According to consultant and culture expert Grant McCracken, between them, Levi-Strauss and Quaker managed to lose $2.4 billion because they failed to read what was happening in the culture around them. From Levi-Strauss missing the hip-hop wave to Quaker overpaying for Snapple, these companies, like so many others, took a misstep and outsourced their understanding of culture to trend hunters, marketing experts, consulting firms and interns—at a high cost.
In McCracken’s latest book, Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, he argues that corporations need a new professional in the “C-Suite”—a Chief Culture Officer, or CCO—to keep a finger on the pulse of fast-moving trends while developing a real understanding of the deep waves that move culture in America and the world. Apple, Virgin and Omnimedia depend on seemingly indispensable “gurus” to navigate culture, and with great success.
McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world’s biggest companies and consulting firms, reverse engineers the likes of Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Martha Stewart to reveal their secrets for reading culture, and provide readers with a toolkit for doing it themselves.
He is a Research Affiliate at C3 at MIT. He consults with an array of companies, including Campbell Soup, Coke, L’Oreal, IBM, and the Children’s Television Workshop. He has written nine academic books and his work has been covered by Oprah, The New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek, and BusinessWeek.
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