Melissa Vogel PhD on Anthropology & Business

Melissa Vogel, PhD, is a business anthropologist specializing in business and organizational research. She founded the Business Anthropology program at Clemson University, directed UX research at Capital One, and leads Great Heron Insights LLC. Prior to this, she studied the Casma culture of Peru as an archaeologist. She has a regular series of short videos called The Anthro Minute, and a substack, On Being Human.

Melissa’s writing.

“From trowels to tech - how can an archeologist work for a Fortune 100 Company?” Anthropology Career Readiness Network

“Articulating Anthropology’s Value to Business” with Adam Gamwell in Anthropology News

So, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It's a big, beautiful question—one of the reasons I use it—but because it's so big, I tend to over-explain it the way I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?

Yeah, that's a cool question because you can choose to answer it a number of different ways. I'm going to take it pretty literally. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m a first-generation American. My dad's family immigrated from Europe after World War II, and honestly, the Midwest never really suited me. It was quite conservative for my taste, including my family.

I was very fortunate that, when I was applying to colleges, my parents didn’t restrict me to the local area. I got into the college of my dreams, which was UCLA.

Oh, wow.

So, I'm a proud Bruin alum.

What was the attraction to UCLA? Do you remember when it first entered your consciousness—when you first became aware of it?

I think when I started looking at colleges in high school. I’ll be frank: one of my criteria was, how far can I get away from St. Louis?

So again, I feel lucky that my parents told me, "You get the grades, and we’ll figure out how to send you where you want to go." I’ve always been the overachiever type—give me a goal, and I run for it. Or I give myself a goal.

We did a little trip out West after I decided it would be really cool to go to school in California. We checked out UCLA, UC San Diego, and I think we swung by Arizona State as well—which was really interesting because, for years afterward, Arizona State just sent me postcard after postcard: "Why didn’t you come here?" I was like, "Because I went to UCLA—what do you think?" That was an easy choice. Sorry, ASU.

But yeah, when we actually visited, I had already heard of the university—obviously, it’s world-famous and incredibly high quality. But then the campus was beautiful, and I loved the idea of being in a big city like L.A. It just seemed like it had everything to offer.

My dad loves to tell the story of our campus tour. He asked the tour guide, “How many of your students come from out of state?” The guide said, “Oh, I don’t know the numbers, but it’s less than five percent.” So my dad was like, "Phew, well we won’t have to worry about this place."Surprise, Dad—I got in.

I'm curious to return to that earlier thread. What does it mean to you to be from the Midwest—or maybe is there a story you can tell about growing up there that feels significant?

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I grew up in a pretty darn white suburb, and my parents very much prized education. Neither of them came from families with education—none of my grandparents finished high school. My dad had come over from Europe; my mom’s family was from rural Missouri.

So when my dad announced he was going to quit his factory job and go to college, my grandmother apparently said, “Are you crazy? Nobody's going to pay you to sit around and read books.” And then when he eventually became a stockbroker, he was like, “Look, Mom—people are paying me to give me their money!”

So yeah, it was a big deal for them to move to a location with a good school district. We were in this very affluent, white suburb, but we didn’t share the same values as a lot of the families around us because of my parents’ backgrounds. I never felt like I fit in there.

This was the ’80s—it was all about conspicuous consumption, what brands you were wearing, who got what car for their birthday. My parents didn’t believe in any of that. We didn’t get an allowance. I actually continue this with my son—I think it was a great idea. My parents wanted us to learn that you have to work for your money. You don’t just get $5, $10, $20 a week because you exist.

There were some chores we had to do for free, but a lot of them they paid us for, to prove the point: you do this work, you get paid. I figured out real quick I made the most money mowing the lawn, so I took that up as soon as my dad would let me. I started babysitting at 11, and eventually, when I was 15—because I’m a late-summer baby—I got a work permit to start waiting tables. I was always trying to figure out, “How do I make the most money in my current circumstances?”

