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