How Cultural Influence Shapes Behavior With Marcus Collins

Tony Martignetti sits down with Marcus Collins to explore the profound impact of cultural influence on human behavior and decision-making. As an award-winning marketer and author, Marcus shares insights into how culture shapes our actions, beliefs, and how we engage with the world. Tune in to discover how understanding and leveraging culture can transform both personal and professional success. This episode offers a fascinating look into the ways culture operates as a powerful force in our lives.

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How Cultural Influence Shapes Behavior With Marcus Collins

It is my honor to introduce my guest, Dr. Marcus Collins. Marcus is an award-winning marketer and cultural translator. I love that title. He is a former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy in New York and marketing professor at the Ross School of Business University of Michigan and the author of the best-selling book For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. It's truly a brilliant book.

Marcus is an inductee into the American Advertising Federation's Advertising Hall of Achievement and a recipient of the Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award for the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. His strategies and creative contributions have led to the launching success of McDonald's cultural resurgence and the Brooklyn Nets move from New Jersey to New York. Way to go among others.

Before his advertising tenure, Marcus worked on iTunes and Nike’s sports music initiative at Apple and ran digital strategy for Beyonce. He writes a column for CMO Network and contributes to business scholarship. Most importantly, he is a proud Detroit native and a loving father to Georgia and Ivy. It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show.

Thank you, my friend. I'm so glad to be here. I feel warm already.

One of the things going through your intro and seeing all the amazing accolades, they don't compare to the way that you show up in the world now. You’re a fount of inspiration and also this person who doesn't hold it over people. You care deeply about sharing a message that radiates. I was inspired by what you did.

That means the world to me, truly. I'm very grateful. I feel like none of this has anything to do with me. I'm a vessel for an idea. Like any other vessel, there's a moment in time in which that vessel has significance and meaning and right now I am the vessel in which these ideas are occupied and I'm grateful for the opportunity. It's never about me.

I know you have another book coming. We'll talk about that later. We'll get into it. Before we do all of that, I want to spend some time digging into your story. As we do on the show, we talk about these things called flashpoints. Flashpoint to these moments in our journey that have ignited our gifts into the world. I want to go back to the wayback machine and talk about what got you to do the work you are doing and share those moments. We'll see what themes that are showing up along the way as you share them. I'm going to turn over to you in a moment and allow you to talk about those moments and look forward to sharing that with the audience.

I would say that I have gotten here through the alchemy of serendipity, terror, and people who believed in me when others didn't or perhaps saw something in me that maybe I didn't even see in myself, and maybe in that order. I do think that things happen as they should and they don't happen by our will. We responded to it as it were.

Things don't happen by our will, but we respond to them as they unfold. It's all about serendipity, terror, and belief.

I started up in engineering as my undergraduate studies in college because that's what one would do. We have an affinity for Math and Science, but I realized fairly quickly that engineering was interesting. I wasn't interested. Interest in Engineering was the only thing I wanted to do. I want to be a songwriter much like my parents.

When I finished my Engineering degree, I went to music and tried to figure it out and make it happen. I was writing love songs for a living. I wasn't great or successful which is why we went back to school to get my MBA and study strategic brand management I thought that marketing was the most creative of all the business disciplines and having been a business co-founder or co-owner, but didn't understand business very much. I thought business school was the best way to go.

Through there, I found myself at Apple, working with Beyonce, my digital strategy for her, and then in the world of advertising. It was an inflection point for me. It's a flashpoint. I was working with a gentleman named Steve Stoute who was a record label guy, who's a record executive who went into advertising with Jimmy Iovine's record label guy, and Jay-Z. The guy has all the things.

The idea for the creative agency was bought to help brands thrive in contemporary culture and what that meant, but I used it all the time. It’s like let's get our ideas out in the culture. It was happening in culture. All this new language I was adopting but didn't know what it meant and they didn't stop me from using it until I had dinner with my now wife and her college friend.

