WHEN THE PUPPETEER IS ALSO THE VENTRILOQUIST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
Often I share with my email address book pieces of information or articles that I find relevant and stimulating. Eventually, they come to be articles on my blog.
Such was the case with Joseph Brown's column, "Rotten Oranges Show Our Work Ethic" (commentary section, The Tampa Tribune, Sunday, July 23, 2006). It dealt with the double standard of migrant workers being needed but yet not wanted, being employed often though illegal in order to remain competitive, and then the final ambiguity, not having workers to pick the oranges, in this instance, resulting in six million boxes of Florida oranges remaining on the trees to rot.
The same scenario is being repeated for tomato farmers in the midwest and apple growers in the northeast. Brown also alludes to the fact that shuckers of oysters in New Orleans can make $12 to $15 an hour but most Americans don’t want the work because it is too hard and too smelly. So, thus you have the conundrum: migrant workers, you can’t live without them and you don’t want to live with them.
Brown was simply stating something that is happening, but which obviously no two people see alike and thus the double bind of migrant workers especially illegals.
I have no problem with original opinions. I have a problem with opinions that sound too much like the promulgated doublespeak of our times presented by corpocracy from the government on down. It is as if a giant puppeteer is acting as ventriloquist to us as obliging dummies, and not for the first time.
I can remember well when seven CEOs addressed congress several years ago, and to a man, because they were all men, claimed cigarettes were absolutely no danger to our health. They said this with straight faces when they had ample research in their respective companies that indicated that smoking was, indeed, dangerous to health. It is one of the major reasons health insurance costs are so high, that along with excessive drinking and eating. Lifestyle is the culprit and lifestyle supports a booming economy so no one wants to in anyway derail it, good health notwithstanding.
My premise is that the things we are programmed to hide behind are not necessarily of our making, but invariably serve our puppeteers. I wrote in my memoir as a novel IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) that as a boy I was shocked when I learned of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went into a deep depression, mainly because no one else did, no one else thought it was terrible, killing all those innocent civilians. But my parents told me that it was war and it saved Americans lives. For some reason that gave me little solace and still doesn't. I guess I've not changed too much.
* * * * * * * * * *
In reaction to several comments regarding Brown’s column, I wrote an update to a piece that has appeared on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com): “Walking Back the Dog and the Question of Immigration,” sharing further thoughts with columnist Joseph Brown.
* * * * * * * * * *
Joseph
I wrote that piece ("Walking Back the Dog and the Question of Immigration") because of the response I got to sharing your column with people on my email address book.
I've only about thirty sum names on the list now, but they are spread out all over the world. That list is extended, however, because one of the emailers has a network of some 300 or 400, which was apparently sent on to some of them.
I am always surprised when people of some education have so little tolerance for the less advantaged. Education and tolerance should be mutually supportive because they suggest understanding, and understanding should imply connection.
Call me naive, but some of my correspondents have insinuated that "you are a liar," or "uninformed," or worse, if you can imagine.
I got a sense of how brave you are to write as you do without rancor presenting the facts as you see them.
What I find uncanny is that these respondents bring up such things as "damage to social security," which most of them don't actually need, and other terrible things being done to our economy, such as hospitals and schools being forced to close because of these migrant nontax paying workers. These workers, like everyone else pays many other taxes hidden in sales tax, gasoline tax and so on. Nor is there any mention that their employers don't withhold the FICA tax on them, and then there is the matter of health insurance.
Many years ago when I was a young executive living in Louisville in a community called "Anchorage," which still retained the pastoral splendor of the antebellum days, I had an African American maid. I paid her $5 an hour more than others in this uppity neighborhood, but also for transportation to and from her home in the city some 30 miles on the other side of the county, which then amounted to an additional $5 a day.
Word got around that I was paying this young lady above the going rate "by an astronomical sum" with one gentleman, the chief engineer of a television station, threatening to take me to court, on what charge, I do not know. My neighbors were medical doctors, psychiatrists, even a COO of a Kentucky distillery, Brown Forman.
Of course, when it comes to migrant workers there is always the language thing, seeing no one is an American that doesn't speak American English. I know how these people feel because I encountered it living in Europe where Europeans, especially the French who resented that I did not learn their language.
So, I can see their point. But I come back with why have we not emphasized language skills in our schools? It astounds me when a tourist guide in Brugge, Belgium can speak four languages as he takes us on a boat trip through the canal streets of this picturesque medieval town, and I am limited to American English. How did I allow this to happen? I don't feel proud. I feel ashamed.
Your reference to shucking oysters at $10 an hour rankled some, as there are apparently tons of Americans that would jump at the chance of such a job difficult and smelly work that it is.
Then those who are contractors or builders or architects they also come in for their two-cents about how they are forced to hire these workers as carpenters and other tradesmen, taking more good jobs away from Americans. Again, this twisted reasoning amazes me. They resent that these migrants (illegals) become able craftsmen, which they are then forced to hire to remain competitive but at the jeopardy of their licenses. Enterprise is what drives America and it is a catching condition. I am not suggesting that we turn a blind eye, but we can't have it both ways, hire them and then blame them for our deceit when caught.
Again and again, I saw in their remarks the face of corpocracy, the face that I know so well, the face that has succeeded in programming moral ambiguity into them which has resulted in ambivalent moral authority across the board in our culture fed no doubt by greed and justified by "survival."
They are not bad people but they do hide behind the flag, God, the president, the military and of course American business, as they know it. Many of them came out of the same dirt as I did, who once were subjugated as my family was to the "corporate good" at all expense, but somehow they have forgotten. I have not.
Now, I know why I have no audience. I don't write hagiographies for corpocracy and I don't write empathetic soliloquies for the middle class to ease their conscience.
As I have attempted to point out in my writing, words are not a substitute for actions, and actions cannot be justified with words.
We have many gurus and talking heads that speak with moral clarity from the president to the secretary of state to such people as Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition to Mel Gibson and his docudrama of the blessed Jesus, but none of them with moral authority because their actions do not support their words.
Leadership is the consistent marriage of moral clarity with moral authority. One without the other is leaderless leadership.
Time magazine (July 31, 2006) has a featured article on Reed's blinding ambition and being in bed with the corrupt Abramoff, Safavian and Ney, and then there is Gibson who featured a film of Jesus in Aramaic then confesses he's a drunk and then while in custody by the police reveals his strong anti-Semitic sentiments.
Executive Excellence, a leadership journal, that has featured my writing for years and years, is going to come out with an article of mine on Andrew Jackson. I liked Jackson's muscular leadership because his moral authority backed up his moral clarity.
That doesn't mean Jackson was a perfect leader. He wasn't. It doesn't mean that everything he did was in the best interest of the country. It wasn't. It certainly wasn't when he removed the Indians from their homelands in the "Trail of Tears."
Jackson, however, fought corpocracy tooth and nail, and he was consistent, and those are my reasons for celebrating him. In "Walking Back the Dog," I see always the corporate face, and it appears that I, alone, do.
But there you have it. I enjoy the liberty to express this observation if no one else subscribes to it, and in that I am lucky to be an American.
One of the amazing freedoms I have always enjoyed is that I understand the wisdom of insecurity. I don't fear anyone taking anything from me because everything I have has little to do with what and who I am. Fear is the corporate game, and when what you are is determined by what you have it will always own you.
Be always well and keep up your consistently good work,
Jim
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Friday, July 28, 2006
WALKING BACK THE DOG AND THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRANTS!
WALKING BACK THE DOG AND THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRANTS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
There is an expression in spy novels, which Robert Littel has used as the motive for a novel, which is "walking back the dog." The idea is to find the spy and bring him back home.
My use is a bit different, but not really. To walk back the spy you must first find him. My interest is finding the source of our present madness. To bring the spy back home you must first find how he got lost in the shuffle. This is not too dissimilar to our current exaggerated reaction to migrant workers.
My intention is not to minimize the inconvenience caused by the difficulty of assimilation, but it is intended to point out that illegals are not the “bad guys.” It is all a matter of how we have been programmed to relate to the problem and by whom.
Edward de Bono, the psychologist that has a whole island to himself, has exposed the limitations to traditional Western by-the-numbers cognitive reasoning and critical Socratic thinking. This is better known as deductive cause and effect analysis. De Bono challenges this mindset with what he calls, "lateral thinking." This is more commonly known as, "thinking outside the box."
I've always had a problem with the expression “thinking outside the box,” as it implies the brain functions in a mechanical box. We now call this a computer. Neither the brain as a box nor the computer think although many so addicted would dispute this. They process information, and the information they process is information already known, ergo, critical thinking.
De Bono espouses to creative thinking. This is the discursive world of contradiction and conceptual, self-organizing, provocative, subjective and perceptual contemplation. It is a world in which I feel most comfortable. My mind rambles over these circuitous elements as I reflect on the many, and I say many responses to my comments to Joseph Brown's column in the Sunday Tampa Tribune, “Rotten Oranges Show Our Work Ethic” (July 23, 2006), or the plight of migrant workers.
In the motive of walking back the dog, I came face-to-face with a consistent preoccupation of mine, corporate society. You would think that having been lifted from the bosom of my feudal lair in working class America into the rarefied air of the mountaintop of corpocracy that I would have become a true believer. It didn’t happen.
You see I never was comfortable making huge amounts of money playing to the tune of the captains of industry.
Early on, remembering where I came from and who I was I never could escape the awareness of my own skin and that the collective presence of my ancestors. They never had my advantages; never wined and dined with royalty in South Africa; never had people carry their bags and bow obediently before them as if they were indeed special. Not only was I never comfortable with this treatment I was embarrassed by it. I always saw these invisible people serving me, people nobody else seemed to notice, because they wore the chagrin countenance of my own ancestors in similar roles.
Yet, there was a side of me that wanted to believe I was actually appreciated as a person, that people in corpocracy valued me not so much for what I did but for what I was. That blew up in my face when I retired the first time in my thirties after experiencing South Africa.
Only a matter of months after that departure, I was in New York City meeting with my Prentice-Hall publisher regarding my first book. It was early 1970. I called on my former company's regional office, the same people who had wined and dined my family with great attention before making connecting flights overseas. Now, no one had time to have lunch with me. I was not relevant; no longer had clout. I was again a non-person, dead in the corporate vernacular.
You experience such things when you are young and idealistic, and they shake your foundation a little, but you are resilient. Later, however, when you have had time to reflect on all you have seen, witnessed and done, when age has matured you like a fine wine, you come to wonder why "Corporate America" has been such an exploiter.
Everywhere you have worked in the world you have seen the land left barren and poisoned for the attention, and the people exploited. This is not the society you were taught you belonged to in school. You were never told that Corporate Society was the religion of the land, the politics of the country, and the god of the American soul.
With age and time and reflection, you have grown to know it is true as you walk back the dog. It is the "Corporate America" to which you belong. You cannot escape it. It is another cast system in which everyone thinks they are free and that those appointed to lead them know best. My family was one of the corporate vassals, and obligingly so, and their son was elevated to a prince, but only as long as he kept the faith as a true believer.
None of this reached my awareness as a grammar school, high school, or indeed, college student. My heart and soul were dedicated to progress that had a face like my face, spoke my language, and believed as I was programmed to believe.
All went well until I worked for “Corporate America” outside the United States, and then it started to nip away at this ideal image. Always, I would rationalize to protect my comfort, and it worked until I experienced South Africa and apartheid, and then reality came crashing through. I’ve never been the same since, and that was thirty-seven years ago. I tried to regain my faith in Corporate Society by going back to school, only to find the university was the training ground for Corporate Society. This had escaped my consciousness when I was young and thrilled as a working class boy with the chance to go to college.
My mind is a kind of mind that records, stores, collates and ultimately retrieves experiences long ago placed in those confines. These experiences haunt me still.
My work took me to South America and Jamaica, to the bauxite refineries and chemical plants of those countries. It took me as well to Beirut, Baalbek, Port Said, Istanbul, throughout Europe and Africa, and of course the United States.
Walking back the dog I find the source of the words and ideas that I have been programmed to repeat and live by are not my own. My conscious and subliminal mind is a product of Corporate Society. Incredibly, my salvation has been that I was a pre-television depression era baby that has known scarcity, a child of the trusting midwest, close to the earth, close to nature, where people are people and what you see is usually what you get.
That was true until “Corporate America” took it over. Now, midwestern folks are spread out across the world and seem to echo Corporate Society sentiments. It would appear they are true believers of its message as if its language is the same as their own. I say this reading their missives on immigrants and illegals. The midwestern conscience is almost gone. Corporate Society has amalgamated it into its own. The midwest even looks and feels and acts like every other place. It now would appear Corporate Society has won, but has it?
"Corporate America" has managed to direct the focus away from itself by the promulgation of its dogma of progress. The main hook to its ambivalent message is “our standard of living.” The great puppeteer cleanses or taints our collective conscience with the promise or takeaway of jobs. Everyone needs jobs so what is so bad about that?
The planet is dying and it has been orchestrated by Corporate Society progress.
How often we have heard this said, and how often we have ignored it. “Corporate America” has made it a bland and boring charge. Obese America on a full belly shows little interest and less regard for the exploitation elsewhere of people, places, spaces and events.
Knowledge of the unfortunate enters our consciousness only in the cold medium of television and we can always change channels without burning our fingers. We think these people envy us when all they want is to live in peace with family and friends in the culture and tradition of their ancestors with enough to sustain them, but even that is placed in constant jeopardy as well as their lives.
When "Corporate America" goes too far, exploits too much, and leaves too little, either people will become desperate and take impossible risks, as illegals do, or they will become implacable enemies, as the jihad terrorists have become.
I have heard it all. Illegals are ruining our Corporate Society. But who ruined the illegals? Who exploited the countries from which the illegals keep coming? Who set this whole process in motion?
If you are a student of history, you know our "great corporate presidents" created the world we live in now, beginning with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We have never lost their momentum as the baton has been passed from one to the other.
My da worked paycheck to paycheck and never made it to the end of the pay period with a penny. In fact, bill collectors were our most frequent callers on our three-party telephone line, allowing gossipy neighbors to get an ear full. Were it not for the kindness of creditors, I don't know if we would have always had food on the table. So, I can identify with desperate people who will go anywhere to find legitimate work even if it means crossing a border illegally.
Why should anyone be in such desperate circumstances in a world of plenty? Why should there be borders between indigenous people? Western man prides himself in being so cultured, so advanced, so technically sophisticated, but Western man cannot handle the simple problem of immigration and illegals.
Illegals were around during my growing up period, nobody seemed to mind. That was before we became a self-indulgent society; before lifestyle excesses made hospital insurance such an expense; before people felt compelled to spend more than they made; before differences were so threatening; before our generous spirit was supplanted by corporate greed. Now, we all want to have six-figure incomes and live in gated communities, safe and secure from a threatening outside world being bombed into oblivion.
We have bought the “Corporate America” mantra of progress as our most important product. It has produced generation after generation of spoiled brats, workers suspended in terminal adolescence, and leaderless leaders. In another sense, progress has resulted in concrete smothering our fertile fields to be lost to agriculture for eternity. It is the same for the air we breathe, the waters we drink, and the delicate ecology that surrounds us.
Corporate spin believes you can have your cake and eat it, too, and we are desperate to believe. Drill for oil along the Florida Gulf Coast, no problem! Picture drilling rigs as sculptured gardens surrounded by singing birds and dancing fish. Paint the sky in cosmetic blue with velvet clouds filtering a joyous sun. Translated, “Radical change won’t happen on my watch, buster.”
"Walking back the dog" I see "Corporate America" has been duplicated in "Corporate Europe" and now in "Corporate China," and on and on and on. As bad as it is, it is going to get much worse and I won’t be around to experience it, but many reading this will be.
My wonder is when the equivalent of the French "Reign of Terror" will visit Corporate Society. Then, I realize, “My God, it is already here!” What other way can we explain the motivation of the jihads, the state of the world now?
If you cannot learn the motivation of your enemies, how can you ever negotiate a peace with them politically? Corporate Society wishes to paint everything in terms of black and white with the enemy always totally black and Corporate Society always totally white. Not true.
Corporate Society has become leaderless, thoughtless and directionless and for it we are meant to pay for its excesses again and again. We the people first pay with the lives of our young who are programmed to fight corporate wars to protect corporate interests, and then to endure corporate malfeasance resulting in the loss of jobs necessary to bail corporate society out of its difficulties. Notice how a company’s stock goes up every time a corporation cuts 30,000 or 40,000 jobs.
What does that tell you? Walking back the dog it tells you the need for the bailing out had little to do with you, and a lot to do with the incompetence of corporate leadership of Corporate Society.
That said Corporate Society has managed to orchestrate paranoia and fear so that war has become a normal means of economic correction but which is espoused always as something else. Mexicans crossing the border illegally did not create the many fiascos of the past decade or so across Corporate Society’s foreign policy.
Still, if hospitals close, and schools cannot meet the needs of the people that flood into the state, and real-estate values plummet, and taxes increase, of one thing you can be certain, Corporate Society will not be the fall guy. It knows how to play the blame game and what better target than a desperate people.
