Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fed Ex as a game engine

This is the delivery schedule I got this morning from Amazon.  I’m waiting for a pair of headphones.  As you can see, these are “out for delivery” and should arrive today.

I looked at this and thought, “but surely there’s a game waiting to happen here.”  It would take a detailed knowledge of Amazon delivery routes and membership in Amazon’s “free delivery” club, but it should be possible to game the system.  (I should leave this to the likes of Kevin Slavin and Jamin Warren, but lets see how far I can get on my own.)

Using FedEx as a game engine opens several possibilities.  For instance, we would see how close we could come to making two packages pass in transit.  Could we make two packages run through Maspeth, New York at the same time?

Here’s what we know:

1) The system is out there and moving packages in any case.

2) We can discover where a package was at any given moment.

3) We can use this data to work the delivery system.

4) This mechanical system could be used for some other purpose.  We can set objectives and competitions.  

This is a culturematic in the spirit of Bill Winkenbach’s Fantasy sports invention.  Bill said, look, the NFL throws off all this data.  Let’s use it for another purpose.  Let’s use to create an alternate sports reality.  

So working the system as a system is really just the beginning.  We could treat packages as game pieces on a chess board.  We could treat them as balls in a pinball machine.  We could set up one of those flash boards that pinball machines have and run up numbers as someone succeeds in sending a package to Maspeth, then Hartford.  Oh, damn, he missed Stratford!

FedEx as a game engine.  That’s the idea, I think.  

Ethnographic Walk-About (or, what to do with the rest of your summer)

A former student is searching for what to do next.  With her summer…or her life.  She’s flexible.  

Here is the reply I sent her this morning:

Dear Jennifer (not her real name):

Thanks for your note.  Great to hear your voice again.

It feels to me that you are more or less uniquely positioned to do an ethnographic walk-about.

You have a great eye, a great voice, you are not wedded to any particular ideology or cultural camp, you have a breadth of experience, you are mobile in almost every sense of the term.

It feels to me like everyone is burrowing, sticking to what and who they know. There is stuff happening “out there,” but people are so shocked by the new that they can’t manage the novelty. So they are not mobile.

I would get someone to give you a mandate and just go looking. My hero her is Frances FitzGerald’s 1986. Cities on a Hill, A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures. Simon and Schuster. She doesn’t make the mistake that hobbles a good deal of American journalism and scholarship, the mistake that supposes that only on the margin are we going to find something new and interesting. She casts the net wide.  And that’s especially important now, because cultural innovation is taking place everywhere.  The avant-garde no longer owns the ingenuity or courage necessary to reimagine the world.  

Go have a look! Most people are not looking. And most of those who are, are looking through lens so particular that they ALWAYS find what they are looking for, and miss what is really going on.  All we know for certain is that Americans are as usual reinvented themselves as a furious pitch and pace.  We don’t have a clear idea of who and what they are becoming.  And that’s probably a bad thing.

Good luck and keep me posted.

Best, Grant

Purchase FitzGerald at Amazon by clicking here.  

Photo: Ms. FitzGerald from her wikipedia entry.  

Suits

Suits, the USA Network show (Thursday at 10:00), deputed it’s second season this week. It’s promises to be as good as last year and then some.  

I think it’s fair to say that this show has better scripts and acting than Mad Men.  It certainly does more interesting things with the law than Mad Men does with advertising.  

The thing that strikes me most about this show is the casting.  None of the actors here come from big projects or grand careers. It took someone with a particular gift to see the greatness (ok, goodness) of which they were capable.  (Greatness will leave for season 3.) 

Hats off to Rachel Rose Oginsky and the following producers and executive producers:

David Bartis
Gavin Barclay
Nathan Perkins
Jon Cowan
Chevy Chen
Igor Srubshchik
Aaron Korsh
Doug Liman
Gene Klein

Post script.

This scene will show you how Mike got this job.  He is chased into an interview room by men looking for the pot in his briefcase.  And so a new life, and show, begins. CLICK HERE.

