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.
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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available with the publisher: www.authorhouse.com, www.amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.