Orchestrate the social drama so we are against these people. Play on our biases, our stereotypes, emphasize the criminal minority, play on our weaknesses, but by all means be sure to avoid our strengths, our generous and loving souls, make us see what we are giving up, not what we are sharing, feed our nationalism, demean our humanism, ensure that we continue to believe Corporate Society knows best even when it knows nothing at all.
Discover this orchestration and you will become aware of walking back the dog.
So, an oil company makes $10 billion in quarterly profits, and the gas price shoots through the ceiling, who’s to blame? The terrorists of course. Who exploited the people before terrorists had a foothold in such societies? And why are there terrorists now? Walk back the dog and you will see a corporate face.
We forget we are a violent society, and have been violent since our beginning. We have been terrorists. Ask the British. We are still violent. Not only do more murders occur in our society than anywhere, but also more people are incarcerated than anywhere else, yes, even in the most primitive societies there is less violence.
Corporate Society has fed greed and self-indulgence while providing blinders to what goes on in half of the rest of the world. Bombs and bullets aside, which solve nothing, and rain down in well known places, there are many people elsewhere who attempt to survive on a dollar a day or less while rogue governments often supported by corporate interests rape, plunder, kill and destroy what little they have.
When I say I wonder what it would have been like had I been born black, I can say the same thing if I had been born Mexican or Indian or any other indigenous people that has been exploited.
Complacency has been encountered wherever I have gone. You could say it has made me angry. You could even say it has driven me to be a writer. I had to laugh the other day when I read Wiley's "Non Sequitur" cartoon. It showed an author with a noose about his neck behind a desk with copies of his book prominently displayed with a sign of equal prominence, “Meet the Author of: DEALING WITH DISILLUISON 1 - 3 today.” No one is there to buy his book, only a woman is reading among book stacks totally unconscious of his presence. The area is roped off to guide prospective book purchasers to the author, but no one is in line. I know the feeling.
* * * * * * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com He has just completed a book, not yet published, titled, “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which deals with the subject of Corporate Society among other subjects.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
There is an expression in spy novels, which Robert Littel has used as the motive for a novel, which is "walking back the dog." The idea is to find the spy and bring him back home.
My use is a bit different, but not really. To walk back the spy you must first find him. My interest is finding the source of our present madness. To bring the spy back home you must first find how he got lost in the shuffle. This is not too dissimilar to our current exaggerated reaction to migrant workers.
My intention is not to minimize the inconvenience caused by the difficulty of assimilation, but it is intended to point out that illegals are not the “bad guys.” It is all a matter of how we have been programmed to relate to the problem and by whom.
Edward de Bono, the psychologist that has a whole island to himself, has exposed the limitations to traditional Western by-the-numbers cognitive reasoning and critical Socratic thinking. This is better known as deductive cause and effect analysis. De Bono challenges this mindset with what he calls, "lateral thinking." This is more commonly known as, "thinking outside the box."
I've always had a problem with the expression “thinking outside the box,” as it implies the brain functions in a mechanical box. We now call this a computer. Neither the brain as a box nor the computer think although many so addicted would dispute this. They process information, and the information they process is information already known, ergo, critical thinking.
De Bono espouses to creative thinking. This is the discursive world of contradiction and conceptual, self-organizing, provocative, subjective and perceptual contemplation. It is a world in which I feel most comfortable. My mind rambles over these circuitous elements as I reflect on the many, and I say many responses to my comments to Joseph Brown's column in the Sunday Tampa Tribune, “Rotten Oranges Show Our Work Ethic” (July 23, 2006), or the plight of migrant workers.
In the motive of walking back the dog, I came face-to-face with a consistent preoccupation of mine, corporate society. You would think that having been lifted from the bosom of my feudal lair in working class America into the rarefied air of the mountaintop of corpocracy that I would have become a true believer. It didn’t happen.
You see I never was comfortable making huge amounts of money playing to the tune of the captains of industry.
Early on, remembering where I came from and who I was I never could escape the awareness of my own skin and that the collective presence of my ancestors. They never had my advantages; never wined and dined with royalty in South Africa; never had people carry their bags and bow obediently before them as if they were indeed special. Not only was I never comfortable with this treatment I was embarrassed by it. I always saw these invisible people serving me, people nobody else seemed to notice, because they wore the chagrin countenance of my own ancestors in similar roles.
Yet, there was a side of me that wanted to believe I was actually appreciated as a person, that people in corpocracy valued me not so much for what I did but for what I was. That blew up in my face when I retired the first time in my thirties after experiencing South Africa.
Only a matter of months after that departure, I was in New York City meeting with my Prentice-Hall publisher regarding my first book. It was early 1970. I called on my former company's regional office, the same people who had wined and dined my family with great attention before making connecting flights overseas. Now, no one had time to have lunch with me. I was not relevant; no longer had clout. I was again a non-person, dead in the corporate vernacular.
You experience such things when you are young and idealistic, and they shake your foundation a little, but you are resilient. Later, however, when you have had time to reflect on all you have seen, witnessed and done, when age has matured you like a fine wine, you come to wonder why "Corporate America" has been such an exploiter.
Everywhere you have worked in the world you have seen the land left barren and poisoned for the attention, and the people exploited. This is not the society you were taught you belonged to in school. You were never told that Corporate Society was the religion of the land, the politics of the country, and the god of the American soul.
With age and time and reflection, you have grown to know it is true as you walk back the dog. It is the "Corporate America" to which you belong. You cannot escape it. It is another cast system in which everyone thinks they are free and that those appointed to lead them know best. My family was one of the corporate vassals, and obligingly so, and their son was elevated to a prince, but only as long as he kept the faith as a true believer.
None of this reached my awareness as a grammar school, high school, or indeed, college student. My heart and soul were dedicated to progress that had a face like my face, spoke my language, and believed as I was programmed to believe.
All went well until I worked for “Corporate America” outside the United States, and then it started to nip away at this ideal image. Always, I would rationalize to protect my comfort, and it worked until I experienced South Africa and apartheid, and then reality came crashing through. I’ve never been the same since, and that was thirty-seven years ago. I tried to regain my faith in Corporate Society by going back to school, only to find the university was the training ground for Corporate Society. This had escaped my consciousness when I was young and thrilled as a working class boy with the chance to go to college.
My mind is a kind of mind that records, stores, collates and ultimately retrieves experiences long ago placed in those confines. These experiences haunt me still.
My work took me to South America and Jamaica, to the bauxite refineries and chemical plants of those countries. It took me as well to Beirut, Baalbek, Port Said, Istanbul, throughout Europe and Africa, and of course the United States.
Walking back the dog I find the source of the words and ideas that I have been programmed to repeat and live by are not my own. My conscious and subliminal mind is a product of Corporate Society. Incredibly, my salvation has been that I was a pre-television depression era baby that has known scarcity, a child of the trusting midwest, close to the earth, close to nature, where people are people and what you see is usually what you get.
That was true until “Corporate America” took it over. Now, midwestern folks are spread out across the world and seem to echo Corporate Society sentiments. It would appear they are true believers of its message as if its language is the same as their own. I say this reading their missives on immigrants and illegals. The midwestern conscience is almost gone. Corporate Society has amalgamated it into its own. The midwest even looks and feels and acts like every other place. It now would appear Corporate Society has won, but has it?
"Corporate America" has managed to direct the focus away from itself by the promulgation of its dogma of progress. The main hook to its ambivalent message is “our standard of living.” The great puppeteer cleanses or taints our collective conscience with the promise or takeaway of jobs. Everyone needs jobs so what is so bad about that?
The planet is dying and it has been orchestrated by Corporate Society progress.
How often we have heard this said, and how often we have ignored it. “Corporate America” has made it a bland and boring charge. Obese America on a full belly shows little interest and less regard for the exploitation elsewhere of people, places, spaces and events.
Knowledge of the unfortunate enters our consciousness only in the cold medium of television and we can always change channels without burning our fingers. We think these people envy us when all they want is to live in peace with family and friends in the culture and tradition of their ancestors with enough to sustain them, but even that is placed in constant jeopardy as well as their lives.
When "Corporate America" goes too far, exploits too much, and leaves too little, either people will become desperate and take impossible risks, as illegals do, or they will become implacable enemies, as the jihad terrorists have become.
I have heard it all. Illegals are ruining our Corporate Society. But who ruined the illegals? Who exploited the countries from which the illegals keep coming? Who set this whole process in motion?
If you are a student of history, you know our "great corporate presidents" created the world we live in now, beginning with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We have never lost their momentum as the baton has been passed from one to the other.
My da worked paycheck to paycheck and never made it to the end of the pay period with a penny. In fact, bill collectors were our most frequent callers on our three-party telephone line, allowing gossipy neighbors to get an ear full. Were it not for the kindness of creditors, I don't know if we would have always had food on the table. So, I can identify with desperate people who will go anywhere to find legitimate work even if it means crossing a border illegally.
Why should anyone be in such desperate circumstances in a world of plenty? Why should there be borders between indigenous people? Western man prides himself in being so cultured, so advanced, so technically sophisticated, but Western man cannot handle the simple problem of immigration and illegals.
Illegals were around during my growing up period, nobody seemed to mind. That was before we became a self-indulgent society; before lifestyle excesses made hospital insurance such an expense; before people felt compelled to spend more than they made; before differences were so threatening; before our generous spirit was supplanted by corporate greed. Now, we all want to have six-figure incomes and live in gated communities, safe and secure from a threatening outside world being bombed into oblivion.
We have bought the “Corporate America” mantra of progress as our most important product. It has produced generation after generation of spoiled brats, workers suspended in terminal adolescence, and leaderless leaders. In another sense, progress has resulted in concrete smothering our fertile fields to be lost to agriculture for eternity. It is the same for the air we breathe, the waters we drink, and the delicate ecology that surrounds us.
Corporate spin believes you can have your cake and eat it, too, and we are desperate to believe. Drill for oil along the Florida Gulf Coast, no problem! Picture drilling rigs as sculptured gardens surrounded by singing birds and dancing fish. Paint the sky in cosmetic blue with velvet clouds filtering a joyous sun. Translated, “Radical change won’t happen on my watch, buster.”
"Walking back the dog" I see "Corporate America" has been duplicated in "Corporate Europe" and now in "Corporate China," and on and on and on. As bad as it is, it is going to get much worse and I won’t be around to experience it, but many reading this will be.
My wonder is when the equivalent of the French "Reign of Terror" will visit Corporate Society. Then, I realize, “My God, it is already here!” What other way can we explain the motivation of the jihads, the state of the world now?
If you cannot learn the motivation of your enemies, how can you ever negotiate a peace with them politically? Corporate Society wishes to paint everything in terms of black and white with the enemy always totally black and Corporate Society always totally white. Not true.
Corporate Society has become leaderless, thoughtless and directionless and for it we are meant to pay for its excesses again and again. We the people first pay with the lives of our young who are programmed to fight corporate wars to protect corporate interests, and then to endure corporate malfeasance resulting in the loss of jobs necessary to bail corporate society out of its difficulties. Notice how a company’s stock goes up every time a corporation cuts 30,000 or 40,000 jobs.
What does that tell you? Walking back the dog it tells you the need for the bailing out had little to do with you, and a lot to do with the incompetence of corporate leadership of Corporate Society.
That said Corporate Society has managed to orchestrate paranoia and fear so that war has become a normal means of economic correction but which is espoused always as something else. Mexicans crossing the border illegally did not create the many fiascos of the past decade or so across Corporate Society’s foreign policy.
Still, if hospitals close, and schools cannot meet the needs of the people that flood into the state, and real-estate values plummet, and taxes increase, of one thing you can be certain, Corporate Society will not be the fall guy. It knows how to play the blame game and what better target than a desperate people.
Orchestrate the social drama so we are against these people. Play on our biases, our stereotypes, emphasize the criminal minority, play on our weaknesses, but by all means be sure to avoid our strengths, our generous and loving souls, make us see what we are giving up, not what we are sharing, feed our nationalism, demean our humanism, ensure that we continue to believe Corporate Society knows best even when it knows nothing at all.
Discover this orchestration and you will become aware of walking back the dog.
So, an oil company makes $10 billion in quarterly profits, and the gas price shoots through the ceiling, who’s to blame? The terrorists of course. Who exploited the people before terrorists had a foothold in such societies? And why are there terrorists now? Walk back the dog and you will see a corporate face.
We forget we are a violent society, and have been violent since our beginning. We have been terrorists. Ask the British. We are still violent. Not only do more murders occur in our society than anywhere, but also more people are incarcerated than anywhere else, yes, even in the most primitive societies there is less violence.
Corporate Society has fed greed and self-indulgence while providing blinders to what goes on in half of the rest of the world. Bombs and bullets aside, which solve nothing, and rain down in well known places, there are many people elsewhere who attempt to survive on a dollar a day or less while rogue governments often supported by corporate interests rape, plunder, kill and destroy what little they have.
When I say I wonder what it would have been like had I been born black, I can say the same thing if I had been born Mexican or Indian or any other indigenous people that has been exploited.
Complacency has been encountered wherever I have gone. You could say it has made me angry. You could even say it has driven me to be a writer. I had to laugh the other day when I read Wiley's "Non Sequitur" cartoon. It showed an author with a noose about his neck behind a desk with copies of his book prominently displayed with a sign of equal prominence, “Meet the Author of: DEALING WITH DISILLUISON 1 - 3 today.” No one is there to buy his book, only a woman is reading among book stacks totally unconscious of his presence. The area is roped off to guide prospective book purchasers to the author, but no one is in line. I know the feeling.
* * * * * * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com He has just completed a book, not yet published, titled, “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which deals with the subject of Corporate Society among other subjects.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
CONFIDENT THINKING THE BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING!
CONFIDENT THINKING THE BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970) was designed to get past the arrogance of the salesman and the adversarial relationship of the selling situation to how it “listened.” It was also designed to focus on the crippling effect of inappropriate sales psychology. Selling is a walk in the part if the salesman has his ducks in a role and isn’t a barrier to his own success because he fails to see the selling situation clearly.
This intelligence can be first gleaned from his own customer base. Virtually all the problems experienced servicing his accounts have occurred in his prospect’s operations. The confident thinking salesman will not only note but also use this data for he will:
(1) Have an understanding of customer business, history, culture, and operations.
(2) Have a record of past and current complaints.
(3) Have identified these complaints specifically as they relate to application of his products, and how they were dispatched, or not.
(4) Have a record of the time lag between reporting and addressing complaints.
(5) Have a record of complexity and success or failure in meeting complaints.
(6) Have a clear understanding of chronic problems associated with technology.
(7) Have an assessment of customer operating competence.
(8) Have a record of who, what, when, where, how, and why relative to account.
This intelligence alerts the salesman to every possible nuance of the sales call, and is pivotal to an exploration and evaluation of the prospect’s current satisfaction. It also represents listening with a “third ear.” This is not a time to be preoccupied with what to say or make an impression. This is a time to listen and learn. There are three levels of hearing in every selling exchange:
(1) The “hearing level”: we hear a noise, the muddled voice of the speaker, but little else.
(2) The “listening level”: we hear what is said, but fail to decode and register what is meant.
(3) The “thinking level”: we hear the words, understand the implicit and explicit message, and decode and digest its precise meaning.
“Listening” is only possible at the “third level.”
Salesmen, like all everyone, are handicapped when it comes to listening: 40 percent of our development is learning to talk; 60 percent learning to read. This leaves out training in listening completely. It would seem we are supposed to acquire the skill by osmosis. Consequently, most salesmen are poor listeners.
There are a series of natural or imposed impediments to active listening: worrying about some situation at home; wounded pride for lack of interest or respect shown by the prospect; a wandering mind, thinking of the next sales call; or how the commission will be spent. A trigger word by the prospect can also throw the salesman emotionally off balance. When the rebuttal instinct comes into play, the game is over.
Listening demands that most rare of human characteristics, emotional maturity and self-discipline. With this maturity comes control, with control comes confident thinking, and with confident thinking comes competence.
So, for a situation to “listen” well, the salesman must be totally absorbed with his whole body. This means utilizing eyes, ears, hands, and posture as components of listening to display genuine interest and attention. Surveys have indicated that 75 percent of communication is verbal, 25 percent is written, and yet only 15 percent of retained information is received through the ears, while 85 percent is received through the eyes.
For the salesman to see clearly, hear clearly, and react clearly, he must trust his mind and allow his whole body to experience the situation. From the moment he comes into the presence of the prospect and his environs, he wears the unique personality, essence, and character of the place as a garment.
He feels everything from his initial contact with the receptionist, security guard or secretary to the person he is to meet. From this, he has a sense of the space and place and what it projects. Is the climate relaxed, tense, anxious, frantic or self-absorbed? The walls talk from environs of the lobby -- how furnished, decorated and ergonomically appointed -- to how he is treated. Is it a salesman friendly? Does it feel hostile, trusting, suspicious, playful, perky or somber? Does it have a traditional or postmodern ambience? Emerson said, “What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you!” Nothing is a function of chance. Everything is crying to be understood.
