Thinkers50 Radar 2024 featuring Marcus Collins

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50.

Stuart Crainer:

And hello from me. I’m Stuart Crainer, the other founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our weekly LinkedIn Live session, celebrating some of the brightest new stars in the world of management thinking.

Des Dearlove:

This week, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar list for 2024. We believe that these are the up and coming management thinkers we should all be listening to.

Stuart Crainer:

The 2024 list was our most eclectic, challenging yet. Sustainability and AI are key themes for 2024, no news there really, as is making workplaces wholly inclusive and healthy for everyone. This year’s Radar is brought to you in partnership with Deloitte and features business thinkers from the worlds of fashion, retail, branding and communications, as well as statisticians, neuroscientists, and platform practitioners from the Nordics to New Zealand and Asia to America. Among the highlights for me are Ludmila Praslova, author of The Canary Code, a really good book, about teaching how to design healthier inclusive organizations.

Des Dearlove:

We also feature the work of Connie Hadley from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, Jenny Fernandez, author of Zigzag to the Top, and Martin Gonzalez, Principal of AI Talent Development at Google and co-author of The Bonfire Moment.

Stuart Crainer:

Bonfire Moment, good title for a book. Closer to home for us, we include the excellent Neri Karra Sillaman, who is a sustainable fashion consultant and entrepreneur expert at Said Business School, Oxford University.

Des Dearlove:

Over the next few weeks, we will be meeting some of these fantastic thinkers in our weekly sessions and we are delighted to see from the chat that some of them are able to join us today. We look forward to some really great conversations. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you are joining us from today and put your questions in the chat or Q&A box at any point. To kick things off, it’s become a bit of a tradition to invite one of the stars of the 2023 Radar. This week, we’re thrilled to be joined by the winner of the Thinkers50 Radar Award, Marcus Collins.

Stuart Crainer:

We really love Marcus’s work. He’s the author of the bestseller For the Culture. He argues that what we wear, what we eat, where we work, who we date, and just about every facet of social living is informed by our cultural subscriptions.

Des Dearlove:

Marcus is a student of cultural contagion and how it manifests itself in our consumption proclivities – I knew I was going to struggle with that word for some reason – organizational dynamics, and society writ large. He’s a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and previously worked as an advertising executive. Along the way, he led iTunes plus Nike Sports music initiatives at Apple before running digital strategy for Beyonce.

Stuart Crainer:

Welcome, Marcus. So you are the man who taught Beyonce to dance fundamentally, and obviously being on the Radar and then winning the Radar Award has changed your life. The last time we saw you, you were being carried shoulder-high through the streets of London.

Marcus Collins:

It was a blast, and I’m still kind of on cloud nine. I won’t lie. This was an unbelievable evening. Definitely wasn’t expected, but a great, great honor. It’s always a pleasure to be with you guys. Thanks so much for having me.

Des Dearlove:

No, it was very well-deserved. For The Culture, it seems to have done really, really well. Can you explain this cultural phenomenon of your book and your work and what readers get from it?

Marcus Collins:

I’m really grateful at the reception of the book and not so much because I wrote it, but I think the ideas are really important and I think they’re important not only for commerce, for business, but also for organizations and society writ large. The book argues, as you mentioned, that there’s no external force more influential to human behavior than culture full stop. And the more we understand that, the more likely we are to harness its sway, to leverage its influence. What that means is that when we go about our day-to-day lives, we think that we have agency over the things that we do and what we buy and where we go and how we engage with the world. But the truth of the matter is that we have only an illusion of agency. With some better understanding of the invisible forces that are pushing upon us, then we can navigate the world with a bit more control.

