ADVANCE COPY – IOWA BOOK TOUR SPEECH FOUR
THE NEED FOR COMPLETION & THE PENALTY OF DELAY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“By the streets of ‘by and by,’ one arrives at the house of ‘never’.”
Cervantes
It is a privilege and an honor to once again be with Clintonians of my birth. This is the third of fourth time I have had this privilege. It is now one of my now common practices to start my book tour in Iowa, in Clinton the city of my birth, and to talk to a community that has been knocked down several times, but is on the march.
While I’m doing that I will also be reminding you ladies and gentlemen that the challenge ahead is far greater than it has ever been in the past. This is because the lethargy, passivity and reactionism have become part of our hard wiring. It is what I call the pathology of normalcy because it is so common to us that it is not noticed, and therefore not alarming. This pathology finds us stuck in a convention that ill serves us. As is our want in typically dealing with this, we resort to crisis management, solving problems that were caused by our pathology in the first place. It has become a full-time job solving the problems that we create, and then congratulating ourselves for the solving when the problems shouldn't have occurred in the first place.
It is interesting to note that it wasn’t until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 that we got into WWII; it wasn’t until the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 that we got into the space race; and it wasn’t until 1980 after Japan, Inc. had been eating our lunch for nearly two decades that we realized our dominance in light fixers, large appliances and automobiles was eroding seriously.
How could this happen to us? Well, it turns out it is ironic and paradoxical.
Three Americans that could not convince American manufacturers to update their quality control practices found willing ears to listen to them in Japan. These Americans were J. M. Juran, W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker. Juran was an expert in process flow analysis identifying and solving chronic problems of quality in manufacturing. Deming was the inventor of Quality Control Circles, a process where workers on the line met regularly to solve work related problems. He also devised a powerful statistical quality control system that came to be known as “Total Quality Management” or TQM. And Drucker brought to the Japanese the wisdom of “Just-In-Time (JIT) supplies so that a company would not have to be burdened with huge warehouses. He also streamlined Japanese management practices for greater efficacy.
Suddenly Japan was transformed into Japan, Inc. and went from making shoddy products to making the best quality products in these major industries in the world.
At the same time the complexion of the American workforce was changing drastically from primarily blue-collar to white-collar workers. Yet, these workers were being managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as if they were still unskilled or semi-skilled workers on an assembly line. The G.I. Bill seeded this transition after WWII in which men and women who had been in the military service rushed to colleges and universities across the country. It was a new day that was not recognized either for its potential or derailing possibilities to American enterprise.
In a short fifty years or since the end of WWII, this development changed the American workforce into the most powerful possessor of intellectual capital in the world, and yet it has never been exploited to its potential.
American enterprise found itself dominated by knowledge workers but it still insisted in maintaining the bureaucratic dominance of position power, wondering why so many of these well-trained workers brought their bodies to work but left their minds at home. I am not talking about this problem hypothetically as I experienced it at every level of my career: from a laborer in a chemical plant during summers while going to college; as a research & development chemist, and then chemical sales engineer in the field; then as a field manager and international corporate executive traveling the world. I was expected to keep my head down, go with the flow, never question management even though I was part of the corps, always expected to be “one of the team” even when the team was off the rails. My experience was not unique then nor is it now by my mail.
Somehow we got stuck in the arrogance of being number one and in having most things going our way as the world struggled to catch up after WWII.
So, in summary at this point, we needed a wake up call as our markets were disappearing and we paid little attention to the changing nature of the workforce. In 1950 nearly 90 percent of all workers were in skilled or semi-skilled jobs as laborers, and 10 percent were professionals, especially in our Fortune 500 companies. Today those numbers are totally reversed but yet we have done precious little to adjust to the changing demands of this new workforce, and we have paid dearly for it. I write about it in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) recording the passive behaviors of these professionals that act like social termites in the organization doing undetected damaged to be discovered only when it is too late for damage control. These passive behaviors have been calculated to cost American enterprise more than a $ trillion a year in lost productivity.
These professionals are stuck and so American enterprise is stuck as well.
What I’m attempting to say, and I don’t have the time to go into great detail that the book does, we created a mindset that looked for answers without changing the way we thought or without recognizing that our workplace culture was out of sync with its workers.
In an early book of mine published in 1990, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I predicted that entitlement programs that were approaching the National Debt would threaten the survival of many Fortune 500 companies. Sadly, my prediction, 17-years later, has come too often true. We were still caught up in the great line from GM’s CEO Wilson in the 1950s, “as GM goes so goes America.” That is now a sobering thought.
It is this arrogance that finds us now in jeopardy needing to catch up to our competitors that we once dominated. But it is not just in industry and commerce that we have this problem but also across America’s institutions. Time magazine came out with this recent cover story that we have no place in our school system for genius, that we want people to be as Garrison Keiller, a Minnesota humorous puts it, “good looking and a little above average.” Ironically, we have a system in sport in which excellence is pursued, meaning that only a small percentage of the student body ever participates in organized sports, but we don’t have it in the classroom. It is as if we are confident that chance will win out and that these gifted children will find their own way and not be shackled by this programming.
A computer consultant is helping me energize my website to produce more activity. In talking to him I learned two things: he is independently wealthy and does this mostly for fun, and is a college drop out. He told me this when I confessed I wasn’t too computer literate, and should treat me as a dull normal. He didn’t laugh.
“I’m thinking of going back to school to get educated,” he said.
Still in his twenties, I asked, “why did you drop out in the first place?”
He said he was bored, and couldn’t find anything that he wanted there. Then he added, “Now I see where some of the things I need I don’t have. I can do all kinds of things with the Internet, and it’s established six of my friends and me. So, now I have options. I have time to deal with my deficiencies.”
Curious, I asked, “What will you study?”
“Oh,” he said, “I’ll study the arts, literature, religion, philosophy, stuff like that.”
“How is that going to impact your work?”
“It will make me better.”
“But that’s all liberal arts stuff, none of its technology.”
“Didn’t I say? That’s what I’m missing.”
So, you see we have something that is vital to us. I don’t have the time but the reason I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) is my sense of this business of being stuck. I wrote an essay in 1972 and it was this essay, now updated to include today, showing how little has changed in that 35-year period except the names. It was written as a kind of catharsis after completing an assignment in South Africa, experiencing apartheid, and retiring in my thirties to do something like my computer friends says he wants to do: I went back to school.
My experience was to find the university was a factory like the one I had left, producing a product, and wanting as little interference as possible in the process. My professors didn’t want to know how their theories in social psychology and organization behavior worked or failed to work. They wanted me, this mature student, to behave as if I was again 18-years-old and fearing what would happen if I stepped out of line.
I hope you will purchase my book as I’m sure you will find it stimulating. I will be here to sign it now. If you want to hear more remarks relating to this book, I will be speaking at the book signing dinner at the Best Western Frontier on Wednesday, September 12. My remark, I assure you, will be on other aspects of this book then. I hope I will see some of you there. Thank you very much.
________
Dr. Fisher's books are available on line at http://www.amazon.com/.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
ADVANCE COPY OF SPEECH -- IOWA BOOK TOUR: HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN!
ADVANCE COPY – IOWA BOOK TOUR SPEECH THREE
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN!
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our to-day.”
Nietzsche
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
What is forgotten about the human species is that we come in alone and we leave alone. The most important person for us to accept in the whole firmament of life is ourselves. The most important person to lead towards the harnessing of our attributes and talents away from our deficiencies and weaknesses is ourselves. The only person that matters in the eyes of God’s is what matters in our own eyes as revealed by our souls.
We spend our whole lifetime worrying about things that never happen. We build up anxieties and imagined fears. Like the slithering snake that happens to represent our primordial brainstem that slithers through our psyche, we are not in control.
We have to look for control outside ourselves. We have to have a personal trainer monitor and motivate our exercise; family and friends to flatter, forgive and protect us from awareness of our weaknesses. We need positive reinforcement to generate self-esteem, which becomes an oxymoron. We don’t recognize our worth until someone tells us. It is as if we are stuck with this stranger and forced to live with him, and, well, it is just not fair.
Control, you see, is not the absence of problems or highs and lows, failures and successes, disappointments and euphoria. Control is recognizing chronic occurrences that throw us off stride and off balance because we refuse to accept them as part of growing and the growing up process. It is why we are a nation of adults suspended in adolescence. Immaturity is nothing if it is not being stuck forever in adolescence.
We have situations or issues with people that constantly cause us great frustration because we have unresolved situations or issues constantly with and within ourselves. It is impossible to accept the behavior of others if we fail to be self-accepting of who and what and how we are.
I am thinking of the person that gives up drinking and that fraternizes with drinkers to his own constant punishment. I am thinking of the person who doesn’t choose his friends wisely and they become corrupted, and so by proximity, he is seen as being corrupted as well. I am thinking about the woman who marries an abusive husband, divorces him and marries another man who is equally abusive of her. I am thinking about people who get in debt, work their way out of it, and then fall into debt again. I am thinking about people who are so enamored of toys that they put themselves in jeopardy buying even more expensive toys although they can’t afford them, don’t need them, or don’t have time for them. This sends shock waves through the system, hidden by running faster while not moving forward at all. I am thinking about people who gamble and do drugs and other self-negating things when they think they are seeking release, relief and pleasure when they are actually driving pain and sorrow deeper into their souls. They are destroying the person whom they have never come to accept, themselves. I am thinking about people who are always looking for a bandwagon to jump on so that they might enjoy some legitimacy, some authenticity, and some identity. I am thinking about people who stay in a job they hate and then sabotage the job and wreak havoc around them until they are eventually let go. They see themselves as the victim not realizing it was only a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. I am thinking about people that believe the world will get better when the right leader surfaces without them changing at all. I am thinking about people who refuse to accept themselves, as they are, which makes it impossible for them to accept others as they find them. I am thinking about people who are afraid to step outside convention or what others think important, failing ever to have an original thought. In this distress, they carp and complain for attention because they believe everyone else has it better then they do, are more gifted and better connected. I am thinking about people who have never come to accept that if they are not the leader of their destiny then who do they think is.
A first step in becoming unstuck is to accept your vanities, your human nature, indeed, your weaknesses. They don’t compel you to throw yourself against walls, but your blind strengths do. These strengths hide in the recesses of your mind like lurking villains. Once they come out of the shadows, and into the sunlight, you see them for what they are, your humanity naked and undressed, vulnerable and fragile, for they are no longer frightening.
The more you grow towards your origin the less remote you are to yourself and the less confused and traumatized you become by normal human events. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD comes at a time when the reading of it will bring you into intimate contact with that person you are too busy to visit, yourself. It may startle you to discover that you are never alone or lonely when you are one with yourself.
Nietzsche put it best: One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. To know thyself is not enough; accepting thyself as well must complement the knowing.
Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available on line with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or your favorite bookstore.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN!
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our to-day.”
Nietzsche
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
What is forgotten about the human species is that we come in alone and we leave alone. The most important person for us to accept in the whole firmament of life is ourselves. The most important person to lead towards the harnessing of our attributes and talents away from our deficiencies and weaknesses is ourselves. The only person that matters in the eyes of God’s is what matters in our own eyes as revealed by our souls.
We spend our whole lifetime worrying about things that never happen. We build up anxieties and imagined fears. Like the slithering snake that happens to represent our primordial brainstem that slithers through our psyche, we are not in control.
We have to look for control outside ourselves. We have to have a personal trainer monitor and motivate our exercise; family and friends to flatter, forgive and protect us from awareness of our weaknesses. We need positive reinforcement to generate self-esteem, which becomes an oxymoron. We don’t recognize our worth until someone tells us. It is as if we are stuck with this stranger and forced to live with him, and, well, it is just not fair.
Control, you see, is not the absence of problems or highs and lows, failures and successes, disappointments and euphoria. Control is recognizing chronic occurrences that throw us off stride and off balance because we refuse to accept them as part of growing and the growing up process. It is why we are a nation of adults suspended in adolescence. Immaturity is nothing if it is not being stuck forever in adolescence.
We have situations or issues with people that constantly cause us great frustration because we have unresolved situations or issues constantly with and within ourselves. It is impossible to accept the behavior of others if we fail to be self-accepting of who and what and how we are.
I am thinking of the person that gives up drinking and that fraternizes with drinkers to his own constant punishment. I am thinking of the person who doesn’t choose his friends wisely and they become corrupted, and so by proximity, he is seen as being corrupted as well. I am thinking about the woman who marries an abusive husband, divorces him and marries another man who is equally abusive of her. I am thinking about people who get in debt, work their way out of it, and then fall into debt again. I am thinking about people who are so enamored of toys that they put themselves in jeopardy buying even more expensive toys although they can’t afford them, don’t need them, or don’t have time for them. This sends shock waves through the system, hidden by running faster while not moving forward at all. I am thinking about people who gamble and do drugs and other self-negating things when they think they are seeking release, relief and pleasure when they are actually driving pain and sorrow deeper into their souls. They are destroying the person whom they have never come to accept, themselves. I am thinking about people who are always looking for a bandwagon to jump on so that they might enjoy some legitimacy, some authenticity, and some identity. I am thinking about people who stay in a job they hate and then sabotage the job and wreak havoc around them until they are eventually let go. They see themselves as the victim not realizing it was only a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. I am thinking about people that believe the world will get better when the right leader surfaces without them changing at all. I am thinking about people who refuse to accept themselves, as they are, which makes it impossible for them to accept others as they find them. I am thinking about people who are afraid to step outside convention or what others think important, failing ever to have an original thought. In this distress, they carp and complain for attention because they believe everyone else has it better then they do, are more gifted and better connected. I am thinking about people who have never come to accept that if they are not the leader of their destiny then who do they think is.
A first step in becoming unstuck is to accept your vanities, your human nature, indeed, your weaknesses. They don’t compel you to throw yourself against walls, but your blind strengths do. These strengths hide in the recesses of your mind like lurking villains. Once they come out of the shadows, and into the sunlight, you see them for what they are, your humanity naked and undressed, vulnerable and fragile, for they are no longer frightening.
The more you grow towards your origin the less remote you are to yourself and the less confused and traumatized you become by normal human events. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD comes at a time when the reading of it will bring you into intimate contact with that person you are too busy to visit, yourself. It may startle you to discover that you are never alone or lonely when you are one with yourself.
Nietzsche put it best: One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. To know thyself is not enough; accepting thyself as well must complement the knowing.
Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available on line with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or your favorite bookstore.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
DR. FISHER, WHAT DO YOU PRESCRIBE?
DR. FISHER, WHAT DO YOU PRESCRIBE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“We seem ambitious God’s whole work to undon – With new diseases on ourselves we war, and with new physics, a worse engine far.”
John Donne
For your information:
A publisher and ghost writer of international best sellers in this genre, and an international consultant and college professor in organization development wrote to me and this was my reply:
_________________
Only yesterday I was talking to my publisher who is about to work with me when I come back from my book tour (September 2007) to get the ideas into people's hands that are already in the people's medium, mainly my books that are languishing, not on bookstore bookshelves because they don't get there, but in the publisher houses that wait anxiously for the call to press them into print.
