Grant McCracken

Trend watch: from Woody to Monk

2010-03-20T01:40:14Z

I’m old enough to remember cocktail chatter in New York City in the 1960s.

It was usual for people to talk about their neuroses, their hang ups, their therapists, and their tortured pursuit of mental health. The paradigm was Freudian and the exemplar was Woody Allen, a man who managed to turn his symptoms into a comic style and cultural touchstone. Cocktail chatter feasted on this cultural motif, because it was more intelligent than comparing Zodiak signs, plus it was funny, human, disarming, and, usually, more revealing than comparing Zodiak signs.

Here’s the thing. I can’t remember someone talking like this for some decades. Apparently, people stopped using the Freudian, the Allenian model. The trend is dead. This fundamental pattern of self and social revelation has changed.

When and why did this happen? And why didn’t someone tell me? (I could just have gone back to Zodiak signs.)

The immediate causes for this trend are not mysterious: the decline of the Freudian paradigm as an cultural influence, the rise of pharmaceuticals, our inability to spend a day or two a week in analysis, the renewal (and triumph?) of that long standing American impatience with reflection. (Reflection takes stillness. We prefer movement.)

But I wonder about another possibility. Did we abandoned neurosis as an explanation (and a party game) because new explanations rose to capture our attention? Specifically I’m interested in cocktail chatter that refers to our attention disorders or our location on the Autistic spectrum. These days our explanations are more neurological than psychological. And our exemplar is (perhaps) Tony Shaloub as Monk.

And why should these new explanations have appealed to us? There are some easy answers here too. We are more and more aware that the incidence of attention disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. By this time, everyone knows who Temple Grandin is and we "get" her condition in a way we never did before.

If the Allenian model was confessional and humanizing (e.g., "These are my failings"), the new model prizes involuntary intelligence and an almost mechanical responsiveness. The new failings make us wittlessly capable automata. In the new regime, our weaknesses arm us as problem solvers. But there is nothing much performed or willed about this behavior. Monk’s intelligence is an obligatory intelligence. He doesn’t chose to do it. It acts itself out in him.

In the old regime, cocktail chatter claimed human qualities that made the speaker more scrutable, more transparent, more human, I always thought. The new cocktail chatter has us claiming qualities that are a little machine like. And it makes perfect sense that we should find this flattering, that this is a comparison we would wish to encourage. After all, since the fall of the Freudian regime, machines in the digital domain have made astonishing strides. Who wouldn’t welcome comparisons with a powerful machine based intelligence and the virtually (eventually) sentient machine?

We might say that if the old regime made us more human, the new one makes us less. But this of course accepts the terms of the old regime. If cocktail chatter is anything to judge by, we are now in the process of working out new models and metaphors. Whither and why?

References

McCracken, Grant. 2004. Our new porousness and "latent inhibition" diminishment. This Blog. May 24. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2004. The Monk in nous. This Blog. June 25. here.

Lara Lee (what a Chief Culture Officer sounds like?)

2010-03-19T03:08:07Z

Lara Lee is a principal associate of Jump Associates and former VP of Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson. I first heard her speak at MIT in 2009, and was impressed with her intelligence and clarity. I thought, “This may be what a Chief Culture Officer sounds like." I interviewed her in San Francisco on January 21, 2010. All the quotes below are from this interview.

Here I am, this young, Caucasian woman from the East Coast, suddenly in Singapore trying to speak to you in Mandarin and help you fix your business problems. And you are the owner of a fish processing company who buys from Indonesia and sells your finished product to California.

This is Lara Lee. Miles from home. Twenty-three years old. Trying to get the job done.

Lee may be out of her depth but she has an advantage. She can see into the world of her Singapore client.

I seem to be able to relate to all sorts of different people, and I think that stems from a natural curiosity and a lot of natural empathy.

Still, she is up against it. Especially back at the office in Singapore.

