Am in NYC for a conference. Went for a wee perambulation in the park this evening. and lo and behold (what can this phrase mean), a many faceted baseball diamond on Heckscher Ballfield in Central park.

This field has four diamond, one in each corner. And it’s small enough that the “outfields” don’t just touch, they actually interpenetrate. This means that as you are playing one game, you have to pay attention to developments in three others. The alternative is terrible collisions, dropped balls, tears and recriminations.

When there is a “heavy hitter” at the plate, each center fielder actually plays facing the center fielder from the game opposite his own.

You can choose your own referent, but if baseball is America’s game, perhaps Heckscher’s field is telling us something.

Your faithful correspondent n the park.

I attended the Marketing Science Institute Meetings in Boston last week.

Two papers stood out:

Innovation Streams, Senior Teams and Ambidextrous Design by Michael Tushman (Harvard Business School)

Best Face Forward: Interface Systems and the New Frontier of Competitive Advantage by Jeffrey Rayport (Marketspace LLC)

A brief account of Tushman’s presentation:

Tushman distinguishes between two modalities in the life of the corporation:

1) The exploitative modality in which the corporation works the world it knows. This is a matter of extracting maximum advantage from the market as presently constituted. This is the traditional modality of the corporation, the very method of “business as usual.” But it is now haunted by a new, tragic understanding: that what makes corporation successful also make it vulnerable to discontinuous technology. Success is now sometimes a tragic flaw.

2) The explorative modality in which the corporation prepares for the world it doesn’t know and can’t fully anticipate. This is the new modality of the corporation, the place it is obliged to give up some of its problem solving, quality controlling, administrative elegance. Here it is obliged to be messy, complicated, iterative, and wrong.

These two modality are mutually presupposing. If the corporation is only exploitative, it cannot survive sudden change. But if it is only explorative, it cannot manage its affairs, exploit opportunity, or “get down to business.” The corporation must do both to make its way in the world.

The trouble is that these are effectively different cultures. They are driven by different assumptions and objectives. It is pretty hard to stuff them into the same organization, because they are often mutually mysterious and perpetually distrustful. In many cases, the explorative and the exploitative camps end up fighting one another, a contest between bean counting, risk-adverse bureaucrats on one side and reckless, restless, risk-crazy adventurers on the other. Or so they see one another, for these modalities are deeply contradictory.

What I like about Tushman’s scheme is that it moves us two steps forward. In effect, it says to the exploitative people., “Look, you have just going to have build explorative modality in. Stop treating change as the unwelcome guest who must be asked to dinner periodically and then sent packing. These are not the odd men out. They are now the odd men in.” Useful! Tushman formalizes something that have known for sometime: that change is a structural reality for the corporation and it must be embraced as such.

But he’s ecumenical, this guy is. For Tushman now says to the explorative people, “You have to stop saying things like ‘everything you know is wrong. Change is the only constant. The new rule is that there are no rules. There is no form upon the deep. It’s all just chaos now.’” Having given them a secure place in the proceedings, Tushman now says to the explorative group, “shut up already. And enough with the scare mongering.” [All these attributions to Tushman are purely my invention. I am merely trying to capture his argument in a vivid way. I have taken liberties in the process, for which all apologies!]

Tushman understands that the corporation can segregate the two modalities into separate functions and different personnel streams, but at some point these two violently contradictory modalities are going to have to co-exist in the same individual. Somewhere there has to be a senior player who understands them both, not as mutually exclusive impulses, but as exclusively mutual. The senior manager is going to have be powerfully, equally, and simultaneously explorative AND exploitative. Hence the notion of “ambidextrous design.”

I have to tell you that at this point in the proceedings I could hear the earth move. Here’s a professor at the Harvard Business School making the case for plenitude and transformation, not as a wild-eyed call for poetic refusal of bourgeois rigidities…but because ambidexterity is good for business.

Hah! So much for the man in the gray flannel suit. Now this guy or gal must be capable of arguing X and not X. This is a Dostoyevskian enterprise that does not come easily to the average MBA, and this is true because there is not instruction in this matter at any business school. (No, not even Tushman’s own.) But now we have an account of the corporation that says that the individual must possess and cultivate his or her own internal complexity to do their jobs.

I know a guy who works for corporate America who has tremendous range. Nick Hahn (Vivaldi Partners) can look at explorative and exploitative problems with perfect simultaneity. When you asked how he manages this, he says that it is a gift from the family. His father was an executive in the world of packaged goods and his mom was an artist. He was accustomed to skipping back and forth between the explorative and the exploitative often and at will

The question is, 1) “how do we build this into the corporate mind set?” and 2) “what MBA program, or change in personnel, would solve this problem?”

Ok, I will complete the second half of this blog tomorrow when I will describe the presentation of Jeffrey Rayport. Oh, and that reminds me. For those in the New York area, I will be talking at the Brand Identity Package Design conference at the Plaza hotel on Wednesday, the 20th. I’m talking at 9:00. Just come in. If challenged, say you are, 1) “his brother,” 2) “his sister,” 3) his “voice coach,” 4) “spiritual advisor,” 5) his “parole officer.” Used individually, I think these will all work.

At a family get-together, I went for a walk with my brother-in-law, a surgeon, and his dog, “Quizzie.” Quizzie stayed about 30 or 40 feet in front of us, with her nose to the pavement in front of her. She was the most evident topic of conversation, and Geoff and I fell to talking about the evolutionary episode that brought dogs and humans together.

The conventional wisdom here, I think, is that dogs predisposed to human contact vastly increased their chances for survival and that the “domesticated gene” got selected in. I think it is probably true that the human communities predisposed to canine contact also increased their chances of survival. While we were selecting them, they were selecting us. They are hard wired to like us. We are hard wired to like them. The relationship is a shared genetic endowment. We might say it’s a mutual genetic endowment.

But as we talked, a larger possibility occurred to us: that dogs may have allowed the human species to engage in a certain “farming out” of the evolutionary process. Once dogs were a dependable part of the human community, they gave us extraordinary powers of sight and smell we no longer needed to supply for ourselves. This freed us to use the evolutionary episode to master other abilities, chiefly higher cognitive ones. (I don’t know the physiology here, but I expect having a chemical laboratory in your nose takes up quite a lot of skull space.) And we could now use these cognitive abilities undistracted by the “Wait, was that a sound? Whoa, what sound was that?” vigilance that is the dog’s life. In the immortal words of Michael O’Donoghue, you can listen good or you can think good, and if you have to choose, it’s better to think good.

