Humour

Dominion of the alpha male

T A Balasubramanian’s take on an alpha male’s hegemony over his tribe.

It is time to return for another dose of tangential tales mixed with arcane wisdom, served up by the inimitable Dr Don Jong, even as he glides curiously into the cloudy world of Bobo Jitter, the discontented CIO of Bazooka Company. Fondly known as The Oddfather because of the devious insights he offers, Dr Jong is a wily wanderer in technology’s unpredictable bylanes.

“Well, well, Bobo, you seem to be getting too—what is the nice word for this—fidgety—today, eh? So what is eating into your heart, if I may ask?” says Dr Jong, smiling as he picks up his pipe.

“You were late, Doc,” says Bobo, walking around nervously, tapping his watch. “Over five minutes.”

“Ah, please accept my deepest apologies for holding you up. I see that it has made you tense, eh?”

“Must be a carry-over from my work life, Doc. Let me tell you of a recent incident at Bazooka that shook me up. Our beloved CEO, Bazooka Zinca, or Bazoo, as we call him in private, has a grand idea hitting him every now and then, so he follows his favourite routine, which is usually to summon me and our CFO, Fin Fina, for an impromptu meeting in his office late in the evening. It is often this way because the grand idea is usually something that I have to execute, while Fina has to find the means to finance it.”

“So, he has important news to convey, your CEO?”

“No, not always. Mostly, he lets Fin Fina and me just sit in his reception area, waiting for as much as an hour, while he talks on the phone.”

“Perhaps a matter of some urgency distracts him every time?”

“Matter of urgency? It never seems to embarrass him in the least that most of the conversation—at least the parts that we could hear—was complete nonsense—personal calls about his son getting into a cricket team at school, and so on. Very late last Friday night, Fin Fina and I were rushed into his office in time to watch him dial up his real estate agent. After over 45 minutes of listening to him negotiate the purchase of a property in Bangalore, Fina reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile phone and dialled Bazoo’s direct number. Our beloved boss apologised profusely to his real estate agent as he had to put him on hold, then picked up the ringing line. ‘Hello,’ he said irritably, to which Fina replied, ‘This is your CFO. I quit,’ then hung up and calmly walked out.”

“Ah, so your CFO had reached his limit of deflation, eh?”

“Limit of what?”

“Deflation. Let me see how this can be expressed. You have in Bazoo the classic case of an Ego Royale—a business chief who has an ego so large that he does not care what happens to the egos of those reporting to him. Many hard-driving managers like Bazoo do not think twice about keeping people waiting, out of a distorted sense of their own importance. So when they deal with their subordinates, they cannot imagine that they may be accidentally deflating another ego, possibly bigger than their own.”

“Well, Doc, no one enjoys being reminded of his or her subordinate position.”

“Quite so, Bobo, Ego Royales are always easy to spot in any setting. Part and parcel to this character flaw is the need to constantly signal one’s importance. For instance, Ego Royales do not make their own phone calls—their secretaries do it for them—even their cell phone calls. Once the secretary reaches the person, she says—‘Mr Royale is calling for you. Please hold.’ Then Mr Royale keeps the callee waiting on the line for several minutes before he picks up. This is because big executives fed on the idea of their own divinity are fond of manipulating time and its availability as a kind of negative status symbol. The Royales believe that the more time you appear to have to spare, the worse off you appear to be—you are instantly branded as a time-to-spare Minion. Through a conspicuous pretence of having no free time, Mr Royale can signal the value of his time and thus himself. Wasting other people’s time without spending a moment of his or her own, clearly establishes the pecking order and no self-respecting senior executive would be caught dead with a hole in his or her schedule.”

“Wow, Doc. That is a whole new game that blows me away, I must admit.

But Mr Royale here has just lost his CFO of many years of experience.”

“Truly so, my boy. As you have noticed in Fina’s astounding actions, the damage that can be caused by senior executives whose egos have run out of control is clear. But you may want to think about this—the Ego Royale and business success are often inextricably linked.”

“You mean Bazoo is good at business because he is an Ego Royale?”

“Hmm, that is not encouraging news, Bobo, yet it is almost impossible to conceive of a successful business being led by a self-deprecating man or woman with little confidence, low self-esteem and no drive.”

“I can you see that, Doc. But then, Bazoo wants to impress everyone. He wants to be seen as forceful and dynamic, even scary I admit, after seeing him use his booming voice as an instrument of devastation when he wants to make a point. At a photo session one day he turned up wearing the tie of a gentlemen’s club he had just been accepted into, simply because he wanted rivals to know he was a member of it. His picture in the annual report has to be a full page in glossy colour.

“Ego Royales like to flaunt it, my boy. This brings me to a story on the behaviour of apes.”

“Ah, the monkey story again, Doc?”

“Yes. In the jungle, the senior-most ape—with the Ego Royale that scientists call the alpha male leader—cannot be challenged by any of the younger apes. To impress his dominating presence, he occasionally stands up and glares or thumps his chest after inflating it to look as large as possible.  He obviously gets to feed first in any community meal. Junior apes in the tribe lurk on the periphery, just out of reach of those huge hairy paws.

It is as if to signal that his appetite and health is important, and the juniors can wait.”

“That is quite a story, Doc.”

“The narcissistic Ego Royale believes that he is far more valuable than anyone else in the tribe, and this is reflected in the amount of space that juniors leave around him. Now the challengers in the tribe—other adult apes with Budding Egos—quite often cannot take this kind of posturing lightly—so they quit, usually after a major show-down with the Ego Royale. You see where this is going?”

“Absolutely, Doc. I can take a hint from feedback, regardless of how it’s delivered.”

“Voila, my boy. Ego Royales need to be indulged a little—but not pampered. There is a fine line between egotism and charisma. Bazoos have to have the courage of their convictions. That can be infectious and energising. But they also need to respect—or at the very least pretend to respect—the people who work for them. Else the best apes in the tribe leave and the ones left are just head-nodders.”