Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

January 15, 2008

Insight from Meyer and Rowan to your Organizational Life

Filed under: Culture, Organizations — Peter @ 3:33 pm

In discussion with a colleague about how to strategically manage life in an organization, I was drawn into thinking about how cultural institutionalism would motivate a strategy. Most organizations have pretty positive stories to tell about themselves - if they didn’t, they have organizational commitment issues. My advice is simple:

1) Learn what the story is that an organization tells about itself.
2) Tell that story.

This seems trivial, and maybe in a sense it is. But if a university’s story about itself includes a commitment to great teaching, you will not succeed there by disrespecting teaching. You may not have to be a great teacher (i.e., there may be disconnect between an organization’s story and how it rewards its members), but you cannot believe that teaching doesn’t matter.

If an organization sees itself as putting customer needs first and providing an awesome user experience, even your justifications based on costs should be couched in terms of user experience and customer needs.

There is nothing cynical about this.

January 11, 2008

The Fightclub of Underground Art

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 12:37 pm

That’s Tourettes without Regrets. But of course that’s not the punchline, it’s MC Jelly D that I want you to know about.

January 7, 2008

If it’s going to be that kind of party

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 6:33 pm

Well, if we’re going all sociological and stuff, we may as well have Veblen stick his thoughts in the mashed potatoes…

Rival Goods

Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 4:35 pm

Now that’s a rival good.

December 6, 2007

How do you know what stuff to get?

Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 8:26 am

I’m always struck by the extent to which marketers have internalized the assumption that my preferences are stable, and static. Discussing next-generation mobile phone software in Technology Review, Kate Greene writes:

The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person’s location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

The idea is that as the software learns more about you, say, whether you like expensive food or fast food, and it’s 12:30pm, it will use GPS to suggest local fast food joints. The key for this is to predict future behavior based on past behavior.

For businesses, the future is all about personalization, effectively the capture and crystallization of a potential consumer’s preferences so as to sell them more stuff. In a large (retail and business-oriented) financial services firm I know of, the big innovation over the last couple years was personalization. There are quite a few organizations out there that engage in this kind of sell-by-stable-preference-assumption: Poindexter (now X+1), Epiphany, Revenue Science, Tacoda, DART (DoubleClick)

I want to unpack this notion of recommendations, since it is widely held to be the next generation of all sorts of business applications. And the idea of preferences is folded into assumptions about the micro-foundations of all kinds of markets as well. Assumptions about preferences are that they are relatively stable, determined a priori, and randomly distributed.

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