Actually, You Can't Afford Not To

With the current new economic OS, you can not afford not to take an anthropological approach. Holistic, systematic, close-to-the-customer or community work is needed yesterday. No more masters of the universe, making plans from cubical land. It's time for some ground-level re-thinking of what brands mean, how products are bought, sold, and used, and how value is created in the present, em, context. (I did not say "marketplace." That word needs a re-thinking, too).

Ken Anderson likes to call the current economic, em, 'situation' The Great Reset. I think that's not bad. But then, someone (maybe it was Dawn Rivers Baker, who thinks and reads a lot about microbusiness) said that in fact, a 'reset' is a switch-off that returns the system back to its old, more stable and operating self. But the conditions that created the present fiscal mud-pit should not be repeated. We need more than a re-set. We need a new OS, a new operating system.

Words like Capitalism and Socialism get thrown around a lot by politicians. They are not used often by entrepreneurs or designers. Anthropologists, these days, are more cautious with those words. We work in China quite a bit, and while there is an emerging (and changing) social contract, it is clearly not a communist one in the strict or even in the loose Marxist sense. Yet the capitalism one sees in China is hardly the unbridled cowboy marketplace (at least, not all the time) that one might imagine it to be.

These Dubaian women will be making adjustments that matter, on the ground. They'll do so faster and in more creative ways than will the political or economic planners (who, if they did not steer us into this muck-pit at least did not do enough to steer us away). They already know what value means, they know how to negotiate with husbands, how to open a business where it was once prohibited for a women to open a business, how to buy, how to sell, how to manage, how to make a family life work. Understanding these folks, not listening to economic hacks, may move us out of the muck-pit.