People were very friendly on the surface, but I found actually a lot of resistance to my presence just beneath the surface. I was 23 years old and highly educated and flown across the world to come and work in this nascent consulting group. It was like "What is she doing here?" "Why do we need her?"

Lee solved this problem as she did the fish processor’s problem, with curiosity and empathy.

I came to understand how all the social skills you use in the wider world … show up in the business world. And that was sort of a mini epiphany. I became fascinated with finding out how to make those emotional connections in the context of business.

For Lee, empathy makes everyone transparent, colleagues, customers, consumers alike. Empathy, it turns out, is an all-access pass.

Lara Lee makes it looks easy, seamless, obvious, but her career is, I think, a small miracle. In the early 1980s, when fellow students were pursing Japanese language training, Lee wondered whether Chinese might be the better bet. (Now, of course, she looks prescient. At the time, she was the only Chinese major at Brown.)

That Lee is doing business at all is remarkable. A lot of kids coming out of Brown in 1985 regarded business and global culture as the enemy. (This remains an article of faith in many Liberal Arts programs.) Lee demurred. She believed that business was where cultures meet. Lee has what the Victorians used to call an “independent cast of mind.”

[More to come! Came back soon to hear how Lara Lee served as a CCO at Harley Davidson.]

simultaneity vs. seriality: what to do now that we have no attention span

2010-03-11T18:28:35Z

I saw a dandy presentation in Boulder by Steve Clouthier.

It had a strange structure. Steve began with one image and stayed with that image for the entire 40 minutes of his talk.

When he wanted to make specific points, he would drop down on to one of the sections of this image, and an entire world would open up. Finished there, he would climb back up to the entire image.

Steve’s presentation was given as if from Google Maps. He was working from 31,000 feet. When he needed to give us a finer view of his topic, he would drop down into it. And then return.

What I liked about this was that it broke from the seriality of a Powerpoint presentation. You know, the one that forces us to move from slide to slide…and away from the "big picture."

The image shows me giving a talk at MIT. I am projected my talk as a tree diagram using Mind Manager. This approach is a little like Steve’s. It shows the entire argument at any given time. And this allows the viewer to go back through and check all the subarguments, test the argument in it’s entirety. It also has the advantage of tattooing passages from the image on my very bald head. I am happy to serve the argument any way I can.

There are small and large advantages to the simultaneous view. In certain liberal arts circles, the idea is to "release" the argument, using powers of evocation as much as denotation. Arguments that are designed to unfold in this way are not well served by simultaneity. Indeed, simultaneity is a little too effortful and obvious.

But this style really works in business schools and other institutions that prize themselves on clarity. This was one of the things I noticed moving from the Museum world to the Harvard Business School and then back to the Liberal Arts at McGill. In Museum circles, it is perfectly okay to speak discursively. And no one ever asks for clarification, as if this was perhaps a confession of intellectual insufficiency or just a matter of being a little obvious.

But at Harvard there was no shame at all in asking people to restate some part of the argument. The person making the request would almost always then look away and listen to the restatement with the utmost care. No shame at all. I guess you couldn’t ask for this sort of thing indefinitely without throwing your intellectual abilities into question. But once or twice a session was perfectly ok.

And that’s, I think, because every argument is not so much an evocation of theoretical verities, niceties, or, indeed, advances, but a little machine. And the listener was entitled to the specs for this machine. And a demonstration of how it works.

At McGill, once more in the embrace of the liberal arts, I was returned to the world of the argument as flight of the pigeons. One turn over the audience and everyone pretty much knew what you meant.Specific details and propositions were entirely up to the listener. Nothing so obvious as restatement was ever permitted. I mean, really.

But there is another reason, I think, to encourage the use of Steve’s approach. (The software in question, he tells me, is Prezi.) Seriality assumes an attention span, and I haven’t had one of those for some years now. And it’s not just me, I don’t think. How many of you "come to" in an auditorium thinking, "oh damn, what is this talk about again?" The great thing about simultaneity is that you don’t have to ask this question. It’s all up there on the screen.

