Tag Archives: business anthropology

Three Myths Of Corporate Culture

by on January 13, 2013 in Organizations

Messy CordsOne of the reasons I chose to pursue a post-grad degree in anthropology was to better understand something that most businesses fail to fully comprehend: organizational culture. There are countless posts out there by otherwise well-intended people trying to describe “corporate” culture. Trying to clarify how this concept of culture works. Trying to explain how we can create culture that gets results.

These posts are all very nice. And most of them are dead wrong, at least in terms of trying to convince us that culture is this narrowly-defined concept bereft of nuance and appreciation for complexity.

In a blogpost last week, Rand Fishkin wrote about what company culture is and is not. On whole, it’s one of the better and more eloquent attempts by a business leader…but it still simplifies culture down to what are very limiting ideas. Yes, culture can encompass shared beliefs and values. Yes, it can include how people act and behave together. But too many organizations use culture to control their people and institute a false sense of order. When this happens, they are perverting culture to be just another management tool.

Business leaders do this based on what I have found to be three interrelated myths of organizational culture:

Myth #1. Culture can be built, top-down.
Yes, it’s important for leadership to clearly articulate goals, values, and mission. But these elements merely provide direction and structure, the expectations of management. They are not the culture themselves. The problem is that management has come to see culture as one more way to institute controls over employees. If you read, “This is the [insert company name] way” when discussing culture, then you’re reading a top-down, executive mandate for what management wants the culture to be…but likely not what actually is. And just because the CEO says, “This is our culture” doesn’t make it true. It’s way bigger than that.

Myth #2. There is just one culture.
No matter how many people call an organization their professional home, there is not just one culture in play. Actually, there are multiple cultures and subcultures that often get overlooked. Even in a small start-up, think about the differences between accounting and sales teams. Yes, they may adhere to the same shared norms and values of the company, but how they work and interact are very different.

This isn’t even including the cultures we bring with us from our own outside lives. Think of the large, multi-national companies with work teams spanning the globe. We don’t shelve our personal lives when we enter the front door of the office, why then would we expect folks to shelve their respective cultures?

Again, by emphasizing one monolithic culture, management can feel like it’s exerting control over the organization. This also ignores the next myth, which is…

Myth #3. Culture is tame and structured.
This is the most pernicious lie that business leaders tell each other. Instead, here’s something closer to the truth: Culture is messy. It’s constantly evolving. It can be fragile and bewildering. This is what happens when people come together. We’re not programmable robots. We’re extraordinarily complex creatures with emotions, dreams, fears, and ambitions.

Corporate culture isn’t a highly conformed and stable melting pot. Instead, think of it more as a dynamic mixed bag of goodies of all shapes, sizes, and flavors.

It pains me to see culture get thrown around like so many other management buzzwords. This is when it gets stripped of its meaning, its vitality, and its power to convey something that is truly beautiful in its complexity.

Photo credit: otkuda via Flickr

Can Your Startup Succeed Like Pinterest? Only If You Understand People

by on March 14, 2012 in Communities, Customer Experience

I’ve been talking with startups in Austin (and a few who made the trip here for SxSW) about how they incorporate the customer into their business. The conversation usually begins at a high-level, where I learn they have someone covering customer support. Then they mention they’re monitoring social media and eventually they realize they think about the customer in their UX design. This is good. It’s the baseline any company – startup or mature – should bake into their operations. But is it enough to differentiate a startup from the competition?

In an interview at SxSWi, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann explained how his startup is organized:

Pinterest’s small team of 20 people is not driven by engineering. The company is split into three divisions: Engineering, design and social — with “social” a combination of quantitative people and community people, who try to understand how and why people use Pinterest, how social groups form and how social norms propagate (emphasis added).

I added that emphasis for a reason. Pinterest doesn’t just want to build apps for customers…it wants to create experiences with them. You can’t do that by sitting in a cube imagining how a customer might use your product. You have to get out of the workspace and observe all the different ways your product is being used in the wild. You need to understand how people are interacting with it in relationship to their everyday world. Take a page from the Pinterest playbook and figure out deeper questions such as:

Why are people really using your product?
Are new social groups forming around your product?
Are unique social norms developing around these new groups?
How can these groups help your business grow…or destroy you if treated poorly?

To be honest, I have no idea if Pinterest is employing fellow anthropologists or social scientists. Based on the mission of their social division, it sure looks like it. But what about your startup? What do you know beyond the usual customer stuff? Do you know why and how your product is being used? If not, we should really have a chat soon…before your competition realizes this is their pathway to true business advantage.

The Convenient Lie Of Customer Lying

by on December 5, 2011 in Research

Last week, Alessandro Di Fiore wrote a blogpost at HBR that provoked some pretty strong reactions from me called How to Get Past Your Customers’ Lies.

First, I don’t believe customers “lie.” When we believe they’re “lying” to us, it immediately puts a negative lens on the customer and their experience. Try this little thought experiment: the next time your significant other (or kid, boss, etc.) says something to you, immediately plant it in your mind that they’re lying or not telling you the whole truth. Makes a big difference in how you treat these relationships, doesn’t it? So what makes us think we can do anything different with a customer? How about if we practice some empathy for our customers instead? Our customers may hide things from us or simply not know how to clearly articulate the needs, frustrations, ideas, and convenient work-arounds that play out in their daily experience. They need help and it’s what a trained anthropologist with experience in fieldwork can do.

