Apr 18, 2022
Hear how anthropology can send yourbusiness zooming to the top I love to readtheFinancial Times. It provides a very differentperspective of the world from our US papers. As I was browsingrecently, I came upon a story about GillianTett,FT'sUS Managing Editor, and her newbook,Anthro-Vision. Curiousas I am, my question was, What is a journalist doing writing a bookabout anthropology, and promoting AI (Anthropology Intelligence)?My joyful discovery was that Gillian is an anthropologist whobecame a journalist, a bit by chance and then by design.Herbook is about the power of observation. WhetherinTajikistanas an aspiring anthropologist studyingmarriage rituals or reporting on a major conference before thefinancial crisis of 2008, she mastered the art of listening to thestories being told, the resistance to change that peopledemonstrate, and the wisdom an anthropologist can offer—if onlyothers are willing to listen. As a fellowanthropologist, I am fascinated and I know youwill be too. Enjoy. Watch and listen to ourconversation here
As anthropologists, our job is to see what isunseen
Anthropologists love to observe, and by capturing the real livesof people, we offer insights that other data capture methods mightcomplement or even might ignore. We know that people don’t reallyknow what they are doing and often tell you what they think youwant to hear. It's their stories that offer opportunities to betterascertain the meaning of their daily lives and see the patternsthat their cultures command.
In Gillian’s bookAnthro-Vision, thereare wonderful stories about how cell phones have become the way inwhich kids growing up in the pandemic have built social lives, andwhy this is probably not going away. There is a great story aboutBad Babysitters and how an anthropologist could open up their eyesto why they were messaging incorrectly to potential customers.
She and I spoke at length about the social silence that gives usa view into what people are thinking. You will enjoy listening toher and love her book as I did. Our interview was at times deep andat others filled with humor, as we shared our journeys and who weare, not what we do.You can contact with GillianonnLinkedIn.
Gillian's 5 big ways Anthropology Intelligence (AI)could help you:
- Recognize that we are all creatures of our environments.
- Accept that there is no natural cultural frame. As humans, wecreate this diversity.
- Find ways to immerse ourselves in the minds and lives of othersto gain empathy.
- Look at ourselves through the lens of an outsider to seeourselves more clearly.
- Listen to what is not said, that social silence.
To learn more about how we at SAMC apply corporate anthropologyto businesses to help them get off the brink and soar, readthefirst chapterof mybook,On the Brink: A Fresh Lens toTake Your Business to New Heights.
For a deeper dive into anthropology and how it can helpyour business thrive:
- Blog:Will You Adapt Or Die? How CulturalAnthropology Can Transform Your Business Strategy
- Blog:What is Corporate Anthropology andWhy Should I Try It?
- Podcast:Rita Denny—Maybe You NeedAnthropology To See Yourself In New Ways
Additional resources for you
- My award-winning second book:Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Womenin Business
- My award-winning first book:On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take YourBusiness to New Heights
- Simon Associates ManagementConsultants
Read the transcript of our podcast here
Andi Simon:Welcome toOn the Brink with Andi Simon.Hi, I'm AndiSimon. I'm your host and your guide and my job is to get you offthe brink. So I try to find people who are going to give you afresh perspective, see things through a clear lens.
Let's just step back and take a moment to be alittleanthropologicaland begin to understandthat you really don't know what's happening until you pause andthink about it differently. And as you know,in my books, I help you see things through theeyes of my clients who all got stuck or stalled because theirstories were so great that they couldn't see all the things thatwere going on around them. And that's why a little anthropology canhelp you change, grow and your companies get unstuck. As you know,I myself am acorporate anthropologist, which is why I'm soexcited to bring to you today's guest.
Today, Gillian Tett is with me. Let me tell you about why she'sso special, and why you're going to enjoy watching her or listeningto her. Listen carefully to the stories she has to tell. Gillianserves as the Chair of the Editorial Board and Editor at Large inthe US of theFinancial Times. Forgive me for readingthis, but it's very important that you hear it.
