Dr. Fisher's Books

Books in Brief & Readers’ Comments



One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist

The Books


CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). The key to success is bringing out your best which means overcoming your resistance to self-confidence. The resistance disappears when you accept yourself as you are and others as you find them (no longer in print).

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990). It defines the sickness of organization, “corpocracy,” as the continuing dependence on management failing to recognize the power shift from managers to professional workers.

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). The book deals with the new reality that everyone is in sales. The workplace as a fixed place of employment has disappeared, as has the conventional art of selling or the security of a single job in a career.

THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). This is a survival manual for never getting fired, not by playing it safe, but by going against the grain of convention and taking charge of your career. Failure is not an option when you take control.

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself. This means systematically reprogramming yourself to trust yourself first, last and always before anyone else.

SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998). Times have changed. Corporate restructuring has become the new reality. What is not obvious is the systematic silent destruction of disgruntled employees through passive behaviors until it is too late for damage control.

CORPORATE SIN (2000). The book deals with the failure of leaders to lead and workers to follow, resulting in leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. This is happening when corporate America is under global siege and needs a wake up call.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). This is a novel of Dr. Fisher’s youth written as a memoir. It deals with a community in the middle of America in the middle of the century when the world was at war and he was an eight-year-old boy.


Brief Descriptions of the Books and Readers’ Comments

CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). This was a unique book for its time in that it didn’t look at the prospect that the salesman was calling on so much as it looked at the psyche of the salesman. The book’s premise was that fear of failure or rejection was built-in to the salesman’s approach and doomed him in most cases to failure. Too often he looked at the customer as an adversary and not a partner, as someone to out finesse, not someone with whom to joint problem solve from the same side of the table. The book exploded on the market and went through more than thirty printings and two editions, and was in print for more than twenty years. Although no longer in print, it is available on some remainder lists on the Internet with ideas as fresh as they were more than a generation ago.

ISBN: 0-13-167510-9: available as remainder book by Internet providers in soft and hardbound edition (189 pages, bibliography, index). Otherwise, out-of-print.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990). This was a shocking look at American business and why eighty percent of the productive work was being accomplished by less than twenty percent of the workers. It concluded that the organization in most cases still operated in 1945 nostalgia, which was management’s greatest hour as it had a decisive role in the winning of World War Two. But over the last six decades, since that war over, there has been a shift in work from being mainly manual to mainly mental, from dependence on management to call the shots to knowledge workers at the level of consequences making the decisions. Too often, however, position power has remained stubbornly at the controls, reluctant to face the new reality. The book systematically looks at the consequences of this anachronistic behavior, including an examination of all the failed cosmetic attempts to improve the situation without changing anything. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of the year, while the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four major works of the year. It was reviewed extensively including on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

READERS’ COMMENTS

Dr. Thomas L. Brown, editor, Industry Week: “Work Without Managers is one of the Top 10 Business books of 1991. “Fisher opens by declaring that any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation, and he has yet hit his stride.”

James R. Wright, columnist, Dallas Morning News: “I find Work Without Managers the most insightful and perceptive examination of the American workplace today.”

Alex Krunic, editor, Business Perspective, Innsbruck, Austria: “Dr. Fisher argues the key to the future is the empowerment of professional workers. The suggestions made here are bound to spark controversy on all levels of organization and therefore should be on the reading list of any interested in understanding the present day American dilemma.”

Business Book Review Journal: “It is our opinion that Fisher has more than accomplished his goal to stimulate discussion and debate, and that Work Without Managers promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental changing in the American workplace.”

National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”: Ten years ago, many were calling for a direction in business that called for less management, less managers. In the early 80s, USC professor Warren Bennis said that American businesses were “over-managed and under-led.” And, sure enough, many businesses chopped layer upon layer of managers from the ranks. Now Tom Brown has found a book that argues that, fear not, Work Without Managers can be far from chaos: it might even be better. Work Without Managers is the angriest book I have read about business and management since Dick Cornuelle’s early 80’s book, De-Managing America.

Angry? Le me just read you the first 50 words: “The era of the free lunch has ended. This century, which began with such paternal control and obedience for America, has run amuck. Now, nothing and no one is in control. Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”

Jim Fisher, an ex-blue collar laborer, chemist, scientist, and industrial psychologist, no doubt means every mean word. This is not casual corporate bashing; Work Without Managers is premeditated capital punishment of standard managerial systems that Fisher thinks have outlived their prime, and may not have been useful even then.

