WHEN THE READER IS READY -- Radio Interview with Dr. Fisher

WHEN THE READER IS READY, THE TEACHER WILL ARRIVE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2007

Reference: Interview of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. by David Vickers, KROS (am) radio, Clinton, Iowa, September 11, 2007

David Vickers (DV): Good morning, nice to see you in Clinton again.

Dr. Fisher (DF): Good to be here.

DV: You’re here to promote your new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. How has the reception been?

DF: Most generous as usual. Clinton is most generous to us that move on and do other things.

DV: This is going to be an extended interview. Does that suit you?

DF: Fine.

DV: Good. You write that two common themes are central to your books: the primacy of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. Could you explain those themes?

DF: I’d be glad to. Take the idea of American democracy and free enterprise. They are ideas in progress, and like all ideas, subject to challenge, refinement and periodic reassessment. They flourish and then falter, and even appear at times threatened with extinction. Ideas are abstract but just as real as any organic thing. We know some species of animals are constantly threatened; so are ideas.

DV: And intellectual capital?

DF: It is just as vulnerable. My da once told me they can take the ground out from under your feet, the clothes off your back, and the roof over your head, but they have to kill you to take from you what you put between your two ears. He had only a seventh grade education, but I’ve never been able to trump his wisdom.

DV: Is that why you are so passionate about writing?

DF: Does anyone understand passion? Since a little boy, I’ve been curious and a wonderer. Education was a way of moving beyond my roots, but in a sense I’ve never left them. I can’t explain my passion but I’ve always been a visualizer, a dreamer if you will, finding kindred spirits in books. This led to writing poetry, and little essays to myself, which triggered something else.

DV: Such as?

DF: I don’t know how to identify it precisely. I’ve always been big for my age, and empathetic with the little guy. I would get angry if I saw or experienced injustice, or bullying. It started when I was quite young and has become a constant with me throughout my schooling and working life. I don’t like to see physical, social, or intellectual bullying. I’ve learned to sublimate my anger into words and ideas, many of which have never seen the light of day. I was an angry young man. Now, I suppose I am an angry old man.

DV: How do you feel about that?

DF: (He laughs) About being angry? It’s my motivator. It’s not that I see something nobody else does, but others feel they have too big a stake in a job, career, marriage, or community to state how they think and feel. I’ve never had that problem. It is why these two themes have crystallized into books and articles. I am speaking for the timid.

DV: You’ve written nine books and some 300 articles, right? But you got a rather late start wouldn’t you say?

DF: Yes, I didn’t write my first book until I returned from a corporate assignment in South Africa for Nalco Chemical Company.

DV: That would be CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970). How does that relate to your two themes?

DF: I was trained as a chemist, started out in R&D for Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco only to make enough money to supplement a graduate fellowship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in pursuit of a doctorate in theoretical chemistry. I had two children at the time, and when another was on the way, I had to make my job with Nalco work. I had no training in sales techniques; only technical training in Nalco’s specialty chemical products. It wasn’t long before I found that Nalco sales engineers attempted to wow customers with their technical know how without understanding the customer’s needs. This made me wonder. I concluded they were afraid to sell because it was demeaning of their engineering prowess. The barrier was not the buyer but the seller. I formulated my own way past this barrier to see the customer as he was.

DV: How did you do this?

DF: Prentice-Hall would ask me the same question many years later when it decided to publish CONFIDENT SELLING. I discovered if I accept myself as I am, warts and all, then I cannot help but accept the customer as he is without prejudice. It is like an invitation into the customer’s mind as he is naked before you.

DV: How did CONFIDENT SELLING sell?

DF: It was in print for twenty years, serialized in a national magazine, and approached six figures in sales over its duration. A consortium wanted to produce a film and audiocassette of the book, but Prentice-Hall made such contractual demands that they dropped out of negotiations. I would never forget this. Prentice-Hall owned the copyright, which meant I had no voice in the decision.

DV: Is that why there was a twenty-year gap before you published your next book?

DF: Not really. I found CONFIDENT SELLING was a lark, that what I was writing was not mature or commercial enough for a publisher to take a chance. I wrote a book on my view of the Roman Catholic Church titled “The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out.” Paulist Press looked at it but declined. Then I went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology for the next six years, consulting on the side, although now with a family of four children. In 1980, after ten years of consulting, I joined Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an organizational development (OD) psychologist. Once again, I was promoted to a corporate executive position as director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. It was the fruition of my work on four continents for Nalco, plus ten years of consulting, and now working for Honeywell Europe during the infancy of the European Economic Community (EEC) that I was moved once again to write a book.

DV: That would be WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES. It took off if my memory serves me right.

DF: Yes and no. I self-published remembering my experience with Prentice-Hall, but learned a hard lesson. There is a lot more to publishing than writing.

