An Anthropological Lens On Leadership In Life Sciences With Bunka's Monika Sumra, Ph.D.

Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, chief editor at Life Science Leader. And today, I'm speaking with doctor Monica Sumra, founder and managing partner at Bunker Incorporated, a management consulting firm and advisor to manufacturing based organizations globally. Monica is a published author and speaker with a unique lens built on a PhD in biosocial anthropology. Her work with life sciences organization sits at the intersection of leadership, performance, and environment. By focusing on environment, Bunka helps organizations develop and set the conditions for sustainable leadership, responsibility, and results. I'm pleased to speak with Monica today about how life sciences companies can build better work environments to set themselves up for success, how to bring quantitative analysis to corporate culture, and how the tools of anthropology can be used to drive efficiencies in key functional areas like manufacturing. Monica, thank you so much for being here. It is my pleasure. Thank you so much for for having having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to speak with you. I think you bring an interesting perspective that, we haven't heard on the business of biotech, and I I wanna maybe just start there with your background. I mentioned you received a PhD, biosocial anthropology from the University of Toronto. How did you become initially interested in in this field? So very good question. And for me, it's always really been I've already always been interested about how people learning how people actually behave when the stakes are real, not how we sing, we behave, or how we design systems really assuming how people will behave. So these are these are things that are I was always interested in. And so anthropology really gave me a a way to really study humans and context. Right? That's what anthropologists do. And the the great thing about anthropology is that it doesn't separate people from environments. And what we look at as anthropologists in any sort of social context is, you know, how does power, hierarchy, uncertainty, and really meaning, you know, shape behavior over time. And that's really what made me very, very interested in it. And once you start seeing behavior that way, a lot of what we call failure really starts to look more like adaptation, over time. And for me, that's the whole idea of being interested in that was just interesting, actually, by human beings just more generally because I happen to be one. So it it's it's it's just really going deeper and and and really understanding my own ways of thinking, challenging myself, and really becoming that individual who really takes all these different perspectives into consideration, you know, before coming to a conclusion. So that's really what got me interested in it, as I progressed. Have you always been a kind of student of human behavior, or do you you know, was that something, like, even as, you know, as a child or or a young …