Grant McCracken's Blog, page 4

American culture* and the new new Coke

[image error]This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening post was “American Culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery,” and you can find it here.

I promised several case studies in support of my thesis and this is:

American culture matters and business is bad at it.

Here’s the second case study: American culture and the Coca-Cola company

Consider Coca-Cola.

Soda sales have fallen in the US for 12 straight years.

The Coca-Cola Company has responded with all kinds of innovation. Water is now a big seller.

But all innovations have had a partial quality. Nothing produced by the Coca-Cola innovation pipeline has had any promise of making a Coca-cola product as compelling to the American consumer as Coke once was.

If Coca-Cola had read culture well and early, it might have mustered the will to begin again. Instead, it responded with partial, sometimes half hearted, incremental innovations.

What we needed was a big picture, a demonstration of two new, bitter truths:

1) the glory days of the Coca-cola company were never going to come again.

2) the Coca-cola company could not increment its way back to accustomed profit and share.

What we needed was a radical act of reinvention, a new new Coke.

What would this product have looked like?

My colleague Kevin Clark has an answer. He says it would probably look a little like gazpacho, or its commercial equivalent, V-8.

Except that it would be exemplary on every dimension…in a way that V-8 is, um, not.

The new new Coke would have ingredients that were organic, locally sourced. The nutrition would be exemplary. This new new Coke would be not an acceptable trade-off, not a forgivable compromise, but the very thing we want to drink a lot of. The taste, the packaging, the design, would all be perfect, all in keeping with the culture motifs and meanings of the moment. And we would communicate this new product according to the new rules of marketing (little, local, hand crafted, playful, counter-expectational) as brilliantly as the old Coke used the old rules of mass marketing and mass media, the ones perfected by the likes of Thomas Nast and Norman Rockwell (below).

[image error]The new new Coke would be as superbly “social” online as it once was in the 20th century soda fountain and fast food drive-in. And of course it would live online as much as it lived in the world. It would be a “Mona Lisa [in] overdrive.”

The new new Coke would be invented, customized, crowdsourced and localized, crafted as much by consumers in all their blooming diversity as it was by a group of people in Atlanta.

In short this product wouldn’t look like a product at all. The brand wouldn’t act like a brand. The marketing wouldn’t proceed like marketing. The “drink” wouldn’t really be a drink. This product would be as superbly responsive to our present America as Coke was to the 20th century.

I can hear someone saying, “I don’t think you understand how difficult this is.” Um, actually I do. Here’s what an anthropologist knows about “Culture Inside,” the culture that defines thought and action inside the organization. Almost everything about this corporate culture conspires to keep people locked in the ideas and practices they know and trust. And the vested interest! Yikes! Could the existing bottling system deliver the new new Coke? Not without massive, painful and incredibly expensive change.

The full scale of the challenge is almost impossible to overestimate. The only way to create the new new Coke is to break from the past. And this means breaking with the institutional heart, mind and memory of the company.

But a single overwhelming truth must be made clear: that the old model is over. It will play out for many more years. It will throw off a fortune in the process. It will decline profitably but it will decline inevitably. This is tragic knowledge, and humans will do virtually anything to avoid tragic knowledge.

There is a strategy for managing change of this order. Call it the Saturn model. Around the existing organization, the mother planet, we want to build a ring where people are allowed to reinvent with no obligations to existing practice or orthodoxy. This is the skunk works strategy except that what is happening on the ring is not a merely an experiment, not a quirky act of imagination. It is deadly earnest. It’s the future.

“So where does culture come into this?” you may be asking.

Working with American culture stretches us in two directions, in time and in space.

It broadens us in the moment. It says that it’s not enough to focus on the existing business model. It’s not enough to maximize and optimize. It’s not enough to “stick to our knitting.” In the famous words of Theodore Levitt (so this impulse has been part of management philosophy for a long time), we must ask “what business are we in?” For survival purposes, we need a place to see black swans, blue oceans, threats and opportunities. The American culture approach says, “put that knitting down and look around you.”

The corporation used to live in a narrow “here.” There were no surprises “out there.” Now of course surprise is the order of the day. Opening things up, we see the full competitive, technological, demographic, economical, political contexts. This is what happens when we embrace culture. It is one of the ways we cast the net wide and expand our “here.”

