Why cultural intelligence is important, according to a business anthropologist

Below, Oliver Sweet shares five key insights from his new book, The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe, and Buy. Oliver is a business anthropologist and head of ethnography at Ipsos, one of the largest research agencies in the world. There, he looks at cultures all around the world and advises companies and governments on how they can become more culturally relevant. What’s the big idea? Culture is our shared way of living. We interact with one another based on cultural rules. If we want to understand ourselves better, we need to understand the culture that we live in. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Oliver himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. Culture is no longer linear; it is divergent. When I started studying culture 20 years ago, it was all a bit different. Culture used to be linear, and I would hang out with people in trendy subcultures to see what people listened to, watched, and wore for clothing. You could then map where culture was going, because you could be sure that mainstream culture would subsume trendy subcultures. Once upon a time, Oasis used to give two fingers to the man, and now they are multimillionaires. The Simpsons used to be ironic and shocking, but now they are part of the wallpaper. It’s all quite different now. Culture seems to thrive on being in opposition. There are: Political divides, like the Republicans and Democrats. Gender divides, like hyper-masculine role models as well as gender non-binary. Influencers, like Joe Rogan and Bad Bunny. Essentially, anything at the edges of culture is thriving. By contrast, the center ground of mainstream culture is in retreat. In many democratic countries, we are seeing narratives like: There’s a difference between the haves and have-nots. The country is broken. Normal people are being left behind. This narrative basically describes how the system is broken for many people. The promise that dominant culture used to offer—a soc