This is an abbreviation of talk I gave for the design firm Thomas Pigeon in early April.
It puts the “case for culture in business” as forcefully as I can make it. (NB I’m not talking about corporate culture here. I’m talking about culture as in “culture creative.”)
01:31 the world is turbulent
…and culture creatives can help
SECTION 2
01:38 strategy struggles
1:44 Peter Schwartz and the corporation in a state of perpetual surprise
1:56 we wake up one morning to discover that our business model can be ripped out from under us
2:00 Michael Raynor and the death of strategy
2:19 Nassim Taleb on black swans and the unimaginable
2:48 these guys are not the least bit defensive (a joke!)
3:07 Andy Grove, here’s how we do strategy now: act like a firehouse
3:24 all that talk of agility is Andy’s firehouse
3:40 strategy is struggling…and we can help
SECTION 3
3:45 corporations and brands are in crisis
3:48 CPG brands especially, all the big brands are down, all of them are struggling to live in this new world
4:00 brands are struggling…and we can help
SECTION 4
4:07 culture to the rescue
this world of commotion gets simpler if you get culture
4:17 getting culture makes the world less “black swany” and less “suprisy”
4:47 we can do better than Andy’s fire house
4:2 culture is the professional competence of the culture creative
4:59 culture is our competitive opportunity
5:02 culture is our difference
5:03 we have always said our difference is creativity and it is but we can’t do great creativity without a connection to culture
creativity requires culture
5:12 creativity that’s not rooted in culture has this calorie-free quality. It’s not lasting, it’s not impactful. It doesnt really change the brand. It doesn’t really touch the consumer, and it doesn’t really resonate with the culture in place.
5:25 that’s when you know there a cycle here: you’ve drawn from culture buy you’ve created something so good, it’s so powerful, it actually contributes to culture
SECTION 5
5:40 culture is 3 things, meanings, rules and motions
6:20 the difference between Roger A and Roger B
(Roger is a dog, he doesn’t have culture. Roger B is a person, he does.)
7:10 Aspies and culture (making conversation in the elevator)
7:44 three purses, one is a Birkin bag worth $14,000
8:18 culture defines how we think about self and the meanings of gender, age, ethnicity, race, and our preoccupation these days with celebrity
8:24…and how we think about groups, style, entertainment and communications are all established by culture
SECTION 6
8:48 is there a Canadian advantage?
Yes, there is (possibly)
e.g., Michael Ennis, Malcolm Gladwell, Marshall McLuhan
SECTION 7:
the case of the artisanal trend
9:08 food after World War II
9:38 the rise of prepared food: Cheese Whiz!
10:02 the artisanal trend itemized
10:38 the artisanal trend created the CPG crisis, it took on prepared food and fast food
10:46 and big brands disrupted by the artisanal
Unilever, Nestle’s, Coca-Cola, P&G taken by surprise
SECTION 8:
How can we help our clients?
11:07 first step: we map culture
11:11 culture too often the latest hippest thing, the coastal stuff, the beltway stuff, the elite stuff
11:23 the recent error of Democratic party
11:46 we want breadth of coverage
11:50 we don’t want to only listen just to the coasts
12:00 second step: choose the meanings (on the map) that really work for the brand?
12:17 which meanings work for the consumer
12:28 third step: now we build an exquisite brand
12:35 fourth step: stage events in the world that create meanings for the world (culturematics: meanings in action)
13:05 fifth step: meanings in motion. we have to track meanings, we need to find metrics. the corporation runs on numbers, all numbers are made with numbers. and when we are asked for numbers we just say just trust us, your career will be fine, your kids will go to college, you can trust us, look how hip our glasses our
13:40 it’s no longer about “refreshing” the brand, we need to be able to show when we want the client to claim this meaning and when to exit the meaning
13:51 We are still inclined to step in, offer a big idea and then leave, as if to say “our work is done”
13:50 what we need to say is “this is when we want you to get into this cultural moment and this is when we want you to get out”
14:02 this is the stuff of an enduring connection with the client
14:27 culture is our competitive advantage, it’s time to see it clearly!
Let’s say you are starting a startup and today you are standing in front of a venture capitalist.
With impatience in his voice, the VC says,
“Tell me again exactly what your enterprise is for. How are you going to create value?”
This is what we do to dreamers.
Because the answer to this question almost always comes to you in a mad conceptual scramble for the simplest, most obvious, most literal statement of what your enterprise is “for.”
You stand, you deliver:
“Our product will help people solve problem x for consumer y cheaper than competitor z.”
Whew!
But not so fast. Because now you are wedded to it. Every time someone asks, you are obliged to repeat your simplest, least interesting statement of what your company is for.
It’s the opposite of poetry. Every time you repeat your “value proposition” it gets more obvious, practical, functional, literal, uninteresting and unbeautiful. Your dream is withering.
In the summer of 2015, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, insisted, against all measures and most opinion, that U.S. productivity was actually up.
The trouble, he suggested, is that we can’t see these gains because we are using old measures. When the GDP measure was developed in the 1930s, Hal observed, it focused on things like steel and grain. The improvements that come from Silicon Valley are harder to see.
Radical Hal. No, call him Heretical Hal. This was the beginning of the end of capitalism as a blunt object, as a search for mere utility. This was an opportunity to free ourselves from those people who see the world as a solutions to problems, and the more pragmatic and practical the better.
