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.