Category Archives: Blogging

Are podcasts a wasteland? (with a post script about Kurt Wagner)

This image of Rebecca Walker is from the Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism (I can’t find an attribution for the image on this page or the one for Ms. Walker.)

(This post was originally published a couple of days ago on Medium. I’ve added a post script which does not appear there.)

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, and was shocked to hear the guests talk about their clothing brand as if it were very special and blindingly original.

They insisted that their brand spoke to young women with a feminist message of empowerment. I kept waiting for the host to gently point out that there were a couple of precedents here.

For starters: One hundred years of suffragette feminism, Gloria Steinem, and Rebecca Walker (pictured), to say nothing of the work of Dove and the brilliant “Throw Like a Girl” videos by Lauren Greenfield for Always.

But no. He sat by while his guests sang their own praises. The best he could muster were obliging prompts on the order of “so tell me, would you say you were totally awesome or merely utterly fantastic?”

The host is from the creative world, so he’s not trained as a journalist. And podcasts are, as we know, a planet still forming.

More’s the pity.

Edison Research found that 48 million people listened to podcasts last year. The number grows steadily. This universe expands steadily. But it’s not clear that it is maturing as a form of discourse. My fear: that it is expanding but a little witless, that it’s agreeable but a little toothless.

The world of journalism has taken this question on, and the podcast has something to learn from this precedent.

The Society of Professional Journalism has code of ethics. The code asks that members adhere to four principals:

1. Seek Truth and Report It.

2. Minimize Harm.

3. Act Independently.

4. Be Accountable and Transparent.

In the podcast world, this might be boiled down to a simple imperative:

cut out the shameless glad handing and ask real questions in the pursuit of real answers. Do not suffer fools.

Post Script

No sooner had I published to this post to Medium than I found myself listening to a Recode Media interview by Kurt Wagner of Nick Bell, Snap VP of Content. I was impressed by Wagner’s willingness to ask the difficult question. Several of them. How well was Bell’s company doing and what did he (really) think about the share price? Why does Bell use “sexy selfies” when we might expect “serious journalism?” Most devastatingly, Wagner asked Bell if he regrets having failed to engage the creator community. (This is a difficult question because it suggests a fundamental failure to grasp perhaps the biggest change ((and opportunity)) in the digital world.)  Bell took these questions in stride, but the interview was now richer and more illuminating. No glad handing here. (It occurred to me that one behavioral marker of the difficult question is the awkward silence. There were a couple. You could almost hear Bell thinking, “He did not just ask me that!”)

I looked Wagner up and was interested to see that he puts the “ethics question” at the center of of how he describes himself.

Kurt Wagner
Senior Editor, Social Media

Kurt Wagner has been a business and tech journalist since 2012 and was previously reporting for Mashable. He also covered general tech and Silicon Valley news in his first job as a tech reporter with Fortune magazine, based in San Francisco. Originally from the Seattle area, Kurt graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in communication and political science. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Santa Clara, the university newspaper, for two years.

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

In June 2016, my then-girlfriend, now-wife took a job as an administrative assistant with Instagram’s marketing and community team. She is now a member of Instagram’s brand marketing team. She does not share material information with me about specific company projects or plans. She has been awarded a small stock grant as part of her compensation package, in which I do not have any ownership or control.

I have various 401K and IRA accounts, as well as non-retirement mutual fund stock accounts that invest in a wide-ranging basket of stocks, over which I have no control. I do not own stock in any individual tech companies.

I do not consult for any companies, nor do I accept gifts or products of value from companies I cover. I do not accept travel or accommodations from companies I cover.

Recode is owned wholly by Vox Media, a company with an audience of 170 million worldwide. It has eight distinct media brands: The Verge (Technology and Culture), Vox.com (News), SB Nation (Sports), Polygon (Gaming), Eater (Food and Nightlife), Racked (Shopping, Beauty and Fashion), Curbed (Real Estate and Home), as well as Recode (Tech Business).

Vox Media has a number of investors, including, but not limited to, Comcast Ventures and NBCUniversal, both of which are owned by Comcast Corporation.

My posts have total editorial independence from these investors, even when they touch on products and services these companies produce, compete with, or invest in. The same goes for all content on Recode and at our conferences. No one in this group has influence on or access to the posts we publish. We will also add a direct link to this disclosure when we write directly about the companies.

Blogger, heal thyself

It’s all very well to play the “J’accuse” card. In point of fact, I do not have a Wagnerian statement of ethics that lets the reader know what standards they can expect of this blog. And I should. (And it says something about the haze of self congratulation that surrounded blogging in the early days that it never occurred to me to criticize blogging in the way I am now criticizing podcasting. Bitter? Ok, a little.)

I will leave the full statement for another day. But I can say this much.

1) I have never expected, solicited, or extracted any sort of payment for a blog post.

2) I have never written in a laudatory manner about anyone for whom I have served as a consultant.

I have written a lot of laudatory pieces. My “beat” at this blog is contemporary American culture and I am especially interested when I see people (by which I mean creatives, writers, agencies, brands, journalists, bloggers) making interesting (witty, rich, powerful) contributions to that culture. My guiding assumption is that much of American culture comes from commerce and we have done a poor job looking at the intersection between culture and commerce. Inevitably this means I look at the work of branders and agencies in an approving way. How does they express culture, how does they improve culture? But in 1.5 million words, I have not got any sort of payment for these posts. Before or after the fact. I’ve never even got so much as a bottle of scotch or a note of acknowledgement. (Agencies like to think they exist sui generis. And this says a lot about why the creative and commercial world struggles so much these days. But it’s also a good thing. It keeps temptation at bay.)

3) It’s one thing never to write in a laudatory manner. If we are to follow the example of journalism in general and a journalist like Wagner in particular, we are obliged also to write negatively. This blog has lots of criticism. I have criticized Gillette, P&G, and Coca-Cola, to name just three. Bad work (i.e., lazy, stupid, craven work) deserves to be called out and scorned. I am sure this has cost me clients who supply the income that keeps my “self-funded anthropology” enterprise afloat. So this has been something more than a cosmetic gesture. It’s cost me.

There may be an official anthropology code here. (And it is almost certainly an exercise in the field’s solipsism, effectively discouraging all interactions with all parties. God forbid, the field should let in data that might disturb its orthodoxies.)  But certainly there is an unofficial “University of Chicago” ethics code. This says, “you are in this inquiry for the inquiry, and the moment you start to shill, you cease to inquire.”

The Gift Economy: A reply to Clay Shirky

PhotosI came across a post today by Gaby Dunn called “Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame.” Dunn gives us YouTube and Instagram celebrities forced to live hand to mouth. It reminded me of an essay I wrote months ago, shelved and then forgot. Here’s a piece of the larger whole.

