I was talking to Mary Walker, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist, about the proposed (now improbable) deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, and we were wondering how such a deal would work itself out. 

Mergers and acquisitions are fraught with difficulty and Mary was pointing out that the failure rate is sometimes as high as 60%.  And this is after tough minded MBAs have examined the deal with their own particularly sophisticated, sighted, numerate version of due diligence.

When things go bad in a merger or an acquisition, the problem is sometimes not with the mechanics, not with the infrastructure of the deal.  The problem is with the superstructure of the deal, the ideas, practices and cultures that must now be brought together for things to work.  We are still inclined to suppose that mergers and acquisitions are straight forward, that the individuals who must now work together need merely resort to an instrumental logic to find common cause and a shared modus operandi. 

But of course the truth is often otherwise.  Corporations are cultural, drawing their answer to the Levittian question (what business are we in), and the Druckerian one (what customer are we for) from the vision of the founder, the history of the enterprise, the region of the country.  Even the business school that supplies the C suite can make a difference here.  I think it’s safe to say Microsoft and Yahoo see the world differently and that a rapprochement would have been challenging. 

The business to business relationship is always richer and more complicated than the transactional model we have of it.  But the business in business relationship is still more challenging.  Now a start-up must figure out a way to fit itself into the massive processes that organize and run the larger corporation.  For someone who is accustomed to creating policy and building consensus over beers after work, the ways of the acquiring corporation can seem mysterious indeed.  Mysterious and deeply gratuitous.  Process run wild.  System for the sake of system.

But the problem is not just large acquiring small.  The merger of two roughly comparable operations will be tricky.  Much of what makes the corporation make sense and run smoothly resides in a shared set of assumptions and because these are assumptions they are most submerged.  They operate a lot like the rules of language. They operate more powerfully for the fact that they operate invisibly. The company that has to sit down and negotiate its assumptions each day would end up looking quite a lot like an undergraduate philosophy class and it would be out of business by the end of the quarter. 

But submerged assumptions are hard to detect or communicate.  This means that those who will be absorbed by the merger or acquisition have no clear play book to follow.  They are obliged at first to guess at the new culture.  Their best hope finally is to reverse engineer from the behavior they encounter on the job, and build up the assumptions that must be operating in other heads.  One thing they CAN take for granted, that no one in the acquiring corporation is going to do the same for them.

This is, finally, not a very complicated anthropological problem.  But for some reason it appears to be a very real M&A one.  Hmmm.  Now I wonder if this could be a merger opportunity. 

References

Walker, Mary.  2008.  Mergers and acquisitions: when corporate cultures collide.  Open range anthropologist.  February 11, 2008.  here. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Richard C. Moeur for the image which comes from his Manual of Traffic Signs at http://www.trafficsign.us. 

Naunihal Singh noted in a Twitter today that Barack Obama uses a University of Chicago behavioral economist, Austin Goolsbee, and I thought, wow, that runs against the Democratic grain.  This got me thinking that McCain enrages the Radio Right by refusing Republic orthodoxy.

In this way, these guys have more in common with one another than they do with their respective parties.  In fact, I wonder if we could argue, at the limit, that there is a two party system but it’s no longer Democrat and Republican.  It’s now heterodoxy versus orthodoxy.  This would join McCain and Obama, distinguishing their new "party" from the one that contains the likes of Romney and Clinton. 

If the world is a churning mass of possibility, surely the last person we want in the White House is someone who votes, who thinks, party line. Surely, the world is too complicated for that…and that politician. This has to be one of the signatures of the good politician.  Isn’t there a prima facie case here?

References

Will, George.  2007.  The Democrat Economists.  The Washington Post.  October 3, 2007.   here. 

The keen eyed ethnographer is always on the look out for the telling artifact and Jason Haas favored us with a beauty yesterday.  (We wrapped up the MIT ethnography course and Jason was reporting research and recommendations for PBS.)

Jason played a YouTube clip that shows Mr. Rogers gently lecturing a committee of the US senate.  At the 3:30 mark of this clip, Mr. Rogers says,

…an expression of care, this is what I give, an expression of care everyday to each child, to help him realize he is unique, I end the program by saying, you’ve made this day a special day by just you being you, there’s no person in the world like you, and I like you just the way you are.

There is something vertiginously strange about listening as Mr. Roberts, in his sing song voice, as he lectures the members of the US Senate…as if they were restive, not-very-bright, five  year olds.  (And, hey.)

"You’ve made this day a special day by just you being you"?  This is the song of individualism.  And you thought that that was Walt Whitman’s job?  Nah.  Well, it was Walt Whitman’s job but then it fell to his perfect opposite: a gentle, caring man in a cardigan, no friend to wilderness, a creature domesticated and domesticating, a surrogate parent to the nation’s young. 

Today was filled with interesting, mind testing contrasts.  In the afternoon, John Deighton was kind enough to show me an astonishing experiment in retail.  In downtown Boston, there is a sneaker store that is concealed beyond what looks like a cigarette and candy hole in the wall.  The window has dry goods that are dust covered and sun bleached.  I am sure there are Bostonians who walk by it everyday without ever guessing that it is in fact a front.  You enter a cramped little store, there is a guy surrounded by lotto tickets and cigarettes.  You might well enter this shop and leave it again without ever guessing what is behind it’s Coke machine.  You must approach the Coke machine and if you get close enough, it disappears every so suddenly, (one imagines a puff of magician’s smoke here, but I don’t think there was one), and you are admitted to the inner sneaker sanctum.  Unbelievable.

John and I then went looking for a place to lunch and wondering into the cafe of the Mary Baker Eddy complex.  This just as remarkable in its way.  Airy, light, well designed, palm trees, sandwiches, agreeable people, and of course with John as always a lively conversation.  And at one point I found myself thinking, "maybe this is what heaven is like."