Over dinner, her college friend who's a social worker kept saying, “In social we do this and that.” I kept asking myself, “Why did she say that over and over again? It's exactly what I say,” because I was running social media. I was saying, “We do this. On television, you do that. In radio, you do this, but in social you do that.” I realized that “Social is people.” I had that realization as we were sitting there talking. I said, “Social is people.”

At that moment, it came to me or dawned on me that I knew nothing about people. Out of fear or terror that when I get fired here’s the social guy who doesn't understand social. I started to invest myself in the social sciences. As I began to explore social science the world became much clearer for me. No that I understand the underlying physics of humanity more but I was able to apply that new knowledge to my work as a marketer. Marketing got a lot better like the word got infinitely better, which made me more curious about the behavioral sciences and it started this cyclic relationship between practice and scholarship.

The more I dive into the behavioral sciences, the more I understand the 'underlying physics' of humanity.

So much so that I started to have a foot in academia while having a foot in practice. Finishing my doctorate I sat in that academic-practitioner gap but it started because A) Serendipity led me to the world of marketing, particularly advertising. B) Fear or terror because I thought I was going to get fired, and C) Stoute and many others like him, saw something in me that maybe I didn't see myself.

I didn't know what culture and language that was but he saw something in me that I could not only adopt the language understanding and new ways and be able to apply it in ways that may be novel to the organization. Maybe to him. I count myself very grateful that he invested in me at that time. In my resume, it said, “I could do this,” but he gave me a shot. Those three things, serendipity, terror, and people who are investing in me, I was the beneficiary of that.

That's an exploration that we often hear in the show is this idea of having people believe in you and then this serendipitous moment that we have shown up in our lives. One of the things that I love that you mention is the idea that language is at the forefront of this. There's a moment where you look at the word like culture and you say, “What does it mean?” Then you have to go back and double-click on it and say, “It's at the core of culture.” What is it? It's people and what people want for themselves or what they believe in.

I do want to explore more about this idea of culture, but before we go there I want to spend a little more time going into the moments that made you who you are like your parents. What were the influencing factors that made your world what it is? Where they could be academics or business people? Tell me more about their background.

My mother was an educator and an academic. She spent her entire life in education. It takes her 50 years in the Detroit Public School system. She was a counselor for many of those years. She was my counselor and my school from kindergarten through eighth grade, and then she went on to become a principal then she passed her doctorate and started teaching in higher ed.

While my mother had a very traditional path, let's say traditional, that means she was born in the 1930s, and so there's nothing traditional about what she did. Not only being Black but also being a Black woman the things she was able to achieve were unbelievable. She is very highly regarded in the city still from the work she’s able to do in Detroit.

While my mother had a more traditional trajectory, my father was very nontraditional. He was born in Rural Arkansas and moved to Detroit right after high school. The day he graduated, he and his twin brother drove up to Detroit to find a new life and my father isn't formally educated. He finished high school. He got his associate's degree, but he didn't get a four-year degree.

Academia wasn't the place where he engaged himself instead, he went to business. He had a good sense of finding opportunities and he was working at Ford Motor Company. He saved tons of money because he's a steward of his finances in that way and he bought into a company as a co-owner. His ability to look at it and see opportunity when others didn’t. His ability to prepare for something that he didn't know was going to come in two of his ways, and his affinity for risk. Those three things helped him achieve in ways that people with the same pedigree never would have.

Even though my mother was very successful in the trajectory that she was in, he was the financial breadwinner. His ability to find an opportunity and go after it, that instinct to see it, and then the forward to go after it is how together they instilled a sense of foundation setting and risk loving in me. In many ways, an amalgamation of the two of them.

I was going to say you are your parent’s child. It's wonderful to see the texture of your background and the ability to take risks. Just even stepping into some of the worlds you have, it's wonderful to see that you are doing the things you are doing and being able to ask the right questions and challenge the conventions that often people don't want to be challenged. In the advertising world, it is oftentimes people say, “You are creative,” but then again they often do the same thing over and over.

