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Welcome to the HBR idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.

There was a time when the study of anthropology meant traveling to remote areas of the world

to observe and report in cultures that people in Western society knew very little about.

And I bet that a lot of people in the corporate world probably still think this is what

anthropologists do. But today's guest works in the growing field of business anthropology.

He studies culture in modern workplaces. He studies how people interact and move and change

in organizations. He studies leaders and workers just like you. And in an era when companies seem

to be rightly obsessed with creating the kind of positive work culture that leads to better

engagement, productivity, and performance, we thought it would be a good time to dive into what

anthropologists have learned most recently about how to do it. I'm joined today by Greg Urban,

professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the co-author along with Mario

Musa and Derek Newberry of the book The Culture Puzzle, harnessing the forces that drive your

organization's success. Greg, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thank you, Allison, pleasure to be here.

So how did you go from studying cultures in far off places to looking closer to home?

The short version of it is that I did spend two and a half decades working with Indigenous people

in Brazil, living with them, learning their languages, cultures, social organizations. And

I was particularly interested all along in questions about the nature of the movement of culture

through time. In addition to being about the past, culture is also about the future. And I've

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