BOOK REVIEW of National Book Award (1969) novel of STEPS by Jerzy Kosinski
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 31, 2008
Reference: Amazon.com requested that I submit a review of this novel for their website. It follows.
My agent, Ned Hamson, knowing I was writing an unconventional novel of my experience in South Africa as a young American executive (GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) during apartheid, suggested I read STEPS.
Kosinski and I were born in the same year at opposite ends of the bloody Second World War. He never had time for innocence while I was an American boy held safely in her bosom in Middle America. All that was shattered for me when I went to South Africa as a young executive to form a new chemical company in 1968, the year before Kosinski won the National Book Award for STEPS.
I not only read this novel and his other works of fiction, but also James Park Sloan's biography, JERZY KOSINSKI.
STEPS and other Kosinski fiction demonstrate a mind that has been shattered by people he admires and people he finds out to be both brutal and brutish. THE PAINTED BIRD is an unexpurgated version of reality as a bookend to Alan Paton's TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE. Both authors deal with the inhumanity of man to man, but Kosinski chooses to walk the tightrope of despair and psychosexual fantasy.
Kosinski and I are both trained social scientists and published authors in that discipline. He went to one of the most prestigious universities in the country (Columbia) and had difficulty with his faculty advisers and never acquired his Ph.D. I had similar problems only I found my way from land grant institutions (Iowa, and University of South Florida) to safe haven in the university system of the future, writing my dissertation and defense for Walden University, a fully accredited university but not yet prestigious in the same sense as the Ivy League.
STEPS is a triumph of mind over matter and soul over eternity, a book that will stay with you the way Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO does which was written for an earlier generation. Kosinski saw life naked, undisguised, and as Joseph Campbell might add, a time that never rose above its sexual organs or its lust for power and pleasure.
STEPS is concise, anecdotal and experimental the way James Joyce’s ULYSSES was. The anecdotes are connected by style, mood, and tone that bite the psyche as if it had teeth. You know the work is art because the fragments hold together like an illuminating collage.
STEPS shows an intensely grim world characterized by brutality, exploitation, and calloused indifference. The impact is like a nightmare where violence breeds only more violence, and the protagonist is lost in the maze of emotion with no way out.
Many of the incidents in STEPS depict sexual exploitation. It is the predator-prey dance where the narrator exploits a woman, but he himself becomes the victim. In one instance, the narrator, an archeological student stranded without money on an island, collapses from hunger. Two fat old women feed him and then assault him sexually.
Among the scenes of perversion, many include accounts of sexual pleasure being derived from inflicting or witnessing pain. Sociological studies of Theodore Adorno (Authoritarian Personality) and Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) come to mind to confirm Kosinski’s thesis.
STEPS captures the whirling dervish of postmodern society with no leavening with virtue. Most of the episodes present actions of lust, greed, brutality, and corruption without mitigating circumstances, a little like watching the nightly news on television.
STEPS could be viewed as a series of “dirty” anecdotes. The reality it portrays is the vicious and perverted side of life debased from human nature.
STEPS suggest narcissistic disassociation of a single person, or perhaps a series of people. That is the subtle strength of its fragmentation and a narrator who is never identified, leaving open the possibility that different narrators are functioning in the various episodes. In any case, regardless of the reader’s reaction, the concrete style and raw intensity of the actions are not likely to be quickly dismissed from the mind of the reader.
To give you a sense of the fickle nature of publishing, 21-pages of STEPS was sent to its original publisher and several others six years after it had won the National Book Award. All turned it down. In 1981, the entire text of STEPS was sent to several literary agents and was turned down again by everyone. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991 at the age of 57, hounded by detractors, none of whom recognized his genius. If you are a writer, take note and persist.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
LETTER TO FLORIDA GOV. CHARLIE CRIST -- REF. BOB BUTTERWORTH, QUINTESSENTIAL LEADER
Governor Charlie Crist
State of Florida
Tallahassee, Florida
Reference: Bob Butterworth, Quintessential Leader
Dear Governor Crist,
More than thirty years ago, I met Bob Butterworth. He was in his mid-twenties and I in my mid-thirties; he an adjunct professor teaching a graduate course in criminal justice for Nova University and I regional coordinator for that university while pursuing a Ph.D. in social-industrial psychology at USF. The seminars were held at the University of Tampa.
His career was just getting underway, while I was a recent corporate executive drop out after forming a new company in South Africa for my employer, Nalco Chemical Company. South African apartheid gave me pause.
The 1970s was the only time we met, but we connected. We have exchanged letters but I’ve observed his career basically from afar. I sensed even then that he was special. You could tell he had social bearing and quiet competence. It was evident as his students; veteran police officers, attorneys, and aspiring criminal justice careerists paid him the compliment of complete attention to the tasks at hand.
Bob knew I was interested in writing, having had one book published (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970), primarily on the subject of leadership. I had witnessed an absence of leadership in my work for Nalco in Europe, South America, South Africa, and the United States, as a chemical sales engineer, field manager and finally corporate executive trouble shooting across the globe becoming increasingly intrigued with the subject.
Not unlike Dionysus seeking an honest man, I was looking for leadership when I saw it personified in Bob Butterworth, first in those seminars, and then confirmed in his long career. How, you might ask?
He knew his subject but not his students. He had just met them. From the beginning, he took risks with them with an openness and confidence that displayed an ability to adjust to their needs, not his own. He embraced possible failure and therefore soared over it.
From the beginning, there was little separation between the mission and the means that might differentiate him from them, or them from him. He was unique.
You know this because you convinced him to head the Department of Children & Families (DCF) when the function was in shambles. He approached that challenge directly and empathetically as he did those first seminars. He created a structure and culture that restored order upon which others might build. Now, he is stepping down after his 18-month tenure at the age of 65 with a daughter readying herself for college, and relishing his involvement in that selection.
What is special about his leadership?
He is a student of what he does. He prepares himself by not only understanding the problem but the people involved. He is a people person. He doesn’t approach a situation with preconceived notions but is a listener, not a teller. I saw that demonstrated again and again. He is first fully on board before he enlists others to join him. That is important. With leadership, there is little separation between the thinker and doer; the teacher and student; the director and representative. They form a common bond in message and mission. Stated otherwise, Bob is the complete follower and quintessential leader rolled into one. Who can resist that combination?
The best way to communicate your message is in action that is consistent, firm, fair and unwavering. Bob was in charge without being in charge, which was part of his appeal. His “Two Sense Strategy” with DCF employees to act with urgency and common sense is consistent with this legacy.
At another level, Bob was comfortable with total transparency by openly answering questions of status and career possibilities. The professor-student bond was a dialogue with little differentiation between the two. When leadership is transparent, feedback is genuine, and confusion is minimal with ample opportunity for meaningful exchange.
Bob didn’t have a weighty syllabus but planned comprehensively. He left ample wiggle room to maximize opportunity for surprise. He didn’t prefigure outcomes but took on the thorny problems of process.
Leadership is the vision to see and the ability to serve. As you know only too well, Bob Butterworth has demonstrated this as a prosecutor, attorney general, sheriff, mayor, judge, head of the Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, adjunct professor of Nova University, dean of the St. Thomas University Law School, and head of the Department of Children & Families.
While doing these things, he has been quiet about his accomplishments. His most visible role was when as one of the attorneys general of the United States, he and his colleagues successfully sued the tobacco companies for damages to lifelong smokers suffering with emphysema. I wish him well.
Sincerely,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 – 2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 – 3631, Cell phone: (813) 990 – 7472
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
State of Florida
Tallahassee, Florida
Reference: Bob Butterworth, Quintessential Leader
Dear Governor Crist,
More than thirty years ago, I met Bob Butterworth. He was in his mid-twenties and I in my mid-thirties; he an adjunct professor teaching a graduate course in criminal justice for Nova University and I regional coordinator for that university while pursuing a Ph.D. in social-industrial psychology at USF. The seminars were held at the University of Tampa.
His career was just getting underway, while I was a recent corporate executive drop out after forming a new company in South Africa for my employer, Nalco Chemical Company. South African apartheid gave me pause.
The 1970s was the only time we met, but we connected. We have exchanged letters but I’ve observed his career basically from afar. I sensed even then that he was special. You could tell he had social bearing and quiet competence. It was evident as his students; veteran police officers, attorneys, and aspiring criminal justice careerists paid him the compliment of complete attention to the tasks at hand.
Bob knew I was interested in writing, having had one book published (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970), primarily on the subject of leadership. I had witnessed an absence of leadership in my work for Nalco in Europe, South America, South Africa, and the United States, as a chemical sales engineer, field manager and finally corporate executive trouble shooting across the globe becoming increasingly intrigued with the subject.
Not unlike Dionysus seeking an honest man, I was looking for leadership when I saw it personified in Bob Butterworth, first in those seminars, and then confirmed in his long career. How, you might ask?
He knew his subject but not his students. He had just met them. From the beginning, he took risks with them with an openness and confidence that displayed an ability to adjust to their needs, not his own. He embraced possible failure and therefore soared over it.
From the beginning, there was little separation between the mission and the means that might differentiate him from them, or them from him. He was unique.
You know this because you convinced him to head the Department of Children & Families (DCF) when the function was in shambles. He approached that challenge directly and empathetically as he did those first seminars. He created a structure and culture that restored order upon which others might build. Now, he is stepping down after his 18-month tenure at the age of 65 with a daughter readying herself for college, and relishing his involvement in that selection.
What is special about his leadership?
He is a student of what he does. He prepares himself by not only understanding the problem but the people involved. He is a people person. He doesn’t approach a situation with preconceived notions but is a listener, not a teller. I saw that demonstrated again and again. He is first fully on board before he enlists others to join him. That is important. With leadership, there is little separation between the thinker and doer; the teacher and student; the director and representative. They form a common bond in message and mission. Stated otherwise, Bob is the complete follower and quintessential leader rolled into one. Who can resist that combination?
The best way to communicate your message is in action that is consistent, firm, fair and unwavering. Bob was in charge without being in charge, which was part of his appeal. His “Two Sense Strategy” with DCF employees to act with urgency and common sense is consistent with this legacy.
At another level, Bob was comfortable with total transparency by openly answering questions of status and career possibilities. The professor-student bond was a dialogue with little differentiation between the two. When leadership is transparent, feedback is genuine, and confusion is minimal with ample opportunity for meaningful exchange.
Bob didn’t have a weighty syllabus but planned comprehensively. He left ample wiggle room to maximize opportunity for surprise. He didn’t prefigure outcomes but took on the thorny problems of process.
Leadership is the vision to see and the ability to serve. As you know only too well, Bob Butterworth has demonstrated this as a prosecutor, attorney general, sheriff, mayor, judge, head of the Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, adjunct professor of Nova University, dean of the St. Thomas University Law School, and head of the Department of Children & Families.
While doing these things, he has been quiet about his accomplishments. His most visible role was when as one of the attorneys general of the United States, he and his colleagues successfully sued the tobacco companies for damages to lifelong smokers suffering with emphysema. I wish him well.
Sincerely,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 – 2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 – 3631, Cell phone: (813) 990 – 7472
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
Monday, July 28, 2008
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2008
“No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland.
A WRITER WRITES:
Over four years ago you emailed this to us. It seems to be a deeper exploration of the victimology concept you described recently, but it has a different tone. It shows more empathy for the plight of those who see themselves as victims. And, consistent with your core, it does not absolve the self-pity.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I am flattered that you keep hold of things that I've written so long ago. It is humbling and also reassuring.
You are perceptive to note a seasoning in me, which, I believe, comes with age. It is the reason I am just now writing my South Africa book forty years after experiencing that country and time. I was not ready before as I told BB today.
You are remembered fondly and I pray that the bump in the road has turned out well for you. It is all in a life. As you have expressed so well, it is a spiritual journey.
THE REFERENCE ARTICLE
Everyone!
My daughter is a communications major and junior in college, and she asked me a question: Do you believe white privilege exists? If so, what can we do about it?
I asked her if she wanted the long or short answer. She said both. "Let me think about it on my walk," which I did and this is what my walk told me.
The short and obvious answer is "yes," white privilege does exist, why else would most good jobs and opportunities and wealth go mostly to whites, right?
But as I walked I thought it was more complicated than that. Many whites never participate in this privilege as they see themselves as "victims of circumstances."
They see themselves imprisoned in a socioeconomic class in a supposedly classless society.
They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They see their jobs disappearing, their economic stability eroding, and opportunity going elsewhere, not to them. And they have done nothing wrong. But what is worse, they think they can do nothing about it.
Books I've read came to mind, one a scathing analysis, not of white privilege but of black under privilege and how it is essentially a myth.
This book is by a black intellectual admonishing his fellow African Americans to let loose of their defeatism and take responsibility for their lives. It was as if this defeatism was peculiar only to blacks. I've spent most of my life surrounded by whites bemoaning their plight.
I also thought of another book that embraces the rapture of lifelong learning, of grabbing hold of all that you are and finding the maturity to engage its ecstasy.
An old reliable essay also came to mind, which was about embracing life and not waiting for opportunity to knock on your door.
The books were John McWhorter's "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America" (2000) and Charles H. Hayes's "The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning" (to be published in 2004). The essay was "Self-Reliance" from "The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950).
McWhorter asks himself this question: Why do so many African Americans, even comfortable middle-class ones, continue to see racism as a defining factor
in their lives?
Instead of seeing racism as a given, he sees it as the ugliest legacy of his people in the form of the disease of defeatism. This cultural virus has three components: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.
He claims this makes blacks their own worst enemy.
While walking and thinking of this book, I could see it was a disease not only endemic to blacks but to so-called "privileged whites" as well and how defeatism may have taken hold.
I thought of our American history. Some 400 years ago settlers, mainly Pilgrims from Great Britain, came to these shores to practice their religion and establish their culture in freedom sui generis, as a unique society, or class by itself.
Out of this grew a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) society that knew
survival depended on hard work with no other options. Emerson was to
express this essence in many essays of which one is that of Self-Reliance, where he
wrote:
”There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Calvin Protestantism and capitalism fostered individualism. McWhorter knows this is the base of the American character. Detractors of individualism often view Americans as irresponsible, narcissistic and self-centered. The individualism that has made America great is self-responsibility. And as Emerson has shown, self-responsibility can never be transformed into self-centeredness.
VICTIMOLOGY
Although black Americans have been part of America nearly from the beginning, the ugly hand of slavery has shackled them, but as McWhorter points out, no more. He argues convincingly strides have been made to establish a thriving black middle-class.
Yet he is saddened that many children of middle-class blacks lag behind whites and Orientals academically. Poverty, ghetto living and racism can no longer justify poor performance in the classroom, as these conditions are the exception rather than the rule.
It is also a white problem as well. Many whites excel, but many more do not. Ask any professor in a land grant institution.
Self-responsibility has gravitated to self-aggrandizement. This does not apply only to middle-class blacks but middle-class whites as well. Many have lost the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the self-responsibility therein contained. I wrote in "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996):
"We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels
inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life, without exception, are sacred,
unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one
actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the
bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves."
McWhorter writes black students are motivated to impress their teachers while Oriental students are motivated to impress their parents. It is a family affair. He finds this, as it should be. Curiously, he makes no mention of students motivated to satisfy themselves.
Yet he discloses his own satisfaction in being able to acquire graduate degrees from first-rank institutions, confessing his love of learning. It s this love of doing that is missing in the equation. He was the genuine article.
Not a copy. "In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995), I ask the question: If you should lose everything, to whom do you turn? Whom do you blame?
During my corporate career, I saw colorblind privilege being usurped from individual workers on all fronts. My reason for writing the books that I have written has been to make them aware of this and rally them to do something about it.
Likewise, the McWhorter, Hayes and Emerson messages are not solutions to problems but ways of defining of them. The heavy lifting is always up to the individual, and that is the manual labor of thinking their way out.
Answers are never with gurus or self-help manuals but always in the individual's own heart, unique, based on a will to prevail. There are no short cuts, no substitutes. When that is missing, victimology becomes a given.
Identifying whites as privileged is a way of forgiving blacks for underachieving. The irony is that many whites also fall into the same trap.
McWhorter's writes:
"Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a
scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and
visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."
It is the porous safety net of non-responsibility of people afraid to make choices, preferring to have choices made for them, and then play the blame game.
When I was a boy my da's Irish Roman CATHolic railroad buddies would sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and crying, "Woe is me!" They were white but had this black disease. They saw Protestant managers putting them down, keeping them in their place. They pulled suspect statistics out of their hats and adopted victimhood as an aspect of identity rather than addressing it as a problem.
McWhorter says blacks are doing the same. In 1960, he writes, 55 percent of blacks lived in poverty; today it is 23 percent. In 1940 only one in one hundred blacks were middle class (middle class being defined as earning twice the poverty rate); today half of American blacks are middle class.
The problem is that victimology is as prevalent among educated blacks with concrete success and ample opportunity. It is a cultural disease (and psychology) that holds on like a chronic virus.
My mother did everything possible to overcome the Irish strain of this virus, which I write about In the Shadow of the Courthouse. She would say, "You're big, beautiful and bright, heads will turn when you enter a room." It wasn't important how true it was. It was important for me to believe it because she was celebrating my uniqueness and saying, "We're going to build on that."
She emphasized my specialness to overcome my da's victimology, and of course realized imperfect results.
McWhorter writes:
"Every time a white person lifts her glass to a black person's Victimology, she is unwittingly contributing to the very interracial strife that she supposed herself to be against -- because Victimology is not about change; it is all about nothing but itself."
With regard to the "Cult of Separatism," McWhorter says, "I couldn't help thinking of how very few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a subject that had nothing to do with being black."
That statement brought a smile to my face. A black clerk at Barnes & Noble sold me McWhorter's book, looking curiously at me and at the book as she rang up the sale.
"Are you a professor?"
I shook my head, "Alas, no."
The suspicion in her eyes said, "Why then are you reading that? What has that
to do with you?"
SEPARATISM
Perhaps without consciously knowing it, she falls into McWhorter's paradigm as Separatism is a direct product of Victimology.
