Category: Culture

Don’t go, if you can help it. Rome, from the perspective of a visitor in 2025, spirals viciously with reinforcing cycles of increasing tourists and increasing attractions for tourists and increasing tourists…

Which might be inevitable. The sheer volume of masterpieces in the Vatican museum alone is staggering; in a single day not only can you not hope to see it all, your brain is oversaturated well before reaching the Sistine Chapel. Everyone walks past a room with a handful of Dali paintings without noticing; the mind has no room for them.

The Pantheon is breathtaking in its architectural beauty. The palimpsest excesses of decoration over the centuries only slightly tarnish the perfection of the design. It hurts to tell you not to see it.

I was there in October and still there were hordes of tourists. I shudder to think what more crowds combined with the oppressive heat of summer feels like. Even the Colosseum struggles to compete for your attention.

Perhaps one, or two days. Skip Campo de’ Fiori. Skip Piazza Navona. Then go to another town where you’ll experience actual Italy; not an English-speaking series of trinkets and tours and consumer opportunities.

As world financial markets toss and turn following the U.S. sub-prime mortgage meltdown, I can’t help but think the bogus products that led to this mess where the result of a toxic culture. From the retail point of view, I recently reacted to how far customer trust has declined.

On a recent morning, in a meeting at a giant bank on Wall Street, I was killing time talking with an old timer and heard some of the employee side of the story. He waxed nostalgically about how fun Wall Street was in the 1960’s and 70’s. They worked hard, but it was fun. The transactions were simpler, the lines between right and wrong were more clear, at lunch they played football in front of the stock exchange, and bonuses would be paid in cash by the boss. Now the products are so complicated the banks don’t understand their own risk exposure, the workplace atmosphere is contentious, and Wall Street is barricaded and guarded by the military brandishing machine guns. Culture begets products, and the culture is sick.

Photo credit: Jennifer Szymaszek, AP

I wonder if this flashy, animated building facade — very not-financial services — changes employees’ perception of Lehman Brothers?

Could it backfire and make employees more cynical?

The always entertaining Andrew Zolli has a new article in the current Fast Company mag, expanding on the themes he’s been talking about in person. Essentially he demonstrates the importance of looking through the demographics lens when thinking about the future…

The hourglass society will bring an avalanche of new social challenges, cultural norms, and business opportunities. With a huge increase in the number of older consumers, entirely new entertainment, culture, and news markets will open up–film, television, books, and Internet sites pitched more to the Matlock set than to the Eminem crowd. Also, older people tend to vote more frequently, and they will wield significant political clout: We could see a multidecade “boomerocracy” or, as one gen-Xer put it archly over cocktails, “TRBN: terminal rule by boomer narcissists.”

I’ve found his presentations quite useful in the past, and I’m looking forward to his participation in the Design 2.0 panel. If you were thinking of going, I hear a few seats are available.

Quotes from the Wall Street Journal…

Ford will announce a plan tomorrow called “The Way Forward” that will involve 30,000 layoffs and target “the root of the auto maker’s recent woes: a stifling corporate culture.”

[In the war room,] high on the wall, hangs a big, white sheet of paper on which is written: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Among other maxims on the wall: “Culture is unspoken, but powerful. It develops over time — difficult to change.”

…implores employees to remember “conflict is healthy.“

Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software created a documentary DVD of the summer interns’ experience creating an actual software product. Notice how they cook and share a meal together. I’m a big fan of establishing a relationship over home-cooked meals. Last winter I met the guys from Zago Design for the first time in one of their homes over a meal. We ate delicious food and talked for hours, and by the end I wanted to partner with them more than other firms I’d known for years on a more superficial basis.

I live in one of the art centers of the world — the West Chelsea section of Manhattan — and my opinion of today’s art can be summed up in one word: boring. Rarely do contemporary artists teach us anything, or even make us feel anything. The best art only manages commentary, as with Banksy’s mockery of Israel’s separation wall.

I’m currently reading Rollo May’s 1975 classic The Courage to Create. As he explores the dangerous work artists created through the ages, I’m reminded of my research into Music and Censorship and this quote from George Bernard Shaw…

Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral… every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom – that is, on morals – as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue.

It seems almost quaint to worry about music — or any artistic — censorship now. Artists no longer force us to question our customs. Does anyone else? In the West we no longer share the meta-narrative of the Bible, so religious plurality is old news. Science so routinely announces breakthroughs we’re rarely shocked.

Our shared customs now center around work. Could there be some action so radical it forced us all to reconsider our working lives? It’s described every month in the pages of Fast Company and Worthwhile, but what if there was a figurehead, an event, or a series of events that led to a tipping point to make these magazine proclomations reality? What if all the middle managers at GE demanded different conditions the way unions do? What if a visionary CEO committed to a completely transparent corporation with activist board members demanding triple bottom line performance? Could changes like this send employees home shocked into a different understanding of how to lead their lives? What sort of conditions could make this possible?

In this latest HBSWK piece, Bain’s talking customer experience. Not long ago, BCG was talking about open source-style collaboration. Naturally, we talk about the vital importance of strategic delivery too, having lived it. I clearly see many ways in which the no-collar working style — natural collaboration, little hierarchy, relationships built on trust, smooth flow of information — benefits performance from the bottom-up, in organizational ways that top-down management styles can’t.

Did Johnson & Johnson heed my advice to stay away from purchasing Guidant with its unethical practices? Probably not, but I’m glad they’re hesistating. Guidant responds, typically, by suing the company that wants to buy it.

Song Airlines is closing. It’s sad that a better customer experience alone isn’t enough to compete, but that in itself is a good lesson. The symptom of Song’s decline was a failure to replicate JetBlue’s service, while the cause is a failure to look beyond JetBlue’s product to the true source of their success. There’s a relationship between product, process, and culture, and JetBlue’s employee-focused (not consumer-focused!) culture is what propels them.

Though I must say the popular doubts about JetBlue’s ability to preserve this culture while they grow and grow are substantiated. As a JetBlue customer, I don’t feel the experience is any better these days, I only fly them for the price. It’s time for change.