THE SPEECH:
THE TWENTY-FIFTH (25TH) ANNIVERSARY OF DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR.’S
CAREER CHANGING SPEECH
1984 DCAS FORUM
FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1984
CARIBBEAN GULF RESORT
CLEARWATER BEACH, FLORIDA 33515
SUBJECT: "PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT - AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW"
BY
DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PSYCHOLOGIST
HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT
HONEYWELL AVIONICS SYSTEMS GROUP
CLEARWATER, FLORIDA 33546
©
March 1984 Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.)
© Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
March 30, 2009
* * *
“Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue, and renders a man in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt.”
Samuel G. Goodrich (1793 – 1860), American author
* * *
“Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), English author and lexicographer
* * *
REFERENCE: WHEN, WHAT & WHY
Today, March 30, 2009, is the twenty-fifth anniversary of a speech I gave on October 30, 1984. It was a career and personal changing event, but why do I make reference to it now?
I am no great orator, or “great” in any sense, but an ordinary man who witnessed a trend, a pattern and an inclination of a nation that made no sense to me. The speech registered my concern before civilian and military executives in the military industrial complex at a Florida resort.
Looking back now, it was like a motion picture in my head because it was “Star Wars,” not the film, but life as it was being lived at the time, surreal and tragic and comic.
The seeds of our troubles today were sprouting weeds then, and yet far wiser men than I said nothing, did nothing, but went along and got along as if the fantasy would last forever.
This speech was published on this blog (www.fisherofideas.com) in four parts on these dates: March 12, 13, 14, 15, 2009.
The great privilege of my long life has not been that I feel no fear, but that I have come to treat fear as a companion and to embrace it, as my lights would allow. It was fear not courage that drove me to make that speech. Had I not made it fear would have haunted me as having betrayed it, and therefore myself. Fear has allowed me to set no man, no institution, no government, no counsel, no individual above what life, living, experience and being has taught me, and continues to teach me. I am not a rich man but richest man I know for this gift of fear. I shall take it to my end of days.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
IATROGENIC -- YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE! "ENAMORED OF WORDS" -- PART TWO
IATROGENIC – YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE!
“ENAMORED OF WORDS!” – PART TWO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 25, 2009
“Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.”
Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1894), American theologian and great grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758), American theologian
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS (Continued from Part One):
Combinations of words can be confusing, but also enriching with the pen of Russian born English philosopher Isaiah Berlin. I read with great relish his sentences, sometimes of 500 words, without getting lost in them. I only wish I were his equal with such clarity. That said it is his concepts that interest me in particular; for example, his take on “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” I had never thought much about the complexity of freedom before reading him.
“Negative freedom” is freedom without barriers. “Positive freedom” is the freedom we enjoy in our Republic, which is loaded with barriers, and increasingly so since 9/11.
In our mind’s eye, we think of something that is “negative” as bad and something as “positive” as always good. Well, that is not necessarily so when it comes to freedom, or, indeed, for “entropy,” which we have discussed “negative entropy” earlier.
“Negative freedom” is something we are losing every day.
On WGN Chicago television today (March 26, 2009), the noon broadcast informed Chicago metropolitan and suburban viewers that not only are cameras to be placed at many stop signs in the city checking for motorists going through red lights, but monitors are also being installed to read license plates of speeders for prosecution as well.
The first reaction to this may be, “That is a good thing,” but it is yet another barrier to “negative freedom.”
The downside of such impositions is that it weakens our collective resolve to behave responsibly because it “is the right thing to do.” The need for such electronic controls makes us more dependent as if still children, or “not to be trusted to do the right thing” on our own.
Without self-trust, there is little chance to develop trustworthiness, or a moral center and functioning moral compass. If we cannot trust ourselves, we are opening the door for someone outside ourselves to assume that responsibility through external control.
My concern is that the abdication of self-responsibility is an invitation for “positive freedom” to accrue without so much as a by your leave.
The Swedish writer, Hakan Nesser introduced me to a new concept, “Klimze Razor.” It is the guidelines for civilized and intelligent conversation. Its basic principle is balance. You can’t demand any more of the person you’re talking to than you are prepared to give of yourself. Decision makers, persons in positions of power usually like to give the impression they are democratic and transparent. I’m sure the City Council of Chicago in imposing these restrictions was of the mind it was conducting a two-way conversation with voters assuming their agreement with such statues.
Corporate executives do the same with mysterious feelings of satisfaction when they organize redundancy exercises while passing out bonuses amongst themselves, saying as they let people go to not take it personally. “We are saving the company in the long run” is their mantra, implying they have an indispensable role and the company would tank without them, when it probably is tanking because of them.
Our corporate society, what I call corpocracy, represents an example of positive freedom, as we are a society of laws and not men. Justice is blind. Nearly every day new laws are passed in the Federal government, the State government, and the Municipal government that increase the leverage of positive freedom. This is also the case in the private corporation without the voices of those affected in the conversation. CEOs with mild, understanding demeanors and paternal tone of voices are daily dispatching people to the soup lines with the comment, “Somebody has to do it.”
Here in Florida we are in the third year of a drought and new laws are being imposed on people watering their lawns. We now have a water police patrol at taxpayers’ expense, but even more effective are neighbors turning in neighbors who don’t abide by the water restrictions, again a further example of positive freedom. We are told such behavior was common in WWII when Jews attempted to hide from the Nazis. Far more common today are people in the workforce turning each other in for minor transgressions, failing to see how they are shrinking their own and everyone else’s “negative freedom” by doing so.
“Positive freedom” can be a barrier to productivity. It is not simply the laws, rules and regulations, policies and procedures imposed by authority that are alone the culprit, but the invisible hand of innuendo and assumption that dictates how people are likely to behave. The more fear the more rules the more chaos the more rules. Fear and chaos are constructs of entropy, and indicative of a sick workplace.
Most workplace cultures I have experienced play off attributions of fear. As such, there is an incessant need of belonging, true believing, and collective security. You are not to embarrass your boss or your colleagues by having a conversation in which you demand as much attention as you interlocutor demands of you.
Since I have spent a good deal of my career on my own flying about the globe, I was essentially guided by “negative freedom.” That found me rising early and working late every day. As I have written elsewhere, when I was a young chemical sales engineer, I would make my service calls well into the night where allowed in plants operating on three shifts so that I could make more sales calls during the business day.
When I was reduced to having an office in a huge facility, and was expected to be there from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., I encountered immediate suspicion when I came in at 7 a.m. and left at 7 p.m. I was going against the consensus culture; I was making other people look bad; I was accused of drawing attention to myself; I was accused of having no personal life; I was accused of having a hidden agenda; I was finally ordered to cease and desist, which I did. Corpocracy had no room for “negative freedom.”
The workplace culture was committed to conformity, ritualism, and rites of passage and promotion with productive work an incidental if not accidental process with it neither being a sufficient or necessary condition to continuing employment.
Somewhat in good humor, I’ve been told I dress like I did sixty years ago, and I do. I’ve never leaped on the bandwagon of any trend at any time in my life. It has been my very narrow window of self-assertion in terms of “negative freedom.” Be assured that “positive freedom” signals go off if you don’t dress, walk, talk and conform to the lights of the culture.
One time three engineers came to me from research and development complaining about a colleague that wore the same shirt and pants every day for more than a month.
“Why does it bother you?” I asked. They looked at me as if I were mad. “Does he stink?” I added.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just not professional.”
“Professional” is another word with which I have trouble. Professionals, especially engineers in my experience, and I am one, disdain honest intellectual discussion outside their discipline, and are by nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize their pride around their disciplines with narrow answers and rigid structures, and expect others outside their disciplines to accept their answers without a fairly well. In this case, I didn’t provoke them with my disdain. Instead, I suggested,
“Maybe he washes them out every night; maybe he has five outfits that are the same; maybe he considers this his uniform,” then I smiled, “maybe he is trying to tell you something.” I was thinking of “negative freedom.”
Totally flummox by then, they left wondering what kind of a psychologist I was.
Behaving to the letter of the established culture manifests a depersonalizing affect. You become a drone without distinction. Stepping outside the culture, ignoring it, or failing to bow to its demands takes personal fortitude. Exorbitant pressure to conform is almost a constant. You place yourself in some jeopardy if you don’t. Isaiah Berlin writes about how fascism and communism have used the machinations of “positive freedom” to impose their ideological will. American corporations practice positive freedom squared.
* * *
Other terms I have used in my writing are “false positive” and “false negative.” These are tricky statistical terms primarily used in medicine, but have metaphorical appeal in explaining things other than statistical significance.
Say a medical test is accurate to 99 percent and the test finds you healthy, when you are not. Despite its impressive statistical history, the test is incorrect, and therefore a “false positive.” I have used the term to explain a situation when the evidence was overwhelmingly slanted in one direction, but totally wrong.
A “false positive” occurs when 99 percent of the times the outcome shows a specific result. If it doesn’t, and indicates just the opposite, then it is a “false positive paradox.” The Chicago Tribune declared Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948 the newly elected president. The newspaper was wrong. The polls had been misread; Harry S. Truman was the winner. A famous picture shows Truman holding up the Chicago newspaper’s front page declaring Dewey the winner with a picture of the New York governor. This was a “false positive.”
A test result that appears negative for a specific cancer and is considered 99 percent accurate yet that cancer does exist, but the test fails to show that it does. That is a “false negative.” I have used the term in one of my books where eight CEOs of cigarette companies, under oath, told Congress that laboratory studies of cigarettes showed that cigarette smoking wasn’t harmful to smokers’ health, yet the mounting death rates among cigarette smokers proved otherwise.
In one sense, such words as “false positive” and “false negative” have the ring of jargon, but in another sense, they remind us that what seems true isn’t always, and we have to be on our guard. Words kill, and often we are their victims.
* * *
We all have the same thinking equipment yet we often are more influenced by the speaker or the source and not the words spoken, or how they register with us. We are inclined to trust ourselves last when that is all we have. An intelligent person is one who is not afraid to say I don’t know, or I don’t understand, and has the temerity to say, “Could you pass that by me again?” It is also the person who is not afraid to ask for a second opinion.
People write to me: “I’m not too good with words.” Well, none of us are, and we all need each other. Others say, “I never had much schooling, and a lot of your words are not familiar.” If so, I apologize for that. I am a Clinton, Iowa boy – now an old man – who is a learner and not a knower. I share with you what I have learned. If it is not helpful to you, or if it is completely wrong to your experience, it should be summarily rejected. You don’t offend me. On the contrary, you inform me you have your own mind, which I applaud.
* * *
One of the sad commentaries of our times is an expression, which I find meaningless, which is “the best and the brightest.” I’ve written disparagingly of this term, and now I find Chris Hedges has topped me with “The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff.” He writes:
“The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton, New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.” (www.truthdig.com)
Like the moth to the light, the “best & the brightest” are attracted to power and money, and then act as obedient accomplices to power with the infallible right to manipulate the rest of us to their will and indulgence.
We elect people who are a “good average” like ourselves, and then those elected people appoint the “best & the brightest” to run the country when we know nothing about them, have never seen them on the campaign trail, never had an opportunity to pass judgment on them, but are exposed to them as the “experts” we need. These experts have gotten us into the mess we are now in, and have been doing so for more than a century now, or since the birth of the “specialist.” To wit:
Robert McNamara put Ford Motor Company in the ditch, and then came to Washington DC as a celebrated egghead, only to throw Vietnam into a similar ditch. He was one of the predecessors to the current crop of the “best & the brightest” described by Chris Hedges.
McNamara was a member of President John Fitzgerald Kenney’s “Camelot Cabinet,” whose members knew how to manipulate words as surrogate for results, and for this they were anointed with knighthood.
It may seem absurd now but in the Vietnam War “body count,” the number of killed Viet Cong, and the “interdiction” of supply routes from North Vietnam with “Agent Orange,” the equivalent of poison gas only to vegetation and to those unfortunately contaminated with it, were considered strategic military indices. We heard them on the Sunday morning television news programs form suave General Maxwell Taylor to agitated General William Westmoreland. The “best & the brightest” invented a whole new language to explain that war, and still lost it in embarrassing fashion.
As for JFK, he along with the “best & the brightest” orchestrated the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco and “Cuban Missile” crisis, and then initiated the insurgence into Vietnam, which would balloon after the president’s assassination into a full-scaled war. JFK was also tardy on the Civil Rights Movement but was rescued by Lyndon Johnson in carrying through on his promise.
The press loved JFK because he was witty, debonair, handsome and flattering. So, he was forgiven for his unsavory appetites and lackadaisical ways, among which was having been an indifferent student at Harvard, a “war hero” for losing his PT boat, an indifferent senator who often didn’t show up to vote, and a Pulitzer Prize winning author for a book he didn’t write. JFK won the presidency because he had that poise and panache that ingratiated him to the American people against Richard Nixon, who if not the devil certainly had stood in for his portrait.
As for Yale graduate President George W. Bush, he took office with a budget surplus and left office with the nation nearly $11 trillion in debt. So, today we’re in the worse financial shape since WWII with every American citizen carrying $33,000 of that debt.
President Bush initiated the entitlement plan of Medicare Part D for helping seniors with drug costs without any plan to pay for it. Medicare Part D is costing American taxpayers as much as the Iraq War today, and whereas the Iraq War will end one day, this goes on in perpetuity to the tune of $60 billion or more a year.
With 73 million baby boomers to turn 65 in 2012, with full Medicare and Medicaid benefits, a generation that has burned the candle at both ends, and is already in poor health, this demographic economic tsunami could push the yearly cost to these entitlements to more than $100 billion, or well beyond what Social Security cost today, the entitlement that always is singled out for abuse.
Because of the “best & the brightest” mismanagement of the national debt, it could rise to $23 trillion by 2019, far beyond the government’s income, or ability to tax the nation. Healthcare costs today are 5 percent of the budget, by 2050 that could loom to 20 percent.
Making the picture even bleaker, should the holders of our bonds, such as Europe, China and India refuse to loan us any more money, or change the currency from dollars to some other international standard, the United States of America, as we know it could cease to exist. This is the legacy of the “best & the brightest” (source: PBSTV Frontline, “Ten Trillion and Counting.”).
* * *
There are a couple of other words, which I suspect the majority would agree to be negative words: narcissism and egoism.
“Narcissism” deals with self-love, but if we cannot love ourselves how can we love anyone else? Love is not the denial of self but emanates from the self. Conversely, the opposite of self-love is self-hate, and self-hatred only hands the control of self to others whom we deem better able to do so.
Actors and writers are narcissistic by definition, and yet some of the most generous and kind people in the world are of those vocations. They entertain rejection every day. No one knows better than they do that they cannot rest on their laurels as they are only accepted (or rejected) on the basis of their latest work.
Charlie Rose asked the late Michael Crighton, author of “Jurassic Park,” on PBS what it was like to be a celebrated author. Quite humbly, and honestly he replied, “Publishers look at my work when I send it to them. Other highly talented writers never see a reader much less the publisher.”
As for egoism, it is the belief in yourself, not that you are better than anyone else, but that you have the confidence you have something of value which you would like to share with others.
It is no accident that in Freud’s transactional analysis that the “Ego” is the Adult, the “Superego” is the Parent, and the “Id” is the Child. The “Ego” is the citadel of the individual as a person distinct from others with the logical balance to accept “what is,” whereas the “Superego” is “what should be,” and the “Id” is “whatever.”
Remember Freud’s construction is an attempt to describe; it is not a prescription. He saw the Parent or the "Superego" as the critical judge of behavior and called it the "Morality Principle." He saw the "Ego" as the nonjudgmental adult or the "Reality Principle.” He saw the "Id" as the self-indulgent or impulsive child, or the "Pleasure Principle."
Another way he looked at these three stages was the "Parent" (the affect or feeling), "Adult" (cognitive or thinking) and the "Id" as (conative or behaving). I cover this in some detail in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Self-negating ourselves does not humble us, but instead humiliates us, causing us to hide in our pride with all kinds of aberrancies. It is not wrong to think well of yourself. It is far more important that we do than to rely on anyone else to do it for us. Remember there is a “Parent” and “Adult” and “Child” in each of us throughout our lives, and whichever one has the upper hand determines whether we will be an emotional cripple or a self-reliant and self-directed contributing citizen.
There is much that can be lost in translation if we fail to get inside words, and understand what they mean to us. My da was convinced I believed everything I read. I told him I believed everything I knew to be true. He shook his head and lit a cigarette on the end of the cigarette he was smoking not realizing the one he was smoking wasn’t burned down.
* * *
Finally, I was teaching a course in “Theory & Thought in Organizational Development.” It was an OD course at the university in the Graduate Program for an MBA. Several of my students were officers in the United States Air Force and in pilot training at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. One day this student, a USAF lieutenant, about age 26, stood up in class and went through a three-minute harangue.
It was confrontational and accusatory, as well as honest and sincere as to his assessment of my teaching style. He was, in a word, outraged. He said he wasn’t learning anything, that he was incredibly frustrated, that I didn’t use the text, that he had no purchase of how he could possibly get a good grade in the course, that several times he wanted to punch me in the nose; that this class was a travesty of the education process. “I’m fed up,” he said as he slammed his books down hard on his desk and made to walk out using that famous “f--- you” expression in his retreat.
I stopped him with this rejoinder, “Welcome to OD!”
With that simple remark, I totally defused that young man, and I was not much older being only in my thirties. He just stood there. His face was red and he had white lines around his ears and neck as if drained of blood, perspiring and shaking as if suffering a chill. He was so traumatized by “Welcome to OD” that he could not move.
I let him anguish there, while the class was as silent as a morgue, and then said,
“Dr. Fisher is not a mechanic, not a Machine Age Thinker. He left the god of the machine a long time ago. He planned to suffer this class until it got it if it took all semester.
“Therefore, Dr. Fisher wants to applaud you for finally getting through all those artificial barriers holding you back from your real self. In confronting me you had to first confront yourself, and with the exception of the expletives, I have no disagreement with what you have said. All of what you have said is true.
“But within that truth is what we call ‘OD,’ and as you already know I am suspect of the discipline although I practice as well as teach it. I don’t want your acquiescence; indeed, I don’t want your approval. I want your mind, your heart, and your soul to zero in on the material and make it yours to use in the service of others.
