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The Ape in the Corner Office : Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us
Richard Conniff
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.
Crown
September 2005
352 pages ISBN: 140005219X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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?
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