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to help slot more roundabout questions, such as "Do you usually get along their white-collar employees into the appropriate places in the better with (A) imaginative people, or (B) realistic people?"
    hierarchy. 15 On its web site, the Enneagram Institute lists, Once again, the only sensible approach is a random one. Do I among the companies supposedly using the Enneagram test to usually show my feelings freely or keep my feelings to myself?

    15
    Hmm, depends on how socially acceptable those feelings Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 125.

    sort out their employees, Amoco, AT&T, Avon, Boeing, DuPont, some mystic unity underlying the disorder of human experience.
    eBay, General Mills, General Motors, Alitalia Airlines, KLM
    Even the more superficially rational of these tests, the Myers-Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Briggs Type Indicator, possesses not a shred of scientific International Weight Watchers, Reebok Health Clubs, respectability according to Annie Murphy Paul's 2004 book, Motorola, Prudential Insurance, and Sony. Amazon offers a The Cult of Personality. It was devised, in the early forties, by a score of books on the Enneagram, none of them apparently layperson—a homemaker in fact—who had become fascinated by critical, including The Enneagram in Love and Work, The Spiritual her son-in-law's practical, detailed-oriented personality, Dimension of the Enneagram, and The Enneagram for Managers.
    which was so different from her own, more intuitive, apIt is true that I encountered the Enneagram in the particularly proach. Inspired by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung's notion of wacky company of The Wizard of Oz. But the test I took was the
    "types"—which were by no means meant to be innate or real thing, which, a web search reveals, is variously said to be immutable—Katharine Briggs devised a test to sort humanity derived from Sufism, Buddhism, Jesuit philosophy, and Celtic into sixteen distinct types, all of them fortunately benign.
    lore—with a generous undergirding of numerology. The early (There were no psychopaths, of the kind who might show up at twentieth-century Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff seems to have work one day with an automatic weapon, in Briggs's universe.) To been a fount of inspiration, but the actual development of the her eternal frustration, the test never won respect from the Enneagram theory is usually credited to two men—Oscar academic psychology profession, and not only because of her Ichazo, a Bolivian-born mystic, and Claudio Naranjo, a outsider status. Serious psychologists have never been con-psychiatrist who made his mark in the nineteen sixties by vinced that people can be so readily sorted into "types."
    employing hallucinogenic drugs in psychotherapy. Whatever Leaving aside the validity of "types," the Myers-Briggs Type
    "ancient learning" the Enneagram test purports to represent, it Indicator has zero predictive value even in its own terms. In one is nothing more than a pastiche of wispy New Age yearnings for study, undertaken by proponents of Myers-Briggs, only 47 percent of people tested fell into the same category on a second only a bad fit between the two. 17
    administration of the test. Another study found 39 to 76
    Of course, if the function of the tests is really ideological—to percent of those tested assigned to a different "type" upon promote the peg-in-hole theory of employment—they do not retesting weeks or years later. Some people's "types" have been have to be in any way accurate as predictors of performance or found to vary according to the time of day. Paul concludes that satisfaction. They serve more as underpinnings of corporate
    "there is no evidence that [Briggs's] sixteen distinct types have etiquette, allowing employers to rationalize rejection or dis-any more validity than