McCracken


My transcription of the first minutes.

What we're gonna talk about today is culture, which is a kind of dark matter for the commercial world, not so much for the creative world, but it's exactly that thing, that interface between the creative community, the cultural creatives as we now talk about them. And the world of commerce and the world of business and the world of some part of marketing doesn't really get the cultural proposition... The world has just got steadily more more complicated right? It changes almost almost as you look at... Joseph Schumpeter is one of the great kind of economists here to glimpse the fact that capitalism was a creative destructive force in the world... He had no idea what the world is going to look like. He was active about 80 years ago. We could you know bring him back to life and prop him up he would be astonished by just how destructive, how creative, capitalism has become.

The same is true of Alvin Toffler right? This is the guy who talked about Future Shock, the sheer force of the world the speed of the world how difficult that is how new that is as a structural feature of our world, and I think he too would look at the speed at which we're moving now and go oh my god. Clayton Christensen of course has this has blessed us with this notion of disruption, given us this idea that disruption is built into the playbook of capitalism. So capitalism is now eating itself in some sense, right? The takeaway here for this little section is the sudden, the difficult truth that capitalism is complicated and turbulent... And the good news here is that the people in this room can help a corporation live in a world like this. 

So strategy is struggle, right? Strategy was the the traditional way with which the corporations said OK what's out there? And how do we make ready for what's out there.... Peter Schwartz, this is the guy who was at Shell, and created the Global Business Network and his notion is that organizations exist in a state of perpetual surprise... You just wake up one day and you go oh my god my business model just got ripped out from under me what now? This is our own Michael Rayner. He was the co-author for the Disruption book written by Clayton Christensen. And he works here in Toronto I think at DeLoitte. But he wrote a book The Strategy Paradox in which he said strategy is dead. It doesn't work. We can't use it the way we used to. That's how difficult the world has become. And this of course is Nassim Talib, the guy who talked about black swans. And for me black swans is another language for disruptions right stuff can happen a Black swan is something out there on the horizon that you can't anticipate you can think as hard as you want about the future but you can't anticipate this black swan until it's upon you until it's sweeps into the marketplace, rips your business model out from under you.