That said in THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (The Delta Group Florida 1995) and subsequently in a more declarative form, CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS (AuthorHouse 2000), I offered a "Blueprint for Senior Management" (pp 82 - 86).
Incidentally, I define "corporate sin" as the collective waste of human resources and individual waste of worker talent.
I will summarize here what those pages suggest as an initial blueprint. I differ with best selling author Tom Peters in that I don't believe you "search for excellence," but create it. You do this by designing (blueprint) and building a culture consistent with your organizational profile, demographics and geography (The Fisher Paradigm © ™).
First an aside:
In SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), and again in a major article in The Journal for Quality &Participation (Winter 2002), an article titled "Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership" (pp 20 - 24), I present the formula for organizational culture:
The Structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates the prevailing organizational behavior; the prevailing organizational behavior establishes whether an organization is to thrive, vegetate or expire.
Now, from CORPORATE SIN (pp 82 – 86):
The way to leverage professional workers' energy and develop their positive mindset is first and foremost you create the appropriate culture. Senior management should:
(1) Recognize that there is no idealistic corporate culture. All differ. All are unique to their respective histories and cultural biases of the groups within and between them. The workplace culture is a combination of micro and macro cultures within and between functional entities, and must be understood in those terms.
(2) You don't search for the appropriate workplace culture. You create it! Many companies profiled in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's book "In Search of Excellence," learned this the hard way attempting to imitate these companies only to lose their way.
(3) The drive for change invariably comes from the foundation of the company, seldom from the top. People at the bottom have little to lose; people at the top have everything to lose. In a climate of tension and lax productivity, senior management has gone to human resources for help. HR came up with touchy feely cosmetology that no one bought. Companies slid from the culture of comfort to complacency bypassing contribution. Workers obediently played out the charade. They didn't volunteer answers of questions not asked. Yet they had all the answers. It will take trust to bring workers out of their shell, but it is essential to putting the ship back on course.
(4) We are in the midst of a quiet revolution in which not only the color of the collar of workers is changing, but the whole complexity of collective enterprise is changing as well. The command and control philosophy of the hierarchical organization is giving way to worker-manager interdependence. The span of control is giving way to the span of relationships. Intracompany competition, a horrible idea of the times, is giving way to interdepartmental cooperation. Regarding trust, when companies turn to their people for answers rather than high paid consultants, they experience synergy beyond comprehension.
(5) The key to everything is the Culture of Contribution. This is not a program. This is a process. It represents a mindset change. This culture is not created by rhetoric or fostered by preferred executive parking, special perks for management, or executive offices separate from workers and the workplace. It is how the organization is structured that determines whether or not this culture has a chance. You create a Culture of Contribution when you seek to meet the mission of the organization and the needs of the workers as a parity proposition, not either one at the expense of the other.
(6) It is apparent that senior management doesn't get it. It is receptive to change as long as it doesn't cost too much, produces quick results, doesn't disrupt normal operations, and most important of all, can be delegated to subordinates and answering to it without losing a step. Commitment is not enough. Total involvement is required. This is so because workers have been programmed for a half century to be polite, reactive, obedient, submissive and passive. This is a wasted resource and will take patience and set backs before the Quantum leap forward is possible.
It is well to note that even though disruption and the need for change come from the bottom of the organization, the architects of change must always come from the top. The evidence is that senior management is still not willing to take that risk. It is why I keep knocking at its door.
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Subj: Re: Dr. Fisher: What do you prescribe?
From the professor:
Jim i am a huge fan of self organizing principles, if you know political theory it is called anarchy. Dee Hock has his brand that has shown to work but for the future get Tapscott new book, Wikinomics, and you will be blown away with how much potential we finally have for self organizing. almost a decade ago i wrote my final letter to my academic colleagues as i was stepping down from board chair of the OD division of the academy of management, i wanted all 2000 of us professors to get serious and to get involved in understanding and perhaps promoting self organizing models for the next generation. not too much has happened but when both the socio-biologists and the techie types get together we may move. i found the short note on self organizing systems, though dated it may mean something to those of us who know there are many better ways of organizing
-------------------
From the publisher:
Jim,
Trapped in administrivia.
Powerless to act.
What a terrible fate.
What's the prescription, Dr.?
Scribble it on a 3x5 note
No long sermon
_________________
Dr. Fisher’s book are all available on line from http://www.amazon.com/ or ask for them at your favorite bookstore.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“We seem ambitious God’s whole work to undon – With new diseases on ourselves we war, and with new physics, a worse engine far.”
John Donne
For your information:
A publisher and ghost writer of international best sellers in this genre, and an international consultant and college professor in organization development wrote to me and this was my reply:
_________________
Only yesterday I was talking to my publisher who is about to work with me when I come back from my book tour (September 2007) to get the ideas into people's hands that are already in the people's medium, mainly my books that are languishing, not on bookstore bookshelves because they don't get there, but in the publisher houses that wait anxiously for the call to press them into print.
That said in THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (The Delta Group Florida 1995) and subsequently in a more declarative form, CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS (AuthorHouse 2000), I offered a "Blueprint for Senior Management" (pp 82 - 86).
Incidentally, I define "corporate sin" as the collective waste of human resources and individual waste of worker talent.
I will summarize here what those pages suggest as an initial blueprint. I differ with best selling author Tom Peters in that I don't believe you "search for excellence," but create it. You do this by designing (blueprint) and building a culture consistent with your organizational profile, demographics and geography (The Fisher Paradigm © ™).
First an aside:
In SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), and again in a major article in The Journal for Quality &Participation (Winter 2002), an article titled "Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership" (pp 20 - 24), I present the formula for organizational culture:
The Structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates the prevailing organizational behavior; the prevailing organizational behavior establishes whether an organization is to thrive, vegetate or expire.
Now, from CORPORATE SIN (pp 82 – 86):
The way to leverage professional workers' energy and develop their positive mindset is first and foremost you create the appropriate culture. Senior management should:
(1) Recognize that there is no idealistic corporate culture. All differ. All are unique to their respective histories and cultural biases of the groups within and between them. The workplace culture is a combination of micro and macro cultures within and between functional entities, and must be understood in those terms.
(2) You don't search for the appropriate workplace culture. You create it! Many companies profiled in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's book "In Search of Excellence," learned this the hard way attempting to imitate these companies only to lose their way.
(3) The drive for change invariably comes from the foundation of the company, seldom from the top. People at the bottom have little to lose; people at the top have everything to lose. In a climate of tension and lax productivity, senior management has gone to human resources for help. HR came up with touchy feely cosmetology that no one bought. Companies slid from the culture of comfort to complacency bypassing contribution. Workers obediently played out the charade. They didn't volunteer answers of questions not asked. Yet they had all the answers. It will take trust to bring workers out of their shell, but it is essential to putting the ship back on course.
(4) We are in the midst of a quiet revolution in which not only the color of the collar of workers is changing, but the whole complexity of collective enterprise is changing as well. The command and control philosophy of the hierarchical organization is giving way to worker-manager interdependence. The span of control is giving way to the span of relationships. Intracompany competition, a horrible idea of the times, is giving way to interdepartmental cooperation. Regarding trust, when companies turn to their people for answers rather than high paid consultants, they experience synergy beyond comprehension.
(5) The key to everything is the Culture of Contribution. This is not a program. This is a process. It represents a mindset change. This culture is not created by rhetoric or fostered by preferred executive parking, special perks for management, or executive offices separate from workers and the workplace. It is how the organization is structured that determines whether or not this culture has a chance. You create a Culture of Contribution when you seek to meet the mission of the organization and the needs of the workers as a parity proposition, not either one at the expense of the other.
(6) It is apparent that senior management doesn't get it. It is receptive to change as long as it doesn't cost too much, produces quick results, doesn't disrupt normal operations, and most important of all, can be delegated to subordinates and answering to it without losing a step. Commitment is not enough. Total involvement is required. This is so because workers have been programmed for a half century to be polite, reactive, obedient, submissive and passive. This is a wasted resource and will take patience and set backs before the Quantum leap forward is possible.
It is well to note that even though disruption and the need for change come from the bottom of the organization, the architects of change must always come from the top. The evidence is that senior management is still not willing to take that risk. It is why I keep knocking at its door.
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Subj: Re: Dr. Fisher: What do you prescribe?
From the professor:
Jim i am a huge fan of self organizing principles, if you know political theory it is called anarchy. Dee Hock has his brand that has shown to work but for the future get Tapscott new book, Wikinomics, and you will be blown away with how much potential we finally have for self organizing. almost a decade ago i wrote my final letter to my academic colleagues as i was stepping down from board chair of the OD division of the academy of management, i wanted all 2000 of us professors to get serious and to get involved in understanding and perhaps promoting self organizing models for the next generation. not too much has happened but when both the socio-biologists and the techie types get together we may move. i found the short note on self organizing systems, though dated it may mean something to those of us who know there are many better ways of organizing
-------------------
From the publisher:
Jim,
Trapped in administrivia.
Powerless to act.
What a terrible fate.
What's the prescription, Dr.?
Scribble it on a 3x5 note
No long sermon
_________________
Dr. Fisher’s book are all available on line from http://www.amazon.com/ or ask for them at your favorite bookstore.
DR. FISHER, PLEASE EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
DR. FISHER, PLEASE EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“I can promise to be candid, though I may not be impartial.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Senate day.”
Pitrim Sorokin
An emailer writes:
I’ve received your advance remarks to be made on your book tour in Iowa in September. With all due respect, Dr. Fisher, I take umbrage at your “counterintuitive” remarks. It is a word you especially favor. I imagine you mean it doesn’t make sense in a normal context consistent (again with a favorite expression of yours) “with our hard wiring.” I am mainly confused with your cavalier use of the term “leaderless leadership” and expressions “we are all leaders or none of us are.” Could you take a moment and explain yourself, as these brainteasers are relatively meaningless to me as matters now stand. If you respond, please send me a blind copy. Thank you.
THE MEANING OF WORDS, THE ESSENCE OF IDEAS
When you are at the advance stage of your life, as I am, where you can look back much further than you can look forward, and you are by nature a thinker, an idea guy, provocative words surface because they resonate with you, and cry out for attention.
There is always the danger you will trigger offense rather than insight, and fly over or under the reader’s radar. It is a risk the writer takes willingly.
In the opening pages of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, I claim, my reason for writing the original essay was to stimulate the conscience of ordinary souls like myself, not scholars, not dilettantes, not specialists with these candid assertions:
I claim no authority but write from my perceptions, reading and experience.
We all have an interest in what makes people act the way they do.
We are all born wonderers and therefore all philosophers.
We are all born storytellers.
We are all selling something.
My writing is meant to trigger new ideas from the reader’s perspective with the objective of making connection.
Nothing is ever written in concrete in a world of constant change. This implies the wisdom of going with the flow. To resist rather than embrace this flow is to become stuck in fear and doubt, and know only misery. That record is clear on this.
THE GENESIS OF LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP
My sense is we see leaderless leadership everywhere but we are not looking. It has become part of our pathology of normalcy.
Leadership is a victim of the entropy of history. The answers no longer reside in the privileged few, but in the passive many. Paradoxically, stability now emanates from the bottom, up, not the top, down. Decisions from corporate mahogany row and academic ivory towers are being superseded in everyday life by decisions at the level of consequences. It is a painful time for everyone because this is counterintuitive to the way they have been programmed.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way. Despite this, we have our foot to the floor on the brake and accelerator at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. Frantic activity has replaced suitable action. We go along to get along until our security disappears. We don’t want to think; we want escape.
Consequently, we are stuck in forward inertia surrounded by our electronic wonders and toys of distraction failing to understand what is happening or why.
We have destroyed our environment and vulgarized our lifestyle. No one says, “stop, look back, see what we’ve done,” because no one is in charge. As we seek more, we become less fulfilled and more impoverished.
Then there is the herd mentality within our human psyche that holds us to the idea the few will always take care of us, the many. The few are still trying but failing. For one, the few are caught up in the same mania; for another, they no longer are in charge.
Leadership exclusively in a leader is now a useless and irrelevant idea, and not working anymore.
That said there is little evidence leadership protocol has changed, only the efficacy of leadership continues to decline. Society is sick with the chronic illness of recidivism, stuck solving the same problems it has experienced before. Look at 2007 and you will see it is a mirror image of the 1970s.
This is so because the many, now a dominant professional class, don’t want the responsibility or accountability of leadership as they are programmed to being cared for and so cling to their comfort zone.
This is odd now that the majority of workers is professionally trained and possesses the efficacy of knowledge power. Professionals refuse to concede the leadership shift to them mainly because of their anachronistic programming, while management with its position power attempts to lead, denying its power has been lost.
The result is chaos, insanity and mayhem in the workplace where the body still lives but the spirit has died. Hope rides the precarious slope of trust that this, too, will pass without anything having to change at all. Could they be right?
Pitrim Sorokin suggests we are in a new phase of human history at the end of a 600-year-long Sensate day and entering a new glorious 600-year Ideational day. He is not alarmed with the dissonance, or the blatant greed, seeing it as evidence of the dying sensate.
Nearly seventy years ago he could see the iconography of the sacred being displaced by the pornography of the profane in art, music, literature, dress, language and behavior.
A crisis in identity would be revealed by people resorting to the ancient ritual of body painting (tattooing) to prove they exist; bring attention to themselves; and make a bold statement of an individuality they did not feel.
In the sensate period, he saw liberty as being “outer.” Ergo, outside authority was the first and compelling reference as society saw people forever as children needing to be stewarded throughout life for their own good.
In the ideational period, however, he sees liberty will be “inner.” The authority of self-responsibility and self-governance will come to the fore. Guidance will be from within rather than without. Self-reliance will be the byword.
In the sensate period, science and truth have been objective and cognitive based exclusively on the senses and empirical research. What cannot be objectively analyzed does not exist because it cannot be proved or disproved.
In the ideational period, science and truth will represent a synthesis of faith and the senses by reason. The intuitive side of human nature will be nurtured and come into its day.
In the sensate period, ethics has been based on the maximum happiness for the maximum number of human beings and has been pleasure driven.
In the ideational period, ethics will represent a synthesis of sensate (material) and ideational (spiritual) values in support of each other. The conquest of nature will pass into history as conservation and self-restraint will prevail at all levels.
Many scientists and social philosophers are already exploring ideational themes including the place of the supernatural in a material universe and the nature of the soul.
Clearly, we are in transition and moving so swiftly our minds are reluctant to grasp much less deal with this rupture with things as they have been.
Against this assumed shift, leaders are trying to lead; followers are looking for leaders; and both are frustrated as no one apparently wants to go with the flow. Buddha says, you cannot push the water. You cannot push people and society into the future that is governed by an eternal present, but you learn from it and flow with it.
We once had the “Divine Rights of Kings” in which kings were treated as if gods on earth. Monarchs vested themselves with the aura of majesty and ruled with impunity. They determined who lived and died, who prospered and who didn’t.
Centuries later, we have their stand ins: presidents, prime ministers, ayatollahs, dictators, CEOs, popes & bishops, educators and academics, pundits and soothsayers, celebrities & entertainers, and bosses of all descriptions. They have assumed the specter of power from that original heady source. We obliged them by giving them our power.
