Savage Interview: ethnographer and entrepreneur theorist Simon Sinek
This winter quarter I had the distinct pleasure of spending several weeks with students talking about corporate globalization and neoliberalism. Students may get an opportunity to think about late capitalism in a more hyped-up and celebratory way in their business or development classes but the anthropological take on capitalism and globalization is that it is patently sinister.
Few disciplines have a less friendly relationship with corporations than anthropology. For many, they are evil incarnate, for some they are a necessary evil, and for others they are a source of gainful employment. The outlook and methods anthropologists share with marketers, branders, and other corporate lackeys compounds anthropologists’ unease with corporations. Few contemporary anthropological projects can afford to ignore the role of capitalism, cognitive colonization, culture industries, consumerism, and corporations in the lives of their informants. Despite the tomes dedicated to the anthropology of capitalism, the variability of values and practices within corporations is rarely documented or theorized. Not without its contradictions and hype, the social values and philanthropic practices of social entrepreneurs seems to be catching on throughout that facet of the corporate world engineered to cater to a politically and ecologically conscious American middle class.
Identifying the parameters of this new species of capitalism would be pretty cool so I thought it important to talk with someone trained as an anthropologist and practiced as a corporate ethnographer who is now an entrepreneur theorist for leaders of elite firms. Simon Sinek is English and grew up in Johannesburg. He got a BA in cultural anthropology from Brandeis University and worked at several top ad agencies, before writing his recent book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. I met him at a truly evocative talk he gave at Causecast in Santa Monica earlier this month and got him on the phone while he was in Dallas last week. We talked about social entrepreneurship, leadership, the academic anti-corporate bias, Western urban business cultures, human biology and marketing, manipulative versus authentic branding tactics, relevant anthropology, corporate culture as Culture, William Ury, benevolent dictatorships versus consensus driven management practices, and the ethnographic imperative to ask why.
A pretty fierce pull quote: “As an ethnographer we are in search of why but we actually ask what.” Simon Sinek
Here’s the audio for the interview with Simon.
Adam Fish researches the intersections of culture, power, and technology. He focuses on how media corporations and political movements imagine themselves and the social and political relevancies of the internet and television. Adam investigates America-based cable television networks attempting to balance neoliberalism, federal policy, and social media in their pursuit of profit, social justice, and improvements of the public sphere. This focus on applied anthropology was developed in over ten years as an indigenous and federal archaeologist. Fish also works for public anthropology through television and film production. You can see his television documentaries at mediacultures.org and follow him on Twitter @mediacultures.
“Everyone is trying to do the right thing, and they don’t even realize how their actions are being misconceived, because there’s no information flow.”
“I’ve never actually talked about this with any Southerners. I’ve heard the spiel on TV in interviews, and I’m inclined to take people on their word on this, just because it tends to fit with out people deal with cognitive dissonance, which helps to explain how and why people lie to themselves.”
1-”cognitive dissonance… people lie to themselves.”
2-”no information flow.”
Which is it? It can be both but you make it one or the other depending on your sympathies.
And you may not have talked to any Southerners about this but I have. Fascinating conversations.
You’re making a fool out of yourself; but you’re a walking example of every argument I’ve ever made.
There’s a post up on this page: “Hard Problems in Anthropology”
The hardest problems are unsolvable, and they’re the ones that deserve the most attention because we need to face them every day. The most important problems are aporias. We are watchers being watched and judges judged. Culture is not a force underlying other peoples lives Rick but the lives of all of us.
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“The best argument for leaving others alone in their bizarre beliefs, for being curious but not contemptuous, is the recognition of your own capacity to believe things equally as odd.”
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I argue with myself all the time. Sometimes my friends have to intervene to break it up.
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Has that actually ever worked for you Seth? The whole throwing out strings of words together without any context in a kind of psuedo intense way? That emperor is without clothes. I’m a grown up, and don’t play those games.
“1-”cognitive dissonance… people lie to themselves.”
2-”no information flow.”
Which is it? It can be both but you make it one or the other depending on your sympathies.”
No you make it one of the other depending on the situation and the practice you find yourself in unless Bourdieu was completely full of shit. I think not.
I guess I have to add that it isn’t just about information flow, because most off the information isn’t there. Where I work, block level info. doesn’t exist, and it’s expensive and time consuming and that’s why I’m doing it. There’s census data, a few survey done here and there every decade, and that’s about it. If you take that whole lotta nothing and aggregate it, then you have an issue with information itself, and the existing information flow.
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Bourdieu was full of shit in a lot of ways. “Distinction” was culturally specific: it never applied to the US and applies less and less to an Americanized Europe. Sarko loves Celine Dion etc.
Bordieu’s Habitus was academic bourgeois. Perhaps you should read Panofsky, where he got the term. He may have been born a postman’s kid but he ended up a high bureaucrat in language and sensibility. From proletarian to anti-aristocrat as bureaucrat, paralleling in perversity the celebration of advertising as art… “because linguistic systems are complex and cool!” Democracy does not necessitate mediocrity but continental intellectuals have never quite figured that out.
Carl was quoting my own words back to me above and I want to take my own advice but I’m disgusted by arguments against the existence of great art, by mediocre minds who defend the existence of great ideas.
I’m also hung over: good news at my day job, I just bagged a major client. But it’s my day-job: it’s not art, it’s not poetry and it’s not brilliance in any way, but it’s ok. And it’s not advertising. It’s not the pitch it’s the product (how’s that for a pitch?)
You can respect a job without becoming a Babbit. You really should follow the links above to my conversation with McCracken.
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“Bordieu’s Habitus was academic bourgeois.”
I followed about 2/3 of all that. I’ve used the concept of habitus and post-structuralism in real life research to understand and explain real life situations and dichotomies. Theory isn’t bourgeois, or proletariat, and having never been a Marxist, I don’t think I’ve every said either of those words in speech, which to me is a pretty accurate symbolic symbol of pretentious middle to middle-upper class kids that got bored and became suedo radicalized. That or just art fags. Neither term are accurate representations of today’s observable world. Those simple dichotomies might have worked in the 19th century, but not today.
I take issue with certain things that Bourdieu stated, but the basic stuff is pretty solid. That being said, you don’t use a hammer when you need a screw driver, and the theory fits to the question and problem, not the other way around. It’s a poor researcher that has a sparse tool box.
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Having said all that, and focusing on the suit aspect. I’ve gone to functions with 3 different sets of clothes before, because I didn’t know which costume would be a better fit for the performance of a dinner party, interview, or whatever…. I have a very nice suit in my closet. Tailored and all and much nicer than the one pictured above, and I’ve never had the opportunity to actually wear it. They guy I was working for in Dallas for a while wanted me to dress down, because I was working in poor neighborhoods. So everyone else had to wear suits, and I’d walk in like a grad. student, no shave, etc… I actually want an excuse to put on my nice suit.
Shit, when I was in Bali, I had to wear a saroc (wrap around dress) to visit sacred sights. I’m not get pissy about it.
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Great post. I also am a fan of Star With Why: http://themikejohnson.com/2009/12/14/simon-sinek-author-of-start-with-why/
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