BUSH’S WAR – CORPOCRACY STRIPPED NAKED
A THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE FROM A READER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 31, 2008
MY OBSERVATIONS:
The people in my email address book are doers. They have lived well, worked hard, and conducted their lives with honor and a sense of duty. They have been loyal to the programming of their souls. Unfortunately, this has left many echoing the rhetoric of their church or school, or, indeed, of one political party or another.
We desire our leaders to be our heroes. Often, without realizing it, we parrot the truth as it is dictated to us; even have a clash of wills when someone differs with our programming.
It is the purpose of my writing to uncover some of the truths disguised under all the rhetoric by bringing together a multitude of ideas and letting what is truly meaningful to us and for us to surface. The piece that follows represents the thoughts of one of my emailers.
Sigmund Freud wrote in the "The Future of an Illusion" (1927), addressing the question of religion, something that gives us pause regarding the question of truth:
"The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth.
"The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that newborn babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grownups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression.
"We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level."
We are bombarded with information often devoid of any consistent symbolism with the truth buried in an avalanche of words.
The key idiom to the "Bush's War" piece that I wrote, as with many others, is an attempt to make truth naked so the reader will see it as he or she perceives truth.
There is some method to my madness. My approach is on the fallacy of the design. This finds me generating ideas not getting lost in information; on creative thinking not deductive reasoning; on provocation not on description; on movement off the dime not on judgment of the dime we're on; on looking at our problems holistically not in parts; on nonlinear thinking not linear logic; on systemic indicators not elemental meanings; on a way forward often by looking back; on challenging those in positions of power not on defending their actions; on gleaning some wisdom not on appearing clever; and on a pluralistic view not on a single perspective.
My whole purpose in writing in this genre is to encourage my readers to participate in this exercise.
We seem lost in a search to do the "right thing" rather than designing a way forward. The emailer here is aware of that. He is laying down a possibility of what may unfold rather than a polemical attack on "what is." He is working out a conceptual framework of understanding of what he perceives as a possibility. He is concerned, and rightly so, but is more interested in action rather than with description. He provides much food for thought.
A peculiar thing happens when we take the time to think our own thoughts rather than what we are told to believe is so. We become creative with information organizing itself around our ideas instead of the other way around, as is problematic of our culture. This comes out of creative thinking and self-organization instead of aping the words of the media, or our cultural programming.
JRF
AN EMAILERS REASONED REACTION TO “BUSH’S WAR -- Corpocracy Stripped Naked"
Some thoughts:
I think the clash between Islam and the West is much deeper and broader than Afghanistan, Iraq, Al Qaeda, the media, etc. It is something akin to a tectonic collision of philosophies, analogous to the earthquake-making, mountain-forming collision of continental plates. The resulting upheaval in human affairs is inevitable; the combination of modern technology and the sheer size of Islam are destined to make this a mighty storm.
To look at Iraq, or any of the battles, on its own, is thinking tactically. That is the most common mode of thinking, but often misses the big picture.
I suspect the WMD debacle was the attempt to create the simplistic and emotional rationale for public consumption, in the same manner that the “slavery” issue was used to rally northern sons to die for what at the root, were economic issues. It was weak to begin with, no WMD’s were found, and it collapsed to the detriment of the Administration.
The success or failure of “Bush’s War” will depend on whether or not democracy takes root in Iraq, spreads to other countries, and offers the Arab people an alternative to the current strain of Islam. That's one hell of a long shot, in my opinion.
In addition, the American people are not known for endurance and stamina in the face of extended difficulty, especially the current generations. To embark upon such a long commitment with the scaled down military, which the Administration inherited, was a bad choice; they're running out of steam.
We can only hope the other side runs out of steam first, and that may happen. Again, we just get lucky. Even if the Iraqi government achieves internal peace, they then have to be strong enough to fend off invasion by Iran or Syria or both after we leave. What are the odds?
None of this is to say there was not a goat rope within the Administration. Clearly, there was. But then, it has been my experience that every human organization is a goat rope to some degree. Some get lucky, others don't.
The winners write history. Both combatants believe they're ‘right’ as they wage conflict. The winner's view of ‘right’ goes on and the loser's is forgotten. It's the might that determines the winner, not their righteousness.
There seems to be very little ‘leadership,’ as you and I would define it, in our species. Rather, we have the summation of billions of tactical decisions made by individuals, with the resultant cacophony of outcomes. Because they are organized and persistent, Islam might conquer the world, seventh century thinking included. The technology magnifier might effectively end our species as part of this. Should that happen, nature will give yet another species their shot at world domination.
______
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sunday, March 30, 2008
SOUTH AFRICA, MINDSET & SELF-IMAGE!
TODAY’S TAMPA TRIBUNE COLUMN (March 30, 2008), SOUTH AFRICA, MINDSET & SELF-IMAGE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2008
Tampa Tribune chief editorial writer is Joseph Brown. Today's column dealt with the progress and failure over the past forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. This dovetails with some of my work now on my novel GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, which juxtaposes 1968 in the US versus the same time in South Africa.
JRF
-----------------
Joseph,
My wife and I had Shabbat dinner with two Jewish couples Friday. I was impressed with the simplicity and sense of community with which the Jewish Sabbath is celebrated.
By nature, I am not very gregarious, actually somewhat of a recluse, but stimulated by the conversation of my host, Dean of Students, USF Medical School, and his other guest, a physicist.
I've often said I would have little to read were it not for Jewish writers. This respect and admiration for the Jewish culture extends back to my college days.
One Christmas vacation, many years ago, when I was making my typical trip to Clinton (Iowa) Public Library, while most others were otherwise occupied, my mother asked me, "Did you see any of your friends there?"
I answered, "Only my Jewish friends."
When I shared this with my Jewish friends, the physicist said, "In many ways, I think, you had a Jewish mother." I think I did in the sense that we shared a common culture in striving for excellence.
The Medical educator, who is something of a sports fan, asked us, who we thought was the greatest leader in sport. The physicist and I shrugged our shoulders.
"Vince Lombardi," the doctor replied. Then he quoted the famous Green Bay Packers coach.
"Everyone remembers Lombardi's famous quote," he said, "'Winning isn't everything; winning is the only thing,' but what I think is a more significant quote is this, ''Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.'"
The Jewish culture has striven for perfection and often achieved excellence, experiencing prejudice and exclusion along the way, but changing the world in the process. Look no further than Freud and Einstein.
You write that April 4, 2008 will be forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. African Americans, as you point out, exploded into violence across the nation in shock and frustration that day.
1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the "Chicago Seven" used their anger to disrupt proceedings, while the Republican Convention in Miami found presidential candidate Richard Nixon embracing Sammy Davis, Jr., as a surreal cloud descended on that convention.
Now, imagine experiencing all this through the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail in South Africa.
The Brits and Afrikaners alike delighted in the racial and political chaos in the United States, especially those sympathetic to the draconian Afrikaans policy of apartheid.
Now fast forward to 2008. The African National Congress is in power with the majority population no longer under the scourge of apartheid.
I have not been back to South Africa in nearly forty years. What I hear and read about South Africa today is discouraging. The country is in apparent chaos with crime out of control, as is AIDS. The Bantu people who lived in impoverished conditions in SOWETO in 1968 when I was there, if anything, finding themselves living in worse conditions today in 2008.
South African illiteracy has failed to improve, school dropout rates are at an all-time high, corruption in government seems part of the modus operandi, and this great country is, to put it politely, floundering.
The magnificent Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg was being built in 1968. Forty years later, it is closed and an eyesore on the Johannesburg skyline.
Because of the oppressive climate and chaos in Johannesburg, white South African doctors I know have immigrated to the Tampa Bay area in Florida.
You and other journalists, educators, scholars, and advocates -- Bill Cosby for one has profiled an upwardly mobile family on television -- imply the country has never left the mindset of slavery, and sadly, I agree.
In South Africa, as elsewhere on this beautiful African continent, the ghost of colonialism pervades the mindset of the populace. Colonialism has left its scar on Africa.
As Freud and others have pointed out -- he in "Civilization and Its Discontent" -- our inclination is to go quickly from pain to pleasure, and in this avoidance process from self-realization to self-destruction. We see it everywhere.
This is unfortunate as embracing pain is the only way to grow, as the Jewish culture has demonstrated, and as all those who have succeeded overcoming major impediments know only too well.
I am in the autumn of my years, and something of an idealist, thinking that by this late stage in my life "right would triumph over might, good over evil, community over corruption."
None of this has happened as might and evil and corruption have become only more sophisticated.
Likewise, change has found us developing more sophisticated toys of distraction, while complicating our lives with them without improving the content of our character.
We have preferred to put off the pain and to retreat into the surreal world of pleasure. Narcissism and hedonism are common conditions. It is why the times are still called the "Age of Anxiety," as the times were in the 1970s. This “pathology of normalcy” led me to write LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
What is the answer?
I worked and lived in Europe in the late 1980s, and the sin of the Nazis was palpable wherever I went in Germany, or whenever I was in the company of Germans in the Netherlands. Now, sixty years later, Germans suffer for something they only know in history books. The mindset of Nazism persists.
You can apology for slavery, colonialism, Nazism or some other ism forever and your apologies will not make any of these isms go away. It will remain a scapegoat as long as people fail to get beyond them.
In 1968, I went to a Museum in Belgium, which displayed exclusively Belgium Congo artifacts, and found it chilling. I asked the curator how these artifacts were obtained. He dismissed my question without an answer. Later, I read a history of this tiny country's colonial experience. It was haunting. Belgium colonizers were brutal and they stole Belgium Congo art as if they had the right without consent or compensation.
This defined the colonial experience, which strangely, I felt I was experiencing in Johannesburg in the 1980s, living like royalty, when I was a lower middle class guy from Iowa, whose father had been a brakeman on the railroad. It was obscene and troubling.
Much of the trouble in Africa, here as elsewhere, is connected to this horrifying and cruel exploitation of the people.
When people are exploited, invariably they take their anger and hostility out on their own. I saw this in a small way in my da, who was badgered by his bosses on the railroad, and unconsciously badgered his family when he came home with his booming voice and earthy expletives.
Gretchen Parker, in another article today on race relations, mentioned senator Joseph Biden saying, Barak Obama was "clean-cut." We seldom realize how patronizing attempts to be "with it" turn out to be.
I'm not into "You Tube" Internet exchanging, but a woman I know accidentally found herself witnessing a conversation between two African Americans girls. "They used ugly racial slurs to describe each other in the conversation." She said it made Don Imus sound like a choirboy.
It may seem weird to mention IBM in this context, but years ago, when I was first joining the workforce as a professional; some of my colleagues were with IBM.
It was a requirement for IBM salesmen, then, to address each other as "Mr." and to dress in dark suits, black shoes and knee high sox, white shirts and solid color ties. The hair had to be short, no sideburns, no mustaches or beards, and clean-shaven. Their appearance had to pass muster every day.
The IBM culture was designed to promote professionalism to the nth degree with the idea if you looked professional, talked professional, you would be professional.
Image is reality and my company, Nalco Chemical Company, adopted the IBM look to the letter.
We cannot undo the sins of the past that our people, in my case the white race, has done against African Americans and American Indians.
It is appalling how little attention is given Native Americans when it comes to discrimination. Yet American Indians have the highest death rate from alcoholism, and the highest death rate of babies born suffering from toxic alcohol.
Sure, there are successful African Americans and American Indians. And, yes, they could probably do more for their poorer members. But as Bill Cosby puts it, the poor could do a lot more for themselves. Challenging words but words don't seem to mean much when they aren't translated into action. And what prevents this?
My sense is that it all starts with SELF-IMAGE.
We forget that there is discrimination amongst successful whites against unsuccessful members of their own race. We are never going to dissolve discrimination; nor can we ever repair the damage done by slavery, colonialism, Nazism, or any other terrible ism.
I've encountered discrimination, as I'm sure you have, every phase of my life from a child to that of a man in his advanced years, and yet I have survived to the point of prevailing, as have you.
I give the total credit for this to my mother who programmed a powerful self-image in me, while my da tried equally strenuously to tear it down. It was this tension that made me, and I believe, makes every individual, not a group, no matter what their color, ethnicity, or culture.
If every child, black, white, red or yellow were given a powerful positive self-image, the pain of life would not only be endured but also embraced, and that person would soar on it to heights he or she might not even imagine in his or her wildest dreams.
The content of character builds on this but it needs nurturing from the very beginning of life so that the person will accept himself or herself as he or she is. Because of this acceptance, that person will in turn accept others as he or she finds them. This will in turn embolden that person to face all challenges with a spirit of can do.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2008
Tampa Tribune chief editorial writer is Joseph Brown. Today's column dealt with the progress and failure over the past forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. This dovetails with some of my work now on my novel GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, which juxtaposes 1968 in the US versus the same time in South Africa.
JRF
-----------------
Joseph,
My wife and I had Shabbat dinner with two Jewish couples Friday. I was impressed with the simplicity and sense of community with which the Jewish Sabbath is celebrated.
By nature, I am not very gregarious, actually somewhat of a recluse, but stimulated by the conversation of my host, Dean of Students, USF Medical School, and his other guest, a physicist.
I've often said I would have little to read were it not for Jewish writers. This respect and admiration for the Jewish culture extends back to my college days.
One Christmas vacation, many years ago, when I was making my typical trip to Clinton (Iowa) Public Library, while most others were otherwise occupied, my mother asked me, "Did you see any of your friends there?"
I answered, "Only my Jewish friends."
When I shared this with my Jewish friends, the physicist said, "In many ways, I think, you had a Jewish mother." I think I did in the sense that we shared a common culture in striving for excellence.
(Dr. Fisher at Kruger National Park South Africa with his Children 1968)
"Vince Lombardi," the doctor replied. Then he quoted the famous Green Bay Packers coach.
"Everyone remembers Lombardi's famous quote," he said, "'Winning isn't everything; winning is the only thing,' but what I think is a more significant quote is this, ''Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.'"
The Jewish culture has striven for perfection and often achieved excellence, experiencing prejudice and exclusion along the way, but changing the world in the process. Look no further than Freud and Einstein.
You write that April 4, 2008 will be forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. African Americans, as you point out, exploded into violence across the nation in shock and frustration that day.
1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the "Chicago Seven" used their anger to disrupt proceedings, while the Republican Convention in Miami found presidential candidate Richard Nixon embracing Sammy Davis, Jr., as a surreal cloud descended on that convention.
Now, imagine experiencing all this through the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail in South Africa.
The Brits and Afrikaners alike delighted in the racial and political chaos in the United States, especially those sympathetic to the draconian Afrikaans policy of apartheid.
Now fast forward to 2008. The African National Congress is in power with the majority population no longer under the scourge of apartheid.
I have not been back to South Africa in nearly forty years. What I hear and read about South Africa today is discouraging. The country is in apparent chaos with crime out of control, as is AIDS. The Bantu people who lived in impoverished conditions in SOWETO in 1968 when I was there, if anything, finding themselves living in worse conditions today in 2008.
South African illiteracy has failed to improve, school dropout rates are at an all-time high, corruption in government seems part of the modus operandi, and this great country is, to put it politely, floundering.
The magnificent Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg was being built in 1968. Forty years later, it is closed and an eyesore on the Johannesburg skyline.
Because of the oppressive climate and chaos in Johannesburg, white South African doctors I know have immigrated to the Tampa Bay area in Florida.
You and other journalists, educators, scholars, and advocates -- Bill Cosby for one has profiled an upwardly mobile family on television -- imply the country has never left the mindset of slavery, and sadly, I agree.
In South Africa, as elsewhere on this beautiful African continent, the ghost of colonialism pervades the mindset of the populace. Colonialism has left its scar on Africa.
