I think we all remember that guy in high school, the one who never really paid attention because he was busy covering his note book with mythical creatures and fighter planes.  Much to everyone’s surprise, he actually improved his technique a little but his taste in topic never got better.  This guys was about beasts and bombers.   Aesthetics be damned.

We all know what happened to this guy.  He went on to design games for Electronics Arts or someone.  These are the games that do astonishing things technically, but aesthetically (with exception of games like Myst), they all pretty much look like crap.  The characters in Halo are particularly bad.  You can almost see the high school notebook from which they sprang.

There is good news from Fast Company.  Arvind Palep and Serge Patzak run a company called 1st Avenue Machine, and they are now famous for a video called Alias. Alias is an astonishing piece of work.  I mean, really.  Palep and Patzak have what the design world should call, after tennis, touch.  I guess Fast Company asked Palep to explain why 1st Avenue Machine was so good and now so sought after.  He replied:

Before, technology was the barrier.  But it’s faster and cheaper now, and there’s a real shift to people with artistic vision.

This means "bye bye" to the guy drooling over his notebook.  In the early days, we were obliged to hire the guy at Bungie (the authoring house that created Halo).  He might not have an aesthetic bone in his body, but he knew the code and he could make it do remarkable things.  But now the technology has begun to assist in its own invention, many more players can deliver technically superb stuff, and advantage now goes to those with "touch."

In effect, the technology has interceded on its own behalf.  It once imposed an access tax.  If you wanted to use it, you had to forswear some of the ways you would normally deliver value.  (Specifically, you foreswear design intelligence.)  But now the technology has disintermediated the guy who knows code and nothing else.  It has migrated to those players with higher order capabilities.  It has effectively put itself in the hands of those who will make it more interesting, more engaging, more beautiful.  Hmmm.  It’s almost as if the tech is engaged in an evolutionary effort to recruit the humans who can be most useful.  Does anyone else feel a chill?

I wonder if something like this is happening in the corporate world more generally.  While discussing the BMW spot, Tom Guarriello and I were contemplating the state of the corporation and specifically how many people are passionate devotees of innovation, and how many remaining implacably hostile to the idea of new ideas.  I believe the nitwits still flourish, but Tom says, no.  He believes the worst offenders are now out or outmanned. 

It’s almost as if the corporation has found a way to put itself in the hands of better humans, too.  The BMW ads are important because they say, effectively, "it’s all about the ideas and the ideators."  And increasingly, I think we see the truth of this.  Everything else can be left to a system constructed by deep thinker at a b-school, a d-school or an e-school (eingineering).  As corporations draw ever closer to the status of a complex adaptive system, superbly able now to spot opportunity and act on it, they must honor the idea above all else,  and this means, in some cases, there will have to be a change of personnel. 

In a weird way, corporations are struggling toward the light.  They do not always know the path to absolute dynamism, but they have very little difficulty figuring out who can help and who will hurt.  I think we have yet to see what the new dynamism has in store for us as a culture and an economy.  But there is no question that, after extraordinary individuals, the first flower of individualism, corporations will be the first one in.  Tom says that those who harbor anti-dynamic inclinations have been rooted out.  I am not so sure.  I think that many of them now live under deep cover.  But that we will find them out as inevitable.  Just as technology came to its own aid, disintermediating those who could not realize its full potential, the corporation will make itself steadily more dynamic and as it does so the party of resistance will become ever more obvious. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Special Effects.  Fast Company.  March.  p. 87.

For the Alias video from 1st Avenue Machine, go here.  (Click on "projects," choose the last box in the vertical array.)

This is an obituary for a friend who has gone over to the method.

Let’s call him Danny. Danny used to be a deeply creative guy. He was a joy to work with and a joy to work for.

Working with Danny was like fishing the Grand Banks before the Europeans came in earnest. So many ideas, so thickly packed, you could walk on them anywhere. New found land! Everywhere.

This is not one of those Village of the Damned scenarios or anything. Danny doesn’t have a glassy stare or a robotic gate. No, it’s just that he now plays things by the book. He’s got this method through which everything must pass. It’s an "eye of the needle" thing. If you are rich in ideas, forget it, you’re not getting through.

I don’t know where Danny got the method.  I think it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that made up with bits and pieces of management theory.  Now every act of creativity takes a Powerpoint deck to choke a horse.  There are lots of lines and boxes and arrows so complicated it reminds me of a radio I broke into as a child.  Man! (Complicated, mind you.  Not complex.  Complex I believe in.  Because complexity comes from simple principles.  But complicated, that’s, what’s the term again? oh, yeah, bad.)

Danny used to believe in beautiful ideas.  And he would tell you, before the method got him, that beautiful ideas were always clear and radically simple.  Yes, you had to roll out lots of supporting data.  Yes, you had to marshal the argument, dotting your Is and crossing your Ts.  But the old Danny treated all of this as the stage mechanics they have at the MET.  It has to be there, but only as a platform.

