How to survive in our gorilla-take-all society

Last month, an Economist’s Schumpeter column described how all leaders in our society are predominantly “gorillas”. CEOs, board members, top executives, and politicians tend to all be tall, athletic, confident, deep-voiced white males. Our human society, like the gorilla society, belongs to the silverback males who are bigger, “strike space-filling postures, produce deeper sounds, thump their chests and exude an air of physical fitness”. A large majority of bosses confirm the above-mentioned stereotype and they all (female bosses included) exude a lot of self-confidence.

The media applaud the gorillas’ meteoric careers, sometimes even regardless of what their actual performances really are. Master gorillas know how to spin their way into a top career without necessarily delivering tangible outcomes for voters or shareholders…

Alas silverback gorillas are generally douchebags, as Michael Mark Cohen would call them. They are the constant center of their troop’s attention, they make all the decisions without heeding the others, they want everyone else to submit to them. They are also very violent and don’t hesitate to kill. In a nutshell, our gorilla society really sucks…

Sadly gorillas have a promising future in our winner-take-all society. It’s all the more important to be a gorilla as society is becoming increasingly unequal. Non-gorilla types are not only more likely to miss on all leading positions but they’re also more likely to be increasingly poor and dominated.

The combined effects of globalization and digitization have made winner-take-all markets the new norm, i.e. markets in which the best performers are able to capture an increasingly large share of the rewards as the remaining competitors are left with very little. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee devoted an entire chapter of their brilliant Second Machine Age to “The biggest winners: stars and superstars” in which they explained that, because “consumers care mostly about relative performance, even a small difference in skill or effort or luck can lead to a thousand-fold or million-fold difference in earnings”. The network effects increase the winner-take-all effects as users choose products or services that other people flock to. Superstar markets are described not by the usual Bell curves, but by Pareto curves, as a small number of people reap a disproportionate share of sales. In many industries, they write, “the difference in payout between number one and second-best has widened into a canyon”.

As a result, all of our western economies have become strikingly more unequal in the past four decades. Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said on Friday she was worried the level on inequalities in the US might greatly harm the country’s economy. “The past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority,” she said.

In particular, job markets are becoming increasingly winner-take-all. The top 0.1% of US wage-earners have become outrageously wealthier while the median wage declined in the US. Top executives receive superstar compensations — the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay increased from 70 in 1990 to 300 in 2005. Indeed, companies choose to pay a premium for executives who they perceive to be the best. They make a sort of Pascal’s Wager on those executives: if they’re really good, then the gains can be gigantic for shareholders. If not, it’s no big deal. Being perceived as the best is therefore of the essence. And statistics show that those perceived as the best tend to be…. gorillas.

Are there exceptions?

• Some women have made it to leadership positions. Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s Prime Minister for 11 years without ever denying her femininity. But in fact she exploited two female archetypes to better dominate others: the mother figure to scold the ‘naughty boys’ in her cabinet and the seductress to lull them into a state of total surrender. She waged a deadly war (500 British deaths) just to prove she was super tough. The “iron lady” was no exception to the rule. Just a different-looking type of gorilla…

• French leaders often don’t look like American leaders. They can be short and certainly don’t have to be athletic. The French have a preference for short Napoleon-style presidents who hardly look like gorillas. And yet, they tend to act like male-chauvinist gorillas: they decide on their own, favor their troops, and ignore public interest. They pride themselves on being “charismatic” and exude an air of authority. No French exception after all. A mere difference in appearance…

• Valley-style entrepreneurship has proved non-gorilla nerds could make it to the top and dominate in their fields. In fact, today’s most powerful corporations were often started by entrepreneurs who did not exactly match the description of a silverback gorilla. Entrepreneurship is more of a meritocracy. It’s much harder to lull everyone into thinking you’re the best just by thumping your chest and emitting power pheromones. You have to perform and execute. It’s as close to a meritocracy as it gets. But non-gorilla entrepreneurial leaders are the exception, not the norm, and they become gorillas as they age and get to the top.

Can the system be gamed or rigged? Yes, in some ways, it can:

• We should practice our power poses, work on posture and voice and develop a more gorilla-like attitude, in other words beat the true gorillas at their own game. In one of the most successful TED talks ever, Amy Cuddy explains why power poses can change how we feel about ourselves as well as how we are perceived by others. Power poses affect our hormonal balance: they reduce the level of cortisol (the stress hormone) and increase the level of testoterone (the power hormone). The right posture inspires trust and confidence. Gorillas know how important it is to take up space and have the right body language. We need to learn from them. What have we non-gorillas got to lose? It’s certainly worth trying.

• If we’re good at something, we all have a “niche gorilla” in ourselves, which we must nurture. Let’s stop competing with gorillas on everything and start exuding confidence by developing expertise and communicating on it. As Sun Tzu reckons, a great warrior picks their battle. And as many Hollywood movies demonstrate, there are ways for non gorillas to crush the usual bullies: mastery, cunning, and humor.

I’ve always been seduced by de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted line “you are not born a woman, you become a woman”. But as hard as I try, I can hardly turn myself into a silverback gorilla. No matter how hard I work on my power poses and postures, I will never be the super testoterony type. As “stereotypes and prejudices cannot be wished away”, we who are born “outside the magic genetic circle” need to help ourselves and others project a sense of power and self-confidence. Non-gorillas should win in real life as they often do in movies.