Horses as Courses

Writer Thomas McGuane once called the alliance between horse and human "a burst of poetry." But the only thing bursting was two blisters on the inside of my left knee when our wrangler asked my partner and me to each hold an end of a belt and walk our horses side by side through a maze in the shimmering aspens high in the Rockies above Steamboat Springs, Colo. Right off, I knew this was a make-or-break moment in what experts refer to as an "experiential" course in corporate training--this one a dusty, five-day regimen crafted by Conversant, a management-training firm based in Boulder, Colo.

Indeed, the equine minuet with belt would bring into play a good many of the skills we'd learned that week, lessons about reining our horses, applying the correct kind of pressure to get the desired results, and letting the horses know when to go fast, go slow or just whoa.

Constant chatter between me and my horse--and between me and my partner--helped us ease our way through the minute adjustments, missteps and trip-ups that went into an exercise that was more a test for us than it was for our complacent cayuses. I may have looked like a rank urbanite, but we finished off the maze in short order, which probably surprised our horses more than it did us.

Complex, rocky and at times perplexing, a week's worth of horsing around at the sumptuous Home Ranch is the latest outdoor pursuit in management training. In today's corporate-training world, there are the old standbys like rock climbing, rope mazes and Dale Carnegie. But a wide variety of other programs have developed that purport to impart management wisdom: martial arts, golf (don't ask), rhythmic drumming (ditto), paintball and treasure hunts among them. Some trainers use improvisational comedy to supposedly unleash the inner Jay Leno in trainees, while other consultants bring along wild animals to scare off any doubts about promoting Smithers to GM in the Northeast office.

Nothing, however, focuses the mind, body and spirit like the prospect of winding up underneath a 1,400-lb. palomino. The lesson in cowpoking is that the whole operation relies on getting an innately stupid animal--no, not your boss, wise guy--to execute a job that's critical to the process. To get an entire herd moving, cowboys need organizational and communications skills that are, the trainees hope, readily applicable when they're home from the range. The chief financial officer of a hospitality company, for example, said he needed to "get more done more efficiently and faster, always faster." He was one of 12 men and four women, mostly in their 30s and 40s, who came from such companies as Ball Aerospace & Technologies, Hewlett-Packard and Tektronix. Someone else wanted to standardize a process at HP, a job he described as "impossible." A brilliant young entrepreneur from Massachusetts said he wanted to become a "better leader and communicator."