FOUR
Motivating Business and the
Business of Motivation
Today there is no excuse for remaining stuck in the swamp of negativity. A whole industry has grown up to promote positive thinking, and the product of this industry, available at a wide range of prices, is called “motivation.” You can buy it in traditional book form, along with CDs and DVDs featuring the author, or you can opt for the more intense experience of being coached or of attending a weeklong “seminar.” If you have the money, you might choose to go to a weekend session in an exotic locale with a heavy-hitting motivational speaker. Or you can consume motivation in its many inert, fetishized forms—posters and calendars, coffee mugs, and desk accessories, all emblazoned with inspirational messages. Successories, a company devoted entirely to motivational products, offers a line of “Positive Pals,” including a “bean bag starfish” wearing a life preserver bearing the words “Reach for the Stars.” Most recently, a canny retailer has invented the “Life Is Good” line of products, including T-shirts, blankets, banners, luggage tags, dog collars, and tire covers.
It doesn’t matter where you start shopping: one product tends to lead ineluctably to another. Motivational gurus write books in order to get themselves speaking engagements, which in turn become opportunities for selling the books and perhaps other products the guru is offering, some of them not obviously related to the quest for a positive attitude. Superstar motivational speaker Tony Robbins, for example, sells nutritional supplements on his Web site along with his books and at one point was heavily involved in marketing Q-Link, a pendant that supposedly protected the wearer from cell phone radiation. Many thousands of potential customers are drawn into the motivation market through the thirty “Get Motivated!” rallies held each year in various cities, at which, for a low ticket price of about fifty dollars, one can hear celebrity speakers like Colin Powell or Bill Cosby. Many things go on at the rallies—“platitudes, pep talks, canned-ham humor, live infomercials, prefab patriotism, Bible Belt Christianity,” according to one newspaper report—but they serve largely as showcases for dozens of other products, including books, tapes, personal coaching, and further training in the art of positive thinking. 1 According to John LaRosa of Marketdata Enterprises Inc., which tracks the self-help industry, “basically the money is made in the back of the room, as they say,” through the sale of “books and tapes and multimedia packages.” 2
Millions of individuals buy these products. People facing major illnesses are particularly susceptible, as are the unemployed and people in risky lines of work. In 2007, I got to know Sue Goodhart, a realtor who was showing me houses, and I happened to mention that I was doing some research on motivational speakers. She smiled ruefully and gestured toward the backseat of her car, which I saw was piled with motivational CDs. When I teased her for being a “motivation junkie,” she told me that she’d come from a working-class background and had never been encouraged to set high goals for herself. Then, at some point in the 1990s, her agency brought in a motivational firm called the Pacific Institute, which provided a five-day session on “goal-setting, positive thinking, visualization, and getting out of your comfort zone,” and she began to think of herself as a self-determining individual and potential success. But that first exposure was hardly enough. She continues to listen to motivational CDs in her car from house to house, both because “sales is a lonely business” and because the CDs help her get to “the next level.”
But the motivation industry would not have become the multibillion-dollar business that it is if it depended entirely on individual consumers. * It carved out a much larger and more free-spending market, and that new market was business in general, including America’s largest companies. Corporations buy motivational products in bulk—books by the thousands, for example—for free distribution to employees. They can pay for motivational speakers, who typically charge five-figure fees per gig and often more. Almost any major U.S. company can be found on the lists of clients proudly displayed on motivational speakers’ Web sites; a book on the motivational-speaking business mentions Sprint, Albertsons, Allstate, Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, and American Airlines among the corporate clients. 3 And companies can command the attention of their employees, requiring them to attend coaching sessions, listen to DVDs, or show up at motivational events. Many of the people who attend “Get Motivated!” events do so with free tickets provided by their employers.
In the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined—not an exhortation to get up and get going but a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels. The publishers of Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking were among the first to see this potential way back in the fifties, urging, in an ad for that book: “EXECUTIVES: Give this book to employees. It pays dividends!” Salesmen would gain “renewed faith in what they sell and in their organization,” plus, the ad promised, the book would bring “greater efficiency from the office staff. Marked reductions in clock-watching.” 4 With “motivation” as the whip, positive thinking became the hallmark of the compliant employee, and as the conditions of corporate employment worsened in the age of downsizing that began in the 1980s, the hand on the whip grew heavier.