“I am a student of OD, have had great success with it, but am still struggling to define what it is. I can describe it but I cannot prescribe for it. How it has worked for me may not work for you. So, when and if it works for you it doesn’t follow that it will necessarily work for someone else in the same manner. You cannot copy it, imitate it, distill and package it; you must experience it by bringing your heart and soul, mind and body to the effort. I am a facilitator not a formulator.
“I don’t want your submission or your permission to see OD as I see it. I want your total person immersed in OD, as that is what it requires. It isn’t a discipline by the numbers, or a cause and effect linear progression. You may use such devices but when it works it pops intuitively into your psyche and you know what to do and how to do it because you have captured the collective mind of the enterprise with which you are working. You know but you don’t know how you know you just know.
“Until you break through that artificial barrier, until you penetrate your programmed shell you are wasting your OD potential and wasting my time. I would imagine several of you feel the same way.” I looked across a sea of intense faces giving nothing away. “Some of you will never get it. We can’t all be neural surgeons and we certainly can’t all be OD psychologists.
“With this verbal explosion, you all witnessed, there was also an implosion. I’m not trying to be cute. I mean what I’m saying. He projected his angst on to me, and in doing so ran into himself. He penetrated that heavy quiet that commands.” Then addressing him again directly, I said,
“That heavy quiet is not enough. I am willing to tell you now that in breaking through to me,” looking at him, “you have broken through to yourself. You will never be the same again. You never feel the same comfort of denial. You will see what others refuse or unable to see. That is the epitome of OD.
“I know I sometimes seem squirrelly because I’m not conventional. It is true I don’t pay attention to the text; I talk a lot about my own exploits; I don’t flatter you and assure you and try to win you because I’m not interested. I’m far more interested in your paying attention to yourself and your experience, interpreting yours in terms of mine, than having you comfortable here in my OD laboratory. You are in my petri dish.” Some laughter.
“Last semester I gave an ‘A’ to a student with a handwritten paper, who said some of the same things you have said, clearly indicating that he got it, and that he was going to use it the rest of his life, and so will you.”
* * *
Later, I learned that this officer had been on the bubble to be booted out of flight school, not for physical impairment but for psychological problems. He expected my OD course to be the solution to his difficulties, a kind of course of the last resort. When he found that not to be the case, his frustrations mounted.
He wrote me a letter several months later. He said he earned his wings, and that he was now in advance training as a fighter pilot and couldn’t be happier. His marriage was going better; in fact, his whole life was looking up. He wanted to give me credit for it, but wrote, “I know you wouldn’t accept that.” Then he confessed this, “I’ll bet you wonder what led me to lose it in class. I didn’t know at the time. I found the answer in another course when I came across the term, ‘reaction formation.’ You said one word that ticked me off and all my accumulated frustrations, many frustrations far removed from you and your class, seemed to prick my balloon and all hell broke lose. What was that word? You’ll never know if you can’t recall. It is sacred and secret to me, and who knows, I may use it one day.”
He had a postscript. “You’ve taught me that words are powerful. Were you not you on that day I exploded, I don’t know what would have happened to me, or my career, but I thank you. We’ll probably never meet again but I plan to pass your wisdom on if I can.” He ended it there.
* * *
“ENAMORED OF WORDS!” – PART TWO
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 25, 2009
“Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.”
Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1894), American theologian and great grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758), American theologian
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS (Continued from Part One):
Combinations of words can be confusing, but also enriching with the pen of Russian born English philosopher Isaiah Berlin. I read with great relish his sentences, sometimes of 500 words, without getting lost in them. I only wish I were his equal with such clarity. That said it is his concepts that interest me in particular; for example, his take on “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” I had never thought much about the complexity of freedom before reading him.
“Negative freedom” is freedom without barriers. “Positive freedom” is the freedom we enjoy in our Republic, which is loaded with barriers, and increasingly so since 9/11.
In our mind’s eye, we think of something that is “negative” as bad and something as “positive” as always good. Well, that is not necessarily so when it comes to freedom, or, indeed, for “entropy,” which we have discussed “negative entropy” earlier.
“Negative freedom” is something we are losing every day.
On WGN Chicago television today (March 26, 2009), the noon broadcast informed Chicago metropolitan and suburban viewers that not only are cameras to be placed at many stop signs in the city checking for motorists going through red lights, but monitors are also being installed to read license plates of speeders for prosecution as well.
The first reaction to this may be, “That is a good thing,” but it is yet another barrier to “negative freedom.”
The downside of such impositions is that it weakens our collective resolve to behave responsibly because it “is the right thing to do.” The need for such electronic controls makes us more dependent as if still children, or “not to be trusted to do the right thing” on our own.
Without self-trust, there is little chance to develop trustworthiness, or a moral center and functioning moral compass. If we cannot trust ourselves, we are opening the door for someone outside ourselves to assume that responsibility through external control.
My concern is that the abdication of self-responsibility is an invitation for “positive freedom” to accrue without so much as a by your leave.
The Swedish writer, Hakan Nesser introduced me to a new concept, “Klimze Razor.” It is the guidelines for civilized and intelligent conversation. Its basic principle is balance. You can’t demand any more of the person you’re talking to than you are prepared to give of yourself. Decision makers, persons in positions of power usually like to give the impression they are democratic and transparent. I’m sure the City Council of Chicago in imposing these restrictions was of the mind it was conducting a two-way conversation with voters assuming their agreement with such statues.
Corporate executives do the same with mysterious feelings of satisfaction when they organize redundancy exercises while passing out bonuses amongst themselves, saying as they let people go to not take it personally. “We are saving the company in the long run” is their mantra, implying they have an indispensable role and the company would tank without them, when it probably is tanking because of them.
Our corporate society, what I call corpocracy, represents an example of positive freedom, as we are a society of laws and not men. Justice is blind. Nearly every day new laws are passed in the Federal government, the State government, and the Municipal government that increase the leverage of positive freedom. This is also the case in the private corporation without the voices of those affected in the conversation. CEOs with mild, understanding demeanors and paternal tone of voices are daily dispatching people to the soup lines with the comment, “Somebody has to do it.”
Here in Florida we are in the third year of a drought and new laws are being imposed on people watering their lawns. We now have a water police patrol at taxpayers’ expense, but even more effective are neighbors turning in neighbors who don’t abide by the water restrictions, again a further example of positive freedom. We are told such behavior was common in WWII when Jews attempted to hide from the Nazis. Far more common today are people in the workforce turning each other in for minor transgressions, failing to see how they are shrinking their own and everyone else’s “negative freedom” by doing so.
“Positive freedom” can be a barrier to productivity. It is not simply the laws, rules and regulations, policies and procedures imposed by authority that are alone the culprit, but the invisible hand of innuendo and assumption that dictates how people are likely to behave. The more fear the more rules the more chaos the more rules. Fear and chaos are constructs of entropy, and indicative of a sick workplace.
Most workplace cultures I have experienced play off attributions of fear. As such, there is an incessant need of belonging, true believing, and collective security. You are not to embarrass your boss or your colleagues by having a conversation in which you demand as much attention as you interlocutor demands of you.
Since I have spent a good deal of my career on my own flying about the globe, I was essentially guided by “negative freedom.” That found me rising early and working late every day. As I have written elsewhere, when I was a young chemical sales engineer, I would make my service calls well into the night where allowed in plants operating on three shifts so that I could make more sales calls during the business day.
When I was reduced to having an office in a huge facility, and was expected to be there from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., I encountered immediate suspicion when I came in at 7 a.m. and left at 7 p.m. I was going against the consensus culture; I was making other people look bad; I was accused of drawing attention to myself; I was accused of having no personal life; I was accused of having a hidden agenda; I was finally ordered to cease and desist, which I did. Corpocracy had no room for “negative freedom.”
The workplace culture was committed to conformity, ritualism, and rites of passage and promotion with productive work an incidental if not accidental process with it neither being a sufficient or necessary condition to continuing employment.
Somewhat in good humor, I’ve been told I dress like I did sixty years ago, and I do. I’ve never leaped on the bandwagon of any trend at any time in my life. It has been my very narrow window of self-assertion in terms of “negative freedom.” Be assured that “positive freedom” signals go off if you don’t dress, walk, talk and conform to the lights of the culture.
One time three engineers came to me from research and development complaining about a colleague that wore the same shirt and pants every day for more than a month.
“Why does it bother you?” I asked. They looked at me as if I were mad. “Does he stink?” I added.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just not professional.”
“Professional” is another word with which I have trouble. Professionals, especially engineers in my experience, and I am one, disdain honest intellectual discussion outside their discipline, and are by nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize their pride around their disciplines with narrow answers and rigid structures, and expect others outside their disciplines to accept their answers without a fairly well. In this case, I didn’t provoke them with my disdain. Instead, I suggested,
“Maybe he washes them out every night; maybe he has five outfits that are the same; maybe he considers this his uniform,” then I smiled, “maybe he is trying to tell you something.” I was thinking of “negative freedom.”
Totally flummox by then, they left wondering what kind of a psychologist I was.
Behaving to the letter of the established culture manifests a depersonalizing affect. You become a drone without distinction. Stepping outside the culture, ignoring it, or failing to bow to its demands takes personal fortitude. Exorbitant pressure to conform is almost a constant. You place yourself in some jeopardy if you don’t. Isaiah Berlin writes about how fascism and communism have used the machinations of “positive freedom” to impose their ideological will. American corporations practice positive freedom squared.
* * *
Other terms I have used in my writing are “false positive” and “false negative.” These are tricky statistical terms primarily used in medicine, but have metaphorical appeal in explaining things other than statistical significance.
Say a medical test is accurate to 99 percent and the test finds you healthy, when you are not. Despite its impressive statistical history, the test is incorrect, and therefore a “false positive.” I have used the term to explain a situation when the evidence was overwhelmingly slanted in one direction, but totally wrong.
A “false positive” occurs when 99 percent of the times the outcome shows a specific result. If it doesn’t, and indicates just the opposite, then it is a “false positive paradox.” The Chicago Tribune declared Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948 the newly elected president. The newspaper was wrong. The polls had been misread; Harry S. Truman was the winner. A famous picture shows Truman holding up the Chicago newspaper’s front page declaring Dewey the winner with a picture of the New York governor. This was a “false positive.”
A test result that appears negative for a specific cancer and is considered 99 percent accurate yet that cancer does exist, but the test fails to show that it does. That is a “false negative.” I have used the term in one of my books where eight CEOs of cigarette companies, under oath, told Congress that laboratory studies of cigarettes showed that cigarette smoking wasn’t harmful to smokers’ health, yet the mounting death rates among cigarette smokers proved otherwise.
In one sense, such words as “false positive” and “false negative” have the ring of jargon, but in another sense, they remind us that what seems true isn’t always, and we have to be on our guard. Words kill, and often we are their victims.
* * *
We all have the same thinking equipment yet we often are more influenced by the speaker or the source and not the words spoken, or how they register with us. We are inclined to trust ourselves last when that is all we have. An intelligent person is one who is not afraid to say I don’t know, or I don’t understand, and has the temerity to say, “Could you pass that by me again?” It is also the person who is not afraid to ask for a second opinion.
People write to me: “I’m not too good with words.” Well, none of us are, and we all need each other. Others say, “I never had much schooling, and a lot of your words are not familiar.” If so, I apologize for that. I am a Clinton, Iowa boy – now an old man – who is a learner and not a knower. I share with you what I have learned. If it is not helpful to you, or if it is completely wrong to your experience, it should be summarily rejected. You don’t offend me. On the contrary, you inform me you have your own mind, which I applaud.
* * *
One of the sad commentaries of our times is an expression, which I find meaningless, which is “the best and the brightest.” I’ve written disparagingly of this term, and now I find Chris Hedges has topped me with “The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff.” He writes:
“The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton, New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.” (www.truthdig.com)
Like the moth to the light, the “best & the brightest” are attracted to power and money, and then act as obedient accomplices to power with the infallible right to manipulate the rest of us to their will and indulgence.
We elect people who are a “good average” like ourselves, and then those elected people appoint the “best & the brightest” to run the country when we know nothing about them, have never seen them on the campaign trail, never had an opportunity to pass judgment on them, but are exposed to them as the “experts” we need. These experts have gotten us into the mess we are now in, and have been doing so for more than a century now, or since the birth of the “specialist.” To wit:
Robert McNamara put Ford Motor Company in the ditch, and then came to Washington DC as a celebrated egghead, only to throw Vietnam into a similar ditch. He was one of the predecessors to the current crop of the “best & the brightest” described by Chris Hedges.
McNamara was a member of President John Fitzgerald Kenney’s “Camelot Cabinet,” whose members knew how to manipulate words as surrogate for results, and for this they were anointed with knighthood.
It may seem absurd now but in the Vietnam War “body count,” the number of killed Viet Cong, and the “interdiction” of supply routes from North Vietnam with “Agent Orange,” the equivalent of poison gas only to vegetation and to those unfortunately contaminated with it, were considered strategic military indices. We heard them on the Sunday morning television news programs form suave General Maxwell Taylor to agitated General William Westmoreland. The “best & the brightest” invented a whole new language to explain that war, and still lost it in embarrassing fashion.
As for JFK, he along with the “best & the brightest” orchestrated the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco and “Cuban Missile” crisis, and then initiated the insurgence into Vietnam, which would balloon after the president’s assassination into a full-scaled war. JFK was also tardy on the Civil Rights Movement but was rescued by Lyndon Johnson in carrying through on his promise.
The press loved JFK because he was witty, debonair, handsome and flattering. So, he was forgiven for his unsavory appetites and lackadaisical ways, among which was having been an indifferent student at Harvard, a “war hero” for losing his PT boat, an indifferent senator who often didn’t show up to vote, and a Pulitzer Prize winning author for a book he didn’t write. JFK won the presidency because he had that poise and panache that ingratiated him to the American people against Richard Nixon, who if not the devil certainly had stood in for his portrait.
As for Yale graduate President George W. Bush, he took office with a budget surplus and left office with the nation nearly $11 trillion in debt. So, today we’re in the worse financial shape since WWII with every American citizen carrying $33,000 of that debt.
President Bush initiated the entitlement plan of Medicare Part D for helping seniors with drug costs without any plan to pay for it. Medicare Part D is costing American taxpayers as much as the Iraq War today, and whereas the Iraq War will end one day, this goes on in perpetuity to the tune of $60 billion or more a year.
With 73 million baby boomers to turn 65 in 2012, with full Medicare and Medicaid benefits, a generation that has burned the candle at both ends, and is already in poor health, this demographic economic tsunami could push the yearly cost to these entitlements to more than $100 billion, or well beyond what Social Security cost today, the entitlement that always is singled out for abuse.
Because of the “best & the brightest” mismanagement of the national debt, it could rise to $23 trillion by 2019, far beyond the government’s income, or ability to tax the nation. Healthcare costs today are 5 percent of the budget, by 2050 that could loom to 20 percent.
Making the picture even bleaker, should the holders of our bonds, such as Europe, China and India refuse to loan us any more money, or change the currency from dollars to some other international standard, the United States of America, as we know it could cease to exist. This is the legacy of the “best & the brightest” (source: PBSTV Frontline, “Ten Trillion and Counting.”).
* * *
There are a couple of other words, which I suspect the majority would agree to be negative words: narcissism and egoism.
“Narcissism” deals with self-love, but if we cannot love ourselves how can we love anyone else? Love is not the denial of self but emanates from the self. Conversely, the opposite of self-love is self-hate, and self-hatred only hands the control of self to others whom we deem better able to do so.
Actors and writers are narcissistic by definition, and yet some of the most generous and kind people in the world are of those vocations. They entertain rejection every day. No one knows better than they do that they cannot rest on their laurels as they are only accepted (or rejected) on the basis of their latest work.
Charlie Rose asked the late Michael Crighton, author of “Jurassic Park,” on PBS what it was like to be a celebrated author. Quite humbly, and honestly he replied, “Publishers look at my work when I send it to them. Other highly talented writers never see a reader much less the publisher.”
As for egoism, it is the belief in yourself, not that you are better than anyone else, but that you have the confidence you have something of value which you would like to share with others.
It is no accident that in Freud’s transactional analysis that the “Ego” is the Adult, the “Superego” is the Parent, and the “Id” is the Child. The “Ego” is the citadel of the individual as a person distinct from others with the logical balance to accept “what is,” whereas the “Superego” is “what should be,” and the “Id” is “whatever.”
Remember Freud’s construction is an attempt to describe; it is not a prescription. He saw the Parent or the "Superego" as the critical judge of behavior and called it the "Morality Principle." He saw the "Ego" as the nonjudgmental adult or the "Reality Principle.” He saw the "Id" as the self-indulgent or impulsive child, or the "Pleasure Principle."
Another way he looked at these three stages was the "Parent" (the affect or feeling), "Adult" (cognitive or thinking) and the "Id" as (conative or behaving). I cover this in some detail in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Self-negating ourselves does not humble us, but instead humiliates us, causing us to hide in our pride with all kinds of aberrancies. It is not wrong to think well of yourself. It is far more important that we do than to rely on anyone else to do it for us. Remember there is a “Parent” and “Adult” and “Child” in each of us throughout our lives, and whichever one has the upper hand determines whether we will be an emotional cripple or a self-reliant and self-directed contributing citizen.
There is much that can be lost in translation if we fail to get inside words, and understand what they mean to us. My da was convinced I believed everything I read. I told him I believed everything I knew to be true. He shook his head and lit a cigarette on the end of the cigarette he was smoking not realizing the one he was smoking wasn’t burned down.
* * *
Finally, I was teaching a course in “Theory & Thought in Organizational Development.” It was an OD course at the university in the Graduate Program for an MBA. Several of my students were officers in the United States Air Force and in pilot training at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. One day this student, a USAF lieutenant, about age 26, stood up in class and went through a three-minute harangue.
It was confrontational and accusatory, as well as honest and sincere as to his assessment of my teaching style. He was, in a word, outraged. He said he wasn’t learning anything, that he was incredibly frustrated, that I didn’t use the text, that he had no purchase of how he could possibly get a good grade in the course, that several times he wanted to punch me in the nose; that this class was a travesty of the education process. “I’m fed up,” he said as he slammed his books down hard on his desk and made to walk out using that famous “f--- you” expression in his retreat.
I stopped him with this rejoinder, “Welcome to OD!”