He suggests that eight to ten participant observations are enough to gather necessary data for decision-making. Field observation in business settings can be time, labor, and money intensive activities. But if we’re going to condense the ethnography, then every single interaction and experience counts. Nothing can be wasted. Field observation isn’t just an academic exercise, it’s purpose is to drive better business and product results. If the whole process – research design, data gathering, and analysis – takes months to complete, that’s critical time lost. Business anthropologists know how to conduct what’s known as rapid ethnography to complete the process not in months, but in weeks.

Finally, the process of getting market feedback and customer ideas in the field is not the sole domain of the C-level suite. As a matter of fact, I’d argue they are the least best option. You have to know how to observe the right things and ask the right questions. You also have to know how to see what’s not there and listen for what’s not actually said. Too many times, CEOS and other executives are too tied to their prior strategies and decisions. They become blinded to what they want to see. And they’re not trained to explore the nuances of things which is often where true discovery happens.

Trust me, a good business anthropologist is going to be able to filter all of this with the necessary focus on business, strategy, and people. It’s this – along with our needed objectivity – that makes us the ideal partner.

Photo credit: discoodoni via Flickr

Clearing The Air About Ethnography

by on September 26, 2011 in Research

Everyday there is evidence that ethnography is entering the general business vernacular. And there is also plenty of evidence that it remains woefully misunderstood. I’ve heard it bandied about as just another tool for getting information about customers and users.

However, the fact is that ethnography is more than just a set of tools. It’s a practice which means there is a whole way of thinking that must go into applying the tools in an honest, coherent way. This is why I get incredibly frustrated when untrained individuals think they can just go out and do ethnography. That’s like me saying that I’m going to go out and build a skyscraper. Just as you wouldn’t want me to be your architect, don’t be so fast to employ some fast-talking market research consultant with zero actual training to do something that requires careful study, preparation, and understanding.

  • Ask them for some credentials. Where did they study or get their ethnography training? If it amounts to zilch or appears dubious boot them out.
  • Ask them about the ethics of conducting ethnography. Are they aware of possible ethical situations that might arise? If they seem clueless or cavalier about it, then boot them out.
  • Ask them about their prior experiences and demand they give examples. Don’t fall for ethnographic techniques that are just interviews in disguise. If they don’t know the difference between interviews and ethnography, then yes, give them the boot. Hell, give them another boot for trying to pull a fast one on you.

And one more thing. While no social science has a monopoly on conducting ethnography, it’s purpose isn’t to reveal individual customer or user psychology. Don’t expect to know how a product makes someone feel or understand personality traits of a buyer or focus on a person’s psyche. If that’s what you want, hire a psychologist for answers.

What we do as business-oriented anthropologists is to help our clients understand how a customer, user, or buyer ascribes meaning to their everyday world. We seek to understand how people situate themselves in their existence. We look at how their actions match or contradict the words they use to describe themselves or their behavior. We view people holistically and seek to understand them within the context of their cultural surroundings.

Why would you want this information? Because it will mean the difference between whether your sparkly new product or revolutionary new service not only sells but gets used, gets talked about, gets people coming back for more. Because we help clients create things that make a difference in the lives of their customers.

Sorry yet another rant but I can’t sit idly while I see misinformed people continuing to degrade anthropology and ethnographic methods in order to be something they clearly are not.

X-Men And Our Own Struggles With Alienation

by on June 5, 2011 in Life

There’s a rather fascinating op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘X-Men: First Class’ reminds us we are all mutants now. It argues that “the superhero movie series reflects an America that has increasingly come to accept individuals with unique identities, desires and talents.”

It’s a good article that raises some interesting ideas. However, where I’ll disagree with the LA Times writers (and perhaps Grant McCracken, though I haven’t fully reviewed his work titled Plentitude (pdf download)) is where they argue this “quickening speciation of social types” is a recent phenomenon. If you need any evidence, just think back to when you were in high school and how many different social types existed. The fact is we’ve always typed individuals. And we’ve always set out to form our own tribes as a way to confirm (or deny) self-identification as well as develop the security of numbers.

Now, it’s a lesser-known fact that I’m a huge comic book collector. I first started reading in 1984 and one of my favorite titles was X-Men. I don’t think I was completely aware of it at the time, but what I undoubtedly found within the stories were themes I could easily relate to: feeling outcast, alone, angry, and different from those around me. I surely felt a kinship between my teenage self and the various mutants within X-Men who sought acceptance from society.

But another way to look at why the X-Men remain popular since their beginnings in the 1960s is to see their relationship to our own cultural outlook. Not only do they fulfill a hero archetype, they connect us to an inner sense of alienation. Each of us is alienated from something in one way or another. It could family if we’ve chosen to do something outside of their wishes. It could be work if we are disconnected from the leadership structure. It could be online in social networks if our attempts at communication are ignored by others.

The moral story of X-Men – not just First Class but throughout the canon – is there are two paths we can take. One is with Magneto who believes alienation should be met with anger and vengeance. The other is with Professor Xavier who argues that alienation can be met with a hope for societal acceptance.

At the end of X-Men: First Class, characters are asked to make a choice: join Magneto or Xavier. It’s the same in our own daily existence. If we’re feeling alienated and apart from the group in which we seek acceptance, do we take the path of brooding anger…or do we take the path of hopeful determination?