THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF DR. FISHER'S CAREER CHANGING SPEECH -- PART FOUR

THE TWENTY-FIFTH (25TH) ANNIVERSARY OF DR. FISHER’S CAREER CHANGING SPEECH – PART FOUR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2009

REFERENCE: 1984 DCAS FORUM, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1984, CARIBBEAN GULF RESORT, CLEARWATER BEACH, FLORIDA 33515

“PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT – AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW”

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REFERENCE:

This is the fourth part of this March 30, 1984 speech, which was broken up into four segments because of its length. Why publish now?

I see us stuck in Machine Age thinking and a factory mentality we're unable to shed. Incongruity rules! We're stuck looking through our rearview mirrors constantly blinded by events ahead. It was why I wrote "A Look Back To See Ahead" (2007). Ordinary people, like this writer, were swept up in events as if they had no choice in the matter, spectators to history.

Twenty-five years ago, we were in a boom period with movie actor President Reagan at the helm. He read his lines with panache, and showed confidence in his symbolic role as leader of the free world. He trumped this with courage when nearly assassinated, showed his mettle negotiating the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, then completed a histrionic trifecta in Berlin when he said, "Chairman Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

A midwesterner of common roots, Reagan was a man comfortable in his own skin, knew who he was and wasn't, had a moral compass and center, and put his indelible mark on his time with a presidency like a Hollywood premiere.

Now all life is surreal. Twenty-five years ago labor unions were in sharp decline, while management's union, Human Resources (HR) was soaring with cosmetic interventions.

Workers were first betrayed by labor unions as management's adversary, and then exploited by HR as management's advocate. The "best and brightest" became cynical and turned to making money rather than making a difference. That legacy has contributed to the present economic crisis.

The uncoupling of workers from managers has widened in the last quarter century as is shown here in Part Four: managers no longer can lead and workers can no longer follow.

Isaiah Berlin wrote a little book, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953), which helps decipher this dilemma. Before the Age of Information and the Internet, leadership survived the insensitivities of managers and immaturities of workers because the Machine Age had not yet reached entropy. It has now. Enter a new leader.

The current White House is alleged to have the most competent people ever assembled around a head-of-state, but no one, including the president, has demonstrated an ability to be clear or plausible about what is going on. One wonders if they are not lost in the details failing to choose or unable to choose what can from what cannot be done.

President George Walker Bush was a cowboy: bold, decisive and misguided, a president with a poor command of the American language, seemingly indifferent to the deep mysteries of life and people. He had help from previous presidents to put the nation and the world in this economic and political slump.

Isaiah Berlin would call Bush a hedgehog, one who knows one big thing and that is America first, foremost and alone. His downfall was that he surrounded himself with other hedgehogs in Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney.

Berlin would call Obama a fox, one that knows many things. He writes like a world-class novelist, he speaks like a world-class orator, he thinks like a world-class professor, all of which he is and has been. He has the supreme confidence of his gifts, and herein lays the concern. He has surrounded himself with like minded foxes, no hedgehogs in sight.

He has already a plausibility gap between his rhetoric and action, his thinking to choose, and choosing to do. The fox wants to do everything simultaneously. A hedgehog like Reagan follows a scrip, while a fox like Obama improvises making it up as he goes along; both are dangerous without the counterbalance of the other.

I have known many foxes among executives. I am thinking of one now who put heart into his subordinates with his courage and calm. His presence created the illusion that his skills were equal to what was happening; that his plans, authority and popularity would resolve the company's difficulties. Morale soared and almost everyone followed his lead without question. When things went awry, it was "his entire fault." His popularity dissolved as fast as it had formed.

This "hedgehog – fox" comparison may offend or confuse. I hope not. It is meant to show foxes are often popular because of their brilliance, hedgehogs tolerated for their tenacity, but neither succeeds without the other.

President Harry S. Truman, a hedgehog, had his foxes in General George Marshall, architect of the "Marshall Plan," and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, architect of the "Truman Doctrine," which kept Western Europe democratic during the "Cold War." And so it has been throughout history.

