Michael Henderson on corporate anthropology, live at TEDx Auckland

Welcome to the first ever TEDx conference in New Zealand. We're here to celebrate the spirit of human potential, and we're going to start with a talk by Michael Henderson, a "corporate anthropologist".
 
Michael's starting off with a story his grandfather told him about a factory in the old Soviet Union. At the end of the day, the workers were always searched to make sure they weren't taking tools etc with them. And this one worker was always taking a wheelbarrow with his coats and various items with him, and they always checked under the coats to make sure there was nothing of value under the coats. Well, after a few years, the guy in question skipped the country, with a large sum of money. He'd been stealing wheelbarrows.
 
He got into anthropology almost by mistake, and when he graduated, his professor told him two things: 1) Congratulations! You'll never be bored for the rest of your life, and 2) Congratulations! You're now unemployable.
 
So he went off to London, and the first time he heard the term CEO he asked what it meant. When he was told "Chief Executive Officer", he got very excited because "chief" is of course an anthropology term.
 
Most people don't know the difference between a cult and a culture. In a cult, the leader sees greatness in himself. In a culture, the leader sees greatness in the people.
 
After he did this work for a while, he went off to Africa to study cultures there, and he learned that when you study people to understand who they are, what you really learn is who you are. And it occurred to him that the native cultures that he was studying didn't need the lessons he was learning because they were perfectly fine, but that the unhealthy organisations he saw in London needed help in improving their culture.
 
CEO: Chief is head of culture, Executive is head of structure, power, authority, etc., and Officer is the military strategist. Culture has been around as long as human beings have been processing cognitive thought, and there are certainly lessons to be drawn and applied to our organisations which are quite young by comparison.
 
Anthropologists suffer from vuja de, the strange sensation that you've never seen this before. The big lesson from tribes is engagement -- tribes are famous for enabling their people (preparing the next generation to hunt, fish, etc.) and engagement, making them proud to be who they are. Around the world in most modern organisations, 20% of the people are engaged, and 80% are moderately engaged or disengaged.
 
There's no tribe he's ever come across that runs engagement surveys -- why would they? They're in contact with people every day, they're in dialogues and expressions. Also, in tribes, they don't follow the 80/20 rule -- they have 80% of the people delivering 100% of the results, and the other 20% are too young or too old.
 
How do you teach Gen Y to respect the older generation, the wisdom that has come before? We can learn from tribes how to live with dignity in the workplace. In Southern Africa they have a term, "umuntu", which means that a person is only a person because of other people. A manager is only a manager because she has people to manage. "Silo mentality" never occurs in a tribe.
 
Just take a moment and picture in your mind the structure of a typical organisation. Now picture where you would position the leader. Now do the same with a traditional tribe -- what would the structure look like and where would the leadership be?
 
Language is the bloodline of culture; if you want to gauge how well a culture is doing, listen to the language. He worked with an organisation monitoring just that, and the most common word spoken began with the letter 'f'.
 
He finds it fascinating that businesses go on 'retreats' and not 'advances'. He also finds it fascinating that executives go away, come up with values, and then come out and announce them to the team. These things used to work, but now they come off more like a Tui ad.
 
It was Enron's culture that brought them down. Birds flock, fish school, humans tribe. Pay attention to two things in your organisation: relationship and result. Don't be afraid to wave the white flag, or to put the relationship ahead of the result.
 
Explore your own life, your own tribe, and measure yourself around how well you're doing with the relationships in your own life -- he thinks that's an idea worth spreading.