Business Books -- Xerox Author Finds Downside Of Corporate Life -- ''The Force''

Looking for summer reading? There are plenty of stimulating new business books around. Among them:

------------------ "The Force." By David Dorsey. Random House. $23. ------------------

David Dorsey spent nearly a year as a journalistic fly on the wall with a team of Xerox sales representatives in Cleveland.

He accompanied them on sales calls, listened to phone conversations, sat in on meetings, shared manhattans with them at lunch and 75-cent beers at a ramshackle dive after work, and scribbled his notes in their kitchens while they bickered with spouses and left voice-mail messages at midnight.

And he chronicled it in a book, that Publishers Weekly said "reveals more about corporate life as a daily struggle for survival than a stack of how-to business manuals."

It would take a David Mamet or an Arthur Miller to invent the characters Dorsey found acting in a real-life guerrilla theater where all relationships are calculated and the distance between appearance and reality would span the Grand Canyon.

Frank Pacetta, the hyperkinetic district sales manager, throws drunken, collegiate pep rallies every month or so to pump up the sales staff, sprinkles a few lines from Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan or some other rock legend into his loony motivational patter, raves about the need for exhaustion and pain, takes glue-sniffer snorts from his Magic Marker while rolling his eyes back into his skull and pantomimes masturbation while talking on the phone with the corporate vice president.

Fred Thomas, the discontented sales manager and main protagonist, plays an ingratiating puppy at sales calls and mangles names and figures of speech ("Hinelick remover") so that others can feel superior to him. But he bugs his sales reps so unmercifully that they call him "the Fly" behind his back and duck into washrooms to avoid him. (One threatens to shoot him.)

When the sales year wanes, the pressures mount as the sales reps try desperately to exceed last year's quotas and earn their way into The President's Club and a weekend blowout in Palm Springs, the ultimate prize called "making trip."

One sales rep breaks out in a rash from the tension. Another bolts out of church in tears one Sunday because "God just isn't responding." Six reps suffer from colitis and another's eczema flares dramatically.

Several reps take Dramamine to blunt the nausea they feel on their most crucial calls. Another periodically examines his face for "nerve zits."

"These people really enjoy, in a sense, the things that drive them to the edge," says Dorsey, who wanted to write "an American success story," showing how sales reps achieved their goals and how their work affected their personal lives.

Dorsey, former reporter and business editor for The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in New York, was given complete access to the Cleveland operation.

He once covered Xerox as a reporter, but still it took a year of cajoling phone calls before the company agreed and steered him to its Cleveland office. Dorsey contacted several companies and says Kodak initially was interested but "got scared and dropped out."

Xerox probably should have done the same. Dorsey says he wasn't looking for dirt, but ended up finding it.