We also need to expand our “now.” In the old days, we could focus on the moment. This was the best way to harvest value, to spot and act on opportunity. But a strange thing happened to our “now.” It was invaded by the future. We are now living with innovations from startups, competitors and the gurus of Silicon Valley, the nature and effect of which are extremely difficult to determine. Any one of them might take our market away. All we can say for certain is that somewhere out there there is a black swan with our name on it. When it comes for us, and it will come for us, we will have almost no time to react. And this means that a narrow “now” is a very bad idea.

So we want to build pictures of the futures, scenarios that acquaint us with some of the ways the future might “break.” We need to map the future to capture the sheer multiplicity of possibility. We have big data. We are getting better at visualization. Why not use the big data to light up a picture of possible futures? I love the idea of a management team meeting once a week (or in times of crisis, once a day) in a war room that really looks like a war room. Maps. Visuals. Movements. Bets made. Bets doubled down upon. Bets rethought and repurposed. People reading the future as if they were standing in an air traffic control tower.

This is what the “future of the future” looks like for the corporation. And this is what is required of the Coca-Cola company. It needs the ideas and initiatives that give permission, provocation, proof necessary to start again. It looks incredibly difficult and dangerous. But what is the burden of senior management, of sterling leadership, if not this?

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and the story of OJ

[This post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn.]

This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening post was “American Culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery,” and you can find it here.

I promised I’d look at several case studies in support of my thesis and this is:

American culture matters and business is bad at it.

Here’s the first case study: American culture and OJ

Consider a glass of orange juice.

[image error]

For a very long time, OJ was in the words of the Atlantic, “the very image of refreshment, packed with vitamins and radiating with sunshine freshness…America’s classic morning drink.”

OJ was a piece of American culture* and its definition of “breakfast,” “morning,” “mothers,” “mealtime” and “nutrition.” It was part of a complex of meanings and rules that define what, when and why Americans eat what they do.

OJ took some of its value from this meaning.

We are accustomed to thinking about value as something that comes from utility, from functional benefits, from what Christensen calls “purpose.”

This is merely part of value. Value also comes from meaning.

But functional value is the thing we measure when we price. Meaning is largely invisible to our calculations. This is why culture is the “dark matter” of American capitalism.

And this brings us to the story of OJ.

Not very long ago, a new idea stole into the American consciousness.

The glass of OJ, once the picture of health, was now being called “a glass of sugar.”

[image error]

The effect was spectacular. Between 2002 and 2017, the Nielsen-measured retail U.S. orange juice market declined by 50 percent. The WSJ heralded the death of this “breakfast table star.” Everyone suffered, farmers, an agricultural industry, and brands like Tropicana, Florida’s Natural, and Minute Maid.

It was a beautiful, if painful, experiment. OJ still had all its functional benefits. It was still charged with Vitamin C, minerals and all that non-specific “goodness.” The only thing that had changed was the cultural meaning. What was once “the very image of refreshment” had become an object of suspicion.

So what changed, precisely? American culture changed. What culture gave, it took away. What it valued, it devalued. What it charged with one meaning, it charged with another.

Specifying what OJ meant in its heyday is the work historians, semioticians, anthropologists, sociologists, strategists, planners, and other “trained professionals” who can comb through American culture and tease out the what, when, who and how of OJ’s rise to its place as “the very image of refreshment.”

Specifying how OJ fell, this falls to the manager, the C-Suite, the leaders of the organization. They may take these truths to be incontrovertible:

1) the meaning of OJ is arbitrary. It’s a little like the price of OJ on commodity markets. It responds to forces outside itself.

2) the meaning of OJ is the outcome of all the forces that now make up American culture, the companion trends, opinion leaders, experts, and marketers who shape and reshape how Americans define “breakfast.”

3) we need to map and track these cultural forces and actors so that we can anticipate the shifting consensus that will decide the fate of OJ. The advent of “big data” puts superb, sometimes real-time data at our disposal. Picture a visualization that lights up one end of the boardroom, showing the various forces at work like an air traffic control array. Behold, the future of OJ.

4) We must get ready now. We want to do this even when OJ is in its ascendancy. Because the first principle of a cultural understanding of Americans markets is biblical: “this too shall pass.” Every consumer taste and preference, however inevitable it seems to us now, is in fact arbitrary, vulnerable and at some point vanishing.

Somewhere out there is a new Alice Waters. She is riding a black swan. She is coming for a market we take for granted. In a superheated marketplace, the time to respond is not when prices are taking a header. The time to respond is when we have deep pockets and breathing room.

