Introduction
I read recently that the thing that keeps CEOs awake at night is “discontinuous innovation�� of the kind Clay Christensen describes.�� This struck me as odd because Christensen’s discontinuity isn’t hard to recognize or anticipate.�� (His model says: an incumbent offers more value than customers want, and a competitor responds with products that are cheaper but “good enough.��)�� Scary, to be sure, but how does it count as a sleep stealer?�� There’s nothing particularly mysterious or unmanageable here.

Surely, the scarier thing for a CEO to discover is that the world has changed in a way that defies his or her deepest assumptions.�� This change is hard to detect.�� And when detected, it is hard to respond to.�� I would have thought that in a Schumpeterian world of creative destruction, this is more likely and the more problematical event (Handy 1991).�� Let’s call it “structural change.��

Every corporation, every act of commerce, is predicated on a set of assumptions.�� These are the infrastructure of all thought and even the most instrumental action.�� Every enterprise is, as Drucker and Levitt demonstrated, shot through with assumptions, some witting, most not. ��

These assumptions aren’t just technically invisible.�� They are deliberately invisible.�� In turns out that some knowledge is more efficacious the more deeply it is assumed. �� (So says Bateson.)�� Indeed, the more we use an idea, the more completely it disappears from view.�� Thus do our deepest ideas “go without saying.”�� Semi-deep ideas can be evoked with a single ‘buzz word.”�� They are “built in�� or, as Foster and Kaplan prefer, “locked in.��

In a perfect world, these assumptions would float to the surface upon expiration.�� As fish do.�� But they don’t.�� So we keep using them.�� These assumptions are deeply implicated in the way we see the world.�� They can be and have been stuff of our best hunches and most powerful intuitions. Breaking up is hard to do. ��

What provokes assumption failure?�� Where does structural change come from?�� Some of it comes from the ceaseless innovation of the world.�� Dupont introduces something called “plastic.�� �� James Black finds a new way to make pharmaceuticals.�� Or Mr. Newmark invents Craig’s List.�� We doze for a moment and there’s a fast food industry.�� We doze a moment more and there’s a slow food movement (American markets are like the weather, or for that matter the markets, in Ireland.�� Wait a moment, they will change). Even as these innovations make themselves visible on the surface of the marketplace, in a less obvious way they attack our deepest assumptions.

Some structural change comes from the academic and the management literature.�� The authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto say “advertising is not messaging, it’s conversation.”�� An industry turns on its ear.�� Jenkins changes the way we think “media�� mediates. �� Another industry is upended.�� Florida says creativity is not an ancillary of the marketplace, but it’s prime mover.�� Pine and Gilmore say, “You are not making products or services.�� You’re making experiences.”��

Whatever else they do, these ideas contradict a fundamental assumption of capitalism, that the business of business is making things.�� Each in their way, Drucker, Porter, Stewart and others anticipated this assault on literalism.�� We are not “making things to make money,�� they said.�� We are “creating value to capture value.”�� And with this fundamental change, new process and practice is set in train, and the world begins to drift. ��

Structural change also comes from practice.�� It emerges from things happening in the marketplace, the corporation, or the world of the consumer.�� This change is not created or officiated by experts.�� (Unless of course that expert is Oprah.)�� It comes swimming up out of the interactions of many parties, driven by various motives, parties who may not be aware of the intentions or even the presence of others.��

Take the case of the American “great room.�� In the last 25 years, millions of Americans knocked down the walls between kitchen, living room, and dining room.�� They spent many hundreds of millions of dollars, in the process turning their homes into construction zones.�� The great room did not come from the design community or even an Oprah episode.�� It came from Americans, flying by the seat of their pants, trying to figure out a way to accommodate emerging notions of children, childhood, child rearing, domesticity, parenthood, feminism, informality, media consumption, dining, hospitality, weekends, entertainment, cooking, serving, and food.�� So much for our assumptions about the American family.

Implications

There are several steps the corporation can take to protect itself from structural change. ��

1.�� Scan the horizon

Watch for changes in the world that will test and perhaps overturn the assumptions in the corporation.�� The disintermediation of the supply chain, what will this mean to our assumptions about distribution?�� More specifically, what happens when Amazon.com begins to eliminate bricks and mortar retailers and the Mall?�� Is there a “New Normal�� that defines consumer taste and preference and what would it mean to our assumptions about what consumers want?�� The corporation needs to examine the future, and to anticipate how it will challenge present assumptions (McCracken).

2.�� Excavate the assumptions of the corporation

2.1�� Excavate Management models

These models sweep through the corporation with some frequency: “excellence�� from Peters and Waterman, “reengineering�� from Hammer and Champy, “built to last�� from Collins and Porras. These models, with their key phrases and characteristic points of view, reform the corporate culture and the minds of managers. ��

There is no “sunset clause�� for management models.�� We may stop using the model, but rarely do we repudiate it.�� The model is still there, passive and invisible.�� Occasionally it will “reactivate�� without warning.�� Someone will object to “strategy A�� on the grounds that “I can’t see what this has to do with excellence.”�� Everyone recognizes the term.�� They know it as a value that corporation once valued.�� So people are inclined to defer.�� “Excellence.�� Good point.�� Let’s move on.”�� Too bad.�� Because “strategy A�� was a good idea. ��

2.2�� Excavate the local culture of the corporation

The local culture of the corporation has many sources: the vision of the founder, ideas introduced through mergers and acquisitions, cataclysmic events in the history of the corporation (public ones like the depression of the 1920s, and private ones like the time the CFO decamped with the corporate “playbook��), and the culture of the locality (Silicon Valley vs. New York City vs. Austin, Texas).�� Here too we have a variety of old and new ideas pouring into the corporation.�� The old live on.�� The new recruit vigorously.�� The corporation hums with a variety of ideas, some visible, all active. ��

