Henry is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I read one of his books several months ago, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” and it was very much one of those right-book-at-the-right-time kind of things. The book is about the ways in which new communication technologies are empowering and encouraging participation in media by people who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do so. It also discusses the gamut of response to these new possibilities; some welcoming, some smug, some fearful.
But I thought of Henry, because I knew he’d be thinking about how the whole YouTube/CNN debate format is appears to be an almost watershed moment for these technologies. And he’s blogged an edifying post about it.
To wit:

In the 1990s, an alternative — the town hall meeting debate — emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question — and why they ask it — is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective — the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can’t get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses — Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were “individuals” who “made a difference.”
What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying “I feel your pain” a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

It seems that increasingly, the prize will go to those who know how to navigate this new media landscape. And by that I don’t mean those who learn to game the system, I mean those who recognize that the transparency it creates demands that they be genuine humans.

He’s joined Deloitte & Touche USA LLP “with a mandate to establish a major new research center in Silicon Valley…[to]…explore key business issues created by the intersection of business strategy and information technology.” The content of the post is dominated by an explanation of the questions that will inform the mission of this center. Concerning the question, “What if there is no equilibrium?” he suggests:

Here’s the paradox: at the same time, we cling to traditional equilibrium concepts and institutions that emerged and prevailed in more stable times. Nathan Mhyrvold highlighted in his talk yesterday the contrast between the exponential advance of technology performance and the linear thinking of most executives. Clayton Christensen got the attention of the business world with his perspective on disruptive innovation – but even that is a punctuated equilibrium view – it holds on to the assumption that equilibrium will eventually return.
A more specific question might be: what are the institutional architectures required to operate in a world where there is no equilibrium? Early conventional wisdom suggest that these architectures should focus on agility and flexibility, but that misses the real opportunity – balancing agility with the persistence and stability required to build and deepen long-term trust based relationships. Being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable may be the greatest challenge of all…

From where I sit, his questions seem to be pointing at a still somewhat inchoate body of interpretation about what is going on with business and technology and marketing communications. I don’t think he’s without some vision of where he thinks the future lies. For my part, I think it has to do with something more subtle than the “democratization of the market” trope that is being advanced by some.
I just think it’s an incredible set of questions and worth reading.

Similarly, bigwideskyvites (alas mere mortals) have experienced threatened relationships with the incredible idea. These ideas, befouled by the clumsy mitts of mankind, likewise protest as the life is squeezed out of them. And whether their aggressor is chronic inflexibility, hyperpragmatism, or cultural suffocation, fate signals their endangered status with a common portent: … “just”.
It might go down like this:

Yaaysayer: “… then this part of the experience will be dynamically generated based on real-time user feedback.”

Naysayer: “That sounds amazing, but let’s just make it static.”

Yaaysayer: “Well, we could pre-develop several outcomes and deliver one based upon the actions of the specific user.”

Naysayer: “Oooh, I like that too! But let’s just have one outcome: ‘DRINK MORE OVALTINE.’”

“Just,” in the pursuit of the incredible idea, is no mere word. It is a premature tourniquet. It dishonorably acknowledges the spectinuum of All Possible Outcomes and presumes the locus of “good enough”. When spoken aloud, it confirms a battle is underway for the integrity and very livelihood of an innovation. “Just” is the clang of the ringside bell: time to put up your dukes and fight.