McWhorter is a prominent linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
One of his colleagues, a black professor, invited him to speak on how the use of media had affected the controversy over the O. J. Simpson trial. He responded that he would be glad to speak, but that he might want to know in advance that he thought Simpson was guilty and that Johnnie Cochran (Simpson black trial lawyer) was no hero of his. He never heard from the professor again because, clearly, he wasn't a brother.
The author is not enamored of Louis Farrakan or Al Sharpton either. But he does admit that he probably would be a racist and of another mind had he been born before 1960.
Separatism has many curious dimensions. I can recall interviewing with the CEO of Bristol-Myers in Cincinnati in 1974 for an executive position. The CEO was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL with Paul Brown the principal owner and coach. He told of visiting training camp and seeing all the rookies, wondering how the coach determined who would make it and who wouldn't.
Coach Brown told him, "Didn't I tell you? Losers and winners hang together. They separate themselves."
(Incidentally, I won the position, but the vice president's job was frozen when OPEC's 1974 embargo hit the US. So, I was hired and fired before ever going to
work.)
Separatism took another form while an undergraduate student at Iowa. There was a core group of us that always had lunch together. We were all what you would call grinds, setting curves and very serious about our studies. Gradually, some peeled away making the core group much smaller. They couldn't party and keep up so they voluntarily separated themselves from the group, never to rejoin it.
McWhorter shows how welfarism and even affirmative action has aided and abetted Separatism. He blames a cadre of white activists who weren't convinced that blacks could work their way out of poverty as whites and Orientals had. He claims white guilt fed directly into Separatist sentiments, making excuses for blacks that whites wouldn't make for themselves.
My da's railroad buddies said they would never play a "CATHolic" boy at the public high school I was scheduled to attend. Yet, they were wrong. I played varsity in football, basketball and track and won seven major letters.
Undaunted, when I planned to go to college, they assured me the railroad was the place for me, "You'll always have a job even if you don't make a lot of money." It was all about SECURITY in capital letters.
Fortunately, I had a Ph.D. uncle, my mother's brother, who was a successful academic and my role model. Having a role model cannot be over emphasized. "Deprived of role models who work, welfare children," writes McWhorter, "cannot help but develop a much less strong sense of work as central to adult existence."
The result is a Separatist sense that work is an option rather than a given when it comes to black people.
Separatism has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy. McWhorter writes of people who never seem to connect, who are always passed over, who seem stuck in the slime of hate. He writes, "People black, white, yellow, and brown would rather not spend time with people who have something against them."
How true! A young woman once confessed to me she "hated Jews."
I said, "But you are employed by one."
She smirked, "How about that!" She was earning a good salary with benefits, only to one day be "let go."
She came to me wailing, "I never said one word against him, not one." I told her she didn't have to. He felt it. That was enough.
Given McWhorter's attention to these two aspects of his model, it is the "Cult of Anti-intellectualism" in which he reaches his stride. That will be my next missive.
Be always well.
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2008
“No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland.
A WRITER WRITES:
Over four years ago you emailed this to us. It seems to be a deeper exploration of the victimology concept you described recently, but it has a different tone. It shows more empathy for the plight of those who see themselves as victims. And, consistent with your core, it does not absolve the self-pity.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I am flattered that you keep hold of things that I've written so long ago. It is humbling and also reassuring.
You are perceptive to note a seasoning in me, which, I believe, comes with age. It is the reason I am just now writing my South Africa book forty years after experiencing that country and time. I was not ready before as I told BB today.
You are remembered fondly and I pray that the bump in the road has turned out well for you. It is all in a life. As you have expressed so well, it is a spiritual journey.
THE REFERENCE ARTICLE
Everyone!
My daughter is a communications major and junior in college, and she asked me a question: Do you believe white privilege exists? If so, what can we do about it?
I asked her if she wanted the long or short answer. She said both. "Let me think about it on my walk," which I did and this is what my walk told me.
The short and obvious answer is "yes," white privilege does exist, why else would most good jobs and opportunities and wealth go mostly to whites, right?
But as I walked I thought it was more complicated than that. Many whites never participate in this privilege as they see themselves as "victims of circumstances."
They see themselves imprisoned in a socioeconomic class in a supposedly classless society.
They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They see their jobs disappearing, their economic stability eroding, and opportunity going elsewhere, not to them. And they have done nothing wrong. But what is worse, they think they can do nothing about it.
Books I've read came to mind, one a scathing analysis, not of white privilege but of black under privilege and how it is essentially a myth.
This book is by a black intellectual admonishing his fellow African Americans to let loose of their defeatism and take responsibility for their lives. It was as if this defeatism was peculiar only to blacks. I've spent most of my life surrounded by whites bemoaning their plight.
I also thought of another book that embraces the rapture of lifelong learning, of grabbing hold of all that you are and finding the maturity to engage its ecstasy.
An old reliable essay also came to mind, which was about embracing life and not waiting for opportunity to knock on your door.
The books were John McWhorter's "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America" (2000) and Charles H. Hayes's "The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning" (to be published in 2004). The essay was "Self-Reliance" from "The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950).
McWhorter asks himself this question: Why do so many African Americans, even comfortable middle-class ones, continue to see racism as a defining factor
in their lives?
Instead of seeing racism as a given, he sees it as the ugliest legacy of his people in the form of the disease of defeatism. This cultural virus has three components: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.
He claims this makes blacks their own worst enemy.
While walking and thinking of this book, I could see it was a disease not only endemic to blacks but to so-called "privileged whites" as well and how defeatism may have taken hold.
I thought of our American history. Some 400 years ago settlers, mainly Pilgrims from Great Britain, came to these shores to practice their religion and establish their culture in freedom sui generis, as a unique society, or class by itself.
Out of this grew a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) society that knew
survival depended on hard work with no other options. Emerson was to
express this essence in many essays of which one is that of Self-Reliance, where he
wrote:
”There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Calvin Protestantism and capitalism fostered individualism. McWhorter knows this is the base of the American character. Detractors of individualism often view Americans as irresponsible, narcissistic and self-centered. The individualism that has made America great is self-responsibility. And as Emerson has shown, self-responsibility can never be transformed into self-centeredness.
VICTIMOLOGY
Although black Americans have been part of America nearly from the beginning, the ugly hand of slavery has shackled them, but as McWhorter points out, no more. He argues convincingly strides have been made to establish a thriving black middle-class.
Yet he is saddened that many children of middle-class blacks lag behind whites and Orientals academically. Poverty, ghetto living and racism can no longer justify poor performance in the classroom, as these conditions are the exception rather than the rule.
It is also a white problem as well. Many whites excel, but many more do not. Ask any professor in a land grant institution.
Self-responsibility has gravitated to self-aggrandizement. This does not apply only to middle-class blacks but middle-class whites as well. Many have lost the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the self-responsibility therein contained. I wrote in "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996):
"We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels
inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life, without exception, are sacred,
unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one
actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the
bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves."
McWhorter writes black students are motivated to impress their teachers while Oriental students are motivated to impress their parents. It is a family affair. He finds this, as it should be. Curiously, he makes no mention of students motivated to satisfy themselves.
Yet he discloses his own satisfaction in being able to acquire graduate degrees from first-rank institutions, confessing his love of learning. It s this love of doing that is missing in the equation. He was the genuine article.
Not a copy. "In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995), I ask the question: If you should lose everything, to whom do you turn? Whom do you blame?
During my corporate career, I saw colorblind privilege being usurped from individual workers on all fronts. My reason for writing the books that I have written has been to make them aware of this and rally them to do something about it.
Likewise, the McWhorter, Hayes and Emerson messages are not solutions to problems but ways of defining of them. The heavy lifting is always up to the individual, and that is the manual labor of thinking their way out.
Answers are never with gurus or self-help manuals but always in the individual's own heart, unique, based on a will to prevail. There are no short cuts, no substitutes. When that is missing, victimology becomes a given.
Identifying whites as privileged is a way of forgiving blacks for underachieving. The irony is that many whites also fall into the same trap.
McWhorter's writes:
"Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a
scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and
visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."
It is the porous safety net of non-responsibility of people afraid to make choices, preferring to have choices made for them, and then play the blame game.
When I was a boy my da's Irish Roman CATHolic railroad buddies would sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and crying, "Woe is me!" They were white but had this black disease. They saw Protestant managers putting them down, keeping them in their place. They pulled suspect statistics out of their hats and adopted victimhood as an aspect of identity rather than addressing it as a problem.
McWhorter says blacks are doing the same. In 1960, he writes, 55 percent of blacks lived in poverty; today it is 23 percent. In 1940 only one in one hundred blacks were middle class (middle class being defined as earning twice the poverty rate); today half of American blacks are middle class.
The problem is that victimology is as prevalent among educated blacks with concrete success and ample opportunity. It is a cultural disease (and psychology) that holds on like a chronic virus.
My mother did everything possible to overcome the Irish strain of this virus, which I write about In the Shadow of the Courthouse. She would say, "You're big, beautiful and bright, heads will turn when you enter a room." It wasn't important how true it was. It was important for me to believe it because she was celebrating my uniqueness and saying, "We're going to build on that."
She emphasized my specialness to overcome my da's victimology, and of course realized imperfect results.
McWhorter writes:
"Every time a white person lifts her glass to a black person's Victimology, she is unwittingly contributing to the very interracial strife that she supposed herself to be against -- because Victimology is not about change; it is all about nothing but itself."
With regard to the "Cult of Separatism," McWhorter says, "I couldn't help thinking of how very few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a subject that had nothing to do with being black."
That statement brought a smile to my face. A black clerk at Barnes & Noble sold me McWhorter's book, looking curiously at me and at the book as she rang up the sale.
"Are you a professor?"
I shook my head, "Alas, no."
The suspicion in her eyes said, "Why then are you reading that? What has that
to do with you?"
SEPARATISM
Perhaps without consciously knowing it, she falls into McWhorter's paradigm as Separatism is a direct product of Victimology.
McWhorter is a prominent linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
One of his colleagues, a black professor, invited him to speak on how the use of media had affected the controversy over the O. J. Simpson trial. He responded that he would be glad to speak, but that he might want to know in advance that he thought Simpson was guilty and that Johnnie Cochran (Simpson black trial lawyer) was no hero of his. He never heard from the professor again because, clearly, he wasn't a brother.
The author is not enamored of Louis Farrakan or Al Sharpton either. But he does admit that he probably would be a racist and of another mind had he been born before 1960.
Separatism has many curious dimensions. I can recall interviewing with the CEO of Bristol-Myers in Cincinnati in 1974 for an executive position. The CEO was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL with Paul Brown the principal owner and coach. He told of visiting training camp and seeing all the rookies, wondering how the coach determined who would make it and who wouldn't.
Coach Brown told him, "Didn't I tell you? Losers and winners hang together. They separate themselves."
(Incidentally, I won the position, but the vice president's job was frozen when OPEC's 1974 embargo hit the US. So, I was hired and fired before ever going to
work.)
Separatism took another form while an undergraduate student at Iowa. There was a core group of us that always had lunch together. We were all what you would call grinds, setting curves and very serious about our studies. Gradually, some peeled away making the core group much smaller. They couldn't party and keep up so they voluntarily separated themselves from the group, never to rejoin it.
McWhorter shows how welfarism and even affirmative action has aided and abetted Separatism. He blames a cadre of white activists who weren't convinced that blacks could work their way out of poverty as whites and Orientals had. He claims white guilt fed directly into Separatist sentiments, making excuses for blacks that whites wouldn't make for themselves.
My da's railroad buddies said they would never play a "CATHolic" boy at the public high school I was scheduled to attend. Yet, they were wrong. I played varsity in football, basketball and track and won seven major letters.
Undaunted, when I planned to go to college, they assured me the railroad was the place for me, "You'll always have a job even if you don't make a lot of money." It was all about SECURITY in capital letters.
Fortunately, I had a Ph.D. uncle, my mother's brother, who was a successful academic and my role model. Having a role model cannot be over emphasized. "Deprived of role models who work, welfare children," writes McWhorter, "cannot help but develop a much less strong sense of work as central to adult existence."
The result is a Separatist sense that work is an option rather than a given when it comes to black people.
Separatism has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy. McWhorter writes of people who never seem to connect, who are always passed over, who seem stuck in the slime of hate. He writes, "People black, white, yellow, and brown would rather not spend time with people who have something against them."
How true! A young woman once confessed to me she "hated Jews."
I said, "But you are employed by one."
She smirked, "How about that!" She was earning a good salary with benefits, only to one day be "let go."
She came to me wailing, "I never said one word against him, not one." I told her she didn't have to. He felt it. That was enough.
Given McWhorter's attention to these two aspects of his model, it is the "Cult of Anti-intellectualism" in which he reaches his stride. That will be my next missive.
Be always well.
JRF
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM
THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 23, 2008
"Where's the outrage?"
Senator Bob Dole during his losing 1996 campaign for president.
Everything I've read from Dr. Donald Farr’s Network makes sense, and clearly people responding are very concerned with high gasoline prices, falling real estate values, declining graduation rates, and the sub prime mess with nobody seemingly in charge, not to mention that water, not oil, is the most pressing crisis.
Some, in the case of people like Dr. Farr living in California, have monumental problems, as they are essentially in a separate nation with one hand tied behind their backs.
I have three perspectives on this problem. One is the home, another is the school, and the third is the real problem, the leadership, which is nonexistent.
Home and school get all the attention as if parents and teachers are truly responsible for poor guidance at home and poor performance at school, when all the prescriptions from the leadership are iatrogenic, or worse than the problem in the first place.
Leadership has been disintegrating for more than one hundred years now and everyone in society across the face of the earth is suffering for it.
You cannot lose 20 million people in the hot wars of the first half of the 20th century and another 20 million in the COLD WAR of the last half and not suffer systemic societal problems.
We little people who pay for these wars with our lives and our capital have multiplied in number while only a few have multiplied in wealth.
In the early 20th century, there were a few hundred millionaires. Now, there are tens of millions of millionaires, and a few thousand billionaires.
War does this because war destroys the moral fabric of society when people are given license to let loose and send caution to the wind.
Meanwhile, the orchestration of these wars are always by people who have an ax to grind or suffer from the nostalgia for empire as did Churchill, Stalin, and yes, Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Emperor of Japan Hirohito.
Typical of our reactionary American style, the sinking of the Lusitania got us into World War I, and Pearl Harbor into World War II.
Behind these two Great Wars were men of devious motivation and duplicitous minds. But we little people are trained to go along with our masters, and we do.
Society is like one giant organism that breathes collectively with the same instinct for survival as if in the caldron of hell, which the 20th century happened to be.
It is hard to imagine that in 1900 there were less than one billion people in the world. It took 50,000 years to reach that number, but a mere hundred years to increase to nearly seven billion and counting. War does you see. The population explodes and explodes and explodes because the instinct for survival is the nervous tic.
This mechanism has been demonstrated since the beginning of time.
When war comes, the fragile nature of society fragments. Morality is always in the mind of the times, not in any sacred book or institution. That morality is a response to human crisis, which is always a fabrication, and predictably, each crisis is followed by monumental change as everything is breaking down, reforming, and not necessarily for the better.
Little people who had little before the crisis have even less after, but those that orchestrate these crises always share in the spoils.
This goes on in plain sight but none of us notice because we are busy blaming each other or blaming our parents or teachers or our children, never the leadership.
Leaders have us waving the flag, listening to their rhetoric and promises, clapping our hands, and believing their every word because it doesn't cost us anything, now. The cost is always later when nothing changes for the better, always for the worse, and always at our expense.
There is always an explanation by the leadership why things go awry, and always we had a significant role in why they went awry.
That is not quite true. No, not quite true at all. The leadership sometimes takes us off the hook and redirects our focus on to someone else to blame for our plight, but certainly never the leadership.
When I was a boy, not only did Catholics not divorce neither did Jews nor most Protestants. It was not because there were so many happy homes but quite the opposite. Divorce was not approved of by society. Not being able to maintain a marriage was a sign of weakness, or something being wrong with you. "For the sake of the children seldom came up," that was an invention later on. Certainly, no one would openly live together in "sin" in those days.
Now, everything goes, but is there more happiness, better functional relationships, more intimacy between people, more of a commitment to a common cause? I don't think so.
I would sense from what I have experienced in counseling more than 1,000 married couples in my professional career, and many others living in various shades of togetherness that people today are not happier but more anxious.
And that is where leadership plays its trump card of having everyone chase money, careers, celebrity, technology, narcissistic indulgence, and always on the ball of deception. .
War and chaos give people permission to let it all hang out, and once out of the genie there is no way to get it back.
I've written about the 1960s but that was only a pimple on the ass of society. Woodstock was one thing, but children in their innocence listened to loud music, slept and made love in the mud, smoked pot or whatever, as they were lost in defiance because there was no control; no direction; no consistency, and no loyalty, more importantly not even to themselves.
Why do you think people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died in their twenties? They were sacrificial lambs on the altar of hedonism in the hippie movement that wasn't going anywhere.
But strangely, in going nowhere, Hippie's knew the Vietnam War was a sham, and somewhere deep in their soul young people found the courage to say, "Hell no, I won't go!"
Four presidents were complicit in that war: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, two Republicans and two Democrats, and so it isn't the party that makes the difference.
How could you expect children to be loyal when their parents weren't loyal right under their noses, and flaunted it as if they were invisible?
They saw their parents lie, cheat on their income tax, make merry with their friends, lose control and forget how they behaved under their children's eyes, and then expect children to behave not as they behaved, but as they said they should behave.
In my long life, I have seen corruption, duplicity, chicanery, malfeasance, and betrayal by leaders who had much in common with Judas. Some of them got away with it, some of them are still flying high today, and a few had their wings clipped, but only trimmed a little. And I'm only one soul in the firmament. Like you, I read about them every day.
This is brief note but I'm going to mention a controversial subject.
My heart goes out to every child that was ever molested by a Catholic Priest, but my heart also is angered by the stupidity of the Church, its arrogance, and its flippant apology in Australia, as if the apology of a pope means anything when priests are meant to behave as eunuchs once they become ordained. The church created this hell and its leadership now gives its Dante's definition.
Predator and prey are both victims in a society orchestrated by leaderless leadership.
