>> Kim Rickets: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim Rickets, and I'm
here to introduce and welcome Grant McCracken who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speaker Series.
He's here today to discuss chief culture officer, how to create a living, breathing corporation. In
chief culture officer McCracken says that too many corporations outsource their understanding of
culture to trend hunters, cool watchers, marketing experts, consulting firms and sometimes
teenage interns.
Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker missed out on the hip hop trend. The cost to
Levi-Strauss was a billion dollars. The lesson, the American corporation needs a new
professional. It needs a chief culture officer. Grant argues that the CCO would keep a finger on
the pulse of contemporary cultural trends from sneakers to slow food to preppies, while
developing a systemic understanding of the deep waves in culture in America and the world. The
CCO's professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes even when they only
exist in the weakest of signals.
Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at C3 at MIT. He earned his PhD in anthropology at the
University of Chicago and was the founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture. He
has taught as Cambridge, McGill university and Harvard Business School and consultants with an
array of companies, including Campbell's Soup, Coke, L'Oreal, I'll get that right, IBM and the
Children's Television Workshop.
He has written nine came books and his work has been covered by Oprah, the New York Times,
the LA Times, Newsweek and Business Week among others. So please join me in welcoming
Grant McCracken to Microsoft to discuss chief culture officer.
[applause].
>> Grant McCracken: Thank you, Kim, for that kind instruction. Listen, I'm happiest in a
classroom that's collaborative and interactive. My favorite teaching was at the Harvard Business
School where those of you who have done case studies will know it's really very interactive.
So you sing out with questions. I won't be able to field all of them in realtime. We may have to
postpone some of the answers, but please could we make this something less than -- if we know
anything about contemporary culture, we know that that old asymmetry that has the expert talking
and the audience listening and something like a deferential attitude, that's just shattered forever,
right? So it's collaborative, and I hope we'll make it interactive.
Okie dokie. I wanted to start with -- it just occurred to me now that I should start with a
photograph that I got taken this morning. I did a radio show in Seattle. And the other people
participating were women who are professional roller derby athletes. And so we all got a photo,
and it's fantastic. They're all doing these kind of martial kinds of poses and these terrifying looks
on their faces. And I sent it to my wife whose only response was come home soon. [laughter].
So what I want to do is talk about -- I'm trained as an anthropologist. Our stock and trade is this
thing called culture. It's slippery and difficult to talk about, but as I hope you'll agree -- may
already think so, but if you don't think so, and I hope you'll think so by the time we're done, and
I'm going to move at pace because I've got a lot to cover. So let me know if things are unclear,
and we'll -- and we'll -- here's my proposition.
That culture is a thing that we can study in a formal systematic way as we know all the things that
come to us from our academic professional training are. And the corporation has been
systematically bad at treating culture as if it were a thing that admits of this systematic
professional study.
Culture remains a kind of simplicity. This is bad news -- oh, just to be clear, when I talk about -when Google uses -- actually has a chief culture officer. When they use that term, they -- by
culture they mean the corporate culture, the culture inside of Google. That's not the culture I'm
talking about here. I'm interested in that kind of culture but the one that really -- the point of the
book is to talk about how we can understand culture outside the corporation.
And by culture I mean -- this is where it gets a bit slippery, especially with people with, you know,
who are the master's of really rigorous arts look at this and go, oh, dude, this is too vague for me,
but that's just what we have to live with. Culture is, if you will, the software in our heads. The set
of meanings and rules with which we create a language and non-verbal behavior and all of the
ways in which we interact with the social worlds, those are constrained by rules.
There's a English anthropologist called Kate Fox who decided that she'd try to figure out what the
rules of English life were, what the culture of England is looking at the rules of social life. And
what she did was go to public places and cut into queues. And she said you could see English
people famously constrained in public spaces, she said you could see the smoke coming out of
their ears as they watched somebody jam in the line. Because the English are good at many
things, and queuing is one of them, that superb sense of how you negotiate this quite complicated
business of getting everyone in a line to take their turn when that turn comes.
This thing called culture, it's hard to talk about. But one of the reasons it's hard to talk about is
that we kind of extracted it from the proposition. Adam Smith, you know, the fantastically gifted
Scottish economist, father of our notion of economics, that was really part of his genius was to
say let's look at human behavior, especially as it takes place in marketplaces. What we're going
to do is extract out anything that's cultural and social. What we'll have left is interested parties
pursuing their self interest through the exchange of value in the marketplace. What we are trying
to do here is put back the cultural and the social in this equation because as we'll see, the
outcomes of those marketplace relationships often turn on that social and cultural stuff.
So here is my argument. This is just sort of -- feels to me like the last order of business.
Corporation is extremely good at a lot of things. It just isn't very good at culture. There are many
core competences, and my argument here is that culture should be one of these. But we need
somebody in the C-suite senior manager who is job this is to keep track of culture.
So does culture really matter and is the corporation really so bad at it? I want to just run through
a few examples here with which to make the case. And I think with these kind of case studies as
it were, tiny little examples they are really, you'll see -- get a clear sense of what I mean by
culture.
Levi-Strauss missed hip hop, the hip hop trend. They had a very good marketing rationale for
what they were doing. The notion was come into a Levi-Strauss store and they would measure
you perfectly so every pair of jeans would be the best fitting pair of jeans every had. In the
meantime culture changed, specifically in this case hip hop came up and they lost a billion dollars
in sale.
Somebody on the marketing team plaintively said well who new knew baggy pants were a
paradigm shift? To which the answer is that's actually your job.
It's just strange to think that something so critical to the success of a company that depends upon
a knowledge of consumer taste and preferences should have escaped them.
Quaker bought Snapple for 1.7 billion dollars. What they didn't know was that Snapple had come
up, really got going -- remember 1991? Remember especially here, Seattle in 1991 that -- when
that alternative enforcement that had been circulating -- I'm just going to use that for lack of better
term, had been circulating in college radio from about '88 to, you know -- the think of the pixies
and finally in '91 the thing just goes wide and people are really, really not interested in the
traditional soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi, and they find this quirky little brand called Snapple at
mom and pop stores at the corner and they embrace it. It runs up in value extraordinarily.
By '96, the alternative thing is dead and dying and the value -- its value as -- the value of Snapple
as a brand captures some of this social culture movement is diminishing. Quaker finds this out
when they're obliged to sell it a few years later for 330 million. This is -- mergers and acquisitions
is a great place for me to kind of make this argument because the metrics are so nice and clear.
The punishment, the penalty for not getting culture is so clear.
Best Buy bought Musicland in 2001, just in the teeth of peer-to-peer sharing and had to give it
away three years later. The CEO of Best Buy said if I just talked to the kids who worked in my
store, I would have understood. If all he had done was tap what every kid working in the Best
Buy already knew, we could have avoid this taking a bath to the order of 700 million dollars.
So Pepsico -- so I tend to hyperventilate when I'm speaking for some reason, so I occasionally
have to make this sound like a whale to just somehow equilibriate.
