North Sea Systems

# North Sea Station North Sea Station is designed to serve the investor in three ways. 1. The investment world now measures everything that matters with one disturbing exception. Not until now has it had a systematic way to detect and investigate headwinds and tailwinds coming from the social and cultural sector. This is just asking for trouble. Critical blue oceans and black swans go undiscovered. Some part of your risk is left exposed. 2. North Sea Station is available to investors only. You can use it to test for subpar C-suites. (Teaching at the Harvard Business School told me C-suite diligence isn't always diligent enough.) You can use the North Sea Station to find tough questions the C-suite will not see coming. This is another way the North Sea Station can help you manage risk. (I tell you, some C-suites are getting away with murder.) 3. The North Sea Station looks at how investments like Lululemon, Yeti Coolers, Crocs, ON, InBev, and Warhammer are shaped by social, cultural and consumer change. It also looks at the transformation of the larger systems of demand. The Station is now tracking things like wellness, activism, story telling, Gen Z, trend formation, celebrity culture, American moms, and higher education, to name a few. Welcome to the North Sea Station, your window on the headwinds and tailwinds now shaping your investments. This is stage 1. This app represents the first stage of North Sea construction. We are in the process of building a system that will map more and more of the trends and enterprises that matter to the investor. We use social science (for concept and theory), statistical evidence (for the 'what'), ethnography (for the 'why'), and artificial intelligence (for the pattern recognition and the complexity management). What's the deal with the "North Sea" metaphor, you ask. After World War II, trends looked like those big waves off the beach at Waikiki, rolling majestically into shore. They were easy to see, to monitor and predict. Now the world is more like the North Sea. Waves are numerous, fleeting, and unpredictable. Winds reach 50 knots. Waves exceed 30 feet. There are no beautiful rollers here. This is where all hell breaks loose. Is North Sea a good metaphor for what our culture and economy? Come on, it's a great metaphor. Our world is increasingly chaotic. This is where black swans gather. We have built North Sea Station to make this world more intelligible and predictable. Now that the trend hunter cannot save us, we need a system and a discipline. Now that the old ideas and models are broken, it's time to start over. © Grant McCracken Please do not distribute or duplicate this work for any purpose without permission.

Grant McCracken Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of 14 books including The Return of the Artisan to be published by Simon and Schuster in July. He was the founder and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. Grant has taught at the Harvard Business School, University of Cambridge, and he was a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. (He taught a course at MIT called "how to be a time machinist.") He is a co-founder of the Artisanal Economies Project. He is the inventor of an early warning system for social and cultural change. He consults widely, and his clients include Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Reddit, Sony, Boston Book Festival, NBC, IBM, Nike, and the Obama White House. He is credited with spotting the rise of Donald Trump, the decline of Second Life, and the disruption of CPG by Alice Waters and the artisanal movement.