With that simple remark, I totally defused that young man, and I was not much older being only in my thirties. He just stood there. His face was red and he had white lines around his ears and neck as if drained of blood, perspiring and shaking as if suffering a chill. He was so traumatized by “Welcome to OD” that he could not move.
I let him anguish there, while the class was as silent as a morgue, and then said,
“Dr. Fisher is not a mechanic, not a Machine Age Thinker. He left the god of the machine a long time ago. He planned to suffer this class until it got it if it took all semester.
“Therefore, Dr. Fisher wants to applaud you for finally getting through all those artificial barriers holding you back from your real self. In confronting me you had to first confront yourself, and with the exception of the expletives, I have no disagreement with what you have said. All of what you have said is true.
“But within that truth is what we call ‘OD,’ and as you already know I am suspect of the discipline although I practice as well as teach it. I don’t want your acquiescence; indeed, I don’t want your approval. I want your mind, your heart, and your soul to zero in on the material and make it yours to use in the service of others.
“I am a student of OD, have had great success with it, but am still struggling to define what it is. I can describe it but I cannot prescribe for it. How it has worked for me may not work for you. So, when and if it works for you it doesn’t follow that it will necessarily work for someone else in the same manner. You cannot copy it, imitate it, distill and package it; you must experience it by bringing your heart and soul, mind and body to the effort. I am a facilitator not a formulator.
“I don’t want your submission or your permission to see OD as I see it. I want your total person immersed in OD, as that is what it requires. It isn’t a discipline by the numbers, or a cause and effect linear progression. You may use such devices but when it works it pops intuitively into your psyche and you know what to do and how to do it because you have captured the collective mind of the enterprise with which you are working. You know but you don’t know how you know you just know.
“Until you break through that artificial barrier, until you penetrate your programmed shell you are wasting your OD potential and wasting my time. I would imagine several of you feel the same way.” I looked across a sea of intense faces giving nothing away. “Some of you will never get it. We can’t all be neural surgeons and we certainly can’t all be OD psychologists.
“With this verbal explosion, you all witnessed, there was also an implosion. I’m not trying to be cute. I mean what I’m saying. He projected his angst on to me, and in doing so ran into himself. He penetrated that heavy quiet that commands.” Then addressing him again directly, I said,
“That heavy quiet is not enough. I am willing to tell you now that in breaking through to me,” looking at him, “you have broken through to yourself. You will never be the same again. You never feel the same comfort of denial. You will see what others refuse or unable to see. That is the epitome of OD.
“I know I sometimes seem squirrelly because I’m not conventional. It is true I don’t pay attention to the text; I talk a lot about my own exploits; I don’t flatter you and assure you and try to win you because I’m not interested. I’m far more interested in your paying attention to yourself and your experience, interpreting yours in terms of mine, than having you comfortable here in my OD laboratory. You are in my petri dish.” Some laughter.
“Last semester I gave an ‘A’ to a student with a handwritten paper, who said some of the same things you have said, clearly indicating that he got it, and that he was going to use it the rest of his life, and so will you.”
* * *
Later, I learned that this officer had been on the bubble to be booted out of flight school, not for physical impairment but for psychological problems. He expected my OD course to be the solution to his difficulties, a kind of course of the last resort. When he found that not to be the case, his frustrations mounted.
He wrote me a letter several months later. He said he earned his wings, and that he was now in advance training as a fighter pilot and couldn’t be happier. His marriage was going better; in fact, his whole life was looking up. He wanted to give me credit for it, but wrote, “I know you wouldn’t accept that.” Then he confessed this, “I’ll bet you wonder what led me to lose it in class. I didn’t know at the time. I found the answer in another course when I came across the term, ‘reaction formation.’ You said one word that ticked me off and all my accumulated frustrations, many frustrations far removed from you and your class, seemed to prick my balloon and all hell broke lose. What was that word? You’ll never know if you can’t recall. It is sacred and secret to me, and who knows, I may use it one day.”
He had a postscript. “You’ve taught me that words are powerful. Were you not you on that day I exploded, I don’t know what would have happened to me, or my career, but I thank you. We’ll probably never meet again but I plan to pass your wisdom on if I can.” He ended it there.
* * *
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
IATROGENIC -- YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE! "ENAMORED OF WORDS" -- PART ONE
IATROGENIC – YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE!
“ENAMORED OF WORDS!” – PART ONE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 23, 2009
“A man cannot speak but he judges and reveals himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws a portrait to the eye of others by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
As I awoke early this morning (4:45am) in that semi-lucid half-dream state an epiphany surfaced. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Negative is as negative does.” You can’t move ahead by looking back. It’s okay to bring the baggage of knowledge and experience into your future, but distrust of business people and their motives is not the best aura to present when you want to help them.
I can be just as persuasive and maintain my beliefs and values in a positive tone. Besides, cynicism requires a lot of thought and energy. The trouble is when people don’t get it they dismiss it as insanity or, worse, senility. The metamorphosis will take a while. Personal change is every bit as difficult as systemic change.
I remember your article (AQP Journal Winter 2002), and pulled it out and re-read it in totality. Yes, as you do, I save nearly everything I’ve read, even the stuff I didn’t like. Who knows? I might change my mind as I gain the wisdom that comes with age.
Your vocabulary occasionally sends me to the dictionary. These days it is wonderful that the dictionary is only a couple of mouse clicks away. False syllogism was the most recent term, and it intrigued me. While this is not a syllogism, your lead-in to the reprint led me to infer that you see similar failings in our current government. And, that this administration is not applying your ten concepts of good leadership.
I believe this President is making an honest appeal to the masses for help in moving out of this mess. The person on the street, whether that street is in a large city or small town, likely does not have a perspective to provide ideas that would influence change on a macro level. That person on the street can do things locally to help the situation.
Some of those things include living more responsibly. I am sure many people are looking around inside their homes at all the crap they piled up while inflating their credit card debt and lamenting those purchases as they struggle to pay a mortgage or rent or car payment or all three while laid-off or working less hours. “Living more responsibly” means cutting down on energy consumption and, coincidently, reducing one’s carbon footprint.
These are agendas the President discusses as he tries to engage all citizens in the recovery. He is promoting and welcoming alternative views. Mr. Obama clearly is not a micro-manager. He allows the people he has selected to do their jobs. The media and Wall Street may not like Mr. Geithner’s plain and even strained communication style. In our instant gratification society, they did not like that he couldn’t develop in less than a week or two details of a plan to rescue banks and keep people from losing their homes to mortgage defaults.
We are not at a loss for solutions. My inference aside, it appears that government is trying to do what it can to stave off serious economic collapse while maintaining the “American” standard of living. Meanwhile, Wall Street says let the free marketers pull us out, greed is good and it will ultimately win the day. It’s not only a question of which are right, but also of which is nobler.
I am beginning to wonder whether there is nobility in either approach, economic or political. Each appeals to the self-interests of specific groups. Does either have a claim to being nobler than the other? At a time when it appears the middle class is bailing out the rich, we are right to question everything related to our economic system. I tend to believe the political approach, one that weighs the short and long term benefits of actions on the system, is the one that serves most of us.
So, before I could finish this, the exchanges began popping into my email. It is indicative of why we are where we are. The belief that we can really change the world. We are where we are because everyone who believes we can change the world has been successful. Some change has been more influential. Some change has rallied greater interest among more people. It is natural for organisms to evolve and adapt. Humans have a freedom different from all other organisms on the planet. We can choose to adopt our adaptations. The adaptations that most people choose become the ones that determine direction.
As we try to change the world, the world changes us. The two are inseparable. As with all organisms, when too many of their population becomes reliant on one source of nutrition or, in the human case, driven by the same motivation, the eco-system for that organism collapses, Humans for centuries have been motivated by greed.
This motivation has not been as dominant and widespread as it has over the past few decades. It’s not just the US. Why was the European Union formed? Go back to the establishment of the ISO-9000 manufacturing standard which was primarily intended to increase trade among European nations and close the door to US and Japanese producers.
That didn’t work. The Common Market did not work to protect European fortunes. The EU is an escalation of that protectionism. Sustaining cheap labor in China and India is not a means to growing their economies for everyone. It is greed allowing haves to keep theirs and have-nots to stay that way.
Too many people, nations and societies feeding on greed caused the system to collapse. And, we have changed the world as a result. There’s no going back. Only going forward. And Ken is right. We can really change the world. Today is everyone’s opportunity to be heard on the agenda for change. The battle is over which agenda will dominate.
Will we re-endow the greed agenda? It appears we won’t. This is why the salvo against AIG bonuses is important. Or, will we become more egalitarian. Dr. Fisher pushes the egalitarian agenda by pointing out the folly of singular leaders who act in their own self-interest. The days of Father Knows Best are over. Dr. Fisher sounds the warnings by recounting the sins. There is great value in that.
It demonstrates not so much that those leaders were or are bad, as it does that we as followers did not take seriously our responsibility to speak up. It is only after it is too late that we realize many of us were thinking the same thing.
There are many people out there with great ideas who will never be heard enough to create the critical mass required to move humanity. The Internet has presented proponents of change a means to be heard. Unfortunately, they have not found a way to promote the message. Most of what is done on the Internet is passively placed hoping for eyes to find it. An advantage we who are interested in new directions have is that this climate has people are searching and listening. This current state reminds me of the old folk tale, which I probably won’t tell well.
I saw a farmer carrying a board and his mule pulling a wagonload of wood walking down the road. The mule was very responsive to every command the farmer gave. As I caught up the farmer I expressed my admiration for the control he had over what is typically a stubborn animal. He explained that it took time and effort to train the mule to respond to commands, but every day the mule starts by wanting to go his own way. “That’s why I carry this board. A whack in the head gets his attention.”
Well, we got our “whack in the head.” And a majority of us are paying attention. Use this window of opportunity to advance the change, whatever it is.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Words! Your response made me think of the power of words. In the present climate of economic uncertainty, words are flying around, words with which most of us are unfamiliar and somewhat lost in the discussions surrounding the use of them. Words such as “toxic assets” and banking “stress tests” and “equity markets” and “discount rates” and “leveraged assets” (another name for “toxic assets), and on and on.
We are in the midst of an economic tsunami that was misread last September (2008), when Secretary of Treasure reassured us that $700 billion would stabilize the markets and that the insolvency of Leman Brothers was not going to hurt us. Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics for 2008, warned us then of what is happening now, and he writes in the New York Times today (March 24, 2009) that he is at the point of “despair,” another strong word.
Is he right? Is he wrong? Will a plan proposed by President Barak Obama where investors and banks share 14 percent of the risk and we as taxpayers are on the hook for the other 86 percent with us sharing equally, 50 – 50, should their be any profit in the selling of these assets? I don’t know. I’m not an economist. They talk over my head with words that makes no sense to me, and make my head hurt.
Not being an economist, but being a student of the complex organization at all levels for forty years, noting how they operate, how they use such terms as “transparency” while operating in secret, denying the real problems people on the line experience, I’m familiar with the behavior. To illustrate, imagine yourself in this situation recorded in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years later (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing. Barry Starvo of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:
"It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet Camaro or Pontiac Firebird. But for Larry Barker, a welder, one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars. ‘One night last fall Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel wells near the motor compartment.
"The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the left side, and when the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped. A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.
"The Rube Goldberg fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided it wasn’t worth it, so then they sent us all home. But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, they probably would have run the assembly line.” (pp 145 – 146)
Reference: Barry Starvro, Los Angeles Times as reported in the St. Petersburg Times, January 28, 1990.
This is the description of a prescription that may seem absurd and off-the-wall, but it is no less so than the machinations of the current economic crisis. The Obama Administration knows it would never get approval for its $ trillion sweetener for banks and investors by going through an enraged Congress, so it is bypassing the process. It is legal, and it may work, but it is deceptive. If it doesn’t work, what then? It could make pessimists look like prophets.
“Rage” is a powerful word and I understand the rage of taxpayers, especially those who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, are homeless, and fear for the future, as they never have before.
Some observers euphemistically call this doomsday scenario a “socio-economic correction.” It has been covered in such books as “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” (1987) by Paul Kennedy, and more recently “The Post-American World” (2008) by Freed Zakaria, editor of Foreign Affairs, a magazine to which I have subscribed to for decades.
These scholars study these things. I interpret them in light of my work and in terms of leadership, which I have found progressively eroding over my forty-year career.
This erosion has not only happened in corporate leadership, but in leadership across the spectrum of American life from the home to the school to the workplace to the government. I have used such words to describe workers in this progression as “self-indulgent,” victims of "learned helplessness” and “suspended in terminal adolescence” and "arrested development." I have equated their dissident behavior as that of “mad monarchs in the madhouse.” I thought I was being provocative, and challenged my critics to prove me wrong. Instead, I was called “an angry man.” The focus was on me not on my description of the workforce.
One of the words that has been given leverage without meaning is “crisis.” I’ve written about “crisis management,” claiming management creates the crises that it experiences, and then devotes all its energies to solving these crises. This epitomizes what I call, “leaderless leadership.”
Charles Krauthammer corroborates my thesis, most recently in his column “The Bonfire of the Trivialities” in The Tampa Tribune (March 24, 2009).
Krauthammer insists that the $165 million of AIG bonuses is a pittance against the size of the problem the AIG executives and managers have created, which one scholar says, “represents one-tenth of one percent of the value of a penny.” Krauthammer writes, “That $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built.”
That’s the irony and paradox of crisis management – the creators of the crisis are the only one’s trained to solve it, and so when we bite their hand we are biting our own. It is the nature of the way we do business.
Who suffers for this? It is always the least able to weather the crisis that suffer the most. Compounding the problem further the managers, who engineer the redundancy exercises caused by their mismanagement, never get rid of the least able or least effective in their jobs, but the least likely to cause political ruckus. I know. I have participated in redundancy exercises as far back as Nalco Chemical Company some forty years ago.
WHEN WORDS FIRST CAME TO INTRIGUE ME
You would expect “words” to first register impact as a student, but that would not be quite true in my case. In school, I took words for granted because I didn't own them, but only rented them. It wasn’t until I was beyond the formal education “factory” that I commenced to be intrigued with words as an extension of me. It is no accident that a high school or college graduation is called a “commencement exercise,” or a beginning. Once on my own, I saw the impact of words and how wordsmiths used words to control me.
My fascination came right after college when I was an enlisted man in the US Navy on the heavy cruiser USS Salem (CA-139) on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean. I had the luxury as a hospital corpsman in the medical division to be able to read books and type letters and commentaries at leisure. I’ve often thought of publishing these letters as “Sojourn of a Sailor.”
The ship’s crew was of 1,400 men with a medical division of twenty with a doctor who was a board surgeon, chief petty officers, three first class petty officers, three other petty officers and the rest of us corpsman.
We had a twenty-bed hospital, which we rotated as duty corpsman around the clock. Only the doctor and I were college graduates. But I didn’t mind. I liked the navy, and learned a great deal from these well-trained petty officers. However, the doctor showed me special treatment so that others called me “rackets” as we would discuss books and ideas.
My shipmates noticed I was always writing or reading. What I was reading seemed strange to them: novels of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, George Sands, Virginia Wolf, among others, which they said, “were girl books.”
“Well, yes, they are novels written by women,” I would agree, “but great novels, and I want one day to be a writer.”
They also noticed that I underlined passages, and had notes on the margins. I explained I was studying these writing styles. I constantly had to explain myself, but they always took my explanations with good humor.
One day one of them picked up a novel by Aldous Huxley – it was “Point Counterpoint,” a musical term, and the first novel of Huxley’s that I had read.
“You’ve got the definition of words on the margins,” he said. “Why? If anyone knows words, it’s you.”
“They’re new words to me.”
“But you’re an educated bloat, why would you need to do that?”
Of course, I didn’t, but I did. I did it also with the works of William Faulkner and Ezra Pound and James Joyce. I thought only one with a terrific vocabulary could write. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It wasn’t until later that I noted that Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Sinclair Lewis didn’t have such gargantuan vocabularies, all Nobel Prize Laureates for Literature as well as Faulkner.
When I was a boy, and there is some truth to this, my sister, Pat, said I read the dictionary. I did thumb through it from the A’s to the Z’s occasionally, as one might the Holy Bible. Early on, I was fascinated with words, but not actually a student of words as such.
My vocabulary has been aided from my Latin learned at St. Patrick’s Grammar School, and my Greek and French in college. Most words in English have a prefix or suffix or stem in one of these languages, especially Latin, and I’ve always been able to work out the approximate meaning of a word if it has some Latin in the word.
But like most excesses, it has proven as a writer to be a handicap. I think in these words and, thanks to my “Best-in-the-Land, BB,” whom I’ve been married to for 23 years, I often translate what I write into a more accessible vocabulary. It is not natural to me, and I sometimes think my writing suffers for this process. She disagrees.
William F. Buckley, Jr. once wrote an article in which one word, which I have regrettably forgotten to my regret, captured the essence of the entire piece – “one word!”
Eric did it in his response to the “Iatrogenic” exchange with the word “nova,” which is about a once brilliant, flashing and spectacular star that burns out and then recedes into the darkness. He capsulated the essence of my piece with that single word in this sentence:
“I’ve often wondered if all of our human ‘progress’ of the last few hundred years was just our species going nova.”
There are many words that hold metaphorical meaning, and “nova” is one. Another is “entropy” and “negative entropy.” A professor from MIT once visiting the Honeywell Avionics campus said, “I’ve never quite understood entropy.” He was in the management school of MIT, but I can’t believe he meant it although “entropy” is a physics term. We experience entropy daily.
Entropy is that phenomenon of nature that everything goes back to its original state of stasis or zero activity, or from light – as in the case of the brilliant nova -- into darkness. We as a species are devotees of the constructs we create that sparkle, recede and fade into obscurity.
The brilliant but somewhat maniacal General Douglas McArthur was perhaps thinking of nova when he addressed Congress at the end of his career: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” He happened to have finished first in his class at West Point with nearly a 100 percent average, but President Harry S. Truman, who never went to college, removed him from his post for his impertinence in the conduct of the Korean War.
On the other hand, Dwight David Eisenhower worked for McArthur in the Philippines, and went on to be the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII, and later a two-term president. He was only a middle 70 percent student at West Point.
