Grant McCracken: Reading A Restless Culture

Most of us read PSFK to get early warning and better intelligence.  This is useful in our own lives, and crucial for the organizations for which we work.  Now these organizations can choose their response.  And this is better than the standard modality of the American corporation: total surprise followed by blind reaction.

Prognostication would be easy if there were a single flight path along which change moved.  We would only need to monitor this path to see the future coming.  (And this was pretty much the way they did it in the 20th century, keeping an eye on taste elites and the avant garde.)  But now cultural developments can come from the worlds of cuisine, sports, music, fashion, movie making, web sites, new media. Chefs, point guards, engineers, indie bands, Hollywood producers, digital celebrities, new presidents, any of these can prove a decisive influence.

To make matters trickier still, we can’t merely monitor the most famous of these players.  It is now possible for obscure players to punt their influence in from the margin.  Consider Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post.  These people began in obscurity and came to prominence in the blink of an eye.  And with them came big changes: crowdsourcing and the decline of the hegemony of the expert (Wales), the end of the newspaper as we knew it (Newmark), and the rise of digital media as a liberal answer to the conservative control of radio (Huffington.)

The question is how do we pick up the Wales, the Newmarks and the Huffingtons early.  And how do we see what they mean?  This is the work of the Chief Culture Officer, not the only way to solve the problem, but a good start, I think.

Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at MIT.  His new book, Chief Culture Officer, was published just a couple of days ago.