Health is Wealth
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobbler is better than a sick king.
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812)
English Dramatist
I had my six-month check-up with my doctor today. During the interim period I had an MRI (head), EKG, treadmill test, sonogram of my heart, lungs and intestinal tract, a colonoscopy, blood tests, and an eye examination. It took me a period of three months to schedule and complete all these tests.
As I came into his office – my appointment had been scheduled for 8:30 a.m. and I had to reschedule it for 1:30 p.m. – I felt in an apologetic mood. Turns out he couldn’t see me until 2:30, but he did so then with a broad smile on his face. “How are you today, James?
“I’m fine,” I said, “I apologize for missing my appointment. My 2000 Taurus wouldn’t start. I’m apparently in better shape than it is.”
He laughed so hard he couldn’t control himself. “Now, that makes my day!”
Then he proceeded to go through all my tests with me. “Do you know, James, you have the body of a 40-year-old, do you know that?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you why. I see all kinds of people. I was born in a small village in India. People here just don’t appreciate what they have. There was no welfare in my village. Your family took care of you or nobody did.
“I’ve got people half your age who can’t pass the treadmill test. I got people here that say they can’t quit smoking and they’ve got emphysema. They want somebody else to quit for them.
“I’ve got people here who can’t pay their bills, and it’s not their fault. They want somebody else to get an education, somebody else to compete for a good job, somebody else to see how hard they’ve got it, and to give them a hand out to get out of their mess.
“I’ve got people here that are obese and have diabetes, and they say it’s not their fault. They can’t exercise because they can’t walk very well, bad backs and bad legs and all. They don’t have any choice but to sit in front of the television all day and eat. They want somebody else to walk for them.
“I’ve got people that are having retarded children and they themselves are retarded. And they want for me to find some agencies to get them more benefits.
“I’ve got people who come here with blood work that indicates they’ve been promiscuous. I won’t treat them. I have no time for them. Society can do all they want for them, but I draw the line because there is no place where it says I have to treat them.
“I’ve got people coming in here who have all of these different ailments. They’ll say the reason I can’t get ahead is because my brother’s in jail and I have to take care of his kids. I can’t get a job. Besides, I ain’t got no education.”
At this point, I interrupted, and said, “You hear it all.”
His head slumped down into his shoulders, “Yes, I hear it all.”
I said, “It’s sad.”
“Yes, it’s very sad. People here just don’t appreciate what they have. I don’t know what the answer is.”
“Do you tell them?”
“Do I tell them what?”
“Do you tell them just what you told me?”
“Do you think it would do any good?”
“Oh, I don’t know, doctor.”
“No, I don’t tell them. Am I a coward, James?”
“No, you’re not a coward, but I agree with you it is sad.”
“James, I don’t know what America is going to come to. Nothing seems to get through to these people.”
“Doctor, you probably see every kind of lifestyle disease there is.”
“Yes, and then some.” Then he added, “It’s not only that. It’s that they don’t think any of this is their fault. There is not a one of these people, that I’ve mentioned, that have failed the treadmill, that have several things wrong with their hearts, that have emphysema and can hardly walk to the end of the block, and some of them are in their forties.
“And that is my fault? That is society’s fault? It’s not their fault. When I say to them, why do you drink? They say, to forget, I’ve had a lot of pressure in my life. Why do you smoke? To calm my nerves. Why do you take drugs? To put me in another place. Not one of them says, I do it because I’m stupid. Not a single one.
“So they come to me, a tall, dark complexioned Indian doctor, who they feel superior to, because I’m a foreigner and I have an accent, and what can I tell them about America? So, I don’t tell them anything.”
I said, “Do any of them get better?”
“You want a truthful answer?”
I nodded.
“No, they don’t get better because they want somebody else to get better for them. You see, that’s the problem.”
Smiling, I said, “Are there many more like me?”
He looked at me steadily. “Well, James, I have all those people out there in the waiting room. I’ve been here since 8:30 this morning. And I’ve been talking to you now, for what, twenty minutes?”
“About.”
“That should be your answer. No, there aren’t many like you. Tell me, why are you like you?”
“I don’t know how to be any different.”
“See, there you have it, nor do I. Good day, James. You’ve put a little light in my day.”
And with that I left.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Saturday, September 16, 2006
CONFIDENT THINKING -- BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING -- PART ONE
CONFIDENT THINKING -- THE BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING
PART ONE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
KEY TO DOING BUSINESS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970) was designed to get past the arrogance of the seller and the adversarial relationship with the buyer.
It was written in the confrontational and popular climate of “winning through intimidation,” which it summarily rejected as counterproductive.
Confident Selling, on the contrary, envisioned the selling situation being totally constructive around intuitive listening, not talking; around observing, not intimidating; on determining the buyer’s needs, not imposing the will of the seller on what the buyer was willing to buy.
Confident Selling's most reverberating claim was, and continues to be, that the biggest obstacle to success in selling is the seller, not the buyer. The lack of confidence in the seller, which the buyer quickly senses, poisons the climate.
Confidence, however, is not derived from reading books, or looking in the mirror and saying repeatedly, “I am confident I am confident I am confident.” It is the seller believing in himself, seeing himself as partner with the buyer in the enterprise, where he interprets the buyer’s situation clearly to the buyer's advantage.
Thus avoided is the crippling effect of inappropriate sales psychology. Selling is a walk in the part if the seller has his ducks in a role and isn’t a barrier to his own success, which happens only too often because the seller fails to define the selling situation clearly.
Confident Thinking can be gleaned from the seller's own customer base. Virtually all the problems the seller has experienced in the seller’s accounts have occurred in the buyer's operation with his present supplier. You can take this to the bank. The Confident Thinking seller will note and use these 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 complaints specifically as they relate to the application of his products.
(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 and where they occur.
(7) Have an assessment of customer operating competence.
(8) Have a record of who, what, when, where, how, and why relative to the account.
Confident Thinking alerts the seller 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 obsessed with making an impression. That will occur naturally when the buyer realizes you are sincerely interested in his operation. 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 “thinking level.” The buyer never says what he means, but always means what he says.
For example, imagine he promised the seller an order when his current supply ran out. But when the seller comes back he finds the buyer has reordered from his current supplier. Is the buyer a liar?
Hearing at the first or second level it might appear so. But at the third level it is clear that the buyer has never been convinced to change. The seller must always translate what the buyer says to what he actually means. Saying he would purchase from the seller was a way to get rid of him. As the evidence clearly indicates, that is precisely what transpired.
Sellers, like everyone, are handicapped when it comes to listening:
(1) 40 percent of our development is learning to talk;
(2) 60 percent is learning to read.
Listening is taken for granted. It would seem we are supposed to acquire the skill by osmosis. Consequently, most sellers, as with most people, are poor listeners.
There are a series of impediments to active listening: worrying about some situation at home; wounded pride for being treated with condescension; lack of respect for the buyer; a wandering mind; thinking of the next call; or calculating the commission on the sale. A trigger word can throw the seller off balance emotionally, such as being called a “peddler.” Should the rebuttal instinct kick in, the game is over.
Listening demands that most rare of human characteristics, emotional maturity and self-discipline. With maturity comes control, with control comes Confident Thinking, and with Confident Thinking comes competence and Confident Selling.
So, for a situation to “listen” well, the seller must listen with his whole body. This means using eyes, ears, hands, and posture as components of listening to display interest and attention. It also means listening to what the seller’s gut is telling him about the buyer. Research indicates 75 percent of communication is verbal and 25 percent is written. That no doubt will be changing with the Internet. Even so, with face-to-face contact, 85 percent of communication will likely continue to be taken through the eyes and only 15 percent through the ears.
For the seller, this is daunting. He must see clearly, hear thoughtfully, and react suitably, trusting his mind and body to be alert to vagaries in the situation. From the moment the seller comes in contact with the buyer in the buyer's environs, he must adjust to what it is shouting at him, that is, he must wear the personality of the place, its essence and character as if a garment. If this sounds absurd, think again.
The Confident Thinker feels everything before he thinks of anything. This is so from his initial contact with the receptionist, security guard or secretary to the person he is to meet. From these data, he has a sense of the space and place and what it shouts to project, equating how authentic this is to its palpable reality.
For example, the seller notes if the climate is relaxed, tense, anxious, frantic or self-absorbed. The walls of the lobby talk -- how furnished, decorated and ergonomically appointed -- to visitors and tell them how they are esteemed.
Is the place seller friendly? Or is it seller hostile? The seller takes a moment to note the dynamics of the people moving about: do they appear to be trusting, suspicious, playful, perky or somber? Does it have a classic or New Age ambience, or some other?
Emerson said, “What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you!” Nothing is a function of chance. Everything is crying to be understood. In this sense, the seller need not think, but only feel. What it “feels like” is likely to be “what it is.”
The seller can check first impressions with all that follows: content, context and process of the sales call. This is all part of listening.
Without realizing it, the seller is busy processing information: (1) potential; (2) climate; (3) personnel; (4) opportunity; (5) possible brush off treatment; and (6) readiness of the buyer to go for the seller's major objective, the order.
* * * * * *
A baseball player may only get a hit every third appearance at the plate, which is considered good, but he expects to be ready to hit every time. He contributes whenever he puts the ball into play, but not before. Likewise, the seller’s success ratio is likely to be even chancier, but he, too, is not contributing until he has an order in hand.
These data are flooding the seller’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 seller can think too much, just as a baseball player can think too much at the plate. Then, seller or player is each other’s own worst enemy.
The Confident Thinker knows valleys go with peaks, failure leads to success, and learning takes place on plateaus, not during soaring euphoria. Ultimately, the seller needs to trust his wits, training, and conceptual framework to put him in the zone, going with the flow with his mind and body working as one.
That will happen if the seller is open to experience, alive and sensitive to everything. No matter how the call goes, it is a learning experience. There is no such thing as a bad at bat or a bad sales call. Each is a step in progress. As long as the seller has the buyer’s best interests at heart, seller and buyer are connected. This will be implicitly understood.
We are all products of our programming. We cannot escape it. It will not get in the way if we accept it and adjust to it with understanding.
* * * * * *
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 well dressed and friendly. He asked my salesman for his business card. They exchanged cards and my salesman nearly feinted.
The man was chairman of the board of a Fortune 100 company. Large potential customers as well as authority figures intimidated this particular salesman in general, being the reason I was traveling with him. It puzzled me because he appeared so talented. If only he could get his arms around his problem, he could be successful, I reasoned, but what was his problem? It showed itself here.
Later, I asked him what had happened? His comment was matter-of-fact, “He’s a civil war buff like I am. We just hit it off.” I said I could see that, but what about the feinting?
No reply.
He asked you to call on him in New York City, right?
“Yes,” he answered, “he’s got some stuff he wants to show me.”
I don’t think so, I said.
“No?”
No, I repeated. What other reason would he want to see you?
This completely threw him. He could not fathom a man of such status would want to work with him. He had allowed the CEO to display his remarkable civil war knowledge – his I sensed was much greater – without interruption, feeding the CEO lines to make his delivery more impressive.
You listened, I reminded him. Didn’t you notice, I persisted, you hardly spoke at all, feeding 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 seller who was easily intimidated by position power, avoiding it whenever he could. This resulted in him making rote calls again and again on high-end buyers while concentrating on low-enders without clout. His programming here was showing.
Even with the flicker of bias, the buyer senses it. It did not show here because it was a neutral zone (construction site), and casual conversation led to a subject of common interest with no one required to make a decision.
Did my salesman experience an epiphany? I would like to say, yes, but that was not the case. He took his rapport with the CEO to be a fluke, and never called on the man in New York City.
If a seller recognizes his bias, he can control it by accepting himself, as he is, being aware and accepting of others as he finds them. Every interpersonal exchange has the potential for hidden contamination when bias is denied.
* * * * * *
Going through the mind of the buyer in the sales interview is this chronology in descending order:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person?
(2) Can I see my people doing business with him?
(3) Will his products fit comfortably with what we are doing?
(4) Is he technically competent?
Notice the chronology. It may seem 180 degrees out of phase, but it is not. It is always in this order, while it is seldom clear to either the buyer or the seller for this to be the case. Yet, both bear it out in practice.
Invariably, the myth persists that competence matters most, when it matters lease in fragile 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 seller who recognizes this chronology and works his magic with it, first in creating comfort, then in developing trust, then in establishing rapport, and finally in generating collegiality will have a most viable trump card if he is also competent. Seller and buyer will then both profit.
If he isn’t competent, the buyer 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.
* * * * * *
PART ONE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
KEY TO DOING BUSINESS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970) was designed to get past the arrogance of the seller and the adversarial relationship with the buyer.
It was written in the confrontational and popular climate of “winning through intimidation,” which it summarily rejected as counterproductive.
Confident Selling, on the contrary, envisioned the selling situation being totally constructive around intuitive listening, not talking; around observing, not intimidating; on determining the buyer’s needs, not imposing the will of the seller on what the buyer was willing to buy.
Confident Selling's most reverberating claim was, and continues to be, that the biggest obstacle to success in selling is the seller, not the buyer. The lack of confidence in the seller, which the buyer quickly senses, poisons the climate.
Confidence, however, is not derived from reading books, or looking in the mirror and saying repeatedly, “I am confident I am confident I am confident.” It is the seller believing in himself, seeing himself as partner with the buyer in the enterprise, where he interprets the buyer’s situation clearly to the buyer's advantage.
Thus avoided is the crippling effect of inappropriate sales psychology. Selling is a walk in the part if the seller has his ducks in a role and isn’t a barrier to his own success, which happens only too often because the seller fails to define the selling situation clearly.
Confident Thinking can be gleaned from the seller's own customer base. Virtually all the problems the seller has experienced in the seller’s accounts have occurred in the buyer's operation with his present supplier. You can take this to the bank. The Confident Thinking seller will note and use these 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 complaints specifically as they relate to the application of his products.
(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 and where they occur.
(7) Have an assessment of customer operating competence.
