Grant McCracken, A Job In Trends & Ideas & The Return Of Craft In Detroit

If you’re interested in trends and ideas and how to use them in your work then you have to add the writing of anthropologist Grant McCracken to your must-read list. The previous PSFK Conference NYC speaker and MIT professor writes one of the team’s favorite blogs This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics and has produced a series of books that should be in every trends analyst’s library. His last book Transformations looked at self reinvention and how it has become a preoccupation of contemporary culture:

“In the last decade, Hollywood made a 500-million-dollar bet on this idea with movies such as “Multiplicity”, “Fight Club”, “eXistenZ”, and “Catch Me If You Can”. Self reinvention marks the careers of Madonna, Ani DiFranco, Martha Stewart, and Robin Williams. The Nike ads of LeBron James, the experiments of New Age spirituality, the mores of contemporary teen culture, and the obsession with “extreme makeovers” are all examples of our culture’s fixation with change. In a time marked by plenitude, transformation is one of the few things these parties have in common. Although transformation is widely acknowledged as a defining characteristic of our culture, we have almost no studies on what it is or how it works. “Transformations” offers the first comprehensive and systematic view. It is an ethnography of the contemporary world.”

He also has begun producing a series of simple pdf-maps that point to his writing including this one which is entitled how to be an anthropologist for hire.

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Grant in Midtown, New York where we talked about each other’s consultancy businesses (Grant provides advice to large corps including IBM). During the lunch we brainstormed two rather fun ideas / he came up with two great ideas and I agreed with him:

* The creation of an idea nursery which brands subscribe to and can drop by a few times a year and pick up new product, service and business ideas that have been well considered and defined. This service could be provided by a ring of great thinkers including Grant McCracken and other innovators. (OK, ok, we threw our consultancy offering into the ring too…)

* The reintroduction of craft to Detroit. Grant explained to me that Detroit used to be made up of lots of different companies that made their own little bit of the auto-build puzzle very well (hence where the name General Motors came from). He wondered if the break-up of Detroit would see the return of this fragmented production style and that would actually make the US motor industry more competitive. With smaller companies making parts of the car, he suggested, maybe we will see the return of craft to car-making which buyers would cherish and would set American cars apart from Asian brands.

For more ideas like this, read Grant’s blog or hire him!