So, now in government, they control our freedom; in industry and commerce they control our jobs; in the church they control our hearts; in school they control our minds; in media they control our thinking, in leisure they control our time; and in work they control our security.
Liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this sensate day are outer, not inner, progressing from demand to reaction; obedience to submission; surrender to retreat, always avoiding conflict or standing our ground. But now it penalizes us all.
No one anticipated the rise of the professional class, or how it would become “the mad monarchs of the madhouse” (see Six Silent Killers, CRC Press 1998). Instead of assuming leadership roles, professionals have retreated into passive behaviors.
Were professionals operating at even 50 percent of their capability, few jobs would have left American shores. No third world nation could touch them with cheap labor because they would be a fire in the mind of enterprise. US intellectual capital is the superpower that is yet to be tapped.
A short fifty years ago, following WWII, the professional class was only ten percent of the workforce. Ninety percent were skilled and unskilled manual laborers. Today, the manual labor working class has nearly disappeared as professionals now dominate.
We are in the dawn of the information age with electronic connection changing the presentation of self in everyday life. But electronics didn’t spawn this class; war did. It was well in progress before iPods and iPhones, computers and the Internet were born. Several generations have had access to the G.I. Bill since WWII, which has seeded this new class. Now, the best minds are those of the knowledge workers.
Where are these minds? What are they about?
The evidence suggests they are operating around the edges of power while the center has become a collapsed vacuum occupied by pyramid structures and anachronistic leadership symbols. Enterprise is falling between the chairs.
It is counterintuitive to say we don’t need leaders; that everyone is a leader or no one is; that the healthiest republic is one in which everyone takes a leadership role.
True, we still have our CEOs, Boards of Directors, Executive Vice Presidents, Regional General Managers and Directors with layer on layer of management when the computer has erased much of their function; when a touch of a mouse can provide the information needed to make a timely decision. Like kings and emperors of the past, and ceremonial monarchs of today, hierarchical bureaucratic management remains a reference point of stubborn nostalgia as if an anchor in a storm. Stuck!
IF EVERYONE IS A LEADER, WHERE ARE THEY?
Is it impossible for postmodern society to grow up and grasp the possibilities of the emerging ideational culture? The answer lies in the question, time will tell. The same is true about the proposition that everyone will finally discovering they are leaders or no one is.
Events can provoke us to escape the cage of critical thinking and to think creatively outside the box. The “what” and “who” are germane to critical thinking; the “why” is to creative thinking.
Two years ago in August 2005 we experienced the catastrophic hurricane, Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, and completely destroyed the storied city of New Orleans.
The controversy still rages as media continue to stir the flames in the blame game. The fact that New Orleans is still not safe, according to Time magazine (August 13, 2007), lies with big-money politics, misguided policies and bureaucratic bungling, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance.
The Louisiana governor, New Orleans mayor, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t do enough to prevent this terrible tragedy, or act decisively once it materialized.
We have been circling the wagons with this commentary for two years, stuck, seemingly unable to get beyond it to the “why” of the tragedy.
We all remember people waving towels at helicopters from atop their roofs, dead and dying bodies in the street unattended, or floating in rivers that were once streets. We also remember thousands of people camped in the coliseum and sports stadium without food or water, medical supplies or sufficient sanitation facilities to meet basic body needs. We also saw looters rampaging through the streets while police stood by, or abandoned their posts. We also saw television reporters making rating bonanzas never experienced before reporting the pathos while saying “we got here, why couldn’t aid workers?” It was pathetic to the point of the absurd in every sense of the word and from every perspective. There were no good guys here! It showed humanity naked and it wasn’t pretty from any aspect.
For the 72 hours before Katrina hit land, when it was still a category 4 hurricane, the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeated incessantly that Katrina could reach landfall as a category 3 hurricane, and if it did it would prove devastating to the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans.
It seems safe to assume that nearly 100 percent of the New Orleans population had access during that period to constant weather updates either from radio or television or both, as the message was repeated again and again and again, and yet people did not move. They were stuck.
The governor, the mayor, the police, the city council, the transportation authority and the leaders of industry and commerce, church and volunteer organizations were in direct contact with Hurricane Weather Central in Miami, or if not, certainly by radio or television with constant updates, and they did not move.
Collectively, as well as individually, they represent the leaderless leadership syndrome of our time. It is the pathology of normalcy. We are programmed to react to crises; to ignore warning signs until it is too late for retreat; to be emboldened with the idea should it come we will hunker down and show our mettle.
Nature has no ego and rules only with first principles. Nature does what it does because it can. Our survival, on the other hand, is predicated on acknowledging this and taking appropriate action.
A tornado, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, volcano eruption, mudslide, flood, hail, wind or snowstorm often provides little warming. When it does, it is well to heed the meteorologist. Nature operates the same as it did millions of years ago, only then we didn’t crowd up the atmosphere. A hurricane has the power of several nuclear bombs and yet we chance it in a way we would not such manmade devices. We attempt to impose our will on Nature when she has no will at all.
The “who” and “what” of Katrina have been covered exhaustively, but the “why” avoided. We blame the president on down for the failure of government to respond to this national emergency. We blame the governor and mayor on down for failure to evacuate New Orleans, especially Ward Nine.
Many lost their lives and several thousand more had their lives disrupted because the levees didn’t hold when the category 3 hurricane hit.
Two hundred thousand people would leave New Orleans, not to return, or half the pre-Katrina population. The mind is fragile, and having survived a hurricane once, the mind is not quick to test fate twice. But “why” still bombards my conscience.
“Why” did 400,000 citizens of New Orleans who had constant radio and television weather reports updating them on the Katrina’s progress for a full 72 hours prior to its bombarding the levees remain stuck in place?
The answer is a profile of our American character. We are a passive people. We react to situations only on the advice of authority, not on the basis of our own good sense. We trust our leaders before we trust our instincts. We wait until it is too late, and then become complicit with media as victims and play the blame game, never getting around to blaming ourselves for the stupidity of our inaction. True, there were many that had no choice but to stay because of health reasons, lack of transportation, or insufficient funds. What about all the others? What about them?
We are more comfortable playing the victim than being seen as paranoid and impulsive. We are obsequious to authority, disinclined to take the initiative. If authority doesn’t tell us to leave, we wait. We listen to our radio, watch our television, listen to the director of the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeat for the nth time: In 72 hours a category 4 hurricane now in the Gulf of Mexico is heading for the southern coast of the United States, and if it hits, and it looks like it may reach landfall along the Louisiana-Mississippi coastline as a possible category 3, it could be devastating.
Those people listening to the radio, or watching their televisions were waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. They failed to perceive themselves as leaders. They failed to realize their first responsibility was to their own survival. They had three days! They did nothing.
They were dependent on a handful of people trained to lead, who were often right, but could be wrong. They had reduced themselves to the dependence programmed into them and scripted in their hard wiring. They had placed on hold the primordial intelligence of the animal that senses danger and moves with haste. This intelligence has saved man many times. Where was it when it was most needed?
In a terrible way, the people of New Orleans were complicit in their own devastation. This doesn’t exonerate others that failed in crises, but it is a less for us all.
--------------------
Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available from the publisher, http://www.authorhouse.com/ or http://www.amazon.com/, or from your favorite bookstore.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“I can promise to be candid, though I may not be impartial.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Senate day.”
Pitrim Sorokin
An emailer writes:
I’ve received your advance remarks to be made on your book tour in Iowa in September. With all due respect, Dr. Fisher, I take umbrage at your “counterintuitive” remarks. It is a word you especially favor. I imagine you mean it doesn’t make sense in a normal context consistent (again with a favorite expression of yours) “with our hard wiring.” I am mainly confused with your cavalier use of the term “leaderless leadership” and expressions “we are all leaders or none of us are.” Could you take a moment and explain yourself, as these brainteasers are relatively meaningless to me as matters now stand. If you respond, please send me a blind copy. Thank you.
THE MEANING OF WORDS, THE ESSENCE OF IDEAS
When you are at the advance stage of your life, as I am, where you can look back much further than you can look forward, and you are by nature a thinker, an idea guy, provocative words surface because they resonate with you, and cry out for attention.
There is always the danger you will trigger offense rather than insight, and fly over or under the reader’s radar. It is a risk the writer takes willingly.
In the opening pages of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, I claim, my reason for writing the original essay was to stimulate the conscience of ordinary souls like myself, not scholars, not dilettantes, not specialists with these candid assertions:
I claim no authority but write from my perceptions, reading and experience.
We all have an interest in what makes people act the way they do.
We are all born wonderers and therefore all philosophers.
We are all born storytellers.
We are all selling something.
My writing is meant to trigger new ideas from the reader’s perspective with the objective of making connection.
Nothing is ever written in concrete in a world of constant change. This implies the wisdom of going with the flow. To resist rather than embrace this flow is to become stuck in fear and doubt, and know only misery. That record is clear on this.
THE GENESIS OF LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP
My sense is we see leaderless leadership everywhere but we are not looking. It has become part of our pathology of normalcy.
Leadership is a victim of the entropy of history. The answers no longer reside in the privileged few, but in the passive many. Paradoxically, stability now emanates from the bottom, up, not the top, down. Decisions from corporate mahogany row and academic ivory towers are being superseded in everyday life by decisions at the level of consequences. It is a painful time for everyone because this is counterintuitive to the way they have been programmed.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way. Despite this, we have our foot to the floor on the brake and accelerator at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. Frantic activity has replaced suitable action. We go along to get along until our security disappears. We don’t want to think; we want escape.
Consequently, we are stuck in forward inertia surrounded by our electronic wonders and toys of distraction failing to understand what is happening or why.
We have destroyed our environment and vulgarized our lifestyle. No one says, “stop, look back, see what we’ve done,” because no one is in charge. As we seek more, we become less fulfilled and more impoverished.
Then there is the herd mentality within our human psyche that holds us to the idea the few will always take care of us, the many. The few are still trying but failing. For one, the few are caught up in the same mania; for another, they no longer are in charge.
Leadership exclusively in a leader is now a useless and irrelevant idea, and not working anymore.
That said there is little evidence leadership protocol has changed, only the efficacy of leadership continues to decline. Society is sick with the chronic illness of recidivism, stuck solving the same problems it has experienced before. Look at 2007 and you will see it is a mirror image of the 1970s.
This is so because the many, now a dominant professional class, don’t want the responsibility or accountability of leadership as they are programmed to being cared for and so cling to their comfort zone.
This is odd now that the majority of workers is professionally trained and possesses the efficacy of knowledge power. Professionals refuse to concede the leadership shift to them mainly because of their anachronistic programming, while management with its position power attempts to lead, denying its power has been lost.
The result is chaos, insanity and mayhem in the workplace where the body still lives but the spirit has died. Hope rides the precarious slope of trust that this, too, will pass without anything having to change at all. Could they be right?
Pitrim Sorokin suggests we are in a new phase of human history at the end of a 600-year-long Sensate day and entering a new glorious 600-year Ideational day. He is not alarmed with the dissonance, or the blatant greed, seeing it as evidence of the dying sensate.
Nearly seventy years ago he could see the iconography of the sacred being displaced by the pornography of the profane in art, music, literature, dress, language and behavior.
A crisis in identity would be revealed by people resorting to the ancient ritual of body painting (tattooing) to prove they exist; bring attention to themselves; and make a bold statement of an individuality they did not feel.
In the sensate period, he saw liberty as being “outer.” Ergo, outside authority was the first and compelling reference as society saw people forever as children needing to be stewarded throughout life for their own good.
In the ideational period, however, he sees liberty will be “inner.” The authority of self-responsibility and self-governance will come to the fore. Guidance will be from within rather than without. Self-reliance will be the byword.
In the sensate period, science and truth have been objective and cognitive based exclusively on the senses and empirical research. What cannot be objectively analyzed does not exist because it cannot be proved or disproved.
In the ideational period, science and truth will represent a synthesis of faith and the senses by reason. The intuitive side of human nature will be nurtured and come into its day.
In the sensate period, ethics has been based on the maximum happiness for the maximum number of human beings and has been pleasure driven.
In the ideational period, ethics will represent a synthesis of sensate (material) and ideational (spiritual) values in support of each other. The conquest of nature will pass into history as conservation and self-restraint will prevail at all levels.
Many scientists and social philosophers are already exploring ideational themes including the place of the supernatural in a material universe and the nature of the soul.
Clearly, we are in transition and moving so swiftly our minds are reluctant to grasp much less deal with this rupture with things as they have been.
Against this assumed shift, leaders are trying to lead; followers are looking for leaders; and both are frustrated as no one apparently wants to go with the flow. Buddha says, you cannot push the water. You cannot push people and society into the future that is governed by an eternal present, but you learn from it and flow with it.
We once had the “Divine Rights of Kings” in which kings were treated as if gods on earth. Monarchs vested themselves with the aura of majesty and ruled with impunity. They determined who lived and died, who prospered and who didn’t.
Centuries later, we have their stand ins: presidents, prime ministers, ayatollahs, dictators, CEOs, popes & bishops, educators and academics, pundits and soothsayers, celebrities & entertainers, and bosses of all descriptions. They have assumed the specter of power from that original heady source. We obliged them by giving them our power.
So, now in government, they control our freedom; in industry and commerce they control our jobs; in the church they control our hearts; in school they control our minds; in media they control our thinking, in leisure they control our time; and in work they control our security.
Liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this sensate day are outer, not inner, progressing from demand to reaction; obedience to submission; surrender to retreat, always avoiding conflict or standing our ground. But now it penalizes us all.
No one anticipated the rise of the professional class, or how it would become “the mad monarchs of the madhouse” (see Six Silent Killers, CRC Press 1998). Instead of assuming leadership roles, professionals have retreated into passive behaviors.
Were professionals operating at even 50 percent of their capability, few jobs would have left American shores. No third world nation could touch them with cheap labor because they would be a fire in the mind of enterprise. US intellectual capital is the superpower that is yet to be tapped.
A short fifty years ago, following WWII, the professional class was only ten percent of the workforce. Ninety percent were skilled and unskilled manual laborers. Today, the manual labor working class has nearly disappeared as professionals now dominate.
We are in the dawn of the information age with electronic connection changing the presentation of self in everyday life. But electronics didn’t spawn this class; war did. It was well in progress before iPods and iPhones, computers and the Internet were born. Several generations have had access to the G.I. Bill since WWII, which has seeded this new class. Now, the best minds are those of the knowledge workers.
Where are these minds? What are they about?
The evidence suggests they are operating around the edges of power while the center has become a collapsed vacuum occupied by pyramid structures and anachronistic leadership symbols. Enterprise is falling between the chairs.
It is counterintuitive to say we don’t need leaders; that everyone is a leader or no one is; that the healthiest republic is one in which everyone takes a leadership role.
True, we still have our CEOs, Boards of Directors, Executive Vice Presidents, Regional General Managers and Directors with layer on layer of management when the computer has erased much of their function; when a touch of a mouse can provide the information needed to make a timely decision. Like kings and emperors of the past, and ceremonial monarchs of today, hierarchical bureaucratic management remains a reference point of stubborn nostalgia as if an anchor in a storm. Stuck!