And John and I were left to wonder whether kind of thinking and theory allows you to encompass all of this, a secret sneaker store and Christian Science, the latter already an interesting and unlikely combination, a bet against the odds.  A sneaker shrine and a religious experiment, not so far from one another.  Shouting distance actually. But cultural speaking, different continents and its up to bloggers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and business school (should they accept this mission) to do the cartography that makes them relative.  And once we’ve done that, we might have a go at thinking how to think about Mr. Rogers and the US Senate in the same thought. 

Acknowledgment

With thanks to Jay Gordon for his remarkable experiment.  Long and much may he prosper. 

The Mr. Rogers video is here. 

I was sad to see, in the recent New York Magazine treatment of Doug Liman, a note of agony.  Liman talks about his new film, Jumper, as something that "completes my sellout trilogy."  He calls Swingers, his first film, "the one film that was truly not a sellout."  Liman believes that Mr. and Mrs. Smith cost him his "indie credibility." 

There is something faintly old fashioned about this agony.  From an anthropological point, I can’t help feeling like I am looking at a little bit of New York history, an artifact of a time gone by.  What we are hearing in Liman is the modernist insistence that the world must be dichotomized into art and commerce, that those who make one can’t make the other, that art is necessarily worthy and commerce necessarily craven, that credibility goes to art, condemnation to commerce.  Those who engage in commerce instead of culture are "selling out."

From an anthropological view, this concept was installed with special virulence in popular culture sometime after World War II.  Any one who made culture for commercial purposes (art directors, copywriters, TV producers, Broadway producers) were filled with self reproach.  It was customary for ad executives to let you know that they were "working on a novel," lest you imagine that they took advertising seriously.  The wonder is that Manhattan turned out so much brilliant popular culture, when so many of its meaning makers were so conflicted, so self hating.

But there it is, the modernism was clear on this: culture that comes from commerce was compromised, bad, dirty and wrong.  From an anthropological (aka, a Martian point of view) it was an amazing vital and formative cultural construction.  And it exists still.  It torments still.  When Liman talks of "selling out" for making films that have entertained millions, it is virulent.

But here is the post modernist view.  (I wonder if we shouldn’t call this the "past modernist" view, because when we wish to say "not modern," we don’t necessarily mean what "post modernism" has come to mean.)  There are two ways to make the case.

First, culture that comes from commerce has got steadily better.  This says the "art vs. commerce" argument was wrong.  People insisted TV was a waste land from which nothing good could ever come.  And of course, now we watch The Wire, Six Feet Under and other HBO productions with the conviction that its pretty good indeed.  Even the major networks now turn out great work, as I think Raines, Life, 30 Rock demonstrate. This evidence is extraordinarily damaging to the "art vs. commerce" argument.  Good work should never have come to TV or Hollywood, if the dichotomy were real.  (See the work of John Carey, Tyler Cowen, John Docker, Steven Johnson, D.L. LeMahieu, and Robert Thompson, as below.)

Second, we are coming to see that art and commerce are not mutually exclusive, that it’s ok to do both.  This argument accepts the original argument: art is better than commerce.  But
it says that we no longer have to choose.  People who do one can do the other.  Specifically, people who do commerce can still do art. (Actually, it might be that the argument still works when transposed.  It may well be that those who do art can’t do commerce.  That would be agonizing…but it is a topic for another post.) 

When Elvis Mitchell asked Steven Soderbergh what he was thinking as he prepared to make his movie Out of Sight, Soderbergh replied:

If you blow this, you will be doing art-house movies for the rest of your life and that’s as bad as doing big budget things.  I wanted to do both.

This is I think the signature of our postmodernism, that conviction that we will not submit to the tyranny of dichotomous categories, that we will not submit to choosing between art and commerce, that we want both.  The post modern self is a voracious creature.  We want everything on offer.  Now.  Ours is a time of expansionary individualism.   

This is not to say that there are not moral issues here, that we are not obliged to think about the kinds of value that different kinds of film-making creates, that we are not obliged to choose with care.  It is merely to say that the art-commerce dichotomy is now an exhausted cultural artifact, a moral antique. 

References

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fishman, Steve.  2008.  The Liman Identity.  New York Magazine. January 21-28, 2008, pp. 36-41, 124. http://nymag.com/news/features/42823/

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.  New York: Riverhead.

LeMahieu, D. L. 1988. A culture for democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

Acknowledgments

To Eunice Hong and The Brown Daily Herald  for the photo above.

Once it was enough for a corporation to make widgets.  Now it must also make ideas.  Especially if it wants to keep making widgets. 

Capitalism was once ruled by a rough and ready, mechanical, pragmatism.  No pointy headed people need apply.  Now ideas are the first order of business. And this gives advantage to the people with higher degrees from Stanford.  I give you the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 

Let’s put this another way.  Capitalism used to belong to the guys who stole lunch money.  Now it’s much more likely to belong to the kids who surrendered it. 

We have lots of institutions that make ideas.  Universities, institutes, laboratories, for instance.  And we have institutions that see to the dissemination of these ideas: books, magazines, and conferences used to serve nicely. 

I can’t be the only one who has noted a change.  Call it the conference that isn’t a conference.  Take the Foo Camp invented by Sara Winge and Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Publishing.  This appears to illustrate that famous William Gibson line about the future being badly distributed. Foo Camp appears to bid (dare?) the future to "assemble here."

There is the Andrew Zolli’s PopTech, and TED founded by Richard Saul Wurman.  There is SxSW and Burning Man.  There is Dave Isenberg’s F2C, Jerry Michalski’s retreat, and Pip Coburn’s dinners in NYC and SF.  There is Russell Davies’ Interesting2007.  There is Piers Fawkes at PSFK.  I think Roger Martin is doing something like this in the context of a business school. 

None of these are conventional approaches to the convention.  I haven’t done my homework here, but I expect all of them exhibit have the structural properties: relatively egalitarian, more interested in expressive individualism than instrumental individualism, more concerned with intrinsic more than extrinsic rewards, suspicious of power and rank asymmetries, playful, dramatic, less interested in intellectual due process and more interested in the counterexpectational, the ad hoc and the improvisational. You have to be nimble witted to take advantage of these things.  And you come away more nimbly witted still.