DV: In that book you said entitlements were set to doom the Fortune 500 companies because they weren’t tied to performance.

DF: Yes, I did.

DV: And they have.

DF: Unfortunately.

DV: You also said companies were in a state of panic as foreign competition made inroads into their markets, going from unconscious incompetence and comfort to conscious incompetence and complacency as they attempted to bribe and buy worker contribution.

DF: Yes.

DV: Why did you say that? Didn’t you know it would make you look like a hot head?

DF: I could see workers were slipping from management dependency to a counterdependence on the company for their total well being; that workers were more interested in what they could get than give, while management was chasing greed because they could. Enterprise had been reduced to chaos fueling the decline.

DV: You also said human resources was management’s union.

DF: Yes, I did. I could see where HR had become complicit in this affair, failing to alert management to the changing character of the workforce and the nature of work.

DV: But as shocking as that was you said something even more shocking.

DF: What was that?

DV: You claimed Total Quality Management (TQM) was a charade, that GM was playing quick and dirty with it, sounding the rhetoric but when push came to shove always meeting schedule at any price. You gave case after case to document your charges.

DF: Yes, I guess I did.

DV: Why call it a charade?

DF: That’s your word, not mine. I said that it was apparent corporate America didn’t believe in quality management. It wasn’t part of its liturgy; meeting schedule was.

DV: You also said the reason the Japanese were eating our lunch was because our experts were ignored in the United States, and had to go to Japan to find work.

DF: You’re referring to J. M. Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Peter Drucker. Yes, I said that, too.

DV: Did WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS get much attention?

DF: NPR’s “All Things Considered” gave it airtime; so did The Wall Street Journal, Industry Week, and The Business Book Review Journal. Industry Week named it a top ten business book but said it was an angry book. Business Book Review said it was one of the top four business books of the year, and that it would change management practices. Now, nearly twenty years later, it is re-releasing a review claiming it is one of the most prophetic business books in the past fifty years.

DV: Whatever became of that book?

DF: It is still in print; let me put it that way.

DV: That didn’t seem to discourage you as you came out with THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN next. Why so?

DF: It was directed at professional workers. I could see that they had failed to see their time had come.

DV: Why professional workers; why not all workers?

DF: Professional workers were becoming essentially all workers and key to getting things done in the organization. Making things has never been our long suit and many countries do a better job of it than we do, but in the creation of things we have no peer. Management, you see, is no longer important as once perceived. Power has shifted from position power to knowledge power, and professionals possess that power, not management.

DV: How is that supposed to work?

DF: Let’s just say, “It’s in the book.”

DV: Your next book CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. What was that book about?

DF: It built on the earlier success of CONFIDENT SELLING, but now made a claim that everyone was in the selling business and no one more so than professionals. Yet, they had no idea how to sell their ideas. On the other hand, everything written on how to become successful dealt with some aspect of manipulation or intimidation. In fact one book of the 1970s celebrated winning through intimidation. My book argued that the only person you have to sell to be successful is yourself. Once done the rest follows. You have penetrated the ultimate barrier and will now see others clearly because you see yourself clearly. Simple? Perhaps, but difficult to achieve. So, the reason for the book.

DV: Em. Then you went on to write a book that we were all rearing our children to be self-haters?

DF: You’re referring to THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND. You state it a rather strongly but however accurately. I wrote an article for The Reader’s Digest which opened with the line, “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.” Reader’s Digest informed me that a request for more than 25,000 reprints was received the following weeks of publication. That was my invitation to write the book.

DV: That sounds like pretty strong stuff.

DF: Well, it is. People are looking for friends and identity in all the wrong places, painting their bodies with tattoos, and retrogressing back to primitives, trying desperately to draw attention to themselves because they need such confirmation to prove they exist. I could see why.

DV: How has that book been received?

DF (Smiles) People read it looking for answers, looking for ways to be more self-assertive, for how to deal with others without first dealing with themselves. Some readers have become angry because it is not a “how to” or “quick fix” book. Such readers are looking for mechanics, for solutions without understanding they are the problem. The book was written for them to unravel their hang-ups and angst, and redefine their situations in more realistic terms. That apparently is not too interesting. I have a line in the book, “The more you do for others the less they do for themselves; the less they do for themselves the weaker they become, and the more they resent you for your attention.” My premise is that readers are the authority to their own solutions. The problem appears they are too busy or too distracted to realize it.

DV: Is that how you have come to give us the tag that we are a solution driven society?

DF: Perhaps.

DV: You next came out with SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE. What is that all about?

DF: It was about the fact that the shift from 90 percent blue-collar to 90 percent white-collar or professionals in most Fortune 500 companies has resulted in a new pathology because the transformation has been largely ignored or treated with hubristic arrogance. I identify these behaviors as social termites that silently destroy the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These silent killers are professionals sitting on their hands feeling they aren’t recognized or appreciated for who and what they are.

