NEW BOOK
“The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us,” by Richard Conniff, Crown Business, $25
Mr. Conniff takes us inside the workplace jungle and introduces us to a number of its inhabitants, including alphas, alpha wannabes, monkey-see-monkey-do workers, command-and-control predators and lone wolves. Using the societal backdrop of the jungle as his metaphor, he shows us how inhabitant interaction can create tolerance, conflict or cooperation.
One of the best analogies he draws between the animal kingdom and the workplace deals with fear. At work, people tend to think of the downside of their actions first. They are often fearful of saying or doing the wrong thing. They want someone’s approval before taking a risk.
When faced with command-and-control predators, people acting out of fear become monkey-see-monkey-do workers. Those who face fear by making decisions (i.e. empowerment) show the predators their value to the firm. If the predators ignore that value, retention will be a problem for the firm.
NEW BOOK
“Success: Advice for Achieving Your Goals From Remarkably Accomplished People,” edited by Jena Pincott, Random House Reference, $14.95
If you want to inspire yourself for something important, jump-start your day, quickly recover from a setback or just make it to 5 o’clock, the quotes from this book do the job.
Here are a few of my favorites:
On success:
“Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.”
–Gustave Flaubert, writer
“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
–Andrew Carnegie, industrialist
On setbacks:
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? Double your failure rate. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you’ll find success.”
–Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
