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.

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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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