You’ll find the book and its author a compelling challenge. This is a roller coaster in print. At its peak, like when he talks about the “Six Silent Organizational Killers,” you’ll find points where you’ll exclaim, “why hasn’t someone said this before?” For example, Fisher argues that people don’t show hustle, don’t do things that need to be done, and have reasons for feeling this way. On the other hand, when he talks about the MBA as “merely a vocational degree,” and lists 16 classics in literature that MBAs probably never studied, but should, some readers will recoil and demand the head of “this scoundrel author.”

Work Without Managers is one of those almost self-published books, which evoke pictures of its author furiously banging away on the keyboard at 3 a.m., hand grasping for more coffee. It is a wide-ranging indictment of the way tradition has taught us to define “management” and has taught us to allow ourselves to “be managed.”

But Fisher’s argument, off-beat as it will seem to most readers, has this to commend it: no one is print today is on “the other soapbox” arguing for keeping things as they are.

Jim Fisher’s style in this book may be a controlled rant, but he seems to be ranting in the right direction.
HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 0-9626498-0-5: Available in softbound edition (350 pages, bibliography, index) from this website at $12.00, plus shipping & handling or from other Internet providers.

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). This book retains the essence of CONFIDENT SELLING while placing the sales person in the center of virtually every occupational endeavor. In the age of electronics, there remains an individual still at the controls. And in a world where your partner and customer may be a continent or more away, awareness of reality has a new meaning. The book is both a blueprint and manual, both a confidence builder and practical guide to confident thinking which is the key to selling with confidence. The book deals with real case histories in the experience of Dr. Fisher from when he was a neophyte salesman to a corporate executive. It also provides a systematic easily understood journey to self-understanding and the power of the open mind. The book was so well thought of that it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for 1992.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Arizona Networking News: “Dr. Fisher feels that the psychology of selling is undergoing a transformation and offers a remarkable guide to better opportunities, a better self-image, and better sales. Not just for sales people, Confident Selling for the 90s & Beyond is a veritable roadmap to ever-increasing success.”

New Awareness Magazine: “While the title of the book refers to selling, the ideas and philosophies can be applied to any and all situations in life. The basic theme of the book is that the relationships in which people are involved, whether they are sales persons or customers, personal relationships or even parent and child will not be the same in the future. Confident Selling for the 90s & Beyond contains a wealth of information, some about the past and present, but much more on the future directions. It could turn out to be as prophetic as John Naisbitt’s Magatrends.”

ISBN: 1-56087-024-9: available in softbound edition (315 pages, bibliography, index) on this website at $10 plus shipping & handling, or from other Internet providers.

THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995). This book claims workers have no choice but to go it alone for nothing changes until they do something. Expecting the company to carry them is over; expecting the economy to go smoothly into the future is a thing of the past; and expecting others to have answers for them that fit their needs no longer has any relevance or currency. The game of charades continues, however, where managers still exercise the power they don’t have and workers continue to refuse to assume the power that they do have by rights of their skills and knowledge. Corpocracy remains bent on cosmetic change, which changes nothing and costs those in power less. Workers absorb the costs for this delay. Not until the Worker, Alone realizes it is up to him or her to put the house in order will change occur. Ventilation won’t accomplish it; nor will finger pointing. The worker must get off the dime and grow up and take charge of work, which is another way of taking charge of life. The call is to workers everywhere. They invested heavily in their education only to find disappointing returns on their investment. Angry and confused, they suffer like fatalists through downsizing, redundancy exercises, reengineering, restructuring, conglomerate takeovers, relocation of jobs abroad, and wonder only when the other shoe will fall. Never have workers been more distrustful of the system, failing in this distrust to recognize they are the system. They are the power. They are the company. Nothing happens until they do something. This is crunch time and this little book puts workers on notice that if they don’t manage their lives and careers then nobody will.

Charles D. Hayes, author and philosopher, whose book The Rapture of Maturity: The Worker, Alone is indeed a book alone, in a category by itself. “In it, Fisher calls for an awakening of America’s workforce as fundamentally profound as Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay was to the nineteenth century.”

