My daughter, Jennifer, graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Marketing & Public Relations last Saturday, December 15, 2007. There were 3,600 graduates. I was thinking about her when I first started this piece, and have not been to bed since Wednesday in an effort to finally finish it. The piece is dedicated to her who is very special and has worked very hard to reach this milestone. I salute her and her graduating classmates.
JRF
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LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Perennial Problem of Emptiness vs. Caring in an Age in Transition
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
“From the lessons of history concerning life and death, the blossoming and sickness of society, man learns hardly anything. He behaves either as if past history were nonexistent or as if the past presented no situation essentially comparable to that in which his own society finds itself; as if there were no causal relationships and consequences; as if there were no such thing as socio-cultural sickness, and hence no need to sacrifice momentary pleasures and other sensate utilities and values in order to avoid an infinitely greater catastrophe. In this field of experience he remains virtually unteachable.”
Pitrim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (1941), p. 325.
“Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. ‘Care’ asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Care’ and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo’ (man), for it is made out of humus (earth).’”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962), p. 242.
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I’ve embarked on this discussion of “emptiness” and “caring” by quoting the Russian born but American pioneering sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, and the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. Both men seem increasingly relevant. Sorokin wrote with passionate clarity about culture; Heidegger with murky detachment about being. Both saw the need for a complete change of contemporary thinking, as well as the need for a fundamental transformation of our conduct toward other men, and the world at large. Neither name has mainstream identity. Even so, their wisdom permeates our time.
UNTEACHABLE EMPTINESS OF OUR TIMES
Heidegger quotes this ancient parable of “Care,” which Goethe also uses at the end of Faust (1832). Goethe’s story is of a disillusioned scholar who deserts his “ivory tower” of academia to seek happiness in the real world. He makes a pact with Satan, spiraling down through a number of escapades to the brink of moral degradation. Like the parable, the moral certainty and intellectual satisfaction that Faust seeks the more insecurity and dissatisfaction he encounters.
Rollo May captures the sense of this in Love and Will (1969) when he suggests modern man lives in a “schizoid” society and culture. He cautions us, however, not to think of “schizoid man” in the psychopathological sense, but in terms of our increasingly self-detachment.
It follows we are out of touch. We avoid close relationships. We have an inability to feel. Yet, in our stubborn desire to remain the same, we become unteachably empty. Even so, we cannot escape caring. We carry caring to our death, as it is our connection with the Earth as conscious thinking man.
Pitrim Sorokin, on the other hand, in Crisis of Our Age (1941) reminds us we are in a transitional period.
The old myths and symbols of stability by which we once oriented ourselves are gone or have disintegrated beyond recognition: the nuclear family; the sacred vows of marriage; the sense of community; the concept of the common good; the ethical standard of the Ten Commandments; the central union of trust, honesty, fairness, and love to character; the natural joy of honest work; all manifestations of caring, all in trouble, all in hasty decline.
The same forces that have determined growth and achievement in our Sensate culture have made unavoidable the growth of the cancer of its disintegration. The more we have the less we feel ourselves to be. Bigger has not proven better, while the distinctions between true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative have been increasingly dissolved. Boundaries have lost their meaning. We have become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” a stranger in the artificial world we have created.
To counter this, we have retreated into our inventions and innovations reversing our minds to “small is better.” This is personified in mobiles: digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and various other electronic wonders. We think we are changing when we are merely flip-flopping. Technology is the new narcotic of the mind. It forgets and forgives our angst and excesses. Today the greatest terror is to be alone without a cell phone.
Anxiety is rampant. We cling to each other electronically, not out of love and caring, but out of boring dullness. We try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love when we are afraid to feel, afraid to love, afraid to step aside from the masses to be different. We are afraid to make choices; afraid to choose one person over another; one career over another; one thing over another. We are afraid to take risks, afraid to take chances. We embrace the Grim Reaper of fate, masking our anguish by putting the tattoo needle to our bodies to become walking billboards of anomie.
Our self-identity is skin deep. We are obsessed with knowing who we are separate from everyone else, only to become restless imitation of everybody. Peter Berger in The Homeless Mind (1973) sees us liberated from the narrow controls of family and community, but lost and empty, unable to influence our situation or others. We balance precariously on the precipice of apathy.
Apathy, Love and Violence
If this dismal outline of our society and culture is disheartening, consider the first step that always follows apathy. It is violence to others or to ourselves.
We are at war with ourselves on every street, every corner, in every community, in every church, school and home.
We have more guns than citizens with nearly everyone over the age of ten with at least one cell phone. We cannot stand silence, or being alone. We go to the mall as much for the noise, and for the crowd and anonymity as much as to shop.
We look for holy causes in which we can lose our identity, our apathy, and ourselves in something bigger than we are, where someone else takes charge, does the thinking, makes the choices, and takes responsibility for the action.
We do this out of a lack of individual self-worth and the gnawing sense of powerlessness.
We are perfect fodder for fanatics and fanaticism, for holy causes and half-truths. Our glass is always half empty if not bone dry. We are at the ready to blame others for the fix we’re in. Enter ambulance chasers who rescue us from ourselves and then turn us into their ornaments.
Look around you. We are moving faster than ever before, but it is an old habit of us to run faster when we have lost our way, and to grasp more fiercely to passing canards. When we have no depth or understanding, we are ornaments on somebody else’s tree.
Whatever merits or failings research, statistics and technical tools may have, they are inanimate things. They are not real people. They may frame an idea but they have no personal meaning beyond a thing. If this seems self-evident, think again. We treat our things better than we treat our people.
The mechanisms of science and technology have chased us from ourselves into the adoration of new tools and toys. Our gullibility is equally evident in our eagerness to accept “scientific pronouncements” with little hesitation. We were once told coffee was bad for our health. The other day we were told coffee is not only good for our health, but it impedes Alzheimer’s disease. The average American drinks less than two cups of coffee a day. It takes five cups of coffee per day to impede this disease. It will be interesting to see if the stock price on coffee futures goes up.
We are buried daily in a sea of factual statistics from the social, behavior and physical sciences, facts which often later prove unreliable, or untrue. This confounds and confuses but should not come as a surprise. In our solution driven culture, ten or more solutions to a problem jump out before the problem has actually been defined. Ergo, it is open season on gullibility.
All You Need is Love
We treat sex as if it is a hostile foreign country. The mind and body are at war with each other. The mind refuses to listen to the body, and the body refuses to listen to the mind. Small wonder why we have trouble connecting. How can we expect to connect with someone else when we refuse to connect with ourselves?
Pornography is an obvious exploitation of this riddle, making the natural perverted and the perverted, natural. We are not content to be silly putty. We have to broadcast it in silly romance novels, television soap operas and situation comedies where sex makes fools of us. And in all this silliness, we have no idea what it means to love.
Love has been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life to greater happiness and well being with not so much as a nod to caring. If this were not so, we would treat each other better when we say we love them. But it doesn’t stop there.
Why is it so often that people in the caring professions – social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists – hard working though they might be, are so seldom found to be caring people? Well-meaning is a far cry from caring. When you care, you see beyond the client to the individual person, and listen to that person not as an ideal type but as a hurting human being.
Love has been crafted in the narrowest sense to love making, which is not necessarily identical with loving. Advertisers have had a field day with Viagra, the performance enhancing sex stimulant. It is ironic that it appears during the dying days of the Sensate culture. Still, love has become a problem, as greater sex hasn’t led to liberation and greater connection, but instead too often to nihilism, and self-estrangement. Why is that?
Love has become all about control. It is a way to possess, dictate, and dominate, as opposed to a means to unity, trust and union. It caused psychiatrist R. D. Laing to suggest that love is a cover for violence.
The Hand of Culture in the Mix
In this age of transition, none of the supporting beams of the past are either in place, or if in place, reliably up to the task of needed support.
Self-assurance in this rational ordering society no longer holds true. We have become ambiguous stick figures teetering on the brink of ambivalence. Life is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. We are stuck. We look for experts to guide us only to find these experts are as lost as we are. We are in “No Man’s Land.” We have missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.
It is not totally our fault, but this should give us little comfort.
No certain clan or group created this societal malaise. To grasp what is happening, it might be thought, in geological terms, to resemble a tectonic shift that speeded up since the bourgeois experience of the Victorian period (1837 – 1901).
Victorians, armed with their wealth and military might, gave themselves permission with impunity to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed inferior. They looked on war as purification, liberation, and the instrument of hope. Historian Peter Gay reveals this narcissistic sentiment in his book, “Cultivation of Hatred” (1993). Victorian hubris has spread across the Western world as a cultural pandemic.
In many ways, despite this postmodern era of electronic wonders, the vestiges of the Victorian age still contaminate our Western roots. This finds us essentially defenseless as the “schizoid man,” the detached man, which is another way of saying the technological man.
The more we cover the sickness of society with technological man’s creative genius the less relevant we have become to ourselves.
Sorokin notes this, and says, there is no cause for alarm. The transition from the magnificent six-hundred-year day of the Sensate culture to the majestic promise of the six-hundred-year day of the Ideational culture is now in progress. Nothing, he says, can change this as there is nothing we can do about it other than understand what is happening and embrace the opportunities that are unfolding.
Cultures and civilizations are born, prosper, disintegrate and die, and then are reborn in new iterations. We are living in the dying days of the Sensate culture. Sorokin writes:
“The failure is not due to this or that incidental external factor, but has been generated by the system of sensory truth in the process of its own development. The seeds of decay were inherent in the system from the very first, and with its development they began to germinate and grow until they have finally become veritable lethal poisons.” (Crisis of Our Age, pp. 115 – 116).
The “truth” landscape of today is a maze of conveniences, conventions, and instrumental and terminal values. We are currently experiencing the contradictory truths of capitalism and communism, Islam and Christianity, Judaism and other isms. Then there is evolution and creative design, deists and atheists, scientists and Christian Scientists, Catholicism and Protestantism, global warming and globalization, pacifists and hawks, patriots and internationalists, religion and pseudo-religion.
Our sick culture has come to be the way we live and how we solve the problems that perplex us. It is the reason why the lid has come off technological man and has exploded into violence. When truths are not treated as relative, and one truth attempts to suppress or destroy another truth, the world more resembles a pock like rash of volcanoes.
Victorians thought it was self-evident that they were the proper custodians of truth; that it was their duty to the world to be policeman and doctor to its tangled web of deceit and debility, and to cultivate its roots with Victorian wisdom and culture.
The reign of queen Victoria ended with her death in 1901, but the momentum continued. The twentieth century was to become a constant bloodbath of opposing truths. More than 100 million people perished on the battlefields of Europe and Asia in two world wars, and many wars after. Currently, Iraq and Afghanistan have the stamp of Victorian hubris on them, proving how fundamental her legacy on the West has been.
Gay writes,
“They (Victorians) would serve as a cloak to imperialistic military or commercial designs, and were driven by personal devils to be exorcised by self-destructive ventures abroad, by unimpeachable benevolence, by active feelings of guilt over one’s privileged position or a mixture of them all. For centuries, the conviction that Christians had a divine call to convert the world had animated believers.”
Gay add:
“Victorians injected what it touted as scientific rationale for hating or despising outsiders. What came to dominate these rationales for aggressiveness was the argument from race.” (Cultivation of Hatred, p. 69)
Thus far the twenty-first century seems to have departed little from this Victorian mindset much as many would argue otherwise.
The Creative Paradox
When pathology takes on normalcy, ‘schizoid man’ does not require repression. Since this is not schizophrenia, or psychotic behavior, but a state that can be constructive, it has pushed the schizoid personality toward creativity making art out of the sickness.
We see this in the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Freud, among others. It was the pathology of the age that liberated their genius.
The pathology also pushed others of a more technological bent toward utilitarian inventions, many of which, as mentioned earlier, have made us more detached, sedentary, and mechanical as well as entertained. This phenomenon is not exclusive to cultures in transition, but a common experience when men are allowed by society and convention to operate “out of their minds,” which is, incidentally, the definition of insanity.
Artists have always been intrigued with the archetypal qualities and characteristics that make us human. That is why they are society’s gatekeepers and recorders when society is coming apart as they thrive on chaos and collapse.
Take Orestes by Aeschylus and Faust by Goethe. These works are more than portraits of two demented characters who have wild flights of fantasy, one in Greece in the fifth-century B.C., and the other in eighteenth-century Germany.
In one sense, they represent the struggles of ambivalent man in everyday life. With the poet’s touch of genius, they interpret the ferocity of our minds as we are forced to deal with what it means to grow up, to find our identity, to affirm our power, to find love and create enough space to breathe, and finally to meet and deal with life up to and including our death. Century, race and ethnicity are strangely irrelevant.
One of the advantages of living in a transitional age is nothing is nailed down.
It forces us to rise to the challenges and contradictions, to uncover new meanings to our nature, and to see more deeply into what makes us human. It is uncanny that Aeschylus in the last Sensate culture of our distant pass, and Goethe in the dying Sensate culture of the modern era would write similarly of their times.
Aeschylus is the theological poet of his time like Milton (Paradise Lost) was in the seventeenth and Goethe in the eighteenth century. Orestes portrays the agony of being caught in the contradictory blood feuds of his time, while Faust sells his soul for immediate gratification. Both protagonists ignore the consequences of their actions.
Diagnosis of the Crisis
Explanatory models don’t represent truth personified, but provide a gauge to better understand complexities that defy easy understanding. Freud comes to mind. His explanatory model of the ego, id and superego is catchy. This is even truer in its elaboration with the “reality principle” (ego), “pleasure principle (id), and “morality principle” (superego). The problem with Freud is that he felt a need to reify his model as being “scientific,” which is far from the truth.
German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote the obituary of civilization in his iconoclastic Decline of the West (1918). His explanatory model claimed that civilizations are mortal and have a distinct organic form and grow, mature, and decay according to a predetermined historical cycle. Spengler’s book was commercially but not critically successful. The book did, however, influence Sorokin. He latched unto the cyclic nature of civilization as explained by Spengler. Instead of seeing the death knell of the West, however, he envisioned a cyclic change from one culture to another in an overlapping continuum.
No culture in Sorokin’s explanatory model is mutually exclusive but has common characteristics to all three cultures before it moves into dominance of one. For instance, he shows how the Grecian Sensate culture (500 B.C. to 100 A.D.) moved into Medieval Ideational culture (200 through 800 A.D.), and then into the Renaissance Idealistic culture (900 through 1500 A.D.), and then into the Sensate culture of the Modern Era (1600 to the present).
As in the time of Aeschylus (c. 525 – 456 BC), Sorokin sees us in the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday. The Ideational culture he sees rising like a Phoenix out of the Sensate ashes as society moves from the secular, materialistic and quantitative culture of the scientific age to a more theocratic, spiritual and qualitative culture where humanism and technology become integrated. It has happened before, and he sees it happening again.
After the collapse of the Grecian Sensate culture of Aeschylus, rose the Medieval Ideational culture of Emperor Constantine and the Roman Empire. Christianity, which had been persecuted, was now protected by the state.
Constantine is alleged to have seen a flaming cross in the sky at the river Tiber before going into battle. It was inscribed with the words, “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” He adopted the cross as his banner, and was victorious. With that stroke of serendipity, Christianity became the most powerful religion in the world, and would one day grow to more than one billion souls.
Modern and Postmodern Era and the Changing Nature of Belief
In the Modern Era of the Sensate culture, beginning roughly with the late sixteenth century, the new principle that true reality was objective, quantifiable, value free and sensory became dominant. Protestantism, and science challenged Catholic doctrine and church mythology.
It was a new age. The arts and sciences, philosophy and pseudo-religions, ethics and law flourished. Society took rational measure of social, economic and political organization. Thinking became objective, cognitive, linear and vertical with the emphasis on the empirical and secular with a “this worldly” cast to its perspective. Man, not God, had become the center of man’s consciousness.
Through the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter Reformation, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution, Western society moved swiftly through the Modern to the Postmodern Era.
Conventional religions, which are mainly intuitive, were being challenged by “pseudo-religions” in the Sensate culture with their emphasis on being scientific, rational, empirical and verifiable. Scientology would fit this description. Pseudo-religions have failed, however, to capture many converts as they have been seen to vulgarize the social and humanistic philosophies
Mystics endowed with charismatic appeal, such as Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, the Hebrew prophets, Mohammed, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and others, found all great religions.
“Pseudo-religions” arise in the Sensate culture based upon “science,” “rationality,” or empirically verified truths. Scientology comes to mind. Pseudo-religions never get anywhere because they vulgarize social and humanitarian philosophy.
The clashes between Islam, Judaism and the Christian West today suggest the emergence of a new synthesis of theocracy in the coming Ideational culture. Sorokin sees this as a movement toward a new spiritual awakening, which may resemble the last Ideational period.
Does his view have credence? Consider this. Seventy years ago, he predicted in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) the dullness of our tastes would lead to shocking art, that the drop in our libido would lead to a preoccupation with sex, that the family would disintegrate, students would riot on college campuses, police would be engaged in bloody confrontations with citizens on the streets, that pornography would become mainstream and addictive, and that the bliss for “bigger and better” would run its course while the world would collapse in continuing war, chaos, and genocide.
Economic and political neuroticism would lead to a crisis in the arts and sciences, philosophy and religion; in laws and morals, manners and mores. This would spread across all Western society.
Sorokin claims that when a society’s creative forces are exhausted, the culture either becomes petrified, rigid, uncreative and stuck, or it shifts into another gear and takes off with new creative force and energy that previously lay dormant. We are in this transitory period and the jury is still out on what is next.
TEACHABLE CARING
As the ancient parable states, “Care” is born in the same act as the infant, the source of human tenderness. Love cannot live without “Care.” It is given power by nature’s sense of pain as we come into life. “Care” then becomes the psychological side of love. We feel this pain in our bodies as a child and in our hearts as an adult. Parents know this pain and sense of powerlessness when a child leaves the protective custody of the home too early.
When we say we no longer “Care,” we lose our being, and “Care” is the only way back to life. If I “Care” about life, I will husband my resources with full attention to its welfare, whereas if I do not “Care,” my life will disintegrate. “Care” is the basic construct of human existence. It constitutes man as man. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by “Care.”
Time is not intimidating nor is it fleeting. Time is what makes “Care” possible. It is the fact that we are finite, that we will one day die, that makes “Care” possible.
Yet, there is a clear distinction between “Care” and sentimentality. Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely experiencing reality. Some people will cry in movies or watching television, but will show no sentiment when they see a homeless person freezing on the street.
Sentimentality glories in tears. It begins with subjectively and ends there. “Care” is caring about something or someone real, and then doing something about it. The caring person is caught up in the experience of the objective thing we “Care” about.