2.3�� Excavate the culture of the component professions

There are many professional paths to the business world.�� People come up as engineers, MBAs, entrepreneurs, accountants, industrial designers, graphic designers, liberal arts graduates.�� Each of these professions imbues the graduate with a certain way of seeing the world, of solving a problem. �� (I did a project for a Canadian telecom and the marketer expressed her frustration with the engineers with whom we were working, “Every time I leave them in a room together, they start building a machine!��)�� In a perfect world, the corporation would achieve a miracle of ecumenical cooperation.�� More often, certain professional cultures are given more influence than others.�� So we need the various professional assumptions and the value hierarchy that distribute their power.��

2.4�� Excavate the culture of the industry

Every industry has characteristic ways and means.�� The car culture of Detroit, the start up culture of Silicon Valley, the P&G method as it has influenced the world of CPG (consumer packaged goods), the engineering cultures of IBM and GE, the new approaches emerging from the likes of Etsy and Zappos.�� Furthermore, every industry is various.�� Some part of the financial world sees itself as “white shoe.”�� Another is “Florsheim.”�� Still another is “hush puppy.”�� These assumptions need mapping.�� To be sure, they build consensus and confer strength.�� But they also create vulnerability when change happens.��

2.5�� Excavate out the culture of business

The world of business has certain shared assumptions.�� We are inclined to share a certain way of defining the actor, the action, the motive, the objective, the unit of analysis.�� These appear to be matters of simple rationality.�� But of course the differences between Japanese, American, and Canadian business practice tell us that cultural choice shapes this rationality.�� Furthermore, there is a range of choice within the rational.�� There are many ways, in that horrible phrase, to skin a cat. ��

The key problem: one rationality may conceal another, as they discovered recently at IBM.�� Kevin Clark, then Director of IBM Alumni Relations and the Greater IBM Connection, noticed that IBM was insisting on the boundaries of the corporation perhaps a little too literally.�� The fact of the matter is that Information Technology is a small world.�� Sooner or later everyone in the industry is going to work for IBM.�� And this means that it’s wrong of IBM to treat outsiders as outsiders.�� Clark noticed, for instance, that when people left IBM, IBM was inclined to severe the relationship.�� Clark believed the more sensible approach was to treat them as “temporarily relocating�� and to keep the relationship alive.

The culture of business encourages the corporation to insist on an emphatic boundary when indeed something more porous is sometimes called for.�� Only the retrieval of business assumptions renders this opportunity visible. �� The task here is to find the assumption and to release the corporation from its thrall.�� This is what Henry Jenkins�� did with his notion of “transmedia.”�� We can see how many ideas take their powers of illumination and the ability to create value from their ability to transcend the assumptions of the moment.�� This category has many examples including Henry Jenkins�� notion of “transmedia,�� C.K. Prahalad on the notion of “cocreation,�� Charles Handy on the future of work and Warren Bennis on the nature of the leader.

Professional development

Who will do this?�� Who will dig out assumptions for the corporations?�� The Liberal Arts ought to be a superb recruiting ground for this new profession.�� One could argue that the ability to find and scrutinize assumptions is the great gift part of the liberal arts education.�� But of course this part of the university continues to sneer at anything attached to commerce as beneath its dignity and corrupted by gainful motive (Nussbaum).�� The move to post-modernism compounds the problem by insisting on the instability of knowledge and the inscrutability of the world (Swaim). �� A.G. Lafley has called for a “hard headed humanist�� but only a few humanists have a feeling for taking on the problems of the real world.

The management consultant may not be the right person to undertake this work, but we have much to learn from the Bains and McKinseys of the world.�� The consulting houses are good at working from faint signals and approximate measures, at living with noisy data sets and problems that might as well be shape-shifters they are so fluid and changeable.�� We need to learn these methods and approaches, which is another way to say that we need to learn how to deal with the world when it is merely ignited by ideas and not very much comprehended by them. ��

A profession of this kind will need an institutional locus.�� To be sure, there are inklings and experiments.�� Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio have created something remarkable at CMS, and Henry Jenkins�� experiment continues at the Annenberg School at USC.�� David Kelley is creating something interesting at the Design Program at Stanford as is Joel M. Podolny at Apple University.�� Peter Drucker left behind an inclusive experiment at the Claremont University business school named for him. ��

If we dolly back a little further, another opportunity emerges: the creation of a consulting house that makes the pattern recognition of the arts, humanities and social sciences an integral part of the advice it gives to business.�� Here too there are inklings and experiments.�� And a question: why only these?

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dan Pereira for his thoughts on the original version of this paper.

You and your spouse are sitting down to some serious education.

You ask, “So what do you feel like?��

Your spouse says “how about Bernie and the Samurai?��

This is a favorite. You and your spouse invented it. It features Bernie Sanders palling around Elizabethan London with a Japanese Samurai.��

����’s pretty fun. You invented it, sure, but chatGPT did most of the work.

After some programming preliminaries (as below), you ask chatGPT:

Please create a script and a setting for Bernie Sanders and a Japanese samurai as they find themselves negotiating life in 16th century London.

Here’s what chatGPT delivers.

Location:��A bustling market square in 16th century London, filled with merchants, townsfolk, and the distant sound of carriages on cobblestone streets. The atmosphere is lively yet tense, with a mix of various cultures due to increased trade.

Time:��Mid-afternoon, with a light drizzle adding to the mud and chaos of the market square.

[Scene opens with Bernie and Takashi walking through a market, observing the various stalls and goods.]

Bernie:��(gesturing to the chaos around them) You know, Takashi, back in my time, this would be considered quite the regulatory nightmare. How are you finding London so far?

Takashi:��(looking around cautiously) It is�� different from Kyoto. More noisy, more dirty. But there is strength here, too. Different, but strong.

