Cold Shower 4: Problems of Culture & Impact on Work

Cold Shower The Problem of Culture & Impact on Work Volume I, Article IV

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the 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 relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I sense from your last discussion that you don’t anticipate a radical renewal in the workplace. Nor do I sense that you feel the prescription for turning American productivity around is likely to succeed. Is this a fair assumption?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Fair? Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye. Six silent killers are increasingly dominant in the workplace. Most workers, no matter their academic preparation or subsequent achievement, are suspended in terminal adolescence, dealing with their anxieties through toys of distraction. Laptops, fax machines, cellular phones, Internet, e-mail, and other constantly developing technological tools have become essentially toys of distraction. Once tools become ends in themselves, or playthings, they perpetuate this condition. We are going through a painful transition from a status quo organizational structure to one that is constantly changing. It is human nature to avoid pain at any cost. Machines attempt to make up the deficit in productive attention. And of course machines always fail.

Napoleon moved his troops at about the same speed as Caesar did nearly 2,000 years before. By the mid-19th century, with the invention of the steamship, it was possible to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. In the past century transatlantic cable made it possible to communicate by telegraph with the continent in a matter of hours. The automobile, steam locomotive, and cable car swiftly converged to form a giant complex, the modern metropolis. By the end of World War I, radio was the rage bringing a slice of the world into the home. A decade later Linbergh flew from New York to Paris in a monoplane. The world was shrinking. World War II accelerated the pace. Yet nothing compares to the technological sweep of the past thirty years with television, telecommunications, computers, robotics, lasers, the Internet, and virtual reality. The world has become a global community with more technological change in the past thirty years than the previous three hundred. This has had enormous social impact, which by extension has created the need for a transformation of the workplace. Obviously, this is common knowledge. Even so, culture resists opening itself to creative change.

We have been brain warped into defining economics only in terms of capital, meaning money. A more appropriate indicator is human capital expressed in skills and education and the needs of people with that greater enlightenment or cultural capital. Technology deals with the world of things. Things don’t talk back to you. People do. Things seldom behave unpredictably, people always do. Things have no sense of freedom, people do. Things are tied to money; people are connected to their soul. Despite this dichotomy, things are driving people and controlling the agenda. People are at the mercy of technology as they try desperately to weave it into the social fabric. Intellectuals tracked the loss of identity in the 20th century with such terms as the “Lost Generation” (1920’s), “Beat Generation” (1950s), “Me Generation” (1970s), and so on. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal,” writes Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present – 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, “the culture is decadent.” Commercial television confirms this assessment. Barzun defines decadence as a “dropping off” of one culture before another takes shape and hold.

Our collective culture is failing us, not by design, but by default. Culture cues societal behavior by assembling values, beliefs, myths, standards and norms. The main instruments of this promulgation are academic institutions, religious affiliations, government bodies, industrial-commercial enterprises and the media, all of whom have a stake in the status quo, and all of whom are reluctant to see the plight of people as they are, preferring to package them as they should be. Society-in-transition realizes little leadership from these entities. This contributes to crime, poverty, illiteracy, social chaos, terrorism, promiscuity, debauchery, genocide, homicide, suicide, and muckraking. In the book Love Locked Out we see precedence for this as the medieval church attempted to stifle love and gave birth to pornography. The church maintained its mythic feudalistic dominance with the literate world confined to the church hierarchy, priests and princesses. That changed when Gutenberg invented the printing press, followed by the arrival of Martin Luther. Luther was in touch with the mind of his time, went against the grain of a church dominated society, and propelled man into the modern world. A single individual demonstrated the leadership that was lacking and seeded, not only the Protestant Reformation but gave birth to individualism, which survives to our day, as well as impetus to fledgling capitalism.

Cultural lag today is characterized by what Barzun calls “PRIMITIVISM,” a longing to shuffle off the complex to define things simplistically. We see this in empowerment, total quality management, teaming and other concepts that are superimposed on a dysfunctional workplace, then wondering why they fail to take hold. The modern workplace does not need managers, it needs leaders and self-managed work teams. It does not need individual performance appraisals, which reify anachronistic management, but work-centered performance criteria. Workers should be compensated, as are executives on the basis of the performance of the organization. There is no justification for special perks, sustaining position power, or continuing feudalistic compensation practices. Workers are essentially contract consultants and should have all the rights that have been traditionally confined to mahogany role. The most exaggerated position in a company is the mythic attachment to the role of the chief executive officer. He (or she) has become essentially an ombudsman for the company, and little more. My wonder is when that single individual, like Luther, will come forward and say, “enough!”
Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1stBooks Library 2000), http://www.amazon.com/ or http://www.barnes&noble.com/