Saving Boston from Bostonians!

I have a post up at the HBR blog today that suggests a way we might use an operation called Thank Bank and social media to make Boston a friendlier place.  Please come have a look. 

Please click here.  

Local history as a potluck potlatch

Thousands of communities in the US nurture a community within the community. This is all the people who care about local history.  

And there is the community within this community.  That’s all the things the community knows, or thinks it knows, about itself.

Most of these local history societies stage a speaker’s series.  They invite someone who is, say, expert in the civil war to come share their knowledge in a 40 minute talk, with drinks afterward.  It’s convivial and interesting.  If the gods are kind, the speaker knows her stuff and how to communicate it.  

There is another possibility.  Call it Potluck or Potlatch.  In this event we canvas and compile the historical knowledge of locals in a real time event.  Everyone brings what they know and shares.  

The way to run this is in the manner of a Harvard Business School classroom, drawing people into the discussion and organizing information as we go.

Naturally, we would want to begin with the declaration that we have the utmost respect for formal history and professional historians, and that we won’t ever want to challenge or diminish this kind of history.

But we also want to say that we want to see how much history we have in our community that qualities as “living history” and “informal knowledge.”

There is after all a larger trend that says our culture is moving from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in the assembly of knowledge.

And in any case, the local historical society has always had an extra-academic purpose: a chance to meet and engage with your neighbors in shared enthusiasms.  

Community-assembled history would give me a much more vivid sense of my neighbors than the sometimes dreary process of watching them as they listen to an expert.  

There are several potential problems with this scheme.  One is that local blow hards will try to commandeer the proceedings, grasping it as an opportunity to show how very knowledgable they are. But it is up to the person is leading things to step in and gently encourage them to give way that others might participate!

The far graver problem is that the community would encourage and perpetuate local falsehoods and misconceptions.  All part of the fun.  Everyone wants to be credulous and scrupulous in equal proportions.  (This too is a trend.)  No one should come to a local history potluck / potlatch with the idea that the history will be definitive.  No one should leave with the conviction that they have certain knowledge.  

The idea is to share and to celebrate what the community believes to be true about itself. Everyone is free, indeed they are encouraged, to repair to their studies, consult the masters, and determine just how much false currency circulates in their home town.  

I propose the HBS model but of course there are lots of ways of solving the problem.  The idea is to have a facilitator who is good at drawing people out, getting historical assertions up on the board, leading the discussion as a discussion, gentling stick handling the puck away from the blow hards, making everyone feel welcome, and otherwise making this bonfire of knowledge burst into flame.  

If someone says, “Sir, how dare you trivial with something so sacred as our history,” you may reply, “History is much too important to be left to the historians.  This is a living trust, richer when shared, aerated and given voice.”

Virtual creatures in marketing

Come see my post on HBR.  It’s about an imaginary girl called Sophie.  

Please click here.  

Women Behaving Badly

I have just posted a cultural reflection on the new show “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23” on the Harvard Business Review Blog.  

My argument: that the main character Chloe is an important cultural development. Popular culture is our gender laboratory.

Please come read the blog post by CLICKING HERE.  

Excavation Day #1: App Opps

I have a habit of jotting down ideas here and there, always with the certainty that I will come back to them and turn them into a post for this website.

I have the best of intensions.  But the ideas pile up.  And I have the attention span of a gold fish, so things…well, they pile up.

So my resolution here is to dig down through all those lists and share the ones that still hold my attention.

These two I call App Opps, aka application opportunities.  Use them as you will.

App 1.  The inside of your head, Thursday afternoon

I want an app that automatically posts clips of things I am looking at and working on and creates (or curates) a picture of the inside of my (or your) brain two weeks ago, so that I could wonder through it and see the stuff that was on the horizon, in the works, in hand, and on its way into the world.  This should be a kind of flash freezing. 