The hedgehog is impetuous and bold while the fox is calm and deliberate. The hedgehog stays the course with what he has chosen to do, while the fox is given to course corrections with improvisations hoping something will finally work out.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a fox who teamed up successfully with a hedgehog in Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain to win the Second World War.

The lesson to be learned here is that brilliance is never enough nor hardheaded determinism, but a suitable combination of both.

We have wallowed in dystopia the last quarter century as indicated in the mostly ignored writings of John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett among others.

I fear George Bush had too many hedgehogs and now Barak Obama too many foxes. More importantly, as this last segment indicates, a common sin of hedgehogs and foxes alike is that they tend to leave people out of the equation, spectators to their own destiny.

JRF


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ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 6: MANAGEMENT IS PREOCCUPIED WITH ORDER, WHICH MAKES IT THE FREQUENT VICTIM OF ITS OWN SELF-PERPETUATING CHAOS

One day a manager walked into my office. He smiled and said, “Everything under control?” “No!” I replied. He smiled broadly while pointing his finger at me, “Now there’s an honest man.”

This conversation implies an understanding that I don’t think readily exists in the organization. Management often acts as if in the absence of agreement, there must be disagreement. If you’re not “for something,” you’re unalterably opposed to it. Conversely, if everyone is bitching, then something is wrong. If morale is low, it must be fixed.

Black and white. Good and bad. Positive and negative. Profit and loss. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Tidiness is thought to be next to godliness. If you’re not pulling with all your horses for something, then surely you are pushing with all your energy against…whatever.

Extremes. God! How we love extremes. Newspapers, television, and films feed this appetite. But it is not a good diet for the organization. The organization functions best when it is aware of its chaos, accepts it as conditional to the dynamics of a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional complex human organization, when unanimity is as rare as a full moon without werewolves.

By the same token, what also makes for confusion is the tendencies to believe if you understand what is proffered you agree with it, which again is seldom the case. Agreement must be worked out and is based on much more than logic and persuasion. It involves understanding, but also a common thread of need or interest or experience. What a manager needs to appreciate is that an intelligent man can function while carrying two opposing ideas in his head, and often does.

The weight of these ideas fluctuates in terms of experience and need. Subtle changes in the environment can tip the scales in one direction or the other and back again. He can manage this process by building a bridge of understanding, including engineering for agreement. But before any of this can take place, he’ll have to acknowledge the chaos and make the most of it. A clean desk does not necessarily signal a clear mind.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 7: ATTEMPTING TO BE ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE WHILE ENDING UP BEING NOTHING TO EVERYONE

There is a very scary situation developing which hinges on Habit No. 6. Managers are undergoing frontal lobotomies on their psyches to make them “right for democracy.” The cry is “be gone despots!” Enter certified human clones! With tranquil spirits, loving hearts, forgiving minds, tolerant dispositions, and selfless dignity.

For those who require such surgery and refuse it their reward is ostracism form the organization, or worse, promotion to a “jobless job” in full view of the working population.

What cannot be tolerated in the quest for the perfect organization is imperfect psyches or naysayers who, for whatever reason, fail to get on the bandwagon to the participative utopia.

This mania for anticipating the every need of the working population is sheer madness. What’s more, it is counterproductive. It brings precious little credibility while fostering confusion and cynicism. “Real folks don’t act that way” is what it comes down to.

This "fitness of mind" craze is also delimiting in another respect. It loses the dynamic energy that real experience manifests. A simple example should suffice in illustrating this:

Imagine that your manager states that your job is secure. You have lifetime employment. You can secure a no interest loan from the company of a specific amount. You need take no risks. Evidence no pain. You are protected totally from these challenges. This is your home. Your family. Your company. If you have a problem, “We’ll be there to help you solve it.” No matter what straights you get into, “We’ll be there. Count on it!”

Wonderful, right! What we all want, right? Total feudal existence in a protected state of eternal bliss. All of us helping each other with smiling faces and eyes full of love. Right?

It is a thermodynamic law of life that energy springs from tension, that music is made out of pain, that character develops through the crucible of fire. That life is not worth a plug nickel if everyone else is in charge of what happens or fails to happen to us in our life experience.