As Freud and others have pointed out -- he in "Civilization and Its Discontent" -- our inclination is to go quickly from pain to pleasure, and in this avoidance process from self-realization to self-destruction. We see it everywhere.
This is unfortunate as embracing pain is the only way to grow, as the Jewish culture has demonstrated, and as all those who have succeeded overcoming major impediments know only too well.
I am in the autumn of my years, and something of an idealist, thinking that by this late stage in my life "right would triumph over might, good over evil, community over corruption."
None of this has happened as might and evil and corruption have become only more sophisticated.
Likewise, change has found us developing more sophisticated toys of distraction, while complicating our lives with them without improving the content of our character.
We have preferred to put off the pain and to retreat into the surreal world of pleasure. Narcissism and hedonism are common conditions. It is why the times are still called the "Age of Anxiety," as the times were in the 1970s. This “pathology of normalcy” led me to write LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
What is the answer?
I worked and lived in Europe in the late 1980s, and the sin of the Nazis was palpable wherever I went in Germany, or whenever I was in the company of Germans in the Netherlands. Now, sixty years later, Germans suffer for something they only know in history books. The mindset of Nazism persists.
You can apology for slavery, colonialism, Nazism or some other ism forever and your apologies will not make any of these isms go away. It will remain a scapegoat as long as people fail to get beyond them.
In 1968, I went to a Museum in Belgium, which displayed exclusively Belgium Congo artifacts, and found it chilling. I asked the curator how these artifacts were obtained. He dismissed my question without an answer. Later, I read a history of this tiny country's colonial experience. It was haunting. Belgium colonizers were brutal and they stole Belgium Congo art as if they had the right without consent or compensation.
This defined the colonial experience, which strangely, I felt I was experiencing in Johannesburg in the 1980s, living like royalty, when I was a lower middle class guy from Iowa, whose father had been a brakeman on the railroad. It was obscene and troubling.
Much of the trouble in Africa, here as elsewhere, is connected to this horrifying and cruel exploitation of the people.
When people are exploited, invariably they take their anger and hostility out on their own. I saw this in a small way in my da, who was badgered by his bosses on the railroad, and unconsciously badgered his family when he came home with his booming voice and earthy expletives.
Gretchen Parker, in another article today on race relations, mentioned senator Joseph Biden saying, Barak Obama was "clean-cut." We seldom realize how patronizing attempts to be "with it" turn out to be.
I'm not into "You Tube" Internet exchanging, but a woman I know accidentally found herself witnessing a conversation between two African Americans girls. "They used ugly racial slurs to describe each other in the conversation." She said it made Don Imus sound like a choirboy.
It may seem weird to mention IBM in this context, but years ago, when I was first joining the workforce as a professional; some of my colleagues were with IBM.
It was a requirement for IBM salesmen, then, to address each other as "Mr." and to dress in dark suits, black shoes and knee high sox, white shirts and solid color ties. The hair had to be short, no sideburns, no mustaches or beards, and clean-shaven. Their appearance had to pass muster every day.
The IBM culture was designed to promote professionalism to the nth degree with the idea if you looked professional, talked professional, you would be professional.
Image is reality and my company, Nalco Chemical Company, adopted the IBM look to the letter.
We cannot undo the sins of the past that our people, in my case the white race, has done against African Americans and American Indians.
It is appalling how little attention is given Native Americans when it comes to discrimination. Yet American Indians have the highest death rate from alcoholism, and the highest death rate of babies born suffering from toxic alcohol.
Sure, there are successful African Americans and American Indians. And, yes, they could probably do more for their poorer members. But as Bill Cosby puts it, the poor could do a lot more for themselves. Challenging words but words don't seem to mean much when they aren't translated into action. And what prevents this?
My sense is that it all starts with SELF-IMAGE.
We forget that there is discrimination amongst successful whites against unsuccessful members of their own race. We are never going to dissolve discrimination; nor can we ever repair the damage done by slavery, colonialism, Nazism, or any other terrible ism.
I've encountered discrimination, as I'm sure you have, every phase of my life from a child to that of a man in his advanced years, and yet I have survived to the point of prevailing, as have you.
I give the total credit for this to my mother who programmed a powerful self-image in me, while my da tried equally strenuously to tear it down. It was this tension that made me, and I believe, makes every individual, not a group, no matter what their color, ethnicity, or culture.
If every child, black, white, red or yellow were given a powerful positive self-image, the pain of life would not only be endured but also embraced, and that person would soar on it to heights he or she might not even imagine in his or her wildest dreams.
The content of character builds on this but it needs nurturing from the very beginning of life so that the person will accept himself or herself as he or she is. Because of this acceptance, that person will in turn accept others as he or she finds them. This will in turn embolden that person to face all challenges with a spirit of can do.
Be always well,
Jim
Saturday, March 29, 2008
BUSH'S WAR -- CORPOCRACY STRIPPED NAKED!
BUSH’S WAR – CORPOCRACY STRIPPED NAKED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 26, 2008
“Being a confidante of a CEO is not the same thing as being the CEO’s organization development (OD) adviser and consultant. Confusing the two roles is a certain route to disaster. One calls for improving the spirit of the CEO to face the day; the other calls for spoiling it by confronting him (or her) with news the CEO would rather not hear; exposing him (or her) to ideas he (or she) would rather not think about much less face, while presenting irrefutable evidence that certain decisions must be made now, decisions the CEO would prefer to table for another time.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Leaderless Leadership in the Twenty-first Century
I PRESIDENT BUSH’S ADMINISTRATION: IN SEARCH OF AN IDEA
In case you missed it, I would urge you to watch the PBS television rendition of “Bush’s War” when it is rebroadcast. Recently (March 24 – 25, 2008), I watched this program suspended between disbelief and horror. No presidency has failed so gloriously upward as this administration over the past seven and one-quarter years. The Bush Administration, as a consequence, has been stripped naked for all to see the folly of man.
The “Bush’s War” is a four and one-half hour presentation over these two nights, which takes us to the present. It distills 40 hours of taping, hundreds of interviews and other sources to create this snapshot of Bush’s War.
For the last score of years, I have been pointing out the disintegration of American leadership in all phases of American life. My interest is not academic or intellectual, but that of a pedestrian scholar viewing the deconstruction as if a sidewalk superintendent watching an edifice tumble to dust before my very eyes.
This has been the equivalent of a reverse moral metamorphoses signaling the collapse from high moral purpose, duty and honor to cynicism, hubris and uncharacteristic hegemony.
It would seem that the Bush Administration in search of an idea has settled on the bellicose policy of “preemption” to be its legacy. This has been a reverse moral metamorphoses free of ideology, free of realism, and even free of a clear defense of freedom. It appears to be predominantly emotional and irrational based on old histories and grudges with a passion to win, to stick it to an old enemy left off the hook, Iraq.
It is no accident that neo conservatives behind this charge into the blind were schooled in corporate America.
The “war on terror” was first launched against the perpetrators of 9/11 trained in Afghanistan, but neo conservatives bristled to widen the war to a larger target, Iraq. President Bush the Elder left Iraq as unfinished business, which president Bush the Younger was determined to finish.
It made no sense from the first, as leadership never does when the heart leads the head. There was no selective service draft, only a relatively small volunteer army, quite inadequate for a major war.
Once again, the National Guard was being asked to take up the slack as it did so well in Bosnia, leaving the nation with inadequate reserve support for national disasters, as Katrina proved. President Bush the Younger insisted he was not supportive of a nation building strategy, but found to his embarrassment that he had backed into this conundrum. It was the old corporate game of “ready, fire, aim!”
What PBS’s “Bush’s War” shows so dramatically is the divisiveness between the State Department headed by Colin Powell and the Department of Defense headed by Vice President Chaney’s old pal, Donald Rumsfeld.
One looks at this snapshot of Bush’s War and remembers his own corporate days like déjà vu. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cuts off the input of think tanks and state department experts on Iraq and the Middle East in favor of his like-minded cronies in the Department of Defense. It is the old corporate saw of “divide & conquer,” and then decide, “what is so,” even if it is not, and then feverishly collect evidence of dubious content and suspect sources to solidify one’s position.
II ORGANIZATION DESIGNED AGAINST ITSELF
Every corporation has ass kisser, and bullies. In most cases, despite their countervailing presence, business gets done. When the bully is the chief honcho and bullying is his preferred arsenal of attack, taking no enemies, it is the making of catastrophe from the beginning.
The reason for going to war with Iraq was ostensibly because Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). The CIA was unable to uncover conclusive evidence of such weapons, and CIA director Tenner told the president so. Chaney and Rumsfeld then badgered the CIA to come up with a “white paper” that suggested otherwise. They eventually complied, applying incredible pressure on the CIA director and his people to be complicit in this charade. When the final “white paper” on evidence of WMDs was presented to President Bush, he said, “Is this all you’ve got?”
It was then, at this point, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as OD consultant to the president, should have said to the CIA director, “Go back and make the case for war or not.” But she was the president’s pal, a confidante and friend, and remained silent. CIA director Tenner, who had been harassed into submission by Chaney and Rumsfeld, told the president it was a “slam dunk.” It was in this theatre of the absurd that the go-cart of war was pushed down the hill into the eventual abyss.
In the middle of this theatre of the absurd, the generals were saying that 400,000 troops would be needed, while Rumsfeld suggested 70,000 would be adequate. He compromised eventually on 120,000. The generals also said that the hard part would be the occupation and dealing with the ethnic tensions that already existed in a population of nearly 30 million with three powerful cultural tribes. Rumsfeld soft-pedaled this. He became a television fixture in a culture that loves its soap opera icons that titillate their fancies with swashbuckling bravado of the United States strutting its stuff as the “lone superpower.”
None of this is real to 99 percent of a nation not asked to make any sacrifices, but very real to the families of the men and women of the 1 percent fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the early low points of this tragic-comedy was the appearance of the Secretary of State, not the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, presenting the case for going to war with Iraq with CIA Director Tenner sitting behind him. The Neocons had successfully created a full-court fiction of WMDs, while two otherwise honorable and long serving patriotic Americans were made history’s stooges in this psychodrama.
Former national security adviser to President Bush the Elder, Brent Scowcroft, sponsor and mentor to Condoleezza Rice, wrote an Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Attack Saddam.” He warned in the piece that invading Iraq would lead to a long, bloody, and costly occupation, while diverting the US from the war on terror, which was then concentrated on Afghanistan. Rice and President Bush were furious. They felt betrayed. This was not however true of his father who received an advance copy of the article and gave it his tacit approval.
President Bush the Younger won the 2001 election by the fabled record of the Florida ballot. After graduating from Yale, he was like a prodigal son who rejected the comfort and affluence of his family and sought his fortune on his own prospecting for oil, and eventually striking it rich. He rejoined the family on his own terms demonstrating a high risk, decisive and entrepreneurial spirit. Prior to being president, he showed little interest in foreign affairs or intellectual pursuits, preferring straight talking men-of-action, men who never second-guessed themselves. What he did as president is common in corpocracy, that is, he surrounded himself with like thinking, acting and feeling individuals. The consequences of this inclination are to magnify personal strengths while compounding personal weaknesses. Leadership, unfortunately, is not a zero sum game.
III WHEN LEADERSHIP WAS NOT CONFUSED WITH GENERALSHIP
The dominant components of leadership are strategic vision along with a clear understanding on the ground, that is, where you are, where you want to go, and what the requirements are to get there. Historian David McCullough, author of “1776” (2007) claims George Washington, our first president, was a great leader, but not a great Revolutionary War general. Nathaniel Greene was a far superior general. McCullough concludes, however, that Washington, in his opinion, was our greatest president because of his leadership.
Washington was a pondering decision maker, a deeply spiritual man but certainly not a conventional Christian. He frequently thanked God for watching over the revolution and blessing the republic, but he rarely spoke of sin or Christ. He often described God as the “Grand Architect” of the universe, “Supreme Dispenser of every Good,” and the clockmaker God of deism. He knew the importance of symbolism and used it to the nth degree. More importantly, he made an accurate assessment of where his new country was and what it would take to move it in the direction of stability.
When the Revolutionary War was going badly in 1776, General Horatio Gates launched a conspiracy of a coterie of ambitious generals to humiliate and embarrass Washington into resigning as Supreme Commander of Army. If you could picture the times, the army was low on ammunition, food and supplies; it had suffered defeat after defeat; the Continental Congress was discussing possible replacements for General Washington; and the enlistments of many of Washington’s men were coming to an end, vastly depleting his army of any ability to compete with the most powerful military force in the world, the British army and navy.
It was in this climate that he opened a letter by accident addressed to general Gates, which disclosed the plot to unseat him. He closed the letter, wrote on it that it had been opened by mistake thinking it was command business, and sent it on to the general. This quelled the conspiracy. Washington knew he needed every man including disenchanted generals.
With the majority of his troops soon to end enlistments in December 1776, he brought them all together and announced that he would give each man a $10 bonus, which was more than a month’s pay, if they would reenlist. The majority did. Washington had no way of keeping his promise, as the Continental Congress was nearly broke. His vision of the final outcome never diminished in the darkest days.
With regard to running the war, Washington knew his assets and limitations. He counted on wiser generals and used his capital to rally the troops. He had an eye for organization, discipline, accountability, and assessment. He also demonstrated a facility for recognizing and developing nascent leadership in his men. It was evident with Nathaniel Greene and Benedict Arnold.
Had Arnold died, for instance, at Saratoga where he proved a brilliant strategist and tactician, he would have been the hero of the revolution. This most decisive victory of the revolution motivated France to finance the war. When the credit for the victory went to general Horatio Gates, who had little to do with the victory, Arnold became increasingly disenchanted, ultimately spying for the British. So, today, a “Benedict Arnold” is known as a traitor or betrayer of trust.
Once the war was won, many in the Continental Congress wanted to make Washington king for life. He rejected this, and instead served two four-year terms as president with no desire to serve beyond that time, endorsing his vice president, John Adams, as the second president. Thus, he set a precedence that was maintained until the four-term election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, who died early in his fourth term (April 12, 1945).
Washington was offered a handsome salary as president, which he refused, suggesting that he only be provided with expenses. Ironically, his expenses in today’s dollars would exceed the president’s present salary.
We have not enjoyed Washingtonian leadership of late, as we have created technocrats as leaders, specifically in this instance the neocons. These people are never elected to office but are brought in by those elected.
IV WHERE HAVE ALL THE LEADERS GONE?
We know Barak Obama has a silver tongue not unlike Abraham Lincoln. Both were first term junior senators in the United States Senate from the state of Illinois; both had previously served in the house; both at an early age knew the powerful theatre of the spoken word.
We have Hillary Clinton, a United States Senator, who has served her country well, and is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, who demonstrated leadership qualities similar to previous leaders.
We have John McCain, a United States Senator, who has served his country well in the senate and on the battlefield. He is in the autumn of his years, and if elected, would be the oldest president in our history to be elected. He shares some of the personality traits of President John Adams, who was a no nonsense president, and who never had any slaves, and always said what he meant and meant what he said.
Each of these candidates have demons in their system that could knock them off their center as George Bush the Younger has been knocked off his. Did George Washington have any demons? Indeed, he did.
Washington loved affluence, pomp and circumstance, and the comfort of the elite. He loved the whole theatre of society. He didn’t like to be touched, and it was nearly theatrical when he would be forced to engage in conversation with underlings. He lacked Benjamin Franklin’s ease with everyone. He had a presence but wasn’t open or affable.
He had many critics similar to President Roosevelt. Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed FDR had a first rate personality and a second rate mind. Washington’s critics saw him second rate in both instances. What made him exceptional is that he recognized this also in himself, and in his new nation, and used it to proceed with caution and care. His vision was never clouded by his demons.