It was a kind of environment where, because there was so much homogeneity, people focused on things like, “Oh, they’re Catholic”—as if that was a big deal. But that’s how little diversity there was. It was a big deal if someone was Lutheran versus Methodist versus Catholic. And it was amazing if there was a Jewish kid in your class. Whoa.

I just never wanted to be a part of that.

One little fun story: when I went back for my sister’s graduation—she stayed in Missouri for college, like a lot of my friends did, and went to the University of Missouri—I ran into a girl who had been in my class. My sister's younger, so we were about three years older than her classmates. This girl said, “Melissa, you got out.” And I said, “You could too!” It was this amazing thing to her that I had managed to leave St. Louis.

And yeah—my sister literally still lives a mile from where we grew up.If that—it might be less than a mile. Actually, it’s probably like half a mile.

Well, it feels like a very... I mean, I grew up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, so the suburban experience is what I feel like you’re describing. Is that fair?

Oh yeah, for sure.

Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I mean, I hear you loud and clear on “get me out of here.” But did you know what you wanted to be?

Oh yeah, I had lots of ideas. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be an astronaut—I think that was right around the time of Sally Ride—and I just thought it was the coolest thing to go to outer space. Unfortunately, as I got older and needed glasses—at least back then—that was a no-no. You couldn’t become an astronaut if you needed glasses, so that was out the window.

Then I remember in second grade, like many second graders, I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing. I asked my parents, “What do you call a scientist who studies dinosaurs?” and they said “a paleontologist.” So when my second grade teacher was asking the class what we wanted to be, I said “paleontologist”—and she didn’t even know what I was talking about.

As I got older, again, I feel very fortunate. Because my dad was from Europe and both my parents enjoyed traveling, they took us with them to a lot of places other kids didn’t get to go. We went back to Europe a couple of times to see my dad’s family, and I developed a love of international travel very young. I think the first time we went to Spain to see his cousins, I was about 12 years old.

I was studying German in school, since that’s the language my dad’s family spoke—although they spoke this obscure dialect I couldn’t understand after learning high German. We went to Germany a couple of years later. So, I really wanted a career that would allow me to see the world, learn other languages, and learn about other cultures.

I only got a tiny introduction to what anthropology was in high school, but I didn’t fully understand how you could do that as a career—especially because I think what I was exposed to was more the evolutionary aspects of anthropology, which has never been my favorite part.

When I started at UCLA, I was actually a political science and international relations major. On that same trip to Germany, we visited cousins in Austria and went to this really cool restaurant up on one of the little mountains. There was this big table of people, all speaking different languages, and there were women at different spots around the table translating. They looked very fancy—I don’t know who they were, maybe businesspeople or diplomats. I asked my parents, “What’s going on over there?” and my dad said, “It looks like they’re translating for them.” I thought, Oh, that would be cool. That was one of the possibilities I considered.

I was lucky that I seemed to have inherited my dad’s ability with languages. He could speak German, French, and English pretty well—though he lost his French after moving to the U.S.—and he picked up a little Spanish along the way too. When I took German in school, it was super easy for me—embarrassingly easy—having been around it a bit with my family, even though it was a different dialect. Later, when I had to pick up Spanish to work in Latin America, that came pretty easily as well.

I just knew I wanted something where I could travel the world.

But when I got to UCLA and started political science, I was really disappointed. The classes were huge—hundreds of people in the lecture halls—and I have to admit, my poli-sci professors came off pretty arrogant. I remember in particular my international relations intro professor. He’d stroll in late and say, “Sorry folks, I just got in from Moscow. I’m not on West Coast time yet.” And I just thought, Oh wow, must be nice for you.

I worked for him through a summer research program students could do, and we were basically writing his book for him. I was appalled. I don’t even know if we got mentioned in the acknowledgments. That’s crazy. The students were doing all the research. He would just talk into a recorder—he’d say, “Okay, this is what I want to cover in Chapter One, blah blah,” and we’d do everything else.

In the meantime, I had luckily signed up for a couple of anthropology classes, and I just thought, These are my people. The students in the poli-sci classes were mostly pre-law and had very different goals in life. It felt almost like that same group back in St. Louis that I hadn’t fit into. The anthro kids, on the other hand, were from everywhere, doing all sorts of interesting things, very nonjudgmental, just interested in the world.

