They’re all doing it! Shell, Du Pont, Dow Chemical, General Motors, IBM, Sears, Owens Corning Fiberglas and Pacific Bell to name a few. Having trimmed operating costs to the bone, these and many other fortune 500 companies are ‘getting religion’ in a renewed effort to increase profitability.
Boardrooms
Prayer meetings have not sprung up in boardrooms across the nation. Yet the religious jargon is there: “vision,” “new paradigm,” “faith,” “transformation.” Recognize that this corporate revival is not, as the hymnals read, a return to “that old time religion.” After all, today’s budding corporate executives are yesterday’s flower children of the psychedelic ’60s.
This is a New Age. So, too, is the adopted religion of big business.
The corporate New Age gurus, hired to tap into the ‘human potential’ of middle and upper management types, dress in custom-made business suits, not saffron robes.
While many are employed by management training firms, under contract to the corporation, some are company personnel working in that hazy field known as ‘Behavioural Training’.
For the most part, these gurus or trainers are men and women playing the role of amateur psychologist, without the qualifications to match.
Motivational seminars
Participants in these so-called motivational seminars spend days or even weeks having their minds probed, all the while being trained to accept the corporate vision.
Relaxation techniques, often employing hypnotherapy, are a common aspect of New Age training. Take, for example, an ‘affirmation tape’ used by an Ontario training firm.
The gentle, melodic voice of the trainer explains: “Tape affirmation is a process of progressive relaxation. You simply let yourself relax as I talk to your subconscious mind. Do not consciously try to relax. Just let it happen easily. You will find that as I count slowly from 1 to 20, your subconscious mind will gradually relax your muscles. You will feel a wonderful sense of peace and tranquillity. Do not be concerned about what depth you are reaching.. .let your mind dwell on the peaceful feeling of relaxation you are experiencing and let yourself go.”
When the subject is fully relaxed, the tape plays a series of ‘affirmations’, repeated six times each, such as, “You like yourself unconditionally. You really like yourself.”
“You always decide for yourself what is best for you and you allow others the same right.”
“You are very creative in all areas of your life, always tapping more and more into your superconscious mind.”
Out of context
One middle management graduate, Gerry (not his real name), revealed that his trainers “attempted to legitimize their program by suggesting that some of the principles were Biblically based, in spite of the fact that references to the Bible were out of context and paraphrased to better suit the point being made.”
When Gerry challenged him, the instructor sidestepped the question, suggesting the point would be addressed later. “As it turned out, my questions were never answered.”
Expecting a course focused on team-building or helping to motivate co-workers, Gerry quickly discovered that “the emphasis was on individual potential. I found that it promoted a very ‘me-oriented philosophy’, advocating the power of positive thinking and self-worth.”
The notion that individuals should try to extract as much productivity from a limited 24 hours is known as ‘time compression’. But can intense devotion to work fulfil all human needs, spiritual and emotional? Do people work to live or live to work?
A matter of love
“Should your company save your soul” is the title of an eye-catching article in the January 14, 1991 edition of Fortune magazine.
In it James Autrey, president of Meredith Corporation, says “Work can provide an opportunity for spiritual and personal, as well as financial growth. Good management is largely a matter of love.. .a calling.. .a sacred trust.”
In the same article, Peter Senge, a research director at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, offers his view of the relationship between corporation and employee.” A corporation can’t save your soul, but it can stand in for the age-old idea of people collectively pursuing a path that has real meaning to them” “When you think of it, that’s sort of like early Christianity,” says Senge.
Lynne Scime, president of Hamilton-based pro-family research group Family Forum, suggests that too often New Age training programs have as their ultimate goal the creation of the “perfect employee. Do companies really want this?”
“It’s almost impossible for the average lay person to pick out what’s good or bad in these seminars,” says Mrs. Scime, a psychiatric social worker.
On a more personal note, she described the story of a young woman – the daughter of a friend – who became a casualty of intensive corporate training. The young woman in question was working for IBM at a time when it was not uncommon for new marketing employees to work sixteen-hour days.
She was sent on a two-week, company-sponsored training seminar in the United States. The basis of the program was to promote company sales. Upon returning, there was a dramatic change in her personality. Her self-confidence had been shattered. A short time later, she left her job and developed agoraphobia, a fear of public places.
Referring to the young woman’s unfortunate experience, Mrs. Scime believes that “companies have a right to develop their employees’ potential, but not at the expense of their mental health. I don’t think that profit should be [made] at the expense of someone’s psychological well-being.”
Situational ethics
Some would argue that schools, with their emphasis on situational ethics and avoidance of moral absolutes, make children easy targets in the working world. “We’re growing another generation devoid of set values. Kids are offered such a smorgasbord of values that they don’t have set values [at all]” Mrs. Scime told The Interim. Even now, in the business world, New Age courses “superimpose on these people values that they should already have. . . teaching people behaviour they could have learned in the home.”
Only ten years ago, the media pointed to a new age where people would have more leisure time.
Current statistics indicate just the opposite. The eight-hour-day is a thing of the past.
Has the Puritan work ethic run amuck? If New Age is the religion of the human potentialists and profit the god of big business, could New Age training be little more than an attempt to marry two religions together, with corporate profit as the goal?
Whether they have earned the label of ‘group psychology’ or ‘behaviour modification’, one American business writer described employer-ordered treatment as “morally indefensible” and an unlawful attempt “to change the employee’s personality.”
Put more bluntly, Peter Drucker (Wall Street Journal, Februarys, 1989) concluded that such courses were nothing more than “brainwashing.”
