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  Because this approach is doomed to fail without constant reinforcement from above, Greenwald encourages top-level managers to downplay results wherever possible. “I don’t want managers focusing so much on whether the sale got closed. I want managers saying, ‘Were you fearless today? Were you in the zone? What do you think you need to do next time?’ ”

  Barry Epstein of Epstein Solutions, a satisfied Greenwald client and a former executive with Oracle, echoes the belief that “wanting it” alone is not the answer: “I think we’ve all had situations where we wanted something so badly, and that’s exactly why we didn’t get it.” Yet mirroring the philosophical confusion in the realm (as in so many SHAM realms), Epstein also concedes, “If I’m a manager and my salesman comes to me and says he ‘engaged’ with the customer and ‘felt fearless’—but he didn’t sell anything—I’m going to say, ‘That’s very nice, but you’re fired.’ ”

  Which is essentially what Bethlehem Steel said to Steve Foucault, a onetime sales manager for the company, which undertook an ambitious sports-oriented training program in the late 1980s. “The awards ceremonies were the worst for me,” Foucault told me. “They always gave the stuff to the people who ‘went the extra mile,’ as if to imply that the rest of us weren’t trying hard enough. Well, I went the extra mile. I tried damn hard. I just wasn’t as naturally gifted as some of the others. I always ended up feeling like a loser, and I wasn’t the only one.” Jim Bouton isn’t surprised. “If everything is do-or-die, and you fail at whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’ve delivered a potent message to yourself.”

  The biting irony is that the metamorphosis from pep rally to program has transformed Sportsthink from an innocuous placebo (or shot of adrenaline) to a much more aggressive form of “treatment” with potentially serious side effects. Sportsthink not only shares SHAM’s propensity for building false and hurtful expectations, it also teaches people to look at their jobs, if not the world, through an overly simplistic, ultracompetitive lens. Life becomes a morality play in which winners win because of good character and losers lose because of a weakness of will or spirit.

  It bears noting that no amount of can-do spirit was able to help Bethlehem Steel overcome global competition and the other external factors that made the company’s prices uncompetitive. The steelmaker filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and faded into history two years later.

  That Sportsthink has been oversold is incontrovertible. Most of its teachings, after all, are fairly generic insights about teamwork, cohesion, goal setting, positive thinking, and the like. Most leading sports speakers make free use of material that’s only tangentially related to sports, or whose sports significance is obscure at best (thus lending further credence to the suspicion that the “sports” label is mostly an attention-getting device for delivering all-purpose SHAM pabulum). Sports psychologist Kevin Elko likes to give talks about “Finding Your 68,” a reference to the uniform number worn by NHL star Jaromir Jagr. Born in the Czech Republic, Jagr favors the number because, says Elko, “it was in 1968 that the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia occurred. So finding your 68 means finding the thing about you that makes you tick.” And what then? “When you find what you want in life, you give it away, and even more will come back to you,” says Elko.

  Even when Sportsthink’s affirmations make actual sense, says Mark Fichman of Carnegie Mellon, “I suspect you could reach similar conclusions if you looked at generalizing from any particular walk of life—say, the entertainment industry—to another.” Clearly Greenwald’s “windshield-wiper” technique could just as well be called automotivethink. Bouton, meanwhile, accuses his peers of “way too much sloganeering, hyping so-called methods that are hardly new or profound.” Nor have they ever been tested in any meaningful way. Although there are plenty of anecdotal success stories, sports-related inspirational talks and business plans have never been empirically validated as a way of improving performance, capacity, innovation—anything. Benjamin Dattner finds this dearth of tracking intriguing, given the numbers mania of the sports world itself. “One of the great things about baseball and football, for example, is the volume of statistics available for benchmarking performance down to the most infinitesimal level. So if you want to emulate sports, then emulate sports: Keep score!” Fichman speculates that Sportsthink may be one of those things that nobody really wants to test. “We want it to work,” he says. “We have too much invested in this, a lot of us, for it to be meaningless in the end.” As a result, high on its intoxicating promise, “managers make assumptions, act on them, and never really verify if they are true,” says Fichman.