Marketing, of necessity, treats the market as an abstraction. Thus, the customer is an abstraction. I’m willing to wager that people don’t mind being abstracted, they just don’t want to feel like an abstraction. If you’re going to try to convince a friend to try a particular restaurant, you will undoubtedly recourse to an abstraction of that friend to find the right bit of persuasive suggestion. However, when you actually talk to your friend about it, the exchange will be anything but abstract. It will take account of the shared social context, your friend’s non-verbal communications, your desire to share a new flavor, and so on. Most importantly, presuming you are anything like a decent human and you call this person a friend because you mean what is generally meant by friend, you will be speaking from your center. You will be honest. You will be human. You will be you.
This is the crack in the edifice of marketing as a paradigm. It has been there since the beginning, and no efforts to ameliorate it from within the marketing paradigm have been successful. Because marketing was a successful innovation to begin, and because its culturally totalitarian nature took time to manifest, the pressure to solve the problem of its anti-social behavior has only recently become increasingly apparent. Marketing is becoming less effective as it becomes more ubiquitous and people become more cynical. Everybody probably already knows that part.
The internet has changed everything; even though the marketers are still in the dark about it. I like to say that marketers have treated the internet like a television with a keyboard and mouse. That some marketers have been experimenting with allowing customers to create content does little to sway my opinion in this regard. I think the citizen/customer generated content (CGC) thing is a whole lot of fun and illuminating, but it does not constitute the next paradigm.
The next paradigm comes when marketers stop marketing and use these new tools to help their organizations to act like humans. The paradigm within which they’ve been operating hasn’t allowed them to do this. Now they can. Make customer service, research and development, and marketing into an organic whole so that it can assimilate these new tools. Have conversations with customers at every point of contact. It’s not democratizing the market as some have suggested, anymore than you are a democracy when you are trying to persuade your friend to join you at your favorite restaurant. It is about being human. Be accountable. Say no when you have to, but explain yourself. Apologize when you have to. Know when to apologize because you’re actually engaged in a dialogue with those you may have hurt. Give praise to those who do novel and compelling things with your products. Tell incredible human stories.
This is what creative, strategic marketers have wanted to do all along, but the marketing gestalt hasn’t made the path visible. Marketers are relegated to being the veneer of the organization—out at the edge of the process—whereas every encounter with the customer should be directly informed by the center; from the human part of the organization; from its core. The new role for marketing is in facilitating the transformation of companies from distant abstractions to human institutions. It is an opportunity for big ideas; big ideas that the big ad agencies are constitutionally incapable of conceiving.
Whatever you call that role, it ain’t marketing. Maybe it’s anthropology, as the other innovation firms call it. I just call it being human.

The Apple Store’s sale per square foot, a key measurement of success in retail, was $4,032. That’s unheard of! Tiffany& Company, the next closest was $2,666 followed by Best Buy at $930, Neiman Marcus at $611 and Sak’s at $362. Apple Stores reached a billion in sales faster than any other retailer in history. Not bad for a company that was supposed to fail inside of two years.
You can go on and read the entire article but the thing that really strikes me is how Steve Jobs approached Apple’s entrance into retail. He did not look to what everybody else in retail was doing. He certainly pulled in some top talent for advise (Mickey Drexler from the GAP and Ron Johnson from Target) but he approached retail from an experience perspective. He wanted the stores to create the same kind of experience that people had with Apple’s products. The store concept was built with the same energy and meticulous attention to design and user experience that Apple’s products are known for. Jobs broke the mold on traditional retail models. Its more of a sit and play like environment with only a demo model on display and plenty of staff on hand to answer all of your questions. Sales associates are very well trained and versed on the products and features. And of course, the stores are beautifully designed.
Being a former retail executive myself, I watched Apple’s efforts with great interest the past few years. I remember thinking that it didn’t matter whether or not the Apple Stores were profitable. In my opinion this effort was a way to extend the Apple brand and expose more people to their incredibly designed and user friendly products. As long as it drove over all demand for Apple’s products up and the stores didn’t lose money, then the retail venture would be a success. Oh what a success story they have created. Job’s turned the traditional retail model on its head. Its time that many other retailers took a step back and thought more about experience vs. sales per square foot.

Because we often work to nail down specific principles and specific opportunities for clients, we talk a lot about specific innovations. And though our recommendations are … well … ambitious, we keep them focused on singular goals. Slowly, patterns of creation have begun to emerge and, for my part, I’m now drawn to the composition of Innovation these specifics have revealed (even if, as I write it, it feels bunk). It seems that common threads bind together disparate ideas too tightly for their similarities to be disregarded.
Specifically, I’m compelled by the role of frontiers in an innovation ideation. That an innovation will house something new is a given. As far as invention is concerned, mankind has been at it for a while. New is the new old. It is when an idea passes bravely into a new frontiers that I feel the tingle of innovation. And that the futureboys reminded me that there isn’t just one frontier to breach makes matters much more tingly. [Eliot charted a conceptual frontier in this plopgraph, for instance, but you know, space still counts too.]
So, in the aforementioned client-attended ideation session, we naturally encouraged them the push their thinking outside normal boundaries. With due respect for Godin’s Edgecraft, we picked variables and turned their knobs both high and low, exploring conceptual extremes of maximum and minimum. And as has been the norm lately, the exploration of these isolated specifics unstitched a common thread: while every idea was new in some way — new to us, new to the client, new to their industry, etc. — those ideas that transcended new and actually threatened foray into a new frontier were the most likely to elicit laughter. In what first may have been misinterpreted as negative feedback, it became clear that this was an earnest laughter, too; one filled with uncertainty and interest as though you’d just been told an outrageous tall tale you secretly wanted to believe.
Jim Dator, another futurist badass who I am likely wholly misrepresenting, probably would have interjected thusly:
“Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous.”

