Comments on: ethnography meets brainstorming (going Israeli)

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:38:05 +0000

There’s some good comments in the Art of Innovation about brainstorming, much of what Grant said, but some other pointers about assigning a couple roles — someone to monitor and someone to orchestrate if I remember. But it’s been awhile.

I was just reading a list of rules of the innovative former Immaculate Heart College of Art and one of the rules is about how you can’t create and analyze at the same time. So don’t.

One of my favorite Anthropology professors, Richard Handler at U.Va. (I took so many of his classes, that he told me to stop, because I got knew his schtick and I needed to learn from others) was absolutely one of the most brilliant teachers (in part because he worked at teaching. it was important to him.) He had the amazing ability to move beyond the stand and deliver. He could make a 250 person lecture class operate like a 15 person seminar. Mesmerizing in his ability to both lecture, and manage Q&A simultaneously. I will never forget how fantastic that was, especially in a class where the topic and his theories were controversial.

By: susan Abbott

susan Abbott — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:33:56 +0000

Good gravy man! I was just taking time out from rewriting endless proposals to catch up on your blog. And I tagged a couple of paragraphs on delicious, because I love your ideas about how to brainstorm well. We should get these engraved on stone tablets and sell them to people, you have it nailed.

And as I am cruising through this article, I see that I should refocus my commercial efforts into “brainstormer for hire”. (Actually, believe it or not, this is starting to happen in some limited ways, no thanks to my careful positioning efforts, it just seemed to emerge as a concept for some clients. Others, as you know, are so threatened by new ideas from their hired help that you need to keep your creative tendencies well in check if you want repeat work.)

More to the point, when will we get to brainstorm again? Will we ever? It would be transcendent.

Warm regards, your friendly neighborhood brainstormer.

By: susan Abbott

susan Abbott — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:32:25 +0000

More to the point, when will we get to brainstorm again? Will we ever? It would be transcendent.

Warm regards, your friendly neighborhood brainstormer.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:31:18 +0000

A great deal of modern management is still, despite Robert S. McNamara and his whizz kids, management-by-anecdote. I’ve lost count of the number of telco managers tell me that some new cell-phone product idea will (or won’t) take off because their teenage son does (or does not) like it, or because they were talking to a friend at the country club who’s sister-in-law did (or did not) like it, and so there’s no need (in either case) to collect any harder evidence regarding potential customer reactions. I wonder to what extent the current fashion among senior managers for ethnographic studies plays to this senior corporate addiction to management-by-anecdote. One challenge for corporate ethnographers, it would seem to me, is to support business decision-making without becoming an enabler for further anecdote-abuse in the C-suite.

By: graffman

graffman — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:38:50 +0000

The corporate world doing ‘ethnography’ often do ‘pragmatic ethnography’ meaning observe a ‘trendy’ place for a couple of days, or interview some persons to get funny quotations. ‘Doing ethnography’ has become the new focusgroup, “every consumer company should do some qualitative research”, but more fun because it invloves photos and film. The anthropological knowledge is sadly dismissed when a marketer only want to be hip and show some photos for his/her boss or agency. The anthropologists need to recapture a space in the corporate world that never even was captured.