Books that Matter: Mastering Social and Cultural Trends

It seems we can’t take anything for granted these days. As a columnist in the New York Times recently noted, men and women alike are now botoxing their faces to such an extent that it’s becoming difficult to discern the visual cues we rely on as part of normal, everyday communication. Meanwhile, that erstwhile mainstay of upward mobility, four years of college, is now outliving its usefulness; a majority of Americans doubt whether higher education provides “good value for the money,” according to a recent Pew Research Center Poll.

How can we make sense of such emerging social and cultural trends? Is our world just getting weirder and less controllable? It might offer some comfort to know that at least a few thinkers are bringing contemporary life into sharper focus. In this week’s Firm Voice, our annual summer reading issue, we spotlight books that offer critical insight into dimensions of our emerging world, prompting helpful questioning, debate, and analysis.

We begin with technology. Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, published last year, offers an unfamiliar specter: A critique of information technology from one of the nerds that helped create the revolution.  Lanier’s big insight: Technology design choices we interact with every day shape our culture and who we are, without our even being aware of it, and quite often, not for the better. Lanier believes the very design of social media emphasizes a collectivist, “crowd” mentality and deemphasizes human individuality, raising the specter that they will “revert to bad mob-like behaviors.” He also sees, as a consequence of the crowd mentality, a cheapening of pop culture, whereby it is “dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.” Lanier’s vibrant call for more humanism in our techy culture should resonate; you’ll never think about your iPad or your Facebook page in the same way.

It’s an exaggeration of course, but some of the few things more ubiquitous than technology in today’s workplace are…internships. We take interns for granted—they are all around us—but have we ever stopped to ponder the internship as a social, economic, and cultural phenomenon? If you’re working with interns, hiring them, or helping run your firm’s internship program, you’ll want to read Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation, a stark critique of internship programs in the United States. To some, Perlin might come across as overly negative, yet his key presumption—that “the internship has become a new and distinctive form, located at the nexus of transformations in higher education and the workplace”—is compelling. Internships may be everywhere today, but they remain such a recent, chaotic phenomenon that there are seldom any rules of the road, any standards or codes of conduct that are honored—only vague expectations, for which no one is held accountable.” Perlin’s book offers a wealth of information, as well as, by the end, some suggestions for improving internship programs, such as offering more pay, advertising positions openly, providing more training and mentorship, and offering more meaningful work.

A third book to consult this summer, if you really want to understand the state of the world today, is Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It. Few concepts have seen more ink these past ten years than globalization. We take for granted that we’re living in a radically connected world where boundaries and borders don’t matter any longer. What if that’s plain not true? Ghemawat’s data-rich book takes an expansive look at the global economy, providing compelling evidence that the world is much less globalized than we like to think—as little as ten to twenty-five percent by most measures. Concerned about the prospect of rising protectionism in the wake of the financial crisis, Ghemawat argues for a middle road: More collaboration across borders on the part of governments, individuals, and businesses, even as we retain borders, national identity, and the like to a reasonable degree. His vision is of a new, more prosperous world of “semi-globalization” rather than the stark nationalism and globalization favored by many commentators. It’s a heady, challenging book—not for the faint of heart or for those seeking a light and amusing beach read. Yet as the Economist has written, the book “should be read by anyone who wants to understand the most important economic development of our time.”

To dazzle our clients with original strategic thinking, it’s vital that we get ahead of social and cultural developments, understand them, question them, master them. Summer is a great time to relax and get a tan, but it’s also the great time to relax, take a deep breath, step outside of our normal work, and think bigger thoughts. If we do, we might just position ourselves over the long term for bigger business wins, too.