(8) Have a record of who, what, when, where, how, and why relative to the account.
Confident Thinking alerts the seller 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 obsessed with making an impression. That will occur naturally when the buyer realizes you are sincerely interested in his operation. 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 “thinking level.” The buyer never says what he means, but always means what he says.
For example, imagine he promised the seller an order when his current supply ran out. But when the seller comes back he finds the buyer has reordered from his current supplier. Is the buyer a liar?
Hearing at the first or second level it might appear so. But at the third level it is clear that the buyer has never been convinced to change. The seller must always translate what the buyer says to what he actually means. Saying he would purchase from the seller was a way to get rid of him. As the evidence clearly indicates, that is precisely what transpired.
Sellers, like everyone, are handicapped when it comes to listening:
(1) 40 percent of our development is learning to talk;
(2) 60 percent is learning to read.
Listening is taken for granted. It would seem we are supposed to acquire the skill by osmosis. Consequently, most sellers, as with most people, are poor listeners.
There are a series of impediments to active listening: worrying about some situation at home; wounded pride for being treated with condescension; lack of respect for the buyer; a wandering mind; thinking of the next call; or calculating the commission on the sale. A trigger word can throw the seller off balance emotionally, such as being called a “peddler.” Should the rebuttal instinct kick in, the game is over.
Listening demands that most rare of human characteristics, emotional maturity and self-discipline. With maturity comes control, with control comes Confident Thinking, and with Confident Thinking comes competence and Confident Selling.
So, for a situation to “listen” well, the seller must listen with his whole body. This means using eyes, ears, hands, and posture as components of listening to display interest and attention. It also means listening to what the seller’s gut is telling him about the buyer. Research indicates 75 percent of communication is verbal and 25 percent is written. That no doubt will be changing with the Internet. Even so, with face-to-face contact, 85 percent of communication will likely continue to be taken through the eyes and only 15 percent through the ears.
For the seller, this is daunting. He must see clearly, hear thoughtfully, and react suitably, trusting his mind and body to be alert to vagaries in the situation. From the moment the seller comes in contact with the buyer in the buyer's environs, he must adjust to what it is shouting at him, that is, he must wear the personality of the place, its essence and character as if a garment. If this sounds absurd, think again.
The Confident Thinker feels everything before he thinks of anything. This is so from his initial contact with the receptionist, security guard or secretary to the person he is to meet. From these data, he has a sense of the space and place and what it shouts to project, equating how authentic this is to its palpable reality.
For example, the seller notes if the climate is relaxed, tense, anxious, frantic or self-absorbed. The walls of the lobby talk -- how furnished, decorated and ergonomically appointed -- to visitors and tell them how they are esteemed.
Is the place seller friendly? Or is it seller hostile? The seller takes a moment to note the dynamics of the people moving about: do they appear to be trusting, suspicious, playful, perky or somber? Does it have a classic or New Age ambience, or some other?
Emerson said, “What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you!” Nothing is a function of chance. Everything is crying to be understood. In this sense, the seller need not think, but only feel. What it “feels like” is likely to be “what it is.”
The seller can check first impressions with all that follows: content, context and process of the sales call. This is all part of listening.
Without realizing it, the seller is busy processing information: (1) potential; (2) climate; (3) personnel; (4) opportunity; (5) possible brush off treatment; and (6) readiness of the buyer to go for the seller's major objective, the order.
* * * * * *
A baseball player may only get a hit every third appearance at the plate, which is considered good, but he expects to be ready to hit every time. He contributes whenever he puts the ball into play, but not before. Likewise, the seller’s success ratio is likely to be even chancier, but he, too, is not contributing until he has an order in hand.
These data are flooding the seller’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 seller can think too much, just as a baseball player can think too much at the plate. Then, seller or player is each other’s own worst enemy.
The Confident Thinker knows valleys go with peaks, failure leads to success, and learning takes place on plateaus, not during soaring euphoria. Ultimately, the seller needs to trust his wits, training, and conceptual framework to put him in the zone, going with the flow with his mind and body working as one.
That will happen if the seller is open to experience, alive and sensitive to everything. No matter how the call goes, it is a learning experience. There is no such thing as a bad at bat or a bad sales call. Each is a step in progress. As long as the seller has the buyer’s best interests at heart, seller and buyer are connected. This will be implicitly understood.
We are all products of our programming. We cannot escape it. It will not get in the way if we accept it and adjust to it with understanding.
* * * * * *
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 well dressed and friendly. He asked my salesman for his business card. They exchanged cards and my salesman nearly feinted.
The man was chairman of the board of a Fortune 100 company. Large potential customers as well as authority figures intimidated this particular salesman in general, being the reason I was traveling with him. It puzzled me because he appeared so talented. If only he could get his arms around his problem, he could be successful, I reasoned, but what was his problem? It showed itself here.
Later, I asked him what had happened? His comment was matter-of-fact, “He’s a civil war buff like I am. We just hit it off.” I said I could see that, but what about the feinting?
No reply.
He asked you to call on him in New York City, right?
“Yes,” he answered, “he’s got some stuff he wants to show me.”
I don’t think so, I said.
“No?”
No, I repeated. What other reason would he want to see you?
This completely threw him. He could not fathom a man of such status would want to work with him. He had allowed the CEO to display his remarkable civil war knowledge – his I sensed was much greater – without interruption, feeding the CEO lines to make his delivery more impressive.
You listened, I reminded him. Didn’t you notice, I persisted, you hardly spoke at all, feeding 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 seller who was easily intimidated by position power, avoiding it whenever he could. This resulted in him making rote calls again and again on high-end buyers while concentrating on low-enders without clout. His programming here was showing.
Even with the flicker of bias, the buyer senses it. It did not show here because it was a neutral zone (construction site), and casual conversation led to a subject of common interest with no one required to make a decision.
Did my salesman experience an epiphany? I would like to say, yes, but that was not the case. He took his rapport with the CEO to be a fluke, and never called on the man in New York City.
If a seller recognizes his bias, he can control it by accepting himself, as he is, being aware and accepting of others as he finds them. Every interpersonal exchange has the potential for hidden contamination when bias is denied.
* * * * * *
Going through the mind of the buyer in the sales interview is this chronology in descending order:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person?
(2) Can I see my people doing business with him?
(3) Will his products fit comfortably with what we are doing?
(4) Is he technically competent?
Notice the chronology. It may seem 180 degrees out of phase, but it is not. It is always in this order, while it is seldom clear to either the buyer or the seller for this to be the case. Yet, both bear it out in practice.
Invariably, the myth persists that competence matters most, when it matters lease in fragile 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 seller who recognizes this chronology and works his magic with it, first in creating comfort, then in developing trust, then in establishing rapport, and finally in generating collegiality will have a most viable trump card if he is also competent. Seller and buyer will then both profit.
If he isn’t competent, the buyer 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.
* * * * * *
CONFIDENT THINKING -- BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING -- PART TWO
CONFIDENT THINKING – BRIDGE TO CONFIDENT SELLING
PART TWO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
FOCUS SALE TRAINING ON SELLER, NOT BUYER
The problem with sales training is that the emphasis is placed primarily on the company and its products, and on the seller’s technical competence, failing to see these are ancillary to interpersonal acumen. The seller must be able to read buyers; and to be able to read buyers; the seller must first be able to read himself. Obviously, competence is important, but competence will produce squat if the seller is unable to get the order.
I know. I worked for a company as a chemical sales engineer, and later as an executive. My initial orientation was intensive technical training in chemical technology, company products and services, but not an hour on how to approach the seller other than to wow him to death with my and my company's competence.
The same “technical dandies” called on me when I was an executive. They were trained in dazzling know how, but not in the sociology of meaningful exchange. It was as if it were an affront to consider selling worthy of their personal involvement. They were above seeing themselves as sellers, and yet that was their function.
The seller’s handbook may be replete with contrivances to get the order, but not when to close. The buyer provides these nuances if the seller is attentive.
How does the seller know? He feels it in his bones. It is then that he asks for the order, and not a token order, but an order to establish a new account, carrying the buyer over this vulnerable threshold with assurance, seeing it as a natural progression to an inevitable and mutual conclusion. Knowing and acting on this intelligence has been called the “killer instinct.”
The “killer instinct” is not to be confused with “winning through intimidation.” An intimidator is not a seller; he is a bully.
Seller and buyer are not adversaries, but partners. Partners must first be comfortable and trusting of each other before they can develop a common problem solving focus. When the seller punishes the buyer with his personality and knowledge, overwhelming him with his dance, success, at best, will be short lived. The seller needs to build a bridge of trust to establish a highway to loyalty.
Given these criteria, small wonder that introverted sellers are successful in the long run. They don’t have the charismatic dance, don’t have the fragile ego to be seen as a big deal, and consequently, have little inclination to be all things to all people. They treat buyers with respect, but expect buyers to give them the same. Introspective sellers see, listen, and act in accordance with the defined situation.
Is there still a place for the charismatic backslapping seller? Obviously, there is because most companies still recruit and develop them.
* * * * * *
Picture a company’s high talent young managers being assembled at a remote location, in this case, Starve Rock State Park in LaSalle-Peru, Illinois.
It is the mid-1960s of a company that had taken thirty years to reach $75 million, but it was soaring with international business. Could it reach $1 billion dollars in sales? The possibility produced an electric climate in this assembly. Little did participants know, however, that company sales would soar into the multi-billions in much less time than it had taken it to reach $75 million.
In this atmosphere, 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 four deep, spellbound by his every word.
He was the prototype of the charismatic leader, six five, 260, tall, dark and handsome with a booming voice and a roaring laugh that made the glassware tinkle on the meeting tables. His command of language exploded like firecrackers in the mind. Some treated him like a god.
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 imagine me being a Tex?” I started to laugh. I got the giggles so bad I was getting a stomachache.
This caused the mountain roaring across the room to stop in mid-sentence. All heads turned accusingly towards us as if we mere Infidels. I had interrupted the soliloquy. Obediently, I raised my hand, palm up, in apology with heads turning back in unison to the droning staccato of their leader.
My friend said, “What was that all about?”
I had the incredible thought of Tex trying to be you, I said. My friend was small of stature, slim of physique, quiet with a small shrill voice that was not much above sotto voce, and an introspective disposition. Although only thirty, he was losing his hair, wore thick glasses that made him look like Woody Allen, and seemingly, moved with exertion.
He was offended. “Thanks a lot.”
Oh, no, I added, I meant no offense. Look at him, I said, poster board extraordinaire, two-dimensional. You’re the real thing, flesh and blood. You’ve outsold the poster board when he was in your shoes ten to one. That’s a fact.
My friend didn’t know how Tex had climbed the ladder. He didn't want to know. He took what he saw as the real deal. It wasn't. He didn’t know that Tex never sold, or that he had a mentor that greased his skids. The irony is that his mentor was the mild mannered executive vice president who closely resembled my friend. Apparently, the vice president felt he needed the charismatic fire that Tex exuded to complement his low-key personality.
My friend left me that night wounded still believing I had stuck a sword in his side, and then twisted it. Obviously, he recovered. He did leave the company, joined a competitor, and no surprise to me, rose ultimately to become its CEO. I’ve always wondered if he found himself a Tex as a direct report.
The point is there is no reason to attempt to emulate what we are not, or to apologize for why we are successful being what we are.
POWER OF THE SALES CRITIQUE
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.
When the call is fresh in your mind, a few words scribbled into a diary can be priceless later. It is amazing what these words reveal in terms of patterns, themes, chronic problems, and opportunities in the cold appraisal when the face is no longer flush and the heart has been restored to its normal rhythm.
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
* * * * * *
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 seller the fact that we carry our geography with us, and no one more so than the buyer. By keeping these notes, the seller comes to appreciate the buyer’s motivation, as patterns are crying out to be heard as the seller steps into the buyer’s office.
The implicit behavior in an operation may be generalized as favoring comfort, complacency or contribution. Data will highlight one or the other or a combination as the buyer responds to the interview, his agenda, interruptions, or observable crises. The seller’s job is not to pass judgment on dominant cultural themes, but to use them, accordingly, in the best interest of the buyer’s operation.
Then there is the matter of how the buyer wants to be perceived. Again, this may be consistent or inconsistent with items displayed or the buyer's behavior.
Books, certificates, mementoes, honors, trophies, personal albums, type and condition of furniture, location of office, and its arrangement all have meaning to the buyer. It can be quickly gleaned as to whether this is a working place or a shrine. Without a word being said the seller can undress the buyer as a person. Capturing the essence of a place can avoid bouncing off the walls of resistance with none the wiser why. We all telegraph the pass of our identity.
* * * * * *
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 an honorary degree as well.
Before I could adjust to this exhibit, he blared, “Give me your spiel,” then turned his swivel chair around with his back facing us and proceeded to clip his fingernails. Not only was this insulting and uncouth, but his office was pretentious to the extreme with furnishings fit for a chief executive officer and he was only a departmental manager.
For fully ninety seconds, I did not say a word and motioned to my area manager with my hand to support my silence. He nodded. Ninety seconds of silence in a sales call is an eternity. Finally, the buyer turned his chair around, and in a stern voice, as if he were a principal addressing a troubled 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 give us your full attention.
He came back, “What if that is never?” I fed this exact line back to him, what if that is never? And again, I sat there in silence. Meanwhile, my area manager was dying. But I was unwavering. 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 the buyer was not George, or the person who could buy. He was an administrator in power plant operations, a paper pusher who processed requests from the line.
Two other bits of information were learned as well: he was intimidated by technical people, and was embittered having been passed over for promotion several times. This was learned from the chief engineer who was “George,” and whom we were allowed to see on the subsequent call. We didn’t get an order on that call, but he was quite accommodating, and the prospects looked good.
How was this information learned?
A telephone call was made to the director of engineering. He was asked technical questions on power plant operations, politely referring me to the chief engineer. I have found executives are quite amenable to sloughing off such queries to men in their line of command.