IF EVERYONE IS A LEADER, WHERE ARE THEY?
Is it impossible for postmodern society to grow up and grasp the possibilities of the emerging ideational culture? The answer lies in the question, time will tell. The same is true about the proposition that everyone will finally discovering they are leaders or no one is.
Events can provoke us to escape the cage of critical thinking and to think creatively outside the box. The “what” and “who” are germane to critical thinking; the “why” is to creative thinking.
Two years ago in August 2005 we experienced the catastrophic hurricane, Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, and completely destroyed the storied city of New Orleans.
The controversy still rages as media continue to stir the flames in the blame game. The fact that New Orleans is still not safe, according to Time magazine (August 13, 2007), lies with big-money politics, misguided policies and bureaucratic bungling, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance.
The Louisiana governor, New Orleans mayor, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t do enough to prevent this terrible tragedy, or act decisively once it materialized.
We have been circling the wagons with this commentary for two years, stuck, seemingly unable to get beyond it to the “why” of the tragedy.
We all remember people waving towels at helicopters from atop their roofs, dead and dying bodies in the street unattended, or floating in rivers that were once streets. We also remember thousands of people camped in the coliseum and sports stadium without food or water, medical supplies or sufficient sanitation facilities to meet basic body needs. We also saw looters rampaging through the streets while police stood by, or abandoned their posts. We also saw television reporters making rating bonanzas never experienced before reporting the pathos while saying “we got here, why couldn’t aid workers?” It was pathetic to the point of the absurd in every sense of the word and from every perspective. There were no good guys here! It showed humanity naked and it wasn’t pretty from any aspect.
For the 72 hours before Katrina hit land, when it was still a category 4 hurricane, the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeated incessantly that Katrina could reach landfall as a category 3 hurricane, and if it did it would prove devastating to the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans.
It seems safe to assume that nearly 100 percent of the New Orleans population had access during that period to constant weather updates either from radio or television or both, as the message was repeated again and again and again, and yet people did not move. They were stuck.
The governor, the mayor, the police, the city council, the transportation authority and the leaders of industry and commerce, church and volunteer organizations were in direct contact with Hurricane Weather Central in Miami, or if not, certainly by radio or television with constant updates, and they did not move.
Collectively, as well as individually, they represent the leaderless leadership syndrome of our time. It is the pathology of normalcy. We are programmed to react to crises; to ignore warning signs until it is too late for retreat; to be emboldened with the idea should it come we will hunker down and show our mettle.
Nature has no ego and rules only with first principles. Nature does what it does because it can. Our survival, on the other hand, is predicated on acknowledging this and taking appropriate action.
A tornado, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, volcano eruption, mudslide, flood, hail, wind or snowstorm often provides little warming. When it does, it is well to heed the meteorologist. Nature operates the same as it did millions of years ago, only then we didn’t crowd up the atmosphere. A hurricane has the power of several nuclear bombs and yet we chance it in a way we would not such manmade devices. We attempt to impose our will on Nature when she has no will at all.
The “who” and “what” of Katrina have been covered exhaustively, but the “why” avoided. We blame the president on down for the failure of government to respond to this national emergency. We blame the governor and mayor on down for failure to evacuate New Orleans, especially Ward Nine.
Many lost their lives and several thousand more had their lives disrupted because the levees didn’t hold when the category 3 hurricane hit.
Two hundred thousand people would leave New Orleans, not to return, or half the pre-Katrina population. The mind is fragile, and having survived a hurricane once, the mind is not quick to test fate twice. But “why” still bombards my conscience.
“Why” did 400,000 citizens of New Orleans who had constant radio and television weather reports updating them on the Katrina’s progress for a full 72 hours prior to its bombarding the levees remain stuck in place?
The answer is a profile of our American character. We are a passive people. We react to situations only on the advice of authority, not on the basis of our own good sense. We trust our leaders before we trust our instincts. We wait until it is too late, and then become complicit with media as victims and play the blame game, never getting around to blaming ourselves for the stupidity of our inaction. True, there were many that had no choice but to stay because of health reasons, lack of transportation, or insufficient funds. What about all the others? What about them?
We are more comfortable playing the victim than being seen as paranoid and impulsive. We are obsequious to authority, disinclined to take the initiative. If authority doesn’t tell us to leave, we wait. We listen to our radio, watch our television, listen to the director of the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeat for the nth time: In 72 hours a category 4 hurricane now in the Gulf of Mexico is heading for the southern coast of the United States, and if it hits, and it looks like it may reach landfall along the Louisiana-Mississippi coastline as a possible category 3, it could be devastating.
Those people listening to the radio, or watching their televisions were waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. They failed to perceive themselves as leaders. They failed to realize their first responsibility was to their own survival. They had three days! They did nothing.
They were dependent on a handful of people trained to lead, who were often right, but could be wrong. They had reduced themselves to the dependence programmed into them and scripted in their hard wiring. They had placed on hold the primordial intelligence of the animal that senses danger and moves with haste. This intelligence has saved man many times. Where was it when it was most needed?
In a terrible way, the people of New Orleans were complicit in their own devastation. This doesn’t exonerate others that failed in crises, but it is a less for us all.
--------------------
Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available from the publisher, http://www.authorhouse.com/ or http://www.amazon.com/, or from your favorite bookstore.
Friday, August 24, 2007
ADVANCE COPY OF SPEECH ON BOOK TOUR
ADVANCE COPY OF SPEECH
TO BE OR NOT TO BE STUCK, THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.© August 2007
Best Western Frontier
Clinton, Iowa
Address & Book Signing - A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Wednesday, 6 PM, September 12, 2007
How many of you walk for twenty to thirty minutes once a month? Twice a month? Three times a month? Once a week? Twice a week? Three times a week? Or more? How many times? Give that person an autographed copy of my book.
Our brains are hard wired for another time. We are dancing naked in a mind field, m-i-n-d, while our consciences have taken a holiday. We are not in charge and our society is ailing.
We are stuck, and as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD argues; it is not a recent condition.
Some years ago, my work took me to Fairfax County Virginia, outside Washington, DC. The county police department had grown from 84 to 840 officers in a little over a decade. Yet, citizen complaints were hand counted while a massive computer sat idly by. A junior officer in the field was computer literate, but he had to complete the requisite years in patrol before transferring to administration.
This same sense of being stuck was experienced on my return to university as a mature student. I had worked at all levels of the complex organization through a good part of the world, and had returned to academia to corroborate and clarify my experience.
My professors weren't interested in my empirical insights. I was part of the production line of the academic factory, and was not to interfere with that process.
We are stuck doing things "the way they've always been done," or "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Corporate "Mahogany Row" has this in common with academia's "Ivory Tower." Meanwhile, both wait until something breaks down, and then it is often too little too late for damage control.
The subprime real estate collapse, Virginia Tech student murder rampage, and recent Minnesota-St. Paul bridge collapse come to mind.
We always have answers after the fact. We are a reactive society. Surprise goads us into action. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US into WWII; the launching of Sputnik to get the US into the space race; disappearing American markets and jobs to recognize the economic threat from South East Asia; and the Katrina debacle by the Office of Home Land Security to alert us to government impotence in national crisis.
Disturbing as this is, we never seem to learn as today is a mirror image of yesterday and an omen of tomorrow.
Thirty-five years ago I wrote an essay registering my disenchantment. It stayed in a drawer until last Christmas, when my wife had to return to Minnesota to attend her ailing parents. I was shocked to see how little had changed except for the names of people, places and things. Otherwise, it was all the same.
This coincidental recognition has become the book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
In 1972, American youth escaped into psychedelic drugs; today electronic tools have become escape toys. Virtual reality of the Internet and cyberspace now eclipses reality, while chance and luck are treated as synonyms.
Forgotten is "we make our own luck," but "take a chance." Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity; chance is buying a lotto ticket or running off to a casino.
We have misplaced our moral compass and lost our way. We are stuck attempting to cure obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with drugs, diet books and weight watcher programs without acknowledging the problem of our hard wiring.
Our minds are stuck in another time in wrong thinking.
In fairness, there are exceptions. Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin understood that problems are never solved but only controlled. They used this distinction to attack a dreaded disease, poliomyelitis. Today, polio no longer terrifies us as it once did, as Salk developed and Sabin perfected a vaccine to control the disease, a triumph of preventive medicine.
Some of you may remember when the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool was closed all summer long because of the threat of polio. You may also remember that former President Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio as a young man, never to walk again. Yet, no one ever saw the ugly steel braces that held up his useless legs.
A chronic problem was identified, addressed and dispatched.
Our sick culture is now our chronic problem.
Disease prevention isn't always as dramatic as a miracle vaccine. Several years ago, The Reader's Digest ran an article on Canadian mailmen in one province who still delivered mail by riding bicycles. In that province's long history, there had never been a single case of heart disease or stroke, not even after retirement.
We have not always been so wise.
Few economic forecasters noticed American markets were fast eroding in the 1960s, or if they did, even fewer listened. The United States was at the height of its hubris. American products were in demand everywhere. The working middle class had never been healthier; jobs were plentiful. Employers were willing to give workers anything but control of their work.
In a short 15-year period since 1945, workers had become management dependent and programmed to react to management's demands. Management had inadvertently assumed the role of surrogate parent to the workforce.
Wages and entitlements escalated. Management, once lean, was now caught up in the fever. During the war, factories operated with a single supervisor for a hundred workers. Now there were department heads, specialty managers, supervisors and group leaders with every ten or twelve workers reporting to someone.
Management empires were being built as pay and perks were based on the size of the reporting staff. Organizations got stuck in glut.
Meanwhile, the GI Bill was turning out a new professional class of workers, armed with knowledge power and maturity with no place to go, as position power was still king. That infrastructural war contributed to American woes when US commerce was already on a slippery slope. Unhappily, it continues to this day. It was 1960 and Japan, Inc. was roaring into American markets with quality products when it previously had a reputation for producing useless items.
What caused this miraculous transformation?
The answer is W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker.
Deming taught the Japanese statistical quality control and introduced them to quality control circles in which workers joint problem solved work related problems.
Juran introduced them to process quality control by identifying chronic operating problems. And
Peter Drucker introduced them to just-in-time inventory control and effective management practices.
These three Americans were working for Japanese companies because they failed to convince American companies of the benefits to their technology. We suffer to this day for that failure.
One night in 1980 this all exploded into our consciousness. We knew Japan was making inroads into US markets in lighting fixtures, large appliances and automobiles, but we didn't know how. That is, until NBC television ran a program called "Japan Can, Why Can't We?"
Tom Brokaw hosted the program. It profiled Japan's total quality management, and quality control circle programs. At the time, I was directing the largest QC Program in the nation at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. Two years earlier, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth had brought quality circles to Honeywell. We had over one hundred circles of hourly assembly workers with ten or twelve in each QC circle.
Overnight, after the NBC awakening, a stampede swept the country with literally tens of thousands of companies introducing QC circles with little idea what they were much less what they could and couldn't accomplish. A bevy of carpetbagging consultants and QC societies sprung up everywhere. One reached more than 100,000 members in six months.
A magic elixir had been discovered to get us out of the rut, but was that true?
In our national frenzy, three things were ignored:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented society; the US is an individualistic culture.
(2) The Japanese workforce at the time was 80 percent blue collar and 20 percent white collar. The US was the reverse of these percentages.
(3) The American white-collar workers did not respond to the QC program. They identified with management and decision-making. Unskilled workers enjoyed the attention and embraced QC circles, but solved only cosmetic problems (e.g., assembly lightning, work station design, procedural manuals).
Today, professionals have an expertise management lacks, yet we are stuck in another time as they are managed, motivated and mobilized as if work, workers and the workplace had not changed.
This forward inertia is not new, but finds us running faster and faster in place. It all comes back to our hard wiring. It doesn't take a scholarly tome to note this.
In 1900, 90 percent of Americans were farmers or in work related to farming. Today, less than 3 percent are. In 1900, few had electricity or indoor plumbing, much less automobiles. We were an agrarian society. In a sense, we still are in an agrarian mindset. We still eat as if our jobs require expanse of great amounts of physical energy.
Statistics indicate we abhor exercise. When we go to the mall, we park as close to the mall as possible. If we play golf, we go from hole to hole in an electric golf cart. Many airports even provide automatic walkways that carry us from point to point. Yet, we eat as if it is 1900 working from sun up to sun down bailing hay.
Denny's has a "grand slam" breakfast; so does Country Kitchen, Perkins and Village Inn. The big breakfast is topped off with a diet drink. You laugh, but we are stuck in a diet of another time. Small wonder only the Bible outsells cookbooks.
In a recent study by the University of South Florida of my county, Hillsborough, 66 percent of Hillsborough citizens were found to be overweight to obese, or roughly 900,000 people. Diabetes, strokes, and heart disease are common in this population.
What about Clinton County, Iowa?
We are stuck in a time when exercise was a necessity, not an option.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD illustrates how the mind is slow to change, stubbornly resists it, and changes only when forced to do so. This is shown dramatically when 1972 is compared to today. The more frustrated we become the more likely we are to throw our hands up and say, "Why bother?" It is hoped that the reader will say, "Because it is necessary to preserve our way of life." Thank you very much, and God bless.
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available with the publisher: www.authorhouse.com, www.amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE STUCK, THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.© August 2007
Best Western Frontier
Clinton, Iowa
Address & Book Signing - A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Wednesday, 6 PM, September 12, 2007
How many of you walk for twenty to thirty minutes once a month? Twice a month? Three times a month? Once a week? Twice a week? Three times a week? Or more? How many times? Give that person an autographed copy of my book.
Our brains are hard wired for another time. We are dancing naked in a mind field, m-i-n-d, while our consciences have taken a holiday. We are not in charge and our society is ailing.
We are stuck, and as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD argues; it is not a recent condition.
Some years ago, my work took me to Fairfax County Virginia, outside Washington, DC. The county police department had grown from 84 to 840 officers in a little over a decade. Yet, citizen complaints were hand counted while a massive computer sat idly by. A junior officer in the field was computer literate, but he had to complete the requisite years in patrol before transferring to administration.
This same sense of being stuck was experienced on my return to university as a mature student. I had worked at all levels of the complex organization through a good part of the world, and had returned to academia to corroborate and clarify my experience.
My professors weren't interested in my empirical insights. I was part of the production line of the academic factory, and was not to interfere with that process.
We are stuck doing things "the way they've always been done," or "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Corporate "Mahogany Row" has this in common with academia's "Ivory Tower." Meanwhile, both wait until something breaks down, and then it is often too little too late for damage control.
The subprime real estate collapse, Virginia Tech student murder rampage, and recent Minnesota-St. Paul bridge collapse come to mind.
We always have answers after the fact. We are a reactive society. Surprise goads us into action. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US into WWII; the launching of Sputnik to get the US into the space race; disappearing American markets and jobs to recognize the economic threat from South East Asia; and the Katrina debacle by the Office of Home Land Security to alert us to government impotence in national crisis.
Disturbing as this is, we never seem to learn as today is a mirror image of yesterday and an omen of tomorrow.
