This is a bit off subject, but consider that a great many compaies want to foster relationships between their employees (friendly, team building) in the hope that it will improve productivity as well as make the company a 'great place to work'. Where I work, we have a once yearly retreat, which I like a lot. We get together and have brunch, etc.

This year the powers that be decided to have us complete a 'team building excercise'. The structure fo the excercise was simple: each team (Unix, NT, Novell, etc) would be paired with another team, and write down their perceptions of the other team (e.g. How competent are they, etc). Then the perceptions would be given to the other team, and the two teams would meet three times to try to work things out. The upshot of all this has been nothing but bad feelings all around, and lots of people seem to be leaving for other companies. It's strange, but aparantly some things that sound excellent to management backfire.

Ivory