A GREAT ELECTION -- AN EXCHANGE WITH DR. KENNETH MURRELL

A GREAT ELECTION – AN EXCHANGE WITH DR. KENNETH MURRELL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 6, 2008

“Unclaimed promises are like uncashed checks; they will keep us from bankruptcy, but not from want.”

Francis Ridley Havergal (1836 – 1879), English poet

“He who promises runs into debt.”

Talmud

DR. KEN MURRELL WRITES:

Jim

Let me thank you in order of your gifts to me.

First, thanks for the connection in Germany, I am only there for a few days but I will see if there is a way to connect.

Second, thanks for the wonderful response and the point I wanted to make clearer was that I do believe the individual does make an impact but if he or she is alone, or in the case of Cheney in the shadows the impact is far more destructive than developmental.

One person can do so much damage and it may take thousands of us to fix it. But then that provides a call for thousands to be of service and this next generation in many ways is understanding of this concept.

We don't want to thank Cheney but without his abuse perhaps we would not have elected an agent of change.

Third, the Arab world, yes, indeed, does have a long history and it is not the same as the world of Islam. When the two became entangled, much was lost, but of course many would also be quick to identify the positive side of this as well.

The best I have seen on the Arab view of the world is in the book by Patai "The Arab Mind.” Many years ago I would quote that chapter and verse. There are likely more up to date sources out there but this book set out the pattern of their worldview. Both within and across cultures

Fourth, and very important while many of us are basking in the glory of the election last evening, your warnings of Cheney are most impressive and critical to be sensitive to as a new ruling party is being framed.

I feared the man (Cheney) and knew that with him and Rumsfield in the same room something close to evil might be cooking.

Surprisingly, when the twin towers came down, I immediately thought of those two and was fearful of what they would do the next day.

Do you recall that I left the country for Cairo after being downsized by Rumsfield after only a few years as the international OD person at G.D. Searle? Rummy was clearly a political being and as a manager quite a disaster. He led a reorganizing effort that was done only as a political operative could.

Rumsfeld’s researchers for this major change were two young not that experienced MBA students he had met while teaching a course on strategy at Northwestern. These were two folks, one of whom had taken some of our OD Programs, but essentially had very little deep knowledge of the discipline. The other was a typical staff manager who knew how to follow orders.

Of course Rummy fired the OD VP right off and from that we all knew where we were going. At this point in time, Searle had one of the best if not the best internal OD teams in the world. Then of course all of us were gone within a year and the company was later broken up and sold to make the family and many others with ownership positions very, very wealthy.

Oh yes, and Rummy did get our mess of R&D records at Searle reviewed by the FDA and lo and behold "asparatame" was approved before even some of our own researchers were satisfied we had made the case for its safety. Limit your diet drinks. I do.

Now to repeat myself, the fifth thanks is to thank you for being exactly what your title suggests--you are a grounded philosopher who keeps a moral compass leading him into tilting at the broken windmills that many can not even see.

Keep up this work; your review of Cheney alone is worth its own blog space. I will not share this though since you like so many of us are walking some thin lines where if we go head to head too often with the ideologues and true believers we may not be around to really get close to what is really happening.

My management department here is full of good people who believe in the politics of what is good for them is good for everyone. I once was so naive when I read all of Ayn Rand and worked on the Goldwater campaign. Both of these were fun and challenging times but I was not very worldly and very, very young.

That makes the perfect condition for narcissism to bloom and in me it sure did. Now we have a culture that wants to love itself and yet also take all of its material wealth with it to the grave. Intellectualism is suspect and anyone who works for the benefit of another is suspicious. What is this culture really based on?

If you have followed any of the work of Clare Graves and his spiral dynamic model, then you know there are ways of making some sense of this lower stage of human development. We all do have a chance to change and grow up but as we can see from so many of our political leaders that is not necessarily a value to many in this culture.

That is what makes this election so important, as a nation we may be growing up just a little. And in the decision we collectively made last night there is hope we can continue to mature and actualize a value set that shows as much concern for others as it does for self.

I am now more hopeful but also very aware that we have set the seeds for our next generation needing all the help it can get and then perhaps earning the label that we have attached to our father's and mother's generation of being the GREATEST GENERATION.

We are making that an imperative and in so many of this younger generation I do see that potential. But they can’t get there without a lot of help so please don’t give up what you do so well

Ken

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you first for your kind words, which are reinforcing in my somewhat solitary walk through this phase of my life.

I’ve often marveled with my Beautiful Betty why I am caught up in the contemporary madness of the times in one sense, and almost a dispassionate observer in the other.

In my long life, I’ve also marveled how little material comfort, or even money means to me, when it is the measure of nearly all things American in terms of significance.