There are two things at play here. You framed it. Growing up in Detroit in the ‘90s as a Black kid, we were always taught that you had to be better than them. The teacher would always point north being the suburbs. You have to be two times as good as them to compete. What was certainly instilled in me as early as I can remember is that you are always going to work hard like it's full stop.

How Passion Shapes Success

No need to work hard. You get to work harder than everyone else which said to me like, “It doesn't matter how talented you are but matters is so the work you put in,” so was that constantly instilled in me and repetitious by my parents, particularly my mother. My father on the other hand when I was telling my parents that I wanted to go into music, my mother was the one who was like, “This is not happening.”

I was like, “Mom, what if Quincy Jones wants to sign me?” She was like I don't care if Jesus Christ wants to sign you. It ain't happening. My mother was very much against this. After the whole blowout that we had, my father pulled me to the side and said, “Listen. If you want to be great at anything, it's got to be something that you don't feel like you are working on when you are doing it. You have to be good at it.”

He's getting that whole thing. “You had to be good at it. You got to be passionate about it,” and I think about passion not like interested in it, but passion through the theological etymology suffers, the passion of Christ, the suffering of Christ. Something that you are willing to suffer for because it's going to require a lot of work to get great at it, and then you get paid to do it.

That idea of going after the thing that you care about or that you feel like when you do it doesn't feel like work because the chance of you getting good and great at it or higher when you don't feel like you are doing work. Two of those things about you are going to have to work full stop. You have to work harder than everyone else just to be in the room. That's a part of me.

Then the idea that like, “While you’re doing all that work, make sure you are doing the work in a thing that doesn't feel like work.” This drives my wife crazy because she is risk-averse to the highest fidelity possible. She sees me and is like, “You are crazy. You jumped off buildings ago.” “I will land somewhere.” In her mind, that's how she sees me. I tell her I go, “It's riskier to do the things that I'm not fulfilled by or to do things that I don't feel passionate about or not willing to suffer for because the chances of you being great at them are significantly mitigated when they aren’t.”

You can work two times harder than anyone else, but if it doesn’t feel like work, you’ve found your passion.

You wrote an article right there. The passion myth is that often people think of passion as the things that you love and it's everything so easy, but no. If you click in and look at passion, it's not about the easy. It's about things you are willing to suffer for. In the process of doing so, you are happy. You are fulfilled by it and happy is a tough word because I don't often use the word happy. I use the word fulfilled because you feel the sense of like, “I feel good about this process,” even though I you know have challenges along the way and it's hard but I also feel great about it. It's like that at the same time.

I learned to play piano when I was a kid and I was playing when I was writing music and I stopped. It’s called Turkey Stop. I was like, “I'm going to focus on this.” Getting worked two times is hard. All my energy is focused on being a better marketer and then it's understanding the theories around Behavioral Sciences. I picked it up later as an adult. You say, “It's like riding a bike.” That's not true. It's like I'm starting all over in many ways and I get frustrated. Why aren't my hands doing what my mind is telling my hands to do? It's like because my hands have to learn it again. They have to develop muscle memory.

While it's frustrating and it's painful going through it I love to be able to play. Someone asked me about the experience of writing my book or the culture. I was like, “It’s painful.” They are like, “What?” I was like, “I hate writing.” They are like, “What do you mean?” I was like, “I find writing to be so painful.” I don't like writing by luck, so I write.

That’s a great insight there and that's something that we often have to think about is, the process is the journey we go on to do hard things. It's worth it in the end and we look back and we say, “I'm so glad I did that.” Don't think it's an easy road. Nothing is easy. Any entrepreneur will tell you that there are moments and they are like, “What the heck am I doing?” They will doubt themselves and that's all part of the journey. The imposter syndrome which people often mention says, “The imposter syndrome is part of the process.” It's a feature. Not a bug.