Thirty-five years ago I wrote an essay registering my disenchantment. It stayed in a drawer until last Christmas, when my wife had to return to Minnesota to attend her ailing parents. I was shocked to see how little had changed except for the names of people, places and things. Otherwise, it was all the same.
This coincidental recognition has become the book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
In 1972, American youth escaped into psychedelic drugs; today electronic tools have become escape toys. Virtual reality of the Internet and cyberspace now eclipses reality, while chance and luck are treated as synonyms.
Forgotten is "we make our own luck," but "take a chance." Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity; chance is buying a lotto ticket or running off to a casino.
We have misplaced our moral compass and lost our way. We are stuck attempting to cure obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with drugs, diet books and weight watcher programs without acknowledging the problem of our hard wiring.
Our minds are stuck in another time in wrong thinking.
In fairness, there are exceptions. Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin understood that problems are never solved but only controlled. They used this distinction to attack a dreaded disease, poliomyelitis. Today, polio no longer terrifies us as it once did, as Salk developed and Sabin perfected a vaccine to control the disease, a triumph of preventive medicine.
Some of you may remember when the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool was closed all summer long because of the threat of polio. You may also remember that former President Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio as a young man, never to walk again. Yet, no one ever saw the ugly steel braces that held up his useless legs.
A chronic problem was identified, addressed and dispatched.
Our sick culture is now our chronic problem.
Disease prevention isn't always as dramatic as a miracle vaccine. Several years ago, The Reader's Digest ran an article on Canadian mailmen in one province who still delivered mail by riding bicycles. In that province's long history, there had never been a single case of heart disease or stroke, not even after retirement.
We have not always been so wise.
Few economic forecasters noticed American markets were fast eroding in the 1960s, or if they did, even fewer listened. The United States was at the height of its hubris. American products were in demand everywhere. The working middle class had never been healthier; jobs were plentiful. Employers were willing to give workers anything but control of their work.
In a short 15-year period since 1945, workers had become management dependent and programmed to react to management's demands. Management had inadvertently assumed the role of surrogate parent to the workforce.
Wages and entitlements escalated. Management, once lean, was now caught up in the fever. During the war, factories operated with a single supervisor for a hundred workers. Now there were department heads, specialty managers, supervisors and group leaders with every ten or twelve workers reporting to someone.
Management empires were being built as pay and perks were based on the size of the reporting staff. Organizations got stuck in glut.
Meanwhile, the GI Bill was turning out a new professional class of workers, armed with knowledge power and maturity with no place to go, as position power was still king. That infrastructural war contributed to American woes when US commerce was already on a slippery slope. Unhappily, it continues to this day. It was 1960 and Japan, Inc. was roaring into American markets with quality products when it previously had a reputation for producing useless items.
What caused this miraculous transformation?
The answer is W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker.
Deming taught the Japanese statistical quality control and introduced them to quality control circles in which workers joint problem solved work related problems.
Juran introduced them to process quality control by identifying chronic operating problems. And
Peter Drucker introduced them to just-in-time inventory control and effective management practices.
These three Americans were working for Japanese companies because they failed to convince American companies of the benefits to their technology. We suffer to this day for that failure.
One night in 1980 this all exploded into our consciousness. We knew Japan was making inroads into US markets in lighting fixtures, large appliances and automobiles, but we didn't know how. That is, until NBC television ran a program called "Japan Can, Why Can't We?"
Tom Brokaw hosted the program. It profiled Japan's total quality management, and quality control circle programs. At the time, I was directing the largest QC Program in the nation at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. Two years earlier, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth had brought quality circles to Honeywell. We had over one hundred circles of hourly assembly workers with ten or twelve in each QC circle.
Overnight, after the NBC awakening, a stampede swept the country with literally tens of thousands of companies introducing QC circles with little idea what they were much less what they could and couldn't accomplish. A bevy of carpetbagging consultants and QC societies sprung up everywhere. One reached more than 100,000 members in six months.
A magic elixir had been discovered to get us out of the rut, but was that true?
In our national frenzy, three things were ignored:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented society; the US is an individualistic culture.
(2) The Japanese workforce at the time was 80 percent blue collar and 20 percent white collar. The US was the reverse of these percentages.
(3) The American white-collar workers did not respond to the QC program. They identified with management and decision-making. Unskilled workers enjoyed the attention and embraced QC circles, but solved only cosmetic problems (e.g., assembly lightning, work station design, procedural manuals).
Today, professionals have an expertise management lacks, yet we are stuck in another time as they are managed, motivated and mobilized as if work, workers and the workplace had not changed.
This forward inertia is not new, but finds us running faster and faster in place. It all comes back to our hard wiring. It doesn't take a scholarly tome to note this.
In 1900, 90 percent of Americans were farmers or in work related to farming. Today, less than 3 percent are. In 1900, few had electricity or indoor plumbing, much less automobiles. We were an agrarian society. In a sense, we still are in an agrarian mindset. We still eat as if our jobs require expanse of great amounts of physical energy.
Statistics indicate we abhor exercise. When we go to the mall, we park as close to the mall as possible. If we play golf, we go from hole to hole in an electric golf cart. Many airports even provide automatic walkways that carry us from point to point. Yet, we eat as if it is 1900 working from sun up to sun down bailing hay.
Denny's has a "grand slam" breakfast; so does Country Kitchen, Perkins and Village Inn. The big breakfast is topped off with a diet drink. You laugh, but we are stuck in a diet of another time. Small wonder only the Bible outsells cookbooks.
In a recent study by the University of South Florida of my county, Hillsborough, 66 percent of Hillsborough citizens were found to be overweight to obese, or roughly 900,000 people. Diabetes, strokes, and heart disease are common in this population.
What about Clinton County, Iowa?
We are stuck in a time when exercise was a necessity, not an option.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD illustrates how the mind is slow to change, stubbornly resists it, and changes only when forced to do so. This is shown dramatically when 1972 is compared to today. The more frustrated we become the more likely we are to throw our hands up and say, "Why bother?" It is hoped that the reader will say, "Because it is necessary to preserve our way of life." Thank you very much, and God bless.
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available with the publisher: www.authorhouse.com, www.amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.
ARE YOU STUCK?
ARE YOU STUCK?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
"If I could change my circumstance, I would have preferred different parents, a different religion and a different wife."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Are you stuck?
That's kind of a threatening question, isn't it?
We are not supposed to be stuck. Yet I claim in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD that we are stuck and have been stuck for a long time. In fact, I build a case that between 1972, when I first wrote this essay and now, a period of 35 years, little has changed only the names have changed.
We're again in an unpopular war. We have a president that hunkers down. We have a congress that missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.
Businesses are disappearing from the American continent faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson."
The other day an engineer making a six-figure income called me and said his workplace was sick and he was unhappy.
How so, I asked.
I think I suffer from malicious obedience, he replied.
Immediately, I knew he had read one of my books. Malicious obedience is withholding information critical to the success of an operation, hiding information required by colleagues to do their job, doing what you're told even if you know it's wrong, or circulating misinformation or disinformation to vent your hostility without anyone being the wiser.
If it is so bad, I asked, why don't you leave?
He answered. Well, let me put it this way. If I left right now, there would be such a huge hole in the bucket that it couldn't hold water.
I let that pass, clearly he sees himself as indispensable. He doesn't recognize that he's stuck. But he is stuck. He wants from his company what it cannot give him, leadership. He wants it to do the right thing when it doesn't know how. It is locked stepped in the past, obsessed with the future, and frozen in the present.
It is a phenomenon experienced across the board but nobody wants to admit it. We are overwhelmed with the complexity of the times. So, we play the lotto or lose ourselves in the casino.
You see, you're stuck if you are in a job you hate, in a relationship you hate, in a profession you hate, in a community you hate, in a religion you hate, in a school you hate, and so on. Hate is a failure to accept things as they are.
As soon as we fail to accept things as they are, we have come to own the problem.
If you hate the way I look, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I act, the way I live, the way I am, I don't have a problem. You have a problem.
I'm perfectly content with what and who and where I am. You're not, and therefore, by definition, you have a problem. You are stuck with me as I am because you want me to change. You want me to be like you want me to be.
But that is impossible because you are not me and I am not you. We have different wills, different constructions, different experiences, and we are different persons.
So, if there is some behavior of another person that drives you up the wall, you are stuck. If you cannot accept what you encounter, you're stuck. It can extend to a person, place or thing beyond your control.
I'll go beyond that.
Let's say you have a problem with yourself. You've been programmed to be a perfectionist, and you know you're not. You've been programmed to always have answers for everything and of course you don't. You've been programmed to wax secure when you're not, and so you're not self-accepting. You're stuck in denial and loathe yourself for being stuck.
See my point.
We have drifted away from our foundation. Forgotten is how we came to be Americans. We originally left Europe in the 17th century to escape religious tyranny. In America we felt free to believe and behave as we willed. We entered a harsh environment and had to embrace its risks and endure its pain, as it was unforgiving. We had to cope with disease, hardship, hunger, and yes, even starvation.
But our will was huge against these forces of nature. We grew resilient, resolute, and strong embracing, not denying our weakness.
That is our legacy. It would come to pass one day for that constitution to find us the strongest nation in the world.
Now, how did that happen?
That happened because the focus was on the process not the outcome. There was no comfort zone, no home in the suburbs. We were all on the same page pushing off the same dime. We were united in hardship not so much because we loved each other so dearly, but because we needed each other so desperately to survive.
We had no time for petty complaints, for saying Harry has advantages Joe doesn't. We worked from sun up to sunset and collapsed in a cold bed with the sleeping sedative of exhaustion.
We had no time to be stuck.
We had no choice but to use our creative intelligence, which deals with what is not known but can be discovered instead of critical intelligence, the intelligence of being stuck, which deals with what is already known.
Critical intelligence solves problems with the same thinking that caused the problems in the first place. We are very familiar with that.
We go round and round in circular logic with cause effect analysis solving problems by identifying and treating symptoms, wondering why they are never resolved. We look for the magic bullet that will cure our lifestyle excesses: eating, drinking, and smoking too much, doing drugs and sexual dalliance. Stuck.
We've come to call it the paralysis of analysis feeling more inclined to describe a problem ad infinitum than to take action.
We are stuck in Socratic hierarchical vertical thinking when the complement of lateral thinking is required. Moreover, we fail to realize problems are never solved, but only controlled.
We're stuck everywhere. We're stuck in a war. We're stuck in a congress that blames the president for the war, and a president that blames the congress for its lack of patriotism and being supportive of our troops in harms way.
In my work, I've often dealt with professionals: engineers, scientists, and specialists. These people go to school a long time, come into industry and commerce only to find they have to work for somebody that doesn't have their knowledge base, but who exerts position power over them.
What do you think they do?
Do they attempt to bridge the gap and bring their bosses up to speed?
They become frustrated, anxious, angry, and yes, retreat into such behaviors as malicious obedience. They don't use their intelligence to school their superiors into seeing the wisdom of doing things differently.
Why?
They are stuck with protocol and programming.
Leadership is supposed to come from the top, down, not the bottom, up. They have been programmed to be passive, reactive and submissive as if nothing has changed. Stuck.
In 1950, 80 percent of workers were blue-collar and 20 percent were white-collar. Today nearly 90 percent are white collar and 10 percent are blue collar. Yet we are stuck managing, motivating and mobilizing workers as if the color of their collar has not changed.
We are stuck with position power while knowledge power dangles in the wind.
If I'm going to change the system, I've got to change me. And if I change me and I'm unhappy, I've got to leave.
Those of you who have read my ten questions will see I've done many things. I've done those many things because I believe in the formula:
On the other hand, the failure to embrace risk and endure pain equals atrophy.
Nothing stays the same; you either grow or waste away.
If you are wasting away, it suggests it is because you are unhappy. You are not getting what you want; you're not going where you prefer. You are stuck.
Now, an individual can be stuck. A corporation can be stuck. A country can be stuck. A society can be stuck. Such things have often happened.
We don't have time to go into the history but I am sure your filter processing what I am saying would immediately block the penetration of the information because we are all stuck on certain things.
We continue to believe what we've been programmed to believe, and don't want new information that challenges such beliefs. Everyone here has core beliefs, beliefs that may be so rooted as if a tree.
Yet, everything is moving. There has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300. We have an exponential acceleration of change that is making it very difficult for us to be on the same page and getting off on the same dime.
The problem can be reduced to three words: what and who and why.
We like simple answers to complex problems.
We are still stuck in the terrible tragedy of 9/11 attempting to determine what caused it, and who was responsible. We are forever stuck on the what and the who, but never seem to get around to the question of why.
Why has been ignored. It would challenge our core beliefs. It would force us to see the terrorists not as demons and murderers, both of which they are deemed to be, but as people believing they have nothing more to lose and, rightly or wrongly, have been disrespected, their culture and religion slandered.
Terrorism is not new and is always a matter of perspective. Desperate people take desperate measures to right imagined or real wrongs. The Minute Men of our American Revolution picked off the British Red Coats marching proudly in a row. George Washington had his greatest victory crossing the Delaware completely surprising the British who expected a secession of hostilities during the holiday season. Menachem Begin had the reputation of a terrorist in the 1940s against British authority in Palestine, only to rise to a celebrated prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Tecumseh Sherman torched the earth and left the South barren and burning in his march to the sea demoralizing and breaking the will of the Confederate Army.
Terrorism is a dehumanizing strategy. And as shown throughout history, it is effective.
Just think, in this little bit of time, I have managed to offend Christians and Jews and patriots, and indeed, western civilization. Minds close when so threatened and become stuck.
We will remain stuck and never progress off the dime or find ourselves on the same page if we continue as we are. The mega force of change has made us one people in a "rainbow coalition."
The United States of America increasingly resembles Europe with multi cultures and languages spoken and costumes on display in virtually all points of the nation. It is not time to resist this trend but to embrace it.
The need to have a token understanding of these languages and acceptance of these differences is no longer a luxury but increasingly a fundamental need to get along.
Why say all these things and stir up the dust?
We once possessed a moral compass of tolerance. We have misplaced it. We have lost our way. To find our way we cannot turn to an authority figure or leader to find it for us. Leaders are as lost and stuck as we are. President John F. Kennedy once said he was born with the wrong parents in the wrong religion and to the wrong wife. It would be hard to improve on a better definition of being stuck.
We are all leaders or none of us are.
We cannot afford to be stuck in this modern world looking for someone else to lead us to safety. Our history indicates that many want to wrest that power from us, and we've paid dearly for the attention.
The answers are not in the media, although the media loves that sense of power; the answers are not in our institutions that programmed us for another time; nor are the answers in our leaders as leadership is no longer top down, but bottom up.
We are stuck asking top down leaders to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. You see, leadership has changed but no one wants to admit it, and so we have dissolved to leaderless leadership and crisis management, stuck.
It is time we take charge, grow up, and embrace our resistance to the present. The future will take care of itself.
Thank you very much.
__________
This is another possible talk composed during my peripatetic walk today for inclusion during my book tour in Clinton, Iowa next month.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
"If I could change my circumstance, I would have preferred different parents, a different religion and a different wife."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Are you stuck?
That's kind of a threatening question, isn't it?