“Care” is what is missing today. It takes many forms, some of which may surprise. For example, “Care” is what young people are fighting when they skip school, or drop out of school, or do drugs, or play house, or go on drinking binges, or steal from their parents or neighbors, or lie about where they are and what they are about, maintaining the cringing, creeping, seeping conviction that nothing matters, that they can’t do anything about it so why give a shit.
“Care” is what pushes young people on the fringe into gangs; young girls into rushing their biological clocks; young boys for thinking with their gonads.
The threatening shadow over all this is apathy, uninvolved in mainstream activities, the relentless grasping for external stimulation. “Care” is the necessary antidote. There is none other. “Care” leads to a productive and fulfilling life.
Should the apathetic person fail to muster this antidote, he may not know it but he is a powder keg sitting on the precarious edge of violence, and possible death at his own hands or the hands of an equally disturbed apathetic person.
The struggle is real as full existence in life is made ever more difficult as the world increasingly becomes mechanical and computerized distancing the individual from meaningful association and therefore from himself.
Apathy is the refusal to accept emptiness though it is everywhere. It is nigh on impossible to maintain human dignity as apathy violates it on every side. Apathy conveniently confuses rights with privileges, failing to recognize that education is a privilege and not a right; a job is a privilege and not a right; a meaningful career is a privilege and not a right; a comfortable existence is a privilege not a right.
Nobody owes us anything. It is a privilege if they befriend us, listen to us, care about us, advise us, guide us, and aid us when we need it, but it is never our right to expect it from anybody.
Failure to understand the difference between privileges and rights drives a wedge between being and becoming. Being is what we are, and it is a process of being to struggle and embrace resistance to get us where we want to go. A bird flies because it embraces the wind. We soar because we embrace adversity and turn challenge into opportunity. Becoming looks to avoid struggle and keeps its eye on the prize while never getting off the dime. Becoming wants to be rich but doesn’t want to take an entry level job, save, sacrifice, study, take risks, and endure pain to get there, all of which being does as a matter of course.
Apathy is always looking for an edge failing to see at its feet that it is surrounded by acres of diamonds. All that is desired and vital to our well being is already at our disposal. Being knows this; becoming avoids this.
Apathy sees some men in full enjoyment of riches and reputation, dignity and authority, happy and in fair frame with wife and children, while it slips off in disgust with aching heart and pangs of powerlessness venting its frustration in virulent epithets. Apathy suffers from the disease of compare and compete. It always looks outside itself for motivation and is always disappointed. Psychiatrist Willard and Marguerite Beecher put it this way in Beyond Success and Failure (1966):
“Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, if not overcome, if produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality and spontaneity. He is humanly dead. Competition produces zombies! Nonentities!” (p.56).
If “Care” is not nurtured, apathy will invade the emptiness, and become the source of this illness. It is so easy for us to be lost in our world, to be cut off from caring for our soul and therefore a contagion to others.
The first sign is the loss of connection with this world, with others, and with ourselves. The myths and symbols of our culture have broken down and have little meaning or relevance. We can easily drift to being on automatic pilot in life, at home, in school, on the job, and throughout the day. We fill our bodies with junk food and spirits that consume our vital organs. We smoke or lull around as if the world owes us a living. While we torture our bodies in this manner, we poison our minds with urban legends, voyeurism and vicarious fixes routing for our favorite teams.
We want life to behave as we see it, not as it is. We take pride in thinking the same as we thought as a child refusing to see how this has shrunk us into micro sized souls. Or we totally escape all the boundaries and barriers of life in hedonistic abandon refusing to acknowledge our growing insensitivity to any stimulant. We have become hollow vessel running on empty.
We listen to the gurus that tell us they have the key to unlock our souls, when theirs are locked up in gods and myths. They play on our heartstrings how they have cut the Gordian knot by exiling suspicion, fantasy, and doubt, and opening life to a world of utter tranquility. They do this while being aloof and detached. This has been the doctrine of the Stoics and Epicureans for thousands of years, reinterpreted by these gurus, yet there has never been more anxiety and depression.
The irony is that these gurus in their passion to explain away the myths are forced to fall into myth making. They talk of progress, which is killing our planet; how wealth brings health, when the wealthy are often as sick as the poor; how struggle and pain can be avoided when they are essential to growth; how stress can be eradicated when stress is essential to life – it is distress that is the culprit; how spiritual man is the answer when they are consumed with economic man, or why would they be on the circuit? They see themselves as the answer to the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death, while they perpetuate their myths.
They embody technological man and that is why they have such large audiences. They are the rationalists with a religion message of health and well being. They would make emotions respond to rational demands as anxiety and dread are cured with understanding and anecdote. They are mythmakers with whom we are well acquainted.
It is the spiritual side of man that makes him human. The material side has reduced the planet to a garbage dump with its sickening redolent perfume; caused a leak in the ozone layer, created global warming; and has led to tankers loaded with nuclear waste under the cover of darkness wandering the seas like the Flying Dutchman, a man without a country, looking for a place to drop their poison.
We feel before we think, feeling is the basis of human existence.
Love starts with caring, and caring starts with feeling. Feeling transports us beyond our egos. Feeling is the way we relate to reality and others. American psychologist William James put it simply, “Feeling is everything.” James doesn’t mean that there is nothing more than feeling, but that everything starts with feeling. Feeling commits one, ties one to the object, and ensures some kind of action. We often call it love, but only because we are not comfortable identifying it as a feeling.
In this scientific age feelings have been relegated to subjective status and so value cluttered that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Reason, not feelings, has become the ultimate reality, and look where reason has gotten us.
When confused or angry, we don’t take responsibility for our feelings. We take offense; seldom stopping to ask ourselves why we are upset. Instead of taking umbrage, we might say, “What you said offends me, you hurt my feelings by not respecting me.” Attack what the person said, and take responsibility for your anger, but don’t attack the person.
When we are upset, angry, disappointed or embarrassed, we should not direct our emotions at the person, but at the offending behavior. We should value the person but be appalled at the behavior. It is the behavior, not the person, per se, that offends us. Like all such behavior, there may be more than a grain of truth to what has been said, explaining why we are upset. Criticism when coached in caring terms can make our feelings work for us.
We cannot know ourselves except as to how we feel.
Descartes didn’t do us a favor by saying, “I think, therefore I am.” He should have said, “I feel, therefore I am.” Thinking follows feeling, not the other way around. Scientists can be crippled by feelings the same as us. In fact, feelings can sometimes be more crippling for them because they deny feelings with pride.
We are subjective actors to our environment no matter how subtlety our minds have been developed.
Consider Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (1952) and Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (1946).
Godot does not come. Vladimir and Estragon wait forever and the problem remains. Beckett forces us to look more deeply into our condition as men. He shocks us into awareness of our human significance, all to make us feel. We find ourselves caring for the tramps despite the apparent meaningless of their situation. Godot does not come, but in the waiting there is care and hope. Beckett is saying, waiting is caring, and caring is hoping.
Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” tells the same story from another perspective. It is Harry Hope’s bar and hardware salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman’s birthday. It is a time when Hickey’s hopes, dreams and pipe dreams have all disintegrated into the self-knowledge that greatness has fled from him forever. At this point, in this heavy state of morose, it seems no longer a play and we are swept up into a vacuum of despair. Hickey is in a paradox state of meaning in meaninglessness. The vacuum, the emptiness, and the apathy are the tragic facts that embrace audience and actors alike. The emoting on stage has taken on a life of its own. These actors feel strangely real to us in their own lives, which have now become a part of ours.
T. S. Eliot captures this contradictory situation with these lines:
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting,
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.”
(Four Quartets, p. 15)
Often artists dwell on nihilism to stoke the boilers for relevance, to transcend superficiality for substance, to penetrate the mythos of “Care” to enable us to feel, to stand ready against cynicism and apathy, to take the high ground of authenticity in relationships, to shed the morality of appearance and form, to seek an honest and genuine connection with others, to feel, to touch, and to look one in the eye and share hopes and dreams without embarrassment, to simply sit in silence and take in the natural light without language, to simply feel connected. No feeling is more embracing for “Care” than this.
Sources: James R. Fisher, Jr., “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007); Pitrim Sorokin, “The Crisis of Our Age” (Dutton 1941); Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time” (Harper & Row 1962); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust” (Alfred A. Knopf 1964); Rollo May, “Love and Will” (Norton 1969); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land” (unpublished); Peter Berger, et al, “The Homeless Mind” (Random House 1973); R. D. Laing, “The Facts of Life” (Ballantine Books 1973); Peter Gay, “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Norton 1993); Aeschylus, “Agamemnon” (University of Chicago Press 1953); John Milton, “Paradise Lost” (Penguin Classics 2003); Oswald Spengler,“Decline of the West” (Modern Library 1965); F. Van der Meer, “The Faith of the Catholic Church” (Dimension Books 1966); Pitrim Sorokin, “Social and Cultural Dynamics”( Porter Sargent 1937); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Thinking” (unpublished); Willard and Marguerite Beecher, “Beyond Success and Failure” (Pocket Books 1966); Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot” (Faber & Faber 1998); Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh” (Vintage 1957); T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace 1943)
Friday, December 21, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
THE QUANDARY OF PLENTY, AND THE PLENTY WHO ARE IN A QUANDARY!
THE QUANDARY OF PLENTY, AND THE PLENTY WHO ARE IN A QUANDARY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
QUESTION:
Jim,
Another question before I dash out to lunch: how do we solve the overpaid CEO problem? I don't think we can pass laws to limit income -- or the world of sports would probably be the first place to start, at least as far as public opinion would dictate. Do we add our voices to the din of outrage? Methinks we'd be ignored by boards that are themselves composed of CEOs from other companies. Do we offer a model that enlightened companies can adopt if we show them some benefit in doing so? Do we "merely" celebrate those few companies that don't participate in this inflationary contest? (That's not "mere" at all; I think that step alone could do some good).
I'll bet you've already thought of something. Can't wait to read it!
Ted
ANSWER:
Ted
Yes, I have thought of this problem, and have looked at it in the ways that follow. My mind is not convinced that anyone with six zeros after a numeral or two is of a mind to do anything enlightening or otherwise to change the status quo.
I see the problem longitudinally as a natural progression that started innocently and collegially but unwittingly poisoned its roots and became damaged goods along the way. CEOs and other senior managers now survive in the cocoon of that denial and assumed safety.
It is of course not safe at all, and like everything else, will lose its perch and fade into history, but I sense not before it remains Faustian for some time.
I don't mean to be vague but wish to prepare you for what I hope is not too cumbersome an explanation.
Jim
* * * * * * * * * * *
WHAT WAS RIGHT BEFORE ABOUT SENIOR MANAGEMENT
There was a time when senior management self-managed itself with dignity and frugality.
That time was the late 1930s or the end of the Great Depression, through the late 1950s, when the euphoria of WWII was still an echo in the mind.
Most companies (compared to today) were small; many were individually owned or in limited partnerships. There were few mega corporations, and they were mostly in retail.
What is especially important to note is that management was integral rather than separate from the function of work. There was no mahogany row. Senior management didn't have personal trainers or make-up artists, or specialists that taught them presentation skills. They winged it, and didn't worry about being politically correct. They were tough but fair, consistent and on target.
They didn't talk in sound bytes but in the jargon and dialect of work. This was not a conscious act; this was the way it was. Affectation had no place in the business, as making an impression had not yet an audience.
Managers and workers were on the same page getting off on the same dime. If you were to use these words to describe work, you would sound to their ears like an alien.
Personhood had not yet raised its ugly head, as the common good was understood as the unifying force. The focus was in doing not describing; into dealing with what was wrong not who was wrong. Schedules had to be met, and they had no time or interest in pointing fingers but in putting the situation right.
My evidence?
"In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003), I take the reader into the mind of a young boy who would scoot down behind the living room sofa, and hide, so that he could listen to his aunts and uncles talk about their work during WWII.
They worked in such places as the Garment Factory that made mosquito nets for North Africa, Central Steel & Tube that made containers for machine guns, Collis & Company that made metal shelving and racks for submarines and destroyers, Chicago & North Western Railroad that moved troops across the country, Schick Army Hospital that took care of the wounded from the South Pacific, and on and on.
His relatives talked about their work with pride -- many of his aunts were "Rosie the Riveter" -- and of their bosses as partners.
They would mention with respect the long hours their bosses worked, and how kind and generous they were to them as colleagues. The focus for all was on the job at hand, taking care of business. Work was gratifying because it was important; self-gratification never came up.
Bosses worked beside workers, listened to their ideas on how things could get done better and more efficiently, and generally put such ideas into practice. Everyone saw themselves as part of a unit, not separate from, or below or above it.
If you are a history buff, and have read about the collapse of the German war machine in World War II, you will find that that didn't happen here, not in small town or metropolitan America.
Germany lost, if you can believe its own historians, because of mismanagement and slave labor, whereas the United States won at home as well as on the battlefield because this was management's finest hour.
American management rose in a chorus of one voice. It became the greatest war machine in military history. The late David Halberstam documents this incredible feat in a little book called, "The Next Century" (1991).
WHAT WENT WRONG WITH AMERICAN MANAGEMENT?
In all my reading on this subject, I've failed to see any attention given to the exhaustion of the captains of industry after the war. Imagine the letdown when a workweek was reduced from 80 to 40 hours.
I knew of cases in my hometown, which was a factory town on the Mississippi, and a perfect place to support the war, where owners of these small industries had severe mental and physical health problems after the war.
I sense that they were worn out physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It must have been like having the bends coming up from the deep too fast.
Owners and managers had been working twelve hour days, seven-days a week for four years without vacations or holidays.
Then peace came, and everyone across the globe wanted to buy American. So, selfless pursuit of a higher purpose by those in the war machine now became a kind of affluence never dreamed of. No one was paid very well during the war. That was all about to change now.
New companies came in; some owners sold their operations becoming employees of the new firms, while others never found purpose again.
To this day -- and I think that is one reason for the success of my book -- there is a mania for nostalgia and for that perfect day when everyone was hitting on all cylinders and moving in happy cadence to the same drum roll.
It has also occurred to me that American management that sacrificed so much, and gave so much, and endured so much, during that great war, but were never given the credit it deserved for its role in managing the war, became miffed and a little passive aggressive.
Over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of supervisors, managers, owners and executives from this period, citizens who didn't fight on the battlefield but fought another war on the frontlines of production, who gave me that impression. It would come in the manner of an apology for not having been in the military when I would remind them that they were.
I've never seen a banner or a banquet for these warriors, and probably never will.
It always surprises the person who has never been a CEO or a senior manager when I remind them that these people are persons, too, and should be given the same courtesy and respect that they expect. "What if I yelled that at you?" I said to one person who shouted, "Liar, liar, liar," as his general manager rode by. "Your words hurt him as much as they would hurt you," I added.
There is nothing wrong with differing with another person, whatever his station, but we should differ politely and frequently and directly when we feel we have cause. It is so easy to forget we are all flesh and blood, bone and muscle, sinew and adipose tissue. We are all somebody.
One of the amazing things I've experienced is that life has treated me so well that people seem to believe I don't need reassurance, don't need the same caring and concern they do. It is as if people think when you reach a certain intellectual or affluent level that you cease to have the same demands that they do, when of course you do. In fact the sensitivity of the person that has been passionately involved in life and career is most likely more acute, making that person more not less vulnerable to the ravages of criticism and ill treatment.
Never forget the high brow has a lot of low brow in him; the sophisticated person who takes barbs from all sides, and is expected not to react, has a breaking point the same as any low brow, only he may hide it longer, or may show it in ways not directly apparent, but more consequential in such expressions as debilitating health.
WHEN THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD AND THE BRAKES ARE ON
The 1960s came and everything started to unravel.
We had a president that looked pretty, spoke pretty, but had his own demons to deal with, and who got us into Vietnam, but was never held responsible for it because he lived in the myth of Camelot, and then was assassinated before that war became truly ugly.
The next president wasn't pretty, didn't speak pretty, and had his own demons but they were mainly contempt for Camelot with which his every action was compared. He escalated Vietnam to the point that more than 600,000 American troops were there; the Civil Rights Movement at home was gaining strength; and he convinced himself that America was so resourceful that it could maintain guns in Vietnam and butter at home in a series of social welfare initiatives that found the United States with its foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once going nowhere.
The United States disengaged in shame from Vietnam, having lost the war, with 55,000 Americans dead on its battlefields.
Not only was the president blamed for this defeat, but the generals in the Pentagon and in the field. Then too, senior management that had been taken for granted in WWII was now openly criticized for its failure to keep workers from strikes and lockouts, students from storming the dorms and the administrative buildings on college campuses, churchgoers from failing to take control of their families, citizens from rioting in the cities.
Divorce, adultery, illicit sex relations, and promiscuity were all on the rise. America was coming apart at the seams. And it didn't get any better with the 1968 presidential campaign and summer Olympics in Mexico City. There was a cultural breakdown and American society was in chaos.
Then when it was thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. Japan, Inc. and South East Asia started to make major inroads into American manufacturing markets: automobiles, electronics, electrical fixtures, electrical appliances, and steel smelting.
I was a young executive during this period and I felt the panic in my own company, and experienced it when I dealt with other companies.
What worked before wasn't working anymore. Rather than entertain questions as to why, and change, a new kind of cynicism developed. Like all cynicisms it contain a kind of manageable innocence and naiveté at first.
Creeping into enterprise was a new sense of command & control, and that was to do what is necessary to make things look good on one's CEO watch. Don't worry about tomorrow, let tomorrow take care of itself. Look out for yourself because nobody else will. If you have to engage change, make sure it is only cosmetic.
Senior management found many ways to do what was legal but not necessarily ethical such as taking finders fees when divisions merged; or accepting elaborate gifts from suppliers in the form of exotic trips or dinners or tickets to sporting events.
Once the focus moved from doing to getting, as innocent and legal as the getting might be, it soon became a pattern, and then progressed to a set of tactics, and finally, became a broad strategy often in collusion with the board of directors.
In my career, I have seen the complex organization go from an organic work-centered enterprise with workers and senior management committed to the same goals, to a multilayered fragmented hierarchical desperate assembly of mixed messages and mixed disciplines with everyone in charge so that no one is.
Once the pattern and then the tactics and finally the strategy become set, it takes on a life of its own, and those that enter this mahogany row as the freshest faces see nothing wrong with the process as it is what they expected, and why they have worked so hard to climb the pyramid to experience its amoral status.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
It might seem facetious to say, but perhaps the best course is to do nothing. As it turns out, nothing has its own momentum and directional velocity. Nothing is building incrementally to something, and what that something will look like when it comes to fruition is still open to question.