There's a scholar at MIT. She studies Imposter Syndrome, and her work suggests that people who suffer from Imposter Syndrome outperform those who don't because people who suffer from Imposter Syndrome over-prepare. They put in more work. They do more of these things because they feel like it's not innate in them or that they are not good enough as they are to perform so they end up outperforming other people. Where people who have the hubris of saying, “I'm all good. I don't need to do anything. I deserve to be here and all these things,” from a manifesting and confidence-building perspective, I see those people go, “I wish my parents would raise me with that confidence because I do not have it.” As science will tell us, maybe I'm better off because of it.

Speaking of Imposter Syndrome, not to put this on you. Let's get back to your story and talk about working with Beyonce. What's the story with that? Not just Beyonce but you've worked with some amazing people in your journey. How did you get the confidence to feel like, “I can do this?”

It’s completely serendipitous. I had left Apple. I was in New York and I was trying to figure it out. This is right in the middle of The Recession. I'm trying to get a gig. Here I am an MBA graduate. I worked at Apple, which is amazing, but I had $116,000 of debt around my neck from my MBA program. No job and no leads in the middle of a Recession moving to New York.

My parents were like, “We raised a fool because this guy is an idiot.” I'm in New York beating the bushes. It always revolves around my wife. My now wife's cousin used to work at Ticketmaster and she goes, “I worked with Beyonce's team. If you want me to introduce you, I'm happy to do that.” By that time, I had met so many people in the industry. Taking people out for coffee, drinks, or dinner trying to beat the bushes, and doing all the networking things.

There were so many close calls like something almost happened and fell apart that I was like, “Sure fine. I’m in Beyonce's team,” whatever. I won’t say I was dejected, but I wasn't feeling optimistic. “Another introduction. Great. Whatever. What’s that going to do?” She introduced me to the person who runs the digital strategy for Beyonce.

Through her record label management company musical entertainment. She introduces me and I send my resume. I replied, “Thanks so much for the introduction. Hey, so-and-so, it’s good to meet you. We love to talk.” Email bounces back and I go, “Of course, it's going to bounce back. That's just my luck.” She sent it to me like, “You bounced back. I guess you’re not there anymore,” and I go, “Thanks. I appreciate it.” No surprise considering my luck.

Unbeknownst to me, his email was getting forwarded to the general manager and she got his email and said, “So-and-so doesn’t work anymore, but we love to meet, Marcus.” I met the team. What I thought was going to be a coffee chat, so I came in and chatted. It was an actual full-out interview. People were there in a semicircle. Five people are interviewing me, drilling me the questions. I was like, “What's going on here?”

I got to get into the weeds here. I was in the city when I got the email asking me to come in to meet these folks. I got on jeans, a polo shirt, and flip-flops. I'm like, “This is music. This attire isn't out of the norm, but I was like, “I'm going to show these guys. I'm done with all this foolishness that I have been encountering trying to get into the industry,” post my time at Apple.

I went and bought a suit off the rack at H&M. I went to Banana Republic, bought some shoes, a shirt, and a tie and I walked into what was going to be a coffee date in my mind and realized it was a full-blown interview. I'm like, “Thank God. I was wearing this suit.” The way I told where the lore goes is that the interview went well in their minds and they called Mathew Knowles Beyonce's father and then manager at the time who said, “Mathew, we met this guy named Marcus.” He goes, “Yeah.” He says, “He was an engineer. He started a music company. He has an MBA. Matthew, he worked at iTunes and he's Black.” Mathew goes, “Not true. He's not real.” They are like, “No. We met him. I was with him. We met him.” He was like, “No.” It's the General Manager. She's like, “Mathew, he's real.” He goes, “I want to meet him.”

