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Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

It's an undeniable fact of life that people make mistakes. Some make more than others. Some mistakes are costlier than others. Just ask those companies that chose to dismiss the significance of the Internet when that phenomenon first emerged. Lessons are not always learned, unfortunately, and history may be in danger of repeating itself in the shape of web 2.0. With its focus on social networking capabilities, web 2.0 has transformed the online landscape to the extent that information sharing is now the norm for multitudes of people. Many companies, however, remain pretty skeptical about the implications of welcoming social networking tools into the workplace. The openness that characterizes this development goes against established principles, especially those founded on command and control.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on scientific models in conceptualising the evolutionary bases of contemporary behaviours, and make cross‐species comparisons, to account for male managerial activities in situ in health organizations.

In the animal world, males of many species display in order to induce females to mate. Such lekking behaviour involves inter alia, strutting, puffing out, catching attention via the use of ornamental physical characteristics, exhibiting gaudily‐coloured body parts, singing or splashing, and other courting and wooing strategies. The paper applies these behavioural repertoires as an explanatory device for male‐dominant organizational lekking in a set of contemporary settings. It draws on six studies of managerial talk, appearance and behaviour in order to do so.

Within the organizational lek male managers display mainly by power dressing, positioning, and exercising power and influence via verbal and behavioural means. Social and religious mores prohibit overt sexual coupling in organizations but lekking for other rewards is nevertheless pursued by male managers. The paper explores this managerial patterning, compares it to the lekking behaviour of other species, and discusses points of comparison and departure. It shows how male managers display within various sub‐habitats, and discusses the central issues of appearance, tasks and work assignment, physical interaction structure, and talk and physiognomy.

Understanding what makes people tick via deep explanations than are customarily rendered is a vital contribution of scholarship to the practical world of management.

The evolutionary bases of contemporary behaviours, and cross‐species accounts, may prove useful paradigms for other theorists and empiricists in organizational studies, and could encourage the development of a new field that might be labeled evolutionary organizational behaviour.