The Fall of the Alphas: The New Beta Way to Connect, Collaborate, Influence—and Lead

by Dana Ardi

The new model for business success: replace top-down Alpha management with collaboration, connection, and increased job satisfaction—the Beta model


The Fall of the Alphas explores the sweeping changes taking place in the corporate and social cultures of today's most successful organizations. Utilizing years of advising companies of all sizes, hypergrowth startups to Fortune 500 company management teams, Dana Ardi identifies a pivotal evolutionary moment: the decline of the traditional Alpha-model (the top-down, male-dominated, authoritarian, corner-office hierarchy that has ruled organizational landscapes for so long), as it is replaced by collaboration, connectivity, and the sharing of power. As Ardi persuasively demonstrates, in the new Beta organization, it is the team players, the sage advisors, the network experts, the trusted assistants, and the communications facilitators who are coming to the fore, as savvy managers learn to lead through influence and collaboration rather than authority and competition. From technology behemoths to small and medium-sized businesses, Beta has become the new paradigm for success in today's challenging market.

With insight and practical guidance, Dana Ardi shows how any business organization or team can re-organize from Alpha to Beta—and be more effective, flexible, and profitable

Genres: Business

239 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Dana Ardi, Ph.D. is a thought leader and expert in the fields of talent management, organizational design, recruiting, assessment, and leadership. She is the founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors.

Dr. Ardi has served as a Partner/Managing Direcor at CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners, and was a Partner at Flatiron Partners. Earlier in her career, she was an operating executive at R. R. Donnelly & Sons and at McGraw-Hill. She also has a background managing and leading executive search firms.

Dr. Ardi has a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a masters degree and doctorate in education from Boston College. She divides her time between New York City and California.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine book. Really could have been a short article, and stretching it to a whole book thins the entire point. Yes, collaboration is great and is happening more and more in successful organizations. Yes, the "alpha male" mentality skews towards toxicity and stubbornly dumb metrics of success. But this "alpha male" mentality is not collapsing. If anything, it's ballooning. This bubble may burst eventually, but it's too compelling to too many to simply imaging that being a tough, brash, cruel "alpha" leads to success. This book does not change the paradigm, and fundamentally misses the mark.

[Mike Jorgensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book, but not quite compelling. The author tends to confuse her desire for beta culture with the inevitability of it. The truth is that both alpha and beta work cultures have always existed and both will likely continue to exist. Perhaps beta will be the norm for millennials, but it seems like the pendulum will swing back to alpha at some point.

[Yoo-Yoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with her fundamental premise that collaboration and flat structures are the way to encourage innovation in today's companies. However, on several occasions, she says something that harkens back to an earlier era - something sexist, something colonialist, and that throws me off. So the book is both very relevant yet mildly outdated at the same time.

For example, on page 38: "the advice I give to people to play to their strengths or, as I like to put it, 'Stick to your knitting, baby.'" Really? That's something men would say to women as a put-down when they tried to do something other than traditionally female tasks. And Ms. Ardi likes to say that to other women?

But on the plus side, she has insights that it wasn't until the 1960s/70s that work was seen as more than "just a way to earn a decent living, but as a way to make a lasting difference" (p. 69). We've grown up with that idea now, but it has been a long time in development.

p75 "As for the status of males in a bonobo group, it's determined not by strength or aggressiveness, but by the status of their mothers. ... if you don't have to be an aggressive, physically intimidating, chest-pounding Alpha male to lead a pack of bonobos, then just maybe you don't need to be one to lead a pack of people, either."

p77 "the traits and skills necessary to succeed cannot be defined or quantified by sex."

p89 "Beta creates networks rather than silos. Beta deemphasizes secrecy, and focuses instead on the pooling of information, ideas, and opinions. Beta emphasizes teamwork over individual competition. ... At its core, Beta is about three things: communication, collaboration, and curation."

p.96 "You can't just say you care what people think. You have to mean it. Younger people today demand authenticity from their leaders."

[Austin Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Youtube review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5F1r...

I received an ARC of this book.

I need to come back and review this one in more detail - I took my time and made a lot of notes on the Kindle.

I'm extremely sympathetic to the author's goals. She wants to see hierarchical, command-and-control, top down organizational structures replaced with collaborative, flatter organizations. She also wants people to be able to choose career paths that match their gifts, instead of having to pursue advancement beyond one's abilities or ambitions.

That's the good part. The bad part is that every business book, every sociology, history, economics book - every popular nonfiction book - has to have a dramatic and expansive metanarrative that changes the way we view the whole world. Think Malcolm Gladwell, or going all the way back to Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization". It's not enough to talk about one's own discipline. We now expect economics books to have dazzling sociological insight, &cet.

This works if you're particularly erudite, or even just idiosyncratic and esoteric. Basically, if your thesis is a ready-made TED talk.

But many legitimate and interesting theses aren't well served by the rhetorical fancy-pants treatment, and this is one of them.

For instance, even if I shared the author's cosmology I would not find her stories of a time in evolutionary prehistory when gender relations were radically egalitarian plausible. Her suggestion that the Allies prevailed over the Axis because the fascist Axis were 'hopelessly Alpha' as opposed to the more Allies, who showed more 'beta' spirit in things like Rosie the Riveter is naive at best.

I also wonder if the phenomenon of flatter corporate structure is a function of size. The case study of two fiction corporations - one Alpha and one Beta - that opens the book seems like a contrast of a large corporation and a mid-sized one. No where in the book are the challenges of realizing a Beta culture across a large corporation addressed - the principles seem to work better in a single division of a large company.

There's been a lot of discussion in the tech news recently about whether Google's famed '20% time' is still around. Google still has an innovation culture, but it seems to be less democratic. In fact, they look to be borrowing a page from Jack Welch!

http://qz.com/116196/google-engineers...

Also, there's been significant discussion recently about whether the lavish benefits offered by tech companies like Facebook and Google are helpful to employees, or whether they represent an overweening paternalism. The Fall of the Alphas praises such benefits without question.

Not only did the book not cover some significant questions I had, there were points where it lapsed into the patois of the corporate consulting world.

In the end, I was very impressed by the author and the goal of the book. It's a worthy one, worth striving for.

[SoonGuan · Rating 3 out of 5]

much of this book revolves around how the traditional Alpha models of management of businesses are slowly losing relevance and competitive advantages compared to new Beta organisations. The idea of how Beta > Alpha gets reiterated throughout the book and it gets rather repetitive towards the end . Nonetheless, still an enjoyable read

[Allisonperkel · Rating 3 out of 5]

10 page article stretched out to 200 pages however the topic is interesting, the author clearly knows her stuff and the ideas and practices, I believe, are the correct path forward. Or maybe I should say the beta path, as described by Mrs. Ardi, is how I tend to operate.

[Jonathan Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book with a realistic look at how the new generation of business men and women should operate today. I will save this and reference it as necessary throughout my career.