COLLAPSE – WE SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED BY THE SHAPE WE’RE IN!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
Early in 1968 before going to South Africa, I was invited by my company to speak in San Francisco at a Regional Meeting.
In the course of that visit, I went to Golden Gate State Park, and Haight Asbury.
Here I was young, successful, working close to seven days a week traveling across the United States, Europe and South America, and I come across literally scores of young people doing absolutely nothing, wearing tie-dyed clothes hair down to their waists -- men as well as women -- smoking something that smelled like burnt rope, a smell I had never encountered before.
If this were not remarkable enough, my cab driver asked me, "Do you want me to take you to a college sex club, cab fare is free if you do." I answered, "What in the world for?" He tossed his hands in the air, "Had to ask."
My audience at the Regional Meeting was people like myself, young and energetic, but who couldn't grasp what I was saying.
You see they wanted to know why I had been so successful, what my formula was. They wanted a simple step process to reach my numbers, when all I could tell them was this, "Once I realized the problem was not the buyer but the seller, my sensors exploded and I found I could read buyers where they were that moment, not before or after, but right then. That point forward we were on the same side of the desk working together."
I also told them that I took copious notes after each call, which I later typed with schematic diagrams of the plants, operating systems, and offices as I remembered them, and what they told me about the buyer and his operations. If there were handout booklets of the company history in the lobby, I read them and annotated them with my notes.
In the calm of my study or motel room, looking at these notes and memos, I would profile the person and the place for developing a strategy. I would use this on my next call with a major and minor goal of that call. I did this religiously despite how hectic my schedule might be. I told them it was a practice that got me a Phi Beta Kappa key in college, and a nice income now.
I had not read selling book, knew little or nothing about psychology, but was inclined to be introspective and to notice things that others were apparently inclined to miss.
I told the group that the buyer is crying out in so many ways to tell the seller precisely where he is and how he is and why he is that way. All the buyer wants is a sympathetic and understanding audience, which you, the seller can be. And just possibly, you may have what he needs but not necessarily what he wants.
The selling comes in persuading him to want what he needs. The barrier to this penetration is the difference between his expectations and what is possible; between his pocketbook and the relative costs, in other words, between needs and wants.
When I got through, they complained almost in unison, "That sounds complicated," when it was the antithesis of complexity. It might be hard work at first, I said, but the dividends are real. They weren’t convinced. They wanted a “how to” approach when I am not a “how to” man.
What I was saying and what they were unprepared to grasp is:
(1) It is more important to listen than to talk.
(2) It is more important to sell what the buyer needs and can afford than to sell the buyer what he is willing to buy but does not need and cannot afford.
If you sell “need,” it will augur better for the buyer and seller in the long run.
They thought it heresy when I admitted what they had heard was true, that is, that I had recommended a competitor’s system to ours because it was a better fit. "We don't cooperate with competitors," they almost shouted, "what does the word competition mean to you, anyway?"
“It means to me,” I said, “to serve the customer.” I left it at that as I knew there was no point in mentioning “at all cost.”
Nor did I mention what I wrote about in one of my books.
My company did not make feeding equipment except very primitive slug by-pass feeders. This was neither economical nor effective chemical treatment. I found a positive displacement pump manufacturer whose pumping equipment was the best in the industry, and also the most expensive. My hardest selling job was persuading the buyers to buy these pumps when we gave ours away free. All my customers eventually had these pumps.
One night I got a call in my home, and the pump seller asked, "What split do you expect from my commissions on these pump sales? You've sold more pumps for me this month than I have myself."
I answered, "I just want the pumps to keep working as effectively as they have," and hung up. I kept selling the pumps and never heard from him again.
Many of you weren't born by 1968, but I've felt that in that particular year things started to unravel.
Young people were full of themselves and used the Vietnam War to justify being irresponsible. Many of these rebels such as Abbie Hoffman (1936 - 1989) are now long dead having burned the candle at both ends.
Subsequent generations have followed their lead as the Hippies, Yuppies, Generation X and Y, and the "Me" generation.
When they have had no other choice but to grow up, at least a little, they didn't find it necessary to accompany it with some ethics and emotional maturity.
We find them today in jobs in real estate, Wall Street, and other occupations where "they were entitled," and used scams and questionable practices selling homes, insurance, real estate and credit cards, cooking the books, and of course many of them eventually found their way unto Mahogany Row, and into brokerage houses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and elected office as well as jobs in industry and commerce, education and the church to continue their prestidigitation.
What do you think fueled the electronic age -- people who didn’t want to work but preferred messing around making electronic toys? Eric Hoffer correctly noted that all things start first with playthings, and then they become forms of work, but not the other way around.
So, we should not be surprised at all with the mess we are in.
JRF
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922 – 2008), A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2004), his last book
Those of you who have read “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (2007) know that I have great affection for another Midwesterner and fellow outsider, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He died last year. True to his form, he combined savvy advice, cutting humor and an appreciation for the absurd. These are all evident in this last collection of wondrous memories, his family legacy, and his poignant, obstinate, unfashionable humanism.
On cigarette smoking, he writes:
“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two”
And they haven’t killed me yet. He was eighty-five when he died.
When I was a student at the University of Iowa, and Vonnegut was a writer-in-residence there, I heard him speak. When I was a field manager with Nalco Chemical Company in Indianapolis, and he came to visit his family, I saw him on television. It was not until I read “A Man Without A Country” (2004) that I learned that he was a chemistry major and took a master’s in anthropology that I felt another professional connection, not to mention that he, too, is a junior, and comfortable being eternally an outsider.
Vonnegut is of German stock whereas I am of Irish stock, two tribes that have always had great affection for each other. He used humor, often gallows humor to cut through the pervading malarkey of his times, which overlap mine.
While eminently successful, he remains a controversial writer. Once he asked a friend, whom he considered wise, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?”
His friend answered, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
Vonnegut and I have that in common, too, we respond to life and write out of our own perceptions, perspectives and experiences.
For the past quarter century or so, I’ve been responding to my experiences and perceptions derived from my early youth as a child (“In the Shadow of the Courthouse," 2003) to my initial encounter of work outside the protection of the chemistry laboratory (“Confident Selling,” 1970) to my growing cynicism of the complex organization despite my meteoric career (“Work Without Managers,” 1990) to a rallying cry for professionals to get off their asses and take charge (“The Worker, Alone!” 1995).
I then took a slightly different tact to address the individual who was looking for answers in all the wrong places (“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend,”1996), followed by registering my total disgust with toxic leaderless leadership at the level of senior management (“Corporate Sin,” 2000) to the self-indulgent passive behavior of workers which was its consequences (“Six Silent Killers,” 1998) to putting the whole period of my career in absurd and cutting perspective (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” 2007).
We keep going down the same road, as Vonnegut pointed out, falling into the same ditches apparently learning nothing for the trouble.
We can write about “Watergate” but it didn’t stop us from having many subsequent “gates.” We can write about the “savings and loan” scandal, but it didn’t stop the run-on-trust that rocks the financial world from Wall Street to Hong Kong. We can have the egregious fiascos of Enron and WorldCom where executives become a law until themselves, but it hasn’t stopped a rash of similar excesses.
We have a toxic society, as Vonnegut pointed out, with people in charge without conscience. They are filled with no doubt because they don’t care what happens to people on Main Street.
The “mask of sanity” is the one worn by these poisoned personalities who still claim their innocence and feel as pure as the driven snow no matter what anybody thinks. It is not enough to be a millionaire, these poisoned personalities have to be billionaires, and then trillionaires, and the government is organized to protect them.
Society wears the “masks of sanity” while it finds the same people with these poisoness attributes rising to the top, which suggest the Orwellian like adage, “insanity is sanity.”
A man like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. passes without much notice, an aggravation but an entertaining one; an interloper who didn’t belong, a man who thought humanism meant being a free thinker and not a true believer, and a person that thought kindness the greatest of all virtues.
Although I have a similar chemistry and psychology foundation to his, I lack his skill and good humor. I’m in your face, and not just in the face of the high rollers but the heavy lifters as well.
The subtitle to “Corporate Sin” was “Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers.” I claim we have a generation of spoiled brats suspended in terminal adolescence afraid of failure so they have no real success, afraid of pain so they experience no real pleasure, afraid of risk so they have no real development, afraid of life so they exist but never find time to live. They take comfort in their latest technological contraption and text message everyone they can think of while no one is more lonely or lost then they are.
