The Corporation's toolbox - Adding Anthropology for a Business Advantage
A certification in Corporate Anthropology gives you an edge. Why? Because culture (not just art, music or dance) defines how people think, live, hope, plan or imagine. Everyone, every country has culture. While applied anthropology is a complex discipline, certain concepts, processes and methods can be quickly learned as an addition to the toolbox for the business environment. We break it down into easy to understand sections. The certification has several levels. You participate and observe. You find patterns and analyse.
Easy Programs for Faster Certification Having practiced corporate anthropology for over 30 years, our staff created programs which take the newbie into the realms of the anthropological. This is not hard to do. You don't need to travel to remote and exotic places. The conference room or water fountain, and traffic behavior or grocery shopping, prove to be at times rather primal locations. With reading materials and observation assignments, the corporate professional or interested individual can do this. Better understand your office, global markets or the consumers. Our staff is ready to help you along. Credit cards are accepted.
What's it about?
For the newbie, the jump-start into anthropology covers basics of cultural anthropology or ethnography. Culture, the full spectrum of learned human behavior patterns, governs our lives in ways both visible and intangible. Within culture exist three layers: the group of traditions common to your own society, the subculture such as ethnic groups and age specific groups, and lastly are the so-called universals shared by humans across the planet. We will use exercises to open up awareness of our own culture and to allow a person to become sensitive to cultural dynamics which previously existed as an unseen substrate. Within the halls of business, on the city streets, commuting on the highways or at home with family, culture dictates behaviors. Awareness of the behaviors allows examination of patterns and from there, possible prediction for future behavior. Culture for humans brought us adaptive mechanisms to survive nearly everywhere on the planet. Cultural change has increased over time until our present rapid rate of technological tools and adaptive lifestyles.
Cultural Awareness To most of us, the way we live and interact over the course of a day just seems "natural" for we are so close to our culture as to be unaware of its aspects. The food we eat and refuse to eat, the parts of our body we clothe and consider adorned, who we hold to be family and who we marry if at all, are governed by our culture. Tolerance to new ideas and living systems opens our minds to perceive others differently and more clearly. Ethnocentrism is the concept of "our way is best," to simplify it. Cultural relativity is the means to suspend judgment of others and open our minds to the alternate ways of living on our planet. Even within our Western society, there are gender specific differences in knowledge, behavior and interactions. We seek to identify the various areas encompassed by cultural study, so that in the next courses, we can apply that knowledge for greater understanding within the corporate world.
Because of the technological advances of our time, distances no longer form barriers. In a few hours or at most a few days, we can be nearly anywhere the world and experience culture shock from the most "exotic" places. In a smaller way, the merger or acquisition of one company by another applies corporate culture shock as divergent methods must align for smooth transitions. Our accelerated jump-start course covers the dynamics, the concepts and the methods used to ascertain and process cultural information. Training resources range from self-guided materials and online evaluation to seminar/workshops where a group of corporate professionals experience a new dimension to viewing the seemingly everyday world. Further Info about Certification