Edition: U.S. / Global  Books of The Times; Life of a Salesman
and the Pursuit of the Grail  Published: May 26, 1994  The Force
By David Dorsey 315 pages. Random House. $23.  Selling is the
subject of David Dorsey's nonfiction book, "The Force," which
manages to combine some of the chilling fascination of David
Mamet's play about Florida land salesmen, "Glengarry Glen Ross,"
with the sympathy of that play's forerunner, Arthur Miller's
"Death of a Salesman."  But unlike the characters in those two
works, the people in "The Force" have something worthwhile to
sell. They work for the Xerox Corporation, manufacturer of what
Mr. Dorsey calls "the single most successful commercial product
in the history of American business -- the photocopier."
Paradoxically, Mr. Dorsey suggests, the success was something
that Xerox never really understood and so was unable to match
with similar inventions. Lacking other products to push when
competitors gained access to the patents to the photocopier,
Xerox was forced to adopt new