By John Brummett

Retreat: The process of receding from a position or state attained.

The question is whether the state Lottery Commission, brand new and having done nothing yet, actually could retreat — by definition, that is.

Anyway, is hasty opening retreat the signal the commission really needs to send? It’s a dubious army that straps its boots and promptly marches backward.

Look on the bright side, quipped a wiseacre sportswriter in the office: At least they didn’t retreat to Tunica.

Our newly constituted Lottery Commission, having merely been organized and facing the very basic ground-level assignment of assembling a vital staff so that it could choose a lottery company, began its work by retreating for two days this weekend to Petit Jean Mountain. 

There it made camp in the serene, pristine, rarefied environs of the University of Arkansas’ Winthrop Rockefeller Institute.

Maybe the new commissioners simply had to get away, if only in hopes that people bugging them for jobs wouldn’t follow them. 

Wave around a few million taxpayer dollars for start-up budgeting. Then mention a staff position with a potential salary of a couple hundred thousand dollars. Then throw in talk of an outside consultant to get things rolling. Suddenly these new lottery commissioners were finding resumes slipped under the front doors of their homes. Well, one, anyway, or so I’m told.

The answer to that seems simple enough. Don’t hire anybody who wants it that brazenly and clumsily. 

Instead do this: Gather to work in one of the spacious and accommodating legislative committee rooms at the state Capitol. Your temporarily loaned employees, meaning members of the legislative staff, are there already. Send out for meals. Meet all day and into the evening.  Go home or to a local hotel and come back early in the morning. Be stingy with the taxpayers’ money. Be spartan in your habits.

Alas, I seem to have a bias against retreats, the corporate variety, anyway.

They are said to be for bonding, from which efficient teamwork supposedly ensues.

This is the story I’ll inevitably tell when the subject of retreats arises. It changed my life.

I went to a corporate retreat once. It was in the spring of 1990 for the Arkansas Gazette in its death-rattle Gannett Corp. incarnation. It was conducted over parts of four days at the Red Apple Inn on beautiful Eden Isle. Management at the time was keen on my columnizing and wanted to induct me, in a way, into the corporate club.

We had pasta for lunch, ribs or steak in the evening, golf in the afternoon and unproductive meetings around a giant table for a few hours in the mornings.

Maybe it was simply a matter of my own peculiarity, but I did no bonding, even when we made a human chain and fell backward into each other.

In fact I did the precise opposite. I became contemptuous of several of the people with whom I was retreating, not to mention distrusting of their competence and commitment.

What I got from the retreat was that I needed to beat another hasty retreat, this one from this very company I once so deeply loved. And I knew that I needed to do so as soon as possible because this place was  doomed.

Each day I was unable to rid myself of the nagging thought that the paper would have been better off if we’d packed our bags and driven back to the office and actually covered some news and sold some ads. 

Perhaps it’ll be different with the lottery.