Consider this crude calculation. Let’s posit 100 people each of whom is producing 10 artifacts a year for the digital domain. (Artifacts include blog posts, fan fiction, web sites, remixes, podcasts, fan art, Pinterest pages, and so on.) We are going to assume that these creative efforts are funded by day jobs, scholarships, and parental support. With this subvention, this “gift economy” produces 1000 artifacts a year. Some of this work is rich and interesting.

The creators are rewarded for their work with acknowledgment and gratitude. The exchange is ruled by what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins would call “generalized reciprocity.” (See his Stone Age Economics.) Gifts are given without expectation of immediate or exact return. There is lots of cultural meaning here but no real economic value.

Let’s release economic value into the system. Now, the best work costs. We pay for ownership or for access. We could even use a “tipping” system. When we admire a piece of fan art, we tip the creator. This tip could come out of the $5 our ISP returns to us from our subscription fee. Or it could be supplied to us by Google which has been the overwhelming beneficiary of the content we have put online. A postmodern PayPal springs up to make this distribution system easy.

Thirty of our 100 kids are now accumulating value. The best of them are accumulating quite a lot of value. Let’s suppose that a piece of fan art, drafting on the success of a hit TV show, goes viral. Let’s say it’s viewed by an audience of 100,000 people, twenty percent of whom tip 40 cents on average. The result, eight thousand dollars, is not a prince’s ransom. (I would check these numbers. An anthropologist with a calculator is a dangerous thing.) And if it is used to allow someone to move out of their parent’s basement, it has no obvious cultural effect.

But if our winner uses the money to take the summer off from her job at McDonald’s, this is a difference from which real differences can spring. Now a good artist can become a more productive artist and eventually a better artist. And a virtuous cycle is set in train. More and better work brings in more income, more income becomes more time free for work, and this leads to more improvements in art and income. Eventually, the McDonald’s job can be given up altogether.

In this scenario, the gift economy loses…but culture wins. The supply of good work increases. Standards rise. Good artists get better.

I expect this vista will make Clay Shirky’s eyes water and possibly tear. (My text is Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.) He might well feel this is a brutal intrusion of capital into a magical world of generosity.

Not so fast. In point of fact, the internet as a gift economy is an illusion. This domain is not funding itself. It is smuggling in the resources that sustain it, and to the extent that Shirky’s account helps conceal this market economy, he’s a smuggler too. This world cannot sustain itself without subventions. And to this extent it’s a lie.

Shirky insists that generalized reciprocity is the preferred modality. But is it?

[In the world of fan fic, there] is a “two worlds” view of creative acts. The world of money, where [established author, J.K.] Rowling lives, is the one where creators are paid for their work. Fan fiction authors by definition do not inhabit this world, and more important, they rarely aspire to inhabit it. Instead, they often choose to work in the world of affection, where the goal is to be recognized by others for doing something creative within a particular fictional universe. (p. 92)

Good and all, but, again, not quite of this world. A very bad situation, one that punishes creators and our culture, is held up as somehow exemplary. But of course reputation economies spring up, but we don’t have to choose. We can have both market and reputation economies. But it’s wrong surely, to make the latter a substitute for the former.

Shirky appears to be persuaded that it’s “ok” for creators to create without material reward. But I think it’s probably true that they are making the best of a bad situation. Recently, I was doing an interview with a young respondent. We were talking about her blog, a wonderful combination of imagination and mischief. I asked her if she was paid for this work and she said she was not. “Do you think you should be paid?” I asked.

She looked at me for a second to make sure I was serious about the question, thought for a moment and then, in a low voice and in a measured somewhat insistent way, said, “Yes, I think I should be paid.” There was something about her tone of voice that said, “Payment is what is supposed to happen when you do work as good as mine.”

One data point hardly represents proof of my position. But it does suggest what might happen when the possibility of payment enters the world. A light goes on. The present internet is so much a gift economy and so little a market one, that it is hard for its occupants to imagine alternatives.

I am not going to take up the intrinsic — extensive distinction that matters here. Clearly, people are now being “paid” in intrinsic satisfactions. They are making great work online for the sake of doing so. But I believe it’s true that here too the intrinsic was never meant to be a substitute for the extrinsic. The luckiest people in the world get paid twice, with intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic value. That’s actually what we’re hoping for. This is, mark you, the way the academic world mostly works. Surely, it’s wrong and a little odd to celebrate the intrinsic as an alternative to the extrinsic.

But let’s get to the very large elephant in the room. It is the career satisfactions of the so-called Millennial generation. This group has suffered diminished career options. They have been obliged to work as interns, always with the promise that this would prepare them the “real job” to come. But of course the “real job” often never comes. The obligation to work for free online reproduces the obligation of working for free in the world, as if life were one long internship, unbroken and unpaid. After a while it begins to look like one’s lot in life. My research reveals a culture of compliance in which members of this generation agree to agree that their present circumstances are not outrageous. Millennial optimism and good humor endures. (Let’s imagine if someone had tried to pull this on Gen X. Oh, wait, someone did. The reaction was an “alternative” culture and a ferocious repudiation of the status quo.)

But back to our academic contemplation of the gift economy. When Shirky says that work given “freely” on line is a great act of generosity, I think we’re entitled to say that generosity is only properly so-called when there are alternatives. And there aren’t. Forced generosity isn’t generosity.

Still more troubling, the gift economy has a second guilty secret. People can only participate if they have access to resources from outside the digital world. In fact, the moral economy excludes people who do not have wealthy parents, generous scholarships, or rewarding day jobs. If someone is poor, uneducated, and or underemployed, it is hard to participate. So much for generosity and connectivity.

Because the “generosity” view is an idealistic view, it feels somehow above reproach. Clearly for Shirky it is manifestly good. But when people are driven by generosity and rewarded with community, something goes missing. Good artists are denied the resources that would make them better. A generation continues to go underemployed. The next evolutionary moment is lost. A series of social and cultural innovations are not forthcoming. The real generative engine of our culture falls silent.

Some will object that there is an economy online even if financial capital does not circulate. They will say that people are paid in reputation, acknowledgement and thanks. Well, yes. But mostly no. The trouble with “acknowledgement” and “thanks” is that they are both mushy and illiquid. They are impossible to calculate. They cannot be exchanged for anything outside the moral economy. Acknowledgment and thanks are not worth nothing. But they verge on the gratuitous. We can “like” something with nothing more than the energy it takes to move the cursor and click the mouse. This is not quite the same as surrendering a scarce value for which sacrifices have been made. Choice, made carefully, at cost, in hope of gain and at peril of loss, this is the fundamental act of economics. Without it, all we have are bubbles of approbation. Our moral economy isn’t an economy, except in a disappointingly slack metaphorical sense.