But the thing that really strikes me is that these exercises are so person centric.  Almost always there is someone at the center of things, duly humble, not an all imperial, but there nevertheless, initiating, organizing, enabling, sustaining.  What’s odd about this is that not so very long ago, this task of bringing people together used to belong to institutions working out of the routinized logic of their role in the world.  These institutions are falling silent, even the very great ones seem to be somehow displaced in the larger, idea production, scheme of things.  It is as if knowledge and knowledge makers now gather at the behest of individuals not institutions. 

This makes me think of city-states for some reason.  I can’t say I know very much about city-states but here’s what I think I know: that they are exercise in "order-out."  The city-state exists in a larger domain that is relatively chaotic.  It creates order, most intensely within the walls of the city proper, but also in the concentric rings that run out into the ever more lawless countryside.  Nation-states, on the other hand, are "order-in."  There is an embracing idea, and an embracing bureaucratic order, and the domain of order they make possible. 

I think Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp is order-out.  At the center of a Foo camp, knowledge gathers.  (There’s a book to be written about these people, O’Reilly, Winge, Zolli, Wurman, Isenberg, Michalsky, Coburn, Davies. Who are these people?  And who is going to organize the meta-foo camp that brings them all of them together?)  And then it begins to filter out into the provinces, the places the future is reluctant to go.  It is carried by simple monks and not so simple courtiers, people who have had a chance to glimpse the glory of this order or that court, and laden with its intellectual riches, go out into the world. 

It’s a medieval model, no? (I know next to nothing about the period, so I proceed with caution.)  And the question is why this order-out model should now be flourishing when indeed we have magnificent post-monastic institutions in place, richly founded, magnificent in their gravitational powers, indubitable in their authority.  In the words of Max Weber, the great scholar of the modern world, "What gives?" 

The answer has got to that the knowledge produced by these events is newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Big institutions can’t produce this kind of knowledge because they are predicated on another model of knowledge, one that is, for all the many things it does well, inclined to grind fine and slow, and mostly slow. 

In the Foo Camp and its many counterparts, we are looking at an adaptive response to a world that is itself newly nimble, spontaneous, improvisational, responsive, in a word, liquid.  Large institutions are being in the words of Thomas Kuhn, "read out" of the field.  The knowledge required of a liquid world must almost necessarily come from liquid events, the only places, we now suspect, that liquid knowledge and news of the future now consent to gather. 

References

O’Reilly, Tim.  2007.  Foo Camp Takeways.  here. 

Wikipedia entry on Foo Camp here.   

Acknowledgments

To The Airfields for the image above.  See their website here. 

The episode of The Wire last night returned the series to its customary form.  The opening treatments were a little disappointing, and it looked for awhile as if the choice to make this season turn on the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun might have been a bad idea. 

But last night we could see The Wire do what it does best, bring together four structural elements that have the effect of creating a vivid anticipation and the arresting question, "what the hell happens now." 

The Wire brings together the following elements:

1) There are many parts.  the police, journalists, politicians, drug dealers, unions, neighborhoods.  Each part has its own parts. 

2) These parts are in the words of Weinberger "loosely joined."  What happens in one community will have deliberate and accidental effects in all the others. 

3) These communities are filled with life-like people whose behavior cannot be predicted.  (Bunk and Jimmy last season were the fastest of friends.  They are now estranged.)

4) Sometimes, one or two of these people will engage in acts of provocation that must have big structural effects.   Spoiler alert! Last night for instance Jimmy decided to fake a serial killer.  A journalist faked a quote.  (So we get some weird and unlikely reciprocity: what Jimmy, a police, did will have consequences for the world of journalism.  What the journalist did will have consequences for a particular police.)  A gang leader awakened a gang killer once retired and moved away, and now destined to return. 

We are returned to the edge of our seats!  We know something big will come of all of this, but because there are so many moving pieces, brought into so many unpredictable relationships, filled with people who will continue to act unpredictably and provocatively, it is impossible to imagine the end of the season.    

It is thrilling that TV should play host to this much indeterminacy and complexity.  It is thrilling to see that David Simon has invented a non-genre: the police anti-procedural.

References

Weinberger, David.  2002.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined.  New York: Basic Books.   

I was in Toronto yesterday doing ethnographic interviews on the topic of Canada and Canadianness.  One of my respondents was Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Part way through the interview, Martin identified a paradox.  He noted that Canadians who are creative and free thinking as individuals can become dramatically less creative in groups.  Let’s call this the Martin paradox.

You might say that this is paradox describes all cultures.  Doesn’t group-think crush creativity everywhere?  Don’t ideas suffer "death by committee" in all countries and economies.  Well, no.  I have seen Americans be sensationally creative in groups.  I have seen The Coca-Cola Company and IBM roll out ideas effortlessly.  That Canadians are not creative in groups, this may be a special national characteristic. 

Or, we might be wrong on the first proposition, that Canadians are especially creative as individuals.  But the anecdotal evidence here is strong.  I give you James Cameron, Martin Short, Malcolm Gladwell, Isadore Sharp, Jim Carrey, Lorne Michaels, Don Tapscott, Tim Bray, James Gosling (inventor of Java), Eugene Levy, Douglas Coupland, Matthew Perry, John Kenneth Galbraith, Hayden Christensen, Nelly Furtado, William Gibson, Rachel McAdams, David McTaggart (co-founder of Greenpeace) Michael Ondaatje, and of course Jason Priestley. It’s as if Canada generates a net surplus of creativity, enough indeed to help fund big chunks of American culture.  (Or maybe of course Canadians go south to escape the group effect.) 

We may take Martin as a good example of a creative Canadian.  He attended Harvard College and the Harvard Business School.  He remained in Cambridge to help build Monitor from a small company to a large one.  While running the Rotman school of Management, he finds time to produce a stream of articles and books.  He was coming north to Rotman just as I was going down to HBS, and I worried that this creative individual might be set upon by Canadians in groups.  But it turns out this guy is bullet proof and now threatens to reinvent b-schools, capitalism and Canada all at once. 