We have created a society of high-minded expectations and low-minded interests. The subprime real estate debacle took self-indulgent buyers as well as greedy sellers. The quest for a college education took entrepreneur educators and consumer driven students, who wanted a degree but not necessarily the experience of learning.
Consequently, grades have been escalated to the stratosphere but we still produce students that can’t think, or think only in terms of money, power, authority, and luxury.
“A Look Back To See Ahead” documented this, not for this generation, or the next, who will continue to create and fall into the same sinkholes, but for many generations in the future when someone will be asked one day, “How the hell could they have created such a mess for us?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922 – 2008), A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2004), his last book
Those of you who have read “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (2007) know that I have great affection for another Midwesterner and fellow outsider, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He died last year. True to his form, he combined savvy advice, cutting humor and an appreciation for the absurd. These are all evident in this last collection of wondrous memories, his family legacy, and his poignant, obstinate, unfashionable humanism.
On cigarette smoking, he writes:
“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two”
And they haven’t killed me yet. He was eighty-five when he died.
When I was a student at the University of Iowa, and Vonnegut was a writer-in-residence there, I heard him speak. When I was a field manager with Nalco Chemical Company in Indianapolis, and he came to visit his family, I saw him on television. It was not until I read “A Man Without A Country” (2004) that I learned that he was a chemistry major and took a master’s in anthropology that I felt another professional connection, not to mention that he, too, is a junior, and comfortable being eternally an outsider.
Vonnegut is of German stock whereas I am of Irish stock, two tribes that have always had great affection for each other. He used humor, often gallows humor to cut through the pervading malarkey of his times, which overlap mine.
While eminently successful, he remains a controversial writer. Once he asked a friend, whom he considered wise, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?”
His friend answered, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
Vonnegut and I have that in common, too, we respond to life and write out of our own perceptions, perspectives and experiences.
For the past quarter century or so, I’ve been responding to my experiences and perceptions derived from my early youth as a child (“In the Shadow of the Courthouse," 2003) to my initial encounter of work outside the protection of the chemistry laboratory (“Confident Selling,” 1970) to my growing cynicism of the complex organization despite my meteoric career (“Work Without Managers,” 1990) to a rallying cry for professionals to get off their asses and take charge (“The Worker, Alone!” 1995).
I then took a slightly different tact to address the individual who was looking for answers in all the wrong places (“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend,”1996), followed by registering my total disgust with toxic leaderless leadership at the level of senior management (“Corporate Sin,” 2000) to the self-indulgent passive behavior of workers which was its consequences (“Six Silent Killers,” 1998) to putting the whole period of my career in absurd and cutting perspective (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” 2007).
We keep going down the same road, as Vonnegut pointed out, falling into the same ditches apparently learning nothing for the trouble.
We can write about “Watergate” but it didn’t stop us from having many subsequent “gates.” We can write about the “savings and loan” scandal, but it didn’t stop the run-on-trust that rocks the financial world from Wall Street to Hong Kong. We can have the egregious fiascos of Enron and WorldCom where executives become a law until themselves, but it hasn’t stopped a rash of similar excesses.
We have a toxic society, as Vonnegut pointed out, with people in charge without conscience. They are filled with no doubt because they don’t care what happens to people on Main Street.
The “mask of sanity” is the one worn by these poisoned personalities who still claim their innocence and feel as pure as the driven snow no matter what anybody thinks. It is not enough to be a millionaire, these poisoned personalities have to be billionaires, and then trillionaires, and the government is organized to protect them.
Society wears the “masks of sanity” while it finds the same people with these poisoness attributes rising to the top, which suggest the Orwellian like adage, “insanity is sanity.”
A man like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. passes without much notice, an aggravation but an entertaining one; an interloper who didn’t belong, a man who thought humanism meant being a free thinker and not a true believer, and a person that thought kindness the greatest of all virtues.
Although I have a similar chemistry and psychology foundation to his, I lack his skill and good humor. I’m in your face, and not just in the face of the high rollers but the heavy lifters as well.
The subtitle to “Corporate Sin” was “Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers.” I claim we have a generation of spoiled brats suspended in terminal adolescence afraid of failure so they have no real success, afraid of pain so they experience no real pleasure, afraid of risk so they have no real development, afraid of life so they exist but never find time to live. They take comfort in their latest technological contraption and text message everyone they can think of while no one is more lonely or lost then they are.
We have created a society of high-minded expectations and low-minded interests. The subprime real estate debacle took self-indulgent buyers as well as greedy sellers. The quest for a college education took entrepreneur educators and consumer driven students, who wanted a degree but not necessarily the experience of learning.
Consequently, grades have been escalated to the stratosphere but we still produce students that can’t think, or think only in terms of money, power, authority, and luxury.
“A Look Back To See Ahead” documented this, not for this generation, or the next, who will continue to create and fall into the same sinkholes, but for many generations in the future when someone will be asked one day, “How the hell could they have created such a mess for us?”
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Q&A ABOUT AN ARTICLE & A BOOK
Q&A ABOUT AN ARTICLE & A BOOK
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2008
SEVERAL WRITERS WRITE:
Is your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, in anyway connected to THE READER’S DIGEST piece “Do Unto Others…”?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The answer is, “Yes.” I took the first rule of that piece – “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself” – and wrote the book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (DeltaGroup 1996). I wrote it because of the positive response to the article and the periodical’s skyrocketing “call for reprints,” and because I found most self-help book not helpful.
What THE TABOO attempted to do:
(1) Introduce the reader to himself: On the inner flap of the book’s flyleaf is this quotation: “We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize that the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.”
(2) Deal with the United States of Anxiety: This is a crazy age, and craziness has become the norm, accepted as real with the focus always on looking for pundits and gurus, books and ideas to answers questions to problems of which we, alone, have the answers.
(3) Illustrate why conforming is the wrong prescription to coping: For the individual to realize identity, he must rebel against his acculturating programming, and then reintegrate it into a viable system that reflects his authenticity. Otherwise, the individual goes through life always looking for answers external to him, or becomes preoccupied solving other people’s problems while his own go unattended.
(4) Realize common sense is uncommon: What everyone knows to be true isn’t necessarily so. The herd mentality of true believers is a force to be reckoned with all one’s life. This force is predicated on the need “to belong,” “to be accepted,” “to be valued.” Lost in the equation is self-belonging, self-acceptance, and valuing self.
(5) Show how it takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to overcome one: Fertile enticements to habit formation are “needs.” Good habits serve us; bad habits serve others. Smokers, drinkers, carousers, liars, stealers, gossipers, and druggies need others to legitimate their self-ruin. They cleverly use the leverage of “needs” to induce those innocent to smoking that first joint, daring them to try that first drug, challenging them to live “dangerously,” which are usually illegal and self-negating.
(6) Indicate the need for intimacy is real: We call it love, but love is not sex, yet love is sensual. It is neither being “the most beautiful,” “the most talented,” nor “the most anything,” as association or achievement cannot develop intimacy. Intimacy must first involve an honest appraisal, understanding and acceptance of self. The process is simple: self-awareness leads to self-acceptance and materializes into self-assertion. How do we know it is so? We are not afraid to say “no” when “no” is our best recourse, or when to go it alone when it is our most prudent course.
(7) Know that material affluence is no gauge to spiritual health or well being: The evidence is overwhelming. We live in a society of too much luxury and too many options with “good times” coming too soon. Nothing of value is ever realized without the cost of application, pain, struggle, risk, disappointment, discomfort, and inconvenience. When these factors are summarily avoided, as they have tended to be over the last several decades, we have the sick material society in which we live.
(8) Understand that pleasure is not bad; pleasure is simply not enough: It is normal to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, but when there is only pleasure and no pain then it becomes a dull ache in our side as pleasure is never enough. Boredom sets in, and we crave distractions. These lead to self-indulgence as we forget that we are dying all the time, and never find time to live and grow where pain resides.
(9) Demonstrate that there is a dual conundrum facing us every moment of existence: We are either self-creating or self-destructing. We are never static, never still. We are either experiencing self-realization or self-defeat, not in the eyes of others; nor in terms of the number of college degrees we have earned, or the number of zeroes in our bank accounts, but in terms of the level of our happiness. Happiness is not a function of being “the best and the brightest,” going to the “right” universities, pursuing the most “prestigious careers,” or being celebrated by others. Happiness is a function of following our own bliss and being involved in ennobling work, or love made visible. This can find us a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or a myriad of other activities. All honest work is divine.