I think that even further beyond that, the book argues that since the world is influenced so heavily by our culture and our culture is subjective, like, for some, a cow is leather, for others a deed, and for some it’s dinner. If that be the case, then the truths that we hold are not objective, they’re subjective, which means then that Stuart’s truth could be different than your truth, Des, and different than mine and they all co-exist. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Therefore, if your truth is different to mine, then we could still coexist. We could still work together so long as your truth doesn’t mean my oppression. I think that that’s an idea that’s not only worth interrogating, it’s an idea that’s worth understanding so that we can be better consumers, more mindful consumers, intentional consumers, we can be better partners in our organizations and more importantly we can be better humans as we share this globe that we call earth.

Des Dearlove:

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Stuart’s truth is very different to my truth. I think we’ve known that for a long time.

Marcus Collins:

Yes, that’s evidence.

Des Dearlove:

One of the key messages I like about the book is in a world that seems to be more and more… there were forces pushing us towards polarization and echo chambers and a binary world where if he’s right then I’m wrong or vice versa. This is kind of an inclusive book. The message is very much that we can coexist and that we should coexist. I really like that. I think it’s really positive.

Marcus Collins:

Thank you. I think that we know these things intuitively, but when we hold our truths as objective truths, then they diametrically oppose us to everyone who sees it differently. I would argue that the truths that we hold are all informed by so many other perspectives that we ought to be just a little bit more open-minded about how these things come about, how they manifest in our day-to-day lives. If we can take the time to just see the world through the lens of someone else that isn’t ours, that doesn’t abide by the same meaning-making system or doesn’t see the world through the same ethnocentristic lenses, then we might find ourselves connected with people in ways we never thought about. I think it’s really powerful.

Stuart Crainer:

Thank you everyone who’s joined us so far. We have people from Germany, Poland, the US, Canada, Singapore, Romania, Italy, the UK, Switzerland, Holland, Portugal. Please send in your questions at any time. Thank you everyone for joining us. Marcus, one of the things that strikes me, that culture is usually used to describe things, that you regard culture as a tool, which is a fundamental difference.

Marcus Collins:

For sure. They’re both things. They describe a set of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. And since they are a set of conventions, they’re a system of systems. These systems can be harnessed, they can be leveraged, and more importantly, they can be tapped into as a way to connect, as a way to find commonalities where you may see the world one way and I see the world in a way that is similar, just articulated different, that if I say in a way that you understand, you go, “Oh, I’ve been feeling that way since forever. Finally, someone said it.” As a result, we come together not only with people, but with brands, with organizations, institutions and entities and even artists and the like.

These systems of systems that demarcate who we are, that we use as a way to present and project our identity, they also become ways by which we can tap into it. That’s just because of our proclivity to want to be in community, to want to belong, and understanding this helps us find better ways to navigate in the world.

Des Dearlove:

Well, let’s talk a little bit about identity because I think we have a sense that we use particularly brands to perhaps signal who we think we are. How does this work in terms of culture? How does culture play with our sense of identity?

Marcus Collins:

Culture is anchored in identity because of who I am, right? And all the many multiple hyphens that make up our selfhood, our personhood, and all the complexity in this intersectionality, these are the monikers that we use to set ourselves apart, to peacock ourselves to the world. I’m a professor, that’s an individual reference. I’m in a fraternity of Bi Beta Sigma, that’s a group reference. I’m a father of two little girls, Georgia and Ivy, that’s an abstract reference. These references, these monikers together make up who I am. And because of who I am, because of the identity that I have subscribed to, there are a set of beliefs and ideologies that are associated to them, and I see the world a certain way because of who I am. Because I see the world a certain way, I therefore navigate the world a certain way, which manifests in the way that I consume, the companies I work for, who I marry, if I marry where I vacation and what I eat.

These things all become outward expressions of inward beliefs. Those beliefs are situated … are fundamentally constructed based on our identity. Culture as an identity project becomes part and parcel to how we navigate the world. Because of who I am, I behave accordingly. Which person is more committed to running? Alex, who likes to run, or Alex who identifies as a runner? Of course, the latter. The Alex who identifies as a runner, that’s the Alex who’s going to get up in the morning even when it’s cold, when it’s wet, when it’s snowy like in Ann Arbor, when they haven’t slept enough, when they just don’t want to do it, they’ll still get up and do it because it’s just who they are and how they see the world becomes the north star for all the behaviors, the artifacts, the language, and the norms that are associated with that identity.

