Zoo management

Dylan Evans finds business to be a jungle in Managing the Human Animal by Nigel Nicholson

Saturday February 10, 2001
The Guardian

Managing the Human Animal
Nigel Nicholson
310pp, Texere, £16.99

In the past few years, evolutionary psychology (or EP as it is known) has given the chattering classes a lot to chatter about, but hasn't had much impact in the world of business. However, that may be about to change. A new book by Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, promises to transform EP from a debating topic into a practical tool for management.

According to Nicholson, executives have been misled by decades of utopian management education. They have been encouraged to believe that they can re-engineer their companies in any way they want, eliminating turf wars and sexism along the way. Such fantasies, however, take no account of the enduring features of human nature, which stubbornly resists the new visions imposed upon it. No wonder so many great new management ideas fail as soon as they move from the business school to the boardroom.

The solution, argues Nicholson, is to construct a new approach to management based on EP. As the first truly scientific account of human nature, EP can teach managers how to work with the grain rather than against it.

Take the emotions, for example. A lot of previous management thinking downplayed the role of the emotions in decision-making. In line with Plato and a whole host of western thinkers since, emotions were seen as at best harmless luxuries and at worst outright obstacles to rational action. Only recently have managers begun to realise that emotional intelligence is vital to business success. EP provides a firm scientific basis for this new trend in management thinking, seeing emotions as complex mechanisms that can enhance rationality in the right circumstances. As Nicholson explains in a fascinating chapter on "playing the rationality game", managers who view emotions - in themselves or in their workforce - as mere obstacles are wasting one of their greatest potential resources.

Nicholson's prose is racy and down-to-earth, and he illustrates the main ideas of EP and their relevance to the business world with well-chosen examples. The story of how Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank, for example, is put to good effect as an object lesson in the psychobiology of risk-taking. Leeson's desperate loss-chasing in his last bout of trading no longer seems quite so bizarre when placed in the context of biology; as Nicholson notes, zoologists have often observed that the closer an animal gets to the survival boundary, the more chances it will take to secure vital resources.

Such comparisons with animal behaviour will no doubt enrage those who think that all scientific claims should be hedged with multiple caveats and disclaim ers. On the other hand, for those who are fed up with the repeated calls for "safe science" and other forms of political correctness, Nicholson's pragmatic bent is refreshing. In fact, his approach resembles that of the practising scientist much more than the sanitised prescriptions of the safe-science brigade do. He takes a theory that has been neither effectively established nor conclusively refuted, and advises managers to try it out. A theory may sometimes be tested more decisively in the crucible of business than in the university laboratory.

EP may not get tested at all any more, unless it is used to shape policy and corporate strategy. There is currently a small but vociferous group of academics who proclaim that EP is so fundamentally flawed that further testing is superfluous. It can, moreover, lead you to become a genetic determinist and, even worse, a reductionist. The very possibility of such a terrible fate is enough to strike fear into the minds of many liberal intellectuals, and dissuade them from putting EP to further scientific test. Thankfully, however, these philosophical worries are not usually uppermost in the average manager's mind. Executives are more often worried about more mundane matters, such as the figures on the bottom line. And so, even if EP is denied a fair hearing in the dining rooms of the intelligentsia, it may get a better chance in the boardroom.