Increasingly, American enterprise lives in a state of defensive, ad hoc, reaction. We are being stripped of strategy and planning. We are not so much agile as engaged in a mad scramble of blind response. Getting good at American culture can help fix this. It can return to us some of our powers of anticipation, preparation, and adaptation.

And so ends this first case study in the series called “American Culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery.”

Tomorrow: “American culture* and the Coca-Cola Company”

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

American culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery

 

[image error]

[this post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn]

When the Harvard Business School invited me to teach a few years ago, I had one question.

“Why?”

Why, I wondered, would a business school want to hire an anthropologist?

The answer was illuminating.

“We are good at solving business problems, but we notice that around 20% of the time we are wrong. Not just wrong but spectacularly mistaken.”

“Really?” I exclaimed.

“Really,” they assured me.

“We do a postmortem to figure out what we did wrong with our analysis. And often the answer is American culture. We don’t know how to think about culture. You do. Help us.”

I now think the figure might be higher than 20%.

American culture is the dark matter of contemporary business. People know it’s out there. But they don’t quite know what it is or how think about it.

Still.

Hence the Culture Camp I’m teaching in June. (More details here.)

I am running this camp because I believe understanding American culture has become an imperative for every organization, for the C-suite, for anyone who cares about how people buy, vote, seek entertainment, engage with culture, and respond to communications, innovation, advertising, and PR. American culture is where the blue oceans exist and the black swans swarms.

And not a moment too soon.

I believe there is a new American culture in place. The future is here. It is not, as William Gibson used to say, “badly distributed.” It’s right under our noses.

I believe that there are 5 structural properties that now define American culture.

But more on that later.

Let’s concentrate on the HBS discovery:

that American culture matters and business is bad at it.

Over the next couple of days, I will offer the following tiny case-studies:

Case Study 1: What happened to orange juice? (Wednesday, May 2)

Case Study 2: Fixing Coca-Cola (Thursday, May 3)

Case Study 3: The crisis at P&G (Friday, May 4)

Case Study 4: Using culture in a Silicon Valley start up (Monday, May 7)

Case Study 5: Making memes out of American culture and American culture out of memes (Tuesday, (May 8)

Case Study 6: The trouble with “cool hunters,” “trend watchers,” and other observers of American culture. (Wednesday, May 9)

Case Study 7: American culture and its 5 new structural properties (Thursday, May 10)

Come join us at Culture Camp June 7, New York City. The details, again, are here.

✻ Why do I call it “American culture?”

To distinguish it from “corporate culture.” There are two kinds of culture an organization must understand and a manager must manage.

Culture Inside: this is the culture of an organization, the “corporate culture.”

Culture Outside: this is American culture.

We sometimes confuse these. But that’s a little like confusing American football and European football. My Culture Camp is dedicated to understanding American culture, the culture outside the organization. This is where we find blue oceans of opportunity. This is where black swans of disruption find us. It’s time we made the distinction.

Beth Comstock and 7 truths for the C-suite

[image error]

(This post was first published on Medium, April 3, 2018.)

Anyone who works as a creative, a strategist, a planner, a story teller, a PR specialist, or a meme-maker knows the frustration of persuading the organization to grasp and act on culture. (No, not corporate culture. American culture.)

It should be easy but it’s not.

In fact, culture remains a kind of “dark matter” for the organization. Senior managers know it’s out there. They know it matters. They know things go disastrously wrong when they do not “factor culture in.”

But getting these managers to “get serious” about culture has been a struggle.

May I introduce Beth Comstock, until recently Vice Chair of General Electric and the person in charge of GE Business Innovations?

Here is Ms. Comstock on dual themes that are dear to everyone concerned with contemporary culture: multiplicity and fluidity.

In our lives, we are multidimensional people. We don’t want everything to be exactly the same all the time and we have different moods. I think there’s a huge segmentation going forward for marketers, for businesses where it’s state of mind. It’s contextually relevant at the moment. It’s not just, “I am a woman.” It’s not just, “I am X age. I am an American. I am a east coaster,” or, “a southerner.” I think those things are maybe more analog, and going forward, it’s much less binary; it’s much more fluid; we have gotten used to — culturally have much more gender fluidity. I think there is going to be much more interest and experience fluidity. It’s going to be challenging and exciting for certainly business and marketing people.

