Snooping Around Marissa Mayer’s House
If I could do an ethnography with anyone in the entire world, I would pick Marissa Mayer.
A lot of people would probably pick Steve Jobs if that was still possible, and in general, tech leaders would be a popular answer because they are trendy, successful, and control a lot of the world’s culture and resources. I, like everyone else, would be delighted to have a peek into these people’s gigantic brains, but an opportunity for an ethnography would be much more revealing than an ordinary dinner conversation and is not an opportunity to be wasted.
Marissa Mayer is a singular person. The point of an ethnography with her would be more than getting really good advice on how to accomplish things. Ethnographies are much more powerful. They are a window into how an individual lives and the influences that have made them what they are, which, more than anything they could say, reveal what they want and what motivates them. That is what really defines a person. Design researchers will tell stories of how what people say in research interviews contradicts what is revealed in the ethnography; for example, when people say they eat healthy food and then their pantries are filled with candy and Cheetos. They’re not usually lying — people just have selective memories or project what they wish were true onto their current circumstances. A person cannot live their entire life in a way that does not correlate to who they are (doing so is fodder for things like the Bourne trilogy), and the traces they leave in the environment they create for themselves reveal what that is.
I would want to find out about what makes Marissa Mayer who she is — what things from her life have influenced how she thinks or what about the way she lives her life makes her who she is. I’m probably just morbidly curious about a controversial, powerful woman, and having her tell me isn’t enough. In an ethnography, the researcher is trying to understand something they don’t quite understand, like why someone would want to use a particular product, or how people perform certain tasks like pack their refrigerator. An ethnography is a way of understanding better how human-driven systems work and the individuals driving them.
There are certainly other powerful female leaders, like Sheryl Sandberg and Aung San Suu Kyi. Mayer, though, does not try to fit into a mold or fulfill any expectation others have of her, and yet is extremely successful. As an ambitious female, I find her admirable but terrifying. She has distanced herself from them and from traditional “feminism” and made professional decisions for the good of her companies without worrying about what critics will think. She does not act like she is walking a line of any kind. She just does her job, whether people hate her more than her male counterparts or not. This attitude is admirable but must be tough to maintain sometimes. Of course, part of the job of a tech executive is to be hated, but it more difficult for females to ascend to and maintain high-power positions and she just doesn’t seem to notice. I don’t understand how she does it, and knowing more about the parts of her life and mind she doesn’t talk or probably even think frequently about would reveal a great deal about how she has achieved so much and what motivates her to do so.
Ordinary people are interesting. There are people in my life that I respect very much (teachers, mentors, bosses, peers) into whose lives I’d love a glimpse. I think the vestiges of transformation — the influences that cause people to develop the qualities we respect, or those things that make us human are important. Marissa Mayer was once a goofy undergrad too (or was she? She may have been one of those driven and precocious people). The vestiges of transformation from an ordinary person into a capable leader are typically present in the lives of the transformed because humans are palimpsests of the cultural milieu they live in and the individual experiences they have accumulated. Seeing what caused that transformation and how it progressed is better insight than an interview. I would like to see the evidence of her transformation in Marissa Mayer’s life.
I would also be interested to see where Mayer is headed, but that would require return trips. She is young and has a lot of career left, although she has already accomplished so much, but figuring out what comes next is outside the scope of such research. The researcher could guess, but it wouldn’t be as interesting or definitive as knowing what really happened. For Mayer, we know her public, professional life very well, but seeing that continued change in character and value as she progresses even farther would be interesting too. I guess what I’m saying is, in addition to wanting dinner advice and an ethnography, I kind of want to be friends with Marissa Mayer but definitely for the wrong reason. So until the autobiography comes out, I will settle for reading the interviews and imagining what information an ethnography would uncover.
And now the requisite question bounced back to you, Dear Reader: who would you get to know if given the unrestricted access of an ethnography?