Lonely Salesmen
Salespeople didn’t need any prompting from management to buy into positive thinking, and for understandable reasons. Theirs is a lonely existence, as Sue Goodhart told me, typically cut off from company headquarters and lived out in the perpetual exile of highways, motels, and airports. As much as anyone in the corporation, they face a life of constant challenge, in which every day is a test likely to end in rejection and defeat. But however lonely and wounded, the salesman has to be prepared to pick himself up and generate fresh enthusiasm for the next customer, the next city, the next rejection. He—and, as the twentieth century wore on, increasingly she—urgently needed a way to overcome self-doubts and generate optimism.
Consider the Internet testimony of a salesman named Rob Spiegel, who describes himself as initially skeptical of positive thinking: “My doubts centered on the thought that positive thinking wasn’t much different than magical thinking. . . . Even more disturbing, I worried that positive thinking may be a nasty form of self delusion that could ultimately clothe you into an unreality that could actually prevent success.” But once he started his own business—he does not say in what—he came to understand the need for a defensive reprogramming of his mind:
When you roll up your sleeves and begin the heavy lifting of starting a company, doom thoughts quickly fill your empty brain. Every “NO” from a sales call is a powerful referendum on the very idea that you could successfully launch a business. If you’re not thinking positively in the face of rejection, you eventually believe those who are rejecting you, and during the early stages, there’s more rejection than acceptance. 5
The centrality of the sales effort to the consumer economy cannot be underestimated: if that economy is to flourish, people have to be persuaded to buy things they do not need or do not know they need, and this persuasion is the job of the sales force as well as the advertising agencies. But for all their contributions to economic growth, salespeople get very little respect. In Woody Allen’s film Take the Money and Run, Allen’s character is tortured by being locked up in a room with an insurance salesman. We find salespeople’s enthusiasm false; we think of them as the quintessentially hollowed-out men. The twentieth century saw two great plays about salesmen—Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross— and in each of them the drama hinges on the fact that some flicker of humanity remains within the salesmen’s shriveled souls.
It was to this despised group that Norman Vincent Peale took his ministry beginning in the 1950s. Although he enjoyed consorting with top business leaders, he especially liked speaking to the lowly salesmen, even to the point of seeing himself as one of them—“God’s salesman,” as he liked to say. Surely, except for the constant rejection, his life resembled those of the salesmen to whom he preached positive thinking. After the success of The Power of Positive Thinking, Peale never ceased traveling and speaking, leaving his children to be raised by his wife and his church to be tended by his staff, so that he shared with salesmen their “nomadic, endlessly mobile, existences, aware that every transaction was an individual performance and a personal challenge,” as a biographer puts it. 6 In The Power of Positive Thinking, most of his anecdotes are set in hotels or conference rooms, where anxious or shattered salesmen buttonhole him for personal counseling. This was Peale’s designated constituency—“the lonely man in the motel room.” 7
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 employees, 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.
The decline of management as a rational undertaking can be traced through the meteoric career of Peters, dubbed the “uber-guru” of management by the Los Angeles Times. He started as an analyst at the old-line, hyperrational McKinsey consulting firm, only to discover the “human element” in management in his 1982 best seller, In Search of Excellence. It was not enough to manage “by the numbers,” he and his coauthor argued, reasonably enough. Employees need to be motivated and rewarded for going the extra mile to satisfy customers, and this involved engaging their emotions. Corporations were made up of people, people are emotional beings, so management would just have to wade into this murky new territory. Peters, in other words, made a rational case for a new, less-than-rational approach to management based on motivation, mood boosting, and positive thinking.
But as the age of downsizing wore on, a menacingly nihilistic tone crept into his message. It was no longer enough to “thrive on chaos,” as his 1988 book advised—the forward-looking manager should actually generate it. “Destroy your corporation before a competitor does!” he wrote in his 1992 book, Liberation Management. “Disorganize! And keep disorganizing!” 25 He issued no statement without his trademark red exclamation marks; he posed for photos in his boxer shorts. A 2000 article on Peters in Fortune began: “If you know one thing about Tom Peters, you know about his first book, and if you know two things, the second is that he hasn’t written a book as good as that since, and if you know three things, the third is that sometime in the 18 years since that first precious book, he’s gone bonkers.” 26
Maybe it was the boxer shorts and Peters’s increasingly madcap speaking style that turned Fortune against him, because, no matter how bonkers, he had not in fact lost touch with corporate America. Downsize was his message for the 1990s—destroy the corporation as we know it—and this is exactly what the CEOs did. When Jack Welch retired from his chairmanship of GE in 2001, he ended his good-bye speech on a note every bit as nihilistic as Peters’s message, “by telling everyone to turn the organization upside down, shake it up, and go blow the roof off.” 27 Did layoffs strengthen or weaken the corporation? A mid-1990s study by the American Management Association found no positive impact on productivity. 28 But it hardly mattered, since layoffs clearly led to increased share prices, at least in the short term. If there was a deity at the center of corporate America’s new “business spirituality,” it was Shiva, the dancing god of destruction.