We are not supposed to be stuck. Yet I claim in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD that we are stuck and have been stuck for a long time. In fact, I build a case that between 1972, when I first wrote this essay and now, a period of 35 years, little has changed only the names have changed.
We're again in an unpopular war. We have a president that hunkers down. We have a congress that missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.
Businesses are disappearing from the American continent faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson."
The other day an engineer making a six-figure income called me and said his workplace was sick and he was unhappy.
How so, I asked.
I think I suffer from malicious obedience, he replied.
Immediately, I knew he had read one of my books. Malicious obedience is withholding information critical to the success of an operation, hiding information required by colleagues to do their job, doing what you're told even if you know it's wrong, or circulating misinformation or disinformation to vent your hostility without anyone being the wiser.
If it is so bad, I asked, why don't you leave?
He answered. Well, let me put it this way. If I left right now, there would be such a huge hole in the bucket that it couldn't hold water.
I let that pass, clearly he sees himself as indispensable. He doesn't recognize that he's stuck. But he is stuck. He wants from his company what it cannot give him, leadership. He wants it to do the right thing when it doesn't know how. It is locked stepped in the past, obsessed with the future, and frozen in the present.
It is a phenomenon experienced across the board but nobody wants to admit it. We are overwhelmed with the complexity of the times. So, we play the lotto or lose ourselves in the casino.
You see, you're stuck if you are in a job you hate, in a relationship you hate, in a profession you hate, in a community you hate, in a religion you hate, in a school you hate, and so on. Hate is a failure to accept things as they are.
As soon as we fail to accept things as they are, we have come to own the problem.
If you hate the way I look, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I act, the way I live, the way I am, I don't have a problem. You have a problem.
I'm perfectly content with what and who and where I am. You're not, and therefore, by definition, you have a problem. You are stuck with me as I am because you want me to change. You want me to be like you want me to be.
But that is impossible because you are not me and I am not you. We have different wills, different constructions, different experiences, and we are different persons.
So, if there is some behavior of another person that drives you up the wall, you are stuck. If you cannot accept what you encounter, you're stuck. It can extend to a person, place or thing beyond your control.
I'll go beyond that.
Let's say you have a problem with yourself. You've been programmed to be a perfectionist, and you know you're not. You've been programmed to always have answers for everything and of course you don't. You've been programmed to wax secure when you're not, and so you're not self-accepting. You're stuck in denial and loathe yourself for being stuck.
See my point.
We have drifted away from our foundation. Forgotten is how we came to be Americans. We originally left Europe in the 17th century to escape religious tyranny. In America we felt free to believe and behave as we willed. We entered a harsh environment and had to embrace its risks and endure its pain, as it was unforgiving. We had to cope with disease, hardship, hunger, and yes, even starvation.
But our will was huge against these forces of nature. We grew resilient, resolute, and strong embracing, not denying our weakness.
That is our legacy. It would come to pass one day for that constitution to find us the strongest nation in the world.
Now, how did that happen?
That happened because the focus was on the process not the outcome. There was no comfort zone, no home in the suburbs. We were all on the same page pushing off the same dime. We were united in hardship not so much because we loved each other so dearly, but because we needed each other so desperately to survive.
We had no time for petty complaints, for saying Harry has advantages Joe doesn't. We worked from sun up to sunset and collapsed in a cold bed with the sleeping sedative of exhaustion.
We had no time to be stuck.
We had no choice but to use our creative intelligence, which deals with what is not known but can be discovered instead of critical intelligence, the intelligence of being stuck, which deals with what is already known.
Critical intelligence solves problems with the same thinking that caused the problems in the first place. We are very familiar with that.
We go round and round in circular logic with cause effect analysis solving problems by identifying and treating symptoms, wondering why they are never resolved. We look for the magic bullet that will cure our lifestyle excesses: eating, drinking, and smoking too much, doing drugs and sexual dalliance. Stuck.
We've come to call it the paralysis of analysis feeling more inclined to describe a problem ad infinitum than to take action.
We are stuck in Socratic hierarchical vertical thinking when the complement of lateral thinking is required. Moreover, we fail to realize problems are never solved, but only controlled.
We're stuck everywhere. We're stuck in a war. We're stuck in a congress that blames the president for the war, and a president that blames the congress for its lack of patriotism and being supportive of our troops in harms way.
In my work, I've often dealt with professionals: engineers, scientists, and specialists. These people go to school a long time, come into industry and commerce only to find they have to work for somebody that doesn't have their knowledge base, but who exerts position power over them.
What do you think they do?
Do they attempt to bridge the gap and bring their bosses up to speed?
They become frustrated, anxious, angry, and yes, retreat into such behaviors as malicious obedience. They don't use their intelligence to school their superiors into seeing the wisdom of doing things differently.
Why?
They are stuck with protocol and programming.
Leadership is supposed to come from the top, down, not the bottom, up. They have been programmed to be passive, reactive and submissive as if nothing has changed. Stuck.
In 1950, 80 percent of workers were blue-collar and 20 percent were white-collar. Today nearly 90 percent are white collar and 10 percent are blue collar. Yet we are stuck managing, motivating and mobilizing workers as if the color of their collar has not changed.
We are stuck with position power while knowledge power dangles in the wind.
If I'm going to change the system, I've got to change me. And if I change me and I'm unhappy, I've got to leave.
Those of you who have read my ten questions will see I've done many things. I've done those many things because I believe in the formula:
RISK + PAIN = GROWTH
On the other hand, the failure to embrace risk and endure pain equals atrophy.
Nothing stays the same; you either grow or waste away.
If you are wasting away, it suggests it is because you are unhappy. You are not getting what you want; you're not going where you prefer. You are stuck.
Now, an individual can be stuck. A corporation can be stuck. A country can be stuck. A society can be stuck. Such things have often happened.
We don't have time to go into the history but I am sure your filter processing what I am saying would immediately block the penetration of the information because we are all stuck on certain things.
We continue to believe what we've been programmed to believe, and don't want new information that challenges such beliefs. Everyone here has core beliefs, beliefs that may be so rooted as if a tree.
Yet, everything is moving. There has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300. We have an exponential acceleration of change that is making it very difficult for us to be on the same page and getting off on the same dime.
The problem can be reduced to three words: what and who and why.
We like simple answers to complex problems.
We are still stuck in the terrible tragedy of 9/11 attempting to determine what caused it, and who was responsible. We are forever stuck on the what and the who, but never seem to get around to the question of why.
Why has been ignored. It would challenge our core beliefs. It would force us to see the terrorists not as demons and murderers, both of which they are deemed to be, but as people believing they have nothing more to lose and, rightly or wrongly, have been disrespected, their culture and religion slandered.
Terrorism is not new and is always a matter of perspective. Desperate people take desperate measures to right imagined or real wrongs. The Minute Men of our American Revolution picked off the British Red Coats marching proudly in a row. George Washington had his greatest victory crossing the Delaware completely surprising the British who expected a secession of hostilities during the holiday season. Menachem Begin had the reputation of a terrorist in the 1940s against British authority in Palestine, only to rise to a celebrated prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Tecumseh Sherman torched the earth and left the South barren and burning in his march to the sea demoralizing and breaking the will of the Confederate Army.
Terrorism is a dehumanizing strategy. And as shown throughout history, it is effective.
Just think, in this little bit of time, I have managed to offend Christians and Jews and patriots, and indeed, western civilization. Minds close when so threatened and become stuck.
We will remain stuck and never progress off the dime or find ourselves on the same page if we continue as we are. The mega force of change has made us one people in a "rainbow coalition."
The United States of America increasingly resembles Europe with multi cultures and languages spoken and costumes on display in virtually all points of the nation. It is not time to resist this trend but to embrace it.
The need to have a token understanding of these languages and acceptance of these differences is no longer a luxury but increasingly a fundamental need to get along.
Why say all these things and stir up the dust?
We once possessed a moral compass of tolerance. We have misplaced it. We have lost our way. To find our way we cannot turn to an authority figure or leader to find it for us. Leaders are as lost and stuck as we are. President John F. Kennedy once said he was born with the wrong parents in the wrong religion and to the wrong wife. It would be hard to improve on a better definition of being stuck.
We are all leaders or none of us are.
We cannot afford to be stuck in this modern world looking for someone else to lead us to safety. Our history indicates that many want to wrest that power from us, and we've paid dearly for the attention.
The answers are not in the media, although the media loves that sense of power; the answers are not in our institutions that programmed us for another time; nor are the answers in our leaders as leadership is no longer top down, but bottom up.
We are stuck asking top down leaders to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. You see, leadership has changed but no one wants to admit it, and so we have dissolved to leaderless leadership and crisis management, stuck.
It is time we take charge, grow up, and embrace our resistance to the present. The future will take care of itself.
Thank you very much.
__________
This is another possible talk composed during my peripatetic walk today for inclusion during my book tour in Clinton, Iowa next month.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
SUMMARY OF BOOK PRODUCTION TO DATE
This is a summary of my book production to date.
This is shared with you as I plan to move into a new iteration of idea sharing. An author, who reviewed my website, has introduced me to new possibilities for networking my ideas. Since networking is not a natural inclination, and since writing is as much as end in itself as anything else, he got my attention.
"Ten years ago I was able to quit my day job and simply write and sell books, and I don't have the range you do."
At his suggestion, I am adding akonboard software so that readers and I can have animated discussions. I am also making contact with radio stations.
"You were made for idea exchange," he offered.
We shall see. More immediately, I will be returning to Iowa September 1 with BB with me until September 9, when she will fly back to Tampa. I will stay as long as there is an interest in my new book, which this author, a former academic, claims was made for senior level and graduate seminar level discussion.
If anyone reading this has access to colleges and universities, please let me know with a name and address of someone I might contact.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SUMMARY OF BOOKS BY JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.:
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches:
Aggressive education after WWII has produced professional workers, who continue to be managed and motivated by corpocracy as if nothing has changed. Workers have lost their identity while companies have become 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. In this climate, US markets have crumbled or disappeared. Enter management's union, human resources, with cosmetic interventions (with no loss of power or control by management) that have backfired, turning the workplace into a playground where the dominant culture is comfort or complacency rather than contribution. The answer? Purge dependence on hierarchical management and focus on decision-making at the level of consequences.
The Worker Alone! Going Against the Grain!
Workers are operating without a center or moral compass. The charade of empowerment has changed nothing. Ventilation won't do it nor will pointing fingers. Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work. They have invested heavily in education only to find a disappointing return on investment. Angry and confused, they take downsizing and redundancy exercises on the chin as if they can do nothing about it. This is crunch time. Workers can no longer expect the company to take care of them if they don't take care to see that the company survives. It is time to break through the forces of denial and retreat to expose the workplace naked and launch a structural change in the way workers think and behave.
Confident Selling for the 90s:
Confidence is a matter of how we think. How we think is a product of how we are programmed to think. Too frequently we are inclined to be self-critical rather than self-accepting. If we are self-accepting, which means we don't impose psychological barriers to what we can do or can achieve, then we are likely to see others as they are, potential partners in enterprise, not as we expect them to be, obstacles to overcome. Translated, we see problems as opportunities not restrictions. Whatever your profession, you are selling, and will know you have the key to open new doors to opportunity. You will have a self-image of success because you have made the biggest sale of your life, belief in yourself.
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend:
To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Taboo deals with the adverse conditioning which programs a person into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but one's own self. Too long we have worried too much about what other people think but too little about what we think and feel. This has often led to us being our own worst enemy instead of our own best friend.
Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge:
Invisible forces have invaded the workplace like social termites only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These social termites are six passive behaviors. Disgruntled workers quietly and silently sabotage work by simply showing up for work and doing as little as possible to get by. The cause is clear. The structure of the work is for another time and workforce. Now, knowledge power makes the difference. Power has shifted from management to professional workers but management shows reluctance to recognize the shift employing cosmetic change that only worsens the situation. The book explores these passive behaviors in depth and suggests radical change is necessary if American industry and commerce is to survive in a global economy.
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers:
Leadership has retreated into self-aggrandizement and the cynicism of self-indulgence. It pervades every institution of society. Families have abandon their responsibility for the actions of their children, the church has covered the abuses of its priests, educators have abandoned discipline in the classroom, while corruption in government and industry has become so common as to approach the pathology of normalcy. In this climate, workers have focused on getting rather than giving, on avoiding the consequences of their actions, retreating into technology, while children, students, workers and citizens have been reduced to statistical numbers in computer grids. As a result, society has lost its moral center and compass. People have become things to address, evaluate and manage. This is the essence of corporate sin.
In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel:
Imagine growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and in the middle of a farm belt industrial community of 33,000, while WWII was raging. No television, mega sports, new automobiles, or manicured lawns. Automakers were making tanks and lawns had been turned into victory gardens. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and industrial league baseball, played by young boys and men too old to go to war. It was a time when the four-faces of the courthouse clock chimed every half hour so no one could excuse being late for meals. It was a working class neighborhood in which both parents were likely to work in one of the many defense industries along the Mississippi River. What sets it apart from today is self-reliance was as natural as breathing.
A Look Back To See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s:
We are stuck. Today resembles the 1970s with such frightening consistency that it is maddening to think otherwise. Then as now young people fought an unpopular war; social upheaval was in the air; corrupt politicians lied and deceived the electorate; drugs were ruining lives; morality was on holiday; new bigotry and old hatreds were hatching; the automotive industry was in sharp decline; energy was in crisis; a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, while Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs. The book breaks through our cool façade and canned rhetoric to expose this chronic disease, and ask what we plan to do about it?
__________
For direct contact, email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
This is shared with you as I plan to move into a new iteration of idea sharing. An author, who reviewed my website, has introduced me to new possibilities for networking my ideas. Since networking is not a natural inclination, and since writing is as much as end in itself as anything else, he got my attention.
"Ten years ago I was able to quit my day job and simply write and sell books, and I don't have the range you do."
At his suggestion, I am adding akonboard software so that readers and I can have animated discussions. I am also making contact with radio stations.
"You were made for idea exchange," he offered.
We shall see. More immediately, I will be returning to Iowa September 1 with BB with me until September 9, when she will fly back to Tampa. I will stay as long as there is an interest in my new book, which this author, a former academic, claims was made for senior level and graduate seminar level discussion.
If anyone reading this has access to colleges and universities, please let me know with a name and address of someone I might contact.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SUMMARY OF BOOKS BY JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.:
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches:
Aggressive education after WWII has produced professional workers, who continue to be managed and motivated by corpocracy as if nothing has changed. Workers have lost their identity while companies have become 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. In this climate, US markets have crumbled or disappeared. Enter management's union, human resources, with cosmetic interventions (with no loss of power or control by management) that have backfired, turning the workplace into a playground where the dominant culture is comfort or complacency rather than contribution. The answer? Purge dependence on hierarchical management and focus on decision-making at the level of consequences.
The Worker Alone! Going Against the Grain!
Workers are operating without a center or moral compass. The charade of empowerment has changed nothing. Ventilation won't do it nor will pointing fingers. Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work. They have invested heavily in education only to find a disappointing return on investment. Angry and confused, they take downsizing and redundancy exercises on the chin as if they can do nothing about it. This is crunch time. Workers can no longer expect the company to take care of them if they don't take care to see that the company survives. It is time to break through the forces of denial and retreat to expose the workplace naked and launch a structural change in the way workers think and behave.
