Great Moments in Corporate Team-Building
Posted Thursday, Oct. 11, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET"About a dozen Burger King marketing-department workers burned their feet when they walked over white-hot coals at a meeting intended to promote bonding," the Associated Press reported over the weekend. Somehow I missed this story until now, but I have to take note of it.
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StumbleUponApparently Burger King brought more than 100 employees to a Florida resort for this exercise. One woman was taken to the emergency room, and others sat in wheelchairs the next day, as they'd suffered first- and second-degree burns.
Did this promote bonding? Perhaps. A Burger King vice president told the AP: "It made you feel a sense of empowerment, and that you can accomplish anything.'' Now, I'm self-employed, and so more or less immune to forced bonding rituals, so maybe this is out of my area of expertise. But to me, that VP's assessment sure sounds like a whopper.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
I'm sure it was a bonding experience: their new-found paranoia and hatred of management will bring them together.
Besides, it was the marketing department. For every one struck down in a tragic off-site mishap, two will spawn to take their place.
--El Doktor
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The funny thing about this is, fire walking is supposed to be easy for an instructor to make safe. It's supposed to look dangerous, but be practically risk free.
Having the purveyor of frame-broiled whoppers get burned fire-walking is a tossup with Limbaugh going deaf as ironic humor of the week.
--Charlie Heath
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(10/12)