Bernie:��Exactly! ����’s the strength of the people. See, back where I come from, I always argue that the strength of a society lies in its fairness. Here, I think, we could do a lot of good.

[A commotion starts a few feet away from them, where a local thief has snatched a loaf of bread and is running away. A guard starts chasing him.]

Takashi:��(nods) In Japan, honor is our way of life. Dishonor, like stealing, brings shame not just to the individual, but to the whole family.

Bernie:��And that’s a good point! Here, people often steal out of necessity, not dishonor. If only they had enough to begin with�� Ah, it’s all about economic justice, my friend.

��

[They reach the end of the market, facing the Thames, a view of ships loading and unloading goods.]

Takashi:��(looking out over the river) So, Bernie, where to next in this vast city?

Bernie:��I say we find ourselves a decent pub and talk about healthcare. I’ve got some ideas that might just work, even here.

[Both laugh as they walk off towards the river, the camera pulling away to show the sprawling city of London.]

Oh, yes, listening to Bernie talking about healthcare in the plague ridden, regulatory nightmare that is early modern London, that’s going to be a beaut.��

Let’s make that episode 2. Bound to be riveting.��

So where did this idea come from?

Yesterday I was listening to the A16Z podcast.��

The topic was next-gen gaming.��

The host was Steph Smith and the guests were Andrew Chen and Josh Lu.��

The theme was creating games that “integrate seamlessly with the digital age�� and “move at the speed of culture.��

Last night, I asked myself “Hey what if chatGPT could work as a game grammar.��

So this morning I asked chatGPT:

�Ұ����Գ�:��

If I gave you 3 paradigmatic classes each with 4 items, could you assemble 1 item from each class to create a series of syntagmatic chains?

chatGPT:

Certainly! Please provide the three paradigmatic classes along with their four items each, and I’ll help you assemble them into syntagmatic chains.

Grant:

Class one should include these items: Jerry Seinfeld, Margaret Atwood, Bernie Sanders, Stuart Brand; Class two should include these items: wild comedy, deep tragedy, dark noir, tender romance; Class three should include these items: 16th century London, pre-colonial Brazil, china before the emperors, imperial Japan. Please create 10 chains.

���󲹳ٳұʰ�:��

Here are ten syntagmatic chains, each combining one item from each of your provided classes:

chatGPT concludes: These chains creatively merge each item from your classes into compelling and imaginative scenarios across different genres and settings.

No, it’s not perfect. But it’s a first try, provoked by simple questions and dispatched in 20 seconds.��

A next stage beckons. We want to give chatGPT access to our blog posts and social media, and anything else it can find, to craft a character called “Grant.�� And then it will insinuate him into the story. Personally, I would love to see what happens to me as I tag along behind Bernie and the Samurai. You know, in the mid-afternoon, with light drizzle adding to the mud and chaos of 16th century London.��

And there is a ton of creative tinkering to be done here. (Why should chatGPT have to do all the work?) What happens when we take these too predictable terms, wild comedy, deep tragedy, dark noir, tender romance and stir them a little: wild tragedy, dark comedy, deep romance and tender noir. The script begins to breathe a little.��

And that’s the end of entertainment as we know it. Who will want to sit down to watch a story written by someone else about someone else? It will all seem so very “silent picture.

[this post originally posted on Substack.]

A power struggle is playing out at��Vogue.��

Several things hang in the balance.

Specifically, this is a struggle between Edward Enninful and Anna Wintour.��

I have been waiting for an insider’s view of the contest, and found one in a brilliant essay by��.

Enniful took the helm of British Vogue in 2017. He was determined to make��Vogue��about diversity, disruption, inclusivity, and lots of experiment. He wanted a��Vogue��that was a champion of women and especially the young.

“disruption is important, because that’s the only way the world can move forward. To the younger generation, I want to say ‘be as fearless as you can and disrupt in your own way.’��

In a word he was fearless. He had no doubt that��

“I’m probably going to get fired for making it inclusive, but at the same time I thought that would be great. Because at least I would have been true to myself.��

As a culture, we are very good at disruption. Even at an institution as important as��Vogue.��

We are so good at disruption that we are now testing the limits of our culture to cohere.

“[Enniful] was always pushing for the next thing that was seen as progressive, but I think the magazine started to lose itself in the process. He was following fads. It was no longer recognizable from the��Vogue��that he walked into,�� a Condé Nast employee told��The Spectator.��

There it is.��

The answer used to be easy. All praise and power to the disruptor. All hail Enniful.

But these days it’s not so simple. However much we value the politics, we are on the verge of “losing�� ourselves. We want a “via media��, a middle road, to use the famous phrase of one of the England’s first great fashion icons, Elizabeth I.

Who’s going to build it?��

Thanks to: Kennedy, Kara. “Was Edward Enninful’s Vogue Too ‘Woke�� for Wintour?”��The Spectator World��(blog), June 8, 2023. .

Originally published on Substack.

Image created on Midjourney on Discord.

The Journal of Business Anthropology asked me to describe my experience. Here is what I wrote for them.

But first, here’s an image from the field. ����’s me talking to respondents who were too busy to sit for an ethnographic interview. “That’s ok,�� I said. “I can interview you at the gym.�� In the world of business, anthropology thy name is opportunism.

I assume I am talking to anthropologists who spend some, much, or most of their career outside the academic world. I assume that my job is to offer advice on one of the ways this can be done.

