Grant McCracken termed the “Diderot effect” that seeks to explain the spiral of continued consumption and dissatisfaction. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup, Diageo, IBM, IKEA, Sesame Street, Chrysler, Kraft, and Kimberly Clark. He has served on marketing advisory boards for IBM and the Boston Beer Company. And he is a weekly contributor to the Harvard Business Review Conversation. His new book, Culturematic, was published by the Harvard Business Review Press in May 2012.

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II, Plenitude, Big Hair, The Long Interview, Flock and Flow, Transformations, and Chief Culture Officer. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now a research affiliate at C3 at MIT.

Grant goes to the very roots of being human, being social, being cultural – engaged, brilliant and funny.