Only yesterday, I was listening to my son and his friends blaming the Mexicans and African Americans for everything from high gas prices to the lack of jobs, to so many people on the dole, while not being responsible and on and on.
I have had the privilege to be in leadership positions and I will tell you one aspect of leadership that leaders share in common and that is the consummate skill to find convenient scapegoat to deflect criticism.
Currently, the economy is in trouble for mainly errors committed by Republicans and Democrats, who have had sweetheart arrangements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were in banking or real estate or government, or lobbying government, or in some other connection with the current sub prime fiasco.
The other day listening to C-span, a caller called in and said, "I lost my home. I make $9 an hour and my real estate broker closed a contract for me for a house costing $238,000. How could he do that?"
He could do that because people like secretary of treasury Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs investment bank with close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae turned a blind eye, as did several other investment banks.
Paulson didn't want anything to jeopardize his abundant salary then, and now he doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of investment bankers too much.
Democrat Jim Johnson was CEO for Fannie Mae in the 1990s and made $9.5 million a year on this crony capitalism.
You could say how could this guy making $9 an hour expect to be able to afford a house costing $238,000? He couldn't, in fact he didn't have a clue. "I was caught up in the euphoria," he said, "when the broker said, 'Not to worry,' everything will work out okay, besides, if you get into trouble, you can always sell it for more than you paid," so stay cool.
While little Jimmy or Johnny, Sally or Sarah is not behaving in school, and parents and teachers are on the rack for their poor performance, people in power have done a number on everyone and you can go all the way back to the First World War for evidence.
If you have watched the three-hour PBS series "The War of the World," you know this historian gives ample proof that the First and Second World War were both mistakes.
What is your point Dr. Fisher?
My point is that there is no point in pointing fingers at ground level. Most parents, even single parents are doing the best jobs they know how. Most teachers are doing the best job they know how as well. As for the children, they are caught in the confusion between home and school where parents and teachers are trying to solve problems they did not create. That is my point. Leaders create the culture, and we all behave blindly to its dictates, and suffer for the attention.
Leaders don't talk about school being fun, creative joy, and expressions of individualism. They talk about jobs, careers, high incomes, and all the material fruits that they deem so important at the expense of all the spiritual pursuits that make us human. Ironically, they get great assistance in this smokescreen from the church.
Parents and teachers are trying to do this but with little help from a leadership that keeps putting everyone in the soup. That is why I say we are pointing the finger at the wrong people, the wrong situation, and for the wrong reasons.
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 23, 2008
"Where's the outrage?"
Senator Bob Dole during his losing 1996 campaign for president.
Everything I've read from Dr. Donald Farr’s Network makes sense, and clearly people responding are very concerned with high gasoline prices, falling real estate values, declining graduation rates, and the sub prime mess with nobody seemingly in charge, not to mention that water, not oil, is the most pressing crisis.
Some, in the case of people like Dr. Farr living in California, have monumental problems, as they are essentially in a separate nation with one hand tied behind their backs.
I have three perspectives on this problem. One is the home, another is the school, and the third is the real problem, the leadership, which is nonexistent.
Home and school get all the attention as if parents and teachers are truly responsible for poor guidance at home and poor performance at school, when all the prescriptions from the leadership are iatrogenic, or worse than the problem in the first place.
Leadership has been disintegrating for more than one hundred years now and everyone in society across the face of the earth is suffering for it.
You cannot lose 20 million people in the hot wars of the first half of the 20th century and another 20 million in the COLD WAR of the last half and not suffer systemic societal problems.
We little people who pay for these wars with our lives and our capital have multiplied in number while only a few have multiplied in wealth.
In the early 20th century, there were a few hundred millionaires. Now, there are tens of millions of millionaires, and a few thousand billionaires.
War does this because war destroys the moral fabric of society when people are given license to let loose and send caution to the wind.
Meanwhile, the orchestration of these wars are always by people who have an ax to grind or suffer from the nostalgia for empire as did Churchill, Stalin, and yes, Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Emperor of Japan Hirohito.
Typical of our reactionary American style, the sinking of the Lusitania got us into World War I, and Pearl Harbor into World War II.
Behind these two Great Wars were men of devious motivation and duplicitous minds. But we little people are trained to go along with our masters, and we do.
Society is like one giant organism that breathes collectively with the same instinct for survival as if in the caldron of hell, which the 20th century happened to be.
It is hard to imagine that in 1900 there were less than one billion people in the world. It took 50,000 years to reach that number, but a mere hundred years to increase to nearly seven billion and counting. War does you see. The population explodes and explodes and explodes because the instinct for survival is the nervous tic.
This mechanism has been demonstrated since the beginning of time.
When war comes, the fragile nature of society fragments. Morality is always in the mind of the times, not in any sacred book or institution. That morality is a response to human crisis, which is always a fabrication, and predictably, each crisis is followed by monumental change as everything is breaking down, reforming, and not necessarily for the better.
Little people who had little before the crisis have even less after, but those that orchestrate these crises always share in the spoils.
This goes on in plain sight but none of us notice because we are busy blaming each other or blaming our parents or teachers or our children, never the leadership.
Leaders have us waving the flag, listening to their rhetoric and promises, clapping our hands, and believing their every word because it doesn't cost us anything, now. The cost is always later when nothing changes for the better, always for the worse, and always at our expense.
There is always an explanation by the leadership why things go awry, and always we had a significant role in why they went awry.
That is not quite true. No, not quite true at all. The leadership sometimes takes us off the hook and redirects our focus on to someone else to blame for our plight, but certainly never the leadership.
When I was a boy, not only did Catholics not divorce neither did Jews nor most Protestants. It was not because there were so many happy homes but quite the opposite. Divorce was not approved of by society. Not being able to maintain a marriage was a sign of weakness, or something being wrong with you. "For the sake of the children seldom came up," that was an invention later on. Certainly, no one would openly live together in "sin" in those days.
Now, everything goes, but is there more happiness, better functional relationships, more intimacy between people, more of a commitment to a common cause? I don't think so.
I would sense from what I have experienced in counseling more than 1,000 married couples in my professional career, and many others living in various shades of togetherness that people today are not happier but more anxious.
And that is where leadership plays its trump card of having everyone chase money, careers, celebrity, technology, narcissistic indulgence, and always on the ball of deception. .
War and chaos give people permission to let it all hang out, and once out of the genie there is no way to get it back.
I've written about the 1960s but that was only a pimple on the ass of society. Woodstock was one thing, but children in their innocence listened to loud music, slept and made love in the mud, smoked pot or whatever, as they were lost in defiance because there was no control; no direction; no consistency, and no loyalty, more importantly not even to themselves.
Why do you think people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died in their twenties? They were sacrificial lambs on the altar of hedonism in the hippie movement that wasn't going anywhere.
But strangely, in going nowhere, Hippie's knew the Vietnam War was a sham, and somewhere deep in their soul young people found the courage to say, "Hell no, I won't go!"
Four presidents were complicit in that war: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, two Republicans and two Democrats, and so it isn't the party that makes the difference.
How could you expect children to be loyal when their parents weren't loyal right under their noses, and flaunted it as if they were invisible?
They saw their parents lie, cheat on their income tax, make merry with their friends, lose control and forget how they behaved under their children's eyes, and then expect children to behave not as they behaved, but as they said they should behave.
In my long life, I have seen corruption, duplicity, chicanery, malfeasance, and betrayal by leaders who had much in common with Judas. Some of them got away with it, some of them are still flying high today, and a few had their wings clipped, but only trimmed a little. And I'm only one soul in the firmament. Like you, I read about them every day.
This is brief note but I'm going to mention a controversial subject.
My heart goes out to every child that was ever molested by a Catholic Priest, but my heart also is angered by the stupidity of the Church, its arrogance, and its flippant apology in Australia, as if the apology of a pope means anything when priests are meant to behave as eunuchs once they become ordained. The church created this hell and its leadership now gives its Dante's definition.
Predator and prey are both victims in a society orchestrated by leaderless leadership.
Only yesterday, I was listening to my son and his friends blaming the Mexicans and African Americans for everything from high gas prices to the lack of jobs, to so many people on the dole, while not being responsible and on and on.
I have had the privilege to be in leadership positions and I will tell you one aspect of leadership that leaders share in common and that is the consummate skill to find convenient scapegoat to deflect criticism.
Currently, the economy is in trouble for mainly errors committed by Republicans and Democrats, who have had sweetheart arrangements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were in banking or real estate or government, or lobbying government, or in some other connection with the current sub prime fiasco.
The other day listening to C-span, a caller called in and said, "I lost my home. I make $9 an hour and my real estate broker closed a contract for me for a house costing $238,000. How could he do that?"
He could do that because people like secretary of treasury Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs investment bank with close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae turned a blind eye, as did several other investment banks.
Paulson didn't want anything to jeopardize his abundant salary then, and now he doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of investment bankers too much.
Democrat Jim Johnson was CEO for Fannie Mae in the 1990s and made $9.5 million a year on this crony capitalism.
You could say how could this guy making $9 an hour expect to be able to afford a house costing $238,000? He couldn't, in fact he didn't have a clue. "I was caught up in the euphoria," he said, "when the broker said, 'Not to worry,' everything will work out okay, besides, if you get into trouble, you can always sell it for more than you paid," so stay cool.
While little Jimmy or Johnny, Sally or Sarah is not behaving in school, and parents and teachers are on the rack for their poor performance, people in power have done a number on everyone and you can go all the way back to the First World War for evidence.
If you have watched the three-hour PBS series "The War of the World," you know this historian gives ample proof that the First and Second World War were both mistakes.
What is your point Dr. Fisher?
My point is that there is no point in pointing fingers at ground level. Most parents, even single parents are doing the best jobs they know how. Most teachers are doing the best job they know how as well. As for the children, they are caught in the confusion between home and school where parents and teachers are trying to solve problems they did not create. That is my point. Leaders create the culture, and we all behave blindly to its dictates, and suffer for the attention.
Leaders don't talk about school being fun, creative joy, and expressions of individualism. They talk about jobs, careers, high incomes, and all the material fruits that they deem so important at the expense of all the spiritual pursuits that make us human. Ironically, they get great assistance in this smokescreen from the church.
Parents and teachers are trying to do this but with little help from a leadership that keeps putting everyone in the soup. That is why I say we are pointing the finger at the wrong people, the wrong situation, and for the wrong reasons.
JRF
Saturday, July 19, 2008
THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM SOLVING
THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM SOLVING, A PROBLEM REVISITED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 19, 2008
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His Laws."
John Adams (1735 - 1826), statesman and second president of the United States
* * * * * *
People come to me all the time for advice mentioning my books in the conversation, books, which by their comments clearly they have not read.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is a book in point of fact. It was misnamed because it is actually a book about confident thinking.
The book is basically about the world of problem solving in a world of predators and prey, suggesting that the greatest predator we face is ourselves, and the most likely prey to be consumed by us is that same self.
It is not other people problems, relationships or money that throws us into the soup. It is our own. We invariably put ourselves into the soup only to blame everyone else.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is therefore a problem solving book with the major problem we all face every day looks at us in the mirror, and by God's mysterious guile, we seldom see the real face staring back at us.
THE SPOILED BRAT GENERATION PERSONIFIED
Recently, someone came to me "to write" something for him after he had been "taken to the cleaners" by his ex-wife for more than $300,000 and counting.
"I cannot see my kids." I was to imply from this that his ex-wife was an evil woman, as only an evil woman could do that.
He wants me to write a two-page something that he can put on the Internet and tons of men in the same boat will agree with him, and want to embellish him with money and support for his cause - to mount a cause to result in changed legislation more favorable to dads separated from their kids.
"It is a common problem today, and many men are facing it the same as I am and they have no recourse but to suck it up and comply. It isn't fair."
When he had calmed down. I said, "What is your problem?"
"What is my problem? I've told you."
"No, you have told me your frustration, which has flooded your brain. So, I repeat, 'what is your problem'?"
When faced with complex problems, problems we cannot resolve, we attempt to change the problem to one we think we can solve letting us off the hook. We hope by some mysterious accident the problem will solve itself. Notice how far from the problem this man is by preferring mounting a costly and time-consuming campaign to lobby for "changed legislation" than to face his problem today.
We're not alone in this type of thinking. It is all around us. It is how the government thinks, the church thinks, the school thinks, the business community thinks, the man and woman on the street thinks.
Solving problem by avoiding the pain of the problem solving is a plague, an epidemic with no way out because we try to resolve the complexities with old, well established but ill-suited practices.
The human community changes slowly to new experiences. It is a cautionary tale that has preserved humanity for at least 50,000 years. The reason for this is the brain, and its hard wiring.
Don't be confused with everyone with a cell phone attached to his or her ear or an iPod in his or her hands. They're as lost as everyone else only they are hip, which gives them a false sense of security.
Our brain has a finite capacity to process information. We suffer today from information overload. This is obvious, you say. Still, when the information fits the network and is within bounds of our ability to process the information, things go reasonably well. When such conditions fail to exist, things go belly up.
This man is attempting to deal with a problem that has grown in complexity and out-of-hand, and yet he prefers to think it just happened, and unfairly so, and he must do something monumental to deal with it, which is not dealing with it at all.
The brain uses the principle of the "match" by which incoming information matches more or less exactly the patterns already stored in the brain, or else it is not recognized and summarily rejected.
This is another fail-safe mechanism that is neither a negative nor a positive but a human condition of conscious thinking.
Present behavior depends heavily on previous behavior; present learning depends heavily on previous learning.
To be hit with changed values, beliefs, or imposed behaviors is to approach gridlock, or worse.
I'm writing a novel about my time in South Africa in 1968. Yesterday, Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday. He was in prison when I was in South Africa, and was not released until the 1990s, and became president of South Africa in 1994 with the abolition of apartheid, or separate development of the races.
South Africans are crying, people mainly white, how bad things are in that country what with crime, AIDS, poverty, unemployment, corruption, and so forth.
What has happened is that the repressed majority population which has been subjugated for 300 years, was suddenly liberated, and expected to behave as if they had been in power all those years, with an equal opportunity for a quality education, jobs, property, voting rights, and so on when they had none of the above.
The majority population of Bantu or Blacks is working their way through this maelstrom, and they will, but it will not be in my lifetime, nor should anyone expect it to be so.
Whatever our core belief system, it represents an amalgam of our genetic inheritance, social conditioning and cultural experience. The perceptual structure, whatever it is and has been, matches information to our existing mental models. We cannot dispose of them as we like but must treat them with the reverence and attention that they deserve.
In these times of rapid technological change, rigid belief systems threaten our individual and collective ability to cope, display confidence and exercise control. Chaos is a manifestation of our current frustration in this transitional and transforming period.
The problem solving is an adaptive mechanism but it must be understood and used or chaos follows.
THE PROBLEM SOLVING
When a person encounters complexity, the rules of social conditioning automatically translate the scene into another order for standard practice.
For example, the guy that wants me to write two magic pages of wisdom to place on the Internet to invite all other wayward husbands to rally around him, change the law so that deadbeat dads have more recourse to being deadbeat dads, doesn't see the folly in this.
As I said earlier, he has access to my books but hasn't read them or he would know that I name baby boomers like him among the spoiled brat generation that expects to have its cake and eat it too, without consequences. And sadly, these spoiled brats have essentially succeeded.
He is insensitive to the plight of single mothers, but only sees his plight in terms of lost cash. This is a mismatch between reality and self-interest. His Internet blog, should he realize it, will not represent a quick fix; will not rally tons of people to his plight, but will magnify rather than resolve his problem.
Complex problem-solving involves four systems and two pairings all of which are inner related, and which can prove successful, but it takes people acting like grown-ups and I don't see many of them around at the moment.
PROBLEM SOLVING MECHANISM
(1) TECHNICAL SYSTEM (the tools to deal with the complexities of the problem) is inseparable from the
(2) SOCIAL SYSTEM (the current relationship of the parties and their common or uncommon history, including all the dirty linen) and the
(3) PURPOSEFUL SYSTEM (the problem domain from all perspectives honestly wrought and ethically established) is mated to the
(4) CONTROL SYSTEM (the solution domain where a win-win proposition is meted out).
Good solutions are flexible; bad solutions are not. Good solutions never give anyone everything they want but everything they need. Good solutions are alive and sensitive to unexpected problems and changing circumstances. It is not simply that good solutions anticipate unanticipated demands, but they have the flexibility to absorb them.
All of you know I am a writer who has been writing for nearly forty years (Confident Selling 1970), but am still unknown. That is okay. I mention this because many established writers are still struggling to get our attention to the problem solving with shock therapy.
Most recently, I read WILD FIRE (2006) by Nelson DeMille, which is more disturbing than you can imagine.
WILD FIRE is about a group of high government officials in the State Department, Defense Department, White House, and so forth, along with billionaire industrialists who have conceived of a plan to solve the energy crisis and the threat of Islam.
They have in their possession several small dirty nuclear bombs and they plan to bomb American cities -- I'll let you read the book -- and blame it on the nations of Islam in the Middle East, justifying a blitzkrieg of nuclear retaliation by the United States against the entire Islam World from the Middle East to Indonesia. The code name for this is "Wild Fire."
It is a novel. It is fiction. But it demonstrates what some twisted minds might believe a problem-solving strategy to remove the threat of a changing world.
WILD FIRE is scary and it reminds this writer that I dare not slow down in my desire to advocate the middle ground to sanity where we are all one race, the human race, made up of men and women, with neither gender more important or more gifted than the other, or no people more important or superior to any other.
How would something like a request for two pages of whining self-pity generate this response? I don't know. You'll have to answer for me. I promise BB I wouldn't write these things anymore.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher's blog: www.fisherofideas.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 19, 2008
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His Laws."
John Adams (1735 - 1826), statesman and second president of the United States
* * * * * *
People come to me all the time for advice mentioning my books in the conversation, books, which by their comments clearly they have not read.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is a book in point of fact. It was misnamed because it is actually a book about confident thinking.
The book is basically about the world of problem solving in a world of predators and prey, suggesting that the greatest predator we face is ourselves, and the most likely prey to be consumed by us is that same self.