But we can’t complete this heresy until we begin to make certain value visible. We need to show how our enterprise will create value of a social, cultural, human kind. We will have to show that Uber is not merely cheaper than a taxi cab, but a richer, more human way to discover a city. (I set aside the labor issues for another time.) We will have to show the Airbnb is not merely a cheaper hotel room, but that it is a richer, more human way to discover a city. As it stands, and as far as capitalism (and Uber and Airbnb themselves) are concerned, this remains “dark value.”
Sometimes dark value is revealed, but typically this revelation comes late in the process. Ideas happen, capital is made added, enterprise springs into the world, innovations are rolled out. And then someone says, “Er, what about marketing?”Planners, strategists, creatives, designers, ethnographers are summoned to contemplate this poor, beaten creature.
With any luck the post mortem goes pre mortem. The innovation springs to life, it’s coat glossy with new meaning. But often even this creative genius can’t do anything for the “innovation.” It is beyond all hope. It is designed to solve a problem that no one cares about because it adds virtually nothing to the world. “Whiter whites” are a death mask.
But sometimes these creatives discover, invent, conceptualize dark value. And the consumer will say, “Oh, that’s what it is. You kept telling me what it’s for. No, that I like. I can live that.”
By this time of course it’s all up stream. The creatives are working with something that’s mostly formed and they are working with people who really in their heart of hearts think “all the creativity stuff is really just icing for the cake.It’s the sizzle that sells the steak.It’s the stuff you have to say to persuade the consumer to buy a product that frankly should have sold itself on the strength of it’s functionality. I mean, really, what is the matter with these people.”
What if we started looking for and working with dark value from the very beginning?
And if this sounds like a good idea, please consider buying my new book Dark Value here. It’s a bargain at $2.99.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for engaging me this morning with a useful email. And thanks to many people on many media who have offered encouragement for the Dark Value project.
Innovators like Airbnb, Uber and Netflix are creating dark value. They are creating features and benefits they didn’tintend and don’t always grasp. And because this value is hard to see, it’s hard to monetize. I believe dark value is a chronic problem in the innovation and sharing economies. To observe one implication of the dark value argument: Airbnb, Uber and Netflix are charging too little.
We will examine dark value created by AirBnb, Uber, Netflix, Evernote, Fitbit, and Facebook. We will show how to make dark value visible in three steps: 1. discover, 2. determine, and 3. declare. Ethnographers, designers, VCs, creatives, planners, PR professionals, marketers, story tellers, curators, programmers, content creators, and social media experts all have a part to play. For all of them, Dark value represents a new professional opportunity and a new revenue stream.
Why buy it? If you are a culture creative in design, marketing, planning, ethnography, advertising, curation, this is a treasure map. It will also help you find new revenue streams, as you find dark value for others. (It now occurs to me that “A Treasure Map” should have been my subtitle.)
What will it cost you? The price is $2.99. It will take you about 30 minutes to read. If you buy a copy, please send me an email and I will put you on a mailing list for updates. I’m thinking about a Keynote deck, and you would get this for free.
How do you know when something in our culture is really good?
I think it’s when it makes us grin a wicked grin.
This is one of those: Dave Chappelle does imitation of Prince and Prince uses the imitation for his album cover. Dave becomes Prince. Prince becomes Dave becoming Prince.
For post-modernists, this is ‘signs circulating.’ Fair enough but not very interesting. It doesn’t explain why we grin wickedly.
It’s the relocation that does it. Daveness taking on Princeness. Princeness taking on Daveness as Princeness. These are meanings in motion. We grin wickedly because we can’t believe that Dave dared attempt Princeness. It’s not temerity that gets us. Dave is free to make fun of a genius like Prince. That’s the privilege of his genius.
No, what makes us grin is astonishment. How did Dave do it? How is that possible? Daveness and Princeness share a claim (and a proof) of genius, but they come from very different parts of our culture. They are in a sense incommensurate.
And they just made themselves (for a moment, in a way) commensurate. This makes our minds happy…and our faces grin. I think it is at some level it makes our brains happy. Meanings attached to one thing now, astonishingly, belong to another. We can feel gears turning in our heads.
Dave and Prince have brought meanings together that are normally kept apart. And we thank them for this semiotic miracle by grinning our admiration, astonishment, gratitude. Who knew our culture could do that.
We make a lot of culture with acts of unexpected, unprecedented combination. (I have tried to map this process for contemporary culture in a book called Culturematic.)
Indeed, wicked grinning should be the new objective not just of comedy and album cover design, but of branding, design and advertising. We used to slavishly obey the rules of official combination (aka genre). Now we bore people with this predictability. If the user, viewer, consumer, audience can see where we’re going, they won’t come with us. (Susan Sarandon did an interview yesterday on Charlie Rose in which she said precisely this.)
Compare a culturematic to old fashioned marketing. The ad man and woman came up with a blindingly obvious message, stuffed it into one of the mass media (3 network TV, magazines, newspaper, radio) and fired it at the target over and over again until our ears bled. Everyone just wanted the “persuasion” to stop. This was cold war torture. And the worse part of this torture was how completely unsurprising it all was.
Every thing changes when we assume that our “consumers” are clever and interesting, and, chances are, making culture on their own. This means first that they can see the grammars we are using. Second, it means that they are looking for culture to make their own, for critical purposes and creative ones. Culture creative, assume you are talking to someone has smart as you are. Assume you are talking to someone who can do what you do. And go with the idea that we have no hope of success unless we are making content that makes people grin wickedly.
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green have invited us to embrace a new slogan: “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” The idea is that a message will die unless people take an act hand in distributing it by social media. I am proposed that before we apply the Jenkins-Ford-Green test, we apply “wicked grin test.” Forget the focus groups and the audience testing. Just show your work to someone and look at the expression on their face.