The higher the position in the hierarchy the more aware office holders are of the power of public relations. That is why a customer complaint that arrives on a CEO's desk sends reverberations throughout the company. Every seller knows this but, in my experience, few are prone to use it as a tool to make the correct connections.
Clearly not a friend, the chief engineer informed me that the nail clipper, initially contacted, had the title of power plant facility management, but no direct involvement in power plant operations. It was also apparent that this person acted as a buffer to power plant personnel, saving them the trouble of dealing directly with sellers. So, as negative as the chief engineer was about the nail clipper, he was performing a designated role.
Few things are as they seem, and when they aren’t, it behooves the seller to use a little ingenuity to find out why.
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 this business of selling.
It has been so natural to use Confident Thinking translated into Confident Selling that I am not surprised that my colleagues saw my success as a matter of luck.
When I made presentations on this indirect and unconventional approach to selling, management, too, was skeptical of this departure from conventional wisdom of adversarial selling.
Adversarial selling involves overwhelming the buyer with benefits, finessing objections, and seeking the order with a manipulative close, an approach at variance with my intuitive one.
The audience for Confident Selling did not appear until 1970 when my book of that title was published. In my thirties, it was the year after my first retirement. 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 Cassandra Effect is equally apt as it was earlier for Confident Selling. The old adage seems to still apply, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. He is here.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher was a sales executive with Nalco Chemical Company working in the United States, South Africa, Europe and South Africa; and for Honeywell Avionics as an organization/industrial psychologist; and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. as a human resource executive. He is author of several books and articles in this genre. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com; email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
PART TWO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
FOCUS SALE TRAINING ON SELLER, NOT BUYER
The problem with sales training is that the emphasis is placed primarily on the company and its products, and on the seller’s technical competence, failing to see these are ancillary to interpersonal acumen. The seller must be able to read buyers; and to be able to read buyers; the seller must first be able to read himself. Obviously, competence is important, but competence will produce squat if the seller is unable to get the order.
I know. I worked for a company as a chemical sales engineer, and later as an executive. My initial orientation was intensive technical training in chemical technology, company products and services, but not an hour on how to approach the seller other than to wow him to death with my and my company's competence.
The same “technical dandies” called on me when I was an executive. They were trained in dazzling know how, but not in the sociology of meaningful exchange. It was as if it were an affront to consider selling worthy of their personal involvement. They were above seeing themselves as sellers, and yet that was their function.
The seller’s handbook may be replete with contrivances to get the order, but not when to close. The buyer provides these nuances if the seller is attentive.
How does the seller know? He feels it in his bones. It is then that he asks for the order, and not a token order, but an order to establish a new account, carrying the buyer over this vulnerable threshold with assurance, seeing it as a natural progression to an inevitable and mutual conclusion. Knowing and acting on this intelligence has been called the “killer instinct.”
The “killer instinct” is not to be confused with “winning through intimidation.” An intimidator is not a seller; he is a bully.
Seller and buyer are not adversaries, but partners. Partners must first be comfortable and trusting of each other before they can develop a common problem solving focus. When the seller punishes the buyer with his personality and knowledge, overwhelming him with his dance, success, at best, will be short lived. The seller needs to build a bridge of trust to establish a highway to loyalty.
Given these criteria, small wonder that introverted sellers are successful in the long run. They don’t have the charismatic dance, don’t have the fragile ego to be seen as a big deal, and consequently, have little inclination to be all things to all people. They treat buyers with respect, but expect buyers to give them the same. Introspective sellers see, listen, and act in accordance with the defined situation.
Is there still a place for the charismatic backslapping seller? Obviously, there is because most companies still recruit and develop them.
* * * * * *
Picture a company’s high talent young managers being assembled at a remote location, in this case, Starve Rock State Park in LaSalle-Peru, Illinois.
It is the mid-1960s of a company that had taken thirty years to reach $75 million, but it was soaring with international business. Could it reach $1 billion dollars in sales? The possibility produced an electric climate in this assembly. Little did participants know, however, that company sales would soar into the multi-billions in much less time than it had taken it to reach $75 million.
In this atmosphere, 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 four deep, spellbound by his every word.
He was the prototype of the charismatic leader, six five, 260, tall, dark and handsome with a booming voice and a roaring laugh that made the glassware tinkle on the meeting tables. His command of language exploded like firecrackers in the mind. Some treated him like a god.
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 imagine me being a Tex?” I started to laugh. I got the giggles so bad I was getting a stomachache.
This caused the mountain roaring across the room to stop in mid-sentence. All heads turned accusingly towards us as if we mere Infidels. I had interrupted the soliloquy. Obediently, I raised my hand, palm up, in apology with heads turning back in unison to the droning staccato of their leader.
My friend said, “What was that all about?”
I had the incredible thought of Tex trying to be you, I said. My friend was small of stature, slim of physique, quiet with a small shrill voice that was not much above sotto voce, and an introspective disposition. Although only thirty, he was losing his hair, wore thick glasses that made him look like Woody Allen, and seemingly, moved with exertion.
He was offended. “Thanks a lot.”
Oh, no, I added, I meant no offense. Look at him, I said, poster board extraordinaire, two-dimensional. You’re the real thing, flesh and blood. You’ve outsold the poster board when he was in your shoes ten to one. That’s a fact.
My friend didn’t know how Tex had climbed the ladder. He didn't want to know. He took what he saw as the real deal. It wasn't. He didn’t know that Tex never sold, or that he had a mentor that greased his skids. The irony is that his mentor was the mild mannered executive vice president who closely resembled my friend. Apparently, the vice president felt he needed the charismatic fire that Tex exuded to complement his low-key personality.
My friend left me that night wounded still believing I had stuck a sword in his side, and then twisted it. Obviously, he recovered. He did leave the company, joined a competitor, and no surprise to me, rose ultimately to become its CEO. I’ve always wondered if he found himself a Tex as a direct report.
The point is there is no reason to attempt to emulate what we are not, or to apologize for why we are successful being what we are.
POWER OF THE SALES CRITIQUE
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.
When the call is fresh in your mind, a few words scribbled into a diary can be priceless later. It is amazing what these words reveal in terms of patterns, themes, chronic problems, and opportunities in the cold appraisal when the face is no longer flush and the heart has been restored to its normal rhythm.
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
* * * * * *
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 seller the fact that we carry our geography with us, and no one more so than the buyer. By keeping these notes, the seller comes to appreciate the buyer’s motivation, as patterns are crying out to be heard as the seller steps into the buyer’s office.
The implicit behavior in an operation may be generalized as favoring comfort, complacency or contribution. Data will highlight one or the other or a combination as the buyer responds to the interview, his agenda, interruptions, or observable crises. The seller’s job is not to pass judgment on dominant cultural themes, but to use them, accordingly, in the best interest of the buyer’s operation.
Then there is the matter of how the buyer wants to be perceived. Again, this may be consistent or inconsistent with items displayed or the buyer's behavior.
Books, certificates, mementoes, honors, trophies, personal albums, type and condition of furniture, location of office, and its arrangement all have meaning to the buyer. It can be quickly gleaned as to whether this is a working place or a shrine. Without a word being said the seller can undress the buyer as a person. Capturing the essence of a place can avoid bouncing off the walls of resistance with none the wiser why. We all telegraph the pass of our identity.
* * * * * *
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 an honorary degree as well.
Before I could adjust to this exhibit, he blared, “Give me your spiel,” then turned his swivel chair around with his back facing us and proceeded to clip his fingernails. Not only was this insulting and uncouth, but his office was pretentious to the extreme with furnishings fit for a chief executive officer and he was only a departmental manager.
For fully ninety seconds, I did not say a word and motioned to my area manager with my hand to support my silence. He nodded. Ninety seconds of silence in a sales call is an eternity. Finally, the buyer turned his chair around, and in a stern voice, as if he were a principal addressing a troubled 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 give us your full attention.
He came back, “What if that is never?” I fed this exact line back to him, what if that is never? And again, I sat there in silence. Meanwhile, my area manager was dying. But I was unwavering. 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 the buyer was not George, or the person who could buy. He was an administrator in power plant operations, a paper pusher who processed requests from the line.
Two other bits of information were learned as well: he was intimidated by technical people, and was embittered having been passed over for promotion several times. This was learned from the chief engineer who was “George,” and whom we were allowed to see on the subsequent call. We didn’t get an order on that call, but he was quite accommodating, and the prospects looked good.
How was this information learned?
A telephone call was made to the director of engineering. He was asked technical questions on power plant operations, politely referring me to the chief engineer. I have found executives are quite amenable to sloughing off such queries to men in their line of command.
The higher the position in the hierarchy the more aware office holders are of the power of public relations. That is why a customer complaint that arrives on a CEO's desk sends reverberations throughout the company. Every seller knows this but, in my experience, few are prone to use it as a tool to make the correct connections.
Clearly not a friend, the chief engineer informed me that the nail clipper, initially contacted, had the title of power plant facility management, but no direct involvement in power plant operations. It was also apparent that this person acted as a buffer to power plant personnel, saving them the trouble of dealing directly with sellers. So, as negative as the chief engineer was about the nail clipper, he was performing a designated role.
Few things are as they seem, and when they aren’t, it behooves the seller to use a little ingenuity to find out why.
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 this business of selling.
It has been so natural to use Confident Thinking translated into Confident Selling that I am not surprised that my colleagues saw my success as a matter of luck.
When I made presentations on this indirect and unconventional approach to selling, management, too, was skeptical of this departure from conventional wisdom of adversarial selling.
Adversarial selling involves overwhelming the buyer with benefits, finessing objections, and seeking the order with a manipulative close, an approach at variance with my intuitive one.
The audience for Confident Selling did not appear until 1970 when my book of that title was published. In my thirties, it was the year after my first retirement. 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 Cassandra Effect is equally apt as it was earlier for Confident Selling. The old adage seems to still apply, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. He is here.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher was a sales executive with Nalco Chemical Company working in the United States, South Africa, Europe and South Africa; and for Honeywell Avionics as an organization/industrial psychologist; and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. as a human resource executive. He is author of several books and articles in this genre. Check out his website: www.fisherofideas.com; email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
WHO IS IN CHARGE?
WHO IS IN CHARGE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
God, the power of words! I received an email of an article in which a journalist was commenting on his impressions of baseball teams he visited in the Midwest. One such team was the Lumber Kings of Clinton, Iowa playing at Riverview stadium. Clinton happens to be my hometown. His comment captured the reality of Clinton with warmth if not euphemistic tact, as “a center struggling to hang on in a soft economy."
It happened I was having lunch with my daughter, a professional model, the same day I read this about Clinton. It was the place where she was born. Unfortunately, we left almost immediately to live in near and far flung places such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Europe and South Africa, and now in Tampa.
Briefly, she visited Clinton this past summer with her own daughter, and loved the place, its ambiance, its relaxed non-congested easy goingness, its friendliness, and its brightness.
I've not been back for a while, but keep tabs on its status, so I asked her, "Would you like to live there," this woman that has always lived in metropolitan areas.
"Live there?" she came back, "What would I do?" Then correcting me, she said, "I meant I liked visiting it for a few days. It is a wonderful respite from all the commotion and noise, that's all I meant, relaxing."
What started my mind reflecting on this baseball story, and its reference to my hometown, was the fact that I played in the Industrial League as a catcher for Pillsbury Mills as an eighth grader going into ninth grade. I also played many games in this same beautiful baseball stadium for the Junior American Legion, and a team called the “Lyons Merchants.”
Dreamily, I remembered the place of my youth, an eclectic industrial blue-collar town of many small job shops and specialized industries, and I loved the place. I told her it was in those days a town of about 33,000 with a sparkling downtown business district, and once luxurious homes of Clinton’s halcyon days converted into the YWCA, Sarah Harding Home, and other utilitarian places; that it had a monumental panoply of giant oak trees forming a cathedral ceiling extending from Fifth Avenue and Fourth Street all the way out to Bluff Boulevard; and that it was a town with a center that controlled its own destiny with self-assurance and self-reliance, beholden to no one.
"It can't be nearly that big now," she said, "and there is virtually no real downtown. You can walk practically anywhere and run into little traffic, which I loved." Then she got thoughtful, "what happened to make it so small?"
Then I thought of a line from one of my books about America: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.” My reference was to the great retreat from our indigenous values. She has heard all that before. It is the quickest way for her eyes to glaze over, and to break contact with me.
So, instead, I treated her to a bit of history that I share with readers in my memoir-as-a-novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
"Clinton," I said, "has a history of propinquity and serendipity," moving on to explain my meaning.
"Because of the many island obstacles and the narrowness of the straits of the Mississippi as it passes by Clinton, it was not advantageous or economical to float logs down from the North (Minnesota and Wisconsin) past Clinton, and so it became the sawdust capital of the entire world."
“Sawdust capital?” She looked at me suspiciously, "You’re kidding?"
I shook my head. "In fact," I continued, "it was that sawdust gold during the first quarter of the last century that resulted in Clinton having more per capita millionaires than any other place in the world."
Again, she found this hard to believe. "Sawdust gold?"
"Sawdust was gold," I repeated, "and Clinton, because of it, became a cultural, intellectual, social, and entertainment center with the world's movers and shakers frequently finding their way to Clinton, as America was emerging as a great nation."
Then with dramatic pause, I added, "Clinton was in the mainstream in its own right."
She smiled, "You're putting me on, right?"
I shook my head again. "Read Clinton, Iowa history, and you’ll see I'm not kidding. I only touch on the subject in my book, but it is a vibrant history, I assure you."
Again, she pressed. "But if that is true, what about now? Why is it, well, so ..."
I added for her, "so drab?"
"No, I was thinking 'so slow'."
"You mean so out of the mainstream as it once was?"
She shrugged, "I guess."
I explained, "There was a massive exodus of the high rollers, as if Clinton was experiencing its own Chicago fire, when the logs quit coming, the sawmills shut down, the 200 person garden parties disappeared, and the operas and symphonies had no audience.