I feel like a spectator thinking about this, sitting in the stands looking at all these handsome highly qualified young people, who are given entry level jobs at anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, depending on their specialty skills, and expected like Henry Ford did a century ago to behave as safe hires.
They are being indoctrinated into becoming willing soldiers of enterprise: obedient, polite, submissive, passive, and docile, while CEOs and senior managers take home suitcases full of cash, while announcing the company is going through belt-tightening.
Yes, CEOs and senior managers have gotten greedy. As stated in the opening, greed has crawled not rushed to its present prominence. Money means a lot to some, but to the majority it is still pride that pulls them out of bed in the morning to do battle every day. Greed is ancillary not fundamental to their construction.
These willing soldiers of enterprise may not understand this, or the fact that they are now expendable. Corporate raiders are always ready to buy a company's assets, give the CEO and senior managers a sweetheart deal, then break up the business, and sell off the pieces at a handsome return on investment.
It is all perfectly legal, if not ethical, and these handsome highly qualified young people have been complicit in the conspiracy by their naiveté and silence.
So, my wonder is when will these professionals wake up and say, "Hell, no, I won't go!" When will they storm the Bastille?
They have the power but only want the perks not the responsibilities of power and senior management knows that.
It all started a century ago when Henry Ford bribed his workers into doing his bidding, and it will go on as long as these new professionals behave as these workers did a century ago.
My prediction is that we will have a revolution when these professionals cannot pay off their student loans after five years of working.
Think of it! When the individual return on the investment is not paying off, something will have to give.
Am I trying to be an alarmist? No, it just stands to reason nobody gives up anything until they have to, and the rhetoric hasn't touched CEOs, as they keep filling up their trunks and carrying their loot off to the bank. So, stay tuned.
Be always well,
Jim
_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back To See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007). This is a discussion that emanates from a question from a colleague in a think tank, The Naples Institute, to which they both belong.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
QUESTION:
Jim,
Another question before I dash out to lunch: how do we solve the overpaid CEO problem? I don't think we can pass laws to limit income -- or the world of sports would probably be the first place to start, at least as far as public opinion would dictate. Do we add our voices to the din of outrage? Methinks we'd be ignored by boards that are themselves composed of CEOs from other companies. Do we offer a model that enlightened companies can adopt if we show them some benefit in doing so? Do we "merely" celebrate those few companies that don't participate in this inflationary contest? (That's not "mere" at all; I think that step alone could do some good).
I'll bet you've already thought of something. Can't wait to read it!
Ted
ANSWER:
Ted
Yes, I have thought of this problem, and have looked at it in the ways that follow. My mind is not convinced that anyone with six zeros after a numeral or two is of a mind to do anything enlightening or otherwise to change the status quo.
I see the problem longitudinally as a natural progression that started innocently and collegially but unwittingly poisoned its roots and became damaged goods along the way. CEOs and other senior managers now survive in the cocoon of that denial and assumed safety.
It is of course not safe at all, and like everything else, will lose its perch and fade into history, but I sense not before it remains Faustian for some time.
I don't mean to be vague but wish to prepare you for what I hope is not too cumbersome an explanation.
Jim
* * * * * * * * * * *
WHAT WAS RIGHT BEFORE ABOUT SENIOR MANAGEMENT
There was a time when senior management self-managed itself with dignity and frugality.
That time was the late 1930s or the end of the Great Depression, through the late 1950s, when the euphoria of WWII was still an echo in the mind.
Most companies (compared to today) were small; many were individually owned or in limited partnerships. There were few mega corporations, and they were mostly in retail.
What is especially important to note is that management was integral rather than separate from the function of work. There was no mahogany row. Senior management didn't have personal trainers or make-up artists, or specialists that taught them presentation skills. They winged it, and didn't worry about being politically correct. They were tough but fair, consistent and on target.
They didn't talk in sound bytes but in the jargon and dialect of work. This was not a conscious act; this was the way it was. Affectation had no place in the business, as making an impression had not yet an audience.
Managers and workers were on the same page getting off on the same dime. If you were to use these words to describe work, you would sound to their ears like an alien.
Personhood had not yet raised its ugly head, as the common good was understood as the unifying force. The focus was in doing not describing; into dealing with what was wrong not who was wrong. Schedules had to be met, and they had no time or interest in pointing fingers but in putting the situation right.
My evidence?
"In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003), I take the reader into the mind of a young boy who would scoot down behind the living room sofa, and hide, so that he could listen to his aunts and uncles talk about their work during WWII.
They worked in such places as the Garment Factory that made mosquito nets for North Africa, Central Steel & Tube that made containers for machine guns, Collis & Company that made metal shelving and racks for submarines and destroyers, Chicago & North Western Railroad that moved troops across the country, Schick Army Hospital that took care of the wounded from the South Pacific, and on and on.
His relatives talked about their work with pride -- many of his aunts were "Rosie the Riveter" -- and of their bosses as partners.
They would mention with respect the long hours their bosses worked, and how kind and generous they were to them as colleagues. The focus for all was on the job at hand, taking care of business. Work was gratifying because it was important; self-gratification never came up.
Bosses worked beside workers, listened to their ideas on how things could get done better and more efficiently, and generally put such ideas into practice. Everyone saw themselves as part of a unit, not separate from, or below or above it.
If you are a history buff, and have read about the collapse of the German war machine in World War II, you will find that that didn't happen here, not in small town or metropolitan America.
Germany lost, if you can believe its own historians, because of mismanagement and slave labor, whereas the United States won at home as well as on the battlefield because this was management's finest hour.
American management rose in a chorus of one voice. It became the greatest war machine in military history. The late David Halberstam documents this incredible feat in a little book called, "The Next Century" (1991).
WHAT WENT WRONG WITH AMERICAN MANAGEMENT?
In all my reading on this subject, I've failed to see any attention given to the exhaustion of the captains of industry after the war. Imagine the letdown when a workweek was reduced from 80 to 40 hours.
I knew of cases in my hometown, which was a factory town on the Mississippi, and a perfect place to support the war, where owners of these small industries had severe mental and physical health problems after the war.
I sense that they were worn out physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It must have been like having the bends coming up from the deep too fast.
Owners and managers had been working twelve hour days, seven-days a week for four years without vacations or holidays.
Then peace came, and everyone across the globe wanted to buy American. So, selfless pursuit of a higher purpose by those in the war machine now became a kind of affluence never dreamed of. No one was paid very well during the war. That was all about to change now.
New companies came in; some owners sold their operations becoming employees of the new firms, while others never found purpose again.
To this day -- and I think that is one reason for the success of my book -- there is a mania for nostalgia and for that perfect day when everyone was hitting on all cylinders and moving in happy cadence to the same drum roll.
It has also occurred to me that American management that sacrificed so much, and gave so much, and endured so much, during that great war, but were never given the credit it deserved for its role in managing the war, became miffed and a little passive aggressive.
Over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of supervisors, managers, owners and executives from this period, citizens who didn't fight on the battlefield but fought another war on the frontlines of production, who gave me that impression. It would come in the manner of an apology for not having been in the military when I would remind them that they were.
I've never seen a banner or a banquet for these warriors, and probably never will.
It always surprises the person who has never been a CEO or a senior manager when I remind them that these people are persons, too, and should be given the same courtesy and respect that they expect. "What if I yelled that at you?" I said to one person who shouted, "Liar, liar, liar," as his general manager rode by. "Your words hurt him as much as they would hurt you," I added.
There is nothing wrong with differing with another person, whatever his station, but we should differ politely and frequently and directly when we feel we have cause. It is so easy to forget we are all flesh and blood, bone and muscle, sinew and adipose tissue. We are all somebody.
One of the amazing things I've experienced is that life has treated me so well that people seem to believe I don't need reassurance, don't need the same caring and concern they do. It is as if people think when you reach a certain intellectual or affluent level that you cease to have the same demands that they do, when of course you do. In fact the sensitivity of the person that has been passionately involved in life and career is most likely more acute, making that person more not less vulnerable to the ravages of criticism and ill treatment.
Never forget the high brow has a lot of low brow in him; the sophisticated person who takes barbs from all sides, and is expected not to react, has a breaking point the same as any low brow, only he may hide it longer, or may show it in ways not directly apparent, but more consequential in such expressions as debilitating health.
WHEN THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD AND THE BRAKES ARE ON
The 1960s came and everything started to unravel.
We had a president that looked pretty, spoke pretty, but had his own demons to deal with, and who got us into Vietnam, but was never held responsible for it because he lived in the myth of Camelot, and then was assassinated before that war became truly ugly.
The next president wasn't pretty, didn't speak pretty, and had his own demons but they were mainly contempt for Camelot with which his every action was compared. He escalated Vietnam to the point that more than 600,000 American troops were there; the Civil Rights Movement at home was gaining strength; and he convinced himself that America was so resourceful that it could maintain guns in Vietnam and butter at home in a series of social welfare initiatives that found the United States with its foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once going nowhere.
The United States disengaged in shame from Vietnam, having lost the war, with 55,000 Americans dead on its battlefields.
Not only was the president blamed for this defeat, but the generals in the Pentagon and in the field. Then too, senior management that had been taken for granted in WWII was now openly criticized for its failure to keep workers from strikes and lockouts, students from storming the dorms and the administrative buildings on college campuses, churchgoers from failing to take control of their families, citizens from rioting in the cities.
Divorce, adultery, illicit sex relations, and promiscuity were all on the rise. America was coming apart at the seams. And it didn't get any better with the 1968 presidential campaign and summer Olympics in Mexico City. There was a cultural breakdown and American society was in chaos.
Then when it was thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. Japan, Inc. and South East Asia started to make major inroads into American manufacturing markets: automobiles, electronics, electrical fixtures, electrical appliances, and steel smelting.
I was a young executive during this period and I felt the panic in my own company, and experienced it when I dealt with other companies.
What worked before wasn't working anymore. Rather than entertain questions as to why, and change, a new kind of cynicism developed. Like all cynicisms it contain a kind of manageable innocence and naiveté at first.
Creeping into enterprise was a new sense of command & control, and that was to do what is necessary to make things look good on one's CEO watch. Don't worry about tomorrow, let tomorrow take care of itself. Look out for yourself because nobody else will. If you have to engage change, make sure it is only cosmetic.
Senior management found many ways to do what was legal but not necessarily ethical such as taking finders fees when divisions merged; or accepting elaborate gifts from suppliers in the form of exotic trips or dinners or tickets to sporting events.
Once the focus moved from doing to getting, as innocent and legal as the getting might be, it soon became a pattern, and then progressed to a set of tactics, and finally, became a broad strategy often in collusion with the board of directors.
In my career, I have seen the complex organization go from an organic work-centered enterprise with workers and senior management committed to the same goals, to a multilayered fragmented hierarchical desperate assembly of mixed messages and mixed disciplines with everyone in charge so that no one is.
Once the pattern and then the tactics and finally the strategy become set, it takes on a life of its own, and those that enter this mahogany row as the freshest faces see nothing wrong with the process as it is what they expected, and why they have worked so hard to climb the pyramid to experience its amoral status.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
It might seem facetious to say, but perhaps the best course is to do nothing. As it turns out, nothing has its own momentum and directional velocity. Nothing is building incrementally to something, and what that something will look like when it comes to fruition is still open to question.
I feel like a spectator thinking about this, sitting in the stands looking at all these handsome highly qualified young people, who are given entry level jobs at anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, depending on their specialty skills, and expected like Henry Ford did a century ago to behave as safe hires.
They are being indoctrinated into becoming willing soldiers of enterprise: obedient, polite, submissive, passive, and docile, while CEOs and senior managers take home suitcases full of cash, while announcing the company is going through belt-tightening.
Yes, CEOs and senior managers have gotten greedy. As stated in the opening, greed has crawled not rushed to its present prominence. Money means a lot to some, but to the majority it is still pride that pulls them out of bed in the morning to do battle every day. Greed is ancillary not fundamental to their construction.
These willing soldiers of enterprise may not understand this, or the fact that they are now expendable. Corporate raiders are always ready to buy a company's assets, give the CEO and senior managers a sweetheart deal, then break up the business, and sell off the pieces at a handsome return on investment.
It is all perfectly legal, if not ethical, and these handsome highly qualified young people have been complicit in the conspiracy by their naiveté and silence.
So, my wonder is when will these professionals wake up and say, "Hell, no, I won't go!" When will they storm the Bastille?
They have the power but only want the perks not the responsibilities of power and senior management knows that.
It all started a century ago when Henry Ford bribed his workers into doing his bidding, and it will go on as long as these new professionals behave as these workers did a century ago.
My prediction is that we will have a revolution when these professionals cannot pay off their student loans after five years of working.
Think of it! When the individual return on the investment is not paying off, something will have to give.
Am I trying to be an alarmist? No, it just stands to reason nobody gives up anything until they have to, and the rhetoric hasn't touched CEOs, as they keep filling up their trunks and carrying their loot off to the bank. So, stay tuned.
Be always well,
Jim
_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back To See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007). This is a discussion that emanates from a question from a colleague in a think tank, The Naples Institute, to which they both belong.
Monday, December 17, 2007
"URBAN LEGEND" -- SOME DELIGHT IN SCHADENFREUDE
Urban Legend -- Some Delight in Schadenfreude
To my email address book readers:
Thanks to editorial columnist Joseph H. Brown of The Tampa Tribune I now know what "urban legend" means.
Brown, who always writes with control and panache, made reference in his Sunday column "All The 'News' Unfit To Print" to some of the wild stories posted on the Internet that are believed to be the unvarnished truth, when they are simply "urban legends." People cut and paste these stories into their emails, and then delight in disseminating them.
The point of the column was that there is an increasingly angry Internet surfing reader who feels newspapers are avoiding the "real stories." Not true.
Brown mentioned the "urban legend" of Andy Rooney. At least ten different emailers in my email address book sent me an article allegedly written by Rooney. The article made me very angry. I accepted it as true, and reacted in an email posted to my address book, and alas, also to my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
I received a cryptic note from Joseph Brown afterwards: "This is only urban legend."
I had no idea what he meant, and never got back to asking him to explain.
My email to him that follows this (below) explains that I am not a Internet surfer of urban legends, not a radio talk "shock jock" listener, and get most of my information from reading and experience. I don't even own cable television.
The alleged "transcript" of "60 Minutes," that Andy Rooney was said to have made with these salacious political and racial views, never happened.
Brown:
"Anyone who has heard Rooney would know instantly (this) wasn't him." Well, not being a "60 Minutes" fan, I wouldn't know.
Brown continues:
"Rooney has been denying this garbage since 2003, and in 2005 disclaimed in a '60 Minutes' segment, saying, 'There's a collection of racist and sexist remarks on the Internet with a picture of me with the caption, 'Andy Rooney said on '60 Minutes...'
'If I could find the person who did write it using my name I would sue him.'"
Brown suggests the Rooney urban legend is alive and well years later, and will likely never die. Sad.
These vicious stories play on our natural inclination to schadenfreude, to the enjoyment of the faux pas of others, and so people will continue to delight in them.
People receptive to such nonsense are apparently too lazy to discover for themselves the real truth. Even more ominous, with this new electronic technology, the worst is yet to come.
People believe what they want to believe: all politicians are corrupt; all Jews are rich; all intellectuals are snobs; something must be rotten in Denmark when an ordinary kid succeeds.
Take me, for instance. I have several degrees from bachelor's to master's to doctorate's, and I have experienced my own variety of urban legend.
A friend has told me that people believe a prominent doctor in my hometown put me through school and greased the skids for my "good connections" and the "good life."
The truth is I never got a dime from anyone at any level through a nine-year college and university educational journey. My parents had no money, so it was entirely up to me. I put myself through school aided by good grades and academic scholarships at the bachelor's, master's, and doctorate's level. What's more, I never took out a school loan. As for my many careers, they, too, have had no sponsors, but a bit of luck and a lot of pluck.
But this is not what people want to hear, so my urban legend will probably continue long after my death.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Subj: RE: Today's column
Date: 12/17/2007 5:06:57 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: JBrown@tampatrib.com
To: THEDELTAGRPFL@cs.com
Received from Internet: click here for more information
Jim:
I remember reading Time magazine in high school and questioned some of the stuff published in it even back then. Henry Luce definitely had an agenda.
Joe
To Joseph H. Brown, Editorial columnist, The Tampa Tribune
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 12:51 PM
SUBJECT: Today's column
Joseph,
Now I know what you mean by "urban legend." It was a new term to me.
I don't surf the Internet, but get from ten to twenty of these things to which you refer from people of my youth.
I don't listen to talk radio, never have. And I am not a fan of "60 Minutes," so didn't know whether Andy Rooney was this or that.
In fact the few times I listened to "60 Minutes" in the distant past, when it related to stories of which I had first hand information, I saw how the story was choreograph for making it viewer friendly to its point of view.
I read books, and still love newspapers especially the "op-ed" pages and sport pages. I feel journalism, especially television journalism has given a huge window to the miscreants of society reporting rape, murder and mayhem on the nightly news as if nothing of significance otherwise has happened in the last 24-hours.
Newspapers have not (yet) been reduced to such exclusive reporting.
Yes, there are people of The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and The New York Times that have sullied their reputations by allowing reporters to publish bogus reports and bogus series, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
The newspaper I have always loved more than any other is my own Iowa "The Des Moines Register." Even the "Daily Iowan" when I went to Iowa was awfully fair for a university newspaper. And the Tampa Tribune, thanks to people like you on its staff, has maintained a dispassionate and credible posture.
Years ago, Time magazine's featured an article (during the midst of the confusion that was the Vietnam War) with the headline, "What you should think about Vietnam."
Incensed, I wrote back that I don't want you to tell me what to think about that war, but for me to decide on my own what I think.
To the Time magazine's credit, an editor wrote back that slanting the news was its role, as anyone that read Time knew it had a point-of-view as, for instance, does Newsweek.
We live in a time when people (most people I know) are quite intelligent at doing things but quite lazy at thinking about things beyond the scope of their direct experience. They don't read, and are obliged to funnel things into their thinking that are convenient and consistent with what they want to believe is true. To penetrate this carapace is the function of a good newspaper.
Be always well,
Jim
To my email address book readers:
Thanks to editorial columnist Joseph H. Brown of The Tampa Tribune I now know what "urban legend" means.
Brown, who always writes with control and panache, made reference in his Sunday column "All The 'News' Unfit To Print" to some of the wild stories posted on the Internet that are believed to be the unvarnished truth, when they are simply "urban legends." People cut and paste these stories into their emails, and then delight in disseminating them.