Stuart Crainer:

I like your line, “Peacock ourselves to the world,” Marcus. The peacock used as a verb.

Marcus Collins:

I’m a marketer. We’re always trying to find ways to rework every fashion language.

Stuart Crainer:

Talk us through the genesis of the book then Marcus, because people won’t necessarily know that you worked as an ad executive, you taught Beyonce how to dance, et cetera. Can you tell us about how the book came about?

Marcus Collins:

Stuart, you can’t start that rumor, man. People are going to believe it if you keep saying it.

Stuart Crainer:

The thing is, we haven’t seen you dance.

Marcus Collins:

This whole world was very new to me. I did my undergraduate studies as an engineer. I studied materials engineering because I thought that polymers were pretty interesting things, that these different carbon chains could come together because they shared an affinity for electrons and they come together to create things that we use. I thought that was really interesting, but I didn’t necessarily see myself doing that for a living. So during my time in university, I started studying music theory as sort of my side thing. I was an engineering major, but all my electives were in the School of Music. I was learning about chord changes and modal mixtures and all these theoretical pedagogy of how music is created. I was like, “I want to be a songwriter.”

When I graduated from school with an engineering degree, I went into the music industry. Came out of the music industry and realized that it’s a tough industry, it’s a tough one. And per my point earlier, Stuart, not a good dancer, not a great singer either. So I went back to school to get my MBA because I thought that marketing was the most creative means of business. From there, I ended up working at Apple. While I was there I met Matthew Knowles, who was Beyonce’s father, and he goes, “Wait a minute, you’re an engineer. You started a music company, you have an MBA, you’re black. Dude, you work at Apple. Who are you?”

I was like, “Oh, I’m Marcus.” He’s like, “Well, you should run digital strategy for Beyonce.” I go, “Oh yeah, I should totally do that.” This is during the I Am Sasha Fierce days, and this is at a time where Beyonce is elevating from Beyonce the artist, to Beyonce the icon. She’s transcending the category and added front row seats to watch this transcendence. In doing so, I started to learn a lot about community. This isn’t about just fans, these are about people who see the world similarly. I would hear, working in music, culture, getting our ideas out in the culture, and I didn’t know what that really meant. I ended up going to advertising from the music industry, started working at a Pure Play social media agency, and then working with Steve Stout, who’s the music executive who turned into an advertising executive with Jay-Z and Jimmy Ivine and his silent partners for an agency called Translation.

The entire ethos of the agency was about helping ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. I was like, that sounds really cool. I didn’t really know what that was, but it felt like all the things that I had done. It was brands and music and sport and all these things. It just felt sort of at home. I would espouse that provocation that we help ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. But when I was challenged on what that meant, what is culture? I was dumbfounded. I didn’t really have any vernacular to describe this well. When I talked to my colleagues and other people who were working in advertising or in music or all these other adjacent entertainment industries, I realized that none of us did. We’re just saying these words, culture, culture, culture, culture.

I go, that’s a problem because if we can’t describe a thing concretely, how do we ever fully harness its power? How do we fully leverage the most influential external force on human behavior? I thought, this is worth the exploration. I started going through that exploratory process when I was starting my doctoral program where I started studying how brands and branded products spread within a cultural context. Out of that I was like, “Oh, this becomes really clear. When we have better language, when we have a better construct, not only can we talk in ways that are shared and understood, but we can actually build on them because the foundation is very strong.”

I thought that it was worth evangelizing what culture is, what it does, and how we can leverage it in a book. So, I decided to write it.