Danny loves the method I think because he thinks it makes him smarter. And maybe this is true. But the method actually makes it kind of hard to tell whether he’s smart or not. It gives all his thinking a certain prefab quality. This is not a bad thing when we are trying to snow the client, I guess. I mean, if we’ve "got nothing," method supplies a facsimile of something. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Danny lost his nerve. Maybe he’s off his game. Maybe the method is smoke and mirrors, bang and chatter, and otherwise deliberately obfuscating of a clear and simple truth: Danny is tapped. (Hey, I’ve been there.)

But I think the method is also a kind of talisman designed to give comfort to Danny and the people who rely on him. "Oh, a method! Hurmph! Here, here!" Suddenly, we’re in a men’s club in Victorian London with everyone nodding in stodging agreement that orthodoxy is always better than just winging it. "I mean, after all!"

"I mean, after all," used to be a phrase we could actually use in conversation. Everyone knew exactly what we meant and what we meant was "let’s hew to orthodoxy because it’s been crafted by people better than ourselves and tested by the ages. Let’s not forget the things we know! Let us come to our senses. I mean, after all."

Those days have passed.  Orthodoxy is sometimes useful.  More often it is a decrepit bridge over a very deep gorge.  It might get us to the other side.  It worked the last time we tried it.  It looks okay.  I’m sure it’ll be fine. 

No one says,  "I mean, after all." much anymore because precedent is no longer always a better bet than its alternative.  Precedent is not even usually better than its alternative.  Precedent should be marked "for use only in an emergency by trained professionals…or Paul" because, as the business press never tires of telling us, "everything we know is wrong." 

Ok, so what’s better than method? Smart people thinking not with method but with messiness. The world got various. Our professional lives stream with novelty. The new comes from every kind of factory, staffed by every kind of creative, driven by the whip of opportunity and the joy of opportunity.

How we might use this "new" is also various. First we have to say what it is, and this is not easy. Is this new an innovation that will take like television or is this an innovation that will fail like smellovision? In the early days of TV, this was technology looking for a purpose and it took several years (and a General) to figure out what that purpose was.

We have to figure out whether and how it might serve as an opportunity, whether and how it might serve as a risk, and to do this we have to shuffle through a deck of interpretive transparencies that help us see it this way and now that way. We have to evoke a series of assumptions and let each of these reveal what it is we might be looking at.

So much for method. This is about intellectual agility. This is about framing and reframing the issue at hand until we find the one that helps make it make minimum sense. Method actually makes things harder. It locks us into one set of assumptions when what we need is to be "assumption agnostic" and capable of a swallow’s flight between assumptions. In Gladwell’s language, it is blink, then blink, then blink, each time supplying new assumptions.

All of us are multiple and in transit. We work for corporations that are multiple and in transit. We live in a world that is multiple and in transit. This makes method perilous, if not murderously at odds with the management of complexity that is now our first assignment, whatever else we are called upon to do.

I don’t know what happened to Danny. He lost his gifting for thinking, his gift for creativity, or maybe he just lost his nerve. He’s still multiple. He’s still in transit. But the method that is supposed to serve him serves him ill. I’m sure he’ll snap out of it. Hope so. I could really use a hand with this smellovision thing.

Football has been called war by other means.  As a grand exercise in strategy and tactics, it might also be called business by other means.  For some purposes, football is America by other means. 

So when someone comes along and threatens to change football at its core, well, we have to pay attention.  Enter Coach Leach of Texas Tech, the object of an article in the NYT Sunday Magazine.

changing the game

Coach Leach has created a football program that punches above its weight.  Typically, he works with kids who are not nationally scouted or ranked.  But what he does with them is not to be believed.  All of his quarterbacks have distinguished themselves, and B.J. Symons set a college record passing 5833 yards in a single season.  The kid threw for more than 3 miles. 

Coach Leach has done this without the aid of charisma…for he is unprepossessing.  He is in fact sometimes mistaken for the equipment manager.  In a sport that has many formidable-looking contestants, he’s the one "with this look on his face like he’s walking around an airport, lost."

An illuminating moment from Lewis’ excellent piece in the NYT:

Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. […] The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was …. just talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: "You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer."

Bloggers live for ideas,  and this sort of thing kind of makes Coach Leach sound like a man after our own, usually pacific, hearts.  Wrong.  Coach also loves the violence of the game, counselling his players to go out "and knock the living dog snot out of people."

what is Coach doing to football?

Coach Leach’s has changed the configuration of the offensive unit, spreading it out on the line of scrimmage, so that it looks more like flag football than tackle football.  The defense must now contend, as Lewis puts it, with  "a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them."

Leach uses  5 receivers (not the usual 3).  They  run routes that are many, various and variable 

There is no play book.  There are places that the offensive player is supposed to stand, things he is supposed to do. 

Leach gives his quarterback the authority to change the play at the line of scrimmage,

"He [the quarterback] can see more than I’ll ever see.  If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn’t get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there’s a ton of touchdowns to be had."

Speed is the order of the day.  Texas Tech players are smaller and faster than their opponents.

Coach makes sure that everyone gets the ball.  This is not  "sharing." 

"You try to get the ball in everyone’s hands because then it makes the whole offense harder to keep track of."

That’s the real objective: to maximize the complexity faced by the opposition while keeping things as simple as possible for Texas Tech players. 