(10) Explain how the paradoxical dilemma is now, not tomorrow: We live in a leaderless society in which all the rules of old no longer apply or work, while all the rulers of old are lost in their own excesses and indiscretions. Meanwhile, followers wait for a correction that never comes, too lame to take control, too self-indulgent to see the handwriting on the wall, too self-absorbed to realize the future is a crumbling present, and Humpty Dumpty are us!
(11) Recognize that we are at war; it is not our borders, which need protection, but the boundaries of our minds, the frontiers of our wills: We have made a frontal retreat from our values to become fugitives to our fears, often taking residence in the violence of meaningless language. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now we are in an age inundated with words without meaning. These words separate us from ourselves forcing on us the hard work to reconnect with ourselves in a world beyond words.
THE TABOO was published in 1996 to little fanfare. In nearly two decades, it has failed to lose its relevance. What is outlined here represents central themes of the book, which are alive with experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances against the backdrop of the times.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
For more information see Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com or check out his books on www.amazon.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2008
SEVERAL WRITERS WRITE:
Is your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, in anyway connected to THE READER’S DIGEST piece “Do Unto Others…”?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The answer is, “Yes.” I took the first rule of that piece – “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself” – and wrote the book, “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (DeltaGroup 1996). I wrote it because of the positive response to the article and the periodical’s skyrocketing “call for reprints,” and because I found most self-help book not helpful.
What THE TABOO attempted to do:
(1) Introduce the reader to himself: On the inner flap of the book’s flyleaf is this quotation: “We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize that the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.”
(2) Deal with the United States of Anxiety: This is a crazy age, and craziness has become the norm, accepted as real with the focus always on looking for pundits and gurus, books and ideas to answers questions to problems of which we, alone, have the answers.
(3) Illustrate why conforming is the wrong prescription to coping: For the individual to realize identity, he must rebel against his acculturating programming, and then reintegrate it into a viable system that reflects his authenticity. Otherwise, the individual goes through life always looking for answers external to him, or becomes preoccupied solving other people’s problems while his own go unattended.
(4) Realize common sense is uncommon: What everyone knows to be true isn’t necessarily so. The herd mentality of true believers is a force to be reckoned with all one’s life. This force is predicated on the need “to belong,” “to be accepted,” “to be valued.” Lost in the equation is self-belonging, self-acceptance, and valuing self.
(5) Show how it takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to overcome one: Fertile enticements to habit formation are “needs.” Good habits serve us; bad habits serve others. Smokers, drinkers, carousers, liars, stealers, gossipers, and druggies need others to legitimate their self-ruin. They cleverly use the leverage of “needs” to induce those innocent to smoking that first joint, daring them to try that first drug, challenging them to live “dangerously,” which are usually illegal and self-negating.
(6) Indicate the need for intimacy is real: We call it love, but love is not sex, yet love is sensual. It is neither being “the most beautiful,” “the most talented,” nor “the most anything,” as association or achievement cannot develop intimacy. Intimacy must first involve an honest appraisal, understanding and acceptance of self. The process is simple: self-awareness leads to self-acceptance and materializes into self-assertion. How do we know it is so? We are not afraid to say “no” when “no” is our best recourse, or when to go it alone when it is our most prudent course.
(7) Know that material affluence is no gauge to spiritual health or well being: The evidence is overwhelming. We live in a society of too much luxury and too many options with “good times” coming too soon. Nothing of value is ever realized without the cost of application, pain, struggle, risk, disappointment, discomfort, and inconvenience. When these factors are summarily avoided, as they have tended to be over the last several decades, we have the sick material society in which we live.
(8) Understand that pleasure is not bad; pleasure is simply not enough: It is normal to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, but when there is only pleasure and no pain then it becomes a dull ache in our side as pleasure is never enough. Boredom sets in, and we crave distractions. These lead to self-indulgence as we forget that we are dying all the time, and never find time to live and grow where pain resides.
(9) Demonstrate that there is a dual conundrum facing us every moment of existence: We are either self-creating or self-destructing. We are never static, never still. We are either experiencing self-realization or self-defeat, not in the eyes of others; nor in terms of the number of college degrees we have earned, or the number of zeroes in our bank accounts, but in terms of the level of our happiness. Happiness is not a function of being “the best and the brightest,” going to the “right” universities, pursuing the most “prestigious careers,” or being celebrated by others. Happiness is a function of following our own bliss and being involved in ennobling work, or love made visible. This can find us a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or a myriad of other activities. All honest work is divine.
(10) Explain how the paradoxical dilemma is now, not tomorrow: We live in a leaderless society in which all the rules of old no longer apply or work, while all the rulers of old are lost in their own excesses and indiscretions. Meanwhile, followers wait for a correction that never comes, too lame to take control, too self-indulgent to see the handwriting on the wall, too self-absorbed to realize the future is a crumbling present, and Humpty Dumpty are us!
(11) Recognize that we are at war; it is not our borders, which need protection, but the boundaries of our minds, the frontiers of our wills: We have made a frontal retreat from our values to become fugitives to our fears, often taking residence in the violence of meaningless language. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now we are in an age inundated with words without meaning. These words separate us from ourselves forcing on us the hard work to reconnect with ourselves in a world beyond words.
THE TABOO was published in 1996 to little fanfare. In nearly two decades, it has failed to lose its relevance. What is outlined here represents central themes of the book, which are alive with experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances against the backdrop of the times.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
For more information see Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com or check out his books on www.amazon.com.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
PRESCRIPTION FOR SUCCESS: "DO UNTO OTHERS . . ."
REFERENCE:
Recently, the remarks of billionaire Bill Gates to high school students were circulated on the web, as they have been circulated in the past, remarks of a kind of tough love approach to getting people out of their counterdependency rut of complacency, a national disease.
At another level, there has been a powerful positive discussion of "how the brain works" on PBS in conjunction with my local affiliates Fall Fund Raising Campaign.
It turns out that the brain like the muscles and sinews of the physical body respond as well to exercise, what scientists call "plasticity," that is, the synapse of the brain and the neurons that make the connection grow if we embrace our resistance to new challenges, new experiences, and new opportunities.
The PBS television program cited, and I think far too many people can relate to this, that people rigorously challenge the brain for only about 25 to 30 years, and then put the brain in "coast mode" for the duration of their lives.
They become set in their ways, fixed in their thinking, and rigid in their beliefs. Afraid to fail, they resist new experiences and new adventures. They worry about how others see them rather than how they see themselves. They get into relationships that stifle their development, and take it to be their lot, as if written in concrete.
In other words, they are not in charge, and so their brain fails to grow, which finds them living in a cage of their own creation.
A number of years ago, I was doing consultant work with a community organization, and there was a young African American boy, about nineteen, that I sensed having great possibilities but who preferred to be bored, belligerent, and disruptive, seeing himself as victim rather than victor.
I went home and wrote down what I called, "Twenty Points of Light," and shared them with him.
Then, I thought the piece might be applicable to others. I had read where the CEO of "The Reader's Digest" had mentioned that "people problems" were the publisher's major concern. I took the audacious step to send my "Twenty Points of Light" directly to him, not expecting them to be published, but to be considered in dealing with his people.
In January 1993, I received a letter from him stating that he wanted to publish my work in his magazine. I agreed. The next month, or February 1993, I received a check for $2,000 for a two-paged article that "The Reader's Digest" said would appear in their June 1993 issue. Never before had I been paid for a work prior to publication.
Sure enough, my article appeared on pages 130 and 131. In August 1993, I received a letter from the CEO stating that they had received over 25,000 requests for reprints of the article in the first weeks after publication. The article follows.
JRF
PS Feel free to copy and share this piece if you so desire.
______________________________________________________________________
Where success with people begins and ends
"Do Unto Others..."
By James R. Fisher, Jr.
In my years as a corporate executive and then consultant, I've learned this: while technical systems change rapidly, the systems that govern our social behavior have evolved little in 2000 years. And we get what we want out of life only by working with and through others. To maintain that perspective in my life, I wrote down some rules that seem to flow from it. Here they are:
To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.
The greatest hunger a person has is to be needed. Help create that feeling in others.
The greatest virtue is kindness. You can't love everyone, but you can be kind to everyone.
Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you.
Be enthusiastic. Nothing of consequence was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Be positive. Positive people attract others, while negative people repel.
You have greater impact on others by the way you listen than by the way you talk.
Gossip cheapens the one who gossips more than the one gossiped about.
Call a person by his or her name and use it often in conversation.
Communicate cheerfulness.
Differences are bound to occur and can be resolved if conflict is managed in a polite manner.
If you are given to making fun of someone, be sure it is of yourself.
