Chief Culture Officer

How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation

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By Grant McCracken

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around November 10, 2009. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Trenchantly on point and bursting with insight, anthropologist Grant McCracken shows American corporations how keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends can change their business practices for the better — and ahead of the curve.

Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn’t realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new — and lucrative — market opportunity, one they could have seen coming if they had but been paying attention to the shape of American culture.
Levi Strauss isn’t alone. Too many corporations outsource their understanding of culture to trend hunters, cool watchers, marketing experts, consulting firms, and, sometimes, teenage interns. The cost to Levi-Strauss was a billion dollars. The cost to the rest of corporate America is immeasurable.

The lesson? The American corporation needs a new professional. It needs a Chief Culture Officer.

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world’s biggest companies and consulting firms, argues that the CCO would keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends-from sneakers to slow food to preppies-while developing a systematic understanding of the deep waves of culture in America and the world. The CCO’s professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes, even when they only exist as the weakest of signals.

Delightfully authoritative, trenchantly on point, bursting with insight and character, Chief Culture Officer is sure to expand your horizons-and your business.
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On Sale
Nov 10, 2009
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465020102

Grant McCracken

About the Author

Grant McCracken is a Research Affiliate at C3 at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and was the founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture. He has written nine academic books, and his work has been covered by Oprah, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and BusinessWeek. He lives in Rowayton, Connecticut.

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