Des Dearlove:

No, fantastic. It’s good looking at the chat too, to see that we are joined by our past and future Radar thinkers. I see Connie Hadley is here. I can see Ruth Gotian joining us from New York. I can see Jenny Fernandez is here, which is all good stuff. I can see some questions coming in as well. We’ve got a question for Marcus, from Mat Symons who says, “Our identity creates our beliefs. I would argue,” he would argue, “that our beliefs then also shape our identity, eg, when someone successfully challenges your beliefs through educational or lived experience. If you agree, then how are both perspectives acknowledged, leveraged to generate a beneficial outcome?”

Marcus Collins:

That’s a great question and provocation, Mat. The thing is that these things live in harmony. They work together. It’s why they’re a system of systems. The thing is that when our beliefs start to change, we then interrogate our identity. For instance, religion is a really good way to think about this. If you say, “I am a Catholic,” and you have beliefs and ideologies that are associated with being a Catholic, when those beliefs start to erode or to become challenged, you go, “Oh man, I don’t know if I believe that so much.” And if I no longer believe that, am I really a Catholic?

As we start to interrogate this incongruence between belief in ideology, we go back to, “So if I don’t believe this, then there’s no way I can be that,” and therefore I must change my identity designation. Then we change our identity designation so that there is congruence between our beliefs and ideologies. Otherwise, we’d navigate the world in cognitive dissonance, and that is terribly painful. Those two things are always living in harmony. We go through this negotiation and construction process all the while, our day-to-day lives. What happens is that when we start to get discourse with people who are like ourselves, who identify by the same monikers, or even people who are different than us, as we enter the discourse and we start these debates, these negotiation processes by which we make sense of the world, they begin to shift our cultural practices.

As we start to talk with each other, we go, “Ooh man, I never thought about that.” Then maybe that actually challenges my beliefs and I either evolve what it means to be, let’s say again, arbitrarily a Catholic, I either evolve my beliefs or I change my identity or rework my identity. For instance, politics is a good example. I write about this in the book. Around the late 2000s, 2007, 08, 09, and squarely in the Barack Obama years here, the country, we started to see a faction of the Republican Party turn into the Tea Party. This is a more radical community inside the Republican Party.

Republicans who were like, “Oh, I don’t believe that,” they go, “I am a fiscally conservative Republican. I’m not those guys. Don’t call me that.” And then later still, you get Maga, another faction. What happens is that as they become conflict with the identity that we subscribe our personhood to and the corresponding beliefs, we find new ways to give our identity context, ie “I’m a fiscal conservative,” or ie, “I’m a progressive Democrat.” Whatever it is, we add another layer of context to it such that so that our behaviors, our beliefs and our identities are aligned. We’re constantly reworking ourselves in the socially phenomenal world so that we feel that we have cognitive equilibrium.

Stuart Crainer:

Well, it’s good to get onto politics. You’ve also mentioned religion as well, Marcus. I’m not sure where we’re going next. A LinkedIn user says, “How can individuals navigate the complexities of maintaining their cultural identity while also integrating into a globalized society?” I suppose, do people from different cultural national contexts respond differently?

Marcus Collins:

Sure. There are many, many, many, many, many cultures within our nationality. For instance in the States, lots of cultures within our nationality and even in sort of our factions of the country, there are many cultures inside of that. If you are into anime, there are different subcultures inside of being anime. This thing can get very micro in their size fairly quickly. The idea of how do we manage our identity in a world that is more heterogeneous, more diverse, more global in its nature, I think it kind of goes back to how we started the conversation, is that we find congruence between the way we see the world where someone else sees the world.

We go, “Oh man, I never thought about it that way. That’s kind of cool because I’ve always thought it this way,” and those things are the same idea, just a different side of the same coin. We either find ways where we find the familiar and the strange. We go, “Oh man, I never thought about it like that. That’s kind of like how I love … fill in the blank.” Or we find the strange and the familiar where we go, “It’s weird that we always do that, isn’t it, huh? And if that’s weird about us, then I imagine when I see someone else behave a certain way that’s just as equally as weird. So my weirdness is just one weirdness and theirs is theirs.”