Somewhere management has made a horrible error in perception if not also judgment. That error is that since most of us fear failure that we want to be protected from that fear. By making the worker a success without failure or any chance at real failure, management has created a dependent monster. Far from extolling this virtuous gesture, this worker has grown more sullen and listless. Many managers reading this can apply the message to their own personal experiences as sons and daughters dangle from the same precarious vine of over indulgent caregivers.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 8: THE JOHN WAYNE MENTALITY

Somewhat endemic to our culture has been the pride of “going it alone” – of taking big risks and “cutting out new territory in the virgin hinterland.” – of individualism and the pioneer spirit.

We have a romance with the tough, rugged, no nonsense cowboys of enterprise – of the maverick temperament. We fantasize about the lone good guy fighting the system, fighting the bad guys. If you have a flair, a style, a certain flamboyance, chances are you will be celebrated and lionized. A Joe Namath, Ralph Nader, Jessie Jackson, Fidel Castro, Steve Jobs, Norman Mailer, Al Davis, all project the John Wayne mentality.

In some instances, they may argue they are team leaders with some justification. But team players they are not. They are above the team.

It is this emphasis on individualism at the expense of collectivism that is the basis of the hypocrisy of Participative Management. Much as we boast of cooperation, team work, entrepreneur spirit, and the like, the fact remains there is a frenzied undercurrent in our culture to get above the masses, above the fog, into the quieting climate of the elite. This permeates every quadrant of our culture from the home to the school to the church to the workplace to the government and beyond.

One part of us believes in selfless identity with the group, the organization, while another part of us fights such identity with all our might. For instance, we want better schools, better education for our children. We encourage teachers to join hands with parents to make this happen.

At the same time, thinking in terms of the “John Wayne mentality,” we argue that teachers should get merit pay – that the really “good” teachers should be differentiated from the “poor” teachers. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

The fact is such a policy is divisive and is driving a wedge between teacher and teacher.

Competition (the comparing of one teacher with another) fosters imitation, which promotes stilted development at the expense of creative self-realization. In other words, teachers are being forced to focus on an arbitrary standard, which will result in mediocrity (i.e., doing enough to qualify, not as much as they are capable of doing).

Moreover, competition is anathema to cooperation because it stifles initiative, innovation, taking risks, and, ironically, individual excellence. For the individual so occupied is not focusing on his inherent abilities but on some external arbitrary goal, which limits his contribution by definition.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 9: PROFESSIONALISM

At first glance, one would think that professionalism is what we all should seek. After all, that is what we are moving towards. But what is professionalism? And is it good for us?

Professionalism has evolved as our culture has moved from producing and consuming things, to a smaller and smaller segment of our culture producing, and larger and larger segments of our culture consuming things. We have become an “acquisitive” society. We have increasingly come to know who we are, not by what we do, but by what we have. We have developed a shorthand system of cataloging people not only by what they have but the quality, value, tastefulness and appropriateness of what they have.

Thus we “know” what type of person would drive a large wheeled pickup truck with a rifle cradled across the rear window of the cab, and a Confederate flag prominent somewhere on the vehicle. Or the Mercedes Benz driver whose vehicle is parked next to it. Do you think they belong to the same club? If they do, they are however making a statement of who they are by what they have, making certain that no one would confuse them for each other.

As far as the goodness or the badness of it goes, frankly, that is not relevant much less important. What is noteworthy is that this acquisitive society is in conflict with itself. Professionalism, which was a product of the Industrial Revolution, answering the need for specialists with well-defined and refined skills, has hit its zenith and is falling sharply towards its nadir. Meanwhile, like all movements, it is holding on for dear life against the reality of its eventual demise.

Rising out of the ashes of this professionalism, and the class of white color – pink-collar workers that it spawned, is the entrepreneur worker.

This worker may come out of an engineering discipline, but become broadly educated in marketing, production, quality and other disciplines before he settles into his niche.

Professionalism, which is the driver in a service-oriented economy, has created a counterdependency in the general populace.

