Anachronism & Atavism Collide
with
The Information Age – ed
The Peripatetic Philosopher Speaks
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 27, 2005
Among the best men are diversities of opinions; which should no more, in true reason, breed hatred, than one that loves black should be angry with him that is clothed in white; for thoughts are the very apparel of the mind.
Soldier & poet, Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586)
Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
American clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
My hometown newspaper is under siege. It has entered and been cordon off by the Information Age, and finds its readers across the continent talking back to it with a vengeance. No longer is its copy taken politely as just this side of the word of God. The newspaper must feel the Internet is Lucifer personified.
I sense that the newspaper, now over one hundred years old, senses it is in a panic mode as readers attempt to influence the direction of the community who are no longer residences. Complicating the picture further is that the people running the newspaper have no sense of local history having never grown up in these environs. Now, the emails fly to its tainted nest like a swarm of locust, eating away its protective shell and exposing its naked vulnerability. It would be tragic if it were not so comedic.
In fairness to the current publisher, editor, and staff, the problem is endemic to the times, and certainly not an isolated incident, nor, indeed, is the condition a problem only of media, but in fact to all matter of industry and organizational pursuit.
I am copied by email of a network of several hundred former residences of this community now spread across the continent. Like myself, many are long in tooth with a passionate interest in the preservation of cherished community landmarks. These are scheduled to disappear with the expediency of America’s cryptic short-term perspective to be replaced by fast food businesses, parking lots, old folk homes, and other businesses that a decade hence will become perennial eyesores.
The folly of our times is that this is driven by the nonsense of “progress,” once America’s most important product, which has finally revealed itself for what it is.
Progress has most recently led to the mudslides in the high rent districts of California, to massive homelessness and mounting death in Haiti and The Dominican Republic, to the deaths of thousands of Chinese due to muddy rivers overflowing their banks brought on by torrential rains, and on and on and on . . . everywhere!
We thought we could cut up our environment at will incessantly and recklessly without consequences . . . forever. This philosophy extends to landmarks as well. We are the great waste makers.
My hometown is not the most beautiful or most historic in the region, but it has some remarkable architecture, work of pioneers a hundred or more years ago.
One such pioneer was a young Irish priest new to the United States who settled in this small Midwestern town and managed to build a church, a grammar school, a convent for teaching nuns, a home for retired nuns, and a Catholic hospital against as much pressure within the Catholic community as outside it. He was a leader and visionary when we had no vocabulary to describe such people.
Now, systematically, his landmarks are disappearing as if they were sand castles on a windy shore.
The first order of leadership is to listen to the people. The second order of leadership is to understand the will of the people. The third order of leadership is to develop a dialogue with the people in which ideas are cleared of excess polemics and made palatable to the majority. And the fourth order of leadership is to implement the people’s design with passion and vigor.
It is no accident that we have had Watergate. Nor is it an accident that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand understood before 9/11. And it is no accident that a community newspaper takes a combative position of paranoia in a panic reaction to its articulate critics.
My premise for the past fifteen years or so has been that the world of management has lacked leadership because it was too busy managing people as things to be managed, and too preoccupied with what it could get rather than bring to the operation. It lost perspective, and when it lost perspective it lost the ability to lead. The evidence points to the fact that the successful management of World War II has given the profession a fixation with nostalgia that it has never been able to escape.
The world has changed. People have changed. The balance of power has changed. But management has not changed. It has not changed in the running of a school, a church, a community, a company, a college, a religious institution, so why should we expect it to change in the running of a newspaper?
The result is that those running things don’t have a clue in how to deal with people, be they workers or citizens, much less citizens-at-large, or former citizens of a community who would challenge their excesses.
These ex-citizens, who the newspaper would label “out-of-towners,” in other words, deserters of the community, are often more informed, more knowledgeable, better educated, and therefore more enlightened than those who would summarily dismiss them as provocateurs.
It is a common problem in America at the moment. The leaders are on the sidelines while leaderless leaders, otherwise known as managers, continue to run things, and often into the ground.
This is happening in every company across the country, and in every community within such confines. Media may be likened to the pope, autocratic, dogmatic, omniscient, and authoritarian. This was true of all of the twentieth century. It doesn’t work anymore in the twenty-first, but damned if media aren’t going to try to make it work!
Regarding citizenship, a citizen is no longer confined to a place but to a mindset. Citizens no longer read newspapers with credulity. They have grown to become cynics of information, questioning its veracity, and querulous to its conclusions.
The days of promulgation to compliance are over. Suspicions must be addressed and satisfied. Motives must be transparent and explored for there is new fight in John Q. Public.
This is where my hometown newspaper missed the boat. It failed to realize that challenge must be entertained and dealt with in order to arrive at communication and to build consensus, the mission of a newspaper.
People want to understand, to have their fears allayed. But before that can happen, they must first be allowed to vent their frustration and confusion, and not be condescendingly labeled in derogatory terms.
It is the essence of a free society of a participative constituency. It is also the same in every enterprise without exception. It is the only way to develop consensus and experience cooperation, which are derived voluntarily, never coercively.
Labeling ex-citizens’ “letters-to-the-editor” as the complaints of “outsiders” is the ploy of the bully. On the other hand, if “insiders” of the community find comments of “outsiders” offensive that is another matter. A dialogue is called for, which will open the seams of discord and provide a theme to reveal what is actually going on in the community and why.
A newspaper in such an instance can act as a “third party interventionist” in this process between “insiders” and “outsiders,” playing the role of the unobtrusive observer. This is not far a field to what a newspaper purports its mission to be: that is, “to report all the news fit to print” without bias.
By assuming the adversarial role in this discussion, the newspaper has become the target taking the pressure off the politicians and change masters organizing the destruction of these community landmarks. It has unwittingly become their foil neutralizing its influence, and therefore its leadership in a debate, which I repeat, is endemic to the times. By so doing, it has obfuscated its role and sullied that debate. Given this, the problem has no chance for a satisfactory redress.
Communities across the land are wrestling with the “folly of progress” without knowing it. This is evident in this instance in the matter of the preservation of the community’s historic integrity against the pressing expedience of progressive development.
Historic landmarks provide identity and a sense of connection with community. We all need this sense of community because we all need to belong to something somewhere.
My hometown newspaper has come off the bad guy. It isn’t, just misguided, caught up in the hysteria of the emotions of the times as landmarks are seemingly set for indiscriminate removal.
I’ve written elsewhere that management is anachronistic, and that managers are atavistic. I hold to that idea.
Many emailers to the newspaper were born in the 1930s and 1940s before the war, and know the sanctity and hold of landmarks on their souls. I call them the “Information Age-ed” because of when they were born and the perspective they bring to this issue.
These old timers, like myself, have known power and can remember when their influence was unchallenged simply because their positions carried owner, president, CEO, vice president, general manager, program manager, supervisor, director, doctor, lawyer, professor, psychologist, engineer, and so on. They have known indisputable authority and remember how quickly they were obeyed. But they also understand, especially now, that it wasn’t because they were wise but because of their position power. Well, that power has evaporated, replaced by knowledge power.
The Information Age has made position power redundant. It has also made certain that there are no secrets anymore. My hometown newspaper is in the crucible of this reality. My desire is that it sees the folly of its ways and regains its important function once again.
* * * * *
Dr. Fisher is author of several books; two soon to be published are WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE; and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?
Monday, February 28, 2005
Cold Shower 15: Words and Wonder
Cold Shower Words and Wonder
Volume 1, Article XV
Dr. Fisher, I don’t know actually how to begin. I feel lost. I am a recent college graduate on my first job. You can cut the pessimism here with a knife. A negative work climate is definitely not what I need. I think I am cynical, but don’t want to be. Does that make sense? I read about the schoolteacher in New Jersey who is killed for her new Toyota by a guy just 17, four years younger than I am, and I feel sick. I read about the pedophile in Scotland who kills nearly a score of five and six-year-olds, and I feel ashamed of the human race. What is most surprising is that I hide my gloomy mood by pretending to be cheerful, and feel guilty for that. Not even my best friends know the “real me.” Is there any hope for me?
Welcome to young adulthood! Going from childhood to adulthood is a precarious and rocky terrain full of booby traps, hot coals, sink holes, quick sand, and yes, terror, and you are now just crossing into it.
One of the remarkable things about your confession is that you mention guilt, shame, and the sense of feeling a fraud, and all in the same paragraph. This is refreshing. A healthy sense of guilt and shame is not only good for the spirit, but it holds the human community together. Awareness of dissembling is the first step toward humility. We live in an atmosphere today in which there is little sense of shame. Television continues to push the boundaries of broadcast drama with blunt language; lewdness is “in” on talk radio; television shock personalities cultivate an increasing tolerance for grossness. It is as if letting go of our inhibitions makes the world right and glorious, when just the opposite proves to be the case. It suggests a character flaw that is so common that it is now taken to be a norm.
You are right to be concerned as the growing storm of changing mores attacks our person, developing a sense of self-hatred, self-contempt, and self-doubt, leaving us with a feeling of helpless and running on empty.
This attack on our humanness works because to some extent we are all frauds, all hiding our real appearance from public view, afraid if the world knew our true identity by learning of closeted secrets, we would be rejected, isolated, and alone, and yes, shamed.
Notice how these human jackals in the entertainment industry exploit our weakness to develop their power and prominence over us.
What do many of us do? We read their books, go to their plays, attend their movies, listen to their music, dial in on their radio talk shows, and watch them cavort on television, shielding the anger they evoke because we want appear to be “with it,” to not register our disgust. You are an exception, and should take pride in this because it is only through embracing our terror and disgust that we find our way.
Not only is there hope for you, but also I would encourage you to explore your gloom and not retreat from it. Those acts of social pathology you mention are truly abhorrent. What leads people to such behavior is beyond conjecture.
One thing seems certain. Guilt and shame were dulled to the point of being nonexistent twisting their character into caricatures of evil.
The young man, just turned seventeen, decided that he needed a new automobile of this specific model and make, and took it, along with the owner’s life. The pedophile was rejected as a scoutmaster, and the anger of that rejection apparently perverted a mind already severely damaged.
We are understandably appalled at these vile acts. They bruise our senses, and violate our honor, but they also alert us to the fact that evil is real, and that the human species is fragile. Anyone can lose social orientation if shame and guilt are obliterated.
Guilt evolves from the anxiety one feels from the sense that one has departed from accepted values and norms that govern society. It is not simply the result of individual inadequacy. It is more complicated than that, arising from conflicting values and demands in a climate of accelerating stress. Guilt can be a reflection of inconsistencies in the social and cultural climate in which one thing is preached and another is practiced; in which the individual sees where bad is rewarded and good is not recognized; in which heroes turn out to be villains in hero disguise.
The point is if you are looking for reasons to nullify guilt there are always ample inconsistencies at hand to justify ignoring it.
No two individuals experience the same environment even if they are twins. Guilt may be traumatic to one because it violates social norms, but be an opportunity for another to exploit normative weaknesses. It is a double-edged condition. The person traumatized by guilt may never pushed the boundaries of convention, whereas another may be of just such a temperament, and in the process cause the development of new values.
Guilt is a natural human condition but not a fixed value. That is why disobedience and rebellion of social mores represent typical behavior on the road from adolescence to adulthood. Identity can only be claimed when these values are internalized voluntarily and no longer a matter of coercive conformity because society insists it be so.
Think for a moment what produced guilt in your grandparents. It could have been living together “in sin” while not being married; getting an illegal abortion; receiving communion without being in a state of grace having had sex outside of marriage, and so on.
Today, a “trial marriage” is common where people live together without guilt or social sanction; abortion is legal; and mortal sin has lost its clout. Guilt today is felt for letting down a friend, not paying your bills and going bankrupt, being poor, being unemployed, being uneducated, and not being pretty or handsome.
Guilt is different because morality is in the mind of the times. It is fluid, not fixed. Failure to integrate conflicting values into a socially acceptable system is one of the causes of social pathology. To sociopaths, the enemy is society with the human face of the individuals meant to feel their wrath.
Shame is social. Guilt is personal. The shame phenomenon involves concealing something, which might damage a person’s social standing in the community – an abusive priest of altar boys; a spy who gives secrets to the enemy; a CEO who commits fraud; a parent who has incest with an offspring; a teacher who has sex with an underage student. There is a saying, Shame in a human marks the inner border of sinning; where he will blush there begins his noble self.
With shame, mind and flesh, essence and existence touch each other. All feelings of shame have this in common: the corporate body has let the spiritual body down. There is felt to be a bridge between the material and spiritual world, between the sacred and profane. When social life is treated profanely, shame is the consequence. These two worlds differ decidedly in adolescence and adulthood.
In the one, shame is practically nonexistent, in the other; a healthy sense of shame is an indicator of a maturing social conscience. On the other hand, the morbidity of an exaggerated sense of shame may indicate a relapse into self-pitying childhood.
Shame that is fixed, not fluid, in which a person decides every case in precisely the same terms and in the same way contributes to social dysfunction, and leads many who might otherwise be disposed to tolerance of their shortcomings to gravitate to anti-social behavior. It is fostered by the idea, “I’m a bad apple anyway so why not behave like one?”
We have seen this in children who reject religion as adults in any form only because religious zealots pounded it incessantly into their heads in their formative years without allowing fluidity to seek its own relevance.
Your quandary might be explained as an attempt to bridge the “Rites of Passage” with evocative language: that is, shame, guilt, fraud, and so on. If so, it is a religious awakening. This is a journey every thinking individual eventually enjoins to develop awareness.
“Words and wonder” can all be traced back to our natural inclination to religion. We like to say we are spiritual but not necessarily religious, failing to realize belief and faith in the human condition is a form of religion.
Religion depends on language to guide us to self-understanding. Atheists and agnostics have trouble with such expressions as “In God We Trust,” or in bible stumping preachers justifying their rhetoric with “the word of God,” or such commentaries as Genesis which commence with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God . . .”
They fail to see the wonder of the word has always opened us to life. Instead, they hear the pompous rhetoric. It is our nature to believe we are not alone on an isolated planet surrounded by a trillion uninhibited stars. Nor is it our nature to believe this is all there is. Our spirit keeps us questioning our doubt, while it keeps our temporal material being alive, and not the reverse order of things.
You are entering the “wonder of the word” in a world in which the sun is not always out, every day is not always idyllic, and what you always believed to be so may not necessarily prove upon closer examination to be the case.
You are sensing, gauging, integrating, discarding, and synthesizing life experience into a philosophy, which is where the “wonder of the word” resides.
You are becoming a fellow traveler with the shaman priest, the Indian mystic, the Mesopotamian prophet, the English poet, the Irish artist, the Italian scientist, the Greek philosopher, and the German psychologist before you. They used the same equipment that you possess, your mind, to wonder about the same things with “words of wonder.”
Doubt is the foundation of belief and faith, first in oneself, and then in others, and then finally in all things.
Poet Walt Whitman wrote and published his iconic book of poems, “Leaves of Grass” (1855) with his own money, producing 795 copies. Reputable publishing houses rejected the book because of its racy content and self-aggrandizing prose. He couldn’t sell it at $2 a copy, then reduced it to $1, and finally to 50 cents, and still it did not sell. When newspapers wouldn’t review his book, Whitman took the unusual step of reviewing it himself. He wrote he liked the book.
With boundless confidence, his poems directly addressed readers of future generations. He was prophetic as the book sells in the tens of thousands of copies each year, as it welcomes a new audience with a similar mindset and yearning. His most famous poem in the book, “Song to Myself,” resonates with readers to this day: I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . .
Your reference to your friends is revealing. It is a constant war in life to weigh the merits of intimacy and shared confidence and the need for the safety of personal isolation. Trust is at issue. To experience trust you must take risks. That means sharing the real you with select others. In order to have a true friend, however, you must first start by being a friend to yourself, trusting yourself, confiding in yourself, and not lying to yourself. Being open and honest with you to yourself is what Walt Whitman is celebrating. It is clear you have made a beginning with this note.
Copyright (1996) see Dr. Fisher’s The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend discounted to $12 shipping and handling included.