So I found my people sophomore year and switched majors.

Yeah, amazing. And catch us up—where are you now? What is the work you're doing? You’ve made a career out of anthropology. What have you been up to?

Yeah, so when I switched majors, my dad was horrified. He was so hoping I was going to end up in law. The quote of his that I love to repeat is, “Anthropology? What do you want to be—poor for the rest of your life?” Yes, Dad, that’s my goal—to be poor for the rest of my life.

But once I got into it, I was serious. Again, I set a goal and ran for it. I went all the way through my doctorate. At the time, I wasn’t really aware—because they don’t broadcast it in grad school—that there are non-academic ways to be an anthropologist. So I thought, Okay, what do I have to do to be a professor? That’s the only option, right?

So I did that. And there were great things about being an academic. I mean, the best part is you get to research whatever you want. You just have to fund it yourself—but as long as you can find someone to give you a grant, go for it.

It took me three years to get a tenure-track job. I had told myself, Okay, I’ve seen other folks just suffer—going from adjunct to adjunct, or visiting professorship to visiting professorship, moving all over the country—and I’m not doing that. I gave myself five years to get a tenure-track job, and I considered myself lucky that I got it in three.

But when you're on the academic track, you go where the job is. You don’t have the luxury of saying, Well, I love California. I want to stay here. The job I got was in South Carolina. I had no family, no friends there, and honestly hadn’t been interested in living in the South. But you go where the job is, right?

So I thought, Okay, I’m more fortunate than a lot of my peers—I got a tenure-track job. Let’s make lemonade.

I helped build the program there. I was only the second anthropologist in the entire department. We built a major. Eventually, I became the grad director and converted their master’s in applied sociology into a master’s in social science—because I’d never had a sociology class in my life. I said, We’re going to have to update this if you want me to be grad director.

I’d always wanted to get into administration, but that just wasn’t happening. I didn’t fit into their idea of who was going to be department chair or dean. And if your own university won’t give you that opportunity, no one else will give you the time of day.

In the meantime, I’d always done applied research. I’ve always thought that was important. I’m very passionate about my discipline—I think anthropology has so much to offer the world. Everyone can be their own little anthropologist in their own way, if they’re so inclined.

So I’d done applied research since grad school, and I just got more and more interested in doing that instead. I’d written something like 18 articles and two books on academic topics that—maybe, if I’m lucky—100 or 200 people ever read.

You know, so I decided to create a business anthropology program. It took a lot of work and a few years to get through all the different approvals, and I was happy with the results. But at the same time, I was banging my head against the wall trying to get an administrative role and not getting anywhere.

Luckily, at that point, I had met my partner, because I really needed the support to make the decision to leave academia. That was a huge, huge decision. I had invested 20 years of my life. I had tenure. I was a full professor. I was the director of a grad program. People don't just walk away from that—it’s unheard of. But I was deeply unhappy. Even though I had built this program, nobody in the administration seemed to care. Students liked it—they were thrilled to have a practical way to apply their anthropology degree—and it was slowly growing. It was still early days, but the administration just didn’t seem interested in me.

I started to feel like I had hit a glass ceiling. I wasn’t going to be able to grow anymore. At the time, I was around 40-ish, early 40s, and I thought, I’m not okay with continuing in this situation for the next 20, 30, however many years I have left to work.

So, after long discussions with my partner, I finally had the guts to say, Okay, I’m going to try applying for industry jobs, take my applied skills, and use them full-time. At first, we were trying to stay local because I have stepkids—we have a blended family—and it just wasn’t happening. And I hate to say this, but even in bigger cities like Charlotte or Atlanta, they just didn’t seem to understand how my experience translated to the business world, no matter how hard I tried to explain it.

When my younger stepkids were ready to go off to college, we agreed we’d consider moving. And sure enough, the first place I applied to in D.C. hired me in six weeks, because it was very easy for folks around here to understand how my experience translated to market research.