Finally, I do not mean to be unpleasant or to indulge ad hominem attack, but I think there is something troubling about a man supported by academic salary, book sales, and speaking engagements telling Millennials how very fine it is that they occupy a gift economy which pays them, usually, nothing at all. I don’t say that Shirky has championed this inequity. But I don’t think it’s wrong to ask him to acknowledge it and to grapple with its implications.

The gift economy of the digital world is a mirage. It looks like a world of plenty. It is said to be a world of generosity. But on finer examination we discover results that are uneven and stunted. Worse, we discover a world where the good work goes without reward. The more gifted producers are denied the resources that would make them still better producers and our culture richer still.

What would people, mostly Millennials, do with small amounts of capital? What enterprises, what innovations would arise? How much culture would be created? I leave for another post the question of how we could install a market economy (or a tipping system) online. And I have to say I find it a little strange we don’t have one already. Surely the next (or the present) Jack Dorsey could invent this system. Surely some brands could treat this as a chance to endear themselves to content creators. Surely, there is an opportunity for Google. If it wants to save itself from the “big business” status now approaching like a freight train, the choice is clear. Create a system that allows us to reward the extraordinary efforts of people now producing some of the best artifacts in contemporary culture.

Oh, thank goodness

Faithful readers will have noticed that This Blog has been down for a full month.

We were hit by the malware attach that caused Google and Firefox to warn away visitors.  

I have to say Network Solutions has been spectacularly unhelpful.

Use "Network solutions" and "malware" as your search terms in Twitter, and you will see that this attack is "epidemical" as they used to say in the 18th century.  The nightmare continues for many.  Network Solutions as acted with the cavalier disregard of the public utility it once was.  Bad brand, bad!

We have abandoned it and good riddance.

But we didn’t get off scotfree.  We lost all the blog posts since December 18th, 2009.  This too is thanks to Network Solutions which managed to delete the entire database.  Yes, that’s 1.5 million words, and many years of work, made to disappear in a puff of digital smoke. Bad brand, very bad brand.

Were it not for a backup at Foliovision, I would have lost the whole thing.  Good brand! Excellent brand.  (No, but really.  Foliovision has earned my undying gratitude.  Highly recommended for anyone thinking of making the transition from TypePad to WordPress.)  

It looks as if we were going to lose the list of Very Good Blogs, but, happily ,David Armano referenced it a couple of months ago, and this gave us a back up.  Thank you, David. 

So we are back in action.  Thanks for your patience.  And thanks to people who wrote in to give me the head’s up on the malware attack.  

Special thanks to Ana Domb for helping me get This Blog back in place.

Expert wanted

Apple_oranges I’ve a number of things that need fixing or improving here at This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. 

Is there someone out there I could help with my  TypePad account?

Please drop a line to grant27[aT]mit.edu[cational]. 

Thanks, Grant. 

The attack on Russell Davies

Russell_davies_1 Oh, f*ck.  Some nit wit has driven Russell Davies off his blog.  The attack came in the form of satire, someone adopting Mr. Davies’ style in order to ridicule it.

Here’s the anthropological take. 

This kind of satire depends upon noticing the structural characteristics, the cultural form, of the target (in this case Davies’ blogging style). 

Now for the unsophisticated cultural observer (or bad anthropologist), the act of noticing carries a certain charge.  It produces a secret glee.  Noticing persuades the satirist that they have punctured a veil of secrecy.  They are claiming to "get" what is "really" going on.  As in, "You thought you were going to get away with this one, but we see exactly what you’re doing." 

What’s odd about this, anthropologically speaking, is that the UCO (aka BA) is giving him/herself credit for an ordinary act of noticing. Sophisticated cultural actors (or good anthropologists) engage in noticing all the time.  It is part of the pleasure of reading.  When ordinary noticing produces a secret glee and when this glee is made public in an effort to inflict social injury, well, we are given a noticing opportunity of our own.  The satirist is punching above his or her intellectual weight.  Or to put this more exactly, those who snicker when noticing tell us that they notice neither often nor well.

But there’s more.  Noticing of the kind we discussing here means to be quietly accusatory.  Look, it says, we have discovered you, Mr. Davies, using self revelation for the purposes of self aggrandizement.  More specifically, the charge against Mr. Davies is that he reveals things about his social life, family life and emotional life.  His satirist is saying, effectively, Mr. Davies uses private matters for metapragmatic purposes, to craft a certain public impression of himself. 

There is Britishness at work here.  Self revelation on one’s blog!  In the U.S., this is not an accusation but a statement of the obvious.  My friend Debbie Millman will not mind me saying that self revelation is the very grammar of her engagement with the blogging world.  But certain kinds of self revelation are prohibited in United Kingdom, still.  Here, too compactly, is the way it works: we are locked into a social world where certain social and cultural capitals are in exceedingly short supply.  Someone may make a bid for these capitals through the deployment of a social strategy, but it is up to the rest of us to call him out.  What keeps Britain from turning into a Hollywood scramble for self aggrandizement is the biting comment, the satiric slam.  (Is my criticism here apt?  I would bet a large sum of money that the author of the satire is British.) 

Four points here: 

One, Britain’s social world is no longer zero sum. 

Two, the world of planning is zero sum in a very narrow sense, but when people like Mr. Davies make planning a more vivid part of the intellectual world, all boats, even the satirist’s, rise with the tide. 

Three, the world of blogging is, for the moment anyhow, in a moment of absolute expansion.  My admiration for Mr. Davies’ blogging does not give to him or take from me. 

Four, we are looking at the emergence of a world of plenitude obliges us to ask whether "zero sum" is any longer the signature calculation of the cultures of capitalism. 

Here’s what I like about Russell Davies’ blog (and I don’t like everything).  He is experimental in form and content.  I am getting weary of blogs that come from a book, an agency, a paradigm, and never ever rise above these origins.  They are always about the book, the agency or the paradigm.  They are promotional vehicles when the point of the exercise is surely to try things out.  If there is one way of recognizing the corporations, agency, planners and consultants who have a chance of surviving the new bouleversement of the marketplace, this is it.  They try things out. 

In fact, Wednesday, when I was writing about cloudiness as the new structural form, I thought about Russell Davies as a case in point.  He might be the cloudiest guy I know.  He has lots of interests and engagements.  And he has let slip the boundaries that used to keep some things in the life out of play.  He is prepared to take up and abandon assumptions, as he goes.  This is to say that the personal matters that Mr. Davies exposes on his blog are something more than ordinary self revelation.  They are notes from an experiment.   