So Pepsico embarked upon redesign of all the big brands. Nooyi, the new CEO could see sales
diminishing, and she said, you know, let's revitalize the brand. And they brought in this designer
called Arnell, who took this package and turned it into this package. Disastrous consequences.
Consumers actually rose up in a fury, sales dropped in a hurry, Pepsico had to restore the old
brand.
And the problem here was that Arnell was actually not thinking about consumers or about culture,
he was thinking as designers sometimes do about what was cool. So his mission as it had been
given him by Nooyi was to make the brand -- to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, and reparticipate
in popular culture. Music to my ears. That's what brands should do.
What he did was go on a five week tour of trendy design houses. This is not the best place to put
your finger in the pulse of American culture. Not the worst place by any means. Designers really
know culture fantastically well, they just have no really breadth here. And this is a point we'll -may or may not come out in what follows. And let me just emphasize it here.
Too often -- and these examples might mislead you. Culture isn't just about cool hunting. It's not
just about the latest thing. I figure those fads and fashions and trends are probably maybe 10
percent of what we call culture, 20 percent tops. The rest is something more -- it changes
certainly but it changes almost at a glacial pace. And that's what we're talking about here when
we talk about culture.
Anyhow, the point I want to make here is Arnell confuses culture and cool. His notion is if I just
did the latest -- if I satisfied what the design community cares about, American culture will take
care of itself.
And my argument here is one of the reasons we need a CCO is that gurus and cool hunters are
unreliable. When people said -- when Business Week said to Arnell how badly do you feel about
screwing up these brands he said well, not really. He said, you know, what the hell, I got paid my
money, I've moved on. He's the picture of unrepentance. A fantastic loss of share value and
brand value and he just doesn't care.
So another reason for a CCO is to somebody who makes a -- has an enduring commitment to the
corporation.
So we're looking here in each case at a blind-side hit that the corporation doesn't see happening.
If it had a CCO, it would have seen each of these blind-side hits happening.
Now I want to look at the other side. So that's just -- if you don't know culture you're subject to
these blind-side hits. Now I'm going to talk about the advantage of knowing cultures because you
see opportunities out there that you can turn to advantage.
Any thoughts before we press on to the second section? Sir?
>>: Yeah. You know, you're talking about this from the anthropological standpoint.
>> Grant McCracken: I am.
>>: It also appears to me that the people in symbiotics also spotting ->> Grant McCracken: Totally.
>>: And they'll spot the trend. They may not know what it means ->> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: But they'll spot the signs.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: So you kind of need both to ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah. I would argue, and this may be a part of imperialism on the part of
my part of the social sciences, but I would argue, you know, you get -- you hire the anthropologist
you get the symbiotician, the reverse is not true.
But again, that's probably a parochial view.
Well I guess I should justify that decision. The anthropologist is looking at -- the symbiotician is
interested in symbol systems, right? Signs that is to say. And the anthropologist is interested in
those symbol systems but them interested in all of the culture meanings that are the foundations
from which those symbol systems sometimes come but don't always come. I mean, there are
things -- there are culture foundations that never find of a kind of explicit coded or code like
expression. And so the anthropologist will get you that and the symbiotician will miss it. The
symbioticians I'm sure are better than the limits of the theory. Sir?
>>: Additional organization for the planner are product manager and at the higher level the chief
marketing officer.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Doesn't this rule of understanding the culture rely on ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah, totally.
>>: [inaudible] a separate ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah. In a perfect world, the CM -- this would be the CMOs doing.
I guess the trouble is CMOs are working fantastically hard as a range often just the tactical -- their
tactical responsibilities are such that the strategic thing that I think somebody actually at HBR did
a study that looked at CM managers and discovered that they were doing like two hours of
strategic planning and think a week or something.
So as it is, those people are maxed out. And this stuff is so complicated and so difficult it really is
a substantial kind of body of knowledge. I think you need -- you need somebody who is -- yeah.
Please?
>>: Have you seen any evidence of somebody seeing this [inaudible] looking and preventing
disaster.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: It seems like something you can arm chair quarterback.
>> Grant McCracken: Totally. And you cherry pick like crazy, right, you just go through the
business literature and choose the things that serve -- well, we're going to talk about a few of
them now, people who have spotted things coming. But that's the real -- that the more scientific
test is okay, give me the 411 on this particular corporation.
And I'm confident with -- I mean, I wrote the book in three months because I had just that window
in which to work. And I really had that anxiety like. Did you just cherry pick the best examples?
So in my blog I try to every week or so try to find another case in point and I apply the argument
and I see does it work or am I, you know, am I smoothing and faking? And I think it actually
works. I think it's more robust than I thought it was going to be, which you know is a big relief
after you've signed your name in the manuscript. Good to see the argument. Seems to work.
But see what you think of these examples. Please?
>>: So I'm starting a little bit to think about this in the context of how we do this on a global scale.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: [inaudible] culture [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Great question.
>>: Rather than that -- you know, because we tend to kind of just look [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Building our products.
>> Grant McCracken: As does everybody.
>>: [inaudible] customers, right?
>> Grant McCracken: Totally.
>>: So I'd love to hear you talk about that.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, yeah.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: It feels like this is where that glocal concept comes in where you're global
on the one hand and very local on the other. And it looks like this is the signature of for many of
us on the planet now is that we have those two loyalties. And what's falling out, this is just a
fascinating kind of topic on its own and maybe we'll get to it, but it's a kind of people calling this
the death valley construction. And the classic perception of this death is the notion of big brands
are flourishing and niche brands are flourishing and the brands in the middle are dying. But you
could use it actually to talk about global citizenship.
So people identify here globally and then locally, and that may mean their neighborhood or their
town and what's falling out for some people is the national identification, I'm Canadian by birth
and Canadians are very global and they're very local, and Canada, they care about being
Canadian, but actually these two things in a way are so -- so any how, yeah. That's the trick isn't
it?
Okay. Let's just press on. So these are some of the people who are naturally occurring CCOs as
it were. You'll recognize some of them. We're going to talk about a few of them. They're
prototypical CCOs. They work in an unofficial capacity. They're good at creating and managing
culture meanings. And this is the upside of culture. This is when culture becomes not a source
of blind-side hits but of opportunities.
And one of my favorite examples here is the guy called Geoffrey Frost who is -- he's an agency
guy. He was a Yale undergraduate. He learned Japanese. I haven't been able to piece together
all of the details here. But he joins Motorola when it's getting hijacked on either side. It's losing to
the Fins on the one side, the Finish on the one side and to the Koreans on the other side.
And you know, Motorola -- I bet have been in this room a certain age owned that Motorola. The
thing was called the clam shell or something. It was the -- you know, I remember giving up a year
and a half of service to get my mitts on this Motorola phone. It was just the phone of the moment.
By the time frost joins Motorola those days are long gone and it's in a kind of free fall
hemorrhaging. It lost 6.5 billion dollars in '01.