Martin gave me a copy of his new book, The Opposable Mind, which I read on the flight home from Toronto.  It’s good.  Friends of this blog will have noticed that I am usually unkind to books in the business literature category.  I have drubbed Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne, Lovemark by Roberts, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and the ideas of Zaltman, Rapaille and Sir John Hegarty.  I have even dared challenge Freakonomics.  I am, by this reckoning, a tough audience, but The Opposable Mind impressed me. 

A skeptic might say I am going easy on Martin because I have met him, because he is a Canadian (and there is Canadian mafia), and/or because he gave me a copy of his book.  May I reassure you that there is no Canadian mafia.  Furthermore, I have met, worked with, and deeply admire Zaltman, so personal acquaintance has no sway. And if you think my good opinion can be purchased with a free book, well, I wonder if we should step into the corridor and discuss this further.  (This is the Canadian version of Honi Soit qui Mal Y Pense. Or, as we might call it in honor of the national sport, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense on ice.) 

The argument is, as I understand, it is that exemplary business leaders

have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads, [and that they are] able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.  (6)

Martin calls this process, "integrative thinking."  He argues that great managers are

born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension, [which tension can be used] to think our way through to a new and superior idea. (7, italics in the original)

There are two things I particularly like about the book.  The first is that it gives us a license to embrace complexity.  We all know that the business world is rippling with new and powerful intellectual challenges.  I am just finishing a project for a large corporation and I have listened to middle and senior managers talk about a world almost liquid with change. The C-Suite seems to have a revolving door, competitors are inscrutable, new technologies unpredictable, cultural trends relentless, consumer taste and preference dynamic.  Blind side hits just keep on coming.  As one respondent put it, things change so fast, the contract "is dead on day 2."  Another said her world was all "turbulence and blur."

What we need in such a world are ideas that are both more powerful and less monolithic.  We need a new order of subtlety and nimbleness.   The nice thing about the Opposable Mind concept is that it allows us to come to terms with complexity, to endure tension, to harvest contradiction.  The usual business book is trying to make complexity go away.  This book says there is no one idea that will return to the world to order.  But there is a process with which we can learn to live with what Martin calls the "staggeringly complexity" of the new business environment. Martin says beware the easy answer, the single model, the cheap dichotomy, the false opposition.  Expect the world the resist comprehension, and learn to work with its complexity.

The second thing I like about this book is that I think it sets an important precedent for the world of the business book.  We know what b-books look like.  Characteristically, they are one-idea exercises, which idea is trumpeted from the title, adequately captured by the cover flap, and ground out with no real depth or subtlety in 200 pages of example and repetition. Which is another way of saying that the business book suffers the same problem as business.  It is wedded to a model of intellectual production that seeks out big, bold monolithic ideas and sticks with them.  B-books are so undeveloped intellectually that one suspects that what the author is really doing is building a consulting platform, and he or she is afraid that real detail will preempt all those lucrative contracts. 

There is something insulting about this withholding.  It is true that business books are read by business men and women who are driven by a 60-70 hour week and a horrific set of conflicting demands on their time.  But I am not sure this means we need to patronize them with a kind of "big print" approach to theory and discussion.  After all, these men and women live in a very testing intellectual environment and some of them are rising to the occasion by developing new intellectual capacities.  (Those who came to business and marketing because it’s "not exactly rocket science," well, I think they know their day is up.)  An evolutionary imperative is making managers smarter and it might be time for the publishing world to catch up.

Certainly, we know from the work of Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson that popular culture is ceased dumbing down and has started smarting up.  Network and cable TV now assume a viewer who is capable of richer, more nuanced stories.  The couch potato is now assumed to have a head and a heart.  Let us take for granted the business reader has a brain.

That The Opposable Mind is produced by the Harvard Business School Press, and specifically Jeff Kehoe, is a good thing.   After all, HBSP has the bully pulpit and to be honest it has in its time produced one or two books in the Keep It Simple model.  If HBSP is rising to the intellectual occasion, we may be looking at a rising tide that will elevate the entire industry. 

Ok, back to the Martin paradox.  Wouldn’t it be elegant if the Martin paradox can be illuminated by the Martin model?  Can we use the Opposable Mind to understand the Canadian inclination to be creative as individuals and uncreative in groups. 

It is a workable argument, I think.  One concept of Canadians is that they are products of contraction and complexity.  They come from a world of two founding cultures (the famous "two solitudes") for which integration is always sought.  Two cultures and languages have given way to many cultures and languages as the multicultural experiment continues.  Canada has licenses new comers with the right to keep and cultivate their differences.  This means that for every cultural characteristic that might serve as a national identifier, there is another that contradicts it.  Take as one case in point, Toronto as a city animated by the "tension" between Methodist Scots who made it Canada’s second city (after Montreal), and the Italians who arrived after World War II to save them from culinary, fashion, social and emotional inadequacies. 

Canadians must also endure the fact that they are practice a communitarian capitalism, that they insist on a tall poppy individualism, that they are both aggressively egalitarian and aggressively hierarchical.  There are really lots of contradictions swimming about here, and I think the people who rise in a world like this are people who are good at surviving and managing complexity.  The fact that Canadians generally are uncomfortable with the "imperial self" that is sometimes popular south of their border gives them a certain perspectival flexibility, let’s call it.  The ones who flourish are precisely the ones who use these complexities as a staircase with which to climb to acts of integration and creativity.  (The relationship between integration and creativity needs more careful examining than I can give it here.)

So it works.  The Martin model helps illuminate the Martin paradox. What about the other way round?   Does the Martin model help us understand why Canadians cease to be creative when in groups?  I’m not sure.  I haven’t finished the book.  My guess is that what is happening here is that Canadians suffer here from the devotion to consensus. Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to agree.  Much more than Americans, Canadians think they have to approve.  One of the things I love about Americans is their pragmatism.  You will be hammering away at a problem in a boardroom and it becomes clear that we are not looking for a consensus, we are looking for something that is "good enough for television.  Let’s get on it." 