Confident Selling for the 90s:
Confidence is a matter of how we think. How we think is a product of how we are programmed to think. Too frequently we are inclined to be self-critical rather than self-accepting. If we are self-accepting, which means we don't impose psychological barriers to what we can do or can achieve, then we are likely to see others as they are, potential partners in enterprise, not as we expect them to be, obstacles to overcome. Translated, we see problems as opportunities not restrictions. Whatever your profession, you are selling, and will know you have the key to open new doors to opportunity. You will have a self-image of success because you have made the biggest sale of your life, belief in yourself.
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend:
To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Taboo deals with the adverse conditioning which programs a person into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but one's own self. Too long we have worried too much about what other people think but too little about what we think and feel. This has often led to us being our own worst enemy instead of our own best friend.
Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge:
Invisible forces have invaded the workplace like social termites only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These social termites are six passive behaviors. Disgruntled workers quietly and silently sabotage work by simply showing up for work and doing as little as possible to get by. The cause is clear. The structure of the work is for another time and workforce. Now, knowledge power makes the difference. Power has shifted from management to professional workers but management shows reluctance to recognize the shift employing cosmetic change that only worsens the situation. The book explores these passive behaviors in depth and suggests radical change is necessary if American industry and commerce is to survive in a global economy.
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers:
Leadership has retreated into self-aggrandizement and the cynicism of self-indulgence. It pervades every institution of society. Families have abandon their responsibility for the actions of their children, the church has covered the abuses of its priests, educators have abandoned discipline in the classroom, while corruption in government and industry has become so common as to approach the pathology of normalcy. In this climate, workers have focused on getting rather than giving, on avoiding the consequences of their actions, retreating into technology, while children, students, workers and citizens have been reduced to statistical numbers in computer grids. As a result, society has lost its moral center and compass. People have become things to address, evaluate and manage. This is the essence of corporate sin.
In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel:
Imagine growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and in the middle of a farm belt industrial community of 33,000, while WWII was raging. No television, mega sports, new automobiles, or manicured lawns. Automakers were making tanks and lawns had been turned into victory gardens. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and industrial league baseball, played by young boys and men too old to go to war. It was a time when the four-faces of the courthouse clock chimed every half hour so no one could excuse being late for meals. It was a working class neighborhood in which both parents were likely to work in one of the many defense industries along the Mississippi River. What sets it apart from today is self-reliance was as natural as breathing.
A Look Back To See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s:
We are stuck. Today resembles the 1970s with such frightening consistency that it is maddening to think otherwise. Then as now young people fought an unpopular war; social upheaval was in the air; corrupt politicians lied and deceived the electorate; drugs were ruining lives; morality was on holiday; new bigotry and old hatreds were hatching; the automotive industry was in sharp decline; energy was in crisis; a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, while Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs. The book breaks through our cool façade and canned rhetoric to expose this chronic disease, and ask what we plan to do about it?
__________
For direct contact, email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
CHRONIC PASSIVITY, THE DIET OF THE TIMES?
CHRONIC PASSIVITY, THE DIET OF THE TIMES?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“December 7, 1941, Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor; December 7, 1989, Japan Buys Pearl Harbor”
Op-ed cartoon in The Tampa Tribune, December 7, 1989.
Note: As often is the case, my thoughts are triggered by a colleague who states a situation, in this case the bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis-St. Paul over the Mississippi River. George D. shares with me a published piece, and asks for my comment. The discussion he quotes differentiates between the “blame game” and accountability. As you will see from my response, I find it much more troubling than a matter of semantics.
George,
Thank you for sharing. I do have some thoughts on this, but they are not original, but are indicative of our 50-year slide into passivity. Americans have taken the meaningless terms of being the lone superpower and "Numero Uno" to the point of obsession. As a consequence, we have lost our identity as a maintenance driven society and have become preoccupied with electronic tools treated as toys of distraction. Permit me to explain.
Eric Hoffer once wrote in the 1960s that the difference between the United States and the rest of the Western world was that Americans paid attention to preventive maintenance.
Hoffer used the example of the implausible yet spectacular record of railway transportation safety across the US. "In plain language, we don't have track failures in the United States because our railroads are maintained."
A decade later this was no longer true, nor has it proven so since. Railroad track failures have become a chronic problem, contributing to many derailments, but this receives little attention because the emphasis and dollars are put to other uses.
Vance Packard, again in the 1960s, in "The Waste Makers," suggested we had become a totally "throw away culture" in which we tired of an item long before it was no longer useful. Manufacturers noting this, he offered, had produced items, such as light bulbs, television sets and radios to approximate this inclination, doing their part to make durable goods more perishable justifying the mounting wastefulness.
As early as 1970 with the writing of "Confident Selling," I suggested that our inclination to look at our selling problems from only one perspective contributed to our fixation with failure. “Think the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” Pessimism joined passivity.
I went on in that book to claim that people fail in selling not because sellers don't believe in the product or service they are selling. They don't believe in themselves. They are trying to succeed when they have failed to accept themselves as they are, or others as they find them. Translated: to read the motivation of others, we must first understand our own. Otherwise, it is the blind leading the blind. It is demonstrated in problems being seen as barriers rather than opportunities.
This has proven metaphorically true in a broader cultural and contextual sense today.
In 1990 with the writing of "Work Without Managers," the American character was exposed to its nearly total passive identity. Monday morning quarterbacking had come to extend well beyond football.
It took our reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to get the US into WWII, the successful launching of the Soviet Union of Sputnik to get the US into the space race, and for the Japanese to successfully use Total Quality Control Management (technology created by Americans), taking away markets dominated by the US, to change our manufacturing techniques.
Markets, once dominated by the US have continued to crumble, most notably the automotive industry for this procrastination. Ironically, books on "competitive edge" and "competitive advantage" by HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) scholars came out when the horse was already out of the barn.
In "Corporate Sin," I went on to show how in the last fifty years this syndrome of passivity had come to contribute and then control the nature of leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.
Thanks to aggressive education since WWII, the US had the best-trained professional workforce in the world with the most anachronistic management by 1980.
It was strange how this played out. Disgruntled professional workers, who were now numbered three out of every four in the workforce, went on to earn MBAs, thinking that further education was the key to their rise. It wasn’t.
Management, senior management in particular, which had been surprisingly frugal and temperate up to and immediately following WWII, adopted a new strategy of greed. This necessitated the painting of an unrealistic picture of "things as they are" during its watch, then voting itself pay increases and bonuses inconsistent with precedence and its performance.
Senior management, with a submissive board of directors, escalated the pay differential between it and workers from single digits, then double digits, then triple digits and beyond. Even Peter Drucker, a supporter of senior management, was appalled and said so in print.
This travesty has never stopped. The question is not its legality but its ethics. Why so much greed? Why, indeed!
Perhaps when you no longer believe in anything getting is the only thing. No surprise, this mentality has trickled down to the lowest ranks where there was once pride in work because there was pride in self, has now been reduced to getting, not giving, while the getting is good.
Americans have always been somewhat skeptical of the future. Now they have become cynical of it. This translates into how they behave.
You may recall my mention in my last missive about Chrysler's new head, Bob Nardelli, who is entering an industry he knows nothing about, and intends to be successful. Well, he left Home Depot with a slumping stock price, but with a $210 million golden parachute. Chrysler will find him difficult to bargain with as he apparently equates pay with a sense of worth, not a very reliable index of performance.
In "Six Silent Killers," I outlined in some detail the angst of professional workers who are paid a dollar more an hour than they have the gumption to confront and complain to management politely and frequently with their concerns. Instead, they have retired into six passive behaviors, behaviors with which I have repeatedly made reference, behaviors, which continue to cripple American industry and commerce.
Now, in my latest, "A Look Back To See Ahead," I address the chronic sickness of our culture and the fact that we are stuck. Why do I do this when I know most readers will take a pass? Good question.
Better than thirty percent of our bridges, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being safe, are considered secure and efficient. Many have ratings close to 1 to 3.
Still, bridge maintenance and safety represent only the tip of the iceberg.
In the 1980s, economist Robert L. Heilbroner wrote a series of articles on the collapsing nature of the American infrastructure, pointing out the deplorable condition of railroad tracks, bridges, roads, dams and airport runways. Little changed.
George, we are a reactive society. We are that way in our personal life, and our society is but an extension of us as individuals.
I have devoted the past seventeen years to saying what I have heard many say to me privately, but were afraid to say to someone in authority for fear of losing their job. I am not original as I stated earlier, but a chronicler of the times collating the common angst and perspectives of ordinary souls.
The irony is that they are looking for leaders and not seeing themselves as leaders. They are looking for someone else to carry the burden, for someone else to blame when things go wrong, for someone else to worry at night and on the weekends that all will go well while they do their thing in the safety and comfort of ignorance and indulgence, being quick to blame authority figures for being greedy, but never expecting to do anything about it other then complain amongst their own kind; to be down on politicians and demonstrate their anger by not voting; to wait for something terrible to happen before they accept part of the burden.
The governor of Minnesota twice vetoed a bill to increase the gasoline tax five cents to pay for infrastructure improvements including roads and bridges. It was such a stance that got him elected governor. Now, the man and woman in the street says that they will be glad to support a five cent tax on gasoline, and I suspect the governor will now promote the bill he once vetoed.
Reaction. After the fact.
Blame and accountability are just words, neither apply. It is just rhetoric. We operate in a leaderless society in which the focus is on what will people think instead of what action is called for. Politicians with gumption don’t get elected; and they never reach the status of CEO. Politicians are slaves to polls in the same way CEOs are slaves to stockholders.
In the simplest terms, we are all leaders or none of us are.
Leaders anticipate problems, they don't wait to react to them; leaders don't point fingers at who is wrong but what is wrong and what we can be done; leaders don't retreat into video games, BlackBerrys, iPods, or whatever; leaders don't write letters to the editor, but start behaving and thinking differently on purpose.
While calamity that is man made often brings out the worst in us, calamity that is by an act of Mother Nature always brings out the best in us. This bridge collapse should give us pause, but I expect it will do little more.
Be always well,
Jim
___________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: http://www.fisherofideas.com/ or order his latest book, A Look Back To See Ahead from your favorite book provider.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“December 7, 1941, Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor; December 7, 1989, Japan Buys Pearl Harbor”
Op-ed cartoon in The Tampa Tribune, December 7, 1989.
Note: As often is the case, my thoughts are triggered by a colleague who states a situation, in this case the bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis-St. Paul over the Mississippi River. George D. shares with me a published piece, and asks for my comment. The discussion he quotes differentiates between the “blame game” and accountability. As you will see from my response, I find it much more troubling than a matter of semantics.
George,
Thank you for sharing. I do have some thoughts on this, but they are not original, but are indicative of our 50-year slide into passivity. Americans have taken the meaningless terms of being the lone superpower and "Numero Uno" to the point of obsession. As a consequence, we have lost our identity as a maintenance driven society and have become preoccupied with electronic tools treated as toys of distraction. Permit me to explain.
Eric Hoffer once wrote in the 1960s that the difference between the United States and the rest of the Western world was that Americans paid attention to preventive maintenance.
Hoffer used the example of the implausible yet spectacular record of railway transportation safety across the US. "In plain language, we don't have track failures in the United States because our railroads are maintained."
A decade later this was no longer true, nor has it proven so since. Railroad track failures have become a chronic problem, contributing to many derailments, but this receives little attention because the emphasis and dollars are put to other uses.
Vance Packard, again in the 1960s, in "The Waste Makers," suggested we had become a totally "throw away culture" in which we tired of an item long before it was no longer useful. Manufacturers noting this, he offered, had produced items, such as light bulbs, television sets and radios to approximate this inclination, doing their part to make durable goods more perishable justifying the mounting wastefulness.
As early as 1970 with the writing of "Confident Selling," I suggested that our inclination to look at our selling problems from only one perspective contributed to our fixation with failure. “Think the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” Pessimism joined passivity.
I went on in that book to claim that people fail in selling not because sellers don't believe in the product or service they are selling. They don't believe in themselves. They are trying to succeed when they have failed to accept themselves as they are, or others as they find them. Translated: to read the motivation of others, we must first understand our own. Otherwise, it is the blind leading the blind. It is demonstrated in problems being seen as barriers rather than opportunities.
This has proven metaphorically true in a broader cultural and contextual sense today.
In 1990 with the writing of "Work Without Managers," the American character was exposed to its nearly total passive identity. Monday morning quarterbacking had come to extend well beyond football.
It took our reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to get the US into WWII, the successful launching of the Soviet Union of Sputnik to get the US into the space race, and for the Japanese to successfully use Total Quality Control Management (technology created by Americans), taking away markets dominated by the US, to change our manufacturing techniques.
Markets, once dominated by the US have continued to crumble, most notably the automotive industry for this procrastination. Ironically, books on "competitive edge" and "competitive advantage" by HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) scholars came out when the horse was already out of the barn.
In "Corporate Sin," I went on to show how in the last fifty years this syndrome of passivity had come to contribute and then control the nature of leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.
Thanks to aggressive education since WWII, the US had the best-trained professional workforce in the world with the most anachronistic management by 1980.
It was strange how this played out. Disgruntled professional workers, who were now numbered three out of every four in the workforce, went on to earn MBAs, thinking that further education was the key to their rise. It wasn’t.
Management, senior management in particular, which had been surprisingly frugal and temperate up to and immediately following WWII, adopted a new strategy of greed. This necessitated the painting of an unrealistic picture of "things as they are" during its watch, then voting itself pay increases and bonuses inconsistent with precedence and its performance.
Senior management, with a submissive board of directors, escalated the pay differential between it and workers from single digits, then double digits, then triple digits and beyond. Even Peter Drucker, a supporter of senior management, was appalled and said so in print.
This travesty has never stopped. The question is not its legality but its ethics. Why so much greed? Why, indeed!
Perhaps when you no longer believe in anything getting is the only thing. No surprise, this mentality has trickled down to the lowest ranks where there was once pride in work because there was pride in self, has now been reduced to getting, not giving, while the getting is good.
Americans have always been somewhat skeptical of the future. Now they have become cynical of it. This translates into how they behave.
You may recall my mention in my last missive about Chrysler's new head, Bob Nardelli, who is entering an industry he knows nothing about, and intends to be successful. Well, he left Home Depot with a slumping stock price, but with a $210 million golden parachute. Chrysler will find him difficult to bargain with as he apparently equates pay with a sense of worth, not a very reliable index of performance.
In "Six Silent Killers," I outlined in some detail the angst of professional workers who are paid a dollar more an hour than they have the gumption to confront and complain to management politely and frequently with their concerns. Instead, they have retired into six passive behaviors, behaviors with which I have repeatedly made reference, behaviors, which continue to cripple American industry and commerce.
Now, in my latest, "A Look Back To See Ahead," I address the chronic sickness of our culture and the fact that we are stuck. Why do I do this when I know most readers will take a pass? Good question.
Better than thirty percent of our bridges, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being safe, are considered secure and efficient. Many have ratings close to 1 to 3.