"The fire in the mind was in the form of panic. So, when the money people left, so did jobs, and with no jobs, people were forced to move on."
To my surprise, she was listening, as she corrected me. "But you grew up in the 1940s, not the 1920s! You said it was very much alive, then, with all kinds of activities."
I complimented her for listening, and then continued, "The war saved Clinton's bacon, but it was able to save its bacon because it was ready. It is that old adage that defines luck as 'when preparation meets opportunity.'
“Clinton was prepared. Big companies didn't swoop into the vacuum when the sawmills shut down. Not at all. Small venture capitalists set up job shops and small industries gradually filling Clinton's moral center with hope to replace the panic, and then the war came, which gave Clinton a rebirth, as the Sphinx rose out of the sawdust.
"This lasted into the 1960s, and then petered out when the rest of the world caught up with the U.S. It didn't just happen to Clinton, but across the American continent. Many other places like Clinton went under, as their identity and moral center disappeared with the ‘slowdown of the economy.’
"You can always tell when this is the case, not just with closed down plants, vacant lots, neglected buildings, and mobile home parks replacing standard homes. The more telling sense of it is the obsession with nostalgia.
“People become melancholy, something I never experienced in my growing up years. My parents didn’t talk about the ‘why it was,’ but the way it would be. They sent their eldest son off to college, and this from a family of few high school and no college graduates.
“They embraced the unknown, not the known. The future was uncertain, but they were optimistic, which made certainty irrelevant. I look back in amazement at the palpable evidence of this. Coming from a family that could not always make its $60 a month house payment, it paid for their eldest son to wear braces on his teeth for four years, something only the wealthy middle class took for granted. But this mother was convinced her son was going to be ‘somebody.’
“Schools, I might add, weren’t considered prisons in those days, but launching pads to the future. Pride was part of this moral center. It was visible in the glint of the teacher’s eye, and the posture of the student. I would say close to ninety percent of my peers have benefited from this connection. Now, you are paying a king’s ransom for your children’s education in private schools, and grammar school no less, which cost my parents nothing, and I can’t see from what I have observed that it is superior.” I looked for an interruption but there was none. So, I continued.
“You can tell a place is sick if not dying when student drop out rates form an ascending linear curve. Even more telling is when the bell curve of population distribution is skewed toward the old and away from the young, as is the case in Clinton and across the Midwest. Vibrant youth is the key to hope and that key cannot fit into many locks when young adults are not having children.”
“Dad,” my daughter interrupted, “you’re getting so serious. Please! I just said I liked Clinton. What’s all this about nostalgia and this other stuff? I didn’t ask you about it.”
“No, you didn’t. You simply asked me what caused Clinton to become small. It made me think about South Clinton, where your grandmother was born. It is a place no more, and it triggered other things. I apologize, but not totally. You see, a big company, ADM, has sucked South Clinton dry with the rationale of creating jobs, and the community has gone along with it, as if it had no choice.
“Once you succumb to what you think is inevitable, it is, and you no longer own yourself. It is the same for a community as an individual.”
“You’re talking about yourself now. I know your history, dad, I know how you won’t let anyone or anything own you, and I’m a little like that.”
“More than a little.”
“You know, honey, when we lived in South Africa, the company there wanted to duplicate my Chicago salary, keeping it quiet, even give us a house, and I said, ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ It was then that I knew I had to resign. I knew things and they wanted to own me to protect their interests. They wanted to buy my silence. It is not new. Happens all the time, but I wouldn’t play ball.
“If they owned me, they could control me. I didn’t want to be controlled, and I knew that if I didn’t go along with the charade they would make my life miserable.”
“Meaning in connection with all this?”
“Communities are pressured the same as individuals are. It is only a matter of scale. There is nothing wrong with communities shrinking on principle. A city newspaper becomes a regional newspaper, franchises replace independent businesses, school districts amalgamate from multiple to singular status, but when someone offers to save you, and it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
“I could see in South Africa retiring by the age of forty by succumbing to their offer, but then I would have to live with myself, and of course, they would own me for the rest of my life. I chose instead to retire, and you kids suffered for my decision, no longer living in a style to which you had become accustomed.
“The funny thing about that is that three of you have found your way to it on your own without my help. Your father didn’t give you a golden parachute, and you knew he wouldn’t put one under you if you failed. You were on your own the same as he had been on his own. You made your own way by reinventing yourself, sometimes over and over again, as in your case.”
“So you’re saying it is the same with communities.”
“Precisely so. A community has the irreplaceable good fortune of its collective identity, vales, pride, purpose, and will to survive. If it barters that away, it no longer owns its destiny. This fortune composes its moral center and becomes the mechanism of its moral compass guiding and directing it through all its opportunities and challenges that are inevitably ahead.
“Once its surrenders, even a part of its guidance system to another, it loses its ‘will within’ to prevail come what may. It becomes the dependent stepchild of someone else’s destiny translated into its current needs.
“In a climate of turmoil, the tendency is to look for answers outside, and to project problems as somebody else’s fault. This is the same with communities as with individuals. The community becomes increasingly dependent upon its temporary benefactor, who incidentally, can pull out at any time.
“Take Ford Motor Company. Countless communities across the country were nearly totally dependent on ‘the company store’ for their total survival. Now, Ford is gone. Only today it offered early retirement to 75,000 employees. It is in a panic mode.
“Don’t think because a company spends millions in plant construction that it plans to stay. Ford spent more than a quarter billion in more than one place and it is pulling out leaving those respective communities in the lurch.
She put her hand up. "You’re losing me. Stay on Clinton. I don't like it when you start generalizing. You confuse me."
I put my own hands up in surrender.
"Okay, guilty as charged. What I see in Clinton, and I've seen it elsewhere is that when a place loses its center, for whatever reason, it does what individuals do when they have lost their drive. They quit growing. They look back to the glory days rather than ahead. They become vulnerable to short-term solutions, putting aside such problems as soil and stream and air pollution, until people start dying, retreating into nostalgia.
“When a community is obsessed with its past, it loses its future. It loses its vitality, and when it loses its vitality, it loses its way.
“Your compliment to Clinton about being relaxing could be construed as a criticism of its dullness, of its failure to grow with the times, of becoming increasingly peripheral to them."
Again, she got that glazed look.
"You were born in Clinton and we moved almost immediately to Indianapolis, then Kentucky, then you were in Europe and Africa, and so on. You grew up on the run seeing places in constant change, and Clinton to you is like frozen music that never changes, but, you see, it has. Many of the people running Clinton now didn’t grow up there. They don’t have it in their DNA. They don’t have it in their bones.
“Clinton has lost its center and sold out for jobs. What do I mean? When Clinton had a center it had the ambiance of vibrant neighborhoods that defined it. In my youth, it may not have been like it was in the 1920s, but in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the ambiance was still there if straining to remain viable.
“Now, the once vibrant neighborhood of South Clinton is gone. It has been gobbled up for jobs. Chancy is another place. It will probably be next. There was once a vibrant neighborhood downtown, producing a lot of leaders that now stretch across the world, but certainly no longer downtown.
“The same is true of Hilltoppers where St. Mary's once had a vibrant ambiance. The same was true of the Courthouse neighborhood, and Lyons, or the neighborhoods north of the Big Tree.
“These neighborhoods never talked about the way it was. They were too busy being the way it is.
“This confederation of neighborhoods, from all classes and ethnicities, has produced doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, coaches, astronauts, engineers, scientists, psychologists, writers, administrators, executives, politicians, musicians, artists, architects, writers, playwrights, journalists, publishers, consultants, professional athletes, professors, inventors, professional soldiers and sailors, priests, rabbis, ministers, philanthropists, industrialists, builders, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sales people, and on and on.
“These people rose out of the soil of this eclectic ambiance. Where did they go? Nearly always to somewhere else.
“When a community experiences ‘brain drain,’ as Clinton has consistently experienced it in the last half century, the center becomes fragile, fragmented, and empty only to more resemble a vacuum than any other space.
“When that happens, neighborhoods can be sucked up for jobs, and the community feels defenseless because without jobs what is there, right?”
My daughter shakes her head affirmatively.
"Wrong," I said emphatically. “Jobs don't make a community, a community makes jobs.
“When jobs govern the community, it is under siege. It has sacrificed its identity for those jobs. That didn't happen when the millionaires left in droves and the logging business collapsed. Solid people stayed the course, perhaps because they had no choice, but also because some risk takers started from scratch like Collis and Curtis and Iten and DePew to build a Clinton that refused to sacrifice one iota of its identity. Instead, it chose to rise like the Sphinx out of the sawdust ash.
“The barbarians didn't come into the city like the Visigoths and Huns to take it over like they did Rome. They were subtler, but not by much.
“John Helyar, a writer I'm sure you don't know, wrote a book called Barbarians at the Gate, which was about a company's collapse (Nabisco), but it illustrates what happens when a place loses its center.
“James Stewart wrote a book that enlarged on the theme called Den of Thieves, showing precisely what happens when a place allows someone else to fight its battles, a place that looks for the easy way out.
“There is always someone with jobs that is ready to move into a place when it takes on the appearance of a vacuum. And when it does, it sucks up neighborhoods in the same manner as the little fish is eaten by the bigger fish who in turns is eaten by the bigger fish."
"Stop, dad! God, all this for just telling you I found Clinton relaxing, and wondered why it had gotten small. I still miss your point."
"Laurie, what has your father been doing most of his life?"
"Traveling. I don't remember seeing you much in all my growing up years, even in Europe and South Africa, you were always traveling."
"What do you think I was doing?"
"I have no idea."
"I was eating up neighborhoods about the globe, only the neighborhoods I was eating up were loaded with natural resources, or were small companies in which I always played on their vulnerabilities, always creating the impression it was best for them when all the good jobs went mainly to foreigners, while giving the natives short shrift with the sense they had no choice in the matter.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, nor too nice."
I paused. "Do you remember South Africa?"
"Yes, of course."
"I was more than a decade younger than you are right now, when we were there. Do you remember what I did?"
"Yes," she said, "you quit and we moved to Florida and you went back to school."
"No, that is not quite right. I went back to school after doing nothing for two years."
"Oh, yeah, I remember now. You played tennis all the time and read books, and wrote, and played basketball with Bobby and his friends. Mom didn’t like it much because you didn't do anything else."
"Well, that's close, but what was more true is that I got tired of sucking up neighborhoods for jobs. I got tired of corpocracy."
"If you say so," she answered, obviously worn out by my diatribe.
**********************************************************
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
God, the power of words! I received an email of an article in which a journalist was commenting on his impressions of baseball teams he visited in the Midwest. One such team was the Lumber Kings of Clinton, Iowa playing at Riverview stadium. Clinton happens to be my hometown. His comment captured the reality of Clinton with warmth if not euphemistic tact, as “a center struggling to hang on in a soft economy."
It happened I was having lunch with my daughter, a professional model, the same day I read this about Clinton. It was the place where she was born. Unfortunately, we left almost immediately to live in near and far flung places such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Europe and South Africa, and now in Tampa.
Briefly, she visited Clinton this past summer with her own daughter, and loved the place, its ambiance, its relaxed non-congested easy goingness, its friendliness, and its brightness.
I've not been back for a while, but keep tabs on its status, so I asked her, "Would you like to live there," this woman that has always lived in metropolitan areas.
"Live there?" she came back, "What would I do?" Then correcting me, she said, "I meant I liked visiting it for a few days. It is a wonderful respite from all the commotion and noise, that's all I meant, relaxing."
What started my mind reflecting on this baseball story, and its reference to my hometown, was the fact that I played in the Industrial League as a catcher for Pillsbury Mills as an eighth grader going into ninth grade. I also played many games in this same beautiful baseball stadium for the Junior American Legion, and a team called the “Lyons Merchants.”
Dreamily, I remembered the place of my youth, an eclectic industrial blue-collar town of many small job shops and specialized industries, and I loved the place. I told her it was in those days a town of about 33,000 with a sparkling downtown business district, and once luxurious homes of Clinton’s halcyon days converted into the YWCA, Sarah Harding Home, and other utilitarian places; that it had a monumental panoply of giant oak trees forming a cathedral ceiling extending from Fifth Avenue and Fourth Street all the way out to Bluff Boulevard; and that it was a town with a center that controlled its own destiny with self-assurance and self-reliance, beholden to no one.
"It can't be nearly that big now," she said, "and there is virtually no real downtown. You can walk practically anywhere and run into little traffic, which I loved." Then she got thoughtful, "what happened to make it so small?"
Then I thought of a line from one of my books about America: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.” My reference was to the great retreat from our indigenous values. She has heard all that before. It is the quickest way for her eyes to glaze over, and to break contact with me.
So, instead, I treated her to a bit of history that I share with readers in my memoir-as-a-novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
"Clinton," I said, "has a history of propinquity and serendipity," moving on to explain my meaning.
"Because of the many island obstacles and the narrowness of the straits of the Mississippi as it passes by Clinton, it was not advantageous or economical to float logs down from the North (Minnesota and Wisconsin) past Clinton, and so it became the sawdust capital of the entire world."
“Sawdust capital?” She looked at me suspiciously, "You’re kidding?"
I shook my head. "In fact," I continued, "it was that sawdust gold during the first quarter of the last century that resulted in Clinton having more per capita millionaires than any other place in the world."
Again, she found this hard to believe. "Sawdust gold?"
"Sawdust was gold," I repeated, "and Clinton, because of it, became a cultural, intellectual, social, and entertainment center with the world's movers and shakers frequently finding their way to Clinton, as America was emerging as a great nation."
Then with dramatic pause, I added, "Clinton was in the mainstream in its own right."
She smiled, "You're putting me on, right?"
I shook my head again. "Read Clinton, Iowa history, and you’ll see I'm not kidding. I only touch on the subject in my book, but it is a vibrant history, I assure you."
Again, she pressed. "But if that is true, what about now? Why is it, well, so ..."
