“Whether you’re marketing Kit-Kats in Japan or fighting the spread of COVID-19 in England, you need a more qualitative understanding of who people are and what they care about. To solve twenty-first-century problems, we must expand our fields of vision and fill in old blind spots with new empathy.” —Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of Gates Foundation
Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life
By Gillian Tett
“Rather brilliant… Tett’s anthropological approach adds academic rigour and richness.” —The UK Times
“Breezily readable . . . The book distinguishes itself neatly from most single-idea business manuals with its thread of anthropology.” —Guardian
“Highly intelligent, enjoyable and enlivened by a string of vivid case studies . . . Refreshingly unorthodox.” —Financial Times
A new wave of anthropological research is transforming how the world does business.
This book reveals how. For over a century, anthropologists have immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, uncovering the hidden rituals that govern how people act. Now, a new generation of anthropologists are using these methods in a new context – to illuminate the behavior of businesses and consumers around the globe.
In Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life (Simon & Schuster; June 8, 2021), Gillian Tett — bestselling author, Financial Times journalist, and renowned anthropologist — reveals how anthropology can help make sense of the corporate world. She explains how to identify the ‘webs of meaning’ that underpin consumers’ behavior on the other side of the planet. She reveals why ‘sense-making’ can explain the most erratic behavior of Wall Street bankers, and why concealed systems of barter shape our relationship with Silicon Valley. She delves into the cultural shifts driving investment in new markets and green issues. And she reveals what anthropology can tell us about our own workplaces, too: by identifying the hidden tribes within the office, or pinpointing which rituals are binding together a team.
Along the way, Tett draws on stories from Tajik villages and Amazon warehouses, Japanese classrooms and City trading floors, all to reveal the power of anthropology in action.
The result is a revelatory way to explain human behavior. In a short-sighted world, we can all learn to see clearly – using the power of Anthro-Vision.
Gillian Tett is the chairman of the US editorial board and editor-at-large at the Financial Times. Perhaps best known for predicting the 2007–8 financial crisis, Tett’s bestselling book Fool’s Gold was one of the definitive books on the crash. Tett holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she studied marriage rituals in Tajikistan. Her work for the FT has taken her around the world – from Brussels to Tokyo to Moscow to New York– and won her numerous awards, including Columnist, Journalist and Business Journalist of the Year prizes at the British Press Awards.