The salesman can corroborate impressions as he waits by the manner others are greeted and treated in these confines. All this is part of listening.
Unless all feelers are engaged and sensitive to what is going on, something can be missed that is important in terms of the framework of content (sales opportunity), context (relative consistency of how environment listens) and process (business health).
These data will be fed simultaneously into the salesman’s thinking starting with (1) awareness of potential for major and minor goals, proceeding naturally to (2) awareness of what it all may mean leavened by judgment, and continuing to (3) a preliminary diagnosis of the most prospect friendly approach to the situation, keeping in mind (4) a backup plan should the initial approach go awry, then depending on the consensus level (5) readiness to close and implement the sale.
A batter in baseball may only get a hit every third or fourth appearance at the plate, which is considered good, but he expects to be ready to hit every time. He contributes, however, when he puts the ball in play. Likewise, the salesman may face the prospect with a similar success ratio, but he also knows that a sale only begins with the order and not before.
These data are flooding the salesman’s consciousness. On the one hand, he must be ready, and on the other, must trust his mind to process the information efficiently. Confident thinking precedes engagement. A salesman can think too much. Ultimately, he needs to trust his wits, training, and conceptual framework to put him in the zone going with the flow with mind and body, heart and soul all in sync with each other.
His only responsibility is to be open to the experience, alive and sensitive to everything. No matter how the call goes, it is a learning experience and he is making progress. As long as he has the prospect’s best interests at heart, he will not need to use the words of being dedicated to a joint problem solving connection with the prospect. It will be understood.
To avoid the impediment of all his biases, his cultural programming, he needs to display due diligence when they surface.
Once I was traveling with one of my men, who became engaged in an animated conversation with a man at a large construction site. The man was affable and well dressed being moved to ask my salesman for his business card. They exchanged cards and my salesman nearly feinted on the spot. The man he was talking with so comfortably was the chairman of the board of a Fortune 100 company. Up to that time, this particular salesman suffered from being too mechanical and ineffective in his selling. This seemed a breakthrough, but only if he could get his arms around the severity of his reaction. His first comment when we discussed the matter later was, “He’s a civil war buff like I am. We just happened to have that in common.”
No, I replied. That is not why he asked you to call on him in New York City. “No?” No, I repeated. Why, then, do you think he did, I continued. This completely puzzled my salesman. He simply could not believe he enjoyed such rapport because he “listened.” He allowed the CEO to display his remarkable civil war knowledge. Didn’t you notice, I persisted; you hardly spoke at all, fueling his remarks with questions that kept him on theme. You were selling. You could have embarrassed him with your knowledge but you didn’t. You perceived him correctly, and kept him on center stage.
Here was a salesman who was easily intimidated by position power, avoiding it whenever he could. This resulted in him making rote calls again and again on prospects without clout. His bias was showing.
Even with the flicker of bias, the prospect will sense this. It did not show in this case because it was a neutral zone, a construction site, and casual conversation on a subject of common interest with no one required to make a decision. Did the salesman experience an epiphany? I would like to say, yes, but that was not true. He took it as a fluke, and never called on the CEO in New York.
Should the salesman recognize such a bias, such vulnerability, he can control this by being aware of himself as he is, and accepting of this awareness in the conduct of the sales interview. Every interpersonal exchange has the potential for hidden contamination.
Going through the mind of the prospect in the sales interview is likely this chronology in descending order:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person?
(2) Can I see my people working closely with him?
(3) Will his product or service fit comfortably with what we are already doing?
(4) Is he technically competent?
Notice the chronology. It is always in this order, and the irony is that this is usually not clear to either the buyer or the seller. Both have probably bought into the myth that competence matters most, when in fact it matters lease in the fragile nature of interpersonal exchange. That is why high tech people are often duped in the selling situation. They think the mind is dominant when the emotions control the game.
The salesman who recognizes this chronology and works his magic first in creating comfort, then trust, then rapport and finally collegiality will have a trump card when it comes competence. If he isn’t competent, the prospect will be duped and likely become embittered towards people who sell, stereotyping them as distrustful when they are no more distrustful than any other profession, perhaps less so. Comfort, fit, and competence are in sequential order and this never changes despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.
The problem with the selling profession is that the emphasis is on company, product, and personnel competence, along with technical competence, failing to see these are ancillary to interpersonal acumen. Obviously, competence is important, but competence doesn’t produce sales, active listening does.
I know. I worked for a company as a chemical sales engineer, and later as an executive. My initial orientation with the company was a month long intensive technical training program of company technology, products and services, but not an hour on how to approach the prospect other than wowing him to death with my competence. The same “technical dandies” called on me when I was an executive. They were trained to dazzle with know how. It was almost an affront to them to consider selling being anything else.
That said there is also the matter of the “killer instinct.” Everything is in the salesman’s hand, but for the order. When the salesman has the prospect psychically ready to buy with no obstacles in place, he must ask for the order, and not a token order, but the order that will establish truly a new account. This must be done quickly, surgically, honestly, forthrightly, aggressively, but not mechanically. It is the conclusion of a natural progression completed as expected.
I have seen few with the “killer instinct” other than those I would deem intimidators. I do not consider intimidation selling. The prospect and salesman are not adversaries. They are potential partners, but partners must first be comfortable with each other and then trusting of each other before creating a bond of working together. When the salesman punishes the prospect with his personality and knowledge, and attempts to overwhelm with the dance, success may occur in the short term but not beyond. He needs to build a bridge of trust between the two companies to create long-term loyalty.
Given these criteria, it is the reason why introverted salesmen are the most successful in the long run. They don’t have to do the charismatic dance, don’t have to be a big deal, and don’t have to be all things to all people, for they are there to see, to listen, and to act accordingly. Is there still a place for the charismatic backslapping salesman? Obviously, there is because most companies still recruit and develop them.
One time I was at a national sales meeting when all of the high talent area managers of the company were assembled at the remote location of Starve Rock State Park in LaSalle-Peru, Illinois. This was in the 1960s just as a $100 million company was about to soar into an international $1 billion corporation, and would in the matter of a decade.
The atmosphere was electric. After dinner one evening, the national sales manager was holding court in a corner of the huge meeting room, surrounded by his adoring acolytes. They were about four deep, spellbound by his every word. He was the prototype of the charismatic figure, six five, 260, tall, dark and handsome with a booming voice and a roaring laugh that tinkled the glassware on the horseshoe created meeting table. His command of language exploded like firecrackers in the mind.
My friend and I were not part of the group. We were sitting diagonally across the room a distant 100 feet away sipping coffee observing this scenario. Finally, my friend said, “I’ll never make it with this outfit.” I asked him why. “Can you picture me becoming like Tex?” I started to laugh. I got the giggles so bad I was getting a stomachache. This caused the mountain that was roaring across the room to grow silent. All heads turned accusingly towards us. I had interrupted the soliloquy. Obediently, I raised my hand palm up in a gesture of apology, with the mountain resuming his message.
My friend said, “What was that all about?” I had the incredible thought of Tex trying to be like you, I said. My friend was small of stature, slim of physique, quiet with a small voice and an introspective disposition. Although only thirty, he was losing his hair, wore thick glasses that made him look a bit like Woody Allen, and moved with exertion.
He was offended. “Thanks a lot.” Oh, no, I added, I mean no offense. Look at him, I said, he’s a poster board and you’re the real thing, flesh and blood. You’ve outsold the poster board when he was in your shoes ten to one.
I knew this to be a fact. He didn’t know how Tex climbed the ladder. I did. He didn’t know that Tex never sold very much, or that he had a mentor that had greased his skids. The irony is that his mentor was the mild mannered executive vice president that apparently felt he needed the charismatic fire that Tex brought to the table to complement his personality.
He left me that night wounded still believing I had stuck a sword in his side, but obviously he recovered. My friend did leave the company, assumed a similar position with another company, and ultimately became its CEO. I always wondered if he found himself a Tex.
The point is there is no reason to attempt to emulate what we are not, or to apologize for why we are successful as we are.
There is a habit that can be developed that can be more revealing than any book read, guru favored, or training program attended and that is the habit of critiquing every sales call, good, bad, or indifferent with a few words after the call as if keeping a diary.
Words stare back written in the heat of the moment to reveal hidden meanings. They leap up to the mind to make known what lies beyond the hurt, wounded pride, humiliation, confusion, defeat, embarrassment, or euphoria experienced during the sales call. Patterns become apparent showing what works and what doesn’t, when and why. Seeing the sales call in the cool of review can become like footprints to success.
POWER OF THE SALES CRITIQUE
When I was a field sales manager traveling with one of my men, I would critique the sales call immediately afterwards, retiring to a coffee shop, writing on napkins my observations. A former salesman confessed to me one day that the stack of napkins he retained from those calls had grown to eighteen inches high. “I’ve referred to them over the years,” he said, “and found them useful especially as a manager.”
My aim with the sales critique was to impress on the salesman the fact that we carry our geography with us, and no one more so than the prospect. By keeping these notes, the salesman comes to appreciate the prospect’s motivation, as patterns are crying out to be heard as the salesman steps into the prospect’s office.
Culture dictates the implicit behavior of operations, which may be generalized into comfort, complacency or contribution. Data will highlight one or the other or a combination as the prospect handles the interview, his agenda, interruptions or crises.
Then there is the matter of how the prospect wants to be perceived. Books, certificates, mementoes, honors, trophies, personal albums, type and condition of furniture, location of office, and its arrangement all have meaning. It can be quickly gleaned if this is a working place or a shrine. Without a word being said the salesman can undress the prospect as a person. Capturing the essence of a place can avoid bouncing off the walls of resistance with none the wiser why.
When I was a salesman calling on a General Electric facilities manager with my area manager, his office reminded me of a shrine. Not only were university degrees prominently on display but honorary degrees as well. Before I could adjust to this exhibit, he blared, “Give me your spiel,” then immediately turned his swivel chair around with his back facing us and proceeded to cut his fingernails. His office was pretentious to the extreme with furnishings fit for a chief executive officer.
For fully ninety seconds, I did not say a word and motioned to my area manager for support and acquiescence. He nodded. Ninety seconds of silence in a sales call is an eternity. Finally, he turned his chair around, and in a stern voice, as if he were a principal addressing a student, said, “What seems to be your problem, young man?” I said, apparently, we caught you at a bad time. I would like to reschedule when you have time to hear my presentation.
He came back, “What if that is never?” I fed his exact words back to him. What if that is never? And again, I sat there in silence. Meanwhile, my area manager was dying. But I was resolute. Looking him in the eye, I waited. He shook his head, looked to my area manager for support, who turned away, put down his nail clipper, and said, “Set it up an appointment with my secretary.” I said, thank you and left.
The critique to that call was simple: prospect arrogant, cut his nails, no respect, office shrine, need to find another way, find George, made appointment but little point to follow up.
Before the next call, I did some espionage and found Mr. Prospect was not George, or the person who could buy. He was an administrator in power plant operations.
Two other bits of information were eventually learned as well: he was intimidated by technical people, especially engineers; and was embittered having been passed over for promotion several times. This was learned from the chief engineer who was “George,” and quite accommodating.
How was this learned? A call was made to the director of engineering. He was asked (on the phone) technical questions on power plant operations. He referred me to the chief engineer. I have found executives are quite amenable to sloughing off such queries to men in their line of command. To my amazement, then, Mr. Prospect had the title of power plant facility management but was ignorant of operations, and dealt with that ignorance by acting as a barrier to sales people having a role to establish technical exchange with operating personnel.
THE CASSANDRA EFFECT
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, King of Troy. She was endowed with the gift of prophecy from the god Apollo. The only problem is Cassandra was never believed. Something of that nature has been my experience in the selling situation.
It has been so easy for me to use confident thinking in confident selling. Yet, many of my colleagues saw it as simply a matter of luck, timing or personal influence. When I made presentations on this indirect and unconventional approach to selling, management was often bemused but not convinced that it should depart from the conventional wisdom of adversarial selling, or overwhelming the prospect with benefits, handling objections, and closing with determination. This mechanical approach was totally at variance with my process approach.
The audience for confident selling did not appear until 1970 when a book of that title was published after I retired the first time in my thirties. That audience proved to be more than 100,000. Now, in the early twenty-first century with confident thinking in demand, it would seem the adage applies as well to confident selling, or the student is ready and the teacher has arrived.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher was previously a sales executive with Nalco Chemical Company working for that company in South Africa, Europe and South Africa, as well as the United States; and for Honeywell Avionics as a psychologist, and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. as a human resource executive. He is author of several books and articles in this and related genres. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970) was designed to get past the arrogance of the salesman and the adversarial relationship of the selling situation to how it “listened.” It was also designed to focus on the crippling effect of inappropriate sales psychology. Selling is a walk in the part if the salesman has his ducks in a role and isn’t a barrier to his own success because he fails to see the selling situation clearly.
This intelligence can be first gleaned from his own customer base. Virtually all the problems experienced servicing his accounts have occurred in his prospect’s operations. The confident thinking salesman will not only note but also use this data for he will:
(1) Have an understanding of customer business, history, culture, and operations.
(2) Have a record of past and current complaints.
(3) Have identified these complaints specifically as they relate to application of his products, and how they were dispatched, or not.
(4) Have a record of the time lag between reporting and addressing complaints.
(5) Have a record of complexity and success or failure in meeting complaints.
(6) Have a clear understanding of chronic problems associated with technology.
(7) Have an assessment of customer operating competence.
(8) Have a record of who, what, when, where, how, and why relative to account.
This intelligence alerts the salesman to every possible nuance of the sales call, and is pivotal to an exploration and evaluation of the prospect’s current satisfaction. It also represents listening with a “third ear.” This is not a time to be preoccupied with what to say or make an impression. This is a time to listen and learn. There are three levels of hearing in every selling exchange:
(1) The “hearing level”: we hear a noise, the muddled voice of the speaker, but little else.
(2) The “listening level”: we hear what is said, but fail to decode and register what is meant.
(3) The “thinking level”: we hear the words, understand the implicit and explicit message, and decode and digest its precise meaning.
“Listening” is only possible at the “third level.”
Salesmen, like all everyone, are handicapped when it comes to listening: 40 percent of our development is learning to talk; 60 percent learning to read. This leaves out training in listening completely. It would seem we are supposed to acquire the skill by osmosis. Consequently, most salesmen are poor listeners.
There are a series of natural or imposed impediments to active listening: worrying about some situation at home; wounded pride for lack of interest or respect shown by the prospect; a wandering mind, thinking of the next sales call; or how the commission will be spent. A trigger word by the prospect can also throw the salesman emotionally off balance. When the rebuttal instinct comes into play, the game is over.
Listening demands that most rare of human characteristics, emotional maturity and self-discipline. With this maturity comes control, with control comes confident thinking, and with confident thinking comes competence.
So, for a situation to “listen” well, the salesman must be totally absorbed with his whole body. This means utilizing eyes, ears, hands, and posture as components of listening to display genuine interest and attention. Surveys have indicated that 75 percent of communication is verbal, 25 percent is written, and yet only 15 percent of retained information is received through the ears, while 85 percent is received through the eyes.
For the salesman to see clearly, hear clearly, and react clearly, he must trust his mind and allow his whole body to experience the situation. From the moment he comes into the presence of the prospect and his environs, he wears the unique personality, essence, and character of the place as a garment.
He feels everything from his initial contact with the receptionist, security guard or secretary to the person he is to meet. From this, he has a sense of the space and place and what it projects. Is the climate relaxed, tense, anxious, frantic or self-absorbed? The walls talk from environs of the lobby -- how furnished, decorated and ergonomically appointed -- to how he is treated. Is it a salesman friendly? Does it feel hostile, trusting, suspicious, playful, perky or somber? Does it have a traditional or postmodern ambience? Emerson said, “What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you!” Nothing is a function of chance. Everything is crying to be understood.
The salesman can corroborate impressions as he waits by the manner others are greeted and treated in these confines. All this is part of listening.
Unless all feelers are engaged and sensitive to what is going on, something can be missed that is important in terms of the framework of content (sales opportunity), context (relative consistency of how environment listens) and process (business health).
These data will be fed simultaneously into the salesman’s thinking starting with (1) awareness of potential for major and minor goals, proceeding naturally to (2) awareness of what it all may mean leavened by judgment, and continuing to (3) a preliminary diagnosis of the most prospect friendly approach to the situation, keeping in mind (4) a backup plan should the initial approach go awry, then depending on the consensus level (5) readiness to close and implement the sale.
A batter in baseball may only get a hit every third or fourth appearance at the plate, which is considered good, but he expects to be ready to hit every time. He contributes, however, when he puts the ball in play. Likewise, the salesman may face the prospect with a similar success ratio, but he also knows that a sale only begins with the order and not before.
