The Ape in the Corner Office

This is an example of taking animal analogies and evolutionary theory a step too far:

One afternoon on the television show "Cheers," Cliff Clavin was explaining the "Buffalo Theory" to his buddy Norm. "Well ya see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."

We're kind of like the dog that caught the bus. Now what are we going to do with the bus?

Boston Scientific CEO James Tobin, after putting his company $11 billion in debt to win a bidding war for medical device maker Guidant.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals. God help the world if writers ever took control.

John Steinbeck

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), Do What You Will (1929)

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate [except Homo sapiens] habitually destroys members of his own species.

Anthony Storr, Human Destructiveness (Morrow 1975)

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

Plotinus (in Porphyry's Enneads, c. 250-270 A.D.)
I actually think he greatly overstated our position. John Kennedy

Top management is supposed to be a tree full of owls—hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest....
Robert Townsend

I could not get far enough down the food chain to talk to him. I had to grunt like an ape to keep the conversation going.
Alan Davies, British comedian

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) Anglo-Irish dramatist, critic

If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Will Cuppy (1884 - 1949) U.S. writer, critic

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) U.S. essayist, poet, naturalist

A cat will look down to a man. A dog will look up to a man. But a pig will look you straight in the eye and see his equal.
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) English statesman, author

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
Pericles (495BC - 429BC) Greek statesman

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) English statesman, author

You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.
U.S. President Bill Clinton, describing a modified piece of legislation, 1996.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle

We ride through life on the beast within us.
Luigi Pirandello (1867 - 1936) Italian playwright, novelist, short-story writer

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly.

Animals give us solutions to problems that are the product of evolution. They are the results of experiments that have been performed without bias or prejudice for millions of years.

Sears, Roebuck chairman Arthur Martinez addressing his top executives, circa 1990

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Philosopher Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)

CUNNING, n. The faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or person from a strong one. It brings its possessor much mental satisfaction and great material adversity. An Italian proverb says: "The furrier gets the skins of more foxes than asses."
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914) US journalist, short-story writer

This is like the marriage of two porcupines. They will have to go about it very carefully.”

It’s like being the pig in the minefield … An advertising executive, on bringing new ideas to Microsoft and hoping to come out alive.

There is a tendency to put cocker spaniels on compensation committees, not Doberman pinschers.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Financial analysts in pinstriped suits don’t like being compared to bare-ass monkeys.

We were sort of a couple of roosters walking around a table, trying to figure out who was better than the other guy. In those days, I was driving a Porsche and he was driving a Mazda. So he really didn't have a claim to fame.

A sales and marketing executive on his job interview with Larry Ellison, before joining Oracle in 1982.

... working for Larry Ellison was like riding a tiger. No matter how wild or dangerous the ride, you had to keep clinging to the tiger's back because if you fell off, the tiger would eat you.

We’ve all been so busy, we’re like a Chihuahua trying to bury a bone on a marble floor.

We admire our senior executives in the way that a black dog sticks faithfully by its beggar in the tube, even though he may be maniacal, lice-ridden, or schizophrenic. We blind ourselves to it, but our nose tells us what the world thinks of them. We have observed more closely than others the self-abasement and daily cruelty of which they are capable. And yet still we walk to heel.

An aide's advice to subordinates of Sanford Weil, when he was the temperamental CEO of Citigroup.

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.

When it comes to detecting and responding to danger, the brain must hasn’t changed much. In some ways we are emotional lizards. I am quite confident in telling you that studies of fear reactions in rats tell us a great deal about how fear mechanisms work in our brains as well.

... this man was a rather loyal and servile lieutenant (his Rorschach responses included poodles, an earthworm, and dissected testicles) ...

It is the art of the primate ethologist to penetrate through the grotesqueness and locate the fellow being.

Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.

Man is the only animal that esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites

Once you’ve seen chimps in action and thought about evolutionary psychology, the way you look at workplace life will forever change. Much more than people consciously realize, workplaces are full of subtle jockeying and constant gamesmanship.

A professor receiving tenure at a leading university, a politician winning an election, or a CEO increasing market share may satisfy the same underlying drive for status as being the alpha male in a chimp community.

As soon as we study animals … we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.