Tag Archives: Tim Sullivan

Culture inside and outside the corporation (The two faces of of the Chief Culture Officer)

This week I took part in a #TChat on employee engagement and specifically onboarding. (Thanks to Marla Gottschalk for including me.) I found myself arguing that onboarding should introduce new hires to the deep culture of the organization, the one that is buried in assumptions and largely hidden from view. Meghan M. Biro, a founder of TChat, invited me to “break it down.” Here goes.

The corporate culture is a complicated culture. It gets reshaped every time a new leader storms the C-suite. (Marissa Mayer is transforming Yahoo now.) It is changed by a succession the managerial models (“reengineering!”) and buzzwords (“tipping point!”). McKinsey and various other consultants introduce new ideas. Mergers and acquisitions bring in new ways of seeing and doing. The average corporate culture is a crowded house, an accumulation of ideas and practices.

And it would be one thing if these ideas and practices were explicit and obvious and sat like a simple “subroutine” in the corporate code, there to be plucked cleanly out when we wanted to change things. But of course, these ideas live cheek by jowl in an unexamined mass. I can’t remember ever hearing someone say, “Oh, ok, now that we’re moving to this idea, let’s root out the old one.”

No, we muddle through, assuming, apparently, that old ideas will expire on their own, or leave in disgrace. But of course they persevere. Every so often someone will break one out during a committee meeting and we all silently think, “Welcome, old friend.” More often, they serve as an assumption we resort to “when things get complicated.” The trouble is, they have a way of making things still more complicated. After all, the ideas that works for one person or group often contradicts and wrong-foots the rest of us. You’re thinking one thing. I’m thinking another. Key projects end up as “ships passing.”

Good luck onboarding a new hire. A handbook may capture the most recent, the most explicit, and the most formal of the ideas and values that govern the culture, but that teeming mass of additional ideas it tends to leave out. It will take weeks, sometimes months for the new hire to glimpse all the ideas at work in the corporate culture and the rules that govern when and by whom they’re used. Time wasted. Value squandered. And sometimes a lost hire. 

Who is responsible for this complicated culture? We have a COO for operations, a CMO for marketing, a CFO for finance. Why not a CCO, a Chief Culture Officer, for culture? As the party who grasps the welter of ideas that inform and animate the corporation, the CCO becomes a critical agent, an intervening angel. She can step in and say to two warring departments and say, “actually, you’re both right. You, department X, are using ideas that came to use from a talk Tom Peters gave here in 2005. And you, department Y, appear to be holding to the managerial mandate we got two years later when McKinsey came in. Here’s the Rosetta stone, the translation table, that sorts this out. Ok, begin again.”

Crisis management aside, the CCO can be there at the moment of creation, inventing the culture of the corporation, auditioning new ideas, integrating them with older ideas, helping clarify the mission, values and purpose of the organization. The CCO now fashions these not only as a grand statement for the annual report but as a work-a-day understanding that helps the organization day all the time.

In effect, this CCO would act as an organizing intelligence, a problem solver, a diplomatic officer, someone who can intervene when a team struggles to define its problem and its solutions. Corporations have always been complicated, but now as they learn to speak to complexity with complexity, things can get very murky very fast. A CCO, acting as an angelic intervention, would be extremely useful. “Ah, yes,” people say after a visit from the CCO, “that’s what we’re for, that’s who we are. Let’s start again.”

This is a grand calling, but I don’t think it exhausts the responsibility of the CCO. I think the corporation should ask the Chief Culture Officer to monitor and master the culture outside the corporation. And by “culture” here I mean, the cultural meanings and social rules that make up American life. When we know these meanings and rules, we negotiate daily life without a hitch. If we don’t know, life turns into a series of mysteries and frustrations. (Try ordering a cup of coffee in the Middle East and see what it’s like not to know the meanings and the rules.)

I recently gave a speech for a large, very serious federal bureaucracy. They wanted me to talk about culture in particular and Culturematics in particular, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Waiting back stage, preparing to go on, I turned to my handler and said, “What am I doing here? Why do they care about culture?” The reply was illuminating. “They keep losing their new employees. They work hard to find the right hires. But the kids come in and after a couple of weeks, they ask your question, ‘What I am doing here’ and leave.”

