Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Rigid leadership mindsets can block innovation and cost companies massive opportunities, as seen in Netflix’s early rejection.
- Today’s leadership crisis is fueled by outdated assumptions from business schools that ignore empathy, curiosity, and cultural insight.
- Leaders with an anthropological mindset — who observe, listen, and adapt — are driving innovation and trust in modern workplaces.
In 2000, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and fellow co-founder Marc Randolph travelled to Dallas to make a pitch to Blockbuster and its CEO, John Antioco. Hastings and Randolph were hoping to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50M.
Antioco dismissed the idea outright, sending the two back to California without a deal. In his book, Randolph says that Antioco did everything except laugh them out of the room, saying that the “dot-com hysteria was completely overblown.”
In my forthcoming book Executive Anthropology: A Mindset for Human-Centered Leadership, I suggest Antioco’s decision was, among other things, a monumental lack of curiosity and openness to learning.
Antioco did what many “traditional” leaders do — the buck stopped with him. Tough leaders make tough decisions. End of story.
Today, Blockbuster is out of business, and Netflix has revenue of $40B and a market cap of $392B, making it the 22nd most valuable company in the world by market cap. It is wrong, though, to blame Antioco. He was simply doing what conventional leaders have been trained to do for generations — make the touch call.
It is more helpful to understand the assumptions, or mindset, within which Antioco and other mainstream leaders operate.
A Leadership Crisis
Traditional leadership “common sense” derives from business schools and other mainstream sources of management education. Such an approach is filled with assumptions, about individuals, culture, motivation, trust, risk management, how to formulate strategy, among others.
Rarely, though, do leaders pause to question those assumptions about why they make the decisions they make. The results of mainstream leadership common sense, of which Antioco was only one example, lead to what is nothing short of a leadership crisis.
This crisis is evident in the data:
- Employee engagement sits at 33%
- Corporate change programs fail 70% of the time
- 70-90% of M&As fail (often because of “poor culture fit”)
- Large companies spend $2,000 per employee per year on culture
- Yet only 69% of employees buy into their leaders’ cultural aspirations
- And 90% don’t behave in ways that support those aspirations
- 47.8 million people quit their jobs in 2021
- 50.5 million quit their jobs in 2022
- 44.4 million quit in 2023
- Slightly below 40 million people quit in 2024
- 56% of employees today say they are considering quitting in 2025
- 57% say they quit their manager, not the position (or company)
- Only 21% of employees ‘strongly agree’ that they trust their leaders
- BCG Innovation Readiness Gap Index in 2023: 83% of firms that list innovation as a top 3 priority, while only 3% say they are prepared to act on that
Such consistently poor human resource data, as well as dismal levels of corporate innovation, suggest that conventional leadership approaches are failing us.
It is time to search for alternatives.
An Anthropological Mindset
While there are as many definitions of an anthropological mindset as there are anthropologists, there are a few basic ideas that most anthropologists agree on. Different people coming from different places and backgrounds can often have radically different versions of events, and widely diverging versions of “common sense.”
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Harvard cultural anthropologist Michael Herzfeld puts it this way: “Social and cultural anthropology is ‘the study of common sense.’ Yet common sense is, anthropologically speaking, seriously misnamed: it is neither common to all cultures, nor is any version of it particularly sensible from the perspective of anyone outside its particular cultural context.”
Leaders with an anthropological mindset do not act formulaically, as if using an instruction kit. They don’t take up the conventional point of view that says “don’t bring me any problems that don’t already have solutions.”
Rather, they seek out different opinions, like ethnographers, and embrace paradox as sources of learning. As Dave Ulrich says in his article, “You Need to Become a Leadership Anthropologist,” “Paradox navigation requires asking questions more than giving answers, not judging on a single dimension, and seeing the combination of ideas instead of a single idea.”
Anthropologically inspired leaders look at things empirically, they question assumptions (starting with their own), they observe what people do rather than what they say, they put themselves in other people’s shoes to see things from other people’s points of view (empathy), they are curious, they listen, and they learn.
The good news is that there are numerous leaders out there who have already figured out how to lead anthropologically: Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Mark Parker (Nike), A.G. Laffly (Procter & Gamble), Jim Sinegal (Costco), Terri Kelly (W.L. Gore), Zhang Ruimin (Haier), Scott Cook (Intuit), among others.
There are four important leadership practices that anthropological leaders commit to as they lead their firms to financial success:
1.Empathy & Learning
According to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, the company’s dramatic financial turnaround since 2015 is due to the company’s embrace of an openness to experimentation, empathy, and continuous learning. Nadella’s famous motto is: “the learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it-all.” And, Nadella insists that this is especially true of CEOs, not just for rank and file employees.
As for innovation, Nadella puts it this way. The source of innovation is your ability to grasp the unmet, unarticulated needs of customers. Where is that going to come from? I believe it comes from empathy.”
2.Curiosity & Assumptions
Mark Parker led Nike from 2006-2020, overseeing the company’s most sustained period of growth. He did so as an anthropologist. He was famous for spending countless hours hanging out with designers, artists, athletes, musicians, and other pop-culture icons in an effort to grok the zeitgeist of American culture. He brought that to innovation at Nike.
He, too, had an anthropologically-oriented motto, one he initially got from his grandmother. “Be a sponge. Curiosity is life. Assumption is death. Look around.”
3.Fieldwork Leadership
Jim Sinegal, CEO of Costco from 1983 to 2011, spent over 200 days a year “in the field” interacting directly with his line-level employees. Employees say that he got to know many employees personally, remembering their names and often asking about their family members who were ill or who had passed.
Like a roaming CEO in an activity based working office (ABW), Sinegal practiced what Tom Peters in the 1980s called “managing by walking around” (MBWA). Field-based leadership not only makes senior leaders more accessible to employees, it also reduces the number of meetings and increases the frequency and effectiveness of mentoring.
4.Storytelling
Anthropologists have long known that humans are more emotional than rational, and that motivation via spreadsheets and power points is only so effective.
When Sal Palmisano set IBM on its transformation from being a hardware (computers and servers) manufacturer competing with low-cost producers such as Dell, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Samsung, he engaged in deep listening to IBM employees in a series of Values Jams. Insights from those open conversations nudged the company to ditch hardware and become an enterprise software company focused on helping improve business, society, and the planet with science.
IBM’s strategy, framed as a story, has kept the company at the fore as a place where top scientists, engineers, and developers want to work and make a difference.
Anthropology and the Leadership Future
There are no silver bullets that will fix our long-standing leadership crisis. It will take efforts on multiple fronts. Particularly, the promises of large language models (LLMs) and AI represent enormous opportunities for elevating organizational learning, building stronger company cultures, and improving the rate at which companies innovate. I wrote about that here not too long ago.
But technology alone will not fix the leadership crisis. To be clear, anthropology’s emphasis on empathy and qualitative insights should not be interpreted as anti-technological. Quite the contrary. Rather, as more and more of what we do is digitized, automated, and scaled, the need for human touchpoints and discernment — particularly human leadership — only increases, not decreases. Without that, we run the risk of losing our humanity altogether.
