"I did it!" they cry when they get to the other side of the firepit. "I did it!"

They've entered a Tony Robbins state of mind. But what exactly does this consist of?

It is, first and foremost, a superior mind-the antidote to Alfred Adler's inferiority complex. Tony uses the word power rather than superior (we're too sophisticated nowadays to frame our quests for self-improvement in terms of naked social positioning, the way we did at the dawn of the Culture of Personality), but everything about him is an exercise in superiority, from the way he occasionally addresses the audience as "girls and boys," to the stories he tells about his big houses and powerful friends, to the way he towers-literally-over the crowd. His superhuman physical size is an important part of his brand; the t.i.tle of his best-selling book, Awaken the Giant Within, says it all.

His intellect is impressive, too. Though he believes university educations are overrated (because they don't teach you about your emotions and your body, he says) and has been slow to write his next book (because no one reads anymore, according to Tony), he's managed to a.s.similate the work of academic psychologists and package it into one h.e.l.l of a show, with genuine insights the audience can make their own.

Part of Tony's genius lies in the unstated promise that he'll let the audience share his own journey from inferiority to superiority. He wasn't always so grand, he tells us. As a kid, he was a shrimp. Before he got in shape, he was overweight. And before he lived in a castle in Del Mar, California, he rented an apartment so small that he kept his dishes in the bathtub. The implication is that we can all get over whatever's keeping us down, that even introverts can learn to walk on coals while belting out a l.u.s.ty YES.

The second part of the Tony state of mind is good-heartedness. He wouldn't inspire so many people if he didn't make them feel that he truly cared about unleashing the power within each of them. When Tony's onstage, you get the sense that he's singing, dancing, and emoting with every ounce of his energy and heart. There are moments, when the crowd is on its feet, singing and dancing in unison, that you can't help but love him, the way many people loved Barack Obama with a kind of shocked delight when they first heard him talk about transcending red and blue. At one point, Tony talks about the different needs people have-for love, certainty, variety, and so on. He is motivated by love, he tells us, and we believe him.

But there's also this: throughout the seminar, he constantly tries to "upsell" us. He and his sales team use the UPW event, whose attendees have already paid a goodly sum, to market multi-day seminars with even more alluring names and stiffer price tags: Date with Destiny, about $5,000; Mastery University, about $10,000; and the Platinum Partnership, which, for a cool $45,000 a year, buys you and eleven other Platinum Partners the right to go on exotic vacations with Tony.

During the afternoon break, Tony lingers onstage with his blond and sweetly beautiful wife, Sage, gazing into her eyes, caressing her hair, murmuring into her ear. I'm happily married, but right now Ken is in New York and I'm here in Atlanta, and even I feel lonely as I watch this spectacle. What would it be like if I were single or unhappily partnered? It would "arouse an eager want" in me, just as Dale Carnegie advised salesmen to do with their prospects so many years ago. And sure enough, when the break is over, a lengthy video comes on the mega-screen, pitching Tony's relationship-building seminar.

In another brilliantly conceived segment, Tony devotes part of the seminar to explaining the financial and emotional benefits of surrounding oneself with the right "peer group"-after which a staffer begins a sales pitch for the $45,000 Platinum program. Those who purchase one of the twelve spots will join the "ultimate peer group," we are told-the "cream of the crop," the "elite of the elite of the elite."

I can't help but wonder why none of the other UPWers seem to mind, or even to notice, these upselling techniques. By now many of them have shopping bags at their feet, full of stuff they bought out in the lobby-DVDs, books, even eight-by-ten glossies of Tony himself, ready for framing.

But the thing about Tony-and what draws people to buy his products-is that like any good salesman, he believes in what he's pitching. He apparently sees no contradiction between wanting the best for people and wanting to live in a mansion. He persuades us that he's using his sales skills not only for personal gain but also to help as many of us as he can reach. Indeed, one very thoughtful introvert I know, a successful salesman who gives sales training seminars of his own, swears that Tony Robbins not only improved his business but also made him a better person. When he started attending events like UPW, he says, he focused on who he wanted to become, and now, when he delivers his own seminars, he is that person. "Tony gives me energy," he says, "and now I can create energy for other people when I'm onstage."

At the onset of the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons-as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and compet.i.tive society. But nowadays we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one's gifts with the world.

This is why Tony's zeal to sell to and be adulated by thousands of people at once is seen not as narcissism or hucksterism, but as leadership of the highest order. If Abraham Lincoln was the embodiment of virtue during the Culture of Character, then Tony Robbins is his counterpart during the Culture of Personality. Indeed, when Tony mentions that he once thought of running for president of the United States, the audience erupts in loud cheers.

But does it always make sense to equate leadership with hyper-extroversion? To find out, I visited Harvard Business School, an inst.i.tution that prides itself on its ability to identify and train some of the most prominent business and political leaders of our time.

The Myth of Charismatic Leadership: Harvard Business School and Beyond

The first thing I notice about the Harvard Business School campus is the way people walk. No one ambles, strolls, or lingers. They stride, full of forward momentum. It's crisp and autumnal the week I visit, and the students' bodies seem to vibrate with September electricity as they advance across campus. When they cross each other's paths they don't merely nod-they exchange animated greetings, inquiring about this one's summer with J. P. Morgan or that one's trek in the Himalayas.