As General of the Continental Army, he parried the thrusts of Gates and his allies with the dexterity of the master politician. But when necessary, he could deflect the thrusts of his covert enemies, and when thought necessary, strike back with ferocity and guile.
Washington was an exceedingly complex man, who appreciated brilliance while knowing he lacked such brilliance. There was no hesitation to surround himself with able men, men such as Greene that could out general him. That said he maneuvered politically to retain his command, even as he simultaneously struggled to prevent the Continental Army from dissolving into mutiny.
He was a pondering man, a handsome man, a striking man, and he used this uniqueness to power him to fulfill his ambitions. He is a leader of a type that we could once again see as being our Commander in Chief.
V THE LEADER’S CONTENT OF CHARACTER
Throughout American history, we have had to endure the dalliances of the power brokers and power pursuers. These people are indigenous to all organizations in every line of endeavor. They have no real ideology, no idealism or realism, or commitment to defending the integrity of the American way of life or the citadels of freedom, although they use elements of this in the rhetoric of their essence. Their real ideology is in succeeding big time at any cost.
The temperance with which President George Washington dealt with these distracting human components is a model for all leaders to consider. It is in his letters, speeches and biographies. He was ambitious; he wanted to be the Supreme Commander of the Continental Army, but feigned that that was the furthest thing from his mind. He even wrote to his wife Martha complaining that he was doing everything to avoid this role, when he wanted nothing more desperately. Washington hid his ambition. The fire in his eyes countermanded the composure of his will.
President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, thought it should be his to refuse, but John Adams, looking at the tall, handsome, graceful Washington, resplendent in his uniform with powdered wig, nominated the general with enthusiasm. Congress concurred.
There is nothing wrong with ambition providing you have the vision to serve and the content of character to absorb attacks from within and outside your sphere of influences, without becoming paranoid, or losing your grip on the focus of your objective. Washington had this; so did Lincoln. They looked like leaders, acted like leaders, comported themselves like leaders. Eisenhower never rose to this level as president, but he did so in war.
Like Washington, Eisenhower showed great leadership as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. But again like Washington, he was an unremarkable general in the field. Truman used his paranoia as a motivator whereas Nixon was consumed by this demon. Brilliant in many other senses, Nixon and several other presidents found it difficulty to get past their demons without scandal or disruption.
VI THE FALLACIES OF CORPORATE SOCIETY
The United States has progressed to being a corporate society, that is, a corporate structure built around its central nucleus of power.
The corporation has evolved into corpocracy where there is a concentric technocratic reporting system from the center to the corporate periphery. This perfection of Machine Age Thinking is as cumbersome and faulty as any that man has ever developed. It looks good, sounds good, but fails to work efficiently if at all, while human activity is stuck with it as a societal boilerplate. Unfortunately, if flawed in the center, where power is meant to reside, but doesn’t, then a vacuum of power is created with the entire sphere collapsing in on the center.
In this scenario, everyone appears to be sharing power without anyone exercising leadership consistent with the organization’s design. The faultiness of this power structure has been well documented.
We see it in the conduct of the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq; in the subprime real estate crisis; in the collapse of the economy in on itself as the dollar plummets, oil prices surge, and wheat fields are turned into cornfields to make ethanol causing food prices to soar; in the stalled immigration policy; in the laxity of the FDA that allows drugs on the market that kill people; in our mega corporations that solve their economic woes by downsizing, exporting jobs abroad, or merging with other failed businesses; in FEMA being folded under the umbrella of Homeland Security, reduced in staff, facilities, and budget, then forgotten until Katrina; in the pride of greed on Wall Street where reality never touches until a recession threatens.
We see it in Bush’s War, which is a mirror image of all of these other components; in the that presidency as it limps to the end of its administration in worse shape than when it started nearly eight years ago; in the trade deficit in 2008 being the largest in US history; in the loss of 3.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2001; in the collapse of the dollar with the price of Gold rising from $260 an ounce in to $1,000 in the past seven plus years; and in oil going from $28 a barrel to more than $100 today.
The paradoxical dilemma of this presidency is that it unwittingly promoted a marginal extremist terrorist movement to global prominence by preemptive action, and in doing so, energized it into a far more formidable enemy than it was at first. It is a failure of leadership. One man cannot be singled out for such failure. The corporate model of construction is designed for such failure.
VII THE CHALLENGE AHEAD, CULTURE
This little piece is designed to illustrate what happens when the system is designed against itself, when departments sabotage each other instead of working in synergy; when the answers that the power center will accept are the answers it expects regardless of relevance; when leadership has devolved to leaderless leadership.
We have forgotten that human society is not a corporate group, but has evolved as a systemic diverse human entity. That system is displayed as culture. Culture is unique, diverse and individualistic. Together, these cultures form a tapestry of life as the human race, which is systemically organic, but which requires every ounce of its diversity, uniqueness and individuality to enrich the fabric of mankind.
For man to survive as human beings, this system must operate in complementary rather than competitive fashion. It starts with the single unit and progresses on to include all human society. I take the liberty of paraphrasing system researcher Russell Ackoff in this context:
“If you take a system apart to identify its central components, and then operate these central components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can irrespective of every other central component, then there is one thing of which you can be certain. The entire system will fail to behave as well as it can, and may collapse in on itself.
“Now, this is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but it is absolutely essential to System Thinking, which is the way the whole human community works or fails to work together. It is way governments work or fail to work from their central power nucleus.
“The corollary to this thinking is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can from its central components to its most peripheral components, then none of its components will be working as well as they might. Each component is supporting complementary components at some price to its own ultimate possible achievement. In doing so, synergy is realized and the possible is exceeded because the decisive outcome is much greater than the sum of the system’s component parts.”
We are on the brink of a new presidential election with our military forces stretched to the limit. The Bush’s War has been a failed policy despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. But the war is emblematic of many other societal failures. We have failed inner city schools in metropolitan areas, but we also have failed schools in the suburbs. We have crime in the poorest and most affluent of neighborhoods. We have empty houses because of the subprime debacle, but also empty factories because of failed industrial leadership. We have our best students in high schools and colleges across the land bored to tears attending classes because that is their job, and not because they are committed to learning anything. We have middle aged men and women who have never caught hold because they have never totally left their adolescence, extending it from their teens into their 30s and 40s. We have our great cities attempting to balance between the electronic Silicon Valley and failed Detroit factory model trying to survive. Our entire society is collapsing in on itself because the nucleus of central power has proven essentially a leaderless leadership vacuum.
As if the gods were upon us at this critical moment, we have one of the most refreshing moments in American history in a presidential candidate that is African American, a presidential candidate who is a woman, and a presidential candidate that is a throwback to our second great president, John Adams. Never has the challenge of culture, and the opportunities to heal differences in a common cause been greater than now.
The good paying factory jobs of Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia are never to return. These candidates are talking about saving these jobs or retraining workers in new technologies. The irony is that our school system from grammar school through college is a preparatory factory, which is now anachronistic.
Corporate society has a factory mentality and discharges its problems with a factory mindset. Indeed, education is a defunct institution because of this. Corpocracy attacks problems at the periphery rather than at the nuclear core or power center, as power brokers, power pursuers, and politicians are wont to do.
A cosmetic approach to the problem solving doesn’t disturb the status quo. Item: create a new course, design a new curriculum, or launch a new corporate intervention, always being careful not to disturb the technocrats in the core center. We must move beyond this; we must start by introducing our little ones to the real world they are about to join.
Ergo, I propose that no student be given a high school diploma or college degree that is not proficient in a foreign language. No college graduate should be allowed to sneak through the system dodging language courses with computer proficiency. Computer literacy is not the equivalent of culture literacy. The only way to truly enter another culture is through its language, and we are now a world society.
Culture is destiny. Culture is not isolated but pervasive. Appreciation of culture is what is missing in education.
For within a culture, there are several subcultures. Often these subcultures compete subversively against the primary culture. This was the case of the Department of Defense subverting the Department of State, and intimidating the CIA to capitulate to its preconceived notion of the presence of WMDs in Iraq, when clearly there were none. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of the integrity of the Office of the President, where the nucleus of central power resided.
When the center collapses in on itself, all subcultures across the spectrum from the farthest dimensions of the corporate structure do as well. This succinctly describes the disaster of the Bush’s War and the present socio-economic state of American society.
Likewise, every nation, as well as every corporation, has a culture, and within its culture a myriad of competing subcultures often contrasting with or in direct competition with the primary culture. It is the role of leadership to first recognize this condition, and then to mount an exercise to integrate these differences into an assimilated pattern of focused determination while acknowledging the respective unique constructions of the subcultures. This sounds simple in expression but is extremely difficult to accomplish in deed. It is why culture is the challenge ahead of true leadership.
_______________
Dr. Fisher is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd., a prolific author, and a registered Republican for more than forty years. See his website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 26, 2008
“Being a confidante of a CEO is not the same thing as being the CEO’s organization development (OD) adviser and consultant. Confusing the two roles is a certain route to disaster. One calls for improving the spirit of the CEO to face the day; the other calls for spoiling it by confronting him (or her) with news the CEO would rather not hear; exposing him (or her) to ideas he (or she) would rather not think about much less face, while presenting irrefutable evidence that certain decisions must be made now, decisions the CEO would prefer to table for another time.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Leaderless Leadership in the Twenty-first Century
I PRESIDENT BUSH’S ADMINISTRATION: IN SEARCH OF AN IDEA
In case you missed it, I would urge you to watch the PBS television rendition of “Bush’s War” when it is rebroadcast. Recently (March 24 – 25, 2008), I watched this program suspended between disbelief and horror. No presidency has failed so gloriously upward as this administration over the past seven and one-quarter years. The Bush Administration, as a consequence, has been stripped naked for all to see the folly of man.
The “Bush’s War” is a four and one-half hour presentation over these two nights, which takes us to the present. It distills 40 hours of taping, hundreds of interviews and other sources to create this snapshot of Bush’s War.
For the last score of years, I have been pointing out the disintegration of American leadership in all phases of American life. My interest is not academic or intellectual, but that of a pedestrian scholar viewing the deconstruction as if a sidewalk superintendent watching an edifice tumble to dust before my very eyes.
This has been the equivalent of a reverse moral metamorphoses signaling the collapse from high moral purpose, duty and honor to cynicism, hubris and uncharacteristic hegemony.
It would seem that the Bush Administration in search of an idea has settled on the bellicose policy of “preemption” to be its legacy. This has been a reverse moral metamorphoses free of ideology, free of realism, and even free of a clear defense of freedom. It appears to be predominantly emotional and irrational based on old histories and grudges with a passion to win, to stick it to an old enemy left off the hook, Iraq.
It is no accident that neo conservatives behind this charge into the blind were schooled in corporate America.
The “war on terror” was first launched against the perpetrators of 9/11 trained in Afghanistan, but neo conservatives bristled to widen the war to a larger target, Iraq. President Bush the Elder left Iraq as unfinished business, which president Bush the Younger was determined to finish.
It made no sense from the first, as leadership never does when the heart leads the head. There was no selective service draft, only a relatively small volunteer army, quite inadequate for a major war.
Once again, the National Guard was being asked to take up the slack as it did so well in Bosnia, leaving the nation with inadequate reserve support for national disasters, as Katrina proved. President Bush the Younger insisted he was not supportive of a nation building strategy, but found to his embarrassment that he had backed into this conundrum. It was the old corporate game of “ready, fire, aim!”
What PBS’s “Bush’s War” shows so dramatically is the divisiveness between the State Department headed by Colin Powell and the Department of Defense headed by Vice President Chaney’s old pal, Donald Rumsfeld.
One looks at this snapshot of Bush’s War and remembers his own corporate days like déjà vu. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cuts off the input of think tanks and state department experts on Iraq and the Middle East in favor of his like-minded cronies in the Department of Defense. It is the old corporate saw of “divide & conquer,” and then decide, “what is so,” even if it is not, and then feverishly collect evidence of dubious content and suspect sources to solidify one’s position.
II ORGANIZATION DESIGNED AGAINST ITSELF
Every corporation has ass kisser, and bullies. In most cases, despite their countervailing presence, business gets done. When the bully is the chief honcho and bullying is his preferred arsenal of attack, taking no enemies, it is the making of catastrophe from the beginning.
The reason for going to war with Iraq was ostensibly because Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). The CIA was unable to uncover conclusive evidence of such weapons, and CIA director Tenner told the president so. Chaney and Rumsfeld then badgered the CIA to come up with a “white paper” that suggested otherwise. They eventually complied, applying incredible pressure on the CIA director and his people to be complicit in this charade. When the final “white paper” on evidence of WMDs was presented to President Bush, he said, “Is this all you’ve got?”
It was then, at this point, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as OD consultant to the president, should have said to the CIA director, “Go back and make the case for war or not.” But she was the president’s pal, a confidante and friend, and remained silent. CIA director Tenner, who had been harassed into submission by Chaney and Rumsfeld, told the president it was a “slam dunk.” It was in this theatre of the absurd that the go-cart of war was pushed down the hill into the eventual abyss.
In the middle of this theatre of the absurd, the generals were saying that 400,000 troops would be needed, while Rumsfeld suggested 70,000 would be adequate. He compromised eventually on 120,000. The generals also said that the hard part would be the occupation and dealing with the ethnic tensions that already existed in a population of nearly 30 million with three powerful cultural tribes. Rumsfeld soft-pedaled this. He became a television fixture in a culture that loves its soap opera icons that titillate their fancies with swashbuckling bravado of the United States strutting its stuff as the “lone superpower.”
None of this is real to 99 percent of a nation not asked to make any sacrifices, but very real to the families of the men and women of the 1 percent fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the early low points of this tragic-comedy was the appearance of the Secretary of State, not the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, presenting the case for going to war with Iraq with CIA Director Tenner sitting behind him. The Neocons had successfully created a full-court fiction of WMDs, while two otherwise honorable and long serving patriotic Americans were made history’s stooges in this psychodrama.
Former national security adviser to President Bush the Elder, Brent Scowcroft, sponsor and mentor to Condoleezza Rice, wrote an Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Attack Saddam.” He warned in the piece that invading Iraq would lead to a long, bloody, and costly occupation, while diverting the US from the war on terror, which was then concentrated on Afghanistan. Rice and President Bush were furious. They felt betrayed. This was not however true of his father who received an advance copy of the article and gave it his tacit approval.
President Bush the Younger won the 2001 election by the fabled record of the Florida ballot. After graduating from Yale, he was like a prodigal son who rejected the comfort and affluence of his family and sought his fortune on his own prospecting for oil, and eventually striking it rich. He rejoined the family on his own terms demonstrating a high risk, decisive and entrepreneurial spirit. Prior to being president, he showed little interest in foreign affairs or intellectual pursuits, preferring straight talking men-of-action, men who never second-guessed themselves. What he did as president is common in corpocracy, that is, he surrounded himself with like thinking, acting and feeling individuals. The consequences of this inclination are to magnify personal strengths while compounding personal weaknesses. Leadership, unfortunately, is not a zero sum game.
III WHEN LEADERSHIP WAS NOT CONFUSED WITH GENERALSHIP
The dominant components of leadership are strategic vision along with a clear understanding on the ground, that is, where you are, where you want to go, and what the requirements are to get there. Historian David McCullough, author of “1776” (2007) claims George Washington, our first president, was a great leader, but not a great Revolutionary War general. Nathaniel Greene was a far superior general. McCullough concludes, however, that Washington, in his opinion, was our greatest president because of his leadership.
