What a nest of vipers an office is! Tens, hundreds, thousands of people, supposedly united in a common enterprise — yet if looks could kill, how many would make it alive through the day?

Office life seems to present one harassment after another. To pawahara (power harassment), sekkuhara (sex harassment) and mata/patahara (maternity / paternity harassment), add sumehara (smell harassment). "Don't underestimate it," counsels "human quality" specialist Yumi Higuchi in an essay written for the business magazine President. Smells are more toxic than looks.

Pity the poor manager, whose task it is to mold into a functioning whole the separate, often irreconcilable elements that make up the seething mass of characters, agendas, personal circumstances and ambitions (or lack thereof, verging on sloth) that compose an office staff. It used to be easier. Managers were respected because they were managers, obeyed because they were respected and took no nonsense because there was little nonsense to take. Now there's a lot. President gives us a bird's-eye view of some of it in a feature titled "Capable women, risky women." The point is not to blame the nonsense on the rise of women to responsible positions. But it does complicate things. It poses a challenge to which managers, still mostly (though no longer exclusively) male, are rising, gamely if clumsily.