Gillian Tett wrote in the recent FT Weekend of the contribution of ethnography and cultural anthropology to an understanding of markets, consumers and leaders. No kidding.
As is often the case with articles such as this one, Tett implies that achieving deeper insights into human behavior through, say, sociology or cultural anthropology is somehow removed from "scientific management." Nothing is further from the truth.
These disciplines and the qualitative data they sometimes produce are scientific - in every way. They often reveal more about the messy business of human nature than can any pile of spreadsheets.
Don't get me wrong. Qualitative and quantitative research methods are both essential. Their specific use depends upon the research questions, of course. They are not mutually exclusive and work well together in mixed-method applications.
Year after year, however, we read the same new discoveries that maybe, just maybe, ethnography and other qualitative methods might help businesses better understand their markets and themselves. There's simply no "maybe" about it.
Just listen to this morning's The Daily podcast about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (link below). Here's a guy who's exquisitely gifted at analyzing quantitative data and, in doing so, built $70 billion in market value along the way. At the same time, here's a seemingly damaged fellow who appears to have no understanding of (and little regard for) people - or of himself - and seems resultantly destined to damage if not destroy the enterprise he created.
Perhaps it's unbalanced genius of Kalanick's type that can make somebody very wealthy and help them "win." Without the moorings of maturity, introspection, emotional intelligence and other things one learns from studies of human nature, however, it's just as certain to make them losers, too. We're only human after all.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736?mt=2#episodeGuid=gid%3A%2F%2Fart19-episode-locator%2FV0%2FWCdSDOQbxV50cb2foPIzB2bGWWWOQONb-5nZMbzEqrc
Kalanick photo courtesy of Inc.
