IMPLICIT ENEMIES OF LEADERSHIP -- PROSPERITY & DEMISE OF CHARACTER

IMPLICIT ENEMIES OF LEADERSHIP – PROSPERITY & DEMISE OF CHARACTER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2008

“Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.”

Plutarch (46 – 120 c.e.), Greek biographer

On January 20, 2009, Barak Obama will be sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. He will be proclaimed the most powerful leader in the world. National polls, an Americans are addicted to polls indicated that 72 percent of the American people expect the new president to lift us out of this economic tailspin and restore the nation to health, wealth, happiness and prosperity.

Prosperity is the key word in this lexicon because Americans equate health, wealth and happiness with their economic well being. Nearly five million American homeowners are in foreclosure. Another addiction, large gas guzzling automobiles getting 18 mpg or less have changed their driving habits as gasoline fluctuates in price. The whole financial system that was taken for granted has collapsed with a bailout that may ultimately approach a $trillion of taxpayers money. The bailout at its current level represents an assessment of $3,500 for every living American in this country of some 320 million.

This current weekend leaders of the G-20 major and emerging nations of the world are convening in Washington, D.C. to summit an action plan to reverse this economic hemorrhaging. Constant reference is being made to the global financial crisis during WWII in which Allied nations met at Bretton Woods to create post-WWII economic policy. At that conference, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were created with the dollar secured to the gold standard as the world’s reserve currency.

There are a lot of expected outcomes already apparent. We as human beings are very good at defining the cause of a crisis after the crisis has occurred. We are failures at anticipating the crisis for reason to which I will return shortly. The G-20 leaders claim the crisis was caused by a failure of investors to understand the risks they were taking. I don’t think so. They preferred to deny the risks.

Once the horse is out of the barn, it is easy to come up with consensus schemes to get the horse back in the barn. G-20 leaders plan to stabilize banks and boost growth; improve regulation; bring more voices having impact on finances into the forum, be more sensible about trade policy, and meet regularly. This is the equivalent of securing the barn so the horse will be safely cared for in a secure building.

WHY DO LEADERS NOT LEAD?

The easy answer would be because they can’t, and I’ve submitted that before. But I’ve learned it has more to do with human nature: why lead when you don’t have to?

Leadership – with all the books to the contrary – is simply a matter of character. We as a species have survived on this hostile planet individually and collectively because of our character more than any other factor. What is character?

Character are those basic attributes of survival in which the individual is totally in touch with the reality of his experience and the dangers and pitfalls of that ambience. Character has everything to do with struggle with the instinct for survival against predators around every corner, above and below, and even within breathing distance. You can feel danger before it touches you. There is a primitive warning system that is generated by the mind-body complex that radiates an invisible protective shield.

Once these predators were wild beast when we had little more than our moxie to survive a predatory world that operated totally on instinct. We could feel danger, taste danger, as the hair on the back of our heads would stand at attention. It was as if we had eyes in the back of our heads. We used this intelligence 50,000 or 100,000 years ago to arrive where we are today.

But of course the predators no longer were wild beast but the beast in the human heart. Countless ages in man’s history found leaders using this mechanism of fear as a prescription for control down to our day. These leaders broke from the pack to explain night and day, thunder and lightning, floods and draughts, hurricanes and tornadoes, things we feared because we didn’t understand. The formula is the same today only the data has changed.

We anoint those that can explain things to our satisfaction with power, privilege, status and exemption from the mundane struggles that are indigenous to life. What has happened over the centuries is that those accustomed to power have learned that the most obvious action on their part to sustain power is to make the powerless even less powerless or more dependent. What better way to do that than to increase comfort, reduce struggle, and make them less aware of who and what and where they are. Put otherwise, to become an anodyne to that primitive mechanism that kept them alert to danger 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Every religion, every monarchy, every totalitarian state, and all the marauding bands of warriors back through and before the Dark Ages of Europe have used this formula to success. It is leadership as man has known it and has become a toxic component in post-modernity in all governments with a sprinkling of the DNA of all these previous ages.

EVIDENCE OF FAILED LEADERSHIP – PANDEMONIUM OF PENALTY OF DELAY

It has been a knee jerk reaction to crisis management all my life: when you don’t know what the problem is and don’t want to go to the trouble to define it properly, throw money at it. We have thrown money at education and we spend the most and have more failed students in math and language skills than any other G-7 nation. Our teachers can’t teach so we throw more money at teachers and they get worse.