For starters, I should say that I don’t think of myself as a business anthropologist. My plan was to use business consulting to finance my anthropology.��

I consult half the year and write half the year. The first half pays for the second. COVID was going to make my income disappear. I don’t have much of a cushion. Bankruptcy now beckoned. ��

What COVID threatened to take away, it would also give, I hoped, in the form of an opportunity to study the American family in a moment of confinement. I’ve studied this family for some 30 years, with particular attention to its material culture and build form. I look in from time to time, most recently to figure out that “what�� and the “why�� of the great room.��

Surely COVID would test this family and home. Surely it would force deformation and reformation. This is the first revelation of studying the American family and home. They are feverish works in progress. Americans are here, as elsewhere, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants inventors.��

My favorite example: an African American single mother of modest means who had used her local zoo as a place to amuse and instruct her kids (a pre-teen boy and girl). COVID closed the zoo. So she bought a guinea pig which she told me did a surprisingly good job standing in for the zoo. (I remember putting the phone down and having a good cry.)

So the intellectual opportunity was obvious: I could go see what COVID would mean to the family. What was happening to house, home and kinship under these extraordinary stresses?

But unless this study was also a commercial opportunity I was done for financially. Surely, I thought, industry would want to know what was happening in the family. And for the first time in my career, I was soliciting work instead of waiting for it. Plus I was undertaking my anthropological work for commercial return. (Normally, I merely solve the problem the client has for me…and return to an anthropology that’s entirely my own.)

The work returned many points of interest. The most striking finding was that mothers and daughters had found one another. Mothers said, “I have my daughters back.�� They meant back from college and back from the preoccupations, digital, social and athletic, of being a teenager and a preteen. Mothers and daughters were, they said, “talking, sharing, connecting.�� (I think this may leave us with a new degree or kind of matrifocality.)��

It turned out industry didn’t much care. No one wanted to hear what I had learned. I got some press (Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, links below). And still no one in industry cared to hear what I had to say. (FN: ; )

Moms were clearly the heroes of these scenarios. Guinea pigs were just the beginning of their creativity. Building new relationships with the daughters were not be any means their biggest accomplishment. Mom (when it was a mom) got the family through a horrible time.

I mentioned “mom heroism�� to anyone who would listen: friends, colleagues, journalists. Their response was surprise. People seemed to say, “But this is what moms do.�� And clearly it is what moms do, but it remains I think odd that they should get so little credit. Even in this time of peril, even as they did heroic things, what they got was “That’s moms for you.”��

A note on method

You see things like guinea pigs standing in for a zoo, and moms rising to the occasion, fleetingly, because nothing happens in the consulting world that’s not a blur. It is only because you will go back to the same terrain, and because ethnography comes with an “extra data�� opportunity, that we can use consulting work for anthropology purposes. (FN: .)

“Fleetingly�� is pretty much our modus operandi as anthropologists in business. We are trained to dwell, interrogate, contextualize and variously worry the data until it’s thinkable and then presentable. Anything less invites the scorn of our colleagues and a certain self loathing. Indeed, “fleetingly�� so contradicts our academic training that it can feel like a betrayal of private hopes and public responsibilities.

We are in effect learning to live like journalists. We are moving at speed from “story�� to “story.�� But anthropologists have an advantage: they are scrutinizing the world from an organizing, X-raying point of view. Systematic properties reveal themselves. And we are working not with events frothing on the surface of public life, but with more enduring materials (e.g., cultural categories). Finally, while we will work for many clients who ask a variety of questions, we return again and again to some of the same topics (e.g., American family and home). Most of the people with whom we compete in the research and consulting world practice amnesia. We gather as we go. ��

To say we resemble journalists and, to that extent, disappoint our missions as anthropologists, is indeed one way to look at it. We could also see our predicament as a trade off. Certain opportunities are denied us. But others are now possible.��

Those who do business anthropology learn to work at speed. We can’t make a living unless we are prepared to capture data, work out understandings, conclusions and recommendations, and write these up, all more or less in real time. There’s no time for taping or transcription. There is precious little time to dwell. Lean in? We are pitched forward, obliged to watch topics constantly pulled away from us by the current. We can’t help feeling there are riches here if we only had time to examine them. ��

The advantage is that we learn to work fast. I wrote two books during the COVID period, thanks chiefly to my consulting training. One was called the The New Honor Code (Simon and Schuster 2021). The second is The Return of the Artisan (Simon and Schuster forthcoming 2022). (I wanted to call it The Return of the Native, but apparently that was taken. I kid.)

The first book is a piece of applied anthropology. As a grad student at the University of Chicago, with Marshall Sahlins (he of sainted memory) as my advisor, I studied Elizabethan England. This was interesting fieldwork for lots of reasons. It helped me see an honor code at work. And as I began to see bad behavior break out in American culture, I wondered “is there something in the Elizabeth case we could reengineer for use in the contemporary world.”��

There is a presumption here that was new to me. Writing a book that aimed to change American culture? Surely, my job was to study culture, not reform it. But the more you study American culture, the more you see how responsive it is to individual initiative. (How else to understand Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe, Virgil Abloh, well, and for that matter, Margaret Mead?)

I wrote Honor in real time, piecing things together in my head as I went. This is “just in time�� assembly I couldn’t imagine before consulting had transformed me. I am the graduate student who spend an entire weekend on a single paragraph, not because I was scrupulous, but because I was such a very bad writer. ��

Just in time assembly means you work with available materials. In my case that meant drawing on a career thinking about American culture on the grounds that “if honor is to be restored, it will have to find a place for itself in the present sea of cultural and moral innovations.�� This gave me license to treat the American avant-garde, mid century modernism, the hippy revolution, the preppie rejoinder, the artisanal movement, celebrity culture, the rise of the millennial, the Gen Z rejoinder, and changing models of American selfhood, sociality and story telling.