Who could ask for anything more? This remarks puts Ms. Comstock so far out ahead of the average manager, it’s impossible to measure.

In a more perfect world, this understanding would be “standard issue” for managers, one of the adaptions that help them navigate the complexities of contemporary capitalism. But as it is, there may be only one senior manager who grasps this point this well. Beth Comstock.

When someone doesn’t understand the new realities of the American market place, the following things become more difficult to grasp:

1. that the American consumer is now a creature of new complexity.

Shouting at consumers with dumb advertising is not just ill advised. It is an invitation to outright repudiation. It destroys brand and financial value.

2. that American marketing in general must surrender some of its “keep it simple, stupid” laboriousness for a new control of nuance and subtlety.

Let your creatives do their jobs. They understand culture, or should do. They know how to negotiate its subtleties. They know how to extract meaning that will become value. Don’t keep putting your oar in. You don’t ask their advice on a new M&A strategy. They don’t want your advice on meaning and message making. Leave it to the professionals.

3. that the American brand in particular must be a house of many mansions. It can no longer define itself in a monolithic way or speak in a single voice.

This is a special challenge for American marketing, so long the devotee of simplicity, repetition, and, um, well, repetition. Contemporary consumers, and the younger they are, the more this is true, HATE the obvious. They can do much more with much less. Stop yelling at them.

4. that American corporation can only speak to this diversity by containing some of this diversity.

There are many Americas out there. Perhaps once everyone was prepared to “go along to get along” with a set of shared meanings. Less and less so now. There are new and emerging fundamentals. But there are also differences that will never go away, and these are blossoming everywhere: race, gender, age, ethnicity, locality… Do you know them? Have you embraced them?

5. that some of the new richness and turbulence of the world out there comes from the new richness and complexity of culture.

(You’re afraid of “Black Swans” as a source of disruption? Many of these come from culture. You’re keen on “Blue Oceans” as a place to discover innovation? Many of these come from culture.)

6. that “culture” is something the corporation must devote itself to understanding.

A couple of years ago, I proposed that the organization appoint a “Chief Culture Officer.” This fell on deaf ears.

7. Let’s start with this fundamental truth, that when we say “culture” we are not talking about corporate culture. We are talking about American culture.

I wish people would stop conflating the two! The confusion was charming for a brief period. Now it’s beginning to resemble a chronic inability to distinguish between American football and European football. It’s really not a good look. Trust me.

It’s one thing to grasp these 7 truths. It’s another to put them to operationalize them as working assumptions and active ideas.

Ms. Comstock has taken the lead here as well. She grasps complexity in a practical way. Listen as she talks about Rachel Shechtman’s experiment called Story.

Meanwhile, I mean, there’s a store here in New York, I am a big fan of the founder and the store is called Story. Rachel Shechtman started it, and every six weeks it’s like a magazine and a media experience and an event. Every six weeks, she changes out and curates a new experience in retail every six weeks. So it’s hard to — it’s a hybrid. It’s hard — is it retail? Yeah. Is it media? Yeah. Is it experiential? Yeah. She has three or four different business models. That’s just one example. You are seeing more and more of those. So I think it really is this interesting mash-up of things. The winners are going to figure those two, the analog and the digital, out together.

All hail Beth Comstock. Let’s hope that, some day, all managers have her gifts.

Source of quotes:

From a podcast interview of Ms. Comstock by Mike Kearney in the Deloitte’s Resilient series here.

Conflict of interest:

None. I have never met Ms. Comstock. As far as I know, I have never worked for her, even distantly.

Photo credit:

With thanks to Joi Ito

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) here.

Transparent marketing and design

[This post first published on Medium March 16, 2018]

I was looking at the app store this morning and noticed in the upper left hand corner The Art of the Steamworld Heist, offered there as a “behind the scenes” tour, and I thought.

“Oh, ok, this is how we do it now.”

[image error]

This is how we do marketing and design now that the consumer is less the passive recipient of culture and more and more an active creator.

The “ad” for Steamworld Heist breaks all the old rules of marketing and design. It does not inform us of the game. It does not try to wow or pitch us. It does not state the value proposition. It does not engage in selling of any kind. There is almost no persuasion here. This ad merely say, “Hey, you might like to see how we made this game. Have a look.”

A lot of marketing and design still hews to the old model. We craft a product or service. And then we craft the brand. And we almost always do this in a closed room.

There was nothing transparent about this marketing and design. In fact, we work hard to keep it secret.

