What Businesses Can Learn From the Collapse of Civilizations

Joe Weisenthal (0:13)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Tracy, do you remember the episode that we did? It was not long after the 2016 election at the time and maybe still is one of our biggest, most popular odd lots ever?

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

Oh, it's definitely one of my personal favorites. And it was one of the earliest odd lots episodes as well.

Joe Weisenthal (0:39)

Right, I guess maybe at the time, being the biggest at the time was not saying as much.

But nonetheless, it was very popular. We talked to an archeologist about civilizational collapse.

Tracy Alloway (0:51)

Right, not just any archeologist though, one who has been called at various times the real life Indiana Jones.

Joe Weisenthal (0:58)

Right, so it was like right after the election. And of course, like half the country was really freaked out. Half the country was probably thrilled.

The half the country that was really freaking out was very interested in this idea like, oh God, what does the end of civilization look like? Because maybe that's what we're seeing now.

Tracy Alloway (1:16)

Right, and so we brought on an expert, a literal expert in the end or collapses of civilizations.

Joe Weisenthal (1:22)

Right, and so all the ominous signs, we walked through it, he's an expert on the collapse of the Mayans and what parallels, if any, there are between then and what we're seeing in modern society in the US.

Tracy Alloway (1:37)

That's right.

Joe Weisenthal (1:38)

Well, we have them back.

Tracy Alloway (1:39)

That is very exciting.

Joe Weisenthal (1:41)

Exactly, so we are once again talking about collapse and ancient civilizations, but our guest this time, he's been doing more work lately, specifically on like parallels to kind of the business world and sort of taking theories from management and economics and applying them to see what parallels there are between that and again, what causes an organization to collapse.

Tracy Alloway (2:08)

So, I find this really interesting because at the moment, in particular, you have a lot of hand wringing over what's going on with the big tech firms. And of course, for technology, culture is such an embedded aspect of a tech firm. And so people are talking about whether or not those tech firms are maybe not going to collapse, although I guess there's a question mark over things like WeWork, but whether or not they're heading for hard times and how that culture is feeding into that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:36)

And even if you don't get outright collapse, like this idea of sort of endemic cultural problems that lead to rot, I think is a really important phenomenon across all kinds of businesses beyond tech. Like just think about banks and or think about a bank like Wells Fargo that has had numerous fines and scandals over the years, despite the best efforts of management to root out all that stuff. It's just extraordinarily difficult, it seems, to undo the rot that can form inside a complex organization.

Tracy Alloway (3:07)

Right, so how does that culture, how does that organizational structure within a company actually impact its business and how does it change over time?

Joe Weisenthal (3:17)

And what can we learn from the Mayans to preserve the robustness of companies? All right, so without further ado, we want to bring back for a repeat performance on Odd Lots, Arthur Demarest. He's the Ingram Professor of Anthropology, a director at Vanderbilt's Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology.

Arthur, thank you very much for joining us.

Arthur Demarest (3:38)

Hi, yeah, I'm happy to be on here. You know, this is an audience that I think matters.

Joe Weisenthal (3:44)

Thank you.

Arthur Demarest (3:45)

It's good to be on here. I have to make one quick correction though.

The collapsed stuff, it's got a little to do with Trump. I've been doing this since 89 and it's been building slowly. And then in the last 10 years, all of a sudden, I'm in great demand everywhere to give talks.

Joe Weisenthal (4:03)

Right.

I didn't mean that you just started jumping on the collapsed bandwagon. I do think that helped explain the interest at least on the podcast.

Arthur Demarest (4:13)

I think it's the stuff that I worry about is more serious as the information technology people and business people and of course, the global warming issue and but there's really, I was surprised, that's one reason why I'm doing this, that the interest was coming from beyond academics and from people who can actually make a difference. And so I sort of shifted over to communicating on these kind of venues. And then I learned that business strategic management theory, partnership theory, these things work really well on looking at ancient civilizations. And so me and my collaborators, one of them is an expert in strategic management, it became a feedback cycle where we're providing information, we have articles submitted to business journals.