The point of the column was that there is an increasingly angry Internet surfing reader who feels newspapers are avoiding the "real stories." Not true.
Brown mentioned the "urban legend" of Andy Rooney. At least ten different emailers in my email address book sent me an article allegedly written by Rooney. The article made me very angry. I accepted it as true, and reacted in an email posted to my address book, and alas, also to my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
I received a cryptic note from Joseph Brown afterwards: "This is only urban legend."
I had no idea what he meant, and never got back to asking him to explain.
My email to him that follows this (below) explains that I am not a Internet surfer of urban legends, not a radio talk "shock jock" listener, and get most of my information from reading and experience. I don't even own cable television.
The alleged "transcript" of "60 Minutes," that Andy Rooney was said to have made with these salacious political and racial views, never happened.
Brown:
"Anyone who has heard Rooney would know instantly (this) wasn't him." Well, not being a "60 Minutes" fan, I wouldn't know.
Brown continues:
"Rooney has been denying this garbage since 2003, and in 2005 disclaimed in a '60 Minutes' segment, saying, 'There's a collection of racist and sexist remarks on the Internet with a picture of me with the caption, 'Andy Rooney said on '60 Minutes...'
'If I could find the person who did write it using my name I would sue him.'"
Brown suggests the Rooney urban legend is alive and well years later, and will likely never die. Sad.
These vicious stories play on our natural inclination to schadenfreude, to the enjoyment of the faux pas of others, and so people will continue to delight in them.
People receptive to such nonsense are apparently too lazy to discover for themselves the real truth. Even more ominous, with this new electronic technology, the worst is yet to come.
People believe what they want to believe: all politicians are corrupt; all Jews are rich; all intellectuals are snobs; something must be rotten in Denmark when an ordinary kid succeeds.
Take me, for instance. I have several degrees from bachelor's to master's to doctorate's, and I have experienced my own variety of urban legend.
A friend has told me that people believe a prominent doctor in my hometown put me through school and greased the skids for my "good connections" and the "good life."
The truth is I never got a dime from anyone at any level through a nine-year college and university educational journey. My parents had no money, so it was entirely up to me. I put myself through school aided by good grades and academic scholarships at the bachelor's, master's, and doctorate's level. What's more, I never took out a school loan. As for my many careers, they, too, have had no sponsors, but a bit of luck and a lot of pluck.
But this is not what people want to hear, so my urban legend will probably continue long after my death.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Subj: RE: Today's column
Date: 12/17/2007 5:06:57 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: JBrown@tampatrib.com
To: THEDELTAGRPFL@cs.com
Received from Internet: click here for more information
Jim:
I remember reading Time magazine in high school and questioned some of the stuff published in it even back then. Henry Luce definitely had an agenda.
Joe
To Joseph H. Brown, Editorial columnist, The Tampa Tribune
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 12:51 PM
SUBJECT: Today's column
Joseph,
Now I know what you mean by "urban legend." It was a new term to me.
I don't surf the Internet, but get from ten to twenty of these things to which you refer from people of my youth.
I don't listen to talk radio, never have. And I am not a fan of "60 Minutes," so didn't know whether Andy Rooney was this or that.
In fact the few times I listened to "60 Minutes" in the distant past, when it related to stories of which I had first hand information, I saw how the story was choreograph for making it viewer friendly to its point of view.
I read books, and still love newspapers especially the "op-ed" pages and sport pages. I feel journalism, especially television journalism has given a huge window to the miscreants of society reporting rape, murder and mayhem on the nightly news as if nothing of significance otherwise has happened in the last 24-hours.
Newspapers have not (yet) been reduced to such exclusive reporting.
Yes, there are people of The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and The New York Times that have sullied their reputations by allowing reporters to publish bogus reports and bogus series, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
The newspaper I have always loved more than any other is my own Iowa "The Des Moines Register." Even the "Daily Iowan" when I went to Iowa was awfully fair for a university newspaper. And the Tampa Tribune, thanks to people like you on its staff, has maintained a dispassionate and credible posture.
Years ago, Time magazine's featured an article (during the midst of the confusion that was the Vietnam War) with the headline, "What you should think about Vietnam."
Incensed, I wrote back that I don't want you to tell me what to think about that war, but for me to decide on my own what I think.
To the Time magazine's credit, an editor wrote back that slanting the news was its role, as anyone that read Time knew it had a point-of-view as, for instance, does Newsweek.
We live in a time when people (most people I know) are quite intelligent at doing things but quite lazy at thinking about things beyond the scope of their direct experience. They don't read, and are obliged to funnel things into their thinking that are convenient and consistent with what they want to believe is true. To penetrate this carapace is the function of a good newspaper.
Be always well,
Jim
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
WHAT DOES A $10 MILLION CEO DO?
WHAT DOES A $10 MILLION CEO DO?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
A lecturer on C-Span posed just that question thinking what the thousands of impoverished Haitian families could do with $10 million.
Her question was rhetorical but she had stumbled on to something that may need to be addressed sooner rather than later in this new century. The mythic image of the CEO is crumbling.
Most $10 million CEOs are tacticians at best and strategists at worst.
CEOs changed the color code spectrum of an automobile, or added an airfoil, leaving what was under the hood more or less the same, while their competition abroad radically redesigned the mode of transportation from inside out, and has taken the market from them.
CEOs revved up the rhetoric on empowerment, tightening their grip on command and control, while the competition designed a whole new way to get things done in the workplace called “quality control circles” and “total quality management.”
That sucking sound is the swish of the mounting trade deficit for which they are the architects due to this failure to anticipate and deal with a changing commercial engine.
CEOs are the dinosaurs of the twenty-first century but no meteorite has appeared to obliterate them from our collapsing infrastructure. They are the ugly blight on a rapacious society and the most prominent aspect of society’s pathology of normalcy.
You may smile at this unenlightened lady’s reflections as simply the rant of an ill informed person well beyond her depth, a person left of center in the political and economic spectrum, who knows nothing about the important work that CEOs do.
Or could it be that she sees CEOs naked with C-Span giving her a forum to share her discovery? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?
More than likely nobody knows actually what CEOs do, or to the fact that some make as much as 1000 times the average worker's take home pay. I've been around them most of my adult life, as a direct report and consultant, and I must admit they are difficult to pin down to a job description, giving off the aura of being untouchables, and therefore generally unsullied when they hear comments to their mind that seem fatuous.
Of course CEOs do important work or where would American industry, commerce and academia be without these people elevated to such lofty positions? Our future depends on them, doesn't it?
The lady answered her own question by saying the world would do just fine without CEOs. Imagine that, saying that in public, and implying that CEOs don't do anything important other than protecting their ranks by maintaining the myth of indispensability.
Now, you say, why even mention such comments? Surely, this woman is quite mad. How would stockholders put up with someone who failed to keep their company shares appreciating?
Well, it gets a little dicey here.
Stockholders display a little ambivalence when it comes to incompetence.
When their shares start to tumble, the price-earnings ratio skyrockets, dividends dry up, and their net worth shrinks, the response is almost always axiomatic. They cry for a change in corporate leadership.
Someone new is brought in, and guess what? For no rational reason, the stock price starts to climb and a new honeymoon period begins. It is a kind of lunacy that makes this woman's madness seem the voice of sanity.
Meanwhile, CEOs who were desperately attempting to manage their watch in the short-short term, and failed, are given golden parachutes to disappear quietly into the sunset.
You don't have to look for such evidence to what happened routinely in this regard yesterday, or last week, or last month. It has been going on for years. Getting fired never looked so good for CEOs.
Take Sidney Jay Sheinberg, who was CEO of MCA a couple decades ago. His contract was the reverse of the prenuptial marriage contract. His contract read: should he lose his job within a year of the company going through a "change in control," he takes home $16.8 million or roughly 23 times his normal annual salary.
MCA two decades ago was a fire sale with top executives not jumping out of windows for the company's failure, but opening their trunks to hold all the cash.
The severance packages for the top five MCA executives cost the company $33.45 million. Add to this another 364 MCA managers were guaranteed lump sum parachutes of three times their normal annual salaries, plus benefit packages and stock options. Their additional parachutes approximated another $82 million.
MCA is mentioned because it is at the modest end of the scale compared to say, IBM, and other prominent Fortune 500 companies.
For instance, IBM's failure to anticipate the impact of the personal computer found the company by the mid-1980s losing $70 billion of stock valuation and the elimination of 200,000 jobs, with surplus employees given the equivalent of golden parachutes.
Indeed, I could itemize in a thousand-word essay the follies and charades of such CEO intrigue, and never cover the subject.
On the other hand, there are legitimate wealth creators that know the business and develop it from the ground up and deserve to be $10 million CEOs.
Among them are the Bill Gates and Steven Jobs of the new world of commerce, where a fraternity of entrepreneurs has changed the face of enterprise, not only in the United States, but also across the world.
Gates has been wise to keep developing people from within from the ground up to assume key executive positions. Jobs has not been so wise.
He must have read Harold Geneen's book "Managing" (1984), where the CEO of ITT claimed competent CEOs could run successfully any business no matter how little they understood the industry or technology. It is one of the more obtuse management pronouncements of the late twentieth century, but again, Geneen was a coffee table name to the CEO community, and when he spoke, people stopped to listen.
Jobs built Apple, Inc. from his own garage into a minor empire with the Macintosh personal computer, and then after slaving 60 - 70 hours a week for years, decided using Geneen's dictum to bring a seasoned CEO into Apple to run the company while he took a holiday.
That person was the affable and likable John Sculley of Pepsi fame, who knew absolutely nothing about the personal computer business, the culture of this industry, nor indeed, of the distinct creative and nontraditional approach to work exemplified by Apple employees.
Sculley practically from day one covered his ignorance with faked hubris as he attempted to put structure, policy and procedure, accountability, and command and control practices into the chaos, and he nearly sunk the Apple ship as certainly as if it were Atlantis.
Sculley did turn out eye-catching color coordinated computers without necessarily bothering much with the hard drive.
He was appalled at the brutal, brash, and intellectual harem that he had inherited, equating chaos with dysfunction, order with productivity, and compliance with cooperation. It didn't take because it was the antithesis of the creative culture of contribution.
Jobs had to return to rescue Apple from extinction. He released his chaotic cohorts into creative bliss eventually coming up with the iPod with Apple again soaring to new heights and new market dominance.
This grandmother looking lady on C-Span was on to something, and I would suggest that CEOs take heed. The days of political and economic license at the top are numbered as they once were for the royalty of another time. Like-ability will no longer carry the day.
Currently, we have the quadrennial madness of presidential primary campaign politics in which the measuring rod to performance is that same old saw of like-ability. That is about as much an index of character and competence as Harold Geneen's famous dictum. Caveat emptor.
________________
Books by Dr. Fisher that explore the CEO myth are "Six Silent Killers" (1998), "Corporate Sin" (2000) and "A Look Back To See Ahead" (2007). Dr. Fisher was formerly director of human resources planning & control for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., an operation of 12,000 employees in 13 European countries with sales of $10 billion
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
A lecturer on C-Span posed just that question thinking what the thousands of impoverished Haitian families could do with $10 million.
Her question was rhetorical but she had stumbled on to something that may need to be addressed sooner rather than later in this new century. The mythic image of the CEO is crumbling.
Most $10 million CEOs are tacticians at best and strategists at worst.
CEOs changed the color code spectrum of an automobile, or added an airfoil, leaving what was under the hood more or less the same, while their competition abroad radically redesigned the mode of transportation from inside out, and has taken the market from them.
CEOs revved up the rhetoric on empowerment, tightening their grip on command and control, while the competition designed a whole new way to get things done in the workplace called “quality control circles” and “total quality management.”
That sucking sound is the swish of the mounting trade deficit for which they are the architects due to this failure to anticipate and deal with a changing commercial engine.
CEOs are the dinosaurs of the twenty-first century but no meteorite has appeared to obliterate them from our collapsing infrastructure. They are the ugly blight on a rapacious society and the most prominent aspect of society’s pathology of normalcy.
You may smile at this unenlightened lady’s reflections as simply the rant of an ill informed person well beyond her depth, a person left of center in the political and economic spectrum, who knows nothing about the important work that CEOs do.
Or could it be that she sees CEOs naked with C-Span giving her a forum to share her discovery? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?
More than likely nobody knows actually what CEOs do, or to the fact that some make as much as 1000 times the average worker's take home pay. I've been around them most of my adult life, as a direct report and consultant, and I must admit they are difficult to pin down to a job description, giving off the aura of being untouchables, and therefore generally unsullied when they hear comments to their mind that seem fatuous.
Of course CEOs do important work or where would American industry, commerce and academia be without these people elevated to such lofty positions? Our future depends on them, doesn't it?
The lady answered her own question by saying the world would do just fine without CEOs. Imagine that, saying that in public, and implying that CEOs don't do anything important other than protecting their ranks by maintaining the myth of indispensability.
Now, you say, why even mention such comments? Surely, this woman is quite mad. How would stockholders put up with someone who failed to keep their company shares appreciating?
Well, it gets a little dicey here.
Stockholders display a little ambivalence when it comes to incompetence.
When their shares start to tumble, the price-earnings ratio skyrockets, dividends dry up, and their net worth shrinks, the response is almost always axiomatic. They cry for a change in corporate leadership.
Someone new is brought in, and guess what? For no rational reason, the stock price starts to climb and a new honeymoon period begins. It is a kind of lunacy that makes this woman's madness seem the voice of sanity.
Meanwhile, CEOs who were desperately attempting to manage their watch in the short-short term, and failed, are given golden parachutes to disappear quietly into the sunset.
You don't have to look for such evidence to what happened routinely in this regard yesterday, or last week, or last month. It has been going on for years. Getting fired never looked so good for CEOs.
Take Sidney Jay Sheinberg, who was CEO of MCA a couple decades ago. His contract was the reverse of the prenuptial marriage contract. His contract read: should he lose his job within a year of the company going through a "change in control," he takes home $16.8 million or roughly 23 times his normal annual salary.
MCA two decades ago was a fire sale with top executives not jumping out of windows for the company's failure, but opening their trunks to hold all the cash.
The severance packages for the top five MCA executives cost the company $33.45 million. Add to this another 364 MCA managers were guaranteed lump sum parachutes of three times their normal annual salaries, plus benefit packages and stock options. Their additional parachutes approximated another $82 million.
MCA is mentioned because it is at the modest end of the scale compared to say, IBM, and other prominent Fortune 500 companies.
For instance, IBM's failure to anticipate the impact of the personal computer found the company by the mid-1980s losing $70 billion of stock valuation and the elimination of 200,000 jobs, with surplus employees given the equivalent of golden parachutes.
Indeed, I could itemize in a thousand-word essay the follies and charades of such CEO intrigue, and never cover the subject.
On the other hand, there are legitimate wealth creators that know the business and develop it from the ground up and deserve to be $10 million CEOs.
Among them are the Bill Gates and Steven Jobs of the new world of commerce, where a fraternity of entrepreneurs has changed the face of enterprise, not only in the United States, but also across the world.
Gates has been wise to keep developing people from within from the ground up to assume key executive positions. Jobs has not been so wise.
He must have read Harold Geneen's book "Managing" (1984), where the CEO of ITT claimed competent CEOs could run successfully any business no matter how little they understood the industry or technology. It is one of the more obtuse management pronouncements of the late twentieth century, but again, Geneen was a coffee table name to the CEO community, and when he spoke, people stopped to listen.
Jobs built Apple, Inc. from his own garage into a minor empire with the Macintosh personal computer, and then after slaving 60 - 70 hours a week for years, decided using Geneen's dictum to bring a seasoned CEO into Apple to run the company while he took a holiday.
That person was the affable and likable John Sculley of Pepsi fame, who knew absolutely nothing about the personal computer business, the culture of this industry, nor indeed, of the distinct creative and nontraditional approach to work exemplified by Apple employees.
Sculley practically from day one covered his ignorance with faked hubris as he attempted to put structure, policy and procedure, accountability, and command and control practices into the chaos, and he nearly sunk the Apple ship as certainly as if it were Atlantis.
Sculley did turn out eye-catching color coordinated computers without necessarily bothering much with the hard drive.
He was appalled at the brutal, brash, and intellectual harem that he had inherited, equating chaos with dysfunction, order with productivity, and compliance with cooperation. It didn't take because it was the antithesis of the creative culture of contribution.
Jobs had to return to rescue Apple from extinction. He released his chaotic cohorts into creative bliss eventually coming up with the iPod with Apple again soaring to new heights and new market dominance.
This grandmother looking lady on C-Span was on to something, and I would suggest that CEOs take heed. The days of political and economic license at the top are numbered as they once were for the royalty of another time. Like-ability will no longer carry the day.
Currently, we have the quadrennial madness of presidential primary campaign politics in which the measuring rod to performance is that same old saw of like-ability. That is about as much an index of character and competence as Harold Geneen's famous dictum. Caveat emptor.
________________
Books by Dr. Fisher that explore the CEO myth are "Six Silent Killers" (1998), "Corporate Sin" (2000) and "A Look Back To See Ahead" (2007). Dr. Fisher was formerly director of human resources planning & control for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., an operation of 12,000 employees in 13 European countries with sales of $10 billion
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
"TELL ME!" "SHOW ME!" "LET ME DO!" -- A SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP FOR TODAY & TOMORROW!
TELL ME, SHOW ME, LET ME DO SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP OF TODAY & TOMORROW
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
TELL ME, SHOW ME, LET ME DO SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP OF TODAY &TOMORROW
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
What is proposed here for the Naples Institute is a three-day seminar for top executives to better understand the nature of the new role in leadership, which is not so much to "command & control," as it is to create a viable culture for its specific requirements, consistent with its customs, values and beliefs.
This relevant culture sponsors the kinds of behavior, commitment and involvement to make it a first-class operation with its people hitting on all cylinders in a synergistic effort to create the moment to establish it as a national or international leader in its industry and market.
PHASE ONE - SEMINAR DAY ONE
CONDUCT A SCHOOL IN WHICH EXECUTIVES ARE TOLD THE THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW
THE "CHICKEN & EGG" PROPOSITION
"Houston, we have a problem!"
The seminar would start with an open discussion to assess the sense these executives have "that they have a problem"; to discern the quality of their knowledge that the complex organization is not working as well as it might.
It would follow as a natural defensive posture for these people to make cosmetic choices that represent little systemic change in operations.
Chief among the reasons might be they don't want to go through the pain. It also could be because they don't know how, or lack the confidence to implement something that is a departure from what they know and have done before.
Now, in terms of the "chicken & egg" proposition, they must have the egg (tool kit) in hand before they can have the chicken (systemic cultural change) in the pot.