Be genuinely interested in others. Get them to talk about themselves.
A smile doesn't cost anything and pays big dividends. Not only does it make you feel good, but it makes everyone else feel better, too.
Be the first to say, "Hello! Good to see you!"
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The golden rule is where it all begins and ends.
_____________
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., is an industrial psychologist and author of Work Without Managers: A View From the Trenches and Confident Selling for the 90s.
Recently, the remarks of billionaire Bill Gates to high school students were circulated on the web, as they have been circulated in the past, remarks of a kind of tough love approach to getting people out of their counterdependency rut of complacency, a national disease.
At another level, there has been a powerful positive discussion of "how the brain works" on PBS in conjunction with my local affiliates Fall Fund Raising Campaign.
It turns out that the brain like the muscles and sinews of the physical body respond as well to exercise, what scientists call "plasticity," that is, the synapse of the brain and the neurons that make the connection grow if we embrace our resistance to new challenges, new experiences, and new opportunities.
The PBS television program cited, and I think far too many people can relate to this, that people rigorously challenge the brain for only about 25 to 30 years, and then put the brain in "coast mode" for the duration of their lives.
They become set in their ways, fixed in their thinking, and rigid in their beliefs. Afraid to fail, they resist new experiences and new adventures. They worry about how others see them rather than how they see themselves. They get into relationships that stifle their development, and take it to be their lot, as if written in concrete.
In other words, they are not in charge, and so their brain fails to grow, which finds them living in a cage of their own creation.
A number of years ago, I was doing consultant work with a community organization, and there was a young African American boy, about nineteen, that I sensed having great possibilities but who preferred to be bored, belligerent, and disruptive, seeing himself as victim rather than victor.
I went home and wrote down what I called, "Twenty Points of Light," and shared them with him.
Then, I thought the piece might be applicable to others. I had read where the CEO of "The Reader's Digest" had mentioned that "people problems" were the publisher's major concern. I took the audacious step to send my "Twenty Points of Light" directly to him, not expecting them to be published, but to be considered in dealing with his people.
In January 1993, I received a letter from him stating that he wanted to publish my work in his magazine. I agreed. The next month, or February 1993, I received a check for $2,000 for a two-paged article that "The Reader's Digest" said would appear in their June 1993 issue. Never before had I been paid for a work prior to publication.
Sure enough, my article appeared on pages 130 and 131. In August 1993, I received a letter from the CEO stating that they had received over 25,000 requests for reprints of the article in the first weeks after publication. The article follows.
JRF
PS Feel free to copy and share this piece if you so desire.
______________________________________________________________________
Where success with people begins and ends
"Do Unto Others..."
By James R. Fisher, Jr.
In my years as a corporate executive and then consultant, I've learned this: while technical systems change rapidly, the systems that govern our social behavior have evolved little in 2000 years. And we get what we want out of life only by working with and through others. To maintain that perspective in my life, I wrote down some rules that seem to flow from it. Here they are:
To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.
The greatest hunger a person has is to be needed. Help create that feeling in others.
The greatest virtue is kindness. You can't love everyone, but you can be kind to everyone.
Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you.
Be enthusiastic. Nothing of consequence was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Be positive. Positive people attract others, while negative people repel.
You have greater impact on others by the way you listen than by the way you talk.
Gossip cheapens the one who gossips more than the one gossiped about.
Call a person by his or her name and use it often in conversation.
Communicate cheerfulness.
Differences are bound to occur and can be resolved if conflict is managed in a polite manner.
If you are given to making fun of someone, be sure it is of yourself.
Be genuinely interested in others. Get them to talk about themselves.
A smile doesn't cost anything and pays big dividends. Not only does it make you feel good, but it makes everyone else feel better, too.
Be the first to say, "Hello! Good to see you!"
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The golden rule is where it all begins and ends.
_____________
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., is an industrial psychologist and author of Work Without Managers: A View From the Trenches and Confident Selling for the 90s.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
AN EXCHANGE: CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP -- VOLUNTEERISM
AN EXCHANGE: THE CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP – VOLUNTEERISM
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 6, 2008
REFERENCE:
A good friend and fellow member of the think-tank, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, is starting a new magazine to be called IMPACT. It is to have a philanthropy-focus showcasing charities, and articles to assist people in more effective ways of making change.
The writer here is a diligent philanthropist and astute entrepreneur who is quite spiritual but pragmatic in the sense that without material success an enterprise cannot possibly get off the ground. He has made significant interventions in one of the most impoverished communities in the State of Florida, bringing computers and state-of-the-arts technologies to children who otherwise would have no such access.
He has been supported of Dr. Fisher’s maverick spirit and work, and as his note indicates, continues to attempt to corral his spirit into a business perspective. The exchange is offered to show how friends can differ, even critically, and for the effort, gain insight into each other as well as themselves by honest exchange.
The referenced article, Crucible of Leadership, was posted earlier on this blog.
THE WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I love - LOVE - the article. Tocqueville is one of my all-time favorites, and your analysis of our current political drama is dead-on.
I do have a request for revision, though. I believe that this piece wanders far a field, and what I'm hoping for is something tighter for our audience, which will consist of intellectuals, Danielle Steel readers with a social bent, and all in between. (Also, the election will be a vague memory by the time our December issue hits the stands and the mail).
What you wrote your friend and copied us spoke to a very specific issue: If you want to be a true leader, learn to lead volunteers. Without position power, you will have to persuade and inspire, rather than coerce. I know from first-hand experience what a new and challenging skill that is for a "boss." In my company, I expect you to perform because I'm paying you. With volunteers.... people vote with their feet.
A big part of what we're trying to accomplish through NI's Adam Smith Awards and as an ongoing theme in IMPACT is to mold the behavior of social- and business leaders. "Influence The Influencers," the sign that hangs on my wall across from my desk, says it all.
This may sound cynical, but I want to change people's behavior, much more than their souls. So even if you're just out for #1, I want to show that doing the right thing will advance your agenda. If people want to polish their leadership skills in order to help more people, great! They should volunteer. If they want to polish their leadership skills to win that corner office, great! They should volunteer, too.
The letter you wrote your candidate-friend, expanded with even more real-world examples from your days at Honeywell and elsewhere, would serve our inaugural issue perfectly. I know such a piece isn't going to be as stimulating to you as what you just wrote. I hope you don't mind.
Regards,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
You have not been the first one to accuse me of "wandering far a field." It is no doubt accurate. I write as I see things, and while my focus is often abstract my intentions are manifestly concrete.
Quite frankly, I am not a commercial guy, but write the truth as I sense it.
The question has been asked of me many times, "Who is your audience?"
I am my audience, and if I make connection with others, all the better. As my mail indicates, I do, of people of broadly different backgrounds but significant accomplishments in their chosen endeavors. While not necessarily agreeing, they find me "refreshing," whatever that means.
I am not a "Dick, see Dick, see Dick run: Jane, see Jane, see Jane run" writer. Nor am I an electronic acronym disciple but a 20th century person who has always walked and talked in the 21st century.
In "Confident Selling for the 90s," which was an update of its 1970s edition, I wrote about the old and new guard regarding sales people, but was thinking of everyman of the present century.
The book was published in 1992. For example, I saw our preoccupation with technicians (old guard) vs. strategists (new guard); short term focus vs. long term focus; loyalty to company vs. loyalty to self; employee vs. owner; crusader vs. communicator, and so on. In a sense, old stuff but actually not.
For instance, we Americans think of ourselves as members of an individualistic society, but we have been essentially a conforming society most of our history with a mantra of material individualism and expression.
Once tattoos were for renegades only, now everyone sports them. I mention tattoos because they are external signs of nothing going on inside. People show them to shout out whom they are when whom they are can only be discovered in what is not showing. It is a private conversation with self that no longer takes place. Individualism is such a conversation.
Moreover, individualism in a spiritual sense is the real basis of individualism of the new century. It is exploding across the globe as I write.
There is an abstract theme throughout this selling book, which is actually a confident thinking book. Please, be patient with my wandering.
The book, you see, is not actually about selling a product or service, but in believing in oneself. Once that is achieved, the rest is academic. Self-knowing and self-acceptance are the critical components of spiritual development for a concrete payoff. Volunteerism introduces the individual to that possibility.
It is not an accident that there are no other books like CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s except in exoteric bookshops.
Take the fact that I mention in the book's "Introduction" leaving Nalco in my mid-thirties making the equivalent in today’s dollars of nearly $500,000, saying, "If I wasn't doing my job, you'd fire me, right? Well, the company is failing me. So, I'm firing the company."
