Anthro-Vision
A New Way to See in Business and Life
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.
Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists learn to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision.
Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology.
“Fascinating and surprising” (Fareed Zararia, CNN), Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Financial Times columnist Tett (The Silo Effect) argues in this cogent survey that financial and political models fail because they don't take culture into account. "Big data can explain what's happening" but not why, she writes, and calls on techies, bankers, and executives to add an anthropological framework to their data science and legal calculations in order to get a deeper and more relevant analysis. Anthropology in business is "vital for the modern world," she writes, and incorporating it into business plans can help prevent tunnel vision as companies "grapple with climate change, pandemics, racism, social media run amok, artificial intelligence, financial turmoil, and political conflict." Through case studies including Coca-Cola's cross-cultural marketing missteps and differing international responses to facial recognition software, she argues that anthropology requires looking at the world according to three principles: make the strange familiar, make the familiar strange, and listen to social silence. With such principles, Tett writes, economists and corporate executives could better consider the environment, and the tech industry could better recognize biases in coding. It's hard to argue with her common-sense case that companies should strive to take an outsider's view: "There are multiple ways to live," she writes, "and everyone seems weird to someone else." Packed full of insight, this has the power to change minds.