You’d be surprised how useful these materials can be to a man who has to come up with 60,000 words in a very months. I was. And grateful. Surely we are done with authors who offer bold new reform with no thought to the American culture it must join if it has any hope of adoption. Otherwise we’re left with an ideational accumulation, a thing of threads and patches. Patches, mostly. We inhabit a culture that’s fast losing the integration Boasians, and some of the rest of us, held dear.��

To write a book fast you need the right voice. And I think consulting gives us this too. We are writing for non anthropologists, non academics and people who are haunted by deadlines and targets. This means we learn to aim for clarity. For the Honor book, I decided to go for a kind of high-polish exposition relieved here and there by informality.��

Here’s a passage. (It is part of my description of the Tilbury speech delivered by Elizabeth I on the eve of the attack by the Spanish armada in 1588. Honor played a key role, not in evidence here.) See what you think.��

In the sixteenth-century scheme of things, England was little and vulnerable. The troops at Tilbury were hungry, underpaid, and properly terrified. By the Spanish standard, this island was poor, provincial, and home to hundreds of thousands of Catholic sympathizers who had been encouraged to rise up in support of the enemy.

Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech was theater in the service of statecraft, infinitely more compelling than the amateur production being staged in the channel by foppish aristocrats firing off conflicting instructions. (The commander of the armada, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, had never fought at sea.) The Spanish called their armada invincible. Elizabeth had come to Tilbury to say, “No, actually, this is what invincible looks like. My courage will triumph over your titles and grandeur.�� This is Elizabethan for “Bring it.��

There are a couple of rhetorical strategies the normal anthropologist would never use. The ‘word painting�� that stands in for patient review of data and argument. The total eclipse of scholarly reference. (Normally, available only to the Geertzian aristocrats among us). The sneering at foppish aristocrats. The daring, off-with-his-head, presumption of putting words in the mouth of a monarch who was the flower of Renaissance humanism and a master rhetorician. The last line is especially cringe worthy. But this was my effort to bring in the reader by being a little less, actually anti, oratorical.��

I am behaving in a way that would horrify the academically scrupulous. The idea is to sacrifice rigor for approachability and agreeability. Consulting has helped me see that this is less a choice than an obligation. Yes, there is something a little shocking about the anthropologist who fails to “ping the tower�� of scholarship as he goes. But the reader unfreighted by scholarship can make better speed and accomplish real distances. Does she survive these compromises without undue harm? I guess she has to make this decision for herself.��

And this last point is a gift of consulting too: that I don’t presume to anticipate all of the needs or reactions of my reader. I look to be useful, interesting, illuminating and clear, and leave the rest to them. Yes, I am not scrupulous. We are, anthropologists are, these days sometimes perhaps preoccupied by scruple. This makes our work tough sledding for the general reader. They say, “Sorry, what? Oh never mind.��

The second book was called Return of the Artisan. It sprang from the Artisanal Economies Project (AEP) that Sam Ford and I founded a couple of years ago. Sam and I had met through Henry Jenkins�� Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and at some point we started thinking about what we could do to help address the opioid abuse then (and still) raging in the US.��

Our idea was to make artisanal activity a way to address lost industrial employment, a bulwark against the despair that sometimes follows unemployment, and the addiction that sometimes follows despair. Could we help induct people into the artisanal economy? We hoped that even a tentative engagement there might sustain self confidence and community connection. (Artisanal economies are very social and collaborative creatures.)

Sam and I did research across the US, much of it in the Midwest and South. We put together an elementary website at , a kind of “lazy susan�� of options. We hoped people would scroll through and find something of interest, start small, and scale up. The project failed to generate much interest and it didn’t draw the funding we needed to push the project further. (We had funded the research and the website out of our own pockets and those resources were now beginning to empty out.)��

Now the issue was salvage. (Opportunism must sometimes be the business consultant’s middle name.) I had been working on the topic since 2006 and Sam suggested I think about combining that work with the AEP data, and create a book. ��

Before consulting, it never occurred to me to start an organization like AEP. My engagements with the world came in the form of books and articles. The university was my exoskeleton. If I was to have any kind of influence, it would be through my students and their students. Marshall Sahlins is an exemplar here. (I am one of his influences, a modest one to be sure.)

But what if what you need to engage the world more directly? Then you are in the “start up game,�� as they call it in Silicon Valley. That’s a very different kettle of fish. And yet another learning curve. And, just to mix my metaphors thoroughly, a recipe for disappointment. Creating an organization is really to reckon with the crooked timber truth of humanity. Nothing is simple. Because (new metaphor alert!) humans really are cats and, as the phrase has it, impossible to herd. ��

But you can start a business. As a consulting anthropologist you have met and worked for lots of people who have created organizations. This removes most of the mystery and all of the awe. There’s lots of precedent and, if you ask for it, advice.��

Starting an organization concentrates the mind. If you make a success of it, you may also get an “equity payday�� when you get “bought out.�� I have preferred to treat books as the big ROI that would see me into my retirement. I’m still waiting. Honor didn’t have a natural audience. Return might.

The artisanal story was really fun to tell. Again I’ve used a convivial prose. See what you think.

����’s a shocking thing to think. We’ve become habituated to the idea of office work. For years this had been the aspiration of almost everyone with a college degree. We got so very good at committee meetings, office speak, annual reviews, feel-good picnics, and morale building exercises, it’s a wonder we got any work done at all.

So a new model of work, this catches our attention. The artisan doesn’t have a suit to wear to work. She didn’t have an office or a parking space. She didn’t lie awake at night and worry about promotions. Her annual review is going to a local cafe with a friend and asking, “So how am I doing, do you figure? Be honest.��

The Artisan book shows some of the symptoms of hasty construction. In the place of a single grand model, I identify 24 properties. These stretch from “hand made�� and “human scale�� to “unbranded�� and “storied.�� These represent a shameless piling system. I stopped when I thought I might have covered everything. Here too integration got short shift.

