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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jaeger" data-source="post: 8768483" data-attributes="member: 27996">Those salon articles should see more circulation:For all the Flack Arneson and especially Gygax get for their past actions - People forget that Peter Adkison was no angel:[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/[/URL]"...We would build an alt-culture workplace of smart young people. We would destroy hierarchies by a resolute program of egalitarian consensus. We would earn fabulous paychecks and free dental treatments. We would encourage diversity in every form.Best of all, though, we would naughty word like rabbits. On "Who Knew? Day" employees wore badges proclaiming their sexual orientation. Intimate relationships sprouted like mold on bread, cutting across departments and seniorities with the hierarchy-smashing fervor of our consensus-driven team meetings. Heedless of status, even peasants and princes coupled, and fell apart.The example was set right at the top: Peter and his wife, also an employee, had an open marriage. Wizards was a big horny summer camp, and we were starring in the teen sex comedy of our fevered dreams. ...Peter had another plan. He would rent a sizable ski lodge and charter a bus, and we'd all spend a weekend frolicking in the woods. About 30 of us went. We played games, ate junk food and drank heavily. And then, late at night, a bunch of us piled into a dark room and played Truth or Swill. ...Basking in shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity with his employees, Peter Adkison rattled off his workplace sexual encounters, both actual and desired. He wasn't boasting, vain or predatory. He just loved all of us, from the depths of his innocent geek heart, and saw nothing wrong with talking about his corporate sex life."[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.salon.com/2001/03/26/wizards_part2/[/URL]"...Peter believed he'd done no real wrong, since his participation was emblematic of the kind of geektopia he was trying to build. The other stone-faced managers thought he was a fool. Corey angrily promised to shun any future company social events, as he felt he no longer had permission to communicate with his co-workers on anything other than a purely professional level. I mostly kept quiet -- the whole ugly scene was just depressing.After the meeting, the board of directors reprimanded Peter and docked him a month's salary.We had failed to achieve consensus. Management believed Peter had jeopardized the entire company with his behavior, the very behavior that the rest of us at the party thought was helping to strengthen it. We had little conception of sexual harassment laws, hostile work environments and all the other issues of the modern workplace.We thought we were building a postmodern workplace, a cheerful throwback to an imagined past where an intimate guild of valiant heroes and heroines worked hard, played hard and made history, to borrow a slogan from Jeff Bezos. But in short order, we were just another corporation. ...Although Peter now acknowledges the strait-laced responsibility a CEO has to his or her shareholders, to some extent he mourns the "different sort of company" he says Wizards could have been. He looks back on the weekend of the Truth or Swill game wistfully. "I still don't think what we did was wrong. But society does, unfortunately." ... "What's good for the goose...</blockquote>

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