Managing Despair
Between 1981 and 2003, about thirty million full-time American workers lost their jobs in corporate downsizings. 29 American institutions—corporate and governmental—had little of concrete value to offer the victims of this massive social dislocation. Unemployment benefits generally run out after six months; health insurance ceases with employment. Many of the downsized white-collar workers bounced back, finding new jobs—although paying an average of 17 percent less than their former salaries—or adjusting to life as contract workers or “consultants” of one sort or another. 30 But without a safety net, formerly middle-class people often tumbled quickly into low-wage jobs and even destitution. I have met, and heard from, many of these downwardly mobile former managers and professionals: the IT marketing woman in Atlanta who worked six months as a janitor between marketing jobs; the Minneapolis car service driver who gives his passengers his old business card, from when he was a media executive, in case they might be interested in hiring one; the chemical engineer whose layoff resulted in a stint in homeless shelters. The once stable middle class of white-collar workers, who had been brought up to believe that their skills and education would guarantee security, was reduced to anxious scrambling.
Downsizing did not, of course, increase the number of salespeople, but it did increase the number of people who were encouraged to think of themselves as salespeople. In the hazardous new corporate workplace, everyone was encouraged to engage in a continual sales effort, selling him-or herself. As anthropologist Charles N. Darrah put it, the white-collar worker had become a “bundle of skills . . . who can move freely between [workplace] settings, carrying his or her skills like so much luggage.” 31 But he or she could hope to move “freely” only by constantly working on and burnishing what Tom Peters termed “the brand called you.” No longer were you to think of yourself as an “employee”; you were “a brand that shouts distinction, commitment, and passion!” 32 Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the “lonely salesman” once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.
The motivation industry could not repair this new reality. All it could do was offer to change how one thought about it, insisting that corporate restructuring was an exhilaratingly progressive “change” to be embraced, that job loss presented an opportunity for self-transformation, that a new batch of “winners” would emerge from the turmoil. And this is what corporations were paying the motivation industry to do. As the Washington Post reported in a 1994 article on motivational products, “Large corporations are looking for innovative and cheap ways to boost employees demoralized by massive layoffs.” 33 According to a “history of coaching” on the Internet, the coaching industry owed its huge growth in the 1990s to “the loss of ‘careers for life.’ ” 34 AT&T sent its San Francisco staff to a big-tent motivational event called “Success 1994” on the same day the company announced that it would lay off fifteen thousand workers in the coming two years. As Time’s Richard Reeves reported, the message of the featured speaker—the frenetic Christian motivator Zig Ziglar—was, “It’s your own fault; don’t blame the system; don’t blame the boss—work harder and pray more.” 35
Products like motivational posters and calendars also owed their market to what a Successories spokeswoman described, in a tactfully abstract fashion, as “a lot of negativity in the world.” “We need [Successories products] because there’s a lot of companies downsizing and companies that can’t afford to give their employees the raises they were expecting,” she said, and her company’s offerings are “one of the ways to smooth that over.” 36 As Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor of journalism, observed, “Corporate downsizers fire every third person and then put up inspirational posters in the halls to cover the psychic wounds.” 37
Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control. “Reality sucks,” a computer scientist with a master’s degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me. But you can’t change reality, at least not in any easy and obvious way. You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime. For now, you can only change your perception of reality, from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world’s great gift to its laid-off employees and the overworked survivors—positive thinking.
Companies brought in motivational speakers for an ever-growing number of corporate meetings. 38 Whatever else goes on at these meetings—the presentation of awards, the introduction of new executives—the “entertainment” is usually provided by motivational speakers. As Vicki Sullivan, who follows the market for such speakers, said at the National Speakers Association conference in 2007, corporations are the “sugar daddies” of the motivational speaking industry. “At some point,” she told me in an interview, employers realized it was not enough to expose people to familiar positive-thinking nostrums like “Don’t read newspapers or talk to negative people.” Instead, she said, “What they’ve learned is that you have to go beyond that, as change happens faster and faster. You have to use motivational speakers to help people hang in there.”