Still, bridge maintenance and safety represent only the tip of the iceberg.
In the 1980s, economist Robert L. Heilbroner wrote a series of articles on the collapsing nature of the American infrastructure, pointing out the deplorable condition of railroad tracks, bridges, roads, dams and airport runways. Little changed.
George, we are a reactive society. We are that way in our personal life, and our society is but an extension of us as individuals.
I have devoted the past seventeen years to saying what I have heard many say to me privately, but were afraid to say to someone in authority for fear of losing their job. I am not original as I stated earlier, but a chronicler of the times collating the common angst and perspectives of ordinary souls.
The irony is that they are looking for leaders and not seeing themselves as leaders. They are looking for someone else to carry the burden, for someone else to blame when things go wrong, for someone else to worry at night and on the weekends that all will go well while they do their thing in the safety and comfort of ignorance and indulgence, being quick to blame authority figures for being greedy, but never expecting to do anything about it other then complain amongst their own kind; to be down on politicians and demonstrate their anger by not voting; to wait for something terrible to happen before they accept part of the burden.
The governor of Minnesota twice vetoed a bill to increase the gasoline tax five cents to pay for infrastructure improvements including roads and bridges. It was such a stance that got him elected governor. Now, the man and woman in the street says that they will be glad to support a five cent tax on gasoline, and I suspect the governor will now promote the bill he once vetoed.
Reaction. After the fact.
Blame and accountability are just words, neither apply. It is just rhetoric. We operate in a leaderless society in which the focus is on what will people think instead of what action is called for. Politicians with gumption don’t get elected; and they never reach the status of CEO. Politicians are slaves to polls in the same way CEOs are slaves to stockholders.
In the simplest terms, we are all leaders or none of us are.
Leaders anticipate problems, they don't wait to react to them; leaders don't point fingers at who is wrong but what is wrong and what we can be done; leaders don't retreat into video games, BlackBerrys, iPods, or whatever; leaders don't write letters to the editor, but start behaving and thinking differently on purpose.
While calamity that is man made often brings out the worst in us, calamity that is by an act of Mother Nature always brings out the best in us. This bridge collapse should give us pause, but I expect it will do little more.
Be always well,
Jim
___________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: http://www.fisherofideas.com/ or order his latest book, A Look Back To See Ahead from your favorite book provider.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
WHEN THE RATIONAL & IRRATIONAL MARRY, WE HAVE THE FAMILY OF BUSINESS!
WHEN THE RATIONAL & IRRATIONAL MEET & MARRY, WE HAVE THE FAMILY OF BUSINESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“There is a foolish corner even in the brain of the sage.”
Aristotle
Yesterday, I was television channel hopping when I came across a pithy panel of profundity discussing the nature of the rational and irrational. The only man on the panel I recognized was Edward de Bono of lateral and parallel thinking fame. I am somewhat of a devotee to his ideas.
The panel discussed the nature of deductive and inductive reasoning, of heuristic and algorithmic mechanisms, the size of the brain, the nature of perception and its limitations, and of course, how science will augment man’s mental deficiencies in a future of computer nirvana
Edward de Bono proved the exception to this forecast. He sees man escaping the net of his delimiting capacities by thinking differently on purpose.
Perhaps so. But in the meantime it would appear we will remain stuck in the hubris of seeing man as a thing to be defined and then controlled with the precision of virtual reality. It is the nature of the business psyche.
Panic, we see, pervades possibilities when there is no escape from the grid of this mindset. The fact that it is everywhere every day makes it unremarkable as push comes to shove, and panic becomes the “crisis management” practice of the moment.
Most recently, the automotive industry of the United States has profiled this panic. For the first time in automotive history, American car manufacturers own less than fifty percent of the American automotive market.
Band-Aids have been applied without changing this hemorrhaging. This has included putting family members in charge of the business; producing imitations of foreign competitors’ product lines; merging with foreign automakers; renegotiating contracts with union workers who have lost their appetite for battle; and even bringing foreign automakers to head American automotive companies, always, however, to no avail. The bleeding would not stop.
The American automotive industry reveals the best and worst in the relationship of workers to their employers.
Henry Ford created the working model of this industry in accordance with the scientific management scheme of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who believed workers were to be treated as things to be managed, not as thinking men and women to be led.
Henry Ford created the $5 dollar eight-hour working day when most workers made only $1 for ten hours of work in most industries. He also created a pension program before there was such a thing as Social Security.
He did this out of self-interests, establishing a ready-made market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford. No one is more responsible for creating the working middle class.
Ford didn’t believe in magnanimity, but in the pragmatics. In a way, his organization model was an extension of feudalism only in a benign rendition of it.
Uncannily, this model was repeated by other car manufacturers and became in hierarchical terms an imitation of the Roman Church, and in operational terms an imitation of the military. Nearly a century later, it has become the predominant model of American industry across the board. The Austrian Peter Drucker reified it into a corporate model.
This model is failing today, has failed, and will continue to fail because it is not a working model consistent with the times, the people, the circumstances, and, indeed, the nature of international commerce.
The automotive industry has the distinction of being a bellwether to what is bound to happen to the Wal-Marts and other giants of the time, despite the perspicacity of their computer inventories and just-in-time logistics.
People have been left out of the equation and now only people can make the difference.
It is apparent that this reality is not going to sink in any time soon. Struggling Ford Motor Company late last year hired a new CEO from outside the automotive industry to rescue the company from its bleeding to death.
Ford named Alan Mulally, former Boeing Company executive, as its president and chief executive officer last September. Boeing is riding high at the moment eclipsing Air Bus with burgeoning orders for its new 787.
Not long before that breakthrough, Boeing looked as if it, too, would tank.
Now, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management LP, has rescued Chrysler, finally separating it from its unhappy German marriage with Daimler-Chrysler.
Chrysler, too, has named an outsider to the automotive industry to bring it back to life. Bob Nardelli, who by reputation has given greed a new name, and who fought for more and more pay at Home Depot, which he headed, took a nose dive on the Big Board on his watch. He promises now to accelerate downsizing and to engage in massive restructuring. Translated: more of the same.
The United Auto Workers Union, created in the 1930s, and made and managed in the image and likeness of the industry it serves, has often chosen its battles unwisely, striking when it should stay the course, and accepting reduction in hours and pay when it should stand its ground.
I have observed the culture of this industry and its characteristic American spirit. The brains of auto making are not in the ivory tower, but on the line. This culture has a language, value and belief system that is indigenous to its work with subtle nuances that can be misread, misunderstood and miscalculated from another perspective.
Traditional workers in this culture have been content to be well-paid serfs in a benign feudal system, but no longer.
Mullaly and Nardelli are moving into a lion’s den in which the appetite to devour them is not unlike that experienced by John Sculley of Pepsi fame. Sculley was handpicked by Steven Jobs to run Apple. He then proceeded, largely because he failed to understand or relate successfully to the workers in their culture, to grind Apple Computer into the ground. Only the return of Jobs rescued Apple, and brought it back to its current health and prominence.
It wasn’t that Steven Jobs was such a genius. He was one of them. Consequently, he benefited from the serendipity of being comfortable in eclectic chaos. Here creativity flourishes, which is fundamental to success in this industry.
Benign feudalism wouldn’t work here because it has little respect for the genius of communication, relying instead on intimidation. Eclectic chaos allows ideas buried in the minds of the workers to surface and flourish unimpeded by directives, proclamations, patronizing procedures, or the regal authority of performance appraisals.
The automotive industry is failing because a long time ago it attempted to bribe workers into productivity with entitlement schemes, which were not earned, not tied to productivity, but were welfare packages that implied “we own you because you depend on us for your comfort and security.”
This never worked too well, but it worked a lot better with a less well-educated, less well-informed, and less self-reliant workforce.
Nardelli plans to accelerate the cutting of 13,000 hourly and salaried jobs at Chrysler. Imagine what would happen if 100,000 Chrysler workers chose not to show up for work. Look what happened when scores of pilots of North West Air Lines called in sick recently: hundreds of flights were canceled across the nation.
One day, sooner or later, the broad based fact will come home to rouse: i.e., that CEOs are paid employees and perhaps of less consequence than workers on the job. This is apparent because cutting employees, restructuring jobs, creating a more attractive balance sheet is accounting, not leadership, and in no instances in my memory has it sustained growth.
It lacks imagination, as college football once did, resembling rugby, until Knute Rockne used the forward pass to change the game and the sport forever.
That was leadership. So, today, no one in football gets more attention than the quarterback, not the coach, not the owner, not the stockholders, but that leader on the field, who is supported by a cadre of folks that determines whether he will succeed or fail.
As I claim in A Look Back To See Ahead (2007), we are stuck in the pathology of normalcy where the rational and irrational are joined in an unhappy marriage. This is our Berlin Wall that may surprise us when it comes tumbling down.
_________________
For more information on Dr. Fisher and his books, check with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or his website, http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“There is a foolish corner even in the brain of the sage.”
Aristotle
Yesterday, I was television channel hopping when I came across a pithy panel of profundity discussing the nature of the rational and irrational. The only man on the panel I recognized was Edward de Bono of lateral and parallel thinking fame. I am somewhat of a devotee to his ideas.
The panel discussed the nature of deductive and inductive reasoning, of heuristic and algorithmic mechanisms, the size of the brain, the nature of perception and its limitations, and of course, how science will augment man’s mental deficiencies in a future of computer nirvana
Edward de Bono proved the exception to this forecast. He sees man escaping the net of his delimiting capacities by thinking differently on purpose.
Perhaps so. But in the meantime it would appear we will remain stuck in the hubris of seeing man as a thing to be defined and then controlled with the precision of virtual reality. It is the nature of the business psyche.
Panic, we see, pervades possibilities when there is no escape from the grid of this mindset. The fact that it is everywhere every day makes it unremarkable as push comes to shove, and panic becomes the “crisis management” practice of the moment.
Most recently, the automotive industry of the United States has profiled this panic. For the first time in automotive history, American car manufacturers own less than fifty percent of the American automotive market.
Band-Aids have been applied without changing this hemorrhaging. This has included putting family members in charge of the business; producing imitations of foreign competitors’ product lines; merging with foreign automakers; renegotiating contracts with union workers who have lost their appetite for battle; and even bringing foreign automakers to head American automotive companies, always, however, to no avail. The bleeding would not stop.
The American automotive industry reveals the best and worst in the relationship of workers to their employers.
Henry Ford created the working model of this industry in accordance with the scientific management scheme of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who believed workers were to be treated as things to be managed, not as thinking men and women to be led.
Henry Ford created the $5 dollar eight-hour working day when most workers made only $1 for ten hours of work in most industries. He also created a pension program before there was such a thing as Social Security.
He did this out of self-interests, establishing a ready-made market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford. No one is more responsible for creating the working middle class.
Ford didn’t believe in magnanimity, but in the pragmatics. In a way, his organization model was an extension of feudalism only in a benign rendition of it.
Uncannily, this model was repeated by other car manufacturers and became in hierarchical terms an imitation of the Roman Church, and in operational terms an imitation of the military. Nearly a century later, it has become the predominant model of American industry across the board. The Austrian Peter Drucker reified it into a corporate model.
This model is failing today, has failed, and will continue to fail because it is not a working model consistent with the times, the people, the circumstances, and, indeed, the nature of international commerce.
The automotive industry has the distinction of being a bellwether to what is bound to happen to the Wal-Marts and other giants of the time, despite the perspicacity of their computer inventories and just-in-time logistics.
People have been left out of the equation and now only people can make the difference.
It is apparent that this reality is not going to sink in any time soon. Struggling Ford Motor Company late last year hired a new CEO from outside the automotive industry to rescue the company from its bleeding to death.
Ford named Alan Mulally, former Boeing Company executive, as its president and chief executive officer last September. Boeing is riding high at the moment eclipsing Air Bus with burgeoning orders for its new 787.
Not long before that breakthrough, Boeing looked as if it, too, would tank.
Now, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management LP, has rescued Chrysler, finally separating it from its unhappy German marriage with Daimler-Chrysler.
Chrysler, too, has named an outsider to the automotive industry to bring it back to life. Bob Nardelli, who by reputation has given greed a new name, and who fought for more and more pay at Home Depot, which he headed, took a nose dive on the Big Board on his watch. He promises now to accelerate downsizing and to engage in massive restructuring. Translated: more of the same.
The United Auto Workers Union, created in the 1930s, and made and managed in the image and likeness of the industry it serves, has often chosen its battles unwisely, striking when it should stay the course, and accepting reduction in hours and pay when it should stand its ground.
I have observed the culture of this industry and its characteristic American spirit. The brains of auto making are not in the ivory tower, but on the line. This culture has a language, value and belief system that is indigenous to its work with subtle nuances that can be misread, misunderstood and miscalculated from another perspective.
Traditional workers in this culture have been content to be well-paid serfs in a benign feudal system, but no longer.
Mullaly and Nardelli are moving into a lion’s den in which the appetite to devour them is not unlike that experienced by John Sculley of Pepsi fame. Sculley was handpicked by Steven Jobs to run Apple. He then proceeded, largely because he failed to understand or relate successfully to the workers in their culture, to grind Apple Computer into the ground. Only the return of Jobs rescued Apple, and brought it back to its current health and prominence.
It wasn’t that Steven Jobs was such a genius. He was one of them. Consequently, he benefited from the serendipity of being comfortable in eclectic chaos. Here creativity flourishes, which is fundamental to success in this industry.
Benign feudalism wouldn’t work here because it has little respect for the genius of communication, relying instead on intimidation. Eclectic chaos allows ideas buried in the minds of the workers to surface and flourish unimpeded by directives, proclamations, patronizing procedures, or the regal authority of performance appraisals.
The automotive industry is failing because a long time ago it attempted to bribe workers into productivity with entitlement schemes, which were not earned, not tied to productivity, but were welfare packages that implied “we own you because you depend on us for your comfort and security.”
This never worked too well, but it worked a lot better with a less well-educated, less well-informed, and less self-reliant workforce.
Nardelli plans to accelerate the cutting of 13,000 hourly and salaried jobs at Chrysler. Imagine what would happen if 100,000 Chrysler workers chose not to show up for work. Look what happened when scores of pilots of North West Air Lines called in sick recently: hundreds of flights were canceled across the nation.
One day, sooner or later, the broad based fact will come home to rouse: i.e., that CEOs are paid employees and perhaps of less consequence than workers on the job. This is apparent because cutting employees, restructuring jobs, creating a more attractive balance sheet is accounting, not leadership, and in no instances in my memory has it sustained growth.
It lacks imagination, as college football once did, resembling rugby, until Knute Rockne used the forward pass to change the game and the sport forever.
That was leadership. So, today, no one in football gets more attention than the quarterback, not the coach, not the owner, not the stockholders, but that leader on the field, who is supported by a cadre of folks that determines whether he will succeed or fail.
As I claim in A Look Back To See Ahead (2007), we are stuck in the pathology of normalcy where the rational and irrational are joined in an unhappy marriage. This is our Berlin Wall that may surprise us when it comes tumbling down.
_________________
For more information on Dr. Fisher and his books, check with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or his website, http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
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