This old model presumes an active meaning maker on the producer side. On the consumer side? Not so much. We assumed the consumer was pretty much just sitting there in front of the TV, working hard to stay abreast of the plotting complexities of The Rockford Files, to say nothing of the terrible mysteries of that great fixture of American TV, the car chase.

But not so fast. I think this view of the consumer was largely a myth created for us by the Frankfurt school, that wrecking crew who declared war on popular culture and, by an unholy alliance with academics and intellectuals (rarely the same thing), conspired to prevent a post-war American culture from ever grasping that it was a culture. The consumer was always more active than the Frankfurt school allowed.

And these consumers have grown ever more so. And now they are very active indeed. It began with what Henry Jenkins called “poaching.” Consumers would steal ideas from popular culture and repurpose them. Fanfic, as we know thanks to the work of Abigail De Kosnik at Berkeley, was just the beginning. We see a new order of participation. Things scale up until a change in degree became a change in kind, and the consumer must now be reckoned as producer in his and her own right. (I expect Henry Jenkins might agree to this. His seminal Textual Poachers was 25 years ago.)

So here we are. The consumer is now a producer. And we have struggled to adjust in a variety of ways. But these efforts have been a little ad hoc-ish, I think. The more sensible, the more revolutionary gesture is to stop making meanings in secret. It is to begin to make our meanings under glass. (And of course to bring the consumer in the creative process, as I argue here.)

I believe someone will object, “But what if the competition sees.” So what? Anyone with half a brain can reverse engineer the design, the PR campaign, the product, the ad. In this sense, we are always transparent…at least entre nous. So an external transparency does not give the competition an advantage.

The way to speak to the consumer is as fellow making makers who find us most interesting when we share our creativity activities with them, when we are transparent about what we think we are trying to do.

Everyone is a culture creative now. We take a professional curiosity in one another’s work. Let’s invite the consumer backstage and let them see what we as designers, marketers, and branders thinking.

In short, we want to act more like the makers of Steampunk Heist. Let’s stop trying to trick, wow, impress or persuade. Who’s buying that? Transparency may be one of our last hopes of making contact.

Gruesome TV: dumb culture returns?

[image error]The thing that strikes you about The Frankenstein Chronicles is how gruesome it is.

This was true too of The Alienist.

In both cases, the series begins with a child who has been tortured and murdered.

The Frankenstein Chronicles is especially grim. The child is pieced together out of other dead children.

I think this is a case of TV struggling to find its way, and, in this case, failing. This might be a sign that dumb TV is once more in the works.

The TV revolution broke the old rules of TV.

Here are five of these rules:

1. bad things must not happen to good people

2. a TV scene must never require a second look

3. if you have to choose between a beautiful actor and a talented one, choose the former.

4. TV must be modulated, not raw (i.e., the showrunner must pull her punches)

5. TV must be convention bound, not free (i.e., when there is a genre convention, you must use it)

The Frankenstine Chronicles and The Alienist appear to be exploring yet another rule.

6. There are some non combatants in TV story-telling, especially the weak, the defenseless, and children.

And now TV goes even there.

This has been some of the excitement of the new TV, looking to see what happens when you break the Aaron Spelling rules of entertainment and make TV more like literary fiction and less like pulp fiction.

When TV breaks a taboo, every showrunner has something new to work with, a new dramatic wheel to add to their narrative clockwork.

And for awhile, the new convention is raw and remarkable. But eventually the new and unruly gets domesticated. It’s gets ruly.

The expressive world of TV is bigger. The experience of TV is less predictable and laborious. But things are settling down.

But the anti-gruesome rule isn’t like this. Dead children will never be tolerable. We will never get used to them. We will never go, “Oh, ok, I get how this works dramatically.” We will never what to go there.

Sometimes, rules exist for a reason. Sometimes, nothing is gained by breaking them. In this case, the art of TV doesn’t get bigger. Sometimes, the medium is diminished.

Here’s what I worry about. Showrunners are now engaged in an arms race. They are now going to want to break even the rules that should be left alone. There are only so many viewers. And at some point, a new level of competition forces a new level of gruesomeness.

I happened to like Penny Dreadful. But this too seemed to exhibit an inflationary pressure. One monster was not enough. No, the writers ransacked every Victorian imagination for every monster.