They behave the same way inside the social hothouse of the Spangler Center, the sumptuously decorated student center. Spangler has floor-to-ceiling silk curtains in sea-foam green, rich leather sofas, giant Samsung high-definition TVs silently broadcasting campus news, and soaring ceilings festooned with high-wattage chandeliers. The tables and sofas are cl.u.s.tered mostly on the perimeter of the room, forming a brightly lit center catwalk down which the students breezily parade, seemingly unaware that all eyes are on them. I admire their nonchalance.

The students are even better turned out than their surroundings, if such a thing is possible. No one is more than five pounds overweight or has bad skin or wears odd accessories. The women are a cross between Head Cheerleader and Most Likely to Succeed. They wear fitted jeans, filmy blouses, and high-heeled peekaboo-toed shoes that make a pleasing clicketyclack on Spangler's polished wood floors. Some parade like fashion models, except that they're social and beaming instead of aloof and impa.s.sive. The men are clean-cut and athletic; they look like people who expect to be in charge, but in a friendly, Eagle Scout sort of way. I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he'd greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination-whether or not he knew the way.

I sit down next to a couple of students who are in the middle of planning a road trip-HBS students are forever coordinating pub crawls and parties, or describing an extreme-travel junket they've just come back from. When they ask what brings me to campus, I say that I'm conducting interviews for a book about introversion and extroversion. I don't tell them that a friend of mine, himself an HBS grad, once called the place the "Spiritual Capital of Extroversion." But it turns out that I don't have to tell them.

"Good luck finding an introvert around here," says one.

"This school is predicated on extroversion," adds the other. "Your grades and social status depend on it. It's just the norm here. Everyone around you is speaking up and being social and going out."

"Isn't there anyone on the quieter side?" I ask.

They look at me curiously.

"I couldn't tell you," says the first student dismissively.

Harvard Business School is not, by any measure, an ordinary place. Founded in 1908, just when Dale Carnegie hit the road as a traveling salesman and only three years before he taught his first cla.s.s in public speaking, the school sees itself as "educating leaders who make a difference in the world." President George W. Bush is a graduate, as are an impressive collection of World Bank presidents, U.S. Treasury secretaries, New York City mayors, CEOs of companies like General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and, more notoriously, Jeffrey Skilling, the villain of the Enron scandal. Between 2004 and 2006, 20 percent of the top three executives at the Fortune 500 companies were HBS grads.

HBS grads likely have influenced your life in ways you're not aware of. They have decided who should go to war and when; they have resolved the fate of Detroit's auto industry; they play leading roles in just about every crisis to shake Wall Street, Main Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue. If you work in corporate America, there's a good chance that Harvard Business School grads have shaped your everyday life, too, weighing in on how much privacy you need in your works.p.a.ce, how many team-building sessions you need to attend per year, and whether creativity is best achieved through brainstorming or solitude. Given the scope of their influence, it's worth taking a look at who enrolls here-and what they value by the time they graduate.

The student who wishes me luck in finding an introvert at HBS no doubt believes that there are none to be found. But clearly he doesn't know his first-year cla.s.smate Don Chen. I first meet Don in Spangler, where he's seated only a few couches away from the road-trip planners. He comes across as a typical HBS student, tall, with gracious manners, prominent cheekbones, a winsome smile, and a fashionably choppy, surfer-dude haircut. He'd like to find a job in private equity when he graduates. But talk to Don for a while and you'll notice that his voice is softer than those of his cla.s.smates, his head ever so slightly c.o.c.ked, his grin a little tentative. Don is "a bitter introvert," as he cheerfully puts it-bitter because the more time he spends at HBS, the more convinced he becomes that he'd better change his ways.

Don likes having a lot of time to himself, but that's not much of an option at HBS. His day begins early in the morning, when he meets for an hour and a half with his "Learning Team"-a pre-a.s.signed study group in which partic.i.p.ation is mandatory (students at HBS practically go to the bathroom in teams). He spends the rest of the morning in cla.s.s, where ninety students sit together in a wood-paneled, U-shaped amphitheater with stadium seating. The professor usually kicks off by directing a student to describe the case study of the day, which is based on a real-life business scenario-say, a CEO who's considering changing her company's salary structure. The figure at the heart of the case study, in this case the CEO, is referred to as the "protagonist." If you were the protagonist, the professor asks-and soon you will be, is the implication-what would you do?

The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. The teaching method plays with an age-old question: If you don't have all the facts-and often you won't-should you wait to act until you've collected as much data as possible? Or, by hesitating, do you risk losing others' trust and your own momentum? The answer isn't obvious. If you speak firmly on the basis of bad information, you can lead your people into disaster. But if you exude uncertainty, then morale suffers, funders won't invest, and your organization can collapse.

