"I THINK I AM SOMETHING OF A SAVANT!"

“I think I am something of a savant!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 5, 2009

“Give according to your means, or God will make your means according to your giving.”

John Hall (1829 – 1889), Irish-American Presbyterian Minister

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REFERENCE:

This exchange was initiated by a professor friend reading the afterword, “Time to Pause,” to my new book “Confident Thinking,” which has yet to be published.

A PROFESSOR WRITES:

Jim

I appreciated this essay, however, as I have likely said before I believe that if you can read a bit of Ken Wilber's work your view can be expanded and then converged again on a higher plain of thought.

His first book "no boundaries" very much helped me to see and appreciate the collective nature of human existence, then in his "a brief history of everything" and his AQAL model I was then able to take my out of control intuitive perspective on the world and bound it.

Wilber provides much to think about and offers a perspective that only such a great thinker can ground in wisdom available only to a few of our most dedicated scholars. Worth looking into in these times of crises; take care and keep sharing your thoughts.

K

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

K,

I don't know whether you are complimenting me or instructing me. I write out of my own experience and scholarship and don't feel the necessity to ape others as legitimate or as relevant as their views may be. I have a unique background, writing repertoire and philosophy. That said I am less interested in referencing others as I would prefer at this late date to have others referencing me.

Be always well,

Jim

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THE PROFESSOR RESPONDS TO THESE REMARKS:

Jim,

The answer is both. You can seldom take the teacher out of the teacher. For me the highest compliment I can pay someone is to offer them something to learn, the next highest then would be too compliment one on what they do know. However the old notion of Socratic irony always appealed to me greatly, but not so great that I discounted totally what I have learned over time also.

K

PS At this not quite so late of a date I still can't help really enjoying something new to learn...that is why I passed on to you something that has profoundly impacted my thinking. K

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS TO THIS SECOND QUIP:

Why do I write? The answer is simple.

One day I will die and something unique, no, more important than unique, perhaps more in the character of a savant has befallen me for no good reason, and certainly with no easy explanation. My dedication for the last several years has been to harness this gift so that it may continue to be used once I am gone.

What is this gift?

“I read people.”

“I read situations.”

As a result of this gift, I have had an amazingly easy life in one sense, and a frustrating one in another. It has never been important for me to be liked, but it has been important for me to be understood.

BB is the exception. I want her to like as well as love me. She both likes and understands me, and only God knows why I have been so blessed with that happening. BB, who is loved by everyone, says that I like the freedom of being distanced from others. Perhaps.

But that does not explain why I am writing these words now. My question, one I have often asked others is this, “What have you learn from me?” I ask that of you now. If you find that question arrogant, then I have failed you. That is my cross. Let me explain.

With Nalco Chemical Company, I obeyed none of the rules of selling and was more successful than any other chemical sales engineer had ever been in a district supposedly without potential, and certainly without the record that I had.

My district manager, as I’ve written elsewhere, wanted to fire me for my arrogance after I’d only been with the company less than a month.

I've always said, "Never ask me a question if you do not want the answer." I am not one in the business of reinforcing people when I feel there are little grounds for reinforcement.

Howard Consell used to say, "I tell it like it is," which is ungrammatical and not what I mean at all. I tell the person what I think, which may or may not be consistent with "what it is."

What I do say is how I read people and read situations, including the people with whom I am working. With Nalco, I was in my early twenties and my mouth got me into trouble. I am still just as mouthy in my seventies, all because of the gift.

From the beginning, I was asked to explain my success. I couldn’t. I had to read selling books to get the language, and then that was inadequate. In the course of three years, in my mid-twenties, Nalco sent 78 men to travel with me. Top executives followed riding through the district with me. Then I was asked to deliver “seminars” around the country to Nalco Regional Meetings.

I was an oddity. I sold without selling, without “penalty of delay” or other hogwash in selling books, or lying to the customer. My customers were my teachers, and I saw myself as working for them. By nature shy and introspective, I learned quickly that the obstacle to my success was not the customer, but was me!

Once I understood that, I acted as if I worked for the customer, but not obsequiously but as a full partner in the problem solving. If they would ask me, if I saw anything wrong in the operation, I would answer bluntly. No finesse. It worked because I was trusted, as I had come to trust myself.