She writes weekly columns covering a range of economic,financial, political and social issues. She's also the co-founderof Financial Times Moral Money, a twice weekly newsletter thattracks the ESG revolution in business and finance, which has sincegrown to be a stapleFTproduct. In 2020, MoralMoney was the SABEW best newsletter. I'll tell you, it's a greatnewsletter. Previously, Gillian was aFinancialTimesUS managing editor. And she's also served asassistant editor for theFinancial Times marketscoverage, and a lot of other things of great importance. I love toread theFinancial Timesand I bet you do as well.
She's the author ofThe Silo Effect, which looksat the global economy and financial system through the lens ofcultural anthropology. She's also authoredFool's Gold:How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Marketsand Unleashed Catastrophe, a 2009New YorkTimesbestseller and Financial Book of the Year at theinaugural Spirits Book Awards.
I must tell you she has written really good books. I brought herhere today because she has a new book outcalledAnthro-Vision. And as you might imagine, ittouched me and my heart. And I read right through it. I couldn'tstop because it was all about how, what she's calling AI, notartificial intelligence, but anthropological intelligence, moreintelligence and a whole new perspective. And what I would like youto understand is how a little anthropology can, in fact, help youand your business see things through a fresh lens and why it's soimportant. Gillian, thank you for joining me today.
Gillian Tett:Well, thank you forinterviewing me. And it sounds like we not only have a lot incommon, but a lot to learn from each other. I'm interested in yourown career and your own story because it sounds fascinating.
Andi Simon:Well, I have enjoyed readingabout yours. But I'd like you to tell the listeners or the audienceabout who Gillian is because you've had a great journey that'staken you to many places. And as ananthropologist, I smiled. Just a little aside, Itook my daughters when they were four and five to Greece to studyGreek women. And I know you'd appreciate this, I learned a wholelot about the Greek woman through my children. I'm not sure what mychildren learned, but they still love me. And so that's all thatmatters. Tell us about yourself.
Gillian Tett:Anyone who reads mybiography would think that I'm thoroughly weird. That has been thereaction of many business leaders, political leaders, economists,grown-ups who pretend to run the world, when they hear about mybackground because most people who work in high finance or businessassume that if you're going to be a journalist writing about them,you should have a PhD in economics or an MBA, or some kind oftraining in quantitative intellectual pursuits. And my backgroundis actually in cultural anthropology. And I did a BA and then a PhDat Cambridge University in the UK.
And what anthropology really is about is looking at humancultures and systems, and what makes people and societies tick, notjust in terms of the obvious things that we recognize, but mostimportantly, the things that we tend to ignore around us all thetime. Just like psychologists look at our hidden biases in ourbrains, anthropologists look at our hidden biases and patterns andassumptions in society.
So in my case, I went into anthropology because I was fascinatedby the rest of the world. I've always loved to explore and travel.And as a child, I dreamed of going to wacky weird places or placesthat seem weird to me. But like Indiana Jones, if you like theintellectual world, and cultural anthropology pretty much came outof that impetus in Victorian England, the idea that people would gooff to other cultures to find the essence of what it meant to behuman. And a lot of what anthropologists did in that waymid-century was indeed to go and travel. That's changed a lot inthe 21st century. I'll come on to that in a moment.
But I went off in my case to a place called Soviet Tajikistan in1989. And I spent about a year and a half of my life up in the highmountains in Tajikistan living with a group of wonderful villages.I imagine most people listening are saying, I've got no idea whereTajikistan is on the map, or what it's like there. But basically,if you imagine the scenes you might have seen of Afghanistan on thenews, and take out the black veils and put on very brightly coloredclothes, then you roughly have the idea of what my village waslike. It was in the high, high mountains of the Hindu Kush. And Iwas studying Tajik wedding rituals there. But I wasn't juststudying wedding rituals, I was looking at these rituals andsymbols and ceremonies, and all the economic exchanges associatedwith weddings as a key to try and understand how the Soviet Tajiksreconciled their identities of being Islamic and communist at thesame time.
Now, after I did my PhD, I then left Tajikistan. I actuallybecame a journalist, originally a war reporter. And then I joinedtheFTand became an economics correspondent.And for the first few years, it felt as if all my training incultural studies was completely irrelevant. But it's funny how lifeworks. Because a few years after I started writing about finance, Isuddenly realized that actually human beings are humans whereverthey are. And in just the same way that I went studying Tajikistanwedding rituals in the Hindu Kush, and looked at how they usesymbols and ceremonies to express ideas about their world.
