Another insidious U.S. export

A few months back I was alarmed to see a conga line of blindfolded executives outside my glass door.
In a trust game, participants in the Hay Group retreat were blindly making their way across the putting green using Teamwork and Synergy. My guess is they were "thinking outside the box" and Continuously Improving (tm) and using Total Quality Management (tm) too. I could smell the proactivity.
Not even the rutted roads of Santa Cruz, the high Andes, the vast rain forest or the Gran Chaco could deter the culty corporate training that has brainwashed legions of MBAs across the globe into thinking that productivity and creativity can be coaxed out by PowerPoint (tm) and buffet brunch.
A symptom of how pervasive this epidemic has become is the propensity of multi-day seminars here, like the two I participated in back in La Paz. The goal of organizers seems to be to take an interesting subject and invite "experts" to discuss it in the most theoretical and abstract way in marathon sessions until the subject is no loner interesting.
By the time I took the podium in La Paz -- two days deep into a seminar about responsible journalism -- not even a reincarnated Simon Bolivar could have roused my audience. PowerPoint is hypnotic. Pretty colors, flashing pictures, wipers. Zzzzz.