The Naples Institute rationale:
My sense is that before we think of great causes in line with the Institute's philosophy of fighting for social justice, it must first be a viable Institution.
To be a viable institution, it must have something to sell that is of value.
To sell something of value, it must have consensus of what that item is (the hedgehog rather than the fox) and put all our resources collectively into that pursuit in a synergistic effort.
Now, there are a lot of possibilities. Since we claim to be a leadership think tank, it would occur to me that our efforts should be in the realm of leadership. This is my proposal for consideration.
Over the last 75 years, we have seen a country in economic panic with soup lines and the WPA, physical panic with the surprise attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and WWII, euphoric affluence followed that war in an explosion of jobs and first generation college students, then the social, moral, and psychological collapse of the working middle class and the institutional infrastructure as children became their own parents, while identity became a homeless mind submerged in affluence, greed, self-indulgence, drugs, crime, civil strife and civil rights, against the background (or foreground) of constant war: policing the world (Korean War), making the world safe for democracy (Vietnam, Kosovo), or reacting to paranoia (Afghanistan, Iraq) in a maniacal attempt to regain purchase of the remembered nostalgia of 1945, the last time everything made sense and was relatively rooted in calm.
Today, we are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.
This is a leadership problem, not the pabulum of the sophists who preach gain without pain, correction without rectitude, and flatter those in leadership roles with the rhetorical but erroneous suggestion that leaders matter most when virtually all the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Leaders are, however, more important than ever before but not from the standpoint of "command & control," but as architects of the viable culture to sustain the necessary behavior for success. Executive status has moved from execution to cultural climate control.
It is the followers that count today in a new role and responsibility. As professionals, they now own the game, hold all the trump cards, and could call "checkmate" at anytime if they only realized it. They don't know how to leverage their new status and power, and need guidance, direction, mentoring and measuring to that end.
This is especially true in the United States and European enterprise as the past fifty years has seen the knowledge gap shrink between bosses and workers, while the economic gap has widened. This is not only wrong this is the making for revolution, and it need not be so.
Long before the Information Age and the Internet took hold this was building. The Internet has only accelerated it, not given birth to it.
Now, this is the essential issue of our times in terms of leadership.
How do we reconcile leaderless leadership and dissonant workers -- what I call "Corporate Sin" (AuthorHouse 2000) -- to the fact that the adversarial relationship is outmoded and that a true partnership must, indeed, exist to place leaders and professionals on to the same page and off on the same dime?
A possible approach, and one with which I would be comfortable, and perhaps others as well, is to tell a personal story.
MAKING FOR A DRAMATIC AND MEANINGFUL SHIFT
For the past twenty years, this problem has concerned me. It concerned me even earlier as a summer laborer in a chemical plant while I was going to college, when I was a chemist in the laboratory, a chemical sales engineer in the field, in the US Navy in the Mediterranean, as a corporate executive in South America, Europe, and South Africa, then again as a graduate student as a mature adult, and finally as a company organizational development (OD) psychologist, and once again corporate executive in Europe trying to make the EEC work for my employer.
Each role, each phase, each development was experienced, processed, analyzed and assimilated into what has become my leadership philosophy.
Then it would be a prudent time to introduce these executives to the "tell me" phase of the "three legs" of leadership.
The three legs of this leadership philosophy are:
(1) corporate culture,
(2) the emerging professional workforce, and
(3) the problem with our problem solving strategy or thinking methodology.
(1) CORPORATE CULTURE:
Six Silent Killers (CRC Press 1998) goes into great detail as to the three dominant cultures in any complex organization:
· Culture of Comfort (management dependent with managers as surrogate parents);
· Culture of Complacency (workers counterdependent on organization suspended in terminal adolescence); and
· Culture of Contribution (interdependent management with managers &mature adult workers in partnership).
The failure to create a Culture of Contribution results in six passive behaviors that have cost Fortune 500 companies literally billions in lost productivity.
(2) PROFESSIONAL WORKERS
The professional (see "The Worker, Alone!" Delta Group 1995) is the magic formula that few companies have discovered. The evidence is overwhelming as these workers are still managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if they were still blue-collar workers.
It has become a cliché to call them "knowledge workers" and to say that "knowledge power" has usurp the influence of "position power," when in fact that is far from the case.
This would be explored here, possibly in several institutional settings: commercial, industrial, academic and governance.
For example, we like to think academia is an institution of free exchange and thinking when, in fact, the university climate is as culturally warped as any other. Graduate seminars are programmed, and conducted with professors ignoring or failing to entertain evidence from the empirical world shared by mature students. "Machine age" thinking and the factory mentality dominate here as elsewhere.
(3) PROBLEM SOLVING METHODOLOGY OR THE FAILURE TO THINK LATERALLY AS WELL AS VERTICALLY.
Science is reputed to be value free when that is impossible as we are irrational as well as rational beings.
Logic is not enough, and the evidence is so overwhelming that there is little point in arguing.
Buildings and bridges and railways are built that are poorly constructed; we are a self-indulgent consumer driven society in which no one saves but expects to be rescued for the most egregious offenses against good sense. Meanwhile, we would rather solve other people's problems than our own.
Moreover, we like to compliment ourselves on our front end planning, when in fact, we are poor planners and a solution driven society with little patience with problems.
It could even be argued that we are better at describing than solving problems, finding solace in description and prescription.
That said we are uncomfortable in a passive mode of thought, yet suspect of intuitive wisdom. Whereas vertical or hierarchical thinking is Socratic and searching, lateral thinking is conceptual and discovering. This could be explained in some pragmatic detail.
Moreover, lateral thinking is perceptual rather than processing, nonlinear rather than linear, and systemic rather than elemental.
We like to break a problem down, solve the parts, and then expect the pieces to fit neatly together into an integrated whole. This was the thinking of MBO (management by objectives), which never worked albeit all the parts successfully accomplished their objectives.
This fragmented thought supports the dictum in system's theory: when all the parts are working as well as they might, then the system isn't. Competition between units does not support confluence and cooperation, but denies them.
The complement of lateral and vertical thinking provides the content and context of the problem solving, which is then structured to move naturally to the solution domain.
What is known or critical thinking governs vertical thinking, while lateral thinking is governed by creative thinking or what is not known but can be found out.
Put another way, lateral thinking is "front end" or forward thinking, whereas vertical thinking is "back end" or backward thinking, looking at what has happened in the past, which is a source but seldom the answer.
As we know, this dominates the problem solving from the "war on drugs" to the "war on poverty" to the "war on AIDS" to the "war on terror."
The metaphor of "war" is apropos as we associate violence and destruction with change and not the blending of rational and irrational components in a holistic integration. Yet, it is in this separation not integration that has produced calamity.
WITH THE RIGHT COMPLEMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, CREATIVE IMAGING AND PROMOTION, THIS ("PHASE ONE" - TELL ME!) COULD BE A POWERFUL FORMAT TO BRING TOP CEOs TO THE NAPLES INSTITUTE TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING ORIGINAL AND TRULY PROVOCATIVE.
Short assessment of Phase One:
The "telling phase" is an introduction to executives as to the nature of what corporate culture is so that they might discover on their own, not imitate some other corporate culture success story elsewhere, on how to apply their own tool kit to the problem.
Professional workers are the most misunderstood and under utilized group in the workforce. Since the 1930s, there has been a tectonic shift from manual to mental labor in the workplace, but it has soared into an unfathomable storm in the last twenty years. This is incomprehensible to professionals and their employers alike. It would be the mission of the "first phase" to make this problem comprehensible.
And finally, the problem solving suffers because of the thinking behind it. This exercise is not a cure but a means of getting them to think differently on purpose by outlining the nature of thinking.
PHASE TWO - SEMINAR DAY TWO
SHOW EXECUTIVES THE A, B, C's OF THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP AND HOW THEY WORK OR FAIL TO WORK IN THE WORKPLACE
(1) HOW TO ASSESS WHERE YOUR CORPORATE CULTURE IS TODAY
This would be a review of the "six silent killers" as they appear in a series of case studies taken from the files of this author or others.
It would be followed by a value clarification discussion, possibly with some visual aids to show what the primary motivations and behaviors are of the dominant cultures and how they appear to gravitate to these certain norms.
This material is gleaned from "Six Silent Killers," which can be presented in such a way as to grasp the essence of it in visual aids.
Suffice it to say this book is heavy in content but can be presented in a user-friendly context with trained facilitators privy to its design.
This implies here that this is something that could be packaged and programmed throughout the country under the auspices of The Naples Institute for the purposes of showing executives how culture dominates, and specifically, where their respective corporate culture fits in the culture continuum (comfort, complacency, contribution).
It is possible, even likely, that there exists several subcultures within a dominant culture.
To ferret out the dysfunctional cultures to align them more with and integrated into the preferred culture would require the possible assistance of an OD specialist.
Downstream, the Naples Institute might create a College of OD Practitioners to be schooled in this corporate culture skill base. As there are MDs in specialties with various levels of competence, the same holds true of OD. It remains a specialist field of which even universities are not certain of its authenticity.
(2) ASSESS THE CHARACTER, COMPETENCE AND VIABILITY OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE
While in Europe in the 1980s, I developed a Performance Management System for chief financial officers (CFO) of the various affiliates who had little training or understanding of assessing, placing and developing professionals in their role as auxiliary human resource directors.
This included developing competency profiles, career roadmaps, assessment centers and mentoring programs. Revised for the twenty-first century in abbreviated form this might work nicely with such a program.
(3) ASSESS THE PROBLEM SOLVING PRACTICES OF THESE EXECUTIVES
This would include a careful development of the content, context, problem and solution domain of the problem solving in terms of vertical or conventional thinking and lateral or more appropriately, creative thinking.
Of necessity, this would be a sensitive area as executives take pride in their problem solving action-oriented handling of crises. Chances are they are not aware that the crises they usually solve are crises they have created or allowed to develop.
The objective here is to supplement rather than radicalize their problem solving strategies.
This can be done by pointing out how the complement of lateral thinking can be a boom to their success, while at the same time a means of reducing internal stress and strain.
It is this energy-sapping predicament that often results in panic when external demands and surprising developments accelerate out-of-control.
Put another way, this is why the limits of command and control cannot be allowed to surface and lead to entrenchment, cover up, finger pointing, conflict and chaos. The answer to the problem always lies in the metamorphosis of the problem.
PHASE THREE - SEMINAR DAY THREE
LET THE EXECUTIVES DO THEIR OWN THING IN TERMS OF THESE THREE LEGS OF THE LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW
By the third day, these executives are schooled in the nuances and implications of the corporate culture, the role of professionals, and approaches to the problem solving.
It is now time for them to be organized into teams to address these issues and create a company culture that is consistent with what they assume to be the objectives of the company.
They will be assisted by facilitators and guided in this undertaking.
The afternoon of the third day will give them each an opportunity to present their cultural blueprint to the group for discussion.
This is offered as a possible launching pad for getting the Naples Institute off the ground.
________________________
Dr. Fisher's books mentioned in this piece are available on this website from PayPal, or from your favorite electronic bookstore. For more information about this seminar, contact by email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
TELL ME, SHOW ME, LET ME DO SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP OF TODAY &TOMORROW
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2007
What is proposed here for the Naples Institute is a three-day seminar for top executives to better understand the nature of the new role in leadership, which is not so much to "command & control," as it is to create a viable culture for its specific requirements, consistent with its customs, values and beliefs.
This relevant culture sponsors the kinds of behavior, commitment and involvement to make it a first-class operation with its people hitting on all cylinders in a synergistic effort to create the moment to establish it as a national or international leader in its industry and market.
PHASE ONE - SEMINAR DAY ONE
CONDUCT A SCHOOL IN WHICH EXECUTIVES ARE TOLD THE THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW
THE "CHICKEN & EGG" PROPOSITION
"Houston, we have a problem!"
The seminar would start with an open discussion to assess the sense these executives have "that they have a problem"; to discern the quality of their knowledge that the complex organization is not working as well as it might.
It would follow as a natural defensive posture for these people to make cosmetic choices that represent little systemic change in operations.
Chief among the reasons might be they don't want to go through the pain. It also could be because they don't know how, or lack the confidence to implement something that is a departure from what they know and have done before.
Now, in terms of the "chicken & egg" proposition, they must have the egg (tool kit) in hand before they can have the chicken (systemic cultural change) in the pot.
The Naples Institute rationale:
My sense is that before we think of great causes in line with the Institute's philosophy of fighting for social justice, it must first be a viable Institution.
To be a viable institution, it must have something to sell that is of value.
To sell something of value, it must have consensus of what that item is (the hedgehog rather than the fox) and put all our resources collectively into that pursuit in a synergistic effort.
Now, there are a lot of possibilities. Since we claim to be a leadership think tank, it would occur to me that our efforts should be in the realm of leadership. This is my proposal for consideration.
Over the last 75 years, we have seen a country in economic panic with soup lines and the WPA, physical panic with the surprise attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and WWII, euphoric affluence followed that war in an explosion of jobs and first generation college students, then the social, moral, and psychological collapse of the working middle class and the institutional infrastructure as children became their own parents, while identity became a homeless mind submerged in affluence, greed, self-indulgence, drugs, crime, civil strife and civil rights, against the background (or foreground) of constant war: policing the world (Korean War), making the world safe for democracy (Vietnam, Kosovo), or reacting to paranoia (Afghanistan, Iraq) in a maniacal attempt to regain purchase of the remembered nostalgia of 1945, the last time everything made sense and was relatively rooted in calm.
Today, we are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.
This is a leadership problem, not the pabulum of the sophists who preach gain without pain, correction without rectitude, and flatter those in leadership roles with the rhetorical but erroneous suggestion that leaders matter most when virtually all the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Leaders are, however, more important than ever before but not from the standpoint of "command & control," but as architects of the viable culture to sustain the necessary behavior for success. Executive status has moved from execution to cultural climate control.
It is the followers that count today in a new role and responsibility. As professionals, they now own the game, hold all the trump cards, and could call "checkmate" at anytime if they only realized it. They don't know how to leverage their new status and power, and need guidance, direction, mentoring and measuring to that end.
This is especially true in the United States and European enterprise as the past fifty years has seen the knowledge gap shrink between bosses and workers, while the economic gap has widened. This is not only wrong this is the making for revolution, and it need not be so.
Long before the Information Age and the Internet took hold this was building. The Internet has only accelerated it, not given birth to it.
Now, this is the essential issue of our times in terms of leadership.
How do we reconcile leaderless leadership and dissonant workers -- what I call "Corporate Sin" (AuthorHouse 2000) -- to the fact that the adversarial relationship is outmoded and that a true partnership must, indeed, exist to place leaders and professionals on to the same page and off on the same dime?
A possible approach, and one with which I would be comfortable, and perhaps others as well, is to tell a personal story.
MAKING FOR A DRAMATIC AND MEANINGFUL SHIFT
For the past twenty years, this problem has concerned me. It concerned me even earlier as a summer laborer in a chemical plant while I was going to college, when I was a chemist in the laboratory, a chemical sales engineer in the field, in the US Navy in the Mediterranean, as a corporate executive in South America, Europe, and South Africa, then again as a graduate student as a mature adult, and finally as a company organizational development (OD) psychologist, and once again corporate executive in Europe trying to make the EEC work for my employer.
Each role, each phase, each development was experienced, processed, analyzed and assimilated into what has become my leadership philosophy.
Then it would be a prudent time to introduce these executives to the "tell me" phase of the "three legs" of leadership.
The three legs of this leadership philosophy are:
(1) corporate culture,
(2) the emerging professional workforce, and
(3) the problem with our problem solving strategy or thinking methodology.
(1) CORPORATE CULTURE:
Six Silent Killers (CRC Press 1998) goes into great detail as to the three dominant cultures in any complex organization:
· Culture of Comfort (management dependent with managers as surrogate parents);
· Culture of Complacency (workers counterdependent on organization suspended in terminal adolescence); and
· Culture of Contribution (interdependent management with managers &mature adult workers in partnership).
The failure to create a Culture of Contribution results in six passive behaviors that have cost Fortune 500 companies literally billions in lost productivity.
(2) PROFESSIONAL WORKERS
The professional (see "The Worker, Alone!" Delta Group 1995) is the magic formula that few companies have discovered. The evidence is overwhelming as these workers are still managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if they were still blue-collar workers.
It has become a cliché to call them "knowledge workers" and to say that "knowledge power" has usurp the influence of "position power," when in fact that is far from the case.
This would be explored here, possibly in several institutional settings: commercial, industrial, academic and governance.
For example, we like to think academia is an institution of free exchange and thinking when, in fact, the university climate is as culturally warped as any other. Graduate seminars are programmed, and conducted with professors ignoring or failing to entertain evidence from the empirical world shared by mature students. "Machine age" thinking and the factory mentality dominate here as elsewhere.
(3) PROBLEM SOLVING METHODOLOGY OR THE FAILURE TO THINK LATERALLY AS WELL AS VERTICALLY.
Science is reputed to be value free when that is impossible as we are irrational as well as rational beings.
Logic is not enough, and the evidence is so overwhelming that there is little point in arguing.
Buildings and bridges and railways are built that are poorly constructed; we are a self-indulgent consumer driven society in which no one saves but expects to be rescued for the most egregious offenses against good sense. Meanwhile, we would rather solve other people's problems than our own.
Moreover, we like to compliment ourselves on our front end planning, when in fact, we are poor planners and a solution driven society with little patience with problems.
It could even be argued that we are better at describing than solving problems, finding solace in description and prescription.
That said we are uncomfortable in a passive mode of thought, yet suspect of intuitive wisdom. Whereas vertical or hierarchical thinking is Socratic and searching, lateral thinking is conceptual and discovering. This could be explained in some pragmatic detail.
Moreover, lateral thinking is perceptual rather than processing, nonlinear rather than linear, and systemic rather than elemental.
We like to break a problem down, solve the parts, and then expect the pieces to fit neatly together into an integrated whole. This was the thinking of MBO (management by objectives), which never worked albeit all the parts successfully accomplished their objectives.
This fragmented thought supports the dictum in system's theory: when all the parts are working as well as they might, then the system isn't. Competition between units does not support confluence and cooperation, but denies them.
The complement of lateral and vertical thinking provides the content and context of the problem solving, which is then structured to move naturally to the solution domain.
What is known or critical thinking governs vertical thinking, while lateral thinking is governed by creative thinking or what is not known but can be found out.
Put another way, lateral thinking is "front end" or forward thinking, whereas vertical thinking is "back end" or backward thinking, looking at what has happened in the past, which is a source but seldom the answer.