  The question arises: Why does Sportsthink have such boundless appeal, when its benefits are so sketchy and its risks so real? The answers say a lot about what America expects from SHAM generally, and why it buys in at such a high cost. Even Sportsthink’s tireless advocates allow that many companies see it as a relatively painless alternative to more demanding types of consulting. “It brings people back to a simpler time in their life,” says Mark Dixon, the director of sales and client services for Acosta Sales and Marketing, which for the past six years has booked sports speakers on behalf of the Southern California deli/bakery industry. “It reminds us of when we were younger, and more optimistic about life—a time when everything was still possible, and we were all going to play center field for the New York Yankees.”

  Sportsthink, then, plays to the Walter Mitty within people. The lure of the message is its hinted promise of transcendence—if Kirk Gibson could do it with his gimpy legs, sore back, and all, well, so can you. Maybe you can’t hit that game-winning home run for the Dodgers. But if, as the movement’s high priests claim, we all have within us an untapped reserve of mettle, then maybe you can learn to hit the winning home run for your company and, by extension, your career. Much as die-hard fans wear Allen Iverson’s jersey or swing Alex Rodriguez’s bat, we think we can absorb their success by embracing the cultural trappings that made them that way. Or so Sportsthink tells us.

  After all, if success happens for magical reasons that have nothing to do with skill or wit or looks—if we can persuade ourselves that Gibson launched that homer because he flat-out willed it—then we too can rise above our limitations. As Tommy says, all ya gotta do is want it.

  THE ENDURING METAPHOR

  Sports-as-workable-microcosm-for-life has achieved something like ubiquity. As we’ll see in the next chapter, many SHAM artists have begun calling themselves “executive coaches” and even the all-encompassing “life coaches.” Politics, too, brims with sports references. President George W. Bush, when not spouting quaint Westernisms meant to remind America’s enemies that thar’s a new sheriff in town, likes to fall back on beefy allusions to the ballpark or the gridiron. Beltway wonks speak of end runs and home runs and strikeouts and goal-line stands, borrowing freely from the sporting lexicon in a manner that underscores its common meaning and impact.

  This trend may have reached its zenith, or nadir, during Bill Maher’s HBO show of February 20, 2004. The comedian and social satirist had as his guest Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia. For a time the two men, both sports nuts, debated the financial underpinnings of the major spectator sports. Then Maher asked Allen a question about politics—specifically, why Allen had accused the Democrats of political obstructionism. Allen responded by arguing that Democrats in Congress had been guilty of delay of game as well as holding, that they were politically and ethically offside in their approach to governance, that they were preventing the president from throwing the ball down the field, that too many legislators had punted when they should have run with the ball. . . . It was a tour de force in extended metaphor made all the more impressive by the sense that Allen had delivered it off the cuff. When he was done, the audience hooted its appreciation, and even the famously unflappable Maher looked flapped. I could hardly help flashing back to my long-ago evening with Tommy Lasorda.

  Lost in the adulation was the fact that Allen had grossly distorted
reality, diminishing his subject by oversimplifying it. The process by which Congress makes law and sets policy is nothing like a football game, and we do injustice to that process by making it seem so. Sports-inspired oratory may produce wonderful sound bites and stump speeches, but it also encourages a win-at-all-costs outlook among politicians and their followers. As the two parties seek to vanquish each other, the best interests of constituents get lost.

  Worse, America buys in. The simpleminded conceit becomes part of the national dialogue, defining how we feel about the subject, causing us to sort ourselves into teammates and opponents, winners and losers, white hats and black hats, red states and blue states. Despite all of Sportsthink’s new precepts, inevitably followers receive the competitive message that overlays it all: You’re either on my team, or you’re not. Like the blurted, prejudicial courtroom remark that jurors remember long after the judge’s admonition to “disregard it,” Sportsthink’s overarching ambition—to win the game—is what sticks, outweighing all that motivational pabulum or even those few potentially helpful aspects of process.