Jim Komar, The Information Management Professionals: “I came across this book in a peculiar way. A friend gave me a copy written by her dad. I was not looking for another book on the state of business. So many of these have taken what is and tried to make it a bit more palatable for those who seem to blindly comply with what their management currently dictates. Few do what Dr. Fisher suggests, go against the grain. What is the purpose of going against the grain? Perhaps Dr. Fisher captures the essence of the ideas with this: ‘Order is first established inside the individual, once person at a time, before any behavioral change is manifested outside in society-at-large. Change the man from a passive person to an active personality with a social conscience, involved in the management of society, and you change the world.’”

HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 0-9626498-1-3: available in hardbound edition (136 pages, bibliography, index) on this website at $10 plus shipping and handling or from other Internet providers.

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). The Taboo deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural, and psychological conditioning, which program people into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but their own selves. Those so inclined worry more about what other people think and feel about them than what they think and feel about themselves. They often display a compulsive need to please others, often at the expense of meeting their own basic needs. Dr. Fisher sees this as leading to an inevitable conclusion: one becomes one’s own worst enemy. The result is self-contempt and depression, as the individual has failed to learn how to be their own best friend. People of such propensity, Dr. Fisher has discovered, live in a virtual prison of mind, captive to someone else’s agenda, and a card-carrying member of a victim mentality. This limits their choices, consumes their energy, clouds their focus, and ultimately commits them to a self-imposed cage that limits their happiness and well being. The Taboo addresses this issue, not in a by-the-numbers-how-to-deal-with-aggression-disappointment-and-pain, but in a no nonsense common sense story telling approach of poignant case studies. These are from the files of Dr. Fisher’s industrial counseling and consulting work. He has dealt with clients who range from CEOs to day laborers, from corporate professionals to independent entrepreneurs. From these intimate observations, he has gleaned insightful strategies for one becoming more self-aware, self-accepting, and self-asserting in the course of their daily life. This is not a how-to book nor a self-help book in the style of the genre, but a take charge book in the style of recognizing one’s situation, accepting it, and taking full responsibility for it. In short, this is a book about making choices and developing one’s own roadmap based on such choices. The benefit is to gain control of one’s life, and in that control to find purposeful satisfaction. Dr. Fisher concludes that it takes courage to embrace The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, a courage, which he believes everyone possesses, but doesn’t necessarily know. What this book is, he says in the final analysis, might be considered an introduction to a new friend, a friend who walks with you every day, only to be ignored most of the time. Alas, hopefully, no longer!

READERS’ COMMENTS

Eric Michael Rodts, marketing executive, Honeywell, Inc.: “My favorite line of the year comes from the pages of The Taboo. ‘To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.’ The same holds true of us. Bingo! Amen! Oh yeah!”

James Wright, senior columnist, The Dallas Morning News: “Churchill once had a great line about nothing being as powerful as the simple declarative English sentence. Dr. Fisher is one of the few folks writing in this genre who knows what he meant. The taboo is full of these simple looking, but profound, and from a marketing angle, readable sentences, such as: ‘we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass.’”

E. Buddy Davis, Director of Human Resources, Johnny Ruth Clarke Health Centers: “I confess I am a purposeful reader. I have little time to read simply for pleasure. What I look for in a book is guidance through the stormy jungle of everyday life to arrive a better person and effective in my profession. I don’t look so much for solutions as for help in defining my problems. The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend is a bonus. It gave me such help, while it convinced me that I’m a pretty nice guy as well.”

Dr. Billy G. Gunter, Professor of Sociology, University of South Florida: “Fisher bares his soul in this book, and in doing so, exposes mine to me. The message here is not to celebrate self-indulgence, but to provide a strategy for penetrating it in order to arrive at self-acceptance. That compound word is so easy to say, ‘self-acceptance,’ yet so difficult to realize. Be advised, Fisher offers no detours on this important journey.”

Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, retired executive: “The flavor of this study is such that the subject matter is retained, after the fact. The coverage shows a great deal of research with a strong but familiar style. Excellent word pictures, but I still don’t know who Howard Stern is!”
HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 0-9626498-2-1: available on this website in cloth edition (460 pages, bibliography, index) at $13 plus shipping and handling, or from other Internet providers.

SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998): Everyone admits technology has made drastic changes in our lives and lifestyles. It has also drastically changed the way we do business with each other, which in turn means it has necessitated the change in the structure of organization and the way we work. But here is the problem. We have had major surgery to the organization in the form of downsizing and corporate restructuring, but we have failed to change the workplace culture consistent with these demands. Now most workers are better trained and educated than most of their bosses with specialized skills and knowledge that they, alone, can manage. But for all intent and purpose, the bosses still call the shots, still maintain the charade of performance appraisal, still conduct senseless department meetings, and still hand out assignments as if most workers were manual laborers and it was 1945. The consequence of this is not open rebellion. The consequence of this are six silent killers that are invisible to the eye unless you are looking for them, but are the equivalent of social termites destroying the infrastructure until it is too late for damage control. These killers are six passive behaviors: coming in late and leaving early and doing as little as possible to get by (passive aggression); doing nothing until told and then once completed waiting around for further instruction (passive responsive); always having an excuse why something doesn’t get done (“Not my job!”) or done on time (passive defensive); accepting assignment one never plans on completing, or if completing never on time (approach avoidance), always wanting to have what others have and be what they are instead of being content with what one has and is (obsessive compulsive); and always spreading misinformation or disinformation about the boss, colleagues or the company; withholding information critical to a task, or misusing company property (malicious obedience). In order to improve the situation, senior management was committed but not involve in the corrective process, turning it over to personnel, now called “human resource management.” The results have been devastatingly and critically inept programming workers from management dependence to a counter dependence on the company for their total well being. There is a way out of all this, which Dr. Fisher leads the reader, but not before taking that reader through the no man’s land unconscious incompetence (culture of comfort) through conscious incompetence (culture of complacency) to finally arriving at conscious competence (culture of contribution). Dr. Fisher claims that no matter the educational achievement most workers, because of this programming, display the emotional maturity of an obedient or devious twelve-year-old child suspended in terminal adolescence although possibly in the body of a fifty-year-old. He calls for the culture of contribution and workers with the adult maturity to complain frequently but politely when they encounter duplicity, chicanery, corruption, or malfeasance as well as counter productive behavior.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Billy G. Gunter, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology, University of South Florida: “Fisher gets his ideas and data directly from the workplace. He has worked inside the corporation at all levels from laborer to corporate executive status, and concludes, ‘we don’t know how to manage, motivate, or mobilize the workforce, and as a consequence we spawn six silent killers, which destroy the foundation and infrastructure of the organization from within without anybody noticing.’ In a thoroughly disarming and informative manner, Fisher explains these killers so sensibly that it is like a light bulb going off in your head. You find yourself saying, why didn’t I think of that? “

Anna Flowers, The Journal of Applied Management and Entreprenerism: “For many years, researchers and behavioral scientists have attempted to explain organizations by using psychoanalytical and other psychological school thought structures. James R. Fisher, Jr. follows similar approaches, but for this reviewer, with great insight, philosophical depth, and uncanny predictive truth. This book provides readers with an accurate development of organization USA over the past century, and those crucial factors that must be taken into consideration if organizations are to survive. Fisher’s vibrant explores the dominant cultures in the marketplace, the need for a new set of organization paradigms, incipient catastrophe, the six silent killers, the cultures of comfort, complacency, and contribution.

Dr. Fisher opens his heavily documented and self-experienced work with the dilemma that has spawned the six silent killers, and discusses why this new phenomenon is the latest and greatest challenge to management. He observes “professionals have more the mind of the artist, rather than that of the analyst, the heart of the creator than the discoverer, and more the soul of the rebel than the patriot.”

Six Silent Killers examines those areas that have created what Fisher calls “the new workforce that the post-industrial society has created.” He cites the six silent killers, which have evolved in organizations as a “reaction to the frustration with the growing breach between the role demands of modern workers and the self-demands of those in charge.”

Fisher six silent killers, “the manic monarchs of the merry madhouse,” are passive aggression, passive responsive, passive defensive, malicious obedience, approach avoidance, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

His poetic description indicates that these silent killers “eat at the sinews of organizations, and workers who display them have an amazing ability to appear as if performers when clearly they are not. They are caught in the crunch between hypocrisy and hype, turning their frustrations into deceptive devices. They are looking for leadership in a leaderless society. They are looking for direction when nobody admits to being off course. They are looking for real work in the chaos of activities. Wherever they look, they find confusion. Nobody knows who is in control or who has the power. Managers and workers alike, equally frustrated, spread these silent killers. Nobody is in charge. Management plays the role but has little control. Workers are reluctant to step up to the challenge of taking control because they don’t want the responsibility. So control and productive effort slip silently between them, covered by smoke and mirrors of frenzied activity.” (pp. 87, 88).