I added for her, "so drab?"
"No, I was thinking 'so slow'."
"You mean so out of the mainstream as it once was?"
She shrugged, "I guess."
I explained, "There was a massive exodus of the high rollers, as if Clinton was experiencing its own Chicago fire, when the logs quit coming, the sawmills shut down, the 200 person garden parties disappeared, and the operas and symphonies had no audience.
"The fire in the mind was in the form of panic. So, when the money people left, so did jobs, and with no jobs, people were forced to move on."
To my surprise, she was listening, as she corrected me. "But you grew up in the 1940s, not the 1920s! You said it was very much alive, then, with all kinds of activities."
I complimented her for listening, and then continued, "The war saved Clinton's bacon, but it was able to save its bacon because it was ready. It is that old adage that defines luck as 'when preparation meets opportunity.'
“Clinton was prepared. Big companies didn't swoop into the vacuum when the sawmills shut down. Not at all. Small venture capitalists set up job shops and small industries gradually filling Clinton's moral center with hope to replace the panic, and then the war came, which gave Clinton a rebirth, as the Sphinx rose out of the sawdust.
"This lasted into the 1960s, and then petered out when the rest of the world caught up with the U.S. It didn't just happen to Clinton, but across the American continent. Many other places like Clinton went under, as their identity and moral center disappeared with the ‘slowdown of the economy.’
"You can always tell when this is the case, not just with closed down plants, vacant lots, neglected buildings, and mobile home parks replacing standard homes. The more telling sense of it is the obsession with nostalgia.
“People become melancholy, something I never experienced in my growing up years. My parents didn’t talk about the ‘why it was,’ but the way it would be. They sent their eldest son off to college, and this from a family of few high school and no college graduates.
“They embraced the unknown, not the known. The future was uncertain, but they were optimistic, which made certainty irrelevant. I look back in amazement at the palpable evidence of this. Coming from a family that could not always make its $60 a month house payment, it paid for their eldest son to wear braces on his teeth for four years, something only the wealthy middle class took for granted. But this mother was convinced her son was going to be ‘somebody.’
“Schools, I might add, weren’t considered prisons in those days, but launching pads to the future. Pride was part of this moral center. It was visible in the glint of the teacher’s eye, and the posture of the student. I would say close to ninety percent of my peers have benefited from this connection. Now, you are paying a king’s ransom for your children’s education in private schools, and grammar school no less, which cost my parents nothing, and I can’t see from what I have observed that it is superior.” I looked for an interruption but there was none. So, I continued.
“You can tell a place is sick if not dying when student drop out rates form an ascending linear curve. Even more telling is when the bell curve of population distribution is skewed toward the old and away from the young, as is the case in Clinton and across the Midwest. Vibrant youth is the key to hope and that key cannot fit into many locks when young adults are not having children.”
“Dad,” my daughter interrupted, “you’re getting so serious. Please! I just said I liked Clinton. What’s all this about nostalgia and this other stuff? I didn’t ask you about it.”
“No, you didn’t. You simply asked me what caused Clinton to become small. It made me think about South Clinton, where your grandmother was born. It is a place no more, and it triggered other things. I apologize, but not totally. You see, a big company, ADM, has sucked South Clinton dry with the rationale of creating jobs, and the community has gone along with it, as if it had no choice.
“Once you succumb to what you think is inevitable, it is, and you no longer own yourself. It is the same for a community as an individual.”
“You’re talking about yourself now. I know your history, dad, I know how you won’t let anyone or anything own you, and I’m a little like that.”
“More than a little.”
“You know, honey, when we lived in South Africa, the company there wanted to duplicate my Chicago salary, keeping it quiet, even give us a house, and I said, ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ It was then that I knew I had to resign. I knew things and they wanted to own me to protect their interests. They wanted to buy my silence. It is not new. Happens all the time, but I wouldn’t play ball.
“If they owned me, they could control me. I didn’t want to be controlled, and I knew that if I didn’t go along with the charade they would make my life miserable.”
“Meaning in connection with all this?”
“Communities are pressured the same as individuals are. It is only a matter of scale. There is nothing wrong with communities shrinking on principle. A city newspaper becomes a regional newspaper, franchises replace independent businesses, school districts amalgamate from multiple to singular status, but when someone offers to save you, and it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
“I could see in South Africa retiring by the age of forty by succumbing to their offer, but then I would have to live with myself, and of course, they would own me for the rest of my life. I chose instead to retire, and you kids suffered for my decision, no longer living in a style to which you had become accustomed.
“The funny thing about that is that three of you have found your way to it on your own without my help. Your father didn’t give you a golden parachute, and you knew he wouldn’t put one under you if you failed. You were on your own the same as he had been on his own. You made your own way by reinventing yourself, sometimes over and over again, as in your case.”
“So you’re saying it is the same with communities.”
“Precisely so. A community has the irreplaceable good fortune of its collective identity, vales, pride, purpose, and will to survive. If it barters that away, it no longer owns its destiny. This fortune composes its moral center and becomes the mechanism of its moral compass guiding and directing it through all its opportunities and challenges that are inevitably ahead.
“Once its surrenders, even a part of its guidance system to another, it loses its ‘will within’ to prevail come what may. It becomes the dependent stepchild of someone else’s destiny translated into its current needs.
“In a climate of turmoil, the tendency is to look for answers outside, and to project problems as somebody else’s fault. This is the same with communities as with individuals. The community becomes increasingly dependent upon its temporary benefactor, who incidentally, can pull out at any time.
“Take Ford Motor Company. Countless communities across the country were nearly totally dependent on ‘the company store’ for their total survival. Now, Ford is gone. Only today it offered early retirement to 75,000 employees. It is in a panic mode.
“Don’t think because a company spends millions in plant construction that it plans to stay. Ford spent more than a quarter billion in more than one place and it is pulling out leaving those respective communities in the lurch.
She put her hand up. "You’re losing me. Stay on Clinton. I don't like it when you start generalizing. You confuse me."
I put my own hands up in surrender.
"Okay, guilty as charged. What I see in Clinton, and I've seen it elsewhere is that when a place loses its center, for whatever reason, it does what individuals do when they have lost their drive. They quit growing. They look back to the glory days rather than ahead. They become vulnerable to short-term solutions, putting aside such problems as soil and stream and air pollution, until people start dying, retreating into nostalgia.
“When a community is obsessed with its past, it loses its future. It loses its vitality, and when it loses its vitality, it loses its way.
“Your compliment to Clinton about being relaxing could be construed as a criticism of its dullness, of its failure to grow with the times, of becoming increasingly peripheral to them."
Again, she got that glazed look.
"You were born in Clinton and we moved almost immediately to Indianapolis, then Kentucky, then you were in Europe and Africa, and so on. You grew up on the run seeing places in constant change, and Clinton to you is like frozen music that never changes, but, you see, it has. Many of the people running Clinton now didn’t grow up there. They don’t have it in their DNA. They don’t have it in their bones.
“Clinton has lost its center and sold out for jobs. What do I mean? When Clinton had a center it had the ambiance of vibrant neighborhoods that defined it. In my youth, it may not have been like it was in the 1920s, but in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the ambiance was still there if straining to remain viable.
“Now, the once vibrant neighborhood of South Clinton is gone. It has been gobbled up for jobs. Chancy is another place. It will probably be next. There was once a vibrant neighborhood downtown, producing a lot of leaders that now stretch across the world, but certainly no longer downtown.
“The same is true of Hilltoppers where St. Mary's once had a vibrant ambiance. The same was true of the Courthouse neighborhood, and Lyons, or the neighborhoods north of the Big Tree.
“These neighborhoods never talked about the way it was. They were too busy being the way it is.
“This confederation of neighborhoods, from all classes and ethnicities, has produced doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, coaches, astronauts, engineers, scientists, psychologists, writers, administrators, executives, politicians, musicians, artists, architects, writers, playwrights, journalists, publishers, consultants, professional athletes, professors, inventors, professional soldiers and sailors, priests, rabbis, ministers, philanthropists, industrialists, builders, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sales people, and on and on.
“These people rose out of the soil of this eclectic ambiance. Where did they go? Nearly always to somewhere else.
“When a community experiences ‘brain drain,’ as Clinton has consistently experienced it in the last half century, the center becomes fragile, fragmented, and empty only to more resemble a vacuum than any other space.
“When that happens, neighborhoods can be sucked up for jobs, and the community feels defenseless because without jobs what is there, right?”
My daughter shakes her head affirmatively.
"Wrong," I said emphatically. “Jobs don't make a community, a community makes jobs.
“When jobs govern the community, it is under siege. It has sacrificed its identity for those jobs. That didn't happen when the millionaires left in droves and the logging business collapsed. Solid people stayed the course, perhaps because they had no choice, but also because some risk takers started from scratch like Collis and Curtis and Iten and DePew to build a Clinton that refused to sacrifice one iota of its identity. Instead, it chose to rise like the Sphinx out of the sawdust ash.
“The barbarians didn't come into the city like the Visigoths and Huns to take it over like they did Rome. They were subtler, but not by much.
“John Helyar, a writer I'm sure you don't know, wrote a book called Barbarians at the Gate, which was about a company's collapse (Nabisco), but it illustrates what happens when a place loses its center.
“James Stewart wrote a book that enlarged on the theme called Den of Thieves, showing precisely what happens when a place allows someone else to fight its battles, a place that looks for the easy way out.
“There is always someone with jobs that is ready to move into a place when it takes on the appearance of a vacuum. And when it does, it sucks up neighborhoods in the same manner as the little fish is eaten by the bigger fish who in turns is eaten by the bigger fish."
"Stop, dad! God, all this for just telling you I found Clinton relaxing, and wondered why it had gotten small. I still miss your point."
"Laurie, what has your father been doing most of his life?"
"Traveling. I don't remember seeing you much in all my growing up years, even in Europe and South Africa, you were always traveling."
"What do you think I was doing?"
"I have no idea."
"I was eating up neighborhoods about the globe, only the neighborhoods I was eating up were loaded with natural resources, or were small companies in which I always played on their vulnerabilities, always creating the impression it was best for them when all the good jobs went mainly to foreigners, while giving the natives short shrift with the sense they had no choice in the matter.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, nor too nice."
I paused. "Do you remember South Africa?"
"Yes, of course."
"I was more than a decade younger than you are right now, when we were there. Do you remember what I did?"
"Yes," she said, "you quit and we moved to Florida and you went back to school."
"No, that is not quite right. I went back to school after doing nothing for two years."
"Oh, yeah, I remember now. You played tennis all the time and read books, and wrote, and played basketball with Bobby and his friends. Mom didn’t like it much because you didn't do anything else."
"Well, that's close, but what was more true is that I got tired of sucking up neighborhoods for jobs. I got tired of corpocracy."
"If you say so," she answered, obviously worn out by my diatribe.
**********************************************************
Sunday, September 10, 2006
RUNNING ALONE, NEW BOOK ON LEADERSHIP -- GEORGE MacGREGOR BURNS
RUNNING ALONE, A NEW BOOK ON LEADERSHIP
BY
GEORGE MacGREGOR BURNS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
There is a certain frustration when you, as a writer, perceive a situation, are lucky to be published widely, and yet sense your ideas have died on the vine.
For more than a decade, I have been writing about leaderless leadership. It is a central theme in Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), Six Silent Killers (1998) and Corporate Sin (2000).
Additionally, Leadership Excellence, The AQP Journal, National Productivity Review, The Journal of Organizational Excellence, The Wall Street Journal, and Industry Week, to name a few, have published my ideas on "leaderless leadership." Clearly, the boldest of these publishers has been Leadership Excellence, which, over the years, has published scores of my articles on this and related subjects.
I mention this because I have had the temerity to publish, only to feel like a single tree falling in the forest, which nobody hears.
This is not the case with James MacGregor Burns. He has made leadership his professional turf, writing about historical figures, and publishing many books on the subject, among them, Leadership (1982), which I found inspiring.
Now, he has published a new book on the decline of presidential leadership. He exposes the pusillanimity of leadership at the highest levels. My take on this pusillanimity has been from the perspective of the ordinary Joe, looking up.
I claim in Work Without Managers, for example, that the source of the problem occurred immediately after W.W.II. In fact, my subtitle is: A View from the Trenches. Boxed on the front cover of the book is this statement:
A shocking look at American Business; why it operates in ‘1945’ nostalgia,’ as six silent killers threaten to destroy it; and how only American Leadership can still save the day!
Burns concurs.
In his new book, RUNNING ALONE: PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP JFK TO BUSH II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (2006), he asserts that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush is the culmination of a half-century of crisis management in American democracy. Kennedy doesn't fair any better.
Beginning with Kennedy's decision to turn his back on the Democratic Party and rely instead on charisma and wealth to win office, Burns charts the decline of genuine leadership across the board in American society, but especially in the Oval Office. He then offers a stirring vision of what the presidency can and should be.
The problem with his analysis is that its focus is on the president and people within the Beltway of Washington, DC. Leadership is never only about leaders.
I have written critically of the Camelot presidency of JFK. finding charisma no index to leadership, but only the pretence of it. Burns is equally critical of the present White House for its imperial nature and disconnect with reality. We only have one president and a weak or misguided president, whatever our politics, does not serve the nation. My problem has been with the lack of moral clarity. Moral authority without moral clarity equals amorality, which I feel is rampant. It is apparent when the separation of church and state becomes cloudy.
I agree with Burns that the two major parties have lost their way, but this is not new to anyone anywhere in this great country. Only the zealots are sure but they represent the extreme and only a sliver of the general population. Ask the pollsters.
When moral authority lacks moral clarity we have the scandalous headlines, which personify leaders in moral chaos in government, education, commerce, industry, the military, and the community. What is sad, when the leadership is corrupt, is that good, honest and hard working people in these institutions are likely to say or do nothing because they see themselves as followers, not leaders.