Was that madness? I don't think so. It was half a lifetime ago, and if anything, is more pronounced in me than ever before.
Ted, I don't write for intellectuals, or academics, and I have no idea who reads Danielle Steel, knowing only that she is a best selling author. I don't think in terms of "my niche," but in terms of an emerging world, in which the United States of America is going to have a less and less dominant role in the scheme of things, a role for which it denies as a possibility and therefore for which it is not prepared.
I see Third World Russia blackmailing the world with its oil and its nuclear bomb arsenal; I see atheistic China attempting to bridge the gap between it and the rest of the world with capitalistic expansion smothering out the need for spiritual nutrition with atheistic communism; I see India that rules like the abused child (product of the British Empire) that now abuses its own (diverse ethnic) family in a similar fashion, again, attempting to use economic and technological substantive growth to supplant its spiritual lapses; I see major South American countries repressed for centuries with draconian and mythic Roman Catholicism and oligarchic authorities trying to dissolve these ties and gain some purchase by attaching themselves to these emerging Third World Powers such as China, Russia and India.
I've not mentioned the "cradle of civilization," where the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates valley of ancient Persia are attempting to become postmodern bypassing the need of modernity, driven by ancient myths and abuses and clerical dominance.
Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 1993 book, "The Clash of Civilizations" that "the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations." He also charges in that book that "the very phase world community has become a euphemism to give legitimacy to the actions of the West."
Yes, Huntington has his critics, which I find inane such as civilizations don't control states, states control civilizations; no culture is an island, or the most absurd to my mind and the most optimistic that the power of prosperity and staying the course will neutralize the complexities. The latter is from the Wall Street Journal, the clerical guide to materialism.
In my wandering way, I mention six points (in this article) as benchmarks to the crucible of leadership, epitomized in volunteerism. I use these to illustrate what I see as the dangers of moral decline and rising decadence in the West. I do this implicitly as I often do in my writing.
I see this decadence as a manifestation of pointless wealth and self-indulgent preoccupation, starving the mind and heart of its necessary spiritual nutrition. The West has led the world down this decline despite the fact the West has 800-900 million people to the rest of the world’s nearly 5 billion. The Pied Piper of Progress has endangered this small planet with its excess while expecting Band Aid therapy to suffice to keep it extant.
Yes, the West does some things for the Third World, but why not an army of volunteers of 1 million or more in a Peace Corps from the United States; why not a confederation of nations of 10 million Peace Corps volunteers in a spiritual-material alliance rather than military alliances? Less we forget we are always on the brink of nuclear holocaust.
It is not cynical, Ted, to change people's behavior without changing their souls. It is impossible. True, surface change can occur when it is pecuniary advantageous to change behavior in the short run, but it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to do it permanently.
The great religious leaders of Jesus Christ, Mohammedan, the Prophets of the Old Testament, and Buddha, among others all essentially spoke with the same spiritual voice that was to be corrupted by their followers who wanted to change behavior without regards to their souls. It is not only Americans who like shortcuts. All of these leaders have been corrupted by this fundamental disregard.
You and I are not on the same page when you talk of "polishing leadership skills" as if they are a pair of Florsheins. We had fifty years of treating leadership as a "style," and now a batch of entrepreneurs are treating leadership as a condiment that can be attained by a collection of recipes, notwithstanding my friend's "Leadership Excellent" contributors, of which I have been one. These all miss the point.
We have gone way too far towards material success (the corner office) and need a decided correction towards spiritual fulfillment (a sense of a life well spent).
As for my writing being stimulating or not, it never occurs to me. I am one single person that has risen from very humble beginnings with an imperfect education, but a wide exposure to this world and how it works and fails to work, and I write from that perspective. Few read me, and even that few often find me contemptible because I don't say what they want to hear.
One of my favorite writers on education is the African American Thomas Sowell. He recently wrote this:
"The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer, and they don't want explanations that do not give them that."
I used the present presidential campaign to illustrate my point, which no matter how it comes out, will be a momentous change in the constellation that is America.
If America is an idea, then that idea also has had to make room for color in a way it has never made room before. Often in my work, I have known brilliant men and women of color who pined away their time in sub roles only because they were of color. That is changing as inevitably as night follows day because people of color dominate the world, and if they are not in positions of leadership than the world's very survival is in jeopardy. Yes, I wander but my wandering is always in focus.
When you have been enslaved or in subservient roles for nearly 300 years, you cannot make a correction in 50 or more years; nor can the world of color suddenly behave as if the West because it is not the West, and the West does not have answers for it.
Now, I'll get back to the "crucible of leadership" and why I think volunteerism is so important. You don't volunteer to influence, or if you do, you're going to be disappointed. You volunteer to serve. Service leadership is volunteerism personified. You don't talk about transformation; you demonstrate it, as you put it, with your feet, with your actions.
You ask for examples of volunteerism and the dismal problems that occur when it is absent. It is in my books and articles, more than a million published words. It is out there! What can I say?
Ted, I have neither the heart nor the head of the insurgent. I’m just trying to make sense of a senseless world to myself, and hope it may resonate with others. I don’t care if it offends. I am not trying to recruit converts. I don’t care if I lose friends. I actually only have one real friend, BB, and that is more than enough for me. And, finally, I have proven decidedly over time, I am not commercial. I can live with that. People are more likely to read me when my voice has been stilled, but they will read me. I have no doubt of that.
Be always well,
Jim
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 6, 2008
REFERENCE:
A good friend and fellow member of the think-tank, THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, is starting a new magazine to be called IMPACT. It is to have a philanthropy-focus showcasing charities, and articles to assist people in more effective ways of making change.
The writer here is a diligent philanthropist and astute entrepreneur who is quite spiritual but pragmatic in the sense that without material success an enterprise cannot possibly get off the ground. He has made significant interventions in one of the most impoverished communities in the State of Florida, bringing computers and state-of-the-arts technologies to children who otherwise would have no such access.
He has been supported of Dr. Fisher’s maverick spirit and work, and as his note indicates, continues to attempt to corral his spirit into a business perspective. The exchange is offered to show how friends can differ, even critically, and for the effort, gain insight into each other as well as themselves by honest exchange.
The referenced article, Crucible of Leadership, was posted earlier on this blog.
THE WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I love - LOVE - the article. Tocqueville is one of my all-time favorites, and your analysis of our current political drama is dead-on.
I do have a request for revision, though. I believe that this piece wanders far a field, and what I'm hoping for is something tighter for our audience, which will consist of intellectuals, Danielle Steel readers with a social bent, and all in between. (Also, the election will be a vague memory by the time our December issue hits the stands and the mail).
What you wrote your friend and copied us spoke to a very specific issue: If you want to be a true leader, learn to lead volunteers. Without position power, you will have to persuade and inspire, rather than coerce. I know from first-hand experience what a new and challenging skill that is for a "boss." In my company, I expect you to perform because I'm paying you. With volunteers.... people vote with their feet.
A big part of what we're trying to accomplish through NI's Adam Smith Awards and as an ongoing theme in IMPACT is to mold the behavior of social- and business leaders. "Influence The Influencers," the sign that hangs on my wall across from my desk, says it all.
This may sound cynical, but I want to change people's behavior, much more than their souls. So even if you're just out for #1, I want to show that doing the right thing will advance your agenda. If people want to polish their leadership skills in order to help more people, great! They should volunteer. If they want to polish their leadership skills to win that corner office, great! They should volunteer, too.
The letter you wrote your candidate-friend, expanded with even more real-world examples from your days at Honeywell and elsewhere, would serve our inaugural issue perfectly. I know such a piece isn't going to be as stimulating to you as what you just wrote. I hope you don't mind.
Regards,
Ted
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
You have not been the first one to accuse me of "wandering far a field." It is no doubt accurate. I write as I see things, and while my focus is often abstract my intentions are manifestly concrete.
Quite frankly, I am not a commercial guy, but write the truth as I sense it.
The question has been asked of me many times, "Who is your audience?"
I am my audience, and if I make connection with others, all the better. As my mail indicates, I do, of people of broadly different backgrounds but significant accomplishments in their chosen endeavors. While not necessarily agreeing, they find me "refreshing," whatever that means.
I am not a "Dick, see Dick, see Dick run: Jane, see Jane, see Jane run" writer. Nor am I an electronic acronym disciple but a 20th century person who has always walked and talked in the 21st century.
In "Confident Selling for the 90s," which was an update of its 1970s edition, I wrote about the old and new guard regarding sales people, but was thinking of everyman of the present century.
