Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

by Gillian Tett Narrated by Imogen Church

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/31/2021

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. (June)

From the Publisher

What could happen . . . if more people embraced some anthro-vision? [Tett’s] conclusions are bright and buoyant.” —Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating and surprising.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN

"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, author of The Moment of Lift

“Absolutely brilliant.” —Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

"A plea to those of us who may be unfamiliar with Tett's academic discipline to think more like an anthropologist. I think she's right . . . Tett's book may be anthropological, but it also embraces a style of accessible economic writing that, sadly, went out of fashion as the mathematicians and their models took over. Anthro-Vision reminds me of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967). Some economists may regard this as a criticism. I can think of no higher praise." —The Times (UK)

"A book that will turn your world upside down in the best possible way: fun, profound and bursting with important insights." —Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

"Tett provides readers with a new intellectual framework—grounded in her deep understanding of anthropology and her path-breaking journalism—that can fundamentally transform how we approach solving society’s most wicked problems . . . I cannot recommend it highly enough." —Mariana Mazzucato, author of Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

"A fascinating and compelling demonstration that all of us, especially economists, can benefit from the insights of anthropology: the worm’s-eye not just the bird’s-eye view of how people behave." —Mervyn King, author of Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

"In a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, we need an antidote to tunnel vision. . . Admirers of Tett’s journalism will love this book, but they will also learn a great deal from it – including how better to understand their own familiar yet strange tribe." —Niall Ferguson, author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

"Looking at the world like an anthropologist has long given Gillian Tett the edge over the rest of us as a journalist and thinker. With this book she generously shares her secret recipe—and explains why we may all need Anthro-Vision to see a way through some of today’s most pressing global challenges." —Stephanie Flanders, Senior Executive Editor for Economics at Bloomberg and head of Bloomberg Economics

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173296580
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/08/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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