I heard about this last week on NPR.
Employee's suit: Company used waterboarding to motivate workers
By Erin Alberty
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 02/27/2008 07:13:46 PM MST
A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
Ellis said the exercise was a dramatization of a story in which a young man asks Socrates to become his teacher. Socrates responds by plunging the student's head underwater and telling him he will learn once his desire for knowledge is as great as his desire to breathe.
However, Ellis said Christopherson explained the exercise before Hudgens volunteered, no one held Hudgens down and Hudgens was free to get up if he was uncomfortable.
"It was meant to be a team-building exercise," Ellis said. "Everybody was . . . involved and enthusiastic."