When we get to that level of sort of understanding subjectivity, we can still be ourselves in new places and appreciate the cultural differences that make up who we are. When it really gets good is when we start to share and exchange our cultural practices, and as a result, we become sort of more global in our identity, where we can still be who we are, but we adopt these other things because our ability to be flexible becomes just a part of who we are.

Des Dearlove:

Talking of sharing and collaborating, I can see a question from Neri Karra Sillaman, who’s one of our 2024 Radar thinkers speaking now across the generation to Marcus 2023 – but never outdated! – the question that Neri asks is, “In my research on iconic luxury brands, the ones that stand the test of time are those that adapt to cultural change. What is your opinion on this?”

Marcus Collins:

Yeah, I love Neri. She’s brilliant. I agree. I’d say that the iconic brands and icons mean that they signify something, they stand in for something, they represent something more than what they do, but they stand in for a broader idea, which the most strongest brands do. They stand in for something else, they represent something else. These brands that represent something more than they do, they stand the test of time because they’re able to change with the evolution of conventions and expectations of the time. For instance, take a brand like Nike. Nike believes every human body is an athlete, and they’ve had that belief since at least for 42 years, at least for 40 plus years. That belief in never changed. What they represent has never changed.

The manner in which they communicate themselves, the manner in which they behave, the manner in which they engage with the cultural zeitgeist has changed over the years with the changing of the cultural characteristics of contemporary culture. These brands are able to remain relevant, not because they change who they are and what they represent, but they adapt to the artifacts, behaviors, and language that are considered acceptable or legitimate in the current time, in the present time. These brands are able to sort of read the tea leaves and feel the breeze of cultural evolution and adapt to them without compromising who they are, their identity, how they see the world, their beliefs and ideologies such that the brand continues to represent what it stands for, how it sees the world, but the way it manifests changes over time.

Stuart Crainer:

Michelle Gustafsson says, “Loves,” your line about, “Our ability to be flexible becomes who we are.” That relates to a question a bit earlier from Rik Spann. Rik’s in Amsterdam and a jazz enthusiast. He says, “On identity from an artistic ecosystem lens, there is an improviser’s allergy to get stuck in patterns that simply block your creative development. Miles Davis, David Bowie, Sonny Rollins, then consciously challenge (‘jam’) their ‘identities’ so far. Adaptive development in action.”

Marcus Collins:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Does that sound familiar, Marcus?

Marcus Collins:

Absolutely. It reminds me of the late great CK Prahalad’s idea about challenging the dominant logic. The dominant logic are sort of these borders that we put around ourselves and saying, “This is just kind of how it is.” And by their very nature, we get stuck in them because they’re just the status quo. But the idea of creativity is about identifying the possibilities. And the possibilities are typically on the other side of convention. It’s no wonder why the most prolific cultural creators are artists because they are constantly challenging the status quo. They’re constantly creating exogenous shocks to the system that forced us to go, “Whoa, what was that?”

Then as a result, we go, “Des, did you hear that?” You go, “I know. It was wild, right? I talked to Stuart about that.” Then we begin the discourse by which we negotiate and construct what is acceptable. Now, in some cases you get an all blues like Miles Davis, all blues, and you go, “Wow, this is unbelievable. Never heard anything like this before. Good night.” Then later still you get something like Witches Brew and you go, “That may be a little too much for me.” The idea is that these cultural creators, these people who break and challenge the dominant logic, who overcome conventions or status quo conventions, they create exogenous shocks to the system.

And that system is our day-to-day living. As that shock happens, we go, “Wow, wow, I’ve never heard anything like that before. Never saw anything like that before. What is this?” Then we collectively negotiate and construct what is acceptable, and we honor and revere those cultural creators, whether they’re musicians, artists, writers, poets, directors, dancers, all these people who challenged the status quo. We revered them so much because of their bravery to challenge the dominant logic and ultimately force us to go, “Wow, what do we think about that?”