Oh, there’s one more thing.  Iteration.  Coach likes to try everything in order to discover the weaknesses of the opponent.  Where do they really panic?  Some of his plays are run for the purpose of discovery.  They are not so much plays as fact-finding missions.

But doesn’t this waste plays?  Leach runs such a prolific offense he can afford to spend plays on fact findng.  Most college football time run 70 plays a game.  Texas Tech aims for 90. 

Hmmm…

So let’s review  Coach uses speed to exhaust, variety and variation to confuse,  iteration to discover, and improv to improve  just-in-time responsiveness.  Football has been hardening into orthodoxy for some years now.  Coach appears to be doing his best to turn football into something more like basketball. 

Wait a second, who does this sound like?

That’s what I thought, too.  It sounds like Coach Leach is running Texas Tech the way AG Lafley is running P&G.  Both appear to have a page from the complexity theory "play book."  They have created organizations that are prolific, fast, responsive.  They have taken organization once committed to "ball control" and "grinding it out," and made them creatures of something much closer to true dynamism. 

In the case of football, this change comes, perhaps, not a moment too soon.  I heard today that Monday Night Football will be consigned to cable (ESPN, but still).  Now that there is a plenitude of options (lots more sports, lots more things competing with sports), it is perhaps time for football to step it up a little.  I mean, some of the games this season, it’s been like listening to Coach talk about pirates for 3 hours. 

References

Lewis, Michael.  2005.  Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep.  New York Times Sunday Magazine.  December 4, 2005. here.

More from the floor at Corante’s Social Architecture meeting in Cambridge (details above).

To illustrate his contention that politicians use a different "operating system" from the rest of us Andrew Rasiej said that he asked Mayor Bloomberg about a wireless New York and the Mayor replied (something like), "oh, that’s great. Would we have to dig up the streets for that?"

As funny as this is, there is a larger problem here.  It’s the "they just don’t get it" accusation that certain parties like to level against the political and the power incumbents.  Sometimes this is exactly right, and it makes it clear that nothing less than a fundamental cultural shift and change of incumbents will get the job done. 

But sometimes, this language (and the terms that just were used by someone asking a question from the floor, "technophobic," and "techno ignorant") actually obscures the opportunities for rapprochement.  There is a larger performative objective here that I dislike, that with this language we construct, we annoint ourselves as smart, attached, people who truly "do get it."  This is self congratulation and when it licenses a refusal to engage with power incumbents, well, it’s just stupid.  I do not level this charge against Rasiej who runs for office and advises politicians. 

I am in Toronto.  I am working on a powerpoint presentation that needs to be perfect before I go to sleep tonight.  I have to present it in the morning to a roomful of high powered marketers.

It’s hard to hear myself think.  My room is on the 4th floor of a court yard and there are a couple of maples in the courtyard which are now host to 200 starlings who are now debating something at length and at volume.  It is deafening.

I think  the debate goes like this, "Now?  How about now?  What about now?"  These starlings have more sense than to spend the winter in Toronto.  Not when flights to the south are so cheap.  And there are other reasons for leaving.  The chief of these is that many Canadians don’t do dynamism with gusto.  What did Peter Ustinov say about Toronto, that it was "New York City as if run by the Swiss."  (And I think Bjork says something like, "I thought I could organize freedom.  How Scandinavian of me."  I believe she meant "Canadian.")

Personally, I blame the likes of Margaret Atwood.  You could get everything Ms. Atwood knows about the well springs of contemporary culture into a phone booth and still have room left over for roughly a dozen college students.  The lit crit crowd has an embargo on certain kinds of thinking and Toronto appears to be engaged in a building frenzy, as if a dynamic culture could be imposed in the form of daring new architecture. 

But as we know, this is not where dynamism comes from.  Wishing will not make it so.  You can not build an opera house and rebuild the musem (as they are now doing) and hope to inspire (or license) dynamism.  The city that needs encouragement (or approval), well, this is really too desparate to think about.  But of course if you want proof, note that the Roy Lanham (as above) has dominated Top 40  radio here in Canada since early July.  We may think of this as the triumph of Canadian content.

I don’t think dynamism-loathing applies to the marketers I am talking to tomorrow.  At least, it better not.  I am arguing that we are seeing a fundamental shift in the consumers under, say, 35.  The groups to which they belong are now much larger, more flexible, more communicative.  Indeed, they are less like groups and more like networks of a certain kind.   The trick will be to peruade my audience of the marketing implications that follow from this argument.

I shall also argue that the new fluidity of the social group is reproduced within the individual.  People under 35 tend to build and sustain some quite complicated identity portfolios, with lots of diversity and lots of change.  If the group has become a network, so has the self become a network…and whopping great marketing implications follow from this too.

Anyhow, that’s the argument.  But if my audience are not buying dynamism as the organizing fact of contemporary life, they are not likely to smile upon my effort to suggest that the dynamism of the whole is also the dynamism of the part and the part’s part, as it were.  The broadest polity, the groups within it, and the selves within these groups, all are fluid, multiple, changeable and a lot like those Starlings debating their departure time, in constant, noisy contact. 

