Business Episodes

Consumers today find brands through many online sources, including search engines and social media. And with the rise of hyper-personalized ads, consumers are constantly being bombarded with brands that seem to speak to their needs and interests....

Show Notes Building a New Labor Market for Global Design Talent with Fredrik Thomassen More and more businesses are switching to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But one startup was ahead of the curve, having been 100% remote since its...

If you’re alive in 2022 you’ve probably also heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency or the blockchain. Whether you’re an active trader, just dabble, or think you’d never touch the stuff, cryptocurrency raises a fascinating challenge to the question of...

This Anthro Life turned 8 years old in October 2021. That's a long time for a podcast. When recently invited to share what I've been working on for a newsletter, TAL's 8th birthday got me thinking about what I've learned working between anthropology and podcasting for almost a decade. I've fancied myself a public anthropologist for a while, but it has been podcasting, and working in an unusual medium (for anthropology) that has taught me some of the most important lessons for what public anthropology actually is. Music - Epidemic Sounds Lenzer - A Fork Fight Yomoti - Fansi Pan

A job search strategy is essential, but what if you don’t even know what to look for or what you want to do? A career plan is something you can do before job searching to define the kind of work you want to do and how to engage with like minded people, so you’ve got opportunities and pathways to work you’ll find fulfilling and meaningful, regardless of industry. While some old-school academics might see creating a career plan as selling out, Career Coach and Strategist Amy Santee and Design + Business Anthropologist Adam Gamwell, say you’re selling yourself short if you don’t. In this seminar we’ll share stories from our experiences and walk you through creating your own plan across defining your values, mapping your journey, finding your people and trying your voice. Whether you’re a student and looking for your first job, a mid career professor or industry insider and curious about what else is out there, a career plan is relevant for anyone. We’ll dig into defining your va…

Dr. Meena Kaushik takes us through her story from the revolutionary idea in the late 1970s of applying semiotics to brand and market research to founding Quantum, which today is a global enterprise research organization in seven countries, through how they have digitally adapted insights research in the face of COVID. Meena Kaushik started her journey as an academic studying the symbolism of death rituals in Hinduism. She conducted extensive fieldwork amongst the Doms of Varanasi, a low caste...

Phil Surles is a cultural anthropologist and consultant who focuses on branding. He works with companies to change their culture for the better and focuses on integrating anthropology into industry. From art school to anthropology to industry Phil discusses how he combined all of his passions into his consulting work. Phil, Astrid, and Adam discuss what it means to be an anthropologist working in industry and ethical issues that may arise. Phil is also working on a new platform called Mindshare ...

Mary Gray is an anthropologist whose work explores how technology informs work, a sense of identity, and human rights. Gray applies these concepts as the Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and as the Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Additionally she remains in a faculty position at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Gray has also authored books such as In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Yo...

Oscar Barrera is a Business Anthropologist based out of Veracruz, Mexico who brings a global mindset to helping businesses turn hurdles into opportunities for positive change. He is an expert in innovation, change management, and strategy. In this episode in partnership with Experience By Design podcast cohosts Adam Gamwell and Gary David dig into Oscar's story to learn the steps he took in moving from academia to business. We also dig into follow along case stories of how Oscar used the soc...

Take a walk with anthropologist and consultant Grant McCracken and host Adam Gamwell, as they discuss Grant's new book The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names and dig into Grant's uncanny ability to excavate and weave together (American) culture, media, and storytelling, and pull out provocative insights like the need to get more anthropologists and cultural experts into the C-Suite, how we might re-invent honor in the contemporary world, and how ...

In this episode we meet Dr. Stan Thangaraj, an anthropology professor at the City College of New York whose research includes immigration in the U.S, being interviewed by Vyjayanthi Vadrevu, a business anthropologist and ethnographer. Together, the two discuss basketball, community, identity, race relations and so much more. Stay tuned with us as you learn about why race relations are so important and the answers to the following questions: What does sports and their global popularity reveal...

This Anthro Life is based on lifting up the voices and value of anthropologists and human scientists in all fields through sharing their stories, thought leadership, struggles, and winding paths. Today we've got something special, where we turn the mic around on our host, Adam Gamwell and hear some of his story on how he is building a career as an anthropologist. TAL's Adam Gamwell recently guested on fellow business anthropologist Keith Kellersohn's new YouTube series Anthro Perspectives, where...

