Category Archives: anthropology

How to fix the Conde Nast business model

Screen-Shot-2019-04-10-at-9.24.46-236AM.pngPeter Kafka has a great piece on Conde Nast, specifically how this once dominant publishing enterprise now struggles and what this means for incoming editor Roger Lynch.

“The magazine industry is in decline because the magazine industry’s core product — packaging stories and ads and presenting them together in a discrete bundle — is in decline, for an obvious reason: Readers and advertisers are more interested in spending their time and money in other ways.”

This post is an anthropological addendum to Kafka’s original. It attempts to answer why readers and advertisers are spending their time and money elsewhere.

Conde Nast and American culture come unstuck

In the post war period, America howled with change. The New Yorker and Vogue were excellent guides, a way to keep a fix on how culture was changing. These publications were working out of New York City, with a select set of gifted journalists, each of them plugged into a series of exquisite networks that ran from the Manhattan delta back into the worlds of innovation. The New Yorker and Vogue made themselves the bearers of essential intelligence. Readers were periodically “read in” to the state of contemporary culture, briefed like so many diplomats, politicians or spies, their cultural capital perpetually topping up.

But American culture changed. So much innovation, from too many parties, with so many effects. Pyromaniacs are now running the fire works factory. (And I don’t just mean Trump. There’s now a Trump on every street corner.) Unsurprisingly, the beautiful intelligence systems called The New Yorker and Vogue have been overwhelmed.

Readers no longer use these publications as they once did. They extract knowledge that is interesting but, for “read in” purposes, this knowledge is now less essential.

in sum 1: the value proposition is broken.

2) In the post war period, people were eager to hear from The New Yorker and Vogue. Eager, indeed, to defer and imitate. The value proposition was bigger than mere intelligence. It was also a matter of sensibility. What was the right style of life and view of world? Vogue and The New Yorker could supply these too. There was a hierarchy in place. Readers knew their place and accepted it. Publications were nice about it. They didn’t actively scorn the reader. (Well, sometimes they did. Paul Fussell made a career revealing status secrets to provincial readers and then scorning them for their interest.)

This is over, mostly. Hierarchy is dying. Deference is tired and tiresome. Provincial readers are no longer provincial. The level of education has risen. Data are distributed. The cultural advantage that comes from living in New York City is radically diminished. Anyone who works as a creative or a strategist routinely looks behind the curtain of American culture. There are few secrets and fewer elites. High culture knowledge is no longer “must know” capital. Neither, interestingly, is avant-garde knowledge. In sum, the New Yorker (both the person and the publication) knows less, and when he/she/it does know more, this matters less.

The reader is no longer a supplicant. The New Yorker and Vogue no longer have quite the same authority. The relationship is no longer quite so asymmetrical.

in sum 2: the value relationship is broken, too.

3) But the problem goes deeper still.

Conde Nast sits in an imperiled middle. This is where “stories” live, to be sure, but, as little bundles of proper nouns, events, causes and consequences, these stories do not take us deeply enough into details or high enough to see the big picture. “Stories” feel like a Victorian machine. Charming and noisy in a Steampunk kind of way. Dear but not useful. The scale and mechanics are just wrong. Any and all claims to utility now dubious.

Conde Nast sits in a certain middle because it is hoping to speak to as many readers (of a kind) as possible. The notion is that the article that really impresses a Methodist minister from the rough and tumble part of Cleveland, Ohio will mystify, perhaps even antagonize just about everyone else.

But, miraculously, the first principle of mass marketing and mass media has been repudiated. The status system of the post war period is suddenly ineffective and people are beginning to think of privilege as a trap. (There are several architects of the mighty ideological change, but one chief hell-raiser was Alice Waters.) Once a reward, an indulgence, an entitlement, privilege now feels “gated” or better “gating.” I have collected the ethnographic data and these data say that privilege is beginning to make people feel limited and unsophisticated. It makes them wondered if they run the risk of having the world steal a march on them. If that Methodist minister has her wits about her, her story may very well prove keenly interesting and useful…even for people who happen to occupy, through no fault of their own, quite different genders, classes, cities, and occupations. The devil is in these details, not the generalities. We are mobile and we are curious. We are (all) anthropologists. This makes the old publishing trade offs and compromises misleading.

