This is an
excellent 15-minute talk by the FT journalist Gillian Tett which describes how her training as an anthropologist helped her to identify during 2006 that all was not well in the world of international finance, despite her unfamiliarity with much of the language. She noted that bank executives tended to spend all their time talking about the stock and currency markets, and rarely (if ever) spoke about the bond and credit markets, despite these forming a large and rapidly-growing part of the balance sheets. This silence fitted certain anthropological theories and pointed to trouble...
It's well worth a listen to, and thought-provoking in an Air Safety context as well. What are the things that our senior executives (their Airships) never talk about? Obviously the last page of this thread covers one topic, but it would be interesting to see if there are others and whether it is the same basic human behaviour at work. I wonder if there is a basis for an Air Clues article in here?