Back in the day, my employer and a group of municipal/county/state agencies sent everybody to this deal with the Great Man himself doing it. A pretty penny the employers put into his bank account.

Besides the pablum, this dude was barking and snapping at his minion who was operating the slide machine in the back of the audience, like, "Next slide!1" and testiness if too slow or going to another slide. Finally, somebody in the audience asked to be recognized for a question, which was, "What's the name of your assistant?!1 Can you use her name and say please and thank you, please?!1" The jerk laughed it off.

It's amazing how jerks can hit upon a franchise idea for raking in the cash and gain fame and be jerks.

Covey was all the Mgmt rage at Charlotte HQ. My boss, an otherwise pretty sharp lady VP was very into it. She had her managers into it. They would actually sit in status meetings and fill out their calendars TOGETHER, like kindergartners in activity time.

I was just the program admin back then, so I escaped all the Covey nonsense.

It finally occurred to me a few years later that corporate types really are lemmings. They talk about out of the box thinking, and diversity, and increasing creativity, but they squash it like a bug when it's genuinely present.

Somehow people have this vision that the people who run large businesses are highly intelligent and productive people. While some may be there's also a large number who lack the capability for abstract thought required to understand how incompetent they really are. Those are the ones reading the 7 habits types books and requiring other people to go to Covey training. Covey was nothing more than a snake oil salesman.

I can complete your assignments pretty easily.

For your legacy, tell them your plan is to borrow as much money from your fellow employees as you can before you quit. Then right before you go, you're going to file as many government complaint and report forms as you can possibly get your hands on. Then months later when someone has to respond to the paperwork you filed, they will say, "That bastard still owes me $20!"

Each new management fad that came down the road would be greeted enthusiastically, with lots of meetings and breakout sessions, and then there would be implementation galore, and then it would slowly fade away ... to be replaced by ....

The New Flavor of the Month! Lots more meetings! Breakout sessions! Implementation!

It is just one of the hoops in life that you have to jump through to keep your job. Smile, give it minimal effort, and move on to the next thing.

This one sounds pretty intrusive, asking some fairly personal stuff that is none of their damn business in the first place. I would participate just enough that I don't get in trouble, smile, and say as little as possible.

I've had to do it too. Alcohol helps a bit and trolling the process can be kind of fun if you can keep a straight face.

IIRC we had to each write something positive down about our work. I wrote "I'm a lazy SOD" (Shout Out To The Sex Pistols). This resulted in a break out group to explore anger issues. You could tell the guys running the show just wanted to find the smartass but they couldn't do it. It made the time pass.

All that group emotion shit really started to piss me off too. Someone would share something personal and everyone would start bawling and it would escalate from there. You could tell that people were bullshitting the stories because it started off with "my mother died when I was 4" and by the end there were people who's entire families were lost in a burning building or some such shit. I'm looking up there thinking "Dammit Marlene I was just at your place when your Mom cooked dinner for everyone"

when it was a sort of mini-rage in certain federal circles that took themselves far, far too seriously. And I remember thinking at the time that Covey was warmed over (can't remember the name now) that was all the rage in the latter half of the eighties. Also in certain federal circles that took themselves seriously too seriously.

If whoever / whatever is subjecting you to this is actually doing this to you now, the world has not only passed them by, it has lapped them a few times.

My deepest sympathies. It sucked when it was "new."

We had an exercise where we wrote down some stereotypes about certain groups: elderly, african american, white males, etc. At the end of the exercise they had us in a line, holding hands, and they asked us to close our eyes and listen to a song. The song: God Bless America. I was internally combusting.

We sat down to talk about the exercise. After some people made the expected points, I asked to speak and I said that I knew what I was about to say wasn't going to make me popular, but I had to say it... That of all the talk about shattering stereotypes, the section of the song, with its religious undertones, went very much against what they were trying to teach. I explained that there is a huge stigma against people who are in the mainstream religions and on people like me - a non-believer, that in some states I can't be elected to public office or that I can't get custody of minor children or even adopt or foster.

The facilitator indicated that there are many categories we could have discussed. I said that was ok, but the fact that song was chosen speaks loudly and I stood by my comment.

Then, we did an exercise where we split in two teams and we were each trying to go through a web without touching the sides or frame. The team leader decided that it would be best to lift people through the various holes after some people had attempted to slide through one leg at a time and touched. This went on for a while. When it came to my turn, I asked the leader if I could try again to slide through, since I am pretty flexible and just wanted to give it a shot (also known as 'taking a risk'). I even stated that if I'd touch the web, I'd be responsible for the consequences (there were consequences related to touching the web) and I'd accept them. The facilitators instead said that the whole team would suffer anyway, even if I took responsibility.

Anyway, I did it and everything was working well until the people on the other side - whom I had asked to help me and guide me - didn't catch my other foot on time and I touched the web.

After that, a very bossy woman (who described herself as having the power to fire people) said that of course I'd fail because all others before me who tried the same way had failed and we had been doing it long enough that our current system was working, so why change it? Then another lady said that I had let my ego in the way because I didn't want to use the same method. That really irked me, upset me and disgusted me. I was very close to saying 'go f yourselves' to everyone.

I thought back to all things that have been discovered. Most of them were discovered as the result of not just one but hundreds of failures, when all others who had tried before had failed. How are you supposed to innovate and create and improve if you don't try again after failing? Sure, the other method works and it's reliable, but it's not the only way. Sure the other method eventually became second-hand nature, but everyone assumed a prescribed role and conformed, in lock step with the 'leader' and not questioning. How can you be creative if you never try something differently and, even if you fail, you try again?

Can you imagine if people kept painting the same 2D style for centuries how boring art would be? I was irritated by the notion that it's somehow the ego that leads a person to think differently or take a risk. I thought we were training to be better leaders, not to be conformist little soldiers who never question the leader or his/her methods.

Go be content to be in lockstep and 'pretend' you're a leader simply by not questioning or not taking risks. Go pretend that diversity is great - as long as everyone is on the same page and apparently is ok with God Bless America in a group of people from all over the world. Never take a risk, never ask why or why not, never try after failing - enjoy staleness and intellectual death.

Once again, interdependence as defined by Covey was the highlight. According to the facilitators, we all got to where we are thanks to others. That's true for many, but for just as many others it's false. Sometimes, we are where we are in spite of others. Sometimes we are where we are despite of others' prejudices, racism, classism, religion, race, etc.

I hope I get a chance to provide feedback on this horrible experience, a waste of two days of my life, and another testament to corporate BS...

usually with resource/land management agencies and various stakeholders. All I know is the facilitator makes ALL the difference. A good facilitator can work the lamest "program" and shitty one can ruin a good one.

I have totally enjoyed and gotten a LOT out of some and just rolled my eyes and gone into total snark with others. It is all about the facilitator.

"Guru" is spelled: Gee! You Are You!