Power Camp

Out on the edge of the continent, on the site of a former evangelical retreat, there's a camp where businesspeople confront issues of power and authority inside organizations -- issues fundamental to the world of work. Upon arrival, participants forfeit their corporate identities. Upon departure, they lose sleep, crash cars, leave jobs. Here the rules of engagement are different, the mental and physical demands extreme. People who attend say it's the weirdest place they've ever been. They say it's just like their company.

Act One: Arrivals

It's Saturday afternoon. the rain is crazy. and for the 50th time in 25 years, New Hope has virtually no chance of living up to its name.

New Hope is a strange place: people enter society in preassigned castes -- elites, middles, and immigrants -- and the community pops up, Brigadoon-style, at Cape Cod's Craigville Conference Center. Just now a management consultant named John is parking his Jeep and puddle-hopping up to the Manor -- his digs for the next five days, a sprawling house overlooking the beach. Inside he finds a bottle of Bordeaux, fruit and cheese, $29,050 in cash, his three co-elites, and a counselor in a tweed sport coat.

"Welcome to New Hope," the counselor says. "You are the elites here. You have great responsibility. You control the court, the economy, the schools, the newspaper, everything." He hands out a sheet of Do's and Don'ts. "I've compiled some advice to help you accomplish what you came here to do." He starts reading: "Don't let yourself get comfortable. Don't make friends. Do commit unnatural acts. Do talk to the devil."

With that, he excuses himself and the four elites launch into a six-hour whiskey-lubricated discussion of the kind of society they wish to create at New Hope. Opinions Ping-Pong from philanthropic to fascist to the bootstrapping ethos of the American dream. Near midnight the group's ideas roll to a steady state. Caitlin -- the lone female, an environmental consultant with an amazing ability not to talk unless she has something useful to say -- sums up: "It seems to me that a guiding principle of this group is that we all want to maintain our power. We want to be wearing our own underwear at the end of the week."

On Sunday at about noon, the rain is still raging. The middles start to pull in. They are four, again three men and one woman, and upon their arrival at Groves -- a modest two-story A-frame -- people with hats marked "Staff" hand out "A Note Regarding Transition."

"You are about to undergo the transition process," the memo reads. "That is, to pass from the reality of your everyday life into a new reality that was designed for this program. As part of the transition process, you will be asked to give up a number of items that you have brought with you."

A few minutes later staffers relieve the four middles of cell-phones, car keys, beepers, Discmans. Doug -- a boyish, blond manager at a company in the information storage and retrieval business -- looks visibly shaken. He and Katherine -- 30ish and high-strung, a human resources manager at Microsoft -- head upstairs, where they maniacally move all of the middles' beds, bedding, and luggage into Groves's two lockable rooms.

Around 3 PM the last New Hope campers, six immigrants, step into the Inn, a public building with a pay phone outside -- although just now the phone is padlocked with a three-quarter inch chain. A sign declares it "out of bounds" to camp participants. Once again staffers hand out copies of "A Note Regarding Transition." This time they also dispense brown grocery bags.

"It'll be easier for me to tell you what you can bring into this society than what you need to leave behind," a woman with a taut, marathon-runner's body explains. "You can take a change of underwear, including socks, saline solution, and any prescription drugs. The brown bag is your new luggage. Wear any clothes you wish, appropriate to the weather." She pauses, letting her message sink in. "I will collect your remaining belongings in approximately 10 minutes."

There's a moment of stillness, just nervous gasps and wide-eyed silence, and then final preparations begin. Lena -- a 5' 1" featherweight StairMastering her way up the ladder -- bulks up in a T-shirt, a long-sleeve thermal shirt, a sweater, a jacket, and two pairs of sweatpants, and then she brushes and flosses her teeth. Lou -- a sales whiz turned applications engineer, driven in a way that belies his laid-back youth growing up in Hawaii -- inhales three Marlboros and rings the office before handing over his cigarettes, beeper, keys, wallet, food stash, phone, and clothes. Stunned, he asks the marathoner, "Are we sleeping outside tonight?"

TOOT I
Welcome to the Power & Leadership Conference, aka Power Camp -- a six-day, intensive training seminar that shines a Klieg light on organizational life and how you, in particular, deal with power, your own and others'. Don't be fooled by the antics. Camp is not about eccentricity; it's about every organization people work in.