Dr. Marcus Collins
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Marcus Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's identity, who we are, a shared way of seeing the world, and then a shared way of navigating the world, like a shared way of life, and then the way we express ourselves, a shared way of expression called cultural production. And the alchemy of those systems make up our culture.
And, you know, I try to prosecute this idea that our consumption behaviors and our behavioral adoption that happens in the marketplace out in the world is culturally mediated or culturally governed because of the way we culturally mediate. We mediate the world through our cultural lenses. And to your point, organizational culture... is the same system of conventions and expectations.
They're the same collection of cognitions and kinetics that govern how we act here. And the leadership may go, we have a great culture here. We do X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, is that really what's true? Because while you're trying to get people to buy into sort of the policies you create, They are negotiating, constructing what people like them do. And we know this intuitively.
Like you start a new job. Hey, Mick, how do I do this thing over here? You go, well, you're supposed to do this, but this is how everybody does it. That's your culture. What everybody does. That's the culture. The leaders of the organization make rules. But it's the people who make culture.
And real leadership is, you know, we talk about it here at Ross, that leadership is the ability to influence without authority. And leadership is about influencing without authority. And what's the most influential force in human behavior? Culture.
So those who are able to contribute to, engage in, move the culture forward, those are the people who are most likely to influence people, to move people forward.
Well, we are social animals by nature, as Aristotle would say. We are built to be in community, are a social being. So if you believe evolution, evolution anthropologists will argue that the reason why we were able to evolve and to sustain as a species because we socialize, we cooperated. That is deep in our brainstem. And therefore, for us, trust and safety matter.
is predicated based on our belonging, based on being a part of something, being with people, which is why we always try to find people like us. We're homophilic. We're self-loving. We find people like us. We feel safe in those numbers. So therefore, being a part of a thing becomes the ultimate currency in life because that means survival.
The job of the brain is to make predictions about the future so that we increase our chances of surviving. And survival is... inextricably linked to being connected, then connectivity means survival. There's no currency greater than that. And we're just constantly just trying to find us. We're trying to bump into people like us.
We're just in everything we do from the way we present ourselves, the clothes we wear, the products that we buy, how we style our hair, if you have it, of course, you know, all the, you know, you know, you know, we're about it.
all these things and we'll actually navigate towards people who seem to be like us i mean i tell my students this all the time that when you were younger you went to sleepaway camp and you find someone who's from your hometown you go oh you're from detroit from detroit too oh my goodness oh my god best friends right we would do this when we travel abroad you could be in a foreign place you hear nothing but foreign accents accents until you hear an american accent you go where are you from someone goes i'm from chicago like i'm from detroit midwest what up
You immediately feel connected to that person. This is your brain saying your chances of survival are better by being with this person. And therefore we connect with them as social beings. There is nothing more important than to be connected. And we go to great, great lengths to do that very thing.
You know, honestly, I did not think that at all. I had no intention of writing a book in any temporal sense, nothing like in the near term at all. I got an email from a literary agent who saw a talk that I gave somewhere online. And he emailed me and said, hey, I think you have a book in you. And I was like, what?
And when the email came through, I honestly thought it was one of those like ghostwriting spam emails or like, hey, just dictate and we'll write the book for you. And no shade to them, but I just never would do that. And I was like, I just kind of ignored it. And then he emailed me again and said, hey, like, I'd love just 15 minutes of your time. I just think you have something interesting to say.
And he caught me right at the right time because we had just had our second daughter, Ivy, and I'm walking her in a stroller and I got a good half hour of time to walk her. So like, I'll take the call. So I was going to call. We talk and And, you know, I'm basically just grilling him about the industry because I didn't know very much about publishing at all. And we agreed to just write a proposal.
No strings attached. We just write a proposal. And honestly, when I hung up the phone, I just compartmentalized it somewhere in the back of my mind so that I would do later in life. COVID happens and a close friend of mine passes very, very early, very early. A gentleman by the name of Marlo Stoudemire. Died March 24th, 2020.
And immediately it reminded me of a book I'd read years ago called Die Empty. And that book said that the most expensive real estate on the planet is the graveyard because that's where ideas are buried that weren't. brought to fruition. Books weren't written. Movies weren't made. Albums weren't recorded. Companies weren't started because everyone was waiting for the right time.
Well, you don't have time. Time, you're on borrowed time. And in the middle of the pandemic, my mortality just felt so tangible. And I was like, I'm going to write this proposal. So I wrote the proposal. My agent liked it. I liked it. He said, let's pitch it. I'm like, great. What's the worst that can happen? Did they say no? And they said yes. And I was like, OK, cool. Great. Awesome.
And we end up getting a deal to write this book. And then I go, oh, man, I don't write a book now. And the truth that matters, and being totally honest, this is like totally true. I wrote like 5,000 words and I go, I got nothing else to say. That's it. I got nothing else to say. And I think I was on, I was on the hook, contractually on the hook to write 85,000 words.
And I go, just take your money back. Like, I can't do this. Like, this is a mistake. I've made a mistake here. And here's where things got interesting for me is that I thought, okay, what am I trying to say? What's the argument I'm trying to say? I'm trying to say that culture is important. So many people have said this. People a million times smarter than me have written that.
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