I fly to Houston to meet Mathew Knowles. We had a great meeting. He asked me to stay the night. He's like, “Get a hotel room. I want you to experience Houston because this is where the company's headquartered. I do it. I'm going to give you an offer in a week.” He does. I say, “Thank you, but the offer was not compelling enough.” I was like, “To do this job. I can do X, Y, and Z.

I was writing a long email. I was like, “I hope you don't feel disrespectful but I feel like to do this job I need these things.” He says which I am so grateful for. He responds and says, “I'm glad you negotiated because if you didn't I would question everything I thought I knew about you.” I was like, “That's great.” Long story short, he counter-offers. I accepted the offer and here I am playing digital strategy for Beyonce during the I Am… Sasha Fierce days, which is an amazing time to be in the Beyonce business.

It's never a bad time to be in the Beyonce business, but this time in particular was great because she was evolving and transcending being Beyonce an artist to being Queen Bey as we know her. I was able to lay one brick on the edifice of her Queendom. I never felt like starstruck working with her. I feel more so responsible for doing right by her. I felt like Matthew took a chance on me on behalf of Beyonce as one to make sure that I do right by her not because she was so big Beyonce but more so because I want to be a good steward of her grace as it were.

I will reflect on it from the point of view that I have seen in my own life is that when you work with people who have high caliber, think grand visions, and all that, they don't want someone who's going to be another fan. They want someone who's going to question what they are doing. Maybe push back and allow them to be a better version of themselves. Oftentimes, it's going to take a lot of courage for you to do that, but you have to be able to say what is best for this person in front of me and that might mean not pleasing them but serving them and that could be challenging for you and that's not for the faint of heart.

Not at all. To your point, Beyonce is amazing at her craft and her expectations of those who she works with is to be amazing also. If I would be very honest, I wasn't amazing at the time. I feel like I was good for the environment that I was in because the environment that I was in wasn't good in the space that was occupying. They weren't good at digital marketing or leveraging social networking platforms. They weren't great at that. I was incrementally better, which made me look like the most brilliant guy in the room, but I was the smartest guy in the room who wasn't as indoctrinated. They weren’t as well-versed in space. That's probably a dummy and every other room that I was in.

The Power Of Cultural Influence

What it speaks to is this idea that your environment shapes you but also this ability to shape your environment as well at the same time and that you became better through that experience. That's a wonderful thing. I'm sure there were a lot of moments and flashpoints along the way but a great segue way to lead into the book and what brought you to writing the book, so let's talk about culture and where we go with this concept of what's captured in the book. Take whatever road you want to get there, but the idea is that we need to be mindful of the culture that we are in.

It falls right into chronological order because the industry, not the music world, Beyonce, or Matthew's team, was that it was the industry itself that wasn't well-versed in the space of digital technologies and social networks and platforms. Trying even more than that was understanding how brands show up in the world based on the orthodoxy of how people engage with marketing, how to consume content, and how they engage with each other.

I moved from the world of music into the world of advertising. I went to a social media marketing firm first called Big Fuel where I learned the ins and outs of social media. Then I met a gentleman named Steve Stoute who was a record label executive who then went into advertising and started his firm. That was part of the biggest inflection point of my career then because Stoute introduced a lexicon to me that felt familiar, but I didn't fully know what it was.

When I took music theory in college, it felt familiar. It felt like Stevie Wonder. It felt like all the things but I didn't know what it was until I learned like, “That's a major seven. That's a sus4. That's a diminished chord. That's what that is.” Stoute provided not only language that had never been interrogated and gave me an opportunity. It's not only to learn it but to apply it and that language is culture. The translation was built by the agency that was at translation was building the idea that who leads culture or more successful in those who follow and I would say that all the time.

I thought about culture as a shortcut for popularity. The shortcut for music, film, and these things. It is. Those are aspects of culture but not what culture is. It would be years later that I asked myself, “What is culture? He keeps talking about culture.” I don't know how to define this thing and I also realized that almost everybody else didn't know how to find it either. We are all saying it in the organization and arguably in the industry.