It is not other people problems, relationships or money that throws us into the soup. It is our own. We invariably put ourselves into the soup only to blame everyone else.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is therefore a problem solving book with the major problem we all face every day looks at us in the mirror, and by God's mysterious guile, we seldom see the real face staring back at us.
THE SPOILED BRAT GENERATION PERSONIFIED
Recently, someone came to me "to write" something for him after he had been "taken to the cleaners" by his ex-wife for more than $300,000 and counting.
"I cannot see my kids." I was to imply from this that his ex-wife was an evil woman, as only an evil woman could do that.
He wants me to write a two-page something that he can put on the Internet and tons of men in the same boat will agree with him, and want to embellish him with money and support for his cause - to mount a cause to result in changed legislation more favorable to dads separated from their kids.
"It is a common problem today, and many men are facing it the same as I am and they have no recourse but to suck it up and comply. It isn't fair."
When he had calmed down. I said, "What is your problem?"
"What is my problem? I've told you."
"No, you have told me your frustration, which has flooded your brain. So, I repeat, 'what is your problem'?"
When faced with complex problems, problems we cannot resolve, we attempt to change the problem to one we think we can solve letting us off the hook. We hope by some mysterious accident the problem will solve itself. Notice how far from the problem this man is by preferring mounting a costly and time-consuming campaign to lobby for "changed legislation" than to face his problem today.
We're not alone in this type of thinking. It is all around us. It is how the government thinks, the church thinks, the school thinks, the business community thinks, the man and woman on the street thinks.
Solving problem by avoiding the pain of the problem solving is a plague, an epidemic with no way out because we try to resolve the complexities with old, well established but ill-suited practices.
The human community changes slowly to new experiences. It is a cautionary tale that has preserved humanity for at least 50,000 years. The reason for this is the brain, and its hard wiring.
Don't be confused with everyone with a cell phone attached to his or her ear or an iPod in his or her hands. They're as lost as everyone else only they are hip, which gives them a false sense of security.
Our brain has a finite capacity to process information. We suffer today from information overload. This is obvious, you say. Still, when the information fits the network and is within bounds of our ability to process the information, things go reasonably well. When such conditions fail to exist, things go belly up.
This man is attempting to deal with a problem that has grown in complexity and out-of-hand, and yet he prefers to think it just happened, and unfairly so, and he must do something monumental to deal with it, which is not dealing with it at all.
The brain uses the principle of the "match" by which incoming information matches more or less exactly the patterns already stored in the brain, or else it is not recognized and summarily rejected.
This is another fail-safe mechanism that is neither a negative nor a positive but a human condition of conscious thinking.
Present behavior depends heavily on previous behavior; present learning depends heavily on previous learning.
To be hit with changed values, beliefs, or imposed behaviors is to approach gridlock, or worse.
I'm writing a novel about my time in South Africa in 1968. Yesterday, Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday. He was in prison when I was in South Africa, and was not released until the 1990s, and became president of South Africa in 1994 with the abolition of apartheid, or separate development of the races.
South Africans are crying, people mainly white, how bad things are in that country what with crime, AIDS, poverty, unemployment, corruption, and so forth.
What has happened is that the repressed majority population which has been subjugated for 300 years, was suddenly liberated, and expected to behave as if they had been in power all those years, with an equal opportunity for a quality education, jobs, property, voting rights, and so on when they had none of the above.
The majority population of Bantu or Blacks is working their way through this maelstrom, and they will, but it will not be in my lifetime, nor should anyone expect it to be so.
Whatever our core belief system, it represents an amalgam of our genetic inheritance, social conditioning and cultural experience. The perceptual structure, whatever it is and has been, matches information to our existing mental models. We cannot dispose of them as we like but must treat them with the reverence and attention that they deserve.
In these times of rapid technological change, rigid belief systems threaten our individual and collective ability to cope, display confidence and exercise control. Chaos is a manifestation of our current frustration in this transitional and transforming period.
The problem solving is an adaptive mechanism but it must be understood and used or chaos follows.
THE PROBLEM SOLVING
When a person encounters complexity, the rules of social conditioning automatically translate the scene into another order for standard practice.
For example, the guy that wants me to write two magic pages of wisdom to place on the Internet to invite all other wayward husbands to rally around him, change the law so that deadbeat dads have more recourse to being deadbeat dads, doesn't see the folly in this.
As I said earlier, he has access to my books but hasn't read them or he would know that I name baby boomers like him among the spoiled brat generation that expects to have its cake and eat it too, without consequences. And sadly, these spoiled brats have essentially succeeded.
He is insensitive to the plight of single mothers, but only sees his plight in terms of lost cash. This is a mismatch between reality and self-interest. His Internet blog, should he realize it, will not represent a quick fix; will not rally tons of people to his plight, but will magnify rather than resolve his problem.
Complex problem-solving involves four systems and two pairings all of which are inner related, and which can prove successful, but it takes people acting like grown-ups and I don't see many of them around at the moment.
PROBLEM SOLVING MECHANISM
(1) TECHNICAL SYSTEM (the tools to deal with the complexities of the problem) is inseparable from the
(2) SOCIAL SYSTEM (the current relationship of the parties and their common or uncommon history, including all the dirty linen) and the
(3) PURPOSEFUL SYSTEM (the problem domain from all perspectives honestly wrought and ethically established) is mated to the
(4) CONTROL SYSTEM (the solution domain where a win-win proposition is meted out).
Good solutions are flexible; bad solutions are not. Good solutions never give anyone everything they want but everything they need. Good solutions are alive and sensitive to unexpected problems and changing circumstances. It is not simply that good solutions anticipate unanticipated demands, but they have the flexibility to absorb them.
All of you know I am a writer who has been writing for nearly forty years (Confident Selling 1970), but am still unknown. That is okay. I mention this because many established writers are still struggling to get our attention to the problem solving with shock therapy.
Most recently, I read WILD FIRE (2006) by Nelson DeMille, which is more disturbing than you can imagine.
WILD FIRE is about a group of high government officials in the State Department, Defense Department, White House, and so forth, along with billionaire industrialists who have conceived of a plan to solve the energy crisis and the threat of Islam.
They have in their possession several small dirty nuclear bombs and they plan to bomb American cities -- I'll let you read the book -- and blame it on the nations of Islam in the Middle East, justifying a blitzkrieg of nuclear retaliation by the United States against the entire Islam World from the Middle East to Indonesia. The code name for this is "Wild Fire."
It is a novel. It is fiction. But it demonstrates what some twisted minds might believe a problem-solving strategy to remove the threat of a changing world.
WILD FIRE is scary and it reminds this writer that I dare not slow down in my desire to advocate the middle ground to sanity where we are all one race, the human race, made up of men and women, with neither gender more important or more gifted than the other, or no people more important or superior to any other.
How would something like a request for two pages of whining self-pity generate this response? I don't know. You'll have to answer for me. I promise BB I wouldn't write these things anymore.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher's blog: www.fisherofideas.com
Monday, July 14, 2008
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DEMING and A DIMINISHING AFFECT
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DEMING and A DIMINISHING AFFECT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 14, 2008
“We are culturally conditioned from birth, programmed to value, believe and behave in a prescribed manner, a manner dictated by society. Conditioning is a powerful force with which few of us stop to wonder. Generations subjected to a particular style of cultural inculcation establish behavioral patterns, patterns, which stubbornly refuse to desist when they are no longer appropriate. Why are there no Catholic priests who are women? Why no American popes? Why has the United States never had a woman or African American president? Why are there no great female philosophers? Why has work gotten a bad name?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (Delta Group 1995), p. 86.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
Jim,
I think you will find this interesting: a new element has been discovered.
Recent hurricanes and gasoline issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element. Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
Forces called morons, who are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons, hold these 312 particles together. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes, slowing down or actually stopping, every action with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to anytime from days to years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of two-six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
As usual, you're too funny. Your humor is always engaging and right on mark, as this surely is. Thank you for sharing. This is so true, unfortunately, but for cause.
Incidentally, the reason I had "DIMINISHING AFFECT" in the title falls right in line with what you have said, only I was speaking more directly to my fellow Americans.
By "affect," I mean "feelings" in the psychological sense, or awareness of what is happening, and making appropriate adjustments, as well as what is missing, and why. Our collective weak affect has dire consequences.
You know the story about the donkey, blocking traffic in the middle of the road. A farmer comes up and hits the donkey with a broad board on the bridge of its nose, and the donkey moves slowly out of the way. When asked to explain his actions, the farmer said, "First you have to get the donkey's attention, then the rest is easy. "
That is my American rubric. You have to get our attention before we act. It seems true in war and peace, or the economics of our health and welfare.
Bad as things appear today, for instance, most Americans don't feel the crunch except psychologically. Yes, we are driving less; eating out less, paying more for food and everything else, but that is perhaps for the better in any case. Self-indulgence has never shown our best side. Wall Street is not a good barometer of our collective awareness. Wall Street panics about once a week. It rides on frayed nerves, and most of us pay it little attention.
Bread lines, however, speak. I was four-years-old when I saw soup kitchens and bread lines in my hometown, and I've never forgotten them. It was the Great Depression. God help us if we don't wake up soon.
It isn't only the government that has played quick and dirty with us. It is mainstream America. We conveniently forget, "We are the government!" If so, we also are the isodopes.
American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a novel "MAIN STREET" in 1920, nine years before the crash on Wall Street in October 1929.
He wrote the novel to puncture the smug egos of Americans, their self-satisfied hubris considering their hometowns flawless, and most importantly, safe from the inane fluctuations around them.
Lewis didn't attack the government, but spoke bluntly about the inadequacies of small-town American life where the center is ripped out, as if the heart, and anything goes because it’s the Jazz Age, and life is beautiful.
This book was published two years after W.W.I, or at a time of great euphoria and celebration. What is different now is that small-town America is tired. Its central role in American life has been ripped out, its economic base depleted, its stability threatened.
At first glance, its seemingly innocuous retreat into diversions has raised little concern. Huge casinos are turning up on the outskirts of small-town America sucking its core wealth and identity from its "main street" center. It has happened in my hometown. It has probably happened in yours.
I have also dwelled on the implicit dangers of our collective preoccupation with electronic wonders, which valuable as they may be in one sense, generate little more than escape toys from self and others in another. People using them are constantly playing games of distraction or talking to someone from a distance. I say this knowing no one is listening or taking this old codger seriously.
The Great Depression was a heart attack brought on by wild speculation. It was like the farmer hitting us with a two-by-four.
Today is different. We are killing ourselves with silent invasions. Much has been written about the recipe for disaster that eating, drinking, smoking, and debauching can be. These hiccup invasions, though dangerous, are still peripheral to the more telling ones. I'm talking about what I wrote in "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995):
"We live in a world of invasions. Countries invade other countries without provocation. Governments invade our bedrooms as they attempt to legislate morality. Men invade women as if it is their right. Television invades our homes and minds to create a wasteland of purpose. Obscenity as art invades our culture forsaking its role of promoting the nobility of man. Information invades all aspects of our private lives so that everything once sacred is now profane.
Conceivably, to invade each other's privacy is the basic way, perhaps the only way workers can relate to each other. There is little intimacy. The void created by its lack is now replaced by licentious gossip.
Humans think and dream. They love. Love requires intimacy. Without love, there is no intimacy. Intimacy is quite possible without being sexual, but intimacy is absolutely a disaster when sexual without being intimate.
Love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today's society: love of work, life, friendship, and being useful. Lust, greed and pleasure are the void fillers for those afraid to love." (The Worker, Alone, pp. 9 - 10)
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 14, 2008
“We are culturally conditioned from birth, programmed to value, believe and behave in a prescribed manner, a manner dictated by society. Conditioning is a powerful force with which few of us stop to wonder. Generations subjected to a particular style of cultural inculcation establish behavioral patterns, patterns, which stubbornly refuse to desist when they are no longer appropriate. Why are there no Catholic priests who are women? Why no American popes? Why has the United States never had a woman or African American president? Why are there no great female philosophers? Why has work gotten a bad name?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (Delta Group 1995), p. 86.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
Jim,
I think you will find this interesting: a new element has been discovered.
Recent hurricanes and gasoline issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element. Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
Forces called morons, who are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons, hold these 312 particles together. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes, slowing down or actually stopping, every action with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to anytime from days to years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of two-six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
As usual, you're too funny. Your humor is always engaging and right on mark, as this surely is. Thank you for sharing. This is so true, unfortunately, but for cause.
Incidentally, the reason I had "DIMINISHING AFFECT" in the title falls right in line with what you have said, only I was speaking more directly to my fellow Americans.
By "affect," I mean "feelings" in the psychological sense, or awareness of what is happening, and making appropriate adjustments, as well as what is missing, and why. Our collective weak affect has dire consequences.
You know the story about the donkey, blocking traffic in the middle of the road. A farmer comes up and hits the donkey with a broad board on the bridge of its nose, and the donkey moves slowly out of the way. When asked to explain his actions, the farmer said, "First you have to get the donkey's attention, then the rest is easy. "
That is my American rubric. You have to get our attention before we act. It seems true in war and peace, or the economics of our health and welfare.
Bad as things appear today, for instance, most Americans don't feel the crunch except psychologically. Yes, we are driving less; eating out less, paying more for food and everything else, but that is perhaps for the better in any case. Self-indulgence has never shown our best side. Wall Street is not a good barometer of our collective awareness. Wall Street panics about once a week. It rides on frayed nerves, and most of us pay it little attention.
Bread lines, however, speak. I was four-years-old when I saw soup kitchens and bread lines in my hometown, and I've never forgotten them. It was the Great Depression. God help us if we don't wake up soon.
It isn't only the government that has played quick and dirty with us. It is mainstream America. We conveniently forget, "We are the government!" If so, we also are the isodopes.
American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a novel "MAIN STREET" in 1920, nine years before the crash on Wall Street in October 1929.
He wrote the novel to puncture the smug egos of Americans, their self-satisfied hubris considering their hometowns flawless, and most importantly, safe from the inane fluctuations around them.
Lewis didn't attack the government, but spoke bluntly about the inadequacies of small-town American life where the center is ripped out, as if the heart, and anything goes because it’s the Jazz Age, and life is beautiful.
This book was published two years after W.W.I, or at a time of great euphoria and celebration. What is different now is that small-town America is tired. Its central role in American life has been ripped out, its economic base depleted, its stability threatened.
At first glance, its seemingly innocuous retreat into diversions has raised little concern. Huge casinos are turning up on the outskirts of small-town America sucking its core wealth and identity from its "main street" center. It has happened in my hometown. It has probably happened in yours.
I have also dwelled on the implicit dangers of our collective preoccupation with electronic wonders, which valuable as they may be in one sense, generate little more than escape toys from self and others in another. People using them are constantly playing games of distraction or talking to someone from a distance. I say this knowing no one is listening or taking this old codger seriously.
The Great Depression was a heart attack brought on by wild speculation. It was like the farmer hitting us with a two-by-four.
Today is different. We are killing ourselves with silent invasions. Much has been written about the recipe for disaster that eating, drinking, smoking, and debauching can be. These hiccup invasions, though dangerous, are still peripheral to the more telling ones. I'm talking about what I wrote in "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995):
"We live in a world of invasions. Countries invade other countries without provocation. Governments invade our bedrooms as they attempt to legislate morality. Men invade women as if it is their right. Television invades our homes and minds to create a wasteland of purpose. Obscenity as art invades our culture forsaking its role of promoting the nobility of man. Information invades all aspects of our private lives so that everything once sacred is now profane.
Conceivably, to invade each other's privacy is the basic way, perhaps the only way workers can relate to each other. There is little intimacy. The void created by its lack is now replaced by licentious gossip.
Humans think and dream. They love. Love requires intimacy. Without love, there is no intimacy. Intimacy is quite possible without being sexual, but intimacy is absolutely a disaster when sexual without being intimate.
Love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today's society: love of work, life, friendship, and being useful. Lust, greed and pleasure are the void fillers for those afraid to love." (The Worker, Alone, pp. 9 - 10)
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, July 13, 2008
THOUGHTS ON W. EDWARDS DEMING AND OUR DIMINISHING "AFFECT"
THOUGHTS ON W. EDWARDS DEMING AND OUR DIMINISHING “AFFECT”
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
© July 13, 2008
“The only way an organization’s leaders can get there from here is to lead from a place in time that assumes you are already there, and that is determined even though it hasn’t happened yet.”
Stanley M. Davis, “Future Perfect,” 1987, p. 25.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
I had a conversation on Deming's need to go to Japan because business leaders here snubbed him in the US. I’m a fan of Deming if not an expert. I have an acquaintance with Jamie Power (JD Power & Assoc), a company started just as Deming did, by gaining work with Japan (Toyota) because American companies were too indifferent to the power of customer surveying. I like to think our business leaders have learned from this complacency, but I think that would be over-stating the case. Instead, my opinion is that start-ups have the far-seeing talent and leadership to "get" innovative management techniques, and that's why companies like Google are always popping on the scene to eat the lunch of the blue chips. It's the way of commerce: innovation brings success which brings size; that almost inevitably leads to bureaucracy and mediocrity, unless your culture is wise like 3M with innovation built right into its process. That’s how I see it. How do you see it?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your spirited optimism generates reflection, at first blush, pessimism on my part. You dwell on the concrete, or the behavior, while I fly off into the abstract, or the motivation. Deming never made purchase on American soil because the motivation wasn’t there.
We are not a reflective society, first, because we have never found the time; and secondly, because we never recognized the need; but most important of all, because "culture" is the cause, and culture suggests operas, literature, symphonies, abstract art, and the like, and we like things down and dirty where you don't have to rise above genital understanding.
We are however a reactive society which is motivated by fear and retribution. In my long life, I cannot point to a single major challenge in which we anticipated and dealt with rather than reacted to danger. Deming was preaching quality when quality wasn't even in our vocabulary.
My profession of OD recognized the importance of quality when it was a haphazard discipline more than a generation ago, but it was a discipline born without teeth and with bleeding gums. Not helpful.
There were pioneers, and I worked for one, a man far ahead of his time in OD.
In 1980, I directed the largest quality control circle (QCC) program in the country due to the wisdom and foresight of my mentor, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth. We had 1,000 hourly workers in quality circles as early as the late 1970s at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. This was before most of the country ever heard of Deming.