These data are flooding the salesman’s consciousness. On the one hand, he must be ready, and on the other, must trust his mind to process the information efficiently. Confident thinking precedes engagement. A salesman can think too much. Ultimately, he needs to trust his wits, training, and conceptual framework to put him in the zone going with the flow with mind and body, heart and soul all in sync with each other.
His only responsibility is to be open to the experience, alive and sensitive to everything. No matter how the call goes, it is a learning experience and he is making progress. As long as he has the prospect’s best interests at heart, he will not need to use the words of being dedicated to a joint problem solving connection with the prospect. It will be understood.
To avoid the impediment of all his biases, his cultural programming, he needs to display due diligence when they surface.
Once I was traveling with one of my men, who became engaged in an animated conversation with a man at a large construction site. The man was affable and well dressed being moved to ask my salesman for his business card. They exchanged cards and my salesman nearly feinted on the spot. The man he was talking with so comfortably was the chairman of the board of a Fortune 100 company. Up to that time, this particular salesman suffered from being too mechanical and ineffective in his selling. This seemed a breakthrough, but only if he could get his arms around the severity of his reaction. His first comment when we discussed the matter later was, “He’s a civil war buff like I am. We just happened to have that in common.”
No, I replied. That is not why he asked you to call on him in New York City. “No?” No, I repeated. Why, then, do you think he did, I continued. This completely puzzled my salesman. He simply could not believe he enjoyed such rapport because he “listened.” He allowed the CEO to display his remarkable civil war knowledge. Didn’t you notice, I persisted; you hardly spoke at all, fueling his remarks with questions that kept him on theme. You were selling. You could have embarrassed him with your knowledge but you didn’t. You perceived him correctly, and kept him on center stage.
Here was a salesman who was easily intimidated by position power, avoiding it whenever he could. This resulted in him making rote calls again and again on prospects without clout. His bias was showing.
Even with the flicker of bias, the prospect will sense this. It did not show in this case because it was a neutral zone, a construction site, and casual conversation on a subject of common interest with no one required to make a decision. Did the salesman experience an epiphany? I would like to say, yes, but that was not true. He took it as a fluke, and never called on the CEO in New York.
Should the salesman recognize such a bias, such vulnerability, he can control this by being aware of himself as he is, and accepting of this awareness in the conduct of the sales interview. Every interpersonal exchange has the potential for hidden contamination.
Going through the mind of the prospect in the sales interview is likely this chronology in descending order:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person?
(2) Can I see my people working closely with him?
(3) Will his product or service fit comfortably with what we are already doing?
(4) Is he technically competent?
Notice the chronology. It is always in this order, and the irony is that this is usually not clear to either the buyer or the seller. Both have probably bought into the myth that competence matters most, when in fact it matters lease in the fragile nature of interpersonal exchange. That is why high tech people are often duped in the selling situation. They think the mind is dominant when the emotions control the game.
The salesman who recognizes this chronology and works his magic first in creating comfort, then trust, then rapport and finally collegiality will have a trump card when it comes competence. If he isn’t competent, the prospect will be duped and likely become embittered towards people who sell, stereotyping them as distrustful when they are no more distrustful than any other profession, perhaps less so. Comfort, fit, and competence are in sequential order and this never changes despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.
The problem with the selling profession is that the emphasis is on company, product, and personnel competence, along with technical competence, failing to see these are ancillary to interpersonal acumen. Obviously, competence is important, but competence doesn’t produce sales, active listening does.
I know. I worked for a company as a chemical sales engineer, and later as an executive. My initial orientation with the company was a month long intensive technical training program of company technology, products and services, but not an hour on how to approach the prospect other than wowing him to death with my competence. The same “technical dandies” called on me when I was an executive. They were trained to dazzle with know how. It was almost an affront to them to consider selling being anything else.
That said there is also the matter of the “killer instinct.” Everything is in the salesman’s hand, but for the order. When the salesman has the prospect psychically ready to buy with no obstacles in place, he must ask for the order, and not a token order, but the order that will establish truly a new account. This must be done quickly, surgically, honestly, forthrightly, aggressively, but not mechanically. It is the conclusion of a natural progression completed as expected.
I have seen few with the “killer instinct” other than those I would deem intimidators. I do not consider intimidation selling. The prospect and salesman are not adversaries. They are potential partners, but partners must first be comfortable with each other and then trusting of each other before creating a bond of working together. When the salesman punishes the prospect with his personality and knowledge, and attempts to overwhelm with the dance, success may occur in the short term but not beyond. He needs to build a bridge of trust between the two companies to create long-term loyalty.
Given these criteria, it is the reason why introverted salesmen are the most successful in the long run. They don’t have to do the charismatic dance, don’t have to be a big deal, and don’t have to be all things to all people, for they are there to see, to listen, and to act accordingly. Is there still a place for the charismatic backslapping salesman? Obviously, there is because most companies still recruit and develop them.
One time I was at a national sales meeting when all of the high talent area managers of the company were assembled at the remote location of Starve Rock State Park in LaSalle-Peru, Illinois. This was in the 1960s just as a $100 million company was about to soar into an international $1 billion corporation, and would in the matter of a decade.
The atmosphere was electric. After dinner one evening, the national sales manager was holding court in a corner of the huge meeting room, surrounded by his adoring acolytes. They were about four deep, spellbound by his every word. He was the prototype of the charismatic figure, six five, 260, tall, dark and handsome with a booming voice and a roaring laugh that tinkled the glassware on the horseshoe created meeting table. His command of language exploded like firecrackers in the mind.
My friend and I were not part of the group. We were sitting diagonally across the room a distant 100 feet away sipping coffee observing this scenario. Finally, my friend said, “I’ll never make it with this outfit.” I asked him why. “Can you picture me becoming like Tex?” I started to laugh. I got the giggles so bad I was getting a stomachache. This caused the mountain that was roaring across the room to grow silent. All heads turned accusingly towards us. I had interrupted the soliloquy. Obediently, I raised my hand palm up in a gesture of apology, with the mountain resuming his message.
My friend said, “What was that all about?” I had the incredible thought of Tex trying to be like you, I said. My friend was small of stature, slim of physique, quiet with a small voice and an introspective disposition. Although only thirty, he was losing his hair, wore thick glasses that made him look a bit like Woody Allen, and moved with exertion.
He was offended. “Thanks a lot.” Oh, no, I added, I mean no offense. Look at him, I said, he’s a poster board and you’re the real thing, flesh and blood. You’ve outsold the poster board when he was in your shoes ten to one.
I knew this to be a fact. He didn’t know how Tex climbed the ladder. I did. He didn’t know that Tex never sold very much, or that he had a mentor that had greased his skids. The irony is that his mentor was the mild mannered executive vice president that apparently felt he needed the charismatic fire that Tex brought to the table to complement his personality.
He left me that night wounded still believing I had stuck a sword in his side, but obviously he recovered. My friend did leave the company, assumed a similar position with another company, and ultimately became its CEO. I always wondered if he found himself a Tex.
The point is there is no reason to attempt to emulate what we are not, or to apologize for why we are successful as we are.
There is a habit that can be developed that can be more revealing than any book read, guru favored, or training program attended and that is the habit of critiquing every sales call, good, bad, or indifferent with a few words after the call as if keeping a diary.
Words stare back written in the heat of the moment to reveal hidden meanings. They leap up to the mind to make known what lies beyond the hurt, wounded pride, humiliation, confusion, defeat, embarrassment, or euphoria experienced during the sales call. Patterns become apparent showing what works and what doesn’t, when and why. Seeing the sales call in the cool of review can become like footprints to success.
POWER OF THE SALES CRITIQUE
When I was a field sales manager traveling with one of my men, I would critique the sales call immediately afterwards, retiring to a coffee shop, writing on napkins my observations. A former salesman confessed to me one day that the stack of napkins he retained from those calls had grown to eighteen inches high. “I’ve referred to them over the years,” he said, “and found them useful especially as a manager.”
My aim with the sales critique was to impress on the salesman the fact that we carry our geography with us, and no one more so than the prospect. By keeping these notes, the salesman comes to appreciate the prospect’s motivation, as patterns are crying out to be heard as the salesman steps into the prospect’s office.
Culture dictates the implicit behavior of operations, which may be generalized into comfort, complacency or contribution. Data will highlight one or the other or a combination as the prospect handles the interview, his agenda, interruptions or crises.
Then there is the matter of how the prospect wants to be perceived. Books, certificates, mementoes, honors, trophies, personal albums, type and condition of furniture, location of office, and its arrangement all have meaning. It can be quickly gleaned if this is a working place or a shrine. Without a word being said the salesman can undress the prospect as a person. Capturing the essence of a place can avoid bouncing off the walls of resistance with none the wiser why.
When I was a salesman calling on a General Electric facilities manager with my area manager, his office reminded me of a shrine. Not only were university degrees prominently on display but honorary degrees as well. Before I could adjust to this exhibit, he blared, “Give me your spiel,” then immediately turned his swivel chair around with his back facing us and proceeded to cut his fingernails. His office was pretentious to the extreme with furnishings fit for a chief executive officer.
For fully ninety seconds, I did not say a word and motioned to my area manager for support and acquiescence. He nodded. Ninety seconds of silence in a sales call is an eternity. Finally, he turned his chair around, and in a stern voice, as if he were a principal addressing a student, said, “What seems to be your problem, young man?” I said, apparently, we caught you at a bad time. I would like to reschedule when you have time to hear my presentation.
He came back, “What if that is never?” I fed his exact words back to him. What if that is never? And again, I sat there in silence. Meanwhile, my area manager was dying. But I was resolute. Looking him in the eye, I waited. He shook his head, looked to my area manager for support, who turned away, put down his nail clipper, and said, “Set it up an appointment with my secretary.” I said, thank you and left.
The critique to that call was simple: prospect arrogant, cut his nails, no respect, office shrine, need to find another way, find George, made appointment but little point to follow up.
Before the next call, I did some espionage and found Mr. Prospect was not George, or the person who could buy. He was an administrator in power plant operations.
Two other bits of information were eventually learned as well: he was intimidated by technical people, especially engineers; and was embittered having been passed over for promotion several times. This was learned from the chief engineer who was “George,” and quite accommodating.
How was this learned? A call was made to the director of engineering. He was asked (on the phone) technical questions on power plant operations. He referred me to the chief engineer. I have found executives are quite amenable to sloughing off such queries to men in their line of command. To my amazement, then, Mr. Prospect had the title of power plant facility management but was ignorant of operations, and dealt with that ignorance by acting as a barrier to sales people having a role to establish technical exchange with operating personnel.
THE CASSANDRA EFFECT
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, King of Troy. She was endowed with the gift of prophecy from the god Apollo. The only problem is Cassandra was never believed. Something of that nature has been my experience in the selling situation.
It has been so easy for me to use confident thinking in confident selling. Yet, many of my colleagues saw it as simply a matter of luck, timing or personal influence. When I made presentations on this indirect and unconventional approach to selling, management was often bemused but not convinced that it should depart from the conventional wisdom of adversarial selling, or overwhelming the prospect with benefits, handling objections, and closing with determination. This mechanical approach was totally at variance with my process approach.
The audience for confident selling did not appear until 1970 when a book of that title was published after I retired the first time in my thirties. That audience proved to be more than 100,000. Now, in the early twenty-first century with confident thinking in demand, it would seem the adage applies as well to confident selling, or the student is ready and the teacher has arrived.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher was previously a sales executive with Nalco Chemical Company working for that company in South Africa, Europe and South Africa, as well as the United States; and for Honeywell Avionics as a psychologist, and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. as a human resource executive. He is author of several books and articles in this and related genres. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 8: YOU ARE A CHANGE AGENT; START THE CHANGE PROCESS WITH YOURSELF; LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS DOOR OPENERS!
CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 8
LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS DOOR OPENERS
YOU ARE A CHANGE AGENT
START THE CHANGE PROCESS WITH YOURSELF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
What is the one thing of which we seem most fixated? To be in control! We all like to think we are working our own agenda, living our own lives, and on our own terms, but are we? A better case could be made that we are out-of-control, indeed, that no one or anything is under control. Everything appears in a state of flux.
This is in no small way due to our programming. We are a solution driven society that expects problems to be solved when they can only be controlled. We desire stability in the vortex of change.
The world is changing. Technology is driving change. Populations are exploding. Values are changing. Developing nations are developing faster. Pollution is increasing. People are living longer.
We can pretend that this doesn’t affect us, that we can insulate ourselves from change, but that of course is impossible. Our programming is designed for a stable society not an ever-changing society.
PROGRAMMING, CONTROL AND THE FALLACY OF THE PROBLEM SOLVING
Such programming of course often fails, especially in school. The most egregious offenders find themselves marched off to the principal’s office with a pink slip and a call home to their parents. Self-control is not in the mix. Conforming behavior is praised as the controlling norm. Those not inclined to subscribe to this norm are soon labeled “trouble makers” or “disruptive influences,” and candidates for Ritalin or some other mind-altering drug.
We are programmed to behave even if it means making us walking zombies.
It doesn’t end there. A scarlet acronym can come to label us an ADD person, that is, a person with an “attention deficit disorder.” Imagine, here we are starting school, a relatively new person in the cocoon of “life,” and already we have acquired the label of a "problem child."
Psychiatrists attempt to drug this ADD malady to death. It is as if our biochemical synapses are at war against us, and the only way to countermand their advantage is to wage a similar biochemical war against them. Lost in this confusing melodrama is the individual child who simply is struggling at this early stage in life to get his insides and outsides adjusted to each other.
Later, I will share the remarkable case of William George Mosley with you. He did just that, got his insides and outsides to work together, with little help from anyone save his grandmother, whom he was exposed to for only three years.
My remarks here are directed to the child who has too much, too many, too soon, and not to the child who has too little, too few, too late. Both are handicapped, but the spoiled child has a handicapping of scale that drives out passion for the possible filling the void with insatiable need.
The abandoned child and the spoiled child are polar opposites that can come to resemble each other with indifferent stimulation of the lower (impulsive) centers of the brain. This occurs when they are fed too many sweets and other condiments that activate these brain centers and energize them to compulsive erratic and disruptive behavior.
Affluent parents often supplement this excess by providing their children with all the electronic wonders currently available. Indigent parents, on the other hand, are as likely as not to have their children sitting in front of a television set as babysitter allowing the colored pixels to dance off their eyes putting them in equal electronic daze to their affluent counterparts.
Both approaches are equally hypnotic and chaotic. It is not uncommon to find an eight-year-old child of affluence to have her own cell phone, while sharing a computer, iPod and game boy with her ten-year-old brother. And it is equally likely that a family on welfare has cable television with a hundred channels for their children to cruise with the remote at their leisure massaging their delicate psyches with bizarre fantasy images.
Parents of all socio-economic classes have a much easier time saying, “yes” to everything than “no” to anything. Saying “no” would demand explanation. Few adults have the time or inclination to communicate meaningfully with their children on their level.
Children almost from birth learn the power of tears and advantage of screams of disruption. If there is anything that fuels a child’s anxiety, it is the lack of attention and the absence of satisfaction. A child soon learns, reluctantly so, that attention is not negotiable, parents are too other-centered, and thus attention is eventually conceded, placing the emphasis on satisfaction, now!
Children quickly discern parents have an obligatory rhetoric of shoulds and should nots, which they consistently fail to put into practice. While mother fastens her little darlings into their car harness, the little wonders note she forgets to fasten her own seatbelt. They are told always to tell the truth, and when asked their age at the ticket counter, their father says before they can answer, “under twelve,” when nearly thirteen. Such discrepancies feed a budding cynicism and a blossoming duplicity.
Mixed messages come to have the regularity of the Fruit Loops such children find in their cereal bowl of a morning, and so this whole obsession with control becomes a bit mystifying from the start.
Long before children find themselves in school, they have been introduced to doublespeak, which was the theme of Robert Smith’s book, “Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing” (1974). It is the rare individual that can master this duplicitous language and still remain authentic. Consequently, self-estrangement starts very early and is consistently fed with dissembling, or beating around the bush.
It is because of cultural arrogance that the problems we solve are more than likely the problems we create over and over again. Former President Harry S. Truman had on his desk a plaque: “The buck stops here!” It identified his presidency, but has become an empty cliché. The buck keeps getting passed around and around until ultimately no one can be found responsible. That is the case with the ADD child. A simple thing as changing the child's diet might do more good than any mood-altering drug.
Solutions are aplenty but no one wants to tackle the real problem head on. We like to blame it all on crass materialism and the depressing spiritual void, but does that get us on top of the situation? I don't think so. To control our problems we need a moral compass with a set of reliable principles that is also adjustable to changing values and demands.
Instead, we continue to describe our problems and tack solutions on them rather than design a way forward. Studies are conducted that reduce children to provocative numbers that can be presented in statistical correlations, followed by articles and books. Obviously, this is not the intent of Jeffrey Kluger’s featured article in “Time” (July 10, 2006), “How your siblings make you who you are.” Kluger’s opens with the caption, “the new science of siblings.” That should do it. Who is going to dispute scientific findings?
