MORE CONVERSATION: CONFESSION OF PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER

READERS:

Comments regarding “Confessions of the Peripatetic Philosopher” continue to roll in, and always mentioning my being cut off from the HBR editor. Interesting. I share this dialogue in the hopes that it has some use to you. This is from an educator and corporate consultant who was educated in the neighborhood of this journal.
JRF

HIS COMMENT:

I'm sorry about the editor of HBR. I notice, though, that you delight in alienating people. Not me; I don't think you could if you tried, and I doubt you'd try. But being an iconoclast, with all of the rejection that goes with it, is something you take pride in. Thus the house arrest (funny if it were in a satire! But I know it was painful to you), and many other experiences you've shared with me along the way.

Do you concur?

MY REPLY:

It is easy to think that my purpose is to irritate rather than provoke. The two words are not the same. I have seen too much corruption, duplicity, chicanery, lying, cheating and stealing in my long life to simply turn my head the other way.

My da once said, "Little people like us lie, cheat and steal, Jimmy, and we hurt ourselves and our families, but when the powerful do they fracture whole communities and beyond." He, with his seventh grade education, and me with all my degrees, has found wisdom and truth in his assessment.

Only tonight I watched "Bill Moyer's Journal" on television that dealt with the House of Representative Oversight Committee.

The program covered the tens of billions of dollars of corruption, or disappearing funds in Iraq of American government contractors, the Iraqi government's sweetheart deals with some insurgency groups, the Black Water vigilante cowboys that operate as if in a lawless West in Iraq, the tens of thousands of White House emails that were used to promote political advantage for Republicans at taxpayers' expense, and on and on.

Bill Moyer is tagged a "pinko" and so discounted. It is easy to discount the messager if in our naiveté we want desperately to believe what he says is not true.

Is one political party better than the other? I doubt it. But that doesn't mean we should be less vigilante and less in their face when they play sleight of hand tricks on us.

HIS COMMENT:

I'm playing shrink here, which is your role -- you do it masterfully. I'm a hack. I think you have more guts than I. Telling a roomful of people that they're all wrong... I've never tried that, and I don't think I'd like it. Of course, much of the information I share on enlightened management runs counter to how my audience behaves at work as executives and entrepreneurs. I can tell when someone in my audience rejects what I'm saying. So I suppose I'm not giving myself enough credit in how I challenge others. I guess the big thing is that when I speak to these folks, everyone thinks of himself as enlightened, so those who are not often don't realize that I'm talking to them. Oh, well.

MY REPLY:

You play a vital educational and informational role, and should not feel any compunction for fulfilling that role with passion and persuasive energy. It is you and it is the vital you that transmogrifies into a tactile message that will resonate with some and be an old familiar song to others.

You are reinforcing the message that will keep your audience coming back for more, like receiving an injection of adrenaline so they can go on doing what they are doing with confidence.

My role is a different one. I am a symbol of the past in my physical appearance, speech, dress and decorum, but a futurist in my voice speaking of a time not yet here. I look back to see ahead.

That said I am not a clairvoyant, not a mystic, not a prophet, but a provocateur. In that role, I may anger, but I may also cause the disenfranchised and the disengaged to reconsider why they have no power, and what they can do about it.

Thirty years ago, I did a study of a corrupt and duplicitous public organization that was racist and cruel. The good-old-boy network was firmly in place at all authority levels. I was hired, as consultants had been hired in the past, as a public relations gimmick to get the newspapers and public off this agency's back.

So, in my opening remarks, before I got into the essence of my study, I reviewed for this body of 60 power brokers what constituted the role of leadership in all its dimensions, a leadership they were not practicing.

This was followed with an assessment of what I had learned. "You are managing this agency as if it were an inanimate thing, and as a consequence, it is clear from my study that your understanding of leadership is skin deep." Then we broke for lunch.

Two people returned for the afternoon session.

I was relieved of the balance of my contract, which scheduled another session for the following day. Did I know this would happen? No. But when it did, I could live with it because somebody had to say what I had said.

Fast forward three years later.

There was a new mayor, new police chief, officers of color in executive positions, and 75 percent of that original group of 60 was gone.