Hardly anyone, at this writing, would have made a move without consulting an expert first, from where they should live to where they should shop, dine out, service their car, bank, go to church or school, from what they should watch on TV to what films they should see, books they should read, music they should listen to, to where they should go on vacation, on holidays, on special personal days, from with whom they should doctor, bring their pets, buy their furniture, household hardware to where they should retire, keep their valuables, probate their will, be buried. It is a birth-to-death fulfillment of an expert’s dream of the good life for us all; with all we need along the way is the price of admission to his counsel and expert advice.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 10: “TASK FOLLOWS STRUCTURE”

No one could argue that there is a black culture and a white culture. That the norms for one group do not necessarily apply to the other. That there are discrete behaviors, which are peculiar to each culture. Clear as this may be, traditionally there has been an inclination to merge these two into a single cultural perspective – that of the white or the dominant group culture.

The net result of this has been that blacks have experienced a deficit or developmental gap of significant magnitude, which has translated behaviorally from “giving up” because it is beyond reach to the charge of “reverse discrimination.”

The point being that the structure – white culture as the standard for all – sometimes has acted at cross purposes to its own interest, that of bringing blacks “up to speed” and into the productive mainstream of American life.

My intentions here are not to dwell on the inequities of this approach, but simply to point out that behavior frequently does not follow the intended purposes.

Likewise, this is true of the relationship between the structure of work and the tasks at hand. There is, for instance, a rather typical structure for production work. It varies somewhat from organization to organization, but very little when there is a product being produced. Likewise, you find railroads are run pretty much the same no matter where they are located. Indeed, a church is operated in much the same fashion no matter what the denomination. Having said that, I think it needs pointing out that there has been a mad dash to institutionalize the Japanese success system, Quality Circles, on American companies indiscriminate of the industry or the structure, not to mention the culture.

The result has been that everyone talks about the great success of this approach when it has had only moderate success in the best of instances. For example, if you buy the theory that 85 percent of the problems of an organization are management owned, it follows that if the production or line organization solves 100 percent of its concerns, only 15 percent of the organization’s problems would be solved, which doesn’t seem to augur too well for the organization that plans on surviving.

By the same token, it has been noted that Quality Circles, as a rule, deal with the “trivial many” rather than the “vital few” problems, which seriously affect the health and success of the organization.

That brings me to the point. Ideas, even brilliant ideas, if they are not structured to fit the tasks are going to go wide of their mark. Item:

(1) Quality Circles, per se, is a concept, which is designed to fit a production environment, not a white-collar environment. Production workers are used to being measured, taking directions, being on time, behaving predictably, not so with white-collar workers.

That is why it is so important that structure follow the task rather than the task the structure. Quality Circles, as designed, moreover, have had their greatest success where the workforce has had a limited educational experience, and has had most of the choices made for it. Consider this against a workforce, which has had broad ranging educational experience, such as an engineering group, with wide access to individual expression and experience. To impose a Quality Circle Program on such a group in the conventional way would be disastrous.

This is another reason why “prescriptions” that work elsewhere need not necessarily apply to your situation. There is real danger in getting caught up in the hype of the moment. Grasping for straws, management shows great naiveté when it come to matters outside its discipline. What seems so right for another company may be so wrong for yours. A simple rule to avoid this is to remember:

(1) The structure of work design must follow the task and not the reverse of this.

Management Style, Participation, Quality of Work, and Quality of Work Life are vague abstractions looking for a home. It may be sensible for you to consider them but in the context of the maturity of your workforce and the nature of your enterprises.

ORGANIZATIONAL NO. 11: MANAGEMENT HAS EMBRACED HUMAN RESOURCES – ITS NEW UNION

One of the remarkable phenomena of the recent past has been the decline of union influence and the rise of Human Resources influence. If you look closely at the two, they are mirror images of each other:

(1) Union is the adversary of management.

(2) Human Resources is the advocate of management.

What this illustrates, incidentally, is that management has a remarkable dependence on a buffer between it and its people. Be that buffer an adversary or advocate is immaterial, the function is basically the same.

Moreover, just as the union movement grew out of an erosion of worker power in the complex organization, the Human Resources movement has grown out of an erosion of management power in the complex organization. This notwithstanding, they both have had a similar function:

(1) That of insuring organizational survival.