To give you an example, two investment bankers get together forgigantic ritualistic ceremonies called investment bankingconferences, where they have all kinds of rituals like PowerPoints,and bar meetings, and golf tours. And those rituals and ceremoniesand symbols also create social networks, and express all kinds ofassumptions which could and should be studied through ananthropologist lens. So the latter part of my career has been allabout trying to use this anthropological vision, and apply it tothe world of business and finance and economics. And frankly, Ithink it's something that anybody could benefit from, particularlynow, given that COVID has ripped up our normal lives and has thrownus all into culture shock. And we can all benefit by thinking aboutwhat makes us really tick.
Andi Simon:When you think about that, youin your book play out some of the stories in there. You've providedus with a broad range of fascinating illustrations of theapplication of anthropology to different situations. Whether it wasto a childcare center that wasn't doing well, or getting into petcare, or to the economic crisis of 2008 or what happened withCambridge analytics, give us some illustrations, some case studiesthat are some of your favorites. The reason I ask is that, as youwere describing, I could imagine being in the highlands ofRussia.
I took my kids to see what it was like to be a woman in Greece,and I studied the Greek immigrants and they returned to migration.But if you haven't done that, there's no way you know what it'slike. And when you do it in modern society, in our businesses,people say, Well, what do you really do? I say, Well, I hang out alot. And I listen a lot. And I'm looking for all the gaps that areon the sides of what people assume to be true. The only truth is,there's no truth, I tell people, and then they get reallyfrustrated because it's all an illusion that we're living. So someillustrations, some great stories that you enjoy sharing about theones that really make a difference.
Gillian Tett:Well, one of the problemswith anthropology and trying to communicate it in a corporatesetting is that the corporate world likes to see things in shadesof black and white, and things on PowerPoints. And anthropologistssay, well life is grey and subtle and often contradictory. And inreality it is, that's really the only way to understand situations.But it's not always easy to boil down into a single chart. But forme, one of the most important moments in my own career was when Irealized that actually the same tools I looked at Tajikistanweddings with in terms of analyzing and symbols could and should beapplied to investment banking conferences.
I went down to the Mediterranean in 2005 to an event called theEuropean Securitization Board and looked at those rituals as if Iwas seeing them like an anthropologist. It showed me that thebankers that were engaged in that securitization business back in2005 had all kinds of assumptions that they were barely aware ofthemselves which were distorting their vision of finance quitesignificantly and laying the seeds for the subsequent 2008financial crisis. So when I looked at the bankers at play in theirconference, I can see that they were a tribe set apart with astrong sense of their own identity. And like any social group thathas a tight network, that was birthed and being reflected andreproduced in the banking conference.
And they had a creation mythology. You know, every group has acreation mythology. Their creation mythology was that perfectlyliquid markets, so called liquefaction of financial markets, wasthe ultimate perfect gold, the Holy Grail. And they were soaddicted to this idea of a perfect free market. So they kind offailed to see all the contradictions in their creation mythology,like the fact that, although they were creating these innovationssupposedly to make markets more innovative and more safe and moreprone to perfect trading, most of these new products were socomplex, they weren't being traded at all. And they weren't evenable to value them with free market prices. Because it wasn't atthe market prices, they had these models, the tools they were usingto disburse risk were actually introducing new risks in the systembecause they were too complex for people to know where the riskswere. And they said that these tools were done entirely to helppeople. But there were no faces in their PowerPoints. It was allGreek letters that indicated it wasn't just an accident that therewere no faces. And their PowerPoints reflected a mentality that theend user had been kind of screened out of the way they sawfinance.
And you can say, well, that's kind of a pity. But actually, ithad a really practical implication because what it meant was thatthe people creating new financial products were so caught up withthe creation process, they couldn't actually see how the productswere being used on the ground at the end of the financial chain.There's a wonderful scene in the movie, The Big Short, where ahedge fund trader goes and meets a pole dancer in Florida. Greatscene. The financier, the hedge fund guy, goes, Holy crap, thesepeople are doing this with subprime mortgages. And it was a realshock. And the thing that was shocking was not the fact thatsubprime mortgages were being used and abused on the ground, it wasthe fact that so few financiers could see what the end result wasbecause they were so detached.
