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