  In the end, the great failing of Sportsthink, both within the corporate world and without, is one that plagues the self-help movement as a whole, and ultimately our society: the tendency to put forth one-dimensional answers to complex, heavily nuanced questions; the tendency to let our decisions be guided by empty prescriptives that are about as useful as that old Yogi Berra line: “Baseball is 90 percent mental—the other half is physical.”

  6

  PUT ME IN, COACH, I’M READY TO PAY

  Soon a coach will be seen as someone you have as a matter of course to make your life run more efficiently, like an accountant.

  —Sunday Telegraph (London), July 1999

  “You are the creator,” says the Web site of Jane Ellen Sexton, “whether you like it or not. That responsibility is also your gift of empowerment. So how do you cooperate with you while honoring your own divinity?”

  That last line does not contain a typo. “How do you cooperate with you” is the kind of question you’d expect from a self-described “intuitive life coach,” especially one who also offers “channeling” for people whose self-help needs exceed garden-variety intuitive life coaching.

  “Channeling,” Sexton helpfully explains, “is the process where I connect with information that flows through me from dimensions outside of the earth plane for purposes of expanding reality. This information comes from a spiritual, non-intellectual level. The best way I would describe the process is that my ego and personality move aside, and I become the vessel for the information that is the most appropriate for you in the moment.”

  Though she may grope a bit in defining the process, Sexton has no trouble explaining that her services as an intuitive life coach cost $150 an hour—or $250 per ninety-minute session if you go the channeling route. But most clients should be able to get away with the basic life coaching, as it’s the “experience” she has “most aligned with” since she became “certified to do spiritual work.” Sexton also promises that “while I’m listening to you, I’m not focused on anything but you.” At $2.50 a minute, that’s comforting to know.

  Marketdata Enterprises estimates that twenty-five thousand “life coaches” of various stripes are now active in the United States, about ten thousand of them working in corporate America alone. The International Coach Federation (ICF), founded in 1992 as the National Association of Professional Coaches, claimed seven thousand members worldwide by 2004; that’s up nearly 200 percent in just four years. And ICF is just one of several fraternal bodies that (very) loosely oversee this new SHAM specialty. Technically, no life coach is answerable to ICF or any other regulatory body. Of course, civilian penalties may apply if coaches commit a provable fraud, but even that’s unlikely to occur, since the nature of the promise is so intangible and, usually, nonspecific.

  Life coaching is the Dodge City of SHAM.

  “A HEAVY INDUSTRY”

  As SHAM subcategories go, the coaching sensation—and it surely is that—remains in its infancy. In a major 2002 survey of coaching practices underwritten by the California School of Organizational Studies (CSOS), 42 percent of the respondents confessed to less than two years of experience. True, an elite corps of top managers has long sought counsel from an elite corps of personal consultants; for the right price, the right person could get Tony Robbins himself for an afternoon. But in recent years, coaching has gone mass-market with an astonishing trajectory: a growth rate the Economist in 2002 estimated at 40 percent per year. Dozens of Web sites lure browsers with names like coachville.com, mylifecoach.com, lifecoachtraining.com, and solveyourproblem.com. There is even inanimate coaching delivered straight to your desktop: A British product, LifeBuilder, claims to be “the only desktop Life-coaching and self-improvement programme available in the world and, at just £19.95 [about US$35] it’s truly amazing. Whatever your goals, aims and dreams might be, take a look at LifeBuilder.”

  Like the regimens themselves, costs are all over the map. In business settings, coaches are so sought after that their hourly earnings often outpace those of counseling professionals with hard-won credentials. A top executive coach like Jeffrey Auerbach, who is also president of the College of Executive Coaching, may charge $400 or more per hour, easily exceeding the going rate for most established psychologists or psychiatrists. This is where the phrase “phone it in” takes on a whole new meaning. Despite the lofty hourly sums, coaches in many cases needn’t show up on the premises. They’ll typically make three or four thirty- to sixty-minute calls, and e-mail their invoices, flexing their coaching pursuits around their 9-to-5 jobs and other freelance activities. A case in point is Richard Brendan of Indianapolis. Aside from being a “Life Purpose” coach, Brendan produces and hosts the inspirational JourneysFire radio show (featuring “conversations on life and love with Activists of the Heart”), promotes himself as a speaker-for-hire, and serves as a director of the Indianapolis chapter of HealthNet, a major managed-care provider. He says he’s also a lifetime member of the Dead Poets Society.