I speak as someone who has the time to observe and write down what he sees. Not everyone has that luxury as they have been programmed to have their foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere. Why? Because we are a society always on the move, afraid to slow down, or stop, for fear of what we might discover.
George MacGregor Burns in an earlier iteration attempted to penetrate this.
During the Jimmie Carter presidency, Burns was an advisor to the president. He was responsible for president Carter’s disastrous “crisis in confidence” speech to the nation. To make matters worse, he chose to speak from the Oval Office in an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater while suggesting there was a national crisis in confidence.
Some of you may recall that speech.
At the time, we had double-digit inflation and double digit unemployment, and the president was implying, on the advice of Burns, that we, as a nation, had lost our optimism and identity, and had retreated into fear.
Well, you don't tell citizens of the United States of America that they don't have their shit together; you don't level with them about how things really are or why; you don't address the nation as "one of us," because we don't want our president to be too much like us, or too much different from what we are. We want our president to stand tall, but not too tall.
We loved the fairy tale presidency of JFK because we had, for a period, our own royalty, our own Camelot. But we also had to endure his little clique, the Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (what I call HYPE), driving us further into NOWHERE LAND and making us more like members of NOWHERE MAN.
NOWHERE LAND, incidentally, is another name for utopia, a place that doesn’t exist, an idyllic state Burns was trying (in the “crisis in confidence” speech) to break a national trance and usher us all back into reality. The backlash proved the nation was not ready.
My only problem with his quest is its limited perspective. I feel if everyone isn't a leader, then no one is. It isn't the president or the Congress or the CEO or the pope or the governor, or whoever the authority figures happen to be that determines the future. We do.
Rome fell apart in the fifth century AD when the political, ethical and moral foundation of society collapsed, and the barbarians from the North, the Visigoths and the Germanic tribes took over. The Dark Ages followed.
That is not to suggest that we are approaching our own “dark age.” On the contrary, I see promise in looking to our past. Leadership Excellence (September 2006) carries my article, "Leadership Matters." In the article, I profile president Andrew Jackson, who was not about pomp and circumstance, nor about impressing this or that interest group.
Jackson took on the Eastern Establishment and the banks, which, at the time, was thought impossible. Imagine this country bumpkin with little education, but with the spirit of the frontier nation behind him, being so effective that this period is now known, as “The Age of Jackson.”
Jackson was not pretty, not articulate, indeed, he was quite flawed. He could hardly write a grammatical sentence, but he was real, and the people he led were real, and the nation was real, and the nation and the people faced real problems, and didn't wait for them to bite them in the ass before being addressed.
So, my hope is that the new book by Burns gets read widely and encompasses more than simply concern for the presidency and his sphere of influence; and that we become more cognizant of ourselves as leaders.
It is no accident that we are adrift. It is not because we are not all in the same boat. It is because few of us have our own oars in the water to pull our weight.
BY
GEORGE MacGREGOR BURNS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
There is a certain frustration when you, as a writer, perceive a situation, are lucky to be published widely, and yet sense your ideas have died on the vine.
For more than a decade, I have been writing about leaderless leadership. It is a central theme in Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), Six Silent Killers (1998) and Corporate Sin (2000).
Additionally, Leadership Excellence, The AQP Journal, National Productivity Review, The Journal of Organizational Excellence, The Wall Street Journal, and Industry Week, to name a few, have published my ideas on "leaderless leadership." Clearly, the boldest of these publishers has been Leadership Excellence, which, over the years, has published scores of my articles on this and related subjects.
I mention this because I have had the temerity to publish, only to feel like a single tree falling in the forest, which nobody hears.
This is not the case with James MacGregor Burns. He has made leadership his professional turf, writing about historical figures, and publishing many books on the subject, among them, Leadership (1982), which I found inspiring.
Now, he has published a new book on the decline of presidential leadership. He exposes the pusillanimity of leadership at the highest levels. My take on this pusillanimity has been from the perspective of the ordinary Joe, looking up.
I claim in Work Without Managers, for example, that the source of the problem occurred immediately after W.W.II. In fact, my subtitle is: A View from the Trenches. Boxed on the front cover of the book is this statement:
A shocking look at American Business; why it operates in ‘1945’ nostalgia,’ as six silent killers threaten to destroy it; and how only American Leadership can still save the day!
Burns concurs.
In his new book, RUNNING ALONE: PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP JFK TO BUSH II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (2006), he asserts that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush is the culmination of a half-century of crisis management in American democracy. Kennedy doesn't fair any better.
Beginning with Kennedy's decision to turn his back on the Democratic Party and rely instead on charisma and wealth to win office, Burns charts the decline of genuine leadership across the board in American society, but especially in the Oval Office. He then offers a stirring vision of what the presidency can and should be.
The problem with his analysis is that its focus is on the president and people within the Beltway of Washington, DC. Leadership is never only about leaders.
I have written critically of the Camelot presidency of JFK. finding charisma no index to leadership, but only the pretence of it. Burns is equally critical of the present White House for its imperial nature and disconnect with reality. We only have one president and a weak or misguided president, whatever our politics, does not serve the nation. My problem has been with the lack of moral clarity. Moral authority without moral clarity equals amorality, which I feel is rampant. It is apparent when the separation of church and state becomes cloudy.
I agree with Burns that the two major parties have lost their way, but this is not new to anyone anywhere in this great country. Only the zealots are sure but they represent the extreme and only a sliver of the general population. Ask the pollsters.
When moral authority lacks moral clarity we have the scandalous headlines, which personify leaders in moral chaos in government, education, commerce, industry, the military, and the community. What is sad, when the leadership is corrupt, is that good, honest and hard working people in these institutions are likely to say or do nothing because they see themselves as followers, not leaders.
I speak as someone who has the time to observe and write down what he sees. Not everyone has that luxury as they have been programmed to have their foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere. Why? Because we are a society always on the move, afraid to slow down, or stop, for fear of what we might discover.
George MacGregor Burns in an earlier iteration attempted to penetrate this.
During the Jimmie Carter presidency, Burns was an advisor to the president. He was responsible for president Carter’s disastrous “crisis in confidence” speech to the nation. To make matters worse, he chose to speak from the Oval Office in an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater while suggesting there was a national crisis in confidence.
Some of you may recall that speech.
At the time, we had double-digit inflation and double digit unemployment, and the president was implying, on the advice of Burns, that we, as a nation, had lost our optimism and identity, and had retreated into fear.
Well, you don't tell citizens of the United States of America that they don't have their shit together; you don't level with them about how things really are or why; you don't address the nation as "one of us," because we don't want our president to be too much like us, or too much different from what we are. We want our president to stand tall, but not too tall.
We loved the fairy tale presidency of JFK because we had, for a period, our own royalty, our own Camelot. But we also had to endure his little clique, the Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (what I call HYPE), driving us further into NOWHERE LAND and making us more like members of NOWHERE MAN.
NOWHERE LAND, incidentally, is another name for utopia, a place that doesn’t exist, an idyllic state Burns was trying (in the “crisis in confidence” speech) to break a national trance and usher us all back into reality. The backlash proved the nation was not ready.
My only problem with his quest is its limited perspective. I feel if everyone isn't a leader, then no one is. It isn't the president or the Congress or the CEO or the pope or the governor, or whoever the authority figures happen to be that determines the future. We do.
Rome fell apart in the fifth century AD when the political, ethical and moral foundation of society collapsed, and the barbarians from the North, the Visigoths and the Germanic tribes took over. The Dark Ages followed.
That is not to suggest that we are approaching our own “dark age.” On the contrary, I see promise in looking to our past. Leadership Excellence (September 2006) carries my article, "Leadership Matters." In the article, I profile president Andrew Jackson, who was not about pomp and circumstance, nor about impressing this or that interest group.
Jackson took on the Eastern Establishment and the banks, which, at the time, was thought impossible. Imagine this country bumpkin with little education, but with the spirit of the frontier nation behind him, being so effective that this period is now known, as “The Age of Jackson.”
Jackson was not pretty, not articulate, indeed, he was quite flawed. He could hardly write a grammatical sentence, but he was real, and the people he led were real, and the nation was real, and the nation and the people faced real problems, and didn't wait for them to bite them in the ass before being addressed.
So, my hope is that the new book by Burns gets read widely and encompasses more than simply concern for the presidency and his sphere of influence; and that we become more cognizant of ourselves as leaders.
It is no accident that we are adrift. It is not because we are not all in the same boat. It is because few of us have our own oars in the water to pull our weight.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
THE PRESIDENT SKATING AT MIDTERM ELECTIONS ON THE FISHER PARADIGM -- IS IT TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?
THE PRESIDENT SKATING AT MIDTERM ELECTIONS ON THE FISHER PARADIGM ™ --
IS IT TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
During the summer of 2004 in the midst of the quadrennial madness of presidential politics, I applied the Fisher Paradigm ™ to the possible outcome of the election, not only predicting that President George W. Bush would win, but being fairly accurate as to how the electoral votes would go in that election.
People for President Bush were reassured with the Fisher Paradigm ™ assessment, but it was quickly forgotten once the election was finalized.
Granted, it is hard to take the paradigm seriously because it is not quantitative, cognitive, statistical, and doesn't rise even to the level of being wrong. Actually, this puts it in good company and that is precisely what the evaluation is of Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” (1999), which champions "string theory."
Now, this is not to suggest that the Fisher Paradigm ™ belongs in such company. Not in the least. String theory mathematics is excruciatingly tough, and when problem arise, the solutions often introduce yet another layer of complexity, reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg contraction.
You see, string theory attempts to fill the gap left by two major incompatible theories of the twentieth century: relativity and quantum theory. Michael D. Lemonick reports in Time (August 21, 2006):
“Quantum theory describes the universe as intrinsically discontinuous; energy, for example, can come in bits just so small, and no smaller. Relativity, on the other hand, treats time, and space, and gravity as a smooth, unbroken continuum. Each theory has its purposes, and generally, they don't overlap. But when dealing with very large masses or time periods that are infinitesimally small, like the core of a black hole, or the first moments after the Big Bang, neither works. Enter string theory. These are claimed to be the basic units of matter and energy not as particles, but as minuscule, vibrating loops and snippets of stuff resembling string, which turn out to exist not just in our familiar four dimensions of space and time, but in ten or more other dimensions. Bizarre as it seemed, this scheme appeared on first blush to explain why particles have the characteristics they do.”
What intrigues me about all this is the absence of proof, fundamental to science, and since it doesn't rise to the level of being proven wrong, it enters phenomenology, or religion.
It was Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) who papered over the cracks between faith and reason in his SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, arguing:
“Philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth.”
Science is now moving into uncharted territory and its sacred scientific paradigm is proving less than perfect for the intrusion.
FISHER PARADIGM ™ -- LESS GRAND, AND MORE FUN
The Fisher Paradigm ™ is as simple as the definition of the three parts of a noun: a person, place, or thing, only it looks at these three aspects in terms of profiles:
Personality (person) profile; Geographic (place) profile; and Demographic (thing) profile.
Each is a dynamic sphere of influence that is constantly in a state of motion and confluence with the two other aspects. Each is in the other and the other is in each. We all use this mechanism all the time but not necessarily as a tool but in a flippant and unconscious way. It is when we harness it that the fun comes in.
The Fisher Paradigm ™ is an organizational development (OD) tool that is not disposed to psychometrics, statistical indices, or longitudinal studies. It is a whimsical tool of intuitive insight based upon the criteria that explode into the consciousness when observing a certain phenomenon.
My recent attention has been on President George W. Bush and his blatant offense in the face of plunging popularity and discouraging developments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us take a cursory examination of this in terms of the president's approach to midterm elections in Congress in November 2006:
PERSONALITY PROFILE: The president is combative, the more so the negative publicity the more his dander rises to confront the situation. Americans like a fighter as they associate themselves with a combative even a violent instinct for engagement. Americans like a leader to roll up his sleeves and take on the challenge. They don't care about what he says or how he says it but that he says it, that he takes action, gets out of his peek-a-boo stance and starts throwing punches.
The president has correctly gauged that he personifies the national personality. When he acts as he has of late, he gains the attention of the undecided, the timid, the laid back, the indecisive, and the herd that is always waiting to jump on the bandwagon of the winner.
GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE: As much hype as there has been about the failing wars, failing response of the government to Katrina, and as devastated as Americans are with the 9/11 terrorist attack, the country as a whole is fat and happy and focused on other things. People are looking more forward to the NFL and NHL season, and the World Series than to the midterm elections.
If fifty percent of the eligible voters turnout it will be a surprise. Television, cell phones, laptops and the Internet have managed to narcotize the people into nearly a somnambulant state of conformity.
The president seems to sense this and know that people receive ninety percent of their information through their eyes as they don't read newspapers, magazines or books, and they make their minds up on a whim, and that whim changes each time they are subject to a poll.
Like a walk off home run in the bottom of the ninth, the president knows it isn't over until it is over, and that he is doing what makes that possibility turn into reality. He knows that the only people that listen to people on the Washington, DC beltway are other people within it. And so he will remain for the next three months a ubiquitous pugilist throwing punches in the east and west, north and south, and not worrying about how many land, as people don't judge the winner in this kind of contest by who has won, but who most reflects the way they see themselves, that is, as in-your-face combatants, when that couldn't be further from the fact.
DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE: The president knows that he has an ace up his sleeve that infuriates his opponents in Congress, and even many in his own party, because with a fully volunteer military, no one really has any leverage on him over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
People would like these wars to end, for the men and women in the arm forces to come home, but they are not willing to get off the couch and lay that sentiment on the line, and he knows that. They probably won't even vote at midterm elections. He knows that, too. He also knows that the Harvard, Princeton, Yale Elitism (HYPE) within the Beltway doesn't resonate with most Americans.
Americans can be rich or poor, educated or not, successful or in decline, but one thing is certain and that is they love to back an underdog, and he has painted himself into that corner, and has loved every minute of it.