This brings us to the big picture. Because, yes, generalities, properly constructed, do sometimes still matter. Without them we cannot see the future coming. And it is now ferociously and perpetually on approach. Sometime after World War II, “trends” died. They ran like large, handsome breakers through American culture, bringing consensus as they went. Now (cliche alert) it’s a perfect storm out there, with lots of trends moving in all directions, colliding in ways that make them impossible to track in conventional ways. And this puts paid to the diffusion models of the post war period, the ones that said if we wanted to know the future of the middle class we only needed to consult their early adopting betters (New York writers, say). The new journalism will have to look more like O’Hare on those windy summer days when the flight schedule takes on a wistful, poetic quality. (Your flight from LA? We have no idea.) This journalism will need a new kind of pattern recognition. Conde Nast may or may not be equal to the task. And this threatens the enterprise with what Taleb would call a “black swan” (i.e., an unanticipated disruption) because someone out there surely is.

Conde Nast uses conventional categories of understanding…at the very moment when these are being deformed and reformed. It uses language like “story,” “politics,” “artist,” “family,” “corporation,” “community,” “self,” “democracy,” as if these terms had not been blown to bits. This makes Conde Nast journalism a shell game. We can’t know what it’s saying. That is unless the story is formed by genre, in which cases it’s not clear why we’re bothering with it in the first place.

The loyalty to the “story” model of journalism is understandable. Simplicity, clarity, everyday language, these represent the deepest contracts between journalist and reader. But the underlying assumptions are now up for grabs. To presume them blithely on the page, it’s like taking Bolivian currency from the 19th century to our local Bank of America and hoping for a kind reception. The old exchange models are broken. We can’t use them to talk about the world in a way that matters.

Glassy and calm. That’s the quality of much American journalism. Beneath the text murmurs a lovely conviction: “this is obvious, you are smart, hey, you get it, let’s move on.” This has always been a little disingenuous. Now it’s flat out dissembling. (Well, unless of course it’s delusional. I mean, if the journalist does not recognize the sleight of hand he/she performs.) We have scant grounds for confidence. The only thing we know for certain is that the world streams with change, that most propositional bets are iffy, that most rhetorical devices are unreliable. The biggest shared assumption of all, of course, is that we share assumptions. This is really unreliable. And if this is now in question, it’s time to stop making glib assumptions about our ability to create the effortless, efficient or reliable acts of communication. (I make this argument only to contradict my argument. Sorry. Not sorry.)

Long form work has a problem of its own. The author, present but unassuming, starts us off with a very particular story, and mines the details every so patiently until the transmission of the idea is accomplished as if by magic. One of the masters of this form is John McPhee, a writer who was so good at making the details speak that The New Yorker is now addicted to his voice. It’s as if the journalist is frightened of frightening the horses. She must now eschew abstractions, metaphors, reckless claims (as above). It’s all so very patronizing. And laborious. And finally, if we are going to be honest about it, ever so slightly anti-intellectual. (Gasp.)

And then there is the herd mentality as people cluster around the intellectual trend of the moment. Someone has an idea (say, “digital engagement is bad for you!”) and then for several months everyone gives voice to exactly the same revelation as if it were new, fresh and totally original. It becomes the worldly, the tough minded, the “I really care about the world,” thing to say on line and especially over drinks. As if, God forgive us, there could be something entirely, unreservedly wrong about a technology that gives us instant access to knowledge and social connection whenever, wherever we want. The New Yorker should be working harder to murder nonsense in its crib.

I am not calling for philosophical discourse, pontificating experts or academics going all papal on us. The post modernists broke the Liberal Arts and they just don’t care. They have committed a crime against the species, and they just don’t care. The last thing we want them to do is have a go at public discourse.