So, anyhow, yesterday, I got an email a friend in the capital markets who specializes in the tech sector and he asked me to comment on satellite radio, an emerging sector about which he has some doubts. Here’s what I said to him in the return email:

I think satellite radio adds value by disintermediating the consumer’s access to good music. Without this delivery system, I have to find, evaluate and chose the music I like. Then I have to buy, digitize and manage this music.

Satellite radio gives me “just in time” delivery across a large spectrum of musical taste. To this extent, it seems to make good on the promise that Larry Ellison was pushing for software a few years ago: that we should only have dumb terminals with all of our software and files residing somewhere on line.

What satellite radio lacks, perhaps permanently, is the ability for me to push a button and identify a particular song I want to add to my personal rotation.

For a consumer taste point of view, it’s as if we are moving in two directions: towards much more novelty (lots more new music and more kinds of music) AND towards more repetition. Satellite works for the first but not the second. Hope this helps.

It seems to be that what satellite radio does for music, Google does for information. “Just in time” access is the coming thing. Once technology releases us from having to find, sort, choose, embrace, and remember our music (or knowledge), does it also open up another “farming out” of the evolutionary process. We have already seen that faster, easier access to cultural materials has encouraged and enabled the construction of larger and more complicated personal identities. What difference will it make to the way we think?

No, really, I’m asking. Or, as we sometimes say in the tri-state area, “I’m asking here.”

My new watch arrived today. I hadn’t really slept since ordering it, so great was the anticipation of ownership. It’s an atomic watch. I couldn’t be more proud.

It’s called the Eurochron Atomic Watch and it sets itself according to the atomic caesium clock located in Boulder, Colorado. Charmingly, Eurochron says my watch receives ‘time telegrams” from Boulder throughout the day.

The eerie thing about my watch is that it’s now in perfect sync with the cable box. Pam and I determined this by shouting “now” when each advanced a minute. I am sure there are some imperfections in the system, but someday all clocks will give exact time.

My grandfather worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and every day at noon, the CPR would send a signal to every little station house so that all clocks could be synchronized and all the trains made to run on time. Between the noon of one day and noon the next, some of these clocks would slip into the dreamy imprecision of an Oxford don, but, hey, who cared? Even the most errant clock would return to orthodoxy in about, oh, 5 hours, 14 minutes and 3 seconds. Give or take. If humans sometimes go on “moral holidays,” surely clocks could have moments of their own.

My sister sent me a Garmin handheld for my birthday. It determines location by GPS. I think she hopes geo-caching will get me out of the house more. The unit shows an animation: a rotating earth surrounded by revolving satellites. You can’t actually see yourself on this spinning planet, but you know you are there somewhere. More exactly, the satellites do…most exactly. This is really eerie. When Pam and I took the Gamin in the car, it calculated not just location but distance traveled and average speed. We can’t get it to “lose” us even when we went 120 miles an hour on I-95 and careened without warning down country roads.

So there’s a tension between the perfect calibration of time and space, and the slippery imperfections of the social and personal world. The world is rich with variety and muddied by loose boundaries. It is, come to think of it, almost entirely Elizabethan. The Renaissance distinguished between the unchanging world of the stars above and the sublunary one below where everything is change and sometimes chaos.

For the Elizabethans these were mutually exclusive worlds, but ours intersect in interesting and useful ways. It is precisely because the world is so precisely calibrated in space and time that the change and chaos can be allowed to flourish. My clients don’t care to know where I am or what I am doing for most of the month of April, just so long as they can synch with me at precisely 4:00 on the 21st day in a specified room of a specified building. This is our CPR moment. I am now entirely devoted to their bidding. My intentions are their intentions. Once the project is done, I begin to wonder off to think of other things. And that’s ok, because the synch will be made to happen again.

Indeed, this might be why the consultant model works so well. It is actually better to hire people who have spent 24 hours (or days) in a relatively feral state. The consultant who is released from corporate intentions (and committee meetings) is actually more interesting and productive than those who are not. I don’t suppose that I get very far out of the corporate mind set, but this is just as well. This is, after all, a “sweet spot” game. I can only serve the corporation if my absence was shore leave. The AWOL consultant is hopeless (and almost certainly has tenure somewhere).

I am not sure where I am going with this one. (Frankly, I am so besotted by my new watch that it’s a wonder that I can write at all.) But I think I am moving away from that favorite way of thinking about the future that says, “everything you know is wrong. We can think about the future only by examining every assumption and learning to live with the most exceptional order of disorder. The world is changing is beyond recognition.” We heard a lot of this on the run up to April 2000.

No, the more interesting strategy is to observe the interactions of order and disorder. It’s as if we are installing an infrastructure. This is designed to make a minimum of assumptions about the world that will spring from it. It is designed to enable just about anything. But it is an infrastructure and as such it will trade off some things to get us others.

So much for the old Romantic idea, that the world of creative profusion comes from departure and a refusal of the rigidities of the human world. No, in this case, disorder depends upon order, imprecision requires precision. The real question then becomes is there a set of minimum assumptions that maximizes the quality and quantity of output even as it works constantly to diminish its own footprint. What do we need at a minimum to generate a world that operates at the maximum?

I don’t know. It could be just my new atomic watch talking.

References

Bettleheim, Bruno. 1959. Joey: A Mechanical Boy, Scientific American, 200, March: 117-126.

The CEO, student of Boethius? Chief executives who have been to the Platonic cave and back again? Senior managers who know their Jane Austin?

Today, the Wall Street Journal issues another call for a liberally educated CEO.

“It’s about maturity and leadership rather than how many accounting courses did you take,” Mr. Veruki says. “Companies are going to start to look at the fundamental value set of an individual and their basic education. Did they study philosophy and culture and history rather than just accounting, finance and engineering? Fast-forward 20 or 30 years, we’re going to find [business leaders] who maybe majored in philosophy rather than business.” [Peter Veruki is head of external relations at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.]

This WSJ story is a perennial. It appears each April in the business press, from which it is ripped by Latin scholars and history teachers and pinned to that profusion of notices on the professorial portal, delicately to scent the halls with new optimism and confuse passers-by with that self defeating protest, “damn it, we are not irrelevant.”