He discovers the trouble with Motorola is that it practices what frost called death by committee.
Good ideas come out of the lab and then people all get together in committee and stick it with a
knife. And before long, even these -- even the best, most robust ideas never make it out of
committee into the world.
So he sees this idea which eventually became the Razr and he goes, oh, this is good. My first
order of business -- and this is where knowing the culture out there and the culture inside is
important. He says, you know, if I leave this corporation to its own devices it will kill this idea, so
he kind of smuggles it through the process. He gets it out into the world. The results are
fantastic. By the end of '06 he sold 50 million units. Motorola is back on easy street. Zander is
taking all the credit and then the story turns sad.
Frost dies in '05. And by '08, three years later, the company's back in free fall again. It's as if
somebody has reached into the corporation and ripped out its navigational equipment. For want
of this guy who is acting like a CCO, Motorola goes into free fall once more.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: He's one of those guys who floated but I think he was like a SVP of -honestly I don't know. It's like innovation or you know one of those titles that -- sir?
>>: Yeah. What's interesting about what you're saying is the CCO dies and the culture dies. Do
you see a attachment when the individual that represents the culture? I mean, the typical
example I think is [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: [inaudible]. The ->> Grant McCracken: Totally.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: It's done. They have ->>: Do you find the same thing with the CCO? Or is it this successful when they actually -- the
organization [inaudible] the culture beyond that?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Here's the hope that -- I had a colleague at HBS, Disponda, Roda
Disponda [phonetic] listen, marketing is too important to be left to the marketers. Everybody in
the corporation should know what it is and know how to do it. And I think that's got to be true of
this culture thing as well.
An important -- I would go -- not just for the reasons that Roda was subjecting, I think what we
can say is there's so much water front and so much of culture to keep track of. If there's
somebody in the corporation who really knows about professional bowling or roller derby or
gardening or pot throwing, they should make that knowledge available to the corporation. In a
per world we would ask them to make that knowledge available to the corporation.
So in a perfect world everybody would be in on the game. And when they were watching TV at
night -- I mean some people can make themselves expert if they're not already experts in kind of
prime time comedies and can see something shifting in two and a half men as it's overtaken by
the big bang theory, right?
You think about those kinds of -- two and a half men is a very clear innovation in the world of
comedy. You look at big bang theory and you go whoa, something is happening here. If you've
got an expert, an unofficial expert, it would be great to have that knowledge on tap. And it means
that if your CCO is coming and going, you still have this kind of ground -- you have this kind of -the culture of the corporation is still connected to the culture outside the corporation.
This is Silvia Lagnado, a Brazilian Canadian who noticed that most women didn't think they were
beautiful by the standards of the beauty industry. And she said well, but surely this is an
opportunity out of which came the do have campaign for real beauty. I don't know if -- do you use
the language blue ocean opportunity here at Microsoft? This is a fantastic blue ocean
opportunity. It had been sitting there for 40 or 50 years, right? This had been true for a very long
time. Marketing executives looked at it and went we don't care about that. We're the beauty
industry. We insist on standards of beauty. It didn't matter if consumers don't buy those
standards.
So along comes Silvia and you have a different approach. And that's just somebody -- I mean, all
these doing there is not really culturally sophisticated, she's just believing what, you know, the
research tells her. She's going with the consequences of what the research tells her.
Chris Albrecht, this is an amazing story. When this guy came to Home Box Office, it was making
boxing -- was showing boxing matches that most people didn't want to watch and movies they
had seen before. It was just a struggling little operation. Within a very short order, it had
transformed -- within 10 years, it had transformed TV. And its high moment is the Emmy Awards
of '04 when it just takes everything going. And in the process, this guy taps what's going on in
culture and manages actually to change the culture in the process. Right?
We think of Sex and the City didn't just sell a lot of fantastically expensive shoes, it actually
changed the way some women thought about who they were, especially in the city, or who they
were as sexual creatures in the city. So some fantastic kind of culturally reckoning and shaping
going on in this case.
Here's the weird thing, right? So this data is from the business press. So in trying to reverse
engineer what I see in the business, any time I see somebody who is going at culture, I say well,
how did they do it and try to figure out their system.
Bonnie Hammer of USA Networks has a system. She is the reason that Comcast just spent a
fortune for NBC. Nobody cares about NBC. What they wanted to get was Bonnie -- what they
want to get was USA Networks. And the reason they wanted USA Networks is they wanted
Bonnie Hammer.
So but this guy, when they asked him so how did you do this, how did you transform TV, his
answer was well, we just take bigger risks. Dude. I mean that's the art of management is not
taking bigger risks, it's making intelligent risks, right. In a perfect world you gather enough
intelligence, enough strategy and enough tactics and it's not risky. But this guy had so also
sense of how he was doing this magic that that was his answer. It was really very odd. He's also
a tragic character now kind of removed from -- but that's for another time.
A.G. Lafley ->>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, sorry.
>>: Don't be a CCO, right? [laughter].
>> Grant McCracken: What?
>>: Don't be a CCO ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Right. No, no, that wasn't what happened to this guy. Anyhow, it's
a story you can't tell at all unless you tell in quite a detailed way so I'm going to spare you. We'll
come back to it if you're interested.
A.G. Lafley is -- I make part of my living as an ethnographer]. When A.G. Lafley said
ethnography -- when he sort of blessed it as the method after focus groups for the corporation, it
was like a papal blessing. My phone just started to ring. It was just suddenly this guy put it on
the map. And several years later this is what he said about the revolution he had brought to
P&G. He says the trouble with P&G is that when it makes a product, it focus on the most narrow
function. If we're making toothpaste, we think about the brush in the mouth of the consumer in
those five minutes in the evening and the morning that they're brushing their teeth. What we
need to do, this isn't his metaphor, it's my metaphor. This his notion is let's dolly back, let's go
from imagine the camera on the hand holding the brush. Dolly back to the full person. Dolly back
to the moment in which this is taking place. Dolly back to the family in which this is taking place,
the household in which it's taking place, the community, and finally the culture.
So here's a guy going from very narrow and functional to a much broader view. And in the
process -- great thing about this guy is, you know, he makes it pay. It's not just well wishing or a
kind of wishful thinking.
But here's the this is just a great story. Chris Hughes was one of the three guys who founded
Facebook. Remember Friendster who came and went in five years. It went from total obscurity
to big profile to total obscurity again. It was there. It should still exist but could never quite get a
handle on what this thing called social media was. The reason Facebook came up and claimed
this moment is that this guy, Chris Hughes, knew what Facebook was for. He knew that we
would use it not just to reach out and make connections with existing people but with new people,
that we would use it to build and build these ever larger -- you know, the anthropological literature
says that 125 people is the number that we can sustain by dent of conventional efforts. We now
look at people with social networks that are vastly larger than that, 500, 600, 2,000.