But, hey, what I’m telling you for?  I have to finish the damn thing.  Pray for me. 

post script: so it’s now 10:30 and thanks to those geniuses at Microsoft, I am still at it.  Twelves slides simply disappeared from the deck, and I have only now reconstructed them. 

But I just took a wee TV break and remembered why marketing can be fun in Canada.

I found myself looking at an ad for Monster.ca.  It opens with a group of office workers standing around the water cooler.  One of them says, "well, it’s your cow" and everyone laughs. 

Now this is an act of major mischief.  The line comes from a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith about his boyhood on a farm in Ontario.  In Scotch, John tells us about the time he was sitting on a fence with a girl.  A cow and bull began to copulate in the field before them, and John, persuasive even in his youth, said, "I wish I can do that."  His companion replied, "well, it’s your cow." 

Ok, back to work.  Pray for me more. 

I was thinking over the weekend about a Hollywood anomaly. (Hollywood anomalies have a way of becoming everyone’s anomalies.)

Apparently, people who win Oscars do not necessarily flourish. This surprises because the old model was clear. The actor who wins an Oscar was supposed to be set for life, the beneficiary of more and better scripts, climbing salaries, and augmented stardom.

A new pattern has emerged. People win Oscars and nothing much happens. Not new scripts. Not higher salaries. Not more stardom.

Adrien Brody and Diane Keaton are, apparently, two cases in point. Neither profited from their recent Oscar wins. Of course, there could be a local explanation here. After all, Brody chose to turn his acceptance speech into the most pious, self righteous, self dramatizing performance anyone could remember and Hollywood is a town filled with people inclined to give pious, self righteous, and self dramatizing performances at the drop of a hat.

And Diane Keaton’s performance in the Oscar auditorium was, well, ditzy. Not in that kooky, isn’t-she-utterly-charming, Annie Hall way. No, Keaton dithered in a way that made many of us wonder "how on earth does this woman manage to dress herself in the morning?" and I am pretty certain it moved some producers to scribble "do not hire DK!!!" in the corner of their programs. Ironically, these two may have used the Oscar occasion to cancel out the benefits of the Oscar win. They brought Oscar disappointment upon themselves.

For the rest of them, it’s not so clear. I have an explanation. It doesn’t work for the short term, really. (And explanations for the short term are here eagerly solicited.) But I think it might apply in the long term, looking out, say, 20 years.

My suspicion, in a truly dynamic culture, we may see short term success as something that disqualifies the victor from future engagements. We will say, "we know that this culture changes so quickly and so dramatically that what succeeds at the moment cannot be the thing that will succeed in the long term. We can’t know with any certainty what will succeed but we can say with certainty it won’t be this."

Is this fair? Does this not break the very "success logic" out of which careers are build. This says, any success is desirable success because small successes become the foundation for larger successes. The notion here is that we "fibonacci" our way out of obscurity, as the whole becomes a part of a larger whole which becomes a part…

In the new model, we will have to choose our moment of success with some care. We will also called upon to transform ourselves (or our brands) at the end of each successful engagement. We might even want to use the Oscar podium (or other awards ceremony) to offer a kind of show trial recantation. "I deeply regret for this persona that brought me this reward, and I want to reassure the Academy and the producers in the audience that I mean to rehabilitate myself as quickly as possible. I have signed in to the Betty Ford clinic for actors in transition and I expect to be new born in 6 weeks."

On the other hand, this may be the "consolation of philosophy" for someone who does not expect stardom or Oscars ever to cross his path. It is also precisely the sort of thing you would expect a Canadian to hope for.

"Stock Keeping Unit" or "SKU" is a term used by retailers to specify a particular variation of an item. Every distinct product in a store has an SKU. Marketers use the term as if it were a word, not an acronym. We say "scew," not S.K.U.

I was talking to a client recently about experimenting with product variation on the shelf. "Let’s do what Snapple did. Put a variety of things on the shelf and see what sells." "No," I was told, "this might work at a Mom and Pop. It will not work at Kroger."

Kroger insists that every product have one and only one SKU. No variations are allowed. No experiment will be endured. The slot on the shelf must be occupied by its designated SKU and nothing else. There is, in other words, an unbreakable link between certain products and certain spaces, and this link is policed by the SKU.

It is clear that Kroger has deep motives for this deployment of the SKU system. Partly, it is a book keeping issue. And this is important for many reasons, including the fact that Kroger sells its in-store data. Also, the SKU system is a way of enforcing slotting fees, another important source of store revenue.

But the consequences for the brand are clear. The store shelve cannot to be used for experimentation. As the world becomes more dynamic, as consumers become harder to read, this is an opportunity that goes missing. (And not a small one, either.  Snapple used shelf experimentation as a path to glory in the 1990s.)

But perhaps there are consequences for the grocery chain. After all, the difference between Kroger and Whole Foods is, to some extent, the fact that the former is too static while the latter blooms with variety and change. (This is the difference between Whole Foods and the new comer Central Market.)

We might argue that the the Whole Foods category opened up, to some extent, precisely because the grocery chains refused to allow the brands to serve them as "partners in dynamism." Shutting brand experiment out of the store was a bad idea.  It meant that the brand could not add the consumer experience that is so evident in Whole Foods.  A source of variation and experimentation went untapped. 