The oddly amazing and amazingly odd (and sadly, recently departed) Robert Anton Wilson, in one of his curious collections of essays, casually suggested the existence of a “Jumping Jesus Phenomenon.” Wilson starts by defining a unit of measure; the “jesus.” He defines it as the “known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D.” The phenomenon then, is the ostensibly exponential growth of human knowledge. As Wilson off-the-cuffs the math:

Before going any further, let us ask how long it took to arrive at one jesus. One way of estimating is to take the estimated age of homo sapiens, in which case it took 40,000 to 100,000 years.
How long did it take to double this accumulation of knowledge, to achieve two jesuses? It required 1500 years – until 1500 A.D. How long did it take to double again and obtain four jesuses? It required 250 years, and we had four jesuses in our larder by 1750.
The next doubling took 150 years, and by 1900 A.D. humanity had eight jesuses in our information account. The next doubling took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 jesuses. The next, ten years, and by 1960 we had 32 jesuses. The next doubling took seven years, and by 1967 we had 64 jesuses. And the next doubling took 6 years; by 1973 we have 128 jesuses.
There is no reason to imagine that the acceleration has stopped. Thus, we almost certainly reached 256 j around 1978-79 and 512 j in 1982.

Ray Kurzweil was saying the same thing back then, and they’re both just formulations of Moore’s Law , but I like Wilson’s whimsy.
Anyway, what these parabolic-growth-of-human-knowledge theories generally seem to agree upon is that we are living in what Kurzweil calls “the boot of the curve.” Things are changing faster than ever. Change is the new stasis.
Now what? If you’re running an organization, this paradigm of change means that it is more difficult than ever to sit on something that will last. For example, an investment in the telegraph in the early 19th century could be expected to yield returns for a lifetime. What extant technology can be expected to be both profitable and unchanged for the next 75 years? No wonder everyone has been chomping at the bit of innovation for the last decade.
This is where I get to ask those pretentious Seth Godinesque rhetorical questions: What is your organization doing to institutionalize innovation? What effect is the paradigm of change having on your organization’s landscape? How cool am I that I can pose these questions with an air of disaffected superiority?

This was the path and eventual demise of the May Department Store Company and could perhaps be the path of Circuit City if they don’t try to get a leg up on Best Buy and the emerging competition from discounters such as Wal-Mart.
Even if Best Buy’s Geek Squad is experiencing quality problems and perhaps there are issues with the pricing model, they should work those out over time and probably have a dominant position on servicing consumer technology needs. That is a position that will give them a leg up on discounters who may beat them on price, but lack a comparable ability to serve those customers with installation and trouble shooting. That need appears to be growing as technology keeps changing. Here is a “60 minutes” feature on the Geeks. Best Buy’s deep pockets allow them to operate in the red and work these kinks out where other competitors may not have that same luxury.
Another example of Best Buy’s innovative culture has to do with the radical work scheduling practices they have implemented at their corporate offices. This was the cover story in Business Week on 12/11/2006 which you can find here It should be noted that Best Buy looks for innovation both inside its company, as demonstrated with the flextime initiative, and outside the company, as we see in their purchase of Geek Squad in 2002.
Wal-Mart is also a pretty progressive company and becoming a big player in the consumer electronics market. It will be interesting to see how Circuit City does over the next few years with Best Buy continuing to dominate and Wal-Mart, Dell and others growing their consumer electronics business.