There will be several ways the CCO can address the issue of employee engagement but one is to use culture to craft a new connection with the hire. We can ask employees to serve as part of the intelligence net with which the corporation (or bureaucracy) keeps track of changes in the world “out there.” And now we have engaged them in something they care about. We have tapped their magnificent knowledge of popular culture. We can listen to them as they listen to one another and the world. They are now our eyes and ears. With this gesture, we honor the whole of the employee, and not the narrow part they bring to work each morning.

It is one of the peculiarities of capitalism that it has asked people to leave their other selves at the door. Someone may have a haircut that shouts “I have a life outside this place,” but we don’t want to know. Traditionally, the response has been, “We don’t know what you do on your own time and we don’t want to know. Just do your job. Everything extraneous to “job performance” is precisely that, extraneous. At best a distraction. A worst, a sign of disloyalty!” When that guy from fulfillment wanders into the cafeteria, someone asks with a small note of horror, “What do you suppose Karl does in his spare time?”

As it turns out, on the weekend Karl becomes a formidable competitor in the gaming world, when he is not working on his Anime collection. Now, there was a time when it truly didn’t matter what Karl did with his free time, but these days, the corporation wants to keep an eye on the entire waterfront of contemporary culture, especially the world of gaming. If the corporation has anything to do with entertainment, marketing or innovation, a working knowledge is essential.

Karl has a working knowledge. And he would be thrilled to be asked. He would be honored to do a brown bag lunch with other members of the organization, swapping stories, comparing notes, mapping out what they know about our culture. The organization is filled with Karls. And between them, they can map a lot of American culture. For some reason, we now ignore our Karls. I was talking to Tom Guarriello about this the other day, and he just shook his head. “When was the last time the corporation left this much value sitting on the table?”

What the corporation needs is someone who fully grasps the corporate culture inside the corporation, someone who can make this knowledge more supple, more available, more strategic and more tactical than it is now. And it needs someone who knows about culture “out there in the world.” What the corporation needs is a Chief Culture Officer.

Or so it seems to me. I welcome thoughts and comments from the HR community. I can only really to speak to “culture outside” and I welcome the chance to work with people who know about “culture inside” the corporation.

Please leave a comment below, or feel free to send me a note at grant27@gmail.com.

References

Baribeau, Paul. 2012. 5 ways to become the Chief Culture Officer.  Workplace Tribes. August 23.  Click here.  

Biro, Meghan M. 2012. Time for a new leader in the C-Suite. Forbes. Aug. 13. Click here.

Biro, Meghan M. 2012. Workplace culture leaders humanize the onboarding process. Forbes. August 22. Click here.

Collins, David. 2000. Management Fads and Buzzwords: Critical-Practical Perspectives. Routledge.

Lambert, Avi. 2012. Chief Culture Officer. Squidoo. Click here.

McCracken, Grant. 2011. Chief Culture Officer. Basic Books. Click here.

McCracken, Grant. 2012. Culturematic. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Click here.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Meghan M. Biro and Avi Lambert who encouraged me to participate in the #TChat and for the conversation that followed.  Thanks to Tim Sullivan and Tom Guarriello for several discussions on the theme.

Explanations

The image is an “umbraculo” in Barcelona.  I like a wall that lets the inside out and outside in.  

Minerva competition: coffee houses vs. food trucks, please explain

Coffee houses: the line in blue.

Food trucks: the line in red.  

One is falling gently (according to this picture from Google Trends).

The other rising sharply.  

The question: why?  

This is an official Minerva competition.  

Conditions:

One thousand words.

Point form ok.

Be imaginative, concise and interesting. Find your assumptions. Show off your knowledge and mastery of popular culture.

Winner gets a Minerva (as pictured) and a place in our Hall of Fame.


Deadline:

one month from today, i.e., September 19.

Submit to grant27[ATsign]gmail.com.

Judges for this contest:

Martin Weigel, head of planning, W+K, Amsterdam.

Linda Ong, President, Truth Consulting.

Piers Fawkes, Founder, Editor-in-Chief, PSFK.com.

Sam Ford, editor/author, Spreadable Media, Director of Digital Strategy, Peppercom.

Eric Nehrlich, Google, and author, The Unrepentant Generalist.

Cheryl Swanson, founder, managing director, toniq.  

Leora Kornfeld, Research Associate, Harvard Business School

Backgrounder:

The Minervas were created to encourage people to ask cultural questions and craft cultural answers.

