Lions and tigers and bears—and you.
The office as jungle is a favorite cliché. Nature writer Richard Conniff, who has swum with piranhas in the Amazon and also authored such lighter fare as The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide, shares insights from anthropologists and animal behavioralists for this new take on an old theme. The upshot: Comparisons to penguins, hagfish, spiders, tree frogs, baboons, and cheetahs can be useful for understanding corporate cultures.
Conniff, whose work has appeared in the Smithsonian, Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, draws on wide-ranging research into multiple species and genera to address a variety of organizational factors, from hierarchy to cubicle gossip. Gossip, for instance, seems ingrained in human nature almost as "our life blood as social primates and as corporate animals," he says.
In his interpretation, survival in the twenty-first-century workplace depends greatly on understanding evolutionary processes; to that end, he challenges the standard view of the misinformed that the workplace—like the animal kingdom—is a swirl of selfishness and competition. "Nature built us to be nice," he writes.
The business world has perpetuated a "negativity bias" about social interactions, creating an environment that is "obsessed with the competition only as rivals" and that excludes any hope of cooperation. While this argument may be overstated, Conniff advocates maintaining a calm state of awareness as a way to survey situations dispassionately. A business person's future success will depend on his or her ability "to replicate ties of trust, comfort, collaboration, and hierarchy that existed only two or three generations ago, in the family, or platoon, or the neighborhood."
In addition to the animal studies, Conniff is adept at illustrating his ideas with real business cases. But while the book is replete with insightful and illuminating illustrations, it lacks an obvious coherency in structure, making it somewhat unclear to the reader how one chapter relates to another. In the end, this lack of unity lessens the strength of Conniff's argument.