Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football . . . Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough Ideas [Hardcover]

Grant McCracken (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2012

Welcome to Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football, Burning Man, the Ford Fiesta Movement, Rube Goldberg, NFL Films, Wordle, Two and a Half Men, a 10,000-Year Symphony, and ROFLCom Memes Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough Ideas

A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.

Once wound up and released, 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 Culturematics simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once. Culturematics are fast, cheap, and out of control. Perhaps as important, they fail early and often. They are the perfect antidote to a world where we cannot guess what’s coming next.

In Culturematic, anthropologist Grant McCracken describes these little machines and helps the reader master them. Examples are drawn from NFL Films, Twitter, the Apple Genius Bar, Starbucks, Ford, SNL Digital Shorts, Restoration Hardware, UNICEF, J. Crew, Pie Lab, USA Network, and the GEICO gecko.

For the traditional producers of culture—the creators of movies, design, advertising, publishing, magazines, newspapers, and corporate R&D—this book will inspire new innovation and creativity.

For the emerging producers of culture—the digital players—this book will serve as a practical handbook. Culturematic: our app for creating the world anew.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“McCracken’s lively exploration of how media experiments, rule breaking, and parody can expose culture and move it forward proves fascinating and provocative.” — Publishers Weekly

“McCracken’s point is that in the modern world it is almost impossible to know where the next big idea is coming from… But, thanks to social media and also to the fact that the world is in many ways a lot more homogenous than used to be the case, certain ideas, thoughts, programmes spread like wildfire.” — futureofbusiness.com

“Grant McCracken introduces, in this thought-provoking book, the notion of the culturematic, a machine for making culture – otherwise described as an ingenuity engine... McCracken has interesting observations about how the growing inscrutability of the world haunts traditional producers of culture.” — The Irish Times

“Worth the read if you’re trying to create meaning and value in the world.” — LeadershipNow (leadershipnow.com)

“Working in the digital culture industry, Culturematic is certainly inspirational. If nothing else, it’s an excellent compendium of cultural artifacts that have touched the zeitgeist in the last few years.” — Social Media Group (socialmediagroup.com)

“Engagingly written and accessible to both business and lay people, the book will have broad appeal to entrepreneurs, marketers, inventors, artists, and people looking for a creativity boost in their professional or personal lives.” — Library Journal

“his book will definitely lead you to a greater appreciation of your own inner curiosities” — Marketing Daily/MediaPost

ADVANCE PRAISE for Culturematic

“No one views American culture—nor discovers its meaning—in quite the way Grant McCracken does. With his sparkling Culturematic as your guide, go from consuming culture to making it, one small, achievable, and ingenious step at a time.” — B. Joseph Pine II, coauthor, The Experience Economy and Infinite Possibility

“Culturematic pulls back the curtain on the fascinating cultural world that drives brands, corporations, and society. Both a revealer of history and a predictor of the future, Grant McCracken provides tools for innovation and mischief that will help you place yourself and your company on the relevant edge of culture. A guidebook, a tool, and a great read.” — Stanley Hainsworth, Chief Creative Officer, Tether

“Grant McCracken is a cool guy and thinker with consistently cutting-edge insights about the way people are thinking, working, and feeling. McCracken’s challenge here, to be a culture-making entrepreneur—‘a Culturematic’—resonated strongly with me, as I expect it will for many people and leaders who want to invent their futures by starting small.” — Peter Sims, author, Little Bets; Cofounder and Director, Fuse Corps

“We are leaving behind a marketing age that rewarded safe bets. Culturematic prepares us to listen more and hear the answers in unexpected places.” — John A. Deighton, Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

“There’s a misconception that innovation lives only in labs populated by white-coat wearing scientists. In his wide-ranging and entertaining book, Grant McCracken shows how that is not true. Culturematic manages to be both an engaging and practical guide to creativity and innovation. A worthwhile read.” — Scott D. Anthony, Managing Director Innosight Asia-Pacific; author of The Little Black Book Innovation

From the Back Cover

"No one views American culture--nor discovers its meaning--in quite the way Grant McCracken does. With his sparkling Culturematic as your guide, go from consuming culture to making it, one small, achievable, and ingenious step at a time."
 
--B. Joseph Pine II, coauthor, The Experience Economy and Infinite Possibility
 
"Culturematic pulls back the curtain on the fascinating cultural world that drives brands, corporations, and society. Both a revealer of history and a predictor of the future, Grant McCracken provides tools for innovation and mischief that will help you place yourself and your company on the relevant edge of culture. A guidebook, a tool, and a great read."
 
--Stanley Hainsworth, Chief Creative Officer, Tether
 
"Grant McCracken is a cool guy and thinker with consistently cutting-edge insights about the way people are thinking, working, and feeling. McCracken's challenge here, to be a culture-making entrepreneur--'a Culturematic'--resonated strongly with me, as I expect it will for many people and leaders who want to invent their futures by starting small."
 
--Peter Sims, author, Little Bets; Cofounder and Director, Fuse Corps
 
"We are leaving behind a marketing age that rewarded safe bets. Culturematic prepares us to listen more and hear the answers in unexpected places."
 
--John A. Deighton, Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
 
"There's a misconception that innovation lives only in labs populated by white-coat wearing scientists. In his wide-ranging and entertaining book, Grant McCracken shows how that is not true. Culturematic manages to be both an engaging and practical guide to creativity and innovation. A worthwhile read."
 
