Tired of swimming with the sharks? Fed up with that big ape down the hall? Real animals can teach us better ways to thrive in the workplace jungle.

You're ambitious and want to get ahead, but what's the best way to do it? Become the biggest, baddest predator? The proverbial 800-pound gorilla? Or does nature teach you to be more subtle and sophisticated?

Richard Conniff, the acclaimed author of The Natural History of the Rich, has survived savage beasts in the workplace jungle, where he hooted and preened in the corner office as a publishing executive. He's also spent time studying how animals operate in the real jungles of the Amazon and the African bush.

What he shows in The Ape in the Corner Office is that nature built you to be nice. Doing favors, grooming coworkers with kind words, building coalitions - these tools for getting ahead come straight from the jungle. The stereotypical Darwinian hard-charger supposedly thinks only about accumulating resources. But highly effective apes know it's often smarter to give them away. That doesn't mean it's a peaceable kingdom out there, however. Conniff shows that you can become more effective by understanding how other species negotiate the tricky balance between conflict and cooperation.

Conniff quotes one biologist on a chimpanzee's obsession with rank: "His attempts to maintain and achieve alpha status are cunning, persistent, energetic, and time-consuming. They affect whom he travels with, whom he grooms, where he glances, how often he scratches, where he goes, what times he gets up in the morning." Sound familiar? It's the same behavior you can find written up in any issue of BusinessWeek or The Wall Street Journal.

The Ape in the Corner Office connects with the day-to-day of the workplace because it helps explain what people are really concerned about: How come he got the wing chair with the gold trim? How can I survive as that big ape's subordinate without becoming a spineless yes-man? Why does being a lone wolf mean being a loser? And, yes, why is it that jerks seem to prosper - at least in the short run?

Chapter 1

Why Acting Like an Animal Comes So Easy

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.

- Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Sounds like an average day at the office, doesn't it? Compulsion, necessity, the unforgiving social hierarchy, parasites . . . Oh, and the high supply of fear. That one I could feel butterfly-fluttering in my abdomen and ant-dancing out on the fringes of my peripheral nervous system. I was standing in front of the top North American distributors for a leading European manufacturer. We had assembled at a resort in the Grand Tetons, in an area still populated by grizzly bears and gray wolves, to which I expected shortly to be thrown. I'd been asked to give a talk about how businesspeople act like animals. I was vaguely nervous.

The top baboon for the North American division, a big, bluff fellow, sat in the front row, arms folded, with his wife (blond, witty, appealing) to one side and his head of sales (short, round, ebullient) on the other. At dinner the night before I had gotten to know many of these people by first name. I recalled a quote about how businesspeople "don't like being compared to bare-ass monkeys." I took a deep breath.

Everybody in the room had heard the statistic that humans are roughly 99 percent genetically identical to chimpanzees. By some estimates, the difference between our two species may be a matter of fewer than fifty genes, out of perhaps twenty-five thousand shared in common. But hardly anyone in the business world seems to have considered what that might mean in our working lives. More often than not, managers endeavor to minimize the human, much less the animal, element and make companies hum like machines. In their own lives, individual workers also tend to treat human nature mainly as something to be overcome, by getting the hair waxed from their torsos or added to their scalps, by dressing for success, by giving at least the appearance of handling stress. (Was that the serene brow of Botox I detected on a woman in the first row? It was really too early in my talk for her to be numb with boredom.)

I asked my audience to think for a moment about how their everyday workplace behavior might be shaped by forces that are less susceptible to change-by the drives and predispositions bequeathed to us by our long evolution first as animals and later as tribal humans. By fear. By anger. By the primordial yearning for social allies and for status. Think of yourself, I suggested, as part of a primate hierarchy unconsciously following thirty-million-year-old rules for establishing dominance and submission, for waging combat and maintaining peace. Think about how the alpha, whether chimpanzee or chief executive officer, typically asserts authority with the identical language of posture, stride, lift of chin, directness of gaze, the sharp glower to quell an unruly subordinate.

The head guy in the first row started to light up at this, especially when I got to the stuff about using political maneuvering among chimpanzees as a better way to understand boardroom confrontations. He surged out of his seat when the talk was done and launched into what he called the natural history of the boardroom.

In the upper echelons at company headquarters, he said, the conference tables are circular rather than rectangular, ostensibly for a round-table atmosphere of equality. "Well, bollocks," he said. In fact, there is a distinct hierarchy, and everybody knows where everybody else stands, or sits, in it; the circular form merely makes the combat a little more open. In a week or two, he said, he'd be heading overseas for a meeting of a committee where the chairman had lately vacated his seat. "No one will say anything. But everyone will be looking at that seat and wondering who's going to take it, whether anyone will have the audacity to sit there."

"You should sit there," the head of sales ventured.

"No, I'd be like the baboon trying to rise three steps above his rank-I'd get knocked down." He was a realist, yet keen for the combativeness that would inevitably surface. "I love it," he said. "Sometimes when there's a kill about to happen, there's a moment of hesitation when people aren't sure if it's going to happen."

By now my eyes were beginning to widen.

"And then they get the scent, and they know it's going to be okay, and they know who's going to take the lead, and who's going to come in for the kill."

"It's like the Serengeti," the sales guy agreed. "The round table just makes it easier for everybody to see the kill."

"Jesus," I said.

"Don't worry," the head guy's wife interjected, taking him gently by the elbow. "I'm really in control here." And everybody laughed.

Copyright © 2005 by Richard Conniff

Tags: Business Life

About the Author

Richard Conniff's work takes him from the executive suite to a casual swim with piranhas in the Amazon, from tea in the member's dining room at the House of Lords to the driver's seat in a demolition derby. He won the 1997 National Magazine Award for his writing in Smithsonian and the 1998 Wildscreen Prize for Best Natural History Television Script for the BBC show Between Pacific Tides. His previous books include The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide and he has also written for Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and National Geographic.