This good idea is out in the culture and was happening in culture, but we are anemic about our understanding of it. That was a fertile place to explore as it started my doctoral studies. I happened to stumble across a field of study called Consumer Culture Theory and these scholars were saying all the things but they had all the theoretical underpinnings of what these things were and why they manifest the way they do, and my mind was blown. I was like, “This major sevens all over again. This is the thing.”

I started to invest myself in it in my doctoral studies while teaching and while in practice and started to identify some languages. Rosetta Stone, in which we describe culture and culture is esoteric. It's amorphous. It's intangible, which makes it very hard to describe. It's like explaining water to a fish. It's in everything. Everything we do, it's all around us.

I think about culture through a sociological lens, particularly through the lens of Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology who talks about culture as a system. They have a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. It's anchored in our identity and who we are and it informs how we make the world like trues, ideologies, and beliefs. As for how we see the world collectively we navigate through the road accordingly. They are a shared way of life. Artifacts, behaviors, and language. They are outward expressions of inner beliefs.

Then we express ourselves collectively through shared work with literature. It was cultural production, music film, television art, poetry, pottery, books, brands, and branding products. The Alchemy of these systems makes up our culture. You see that and you go, “This is what culture is.” Is this what culture is but it's also a way by which culture is operationalized. These are the mechanisms that makeup the culture and you go, “Now I could identify it when I see it.” I go, “Someone who operates or navigates to life differently than I do I go. They are from a different culture.” What do they believe? How do you see the world then how does that manifest in the way they show up in the world and how they express themselves through shared work? It starts to contextualize how we interact with Humanity but also brings humanity back to humanity.

You dropped a lot of big things right there. I was following along and then the last part I need you to provide a little more clarity because I loved what you were sharing. It gave me a lot of sense as to what it all means and how it all connects and it's well said. Bringing humanity back into humanity, tell me about that.

When we typically look at people, we tend to reduce them to labels or boxes that make life very easy for us. We are very complex. Full of intersectionality, contradictions, and all the many facets so much we show up that make up our identity. We are complex. It is just what it is. Neil deGrasse Tyson the astrophysicist says, “When human behaviors enter the equation things go nonlinear. That's why physics is easy and sociology is hard. We are very complex, but the brain hates complexity.

What do we do? We reduce people to boxes that make life easy, neat, and clean as opposed to messy like it is. Instead of looking at someone and all the intersectionality, I call them Gen Z because of their age group. I look at someone because of the 1 millimeter of skin that has a certain color, I describe them by their skin color as a post to who they are. It makes life easier.

All women love to shop. That's not true of business school here at Ross. I see some of the girls in the hallway talking saying, “All men are dogs.” I go, “No. Your boyfriend is a dog.” It’s different that we put people in boxes and when we do that though, it makes life easy for us to make sense of the world. It strips people of their humanity.

Understanding Cultural Actors

When we understand that we are social actors that abide by a cultural governing operating system, we start to see humans in their humanity. We understand culture and see people as cultural actors, animals, or beasts as they were, we begin to bring humanity back to humanity as opposed to the categorical boxes that we put them in to make life simple for us.

I'm glad I asked this question because that is such a beautiful way to think about this. It's interesting because I brought up this element in my last book Campfire Lessons for Leaders, this idea of how we get past those boxes. It is convenient. We want to make things easy for ourselves, but that's not where we stop. We have to get past that and think differently.

We don't explicitly go, “You are Black. Come sit at this campfire with me.” We don't typically do that. We go. “I love your sneakers.” “These are the Jordan 3. This colorway.” “I got the Jordan 3 and this colorway.” “You must be a sneakerhead. Come sit down and let's talk.” We build community or whether we engage in community when they are shared ideologies. We rely on demographic representations of us only as a shortcut to shared ideologies.