It is of course a splendid idea. CEOS are living in a world of vertiginous complexity. The world now moves so quickly, we can almost see the hands move on the IBM clock. The CEO now needs formidable powers of pattern recognition. He or she doesn’t have to know anything about Plato qua Plato. But a chance to think as Plato thought, a chance to think the things Plato thought, supplies patterns so powerful, so revelational that any one of them might serve to help a CEO see a forest in the trees. Some CEOS like to wear their learning on their sleeve. Hollinger’s Lord Black was one. (Little Latin, less Geek?) No, what we want is not the content but the form of Platonic thinking, the better to parse and shape problem sets of which the immortal could not dream (but now observes with interest).

The trouble, as we have noted in this blog before, is that the Liberal arts have been taken hostage by the antiquarians on the one side and the world renouncers on the other. The antiquarians do love their special studies so well that they will not release their forms for other intellectual activities. The usual study of Peloponnesian wars grinds very fine and thin. It is only sometimes about bigger pictures and larger forces. Mostly, it is designed to satisfy an academic agenda, and this is its own little battle field, a million small qualifications mobilized to defend the author from criticism only another academic could think up. Can this study gift the CEO with new powers of pattern recognition? No freakin way.

But the world renouncers are much worse. These are the radicals with tenure, the people who took to the academy so that they could absent themselves from the real world, and who know use their redoubt to mock and scorn anyone who engages with it. To think that these people might have any influence over the education of a CEO is a prospect to horrible to contemplate. And this brings us to the nub. Students who would prepared themselves for senior management with a liberal degree have a very good chance of being taken captive by the nit wits. The would-be CEO who enters the liberal arts has taken up a knight’s quest that only the most exceptional can survive.

So, by all means, let us encourage this idea that the liberal arts are necessary part of the senior manager’s education. But let us insist that CEOs pursue this exceptional knowledge from the venues where the well runs pure: night school and self instruction. Everything else is a fool’s errand.

References

White, Erin. 2005. Future CEOs May Need to Have Broad Liberal-Arts Foundation. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. April 12, 2005.

My Microsoft migration continues. Having replaced Explorer with Firefox, and Outlook with Gmail, I needed to find a replacement for Outlook’s calendar. I struck upon Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus for Windows XP.

Very useful, it is, too. But what struck me was the design.

First, the splash page of the program, the one that loads each morning, shows an African American male who appears to be about 35 years old (as above).

Typically, “diversity” as a cultural agenda encourages commercial players to show, say, four people in an ad or package, one of whom is African American. This is one of the communications clichés of our age and in a hundred years they will smirk at us for it. I don’t mean that it’s not a good idea, just that it is by this time a somewhat labored one. There are, to be sure, one or two cases in which an African American appears alone, and in this case, it is almost always an African American woman. I don’t think I have ever seen a corporation use an African American man alone.

The Franklin Covey image changes things quite substantially. This African American model does not stand for all African American consumers. He stands for all consumers, plain and simple. He stands for us all. The splash page dares to show our collective face as an African American one. Splendid. At a stroke (splash?), Franklin Covey has replaced a patronizing strategy of representation with something like real inclusion, a consumer society so integrated that any part of the whole can stand for the whole of the whole, as it were. Of course, we are not yet completely integrated, but I think this is one of the ways societies can work our way in that direction. Splendid, splendid, splendid.

But the theme of diversity shows up elsewhere in the software. When you evoke the “big compass” aspect of the program, you are invited to specify your most important life objectives according a variety of roles. I remember looking in on PlanPlus software about 5 years ago, and I don’t remember seeing reference to “role.” If it is new, it means that Franklin Covey has moved to embrace a second notion of diversity, what we might call the diversity within.

I believe that “diversity within” is one of the big cultural issues of our day. We are all of us much more diverse as individuals; we construct and occupy more deeply diversified portfolios of self. This aspect of diversity has been relatively obscured by the notion of diversity as racial, gender, sexual inclusiveness, by “diversity without.” More’s the pity. “Diversity without” is a pressing issue, but “diversity within” will be the deeper, more lasting, more important development in our culture.

Anyhow, we find Franklin Covey rising even to this occasion. It is perhaps well known that Franklin Covey has roots in the community of the Latter Day Saint’s. It is perhaps less well know that some members of this community have been unhappy that the Franklin Covey software sometimes leans away from church teachings in the direction of a new age view of the world. And so we may take it for granted that the Franklin Covey decision makers had to take their courage in both hands to incorporate “roles” as part of the software.

So it’s courage on both counts. Franklin Covey gives us diversity without and diversity within. In the case of the former, they risk their enterprise to achieve a larger social good. In the case of the latter, they advance enterprise by speaking to new realities.

Capitalism, it’s just the strangest, most interesting thing.

Here are two rules and an example for trend spotting:

Rule 1:

Take any possibility seriously. The new wouldn’’t be new unless it defied expectation. All ideas, even crazy ones, are to be taken seriously.

Rule 2:

Install a good SETI system. This is about pattern recognition. Rule 1 means that we are going to have lots and lots of ‘trend candidates.” We need some culling system that allows us to get rid of false positives. In the case of the real SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), there are 5 steps: 1) collect data, 2) find candidate signals, 3) check data integrity, 4) remove radio interference, 5) identify final candidates.

Clearly, these two rules are related. The credulity of Rule 1 exposes us the chaos of too many trend candidates, and obliges us to embrace a Rule 2 that sorts out the real trends from the apparent ones. Indeed, the wider we cast the credulity net, the more formidable must be our powers of pattern recognition. Or, to put it the other way round: the better prepared we are intellectually to spot a trend, the more widely we may cast the net.

In fact, we could say that these two rules force an intersection in a Venn diagram: where the circle 1 of dreamers/droolers/utterlyingenuous overlaps with the circle 2 of hardheaded/toughminded/cleareyed. This is a very good place to be, not least because in a culture in which anything is possible no longer finds much of interest in someone who sees that everything is possible. (“The world supplies that, we don’t need you.””) The real question is whether any given possibility contains any trace of plausibility, whether it might visit us, that is to say, not just in the imagination but in the world. But, I am missing the obvious (comme toujours): the intersection of circles 1 and 2 is for certain purposes precisely the characteristic intersection of culture and commerce (not to mention the place this blog sits).