Even in haste, there were wonderful things to notice. There was the strange duality of the artisanal economy. Especially, as we saw it operating in Kentucky, it was, my phrase, not theirs, “a grid below and a dome above.�� People see themselves and their enterprises as emphatically free standing. They do not ask for support or succor.�� But they are constantly throwing off acts of generosity designed to serve the larger community. We interviewed a farmer who keeps an exotic species of sheep. He will never recover the costs of doing this, but he believes this matters to the community. In the “grid below,�� advantage is calculated and pursued, steelyly, so to speak. Everything is counted. In the “dome above,�� everyone gives and takes freely. No books are kept. No debts are registered. Nothing is owed.

This is direct and indirect exchange in a perfect laminate, discrete economies that operate almost without contact or mutual acknowledgement. When you ask why people give so generously to the community, the answer is various: God, church, community, caring. But usually the answer was “Kentucky.�� I pursued this and was eventually told, “Kentucky is the only place that gives you a tattoo on the inside.��

Anthropologists have lots of natural advantages. It has tattooed many of us on the inside. This gives us a chance to carry our professional identity into our consulting life and, with the appropriate adaptations, serve our culture with an understanding of our culture they cannot get from any other social scientist, journalist, or helping professional. I don’t say that Durkheim, Boas, or Sapir�� would look at my career and register even a flicker of recognition. But as I was leaving the academic world, I thought, “What could it hurt to pitch one more anthropologist into the world?”��

����’s a long shot but not a bad bet. And it cost the field nothing. This is one of the reasons I am sorry that the field has not supported consulting anthropologists more. Yes, of course, seen by unexamined assumptions, the consultant is the apostate. On the other hand, this experiment can advance the anthropology of American culture. And this culture needs all the friends it can get.

Bio

Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of 14 books including The Return of the Artisan to be published by Simon and Schuster in July. He was the founder and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. Grant has taught at Harvard, University of Cambridge, and he was a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He is a co-founder of the Artisanal Economies Project. He is the inventor of The Griff, an early warning system for social and cultural change. He consults widely, and his clients include Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Reddit, Sony, Boston Book Festival, NBC, IBM, Nike, and the Obama White House.�� For several publications:

Originally published:

McCracken, Grant. 2022. Just in Time. Journal of Business Anthropology. Vol. 11, No. 1. ;

Marissa Shrum and I talk from time to time.

Today, we got talking about Elizabeth I. Today is November 17 and that makes it the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne of England in 1558.

I was noting how extraordinary Elizabeth was a political force. I even found myself speculating that had Elizabeth not been on the English throne for 45 years, Marissa and I might be having our conversation in Spanish.

I don’t��know��that this is true, but we can say this much. When Elizabeth took the throne, Spain was the indisputably the most powerful European nation. But the end of her reign in 1603, England was rising fast.

Marissa and I were talking about women and power. We were noting how tragic it was that, hundreds of years after Elizabeth, women continue to struggle to be fully acknowledged and deferred to as leaders.

The problem we agreed was sometimes that women are obliged by cultural convention to present themselves as generous and supportive. This inspires some employees (especially, but not only, men) to withhold their deference and loyalty to the boss. Subordinates don’t respect female bosses as much as they do male ones. (By and large, on the whole.)

What would Elizabeth have thought about this? I hesitate to presume to speak for so brilliant and accomplished a woman. But I do have the advantage of having studied Elizabethan culture for several years. (My PhD thesis at the University of Chicago was about how Elizabethans treated public life as a theatrical performance.)��

Elizabethans were keenly interested in what we might call the stylistics of power, how people used non verbal behavior, facial expression, tone of voice, and the gestures of the body for political effect.��

Elizabeth was especially interested in these matters. After all, she was a woman and in 1558 a young woman. Many people were prepared to doubt and even challenge her claim to power. She was obliged to use every medium and device at her disposal. (Including, of course, clothing. See the magnificent outfit she wears in the Armada portrait image above. Who could doubt this claim to majesty and empire? Well, lots of people could and did. Hence her careful attention to the languages of power.)

Shadows of doubt

Here’s what I think Elizabeth might say to women in the present day.

The objective of political posture is what we might call a shadow of doubt.

We want to create in the subordinate a small tremor of uncertainty. What if his or her relationship with the superordinate is not secure? What if the boss is prepared to withdraw her good opinion and support?

Let’s be clear: this is not a permanent shift in attitude and tone. Female leaders will want to continue most of the time to be supportive and generous. All we want to do is to drop a new signal into the flow of signals between boss and superordinate. Just enough to make the subordinate to go “hmm.��

Ok, now to specifics. Here’s what Elizabeth might advise:

Again, these are intermittent activities. Use them sparingly. Use them all the time and you compromise the other half of your management style: that generosity and supportiveness. Your “resting style�� as a boss should be open eyes, brisk and continuous conversation, the usual warmth of interaction.��

����’s men who often seek more obvious control or intimidation. The Elizabethan approach to power, at least as we are interpreting it here, is more subtle, more “nuanced�� (Marissa’s word, as I recall).��

What does success look like? The subordinate should now be carrying on an new internal conversation. “Are we good?�� “Is something wrong?�� “Should I be working harder?�� “Do I need to lean in a little more?�� And the phrase that should no be banished forever from consciousness: “She will let me get away with that. I mean, she’s so nice.��

Some will recoil at this on the grounds that the advice is manipulative. Of course it’s manipulative. If the alternative is employees who think that they can take advantage of the boss, well, a little manipulation is clearly called for. And probably too good for them. Elizabeth had many still more formidable ways of manipulating the relationship. But you, the female executive, probably don’t have access to a rack, the tower, or banishment from court. (Perhaps that should change.)