Washington was a pondering decision maker, a deeply spiritual man but certainly not a conventional Christian. He frequently thanked God for watching over the revolution and blessing the republic, but he rarely spoke of sin or Christ. He often described God as the “Grand Architect” of the universe, “Supreme Dispenser of every Good,” and the clockmaker God of deism. He knew the importance of symbolism and used it to the nth degree. More importantly, he made an accurate assessment of where his new country was and what it would take to move it in the direction of stability.
When the Revolutionary War was going badly in 1776, General Horatio Gates launched a conspiracy of a coterie of ambitious generals to humiliate and embarrass Washington into resigning as Supreme Commander of Army. If you could picture the times, the army was low on ammunition, food and supplies; it had suffered defeat after defeat; the Continental Congress was discussing possible replacements for General Washington; and the enlistments of many of Washington’s men were coming to an end, vastly depleting his army of any ability to compete with the most powerful military force in the world, the British army and navy.
It was in this climate that he opened a letter by accident addressed to general Gates, which disclosed the plot to unseat him. He closed the letter, wrote on it that it had been opened by mistake thinking it was command business, and sent it on to the general. This quelled the conspiracy. Washington knew he needed every man including disenchanted generals.
With the majority of his troops soon to end enlistments in December 1776, he brought them all together and announced that he would give each man a $10 bonus, which was more than a month’s pay, if they would reenlist. The majority did. Washington had no way of keeping his promise, as the Continental Congress was nearly broke. His vision of the final outcome never diminished in the darkest days.
With regard to running the war, Washington knew his assets and limitations. He counted on wiser generals and used his capital to rally the troops. He had an eye for organization, discipline, accountability, and assessment. He also demonstrated a facility for recognizing and developing nascent leadership in his men. It was evident with Nathaniel Greene and Benedict Arnold.
Had Arnold died, for instance, at Saratoga where he proved a brilliant strategist and tactician, he would have been the hero of the revolution. This most decisive victory of the revolution motivated France to finance the war. When the credit for the victory went to general Horatio Gates, who had little to do with the victory, Arnold became increasingly disenchanted, ultimately spying for the British. So, today, a “Benedict Arnold” is known as a traitor or betrayer of trust.
Once the war was won, many in the Continental Congress wanted to make Washington king for life. He rejected this, and instead served two four-year terms as president with no desire to serve beyond that time, endorsing his vice president, John Adams, as the second president. Thus, he set a precedence that was maintained until the four-term election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, who died early in his fourth term (April 12, 1945).
Washington was offered a handsome salary as president, which he refused, suggesting that he only be provided with expenses. Ironically, his expenses in today’s dollars would exceed the president’s present salary.
We have not enjoyed Washingtonian leadership of late, as we have created technocrats as leaders, specifically in this instance the neocons. These people are never elected to office but are brought in by those elected.
IV WHERE HAVE ALL THE LEADERS GONE?
We know Barak Obama has a silver tongue not unlike Abraham Lincoln. Both were first term junior senators in the United States Senate from the state of Illinois; both had previously served in the house; both at an early age knew the powerful theatre of the spoken word.
We have Hillary Clinton, a United States Senator, who has served her country well, and is the wife of former President Bill Clinton, who demonstrated leadership qualities similar to previous leaders.
We have John McCain, a United States Senator, who has served his country well in the senate and on the battlefield. He is in the autumn of his years, and if elected, would be the oldest president in our history to be elected. He shares some of the personality traits of President John Adams, who was a no nonsense president, and who never had any slaves, and always said what he meant and meant what he said.
Each of these candidates have demons in their system that could knock them off their center as George Bush the Younger has been knocked off his. Did George Washington have any demons? Indeed, he did.
Washington loved affluence, pomp and circumstance, and the comfort of the elite. He loved the whole theatre of society. He didn’t like to be touched, and it was nearly theatrical when he would be forced to engage in conversation with underlings. He lacked Benjamin Franklin’s ease with everyone. He had a presence but wasn’t open or affable.
He had many critics similar to President Roosevelt. Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed FDR had a first rate personality and a second rate mind. Washington’s critics saw him second rate in both instances. What made him exceptional is that he recognized this also in himself, and in his new nation, and used it to proceed with caution and care. His vision was never clouded by his demons.
As General of the Continental Army, he parried the thrusts of Gates and his allies with the dexterity of the master politician. But when necessary, he could deflect the thrusts of his covert enemies, and when thought necessary, strike back with ferocity and guile.
Washington was an exceedingly complex man, who appreciated brilliance while knowing he lacked such brilliance. There was no hesitation to surround himself with able men, men such as Greene that could out general him. That said he maneuvered politically to retain his command, even as he simultaneously struggled to prevent the Continental Army from dissolving into mutiny.
He was a pondering man, a handsome man, a striking man, and he used this uniqueness to power him to fulfill his ambitions. He is a leader of a type that we could once again see as being our Commander in Chief.
V THE LEADER’S CONTENT OF CHARACTER
Throughout American history, we have had to endure the dalliances of the power brokers and power pursuers. These people are indigenous to all organizations in every line of endeavor. They have no real ideology, no idealism or realism, or commitment to defending the integrity of the American way of life or the citadels of freedom, although they use elements of this in the rhetoric of their essence. Their real ideology is in succeeding big time at any cost.
The temperance with which President George Washington dealt with these distracting human components is a model for all leaders to consider. It is in his letters, speeches and biographies. He was ambitious; he wanted to be the Supreme Commander of the Continental Army, but feigned that that was the furthest thing from his mind. He even wrote to his wife Martha complaining that he was doing everything to avoid this role, when he wanted nothing more desperately. Washington hid his ambition. The fire in his eyes countermanded the composure of his will.
President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, thought it should be his to refuse, but John Adams, looking at the tall, handsome, graceful Washington, resplendent in his uniform with powdered wig, nominated the general with enthusiasm. Congress concurred.
There is nothing wrong with ambition providing you have the vision to serve and the content of character to absorb attacks from within and outside your sphere of influences, without becoming paranoid, or losing your grip on the focus of your objective. Washington had this; so did Lincoln. They looked like leaders, acted like leaders, comported themselves like leaders. Eisenhower never rose to this level as president, but he did so in war.
Like Washington, Eisenhower showed great leadership as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. But again like Washington, he was an unremarkable general in the field. Truman used his paranoia as a motivator whereas Nixon was consumed by this demon. Brilliant in many other senses, Nixon and several other presidents found it difficulty to get past their demons without scandal or disruption.
VI THE FALLACIES OF CORPORATE SOCIETY
The United States has progressed to being a corporate society, that is, a corporate structure built around its central nucleus of power.
The corporation has evolved into corpocracy where there is a concentric technocratic reporting system from the center to the corporate periphery. This perfection of Machine Age Thinking is as cumbersome and faulty as any that man has ever developed. It looks good, sounds good, but fails to work efficiently if at all, while human activity is stuck with it as a societal boilerplate. Unfortunately, if flawed in the center, where power is meant to reside, but doesn’t, then a vacuum of power is created with the entire sphere collapsing in on the center.
In this scenario, everyone appears to be sharing power without anyone exercising leadership consistent with the organization’s design. The faultiness of this power structure has been well documented.
We see it in the conduct of the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq; in the subprime real estate crisis; in the collapse of the economy in on itself as the dollar plummets, oil prices surge, and wheat fields are turned into cornfields to make ethanol causing food prices to soar; in the stalled immigration policy; in the laxity of the FDA that allows drugs on the market that kill people; in our mega corporations that solve their economic woes by downsizing, exporting jobs abroad, or merging with other failed businesses; in FEMA being folded under the umbrella of Homeland Security, reduced in staff, facilities, and budget, then forgotten until Katrina; in the pride of greed on Wall Street where reality never touches until a recession threatens.
We see it in Bush’s War, which is a mirror image of all of these other components; in the that presidency as it limps to the end of its administration in worse shape than when it started nearly eight years ago; in the trade deficit in 2008 being the largest in US history; in the loss of 3.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2001; in the collapse of the dollar with the price of Gold rising from $260 an ounce in to $1,000 in the past seven plus years; and in oil going from $28 a barrel to more than $100 today.
The paradoxical dilemma of this presidency is that it unwittingly promoted a marginal extremist terrorist movement to global prominence by preemptive action, and in doing so, energized it into a far more formidable enemy than it was at first. It is a failure of leadership. One man cannot be singled out for such failure. The corporate model of construction is designed for such failure.
VII THE CHALLENGE AHEAD, CULTURE
This little piece is designed to illustrate what happens when the system is designed against itself, when departments sabotage each other instead of working in synergy; when the answers that the power center will accept are the answers it expects regardless of relevance; when leadership has devolved to leaderless leadership.
We have forgotten that human society is not a corporate group, but has evolved as a systemic diverse human entity. That system is displayed as culture. Culture is unique, diverse and individualistic. Together, these cultures form a tapestry of life as the human race, which is systemically organic, but which requires every ounce of its diversity, uniqueness and individuality to enrich the fabric of mankind.
For man to survive as human beings, this system must operate in complementary rather than competitive fashion. It starts with the single unit and progresses on to include all human society. I take the liberty of paraphrasing system researcher Russell Ackoff in this context:
“If you take a system apart to identify its central components, and then operate these central components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can irrespective of every other central component, then there is one thing of which you can be certain. The entire system will fail to behave as well as it can, and may collapse in on itself.
“Now, this is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but it is absolutely essential to System Thinking, which is the way the whole human community works or fails to work together. It is way governments work or fail to work from their central power nucleus.
“The corollary to this thinking is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can from its central components to its most peripheral components, then none of its components will be working as well as they might. Each component is supporting complementary components at some price to its own ultimate possible achievement. In doing so, synergy is realized and the possible is exceeded because the decisive outcome is much greater than the sum of the system’s component parts.”
We are on the brink of a new presidential election with our military forces stretched to the limit. The Bush’s War has been a failed policy despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. But the war is emblematic of many other societal failures. We have failed inner city schools in metropolitan areas, but we also have failed schools in the suburbs. We have crime in the poorest and most affluent of neighborhoods. We have empty houses because of the subprime debacle, but also empty factories because of failed industrial leadership. We have our best students in high schools and colleges across the land bored to tears attending classes because that is their job, and not because they are committed to learning anything. We have middle aged men and women who have never caught hold because they have never totally left their adolescence, extending it from their teens into their 30s and 40s. We have our great cities attempting to balance between the electronic Silicon Valley and failed Detroit factory model trying to survive. Our entire society is collapsing in on itself because the nucleus of central power has proven essentially a leaderless leadership vacuum.
As if the gods were upon us at this critical moment, we have one of the most refreshing moments in American history in a presidential candidate that is African American, a presidential candidate who is a woman, and a presidential candidate that is a throwback to our second great president, John Adams. Never has the challenge of culture, and the opportunities to heal differences in a common cause been greater than now.
The good paying factory jobs of Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia are never to return. These candidates are talking about saving these jobs or retraining workers in new technologies. The irony is that our school system from grammar school through college is a preparatory factory, which is now anachronistic.
Corporate society has a factory mentality and discharges its problems with a factory mindset. Indeed, education is a defunct institution because of this. Corpocracy attacks problems at the periphery rather than at the nuclear core or power center, as power brokers, power pursuers, and politicians are wont to do.
A cosmetic approach to the problem solving doesn’t disturb the status quo. Item: create a new course, design a new curriculum, or launch a new corporate intervention, always being careful not to disturb the technocrats in the core center. We must move beyond this; we must start by introducing our little ones to the real world they are about to join.
Ergo, I propose that no student be given a high school diploma or college degree that is not proficient in a foreign language. No college graduate should be allowed to sneak through the system dodging language courses with computer proficiency. Computer literacy is not the equivalent of culture literacy. The only way to truly enter another culture is through its language, and we are now a world society.
Culture is destiny. Culture is not isolated but pervasive. Appreciation of culture is what is missing in education.
For within a culture, there are several subcultures. Often these subcultures compete subversively against the primary culture. This was the case of the Department of Defense subverting the Department of State, and intimidating the CIA to capitulate to its preconceived notion of the presence of WMDs in Iraq, when clearly there were none. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of the integrity of the Office of the President, where the nucleus of central power resided.
When the center collapses in on itself, all subcultures across the spectrum from the farthest dimensions of the corporate structure do as well. This succinctly describes the disaster of the Bush’s War and the present socio-economic state of American society.
Likewise, every nation, as well as every corporation, has a culture, and within its culture a myriad of competing subcultures often contrasting with or in direct competition with the primary culture. It is the role of leadership to first recognize this condition, and then to mount an exercise to integrate these differences into an assimilated pattern of focused determination while acknowledging the respective unique constructions of the subcultures. This sounds simple in expression but is extremely difficult to accomplish in deed. It is why culture is the challenge ahead of true leadership.
_______________
Dr. Fisher is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd., a prolific author, and a registered Republican for more than forty years. See his website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com.
Friday, March 21, 2008
AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICANS!
AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICANS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Good Friday, March 21, 2008
Some twenty years ago, I retired as a corporate executive who had worked over a good share of the world. Since that time, I have published hundreds of articles and several books on the subject of leaderless leadership as I have experienced it in my corporate career. I have witnessed a pusillanimous slide of American society into cultural ambivalence.
Here we are in the most important season of the Christian faith, and educators, government officials, corporate leaders, religious leaders and citizens in general are waffling.
There appears to be no clear sense in this United States of America as being a Christian nation. Christian pilgrims founded America, the Founding Fathers were Christians, even the Hussein mercenaries and the British troops of King George III during the American Revolution were Christian. Our history is that of a Christian people.
Today, more than 80 percent of the American population of more than 300 million claims to be devout or tacit Christians, while more than 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God.
Now, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution separate church from state, while giving all Americans the right to express their religious preference.
Still, these minority religions are residents of a Christian country. This is not their country if they do not assimilate themselves into the American language, the American value system, and the American system of law and order, as this is a society of laws and not men.
What may be construed as magnanimous tolerance by suborning the American value system to placate minorities is, in fact, demonstrating leaderless leadership. Such indecision throws American society off course and away from what has made it great. It is the Christian religion, the Protestant work ethic, and the Calvinistic determination to be all we can be that has produced a society second to none.
Imagine if you will, if this American population of more than 80 percent Christians were to boycott merchants, the economy would collapse; if it boycotted work, the country would come to a standstill; if it boycotted the public school system it, too, would collapse.
Yet, in a strange way, when a sliver of the population takes a stand in opposition to an open expression of the American Christian culture, merchants, workplaces and schools capitulate in a frantic effort not to offend, disregarding the majority population without compunction.
Merchants do this by no longer putting up Christmas trees, but holiday trees; no longer saying, "Merry Christmas" to customers, but "Happy Holidays"; no longer publishing Christmas cards but Holiday cards; no longer celebrating the Birth of Jesus, but having an end of the year celebration. The schools and workplaces and the government, indeed, the media are equally complicit in this rush away from our cultural roots.
Today. it is Good Friday, the day that Jesus died on the Cross, a day, traditionally, that schools were closed, workplaces and government offices, too, but no longer for fear of offending this or that minority that has chosen to take residence in this Christian country.
Should you dispute this being a Christian culture on the basis that all religions are legitimate you beg the question of America's history and culture, making it a moot point. It is the identity of the American character.
Unfortunately, for wont of leadership, we have an identity issue here. The seeds of our society have sprung many weeds that are choking out the life of our identity. The American character and its content has been diminished like that person who always says to your face what you want to hear, and does the same to the next person, and the next, until the face is faceless without any distinguishable characteristics.
Sadly, the American character has become faceless, purposeless, and shameless in regard to the question of what it is, why it is, how it became so, and what it has lost.