According to these data, parents, teachers, preachers, mentors and other authority figures are placed in secondary roles to siblings. It is another way of taking authority figures off the hook. It is not their fault that the world is in a ness with few mature self-reliant adults on the scene.
Children have endured being essentially their own parents through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s, as both parents are likely to have full-timed jobs, who don’t expect ever to become old and so never to grow up, and who verify their eternal youth status by partying in their spare time, while expecting their children to grow up tall, and straight and true without any directional control or influence from them other than extravagant materialistic support.
It didn’t happen in the 1970s, and it isn’t happening now. It may make good copy to suggest that siblings carry the load of influence, if so, it is a matter of default not by design, while burying the problem once again.
We want so desperately to explain away the aberrancy of children, and to take society, especially parents off the hook, because the society we have created is a sick society and no one wants to tackle that can of worms.
We have created little monsters at all levels of society, some of them running the country, and the only chance we have of correcting this problem is by installing a confident thinking problem solving governor in children at an early age where they make choices that are self-creating rather than self-destructive, where they are the masters of change rather than its slaves, and where they live in harmony with their internal clock and external environment, and where they have confidence in the change process.
Children are the only hope. There is no hope of changing chronological adults suspended in terminal adolescence. There is no way to make them mature self-reliant emotionally responsive problem solvers. If you have any doubts about this, I suggest you read my “Six Silent Killers” (1998). It is not only a management problem but also a societal one. You cannot “will” people into creative problem solvers comfortable with change when they have been programmed into critical thinking conformist and passive individuals who stubbornly insist on stability in a climate of constant change.
THE PROBLEM, THE PROBLEM SOLVER, AND CODEPENDENCY
We have handicapped our culture in the problem solving. There is no shortage of television gurus and authors who have all the answers without having the slightest knowledge of the persons whose problems they are attempting to solve, other than superficially. You cannot prescribe a cure for the loveless marriage, the drug addict, or the perennially unemployed worker by a three-minute session with some television crony. It is simply a praise of folly.
If truth be known, you can’t do it with 3,000 hours if the relationship is one of passive engagement, looking for answers or justification outside of one’s own chaotic heart.
If you don’t have your ducks in a row, don’t have a clear identity in terms of your “real self” and “ideal self,” or have come to accept the difference between self-demands and role demands, any therapeutic exercise is one of futility because you will never come to define your situation as it actually is, and therefore to design an action plan forward.
The more dependent on the authority of someone else the deeper into self-delusion and ultimate self-destruction you are likely to drift. The attraction for such dependency is a closet desire for change without pain. Indeed, you want the option of blaming someone else should your life not turn up roses. It will not happen. No one can save you from yourself but yourself.
Melody Beattie has written a series of books such as “Codependent No More” (1987) and “Beyond Codependency” (1989), which have all the right words and ideas about getting beyond making the situation worse for the person you’re trying to help, but does it work?
Perhaps everyone reading this, including this writer, has had a needy family member or friend crippled by continual “help.” What invariably develops is that the needy person comes to expect to be “bailed out” no matter how serious the fix he or she manages to get in. It is never the person’s fault. The needy person knows your vulnerability, knows how to exploit all your weaknesses with the precision of a surgeon with little risk, and even less sense of regret should it destroy your own security in the process. The needy have only sensitivity to their need.
Once the pattern is established, it never changes. Gradually, the high crimes and misdemeanors of the needy person escalate until you are emotionally and economically strapped. The phone can ring at any time of night or day and you are expected to be there for them. Were the positions reversed, do you think the needy person would be there for you? If pigs could fly!
If a family member will have none of this, that family member is exempt from being contacted. The needy person knows he will not be moved by tears, guilt, blackmail, or threats (including the threat of suicide). Now why is that?
The needy person recognizes the limits of his or her manipulative skills, and therefore employs them only where success is guaranteed. It is the same with the child. The child knows when and with whom to engineer a crying jag and when it would be a waste of energy.
Is such unresponsive behavior cruel? Heartless? These are not even relevant questions. It puts the focus on the responder and not on the needy, not on the person who is on a self-destructive tear. A long time ago, if that person had been alone in the rag bone cellar of the human heart, and had no one else to pick her up, she would have picked herself up and gone forward. She would have developed the rudiments of problem solving. That is the nature of the life instinct and the survival mechanism placed in the human heart. That has been denied the needy person. Therein lies the tragedy.
A psychologist with an unpronounceable name, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, has made a reputation advocating, “going with the flow” (“Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” 1990). The author’s idea is flow is the way a painter gets so absorbed in his canvas that he loses track of time; the musician disappears into the piece she’s playing. It happens to athletes, surgeons and chess players. They are all in an apparent state of ecstasy where everything comes together. The common expression is “they’re in the zone” with good neurotransmitters flooding their synapses. Notice these people first are self-reliant and emotionally mature which is an index of disciplined control where such flow is possible. They have paid their dues, and the price tag has had more than a modicum of failure punched into its ticket.
That is the problem with such books: they give false hope; they put the preliminary need for struggle and pain aside and avoid the process, focusing instead on the product, the ecstasy of the optimal experience as if life were an unrealized utopian dream available to all; that it is a matter of osmosis. It is not. Too many don’t have the gumption to pick themselves off the deck and take the risks to do something meaningful. They would rather envy others that do.
Is this because people don't want to embrace the hard work of confident thinking? Only you can answer that question for yourself. In any case, it is true we look to books and television gurus to short-circuit us to the good life without sacrifice, pain, failure, or inconvenience. Yet, it is sacrifice, pain, failure, inconvenience, as well as discipline that allow these good neurotransmitters to flood our synapses and to put us in the zone.
Unfortunately, when you are at wits end and trying to grab something, anything, to make sense of a problematical life, there is always another book to ease your conscience if not resolve your concern.
Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial book that gained some attention, “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do” (1998) with the subtitle, “Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More.” Dr. Harris was taking on the debate between nature vs. nurture, and siding with the latter. As with the “Time” article weighing in on the influence of siblings, "the nurture assumption,” again, takes parents off the hook.
"The new science of siblings” and “the nurture assumption” are admittedly eye-catching declarations, but do they provide greater insight into the nature of self?
What makes problem solving so critical to confident thinking is that the person must first be aware that he or she has been programmed to think, believe, value and behave in a certain way. That type of programming was reasonably effective up to and through World War II, or the first half of the twentieth century. Change was then moving at a tortoise pace, but no longer. Now change is a speeding rabbit and each of us must govern the change process within ourselves if we are to be effective change agents in our problem solving.
This programming is in trouble because it has created a passive society with a reactive disposition. We are in a time when people need to anticipate and plan actions designed to unravel complexities not be consumed by them, or to strike out on tangents. Unfortunately, we are all graduates of the “Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving.”
This is the school that believes throwing money at education will solve illiteracy; finding a cure for AIDS will stem this epidemic; conducting massive layoffs and redundancy exercises will bring back corporate health; searching for miraculous cures to obesity, diabetes, and other lifestyle diseases will ultimately succeed in a climate of self-indulgence.
Consequently, causes and effects are treated interchangeably, as if they are the same, which of course they are not. AIDS is an effect which is caused by ignorance and lifestyle promiscuity. It has resulted in a search for the definitive virus antidote while the epidemic spreads.
When causes are addressed, the results are dramatic. While modern medicine receives the accolades for improved mortality rates, lower birth defects, longevity and societal health, the credit more deservedly should go to public health practices, public health education and public sanitation. Safe drinking water, efficient control of waste removal, and educational lifestyle communiqués have been powerful change agents.
Meanwhile, we remain in awe of medical science with its sophisticated tools that have been put into play because of lifestyle excesses such as “CAT” scanners, x-ray therapy, renal dialysis machines, cardiac pacemakers, and other electronic devices that can identify and measure nearly every body function instantaneously. It is clear “Nuclear Man” has gambled almost everything on a mechanistic quantitative approach to his physical and psychological well being. The “heart of God” now resides in science. Translated: man can ravage his mind and body, and by extension his environment in wanton glee, and science ultimately as superman will come to the rescue.
What is paradoxical about science is that the cleaner the technology the more abstruse the ramifications. Take nuclear power. Nuclear energy has become the consensus source of cheap and clean fuel to rescue the planet from global pollution. Nuclear waste cannot be destroyed. Meanwhile, barges roam the seas and byways of the world in the dead of night like vessels without a country looking for a safe haven to dump their dubious product.
We think so well “big,” but so poorly “small.” Little things are killing the planet and us with them. Lifestyle excesses start with feeding sugar to babies giving them what they want rather than need, which continues through adulthood. What is a cigarette but a candy substitute? This has become metaphor to our times, codependency from cradle to grave.
Creativity is apparently on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to embrace the unknown. Critical thinking reifies what is already known. The word “education” means to “to lead forth.” Simply regurgitating information is not learning.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses? If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect little. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects. In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Learned helplessness is educated into our society. It cripples the student when study demands initiative, or in the case of a worker a quick response to a problem when it is not necessarily in his job description, but something he can handle. A response of helplessness is the polar coordinate of codependency.
It finds children blaming parents, parents blaming children, teachers blaming both with everyone attempting to dump the problem on to someone else. It is the same in the work environment. In this landscape, solutions have many authors with nearly everyone blind to the obvious problem. This might explain why so many books are written on the subject of society’s ills without a consensus definition of the problem situation. We are crippled with our dependence on analysis rather than designing our way out of the mess. Designing suggests radical change or action, not reaction to calamity once it occurs.
There isn’t an author who pens a book, this author included, who is not guilty of many of the behaviors mentioned selectively here. The reader must read-between-the-lines to see how the information and conceptual detail fit his situation, and then go on from there with an action oriented design. Stated otherwise, the reader needs to rally support to a strategy that fits his problem situation. The person who experiences the problem, first hand, whatever the problem may be, has the solutions within his grasp. It will not be found in a remote generalized description of the problem nor in watered down logic provided by others. The reader must come out of his cups and rally himself into action. This is not easy.
When we are programmed to be suspended in terminal helplessness, parent-dependent, then teacher-dependent, and later in the workplace manager-dependent, we are likely to be always looking for solutions to our difficulties outside ourselves when they are always within our reach, within us.
True, there are supportive and abusive parents, supportive and abusive peers, and so on, but somehow we must get past these impediments, and find our way to self-dependence and confident thinking. This includes enduring pressures from family and friends who are certain they know what is best for us. They may use guilt or intimidation, or hit us with, “how could you think of doing this when all the things we have done for you?”
When other people make us feel miserable about ourselves, no matter who they are, they do not have our best interest at heart, even though they are confident that they do, but only their own. Nor can we pine away about what our parents did or didn’t do for us, using this as the justification for our miserable lot in life. Grow up! Accept the fact that once we are on our own, we are alone, and being “al-one” is the beauty of being al-together, whole, ready to face the world and contribute to it.
Likewise, I have heard so many people tell me they never had good teachers. This is horse hockey! It is meant to convince ourselves that it is someone else’s fault that we never developed a passion for learning. Grow up! It doesn’t work that way.
There is a saying the teacher will arrive when the student is ready. This places the burden where it belongs on the student. There is not a more difficult or more thankless job than that of a teacher. It is very hard work with a lot of time and attention that must be committed outside of the classroom for little appreciation or remuneration. Yet, a teacher’s role is the most important in society. Why is it, then, that education is made so important in lip service but teachers are not esteemed equally to that of other professions? The answer is obvious. Society places a higher premium on material wealth than intellectual acumen; on the product (wealth) rather than the process (learning). It is that simple. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees baseball team makes more in one year than 400 teachers at $50,000 per annum make teaching school with master’s or doctorate degrees in Florida’s public school and university system. Something is wrong with this picture.
* * * * * * * * * * *
What has happened in the workplace illustrates dependency to the point of sorrow. Millions on the assembly line and in manufacturing jobs have found those jobs disappearing at an alarming rate and being relocated to other countries about the globe. This is not cruel and inhuman treatment. This is the reality of a global economy. It is a process that has been underway for the past fifty or sixty years. It did not just happen.
I saw it first hand when I was a youth. Factory workers in Detroit were making more than most professional men with college degrees and graduate educations. I saw the sons and daughters of assembly workers going into the factories right out of high school without a thought to improving their intellectual skills or preparing for a future when “paradise lost” would not be a Milton poem, but a fact of American industrial life. No one wanted to talk about it, taking comfort in, “as Detroit goes so goes America!” In other words, have no fear!
So, Detroit continued to make automobiles that were designed primarily for American roads because Americans loved big gas guzzling machines, and gasoline was cheap. Detroit believed in that incredibly absurd model, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Detroit, the hub of American industry, wore blinders as if American utopia was a lasting state. No attempt was made to educate the buying public to think differently. It was the codependent parent giving the American baby what it wanted. So Detroit, the car industry, the assembly worker, and the car buyer have all been complicit in the downturn.
The same syndrome of learned helplessness of course has plagued other American industries. Steel mills, shoe factories, linen producers, appliance makers, and airlines have been economically disrupted if not forced to close. Industrial workers once received generous employee benefits that were not a function of productivity but guarantees for surrendering control of work. This made workers counter dependent on the company for their security and financial well being. The more workers made they more they spent, keeping the economy healthy, but not saving for a rainy day. What is worse, companies operated on the margin even borrowing from pension programs to finance optimistic expansion, as if the dog days of summer would never end. Now we see the fall out of this excess in bankruptcies and empty pension fund coffers. In too many cases, workers have been left high and dry. Whose fault was this?
It is easy to blame companies. Many played quick and dirty with pension funds making them complicit in these developments. But more basic is that management and unions were in collusion allowing wage and benefit demands to spiral out of control to the point that many such companies are no longer competitive. Every General Motors vehicle off the assembly line has $1,500 added to pay for entitlement programs for current and retired workers. It would seem as if no one expected the rest of the world to catch up. This has proven worse than naïve; it hs proven insane.
It points to a fatal flaw in the American character when it comes to problem solving. American workers treated management as surrogate parents, suspending themselves in permanent adolescence in learned helplessness, totally reactive to demands, staying out of trouble by being polite, obedient, submissive, and conforming. Management not only encouraged this behavior, but also systematically programmed it into workers. So, now, when workers need to take the initiative, demonstrate creative verve, be confrontational, and self-motivated problem solvers, the adaptive skills are missing in their gene pool.
Instead, what we see are American workers moaning on television about their plight with no sense of being complicit in the strategy. How they see it is that they did what they were told, and management made promises, promises few companies could reasonably expect to discharge, especially when the generosity was not tied to productivity.
Still, companies encouraged this prevailing attitude by creating the impression that the company “was a family.” Companies have paid dearly for this erroneous metaphor. The only guarantee a worker should truly expect is a full day’s pay for a full day’s work. It is up to him to make his value-added status one that ensures his security, and by extension, his company’s stability. Somehow this got lost in post World War II euphoria, and now everyone is suffering for it.
It has been my observation that for every hard worker, there are four that are dogging it. What is sad to report is that everyone knows this, but no one does anything about it. Mired in learned helplessness, hard workers don’t want to be labeled snitches, while loafers know how to play the system to their advantage. Since loafers are paid the same, they busy themselves looking for ways to redirect attention by constant complaining or flattering their bosses. Like the disruptive child that used tears to get its way, they know the squeaky wheel gets oiled. So, while hard workers are focusing on work they are nitpicking or focusing on making an impression. Loafers have killed the golden goose, and now, with matters as they are, with a global economy in full spring, the blame game has no fire or audience.
WILLIAM GEORGE MOSLEY’S PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE
Michelle Bearden is a journalist with “The Tampa Tribune.” She has written a moving article (July 9, 2006) on an African American man that while inspiring is indicative of the resilience of the human spirit under the most trying of circumstances. Mr. Mosley’s journey epitomizes the beauty and breadth of confident thinking problem solving, and for that reason, it is included here.
Mr. William George Mosley is 87. When he stubbed his toe and infection set in two years ago, doctors had to take his left leg. For a time he got down and let his health go, but now he works out religiously at the Interbay-Glover YMCA in Tampa, and attends church in his best dress every Sunday.
The simple rules provided by his grandmother have guided this man throughout his life. She told him to keep his head up and face his problems. “I just may be the luckiest man around,” he declares. “And I ain’t got but one leg, no teeth, and no money, but I know God is blessin’ me, as sure as I know anything.”
He believes to understand where a man is, you have to understand where he came from. Mr. Mosley came from Macon, Georgia, where he was born September 21, 1918. His daddy, a Pullman porter, died of a heart attack that very day. Three months later, his mama passed away. His maternal grandmother in Tampa took him in and poured on the love.
She taught him pretty much all he would ever really need to know: “don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t drink no liquor, and don’t do no drugs, don’t hang out with no crowd, don’t do nothin’ that will land you in jail, and surely don’t do nothin’ that will land you in an early grave.”