As I recall from my museum days in Toronto, it was customary to watch people withdraw their compliance and it was customary for people to sniff their disapproval.  Again, in the American case, people pursue the thing much less personally, and are inclined to go with things that are responsive to the opportunity…even if they are not especially consistent with one’s own preferences.  Finally, Canadians believe their is a null space to which a committee, an institution (and their nation?) can retreat, a place of no decision and no momentum.  For most Americans, this is intolerable.  In American committee meetings there is a unspoken but deeply shared understanding.  We are going to decide on something, and we are going to act on it, it’s just a matter of what. 

In Canadian groups, contradictions live and they have the power to derail things.  Which is to say the Martin model cannot take effect.   These Canadians cannot escape their contradictions.  They cannot integrate.  They can ascend to higher plane of generality, a richer synthetic moment of creativity.  Canadians in groups become the victim of their differences while as individuals they are the beneficiaries of these differences.  Or, to put this another way, the integration that Canadians do so well as individuals is denied them in collectivities. 

Anyhow, check out The Opposable Mind.  It’s really interesting.

References

Martin, Roger.  2007. The Opposable Mind.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. here at Amazon.com.

That brilliant Scottish idea, the one that accomplished something like an intellectual miracle, and stripped away all things the rest of the world, and the whole of the world, took for granted. 

It said all of the sociality that is present to the creation of any social moment, the existence of prior understandings and connections and an assignment of status according to who owns what to whom as established by kinship, clan or hierarchy, or some other social overlay–all of this we can set aside. 

For this thing called a market, we need only posit two parties, as unattached atoms, engaged only by their interest, and only for the duration of this exchange of value.  That’s all.  They will have social connections, they will be something to someone for some purposes, and they will be this over time and space, but in this thing called a market, they are atoms with interest transacting.  C’est, as the French say, tout.  (Sorry. I was in Montreal all day.)

It was a simplifying idea, and a liberational one.  It released the world from cultural constructs and social elites, and it made the world responsive to what people wanted in spite of social assigned standing, status and desire.  It enabled a world that was responsive, not to what people were supposed to want, but what, for better or worse, and often worse, they did want.  (I will tell you in confidence that I am the only anthropologist on the face of the earth prepared to make this argument.  Where I see liberation and transparency,  they see alienation and anomie.  To which I say, freedom is grueling difficult and only people with tenure think otherwise.) 

And as bad as this ever was (this uncontrolled wanting), there was now at least a certain transparency.  This world was not a reflection of the interest of elites or the imaginings of culture.  It reflected, in an unsentimental, unmediated way, what people were actually willing to pay for.  In a marketplace society, the truth will out.  Elites and received wisdom, these get the Sicilian salute.  (A mental picture of which, please insert here.)

My point and I do have one.  I just finished a round of ethnographic interviews in a large and influential corporation.  The question was how to bring the corporation into a better alignment with the world out there.  (Sorry, I can’t be more specific and honor my oath of confidentiality.)  (It went well, I think.  I was impressed with how well I did.  It turns out I  make a very good ferret.  If your organization needs to take another look at some aspect of the how the corporation works relative to the world out there, call me.)  The thing that impresses me as a result of this research is the possibility that the Scottish idea might be for some corporate purposes ill advised. 

Take for instance the churn in the c-suite.  [C-suite means the offices occupied by the CEO (chief operating officer), the CIO (chief information officer), the CMO (chief marketing officer), the CSO (chief strategic officer), and so on.]  People are now in place on average about 20 months.  And this is the reason that more and more CMOs , for instance, come with "their people" attached.  They do not meekly accept the agency with which the corporation is dealing.  No, they have a standing relationship with an agency of their own, and they bring this with them.  After all, they only have 20 months to make a difference.  The clock is ticking.  Getting to know the incumbent agency will cost them 6 months of their precious allottment.

Ok, so what if we take c-suite churn seriously.  I wonder if it says that the real center of gravity has moved from the corporation to the C-suiters as they move from gig to gig.  If indeed the corporation responds to change by streaming c-suiters through upper management, what is the unit of analysis, where is the real seat of decision making, what is the real locus of continuity?  It isn’t, or might not be, the corporation. This is now streaming with change.  It’s a box of bees.  It is no longer the Romain outpost of order. 

The real locus of governance and continuity is the c-suiter, that itinerant man or woman, traveling from corporation to corporation.  And this means that agencies and consultants and all of the rest of the traveling retinue on which the corporation depends, should establish its first loyalty to the CMO and only then to the corporation.  I don’t know.  It’s a thought only.  But my notion and I do have one, is that as the corporation responds to dynamism it is going to change shape and form, and the locus of some things is going to shift. 

Just to return to the Scottish idea.  It says that corporation will transact episodically and fitfully, as and when it discover the best clients and partners.  (This is a fiction of course, but a deeply useful fiction.  For most purposes, the corporation is economic corporation to corporation and for some purposes, supra-economic within the corporation.)  And these connections between corporate agents will become more and more instantaneous and less and less enduring. Certain continuities will be impossible to sustain.  If they are to exist, and its a fair question whether they must exist, they will have to exist outside the corporation.  Continuity will have to live in networked relationships between players who are in a sense in constant transit, migratory and in motion, and more actual for some purposes, between engagements than within them.

It may be that the corporation is obliged to decide that to be fully responsive to dynamism, it can’t afford certain continuities and is then obliged to farm these out and make them resident in professional communities that exist in orbit outside itself.  Ok, you can see I’m struggling.  When people start repeated themselves, they are looking for the thread, and clearly I haven’t found mine.  But something is shifting, and the corporation, for so long the great "city states" of capitalism, enduring and magnificent, perhaps they will in respond to the market place by seconding some of their essentials to the world out there.

This would be another way of saying that networks so dominant in personal matters may be poised to transform even the institutional world. 

