Consulting
Melissa Fisher Ph.D. has over two and a half decades of experience as a business anthropologist and workplace and marketing strategist. Today, she helps clients design workplaces and organizational cultures that optimize how people navigate – and prosper – in physical and digital environments. Melissa is particularly adept at collaborating with architects, chief technology officers, CEO'S, human resource managers, corporate real estate professionals, designers, and facility managers. The expertise of these professionals, she argues, are deepened and strengthened by the cultural and socio-economic context and ethnographic methods that anthropological approaches provide. Melissa has independently consulted since 2001.
Since 2023 Melissa has been a Senior Advisor focusing on Workplace Culture and Design at Consulting and Coaching Services | CFAR, a firm with origins in the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and expertise on consulting on culture change, corporate governance, leadership, as well as strategy development and implementation; and she has been a Distinguished Principal Research Fellow at The Conference Board About Us since 2019. Prior she worked at Batten and Company, and the Cultural Discoveries Department at The online home of BBDO Worldwide - BBDO NY, both members of the Omnicom Group of Companies. She also served as a cultural and historical consultant on a number of films, including the 2014 documentary MAKERS: Women in Business as well as the 2016 Sony Classic, Equity, the first female financial thriller. Equity | Official Trailer HD (2016).
Melissa Fisher speaking at UBS with Candy Straight about Equity, the 2016 Sony Classic first female financial thriller.
Melissa’s Current Consulting Services Include:
Conduct ethnographic research to improve employee experience navigating working across digital and physical workspaces.
Work with clients to lead workplace culture change including diagnosing cultural challenges, and thinking creatively about how to create vibrant, productive, and impactful workplace culture by design.
Help organizations to develop new kinds of leaders through an innovative approach to leadership thinking and learning.
Conduct workshops to educate professionals on career building including the power of networking, and mentoring. Specialize in developing women leaders.
Develop creative strategy and brand building to help companies, brands, and people grow with purpose.
Engage in expert research and story development about business for the film industry; Engage in developmental editing with authors on books and articles.
Sample Past Projects
At CFAR, I collaborated with a team to help leaders in a new academic institution to achieve their goals by strengthening culture and improving organizational and leadership effectiveness.
At Workathon I worked as part of the editorial team that reviewed Workathon's first published report, The United States of Work, published on March 10th 2025 to coincided with the fifth anniversary of Covid-19 which accelerated the trends affecting working life (closely followed by AI).
As a business anthropologist I engaged in an ethnographic research project on the return to work among women in global finance post the pandemic. I provided recommendations for recruiting, retaining and advancing women in the industry.
At BBDO, I contributed to a marketing strategic consulting engagement to help a financial services company understand the way consumers classify, organize, and assign different meanings and special uses to specific products. My recommendations influenced the client’s creative strategy, brand positioning, and execution.
At Batten and Company, I worked on an executive visioning and workplace and marketing strategy engagement with a global mid-tier hotel to address the unmet needs of today’s traveler and hotel guests and define and implement a new set of ideas and standards, especially for women, who had been historically “lumped” into the guest cohort.
As a business anthropology consultant, I provided research and story development to actresses and producers, Alysia Reiner and Sarah Meghan Thomas, on Equity, the 2016 Sony Pictures, the first female financial thriller. I also advised on fundraising leading to over a million dollars raised to make the film by investment banker turned producer, Candy Straight.
As a business anthropologist consultant I held career and networking-focused workshops at the United States Embassy in Berlin for professional women.