We used Deming's statistical quality control. In fact, Honeywell had me attend a school of Six Sigma Quality Control (i.e., quality to the sixth decimal place) to familiarize me with the technology.
Six Sigma was statistics beautifully wrought, delivered, and applied. No symphonic music was more apropos or appreciated by the engineers taking the course. I was frankly awed by the whole process.
Later, again not my daily task, I attended a seminar in New York City of Dr. J. M. Juran's statistical process control. Juran identified chronic problems and attacked them at the source in the planning and process stage (see "Juran on Planning for Quality," 1988), not the product stage.
Attacking problems at the chronic state or where they happened most frequently made perfect sense, but operationally we were making scrap first followed by endless rework. Costly? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Juran had been on his soapbox for forty years before he got much attention, mirroring the experience of Juran.
If Honeywell seems the exception, it wasn't, and it isn't. A cruel way of putting it was that it gave managers an opportunity to display their crisis management and circular logic skills.
Juran's instruction was the pure beauty of another great mind like Deming's in profiling the statistical discipline. No one in my experience used an overhead projector more effectively, writing out his equations, schematics and graphs with a fluidity that was mesmerizing as well as informing.
THESE WERE MECHANICAL PROCESSES FOR MECHANICAL PURPOSES, and they worked as far as such processes go.
Honeywell had 2,000 support professionals who were not necessarily comfortable with the statistical approach to problem solving. Moreover, they tuned out to the quality circle format, as did the 1,000 engineers.
Engineers and other professionals did not like contrived meetings to make cosmetic changes. Blue-collar workers liked the attention, the cigarette breaks, and the condiments often provided. It was play, so why not go along?
The only problem is that 80 percent of Honeywell's workers, as with most high tech companies, were professional, whereas close to 90 percent of Japanese workers were blue collar. They were programmed to group activity.
We brought experts into Honeywell on OD from the University of Southern California who were proficient in wage and entitlement benefits, but this was HR and not OD. This didn't help with the problem.
Nor did the rhetoric or slogans (participative management, total quality management, total employee involvement, lifetime employment) improve performance. A worker was not a sanitized machine reducible to mathematics, as Einstein once alluded. The greatest mind of our age was championing our humanness, which had somehow got lost in the equation.
Every organization, and Honeywell was no exception, has a "cult of personality" (Honeywell's was engineering) with culture either taken for granted or dismissed as irrelevant, and therein lay the trouble.
Peter F. Drucker in a piece in The Wall Street Journal (March 28, 1991) made one of the most stupid statements ever made: "Don't change corporate culture. What we need is to change behavior." This inanity was the basis of my article "In Praise of Folly" (1993) for an engineering newsletter. CULTURE DICTATES BEHAVIOR. Nothing in my experience has proven truer.
So, as precious as Deming, Juran and Drucker are to the corporation, in one sense or another, they solve only half the equation, and half an equation, as we have seen, leads to the current problems on the corporate front.
Corporate executives look for profits and as little trouble as possible during their watch. They are not intellectually inclined however bright they may be; often prisoners of summaries generated by others; and quick to jump on the bandwagon of some guru with a magic panacea (translated: results without changing anything).
While finding Honeywell professionals not buying into "teaming" and "quality circles," I read Robert E. Cole's JAPANESE BLUE COLLAR (1971) and Cole's subsequent, WORK, MOBILITY & PARTICIPATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN AND JAPANESE INDUSTRY (1979).
The books were a gold mine. Cole spent years in Japan and as an American academic. He built a convincing case that the Japanese's group norm culture and the American's individual norm culture were like water and oil. He claimed it was dangerous to see the two in the same context, and to create strategies on this faulty basis. Yet, who was listening? Not many.
Then, Tom Brokaw came on NBCTV in 1980 with the cry, "Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The country went crazy with QCC's across the land. I watched this with amazement and some despair because we had had QCC's for years and they weren't working all that well.
It would cause me to present my remarks in a speech ("Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View," March 30, 1984), which nearly got me fired.
My experience complemented by my reading found everything falling into place. Culture was critical.
CORPORATE CULTURE (1982) by Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy, and THE JAPANESE MIND (1983) by Robert Christopher, along with scores of other books were all saying this with great clarity.
My shock was that OD could intellectualize the problem, but not exert palpable change. OD was going along to get along; was careful not to disturb the paycheck; and not create conflict with human resources, which had another role.
OD dangled between left and right brain thinking, deciding to surrender to left-brain thinking entirely as a matter of prudence. After all, were they not "social scientists"?
Typical of this approach is Dantel Hershey's "Entropy Analysis of an Aging, Evolving Corporate System" (1984). It is a statistical rendition of the problem of entropy and the need for negative entropy for regeneration of a corporation. Who understands this other than other OD practitioners?
You don't need statistical proof of entropy because it is right before your eyes. If you want to measure it, get in the trenches. Operators on the job may have no idea what "entropy" is but they can recognize it. They see it in their jobs drying up, but choose to ignore the signs. This complicity has killed the golden goose.
Some clarity of the problem was presented most recently by authors Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert Kaiser in their paper: THE TOXIC TRIANGLE: DESTRUCTIVE LEADERS, SUSCEPTIBLE FOLLOWERS AND CONDUCIVE ENVIRONMENTS (2008).
These authors did a thorough literature search to build their case, but provide little empirical evidence, the kind experience delivers. Such academics have the same problem that I have had: getting the right people's attention! Academic validation by Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane is not enough to alert corpocracy to its troubles.
Perhaps we need another Great Depression. We're doing all the right things to see that it comes about, all the safeguards notwithstanding.
I'm an old man on the sidelines attempting to write a novel, and I watch the mystic dance of people glued to their electronic toys, and I wonder what level of Dante's Hell we're in at the moment. Then, I also wonder, where is OD when you need it?
The other day a network program had a segment on a young man who was advertising on his iPod for a girl to teach him how to kiss. He was in his twenties and claimed never to have had a girlfriend, as he was addicted to computer games.
We have had 50 years of programming into operating in suspended electronic wonders to the point of diminishing our affect. This is evident from the top of our leadership to the lowest levels of followership.
First it was television as escape from individual thought and from the self.
Then, it was fondness for the noise of loud rock music with a metaphor for drowning out the desire for the possibility of individual human exchange with others.
After that, it was the frenetic mating of bodies in free love chasing the elusive ultimate orgasm. Now, sex has about as much mystery as a glass of water
Along the way television made us passive pansies for its vibrating blankness.
Now, electronic wonders keep coming off the assembly line at a maddening rate to reduce everything to the neutrality of individual and collective meaninglessness. So, today young people hold stultifying boredom in common.
My point is that innovation is a ruse if the soul is dead. Nietzsche said "God is dead," but I don't remember him going as far as the human soul. After all, it's what makes us human, and he wrote a book "All Too Human."
I confess that the pragmatics that you describe are superfluous if there isn't a core of life to the human soul. You mention 3M, which is a good example of innovation built into its processes, as you point out, and I've witnessed first hand. But even 3M is having trouble in the present climate, as you perhaps know, and is moving away from being this distinguished exception to the rule.
By coincidence, I am writing a novel about South Africa as Nelson Mandela celebrates his 90th birthday. He was in prison in 1968 when I was there. How could a man survive more than a score of years in prison and come out emotionally balanced and disciplined with a strong affect, enough so to forgive his captors? It gives one pause.
Your thoughts on innovation might include Mandela's reflection on leadership (Time, July 21, 2008):
(1) Courage is not the absence of fear. It's inspiring others to move beyond it.
(2) Lead from the front, but don't leave your base behind.
(3) Lead from the back, and let others believe they are in front.
(4) Know your enemy, and learn about his favorite sport.
(5) Keep your friends close, and your rivals closer.
(6) Appearances matter, and remember to smile.
(7) Nothing is black or white.
(8) Quitting is leading too.
There is so much wisdom here, so many ways to read these points other than that provided by Time, as they spell out so clearly what I've been attempting to convey about leadership. After nine books, I've not come close to the quiet wisdom of this quiet man.
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
© July 13, 2008
“The only way an organization’s leaders can get there from here is to lead from a place in time that assumes you are already there, and that is determined even though it hasn’t happened yet.”
Stanley M. Davis, “Future Perfect,” 1987, p. 25.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
I had a conversation on Deming's need to go to Japan because business leaders here snubbed him in the US. I’m a fan of Deming if not an expert. I have an acquaintance with Jamie Power (JD Power & Assoc), a company started just as Deming did, by gaining work with Japan (Toyota) because American companies were too indifferent to the power of customer surveying. I like to think our business leaders have learned from this complacency, but I think that would be over-stating the case. Instead, my opinion is that start-ups have the far-seeing talent and leadership to "get" innovative management techniques, and that's why companies like Google are always popping on the scene to eat the lunch of the blue chips. It's the way of commerce: innovation brings success which brings size; that almost inevitably leads to bureaucracy and mediocrity, unless your culture is wise like 3M with innovation built right into its process. That’s how I see it. How do you see it?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your spirited optimism generates reflection, at first blush, pessimism on my part. You dwell on the concrete, or the behavior, while I fly off into the abstract, or the motivation. Deming never made purchase on American soil because the motivation wasn’t there.
We are not a reflective society, first, because we have never found the time; and secondly, because we never recognized the need; but most important of all, because "culture" is the cause, and culture suggests operas, literature, symphonies, abstract art, and the like, and we like things down and dirty where you don't have to rise above genital understanding.
We are however a reactive society which is motivated by fear and retribution. In my long life, I cannot point to a single major challenge in which we anticipated and dealt with rather than reacted to danger. Deming was preaching quality when quality wasn't even in our vocabulary.
My profession of OD recognized the importance of quality when it was a haphazard discipline more than a generation ago, but it was a discipline born without teeth and with bleeding gums. Not helpful.
There were pioneers, and I worked for one, a man far ahead of his time in OD.
In 1980, I directed the largest quality control circle (QCC) program in the country due to the wisdom and foresight of my mentor, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth. We had 1,000 hourly workers in quality circles as early as the late 1970s at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. This was before most of the country ever heard of Deming.
We used Deming's statistical quality control. In fact, Honeywell had me attend a school of Six Sigma Quality Control (i.e., quality to the sixth decimal place) to familiarize me with the technology.
Six Sigma was statistics beautifully wrought, delivered, and applied. No symphonic music was more apropos or appreciated by the engineers taking the course. I was frankly awed by the whole process.
Later, again not my daily task, I attended a seminar in New York City of Dr. J. M. Juran's statistical process control. Juran identified chronic problems and attacked them at the source in the planning and process stage (see "Juran on Planning for Quality," 1988), not the product stage.
Attacking problems at the chronic state or where they happened most frequently made perfect sense, but operationally we were making scrap first followed by endless rework. Costly? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Juran had been on his soapbox for forty years before he got much attention, mirroring the experience of Juran.
If Honeywell seems the exception, it wasn't, and it isn't. A cruel way of putting it was that it gave managers an opportunity to display their crisis management and circular logic skills.
Juran's instruction was the pure beauty of another great mind like Deming's in profiling the statistical discipline. No one in my experience used an overhead projector more effectively, writing out his equations, schematics and graphs with a fluidity that was mesmerizing as well as informing.
THESE WERE MECHANICAL PROCESSES FOR MECHANICAL PURPOSES, and they worked as far as such processes go.
Honeywell had 2,000 support professionals who were not necessarily comfortable with the statistical approach to problem solving. Moreover, they tuned out to the quality circle format, as did the 1,000 engineers.
Engineers and other professionals did not like contrived meetings to make cosmetic changes. Blue-collar workers liked the attention, the cigarette breaks, and the condiments often provided. It was play, so why not go along?
The only problem is that 80 percent of Honeywell's workers, as with most high tech companies, were professional, whereas close to 90 percent of Japanese workers were blue collar. They were programmed to group activity.
We brought experts into Honeywell on OD from the University of Southern California who were proficient in wage and entitlement benefits, but this was HR and not OD. This didn't help with the problem.
Nor did the rhetoric or slogans (participative management, total quality management, total employee involvement, lifetime employment) improve performance. A worker was not a sanitized machine reducible to mathematics, as Einstein once alluded. The greatest mind of our age was championing our humanness, which had somehow got lost in the equation.
Every organization, and Honeywell was no exception, has a "cult of personality" (Honeywell's was engineering) with culture either taken for granted or dismissed as irrelevant, and therein lay the trouble.
Peter F. Drucker in a piece in The Wall Street Journal (March 28, 1991) made one of the most stupid statements ever made: "Don't change corporate culture. What we need is to change behavior." This inanity was the basis of my article "In Praise of Folly" (1993) for an engineering newsletter. CULTURE DICTATES BEHAVIOR. Nothing in my experience has proven truer.
So, as precious as Deming, Juran and Drucker are to the corporation, in one sense or another, they solve only half the equation, and half an equation, as we have seen, leads to the current problems on the corporate front.
Corporate executives look for profits and as little trouble as possible during their watch. They are not intellectually inclined however bright they may be; often prisoners of summaries generated by others; and quick to jump on the bandwagon of some guru with a magic panacea (translated: results without changing anything).
While finding Honeywell professionals not buying into "teaming" and "quality circles," I read Robert E. Cole's JAPANESE BLUE COLLAR (1971) and Cole's subsequent, WORK, MOBILITY & PARTICIPATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN AND JAPANESE INDUSTRY (1979).
The books were a gold mine. Cole spent years in Japan and as an American academic. He built a convincing case that the Japanese's group norm culture and the American's individual norm culture were like water and oil. He claimed it was dangerous to see the two in the same context, and to create strategies on this faulty basis. Yet, who was listening? Not many.
Then, Tom Brokaw came on NBCTV in 1980 with the cry, "Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The country went crazy with QCC's across the land. I watched this with amazement and some despair because we had had QCC's for years and they weren't working all that well.
It would cause me to present my remarks in a speech ("Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View," March 30, 1984), which nearly got me fired.
My experience complemented by my reading found everything falling into place. Culture was critical.
CORPORATE CULTURE (1982) by Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy, and THE JAPANESE MIND (1983) by Robert Christopher, along with scores of other books were all saying this with great clarity.
My shock was that OD could intellectualize the problem, but not exert palpable change. OD was going along to get along; was careful not to disturb the paycheck; and not create conflict with human resources, which had another role.
OD dangled between left and right brain thinking, deciding to surrender to left-brain thinking entirely as a matter of prudence. After all, were they not "social scientists"?
Typical of this approach is Dantel Hershey's "Entropy Analysis of an Aging, Evolving Corporate System" (1984). It is a statistical rendition of the problem of entropy and the need for negative entropy for regeneration of a corporation. Who understands this other than other OD practitioners?
You don't need statistical proof of entropy because it is right before your eyes. If you want to measure it, get in the trenches. Operators on the job may have no idea what "entropy" is but they can recognize it. They see it in their jobs drying up, but choose to ignore the signs. This complicity has killed the golden goose.
Some clarity of the problem was presented most recently by authors Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert Kaiser in their paper: THE TOXIC TRIANGLE: DESTRUCTIVE LEADERS, SUSCEPTIBLE FOLLOWERS AND CONDUCIVE ENVIRONMENTS (2008).
These authors did a thorough literature search to build their case, but provide little empirical evidence, the kind experience delivers. Such academics have the same problem that I have had: getting the right people's attention! Academic validation by Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane is not enough to alert corpocracy to its troubles.
Perhaps we need another Great Depression. We're doing all the right things to see that it comes about, all the safeguards notwithstanding.
I'm an old man on the sidelines attempting to write a novel, and I watch the mystic dance of people glued to their electronic toys, and I wonder what level of Dante's Hell we're in at the moment. Then, I also wonder, where is OD when you need it?
The other day a network program had a segment on a young man who was advertising on his iPod for a girl to teach him how to kiss. He was in his twenties and claimed never to have had a girlfriend, as he was addicted to computer games.
We have had 50 years of programming into operating in suspended electronic wonders to the point of diminishing our affect. This is evident from the top of our leadership to the lowest levels of followership.
First it was television as escape from individual thought and from the self.
Then, it was fondness for the noise of loud rock music with a metaphor for drowning out the desire for the possibility of individual human exchange with others.
After that, it was the frenetic mating of bodies in free love chasing the elusive ultimate orgasm. Now, sex has about as much mystery as a glass of water
Along the way television made us passive pansies for its vibrating blankness.
Now, electronic wonders keep coming off the assembly line at a maddening rate to reduce everything to the neutrality of individual and collective meaninglessness. So, today young people hold stultifying boredom in common.
My point is that innovation is a ruse if the soul is dead. Nietzsche said "God is dead," but I don't remember him going as far as the human soul. After all, it's what makes us human, and he wrote a book "All Too Human."
I confess that the pragmatics that you describe are superfluous if there isn't a core of life to the human soul. You mention 3M, which is a good example of innovation built into its processes, as you point out, and I've witnessed first hand. But even 3M is having trouble in the present climate, as you perhaps know, and is moving away from being this distinguished exception to the rule.
By coincidence, I am writing a novel about South Africa as Nelson Mandela celebrates his 90th birthday. He was in prison in 1968 when I was there. How could a man survive more than a score of years in prison and come out emotionally balanced and disciplined with a strong affect, enough so to forgive his captors? It gives one pause.
Your thoughts on innovation might include Mandela's reflection on leadership (Time, July 21, 2008):
(1) Courage is not the absence of fear. It's inspiring others to move beyond it.
(2) Lead from the front, but don't leave your base behind.
(3) Lead from the back, and let others believe they are in front.
(4) Know your enemy, and learn about his favorite sport.
(5) Keep your friends close, and your rivals closer.
(6) Appearances matter, and remember to smile.
(7) Nothing is black or white.
(8) Quitting is leading too.
There is so much wisdom here, so many ways to read these points other than that provided by Time, as they spell out so clearly what I've been attempting to convey about leadership. After nine books, I've not come close to the quiet wisdom of this quiet man.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
FOLLY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
FOLLY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 10, 2008
“The Christian religion on the whole seems to have some kinship with folly, while it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proof of this, observe first that children, old people, women, and fools take more delight than anyone else in holy and religious things; and that they are therefore ever nearest the altars, led no doubt solely by instinct.”
Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), The Praise of Folly (Hendricks House 1946), p. 127.
Writer Comment:
(Reference: “Perplexing Dilemma.” This piece looked at the prudence of a community wise in forestalling the flooding waters of the Mississippi River, but foolish in not preserving its ancient landmarks.)
I do not profess knowing the history of Clinton, Iowa's Catholic churches since I knew nothing of them until starting to St. Mary's school in third grade.
You made reference to a number of matters to which I hold some knowledge. For example, Mount St. Clare Academy was merged with St. Mary's to become Mater Dei High School the year my son, who was going to Mount St. Clare Academy, was to be a senior. He finished instead at Clinton High School, a good choice at the time. Mount St. Clare College is now Ashford University and flourishing.
Sacred Heart is not on the chopping block as you suggest. St. Ireneaus has been defrocked as a church. St. Patrick's church has indeed been razed, and the site sold. The city council would not approve the site for lower income housing as suggested by the church.
I have been a contributor to the new church, which will replace all these old churches, and will celebrate when it is opened. I have not, nor will I contribute a single dime for costly repairs to run down buildings.
Take care, God bless.
George
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher Responds:
George,
Thanks for your reflections. Artifacts of history are worth preserving. They are palpable evidence of a community's character.
The American Catholic Church, in this case the Archdiocese of Davenport, Iowa, has dangled, drifted, and declined going along to get along and now is deep in its own dodo.
Catholics have left the Church in droves across the nation because of its failure to maintain the church as a living, breathing, and relevant institution. I have written elsewhere:
"The Vatican is some forty hectares of property and the most powerful state on earth. It is an absolutist medieval monarchy, a throne bolstered by a religion that has become little more than a show of televised papal visits, but bottom line, a business."
Nor am I a historian but have read deeply on Roman Catholicism as it has permeated my most formative years. Like it or not, I am a Catholic thinker and Catholic writer. It is my limitations and the boundaries of my perspective.
I see the elephant of life from this lone vantage point. The Roman Church has had a polka dot history, often losing its way, and seldom rises far above the baser instincts of the human experience.
Stated another way, the Church has seldom allowed its spiritual calling to get in the way of its material aspirations.
It is for that reason I share little of your optimism that Church properties in Clinton will survive the selling block. Church authorities are primarily bean counters.
Only today I read that the Vatican ran $13 million in the red in 2007, blaming it on the weak American dollar against the Euro.
That may not seem like startling news, but it is. The church has usually had a comfortable cash flow. What is the shortfall -- the tourist business? You would think we were discussing Disney World.
That is the state of religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Wasn't it Jesus that tossed the moneychangers out of the temple?
It is apparent that the Church agrees with you that these artifacts "are run down buildings too costly to maintain," failing to see beyond the material boundaries.
Imagine an institution with scores of structures of impressive architecture well over a hundred years old in a small community such as Clinton being treated as so much worn out brick and mortar. This would never happen in Europe.
But as Vance Packard wrote in The Waste Makers (1964):
"Americans cannot stand anything that has a little age on it, homes, furniture, cars, homes, or other people, places or things."
We build our lives on disposable income and disposable possessions, and disposable relationships, but never more so than now. Impermanence has become a lifestyle.
My beat is the complex organization. I am physician to that territory, and I have seen the many sins the church has committed that has literally cut the spirit out of the Church, and with it the devotion of tens of millions of souls.
Ashford University may be quite successful, but it is no longer a Catholic institution sustaining the Catholic culture to which many have benefited. It has created its own secular culture and that is a protean factor to its success.
The culture of Mount St. Clare was disposed of as a real estate deal, which is my point.
When the Bishop of Davenport dissolved St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare, and arbitrarily created a synthetic hybrid of the two, he did what we say in OD, “the clash of cultures has killed them both.”
St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare were two different cultures with two different teaching orders (Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sisters of St. Francis), both Catholic orders, but with widely different histories, values and traditions.
Corporate America does this all the time with the same results as Mater Dei. The school has become essentially a vestige of the imagination.
The European-American Catholic Church is mainly dead, so the Church has turned to Africa, again to South America, and South East Asia to take up the slack, areas rich in population but poor in filthy lucre as Freud might put it.
Garry Wills, once a Jesuit, and now a Northwestern University adjunct professor, and prolific author, wrote in his book, PAPAL SIN: Structures of Deceit (Doubleday 2000):
"The truth, we are told, will make us free. It is time to free Catholics, lay as well as clerical, from the structures of deceit that are our subtler modern form of papal sin . . . These are the quiet sins of intellectual betrayal."
This book inspired me to write CORPORATE SIN: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (AuthorHouse 2000).
Most recently, I wrote a long piece DANGLING, DRIFTING, DECLINING, And COLLAPSING: The New American Frontier? (Peripatetic Philosopher July 9, 2008). In that piece, I outlined my experiences that mirrored our times, structures not unlike the Church, which have become incongruent with the times and their function.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 10, 2008
“The Christian religion on the whole seems to have some kinship with folly, while it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proof of this, observe first that children, old people, women, and fools take more delight than anyone else in holy and religious things; and that they are therefore ever nearest the altars, led no doubt solely by instinct.”
Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), The Praise of Folly (Hendricks House 1946), p. 127.
Writer Comment:
(Reference: “Perplexing Dilemma.” This piece looked at the prudence of a community wise in forestalling the flooding waters of the Mississippi River, but foolish in not preserving its ancient landmarks.)
I do not profess knowing the history of Clinton, Iowa's Catholic churches since I knew nothing of them until starting to St. Mary's school in third grade.
You made reference to a number of matters to which I hold some knowledge. For example, Mount St. Clare Academy was merged with St. Mary's to become Mater Dei High School the year my son, who was going to Mount St. Clare Academy, was to be a senior. He finished instead at Clinton High School, a good choice at the time. Mount St. Clare College is now Ashford University and flourishing.
Sacred Heart is not on the chopping block as you suggest. St. Ireneaus has been defrocked as a church. St. Patrick's church has indeed been razed, and the site sold. The city council would not approve the site for lower income housing as suggested by the church.
I have been a contributor to the new church, which will replace all these old churches, and will celebrate when it is opened. I have not, nor will I contribute a single dime for costly repairs to run down buildings.
Take care, God bless.
George
* * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher Responds:
George,
Thanks for your reflections. Artifacts of history are worth preserving. They are palpable evidence of a community's character.
The American Catholic Church, in this case the Archdiocese of Davenport, Iowa, has dangled, drifted, and declined going along to get along and now is deep in its own dodo.
Catholics have left the Church in droves across the nation because of its failure to maintain the church as a living, breathing, and relevant institution. I have written elsewhere:
"The Vatican is some forty hectares of property and the most powerful state on earth. It is an absolutist medieval monarchy, a throne bolstered by a religion that has become little more than a show of televised papal visits, but bottom line, a business."
Nor am I a historian but have read deeply on Roman Catholicism as it has permeated my most formative years. Like it or not, I am a Catholic thinker and Catholic writer. It is my limitations and the boundaries of my perspective.
I see the elephant of life from this lone vantage point. The Roman Church has had a polka dot history, often losing its way, and seldom rises far above the baser instincts of the human experience.
Stated another way, the Church has seldom allowed its spiritual calling to get in the way of its material aspirations.
It is for that reason I share little of your optimism that Church properties in Clinton will survive the selling block. Church authorities are primarily bean counters.
Only today I read that the Vatican ran $13 million in the red in 2007, blaming it on the weak American dollar against the Euro.
That may not seem like startling news, but it is. The church has usually had a comfortable cash flow. What is the shortfall -- the tourist business? You would think we were discussing Disney World.
That is the state of religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Wasn't it Jesus that tossed the moneychangers out of the temple?
It is apparent that the Church agrees with you that these artifacts "are run down buildings too costly to maintain," failing to see beyond the material boundaries.
Imagine an institution with scores of structures of impressive architecture well over a hundred years old in a small community such as Clinton being treated as so much worn out brick and mortar. This would never happen in Europe.
But as Vance Packard wrote in The Waste Makers (1964):
"Americans cannot stand anything that has a little age on it, homes, furniture, cars, homes, or other people, places or things."
We build our lives on disposable income and disposable possessions, and disposable relationships, but never more so than now. Impermanence has become a lifestyle.
My beat is the complex organization. I am physician to that territory, and I have seen the many sins the church has committed that has literally cut the spirit out of the Church, and with it the devotion of tens of millions of souls.
Ashford University may be quite successful, but it is no longer a Catholic institution sustaining the Catholic culture to which many have benefited. It has created its own secular culture and that is a protean factor to its success.
The culture of Mount St. Clare was disposed of as a real estate deal, which is my point.
When the Bishop of Davenport dissolved St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare, and arbitrarily created a synthetic hybrid of the two, he did what we say in OD, “the clash of cultures has killed them both.”
St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare were two different cultures with two different teaching orders (Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sisters of St. Francis), both Catholic orders, but with widely different histories, values and traditions.
Corporate America does this all the time with the same results as Mater Dei. The school has become essentially a vestige of the imagination.
The European-American Catholic Church is mainly dead, so the Church has turned to Africa, again to South America, and South East Asia to take up the slack, areas rich in population but poor in filthy lucre as Freud might put it.
Garry Wills, once a Jesuit, and now a Northwestern University adjunct professor, and prolific author, wrote in his book, PAPAL SIN: Structures of Deceit (Doubleday 2000):
"The truth, we are told, will make us free. It is time to free Catholics, lay as well as clerical, from the structures of deceit that are our subtler modern form of papal sin . . . These are the quiet sins of intellectual betrayal."
This book inspired me to write CORPORATE SIN: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (AuthorHouse 2000).
Most recently, I wrote a long piece DANGLING, DRIFTING, DECLINING, And COLLAPSING: The New American Frontier? (Peripatetic Philosopher July 9, 2008). In that piece, I outlined my experiences that mirrored our times, structures not unlike the Church, which have become incongruent with the times and their function.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
DANGLING, DRIFTING, DECLINING, COLLAPSING: THE NEW AMERICAN FRONTIER?
DANGLING, DRIFTING, DECLINING, AND COLLAPSING: THE NEW AMERICAN FRONTIER?
HARD LESSONS OF OD NEVER LEARNED, CONTINUED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 9, 2008
“All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth, including America, of course, consist of pilferings from other people’s wash. No tribe, however significant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other’s territorial clotheslines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and restolen 500 times.”
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
Comment of Reader:
GM had one of the largest OD departments of any US corporation. It had union and management that lost their way during the “free” years of 1949 – 1964. It was a time when US industry could make believe that they were the best in the world. It was easy in the 1960s for Europe and Asia to take on flabby US industries. So, OD on board is not necessarily the answer.
Dr. Fisher Responds:
When I was with Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) in the 1980s, we had no less than seven Ph.D.s in OD, but our work was confined primarily to training and cosmetic interventions. We were like pedigreed robots of the system, well credentials but with little challenge to the status quo. I suspect the same was true at GM. The OD qualitative impact is not necessarily a function of the OD quantitative presence.
The times need to be leavened with a little down country Mark Twain philosophy. That is to say, this is not the time to rally for a cause but to recognize that the good, the bad, and the ugly seem degrees of the same behavior. In point of fact, the dichotomy between good and evil has today transmogrified from evil to lesser evil, as no side is above the need for redemption. It is no longer “we” against “them,” but “we” against “us,” a variation of Walt Kelley’s “Pogo.”
Organization development (OD) knows, understands and works in this murky climate. As Mark Twain suggests in his remarks (above), no one can stand on the sidelines in a stain free white uniform, as we are all soiled by the fray like it or not; all guilty of the same sins either by commission or omission.
We must get past this posturing or dystopia in a clear possibility. We must attack the behavior, not the race, religion, nation or culture. Individuals do bad things, but people are inherently good, and there is no progress in the blatant defamation of character. OD focuses on individual and collective behavior, and lets the chips fall where they may. It is probably why it is a hidden science.
EMOTIONAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION HEALTH
There is perhaps some confusion as to the nature of organization development (OD). As physician to the organization, OD monitors the emotional health; as policeman it serves and protects the dual interests of workers and the organization alike; and as priest it monitors the spiritual health and ethical well being to enhance its focus and survival.
One of the incongruities of the complex organization is that finance reports directly to the chief executive officer, but not OD. OD has an equal responsibility and comparable impact. Without OD’s qualitative contribution, the organization is likely to spin out of control. It does this by being obsessed with command only to generate chaos, failing to realize that control is a function of letting go within reasonable perimeters.
THE PURPOSE OF THE ORGANIZATION IS WHAT IT DOES
OD monitors "what it does" making corrections to prevent it from sliding off track. OD does this by using various unobtrusive instruments to gauge where it is to where it thinks it is, along with interventions to correct its course.
Two common constructs common to organization are motivation and morale.
Motivation is an individual norm. It is revealed in the construct of attitude, or the individual’s predisposition to act in a certain way. Workers bring their attitude to the workplace. Motivation is complex, but common indices represent the equivalent of “a look inside” the individual. These include the individual’s values, interests (intrinsic and extrinsic), aspirations, self-image, self-perception and dreams.
The workplace has an attitude as well. It is called “culture.” If the attitude of the workplace is incompatible with workers’ motivation-attitude, and workers fail to adapt and adjust to the prevailing cultural norm, then there is likely to be a problem. This problem is called “morale.”
Morale is a group norm. Morale is based on the collective response of workers to the construct of culture. Culture is the collective values, beliefs, ethics, interests, work and economic history of the workplace over time.
Individuals bring their attitudes to the workplace culture. The workplace culture exacts its attitude on these workers. They have a choice: either to adapt to the group norm or move on. If they don’t, if the workplace culture is not compatible with their value system, work could literally affect their health: physically, mentally, and emotionally. No paycheck is worth such a price.
Attitudes rarely change. If entrepreneur-oriented individuals are in a company that has little interest in innovation, the individual is likely to become frustrated, and feel locked in a pressure cooker.
Morale can be improved by an OD intervention. The organization could design with OD assistance a recruiting, selecting, and hiring policy consistent with its workplace culture and work requirements. Existing staff could participate in the same intervention in an effort to increase harmony while upgrading skills. Such an intervention will be discussed later.
All bets are off when an organization merges with another entity without giving due consideration to the natural incompatibilities of discrete cultures. These distinct cultures must be identified, studied, and evaluated before adopting a strategy and schedule to promote integration.
OD does not dictate the culture. OD endeavors to do an in depth study of the culture and to make recommendations consistent with its findings. When cultures merge, a whole new set of problems is created. Dealing with these problems is as important as a viable business plan.
An organization goes through the iterative process of birth, growth, maturity, and deterioration according to the laws of entropy. To increase longevity, it must reinvent itself to restore its viability.
Failure to acknowledge and adapt to new technology and to the changing demands of the marketplace are likely to create internal stress and strain, and lead inevitably to crisis, as the operation encounters difficulty responding to unanticipated or accelerating external demands.
I made an intervention of a police department in Virginia, which went from 84 officers to 840 officers in ten years. It had a set culture in which all new police officers had to spend a minimum of three years in patrol before going into administration. A crisis developed when a riot occurred in a suburb, only to find a plethora of complaints in the area had not been processed. No one in central command was computer literate although it had the technology available with officers in the field with the academic training. Complaints were still hand processed with boxes of them yet untouched (M.A. thesis: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, USF, 1976).
Morale is a construct of culture. It can be anticipated and managed by this formula:
The way work is structured determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organization behavior; organization behavior establishes whether the purpose of the organization will be fulfilled or not (“Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership,” Winter 2002, pp. 20 – 24).
OD steps were taken to redress this snafu, but not before a riot brought the matter to the public’s attention.
When morale is high, individual and group interests coincide. When morale is low, the organization is paralyzed and can spin off into crisis. That was the case here.
MORALE: A CAVEAT
Low morale can be compounded by an inappropriate intervention.
That happened in the 1980s throughout the United States. Human resources management (HR) convinced senior management to increase pay and benefits to workers, along with recreational opportunities on the job, and mind you, without these perks being tied to improved performance. It was as if work was turned into play, and workers had only to show up for work on time, and leave on schedule to merit a paycheck.
For a half-century, workers had been programmed to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, and conforming. Passivity had become an engrained habit of doing. This intervention ignored this fact, failed to deal with it, and unwittingly reinforced more of the same.
Workers had been “management dependent” in a Culture of Comfort, where managers acted as surrogate parent. Now, workers as “spoiled child” slipped into “counter dependence on the workplace” for their total well being in the Culture of Complacency. This became the equivalent of workers being stuck in terminal adolescence (see “Six Silent Killers," CRC Press 1998) with the mindset of obedient 12-year-olds in 50-year-old bodies.
Group norms do not change automatically; nor can a culture be changed by edict.
The workplace culture needs to be understood for what it is and how it works before considering how it would prefer to be. To make the transition to the desired state, OD employs this simple formula:
Pain (struggle) + risk (change) = growth (reinvention)
An organization that echoes the sentiment, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” will fail to grow, and eventually fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, many organizations are committed to doing too little, too late.
GM and the UAW may have a cadre of OD practitioners, as do many other organizations, but all are governed by the same principle: the purpose of an organization is what it does. If what it does is not purposeful, and OD is present, and doesn’t do anything about it, then OD is a token concession to image and of no moment.
PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW
Sometimes you have to use shock therapy to get attention.
On March 30, 1984 at the Caribbean Gulf Resort, Clearwater, Florida, I gave the keynote address to the DCAS Forum of Department of Defense (DoD) contractors. The theme of the seminar was “Participative Management,” which was, at the time, celebrated across the United States as the panacea to productivity in the public and private sector.
Some 400 delegates attended, from admirals and generals to CEOs and contract professionals from both sides of the military and industrial complex.
The vice president and general manager of my division (Honeywell Avionics) gave opening remarks apparently about how wonderful this new process was working. I was not present to hear his remarks.
For four years, I had been working on Honeywell Avionics’ attractive college type campus of some 4,000 employees with workers building prototypes for NASA, and ring laser gyro guidance systems for the US Navy, the facilities two biggest customers.