Bill O’Connor was kind enough to send me an early comment on my recent blog post on Design and the corporation. He has given me permission to reproduce a portion of these remarks here. Thank you, Bill.
His remarks:
I wondered, is design in some recurrent cycle of boom and bust affected by the patronage of the essential economic engines – manufacturing, finance, IT et al? Design by it’s essence seems to be a creature of, well, design, and like so many activities that thrive at the pleasure of the culture design seems to be frequently in need of reinventing itself, more frequently, it seems to me, than other creative, problem-solving enterprises.
When design du jour becomes unfashionable and creativity yields to manifest rationality design looses its business patron, its economic platform gets shaky and design businesses close or contract or morph into some other expression.
Maybe we’re in one of those periods now and design stars, whose lumens are dimming, are navigating to the safe haven of the corporate port. Fickle corporate patrons in their search for the next new advantage that they’re unable to conjure themselves discover and then devour these weird and wild odd-thinkers.
The predictable MO seems so let’s acquire it, keep it from our competitors, bring it in-house and mange it better – better for our purposes and our bottom line……..like capturing the butterfly, putting it in a controlled, safe space in the study and observing it and taking care of it. We know where that goes.
The design business seems to suffer from perilous dilution by pretenders, poseurs, immitators and wannabes. The word itself seems over-extended and over applied to the point of dilution. Design is a transitive verb.
Have you seen the piece Robert Fabricant wrote for Wired as a year-end review? I think you’ll find it both chilling and cheering.
Fabricant says “leading design firms are contracting or exiting the business.” Where did all this talent flow? Fabricant says it went to Fortune 500 companies.
Cheering?
Well, yes. This is good news for those of us who believe that the corporation is systematically challenged when it comes to capturing and thinking about culture. No, not corporate culture. I mean the body of ideas and practices with which each of us (and all of us) construct and negotiate the world. (AKA “trends” but of course so much more than merely trends.)
THIS culture is an essential knowledge for the corporation. It is the source of “black swans” and “blue oceans,” the dangers and opportunities, that confront the corporation. Mastering culture will help the corporation flourish even in a world of terrible, otherwise inscrutable dynamism. But no. The corporation prefers to treat culture as a dark matter. It knows culture is out there, but it can’t retrofit its models to account for it. The result is tragic.
So it’s good news that designers are now joining the corporation. Though we can just imagine the moments of first contact as the C-suiters look out of their princely offices over the parking lot to observe…anomalous data. Colors, shapes and models that break the otherwise uniform sea of sensible sedans. Minis, Fiats, BWM i3, Teslas, cars that say the owner pays attention to the world around her, prizes the exquisite visual choice and the witty design decision, likes that shock of recognition when a shape in the world gives voice to an idea in our heads, who actually lives for a material culture that makes culture material.
This is not the C-suiters reaction. No, their reaction is “wait, what?” This is their idea of pattern recognition, noticing when things look, like, weird. Welcome to the designers. They are, like, weird.
I remember my first contact with designers. I was a freshly minted PhD and I went to a conference on built form staged by Setha Low. I was doing the anthropological thing, which is, when in the presence of people different from yourself, trying to guess the grammar, the culture, from which their view of the world springs. And the best I could do in the early days was to notice that designers managed a paradox that seemed beyond the rest of us (or at least me). They had their feet on the ground, even as they kept their heads in the clouds. Weird, yes. Wild, too.
Designers managed to be more or less fully domesticated, capable of adult behavior and professional careers, even as they harbored an enfant sauvage within, a creature who put creativity above conventional niceties, who was in fact not so domesticated after all. To use the cliché, designers somehow managed to think inside the box and live outside of it. This impressed me deeply.
Which brings us to:
Chilling?
Is there something chilling about the fact the design is now taking up residence in the corporation? I think there might be. For all these years, designers kept a careful distance. They were in but not of the world of business. But now, if Fabricant is correct, they are at risk of falling into the gravitation field of the corporation, into what for some may be an incinerating embrace.
What if we are looking at the domestication of design, the end of its ability to think in restless, anarchic ways, the very extinction of the discipline as the fount of creativity in our midst. Those of you who have the ethnographic data, please do comment. Do you see any of the early signs? Designers getting complacent? People going home at 5:00? The end of that thrilling charrette-mentality where it’s all hands on deck and we’ll sleep when we have to, eat when we must. The real sign may be this: when the designer’s car in the parking lot begin to go out, now good grey sedans, no longer colorful, provocative, counter-expectational “vehicles” for passengers of any kind. Then we will know the thing is done, the field is dead.
I suggest designers think of this as a hostage negotiation. They must insist on a trade. We the designers will bring you this precious knowledge, the ability to use design thinking and cultural knowledge, if and only if we may remain an edgy, disturbational, counter-intuitive presence in your midst.
More probably, the outcome will look like this. The corporation will hold designers in its thrall for a couple of years. Then two things will happen. Noticing how miserable they are, some designers will leave. The corporation will see they have so wounded the golden goose that culture and creativity is no longer forthcoming. It will then turn into a willful child, throwing away its “broken toy” and moving on to some new enthusiasm. Released from their Babylonian captivity, designers will return eventually to form. And the world will be, like, weird again. And wild.
post script
I set this post to Darrel Rhea for comments and he came back with a beautifully observed response. I will post this tomorrow. Please come back!
I’ve been thinking some more about Bosco, the kid who knows all about meth labs and not a lot else.