By then, that was my fourth market research company, but it wasn’t the first one full-time—because I did do a year full-time in between grad school and my academic job. It was a great place to transition out of academia. It was full of people just like me—former academics who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be in academia anymore. Just super smart people who knew what they were doing.

But it was also the start of COVID.

Oh wow.

Yeah, so it was a tough time for all businesses, certainly for market research. It was just a struggle. But I’m really proud of what we were able to do there. I helped them dramatically update their program. I was the director, and eventually senior director, of qualitative research. I helped them update their pricing model—they were way underpricing their qual work. I created a more streamlined work process to bring timelines down. We expanded into all sorts of online qual, because before the pandemic, they hadn’t done any.

So yeah, did some really cool things, despite the struggles.

I want to return and talk about the transition, but before that, I was curious—I’d love to hear you celebrate anthropology. What makes anthropology so important? I can’t remember the language you used, but there’s something that anthropology does that nothing else does. How do you think about what makes it powerful?

Yeah, well, you’ll have to watch me, or we’ll be here all day.

I should note that I was introduced to you through The Anthro Minute, this beautiful series of wonderful little introductory videos on YouTube—I’ll share a link to it. I’m always excited to hear really accomplished people champion the beautiful things about anthropology. So, back to the question—what is the power of anthropology?

Well, thanks for asking, because I did want to make sure to mention The Anthro Minute at some point.

Oh yes, of course.

So, for those who may not know—because I think anthropologists, unfortunately, have done a terrible job of explaining who we are, what we do, and why anyone should care—anthropology is the broadest of all the social sciences. It’s the study of every single aspect of humanity: the biological, the cultural, the linguistic, and our past. That’s literally our four subfields.

And that’s what I love about it—you can completely immerse yourself in anything about humans that fascinates you. Everything from how we got to be Homo sapiens from our ancestors—I was a specialist in archaeology for a long time, so I loved learning about past civilizations. I loved that in archaeology you got to use all the subfields. Archaeologists need all of them. We don’t just know about the past—we know about cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology because we use it in our work.

Also, in the United States, graduate programs are usually what we call four-field programs. You have to know about all four fields and be able to teach at least a little bit of each to be competitive in the work environment. I loved that—it was so holistic, so comprehensive.

But I also just love the fact that one of the major things anthropology teaches us is cultural relativism, meaning every culture is just as good as any other. There’s no superior culture—there’s no “this one’s better than that one.” They all have their own cultural logic as to why they do what they do. And I just thought that was fantastic. Having felt kind of like an outsider for a good chunk of my younger life, it was really appealing to me to understand that not every culture is like mine. They don’t all do things the way I do. Sometimes I like how they do it better.

So yeah, I think anthropology has so much to offer everyday life, because it’s really just about understanding humans—who we are, where we come from, our beliefs, our behaviors that are passed down, that are learned and shared among groups of people.

I created The Anthro Minute because people don’t know what we do. I mean, you walk up to someone on the street and ask, “What does a psychologist do?” and hopefully, at bare minimum, they can tell you what a therapist does. Maybe they’ll think of counseling, even if they don’t know all the subfields of psychology.

But you walk up to someone on the street and ask what an anthropologist does, and they’re probably going to think of the retail store. That’s the first thing that comes to mind—Isn’t that a store? Or maybe they’ll think about archaeology, although a lot of times archaeologists are confused with paleontologists. No, we don’t dig up dinosaurs—which is kind of a bummer. I like dinosaurs.

It’s so funny—Indiana Jones came to mind as you were talking.

Oh yeah, that’s the number one response you get when you tell someone you’ve been an archaeologist. Certainly.

But for some reason, it came up even just now as we were talking about anthropology, which is kind of funny. That’s strange. But of course, I completely agree. Anthropology—I'm not an anthropologist, but even qualitative research has, in my experience, done a very poor job of articulating itself. What do you love about the work? Of all the different things involved in what you do as an anthropologist, what’s the part you love most? Where’s the joy in it for you?

I got to do what I wanted to do as a kid—I’ve gotten to see the world. And I’m not done.