The book was published in 1992. For example, I saw our preoccupation with technicians (old guard) vs. strategists (new guard); short term focus vs. long term focus; loyalty to company vs. loyalty to self; employee vs. owner; crusader vs. communicator, and so on. In a sense, old stuff but actually not.
For instance, we Americans think of ourselves as members of an individualistic society, but we have been essentially a conforming society most of our history with a mantra of material individualism and expression.
Once tattoos were for renegades only, now everyone sports them. I mention tattoos because they are external signs of nothing going on inside. People show them to shout out whom they are when whom they are can only be discovered in what is not showing. It is a private conversation with self that no longer takes place. Individualism is such a conversation.
Moreover, individualism in a spiritual sense is the real basis of individualism of the new century. It is exploding across the globe as I write.
There is an abstract theme throughout this selling book, which is actually a confident thinking book. Please, be patient with my wandering.
The book, you see, is not actually about selling a product or service, but in believing in oneself. Once that is achieved, the rest is academic. Self-knowing and self-acceptance are the critical components of spiritual development for a concrete payoff. Volunteerism introduces the individual to that possibility.
It is not an accident that there are no other books like CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s except in exoteric bookshops.
Take the fact that I mention in the book's "Introduction" leaving Nalco in my mid-thirties making the equivalent in today’s dollars of nearly $500,000, saying, "If I wasn't doing my job, you'd fire me, right? Well, the company is failing me. So, I'm firing the company."
Was that madness? I don't think so. It was half a lifetime ago, and if anything, is more pronounced in me than ever before.
Ted, I don't write for intellectuals, or academics, and I have no idea who reads Danielle Steel, knowing only that she is a best selling author. I don't think in terms of "my niche," but in terms of an emerging world, in which the United States of America is going to have a less and less dominant role in the scheme of things, a role for which it denies as a possibility and therefore for which it is not prepared.
I see Third World Russia blackmailing the world with its oil and its nuclear bomb arsenal; I see atheistic China attempting to bridge the gap between it and the rest of the world with capitalistic expansion smothering out the need for spiritual nutrition with atheistic communism; I see India that rules like the abused child (product of the British Empire) that now abuses its own (diverse ethnic) family in a similar fashion, again, attempting to use economic and technological substantive growth to supplant its spiritual lapses; I see major South American countries repressed for centuries with draconian and mythic Roman Catholicism and oligarchic authorities trying to dissolve these ties and gain some purchase by attaching themselves to these emerging Third World Powers such as China, Russia and India.
I've not mentioned the "cradle of civilization," where the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates valley of ancient Persia are attempting to become postmodern bypassing the need of modernity, driven by ancient myths and abuses and clerical dominance.
Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his 1993 book, "The Clash of Civilizations" that "the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating civilizations." He also charges in that book that "the very phase world community has become a euphemism to give legitimacy to the actions of the West."
Yes, Huntington has his critics, which I find inane such as civilizations don't control states, states control civilizations; no culture is an island, or the most absurd to my mind and the most optimistic that the power of prosperity and staying the course will neutralize the complexities. The latter is from the Wall Street Journal, the clerical guide to materialism.
In my wandering way, I mention six points (in this article) as benchmarks to the crucible of leadership, epitomized in volunteerism. I use these to illustrate what I see as the dangers of moral decline and rising decadence in the West. I do this implicitly as I often do in my writing.
I see this decadence as a manifestation of pointless wealth and self-indulgent preoccupation, starving the mind and heart of its necessary spiritual nutrition. The West has led the world down this decline despite the fact the West has 800-900 million people to the rest of the world’s nearly 5 billion. The Pied Piper of Progress has endangered this small planet with its excess while expecting Band Aid therapy to suffice to keep it extant.
Yes, the West does some things for the Third World, but why not an army of volunteers of 1 million or more in a Peace Corps from the United States; why not a confederation of nations of 10 million Peace Corps volunteers in a spiritual-material alliance rather than military alliances? Less we forget we are always on the brink of nuclear holocaust.
It is not cynical, Ted, to change people's behavior without changing their souls. It is impossible. True, surface change can occur when it is pecuniary advantageous to change behavior in the short run, but it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to do it permanently.
The great religious leaders of Jesus Christ, Mohammedan, the Prophets of the Old Testament, and Buddha, among others all essentially spoke with the same spiritual voice that was to be corrupted by their followers who wanted to change behavior without regards to their souls. It is not only Americans who like shortcuts. All of these leaders have been corrupted by this fundamental disregard.
You and I are not on the same page when you talk of "polishing leadership skills" as if they are a pair of Florsheins. We had fifty years of treating leadership as a "style," and now a batch of entrepreneurs are treating leadership as a condiment that can be attained by a collection of recipes, notwithstanding my friend's "Leadership Excellent" contributors, of which I have been one. These all miss the point.
We have gone way too far towards material success (the corner office) and need a decided correction towards spiritual fulfillment (a sense of a life well spent).
As for my writing being stimulating or not, it never occurs to me. I am one single person that has risen from very humble beginnings with an imperfect education, but a wide exposure to this world and how it works and fails to work, and I write from that perspective. Few read me, and even that few often find me contemptible because I don't say what they want to hear.
One of my favorite writers on education is the African American Thomas Sowell. He recently wrote this:
"The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer, and they don't want explanations that do not give them that."
I used the present presidential campaign to illustrate my point, which no matter how it comes out, will be a momentous change in the constellation that is America.
If America is an idea, then that idea also has had to make room for color in a way it has never made room before. Often in my work, I have known brilliant men and women of color who pined away their time in sub roles only because they were of color. That is changing as inevitably as night follows day because people of color dominate the world, and if they are not in positions of leadership than the world's very survival is in jeopardy. Yes, I wander but my wandering is always in focus.
When you have been enslaved or in subservient roles for nearly 300 years, you cannot make a correction in 50 or more years; nor can the world of color suddenly behave as if the West because it is not the West, and the West does not have answers for it.
Now, I'll get back to the "crucible of leadership" and why I think volunteerism is so important. You don't volunteer to influence, or if you do, you're going to be disappointed. You volunteer to serve. Service leadership is volunteerism personified. You don't talk about transformation; you demonstrate it, as you put it, with your feet, with your actions.
You ask for examples of volunteerism and the dismal problems that occur when it is absent. It is in my books and articles, more than a million published words. It is out there! What can I say?
Ted, I have neither the heart nor the head of the insurgent. I’m just trying to make sense of a senseless world to myself, and hope it may resonate with others. I don’t care if it offends. I am not trying to recruit converts. I don’t care if I lose friends. I actually only have one real friend, BB, and that is more than enough for me. And, finally, I have proven decidedly over time, I am not commercial. I can live with that. People are more likely to read me when my voice has been stilled, but they will read me. I have no doubt of that.
Be always well,
Jim
Friday, September 05, 2008
CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP -- VOLUNTEERISM
CRUCIBLE OF LEADERSHIP – VOLUNTEERISM
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 4, 2008
“VOLUNTEER: One who renders a service or takes part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition)
In “Democracy in America” (Volume One, 1835), Alex de Tocqueville quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman who mingles descriptions of the weather with news of the torture of local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. The lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains, but was full of kindness only for her own class. Her range of sympathies extended only to those who were equals. She could not imagine herself in a place of the peasants.
In America, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good Samaritanism among perfect strangers. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of equalitarianism.
He points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals. It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy.
Would this revered observer be surprised with America nearly 174 years later? We can only wonder. Today we have an African American running for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, and a woman as Vice President running on the Republican Ticket.
One of the consistent themes through all the current campaign rhetoric is how common these candidates are, or want us to believe them to be. No one would suggest that equality has reached the point of totally supplanting the aristocratic Frenchwoman’s perspective, but it is clear we have reached the point where the rhetoric if not the reality would suggest that is the case. Let us examine some aspects of this phenomenon of assumed shared aims more closely and attempt to understand why it is important, especially now.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY
(1) INDIVIDUALISM COUNTS
There would not have been a successful Barak Obama candidacy for president without the people’s medium, the Internet. Hillary Clinton was all but the nominee until Obama used this new technology to recruit people and create a multi-million dollar war chest of funds from volunteers across the nation. True, more often than not these were young idealistic contributors with limited funds rather than old and established captains of industry and commerce.
Obama created excitement and enthusiasm with his theme of change and a new beginning. A nimble mind and gifted speaker, he chose to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream.”