If I'm in a room full of White people and I’m the only Black person. I see another Black person, I go, “Where are you from?” They go, “I’m from Chicago.” “I’m from Detroit.” “Midwest. What's up?” We assume that there are shared ideologies within us and that's the thing that community is based on. Community is based on shared ways of seeing the world. We talked about building campfires. We are fostering and harboring a safe environment where people who see the world similarly can be in a community.

The key thing is making sure that we are not stopping at the first thing we see. It's opening the aperture a bit more and saying, “What else is possible here? What else could I know and learn by being in the community and starting to learn more about what else is there? What else?” I could talk about this all day. I want to ask. We talked about the book and this concept is in the book.

The book is anchored on that idea. It's like culture is the most influential external force of human behavior full stop. Those Who understand it, leverage the power of culture to make people behave. Those who don't understand it are probably more likely to be influenced by those who do. The question becomes, “Do you want to do the influencing or do you want to be influenced?”

I would argue whether you have marketing in your title or not, we are all in the business of influencing behavior. Whether you are a manager trying to get your team to act or you are a teammate trying to get your manager to recognize and promote you. Whether you are a candidate trying to get people to vote for you. Whether you are an entrepreneur trying to get a VC to fund your initiative or you are trying to get your kids to eat peas. Whatever the case may be, we are constantly trying to influence people. The idea here is that since we are endeavoring to do this, then let's leverage the greatest cheat code there is and that's culture. That's what the book is predicated on. That argument and thesis begin to lay out how we might be able to engage in doing that very thing.

That captures the essence of what the book is about. We want to make sure people know that you have to read the book to get all of the stories and a lot of the elements that you beautifully capture in this book. I'd pick up. Grab the book. I want to take a risk and go out there and say, “Tell us a little bit of what you are going to venture into next.” The next book if you don't mind.

Organizational Culture And Its Impact

I do not mind at all. For the culture behind what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be, my first book is an exploration of consumer culture. The things that we consume and that we enter and trade to possess. Focus on the external customer. This next book is going to focus on the internal customer and this is Organizational Culture. As you said, there are many different cultures. This is one context of how culture manifests within organizations.

These are collectives or groups of people whether they are companies, institutions, sports teams, musical acts, or anyone who engages in the production of collective work. There is an inherent operating system that governs the way we work together and that is organizational culture. The idea of this book is to explore how we identify and optimize organizational cultures so that we might be able to realize our full potential as an organization. To no surprise as anemic as our understanding of consumer culture is, the same thing goes for organizational culture.

We talk about organizational culture all the time. The HR folks say, “We have a foosball table in the kitchen. We have a great culture here. We observe summer Fridays. We have a great culture.” Those are byproducts of culture. This book is focused on exploring organizational culture so that leaders, managers, HR folks, team members, band leaders, coaches, or anyone who is responsible for leading groups and leading collections of people are a part of these collectives. The book is focused on empowering them to make better decisions so that they might be able to fully realize their potential individually and also collectively.

I love what you said. To come back to where you talked about it is to influence it as opposed to following it. A post to accept what is and saying, “I got to follow what everyone else is doing and therefore if they don't like it, I have to leave.” Maybe there's an opportunity here for people who say, “I like this place and there's some things that I'd like to influence in the way that we do things. I maybe have more power or I can be in power to influence it.”

The organizational culture at its core, it's going to happen. Is it going to happen by default or design? You choose. You probably don't want default but by design. You have to be intentional to ensure that how you envision the work that you will do as a group is systematically facilitated through the conventions and expectations of people like you.

Before you go to the last question, I had this urge to ask. What are some things you've learned about yourself in this journey, including expanding your world into going out and speaking and things like that you want to share that you have already shared?

I wrote an additional chapter in the paperback version of the book and the epilogue to address this very thing. Essentially, what I learned since writing for the culture and supporting the book. It's been out. It’s a simple idea when you see it on the surface, but it was pretty revelatory for me. It's that the world is an objective. It's subjective.