Ok, that’s advice from a monarch. And if you would do me this small courtesy. Tonight if you happen to holding a glass of wine, please raise it in celebration. If you are willing or alone, please say, “Long may she reign over us.�� The English celebrated November 17th well past Elizabeth’s passing. They lit bonfires and set off fire works. (Yes, if you have fire works, that would be a nice touch.)��

But the better way to celebrate Elizabeth is this: every time you are dealing with one of your “unruly subjects,�� you now know what to do. In the course of conversation, simply stop talking, let your face become a little pensive or even a little blank, and look away from a moment. Then come back to the conversation. You have evoked a shadow of doubt and this should have summoned a ruly subject, someone who no longer dares take your generosity for granted.��

[I should say the actual details of my nonverbal advice here are mostly surmise. I have read the Elizabethan “courtesy literature�� and its description of nonverbal strategies. But as far as I know, Elizabeth didn’t ever record her strategies and I am only guessing what her actual advice would be.]

Bonus round

My recently published book, The New Honor Code, offered a glimpse of Elizabeth.��

����’s part of my description of the Tilbury speech Elizabeth delivered on the eve of the attack by the Spanish armada in 1588.��

In the sixteenth-century scheme of things, England was little and vulnerable. The troops at Tilbury were hungry, underpaid, and properly terrified. By the Spanish standard, this island was poor, provincial, and home to hundreds of thousands of Catholic sympathizers who had been encouraged to rise up in support of the enemy.

Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech was theater in the service of statecraft, infinitely more compelling than the amateur production being staged in the channel by foppish aristocrats firing off conflicting instructions. (The commander of the armada, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, had never fought at sea.) The Spanish called their armada invincible. Elizabeth had come to Tilbury to say, “No, actually, this is what invincible looks like. My courage will triumph over your titles and grandeur.�� This is Elizabethan for “Bring it.��

Run for your life, anthropologist, run for your life!

I was looking at a new ad for Lexis. Here it is.

So much going on.

See especially the opening chords which are, unless I’m mistaken, played on the gear box of a Lexus.

Then there’s this.

This really got me. The choreography of Zak Ryan Schleger on a parking garage roof top. Astonishing. Dance let loose in the world.

This is the Creative Sparks / No Ceiling campaign for Lexus. It represents a collaboration by songwriting duo Nova Wave, Korean-American R&B artist Audrey Nuna, Argentinian freestyle rapper Ecko, dancer and choreographer Zak Ryan Schlegel, director Sebastian Strasser, Mark Miller at Team One, amongst others, and Vinay Shahani at Lexus, amongst others.

It feels like something important has been accomplished here. (Sure they scared an anthropologist. But I don’t believe any other social scientists were frightened in the making of this campaign.)

Brands have been looking for this North West passage forever. In and of themselves they are the poor cousins, sometimes the idiot cousins, of contemporary culture. Shill machines that never really brought anything to the party. Indeed if you bought the Naomi Klein argument, brands were constantly extracting value and meaning from our culture.

But brands kept trying. And why would they not? They could see that all the action in our culture came from the worlds of music, video, subcultures, movies, memes, street fashion, cultural movements, blogs, fanfic, curation, YouTube, Instagram, etc. All the best meanings were being made by someone else. Brands wanted in. What if they could dress themselves in these meanings? Mon dieu. All the riches of Asia awaited them.

Sometimes it would work. More often it was painful. The brand would hire a band (or other creative) and rent a stage. The brand would stand stage-right with a hopeful expression that said something like “do you love me now?�� No, the consumer did not love you now. They looked right past the brand to the band. There was no meaning transfer. The brand remained clueless and utterly out of it. And not just because the brander was usually wearing Khaki trousers and a branded golf shirt.��

The very worse species of brands seeking culture is the celebrity perfume ad. How awful. Johnny Depp for Sauvage. Charlize Theron for Dior. Wonderful actors both. But as pitch people? Oi. And so bad for the celebrity. Routinely and without a shadow of a doubt, a perfume ad takes some of your credibility and creative accomplishment into the studio parking lot and sets it on fire. I expect that the actor thinks “wow, a vast sum of money and all I have to do is swan about with majestic music and sets in the background. What could possibly go wrong?�� Here’s what goes wrong: you look like a self-absorbed ninny, the very creature we are beginning to suspect most celebrities are (and during COVID were), monsters of self consuming narcissism who have ceased to believe in the existence of people other than themselves.��

But otherwise, good work was stirring. I love the determination and accomplishments of Jack Conte. There were celebrities prepared to act of design consultants to the brand. Will.I.am has done some interesting things. Years ago BMW hired directors to make short films. More recently Intel and Vice reached out to artists.��

This work was brave and interesting. But nothing quite made it all the way to Asia. The Northwest passage remained a mystery.��

Until now.��

No Ceiling��is a miracle. ����’s gives us diverse materials brought together but kept apart.��

There are media, music, several kinds of music, music video, dance, movements, gestures, post its, traffic jams, parking garages, dance studios, recording studios, texts, artists trying stuff, symphonies, basketball courts, apparitions on roof tops, and yes that gear box, and a flat note (can you find it?), as artists converge on this magical exercise of meaning making for the brand.

And the Lexus is there, present, welcome, seen! There are one too many product features featured for my taste. But otherwise, the Lexus performs brilliantly as a car and the brand. ����’s not all golf shirted and Khaki clad attempting to crash the culture. No, here it’s credible and interesting and alive to the game around it. The brand profits! It soaks up this creative fever til it begins to give it off. Indeed this campaign could be the brand’s fever dream. What a Lexus dreams of when asleep in that parking garage.

Who doesn’t want a car like that?

I showed the ad to my wife. She said, “wonderful but not for me.��

I said, “I��want��one. And I don’t drive. And I don’t care about cars.��

What’s the secret of this miracle?

