(FORTUNE Magazine) – It was the second weekend of the Clinton Administration, and the new President had gathered his Cabinet and top aides at Camp David for briefings on the workings of the government of the most powerful nation on earth. But Saturday night was something truly special. Two professional ''facilitators'' were brought in to encourage the Clintonites to tell intimate secrets about themselves in order to build relationships and trust. According to the Washington Post, the Hugger-in-Chief got the bonding ball rolling with a difficult memory of what it was like being a fat 5-year-old and having other kids taunt him. Richard W. Riley, the Secretary of Education, told of overcoming a spinal disease and small physique to become co-captain of the high school football team. Others shared stories of their professional lives, marriages, or childhoods. It's not just the executive branch of the U.S. government that seems to have gone all touchy-feely these days. Sensitivity is engulfing the business bookshelves as well. Japanese management technique is out; caring management is in. Are these guides any good? Put some ocean sounds on the CD player, fondle some crystals, and join us as we take a brief excursion through this brave new world of business. The genre comes in many flavors. Some authors merely set out to make you a more aware manager. No one, save a few unreconstructed corporate mastodons, could argue with their essential premise -- people should treat colleagues, customers, and suppliers with respect and kindness. But other authors go well beyond basic Golden Rule stuff and get, well, a little carried away. They see New Age business as the savior of the planet. The big kid on the bookshelf is M. Scott Peck, whose latest meditation, A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered (Bantam, $22.95), is pitched more to a business audience than are his usual efforts. Since Peck's first amalgam of psychoanalysis, God, and vague mysticism, The Road Less Traveled, has spent 500 weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list and sold about 4.75 million copies, the man clearly deserves some attention. What's he selling? This time it's civility, a quality that, as Peck explains it, goes deeper than superficial politeness. ''Genuine civility is . . . consciously motivated organizational behavior.'' His new book concentrates on two kinds of organizations -- the family and the workplace. Give Peck his due; the man can write. You breeze through his case histories of real people in various crises, from a narcissistic CEO whose need for domination extends to his wife, to a prep school student with an attitude problem, to two feuding senior executives. These parables are the most enjoyable parts of the book. Peck starts to get loopy with his chapter on transference. He posits that many boss-subordinate problems can be traced to a manager's stormy relationship with his or her parents. Okay, that may be true. But then Peck confides that, in the case of his two feuding executives, a psychotherapist (hired by a doubtlessly enlightened CEO) determined that they were acting out unresolved sibling conflicts. The shrink recommends joint fishing trips to establish empathy between the pair. Peck claims that this worked and that the exercise was cost effective, since the few thousand dollars the company spent on the therapist and fishing outings were insignificant compared with the cost of replacing one or both executives. ''Yet many businesses,'' he says in wonderment, ''are often amazingly reluctant to seek such help.'' Imagine that. WHAT PECK is really pushing is the need for organizations to ''get to community.'' ''Community,'' he writes, ''requires its members to honestly and openly speak their minds, to risk intimacy, to confess what is appropriate, to make the hidden known when doing so is helpful.'' Any company seeking advice on how to achieve this, by the way, need merely check out the workshops and publications offered by Peck's Foundation for Community Encouragement in Ridgefield, Connecticut. (Its phone and fax numbers are thoughtfully provided at the end of his book.) Apparently, the basic exercise involves what went on at Camp David in January -- bonding through personal revelations, often to the point where participants start to cry and talk about God. What would be the payoff if every company joined this quest? No Peck of small potatoes, the author claims. ''If Utopia is to emerge, it will do so primarily from the world of business.'' Peck even maintains that a new ''planetary culture of civility'' could result. Two words, Scotty: Get real. In The Power of Ethical Persuasion: From Conflict to Partnership at Work and in Private Life (Viking, $20), psychiatrist and consultant Tom Rusk sets more modest goals. He merely promises that ethical persuasion (or EP as he refers to it) will ''help you settle arguments, solve problems, and ease negotiations'' as well as ''deepen any kind of relationship.'' Think of it as the One-Minute Manager Goes to Encounter Group. This book is really about listening and communication skills for use in emotion-charged situations. To illustrate his points, Rusk presents various confrontations as ''dialogues,'' showing both the wrong way to handle them (without EP) and the right way (with EP). A standoff between a black woman who feels she was unfairly passed over for promotion and a white human resources director, for example, is examined from the points of view of both participants. Many managers will find something useful in Rusk's techniques. Carol Orsborn is the founder of an organization called Overachievers Anonymous. She publishes a quarterly newsletter called EGADS (Exposing the Glorification of Our Anxiety-Driven Society). She and her husband run a public relations firm in San Francisco; a few years ago they got some attention when they decided to scale down the size of their firm, buy a smaller house, and drop off the having-it-all treadmill. In Inner Excellence: Spiritual Principles of Life-Driven Business (New World Library, $17.95), she reports that within months of this laid-back downsizing, her firm was back at its old profit levels, and productivity was rocketing. Her premise, that by slowing down and getting saner you can make the same with less effort, is a nifty notion. Unfortunately, Orsborn's book is a collection of bromides, a feature article stretched into a book. Don't waste your time -- go smell some roses.

Two books from Berrett-Koehler, a small San Francisco publisher, revisit Peck's Utopian vision, though in far more plodding prose. They are The Fourth Wave: Business in the 21st Century, by Herman Bryant Maynard Jr. and Susan E. Mehrtens, and Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, by Peter Block (both $24.95). The thesis of the Maynard/Mehrtens effort, which takes its title from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, is that it's up to business to assume responsibility for the whole planet since other institutions have failed to offer ''effective leadership.'' In other words, business must make the ''intellectual shift from wanting to beat the competition to wanting to serve the world.'' Maynard, who spent 22 years as an executive with Du Pont, and Merhtens, whose firm tracks trends from Mineola, New York, predict that Fourth Wave businesses will feature meditation rooms and will be more ethically sensitive because their leaders will be ''in touch with the feminine side.'' In Stewardship, Block, a partner in a New Jersey training firm, pushes that concept as ''the guidance system for navigating this intersection of governance, spirituality, and the marketplace'' and dreams of a corporate world where consensual decision-making and democracy reign. No more bosses! Uniquely among New Age authors, Block also attempts to explain how staff functions, such as finance and human resources, might work in a company with no hierarchy. He fails to convince, but at least he tries. Collective decision-making and ''getting to community'' are possible and perhaps desirable in small partnerships or within a corporate department. None of these authors, however, offer a shred of evidence that group stewardship has ever worked in any large enterprise outside an ant colony or a beehive. Certainly the tentative performance so far of the Clinton Administration isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for these techniques.

BOX:

EXCERPT: ''Introduce genuine community into your business, and you will guarantee its ethical integrity.''

EXCERPT: ''((This approach)) persuades people to treat each other with greater respect . . . and fairness.''