So I came back from my conference, having spotted all this interms of how the bankers were conducting their rituals, and it'sone thing that led me to later warn that there was going to be afinancial crisis. And I kept issuing those warnings over and overagain. So that's one example where you can use anthropology toolsto look at how a social group is blinkered and has blind spots thatdon't see, which can be dangerous.
But in my book, I talk about ways that consumer industry groupscan use anthropology to try and understand consumers, to try andunderstand what really drives fashions and trends to try. And alsoI've talked about how businesses can use anthropologists to seewhat's going wrong in their companies. General Motors did that veryeffectively several times. And you can also use anthropology tounderstand how other offices really work, or how they don't work.So almost any sphere of life where people are operating can benefitfrom some anthropology.
Andi Simon:Often, I'll take a client withme out to their clients, to go spend a day in the life of theirclients. So I'm going to teach you a little anthropology, I say.Let's go watch and see what's going on. You sell them solutionsthat you think are perfect. Let's watch how they're actually usingthem. Because to your point, if I went out and looked and cameback, they would delete me. You didn't hear it, right? You didn'tsee it, right? So we go with them. And the two of us watch in thesame factory exactly how it's being used. A sensor that's actuallymeasuring the color of something or some technology that's beingapplied. Then we go out and we write down everything we saw. Andthe two of us were in two different places at the same time. Wewere each seeing completely different things.
The conversation that follows is fascinating to me, becausethey're still trying to figure out what it was I was looking at andlistening to. To your point, this is about listening and seeing andwhat they were listening to and why they were trying to fit it intotheir box. Like, you're a wonderful economist, we're trying to fitit into their illusion of reality, and what the reality actuallywas and I might claim as mine in a better reality, but I'm lookingfor the gaps for you and you're looking to fit it into your box,which may no longer be the right box anymore. And that's soimportant now, coming out of the pandemic The way we used to dothings isn't any longer the way we're doing it. So people arehiring us to figure out, what do we do now? What's happening outthere? Come watch with us. So as you were putting together yourbook, I have a hunch each of the stories touched you in some of thesame ways.
Gillian Tett:I mean, the power ofanthropology, in many ways I would argue, is essentially whatyou're doing is trying to engage in a three part journey. And theway I put it, that basically you are trying to simultaneouslyimmerse yourself into the minds and lives of others so that you canunderstand them better. You're trying to not just immerse yourselfin the mind of others, but really trying and seeing the worldthrough their eyes in a kind of humble, open-minded way and tocollide with the unexpected. You're trying to then use thatknowledge to look back at yourself. Because, there's this wonderfulChinese proverb that a fish can't see water. None of us can see theassumptions that shaped us unless we periodically jump out of ourfishbowl, go with other fish and talk to other fish and then lookback at ourselves again with clarity of vision. And then you usethat inside-outside perspective.The experience of being astranger in your own land to not just look at the parts of theworld that you talk about, the visible parts, but also the parts ofthe world that you don't talk about, or the assumptions that youignore because they seem boring or geeky or dull or taboo orobvious. And that sort of three-part journey can be reallypowerful.
An example: General Motors brought in an anthropologist to lookat why some of its meetings were going so badly wrong, why somemerging initiatives were going so badly wrong. There was an attemptin the latter part of the 20th century to create a sort of jointcar between German and American engineers.They tried and tried forabout two years to create a joint small car by bringing this teamof engineers together. And at the time, they assumed the problemwas because of linguistic differences. I know the tendency to thinkoh, those Germans don't understand the Americans and Americansdidn't ask the Germans, because that was the obvious difference anddistinction that was in everyone's faces. But some anthropologistsobserved the group and realized that actually it wasn't a straightstory of German versus American clash. There was a bigger clashbetween different teams of Americans between Tennessee and Detroit.And because they all had very different cultures in theirfactories.