Now, Secretary of Treasurer Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke composed a three-page memo to bailout Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with what have ballooned to over $150 billion. Then it was AIG that first received $40 billion, which that has also increased, and yet the foreclosures and failures in real estate mount. Now, at the eleventh hour, these two leaders have decided not to assume toxic debts of banks but to turn to relieving citizens of credit card debt and home loans directly. Why? Because fluidity has not occurred with this gigantic cash flow into lending institutions. They are holding on to the money waiting for the prime rate to go up. Predators and prey understand this primitive game if leaders don’t.

In our society, we equate brains, culture, education and experience with character. They are not the same animal. They cannot be equated.

Character understands the dark sides of man’s nature, the primitive fears that lurk in his primitive brain stem. He doesn’t deny them. He uses them. It may make him at times melancholy and depressed because he sees reality so clearly, and is not fooled by the moment. Character has not only been excised from our leaders (I’ll mention some exceptions), but from ourselves. I write in my best and shortest book THE WORKER, ALONE! (Delta Group 1995):

“The worker is on his own nickel, and there is no savior, no god, no protector to shield him from the crush of history, from the inevitable force of reality, other than himself. What is missing in a lack of attention to fear. Workers are afraid to lead fuller lives, not because they embrace fear, but because they deny it by preoccupation with distractions. I understand fear. Fear runs through my body the way sap runs through a tree. I am attentive to fear each day of my life, for that day may be my last. Were I not so attentive I might be distracted and go to my grave without expressing these sentiments. Fear is a powerful positive in my life. It keeps me attentive. It finds me taking life seriously, but not myself.”

Paulson and Bernanke claimed the $700 billion bailout was necessary to save us from another Great Depression. This is the fear game played by actors with brains, culture, education and experience but little character. They are flying by the seat of their pants and expecting us to keep them air bound. To oppose the bailout is made unpatriotic, anti-American and anti-capitalistic. Witch doctors used the same strategy thousands of years ago.

In the 1950s, when General Motors was king, and WWII had successfully been concluded, Charlie Wilson, then CEO of GM said, “As GM goes so goes America.” It was the hubris of an industry on top of the world looking down with reason: one out of every eight jobs (outside farming) in the United States was tied to the automotive industry.
The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) had similar hubris and clout. It punished its employers with worker entitlements and demands not associated with productivity. The automotive conceded because it was willing to give anything as long as the UAW didn’t demand control of the workplace. It was as elicit a bargain as any devised between workers and management. It killed the spirit of creative work and a sense of ownership. What was getting, not giving became a measure of pride and status. Workers became renters, not owners of what they did, but the best paid workers in the world.

Today, some fifty years later, the stock of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in the single digits moving precariously toward zero and bankruptcy or possibly extinction.
Detroit now wants some of this $700 billion. For starters, they have requested a modest $25 billion for retooling. This would be funny is it weren’t so tragic.

Two things haunt Detroit today: (1) its failure to retool; and (2) the enormous UAW contracts with present autoworkers and millions of automotive retirees today. But is this fair? Of course, it isn’t. It is far more complex. What is apparent, however, is that Detroit didn’t lead because it didn’t believe it had to lead.

Speaking from experience, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get oiled. The messenger gets tarred and feathered or worse, sent into the wilderness.

I watched Apple Computer almost go under when Steven Jobs brought in the CEO of Pepsi Cola fame, John Sculley, a brand that had not changed in its history. Sculley was an enabler like a doting father, forgiving indiscretions and failed deadlines, parenting his brood like he had at Pepsi, masterminding advertising campaigns. The latter was key to Pepsi’s success, not innovation.

Electronics are outdated as soon as they roll off the assembling line. Jobs, pesky, brutal, brash, brilliant, a workaholic and an innovator of the first magnitude, understood this but didn’t understand his own character and culture. Apple’s success was predicated on knowing the business and being a creature of it.

Thomas Friedman, the print guru of the world is flat suggests that Steven Jobs would make a good candidate to run “GM iCar.” It is clever but it wouldn’t work, won’t work, and I hope no one takes this absurdity to heart.

LEADERSHIP – CHARACTER WRITTEN LARGE

To restore the American automotive industry, or America’s way through this crisis is to find leaders within the cultures not outside of them, and these leaders will possess CHARACTER written large

What do I mean? I have tendency to go on and on, so let me address the automotive industry in the hopes that the reader will extrapolate what I say about it to the wider business of leadership in these United States.

First of all, $25 billion would be like pouring piss down a drain. Before you know it, this amount would be three times, four times and as many as ten times this number. This is not the age of Lee Iaccoca fame and the Congressional bailout of Chrysler. Toyota is now bigger than Chrysler ever was in these United States with plants sprinkled across the country. That was not so in the 1970s.