--Scott D. Anthony, Managing Director, Innosight Asia-Pacific; author of The Little Black Book of Innovation.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (May 15, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1422143295
• ISBN-13: 978-1422143292
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Trained as an anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago), Grant has studied American culture and commerce for 25 years.

He has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and worked for many organizations including Timberland, New York Historical Society, Diageo, IKEA, Sesame Street, Nike, and Kimberly Clark.

He started the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he did the first museum exhibit on youth cultures.

He has taught anthropology at the University of Cambridge, ethnography at MIT, and marketing at the Harvard Business School. He is presently a research affiliate in the Department of Comparative Media at MIT.

He is a long time student of culture and commerce. He has explored this theme in two books: Culture and Consumption I, and Culture and Consumption II.

He has also looked at how Americans invent and reinvent themselves. He had explored this theme in two more books: Big Hair and Transformations: identity construction in a contemporary culture.

He is the student of American culture. Plenitude published in 1997 looked at the new explosive growth of contemporary culture. In Flock and Flow, he shows how contemporary culture and commerce change.

Two years ago, he published a book called Chief Culture Officer with Basic Books that argues that culture now creates so much opportunity and danger for the organization that need senior managers who focus on it full time. He is hoping this will create a new occupational destination for graduates in the arts and humanities.

This spring Grant is publishing a book called Culturematic with the Harvard Business Review Press.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Relevant, then informative, then inspiring, then actionable May 19, 2012

By Cameron Maddux

Format:Hardcover

I have been a fan of Grant McCracken for several years. Not only has his blog been consistently thoughtful and timely, but back before social - his blogroll was the standard for creative-cultural amazingness. I've mostly enjoyed his books with head-nodding and inner exclamations of "yes, absolutely."

This book is different, in a good way. This book had me wanting to hurry up and finish it so I could get up and DO SOMETHING CULTUREMATIC, almost similar to the way one feels at the end of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (who is a Culturematic reference.)

The book starts nicely by building relevance, especially if you are a fan of the often mentioned with this title Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries or the great Gilmore and Pine books (The Experience Economy, Updated Edition & Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want.) McCracken's discussion and points about modern culture making are diverse and simple to understand. What he is writing about in Culturematic weaves into many existing conversations. After establishing relevancy, he helpfully gives the reader dozens of up-to-date examples. It is informative, but also respectful of our access to Wikipedia, Google and YouTube - so we get the important bits and how it ties in with the discussion, but no more.

The book then moves into action mode - and this is where it seemed to become a McCracken 2.0 for me. I've had the pleasure of attending a McCracken lecture, which was full of energy and created quite a buzz in the room and for days later, but I rarely got that from his books (perhaps more because I don't fit the typical reader profile, than anything to do with the book's content.) For me, this book actually captures his unique energy, while not giving up on being both well-researched and intelligent. He shows the reader the patterns in modern culture-making and helps us recognize them ourselves; he gives us experiments and then challenges us to "Be a Curator" or "Be a Storyteller" or my personal favorite, "Be a Cartographer." I have pages filled with notes on how I'm going to act on Culturematic. The book closes with a quick chapter of actionable items for executives, managers and corporations (but really anyone can absorb it as "long-term" "day-to-day" and the "entity.")

Read this book. It reminded me of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World or Marcus Wohlsen's Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life in that these are important issues that are growing in significance and permeating into unexpected everyday places, you just plan HAVE to be informed about these subjects. Also, it is a quick read, but it leaves you with lots of places to go investigate or just get up and build your own Culturematic.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific discussion of experimentation May 7, 2012

By Tim Kastelle

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

In his last book, Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken made the case for why firms must pay attention to culture to succeed. In this book, McCracken outlines a method for doing this effectively. He defines a Culturematic as a tool for cultural innovation. They are basically tests - you answer a "what if..." question, try it out, discover what works (and what doesn't), and then unlock value from what you learn.

The idea is deceptively simple, but profound. You may read the descriptions of the book and say "but I'm not interested reality TV, fantasy football, ROFLcon etc." It doesn't matter. What McCracken describes is an experimental approach to innovation that applies more generally than might be obvious. Experimenting is at the core of any successful innovation effort, and the tools described in this book can be used in much wider contexts than those used as examples in it. In that, it is a good companion to Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.

The ideas in this book will be useful to anyone interested in innovation, design thinking or those running organisations that have a strong connection to culture (be it low or high). On top of that, it is well-written and fun to read - an added bonus.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing Insight into Innovation June 18, 2012

By barbcfa

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

As an Equity Analyst, I love reading business strategy books to gain new insights into how to look at companies. I discovered Culturematic while listening to a recent HBR Ideacast podcast interview with its author, Grant McCracken - [...] I was intrigued and downloaded the book onto my Kindle. I found Culturematic a refreshing change from most business strategy books as McCracken approaches the concept of innovation from his expertise as an anthropologist. It is interesting as McCracken's own blog which "sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics" - [...]-camps - is a culturematic itself as it brings together two unrelated domains and creates a new way for people to look at corporate strategy. Another example of a company that is a culturematic which follows McCracken's "...rules: Don't look for big ideas. Seek small ideas that can grow. Fail fast. Fail often. Keep learning and never give up." is lululemon - [...]. I highly recommend you check out this fascinating book!