After a substantive analysis of organizations and managers and worker, which represent the residue of an obsolete culture, Fisher explores the cultures of comfort, complacency, and contribution. He suggests that modern organizations should develop the culture of contribution, which represents “an entirely new landscape for doing business, a new visage and frame of reference. It is the land of growth and contribution.”

This book is written with sincerity and passion, evoking incredible syntactic imagery and stimulating thought. However, it is more an analytical approach in understanding the cause and effect of American Society and its organization than the process of solutions. It is optimistic, perhaps simplistic in the actualization of coping behaviors for survival, but it is very deep in ferreting out those hidden factors (subconscious) that impact behavior without an explanation as to why this kind of behavior occurs.

James R. Fisher, Jr. has succeeded in writing a book, which is a valuable contribution to the fields of psychology, philosophy and business. He provides insight and important issues in contemporary society that allows readers and organizations to understand, prepare for, and survive in the new millennium.

The Wall Street Journal – Across the Board Magazine: One of the hazards of modern life is that its sheer speed forcibly filters out those wonderful moments many previously used to digest a good book. Such reading is in contrast to ingesting an author’s words via the kind of rapid scanning needed just to get through the information flood that engulfs us each day. But it’s not just verbal overflow that has kept thoughtful, even meditative reading to a minimum. Starting somewhere around the days of the One Minute Manager, many authors started reducing the intellectual weight of their books, so as to keep (they hoped) their invitingly simple-to-read books near the top of the pile. Jim Fisher is simply not that kind of author. An industrial psychologist with 40 years of corporate experience, he has written several books; more than likely most managers have read none of them. They are heavyweight reads utilizing a wide range of reference and examples. In sum, you have to work to read them, the payoff being (even if you don’t agree with him!) a full and complete connection with another mind’s thoughts about work, managing, and leading. Why, then, would Fisher’s latest book, Six Silent Killers, merit your attention? Well, this time Fisher seems to have found the magic balance between buoyancy and density. Yes, there are still the voluminous references, and Fisher is not afraid to cite Charles Dickens, Edward de Bono, Deepak Chopra, and Douglas McGregor, all in the same chapter, but he has thrust them into an argument that is simple and well-framed. So, almost 300 pages from the preface, it’s really hard to get lost in this book. Upset, maybe, but never lost . . . In short, trying to keep Fisher’s six silent killers from killing further will be tough work. No wonder he calls Chapter 10, “The Difficult Agenda Ahead, or When the Simple Is Complex.” Still, Fisher refuses to discount his estimate of the overall workplace problem with pat answers designed to sell books. Fisher’s assessment that changing the contemporary workplace will be tough does not, however, lead the book to a cheerless ending. Six Silent Killers ends with a single-point call for change on the part of management. In a brief afterward, Fisher calls for new initiatives to build greater levels of trust in the workplace: “Workers don’t trust management. Management doesn’t trust workers. And neither workers nor managers trust themselves.” His sentiments come at the very end of the book and are explored less than the book’s other topics. One suspects that the author intentionally planned a “sun just coming up over the horizon” wrap. Thus, when he endorses “soft approaches to hard problems” in the very last paragraph, most readers will be saying: “Over? So soon?” Yet, upon reflection, Fisher’s closing words are a capstone to a well-reasoned, well-documented study of how people think about working and managing today. Invest the time, really read the book, and you’ll probably agree that the central reason for an unhappy workplace is some well-defined “killers.” And ever so handily, Fisher will lead you to one more (albeit unstated) conclusion: that there’s a seventh killer somewhere here. It’s a management profession failing to move forward with the times that talks endlessly about “vision” and “empowerment” while refusing to loosen “the command-and-control screws” even one turn. Fisher seems to end his book precipitously, but only the manager who reads it can write the next chapter.