I got to spend 20 years working in Latin America—either being on or running projects in Nicaragua, Belize, and mostly Peru—and traveling to nearby countries while I was there. And then you get other opportunities because you have friends working in other areas, so you get to visit them. I got to visit friends in the UK. I had other friends I ended up visiting in Bali. You get around.

And you get to see the insider’s view of things, because you’re not just there as a tourist all the time. I like being a tourist too, don’t get me wrong. But I really love the opportunity to get out in the world and understand how people live in different places—and try to see it the way they see it, if I can.

That’s one of the big concepts in the anthropological perspective: balancing what we call the emic and the etic, the insider and the outsider perspectives. In my case, now that I do a lot of work in the United States, I’m not necessarily an outsider. But traditionally, we were outsiders trying to understand the insider perspective. And it works both ways.

It’s a really wonderful way to—hopefully—understand the best of humanity. Although you’re probably going to come across some things that aren’t so great, too. But that’s what I love about it.

What kinds of things were you exploring? Can you tell me a story about some of the research you’ve done?

Yeah. Most of my work in Peru focused on a culture called the Casma, who are not very well known. Most folks—if they’ve heard of pre-colonial Peruvian cultures—only know about the Inca. Again, we haven’t done the greatest job of publicizing that.

The Casma existed from about 700 to 1400 AD on the north coast of Peru. I was looking at the whole development of their civilization, but especially the origins of urban environments—so, Andean urbanism.

The preservation you get on the coast of Peru is rivaled only by Egypt. It’s this incredibly dry desert, and what’s wonderful about that is you get a window into ancient people’s lives that can be hard to get in other climates where preservation isn’t as good.

I was able to study and write books about how these people lived—how they built their cities, how they seemed to run their religion and their economy, what we could see about their social structure. I really tried to take as holistic a view as I could to understand them and how they fit into the larger picture of Peruvian prehistory.

They came after a group called the Moche, who were very theocratic, with a lot of dependency on ritual and religion to maintain authority. After them comes an empire called the Chimu, who were very bureaucratic—very much like all roads lead to Chan Chan, which was their capital city. Very highly centralized.

The Casma occupy this niche in between, showing a kind of transition—from people using spectacle and elaborate rituals to maintain authority (not that ritual ever goes away), to something with less emphasis on centralized bureaucracy, like with the Chimu.

The Casma seem to have been this grassroots, local group that managed to get out from under the thumb of the Moche. Eventually, they fall under the Chimu, but for a few hundred years, they seem to have been running their own show. More of a heterarchy than a hierarchy.

I think you said Andean urbanism, is that correct? What can you tell me? I mean, in my sort of narcissistic way, I’m really interested in urbanism and cities. What’s the most interesting thing you learned about Andean urbanism? What were cities like?

Yeah, I mean, what was fascinating with the Casma—and so different from what we see after them with the Chimu—is that the growth of the cities seems to be pretty organic. While there is a more elite sector of their capital city at El Purgatorio, which has these grand compounds with big high walls, and within them small—not the big giant pyramids you think of, say, in Mexico—but small pyramidal mounds with either stairways or ramps, and plazas in front of them, they’re all inside these walled compounds, which is a long-standing tradition on the north coast.

So they do have more formal elite sectors eventually, but when you start digging through those layers, you find all sorts of places where they’ve remodeled and built on top of what was a much more organic growth underneath. And as you see the rest of the city—and we get radiocarbon dates to support this—you can see where the city expanded around the side of this mountain and up onto a little saddle on top, where there was more of a working-class living sector.

We see the differences in the material culture to recognize the different statuses of people and the different activities they’re doing, and indications of trade—both between the farmers in the valley and the fishermen on the coast, as well as with other nearby cultures up in the mountains and things like that. There are certain things that don’t grow on the coast, but we find them, so we know they’re trading for those.

Yeah, I think that’s what’s really cool—to see how these larger and larger conglomerations of people just sort of organically pop up. Andean cities never seem to have gotten as big as, say, Central American cities like Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan. We don’t have those massive piles of people together, and yet they were very complex.

