Experience

Cultural Keys LLC

• United States
• Business Consulting and Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Founder and Principal

  • 2009 - Present

  Cultural Keys helps firms and nonprofits • Understand and reach customers by capturing diverse and changing behaviors, preferences, and perceptions and their implications for marketing, product, and services • Improve internal effectiveness by identifying and helping to remove internal and external obstacles to success. Cultural Keys uses an anthropological approach that takes into account the larger cultural context, and a toolkit that combines observation, interviews, detailed content analysis, and recommendations with a focus on actionable results. Our approach builds on the models, process, and tools described in Transforming Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Recent Projects to Understand and Reach Customers: • Identifying customer demand in the intimate apparel industry and proposing solutions for competing more successfully with aggressive competitors • Helping a hospital become more "patient-centric" by reducing patient wait time, breaking down hospital "silos" to support innovation, and for improving the overall patient experience. • Communicating the value of an assisted living and nursing care community by refining the marketing strategy based on cultural themes emerging from interviews Recent Projects to Improve Internal Effectiveness: • Assessing the key challenges, implications, and opportunities in a new approach to cross-organizational teams; offering lessons learned for future innovative teams • Explaining why student-to-student collaboration is a survival strategy at an Research 1 university and promoting changes to increase faculty-student interactions • Gathering cultural attributes of recently-acquired firms and their reactions to the recent purchase; advising the home office on ways to improve the organizational transition • Creating research-based tools that foster a culture of collaboration from field work that exposed weaknesses in co-worker and supervisor relationships in several manufacturing plants Show less



Relations Research, LLC

• United States
• Business Consulting and Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Anthropologist

  • Jun 2021 - Present



General Motors

• United States
• Motor Vehicle Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Technical Fellow, Staff Research Scientist, and Senior Research Scientist

  • 1985 - 2009

  I worked as a cultural anthropologist at General Motors R&D on an array of issues affecting employees both in the U.S. and abroad. The projects ranged from the effects of downsizing and restructurings on employees, to the impact of decision-making differences on global vehicle programs, to explaining the variation in repatriation experiences among GM’s expatriate corps. Organizational changes occurred at GM as a result of my research and change-management efforts. For example, GM redesigned the role of the vehicle program manager using my studies. I have published much of my work and presented it at conferences and in university settings. Show less