Now, the president is putting that image on the road, swinging for the fences with nobody worrying about how many times he has struck out in the past. It is not fashionable to broadcast this sentiment, but it remains in the bones, and the president is working them now.
He swaggers and rolls his shoulders like the Texas Ranger he sees himself as being, a guy with calluses on his hands, and a saddle bag over his shoulder, and shit-kicking boots on his feet, talking in “plain speak” with a wry smile and a kick-ass grin, knowing this infuriates his opponents in their three-piece button-down world, the privileged world that he came from, but nobody cares because he acts, walks, talks, and fumbles along like they do.
Yes, the underdog image he plays to the hilt, but the question is: has he waited too long to recall why he won the presidency in the first place. It wasn't his brains, good looks, or his command of the situation. It was because he was trusted to stay in character consistent with his image. He left it for a while, but he is now back in full colors.
Personality, Geography, and Demographics collide with each other to produce insight and intuitive assessment. It is not my nature to hedge my hunch. If the president had started on this track only three months ago, I would say the Senate and House would remain Republican. Now, it is not so certain.
That said, if he maintains his present gusto, and circumstances don't bite him harder in the ass than they already have, I feel we are doomed to have a Republican Congress for the next two years. Democrats! Are you listening?
IS IT TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
During the summer of 2004 in the midst of the quadrennial madness of presidential politics, I applied the Fisher Paradigm ™ to the possible outcome of the election, not only predicting that President George W. Bush would win, but being fairly accurate as to how the electoral votes would go in that election.
People for President Bush were reassured with the Fisher Paradigm ™ assessment, but it was quickly forgotten once the election was finalized.
Granted, it is hard to take the paradigm seriously because it is not quantitative, cognitive, statistical, and doesn't rise even to the level of being wrong. Actually, this puts it in good company and that is precisely what the evaluation is of Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” (1999), which champions "string theory."
Now, this is not to suggest that the Fisher Paradigm ™ belongs in such company. Not in the least. String theory mathematics is excruciatingly tough, and when problem arise, the solutions often introduce yet another layer of complexity, reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg contraction.
You see, string theory attempts to fill the gap left by two major incompatible theories of the twentieth century: relativity and quantum theory. Michael D. Lemonick reports in Time (August 21, 2006):
“Quantum theory describes the universe as intrinsically discontinuous; energy, for example, can come in bits just so small, and no smaller. Relativity, on the other hand, treats time, and space, and gravity as a smooth, unbroken continuum. Each theory has its purposes, and generally, they don't overlap. But when dealing with very large masses or time periods that are infinitesimally small, like the core of a black hole, or the first moments after the Big Bang, neither works. Enter string theory. These are claimed to be the basic units of matter and energy not as particles, but as minuscule, vibrating loops and snippets of stuff resembling string, which turn out to exist not just in our familiar four dimensions of space and time, but in ten or more other dimensions. Bizarre as it seemed, this scheme appeared on first blush to explain why particles have the characteristics they do.”
What intrigues me about all this is the absence of proof, fundamental to science, and since it doesn't rise to the level of being proven wrong, it enters phenomenology, or religion.
It was Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) who papered over the cracks between faith and reason in his SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, arguing:
“Philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth.”
Science is now moving into uncharted territory and its sacred scientific paradigm is proving less than perfect for the intrusion.
FISHER PARADIGM ™ -- LESS GRAND, AND MORE FUN
The Fisher Paradigm ™ is as simple as the definition of the three parts of a noun: a person, place, or thing, only it looks at these three aspects in terms of profiles:
Personality (person) profile; Geographic (place) profile; and Demographic (thing) profile.
Each is a dynamic sphere of influence that is constantly in a state of motion and confluence with the two other aspects. Each is in the other and the other is in each. We all use this mechanism all the time but not necessarily as a tool but in a flippant and unconscious way. It is when we harness it that the fun comes in.
The Fisher Paradigm ™ is an organizational development (OD) tool that is not disposed to psychometrics, statistical indices, or longitudinal studies. It is a whimsical tool of intuitive insight based upon the criteria that explode into the consciousness when observing a certain phenomenon.
My recent attention has been on President George W. Bush and his blatant offense in the face of plunging popularity and discouraging developments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us take a cursory examination of this in terms of the president's approach to midterm elections in Congress in November 2006:
PERSONALITY PROFILE: The president is combative, the more so the negative publicity the more his dander rises to confront the situation. Americans like a fighter as they associate themselves with a combative even a violent instinct for engagement. Americans like a leader to roll up his sleeves and take on the challenge. They don't care about what he says or how he says it but that he says it, that he takes action, gets out of his peek-a-boo stance and starts throwing punches.
The president has correctly gauged that he personifies the national personality. When he acts as he has of late, he gains the attention of the undecided, the timid, the laid back, the indecisive, and the herd that is always waiting to jump on the bandwagon of the winner.
GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE: As much hype as there has been about the failing wars, failing response of the government to Katrina, and as devastated as Americans are with the 9/11 terrorist attack, the country as a whole is fat and happy and focused on other things. People are looking more forward to the NFL and NHL season, and the World Series than to the midterm elections.
If fifty percent of the eligible voters turnout it will be a surprise. Television, cell phones, laptops and the Internet have managed to narcotize the people into nearly a somnambulant state of conformity.
The president seems to sense this and know that people receive ninety percent of their information through their eyes as they don't read newspapers, magazines or books, and they make their minds up on a whim, and that whim changes each time they are subject to a poll.
Like a walk off home run in the bottom of the ninth, the president knows it isn't over until it is over, and that he is doing what makes that possibility turn into reality. He knows that the only people that listen to people on the Washington, DC beltway are other people within it. And so he will remain for the next three months a ubiquitous pugilist throwing punches in the east and west, north and south, and not worrying about how many land, as people don't judge the winner in this kind of contest by who has won, but who most reflects the way they see themselves, that is, as in-your-face combatants, when that couldn't be further from the fact.
DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE: The president knows that he has an ace up his sleeve that infuriates his opponents in Congress, and even many in his own party, because with a fully volunteer military, no one really has any leverage on him over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
People would like these wars to end, for the men and women in the arm forces to come home, but they are not willing to get off the couch and lay that sentiment on the line, and he knows that. They probably won't even vote at midterm elections. He knows that, too. He also knows that the Harvard, Princeton, Yale Elitism (HYPE) within the Beltway doesn't resonate with most Americans.
Americans can be rich or poor, educated or not, successful or in decline, but one thing is certain and that is they love to back an underdog, and he has painted himself into that corner, and has loved every minute of it.
Now, the president is putting that image on the road, swinging for the fences with nobody worrying about how many times he has struck out in the past. It is not fashionable to broadcast this sentiment, but it remains in the bones, and the president is working them now.
He swaggers and rolls his shoulders like the Texas Ranger he sees himself as being, a guy with calluses on his hands, and a saddle bag over his shoulder, and shit-kicking boots on his feet, talking in “plain speak” with a wry smile and a kick-ass grin, knowing this infuriates his opponents in their three-piece button-down world, the privileged world that he came from, but nobody cares because he acts, walks, talks, and fumbles along like they do.
Yes, the underdog image he plays to the hilt, but the question is: has he waited too long to recall why he won the presidency in the first place. It wasn't his brains, good looks, or his command of the situation. It was because he was trusted to stay in character consistent with his image. He left it for a while, but he is now back in full colors.
Personality, Geography, and Demographics collide with each other to produce insight and intuitive assessment. It is not my nature to hedge my hunch. If the president had started on this track only three months ago, I would say the Senate and House would remain Republican. Now, it is not so certain.
That said, if he maintains his present gusto, and circumstances don't bite him harder in the ass than they already have, I feel we are doomed to have a Republican Congress for the next two years. Democrats! Are you listening?
Monday, September 04, 2006
MEETING OF MIND -- PREVIEW OF THE WORKS OF A DISTINGUISHED THINKER!
MEETING OF MIND – Preview of the Works of a Distinguished Thinker
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
William L. Livingston III is a friend of mine who once wrote three provocative books. The way he and I came to know each other was through the exchange of books. He saw my book Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches (1990) in a Book Fair in New York City, and said, “Send me a copy of your book, and I’ll send you a copy of mine.”
In his note, he said if ever in New York City look me up, which I did early in 1991. I found he was a nuclear engineering specialist with a large international consulting firm located in the Twin Towers. I visited him there, and subsequently at his home in the suburbs (Bayside, NY). To my surprise, he assembled an impressive group of his friends: nuclear scientists, journalists, Wall Street types, and their wives and children.
All the men were familiar with my book, and were full of questions about it. Since I was totally out of my technical depth – there wasn’t a chemist in the bunch – I was relieved that I could at least converse with them at some level.
Bill Livingston had just completed a two-year stint in South Korea where his firm built a nuclear power plant. I learned from one of the group that Bill also was the holder of some 101 patents besides being a consultant and fledgling writer.
For the past fifteen years, we have been friends and have communicated regularly. Where we differ is that he now desists from writing about organization and management while I persist. I say this with sadness because he has a lot to say that remains relevant to this day.
The quality of his thought is so penetrating that it disappoints me that his literary efforts have not been more receptively received. He epitomizes the frustrated highly technical scientist that is managed, manipulated, motivated, and marginalized by a much less sophisticated management, leading to the growing entropy and collapse of many organizations.
I have attempted to address this problem with seven books and more than 400 articles over the past twenty years, but I must admit I share his frustration. Like him, I am on the fringe, an unknown entity. This drove him from publishing, while it seems only to spur me on. The best way to give you some measure of his mind is to share bits and pieces of his three published books, books, unfortunately, not listed on www.amazon.com. These are a few of the highlighted passages that appealed to me, and should not be taken out of the context of the respective books, but be seen only in that sense.
THE NEW PLAGUE (1985)
HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988)
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990)
* * * * * * * * *
THE NEW PLAGUE
This was the first book he autographed for me, subtitled “Organizations in Complexity.” He signed it: “To Fearless Fisher, Fellow traveler in the Big Muddy”
Quoted passages follow:
PREFACE
My purpose in writing this book is to promote awareness of a great new plague that is suffocating humanity and to show that the plague is unnecessary.
CHAPTER 1
The quantity of scientific facts is now doubling every seven years. Fresh complications emerge before old ones are digested. The New Plague is the colossal mess being made with this large and increasing quantity of unresolved complex matters.
A thing is complex when it exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal.
At the heart of every case of The New Plague is an organization. Organizations are man-made contrivances to provide order and structure for collaboration. For complex problems, the grand organizational scheme for collaboration so efficient for simple matters produces disaster.
Corporations famous for being so much in control are most certainly not.
There is no doubt that the workers in the shops who have long labored to make the project go are mad as hell at somebody. Our society is good at composing solutions.
An undiscussable refers to a subject or information about a discussable subject that is known to individuals but not verbalized in the occupational environment. Seven-eights of everything significant isn’t discussed.
CHAPTER 2
Preserving culture is far more important than preserving life.
In one computer application for the control of a nuclear power plant, the initial projection of $3 million ended up to be over $50 million and the system failed to meet half the expectations of performance.
The worse the project the earlier it is widely known that it is in trouble.
There is no extreme to which a cultural entity will not resort to justify its performance.
If enough people do a thing wrong often enough, it becomes right. Quantity is protection from criticism.
The reaction of management to the wreckage caused by its practices is to increase the intensity of their application. Management has no functionality for problems that don’t fit its practices.
The worse a project turns out the less likely that lessons learned will be used in the next assault . . . That is, meaningful feedback from practices and designs causing the wreckage reduces as the amount of wreckage increases.
CHAPTER 3
Unfortunately, but inevitably, the sharks dismember the wrong problem . . . No one knows and no one is tasked to care. EOPMD (end of the project mismatch discovery) is a long way off. The important thing is to reduce the unknown complexity as fast as possible to fit into the known organizational compartments. It is the only way to remove the anxiety. Get parts in order. Rush into action, any action. We must know what we are doing. Look at all the activity. Nothing else matters. The feeding frenzy ceremony announces to all that the project is and will continue to be out of control.
During party time the working groups each realize that no one is in control of the project, and they silently disconnect from one another and retrench their positions to a sphere of domain over which they know they can exercise rational control.
Whistleblowers are never attacked for the information they reveal to the press, which comes as a surprise to no one. They are assaulted for having the asocial audacity to go public.
HAVE FUN AT WORK
This second book I received at his home in Bayside (NY) and it had this inscription: “To Jim, off to the races on the great crusade to organization sanity.”
CHAPTER One
(He has simply a captivating illustration on the opposite page to this chapter. It shows a man in the rafters with his shirtsleeves rolled up as a puppeteer working the strings on a manager standing in front of a bar graph in a conference room, who in turn is working the strings as a puppeteer of seven men around a conference table with windup keys in their backs.)
The natural process of forming a belief system prefers myths to truth.
In a screwed up situation, turnover is not related to turnaround.
When the remedies are unrelated to the malady, large doses only make more maladies. The mess process is not something that is exhibited piecemeal, or in gradual increments. It is either florid or it is absent.
CHAPTER Three
In terms of unfun, we call a thing complex when we perceive an imbalance between what we think the situation requires of us and what we think we can handle.
When everyone thinks the same, no one has to think.
Human suffering has never been a factor of influence to the corporate decision-making.
Adjusting to the diseases of a sick organization will not make you well.
POSIWID (purpose of a system is what it does) shows that espoused values like health, wealth, dignity and survival don’t rank very high in the social totem pole.
The establishment does not understand technology.
CHAPTER Four
To join an organization is to grant an unconditional surrender of your option space. The right of the organization to constrict your behavior and limit your freedom for action is a basic social assumption.
There is never any time for problem definition. As POSIWID, then the function of the Feeding Frenzy is to take a problem that is not understood and to grind it into organizational components that are.
There are many sides to a decision until you take one.
When the cleverest tongues rather than the most appropriate solutions control dialogue, what you fear is what you get.
The higher the spirits of management the less they are aware of what is going on.
When you don’t know who is coordinating the solution, then no one is.