Motivational speakers and coaches promoted themselves as a tool for managing “change,” meaning layoffs and the extra workload imposed on layoff survivors. A coaching company, for example, promised to cure the toxic atmosphere left by downsizing: “This program is perfect for organizations and corporations that are going through change such as downsizing, mergers or acquisitions. If the people in your organization are reacting with resistance to change, coffee room gossip, decreased performance, declining communication, or increased stress, this change management training teaches how to stay positively motivated and focused.” 39 One unusually forthcoming motivational speaker expressed some discomfort with her role, telling me that employers use people like her in part “to beat up employees” if they don’t achieve the goals that have been set for them. “They can say, ‘Didn’t you listen to the speaker we brought in?’ ”
The burgeoning genre of business self-help books provided another way to get white-collar workers to adapt to downsizing. Of these, the classic of downsizing propaganda was Who Moved My Cheese?, which has sold ten million copies, in no small part due to companies that bought it in bulk for their employees. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that it would fall into the hands of many reluctant readers, it’s a tiny volume, only ninety-four pages of large print, offering the kind of fable appropriate to a children’s book. Two little maze-dwelling, cheese-eating people named Hem and Haw—for the human tendency to think and reflect—arrive at their “Cheese Station” one day to find that the cheese is gone. The “Littlepeople” waste time ranting and raving “at the injustice of it all,” as the book’s title suggests. But there are also two mice in the maze, who scurry off without hesitation to locate an alternative cheese source, because, being rodents, they “kept life simple. They didn’t overanalyze or overcomplicate things.” 40
Finally the little humans learn from the mice that they may have to adapt to a new cheese. Haw uses what amounts to the law of attraction to find it: he starts to “paint a picture in his mind . . . in great realistic detail, [of himself] sitting in the middle of a pile of all his favorite cheeses—from Cheddar to Brie!” 41 Instead of resenting the loss of his old cheese, he realizes, more positively, that “change could lead to something better” and is soon snacking on a “delicious” new cheese. Lesson for victims of layoffs: the dangerous human tendencies to “overanalyze” and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.
Companies employed a variety of positive-sounding euphemisms for layoffs, describing them as “releases of resources” or “career-change opportunities,” but the actual process was swift and brutal. 42 By the 1990s, managing the actual layoffs had become a specialized art in itself, often practiced by restructuring experts brought in from outside. For one thing, the layoffs had to be announced suddenly and all at once, so there would be no time for the grumblings of the victims to infect the surviving work-force. Typically it was the company’s security force that managed the actual people-removing process and ensured that the discarded workers left without making a fuss. In the usual scenario, a person would be told of his or her layoff and quickly escorted by a security guard to the door. Sometimes discarded employees would be given a chance to pack up any personal effects they had in their offices—family photographs, for example—and sometimes these things would just be shipped to them later.