Conflict of Interest declaration

I have met Russell Davies on two occasions, once in London, once in New York City.  I have participated as a "visiting professor" on two occasions in his Account Planning School of the Web.  We have not worked together otherwise. 

References

Davies, Russell.  2007.  Bugger.  Russell Davies.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  Cloudiness: of selves, groups, networks and ideas.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. January 31, 2007.  here.   

What is blogging good for

Ebay_logo Some say blogging is still an answer looking for a question.

Not bloggers, of course.  We know it’s a chance to shoot our mouths off.

But the rest of the world wonders.  What is blogging good for?

Today, notice of that eBay may have found a way to make us useful.

Ebay wants to build bridges by developing software which it can then put in the hands of bloggers, allowing them to create links between niche communities and relevant products.  … The idea behind [MeCommerce] software is to allow bloggers to recommend music, books, DVDs and T-shirts to readers who can make impulse purchases without leaving the blog.

We will serve as a tributary system for Ebay.  We will find consumers where they live…or at least where they read. We will make heartfelt endorsements.  Purchases will be made.  If this model works, blogging is the new TV, tiny and particular where TV was mighty and mass.

Then the question is whether bloggers will "flock" in a manner that allows producers to recapture big bets.  Will enough of us recommend the same movies, books, TV shows (and perhaps TV sets, cars, and suit makers?) that someone can hope to make their numbers.  Or is this truly a descent into Chris Anderson’s notion of the market as a small tail, in which small producers exist to serve small niches. 

The other question is what the Ebay harness would do to blogging.  I think there is a good chance that it would transform our editorial content quite substantially.  It might well make us less criticial. Why diss something when we can give praise that brings profit?  I think I like the blogosphere better without a harness.

And while we are glimping the larger significance of blogging, consider the interview with Fiona Czerniawska on the present and future of consulting Management Consulting News. 

See if blogging doesn’t seem like an answer to the "thought leadership" issue.  We will have to think of ways, first, to inform bloggers with better data, in the manner of all management consulting, and second, to aggregate and harvest blogging idea generation.  But clearly there is a great engine of ingenuity, creativity, and intellectual activity out there that shouldn’t be very hard to tap.  I am hoping that Steve Postrel might give us the benefit of his opinion. 

MCNews: As consultants try to make their mark among  these various decision makers, what’s working for consultants in terms of marketing, and is that changing  at all?

Czerniawska: I see a great deal of activity around thought leadership. I can’t count the number of firms that seem to be investing heavily in revamping their thought leadership, both in terms of the internal process through which they develop content but also the extent to which they communicate effectively outside.

MCNews: Do you see that as a renewed effort?

Czerniawska: Yes. Quite a few firms canned their thought leadership teams in 2002, but are now rebuilding them. And they’re by no means alone. When I say the words ‘thought leadership’ to virtually any firm, I get lots and lots of people sitting up and paying attention and saying, we’re putting millions of dollars into this. We don’t know what we’re getting, but we need to do something.                   

MCNews: Is it your sense that understanding the return on investment for thought leadership is important or is it something that firms just believe they need to do?

Czerniawska: Oh, I think they recognize that it’s important. Maybe they’ve been down the road with the big expense of advertisements, which help build a firm’s brand but don’t really help clients short-list the firm for projects. It’s an increasingly hard tool to use for differentiation. I think people see thought leadership as the key battleground at the present.

References

Callan, Eoin.  2006.  Ebay considers creating software tools to tap blogging markets.  Financial Times.  July 5, 2006. 

For the Management Consulting News interview with Czerniawska, go here.

Bloggers vs. the old media (are they panicking yet?)

Sack_of_romeI think the old media verge on panic. One or two symptoms are beginning to show.

Thursday, I noted Lance Ulanoff’s alarmist treatment of YouTube. Ulanoff thinks it will turn us all into iVideots and that things must end badly:

The inescapable truth is that the moving image will be everywhere, yet iVideots will soon lose any true connection with the live people moving all around them.

Tom Guarriello caught the WSJ’s Henninger calling our world, gasp, uncivilized.

But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It’s called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.

Recently, Ann Moore, CEO of Time, Inc., implied that blogging was cheap opinion.

One of the biggest threats to our business is this confusion in the public between real, fact-based, checked news and opinion, which is very cheap… And so, I’m really committed…to really paying attention to Time and figuring out how we can hold up the price value of fact-based news.

I am sure there is an "anthropology of decline" that documents the symptomatology of regime transition. I just don’t know it. 

But here’s a simple typology. I keep it on cardboard in my wallet….to make it easier to identity institutions in their last days.

Stage 1. Benign neglect.

In the early days of regime transition, the incumbent (aka New York Times, Wall Street Journal) treats the new challenger (aka bloggers) with a certain high handed indifference. If acknowledgment occurs at all, it comes with a patronizing pat on the head, as in "Hey, aren’t the newcomers charmingly amateur? Welcome to the party. Now, run along and get me a drink."  More often, bloggers are not acknowledged.  They just don’t matter. 

Stage 2. Lordly disdain

Blogging actually wins a couple of battles. In its "wisdom of crowds" way, it begins to threaten the traditional players. These respond with certain sneering, scolding, dismissal.  The implicit message: "who do you think you are, don’t you know who I am?"  Now we’re getting somewhere.

Stage 3. Irritation plus Obfuscation

As it turns out, bloggers refuse to wither in the face of high handed treatment.  In fact, they get stronger.  Their victories grow more numerous.  Their voice becomes more compelling.

Now it’s clear that the traditional media outlets must pay attention.  They begin to "cover" blogging.  They begin to read blogging.  They begin to help themselves to its content. 

And now they begin to see the writing on the wall.  If Wikipedia can rise to become a creditable challenge for the Encyclopedia Britannica, surely the NYT and the vulnerable too.  And at this point, things can get a little chippy.  See my account of a skirmish with a Canadian journalist (McCracken 2004) below. 

Stage 4. Panic! Attack!  Panic Attack!

In Stage 4, the alarm is now running full time.  You can hear  it coming from the old media world as if from a neglected warehouse.  It’s time to roll out the "barbarians at the gate" argument.  Enter Ulanoff, Henninger and Moore. 

Now, not everyone reacts this way.  I had lunch with a senior journalist who cheerfully admitted that the NYT might be dead in a decade.  But for most people, it is time to defend the vested interest.  (And this is of course a rich irony, coming as it does from profession that is supposed to protect us against same.)

Naturally, these aggressions can make thing worse.  Moore reveals a deeply patronizing attitude towards her reading public.  She implies they are not quite bright enough to see the difference between fact and opinion.  (Yes, I appreciate she is trying to stake out a value proposition for the capital markets, but when a CEO makes her value proposition by dissing her customers, analysts are going to wonder if she’s fit for office.  This self destructive behavior may be taken as a real measure of the panic.)