It is the genius of management that keeps the workery from questioning the inequity of the system.
As long as the disaster outcome is accepted as inevitable, it is guaranteed.
When managers start to purl about form rather than content, projects waste is at its peak.
Changing managers changes nothing.
Without feedback, there can be no correction.
An organization of sheep begets an administration of wolves.
Recognizing the language of failure is the first step to have fun at work.
CHAPTER Six
The only thing well organized by an organization is hypocrisy.
Technical literature on organizations can be classified into two categories: irrelevancies and lies. Most people who write books on these topics are salaried employees of particularly gruesome organizations called universities.
Authority is harsh in direct proportion to its ignorance.
When computers learn to cover up their limitations and their errors, the day of true artificial intelligence will have arrived.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
(This was William Livingston’s last book, and his inscription was a bit sentimental and optimistic: “To F, thanks for all the great insights, and meshing of energies. A great step forward.”)
(The remarkable illustration opposite chapter one of HAVE FUN AT WORK is now the cover of this book.)
PREFACE
Your friends in the highest places are the laws of nature.
As the most significant event concerning the individual since the Industrial Revolution, the constellation marks the swing of the pendulum of power away from the impersonal corporation, where totalitarianism reigns supreme, to the individual and into the Skunkworks (collection of specialists dedicated to a specific project with decision authority), where the real business of solving problems always takes place.
CHAPTER One
So much of what we have been encouraged to believe about solving problems has turned out, instead, to be problem amplification . . . The stuff of problem-solving works like a charm, especially in the trenches where we labor, and the payoff is now (Livingston’s italics).
Facing up to big bad problems can be postponed. The ostrich crisis coping posture can be observed everywhere. Officials in the establishment have turned evasion into an art form. Think of all the big problems, which are bypassed day by day. You are discouraged from thinking for yourself and you are persuaded to ignore complex matters rather than to face them. The establishment wants you to grow only in your narrow specialty and react to everything else by reliance on feelings. The herd likes company.
(And finally)
While the increasingly complex work demands more understanding, we are encouraged to think less and less for ourselves. What this establishment-designed context does, in effect, is to outlaw the complex problem and its solution from the forums of science and public debate. With no suitable arena for large scope matters, the technical community, in one stroke, has cut itself off from the growth experience of solving complex problems. Denial of complexity, the first defense of weak minds, leads directly to the consequences of complexity unchained.
Communication about problem-solving matters runs right into this dilemma. Because everything is connected to everything else, concepts and embodiments of concepts about complexity are messy to understand. If the particulars are presented before the concepts, they can only be recognized as particulars. When the concepts are presented before the examples, they are imaged as abstract rather than tangible forms. If concepts and examples are presented piecemeal, the relationship among pieces is obscure. Writing about complexity is complex matter itself. We still do not know how to make understanding complexity easy. We don’t think it is necessarily possible anymore, and we make no apologies for fundamental truth.
* * * * * * * * * *
I share these Livingston gems with you because organizational life remains a challenge, and I sense that his passion will make connection with you. He comes out of the incubator of science and so it should come as no surprise that he thinks in terms of acronyms and epigrams. Like reading Hemingway, much is left out.
For example, in the last piece, he is implying inductive and deductive reasoning are not enough; that linear logic can become simplistic as applied to complex problems. In other words, everything flies apart or goes around and around in cyclic confusion.
We are all aware of cyclic logic. One experiences the same problems over and over again never reaching resolution. Indeed, it describes many of our lives.
Lateral thinking (right brain), the complement to this vertical thinking (left brain), does not adapt so willingly to acronyms and epigrams, but rather to conceptual forays emboldened by intuitive perspectives. It so happens I feel more comfortable thinking intuitively, while Bill appears more comfortable thinking cognitively. This should come as no surprise to those that read me.
Beautiful Betty has suggested that we would make a good writing team, he with his epigrams and acronyms and me with my whimsical conceptual intuitions. But alas, I am not a collaborator, nor is he.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
William L. Livingston III is a friend of mine who once wrote three provocative books. The way he and I came to know each other was through the exchange of books. He saw my book Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches (1990) in a Book Fair in New York City, and said, “Send me a copy of your book, and I’ll send you a copy of mine.”
In his note, he said if ever in New York City look me up, which I did early in 1991. I found he was a nuclear engineering specialist with a large international consulting firm located in the Twin Towers. I visited him there, and subsequently at his home in the suburbs (Bayside, NY). To my surprise, he assembled an impressive group of his friends: nuclear scientists, journalists, Wall Street types, and their wives and children.
All the men were familiar with my book, and were full of questions about it. Since I was totally out of my technical depth – there wasn’t a chemist in the bunch – I was relieved that I could at least converse with them at some level.
Bill Livingston had just completed a two-year stint in South Korea where his firm built a nuclear power plant. I learned from one of the group that Bill also was the holder of some 101 patents besides being a consultant and fledgling writer.
For the past fifteen years, we have been friends and have communicated regularly. Where we differ is that he now desists from writing about organization and management while I persist. I say this with sadness because he has a lot to say that remains relevant to this day.
The quality of his thought is so penetrating that it disappoints me that his literary efforts have not been more receptively received. He epitomizes the frustrated highly technical scientist that is managed, manipulated, motivated, and marginalized by a much less sophisticated management, leading to the growing entropy and collapse of many organizations.
I have attempted to address this problem with seven books and more than 400 articles over the past twenty years, but I must admit I share his frustration. Like him, I am on the fringe, an unknown entity. This drove him from publishing, while it seems only to spur me on. The best way to give you some measure of his mind is to share bits and pieces of his three published books, books, unfortunately, not listed on www.amazon.com. These are a few of the highlighted passages that appealed to me, and should not be taken out of the context of the respective books, but be seen only in that sense.
THE NEW PLAGUE (1985)
HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988)
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990)
* * * * * * * * *
THE NEW PLAGUE
This was the first book he autographed for me, subtitled “Organizations in Complexity.” He signed it: “To Fearless Fisher, Fellow traveler in the Big Muddy”
Quoted passages follow:
PREFACE
My purpose in writing this book is to promote awareness of a great new plague that is suffocating humanity and to show that the plague is unnecessary.
CHAPTER 1
The quantity of scientific facts is now doubling every seven years. Fresh complications emerge before old ones are digested. The New Plague is the colossal mess being made with this large and increasing quantity of unresolved complex matters.
A thing is complex when it exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal.
At the heart of every case of The New Plague is an organization. Organizations are man-made contrivances to provide order and structure for collaboration. For complex problems, the grand organizational scheme for collaboration so efficient for simple matters produces disaster.
Corporations famous for being so much in control are most certainly not.
There is no doubt that the workers in the shops who have long labored to make the project go are mad as hell at somebody. Our society is good at composing solutions.
An undiscussable refers to a subject or information about a discussable subject that is known to individuals but not verbalized in the occupational environment. Seven-eights of everything significant isn’t discussed.
CHAPTER 2
Preserving culture is far more important than preserving life.
In one computer application for the control of a nuclear power plant, the initial projection of $3 million ended up to be over $50 million and the system failed to meet half the expectations of performance.
The worse the project the earlier it is widely known that it is in trouble.
There is no extreme to which a cultural entity will not resort to justify its performance.
If enough people do a thing wrong often enough, it becomes right. Quantity is protection from criticism.
The reaction of management to the wreckage caused by its practices is to increase the intensity of their application. Management has no functionality for problems that don’t fit its practices.
The worse a project turns out the less likely that lessons learned will be used in the next assault . . . That is, meaningful feedback from practices and designs causing the wreckage reduces as the amount of wreckage increases.
CHAPTER 3
Unfortunately, but inevitably, the sharks dismember the wrong problem . . . No one knows and no one is tasked to care. EOPMD (end of the project mismatch discovery) is a long way off. The important thing is to reduce the unknown complexity as fast as possible to fit into the known organizational compartments. It is the only way to remove the anxiety. Get parts in order. Rush into action, any action. We must know what we are doing. Look at all the activity. Nothing else matters. The feeding frenzy ceremony announces to all that the project is and will continue to be out of control.
During party time the working groups each realize that no one is in control of the project, and they silently disconnect from one another and retrench their positions to a sphere of domain over which they know they can exercise rational control.
Whistleblowers are never attacked for the information they reveal to the press, which comes as a surprise to no one. They are assaulted for having the asocial audacity to go public.
HAVE FUN AT WORK
This second book I received at his home in Bayside (NY) and it had this inscription: “To Jim, off to the races on the great crusade to organization sanity.”
CHAPTER One
(He has simply a captivating illustration on the opposite page to this chapter. It shows a man in the rafters with his shirtsleeves rolled up as a puppeteer working the strings on a manager standing in front of a bar graph in a conference room, who in turn is working the strings as a puppeteer of seven men around a conference table with windup keys in their backs.)
The natural process of forming a belief system prefers myths to truth.
In a screwed up situation, turnover is not related to turnaround.
When the remedies are unrelated to the malady, large doses only make more maladies. The mess process is not something that is exhibited piecemeal, or in gradual increments. It is either florid or it is absent.
CHAPTER Three
In terms of unfun, we call a thing complex when we perceive an imbalance between what we think the situation requires of us and what we think we can handle.
When everyone thinks the same, no one has to think.
Human suffering has never been a factor of influence to the corporate decision-making.
Adjusting to the diseases of a sick organization will not make you well.
POSIWID (purpose of a system is what it does) shows that espoused values like health, wealth, dignity and survival don’t rank very high in the social totem pole.
The establishment does not understand technology.
CHAPTER Four
To join an organization is to grant an unconditional surrender of your option space. The right of the organization to constrict your behavior and limit your freedom for action is a basic social assumption.
There is never any time for problem definition. As POSIWID, then the function of the Feeding Frenzy is to take a problem that is not understood and to grind it into organizational components that are.
There are many sides to a decision until you take one.
When the cleverest tongues rather than the most appropriate solutions control dialogue, what you fear is what you get.
The higher the spirits of management the less they are aware of what is going on.
When you don’t know who is coordinating the solution, then no one is.
It is the genius of management that keeps the workery from questioning the inequity of the system.
As long as the disaster outcome is accepted as inevitable, it is guaranteed.
When managers start to purl about form rather than content, projects waste is at its peak.
Changing managers changes nothing.
Without feedback, there can be no correction.
An organization of sheep begets an administration of wolves.
Recognizing the language of failure is the first step to have fun at work.
CHAPTER Six
The only thing well organized by an organization is hypocrisy.
Technical literature on organizations can be classified into two categories: irrelevancies and lies. Most people who write books on these topics are salaried employees of particularly gruesome organizations called universities.
Authority is harsh in direct proportion to its ignorance.
When computers learn to cover up their limitations and their errors, the day of true artificial intelligence will have arrived.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
(This was William Livingston’s last book, and his inscription was a bit sentimental and optimistic: “To F, thanks for all the great insights, and meshing of energies. A great step forward.”)
(The remarkable illustration opposite chapter one of HAVE FUN AT WORK is now the cover of this book.)
PREFACE
Your friends in the highest places are the laws of nature.
As the most significant event concerning the individual since the Industrial Revolution, the constellation marks the swing of the pendulum of power away from the impersonal corporation, where totalitarianism reigns supreme, to the individual and into the Skunkworks (collection of specialists dedicated to a specific project with decision authority), where the real business of solving problems always takes place.
CHAPTER One
So much of what we have been encouraged to believe about solving problems has turned out, instead, to be problem amplification . . . The stuff of problem-solving works like a charm, especially in the trenches where we labor, and the payoff is now (Livingston’s italics).
Facing up to big bad problems can be postponed. The ostrich crisis coping posture can be observed everywhere. Officials in the establishment have turned evasion into an art form. Think of all the big problems, which are bypassed day by day. You are discouraged from thinking for yourself and you are persuaded to ignore complex matters rather than to face them. The establishment wants you to grow only in your narrow specialty and react to everything else by reliance on feelings. The herd likes company.
(And finally)
While the increasingly complex work demands more understanding, we are encouraged to think less and less for ourselves. What this establishment-designed context does, in effect, is to outlaw the complex problem and its solution from the forums of science and public debate. With no suitable arena for large scope matters, the technical community, in one stroke, has cut itself off from the growth experience of solving complex problems. Denial of complexity, the first defense of weak minds, leads directly to the consequences of complexity unchained.
Communication about problem-solving matters runs right into this dilemma. Because everything is connected to everything else, concepts and embodiments of concepts about complexity are messy to understand. If the particulars are presented before the concepts, they can only be recognized as particulars. When the concepts are presented before the examples, they are imaged as abstract rather than tangible forms. If concepts and examples are presented piecemeal, the relationship among pieces is obscure. Writing about complexity is complex matter itself. We still do not know how to make understanding complexity easy. We don’t think it is necessarily possible anymore, and we make no apologies for fundamental truth.
* * * * * * * * * *
I share these Livingston gems with you because organizational life remains a challenge, and I sense that his passion will make connection with you. He comes out of the incubator of science and so it should come as no surprise that he thinks in terms of acronyms and epigrams. Like reading Hemingway, much is left out.
For example, in the last piece, he is implying inductive and deductive reasoning are not enough; that linear logic can become simplistic as applied to complex problems. In other words, everything flies apart or goes around and around in cyclic confusion.
We are all aware of cyclic logic. One experiences the same problems over and over again never reaching resolution. Indeed, it describes many of our lives.
Lateral thinking (right brain), the complement to this vertical thinking (left brain), does not adapt so willingly to acronyms and epigrams, but rather to conceptual forays emboldened by intuitive perspectives. It so happens I feel more comfortable thinking intuitively, while Bill appears more comfortable thinking cognitively. This should come as no surprise to those that read me.
Beautiful Betty has suggested that we would make a good writing team, he with his epigrams and acronyms and me with my whimsical conceptual intuitions. But alas, I am not a collaborator, nor is he.
Be always well,
Jim
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