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.These two symbols gave him acertain amount of authority that differentiated him fromthe 'nigger' in the same city.Big business sets up a host of built-in status symbols.Alarge drug firm in Philadelphia earned enough money48WHEN SPACE IS INVADEDthrough the sale of tranquillizers to put up a new buildingthat would house their rapidly expanding staff.The build-ing could have been designed with any number of officesand workrooms, but quite deliberately the company set upa built-in status symbol in the offices.The corner officeson the very highest floor were reserved for the very high-est personnel.The corner offices on the floor below werereserved for the next rank of top personnel.Lesser, butstill important executives had offices without cornerwindows.The rank below this had offices withoutwindows at all.Below them were the men with par-titioned cubicles for offices.These had frosted-glass wallsand no doors and the next rank down had clear-glass cubicles.The last rank had desks out in an openroom.Rank was arrived at by an equation whose elementsconsisted of time on the job, importance of the job,salary and degree.The degree of MD, for example,gave any man, no matter what his salary or time onthe job, the right to have a closed office.PhDs mightor might not have such an office, depending on otherfactors.Within this system there was room for many otherelements to demonstrate degree of status.Curtains, rugs,wooden desks as opposed to metal desks, furniture,couches, easy chairs, and of course, secretaries, all set upsub-hierarchies.An important element in this set-up was the contrastbetween the frosted-glass cubicles and the clear-glasscubicles.By allowing the world to see in, the manin the clear-glass cubicle was automatically reduced inimportance or rank.His territory was that muchmore open to visual invasion.He was that much morevulnerable.49BODY LANGUAGEHow to Be a LeaderOpening of territory and invasion of territory are impor-tant functions of rank in business.What about leadership ?By what tricks or by what body language does a leaderassert himself?Back in the years just before World War II, CharlieChaplin did a motion picture called The Great Dictator.As with all of Chaplin's movies, it was filled with bits ofbody language, but the most delightful sequence was onethat took place in a barber shop.Chaplin as Hitler and Jack Oakie as Mussolini areshown getting shaves in adjacent chairs.The scene centresaround the attempts of each to put himself in a dominantposition to the other in order to assert his superior leader-ship.Trapped within their chairs, lathered and draped,there is only one way to achieve dominance, and that is bycontrolling the height of the chairs.They can reach downand jack them up.The higher man wins, and the scenerevolves around the attempt of each to jack his own chairto a higher position.Dominance through height is a truism that works fromthe animal kingdom to man.Among wolves, recentstudies have shown that the pack leader asserts his domi-nance by wrestling a yearling or subordinate wolf to theground and standing over him.The subordinate expresseshis subservience by crawling beneath the pack leader andexposing his throat and belly.It becomes a matter of whois higher.The same positioning occurs with humans.We are allaware of the tradition of abasement before a king, beforeidols, before altars.Bowing and scraping in general are allvariations of superiority or inferiority by height.They5°WHEN SPACE IS INVADEDare all actions to point out the body-language message,'You are higher than I am, therefore you are dominant.'A young man I know, well over six feet tall, wasextremely successful in business because of his ability toshow empathy for his associates.Observing him inaction in some successful business transactions I becameaware that whenever possible he stooped, sloped his body,or sat, in order to allow his associate to achieve dominanceand feel superior.In family searings the dominant member, usually thefather, will hold sway at the head of a rectangle table or anoval table [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]