His notion was well the recently -- these networks are now technically possible. The technology
makes it possible for people to reach out and make contact. But these systems are hydraulic.
They're exactly like mushrooms after a spring rain. Unless they're constantly fed with tiny bits of
content, they wither and die. So it's easy to build a network of 2,000 people, but it's nothing -- it
does not create value for yourself unless you're constantly feeding it with things. And Chris
Hughes said let's make photos one of the things that people feed their networks, sustain their
networks with. And if their -- if we need proof of our interest in this aspect of social media, we
need only observe that 24 million photographs a day are placed on Facebook.
I do some work for IBM and occasionally the CEO will make grand statements about IBM loves
Facebook. But of course he does. The amount of hardware needed to sustain, to capture, to
store 24 million photos captured every day is phenomenal.
Anyhow. So this guy has a feeling for culture. He has a -- he's good at spotting how something
creates value. And then he leaves Facebook to go to work for Obama and the Obama team said
great, you do this, whatever this thing is called social media, that's fine, good, good, good, go get
us money. And he says well, nah, don't ask me to use new media for old media purposes.
There's a bigger opportunity here. He says look, you can use -- well, we know this, right? You
can use these networks to create -- to gather intelligence. Now you can have somebody, you can
have your Obama rep listening to every village in America. You've got somebody in place
thinking what do people care about, what does Obama know if he wishes to be the president of
the United States?
And once that intelligence comes back to you, you can refashion your political message, and then
you can send it back into the community and each of these people can deliver it in realtime
crafting it for the community as that community changes. And you know, it is the beginning. Until
we completely disintermediate politics -- and just in a personal note, when are we going to start
talking about this? This is the year we saw education get disintermediated -- I mean, I'm sorry,
this is the year we saw newspapers get disintermediated. Education can't be far off. But when
politics? And I'm a great admire of President Obama, but when is he going to start talking about
using the technologies that are now -- I mean, American Idol can canvas hundreds of millions of
Americans -- maybe not quite that many, but it's typically 76 million votes, just teenagers voting
often. But you know what I mean, right? The possibility here is here and with real control and
some intelligence we could be voting every 15 minutes. So when is that going to happen? I don't
hear anybody even talking about it, which I think is just weird.
Any how. So there is Hughes kind of spotting how -- that kind of first step toward completely
disintermediated politics. So what these people have in common is a deep knowledge of what
needs to happen inside the corporation and then a deep knowledge of what's happening in
culture and what's possible, what's irresistible and what's next.
So now this is a little bit -- this last section is all about Microsoft. And, hey, I'm no expert, and you
are experts, so I realize that I'm kind of, you know, taking my -- I'm putting myself in harm's way.
But that's my job. [laughter].
Okay. We can use lots of examples here to talk about corporations that have been -- have
created value out of culture. And the examples would be the Four Seasons, Starbucks -- and
Starbucks talks about that third space, part work, part home, how they combine the two. You
know, the ven diagram that brings those two. The space that's both public but kind of private,
that's open but also intimate. That's a culture engineering that's going on there, right? Those --
our culture and only our culture, thank you very much, insisted that those were mutually exclusive
domains. And Schultz says, well, with some smart design and some good strange, the right retail
formula, we can bring those two domains together. We can create a third space in this culture.
It's pretty interesting.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about Microsoft. It seems to me this
campaign, which you must just loathe, I know the feeling, I've seen it so often I'm beginning to
loathe it myself, but this is a classic bit of culture engineering to the extent that it takes an existing
distinction our culture between mainstream and the avant garde, and it maps on to that cultural
distinction this distinction between the brands, Apple and Microsoft. In other words, Apple is
taking advantage of a cultural structure, a cultural architecture and it seems to me with the work
that Bogusky has recently done for you, I'm sure you work in collaboration with Bogusky, you
managed to tunnel out. It's a lovely piece of -- it's a lovely piece of work.
So here's kind of what it looks like. Western culture has always had this notion of a mainstream.
For all of the diversity that's always existed in western cultures there's been something like a
consensus in place governed by elites and yet people signing on. And it's a certain amount of
noise in the system, but there's a general consensus about what this culture cares about and how
people think about themselves and how they think about the world. And then you add -- and
times our on the 1850s and you'll see it in the book. I try to nail this down, and I shouldn't done a
perfect job. But I think roughly speaking this is right.
Around 1850 you get this kind of systematic invention of a thing called the avant garde. It
happens in Paris. Its artists systematically defining themselves in contradistinction to Bourgeoise
society in Paris. And this thing -- check it out and see if I got this right. But it looks to me like
these 5,000 artists in Paris around 1850 design this posture, this alternative posture and it's the
ultimate name, it's the ultimate virus. It starts to recruit like crazy until you get a hundred years
later in 1950s, you've got beat poets who are playing out the same alternative vision, but now -- I
grew up as a kid in Vancouver, BC, up the road here. I knew -- I mean, totally obscure, totally
kind of middle class bland Canadian upbringing and I knew about the beat poets. What those
artists invented 100 years before was now kind of general rally distributed. And our culture now
had this kind of tension between the mainstream -- the old mainstream and the present avant
garde.
Sorry. I have to take a breath.
Something -- sometime around the 1880s, this was really fun to see anthropologically. This is
one of my big bets as an anthropologist. I wrote a book called Platitudes, everyone said -- I
mean, the jeer -- my argument was our culture is fragmenting, we've got this dynamism, this kind
of invention has been let loose and the elites are falling -- the whole thing is kind of generating in
an interesting kind of way.
I'm pleased to say everybody now agrees with me. But when I produced this book 20 years ago,
I was pilloried for it.
So anyhow, we now know there's a their circle here where people are disobeying the mainstream
but it's not because they're insisting upon making the statement of themselves as being hip or
cool or alternative or holier than thousand. That whole avant garde notion comes right out of
Paris in the 1850s was we may be poor, we may live on the margin of things, but we have a kind
of cultural capital. We have a kind of social standing that makes us way more important, way
better, more sophisticated, more desirable than those poor schmooze who live in Bourgeois
splender in the suburbs. We're better than that.
That alternative message isn't happening here. These people are just saying no, we're not
mainstream, but we're not posturing here, we're not insisting on our coolness, we're just different.
So here's how it plays out. Apple says book, we're going to map the brands against this
distinction between mainstream and avant garde, and then Bogusky, you guys and Bogusky get
together and think how do we do this? And the notion is let's occupy this third space with the
IMPC campaign. I think it's just a brilliant piece.
You were the captives of Apple's strategy and its use of some aspect of your culture and you
tunneled out brilliantly. I mean just brilliantly. Now it just does brilliant things in your struggle with
Apple. Instead of looking like that guy from, you know, the IMPC -- I'm sorry, the Apple PC
distinction, instead of this guy, you know, he's always dressed like a hipster vaguely and he's
always dealing with this clueless -- this guy, now Apple suddenly looks self-conscious, it looks like
it's trying so hard, it looks like it's so hip it hurts. Tragically hip is the phrase used in Canada.
