Incorporating Sources

1)     Regarding employee’s time, Malcolm Malloby argues that the work week should be shorter in his essay The Five Hour Week. “Under the current model, employees don’t maximize their time,” he says (11). Malloby’s argument points to a larger trend in corporate culture that I will detail now…

2)     Many people have long thought monkeys would make good bosses because they make everything silly and fun, adding an air of hilarity to the workplace. Janet Hauser, a primatologist at the University of California, says this would be a terrible idea. “Monkeys hate schedules,” she says (33). As I will point out, schedules are extremely necessary in corporate culture, making such a setting a bad fit for monkeys. Monkeys as bosses, Hauser says, “is just stupid” (184).

3)     Just as monkeys have no role in the workplace, neither do pirates. Justin Lacer, a historian at George Mason University, describes pirates’ behavior as “essentially individualistic” (33). Certainly such individualistic behavior would be at odds with the emphasis on collaboration and interaction that most workplaces value.

4)     While some animals are born with clever defense mechanisms, the hooded pitouhi bird of New Guinea cleverly generates its own defense. The bird, according to ornithologist Jack Spiers, wards off predators by ingesting a beetle that gives the bird an extraordinarily bad smell. “You wouldn’t eat it either,” Spiers jokes in his description of the bird (Hooded Pitouhis 17). This ability to develop its own defense mechanism is rarely seen in nature…