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

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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.