And the really interesting thing was they kept calling meetingsto try and resolve the problems without realizing that all threedifferent groups had different ideas about what a meeting was andwhat the whole point of it was. The Germans thought it wasbasically to rubber stamp a decision that had already been takenand that it was very hierarchical Their meeting didn't reallycount as work because work was what you did elsewhere. TheTennessee group thought that a meeting was there to kind ofbrainstorm and you had to have some kind of collaborativeconsensus-based system and they thought meetings were work. And theDetroit group had another idea all over again.
So all of the people were coming into that meeting withdifferent expectations, and because they weren't actually talkingto each other in advance, and they weren't looking at the storybehind the story, which is basically what were their differentcultures, and what were their expectations of meetings, they keptwrongly describing it as a German-American thing, and it wasn't. Sothose patterns played out over and over again in offices.
And it's really important to think about that now for tworeasons. Firstly, most businesses right now are in the grips ofradical tech transformation, as automation and digitization takesoff. And that's creating a whole different bunch of culturalclashes, because the way that a group of techies in San Franciscoare trained to think about meetings is not the same as say, a groupof metal bashers in Detroit. But secondly, COVID and the pandemicand lockdown has challenged all of our ideas about how offices andwork and meetings should happen. And we haven't been together ingroups to kind of learn from each other and thrash it out. We'veall been scattered and isolated.
So within every company, the longer that COVID and lockdown hasgone on for, the more you've created micro subcultures, who may betotally talking past each other all the time. And often exasperatedsenior managers who are middle aged, go, Oh, these millennials,they're so weird. But what about the age gap between differentgenerations? Or maybe just the fact that different subcultures aregrowing up inside companies as we're scattered. And as we returnhopefully to the office, different cultural patterns will developall over again, and we need to think about it.
Andi Simon:Well, you're not Malinowski,and you're not going off like Margaret Mead to a small island. Tosome degree, that's just what's happened during this pandemic,islands have been created. And as we're watching them...forexample, I have a wonderful client that I'm going on my fifth yearwith them all in transformation. And they used to give remote workas a benefit to their partners and their employees, until thepandemic hit and everyone went remote. All 70 employees. Now theycan't get them back into the office. And they said, Well, what wasvalued before as a benefit, it's now a penalty. And how do you takethe same thing: remote work one minute is wonderful and in oneminute it's awful. What are the values that are coming, and thepartners are lonely.
And the reason they want them back together is for humancompanionship. And what's so interesting for me is to watch thedynamics going on. Because they don't find a way to articulate whatreally matters here. It isn't about having them come back in theoffice, and that's not bad, and people decide with feelings. Theirlogic is, Well, I don't have to commute for an hour plus, I can getso much work done. Why do I have to be there to have lunchtogether, we're not going to do that. I mean, it's so interestingto watch the head and the hearts here at odds with each other onthis island that I'm not quite sure was perfect before. And I'm notquite sure it's so bad right now, but nobody's quite sure what weshould do to build coming out of it. And I have a hunch this is theproliferation of islands that all of us are watching happen acrossthe country and across different industries. It's reallyinteresting as an anthropologist to step back and just observe andlaugh a little and cry a little bit too.
Gillian Tett:I guess the point that youknow very well that you've seen in your own kind of work, which isso important, is that we need to talk not just about what peopleare obviously talking about all the time, that's in your face, butalso we need to always ask ourselves in any context, whether we'rein an office or any other setting, What are we not talking about?What are we missing? What is the story behind the story? What's thecontext? And one of the ways I try to illustrate that point isthrough an issue that isn't to do with work.
Practically, everyone who's middle aged with teenage kids isgrappling with why are teenagers so addicted to their cell phones?And if you ask people that question, they go, it's because of cellphone technology. Or is it because of those wretched teenagers orit's because you know, evil tech companies are busy designingalgorithms, which are addictive? Certainly that's true to somedegree. But the reality is that you can't understand teenage cellphone usage without stepping back and looking at what people don'ttalk about, which is how teenagers move in the real physical world.And if you go back 100 years, teenagers had a lot of opportunitiesto physically roam, to meet their friends on the streets, even 50years ago, they went to the shopping mall. They cycled to school.They would hang out with their friends on the fields, withoutparents watching every move.