The Democratic presidential nominee made an effort to reach a demographic, geographic and personality profile of a citizenry wanting to be heard. He enabled them to resonate as if with one voice. He recognized that the volunteer is an individual but finds its voice in the collective conscience.
(2) PUBLIC SERVICE vs. SELF-INTERESTS
Not to be outdone on this issue of equality and equal opportunity, presidential nominee for the Republican Party, John McCain, has had a reputation of being a crusader against the so-called concentrated powers of selfishness such as pork barrel legislation, the oil lobby, the Alaskan $200 million bridge to nowhere of Don Young and Ted Stevens, and the outrageous contracts to Pentagon contractors by lobbyist puppeteer Jack Abramoff.
Corruption kills volunteerism while integrity seeds volunteers who rise from every section of the country when they feel they are needed and respected as meaningful contributors.
(3) NATURAL DISASTERS AND THE RESPONSE TO THEM
We witnessed the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina that hit the city of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and the subsequent fumbling and bumbling of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Not only was there a failure of coordination between local, state, and federal authorities, but also ordinary citizens were left out of the equation. They were made to feel they did not count.
This was especially true of those living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the levee gave way there, and flooded the city taking hundreds of lives and leaving thousands scrambling for shelter, volunteers across the country rushed to help, only to find no one in charge.
Fortunately, this error was not repeated with Hurricane Gustav. Instead, there was coordination, cooperation, and sensible planning to enable more than 2 million citizens to evacuate the area safely. Unfortunately, more than a week later 1.2 million homes are still without electrical power.
Throughout American history, volunteerism has reached its zenith in dedication and selfless service during natural disasters. Yet, what Hurricane Katrina taught us is that volunteerism is not an occasional or emergency activity but needs to be part of the hard wiring of the collective psyche of society. When it is not, people wait to be led, and as Katrina proved, that can be disastrous.
(4) VALUES CANNOT BE TAUGHT, THEY ACCRUE, ERODE AND CHANGE
Many reading this know of World War II only from history books. It was a period of volunteerism on a grand scale. America was attacked by the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately on December 7, 1941 on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Nearly 3,000 American military servicemen and servicewomen were killed or wounded, and the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy was virtually immobilized.
The United States was forced from a peacetime philosophy of isolationism into a wartime combatant society overnight. There was no sacrifice too great, no inconvenience too monumental for tens of thousands of young people to volunteer for military service, and tens of thousands of wives and mothers to choose to serve their country by working in defense factories. This collective effort grew out of the American culture and value system of the common good. It was not manufactured; it existed; it was the value system of the American people.
A value system cannot be taught. It accrues over time. Values are demonstrated in action, not in rhetoric. There is no substitute for this pervading reality.
Over the past fifty years or so, or since WWII, there has been erosion in the value of the common good. We have seen selfishness take precedence over service, what you can get over what you can give. It is obvious in the home and in the classroom, in the workplace and in the government.
In the process, we have confused rights with privileges. We have a right to a public education, but it is a privilege to learn. The honor of intellectual labor is not a college degree but the enlightenment, maturity, and understanding that such a privilege makes possible. Parents, teachers, priests and executives should differentiate the difference between rights and privileges. There was a time when only the upper aristocratic classes had access to scholarship and the privilege of enlightenment.
Tocqueville has an interesting take on this:
“There is no class in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.”
We want the privilege of being wise without the effort. We desire an education but not the pain of its attainment. Students often hate the need for education but want to enjoy its fruits; parents are often afraid to be parents for fear their children won’t like them; teachers are afraid to be teachers complaining they don’t get enough administrative support; and executives are afraid to have honest feedback for fear it might compromise their intended course. Each of these dispositions kills self-expression and volunteerism.
Americans of WWII vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country is good enough for me." But Americans of the post Vietnam War era think more in terms of “the right to fail, the right to work, the right to civil disobedience, civil rights, human rights, or in terms of controlling their own destiny without any consequences for their actions." They have an antipathy for the collective reality. I have coined this disposition and orientation, personhood.
It has led to the Hippie, Yippie, X Generation, Y Generation, and the “Me” Generation, all in succession. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good while professionals increasingly have adopted the value system of personhood.
It appears personhood is a pivotal orientation, which is eroding as these “spoiled brat” generations come increasingly into leadership positions.
Americans who are now becoming 40, 50 and 60-year-olds have witnessed a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements; between the standing of the United States in the world with what they anticipated. They are disappointmented to discover the accumulation of wealth is a bridge to nowhere; while finding service to others, philanthropy, and volunteerism not only is gratifying but enriching to the soul.
This cyclic return to good sense could not be taught, but had to be experienced.
(5) THE WISDOM OF THE DIDACTIC IN ITS ASCENDANCY
We are in the age of a rebirth of volunteerism, which does not spring from emergency or crusader zeal, but from a spirit of natural connection. We are also in a transitional period in which institutional authority is disintegrating at a more alarming rate than the alleged dissolving ice caps in the Artic and Antarctica.
Authority is now a groundswell from the people, and not a trickle down condition from the top. Ordinary citizens have come into their own and never more powerfully than since the advent of the Internet and avalanche of bloggers. It is the Age of the Amateur.
Authority has moved almost imperceptivity away from defined authority to the amateur thinker. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007):
“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad philosophical terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience. Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of bastardized syntax of the technical in the vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”
The palpable evidence is in presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a one-term senator of four years with no executive experience, and Sarah Palin, a vice president candidate and a one-term governor of Alaska for less than two years in a state with more moose and bears than people.
The African American Obama rose out of the bowels of mix race and a single parent upbringing while housewife and hockey mom Palin rose out of the same commonality. Much is made of the historical significance of this without realizing top down authority is dissolving while bottom up authority is just gaining its stride.
(6) A CASE IN POINT
A man I esteem is running for a city council seat in my local community. He emailed me his frustration with all kinds of people trying to give him advice on what to do and not to do. He thought the way they perceived him was the reason they pushed for his candidacy. I responded to his email in this manner:
“Your best counsel is yourself, and your best sounding board is your wife. Anyone beyond that has a vague idea of who, what, and why you are. They have a special interest in your candidacy but only know you in singular dimensions.
You have brought value added to whatever you have done, going into the US Army right out of high school, then qualifying for Officers Candidate School, rising to a full-bird Colonel, acquiring a college degree in business administration along the way, and always working within the community you found yourself to make it better. You are energetic, creative, yes, impatient, but we need that in people who run for public office.
You are not only a proven leader in the military sense but also more importantly, a proven leader in the volunteer sense. I know because I have worked and served with you in that capacity.”
I then shared with him my experience as a psychologist with Honeywell, Inc. I tried to get some executives who led with position power to do volunteer work. Leadership in volunteer work is demonstrated more through persuasion than authority. None took me up on that challenge.
Over the years, I told him, young engineers would come to me after attending a seminar on leadership, and say, “I’ll be a worker-centered leader when I’m a program manager.” Many of them became program managers and went on to being directors or above. Somehow in the transition they had forgotten the promise to lead by following, and instead asserted themselves as omniscient, or exactly as they had previously been led.
My friend had been commander of some 3,500 men and women, and was used to his word being the law. I know because the captain of my Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (Ca-139) was God incarnate as I would imagine the colonel’s people saw him. I didn’t meet him when he had that command authority, but when he was a community volunteer with no position power, but the power of his ideas, intelligence, social skills, and persuasion. These will all serve him well in elective office for volunteerism is the crucible of leadership.
_____________
A version of this piece is to appear in the first issue of IMPACT in December 2008.
JAMES R. FISHER, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 4, 2008
“VOLUNTEER: One who renders a service or takes part in a transaction while having no legal concern or interest.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition)
In “Democracy in America” (Volume One, 1835), Alex de Tocqueville quotes a letter written by an aristocratic Frenchwoman who mingles descriptions of the weather with news of the torture of local peasants who were revolting against a new tax. The lady was not an unkind person, Tocqueville explains, but was full of kindness only for her own class. Her range of sympathies extended only to those who were equals. She could not imagine herself in a place of the peasants.
In America, Tocqueville found a surprising display of charities of all kinds, as well as of good Samaritanism among perfect strangers. This sympathetic attitude is not inherent in the culture of the Americans, Tocqueville argues, but is rather a product of equalitarianism.
He points to the inability of the white Americans to sympathize with the plight of the Negro slaves, whom they do not regard as equals. It is the limits of equality, and not the cultural outlook, that set the limits of sympathy.
Would this revered observer be surprised with America nearly 174 years later? We can only wonder. Today we have an African American running for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic Ticket, and a woman as Vice President running on the Republican Ticket.