Simultaneity is good for the big picture and it’s good for scrutinizing the finer points of the argument. And it’s a good way to deal that problem that some of us have with that…er…what was I saying again?

References

See more on the software in question here.

T-Mobile, ever so badly behaved

2010-03-08T23:55:52Z

So I am in the United lounge at La Guardia (sp) the other day. And I hope to use the wireless system there. And for a moment it works.

T-mobile at my disposal.

Not really. I can’t make contact.

And then, I can’t get out.

Mr. Impatient business man, I revert to my wireless carrier of choice, AT&T

But T-Mobile won’t let go.

In fact, I can’t "get out" and make contact with AT&T because T-Mobile insists I must be trying to talk to it.

"You talking to me." It is very like a scene out of Taxi Driver. I am now in the hands of a maniac.

Normally, bygones would be bygones. But no. Every time I look at the little line of icons on Google Chrome, the place normally occupied by the Google M (for Gmail) is now occupied by that funny purple icon (as above).

T-Mobile, to make absolutely clear that it is really very badly behaved has commandeered even the icons that once belonged to Google.

Google, bless them, signed on to the digital world by saying "don’t be evil."

Apparently, T-Mobile never got the memo.

Truth, beauty and D’oh!

2010-03-04T00:16:30Z

For one shining moment here in Boulder while walking down a side walk, I thought one of life’s great secrets was about to be revealed to me.

This reads: "There is no greater beauty than that of." So close to illumination and then..new sidewalk!

Edinburgh notes

2010-03-01T11:51:36Z

Am in Scotland today. It is unforgettably beautiful…except that I failed to remember this beauty from my last trip 20 years ago. Staying at the Balmoral hotel and was reminded of the British struggle to do hotels well. I used to think this was due to the Britisl loathing of anything that looks like servitude. But this morning as I struggled with a badly designed shower I began to wonder this isn’t also about the ancient problem of hotels in a hierarchical societies as Britain once was so ferociously. Travelers are people out of place. It is hard to know what their status is. Besides which hotels are obliged to treat them well, better that is than there standing merits…and that’s annoying for just about everyone. Now that the UK is more equalitarian, hotels are less vexing for both purposes. So why can’t someone install a shower that is not an act of status belittlement? Details Too arty photo is from Waverly Station in Edinburgh

Rusting Buicks and the destruction of wealth

2010-02-26T03:23:08Z

Picture yourself in the hinterland of British Columbia.

You are many hundreds of miles from Vancouver.

You are in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of road so desolate it feels like something out of an X-Files episode. (Cue the X-Files orchestra for a few bars of that eerie theme music.)

There’s a mining camp at one end of the road and a mining camp at the other. Most everyone here get an hourly wage. And the wage is generous. These rough necks are paid like princes. They start high. (Who would come to this god forsaken place otherwise?) And because there is nothing much to do here, they work extra hours most days and most weekends. Add "time and a half" and "double time," and it’s not long before these people are worth a bundle.

Periodically, they head for town. For most the destination is Vancouver, many hundreds of miles away. Guys, they are mostly guys, will hitchhike for a while. And they take buses when they must, and eventually they say, "F*ck it, I’m buying a car." And they do. They buy a Buick with all the trimmings. And away they go.

The trouble is, the guys have been drinking since they left camp and by this time they are often blind drunk, so, well, it’s not uncommon to come off the road and wrap the Buick around a tree.

And here’s the weird part. The guys don’t get the Buick fixed. They just keep going. What they have done to the Buick captures what they will do for the remainder of this trip to Vancouver and for the duration of their stay there.

The "skid row" in Vancouver is there to greet them. The card sharks, hookers, and bars are seasoned tourist professionals, skilled at various kinds of value transfer. It will take a couple of weeks. But eventually our guys will wake up in a gutter without a dime.

And here’s the other weird part. They will brush themselves off, and go back to the hinterland. Some will do this many times over several decades. Which is way there are so many cars rusting on the roads of the interior of BC.