Volume 1, Article XV
Dr. Fisher, I don’t know actually how to begin. I feel lost. I am a recent college graduate on my first job. You can cut the pessimism here with a knife. A negative work climate is definitely not what I need. I think I am cynical, but don’t want to be. Does that make sense? I read about the schoolteacher in New Jersey who is killed for her new Toyota by a guy just 17, four years younger than I am, and I feel sick. I read about the pedophile in Scotland who kills nearly a score of five and six-year-olds, and I feel ashamed of the human race. What is most surprising is that I hide my gloomy mood by pretending to be cheerful, and feel guilty for that. Not even my best friends know the “real me.” Is there any hope for me?
Welcome to young adulthood! Going from childhood to adulthood is a precarious and rocky terrain full of booby traps, hot coals, sink holes, quick sand, and yes, terror, and you are now just crossing into it.
One of the remarkable things about your confession is that you mention guilt, shame, and the sense of feeling a fraud, and all in the same paragraph. This is refreshing. A healthy sense of guilt and shame is not only good for the spirit, but it holds the human community together. Awareness of dissembling is the first step toward humility. We live in an atmosphere today in which there is little sense of shame. Television continues to push the boundaries of broadcast drama with blunt language; lewdness is “in” on talk radio; television shock personalities cultivate an increasing tolerance for grossness. It is as if letting go of our inhibitions makes the world right and glorious, when just the opposite proves to be the case. It suggests a character flaw that is so common that it is now taken to be a norm.
You are right to be concerned as the growing storm of changing mores attacks our person, developing a sense of self-hatred, self-contempt, and self-doubt, leaving us with a feeling of helpless and running on empty.
This attack on our humanness works because to some extent we are all frauds, all hiding our real appearance from public view, afraid if the world knew our true identity by learning of closeted secrets, we would be rejected, isolated, and alone, and yes, shamed.
Notice how these human jackals in the entertainment industry exploit our weakness to develop their power and prominence over us.
What do many of us do? We read their books, go to their plays, attend their movies, listen to their music, dial in on their radio talk shows, and watch them cavort on television, shielding the anger they evoke because we want appear to be “with it,” to not register our disgust. You are an exception, and should take pride in this because it is only through embracing our terror and disgust that we find our way.
Not only is there hope for you, but also I would encourage you to explore your gloom and not retreat from it. Those acts of social pathology you mention are truly abhorrent. What leads people to such behavior is beyond conjecture.
One thing seems certain. Guilt and shame were dulled to the point of being nonexistent twisting their character into caricatures of evil.
The young man, just turned seventeen, decided that he needed a new automobile of this specific model and make, and took it, along with the owner’s life. The pedophile was rejected as a scoutmaster, and the anger of that rejection apparently perverted a mind already severely damaged.
We are understandably appalled at these vile acts. They bruise our senses, and violate our honor, but they also alert us to the fact that evil is real, and that the human species is fragile. Anyone can lose social orientation if shame and guilt are obliterated.
Guilt evolves from the anxiety one feels from the sense that one has departed from accepted values and norms that govern society. It is not simply the result of individual inadequacy. It is more complicated than that, arising from conflicting values and demands in a climate of accelerating stress. Guilt can be a reflection of inconsistencies in the social and cultural climate in which one thing is preached and another is practiced; in which the individual sees where bad is rewarded and good is not recognized; in which heroes turn out to be villains in hero disguise.
The point is if you are looking for reasons to nullify guilt there are always ample inconsistencies at hand to justify ignoring it.
No two individuals experience the same environment even if they are twins. Guilt may be traumatic to one because it violates social norms, but be an opportunity for another to exploit normative weaknesses. It is a double-edged condition. The person traumatized by guilt may never pushed the boundaries of convention, whereas another may be of just such a temperament, and in the process cause the development of new values.
Guilt is a natural human condition but not a fixed value. That is why disobedience and rebellion of social mores represent typical behavior on the road from adolescence to adulthood. Identity can only be claimed when these values are internalized voluntarily and no longer a matter of coercive conformity because society insists it be so.
Think for a moment what produced guilt in your grandparents. It could have been living together “in sin” while not being married; getting an illegal abortion; receiving communion without being in a state of grace having had sex outside of marriage, and so on.
Today, a “trial marriage” is common where people live together without guilt or social sanction; abortion is legal; and mortal sin has lost its clout. Guilt today is felt for letting down a friend, not paying your bills and going bankrupt, being poor, being unemployed, being uneducated, and not being pretty or handsome.
Guilt is different because morality is in the mind of the times. It is fluid, not fixed. Failure to integrate conflicting values into a socially acceptable system is one of the causes of social pathology. To sociopaths, the enemy is society with the human face of the individuals meant to feel their wrath.
Shame is social. Guilt is personal. The shame phenomenon involves concealing something, which might damage a person’s social standing in the community – an abusive priest of altar boys; a spy who gives secrets to the enemy; a CEO who commits fraud; a parent who has incest with an offspring; a teacher who has sex with an underage student. There is a saying, Shame in a human marks the inner border of sinning; where he will blush there begins his noble self.
With shame, mind and flesh, essence and existence touch each other. All feelings of shame have this in common: the corporate body has let the spiritual body down. There is felt to be a bridge between the material and spiritual world, between the sacred and profane. When social life is treated profanely, shame is the consequence. These two worlds differ decidedly in adolescence and adulthood.
In the one, shame is practically nonexistent, in the other; a healthy sense of shame is an indicator of a maturing social conscience. On the other hand, the morbidity of an exaggerated sense of shame may indicate a relapse into self-pitying childhood.
Shame that is fixed, not fluid, in which a person decides every case in precisely the same terms and in the same way contributes to social dysfunction, and leads many who might otherwise be disposed to tolerance of their shortcomings to gravitate to anti-social behavior. It is fostered by the idea, “I’m a bad apple anyway so why not behave like one?”
We have seen this in children who reject religion as adults in any form only because religious zealots pounded it incessantly into their heads in their formative years without allowing fluidity to seek its own relevance.
Your quandary might be explained as an attempt to bridge the “Rites of Passage” with evocative language: that is, shame, guilt, fraud, and so on. If so, it is a religious awakening. This is a journey every thinking individual eventually enjoins to develop awareness.
“Words and wonder” can all be traced back to our natural inclination to religion. We like to say we are spiritual but not necessarily religious, failing to realize belief and faith in the human condition is a form of religion.
Religion depends on language to guide us to self-understanding. Atheists and agnostics have trouble with such expressions as “In God We Trust,” or in bible stumping preachers justifying their rhetoric with “the word of God,” or such commentaries as Genesis which commence with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God . . .”
They fail to see the wonder of the word has always opened us to life. Instead, they hear the pompous rhetoric. It is our nature to believe we are not alone on an isolated planet surrounded by a trillion uninhibited stars. Nor is it our nature to believe this is all there is. Our spirit keeps us questioning our doubt, while it keeps our temporal material being alive, and not the reverse order of things.
You are entering the “wonder of the word” in a world in which the sun is not always out, every day is not always idyllic, and what you always believed to be so may not necessarily prove upon closer examination to be the case.
You are sensing, gauging, integrating, discarding, and synthesizing life experience into a philosophy, which is where the “wonder of the word” resides.
You are becoming a fellow traveler with the shaman priest, the Indian mystic, the Mesopotamian prophet, the English poet, the Irish artist, the Italian scientist, the Greek philosopher, and the German psychologist before you. They used the same equipment that you possess, your mind, to wonder about the same things with “words of wonder.”
Doubt is the foundation of belief and faith, first in oneself, and then in others, and then finally in all things.
Poet Walt Whitman wrote and published his iconic book of poems, “Leaves of Grass” (1855) with his own money, producing 795 copies. Reputable publishing houses rejected the book because of its racy content and self-aggrandizing prose. He couldn’t sell it at $2 a copy, then reduced it to $1, and finally to 50 cents, and still it did not sell. When newspapers wouldn’t review his book, Whitman took the unusual step of reviewing it himself. He wrote he liked the book.
With boundless confidence, his poems directly addressed readers of future generations. He was prophetic as the book sells in the tens of thousands of copies each year, as it welcomes a new audience with a similar mindset and yearning. His most famous poem in the book, “Song to Myself,” resonates with readers to this day: I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . .
Your reference to your friends is revealing. It is a constant war in life to weigh the merits of intimacy and shared confidence and the need for the safety of personal isolation. Trust is at issue. To experience trust you must take risks. That means sharing the real you with select others. In order to have a true friend, however, you must first start by being a friend to yourself, trusting yourself, confiding in yourself, and not lying to yourself. Being open and honest with you to yourself is what Walt Whitman is celebrating. It is clear you have made a beginning with this note.
Copyright (1996) see Dr. Fisher’s The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend discounted to $12 shipping and handling included.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Cold Shower 14: Group Norms vs. Individual Achievement
Cold Shower Group Norms vs. Individual Achievement
Volume I, Article XIV
Dr. Fisher, I must admit to being somewhat confused. All my life the emphasis has been placed on being “No. 1,” and out achieving my peers. The books I’ve read in the past reinforced this mindset, such as Robert Ringer’s “Winning Through Intimidation.” Since then, I’ve been fed nothing but groupthink, teamwork, group goals, and the like, while the people still getting ahead are the hard-charging individuals. They climb over anyone that gets in their way. Tell me, am I missing something? Are my bosses talking out of both sides of their mouths?
My first reaction is to say, “Only in America!” We seem to go from theme to theme, and from extreme to extreme. It is as if everything is a case of “either/or,” when it never is. I am not making small of your dilemma. Eric Hoffer calls it the mania of “true believers,” people who frantically jump on the mania bandwagon with little regard where it is going or why. They just want to belong, to be included, and not to be left behind.
Once I was consultant to a small satellite company of a major corporation. The company was caught up in the hysteria of “total quality management.” The company was a mess. Productivity was down. Markets were disappearing. Plants and equipment were obsolescent. Skill training of personnel was nonexistent. The company thought that winning a prestigious quality award would make everything right. So, 400 workers committed themselves totally to that effort. They won the award. The quality assurance manager received a $10,000 bonus. The other 399 workers were given kudos over the company intercom, and that was it. The operation quickly slid into receivership.
On another occasion, I was given the task of creating a contest to nominate the “best manager” among 14,000 employees in some twenty operations throughout Europe. Anyone could make a nomination, stating how that individual fostered teamwork, created winning morale, and effectively coached and counseled the development of his or her people. Several hundred nominations were received. A committee of workers and managers was created to screen these nominations, and ultimately to select “the workers’ choice of manager of the year.”
To my consternation, once we put forth the consensus nominee for this honor, it was overridden by senior management, which hurriedly placed in nomination an influential country president who was to receive the honor. The irony is that this individual had not even been nominated making a mockery of the contest.
One could be outraged, or wonder why the duplicity. There is little point in either as I have found senior management lacks sophistication in terms of cultural trends or their implications. It does these things because it can, feeling the ends justify the means.
Senior management is a cadre of doers, not students of human nature. With severe limitations in terms of time to make their impact, not unlike professional athletes, senior managers are more inclined to be “numbers” people than transforming agents. They count how many meetings they have attended, not what was accomplished; how many new people hired and trained, not how they have performed; how much and how many of everything with an elastic ruler. As market share dwindles, they have statistics to illustrate why it is not the consequence of their watch; as market share crashes, they have sets of extenuating circumstances causing this “temporary drift in price decline.” Consequently, they get caught up in the twisted metaphor of rhetoric smothering reality. Senior management needs counsel but prefers sybaritic sycophants who generate excuses for their petty strategies.
These spin doctors are so successful in this ploy that regularly a stock can fall from say $70 a share to $20 a share, as in the case of one high tech company over the tenure of one CEO, who is dismissed with $21 million not including pending bonuses and entitlements yet to be figured. It is the only job in America where pay-for-performance has absolutely no relevance.
Esteeming the individual neutralizes the sovereignty of the group. Look to what has happened in professional sport. Numbers have come to dominate. In basketball, the rebounder, the assist maker, the shot blocker, and the defense specialist with high numbers in steals receive top billing where it once was the exclusive domain of the scorer. Professional sports have developed sophisticated performance appraisals that are indisputable as everyone can see the results. The fact that these individual statistics don’t always contribute to group goals, such as winning, is lost in salary arbitration.
Professional sports recognize and accept the individualism of the American psyche, and have found that professional athletes know their worth and negotiate accordingly. Coaching has been reduced to facilitation. It involves little management as professional athletes manage themselves, and when they don’t, they quickly find themselves on the cutting block.
Why have industrial, commercial, educational, religious, and governmental institutions failed to make this connection?
My answer is that athletes recognize their power and know that they control the game, not the coaches, not the owners, and not even the fans. They stir the drink, the drink doesn’t stir them.
Professional workers, that is, knowledge workers, who pride themselves on being so much smarter than professional athletes, have failed to recognize the shift in power to them, or that they now control the work, the work no longer controls them. If they don’t show up, nothing gets done. Nothing!
Despite this, professional workers act as if they don’t have the power, while, paradoxically, management acts as if it is 1945 and it still has it. No one seems to notice as decisions are delayed, opportunities are missed, markets disappear, and power “falls between the chairs.” It isn’t until panic sets in, and crisis management commences that the charade is revealed for what it is – a circus of chaos. Extremes come into play.
Is it individualism or group norms that are the salvation of the organization? The answer is that both must be brought into play, and power be reconciled to the reality of the times, as it has been recognized in professional sport.
We have moved toward group interdependence from individual dependence in every aspect of existence. No single entity is responsible for our safety, security, health or well-being. Society has become a collective conscience of interdependent activity.
In work, this means if there is to be fairness that compensation must reflect contribution as it does in sport. Many athletes make ten times as much as their coaches, and the management above the coaches, whereas CEOs today often makes 300 times the average professional worker’s pay on the line. Something is wrong with this equation.
Professional athletes are in a high-risk business. It now calls for professional workers in-group projects to participate in risk enterprises as well, where their compensation reflects their success or failure, meaning fluctuation in their respective fortunes. Within this context, there is room for individual variation in income as there is in sport, but the group norm still takes precedence in terms of achievement or the lack of same.
As an athlete in a career can play for several teams, the same is most likely to be the case of professional workers in the future. There is no lifetime employment, no guaranteed income, and certainly the biweekly paycheck is soon to be a matter of the past.
Companies in a world economy will have to relocate consistent with this dynamic, perhaps several times and several places around the globe. This is to become a given, as it can no longer be a crutch. CEOs’ compensation will decline, but not until professional workers understand the economic dynamics described here.
By the same token, entitlements will be cut back for all employees. Companies can no longer afford to play the welfare role. Admittedly, they had an ulterior motive for doing so. It was a way to hold on to control through the power of the benefactor. They can no longer afford that role while control as well as power has shifted away from them.
Don’t look for any seismic change in the near future, as average technology workers in Western societies remain suspended in terminal adolescence with a dependency mindset and little knowledge of their nascent control of the agenda. They are in business for themselves, not unlike professional athletes, and can no longer look to others to control their destiny. The die has been caste, and now they are “it.”
Copyright (1996) James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. Cold Shower articles can be obtained by going to www.blogger.com and then www.peripateticphilosopher.blodsport.com.
Volume I, Article XIV
Dr. Fisher, I must admit to being somewhat confused. All my life the emphasis has been placed on being “No. 1,” and out achieving my peers. The books I’ve read in the past reinforced this mindset, such as Robert Ringer’s “Winning Through Intimidation.” Since then, I’ve been fed nothing but groupthink, teamwork, group goals, and the like, while the people still getting ahead are the hard-charging individuals. They climb over anyone that gets in their way. Tell me, am I missing something? Are my bosses talking out of both sides of their mouths?
My first reaction is to say, “Only in America!” We seem to go from theme to theme, and from extreme to extreme. It is as if everything is a case of “either/or,” when it never is. I am not making small of your dilemma. Eric Hoffer calls it the mania of “true believers,” people who frantically jump on the mania bandwagon with little regard where it is going or why. They just want to belong, to be included, and not to be left behind.
Once I was consultant to a small satellite company of a major corporation. The company was caught up in the hysteria of “total quality management.” The company was a mess. Productivity was down. Markets were disappearing. Plants and equipment were obsolescent. Skill training of personnel was nonexistent. The company thought that winning a prestigious quality award would make everything right. So, 400 workers committed themselves totally to that effort. They won the award. The quality assurance manager received a $10,000 bonus. The other 399 workers were given kudos over the company intercom, and that was it. The operation quickly slid into receivership.