Artificial Intelligence. Natural Language Processing. Machine Learning. Big Data. If you've studied Anthropology at all, you'll likely notice these terms don't often get use, unless you happen to be studying one of these areas, like doing an ethnography on artificial intelligence. Yet if these tools are used everyday across millions of applications and software lines of code to make our world run, how might they help us understand ourselves better? Big data often gets used to understand patterns...

Ever wonder why certain new ideas stick while others don’t? We often hear a lot about innovation when it comes to new ideas, but really that’s only part of the equation. Psychology, marketing, neuroscience - and yes - anthropology can help us make sense of why some new ideas stick while others fall flat. On this episode Adam Gamwell talks with neuroscientist Dr. Matt Johnson and Professor of marketing Prince Ghuman about the fascinating role neuroscience plays in our evolving consumer lives. ...

Today we talk with Voltage Control president Douglas Ferguson and we're taking you beyond the prototype. If you ever run a design sprint, or even if you simply sat down at your desk to think through a really cool idea for a product or a new podcast or how do we improve something in your neighborhood. You started the design process. The question is, how do you go from a good idea to putting something out into the world? Douglas helps us find out. "You gotta slow down to go fast" - Douglas Ferg...

Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers. On this episode we talk about what brands are, how the cultural work of branding has changed in recent decades with the advent of new and easier to use technologies, and how we can think about brands as conversations - not just between businesses and customers but also between businesses. Transcript of this epi...

in this episode, Adam and guest host Leslie Walker talk with visual anthropologist and film producer Chris Chan, producer of the 100 Years of Beauty series on YouTube. If you haven't seen this series (or some of the spinoffs from companies like Vogue and Allure, definitely take a few minutes to enjoy). As an ethnographer, he also makes a wonderful behind-the-scenes series that documents the research he and his team does for each country called Chanthropology. We cover the development of t...

At long last we are back! In this episode host Adam Gamwell talks with Design Researcher and Strategist Amy Santee. This is one of these conversations that's a few years in the making. Adam has been following Amy's work for a while now both on her blog anthropologizing.com where she writes about anthropology in industry, design and business, on LinkedIn and other social media sites as well as at conferences sharing the good work of doing anthropology in industry. Adam and Amy discuss what Des...

In this episode Adam Gamwell talks with Alex Limpaecher and LaiYee Ho, co-Founders of Delve. While Delve is a qualitative research suite, to help code transcripts, find insight, and pull actionable insights from data, the conversation takes focus on the subject of research. Specifically, the driving question is: how can qualitative and quantitative data work together? Here, academic and industry methodologies with anthropology are put into conversation leading to insights and actionable steps fr...

In this episode, Adam and Aneil reflect on Aneil’s fieldwork in climate finance. Climate finance is an area of finance focused on mobilizing investment for climate change solutions, namely infrastructure that is sustainable. Aneil’s research is centered on the growth of the green bond market within climate finance. Green bonds are debt instruments that finance infrastructure deemed sustainable by the climate finance community, such as public transit, green building, renewable energy, and water i...

Welcome to This Anthro Life x EPIC 2019. This is the first episode in our 2019 collaboration with the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community or EPIC. EPIC is a professional organization that brings together ethnographers and social science practitioners across fields like user experience research and design, marketing, computer science, academia, and more. This year’s conference theme is agency, which is fascinating given the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, voice recognition software a...

Adam sits down (in a cafe, so this is live, people) with Jay Hasbrouck, Founder and Principal of Filament Insight and Innovation and author of Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset, a how-to guide for anyone looking to better understand and apply many of the methods ethnographers learn to their own businesses and practices. We talk through some of the techniques Jay covers in his book as well as talk candidly about the world of consulting and client relationships. --- Send in a voice m...

This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year's Annual EPIC Conference. “Evidence” is a subject of increasing social importance in today’s political climate. What constitutes evidence and when it is found to be credible all have far-reaching consequences. Because of this, practicing anthropologists are exploring concerns of and around evidence through experimentation, new methodolo...

Dr. Tricia Wang sees her work consulting as sitting at the crossroads of data and social justice. As a global tech ethnographer, Dr. Wang is obsessed with how technology and humans shape each other. In her own words, she wants to know, “How do the tools we use enable us to do more of what humans do, like socializing, emoting, and collaborating? And how do human perspectives shape the technology we build and how we use it?” Said differently, Dr. Tricia Wang’s expertise inhabits a gray space betw...