From an conventional point of view this is deeply irrational behavior. Why endure the privations of life in the bush, and the exertion and the danger of this kind of labor, unless you are going to keep some part of what you earn? Surely, the point of coming here is to earn your way out. Not to spend your way back in. But the hinterland is a prison to which inmates keep returning by choice. In a sensible world, people would come here just long enough to make enough to buy the motel, dry cleaning store, or bowling alley that will release them from wage labor forever. But no, they take their stake and they squander it. These guys seem bent on destroying wealth.

Which brings us to Pirates. I know you were waiting for the Pirate passage. I’m reading a nice little book called And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis. Here’s a passage.

After his raids, Captain Morgan and his men would sail to Port Royal to whore and drink and spend their money. The more carelessly they could rid themselves of their gold, the happier they were. "Wine and Women drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of them became reduced to Beggary," reported pirate chronicler Charles Leslie. "They have been known to spend 2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night…" Morgan "found many of his chief officers and soldiers reduced to their former state of indigence through their immoderate vices and debauchery." Then they would pester him to get up a new fleet for further raids, "thereby to get something to expend anew in wine and strumpets." (location circa 664 in the Kindle version of this book)

Which brings us back to British Columbia, and an aboriginal practice called "potlatch" when rival communities would take turns dumping Hudson Bay blankets and other valuables into the Pacific ocean. One of the explanation for this practice is that it is undertaken as a very deliberate act of wealth destruction. ( I don’t know the literature here as well as I should so I am penciling these data in provisionally.)

This destruction of wealth is a wonderful thing. Wealth for miners, pirates, and perhaps aboriginals is charged with potentiality. To keep this wealth is to do its bidding. Once you’ve made a small fortune in a logging camp, some convention says, you must leave the hinterland, pay that motel, and "start a new life." Which these loggers and miners devoutly do not wish to do. Hence those trips to town. These loggers are fighting demon wealth.

Our loggers, miners, pirates (and aboriginals?) are defending their way of life. They are destroying the money that threatens it. They can see the potentiality of all this wealth, they can feel the cultural instructions embedded in it, and they are damned if they will give in it. Better, easier, truer to their life missions, to piss this money away.

Actually, there is nothing irrational about this behavior. It has a job to do and it does well. But there is no economic model that came help us retrieve the rationality of this behavior, I don’t believe. To do this we need to look beyond "rationality" narrowly defined, beyond "interest" and "benefit" as it is usually construed. We need to capture the culture that supplies the meanings that shapes the lives that demands the destruction of wealth the results in all those rusted Buicks. There’s a method to the madness. In fact, it isn’t madness.

Indeed, under carefully scrutiny a lot of economic behavior, even the b to b variation thereof, is not fully rational. But when the economists find things that do not find the paradigm, they insist these are "irrational." Um, but surely there is a grey area in between. That economic actors are not rational doesn’t mean that are irrational. The trouble is that the idea of rationality is so narrowly defined is to leave much of the human experience out of account. It is true that actors are sometimes not rational but they are almost never not interested. They are always driven by an idea, a concept, a preference, an "interest," and almost always this idea, concept, preference or interest comes from culture.

So when Adam Smith excises culture from the proposition in a sense he assumes what he means to prove. And he leaves us with a model that can’t explain new Buicks any more than it can rusted ones. I mean if transportation is the object of the exercise, there’s an awful lot chrome that doesn’t seem germane. And no, we may not put the model on life support by evoking status competition and conspicuous consumption. Nice try, Mr. Veblen but there are so many more cultural meanings besides status at issue in any give Buick that you did not so much rescue the model as cleared the way for a more thorough going assessment of its insufficiency.

I guess this post is my way of saying there is a lot of learn from loggers, miners and pirates. It’s just so very difficult to get them to come in for guest lectures.

