Tricky Times

Navigating the Messy Middle of Change

A 2025 Management Book of the Year finalist, 'Tricky Times' is an essential guide for understanding the challenges, opportunities and leadership needed during uncertain times. Leading corporate anthropologist Jitske Kramer masterfully shows us how to navigate change – as an individual, team or organization.

In Tricky Times, Jitske Kramer unravels the complexities of transformations and cultural change. Fascinated by the myriad changes impacting our world and universally fierce emotions they are arousing, best-selling Dutch author and anthropologist Jitske Kramer set out to unravel the patterns of this liminal time. In clear language she describes the opportunities, the dangers and the lures during major changes. When wild stories confound, tricksters continually toy with truth and power relations shift.

We are lost in a trickster culture. We hail the best spinners of truth as heroes and now have Jack Sparrows as CEOs and Pinocchios as political leaders. Tricky Times is an unsettling book that will have you seeing society, and yourself, with fresh eyes. A book of insightful interpretations and personal views. Sharing lessons Jitske learned on her travels in diverse cultures. Offering a vision on the kind of leadership needed in liminal times. And an urgent book, because we can and must do better. We have work to do.

Navigating through uncertain times is a tricky business. It takes fearlessness and faith. Taking the knowledge and tools of anthropology, this book delves into the patterns and dynamics of major change. Anthropology has the ability to illuminate and lay bare things we knew but could not yet put into words. In Tricky Times; Navigating the Messy Middle of Change, Jitske Kramer unravels the complexities of cultural change. Focusing particularly on what happens in the uncomfortable, turbulent, precarious and messy middle—when we know we cannot go back to how things were, but also can’t yet clearly picture what’s to come.

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