And if you’re familiar at all with the quipus that the Inka used—it’s a series of knotted strings used for accounting purposes—there was someone called a quipucamayoc, who was the person who kept the quipu and would read it for the ruler. To me, it was just fascinating to see that people can reach more complex levels of civilization in different ways. They didn’t have the written language that the Central Americans or folks in the Old World had, but they still had their own complicated way of keeping track of things and running cities and governments.

So, for dramatic effect, I’m curious now to talk about the transition into business anthropology—being an anthropologist in the corporate space. What in God’s name do you do with that kind of thinking and perspective when trying to apply it to a market research context? How did that go?

If you want, we can put in the show notes the article I wrote about this called From Trials to Tech: How an Archaeologist Ended Up at a Fortune 100 Company, because I make the argument that being an archaeologist actually gives you a lot of the skills you need to run a corporate team.

Archaeologists don’t work alone—ever. Where some cultural or linguistic anthropologists might venture off into whatever area they’re trying to study all by themselves, we don’t do that. We always have a team, and it’s nearly always interdisciplinary. We can’t be masters of everything.

So when I was directing projects, I had my faunal and floral expert who handled all those remains. I had my osteologist who handled the human skeletal remains. My expertise was more in architecture, ceramics, and iconography. But yeah, to do excavations, you need a lot of people. You learn, the hard way if you have to, how to manage a team, how to manage a budget.

Also, when you’re working in another country—I never did archaeology in the United States—I always thought, Wow, that must be so easy. I mean, that may not be true, but when you’re working abroad, you have to navigate a foreign government, a foreign language. You’re expected to do permits and hiring and all sorts of stuff in that country. You need to adjust to their customs. You’re going to be eating their food. You need to fit in enough with their culture that you’re not putting yourself in jeopardy.

And it behooves you to use all your cultural anthropology skills too. As much as I used to joke that the nice thing about archaeology is “my people don’t talk back,” the reality is there’s virtually no archaeological site in the world that isn’t near a modern community anymore. It really behooves you to take an interest in that local community from the beginning, and make sure you’re involving them in any way you can—and hopefully in a way that they appreciate, not in a way that makes them want you out.

We would hire local workers, and we always had a public interest component where we’d ask, “Is there something you would like to get out of this work we’re doing?” For example, on my last project, they said, “We want to learn English.” So we did—we had informal Saturday classes for anyone who wanted to show up and learn how to speak some English.

All of those skills translate directly to a corporate experience. You learn how to manage people, budgets, timelines, deal with different types of governmental regulations or communities. And you need to be able to relate to people.

Part of the decision to switch from working in Peru to doing business anthropology primarily in the U.S. was that I had a family of my own by then. It’s extremely difficult to work internationally once you have kids. That was something that was important to me—I didn’t want to miss any part of my son’s life.

So, on top of being frustrated in my career, I also didn’t want to be away from him. And it wasn’t feasible for my partner to spend every summer in Peru, like I’d been doing for 18 years. So it just made sense to go back to the applied work that I was also passionate about.

I wanted people to see the value of anthropology for solving everyday business problems—which is what business anthropologists do. My original way into it was through market research, but eventually I transitioned into design anthropology, doing user experience work at a fintech. We had done a little of that at the market research company I was at as well.

I also had been doing the third subfield of business anthropology, which is organizational culture work—especially around what later became known as DEI. When I first started doing it, it wasn’t called DEI, that was the later term. But I did that work in academic institutions and then through the market research firm.

And that’s now what I want to do in my own company, which I’m starting right now.

What were the challenges or difficulties in translating anthropology into market research—or in helping market researchers understand and make room for anthropology? Where did these things fit—or not fit—together as you tried to make it work?

Well, I think one thing that helped a lot is that, as an archaeologist, we use both qualitative and quantitative data. We don’t restrict ourselves to one or the other. So, for example, I’ve literally mapped archaeological sites with a total station or a transit, and used survey software to create that—I used to have to do AutoCAD and all that kind of stuff.