It’s a problem that demands anthropology, ethnography, design thinking, strategy, marketing, several of the intellectual practices we now have on tap. (See the preliminary posts here and here.)
One approach: transfer the knowledge possessed by kids of privilege. So that Bosco does not suffer that pernicious disadvantage of constrained horizons or what we might call a “cosmopolitan gap.”
There’s an inclination to say, “Perfect! It’s a simple transfer. We find out what Tommy (child of privilege) knows and send this knowledge to Bosco.”
But of course it’s not this simple. Knowledge is not data organized according to a single scheme. It is not something that exists independent of communities and practices of knowledge.
So it’s NOT the case that Bosco’s knowledge of the world looks like this on a grid of knowledge. (B = the things on the grid of knowledge that Bosco grasps.)
Tommy’s richer knowledge of the world does NOT look like this:. (Where T would stand for the [many more] things Tommy understands.)
So it’s NOT the case that all we need to do is to communicate Tommy’s knowledge to Bosco.
Instead, knowledge is variously assembled and framed so that what is knowledge in one system may not show as knowledge in another system. Or knowledge in one system may show in another, but it takes on a new place or significance. This is an elaborate way of saying we don’t just need to know what Tommy knows but what Bosco knows. And then we have to build a translation table. Not a Rosetta stone, but something more complicated and calculating. Less a translation table, more a translation machine.
Notice that we are not taking the postmodernist bait and sliding into that sophomoric relativism that says Tommy and Bosco live in worlds so different that communication or transfer is impossible. This is good fun to debate in a university seminar. But when it used to frustrate our rescue mission, specious nonsense turns dangerous too.
Off the bat, I can see two ways that cultural creatives can help.
architecture of knowledge
This is what ethnography is for, after all. We can sit down, and capture the categories of Bosco’s knowledge, how these go together, what assumptions they rely on. We can build a rough model of the inside of Bosco’s head. And with this we can begin to figure out when, whether and how to begin the transfer of knowledge from Tommy to Bosco. We noted in previous post that this transfer will have real implications for Bosco’s relationships with friends and family, but that’s not the problem we are solving here. Our task is to discover what Bosco knows and the way he thinks and to use this to prepare the way for a transfer of knowledge.
visualization of knowledge
This is the really interesting part. And now I am at the edge of my competence. The idea here is to represent Bosco’s existing knowledge and to help Bosco see how new knowledge attaches. Because as we know knowledge is adhesive. This is why it’s easier to get knowledge if you have knowledge. And of course knowledge is also hierarchical. It’s hard to learn some things if you don’t already know other more general things.
This is a job for the designer, to create a visualization of what Bosco knows and to use that to introduce him to new knowledge and show how he can “attach” it to existing knowledge. Where necessary we will build some intermediating pieces of knowledge, so that Bosco can learn something for which his existing system of knowledge does not yet have points for adhesion. (Or we hold back knowledge until other knowledge is in place.)
Effectively, the cultural creatives will occupy a lab that might as well be called “the inside of Bosco’s head.” We will know what he knows, what he is ready to learn, and what he has to learn to learn something new. We will constantly be working on a grand visualization that helps Bosco assimilate new and useful Tommy knowledge.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about Bosco, the 8 year-old who knows all about meth labs and not a lot else.
I got precisely one response, a woman who said this was kind of problem she likes to solve. And that was it.
I thought, “maybe if I develop the idea a little.” My first idea was a kind of twinning project. You know, the kind that cities have. ( New York is a sister city to Cairo.)
We would identify 6 kids across the US who would then become Bosco’s twins. And we find away to capture what they are learning as they are learning it and we find some way to communicate this knowledge to Bosco.
Our objective is to make him cosmopolitan in the ways that they are cosmopolitan. (And by “cosmopolitan,” I mean merely, “knowledgeable about the world outside one’s own.”) My assumption: that there are many disadvantages to growing up in the home in which Bosco finds himself but one of the most debilitating is a lack of knowledge/understanding/awareness. (Call it “cultural capital.“) This lack of knowledge is, we could argue, more damaging than illiteracy or innumeracy.
Problem 1. There is a “barrier to entry” problem here. As meth cookers, there’s a good chance that Bosco’s parents have limited horizons (prima facie case, no?) and that they would not welcome the intrusion of a system that is designed to broaden the horizons of their son.
I don’t how to solve this problem. I have a feeling that an anthropologist and an economist working together, with the levers of meaning and value, could come up with a solution, but more on this later.
Problem 2. There is no question that this twinning process, if it worked, would transform Bosco and there’s not much doubt that it would estrange Bosco from his family. This would make Bosco the captive of a hostile environment. From the parental point of view, we have created a “little Lord Fountleroy,” someone who thinks himself (or is thought to think himself) better than his family.
I don’t know how to solve this problem either. It’s worth pointing out that every immigrant and upwardly mobile family find themselves with kids who are more cosmopolitan than their parents. And these parents find a way to deal with it.
Mind you, these people have sought the condition they endure. Our “meth” mom and dad accomplish that magical contradiction that allows them to refuse the idea that they are not cosmopolitan even as they resent those who are.
How do we reach them? What do we say? Could we construct a forgivable space, a status allowance, for Bosco in the home, one that allows his parents to say, “Oh, don’t listen to him. He’s our little Martian. Always talking about the craziest stuff!” (Yes, but of course, we could hope for something more than this but I think it’s wise ((and not particularly hostile)) to assume the worst. We are not looking for perfection. We just want an allowance.)