Here are samples of my remarks to this august assembly of delegates:
“A typical company today is made up of those that manage and those that do. Those that manage have become a force unto themselves. Next there is a parallel organization that supports and serves management that neither manages nor does anything contributing to the bottom line. These are primarily staff functions.
“These non-doer doers have been called ‘professionals.’ You find them in personnel, finance, security, marketing, maintenance, and even engineering. They have created a need for their services and deliver it with consummate flair. Once there presence has been identified as a need management cannot do without, they have won security.
“We have far too many non-doer doers doing non-thing things. So, when the competitive edge to American enterprise was felt, the last thing considered was to get rid of this excess baggage. No, a far easier course was to get rid of the doers throughout the organization who never found time to secure their security. This has contributed to participative management’ becoming an oxymoron."
At another point in the talk:
“The place in which I work is comparable to other multifaceted facilities of mega corporations. Out of a population of 4,000, there are 1,000 production workers (25%), 1,000 engineers (25%), 400 managers (10%), and 2,000 professionals (50%). That means we have one manager for every ten workers.
“If that were not concern enough, no less than one quarter of these professionals are believed to be having serial careers ‘on the job’ at the expense of their paid position. I have conducted informal surveys throughout the five plants and have witnessed workers selling jewelry, pet fish, insurance, real estate, running a restaurant, and management consulting from their cubicles or offices. I have also found them doing graduate work, grading papers as professors for local universities, even running a hardware store, and doing private investigative work at their desk for an attorney.
"This is not hidden. It is completely in the open. Indeed, I have seen people selling fruits and vegetables right under the nose of the security. Workers show their badges than make their purchases. Several others find time to have assignations in plant cafeterias between scheduled meal hours; still others can be found taking smoke breaks every half hour outside one of the facilities, rain or shine.
“The recreation center is a busy place at lunchtime. Workers can be seen, playing basketball, handball, pool, chess, or jogging. The turnaround time for some of these workers is easily two or more hours.
At yet another snippet:
“Two hundred years ago, when most business was conducted in small guilds, there was great informality without rules and regulations or performance appraisals, without non-doer doer supervisors breathing down workers’ necks.
“Survival was predicated on doing the best you could with the skills you had, and others took up the slack. Workers knew who they were by what they did. They had a sense of pride and ownership and brought this to work. Work was love made visible.
“Often work was dirty, grimy and exhausting with little profit at the end of the day. We romanticize this period now, but in reality it was a harsh environment, working seventy hours a week was not uncommon. There were no entitlements and bosses worked as hard and other workers. Usually, they were the owners.
“Were these workers happy? Not particularly. Were they productive? Extremely so. Were they doing the best they could do? Generally speaking, yes. Did they have the entrepreneur spirit? The best and the brightest did, but they didn’t punish the others that didn’t. They had no choice. The wolf was always gaining ground on everybody.
“Two hundred years later, we have the sophisticated complex organization which has made the individual non-responsible for his own actions. The organization has become the worker’s caregiver and caretaker.
“Incredibly, the worker has been left out of the equation, relieved of struggle, of the pain of growth, and the consequences of his and other workers misguided behavior.
“A productive worker is awarded no more than an nonproductive worker, which means a productive worker is punished for excelling. This weakens the organization. It protects the worker from the reality of his efforts, and thereby protects him from knowing himself. There can be no real success if failure is not identified and dealt with accordingly.
“Failure is correctible if failure is acknowledged. Otherwise, the worker becomes self-estranged, and self-doubting, always looking for answers outside himself, never seeing the reality of his own experience clearly.
“The worker no longer identifies with the quality of what he does. He has gravitated from fierce independence to groveling dependence; from being captain of his fate to its nervous victim.
“Meanwhile, management manages the way it is paid, which is predicated on costs, meeting schedule and profits. Workers are sacrificed to the bottom line, and so workers in turn see any problem regarding costs, schedule and profits ‘management’s problem,’ not theirs.
“It is the single most glaring reason that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the workers; or four out of every five workers are more preoccupied with what they can get than doing what they are paid to do. This equation has failed to change despite all the cosmetic interventions, participative management being the latest.
“You cannot reconcile a 50-year-lapse with a campaign of ‘employee involvement’ when workers have no sense of ownership. You cannot launch a campaign of ‘pay-for-performance’ when managers have been programmed to be subjective about work and workers for half a century.
“You must start from scratch and ease workers into self-responsibility and managers into accountability. There are no shortcuts. Peace!”
(Note: I was put on “house arrest” for this speech having to turn over all my notebooks, and my notes every week; my salary was frozen for 18 months; and I was not allowed to give any public speeches during this quarantine period. The notebooks were returned, unread. They eventually became the book, Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches Delta Group 1990.)
BALANCING ACT – AN OD INTERVENTION
I had been a corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company in the “for profit” private sector. Following earning my Ph.D., I consulted for ten years in the public and private sector before joining Honeywell Avionics, whose customers were all in the public sector.
One of my first OD interventions at Honeywell Avionics had to do with the engineering community. It was pure serendipity. I was asked to prepare a paper to be presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (October 1981). The paper I created was based on my work as manager of Honeywell’s Quality Circle Program, which at the time was the largest in the country. The paper was titled, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation Through Participation.”
When the engineer returned, I asked him to give me a report of the conference’s reaction to the paper. This surprised him.
“I didn’t take any notes.”
In further investigation into this engineering community, I learned that engineers did all their own training no matter the duplication, and that these technical sojourns were treated largely as recreational perks.
After completing extensive demographic work of the engineering community, I discovered something quite disturbing:
· 80 percent of the 1,000 engineers were working on technology developed after these engineers had left school.
· Engineering salaries were highest for engineers with the most obsolescent engineering skills.
· Honeywell was paying for incompetence by awarding seniority over state of the arts engineering proficiencies.
Taking up this slack were the neophyte engineers coming out of the colleges and universities, who were making less than a third to half as much as the more veteran engineers.
Presenting this to senior management, a budget of $1 million was set aside to create a Technical Education Program, which won enthusiastic support from the engineering community after an initial period of understandable skepticism.
Today, technicians are earning their engineering degrees in cooperation with the Department of Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) in this program.
(Note: I presented a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 9, 1986, ironically two years after being sanctioned for my adversarial speech on participative management. The engineering paper was titled, Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program.)
We created a Technical Education Chair to be rotated to a new veteran engineer every year. This became a morale booster for these engineers who saw an opportunity to put their personal stamp on technical education during their tenure.
Electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, systems analysts, physicists and mathematicians came to occupy the chair. Classes were conducted during and after hours with most of the instructors holding Ph.D. degrees in their discipline. I wrote a “train-the-trainer” monograph (Training the Occasional Instructor, February 1984) for these instructors.
OD can work, and does work when OD confronts the issue, takes the heat, and looks past the resistance to develop common ground that serves the objective of the intervention.
One reason the resistance was not greater might have been the fact that I had been a laboratory chemist, knew the technical culture, along with the jargon, and remembered how insular and insecure if not xenophobic this technical culture could be.
Engineers have paid dearly for this inward-looking predilection. They have created the postmodern world but non-engineers own it. As knowing as engineers may be in their discipline, they appear equally ignorant of the social, political and moral skullduggery, which was taking place right under their noses.
We don’t like to consider science and engineering as conforming disciplines, but they are. People in them seldom venture much beyond what they know and love. Take how Microsoft finessed Seattle Computer:
“Microsoft bought the rights to what was called the ‘Quick and Dirty Operating System’ (QDOS) from Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become. Microsoft quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was home free.
“This is a common story throughout the history of engineering. Engineers have been finessed and flummoxed by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and sophistication when it comes to selling and profiting from their ideas.” (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” AuthorHouse 2007, pp. 113 – 114.)
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
A quarter century later, we have gone from dangling to drifting to declining to collapsing on so many fronts that it is dizzying to keep up with these discouraging developments. Mort Zuckerman of US News & World Report suggested Sunday, July 6, 2008 on PBS that we are “now in the most serious recession since the Great Depression.” Still, most people don’t feel it so it doesn’t exist.
When I went to Europe in 1986 as director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., I found Europe, if anything, in worse shape than the United States.
Europe was still shackled with the Work Councils of post WWII in most countries. These labor-regulating bodies controlled wages and benefits to an absurd degree. Workers in France and Italy at the time enjoyed workweeks of 35 hours or less.
The Residential Manufacturing Division of Honeywell Europe provided an early introduction into the European problem. Building and residential thermostatic control systems were selling at land office prices. The only problem Honeywell was losing money.
An OD study revealed that 90 percent of the buyers of Honeywell commercial and residential control systems were college trained while only 10 percent of Honeywell’s sellers were. Honeywell sellers were being taken by their buyers, and with reason.
Moreover, most Honeywell Europe HR directors, especially in the smaller countries, were basically finance officers with HR an added role. They had little training in human resource management.
Then there was the latent national animosity between some countries, a holdover from the Second World War. It surfaced as a reluctance to share talent, technology, and even Honeywell products manufactured in their country.
The European Economic Community (EEC) was struggling with its new political, social and economic configuration as well, prime territory for OD.
We developed a “Performance Management System” (PMS) that:
(1) Set up skills training for HR directors;
(2) Developed an “Upgrade the Skills of the Workforce” by creating competency profiles, career roadmaps, assessment centers, and incentives to seek further education, along with all new hires in critical skills to be college graduates; and
(3) Tracked high talent throughout Europe with a software database which profiled this talent pool in terms of education, age, job experience, and readiness for promotion.
PMS cut through underlying national animosity as self-interest triumphed over old grudges. Delight was expressed when a match between need and talent was found. It also improved morale as professionals discovered expanded opportunity.
YOUR POINT, DR. FISHER!
In the simplest terms: we need to grow up, especially the management of our society. The people that rise to the top epitomize immaturity. If you have any doubt, follow their behavior. They haven’t left the sixth grade; live in Camelot and play King Arthur games.
I once gave a copy of my book “Six Silent Killers” to a very successful industrialist. We were having lunch one day and I asked him if he had read the book.
“The good parts.”
“The good parts?”
“Where you’re not rattling management’s cage.”
“What did you learn?”
“What did I learn?”
The question clearly puzzled him. It was apparent he had learned nothing. The book, which was about passive corporate behavior, and how management condoned or sponsored it, was to his taste obviously a distasteful exercise. He was a busy man! He had no time for criticism. He was also a trained critical thinker, comfortable with what he knew, but not comfortable with what he didn’t know, but could find out.
“Six Silent Killers” invited him to think creatively, to ponder ideas in a conceptual framework that defined the ills of corpocracy. As an OD practitioner, I had found serious voids between directing and doing.
The book made no attempt to slide into the popular rhetoric of “thinking outside the box.” Its premise was to think outside the discipline of thinking; to thrash about in the chaotic and contradictory realm of intuition, letting the mind unhinge itself from pet perceptions and deceptions, and free fall to whatever might collect before the mind hit consciousness.
* * * * * * * * * * *
When you address a company of executives, they assume you see them as creative thinkers, which of course they aren’t. They live in the protective carapace of their turtle shell feeling safe within its confines as long as they don’t have to stick their necks out too far.
I made an intervention for an agency that serves the needs of indigent children of Hillsborough County (Florida). In accepting the contract, I said to the director, “What do you expect from the study?”
“I expect you to show us what we are doing wrong and how we can operate more effectively.”
That seemed fair enough, but I added, “Do I understand there are no holds barred?”
“Absolutely. We are a transparent organization and have nothing to hide.”
The director was a former academic who had made the transition from the University of South Florida into the political arena of county politics and services. That was the reason for my asking for clarification. I took her at her word, which proved a mistake.
The agency had a major problem. It had an annual budget of more than $25 million, which failed to be fully implemented because of bureaucratic snafus. It soon became apparent once the study was underway that the reasons were operational and cultural, psychological and political, organizational and reportorial.
With these criteria, the completed study was titled, “Why The Agency Cannot Get Its Work Done.” It outlined systemic recommendations with short-term and long-term benchmarks for improved performance.
When the report was presented, it was obvious from its reception that the director took its critical nature personally, not professionally. She expected verification, not what she perceived to be vilification. Her displeasure was demonstrated by withholding $3,750 of my fee. I never pursued the matter because the chief operating officer, who contacted me for the study, was a personal friend.
* * * * * * * * * * *
My point is that in this climate of leaderless leadership immaturity rules the day, and management has become super sensitive to its role, as royalty once removed. We as a nation find our institutions dangling, drifting, declining, and collapsing as the New American Frontier. It is talked around but not about. Optimism is equated with patriotism.
The corollary to this is that workers, now mainly professional, demonstrate their immaturity in their spoiled brat self-indulgence. They don’t seem to have the aptitude to climb out of their caves or cages, and take a stand to change the cultural landscape more consistent with their requirements. They are waiting for God or Science or Management to do it for them.
The New American Frontier looks bleak, and this is not a recent discovery. It is a time worthy of George Orwell’s talents. He published “1984” in 1948 with the idea that “big brother is watching us,” and “war is peace,” and the “Ministry of Truth” is the office of lies. Sixty years later the world mirrors his dystopia.
More than a half century earlier, America’s greatest humorous, Mark Twain, was writing scathingly of America’s hypocrisy in faith, manners and morals, especially on the role of Christendom in this exploitation. He did this primarily with folk humor hiding his intent between the lines.
Twain’s strongest attack was on lynching and the moral cowardice of the church and law abiding citizens. People didn’t want to be reminded of their sins; they wanted to be entertained. So, Twain’s most angry, mocking essay of lynching was not published until 2000, or ninety years after his death, and then in an obscure scholarly publication.
He used humor as a balancing act with no room for beating around the bush of “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other.” Twain respected the depths of people’s belief as he saw it displayed on his travels about the globe. What angered him was the bossiness of religion and its easy alignment with corruption retreating when challenged into the sanctuary of a higher power. Twain attacked the behavior, not the people. It made his humor special.
It was the reason I thought of him in my opening remarks here, which were recorded as I walked today. Twain knew that as much as we think we own we own nothing, and it is in that knowledge that there is freedom, a freedom he spent a lifetime attempted to record for posterity. Alas, if we would only listen!
* * * * * * * * * * *
HARD LESSONS OF OD NEVER LEARNED, CONTINUED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 9, 2008
“All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth, including America, of course, consist of pilferings from other people’s wash. No tribe, however significant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other’s territorial clotheslines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and restolen 500 times.”
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
Comment of Reader:
GM had one of the largest OD departments of any US corporation. It had union and management that lost their way during the “free” years of 1949 – 1964. It was a time when US industry could make believe that they were the best in the world. It was easy in the 1960s for Europe and Asia to take on flabby US industries. So, OD on board is not necessarily the answer.
Dr. Fisher Responds:
When I was with Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) in the 1980s, we had no less than seven Ph.D.s in OD, but our work was confined primarily to training and cosmetic interventions. We were like pedigreed robots of the system, well credentials but with little challenge to the status quo. I suspect the same was true at GM. The OD qualitative impact is not necessarily a function of the OD quantitative presence.
The times need to be leavened with a little down country Mark Twain philosophy. That is to say, this is not the time to rally for a cause but to recognize that the good, the bad, and the ugly seem degrees of the same behavior. In point of fact, the dichotomy between good and evil has today transmogrified from evil to lesser evil, as no side is above the need for redemption. It is no longer “we” against “them,” but “we” against “us,” a variation of Walt Kelley’s “Pogo.”
Organization development (OD) knows, understands and works in this murky climate. As Mark Twain suggests in his remarks (above), no one can stand on the sidelines in a stain free white uniform, as we are all soiled by the fray like it or not; all guilty of the same sins either by commission or omission.
We must get past this posturing or dystopia in a clear possibility. We must attack the behavior, not the race, religion, nation or culture. Individuals do bad things, but people are inherently good, and there is no progress in the blatant defamation of character. OD focuses on individual and collective behavior, and lets the chips fall where they may. It is probably why it is a hidden science.
EMOTIONAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION HEALTH
There is perhaps some confusion as to the nature of organization development (OD). As physician to the organization, OD monitors the emotional health; as policeman it serves and protects the dual interests of workers and the organization alike; and as priest it monitors the spiritual health and ethical well being to enhance its focus and survival.
One of the incongruities of the complex organization is that finance reports directly to the chief executive officer, but not OD. OD has an equal responsibility and comparable impact. Without OD’s qualitative contribution, the organization is likely to spin out of control. It does this by being obsessed with command only to generate chaos, failing to realize that control is a function of letting go within reasonable perimeters.
THE PURPOSE OF THE ORGANIZATION IS WHAT IT DOES
OD monitors "what it does" making corrections to prevent it from sliding off track. OD does this by using various unobtrusive instruments to gauge where it is to where it thinks it is, along with interventions to correct its course.
Two common constructs common to organization are motivation and morale.
Motivation is an individual norm. It is revealed in the construct of attitude, or the individual’s predisposition to act in a certain way. Workers bring their attitude to the workplace. Motivation is complex, but common indices represent the equivalent of “a look inside” the individual. These include the individual’s values, interests (intrinsic and extrinsic), aspirations, self-image, self-perception and dreams.
The workplace has an attitude as well. It is called “culture.” If the attitude of the workplace is incompatible with workers’ motivation-attitude, and workers fail to adapt and adjust to the prevailing cultural norm, then there is likely to be a problem. This problem is called “morale.”
Morale is a group norm. Morale is based on the collective response of workers to the construct of culture. Culture is the collective values, beliefs, ethics, interests, work and economic history of the workplace over time.
Individuals bring their attitudes to the workplace culture. The workplace culture exacts its attitude on these workers. They have a choice: either to adapt to the group norm or move on. If they don’t, if the workplace culture is not compatible with their value system, work could literally affect their health: physically, mentally, and emotionally. No paycheck is worth such a price.
Attitudes rarely change. If entrepreneur-oriented individuals are in a company that has little interest in innovation, the individual is likely to become frustrated, and feel locked in a pressure cooker.