Compared to little Kylie, remember she's probably Korean American, the little girl who is editing a
photograph on her -- you know, Apple now just looks likes -- looks like a dope by comparison. So
it's fantastically good work because that -- Apple's works there had been devastating to the
brand. And this is a nice way of getting out.
So value of CCO then is someone who knows the standing architect of the culture that knows that
we divide the world into mainstream and avant garde sees the third domain install itself and
seizes on itself as an opportunity to fight the Apple positioning.
So just summing up now, suggesting I would ask you to consider the possibility that we treat
culture as a core competence. This is a time I think to take culture more seriously, to map it, to
mine it, to spot the blind-side hits, to look for the opportunities to have the CCO acting as a
navigational officer. And I just want to make a last note. Because I know people in this room are
really good at one of the things I'm not good at. And please, this is just a kind of personal appeal.
It would be very quick.
I need culture metrics. A CCO is going to need cultural metrics. And they don't exist right now.
Because of this, you know -- the inclination to make culture a thing of the humanities and
anthropologies not famously statistical.
I've got an HBS student is now running -- he owns a music catalog and we were topology and he
said at any time ASCAP can give me the figures for what music was played this morning in the
United States broken down by region, by radio station region and the radio stations are very
carefully kind of positioned, right, to take advantage of certain demographics.
So that data, you know, just at the very least if what we had was a baseline and then noticed the
data tell us that country and western music is up in the northeast, that would be really interesting
as a cultural indicator that something was happening. It would be like here's some work I did for
Coke was, Coke sponsored a torch run in Tokyo and people came out wept as they watched this
torch run go by. And Coke said what do we do? I mean, they do this with all Olympics and
people like it or don't like it. But this was an extraordinary action. They sent a team of us in to
find out. So this is the kind of thing you get this baseline, you get the data, you send people in to
find out what's going on. We can -- you know, people are trying to scrape Amazon and YouTube
for this kind of data but we can get way better at it.
I just want to end with this wonderful example. And this is kids at MIT rigged Cambridge with
cameras that were sensitive only to color. And so what -- what you can use these cameras to tell
you, to identify -- this is Cambridge and these are -- this is color clothing -- clothing color in
Cambridge. I mean, believe me, nobody cares about how people are dressing in Cambridge. I
mean least of all the kids living in Cambridge.
But imagine if you had this map for some fashion sensitive neighborhood in Paris or London or
Tokyo, imagine if you had a map for each of those and you could watch -- you could say -- you
could say, okay, the fashion shows happen in Paris and then you could watch all these
neighborhoods and see where the colors took. Just this kind of this idea of streaming data. So if
any of you are interested in kind of working on a project like that, I would love to hear about it.
Okay. That's it. Thank you very much. Please let's chat and thoughts and comments, please.
Give me a shout. Thank you. Sir?
>>: A lot of your talk focussed on large corporations and how they should adopt [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Was your recommendation for smaller startups or media size companies?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. I think, you know, Moore's book, Leaping the Chasm, the earlier of
doctors of any technology are people who are themselves very good at technology that probably
have some knowledge of, and so you give them a new technology and they figure out how to use
it. The way the chasm comes is you want to start speaking to people who don't have that
inclination or that knowledge, now you have to craft it for somebody who's clueless. It seems to
me that's where you really needed a CCO.
And if you think about Facebook as a startup in its early days and you see what Chris Hughes is
doing, he's really looking at how people are going to want to use the technology, then he says oh,
this is the kinds of differences this will make to people's lives and then let's build this in. So that
rapid iteration I think that would be a case in point.
But I think it's -- you know, I have a friend of mine at MIT who says, you know, you should be
talking to people who are coming out of startups that stalled not for want of money, necessarily,
but because they couldn't find that place in the market that really works. Those are the people
who might be interested in the book. Sir?
>>: I can't help but think there might be a little bit of innovators the lemon built in, like especially
the Levi's example, the baggy jeans. Like I have a hard time believing none of their product
managers, marketers saw the trend at all.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: They were probably just in denial about it, I mean that their way was better?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: And they had something to protect. They had a sort of installed base to protect. Do you
agree with that?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, totally. I think that had to be the case with Tropicana. You know,
everybody looks at that second package and just goes what were you thinking? I mean,
everybody knows that's bad design. And so I expect a lot of people didn't want to do it. And
that's the thing. It was so much pressure coming from on high that only a senior manager, only a
CCO could throw himself on the tracks on that one. Everybody else was just going to be Nooyi
wants this, Massimo was her second in command wants this, so they just do what they do.
So that's my -- that would be another I think rationale for somebody who's prepared to -- a heavy
hitter ->>: It has to be a pretty senior person to have that fighting chance is what you're saying?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, exactly. Sir?
>>: How do you really operationalize this [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: No, I know. It's like I -- you know, the first generation of CCOs, if there is a
first generation, they're going to be like engineers that have to invent the math while they're doing
the engineering. I mean, it's not -- and that's why I want some of the cultural metrics because I
think that will make life -- there's so much water front to cover the churn, the dynamism is so
intense that, you know, anything we can do to create those instruments would be useful. But it's
not going to be -- it's not going to be easy.
One of the things I think we won't want to have happen -- a lot of people who are doing MBAs
also did a first degree at a business school. And my sense is that that's wrong. You know, liberal
arts is a good place to start. Engineering is a great place to start. But this two MBA thing -- two
business degrees is probably not a good idea.
So I have no real answer. And that's a problem. If something like this presentation the Stanford
B school, one of the kids did the symbol of hurry up, like we get the argument, now how do we do
this? And I had to say, well we'll have to see how it works.
>>: Well, it seems like it's kind of at odds with the current methodology that we're used to. You
study the market on a product or any of those things, right? It's almost like it's another layer on
top of [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Totally.
>>: And you almost have to engineer it [inaudible] it's a new thing.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I'm hoping if people really have -- you know, do
their foundational work and they have a, you know, deep and intimate knowledge of American
culture they can deliver in realtime, you know, ad hoc -- on an ad hoc basis. So they can look at
a -- they can step into a project that's happening and saying, you know, if it's not a very bad idea,
in which case they have to throw themselves on the tracks, they can say tinker here, tinker there,
fit, fit, fit kind of thing. Yeah? Please.
>>: And also related question. It also feels like in the example [inaudible] more of a right brain
[inaudible] making some of those decisions.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Having that foundation [inaudible] could also allow the people just to use that [inaudible].
Like I'm sure when he saw the Razr that was a [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. The problem here, this stuff often gets looked at as kind of soft side
as opposed to hard side decision making. The problem is that there's so many factors you need
to control. This is why historian's and actually not very good as historian's until they're in their
40s because they have to learn so many facts before they can have the sense of pattern
recognition where they can go oh, they've got all factors in mind. And then the truth, some
conclusion comes to them as if bubbling up from the unconscious. But in fact that's a systematic
kind of -- and almost a hard process, right, of keeping track of many factors and figuring out how
he work in relation one to the other.
