Intel is incorporating anthropology into its business?
A. With Intel, there was this moment with the principal decision makers that Intel no longer looks like the market they started, the people who bought technol- ogy looked remarkably like the people who made it in private companies. And technology really changed. It became global. It involved people who had very different lives, aspirations, and desires, and marketplaces than Intel was used to.
I think part of the function my team and I have performed in Intel has really been about this research: How do you help make sure that we’re not imposing the way we wish the market was vs. the way it really is? My function is partly education and partly reality check, and partly having to say to senior leaders, “I know you want this piece of technology just like that, but you don’t represent any percentage of the market; they are 20 years younger and liv- ing in a different country.” So they get a piece of that.
For Intel, it was about what happens when the things that made you success- ful historically don’t scale, when your instincts for what things are don’t work out. What made us successful in World War II in Soldiers, what was going to make us successful in Vietnam and Korea—those were different wars fought against different notions of what was meant to be there, different notions about what women looked like. How do you about what you’re doing and critically ask, “Those things, the way we’ve always done it, do those make sense anymore? Are there other things we should be con- sidering? Do the instincts of our leaders
to get done?”
We do some things here that, you know, have been about how to equip our lead- ers with different sensibilities. We have a program now where we take our senior leaders into the houses of everyday con- sumers outside of their own country, go sit with consumers and think about what does it mean to live in a house in China or India, or Brazil or Nigeria. They come back with a very different sensibility almost immediately. My colleagues are anthropologists for large airline compa- executives of that airline into economy seats, they made them sit there for seven hours. It completely changed their per- spective on what they were doing.
So it’s how do you manage to refresh and reengage your senior leaders and decision makers with the reality of the world as it is now?
Q. You recently talked with Slate maga- zine’s Katy Waldman about your team’s examination of how people use cars. That was a pretty interesting article. Two points: One, that cars protected people not from just physical danger, but also from social danger. And another point, that cars were a powerful proxy for other digital devices. If you were to look for a new way to study how Soldiers use tech- nology, where would you start?
A. That’s such an interesting question. I know a little bit of work inside our fac- tories at Intel, and one of the places we found most valuable was to start trying to tease apart the difference between what the rule book says and what was actually happening, because it turns out that’s the place where either the rule book isn’t clear or it’s gotten outdated. So Intel has a very set mechanism for how you make
new silicon. And you know there is a rule book and a binder with all the informa- tion, but we started to talk and wanted to know, what are people actually doing? Does it look like it’s supposed to?
I suspect if it were me, I’d be doing a num- ber of things that started with, “What is the kit people are issued? And by the time they get wherever they are going, will they come back with the kit they actually have? What do they have to supplement? What have they stopped using? What have they added? What have they hacked together to make something new?” Because I bet all of that exists: Whatever kind of modi- sticking photos in their helmets, whether it’s stitching things together to make different kinds of safety provisions, I guarantee you that there are people doing it, but it is completely off-book.
And I also bet you that everyone knows about it. And sometimes there is a - cations and re-implementing them. But I bet it’s not fast enough. So one of the people being issued within the various branches and what do they have when they deploy and when they come back? Also, what have they used, and what haven’t they?
The thing we found with the car, which was useful, was [the researchers] actually made people empty the entire contents of their car, and then they inventoried all of it. And they asked them why the stuff that was there was there. And it was a really instructive conversation about how things end up in your glove compartment and in the trunk of your car. I suspect there is something similar about how something ends up in your duffel, or why that is the thing that you have. I think that would be wonderful, just because I always think
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