We take lots of measurements. We don’t do super sophisticated statistical analyses, but we do use statistics for various things—to group things into categories or for a lot of spatial analysis. So we’re quite comfortable moving between qual and quant. That made it pretty easy to translate into market research, where—to be successful—you really need to be comfortable with both.

You don’t have to be a statistician, but if you’re really... I mean, that’s one thing I tried to help my teams with. I would certainly bill myself, if I had to, as more of a qualitative than quantitative person, because I don’t have the heavy stats background. But numbers don’t scare me.

I’d really try to help my qual researchers understand the importance of being able to administer a survey, understand what the results mean, and how to properly represent those numbers. I was surprised when I entered the business world how many people didn’t seem to know how to do that.

So, yeah—I think that helped. But I mean, you also just have to explain to people the hard way—with examples. And I was fortunate that I had been doing this work off and on the whole time. I don’t think it would’ve been so easy for me to transition if I hadn’t.

I was doing it in grad school just to make extra money, but I had no idea I was building a muscle I would end up using full time. I always say, no experience is ever wasted. When I finished my PhD and didn’t have an academic job, I ended up working with other grad students at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evaluation. That was a team environment where we were the folks doing the fieldwork—going out and doing interviews, observations, different types of qualitative techniques, and also administering the surveys. Then our statisticians back at the university would do the heavier stats work for us, and we would write up the reports.

I had no idea that job—which was just to pay the bills—was going to be what I would end up doing full time. That would've been, let’s see, like 15 years later. So there was just instance after instance where you’re doing something that uses your skill set, but mostly you’re just trying to pay the bills—and then you realize later, wow, I have all these foundational skills that I developed in all these jobs I picked up along the way.

I know you're a member of EPIC, which is a beautiful organization. Do you have a point of view on the state of business anthropology—or anthropology in the corporate sector—and where we are today?

Oh, yeah. I mean, we still have a big PR problem, which is one of the reasons I created The Anthro Minute. We've unfortunately been targeted politically. Even though we do what I think is really important, useful research on humans, we’ve unfortunately—since Margaret Mead died—not had a public spokesperson to really represent our discipline for decades.

So people... we sort of were like, Oh yeah, we’re not going to worry about that—we just want to do our research and be left alone. And that’s been to our detriment, because now folks don’t know what we do. They think it’s frivolous. They don’t understand how it’s highly relevant to their everyday lives.

The skills we build as anthropologists help companies build better products—things people actually want and need—understanding what customers are looking for to market those products and actually gain greater market share. Especially if you're going internationally and want to broaden the cultural audiences you’re selling to. And to improve their own cultures—to be workplaces where people actually want to be.

Unfortunately, right now in the U.S., we’re in a really bad place. The trend has done a total 180. There’s a real lack of concern for humans—a lack of concern for what people want or need. A lack of caring about whether your employees like where they work. There just don’t seem to be enough companies that care about being a great place to work. I’m sure there are some, but that doesn’t seem to be the dominant trend this year.

So, I think we really have our work cut out for us as anthropologists—to continue explaining why a deep understanding of humanity in all its variety, and globally—having that global mindset, not just this trend of being insular and focusing locally—why that matters.

Because there’s no turning back the clock. We live in a global economy. That’s not going to stop. It’s going to continue. I think people like anthropologists—who can help you understand the world and people—are going to be much more successful than someone who thinks they can just turn inward, shut out the rest of the world, and shut out different opinions.

I love that you mentioned Margaret Mead. I wonder if you might talk a little about her role—what was the role she played that you say is currently lacking?

Well, I’ll be honest—I wasn’t alive, so this is just from what I’ve read. But yeah, my understanding is that she was the public figure for a long time in the United States. She published a column in Redbook, which was a popular women’s magazine at the time, and really made an effort to put herself out there.

Unfortunately, as we now know even more than when Margaret Mead was alive, when you put yourself out there, you can become a target. So she certainly had to deal with some controversies during her lifetime. And with hindsight, we can always look back at someone’s work and say, “Oh, they should’ve done this better or that better,” or whatever.

