There are limitless uses of anthropology in the work environment. The students have said they have used it in mediating disputes and create more effective ad campaigns, Hallmark used anthropologists to make cards for people of different cultures and understand what they celebrate, a razor company used it to make a better product by finding out what people were looking for and how to do it better, but this particular writing focuses on Susan Stanton taking a management position which other's wished her luck and referred to employees as "knuckle draggers." There are many concepts and methods that one needs to take in when doing ethnographic research, on of which is to not have preconceptions. Taking the "knuckle dragger" mentality previous managers had would have been a huge issue coloring how she would conceive of how everything works and potentially take her attention away from real problems. Susan also took the time to listen to employees and understand them by using her grace period to ask around about all sorts of things and "find out what people actually did and why. I talked to end customers. I talked to salespeople, people who were trying to sell things to help customer outlets with their needs," (pg 377). Rather than making assumptions, she could see what the problems are from the employee's point of view. She looked at how cultures were similar or different and noticed a disconnect from the warehouses and the outlets in terms of how they worked. Anthropology is a field of studying culture, which is effectively how things connect and interact. By finding out how trouble packing books would lead to trouble unloading them as well, she could find a solution for both, making everyone's lives easier by shrink-wrapping them. This boosted morale, cut down on theft, made inventory management easier, and books stayed in better condition. 

I'm not so sure I'd call this a fault of anthropologists, but I'd say that it would be useful in having anthropologists in more spaces to look at what policies are effective, what is there arbitrarily and makes things harder, and showing how to streamline things. For example, a contemporary problem on my campus is scheduling classes. We have three different websites one must go to in order to effectively study classes. Rather than put degree requirements, classes, and schedules in one place, they are spread out, messy, and none of which individually conveys information well. It would be relatively easy for a company that is big enough to handle campuses from the east coast to the west to put these three sites in one place and see how it would all look as a student chooses classes and add customization almost as it was three windows, much like the one I type in now, and seeing a most effective layout among a group of students, and such. I think the biggest problem is that we don't listen and apply solutions enough, as in, we need more anthropologists. I will bring up an issue that I've heard from another professor though which is how we maintain relationships with the people that we learn from post-study. How to make sure they don't feel like what they did was for nothing, or that their effort goes unappreciated. Some anthropologists give gifts like we've covered in Eating Christmas In The Kalahari, but that also makes it transactional which it could be, but more largely if say someone agrees to an interview because there is some sort of reward for the information they give, that information could be colored to try to make the anthropologist happy with the results and this be bad data. There's also issues going back to Christmas in Kalahari again with how anthropologists approach peoples such as how the person, in that case, had months of canned food on hand leading to him being seen as stingy even if it was for the sake of not interrupting their economy which he was studying. I think maintaining relationships in a fair and balanced way over time is hard and that there's arguments going one way or the other about it. I also Have a concern for contemporary anthropology being exploitative as it's applied to more general contexts, giving a better product, but as a means of making profit rather than for well being in some cases. Harkening back to early anth where it was used to colonize more effectively, i think its a field that can always easily be weaponized and anthropologists have to be careful about how they use their skills. Maybe anthropologists need to do a better job recognizing their privilege or lack of or how who they are colors results and need to use more informants, maybe anthropologists are too invasive in some cases but that's by nature of the research, but many of these things are up to the individual and not something so broadly said, so I don't think I can generalize like that as many do a good job of it. 

Edit: Im glad I did this early so I have time to come back to it but I have criticisms for anthropology now. Given the age of internet, an anthropologist cannot sit down and engage in an online forum in necessarily the same way they could with in-person community interaction. The validity of responses the vast array of subcultures that it takes time to learn, people doing stuff to mess with people, how much things are abstracted or implicit, all propose problems as much behavior and culture now that is widely spread is digital, and while you can ask one person a question, when it comes to why, such as say the horrible phenomenon of red-pilling people, you hit a screen and people aren't the focus in the same way so new anthropologists need to adapt to that. There is also the problem of identifying who someone is to even talk to them in person or anything as people on the internet tend not to give personal info away as a good standard practice for obvious reasons.  Another thing is with a growing population of the world, there needs to be a growing anthropological field as well. I think that this may keep up, but again, with so many people and so many varied experiences and only becoming more and more nuanced and such, it takes more to learn it. In the !Kung paper, Eating Christmas, there was that exchange:

“But why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked Tomazo with some heat.
“Because you never asked me,” said
Tomazo, echoing the refrain that has
come to haunt every field ethnographer."
How to know what to ask and not to miss something, and asking enough/the right questions is critical to understanding. There's also the issue of anthropology being a temporary role sacrificing much understanding over someone who lives in a place full time for many many years and considered a true part of the community rather than as a temporary stint. There is also the issue of implicit bias and how it can invade the study in terms of how you treat people and how they see you, microaggressions in questions, how you write and also what your reviewers bias is, and things such as that which can influence us in a way we don't notice especially because experiences are subjective, so what is necessarily right? If we look at the book The Forest People, we see an ethnography that by the standards of the 1960s was probably pretty decent, but we look on it now and its absolutely horrific, racist, sexualizing, the writer judges the practices of the people and asserts their own standards of beauty, pats themself on the back and is genuinely a pain to read and a book I personally hate, even if it does have good info. Who is to say we won't be the same looking back in another 60 years if we are not careful. There is also the issue of leading questions. I recently watched the movie Skin about colorist where a person was asking different women about their experiences, and while not an anthropological movie, the questions were very much leading questions and while it makes sense to us in that context, it is not a practice that we can do in anthropology. We can poke around for more information if the informant is willing to tell us more, but we cannot lead the informant into a trap with a question to get an answer we want as it also affects and corrupts the resulting information. It's very easy to d accidentally and thus very dangerous.