I think the thing in my head was that the thought was that someone who’s as much of an expert as you’re looking for, who’s passionate enough about the cultural convergences that really create something new that they’d be so internally motivated that they’d *have* to pursue it on their own. But that’s not right at all, because the motivating factors for entrepreneurship are almost their own thing.

Hrm. Weird. Completely blindsided by something totally obvious.

Ha!

Which is, honestly, probably all the comment I need to make on my own relevance to the CCO position, but hell, I’m gonna keep talking anyway.

—

So, I’d written a really long, rambling thing about how I’d misunderstood the CCO position to be more of a position that processes the internal culture of a company than taking external culture and processing it. The thing that strikes me about that is that yes, you’re right – one person can’t do it all. But (and this may seem strange, for someone who’s espoused the virtue of being a connector in the past), I’m not convinced that you can collaborate on this, either.

For me, two things:

1.) As a game designer, I do talk to people doing a diverse range of things. My level of competency varies, but in general, I feel like I can understand enough to get by in most conversations. My strength, though, comes from an ability to parse input from many sources, but the synthesis comes from a massively deep knowledge about interactive media. The *advantage* comes from the fact that I can get more diverse input than most game designers who don’t have a music, art and engineering background – but the synthesis of that information into something new in a particular field relies also on my expertise in that particular field.

2.) That expertise is non-transferrable.

That is, I can tell you what I do – I can even tell you my entire thought process, what went into it, blah blah blah – but I can’t make you think that way.

In the nineties, I was regularly about a year or two “ahead of the curve” when it came to “alternative” music. I knew the right sources to find new information – stuff that other people couldn’t find, because it *wasn’t* in books or magazines yet. So I had good leads. I also had good judgment – I knew that things I liked also tended to be things that would be successful. If a hook caught my ear, or a lyric caught my attention, I could pretty reliably guess that other people would like them, too.

Now? I have no idea where to find new music. People recommend new bands, but I have very little personal expertise in the field. More, I can’t even parse other peoples’ expertise in that field anymore. Someone tells me something will be awesome, I listen to it, and I’m like, “Dur? Maybe? I dunno. I don’t really like it,” then six months later, they’re the new shit.

Being an expert in culture isn’t a transferable skill, in my experience – and the problem with it is that defines the “truth” about a culture is so subtle. The difference between a poseur and someone genuinely engaged in some aspect of culture is really, really obvious to the engaged people, and not at all obvious to the poseur.

So, maybe I need to read the book, but I can’t shake the feeling that the problem with the concept is that (as described) the CCO, without a deep internalized expertise that they possess is a poseur – but a CCO *with* that knowledge, who can synthesize cultures into something new… well, we already have a word for them.

Visionaries.

And that’s not a position you can hire to fill.