On Lore

1. Lore is anti-marketing 2. Lore is inner psyche-management 3. Lore is born-baroque imaginative irony 4. Lore is Posture, Narrative, Behavior (PNB) triad molecules 5. Lore is narrative territory catalyzed by shaky epistemologies 6. Lore is about circumstances you manage, not problems you “solve” 7. Lore is epic-orthogonal everyday life habits

Lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff. This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a genuinely new managerial capability.

The common feature in the work of these emerging thinkers is the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory. Lore, you might say is the feedstock of both stories and wo... See more

What is notable about this construct is that while it inherits many elements from older traditions that will be familiar to older managers and leaders (even Boomers should be able to parse the Mission and Ethics columns), the core of it is the Lexicon and Lore columns, which have no real counterparts in older traditions. As far as I know, no MBA co... See more

Arguably, lorecraft is the first truly internet-native school of management and organizational thinking, though I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Lorecraft is clearly a strikingly millennial school of management thinking. All the thinkers who belong in this tradition are, as far as I can tell, between about 28-35 or so. They are firmly middle-of-the-pack millennials. Founders of startups who seem to practice a sort of management by lorecraft, such as Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research, ar... See more

lore is working knowledge that knows its own limits.

If this hypothesis of lorecraft as an emerging managerial capability is correct, any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lo... See more