Entrepreneurial Boot Camps We don't know what you've been told, but boot camp's worth its weight in gold. These intense leadership training courses are changing the way entrepreneurs do business. Think you can handle it?

Entrepreneur Wayne J. Griffin thought he would have little to learn by attending a leadership training program in the summer of 2002 with a bunch of corporate presidents and COOs. "They're great, but at the end of the day, they don't have their own butts on the line the way I do," says the owner of an electrical contracting firm in Holliston, Massachusetts.

But during an exercise at Leadership at the Peak, a course offered by the Center for Creative Leadership, in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Griffin and some cohorts were blindfolded and led by others on a half-mile hike through the woods. Once they reached a clearing, the exercise in dependency and trust continued as the group play-acted the removal of a piece of "radio-active waste" using a ball, a bucket and bungee cords. "I had to give trust to get trust, and even then, the outcome was unknown," recalls Griffin.

The experience transformed him. "I realized that my biggest strengths could be some of the company's biggest weaknesses if I didn't properly channel them, because I'm a take-charge guy," says Griffin, 48, founder of Wayne J. Griffin Electric Inc. Now he's quicker to "ask permission" of his employees before making a decision and more likely to delegate important matters to them. "If I can't see that their actions can be positive," he says, "no one will ever develop to succeed me."