As we know, this dominates the problem solving from the "war on drugs" to the "war on poverty" to the "war on AIDS" to the "war on terror."
The metaphor of "war" is apropos as we associate violence and destruction with change and not the blending of rational and irrational components in a holistic integration. Yet, it is in this separation not integration that has produced calamity.
WITH THE RIGHT COMPLEMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS, CREATIVE IMAGING AND PROMOTION, THIS ("PHASE ONE" - TELL ME!) COULD BE A POWERFUL FORMAT TO BRING TOP CEOs TO THE NAPLES INSTITUTE TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING ORIGINAL AND TRULY PROVOCATIVE.
Short assessment of Phase One:
The "telling phase" is an introduction to executives as to the nature of what corporate culture is so that they might discover on their own, not imitate some other corporate culture success story elsewhere, on how to apply their own tool kit to the problem.
Professional workers are the most misunderstood and under utilized group in the workforce. Since the 1930s, there has been a tectonic shift from manual to mental labor in the workplace, but it has soared into an unfathomable storm in the last twenty years. This is incomprehensible to professionals and their employers alike. It would be the mission of the "first phase" to make this problem comprehensible.
And finally, the problem solving suffers because of the thinking behind it. This exercise is not a cure but a means of getting them to think differently on purpose by outlining the nature of thinking.
PHASE TWO - SEMINAR DAY TWO
SHOW EXECUTIVES THE A, B, C's OF THREE CRITICAL LEGS OF LEADERSHIP AND HOW THEY WORK OR FAIL TO WORK IN THE WORKPLACE
(1) HOW TO ASSESS WHERE YOUR CORPORATE CULTURE IS TODAY
This would be a review of the "six silent killers" as they appear in a series of case studies taken from the files of this author or others.
It would be followed by a value clarification discussion, possibly with some visual aids to show what the primary motivations and behaviors are of the dominant cultures and how they appear to gravitate to these certain norms.
This material is gleaned from "Six Silent Killers," which can be presented in such a way as to grasp the essence of it in visual aids.
Suffice it to say this book is heavy in content but can be presented in a user-friendly context with trained facilitators privy to its design.
This implies here that this is something that could be packaged and programmed throughout the country under the auspices of The Naples Institute for the purposes of showing executives how culture dominates, and specifically, where their respective corporate culture fits in the culture continuum (comfort, complacency, contribution).
It is possible, even likely, that there exists several subcultures within a dominant culture.
To ferret out the dysfunctional cultures to align them more with and integrated into the preferred culture would require the possible assistance of an OD specialist.
Downstream, the Naples Institute might create a College of OD Practitioners to be schooled in this corporate culture skill base. As there are MDs in specialties with various levels of competence, the same holds true of OD. It remains a specialist field of which even universities are not certain of its authenticity.
(2) ASSESS THE CHARACTER, COMPETENCE AND VIABILITY OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE
While in Europe in the 1980s, I developed a Performance Management System for chief financial officers (CFO) of the various affiliates who had little training or understanding of assessing, placing and developing professionals in their role as auxiliary human resource directors.
This included developing competency profiles, career roadmaps, assessment centers and mentoring programs. Revised for the twenty-first century in abbreviated form this might work nicely with such a program.
(3) ASSESS THE PROBLEM SOLVING PRACTICES OF THESE EXECUTIVES
This would include a careful development of the content, context, problem and solution domain of the problem solving in terms of vertical or conventional thinking and lateral or more appropriately, creative thinking.
Of necessity, this would be a sensitive area as executives take pride in their problem solving action-oriented handling of crises. Chances are they are not aware that the crises they usually solve are crises they have created or allowed to develop.
The objective here is to supplement rather than radicalize their problem solving strategies.
This can be done by pointing out how the complement of lateral thinking can be a boom to their success, while at the same time a means of reducing internal stress and strain.
It is this energy-sapping predicament that often results in panic when external demands and surprising developments accelerate out-of-control.
Put another way, this is why the limits of command and control cannot be allowed to surface and lead to entrenchment, cover up, finger pointing, conflict and chaos. The answer to the problem always lies in the metamorphosis of the problem.
PHASE THREE - SEMINAR DAY THREE
LET THE EXECUTIVES DO THEIR OWN THING IN TERMS OF THESE THREE LEGS OF THE LEADERSHIP CULTURE TODAY &TOMORROW
By the third day, these executives are schooled in the nuances and implications of the corporate culture, the role of professionals, and approaches to the problem solving.
It is now time for them to be organized into teams to address these issues and create a company culture that is consistent with what they assume to be the objectives of the company.
They will be assisted by facilitators and guided in this undertaking.
The afternoon of the third day will give them each an opportunity to present their cultural blueprint to the group for discussion.
This is offered as a possible launching pad for getting the Naples Institute off the ground.
________________________
Dr. Fisher's books mentioned in this piece are available on this website from PayPal, or from your favorite electronic bookstore. For more information about this seminar, contact by email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
Friday, November 30, 2007
WHY CULTURE IS CRITICAL TO LEADERSHIP
WHY CULTURE IS CRITICAL TO LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“Culture: 5 (a): the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; (b) the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; (c) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Don’t change corporate culture. What we need is to change organization behavior.”
Peter F. Drucker, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1991
* * * * * * * * * * *
We suffer from the celebrity syndrome. This is not only true of the entertainment industry, but also across every walk of life.
Think about it. We accept the source as reliable because it has been reliable in another context. Such is the case with the esteemed management guru Peter Drucker. He failed to understand that culture dictates behavior; to change behavior without the appropriate culture is pure folly.
Yet, Drucker made such a statement in 1991 in the Wall Street Journal, and I know in my own consultancy work that many senior managers took comfort from it, seeing it as a license to do nothing about company culture.
Then there are cases where CEOs find suitable cultures for their enterprises. This is one.
THE HEDGEHOG PHILOSOPHY OF SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
Isaiah Berlin wrote a book on Tolstoy’s view of history. He based it on an ancient Greek story by the poet Archilochus called, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1978).
The book underlines a fundamental distinction between people (foxes) who have a fascination with, and an inclination towards an infinite variety of things, while another group of people (hedgehogs) relates everything they do to a central theme and all-embracing concept. Foxes are so busy trying to do everything well that they do nothing well. Not so hedgehogs.
Two relatively small airlines exemplify these two approaches. Both airlines had essentially the same business plan; the same market area, the same assets, the same complement of competent people, and nearly the same mission statements, yet they experienced decidedly different outcomes.
Southwest Air Lines became a great commercial success as a hedgehog, while Pacific North West Air Lines failed as a fox.
Pacific North West attempted to do everything well in the interest of satisfying its stockholders, customers and employees going like gangbusters in that pursuit.
Southwest Air Lines adopted the “hedgehog concept,” focusing on doing one thing very well, allowing the process to suitably gestate before expecting it take hold.
What was that one thing?
It was in identifying, developing and implementing the best workplace culture for its people. It assumed if that were done the rest would follow naturally. This was total front-end lateral thinking with a primary focus.
How was the “hedgehog concept” visualized?
The CEO visualized the workplace culture as being three interlocking spheres of influence and behavior: a passion for serving; a mission to be the best in the world, and an emphasis on equal service to customers and employees alike.
Culture was understood to be primarily a spiritual entity. Intangibles are the drivers of people much as many would prefer such drivers to be simply money. Tangibles are easily given without any personal involvement, not so with intangibles.
How can the "hedgehog concept" be measured?
The pervasive company spirit is visible and even palpable. A measure of intangibles is seeing how employees support each other, and respond to change and disruption.
The way to attain and sustain that spirit, the Southwest CEO decided, was to make it clear that Southwest employees came first, then the customers, and last but not the least the stockholders. This created a bond of trust.
He also made it clear that employees would not be subject to surprises, but instead would be informed of critical developments so that they could participate in the problem solving. Since change is constant, workers need to be flexible to meet such changes. Being well informed relative to company operations translates into flexibility because employees are never surprised and know always where they stand.
Not long ago, all company employees met in conference to discuss how to deal with ever increasing fuel costs. Currently, fuel costs represent an increase of $600 million over last year. To put this in perspective, employees were told, profits in all of 2005 were $485 million.
There was no panic, no finger pointing, but a genuine desire to look for new ways to increase productivity, improve gate turnaround, and to do more with less.
Employees know they are valued by the way they are treated. Consequently, they are constantly looking for ways to deal with increased competition, changing market demands, and the challenges of a volatile world. Periodic disruptions don’t sound the alarm for downsizing. On the contrary, they rally the troops to ratchet up their efforts.
Core values, passion and high spirits carry an enterprise through disruptive times because the culture has a singular focus and employees understand their mission. Put another way, core values are a constant to deal with that other constant, change.
ARCHITECTS OF CULTURE
The “hedgehog concept” took hold at Southwest Air Lines because the CEO and his senior management team decided business would be managed around guiding principles outlining this value system and attitudinal policy.
The workplace culture created was user friendly and accessible to all disciplines without exception and displayed in behavioral language.
The culture desired is manifested when the preferred values are on display without prompting. It is an "invisible hand" that puts everyone on the same page so that they can get off the dime.
CAN THIS WORK ANYWHERE?
It is a matter of will and involvement.
The nature of the complex organization is such that chronic problems are bound to occur. These problems disrupt work, create polarity, and often derail the collective effort away from rather than toward the mission.
So, the first thing that must be done is for senior management to understand that there is a problem, then what the problem is, where the problem is, why the problem exists, how long it has existed, what has been done about it in the past, what was the outcome of such intervention, and what are some more effective ways of dealing with it now?
You cannot concentrate on behavior, as Peter Drucker assumed, and disregard culture. Culture is the engine of work. It is the attitudinal machine of enterprise. Nor is culture something that you can copy but something that each enterprise must create from scratch.
To deal with a chronic problem of organization life takes the assistance of someone who is professionally trained to facilitate the problem solving process.
That would be the organizational development (OD) psychologist. OD deals directly with the CEO and senior management in an integrative effort.
Are there any words of caution?
There is one stipulation. Culture is not something the CEO and senior management can be committed to without also being totally involved.
After all, they are architects of the culture. They draft the blueprint of the core value system. If they are not involved, if they abdicate this role and delegate it to staff or consultants, then the prospects of success are limited, indeed.
Southwest Air Lines has shown that other companies can use the “hedgehog concept” to their advantage. Any troubled enterprise can resolve its difficulty by going back to the drawing board, examining its value system and culture, and redesigning it to a more compelling focus. Culture is not something you "search for" or attempt to copy the model successful somewhere else. Culture is the challenge of each enterprise and the key to a successful future.
________________________
Dr. Fisher is author of several books in the OD discipline. His latest is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“Culture: 5 (a): the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; (b) the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; (c) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Don’t change corporate culture. What we need is to change organization behavior.”
Peter F. Drucker, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1991
* * * * * * * * * * *
We suffer from the celebrity syndrome. This is not only true of the entertainment industry, but also across every walk of life.
Think about it. We accept the source as reliable because it has been reliable in another context. Such is the case with the esteemed management guru Peter Drucker. He failed to understand that culture dictates behavior; to change behavior without the appropriate culture is pure folly.
Yet, Drucker made such a statement in 1991 in the Wall Street Journal, and I know in my own consultancy work that many senior managers took comfort from it, seeing it as a license to do nothing about company culture.
Then there are cases where CEOs find suitable cultures for their enterprises. This is one.
THE HEDGEHOG PHILOSOPHY OF SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
Isaiah Berlin wrote a book on Tolstoy’s view of history. He based it on an ancient Greek story by the poet Archilochus called, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1978).
The book underlines a fundamental distinction between people (foxes) who have a fascination with, and an inclination towards an infinite variety of things, while another group of people (hedgehogs) relates everything they do to a central theme and all-embracing concept. Foxes are so busy trying to do everything well that they do nothing well. Not so hedgehogs.
Two relatively small airlines exemplify these two approaches. Both airlines had essentially the same business plan; the same market area, the same assets, the same complement of competent people, and nearly the same mission statements, yet they experienced decidedly different outcomes.
Southwest Air Lines became a great commercial success as a hedgehog, while Pacific North West Air Lines failed as a fox.
Pacific North West attempted to do everything well in the interest of satisfying its stockholders, customers and employees going like gangbusters in that pursuit.
Southwest Air Lines adopted the “hedgehog concept,” focusing on doing one thing very well, allowing the process to suitably gestate before expecting it take hold.
What was that one thing?
It was in identifying, developing and implementing the best workplace culture for its people. It assumed if that were done the rest would follow naturally. This was total front-end lateral thinking with a primary focus.
How was the “hedgehog concept” visualized?
The CEO visualized the workplace culture as being three interlocking spheres of influence and behavior: a passion for serving; a mission to be the best in the world, and an emphasis on equal service to customers and employees alike.
Culture was understood to be primarily a spiritual entity. Intangibles are the drivers of people much as many would prefer such drivers to be simply money. Tangibles are easily given without any personal involvement, not so with intangibles.
How can the "hedgehog concept" be measured?
The pervasive company spirit is visible and even palpable. A measure of intangibles is seeing how employees support each other, and respond to change and disruption.
The way to attain and sustain that spirit, the Southwest CEO decided, was to make it clear that Southwest employees came first, then the customers, and last but not the least the stockholders. This created a bond of trust.
He also made it clear that employees would not be subject to surprises, but instead would be informed of critical developments so that they could participate in the problem solving. Since change is constant, workers need to be flexible to meet such changes. Being well informed relative to company operations translates into flexibility because employees are never surprised and know always where they stand.
Not long ago, all company employees met in conference to discuss how to deal with ever increasing fuel costs. Currently, fuel costs represent an increase of $600 million over last year. To put this in perspective, employees were told, profits in all of 2005 were $485 million.
There was no panic, no finger pointing, but a genuine desire to look for new ways to increase productivity, improve gate turnaround, and to do more with less.
Employees know they are valued by the way they are treated. Consequently, they are constantly looking for ways to deal with increased competition, changing market demands, and the challenges of a volatile world. Periodic disruptions don’t sound the alarm for downsizing. On the contrary, they rally the troops to ratchet up their efforts.
Core values, passion and high spirits carry an enterprise through disruptive times because the culture has a singular focus and employees understand their mission. Put another way, core values are a constant to deal with that other constant, change.
ARCHITECTS OF CULTURE
The “hedgehog concept” took hold at Southwest Air Lines because the CEO and his senior management team decided business would be managed around guiding principles outlining this value system and attitudinal policy.
The workplace culture created was user friendly and accessible to all disciplines without exception and displayed in behavioral language.
The culture desired is manifested when the preferred values are on display without prompting. It is an "invisible hand" that puts everyone on the same page so that they can get off the dime.
CAN THIS WORK ANYWHERE?
It is a matter of will and involvement.
The nature of the complex organization is such that chronic problems are bound to occur. These problems disrupt work, create polarity, and often derail the collective effort away from rather than toward the mission.
So, the first thing that must be done is for senior management to understand that there is a problem, then what the problem is, where the problem is, why the problem exists, how long it has existed, what has been done about it in the past, what was the outcome of such intervention, and what are some more effective ways of dealing with it now?
You cannot concentrate on behavior, as Peter Drucker assumed, and disregard culture. Culture is the engine of work. It is the attitudinal machine of enterprise. Nor is culture something that you can copy but something that each enterprise must create from scratch.
To deal with a chronic problem of organization life takes the assistance of someone who is professionally trained to facilitate the problem solving process.
That would be the organizational development (OD) psychologist. OD deals directly with the CEO and senior management in an integrative effort.
Are there any words of caution?
There is one stipulation. Culture is not something the CEO and senior management can be committed to without also being totally involved.
After all, they are architects of the culture. They draft the blueprint of the core value system. If they are not involved, if they abdicate this role and delegate it to staff or consultants, then the prospects of success are limited, indeed.
Southwest Air Lines has shown that other companies can use the “hedgehog concept” to their advantage. Any troubled enterprise can resolve its difficulty by going back to the drawing board, examining its value system and culture, and redesigning it to a more compelling focus. Culture is not something you "search for" or attempt to copy the model successful somewhere else. Culture is the challenge of each enterprise and the key to a successful future.
________________________
Dr. Fisher is author of several books in the OD discipline. His latest is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (2007).
Monday, November 26, 2007
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“REALITY: a real event, entity, or state of affairs; the totality of real things and events; something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public service and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties, and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.
“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”
Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
New York Review, December 6, 2007
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Judt is not an alarmist, far from it. He sees where a half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent in our economic calculations, our political practices, and our international strategies, even our educational priorities that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risk and opportunities are without precedence; there is no point in looking back to see ahead.
Judt continues, “Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.” When people count only in terms of statistical validity, and profits carry the day over people, the “soul of the city” flaps like a rag in the wind.
* * * * * * * * * * *
If over the last half-century, you have had an opportunity to work and live extensively across the globe, and have engaged in a study of human behavior and the workings of institutions, as I have had, it is difficult not to be moved by these words and this concern for the future.
We are programmed to be optimists; to believe whatever challenges lie ahead we will find the initiative and resources to meet them; to corral the science and develop the technology that forgive our lapses and absolve our indiscretions to allow us to sin another day.
We don’t like gadflies or pessimists that rain on our parade. We don’t like to look back and have little inclination to see ahead. We believe the future will take care of itself. Rearview window thinking dominates.
Against the absurdity of this reality, we have an army of apologists who occupy positions of power and influence, designations described as leadership positions, whose occupants are just as lost as we are. Like the Merry Pied Piper of literary myth, we march to their tune and toward the inevitable void.
It has happened throughout man’s history only the consequences today are light years more consequential. I take heart in that others are saying some of the same things I have been saying for decades, voices that are deeply entrenched in reality and dealing with its absurdity.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM TURNS INTO ALCHEMY
My generation of the Great Depression has ridden this golden tide for 50 years peaking in the 1970s. After WWII, now as a teenager, I would visit my uncle in Detroit who was a professor at the Jesuit University of Detroit, and play baseball with kids whose fathers and mothers worked in the automotive industry. They had fabulous homes and everyone over the age of sixteen had access to an automobile. My uncle was also a consultant with an office in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit. His secretary, a former UD student, I remember was flush enough to buy a new Cadillac every year.
Automotive working families in this era made as much as Detroit MD’s. They were firmly and stably situated in the economic working middle class. Not a single member of any of these families attended college. Many parents hadn’t finished high school. Nor were any of the boys I played baseball with planning to go to college. They expected to work in the automotive industry beside their parents as skilled or unskilled workers with full benefits and the assurance of retiring on a comfortable pension.
