From horse’s mouth: Managers learn ‘gentler’s’ technique for office

They arrive at Mountainview
Ranch hoping to find the wise, wind-swept cowboy
that Robert Redford plays in the movie "The Horse
Whisperer." They agree this is wistful foolishness, until
Louis Wood makes his entrance on horseback.

By Leef Smith
The Washington Post

Clad in leather chaps, a denim shirt and a white
rancher’s hat, he looks the quintessential cowpoke.

Wood hangs back in the saddle to study the 18
coffee-sipping, pencil-pushing suburbanites mingling
like lost cattle in his grassy pasture. He has a long
conversation planned, but not with them.

No, he’s going to chat with a horse named Rosy.

The nearly silent tête-à-tête goes on for three hours
inside a round wooden pen as Wood works up to
saddling the skittish mare for the first time. Rather
than using fear to "break" her, he relies on trust and gentle guidance. His visitors take it all in,
scribbling on clipboards to carry his cowboy wisdom back to their office cubicles.

"There is a very fine line between offering leadership and guidance and getting in the way," Wood
says as Rosy’s transformation begins. "It’s not about submission. It’s not about what you put on the
horse’s back. It’s about what we put in his head."

The frontline managers from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, drink in Wood’s words. They
will leave sunburned and enlightened, believing that what they’ve seen might help them become
better bosses.

The common-sense approach to better management isn’t new, of course. Every year seems to
bring innovative, sometimes bizarre, workshops aimed at teaching better communication and
team-building skills to improve the karma around the office water cooler.

Wood’s two-day course, offered by the University’s Leadership Development Center, takes the idea
one step further by using his back-to-basics lessons in horse sense. So far, the quirky program has
drawn a wide range of interest, from corporate executives to fire chiefs.

Wood’s carrot-over-stick philosophy comes from a
lifetime of wrangling horses on his family’s 116-acre
cattle ranch. His teaching methods are patterned after
the work of other "horse gentlers," the term favored by
some. Among the most prominent is Monty Roberts,
whose training techniques are thought to have
partially influenced Nicholas Evans’ 1995 best seller
"The Horse Whisperer," which spawned the Redford
film.

"Monty can achieve with a horse in 28 minutes what
typically takes six to eight weeks using fear and
intimidation," said Bob Foxworthy, a management
consultant in Fairfax County, Va., who partnered with
Roberts in 1999 to conduct training seminars.

Among the firms Roberts says he helped is Volkswagen America. Company executives were
skeptical in 1994 when they arrived at his ranch in Solvang, Calif., northwest of Santa Barbara but
quickly grasped the management metaphor, he says. They "got the message and used it for the
betterment of the company. … Horses have only two goals: survive and reproduce. … Therefore, we
can study this species that doesn’t have ego or greed to mask. We can learn to eliminate the
modified behavior."

Wood and Roberts reject the term "horse whisperer" as a Hollywood-ism. Both men say they are
listeners and observers, not magicians.

"It’s not about whispering to horses," Wood tells the people gathered at his ranch. "It’s about
understanding and communicating what we know to the horse."

Wood rides the stately Augustus McCray, a towering chestnut thoroughbred he has trained to
understand his every motion. All it takes is a gentle tap and the horse easily executes a tricky
maneuver that Wood describes, in his aw-shucks drawl, as "parallel parking."

This year, Wood will give more than 100 clinics in natural horsemanship, including at least a
dozen management seminars for the University of Virginia with his partner, John Lord, director of
the university’s Leadership Development Center.

It was Lord’s troubled horse Cody that brought the two men together in 1999 and led them to
explore the horse-human connection. Their workshops began experimentally later that year.
Today, the lessons run with precision, including a down-home barbecue and copious amounts of
sunblock for office dwellers.

Charles Werner, deputy chief of the Charlottesville Fire Department, attended his first workshop last
year and became an immediate convert.

"After September 11, our lives changed so dramatically in the fire service," Werner said, noting
that emergencies can quickly force leadership roles on the unexpecting. "The workshop created
this vivid image of leadership that transcends all different aspects of life, from the workplace to
children. At first you’re thinking, ‘What am I going to learn from a horse?’ But it is so enlightening.
It’s like being hit in the head with a skillet."

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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