Today salespeople are hardly alone in their efforts to achieve a state of frenzied enthusiasm; they get plenty of help from their employers, who have become increasingly ingenious in their motivational efforts. One approach, pioneered by the pharmaceutical companies, is to start by hiring people who are already, in a sense, motivators themselves—college cheerleaders—and they have turned out to be so successful as sales reps that a regular recruiting pipeline has developed between the drug companies and the campuses. “They don’t ask what the major is,” a cheerleading adviser at the University of Kentucky said of the recruiters; it’s enough for the job candidate to be a trained cheerleader. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm,” the adviser continued, “they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.” 8 Another straightforward way to motivate a sales force is to offer rewards for high performers. Top sellers of Mary Kay cosmetics get pink Cadillacs; the “employee of the month” at any company may get a more convenient parking space. A management consultant observed in 2006 that “U.S. employers spend $100 billion a year on incentives like T-shirts, golf outings and free trips to Florida in the belief that they somehow motivate and inspire their employees.” 9
Not all the motivational methods applied to salespeople feature rewards and incentives. In a workplace environment where employees have few if any rights, some companies resort to motivating their salespeople in ways that are cruel or even kinky. Alarm One, for example, a California-based home-security company, was sued in 2006 by a saleswoman for subjecting her to what could be called motivational spankings. The spankings, usually administered with the metal yard signs of competing companies, were meant to spur competition between teams of salespersons. As one salesman testified, “Basically, you’d get up in front of the room, put your hands on the wall, bend over, and get hit with the sign.” Other punishments for underperforming salespersons included having eggs broken on their heads or whipped cream sprayed on their faces and being forced to wear diapers. (Since both men and women were subjected to them, the spankings did not qualify as sexual harassment, and the woman lost her suit.)
An even more disturbing case comes from Prosper Inc. in Provo, Utah, where in May 2007 a supervisor subjected an employee to waterboarding as part of a “motivational exercise.” The employee, who had volunteered for the experience without knowing what was involved, was taken outside, told to lie down with his head pointed downhill, and held in place by fellow employees while the supervisor poured water into his nose and mouth. “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there,” the supervisor reportedly told the sales team. “I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.” 10 While insisting that the company does not condone torture, Prosper management has had nothing to say about this supervisor’s more routine motivational practices, like drawing mustaches on employees’ faces and making them work standing up all day. Oddly enough, Prosper is itself in the business of selling “motivation” to other companies.
Far more commonly, of course, companies have left their salespeople’s bodies untouched and sought only to control their minds. When sociologist Robin Leidner underwent sales training at a company called Combined Insurance in 1987, he found an “emphasis on teaching proper attitudes and selling techniques and [a] relative lack of attention to teaching agents about life insurance.” The first day of class began with trainees standing up and chanting, “I FEEL HEALTHY, I FEEL HAPPY, I FEEL TERRIFIC!” while throwing “the winning punch.” At Combined Insurance, this was part of the “Positive Mental Attitude” philosophy developed by the company’s founder, W. Clement Stone—a major Republican donor and coauthor, with Napoleon Hill, of Success through a Positive Mental Attitude. Slogans flashed at sales trainees on video included “I dare you to develop a winning personality.” Leidner comments, “As that last slogan makes clear, trainees were encouraged to regard their personalities as something to be worked on and adjusted to promote success.” 11
Few companies have worked as hard to instill positive thinking in their sales force as Amway, the purveyor of cleaning products, water purifiers, and cosmetics. Amway recruits undergo an intense indoctrination, paid for out of their own pockets, in the form of tapes, books, seminars, and rallies. In the early 1980s, salespeople were expected to buy a book a month from a list including such classics as The Power of Positive Thinking and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich! 12 At seminars, which the salespeople pay to attend, they learn that “God is Positive, and the Devil is Negative.” As one former Amway salesman explains, “Whatever influence weakens your belief and commitment in the business is Negative. . . . Refusal to buy a tape when recommended by the upline [people higher in the sales hierarchy] is Negative.” This salesman describes an Amway sales rally as something like a rock concert:
Waves of reciprocal chanting sweep back and forth over the hall, one side shouting, “Ain’t it Great!” and the other answering, “Ain’t it Though!” In a regional event, thousands flick their Bics, or other brand-name propane lighters (Amway does not yet manufacture one) and whirl the flames in a circle to symbolize the mystical force of the [company’s current sales] Plan. . . . Slogans and circles are flashed on a huge video screen at the front of the amphitheater, strobe-light style, in time to the music. 13
Not to throw oneself wholeheartedly into the frenzy would, of course, be “Negative.”
