Anthro-Vision cover art

Anthro-Vision

How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Anthro-Vision

By: Gillian Tett
Narrated by: Imogen Church
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the best-selling author of Fool's Gold

To understand business, you need to think like an anthropologist.

Is your workplace riven by tribal conflict? Are your meetings governed by dozens of unspoken rituals? Is there something faintly religious about the way your colleagues worship the CEO?

If so, then you might need a lesson in business anthropology. For a century, anthropologists have had an unusual method: immersing themselves deep inside 'alien' tribes and uncovering, from the inside, how they tick. Today, a new generation of anthropologists are using this approach to explain modern businesses - revealing the hidden rituals that define what we buy, who we sell to and how we work.

Now, best-selling author Gillian Tett reveals how this new wave of anthropology can help make sense of your business. She shows how thinking like an anthropologist can help you navigate a globalised economy, allowing you to get inside the heads of consumers on the other side of the world. And she argues that anthropology can explain your own workplace, too: by revealing why, say, your IT team seem to have such different priorities to you - or how to alter the behavioural patterns of your most perplexing colleagues.

Along the way, Tett draws on extraordinary stories from Tajik villages and Amazon warehouses, Japanese classrooms and Wall Street trading floors - all to reveal how you, too, can think like an anthropologist.

The result is a revelatory new way to view global business. In a short-sighted world, we can all learn to see clearly - using the power of Anthro-Vision.

©2021 Gillian Tett (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Anthropology Consumer Behavior & Market Research Marketing & Sales Business Thought-Provoking Marketing Capitalism

Listeners also enjoyed...

Net Positive cover art
Which Side of History? cover art
Being Human: Life Lessons from the Frontiers of Science cover art
The 100-Year Life cover art
The Language of Sales cover art
Trampled by Unicorns cover art
Social and Cultural Anthropology cover art
Dark Future cover art
A Most Elegant Equation cover art
The Vory cover art
The Signals Are Talking cover art
On Writing and Worldbuilding - Volume I cover art
Present Shock cover art
HR on Purpose cover art
The YouTube Formula cover art
Odin’s Runes cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
For a layman this book has some very interesting ideas & the need to incorporate local/multi disciplinary & multi cultural approaches to solving problems & implementing solutions.
That said, I really got the feeling that the author has a very high opinion of herself and this maybe down to the narration.
I felt emphasis was given to views that others may not share as if it was the only view. The change in tone & volume was annoying at best & patronizing at worse.
To some extent, it seems all the world's problems wouldn't exist if only we had listened to Gillian Tett earlier and this leads me to my review (and perhaps a cynical view):
it seems that a lot of the people asking the questions think they also know the answers - and if you could just enlighten us on the solution to VUCA in stead of patronising us like a school teacher, helping us discover our own solutions.
That said, I am glad I listened to the book because there are some very interesting ideas.

If you know all the answers, why ask the question

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

There were interesting ideas in the book, but I found the narrator rather off-putting. Every sentence had several heavily stressed words, which made listening rather stressful. The content was a bit repetitive too.

Interesting content, delivery not great

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Very annoying narrator, but very interesting book not all of it news, but fascinating nonetheless

Maddening narrator but v nteresting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Deep insights and well crafted book. I like the stories that were used to illustrate the points. Wealth of experiences shared by Gillian Tett.

Deep insights and well crafted book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The book's main message is that we cannot ignore culture and diversity in whatever field of activity. Also we can no loger presume that western perspectives, democracy and capitalism are inherently preferable to others. That's well explained. How anthropology's perspectives and methods can be helpful is very interesting.
However, long chapters on how to understand and manipulate consumers and faith in 'moral money' are very questionable.
The narration is over emphasized at times and not always necessarily. I hated it at first, but must admit it makes listening much easier than flatter rendition.

Slightly disappointed, but brilliant in places

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Although I'm not a professional in anthropology, I think the book lacks substance. It's just a collection of memories in different fields and walks of life. The author tries to connect them with the field of anthropology, but it does not feel rigorous or scientific at all.
However, the performance of the reader is astonishing. She knows when to stress some parts and adapts her intonation magnificently.
All this makes it a great listen, but only if you're not here for the theory behind it.

Great listen if you're not looking for the science

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I want to mention the performance first. At first I thought the reader was excellent. She reads slowly with a lot of expression. Then I began to enjoy her narration less. Her slow reading and emphasis started to feel insulting or to express values which I did not share.

Take for example her sarcastic emphasis on doctors helping with the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone as “experts”. The sarcasm arises because they weren’t taking anthropology into account. (Now, it may be that the sarcastic quotes around the word expert also exists in Tett’s book, in which case the reader is faithfully reproducing that emphasis, in which case the actual blame lies with the author .) But even if the doctors were not culturally sensitive, they are still experts in improving people’s health. So I found this sort of emphasis grating.

The reader would be ideal for reading books designed to fuel outrage. Or poetry readings. But perhaps less so factual books. If you feel the need to try to make the statement that the area of a circle is pi times r squared sound like a diatribe, maybe change your genre?

The book is quite good, and the content is not challenging at all, with one big idea per chapter. It did get me thinking about the parallels between the behaviour of us supposedly highly educated people in the West and the perhaps less well educated Sierra Leonians. We are not so different. Having said that, the author may be suggesting at times that there is no such thing as objective truth. That is sheer folly.

The book is worth reading.



Book worth reading but be prepared to grit your teeth through the performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This is a fabulous book for anyone interested in a more evidence and research-based view of our world. Anyone who likes to see beyond the usual assumptions and rhetoric that plagues our social media, news and social ‘chatter’ will find this a useful, informative and fascinating read. Wholly recommended.

Excellent wide ranging and important

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I really believe the ideas in this book are kind of crucially important to become widely known.
It’s also a really entertaining and ‘easy’ listen. Thanks so much.

I am recommending this to everyone !

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Anthropology’s power to generate deep understandings of complex human issues, and to recommend workable solutions, comes of age in this tremendous book.

Fantastically insightful and beautifully timely

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.