The HBS teaching method implicitly comes down on the side of certainty. The CEO may not know the best way forward, but she has to act anyway. The HBS students, in turn, are expected to opine. Ideally, the student who was just cold-called has already discussed the case study with his Learning Team, so he's ready to hold forth on the protagonist's best moves. After he finishes, the professor encourages other students to offer their own views. Half of the students' grade, and a much larger percentage of their social status, is based on whether they throw themselves into this fray. If a student talks often and forcefully, then he's a player; if he doesn't, he's on the margins.

Many of the students adapt easily to this system. But not Don. He has trouble elbowing his way into cla.s.s discussions; in some cla.s.ses he barely speaks at all. He prefers to contribute only when he believes he has something insightful to add, or honest-to-G.o.d disagrees with someone. This sounds reasonable, but Don feels as if he should be more comfortable talking just so he can fill up his share of available airtime.

Don's HBS friends, who tend to be thoughtful, reflective types like him, spend a lot of time talking about talking in cla.s.s. How much cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation is too much? How little is too little? When does publicly disagreeing with a cla.s.smate const.i.tute healthy debate, and when does it seem compet.i.tive and judgmental? One of Don's friends is worried because her professor sent around an e-mail saying that anyone with real-world experience on the day's case study should let him know in advance. She's sure that the professor's announcement was an effort to limit stupid remarks like the one she made in cla.s.s last week. Another worries that he's not loud enough. "I just have a naturally soft voice," he says, "so when my voice sounds normal to others, I feel like I'm shouting. I have to work on it."

The school also tries hard to turn quiet students into talkers. The professors have their own "Learning Teams," in which they egg each other on with techniques to draw out reticent students. When students fail to speak up in cla.s.s, it's seen not only as their own deficit but also as their professor's. "If someone doesn't speak by the end of the semester, it's problematic," Professor Michel Anteby told me. "It means I didn't do a good job."

The school even hosts live informational sessions and web pages on how to be a good cla.s.s partic.i.p.ator. Don's friends earnestly reel off the tips they remember best.

"Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only fifty-five percent, say it as if you believe it a hundred percent."

"If you're preparing alone for cla.s.s, then you're doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone."

"Don't think about the perfect answer. It's better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in."

The school newspaper, The Harbus, also dispenses advice, featuring articles with t.i.tles like "How to Think and Speak Well-On the Spot!," "Developing Your Stage Presence," and "Arrogant or Simply Confident?"

These imperatives extend beyond the cla.s.sroom. After cla.s.s, most people eat lunch at the Spangler dining hall, which one grad describes as "more like high school than high school." And every day, Don wrestles with himself. Should he go back to his apartment and recharge over a quiet lunch, as he longs to do, or join his cla.s.smates? Even if he forces himself to go to Spangler, it's not as if the social pressure will end there. As the day wears on, there will be more such dilemmas. Attend the late-afternoon happy hours? Head out for a late, rowdy evening? Students at HBS go out in big groups several nights a week, says Don. Partic.i.p.ation isn't mandatory, but it feels as if it is to those who don't thrive on group activities.

"Socializing here is an extreme sport," one of Don's friends tells me. "People go out all the time. If you don't go out one night, the next day people will ask, 'Where were you?' I go out at night like it's my job." Don has noticed that the people who organize social events-happy hours, dinners, drinking fests-are at the top of the social hierarchy. "The professors tell us that our cla.s.smates are the people who will go to our weddings," says Don. "If you leave HBS without having built an extensive social network, it's like you failed your HBS experience."

By the time Don falls into bed at night, he's exhausted. And sometimes he wonders why, exactly, he should have to work so hard at being outgoing. Don is Chinese-American, and recently he worked a summer job in China. He was struck by how different the social norms were, and how much more comfortable he felt. In China there was more emphasis on listening, on asking questions rather than holding forth, on putting others' needs first. In the United States, he feels, conversation is about how effective you are at turning your experiences into stories, whereas a Chinese person might be concerned with taking up too much of the other person's time with inconsequential information.

"That summer, I said to myself, 'Now I know why these are my people,' " he says.

But that was China, this is Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. And if one judges HBS by how well it prepares students for the "real world," it seems to be doing an excellent job. After all, Don Chen will graduate into a business culture in which verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success, according to a Stanford Business School study. It's a world in which a middle manager at GE once told me that "people here don't even want to meet with you if you don't have a PowerPoint and a 'pitch' for them. Even if you're just making a recommendation to your colleague, you can't sit down in someone's office and tell them what you think. You have to make a presentation, with pros and cons and a 'takeaway box.' "

Unless they're self-employed or able to telecommute, many adults work in offices where they must take care to glide down the corridors greeting their colleagues warmly and confidently. "The business world," says a 2006 article from the Wharton Program for Working Professionals, "is filled with office environments similar to one described by an Atlanta area corporate trainer: 'Here everyone knows that it's important to be an extrovert and troublesome to be an introvert. So people work real hard at looking like extroverts, whether that's comfortable or not. It's like making sure you drink the same single-malt scotch the CEO drinks and that you work out at the right health club.' "

Even businesses that employ many artists, designers, and other imaginative types often display a preference for extroversion. "We want to attract creative people," the director of human resources at a major media company told me. When I asked what she meant by "creative," she answered without missing a beat. "You have to be outgoing, fun, and jazzed up to work here."