What you can do

How far will they go? The old media is a little like the old mafia. We muscle in on their turf at our peril.  We can’t know how far they will go, but I think it’s more than remotely possible that the community of bloggers, normally so serene and tranquil, is this far from becoming one of those Law and Order episodes in which bodies start turning up everywhere. 

This means bloggers will want to think about hiring protection.  Plastic surgery and name changes are not out of the question.  (Finally, an excuse!)  I understand that a blogger was found beaten and bloody in Second Life.  He was incoherent, but in his hand was found a scrap of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.  You are warned.  Take steps now!

References

Guarriello, Tom. 2006. Guest Post: On mass media and blogging. This blog sits at the… April 21, 2006. here.

Lance, Ulanoff.  2006.  Are you an iVideot?  Internet Video is sucking life out of our live world.  PCMagazine.  April 20, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2004. Newspaper vs. Blogs: I think we’re catching up. December 20, 2004. here.  [for the Canadian journalist thing]

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Youtube: a peril to us all? This blog sits at… April 20, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Muddles in the old media models. This Blog Sits At… February 8, 2006. here. 

Steinberg, Brian. 2006. Time’s Chief Plans A Digital-Age Transformation. Wall Street Journal. February 8, 2006. p. B3.

Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday.

the Wikipedia homepage here.

Post Script. 

On Thursday, Steve Postrel offered this useful bigger picture of the regime transition:

Remember: it was always better Before. The ancient Greeks had Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages before their own Lead. The Roman Republic looked back to Romulus and Remus. The early Roman Empire missed the Republic. The Renaissance thinkers and artists saw themselves as restoring ancient glory.

Nostaligia turned to "social criticism" during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The romantic movements in poetry and literature set the tone. Then we had Rousseau and then Marxists (not all of them, and not Marx himself) who insisted that living in a free society with specialization and market competition and fluid social roles was inferior to rustic stability and feudalism.

Fast-forward to the postwar US. First we had the problems of the Lonely Crowd and mass society–things were better in the old days when people were more individualistic. Then we had the problem of excessive abundance and mindless consumerism and the Leisure Crisis–things were better when our mass economy wasn’t so productive. Then we had the Age of Scarcity–things were better when the economy was booming and we didn’t have to worry about foreign competition.

Then we had the transition to today’s New Economy, with flexible supply chains and firms facing gales of entrepreneurial creative destruction, higher returns to skill and creativity, and the ability to segment and individualize goods and services like never before.

Now the Before of the social critics is the Mass Society where people didn’t go Bowling Alone or watch different TV shows from one another. And they’re already campaigning to valorize today as a Before life-extension period, when people had the good grace to die quickly.

Thank you, Steve.

Guest post: Tom Guarriello on the mass media and blogging

Tom_at_true_talk_2

Yesterday, Tom Guarriello offered a great comment on old media’s cry of alarm about blogging and the new media:

It’s a particularly interesting day in the "they’ve gone mad" wing of the tsk-tskers. Here, Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:

"But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It’s called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.

Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger’s video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.

In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue."

Oh, man, women in their underwear. What’s next?

References

Tom’s blog, The TrueTalk Blog, here. 

XBS, the Bloggers’ b school (XBS 3)

Hbs_1Last week, I had a couple of thoughts on the "bloggers business school."  There was some encouragement, especially from Francois Gossieaux at Corante and Russell Davies in the UK.  It feels like this is an idea with legs.  Now if we can just give it a head and a heart…

Naming:

How about a name?  The sensible thing is to name the enterprise after it’s most generous donor.  New York real-estate developer Stephen M. Ross recently gave the University of Michigan business school $100 million.  My concern: would this be enough?

So let’s call it the XBS for the time being where X is the name of the future donor.  And, no, I don’t think this donor is going to have to match Stephen Ross’s gift.  I think we could sell the name to the right donor for around $20 million.  This would generate enough interest to supply salaries and keep XBS tuition free. 

Educational philosophy

The first objective of XBS is to create a network that links faculty to participants (a.k.a. students), participants to one another, and both participants and faculty to the world that is the web. 

The second objective is to link XBS to the world of business, so that the network is networked, as it were. 

The first objective means that instruction happens on line.

The second objective: instruction is integrated with the world. 

Russell Davies is developing something like a tutorial model, and this has advantages.  (If it’s good enough for Oxford and Cambridge…)  For my money, this model is didactic, too much a matter of educational superordinates telling their subordinates what and how to think.  (I say this with alll due respect to Russell.  He is casting around for solutions to an urgent problem and he has taken it on, heroically, as a one-man exercise.) 

I prefer a more collaborative model, one in which participants and faculty work together to solve problems, and master problem solving in the process.  The "case study" method work nicely here, and in the best case, students are co-authors of what happens in the classroom and "tutors" are there to direct discourse.  (There are HBS professors who can run an 80 minute class by asking a handful of questions.  The art of teaching here: to ask the exquisitely correct question of exactly the right student at precisely the right moment.  Russell, I believe, would do this brilliantly.) 

But the case study is not perfect for XBS.  This is because the case study is, again for my money, too artificially delimiting of the problem at hand.  Case studies demand cases: usually, a 6 to 12 page, closely worded treatment of data and observation, out of which the students must extract the problem, data, alternatives, and an answer. 

But the case is canned.  It is removed from the real world in all its blooming complexity and churning dynamism.  This prevents students from mastering complexity management (and I believe this will be their first professional responsibility in the capitalism of the 21st century).  More important, the canned case forces the b-school to play johnny-come-lately to capitalism.  As it stands, business schools are rest stops on the interstates of commerce.  Capitalism does not run through them.  It runs around them.  This leaves most business schools, even very powerful ones, working at a remove. 

So, let’s say XBS uses the "world study method."  In this event, every problem in the classroom would have to be a problem in the real world.  Below, I have attached my working notes for a case study  called "Arrested Development: you’re Mitch Hurwitz, what do you do?"  I think this will eventually become a cases study of the conventional kind, but what I like about it for present purposes is that it is in fact an urgent problem.

You will see that there are lots of outstanding questions in the working notes.  Anything in italics is a question that would have to be supplied in the case.  But these questions could be answered in the XBS classroom by participants who have industry contacts and formidable googling skills.    Furthermore, the answer to these questions are changing constantly.  One of Mitch’s options, internet distribution, has new options emerging all the time. 

In a perfect world, the XBS contemplation of Mitch’s problem would not be a "let’s pretend" version, a mere shadow of his deliberations, but something so comprehending (and comprehensive) of the complexities of the matter, that Mitch would find it deeply interesting and useful.

