DR. FISHER GOES TO SEA!

DR. FISHER GOES TO SEA

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2007

"Thoughts lead on to purpose; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny."

Tryon Edwards (1809 - 1894), American theologian

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As with all the other iterations of my career, I have shared my wondering, thinking and speculations in missives, articles and books on a host of topics, which might be of interest to you.

What I share with you now gives a sense of how serendipity plays in an ordinary life.

Like many others, I have ratcheted up the process, gradually, incrementally, and continuously in a persistent fashion over the past seventeen years, or since I retired from corporate life in 1990.

During that period, I have written nine books and hundreds of published articles, as well as hundreds of other unpublished articles on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) and am now busily writing a tenth, which is to be a novel of South Africa during apartheid in the late 1960s.

"You can see from this production, Jim is a passionate writer," says Gary Herrity, a Clinton (Iowa) historian, and friend of mine in defining this persistence. I would prefer to be seen as an "idea guy" and peripatetic philosopher inclined to remind others of what is taken for granted, and therefore not seen at all. (Bernie, he said this recently at a dinner held while on a book tour to Iowa in September for my latest book.)

I've always been pretty focused and disciplined almost to a fault but best remembered by my generation as an athlete. What never seemed to register is that I was always more interested in academics than athletics almost from the beginning.

Writing has been a means of expression since a little boy. I know this to be a fact because my mother held on to things, and collected them in scrapbooks of virtually everything I did. These collections reveal a linear curve of curiosity and confluence into a mindset that in the evening of my life differs little with that long ago morning.

The latest confluence is the signing of a contract to give one or more cultural enrichment lectures on Oceania Cruises in 2008. It is the same cruise line that BB and I took this summer to the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts as well as new ones such as Russia, Poland, and Estonia. It is a small ship (600 passengers) with the focus on enrichment rather than the typical entertainment ambiance of much larger cruise ships.

Consistent with the premise of this piece, I'm now going to share how that came about.

BB and I became friendly with the Park West Galleries art director of the cruise, attending all his art shows and auctions, and acquiring a couple pieces of original art. In the process, he asked what we did. BB told him she was an accountant and the business manager of a Jewish Day School, and I told him I wrote books.

"What kind of books do you write," he asked, a typical question of a writer. I told him, which spiked his interests.

"I'd sure like to read you." With that, I handed the only copy I brought of "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD." He read it, and showed it to the cruise director, who met with me. I told him about my website, and he gave me information on the manager of entertainment, whom I wrote to when I got back to the States.

About two months later, this manager contacted me by email, and asked if I would be interested in being an enrichment lecturer. I emailed him back to send me some information on what that entailed.

What I received was an opportunity to give enrichment lecturers on the history and geography of the regions to be visited. I thought that closed the door on me.

Since I am neither a geographer nor historian, I wrote back, "Sorry, but this is beyond my expertise," stating what that was. He emailed again saying I could participate as a "special interest" lecturer. Still, not satisfied with that response, I sent him the following as to the content and context of possible lecturers based on my books.

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Michael,

Before I go into possibilities, I want you to know I am interested. That said I would like to know your policy on selling books or even taking orders should people find they would like to read more of what I have to say.

RATIONALE FOR MY APPROACH

People are always interested in writers, how they become writers, where they get their material, how they first thought to become writers, what it takes to get published, and so on, mainly because everyone is in the communication business and secretly imagines they, too, could write and see their name in print with a book.

My approach as a wonderer and thinker is to translate my thoughts and ideas into books (nine to date) and articles (more than 300) accessible to everyone. I write out of my life, education, and experience.

My lectures would be built around my books:

· A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007) -- how we are stuck in nostalgia repeating the same problems.

· Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990) -- a book that predicted that entitlement programs would sink the Fortune 500, and they have. The book dared to go where others refused to tread, and has come to have classical significance.

· Confident Selling/Confident Thinking (1992) -- the seller is the barrier to success, not the buyer. Walls of resistance are self-created. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 1992.

· The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) -- whatever the industry, professionals have become the majority of workers, but, unfortunately, they have not been programmed to recognize or deal with this successfully. So, they continue to complain rather than contribute when the only game in town belongs to them.

· The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) -- to have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. The emphasis of self-help books is on building self-esteem or becoming more assertive, when the problem is not with "others," but "you!" And the problem "with you," is that self-hatred vies with self-confidence and self-hatred usually wins. Self-help gurus and books spawn this disease, which nobody seems to notice.

Other possibilities are my novels:

· In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003) -- this is a snapshot of the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States when the nation was at war (WWII). It was a time when problems were all about what we could do, collectively, to solve them. Now, problems are all about our precious egos and how we are being exploited. There was a period after the Great Depression and during WWII when people didn't have the luxury of being hedonistic or self-indulgent. Survival was the focus. Now, that sense of struggle and survival is long gone. In the Shadow is a nostalgic picture of what it was like when we had so little but were so much.

