Showing results by author "Grant McCracken" in All Categories

Cultural anthropologist and thought leader Grant McCracken proposes a radical solution for our time of unprecedented scandal: a return to honor. What used to be shocking has somehow become the new normal. Sexual predators stalk interns at work. Parents try to buy a place for their kids in...

A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine. The Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how. Culturematics start small but can scale up ferociously, bootstrapping themselves as they go. Because they are so inexpensive, we can afford to fire off a multitude of them simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once.

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world's biggest companies and consulting firms, argues that the CCO would keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends, from sneakers to slow food to preppies, while developing a systematic understanding of the deep waves of culture in America and the world. The CCOs professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes, even when they only exist as the weakest of signals.