An example:

I’’m reading the New York Times today, and there is a story about a guy who’s renovating his place and decided that he will have no chrome, steel, aluminum, nickel or any brushed, satin or polished metal in his home.

As he put it, “No visible metal has become my new obsession.””

Rule 1 says that we must consider this as a new trend candidate. No more metal. No more homes that shine, gleam or even glow. Good bye to all those bright, shiny bits in the kitchen and bathroom. Good bye to anything sleek or polished. Good bye to anything light bearing.

At first, this seems ludicrous. What are the chances that North American householders would ever forsake “visible metal?” But if we are reacting simply against sheer implausibility, this must give us pause. Sheer implausibility is, in fact, good grounds that this trend candidate deserves a hearing. The really new new must always offend us in this way. (If someone had tried to tell us in, say, 1965 that middle class householders would someday install industrial strength stoves in their suburban kitchens, we would have laughed at them.)

Rule 2 says that we must root through the intellectual toolkit to see if we have anything that would provide “skids,”” a way to “dock”” the candidate trend with what we know and a future we can imagine. There are lots of approaches here, but one particularly jumped out at me: brightwork. Brightwork is the name for the bits of metal on North Americans cars. It was especially current in the 1950s.

The term is sufficiently arcane that my Microsoft spell checker does not recognize it, and now shows it with that accusing red underline that says, summon your best imitation of a highly judgmental Bill Gates, “you have made a mistake”” or, as it will be understood for the remainder of this blog entry, ‘this is a trend candidate for which we cannot vouch. Proceed at your own risk. Low Headroom.””

One of the points of brightwork was to make cars look fast. It helped to create the impression that the car was “streaming”” forward. It was brightwork, among other things, that helped give the impression that cars were “moving even when standing still,”” a phrase of high praise for cars at mid century.

I cannot prove, but I do nevertheless believe, that there was a deep cultural connection here: the appearance of motion that brightwork supplied and a temporal orientation that prized the idea that individuals, corporations and countries were “moving forward,”” “racing into the future,”” and otherwise, “on their way up.”” The confusion of movement in space and time was, I think, a key article of mid century modernism. (I have substantiated this claim to some extent in Culture and Consumption II, in an essay on the 1954 Buick.)

Anyhow, the “brightwork”” idea gives us a way to think about the trend candidate presented by the NYT author. If he is removed brightwork from his home, we might suppose that other individuals will do so if and when they decide that the home should be stripped of these important traces of dynamism, that they wish to retreat from a culture that prizes individual and collective mobility, that one of the new objectives of interior design is aesthetic stillness. Naturally, I can’’t even begin to imagine whether any of these things are true. But I know have a set of auxiliary trend candidates, the encouragement of anyone of which would help reinforce the “candidacy”” of the “no metal trend.””

This is not a great example, perhaps. The brightwork notion will test your credulity even more than the “no metal”” one. But it does suggest how “rule 2”” might apply here. And this gives weight to the notion that trend watching should be left not to the hippest person in the room but the person who actually knows something about the culture in question.

We all know who I am talking about. The cool hunters who take good corporate dollars in return for a recitation of all the things you end up taking for granted if you live in TriBeCa. These poor creatures don’’t have intellectual depths. They only have tabloid-like surfaces. They can only reflect what is. They cannot reflect upon what is. One of these days I am going to name names. I really am. It is time to remove this “radio interference”” that we might examine the future with new clarity.

References

Marin, Rick. 2005. Heave-Ho, Silver! The New York Times. April 7, 2005.

A friend is working for a not-for-profit (NFP). Her boss held a meeting recently to announce that he was convening a meeting to create a “mechanism” to make a decision on personnel policy at the NFP. It turns out that the mechanism would be a committee and this, he thought, would meet 2 or 3 times to reach a decision.

Here’s how my friend does the math: five meetings would be held to make a decision that could be dispatched in 20 minutes. In fact, five hours would be used to do the work of 20 minutes. The ratio of ‘time required” to ‘time spent:” 1 to 15.

My experience in the NFP world tells me this sort of thing is not uncommon. My experience in the FP world says the opposite is happening there: decisions get faster, time is compressed, the world spins ever faster. It’s as if there’s a “continental drift” taking place between these worlds.

This drift comes from many things but it comes in part from a cultural distinction between expressive individualism and instrumental individualism. (With a hat tip to Daniel Bell, and his theoretical contributions here, with which I now take liberties.)

Expressive individualism says the individual is unique, precious, and laden with rights. These rights are self evident and so is the self…evident, I mean. The individual requires no performance, no accomplishment, no reciprocity to assert its claim to these rights.

Instrumental individualism says the individual is an agent and an outcome. The more successful the agent, the more individuated, authoritative, and vivid the outcome. This self is self creating and unpredictable. The self is not evident, it’s emergent.

It was precisely to honor the expressive individual the NFP boss intends to hold 5 meetings. Everyone is to be included. All voices will be heard. If we belong to the instrumental world, we might regard this as intolerable. The opportunity cost of 5 meetings is pretty large. Some of us will be inclined to say, “Let me surrender a little power to the Prince in exchange for the chance to get on with my life.”

But if we belong to the crystal palace of expressive individualism, we say, “No, what counts here is the acknowledgement and enactment of my selfhood. I don’t care that the affairs of state, or at least those of the NFP, are diminished…for I am enlarged.” In a weird way, this is a democratization of the Brahmin bureaucrat for whom form, and not accomplishment, is everything.

But here’s the problem. While the expressive individualists are indulging themselves in the theatre of the 1 to 15 ratio, the rest of the world begins to wonder why they should have to pay for it. And when they decide that they do not wish to, what they withdraw from it’s not just the theatre of expressive individualism but the social contract for which the NFP stands. Now that’s expensive.

Pam and I went for a drive through Brooklyn over the weekend: the Heights, Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sheepshead, that sort of thing. My conclusion: Brooklyn is very large. Coney Island is very small. (In person, the cyclone’s more like a tornado.)

We drove right past a store called American Apparel in downtown Brooklyn. This is what it said in the window.

Made in L.A.
Sweatshop Free
Brand-Free Clothes

As brand propositions go, this one is interesting.