Every minority should have the same rights as the American majority. At the same time, the minority has a choice to make: assimilate themselves into American society, and adopt American values, and profit from what has made America great, or leave. Instead, too frequently, some in the minority community denigrate the American way, and blaspheme the United States in their native language publications, while experiencing the largesse and comfort of American society.
Americans have an amazing capacity to absorb disrespect. Respect is something you must earn, but you don't earn respect without roots: that is, without beliefs, values, and cultural doctrines that identify you as American.
This is my worry. I have several grandchildren, many teenagers, some ready to take their place in society, and others who already have. My grandchildren are essentially without religious convictions, without belief in anything. The major beliefs of the teenagers are in their electronic toys or some fantasy television programs, while those about to graduate from college, or now in the workplace are principally interested in "making it" in an amoral society.
For this, we have lost something. These young people are in or soon will be taking leadership positions in society, and if they don't know who they are, have little sense of identity, chances are they will try to be everything to everybody and end up being no one to everyone, and mainly to themselves.
The Christian culture is our center, and without it, we have no roots.
We cannot blame these young people for this predicament. It is American society that has shrunk from its culture and its roots, giving these young people little guidance or sense of identity much less direction in the most challenging era ever known to this nation. It is a time to take inventory and then action to redress this wrong.
----------------------
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Tampa, FL 33617-2504
Dr. Fisher is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. He is a trained chemist and chemical engineer who has worked and lived in South America, Europe and South Africa aside from his roots in Clinton, Iowa, and his present residence is Tampa, Florida with his wife Betty. He has thirteen grandchildren spread across the United States from two sets of 3 years old twins to a 31 year old. He earned a Ph.D. in organization/industrial psychology. He has more than 300 published articles and nine books one of which is a memoir as a novel. His most recent book sees the sins of the 1970s being replicated today with almost frightening consistency. The book is titled A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). His website is: www.fisherofideas.com and his email address is: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Good Friday, March 21, 2008
Some twenty years ago, I retired as a corporate executive who had worked over a good share of the world. Since that time, I have published hundreds of articles and several books on the subject of leaderless leadership as I have experienced it in my corporate career. I have witnessed a pusillanimous slide of American society into cultural ambivalence.
Here we are in the most important season of the Christian faith, and educators, government officials, corporate leaders, religious leaders and citizens in general are waffling.
There appears to be no clear sense in this United States of America as being a Christian nation. Christian pilgrims founded America, the Founding Fathers were Christians, even the Hussein mercenaries and the British troops of King George III during the American Revolution were Christian. Our history is that of a Christian people.
Today, more than 80 percent of the American population of more than 300 million claims to be devout or tacit Christians, while more than 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God.
Now, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution separate church from state, while giving all Americans the right to express their religious preference.
Still, these minority religions are residents of a Christian country. This is not their country if they do not assimilate themselves into the American language, the American value system, and the American system of law and order, as this is a society of laws and not men.
What may be construed as magnanimous tolerance by suborning the American value system to placate minorities is, in fact, demonstrating leaderless leadership. Such indecision throws American society off course and away from what has made it great. It is the Christian religion, the Protestant work ethic, and the Calvinistic determination to be all we can be that has produced a society second to none.
Imagine if you will, if this American population of more than 80 percent Christians were to boycott merchants, the economy would collapse; if it boycotted work, the country would come to a standstill; if it boycotted the public school system it, too, would collapse.
Yet, in a strange way, when a sliver of the population takes a stand in opposition to an open expression of the American Christian culture, merchants, workplaces and schools capitulate in a frantic effort not to offend, disregarding the majority population without compunction.
Merchants do this by no longer putting up Christmas trees, but holiday trees; no longer saying, "Merry Christmas" to customers, but "Happy Holidays"; no longer publishing Christmas cards but Holiday cards; no longer celebrating the Birth of Jesus, but having an end of the year celebration. The schools and workplaces and the government, indeed, the media are equally complicit in this rush away from our cultural roots.
Today. it is Good Friday, the day that Jesus died on the Cross, a day, traditionally, that schools were closed, workplaces and government offices, too, but no longer for fear of offending this or that minority that has chosen to take residence in this Christian country.
Should you dispute this being a Christian culture on the basis that all religions are legitimate you beg the question of America's history and culture, making it a moot point. It is the identity of the American character.
Unfortunately, for wont of leadership, we have an identity issue here. The seeds of our society have sprung many weeds that are choking out the life of our identity. The American character and its content has been diminished like that person who always says to your face what you want to hear, and does the same to the next person, and the next, until the face is faceless without any distinguishable characteristics.
Sadly, the American character has become faceless, purposeless, and shameless in regard to the question of what it is, why it is, how it became so, and what it has lost.
Every minority should have the same rights as the American majority. At the same time, the minority has a choice to make: assimilate themselves into American society, and adopt American values, and profit from what has made America great, or leave. Instead, too frequently, some in the minority community denigrate the American way, and blaspheme the United States in their native language publications, while experiencing the largesse and comfort of American society.
Americans have an amazing capacity to absorb disrespect. Respect is something you must earn, but you don't earn respect without roots: that is, without beliefs, values, and cultural doctrines that identify you as American.
This is my worry. I have several grandchildren, many teenagers, some ready to take their place in society, and others who already have. My grandchildren are essentially without religious convictions, without belief in anything. The major beliefs of the teenagers are in their electronic toys or some fantasy television programs, while those about to graduate from college, or now in the workplace are principally interested in "making it" in an amoral society.
For this, we have lost something. These young people are in or soon will be taking leadership positions in society, and if they don't know who they are, have little sense of identity, chances are they will try to be everything to everybody and end up being no one to everyone, and mainly to themselves.
The Christian culture is our center, and without it, we have no roots.
We cannot blame these young people for this predicament. It is American society that has shrunk from its culture and its roots, giving these young people little guidance or sense of identity much less direction in the most challenging era ever known to this nation. It is a time to take inventory and then action to redress this wrong.
----------------------
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Tampa, FL 33617-2504
Dr. Fisher is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. He is a trained chemist and chemical engineer who has worked and lived in South America, Europe and South Africa aside from his roots in Clinton, Iowa, and his present residence is Tampa, Florida with his wife Betty. He has thirteen grandchildren spread across the United States from two sets of 3 years old twins to a 31 year old. He earned a Ph.D. in organization/industrial psychology. He has more than 300 published articles and nine books one of which is a memoir as a novel. His most recent book sees the sins of the 1970s being replicated today with almost frightening consistency. The book is titled A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). His website is: www.fisherofideas.com and his email address is: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
THE NATURE OF A THINK TANK
THE NAPLES INSTITUTE IS A THINK TANK
What is a think tank?
In our busy lives, it is necessary for most people to think on the run. A think tank separates itself from this daily rush to consider current and future relevant concerns.
Think tanks are not generic but dedicated to specific areas of concern. The Naples Institute is focused on social justice. This means it can find cause with many more specifically directed think tanks, and possibly joint problem solve with them.
A think tank is an idea factory. The Naples Institute sponsors original research on leadership as the key to social justice problem solving.
The Naples Institute is dedicated to original scholarship and empirical studies by working in the field solving problems relating to the poor, indigent, and marginalized.
Why a think tank for ideas?
Ideas generate change. Think tanks are often the catalyst for an idea whose time has come. A think tank is like the advance scout who examines ideas on the horizon to anticipate what is ahead, and how to deal with its challenges. Think tanks are often special branches of universities or industrial complexes where members of such establishments are free to think without restrictions.
How do ideas cause change?
An idea requires an advocate and facilitator to make the nascent idea (1) take hold; (2) be found useful, and then (3) be perpetuated. That takes leadership.
An idea filters from intellectual speculation and germinates into a theoretical concept. Papers are written and presented at conferences profiling the idea. Should the idea survive this rigorous scrutiny, and subsequent controlled trials, it most likely finds purchase with the wider audience, and eventually becomes part of the fabric of society.
Often, a special interest finds the idea to its liking and helps it along. Gradually, or swiftly, as the case may be, the idea is disseminated, implemented, evaluated, and if right for the times, assimilated into the culture.
Changes invariably occur as the idea goes through this process. It takes leadership to maintain the integrity of this process. Stated otherwise, no idea will take hold if the culture to which it is to be introduced is not understood totally, or the special problems that the new idea might spawn in the process of implementation.
How does a think tank function?
A think tank is composed of an eclectic group of scholars, academics, corporate change agents and social thinkers with diverse academic and/or empirical backgrounds.
It functions as a collaborative effort, while preserving individual integrity of its members as they address questions of concern.
Diverse points of view and scholarly interests make for a creative climate in face-to-face exchange. Even in this age of the Internet, there is a substantive advantage to a place dedicated to intense discussion of important questions of the day.
How does a think tank market its ideas, more specifically, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE?
The Internet is an important conduit. The Naples Institute has a website that profiles its members, their credentials, their special interests, along with its current and long term goals, and the status of current projects.
Plans have been created for a bookstore, a publishing company, a speaking bureau, and a traveling seminar to market the Institute’s newest ideas. A newsletter is also planned with executive summaries of what ideas are currently in the mill. Long range, the Institute plans to create a magazine and to broadcast its activities across the globe by satellite radio.
In addition, training films, videos, and DVDs as leadership aids are to be made available with the eventual creation of a School of Social Justice.
The “State of The Naples Institute” will be published in an annual report listing all philanthropic organizations that are assisting the Institute in its work.
The Naples Institute will be constantly canvassing for new scholars, field researchers, and academics to join in its quest for social justice. It is currently looking into the possibility affiliating with several universities.
What is the role of entrepreneurs in THE NAPLES INSTITUTE?
Entrepreneurs who have been involved in philanthropic work have founded The Naples Institute. One founder created Walden University, a fully accredited graduate institution of some 20,000 students; another established a successful restaurant chain across the nation (Chuck e Cheese); another has created a foundation for the poor (The Coine Foundation, Inc.); and a fourth is an international author of several books on leadership.
Is this think tank a business?
Yes, The Naples Institute is a for profit business.
Where is THE NAPLES INSTITUTE located?
Naples, Florida on the West Coast of Florida.
What is the difference between a think tank and an advocacy group?
This is a very good question because a think tank and an advocacy group have different functions, which can be conflicting and pusillanimous. Well intentions notwithstanding, their respective functions may be complementary, but decidedly different. A think tank is an idea factory generating ideas, or a reflective organization. An advocacy group has a specific cause and is action oriented.
The Naples Institute creates ideas that support the Institute’s vision of fighting for social justice. It develops instruments to assist in this fight.
An advocacy group is dedicated to a single issue, and measures its success by the impact it makes into that cause. Advocacy groups could be considered lobbyists for single-track ideas, and because of this, might receive the backing of special interests.
Should a think tank conform to special interests, it would compromise its mission. As sharp a difference as this might be considered, a wider divergence is that think tanks are led by intellectuals, who are comfortable in the abstract world of ideas, whereas advocacy groups are led by pragmatists who prefer the concrete world of the problem solving. Think tanks encourage diverse thinking, while advocacy groups resist prefer consensus building to tangible results.
Consequently, by definition, think tanks have a wide perspective and comprehensive goal, whereas an advocacy group has a narrow perspective and an even narrower goal. This is so because advocacy groups are looking for specific self-interested financial backers. A think tank is often endowed similar to a university to pursue general research with no specific outcomes expected.
What is the role of politics in a think tank?
The role of ideology in a think tank is specific. Every think tank has an ideology. The Naples Group is fighting for social justice. Should it depart from its ideology in favor of a political party, its function could quickly be compromised.
-------------
Prepared by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.
What is a think tank?
In our busy lives, it is necessary for most people to think on the run. A think tank separates itself from this daily rush to consider current and future relevant concerns.
Think tanks are not generic but dedicated to specific areas of concern. The Naples Institute is focused on social justice. This means it can find cause with many more specifically directed think tanks, and possibly joint problem solve with them.
A think tank is an idea factory. The Naples Institute sponsors original research on leadership as the key to social justice problem solving.
The Naples Institute is dedicated to original scholarship and empirical studies by working in the field solving problems relating to the poor, indigent, and marginalized.
Why a think tank for ideas?
Ideas generate change. Think tanks are often the catalyst for an idea whose time has come. A think tank is like the advance scout who examines ideas on the horizon to anticipate what is ahead, and how to deal with its challenges. Think tanks are often special branches of universities or industrial complexes where members of such establishments are free to think without restrictions.
How do ideas cause change?
An idea requires an advocate and facilitator to make the nascent idea (1) take hold; (2) be found useful, and then (3) be perpetuated. That takes leadership.
An idea filters from intellectual speculation and germinates into a theoretical concept. Papers are written and presented at conferences profiling the idea. Should the idea survive this rigorous scrutiny, and subsequent controlled trials, it most likely finds purchase with the wider audience, and eventually becomes part of the fabric of society.
Often, a special interest finds the idea to its liking and helps it along. Gradually, or swiftly, as the case may be, the idea is disseminated, implemented, evaluated, and if right for the times, assimilated into the culture.
Changes invariably occur as the idea goes through this process. It takes leadership to maintain the integrity of this process. Stated otherwise, no idea will take hold if the culture to which it is to be introduced is not understood totally, or the special problems that the new idea might spawn in the process of implementation.
How does a think tank function?
A think tank is composed of an eclectic group of scholars, academics, corporate change agents and social thinkers with diverse academic and/or empirical backgrounds.
It functions as a collaborative effort, while preserving individual integrity of its members as they address questions of concern.
Diverse points of view and scholarly interests make for a creative climate in face-to-face exchange. Even in this age of the Internet, there is a substantive advantage to a place dedicated to intense discussion of important questions of the day.
How does a think tank market its ideas, more specifically, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE?
The Internet is an important conduit. The Naples Institute has a website that profiles its members, their credentials, their special interests, along with its current and long term goals, and the status of current projects.
Plans have been created for a bookstore, a publishing company, a speaking bureau, and a traveling seminar to market the Institute’s newest ideas. A newsletter is also planned with executive summaries of what ideas are currently in the mill. Long range, the Institute plans to create a magazine and to broadcast its activities across the globe by satellite radio.
In addition, training films, videos, and DVDs as leadership aids are to be made available with the eventual creation of a School of Social Justice.
The “State of The Naples Institute” will be published in an annual report listing all philanthropic organizations that are assisting the Institute in its work.
The Naples Institute will be constantly canvassing for new scholars, field researchers, and academics to join in its quest for social justice. It is currently looking into the possibility affiliating with several universities.
What is the role of entrepreneurs in THE NAPLES INSTITUTE?
Entrepreneurs who have been involved in philanthropic work have founded The Naples Institute. One founder created Walden University, a fully accredited graduate institution of some 20,000 students; another established a successful restaurant chain across the nation (Chuck e Cheese); another has created a foundation for the poor (The Coine Foundation, Inc.); and a fourth is an international author of several books on leadership.
Is this think tank a business?
Yes, The Naples Institute is a for profit business.
Where is THE NAPLES INSTITUTE located?
Naples, Florida on the West Coast of Florida.
What is the difference between a think tank and an advocacy group?
This is a very good question because a think tank and an advocacy group have different functions, which can be conflicting and pusillanimous. Well intentions notwithstanding, their respective functions may be complementary, but decidedly different. A think tank is an idea factory generating ideas, or a reflective organization. An advocacy group has a specific cause and is action oriented.
The Naples Institute creates ideas that support the Institute’s vision of fighting for social justice. It develops instruments to assist in this fight.
An advocacy group is dedicated to a single issue, and measures its success by the impact it makes into that cause. Advocacy groups could be considered lobbyists for single-track ideas, and because of this, might receive the backing of special interests.
