Business consultant Karl Corbett sometimes wonders why it took him and his wife and partner, Brenda, so long to figure it all out:  If companies want to retain employees - or for that matter retain clients or customers - they need to have workers who care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That's probably impossible, so what the Corbetts' Sasha Corp. realized is that employees only need to do a convincing job of acting as if they care.

And if acting as if they care was what was critical, then why not shift his Sasha Corp. training efforts toward an approach that embraced the tenets of method acting?

"We set out to change the way people think and how they approach their jobs," he said.

"If you act, you are always taught to think about why something matters. 'What's my motivation' is the question every actor asks. We want people to know motivation and to create power moments."

Sasha will be creating plenty of those power moments in the months to come.

The company will provide seminars in August 2003 for employees of members of the Greater Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau. The goal is to make Cincinnati the most hospitable city in the world.

"You have to think big," he said. "It can be done."

Depending on the size of the company and the scope of the training, it costs from $20 to $100 an employee.

It was born after a trip about a year ago to New York City where Corbett got a chance to drop in on a session at the famous Lee Strasberg Actors Studio.

A longtime friend of Corbett, former WEBN-FM jockey Dan Region, was part of the studio group. While tagging along one day, Corbett realized that the same method training could function for companies and executives wanting to develop a work force that would retain customers and build teamwork.

"Leadership is really about attitude," he said. "Cheerfulness, respect, sympathy, attentiveness. The challenge was to change how people think and how they approach their jobs.

"When we scripted our method approach, we knew we were onto something but we didn't know that it would be this big. So far, what we have is the equivalent of a hit record. It's been awesome."

In one anonymous post-seminar survey, 95 of 100 trained employees indicated they planned to implement the training while on the job.

"It was far more effective than any other training we've brought in," said Jon Lindy, vice president of Appearance Plus Cleaners, which employs 70. "We are seeing permanent, positive change in the way people take care of and relate to customers.

"In the customer-service field, staying in the moment and being the most important person to that customer at a point in time is really an employee's role on the stage that is our business."

• Create power moments with customers or clients, Corbett says. "Recognize that for the customer, you're the only person in the world at that moment. Once someone gets in that mindset, they are no longer on automatic pilot."

• Eye contact cements a customer relationship. "There are people who will go the entire day and not have a single person look them in the eye and be warm and sincere. The impact is profound. People crave eye contact. You're giving them something very important."