Showrunners, here’s the thing about the new TV. You have vast new creative territories at your disposal. You have at least two generations of fantastically alert and thoughtful viewers. Perhaps most important you have access to a very larger community of gifted actors. They can do much more with much less.

Showrunners, heal thyself. Stow the gruesome effects. Scale down the canvas. Work small, delicate and subtle. Take that actors out of their Dracula make-up and see what they can do with story telling that’s taut, disciplined and thoughtful.

Gruesome TV is in some ways a return to the old TV. It feels like a daring bid for something unprecedented. But really, and let’s be honest, it’s just lazy showrunning. As if someone said, “Dead child made up of other dead children? This has to get their attention!”

I leave to others this question: why is Victorian London the place where showrunners like to go for horror?

Craft fatigue / Artisanal exhaustion?

[image error]One of the things we are watching at Culturematic HQ is whether the artisanal theme is beginning to run out of steam.

Leo Burnett London offers us this lovely repudiation of the theme for McCafe / McDonald’s UK.

A single ad playing in the UK does not a summer make.

But clearly this would be big news for a lot of CPG players.

We need more evidence. Let’s keep a “weather eye” open.

Perhaps best to file this under “early / earliest possible warning.”

p.s. fly high with your dreams!

Hat’s off to the Leo Burnett London team:

Creative director: Matt Lee, Pete Hayes

Art director: Matt Lee, Pete Hayes

Copywriter: Matt Lee, Pete Hayes

Board account director: Simon Hewitt

Account director: Sam Houltson

Senior account manager: Emily Reed

Account executive: Gracie Smith

Agency producer: David Riley

Director/Production company: Tony Barry/Knucklehead

Producer: Sara Cummins

Culture when it takes us captive

[This post was [image error]originally published on Medium.]

Every organization operates out of an idea of itself. (We call this idea several things: our “business model,” our “value proposition,” our “core mission.”)

Of course, we would like to think this idea is perfectly adapted to reality, that it is the best, most sensible, way of extracting value from the world.

But sometimes our idea falls out of its “match” with the world. And now that the world changes so often and so fast, this happens a lot. “Idea” and “world” are no longer dance partners.



Part of the work of management is detecting these moments of disconnect and restoring the connection between our idea and the world.



If, on the other hand, we neglect (or refuse) to restore the connection, something bad happens. We are taken captive by our culture.



This makes for a grand sounding generality. So I was interested this morning to find an example from the Spotify boardroom.



Thanks to the magnificent curatorial work by Jason Hirschhorn at REDEF, I read this essay from Track Record. It describes a confrontation at Spotify between Blake Morgan and Spotify executives.



There are lots of issues here. I will focus only on the cultural one.



Here is Blake Morgan’s account of his meeting at Spotify.



I was a vocal participant in the meeting, and when it was over I found myself surrounded by several Spotify executives.

One said, “Blake, I just don’t think you understand, our users love our product because it’s such an amazing one.”

Another added, “You have to look past just numbers, our product is so great it’s actually turning the industry around.”

This went on for a while, until I finally said to one of the executives, “You keep using that word, ‘product.’ I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m really asking you: what do you think your product is?”

The executive was surprised. He stared at me blankly and said, “What do you mean? Our product is Spotify.”

There it was. It was a shocking admission to me, in earshot of everyone, and one he obviously didn’t think was an admission at all.

“No no…sorry,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Your product isn’t ‘Spotify.’” He continued to stare at me. I said, “Sir, your product is music.” The emboldened musicians standing around us started laughing. The exec smiled and backed away, “Well okay, if you’re going to be like that.”



I especially like the line:



“The executive was surprised. He stared at me blankly.”



That’s when you know someone is the captive of their culture. They cannot “compute” the question that challenges it. They are “deep in.”



Cultural captivity is dangerous. It may be the single most reliable way to expose the organization to disruption.



What’s the best way to escape cultural captivity? Make sure that your ideas are not assumptions. Make them vivid and present. Make them visible. Work on your ideas as if they were the first and most precious of your “intellectual properties.”

Culture is your friend or it’s your captivity.

Why you could move from Word to Pages

[This post originally appeared on Medium.]

[image error]○ Word is expensive, Pages is free.

○ Pages used to be bad at footnotes (while Word was always superb). Now it’s fine.

○ Word used to have a brilliant “selection” feature for sentences (Command + Click) that many writers found indispensable. Microsoft eliminated it. Then they put it back. (But by that time I was gone. Please, Apple programmers, could we have one of these for Pages.)