>>: [inaudible] or is it something that [inaudible] like ->> Grant McCracken: I think you can ->>: [inaudible] like he just did a -- I mean his own explanation of it was organic, right, even if it
was a systematic approach it [inaudible] consciously ->> Grant McCracken: Yes. I think you know you can get -- I mean, the really inspired people will
always be head and shoulders above the rest of us, but I think the rest of us can get way better at
-- the smartest thing anybody said in the HBS -- the HBS knew, was he said something so brilliant
it was like a holographic image formed above our heads. It was just perfect. And I looked him
up in the system and I said this is going to be a kid with a degree from Princeton or something.
And he was an engineer who had come out of the British military just like no humanity's training
whatsoever, just very smart, very clear, fantastic, you know, he's a commando actually, so it was
all about improv kind of like what do we do in this -- how do we read this situation as it forms and
what do we do now?
So I think all that stuff is -- yes?
>>: So how do you see this connecting? I know at the beginning you said this is about you know
American culture outside the culture ->> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: The [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, totally.
>>: [inaudible]. I, you know, would envision a chief culture officer being able to [inaudible] that
and reconcile those and [inaudible] then also being able to create a culture inside in that
[inaudible] culture outside.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: And drag that.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: So how do you see that relationship happening between or balancing or, you know,
integrating the outside culture ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: The work going on on inside?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: The corporate culture and changes that are trying to drive or what not.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's not going to be easy. And my -- one of the things I
sort of labored to talk about in the book and I haven't had a chance to talk about it here is I think
this notion of CCO will have to be a person of absolute humility. This -- I've seen this happen. I
don't know if you see it happening here, but I used to see it happening in Coca-Cola company.
You would come into the board room a tiny bit late and you could tell exactly who the agency -not the agency to be -- that's unfair. But the gurus in the room would always have -- be dressed
in Prada head to toe and have fantastically cool glasses. And the rest of the meeting would
consist of them telling senior managers of Coca-Cola company, very smart people, thank you
very much, sort of brow beating them for not knowing what the kids were doing, you know, not
knowing what an ollie was in the skateboard culture.
And it was just like, this can't be happening -- you know, and bless them, these senior managers
would go okay, good ollie the check. But there's some sense that they had been embarrassed for
not knowing about culture. And I guess that's my hope here is that we'll see people -- we'll see all
of that go away.
But we have to stay a step further -- I'm sorry. I am getting to an answer. The person who is a
CCO in the C suite is not only not going to be able to be Mr. Smarty or Ms. Smarty pants, she or
she is going to have to be an extraordinarily humble person who just puts him or herself at the
disposal of everybody in the C suite. So, you know, HR should have a keen interest in the culture
of American culture.
So it's that kind of devotion to everyone's enterprise in addition to one's own. And then this
question of how -- and again, there's this opportunity in making the corporate culture a fountain of
knowledge about contemporary culture. So that's one way of getting engagement. And building
that loop inside outside, outside inside, living, breathing kind of corporation notion. And then this
global notion of like you know, just talking about American culture, you're talking about a global
culture as American culture shapes and is shaped by that. So it's a very -- it's a complicated
thing. And it will take -- you know, somebody is going to have to have the powers of an air traffic
controller in Chicago's O'Hare, right, just being able to keep track of all this stuff would be
fantastically interesting.
But, yeah, I'm hoping it's possible. I'm hoping I haven't created like a misery for someone. That's
my great fear. I think -- sir, let me just, please.
>>: I have a question about the metrics.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah?
>>: So can you give another example -- I ->> Grant McCracken: Sure.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: You bet.
>>: Because you started off with a mystery, a culture is a mystery.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah.
>>: Now I understand, you know, how you might be able to look at [inaudible] but the measurable
part [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah. The notion is, it's kind of standing notion, this wonderful
Harvard anthropologist called Nonie Adams goes into this Indonesian village and she looks at the
pattern, she looks at the way villages are designed, and she says holy cow, if you think about it,
sort of blink your eyes and you stand back a little bit, that's the structure of thought in this
Indonesian community. And that's the notion is that for anthropologists you conditional ever see
culture straight up, right? You can't ever see the ideas in somebody's head. All you can see are
the manifestations. Some of those come to you in the course of an ethnographic interview, just
quiz you long enough and carefully enough and they begin to see what you think and you feel
and how you've conceptualized your world.
But another way, kind of wisdom of crowd's way is to see what happens when -- you know, the
coolest example here would be a best seller list is crudely a measure of what people care about
to the extent that we imagine the industry -- the publishing industry is good enough actually to
speak to every interest out there of any size and then it's a kind of voting system. People buy
books or they don't buy books and the topics we care about most rise to the top and now we have
a measure. That's really all I'm talking about here. Is any unobtrusive measure that gives us a
sense of what's going on in people's heads and their hearts.
And what happens to them collectively as they all decide they're interested in American Idol.
>>: It's a great example when you see looking back as in after the fact you measure things.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: But before the fact when you look into the future.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah.
>>: What are you measuring?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. You're getting at these basic -- theories the thing that just occurred
to me a couple days ago. I was looking at somebody was talking about the TV shows, the prime
time TV shows that had won on Thursday evening -- Tuesday evening and the ones that had lost.
And I thought okay, what are the ones that have lost have in common with one another, what do
the ones that have won have in common with one other? And you could say holy cow, maybe the
alternative impulse of our culture is so strong in the 1990s, maybe it's gasped its last gasp
because all the losers look like they came from a '90s sensibility. All the winners looked like they
actually expressed a kind of post '90s, non-ironic, non-alternative kind of sensibility.
So it's that kind of thing. And then you do your ethnography and you -- please?
>>: So my question is for a CCO.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Is it just intuition that you ->> Grant McCracken: I think it's intuition based on years of study and then these great metrics or
these great opportunities to see that oh, the country western music is up in the northeast. The
last thing you expect. It's any time your expectations are violated and you go wait, that can't be
happening, now you know this is a culture under construction as it always is. I'm sorry. You
know ->>: I'm just.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah, no, no, I know. Sure. Totally. Sir?
>>: So you seem to be talking about external culture as being pretty distinct from the corporate
culture. Or maybe not distinct [inaudible] just a distinction [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: I want to know what thoughts you have around corporate culture actually being a reflection
reflective of the external culture of [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Like the [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Something that comes to mind was like [inaudible] argues that culture is really controlled by a
set of people.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Called connectors.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Who pretty much [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: So [inaudible] why do you have to hire that guy who has to figure out what the coolest boots
are to wear? Why should the dude who wears the boots like everybody else [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Why do you have to find one guy who still goes out where the connectors are?
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Why don't you actually hire a bunch of connectors to work for you and to be not under the
influence of -- influence of culture but they are also [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: So I don't know what your thoughts are.
>> Grant McCracken: Sure.