We are intimidated by brilliance, clearly so. That is why Paul Krugman is not a member of the Obama Administration, but has the role of a gadfly and New York Times columnist, along with being a Princeton professor. Apparently his brilliance would be disruptive.
Novas notwithstanding, entropy in the human community can be slowed down if not reversed with “negative entropy,” which is the equivalent of raising the Phoenix out of the ashes. Steve Jobs did that when he returned to Apple as it was floundering towards extinction. He did it by the sheer will of his creative force personified in renewal, renovation, and innovative product development.
We practice “negative entropy” every day by slowing down the aging process through exercise and diet, rest and recreation, thinking and doing, socializing and serving others.
* * *
Note: This is “Part One” of a two-part response to “Iatrogenic – Yet Another Exchange.”
“ENAMORED OF WORDS!” – PART ONE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 23, 2009
“A man cannot speak but he judges and reveals himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws a portrait to the eye of others by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
As I awoke early this morning (4:45am) in that semi-lucid half-dream state an epiphany surfaced. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Negative is as negative does.” You can’t move ahead by looking back. It’s okay to bring the baggage of knowledge and experience into your future, but distrust of business people and their motives is not the best aura to present when you want to help them.
I can be just as persuasive and maintain my beliefs and values in a positive tone. Besides, cynicism requires a lot of thought and energy. The trouble is when people don’t get it they dismiss it as insanity or, worse, senility. The metamorphosis will take a while. Personal change is every bit as difficult as systemic change.
I remember your article (AQP Journal Winter 2002), and pulled it out and re-read it in totality. Yes, as you do, I save nearly everything I’ve read, even the stuff I didn’t like. Who knows? I might change my mind as I gain the wisdom that comes with age.
Your vocabulary occasionally sends me to the dictionary. These days it is wonderful that the dictionary is only a couple of mouse clicks away. False syllogism was the most recent term, and it intrigued me. While this is not a syllogism, your lead-in to the reprint led me to infer that you see similar failings in our current government. And, that this administration is not applying your ten concepts of good leadership.
I believe this President is making an honest appeal to the masses for help in moving out of this mess. The person on the street, whether that street is in a large city or small town, likely does not have a perspective to provide ideas that would influence change on a macro level. That person on the street can do things locally to help the situation.
Some of those things include living more responsibly. I am sure many people are looking around inside their homes at all the crap they piled up while inflating their credit card debt and lamenting those purchases as they struggle to pay a mortgage or rent or car payment or all three while laid-off or working less hours. “Living more responsibly” means cutting down on energy consumption and, coincidently, reducing one’s carbon footprint.
These are agendas the President discusses as he tries to engage all citizens in the recovery. He is promoting and welcoming alternative views. Mr. Obama clearly is not a micro-manager. He allows the people he has selected to do their jobs. The media and Wall Street may not like Mr. Geithner’s plain and even strained communication style. In our instant gratification society, they did not like that he couldn’t develop in less than a week or two details of a plan to rescue banks and keep people from losing their homes to mortgage defaults.
We are not at a loss for solutions. My inference aside, it appears that government is trying to do what it can to stave off serious economic collapse while maintaining the “American” standard of living. Meanwhile, Wall Street says let the free marketers pull us out, greed is good and it will ultimately win the day. It’s not only a question of which are right, but also of which is nobler.
I am beginning to wonder whether there is nobility in either approach, economic or political. Each appeals to the self-interests of specific groups. Does either have a claim to being nobler than the other? At a time when it appears the middle class is bailing out the rich, we are right to question everything related to our economic system. I tend to believe the political approach, one that weighs the short and long term benefits of actions on the system, is the one that serves most of us.
So, before I could finish this, the exchanges began popping into my email. It is indicative of why we are where we are. The belief that we can really change the world. We are where we are because everyone who believes we can change the world has been successful. Some change has been more influential. Some change has rallied greater interest among more people. It is natural for organisms to evolve and adapt. Humans have a freedom different from all other organisms on the planet. We can choose to adopt our adaptations. The adaptations that most people choose become the ones that determine direction.
As we try to change the world, the world changes us. The two are inseparable. As with all organisms, when too many of their population becomes reliant on one source of nutrition or, in the human case, driven by the same motivation, the eco-system for that organism collapses, Humans for centuries have been motivated by greed.
This motivation has not been as dominant and widespread as it has over the past few decades. It’s not just the US. Why was the European Union formed? Go back to the establishment of the ISO-9000 manufacturing standard which was primarily intended to increase trade among European nations and close the door to US and Japanese producers.
That didn’t work. The Common Market did not work to protect European fortunes. The EU is an escalation of that protectionism. Sustaining cheap labor in China and India is not a means to growing their economies for everyone. It is greed allowing haves to keep theirs and have-nots to stay that way.
Too many people, nations and societies feeding on greed caused the system to collapse. And, we have changed the world as a result. There’s no going back. Only going forward. And Ken is right. We can really change the world. Today is everyone’s opportunity to be heard on the agenda for change. The battle is over which agenda will dominate.
Will we re-endow the greed agenda? It appears we won’t. This is why the salvo against AIG bonuses is important. Or, will we become more egalitarian. Dr. Fisher pushes the egalitarian agenda by pointing out the folly of singular leaders who act in their own self-interest. The days of Father Knows Best are over. Dr. Fisher sounds the warnings by recounting the sins. There is great value in that.
It demonstrates not so much that those leaders were or are bad, as it does that we as followers did not take seriously our responsibility to speak up. It is only after it is too late that we realize many of us were thinking the same thing.
There are many people out there with great ideas who will never be heard enough to create the critical mass required to move humanity. The Internet has presented proponents of change a means to be heard. Unfortunately, they have not found a way to promote the message. Most of what is done on the Internet is passively placed hoping for eyes to find it. An advantage we who are interested in new directions have is that this climate has people are searching and listening. This current state reminds me of the old folk tale, which I probably won’t tell well.
I saw a farmer carrying a board and his mule pulling a wagonload of wood walking down the road. The mule was very responsive to every command the farmer gave. As I caught up the farmer I expressed my admiration for the control he had over what is typically a stubborn animal. He explained that it took time and effort to train the mule to respond to commands, but every day the mule starts by wanting to go his own way. “That’s why I carry this board. A whack in the head gets his attention.”
Well, we got our “whack in the head.” And a majority of us are paying attention. Use this window of opportunity to advance the change, whatever it is.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Words! Your response made me think of the power of words. In the present climate of economic uncertainty, words are flying around, words with which most of us are unfamiliar and somewhat lost in the discussions surrounding the use of them. Words such as “toxic assets” and banking “stress tests” and “equity markets” and “discount rates” and “leveraged assets” (another name for “toxic assets), and on and on.
We are in the midst of an economic tsunami that was misread last September (2008), when Secretary of Treasure reassured us that $700 billion would stabilize the markets and that the insolvency of Leman Brothers was not going to hurt us. Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics for 2008, warned us then of what is happening now, and he writes in the New York Times today (March 24, 2009) that he is at the point of “despair,” another strong word.
Is he right? Is he wrong? Will a plan proposed by President Barak Obama where investors and banks share 14 percent of the risk and we as taxpayers are on the hook for the other 86 percent with us sharing equally, 50 – 50, should their be any profit in the selling of these assets? I don’t know. I’m not an economist. They talk over my head with words that makes no sense to me, and make my head hurt.
Not being an economist, but being a student of the complex organization at all levels for forty years, noting how they operate, how they use such terms as “transparency” while operating in secret, denying the real problems people on the line experience, I’m familiar with the behavior. To illustrate, imagine yourself in this situation recorded in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years later (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing. Barry Starvo of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:
"It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet Camaro or Pontiac Firebird. But for Larry Barker, a welder, one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars. ‘One night last fall Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel wells near the motor compartment.
"The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the left side, and when the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped. A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.
"The Rube Goldberg fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided it wasn’t worth it, so then they sent us all home. But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, they probably would have run the assembly line.” (pp 145 – 146)
Reference: Barry Starvro, Los Angeles Times as reported in the St. Petersburg Times, January 28, 1990.
This is the description of a prescription that may seem absurd and off-the-wall, but it is no less so than the machinations of the current economic crisis. The Obama Administration knows it would never get approval for its $ trillion sweetener for banks and investors by going through an enraged Congress, so it is bypassing the process. It is legal, and it may work, but it is deceptive. If it doesn’t work, what then? It could make pessimists look like prophets.
“Rage” is a powerful word and I understand the rage of taxpayers, especially those who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, are homeless, and fear for the future, as they never have before.
Some observers euphemistically call this doomsday scenario a “socio-economic correction.” It has been covered in such books as “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” (1987) by Paul Kennedy, and more recently “The Post-American World” (2008) by Freed Zakaria, editor of Foreign Affairs, a magazine to which I have subscribed to for decades.
These scholars study these things. I interpret them in light of my work and in terms of leadership, which I have found progressively eroding over my forty-year career.
This erosion has not only happened in corporate leadership, but in leadership across the spectrum of American life from the home to the school to the workplace to the government. I have used such words to describe workers in this progression as “self-indulgent,” victims of "learned helplessness” and “suspended in terminal adolescence” and "arrested development." I have equated their dissident behavior as that of “mad monarchs in the madhouse.” I thought I was being provocative, and challenged my critics to prove me wrong. Instead, I was called “an angry man.” The focus was on me not on my description of the workforce.
One of the words that has been given leverage without meaning is “crisis.” I’ve written about “crisis management,” claiming management creates the crises that it experiences, and then devotes all its energies to solving these crises. This epitomizes what I call, “leaderless leadership.”
Charles Krauthammer corroborates my thesis, most recently in his column “The Bonfire of the Trivialities” in The Tampa Tribune (March 24, 2009).
Krauthammer insists that the $165 million of AIG bonuses is a pittance against the size of the problem the AIG executives and managers have created, which one scholar says, “represents one-tenth of one percent of the value of a penny.” Krauthammer writes, “That $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built.”
That’s the irony and paradox of crisis management – the creators of the crisis are the only one’s trained to solve it, and so when we bite their hand we are biting our own. It is the nature of the way we do business.
Who suffers for this? It is always the least able to weather the crisis that suffer the most. Compounding the problem further the managers, who engineer the redundancy exercises caused by their mismanagement, never get rid of the least able or least effective in their jobs, but the least likely to cause political ruckus. I know. I have participated in redundancy exercises as far back as Nalco Chemical Company some forty years ago.
WHEN WORDS FIRST CAME TO INTRIGUE ME
You would expect “words” to first register impact as a student, but that would not be quite true in my case. In school, I took words for granted because I didn't own them, but only rented them. It wasn’t until I was beyond the formal education “factory” that I commenced to be intrigued with words as an extension of me. It is no accident that a high school or college graduation is called a “commencement exercise,” or a beginning. Once on my own, I saw the impact of words and how wordsmiths used words to control me.
My fascination came right after college when I was an enlisted man in the US Navy on the heavy cruiser USS Salem (CA-139) on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean. I had the luxury as a hospital corpsman in the medical division to be able to read books and type letters and commentaries at leisure. I’ve often thought of publishing these letters as “Sojourn of a Sailor.”
The ship’s crew was of 1,400 men with a medical division of twenty with a doctor who was a board surgeon, chief petty officers, three first class petty officers, three other petty officers and the rest of us corpsman.
We had a twenty-bed hospital, which we rotated as duty corpsman around the clock. Only the doctor and I were college graduates. But I didn’t mind. I liked the navy, and learned a great deal from these well-trained petty officers. However, the doctor showed me special treatment so that others called me “rackets” as we would discuss books and ideas.
My shipmates noticed I was always writing or reading. What I was reading seemed strange to them: novels of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, George Sands, Virginia Wolf, among others, which they said, “were girl books.”
“Well, yes, they are novels written by women,” I would agree, “but great novels, and I want one day to be a writer.”
They also noticed that I underlined passages, and had notes on the margins. I explained I was studying these writing styles. I constantly had to explain myself, but they always took my explanations with good humor.
One day one of them picked up a novel by Aldous Huxley – it was “Point Counterpoint,” a musical term, and the first novel of Huxley’s that I had read.
“You’ve got the definition of words on the margins,” he said. “Why? If anyone knows words, it’s you.”
“They’re new words to me.”
“But you’re an educated bloat, why would you need to do that?”
Of course, I didn’t, but I did. I did it also with the works of William Faulkner and Ezra Pound and James Joyce. I thought only one with a terrific vocabulary could write. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It wasn’t until later that I noted that Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Sinclair Lewis didn’t have such gargantuan vocabularies, all Nobel Prize Laureates for Literature as well as Faulkner.
When I was a boy, and there is some truth to this, my sister, Pat, said I read the dictionary. I did thumb through it from the A’s to the Z’s occasionally, as one might the Holy Bible. Early on, I was fascinated with words, but not actually a student of words as such.
My vocabulary has been aided from my Latin learned at St. Patrick’s Grammar School, and my Greek and French in college. Most words in English have a prefix or suffix or stem in one of these languages, especially Latin, and I’ve always been able to work out the approximate meaning of a word if it has some Latin in the word.
But like most excesses, it has proven as a writer to be a handicap. I think in these words and, thanks to my “Best-in-the-Land, BB,” whom I’ve been married to for 23 years, I often translate what I write into a more accessible vocabulary. It is not natural to me, and I sometimes think my writing suffers for this process. She disagrees.
William F. Buckley, Jr. once wrote an article in which one word, which I have regrettably forgotten to my regret, captured the essence of the entire piece – “one word!”
Eric did it in his response to the “Iatrogenic” exchange with the word “nova,” which is about a once brilliant, flashing and spectacular star that burns out and then recedes into the darkness. He capsulated the essence of my piece with that single word in this sentence:
“I’ve often wondered if all of our human ‘progress’ of the last few hundred years was just our species going nova.”
There are many words that hold metaphorical meaning, and “nova” is one. Another is “entropy” and “negative entropy.” A professor from MIT once visiting the Honeywell Avionics campus said, “I’ve never quite understood entropy.” He was in the management school of MIT, but I can’t believe he meant it although “entropy” is a physics term. We experience entropy daily.
Entropy is that phenomenon of nature that everything goes back to its original state of stasis or zero activity, or from light – as in the case of the brilliant nova -- into darkness. We as a species are devotees of the constructs we create that sparkle, recede and fade into obscurity.
The brilliant but somewhat maniacal General Douglas McArthur was perhaps thinking of nova when he addressed Congress at the end of his career: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” He happened to have finished first in his class at West Point with nearly a 100 percent average, but President Harry S. Truman, who never went to college, removed him from his post for his impertinence in the conduct of the Korean War.
On the other hand, Dwight David Eisenhower worked for McArthur in the Philippines, and went on to be the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII, and later a two-term president. He was only a middle 70 percent student at West Point.
We are intimidated by brilliance, clearly so. That is why Paul Krugman is not a member of the Obama Administration, but has the role of a gadfly and New York Times columnist, along with being a Princeton professor. Apparently his brilliance would be disruptive.
Novas notwithstanding, entropy in the human community can be slowed down if not reversed with “negative entropy,” which is the equivalent of raising the Phoenix out of the ashes. Steve Jobs did that when he returned to Apple as it was floundering towards extinction. He did it by the sheer will of his creative force personified in renewal, renovation, and innovative product development.
We practice “negative entropy” every day by slowing down the aging process through exercise and diet, rest and recreation, thinking and doing, socializing and serving others.
* * *
Note: This is “Part One” of a two-part response to “Iatrogenic – Yet Another Exchange.”
Monday, March 23, 2009
IATROGENIC -- ANOTHER EXCHANGE! "HABITS, THE HEART, AND TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON!"
IATROGENIC – ANOTHER EXCHANGE
“HABITS, THE HEART, AND TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 23, 2009
“Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation: Prince,
Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.”
John Doone
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton
* * *
A WRITER FROM GERMANY WRITES:
Jim,
To implement change is always difficult, because:
1) People want to keep what they are used to instead of doing it differently;
2) They are afraid of what they might get and don't see the advantage to them as sure (safety issue);
3) They need to learn how to get on track and are not sure whether they can do it or left behind;
4) Change mostly also means a change of the ranking order and last but not least:
5) Too many different opinions what kind of change would be best suited to fix the problem.
Change is like a revolution: there are losers and there are winners. But who wants to become a loser?
There are still quite a few people, which we call establishment, who benefit from the actual situation and in some cases they get helped out for their failures. So why should they promote change?
Take care and never mind,
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
I can't dispute your points. The part to change seemingly always left out, though, is the reprogramming necessary for change. I grew up in an era when it was "cool" to smoke. Now it is "uncool" and banned practically everywhere in the United States. In fact, I read an editorial today that a foundation wants to sue all CEOs of cigarette companies beyond what they have already been sued as corporations.
How did that happen?
The American Cancer Society launched a national campaign. It lobbied against movies showing people smoking in them or on television. It had a campaign for high school students. But where it really hit home, and this follows your outline, was when it was implicitly shown that the poor, the disadvantaged, the ignorant, and the left out were most likely to smoke. The rich and famous, the educated and sophisticated no longer smoked. It was a psychologically groupie thing, which indicated how superficial we are. But it worked!
On the other hand, it has become "cool" to have tattoos. In my youth, there was nothing less "cool." Outsiders had tattoos, now everyone is a groupie with them.
Society changes when it is to its advantage to change. Its preferred image, through education and indoctrination, is modified by public pressure to change to warrant inclusion. One of the ironies of a society of supposed individualism such as ours is that very few have the actual courage to be individualistic. We are careful to dress, walk, talk, and behave the same; to want, value and believe the same; and to seek the same rewards.
You are right about change, but remember Barak Obama won on a campaign platform of change. Were your five points less valid? Of course not. Then how did he manage being elected? Like the American Cancer Society, Obama’s appeals was to the “in” crowd and made it “cool” to want what he wanted, and the “forgotten crowd” of young people savvy using the Internet. If anything, our new president is a maestro manipulating the media. At the same time, he made it “uncool” not to want the same for those earlier excluded, such as African Americans like himself. As Kennedy used religion by not using it to get elected, Obama used race by not using it to get elected. Kennedy reminded Americans of the Declaration of Independence; Obama reminded Americans of the Emancipation Proclamation.