In a sense, this is simple Marc Andreessenian wisdom. Publishing has suffered a disintermediation. Software is eating the world. Magazines were a nice light snack. Put it this way, and the future is clear. We have to find a way to change how a magazine mediates between the reader and the world. The solutions will not be merely digital. There is no simple UX solution, no algorithmic fix. We have to rethink categories and conventions, all that cultural stuff. All that cultural stuff the digital world likes to think is residual and likely to work out on its own. But it won’t. So the problem may be Andreessenian, but the solution probably won’t be.

Thoughts on how to create value

1) The real insight comes not from “story” but from the deeper dive and the bigger picture. The middle matters less and less. Go high. Dig deep.

2) The language of the story is itself a story. We can’t assume that even the simplest terms are reliable. Examine assumptions. Entertain alternatives. Show what differences follow from one choice over another. Most of all, we want to use language not as something transparent to reality, but as something that needs reformation.

3) There is no privileged point of view. Tell the story from several points of view, class, race, gender. Identities flourish. We are multi-perspectival. (Without being in the least Baudrillardian about it. Meaning matters. Culture continues.) This should look great on the page. And it is the world according to John Stewart Mill. So.

4) Let’s stop acting as if the story, once told, is over. What the reader needs is an arc. What came before. Where things stand now. Where things might go from here. Show things in process. This change is just now taking place in the strategic world. Until very recently, strategy firms would sell the client on a new idea with the implicit notion that “change this and you are done!” We are beginning to see that good strategies have a “best by” date. Let’s advise readers as we do clients: “this too shall pass. We want you to get into this strategy/stock/market/innovation in 12 months and out of it in 24 months.” The story is a window. Everything rushes through it.

5) Even the most sinuous prose style will not be sufficient. We need statistical data. Nothing effortful. Let’s be honest. No one wants to “do the math.” But data visualizations, these are essential. Again, it’s a world in motion and a story that only quantitative data can tell.

6) And speaking of Peter Kafka (and Kara Swisher), we must ask why pod casts are flourishing. Some insights come most surely when crackling up out of all the “noise on the line” of a real conversation. It turns out that some of the stuff the writer was supposed to eliminate, we want back in. Why? That’s a story too.

What publication will step up and reinvent reporting? The world set sail. Journalism stands on a wharf in 19th century Manhattan, smiling bravely. Who will rescue it?

in sum 3: parts of journalism are broken

It’s a lot to fix. The value proposition, the relationship and the model. Until we fix these problems, we can’t hope to fix the business model. We won’t get people to pay for content. But once we do, they will. The new journalism will be worth a fortune.

Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of 12 books including most recently CulturematicFlock and Flow, and Dark Value. He is the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. He is a cofounder of the Artisanal Economies Project. Grant has taught at the Harvard, University of Cambridge, and MIT. He advises widely, including Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Boston Book Festival, Nike, and the White House (no, the other one).

How to make a good ad

There are two DNA ads running at the moment. They illuminate the art of advertising today.

The first is called Testimonial: Livie and it’s for AncestryDNA.com. This is perfect serviceable. And that’s a problem.

This gives us a woman, Livie, living a safe, tidy life. Her DNA results come as a revelation. It turns out she is, as she puts it, “everything.” She now checks “other.”

An entire world opens up, and, and, and Livie checks a new box. Good lord.

This is identity as ornament. This is that girl who cornered you at a party in college to say she is 1/32 Choctaw. This is identity as a cocktail chatter, a party favor, a way of showing how absolutely fascinating you are.

And never mind the hair raising assumptions being made about the difference genetic origins make to who we are. (We love to think they do, but the science is of course stubbornly unromantic on this score. We are made by our upbringing and the culture in place. That “Choctaw difference” makes no identity difference.)

Ok, now have a look at %100 Nicole.

The music! So splendidly wrong and antique and odd. Perfect. This is how we make some of the best culture now. We run things together that don’t go together…until they do…sort of, but not quite.  These culture meanings deliberately act as what Weinberger might call, to borrow the title of his book, “small pieces loosely joined.”

The sunglasses and helmet of the second scene. So completely “what?” Here too the ad maker (in this case Diego Contreras of [or for] Venables Bell and Partners LA) is asking us to pay attention. This is not culture served up according to genre. This is culture flushed out of its conventional categories. We are driven up out of our couch potato stupor to ask the ancient’s immortal question “huh?”