Glenn V. Wilson, restaurateur. In this book Fisher presents models for three phases of cultural development: Culture of Comfort, Culture of Complacency, and Culture of Contribution. Six “productive” organizational activities commonly initiated by senior management are dispelled as “unproductive” to a contributory culture. Fisher goes on to acknowledge that just as termites destroy a home, “social termites” (employees with destructive behaviors) destroy and undermine an organization’s infrastructure. Managing these covert destructive behaviors (Six Silent Killers) are one of management’s greatest challenges. Fisher doesn’t pull any punches in this book, and I like that. His brilliant and succinct writing style makes this book an absolute must for anyone who: a) makes decisions about employees (hiring, firing, performance assessments, etc.); b) can’t put their finger on employee challenges; and c) for those looking to improve productivity and well being in the workplace. As I was reading this book, I realized that three of my six employees in my restaurant business were clearly “social termites.” I was working hard but getting nowhere, spending all my time putting out fires. This book provided me with the insights into employee behaviors, which I was then able to take action on. Sales are up, customers are happy; other workers seem to enjoy their work more, leading to improved productivity. I no longer spend all my time putting out fires. I now spend my time managing a “successful, creative business, and leading the ENTIRE organization, not just an un-chosen few. I wish I had this book 30 years ago, but grateful that I have it now! Thank you James R.




HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 1-57444-152-3: available in hardcover edition (291 pages, illustrations, schematics, bibliography, index), from St. Lucie Press (www.crcpress.com) or other Internet providers. This website price: $40 plus shipping and handling.

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000): Corporate Sin deals with the mortal sin of anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership. Leaders don’t lead. Followers don’t follow. Because they don’t know how in the present work climate. Consequently, it is a standoff with precious time, money, energy, and resources wasted at the expense of productive work. Leaderless leadership seems to be limited by a penchant for critical thinking, which is the prison of what is already known. Followers are frustrated with leadership at a time when leadership is required of them. Given this situation, leadership resorts to emergency measures or panic tactics, and calls them “strategies.” Meanwhile, followers act as if the corporation owes them a living, behaving as if spoiled brats, waiting to be rescued. It is a case of the leadership unable to relinquish the role of surrogate parent to workers as dependent children. Fifty years of this counterdependency is a luxury no organization can any longer afford. Rather then deal with deal with this inclination, leadership instead resorts to precipitous corrections – downsizing, redundancy exercises, mergers, and the like. Dr. Fisher tabs this “schizophrenic management,” as he sees the leadership having lost its moral compass, and therefore its way. Fisher claims this can be traced to its nostalgia for “1945 management,” where workers behaved as obedient children, and no one challenged authority. Not anymore. The book outlines this problem, and offers a blueprint for rectifying the situation. Corporate Sin is admittedly iconoclastic, but at the same time, ameliorative in its assessment and correction. Professionals and senior managers will find it an invaluable resource to getting off the time and on the same page.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Charles D. Hayes, author of Beyond the American Dream: No one is spared in this forthright analysis, neither the self-righteous leaders nor the self-indulgent followers.
It is like a “left cross” to the Psyche. Franz Kafka said that if the book you are reading doesn’t affect you with force as a blow to the side of the head, then reading might be a waste of your time. In that light, reading Corporate Sin, by James R. Fisher, Jr., is an experience similar to receiving steady left jabs, frequent left hooks, and an occasional overhand right that you don’t always see coming and that continues to send shock waves long after it connects. Corporate Sin is a kind of book that will get you out of the middle of the road, and into your own lane. It is a rare find in the management genre, as few in the field write with such passion and honesty. Not many people have the guts to tell the truth as they see it, which is why we’re so startled when someone articulates it. If you are going to read only one book on management this year, make it Corporate Sin.




HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 1-58820-689-0: available: available from this website in softbound edition (228 pages, illustration, schematics, graphs, footnotes) or from other Internet providers. Price from this website: $20 plus shipping and handling.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003): Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century, and in the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000, snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River during World War II. It is in this working class climate that the author came of age In the Shadow of the Courthouse, while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb. There was no television, mega-sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus or rode their bicycles to work. It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour, and threw a metaphorical shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories, or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park, left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snow banks were four feet high. This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the courthouse, St. Patrick’s School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mount St. Clare College, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, the churches, schools, and hospitals throughout the city, U.S. Army’s Schick General Hospital, which brought the war to this place, tending battlefield casualties, the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway, Clinton Foods, Dupont, and many other industrial work places, which were working hard toward the war effort, as seen through the impressionistic eyes of the author, as a boy from age eight to thirteen. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality again. This is not a history of the times, nor is it a novel in the conventional sense, but rather the recollections of a time, place, and circumstance through the author’s self-confessed imperfect vision. In the Shadow of the Courthouse promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.

