The science of cloning is alive and well – in the workplace. If you don’t subscribe to this, look around you. Signs are everywhere: employees inadvertently echoing their bosses’ fashion statements – from computer briefcases to tweed jackets, the secretary clipping her vowels or slurring her consonants the way the top gun does, junior executives taking up the same sport their chief plays.
Cubicle Culture
There are two ways clones are reproduced in a company: managers hire versions of themselves or the staff voluntarily take it upon themselves to ape the boss. It’s logical, really. Employees may reinvent themselves out of ambition (The CEO has a Lexus. I must lease one, too!), survival, or because of some primal need to belong (I can’t be one of the boys unless I play golf!).
Managers, on the other hand, hire their own carbon copies for more predictable motives: comfort, fear of disparity, conceit (Why, this person is just like me! I bet he’s more efficient and capable than anyone else!), or self-love (I’m such a great person time I wouldn’t mind spending twice the time with myself!).
The Road to the Executive Suite
Experts think the similarity between the clone and the cloned is ignorance about the real recipe for success. Not knowing why Staff A is stuck with being an underling while Staff B went on to become junior partner, corporate newbies practice quack cures on themselves. They use Cross pencils, work out manically to become a size two, tote about Zippo lighters, or even get wife number two, just in case any of those things actually had something to do with propelling one to the executive suite.
Just how far-spread is this outbreak of two-legged facsimiles in the office? Very. It’s more “out there” than you believe. In fact, this cubicle culture of cloning explains why all lawyers seem to look alike, why you find it impossible to tell one hairstylist from another, and why the wealthy always seem to gravitate towards the same leisure zones – the Hamptons, for example, or Europe for the summer.