In the place of Livie’s perfect sitting room, we have Nicole plunged into the world, seizing her DNA connections has an occasion to engage with the world. (Here too, sitting in the background there are troubling assumptions. We hope we are not being asked to assume that Nicole has some essential connection to East Asia or West Africa. Right?) In a more perfect world, we would all travel often and with Nicole’s joy to countries and cultures to which we have no DNA “connection.” Right?

So many details are arresting. The joy of that dance. The shock of that fiord. The delicacy of soccer. The animation of this actress.

Livie ticks boxes. Nicole embraces life. Livie looks for identity in the old fashioned way, by adding badges to her sleeve. Nicole finds it by taking the world by storm.

Hat’s off to the agency in question:

CLIENT
23 and Me
AGENCY
Venables Bell and Partners
LOCATION
Los Angeles
DIRECTOR
Diego Contreras
EDITOR
Martin Leroy

 

The case for culture in business, as clearly and forcefully as I can make it

This is an abbreviation of talk I gave for the design firm Thomas Pigeon in early April.

It puts the “case for culture in business” as forcefully as I can make it. (NB I’m not talking about corporate culture here. I’m talking about culture as in “culture creative.”)

Here’s a summary:

SECTION 1

00:25 capitalism and its creative destruction

00:30 Schumpter
00:54 Alvin Toffler
01:11 Clayton Christensen

01:31 the world is turbulent
…and culture creatives can help

SECTION 2

01:38 strategy struggles

1:44 Peter Schwartz and the corporation in a state of perpetual surprise

1:56 we wake up one morning to discover that our business model can be ripped out from under us

2:00 Michael Raynor and the death of strategy

2:19 Nassim Taleb on black swans and the unimaginable

2:48 these guys are not the least bit defensive (a joke!)

3:07 Andy Grove, here’s how we do strategy now: act like a firehouse

3:24 all that talk of agility is Andy’s firehouse

3:40 strategy is struggling…and we can help

SECTION 3

3:45 corporations and brands are in crisis

3:48 CPG brands especially, all the big brands are down, all of them are struggling to live in this new world

4:00 brands are struggling…and we can help

SECTION 4

4:07 culture to the rescue

this world of commotion gets simpler if you get culture

4:17 getting culture makes the world less “black swany” and less “suprisy”

4:47 we can do better than Andy’s fire house

4:2 culture is the professional competence of the culture creative

4:59 culture is our competitive opportunity

5:02 culture is our difference

5:03 we have always said our difference is creativity and it is but we can’t do great creativity without a connection to culture

creativity requires culture

5:12 creativity that’s not rooted in culture has this calorie-free quality. It’s not lasting, it’s not impactful. It doesnt really change the brand. It doesn’t really touch the consumer, and it doesn’t really resonate with the culture in place.

5:25 that’s when you know there a cycle here: you’ve drawn from culture buy you’ve created something so good, it’s so powerful, it actually contributes to culture

SECTION 5

5:40 culture is 3 things, meanings, rules and motions

6:20 the difference between Roger A and Roger B
(Roger is a dog, he doesn’t have culture. Roger B is a person, he does.)

7:10 Aspies and culture (making conversation in the elevator)

7:44 three purses, one is a Birkin bag worth $14,000

8:18 culture defines how we think about self and the meanings of gender, age, ethnicity, race, and our preoccupation these days with celebrity

8:24…and how we think about groups, style, entertainment and communications are all established by culture

SECTION 6

8:48 is there a Canadian advantage?
Yes, there is (possibly)
e.g., Michael Ennis, Malcolm Gladwell, Marshall McLuhan

SECTION 7:
the case of the artisanal trend

9:08 food after World War II

9:38 the rise of prepared food: Cheese Whiz!

10:02 the artisanal trend itemized

10:38 the artisanal trend created the CPG crisis, it took on prepared food and fast food

10:46 and big brands disrupted by the artisanal
Unilever, Nestle’s, Coca-Cola, P&G taken by surprise

SECTION 8:
How can we help our clients?