As anyone who’s attended a sports event, a revival meeting, or a real rock concert knows, it’s hard to resist the excitement of a crowd. When the music’s pounding and others are standing, chanting, or swaying, we are involuntarily drawn in and may briefly experience a sense of exaltation, of being part of “something larger than ourselves.” Motivational speakers—and event planners—understand and exploit this human capacity, often demanding that the audience stand and perhaps chant or dance in place. In his book on the motivational-speaking business, Jonathan Black describes one speaker’s audiences as “transformed employees,” who occasionally “break down in sobs.” after the performance, “they clasp [the speaker’s] hands and tell him he’s their savior. They hug him, shaking and crying.” 14 For an anxious salesperson or cubicle dweller, an event like this can be a thrillingly cathartic experience—not something to resent, as an attempt at mind control, but something to expect at any company gathering and even feel entitled to as a temporary release from the ongoing pressure.
By the start of the twenty-first century, canned motivation had ceased to be a sideshow to the main drama of the corporate world and begun to penetrate to the heart of American business. Not only salespeople but other white-collar workers, IT people, engineers, and accountants are now increasingly found to be in need of motivation and its promised results—positive thinking and improved performance. Everyone in the corporate world, it seems, is in danger of falling into a nonproductive funk unless continually propped up by fresh doses of motivational adrenaline. And perhaps the most surprising converts to positive thinking are the actual decision makers—the executives and managers.
The Era of Irrationality
When I talk to relative insiders about the corporate market for motivation, they often seem uncomfortable with its loopier aspects—sales events that resemble political rallies or revival meetings, for example, and the promise of omnipotence through the law of attraction. James Champy, a management consultant and coauthor of the 1993 best seller Reengineering the Corporation, said he finds much of the motivational oeuvre “delusional” and its practitioners often “cads.” Clarke Caywood, a professor of marketing at Northwestern, admitted to being too “over-educated and cynical” for motivational tricks like visualization but insisted that they “can’t hurt”: “If you learn just one little trick—like putting a picture of the boat that you want on your mirror—that could be what leads to a sale.” He and I—a professor and a writer, respectively—might realize that visualizing a boat will not bring it to you, but it would be “arrogant,” he told me, to deny that most corporate employe
es, especially salespeople, need to rely on such “tricks” just to get them through the day.
Corporate managers had thought of themselves, through much of the twentieth century, as cool-headed professionals trained in “management science” and performing a public service by making firms run smoothly and efficiently. Arising in the early part of the century, at the same time that medicine and engineering were organizing themselves into professions, professional management reflected a widespread middle-class faith—antithetical to the tenets of positive thinking—that all problems would yield to a rational, scientific approach. Why bother with wishful thinking when science and technology were already generating such fabulous innovations as the automobile, the telephone, and the radio? The college-educated American middle class hewed to one central belief: that the goal was progress for all, not just individual success, and that it would be achieved through the work of highly trained, rational, dispassionate specialists.
There never was a body of management “science” in the way that there is, for example, a body of medical science; there were only case studies to ponder and what we now call “best practices” to review. But the notion that management was a rational enterprise that anyone could master through study had a powerful meritocratic thrust, challenging the old practice of replacing business leaders with their sons or sons-in-law. The number of people employed as corporate managers ballooned in the postwar period; business became the most popular undergraduate major and the MBA the most popular graduate degree—all based on the idea that management was an impersonal, rational undertaking.
Then, in the 1980s, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were “restructuring,” “reengineering,” and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue. Between 1980 and 1985, General Electric’s CEO, Jack Welch, earned his nickname of “Neutron Jack” by laying off 112,000 employees and announcing his intention to eliminate the bottom-performing 10 percent every year. Soon shareholders throughout the corporate world were demanding constant “reductions in force” (RIFs) as a way of boosting share prices, at least in the short term. The New York Times captured the new corporate order succinctly in 1987, reporting that it “eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter.” 15
Corporations had once been task-oriented entities, created in the nineteenth century through charters to perform specific projects like canal or railroad building. The word “corporate” still suggests a group engaged in some collective undertaking—beyond making money for shareholders—and well into the postwar period corporations continued to define themselves in terms of their products and overall contribution to society. But with the advent of “finance capitalism” in the 1980s, shareholders’ profits came to trump all other considerations, even pride in the product. Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana, who has chronicled the decline of professional management, traces the changing conception of the corporation through policy statements made by the Business Roundtable. In 1990, this body representing America’s large corporations stated that “corporations are chartered to serve both their shareholders and society as a whole,” including such stakeholders as employees, customers, suppliers, and communities. In 1997, however, the Roundtable explicitly denied any responsibility to stakeholders other than shareholders, stating that “the notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors.” Relieved of any concern for employees, customers, and “society as a whole,” corporations degenerated into mere “aggregations of financial assets” to be plundered, disaggregated, or merged into one another at will. Some management thinkers even began to describe the corporation as “a legal fiction, a ghost of the mind,” because the product was increasingly incidental and the bonds between corporate employees were increasingly fragile. 16 Business advice books like Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive stressed that in the new corporate setting it was every man for himself.
