COMPENDIUM OF WHAT IS TO COME!

COMPENDIUM OF WHAT IS TO COME

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005



There is only one thing a writer can control, and that is his output. When you reach my advanced age, and people complain that your output is stultifying, you say, "Thank you," because it is a compliment, as energy will never give you advance notice on when it will wane, or, indeed, cease to exist.

Not only have I published a great deal in the past fifteen years, but there is a much greater amount that I have not published in the past thirty years, years that I have been constantly wondering and wandering, thinking and pondering, and of course, always scribbling.

What I plan to do, first of all, is publish on my blog PART THREE OF WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE.

It will deal with my thesis "design is destiny," or "destiny follows design." Like all complex theses, God never reveals the whole kitten caboodle all at once, but piecemeal. A writer, however, publishes it as his muses visit him, and hopes that one-day all the parts fit nicely together, which they seldom do.

With another project, I plan to start with the end of the initial manuscript of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, and publish pieces that were deleted from the original work for two reasons. Some readers hoped that I would publish a sequel to this book. That doesn't look likely. I self-published this book, and it took an enormous amount of time, money, energy and flesh crunching to get it in people's hands. Marketing a book takes away precious writing time, and is more energy sapping than writing a 10,000-word essay. Notice you never see on television these best selling authors who publish a new book every nine months to a year. They can't afford the time, and people can't keep from buying their books anymore than they can eat one peanut and stop. That, of course, is not my problem. Age is my problem.

A third and fourth project, again not necessarily in the order presented here, would be to publish much of what was left out in the 1990 breakthrough book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS. It is regarded as a classic now, and has been much copied, mainly because it identified a trend before anyone else.

Beautiful Betty and I worked hundreds of hours on that project while I was an executive with Honeywell in Europe. She is an excellent researcher and collator of diverse and complex data, and I still have tons of notebooks to prove it. Moreover, while I composed, walking around my Belgian study, she took my dictation. Henry James composed in this fashion, and I see why. The text flows much less pedantically and much more conversationally, even though, as she can tell you, I never found a multiple syllable word or an esoteric term that I didn't love.

If I am still functioning, I hope to publish, again on my blog, because I am retreating from the publishing world of books because of (a) not wanting to leave BB holding the debts of my vanity; and (b) not wanting to compromise my integrity to win an audience.

I plan to publish on my blog excerpts from my unpublished Catholic book, THE SILENT SENTINEL: A PLEBEIAN VIEW OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN DECLINE.

More than eighteen months was spent in preparing this manuscript some thirty years ago. It was almost published by the Paulist Press, but it declined finding it too polemical. Much of my best writing is in that manuscript.

And finally, if the energy is there, I might publish some of a long paper I wrote while in graduate school for a course in the Sociology of Religion. It was titled IN SEARCH OF THE REAL PARENTS OF MY SOUL. That paper so enchanted my professor that he wanted me to be the scribe for his published efforts. I declined, and that made my life let us say less familial and more interesting.

In that vein, at the frenetic height of the hysteria for "participative management," I was asked to be the principal speaker for a Conference of Department of Defense Contractors. My paper was titled "Participative Management: An Adversarial Point of View." I saw how this not-thought-through concept was plunging my employer into chaos. My employer wasn't too happy with my analysis as the customers were admirals and generals of the military and were meant to get a totally different impression of this "new intervention" and its efficacy.

For my apostasy, I was placed on house arrest, given no promotions or raises for two years, and not allowed to give any more speeches during this period. The irony, and irony is like an older brother to me, at the end of this period, with the EEC or the European Economic Community taking shape, I was promoted to a directorship of my employer's European operations.

The benefit of a scribbler, and the reason a scribbler should get his ideas down, is that such ideas become much more palatable when he is deceased. You only have to read history to recognize this final irony.