To stay on the jazz metaphor, there was a time where everything that John Coltrane touched was gold. You’re thinking like, “Giant Steps, oh my goodness, this is the new standard of jazz.” But then as he became more progressive, pushing us, challenging us beyond our level of acceptance, they became a gulf between his creativity and us. For cultural creators to stay in lockstep with where society is, where it could potentially goes, becomes an act of risk, not unlike brands and branded products that put new products in the world, that challenge what is conventional. 20 years ago, we used to tell people don’t get in the cars with strangers. Now we pay people to get in the cars with strangers! This is a novel idea that challenged the conventional wisdom, that challenged the dominant logic. And as a result, new innovations end up shifting what we consider to be culturally acceptable.

Des Dearlove:

I’m going to steer you a little bit away from the music world now. I’m back looking in the mirror at the thought leadership space, if you like, the sort of where Thinkers50 plays and the domain that we are in. Because you name-checked CK, and I would say the same is true of the late great Clay Christensen who we talk about how hard it is to change the paradigm to break the paradigm. My point being that academics and thinkers traditionally quite often find it hard to get out of the groove. It’s difficult to challenge the dominant logic or the paradigm. I mean, you are probably an exception to that, but how do we get make it easier for thinkers to be more creative and to challenge the dominant logic?

Marcus Collins:

I think that as a community of thinkers, as a community of scholars, as a community of rigorous researchers, we have to create a culture of being neophilic, of new loving. That while we are rigorous in our interrogation, and while we ensure that there is a standard of rigor, we have to also be willing to try new ideas, to hear new ideas out. Our ability or our willingness to do this creates a lane, creates a spirit of risk, creates a spirit of exploration among other thinkers to go, “Let me give it a shot,” as opposed to “If I put this in the world, I’m going to get blasted immediately, so I’m not going to even try this. This might seem like heresy.”

But if we accept or we make room for questions of heresy, then we create an environment whereby new ideas are more acceptable, where new ideas are more encouraged. To your point about Clay Christensen, the idea of jobs to be done, for instance, which I just absolutely love, I imagine when he first said that people were like, “I don’t know about that. It seems too simple.” Oftentimes as scholars, we know that the answers to life are much more complex than they seem on the surface. When they’re presented in a simple way, we go, “It’s overly simplified,” where the truth of matter is that the complexity of the idea is just presented in a way that is brilliantly simplified, and that’s the gift of a Clay Christensen object.

CK Prahalad as well. I mean, go on and on the list, from Amy Edmondson to Dan Pink to Adam Grant. I mean, these people have taken complex ideas and simplified them in ways that they are digestible, but they still have all the rigor in the academic literature that we normally write. For us to create an environment where people feel free, feel psychologically safe to explore, then we have to be active participants in that to say, “Hey, let’s be open with some new ideas,” interrogate it as we should, because that is a part of what we do. We have to rigorously sort of poke, but we have to say, “Hey, give us a shot. Give it a shot.”

Des Dearlove:

I think again, some people will know, you probably know yourself, that Clay famously had the sign on his outside his study, which said, “Anomalies  wanted.” In other words, come in here and challenge my theory. Please come in here and challenge my theory. I want to make it better. I want you to disrupt me. I want you to poke and prod and provoke me so that the theory gets better.

Marcus Collins:

Even that idea of let’s have discourse, I think that that can be approached not as a diametrically opposed conversation, but like, “Hey, let’s just make it better.” To go back to jazz for a moment, this is sort of how jazz is. I have a lick – or what do we call that – I have the melody, but the majority of the songs will be spent with each one of us soloing over it. That is each one of us building on top of the foundations of the song. I think the same thing goes with ideas. I have an idea, and it’s only going to get better because of everyone else’s brilliance. That’s the gift of feedback, everyone pushing against it. And in doing so, we get to something far better.