>>: About that. Can you ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: [inaudible] distinct from outside culture or just be [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah. I did just something for each Harvard business review blog
on the Ford Fiesta campaign. They have a car coming out next year, and they used this really
interesting approach to social media. What they did -- what's interesting about this I think from
marketing point of view is they said that that Malcolm Gladwell's model is dying. That was the
notion that, you know, incredibly powerful over the last five years, maybe after Malcolm' book,
right, whatever that date is forward, this kind of virus -- well, I guess the guy at NYU also makes
this argument.
But this notion that -- it's a virus and that all you need to do is colonize the early adopters and
they'll do the work of dissemination, of diffusion, right? They'll get the message out. And other
people because they admire them will follow them and then you get a few, you get a lot.
His notion for the Ford Fiesta campaign there's a guy called Bud Caddell who works for
undercurrent who worked for Ford. And his notion was no, these are not the people we want to
talk to. We want to talk to the people who create the best and most interesting cultural content
and engage them as co-creators of the brand. And they don't have to be especially influential,
they just have to be especially creative. Anyhow, I'll send you the reference. If you give me your
card, I'll send you the reference.
So it feels like there's some shift in that Gladwellian proposition, there's some -- I certainly write
for some purposes. But what it assumes is that you can get there from here, you know, and if
what Granovetter tells -- which is to say these people -- these networks are really wired in just this
way and that we really do imitate our betters, our diffusion betters. We see what they do and we
go oh, yeah, I want an Infinity automobile.
Those propositions may be dubious and the more fragmented our culture gets, the less certain it
is. So you can get to early adopters, but they have a relatively small radius. And I think
Granovetter's argument, from which Gladwell drew some of his argument would argue that in fact
we're more disparate, we're less connected than we used to be. And so you can't get many from
a few necessarily.
>>: So you wouldn't be a focus of say the HR department of a company to say we have to make
sure we target people who have some ->> Grant McCracken: Oh, you're arguing like hire them for internal purposes and then use them
for external purposes. Sorry, missed that. That's brilliant. No, it's a great idea.
And then it's going to be -- I was just reading about Zappos and everybody is talking about how
fun it is to work at Zappos, and when you come in they all sing and I was thinking, oh, dear, I
don't want to work in a corporation where I have to sing the praises of -- you know, there's kind of
that forced fun thing that you get going on in some companies. I don't think -- and you certainly
couldn't do it if what you had done was bring somebody in because they really new some expect
of culture. I'm not sure you can ever -- I think that's what you want to have and you don't want to
make them kind of a champion of the corporate culture because that's less interesting than what
they know from outside. It's a great idea though. Please?
>>: I notice that all of your examples were [inaudible] facing.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Do you suggest that this would be as relevant for non [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Like a B to B kind of thing. Yeah, I would hope so. I would hope so. And
it comes from -- I just did something for a scientific supply company in Boston, and they were -they used to make filters. Now, suppliers offshore make those same filters. So their notion is
oops, we have to make filters plus some intellectual value.
>>: Like what Johnson controls has done over the past several years.
>> Grant McCracken: Is that right? I don't know that story. That's interesting. But ->>: [inaudible] designing interiors.
>> Grant McCracken: Exactly. And as you climb that hierarchy of value, you have to know more
and more about the culture because it's no longer just about the utilitarian property of how tiny
are the portions between the strands and the filter kind of thing. So, yeah, I would argue. And if
that's where American companies are going to be forced to go, because there are offshore
competitors who just undercut them by price extraordinarily, it feels like -- and it is the American
advantage. I think Americans are good at -- well, I would be careful about saying this, because I
think south Asia is an interesting place because I get the sense of south Asian friends in Toronto
are quick to point out that they get a south Asia culture and they get a North American culture.
So -- I'm interested to see India kind of establish a claim here that will test the person claim to
being as Richard Florida would say, you know, the culture creatives who really get the cultural
stuff and can really create value at that level. I think India will give us the Americans a run for our
money. Yeah? Please.
>>: You made a brief comment about American [inaudible] and being surprised that people
[inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Could you explain [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. It just feels to me like democracy in its perfect -- in it's Athenian
origins, right? It's voice -- it's face to face, it's voice to voice. You -- literally people are counting
and with the new technologies it should be possible to canvas.
Now, listen, I totally understand American Idol is for certain purposes the very worst kind of thing
because people are gaming the system like crazy. But I'm assuming that's what great
engineering is for is to figuring out how to create a system that can't be gamed.
>>: I disagree strongly. It's not engineering. We know how to do the engineering. There are
reasons for not doing it. So ->> Grant McCracken: Really? Great. I'd love to hear about those. It just feels to me like it
should be -- the expression political will should be more transparent than it should. And why do
we have people in Washington who are subject to every kind of influence beyond the will of the
voice of the people feels to me like we could get better. If we disintermediated that process,
Washington would be more reflective of ->>: In some ways. But there are advantages to representing the [inaudible] living in a state
where [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: We see here the pain [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible] ever little thing.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: And there's a real reason for secret ballot voting. And we have no practical way of doing that
[inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Fair enough. Good argument. Thanks. Sir?
>>: I was thinking about the photo of the colors and it was kind of muddy in some ways.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: I mean, there was pockets of color and everything. And I was thinking about the churn and
the fragmentation that you were mentioning. I wonder about the longevity of this role.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: In the sense that all fashions it seems like are in balance now. You can see people 70s, 80s,
90s and probably 20s.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: [inaudible] and it makes me wonder, is the really acronym not so much CCO but CVO, chief
values officers. And my question is what is the relationship between culture and values and how
would this role actually leverage that? Because that's the meat of how we define I think the
different global ->> Grant McCracken: Gotcha.
>>: Differences.
>> Grant McCracken: Totally. From the anthropological orthodoxy here is values continue within
cultures and values are explicit consciously held expressions of preference that say, you know,
this is what a family should look like, whatever it looks like. Whereas so it's just a subset of the
larger piece which is culture which contains many things. Ideas that we have about the world we
don't know we have about the world. So culture there is operating invisibly within us to organize
our perception and our response to the world. But it's not unlike a value, something that we can
see ourselves using.
And so so much of culture then, because it's invisible, doesn't admit of our change except in a
kind of collective kind of dynamic kind of unconscious kind of way whereas values are -- you
know, people can and do have violent debates about what family values are, for instance. So
that would be -- so only to know about values would be only knowing about signs. There's a big
piece of culture that you still want to have control of I think.
>>: Perhaps one more question and [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Sure. You bet. Sir?
>>: I'm going to do an AB question here. [laughter].
>> Grant McCracken: Sure.
>>: First question with regards to culture and trends. Do you see culture as evolving quicker
based on Facebook and our online world?
Second question. We already talked about a vision. And what I keep hearing you say is we have
really good fast, ultra fast. So help me blend between -- right.