I am not saying that Whole Foods does not use the SKU system. I am saying that it is hard for me to believe that they use it as restrictively as does Kroger. This may be one example of where short term advantage has expensive long term effects for the chain, shutting out dynamism that is important to vital brands and vital channels.

The poor copy editor! She took a look at the manuscript for my new book, Flock and Flow, and slashed it to ribbons with a sharp red pen. I returned parry and thrust as best I could, but finally I was obliged to call the executive editor and explain that a book that attempts to describe how trends work and how we, as marketers, may work with them, must be written in a manner that is a little liquid, nay, delirious. Write a Preface and explain yourself, he said. So, I did.

Preface

Trends come up like a squall. Brands must respond or capsize.

There are two ways to respond: short term adjustment or long term strategy.

This book takes the second approach. It asks, "how can we read trends better?" How can we proceed strategically? How do we this systematically?

Systems do not come to us "off the shelf." To build a trend system, we have to invent things and assemble them as we go. If you are looking for something elegant, you can stop right here. This book is experimental. It is sometimes inelegant and frequently wrong.

My defense: these are early days. New, intellectual appliances are always a little bit out of kilter. To make matters worse, I offer no warranty and the operating manual, as you are soon to discover, is sketchy in some places and sheer surmise in others. There will be moments when the ideas look odd, or the prose turns delirious. Please, if you would, bear with me. Better still, consider yourself a co-investigator. If you can see another way to solve the problem, send me an email (grant27@gmail.com) or drop by my web log (www.cultureby.com).

Also, consider this your "mixed metaphor advisory." In the manner of marketers everywhere, I will deploy metaphors as and when they occur to me with scant regard for whether and how they speak to one another. For this book, I am writing out of the "short, sharp, shock" school of rhetoric. It isn’t pretty. I’m hoping it’ll be effective.

Clearly, the problem of the explosive dynamism, the "perfect storm," of consumer taste and preferences isn’t going to go away. It is time for marketers to stop responding with ad hoc adjustment and get in the game long term.

end of preface

I will let you know if this does the trick. 

A friend of mine in graduate school, Jimmie Weiner, used to joke that he wished that someone would steal his research and publish the results. "So I can find out what I have."

This is what we all want: someone to come in and find a forest in the trees. I’d be grateful if someone could figure out what my new book is about. It would make the writing go a lot faster.

Sometimes, this is what a client hires me to do. I am sent a batch of research studies, and it’s up to me to ferret my way through them.

Sometimes the client wants a comprehensive review, but more often s/he wants me to see if I can run through the data and analysis and return with a single good idea.

Mark Murray at JWT recently hired me to look at four research decks for a pharmaceutical company trying to crack a new market. Some of the decks were distressingly bad. There are people out there who are selling the corporation a bill of goods. But certain diplomacy rules apply. Mark and I hold our noses and I proceed.

If you are new to the data, and you move at pace, things leap into view. It is a little like my recent post on the Razr, where it seemed the faster a new product moves through the development cycle, the more likely it is to preserve what was smart, fresh and genuinely powerful about the original concept.

In this case, the faster we move, the more surely we discover the concepts that integrate good insights and winnow out bad ones. (Which is to say there are, really, no similarities between the two. Ok, they are, in fact, opposite. ‘Concept first’ versus ‘concept last.’ This moment of pattern recognition brought to you by the effects of blogging at 31,000.)

Anthropologists are trained in a particular kind of pattern recognition. They are obliged to think of a culture all at once because, according to the post Kantian idea here, a culture, given its druthers, orders all the world all at once.

Or, this is what anthropologists used to think before they cavalierly took "culture," the field’s most powerful notion and valuable asset, and bet it at the epistemology table. In a couple of rolls, they lost the whole thing, rendering themselves still less clueful, still more provincial, and now pretty much the poor cousins of the social sciences. (Oh, those French croupiers. Never trust them!) Fortunately, the culture concept was spirited away by other disciplines and certain anthropologists just in time.

As it turns out, my education at the University of Chicago, with its tough minded Boasian/Sahlinsian clarities, appears to have immunized me against the deepest stupidities penned by the post-modernist camp. This means, I say piously, that "patterns" are still prepared to reveal themselves to me…even as they hide like small forest animals whenever a postmodernist comes thundering by.

But, I don’t have to rely on my anthropological training alone. My stay at the Harvard Business School taught me something about "cracking the case." This is a wonderful thing to see. By the time someone graduates with an MBA, he or she has scrutinized around 500 cases. They are superbly good at spotting all but only the things that matter and driving their way to a recommendation. (And, of course, cases are deliberately filled with red herrings to tempt and confuse.)

And this is why the first Harvard MBA I saw in action stunned me with his speed and acuity. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, we were met at the Coca-Cola Company to solve a problem. Before we could settle in, Khalil Younes, then the most junior person in the room, told us exactly what the problem was and exactly what we should do about it. That’s pattern recognition.

Let me return to the failed comparison above. I think it is true that the Razr demonstrates that the faster things happen in the corporate world, the better they happen. And speed is the advantage in ferreting as well. The faster we go, the more surely we capture the more robust patterns. The faster we go, the more surely we find and solve the key problems.

