My 5 Days at Camp Lur'ning

Day 1

I am standing, lost and a little bewildered, in the middle of a crowd of some 200 noisy, happy party-goers, in the reception hall of Xerox Document University (XDU). It's after 8 PM on a cool summer night in Leesburg, Virginia. Everyone's wearing khaki pants and polo shirts -- men and women alike -- and I'm wearing jeans and a Day-Glo T-shirt. The public relations guy at Xerox Business Services told me the dress would be casual, and I've managed to come underdressed. I forgot that in the corporate world even casual means a uniform.

I'm here to find out if XBS is really on to something new in corporate learning, or if Camp Lur'ning is just a goofy way of spelling "same old, same old." I've been told that Camp Lur'ning is revolutionary. If this is a revolution, the early warning signals aren't good: these khakis just came off the shelf. They've still got the new-pants creases.

And the place they chose for their revolution, Xerox Document University, looks like something designed by the military-industrial complex. Outside it looks like a 1960s country club that chose an unfortunate architect. Inside it looks like the Pentagon. I haven't been able to find my dorm room yet.

I haven't been able to find Tamara either. She's my camp counselor -- whatever that means -- and she's supposed to help me get oriented. I finally resort to stopping people with counselor badges and asking them if they're Tamara. No one seems to know where she is, but they all offer to help.

"You're not in my group. Are you a late arrival?" When we find her, Tamara is friendly, but a little puzzled. I explain that I'm a journalist participating in Camp Lur'ning to learn more about it. After that, she pays close attention.

There are, she explains, only three rules: Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Take care of this place. The goals? Help your group develop a plan for ways to get closer to a specific, real-life customer -- assigned at the beginning of the week -- and report back to the entire camp on Thursday. Attend as many of the all-camp seminars and talks as you can stand. And have fun.

By the end of the evening, I've learned a couple of interesting tidbits. First, there are real-live customers sprinkled among the XBSers. Including them was the employees' idea. If you're trying to get close to your customers, why not invite them to your corporate training sessions? The logic is inescapable -- and highly unusual.

Second, I've figured out why the khakis are new. There are a lot of what we used to call blue-collar employees at Xerox. People whose sole job was running or repairing a Xerox machine on a customer site. They had a set of rules and a uniform: navy polyester pants, blue shirt, navy tie. Now these people are redesigning their own workplaces, figuring out how to solve their clients' information problems, and managing complex document preparation, storage, and retrieval services. Their rules have changed, and the uniform has become optional. They're wearing khakis because they usually wear jeans on the job and cut-offs at home. They're dressing up to come to camp.

With a little help from my friends, I've managed to find my room. As I drift off to the lullaby of hungry mosquitoes working their way through the screens, I'm beginning to think that XBS may actually be on to something here.

Day 2

"Reengineering is dead," says Chris Turner, the key player in XBS's cultural transformation. "It was the last gasp of the old rigid command-and-control corporate model." Turner has agreed to help me understand Camp Lur'ning.

"We have the sense that many people are beginning to look in a new direction," she continues. "We know the outlines of it, but the precise shape it will take is not exactly clear. We've learned that you can't push change through an organization, because the harder you push, the more resistance you get. That's why we've turned to the concept of natural systems. We've also learned that work life should be more like home life. People work better when they don't have to pretend. And we've learned that you have to trust people to develop their own solutions to problems in the workplace. When they own them, they make them succeed."

I keep trying to bring the conversation down to more manageable levels. What's going on at Camp Lur'ning? What does XBS know about culture that other companies don't? How will corporations hire, train, and retain the employees of the 21st century?

Turner patiently explains the new gestalt to me as if I were an eager but slightly dim pupil. The old ways no longer work for a corporation that is growing enormously in the twilight of the 20th century. At Camp Lur'ning, almost 400 XBS employees, and customers as diverse as TRW, Estée Lauder, Bain & Co., Dow Chemical, Microsoft, and American Stores, have gathered together to learn how to get ready for the coming century. No corporate hierarchy here. All titles are left at the door. There are only campers.