Some of the brand meanings are being “sourced” from the way the clothes are made. One of the triumphs of capitalism, and the thing that the Marxists had trouble grasping, is that the meaning of a product only rarely comes its production. Generally, only “hand crafted” products take on meaning this way. Usually, meanings come from marketing, not making. (This is one of the things that Charles Revson had in mind when he said, “In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”)

Still, there was an opportunity here. The specter of sweat shops and the hits taken by Kathy Lee Gifford, Nike and Benetton, meant that someone was going to seize the marketing, as opposed to the moral, advantage of working state side. (Frankly, until someone factors in the social good that is extinguished when members of the Third World are denied access to employment in off shore factories, I am undecided. More simply: buying “Made in L.A.” costs someone in the Third World.) As the AA website puts it: “Our goal is to make garments that people love to wear without having to rely on cheap labor.”

But American apparel doesn’t stop there. Theirs is a “via media.”

American Apparel is a youth-directed company, founded without the assistance of institutional investors. Having no political ties, the company has rejected established norms on all sides; we’ve dismissed both the corporate right and the politically correct left in favor of something new.

Oh, so it’s not one of those “let’s pretend this isn’t a business” propositions. No, sir. At first, this casual flipping of the bird in the direction of the Thomas Franks of the world seems gratuitous, but then you notice the obvious: AA is not a union shop. This is a middle way: anti sweat shop and anti union. Tools down. All out.

But not a brand? Really? There’s a name, a product, provocative catalogue, a well designed website, lots of images of stunning, young models, a front story, a back story. Not least, this brand, constructed and positioned to take on very potent meanings at the moment, is not on equity the way an ancient Cape Dory takes on water. Wishing can’t make it so. If is walks like a brand, and it talks like a brand, chances are that’s exactly what it is.

The history of branding is filled with “x, not-x” strategies. The oppositional move says, “You know x? We’re not that.” (Coke-Pepsi, Avis-Hertz, CBS-Fox, IBM-Apple and so on.) But the brand strategy goes a step further. It says, “We are not J. Crew. In fact, we’re not even a brand.” We could call this the Escher strategy in brand building. And one of these days, American Apparel, the brand that isn’t a brand, is going to be worth a lot of money.

I think I see President Summers’ problem.  He has been speaking to his Harvard faculty when he should have been addressing the Yalies of the Yard. 

I don’t have a lot of ethnographic data on Yalies but I do recall one astonishing weekend I spend with 8 of them in Washington.  We were there for a Yale-Smithsonian conference and, as part of the proceedings, we, the participants, were driven around the nation’s capital in a small van.

What caught my attention (and there is nothing like forcible confinement to sharpen the senses) is that the Yalies kept up a line of self congratulatory humor and comment that said, roughly, ‘this may be Washington, but we are Yalies!’   It was as if they were trying to show they were not threatened by the nation’s capital.  In that great tradition of protesting too much, they managed to demonstrate just the opposite:  "This is Washington, we are terrified."

As I say, it is not a lot of data, but it makes a nice little puzzle.  Why would people from one of the nation’s great universities become defensive when obliged to tour the nation’s capital? 

One way to solve this puzzle is to embark in a long, reckless, thoroughly speculative, and utterly groundless discourse on Yale’s strategy of self presentation, and this is precisely what I intend now to do.  For roughly 304 years, Yale has fought a status game with Harvard and lost it almost every year.  (They’ve done somewhat better in the classic football contest, where the two schools are virtually tied.)  For all its greatness, Yale is poorer than Harvard in virtually every category.  For all its antiquity, it is a newcomer.  Yale sometimes wins "the game" (as they call the Harvard-Yale gridiron contest).  It almost never wins the comparison. 

This is tough on a college, even one as mighty as Yale, and a response is called for.  The classic cultural response is to doubt the grounds of the comparison, and here, I think, Yale may have been tempted by two options.  The first is to insist that Yale is other-worldly and to that extent a finer, more cerebral enterprise than Harvard.  This is one of the ways Oxford declares its difference from Cambridge and all those earnest, artless scientists on the fens.  The second, and this might be offered as a demonstration of the first, is to position Yale as a place that refuses power as enthusiastically as Harvard pursues it.  (Do universities "position" themselves in this manner?  Nations do.  At the end of the 19th century, France recognized that it would lose all future military contests to Germany and all economic ones to England.  Culture seemed the wisest course, the prudent thing to do.)

Did Yale "manage" the Harvard comparison this way, by escaping it on the grounds of a higher calling?  I can’t say.  This is, I hasten to remind you, discourse both speculative and groundless.  But we judge ideas by the work they perform in the world, and this one helps explain a couple of things.  It would explain why those Yalies were so threatened by Washington.  It would also explain why Yales are so often liberal and/or lefty.  (If there is a single reason that keeps the Democrats out of the mainstream, it is their presumption of moral superiority.  Thus have they removed themselves from the mainstream.)  Finally, it would explain why we’ve heard of almost no one at Yale.  I bet with a little effort you could name ten to twenty people teaching at Harvard.  Take a moment.  Think of Yale.  Three?  Five?  Any?  No, Yale is too good for this world, too good in any case to be compared with the likes of worldly Harvard.  ("Whew!  You can not judge us, we are too fine.")

That’s the trouble with this status strategy.  Renounce the world often enough and, after awhile, otherworldliness becomes obscurity.  Those who are too good for the world are charged with ever fewer responsibilities and finally, the world begins to lose interest altogether. 

Back to President Summers (just ignore the sound of gears grinding heroically as I redirect the argument).  President Summers comes from the outer ring of his university, the economics department, a place so worldly and influential it supplies many people for Washington posts, including, of course, Summers himself, who was secretary of the treasury there.  Harvard has not been shy about power.  The business school, the law school, the medical school, these are the brilliant rings of the planet and carry the university’s influence out into the world and back again.  Ironically, only the Kennedy school manages to keep itself disengaged (managing to look a little Yale-like in the process). 

All of the professional schools know a thing or two about chain of command, the realities of power, the privileges of standing, and what it takes to make the world bend to Harvard’s, or anyone’s, influence.  The rule here, and it’s got to be in Machiavelli somewhere, you can’t be too particular or fastidious.  You must get on with it.  The chief executive officers of these schools are not quite CEOS in the corporate sense, but certainly they bear very little resemblance to the godly churchmen who were their predecessors.  They know the lessons, the realities, of power in a way that most academics do not. 

