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:
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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.

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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

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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

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Dr. Fisher’s book are all available on line from http://www.amazon.com/ or ask for them at your favorite bookstore.