ADVANCE COPY -- IOWA BOOK TOUR SPEECH FOUR: THE NEED FOR COMPLETION & THE PENALTY OF DELAY!

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.

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Dr. Fisher's books are available on line at http://www.amazon.com/.