Margaret Mead meets Tom Peters

Thursday, August 21, 2008

I don’t think I’ve written yet about the field of anthropology and its role in understanding corporate culture so Scott Berkun’s interview with Grant McCracken in the Harvard Business Review Online this week caught my eye. Their discussion focused more on the connection between marketing and anthropology and less on corporate culture. I would have liked to have read more about McCracken’s take on “how to win by studying corporate culture.” Let me use his story about the Harvard Business School intern at Coca-Cola to make my point.

I can see why the link between anthropology and marketing would have jazzed this guy – it’s the secret code to grabbing greater market share. I suspect, however, he missed the significance of understanding corporate culture. As "massively talented and unstoppable" as he and most executives are, they can hit a huge brick wall if they ignore or dismiss their corporate culture. I’ve written in previous blogs about the great "case study" that is Deborah Sontag's feature article ("Who Brought Bernadine Healy Down?") in the December 23, 2001 issue of the New York Times Magazine on the battle between a strong CEO (Bernadine Healy) and a strong corporate culture (American Red Cross). My experience is that it takes a wise (and not just talented) leader to appreciate the intangible pull of a corporate culture on why humans do what they do in an organization. Add to this the myth that leaders are capable of independent thought and action – something as soft as culture can’t sway them – and leaders can end up wearing some serious blinders.

So my take is that a leader wins by studying their own corporate culture – taking a more participant-observer role in his or her own organization – paying attention to why people do certain things in some situations and not in others. Being an informal ethnographer. J. McIver Weatherford’s “Tribes on the Hill: the U.S. Congress rituals and realities” is a great book that can open your eyes about “seeing” organizational culture through the lens of anthropology. He published it back in 1981 and it may only be available through used bookstores but I remember reading it back then and thinking it very eye opening.