One of the consistent themes through all the current campaign rhetoric is how common these candidates are, or want us to believe them to be. No one would suggest that equality has reached the point of totally supplanting the aristocratic Frenchwoman’s perspective, but it is clear we have reached the point where the rhetoric if not the reality would suggest that is the case. Let us examine some aspects of this phenomenon of assumed shared aims more closely and attempt to understand why it is important, especially now.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY
(1) INDIVIDUALISM COUNTS
There would not have been a successful Barak Obama candidacy for president without the people’s medium, the Internet. Hillary Clinton was all but the nominee until Obama used this new technology to recruit people and create a multi-million dollar war chest of funds from volunteers across the nation. True, more often than not these were young idealistic contributors with limited funds rather than old and established captains of industry and commerce.
Obama created excitement and enthusiasm with his theme of change and a new beginning. A nimble mind and gifted speaker, he chose to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream.”
The Democratic presidential nominee made an effort to reach a demographic, geographic and personality profile of a citizenry wanting to be heard. He enabled them to resonate as if with one voice. He recognized that the volunteer is an individual but finds its voice in the collective conscience.
(2) PUBLIC SERVICE vs. SELF-INTERESTS
Not to be outdone on this issue of equality and equal opportunity, presidential nominee for the Republican Party, John McCain, has had a reputation of being a crusader against the so-called concentrated powers of selfishness such as pork barrel legislation, the oil lobby, the Alaskan $200 million bridge to nowhere of Don Young and Ted Stevens, and the outrageous contracts to Pentagon contractors by lobbyist puppeteer Jack Abramoff.
Corruption kills volunteerism while integrity seeds volunteers who rise from every section of the country when they feel they are needed and respected as meaningful contributors.
(3) NATURAL DISASTERS AND THE RESPONSE TO THEM
We witnessed the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina that hit the city of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and the subsequent fumbling and bumbling of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Not only was there a failure of coordination between local, state, and federal authorities, but also ordinary citizens were left out of the equation. They were made to feel they did not count.
This was especially true of those living in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When the levee gave way there, and flooded the city taking hundreds of lives and leaving thousands scrambling for shelter, volunteers across the country rushed to help, only to find no one in charge.
Fortunately, this error was not repeated with Hurricane Gustav. Instead, there was coordination, cooperation, and sensible planning to enable more than 2 million citizens to evacuate the area safely. Unfortunately, more than a week later 1.2 million homes are still without electrical power.
Throughout American history, volunteerism has reached its zenith in dedication and selfless service during natural disasters. Yet, what Hurricane Katrina taught us is that volunteerism is not an occasional or emergency activity but needs to be part of the hard wiring of the collective psyche of society. When it is not, people wait to be led, and as Katrina proved, that can be disastrous.
(4) VALUES CANNOT BE TAUGHT, THEY ACCRUE, ERODE AND CHANGE
Many reading this know of World War II only from history books. It was a period of volunteerism on a grand scale. America was attacked by the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately on December 7, 1941 on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. Nearly 3,000 American military servicemen and servicewomen were killed or wounded, and the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy was virtually immobilized.
The United States was forced from a peacetime philosophy of isolationism into a wartime combatant society overnight. There was no sacrifice too great, no inconvenience too monumental for tens of thousands of young people to volunteer for military service, and tens of thousands of wives and mothers to choose to serve their country by working in defense factories. This collective effort grew out of the American culture and value system of the common good. It was not manufactured; it existed; it was the value system of the American people.
A value system cannot be taught. It accrues over time. Values are demonstrated in action, not in rhetoric. There is no substitute for this pervading reality.
Over the past fifty years or so, or since WWII, there has been erosion in the value of the common good. We have seen selfishness take precedence over service, what you can get over what you can give. It is obvious in the home and in the classroom, in the workplace and in the government.
In the process, we have confused rights with privileges. We have a right to a public education, but it is a privilege to learn. The honor of intellectual labor is not a college degree but the enlightenment, maturity, and understanding that such a privilege makes possible. Parents, teachers, priests and executives should differentiate the difference between rights and privileges. There was a time when only the upper aristocratic classes had access to scholarship and the privilege of enlightenment.
Tocqueville has an interesting take on this:
“There is no class in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects.”
We want the privilege of being wise without the effort. We desire an education but not the pain of its attainment. Students often hate the need for education but want to enjoy its fruits; parents are often afraid to be parents for fear their children won’t like them; teachers are afraid to be teachers complaining they don’t get enough administrative support; and executives are afraid to have honest feedback for fear it might compromise their intended course. Each of these dispositions kills self-expression and volunteerism.
Americans of WWII vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country is good enough for me." But Americans of the post Vietnam War era think more in terms of “the right to fail, the right to work, the right to civil disobedience, civil rights, human rights, or in terms of controlling their own destiny without any consequences for their actions." They have an antipathy for the collective reality. I have coined this disposition and orientation, personhood.
It has led to the Hippie, Yippie, X Generation, Y Generation, and the “Me” Generation, all in succession. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good while professionals increasingly have adopted the value system of personhood.
It appears personhood is a pivotal orientation, which is eroding as these “spoiled brat” generations come increasingly into leadership positions.
Americans who are now becoming 40, 50 and 60-year-olds have witnessed a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements; between the standing of the United States in the world with what they anticipated. They are disappointmented to discover the accumulation of wealth is a bridge to nowhere; while finding service to others, philanthropy, and volunteerism not only is gratifying but enriching to the soul.
This cyclic return to good sense could not be taught, but had to be experienced.
(5) THE WISDOM OF THE DIDACTIC IN ITS ASCENDANCY
We are in the age of a rebirth of volunteerism, which does not spring from emergency or crusader zeal, but from a spirit of natural connection. We are also in a transitional period in which institutional authority is disintegrating at a more alarming rate than the alleged dissolving ice caps in the Artic and Antarctica.
Authority is now a groundswell from the people, and not a trickle down condition from the top. Ordinary citizens have come into their own and never more powerfully than since the advent of the Internet and avalanche of bloggers. It is the Age of the Amateur.
Authority has moved almost imperceptivity away from defined authority to the amateur thinker. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007):
“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad philosophical terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience. Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of bastardized syntax of the technical in the vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”
The palpable evidence is in presidential candidacy of Barak Obama, a one-term senator of four years with no executive experience, and Sarah Palin, a vice president candidate and a one-term governor of Alaska for less than two years in a state with more moose and bears than people.
The African American Obama rose out of the bowels of mix race and a single parent upbringing while housewife and hockey mom Palin rose out of the same commonality. Much is made of the historical significance of this without realizing top down authority is dissolving while bottom up authority is just gaining its stride.
(6) A CASE IN POINT
A man I esteem is running for a city council seat in my local community. He emailed me his frustration with all kinds of people trying to give him advice on what to do and not to do. He thought the way they perceived him was the reason they pushed for his candidacy. I responded to his email in this manner:
“Your best counsel is yourself, and your best sounding board is your wife. Anyone beyond that has a vague idea of who, what, and why you are. They have a special interest in your candidacy but only know you in singular dimensions.
You have brought value added to whatever you have done, going into the US Army right out of high school, then qualifying for Officers Candidate School, rising to a full-bird Colonel, acquiring a college degree in business administration along the way, and always working within the community you found yourself to make it better. You are energetic, creative, yes, impatient, but we need that in people who run for public office.
You are not only a proven leader in the military sense but also more importantly, a proven leader in the volunteer sense. I know because I have worked and served with you in that capacity.”
I then shared with him my experience as a psychologist with Honeywell, Inc. I tried to get some executives who led with position power to do volunteer work. Leadership in volunteer work is demonstrated more through persuasion than authority. None took me up on that challenge.
Over the years, I told him, young engineers would come to me after attending a seminar on leadership, and say, “I’ll be a worker-centered leader when I’m a program manager.” Many of them became program managers and went on to being directors or above. Somehow in the transition they had forgotten the promise to lead by following, and instead asserted themselves as omniscient, or exactly as they had previously been led.
My friend had been commander of some 3,500 men and women, and was used to his word being the law. I know because the captain of my Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (Ca-139) was God incarnate as I would imagine the colonel’s people saw him. I didn’t meet him when he had that command authority, but when he was a community volunteer with no position power, but the power of his ideas, intelligence, social skills, and persuasion. These will all serve him well in elective office for volunteerism is the crucible of leadership.
_____________
A version of this piece is to appear in the first issue of IMPACT in December 2008.
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