The trick is making it “our little Martian.” We need to construct a status for Bosco in the home that gives him room to take on and give off cosmopolitan knowledge. And this will depend on constructing a status that allows his parents to forgive, and perhaps even take credit for, their oddball son.
At this point, I need to address a tide of unhappiness that I know is rising in anthropological readers (and some others). People will complain that I am “essentializing” Bosco’s parents and Bosco himself, that I am imputing characteristics in an act of class stereotyping and status diminishment, that this is an exercise of power.
Allow me to do an anthropology of the anthropologists (and engage in another act of classification). Anthropologists are almost silent when it comes to the big problems of our day and that is because the field is largely preoccupied by acts of self criticism. Hand to brow, with a show of their sensitivity, they ask, “Can we generalize? What are the politics of generalizing? What are the ethics of generalizing?” These are real questions. But Anthropology is now effectively an amateur theatre company dedicated to a production of moral posturing and ethical declamation.
I am not saying these cautions do not matter. They do. But when they are the only thing you do, when they are the thing you do instead of helping a kid like Bosco, when they are the thing you do that prevents you from helping a kid like Bosco, I say this. Bite me. Get over yourself. Snap out of it. Start again. Your trepidations matter less than Bosco’s future. While you posture, pain and suffering flourish like the green bay tree.
Whew! Sorry. Anthropologists have to stop being too good for the world. It’s the only way they can return to usefulness.
One way to address Problem 2 is to catalogue all the instances of families in which children are marked as different, where parents are called upon to explain and, we hope, make allowances. Families with autistic kids, for instance, sometimes resort to calling them “little professors.” There are other precedents. What are they? Are any of them usable here? How would we adapt these?
Let’s say we solve Problems 1 and 2. Let’s say we find a way to create a twinning system and relay information from Bosco’s twins to Bosco himself. How would we do this?
This is where I thought of William Drenttel. I gave a paper at Yale a couple of years ago and afterward he and I had a roaring, gliding conversation. It was clear he was trying to recruit me for one of his grand schemes and to my discredit I failed to rise to the occasion. (I was working on schemes of my own, which I now see were minor and ordinary by comparison.)
When I thought about how to get information, knowledge and understanding to Bosco, I thought of Bill. He is one of those designers who strike me as the anti-anthropologist: citizens of several worlds, effortlessly mobile in passage between them. Bill, I thought, would know how to think about this problem. This is a design thinking problem because we are, in effect, being asked to design thinking.
If we could find some way to represent the knowledge being accumulated by Bosco’s twins, this might help. Let’s say Twin 1, the one in Philadelphia, is sitting with his family watching TV. There’s a news story about LA and the family conversation that follows somehow puts LA on Twin 1’s “mattering map.” (I have this term from Rebecca Goldstein).
The trick now is to make LA matter on Bosco’s mattering map. The fact that we are talking about geographical knowledge helps a lot. A map is itself a useful, perhaps the original, visualization. But our job is to show how “LA” matters not just for its relative location (Bosco lives somewhere in the midwest) but also as the home to Hollywood, dinosaur-rich tar pits, several sporting franchises, and a particular place in the American imaginary. (We will have to fit that last one with new language.) Our question: What does Bosco already know and how do we use this to help him grasp facts and fancies about LA.
Bill, I thought, will know how to take this problem on. And today I discovered that William Drenttel passed away in December of last year. (See this remarkable obituary by Julie Lasky.) I think an honest, hard-earned moment of self repudiation is called for here. Why wasn’t I in touch with him? Why didn’t I know about his illness or his passing? Is there some good reason why I live like a small forest animal, posting out of a tree stump and otherwise out of touch with the world? What is my excuse exactly? And who am I kidding? (Forgive a maudlin outburst.)
My thought originally was to make designers and anthropologists the intermediaries of the movement of knowledge between Bosco and his twins. But in a more perfect world, and now with social media at our disposal, it might be possible to make Bosco and his twins a tiny community (Marshall Sahlins’s “mutuality of being“) that pools its knowledge and helps one another master it. Can eight year-olds do this kind of thing? I don’t know. Maybe with some training.
Happy coincidence but this morning I saw a tweet by Sara Winge on the attempt by UNICEF to use Minecraft to show what a reconstructed Haiti might look like.
Could a band of eight year-olds build a model of their knowledge? In Minecraft or some other medium? Jerry Michalski has put some of his knowledge online. Some 160,000 “thoughts” all in categories and ready to hand. Bosco and his friends might do the same with the right education and encouragement.
There is lots of work to do here. Who’s interested? If we get something up and running, I propose we call it the Drenttel project. No, there are so many Drenttel projects running in the world, that would be wrong and clueless. Let’s call it A Drenttel Project.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Kevin Smith, William Drenttel and Architect’s Newspaper here for the image of Bill above.
My blog subtitle used to be “This blog sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.” This was both too grand and untrue. Fine for politicians but not websites.
So now it’s “How to make culture.” For the moment. Also thinking of “New Rules for Making Culture.” Is that better? I can’t tell. Please let me know.
Yesterday, I was blogging about the new rules of TV. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve been talking about advertising, education, late night TV, game shows, culture accelerators. Less recently, I’ve been talking about marketing, comedy, language, branding, culturematics, story telling, hip hop, publishing, and design thinking.
All of this is culture made by someone. And all of it is culture made in new ways, often, and according to new rules, increasingly. Surely an anthropologist can make himself useful on something like this. Anyhow, I’m going to try.
