Dr S Ranganathan, ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., Chennai

1. The behaviour of female praying mantis, especially ‘during and post’ mating has an
important management message for the corporate world to learn. It is reported
that, during mating, the female praying mantis used to cut the head of the partner
and would eat it fully or partially. Although such feature may not be regular but
indeed is common.
The removal of the head of the male praying mantis is understood to have no
negative effect in the mating behaviour, as the brain that is situated in the head of
the male praying mantis and is responsible only for controlling the inhibition, while
the ganglion located in the abdomen controls the movements of copulation. Both
functions independently and separately.
When the head is chopped off, the male praying mantis therefore will lose the
inhibitions and involve deeply in the process of mating continuously without any
aberration as requires not command from the head. Certainly cutting the head of
the male has an advantage to the female praying mantis during mating.
The irony is that the partner, who was responsible for the female praying mantis in
achieving its very biological purpose of procreation, and making her happy, looses
its life at the end. The truth is that only when the male looses its head, the male
praying mantis can make the female happy.
Many corporate leaders do follow the same approach or practice. They involve
many people in executing some projects at the beginning and ensure success of the
project. Once the project becomes successful or move close to success, the leaders
would suddenly discover some strange reasons and remove the people who had
made definite contributions to the project and had ensured success.
The reason being is that the ego of the bosses never allows them to have an achiever
in their team. Only when the achiever is removed, the bosses can comfortably claim
the total and complete ownership on the success of the project. The ego of such
bosses never allows an achiever to be in the scene and they only love to have ‘weak’
people or personalities in the team.
The least contributors in team go unaffected as the ego of the bosses would never
target these people. When the bosses are more egoist, greater the possibility that
the contributing and talented people will be removed once the project meets
success.
Only the hungry female praying mantis are said to kill the male by pinching off its
head. Unless the HR function understands the psychology and ego centric working
style of the bosses, the corporate might loose many talents.

2. When a project becomes grand success, the corporate by default listens only to the
bosses and they believe that only because of these bosses, the corporate could make
success. This ‘situation’, most of the ego centric bosses exploit smartly to remove
the ‘real achievers’. This problem is rampantly seen in corporate that are run by
single man.
Only the ‘right’ intervention by the HR function and the top management, the
praying mantis behaviour of some bosses can be corrected.
Dr S Ranganathan, ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., Chennai
Learn more from the following management books
1. Jungle wisdom for corporate management – lessons from the university
of nature by Swami Sukhabodhananda and Dr S Ranganathan
2. Nature – The Entrepreneur by Dr S Ranganathan