Yes, I guess I could get this my looking at my (your) twitter stream, Evernote clippings, Kindle highlights, Pinterest page and so on.  But I want this put together in the manner of a news briefing or a museum exhibit.  

As the world gets faster and we get more multiple, we are going to want this sort of thing for the sake of continuity and remembering. 

App 2.  Less is more media

I want a program that removes 2 minutes out of every 10 in the movie I am watching. That’s because with a lot of popular culture “less is more.”  Somewhere on this website I talk about the advantage of coming into a movie or a TV show, 10 minutes late.  You miss the set up and the exposition, so you are left to figure out what’s going on and the viewing process is much more fun.   If a film is really laborious, it could be made more interesting if we extract 2 minutes every 10 minutes, and films that were made to the laborious standard of say the 40s could be returned to usefulness or watchableness.  We could think of this as colorization. Perhaps we call it storification.  (The background thinking for this idea can be found in the discussion of the Kauffman continuum in Flock and Flow.)

Making a culturematic of yourself (the Nick Sherrard way)

Everyone constructs an identity on line.  

Some do it with wit and panache.  

Others, mea culpa, are more plodding and less interesting.

This morning I laughed out loud when I read Nick Sherrard’s description of himself on Twitter.

Note: CCTV refers to the system of cameras that blankets the UK.   We see Nick standing one of the few places in Britain that does not appear on CCTV, aka the moral high ground (at sea level).  

(Post script: thanks to Barbara Monteiro, Connie Perry, and Sarah Fogarty for a great conversation yesterday.)  

Bjork and Tina Brown: sisters of innovation

Björk and Tina Brown have many differences but one common problem: They are watching the boat beneath them sink. Their print and music industries are being disintermediated by the digital revolution. They are struggling to respond to the blue-ocean and white-space and black-swan disruption that besets us all.

For more of this post, please go to the full post on the Harvard Business Review blog by clicking HERE.

The Mall Is Dying (an abbreviated argument)

 

Lots of creativity comes from

using old forms for new purposes.  

After World War II, on the campus of the University of British Columbia, people took the quonset huts that had housed soliders and turned them into classrooms.

Old form, new purpose.

But there is nothing really all that creative about the quonset hut conversion.  In both cases, old and new, the hut serves as shelter.

What’s more interesting is when we find a new application for something old.  

Exhibit 1

I am corresponding with a woman called Barbara Monteiro.  Barbara has this amazing email style.  She starts her message in the subject heading and then at some point leaps into the text.  It gives her emails pace and a certain breathless excitement.  And in what 10 years of email it’s the first time, I’ve seen email “reinvented” in this way.

Exhibit 2

This morning I came upon a Pinterest site by Ryan Zeigler that uses the 9 picture grid to compose a single photo.  Very clear. http://pinterest.com/ryanjz/

Exhibit 3

In Culturematic, I describe the case of Fantasy football which found a way to repurpose the statistical data pouring out of the NFL to a new and very lucrative purpose. 

More on this theme later.  The client is waiting for me!

Justin Theroux, culturematic

The old career path was simple.  

Fix on an objective.  Commit body and soul.  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Stay at it.

No experimenting with other options.  No idle curiosity.  No putzing around.  In sum, no career wanderlust.  

Make a choice.  Stick with it.  

But for some Hollywood stars, this has changed.

Take the case of Justin Theroux.  He’s the one in the poster to the right (bottom row, far left).

Theroux wrote Tropic Thunder, Iron Man 2, and stars in the new comedy Wanderlust.  He also dates Jennifer Aniston (bottom row, second from the left).  

Rottenberg of Entertainment Weekly says:

More the most actors, Theroux is a moving target, bouncing between small roles and big ones, art films and blockbusters, dramas and comedies, TV and film.  ”I’ve had the most unpredictable career path — it’s really a career stumble,” says the actor, 40.

We have seen this pattern before.  In Culturematic, I write about the case of James Franco, an actor famous for trying a wide variety of roles and educational programs, all of this at the height of his career.