Here’s the rub.  President Summers comes from these outer rings.  He embraced its culture.  He constituted himself a creature of power, a man of standing.  He wore, we might say, his rings on his sleeve.  And then he made an anthropological error.  He assumed that his Harvard was everybody’s Harvard.  He failed to see the Yalies within. 

Mr. President!  The first rule of rhetoric is "know your audience."  Harvard has a little Yale, the scholars who occupy the liberal arts, the social sciences and the Yard.  These people are largely shut out of, or kept from, Harvard’s engagement with the world.  Not for them the government posts, the consulting gigs, the television interviews, the world’s eager consultation.  For most of them the "ambit of influence" is the table they commandeer each day at the Faculty Club, and, outside of academic circles, not much more.  (I am using here a rhetorical trope here called "exaggeration".)

I’m sure this rankles but it should not surprise.  After all, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have made Yale’s bargain with the universe.  They have insisted that they are much too good, too noble, too moral to engage with the world.  They are now a little like ceremonial creatures of court removed from the world that they might commune with the gods.  Not for them the rough and ready pragmatism of the outer rings.  As keepers of the nobler view, they are, some of them, just a dubious hat and push cart away from wandering out of the Yard to shout imprecations at startled fellow Cantabrigians.  (That pesky trope again.)

This strategy of absenting yourself from the real world has many implications.  Some of them are tragic.  (The social sciences and humanities are now frightfully out of touch with some of the real compelling intellectual issues of our day.  Too bad.  They might have been useful.)  But here is the important implication for our purposes.  If you are surrounded by power but kept from it, if you are made a ceremonial creature, but only that, if you absent yourself from the world, and rewarded with obscurity, if all these things are true, you are in a very bad temper a good deal of the time.  The world has done you wrong.

Now, we know what happens to ceremonial creatures when they are wronged.  They become obsessed with form.  The world may not respond to their will, but they will have their due.  They will insist upon a precise acknowledgment of every detail of the ritual regime.  In President Summers’ case, this means no gratuitous references to the ROTC program, that sterling demonstration of the military-industrial-educational complex.  It means no reckless comments about women and science.  This too is, forgive me, a "motherhood" issue in the Yard.  And it means that the President may not evidence the arrogance of the CEO from the outer ring, nor the swash buckling style we might expect from a man who owes his Harvard position, in part at least, to the fact that he once had a corner office in the corridors of power. 

Finally, the Yalies of the Yard have one metapragmatic directive: you may have power, you may have the task of bending the world to Harvard’s will, but.don’t.rub.our.noses.in.it!  Give us this illusion: what we think matters, what we do counts.  And by all means, observe the ceremony and ritual that is our balm, our succor, our consolation.  Mr. President, we have only one power, that of form, and unless you honor us by acknowledging it, we, sir, will make you pay. 

(Sorry that got a little CSI: Miami at the end there, didn’t it?)

Prefatory note: Wow, the “what should Meg Whitman know about contemporary culture post” proved to be quite a lot more time consuming that expected. Hope to post it next week.

On an emergency trip to the dentist yesterday, I learned that Americans have been whitening their teeth at such a furious pace that the makers of caps, crowns and in-fills cannot match the new American mouth. Their stuff just isn’t white enough.

According to the American Association of Cosmetic Dentistry, teeth whitening/bleaching has increased by over 300% in the past 5 years, direct bonding has increased by over 100% in the past 5 years, veneers have increased by over 250% in the past 5 years.

The trend to whiter teeth looks like a simple matter of vanity caught in an inflationary spiral. The moment any significant group of consumers whitens its teeth, all other consumers are obliged to follow suit. People who were once whitening for competitive advantage, now must whiten merely to sustain parity. It’s the cold war all over again.

So the question is not “why so much whitening.” Once this gets started, it will run its course. The question is “what was the ignition point” that got things going.

I haven’t done the research here so what follows is surmise. But plainly there is an inclination to transformation in our culture that grows ever more powerful.

In the 1980s, I knew a man in his 80s. He was a plain spoken, hard working, Protestant corn farmer, smart as the dickens, and utterly true to rural form. He was the kind of guy who liked to read his way through an encyclopedia and then think about things with a craftman’s care while out in the fields. I remember asking him a question about the rural economy. He hardly seemed to acknowledge the question, and, then, about 15 minutes later, he gave me an almost perfect recitation of the pertinent facts and figures. Just took him awhile to find the file. The thing about this guy is that for all his fierce and thorough intelligence, he looked like every other farmer in his neighborhood. I think of him as a kind of bench mark for the transformation culture. “Farm form,” let’s call this.

Mr. Woolcott’s farm house was utterly unadorned despite the fact that he had lived there with his wife all his married life, raising 4 kids in the process. His clothing was whatever he happened to find at the local clothing store. I believe the motto here was: “nothing flashy.” His idea of branding was wearing a baseball cap with a seed supplier’s logo. His view of the body was interesting. God gave you one. You used it till you used it up. The idea of any kind of intervention, surgical, fashionable, cosmetic was unthinkable. I would dearly love to see his wonderfully unforthcoming face struggle to maintain blankness in the face of an off hand question, “So, Mr. Woolcott, I’m thinking getting my teeth whitened. What do you think?”

We are moving away from “farm form” at something like light speed. In the place of the idea that “use your body up,” we are now treat the body as a rough first approximation, variously to be reworked by exercise, surgery, clothing, and design of every kind. This is not the place to wring hands and regret the new, intoxicated inauthenticities of our culture. From an anthropological point of view, it is enough to say, ‘this is what cultures do from time to time” and to wonder what it was the prompted our culture to do it now.

Some of it has to do with our admiration for celebrities. By this standard, all of us have teeth too dim. Joan Kron in her work on plastic surgery says that much of what we know about the medicine thereof comes out of Hollywood and the willingness of the stars of the early 20th century to submit themselves to experimental procedures. Celebrities became exemplars of transformation and they helped pioneer some of the techniques thereof.

But there must be a Goffmanian answer here, as well. Smiles are “dazzling,” we are blinded by the light. Really dazzling smiles have the effect of making the smiler seem glamorous and a little inaccessible…a little not of this world…at least not of my world. And this is a strange thing because a smile is an opening of the body, and this has always been a dismantling of defenses and a invitation to approach. New, brighter, whiter smiles seem to send a double message: I am fabulous, you may approach me. Or it may be that here too, we wish to have our cake and eat it too, to appear sensational and approachable, the two at once. And when you think about it, celebrities, the ones who climb to real greatness, do manage to square this circle with apparent ease.