Should a think tank conform to special interests, it would compromise its mission. As sharp a difference as this might be considered, a wider divergence is that think tanks are led by intellectuals, who are comfortable in the abstract world of ideas, whereas advocacy groups are led by pragmatists who prefer the concrete world of the problem solving. Think tanks encourage diverse thinking, while advocacy groups resist prefer consensus building to tangible results.
Consequently, by definition, think tanks have a wide perspective and comprehensive goal, whereas an advocacy group has a narrow perspective and an even narrower goal. This is so because advocacy groups are looking for specific self-interested financial backers. A think tank is often endowed similar to a university to pursue general research with no specific outcomes expected.
What is the role of politics in a think tank?
The role of ideology in a think tank is specific. Every think tank has an ideology. The Naples Group is fighting for social justice. Should it depart from its ideology in favor of a political party, its function could quickly be compromised.
-------------
Prepared by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
EARLY RESPONSES TO: COLD SHOWER No. 2 -- While America Slept!
Early responses to COLD SHOWER No. 2
RESPONSE NO. 1:
Dr. J -
You make me g-d mad. I have to tell you that. I don't agree with you at all.
unsigned
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 1:
It is okay to get g-d mad at me. I have no problem with your anger. I do have a problem when you say I make you mad and don't explain why I make you mad, or the rational supporting for you thinking otherwise than how I think. What produces such anger. My desire is to make you think; make you better understand why you think the way you do. Is it because it is popular to think that way; is it because everyone in your group thinks that way; is it your self-interest to think that way; is it because of your job to think that way; is it because of your affiliation with a social, religious or political group to think that way. It is not important for you to be honest with me. It is important for you to be honest with yourself. You see, my problem at this time in my life when my lights are dimming is to penetrate the darkness that I see all around me. It is the treachery of self-ignorance that makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. We cannot escape ourselves. If we live a lie, the lie owns us. If the lie owns us, then we are not more than a slave to it. The perpetrators of the lie are always there waiting in the darkness to exploit our vulnerability to the lie.
JRF
==========
RESPONSE NO. 2:
Jim,
As always, you have put down an excellent paper which I read carefully.
Again, it is not a typical American problem, but one of the Western world. And I am afraid, it is a problem caused by our political system.
One paragraph of your paper jumped into my eyes:
"Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world."
The vast majority of the population is not interested in the complex political world, but in the comfort of such gadgets as you have pointed out (cars, fancy clothing, casinos, movie glamour, BlackBerries, laptops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3's, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders). And each of them are voters who determine the outcome of the governmental race.
It is not only back to the 1970s, it is even further back to the old Romans "panem et circenses" (give them food and entertainment).
What does this tell us?
If you want to become elected, you have simply to make attractive promises to please the lower masses, not to ask for challenges -- which necessarily leads to a deplorable lack of intellect and other virtues.
As the unions and the workers force better conditions from the companies, the politicians oblige to the primitive masses. The is the result of a political system which doesn't fit anymore the 21st century.
Be well
M
=========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 2:
Response: This is from a European colleague and friend of mine who was forced to be a Brown Shirt in World War II as only a boy of eight in order to eat. He knows a time and a danger and life that I can capture only in books. I am a self-confessed Germanophile with Berlin my favorite city in Europe. He was executive vice president human resources of Honeywell International, while I was a director of human resources out of Brussels. He knows of my serious criticisms of things HR as well as my serious criticism of things MBA, but tolerates my ways. He has traveled the world and is a student of history. I am always enlightened by his exchanges.
Incidentally, it is true that Rome slept, as did Great Britain slept marking the end of their empires. Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" claims logistics and internal self-indulgence (as M points out) led to its demise so the Visigoths could storm Rome. We are playing the same game with troops in Korea now for more than 50 years, and the Iraq War costing us from $33.8 billion (2002) to $171 billion (2007) without even including Afghanistan.
Finally, Nicholson Baker in his new book HUMAN SMOKE (Simon & Schuster) suggests we weren't the good guys, that FDR and Churchill did some funny stuff. The reason I mention this is that the history we read always favors the victors, and doesn't tell the whole story. I just read a novel by a Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo titled "The Redbreast" which gives yet another view of that terrible war.
We should be always open to new ideas, not necessarily to buy them, but to complete the soundness of our reasoning.
JRF
========
RESPONSE NO. 3:
Jim,
Hope your shingles are better.
My opinion: In the last 6 – 12 months, your writing has reached some kind of personal critical mass in both quality and content. It’s as if your decades of pondering have somehow all come together to make a single picture. I think everything you’ve written is spot on. (that could imply you have dementia and your thinking has dropped to my level, but I hope not. )
I’ve often wondered if success carries within it the seeds of the next failure. Those who grow up amongst affluence don’t learn the lessons that created that affluence, and that’s what’s happening to America.
If you ever find out what made your respondent g-d mad; that’d be interesting. Me thinketh thou hit a nerve there.
Still working on the missive; just have been swamped.
Cya
e
========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 3:
My shingles are about 80 percent gone. I'm a slow healer. Thank you for asking.
And thank you for your comment about my writing. I appreciate it. I look forward to reading your missive for the "Enlightened Leadership." My interest in the project has waned.
I am an individualistic thinker and not a group thinker, nor am I one that adjusts my focus or intensity to satisfy a group goal. I guess you could say I'm not a team player.
I think we are in a mess and it is a mess those that publish don't want to examine. I am not a do gooder or a crusader. I am a thinker. I'll examine questions of my time until I die without let up or reservation.
I have reached the point where I write to be writing, thinking that maybe some of it will stick when I'm gone.
I don't think a single presidential candidate, for example, has a clue as to where we are, how we got here, where we are going, or why, and therefore even less clue as to how to get us out of it. Leaderless leadership never had such a fertile soil.
I have been attacked on my stand on HR/MBA professionals, whom I don't fault for making a living in this manner, but they are monsters we have created without thought.
No, I'm not going to share with what I've received. It will come out in my writing.
My novel goes well but slowly.
On another subject, our current pope, and his itemized selection of "new" mortal sins, indicates how low we have sunk in the leadership firmament.
Religion has done what all disciplines do when they cease to be relevant or competent. They get where the action is; they become what Eric Hoffer once called "true believers," feverishly jumping on the current social-cultural bandwagon to discover their relevance because they have lost their sense of authenticity. Sad.
I have no trouble with people who have the gumption to express themselves. It means they have broken through that wall within the brain that holds us back from looking stupid to finally say something intelligent and meaningful. That person will read what I have said, and perhaps for the first time, be introduced to himself.
I was once teaching a graduate seminar in the theory of organization development (OD) for Golden Gate University. This graduate student came up to me after class in total frustration, and gave me a thorough piece of his mind, and a comprehensive picture of his frustration with the course, with me, and with life in general.
When he was through, I said, "Welcome to OD. You just broke through. Your intervention has been successful."
He looked at me his face red with emotions, breathing hard, not expecting my comment. For the longest time, he just stood there saying nothing, and I didn't interrupt his silence.
Finally, he picked up his books, and left. I never talked to him again the rest of the semester.
Then about two years later, I got a letter from him. "You won't believe this," he said, "but that session (with me) changed my life. It has been smooth sailing ever since."
And then he said the most important thing of all, something that I don't think many people today (sadly) ever reach, "I'm no longer a stranger to myself." I closed the letter and said to myself, "No, you're not."
Always be well,
Jim
==========
RESPONSE NO. 4:esponse 2:
Dear Jim:
Seems like you touched a nerve of someone who's sold on the status quo or is comfortable with the way things have been.
After watching the demise of Bear Sterns this weekend, I wonder how long we will be so kind to the folks who control our economy that has been leveraged with greed to the hilt. We are now seeing the "Perfect Storm" developing with 2 wars being waged with our kid's blood, sacrifice and money, housing bubble bursting, corporations shedding jobs, $5 gallon gas coming by summer, dollar trading at all time low, feds bailing out investments banks who made stupid investments in high risk mortgages, and so on.
We send our manufacturing jobs over seas and get back tainted toys, pharmaceuticals, that kill us and our kids and we are happy as a lark to let it continue to happen.
Keep up the great work Jim. Maybe someone will get mad enough to start doing something about it.
B
___________
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 4:
Were I never to have left Clinton, Iowa; had I never seen my Roman Catholic Church up close and personal; had I not worked for two major Fortune 200 corporations at the corporate executive level across the Americas and the Western world; had I not experienced education from the private Catholic grammar school, the public high school, or the land grant university, at every level from under graduate to a terminal Ph.D., had I not consulted private and public sector companies across these United States, had I not benefited from corporate entitlements, and had I not participated in the whimsical world of a stock portfolio investments, I would have no problem with Federal Reserve bailouts, but, unfortunately, I did leave Clinton, Iowa.
What is happening -- dare anyone say it -- capitalism is not an infallible institution and is vulnerable to the caprice of the wealth controllers. By the nature of its construction, it will always have excesses, and those that pay for the excesses will always be those least able to absorb the shock.
I am so glad that I was born poor, and able to watch how men like my da were treated during the Great Depression, indeed, how his family was treated when he died, and left no estate, and the railroad didn't want to give my mother the puny compensation she deserved.
Many people write to me and say such things, as, "I was poor, too, but didn't know it." Well, this boy had a sensitivity since he came out of the womb to note and remember ever slight, every innuendo, every imperious gesture that was directed at my parents, and to sublimate it into my art and thinking.
My problem, B, is that little people like us think those people like Bear Stern and other holders of real estate mortgages, and all those hedge fund operators are smarter than the common Joe, AND THEY ARE NOT! They are just more greedy, and they translate their greed into being astute guardians of our capitalistic system.
We have a financial system which is supported by Putin's Russia and Communist China, among others, and most major European nations, who hold our note. We are a debtor nation, and if each of us operated the way our government operates, we would all be in deep yogurt to say the least. We are conducting wars on borrowed money, and running our society on borrowed money, and if Russia, China and Europe, not to mention several other countries from South East Asia were to ask for their money NOW, the world would devolve into the greatest depression ever known to man. IT COULD HAPPEN! It is unlikely to happen, and here is the irony, because of GREED. Yes, greed, keeps these investors in the US of A not withdrawing their money, because it they did, they, too, would collapse.
We make high finance like it is some beyond our comprehension system that only experts can understand, monitor and appreciate, but boil it all down, and it is grade school arithmetic.
What is the answer? It is implicit in your response.
(1) DON'T DRIVE SO MUCH!
(2) RUN A CHEAP ECONOMICAL AUTOMOBILE.
(3) DON'T BUY WHAT YOU DON'T NEED!
(4) SAVE IN GOLD OR OTHER HIGH SECURITIES!
(5) BE YOUR OWN FEDERAL RESERVE!
(6) THE RICHEST PEOPLE ARE NOT THOSE WITH THE MOST MONEY, BUT WITH THE MOST SENSIBLE AND CONTROLLED TASTES.
(7) DON'T WORRY ABOUT SAVING THE WORLD.
(8) CONCENTRATE ON SAVING YOUR SELF, WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.
(9) DON'T READ 99.9 PERCENT OF ALL THE GARBAGE YOU GET IN THE MAIL TO BUY THIS OR THAT.
(10) START RECOGNIZING IF YOU ARE NOT A LEADER NO ONE IS.
(11) READ, READ, READ!
(12) DON'T READ WHAT OTHERS SAY YOU SHOULD READ, READ WHAT YOU LIKE, AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS THINK.
(13) WATCH LITTLE TELEVISION.
(14) REMEMBER, CELEBRITIES ARE BY DEFINITION NARCISSISTIC, AND THEREFORE SYMPTOMATIC OF OUR CULTURAL DISEASE, NOT ITS CURE.
(15) USE YOUR CELL PHONE FOR EMERGENCIES, NOT AS A PACIFIER.
(16) DON'T LET THE INTERNET BE THE MAIN SOURCE OF YOUR INFORMATION. (17) DON'T BELIEVE 99.9 PERCENT OF WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET OR BLOGS ON GROUPS OR RELIGIONS UNFAMILIAR TO YOU.
(18) FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, CULTURES AND RELIGIONS.
(19) REMEMBER, IN THE END, WE AS THE HUMAN RACE HAVE MUCH MORE IN COMMON WITH EVERYONE ELSE THAN WE HAVE DIFFERENCES.
(20) DON'T BELIEVE BECAUSE YOU HAVE THIS OR THAT DEGREE THAT YOU ARE EDUCATED.
(21) EDUCATION IS A FACTORY AND NOT A TOO EFFICIENT ONE.
(22) IN THE END AS IN THE BEGINNING, ALL YOU HAVE IS YOU.
(23) SO, IT IS ALL UP TO YOU!
Be always well,
Jim
RESPONSE NO. 1:
Dr. J -
You make me g-d mad. I have to tell you that. I don't agree with you at all.
unsigned
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 1:
It is okay to get g-d mad at me. I have no problem with your anger. I do have a problem when you say I make you mad and don't explain why I make you mad, or the rational supporting for you thinking otherwise than how I think. What produces such anger. My desire is to make you think; make you better understand why you think the way you do. Is it because it is popular to think that way; is it because everyone in your group thinks that way; is it your self-interest to think that way; is it because of your job to think that way; is it because of your affiliation with a social, religious or political group to think that way. It is not important for you to be honest with me. It is important for you to be honest with yourself. You see, my problem at this time in my life when my lights are dimming is to penetrate the darkness that I see all around me. It is the treachery of self-ignorance that makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. We cannot escape ourselves. If we live a lie, the lie owns us. If the lie owns us, then we are not more than a slave to it. The perpetrators of the lie are always there waiting in the darkness to exploit our vulnerability to the lie.
JRF
==========
RESPONSE NO. 2:
Jim,
As always, you have put down an excellent paper which I read carefully.
Again, it is not a typical American problem, but one of the Western world. And I am afraid, it is a problem caused by our political system.
One paragraph of your paper jumped into my eyes:
"Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world."
The vast majority of the population is not interested in the complex political world, but in the comfort of such gadgets as you have pointed out (cars, fancy clothing, casinos, movie glamour, BlackBerries, laptops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3's, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders). And each of them are voters who determine the outcome of the governmental race.
It is not only back to the 1970s, it is even further back to the old Romans "panem et circenses" (give them food and entertainment).
What does this tell us?
If you want to become elected, you have simply to make attractive promises to please the lower masses, not to ask for challenges -- which necessarily leads to a deplorable lack of intellect and other virtues.
As the unions and the workers force better conditions from the companies, the politicians oblige to the primitive masses. The is the result of a political system which doesn't fit anymore the 21st century.
Be well
M
=========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 2:
Response: This is from a European colleague and friend of mine who was forced to be a Brown Shirt in World War II as only a boy of eight in order to eat. He knows a time and a danger and life that I can capture only in books. I am a self-confessed Germanophile with Berlin my favorite city in Europe. He was executive vice president human resources of Honeywell International, while I was a director of human resources out of Brussels. He knows of my serious criticisms of things HR as well as my serious criticism of things MBA, but tolerates my ways. He has traveled the world and is a student of history. I am always enlightened by his exchanges.
Incidentally, it is true that Rome slept, as did Great Britain slept marking the end of their empires. Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" claims logistics and internal self-indulgence (as M points out) led to its demise so the Visigoths could storm Rome. We are playing the same game with troops in Korea now for more than 50 years, and the Iraq War costing us from $33.8 billion (2002) to $171 billion (2007) without even including Afghanistan.
Finally, Nicholson Baker in his new book HUMAN SMOKE (Simon & Schuster) suggests we weren't the good guys, that FDR and Churchill did some funny stuff. The reason I mention this is that the history we read always favors the victors, and doesn't tell the whole story. I just read a novel by a Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo titled "The Redbreast" which gives yet another view of that terrible war.
