chief culture officer

December 21st, 2009 • posts i've written

Last night, I inhaled Grant McCracken’s latest book, Chief Culture Officer. In it, Grant argues that corporations need a new role and position to assimilate and navigate the cultural waters: the Chief Cultural Officer.

The book is one-part manifesto, one-part how-to manual, and one-part blogroll for everyone and everything you should be paying attention to right now. When I first picked it up, I thought, “Boy, this sounds just like me!” and then about half way through I realized, “this sounds just like me and most of my colleagues and friends.” Full disclosure, Grant name checks me on page ninety-one, but in no way has Grant asked me to write about the book or recommend it to my readers.

For many years, brands were the backward little brother of the cultural world, not as extravagant as film, not as experimental as art, not as forceful as fiction. Brands had a simple task, to bang the drum on behalf of a product or service, to play carney barker for the corporation. Brands were predictable. They were tedious. The subordinated intelligence and creativity for marketing’s favorite rhetorical devices: repetition, good humor, simplicity, and of course repetition. (p 142-143)

I thought the best way to urge you to buy a copy or borrow one from a friend would be to share with you some of my favorite passages from the book.

On the importance of culture to the corporation,

Let’s be clear. Without a connection to culture, Coke is merely carbonated water and syrup. Without culture, it’s just a fizzy drink. So culture counts. Let’s be clearer still. The fundamental terms of the Coke proposition are changing. The carbonated soft drink is now contested by new ideas of what a drink should be (Snapple, Gatorade, Poland Springs, Vitamin-water, Red Bull). In the traditional case, culture matters. In the present case, it matters more. (p 10)

Thousands of little experiments,

For we are a culture with a third term, a restless creativity. If once we were a mainstream and avant-garde, now we are a great wilderness, with thousands of little experiments happening everywhere. Point, counterpoint is dead. The struggle between status and cool is over. We are now a culture over-flowing with variety and noise. (p 78)

On status and cool,

Taste now comes from a mastery of change, not a mastery of status. [...] Cool is an outsider’s sensibility now completely internalized, built into every individual and our entire culture. [...] it is anthropologically more rewarding, I think, to see cool as a measure of our culture’s ability to absorb conflicting impulses and embrace contradiction. (p 70,77)

Grant’s advice to the newly minted CCO,

The most important rule here: Don’t be partisan. Don’t be cool. Treat everyone as more knowledgeable than yourself. (p 111)

Tracking, measuring, and scrutinizing your wins and losses,

The big picture will oblige us to pick up things that are surviving infancy and moving forward. We must decide where we expect them to stand in three months, six months, and a year. And then we must scrutinize our successes and our failures and see how the algorithm needs to be changed. (p 105)

A CEO can’t go it alone,

But media is now so finely segmented and in the case of mainstream radio so repetitive, consuming media does not guarantee broad acquaintance. (p 156)

The final chunk of the book is literally a list of lists – content creators and publishing houses that demand your attention to be better connected to culture. That alone is worth the purchase price.

BTW, if you buy the book on Amazon today, they’ll have it shipped in time for Christmas. Stocking stuffer, anyone?

Related posts:

1. tonight: chief culture officer @ cooper union
2. interview with grant mccracken for chief culture officer
3. chief culture officer interview, part two

Tags: chief culture officer, culture, grant mccracken

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