It’s also true that there are moments when we wish to be light bearing. Someone once told me that when she was interviewing celebrities she noted that they were always the brightest, whitest person in the room…it was as if, she said, the light was flowing from them. Then she noticed that the celebrities were always drinking water and she wondered whether there was not some connection. Hydrated skin was more light bearing.

It would be easy to say that we always want to be light bearing but there are moments in the West when this is the last thing that people want. We have a community in our midst that wants never to be light bearing: goths and of course tortured poets (when these are not the same person).

Why light bearing? What is “light” here in the cultural code of the moment? What is the act of bearing light (in the cultural code of the moment)? What attributions do we make to those who are light bearing?

There is lots more to puzzle over here but I have to get out into the field. I turn the question over to gifted readers. The question: why did we start whitening? What difference does this difference make? What penalty in the economy of glances do you pay if your teeth are, like mine, too dim. What advantage comes to those who have turned up the wattage? Is there any penalty for teeth that are too white? Can teeth be too white?

Meg Whitman allowed her name briefly to stand for the CEO position at Disney last week.

“Oh, no,” I thought, “not another Disney executive who knows nothing about contemporary culture!” (Faithful readers of this blog will know that the cultural literacy of Disney leaders has been contemplated in these “pages” before.)

Is this true? Is Ms. Whitman on or off the Cluetrain when it comes to culture? It’s hard to tell. Biographical notes scattered over the net are not encouraging. Whitman sprinted through high school…and this is where most of us begin our study of contemporary culture, especially popular movies and films. (A Martian looking at things “objectively” would have to say, “yes, parents send their kids to high school for math and biology. The kids go for music and film.”)

Whitman then choose economics at Princeton, and, again, this probably took her away from a deep knowledge of her culture, not towards it. She was only 21 when she hit the Harvard Business School and I can tell you from my own experience there that this place is almost hermetically sealed against the possibility of cultural competence finding its way into the curriculum. To speak ill for a moment of an institution that is otherwise exemplary, HBS is high school all over again. Occasionally, in the classroom or my office I would raise some aspect of contemporary culture as a talking point and the student(s) would blink rapidly and I could hear a frenzy of search activity as they activated a base of knowledge and perspective that is never otherwise as part of their education. (Talk about Martian.)

So on balance there is a good chance that Meg Whitman is not a wunderkind when it comes to knowing the culture she would both ride and shape as Disney CEO.

Then I thought, “Who cares! Whitman has other qualities. This CEO gets responsiveness as few CEOS do.”

When we hire people, they often don’t understand what eBay is. It takes six months for people to actually understand. Often your instincts coming from more traditional companies are wrong. We have to enable the community, we can’t direct them. Our community is people, not wallets. The people who end up not being as effective as they otherwise might be are ones that try to control and direct as opposed to listen and enable.

Q: Do you still get direct feedback yourself from the community?
A: Yeah. First of all, the community has my e-mail address. It’s meg@ebay.com. I read all my own e-mail — anywhere from 100 to 500 e-mails a day — many of which are from the community. So I have a pretty good pulse of what’s happening out there. Also, at least a couple of times a week, I check the eBay discussion boards. I can get a real good pulse there. And I often sit in on Voice of the Customer groups.

Whitman says, “This company truly is built by the community of users.” So what would Disney look like if it were run by someone who actually published their email address. It is of course utterly inconceivable to think of Eisner doing such a thing. By the sound of things, Eisner took some pains to avoid consulting his own executives, let alone the movie-going public.

When Whitman took eBay over, it was tech driven. Now it’s consumer driven. Of eBay’s nearly 5,000 employees, 2,400 are in customer support and 1,000 in technology. What a fine idea: vast network of email and phone intelligence gathering with which Disney assiduously listens to the shifting tides of taste and preference. What did people think of the picture they saw last night? Tell me what you think of your visit to Disneyworld right now! Who are you, where are you, what’s happening right now? What, in short, would Disney look like if the CEO believed, “This company truly is built by the community of users”?

Clearly, the ability to listen is not enough by itself. The CEO still has to know something about the culture to which he or she is listening. Otherwise, they are in the famous Balinese figure of speech, as water buffalo listening to a symphony. Or, to use the language of a Cambridge don: unless you have concept, the world is all percept.

Tomorrow: what a CEO would have to know to possess cultural literacy.

References
Hof, Robert D. 2003. Meg Whitman on eBay’s Self-Regulation. BusinessWeek. August 18, 2003.
here

Lashinsky, Adam. 2003. Meg and the Machine. Fortune Magazine. August 11, 2003
here

Mangalindan, Mylene and Joann S. Lublin. 2005. After Disney Try, EBay’s Whitman Sees Star Rise. Wall Street Journal. March 14, 2005.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Disney: CEOs and the arcane art of predicting contemporary culture.
here

I’m moving to Google’s Gmail. It’s been a week now.

The advantages over Outlook are striking:

1) My email is now stored outside my laptop. This protects me against cataclysmic loss…a big benefit because my email file is a good approximation of all the people, projects, and information I need to “keep in mind.” What protects me from loss of email protects me from the first enemy of every complex adaptive system, the moment that dynamism tips into disorder, when one missing piece of information cause plates to begin to spin off their sticks, reducing me to a sweating immigrant on Ed Sullivan’s stage, a grinning, desperate creature who doesn’t control the routine or own the plates. (It was a cruel show, when you think about it, reality programming before its time.)

2) My email, as my map of the matters that matter, is more accessible to me when I am out of the house. I can use any computer with almost any operating system. This too is a big “value add.” When out of the house, I am often especially needful of orientation. My great grandfather needed a compass. I need my email. It contains almost every name, number, date and address I need, not as a tedious database of “contacts” that is ever more voluminous but perpetually incomplete, and always missing the contact I need right now. Unlike “contacts,” my Gmail probably contains the datum that sent me out of the house in the first place.

3) The spam problem has been diminished to next to nothing. How much time have we spent getting rid of spam? How many important messages have got lost in this immense shuffle? I don’t know, but I would dearly like to bill someone for the loss of time and the damage to my mattering map. More than that, spam was a thicket that stood between me and getting on with the day. As a flow of interrupts over the course of the day, spam exacted a small psychic tax on my ability to concentrate and initiate. Now it’s gone.

