All In A Day's Work

It's a jungle out there, folks. And it's a savanna in here, adds Nigel Nicholson, a London Business School professor who applies evolutionary psychology-the science that explains human behavior by reconstructing how our ancestors thought and acted-to management. In short, Nicholson says the reason employees sometimes act like so many Neanderthals is because they are (and so are you).

Some of this book won't go down too easily. Nichol-son maintains, for instance, that there are inescapable inequalities between men and women. Still, his explanations of why entrepreneurs so often seem to adore risk and ignore danger ring true, and Nicholson's writing is consistently lucid and witty.

Executive Instinct (Broadway Books) is available at Amazon.com.

		What Are You Reading? First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, $25) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman "I think I run my 2½-year-old company in a very different fashion than the multinational companies I've been accustomed to working for [are run]. This book is an affirmation that my business methods are natural. It's an affirmation that it's OK to do things in nontraditional ways." -Cecilia Pagkalinawan, 32, CEO of Boutique Y3K Inc., New York City

This article was originally published in the January 2001 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: All In A Day's Work.