But in the 21st century, and even before lockdown, you had awhole generation of middle class American teenagers, particularlyin suburbs, who essentially are overscheduled. They are driveneverywhere by their parents constantly being monitored. And thenyou go into the pandemic, and suddenly this sense of physicalconstraint is even more extreme. So is it any surprise that youhave a generation of people who think that the only place as ateenager that you can test boundaries, congregate spontaneously,explore the world without parents watching is online, incyberspace? You can't talk about cyberspace experience withoutlooking at the physical world. That's the social silence, to use aword that anthropologists sometimes use. And that model or metaphorapplies over and over again to almost any aspect of modernlife.
Andi Simon:You said something veryprofound and well worth emphasizing. The times make the man or theman makes the times. Here we have a transformation of trust and ofsafety. When I was a kid growing up, we would go outside and playstickball on the street, and get on my bike and ride to the mall togo shopping with nobody. As my kids grew up, we began to realizehow much more structured their lives were without thinking aboutthe implications of it. I don't think we spend our time sayingthat's good or that's not good. We sort of flow with what societyis doing and then you have all of the after effects oftransformation.
I've had several university clients who are frustrated becausethey couldn't get their Gen Ys, now the Gen Zs, to come in and playathletics. They spent their days on video games. And they were muchhappier playing a video game and not coming in to go play baseballor basketball or watch them. And socializing with more challenges.I actually had a grownup client, a professional, who spent hisweekends playing games. His whole friendship network was there. Andas an observer, I said, Oh, this is really a pure point, atransformation of our society without much intentionality here, ifyou know the world he was in, he never met any of the folks that heplayed with, which by itself was sort of an interesting and new andbizarre society in which we're in.
You know, as you're thinking about what's coming next, I don'tknow when the pandemic is really going to end or if we're going tolive in a COVID world for a while. Are you? As this is a futuristpodcast, I would like to ask what are the signs you're seeing? Whatdo you hear coming through? I have a hunch, you're picking uplittle signals already that you're curious about? Because I know Iam. What do you see?
Gillian Tett:Well, I think that peoplehave been forced to re-examine how they're living. And what isfascinating was the late 20th century was a time when people hadquite rigid boundaries between home and work in many professionalcontexts. Not always, but most western professionals thought thatthe office was a place you worked in, you might bring work back tohome. But that was separate, you had a work time and a home time.You had your office colleagues, your friends, your family, they allsat in different buckets and we took that for granted.
The reality is that actually that pattern of the 20th century isan absolute aberration throughout most of human history, and eventhroughout many parts of the world today. And what COVID has donehas tossed most of us back into a state of being something like apeasant farmer, where your house is your locus of work, and yourfamily is mixed up with your colleagues and everything else. And wemay not like it, but it certainly challenged our boundaries. Idon't think it'd be that easy for people to recreate thoseboundaries in such a rigid way going forward.
A second change that's happened, which is not so bad, is becausewe've been locked down in our own groups, I think maybe we'vebecome myopic. We've basically been locked down with people justlike us, our pod, our friends. And people thought initially thatwhen we went online, we would somehow break down our tribalism.Quite the reverse has happened because the key thing to understandabout the internet is that it allows us to customize our identitiesand experiences in a way that's never been possible before. And Ithink it's changed our vision of how we as individuals relate tosociety.
You know, most societies in human history have seen theindividual as a derivative of society. We're a cog that fitsinto a machine with identities that are pre-assigned. You know theenlightenment in Europe and this idea that we are the center of oursociety. The "me generation." "I think, therefore I am."Society's derivative of me. 21st century with digital tools hasgiven us the capability to basically customize our world as we wantto know. We customize our coffee choices, our media sources, ourfriendship groups, and identities online. We customize our musictastes. Today's generation doesn't want to have a vinyl record,which has been pre-assembled with someone else. We want our ownpick of a mix of music to listen to when we want, exactly what wewant. And that's really a shift that's been exacerbated by thepandemic because we've been so reliant on cyberspace. And it's madeus even more tribal, I think, in a very bad way.