My uncle, who had two Ph.D.’s (psychology and economics), and was head of his department, lived more modestly with much less security. When I asked about the affluence of these autoworkers, he said this was so because the automotive industry was protected from foreign competition under the guise of the US being a “free market economy.”
Another reason for this working class golden age was the more equitable distribution of wealth. After WWII, the CEOs in the automotive industry made only about 30 times the pay and benefits paid to typical automotive workers. By 1968, CEOs were now making about 60 to 70 times as much as the typical worker. This was true across the nation as well as in Detroit.
After the 1970s, manufacturing became a hollow industry in the United States with more and more manufacturing being done abroad, especially in the Far East. At the same time, the “rising sun” of Japan, Inc. was taking a major chunk out of the US economy, especially in the manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, appliances and other quality intensive products.
Panic set in and mahogany row and senior management no longer played to win but not to lose, a strategy that always trumps the practitioner. If any situation defined a moment, it was this. South East Asia was coming into its own as an economic power, and concomitantly, the distribution of wealth in the US commenced its widening separation.
America lost control of its character and with it the US’s competitive advantage. For the next thirty years, the rich would become richer and the poor poorer, and the poor had done nothing wrong. Avner Offer writes in “The Challenge of Affluence” (2007):
“The spread of affluence not only corrupts character, but has caused all these disorders and discontents: family breakdown, stress, road and landscape congestion, obesity, poverty, denial of health care, mental disorder, violence, economic fraud, and insecurity.”
Author Offer cites surveys in which today’s Americans declare themselves unhappier than their parents were. Young people who earlier heeded their elders are now prone to “intoxicating short-term dissipation.” He argues that advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of this malaise. He continues, “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.”
Throughout history when a nation loses its perspective and confidence, it often goes to war to project its frustration and discontent to regain its momentum. The Vietnam War and its embarrassing conclusion indicate what happens when such plans go awry. It might have been a wake up call that something was wrong in paradise. Instead, it represented a shift from the common good to “personhood,” or from a sense of national and regional cooperation to everyone out for themselves while the getting was good.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the CEO and senior management level (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers: “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp 136 – 142). Massive wealth was created for a few that make the era of the Golden Age of the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century seem timid in comparison.
In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times the pay of his average employee. The Wal-Mart family that same year earned about $90 billion. That represents the equivalent of the earning of the bottom 40 percent of the US population; in other words, 120 million people.
The wealth gap now is the widest since the Great Depression of 1929 with 21.2 percent of the national income accruing to 1 percent of earners. The late management guru Peter Drucker was appalled with what he called “predatory corporate capitalism.” He was referring to the obscene salary and perks management bestowed upon itself without any regard to ethical performance criteria. Drucker judged such practices to be blatantly immoral and reminiscent of the robber baron mentality, and a major contributor to the loss of employee loyalty and allegiance (see Corporate Sin, p. 137).
Tony Judt sees this in a wider perspective as the incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of our society. The evidence? Congressional bills are written to private advantage; influential contributors determine the policies of presidential candidates; while individual voters have edged out of the public sphere. Overpaid executives and value obsessed shareholders have tilted the scales to short term growth and profit, obscuring and displacing the broader collective goals and common interests that once bound us together.
Robert Reich sees it differently. In his new book “Supercapitalism” (2007), the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration claims the superrich are not at fault, CEOs have not become greedy, corporate boards are still highly responsible, and investors are not docile. The question of the “common good” is not relevant on his scales. He argues it isn’t the job of business to be moral. Corporations just do what they do. Technology and self-interest, alone, are deterministic. There are no heroes, no villains, and no one to blame. There is only economic man.
Let’s face it, Reich is saying, we live in an economic age and survival of the fittest is in play. Reich, like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat 2006), is a technological determinist seeing an integrated system of global capitalism as our ineluctable destiny.
In this context, “growth is good” and “progress is good.” Social class has been rendered anachronistic with economic man filling the void in the worship of productivity. Global warming, pollution, and other expressions of self-indulgent man will be addressed and resolved by technology, have no fear.
The absurdity of this new faith in unimpeded wealth creation is not considered. On the contrary, these technology determinists are confident that more efficiency-induced productivity growth will deliver expanding opportunity, upward mobility, greater happiness and well being, as well as greater affluence and security. In other words, this is a new belief system, which seems quite similar to the old.
Yet, the absurdity of this reality is that the American working middle class has all but disappeared and it has done nothing wrong. Today in 2007, 94 percent of working class Americans earn less than $93,000 a year.
What we have produced in the last 50 years with increased growth is greater social resentment rather than alleviating it; greater fragmentation of society from the nuclear family to the school to the church to the community to the workplace and beyond. We have systematically destroyed what made America great and the envy of the world, a solid working middle class, and applied the wrecking ball of indefinite economic growth to the soul of society. No longer are we clear on what binds us together finding a strange parity in polarity where cooperation once resided.
We have drugs not only in drug cartels or guns on the battlefield, but in the homes and classrooms and playgrounds across the nation, as media report in bold headlines violent and sick behavior in everyday life: spouses killing their partners, parents killing offspring, siblings killing each other, students killing teachers and other students, teachers seducing students, and care givers abusing children. While higher purpose has been lost along the way, terror and murder rage in our cities unchecked and uncontrolled. Our commercial driven society has a hole in it.
What appears behind hard covers in a book (re: Supercapitalism) as sensible economic policy carries, as Tony Judt points out, implicit civic costs. If we have learned nothing from the fall of great societies of the past, we should at least note that neglect of the powerless inevitably sealed their fate. Here Reich tells us only people with jobs are full members of the community. Others are less so and a drain on the economy. There is little room for caring or lifting the lame up when self-interest is the exclusive mantra of civilized society.
Yet no society is healthy or cohesive that lacks a moral compass and moral center with room for everyone whatever their disposition or circumstances.
Tony Judt may not have read, “A Look Back To See Ahead,” but he captures the flavor of it in these remarks:
“But here (reference Reich’s economic policy), as with welfare reform, what purports to represent the future has actually begun to resemble the past, breaking up the public and collective agencies of the modern era into fragmented and privately held assets reminiscent of a much earlier age. With the advent of the modern state, transport, hospitals, schools, mails, armies, prisons, police forces, and affordable access to culture – all of them essential services not obviously well served by the workings of the profit motive – were taken under public regulation or control. They are now being handed back to private entrepreneurs . . . This is just old-fashioned subsidy under another name and a moral hazard, inviting irresponsibility and often corruption.”
Imagine the absurdity of this. Public services are not for profit and all the monies stipulated for a given purpose are meant to go into the design and delivery system. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are for profit operations and must cut cost in the design and delivery in order to accrue a profit. Since budgets for these necessary services at taxpayer expense are seldom adequate in the first place, where can the profit be excised, but at the expense of the function?
The “invisible hand” of the market place may be favorable to commercial operations but it cannot be reproduced with the same success in noncommercial institutions. Here relations and cohesion is the product of trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality and authority. This gives stability and functional security.
People who elect to serve in institutions in a democracy do not have the same sense of efficiency, growth or profit that exists in the private sector, as they are driven by continuity and consistency in the design and delivery of services. There is a clear spiritual dimension to public policy and service.
The English reformer John Stuart Mill was troubled to see a disproportionate of benefits of the private economy going to financial interests at the expense of the majority. He wrote, “I find it essentially repulsive. A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”
So that is the challenge, to recognize and deal with the absurdities of reality.
If you have any doubt, listen to those campaigning in this quadrennial madness of presidential politics. People are experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity: economic with the sub prime real estate fiasco and rising gasoline prices at the pump, and physical with crime in the streets. It finds people with a new appetite for political symbols and territorial imperatives.
There is a rising attraction of protectionism in American politics with the appeal for anti-immigration policies controlled with walls, barriers and tests, forgetting that the economy rides on the backs of many undocumented workers. This hypocrisy and many other conundrums have driven the United States into a Prozac nation.
THE SHRINKING OF AMERICA BACK INTO A PROZAC NATION
“A Look Back To See Ahead” was written to alert readers to the chronic myths that our culture perpetuates, myths we continue to swallow whole no matter how absurd. I stepped back thirty years to surface the drum roll that dominated a paranoid society then, which was perambulating to perdition. I asked readers in the present to make note of this, and to take control of their circumstances with due diligence.
How? By rediscovering that reliable governor from within. I made no attempt to write a definitive book on our consuming mania for drugstore therapy. I did indicate, however, that we were duped a generation ago into believing the 1970s was the “Age of Depression.” Today, soul engineers as advance representatives of pharmaceutical companies tell us this once again. What is bizarre about this is that we have been reduced to a psychological society in which common behavior has become a sickness.
To show you how this works, consider The Oprah Winfrey Show in the summer of 2002. She had Ricky Williams on her show, the Heisman Trophy holder, and an extraordinaire running back with the Miami Dolphins. He was on the show to confess his consuming anxiety, which was shyness. It so happens that the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo-SmithKline was paying Williams for his appearance, and was in fact pushing its drug Paxil CR as a remedy for this condition.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about this except that most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones with some drug a miraculous cure for them. Pharmaceutical companies know convictions obliterate perceived needs. So, they focus on our convictions and design products identified with them. This should come as no surprise as we manage our health care system with products that will match these convictions. Not convinced? Look at all the cold medicines, headache remedies, energy boosters, and so on. They emanate from and follow our convictions.
Nothing is left to chance. For what we believe ails us a plethora of drugstore products will appear. Major pharmaceutical corporations spend $25 billion worldwide on marketing, and employ an army of Washington lobbyists to see that legislation is passed that is drug company friendly. Drug makers’ power is so disproportionately huge that they even dictate how they are to be regulated. They also shape much of the medical research agenda, and spin the findings of such research in their favor. They conceal incriminating data, co-opt potential critics, and colonize both the minds of doctors and our own.
In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield cite that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of disability, behind heart disease.
Unfortunately, WHO fails to distinguish major depression from genuine sadness. This is largely due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies who are less interested in answering a need but in turbo charging a conviction, such as depression. It is the tactic of exaggerating the problem and implying medication will easily fix it. Drug makers find there is no place for sadness. If we are in tears at the loss of a loved one, we must be depressed when actually we are dealing naturally with our sadness.
During the past half-century, with such tranquilizers as Miltown and Valium, Americans became convinced that medication would neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt.
Christopher Lane In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (2007) shows how Madison Avenue promoted shyness as a social anxiety disorder and revved it up into a national emergency. With the right regiment of medication the individual yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed could find his way to drugstore Nirvana.
Valium, some readers may recall, was said not to be addictive, but such promises were dashed when serious neurotic and psychotic episodes became common with its misuse. It was meant to calm anxiety but often led to mental fogginess and dependency.
Meanwhile, Prozac and its cousins were very different. They enhanced alertness and made users feel as if a better self were surfacing. Peter Kramer named this phenomenon, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” in “Listening to Prozac” (1993). Here utopian convictions raced well ahead of drug companies’ most optimistic predictions. America fell in love with Prozac.
By the 1990s not all was well in the Prozac nation. Users were being warned of the possibility of experiencing uncontrollable tremors, diminished sexual capacity, and a growing tolerance that might lead to noxious higher doses, an inclination to suicide, or other self-destructive tendencies.
These warnings were largely ignored, as users were willing to take the risks against the prospects of becoming self-assured and gregarious. As critic Frederick Crews points out, “One thing is certain: the antidepressant makers have exploited our gullibility, obfuscated known risks, and treated the victims of their recklessness with contempt.”
David Healy in “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007) acknowledges the legitimacy of this concern. He is a distinguished researcher and practicing psychiatrist, and has found major pharmaceutical companies close ranks against perceived troublemakers when damaging side effects of prescribed drugs are pointed out. As a psychopharmacologist, he saw drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established. Healy sees this as no more reasonable than claiming headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.
There is so much myth about the brain and serotonin. The idea that our brain needs a certain amount of serotonin, and when we run out, it’s like running out of gas is nonsense. Contrary to propaganda, the brain possesses no known “depression center,” and about 95 percent of our serotonin is found elsewhere in the body. Prozac, Soloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa – serotonin-boosting pills – are promoted as drugs, which will surely do the trick. Thus millions who might need only counseling expose themselves to these drugs and take incredible risks including horrific withdrawal symptoms, dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation.
“Let Them Eat Prozac” profiles a disturbing development. When a user dies and the bereave file a suit of negligence against the pharmaceutical company, the drug maker’s lawyers parry the suit by explaining the drug-induced stabbing, shooting, or self-hanging by a formerly peaceable individual was actually a manifestation of the not-yet-subdued depressive state of the user.
When Healy attempted to punch holes in this doubletalk by insisting on an extensive double-blind randomized trial to determine causal link to destructive behavior, he was denied a professorship at the University of Toronto Research Institute. Pfizer, maker of Zoloft, is a major supporter of the institute.
Healy further notes that the FDA is timid, understaffed and under funded. Worse yet, drug companies have infiltrated the FDA with friends of the pharmaceutical industry. Even respected medical journals are careful not to offend drug companies as they advertise widely in these journals and fund professional conferences and trade fairs. Then too, leading professors accept huge honorariums in return for venal research, while many “research” papers are actually ghostwritten by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, major drug makers don’t bend the rules; they buy the rulebook.
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY
Thirty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted in conferences on what was and wasn’t a mental disease. At the time, members voted that homosexuality was a mental illness. It has since been relegated to a lifestyle. That said the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) doesn’t give an automatic pass to drug makers.
So, can we rely on this guidebook for objective judgment, identification and treatment of mental illnesses?
Christopher Lane is not so sure. He notes that the DSM makes a case for such dubious pathognomonic symptoms of depression as “feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking.” This differs little with the original subjective criteria of thirty years ago. In fact, today mental disorders are presented in bingo style and affixed to a patient who fits five out of a possible nine listed symptoms of a specific disorder. Not surprising, drug maker advertisers often use these lists. They tie the DSM checklist to a drug they are promoting asking readers to discuss the use of the drug with their physician.
It is scary when you stop to think about it, but unfortunately, few of us ever stop to do so. We take authority figures at their word. Seldom do we question the motivation of the source of the authority no matter how silly the criteria of the argument.
Advertisers exploit this vulnerability and no place more effectively than in matters of health, happiness and security.
The American Psychiatric Association since the 1970s has not been pushing drugs, but doing everything to lend greater scientific respectability to the psychiatric field. It has attempted to do this by improving validity and reliability in the more accurate identification of mental disorders.
What has happened instead is the APA has made a faint gesture toward this goal through the false concreteness of checklists. Psychologists have done it as well but they don’t have the weapon of prescribing drugs. Only medical doctors, and psychiatrists are medical doctors, have such power.
The reality is that the APA and DSM have attempted to imply that mental disorders are as sharply recognized as diabetes and tuberculosis when they are not. Psychiatrists when they prescribe drugs are often playing Russian roulette with the patient, emphasizing the benefits of a drug while failing to stress the side effects as well.
Attention Deficit Hypertension Disorder (ADHD) is a case in point. There is a whole regiment of drugs prescribed for hyperactive children, the most famous being Ritalin. This is not the approach of the Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee (see “Making A Difference Quietly,” www.fisherofideas.com, October 25, 2007).
Dr. Blondel Senior has found that ADHD is often misdiagnosed; that environmentally prompted mood swings, those responding to stress or hardship or sudden loss, create dysfunctional states that are receptive to drug free treatment. How so?
The person is placed in a controlled and reinforcing environment. Boys at the Advent Home receive a large dose of reality in work details, rigorous academic programs, creative pursuits and recreational sports. This is a simple and direct rational health care formula compared to the cumbersome and profit driven system of the APA.
Time will tell if psychiatry can escape bureaucratized psychological treatment, settle on a discrete list of disorders, and become less enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and approach the success level of Dr. Senior’s Advent Home.
And finally, the reality is that economic man is not a replacement but the complement to social man. Why does it have to be either, or?
While pharmaceutical companies urge us to replace nature with drugs to cope with our shrinking world, their hired promoters would exonerate us from our self-indulgence and economic excess. These apologists would insist that technology and self-interest, not morality, drive postmodern man; that economics is not about ethics but about business. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishop.”
They don’t get it! These global capitalists, capricious pharmaceutical companies, and ambivalent psychiatrists, all in leadership positions, are wheeling a wrecking ball at reality, forgetting that there is a common thread that connects us to each other and the same history.
Profits cannot be more important than people nor competition more an expression of humanity than cooperation. The absence of leadership in every endeavor has placed us in this predicament and jeopardy, noting it will change nothing, but it is a beginning.
References: Tony Judt, “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 22-27; Robert Reich, “Supercapitalism” (2007); Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, “The Loss of Sadness” (2007); Christopher Lane, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007); David Healy, “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007); Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, “The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry” (`1992) and “Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders” (1997); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1995) and “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Making A Difference Quietly” (www.fisherofideas.com, 2007); Frederick Crews, “Talking Back To Prozac,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 10 – 14; Andrew Hacker, “They’d Much Rather Be Rich,” NYR, October 11, 2007; Avner Offer, “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950” (2007); Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, “Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years” (2007); Edward Findlay, “Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in Thought of Jan Patocka (2002); Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac” (1993); Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Flat” (1993).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“REALITY: a real event, entity, or state of affairs; the totality of real things and events; something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public service and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties, and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.
“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”
Tony Judt, Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
New York Review, December 6, 2007
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Judt is not an alarmist, far from it. He sees where a half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent in our economic calculations, our political practices, and our international strategies, even our educational priorities that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risk and opportunities are without precedence; there is no point in looking back to see ahead.
Judt continues, “Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.” When people count only in terms of statistical validity, and profits carry the day over people, the “soul of the city” flaps like a rag in the wind.
* * * * * * * * * * *
If over the last half-century, you have had an opportunity to work and live extensively across the globe, and have engaged in a study of human behavior and the workings of institutions, as I have had, it is difficult not to be moved by these words and this concern for the future.
We are programmed to be optimists; to believe whatever challenges lie ahead we will find the initiative and resources to meet them; to corral the science and develop the technology that forgive our lapses and absolve our indiscretions to allow us to sin another day.
We don’t like gadflies or pessimists that rain on our parade. We don’t like to look back and have little inclination to see ahead. We believe the future will take care of itself. Rearview window thinking dominates.
Against the absurdity of this reality, we have an army of apologists who occupy positions of power and influence, designations described as leadership positions, whose occupants are just as lost as we are. Like the Merry Pied Piper of literary myth, we march to their tune and toward the inevitable void.