On another occasion, I was given the task of creating a contest to nominate the “best manager” among 14,000 employees in some twenty operations throughout Europe. Anyone could make a nomination, stating how that individual fostered teamwork, created winning morale, and effectively coached and counseled the development of his or her people. Several hundred nominations were received. A committee of workers and managers was created to screen these nominations, and ultimately to select “the workers’ choice of manager of the year.”
To my consternation, once we put forth the consensus nominee for this honor, it was overridden by senior management, which hurriedly placed in nomination an influential country president who was to receive the honor. The irony is that this individual had not even been nominated making a mockery of the contest.
One could be outraged, or wonder why the duplicity. There is little point in either as I have found senior management lacks sophistication in terms of cultural trends or their implications. It does these things because it can, feeling the ends justify the means.
Senior management is a cadre of doers, not students of human nature. With severe limitations in terms of time to make their impact, not unlike professional athletes, senior managers are more inclined to be “numbers” people than transforming agents. They count how many meetings they have attended, not what was accomplished; how many new people hired and trained, not how they have performed; how much and how many of everything with an elastic ruler. As market share dwindles, they have statistics to illustrate why it is not the consequence of their watch; as market share crashes, they have sets of extenuating circumstances causing this “temporary drift in price decline.” Consequently, they get caught up in the twisted metaphor of rhetoric smothering reality. Senior management needs counsel but prefers sybaritic sycophants who generate excuses for their petty strategies.
These spin doctors are so successful in this ploy that regularly a stock can fall from say $70 a share to $20 a share, as in the case of one high tech company over the tenure of one CEO, who is dismissed with $21 million not including pending bonuses and entitlements yet to be figured. It is the only job in America where pay-for-performance has absolutely no relevance.
Esteeming the individual neutralizes the sovereignty of the group. Look to what has happened in professional sport. Numbers have come to dominate. In basketball, the rebounder, the assist maker, the shot blocker, and the defense specialist with high numbers in steals receive top billing where it once was the exclusive domain of the scorer. Professional sports have developed sophisticated performance appraisals that are indisputable as everyone can see the results. The fact that these individual statistics don’t always contribute to group goals, such as winning, is lost in salary arbitration.
Professional sports recognize and accept the individualism of the American psyche, and have found that professional athletes know their worth and negotiate accordingly. Coaching has been reduced to facilitation. It involves little management as professional athletes manage themselves, and when they don’t, they quickly find themselves on the cutting block.
Why have industrial, commercial, educational, religious, and governmental institutions failed to make this connection?
My answer is that athletes recognize their power and know that they control the game, not the coaches, not the owners, and not even the fans. They stir the drink, the drink doesn’t stir them.
Professional workers, that is, knowledge workers, who pride themselves on being so much smarter than professional athletes, have failed to recognize the shift in power to them, or that they now control the work, the work no longer controls them. If they don’t show up, nothing gets done. Nothing!
Despite this, professional workers act as if they don’t have the power, while, paradoxically, management acts as if it is 1945 and it still has it. No one seems to notice as decisions are delayed, opportunities are missed, markets disappear, and power “falls between the chairs.” It isn’t until panic sets in, and crisis management commences that the charade is revealed for what it is – a circus of chaos. Extremes come into play.
Is it individualism or group norms that are the salvation of the organization? The answer is that both must be brought into play, and power be reconciled to the reality of the times, as it has been recognized in professional sport.
We have moved toward group interdependence from individual dependence in every aspect of existence. No single entity is responsible for our safety, security, health or well-being. Society has become a collective conscience of interdependent activity.
In work, this means if there is to be fairness that compensation must reflect contribution as it does in sport. Many athletes make ten times as much as their coaches, and the management above the coaches, whereas CEOs today often makes 300 times the average professional worker’s pay on the line. Something is wrong with this equation.
Professional athletes are in a high-risk business. It now calls for professional workers in-group projects to participate in risk enterprises as well, where their compensation reflects their success or failure, meaning fluctuation in their respective fortunes. Within this context, there is room for individual variation in income as there is in sport, but the group norm still takes precedence in terms of achievement or the lack of same.
As an athlete in a career can play for several teams, the same is most likely to be the case of professional workers in the future. There is no lifetime employment, no guaranteed income, and certainly the biweekly paycheck is soon to be a matter of the past.
Companies in a world economy will have to relocate consistent with this dynamic, perhaps several times and several places around the globe. This is to become a given, as it can no longer be a crutch. CEOs’ compensation will decline, but not until professional workers understand the economic dynamics described here.
By the same token, entitlements will be cut back for all employees. Companies can no longer afford to play the welfare role. Admittedly, they had an ulterior motive for doing so. It was a way to hold on to control through the power of the benefactor. They can no longer afford that role while control as well as power has shifted away from them.
Don’t look for any seismic change in the near future, as average technology workers in Western societies remain suspended in terminal adolescence with a dependency mindset and little knowledge of their nascent control of the agenda. They are in business for themselves, not unlike professional athletes, and can no longer look to others to control their destiny. The die has been caste, and now they are “it.”
Copyright (1996) James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. Cold Shower articles can be obtained by going to www.blogger.com and then www.peripateticphilosopher.blodsport.com.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Cold Shower 13: The Mystique of Dr. Fisher
Cold Shower The Mystique of Dr. Fisher
Volume I, Article XIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years, he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books, and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, I have read your books, listened to your lectures, and have discussed your ideas with friends. I have even broached your subjects to my superiors. I have also read Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, and Peter Drucker. You all seem to be saying similar things, but for some reason, and this is my question, only you seem to, dare I say, be tagged as “radical”? What do you make of this? Do you consider yourself radical? Or do you simply see yourself as enigmatic?
The reason I write in this genre as I do is because nobody else writes as I do. If they did, I wouldn’t write. The authors mentioned are careful to follow a tried and true formula: (1) what is known; (2) what do I know; (3) what do they know; (4) what do they need to know; and (5) what do I need to tell them? Obviously, from their success, the formula works. I have a sixth question: does it move them off the dime? I claim it doesn’t. I go even further to claim it hasn’t changed anything or moved anything much less workers, except rhetorically, and the workplace, except cosmetically.
We still have basically the same organization that we had after World War II. Worse yet, we still manage, motivate, manipulate and evaluate work and workers as if 90 percent were still wearing blue-collars when they, in fact, are wearing white-collars with barely 10 percent still wearing blue-collars.
Rosabeth Kanter writes of “World Class,” Michael Porter about “Competitive Edge,” and Margaret Wheatley about “Conquering Complexity.” These high sounding concerns are marginal compared to the left out workers.
I have come to realize that the structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work determines the workplace culture; the workplace culture determines the predominant organizational behavior.
Gain and loss, fear and desire, material and spiritual, subject and object, worker and work are each part of the same whole. Duality transcends to unity. Understand this and everything falls into place because “working class” leads to world class, collective enterprise leads to competitive edge, and everyone on the same page getting off on the same dime reduces complexity to competent completion. People ultimately make the difference is you can catch their spirit.
My aim is always at the psyche, not at the psychology.
I have come to know I am “it,” while my society keeps telling me I am not “it.” Since I am “it,” so are you. I am aware of how I have been programmed from birth by the Lord of Social Duty to think, behave and feel in a “should” and “should not” world of arbitrary beliefs, values, aspirations and fears, all of which are out-of-tune with the times.
We live in a classless society, for instance, that is obsessed with class. We live in a society that celebrates innovation as long as it doesn’t upset the status quo. We like to think we are different because of our economic disposable income, when we are all plainly alike in our obsessive materialism. We love to quote Jung but we don’t want to admit the Jungian collective unconscious guides us all.
Early on, in my attempt to please others, I realized it left little time to please myself. I had no time to appreciate what society keeps telling me is my inherent uniqueness. Instead, I was preoccupied with what society kept telling me was my social duty. This left little time for self-discovery.
My focus was outside myself for guidance, not inside myself for revelation. Illumination comes from time alone where there is quiet and seclusion, and an opportunity for meditation, and contemplation. We all have the same equipment, but there is no chance for illumination with a busy racing mind full of noise, activity and nonsense. English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792) says: There is no expedient to which man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
What we call thinking is actually the frenetic panic of doing. It is not that we cannot think outside the box. It is that thinking outside the box has little appeal to people concerned with their comfort, which most of us are.
We want to hear of global problems that are well beyond our door, or of cosmetic changes that don’t require us to make even slight adjustments in our thinking or doing. Notice no one, absolutely no one questions the dangers and haunting implications of that magic word in our vocabulary, “progress.” It is our most important product, and it is killing us, and our planet.
We have a choice to make, to move away from the field of time, as monks and nuns do; or to continue moving in the field of time, as most of us do. Asceticism is noble, as is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. Confucius says: All things are without a self. So be the food of others, resolve the self. This is the great delight, the best austerity, the best discipline. Participate in life as if life were a play.
This was the theme of T. S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party,” a penetrating social analysis of the fetish of psychiatry, the dullness of cocktail parties, and those who gave them, and the empty meaning of success in contemporary civilization of the West. Eliot was getting at the point of moving in the field of time, and yet remaining unmoved by it. He was asking for more balance between austerity and indulgence.
I think you are asking me to be more definable and agreeable as an author. The reader determines if a writer is radical. If I am, I accept it as a compliment. The nineteenth century philosopher Schopenhauer saw radicalism as a problem of will. He claimed the will is the creative but covert irrational force in human nature, the spontaneous desire to serve others, not for gain, but as a metaphysical realization of will, which has broken through, making us one.
Incidentally, Schopenhauer had a combative style. Students avoided his seminars because they found his lectures too discouraging. Readers ignored his books. He became a reclusive around Frankfurt-am-Main, accompanied only by his poodle. Ultimately, he influenced the work of Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, Tolstoy, Proust and Mann. These men changed our world and times. Schopenhauer listened to his heart, wrote his mind, and touched the common thread of humanity.
My writing describes what I think, feel and have experienced reared and educated in the middle of the United States, while working and living around the world. I lack a fawning nature, and display the directness consistent with my midwestern roots. I am a writer of ideas, which have been put through the crucible of my experience. I capture them on paper instead of tossing them in the air to see if they will stick to the ceiling.
My mother confronted me in 1990 when I came back from my European assignment for Honeywell, saying, “You remind me of Van Gogh, Jimmy. He had a lot of ideas. He got them on canvas. His paintings sell in the millions today. He couldn’t give them away in his lifetime.” She reminded me that I wasn’t getting any younger. I pointed out how difficult it was to build an audience. “That’s not my problem,” she concluded. Often, I have wondered if Van Gogh had been tainted with fame in his lifetime would it have destroyed his vision.
Copyright (1996) these themes are consistent with Dr. Fisher’s books and articles. Look for WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? Both books are due to be published in 2005.
Volume I, Article XIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years, he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books, and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, I have read your books, listened to your lectures, and have discussed your ideas with friends. I have even broached your subjects to my superiors. I have also read Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, and Peter Drucker. You all seem to be saying similar things, but for some reason, and this is my question, only you seem to, dare I say, be tagged as “radical”? What do you make of this? Do you consider yourself radical? Or do you simply see yourself as enigmatic?
The reason I write in this genre as I do is because nobody else writes as I do. If they did, I wouldn’t write. The authors mentioned are careful to follow a tried and true formula: (1) what is known; (2) what do I know; (3) what do they know; (4) what do they need to know; and (5) what do I need to tell them? Obviously, from their success, the formula works. I have a sixth question: does it move them off the dime? I claim it doesn’t. I go even further to claim it hasn’t changed anything or moved anything much less workers, except rhetorically, and the workplace, except cosmetically.
We still have basically the same organization that we had after World War II. Worse yet, we still manage, motivate, manipulate and evaluate work and workers as if 90 percent were still wearing blue-collars when they, in fact, are wearing white-collars with barely 10 percent still wearing blue-collars.
Rosabeth Kanter writes of “World Class,” Michael Porter about “Competitive Edge,” and Margaret Wheatley about “Conquering Complexity.” These high sounding concerns are marginal compared to the left out workers.
I have come to realize that the structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work determines the workplace culture; the workplace culture determines the predominant organizational behavior.
Gain and loss, fear and desire, material and spiritual, subject and object, worker and work are each part of the same whole. Duality transcends to unity. Understand this and everything falls into place because “working class” leads to world class, collective enterprise leads to competitive edge, and everyone on the same page getting off on the same dime reduces complexity to competent completion. People ultimately make the difference is you can catch their spirit.
My aim is always at the psyche, not at the psychology.
I have come to know I am “it,” while my society keeps telling me I am not “it.” Since I am “it,” so are you. I am aware of how I have been programmed from birth by the Lord of Social Duty to think, behave and feel in a “should” and “should not” world of arbitrary beliefs, values, aspirations and fears, all of which are out-of-tune with the times.
We live in a classless society, for instance, that is obsessed with class. We live in a society that celebrates innovation as long as it doesn’t upset the status quo. We like to think we are different because of our economic disposable income, when we are all plainly alike in our obsessive materialism. We love to quote Jung but we don’t want to admit the Jungian collective unconscious guides us all.
Early on, in my attempt to please others, I realized it left little time to please myself. I had no time to appreciate what society keeps telling me is my inherent uniqueness. Instead, I was preoccupied with what society kept telling me was my social duty. This left little time for self-discovery.
My focus was outside myself for guidance, not inside myself for revelation. Illumination comes from time alone where there is quiet and seclusion, and an opportunity for meditation, and contemplation. We all have the same equipment, but there is no chance for illumination with a busy racing mind full of noise, activity and nonsense. English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792) says: There is no expedient to which man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
What we call thinking is actually the frenetic panic of doing. It is not that we cannot think outside the box. It is that thinking outside the box has little appeal to people concerned with their comfort, which most of us are.
We want to hear of global problems that are well beyond our door, or of cosmetic changes that don’t require us to make even slight adjustments in our thinking or doing. Notice no one, absolutely no one questions the dangers and haunting implications of that magic word in our vocabulary, “progress.” It is our most important product, and it is killing us, and our planet.
We have a choice to make, to move away from the field of time, as monks and nuns do; or to continue moving in the field of time, as most of us do. Asceticism is noble, as is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. Confucius says: All things are without a self. So be the food of others, resolve the self. This is the great delight, the best austerity, the best discipline. Participate in life as if life were a play.
This was the theme of T. S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party,” a penetrating social analysis of the fetish of psychiatry, the dullness of cocktail parties, and those who gave them, and the empty meaning of success in contemporary civilization of the West. Eliot was getting at the point of moving in the field of time, and yet remaining unmoved by it. He was asking for more balance between austerity and indulgence.
I think you are asking me to be more definable and agreeable as an author. The reader determines if a writer is radical. If I am, I accept it as a compliment. The nineteenth century philosopher Schopenhauer saw radicalism as a problem of will. He claimed the will is the creative but covert irrational force in human nature, the spontaneous desire to serve others, not for gain, but as a metaphysical realization of will, which has broken through, making us one.
Incidentally, Schopenhauer had a combative style. Students avoided his seminars because they found his lectures too discouraging. Readers ignored his books. He became a reclusive around Frankfurt-am-Main, accompanied only by his poodle. Ultimately, he influenced the work of Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, Tolstoy, Proust and Mann. These men changed our world and times. Schopenhauer listened to his heart, wrote his mind, and touched the common thread of humanity.
My writing describes what I think, feel and have experienced reared and educated in the middle of the United States, while working and living around the world. I lack a fawning nature, and display the directness consistent with my midwestern roots. I am a writer of ideas, which have been put through the crucible of my experience. I capture them on paper instead of tossing them in the air to see if they will stick to the ceiling.
My mother confronted me in 1990 when I came back from my European assignment for Honeywell, saying, “You remind me of Van Gogh, Jimmy. He had a lot of ideas. He got them on canvas. His paintings sell in the millions today. He couldn’t give them away in his lifetime.” She reminded me that I wasn’t getting any younger. I pointed out how difficult it was to build an audience. “That’s not my problem,” she concluded. Often, I have wondered if Van Gogh had been tainted with fame in his lifetime would it have destroyed his vision.
