flâneur

How Corporate America Killed a Lifestyle That Threatened Its Dominance

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Forty years ago, a brilliant man named Arnold Mitchell invented a whole new way of analyzing how people behave. He worked for corporate clients at SRI, a West Coast think tank. So Mitchell’s main goal was to help companies make money—with smarter marketing. But his analysis was so innovative that you could use it to predict almost any social movement. Mitchell wrote a book about his breakthrough in 1983. And I’ve studied that book carefully, returning to it again and again. It has helped me enormously in my efforts to anticipate trends, understand culture and society, and forecast the future. In fact, I was so impressed by Mitchell’s work that I later tried to track down people who had worked with him—in hopes of learning his techniques at a deeper level. Unfortunately Mitchell was dead by that point. I did get firsthand info, however, from his former colleagues. And the more I learned, the more interesting the story got. But I was the only person to do this. As far as I can tell, nobo

Forty years ago, a brilliant man named Arnold Mitchell invented a whole new way of analyzing how people behave. He worked for corporate clients at SRI, a West Coast think tank. So Mitchell’s main goal was to help companies make money—with smarter marketing. But his analysis was so innovative that you could use it to predict almost any social movement. Mitchell wrote a book about his breakthrough in 1983. And I’ve studied that book carefully, returning to it again and again. It has helped me enormously in my efforts to anticipate trends, understand culture and society, and forecast the…

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