For me, my path wasn’t in the traditional means of scholarship. I was writing love songs and then a marketer, and then later got into the world of academia and management theory. When I started to kind of put my toe in the water to explore this world, I would email professors across the country like just cold email them and say, “Hey, I’ve done these things. I’ve had these chevrons. If you ever need a guest lecturer, I would love to do that. Please reach out. You don’t have to pay me anything. In fact, I’ll pay for my own travel. All I ask is that you give me an hour of your time to beat up the ideas that I presented to your class. That’s all I ask.”

And over about a year and a half, I just got better just tightening and tightening and tightening to say, “I like that example. That wasn’t that accurate. You cited this research, but you really were trying to actually talk about this research over here.” Over time, that feedback was given out of love. It wasn’t to sort of beat me up. It was to push the ideas to get better, and as a result, I got better. So this notion of like, “Hey, ideas, welcome. Please push feedback, welcome,” when done in the spirit of constructive criticism, when done in the spirit of making it better, I think that we as a community, we have to embody that. We have to embody that idea of if we create a space where people feel safe to explore, that only happens when we engage in the space in such a way that people feel like they have that freedom without being persecuted.

Stuart Crainer:

Brilliant. Simplification always stands out. Anish from Singapore has a question. “Has your research in writing the book led you to change your belief? If so, what was the belief? What new information influenced this change, and how has it affected your approach since?” That’s putting you on the spot there, Marcus.

Marcus Collins:

Yeah, totally, totally. I always-

Des Dearlove:

Do you still identify as a songwriter? 

Marcus Collins:

I always put in the time horizon that I was a songwriter. I tell my students, even having studied engineering, even though I never practiced engineering as a professional, I still think like an engineer. I approach songwriting like an engineer, which is probably why I wasn’t a great songwriter. And I approach the way that I solve problems in the world of marketing, even the way I do research as an engineer, there’s systems to everything. Understanding these systems help us get at the antecedent that’s driving a particular outcome that we’re observing. To the question of what did I learn? I think for me, the biggest learning really boiled down to this notion of subjectivity.

I thought in my mind that cultures are different, but then the rules, the meanings inside of cultures are fixed within the culture, within a particular group of people within the community. But the truth of the matter is, it’s just not the case at all. These things are always in motion. They’re fluid, they’re always changing, and everything that happens in the world becomes opportunities for us to negotiate and construct what’s acceptable behavior for people like us. We call this social process legitimation. The process by which ideas, beliefs, behaviors become reworked into our cultural practice. They become what’s in versus what’s out, what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Then going through this research and practicing at the same time, I realized that as marketers, we don’t make meaning. We signal meaning. Meaning is in the mind of the meaning maker, just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning is in the mind of the people. We signal meaning in hopes that people see it the way that we do. And if they do, they go, “Oh, great. Got it.” If they don’t, then we’ve missed the mark. I’ve realized that from, through the lens of marketing and then expanded that to just what it means to be human. The majority of arguments I have with my wife is typically because she interpreted something I said wrong or not as I intended it, or she observed my behavior and translated through a different meaning-making system than me.

It says to me then, if the world is subjective and my intentions, what I say isn’t always what people hear, then we need to spend more time understanding the potential translations of different people than we are about our intention in what we do. And that, if I understand how Stuart sees the world and how he translates the world, then I’d be much more inclined to rework my messaging, rework my communication, rework my engagement with him, such that it’s aligned with how he sees it or how he’ll accept it.

This really sort of moves the frame from being focused on us as individuals, to being focused on us as society. While that may seem obvious on the surface, it wasn’t obvious for me at all, especially as a marketer. I was like, “Hey, what is the brand trying to communicate? What do we believe? Let’s get it out in the world, tell everybody. So everyone goes, oh, they believe that. We believe that too. Let’s go.” But just because you say it doesn’t mean that people see it that way. Just because you say it doesn’t mean that that’s how they hear it. We need to spend more of our time focused on the people than we are on ourselves.

Stuart Crainer:

Great insights, Marcus. I think we’ve moved from politics, to religion, to relationship guidance. I’ve taken notes there. Now we’re nearly out of time, Marcus. Where’s your research gone? Since the book came out, you’ve had lots of feedback from the book, lots of people giving you their experiences and stories and insights. So where’s your research and interest gone since the book came out?