The corporation has for a long time worked at improv speed. For some time, it has been as if we have been forced to breathe data in and conclusions out. And these days it feels as if things are speeding up, and sometimes we wonder whether the corporation can survive its hyper ventilation. Still, it could be that the pace at which we are being forced to act is actually the best pace at which to work in any case.

It’s as if the future is forcing to give up the inefficiencies of the committee, the bloody mindedness of the time servers and the numb skulls, the stultification of Murphy’s law(yers), and finally become the economic, corporate actor(s) we should have become in the first place. It is as if a dynamic world releases us from our worst inclinations and pushes us into what is everyone’s favorite state of thinking, deciding and doing: something that moves at speed, engages our real gifts, and plays out our real joys. It is as if we are, to steal a phrase from Rousseau, now "forced to be free." (And so we must be conclude that the worst of all possible worlds is really the best of all possible worlds. I am Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, at your service.)

Naturally, there are necessary conditions, without which the press of dynamism makes the world a chaos, a torment, a veritable New Orleans. The corporation must equip itself with people who are fewer, more powerful, smart, well trained, capable of intellectual improv and playing well with others, and who are given very fast execution, almost instantaneous feed back, and the chance to iterate often. That’s not so much to ask, is it?

WSJ: How would you describe your management philosophy?

 

Ed Zander (CEO, Motorola): Whack yourself before somebody whacks you. I used to have these meetings called the whack meetings at Sun where we’d think about what could happen to us and what we have to do to keep that from happening. That approach led to the creation of Java and a lot of the Internet.

When Peters and Waterman published In Search of Excellence in 1982, they identified many really good companies.  Within two years, several of these exemplars, including Atari, Chesebrough-Pond’s, Data General, Fluor and National General, were in decline.

What happened? I think there’s a good chance they weren’t holding whack meetings.  They were taking care of business in the conventional way: doing 5 year reviews, meeting quarterly targets, keeping the great ship of state on course and on time.  In those days, you could pursue excellence without whack meetings. Due diligence might call for brain storming of one kind or another, but the manager’s philosophy was about squeezing margins, tightening quality control, “trimming sails” and “tuning engines.”

Something changed.  Whack meetings moved from being an expensive luxury to the very stuff of due process.  Now, as a matter of course, the corporation was required to engage in the self contemplation that was once the preserve of the philosopher and the self absorbed.  Notice that Zander didn’t say that “whack meetings” were a good idea, or something that stands high on his “to do” list.  He called them his “management philosophy.”

Well, what changed, exactly? Thanks to the work of Clayton Christensen and others, we understand that discontinuity is a new structural characteristic of capitalism.  This means that it’s now necessary for corporations to engage in a constant act of self and world scrutiny that asks deeply skeptical questions: what business are we in, what industry are we becoming, what just happened to our consumers, what does nanotechnology mean to us, what will change when 3G is fully installed, is everything we now assume dubious or just a couple of our dearest assumptions, and if that latter, which ones? It’s enough to make the head spin.  (I wonder if this is why they call them “whack meetings.”)

There are lots of implications here, but one of my favorites is what whack meetings tell us about the real intellectual demands of business.  Whack meetings may be charmingly, disarmingly named, but make no mistake.  This term stands for the deep contemplation of what and who the corporation is, and how its world might change as a result of a discontinuous innovation. For a long time, we have had to endure the disdain of intellectuals and academics on this score. Really smart people didn’t go into business.  After all, there was nothing to engage them. Well, now there are whack meetings. Come on down.

References

Christensen, Clayton. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School.

Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.  Boston: Harvard Business Press. (acknowledged with thanks for data in paragraph 3)

Peters, Tom and Robert Waterman Jr. 1982.  In Search of Excellence. New York: Warner Books.

Rhoads, Christopher. 2005. Motorola’s Modernizer.  Wall Street Journal. June 23, 2005, pp. B1, B5. subscription required here.

This little gizmo is the latest data dispatcher from the people at Ambient. It’ll cost you $149.00 and you can use it for info on the DOW, S&P 500, NASDAQ, the weather, even the presidential approval rating. For an additional subscription fee, it will give particular stock prices, the allergy index, even traffic congestion reports.

Modernism, especially the modernism of the mid 20th century, liked to conceive of life as something best lived in motion, that “getting ahead” and “progress” were the objects of the day, that people were happiest when “really going somewhere.” “Life as motion” was one of the powerful ideas of the day.

And it’s not hard to see why. Forward motion was a good metaphor in (and for) a technologically advanced, socially mobile world where things changed so quickly you could be forgiven the sensation of movement even when standing still. (Standing on a corner of any busy city and it looked like the place was changing at time-lapse speed, that we and the intersection were racing forward in time.)

But that’s pretty much done for. These days we are more inclined to suppose that we are stationary and the data move. We like to talk about data streams, bit torrents, mobile data. In a post-modern era, we are still. It’s the data thats always in motion.