We should be always open to new ideas, not necessarily to buy them, but to complete the soundness of our reasoning.
JRF
========
RESPONSE NO. 3:
Jim,
Hope your shingles are better.
My opinion: In the last 6 – 12 months, your writing has reached some kind of personal critical mass in both quality and content. It’s as if your decades of pondering have somehow all come together to make a single picture. I think everything you’ve written is spot on. (that could imply you have dementia and your thinking has dropped to my level, but I hope not. )
I’ve often wondered if success carries within it the seeds of the next failure. Those who grow up amongst affluence don’t learn the lessons that created that affluence, and that’s what’s happening to America.
If you ever find out what made your respondent g-d mad; that’d be interesting. Me thinketh thou hit a nerve there.
Still working on the missive; just have been swamped.
Cya
e
========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 3:
My shingles are about 80 percent gone. I'm a slow healer. Thank you for asking.
And thank you for your comment about my writing. I appreciate it. I look forward to reading your missive for the "Enlightened Leadership." My interest in the project has waned.
I am an individualistic thinker and not a group thinker, nor am I one that adjusts my focus or intensity to satisfy a group goal. I guess you could say I'm not a team player.
I think we are in a mess and it is a mess those that publish don't want to examine. I am not a do gooder or a crusader. I am a thinker. I'll examine questions of my time until I die without let up or reservation.
I have reached the point where I write to be writing, thinking that maybe some of it will stick when I'm gone.
I don't think a single presidential candidate, for example, has a clue as to where we are, how we got here, where we are going, or why, and therefore even less clue as to how to get us out of it. Leaderless leadership never had such a fertile soil.
I have been attacked on my stand on HR/MBA professionals, whom I don't fault for making a living in this manner, but they are monsters we have created without thought.
No, I'm not going to share with what I've received. It will come out in my writing.
My novel goes well but slowly.
On another subject, our current pope, and his itemized selection of "new" mortal sins, indicates how low we have sunk in the leadership firmament.
Religion has done what all disciplines do when they cease to be relevant or competent. They get where the action is; they become what Eric Hoffer once called "true believers," feverishly jumping on the current social-cultural bandwagon to discover their relevance because they have lost their sense of authenticity. Sad.
I have no trouble with people who have the gumption to express themselves. It means they have broken through that wall within the brain that holds us back from looking stupid to finally say something intelligent and meaningful. That person will read what I have said, and perhaps for the first time, be introduced to himself.
I was once teaching a graduate seminar in the theory of organization development (OD) for Golden Gate University. This graduate student came up to me after class in total frustration, and gave me a thorough piece of his mind, and a comprehensive picture of his frustration with the course, with me, and with life in general.
When he was through, I said, "Welcome to OD. You just broke through. Your intervention has been successful."
He looked at me his face red with emotions, breathing hard, not expecting my comment. For the longest time, he just stood there saying nothing, and I didn't interrupt his silence.
Finally, he picked up his books, and left. I never talked to him again the rest of the semester.
Then about two years later, I got a letter from him. "You won't believe this," he said, "but that session (with me) changed my life. It has been smooth sailing ever since."
And then he said the most important thing of all, something that I don't think many people today (sadly) ever reach, "I'm no longer a stranger to myself." I closed the letter and said to myself, "No, you're not."
Always be well,
Jim
==========
RESPONSE NO. 4:esponse 2:
Dear Jim:
Seems like you touched a nerve of someone who's sold on the status quo or is comfortable with the way things have been.
After watching the demise of Bear Sterns this weekend, I wonder how long we will be so kind to the folks who control our economy that has been leveraged with greed to the hilt. We are now seeing the "Perfect Storm" developing with 2 wars being waged with our kid's blood, sacrifice and money, housing bubble bursting, corporations shedding jobs, $5 gallon gas coming by summer, dollar trading at all time low, feds bailing out investments banks who made stupid investments in high risk mortgages, and so on.
We send our manufacturing jobs over seas and get back tainted toys, pharmaceuticals, that kill us and our kids and we are happy as a lark to let it continue to happen.
Keep up the great work Jim. Maybe someone will get mad enough to start doing something about it.
B
___________
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 4:
Were I never to have left Clinton, Iowa; had I never seen my Roman Catholic Church up close and personal; had I not worked for two major Fortune 200 corporations at the corporate executive level across the Americas and the Western world; had I not experienced education from the private Catholic grammar school, the public high school, or the land grant university, at every level from under graduate to a terminal Ph.D., had I not consulted private and public sector companies across these United States, had I not benefited from corporate entitlements, and had I not participated in the whimsical world of a stock portfolio investments, I would have no problem with Federal Reserve bailouts, but, unfortunately, I did leave Clinton, Iowa.
What is happening -- dare anyone say it -- capitalism is not an infallible institution and is vulnerable to the caprice of the wealth controllers. By the nature of its construction, it will always have excesses, and those that pay for the excesses will always be those least able to absorb the shock.
I am so glad that I was born poor, and able to watch how men like my da were treated during the Great Depression, indeed, how his family was treated when he died, and left no estate, and the railroad didn't want to give my mother the puny compensation she deserved.
Many people write to me and say such things, as, "I was poor, too, but didn't know it." Well, this boy had a sensitivity since he came out of the womb to note and remember ever slight, every innuendo, every imperious gesture that was directed at my parents, and to sublimate it into my art and thinking.
My problem, B, is that little people like us think those people like Bear Stern and other holders of real estate mortgages, and all those hedge fund operators are smarter than the common Joe, AND THEY ARE NOT! They are just more greedy, and they translate their greed into being astute guardians of our capitalistic system.
We have a financial system which is supported by Putin's Russia and Communist China, among others, and most major European nations, who hold our note. We are a debtor nation, and if each of us operated the way our government operates, we would all be in deep yogurt to say the least. We are conducting wars on borrowed money, and running our society on borrowed money, and if Russia, China and Europe, not to mention several other countries from South East Asia were to ask for their money NOW, the world would devolve into the greatest depression ever known to man. IT COULD HAPPEN! It is unlikely to happen, and here is the irony, because of GREED. Yes, greed, keeps these investors in the US of A not withdrawing their money, because it they did, they, too, would collapse.
We make high finance like it is some beyond our comprehension system that only experts can understand, monitor and appreciate, but boil it all down, and it is grade school arithmetic.
What is the answer? It is implicit in your response.
(1) DON'T DRIVE SO MUCH!
(2) RUN A CHEAP ECONOMICAL AUTOMOBILE.
(3) DON'T BUY WHAT YOU DON'T NEED!
(4) SAVE IN GOLD OR OTHER HIGH SECURITIES!
(5) BE YOUR OWN FEDERAL RESERVE!
(6) THE RICHEST PEOPLE ARE NOT THOSE WITH THE MOST MONEY, BUT WITH THE MOST SENSIBLE AND CONTROLLED TASTES.
(7) DON'T WORRY ABOUT SAVING THE WORLD.
(8) CONCENTRATE ON SAVING YOUR SELF, WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.
(9) DON'T READ 99.9 PERCENT OF ALL THE GARBAGE YOU GET IN THE MAIL TO BUY THIS OR THAT.
(10) START RECOGNIZING IF YOU ARE NOT A LEADER NO ONE IS.
(11) READ, READ, READ!
(12) DON'T READ WHAT OTHERS SAY YOU SHOULD READ, READ WHAT YOU LIKE, AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS THINK.
(13) WATCH LITTLE TELEVISION.
(14) REMEMBER, CELEBRITIES ARE BY DEFINITION NARCISSISTIC, AND THEREFORE SYMPTOMATIC OF OUR CULTURAL DISEASE, NOT ITS CURE.
(15) USE YOUR CELL PHONE FOR EMERGENCIES, NOT AS A PACIFIER.
(16) DON'T LET THE INTERNET BE THE MAIN SOURCE OF YOUR INFORMATION. (17) DON'T BELIEVE 99.9 PERCENT OF WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET OR BLOGS ON GROUPS OR RELIGIONS UNFAMILIAR TO YOU.
(18) FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, CULTURES AND RELIGIONS.
(19) REMEMBER, IN THE END, WE AS THE HUMAN RACE HAVE MUCH MORE IN COMMON WITH EVERYONE ELSE THAN WE HAVE DIFFERENCES.
(20) DON'T BELIEVE BECAUSE YOU HAVE THIS OR THAT DEGREE THAT YOU ARE EDUCATED.
(21) EDUCATION IS A FACTORY AND NOT A TOO EFFICIENT ONE.
(22) IN THE END AS IN THE BEGINNING, ALL YOU HAVE IS YOU.
(23) SO, IT IS ALL UP TO YOU!
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, March 16, 2008
WHILE AMERICA SLEPT, HER ADVANTAGE WAS STOLEN!
Cold Shower™
While America Slept
Her Advantage Was Stolen:
“Six Silent Killers” &
Other Indices Telegraphing Her Decline
No. 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2008
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial /organization psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern professional workers everywhere. His latest book captures the fixation of the times, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Question:
Dr. Fisher, you argued years ago that GATT and NAFTA were not the problem, that they were not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, that it was American leadership. Now, in your new book, you claim corporate leadership from government to industry has “missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.” You turn former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s words around to claim the “six silent killers” are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise along with American leadership stuck in the past. I’m familiar with the “six silent killers,” but I’m not convinced of your argument on GATT and NAFTA. Help me!
Dr. Fisher replies:
You will recall I’ve used the metaphor of “social termites” to describe the mass behavior of American workers. Termites destroy a home with no one the wiser, until too late for damage control. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working beyond our awareness.
We note with alarm the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse. So, now most workplaces are smoke free and workers have to submit to drug tests. These are positive steps of a recognized problem dealt with effectively.
Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and mental illness. These problems contribute to diminishing capacity to work productivity due to overeating, lack of exercise, and stress. These problems are visible and consequential but more difficult to deal with because healthful behavior cannot be enforced. Many firms have Employee Assistant Programs and volunteer exercise and diet programs as well, but this can have only limited success.
It doesn’t help that obesity, diabetes, heart trouble and mental illness are global workplace problems. China is now dealing with these health issues while experiencing sophisticated versions of the “six silent killers” through Chinese ingenuity.
In the current quadrennial madness of election politics 2008, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have resurfaced, and once again, are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad.
Two formerly powerful manufacturing states of Michigan and Ohio have loss nearly a half million high paying manufacturing jobs to this mass industrial exodus to Asia. This problem can be broken down into three parts: (1) the changes in the last forty years; (2) the missed opportunities; and (3) staying the same.
(1) CHANGES
The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine jumped started European recovery after WWII.
In the Far East, especially Japan, General Douglas MacArthur’s leadership turned Japan and the Japanese people into a modern productive industrial nation. He led the way towards its rapid industrial and technological development.
American management scholars such as W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker provided the quality management strategy, acclimating their designs to the group conscious Japanese culture. The gestation period was not long. WWII ended in 1945, by the early 1970s, Japan, Inc. was making inroads into cherished American industries such as automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, radios and televisions.
In 1980, as if awaken from a dream, Tom Brokaw of NBCTV anchored an hour long program titled, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” The program focused on the amazing quality of Japanese products and how workers in what were called “quality circles,” solved jointly work related problems. It was an old idea similar to the pre-industrial European guilds wrapped in a new culture.
Indonesia and India followed Japan’s lead, and soon there appeared not only a mad dash to buy products from the Far East, but a hysterical drive in the USA to replicate the Japanese success formula without a second thought. Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), and Six Silent Killers (1998) deal with the mounting nature of this problem, and the insane and counterproductive USA response.
Briefly, there were compelling differences between the USA and Japanese culture in the 1990s, noted here, which are even more pronounced today:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented, group think society; the USA is an individualistically oriented and creative society.
(2) Only 15 percent of Japanese major industry has a thousand employees or more compared to 50 percent of USA major industry.
(3) Nearly 90 percent of Japanese workers are blue collar, while less than 25 percent of USA workers are.
(4) Close to 100 percent of major Japanese industries have plants and equipment less than 25 years old; nearly 80 percent of major USA industries have plants and equipment well over 50 years old.
(5) Senior management in major Japanese industry is slim but very powerful with only four levels and a common informal link between workers and top management. Major USA management in industry is top heavy with ten to twelve levels of management with a sharp formal demarcation between managers and workers at all levels, distinguished by perks.
(6) Japanese top management earns 10 – 20 times as much as the line worker; USA top management earn from 500 – 1000 times as much as the line worker.
(7) Senior management delegated the problem of quality and productivity to human resources (HR) management. I have described HR as management’s union, telling it what it wants to hear, and making cosmetic interventions that don’t upset the pay structure, the formality, or the organization status quo.
(8) Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Employee Involvement (TEI), Quality of Work (QW), Participative Management (PM), Lifetime Employment (LE), Empowering Programs (EP), Quality of Work Life (QWL), and Quality of Management (QW) have produced interesting acronyms. They have not produced positive change. Instead, they have resulted in typical major USA industry going from a culture of comfort (management dependent) to a culture of complacency (workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being). These programs missed the intended target, the culture of contribution (manager-worker interdependence).
(9) HR’s disastrous history has failed to be highlighted. The reason is obvious. Senior management delegated blindly and thus spawned the “six silent killers,” which has crippled major USA industry. American business and industry could not stand the hit. It was already handicapped with a workforce and culture out-of-step and out-of-date with an emerging industrial world from the devastation of World War II. By 1945, USA plants and equipment were obsolete, while the rest of world was building from scratch. USA workers in 1945 had the best skills and management the most astute practices in the world, but it stayed the same.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family. Real income of American workers has been diminishing at a frightening pace from the 1950s to the present or 2008.
American workers instead of improving their skills to enhance the chances to higher paying jobs by becoming students of changing technology, got second jobs of similar or lower demanding skills, and put their partners to work. By this short-term strategy, the pain of diminishing purchasing power was put to rest.
Similarly, when a plethora of studies indicated American schools were slipping precipitously in basic skills of math and science, reading and language, against other advanced societies of the world, parents put the weight of the problem on educators.
This changed the whole dynamic of the family.
Parents spent most of their time working so the family infrequently sat down to a shared meal; infrequently were involved in joint social activities; and infrequently found parents giving guidance and direction to their children.
Children became their own parents.
The school became a combat zone in which discipline and punctuality got more attention than the curriculum as teachers had little energy left after attempting to keep order.
Junk food and empty calories became the diet of children leading to attention deficit and disruptive disorders for many, and leading in turn to a regiment of Ritalin related products, masking but not dealing with the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the quality and effectiveness of work continued to deteriorate in the workplace against an emerging more competitive world. It called for insightful and authentic leadership.
What major USA industry got instead was a new regiment of bean counters with MBAs.
MBAs and HRs are the bookends to the magnificent shrinkage of USA’s industrial and manufacturing might.
Whereas HR became management’s union, protecting its status quo while ensuring its atavistic construction and anachronistic practices, the MBA took up where Frederick Winslow Taylor left off, treating workers as disposable “things” to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and motivated by bribing them with money and benefits to be more productive. It didn’t work. Workers only got more adolescent and less productive.
MBAs engineered the entitlement programs, the liberal medical and sick leave policies, along with generous vacation schedules, having few qualms as entitlements approached the trillions in dollars and flirted with the national debt.
Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world.
The consequence of this inept action can be expressed in two words, “leaderless leadership.” Because of this we are becoming a second rate nation, while continuing the hubristic belief that all our problems can be solved with money.
If that were the case, we would have the best secondary school test scores instead of the near the worst across the board against other advanced nations of the world.
