Between Good Mag and Method product designers, PSFK at Ft. Mason was the highlight of my strategic wonkiness last year. I’m hopeful (and optimistic) that the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Planning-Ness starting October 16 will provide the same quality of stories from folks who have been there, especially when they hail from Smart Design and MIT. The latter’s Grant McCracken’s presentation “how to help organizations pay attention to culture” sounds fantastically timely:
The corporation is good at many things: management, finance, marketing, technology. It still pretty much sucks when it comes to culture. The price tag is high. Not understanding culture recently cost Quaker, Levi-Strauss, and Best Buy $3.1 billion collectively. The corporation needs to treat culture as a new core competence.