When he was four going on five, his grandma passed away. An aunt took him in, but he doesn’t remember much love in that house. “She beat on me bad, like a dog,” he says. “So, I grabbed me a knapsack, and I ran away.” He was five going on six.
He spent days foraging for food in Ybor City (Cuban suburb of Tampa), and running errands for Cuban shopkeepers to earn a few coins, always mindful of his grandmother’s rules. When darkness came, he bundled up in a potato sack and slept under front porches and produce trucks and in outhouses. When the stink got to be too much, he’d open the door a crack and stick his nose out to breathe in the fresh air.
He tried once to go to school. He got in line with the other children in the schoolyard, but a teacher noticed how filthy he was and delivered him to the principal’s office. “They told me to go home to my mother and father and take a bath,” he says. “I walked right out of there and never looked back.”
Instead, he taught himself to read and write. He would study a word in a newspaper or comic book, and when he saw a friendly face, he’d ask what it meant. His Cuban friends taught him Spanish, too. He learned to count money and take care of his own finances. Never bothered with a bank account; a money belt did just fine.
Grandmother had always told him to watch his back; don’t rely on no one but your own good sense. “Nothin’ more than puttin’ your mind to it,” he says.
From time to time, a kind family took him in and treated him like one of their own. “There’s good folks out there, wherever you go,” he says.
As a young man, he ventured down to Opa-locka (Florida) where he worked for $15 a week for Mr. Cook, a white man from Tennessee who owned a car lot. He washed cars for a while, before admitting to his boss he would rather be selling them.
One day, he got that chance. “A black man was in the lot from 9 in the morning ‘til quarter to 2,” he recalls. “And Mr. Cook, he told me to see what was up. The man bought two Coup de Villes, one for himself, and one for his wife. Then he told me he’d pay me $150 to drive one of the cars to Fort Lauderdale (Florida)."
When Mr. Mosley returned, his employer gave him $400 cash commission for each car. He had never seen so much money in his life. “Bill, you got yourself a job selling cars. And I’m making you my assistant manager,” Mr. Cook proclaimed. Two of the other three salesmen promptly quit. They would have no part of working for a black man. The next day, the remaining salesman fetched Mr. Mosley a cup of coffee.
Serendipity continued to follow him. One time he was on his way to Tuskegee, Alabama to pick up some cars, when he got caught up in Martin Luther King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights. He remembers it as a beautiful thing with hundreds of people, black folks and white, marching side by side. He also remembers the police using fire hoses and fierce dogs against the marchers. He could hear his grandmother’s warning about staying out of crowds and away from trouble. Still, he felt it was important to be there, make his stand for equality. “But it was real scary,” he says.
He didn’t want trouble on his travels, so he took to dressing like a chauffeur, “white shirt, black pants, black cap,” when he drove one of his beloved Cadillacs. He didn’t want anyone thinking he was uppity. When he gassed up, he would always tell the gas station attendant that he was driving for Dr. Mosley. Only when self-service stations opened along the interstate did he let his guard down. “Best thing that happened for us,” he says, “didn’t have to rely on the eyes in the back of our heads.”
Eventually, with the entrepreneur spirit, he had a fleet of limousines, driving for such celebrities as crooner Nat King Cole and Muhammad Ali. “You call him Cassius Clay and he’d knock you out,” he says.
And so now, Mr. Mosley in his eighty-eighth year is still smiling, still living by the code of his grandmother, and still always finding something happening to brighten his day.
Is Mr. William George Mosley unique? I don’t think so. He was blessed very early in his life with programming from his beloved grandmother. It sustained his spirit under the most trying circumstances. He has been a confident thinking problem solver engaged in a passion for the possible. Resilience has blessed his life, and all those he has touched. His moral compass was set firmly in place in his heart by a grandmother he lived with for only three years. Imagine that! What lessons his life teaches us.
* * * * * * * * * *
LOOK AT PROBLEMS AS DOOR OPENERS
YOU ARE A CHANGE AGENT
START THE CHANGE PROCESS WITH YOURSELF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
What is the one thing of which we seem most fixated? To be in control! We all like to think we are working our own agenda, living our own lives, and on our own terms, but are we? A better case could be made that we are out-of-control, indeed, that no one or anything is under control. Everything appears in a state of flux.
This is in no small way due to our programming. We are a solution driven society that expects problems to be solved when they can only be controlled. We desire stability in the vortex of change.
The world is changing. Technology is driving change. Populations are exploding. Values are changing. Developing nations are developing faster. Pollution is increasing. People are living longer.
We can pretend that this doesn’t affect us, that we can insulate ourselves from change, but that of course is impossible. Our programming is designed for a stable society not an ever-changing society.
PROGRAMMING, CONTROL AND THE FALLACY OF THE PROBLEM SOLVING
Such programming of course often fails, especially in school. The most egregious offenders find themselves marched off to the principal’s office with a pink slip and a call home to their parents. Self-control is not in the mix. Conforming behavior is praised as the controlling norm. Those not inclined to subscribe to this norm are soon labeled “trouble makers” or “disruptive influences,” and candidates for Ritalin or some other mind-altering drug.
We are programmed to behave even if it means making us walking zombies.
It doesn’t end there. A scarlet acronym can come to label us an ADD person, that is, a person with an “attention deficit disorder.” Imagine, here we are starting school, a relatively new person in the cocoon of “life,” and already we have acquired the label of a "problem child."
Psychiatrists attempt to drug this ADD malady to death. It is as if our biochemical synapses are at war against us, and the only way to countermand their advantage is to wage a similar biochemical war against them. Lost in this confusing melodrama is the individual child who simply is struggling at this early stage in life to get his insides and outsides adjusted to each other.
Later, I will share the remarkable case of William George Mosley with you. He did just that, got his insides and outsides to work together, with little help from anyone save his grandmother, whom he was exposed to for only three years.
My remarks here are directed to the child who has too much, too many, too soon, and not to the child who has too little, too few, too late. Both are handicapped, but the spoiled child has a handicapping of scale that drives out passion for the possible filling the void with insatiable need.
The abandoned child and the spoiled child are polar opposites that can come to resemble each other with indifferent stimulation of the lower (impulsive) centers of the brain. This occurs when they are fed too many sweets and other condiments that activate these brain centers and energize them to compulsive erratic and disruptive behavior.
Affluent parents often supplement this excess by providing their children with all the electronic wonders currently available. Indigent parents, on the other hand, are as likely as not to have their children sitting in front of a television set as babysitter allowing the colored pixels to dance off their eyes putting them in equal electronic daze to their affluent counterparts.
Both approaches are equally hypnotic and chaotic. It is not uncommon to find an eight-year-old child of affluence to have her own cell phone, while sharing a computer, iPod and game boy with her ten-year-old brother. And it is equally likely that a family on welfare has cable television with a hundred channels for their children to cruise with the remote at their leisure massaging their delicate psyches with bizarre fantasy images.
Parents of all socio-economic classes have a much easier time saying, “yes” to everything than “no” to anything. Saying “no” would demand explanation. Few adults have the time or inclination to communicate meaningfully with their children on their level.
Children almost from birth learn the power of tears and advantage of screams of disruption. If there is anything that fuels a child’s anxiety, it is the lack of attention and the absence of satisfaction. A child soon learns, reluctantly so, that attention is not negotiable, parents are too other-centered, and thus attention is eventually conceded, placing the emphasis on satisfaction, now!
Children quickly discern parents have an obligatory rhetoric of shoulds and should nots, which they consistently fail to put into practice. While mother fastens her little darlings into their car harness, the little wonders note she forgets to fasten her own seatbelt. They are told always to tell the truth, and when asked their age at the ticket counter, their father says before they can answer, “under twelve,” when nearly thirteen. Such discrepancies feed a budding cynicism and a blossoming duplicity.
Mixed messages come to have the regularity of the Fruit Loops such children find in their cereal bowl of a morning, and so this whole obsession with control becomes a bit mystifying from the start.
Long before children find themselves in school, they have been introduced to doublespeak, which was the theme of Robert Smith’s book, “Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing” (1974). It is the rare individual that can master this duplicitous language and still remain authentic. Consequently, self-estrangement starts very early and is consistently fed with dissembling, or beating around the bush.
It is because of cultural arrogance that the problems we solve are more than likely the problems we create over and over again. Former President Harry S. Truman had on his desk a plaque: “The buck stops here!” It identified his presidency, but has become an empty cliché. The buck keeps getting passed around and around until ultimately no one can be found responsible. That is the case with the ADD child. A simple thing as changing the child's diet might do more good than any mood-altering drug.
Solutions are aplenty but no one wants to tackle the real problem head on. We like to blame it all on crass materialism and the depressing spiritual void, but does that get us on top of the situation? I don't think so. To control our problems we need a moral compass with a set of reliable principles that is also adjustable to changing values and demands.
Instead, we continue to describe our problems and tack solutions on them rather than design a way forward. Studies are conducted that reduce children to provocative numbers that can be presented in statistical correlations, followed by articles and books. Obviously, this is not the intent of Jeffrey Kluger’s featured article in “Time” (July 10, 2006), “How your siblings make you who you are.” Kluger’s opens with the caption, “the new science of siblings.” That should do it. Who is going to dispute scientific findings?
According to these data, parents, teachers, preachers, mentors and other authority figures are placed in secondary roles to siblings. It is another way of taking authority figures off the hook. It is not their fault that the world is in a ness with few mature self-reliant adults on the scene.
Children have endured being essentially their own parents through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s, as both parents are likely to have full-timed jobs, who don’t expect ever to become old and so never to grow up, and who verify their eternal youth status by partying in their spare time, while expecting their children to grow up tall, and straight and true without any directional control or influence from them other than extravagant materialistic support.
It didn’t happen in the 1970s, and it isn’t happening now. It may make good copy to suggest that siblings carry the load of influence, if so, it is a matter of default not by design, while burying the problem once again.
We want so desperately to explain away the aberrancy of children, and to take society, especially parents off the hook, because the society we have created is a sick society and no one wants to tackle that can of worms.
We have created little monsters at all levels of society, some of them running the country, and the only chance we have of correcting this problem is by installing a confident thinking problem solving governor in children at an early age where they make choices that are self-creating rather than self-destructive, where they are the masters of change rather than its slaves, and where they live in harmony with their internal clock and external environment, and where they have confidence in the change process.
Children are the only hope. There is no hope of changing chronological adults suspended in terminal adolescence. There is no way to make them mature self-reliant emotionally responsive problem solvers. If you have any doubts about this, I suggest you read my “Six Silent Killers” (1998). It is not only a management problem but also a societal one. You cannot “will” people into creative problem solvers comfortable with change when they have been programmed into critical thinking conformist and passive individuals who stubbornly insist on stability in a climate of constant change.
THE PROBLEM, THE PROBLEM SOLVER, AND CODEPENDENCY
We have handicapped our culture in the problem solving. There is no shortage of television gurus and authors who have all the answers without having the slightest knowledge of the persons whose problems they are attempting to solve, other than superficially. You cannot prescribe a cure for the loveless marriage, the drug addict, or the perennially unemployed worker by a three-minute session with some television crony. It is simply a praise of folly.
If truth be known, you can’t do it with 3,000 hours if the relationship is one of passive engagement, looking for answers or justification outside of one’s own chaotic heart.
If you don’t have your ducks in a row, don’t have a clear identity in terms of your “real self” and “ideal self,” or have come to accept the difference between self-demands and role demands, any therapeutic exercise is one of futility because you will never come to define your situation as it actually is, and therefore to design an action plan forward.
The more dependent on the authority of someone else the deeper into self-delusion and ultimate self-destruction you are likely to drift. The attraction for such dependency is a closet desire for change without pain. Indeed, you want the option of blaming someone else should your life not turn up roses. It will not happen. No one can save you from yourself but yourself.
Melody Beattie has written a series of books such as “Codependent No More” (1987) and “Beyond Codependency” (1989), which have all the right words and ideas about getting beyond making the situation worse for the person you’re trying to help, but does it work?
Perhaps everyone reading this, including this writer, has had a needy family member or friend crippled by continual “help.” What invariably develops is that the needy person comes to expect to be “bailed out” no matter how serious the fix he or she manages to get in. It is never the person’s fault. The needy person knows your vulnerability, knows how to exploit all your weaknesses with the precision of a surgeon with little risk, and even less sense of regret should it destroy your own security in the process. The needy have only sensitivity to their need.
Once the pattern is established, it never changes. Gradually, the high crimes and misdemeanors of the needy person escalate until you are emotionally and economically strapped. The phone can ring at any time of night or day and you are expected to be there for them. Were the positions reversed, do you think the needy person would be there for you? If pigs could fly!
If a family member will have none of this, that family member is exempt from being contacted. The needy person knows he will not be moved by tears, guilt, blackmail, or threats (including the threat of suicide). Now why is that?
The needy person recognizes the limits of his or her manipulative skills, and therefore employs them only where success is guaranteed. It is the same with the child. The child knows when and with whom to engineer a crying jag and when it would be a waste of energy.
Is such unresponsive behavior cruel? Heartless? These are not even relevant questions. It puts the focus on the responder and not on the needy, not on the person who is on a self-destructive tear. A long time ago, if that person had been alone in the rag bone cellar of the human heart, and had no one else to pick her up, she would have picked herself up and gone forward. She would have developed the rudiments of problem solving. That is the nature of the life instinct and the survival mechanism placed in the human heart. That has been denied the needy person. Therein lies the tragedy.
A psychologist with an unpronounceable name, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, has made a reputation advocating, “going with the flow” (“Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” 1990). The author’s idea is flow is the way a painter gets so absorbed in his canvas that he loses track of time; the musician disappears into the piece she’s playing. It happens to athletes, surgeons and chess players. They are all in an apparent state of ecstasy where everything comes together. The common expression is “they’re in the zone” with good neurotransmitters flooding their synapses. Notice these people first are self-reliant and emotionally mature which is an index of disciplined control where such flow is possible. They have paid their dues, and the price tag has had more than a modicum of failure punched into its ticket.
That is the problem with such books: they give false hope; they put the preliminary need for struggle and pain aside and avoid the process, focusing instead on the product, the ecstasy of the optimal experience as if life were an unrealized utopian dream available to all; that it is a matter of osmosis. It is not. Too many don’t have the gumption to pick themselves off the deck and take the risks to do something meaningful. They would rather envy others that do.
Is this because people don't want to embrace the hard work of confident thinking? Only you can answer that question for yourself. In any case, it is true we look to books and television gurus to short-circuit us to the good life without sacrifice, pain, failure, or inconvenience. Yet, it is sacrifice, pain, failure, inconvenience, as well as discipline that allow these good neurotransmitters to flood our synapses and to put us in the zone.
Unfortunately, when you are at wits end and trying to grab something, anything, to make sense of a problematical life, there is always another book to ease your conscience if not resolve your concern.
Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial book that gained some attention, “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do” (1998) with the subtitle, “Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More.” Dr. Harris was taking on the debate between nature vs. nurture, and siding with the latter. As with the “Time” article weighing in on the influence of siblings, "the nurture assumption,” again, takes parents off the hook.
"The new science of siblings” and “the nurture assumption” are admittedly eye-catching declarations, but do they provide greater insight into the nature of self?
What makes problem solving so critical to confident thinking is that the person must first be aware that he or she has been programmed to think, believe, value and behave in a certain way. That type of programming was reasonably effective up to and through World War II, or the first half of the twentieth century. Change was then moving at a tortoise pace, but no longer. Now change is a speeding rabbit and each of us must govern the change process within ourselves if we are to be effective change agents in our problem solving.
This programming is in trouble because it has created a passive society with a reactive disposition. We are in a time when people need to anticipate and plan actions designed to unravel complexities not be consumed by them, or to strike out on tangents. Unfortunately, we are all graduates of the “Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving.”
This is the school that believes throwing money at education will solve illiteracy; finding a cure for AIDS will stem this epidemic; conducting massive layoffs and redundancy exercises will bring back corporate health; searching for miraculous cures to obesity, diabetes, and other lifestyle diseases will ultimately succeed in a climate of self-indulgence.
Consequently, causes and effects are treated interchangeably, as if they are the same, which of course they are not. AIDS is an effect which is caused by ignorance and lifestyle promiscuity. It has resulted in a search for the definitive virus antidote while the epidemic spreads.
When causes are addressed, the results are dramatic. While modern medicine receives the accolades for improved mortality rates, lower birth defects, longevity and societal health, the credit more deservedly should go to public health practices, public health education and public sanitation. Safe drinking water, efficient control of waste removal, and educational lifestyle communiqués have been powerful change agents.
Meanwhile, we remain in awe of medical science with its sophisticated tools that have been put into play because of lifestyle excesses such as “CAT” scanners, x-ray therapy, renal dialysis machines, cardiac pacemakers, and other electronic devices that can identify and measure nearly every body function instantaneously. It is clear “Nuclear Man” has gambled almost everything on a mechanistic quantitative approach to his physical and psychological well being. The “heart of God” now resides in science. Translated: man can ravage his mind and body, and by extension his environment in wanton glee, and science ultimately as superman will come to the rescue.