It has happened throughout man’s history only the consequences today are light years more consequential. I take heart in that others are saying some of the same things I have been saying for decades, voices that are deeply entrenched in reality and dealing with its absurdity.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM TURNS INTO ALCHEMY
My generation of the Great Depression has ridden this golden tide for 50 years peaking in the 1970s. After WWII, now as a teenager, I would visit my uncle in Detroit who was a professor at the Jesuit University of Detroit, and play baseball with kids whose fathers and mothers worked in the automotive industry. They had fabulous homes and everyone over the age of sixteen had access to an automobile. My uncle was also a consultant with an office in the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit. His secretary, a former UD student, I remember was flush enough to buy a new Cadillac every year.
Automotive working families in this era made as much as Detroit MD’s. They were firmly and stably situated in the economic working middle class. Not a single member of any of these families attended college. Many parents hadn’t finished high school. Nor were any of the boys I played baseball with planning to go to college. They expected to work in the automotive industry beside their parents as skilled or unskilled workers with full benefits and the assurance of retiring on a comfortable pension.
My uncle, who had two Ph.D.’s (psychology and economics), and was head of his department, lived more modestly with much less security. When I asked about the affluence of these autoworkers, he said this was so because the automotive industry was protected from foreign competition under the guise of the US being a “free market economy.”
Another reason for this working class golden age was the more equitable distribution of wealth. After WWII, the CEOs in the automotive industry made only about 30 times the pay and benefits paid to typical automotive workers. By 1968, CEOs were now making about 60 to 70 times as much as the typical worker. This was true across the nation as well as in Detroit.
After the 1970s, manufacturing became a hollow industry in the United States with more and more manufacturing being done abroad, especially in the Far East. At the same time, the “rising sun” of Japan, Inc. was taking a major chunk out of the US economy, especially in the manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, appliances and other quality intensive products.
Panic set in and mahogany row and senior management no longer played to win but not to lose, a strategy that always trumps the practitioner. If any situation defined a moment, it was this. South East Asia was coming into its own as an economic power, and concomitantly, the distribution of wealth in the US commenced its widening separation.
America lost control of its character and with it the US’s competitive advantage. For the next thirty years, the rich would become richer and the poor poorer, and the poor had done nothing wrong. Avner Offer writes in “The Challenge of Affluence” (2007):
“The spread of affluence not only corrupts character, but has caused all these disorders and discontents: family breakdown, stress, road and landscape congestion, obesity, poverty, denial of health care, mental disorder, violence, economic fraud, and insecurity.”
Author Offer cites surveys in which today’s Americans declare themselves unhappier than their parents were. Young people who earlier heeded their elders are now prone to “intoxicating short-term dissipation.” He argues that advertising, by flaunting what we don’t have, is a major cause of this malaise. He continues, “By saturating the public domain with false sincerity, advertising makes genuine sincerity more difficult.”
Throughout history when a nation loses its perspective and confidence, it often goes to war to project its frustration and discontent to regain its momentum. The Vietnam War and its embarrassing conclusion indicate what happens when such plans go awry. It might have been a wake up call that something was wrong in paradise. Instead, it represented a shift from the common good to “personhood,” or from a sense of national and regional cooperation to everyone out for themselves while the getting was good.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the CEO and senior management level (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers: “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp 136 – 142). Massive wealth was created for a few that make the era of the Golden Age of the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century seem timid in comparison.
In 2005, the CEO of Wal-Mart earned 900 times the pay of his average employee. The Wal-Mart family that same year earned about $90 billion. That represents the equivalent of the earning of the bottom 40 percent of the US population; in other words, 120 million people.
The wealth gap now is the widest since the Great Depression of 1929 with 21.2 percent of the national income accruing to 1 percent of earners. The late management guru Peter Drucker was appalled with what he called “predatory corporate capitalism.” He was referring to the obscene salary and perks management bestowed upon itself without any regard to ethical performance criteria. Drucker judged such practices to be blatantly immoral and reminiscent of the robber baron mentality, and a major contributor to the loss of employee loyalty and allegiance (see Corporate Sin, p. 137).
Tony Judt sees this in a wider perspective as the incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of our society. The evidence? Congressional bills are written to private advantage; influential contributors determine the policies of presidential candidates; while individual voters have edged out of the public sphere. Overpaid executives and value obsessed shareholders have tilted the scales to short term growth and profit, obscuring and displacing the broader collective goals and common interests that once bound us together.
Robert Reich sees it differently. In his new book “Supercapitalism” (2007), the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration claims the superrich are not at fault, CEOs have not become greedy, corporate boards are still highly responsible, and investors are not docile. The question of the “common good” is not relevant on his scales. He argues it isn’t the job of business to be moral. Corporations just do what they do. Technology and self-interest, alone, are deterministic. There are no heroes, no villains, and no one to blame. There is only economic man.
Let’s face it, Reich is saying, we live in an economic age and survival of the fittest is in play. Reich, like Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat 2006), is a technological determinist seeing an integrated system of global capitalism as our ineluctable destiny.
In this context, “growth is good” and “progress is good.” Social class has been rendered anachronistic with economic man filling the void in the worship of productivity. Global warming, pollution, and other expressions of self-indulgent man will be addressed and resolved by technology, have no fear.
The absurdity of this new faith in unimpeded wealth creation is not considered. On the contrary, these technology determinists are confident that more efficiency-induced productivity growth will deliver expanding opportunity, upward mobility, greater happiness and well being, as well as greater affluence and security. In other words, this is a new belief system, which seems quite similar to the old.
Yet, the absurdity of this reality is that the American working middle class has all but disappeared and it has done nothing wrong. Today in 2007, 94 percent of working class Americans earn less than $93,000 a year.
What we have produced in the last 50 years with increased growth is greater social resentment rather than alleviating it; greater fragmentation of society from the nuclear family to the school to the church to the community to the workplace and beyond. We have systematically destroyed what made America great and the envy of the world, a solid working middle class, and applied the wrecking ball of indefinite economic growth to the soul of society. No longer are we clear on what binds us together finding a strange parity in polarity where cooperation once resided.
We have drugs not only in drug cartels or guns on the battlefield, but in the homes and classrooms and playgrounds across the nation, as media report in bold headlines violent and sick behavior in everyday life: spouses killing their partners, parents killing offspring, siblings killing each other, students killing teachers and other students, teachers seducing students, and care givers abusing children. While higher purpose has been lost along the way, terror and murder rage in our cities unchecked and uncontrolled. Our commercial driven society has a hole in it.
What appears behind hard covers in a book (re: Supercapitalism) as sensible economic policy carries, as Tony Judt points out, implicit civic costs. If we have learned nothing from the fall of great societies of the past, we should at least note that neglect of the powerless inevitably sealed their fate. Here Reich tells us only people with jobs are full members of the community. Others are less so and a drain on the economy. There is little room for caring or lifting the lame up when self-interest is the exclusive mantra of civilized society.
Yet no society is healthy or cohesive that lacks a moral compass and moral center with room for everyone whatever their disposition or circumstances.
Tony Judt may not have read, “A Look Back To See Ahead,” but he captures the flavor of it in these remarks:
“But here (reference Reich’s economic policy), as with welfare reform, what purports to represent the future has actually begun to resemble the past, breaking up the public and collective agencies of the modern era into fragmented and privately held assets reminiscent of a much earlier age. With the advent of the modern state, transport, hospitals, schools, mails, armies, prisons, police forces, and affordable access to culture – all of them essential services not obviously well served by the workings of the profit motive – were taken under public regulation or control. They are now being handed back to private entrepreneurs . . . This is just old-fashioned subsidy under another name and a moral hazard, inviting irresponsibility and often corruption.”
Imagine the absurdity of this. Public services are not for profit and all the monies stipulated for a given purpose are meant to go into the design and delivery system. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are for profit operations and must cut cost in the design and delivery in order to accrue a profit. Since budgets for these necessary services at taxpayer expense are seldom adequate in the first place, where can the profit be excised, but at the expense of the function?
The “invisible hand” of the market place may be favorable to commercial operations but it cannot be reproduced with the same success in noncommercial institutions. Here relations and cohesion is the product of trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality and authority. This gives stability and functional security.
People who elect to serve in institutions in a democracy do not have the same sense of efficiency, growth or profit that exists in the private sector, as they are driven by continuity and consistency in the design and delivery of services. There is a clear spiritual dimension to public policy and service.
The English reformer John Stuart Mill was troubled to see a disproportionate of benefits of the private economy going to financial interests at the expense of the majority. He wrote, “I find it essentially repulsive. A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”
So that is the challenge, to recognize and deal with the absurdities of reality.
If you have any doubt, listen to those campaigning in this quadrennial madness of presidential politics. People are experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity: economic with the sub prime real estate fiasco and rising gasoline prices at the pump, and physical with crime in the streets. It finds people with a new appetite for political symbols and territorial imperatives.
There is a rising attraction of protectionism in American politics with the appeal for anti-immigration policies controlled with walls, barriers and tests, forgetting that the economy rides on the backs of many undocumented workers. This hypocrisy and many other conundrums have driven the United States into a Prozac nation.
THE SHRINKING OF AMERICA BACK INTO A PROZAC NATION
“A Look Back To See Ahead” was written to alert readers to the chronic myths that our culture perpetuates, myths we continue to swallow whole no matter how absurd. I stepped back thirty years to surface the drum roll that dominated a paranoid society then, which was perambulating to perdition. I asked readers in the present to make note of this, and to take control of their circumstances with due diligence.
How? By rediscovering that reliable governor from within. I made no attempt to write a definitive book on our consuming mania for drugstore therapy. I did indicate, however, that we were duped a generation ago into believing the 1970s was the “Age of Depression.” Today, soul engineers as advance representatives of pharmaceutical companies tell us this once again. What is bizarre about this is that we have been reduced to a psychological society in which common behavior has become a sickness.
To show you how this works, consider The Oprah Winfrey Show in the summer of 2002. She had Ricky Williams on her show, the Heisman Trophy holder, and an extraordinaire running back with the Miami Dolphins. He was on the show to confess his consuming anxiety, which was shyness. It so happens that the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo-SmithKline was paying Williams for his appearance, and was in fact pushing its drug Paxil CR as a remedy for this condition.
There is nothing out of the ordinary about this except that most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones with some drug a miraculous cure for them. Pharmaceutical companies know convictions obliterate perceived needs. So, they focus on our convictions and design products identified with them. This should come as no surprise as we manage our health care system with products that will match these convictions. Not convinced? Look at all the cold medicines, headache remedies, energy boosters, and so on. They emanate from and follow our convictions.
Nothing is left to chance. For what we believe ails us a plethora of drugstore products will appear. Major pharmaceutical corporations spend $25 billion worldwide on marketing, and employ an army of Washington lobbyists to see that legislation is passed that is drug company friendly. Drug makers’ power is so disproportionately huge that they even dictate how they are to be regulated. They also shape much of the medical research agenda, and spin the findings of such research in their favor. They conceal incriminating data, co-opt potential critics, and colonize both the minds of doctors and our own.
In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield cite that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of disability, behind heart disease.
Unfortunately, WHO fails to distinguish major depression from genuine sadness. This is largely due to the influence of pharmaceutical companies who are less interested in answering a need but in turbo charging a conviction, such as depression. It is the tactic of exaggerating the problem and implying medication will easily fix it. Drug makers find there is no place for sadness. If we are in tears at the loss of a loved one, we must be depressed when actually we are dealing naturally with our sadness.
During the past half-century, with such tranquilizers as Miltown and Valium, Americans became convinced that medication would neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt.
Christopher Lane In “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness” (2007) shows how Madison Avenue promoted shyness as a social anxiety disorder and revved it up into a national emergency. With the right regiment of medication the individual yearning to be born again without the nuisance of subscribing to a creed could find his way to drugstore Nirvana.
Valium, some readers may recall, was said not to be addictive, but such promises were dashed when serious neurotic and psychotic episodes became common with its misuse. It was meant to calm anxiety but often led to mental fogginess and dependency.
Meanwhile, Prozac and its cousins were very different. They enhanced alertness and made users feel as if a better self were surfacing. Peter Kramer named this phenomenon, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” in “Listening to Prozac” (1993). Here utopian convictions raced well ahead of drug companies’ most optimistic predictions. America fell in love with Prozac.
By the 1990s not all was well in the Prozac nation. Users were being warned of the possibility of experiencing uncontrollable tremors, diminished sexual capacity, and a growing tolerance that might lead to noxious higher doses, an inclination to suicide, or other self-destructive tendencies.
These warnings were largely ignored, as users were willing to take the risks against the prospects of becoming self-assured and gregarious. As critic Frederick Crews points out, “One thing is certain: the antidepressant makers have exploited our gullibility, obfuscated known risks, and treated the victims of their recklessness with contempt.”
David Healy in “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007) acknowledges the legitimacy of this concern. He is a distinguished researcher and practicing psychiatrist, and has found major pharmaceutical companies close ranks against perceived troublemakers when damaging side effects of prescribed drugs are pointed out. As a psychopharmacologist, he saw drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established. Healy sees this as no more reasonable than claiming headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.
There is so much myth about the brain and serotonin. The idea that our brain needs a certain amount of serotonin, and when we run out, it’s like running out of gas is nonsense. Contrary to propaganda, the brain possesses no known “depression center,” and about 95 percent of our serotonin is found elsewhere in the body. Prozac, Soloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa – serotonin-boosting pills – are promoted as drugs, which will surely do the trick. Thus millions who might need only counseling expose themselves to these drugs and take incredible risks including horrific withdrawal symptoms, dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation.
“Let Them Eat Prozac” profiles a disturbing development. When a user dies and the bereave file a suit of negligence against the pharmaceutical company, the drug maker’s lawyers parry the suit by explaining the drug-induced stabbing, shooting, or self-hanging by a formerly peaceable individual was actually a manifestation of the not-yet-subdued depressive state of the user.
When Healy attempted to punch holes in this doubletalk by insisting on an extensive double-blind randomized trial to determine causal link to destructive behavior, he was denied a professorship at the University of Toronto Research Institute. Pfizer, maker of Zoloft, is a major supporter of the institute.
Healy further notes that the FDA is timid, understaffed and under funded. Worse yet, drug companies have infiltrated the FDA with friends of the pharmaceutical industry. Even respected medical journals are careful not to offend drug companies as they advertise widely in these journals and fund professional conferences and trade fairs. Then too, leading professors accept huge honorariums in return for venal research, while many “research” papers are actually ghostwritten by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, major drug makers don’t bend the rules; they buy the rulebook.
THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY, REALITY
Thirty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) voted in conferences on what was and wasn’t a mental disease. At the time, members voted that homosexuality was a mental illness. It has since been relegated to a lifestyle. That said the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) doesn’t give an automatic pass to drug makers.
So, can we rely on this guidebook for objective judgment, identification and treatment of mental illnesses?
Christopher Lane is not so sure. He notes that the DSM makes a case for such dubious pathognomonic symptoms of depression as “feeling low, worrying, bearing grudges, and smoking.” This differs little with the original subjective criteria of thirty years ago. In fact, today mental disorders are presented in bingo style and affixed to a patient who fits five out of a possible nine listed symptoms of a specific disorder. Not surprising, drug maker advertisers often use these lists. They tie the DSM checklist to a drug they are promoting asking readers to discuss the use of the drug with their physician.
It is scary when you stop to think about it, but unfortunately, few of us ever stop to do so. We take authority figures at their word. Seldom do we question the motivation of the source of the authority no matter how silly the criteria of the argument.
Advertisers exploit this vulnerability and no place more effectively than in matters of health, happiness and security.
The American Psychiatric Association since the 1970s has not been pushing drugs, but doing everything to lend greater scientific respectability to the psychiatric field. It has attempted to do this by improving validity and reliability in the more accurate identification of mental disorders.
What has happened instead is the APA has made a faint gesture toward this goal through the false concreteness of checklists. Psychologists have done it as well but they don’t have the weapon of prescribing drugs. Only medical doctors, and psychiatrists are medical doctors, have such power.
The reality is that the APA and DSM have attempted to imply that mental disorders are as sharply recognized as diabetes and tuberculosis when they are not. Psychiatrists when they prescribe drugs are often playing Russian roulette with the patient, emphasizing the benefits of a drug while failing to stress the side effects as well.
Attention Deficit Hypertension Disorder (ADHD) is a case in point. There is a whole regiment of drugs prescribed for hyperactive children, the most famous being Ritalin. This is not the approach of the Advent Home in Calhoun, Tennessee (see “Making A Difference Quietly,” www.fisherofideas.com, October 25, 2007).
Dr. Blondel Senior has found that ADHD is often misdiagnosed; that environmentally prompted mood swings, those responding to stress or hardship or sudden loss, create dysfunctional states that are receptive to drug free treatment. How so?
The person is placed in a controlled and reinforcing environment. Boys at the Advent Home receive a large dose of reality in work details, rigorous academic programs, creative pursuits and recreational sports. This is a simple and direct rational health care formula compared to the cumbersome and profit driven system of the APA.
Time will tell if psychiatry can escape bureaucratized psychological treatment, settle on a discrete list of disorders, and become less enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and approach the success level of Dr. Senior’s Advent Home.
And finally, the reality is that economic man is not a replacement but the complement to social man. Why does it have to be either, or?
While pharmaceutical companies urge us to replace nature with drugs to cope with our shrinking world, their hired promoters would exonerate us from our self-indulgence and economic excess. These apologists would insist that technology and self-interest, not morality, drive postmodern man; that economics is not about ethics but about business. As the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed, “If people want morality, let them get it from their archbishop.”
They don’t get it! These global capitalists, capricious pharmaceutical companies, and ambivalent psychiatrists, all in leadership positions, are wheeling a wrecking ball at reality, forgetting that there is a common thread that connects us to each other and the same history.
Profits cannot be more important than people nor competition more an expression of humanity than cooperation. The absence of leadership in every endeavor has placed us in this predicament and jeopardy, noting it will change nothing, but it is a beginning.
References: Tony Judt, “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 22-27; Robert Reich, “Supercapitalism” (2007); Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, “The Loss of Sadness” (2007); Christopher Lane, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (2007); David Healy, “Let Them Eat Prozac” (2007); Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk, “The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry” (`1992) and “Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders” (1997); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (1995) and “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007); James R. Fisher, Jr., “Making A Difference Quietly” (www.fisherofideas.com, 2007); Frederick Crews, “Talking Back To Prozac,” NYR, December 6, 2007, pp 10 – 14; Andrew Hacker, “They’d Much Rather Be Rich,” NYR, October 11, 2007; Avner Offer, “The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950” (2007); Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, “Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years” (2007); Edward Findlay, “Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in Thought of Jan Patocka (2002); Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac” (1993); Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Flat” (1993).
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