A last point

Just a note on a national difference.  I am on the train from Montreal to Toronto as I file this post.  (There is something completely thrilling about being able to get a wireless connection on a train.  I can’t say why.  There just is.)  And at 4 hours the trip is roughly like the one from New York City to Boston.  But here’s the difference. On the American trip, the wait staff feed you alcohol as if it were a  medical responsibility and a matter of some urgency.  Triage!  (In point of fact, they are softening you up for their tip.  So it is not so much as social gesture, as an economic thing.  And this is fair…and of course the reason the Acela is perpetually in the read.) 

On this trip to Toronto, however, they are much more abstemious, as if there is a good chance that any given passenger might be called upon in an emergency to operate the train and, well, it’s probably better if each of us has a clear head.  And this refusal to lead the wine flow with Dionisian (sp?) generosity is a bad thing because I believe there are few things so charming as being intoxicated on a train that is traveling at speed.  I can’t say why.  This is an enduring truth.  It’s there in Aristotle somewhere.  You can look it up.   So I am as I write this suffer a small degree of alcohol deprivation and I am sure it shows in my prose.  But hey, it could change.  The stewart might bring more wine.  And just as I wrote this last sentence, I swear to God, the steward came by and told me that he would be back with more wine.  I am, I guess, jonesing pretty bad and, ok, most visibly. 

I am hearing lots of talk during the US primaries about change.  But I haven`t yet heard any politician talk about digital politics.

We have seen the digital effect sweep through the economy, entertainment, sociality, culture and learning, to name a few.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that this digital effect will come to politics, and that when it does it will transform things entirely. 

After all, tthe digital effect is, first and foremost, a disintermediating revolution.  And politics are about nothing if not mediation.  The very idea of `representation` assumes a politician to devine and define our political wishes.   

Well, I guess it is unreasonable to ask a politician who depends upon mediation to be the champion of disintermediation.  But still, if the present candidates really want to look like leaders willing and able to take on the challenges of the present day, surely it is time for one of them to step forward with promises about the digital reinvention of politics. 

I mean, we can work something out.  We can grandfather them through to retirement.   And the sooner they retire themselves, the better. 

It was painful to watch Dick Clark bring in the new year, wasn’t it?  This guy was once the picture of unassuming, unaffected ease, a very democratic master of ceremonies.  He is now diminished and laborious. At the stroke of midnight, he saluted us with "Happy Dew Year!" 

We are a culture that is likes to move through time with dispatch. Most cultures think of time as a circle.  We think of it as an arrow, whistling forward.  The future interests us so keenly we are happy, actually eager, to say farewell to the past.  Most cultures revere tradition.  We practice amnesia.  We like to keep moving.

So a new year’s ceremony is an important event in the ritual scheme of things.  We acknowledge time moving with our only shared act of time marking.  The world rushes together in unison for a moment before returning to the chaos that is our preferred condition.  We rush together and then once more off in all directions.  By Jan. 1 we have returned to our fractious, pell-mell, state of diversity, everyone careening off in pursuit of their very own 2008. 

The ritual officer matters.  We want someone who makes this liminal moment go smoothly.  We want someone to bless our fleeting, uneasy, unlikely consensus with a certain grace.  We want someone to bless our passage into a reckless, vortex-like future with a humor so reassuringly bland that peril seems unthinkable. 

Dick Clark used to be perfect.  Now he’s not.  If I may anticipate the anthropologist of the 22nd century, this doesn’t look good.  It might even be taken as a symptom.  When a culture make its chief temporal officer a man who suffers diminished capacity, when it puts the ritual in the hands who someone who can’t quite discharge the ritual, this might be a sign of a new ambivalence.

And who’s to say this anthropologist is wrong.  For myself, I am astonished by how fast things change, how responsive individuals and institutions have become, how hard and ceaselessly everyone works.  The mid-century modernism of, say, 1950s America delighted in change.  We were eager and optimistic.  Fifty years later a certain exhaustion appears to be setting in.  We head into a new years with the usual joy of anticipation, but there are notes of concern.  If this is what the future looks like…wow, it’s really hard work.

So what do we do with the ritual, that relic of our unalloyed optimism?  Small interventions will do for the moment.  It reminds me of a Honda I saw in the 1980s.  The factory had installed a decal in the back window that read, "Another Happy Honda!"  The owner razored out the second word, so that now his car read "Another Honda!"  Perfect.  Maybe Dick Clark is just our man. 

Post script:

New Year’s by the numbers:
ABC’s combination of theatrical Shrek 2 and Dick Clark’s Primetime New Year’s Rockin’ Eve finished first in prime-time on Monday, with an average 7.8 million viewers and a 2.4 rating/8 share among adults 18-49. Comparably, that beat the No.2 network (CBS in total viewers; Fox among adults 18-49) by a hefty 2.7 million viewers and 71 percent in the demo. 

[Sorry, I have lost my source here.  It might be from Marc Berman’s The Programming Insider.  Highly recommended.]

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Tom and Karen Guarriello for sharing new years with us, and to Karen for the "Happy Dew Year" spot.

Thanks to Alan Light for the image of Dick Clark.   

Seth Butler has put an exhibit on-line called Tattered.  It offers 51 photographs that investigate what Butler calls the "identity, misuse, commodification and desecration of the American flag."

The stars and stripes have ended up in some very strange places: eye glasses, coffee cups, lawn ornaments, pool filters, sports equipment, "I’m with stupid" t-shirts, wheel covers, beef jerky packages…it’s a long list. 

I understand Mr. Butler’s concern for desecration.  The rules of flag use are frequently abused in my little part of Connecticut.  Flags are allowed to fall into a state of disrepair. They are even allowed to fly in tatters.  They are flown at night without illumination.  They are allowed to touch the ground.  They are improperly folded and stored.  They are treated as boat house decorations.

I’m always appalled.  Even if we don’t care about the flag, the fact that it is something for which people have given their lives, leaves us with no choice.  We must treat it with respect.  And if we do revere the flag, well, maybe we can get off our butts and bring our flag in when it rains.  I’m just saying.