You say “never mind,” implying that there is no point to mind, but I do mind, and I think a writer of descriptive truth, as I put it, is more needed now than ever before because prescriptive truth is worn out, and as you indicate, people will buy into a solution if they see themselves as winners. I am not interested in either winners or losers, but in people understanding why they are the way they are. I am not interested in them changing. If I were, I’d own their problems. But I am interested in explaining why choosing to change or not change is a problem. For that reason I share a couple excerpts with you.
I wrote this in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) in a chapter titled "Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon":
"Change is not amendable to miracles, but to painful struggle with no guarantees that the new direction will provide absolution to old sins. There is no way to avoid paying for past excesses. Retribution is not personal, only a given. Better to acknowledge this and deal with it then to prolong the agony and exacerbate the consequences.
“As the mysteries of nature are revealed through science and launched into consciousness with technology, we find ourselves submerged in complexity, a complexity far beyond our capacity of a single individual to manage. Many heads must work as one to resolve the mysteries of life – at home, in school, in the workplace and in government. Cooperation is no longer simply a sufficient but necessary condition.
“A total reprogramming from dependent to interdependent behavior is often mentioned as an answer to this challenge, but without the necessary radical cultural change required. We prefer to do things as painlessly as possible, or one-step-at-a-time. Chronological change or incremental change is not the answer. The foundation of our cultures is all wrong for the requirements.
“Change cannot be superimposed on a quicksand foundation. This strategy, however, is now receiving wide acceptance, and a strategy, I might add, which continues to fail. Only psychological change, like being reborn a cooperative individual, has any chance of success. In essence, this requires going against the grain of conventional wisdom. This would not be proposed if complexity could be handled otherwise. Change demands consensus movement in the same direction. This is not easy to accomplish, so we avoid it. History tells us radical change seldom occurs before disaster is reached. Disaster as catalyst is always costly. Can we still manage such costs?” (pp 232 – 233)
In this same book, I write in a chapter titled “Habits and the Heart” about psychological time. I can sit here writing for six to eight hours and think nothing of it, but BB gets on my case reminding me of the chronological time I have spent without taking a break. I’ve never been one committed to chronological time, or I probably wouldn’t be working harder now than I did when I was young, and I worked pretty damned hard then.
Early on, after my da died at 49, never receiving any relief from pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, I decided I was going to live the life God denied him, to live in psychological time. I was 22 at the time. I’ve never been imprisoned in chronological time since, as my many careers attest. I’ve never planned for the future. I haven’t had to because I’ve never joined the “in”club. Psychological time is living in the moment, and I was doing that before I read existential philosophy. I mention this because I’m going to quote from this chapter:
THE TABOO – "HABITS AND THE HEART"
“It is habits and the heart that dictate behavior. The heart, not the head, drives habits. Habits are formed so that behavior can be largely unconscious. It takes six weeks to form a habit, twice as long to change one. This is because feelings, not thinking drive behavior. Moreover, conscious behavior is driven by our psychological clock, whereas our chronological clock drives habitual behavior.
“Take the much accomplished athlete Peter Maher, 35, a dozen years ago he weighed 256 pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes and drank a case of beer a day. “And to really get drunk,” he states, “I’d down some really hard liquor like Jack Daniel’s or Southern Comfort.”
“A Canadian transplant living in St. Petersburg, Florida, he has made a complete metamorphosis. He carries 150 pounds on his 6-foot-5-frame, and only 3 percent body fat. The two-time Olympian owns the world’s best time in 25 kilometers (1:14:29) and the Canadian record in the half marathon, with a career best of 2:11:47 in an eighth place finish at the London Marathon in 1991.
“Maher, who never drank a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette until age 18, says running is bookends to his life. He decided to reform because he had the feeling he wouldn’t be around long. Now he doesn’t eat fatty foods, and figures exactly what his body needs to run 140 miles a week, 25 miles on Sundays. “He can’t do things half-measure,” says a friend. “When it comes to Peter, it’s full blast. He goes into things headfirst. He lives and dies with his racing ability.”
“The young man, well intended as he is, has given up one addiction for another. There is little balance in his life, only a new obsession. He made the psychological commitment to change “cold turkey,” but his addictive personality was still not mastered. He still measures his progress in terms of a chronological clock. “The thing about running is it is like a big stick over your head. It challenges you every day; it does not let you hide. You can’t run away from it.” But you can run away from yourself, and we do, when we fail to make peace with ourselves.
“People addicted to cigarettes are fooling themselves who try to quit one-step-at-a-time. The same is true if they wear a nicotine patch to ease their craving for cigarettes, or submit to methadone treatment in the case of drug addiction. Chronological commitment does not cure the addiction, but rather prolongs the pain and is therefore seldom successful.
"Ninety percent of those who use this approach eventually revert back to their former addiction. This is because the euphoria of drinking binges, the calming satisfaction of a cigarette, the incredible highs of a gambling spree, the passionate love-making after a knock-down-drag-out-fight with one’s spouse, the wild episodes of philandering, or whatever the addiction, more often than not has a perverse way of being remembered fondly.
“The behavior may be temporarily halted, but the mind refuses to let go. It may be a year, five years or more, but in a moment of psychological or physical anguish, the itch returns and the behavior follows. This is so because the person’s psychology has not changed. When there is psychological change, the addicted person is fully AWARE of his addiction, fully ACCEPTS his responsibility for the state of addiction, then takes ACTION by choosing to end the addiction, realizing full well that it will be with him all his days, only now under control.
“There are no good or bad habits, only behaviors, which can become with repetition unconscious, and therefore potential hazards to life and happiness.” (pp 186-188)
Manfred, another reason I offer these excerpts is to show my writing is “descriptive truth” and not “prescriptive truth.” I am not in the solution business.
THE TABOO only has one review on www.amazon.com and she blasts the book because obviously she was looking for solutions and I am not a solution writer, as you can see from these excerpts. In many ways I am still a chemist, impersonal and stoichiometrically focused on the mole fractions of the equations. Here they are “habits and the heart,” and “chronological and psychological time.”
Be always well,
Jim
“HABITS, THE HEART, AND TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 23, 2009
“Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation: Prince,
Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.”
John Doone
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton
* * *
A WRITER FROM GERMANY WRITES:
Jim,
To implement change is always difficult, because:
1) People want to keep what they are used to instead of doing it differently;
2) They are afraid of what they might get and don't see the advantage to them as sure (safety issue);
3) They need to learn how to get on track and are not sure whether they can do it or left behind;
4) Change mostly also means a change of the ranking order and last but not least:
5) Too many different opinions what kind of change would be best suited to fix the problem.
Change is like a revolution: there are losers and there are winners. But who wants to become a loser?
There are still quite a few people, which we call establishment, who benefit from the actual situation and in some cases they get helped out for their failures. So why should they promote change?
Take care and never mind,
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
I can't dispute your points. The part to change seemingly always left out, though, is the reprogramming necessary for change. I grew up in an era when it was "cool" to smoke. Now it is "uncool" and banned practically everywhere in the United States. In fact, I read an editorial today that a foundation wants to sue all CEOs of cigarette companies beyond what they have already been sued as corporations.
How did that happen?
The American Cancer Society launched a national campaign. It lobbied against movies showing people smoking in them or on television. It had a campaign for high school students. But where it really hit home, and this follows your outline, was when it was implicitly shown that the poor, the disadvantaged, the ignorant, and the left out were most likely to smoke. The rich and famous, the educated and sophisticated no longer smoked. It was a psychologically groupie thing, which indicated how superficial we are. But it worked!
On the other hand, it has become "cool" to have tattoos. In my youth, there was nothing less "cool." Outsiders had tattoos, now everyone is a groupie with them.
Society changes when it is to its advantage to change. Its preferred image, through education and indoctrination, is modified by public pressure to change to warrant inclusion. One of the ironies of a society of supposed individualism such as ours is that very few have the actual courage to be individualistic. We are careful to dress, walk, talk, and behave the same; to want, value and believe the same; and to seek the same rewards.
You are right about change, but remember Barak Obama won on a campaign platform of change. Were your five points less valid? Of course not. Then how did he manage being elected? Like the American Cancer Society, Obama’s appeals was to the “in” crowd and made it “cool” to want what he wanted, and the “forgotten crowd” of young people savvy using the Internet. If anything, our new president is a maestro manipulating the media. At the same time, he made it “uncool” not to want the same for those earlier excluded, such as African Americans like himself. As Kennedy used religion by not using it to get elected, Obama used race by not using it to get elected. Kennedy reminded Americans of the Declaration of Independence; Obama reminded Americans of the Emancipation Proclamation.
You say “never mind,” implying that there is no point to mind, but I do mind, and I think a writer of descriptive truth, as I put it, is more needed now than ever before because prescriptive truth is worn out, and as you indicate, people will buy into a solution if they see themselves as winners. I am not interested in either winners or losers, but in people understanding why they are the way they are. I am not interested in them changing. If I were, I’d own their problems. But I am interested in explaining why choosing to change or not change is a problem. For that reason I share a couple excerpts with you.
I wrote this in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) in a chapter titled "Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon":
"Change is not amendable to miracles, but to painful struggle with no guarantees that the new direction will provide absolution to old sins. There is no way to avoid paying for past excesses. Retribution is not personal, only a given. Better to acknowledge this and deal with it then to prolong the agony and exacerbate the consequences.
“As the mysteries of nature are revealed through science and launched into consciousness with technology, we find ourselves submerged in complexity, a complexity far beyond our capacity of a single individual to manage. Many heads must work as one to resolve the mysteries of life – at home, in school, in the workplace and in government. Cooperation is no longer simply a sufficient but necessary condition.
“A total reprogramming from dependent to interdependent behavior is often mentioned as an answer to this challenge, but without the necessary radical cultural change required. We prefer to do things as painlessly as possible, or one-step-at-a-time. Chronological change or incremental change is not the answer. The foundation of our cultures is all wrong for the requirements.
“Change cannot be superimposed on a quicksand foundation. This strategy, however, is now receiving wide acceptance, and a strategy, I might add, which continues to fail. Only psychological change, like being reborn a cooperative individual, has any chance of success. In essence, this requires going against the grain of conventional wisdom. This would not be proposed if complexity could be handled otherwise. Change demands consensus movement in the same direction. This is not easy to accomplish, so we avoid it. History tells us radical change seldom occurs before disaster is reached. Disaster as catalyst is always costly. Can we still manage such costs?” (pp 232 – 233)
In this same book, I write in a chapter titled “Habits and the Heart” about psychological time. I can sit here writing for six to eight hours and think nothing of it, but BB gets on my case reminding me of the chronological time I have spent without taking a break. I’ve never been one committed to chronological time, or I probably wouldn’t be working harder now than I did when I was young, and I worked pretty damned hard then.
Early on, after my da died at 49, never receiving any relief from pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, I decided I was going to live the life God denied him, to live in psychological time. I was 22 at the time. I’ve never been imprisoned in chronological time since, as my many careers attest. I’ve never planned for the future. I haven’t had to because I’ve never joined the “in”club. Psychological time is living in the moment, and I was doing that before I read existential philosophy. I mention this because I’m going to quote from this chapter:
THE TABOO – "HABITS AND THE HEART"
“It is habits and the heart that dictate behavior. The heart, not the head, drives habits. Habits are formed so that behavior can be largely unconscious. It takes six weeks to form a habit, twice as long to change one. This is because feelings, not thinking drive behavior. Moreover, conscious behavior is driven by our psychological clock, whereas our chronological clock drives habitual behavior.
“Take the much accomplished athlete Peter Maher, 35, a dozen years ago he weighed 256 pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes and drank a case of beer a day. “And to really get drunk,” he states, “I’d down some really hard liquor like Jack Daniel’s or Southern Comfort.”
“A Canadian transplant living in St. Petersburg, Florida, he has made a complete metamorphosis. He carries 150 pounds on his 6-foot-5-frame, and only 3 percent body fat. The two-time Olympian owns the world’s best time in 25 kilometers (1:14:29) and the Canadian record in the half marathon, with a career best of 2:11:47 in an eighth place finish at the London Marathon in 1991.
“Maher, who never drank a drop of alcohol or smoked a cigarette until age 18, says running is bookends to his life. He decided to reform because he had the feeling he wouldn’t be around long. Now he doesn’t eat fatty foods, and figures exactly what his body needs to run 140 miles a week, 25 miles on Sundays. “He can’t do things half-measure,” says a friend. “When it comes to Peter, it’s full blast. He goes into things headfirst. He lives and dies with his racing ability.”
“The young man, well intended as he is, has given up one addiction for another. There is little balance in his life, only a new obsession. He made the psychological commitment to change “cold turkey,” but his addictive personality was still not mastered. He still measures his progress in terms of a chronological clock. “The thing about running is it is like a big stick over your head. It challenges you every day; it does not let you hide. You can’t run away from it.” But you can run away from yourself, and we do, when we fail to make peace with ourselves.
“People addicted to cigarettes are fooling themselves who try to quit one-step-at-a-time. The same is true if they wear a nicotine patch to ease their craving for cigarettes, or submit to methadone treatment in the case of drug addiction. Chronological commitment does not cure the addiction, but rather prolongs the pain and is therefore seldom successful.
"Ninety percent of those who use this approach eventually revert back to their former addiction. This is because the euphoria of drinking binges, the calming satisfaction of a cigarette, the incredible highs of a gambling spree, the passionate love-making after a knock-down-drag-out-fight with one’s spouse, the wild episodes of philandering, or whatever the addiction, more often than not has a perverse way of being remembered fondly.
“The behavior may be temporarily halted, but the mind refuses to let go. It may be a year, five years or more, but in a moment of psychological or physical anguish, the itch returns and the behavior follows. This is so because the person’s psychology has not changed. When there is psychological change, the addicted person is fully AWARE of his addiction, fully ACCEPTS his responsibility for the state of addiction, then takes ACTION by choosing to end the addiction, realizing full well that it will be with him all his days, only now under control.
“There are no good or bad habits, only behaviors, which can become with repetition unconscious, and therefore potential hazards to life and happiness.” (pp 186-188)
Manfred, another reason I offer these excerpts is to show my writing is “descriptive truth” and not “prescriptive truth.” I am not in the solution business.
THE TABOO only has one review on www.amazon.com and she blasts the book because obviously she was looking for solutions and I am not a solution writer, as you can see from these excerpts. In many ways I am still a chemist, impersonal and stoichiometrically focused on the mole fractions of the equations. Here they are “habits and the heart,” and “chronological and psychological time.”
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, March 22, 2009
IATROGENIC -- AN EXCHANGE! "QUIT COMPLAINING, DR. FISHER, GET ON THE SOLUTION BANDWAGON!"
IATROGENIC – AN EXCHANGE!
“QUIT COMPLAINING, DR. FISHER, GET ON THE SOLUTION BANDWAGON!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 22, 2009
“We commonly select practices according to what is known about the solution when we should choose practices according to what is known about the problem. The popular notion is that the ‘problem domain’ is an incoherent riddle, while the ‘solution domain’ is coherent and tidy. Actually, the opposite is true.”
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), p. 53.
REFERENCE TO THE EXCHANGE
One of the advantages to being relatively unknown is that the labels people are inclined to prescribe to you do not exist. You are like a free-floating entity invisible to the naked conscience. Once gone, however, all sorts of appendages can be attached to your persona including non grata. But of course you could care less because by then you are fertilizing daisies.
That said many of us are so afraid of offending that we don’t have time for comprehending. We are so busy feeding off the minds of others that we never have time to actually wonder what is going on in our own. It has been my mission to push against that hot air, encouraging other common souls such as myself to do the same. When push comes to shove, no one has the answers for any of us but ourselves within the limits of our own experiences, comprehension and determination. We are all philosophers.
We happen to live in the Age of Optimism, against all evidence to the contrary with a palpable fear of pessimism, as if it were the “New Plague,” which perhaps it is. Yet, we read George Orwell’s “I984” with the omen Big Brother is watching us, and say, “Oh yeah! That’s true enough!” We read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which people are chemically produced and the word “love” or physical intimacy is banned, and we chuckle, “Oh yeah! Here about that woman who had octuplets, didn’t she lift that right out of the book? She already had six kids at home without a man, insanity!”
But it’s not shocking because the shocking has become the norm. It gives the ludicrous Dr. Phil a role in life to fulfill. It is easy to throw stones at Jerry Springer, but he admits to working in a farcical zoo, while the good doctor fails to see the absurdity of his role. Millions are loyal fans to these two panderers to pessimism.
In an Age of Optimism, noise is music; splashing paint on a canvas is art. Mayhem and murder on high rated CSI-type TV dramas compete with bizarre sexual innuendo comedies for prime time audiences. Literature and films cannot have two sentences of dialogue without the “F” word, while education and religion struggle to be “with it” in a catch up fashion, when it was their mission to set the standards.
People find the disgusting entertaining failing to realize they are carrying the banner of pessimism right into their living rooms. Orwell, Huxley, et al, documented the dystopia of our culture and now we are living it.
My story about the “Man in the Cage,” which I shared with readers earlier, is pure dystopia. Some readers nailed its message. They had had corporate experiences similar if not the same as the protagonist.
That is the intention of the story – identity, or there go I but for the grace of God. In other words, it was not just the man who found the cage so enticing that he entered it voluntarily never to escape, but the story was intended to address us all.
That’s what writers of dsytopia do. The story is suggesting that we all create a cage to which very few of us ever escape. The cage is our cultural programming. The message implies society is moving in that direction; that we have become afraid to be individuals in a society predicated on that principle. We have become a groupie culture flaunting our tattoos. But again, like Orwell and Huxley, it is but a story, and as stories go, it can ring true or false to the reader, who has that option always.
Serious novelists are philosophers describing the world in the light of the darkness they observe. They speculate on what the future portends to be. Viewed simply as novels, little learning takes place. But viewed in the wider sense of everyday life in society it can have another meaning.
My writing suggests we are a knowing society not a learning society. There is nothing more dangerous, in my view, because when you know all the answers you are not open to the problems you face. You hide in their complexities choosing to see them beyond the pale of comprehension, and therefore deciding to solve the problems you can, which in an absurd way was illustrated by Samuel Beckett in “Waiting for Godot,” another dytopia work.
* * *
One of the benefits of these exchanges is not only a better insight into the ideas exchanged, but the reader cannot read such an exchange without having a conversation with him or herself.