We appreciate say, Dr. Paul Krugman, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics, as much for the $1.3 million that comes with it as to the relevance of his research. We leave it at that, saying the research must be important otherwise, why the prize, right? How many of us will attempt to understand how his research might impact world economics in the future?

We read books almost exclusively on the bestseller lists failing to realize that such a list reflects our limitations and mediocre tastes rather than challenging our cerebral attentiveness. Few stop to think that their favorite authors churn out a new bestseller or two a year with plot lines and storyboards of only marginal difference.

We want to be entertained, not challenged, to be comforted with pleasure, not reminded of our pain. Ever noticed that the themes of most popular fiction are so surreal they seem only a cut above soap operas? My wonder is why we are so preoccupied with sex for entertainment when we have so little understanding of our shared commonality or diverse differences in our genders.

We want to be taken out of ourselves, not reacquainted with ourselves. We judge neighborhoods by their exclusivity and not by their neighborliness, and yet we are moving ever closer to each other, while remaining strangers to ourselves.

This describes the landscape of your work, and what is ironic is that the behavior of Donald Rumsfeld with the two MBA graduates, and the subsequent fall out at G. D. Searle & Company was as predictable as night following day. It reflects the objectivism of Ayn Rand, the self-interest that is eclectic and visceral rather than well thought out and cerebral.

I’m sure Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney see themselves as patriots, good people, and servants at the pleasure of The Republic. They have been operatives for years in the halls of power, sitting on the shoulders of State, and directing it here and then there, as if they held remote controls in their hands.

Before I was five, I lived with my Aunt Annie and Uncle Martin Dean. They would let me color the comic strips in The Clinton Herald as I sat on the floor before their rocking chairs.

I still remember to this day coloring a particular “Brick Bradford” comic strip. My hero found his way inside the head of a mechanical monster that was wreaking havoc. Brick Bradford took over the controls of the monster’s actions, dismantling the machine so that it could no longer destroy the planet.

The metaphor of that machine has stayed with me all my life. It has taken on the character of society, a society that seems increasingly to resemble a machine on automatic pilot, or is it a machine with some shadowy despicable genius at the controls?

The shadow metaphor of Dick Cheney is mine, alone, and not the writers of the books to which I refer. It comes however from this latent memory of a little boy long ago. As events have unfolded, with decent people such as Colin Powell caught up in its web, and as my own life has unfolded, I have been made aware of how important the controller.

The damage done to our society, dissipating our great wealth in preemptive wars was done less by the president (George W. Bush) than those who took the controls from his hand. Yes, it is “W’s” presidency, but he was not equipped to manage the responsibility. He allowed himself to get caught up in the rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” by the religious right, which is as brutal in its ascendancy to power as any of our enemies.

You may use what I have said in my missive because it comes out of the books of experts and observers who still have the freedom to research and report and publish whatever they find to be the case.
No, I am not familiar with Clare Graves or his spiral dynamic model. I find myself reading at the moment many books on early Christianity, which I might add, is every bit an OD phenomenon.

If I listed all the books I’m currently reading or have read, BB would be appalled at how little I’ve written on my novel. But the Jesus story is terribly compelling.

This is especially true when taken out of the context of God and all that, and focusing instead on the incipient nature of this religion, and how a religion of such inauspicious beginning came to such dominance.

This, alone, is as disturbing as it is striking. Dan Brown uncovered a kettle of worms with his “Da Vinci Code.” Most of what he writes cannot be confirmed, and even then remains highly speculative. The Jesus story defies human understanding, especially if you have any foundation in cosmology or quantum mechanics, or the idea of an expanding universe of billions of planets and other solar systems.

That said the Jesus story is moving as a piece of our humanity, and a great OD project.

Finally, I have great respect for you as a practicing OD professional. OD is still a young field, and not enough research is being done in it.

I did a great deal in preparation for the writing of WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS, and amplified on that research in SIX SILENT KILLERS. The core of both works while remaining relevant has been neglected. Dr. Thomas Brown did all he could to bring it to people’s attention and fruition.

I think the failure can be however put to me, as it was not quite a textbook and certainly not designed to salve the ego or conscience of executives. These books were not written to make money (maybe that’s the problem), but to illustrate what worked so effectively for me in my long career. Sadly, virtually everything that has happened in the last several decades in the complex organization is explained in these pages.

Sure, there are the demographics, psychometrics, profiling, and other number games, the questionnaires and the reifying with statistics, but how many longitudinal OD studies such as those being done in epidemiology? These two books were longitudinal studies of my career.

Incidentally, I wrote a book that was never published “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” in which I explored some of this stuff in great depth. But as you have correctly identified, I am more a philosopher than a tactician. I’m glad you find my ideas useful because that is why I continue to post them.

Be always well,

Jim