I was never hired back again, and the word spread of what had happened across several state lines, and that essentially ended my career dealing with such agencies.

Coincidentally, I wrote my master's thesis and doctor's dissertation on this and several other interventions that I had conducted from Connecticut to Miami.

My work has been used in the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York City, and at the University of North Carolina. My master's thesis and doctor's dissertation have been cited by hundreds of students in their work and checked out in university libraries by the thousands.

I got fired, but the fire in my words seemingly has lived on. If you want to understand my motivation it is to influence but not necessarily by winning friends.

HIS COMMENT:

Anyway. I found page 40 in your book CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s, and I see your point about mentioning, but not endorsing, Tom Peters or the premise of his book, "In Search of Excellence."

MY REPLY:

Thank you. I think that is perhaps the most useful book I have written with absolutely the worst title.

People may think a book written in 1992 has little relevance in the twenty first century, but it couldn't be more relevant. We are all in the business of selling even when we provoke as I do.

I am selling rage, and under rage is rationality. Even the most irrational individual cannot help but find contact with his rational side once his rage subsides. Think of yourself. See? It is true of us all.

HIS COMMENT:

One big thing I feel you may be having trouble with -- and something I find quite challenging, indeed galling -- is that most people aren't that bright. It isn't their fault, at least if you buy into the determinism of the bell curve. Then, even those who are above-average are often just too busy to soak up a deep book and left it knock around in their heads long enough to make profound change. And then, even those who are quite bright are often lopsided in their intelligence, so they can be very good at running a line efficiently and doing crossword puzzles, say, but have no appreciation for fine art, humor, or the type of philosophy we're peddling. All of which means that giving people sound bites works best on a mass scale. I don't mean it works most profoundly, obviously. Only that it gets through much more effectively to a lot of people. It's frustrating, as I said. We want the world to snap out of it (whatever our particular "it" is) and buy what we're selling, for their own good. But only 2% ever will truly get it the first time around, and you need to reach that 2% in the first place.

That's why I keep the sign "Influence the Influencers" on my office wall.

MY REPLY:

James Watson, cofounder of the "Double-Helix" of DNA, confesses in his biography that he has an IQ of 105. You can't get more average than that. Yet, to explain his great success, he claims to be curious and to have great tenacity in the pursuit of this curiosity.

Strangely enough, Einstein confesses that curiosity is his greatest gift and the difference between him and others is that "I stick to problems longer."

My sense is that God gave us all barring some inherited or congenital defect the capability to do whatever our minds can envision us doing. I further contend that society programs us to have low expectations of ourselves and then reinforces those low expectations by labeling us bright, average, slow or stupid, when we are all pretty much the same.

I'm sure you are familiar with the self-fulfilling prophecy study. A group of 30 children all with the same IQ of 100 were divided into two groups. The teacher of the one group was told that she had extraordinary students of a high level of intelligence; the other teacher was told that her group was slow to average. After six weeks of study, the two groups were retested for IQ. The group that was told it was smart scored 10 points higher than their previous test; the other group 10 points lower.

If there is a more damaging construct than IQ, I don't know what it is. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a powerful book on the subject titled, "The Mismeasure of Man."

Where you are absolutely correct is that our minds are only receptive to information that is congruent with information already in our heads. It is a survival mechanism. We summarily reject information that does not combine naturally with this information because otherwise we would be log jammed with detritus, what my da used to say about me, "Jimmy, your head is so full of bullshit you need an enema."

Early on, say about when I was nine or ten, I already wanted to be a writer, and thought that I had to have a magnificent vocabulary to be taken seriously as a thinker, so I studied the dictionary like it was a novel, page by page, and would practice the words on my family, often using them incorrectly, as well as mispronouncing them.

The irony now is that I often have to rewrite into simpler words because I find now that I think in these words, words that put an extra barrier between me and my readers or listeners, and I have enough barriers already not to construct additional ones.

HIS COMMENT:

So, I sound like an intellectual snob? Okay, guilty. You should do me the favor of deleting this email as soon as it's done, just in case I change my mind and decide to run for office one day (Heaven forbid!)

MY REPLY:

No you don't sound like an intellectual snob. A snob by definition is insincere and you couldn't be insincere if your life depended upon it. You want to make a difference and are making a difference.

