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HooksJohn Mcreery (jlm@TWICS.COM)Tue, 4 Oct 1994 16:58:12 JST
of us have expressed interest in seeing the results of this inquiry. Before we can see results, we need to see some suggestions. So far we've seen the following: [I list them in an order which suggests a story] " When I have done some consulting work, all I have to do is say the word anthropology and corporate types salivate like I have some inner tap into knowledge... of course I do." --Patsy Evans [Really? Why should this be?] "anthropologists know people"--Bonnie Blackwell [What could you possibly mean by that?] "How about this: People can seem crazy when you don't know their culture. You can't dobusiness with crazy people. What an anthropologist is trained to do is to consider that the others are not crazy but that he himself is ignorant. People from other cultures are making assumptions different from yours -- understand the assumptions and they end up as understandable as anyone else. Understand the assumptions and you can do business with them. Anthropologists are experts in figuring out other people's assumptions about manners, fairness, friendship, and humor." --Jerry Barkow [Yes, but what's the bottom line?] "actually a rough one to answer. the potential considerably greater than the current reality. I keep coming back to US Census demographic studies of the shifting ethnic pattern in US Culture, the fact that the long term shift from a euro-based to more latino-asian-american-afro-american mix with that euro-based culture is in the making, already reflected in our cities to a high degree, and that the projections are that these shifts, in part cultural, will also be reflected in the changing nature of the work force, which business people don't know enough about. long term thinking - a rare commodity in certain circles would suggest that cross cultural knowledge might be of some advantage to corporate leaders. (indeed some of the bigger corps are heading in this direction - here in Colorado, firms like US West taking the lead). tack 2 is to point out that in this post cold war world that is seeing a gradual but long term decline in us power, and one in which a growing component of corporate sales and profits come from exports, it becomes more important for us companies, corporate managers and the like to 1. learn certain foreign languages: German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Russian come to mind. believe it or not there are actually people making big bucks doing such things." --Rob Prince [It seems to me that we're getting somewhere. But I'd like to see some more brainstorming before we start to weed and edit. To keep things rolling, I'll throw in my own experience working for Japan's 2nd largest ad agency:] "Most of the folks I work with are totally focused on pressing tasks. Thecreatives trying to come up with ideas; the marketing department trying to put together strategies; the account executives massaging the client and worrying about money. Rare, indeed, are the people who see the business whole, notice how different parts (cultural, oganizational, ecological ) fit together, have a sense of how and why it developed the way it did, and where it might be going, given the way its world is changing...Anthropological training? If you want to be a creative director or a better than average manager, it's hard to imagine better preparation...<g>" [Ah, yes, the old holistic understanding story. Sounds plausible. But at the end of the day, what do you do that people with other types of training can't do as well or better?]
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