I have four convictions. Open to discussion and disproof.
1) that our culture is changing. Popular culture is becoming more like culture plain and simple. Our culture is getting better.
I have believed in this contention for many years. Certainly, since the 90s when I still lived in Toronto. (It was my dear friend Hargurchet Bhabra who, over drinks and a long conversation, put his finger on it. “It’s not popular culture anymore. Forget the adjective. It’s just culture.”)
This was not a popular position to take especially when so many academics and intellectuals insisted that popular culture was a debased and manipulative culture, and therefore not culture at all. Celebrity culture, Reality TV, there were lots of ways to refurbish and renew the “popular culture is bad culture” argument. And the voices were many. (One of these days I am going to post a manuscript I banged out when living in Montreal. I called it So Logo and took issue with all the intellectuals who were then pouring scorn of popular culture one way or another.)
My confidence in the “popular culture is now culture” notion grew substantially this fall when I did research for Netflix on the “binge viewing” phenomenon. To sit down with a range of people and listen to them talk about what they were watching and how they were watching, this said very plainly that TV, once ridiculed as a “wasteland,” was maturing into story telling that was deeper, richer and more nuanced. The wasteland was flowering. The intellectuals were wrong.
2) This will change many of the rules by which we make culture. So what are the new rules?
I mean to investigate these changes and see if I can come up with a new set of rules. See yesterday’s post on how we have to rethink complexity and casting in TV if we hope to make narratives that have any hope of speaking to audiences and contributing to culture. Think of me as a medieval theologian struggling to codify new varieties of religious experience.
3) The number of people who can now participate in the making of culture has expanded extraordinarily.
This argument is I think much discussed and well understood. We even know the etiology, chiefly the democratization (or simple diffusion) of the new skills and new technology. What happens to culture and the rules and conventions of making culture when so many other people are included, active, inspired and productive? We are beginning to see. Watch for codification here too. (As always, I will take my lead for Leora Kornfeld who is doing such great work in the field of music.)
4) We must build an economy that ensures that work is rewarded with value.
I have had quite enough of gurus telling us how great it is that the internet represents a gift economy, a place where people give and take freely. Two things here. 1) The argument comes from people who are very well provided for thanks to academic or managerial appointments. 2) This argument is applied to people who are often obliged to hold one or more “day jobs” to “give freely on the internet.” Guru, please. Let’s put aside the ideological needle work, and apply ourselves to inventing an economy that honors value through the distribution of value.
I have made this sound like a solitary quest but of course there are many thousands of people working on the problem. Every creative professional is trying to figure out what he or she can do that clients think they want. I am beginning to think I can identify the ones who are rising to the occasion. They have a certain light in their eyes when you talk to them and I believe this springs from two dueling motives I know from my own professional experience, terror and excitement.
Intelligence gathering, pattern seeking, culture watching, early warning wanting, this is the name of the game for everyone in the creative space.
But it is one thing to gather this knowledge, and another to put it to use.
One interesting case study here is Midori House, which I visited last year. (I am rolling it out now because I am on the road and serving up topics I have written about but not yet posted on.)
“Being Tyler Brule is a full time job,” says the intern, with a touch of irritation. Tyler Brule (pictured) is the head of Monocle and Winkreative, this kid’s boss, and a man not to be crossed. I wonder if the intern understands what this indiscretion could cost him. Or perhaps, young and impossibly handsome, he just doesn’t care.
The intern is giving me a tour of Midori House. It stands in a London courtyard, about 90 feet long, 40 feet wide, and five stories high. It’s about the size of a ferryboat or small cruise ship.
I am here to be interviewed on the Monocle radio station. This surprises me because I thought Monocle was a magazine.
And Monocle is a magazine, quite a famous one, in fact. But it is also a design studio, advertising agency, strategy consultancy, and, yes, a radio station. Typically, we see these 5 functions spread over 5 separate companies. Bringing them altogether into so small a space would, in the old days, have brought a charge of indecision or promiscuity.
These days it’s a smart thing to do.
All of the Monocle bits and pieces run on the same thing: a knowledge of, and a feeling, for the state of our world. Indeed, I found myself wondering if there was a pipe in the basement through which intelligence comes pouring into Midori House.
Let’s say someone in the design house is working on a project for Burberry, the clothing brand. They go to the basement and pour off a pint size container called “the latest thing in luxury clothing.” Someone working for the ad agency is looking for information on the way housewives think about breakfast. The pipe provides here too. The book review man for Monocle, is always on the look out for new books but for that great cloud of ideas and sentiments that make our culture now.
It sounds a little complicated, but there is a big idea here. In fact, Monocle has found a way to maximize its return on investment. What flows in from that pipe is used 5 times, as design, advertising, strategy, print on the page and words in the air. Everything it learns, it turns to advantage. If the print client doesn’t want something, the strategy client will. And sometimes, a single understanding of the world pays off in all 5 of the Monocle faces. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a robust ROI.
And this is no simple “pass through” model. Monocle accelerates what it learns. Inevitably, the people designing for Burberry end up talking to the ad people. The ad people reply with their latest learnings. And everyone listens to Dan, the book reviewer, because he knows what’s happening in the world of arts, letters and ideas.
And together the Monocle team members multiply their knowledge until Midori House rises on a tide of intelligence that may not exist anywhere else in London. And this is a city famous for its sensitivity to the new. London is filled with watchers of culture and makers of culture, people trying to divine and deliver the new. Accelerators of the Midori House kind, there could be something to this.
An anthropologist looks for puzzles. This is, after all, the way the future often makes a first appearance.
