The prevalence of crude hierarchies means that what he describes is all too recognisable. Gary Ince, head of the Institute for Leadership and Management which runs the country's largest system of workplace qualifications, acknowledges that people "often confuse being firm with being aggressive". Questions of communication, he says, tend to get left out.As Professor Rickards suggests, the arrival of successful but non-confrontational soccer managers such as Arsenal's Arsene Wenger is raising awkward questions about the methods used by their predecessors.Chester Zoo has its own positive role models. The alpha male even goes in for a bit of grooming."This he feels is not unlike some kinds of high-pressure workplaces - Hollywood film studios, for example, where the crews are tyrannised by their desire to succeed and the need to keep the cameras rolling. It's a much subtler kind of social relationship," says Professor Rickards. "The adult males play with the children to curry favour, for example.

Chimps have many faults and they too operate in rigid hierarchies but, compared with mandrills, they are sophisticates "They are a lot more intelligent. The male mandrill is almost three times the size of the female and virtually all mating is rape."The alpha male spends his whole time defending his right to be the alpha male, but despite all the aggression he only ever lasts about two years By then he's mated with all the females But he's exhausted His body loses its colour His red nose fades from red into a rather pathetic pink. "I think they expected to find a common pattern of leadership wherever they looked across the animal species," he says.Professor Rickards is already well-known for introducing his MBA students to "horse whispering" as a metaphor for leadership. Some of the best horse trainers in the world, he points out, ignore coercive methods and instead rely on horses' natural desire to please as the main source of motivation.Mandrills have no truck with that sort of outlook They run the ultimate macho male group Collaboration is almost zero. It raises questions about the optimum size for an organisation, for example, about the balance between collaboration and competition. We'll ask the students to go back and reflect on their views on leadership and whether their views have changed after what they saw in the zoo."The handful of students who have taken part so far have been surprised by the range of different strategies on view. There's a range of leadership behaviours that you see when you start looking at different animal species.

What you actually see in animals is a subtle balance of competition and collaboration. "It has been hard work, but I have enjoyed it a lot."The course content is being modified for its second year and design of the programme starting in September is just being finalised. The first semester will consist of work in the traditional business areas, such as finance, marketing, HR and total quality management.It is in the second semester that the uniqueness of the course really asserts itself, in modules that marry business disciplines with the realities of technology. This is the sort of thing the Manchester Business School is hoping to debunk."We're asking what can we learn from studying other social groups as well as human beings. Professor Rickards hopes to develop some useful analytical tools in his own work on "distributive leadership", where power is decentralised, in contrast with an older model of the charismatic or heroic leader.Animal metaphors, particularly rodent, are already well-established in business literature and are often used to justify tough behaviourist psychology of the "do-it-or-you're-fired" variety. For the students, the hope is they get some idea of the different leadership strategies employed by different species, for good or for ill. In partnership with zoologist Stephen McEwan, who heads the education unit at Chester, the course is staging weekly visits to watch the apes go about their business.

They will get plenty of opportunity because in a few months the monkey house at Chester Zoo will be an integral part of the Manchester school's MBA course. The sad thing about the top mandrill, the one with the reddest nose of all, is that he exhausts himself fighting off the rivals and then, inevitably, is deposed.The professor hopes his students will take the point. But, despite its prevalence, this is not the only model of power, nor is it particularly effective in the long term, says Professor Rickards. They spend their lives climbing to the top of the group hierarchy and, once there, behave abominably. Bottoms are flashed, willies waved, rivals clobbered and females impregnated with abandon.It is, you might think, an everyday tale from the boardroom or the golf course, one all too familiar to corporate workers on either side of the Atlantic.