  Though it’s almost impossible to reckon a total dollar volume for all coaching activities, one can extrapolate from the CSOS survey. It arrived at a mean annual income of $37,500 for its 1,338 respondents, most of whom worked only part-time. (Those labeling themselves “executive coaches” reported an average income of $77,339.) If the $37,500 figure holds for Marketdata’s estimated universe of twenty-five thousand coaches, the end result is just under $1 billion in coaching income.

  “Coaching is becoming a heavy industry,” Warren Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California’s business school and the author of the 1990 business classic On Becoming a Leader, told me in an interview. “It’s an incredible story.”

  All the more so because many of today’s life coaches were doing something else before the turn of the millennium; in a fair percentage of the cases that something had little to do with counseling, therapy, or training of any kind. “Whenever you get increased demand, and supply comes to meet it quickly, it doesn’t necessarily have to be of the best quality,” John Kotter, a professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, told me. “If the demand is high enough, all kinds of muck will flow into the market.”

  That river of flowing muck has not prevented a steady complement of otherwise-savvy people (as well as some not-so-savvy ones, as we’ll see) from putting their faith in coaching. Today, says Jim Naughton of Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine for professionals in counseling fields, life coaching is fast becoming “the equivalent of having a personal trainer.” That’s how mainstream the once-fringe concept has gone. Fortune magazine, in a long article on the subject, called executive coaching “the hottest thing in management.”

  The demand is such that companies sometimes will even try to make coaches out of people who didn’t think of it on their own. For example, Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor, has reportedly been “inundated” wi
th requests to coach.

  Managers hire coaches to facilitate divisional change (and deflect the blame that often accompanies it). Midlevel staffers, no longer anticipating the continuity of employment or professional TLC that once was expected from the business world, have turned to coaches for guidance on how to improve their morale, get that last ounce out of professional productivity, and make better, more personally relevant decisions—both on the job and off. Personal coaches are “not just sticking to corporate matters,” Bennis told me, “and that’s really the whole point of it. They’ve widened the lens to encompass all areas of the person’s performance. They’ll ask questions like ‘Does this job make you happy?’ ‘Should you even be in this line of work?’ ”

  BIRTH OF A SENSATION

  Coaching as we now know it debuted in the 1980s, probably with a Seattle financial planner, Thomas Leonard. Leonard realized that his successful young clients, though emotionally “whole” and hardly candidates for traditional psychiatry, nonetheless seemed to need more from him than just the usual tips on how to invest and shelter their formidable incomes. Years later, he would remember a moment of truth when he asked some of them if they wanted to talk more holistically about life. “They jumped at it,” Leonard told Fortune. “They didn’t need a therapist. They just wanted to brainstorm.”

  His career shifted from financial planning to full-time brainstorming, which at the time he called “life planning.” He recalls that he “had an inkling there was something interesting and powerful about this idea.” As mergers-and-acquisition mania took hold and widespread corporate downsizing destabilized the American job market, the hunger for Leonard’s services grew. Some of his clients wanted to kick around alternative ways of making money, some wanted to learn how to de-stress, some wanted a pat on the back, some wanted a shoulder to cry on. Coincidentally, by this time the rise of managed care had left many mental-health professionals searching for other ways to earn a living, ways that were more recession-proof and less dependent on insurance reimbursement. They became ideal candidates for Leonard’s more SHAM-like—and prepaid—training methods. Somewhere along the line, somebody used the word coaching, and within a few years Leonard was coaching other prospective coaches, who were often corporate burnouts or refugees from other areas of the conventional business world.