To limit ill will, if only to head off wrongful-termination suits and bad-mouthing by former employees, employers turned to outplacement firms, which, in addition to training in résumé writing, offered to console the laid-off with motivational services. The owner of an outplacement company in Portland, Oregon, asserted in 1994 that, with his help, people came to see “that losing a job was a step forward in their lives, . . . a growth experience, self-retreat, a needed time out.” The Los Angeles Times reported on the case of Primalde Lodhia, an Indian-born MBA, computer scientist, and mechanical engineer who was laid off in 1991 with no explanation other than “We are very happy with your work, but we have to let you go. You don’t fit in our management.” The company offered him outplacement services; he asked for cash instead, but the company insisted. In the motivational halfway house of outplacement, Lodhia was advised not to talk to anyone about his job loss for a month. He complied, later telling the Times, “It was good advice. I was so bitter, I would have said things that would have been bad for me.” 43
Not all companies rely on outplacement firms, which often charge over $10,000 per layoff victim, instead expecting their discarded employees to seek out and pay for their own motivational services. I attended about a dozen of these networking events and “boot camps” for white-collar job seekers in 2005 and found that the core message was positive thinking: whatever happens to you is a result of your attitude; by overcoming bitterness and converting to a positive or “winning” attitude, you could attract the job of your dreams. In her research on laid-off tech workers in the early 2000s, Carrie Lane, a professor of American studies, found the same thing. Events targeting laid-off workers “subtly urged [them] to snap out of it and start acting like a good (optimistic and industrious) jobseeker.” 44
After the layoff victims had been winnowed out and perhaps further isolated, like Lodhia, with advice not to communicate with others, there were the shocked and anxious survivors to deal with, and here again management turned to the motivation industry. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser calls the motivational effort “internal public relations,” used to create “pumped-up, motivated converts who would be ready to thrive under the most grueling and even hostile of business conditions.” For example, in the midst of downsizing in the mid-1990s, NYNEX subjected its employees to mandatory exercises, such as one in which you had to show how many ways you could jump around a room: “So [the employees] jumped—on one leg, on both legs, with their hands in the air, with one hand covering an eye. They jumped and they jumped and they jumped some more. . . . Then the leaders would say things like, “ ‘Look at how creative you are, how many different ways you can manage to jump around the room.’ ” 45
But the most popular technique for motivating the survivors of downsizing was “team building”—an effort so massive that it has spawned a “team-building industry” overlapping the motivation industry. Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the “team.” And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continued downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units. “Rather than eliminate or postpone teams, organizations should consider the benefits teams can offer in a downsizing phase,” a management consultant and “organizational change” expert wrote. “The team system offers a form of camaraderie that helps promote teamwork around getting the job done and enables people to feel connected to something smaller and safer than a large organization. People generally have an innate need to feel connected to a small group of people. . . . Teams offer this in the work environment.” 46
In search of team spirit, team-building companies offered dozens of “fun” bonding exercises, indoor and outdoor—simple ones involving balloons, blindfolds, or buckets of water and more intensive ones such as weeklong wilderness excursions. The idea was to whip up a fervent devotion to the firm even as it threatened to eliminate you. As a downsized AT&T worker told the PBS Evening News Hour in 1996: “We went to Outward Bound, the phone center people, for a week, and you bonded with everybody in the country. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever been through. You were a family. You were the most dedicated people in the world. I mean, if your kids didn’t stand up and do the Pledge of Allegiance to an AT&T commercial, you know—” 47
Team building is, in other words, another form of motivation, with the difference being that, in the desolate environment of the downsized corporation, this motivation was supposed to be generated from within the work group or “team.” One group offering both motivational and team-building services makes this clear on its Web site—though not too clear, given the garbled English that is another characteristic of the postrational corporate world: “In this team building workshop, you will learn both the team building skills and motivation skills guaranteed to make your team more cohesive, increase employee morale, and motivated. You’ll learn how to build a team that grumbles less and works more, discipline less and reward more, create more focused and productive meetings and get recognized by the organization.” 48
As for the connection to old-fashioned, Peale-style positive thinking, the literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.
Sometimes the motivational effort backfired, especially when combined with ongoing layoffs. In the mid-1990s, while shedding 20 percent of its workforce, NYNEX initiated a “Winning Ways” program aimed at instilling employees with “the mentality of a winner,” but the employees sneeringly relabeled it “Whining Ways.” 49 When E. L. Kersten was working for a Dallas Internet service provider, he took note of the motivational products the company president favored and got the brilliant idea of going into business selling parodies of them. One of the “demotivational” posters available at Kersten’s [http://despair.com] despair.com site shows a bear about to snap up a salmon swimming upstream. The caption reads: “The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.” Another one shows a beautiful shoreline at sunset, with the caption “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.”
But such creative cynicism was rare. By and large, America’s white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, “I’ve gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional.” Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the “cheese” was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview—a belief system, almost a religion—that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.
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* Marketdata Enterprises estimates that in 2005 the total U.S. market for “self-improvement products”—including tapes, books, and coaches on business, diet, and relationships—amounted to $9.6 billion, but with the caveat that “information about the market and its privately owned competitors is still very difficult to obtain. Most companies or organizations are very reluctant to give out any information regarding their revenues, enrollments at their programs, or how they are doing/how fast they are growing.” In 2004, Potentials magazine gave an estimate of $21 billion a year for the market in all “motivational products” (Steven Winn, “Overcome That Gnawing Fear of Success,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 2004). The International Coach Federation estimates that coaches worldwide garnered $1.5 billion in 2007 and that most of them were business coaches (Executive Summary, ICF Global Coaching Study, revised Feb. 2008).