DV: What can explain such behavior?

DF: Professionals don’t want to take on power or its responsibility. They want only the perks of power. So, when these are denied, they become dissident and retreat into six silent behaviors.

DV: Such as?

DF: Passive aggression – coming in late and leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by; passive responsive – never doing anything until told what to do, doing it even if it is wrong, bringing their bodies to work and leaving their minds at home; passive defensive – always having a ready excuse for why something isn’t done or done on time; approach avoidance – accepting assignments they have no plans to complete or complete on time; obsessive compulsive – being obsessed with what they don’t have at the expense of what they do, always seeing the grass greener on the other side of the tracks; and malicious obedience – withholding valuable information critical to a project, spreading disinformation, or hiding information from those who need it.

DV: Wow! How has that book done?

DF: The Wall Street Journal said every executive in America should read it.

DV: Have they?

DF: Not hardly. It’s still in print; let me put it that way.

DV: Then you came out with CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS. What’s that about?

DF: Each of my books builds on the premise of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. This book looked beyond the palpable corporate greed so widely reported to the failure of senior management to solve the complex problems it faced, instead concerning itself only with problems it could solve, putting a good cosmetic face on its watch while throwing the organization into chaos. Professionals demonstrated their angst with the six silent behaviors. Both failed to realize they were committing corporate sin, killing the spirit of work while seriously jeopardizing operational success.

DV: Did you offer any solutions?

DF: (Smiles) As a matter of fact, I did going against my own grain. I presented a blueprint for getting out of the rut.

DV: How has that book done?

DF: Let’s just say it is still in print.

DV: Now you come out with A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, but not before you write a novel.

DF: Yes to both. The novel was actually a memoir written as a novel titled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. I wanted to go back to my adolescence during WWII to show when our moral compass was firmly in place and we weren’t ambivalent about our identity. Everything worked for us then because it wasn’t all about “us,” but about the collective challenges we faced during that war. More than fifty years later, I see us no longer happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.

DV: So you say, but who is listening? Why don’t you just give it up and go quietly into the sunset and enjoy your remaining years?

DF: I suppose I could, but we all have a purpose in life and this is mine. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is the distillate of that process.

DV: What do you expect from this book?

DF: I don’t expect anything. I think I’ve made that clear.

DV: So why are you on a book tour?

DF: Good point. Why, indeed. The short answer is because it is necessary. I am not a celebrity personality or a national best selling author, yet I believe I’m saying some relevant things helpful in promoting the dialogue. I have a problem with our thinking and our problem solving strategy. In the most common language, I point out how our present approach to problem solving is doomed to failure, as countless events prove again and again. Since we can’t solve the problems crippling us, we solve the problems we can. This keeps us stuck.

DV: So it’s a book about problems?

DF: You could say that.

DV: But I don’t see your point.

DF: The point is we reject complexity because it is overwhelming. Instead, we manufacture solutions and declare war on our vices without ever clearly defining them. We have an appetite for violence and so declare war on our vices. We have a war on obesity, war on poverty, war on drug abuse, war on terror, war on promiscuity, war on greed, war on corruption, failing to realize in everyone of these wars we are failing, stuck, because buried in the violence is the actual cause. We fail to look at the problem from a complementary vantage point of vertical and lateral thinking, but exclusively in terms to top down vertical thinking with linear logic, cause & effect analysis, dividing the problem into manageable pieces, and then putting it back together as the solution. This is critical thinking or thinking in terms of what is already known without the complement of creative thinking, or what is not known, but can be found out. Creative thinking is mainly bottom up thinking or lateral thinking, thinking that is holistic, counterintuitive and conceptual. Knowledge power is not the exclusive domain at the top of the hierarchy but in the middle and bottom of the organization as well. The organization must flatten out to garner the full advantage of its intellectual capital. Top down needs the complement of bottom up thinking. But there is a problem. It is our take on authority. For one, bottom up thinking doesn’t want to be tagged with the responsibility should something go wrong; and for another, it doesn’t know how to leverage its thinking to complement top down vertical thinking. Professionals are programmed, as are their blue-collar colleagues to be reactive, passive, submissive, and surrendering to the will of the organization.

DV: So what is the answer?

DF: The answer is not teaming, not working as a family, or some other patronizing dribble. The answer is counterintuitive. It is confrontation, conflict and creativity. Workers don’t have to love each other to work productively together. They need only to respect and accept each other as they are. Then they will confront and criticize each other honestly and timely when something goes wrong. They will do this frequently and politely, not infrequently and violently. Managed conflict is the glue that holds workers to the task at hand.

DV: Conflict and creativity. Could you say more?

