relevance.  Looking for one's name sakes give us the opportunity to dwell ever so fleetingly on questions of identity.  The McDonald's stunt (sorry, I can't think of the guy who staged it, and I'm on the plane.) gives rise to thoughts of diet, obesity, and wellness in America.  To satisfy condition 2, we don't want extended treatments or very deep thoughts.  But the occasional resonance doesn't hurt. 

It is possible event to stage these artifacts for commercial purposes.  As when the philosopher Alain De Button spend a week as writer-in-residence at Heathrow.  It was very good publicity for all concerned.  And I deeply hope some airport would so engage me.  Perhaps a bus station is a little more my speed. 

I am not sure what it says about us that so much culture is being produced by these devices.  Surely, it has something to do with the fact that we are so multiple, so changeable, so unpredictable.  Culturematics make the world a little less …  The boys in the lab are still looking for that last word.  Watch this space. 

But, listen, please consider creating your own culturematic.  And please keep us posted on the outcome. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  Transformations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

For more on Alain De Botton's experiment, go here. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Craig Swanson for the Alain de Botton reference.

No one is talking about it, but what's happening to journalism may some day happen to higher education.

It's not too early to look down the road.

Tim Sullivan and I were chatting about the options the other day and I came away with this rough sketch of a radical scenario: the university continues as a center of knowledge production, but ceases to matter as a center of knowledge distribution.

Let's assume the following.

1) that there is easy access to information and knowledge, thanks to internet access. 

2) that educational resources online will get better.  (See, for instance, the open course ware at MIT.)

3) that people are getting better at assimilating data and mastering knowledge by their own effort.

4) that as people continue to move from a passive to an active model of engagement, they may prefer to learn through self instruction. 

What's doesn't shift in this scenario is accreditation.  We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. 

Then the question becomes:

5) what's the best way to do accreditation?

The English universities are a useful indicator.  Traditionally, they forgave the separation knowledge acquisition from examination.  The universities allowed the student an extraordinary latitude.  If a student could pass her exams, it didn't matter if she had spent all her time in the college bar.  She was good to go.

We could use a model of this kind.  We would leave it to students to prepare their own programs of education, to gather on line with whomever they found interesting and useful.  They could indeed spend several years in the bar of their choice.  What awaits them is a small committee of smart people with credible credentials who travel their locality, assessing intellectual ability, power and skill in argument, the ability to inquire, to marshall the data, to build the case, to respond to rebuttle, and to otherwise make their way from less knowledge, understanding and wisdom to more knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. 

Students in self instruction will have to decide whether they are ready to sit their exams.  They will visit the accreditation website occasionally and examine the oral exams and written ones.  They ask themselves, "Could I handle questions of that order?"  And if they think they can, they book an appointment, pay their fee, and wait for the examiners to swing back through town.

A world of several degrees may be replaced by a world of many levels.  We can expect the degree world to look like a ziggurat.  Students will work their way upwards, eventually find their natural location in the sweet spot between the prized and the passable.  Perhaps we can do this in the manner of a Judo studio.  It will be a matter of belts.

Who should staff these committees?  How about journalists, people who know a thing or two about inquiry, building arguments, and acquiring knowledge. 

References

For a glimpse of some of the educational resources on line, go to the Online Degrees Hub here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tim Sullivan, editor at Basic Books, for the conversation from which this blog post comes.  He is not to be held responsible for anything written here. 

The magnificent image, if you see one, was taken this summer in Turkey by Paul Melton.  Good, or what?

Any corporation can be forgiven being a little anxious these days.  Everyone's confidence is being tested. 

I interviewed Debbie Millman over the weekend, and she helped me see an unexpected connection between this confidence and the brand.

When the corporation loses it's nerve, it ceases to take chances.  It begins to white-knuckle its way through the world.  It begins to lean towards stasis.  The consumer may too.

Debbie sees a value cascade at work.  In the positive version of this cascade, confidence begets confidence.  The confidence of senior management becomes a confidence in the corporation.  This in turn becomes a confidence in the brand.  And this in turn becomes a confidence in the consumer.  Confidence ends up as a part of the augmented brand.  But only if it is there in the head and heart of the senior manager. 

The negative version of the cascade is, well, what you would expect.  The senior manager loses his or her nerve.  This carries into the brand and this carries into the consumer.  In effect, the consumer is infected by failing confidence of the corporation. 