11:07 first step: we map culture

11:11 culture too often the latest hippest thing, the coastal stuff, the beltway stuff, the elite stuff

11:23 the recent error of Democratic party

11:46 we want breadth of coverage

11:50 we don’t want to only listen just to the coasts

12:00 second step: choose the meanings (on the map) that really work for the brand?

12:17 which meanings work for the consumer

12:28 third step: now we build an exquisite brand

12:35 fourth step: stage events in the world that create meanings for the world (culturematics: meanings in action)

13:05 fifth step: meanings in motion. we have to track meanings, we need to find metrics. the corporation runs on numbers, all numbers are made with numbers. and when we are asked for numbers we just say just trust us, your career will be fine, your kids will go to college, you can trust us, look how hip our glasses our

13:40 it’s no longer about “refreshing” the brand, we need to be able to show when we want the client to claim this meaning and when to exit the meaning

13:51 We are still inclined to step in, offer a big idea and then leave, as if to say “our work is done”

13:50 what we need to say is “this is when we want you to get into this cultural moment and this is when we want you to get out”

14:02 this is the stuff of an enduring connection with the client

14:27 culture is our competitive advantage, it’s time to see it clearly!

My Tribe Is an Unsophisticated People

turnbull-obit-articleLargeThis is a photograph of Sara Little Turnbull (1917–2015). Sara was an designer and anthropologist. In 1988 she founded, and for 18 years she ran, the Process of Change Laboratory for Innovation and Design at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

I like this photo for a couple of reasons. Sara was caught at her desk, mid-task, mid-thought. She senses the camera and gives it a knowing look. What’s maybe most striking is her clothing. Ever so fashionable. Ever so anti-anthropological.

My tribe dresses badly. Jeans. It takes a lot of denim to clothe the field. We don’t ever dress up. The idea appears to be to dress as far down as possible without provoking the suspicion of vagrancy. When formal clothing is called for the anthropologist sometimes resorts to the clothing of the culture they study. Put it this way, no one ever looks like Sara.

A lot of this is “badge of pride” stuff. Anthropologists dress badly to make a point. They want you to know that they reject the conventions of a mainstream society, that they care nothing for the bourgeois respectability, upward mobility, and/or conspicuous consumption that animate the dress codes of the rest of the world. It’s not a punk violation of code. It’s just a way of saying “Look, we’re out.”

This strategy is not without it’s costs. As Marshall Sahlins, God’s gift to anthropology, used to say in his University of Chicago seminars, “every theory is a bargain with reality.” (By which we believed he meant, every theory buys some knowledge at the cost of other knowledge.) And so it is with every suit of clothing. It give you access to some parts of the world, but it denies you access to others.

This social immobility is not a bad thing if you are a nuclear scientist or a botanist. But it does matter if you are prepared to make claims to knowledge when it comes to your own culture, and anthropologists are never shy on this topic.

Anthropologists believe they know about a great deal about their own culture. But in point of fact, there are many worlds they do not know and cannot access, worlds of which they have scant personal knowledge and in which they have few personal contacts. Generally speaking, they don’t know anyone in the worlds of venture capital, advertising, graphic design, publishing, fashion, forecasting, strategy, philanthropy, art museums, professional sports, industrial design, user experience, startup capitalism, banking, branding, public relations, small business, big business, or politics. It’s a lot, the things anthropologist don’t know about their own culture.

Anjali Ramachandran recently heard Salman Rushdie speak in London and recalls he said something like,

“One thing I tell students is to try and get into as many different kinds of rooms to hear as many different kinds of conversations as possible. Because otherwise how will you find things to put in your books?”

Just so. Rushdie’s “many rooms” strategy is not embraced in anthropology. By and large, anthropologists encourage their students to stick to a small number of rooms where, by and large, they conduct the same conversation.

This is ironic not least because one of the field’s most recent and convincing contributions to the world beyond it’s own is actually a contemplation of the danger of living in a silo. Gillian Tett (PhD in social anthropology, University of Cambridge) recently published a book called The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. This is a book about the compartmentalization of all organizations, but it might have been a study of the field of anthropology.