Winners so far:

Juri Saar (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Reiko Waisglass (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Brent Shelkey (for the “Who’s a good doggie woggie?” contest)
Daniel Saunders (for the “JJ Abrams vs. Joss Whedon” contest)
Tim Sullivan (for the “Karen Black vs. Betty White” contest)
Lauren LaCascia (for the “Showtime vs. USA Networks” contest)
Diandra Mintz (for the “Showtime vs. USA Networks” contest)
Mark Boles (for the “Antique Roadshow vs. Pawn stars” contest)
Indy Neogy (for the “Nordic Noir” contest)

Judges so far:

Debbie Millman

Pamela DeCesare

Dan Formosa

Tom Guarriello

Scott Lerman

Richard Shear

All of the above are from the SVA branding program.

Also:

Rick Boyko, Director and Professor, VCU Brandcenter

Schuyler Brown, Skylab

Bryan Castaneda, Attorney At Law

Ana Domb, C3, MIT

Mark Earls, author, Herd

Brad Grossman, Grossman and Partners

Christine W. Huang, PSFK, Huffington Post and Global Hue

Steve Postrel

Working the high mountain air in Banff, Alberta

Apologies for having been away. I was laboring to finish the manuscript for Culturematic.  And it’s done! God, Tim Sullivan, and the Harvard Business Review Press willing, it will be published March of next year.  Thank you to blog readers for their encourage and comments.

I am in Banff at the moment, at the Banff World Media Festival.  I present in a couple of hours.  Will be talking about how to use the Kauffman continuum to make great popular culture. I dreamed it up for the Rio Content conference in Brazil last year and it played quite well.  

Last night I got back to the hotel around 9, still lots of light in the sky this far north.  I walked out on to the grand patio at the back of the Banff Springs hotel.  There was an older couple already there.  Together, we stared at the sheer glory of the mountains, the water, the forests.  It really is astounding.  

And then we realized we were not alone.  The air was filled with swallows fetching their evening meals.  They were doing that fly-boy thing, whistling at top speed, changing direction in the blink of an eye, flying apparently in all directions at once. 

The three now stood watching the sheer art and athleticism of this performance, when we were buzzed by a swallow who traveling at 100 miles an hour managed to come within 18 inches of our heads.  We grinned with alarm at one another with that look that claimed to say, “that was close!” but really said, “I’m not afraid.”

A voice in the back of my head, “is it safe out here?  I mean, what if one of these guys runs into us.”  And then I thought again.  A swallow has as much trouble avoiding a human on a patio as I do avoiding a winged back chair in the lobby.  A tiny course correction.  Collision avoided.  Ain’t nothing to it.  

Of course the comparison is preposterous. Compared to these feathered fly boys I am quite a lot like a wing back chair in the lobby. Utterly immobile, virtually insensate, and incapable of dynamism of any kind.  And that is the point of these proceedings.  How to be more like swallows and less like winged back chairs.  How to produce culture that is responsive to the new speed and diversity of contemporary culture. How to course-correct in real time and the blink of an eye.  Most of all, I guess, it’s how to find the joy in the proceedings and forgo the self congratulatory stolidity of a winged back chair.

I’ve met some wonderfully agile people over drinks, including a rollicking conversation about popular culture with Mickey Rogers and Ty Funk yesterday and Judy Gladstone and Philip Alberstat last night.  Canadians have a genius for working the interface between culture and commerce.  Of course, I say that without knowing whether the audience is going to like my presentation this morning.  And if they don’t like it, well, the nation totally has a problem with the culture and commerce thing!  (I can do winged back, I really can.)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert Montgomery and Achilles Media for including me in this event.  

Minerva Contest

Squint your eyes, and the two shows look virtually identical.

In both, a stranger arrives bearing an object of uncertain provenance and, with cameras rolling, an expert offers an assessment of value.

Stop squinting, and the differences flourish.

One show is the Antiques Roadshow, the pride of the PBS system.

The eight-time Emmy® Award-nominated ANTIQUES ROADSHOW marks its 14th season in 2010. PBS’s highest-rated series, ROADSHOW is seen by almost 10 million viewers each week. In each episode, specialists from the country’s leading auction houses — Bonhams and Butterfields, Christie’s, Doyle New York, Skinner and Sotheby’s — and independent dealers from across the nation offer free appraisals of antiques and collectibles. ANTIQUES ROADSHOW cameras capture tales of family heirlooms, yard sale bargains and long-lost items salvaged from attics and basements, while experts reveal the fascinating truths about these finds.