In this way, XBS could serve as an intellectual staging area for the real world.  Business professionals could bring their problems to the classroom.  (There are precedents for this sort of thing.  Harry Davis runs a product development course at the University of Chicago.  Each term students address on a problem proposed by someone in industry.) 

There are two objections, of course.  One is that no professional marketers is going to put a real problem "under glass" in this way and so expose his or her world to competitive scrutiny.  The nice thing about really productive classrooms is that they throw off a profusion of solutions.  The proposer may pick and choose his/her solution and the competition need be none the wiser.
The other objection is that these cases would be short lived.  Every b-school struggles to keep cases fresh.  Once Mitch has made his decision, the case is dead.  I am not so sure of this.  After all, there are no right answers here.  Even after Mitch has made a choice, the alternatives to his decision will attract student support, and as the world turns, the problem set will turn as well.  Fully attached to the world, these cases may have the ability to renew themselves. 

I think it would be especially interesting to give the same problem to several classes and watch each work through to its own solution.  This is an evolutionary model with multiple "what if" scenarios.  Each class would fix on its own particular version of the problem, data, strategy and answer.  Together, the classes would supply an interesting survey of the problem various configured.

If we are serious when we say that the world is becoming more dynamic, more inscrutable, more difficult to manage, surely a business school that runs the problem set in several different ways is a useful thing.  Indeed, by making itself a kind of staging area for the future, XBS could makes itself an essential part of the decision making process.  We can imagine managers building it into the problem solving process.  This would give them a chance to see what very complicated problems sets would look like when configured in very different ways.  ("Ok, here is what the what things look like if these factors are held to be most important, and here is what it looks like if other factors prove more important.")  This allows XBS to move from post hoc "catch up" to something much more prospective and useful.   

The value to the business world is perhaps clear, but I think this suggests a compelling case of the value of XBS to its participants (a.k.a. students).  Students will eventually be allowed onto the cat walk to see into every class that has entertained the question in question.  This is really very useful, demonstrating in an illuminating way what might have happened had other options been pursued.  XBS may be a better way to teach business in any case.  Almost certainly, it is a better way to teach business when business practice must content with new orders of dynamism. 

Appendix:  Case study

[these are my notes for a case study under construction.  Anything is italics is information I need to find out and build into the case.  (Or it may be information I have found out.)  It occurred to me that this is the sort of thing that could be left to the blogger business student to determine on their own.]

Mitch Hurwitz was sitting at his desk at The Hurwitz Company.  The office was quiet, even a little mournful.  Mitch’s  baby, Arrested Development, had just been cancelled.

Five Emmys and the 2004 award for "best comedy series" had not been enough to protect it.    As Fox executive Peter Liguori put it, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV – it’s just too small." The numbers this season had been disappointing, around 4.3 million viewers a week.

Insert here:
economics of TV:
what it costs to mount a series
how many are tried each year, how many successful
how profitable are the successful ones, who makes the profit
how many viewers are required to sustain a series
what the break even point is
when success is not immediately, who decides
famous exceptions, etc. (shows that struggled in obscurity with small numbers & finally made it)

second set:
how much can a series creator/writer hope to make, what about the West Wing writer, what about the guy who did the HBO Western, I think he started out doing NYPD Blue, we need to show that really successful shows make a prince’s ransom (this to support the argument that Hurwitz should cut his loses and begin again with a new property)

third set:
how did the audience for AD take shape.
Did the numbers build slowly?
Did early adopters convert to loyalists?
Was there a good deal of "churn" is fans came and went?)

In the old days, Mitch knew, cancellation was cancellation.  The networks were god.  There were no stays of executive.  When the network cancelled a show, it stayed cancelled.  But because Mitch was familiar with the writings of Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine and because he was a man deeply acquainted with the trends of his industry, he knew there was still hope.

fourth set:
Mitch’s career in television
what he had come to know about the industry
how things had changed as he came up, etc.
There is a good interview at the AV Club (link below)
how network TV had changed,
how cable plays had emerged,
the role of HBO in the reinvention of cable,
how even small cable outlets were now producing,
how the economics of the industry had changed as a result
sale by DVD, history, numbers, examples
distribution by internet, history, numbers, examples
video iPod and other venues
prepay for access to TV shows (see the opera subscription number)
Anderson’s small tail theory

Content from the AV Club Interview from February 05 that might be mined:

The show does need the space. Its complicated characters, baroque storylines, and manic pacing all pack a great deal of information into a small window, and it took some time to fully hit its stride, though last year’s DVD release of the entire first season made catching up easy.  [Robinson]

Hurwitz created and oversees the series, which shows a little of the gag-a-minute sensibility he learned as a writer and producer on programs like The Golden Girls, The Ellen Show, and The John Larroquette Show, but finds its own unique vibe in a quick-moving documentary style, with film director Ron Howard as the narrator who holds everything together. [Robinson]

Mitchell Hurwitz:

It became a very expensive show very quickly. When I was on The Golden Girls, we’d have eight scenes per show. And when Seinfeld came along, they went to, like, 30 scenes a show, which was revolutionary. Arrested Development has probably got 60 scenes per show. It just keeps emerging as this more and more complex thing. I always try to keep it very simple at its heart.

The style of the show that has emerged is broad comedy done very dry. We throw a lot of the jokes away. So it feels improvised, but we really do write these out. We write in the overlaps often. We write in the stutters sometimes, if that’s important to a scene. Then, that said, a lot of the people on our cast—Will Arnett, David Cross, and Jason Bateman are really good at adding to the dialogue, and spinning things, and coming up with pieces here and there. But it’s a very tightly scripted show, because we’re trying to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time.

Our hope is that we just stay alive long enough that people discover it, and word of mouth develops, and that kind of thing. We’re just putting everything we can into it. So I really have no theories why it’s not working better. But on the other hand, it’s working as well as anything I’ve ever done. So it’s all new to me.

[these quotes from interview of Mitchell Hurwitz by Tasha Robinson, February 9th, 2005, http://avclub.com/content/node/24899/1/1%5D

WE WANT TO SUPPLY INFO THAT ALLOWS STUDENTS TO MOUNT AND DEFEND EACH OF THE FOLLOWING 4 SCENARIOS
THE FOLLOWING REMARKS COULD GO INTO THE TEACHING NOTE

Scenario 1:  "revenge of the long tail."

Fox, bless them, gave AD it’s run.  The numbers are in and the test is over.  AD has found its audience: 4.3 million viewers is it.  Mitch should throw in his cards. He might want to take AD to cable, but a guy with his talent and track record would do better to start again.  AD gives him lots of profile and credibility.  People will return his phone calls.  Dump this baby.  Go again.