But indignation is not the presiding emotion with which I looked at Butler’s exhibit.  Eventually, I was filled with something more like astonishment.  The stars and stripes in Tattered can be read as American exuberance, ingenuity, imagination, and irreverence.  What can happen to the flag has happened to the flag.  I couldn’t help wondering whether Americans were ever more American than when taking their flag, um, lightly. 

Butler gives us an American flag not so much desecrated as busting out all over. Isn’t this apt?  What better way to give voice to a country that says tradition that must bend to the user, that even icons will be malleable, that even sacred things must enter the secular hurly burly of everyday life?  Reinvention, if there is a defining idea of and for American culture, I think this might be it. 

Disrepair and neglect, there is no defense for these.  But the rest, the hand warmers, book marks, and beach towels, we may think of these as the flag on shore-leave behaving  irrepressibly, irresistibly, irresponsibly and satisfyingly in-character.  Other nations insist on a more reverent approach, well, that’s their problem. 

References

The Seth Butler Tattered exhibit can be found here.

Acknowledgments

The image above is photograph number 28 in the Tattered exhibit.   I thank Seth Butler for permission to use an image from this wonderful exhibit.

Philosophy is famous for lively exam questions.  My favorite is:  "Does this count as a question?"  (One student answered, "Yes, if this counts as an answer.")

I don’t know that anthropology has a tradition of good exam questions.  We’re too earnest, too dutiful. 

But that can change.  In the present issue of New York Magazine, Jacob Rubin tells us about a wonderful experiment he did recently in Union Square.  He went up to strangers and asked a favor.  The object of the exercise: to see how forthcoming New Yorkers would be. 

One of the questions Rubin asked is:

"Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

One New Yorker fell to bended knee, and exclaimed,

"Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?"

So that’s my exam question. 

A man approaches a woman in Union Square and asks, "Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"   

She falls to her knees and says to the dog in question, "Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?" 

Please unpack.

For non-anthropologists, "unpack" means supply the cultural assumptions that are (probably) at work here.  We would expect students to supply underlying cultural notions that would help a visitor from Indonesia (or Mars, for that matter) to grasp what happened in Union Square. 

I am hoping this wouldn’t be necessary but we could add questions like the following: 

Who is the speaker addressing?  Why the "Mr."?  What’s a "doggy-woggy"?  What’s with the honorific (Mr.) and the diminutive (doggy-woggy)? Conversations carry assumptions, and assumptions construct the people conversing.  How does this speech construct these speakers? 

Ok, here’s the deal.  In the spirit of Russell Davies’ I hereby post this question.  Submit your answer to me at grant27 [at] mit [dot] edu.  You answer should be less than 800 words.  The due date for answer is January 5, 2008.  (Thanks, Juri.)  I will prize answers that find a sweet spot between power and precision.  The winning answer will be posted at this website.    The prize will be a gift token from Amazon.com for $100.00 and something commemorative.  I might ask John Deighton to help judge the answers.  He’s especially good at this sort of thing.   Russell, too, if he’s willing.  Actually, come to think of it, I might post the best three answers and let This Blog Sits readers decide.  We shall see. 

You may pick up your pencils…wait for it…now! 

A man approaches a woman in Union Square and asks, "Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

She falls to her knees and says to the dog in question, "Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?" 

Please unpack.

Reference

Rubin, Jakob.  2007.  Because we’re not actually that rude.  New York Magazine.  December 24-31, 2007, p. 66.

When does the anthropologist know that the culture is question is really in question? 

When key players, players with incumbency and great advisers, throw up their hands and say, "I dunno.  Things are changing.  And we can’t say how."

I am no guarantee that a movie is going to be a success.  …  The audience has become smart about stars.  So it’s chaos out there now.  Nobody has any idea why people are going to see a movie.  Nobody knows what’s going to be a hit or what’s going go be irrelevant.  There are no new models.  The new paradigm in Hollywood is that there is no new paradigm.  (Tom Hanks in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly.)

Now, we could be listening to a celebrity who wants to express reticence or apology for the current project (in the case, Charlie Wilson’s War).  Or this may merely reflect Hollywood’s puzzlement over the failure of recent war movies (The Kingdom, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, A Mighty Heart). 

But if we are hearing a deep indeterminacy in the world of Hollywood, something remarkable is upon us.  After all, Hollywood is good at listening, good at responding to the moment, good at finding a way to speak to shifting taste and preference of Americans, whatever these tastes and preferences are.  If Hollywood has lost the thread, something’s up.

There are three possibilities:

1) tastes and preferences are in transition.  And, God knows, this happens.  Trends make their way through our culture.  One Easy Rider and all bets are off.

2) tastes and preferences are now indiscernible. They are out there.  But our powers of pattern recognition are modest and we can’t see them.

3) tastes and preferences are so disaggregated that a mass medium like film making can no longer count upon the mass audiences needed to manage an acceptable return on an investment of $ 100 million dollars.  (This is the average cost of a Hollywood film.  I’m sure Charlie Wilson’s War was much more.)

You choose.

References

Svetkey, Benjamin.  War Games.  Entertainment Weekly.  December 21, 2007.  pp. 29-37, p. 37.

This morning I found myself thinking about Fire Eagle, the new GPS status casting site coming this fall from Yahoo.  What, I wanted to know, is a "fire eagle"?

Then I start thinking about Firefox.  I remember the first time I heard this term, I thought "what?" and then it settled without further complaint into consciousness.  "Firefox."  I had no idea what it meant.  But I got finally that it meant something, and decided finally that it meant quite well.

And then "fire dogs."  This is an in-home technology advice service offered by Circuit City.  They are trying to catch up to Best Buy, and the spectacularly successful innovation created by Robert Stephens in 1994 called Geek Squad. 

Now, "fire dogs" is I think a metaphor from the fire house.  A fire dog is the Dalmatian that rides to the aid of humans in need.  As in "Sparky the fire dog."