· Green Island in a Black Sea (now being written) -- this is a novel of South Africa apartheid based upon a time when the protagonist was there forming a new company of a British affiliate, South African chemical company, and his own company's subsidiary in the late 1968, when the US seemed to becoming apart at the seams, and he with her.

POSSIBLE THEMES

It has been my experience that the ordinary can prove exhilarating and extraordinary. With that in mind, here are some possible themes that could be built into special interest lectures:

(1) TRANSFORMATION (A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s)

The idea here is that we are stuck in transition from the "American Century" to the reemergence of Europe, and the incipient emergence of capitalistic China and India in the twenty-first century. This threatens our stability and lifestyle as we have come to know ourselves. It needn't be. Unfortunately, our institutions are atavistic and our problem solving methodologies (vertical thinking) have proven limiting, resulting in our national psyche being stuck, replicating, duplicating and repeating the same tired strategies and problems experienced decades ago only with different names and faces, but with little apparent sense of how this praises our folly.

(2) PIVOTAL SYNDROME OF SELF-CONFIDENCE &SELF-HATRED (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend)

Too often the person we respect, trust and like least of all is ourselves. We explore the why of this here. Our orientation, for example, is to look for identity, authentication and approval from others who often disparage us in hopes of elevating themselves when it works always in reverse.

Pet themes are touched on including the charade of instant solutions such as "codependency no more," and "pulling your own strings" to illustrate how we have created the industry of self-help that seldom helps anyone but the generators of the material.

The importance of balance between essence (what we are born with) and personality (the many masks we wear in public) is exposed and illustrated for discussion.

(3) THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKER (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches)

Quickly, it is shown how we have moved from an agrarian to an industrial to an electronic age, and how the first Quantum leap came when so many veterans of WWII took advantage of the GI Bill to acquire a college education. Their children (Baby Boomer Generation) followed their lead in massive numbers, so that today a college education has become routine.

The educated now are essentially craftsmen compared to the classical educated high school graduate of the early twentieth century. The latter would put to shame a college graduate today. Education today has become basically "trade school training" in preparation for a job, not preparation for life and how to deal with a changing world.

The second Quantum leap in this postmodern era has been the explosion in electronic technology so that the world has been reduced to a global community. Laptops and handheld devices can bridge thousands of miles in an instant, but it remains a bridge too far to make contact with ourselves between our two ears.

Unfortunately, institutional structures and organizational behavior lag in the midst of this rupture, creating the "United States of Anxiety," which has become an exported product to the rest of the world.

Since progressive societies across the globe copy our model, they are stuck in the same mud of our anachronistic practices, cutting and controlling until the lakes dry up, the air becomes a perfect storm, and everyone retreats into an artificial world to watch reality television.

Nobody knows how to lead and nobody wants to follow.

The answers were never less in Mahogany Row and more distributed throughout the organization because knowledge is now power and it is quite democratically distributed.

The problem is that like all transitions and transformations there is a natural resistance to change; only now the consequences of delay are more immediate.

(4) THE POWER OF NOVELS TO GET OUR ATTENTION (this is a possibility covering "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" and "Green Island in a Black Sea" that is now being written)

This enrichment lecture would take the audience through the power of awareness that certain novels can generate, none of course greater than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

I am a writer in that vein as I show little forgiveness for our excesses. Instead, I attempt to show we only lose by dodging our problems, while scapegoats have a way of winning by default. You will note this in visiting my website: www.fisherofideas.com.


The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes, "Above all else, a novel is a vessel that carries inside it a dream world we wish to keep, forever alive and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape. The more we write, the richer these dreams become and the broader, more detailed, more complete seems that second world inside the vessel." I would agree.

Pamuk continues, "It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are." It is why I have returned to this form.

I hope this helps in letting you know how I might fit into your enrichment lecture program. Let me know what you think. Again, my wife and I are fans of Oceania Cruises.

Be always well,
Jim

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Michael wrote back that this menu was acceptable, but that I should downplay selling my books as the focus of my lectures might sound too much like infomercials. I agree.

Is this going to make me "rich"? No. It is going to give me free cruises where I sing for my supper, and visit interesting places. At the moment, I am contracting for only one cruise.

Not a bad deal as many of you know when it comes to how expensive these cruises can be. My only reservation is that it takes time away from my writing because the cruises last two weeks and then there is the time of preparation and travel to and from.

To give you a sense of my dilemma, I appear as if I am speaking off the cuff when I have put hours and hours into my preparation. It is the way I deal with my anxiety and the possibility of bombing, something of which I am familiar. I assure you it is not a happy experience. So, stay tuned.

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Dr. Fisher's books mentioned here may be asked for at your favorite bookstore, are available on his website (www.fisherofideas.com), or other electronic sources such as www.amazon.com.