Scenario 2: Retreat to cable

With the advent of long tail TV (LTTV?), there is a lingering hope for AD: that it takes refuge with a lesser network.  There are some networks for whom 4.3 million viewers is just fine, thank you very much.  On TNT, an only slightly larger number made The Closer one of the biggest hits in cable history.

The students who take this position would have to defend themselves against the accusation that there is not enough money in cable to sustain a show like AD and if some of its stars left, the show would close in any case.

Scenario 3: Return to glory

This option says, take refuge with USA network for a couple of years, let the audience build, and return to Fox (and the big money).  Mitch is on record as saying, "why should we assume that when you try something different it will immediately be accepted?”   This suggests that he believes that AD is a little ahead of its time.  He might wish to say in play until the world catches up to him.

Scenario 4: Move to new channels and new revenue sources

Hurwitz can abandon TV distribution altogether.  The advent of the DVD market gives him both a new way to get to market and a new source of funding.  (See Ginna on Sternberg on Whedon’s Firefly options, below. )   There is also a internet distribution possibility, likely funded by a subscription model of some kind. [thanks to bloggers who contributed here.]

This option leaves open the "return to network glory" possibility, but I am guessing that Scenario 4 would give Hurwitz more creative freedom and better returns.  It was also give him a heroic standing in the small tail markets that remain, in the case of TV and Hollywood, still pretty "fat middle."

And the winner is…

Each of these positions is defensible and every good case study should allow the class to break into camps and for controversy to ensue.  But every case has, in the heart of the writer and the instructor, a right answer.  And this is a section from the "teaching note" that is send to the instructor.

How do we decide which scenario?  The shape of the numbers should tell us.  When Liguori says, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV," this is a bad sign.  This suggests that we have got everyone aboard who is coming aboard.  If this is what the numbers tell us, advantage goes to students who support Scenario 1.

On the other hand, if the enthusiasm is distributed, that’s more promising.  They should show degrees of enthusiasm and some evidence of conversion: that it takes awhile for newcomers to become fans, for fans to become loyalists and for loyalists to become devotees.  We should see word of mouth support and the statistical evidence that WOM is indeed taking place.

Of course, there is a more fundamental problem here and that is whether news of AD actually found its way to all or most of the would-be viewers.  Daniel Drezner and Debbie Millman says that news reached him belatedly…and this suggests that marketing has something to answer for.  Drezner and Millman are after all pretty well informed about popular culture.  If we determine that news was badly distributed, then we go with Scenario 2 and/or 3.

So the "right answer" turns on whether we think the AD audience is a long tail market, or a long tail market struggling to become a fat middle.  So the "right answer" turns on what numbers we supply (or what they can be made to say).  Do they show an adoption pattern for AD that is thickly packed or more stretched out?  Does this flock cluster or does it attenuate?

References

Drezner, Daniel.  2005. My Personal Apologies to Mitchell Hurwitz. Blog post.  November 14, 2005. here.

Justin, Neal. 2005. Neal Justin: Kyra Sedgwick is getting her closeup — finally. Star Tribune. July 28, 2005.  here.

Robinson, Tasha.  2005. An interview with Mitchell Hurwitz.  The AV Club.  February 9th 2005. here.

Snierson, Dan.  2005. Arrested Development 2003-2005?  We say goodbye to ”Arrested Development” — EW looks back on the three seasons of the critically acclaimed Fox comedy.
Entertainment Weekly.  November 18, 2005.  here.  (subscription required)

(all quotes and stats from the Entertainment Weekly article, with the exception of the numbers for The Closer which are from Neal Justin, as above.)

last note: On December 19, there appeared an article in the NYT on new means and methods of movie distribution.  All of these clippings from Holson, Laura M. 2005. Before You Buy a Ticket, Why Not Buy the DVD?  New York Times.  December 19, 2005
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2005/12/19/business/19Theaters.html&tntemail0=y

a couple of passages:

Among them is IndieFlix, based in Seattle, which was introduced by two independent filmmakers in October. For $9.95 a disc, the company will burn a feature or documentary film onto a DVD and ship it to a customer who has ordered it online. Another outfit, 2929 Entertainment, has teamed up with the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh to offer the forthcoming movie "Bubble" simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable television.

Hollywood has a long-established way of promoting its movies, mainly through blockbuster releases. Until that changes, entrepreneurs will probably continue to find it challenging to get people to watch their films and to earn enough money to make their ventures profitable.

"The idea that a lot of things can get out without marketing clout is not there," said Bob Berney, a Hollywood veteran and president of Picturehouse, a theatrical distribution company. "I think there are complications for the next several years, as we are still in a theatrically driven mode."

Still, many in Hollywood smell opportunity, particularly since Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and an industry outsider, announced he would offer some television shows and movies on the video iPod. "I’ve seen more movement in the last three months than the previous five years," said Todd Wagner, who along with his business partner, Mark Cuban, will release Mr. Soderbergh’s "Bubble" in late January. "I think people are now saying they can’t avoid this."

Bloggers Business School (XBS 2)

101905_1732Yesterday, I offered some thoughts on the bloggers business school.  There were several good responses, including one from Russell Davies who, it turns out, is all over the idea. 

Davies is a star in the account planning field.  Account planning was invented in UK to give ad agencies a deeper understanding of the consumer.  For my money, planners are the most anthropologically minded people in the agency world.  They believe in culture and many of them have a deep and nuanced knowledge of it. 

Davies has created what he calls the Account Planning School of the Web.  He thinks of this as a correspondence course and so far it works on a kind of call and response model made famous by African American music and the Oxbridge Don. 

In the call and response model, the band leader (or don) sets a topic, a problem, proposition, and the student (or musician) crafts a response.  Davies is planning to set an assignment once a month and plans to ask industry luminaries to pose problems of their own.  Participants right up brief essays and submit them for Davies’ scrutiny and comment.  It’s a little like visiting our Cambridge tutor and hoping to high heavens that he/she likes what we’ve done.  (Because if he/she doesn’t, there’s not much place to hide…and in this case, the criticism is particularly public.)

Davies’ model occasioned a couple of thoughts:

1.  that the opportunity here is not only graduate business education but executive development, that students who came for an MBA might want to stay involved with an enduring connection. 

This raises questions of the kind that swarm every new enterprise in the new economy.  In this case: is there an important distinction here between executive education and an MBA?  How important is the latter credential?  What value does it create for the participant?  Or are degrees really just a bricks and mortar preoccupation? 