Marcus Collins:

There’s two things. I think that I have taken the fundamental provocations of the book and have been able to work with organizations, institutions, brands, politicians, activists, to move it out of a frame of commerce, which is how I approached it as a marketer, realizing that it had much more headroom. Like I said, it’s not a marketing book, it’s a people book. I’ve had so many opportunities to take the thinking, these mechanisms that constitute our culture and watch it play out not only in commerce, but in organizational behavior and societal behavior. That’s been super rewarding for me.

What I’ve been realizing more and more is that there’s not just the culture of the people that we connect with, but there’s also the culture of the environment that we’re in. That’s become really interesting for me. I may tell a certain joke at the bar because I feel licensed to, but I would never tell that joke in the church sanctuary with the same people. Why is that? Because there are expectations of what’s acceptable for the environment that we’re in. So we as individuals, we have a system of conventions, expectations that govern how we see the world and how we navigate the world. These things are translated or transferred over to the environment that we’re in, which means that we have to not only think about how we interact with each other, but we also think about the context in which we interact.

That’s become really, really interesting, especially as we think about the office that we’re in. We think about either being in the office or remote or hybrid. It’s often brought up when we think about how we engage voters based on where we are in the country or in the world. I think it’s just a fascinating exploration and it pushes the thinking beyond sort of what culture is, how it influences us and how we tap into it. But it starts to explore and interrogate all the many ways in which it manifests based upon the context in which we interact with our people. That’s been fascinating.

Des Dearlove:

What’s next for Marcus Collins? Is there another book in the works? I mean, it sounds like you are having fun and in exploring some of these different ways, because as I say, for a marketing book, it’s a very profound book.

Marcus Collins:

Oh, thank you. Thank you. I’m having an absolute blast. It’s been amazing. I’ve been given this great honor to evangelize the thinking on stage, which has been great. I’ve worked with a lot of companies on integrating the work into their work, not just their external production, but internally how they work together. I’m actually launching a course, a four-day executive education course through the Ross School of Business where I teach here called The Business of Culture, where we are going to take the foundations of the book and help participants, help students, executives, not only understand the ideas, but leverage it in their work. Then in the fall, we have the paperback version of the book comes out, which is great because I’m going to add a little additions to it as well. It’s just awesome. It’s just really, really great.

Stuart Crainer:

We should end with the killer question from Rhonda Morris, “Hi, Marcus. What is your favorite song and why?”

Marcus Collins:

Oh, goodness gracious. My favorite song and why.

Stuart Crainer:

It can’t be one you wrote, Marcus. That’d be the ultimate peacocking.

Marcus Collins:

Yes, right. I think that if I were to quantify this, I’ll rely on my Spotify data, and it would probably be Get Away Jordan by Take Six. Why? Because they are the epitome of vocal music. I’ve been listening to this song since 1989. I’ve been singing this song since 1989. And even still, I find new intricacies, new parts, new melodic counterpoints that I have never heard before almost in every listen. My children, their ears are probably bleeding every time they hear it because I play it over and over and over again. That’s one of those songs that if I were, the hypothetical, if you’re on an island and you can only bring one song with you, what would it be? It’d be Get Away Jordan. I guess quantitatively and qualitatively speaking, it’s Get Away Jordan.

Stuart Crainer:

You heard it here first. Thank you very much to Marcus Collins. I think a fantastic start to the series. You can find out more about Marcus’s work at his website, marktothec.com, and For the Culture is available wherever you buy books. Next week, we’ll be joined by the first of this year’s members of the Thinkers50 Radar community, Connie Hadley from Boston University Questrom School of Business. Connie is an organizational psychologist who is amongst the audience today. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Life at Work. So there’ll be a lot to discuss. That’s an hour later next week on Wednesday.

Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. And thank you very much to Marcus Collins.

Marcus Collins:

Thank you.