Copyright (1996) these themes are consistent with Dr. Fisher’s books and articles. Look for WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? Both books are due to be published in 2005.
Cold Shower 11: The United States of Anxiety
Cold Shower The United States of Anxiety
Volume I, Article XI
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years, he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, I am a sport’s fan, especially of basketball and the Chicago Bulls of the NBA. On my salary, I am able to attend only about two or three games a year. What I don’t understand is the attitude of some players such as Dennis Rodman. Thank God for Michael Jordan, that’s all I can say. My question is why do we have to put up with well-paid jerks like Rodman who ruin the game?
If I may paraphrase President Richard M. Nixon’s remarks when asked about President John F. Kennedy, I think many of us see Michael Jordan as the person we would like to be, while these other so-called “jerks” are the people with whom we can more easily identify. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be marketable. Take Dennis Rodman who makes a fetish (and career) of being weird to the applause of the crowd.
Michael Jordan, and others like him, is the product of spin-doctors, public relation gurus, and the careful orchestration of image-makers. Jordan is a commodity that sells, and so is Rodman. They are bookends of the public conscience. The ideal versus the real model of how most of would like to be. Jordan is not real, nor is Rodman. No one is as happy as Jordan, or as weird as Rodman. They represent projections of the United States of Anxiety. You may recall the pressure of their cages found them both abandoning and then returning to the cages of celebrity sport, Jordan to baseball and Rodman to hedonistic Playboy Club excess. In baseball, Jordan proved totally mediocre, while Rodman was a bore as a profligate. Both were treated as supermen of sport, only to return to the crown of their former achievements a step or two slower, and well past their prime.
Dennis Rodman, along with scores of rock stars, epitomizes the temper of the times. His body, like many entertainers in sport and music, is a walking billboard of his delights and pains, his tattooed conflicts and unresolved mysteries, with his hair the color of his preferred flavor of the day. Meanwhile, Michael Jordan is waxed lyrical to the point of suffocation. Rodman craves acceptance and is rejected with a vengeance. Jordan delights in attention and is deified as a role model. They personify the range of our love and hate, which as you can see is quite banal.
Rodman, once the league’s leading rebounder in his prime was given a six-game suspension without pay and a $20,000 fine for head-butting a referee. At a salary of $34.500 per game, that represented a combined fine of more than $200,000. Most fans could not fathom such a setback, but for Rodman, he just trolled along. He can make that up in one sitting for a television commercial, no sweat!
Jordan perhaps had no idea he was exposing the mystery of the misery when he said of his teammate, “A lot of what you see in Dennis is his image and persona, not the man.” Could this also be true of Jordan?
Rodman, I sense, is the perennial little boy most American men hold tenaciously to all their lives, and are perfectly willing to let him exhibit the pain and anguish of the United States of Anxiety as an entertainment, or not something to be taken seriously. Like most American men would like to believe, Rodman refuses to jump through hoops demanded by public relations; basketball is a job, not a way of life; he doesn’t have to be perfect, or worry about letting the group down. Rodman is seen as a free man. Jordan is seen as trapped in his celebrity with little freedom.
Jordan epitomizes control. Rodman embodies spontaneity. Which behavior more reflects the times? Would you believe neither? Both are acts on a synthetic stage. Jordan is master of a Teflon society not in touch with itself; Rodman is master of his private hell.
Listen to their interviews. Jordan speaks in platitudes the balm of an uptight society. Rodman listens and talks with his eyes in a language beyond words.
My sense is Rodman is not a jerk, but an intelligent man to lazy to release it into positive action. Jordan appears long ago to have tired of public adulation, and would just like to play golf and smoke his cigars. I see them both far more alike than different, and both quintessentially American. But don’t look for Rodman’s image anytime soon on a box of Wheaties.
In my youth, I played and loved basketball, but I never mastered the game as it is played today. It has become an art form played with such consummate skill and at such a level that it is beyond my comprehension. Jordan and Rodman, and many others like them, are artists and flawed human beings, who have good and bad days, peaks and valleys. We try desperately to make them into machines in the United States of Anxiety. Rodman gives us insight into our own concealed self-contempt, while Jordan gives us permission to deny reality. I am sorry you see Rodman as a problem and Jordan such a joy. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer puts it, “Study the way we play our games, and you will have an insight into our society.” In that sense, they may represent our magnificent obsession.
Copyright (1996) this and other such issues are covered in some detail in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996), discounted at $12 including shipping and handling.
Volume I, Article XI
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years, he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, I am a sport’s fan, especially of basketball and the Chicago Bulls of the NBA. On my salary, I am able to attend only about two or three games a year. What I don’t understand is the attitude of some players such as Dennis Rodman. Thank God for Michael Jordan, that’s all I can say. My question is why do we have to put up with well-paid jerks like Rodman who ruin the game?
If I may paraphrase President Richard M. Nixon’s remarks when asked about President John F. Kennedy, I think many of us see Michael Jordan as the person we would like to be, while these other so-called “jerks” are the people with whom we can more easily identify. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be marketable. Take Dennis Rodman who makes a fetish (and career) of being weird to the applause of the crowd.
Michael Jordan, and others like him, is the product of spin-doctors, public relation gurus, and the careful orchestration of image-makers. Jordan is a commodity that sells, and so is Rodman. They are bookends of the public conscience. The ideal versus the real model of how most of would like to be. Jordan is not real, nor is Rodman. No one is as happy as Jordan, or as weird as Rodman. They represent projections of the United States of Anxiety. You may recall the pressure of their cages found them both abandoning and then returning to the cages of celebrity sport, Jordan to baseball and Rodman to hedonistic Playboy Club excess. In baseball, Jordan proved totally mediocre, while Rodman was a bore as a profligate. Both were treated as supermen of sport, only to return to the crown of their former achievements a step or two slower, and well past their prime.
Dennis Rodman, along with scores of rock stars, epitomizes the temper of the times. His body, like many entertainers in sport and music, is a walking billboard of his delights and pains, his tattooed conflicts and unresolved mysteries, with his hair the color of his preferred flavor of the day. Meanwhile, Michael Jordan is waxed lyrical to the point of suffocation. Rodman craves acceptance and is rejected with a vengeance. Jordan delights in attention and is deified as a role model. They personify the range of our love and hate, which as you can see is quite banal.
Rodman, once the league’s leading rebounder in his prime was given a six-game suspension without pay and a $20,000 fine for head-butting a referee. At a salary of $34.500 per game, that represented a combined fine of more than $200,000. Most fans could not fathom such a setback, but for Rodman, he just trolled along. He can make that up in one sitting for a television commercial, no sweat!
Jordan perhaps had no idea he was exposing the mystery of the misery when he said of his teammate, “A lot of what you see in Dennis is his image and persona, not the man.” Could this also be true of Jordan?
Rodman, I sense, is the perennial little boy most American men hold tenaciously to all their lives, and are perfectly willing to let him exhibit the pain and anguish of the United States of Anxiety as an entertainment, or not something to be taken seriously. Like most American men would like to believe, Rodman refuses to jump through hoops demanded by public relations; basketball is a job, not a way of life; he doesn’t have to be perfect, or worry about letting the group down. Rodman is seen as a free man. Jordan is seen as trapped in his celebrity with little freedom.
Jordan epitomizes control. Rodman embodies spontaneity. Which behavior more reflects the times? Would you believe neither? Both are acts on a synthetic stage. Jordan is master of a Teflon society not in touch with itself; Rodman is master of his private hell.
Listen to their interviews. Jordan speaks in platitudes the balm of an uptight society. Rodman listens and talks with his eyes in a language beyond words.
My sense is Rodman is not a jerk, but an intelligent man to lazy to release it into positive action. Jordan appears long ago to have tired of public adulation, and would just like to play golf and smoke his cigars. I see them both far more alike than different, and both quintessentially American. But don’t look for Rodman’s image anytime soon on a box of Wheaties.
In my youth, I played and loved basketball, but I never mastered the game as it is played today. It has become an art form played with such consummate skill and at such a level that it is beyond my comprehension. Jordan and Rodman, and many others like them, are artists and flawed human beings, who have good and bad days, peaks and valleys. We try desperately to make them into machines in the United States of Anxiety. Rodman gives us insight into our own concealed self-contempt, while Jordan gives us permission to deny reality. I am sorry you see Rodman as a problem and Jordan such a joy. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer puts it, “Study the way we play our games, and you will have an insight into our society.” In that sense, they may represent our magnificent obsession.
Copyright (1996) this and other such issues are covered in some detail in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996), discounted at $12 including shipping and handling.
Cold Shower 2: Six Silent Killers of Organizational Life
Cold Shower Six Silent Killers of Organizational Life
Volume I, Article II
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, you argue that GATT and NAFTA are not the problem, that they are not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, but that six silent killers are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise. Please explain.
Termites destroy a person’s home with no one the wiser, that is, until irreparable damage is done. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working diligently and effectively beyond our awareness. On the other hand, we note and are alarmed with the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse every year. Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, or mental illness. Then there are other contributors to diminishing capacity (i.e. to work productivity) such as excessive smoking, eating and drinking of alcoholic beverages. These problems are palpable, visible, and consequential. Since we are aware of them, many firms have Employee Assistant Programs to deal with them.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad. One factor has clearly contributed to this drastic action.
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family.
This erosion in contribution represents social termites at work, and I call these termites “the six silent killers” of organizational life. Successful people are successful no matter what the adversity. Successful people are aware of their behavior. When that behavior is not conducive to promoting the desired ends, they change it. They are in control and responsible. They are what I call “mature adults.” They are valued and secure employees. They can see beyond their own special self-interests to the necessity of a genuine collective strategy. This is not the case of those infected with the six silent killers.
Social termites choose to deny reality, to become inauthentic to themselves and others, and obsessively negative. They look for what is wrong, not right; for who is responsible, not how to correct; for what they can get, not give. They develop political cunning which finds them managing influence and manipulating colleagues and supervisors indiscriminately. They see themselves as victims of a system, which fails to appreciate them, or to satisfy their needs. They fail to recognize “they are the system.” Without knowing it, they have become seduced by six silent behaviors, behaviors that can kill a career before it is started, undermine all that they might become, and literally destroy the enterprise for which they work. These are the social termites, the six silent killers:
(1) Passive Aggressive Behavior – come in late, leave early, do as little as possible to get by, not as much as you are capable of doing.
(2) Passive Responsive Behavior – do nothing until you are told, and only that, then wait for instructions before doing anything else, bring your body to work and leave your mind at home.
(3) Passive Defensive Behavior – always have an excuse why something isn’t done (Not my job! Nobody told me!); point fingers at others who don’t do their jobs; play show your ass (SYA) and cover your ass (CYA) games; help others do their work as alibi for not doing yours.
(4) Approach Avoidance Behavior – volunteer for assignments you don’t intend to complete, or complete on time; take on projects then fail to show up for required meetings; punish others with your knowledge to mask your unwillingness to learn new things.
(5) Obsessive Compulsive Behavior – always want to be and have what someone else is or has; fail to appreciate what you are and have; always see the grass greener on the other side of the fence; consumed with jealousy and envy; locked in to comparing and competing.
(6) Malicious Obedient Behavior – do precisely what told to do even when you know it is wrong; withhold or hide important information necessary to the project; spread disinformation about the company, department or individuals; play games of divide and conquer; toy with natural suspicions with rumors, misuse company property.
There is no way to actually calculate the economic, emotional and spiritual damage these behaviors do to the individual and the collective enterprise. It is probably greater than all the losses from substance abuse, stress-related illnesses, and industrial accidents. That is why we will examine these behavioral indicators in Cold Shower III.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40 including shipping and handling.
Volume I, Article II
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Dr. Fisher, you argue that GATT and NAFTA are not the problem, that they are not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, but that six silent killers are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise. Please explain.
Termites destroy a person’s home with no one the wiser, that is, until irreparable damage is done. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working diligently and effectively beyond our awareness. On the other hand, we note and are alarmed with the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse every year. Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, or mental illness. Then there are other contributors to diminishing capacity (i.e. to work productivity) such as excessive smoking, eating and drinking of alcoholic beverages. These problems are palpable, visible, and consequential. Since we are aware of them, many firms have Employee Assistant Programs to deal with them.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad. One factor has clearly contributed to this drastic action.
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family.
This erosion in contribution represents social termites at work, and I call these termites “the six silent killers” of organizational life. Successful people are successful no matter what the adversity. Successful people are aware of their behavior. When that behavior is not conducive to promoting the desired ends, they change it. They are in control and responsible. They are what I call “mature adults.” They are valued and secure employees. They can see beyond their own special self-interests to the necessity of a genuine collective strategy. This is not the case of those infected with the six silent killers.
Social termites choose to deny reality, to become inauthentic to themselves and others, and obsessively negative. They look for what is wrong, not right; for who is responsible, not how to correct; for what they can get, not give. They develop political cunning which finds them managing influence and manipulating colleagues and supervisors indiscriminately. They see themselves as victims of a system, which fails to appreciate them, or to satisfy their needs. They fail to recognize “they are the system.” Without knowing it, they have become seduced by six silent behaviors, behaviors that can kill a career before it is started, undermine all that they might become, and literally destroy the enterprise for which they work. These are the social termites, the six silent killers:
(1) Passive Aggressive Behavior – come in late, leave early, do as little as possible to get by, not as much as you are capable of doing.
(2) Passive Responsive Behavior – do nothing until you are told, and only that, then wait for instructions before doing anything else, bring your body to work and leave your mind at home.
(3) Passive Defensive Behavior – always have an excuse why something isn’t done (Not my job! Nobody told me!); point fingers at others who don’t do their jobs; play show your ass (SYA) and cover your ass (CYA) games; help others do their work as alibi for not doing yours.
(4) Approach Avoidance Behavior – volunteer for assignments you don’t intend to complete, or complete on time; take on projects then fail to show up for required meetings; punish others with your knowledge to mask your unwillingness to learn new things.
(5) Obsessive Compulsive Behavior – always want to be and have what someone else is or has; fail to appreciate what you are and have; always see the grass greener on the other side of the fence; consumed with jealousy and envy; locked in to comparing and competing.
(6) Malicious Obedient Behavior – do precisely what told to do even when you know it is wrong; withhold or hide important information necessary to the project; spread disinformation about the company, department or individuals; play games of divide and conquer; toy with natural suspicions with rumors, misuse company property.
There is no way to actually calculate the economic, emotional and spiritual damage these behaviors do to the individual and the collective enterprise. It is probably greater than all the losses from substance abuse, stress-related illnesses, and industrial accidents. That is why we will examine these behavioral indicators in Cold Shower III.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40 including shipping and handling.
Cold Shower 28: Making Peace with the World of Work
Cold Shower Making Peace with the Modern World of Work
Volume I, Article XXVIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing work climate, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I look to books for easing my dilemma. Instead, they contribute to it. Books conquering complexity through leadership and new science only add to my confusion. I attended a lecture on world class and the new global economy, and felt as if in an alien world. Where do I fit in? My answer comes back, “Nowhere!” Am I the exception?
Dr. Fisher replies:
No. But give these writers credit for attempting to show the way. Writers write first to perceive their own dilemma, and hope to contribute to the resolution of yours.
This has led me to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction, as we commonly understand the distinction, but only narrative. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, ever since the arrival of Zoraster or Zarathrustra, as Nietzsche prefers, the world has bought into his perceived struggle between light and darkness, good and evil. This has given rise to the command to conquer rather than to live in harmony with nature.
Conquest has idealized “progress,” which has become Western society’s most important product. Moreover, the great religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam owe the Iranian prophet a great debt. Now why do I mention this?
First, we are all a product of at least a 3,000-year cumulative tradition. We accept this tradition, for the most part, as truth personified without review or reflection. Man decided then that the world was alien to him and must be conquered, and yet that world keeps besting us at every turn. Second, our religious tradition, which has been a refuge from confusion and a sanctuary for peace, has lost its way as well. Third, science has attempted to fill this spiritual void of subjective ends with material certitude of objective means with uneven outcomes.
It is no longer a question of how many angels are on the head of a pin but what is the ultimate subatomic entity upon which all life is based. Indeed, the focus has shifted in the last 300 years from religion to science, from a God-centered universe to a man-centered society, from language to semantics, from simplicity to complexity.