I have a feeling that the BBS (bloggers business school) is most interesting as an information exchange of a hyper intensive, highly participatory nature.  It will help cultitvate talent and in the process it will help sort talent.   The MBA may be an "all or nothing" label when in fact the BBS advantage is the ease with which it demonstrates student abilities so that enterprises can made hires that are better informed and therefore more exact.

Tough questions, these, but the stuff of an excellent case study for the BBS.  How much of the bricks and mortar model should a BBS enterprise carry with it into the new?  What are the new units, new relationships, new incentives?  Where is value truly becoming created?  Where is it being captured?  (I like the fact that we know live in a world where the ordinary assessment of opportunity demands quite searching questions and quite a lot of intellectual power and imaginative ability.  So much for capitalism being the simple pursuit of the obvious.  And just when you’re shooting your mouth off, you stumble upon a mission statement. BBS objective: to give students the intellectual power and imaginative ability demanded by the new capitalism.) 

2.  that the BBS could and should serve as a knowledge exchange.  (Now the resonance with the Bulletin Board System has a certain poetic aptness.)

I like the idea that students work through problems together, case study style.  This builds lots of skills, but it also builds lots of connections. 

The knowledge exchange works on several levels.  It works in the classroom but it also works across specialties.  Thus Davies’ students, the good ones, have a deep knowledge of contemporary culture they can trade with students who are strong in the areas of management theory or strategy.   

The connections that begin in BBS should endure into professional life.  Good b-schools give the graduate access to a large field of gifted consultants who are prepared to work for free (as long as the call doesn’t take longer than 20 minutes.)  The BBS school difference ought to be that it builds networks that are deeper and larger.  If it doesn’t, it should.  This has to be an objective.  Maybe there are grounds to doubt the value of the case study method.

3. velcro world

Sometime ago, I put my money on the idea that the corporation would take on a velcro character.  We would launch a new brand the way Hollywood creates a new movie, by bringing together all but only the people who can get the job done.  And once the job is done, every one goes back into their respective talent pools to await the next assignment, the next configuration.  (Since I made this bet, the "fixed personnel" corporation has got ever stronger.) 

If and when the velcro model comes to pass, however, the blogger business school will serve us well.  It will serve as a fluid network that launchs lots of fluid networks.  The identification of opportunity and the problem crunching necessary to take advantage to it, these will belong to the people who are superbly good at hunting and gathering in the vast data fields of the internet, people who have astonishing powers of pattern recognition, people who can reach out and piece together the tasks and the teams that can get the job done.  More and more business will move onto the internet and the bloggers skills, cultivated and intensified by BBS, will prove increasingly valuable.  This might be the ultimate value add of BBS, but I think this suggests that we need to rethink the case study method.

It makes your head spin, but then I guess that’s what it’s for. 

Last thought: having people like Russell Davies as a colleague, I believe that’s one of my incentives/objectives for participating in a BBS. 

References

For more on Russell Davies and his experiment, here and here.

The Bloggers Business School (XBS 1)

HbsAs readers of the blog know, I am keen to see the reinvention of the business school. 

I have several reasons, the chief of this is that many b-schools are, like the army, fighting yesterday’s battles. 

I saw someone arguing recently that the knowledge economy has been replaced by the creative economy.  (Come to think of it, it was BusinessWeek.  They were offering this as one of their take-aways for 2005.)

The Knowledge Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy. Information has become a commodity like coal or corn. People once thought that superiority in technology and information would ease the economic pain of outsourcing manufacturing to Asia. But it turns out that a good deal of knowhow–software writing, accounting, legal work, engineering–can be outsourced to places like India, China, and Eastern Europe, too. […]

 The solution: Focus on innovation and design as the new corporate core competencies. To prosper, companies have to constantly change the game in their industries by creating products and services that satisfy needs consumers don’t even know they have yet.  [BusinessWeek, below]

And I thought to myself, "oh, fine, b-schools are only now coming to come to terms with the knowledge economy.  God help them when it comes to the creative economy."

In point of fact, b-schools are bad at preparing people for dynamism inside the corporation and outside in the marketplace.  They are completely hopeless when it comes to teaching students about cultural literacy.  And without this knowledge, MBAs cannot hope to manage or respond to sudden changes in consumer taste aned preference.  Everything comes as a blind side hit. 

Sometimes I amuse myself by assembling a "dream team" faculty for the "Dynamism department" at a business school.  Several of the readers of this blog have a cherished place there, not to mention a named chair.  (Hey, as long as I am just making it up I can afford to be extravagant.)

But then I snap out of it and it occurs to me that the bricks and mortar model here is probably done for.  We must begin from the ground up.

Then I fell to thinking about a business school founded in blogging.

Here then are some rules for the blogger business school:

1. you must blog to be admitted

2. how well you blog will be used to determine whether you are admitted

3. most instruction will happen on line

3.1 there may be 1 week get-togethers in the summer, and the occasional weekend

4.  everyone will keep their "day job"

5.  instruction will consist in problem solving

6. using real time, real world problem sets

7. these problem sets will be created by shadowing real world problems. 

[We know for instance that over the last week or so Mitch Hurwitz is struggling to decide what to do now that Arrested Development has been cancelled by Fox.  (see my post on the topic).   Today, we learn that Hurwitz may do a deal with Showtime.  Because they are suberbly well informed, the class will have picked up Hurwitz’s problem early, come up with its own recommendations…and then rethought the whole thing as additional data about the Showtime deal becomes evident.]

8. classroom activities will take place for an hour at one’s desk, perhaps once a week per course.

9. students will do their own prep, drawing and posting useful information as they go.

10.  post hoc, there will be links for follow up.  For example:

10.1. each "problem post mortem" will be tagged: "this is an HR issue, with 3 options."  Each options will be laid out with key passages from the managerial literature with further links to the paradigms of key thinkers.  Collaborators may take issue with these assertions and correct them in the manner of a Wikipedia.  This may be the only body of work that is not disclosed to a general public.  This is the body of knowledge that belongs to each class. 

11.  problem solving will be collaborative, organized into teams, one team set against the other, teams will emerge spontaneously in the course of the debate, teams will not remain fixed in membership

12. all of this will happen under glass.  The b-school will be posted!  The difference between students and observers will be rights of participation as determined by program admission. 

13.  I haven’t quite figured out how grades are given, though this too may be an antique concept.  The question is whether you get the degree, and this decide when the faculty meet to look at a student’s contribution to a problem solving session of the student’s choice, of their choice, and one chosen at random. 

14.  No one fails.  They just don’t graduate.

References

Anonymous.  2005.  Best of 2005: Ideas: The Way to Succeed in The Creative Economy: Innovate.  BusinessWeek. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Arrested Development case study: Say you’re Mitchell Hurwitz, what would you do?  This Blog Sits At the… November 25, 2005. here.