The further irony is that in its post-modern moment, anthropology claims to be especially, even exquisitely, self reflexive, but the sad thing is that it does ever seem to be reflexive on matters like this. Clifford Geertz used to say that much of anthropology is self confession. Too bad that’s no longer true.

Irony gives way to something less amusing when we see that this provincialism is not just self-imposed but enforced as a tribal obligation. Those who dare dress “up” or “well” or “fashionably” or, as we might say, “in a manner that maximizes cultural mobility” is scorned. As graduate students, we actually dared sneer at the elegant suits sported by Michael Silverstein. How dare he refuse this opportunity to tell the world how world-renouncing he was! There is something odd and a little grotesque about willing a provincialism of this kind and then continuing to insist on your right to make claims to knowledge.

Sara Little Turnbull knew better. She understood how many mansions are contained in the house of contemporary culture. She embraced the idea that anthropology was a process of participant observation and that we can’t understand our culture from the outside alone. Sara also understood that the few “ideas” that anthropology uses to account for this endlessly various data is a little like the people of Lilliput hoping to keep Gulliver in place on the beach with a couple of guy wires. Eventually the beast comes to. Sara could study contemporary culture because she didn’t underestimate it or constrain her rights of access.

This post is dedicated to Sara Little Turnbull who passed away September 4, 2015.

This post first appeared on Medium.

Photocredit: Center for Design Research

Putting the gift back in the gift economy (with the fractional and the frictionless)

Kula ring see webspace yale edu anth 500 projects I've been corresponding with Dave McCaughan of McCann Erickson Japan.  We have been talking about the "gift economy." 

As I understand it, the "gift economy" ideas says that we are moving away from direct exchange to something more circular. 

Instead of trading "exactly this" for "exactly that," we now release things into the world (blog posts like this one, tweets, music, Youtube videos) with the hope that something will return to us someday in the form of some kind of value (revenue, reputation, social capital, cultural capital.)  In other words, we gift the world with our efforts, and we do so without expectation or guarantee of a return.  Adam Smith would be horrified. 

I like this idea and what's more I believe in it.  But it's not without its problems. 

Take the case of Jimmy Pantino.  He's spending his summer working at Denny's as a short order cook.  He would much rather have spent it shooting and editing shorts for YouTube.  He's got pretty good at it.  The trouble is YouTube doesn't pay him anything.  Nor do any of the 120,238 people who have seen his work on line.  In point of fact, at least from Jimmy's point of view, this is not a gift economy. It's a grab economy, which is to say, no economy at all.

The problem is not that people don't want to pay Jimmy and free him from his Denny's bondage.  They just don't want to pay him in the usual domination.  In our economy, in most circumstances, the smallest useful unit of payment is a dollar.  And we don't want to pay Jimmy a dollar.  It's just too much.  But we are prepared to pay him a nickle.  And at a nickle a hit, Jimmy's YouTube audience would have paid him around $6000.  This is not a princely sum.  No, as an alternative to working this summer at Denny's, it's actually much richer than that.

The further problem is that there isn't any financial architecture that makes it possible for us to pay Jimmy his nickle.  Certainly, there's no way to do it easily and swiftly.  Not only do we not want to pay Jimmy a dollar.  We really don't want to make a big production of it.  Unless it happens in the blink of an eye, we can't be bothered.  Which is to say, we want to spend as little in time as we do in money.  (What is the temporal equivalent of a nickle?  Two seconds, probably.  Click of a mouse.)

What we need is a financial system capable of delivering fractional amounts in a frictionless way.  When looking at one of Jimmy's videos we that they can just hit a button and keep going.  No signing in or keeping track.  Jimmy gets a nickle.  We fill up our virtual wallet every quarter or so, distributing fractional amounts til it's gone. 

The company that creates this system gets to be a hero to the kids.  (Expect abject worship from Jimmy in particular.)  It gets to be a participant in the new social networks and the plenitude of contemporary culture.  It gets to be a patron of the new society and culture now in the works.  Most simply, it gets to escape its status as an old order corporation and become a new order one.  Tactically, this is a seat at the most important table.  Strategically, its a chance to own some part of the future instead of tagging witlessly along behind it.  

