Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation - Couverture souple

Create Your Own Economy
“I have deep admiration and respect for Grant McCracken, a nimble thinker who combines a mastery of marketing, culture, anthropology, and modern business practice. Chief Culture Officer has many lessons for anyone interested in understanding how to run a successful business in the early 21st century. It will prove one of the most stimulating books of the year.”

Philip Kotler, author of Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence
“Marketing gets failing grades when it comes to understanding and using culture. In Chief Culture Officer—a delectable cultural soup that is sure to stir your taste buds—Grant McCracken makes a compelling case that culture will be marketing’s next silver bullet. I whole-heartedly endorse his call for bringing culture-thinking into the company.”

Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey through Silicon Valley
“This is a marvel of a business book: highly entertaining, original, and provocative. Entrepreneurs who want to understand their customers, target market, and the cultural dynamics that shape the business world—which is to say all entrepreneurs—need to read it.”
Seth Godin, author of Tribes & Purple Cow
“The title of this book is a lie. It's not merely for companies that decide they need a Chief Culture Officer, or even just for those who aspire to that job. It's for you. Right now. If your job involves marketing, inventing, selling or simply investing in companies that make stuff, this book is a must read.”

John Deighton, Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
“For those who are open to its thrall, Chief Culture Officer will change the trajectory of their lives.”

Faris Yakob, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Strategist, McCann Erickson New York
“In Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken highlights the increasing importance of cultural understanding for brands that wish to remain relevant—and profitable—in the protean flux of the modern marketplace, as he carves out a new role for the 21st century corporation. The best marketers can hope for is to create something that resonates so strongly it becomes part of our cultural fabric. This book is an indispensable tool for achieving that goal.”

Tyler Cowen, author of

For too long, corporations have ignored culture - to their great disadvantage. In "Chief Culture Officer", anthropologist and consultant Grant McCracken reintroduces culture to bottom-line business plans Levi-Strauss missed the hip hop trend. As rappers adopted baggy pants and gangster bling, Levi's remained above the fray. It cost the corporation $1 billion. Afterwards, a team member complained, 'Who knew baggy pants were a paradigm shift?' Culture is an essential piece of the intelligence an organization needs in a turbulent world. And you'd think we would have found a way to factor it in to the decisions make by an organization. Far from it. Corporations have an alphabet soup of executives - CEOs, CMOs, CSOs, CIOs, CTOs - but no to deal with culture. Instead, they've chosen to outsource their understanding of culture to trend hunters, cool watchers, marketing experts, consulting firms, and, sometimes, their interns. Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world's biggest companies and consulting firms, suggests that every company needs a Chief Culture Officer - that's how important an understanding of culture has become. According to McCracken, the CCO would keep a finger on the pulse of both contemporary cultural trends but also try to develop a real understanding of the deep waves that move American and world culture much more broadly. That would mean attending events from SxSW to Pop!Tech and TED; gathering with the cognoscenti at the less formal gatherings staged by Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, and Tim O'Reilly; constantly monitoring magazines and watching websites. But a CCO should also have a personal network of gifted respondents who can report on what is happening in the diverse provinces of contemporary culture, and they should participate in the networks that have emerged on their own. The CCO must be a miracle of empathy, capable of imagining what is happening in contemporary culture without bias. The CCO must be prepared to admit ignorance and ask naive questions, and must also have a high tolerance for complexity, ambiguity and contradiction. You can see why the culture needs a spot in the C-suite: there's just too much going on to ignore or deal with ad hoc. And while being CCO sounds almost impossible, McCracken will show you how to do it, how to profit by it, and why it's essential.