If that were the case, we would have the highest productivity rates in the world as American workers remain the highest paid while China, India and South East Asia are among the lowest paid.
We have the most technological advanced universities in the world with the most gifted and competent staffs to teach, conduct research and development, and create cutting edge technology; the only problem is that most of the students in these advanced curriculums are foreign exchange students.
We love our cell phones, BlackBerries, labtops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders, most likely made somewhere else. We also love our big cars and our fancy homes, our indulgent lifestyles, our obsessive celebrity tracking, and appetite for fantasy films. We don’t like to study if it doesn’t translate into big bucks, or heady dreams, or Hugh Hefner viagara experiences.
STAYING THE SAME
We have currently a presidential campaign between senators Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. It is the first time an African American or a woman has vied at this late stage for that position.
This is new, and this is good. Obama has painted himself the candidate for change, while Clinton has painted herself as the candidate for experience. This is not new. This is the old wrapped in the new with the same mothball scent.
Indeed, there is absolutely not one new idea, or morsel of thinking beyond the obvious in the campaign of either candidate, and that is sad.
These candidates epitomize the nature of the Sisyphus Mountain that has become the construct to our declining society and perhaps our true destiny.
We want these candidates to offend no one, please everyone, promise everything, and tell us what great minds we have, how wonderful we are, when chances are we don’t think at all, and could do better for ourselves if we weren’t so robotic.
These candidates flatter us by painting wants in dreamlike needs meant to capture our attention and impulse to vote, and of course for them. It is a popularity contest in which leadership is not even part of the exercise. Leadership is action, not words; results, not promises.
What we see, and it has always been so, is process and the process is fueled by the hysteria, and we know what hysteria gives us: polls! The pundits and television anchors are obsessed with delegate count. What has that to do with leadership, or problem solving? It demonstrates once again our reduction of people to poll percentages and things.
We are stuck. We have not left the 1970s. We insist in staying the same. We cannot even escape repeating the same problems, dotting the same “i’s” and crossing the same “t’s” with the same social penmanship, only the faces have changed.
(1) In 1970s we had the Viet Nam War; now we have the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq, with the same crushing unpopularity, the same endless debilitating costs with no light at the end of the tunnel. We do not learn from our failures, but insist on repeating them. We do not understand the world of which we are only a small part;
(2) In the 1970s, political corruption was in the air; first there was Watergate, then regime change from Nixon to Ford to Carter with Iran Hostage Crisis, OPEC Embargo, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Then as now, we have the distraction of an endless parade of leadership sex scandals: Clinton, Packwood, Frank, Hart, Vitter, Craig, Foley, McGreevey, down to Spitzer. People who were supposed lead us and couldn’t even lead themselves. Drugs were running wild in the 1970s. We declared “War on Drugs,” with the same impotency of our success in shooting wars. We had a paranoid president in the 1970s, and a paranoid president now. The 1970s were called the “age of anxiety,” and now we use the same term to describe this age. New forms of hatred and bigotry were hatching then, and hatching again now. We wrenched our hands at the decline of the automotive industry then; we wrench our hands now with it on life supports. We looked to science to solve the problems of our self-indulgent lifestyle then; we look to science to solve the same problems now. They are no different, only more pronounced. We were addicted to optimism in the midst of our crises in the 1970s. Carter told the truth and said we had a “crisis in confidence,” and he was nearly tarred and feathered. We don’t like to be reminded of how we are, only how we like to think ourselves to be. We are a crisis-managed society. We don’t anticipate our problems. We wait until they become crises, then we attempt to solve them with the thinking that caused them. Or we choose to totally ignore our problems and turn our attention to solvable ones. So, the more things change the more they don’t.
(3) We set up our leaders to be more than human and when they operate with reckless abandon, we treat them less than human.
Staying the same is a chronic cultural neurosis that has not left us. If anything, over time, it is more intense. The material-technological hard wiring in our brains has become part of our natural spontaneity for gadgetry and escape, and likewise, our appetite for rhetoric and good presentation skills.
We have allowed ourselves to be swallowed up in culturally consistent patterns and perceptions that no longer serve us, but have allowed them to become such a part of us that they are no longer recognized.
Time magazine (March 24, 2008) titles its featured piece, “Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.” Reading them you realize Time has no more clue than the average Joe. There is not one word on a changing Africa, a lot about the environment, the economy and technology, even a bit about religion, all consistent with the evasive strategy of counting Democratic delegates, as America remains fast asleep.
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com
While America Slept
Her Advantage Was Stolen:
“Six Silent Killers” &
Other Indices Telegraphing Her Decline
No. 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2008
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial /organization psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern professional workers everywhere. His latest book captures the fixation of the times, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Question:
Dr. Fisher, you argued years ago that GATT and NAFTA were not the problem, that they were not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, that it was American leadership. Now, in your new book, you claim corporate leadership from government to industry has “missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.” You turn former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s words around to claim the “six silent killers” are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise along with American leadership stuck in the past. I’m familiar with the “six silent killers,” but I’m not convinced of your argument on GATT and NAFTA. Help me!
Dr. Fisher replies:
You will recall I’ve used the metaphor of “social termites” to describe the mass behavior of American workers. Termites destroy a home with no one the wiser, until too late for damage control. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working beyond our awareness.
We note with alarm the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse. So, now most workplaces are smoke free and workers have to submit to drug tests. These are positive steps of a recognized problem dealt with effectively.
Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and mental illness. These problems contribute to diminishing capacity to work productivity due to overeating, lack of exercise, and stress. These problems are visible and consequential but more difficult to deal with because healthful behavior cannot be enforced. Many firms have Employee Assistant Programs and volunteer exercise and diet programs as well, but this can have only limited success.
It doesn’t help that obesity, diabetes, heart trouble and mental illness are global workplace problems. China is now dealing with these health issues while experiencing sophisticated versions of the “six silent killers” through Chinese ingenuity.
In the current quadrennial madness of election politics 2008, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have resurfaced, and once again, are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad.
Two formerly powerful manufacturing states of Michigan and Ohio have loss nearly a half million high paying manufacturing jobs to this mass industrial exodus to Asia. This problem can be broken down into three parts: (1) the changes in the last forty years; (2) the missed opportunities; and (3) staying the same.
(1) CHANGES
The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine jumped started European recovery after WWII.
In the Far East, especially Japan, General Douglas MacArthur’s leadership turned Japan and the Japanese people into a modern productive industrial nation. He led the way towards its rapid industrial and technological development.
American management scholars such as W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker provided the quality management strategy, acclimating their designs to the group conscious Japanese culture. The gestation period was not long. WWII ended in 1945, by the early 1970s, Japan, Inc. was making inroads into cherished American industries such as automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, radios and televisions.
In 1980, as if awaken from a dream, Tom Brokaw of NBCTV anchored an hour long program titled, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” The program focused on the amazing quality of Japanese products and how workers in what were called “quality circles,” solved jointly work related problems. It was an old idea similar to the pre-industrial European guilds wrapped in a new culture.
Indonesia and India followed Japan’s lead, and soon there appeared not only a mad dash to buy products from the Far East, but a hysterical drive in the USA to replicate the Japanese success formula without a second thought. Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), and Six Silent Killers (1998) deal with the mounting nature of this problem, and the insane and counterproductive USA response.
Briefly, there were compelling differences between the USA and Japanese culture in the 1990s, noted here, which are even more pronounced today:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented, group think society; the USA is an individualistically oriented and creative society.
(2) Only 15 percent of Japanese major industry has a thousand employees or more compared to 50 percent of USA major industry.
(3) Nearly 90 percent of Japanese workers are blue collar, while less than 25 percent of USA workers are.
(4) Close to 100 percent of major Japanese industries have plants and equipment less than 25 years old; nearly 80 percent of major USA industries have plants and equipment well over 50 years old.
(5) Senior management in major Japanese industry is slim but very powerful with only four levels and a common informal link between workers and top management. Major USA management in industry is top heavy with ten to twelve levels of management with a sharp formal demarcation between managers and workers at all levels, distinguished by perks.
(6) Japanese top management earns 10 – 20 times as much as the line worker; USA top management earn from 500 – 1000 times as much as the line worker.
(7) Senior management delegated the problem of quality and productivity to human resources (HR) management. I have described HR as management’s union, telling it what it wants to hear, and making cosmetic interventions that don’t upset the pay structure, the formality, or the organization status quo.
(8) Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Employee Involvement (TEI), Quality of Work (QW), Participative Management (PM), Lifetime Employment (LE), Empowering Programs (EP), Quality of Work Life (QWL), and Quality of Management (QW) have produced interesting acronyms. They have not produced positive change. Instead, they have resulted in typical major USA industry going from a culture of comfort (management dependent) to a culture of complacency (workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being). These programs missed the intended target, the culture of contribution (manager-worker interdependence).
(9) HR’s disastrous history has failed to be highlighted. The reason is obvious. Senior management delegated blindly and thus spawned the “six silent killers,” which has crippled major USA industry. American business and industry could not stand the hit. It was already handicapped with a workforce and culture out-of-step and out-of-date with an emerging industrial world from the devastation of World War II. By 1945, USA plants and equipment were obsolete, while the rest of world was building from scratch. USA workers in 1945 had the best skills and management the most astute practices in the world, but it stayed the same.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family. Real income of American workers has been diminishing at a frightening pace from the 1950s to the present or 2008.
American workers instead of improving their skills to enhance the chances to higher paying jobs by becoming students of changing technology, got second jobs of similar or lower demanding skills, and put their partners to work. By this short-term strategy, the pain of diminishing purchasing power was put to rest.
Similarly, when a plethora of studies indicated American schools were slipping precipitously in basic skills of math and science, reading and language, against other advanced societies of the world, parents put the weight of the problem on educators.
This changed the whole dynamic of the family.
Parents spent most of their time working so the family infrequently sat down to a shared meal; infrequently were involved in joint social activities; and infrequently found parents giving guidance and direction to their children.
Children became their own parents.
The school became a combat zone in which discipline and punctuality got more attention than the curriculum as teachers had little energy left after attempting to keep order.
Junk food and empty calories became the diet of children leading to attention deficit and disruptive disorders for many, and leading in turn to a regiment of Ritalin related products, masking but not dealing with the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the quality and effectiveness of work continued to deteriorate in the workplace against an emerging more competitive world. It called for insightful and authentic leadership.
What major USA industry got instead was a new regiment of bean counters with MBAs.
MBAs and HRs are the bookends to the magnificent shrinkage of USA’s industrial and manufacturing might.
Whereas HR became management’s union, protecting its status quo while ensuring its atavistic construction and anachronistic practices, the MBA took up where Frederick Winslow Taylor left off, treating workers as disposable “things” to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and motivated by bribing them with money and benefits to be more productive. It didn’t work. Workers only got more adolescent and less productive.
MBAs engineered the entitlement programs, the liberal medical and sick leave policies, along with generous vacation schedules, having few qualms as entitlements approached the trillions in dollars and flirted with the national debt.
Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world.
The consequence of this inept action can be expressed in two words, “leaderless leadership.” Because of this we are becoming a second rate nation, while continuing the hubristic belief that all our problems can be solved with money.
If that were the case, we would have the best secondary school test scores instead of the near the worst across the board against other advanced nations of the world.
If that were the case, we would have the highest productivity rates in the world as American workers remain the highest paid while China, India and South East Asia are among the lowest paid.
We have the most technological advanced universities in the world with the most gifted and competent staffs to teach, conduct research and development, and create cutting edge technology; the only problem is that most of the students in these advanced curriculums are foreign exchange students.
We love our cell phones, BlackBerries, labtops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders, most likely made somewhere else. We also love our big cars and our fancy homes, our indulgent lifestyles, our obsessive celebrity tracking, and appetite for fantasy films. We don’t like to study if it doesn’t translate into big bucks, or heady dreams, or Hugh Hefner viagara experiences.
STAYING THE SAME
We have currently a presidential campaign between senators Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. It is the first time an African American or a woman has vied at this late stage for that position.
This is new, and this is good. Obama has painted himself the candidate for change, while Clinton has painted herself as the candidate for experience. This is not new. This is the old wrapped in the new with the same mothball scent.
Indeed, there is absolutely not one new idea, or morsel of thinking beyond the obvious in the campaign of either candidate, and that is sad.
These candidates epitomize the nature of the Sisyphus Mountain that has become the construct to our declining society and perhaps our true destiny.
We want these candidates to offend no one, please everyone, promise everything, and tell us what great minds we have, how wonderful we are, when chances are we don’t think at all, and could do better for ourselves if we weren’t so robotic.
These candidates flatter us by painting wants in dreamlike needs meant to capture our attention and impulse to vote, and of course for them. It is a popularity contest in which leadership is not even part of the exercise. Leadership is action, not words; results, not promises.
What we see, and it has always been so, is process and the process is fueled by the hysteria, and we know what hysteria gives us: polls! The pundits and television anchors are obsessed with delegate count. What has that to do with leadership, or problem solving? It demonstrates once again our reduction of people to poll percentages and things.
We are stuck. We have not left the 1970s. We insist in staying the same. We cannot even escape repeating the same problems, dotting the same “i’s” and crossing the same “t’s” with the same social penmanship, only the faces have changed.
(1) In 1970s we had the Viet Nam War; now we have the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq, with the same crushing unpopularity, the same endless debilitating costs with no light at the end of the tunnel. We do not learn from our failures, but insist on repeating them. We do not understand the world of which we are only a small part;
(2) In the 1970s, political corruption was in the air; first there was Watergate, then regime change from Nixon to Ford to Carter with Iran Hostage Crisis, OPEC Embargo, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Then as now, we have the distraction of an endless parade of leadership sex scandals: Clinton, Packwood, Frank, Hart, Vitter, Craig, Foley, McGreevey, down to Spitzer. People who were supposed lead us and couldn’t even lead themselves. Drugs were running wild in the 1970s. We declared “War on Drugs,” with the same impotency of our success in shooting wars. We had a paranoid president in the 1970s, and a paranoid president now. The 1970s were called the “age of anxiety,” and now we use the same term to describe this age. New forms of hatred and bigotry were hatching then, and hatching again now. We wrenched our hands at the decline of the automotive industry then; we wrench our hands now with it on life supports. We looked to science to solve the problems of our self-indulgent lifestyle then; we look to science to solve the same problems now. They are no different, only more pronounced. We were addicted to optimism in the midst of our crises in the 1970s. Carter told the truth and said we had a “crisis in confidence,” and he was nearly tarred and feathered. We don’t like to be reminded of how we are, only how we like to think ourselves to be. We are a crisis-managed society. We don’t anticipate our problems. We wait until they become crises, then we attempt to solve them with the thinking that caused them. Or we choose to totally ignore our problems and turn our attention to solvable ones. So, the more things change the more they don’t.
(3) We set up our leaders to be more than human and when they operate with reckless abandon, we treat them less than human.
Staying the same is a chronic cultural neurosis that has not left us. If anything, over time, it is more intense. The material-technological hard wiring in our brains has become part of our natural spontaneity for gadgetry and escape, and likewise, our appetite for rhetoric and good presentation skills.
We have allowed ourselves to be swallowed up in culturally consistent patterns and perceptions that no longer serve us, but have allowed them to become such a part of us that they are no longer recognized.
Time magazine (March 24, 2008) titles its featured piece, “Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.” Reading them you realize Time has no more clue than the average Joe. There is not one word on a changing Africa, a lot about the environment, the economy and technology, even a bit about religion, all consistent with the evasive strategy of counting Democratic delegates, as America remains fast asleep.
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Reaction to COLD SHOWER No.1
REACTION TO "COLD SHOWER" No. 1
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
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