Financiers use rituals & symbols to reinforce their social ties and worldview and share a creation myth

See Anthro-Vision’ Review: How to Take the Blinders Off by Tunku Varadarajan of The WSJ.

He reviews the book Anthro-Vision: A New Way To See In Business And Life by Gillian Tett. Excerpts:   

"Ms. Tett’s doctoral research, conducted in 1990 in a remote valley in Soviet-era Tajikistan, had focused on Tajik wedding rituals, as well as on the friction between Communism and Islam in that erstwhile backwater of the U.S.S.R. Fifteen years later, at a European Securitization Forum in Nice, France, she observed that the assembled financiers—“ranks of chino- and pastel-shirt-clad men”—were using rituals and symbols to “reinforce their social ties and worldview.” In Tajikistan, this bonding had occurred with a complex cycle of wedding ceremonies, dancing and gifts of embroidered cushions. In Nice, the bankers were swapping business cards, rounds of alcohol and jokes while engaging in “communal golf tours” and watching PowerPoint presentations.  

In both cases, Ms. Tett writes, the rituals and symbols were part of a “shared cognitive map,” one designed by biases and assumptions held in common. For all their globe-trotting and polyglot panache, the financiers were no less insular than Tajik matrons. They were, she says, a close-knit tribe “with little external scrutiny” who “could not see whether their creations were spinning out of control”—which they were, as the financial collapse of 2008 was to confirm. Because they shared such a strong “creation myth” about the benefits of novel instruments—such as collateralized debt obligations and other financial confections that brought markets crashing down—they needed someone in their midst who could see the “blind spots” they could not see for themselves."