But Firefox?  And Fire Eagle?   These might be a a nod in the direction of Joss Whedon and his TV series, the underground hit, called Firefly (Fox 2002).  Except that fireflies actually exists, we have seen them, we know exactly what they mean.  Or this may be an American construction lost on a Canadian anthropologist.

As a naming strategy, I think I see what’s happening here.  A Firefox and a Fire Eagle are counter intuitive in exactly the right proportions.  These names resist comprehension but only just.  They are counter intuitive, but not unintelligible.  In the first moment of exposure, we don’t quite get them…and this prevents them from washing over us and out into that sea of forgettable branding and marketing.  Comprehension is held up just long enough for the new name to lock into memory.  As branding becomes more subtle, we will see more and more of this. 

Firefox and Fire Eagle sound a little like mythical creatures, the sort of thing we might hear about from the mythic worlds of North American aboriginals, classical Greece, or ancient Scandinavia.   And this works too.  Natural creatures with supernatural powers, this makes sense.  Ordinary creatures with extraordinary powers.  Mythic creatures that make periodic appearances in the human world.   

Later in the morning, I read that NBC is returning some $10 million to advertisers, because it failed to make its audience numbers. 

CBS chief research officer David Poltrack says the four major broadcast networks have seen live viewing decline 8% for households and viewers. "Viewers currently are skipping about 60% of commercials during playback…"

Viewers choosing whether to watch ads?  A way of recording whether and when they do so?  A network giving money back?  Marketing being held to account?  Lord in heaven, our world is changing.  Many of the old bets are off. 

And the Fire-prefix came rushing back for an encore in consciousness.  Our world is quietly in crisis.  We are watch old institutions like advertisers and networks forced to change the very nature of how they do business.  We watching as the new media work their way through our customs and our culture.  It’s inexorable and sometimes devastating. 

Maybe this is why a mythological naming appeals to us.  It is a little as if we have been returned to a mythical world, or a human world shot through with mythical interventions.  As our world is turned upside down by the new technologies, it does begin to feel like a place occupied by creatures capricious and unpredictable, spectacular but often unintelligible, sometimes intervening on our behalf but just as often unkind to our kind.  If we were to put a face to the digital revolution, maybe this it: hybrid creatures with fantastic powers engaging in spectacular interventions in the human world, but rarely possessed of anything more than a casual interest in human welfare.  Yes, I believe that does resemble my world.  You? 

References

Anonymous.  2007.  NBC pays out to advertisers over ratings shortfall.  WARC.  December 14, 2007.

Status casting.  What a lovely term.  We know what it means at a glance.  It is process by which we let the world know of our existence, our condition, our location, our intentions.  Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Dopplr, MySpace, all of these allow us to status cast. 

I first heard this term from Marc Davis.  I heard Marc speak a couple of weeks ago at the MIT C3 "Futures of entertainment" conference.  This is one wonderfully smart, well informed fella, and I sat there thinking, why is this the first I am hearing of him?  At Jerry Michalski’s get-together, I heard a guy called Christian Crumlish, Yahoo’s "pattern detective," and thought the same thing. 

Is there something in Yahoo culture that insists on hiding its lights under a bushel?  Does this corporation work under deep cover?  If Yahoo is smart enough to hire people this talented, why isn’t it smart enough to publicize them?  They "add value" like crazy and some of the credit should go to the company that sustains them.

Forget Yahoo.  Doesn’t the world distribute more successfully than this?  Isn’t that the point of all these new networks?  Davis and Crumlish are exactly the guys the new technologies should help us find.  These are status-casts I would like to follow.  Apparently, our status-casting still has some considerable way to go. 

Anyhow, Marc says he heard "status casting" from Leonard Lin, the co-founder of Upcoming.org.  I sent Leonard an email asking where he heard it.  He’s now checking.  (Thank you, Christian for Leonard’s address.)  Here’s the latest as of December 19, 2007: Leonard and Edward Ho recall using the term "status casting" while working together in the summer of 07.  They make no claim to being the originators of the term, and suppose that it was in wide circulation. 

When we status-cast, we’re a little like animals.  As I argued in my post on the "puzzle of exhaust data" I suggested that one way to think about exhaust data was to treat it as phatic communication.  (In humans and other animals, phatic communication consists in non-verbal gestures and small, sub-linguistic noises.  Murmurs, shouts, groans, all of these are phatic.)  We can say that tiny posts on twitter are phatic, too. You may not care that I am "feeding my cat."  But knowing this tells you I exist, my location, my condition, my, er, status.  Twitter data are not "exhaust data" precisely because they serve this locational purpose. 

When we status-cast, we are also a little like machines, like those brave little Mars probes phoning home periodically before they eventually disappear from view.  It’s a good metaphor, I think, because we live in a world so reckless with risk and dynamism that it is probably wrong to assume that our friends and acquaintances are safe and sound.  Maybe it’s just me playing the fretful Canadian, but I worry about people. 

I mean, I haven’t talked to Tom Guarriello in a week or so.  How is he?  What about the Russell Davies who is, I believe, away and offline?  What about Jan Chipchase, the hardest working man in anthropology, the James Brown of the social sciences.  This guy is on the road almost all the time.  I am still not sure what happened to Geoffrey Frost, the man who saved Motorola, but I think it had something to do with the punishments of life of the road, life in a fast lane.  (There but for the grace of…)

But you don’t have to be on the road to be in harm’s way.  The subprime debacle puts us all at risk.  Any one of us could find our livelihoods disappearing out from under us.  In the old days, you could make assumptions about the persistence of someone’s good fortune.  In the old days, we could make some enduring assumptions about Buddy’s well being.  These days even Buddy’s career is the plaything of unpredictable events and global forces.

I like the idea of people throwing off signals, casting their status, phoning home.  I mean, it’s a cruel world out there.  There’s lots of chatter in our world about persistent virtual worlds.  At the moment, I’m more concerned with persistent friends. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  How Social Networks Work: The Puzzle of Exhaust Data.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  July 19, 2007.  here.