The person who does it gets to be the next Jeff Bezos or Jimmy Wales. You will be interviewed by Wired Magazine.  You will be showered with honorary degrees.  Most important: You will get way better seats at basketball games. 

Building a system like this must be complicated.  Otherwise we would have one by now.  But surely it's not more complicated than Facebook.  It just has to be a little more secure.  Ok, a lot more secure.  (I would love to hear from someone who has an idea of what this sort of system would require from a technical point of view.)

My plea: let's put the gift back into the gift economy, and for that matter, the economy in the economy.  I mean, imagine what Jimmy Pantino could do for our culture if he was working with more than his free time and that crappy old computer his parents refuse to replace. 

Economies create great things.  Let's turn this one loose.

References

Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Reissue. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Aldine Transaction.

Anthropology: The Business Model

I had the good fortune to participate in a call organized yesterday by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn.  This is an open discussion, the Yi-Tan, they hold by phone, addressing the big issues, intellectual and otherwise, that vex and test the tech community.

These are two sublimely smart guys, but it was clear they weren’t sure exactly what to ask me.  Join the club.  I mean, what, finally, does an anthropologist bring to the party?  No one is exactly sure, not even the anthropologist. 

Ethnography, that’s the easy answer.  This is the method of anthropology, so, hey, if you need an ethnographer, you probably need an anthropologist, and now that A.G. Lafley, M.S.I. Kodak, IBM, and Campbell Soup use ethnography, anthropology has a place in the world.

But what else?  Is there something to anthropology beyond ethnography?

Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data.  My clients get this about me.  They used to ask me to find the solution.  More and more, they ask me to find the problem.  How, they ask, should we be thinking about this?  Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.

Jerry and Pip were kind enough to ask if I would join in the call.  Please them for this confidence.  And here are the notes I scratched out for myself.  You may determine for yourself whether they identify a problem worth thinking about.

If we look at culture and commerce from a pattern-seeking, assumption-hunting point of view, we see two things:

First, a clarity is giving way to a fluidity.  I grew up in a world that for all of its modernist momentum had a certain order.  It was like something defined by a mechanical engineer: parts and wholes, relationships and processes, outcomes and feedbacks, all of these were relatively clear. 

This clarity is now at issue.  What are the parts?  What is the whole?  What are the relationships and processes?  Can we predict outcomes?  Are there feedbacks? 

What, for instance, is a corporation, now that it contains so many different moving parts, now that it changes so much and so often, now that it has, often, many objectives instead of one.  Does it have a boundary?  Or is just more porous?  And if it is porous, has it found a way to manage its new fluidity.

A friend and I were talking yesterday how much the corporation has changed inside, swapping personnel in and out, refashioning the employment contract now that "one size" no longer fits all.

What is a "brand" now that consumer are let into the moment of creation, now that the corporation spends so much more time out and about, sensing and responding to the world "out there?"

What is a "self," now that each of us is so crowded with diverse interests and the ability to negotiate the complexities of a dynamic world?

Each of these things has in a sense "gone global," embracing more heterogeneity in a more dynamic mix, trading clarity for fluidity.   

Fifty years ago, the specs for each was pretty clear.  Intellectuals were unhappy with some of the design particulars but the rest of the world just got down to business and got on with life.  Now, it looks as if someone had a Starbucks accident.  Blueprints drip with coffee from Sumatra, not to mention that latte and cinnamon.  Boxes and arrows run and blur.  Fluidity, to be sure. 

Second, it’s not clear that we have come up with a better way of thinking about a world like this, despite the fact that we have been on notice since the work of the Tofflers in the 1960s.  There are small inklings here and there, the Long Now Project, the complex adaptive theory that comes from the Santa Fe institute, the call for dynamism that comes from gurus like Tom Peters.  A big tech company recently asked me to rethink the B to B relationship.  But these are all mere inklings, and nothing like a formal shift. 

As I say, not everyone sees this as the anthropological "value add."  And that’s a shame.  Because the world is getting complicated in ways that anthropologists know how to reckon with.  As people survey the fizzing, teeming confusion of the contemporary world, they ought to be saying, "where can I find an anthropologist to help me think about this. "