The reason it might appear that the writer and I are talking past each other here is because he is in the “prescriptive truth business,” the business of solutions, and his focus is on those who will provide him with solutions:
(1) Prescriptive truth is practical and applicable to the problems at hand and is “solution intensive.”
(2) Prescriptive truth conforms to what ought to be desired or what is right in that context.
Optimism is an “opt to be,” or preferred to be position to pessimism because it is right for our health and well-being. It is a choice or preference, which may or may not be consistent with reality. Optimistically speaking, everyone should have health insurance. Realistically, is it possible or even desirable? What pressures would it place on other institutions? Would it lead to inferior quality for all?
I am in the “descriptive truth business,” the business of defining problems, as clearly as possible in light of data and situations, fully realizing the competing influences of my own “self-demands” and my “ideal self,” or how I ought to be. “The Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution” was created to illustrate this.
Descriptive truth has no right or wrong, or ought’s or should be’s but only “what is” and “what is not.” Descriptive truth is the only truth we can know or deny knowing because it is the reality of our actual experience. It is “problem-intensive” and not solution driven.
Prescriptions are solutions to deal with problems, and descriptions are problems defined as carefully as the writer is talented to define them in the belief that a well-defined problem is already more than half solved.
So, you can see prescriptive truth and descriptive truth are not the same. Educators are in the prescriptive truth business for the most part because they are imparting as educators solutions that have survived the test of time. Educators who write books are providing solution-driven formulae to that end.
Philosophers are almost exclusively in the “descriptive truth business,” as they are looking for trends and patterns that identify problems, not only of their time, but are indigenous to man as they see him.
Philosophers cannot divorce themselves from the fact that their vision is flawed because their reality, too, is governed by “what is” and “what is not” true about them. Schopenhauer, for instance, who wrote about love, will and ideas, held intense hatred for George Hegel, a fellow academic and philosopher, and quit teaching because of him. Should we discount Schopenhauer for this, him being one of the first philosophers who took the subject of “love” seriously as a philosophical subject? I think not.
To him reality was one thing, “WILL.” Kant said we could never know the true nature of reality, or the “thing in itself.” Schopenhauer disagreed. He was a German idealist. He saw “WILL” as a random, irrational and often destructive force. Our age confirms his thesis. He saw us as an animal governed by the survival instinct. He saw life as pain, WILL as inspiring desire, and desire constantly reminding us of the things we lack, which leads to mounting frustration, anxiety and pain.
When we do things, self-destructive things, things that baffle us after the fact, such as Bernard Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, it is the WILL, Schopenhauer says, following its own singular path. He anticipated the “Age of Knowledge," claiming the more we know the more it hurts because we can never know enough. Not very comforting, but more importantly, does his description resonate with the reader today? That is the reader’s option to determine.
Descriptive truth is so vast that philosophers only tear off a piece of it: Aristotle – ethics; Erasmus – religion of the heart (no need for a church hierarchy); Heidegger – on being or awareness of mortality; James – on pragmatism; Jung – on the unconscious; Kant – on reason; Keynes – on the efficacy of government intervention; Kierkegaard – on contempt for individual man; Locke – on the perceiving mind; Marx – on a classless society; More – on utopia; Newton – on the laws of gravity & motion; Nietzsche – on the will to power; Plato – on ethics and Socratic truth; Pythagoras – on the ultimate reality, numbers; Freud – on the talking cures, and so on.
I am in the “descriptive truth business,” which is the business of defining problems I have experienced in the line of my work. I am not in the solution business, nor do any of my books or articles purport to being prescriptions for a better life, a more prosperous livelihood or a happier existence.
(1) They instead identify, for example, the six passive behaviors I have observed killing worker performance along with worker spirit and contributing to the entropy of corporations.
(2) They identify the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and the impact of culture.
(3) They characterize how we have become stuck in time with the illusion of reality founded on progress and unhinged with nostalgia.
(4) They document leaderless leadership and the causes of dissidents among workers, and so on.
(5) Even this current missive is descriptive truth with no intention or interest in providing prescriptive formulae.
By describing the situation, and defining it in terms relative to my experience, it allows the reader to do the same in terms of his own, as I have no answers for him because I am not he, and make no claim to being capable of solving his problem. The problem belongs to him, alone. He owns it. I do not.
If he chooses to deny it, retreat from it, or project it to others, my descriptions will give him little comfort. I am not in the comfort making business anymore than I am in the business of hiding the pessimism with a word brush of optimism.
Pessimism is “what is,” and it will be “what is not” when it no longer suits the mind of the time. We are in an age of superficiality and artificiality, claiming intimacy because we exchange text messages with each other. We are afraid to grow old and therefore grow up, spending billions to be eternally young, while burning the candle at both ends. Everything must be grand, contrived, formalized, ritualized to give it moment. There is no joy in celebration when there is no room for spontaneity, sincerity, and unbridled candor. When we live in the surreal, the real has no purchase for us.
This is description, not prescription. What is the antidote? It would be a first step to get inside the emotional character of our pessimism, which would be defining the problem. We cannot will it away, hope it away, or deny its existence with optimism. It serves our needs and therefore “it is” “what is.”
* * *
MY PROFESSOR FRIEND WRITES:
Jim,
Yes to what you just wrote but are there anyone left in this country that fails to see the problems? We all hear about these every moment of every day do we not?
How about moving the conversation both towards solutions and actions? This is not a time for our great nation to simply complain and diagnose every problem to the finest level of detail and each of us promote our own agenda as if we alone can figure this out. It is so tiresome to hear most of our talking heads and pundits telling us they have figured
out what is wrong.
Hurrah for them and on their tombstone it should read that they really knew more than anybody else. Now some if not most of us have to get engaged in creating a new economic system.
We need to promote our solutions and then do the really hard work and make the serious effort to work with others to create some small steps towards the actions needed to move us towards what we can create that is far better.
This crisis in particular is one that represents an incredible opportunity to create a far better world than what we inherited. Or more accurately lets try to leave something for our children and grandchildren that helps restore their and our own faith and trust, and
here is our real call to take action.
We now have the chance to work together and by using the miracles of a wired world it takes only a few keystrokes to find any number of places that are begging for help in creating actionable solutions. We have a surplus of complainers but apparently only a few who have the skill and desire to move to action.
Here is one example of a person who can complain with the best of them but who is also organizing an effort to make a real difference. In the past I worked with Dave Korten and brought some of my thoughts and experiences to two of his books. He and many others working with him have taken initial steps in organizing a new economic agenda and have
set up a place that people can join with each other to effect change and not just talk about it.
David's new book "Agenda for a New Economy" has just been released and his publisher, Berrett/Kohler has a president, Steve Piersanti who is also a person I highly respect. This is a firm I have encouraged you to send some of your work to. You can examine very carefully how this publisher and its leader do practice what they and their authors
preach. Steve and David are both men of principle who have the skill and energy to move beyond just words to actions.
Another person I also know and have confidence in is Carolyn Lukensmeyer and she too has the talent to help us move well beyond the complaining stage to action. This site below can give you more info on the work that her and thousands of others have been doing in helping create a democratic process and not just talking about it.
Carolyn also has a Wiki page dedicated to her and she is one of the few OD trained colleagues who has worked inside the centers of political power and devoted more time to changing the world than just complaining about it. I admire that greatly. One final note for anyone who wants to move to or support action is an incredible story captured on video as told by Paul Hawkens. His theme is to identify the greatest social movement ever.
These are the careers of the future. We all have a chance, more than in any prior generation, to move our thoughts and ideas towards collaborative action. Action that can really make a difference.
What a world and what an opportunity! Now what was it you were saying, Jim, about what is wrong today? Lets work together to move and make more efforts to really CHANGE the world. We have all shown quite convincingly that we can make words, publish books and critique the times we live in but can we bring our skills and experiences out into the world of action?
These are exciting times and not since that original forming of our country, back over nearly a quarter of a millennium ago have we been provided such an opportunity.
Thanks
Ken
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ken,
You are one of the men I admire for your dedication and hard work to make a difference in the lives that you touch academically and throughout the world in your OD consulting work. That said we might be yin and yang, the positive and negative, or the optimist and pessimist to each other.
We both come out of the tradition of organizational development (OD), but your world has been more cognitive to my intuitive experience. Put otherwise, it has not been what I have done that has made the difference. It has been what I have found out, and shared with others, which has moved them to do that has been the differentiator.
In all cases, many of which are discussed in my two new books, “Creative Selling,” and “Confident Thinking,” now struggling to find a publisher, I describe problems; I do not prescribe solutions. The answers are there, but they are not my answers, but the readers.
My experience has taught me that problems are never solved, only controlled, and to control them sufficiently, one must know the chronic perturbations that confound the systems that purport to be working smoothly. I also know that a great idea will fail if the people don’t believe in it, and a poor idea will succeed if they do.
Now to some of the ideas in your response:
(I): "The conversation should be about solutions, and actions."
I think that is the problem.
We are a solution driven society with an incredible level of energy for action for actions sake. You say we have conversations about problems. Yes, but conversation is not the problem. The problem is we are not a society with any patience for the defining of the problem. The sheer panic of the Bush and then the Obama administration with regard to the economic meltdown is evidence enough to rest my case. They both have acted half cocked with $billions of taxpayer dollars being filtered into European banks and brokerage and insurance houses, while, paradoxically, these American firms are attempting to pay down some of their debt to their European connections. It is so convoluted that no one can get a bead on it, but that, of course, was the point of it all in the first place.
William L. Livingston III, who wrote three penetrating and poignant books about defining the problem, gave up, and quit publishing in disgust. I keep publishing in the problem-defining genre and run into the same wall he has vacated.
You are prescription driven, and I can see why because you are in the business of applying prescriptions to real OD problems. Livingston was in the descriptive business, identifying problems for which society had no patience or stomach for dealing with much less identifying.
(2) “We are preoccupied with complaining.”
That, too, is not the case. Talking heads aside, who are in the business of exploiting people’s hot buttons, are not in the descriptive business, per se. It may seem, and quite legitimately so, that I keep hammering away at the same excesses, but always in terms of describing the problem, hopefully, more poignantly to bring attention to it. If anything, there is not enough qualified descriptive criticism that would reveal the true nature of the problem. Writers want to be published and so attempt to narrow their pitch to a specific audience. I attempt only to narrow mine to my descriptive experience in the hopes it has some value to the reader. I am not in the solution business.
(3) "We must create a new economic system."
We have had Adam Smith, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx with Nobel Laureates feeding off their economic crumbs, while each of these distinguished minds were in the descriptive truth business of their respective times, allowing others to wrangle over pragmatic solutions. We cannot create a new economic or any other system until we understand why the old system failed.
In my descriptive parlance, one reason it fails is because we are all programmed for it to fail in the light of the new challenges. We keep failing, and will continue to fail because we are structured and programmed to fail.
We keep promoting "critical thinking," or cognitive thinking exclusively in the problem solving without the complement of “creative thinking,” or intuitive thinking in the process except cosmetically. No less than Einstein said that problem solving so handicapped is an impossibility.
We would still be doing Newtonian physics if he had not come along. We need “creative thinking,” or thinking beyond the dimensions of the problem embracing the unknown prudently, cautiously and patiently, as Einstein did, which is not in our character. We panic and then create a plethora of solutions desperately looking for problems. It is why Carl Sagan once said, “An Einstein comes around about every 300 years.” Since there has been more change in the last 30 years than the previous 300, we need an Einstein in economics now.
(4) “This crisis represents an opportunity.”
Sorry, but that statement has the ring of a cliché and a cover up for the painful business of a society unglued. It isn’t pessimism that is killing us; it is unbridled optimism that keeps generating these crises calling them new opportunities.
It is time that we start crawling through the underworld muck we have created and get inside our crises instead of dressing them up as opportunities.
We are in the crisis generating business. That is our main business. We create crises, then solve them, learn little or nothing from them, congratulate ourselves for our solutions, and then repeat them over and over again.
That is what I describe in such books as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I don’t prescribe for it. I show where we are stuck, page, chapter and book. I tell why we are stuck. Why?
“Progress is our most important product.”
Progress is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates economic miracles in the US, then Germany, then Japan, now India and China, and for it we cannot see our face across the street.
Tell me one advanced society or one emerging society that questions the dictum: progress is our most important product? None, zero, zilch!
It is progress that is killing us, and we are in the manufacturing business of creating crises of progress so we can solve them, and then congratulate ourselves for the limited success that we experience, because with an ephemeral tick of the clock another crisis in progress is happening somewhere on this small planet earth.
(5) “We have the miracle of the wired world.”
It is a miracle no doubt. It is the future. No doubt about that either, but where it is taking us? That is in doubt.
If it is used for good, people in the most remote sections of the world can be contacted with the potential of them sharing their cultural riches with us and us with them. At present, it is more a toy than a tool, more a curiosity than cooperative device. It has not lessened the great divide between the haves and have-nots. It has not reduced hunger or reduced genocide. In fact, an argument could be made that it has increased man’s greed and malevolence. Where are philosophers when you need them?
(6) “We have a surplus of complainers.”
If I take your meaning correctly, and I believe I do, you place me in that category. If so, you have not understood what I am saying or why.
There is no gain to my pain. Writing these missives takes away from my novel, and I’m not getting any younger. If there is anything that I am saying that is worthwhile, it is that:
(1) We cannot depend on bromides, pretty words, reassuring writers,
(2) We cannot depend on people who can write tantalizing prose with algorithms and paradigms that capture the reader’s mind and ease his discomfiture with solutions.
(3) We love solutions, and then we don’t have to think for ourselves.
(4) We are past the time of experts, past the time of dependency on specialists, past the time of obeisance to authority, past the time of the nation-state, past the time of one dominant race, past the time hegemony and empire,
(5) We as people, however, crave the words of spellbinders who would relieve us of the need to think for ourselves. So, they will always be there waiting to mesmerize us with their easy answers to health, wealth and happiness.
Notice these scholars and writers, journalists and educators don’t cause the reader any pain, and as a bonus, they give the reader a new boat of solutions to launch into the water.
I cause pain. I cause unease. I cause people to think about the unthinkable. I cause people to wonder about what they take for granted. Yes, I introduce them to themselves as thinking persons because they have not been trained to think. A college degree doesn’t train you to think, nor does a Ph.D. Education is an industry producing a product and that product is a specialist of some sort to be plugged into the system, no thinking required.
You can’t be serious, Jim, you might say? I’m dead serious. We can launch a satellite to the moon, we can do open heart surgery, but that is not thinking; that is programmed learning to do those things. Thinking is beyond the doing to enjoin all the complexities of life, which originate with and end with us, alone.
The two best selling books in the world require no thinking; they are all about behavioral change: they are the Holy Bible and diet books.
We have astrophysicists and brain surgeons that know a lot about knowing, but can prove behaviorally to know very little about being. That’s the problem; that’s where ethics is involved; that’s where people cannot be duped; that’s where people can see beyond the end of their nose. I dare say astrophysicists and brain surgeons are not any less likely than high school drop outs to be prisoners to their own appetites, as Schopenhauer might say.
Specialists have been trained to regurgitate and do, to behave within the confines of their professions, but not necessarily outside of them, to be optimistic, to hope for the best, to believe in their leaders. You have seen me write, “Everyone is a leader or no one is.” I don’t say that lightly.
There is never much written about that premise, which to my mind is the unit of leadership, everything else is only incidental to it. A President of the United States is part of a tradition started 10,000 years ago with witch doctors. I remind readers of that fact.
(7)“My friend Dave Korten has a new economic agenda.”
I’m sure it resonates with you, and I’m equally sure it will resonate with many others because they are looking for something new. I am not interested in a new economic agenda because as powerful and well thought out as it might be it pales by comparison with what I am saying here.
You cannot superimpose the most striking edifice on a crumbling foundation. It will ultimately collapse.
You travel the world and do a lot of good. I travel through the labyrinth of my thoughts and they take me to far off places beyond topography and geography. I am a philosopher with a problem solving background. I am not the first scientifically trained man to be smitten with philosophy. I’ve just not taken the time to create a system. Perhaps I’ll do it in my novels.
Bill Livingston, as mentioned earlier, has been one of my best teachers and I’m sure you’ve never read his books: “The New Plague”(1985), “Have Fun at Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). I have read them many times and their wear and tear shows.
He saw my “Work Without Managers” (1990) at a Book Fair in New York City, and we exchanged books. We have been friends ever since. Virtually everything he defined in those books, and I defined in mine, came unhappily true.
Were we complaining? We thought we were defining the problem, something that solution driven books are trying to solve without knowing what it is. Livingston became weary of publishing, but I persist even though I am misread and misunderstood. When the two of us are long gone, others will read our books because they will be safely free of our torch and torque.
(8) “Action is what we need.”
There is no argument there. You are not only a proponent of such action but a dedicated practitioner, and for that I commend you. You are a collaborator and that also is needed. You care and make a difference. The world is a better place for your being out there doing your thing. It would please me even more if a lot of the things I’m saying here were more responsive to and in support of your doing.
(9) “Let’s change the world.”
I don’t want to change the world. I want to understand and accept it as it is, and as it isn’t. I think that is our problem. We look at things from opposite ends of the telescope.
So many well-intentioned people are attempting to change the world without knowing whether the world wants or needs changing. Not everyone needs digital TV to be happy. Nor does everyone have to live in an electronically automated and controlled mausoleum. You know this, Ken, you’ve traveled as I have traveled, and have seen indigenous people happy living close to the earth and God, and each other with very little. They don’t envy us; they just want us to leave them alone.
* * *
I must share a conversation I had with BB. She read my last missive to you, and said, “Well, you’ve done it again, haven’t you?”
“Done what?” I replied innocently.
“Lost another friend, someone you actually esteem.”
“He knows that.”
“Of course, he does, after you slam everything he says.”
“I’m just expressing myself.”
“Do you have to do it with a sledgehammer.”
“A sledgehammer? Now that’s a little harsh.”
“You think that’s harsh?”
“You know it is.”
“No I don’t. I planned on saying a bulldozers, but I thought better.”
“He’ll write me back.”
“You think so. Why?”
“Because he’s a smarter and nicer person than I am.”
“He is nice, but you like being contrary, as to him being smart, do you ever tell him that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He knows.”
“How does he know?”
“I’ve spent three days composing this. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t esteem and respect and value him as a friend, and worthy of my honest ideas.”