Things aren't the way they are. They are the way that we are which means that your truth is as valid as my truth even if they are conflicting or contradictory truths are equally as valid so long as your truth doesn't mean my oppression, marginalization, subjugation, and eradication so long as those things are not present in your truth. They were better because we shared different perspectives on the world. We got a much more vivid view of the tapestry that is social living so that we might be able to arrive at more heterogeneity about our solutions, with regards to our creative productions, and our ability to innovate.

The world isn't the way it is; it's the way we are. Your truth is as valid as mine, so long as it doesn't oppress or marginalize others.

Our ability to produce innovations comes from the novelty and the heterogeneity. The diversity comes from different perspectives and that's a beautiful thing. For a long time before doing this work, I'd said something like, “Some people are crazy.” People did things that were different from me or saw the world differently from me. I'm like, “These people are stone-cold crazy.”The truth is they are not. They operate by a different meaning-making system than I do.

I don’t have to agree with it. I'm far better off with my understanding. That to me has melted away probably some ignorance that I once held. I'm soft in my stance on some beliefs that I want to hold up as the objective truth. As a result, I feel like I'm not only a better practitioner as a marketer but even better. I feel like I'm a better citizen of the world and that's an ambition that's worth pursuing.

Well put and you are eloquent in the way you described that is why I'm so glad we do these things because it's so beautiful the way you described. What we need more people to grasp is that we can have our way of looking at the world and also honor and respect other people's view of the world and it's okay. I know we are going to run out of time here. I wish I had twenty hours to spend with you but we don't. The last question for you is what are 1 or 2 books, maybe 3 that have had an impact on you and why?

I will say the book that changed my life was Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational. It's the first book that I read that was in this space of the behavioral sciences and it rang a bell that I couldn't unring. As soon as I saw it, I was like, “We are all wired in very similar ways,” and because we are wired the way we are, we act the way we do. If you understand the wiring then you could get an idea of what people are likely to do.

The Role Of Network Effects

It was like, “Why aren't more people focused on this? This is the way forward.” That was the first. It was a watershed moment for me. There was another book by two network theorists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler called Connected. What their work did was give language to something that I felt intuitively but didn't know how to describe. This idea of network effects and how we are all connected.

To put a bell on all of it, I gravitate to their work so affectionately because they looked at social behavior based on network dynamics. As an engineer, I study Material Science and I gravitated towards polymers which are carbon chains. They are network chains. I started to look at humanity understanding the underlying physics of it from studying the behavioral sciences and the onset but I started to see humanity as a set of networks. It became Kind of clear how these networks behave because of the dynamism of connected notes.

I feel like it capsulizes that everything that I was doing beforehand was random, at least in the eyes of my family, my parents in particular, that these things were all kismet. They were all aligned because my experience will ultimately inform what I do now in a way that hopefully and prayerfully God willing inshallah is unique to me.

I love it because you encapsulated a lot of the reasons why I do the show. When people look back and look at the flashpoints, they often connect the dots for people to see, “This is why I do what I do and it gets me in this place of understanding more clearly who I am.” Both of those books are brilliant. It's the way you described it. It was so well done and I hope people see that as the breadcrumbs to go follow and continue to uncover their Journey. I can't thank you enough for coming to the show. This was a wonderful exploration of the culture of your journey of seeing what got you where you are. First of all, thank you so much, but before you go, I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about you.

I'm on all the social webs at @MarcToTheC. You can find me on my website, www.MarcToTheC.com.

Thanks again and thanks to the readers for coming on this journey. I know you are leaving inspired. Go grab Marcus’ book and be ready for the next one. It's going to be a brilliant bestseller right out of the gates. I can see it.

From your lips to God's ears.

Thanks again.

I appreciate you.

That's a wrap.

Take care, my friend.

Important Links

• For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be
• Campfire Lessons for Leaders
• Predictably Irrational
• Connected
• @MarcToTheC - Instagram
• Marc To The C

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