But she was one of the pioneering anthropologists that came out of the original circa 1900 group of anthropologists—all students of Franz Boas. For a while, there was a biological anthropologist doing research on love and attraction—and of course, now I’m blanking on her last name. I know her name was Helen, and I just lost the last name. But she did get a little bit of public attention for a while, which was great.

Then... I don’t know if she decided she didn’t like it anymore, or people just weren’t as interested anymore. Like, she really stayed focused on her one subject area, so maybe that’s why. So yeah, I really think—and I’d be happy to be one of the people who tries—to become one of these public anthropologists who really helps people understand: Why do we need to know about other cultures? Why do we need to care what motivates human beings in different places?

Because, you know, one of the areas where we tend to disagree with psychologists is in thinking that we all operate the same way. Anthropologists tend to celebrate the differences as well as the similarities across cultures.

So, we’re kind of near the end of our time. What Anthro Minutes do you have coming up, or what topics will you be tackling, if you have any in the queue?

Well, I had a request for more business anthro case studies, so I’m currently working on that. I’ve already mentioned a bunch of them as examples, and now I’m hunting down new ones, because I’d really like to have some that are more recent and a little more relevant. So that’s a work in progress.

But the one coming out next week is about environmental anthropology and sustainability. Then there’ll be one after that talking more explicitly about user experience in the design anthropology world. And I’ll keep seeking out more case studies that really bring home for people the practical applications.

And, you know, I only keep myself to under 90 seconds, so I can’t get that deep into any case study. But the more I can demonstrate for folks how anthropologists are actually impacting... you know, we have Go-Gurt and Toughbooks because of anthropologists, right? So, the different ways that we've led to innovations.

Well, hold on—now I need to hear either a Go-Gurt story or a Toughbook story. Your choice.

So, Sue Squires is an anthropologist who was doing research for—I believe it was a breakfast cereal company—and doing ethnography in people’s homes while they were getting ready for the day, getting off to school and work. Interviewing them as they were doing that, asking what they were looking for in breakfast foods.

She made a lot of important observations. One of the things that’s really important about our primary methodology, participant observation, is that people will often say one thing and do another. So, you want to ask them, but you also want to watch them, if you can.

She found that parents would talk about how important it was to give their kids a nutritious breakfast and send them off to school fueled to learn. This sounded great—like what every parent would want. But she was watching the kids do things that contradicted that—either refusing to eat what was put in front of them, secretly sneaking off and throwing it in the trash, or sneaking to the cupboard to get some kind of snack food to stick in their backpack for later. She noticed all of this going on.

And at the same time, these poor, harried parents were just trying to get their kids ready and out the door. That led to the idea for Go-Gurt—that you could take yogurt on the go. The kids could eat it in the car.

One thing I didn’t know—since I’ve not been a big Go-Gurt user myself—is that you can actually freeze Go-Gurt, stick it in your kid’s lunchbox in the morning, and by lunchtime it’s defrosted, but still safe to eat. It hasn’t gotten all hot and gross. So yeah, it was the idea of: how could we have a healthy breakfast food that kids can take with them on the go?

That has to do with John Sherry at Intel. He was sent up to do research on Alaskan fishing boats—what they needed from a computer. He was watching these guys—if you’ve seen that show Deadliest Catch, where they’re throwing tons of fish on the deck, processing them, and blood and guts are flying everywhere—it’s just disgusting.

He’s watching this and talking to them, and they’re like, “Look, what I really need from a computer is to be able to hose it down when I hose down the deck.” And out of that research eventually came what we now think of as rugged-use computers—Toughbooks that can stand up to conditions like fishing boats, construction sites, or other places where the more delicate computers of the past would have been a disaster.

And that was Panasonic? Is that a Panasonic Toughbook—is that what it was?

I think so. But John was working at Intel, so it must’ve been a partnership. That Toughbook brand—I remember it. I had never seen anything like it.

Yeah, that story is really powerful.

Awesome. Melissa, again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your wisdom with us. I’ll put all the links to all your good stuff here. It’s been wonderful to get to know you a little more, and I appreciate what you’re doing.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun.

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