My mentoring role with you is simple: to build on your solid base and to not have you feeling guilty for being human.

We live in an anti-intellectual society because society has made intellectualism effete and snobbish. If you were to take a cross section of people who like opera, for example, which is often seen as the epitome of snobbish, you would find people in all socioeconomic classes, especially in Europe. They love opera because it is about life in the raw with all its passion and folly.

You didn't mention elitism. I am an elitist, not in the sense that I am better than anyone else whatever his or her life's work may be, but in a passion for excellence. As I said in CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), "My drive is for the effective utilization of my inherent ability." That is not to accumulate wealth or fame, but to make my short time on this planet useful in the service of others. In other words, I want to be used but not exploited, to help others but not solve their problems, to listen and learn but not feel obligated to necessarily buy what they say.

When I say influence is my motivation, it is not for others to think or be like me but to encourage them to understand and accept themselves as they are.

Your demons are not my demons. My demons can accelerate or retard my development. They can have no effect on yours, unless you let them. You will let them if you are not familiar with your own demons.

Demons are not bad. They are the "secret self " that either we control or it controls us. Our demons never leave us, and so it is best that we become well acquainted with them and not act as if they don't exist. Now there is the real danger.

HIS COMMENT:

New subject. I really like what you said in this piece. I'm going to use it next week, when I present it to a small group of managers who perform now as star individuals, rather than as teachers and team-leaders. Here is what you said in that piece:

"Of a typical organization, 15 percent are hard chargers, 15 percent are foot draggers, and 70 percent are palm trees going the way of the prevailing winds.

"Of some 4,000 employees (at the time in the facility in which I worked), 600 (4000 x 0.15) should be having performance and developmental problems. In actuality, I found that only six employees were downgraded and four were designated needing improvement (WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS, p. 169).

"More than a thousand hours of company time were dedicated to this cosmetic process only to justify the paperwork for individual rate increases."

I can't stand reports, evaluations, etc. I do admire GE for cutting its bottom 10 percent each year. That's brutal, but efficient and harshly fair. What's your take on that?

MY REPLY:

For openers, I am not fond of corpocracy and that includes GE. GE engineers, scientists, program managers and other professionals have read my books and have dropped me a line from time to time. From what they have indicated is consistent with what I have experienced.

I was an OD private consultant for ten years, and invariably to justify my fee, we would cut personnel. It was axiomatic. I wasn't around to see these cuts, just to recommend them.

But I was an executive with a chemical company and a high tech company and did participate in "cost cutting" practices, or was indirectly involved in the same.

You use the term "bottom 10% each year." I wager to say, and this is based on what my correspondents have written, it was never "the bottom 10%," but the ones that had so little power or would go quietly that got cut.

The bottom 10% is never cut because the "foot draggers" are one of the cagiest groups ever known to man at the business of survival. They know who to flatter, whom to cheat for, steal for, and hide their duplicitous ways for, and who to blackmail if it comes to that to save their jobs.

In my entire corporate career, I have never once seen the most deserving to be let go, gone. It has never happened at GE, never at GM, or ATT, or any other acronym, and it is one of the reasons the troops play to the choir and do as little as possible to get by not as much as they are capable of doing. What I am saying is no secret. The calamity is that American might and industry goes down the tubes every day because of this chicanery.

I've proposed this in my books, and directly to executives as well. Let every function have a secret ballet of whom is the most productive, average productive and least productive in the department, and use this to determine who is and who isn't cut. Workers know who does and doesn't do the work.

One of my experiences was to work in a department of seven Ph.D.s, who worked for a manager that had no idea what they did, and so he had them jumping through hoops doing busy work, when they were all doing important work.

When there was downsizing, the manager stayed and three Ph.D.s were let go. The department had a director, and ten managers and supervisors for a department of 60 professionals. When the downsizing was completed, it had a director, and ten managers and supervisors for a department of 45, representing a cost cutting of more than 20 percent (15/71 = 0.21). The department got kudos for its cost cutting strategy.

That is my problem, and I suppose that is also my mission.

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Check out Dr. Fisher's books and essays (such as this) on www.fisherofideas.com.