Two puzzles have crossed my path this week:
1) Why is Gill Sans winning out over Helvetica? (If it is, and, come on, it is.) Long the visual language of public institutions in the UK (the subway, especially), it looked until recently (to me at least) a little out of touch. But now it seems to be to have all the punchy clarity of the sans-serif regime without giving away the ability to evoke something bigger than the message at hand.
There is a follow up question: will Gary Hustwit ever make a documentary about it of the kind he made for Helvetica? I would so love to see this documentary. The Helvetica doc is a thing of wonder. “Gill Sans” as a follow-up doc would have lots more historical depth and charm. No modernist hoodlum this.
2) Why is that in at least two instances in popular culture, the role of the guardian angel is occupied by a psychopath. I refer to Dexter and the BBC show Luther, and in the case of Luther specifically to the character Alice Morgan. Strictly speaking, the last person who should serve in this capacity is a psychopath, but somehow in our culture right now, the notion is not implausible.
Anyone want to write fewer-than-a-thousand words on either topic (or for the very daring both at once) should send it to me and if it’s really good, you will win a Minerva.
Here’s the video for an interview I did with Greg Parsons in Chicago on June 11. The event behind us was NEOCON, the design event that happens each year in Chicago. It was an impromptu interview so not only are my questions “not prepared,” they are unprepared. I shot the interview on my iPhone which I thought did really well given the noise and the commotion. I have to declare a conflict of interest. I consulted for Herman Miller on this project. Which, I have to say, does nothing to augment my admiration for the undertaking. If only I could always work for clients this gifted.
And here’s the transcript:
Interviewer: …do? [laughs]
Greg Parsons: Oh no, no. I won’t be able to take it again. [laughs]
Interviewer: No, look! We can just keep doing it until we get a take you like.
Greg: Huh? [jokingly] No.
Interviewer: We’ll just keep throwing them away. I love what you just said about getting things together, getting people together, telling them the purpose and then turning them loose.
Greg: The way we manage has been…You line people up, you tell them what to do, you get a piece, you know their outcome. You make sure and you monitor, and you see how it’s all tied together. The future is actually much more complex and free in that you actually take people…You align them around passion and purpose, but then you set them free. You don’t pin them down, and they bounce off against each other. They build relationships and together they find the next direction.
As long as you have a clear picture of what you’re trying to achieve, and a clear set of purpose and principles, that will do just fine. You teach them how to make decisions together, so it’s not pinned down. Everything have a process map. It’s actually let people be free, and it’s counterintuitive for people to do that.
Interviewer: Yeah. It feels like we should send in a group of people called pattern recognizers.
Greg: No, I agree.
Interviewer: Who go in and say, “This is an idea.” They just lift it off, as you would transparency. You just lift that off and people keep thinking, keep lifting ideas off.
Greg: That’s exactly how we’ve designed this. We had a big idea around the living office. It’s very general. It’s very abstract. We started to say, we think there’s eight parts of this. And then we said, no, there are nine and we actually have landed on 12 parts and it’s everything from a shared vision to a place design paradigm to a set of products and a set of services. There are 12 things and we’ve put one person who’s passionate and qualified in charge of each of the 12, haven’t told them what to do in their area, but we all get together and do the nodes of our offer. Those nodes keep developing and evolving, which causes the one next to them to develop and evolve, to form new relationships and new matrixes and new networks.
It’s incredibly organic and it’s incredibly uncertain and it’s incredibly invigorating and surprising. Sometimes you go off the rails and you pull people back, but it works, and we got to where we are twice as fast as I think we would have. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we would be here today if we tried to set a process and tell everyone what they needed to do and have a process, the Microsoft project map for everything. We wouldn’t even have the map done by now.
We just had a shared view, got people who were passionate, told them their area of the percolate and we just bounce of each other and build connections as we go.
Interviewer: In a sense the concept of the living office came from a living office.
Greg: It came from the principles of life and we said “What are the principles of life?” It’s the elements of surprise and uncertainty, and it’s freedom, these loose systems of things, interacting, each evolving on their own, but together forming an ecosystem. We said “Let’s apply that to places, let’s apply that to tools and technology, and let’s apply that to actually how you manage people.” Herman Miller has always managed this way, but we didn’t know what it was, so our founder talks about covenant relationships, not contracts. We’re all about innovation and imagining and delivering things that didn’t exist.
It’s very hard to do that in a contract relationship where you define what you need by when because you don’t even know what you’re doing, and so Herman Miller has always said covenant relationships, where you agree on the purpose, the goal, the objective, the loose vision.
You agree who’s responsible for which areas and then you set people free and you keep kneading and bouncing off each other to get out [inaudible 03:48] . Very different, very frightening to most companies.
Completely the opposite to what we’re taught is a good process for management, but it’s the mode of living, it’s how people live, and it’s how life happens and so we believe it’s probably how organizations should work…
Interviewer: You have a design degree, and an MBA, both?
Greg: I have a fine art degree, a degree in history, and an MBA.
Interviewer: Right. Your most recent degree was an MBA?
Greg: Yes. I was the wacko artist at the University of Chicago where everybody else was an investment banker.
Interviewer: [laughs] Could you see then what you’re witnessing now, that the world of work, that capitalism would be flexible and fluid in this way?
Greg: No. Basically, when I went to business school, I was learning design at Herman Miller, and how we do it, which is a lot of what I’m telling you about, when we apply onto products, and then I went to business school and said “What if we applied this to business instead of products?”, and it works. To me, this is how Herman Miller is innovative, but we just don’t know it as a practice, and so we’re getting better and better at knowing it as our practice.
