Jane Goodall on Leadership Lessons from Primates
ReThinking
TED
4.7 • 626 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever felt your work colleagues sometimes act like animals? In this conversation, Jane and Adam take that idea literally, exploring what Jane's expertise on chimp behavior can teach us about how humans relate and organize. With grace and wisdom, Jane shares primal insights on how we acquire and keep power, the difference between being a leader and being a boss, and the role of patience in making discoveries and making a career. Find the transcript for this episode at go.ted.com/T4GTscript3
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, work lifers, it's Adam. |
| 0:02.3 | We're getting close to the premiere of season four of our show, |
| 0:05.2 | but today I've got another conversation for you |
| 0:07.2 | from our taken for granted series |
| 0:08.9 | of unscripted interviews about rethinking assumptions. |
| 0:12.8 | This year and last, |
| 0:13.9 | many of us have been forced to communicate |
| 0:15.3 | with our closest colleagues and friends from a distance. |
| 0:18.5 | And that skill is not uniquely human. |
| 0:26.9 | Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, and friends from a distance. And that skill is not uniquely human. This is the distance greeting. And that simply means this is me, this is Jane. |
| 0:32.1 | Yep. This is Jane Goodall, legendary ethologist, an expert on primate behavior. Jane greeted us from her home in the |
| 0:39.7 | UK over Zoom. It's an unnatural habitat for a person who usually spends most of her time outdoors. |
| 0:47.3 | More than 60 years ago, Jane started her career studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, along with |
| 0:53.3 | anthropologist Louis Leakey. |
| 0:55.4 | She famously immersed herself with wild chimps and made groundbreaking discoveries about how |
| 0:59.9 | primates behave and communicate. It turns out that we have a lot more in common with apes than we |
| 1:04.8 | realize. And by observing their actions and interactions, I think we can learn a lot about leadership, |
| 1:10.6 | status, and culture |
| 1:11.7 | among humans. |
| 1:15.6 | I'm Adam Grant, and this is taken for granted by podcast with the TED Audio Collective. |
| 1:20.6 | I'm an organizational psychologist. |
| 1:22.8 | My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live. |
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