Another shift that's happened is that people's sense of thefuture, being a predictable, rigid path that goes in one directionhas been shaken by the pandemic. Late 20th century was a time wheremost Westerners had lived a pretty stable life, pretty predictablelife...no longer. And it was also a world where people thoughtokay, so I have business economics in one bucket, and sort of ado-gooding environment, social issues in another. And I think,again, that's breaking down. And you can see that in the corporateworld where, essentially, companies are realizing thatenvironmental, social and governance issues aren't just aboutactivism, they're about risk management, about making sure that youdon't suffer reputational risks, or the loss of assets that losevalue if the regulatory climate change changes, and you don'talienate your customers and your employees.So people are nolonger seeing business in just such a rigid tunnel vision way, it'smore about lateral vision. And that's very, very important.
And last but not least, I'd say that another shift has been interms of cryptocurrencies and finance. In some ways, the move intocryptocurrencies, the move into meme stocks, is also part of thispick and mix culture. Patterns of trust are changing. Asanthropologists, we used to say there was either vertical trust, orhorizontal trust, where people trusted each other in peer-to-peergroups. This provides a social group glue to keep groups together.Or, you had vertical trust, which was trust in institutions andleaders on a large scale. It was presumed that when you had biggroups, you couldn't have horizontal trust. Digital platforms haveenabled something called distributed trust to explode. Suddenly,huge groups of people can do things on the basis of trusting eachother via digital tools. That's how Airbnb operates. It's also howmost cryptocurrencies operate. You trust the crowd through adigital platform, but not through an organizational hierarchy. Andthat's, again, changing people's attitude toward money and valueand exchanges in a fascinating way.
Andi Simon:If we write about this inabout five years, we will have captured a major catalytic momenttransforming society. If you listen to the multipliers of whatwe've just described, when I work with my own CEOs, mostlymid-market size clients, they are becoming far more stuck, stalledand immobilized than they've ever experienced in the past. Theydon't know what to do. And what's so fascinating to me is that theyreally don't know what to do. And they're not willing to go out oftheir corner office, out of their comfort zone to begin to see. Andso they're really struggling with whether or not their businessesare going to survive. And there's no reason why they can't survive,they just have to change. And all of a sudden, that entrepreneurialspirit that got them there is stalled. And the certainty you spokeabout, I'm not sure that was true, or an illusion that humansprefer certainty versus being fragile. But in fact, it's reallyraising up those people who can see opportunity in being agile, andI'm willing to change. The brain hates me when I go into a companyto say, You're going to change and immediately all that cortisol isproduced, and they go, Oh, please get out of here.
But in fact, I do think there's going to be a training groundnow for the agility that's needed for the next phase. Because as wecome out of this, it's not going to be certain either, and nobodycan really plan the way they might have thought. And I don't thinkthat you should plan anything. I think you should try to be nimble,agile, adaptive, and talk to people. You speak about the silence,it's a great time to start listening. Just talk to people and youdon't have to do it in person if you don't want to, but you cantry. But I do think it's a time to listen to each other and notdecide anything, just pull it in and just be anthropologists. Justlisten to the conversations.
Judith Glaser has a wonderful book on conversationalintelligence, that you start by saying all of society areconversations. And I truly think that's a simple way of saying,Yep, just listen to each other. But the conversations are hangingout, and begin to think about what's really going on in thoseconversations. It's a little like that picture of that scene whenthey say, Who's doing the subprime mortgages. What are wemissing?
You have some great five big thingsinAnthro-Vision.Do you want to share them withour audience? I guess I'm pushing people to bring a littleanthropology into your life. It's important and one of those fivethings.
Gillian Tett:Absolutely. Well, havingsaid you can't boil anthropology down to a PowerPoint, here's myPowerPoint. Lesson one: recognize that we're all creatures of ourown environment. In a cultural sense, we're all fundamentallyshaped by a set of assumptions that we inherit from oursurroundings that we never usually think about. And theymatter.
Lesson two: recognize that just because we are shaped by sort ofassumptions, that doesn't mean they're universal. It sounds veryobvious, but the reality is that it's human nature to assume thatthe way that we live and operate and function is not justinevitable, but natural and proper, and that everyone else wouldkind of live like us. And guess what, there's a multitude ofdifferent ways to live and think, and if you think that yours isthe only right way, you're going to suffer badly in business.