High-level managers came to realize that they were no less expendable than anyone else. A hostile takeover or a sudden decision to eliminate a product line or division could send them packing at any time; even CEOs were being churned in and out of their jobs. But the higher-ups had one great advantage over the average employee living under the threat of layoffs: because they were increasingly rewarded with stock options—and often with golden parachutes—they stood a chance of striking it rich in the ongoing turmoil.
The combination of great danger and potentially dazzling rewards makes for a potent cocktail—leading, in this case, to a wave of giddiness that swept through America’s managerial class. Rejecting the old, slow, thoughtful methods of professional management, American managers became enamored of intuition, snap judgments, and hunches. As business guru Tom Peters observed, “Things are moving too fast for us to sort out logically what’s going on.” 17 An article in Fast Company complained that “there’s this one big rub about management books—even the best-selling ones and even the ones with plenty of data attached. The world they seek to describe is so complex, so tumultuous, often so random as to defy predictability and even rationality.” 18 Or, as BusinessWeek put it in 1999: “Who has time for decision trees and five-year plans anymore? Unlike the marketplace of 20 years ago, today’s information and services-dominated economy is all about instantaneous decision-making”—and that had to be based on gut feelings or sudden, inexplicable revelations. 19 Hesitating or spending too long on a decision was now condemned as “overanalyzing” or “overintellectualizing.” The only workable “paradigm” was change itself, and the only way to survive was to embrace it wholeheartedly or, in Peters’s words, learn to “thrive on chaos.”
At the top of the managerial hierarchy, CEOs forged a new self-image as charismatic leaders who could be counted on to have the right intuitions and gut feelings in a fast-changing world. The old-style CEO had risen from within the ranks of the company, mastering every aspect of the business before ascending to the top; the new one was likely to have been hired for his celebrity status in the business world, even if it was derived from totally unrelated lines of businesses. As Khurana describes the transformation: “The image of a CEO changed from being a capable administrator to a leader—a motivating, flamboyant leader”—very much like a motivational speaker, in fact. 20 Some business school academics found a disturbing element of the divine in the new CEO self-image. According to a 2002 article in the journal Human Relations, many business leaders “develop a monomaniacal conviction that there is one right way of doing things, and believe they possess an almost divine insight into reality.” They were now convinced, in no small part by the motivational gurus who were replacing the old management “consultants,” that “they are charismatic visionaries rather than people in suits.” 21
Forsaking the “science” of management, corporate leaders began a wild thrashing around in search of new ways to explain an increasingly uncertain world—everything from chaos theory to Native American wisdom, from “excellence” to Eastern religions. It wasn’t enough to reject the old approaches; a kind of antirationality gripped American business. With a nod to management’s past commitment to rational analysis, BusinessWeek admitted that “spiritual thinking in Corporate America may seem as out of place as a typewriter at a high-tech company.” But as the cover story went on to report, it was everywhere. A 1999 gathering, for example, of “some of the world’s youngest and most powerful chief executives” featured a “shamanic healing journey”:
There, in a candlelit room thick with a haze of incense, 17 blindfolded captains of industry lay on towels, breathed deeply, and delved into the “lower world” to the sound of a
lone tribal drum. Leading the group was Richard Whiteley, a Harvard business school–educated best-selling author and management consultant who moonlights as an urban shaman. “Envision an entrance into the earth, a well, or a swimming hole,” Whiteley half-whispered above the sea of heaving chests. He then instructed the executives how to retrieve from their inner depths their “power animals, who would guide their companies to 21st century success.” 22
Not only shamanic healing but dozens of forms of spiritual practice proliferated within corporate American in the 1990s and 2000s. There were “vision quests” and Native American healing circles for top managers, as well as prayer groups, Buddhist seminars, fire walking, exercises in “tribal story telling” and “deep listening.” At the beginning of the 1990s, Esalen, the Big Sur spa that had been a bastion of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, was raising money to turn its main building into a luxurious corporate retreat, and major companies like AT&T, DuPont, TRW, Ford, and Proctor and Gamble were buying up spiritual experiences for their higher-level managers. “Corporations are full of mystics,” a 1996 business self-help book declared. “If you want to find a genuine mystic, you are more likely to find one in a boardroom than in a monastery or cathedral.” 23
In the newly “spiritual” corporate culture, there was nothing at all unsettling about positive thinking and its promise that the law of attraction allows you to control the world with your thoughts. As Fortune observed, the new business spirituality offered “a world view in which . . . reality is not absolute but a by-product of human consciousness.” 24 Traditional number-crunching management consultants began to give way to self-described management gurus like Peters and Tony Robbins—best-selling celebrities who could bring an audience to their feet with spirited renditions of the old positive-thinking nostrums.