In Search of a Latin-American Publisher

In Search of a Latin-American Publisher

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

(c) October 2005


Here is my situation. I think. I write. I find little difficulty getting published.

But I am a single voice in the wilderness with one hand clapping. Despite this, and with all due modesty, I feel I am perhaps one of the most qualified writers in the genre of work, workers and the workplace, considering my executive and industrial background, academic credentials, and international experience.

I have been publishing since a boy, and extensively in my adult career while associated with Nalco Chemical Company, Honeywell, Inc., and Honeywell Europe, Ltd., as both a staff and line executive. Since 1990, I have been a full-time writer, consultant and speaker in this genre.

The complex organization has been my beat, from research & development to sales & marketing to planning & development to personnel management to corporate decision making, and indeed, as a consultant in organizational development (OD), and as an academic adjunct professor in several graduate school programs.

Additionally, I have worked and lived in South America, Europe and South Africa, as well as in the north and south of my home country, the United States.

I mention this because my laboratory has been the workplace. My reaction to that world has been the basis of my writing.

For example, when I look at the selling situation, I don't see the barrier to success being that of the customer, but that of the salesperson.

With regard to the complex organization, I fail to see the quintessential CEO as the answer to corporate success, but the rank and file workers and managers.

Once professional workers in particular dissolve themselves of management dependence and territorial regidity, information flows in user friendly terms, and problems are solved on a timely basis.

It is admittedly a different perspective, but is not based on some surreal theoretical model, but my actual experience as an organizational development (OD)psychologist, and worker-manager at all levels of the complex organization, as well as consultant to the same, and including working as a professor in several MBA graduate programs.

This experience has shaped my mind, and provided me with a litmus test of the problems and opportunities now threatening to be ignored in the twenty-first century organization.

All my books and articles are researched, but not on the basis of case studies conducted at Harvard or Columbia, or from books and journals written by academics, but through extensive interfacing on a daily basis with the real world of work in all its mutations throughout the working world.

The irony and paradox of my professional life as a thinker and writer is that I see the emperor always half dressed and in somebody else's clothes, if not totally naked. I make note of this fact, and suggest the consequences of such a state.

To alert readers to my take on organization, I have developed typologies to illustrate how leaderless-leadership has come to dominate the complex organization. We have most recently seen palpable evidence of this with Hurricane Katrina. But that was a natural disaster. We have man-made disasters every day.

For example, as I write, General Motors, which once echoed the hubris, "as GM goes so goes America," is near bankruptcy, while BMW in Germany is realizing double-digit profits and assigning bonuses of $3,750 to every employee. How is that?

The discrepancy is not management because GM is a well managed company. The discrepancy is in leadership with BMW displaying a clear understanding of the demographics of the marketplace and the nature of leadership. GM, on the other hand, attempts to manage, motivate and manipulate car buyers with its preferred mantra, while BMW makes machines its clientele desires and is willing to purchase. GM believes leading is taking followers where GM wants to go. BMW understands leading is taking followers where they want to go. Sadly, more companies follow GM's lead than they do BMW's.

There is a consistent pattern to my thinking, which may prove disturbing to some, especially those that have a vested interests in things as they are. One of the great mistakes companies make, when they see the success of a BMW, for example, is to attempt to imitate BMW's success formula by duplicating its practices and adapting their situation to the BMW model.

This never works no matter how much Tom Peters successfully sells the idea.

Each company, as with every individual, has a unique competitive and competency profile. The company face in the mirror has no doubt changed over time, but chances are the company hasn't changed with this new reality. Correction starts by accepting this fact, and then reinvigorating the company by building on its unique strengths in a new age and in a new way. BMW is doing that.

My greatest fault is not the relevance of my material, but the fact that I am not a good self-promoter. I am introspective and not especially gregarious. Despite that shortcoming, when I speak, people tend to pay attention, even if they don't necessarily plan to translate my ideas into action. That said I never make them feel comfortable taking me as entertainment.

I have a body of work that I would like to see translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and made available to Latin-America. Latin-America is rising to prominence almost without notice, while the focus remains essentially on China and India. Somehow Japan and Korea have escaped the economic radar screen, while Europe has been off it so long it is doubtful it knows it exists.

I have six published books still in print that represent building blocks to a particular perspective: (1) Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches; (2) Confident Selling for the 90s & Beyond; (3) The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain; (4) The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend; (5) Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers; and (6) Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge.

(1) views a corporation in search of itself, committed to fads and cosmetic change, while rushing to oblivion; (2) attempts to get the attention of professionals, who now control the complex organization, a fact that haven't registered on their delicate psyches, and as a consequence they are adrift in self-pity; (3) is an in-your-face essay that exhorts professionals to take control of their work in order to take control of their lives; (4) reminds workers that they are now on center stage in a new age, and they control their destiny, not by beating up on themselves, but by celebrating the fact; (5) builds on the premise that the organization is in trouble, not only because of leaderless leadership, but also because of dissonant workers, and offers a blue-print for pulling themselves out of this malaise; and (6) identifies the social termites of passive worker behaviors that destroy the infrastructure of organization, only to be discovered too late for damage control.

These six books represent a point-of-view that could contribute to an open dialogue about the complex organization in transition. As matters now stand, the organization is reluctant to shed its anachronistic practices and atavistic controllers. The result is a prairie fire of dysfunction across the world of work.

The malaise is not limited to this, however, but invades the very way we think about the business of "progress." Nature is a finite entity, and there will be no place to conduct business if we continue to pollute our streams, destroy our forests, pollute the atmosphere, and become increasingly gorged on ever more sophisticated technology without registering "at what price?"

I have completed manuscripts on two other books that may find a Latin-American audience. What is holding American and British publishers back, I am told, is because these books are: (a) written by a relative unknown; (b) not written in a sensational style; (c) don't provide simplistic (by the numbers) painless answers; but (d) instead directed at placing the onus on workers and managers to change, or suffer the consequences for their profligacy.

The first book is titled "Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? The book argues that we are "cutting and controlling" ourselves virtually out of existence by wasteful practices. It further argues that the belief that technology will save us from all our excesses is the most stupid idea I have ever heard.

The second book is titled "Who Put You In The Cage?" This book complements the first book. In other words, it goes from the general (in the first book) to the particular (in the second), or from a priori reasoning in global terms to a posteriori reasoning in personal terms.

Moreover, the second book's premise is that we all put ourselves in cages of our own making, and then spend most of our lives attempting to justify them. Its context and content are derived from my own personal research. My aim here is to increase awareness in the hopes that the reader will develop an inclination to walk out of the self-imprisoning cage.

Meanwhile, I am working on a novel titled "Green Island in a Black Sea," which is about my time in South Africa as an American executive forming a new company in the late 1960s, a time of apartheid, or separation of the races in that country. The book is about a young executive who goes into the heart of darkness and discovers the darkness in his own heart. I suspect that it will complement these books in a very real way.

So, if any publishers out there, especially in Latin-America, reads this and are interested, well, we can make history together because I'm not going to go away.

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