What is paradoxical about science is that the cleaner the technology the more abstruse the ramifications. Take nuclear power. Nuclear energy has become the consensus source of cheap and clean fuel to rescue the planet from global pollution. Nuclear waste cannot be destroyed. Meanwhile, barges roam the seas and byways of the world in the dead of night like vessels without a country looking for a safe haven to dump their dubious product.
We think so well “big,” but so poorly “small.” Little things are killing the planet and us with them. Lifestyle excesses start with feeding sugar to babies giving them what they want rather than need, which continues through adulthood. What is a cigarette but a candy substitute? This has become metaphor to our times, codependency from cradle to grave.
Creativity is apparently on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to embrace the unknown. Critical thinking reifies what is already known. The word “education” means to “to lead forth.” Simply regurgitating information is not learning.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses? If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect little. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects. In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Learned helplessness is educated into our society. It cripples the student when study demands initiative, or in the case of a worker a quick response to a problem when it is not necessarily in his job description, but something he can handle. A response of helplessness is the polar coordinate of codependency.
It finds children blaming parents, parents blaming children, teachers blaming both with everyone attempting to dump the problem on to someone else. It is the same in the work environment. In this landscape, solutions have many authors with nearly everyone blind to the obvious problem. This might explain why so many books are written on the subject of society’s ills without a consensus definition of the problem situation. We are crippled with our dependence on analysis rather than designing our way out of the mess. Designing suggests radical change or action, not reaction to calamity once it occurs.
There isn’t an author who pens a book, this author included, who is not guilty of many of the behaviors mentioned selectively here. The reader must read-between-the-lines to see how the information and conceptual detail fit his situation, and then go on from there with an action oriented design. Stated otherwise, the reader needs to rally support to a strategy that fits his problem situation. The person who experiences the problem, first hand, whatever the problem may be, has the solutions within his grasp. It will not be found in a remote generalized description of the problem nor in watered down logic provided by others. The reader must come out of his cups and rally himself into action. This is not easy.
When we are programmed to be suspended in terminal helplessness, parent-dependent, then teacher-dependent, and later in the workplace manager-dependent, we are likely to be always looking for solutions to our difficulties outside ourselves when they are always within our reach, within us.
True, there are supportive and abusive parents, supportive and abusive peers, and so on, but somehow we must get past these impediments, and find our way to self-dependence and confident thinking. This includes enduring pressures from family and friends who are certain they know what is best for us. They may use guilt or intimidation, or hit us with, “how could you think of doing this when all the things we have done for you?”
When other people make us feel miserable about ourselves, no matter who they are, they do not have our best interest at heart, even though they are confident that they do, but only their own. Nor can we pine away about what our parents did or didn’t do for us, using this as the justification for our miserable lot in life. Grow up! Accept the fact that once we are on our own, we are alone, and being “al-one” is the beauty of being al-together, whole, ready to face the world and contribute to it.
Likewise, I have heard so many people tell me they never had good teachers. This is horse hockey! It is meant to convince ourselves that it is someone else’s fault that we never developed a passion for learning. Grow up! It doesn’t work that way.
There is a saying the teacher will arrive when the student is ready. This places the burden where it belongs on the student. There is not a more difficult or more thankless job than that of a teacher. It is very hard work with a lot of time and attention that must be committed outside of the classroom for little appreciation or remuneration. Yet, a teacher’s role is the most important in society. Why is it, then, that education is made so important in lip service but teachers are not esteemed equally to that of other professions? The answer is obvious. Society places a higher premium on material wealth than intellectual acumen; on the product (wealth) rather than the process (learning). It is that simple. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees baseball team makes more in one year than 400 teachers at $50,000 per annum make teaching school with master’s or doctorate degrees in Florida’s public school and university system. Something is wrong with this picture.
* * * * * * * * * * *
What has happened in the workplace illustrates dependency to the point of sorrow. Millions on the assembly line and in manufacturing jobs have found those jobs disappearing at an alarming rate and being relocated to other countries about the globe. This is not cruel and inhuman treatment. This is the reality of a global economy. It is a process that has been underway for the past fifty or sixty years. It did not just happen.
I saw it first hand when I was a youth. Factory workers in Detroit were making more than most professional men with college degrees and graduate educations. I saw the sons and daughters of assembly workers going into the factories right out of high school without a thought to improving their intellectual skills or preparing for a future when “paradise lost” would not be a Milton poem, but a fact of American industrial life. No one wanted to talk about it, taking comfort in, “as Detroit goes so goes America!” In other words, have no fear!
So, Detroit continued to make automobiles that were designed primarily for American roads because Americans loved big gas guzzling machines, and gasoline was cheap. Detroit believed in that incredibly absurd model, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Detroit, the hub of American industry, wore blinders as if American utopia was a lasting state. No attempt was made to educate the buying public to think differently. It was the codependent parent giving the American baby what it wanted. So Detroit, the car industry, the assembly worker, and the car buyer have all been complicit in the downturn.
The same syndrome of learned helplessness of course has plagued other American industries. Steel mills, shoe factories, linen producers, appliance makers, and airlines have been economically disrupted if not forced to close. Industrial workers once received generous employee benefits that were not a function of productivity but guarantees for surrendering control of work. This made workers counter dependent on the company for their security and financial well being. The more workers made they more they spent, keeping the economy healthy, but not saving for a rainy day. What is worse, companies operated on the margin even borrowing from pension programs to finance optimistic expansion, as if the dog days of summer would never end. Now we see the fall out of this excess in bankruptcies and empty pension fund coffers. In too many cases, workers have been left high and dry. Whose fault was this?
It is easy to blame companies. Many played quick and dirty with pension funds making them complicit in these developments. But more basic is that management and unions were in collusion allowing wage and benefit demands to spiral out of control to the point that many such companies are no longer competitive. Every General Motors vehicle off the assembly line has $1,500 added to pay for entitlement programs for current and retired workers. It would seem as if no one expected the rest of the world to catch up. This has proven worse than naïve; it hs proven insane.
It points to a fatal flaw in the American character when it comes to problem solving. American workers treated management as surrogate parents, suspending themselves in permanent adolescence in learned helplessness, totally reactive to demands, staying out of trouble by being polite, obedient, submissive, and conforming. Management not only encouraged this behavior, but also systematically programmed it into workers. So, now, when workers need to take the initiative, demonstrate creative verve, be confrontational, and self-motivated problem solvers, the adaptive skills are missing in their gene pool.
Instead, what we see are American workers moaning on television about their plight with no sense of being complicit in the strategy. How they see it is that they did what they were told, and management made promises, promises few companies could reasonably expect to discharge, especially when the generosity was not tied to productivity.
Still, companies encouraged this prevailing attitude by creating the impression that the company “was a family.” Companies have paid dearly for this erroneous metaphor. The only guarantee a worker should truly expect is a full day’s pay for a full day’s work. It is up to him to make his value-added status one that ensures his security, and by extension, his company’s stability. Somehow this got lost in post World War II euphoria, and now everyone is suffering for it.
It has been my observation that for every hard worker, there are four that are dogging it. What is sad to report is that everyone knows this, but no one does anything about it. Mired in learned helplessness, hard workers don’t want to be labeled snitches, while loafers know how to play the system to their advantage. Since loafers are paid the same, they busy themselves looking for ways to redirect attention by constant complaining or flattering their bosses. Like the disruptive child that used tears to get its way, they know the squeaky wheel gets oiled. So, while hard workers are focusing on work they are nitpicking or focusing on making an impression. Loafers have killed the golden goose, and now, with matters as they are, with a global economy in full spring, the blame game has no fire or audience.
WILLIAM GEORGE MOSLEY’S PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE
Michelle Bearden is a journalist with “The Tampa Tribune.” She has written a moving article (July 9, 2006) on an African American man that while inspiring is indicative of the resilience of the human spirit under the most trying of circumstances. Mr. Mosley’s journey epitomizes the beauty and breadth of confident thinking problem solving, and for that reason, it is included here.
Mr. William George Mosley is 87. When he stubbed his toe and infection set in two years ago, doctors had to take his left leg. For a time he got down and let his health go, but now he works out religiously at the Interbay-Glover YMCA in Tampa, and attends church in his best dress every Sunday.
The simple rules provided by his grandmother have guided this man throughout his life. She told him to keep his head up and face his problems. “I just may be the luckiest man around,” he declares. “And I ain’t got but one leg, no teeth, and no money, but I know God is blessin’ me, as sure as I know anything.”
He believes to understand where a man is, you have to understand where he came from. Mr. Mosley came from Macon, Georgia, where he was born September 21, 1918. His daddy, a Pullman porter, died of a heart attack that very day. Three months later, his mama passed away. His maternal grandmother in Tampa took him in and poured on the love.
She taught him pretty much all he would ever really need to know: “don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t drink no liquor, and don’t do no drugs, don’t hang out with no crowd, don’t do nothin’ that will land you in jail, and surely don’t do nothin’ that will land you in an early grave.”
When he was four going on five, his grandma passed away. An aunt took him in, but he doesn’t remember much love in that house. “She beat on me bad, like a dog,” he says. “So, I grabbed me a knapsack, and I ran away.” He was five going on six.
He spent days foraging for food in Ybor City (Cuban suburb of Tampa), and running errands for Cuban shopkeepers to earn a few coins, always mindful of his grandmother’s rules. When darkness came, he bundled up in a potato sack and slept under front porches and produce trucks and in outhouses. When the stink got to be too much, he’d open the door a crack and stick his nose out to breathe in the fresh air.
He tried once to go to school. He got in line with the other children in the schoolyard, but a teacher noticed how filthy he was and delivered him to the principal’s office. “They told me to go home to my mother and father and take a bath,” he says. “I walked right out of there and never looked back.”
Instead, he taught himself to read and write. He would study a word in a newspaper or comic book, and when he saw a friendly face, he’d ask what it meant. His Cuban friends taught him Spanish, too. He learned to count money and take care of his own finances. Never bothered with a bank account; a money belt did just fine.
Grandmother had always told him to watch his back; don’t rely on no one but your own good sense. “Nothin’ more than puttin’ your mind to it,” he says.
From time to time, a kind family took him in and treated him like one of their own. “There’s good folks out there, wherever you go,” he says.
As a young man, he ventured down to Opa-locka (Florida) where he worked for $15 a week for Mr. Cook, a white man from Tennessee who owned a car lot. He washed cars for a while, before admitting to his boss he would rather be selling them.
One day, he got that chance. “A black man was in the lot from 9 in the morning ‘til quarter to 2,” he recalls. “And Mr. Cook, he told me to see what was up. The man bought two Coup de Villes, one for himself, and one for his wife. Then he told me he’d pay me $150 to drive one of the cars to Fort Lauderdale (Florida)."
When Mr. Mosley returned, his employer gave him $400 cash commission for each car. He had never seen so much money in his life. “Bill, you got yourself a job selling cars. And I’m making you my assistant manager,” Mr. Cook proclaimed. Two of the other three salesmen promptly quit. They would have no part of working for a black man. The next day, the remaining salesman fetched Mr. Mosley a cup of coffee.
Serendipity continued to follow him. One time he was on his way to Tuskegee, Alabama to pick up some cars, when he got caught up in Martin Luther King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march for civil rights. He remembers it as a beautiful thing with hundreds of people, black folks and white, marching side by side. He also remembers the police using fire hoses and fierce dogs against the marchers. He could hear his grandmother’s warning about staying out of crowds and away from trouble. Still, he felt it was important to be there, make his stand for equality. “But it was real scary,” he says.
He didn’t want trouble on his travels, so he took to dressing like a chauffeur, “white shirt, black pants, black cap,” when he drove one of his beloved Cadillacs. He didn’t want anyone thinking he was uppity. When he gassed up, he would always tell the gas station attendant that he was driving for Dr. Mosley. Only when self-service stations opened along the interstate did he let his guard down. “Best thing that happened for us,” he says, “didn’t have to rely on the eyes in the back of our heads.”
Eventually, with the entrepreneur spirit, he had a fleet of limousines, driving for such celebrities as crooner Nat King Cole and Muhammad Ali. “You call him Cassius Clay and he’d knock you out,” he says.
And so now, Mr. Mosley in his eighty-eighth year is still smiling, still living by the code of his grandmother, and still always finding something happening to brighten his day.
Is Mr. William George Mosley unique? I don’t think so. He was blessed very early in his life with programming from his beloved grandmother. It sustained his spirit under the most trying circumstances. He has been a confident thinking problem solver engaged in a passion for the possible. Resilience has blessed his life, and all those he has touched. His moral compass was set firmly in place in his heart by a grandmother he lived with for only three years. Imagine that! What lessons his life teaches us.
* * * * * * * * * *
Sunday, July 16, 2006
A LETTER TO MY GRANDSON ON HIS FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY!
July 20, 2006
Dear Taylor,
Happy Birthday! You are now fourteen-years-old and going into high school. This is a wonderful time in your young life and you will feed on it all of your days, as people of your grandfather’s age do now. Only today I wrote about someone I went to St. Patrick’s with, and then played football with in high school. His name is Tom Berdan, a powerful football player. I’ve lost track of Tom, and haven’t seen or heard from him in more than fifty years. That is what I’m talking about. These untroubled days you are now in are the most carefree of your life, so enjoy them and make the most of them. They represent your emotional and intellectual investment in the future.
I understand you are active in sports and have excelled in baseball this summer, and are looking forward to playing football. What I like about organized athletics is that they teach you discipline, how to play as a member of a team, how to take victory and defeat in stride, surprise and disappointment, in other words, as a preparatory course in life.
Athletics also coordinate the body with the mind, as both must work together to be successful in sport. The uncanny thing about this is that you do things spontaneously in sport, or without thinking about it as the mind and body assume a rhythm and mutual support system that results in “being in the zone” and “going with the flow.”
As important as athletics are, and they are important as I point out here, what makes life truly a joyous, almost a luxury pursuit is education. For every minute you hit the books, you will get an hour’s of recreational reinforcement when you are in your working years. Believe me, study separates the doers from the pretenders, the confident ones from the con artists, and the people who make a difference from those bent on making an impression. So, study, young man, study hard and with the same dedication, determination, discipline and energy that you display throwing or catching some kind of ball.
Your grandfather’s good fortune is that I had an uncle, Dr. Leonard Martin Ekland, that once wrote me words similar to those I am sharing with you here now, knowing that I was full of myself, and receiving accolades for my athletic prowess. I loved him and believed in his words, and he became my mentor and model, and the reason, I believe, for the life that I have enjoyed and the many adventures I have experienced.
There is no limit to experience when you are honest with yourself, and have a set of principles that are inviolable and that no one can deter you from putting into play. The game of life is the most exciting game of all, and you are moving into it with zest and a winning wind at your back. I love and respect you, and wish you always well.
Your grandfather,
Grandpa Jim
Dear Taylor,
Happy Birthday! You are now fourteen-years-old and going into high school. This is a wonderful time in your young life and you will feed on it all of your days, as people of your grandfather’s age do now. Only today I wrote about someone I went to St. Patrick’s with, and then played football with in high school. His name is Tom Berdan, a powerful football player. I’ve lost track of Tom, and haven’t seen or heard from him in more than fifty years. That is what I’m talking about. These untroubled days you are now in are the most carefree of your life, so enjoy them and make the most of them. They represent your emotional and intellectual investment in the future.
I understand you are active in sports and have excelled in baseball this summer, and are looking forward to playing football. What I like about organized athletics is that they teach you discipline, how to play as a member of a team, how to take victory and defeat in stride, surprise and disappointment, in other words, as a preparatory course in life.
Athletics also coordinate the body with the mind, as both must work together to be successful in sport. The uncanny thing about this is that you do things spontaneously in sport, or without thinking about it as the mind and body assume a rhythm and mutual support system that results in “being in the zone” and “going with the flow.”
As important as athletics are, and they are important as I point out here, what makes life truly a joyous, almost a luxury pursuit is education. For every minute you hit the books, you will get an hour’s of recreational reinforcement when you are in your working years. Believe me, study separates the doers from the pretenders, the confident ones from the con artists, and the people who make a difference from those bent on making an impression. So, study, young man, study hard and with the same dedication, determination, discipline and energy that you display throwing or catching some kind of ball.
Your grandfather’s good fortune is that I had an uncle, Dr. Leonard Martin Ekland, that once wrote me words similar to those I am sharing with you here now, knowing that I was full of myself, and receiving accolades for my athletic prowess. I loved him and believed in his words, and he became my mentor and model, and the reason, I believe, for the life that I have enjoyed and the many adventures I have experienced.
There is no limit to experience when you are honest with yourself, and have a set of principles that are inviolable and that no one can deter you from putting into play. The game of life is the most exciting game of all, and you are moving into it with zest and a winning wind at your back. I love and respect you, and wish you always well.
Your grandfather,
Grandpa Jim
Friday, July 14, 2006
NOW IS A TIME FOR MUSCULAR LEADERSHIP!
