A RESPONSE TO "HARD LESSONS OF OD NEVER LEARNED!"

A RESPONSE TO “HARD LESSONS OF OD”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 29, 2008

A WRITER WRITES:

These are some good thoughts. But sometimes I wonder if contemplating a scene (he sends a photo of beautiful flowers) is more humanizing. I have a friend who did his best to humanize GM as an international rep for the UAW - and who retrained a lot of GM OD and other OD folks, but for naught.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

The photo is relaxing and understandable, as we prefer to take our attention away from rather than towards our problems. Nature may prove humanizing but OD is more pragmatic than using escape to make its point.

It has been my life’s work to draw attention to the ugly smell in the room caused by adults wetting the bed, not potty trained, or restrained in any way, while resorting to tantrums when their needs are not met. This has been a case of unintended consequences. It has evolved with steady consistency over the decades driving our American culture into placidity and inevitable decline. We have answers for all this most of which we blame on foreigners who will work for so little while staying in school so long to acquire skills we have no time or interest to pursue.

Darwin with a small "d" has shadowed us all my life.

You mention UAW and GM.

GM historically was a collection of tool & die guilds right out of the 19th century that formed into "General Motors." These tool & die makers set up their own machines, made arrangements to have them repaired, bought replacement parts, and, indeed, purchased their own supplies necessary to run the machines.

In short, these workers had control of what they did. When GM first commenced to coalesce into a "corporation," worker control was still a fact of operating life.

It was the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, and such companies as GM were putting the screws to workers, even hiring gangs to put them into line. The so-called famous "Robber Barons" were not a very ethical group.

Enter the union movement in a big way. Unions never quite gained purchase in the 19th and early 20th century. We all know about the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) legendary Walter Ruether. His rise to power and prominence was after the cataclysm of WWI. What Ruether did, and what all the other labor unions did as well was:

(1) Construct the UAW business model after that of the emerging business model of GM;

(2) Use the strike to force GM to negotiate concessions; and

(3) Sue for wage and benefit concessions, as well as more improved working conditions and labor relation policies.

This all sounds well and good, so proper, but it is OD deficient because of one looming, implicit and irrevocable change. OD would have noted this, and made clear to UAW and GM management alike that it was throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The implicit concession was workers gave up control of work to management for wage and benefits. UAW would continue to do this throughout the 19540s into the twenty-first century without interruption or the slightest of departures from the draconian practice.

This is precisely what company management wanted.

The dance between GM and UAW was entertaining until 1968, when the game they were playing was taken away from them by Japan, South East Asia, and increasingly, by Europe.

Even so, GM and UAW didn’t tarry from their two-step wage-benefit routine, as if the world would eventually change to accommodate Detroit, there was no way Detroit was going to accommodate the world.

The wake-up call of Tom Brokaw in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We” on NBCTV only drove GM to cosmetic change engineered by human resources management. No power was gained by workers, but a new vocabulary introduced: such expressions as “participative management” and “empowerment” and “work centered management,” and so on. Words, only words! It was a con game and nothing happened in American until GM did something. Remember that arrogance?

Then someone in the leaderless leadership decided that the problem was GM and other companies weren’t generous enough. The thinking went something like this: give workers more money, more perks and they will show their gratitude by being more productive. WRONG!

It was with such thinking that the workplace has slipped from any notion of contribution to comfort and finally to a culture of complacency. I’ve written several books on this nosedive without so much as a modest blip on the American business conscience.

That said we see this descent (contribution-comfort-complacency) at all levels of work with one exception, which is mentioned in the piece you reference, and that is the electronics industry. Operationally, the high tech industry has retrogressed back to a guild-like determination, knowing full well that creativity is a function of a sense of individual initiative and control and is best generated in chaotic conditions where conflict is a norm, and confrontation is managed. No one is pyramid climbing or campaigning for the next job; everyone is trying to come up with the next electronic iteration of the industry. Brains are on fire!

Unfortunately, for workers in most other enterprises we killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and I've written (as have others) about this extensively.

We have never found our way back to enterprise and have come to accept (or is the word concede) that (as Time mentions in its July 7, 2008 issue, "service is our strength") we are no longer a maker of things. We have accepted that “have a happy day” is our mantra, always said with a smile because we are no longer in charge of anything leastwise ourselves.

I write in SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998):

"The dramatic change in work was primarily caused by leisure, not work. Before the twentieth century, there was little leisure for most Americans. Work and struggle were all the average family experienced. After WWII, when leisure became legitimate aspect of working life, the majority of workers didn't know how to handle it.

"This was dramatically illustrated by the late 1960s with the furlough program of Bethlehem Steel and Alcoa. A 13-week furlough program was inaugurated for veteran steel workers who already enjoyed practically every benefit and financial concession imaginable. These veteran steelworkers were given an additional 13 weeks of paid vacation every five years. The furlough was designed to administer manpower requirements more effectively, and to give workers the opportunity to pursue self-enhancement interests...Most furloughed workers got second jobs, and enjoyed the benefit of double incomes. When they returned to work, they complained they couldn't live on the status of a single income, and became petulant as children, many dogging it. The program completely backfired and demonstrated the true maturity of the workforce." (Six Silent Killers, pp. 89 - 90)

I wrote in another book (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend Delta Group 1996):

"To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true for ourselves."

We have created this monster, the American worker, flabby, self-pitying, looking for what he can get, not give, and permanently suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset and maturity of a twelve-year-old dependent child.

It started in the 1930s, given a respite during WWII, and came to total true fruition by 1968. We have a spoiled brat constituency, and you need look no further than what the two presidential candidates are saying, “It is not any of our faults.” Both candidates want to get elected, and so we will be asked to sacrifice nothing, to change no behavior, but to look for government to suckle us at her breast and calm our anxiety. Whoever is elected, it seems certain that the maturity of our collective psyches will continue to blame the world for America’s decline.

OD could have had a role in this but hasn't and didn't because human resources management came into the void, a discipline that can never say "no" to management, a discipline that has a "pleaser" mentality, and a discipline that echoes the management mantra of treating people like things to be managed, not people to guide through the necessary pain and struggle and chaos that is the road to purposeful performance.

JRF