She shakes her head. “I’m going to make dinner.”
And always be well,
Jim
“QUIT COMPLAINING, DR. FISHER, GET ON THE SOLUTION BANDWAGON!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 22, 2009
“We commonly select practices according to what is known about the solution when we should choose practices according to what is known about the problem. The popular notion is that the ‘problem domain’ is an incoherent riddle, while the ‘solution domain’ is coherent and tidy. Actually, the opposite is true.”
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), p. 53.
REFERENCE TO THE EXCHANGE
One of the advantages to being relatively unknown is that the labels people are inclined to prescribe to you do not exist. You are like a free-floating entity invisible to the naked conscience. Once gone, however, all sorts of appendages can be attached to your persona including non grata. But of course you could care less because by then you are fertilizing daisies.
That said many of us are so afraid of offending that we don’t have time for comprehending. We are so busy feeding off the minds of others that we never have time to actually wonder what is going on in our own. It has been my mission to push against that hot air, encouraging other common souls such as myself to do the same. When push comes to shove, no one has the answers for any of us but ourselves within the limits of our own experiences, comprehension and determination. We are all philosophers.
We happen to live in the Age of Optimism, against all evidence to the contrary with a palpable fear of pessimism, as if it were the “New Plague,” which perhaps it is. Yet, we read George Orwell’s “I984” with the omen Big Brother is watching us, and say, “Oh yeah! That’s true enough!” We read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which people are chemically produced and the word “love” or physical intimacy is banned, and we chuckle, “Oh yeah! Here about that woman who had octuplets, didn’t she lift that right out of the book? She already had six kids at home without a man, insanity!”
But it’s not shocking because the shocking has become the norm. It gives the ludicrous Dr. Phil a role in life to fulfill. It is easy to throw stones at Jerry Springer, but he admits to working in a farcical zoo, while the good doctor fails to see the absurdity of his role. Millions are loyal fans to these two panderers to pessimism.
In an Age of Optimism, noise is music; splashing paint on a canvas is art. Mayhem and murder on high rated CSI-type TV dramas compete with bizarre sexual innuendo comedies for prime time audiences. Literature and films cannot have two sentences of dialogue without the “F” word, while education and religion struggle to be “with it” in a catch up fashion, when it was their mission to set the standards.
People find the disgusting entertaining failing to realize they are carrying the banner of pessimism right into their living rooms. Orwell, Huxley, et al, documented the dystopia of our culture and now we are living it.
My story about the “Man in the Cage,” which I shared with readers earlier, is pure dystopia. Some readers nailed its message. They had had corporate experiences similar if not the same as the protagonist.
That is the intention of the story – identity, or there go I but for the grace of God. In other words, it was not just the man who found the cage so enticing that he entered it voluntarily never to escape, but the story was intended to address us all.
That’s what writers of dsytopia do. The story is suggesting that we all create a cage to which very few of us ever escape. The cage is our cultural programming. The message implies society is moving in that direction; that we have become afraid to be individuals in a society predicated on that principle. We have become a groupie culture flaunting our tattoos. But again, like Orwell and Huxley, it is but a story, and as stories go, it can ring true or false to the reader, who has that option always.
Serious novelists are philosophers describing the world in the light of the darkness they observe. They speculate on what the future portends to be. Viewed simply as novels, little learning takes place. But viewed in the wider sense of everyday life in society it can have another meaning.
My writing suggests we are a knowing society not a learning society. There is nothing more dangerous, in my view, because when you know all the answers you are not open to the problems you face. You hide in their complexities choosing to see them beyond the pale of comprehension, and therefore deciding to solve the problems you can, which in an absurd way was illustrated by Samuel Beckett in “Waiting for Godot,” another dytopia work.
* * *
One of the benefits of these exchanges is not only a better insight into the ideas exchanged, but the reader cannot read such an exchange without having a conversation with him or herself.
The reason it might appear that the writer and I are talking past each other here is because he is in the “prescriptive truth business,” the business of solutions, and his focus is on those who will provide him with solutions:
(1) Prescriptive truth is practical and applicable to the problems at hand and is “solution intensive.”
(2) Prescriptive truth conforms to what ought to be desired or what is right in that context.
Optimism is an “opt to be,” or preferred to be position to pessimism because it is right for our health and well-being. It is a choice or preference, which may or may not be consistent with reality. Optimistically speaking, everyone should have health insurance. Realistically, is it possible or even desirable? What pressures would it place on other institutions? Would it lead to inferior quality for all?
I am in the “descriptive truth business,” the business of defining problems, as clearly as possible in light of data and situations, fully realizing the competing influences of my own “self-demands” and my “ideal self,” or how I ought to be. “The Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution” was created to illustrate this.
Descriptive truth has no right or wrong, or ought’s or should be’s but only “what is” and “what is not.” Descriptive truth is the only truth we can know or deny knowing because it is the reality of our actual experience. It is “problem-intensive” and not solution driven.
Prescriptions are solutions to deal with problems, and descriptions are problems defined as carefully as the writer is talented to define them in the belief that a well-defined problem is already more than half solved.
So, you can see prescriptive truth and descriptive truth are not the same. Educators are in the prescriptive truth business for the most part because they are imparting as educators solutions that have survived the test of time. Educators who write books are providing solution-driven formulae to that end.
Philosophers are almost exclusively in the “descriptive truth business,” as they are looking for trends and patterns that identify problems, not only of their time, but are indigenous to man as they see him.
Philosophers cannot divorce themselves from the fact that their vision is flawed because their reality, too, is governed by “what is” and “what is not” true about them. Schopenhauer, for instance, who wrote about love, will and ideas, held intense hatred for George Hegel, a fellow academic and philosopher, and quit teaching because of him. Should we discount Schopenhauer for this, him being one of the first philosophers who took the subject of “love” seriously as a philosophical subject? I think not.
To him reality was one thing, “WILL.” Kant said we could never know the true nature of reality, or the “thing in itself.” Schopenhauer disagreed. He was a German idealist. He saw “WILL” as a random, irrational and often destructive force. Our age confirms his thesis. He saw us as an animal governed by the survival instinct. He saw life as pain, WILL as inspiring desire, and desire constantly reminding us of the things we lack, which leads to mounting frustration, anxiety and pain.
When we do things, self-destructive things, things that baffle us after the fact, such as Bernard Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, it is the WILL, Schopenhauer says, following its own singular path. He anticipated the “Age of Knowledge," claiming the more we know the more it hurts because we can never know enough. Not very comforting, but more importantly, does his description resonate with the reader today? That is the reader’s option to determine.
Descriptive truth is so vast that philosophers only tear off a piece of it: Aristotle – ethics; Erasmus – religion of the heart (no need for a church hierarchy); Heidegger – on being or awareness of mortality; James – on pragmatism; Jung – on the unconscious; Kant – on reason; Keynes – on the efficacy of government intervention; Kierkegaard – on contempt for individual man; Locke – on the perceiving mind; Marx – on a classless society; More – on utopia; Newton – on the laws of gravity & motion; Nietzsche – on the will to power; Plato – on ethics and Socratic truth; Pythagoras – on the ultimate reality, numbers; Freud – on the talking cures, and so on.
I am in the “descriptive truth business,” which is the business of defining problems I have experienced in the line of my work. I am not in the solution business, nor do any of my books or articles purport to being prescriptions for a better life, a more prosperous livelihood or a happier existence.
(1) They instead identify, for example, the six passive behaviors I have observed killing worker performance along with worker spirit and contributing to the entropy of corporations.
(2) They identify the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and the impact of culture.
(3) They characterize how we have become stuck in time with the illusion of reality founded on progress and unhinged with nostalgia.
(4) They document leaderless leadership and the causes of dissidents among workers, and so on.
(5) Even this current missive is descriptive truth with no intention or interest in providing prescriptive formulae.
By describing the situation, and defining it in terms relative to my experience, it allows the reader to do the same in terms of his own, as I have no answers for him because I am not he, and make no claim to being capable of solving his problem. The problem belongs to him, alone. He owns it. I do not.
If he chooses to deny it, retreat from it, or project it to others, my descriptions will give him little comfort. I am not in the comfort making business anymore than I am in the business of hiding the pessimism with a word brush of optimism.
Pessimism is “what is,” and it will be “what is not” when it no longer suits the mind of the time. We are in an age of superficiality and artificiality, claiming intimacy because we exchange text messages with each other. We are afraid to grow old and therefore grow up, spending billions to be eternally young, while burning the candle at both ends. Everything must be grand, contrived, formalized, ritualized to give it moment. There is no joy in celebration when there is no room for spontaneity, sincerity, and unbridled candor. When we live in the surreal, the real has no purchase for us.
This is description, not prescription. What is the antidote? It would be a first step to get inside the emotional character of our pessimism, which would be defining the problem. We cannot will it away, hope it away, or deny its existence with optimism. It serves our needs and therefore “it is” “what is.”
* * *
MY PROFESSOR FRIEND WRITES:
Jim,
Yes to what you just wrote but are there anyone left in this country that fails to see the problems? We all hear about these every moment of every day do we not?
How about moving the conversation both towards solutions and actions? This is not a time for our great nation to simply complain and diagnose every problem to the finest level of detail and each of us promote our own agenda as if we alone can figure this out. It is so tiresome to hear most of our talking heads and pundits telling us they have figured
out what is wrong.
Hurrah for them and on their tombstone it should read that they really knew more than anybody else. Now some if not most of us have to get engaged in creating a new economic system.
We need to promote our solutions and then do the really hard work and make the serious effort to work with others to create some small steps towards the actions needed to move us towards what we can create that is far better.
This crisis in particular is one that represents an incredible opportunity to create a far better world than what we inherited. Or more accurately lets try to leave something for our children and grandchildren that helps restore their and our own faith and trust, and
here is our real call to take action.
We now have the chance to work together and by using the miracles of a wired world it takes only a few keystrokes to find any number of places that are begging for help in creating actionable solutions. We have a surplus of complainers but apparently only a few who have the skill and desire to move to action.
Here is one example of a person who can complain with the best of them but who is also organizing an effort to make a real difference. In the past I worked with Dave Korten and brought some of my thoughts and experiences to two of his books. He and many others working with him have taken initial steps in organizing a new economic agenda and have
set up a place that people can join with each other to effect change and not just talk about it.
David's new book "Agenda for a New Economy" has just been released and his publisher, Berrett/Kohler has a president, Steve Piersanti who is also a person I highly respect. This is a firm I have encouraged you to send some of your work to. You can examine very carefully how this publisher and its leader do practice what they and their authors
preach. Steve and David are both men of principle who have the skill and energy to move beyond just words to actions.
Another person I also know and have confidence in is Carolyn Lukensmeyer and she too has the talent to help us move well beyond the complaining stage to action. This site below can give you more info on the work that her and thousands of others have been doing in helping create a democratic process and not just talking about it.
Carolyn also has a Wiki page dedicated to her and she is one of the few OD trained colleagues who has worked inside the centers of political power and devoted more time to changing the world than just complaining about it. I admire that greatly. One final note for anyone who wants to move to or support action is an incredible story captured on video as told by Paul Hawkens. His theme is to identify the greatest social movement ever.
These are the careers of the future. We all have a chance, more than in any prior generation, to move our thoughts and ideas towards collaborative action. Action that can really make a difference.
What a world and what an opportunity! Now what was it you were saying, Jim, about what is wrong today? Lets work together to move and make more efforts to really CHANGE the world. We have all shown quite convincingly that we can make words, publish books and critique the times we live in but can we bring our skills and experiences out into the world of action?
These are exciting times and not since that original forming of our country, back over nearly a quarter of a millennium ago have we been provided such an opportunity.
Thanks
Ken
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ken,
You are one of the men I admire for your dedication and hard work to make a difference in the lives that you touch academically and throughout the world in your OD consulting work. That said we might be yin and yang, the positive and negative, or the optimist and pessimist to each other.
We both come out of the tradition of organizational development (OD), but your world has been more cognitive to my intuitive experience. Put otherwise, it has not been what I have done that has made the difference. It has been what I have found out, and shared with others, which has moved them to do that has been the differentiator.
In all cases, many of which are discussed in my two new books, “Creative Selling,” and “Confident Thinking,” now struggling to find a publisher, I describe problems; I do not prescribe solutions. The answers are there, but they are not my answers, but the readers.
My experience has taught me that problems are never solved, only controlled, and to control them sufficiently, one must know the chronic perturbations that confound the systems that purport to be working smoothly. I also know that a great idea will fail if the people don’t believe in it, and a poor idea will succeed if they do.
Now to some of the ideas in your response:
(I): "The conversation should be about solutions, and actions."
I think that is the problem.
We are a solution driven society with an incredible level of energy for action for actions sake. You say we have conversations about problems. Yes, but conversation is not the problem. The problem is we are not a society with any patience for the defining of the problem. The sheer panic of the Bush and then the Obama administration with regard to the economic meltdown is evidence enough to rest my case. They both have acted half cocked with $billions of taxpayer dollars being filtered into European banks and brokerage and insurance houses, while, paradoxically, these American firms are attempting to pay down some of their debt to their European connections. It is so convoluted that no one can get a bead on it, but that, of course, was the point of it all in the first place.
William L. Livingston III, who wrote three penetrating and poignant books about defining the problem, gave up, and quit publishing in disgust. I keep publishing in the problem-defining genre and run into the same wall he has vacated.
You are prescription driven, and I can see why because you are in the business of applying prescriptions to real OD problems. Livingston was in the descriptive business, identifying problems for which society had no patience or stomach for dealing with much less identifying.
(2) “We are preoccupied with complaining.”
That, too, is not the case. Talking heads aside, who are in the business of exploiting people’s hot buttons, are not in the descriptive business, per se. It may seem, and quite legitimately so, that I keep hammering away at the same excesses, but always in terms of describing the problem, hopefully, more poignantly to bring attention to it. If anything, there is not enough qualified descriptive criticism that would reveal the true nature of the problem. Writers want to be published and so attempt to narrow their pitch to a specific audience. I attempt only to narrow mine to my descriptive experience in the hopes it has some value to the reader. I am not in the solution business.
(3) "We must create a new economic system."
We have had Adam Smith, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx with Nobel Laureates feeding off their economic crumbs, while each of these distinguished minds were in the descriptive truth business of their respective times, allowing others to wrangle over pragmatic solutions. We cannot create a new economic or any other system until we understand why the old system failed.
In my descriptive parlance, one reason it fails is because we are all programmed for it to fail in the light of the new challenges. We keep failing, and will continue to fail because we are structured and programmed to fail.
We keep promoting "critical thinking," or cognitive thinking exclusively in the problem solving without the complement of “creative thinking,” or intuitive thinking in the process except cosmetically. No less than Einstein said that problem solving so handicapped is an impossibility.
We would still be doing Newtonian physics if he had not come along. We need “creative thinking,” or thinking beyond the dimensions of the problem embracing the unknown prudently, cautiously and patiently, as Einstein did, which is not in our character. We panic and then create a plethora of solutions desperately looking for problems. It is why Carl Sagan once said, “An Einstein comes around about every 300 years.” Since there has been more change in the last 30 years than the previous 300, we need an Einstein in economics now.
(4) “This crisis represents an opportunity.”
Sorry, but that statement has the ring of a cliché and a cover up for the painful business of a society unglued. It isn’t pessimism that is killing us; it is unbridled optimism that keeps generating these crises calling them new opportunities.
It is time that we start crawling through the underworld muck we have created and get inside our crises instead of dressing them up as opportunities.
We are in the crisis generating business. That is our main business. We create crises, then solve them, learn little or nothing from them, congratulate ourselves for our solutions, and then repeat them over and over again.
That is what I describe in such books as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I don’t prescribe for it. I show where we are stuck, page, chapter and book. I tell why we are stuck. Why?
“Progress is our most important product.”
Progress is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates economic miracles in the US, then Germany, then Japan, now India and China, and for it we cannot see our face across the street.
Tell me one advanced society or one emerging society that questions the dictum: progress is our most important product? None, zero, zilch!
It is progress that is killing us, and we are in the manufacturing business of creating crises of progress so we can solve them, and then congratulate ourselves for the limited success that we experience, because with an ephemeral tick of the clock another crisis in progress is happening somewhere on this small planet earth.
(5) “We have the miracle of the wired world.”
It is a miracle no doubt. It is the future. No doubt about that either, but where it is taking us? That is in doubt.
If it is used for good, people in the most remote sections of the world can be contacted with the potential of them sharing their cultural riches with us and us with them. At present, it is more a toy than a tool, more a curiosity than cooperative device. It has not lessened the great divide between the haves and have-nots. It has not reduced hunger or reduced genocide. In fact, an argument could be made that it has increased man’s greed and malevolence. Where are philosophers when you need them?
(6) “We have a surplus of complainers.”
If I take your meaning correctly, and I believe I do, you place me in that category. If so, you have not understood what I am saying or why.
There is no gain to my pain. Writing these missives takes away from my novel, and I’m not getting any younger. If there is anything that I am saying that is worthwhile, it is that:
(1) We cannot depend on bromides, pretty words, reassuring writers,
(2) We cannot depend on people who can write tantalizing prose with algorithms and paradigms that capture the reader’s mind and ease his discomfiture with solutions.
(3) We love solutions, and then we don’t have to think for ourselves.
(4) We are past the time of experts, past the time of dependency on specialists, past the time of obeisance to authority, past the time of the nation-state, past the time of one dominant race, past the time hegemony and empire,
(5) We as people, however, crave the words of spellbinders who would relieve us of the need to think for ourselves. So, they will always be there waiting to mesmerize us with their easy answers to health, wealth and happiness.
Notice these scholars and writers, journalists and educators don’t cause the reader any pain, and as a bonus, they give the reader a new boat of solutions to launch into the water.
I cause pain. I cause unease. I cause people to think about the unthinkable. I cause people to wonder about what they take for granted. Yes, I introduce them to themselves as thinking persons because they have not been trained to think. A college degree doesn’t train you to think, nor does a Ph.D. Education is an industry producing a product and that product is a specialist of some sort to be plugged into the system, no thinking required.
You can’t be serious, Jim, you might say? I’m dead serious. We can launch a satellite to the moon, we can do open heart surgery, but that is not thinking; that is programmed learning to do those things. Thinking is beyond the doing to enjoin all the complexities of life, which originate with and end with us, alone.