The automotive industry says 2.5 million jobs will be lost. I don’t think so. They will be changed. People will be forced to struggle to learn new skills. The creative verve of the American worker will have to be leveraged. It is there waiting to be energized.

The sins of the automotive industry must be acknowledged and not repeated. The technology for 60-mpg automobiles has existed for decades. Instead exploiting this technology, the automotive industry has lobbied expensively and diligently to oppose legislation to increase mpg of new automobiles.

A score of years ago, I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (Delta Group 1990) pointing out that America’s big gas guzzling boats as automobiles couldn’t negotiate many of European city streets. I found it ludicrous as I watched a Cadillac tried to make a u-turn in one of these streets without success, and wrote about it. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that Americans would build SUV’s as big as tanks making the earlier Cadillac look like a toy by comparison.

Fuel efficiency has never been a Detroit priority; making money has, and the American consumer has cooperated in this fantasy as it has always been enamored of big cars and trucks as phallic symbols of its virility and fertility.

The United States Congress cannot be left off the hook as it has been responsive to the demands of these high paid automotive lobbyists, who have winked at the gas guzzlers and talked corporate speak when challenged about doing nothing about the problem.

So, in essence, the problem in the automotive industry has been one of collusion between the automaker, the American auto consumer, and the American Congress. Now, when push comes to shove, the American consumer as citizen is expected to carry the burden. It is the old American rubric: actions don’t necessarily have consequences. Americans have gotten away with narcissism and self-indulgence for more than a century, why not now? I called this “the crippled genius of the American character.” I write in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:

“The American character, in truth, remains that of a child. And like a child, the focus of America’s existence has always been on becoming rather than on being; on the competitive drive, rather than the spirit of cooperation; on the preferred role of spectator to the participant; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. . Man’s primary motivation is to contribute not to consume. Capitalism makes the wish to have and to use the most dominant of human desires. A man so dominated is a crippled genius with the ambition to acquire overpowering his desire to accomplish. Yet, neither private property nor profit is man’s mission, but the free unfolding of his human powers. As Erich Fromm puts it, ‘Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed truly human being.’”

The reader will think this harsh. Imagine how the reader thought of it twenty years ago. But twenty years ago, there was a billion less people in the world; China and India had not yet emerged as great manufacturing and marketing centers; and American manufacturing had not yet become a hallow industry.

SO WHAT?

So, the United States is now a world player and no longer the only world player.

The subprime fiasco has seeded a worldwide meltdown with industry and industry collapsing as if dominoes.

People such as myself were born in the Great Depression. Some of us came from very little. We never got caught up in living beyond our means. We saw the importance of education and sacrifice and struggle. We accepted failure and setbacks and disappointments in stride because we had no choice.

There was no safety net, no fall back position. If we fell on our faces, we had no choice but to pick ourselves up and go forward.

Teachers slapped us around when we needed to be slapped around, and we didn’t go home to our parents and tell on them. If we did, it wouldn’t have done any good. Our parents would inevitably have sided with the teachers.

If we screwed up in school and got into trouble, we were expelled. That was the end of it. We could never get back in that school.

If we didn’t do our schoolwork, we got a failed grade. No written excuse from our parents would change that.

If we didn’t pass our tests we weren’t promoted. Some students stayed in the same grade two or three times, and no one got excited about it.

There was a finality to the system that no longer exists.

College students can take over courses they have failed or gotten low grades in and replace those grades with better performance.

There were no SAT’s or GRE’s in our day, so there were no SAT or GRE crib courses for such exams to get a ballooned score. We parents have always thought these crib courses were ludicrous. If the course work in school didn’t measure performance, what did? Certainly not a high SAT score!

Incidentally, an “A” average in school today would probably be no more than a high “C” average fifty years ago.

If you cheated on a test, then you got a failed grade. If you cheated again, you were expelled. It happened all the time.

I remember a star football player stole out of another student’s locker and was caught. It was his first offense. He was sent for two years to the State’s Reformatory for Boys.

It was tough. It was real. Behavior had consequences. It built character and, yes, modesty and moderation. And it produced leaders with modest demands.

Evidence of this is that fifty years ago the average executive salary was five times that of the worker, but the CEO’s salary could be as much as ten times. Today, CEO salaries with bonuses can be 1,000 times that of workers.

The whole process over the last fifty years has compromised character and character is leadership, and when character is nonexistent, you have the crises that we have experienced in recent times.