Now writers, who are as much immersed in this confusion as you are, attempt to deal with their isolation and confusion by splitting themselves in two: creator and documentarian, teller and listener, penetrator and explainer (of complexity), conspiring to pass on the collective wisdom in its own language, disguised in its own enlightened bias, that of the factual world.
Ideally, the connection between writer and reader in this enterprise is to promote acceptance of what helps clarify confusion and rejection of what only adds to bewilderment. Writer and reader, it might be mentioned, are jointly stumbling in the dark, knowing that they have limited vision and limited access to truth.
With this in mind, I propose these thoughts:
1) Truth depends on its usefulness in making sense of experience. Value what you observe; evaluate secondary and tertiary information in that light.
2) You are your own guide through complexity. Complexity is simplicity compounded to the point of obfuscation. You don’t have to buy into it.
3) Freedom is your inherent right. It gives you the opportunity to make choices. The problem with choices is they demand inner integrity and self-responsibility.
4) Comparing and competing can become quite bewildering, and the source of much wasted energy in imitation of others rather than in concentration on your own unique gifts and qualities.
5) If you fail to enter and leave the workplace with a comparable sense of zest and satisfaction, chances are you are in the wrong space. Life is too short to punish yourself with justification for an untenable situation. There is not enough pay or opportunity that justifies misery.
6) Equality and excellence are not mutually compatible. If the focus is totally on equality, excellence is its first casualty.
7) Use your powers to enlighten and enable others. The greatest gift life has given you is your mind, a mind that has symmetry, balance, harmony and confluence, a mind that has the capacity to see clearly through the veil of confusion, a mind that is free but can be easily enslaved if you are not watchful.
8) Trust is the critical component to enlightened development and social engagement. More work can be accomplished and more time spent in dealing with problems in an atmosphere of trust.
You may have felt confused and alien to what you heard at this lecture on world class and the new global economy because it did not fit neatly in with what you already knew. This is one of the deathtraps of the mind. The brain develops grooves of thought and is weary of anything that is not consistent with those grooves. That said, the human brain is capable of defining the problem, and determining its context rather than to be obsessed with its solution. In any event problems are controlled, not solved. As author William L. Livingston puts it,
Only the individual human brain, acting alone, solves problems. Problems are perceived and solutions are “hatched.” No two humans perceive the problem the same and no two humans will “hatch” the same solution (Friends in High Places, F.E.S. Ltd. Publishing, 1990, p. 96).
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? The book will be out in 2005.
Volume I, Article XXVIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing work climate, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I look to books for easing my dilemma. Instead, they contribute to it. Books conquering complexity through leadership and new science only add to my confusion. I attended a lecture on world class and the new global economy, and felt as if in an alien world. Where do I fit in? My answer comes back, “Nowhere!” Am I the exception?
Dr. Fisher replies:
No. But give these writers credit for attempting to show the way. Writers write first to perceive their own dilemma, and hope to contribute to the resolution of yours.
This has led me to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction, as we commonly understand the distinction, but only narrative. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, ever since the arrival of Zoraster or Zarathrustra, as Nietzsche prefers, the world has bought into his perceived struggle between light and darkness, good and evil. This has given rise to the command to conquer rather than to live in harmony with nature.
Conquest has idealized “progress,” which has become Western society’s most important product. Moreover, the great religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam owe the Iranian prophet a great debt. Now why do I mention this?
First, we are all a product of at least a 3,000-year cumulative tradition. We accept this tradition, for the most part, as truth personified without review or reflection. Man decided then that the world was alien to him and must be conquered, and yet that world keeps besting us at every turn. Second, our religious tradition, which has been a refuge from confusion and a sanctuary for peace, has lost its way as well. Third, science has attempted to fill this spiritual void of subjective ends with material certitude of objective means with uneven outcomes.
It is no longer a question of how many angels are on the head of a pin but what is the ultimate subatomic entity upon which all life is based. Indeed, the focus has shifted in the last 300 years from religion to science, from a God-centered universe to a man-centered society, from language to semantics, from simplicity to complexity.
Now writers, who are as much immersed in this confusion as you are, attempt to deal with their isolation and confusion by splitting themselves in two: creator and documentarian, teller and listener, penetrator and explainer (of complexity), conspiring to pass on the collective wisdom in its own language, disguised in its own enlightened bias, that of the factual world.
Ideally, the connection between writer and reader in this enterprise is to promote acceptance of what helps clarify confusion and rejection of what only adds to bewilderment. Writer and reader, it might be mentioned, are jointly stumbling in the dark, knowing that they have limited vision and limited access to truth.
With this in mind, I propose these thoughts:
1) Truth depends on its usefulness in making sense of experience. Value what you observe; evaluate secondary and tertiary information in that light.
2) You are your own guide through complexity. Complexity is simplicity compounded to the point of obfuscation. You don’t have to buy into it.
3) Freedom is your inherent right. It gives you the opportunity to make choices. The problem with choices is they demand inner integrity and self-responsibility.
4) Comparing and competing can become quite bewildering, and the source of much wasted energy in imitation of others rather than in concentration on your own unique gifts and qualities.
5) If you fail to enter and leave the workplace with a comparable sense of zest and satisfaction, chances are you are in the wrong space. Life is too short to punish yourself with justification for an untenable situation. There is not enough pay or opportunity that justifies misery.
6) Equality and excellence are not mutually compatible. If the focus is totally on equality, excellence is its first casualty.
7) Use your powers to enlighten and enable others. The greatest gift life has given you is your mind, a mind that has symmetry, balance, harmony and confluence, a mind that has the capacity to see clearly through the veil of confusion, a mind that is free but can be easily enslaved if you are not watchful.
8) Trust is the critical component to enlightened development and social engagement. More work can be accomplished and more time spent in dealing with problems in an atmosphere of trust.
You may have felt confused and alien to what you heard at this lecture on world class and the new global economy because it did not fit neatly in with what you already knew. This is one of the deathtraps of the mind. The brain develops grooves of thought and is weary of anything that is not consistent with those grooves. That said, the human brain is capable of defining the problem, and determining its context rather than to be obsessed with its solution. In any event problems are controlled, not solved. As author William L. Livingston puts it,
Only the individual human brain, acting alone, solves problems. Problems are perceived and solutions are “hatched.” No two humans perceive the problem the same and no two humans will “hatch” the same solution (Friends in High Places, F.E.S. Ltd. Publishing, 1990, p. 96).
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book, Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? The book will be out in 2005.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Cold Shower 27: What should I be reading?
Cold Shower What should I be reading?
Volume I, Article XXVII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I’ve read your book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, and the thought occurred to me I should be reading more, but what? Any suggestions?
Dr. Fisher replies:
What a wonderful question. With television, the Internet, e-mail, fax machines, cell phones, video games, and VHS and DVD videocassettes of practically everything, we are told the reading of books is passé. Yet traditional publishers produce 60,000 new books every year. In addition, “the small press” and electronically produced books “printed on demand” (POD) account for another 30,000 books annually. This does not include so-called “e-books,” which can be downloaded directly from your computer.
Should you be reading more? You are asking the wrong person. I am never without a book in my hands. I can be standing in line at the post office, or supermarket, or sitting waiting while my wife tries on clothes at the department store, and I am reading. In high school when I was an athlete, I always read on the bus while other guys were shooting the breeze, playing cards, or cutting up. During my professional career, I spent more than a million miles in the air, which I never minded because I always had several books to read. Reading is my passion, and it was quite natural to make the next step to writing.
Your question also implies the desire for a reading list. Mortimer Adler notwithstanding, no one can develop a reading list for you, or suggest how you might find time to read. Reading for scholarship, pleasure, information, escape or to kill time only touches the surface. That surface has a multiple of subsets each unique and individualistic. What I can share is my personal reading habits. My tastes are eclectic.
My mother was a reader preferring historical tomes, parts of which she often read to me. This gave me a taste for the word. The Sisters of St. Francis at St. Patrick’s Grammar School required 18 book reports for both the 7th and 8th grade. It was in that compulsive reading climate that I discovered my passion. Many of the books I then read were on the lives of saints. I discovered their humanness, and that caring sharpened my own.
Strangely, I attended a public high school where reading was less emphasized. Many of my peers didn’t even read what was assigned, but faked it. When I entered the university, and majored in chemistry, I was prevented from becoming a technical nerd by required core courses in the humanities. This re-stimulated my passion for reading. There I discovered James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, John Dos Passos, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare. During my summer vacations during my college years I read at least a 100 books each summer. Among those that still resonate with me are James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy, Mazo de la Roche’s Growth of a Man, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Stendhal’s Red and Black, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and John dos Passos’s USA. All novels, they helped me to better understand the adult world and myself.
When I was a boy during WWII, I read The Clinton Herald like the bible, and became a student of op-ed columns, which found me gravitating to other newspapers and syndicated columnists such as Mike Royko, James Reston, and William Raspberry.
Reading habits change. I once read The Saturday Review of Literature cover-to-cover. I now read instead The New York Review, and The London Review for their insightful essays. I’ve found that Garry Wills, Murray Kempton, Gore Vidal, Janet Malcolm, Stephen Jay Gould, William Pfaff, Rosemary Dinnage, Michael Wood, Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, among others, have a taste for the good sentence. They entertain as they enlighten. There is no shortage of good essayists today. Foreign Affairs is another periodical I find enchanting, which introduced me to such writers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Paul Johnson, Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama and Peter Drucker. They guide me through the labyrinth of international intrigue. On the other hand, I find newspapers disappointing. They have become comic books with subtitles. Provocative pictures and captioned summaries have become common fair without much content or subtext.
I’ve been writing a novel for the past twelve years, which finds me reading several popular authors in this genre to get a sense of their magic. I’ve encountered, to my surprise, some very good writing. My tendency is to identify with authors rather than books. Once I discover a writer I like I read all their works I can find. This is true of nonfiction as well as fiction. A partial list of such authors is Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer, Rollo May, Krishnamurti, Khalil Gibran, John Le Carre, Isaiah Berlin, Carl Sandbug, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser, Fulton J. Sheen, Will Durant, Christopher Lasch, Joseph Campbell, J. P. Donleavy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dame Sackville West, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, P. D. James, Martha Grimes, Elizabeth George, Jonathan Harrington, Bill Granger, David Wiltse, James Joyce, and so on. These authors teased away the veil of obfuscation and put me in touch with myself.
The New York Review introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and television to Joseph Campbell. Berlin’s history of ideas, and Campbell’s cultural mythology have changed my perspective. Reading is personal. No one’s needs are identical to another person’s. Read where your heart leads you, and it will be right and good and wonderful.
Copyright (2002). Look for Dr. Fisher’s “wake-up call” book due out in 2005: Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent man?
Volume I, Article XXVII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I’ve read your book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, and the thought occurred to me I should be reading more, but what? Any suggestions?
Dr. Fisher replies:
What a wonderful question. With television, the Internet, e-mail, fax machines, cell phones, video games, and VHS and DVD videocassettes of practically everything, we are told the reading of books is passé. Yet traditional publishers produce 60,000 new books every year. In addition, “the small press” and electronically produced books “printed on demand” (POD) account for another 30,000 books annually. This does not include so-called “e-books,” which can be downloaded directly from your computer.
Should you be reading more? You are asking the wrong person. I am never without a book in my hands. I can be standing in line at the post office, or supermarket, or sitting waiting while my wife tries on clothes at the department store, and I am reading. In high school when I was an athlete, I always read on the bus while other guys were shooting the breeze, playing cards, or cutting up. During my professional career, I spent more than a million miles in the air, which I never minded because I always had several books to read. Reading is my passion, and it was quite natural to make the next step to writing.
Your question also implies the desire for a reading list. Mortimer Adler notwithstanding, no one can develop a reading list for you, or suggest how you might find time to read. Reading for scholarship, pleasure, information, escape or to kill time only touches the surface. That surface has a multiple of subsets each unique and individualistic. What I can share is my personal reading habits. My tastes are eclectic.
My mother was a reader preferring historical tomes, parts of which she often read to me. This gave me a taste for the word. The Sisters of St. Francis at St. Patrick’s Grammar School required 18 book reports for both the 7th and 8th grade. It was in that compulsive reading climate that I discovered my passion. Many of the books I then read were on the lives of saints. I discovered their humanness, and that caring sharpened my own.
Strangely, I attended a public high school where reading was less emphasized. Many of my peers didn’t even read what was assigned, but faked it. When I entered the university, and majored in chemistry, I was prevented from becoming a technical nerd by required core courses in the humanities. This re-stimulated my passion for reading. There I discovered James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, John Dos Passos, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare. During my summer vacations during my college years I read at least a 100 books each summer. Among those that still resonate with me are James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy, Mazo de la Roche’s Growth of a Man, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Stendhal’s Red and Black, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and John dos Passos’s USA. All novels, they helped me to better understand the adult world and myself.
When I was a boy during WWII, I read The Clinton Herald like the bible, and became a student of op-ed columns, which found me gravitating to other newspapers and syndicated columnists such as Mike Royko, James Reston, and William Raspberry.
Reading habits change. I once read The Saturday Review of Literature cover-to-cover. I now read instead The New York Review, and The London Review for their insightful essays. I’ve found that Garry Wills, Murray Kempton, Gore Vidal, Janet Malcolm, Stephen Jay Gould, William Pfaff, Rosemary Dinnage, Michael Wood, Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, among others, have a taste for the good sentence. They entertain as they enlighten. There is no shortage of good essayists today. Foreign Affairs is another periodical I find enchanting, which introduced me to such writers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Paul Johnson, Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama and Peter Drucker. They guide me through the labyrinth of international intrigue. On the other hand, I find newspapers disappointing. They have become comic books with subtitles. Provocative pictures and captioned summaries have become common fair without much content or subtext.
I’ve been writing a novel for the past twelve years, which finds me reading several popular authors in this genre to get a sense of their magic. I’ve encountered, to my surprise, some very good writing. My tendency is to identify with authors rather than books. Once I discover a writer I like I read all their works I can find. This is true of nonfiction as well as fiction. A partial list of such authors is Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer, Rollo May, Krishnamurti, Khalil Gibran, John Le Carre, Isaiah Berlin, Carl Sandbug, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser, Fulton J. Sheen, Will Durant, Christopher Lasch, Joseph Campbell, J. P. Donleavy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dame Sackville West, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, P. D. James, Martha Grimes, Elizabeth George, Jonathan Harrington, Bill Granger, David Wiltse, James Joyce, and so on. These authors teased away the veil of obfuscation and put me in touch with myself.
The New York Review introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and television to Joseph Campbell. Berlin’s history of ideas, and Campbell’s cultural mythology have changed my perspective. Reading is personal. No one’s needs are identical to another person’s. Read where your heart leads you, and it will be right and good and wonderful.
Copyright (2002). Look for Dr. Fisher’s “wake-up call” book due out in 2005: Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent man?
Cold Shower 25: Servant Leadership -- Putting People First
Cold Shower Servant Leadership – Putting People First
Volume I, Article XXV
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I read your book Work Without Managers quite by accident. I was looking for something on management to take me out of the doldrums and came across your book. “Work without managers,” I said, “now that’s something novel.” So many books on management leave people out of the equation, while your book puts them squarely in the frame. I like your definition of the requirements of leadership – the capacity to see and the ability to serve. Wow! In my twenty years with my company I have seen little of this. Soon I will be a casualty of major company downsizing (18,000), while the CEO of my company tells The Wall Street Journal that he feels “no pain” in accepting his $16 million compensation for managing the process. I am angry, bitter, hurt and resentful, but strangely still not cynical. Is there any hope people will one day be put first?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Your maturity under difficult circumstances is remarkable. Hopefully, one day it will also be rewarded. The complex organization is in transition and the working culture lags the reality of the situation. A poison in the system takes time to circulate before it forms an ugly boil on the surface, where it is noticed and is likely to first be denied and then hidden by cosmetics. Ultimately, the boil will have its way and rupture. We are waiting.
Downsizing -- cutting payroll to improve cash flow and appease stockholders – is expedient but only cosmetic surgery. The boil has not been acknowledged and so it will in due course wreak its reward. There is an ugly boil on the complex organization and it extends to all institutions – family, church, school, community, state and society - not just business and industry. Society is not yet ready for enlightened individual workers.
