Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life

Description

A new wave of anthropological research is transforming how the world does business. This book reveals how. To understand business, you need to think like an anthropologist. In a career spanning three decades, Gillian Tett has established a reputation as one of Britain's most astute financial journalists. But before joining the Financial Times, Tett completed a PhD in anthropology at Cambridge - and it is her anthropological training that gives her such a razor-sharp insight into global business. Anthropologists have a unique view of the world. Instead of building their arguments on data or written sources, they undertake ethnographies - meaning they go inside groups of people and seek to understand, from within, how they think. This once involved besuited Victorians going to live alongside Amazonian tribespeople for years on end. But these days anthropologists are just as likely to undertake ethnographies in the boardrooms of law firms, or on the trading floors of investment banks. In her new book, Tett will reveal what anthropology can teach all of us about business. She will recount the most fascinating findings from a recent wave of 'business anthropology', telling stories from inside the likes of the London Stock Exchange, JPMorgan and Adidas. She will explore the hidden rituals that underpin how businesses work- from the invisible norm that explains why we are all so happy to sign away our data, to the unspoken laws that govern the behaviour of the world's best coders. Above all, Tett will reveal how you too can learn to think like an anthropologist. Once you understand the power of business anthropology, it will revolutionise how you buy, work and think - starting today.

Gillian Tett is the chairman of the editorial board and editor-at-large at the Financial Times. Best known as the woman who predicted 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, wher she wrote her dissertation on marriage rituals in Tajikistan. Her work for the FT has taken her around the world - from Brussels to Tokyo to Moscow - and won her numerous awards, including Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Will turn your world upside down in the best possible way: fun, profound and bursting with important insights. -- Tim Harford, author of HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP Makes a compelling case that "anthro-vision" can help us understand ourselves, our tribes, companies and communities, and to reduce our wilful blindness . . . One of the glories of Anthro-Vision is that it never argues (as many do) that its way of seeing is the only way. It's a timely call for decision-makers to wean themselves off their dependency on big data and embrace the full complexity of human life. * Financial Times * 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, former governor of the Bank of England and co-author of RADICAL UNCERTAINTY Drawing on a wide breadth of case studies, Gillian Tett explains that 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. Anyone working to rebuild a more equal world will benefit from Tett's well-argued case that 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, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and author of THE MOMENT OF LIFT Absolutely brilliant . . . Very compelling examples. -- Daniel Kahneman, author of THINKING, FAST AND SLOW and NOISE