No snappy terms and compelling metaphors yet. We are still the captive of the notions “push,” where data is send to us (sometimes intrusively), and “pull” where we must decide what it is we want (sometimes laboriously). I

But it’s clear what we want: streams of data that are perfectly chosen, arriving just in time, in exactly the form we need them. Every cell phone, PDA, laptop and desktop offers this promise. All of them disappoint. The company that gets this right will have created the ultimate killer app. And that’s because what used to appeal to us as a “cool gadget” now has the status of a necessity. It is the only device that promises us order in the world.

This has to be one of the reasons that Google just got into the portal game. The new portal gives us time, weather, news flashes, email. Google is a welcome player. It was late to the search engine game and still rose to the greatness. It did this partly by eliminating things from the screen. This sounds easy but it was, until recently, entirely beyond the poor bastards at Yahoo! and eBay who managed to make the screen look like the dog’s breakfast had just exploded. (It turns out that the rule of parsimony that governs good prose operates here as well. What we take out is just as important as what we put in.)

And now there is a new player in the data dispatch game. The system from Ambient is not much to look at for the moment. The “dashboard” above is a breathtakingly old fashioned (I will not say “retro”) metaphor straight outa the 1950s. No, this iteration is not very promising, but listen to what Ambient offers as their business concept:

For the first time in history, ubiquitous wireless networks can affordably deliver digital information anytime, anywhere. The result for most of us is cacophony. Ambient wants to make the world calmer.

This is a very Google-ish objective and bodes well. Everyone in the computer space is in the business of manipulating and delivering information. And those who do merely this risk playing in the commodity basement. Advantage goes to those who can offer discrimination in a data rich world. Still greater advantage goes to those who can offer calm. This is the very top of the value chain, perhaps the biggest “value add” of all

Someone will surely say, “So, this games belongs to Google and Ambient has no play.” The thing is Ambient uses a proprietary broadcast system. This allows it to communicate with ordinary objects in our lives. The dashboard, an orb that shows the state of the stock market, a cube that announces the weather. No internet connection is required. Ambient has in other words found a way to disintermediate the disintermediator. Hmm, this is a value that Google cannot deliver, at least not until we find a way to wire (or wireless) the fridge and other things around the house.

But here’s the thing that I thought really makes it sound like Ambient gets it.

With Ambient the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.

The dashboard is not very interesting, but an environment that pulses with data dispatches…that we can use.

Now, we can choose between a) waiting till we go to the Google search engine for our data dispatch, or b) having the data come to us on any/all of the surfaces of the domestic world. This is data access that works a little like the pilot’s “head’s up display:”all but only the data we need, exactly where and when we need it.

Ambient needs a better execution than the “dashboard” before it puts fear into the hearts of Google. And in the meantime, I would bet, Google will buy them as a precautionary bet against the rise of a new channel play.

References

The Ambient website here

The American comic Shelly Berman used to say he preferred watching TV at home to going to the movies because at home he didn’t have to wear any pants.

This may or may not answer the puzzle now vexing Hollywood: why attendance is skidding downwards.

This year, box-office is off 5 %, and attendance is down 9 %. One weekend in early May, the top twelve films made a mere $77 million, the worst gate in five years. Box office is off 10% since 2002.

Sharon Waxman of The New York Times is all over this trend, and recently she put an “uncomfortable” question: “Are people turning away from lackluster movies, or turning their backs on the whole business of going to theaters?”

It will not do to say Star Wars ($50 million it’s first day) will save the day. An industry expert says otherwise.

“One movie cannot change the whole course of events over one weekend. […] We could not reverse three months of downward with one film. We’re way down.” (Paul Dergarabedian, president, Exhibitor Relations in Waxman, 2005a)

Lots of thing have driven attendance down: better home theatres, faster access to DVDs, failing block busters, “sleepers” that never awaken. Waxman (as below) reviews them well.

But I think Shelly Berman might have been right. Watching movies or TV at home has certain advantages. The chief of these is that at home we can multitask.

I don’t know what the figures look like here, or where to look for them, but I think it’s probably true that everyone multitasks more than they used to, and some of us multitask virtually all our waking hours.

In short, we are all teenagers now. This was one of marketing research revelations of the 1990s: that teens could watch TV, take a phone call, do their home work, monitor a conversation in the other room, and ignore their parents all at the same time. But some 10 years later, it looks like kids were merely the early adopters.

I know it’s true from my own experience. I am pleased to see how many emails I can dispatch in the time it takes Pam and I to “watch” CSI: Miami. I am sure shards of TV dialogue find their way into my emails and perhaps shouts of warning (“Look out behind you, Hortio, look out!”) but these are merely the moments of incoherence my clients have come to expect of me.

Going to the movies does take us captive. We can only do one thing. What a charmingly 20th century idea! Does anyone do one thing anymore? Surely not. We don’t multitask because we can, we multitask because we must.

There is even multitasking within the multitasking. When watching TV we can surf the channel stream and we do often manage to watch more than one program at once. This is remotely possible in a Cineplex and I was once decided to go at random from one film to another. Just to see. It wasn’t pretty. I walked out of a Rozema treatment of Jane Austin (always a good idea) straight into Fight Club. (I am still in counseling.)