DF: An organization that is hitting on all cylinders talks about real things to real people in real time. There are no favorites. When somebody sees something wrong, it is reported. The messenger isn’t killed. When workers have a problem with each other, it is managed, not avoided, ignored or denied. Studies have shown that when all elements of a system are working as well as they can, then the overall system is not. And the corollary, when the elements of the system are not performing as efficiently as they can, then the overall system is. This is counterintuitive but has proven to be the case. Competition between units is divisive; cooperation is uniting. Competition has proven the wrong motivating strategy. We have seen this again and again when every department reaches 100 percent of its goal while the company is failing.

DV: So what is the payoff of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?

DF: We don’t stay stuck. We don’t remain a sick society. We get on the same page and off on the same dime. We don’t retreat into oblivion. We don’t let the world take the game we invented away from us.

DV: That’s what you see happening?

DF: Oh, yes.

DV: Your evidence?

DF: I could simply say, “read the book,” but that would be a cop out. Evidence is everywhere. In the 1970s, we saw a paranoid president hunker down. He had been paranoid long before. Third in his class at law school at Duke University, he broke into the dean’s office to see his grades only to be caught. Watergate was anticlimactic. We saw it in the S&L banking scandal and in Enron. The recent sub-prime real-estate fiasco is anticlimactic to chronic cultural greed. Each episode has proven further evidence of a sick society, stuck and diminished, not only in our own eyes, but also in the eyes of the world. We argue that Viet Nam and Iraq are not the same, yet watch as Congress repeats the same histrionics. Then as now Congress continues to miss the changes, stays the same, and leaves the future up for grabs. We have failed to act effectively against this because we are caught up in the pathology of normalcy. We are stuck in WWII nostalgic hubris failing to see our descent is marked with a cultural plague. This plague is seen everywhere in colorful casinos across the land that produce nothing but feed misplaced dreams.

DV: They produce jobs, bring serious money into communities.

DF: But where does this money come from? It comes from people that can least afford it.

DV: You don’t know that for certain. Anyway, what will convince me to read A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?

DF: I’m saying we have failed to look back and as a consequence have failed to see ahead. The evidence is everywhere but the reader must sense it. We are failing to see we are going the same way of the Greeks, Romans, Spanish, and English. We’re seeing the “American Century” sputtering to a whimpering end. We’re seeing all the resources that made us great now diminishing us because we haven’t paid attention.

DV: So this is a gloom and doom book.

DF: No. It is a kind of coming to Jesus meeting.

DV: That pretty stern stuff.

DF: Well, these are pretty trying times.

DV: Then would you say A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is uplifting?

DF: Let me put it this way, when I was a young man and came back from South Africa, where I experienced the ugliness of apartheid, I felt terrible because I could identify with the Afrikaners. The Boers, as they are known, are farmers like us, ordinary, conscientious, hard working, God fearing people. They created this monstrosity apartheid with four million whites governing 14 million Bantu or blacks. The majority population was without a vote, without rights or privileges, without freedom of speech, movement or association, yet these same Afrikaners felt they had done these people no harm. I saw this, experienced the benefits of it, me a simple man from Iowa of modest circumstances living the life of a colonial king, and it was too much.

DV: What did you do?

DF: I retired, took a two-year sabbatical, after which I went back to school looking for answers.

DV: Did you find them there?

DF: No, I found the university was another factory producing a product not unlike the products the corporation I had just left.

DV: That’s pretty critical. You’re kind of a serious dude. So, what do you expect to happen with this book?

DF: I hope something happens like it did to me when I returned to the United States from South Africa, and found myself in one of those little newspaper kiosks in New York City. I purchased a little book that changed my life. It was by Alan W. Watts and was titled simply, THE BOOK. I would like this book to do the same thing to someone else. When you write a book, you hope it touches a cord in the reader that hasn’t been touched before. That is my aim.

DV: But it sounds like a book more for academics. You’re smiling, why are you smiling?

DF: That is the easiest way to reject this book, to think that thinking is the exclusive domain of academics and specialists, not the general reader, not everyman and every woman. I am not an academic. I am a man of ideas that belongs to no coterie of elites, no special school of thought that can verify my pedigree as a qualified thinker. I am a man who grew up in the shadow of the courthouse, and ponders things because I can and because I must. Universities don’t have time for me.

DV: Why do you say that?

DF: I’m an outsider.

DV: You admit it.

DF: I cherish it. It gives me great freedom. I’m academically trained but not an academic. I’m a former corporate executive who has worked at every level of the organization from the lowest to the highest, and yet I’ve never joined the club. I’ve written nine books and hundreds of articles, yet I’m neither a journalist nor intellectual.

DV: So, you’re not a celebrity.

DF: No, I’m a voice in the wind, and a voice that will soon be leaving this town. Thank you very much.

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Books mentioned in this interview are available on the Internet, from your favorite bookstore, or from http://www.fisherofideas.com/.