Morale can be improved by an OD intervention. The organization could design with OD assistance a recruiting, selecting, and hiring policy consistent with its workplace culture and work requirements. Existing staff could participate in the same intervention in an effort to increase harmony while upgrading skills. Such an intervention will be discussed later.
All bets are off when an organization merges with another entity without giving due consideration to the natural incompatibilities of discrete cultures. These distinct cultures must be identified, studied, and evaluated before adopting a strategy and schedule to promote integration.
OD does not dictate the culture. OD endeavors to do an in depth study of the culture and to make recommendations consistent with its findings. When cultures merge, a whole new set of problems is created. Dealing with these problems is as important as a viable business plan.
An organization goes through the iterative process of birth, growth, maturity, and deterioration according to the laws of entropy. To increase longevity, it must reinvent itself to restore its viability.
Failure to acknowledge and adapt to new technology and to the changing demands of the marketplace are likely to create internal stress and strain, and lead inevitably to crisis, as the operation encounters difficulty responding to unanticipated or accelerating external demands.
I made an intervention of a police department in Virginia, which went from 84 officers to 840 officers in ten years. It had a set culture in which all new police officers had to spend a minimum of three years in patrol before going into administration. A crisis developed when a riot occurred in a suburb, only to find a plethora of complaints in the area had not been processed. No one in central command was computer literate although it had the technology available with officers in the field with the academic training. Complaints were still hand processed with boxes of them yet untouched (M.A. thesis: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, USF, 1976).
Morale is a construct of culture. It can be anticipated and managed by this formula:
The way work is structured determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organization behavior; organization behavior establishes whether the purpose of the organization will be fulfilled or not (“Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership,” Winter 2002, pp. 20 – 24).
OD steps were taken to redress this snafu, but not before a riot brought the matter to the public’s attention.
When morale is high, individual and group interests coincide. When morale is low, the organization is paralyzed and can spin off into crisis. That was the case here.
MORALE: A CAVEAT
Low morale can be compounded by an inappropriate intervention.
That happened in the 1980s throughout the United States. Human resources management (HR) convinced senior management to increase pay and benefits to workers, along with recreational opportunities on the job, and mind you, without these perks being tied to improved performance. It was as if work was turned into play, and workers had only to show up for work on time, and leave on schedule to merit a paycheck.
For a half-century, workers had been programmed to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, and conforming. Passivity had become an engrained habit of doing. This intervention ignored this fact, failed to deal with it, and unwittingly reinforced more of the same.
Workers had been “management dependent” in a Culture of Comfort, where managers acted as surrogate parent. Now, workers as “spoiled child” slipped into “counter dependence on the workplace” for their total well being in the Culture of Complacency. This became the equivalent of workers being stuck in terminal adolescence (see “Six Silent Killers," CRC Press 1998) with the mindset of obedient 12-year-olds in 50-year-old bodies.
Group norms do not change automatically; nor can a culture be changed by edict.
The workplace culture needs to be understood for what it is and how it works before considering how it would prefer to be. To make the transition to the desired state, OD employs this simple formula:
Pain (struggle) + risk (change) = growth (reinvention)
An organization that echoes the sentiment, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” will fail to grow, and eventually fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, many organizations are committed to doing too little, too late.
GM and the UAW may have a cadre of OD practitioners, as do many other organizations, but all are governed by the same principle: the purpose of an organization is what it does. If what it does is not purposeful, and OD is present, and doesn’t do anything about it, then OD is a token concession to image and of no moment.
PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW
Sometimes you have to use shock therapy to get attention.
On March 30, 1984 at the Caribbean Gulf Resort, Clearwater, Florida, I gave the keynote address to the DCAS Forum of Department of Defense (DoD) contractors. The theme of the seminar was “Participative Management,” which was, at the time, celebrated across the United States as the panacea to productivity in the public and private sector.
Some 400 delegates attended, from admirals and generals to CEOs and contract professionals from both sides of the military and industrial complex.
The vice president and general manager of my division (Honeywell Avionics) gave opening remarks apparently about how wonderful this new process was working. I was not present to hear his remarks.
For four years, I had been working on Honeywell Avionics’ attractive college type campus of some 4,000 employees with workers building prototypes for NASA, and ring laser gyro guidance systems for the US Navy, the facilities two biggest customers.
Here are samples of my remarks to this august assembly of delegates:
“A typical company today is made up of those that manage and those that do. Those that manage have become a force unto themselves. Next there is a parallel organization that supports and serves management that neither manages nor does anything contributing to the bottom line. These are primarily staff functions.
“These non-doer doers have been called ‘professionals.’ You find them in personnel, finance, security, marketing, maintenance, and even engineering. They have created a need for their services and deliver it with consummate flair. Once there presence has been identified as a need management cannot do without, they have won security.
“We have far too many non-doer doers doing non-thing things. So, when the competitive edge to American enterprise was felt, the last thing considered was to get rid of this excess baggage. No, a far easier course was to get rid of the doers throughout the organization who never found time to secure their security. This has contributed to participative management’ becoming an oxymoron."
At another point in the talk:
“The place in which I work is comparable to other multifaceted facilities of mega corporations. Out of a population of 4,000, there are 1,000 production workers (25%), 1,000 engineers (25%), 400 managers (10%), and 2,000 professionals (50%). That means we have one manager for every ten workers.
“If that were not concern enough, no less than one quarter of these professionals are believed to be having serial careers ‘on the job’ at the expense of their paid position. I have conducted informal surveys throughout the five plants and have witnessed workers selling jewelry, pet fish, insurance, real estate, running a restaurant, and management consulting from their cubicles or offices. I have also found them doing graduate work, grading papers as professors for local universities, even running a hardware store, and doing private investigative work at their desk for an attorney.
"This is not hidden. It is completely in the open. Indeed, I have seen people selling fruits and vegetables right under the nose of the security. Workers show their badges than make their purchases. Several others find time to have assignations in plant cafeterias between scheduled meal hours; still others can be found taking smoke breaks every half hour outside one of the facilities, rain or shine.
“The recreation center is a busy place at lunchtime. Workers can be seen, playing basketball, handball, pool, chess, or jogging. The turnaround time for some of these workers is easily two or more hours.
At yet another snippet:
“Two hundred years ago, when most business was conducted in small guilds, there was great informality without rules and regulations or performance appraisals, without non-doer doer supervisors breathing down workers’ necks.
“Survival was predicated on doing the best you could with the skills you had, and others took up the slack. Workers knew who they were by what they did. They had a sense of pride and ownership and brought this to work. Work was love made visible.
“Often work was dirty, grimy and exhausting with little profit at the end of the day. We romanticize this period now, but in reality it was a harsh environment, working seventy hours a week was not uncommon. There were no entitlements and bosses worked as hard and other workers. Usually, they were the owners.
“Were these workers happy? Not particularly. Were they productive? Extremely so. Were they doing the best they could do? Generally speaking, yes. Did they have the entrepreneur spirit? The best and the brightest did, but they didn’t punish the others that didn’t. They had no choice. The wolf was always gaining ground on everybody.
“Two hundred years later, we have the sophisticated complex organization which has made the individual non-responsible for his own actions. The organization has become the worker’s caregiver and caretaker.
“Incredibly, the worker has been left out of the equation, relieved of struggle, of the pain of growth, and the consequences of his and other workers misguided behavior.
“A productive worker is awarded no more than an nonproductive worker, which means a productive worker is punished for excelling. This weakens the organization. It protects the worker from the reality of his efforts, and thereby protects him from knowing himself. There can be no real success if failure is not identified and dealt with accordingly.
“Failure is correctible if failure is acknowledged. Otherwise, the worker becomes self-estranged, and self-doubting, always looking for answers outside himself, never seeing the reality of his own experience clearly.
“The worker no longer identifies with the quality of what he does. He has gravitated from fierce independence to groveling dependence; from being captain of his fate to its nervous victim.
“Meanwhile, management manages the way it is paid, which is predicated on costs, meeting schedule and profits. Workers are sacrificed to the bottom line, and so workers in turn see any problem regarding costs, schedule and profits ‘management’s problem,’ not theirs.
“It is the single most glaring reason that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the workers; or four out of every five workers are more preoccupied with what they can get than doing what they are paid to do. This equation has failed to change despite all the cosmetic interventions, participative management being the latest.
“You cannot reconcile a 50-year-lapse with a campaign of ‘employee involvement’ when workers have no sense of ownership. You cannot launch a campaign of ‘pay-for-performance’ when managers have been programmed to be subjective about work and workers for half a century.
“You must start from scratch and ease workers into self-responsibility and managers into accountability. There are no shortcuts. Peace!”
(Note: I was put on “house arrest” for this speech having to turn over all my notebooks, and my notes every week; my salary was frozen for 18 months; and I was not allowed to give any public speeches during this quarantine period. The notebooks were returned, unread. They eventually became the book, Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches Delta Group 1990.)
BALANCING ACT – AN OD INTERVENTION
I had been a corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company in the “for profit” private sector. Following earning my Ph.D., I consulted for ten years in the public and private sector before joining Honeywell Avionics, whose customers were all in the public sector.
One of my first OD interventions at Honeywell Avionics had to do with the engineering community. It was pure serendipity. I was asked to prepare a paper to be presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (October 1981). The paper I created was based on my work as manager of Honeywell’s Quality Circle Program, which at the time was the largest in the country. The paper was titled, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation Through Participation.”
When the engineer returned, I asked him to give me a report of the conference’s reaction to the paper. This surprised him.
“I didn’t take any notes.”
In further investigation into this engineering community, I learned that engineers did all their own training no matter the duplication, and that these technical sojourns were treated largely as recreational perks.
After completing extensive demographic work of the engineering community, I discovered something quite disturbing:
· 80 percent of the 1,000 engineers were working on technology developed after these engineers had left school.
· Engineering salaries were highest for engineers with the most obsolescent engineering skills.
· Honeywell was paying for incompetence by awarding seniority over state of the arts engineering proficiencies.
Taking up this slack were the neophyte engineers coming out of the colleges and universities, who were making less than a third to half as much as the more veteran engineers.
Presenting this to senior management, a budget of $1 million was set aside to create a Technical Education Program, which won enthusiastic support from the engineering community after an initial period of understandable skepticism.
Today, technicians are earning their engineering degrees in cooperation with the Department of Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) in this program.
(Note: I presented a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 9, 1986, ironically two years after being sanctioned for my adversarial speech on participative management. The engineering paper was titled, Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program.)
We created a Technical Education Chair to be rotated to a new veteran engineer every year. This became a morale booster for these engineers who saw an opportunity to put their personal stamp on technical education during their tenure.
Electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, systems analysts, physicists and mathematicians came to occupy the chair. Classes were conducted during and after hours with most of the instructors holding Ph.D. degrees in their discipline. I wrote a “train-the-trainer” monograph (Training the Occasional Instructor, February 1984) for these instructors.
OD can work, and does work when OD confronts the issue, takes the heat, and looks past the resistance to develop common ground that serves the objective of the intervention.
One reason the resistance was not greater might have been the fact that I had been a laboratory chemist, knew the technical culture, along with the jargon, and remembered how insular and insecure if not xenophobic this technical culture could be.
Engineers have paid dearly for this inward-looking predilection. They have created the postmodern world but non-engineers own it. As knowing as engineers may be in their discipline, they appear equally ignorant of the social, political and moral skullduggery, which was taking place right under their noses.
We don’t like to consider science and engineering as conforming disciplines, but they are. People in them seldom venture much beyond what they know and love. Take how Microsoft finessed Seattle Computer:
“Microsoft bought the rights to what was called the ‘Quick and Dirty Operating System’ (QDOS) from Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become. Microsoft quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was home free.
“This is a common story throughout the history of engineering. Engineers have been finessed and flummoxed by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and sophistication when it comes to selling and profiting from their ideas.” (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” AuthorHouse 2007, pp. 113 – 114.)
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
A quarter century later, we have gone from dangling to drifting to declining to collapsing on so many fronts that it is dizzying to keep up with these discouraging developments. Mort Zuckerman of US News & World Report suggested Sunday, July 6, 2008 on PBS that we are “now in the most serious recession since the Great Depression.” Still, most people don’t feel it so it doesn’t exist.
When I went to Europe in 1986 as director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., I found Europe, if anything, in worse shape than the United States.
Europe was still shackled with the Work Councils of post WWII in most countries. These labor-regulating bodies controlled wages and benefits to an absurd degree. Workers in France and Italy at the time enjoyed workweeks of 35 hours or less.
The Residential Manufacturing Division of Honeywell Europe provided an early introduction into the European problem. Building and residential thermostatic control systems were selling at land office prices. The only problem Honeywell was losing money.
An OD study revealed that 90 percent of the buyers of Honeywell commercial and residential control systems were college trained while only 10 percent of Honeywell’s sellers were. Honeywell sellers were being taken by their buyers, and with reason.
Moreover, most Honeywell Europe HR directors, especially in the smaller countries, were basically finance officers with HR an added role. They had little training in human resource management.
Then there was the latent national animosity between some countries, a holdover from the Second World War. It surfaced as a reluctance to share talent, technology, and even Honeywell products manufactured in their country.
The European Economic Community (EEC) was struggling with its new political, social and economic configuration as well, prime territory for OD.
We developed a “Performance Management System” (PMS) that:
(1) Set up skills training for HR directors;
(2) Developed an “Upgrade the Skills of the Workforce” by creating competency profiles, career roadmaps, assessment centers, and incentives to seek further education, along with all new hires in critical skills to be college graduates; and
(3) Tracked high talent throughout Europe with a software database which profiled this talent pool in terms of education, age, job experience, and readiness for promotion.
PMS cut through underlying national animosity as self-interest triumphed over old grudges. Delight was expressed when a match between need and talent was found. It also improved morale as professionals discovered expanded opportunity.
YOUR POINT, DR. FISHER!
In the simplest terms: we need to grow up, especially the management of our society. The people that rise to the top epitomize immaturity. If you have any doubt, follow their behavior. They haven’t left the sixth grade; live in Camelot and play King Arthur games.
I once gave a copy of my book “Six Silent Killers” to a very successful industrialist. We were having lunch one day and I asked him if he had read the book.
“The good parts.”
“The good parts?”
“Where you’re not rattling management’s cage.”
“What did you learn?”
“What did I learn?”
The question clearly puzzled him. It was apparent he had learned nothing. The book, which was about passive corporate behavior, and how management condoned or sponsored it, was to his taste obviously a distasteful exercise. He was a busy man! He had no time for criticism. He was also a trained critical thinker, comfortable with what he knew, but not comfortable with what he didn’t know, but could find out.
“Six Silent Killers” invited him to think creatively, to ponder ideas in a conceptual framework that defined the ills of corpocracy. As an OD practitioner, I had found serious voids between directing and doing.
The book made no attempt to slide into the popular rhetoric of “thinking outside the box.” Its premise was to think outside the discipline of thinking; to thrash about in the chaotic and contradictory realm of intuition, letting the mind unhinge itself from pet perceptions and deceptions, and free fall to whatever might collect before the mind hit consciousness.
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When you address a company of executives, they assume you see them as creative thinkers, which of course they aren’t. They live in the protective carapace of their turtle shell feeling safe within its confines as long as they don’t have to stick their necks out too far.
I made an intervention for an agency that serves the needs of indigent children of Hillsborough County (Florida). In accepting the contract, I said to the director, “What do you expect from the study?”
“I expect you to show us what we are doing wrong and how we can operate more effectively.”
That seemed fair enough, but I added, “Do I understand there are no holds barred?”
“Absolutely. We are a transparent organization and have nothing to hide.”
The director was a former academic who had made the transition from the University of South Florida into the political arena of county politics and services. That was the reason for my asking for clarification. I took her at her word, which proved a mistake.
The agency had a major problem. It had an annual budget of more than $25 million, which failed to be fully implemented because of bureaucratic snafus. It soon became apparent once the study was underway that the reasons were operational and cultural, psychological and political, organizational and reportorial.
With these criteria, the completed study was titled, “Why The Agency Cannot Get Its Work Done.” It outlined systemic recommendations with short-term and long-term benchmarks for improved performance.
When the report was presented, it was obvious from its reception that the director took its critical nature personally, not professionally. She expected verification, not what she perceived to be vilification. Her displeasure was demonstrated by withholding $3,750 of my fee. I never pursued the matter because the chief operating officer, who contacted me for the study, was a personal friend.
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My point is that in this climate of leaderless leadership immaturity rules the day, and management has become super sensitive to its role, as royalty once removed. We as a nation find our institutions dangling, drifting, declining, and collapsing as the New American Frontier. It is talked around but not about. Optimism is equated with patriotism.
The corollary to this is that workers, now mainly professional, demonstrate their immaturity in their spoiled brat self-indulgence. They don’t seem to have the aptitude to climb out of their caves or cages, and take a stand to change the cultural landscape more consistent with their requirements. They are waiting for God or Science or Management to do it for them.
The New American Frontier looks bleak, and this is not a recent discovery. It is a time worthy of George Orwell’s talents. He published “1984” in 1948 with the idea that “big brother is watching us,” and “war is peace,” and the “Ministry of Truth” is the office of lies. Sixty years later the world mirrors his dystopia.
More than a half century earlier, America’s greatest humorous, Mark Twain, was writing scathingly of America’s hypocrisy in faith, manners and morals, especially on the role of Christendom in this exploitation. He did this primarily with folk humor hiding his intent between the lines.
Twain’s strongest attack was on lynching and the moral cowardice of the church and law abiding citizens. People didn’t want to be reminded of their sins; they wanted to be entertained. So, Twain’s most angry, mocking essay of lynching was not published until 2000, or ninety years after his death, and then in an obscure scholarly publication.
He used humor as a balancing act with no room for beating around the bush of “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other.” Twain respected the depths of people’s belief as he saw it displayed on his travels about the globe. What angered him was the bossiness of religion and its easy alignment with corruption retreating when challenged into the sanctuary of a higher power. Twain attacked the behavior, not the people. It made his humor special.
It was the reason I thought of him in my opening remarks here, which were recorded as I walked today. Twain knew that as much as we think we own we own nothing, and it is in that knowledge that there is freedom, a freedom he spent a lifetime attempted to record for posterity. Alas, if we would only listen!
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