This raises another question. How is it we can follow more than one channel at once? It is because our media I.Q. have risen so dramatically that several programs at once is pretty easy. Once we became masters of genre, a good deal of the standard TV show became gratuitous. Our grandparents might have labored heroically to follow the complexities of a Lucy Show. We need a couple of interventions over 30 minutes not just to “get” the plot but to predict the outcome. (And it may be this new sophistication that has encouraged TV shows to build new complexity in. See the new book noted in the post on Culture wars, about 5 days ago.)

Now the movies are really in trouble. They may build in all the complexity they want, but really, after about 4 minutes we know were this baby is going and we are reaching for our cell phones or laptops. SHHHH! Not in a movie theatre, these are little shrines to the very old idea of doing one thing at once. In a movie theatre we are, in the Tom Wolfe/NASA phrase, spam in a can. Actually, we are pre-spam. We are cows in a feed stall.

So Shelly Berman was right, in a way. The advantage of TV is that it allows for multitasking, and our new media multiplicity, our ability to follow several threads at once.

My prediction: the television is slowly and belatedly making good on its early rep: that it would be the death of the movie house.

References

Waxman, Sharon. 2005a. ‘Star Wars’ Breaks Box-Office Records. New York Times. May 23, 2005.
here

Waxman, Sharon. 2005b. Hollywood Worries As Decline Continues. New York Times. May 10, 2005.
here

The program Mind Manager Pro is a dandy device for organizing complex bodies of data.

And it creates great little data maps that genuinely help to manage complexity.

I used one at Sesame Street on Tuesday and it makes it vastly easy to cover lots of topics without spinning into incoherence, my usual modus operandi.

The Mindjet website is here.

The military organization was once a lot like Hobbes’ Leviathan. Decision making was resident on high—in the senior officer’s corps. The ordinary soldier was a limb operated at a distance—by someone else’s intelligence.

That’s changing. Militaries are now thinking about a distributed, networked intelligence that would give the ordinary soldier new agency. The American Department of Defense (DOD) has created the Office of Force Transformation, the Command and Control Research Program, and the doctrines of Network Centric Warfare (NCW) and Effects based Operations. The DOD will spend $17 billion to support NCW and transform DOD from a command and control organization into something more distributed and networked. The effect of this new approach is one of the untold stories of the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it is not just the U.S. that has been experimenting with a dynamic military. Israel has a longer tradition.

Izhar Shay (former paratrooper in the Israeli Army and the chief executive of V-Secure Technologies), […] and other veterans say the Israeli military trains its soldiers to think quickly and act nimbly, adjusting to circumstances as they arise rather than waiting for orders. While the American military in the post-9/11 era increasingly favors those same qualities, notably in the Special Forces that it deploys deep inside enemy territory, Israel has been giving its warriors greater latitude to call their own shots ever since its founding more than half a century ago.

Today comes notice that this training is having an interesting diffusion effect.

“[a] disproportionate number of Israel veterans begin their own businesses, often in highly competitive technical fields.

This means that the Israel military is supplying a de facto business education, as Betsy Cummings suggests in the title of her excellent article in today’s Times: I got my MBA in the Israeli Army.

Right, then. Business schools have a new challenger. It’s the military. I only know the marketing departments in question, but I don’t think any one of these is supplying the kind of training in dynamism now on offer from the DOD. It’s a great big irony. As I understand it, “graduates” from the military used to flourish in the corporate world partly because they were so good at “command and control” bureaucracies. To think that their advantage is a knowledge of dynamism…well, this is a pretty remarkable shift in the order of things.

Can business schools take on their new competitors? In the language of the 8 ball: chances look slim.

We might argue that business schools are much too removed from the hurly burly of the real world to understand that dynamism is the order of the day. University professors live in protected circumstances. Their slow, still world is one of the last places of stasis. The real world does intervene very much or very often. The organs of intelligence, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek, mediate very nicely. The professor and the student are never “up against it” in the way that a soldier is on the battle field. Professor and student never learn to manage complexity in the face of real dynamism, to say nothing of life threatening dynamism.

Consider the “case study,” the much vaunted technology method of the business school. The only dynamism here comes from the shifting terms of the debate with which students break into the case and lay it bear. Case are anti-dynamic. The terms of the debate may change. Terms of reference never do. Teachers and students do not have to shift frame (or construct frame) to “crack the case.” Case studies are a little like Chinese puzzleboxes. The trick is to find the piece of the case that slides open and lets us in. Things don’t change as we go. Cases with a higher fidelity would reveal their secret only if we approached them, in quick succession, as a sonnet, an early VCR manual, and a Balinese symphony, thinking about our assumptions even as we think with them.

Business schools talk a lot about competition. Let’s see if they can engage in it when the competitor is not another lumbering business school but the realest of the real worlds.

References

Anon. Network Centric Warfare: Report to the Department of Defense
here

Cummings, Betsy. 2005. I got my M.B.A. in the Israeli Army. New York Times. March 3, 2005.
http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/000765.html
here

Alberts, David and Richard Hayes. 2003. Power to the Edge. Washington: Command and Control Research Program, DOD.

$17 billion dollar figure from John Clippinger’s website here