DESCRIPTIONS

Executive Anthropology is an invitation to a different way of thinking about corporate leadership. It introduces readers to an anthropological mindset and way of thinking about people, culture, innovation, and customer experience. The book is designed as a min-textbook in leadership development, one that can supplement more mainstream approaches used in business schools and leadership consultancies. It challenges readers to re-examine the assumptions they rely on to make important business decisions. The book covers a range of core topics that leaders face in the course of their work: culture, risk management, strategy, innovation, developing people, organizational learning (and AI), fieldwork vs. meetings, and sustainability. Executive Anthropology leans into anthropology's enduring commitment to ethnographic and field based research, and introduces tangible practices and methods that leaders can use to better engage their employees, improve organizational learning, and boost innovation. The concept of field based leadership, or participant observation leadership, is presented as an updated version of the management by walking around (MBWA) approach popularized by Tom Peters in the 1980s.