Lesson three: coming out of this is to take time to immerseyourself periodically in the minds and lives of people who seemdifferent from you. In my case, I went to Tajikistan, which forsomeone having grown up in England, it was very, very differentindeed. But you don't have to go to the other side of the world ofHindu Kush. Just go talk to someone down the end of your road wholives in a different world. Go talk to someone in a differentdepartment, go take a different route to work, go swap a day withsomeone with a different profession. And if you can't do itphysically, because of the pandemic, get online and basicallyexplore another tribe online. And then mentality: I mean, justchange the people you follow on Twitter, say for a week, and you'llsee a completely different perspective on life.
And then lesson five: for us, the experience of immersingyourself in the minds of others to become a stranger in your ownland, and to look back at yourself with fresh eyes, and see what astranger would consider to be weird or shocking, or impressiveabout how you live and your assumptions. And think about whatyou're not thinking about. What are the parts of your life thatyou're ignoring, the social silences, often thinking about therituals that you're using in your everyday life, the symbols, thepatterns that you use to organize your space, and your familygroups, or your time. Those can often be very revealing, if youstep back and look at them with an inside or outside his eyes. Youknow, why would you consider it to be odd to keep your hairbrush inthe fridge? What does that mean? I mean, what are you missing?Well, what is one of your ideas about different body parts andabout your mouth versus your hair, or you know all these inbuiltassumptions, which you take for granted, but are often veryrevealing.
There's nothing wrong with the patterns we inherit from oursurroundings, unless we remain prisoners of them and cannot imaginealternatives. And right now, as we come out of the pandemic, try toreimagine the world and recover and rebuild. It really is time tohave an open mind, particularly after a pandemic that's kept uslocked down mentally and physically, and in danger of beingcaptured by tribalism.
Andi Simon:What a beautiful ending,Gillian. Thank you so much. I've had such fun. It's fun to wanderwith you. Any last thoughts? How can they reach you? And how canthey buy your book?
Gillian Tett:First, let me say what agreat joy it has been to do this with you. And I greatly salutewhat you've done in your own career, which is fascinating. I writefor theFinancial Times, twice a week with columns. Ialso oversee a platform called Moral Money, which is the ESGsustainability platform at theFT, which is anewsletter that goes out three times a week. And my newbook,Anthro-Vision,isout on sale. I should say last but not least, as another sign ofculture, if you're listening to this in America, you can find mybookAnthro-Vision, with abright red jacket cover, and a picture of me on the back wearing abright red top looking like Fox TV because that sells in America.If you pick up my book in the UK, or any part of the formerCommonwealth as they say, you'll find my book is sold with a nicewhite understated cover with a picture of me on the back, wearing ablue shirt on a stoop clutching a cup of coffee. The Britishpublishers thought that a picture of me looking like a Fox TV babewas too scary for the British market. And therein lies a storyabout why culture matters.
Andi Simon:And you hope they're right.Well, I think that for the listeners, and our audience, whetheryou're watching this or listening to us, it's been truly a specialtime to share the essence ofOn the Brink withAndi Simon, our podcast, but my job is to help youget off the brink helping you to see, feel, and think through afresh lens. There is so much going on today that's going to expandin a positive way the possibilities that are before you. It's theart of possibilities now. And rather than trying to goback...people say, I can't wait till the old comes back. It's notcoming back because I don't even know what the old was and youdon't either. But you also know that the new is giving youopportunities that are tremendous. Think about them in a positiveway and you'll see them turning lemons into lemonade or limes intomargaritas as somebody said to me recently.
It's a great time. Gillian, thank you for joining me today. Andfor our listeners, don't forget, here's what I'd like you to do. Iget emails from across the globe at info@Andisimon.com. You send meyour ideas, you send me people whom you want me to interview. Sendthem to me, give me some ideas about topics that would be cool foryou. I actually am doing a Leadership Academy and one of thegentlemen there, a physician, said, You know, my sons are listeningto your podcast, and I laughed, and I said, How old? Eight and ten!I said, so that's my target audience. And I will keep talking tothem, but they should listen because I think they and you willreally benefit from understanding how a little anthropology canhelp you and your business soar. Bye bye now. Stay well. Byebye.