The other is Pawn Stars,

At the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop on the outskirts of Las Vegas, three generations of the Harrison family–grandfather Richard, son Rick and grandson Corey–jointly run the family business… The three men use their sharp eyes and skills to assess the value of items from the commonplace to the truly historic, including a 16th-century samurai sword, a Super Bowl ring, a Picasso painting and a 17th-century stay of execution. It’s up to them to determine what’s real and what’s fake, as they reveal the often surprising answer to the questions on everyone’s mind, "What’s the story behind it"? and "What’s it worth?"

Your assignment: to write an essay of 1000 words or less that captures the culture similarities and differences between these two shows.  Be exhaustive.  Be exacting.  Be brief.  Point form is perfectly ok.

Your essays will be judged by a panel of experts (and value will be assessed, no cameras rolling).  The winner will get a Minerva (as pictured).  One hint: what are the cultural worlds from which these variations come?  Another: what is value and how is it being assessed in each case? A third: Please examine stylistic differences.

Deadline: December 15.

Previous Winners

Juri Saar (for the "Who’s a good doggie woggie?" contest)

Reiko Waisglass (for the "Who’s a good doggie woggie?" contest)

Brent Shelkey (for the "Who’s a good doggie woggie?" contest)

Daniel Saunders (for the "JJ Abrams vs. Joss Whedon" contest)

Tim Sullivan (for the "Karen Black vs. Betty White" contest)

Lauren LaCascia (for the "Showtime vs. USA Networks" contest)

Diandra Mintz (for the "Showtime vs. USA Networks" contest)

Judges:

Members of the faculty of the SVA (School of Visual Arts) ‘masters in branding’ program, including Debbie Millman, Pamela DeCesare, Dan Formosa, Tom Guarriello, Scott Lerman, and Richard Shear.   

Tongues untied (tech to the rescue)

I am not a gifted conversationalist.

I carry on every conversation as if it were bomb disposal.

One false move.  One stray remark.  And it’s all going to end in free fall.

This must be why I’ve always thought that social actors should have a "prompter" the way actor actors do.

You know, for those awful moments when we don’t know what to say.

The prompter would, er, prompt us.

"Say ‘I love your dress.’  No, dress!"

You often see people who have run out of things to say.  Or you see people who have been driven back on the cliches.

Yesterday, thanks to fresh ethnographic wedding data from Tim Sullivan, I was tweeting about "Woo girls."  These people are really running on empty.  They are defined (perhaps unfairly) be the predictability of the things they say and the sounds they make.  Indeed, these women are now the targets of TV satire.  These women really need prompting.

Bar tenders are astoundingly good at creating and managing conversation.  It is an unofficial part of their job description.  I have sat with lots of them as they told me how they can see a twosome or a party of 4 coming undone.  Their job is to intervene and reanimate the conversation.  They supply this service so routinely we might as well call them emergency personnel standing by.

I’ve always felt that brands could and should get in on the act.  After all, they are often keenly interested in the outcome of the event in question.  Carbonated soft drinks are largely about making the effervescence of the product the effervescence of the event.  Successful social events are good for the brand.  The Coke brand is well served when things go better with Coke.  

I have pitched more than one client on the idea that we could use cell phones to drop conversational prompts into social situations.  If people wanted to, they could sign up for text messages and they could then speak the message that appeared on their phone.  It would by funny and fun, and it would remove chuckleheads from harm’s way.  

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to hear about the Conversacube.  This is invented by Lauren McCarthy.  This is how McCarthy describes her invention

The Conversacube is a small box meant to form the centerpiece of any conversation situation. The box sits in the middle of all conversants, with one face facing each person. Each outward face of the box has a small screen and a microphone embedded just inside. As the conversation progresses, each person is personally prompted with directions or lines to keep the conversation running seamlessly with minimal awkward or uncomfortable moments. The microphones monitor audio levels of each participant and the cube responds accordingly, adjusting prompts to enliven, mediate conflict, or balance conversation as necessary.

Brilliant or what?  Marketers, start your engines.  

References

Anonymous.  n.d. "Woo girl" defined.  Urban Dictionary.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woo+girl

A clip from How I Met Your Mother "Woo girls at the bar" http://fliiby.com/file/124875/35932da1l8.html

More details on the Conversacube and Ms. McCarthy here http://conversacube.com/

JJ Abrams versus Joss Whedon, your CCO assignment

Here’s your assignment.

JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, compare and contrast.