Some of it comes from not flattening the composites. The song, the singing, the dance, the city, the rooftops, all these must be brought in undiminished.��

We could think of this in terms of Henry Jenkins�� idea of transmedia. In this case, a single story is let out into the world to play out in lots of media, comic book origins, movies, fanfic, etc. All of this, Jenkins says, is one story and at a stroke he gave us a grouping that was rich and diverse even as the composites all somehow remain within shouting distance of one another, a thing, a we.

David Weinberger gave us the notion of “small pieces loosely joined.�� Here too we were treated to a category that did not police its contents, a category that bloomed with an internal diversity, a category that teetered on the edge of the extra-categorical.

This is one of the secrets of the Northwest passage: how to bring things in while honoring their difference. How to bring diverse materials together even as we keep them apart.��

No assembly required

How can this happen in a popular culture, for whom “keep it simple, stupid�� (aka “keep it stupid, simple��) was the mantra. The lesson from contemporary culture, this too courtesy of Henry Jenkins, is that we��can��combine diverse meanings and media because the media literacy of the audience is so high. Somehow popular culture turned into culture and in the process we all get smarter.

There are a ton of questions begging for an answer. How do people combine things? Do they choose to work with the materials in the Lexus ad? How do these meanings enter and ricochet around in the brand? How do we engineer meanings, ads and brands that can rise to this occasion?

Oh, and one more thing. Formally speaking, the problem of the brand is very like the problem now faced by the whole of contemporary culture. What we know and what we learn could be applied to an American culture that’s on the verge of social structural collapse. Once a robust category, it’s now an ungodly mess.

We could help.��

But there’s a dangerous alchemy attempted here. Bringing together distant generations is hard to do. It almost always descends an effort to find the funny in mutual incomprehension.

And nothing is sadder.

Different generations are different cultures. Strict rules govern the comedic possibilities. ����’s ok if Selena doesn’t get Steven and Martin. Cool rules. Youth doesn’t understand age as a matter of principle…and pride.

But it’s not ok if Martin and Steve don’t understand Selena. This occasions embarrassment and drives every bit of funny out of the room.

On the other hand, maybe not.

Martin Short is a genius. Steve Martin is very funny. And show runner Dan Fogelman is gifted.

So.

Maybe.

But here’s a solution. It comes straight out of the ethnographic data. Call it a gift from anthropology to Hollywood.

My interviews with Millennials tell me two things:

So it’s simple, really. Let Steve and Martin not “get it�� all they want, but allow Millennials this method of managing them.

We are all culture curators one way or another. We are passionate about graphic novels, hip hop, noir films, craft beer, computer games, folk arts, or this thing called American culture or those people called the French. Something.

As curators, we have deep knowledge.

Go ahead. Ask us about Game of Thrones. And make yourself comfortable. Because we will talk for hours: the story lines, actors, producers, backstories, and why X did Y to Z. (That bastard!)

Our curator knowledge is vast and diverse. It stretches in all directions. We know something about a lot of things, and a ton about several things in particular. We are curators broad and curators deep.

Our curatorial knowledge is so vast, we don’t see it as knowledge. We don’t see it as valuable. We don’t think of it as an accomplishment.

Maybe this is the reason we just give it away.

Our curatorial competence ends up being a gift economy in the worst sense of the term: one party gives and the other party takes.

We supply our curatorial knowledge to someone in the world. And that’s that. No money changes hands. No recognition is forthcoming. The curator gives. The corporation just helps itself.

Recently we saw the��creator��economy��suddenly lift off. Suddenly there is money to be had for those who make culture in the form of videos, game play, TikTok performances, Instragram images, podcasts and even blog posts. (No, not this one.)

Money is��pouring��into the creator economy. One case in point:��

So how about a��curatorial economy?

I mean, really. How about it?��

I will post on the curator economy again tomorrow.��

Look for “The Curatorial economy II (how to be Malcolm Gladwell or at least try).

If this approach interests you, please consider joining us at����in June!

This morning we got a query from a guy in the travel industry, who wanted to know why the camp could be useful for someone in his industry.

I thought you might be interested in my reply!

Eric

Great to hear your voice.

Here are a couple of thoughts on culture and travel that will help indicate some of the things we will be thinking about in Culture Camp.

A knowledge of culture helps identify who the consumer is and what they want to be.

Here is what the travel industry looks like through the culture prism.

One of the trends we are watching (and I am sure you are seeing it too) is women .

This is driven, we believe, by lots of things but especially perhaps by the success of Eat, Pray, Love as well as Under the Tuscan Sun.

We are looking at the possibility that this will get another push if and when we see the rise of a female Anthony Bourdaine. We are looking for this.

Or for that matter, a woman doing a version of the Stanley Tucci doc that’s just come out, Searching for Italy, I think it’s called.

Another development in culture is the way boomers are redefining their 70s and 80s. The model here used to be a decline into passivity and a cruise ship. As they search for something more active and transformational, new models are called for (and probably emerging). Would love to hear your thoughts here too.

In general, the trend is away from owning things to gathering experiences and it feels like travel is a perfect arena for this undertaking.

Foodies, in the Stanley Tucci tradition, have new reasons to travel. ()

DNA and the genealogical work is helping people see that they have connections to countries that used to be just colors on a map. Looking for the home of your ancestry (see the very interesting work of Henry Louis Gates here) supplies another motive.

Airbnb used to sell itself (and it may still) as a chance to be embedded in a place, as opposed merely a tourist there. So we are looking for new ways to be a tourist �� and escape the old tourism model.

Hope this helps! We would love to see you!

Best, Grant

Come join us!

I haven’t posted in a while.

But I have an excuse.

Two excuses actually.

I spent the first half of 2020 scrambling to finish a book. is now out. (Please support Cultureby.com by buying a copy!)

And I spent the second half of the year scrambling to finish The Return of the Artisan. This too is from Simon and Schuster and appears in the Summer of 2021. (Pre-order : . Please.)