The human dynamic has changed because the worker in the equation has changed. The worker is no longer the submissive, expendable, predictable factor in the equation but the assertive, critical and surprisingly dominant one. The worker is better educated than his management, more in touch with the reality of work, better able to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, and a more competent problem-solver because he has the best information. The hierarchical structure is designed to function for another time with a different set of variables. This is the poison in the system.
This worker is entertained to a confection of bromides in which he is asked to be a “team player” in a pragmatic culture of individualism. This is not consistent with the cultural capital of his heritage, or capitalism. Continuing the sport analogy, capitalism has luxuriated as a team sport with the emphasis on individual performance. As such, it is much closer to baseball than basketball in the sense that individualism is controlled by a manager outside the actual play, whereas in basketball the manager is in the game and hence performance is a function of the chemistry of the team where control exists on the floor. The dichotomy between the two is the reason why management has become schizophrenic.
The comment of your CEO is consistent with the phantom of this elitism, which believes it still calls the shots and is the critical mass necessary for corporate success. He is wrong and a good fifty years behind the curve. He and his cronies have become a vestigial organ. That said, he still gets away with his primal dance because it is easier for workers, even workers made redundant, not to be cynical and to continue to believe in atavistic management and an anachronistic system than it is to do anything about it.
People will be put first when people see themselves as having earned the right to be put first, but not before. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have unlimited security and enjoy the freedom of contribution. You cannot have a guaranteed paycheck of certain dollars and expect to control what you do. You cannot behave like a spoiled brat and expect to have the gumption to act as a mature adult. You cannot be a whiner and complainer and expect your situation to change without your involvement in the process.
This situation will not change with reengineering or rational ordering of factors. It will only change when the will to change ruptures the ugly boil and starts the natural recovery process to health and beauty. There is little evidence that this is happening and so cosmetics are still in fashion and semantics remain the language of change.
It is as predictable as Newtonian physics that the function of work follows the structure of work, and the structure and function of work combine to establish a culture of work, and the culture of work determines the dominant behavior of work. If these words seem confusing, I apologize. But I still insist that they are elementary.
The individual is the critical mass or he is not; either the organization is built around the synergy of his contributions or it is dedicated to seeing that he behaves and fits. With all the hoopla of the past decades on the management of change, no one has offered the observation that the most successful workers are political and bring about 20 percent of their brains to the attention of work, using the other 80 percent to scheme to their career advantage. Small wonder we have redundancy exercises.
It would be nice if I could reassure you that people will soon be put first. It won’t happen in my lifetime, I’m sure, perhaps not in yours as well because managing change is the wrong focus. Change will come about naturally once workers bring change about in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way the worker’s mind views the world. I don’t see this happening soon.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40, including shipping and handling.
Volume I, Article XXV
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 published articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I read your book Work Without Managers quite by accident. I was looking for something on management to take me out of the doldrums and came across your book. “Work without managers,” I said, “now that’s something novel.” So many books on management leave people out of the equation, while your book puts them squarely in the frame. I like your definition of the requirements of leadership – the capacity to see and the ability to serve. Wow! In my twenty years with my company I have seen little of this. Soon I will be a casualty of major company downsizing (18,000), while the CEO of my company tells The Wall Street Journal that he feels “no pain” in accepting his $16 million compensation for managing the process. I am angry, bitter, hurt and resentful, but strangely still not cynical. Is there any hope people will one day be put first?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Your maturity under difficult circumstances is remarkable. Hopefully, one day it will also be rewarded. The complex organization is in transition and the working culture lags the reality of the situation. A poison in the system takes time to circulate before it forms an ugly boil on the surface, where it is noticed and is likely to first be denied and then hidden by cosmetics. Ultimately, the boil will have its way and rupture. We are waiting.
Downsizing -- cutting payroll to improve cash flow and appease stockholders – is expedient but only cosmetic surgery. The boil has not been acknowledged and so it will in due course wreak its reward. There is an ugly boil on the complex organization and it extends to all institutions – family, church, school, community, state and society - not just business and industry. Society is not yet ready for enlightened individual workers.
The human dynamic has changed because the worker in the equation has changed. The worker is no longer the submissive, expendable, predictable factor in the equation but the assertive, critical and surprisingly dominant one. The worker is better educated than his management, more in touch with the reality of work, better able to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, and a more competent problem-solver because he has the best information. The hierarchical structure is designed to function for another time with a different set of variables. This is the poison in the system.
This worker is entertained to a confection of bromides in which he is asked to be a “team player” in a pragmatic culture of individualism. This is not consistent with the cultural capital of his heritage, or capitalism. Continuing the sport analogy, capitalism has luxuriated as a team sport with the emphasis on individual performance. As such, it is much closer to baseball than basketball in the sense that individualism is controlled by a manager outside the actual play, whereas in basketball the manager is in the game and hence performance is a function of the chemistry of the team where control exists on the floor. The dichotomy between the two is the reason why management has become schizophrenic.
The comment of your CEO is consistent with the phantom of this elitism, which believes it still calls the shots and is the critical mass necessary for corporate success. He is wrong and a good fifty years behind the curve. He and his cronies have become a vestigial organ. That said, he still gets away with his primal dance because it is easier for workers, even workers made redundant, not to be cynical and to continue to believe in atavistic management and an anachronistic system than it is to do anything about it.
People will be put first when people see themselves as having earned the right to be put first, but not before. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have unlimited security and enjoy the freedom of contribution. You cannot have a guaranteed paycheck of certain dollars and expect to control what you do. You cannot behave like a spoiled brat and expect to have the gumption to act as a mature adult. You cannot be a whiner and complainer and expect your situation to change without your involvement in the process.
This situation will not change with reengineering or rational ordering of factors. It will only change when the will to change ruptures the ugly boil and starts the natural recovery process to health and beauty. There is little evidence that this is happening and so cosmetics are still in fashion and semantics remain the language of change.
It is as predictable as Newtonian physics that the function of work follows the structure of work, and the structure and function of work combine to establish a culture of work, and the culture of work determines the dominant behavior of work. If these words seem confusing, I apologize. But I still insist that they are elementary.
The individual is the critical mass or he is not; either the organization is built around the synergy of his contributions or it is dedicated to seeing that he behaves and fits. With all the hoopla of the past decades on the management of change, no one has offered the observation that the most successful workers are political and bring about 20 percent of their brains to the attention of work, using the other 80 percent to scheme to their career advantage. Small wonder we have redundancy exercises.
It would be nice if I could reassure you that people will soon be put first. It won’t happen in my lifetime, I’m sure, perhaps not in yours as well because managing change is the wrong focus. Change will come about naturally once workers bring change about in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way the worker’s mind views the world. I don’t see this happening soon.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40, including shipping and handling.
Cold Shower 24: The Silent Invasion of an Uptight Society
Cold Shower Silent Invasions of an Uptight Society
Volume I, Article XXIV
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, You write in Corporate Sin (2000) about “silent invasions” in our lives. Quite frankly, it never occurred to me that this was true, yet increasingly I see that this is the case in every direction – government, TV, noises of all kinds. Why is this? Why do we put up with it? And what can we do about it?
Dr. Fisher replies:
It is this way because you permit it to be so. Think about it? Do you get exercised if your favorite team doesn’t win? Do you play homage to your favorite players like they are gods? Do you watch television shows in which stupid people act stupidly in front of an audience for no other reason then to feed their need for exhibition and yours for voyeurism? Do you plug into television gossip journalists who entertain you with the most egregious pranks of your favorite celebrities? Do you limit your knowledge of current events to the celebrity pretty faces of network news? In short do you avoid a modicum of thinking for fear it might fry your brain?
We are a personality society with a cult of celebrity keeping us as far as possible from personal intimacy, while at the same time, allowing dissembling voices, such as ex-presidents, rock stars and film stars, winning coaches, star athletes, et al, to be treated with more gravity than family members. Ex-presidents make anywhere from $100,000 to $350,000 for a single speech according to the Key Speakers Bureau, which handles celebrity engagements. Chances are slim that it is the context of their messages but rather the content of their celebrity that demands these exorbitant fees.
The same fiction and nonfiction authors are repeatedly on the bestseller list, the same faces get elected and reelected to Congress, and the same inane television shows win our allegiance time and again. We speak, dress and behave the way these television icons sell the latest rust buckets on TV. And we think the way social scientists regroup and interpret the facts.
Social psychologists have given us such terms as “complex,” “sublimation,” “repression,” “identity crisis,” “objective relations,” “borderline personality,” and so on. You may have no idea what they are talking about, but take what they say to heart because “they’re supposed to know.” We fail to reflect that their counsel is nonspecific, collated, and subject to verification, while being constantly revised, monitored, updated and retold in new ways with us accepting the new ways as if gospel.
One day we’re told one thing, the next another, and we believe them both, and wonder why we are conflicting. Nutritionists get in the act as well, saying milk is good, then not good for us; coffee is bad for us, then good for us. The point is we look for veracity from experts, not from the common sense of our lives. We are living in a kind of stunned submission to circumstances and rules that have silently invaded our sanctuary. Rather than creators of our culture, we are made by it.
Given this invasion, we lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others. We piously pretend to principles we don’t believe in. We whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We think only of ourselves and our own and are brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. And as much as we are guilty of these sins, those in positions of power, be they in the church, state, government, industry or commerce, sin at a magnitude beyond our comprehension. They do so because we allow them to.
Silent invasions destroy our balance. We have many truths to live by, self-reliance, frugality, patriotism, and so on, but anyone of these can become grotesque when carried to fanaticism. George Orwell in 1984 understood the seductive attraction of these silent invaders with what he called doublethink: “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions . . . knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them.”
We live in Orwell’s “Big Brother” world, where to defend the indefensible, these silent invaders need to deform the language, use words not to communicate but to prevent it, need to brainwash people, rewrite history, deaden language, wage war on phantom fears, and maintain control by forever keeping us strangers to ourselves.
We put up with it because we have lobotomized ourselves by giving control of our reality to “experts,” by indiscriminately buying into pop-culture’s latest desires and fears.
What can we do about it? I think you know. To cure our individual learned helplessness we must first put ourselves back together. To rebuild our sense of self, we may have to go back to our childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.
There is a pattern to who we are and what we have become that is as persistent and as palpable as our face in the mirror. The problem is, with all these silent invasions, the face we see in the mirror is not likely to be the face we project to the crowd. In my book Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) I put it this way: We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book in 2005, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
Volume I, Article XXIV
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, You write in Corporate Sin (2000) about “silent invasions” in our lives. Quite frankly, it never occurred to me that this was true, yet increasingly I see that this is the case in every direction – government, TV, noises of all kinds. Why is this? Why do we put up with it? And what can we do about it?
Dr. Fisher replies:
It is this way because you permit it to be so. Think about it? Do you get exercised if your favorite team doesn’t win? Do you play homage to your favorite players like they are gods? Do you watch television shows in which stupid people act stupidly in front of an audience for no other reason then to feed their need for exhibition and yours for voyeurism? Do you plug into television gossip journalists who entertain you with the most egregious pranks of your favorite celebrities? Do you limit your knowledge of current events to the celebrity pretty faces of network news? In short do you avoid a modicum of thinking for fear it might fry your brain?
We are a personality society with a cult of celebrity keeping us as far as possible from personal intimacy, while at the same time, allowing dissembling voices, such as ex-presidents, rock stars and film stars, winning coaches, star athletes, et al, to be treated with more gravity than family members. Ex-presidents make anywhere from $100,000 to $350,000 for a single speech according to the Key Speakers Bureau, which handles celebrity engagements. Chances are slim that it is the context of their messages but rather the content of their celebrity that demands these exorbitant fees.
The same fiction and nonfiction authors are repeatedly on the bestseller list, the same faces get elected and reelected to Congress, and the same inane television shows win our allegiance time and again. We speak, dress and behave the way these television icons sell the latest rust buckets on TV. And we think the way social scientists regroup and interpret the facts.
Social psychologists have given us such terms as “complex,” “sublimation,” “repression,” “identity crisis,” “objective relations,” “borderline personality,” and so on. You may have no idea what they are talking about, but take what they say to heart because “they’re supposed to know.” We fail to reflect that their counsel is nonspecific, collated, and subject to verification, while being constantly revised, monitored, updated and retold in new ways with us accepting the new ways as if gospel.
One day we’re told one thing, the next another, and we believe them both, and wonder why we are conflicting. Nutritionists get in the act as well, saying milk is good, then not good for us; coffee is bad for us, then good for us. The point is we look for veracity from experts, not from the common sense of our lives. We are living in a kind of stunned submission to circumstances and rules that have silently invaded our sanctuary. Rather than creators of our culture, we are made by it.
Given this invasion, we lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others. We piously pretend to principles we don’t believe in. We whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We think only of ourselves and our own and are brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. And as much as we are guilty of these sins, those in positions of power, be they in the church, state, government, industry or commerce, sin at a magnitude beyond our comprehension. They do so because we allow them to.
Silent invasions destroy our balance. We have many truths to live by, self-reliance, frugality, patriotism, and so on, but anyone of these can become grotesque when carried to fanaticism. George Orwell in 1984 understood the seductive attraction of these silent invaders with what he called doublethink: “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions . . . knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them.”
We live in Orwell’s “Big Brother” world, where to defend the indefensible, these silent invaders need to deform the language, use words not to communicate but to prevent it, need to brainwash people, rewrite history, deaden language, wage war on phantom fears, and maintain control by forever keeping us strangers to ourselves.
We put up with it because we have lobotomized ourselves by giving control of our reality to “experts,” by indiscriminately buying into pop-culture’s latest desires and fears.
What can we do about it? I think you know. To cure our individual learned helplessness we must first put ourselves back together. To rebuild our sense of self, we may have to go back to our childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.
There is a pattern to who we are and what we have become that is as persistent and as palpable as our face in the mirror. The problem is, with all these silent invasions, the face we see in the mirror is not likely to be the face we project to the crowd. In my book Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) I put it this way: We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book in 2005, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
Cold Shower 23: What is this thing called "superiority"?
Cold Shower What is this thing called “superiority”?
Volume I, Article XXIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I’m not sure I have a problem. My son is nine and seems gifted. He’s been tested and scored in the 99.9 percentile on the verbal section and in the 97.0 percentile for performance (application criteria). His I.Q. of 145 is considered “very superior” in intelligence. The poor kid doesn’t have a motor skill to his name, can’t even read his own writing. Teachers, counselors and psychologists enjoy him, but find he has no leadership ability and has no tolerance for his peers and is socially excluded. Recently, he called a computer salesman who sold him the wrong modem an idiot. He’s going to group therapy with other boys his age where they talk about friendship. Most of the kids in the group are there because they’re physical bullies compared to my son’s intellectual snobbery. Do I have a problem? If so, what in God’s name should I be doing?
Your candor is appreciated. Your love and caring are an immense positive. Be careful of experts! It is dangerous to say one has no leadership ability and no tolerance for his peers. Both expressions are subjective and relative. It seems your son is going through a difficult patch. His essence (genetic inheritance) is way ahead of his personality (learned behavior). Essence is the “owned self.” It cannot be lost, changed, or injured in the normal sense. Personality is the “acquired self.” Personality can be altered or changed by circumstances and easily injured or even lost. Essence is the basis of our physical and mental make-up. Personality is learned behavior through social programming and conditioning, either by conscious teaching or by unconscious imitation. Imitation is important in building personality but often at the expense of essence.
We live in a culture obsessed with personality, not essence, where prepackaged ideas are the fodder of an urban dominated society. The mantra of advertising is the stinging refrain, “one size made to fit all.” Albert Einstein was a poor student, didn’t mix well with his peers, and didn’t even have access to a laboratory when he formulated his revolutionary theories about time, space, light, mass and energy, theories formulated in a Swiss patent office where he was a low level employee.
The key to balance, and a nine year old is unlikely to find it easily, is to like what is good for you and dislike what is bad. This profiles the healthy personality where essence dominates personality. What is bad today once might have been good. Hollywood once glamorized cigarette smoking. Millions learned to like cigarettes. Movies still choreograph tense emotional situations by having someone lighting up. Now that cigarette smoking is connected to emphysema and other diseases, it is considered bad, finding many struggling to quit, a case of personality dominating essence.