READERS’ COMMENTS:

Tom Dunmore (Freeport, Illinois): This book is extra special to me since my father, Jack Dunmore, my uncle, Dick Dunmore, and my grandfather, the courthouse groundskeeper, are all part of the story . . . This book will bring back memories to anyone who grew up in a small midwestern city before video games and 100+ channels on TV.

Lynn M. Carr (Houston, Minnesota): While reading this book, I felt nostalgia for a time and place that will never come again. I, too, grew up in Clinton, although it was in the 50’s, but I remember some of the same people. . . When Dr. Fisher mentions that in recent years St. Pat’s was demolished, the school and church he writes about, I remembered when I was there last, at my Bray’s funeral. His coming of age story reminds me so much of Frank McCourt’s books, and no wonder, as they are both of Irish families with hardships, tempers flaring, and the strong love of God and family. . . Clinton has changed, but the warm loving embrace of a community that fought for peace and lovingly raised their children hoping, for a better life for them can be found in the pages of Dr. Fisher’s book. I wish I knew what became of the boys who spent their summers playing in the shadows of the courthouse walls.

Cindy Rockwell (Iowa): This book prompted me to send a note to the author, something I generally avoid doing. Here is that note: I just wanted to drop you a line. The book is quite a joy to read. There are only a few authors that I read on an ongoing basis, it seems so few have the talent to really pull a person into the setting that they are writing about. Stephen King, I believe, is one who can. John Irving, at least in A Pray for Owen Meany is another. And, although the themes of those authors may not be compatible with yours, you certainly have that same ability to really describe without being noticed. I believe that an author who is able to both capture your attention with the tale and then disappear, so that you, the reader, can read unencumbered, has done a wonderful job of telling the tale. That type of author is the one I enjoy the most, and I would like to just say Thank You, it is a great read.

Donald E. Farr (Newhall, California): Having much in common with Dr. James Fisher (both of us practiced industrial psychology and had highly technical and scientific backgrounds, and both graduated from Clinton schools the same year and both enjoyed sports In the Shadow of the Courthouse) makes it understandable that his personal account of people, places, and events would help revive memories of my childhood. On the other hand, I graduated from another Clinton high school (Lyons High, a small school in the north end of town, and had a much different set of friends, hobbies, interests, and events that molded that period of my growth. Our parents were vastly different. What I found in reading this book is a writing technique allowing a remarkable capability through explicit detail, to COMPARE family, friends, and events through recall even though vastly different. I believe that even if you never heard of Clinton, Iowa, this fine book will take you back to YOUR childhood. It will have you remembering where you were and what you were doing during a specific age or year in your own personal life. A most wonderful stimulus and a gift of memories for our children. A great read.

Barbara Hollowell Edgren (Portland, Oregon): Once I started reading this book, I couldn’t put it down. It brought back so many memories and triggered so many more. Some things brought tears to my eyes just thinking of the wonderful and sometimes sad times I remember as a child born in Clinton, Iowa, and never leaving until I went to Iowa State . . . Just reading the names of familiar people and remembering some I haven’t thought about for many years was so exciting to me. Anyone growing up in the Midwest can relate to Jim’s book even if they didn’t grow up in Clinton or know these people personally. There were so many “Clintons” in the Midwest and we all had the same type of childhood – simple, safe, and loving. I have decided to give each of my boys a book for Christmas because this book depicts my life in the 40’s more than anything I could tell them. Thank you Jim Fisher for bringing back some very special memories in my life.

Richard R. Crider (Chula Vista, California): In the Shadow of the Courthouse depicts an era that should be considered historical. The trials and tribulations growing up with little money or influence for most of the children of the time is portrayed in an excellent manner. Credit was bestowed on those who help guide us through those times, such as the Clinton County Sheriff, his Deputies, and many others. It is as honest as one could expect in trying to dredge up times, dates, places, etc. It is one of the finest books I have read in the past 20 years. I am not an avid reader, but this book about Clinton, Iowa, the Mississippi River, and most of all the beloved County Courthouse and Courtyard, where all of us played baseball, football, basketball, ice skated, and in general spent very much of our time in good stead, and as my grandfather stated, under the scrutiny of fine people. It points to Americans of all ages and particularly those struggling through their adolescent years with limited supervision and how they dealt with it. This is such a book, and Dr. Fisher has done a very commendable job of penning this story written as a novel.