Time for Muscular Leadership
The past is prologue to the future.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
ABSTRACT:
The remarks that follow are admittedly somewhat Machiavellian and centered around one man and his bold action oriented leadership, former President Andrew Jackson. He was a muscular leader. It was a requirement of his time and the natural essence of his disposition. He took on banking, the symbolic quintessence of the eastern establishment, from his relatively powerless frontier power base. He saw the bank’s monopolistic usury practices, and took action. He was an action figure, not a reaction apologist. In our day, this central bank determines interests rates while many believe it is the market. Interest rates in fact are determined by this misnamed private central bank, “The “Federal Reserve,” which in turn is owned by other commercial banks. Yet, we pay attention to its every action with bated breath, as does the stock market. Thomas Jefferson, who was more a man of words than of action, believed that bankers were a greater danger than a standing army and argued that if fractional reserve banking were allowed, within 200 years the people would be dispossessed of their own country. Knowing this, he did little to change it. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, refused to renew the charter of the first central bank, a war he never totally won, but a war he wasn’t afraid to fight. He called a delegate of bankers who came to lobby him a “den of vipers and thieves.” A “time for muscular leadership” is not a hagiography of Jackson; neither is it about banking nor an endorsement of either party. It is about our drift away from muscular leadership. That said if you want to see a bunch of wimpish leadership, go no further than the United States House and Senate banking committees. No muscular leadership here! The sad fact is that wimpish leadership prevails across the land and in all our institutions and industries. I have deemed this elsewhere, as “leaderless leadership.” Such is the core leadership of our times, and thus the reason for these comments.
* * * * * * * * * *
Andrew Jackson was born before the Declaration of Independence (1776) was signed. He fought in the Revolutionary War, became an Indian fighter, lawyer, judge, congressman, senator, and general before becoming the seventh U.S. president – and all this without a formal education. He was the original self-made man and proud of it.
This colorful leader defied the modality of his times. His victory in the Battle of New Orleans (1815) saved the Mississippi basin and stifled expansionistic threats from Spain and Great Britain. Jackson rode his popularity to the presidency. As president, his frontier style of leadership resonated with people in the heartland.
Jackson’s leadership released pent-up energy and changed the course of American history. America on the frontier personified constant struggle. Even with all his follies, he never became stuck, but always forged ahead. Reality was his companion, survival his focus.
Critics point to Jackson’s flawed character, but he was also real. We seem to prefer flawless leaders who look good and behave as scripted. Jackson’s passion obliterated the frontier barrier of his age, and reinvented the presidency.
We are now confronting a new frontier—the Information Age. As Jackson personified the leadership of America’s emerging new frontier, the Information Age is looking for new leadership against declining expectations. This requires Jackson’s boldness, yet we are stuck in leaderless leadership. Polls drive the stake of denial further into our psyche.
Our addiction to numbers finds us “numbers addicts” hypnotized by institutional theories that create a false sense of control. Such a society resists a wake-up call in the surreal belief that no matter the calamity the resources will be there to dispatch it. Often only messy, atypical leadership can reverse this trance, as Jackson proved, making it clear why leadership matters.
Why Leadership Matters
The dominant themes of a time define leadership. They call for constant reinvention to match a changing world.
The Jackson Age was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial society. We are now in the post-industrial age driven by the Internet, moving beyond capitalism in doing business, and into a wilderness we fail to understand. We are in a state of chaos with no one seemingly in charge.
We still need hierarchies that will unlikely follow capitalistic structures, or along lines of wealth and academic credentials. Influence will reside with those who provide information. Kids in garages are rewriting the codes by which we live. Institutions are lost in their own mazes unable to catch up because they are unable to catch on, while the government creates wars it can’t win, and responds to natural disasters it can’t manage.
Power will no longer reside with those who own the means of production, but will be in the hands of those who create and sustain attention. They will inherit the future. The old guard of institutions is atavistic, and institutional life is anachronistic.
Leadership is individualistic. Leaders sense they are special long before it is clear to those they plan to lead. Leaders are narcissistic with one eye on opportunity and the other on posterity. Leaders court posterity with the same enthusiasm as they court supporters. They use people like mirrors to reflect their own self-image.
There are no such things as humble leaders. The led wouldn’t be interested, as they are attracted to the reputedly infallible and powerful. Leaders display confidence, never second-guess themselves, court posterity by keeping records of their watch and time.
Leaders are seldom brilliant or creative, but decisive, and self-directed doers. This is not enough to make them stand alone as leaders. They must have a cause that resonates with the people, and lifts them out of their confusion. Leaders must first convince themselves they are special and gifted to lead.
Though leaders are often selfish and self-interested, they feign selflessness and other-directedness. It eases them through the barrier of suspicion. Even with this, there is no certainty they will succeed. Leaders must possess a singular ambition that fuels their desire to carry them to where they want to go. Ambition can be loud or quiet, but it is necessary because talent is never enough.
Leaders have clear responsibilities to the led, but the led have obvious responsibilities to the leadership. The led are quicker to criticize than to see their complicit role when things go awry. People get the leadership they deserve.
Leaders must realize people vote their hearts, not their heads. The Information Age and Internet has placed the nation on a global frontier where what was applicable no longer applies. The leadership that brought the country to this frontier will not suffice to carry it safely through it.
What made Jackson a popular president was his ability to relate to people. They were uncritical of his liberal language sprinkled with cuss words because his message was clear. It was directed to their self-interests. He was one of them, and he was on top—and they loved it because that meant they were on top, too.
Jackson was an impressive communicator not for what he said but how he said it. His vigor captured the moment, as he acted out his impulses as if thoughts were actions, knowing what nerves to touch. He was in your face without disguise or guile.
Nor was he given to reflection, but maintained sturdy principles that never steered him wrong. He was neither interested in the free exchange of ideas nor in improving his mind. The only law he respected was the law he made. He had no qualms about using questionable means if he felt the ends were justified. Nor did he have a concept of social justice because his justice only reaffirmed his own impulses and experience. He was confident he could handle any problem that might arise.
Brilliant men as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Aaron Burr, and John Calhoun constantly underestimated him. They painted him into corners, yet his counter moves would not only prove them the losers, but also make them look bad for the exercise. What they failed to understand is that along with all his self-deceit, he knew himself well enough to see it in others, and thus to beat them at their own game.
What Leaders Can Learn
What made Jackson popular was he made his triumphs their triumphs; his courage their courage; his heroics their heroics. Being able to touch people’s hearts, and therefore their lives, means more than a display of native intelligence. People believe what a person does is what they are.
It is how we perceive leaders symbolically that matters. We will follow our leaders to the death if they make us feel more than we are and stand for what we believe we should be. Such leaders create well-crafted personas that suggest invincibility, if not infallibility. Heroes remove the trauma of uncertainty.
Leaders cannot be packaged through institutional education, nor created by a well-honed network of friends. Leaders rise out of the muck of misadventures, percolating to the top of enterprise to see over our confusion. They often emerge as the answer to an imagined crisis, which is real in its consequences.
Leaders can know the pain that comes from struggle and deprivation and can see into people’s hearts and articulate their desires. Jackson’s father died as he was being born, his mother and two brothers died in the Revolutionary War, which found him an orphan without prospects at age 14. He had a deprived upbringing and education, and deprived of much chance to develop self-esteem. During his climb to prominence, America was also finding its own center, and climbing with him. So it is with all leaders who resonate with the people.
In adulthood, despite his many feats, his enemies ridiculed his inability to write a complete sentence without misspellings, and would cite evidence of an incurable ignorance. Yet, he changed the presidency, changed leadership as it was perceived, gave birth to a political party, and created an age of like-thinking presidents.
His intuitive vision allowed him to reach conclusions by shortcutting the problem while others were beating around the bush for the game. His strength translated intellect into character. He knew that people must first vent their frustrations before he could make connection. He was not a man of reflection, but a man of action.
The new Information frontier is less physically dangerous but more psychologically intimidating than Jackson’s frontier. Electronics are changing work, displacing millions of breadwinners from their traditional livelihood. Government has become high political theater where words are symbols that supplant action.
Words, however, are never the things they symbolize. More Americans are losing their jobs, suffering poor educations, and foregoing healthcare. Yet we wage wars that cost hundreds of billions of dollars that have no clear enemy, other than fear, and cannot be won. The money might better be spent elsewhere, but those in power always need an enemy to pursue. Companies announce having “great years” and then lay off thousands of employees. These things parallel to an amazing degree the time of Andrew Jackson when it became so clear why muscular leadership mattered.
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. and author of several books and articles in the genre of leadership. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com
The past is prologue to the future.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006
ABSTRACT:
The remarks that follow are admittedly somewhat Machiavellian and centered around one man and his bold action oriented leadership, former President Andrew Jackson. He was a muscular leader. It was a requirement of his time and the natural essence of his disposition. He took on banking, the symbolic quintessence of the eastern establishment, from his relatively powerless frontier power base. He saw the bank’s monopolistic usury practices, and took action. He was an action figure, not a reaction apologist. In our day, this central bank determines interests rates while many believe it is the market. Interest rates in fact are determined by this misnamed private central bank, “The “Federal Reserve,” which in turn is owned by other commercial banks. Yet, we pay attention to its every action with bated breath, as does the stock market. Thomas Jefferson, who was more a man of words than of action, believed that bankers were a greater danger than a standing army and argued that if fractional reserve banking were allowed, within 200 years the people would be dispossessed of their own country. Knowing this, he did little to change it. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, refused to renew the charter of the first central bank, a war he never totally won, but a war he wasn’t afraid to fight. He called a delegate of bankers who came to lobby him a “den of vipers and thieves.” A “time for muscular leadership” is not a hagiography of Jackson; neither is it about banking nor an endorsement of either party. It is about our drift away from muscular leadership. That said if you want to see a bunch of wimpish leadership, go no further than the United States House and Senate banking committees. No muscular leadership here! The sad fact is that wimpish leadership prevails across the land and in all our institutions and industries. I have deemed this elsewhere, as “leaderless leadership.” Such is the core leadership of our times, and thus the reason for these comments.
* * * * * * * * * *
Andrew Jackson was born before the Declaration of Independence (1776) was signed. He fought in the Revolutionary War, became an Indian fighter, lawyer, judge, congressman, senator, and general before becoming the seventh U.S. president – and all this without a formal education. He was the original self-made man and proud of it.
This colorful leader defied the modality of his times. His victory in the Battle of New Orleans (1815) saved the Mississippi basin and stifled expansionistic threats from Spain and Great Britain. Jackson rode his popularity to the presidency. As president, his frontier style of leadership resonated with people in the heartland.
Jackson’s leadership released pent-up energy and changed the course of American history. America on the frontier personified constant struggle. Even with all his follies, he never became stuck, but always forged ahead. Reality was his companion, survival his focus.
Critics point to Jackson’s flawed character, but he was also real. We seem to prefer flawless leaders who look good and behave as scripted. Jackson’s passion obliterated the frontier barrier of his age, and reinvented the presidency.
We are now confronting a new frontier—the Information Age. As Jackson personified the leadership of America’s emerging new frontier, the Information Age is looking for new leadership against declining expectations. This requires Jackson’s boldness, yet we are stuck in leaderless leadership. Polls drive the stake of denial further into our psyche.
Our addiction to numbers finds us “numbers addicts” hypnotized by institutional theories that create a false sense of control. Such a society resists a wake-up call in the surreal belief that no matter the calamity the resources will be there to dispatch it. Often only messy, atypical leadership can reverse this trance, as Jackson proved, making it clear why leadership matters.
Why Leadership Matters
The dominant themes of a time define leadership. They call for constant reinvention to match a changing world.
The Jackson Age was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial society. We are now in the post-industrial age driven by the Internet, moving beyond capitalism in doing business, and into a wilderness we fail to understand. We are in a state of chaos with no one seemingly in charge.
We still need hierarchies that will unlikely follow capitalistic structures, or along lines of wealth and academic credentials. Influence will reside with those who provide information. Kids in garages are rewriting the codes by which we live. Institutions are lost in their own mazes unable to catch up because they are unable to catch on, while the government creates wars it can’t win, and responds to natural disasters it can’t manage.
Power will no longer reside with those who own the means of production, but will be in the hands of those who create and sustain attention. They will inherit the future. The old guard of institutions is atavistic, and institutional life is anachronistic.
Leadership is individualistic. Leaders sense they are special long before it is clear to those they plan to lead. Leaders are narcissistic with one eye on opportunity and the other on posterity. Leaders court posterity with the same enthusiasm as they court supporters. They use people like mirrors to reflect their own self-image.
There are no such things as humble leaders. The led wouldn’t be interested, as they are attracted to the reputedly infallible and powerful. Leaders display confidence, never second-guess themselves, court posterity by keeping records of their watch and time.
Leaders are seldom brilliant or creative, but decisive, and self-directed doers. This is not enough to make them stand alone as leaders. They must have a cause that resonates with the people, and lifts them out of their confusion. Leaders must first convince themselves they are special and gifted to lead.
Though leaders are often selfish and self-interested, they feign selflessness and other-directedness. It eases them through the barrier of suspicion. Even with this, there is no certainty they will succeed. Leaders must possess a singular ambition that fuels their desire to carry them to where they want to go. Ambition can be loud or quiet, but it is necessary because talent is never enough.
Leaders have clear responsibilities to the led, but the led have obvious responsibilities to the leadership. The led are quicker to criticize than to see their complicit role when things go awry. People get the leadership they deserve.
Leaders must realize people vote their hearts, not their heads. The Information Age and Internet has placed the nation on a global frontier where what was applicable no longer applies. The leadership that brought the country to this frontier will not suffice to carry it safely through it.
What made Jackson a popular president was his ability to relate to people. They were uncritical of his liberal language sprinkled with cuss words because his message was clear. It was directed to their self-interests. He was one of them, and he was on top—and they loved it because that meant they were on top, too.
Jackson was an impressive communicator not for what he said but how he said it. His vigor captured the moment, as he acted out his impulses as if thoughts were actions, knowing what nerves to touch. He was in your face without disguise or guile.
Nor was he given to reflection, but maintained sturdy principles that never steered him wrong. He was neither interested in the free exchange of ideas nor in improving his mind. The only law he respected was the law he made. He had no qualms about using questionable means if he felt the ends were justified. Nor did he have a concept of social justice because his justice only reaffirmed his own impulses and experience. He was confident he could handle any problem that might arise.
Brilliant men as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Aaron Burr, and John Calhoun constantly underestimated him. They painted him into corners, yet his counter moves would not only prove them the losers, but also make them look bad for the exercise. What they failed to understand is that along with all his self-deceit, he knew himself well enough to see it in others, and thus to beat them at their own game.
What Leaders Can Learn
What made Jackson popular was he made his triumphs their triumphs; his courage their courage; his heroics their heroics. Being able to touch people’s hearts, and therefore their lives, means more than a display of native intelligence. People believe what a person does is what they are.
It is how we perceive leaders symbolically that matters. We will follow our leaders to the death if they make us feel more than we are and stand for what we believe we should be. Such leaders create well-crafted personas that suggest invincibility, if not infallibility. Heroes remove the trauma of uncertainty.
Leaders cannot be packaged through institutional education, nor created by a well-honed network of friends. Leaders rise out of the muck of misadventures, percolating to the top of enterprise to see over our confusion. They often emerge as the answer to an imagined crisis, which is real in its consequences.
Leaders can know the pain that comes from struggle and deprivation and can see into people’s hearts and articulate their desires. Jackson’s father died as he was being born, his mother and two brothers died in the Revolutionary War, which found him an orphan without prospects at age 14. He had a deprived upbringing and education, and deprived of much chance to develop self-esteem. During his climb to prominence, America was also finding its own center, and climbing with him. So it is with all leaders who resonate with the people.
In adulthood, despite his many feats, his enemies ridiculed his inability to write a complete sentence without misspellings, and would cite evidence of an incurable ignorance. Yet, he changed the presidency, changed leadership as it was perceived, gave birth to a political party, and created an age of like-thinking presidents.
His intuitive vision allowed him to reach conclusions by shortcutting the problem while others were beating around the bush for the game. His strength translated intellect into character. He knew that people must first vent their frustrations before he could make connection. He was not a man of reflection, but a man of action.
The new Information frontier is less physically dangerous but more psychologically intimidating than Jackson’s frontier. Electronics are changing work, displacing millions of breadwinners from their traditional livelihood. Government has become high political theater where words are symbols that supplant action.
Words, however, are never the things they symbolize. More Americans are losing their jobs, suffering poor educations, and foregoing healthcare. Yet we wage wars that cost hundreds of billions of dollars that have no clear enemy, other than fear, and cannot be won. The money might better be spent elsewhere, but those in power always need an enemy to pursue. Companies announce having “great years” and then lay off thousands of employees. These things parallel to an amazing degree the time of Andrew Jackson when it became so clear why muscular leadership mattered.
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. and author of several books and articles in the genre of leadership. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com