that the secrets of success are finite and can be briefly enumerated. Again Carnegie was the pioneer, offering ‘seven ways to peace and happiness’ and ‘four good working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry’. Having hit the jackpot with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey went even further in his sequel, whose chapter headings include ‘Three Resolutions’, ‘Six Days of Creation’, ‘Six Conditions of Empowerment’, ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (didn’t someone else think of that first?), ‘Seven Chronic Problems’, ‘Eight Ways to Enrich Marriage and Family Relationships’ and, generously enough, ‘Thirty Methods of Influence’. Meanwhile, Anthony Robbins has discovered the ‘Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness’ and ‘Seven Lies of Success’. More ambitiously still, his book Giant Steps provides no fewer than ‘365 lessons in self-mastery’ – though some of them are pretty skimpy. Here is Lesson 364, in its entirety: ‘Remember to expect miracles … because you are one.’
If the gurus offered nothing but cracker-mottoes, their appeal might have been limited to a few simpletons; but the faux naivety was cunningly seasoned with an equally faux sophistication. They made liberal use of neologistic jargon –‘re-engineering’, ‘demassing’, ‘downsizing’, ‘benchmarking’ – to give their twee clichés an appearance of scientific method and intellectual rigour. And it worked: even grizzled New York police chiefs and four-star generals began babbling about ‘the mobility pool’ and ‘proactive outplacement’. (‘Of course this benchmarking is only a rough guide,’ one Pentagon official told a reporter. ‘The ultimate benchmarking exercise is war.’) Stephen Covey’s client-list in the US included the departments of energy, defence, interior and transportation, the postal service – and Bill Clinton, who invited both Covey and Anthony Robbins to spend the weekend with him in December 1994.
Reeling from his party’s defeat by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in the previous month’s congressional elections, the president summoned no fewer than five feelgood authors to help him ‘search for a way back’. The other three were Marianne Williamson, a glamorous Hollywood mystic (and, one need hardly add, bestselling author) who had performed the marriage rites at Elizabeth Taylor’s 1991 wedding to Larry Fortemsky; Jean Houston, a self-styled ‘sacred psychologist’ whose fourteen books included Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self; and her friend Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropology professor whose study of ‘non-traditional life paths’ had been praised by Hillary Clinton.
This quintet of sages asked the president to describe his best qualities. ‘I have a good heart,’ he said. ‘I really do. And I hope I have a decent mind.’ (If so, one might ask, why seek solace from snake-oil vendors?) As they talked long into the night, and all the following day, the conversation was increasingly dominated by Hillary’s problems – the constant personal attacks she endured, and the failure of her plan to reform health-care. Jean Houston, who felt that ‘being Hillary Clinton was like being Mozart with his hands cut off’, informed the First Lady that she was ‘carrying the burden of 5,000 years of history when women were subservient … She was reversing thousands of years of expectation and was there up front, probably more than virtually any woman in human history – apart from Joan of Arc’
The latter-day Joan was understandably flattered. Over the next six months Houston and Bateson often visited Hillary Clinton in Washington, urging her to talk to the spirits of historical figures who would understand her travails and thus help her ‘achieve self-healing’. Sitting with her two psychic counsellors at a circular table in the White House solarium, she held conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt (her ‘spiritual archetype’) and Mahatma Gandhi (‘a powerful symbol of stoic self-denial’). It was only when Houston proposed speaking to Jesus Christ –‘the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated’ – that Hillary called a halt. ‘That’, she explained, ‘would be too personal.’ The reticence seems rather puzzling: don’t millions of Christians speak to Jesus, both publicly and privately, through their prayers?
There was little the Republicans could do to exploit ‘Wackygate’, as it became known: too many people remembered Ronald Reagan’s dependence on Nancy’s astrologer. Those with longer memories might even have recalled that Norman Vincent Peale, the man who brought God into the selling of vacuum-cleaners, was a regular visitor to the White House during Eisenhower’s presidency and presided at the wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie. Indeed, a few months before Clinton’s chinwag with the gurus, three former presidents – Ford, Reagan and Bush – had joined Peale’s widow, the Rev. Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar (‘America’s No. 1 motivational speaker’) in a forty-one-gig travelling show titled Success ‘94. Ten days after the Camp David self-help session, the Republican congressman John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee, invited his staff to a seminar with Doug Hall, author of Jump Start Your Brain. ‘Hall blasted the old Sam the Sham song “Woolly Bully” in the committee room,’ the Washington Post reported, ‘while the staffers shot at one another with Nerf guns.’
No wonder President Clinton remained so stubbornly popular, however many scandals buffeted his reputation: his dabblings in alternative psychology and New Age management techniques must have been a great reassurance to many fellow-citizens who had previously felt slightly shamefaced about their own dalliance with Deepak Chopra or Anthony Robbins. As Newsweek pointed out when the story of Hillary’s chats with ghosts eventually leaked, ‘From Atlantic Richfield to Xerox, corporate America has spent millions every year putting managers through the same kind of exercises in personal transformation the Clintons have been sampling for free. Houston herself has run seminars for the Department of Commerce and other federal agencies. At Stanford Business School, Prof. Michael Ray has prepared future captains of industry with Tarot cards and chants to release their deeper selves.’
Everyone was at it. In Britain, allegedly the home of the stiff upper lip, the loopier manifestations of soul-baring may have been mocked but managerial mumbo-jumbo found an eager market. By 1995 the British government was spending well over £100 million a year on management consultants, as branches of officialdom were forcibly transformed into ‘agencies’. What had once been straightforward public services, such as the health system or the BBC, acquired their own internal markets – which in turn created new blizzards of paperwork and extra layers of bureaucracy, all in the name of efficiency. The ensuing chaos was best described by an official inquiry into the semi-privatised British prison service, commissioned after two murderers and an arsonist escaped from Parkhurst jail in January 1995: ‘Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation.’ The home secretary promptly sacked the director-general of the prison service, Derek Lewis, a businessman who knew nothing about jails or indeed public administration. Lewis was understandably puzzled: the same government which recruited him three years earlier to give the penal system a dose of management theory had now punished him for doing just that.
This fiasco did nothing to dampen the Tories’ enthusiasm for merchants of gimmickry and gobbledegook; and the only difference made by the election of New Labour in 1997 was that that the Blairites seemed even more susceptible. Government spending on private consultants rose by 25 per cent in both 1998–9 and 1999–2000, and by more than 50 per cent the following year – from £360 million to £550 million. The recipients of this largesse could hardly believe their luck. ‘Go back two or three years,’ the trade journal Management Consultancy commented in August 2001, ‘and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone anticipating an increase in spending of that magnitude from the state.’ Not so: Tony Blair had never concealed his reverence for management gurus. In the summer of 1996 he despatched 100 Labour frontbenchers to a weekend seminar at Templeton College, Oxford, where a posse of partners from Andersen Consulting lectured the wannabe ministers on ‘total quality service’ and ‘the management of change’. (The veteran Labour politician Lord Healey, who also spoke at the event, was unimpressed: ‘These management consultants are just making money out of suckers.’) When Blair entered Downing Street, several executives from Andersen – and McKinseys, the other leading management consultancy-were seconded to Whitehall with a brief to practise ‘blue skies thinking’. Soon