>>: Because you're identifying trends. But to me that's fast fall. But tell me how to get to leading
in applying vision. But first I'd like to know how fast -- how do you see trends in terms of culture
changing? Are they changing faster or are they changing the same pace? We just -- you know
kind of project that they're happening faster?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. It's an interesting problem. Well, here's a good example of how
things are -- structural prompts of our culture are changing under the pressure of change. When I
did an exhibit about Toronto teenagers in 1990 in Canada we were looking at kids -- when I was a
teenager, growing up in Vancouver I was asked as a teenager to subscribe to a culture different
than my parents. And I had two or three choices. And once I made that change, the notion was
this was a life long kind of change, I would be whatever I was for the -- I actually got recruited to
be part of a gang in Vancouver, believe it or not.
The notion was I would belong to that group forever. When we were doing the study in 1990, it
was clear that kids were -- that what had happened in the interim was that kids now had many
gangs -- I'm sorry, many groups were open to them as definitional envelopes or possibilities for
them as teenagers, and they could kind of mix and match. They could belong to several or two or
-- and they could move back and forth between them. And when we did the study in 1990, we're
beginning to see the pattern that is now in place, which is the notion of groups is kind of dying all
together and kids are developing this kind of modular identity, a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
maybe some as they particular kind of -- you know for some purposes they might have a Goth
moment, for other purposes they might have a skater moment, but those are not like -- they're no
longer cultures or trends of any substantial kind. And it's much more like a smorgasbord, a little
of this, a little of that, moving back and forth, cultivating this kind of complicated portfolio of
selves.
So that's -- you know, now we're liquefying, right, we're going from the old model of here's a
group, you have to choose whether you belong to it or not, and once you choose you're locked in.
Now we're going to oh, they really aren't groups, they're motifs for the self that you can adopt or
not adopt.
And am I getting to ->>: [inaudible] our cultures changing but I'm thinking if I'm Levi-Strauss, right.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: And today it's about baggy jeans, tomorrow it's about straight, you know, skinny leg jeans
and so are these things happening faster than they used to be? You know, a trend lasted three
years, now it's six months.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. Yeah.
>>: Is this [inaudible].
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. So one way to think about this is to look at Madonna as an
innovator, right? She came along at a time -- in the old days it used to be if you were lucky
enough to get a hip act you would remain that persona, you would remain that band until you
ended up playing in Las Vegas for the rest of your life, where you have to play your best seller
over and over and over again.
So Madonna comes along and says, well, this isn't very interesting, and she changes, what,
every year or every six months she's -- what she's doing is picking up innovations she sees taking
place in the street and she becomes those for a brief time. But she's only there for a very -- I did
a book called transformations a couple of years ago in which I contrast Madonna with. Who is
that -- the woman ->>: Lady Gaga?
>> Grant McCracken: No, I'm coming to her actually. Who is the brunette who is on the
Grammy's or the Golden Globes just the other night, the woman with -- I'm sorry. Damn. What's
her name? I can't think of it. Anyhow. So the difference -- the instructive difference here I think is
between Madonna and lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is changing her persona with every performance,
right? And so she's streaming novelty.
And I think -- now, we still get in the face of that fantastic variety or that streaming change, I think
we get some good effects for big brands. And I think it's this kind of when the word streams with
novelty here, you really want to have a connection to big brands, which have this kind of I give
you a navigational signal, I give you a kind of anchoring in the world, so whatever else changes
and everything else is going to change ->>: This is a great way to segue in vision.
>> Grant McCracken: Yes.
>>: And why I'm curious why you've not said vision.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: Talked about vision, the importance of setting a direction.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: As opposed to saying [inaudible] anthropological trends.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: That say well I kind of see opportunities here where in our business you're having a little
[inaudible] 10 years out. I mean these are big bets, right?
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: It's not I can change our product line in a minute.
>> Grant McCracken: Totally. Totally.
>>: So where's the role of vision in this saying maybe I don't flee see the trends like -- I would
actually argue looking at the orange juice box.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: Okay? Who's to say that that wasn't the right direction? Show me the metrics.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: And I come from a design background.
>> Grant McCracken: Right.
>>: I come from ad agency background. That's why I would say hey, it's beautiful. I may not
admit the needs of a particular target audience, but that doesn't mean he was wrong.
>> Grant McCracken: Well, 20 percent drop in sales says he's wrong. In a month.
>> Grant McCracken: And I look at that. But I would also say that how many examples of things
would we show hey, people got too far out ahead of a curve because their vision was too far out.
>>: Right.
>> Grant McCracken: That's all I'm saying is how do you blend those things there because oh,
there's always a fast follower, which we get the most discredit for being ->> Grant McCracken: Yeah, totally. I think if you know your culture you can talk about
trajectories and so you're no longer locked into that brief moment when things -- you know, we
think about this as a kind of ocean plus a surface world, right, and there are forces operating to
shape what's happening under water. And if what we're doing is -- if the only time we can track
them is when they break the surface and capture them as they arc and then disappear again, as
things get faster, that's a mug's came as my father would have said.
What we want is to have some sense of what's circulating under the surface and tracking it and
having some sense of what its possibilities are so that when it breaks the surface we have -- we
know it on a first name basis and we can make some predictions about how long, how fast. Well,
this is one of the things I didn't talk about, but one of the things I recommend in the book is this
notion of a big board. And I have a student who now works in a big -- now manages a big
portfolio fund as one of the people who does. And I love the way he goes through, looks at all of
his stock bets on a like weakly, monthly, quarterly basis, figures out, well, the things you did right,
you know -- even the decisions he made right he goes through and figures out why he was right
and whether he was right for the right reasons and then for the reasons he was wrong he's just
scrupulously kind of honest about the assumptions he made and why his thinking was off.
That -- and so if we can pick up things really early and track them, then it should be old friends by
the time they hit the mainstream and we should have some sense of -- and I love the way he's
effectively having to place bets, right, because he's managing -- but we could do that too.
>>: But effectively we're playing big bets with everything we do.
>> Grant McCracken: Totally.
>>: Because the consumer and then you know, you like the commercial side of this. And they're
very different, right.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah.
>>: And they're moving at different paces.
>> Grant McCracken: Yeah. So I like the idea of us picking up stuff when it's just -- it's almost all
noise and not much signal. It's really hard to tell what it is, right? Some of the innovations that
we now see in a Hollywood screen showed up in alphabet city in New York City 20 years ago as
innovated, innovative kind of film making.
>>: Right.
>> Grant McCracken: And in those days you're really not sure what you're looking at, you're not
sure if it's good for anything, but you should have it on the big board and you should be watching
it. You should have measures metrics that say, yeah, it's recruiting, it's growing, it's happening.
And then you should say in three months we figure it should be here. And when it's not there
three months later, we have to say, well, we were wrong somehow about what we thought it was
going to be. I mean, that's my -- that's what I'm hoping.
>> Kim Rickets: Thank you.
>> Grant McCracken: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening.
[applause].
>> Grant McCracken: Please, give me a shout.