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

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.