Whoa, Nelly.  This is a radical proposition.  It has several implications.  One of them is that if corporations want consumers to start spending again, they have start spending too.  More to the point, the corporation has to begin acting like there is a future in the future.  Because here, as in so many things culture, wishing makes it so.  Economies, like cultures, have a performative quality. 

References

See Debbie Millman's website here.  Recording of the interview to follow here or on Ning for Chief Culture Officer.

Post Script

Thanks very much to all of those who voted yesterday.  (Polls are still open for those who haven't yet.)  It looks like we had around 140 votes with a dead heat between Covers 1 and 2.  I will keep you posted on the outcome.  A decision has to be made soon!

Could you help me choose a cover for Chief Culture Officer?

Cover 1

Cover 2:

Cover 3:

Thanks for your help.

Please feel free to live comments and suggestions.

This is Cambridge, Massachusetts, one rainy autumn afternoon in 2005. 

Fantastic?  Or totally spectacular?  You be the judge.

It was created by Burak Arikan and Ben Dalton at MIT's Media Lab.  It designed to show the color of clothing in motion in the many neighborhoods that make up Cambridge.

Arikan and Dalton rigged up cameras, capture color data and converted it to this astonishingly useful piece of data visualization.  

To be fair, Cambridge is not the most fashion forward place in the world.  Indeed, I have seen people on the MIT campus who look as if they just walked out of explosion at Goodwill.  I'm not talking hipster refusal of mainstream fashion.  I'm talking completely random.  This is a wonderful thing from an anthropological point of view but somewhat at odds with the clothing conventions that rule our world.

So the Chief Culture Officer may not care about these data as data.  The Arikan-Dalton visualization will matter more as proof of concept.

And what a concept.  Imagine an Arikan-Dalton machine in all the neighborhoods we care about in all of the cities we care about (London, Paris and Tokyo, at a minimum).  A real time feed of essential cultural intelligence delivered in a form that allows for effortless pattern recognition. 

Well, you don't have to be a CCO.  Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, should have an Arikan-Dalton machine.  If only to observe the effects of the Fall issue.  She could watch colors she had blessed suddenly begin to infuse the city center and then ripple out into the suburbs.  She could watch them leap from country to country.  She could begin to experiment, using data vastly more accurate than feedback from the industry. 

What if we were American Apparel or J. Crew?  Wouldn't the likes of Dov Charney and Mickey Drexler want an Arikan-Dalton machine on the wall of their trend rooms?  Indeed everyone in the design world, architecture, branding, interior, product, would want one of these machines.  So should every school and studio of fashion and design. 

An Arikan-Dalton machine would matter especially to the CCO because the CCO knows that colors spring from culture.  They do not coming spinning out of the fashion industry at random.  They emerge as the logic of our culture works itself out out, sometimes mysteriously, through the choices of the fashion industry.  The Arikan-Dalton data are not only color and movement.  They are culture effectively, very cleverly, coded as color and movement.

The CCO knows this: there is no sudden, dramatic change in color trends that is not driven by some shift in culture.  This makes the Arikan-Dalton machine an early warning machine.  The ADM (the Arikan-Dalton machine) tells us that a change must have taken place.  And then allows us to track the change as it moves from city to city, from early adopter to late adopter, from the urban center to the hinterland.  Now we can send in the researcher for a qualitative examination of "what the hell just happened out there."  It will raise questions like "That's weird.  Paris didn't bite," or "Wow, that little town in Brazil just started 'broadcasting' in fuchsia!"  This is the kind of data that will send us off in pursuit of still better data.  The ADM creates data that takes us towards knowledge, then intelligence, then strategy.  It's the beginning of wisdom.

The benefits of the ADM are broader still.  It would allow us to watch our culture as a living, breathing, organic thing, bound together by meanings in motion.  It would show us our miraculous society of strangers as we enter into, or refuse, the new trends, the fleeting consensus, the rivers of briefly shared meaning, that run through us, and make us briefly up. 

References

For more details on the ARM, go to Visual Complexity here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

Manuel Lima and his site here for curating this work.

Ben Malbon for pointing me towards Lima's work at Visualcomplexity.  If you are interested in this kind of thing, I recommend following Ben on Twitter at "bbhlabs." 

Clarification

I don't actually know the time period over which the Arikan Dalton data was collected in Cambridge.  I bet it was longer than a day.  (I was using my poetic license, recently renewed.)  Hopefully someone will clarify.