The two best selling books in the world require no thinking; they are all about behavioral change: they are the Holy Bible and diet books.
We have astrophysicists and brain surgeons that know a lot about knowing, but can prove behaviorally to know very little about being. That’s the problem; that’s where ethics is involved; that’s where people cannot be duped; that’s where people can see beyond the end of their nose. I dare say astrophysicists and brain surgeons are not any less likely than high school drop outs to be prisoners to their own appetites, as Schopenhauer might say.
Specialists have been trained to regurgitate and do, to behave within the confines of their professions, but not necessarily outside of them, to be optimistic, to hope for the best, to believe in their leaders. You have seen me write, “Everyone is a leader or no one is.” I don’t say that lightly.
There is never much written about that premise, which to my mind is the unit of leadership, everything else is only incidental to it. A President of the United States is part of a tradition started 10,000 years ago with witch doctors. I remind readers of that fact.
(7)“My friend Dave Korten has a new economic agenda.”
I’m sure it resonates with you, and I’m equally sure it will resonate with many others because they are looking for something new. I am not interested in a new economic agenda because as powerful and well thought out as it might be it pales by comparison with what I am saying here.
You cannot superimpose the most striking edifice on a crumbling foundation. It will ultimately collapse.
You travel the world and do a lot of good. I travel through the labyrinth of my thoughts and they take me to far off places beyond topography and geography. I am a philosopher with a problem solving background. I am not the first scientifically trained man to be smitten with philosophy. I’ve just not taken the time to create a system. Perhaps I’ll do it in my novels.
Bill Livingston, as mentioned earlier, has been one of my best teachers and I’m sure you’ve never read his books: “The New Plague”(1985), “Have Fun at Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). I have read them many times and their wear and tear shows.
He saw my “Work Without Managers” (1990) at a Book Fair in New York City, and we exchanged books. We have been friends ever since. Virtually everything he defined in those books, and I defined in mine, came unhappily true.
Were we complaining? We thought we were defining the problem, something that solution driven books are trying to solve without knowing what it is. Livingston became weary of publishing, but I persist even though I am misread and misunderstood. When the two of us are long gone, others will read our books because they will be safely free of our torch and torque.
(8) “Action is what we need.”
There is no argument there. You are not only a proponent of such action but a dedicated practitioner, and for that I commend you. You are a collaborator and that also is needed. You care and make a difference. The world is a better place for your being out there doing your thing. It would please me even more if a lot of the things I’m saying here were more responsive to and in support of your doing.
(9) “Let’s change the world.”
I don’t want to change the world. I want to understand and accept it as it is, and as it isn’t. I think that is our problem. We look at things from opposite ends of the telescope.
So many well-intentioned people are attempting to change the world without knowing whether the world wants or needs changing. Not everyone needs digital TV to be happy. Nor does everyone have to live in an electronically automated and controlled mausoleum. You know this, Ken, you’ve traveled as I have traveled, and have seen indigenous people happy living close to the earth and God, and each other with very little. They don’t envy us; they just want us to leave them alone.
* * *
I must share a conversation I had with BB. She read my last missive to you, and said, “Well, you’ve done it again, haven’t you?”
“Done what?” I replied innocently.
“Lost another friend, someone you actually esteem.”
“He knows that.”
“Of course, he does, after you slam everything he says.”
“I’m just expressing myself.”
“Do you have to do it with a sledgehammer.”
“A sledgehammer? Now that’s a little harsh.”
“You think that’s harsh?”
“You know it is.”
“No I don’t. I planned on saying a bulldozers, but I thought better.”
“He’ll write me back.”
“You think so. Why?”
“Because he’s a smarter and nicer person than I am.”
“He is nice, but you like being contrary, as to him being smart, do you ever tell him that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He knows.”
“How does he know?”
“I’ve spent three days composing this. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t esteem and respect and value him as a friend, and worthy of my honest ideas.”
She shakes her head. “I’m going to make dinner.”
And always be well,
Jim
Friday, March 20, 2009
IATROGENIC -- THE CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE!
IATROGENIC – THE CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 20, 2009
“The wise man has his follies no less than the fool; but herein lies the difference -- the follies of the fool are known to the world, but are hidden from himself; the follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the world.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
* * *
The winter of 2002, the AQP journal published my piece on “Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership.” I identified sixteen leadership behaviors that not only were killing our society'S spirit but also corrupting our institutional behavior, which ultimately impacts us all.
It was my hope that it would lead to discussion and some amelioration of the problem because what was happening then, and continues to happen now would even prove incredulous to Desiderius Erasmus, author of “In Praise of Folly” some five hundred years ago.
No one could write a play for the stage more dubious than the incredible ineptitude of our new President, his Secretary of Treasurer, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the Congress of the United States in the current economic crisis.
These follies keep compounding as they attempt to put the toothpaste back into the tube with a 90 percent tax on the legitimate but ludicrous bonuses to executives at AIG, a failing corporation given $170 billion in bailout money from the tarp, and then distributing from that bailout money some $165 million in bonuses contracted to be given to a select group of executives.
Everyone knew about these bonuses. Senator Dodd tried to cut them from the $700 billion stimulus bill, but was shouted down, and spinelessly backed down. No courage there.
Now those in charge claim they didn’t know about these bonuses, that is, until taxpayer rage cut through their leaderless leadership.
Such reaction to outrage or decisions after-the-fact is typical of American leadership. The “present panic of now,” as I describe it in one of my books, results in compulsive behavior of a reaction driven society.
We shouldn’t be surprised. We have been so inclined almost from the conception of our Republic. We have perfected crisis management to an art form. We are far better at reacting to our problems than anticipating them. It is then that we display our outrage, citizens and leaders alike. We even had an Iowa senator, my home state, say that these people receiving bonuses should commit suicide. He later said he didn’t mean what he said, which is par for the course. Our leadership rarely says what it means or means what it says, but no one seems to find that absurd but this writer, who continues to remind readers of the fact.
Say what you want, politics notwithstanding, we have no one in charge, and those in charge are no comfort to our prospects. It didn’t start with the present administration. In fact it didn’t commence with the previous administration. That’s the point. It is endemic to our culture.
“Leadership is in a state of retreat bordering on confusion,” I say in this article, “Not only is leadership out-of-date, but out-of-touch with reality,” and I could add “and so are citizens-at-large.”
Here in brief is the typology of leaderless leadership offered in that piece:
(1) Manipulators: They believe everyone has his price. Their weapon is fear.
(2) Frustrated Participants: They suck it up, deny what is happening, and never move until the crisis hits.
(3) Inside Outsiders: Those with special skills are needed but not wanted; leadership never likes to share power. So they find other ways of getting their revenge.
(4) Winning Side Saddlers: Pay and perks justify them going along to get along; being all things to all people, especially those in charge, never rocking the boat, even when its sinking.
(5) Nostalgia Elitists: They long for the way it was, romanticize what never was and treat it as if it was, and keep repeating it until it must have been.
(6) Waiters in the Wing: They study what is happening, who’s up, who’s going down, and step forward at the critical moment to “save their day,” but not necessarily the organization.
(7) Happily in Harness: They wear blinders to what is happening, stay focused on the work at hand, stay optimistic, hope for the best, and go down with the ship, at least in their dreams.
(8) Quiet Soldiers: They can never say “no” to a boss no matter how insane or immoral the demands; they do it because “it’s their job.”
(9) Victims: They see martyrdom as a form of loyalty. They expect to be trusted without being trustworthy, believed without being believable, taken at their word without being credible.
(10) Unbending Idealists: They live in a corporate dream world where the greater good is the corporate good and the ends justify the means. They hold workers to their tasks but don’t see why the same rigor should apply to them. After all, they are in charge.
(11) Adventurers: They see themselves as swashbuckling trendsetters, that is, until everything goes south, then they scurry to find a scapegoat to pin the blame on. They always have such a backup plan.
(12) Spin Doctors: They all have MBA’s which provide them with the language to make bad news seem good, to make setbacks seem advances, and falling revenues as reinvestments in the future.
(13) Reluctant Soldiers: They see things as they are, and remain like the “Quiet Soldier,” silent, secure with their pay, perks and bonuses to be loyal to the end come hell or high water.
(14) Overachievers: They work hard rather than smart, do everything rather than anything specific, deny their panic by constantly being on the go, treat doing and thinking as synonyms, failing to come to terms with their plight until they are burned out.
(15) Messiahs: They convince themselves that they are gifted and can do it alone, that divine intervention is part of their tool kit, and people just must be patient while they perfect their miracles.
(16) Professionals: they see themselves as a breed apart, smarter, wiser, and more qualified than any of their critics. Why should they listen to anyone; what can they tell them that they don’t already know. They are inclined to mention repeatedly how “smart” and “wise” and “gifted” the people around them are, inferring that they by comparison are even more so.
The article also includes ten guidelines for successful leadership. Here they are in brief:
(1) All contributors large and small are essential to an operation. All work is ennobling.
(2) No worker or work is complete within itself, pulling together is critical.
(3) Competitors are not the enemy. Industry rises and falls by shared information.
(4) Technology does not have the luxury of being user friendly. It must be user friendly. When it becomes a toy rather than a tool, technology loses its power.
(5) The best organization is not harmonious. The best organization has no safe hires. The best organization is conflicting with managed conflict the glue holding it together and on course.
(6) All organizations are in a state of dying. Darkness is consuming if new light is not shed on its ailing body. The most insane motto is “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” It is when it isn’t broken but obviously dying that new light should be shined into the darkness. Everything dies. Everything. That includes organizations. The only way to save them is to continually be in the resurrection business by never being comfortable with the status quo. Study competitors, study the market, and study the changing nature of the workforce, study, study, study, and then act!
(7) An organization is not a thing; it is a human group. It is people. People have a spirit. Feeding the spirit is even if not more important than feeding the body. Leadership is primarily about feeding the spirit; management is primarily about feeding the body. They are not the same. Management is of things; leadership is of people. When profits are considered before people, it kills the spirit which signals the ultimate death knell of the organization.
(8) People are programmed to compare and compete. Nothing could be less beneficial to an organization. Awarding one group at the expense of another with appreciation of this or that only compounds the problem. It promotes imitation, cheating, backstabbing and other undesirable behaviors. Research has shown when one group is operating as well as it can, then it is at the expense of another group. Russell Ackoff, a system researcher, puts it bluntly, “When a system is operating as well as it can, none of its parts will be.” Why? Because they are helping each other at the expense of pushing their own envelop. This is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking but especially true today with the sophisticated workforce that we enjoy.
(9) The vertical structure of the organization is anachronistic, and the role of level on level of managers reporting up the tree is atavistic. An integration of the horizontal with the vertical organization, especially at the level of consequences, is critical to organization success and timely decision making.
(10) Organization culture is critical to any successful organization, and is the most important tool of leadership. Dr. Fisher’s formula applies here:
“The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates the predominant organization behavior; the dominant organization behavior establishes whether an organization is growing, vegetating, floundering, declining, or expiring."
Somehow, some day, perhaps when I won’t have the benefit of seeing it, we Americans will leave our adolescence and the twentieth century behind, and behave as grown ups, but I see no sign of in the present climate.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 20, 2009
“The wise man has his follies no less than the fool; but herein lies the difference -- the follies of the fool are known to the world, but are hidden from himself; the follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the world.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
* * *
The winter of 2002, the AQP journal published my piece on “Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership.” I identified sixteen leadership behaviors that not only were killing our society'S spirit but also corrupting our institutional behavior, which ultimately impacts us all.
It was my hope that it would lead to discussion and some amelioration of the problem because what was happening then, and continues to happen now would even prove incredulous to Desiderius Erasmus, author of “In Praise of Folly” some five hundred years ago.
No one could write a play for the stage more dubious than the incredible ineptitude of our new President, his Secretary of Treasurer, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the Congress of the United States in the current economic crisis.
These follies keep compounding as they attempt to put the toothpaste back into the tube with a 90 percent tax on the legitimate but ludicrous bonuses to executives at AIG, a failing corporation given $170 billion in bailout money from the tarp, and then distributing from that bailout money some $165 million in bonuses contracted to be given to a select group of executives.
Everyone knew about these bonuses. Senator Dodd tried to cut them from the $700 billion stimulus bill, but was shouted down, and spinelessly backed down. No courage there.
Now those in charge claim they didn’t know about these bonuses, that is, until taxpayer rage cut through their leaderless leadership.
Such reaction to outrage or decisions after-the-fact is typical of American leadership. The “present panic of now,” as I describe it in one of my books, results in compulsive behavior of a reaction driven society.
We shouldn’t be surprised. We have been so inclined almost from the conception of our Republic. We have perfected crisis management to an art form. We are far better at reacting to our problems than anticipating them. It is then that we display our outrage, citizens and leaders alike. We even had an Iowa senator, my home state, say that these people receiving bonuses should commit suicide. He later said he didn’t mean what he said, which is par for the course. Our leadership rarely says what it means or means what it says, but no one seems to find that absurd but this writer, who continues to remind readers of the fact.
Say what you want, politics notwithstanding, we have no one in charge, and those in charge are no comfort to our prospects. It didn’t start with the present administration. In fact it didn’t commence with the previous administration. That’s the point. It is endemic to our culture.
“Leadership is in a state of retreat bordering on confusion,” I say in this article, “Not only is leadership out-of-date, but out-of-touch with reality,” and I could add “and so are citizens-at-large.”
Here in brief is the typology of leaderless leadership offered in that piece:
(1) Manipulators: They believe everyone has his price. Their weapon is fear.
(2) Frustrated Participants: They suck it up, deny what is happening, and never move until the crisis hits.
(3) Inside Outsiders: Those with special skills are needed but not wanted; leadership never likes to share power. So they find other ways of getting their revenge.
(4) Winning Side Saddlers: Pay and perks justify them going along to get along; being all things to all people, especially those in charge, never rocking the boat, even when its sinking.
(5) Nostalgia Elitists: They long for the way it was, romanticize what never was and treat it as if it was, and keep repeating it until it must have been.
(6) Waiters in the Wing: They study what is happening, who’s up, who’s going down, and step forward at the critical moment to “save their day,” but not necessarily the organization.
(7) Happily in Harness: They wear blinders to what is happening, stay focused on the work at hand, stay optimistic, hope for the best, and go down with the ship, at least in their dreams.
(8) Quiet Soldiers: They can never say “no” to a boss no matter how insane or immoral the demands; they do it because “it’s their job.”
(9) Victims: They see martyrdom as a form of loyalty. They expect to be trusted without being trustworthy, believed without being believable, taken at their word without being credible.
(10) Unbending Idealists: They live in a corporate dream world where the greater good is the corporate good and the ends justify the means. They hold workers to their tasks but don’t see why the same rigor should apply to them. After all, they are in charge.
(11) Adventurers: They see themselves as swashbuckling trendsetters, that is, until everything goes south, then they scurry to find a scapegoat to pin the blame on. They always have such a backup plan.
(12) Spin Doctors: They all have MBA’s which provide them with the language to make bad news seem good, to make setbacks seem advances, and falling revenues as reinvestments in the future.
(13) Reluctant Soldiers: They see things as they are, and remain like the “Quiet Soldier,” silent, secure with their pay, perks and bonuses to be loyal to the end come hell or high water.
(14) Overachievers: They work hard rather than smart, do everything rather than anything specific, deny their panic by constantly being on the go, treat doing and thinking as synonyms, failing to come to terms with their plight until they are burned out.
(15) Messiahs: They convince themselves that they are gifted and can do it alone, that divine intervention is part of their tool kit, and people just must be patient while they perfect their miracles.
(16) Professionals: they see themselves as a breed apart, smarter, wiser, and more qualified than any of their critics. Why should they listen to anyone; what can they tell them that they don’t already know. They are inclined to mention repeatedly how “smart” and “wise” and “gifted” the people around them are, inferring that they by comparison are even more so.
The article also includes ten guidelines for successful leadership. Here they are in brief:
(1) All contributors large and small are essential to an operation. All work is ennobling.
(2) No worker or work is complete within itself, pulling together is critical.
(3) Competitors are not the enemy. Industry rises and falls by shared information.
(4) Technology does not have the luxury of being user friendly. It must be user friendly. When it becomes a toy rather than a tool, technology loses its power.
(5) The best organization is not harmonious. The best organization has no safe hires. The best organization is conflicting with managed conflict the glue holding it together and on course.
(6) All organizations are in a state of dying. Darkness is consuming if new light is not shed on its ailing body. The most insane motto is “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” It is when it isn’t broken but obviously dying that new light should be shined into the darkness. Everything dies. Everything. That includes organizations. The only way to save them is to continually be in the resurrection business by never being comfortable with the status quo. Study competitors, study the market, and study the changing nature of the workforce, study, study, study, and then act!
(7) An organization is not a thing; it is a human group. It is people. People have a spirit. Feeding the spirit is even if not more important than feeding the body. Leadership is primarily about feeding the spirit; management is primarily about feeding the body. They are not the same. Management is of things; leadership is of people. When profits are considered before people, it kills the spirit which signals the ultimate death knell of the organization.
(8) People are programmed to compare and compete. Nothing could be less beneficial to an organization. Awarding one group at the expense of another with appreciation of this or that only compounds the problem. It promotes imitation, cheating, backstabbing and other undesirable behaviors. Research has shown when one group is operating as well as it can, then it is at the expense of another group. Russell Ackoff, a system researcher, puts it bluntly, “When a system is operating as well as it can, none of its parts will be.” Why? Because they are helping each other at the expense of pushing their own envelop. This is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking but especially true today with the sophisticated workforce that we enjoy.
(9) The vertical structure of the organization is anachronistic, and the role of level on level of managers reporting up the tree is atavistic. An integration of the horizontal with the vertical organization, especially at the level of consequences, is critical to organization success and timely decision making.
(10) Organization culture is critical to any successful organization, and is the most important tool of leadership. Dr. Fisher’s formula applies here:
“The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates the predominant organization behavior; the dominant organization behavior establishes whether an organization is growing, vegetating, floundering, declining, or expiring."
Somehow, some day, perhaps when I won’t have the benefit of seeing it, we Americans will leave our adolescence and the twentieth century behind, and behave as grown ups, but I see no sign of in the present climate.
* * *
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