One way to study our culture is to compare the roughly comparable.  Nothing comes of the wildly different.  It’s all contrast, no shades of grey.  

No, what we want is a common ground from which Instructive contrasts can then emerge.  

JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon are roughly comparable. Both were born in the middle 60s.  And in the world of popular culture, both were well born.  Abrams’ mother and father were TV producers. Whedon is a third generation TV writer.  Both have changed the face of television, Abrams with… well, now I’m doing your work for you.

What I want is a brief essay, no more than 1000 words.  Let’s stick to their TV work.  Point out the similarities between these two fellas, and then their differences.  Show what they mean to popular culture.  Compare Felicity and Buffy.  Or Lost and Dollhouse.  It’s up to you.  Tell us how their TV has changed our culture.

Keep it short, crisp, intelligent and illuminating.  The winner will receive the winged bird you see above.  I like to think of her as the Owl of Minerva from Greek mythology.  We have been searching for the right statuette for years now.  Ana Domb found this one in a museum catalog. (Thank you, Ana.) Officially, this is the Chief Culture Officer Award.  Unofficially, we will call her the Minerva. 

The Minerva is really heavy.  (I have held an Oscar and I’d say they are about the same weight. It was Julie Christie’s Oscar if you must know.)  It will look good on your desk or bookcase.  When friends and strangers say, "what’s that?"  You can say, ever so distractedly, "Oh, that’s my Minerva.  I won it for something I wrote."  There will be a small pause as your friend recalculates your standing in the world and considers now whether reverence should perhaps replace the impatience with which they now generally regard you. 

Our last contest, Betty White versus Karen Black, has a winner.  It’s Tim Sullivan.  See his excellent answer below.  Congratulations, Tim.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  Betty White versus Karen Black, your CCO assignment.  This Blog.  May 11.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Available on Amazon here.  (Citing this book in your essay will curry no favor with the judges.  But really, if you haven’t bought a copy, please do so now.)

Previous Minerva winners (now immortal)

Juri Saar

Brent Shelkey

Tim Sullivan

Reiko Waisglass

Tim Sullivan’s answer to the Betty While versus Karen Black assignment

Betty White v. Karen Black

This is a story of generations and media and sex, and the nostalgic value we place on them.

White: born 1922, lived through the Depression—actually arrived in California because of it, and started her career in radio in 1939, followed by TV in the 40s.
Black: born 1939, on the verge of being a Boomer. Trained in theater in college, moved to off-Broadway productions, and then to movies.

White: Since the ‘50s—with her show Life with Elizabeth—she’s had a devilish glint in her eye. She’s played against type: the pretty, sweet, slightly befuddled “girl” who secretly knew exactly what’s going on.
Black: Her first big hit is Easy Rider, 1969, a generational touchstone, cementing her place as a Boomer touchstone. In Five Easy Pieces, she’s plays the easy-to-dupe and pregnant girlfriend—no glint in her eye there. Myrtle Wilson, a variation on a theme, follows in The Great Gatsby.

White: Her medium is TV, in our living rooms every day, especially since her hit shows went into syndication. Some of us ate snacks with her after school or after work. Comforting, familiar.
Black: Lives on the Silver Screen. We visit her once in a while, and we usually don’t much like her—even when she’s determined and focused. By the late 70s and beyond, she had moved on to schlocky sci-fi and horror combined with art house pics.

White: Comedy (i.e., hard work) made to look easy. Sweet, smart, and sexy in our living rooms every day.
Black: Drama that feels hard, a little overwrought, spilling over into a genre that gets no respect.

White: She persists, she’s controlled her own destiny. In fact, with Life with Elizabeth, she was the first woman to have complete creative control over her own show,
Black: The characters she’s best known for were not people we would want to spend time with. Her affect is forced and demanding.

White: Another blow to Christopher Hitchens, who told us, infamously, in the pages of Vanity Fair “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” The reaction to that article, and the respect that female comedians have garnered before and since, culminate in the current celebration of Betty as a model for the current crop of successful women.
Black: Celebrated by the fanboy horror community, but b-grade horror flicks have little chance of breaking out into the mainstream. She’s painted herself into a corner. We can’t be nostalgic for her because her early career represents something about relationships between the sexes that we now eschew: the testosterone driven man chewing the scenery while Black’s character tries to create space for herself. She’s pre-Title IX.

Looking forward: A continued move away from and against the Boomers, as we as a society look for icons who create a foundation for Boomers, X, and Y alike through shared media.