○ Pages is better than Word at producing well behaved PDFs. Images in the PDF are more stationary. The PDFs produced by Pages are higher resolution than those produced by Word.

○ Pages is not quite as good as Word at giving us a “map” of chapter headings. But its “bookmarks” feature is catching up. (Apple only need to look at “sidebar” then “navigation” to see why the Word version is stronger. It’s more compact and it distinguishes between chapters and subchapters.)

○ Pages handles Tables of Content more elegantly (and more automatically). Word TOC needed to be refreshed with each change to headings in the manuscript. This was a pain.

○ Pages handles the “find” function more efficiently.

○ Pages converts Word documents faultlessly, as nearly as I can tell.

○ Pages feels simpler and smarter. Less feature bloat. More “all but only” the features we need. By this time, Word is a bit of a Frankenstein. Microsoft has been “adding to” instead of “starting again” for years now.

Some big changes start small. I have written over a million words with Word. This made me what you might call a loyal user, or at least a habitual one. Then Word withdrew that “sentence selection” feature. Clearly it was an oversight because eventually they put it back.

But this sudden, apparently thoughtless, change started a cascade.

I began searching for another word processor and I auditioned several, including Mellel, Byword, Scrivener, Pages, iA Writer Pro and Ulysses. (I love Scrivener, but the lack of WYSIWYG, and the need to fiddle with output, drives me crazy.)

Once Pages demonstrated new skill with footnotes and PDFs, I signed on.

And now that I was done with Word, I began to think about leaving Powerpoint. I was already using Keynote some of the time.

And now that I was out of Word and Powerpoint, I could consider dumping Excel.

All of a sudden, I was post-Microsoft.

Microsoft has never made the best software. It has relied on an installed base, and the lethargy of people like me. But eventually, at least for me, their cynicism and/or indifference caught up with them.

And things slid away. No black swan. No radical disruption. No act of competitor innovation.

Just a self inflicted wound.

And one user escapes his Office captivity. How about you?

Why you should move from Word to Pages

[This post originally appeared on Medium.]

[image error]○ Word is expensive, Pages is free.

○ Pages used to be bad at footnotes (while Word was always superb). Now it’s fine.

○ Word used to have a brilliant “selection” feature for sentences (Command + Click) that many writers found indispensable. Microsoft eliminated it. Then they put it back. (But by that time I was gone. Please, Apple programmers, could we have one of these for Pages.)

○ Pages is better than Word at producing well behaved PDFs. Images in the PDF are more stationary. The PDFs produced by Pages are higher resolution than those produced by Word.

○ Pages is not quite as good as Word at giving us a “map” of chapter headings. But its “bookmarks” feature is catching up. (Apple only need to look at “sidebar” then “navigation” to see why the Word version is stronger. It’s more compact and it distinguishes between chapters and subchapters.)

○ Pages handles Tables of Content more elegantly (and more automatically). Word TOC needed to be refreshed with each change to headings in the manuscript. This was a pain.

○ Pages handles the “find” function more efficiently.

○ Pages converts Word documents faultlessly, as nearly as I can tell.

○ Pages feels simpler and smarter. Less feature bloat. More “all but only” the features we need. By this time, Word is a bit of a Frankenstein. Microsoft has been “adding to” instead of “starting again” for years now.

Some big changes start small. I have written over a million words with Word. This made me what you might call a loyal user, or at least a habitual one. Then Word withdrew that “sentence selection” feature. Clearly it was an oversight because eventually they put it back.

But this sudden, apparently thoughtless, change started a cascade.

I began searching for another word processor and I auditioned several, including Mellel, Byword, Scrivener, Pages, iA Writer Pro and Ulysses. (I love Scrivener, but the lack of WYSIWYG, and the need to fiddle with output, drives me crazy.)

Once Pages demonstrated new skill with footnotes and PDFs, I signed on.

And now that I was done with Word, I began to think about leaving Powerpoint. I was already using Keynote some of the time.

And now that I was out of Word and Powerpoint, I could consider dumping Excel.

All of a sudden, I was post-Microsoft.

Microsoft has never made the best software. It has relied on an installed base, and the lethargy of people like me. But eventually, at least for me, their cynicism and/or indifference caught up with them.

And things slid away. No black swan. No radical disruption. No act of competitor innovation.

Just a self inflicted wound.

And one user escapes his Office captivity. How about you?