Interviewer: In a manner of speaking, Herman Miller, with this new living office is exporting its corporate culture to other corporate cultures.
Greg: Exactly. We’re learning it better ourselves. Most people, we do our thing and we don’t even know what we do and that’s how Herman Miller has an organization. It’s just who we are, it’s our culture, and we don’t really see what we’re doing, and so we’re trying to step back a bit and see what we’re doing so that we do it better and we actually find that we are a network organization. We are a living organization. There are these principles that we’re talking about that are actually coming from us, so why shouldn’t we share them with the world, because they’ve worked incredibly well for us in terms of innovation.
It’s not necessarily right for all work, so if you’re making 500,000 of the same thing, it’s probably not the way to manage. But if you want to reinvent that next thing you’re going to make 500,000 of, it is the right way to manage.
Interviewer: Yes, and to the extent that whatever they’re doing at the moment, they’re also in the game of reinventing who they are and what they will do in the next moment.
Greg: That’s the other thing we are seeing. Every large company started as a small company with a big idea. Most Fortune 500 or 1,000 companies have many of these big ideas that they expand globally, expand and extend into niche markets. They drive down costs as low as possible, but then they have to reinvent the idea, because the Earth is only so big and most of these companies are global. They found the most efficient means to manufacture so costs are approaching zero or as low as possible. Now what’s left is reinventing the big idea, and many of them try and apply the same principles that they have to optimize to how they invent, and it doesn’t work. You have to apply what we’re talking about, which is this mode of living management which is freeing people, giving them shared purpose, giving them shared direction, connecting right capabilities and passions, and then letting them evolve their part of the organization or the living organism.
That’s how life works.
Interviewer: Are there any early adopters out there who will be the first ones into the Living Office and will be a laboratory for you?
Greg: Yes, there are. I probably can’t share them, but, frankly, there are a number of companies we’re talking to that received pieces of this. Actually, we saw it in them before we saw it in ourselves. “Hey,” we said, “they’re doing this. We do that, too,” and we were realizing we do many pieces of it, but a lot of those pieces do live elsewhere. One fundamental thing that most of them seem to share is our perspective on purpose. When I went to business school, we were asked in a lecture hall of 40, “What’s the purpose of a business?” 39 hands went up to say “to make money.” I was the only one who said “to solve a problem really well.” I was told that I was crazy and I left thinking I was crazy.
What I learned was Herman Miller was founded on that idea, that if you actually solve a real problem for people, you’ll get rewarded much more highly financially than you would if you were trying to achieve a financial goal. The way we look at it is, if you want to make more money, don’t focus on money, focus on your purpose and your passion and the money will come.
What you get is very counterintuitive, but companies like Johnson and Johnson and Herman Miller and IBM were all founded on this principle. About 10 percent of businesses seem to pursue it, and those are the ones that have lasted for many decades and have outperformed the stock market.
Thanks to Andrew Hazlett, I paid a visit to Shorpy.com today, to do a little “armchair time travel,” as Andrew calls it.
Before long I was staring dumbing at this photo.
Of course, my first reaction is wonder at the sheer beauty of this automobile.
It’s only when I page through the comments that I come across this detail. According to someone called Anonymous Tipster, this auto is a “nicely optioned 1940 Packard.”
It’s only several comments later that Tipster reveals the more telling detail:
“Those speedlines on the Packard look like someone’s attempt at customization.”
At first sight, I accepted the Packard whole. Now I can see as additional those little horizontal lines that appear to issue from the front and back wheels.
The Packard ceases to be “something from a mysterious past” and “a car the likes of which we will never see again.” Now it’s someone’s possession, the bearer of their conceit, their play, their ambition.
Who was this person who felt that his/her Packard just wasn’t fast enough? Who felt it had to be made to look faster, actually moving even when standing still?
And where is this design convention from? Those little lines, I mean. I bet people from some cultures would be unable to read these as speedlines. I bet these come from a graphic design and probably a cartoon tradition, which tradition probably comes from the furiously inventive popular culture of the first half of the 20th century. In effect, our owner was making his or her car look faster by making it look like a cartoon. (Who says this was a rational, technocratic culture?)
My armchair travel brings me first to the car, then to the invisible owner of the car, and then to the culture that helped provide the owner’s customization. Quite a lot of movement for a man stuck in a London hotel room. Thank you to Andrew and Shorpy for this opportunity to get out and about.
To see the photo in context, go to shorpy.com by clicking here.
Living in Connecticut, you begin to master the subtleties of the world of the high-end automobile.
I don’t own one of these magnificent machines. But of necessity I have become their student.
So today, on the way to lunch, I was impressed to see a luxury car I did not recognize. On closer scrutiny it proved to be a Lincoln. ”Wow,” I thought, “they finally got something right.”
Cars represent an interesting chapter of the designification of America (by which I mean the new sophistication in matters of design that has comes to virtually every category of consumer good). They went from terrible to something less disagreeable and in some cases to something close to splendid.
Ford let the way here with success stories across their line of automobiles. All but the Lincoln that is. These have remained really horrible. Tone deaf. As if somehow, someone at Ford has taken the Lincoln line captive, perhaps casting it into a deep sleep preventing any participation in the design thinking revolution.
So I was thrilled, finally, to see a Lincoln that didn’t suck.
I asked the owner, “Hey, when did this come out?”
He looked at me with surprise and said, “This car is 10 years old.”
