Free Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich Page B

group.
    there's the enigmatic Cynthia, a tousled redhead of about fortyI want to tell you my philosophy. It's very powerful. Every unit increase in five, who manages to look fastidious and slightly remote even in your personal sense of well-being increases your external performance exponentially.
    blue jeans. But there are no introductions, and we leap right in.
    Patrick, who had boomed confidently on the phone, is not the T h i s p r o p o s i t i o n i s e x p r e s s e d o n t h e f l i p c h a r t a s commanding presence I pictured. Partly bald, with colorless,
    "EP/PSWB." We're only five minutes into the day's work, and already I'm straining to understand. If EP, meaning external the "four questions," under Patrick's vigilant leadership. He tells performance, varies exponentially with PSWB—one's personal us that he "has permission" to interrupt us at any moment and say sense of well-being—why are we interested in the ratio of EP to
    "freeze," upon which we are not to speak or make eye contact PSWB? Over the course of the day, this central proposition will with others. Who gave him "permission"? Certainly not the people take various pseudomathematical forms, such as "EP10+/PSWB"
    in the room, most of whom seem to have already been frozen and "EP 10x/PSWB," driving me nuts. Of course I am losing into a state of dull acquiescence. As at the Forty-Plus Club, the sight of the fact that neither EP nor PSWB can be expressed in prevailing emotional tone is depression, leavened with timid numerical form; at least I can't imagine how you would quantify expectation. Anyway, this "freezing" business is called your personal sense of well-being. But, although the room
    "pattern interruption," and, Patrick tells us, "it's very turns out to contain several IT and telecom guys who must powerful." The purpose is to "get value from experience," as if have some glancing acquaintance with mathematics, or at least experience were a novel new place to find "value."
    with logical, digital-type thinking, no one else seems First up is Richard, who is about sixty and has a kindly face remotely bothered. The point is to pump that PSWB up.
    etched with permanent wince lines. He had been in real estate but left that field for undisclosed reasons, seemingly having to do PSWB depends on authenticity and congruency and these are reinforced with its being "so high pressure." Then he realized his lifelong by a journey of self-discovery. You're going to watch people make changes in their lives . . . You have to trust that whatever I do will lead to dream of going into business with his son, but "that didn't this [self-discovery.] This is the Knowles group model of experiential work out." This is a trend, I've read: unemployed parents going coaching.
    to work in their grown children's businesses. It can be a risky undertaking, involving, as it does, the overthrow of long-standing So this is how the "Knowles group model" operates: We will parental authority; and I can think of nothing sadder than to be go around the table, though not in any predictable order, with fired by one's own child on the threshold of old age. What each person in turn going to the front of the room and addressing Richard's looking for now is fairly cosmic: "some direction another "they"—some external force or entity that can be used as for my life."
    an excuse for our failures.
    All this is delivered in a flat tone, without the slightest self-This lesson is reinforced with Kevin, who says he is thirty-six pity but with an expression suggesting that Richard is accus-and a practitioner of something called "operations manage-tomed to having his utterances answered with slaps. I am ment." Poor Kevin—who offers, as his most positive self-afraid he'll start to cry or at least put his hands up over his face endorsement, that he is "dependable"—now faces rumors of to ward off oncoming blows, but, mercifully, Patrick "freezes" him impending layoffs at his firm and is contemplating a