Yet, the reason for drawing special attention to this “new unionism” (i.e., Human Resources) is that it reveals, once again, how precariously the organization is, indeed, functioning. Also, it indicates the void between the workforce and management is not growing narrower. On the contrary, it would appear that it is growing wider.

With the union movement, you may recall, union leaders bought into management’s emphasis on productivity. Somehow their attention was diverted from the severe erosion of worker power in terms of planning and scheduling their own work to compensation.

This power the union gave management in a silver platter as long as management paid more and more for less and less productivity. Ultimately, this collusion hurt the worker and management alike. Management, on its part, believed that paying the worker more and more would motivate him to do more. One need look no further than the steel and automotive industries to see that this did not work.

Now, we have the “New Union,” Human Resources, orchestrating all types of programs to make the workplace close to a paradise. And just as management gave the unions the money they said they needed, management is now giving Human Resources all of these wonderful perks for employees:

(1) From parking to policy concessions;

(2) From touchy-feely supervision to extraordinary fringe benefits;

(3) From beautiful work areas to wonderful group programs.

Whereas the union got management and the worker to think in terms of money concessions, Human Resources has gotten management and the worker to think in terms of comfort and climatic luxury. The net result in both cases is a demotivated workforce.

What has to happen to management before it comes to realize it is repeating the same errors only the purveyor is dressed in a three-piece business suit (i.e., Human Resources) rather than coveralls (i.e., unions)?

It is high time that management becomes less dependent on either advocates or adversaries and more on itself. A start would be to remove the arbitrary barrier between the worker and management. After all, they are increasingly becoming products of the same conditioning experience and culture.

AND SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

What I have attempted to do in this paper has been admittedly a most ambitious and, yes, risky analysis of a complex problem. There is absolutely no way one can make such an analysis without stepping on some toes including the hand that feeds one. Be that as it may, waiting patiently for someone else to say these things, I have concluded that it wasn’t likely to happen. In the final summary, these appear realities, which must be dealt with:

(1) That the modern complex organization has got to find balance;

(2) That balance cannot be discovered by ignoring history or by embracing untested new ideas;

(3) That the way workers work is based more on how they have been conditioned to grow than from any prosthetic experience they may have in the workplace such as Quality Circles and Participative Management Programs;

(4) That management, which has had a haughty dependence on its grasp of technology (or things), has maintained a horrifying ignorance of people, and therefore a counterdependence on “people persons” such as myself;

(5) That the worker, like people in all individual pursuits, wants to contribute, wants to feel a part of the ownership;

(6) That the worker has a need to grow in order to feel worthwhile;

(7) That the worker has been treated like a child and so he acts like a child;

(8) That the organization is immature, be it home, church, school, or community;

(9) That it is immature because it persists in believing it knows what is best for the individual without knowing what the individual needs, values, believes and expects.

(10) That before Participative Management has a ghost of a chance that we must be aware of the organization as “it is,” fully accepting in that awareness, before we can bridge the gap between an adolescent oriented and an adult oriented organization;

(11) That what all the programs, such as Participative Management have shown, is that we still are basically ignorant in organizational terms of what motivates the individual.

Having said all this, I think a first step is to recognize that the “management of things” and the “management of people” are discretely different functions. That we, as managers or consultants, must realize that listening is more powerful than talking. That search for the problem is more important than generating solutions. That we are on the threshold of a wonderful tomorrow and all we have to do is “let go” of all our precious assumptions and let a little reality guide our way.

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© Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. March 15, 2009. This is the fourth and final segment of the four-part reintroduction to the reader of Dr. Fisher’s speech of March 30, 1984, titled, “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.” No part of this “four-part” paper may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.

It was a career changing speech, and nearly got him fired for giving it. His company, Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida, was the host of the DCAS Forum organized to celebrate the new empowerment of workers. Dr. Fisher, who was directing the largest Quality Control Circle Program in the continental United States at the time, had a differing view of this empowerment. It would appear in retrospect that the “Sins of the Fathers,” which he then addressed, have come to roost today.

Dr. Fisher is author of nine books in the genre including Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), Six Silent Killers (1998), Corporate Sin (2000) and A Look Back To See Ahead (2007). Creative Selling and Confident Thinking are soon to be published.