The time comes to settle in and ponder possibilities

By Irene Sege
Globe Staff

The morning after Labor Day 1997 breaks foggy and mild as Leslie Boorse and Katie Thyne walk down Beacon Hill and across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River, to Sapient in Kendall Square. The Esplanade curves with the river, and rowers slice through the water's veneer. The roommates step aside for joggers and pedestrians in overdrive. They pass the amblers. Best of all, when a Red Line train rumbles toward Cambridge, Leslie's not on it. Her car's not parked in Quincy, and she's not facing a drive back to Hingham, where she used to live.

This first morning walking from their new apartment, they time the trip. Twelve minutes door to door.

It's not only the walk to work that feels new. Work itself is still new. Leslie is barely past the one-month mark on the "culture team" in a firm Business Week labels as a "hot growth company." She didn't grow up aspiring to have a career, but now, for the first time, that's preceisely what she feels she has, not just a job. Leslie's "an egalitarian and a humanitarian" and "probably not" a feminist, yet she says "any limitations I have I have because of society and the roles people play."

Gone are the days when Leslie looked at the clock and thought, two more hours to lunch, three more hours till I leave. "I never think about the time any more," she says.

It's not that Leslie complained about her old job at Talbots, not even to Laurie Jessen, her best friend, who works in public relations at Clarks shoes. But face it. How exciting is it to check whether stores follow company procedures on things like shipping merchandise and processing time sheets? What was exciting was the traveling, staying the weekend discovering cities where she knew no one. But when Leslie began to think her life needed an overhaul, that seemed a barrier for forming closer relationships.

"I was really a loner," she says. "Being alone and liking that and getting myself in situations where that could be fostered. Like getting myself a job traveling all over the country by myself and loving it. THose were some amazing times, but I was really on mky own. I don't think it was an accident."

Sapient was founded in 1991 by two guys with 13 credit cards and the idea that they could make money by delivering software applications to clients at a fixed cost on a fixed deadline. Then it grew to a bunch of post-college, pre-30 technojocks who kept sleeping bags under their desks. By the time Leslie arrives in 1997, the staff is 650 and still so young that, at 29, she's a mature worker.

Eventually, Leslie will run the "boot camps" Sapient holds for new employees to inculcate them into a corporate culture with "core values" like "relationships," "pioneering," "openness" and "growth," all of which describe exactlhy what Leslie seeks in her life off the job. She'll also help groups of software designers learn to work as teams.

Right now, however, in September 1997, Leslie, as part of her orientation, is assigned to a team designing reusable software infrastructure. She doesn't even know Microsoft Word, and these people are talking "visio" and "C++" and "Java." She's so overwhelmed on Sept. 4 that she cries on the bridge walking home. "It was all I could do to get out of the building with the tears in," she says. Katie buys her chocolate-covered raisins -- Leslie is addicted to chocolate-covered raisins -- to console her.

On Oct. 6, Leslie's back on the culture tream. She puts an exclamation point in her calendar to mark the day. She's back at her desk with the view of the river, located in an oasis of women in a company mostly of men. On her desk is a picture of Dan MacKenszie, the musician in Los Angeles she's been seeing since March buyt who isn't her boyfriend because they agreed from the start they have an occasional present but no future.

The challenge of this job excites her. As independent as Leslie is and as determined to have "an incredible life," she is also reserved. She used to be so shy she once hid behind fellow bridesmaids when the wedding videographer came seeking comments. When Leslie applied for the sapient job, Courtney Dickinson, the 27-year-old former teacher who started the culture team, initially thought Leslie lacked the requisite "presence and poise," but would up impressed with "her passion about her beliefs and her intelligence."

A good part of Leslie's job is standing in front of a group of people, motivating them to invest in Sapient's way of doing business and coaching them to take on leadership themselves. She learns how to position herself in a room for the most impact. When Courtney, who trains her, suggests she offer more of herself in presentations, Leslie opens a boot camp by saying, "I am here, and I am completely committed to your growth."

The line is straight from Landmark Education Corp., the post-est, softer-than-est, sometimes controversial personal growth courses founded in 1991 by employees of Werner Erhard and Associates. For two years, Leslie's sister in Dallas, Lynn, who's 31, encouraged Leslie to enroll in the introductory forum, which Leslie finally did in the spring of 1997. In the fall she takes the advanced course. She's heard the criticisms of Landmark, that it's hard-sell mind games, but she says anyone who knows her knows she'd never be involved in anything like that.

"It shows you that you have a choice in creating your life," Leslie says. "In the forum you work a lot with fear and bcoming ware of how much fear stops us. It's soft of looking at what it means to be a human being. I was a little afraid of the advanced course, but it was really cool. It talks about what's possible for you as a human being."

Between the Landmark courses and her new job, you almost need a dictionary to talk to Leslie these days. Landmark talks about "possibilities" and not being "invested in the outcome" and making "distinctions." At Sapient you "wordsmith" instead of write and "own" whatever you lead. She spends a week for work in Washington, D.C., training to administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a personality test. Suddenly, she's calling herself an introvert. Leslie assesses Laurie and Katie and discovers they're extroverts, which she probably already knew.

"It's a fall of discovery, of, yes, "possibilities." Even going to church is different in the city. Leslie was raised "very Catholic" -- parochial school and daily Mass and crosses in her girlhood home. As soon as she was on her own she stopped attending church, but she never lost her belief in God, because, she says, "I don't see how anybody can pay attention to life and not believe in some great spirit." Then, a few years ago, when "I was questioning what it was all about," Leslie began worshipping at Old Ship Unitarian church in Hingham.

"I didn't want to go back to the Catholic church," she says. "Just the thought of it felt restraining." After her first visit to Old Ship, where the pastor quoted Walt Whitman and inspired her with a sermon she can no longer recall, she thought, "Wow, that's what going to church is supposed to do for you."

Leslie hangs the twig cross she bought in San Antonio beside her bed in her new apartment and tries the Arlington Street Church, the Unitarian church in Back Bay. It's a grande dame in reduced circumstances, with frayed red carpet and peeling ceilings, a progressive haven where gay couples arrive hand in hand and worshippers light candles for partners who died of AIDS and against the despair of being homeless and against ecological decline. "It caught me off guard," Leslie says. "I thought, I don't know about this."

So she tries the First Parish in Cambridge, but it's too traditional. Thus Arlington Street becomes her church.

On Sept. 13, Leslie writes in her calendar that she's "in love with the city," and on Nov. 22 she writes, "I have a great life" and underlines it. But as attached as she is to Boston, she is still unfettered by person or place. Sapient hopes to open an office in London next year or so, and, at her first quarterly culture team meeting, when it comes time to set personal goals, Leslie says she wants to work there.

"It's incredible," she says. "I could pick up tomorrow and move to England, and I don't have to consider anyone else's situationj. I could just go. I'm light."

Reprinted from The Boston Globe, October 26, 1998, Boston, MA.