As far as I knew (as a fleeing anthro student who went into business jobs back in late 1980s), the only roles for social sciences people in mainstream US business ~20 years ago were:

- market researchers (although most of them tended to be quants and not ethno / antho orientation)
- organizational development people (often folded into the HR organization, though it usually wasn’t the right place for them)
- occasional one-off others (sometimes a process improvement or product development person would have some anthro type skills)

( There may well have been other roles — these were just the ones I knew about. )

But now — things look different (in some industries / organizations at least). My view is that it’s a convergence of two big trends: 1) the globalization of business and the workforce, and 2) the increasing importance of design in business. (more…)

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Not for him. He’s not a manager or an exec. He didn’t care about long term strategy or “synergies.” He’s a sales guy. All he cared about was that in the first few weeks after the merger, sales motion came to a dead stop. Nobody knew for certain how to handle sales anymore. It wasn’t clear how the sales organization would change, which products to sell, what pricing to apply, which contract paperwork to use, what signing authority anybody had, or even if their old compensation plans were still valid.

My friend said, “I realized I could hang around for 6 to 12 months while they figured things out. Or I could quit and get a start on making my numbers someplace else. Within 2 months I was gone.”

Turns out this isn’t unusual. (more…)

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These Futures Workshops are designed to be part of strategic planning at PARC — getting in outside speakers to talk about trends impacting businesses over the next decade. PARC’s goal is to work on core technologies that are still 5-10 years away from mainstream commercialization — so they need to keep their eye on where the puck’s going, rather than where the puck is now.

My slides are over on Slideshare here. I also got to participate in a panel and played facilitator at times. Overall tons-o-fun spending the day with the PARC folks.

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One of my bosses used to say, “Never be afraid to look for the obvious and to ask the simple questions.” (This from a man who spent his career orchestrating rocket-science financial transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.)

I try to remember that Rule of Simple with anthropology. There’s plenty of complexity in anthro. But at work, when I’m using anthro glasses to examine organizations and come up with practical recommendations, there’s a lot of simple stuff that can be a big influence on people’s behavior, the resulting social dynamic and thus organizational performance.

A recent New York Times article by Carol Pogash gave a great example. It turns out that many schoolkids who qualify for subsidized meals don’t eat them. Kids will go hungry rather than eat free food. Why? (more…)

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The potential Microsoft-Yahoo merger is big news here in Silicon Valley. In many of the articles, there’s a throwaway comment about the two companies having big cultural differences — but there’s usually not much of substance said beyond that (other than the usual tropes of “Silicon Valley hates Redmond” and “Yahoo is boring because it’s not a startup anymore”). The meme that “organizational culture differences are a threat to M&A” seems to be widely-accepted trusim…but beyond that, it can be hard to find much of substance on the issue. (If you want to cut to the chase, I list a few sources for more information down at the end of this post.)

(There was one article that used baseball and football as metaphors for the two companies’ cultures, which IMO gets more points for creativity than insight. Although I’m tickled at the notion of using sports metaphors as a symbolic taxonomy for professional groups….so what company/professional group are the hockey players? the Olympic equestrian team? Ping Pongers?…OK I’m off topic.)

Back to corporate culture and M&A: Grant McCracken and I chatted on this topic last week. I’m not an expert on Microsoft or Yahoo, but the conversation got me thinking about M&A and organizational culture in general. We know a lot about the financial issues of M&As; those are easy to track, and that news doesn’t look encouraging (the truism is that 60-80% of mergers fail to meet financial targets). But what do we know about the cultural issues of M&As? (Side note: mergers do differ from acquisitions, but I’m treating them as one broad organizational dynamic in this post.) (more…)

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As a result, more and more of us netizens are having celebrity experiences: (more…)

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The unspoken judgment is that people with “too many” names in their social network “don’t know what a real friend is” and are probably shallow and superficial in their friendships.

There are a number of reasons why some people rack up the headcount on their friendslists. (It’s well known that a few people are into the game of it, chasing the high score.) But there is a practical reason for having a lot of contacts: online social network tools are a great way to manage your weak links. (more…)

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The point of the article was that people who work for social change tend to fall into two camps — the “work for change from the inside” folks (the pragmatists/compromisers) and the “work for change from the outside” folks (the purists/non-compromisers). The study looked at various NFPs along that spectrum of purity-pragmatism, to look for patterns of outcomes. (more…)

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It’s a big issue for parents: how to best prepare a child for adulthood? How to introduce children to adult activities and responsibilities? (more…)

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The article talks about how people take Ikea components and create different things out of them: guitars (wow!), other furniture, art pieces, etc. A lot of these are whimsical, like a weiner-dog bench or a surfboard table. For more examples, check out this blog. An official Ikea representative was reportedly thrilled and said this was an example of people finding the Ikea brand to be friendly and fun.

This is one more way in which Ikea is Legos for adults. (Note: lots of people have made this Legos=Ikea observation before me, so I’m not being original here.) (more…)

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