Essence and personality need to grow together; neither must outgrow the other. By outgrow is meant to mature so quickly that proper assimilation is impossible, while by dominate is meant to control or govern behavior so that assimilation is possible.
Curiously, where we see essence outgrowing personality is often among the uneducated. Cleverness or cunning fails to be balanced by social conditioning, and therefore a “we/they” polarity, and victim mentality can fester to the point of bypassing conventional means to redress perceived wrongs by using terror or sabotage. And just as curiously, cases where personality outgrows essence are often found among people of affluence or the so-called cultured. Such people often see themselves as clearly better than others, and therefore have little motivation to take risks, endure pain, face reality, or attempt to understand the less advantaged. Their essence, consequently, is never developed fully. This is frequently displayed in those who inherit great wealth or are born to royalty.
What does this all mean to your son? He lives in an imitative society where comparing and competing are considered virtuous behavior. In this imitative climate tact is often more important than talent, conforming more acceptable than confronting, making an impression more career enhancing than making a difference.
Your son’s essence, at the moment, is outgrowing his personality. His intelligence is wielded as a weapon instead of a tool. He seems inclined to punish people with his essence rather than to help others find theirs. Social skills are demeaned, or ignored.
That said, I would ask you to be resolute, to steer him towards his lights by putting him in touch with others who have mastered the balance I have outlined. They may be other young people or professionals who have experienced the downside to this imbalance before they found the benefits to the upside of balance. I would further suggest you steer him clear of therapists who talk in psychobabble about leadership and tolerance. Remember, he is nine years old and is just stepping into life and requires guidance.
No one is superior to any other person. No one. We all need each other. We are all connected with different attributes. There are many kinds of intelligence. You have mentioned your son’s intellectual intelligence while describing his lagging emotional, social and animal (motor) intelligence. There is also instinctual intelligence where a sense of survival resides. He must experience the consequences of his actions and realize genius is of little value or comfort if it is not used in the service of others.
At age nine, physical prowess wins love, awe, and affection among peers; intellectual prowess creates fear and enmity amongst these same peers and is threatening to their self-esteem. This will change as intellectual prowess wins friends and influence those who once were devotees of physical prowess. Meanwhile, show you are in charge; be firm, fair, direct, consistent and honest with him as you have been with me. Listen to him, help him work through his social goofs, love him, and don’t judge or evaluate him.
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book in 2005, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
Volume I, Article XXIII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I’m not sure I have a problem. My son is nine and seems gifted. He’s been tested and scored in the 99.9 percentile on the verbal section and in the 97.0 percentile for performance (application criteria). His I.Q. of 145 is considered “very superior” in intelligence. The poor kid doesn’t have a motor skill to his name, can’t even read his own writing. Teachers, counselors and psychologists enjoy him, but find he has no leadership ability and has no tolerance for his peers and is socially excluded. Recently, he called a computer salesman who sold him the wrong modem an idiot. He’s going to group therapy with other boys his age where they talk about friendship. Most of the kids in the group are there because they’re physical bullies compared to my son’s intellectual snobbery. Do I have a problem? If so, what in God’s name should I be doing?
Your candor is appreciated. Your love and caring are an immense positive. Be careful of experts! It is dangerous to say one has no leadership ability and no tolerance for his peers. Both expressions are subjective and relative. It seems your son is going through a difficult patch. His essence (genetic inheritance) is way ahead of his personality (learned behavior). Essence is the “owned self.” It cannot be lost, changed, or injured in the normal sense. Personality is the “acquired self.” Personality can be altered or changed by circumstances and easily injured or even lost. Essence is the basis of our physical and mental make-up. Personality is learned behavior through social programming and conditioning, either by conscious teaching or by unconscious imitation. Imitation is important in building personality but often at the expense of essence.
We live in a culture obsessed with personality, not essence, where prepackaged ideas are the fodder of an urban dominated society. The mantra of advertising is the stinging refrain, “one size made to fit all.” Albert Einstein was a poor student, didn’t mix well with his peers, and didn’t even have access to a laboratory when he formulated his revolutionary theories about time, space, light, mass and energy, theories formulated in a Swiss patent office where he was a low level employee.
The key to balance, and a nine year old is unlikely to find it easily, is to like what is good for you and dislike what is bad. This profiles the healthy personality where essence dominates personality. What is bad today once might have been good. Hollywood once glamorized cigarette smoking. Millions learned to like cigarettes. Movies still choreograph tense emotional situations by having someone lighting up. Now that cigarette smoking is connected to emphysema and other diseases, it is considered bad, finding many struggling to quit, a case of personality dominating essence.
Essence and personality need to grow together; neither must outgrow the other. By outgrow is meant to mature so quickly that proper assimilation is impossible, while by dominate is meant to control or govern behavior so that assimilation is possible.
Curiously, where we see essence outgrowing personality is often among the uneducated. Cleverness or cunning fails to be balanced by social conditioning, and therefore a “we/they” polarity, and victim mentality can fester to the point of bypassing conventional means to redress perceived wrongs by using terror or sabotage. And just as curiously, cases where personality outgrows essence are often found among people of affluence or the so-called cultured. Such people often see themselves as clearly better than others, and therefore have little motivation to take risks, endure pain, face reality, or attempt to understand the less advantaged. Their essence, consequently, is never developed fully. This is frequently displayed in those who inherit great wealth or are born to royalty.
What does this all mean to your son? He lives in an imitative society where comparing and competing are considered virtuous behavior. In this imitative climate tact is often more important than talent, conforming more acceptable than confronting, making an impression more career enhancing than making a difference.
Your son’s essence, at the moment, is outgrowing his personality. His intelligence is wielded as a weapon instead of a tool. He seems inclined to punish people with his essence rather than to help others find theirs. Social skills are demeaned, or ignored.
That said, I would ask you to be resolute, to steer him towards his lights by putting him in touch with others who have mastered the balance I have outlined. They may be other young people or professionals who have experienced the downside to this imbalance before they found the benefits to the upside of balance. I would further suggest you steer him clear of therapists who talk in psychobabble about leadership and tolerance. Remember, he is nine years old and is just stepping into life and requires guidance.
No one is superior to any other person. No one. We all need each other. We are all connected with different attributes. There are many kinds of intelligence. You have mentioned your son’s intellectual intelligence while describing his lagging emotional, social and animal (motor) intelligence. There is also instinctual intelligence where a sense of survival resides. He must experience the consequences of his actions and realize genius is of little value or comfort if it is not used in the service of others.
At age nine, physical prowess wins love, awe, and affection among peers; intellectual prowess creates fear and enmity amongst these same peers and is threatening to their self-esteem. This will change as intellectual prowess wins friends and influence those who once were devotees of physical prowess. Meanwhile, show you are in charge; be firm, fair, direct, consistent and honest with him as you have been with me. Listen to him, help him work through his social goofs, love him, and don’t judge or evaluate him.
Copyright (1996) Look for Dr. Fisher’s new book in 2005, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
Cold Shower 22: WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
Cold Shower Who Put You In The Cage? Volume I, Article XXII
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started out as a laborer, working his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, here is my predicament. I am close to retirement on a job that I have hated since the day I took it. When I took the job, it was supposed to be temporary, but my girlfriend got pregnant, and I had to marry her, support the kid. My religion, or should I say my wife’s religion, wouldn’t permit birth control, so every time I looked at her we had another kid. I have six grown kids now with two daughters and their two kids back living with me. No husbands in sight. They still like to party which means leaving me and the wife with their brats. I’ve got another son, 27, my youngest, who refuses to work, and sits around all day smoking my cigarettes and drinking my beer. If this doesn’t beat all, my mother-in-law joined us two years ago. She is nearly blind, and besides a royal pain in the ass. Need I go on? I’ve always wanted to go to school and make something of myself, but what am I, a maintenance man at the plant and a fix-it-man for every relative and neighbor within sight. I’ve never read your books, but I catch your columns now and then. Can’t say I make much sense of them, but thought it fun to see what you’d have to say about my predicament.
Dr. Fisher Replies:
After more than thirty years of dealing with people, I can still be amazed. Yes, your letter amazes me. It would suggest that you have never grown up; that you have spent your entire life reacting, not acting. You are not in charge of anything if this letter is truly a reflection of your situation.
Brick by brick, situation by situation, you have constructed a prison in which to barricade yourself. Granted, you don’t see it that way. How could you? You are insulated from self-knowing by the elaborate carapace of your cultural conditioning. You have accepted each situation as you have thought it best to accept it in terms of what you were told was right and just. But right and just for whom? And why?
Your job, which you claim you hate, has kept you incubated in a dependent state free of struggle, pain, of making decisions or of showing any sign of maturing into an adult. I define a mature adult as a person with a defined character, a character which he or she states subtly or emphatically to significant others so there is no confusion. What I perceive from your letter is that you have allowed others and other circumstances to define who you are, what you are and even why you are. You are out-of-control, a victim, a man in a cage.
If you have read what I say so far, and get mad, it means I have touched home. That is a good sign. Somewhere in your development you got stuck. Before we become ourselves, we must first pass through what is important to our parents, relatives, peers, and authority figures outside the home (teachers, priests, nuns, storekeepers, police). Should we internalize all this contradictory data without examining, screening, evaluating and discarding it, our persona is a stranger to ourselves. We are everyone and no one. We display a victim’s mentality. We are unhappily stuck in social confusion unable to reach contact with our essential self.
What we call personality is our acquired self, the product of all this conditioning. Our real self, or our essence is the natural fruition of all that we are innately given at birth. Our essence requires that we rebel against the prevailing norms, not violently but frequently and politely. Otherwise, we remain inauthentic to ourselves from cradle to grave.
Society is showing some maturity. Today, chances are you would not have married your girlfriend, which might have been better for you both. I sense little love in that marriage, just obligation. Obligation can produce a great deal of psychological if not physical damage. Your wife has a right to her religious beliefs, but so do you. Moreover, nowhere is it written that you have to take in your grown offspring. To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. Unless your children have some genetic deficiency, other than being spoiled brats, they should be on their own. You are doing them no favor.
Perhaps the most important word in the English language for a mature adult who wishes to enjoy a modicum of freedom is the word “No!” Try it, you will be amazed at what a leveler it is, and how quickly you can regain control of your life. “No!” to your pampered children. “No!” to your exploiting relatives and neighbors. “No!” to your mother-in-law, whom I understand from your letter has the means to afford a full-service retirement home. But “Yes!” to taking a course at your community college that meets your fancy. “Yes!” to a vacation for that long-suffering wife of yours whom I understand is equally a victim of circumstances. You were not put on earth to wear a long face and a hair shirt. The irony is that you do no one a favor by relieving them of their own burden. Each of us must carry our own. The purpose of all of our lives are what we do with them, not what we would do with them if things were different. We define and determine all our own circumstances with the emphasis on “all.” Whatever our situation, we have made a decision to abide by it, probably because we have a higher need to meet the needs of others than our own. Should that be true, we have put ourselves in a cage. We are not our own best friend but our own worst enemy.
Copyright (1996) Look for WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? Book is to be released in 2005.
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started out as a laborer, working his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, here is my predicament. I am close to retirement on a job that I have hated since the day I took it. When I took the job, it was supposed to be temporary, but my girlfriend got pregnant, and I had to marry her, support the kid. My religion, or should I say my wife’s religion, wouldn’t permit birth control, so every time I looked at her we had another kid. I have six grown kids now with two daughters and their two kids back living with me. No husbands in sight. They still like to party which means leaving me and the wife with their brats. I’ve got another son, 27, my youngest, who refuses to work, and sits around all day smoking my cigarettes and drinking my beer. If this doesn’t beat all, my mother-in-law joined us two years ago. She is nearly blind, and besides a royal pain in the ass. Need I go on? I’ve always wanted to go to school and make something of myself, but what am I, a maintenance man at the plant and a fix-it-man for every relative and neighbor within sight. I’ve never read your books, but I catch your columns now and then. Can’t say I make much sense of them, but thought it fun to see what you’d have to say about my predicament.
Dr. Fisher Replies:
After more than thirty years of dealing with people, I can still be amazed. Yes, your letter amazes me. It would suggest that you have never grown up; that you have spent your entire life reacting, not acting. You are not in charge of anything if this letter is truly a reflection of your situation.
Brick by brick, situation by situation, you have constructed a prison in which to barricade yourself. Granted, you don’t see it that way. How could you? You are insulated from self-knowing by the elaborate carapace of your cultural conditioning. You have accepted each situation as you have thought it best to accept it in terms of what you were told was right and just. But right and just for whom? And why?
Your job, which you claim you hate, has kept you incubated in a dependent state free of struggle, pain, of making decisions or of showing any sign of maturing into an adult. I define a mature adult as a person with a defined character, a character which he or she states subtly or emphatically to significant others so there is no confusion. What I perceive from your letter is that you have allowed others and other circumstances to define who you are, what you are and even why you are. You are out-of-control, a victim, a man in a cage.
If you have read what I say so far, and get mad, it means I have touched home. That is a good sign. Somewhere in your development you got stuck. Before we become ourselves, we must first pass through what is important to our parents, relatives, peers, and authority figures outside the home (teachers, priests, nuns, storekeepers, police). Should we internalize all this contradictory data without examining, screening, evaluating and discarding it, our persona is a stranger to ourselves. We are everyone and no one. We display a victim’s mentality. We are unhappily stuck in social confusion unable to reach contact with our essential self.
What we call personality is our acquired self, the product of all this conditioning. Our real self, or our essence is the natural fruition of all that we are innately given at birth. Our essence requires that we rebel against the prevailing norms, not violently but frequently and politely. Otherwise, we remain inauthentic to ourselves from cradle to grave.
Society is showing some maturity. Today, chances are you would not have married your girlfriend, which might have been better for you both. I sense little love in that marriage, just obligation. Obligation can produce a great deal of psychological if not physical damage. Your wife has a right to her religious beliefs, but so do you. Moreover, nowhere is it written that you have to take in your grown offspring. To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. Unless your children have some genetic deficiency, other than being spoiled brats, they should be on their own. You are doing them no favor.
Perhaps the most important word in the English language for a mature adult who wishes to enjoy a modicum of freedom is the word “No!” Try it, you will be amazed at what a leveler it is, and how quickly you can regain control of your life. “No!” to your pampered children. “No!” to your exploiting relatives and neighbors. “No!” to your mother-in-law, whom I understand from your letter has the means to afford a full-service retirement home. But “Yes!” to taking a course at your community college that meets your fancy. “Yes!” to a vacation for that long-suffering wife of yours whom I understand is equally a victim of circumstances. You were not put on earth to wear a long face and a hair shirt. The irony is that you do no one a favor by relieving them of their own burden. Each of us must carry our own. The purpose of all of our lives are what we do with them, not what we would do with them if things were different. We define and determine all our own circumstances with the emphasis on “all.” Whatever our situation, we have made a decision to abide by it, probably because we have a higher need to meet the needs of others than our own. Should that be true, we have put ourselves in a cage. We are not our own best friend but our own worst enemy.
Copyright (1996) Look for WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? Book is to be released in 2005.
Cold Shower 21: Corporate Role vs. Accent on the Individual
Cold Shower Corporate Role versus Individual
Volume I, Article XXI
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I take it reading your books that you don’t hold much stock in all this talk about worker empowerment, self-directed work teams, and a more open and collegial culture. Am I right? If so, why be so contrary?
Dr. Fisher replies:
I don’t hold much truck with these interventions. It is a problem of our blue-collar culture. We prefer to change without changing at all. We are more interested in describing a problem than taking action on it, more interested in developing processes (e.g. worker empowerment and self-directed work teams) than perceiving the problem, more inclined to external manipulation than self-organizing enabling. The individual seems the focus but this is a ruse as the intention is reify, not clarify “what is.”
We are a blue-collar culture suspect of intellectuals. Any problem, large or small, is divided into fragments and the fragments are attacked with vigor. Anyone who promotes a holistic view with a creative and conceptual approach is unlikely to be taken seriously. Why? Such an approach is likely to be subjective rather than objective, intuitive rather than cognitive, non-linear rather than linear, systemic rather than elemental, involving creative rather than critical thinking. Creative thinking reconciles contradictions as opposed to rejecting them, embraces overlapping information rather than avoiding it, and is more interested in creating a solution than in discovering one.