Oh Canada

2010-02-23T22:26:02Z

A friend of mine, a deeply observant and credentialed observer of human affairs, told me this morning that when Canada played the US in the Olympics a couple of days ago, the fans, the Canadian fans, were tepid. (I missed the game.) It was as if, he said, they were trying to be enthusiastic but just couldn’t manage to find enough oomph.

This reminded me of being on the Toronto Subway just after a Blue Jay World Series win. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, sharing the car with12 other people, also minding their own business. This is a Toronto thing.

When suddenly this guy, a Jamaican Canadian to judge by his accent, leapt up and began to berate us.

What is the matter with you people? You just won the World Series for crying out loud! The World Series! And you’re just sitting there. What does it take to get you people out of your seats?

We just sat there, blinking at him with confusion. And stayed in our seats. Even with encouragement, we would betray no happiness.

Naturally, there were some Canadians somewhere carrying on with reckless, unreserved abandon. But the statistical average is probably closer to what we say in the subway car. World Series win. Who hoo.

This is a long standing problem for Canadians. And it’s a vexing one. You don’t have to be Emile Durkheim to observe that emotion matters when it comes to nationhood. Truly, sometimes it matters too much, and produces the murderous episodes.

But more often it is the standard, necessary stuff of nationhood. Collective matters are marked by collective enthusiasms and accomplishments, and these are marked by big, broad, unstinting expressions of shared emotion.

I leave you with the question posed by the Jamaican Canadian: what is wrong with my home and native land?

Boot camp and a week of ethnographic interviews

2010-02-23T02:50:55Z

Well, it worked

I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got 80 people in a room in NYC to talked culture, about being a Chief Culture Officer and showed them 320 slides over 6 hours.

Dreary?

Tedious?

Just not very interesting?

I am probably not the most credible source, but I think it went really well.

The audience was really listening. Questions and comments were superb.

The evaluations coming back are really positive, including "It was worth the trip from Amsterdam." That’s a good sign, right?

So we have proof of concept and want to stage the thing again relatively soon. It sounds like there may be interest in Austin, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, possibly. We shall see.

And then it was straight out of the Boot Camp classroom onto the train to Providence. We did ethnographies on the street, in book stores and in coffee shops. Then to Cambridge, Boston and Jamaican Plains. Then we came back to New York City talking to people upscale bars in Soho and speakeasy places and other bars in Brooklyn. I’m sorry not to have posted for the week. But it really was that absorbing. It was 16 hours a day flat out.

I can’t talk about the details. But what made the week especially interesting was a really smart client and his consultant, also very smart. The model was roughly: client at the center, his consultant in tight orbit and me in a looser orbit. Data poured in from the outer ring. Intelligence radiated out from the inner ring. It’s a good way to study culture. And, man, are things in play out there.

I am hoping that one of these days, the client, the consultant and I can give you a fuller glimpse of how this worked.

Boot camp Saturday

2010-02-11T22:43:02Z

We will have participants from Google, Coca-Cola, and Harvard Business School will be there. We will have people from small marketing houses, big agencies, new brands and old, consulting giants, design houses (large and small), web aggregators, and new media shops.

The room will fill with cultural references: Quaker, Snapple, Facebook, Obama, PepsiCo, Peter Arnell, HBO, Burn Notice, 30 Rock, the revenge movie, the new "enmeshed" male, Adbusters, David Hassellhoff, Chris Hughes, Claudia Kotchka, Silvia Lagnado, Paula Spear, Preppies, how restaurants form, how Frank Black became Hootie and the Blow Fish, among other things.

We will be talking about empathy, ethnography, noticing, forecasting, brain storming, presentation strategy, scenario building, to name a few. But most of all we will be talking about how a CCO (Chief Culture Officer) can learn about culture, deliver it to the corporation, make it part of the corporation, and in the process, make the corporation something living and breathing.

Best of all, (because who wants to listen to me talk for a day) this will be a full collaborative undertaking. With all the talent in the room, it is sure to be a dazzling conversation.

There are a few places left. Come join us!