OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 3, 2009

“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.”

Ben Franklin

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I have listened to the pundits; I have listened to the scholars; I have listened to corporate executives; I have listened to bankers; I have listened to journalist, and I have read many of them as well, but I have been waiting, it would be too dramatic to say, desperately, for someone to step outside the box and look at the current economic problem other than in the conventional manner.

Imagine you are an ordinary consumer in everyday life, and for years, perhaps all of your life, you have been told you’re a reckless and self-indulgent spendthrift and materialistic to a fault. You don’t save; you don’t treat your possessions with care; and as Vance Packard charged, you’re a waste maker. You’d rather buy a new car than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new television set than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new refrigerator and stove, washer and dryer than fix the old ones. You rather spend $20,000 remodeling your kitchen than acclimating yourself to the old one. You are obsessed, we are told, with spending, spending gratuitously, automatically and impulsively. Christopher Lasch attempted to get our attention by impertinently suggesting consuming was our therapy, but it didn’t slow us down.

So, the moment there is a downturn in the economy, and the value of our stocks plummets; the value of our real estate plummets; the value of all our material possessions plummets; gas prices increase; utilities increase; the packages in the supermarket grow smaller but the prices stay the same; the price of life, medical, and homeowner insurance increases; and on and on, we consumers, who have always been labeled out of control, show a little prudence, and we discover we’re still the bad guys. Missed is that we have always been discriminating spenders only it was based on desire not necessarily need.

Now, in this downturn when we’re finally saving, it is our fault not only that the American economy is deep in recession but the whole global economy. We are reminded that two-thirds of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States depends on us not saving a penny and spending every last dime. We have been patriotically living paycheck to paycheck, mortgaging our home beyond what we can afford, buying automobiles beyond our budget to maintain, maximizing our credit cards by eating out continuously, refurnishing our wardrobe and home with clothes and furniture we don’t need but are tired of what we have.

It doesn’t stop there. We have been faithfully spending buckets of cash on films, sporting events, concerts, and all the products celebrities generate from these activities so as to identify ourselves with them. This celebrity worship has not dried up but prudence has entered the equation.

We have been programmed in our culture to be conformist, polite, submissive, reactive, and we have been. Now, the moment we show a few stones, a little courage, a little more self-interest, the world collapses around us like a shroud. It is our fault; we have done it. But have we?

We have seen bailouts of the big banks, the big commercial and investment institutions, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Max, and none of this has stopped the leak in the damn. But it is still our fault. We shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be duped by the subprime lenders; we shouldn’t have been so obliging when we were hit with subliminal stimuli to buy, buy, and buy. We should have been more self-reliant, self-directed, showing initiative, keeping our house in order. But we were behaving precisely as we had been programmed to behave.

Now, when we are attempting to deprogram ourselves from such passivity, we’re again the bad guys. Whether spending or saving, coming or going, we can’t win for losing. We’re always in the eye of the storm. Just now, when we finally have a situation, which shows we have a chance to get beyond our dependent programming, the attention is elsewhere, chasing symptoms.

We are ready for reprogramming to greater self-management, self-direction, self-reliance, self-control, self-initiative and being proactive. We are ready to grow up, to take charge, and act adult instead of remaining terminally suspended in adolescence counter dependent on our employers, the government and society. But apparently our leaders are not.

We are all in this mess because we have always attempted to solve our problems with the same thinking that got us into the mess. Nothing has changed in that regard. Nothing.

Our spirits as workers and consumers were not broken in 2006, 2007, or 2008; our spirits were broken forty years ago when Corporate America panicked.

It saw Japan, Inc. and South East Asia taking away US venerated markets in automobiles, appliances, steel and other hardware. Corporate America thought it could motivate us as workers and consumers by more entitlements, more free time, and changing the workplace into a playpen. We were expected to say, “Gee whiz, thanks, I’ll show my appreciation by working harder, smarter and more effectively so you’ll be proud of me.” Didn’t happen.

The workplace became a Love Boat and Recreation Center. Work went from the culture of comfort and management dependent to the culture of complacency with a counter dependence on the company for the worker’s well being. We accepted sick leave as a right and took every day; we accepted the ninety percent life and health insurance benefit as a right or as untaxed income; we took the liberal conditions in the workplace to use the facilities as an extension of our private life, using company time and property to do personal business, failing to see these benefits as the privileges they were. No one paid attention. It is remarkable on unwise Corporate America insists in being, the present crisis no exception.

We have had several bumps in the road since the late 1950s, always reacting never anticipating situations, and constantly failing to learn our way is the wrong way. There was Sputnik (1957), then in the 1960s, three Americans: Peter Ducker, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran who couldn’t interest Detroit in their organizational designs, set up statistical quality control and total quality management in Japan. It was to make Japan the envy of the world in Quality.

The 1970s saw double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the OPEC Embargo, and still little changed.

It took Tom Brokaw of NBC television in 1980 to ask, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Pandemonium followed. Deming and Juran had created Quality Control Circles (QCC) where employees were involved in solving quality problems. Americans were buying Japan because it was of superior quality. Now Corporate America rushed to duplicate the Japanese miracle.

The only problem is that Japan is a group culture, the US and individual culture. Japan large industry was only 20 percent of its industry, 90 percent of these employees was blue-collar. Already, in the 1980s, seventy-five percent of American workers were professionals, and less than twenty-five percent blue-collar. Blue-collar workers were used to taking orders and responded to the cosmetic changes of QCC, professionals thought of themselves as part of management and resisted. I know as I directed the largest QCC Program in the nation in the early 1980s with 1,000 blue-collar and 3,000 professionals at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.

I’ve written scores of articles and eight books on the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and management. We have atavistic management and anachronistic programming for workers and managers alike. As matters now stand, American workers are not great, the president notwithstanding. They are not programmed to be great. They are programmed to wait for iconic leadership to appear to miraculously bail them out of their doldrums. That is old school and it won’t wash now or in the future.

Recent behavior of Americans indicates a sense that the shackles of traditional programming are fragmenting. This does not mean they are buoyed by hope but by a new courage. Hope is passive courage is active. This is a good sign. A bad sign is Wall Street’s justification for the $18 billion bonuses of taxpayer’s money handed out in December 2008 with the malarkey, “we need these people and if we don’t pay them they’ll go somewhere else.” There is something wrong when the real economy produces things and the financial economy makes money from money and produces nothing but holds all the cards and gets all the attention. I said my piece on my walk today, and I’ll leave it at that.





James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Tampa, FL 33617
Cell Phone: (813) 990 –7472
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com

Books: Confident Selling (1970); Work Without Managers (1990), Confident Selling for the 90s (1992), The Worker, Alone! (1995), The Taboo Against Being Our Own Best Friend (1996), Six Silent Killers (1998), Corporate Sin (2000), In the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003), A Look Back To See Ahead (2007).