I was slow to move to Gmail. A friend of This Blog Sits At was kind enough to send me an invitation. But I balked. The idea of “paying” for Gmail by looking at ads did not sit well. Indeed, as I argued here months ago, ads would contradict the signature look, and one of the real benefits, of the Google proposition: exquisite simplicity.

I was wrong about the ads. They line up politely. No shouting. No music. No special effects. Just a tidy cue. Hands politely raised. Expectant looks, but no remonstrations.

Actually, it’s better than that. The ads are being generated by Google on the basis of the content of the email. So when I am corresponding with someone about a research project I am doing on commercial ethnography, I actually get ads from the suppliers of commercial ethnography. Useful!

Actually, it’s better than this. Often the ads have nothing to do with the email at hand. So when I am corresponding with a friend from Montreal, I get ads on pregnancy testing and sail boat equipment.

This is a like the scene in Mars Attacks when, to understand the arriving Martian, the President summons a Professor and his translation machine. For the first few minutes the machines turns Martian speak into the purest poetry. The professor intercedes with a screw driver and before long the Martians are being as discursive and unmistakable as everybody else.

Far from resenting those ads on Gmail, I am now hoping that some will continue to prove evocational and referentially promiscuous. Now, that’s a value ad, er, add.

The transition to Gmail is not quite complete. I am using Microsoft Word to write this post, and every time I used the term Gmail, Microsoft marks it as misspelled. Oh, insult to injury! I am now going to teach my spell checker that Gmail’s a word it must recognize. There.

Martha Stewart leaves her West Virginia prison this weekend. Decisions must be made.

Strategically, there are three options for the post-prison Martha:

1) act as if nothing happened, carry on as usual.

2) act as if something happened, but acknowledge it only outside the public Martha.

3) act as if something happened, and build it into the public Martha.

To judge from the public pronouncements of the Stewart team, Option 1 beckons. But it’s a terrible idea.

Five months of prison has refashioned Stewart’s image. To pretend otherwise, to return Stewart to her “little miss perfect” persona as a Connecticut arbiter of middle class taste, that’s just crazy. Or to put this another way, there’s always going to be an elephant on the sound stage, and this one’s wearing prison blues.

The old Martha Stewart was forbidding, inaccessible, a goddess of the status heights of Connecticut. She had to stoop to conquer and conquer she did.

This persona (and brand) is destroyed. Thank goodness. Like it or not, Stewart is more interesting and complex than before. She has suffered. She has come down from the mountain. Martha can now claim to know about life, and not just about style. She can feel our pain (having suffered some of her own).

In sum, option 3 is not just an option but an opportunity. The question is whether prison changed Martha Stewart. Is she capable of exhibited this for public purposes? Will the management team she has surrounded herself with rise to the occasion? Open questions, all.

“This blog sits at” wishes her well. And that’s not something any of us would have thought to do before. And that’s a measure of the opportunity.

References

Barnes, Brooks. 2005. Susan Lyne: Relaunching of Martha: Keeping priorities straight

Fournier, Susan. 2003(?). Harvard Business School Case Study on Martha Stewart.

post script

I am doing another hour on the Debbie Millman show on Voice America today, 3:00 to 4:00 eastern seaboard.

Heidi Fuller-Love and her husband created a bed and breakfast in France a couple of years ago. They asked the village to make a small change to accommodate them, and all hell broke lose.

Over the next few years we suffered every kind of persecution imaginable. The neighbour’s scruffy mongrel with close-set eyes was left outside to bark day and night, adolescents with mopeds revved for hours on end outside our front door, the cantonnier sprayed our roses with weed killer, fisherman tramped through our flowerbeds and horsemen tore down a part of the fence, then rode roughshod over our newly planted lawn. When we complained they said our garden was on a right of way and we had the devil’s own job to prove them wrong.

Apparently, this happens a lot.

Our lawyer in Angoulême regaled us with a host of similar tales. “Making people leave” was a well-loved local blood sport, apparently.

Finally, a Catholic priest helped clarify.

“You can get on fine in rural France if you don’t take initiatives. But if you scare local people – and anyone who wants to change things inevitably will – then God help you!”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as simple xenophobia. But I couldn’t help thinking that that this little village on the Charente/Dordogne border was once more the rule than the exception.

Most anthropologists find themselves dealing with people who exhibit an implacable hostility for innovation. They may not quite as bad a French villagers. (Clearly this is the special accomplishment of La France.) But by and large, most human communities, especially, second and third world ones, don’t like innovation or initiative, and fight them hard.

This makes mysterious the fact first-world Westerners should embrace change so readily and manage it relatively well. Actually, the first mystery is how we went from a dirge march as hunters-gathers to the full out sprint of the present day. It’s as if something remagnitized our feeling for change. It’s as if we wouldn’t change until we started changing, and once we started changing, we couldn’t stop.

The second mystery is how we do it now. We are changing just about all the time. We accept change as the constant of our lives. Sometimes we grouse and grumble, but mostly accept each new new, and all the rippling innovations that come from it. Email, birth control, Linux, Anthony Robbins…if we were hunter-gathers (or French villagers), we would have murdered all of these innovations in their crib.

We have effectively reengineered the person. Speaking of Anthony Robbins, we may take his program and career as part of the reengineering, as an attempt to give the self new properties, to give the individual a new willingness and agility in embracing change. In fact, we could treat a good deal of the cultural change in the West in the last half of the 20th century as a cultural response to change. This would stretch from Anthony Robbins backward to Objectivism and forward to the electronic enablements (PDAs, etc.) at our disposal. Indeed, we might even think of the MBA as a set of preparations for a professional life that will be nothing if not a process of constant innovation and adjustment.

But the strangest thing of all from an anthropological point of view is that we cut ourselves no slack. We don’t say, “Yikes, we have created a world of new dynamism. What, systematically, are the problems it creates? What, systematically, are the solutions we require.” No, we make ready often badly and by halves. The anthropologists wonders, “when are they going to snap out of it, and see that they have a new set of problems that are better addressed structurally and strategically?” Anthony may be the right person to lead us into the promised land of proactive dynamism. On the other hand…

References

Fuller-love, Heidi. 2005. Fear and loathing in rural France. The Telegraph. February, 14, 2005. full text here