Identifying the self- acknowledged bare-ass monkeys

The Book The Ape in The Corner Office — Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us ( Crown Business, New York pp. 341, $ 35) The author Richard Conniff The Planet of the Apes is with us, according to Richard Conniff, and has been ever since we swung down from the trees and got rid of the tail that made it hard to sit in an exeutive Aeron chair. Most of us don’t like to think that much of our behaviour is predicated on our being not that far from our simian ancestors, he says. It’s unsettling for most people, but some business people are “entirely prepared to liken themselves to bare-ass monkeys. They just want to be dominant, predatory bare- ass monkeys.” Ape takes us on to the executive floor of huge U.S. corporations, and demonstrates the pettiness, the posturing, the aggressiveness, the subservience and quest for dominance observed among lower primates. During a kangaroo court meeting at Intel, the account of which Conniff borrows from Tim Jackson’s Inside Intel, the behaviour of the senior executives leaves your head shaking. But they are at the top of the corporate tree, the alphas. While Ape is exceptionally well written ( Conniff is a journalist), it gets tiresome reading account after account comparing business people to monkeys. It’s only in the nine- page epilogue that he asks, and answers, the question arising from the previous 300 pages: “What are some of the key strategies of highly effective apes?” The book, however, is thought provoking. Business leaders don’t do what they do for the money, they do it because they are alphas, and it’s their destiny to rule over all the little monkeys.