In Culturematic (out in May!), I compare Franco to Bethenny Frankel.  Both Franco and Frankel are experimental, trying a variety of things.  Whereas Frankel exhibits a simple opportunism, Franco appears to give us something broader.  Here’s what I say in the book.  

The point of Franco’s explorations is not celebrity. Indeed, he appears almost in flight from celebrity. More probably, his motive is curiosity. In the old Hollywood, stardom brought the actor a kind of completion. Nowadays, for some actors, it is seen to close off options and experiences the actor cares about. Franco doesn’t know what he needs to be an actor or a person. And he doesn’t know what he needs to know to stop being an actor. So he needs to find what’s “out there.”

For most of us this sort of thing would be take as a symptom of indecision, perhaps a refusal to commit.  For Hollywood stars, some of them anyhow, it’s a way of doing business.

Both Theroux and Franco have turned their careers into culturematics.  They are using it to search the world for options.  They are prepared to risk a certain blurriness of image to surface options that are otherwise hard to see.  There are to this extent treating their careers, once so simple and well defined, as adaptive exercises.  

This really was a bad idea when Hollywood was a simpler place, when ours was a simpler culture.  But now that our culture is so various and unpredictable, now that Hollywood is a more complicated, less scrutable place, it makes sense to do a career “stumble” as Theroux calls it.  This is an excellent way to discover and make contact with possibilities that would otherwise be invisible.  

First quote: Rottenberg, Josh.  2012.  It’s Time You Got to Know Justin Theroux. Entertainment Weekly.  February 24.  (I can’t find this article on line.  Sorry!)  

Second quote: McCracken, Grant.  2012.  Culturematic.  Harvard Business Review Press. (To be published May 15, 2012.  You may preorder from Amazon by clicking HERE.)

Learning to live with complexity

We are up against it, aren’t we?

The world moves so fast, changes so much, and disrupts so often, that most of our instincts and many of our strategies are just plain wrong.

We are obliged to manage a contraction.  

On the one hand we want to stay steady, grounded, true to mission, maximizing as much continuity as we can.

On the other, we want to create new ideas and behaviors, to spot disruption and reply in kind.  

Niether of these is easy.  Doing them together is really, really hard.  

In a new essay, Stanford’s brilliant Ed Batista gives a glimpse of how a coach can help.  It’s a wonderful piece reinventing coaching in order to reinvent the corporation.

See read the essay, click here. 

Photo acknowledgment: Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for the magnificent photo which appears in Batista’s post.  

Inside Inside Comedy

You don’t go into comedy unless, really, it’s all about you.  Even if your comedy is about self loathing, it’s still about you.  

What comedians want is clapping, whistling, foot stomping approval. The room, if not the heavens, should ring with our admiration and gratitude.

So Inside Comedy (Showtime, Thursday, 11:00) had a problem.  Where to find someone who knew comedy from the “inside” but was not the captive of the comedian’s essential self regard.  

Popular culture is strewn with projects in which the comedian serves as interviewer only to ruin the occasion by butting in with their own observations or hunting down the funny.  (David Letterman has no clue how to conduct an interview despite 30 years of trying.  There is no more convincing demonstration of someone’s inability to learn on the job.)

Enter David Steinberg, the interviewer (and executive producer) on Inside Comedy.  Nancy deWolf Smith says:

Mr. Steinberg … is the ideal interviewer. He does not focus on himself but is exquisitely tuned in to his subjects, many of whom he knows well. This seems to have relaxed some of his guests to the point where they appear more natural, and less switched on—as entertaining as that can be—than they are with other interviewers.

Steinberg has a courtly quality, a fineness, a liquid intelligence, all of them made more generous by the evident conviction that comedy is not a zero sum enterprise.  He also has a curiosity that promises us genuine interest in the place of the paddle-ball approach that characterizes so much interviewing these days.  Inside Comedy should be good.  

See the full article by Nancy deWolf Smith, by clicking here.