A blue-collar culture prides itself in critical thinking. This thinking never gets outside the box. It is the box, or what is already thought, practiced and believed -- the only things that critical thinking can evolve. Critical thinking emphasizes analysis, which invariably gets bogged down in symptoms at the expense of chronic root causes. Analysis tells us “what is,” or what we already know. Empowerment and self-directed work teams are thus little more than spin. They have absolutely nothing to do with change. The problem with analysis is that it will only allow us to select an idea from our repertoire of standard ideas but it will not allow us to find a new idea.
We are a culture of possibility thinking. As a patterning system, the brain can only “see” what it is prepared to see. The analysis of information, then, is incapable of seeing new ideas, and can only select from existing ideas. The popular lingo of thinking “outside the box” is just that, an interesting slogan. We are educated to think in the box. This instructs us to search and discover (answers), not explore and design them.
What I’m driving at is that our blue-collar culture is wrong-headed for the times. We have moved into a new era and we still cannot unshackle ourselves from the old. Blue-collar culture is judgmental and society cannot thrive on judgment alone. Judgment may be enough to resist change, but not enough to benefit from change.
Quirky programs such as empowerment and self-directed work teams sound wonderful, but still: a) the structure and function of work is as it has always been; b) the hierarchical pecking order is essentially the same; c) position power still rules over the power of knowledge; d) compensation is still skewed toward senior management and its sycophants; e) perks from preferential parking to selective bonuses still go to a privileged few; f) inside information on the company’s status is proffered to a privileged few; g) employees are still expected to behave as loyal, obedient and obsequious children; h) the most attractive career track is into management (although management is becoming increasingly redundant as a function); i) anachronistic performance appraisal is still an institutional aspect of this blue-collar culture, when it has proven ineffective at best and a waste of time and money at worse; and j) the individual remains buried in the forward inertia of corpocracy.
You cannot generate change when the vehicle for change is totally resistant to change, and that is personified in a blue-collar culture. We pride ourselves in being action oriented. But if you believe that action springs directly from “what is” or experience then you are not concerned with the design of action. If you believe “what can be” has to be designed then you apply the design process to action itself. That is not happening.
A blue-collar culture is imprisoned in the tyranny of the box. I am a trained box thinker. Psychology puts people into classes, groups, classifications, categories and, yes, boxes. Tests are devised for this purpose with little practical value. People are put in boxes and obediently stay there: employer, employee, engineer, technician, and so on. The reason for this is to make sense of the world and to make it simpler. Perhaps, then, it is not the boxes that are the problem but the arrogant, absolute certainty with which we hold a particularly boxed view of the world. In science the lumping process is an attempt to find universal laws. In life the lumping process is an attempt to simplify the world to provide conventional focus for dominant emotions – e.g., empowerment/teamwork slogans.
There is a war going on between the individual and corpocracy. A blue-collar culture is not designed to deal with a changing world. It is inadequate to deal with change, because it does not offer creative, constructive and design energy to the problem solving. It suggests dangerous judgments and cosmetic solutions will suffice which tend only to make matters worse. And its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure. What is called for? Creative thinking and a willingness to challenge, a willingness to take risks, a willingness to be provocative, and a willingness to step outside the judgments (boxes) that are a summary of past experience. It starts with you not being taken in with bromides such as empowerment and self-directed work teams.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40 including shipping & handling.
Volume I, Article XXI
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I take it reading your books that you don’t hold much stock in all this talk about worker empowerment, self-directed work teams, and a more open and collegial culture. Am I right? If so, why be so contrary?
Dr. Fisher replies:
I don’t hold much truck with these interventions. It is a problem of our blue-collar culture. We prefer to change without changing at all. We are more interested in describing a problem than taking action on it, more interested in developing processes (e.g. worker empowerment and self-directed work teams) than perceiving the problem, more inclined to external manipulation than self-organizing enabling. The individual seems the focus but this is a ruse as the intention is reify, not clarify “what is.”
We are a blue-collar culture suspect of intellectuals. Any problem, large or small, is divided into fragments and the fragments are attacked with vigor. Anyone who promotes a holistic view with a creative and conceptual approach is unlikely to be taken seriously. Why? Such an approach is likely to be subjective rather than objective, intuitive rather than cognitive, non-linear rather than linear, systemic rather than elemental, involving creative rather than critical thinking. Creative thinking reconciles contradictions as opposed to rejecting them, embraces overlapping information rather than avoiding it, and is more interested in creating a solution than in discovering one.
A blue-collar culture prides itself in critical thinking. This thinking never gets outside the box. It is the box, or what is already thought, practiced and believed -- the only things that critical thinking can evolve. Critical thinking emphasizes analysis, which invariably gets bogged down in symptoms at the expense of chronic root causes. Analysis tells us “what is,” or what we already know. Empowerment and self-directed work teams are thus little more than spin. They have absolutely nothing to do with change. The problem with analysis is that it will only allow us to select an idea from our repertoire of standard ideas but it will not allow us to find a new idea.
We are a culture of possibility thinking. As a patterning system, the brain can only “see” what it is prepared to see. The analysis of information, then, is incapable of seeing new ideas, and can only select from existing ideas. The popular lingo of thinking “outside the box” is just that, an interesting slogan. We are educated to think in the box. This instructs us to search and discover (answers), not explore and design them.
What I’m driving at is that our blue-collar culture is wrong-headed for the times. We have moved into a new era and we still cannot unshackle ourselves from the old. Blue-collar culture is judgmental and society cannot thrive on judgment alone. Judgment may be enough to resist change, but not enough to benefit from change.
Quirky programs such as empowerment and self-directed work teams sound wonderful, but still: a) the structure and function of work is as it has always been; b) the hierarchical pecking order is essentially the same; c) position power still rules over the power of knowledge; d) compensation is still skewed toward senior management and its sycophants; e) perks from preferential parking to selective bonuses still go to a privileged few; f) inside information on the company’s status is proffered to a privileged few; g) employees are still expected to behave as loyal, obedient and obsequious children; h) the most attractive career track is into management (although management is becoming increasingly redundant as a function); i) anachronistic performance appraisal is still an institutional aspect of this blue-collar culture, when it has proven ineffective at best and a waste of time and money at worse; and j) the individual remains buried in the forward inertia of corpocracy.
You cannot generate change when the vehicle for change is totally resistant to change, and that is personified in a blue-collar culture. We pride ourselves in being action oriented. But if you believe that action springs directly from “what is” or experience then you are not concerned with the design of action. If you believe “what can be” has to be designed then you apply the design process to action itself. That is not happening.
A blue-collar culture is imprisoned in the tyranny of the box. I am a trained box thinker. Psychology puts people into classes, groups, classifications, categories and, yes, boxes. Tests are devised for this purpose with little practical value. People are put in boxes and obediently stay there: employer, employee, engineer, technician, and so on. The reason for this is to make sense of the world and to make it simpler. Perhaps, then, it is not the boxes that are the problem but the arrogant, absolute certainty with which we hold a particularly boxed view of the world. In science the lumping process is an attempt to find universal laws. In life the lumping process is an attempt to simplify the world to provide conventional focus for dominant emotions – e.g., empowerment/teamwork slogans.
There is a war going on between the individual and corpocracy. A blue-collar culture is not designed to deal with a changing world. It is inadequate to deal with change, because it does not offer creative, constructive and design energy to the problem solving. It suggests dangerous judgments and cosmetic solutions will suffice which tend only to make matters worse. And its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure. What is called for? Creative thinking and a willingness to challenge, a willingness to take risks, a willingness to be provocative, and a willingness to step outside the judgments (boxes) that are a summary of past experience. It starts with you not being taken in with bromides such as empowerment and self-directed work teams.
Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40 including shipping & handling.
Cold Shower 20: The Monster We've Created: Dr. Fisher's Continuing Pique with MBA's
Cold Shower The Monster We’ve Created: Dr. Fisher’s
Continuing Pique with MBA’s Vol. I, Art. XX
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I sense you have a problem with MBA’s. Before I go further, I should mention I have an MBA. What is your problem with us? Why single us out for contempt?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Not only do I have a problem with MBA’s, I have a problem with the entire construction of business and technology education. Currently, you can acquire an MBA in over 100 different disciplines. In my book Work Without Managers (1990) I make the claim that “any large company is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation.” Management education appears to be 100 or more MBA degrees in search of a career.
It is no accident that corporate America has lost its way as society has made a sharp turn from a mechanistic to an organic model of operation. Most CEO’s of the Fortune 100 companies, a score of years ago, were first trained as engineers. Engineering is a conformist, not a creative discipline, one in which control emanates from a hierarchy in which position power along with its vertical distribution carries out the decision-making will of the anointed one. That no longer works. Power now is in knowledge, and knowledge is distributed throughout the organization, making it expedient that decisions are made horizontally, timely, and at the level of consequences.
Leadership in this new configuration is a platform of trust supported by four legs: fairness, firmness, consistency and honesty. If any one of these legs should be missing, trust is broken down and morale is the first casualty followed by the Six Silent Killers (1998). What has this got to do with MBA’s? The answer is, EVERYTHING!
Management has evolved as a rational deductive process. When problems occur, management has decided it must be a problem of finance, human resources, accounting, database administration, customer service, business law, marketing, business communication, ethics, organizational behavior, supply-chain management, decision analysis, and on and on, creating MBA degrees to match and materialize such expertise. The result is that 80 percent of the cost of enterprise is indirect expense and only 20 percent in the making of the product. Guess what kind of people create the lion’s share of this indirect expensing? MBA’s. The unspoken rationale goes like this:
The way to stem the tide of change, without appearing to drag your feet, is to particularize diverse functions into experts, which can be controlled, rather than integrate these functions into generalists who might challenge your authority and decision-making.
Leadership is an intuitive inductive process based upon generalized knowledge and specific experience, and a conscious awareness and ability to deal with reality. This is missing.
Instead, business and technology education has created a monster, the professional worker. This worker chases degree after degree, discipline after discipline, and attempts to stay as far as possible from real experience and real work along the way. Everything for this professional is a priori, or a matter of cause and effect analysis, which often turns into circular logic with the dog chasing its own tail. Costly and time consuming presentations and pointless conferences with elaborate PowerPoint shows put the emphasis on description at the expense of action. Critical thinking, emphasizing the discipline of one’s box, is preferred to conceptual thinking, where the emphasis is on defining, designing and creating outside the box.
MBA’s have been trained with all the high tech tools in technology’s tool kit which they then apply to searching and discovering answers to problems that satisfy corporate requirements, instead of designing and creating answers that both meet these requirements as well as the personal needs of employees. You cannot have satisfaction of one without the other. MBA’s are trained to manage things. People are not things to be managed. People are individuals to be led. This is not in the curriculum.
For more than thirty years I have been exposed to MBA students and MBA professionals. I was an adjunct professor in graduate management education at a number of universities for several years. As an executive, I employed their services, and as a consultant I evaluated their corporate contribution against their compensation. My experience indicates that the first loyalty of B-school graduates is to their compensation, followed by their profession, next to telling senior management what it wants to hear, and finally to filling the right boxes to promote their careers by constantly campaigning for the next position.
MBA’s, as they are employed in many cases, are little more than overdressed computer programmers. My sense is that we are throwing our prime resources into financial or tracking activities remotely related to the production of goods and services. We do this because the business and technology model has not been thought through, but has evolved helter-skelter as traditional thinking and management has been stuck in leaderless leadership. MBA’s, as well as most professionals, have been unwitting chess pieces in a corporate chess game.
What is the answer? It starts with thinking differently on purpose. Corporate thinking is not structured to deal with a changing world because it does not offer creative, constructive and design solutions to enterprise. Placing MBA’s in the equation has reified vertical thinking at the expense of its complement, lateral thinking. This is unlikely soon to change because the complacent arrogance of corporate thinking prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure, which is epitomized with the arrival on stage of the MBA.
Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000) discounted at $15 (S & H included), or The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) discounted at $10 (S & H included).
Continuing Pique with MBA’s Vol. I, Art. XX
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.
Question:
Dr. Fisher, I sense you have a problem with MBA’s. Before I go further, I should mention I have an MBA. What is your problem with us? Why single us out for contempt?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Not only do I have a problem with MBA’s, I have a problem with the entire construction of business and technology education. Currently, you can acquire an MBA in over 100 different disciplines. In my book Work Without Managers (1990) I make the claim that “any large company is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation.” Management education appears to be 100 or more MBA degrees in search of a career.
It is no accident that corporate America has lost its way as society has made a sharp turn from a mechanistic to an organic model of operation. Most CEO’s of the Fortune 100 companies, a score of years ago, were first trained as engineers. Engineering is a conformist, not a creative discipline, one in which control emanates from a hierarchy in which position power along with its vertical distribution carries out the decision-making will of the anointed one. That no longer works. Power now is in knowledge, and knowledge is distributed throughout the organization, making it expedient that decisions are made horizontally, timely, and at the level of consequences.
Leadership in this new configuration is a platform of trust supported by four legs: fairness, firmness, consistency and honesty. If any one of these legs should be missing, trust is broken down and morale is the first casualty followed by the Six Silent Killers (1998). What has this got to do with MBA’s? The answer is, EVERYTHING!
Management has evolved as a rational deductive process. When problems occur, management has decided it must be a problem of finance, human resources, accounting, database administration, customer service, business law, marketing, business communication, ethics, organizational behavior, supply-chain management, decision analysis, and on and on, creating MBA degrees to match and materialize such expertise. The result is that 80 percent of the cost of enterprise is indirect expense and only 20 percent in the making of the product. Guess what kind of people create the lion’s share of this indirect expensing? MBA’s. The unspoken rationale goes like this:
The way to stem the tide of change, without appearing to drag your feet, is to particularize diverse functions into experts, which can be controlled, rather than integrate these functions into generalists who might challenge your authority and decision-making.
Leadership is an intuitive inductive process based upon generalized knowledge and specific experience, and a conscious awareness and ability to deal with reality. This is missing.
Instead, business and technology education has created a monster, the professional worker. This worker chases degree after degree, discipline after discipline, and attempts to stay as far as possible from real experience and real work along the way. Everything for this professional is a priori, or a matter of cause and effect analysis, which often turns into circular logic with the dog chasing its own tail. Costly and time consuming presentations and pointless conferences with elaborate PowerPoint shows put the emphasis on description at the expense of action. Critical thinking, emphasizing the discipline of one’s box, is preferred to conceptual thinking, where the emphasis is on defining, designing and creating outside the box.
MBA’s have been trained with all the high tech tools in technology’s tool kit which they then apply to searching and discovering answers to problems that satisfy corporate requirements, instead of designing and creating answers that both meet these requirements as well as the personal needs of employees. You cannot have satisfaction of one without the other. MBA’s are trained to manage things. People are not things to be managed. People are individuals to be led. This is not in the curriculum.
For more than thirty years I have been exposed to MBA students and MBA professionals. I was an adjunct professor in graduate management education at a number of universities for several years. As an executive, I employed their services, and as a consultant I evaluated their corporate contribution against their compensation. My experience indicates that the first loyalty of B-school graduates is to their compensation, followed by their profession, next to telling senior management what it wants to hear, and finally to filling the right boxes to promote their careers by constantly campaigning for the next position.
MBA’s, as they are employed in many cases, are little more than overdressed computer programmers. My sense is that we are throwing our prime resources into financial or tracking activities remotely related to the production of goods and services. We do this because the business and technology model has not been thought through, but has evolved helter-skelter as traditional thinking and management has been stuck in leaderless leadership. MBA’s, as well as most professionals, have been unwitting chess pieces in a corporate chess game.
What is the answer? It starts with thinking differently on purpose. Corporate thinking is not structured to deal with a changing world because it does not offer creative, constructive and design solutions to enterprise. Placing MBA’s in the equation has reified vertical thinking at the expense of its complement, lateral thinking. This is unlikely soon to change because the complacent arrogance of corporate thinking prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure, which is epitomized with the arrival on stage of the MBA.
Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000) discounted at $15 (S & H included), or The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) discounted at $10 (S & H included).
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