Karen Ingram (La Quinta, California): I enjoyed this novel very much and had ordered it from the author prior to its publication. He is writing about his childhood in Clinton, Iowa and I, too, was born and educated there. His characters feel very real, some of them I actually knew, or heard of from older siblings, but they could be people from just about anywhere during the 40’s. As midwesterners, we tend to appreciate the same values and ethics, still respecting the views of others. Each of the characters are “testing the waters” and trying to find their own way. The visualization of his scenes makes it easy to understand the times bringing back a period of history when life seemed simpler, people less rushed, and a dedication to sports and making friends, made life worthwhile. Though the economy was tight and work was scarce, people were creative and Family was very important. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to examine their childhood with friends, and teachers, or mentors, who played such important roles in shaping their lives. It reads very quickly and is refreshing in light of today’s standards of behavior.

Jo Rogis (Clinton, Iowa): Really enjoyed reading this book, course, being from Clinton and living in Clinton during the “era” that the book was written about, I found it especially interesting. How someone could write his memories from 50+ years ago and be so accurate in “remembering” the good old days of Clinton, Iowa, just amazes me. The author revealed his innermost thoughts as a child, and some of them were very touching. I think it must have been difficult for him to reach back into his past and delve into childhood relationships. Kudos to Dr. Fisher on the publication of his new book. However, Dr. Fisher will always be “Rube” to those who knew him in high school!!

Michael J. Kearney (Los Angeles, California): I was born in Clinton and was a member of St. Patrick’s parish. I know most of the people and places described in the book. Jim’s narrative made it all come alive for me and embraced universal experiences and feelings that should make this book interesting to anyone.

Barry R. Greene (Iowa City, Iowa): I grew up just a little further away from the same Courthouse in Clinton, Iowa as the author. I am a college professor and must admit my bias early in that I think I was able, to some extent at least, to look at the book from the inside out. I knew many of the same people and certainly all of the social, political and religious institutions. This is an excellent book about one of the more interesting times in our history, during and just after World War II. The memories stem from a midwestern river town, but the most compelling narrative for me related to the early priority of life’s choices and circumstances. This is very good reading for anyone with even the slightest interest in history and the joy and anguish of growing up.

Sharon Holt (Longwood, Florida): This book was a nostalgic trip back to my childhood, and consequently back to anyone’s childhood who was raised in a small midwestern town in the 1940’s when the traditional values of family, education, religion, sports, and deep personal friendships were the make-up of common existence. The author has evoked every emotion that is present in the maelstrom of growing up; creating a story that touches one’s sensibilities to the core. This step back into the past weaves a common thread about life during WWII when we all clung together from necessity for emotion and physical survival.

George Jensen (Edmond, Oklahoma): I am about four years younger than the author, but growing up in Clinton I share the same feelings for that time and for Clinton. Growing up as a Lutheran, I did not embrace Catholicism then, but since my grandchildren have grown up as Roman Catholics, I can appreciate what the author is saying. Now living in Oklahoma, I think that anyone growing up in a town of Clinton’s size can find something to relate to. The picture of the courthouse is exactly as I remember it and on a recent visit to Clinton, I verified that everything is so accurate.

Ron McGauvran Clinton, Iowa): When you read In the Shadow of the Courthouse, you will experience Clinton, Iowa and the Midwest in a time far different from Clinton today. For Clintonians, it will remind them of many things long forgotten. For others, it will give them a sense of what it was like growing up when their parents and grandparents were children. For everyone, it will reacquaint them with their youth and how they dealt with growing up, the naiveté and fumbling for an understanding of life. The author literally grew up in the shadow of the Clinton County Courthouse, and attended St. Patrick’s parochial school through the eighth grade. The book focuses on those WWII and postwar years (1942 – 1947) in Clinton as he deals with adolescence, parents, poverty, Catholicism, and friendships. The book promises to stimulate nostalgic recollections and to hold interests from the first to the last scintillating page.

HOW TO PURCHASE

ISBN: 1-4107-1139-0: available in both hard cover and softbound editions (370 pages, map, art work by Carl H. Johnson of Galena, Illinois, poem on the courthouse, and facsimile map). The book may be purchased from this website: $25 plus shipping and handling (hard cover) and $17.50 plus shipping and handling (softbound), or from other Internet providers.