How Embracing the Anthropologist CEO Mindset Changed Everything
Picture this: You’re running a company with over $10 million in sales, your team is celebrating growth milestones, and from the outside, everything looks perfect. But there’s a problem nobody wants to talk about…the more you grow on the top line, the less you have to show on the bottom line.
That was our reality over a decade ago when I was CEO of a family entertainment industry supplier.
Then, at a Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program (HEMP) retreat, a speaker introduced a concept that would fundamentally change how our entire leadership team thought about business: ethnography. He posed a simple but radical question: What might happen if we stopped selling and truly understood our customers’ unspoken needs?
That question changed the way I thought about business.
It planted the seed for a new kind of leadership. One rooted in curiosity, empathy, and connection.
And eventually, it changed everything about how we showed up.
Why the Anthropologist CEO Sees What Others Miss
As Maren Perry notes in her recent Forbes article, anthropologists are trained to observe, listen, and ask thoughtful questions about what people do and why. They study the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Good CEOs, she argues, should do the same.
But here’s what the business books don’t tell you: becoming an anthropologist CEO isn’t about adding another framework to your toolkit. It’s about fundamentally changing how you and your entire team see your business and your customers.
How Anthropologist CEOs Learn by Observing, Not Selling
Inspired by that HEMP talk, I initiated something that gave our board of directors pause: we stopped trying to sell and started trying to understand. I began traveling to customer sites (family entertainment centers that ran redemption prize centers) not as their vendor, but as an assistant.
I wasn’t there to pitch. I was there to work behind the counter, watch, take notes, and study.
Here’s where the real magic happened: This wasn’t a solo mission. As the insights began to flow, our talented team members embraced this approach and ran with it. They built systematic processes around these initial observations. They developed frameworks, created new service models, and ultimately restructured our entire organization around what we were learning.
Think about the audacity of that for a moment. Here we were, a multimillion-dollar company, with executives and team members working as assistants in our customers’ businesses. But those hours on the floor revealed what no sales report or customer survey ever could.
What the Anthropologist CEO Discovers Through Deep Observation
As our team watched customers work, patterns emerged that were invisible from the conference room:
- Process Chaos: Every customer faced process issues that led to waste and rework. They were so busy fighting fires that they couldn’t see the systemic problems.
- The Paradox of Choice: We were overwhelming them with too many product options for their redemption counters. More choices weren’t making them more successful—they were paralyzing decision-making.
- The Hidden Customer: While we focused on our direct customers (the business owners), the real insight came from watching their customers—the families and kids at the redemption counter.
These weren’t insights you could get from a survey. As Perry’s Forbes article emphasizes, culture and behavior are revealed not in what people say, but in what they do. The same applies to customer needs.
How the Anthropologist CEO Turns Insight Into Business Transformation
McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index shows that companies focusing on cultural health are three times more likely to outperform their peers. But what about customer health? What about truly understanding the ecosystem your customers operate in?
Our team’s ethnographic approach ended up sparking a complete transformation of our business model.
And this is where the collective genius really came through.
I may have started the observation phase, but it was the broader team that:
- Redesigned our product offerings: They dramatically reduced choices while improving relevance
- Created process consulting services: They shifted us from just selling products to improving operations
- Restructured internal operations: They reorganized our own processes to better serve what we’d learned
- Built new training programs: They helped our customers optimize their customer experience
The result? We helped our customers make more money by doing less. Their customers had better experiences and returned more often. And our bottom line? It finally started matching our top-line growth.
The Questions That Changed Everything
Perry’s article suggests that anthropologist CEOs should ask questions such as: “Why do people hesitate to share feedback?” and “What rituals signal belonging?”
For customer-focused ethnography, our team learned to ask:
- What are our customers doing when no vendor is watching?
- What problems have they accepted as “just part of the business”?
- What would their customers say if we weren’t in the room?
- Where does friction show up in their daily operations?
- What workarounds have become standard practice?
Why Empowerment and Observation Matter to the Anthropologist CEO
Here’s what’s hard about becoming an anthropologist CEO: It requires you to stop talking and start observing. In a world that rewards quick decisions and aggressive sales tactics, ethnography asks you to slow down and pay attention.
But here’s what’s even harder: trusting your team to take those observations and build something transformative with them. The real breakthrough came not just from my initial fieldwork, but from the brilliant execution and process improvements that our team members developed and implemented.
As Perry notes in her Forbes piece, the best CEOs know that culture, whether inside the company or with customers, can’t be changed until it’s truly understood.
You can’t solve problems you don’t fully see. And you can’t create meaningful solutions without a team that feels empowered to act on what they’ve learned.
How to Begin Your Journey as an Anthropologist CEO
The speaker at that HEMP retreat changed our business with one question. So let me leave you with two of your own:
What would you discover if you and your team spent a week working in your customer’s business?
And who on your team has the talent to transform those observations into breakthrough solutions?
Not visiting. Not selling. Not consulting. Just working, observing, and understanding, then empowering your team to build on what you learn together.
Because sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come not from what we sell, but from what we see when we stop selling long enough to truly observeand from the talented people who help us transform those observations into action.
The path from that $10 million problem to a breakthrough wasn’t through better sales strategies or cost-cutting measures. It was through putting down the pitch deck, picking up a notebook, and then trusting a talented team to help rebuild the business around what we discovered together.
In today’s complex business environment, that combination of observation and collective action may be the most important capability any organization can develop.
What patterns would emerge if you and your team studied your customers like anthropologists? How could your organization transform those insights into breakthrough solutions? Share your observations, and let’s learn from each other’s field notes.
Note: This transformation occurred over a decade ago during my time as CEO in the family entertainment industry. The principles of ethnographic observation and team-driven implementation remain as relevant today as they were then.