I’m explaining it here now, but I couldn’t explain it then. I just did it, but, again, not before I read the customer and read the situation.

Out of this exposure and experience, someone in the ivory towers of mahogany row picked me out of the field, jumping me over four intermediate management positions to vice president status in the International Division.

My first assignment in that new position was to be sent to Suriname to Alcoa's operation there, not to save the account, but to placate this $ million international customer. I saved the account and upgraded it in a two-week stay while senior management was in Pittsburgh giving away the store.

My success was not expected, in fact, it was something of an embarrassment. It was like scoring a touchdown for the opponent, leastwise that is how some of the brass saw it, as their behavior in Pittsburgh made them look weak and subserviant.

Again, what I didn’t realize then was that my gift was threatening some people personally, and the status quo of the company generally. I was operating without a playbook, or with one with which they were unfamiliar, and had no interest in learning.

Growing up and working in a "critical thinking" universe, where management is driven by "crisis management," or with what is already known, solving one crisis after another that it, in fact, created in the first place with consistent hubris, I was an unknown entity, and a threat to the status quo.

I sit here in my study writing these words watching the world economy tank, and seeing management still stubbornly engaged in critical thinking with not an iota of interest in creative thinking, or what is not known but can be found out, which is CONFIDENT THINKING.

The Nalco people decided to call my successes, “luck,” which I accepted as I could not explain them. It was certainly not charisma or sales talk or technical prowess because I was none of those things.

“I read people; I read situations,” and said bold, direct and invasive things, as I had done in my selling, as I had done before that as a student, and as I had done as a little Irish Catholic boy with my priest to the point that he wanted to expel me.

I was doing OD work and had no idea what it was. OD is still somewhat mystical for me despite all its attempts to make it sound legitimate. My OD success was repeated again and again and reached a level of fruition in South Africa where I lived in 1968, bringing an affiliate, subsidiary and African company together into a new entity, and making it not only work, but also thrive.

At the time, I had never taken a psychology course and certainly nothing in OD. I was a trained chemist doing chemical engineering work with people happening to be my stoichiometry.

Everything I did was unconventional, inflaming my CEO, and finally having my boss, who was executive vice president tire of running interference for me. Nalco thought they could drive me into obedience by intimidation and executive compensation, but instead I retired, disenchanted that the company would try to “buy” me without understanding why I succeeded. They took it to be a fluke and I have never forgiven them for that.

In 1969, I retired to Florida, played tennis, read books, had no intentions of working again, but wanted to put into writing what I had learned. Naively, only in my mid-thirties, I thought I could write what I did to benefit others, and make a living doing so. I was wrong.

“Confident Selling” (1970) was my first attempt. It sold well. People came to Florida from California and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – businessmen – to see the guy who wrote the book. I would ask them, “What did you learn from me?”

Every time I was disappointed. Not once did they catch a phrase in the book that said it all.

Prentice-Hall had asked me to write a paragraph explaining what the book’s message was. I wrote them a single sentence, me who writes volumes: “Accept yourself as you are, and you will accept others as you find them.”

That is the key to reading people and reading situations. It is also a definition of being tolerant without caving into bleeding rhetoric.

I decided, as I had earlier having to read selling books, that I should go back to the university and find answers that would explain my gift. I did so and in the process earned a Ph.D.

But I found no answers at the university. In fact, I found the university setting dull, dim, dumb and backward, and more of a factory than working for Nalco, or prior to that Standard Brands, Inc. as a chemist.

The whole process was no different than packaging and promoting cereal. What is more, I never found a single professor that read as deeply or as much as I did, with the exception of one. Once you got tenure, it was a gravy train. My professors didn’t like me, and I didn’t respect them. Nothing new here.

Consulting followed, and I had incredible and unconventional success in that line of work, some interventions while I was going to school for six years, consulting on the side. I wrote my M.A. and Ph.D. on this work, which was mainly with police organizations from New York City to Miami on the East Coast, and seminars across the country for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association, along with nine months in residence in Fairfax County (Virginia), and three months in residence in Raleigh (North Carolina), both OD interventions involving explosive situations (they are in “Confident Thinking”).

I didn’t like doing seminars. I found them very tiring, energy sapping. I preferred then and still do now, writing, but talking paid better than my words, because I still didn’t capture the gift that eluded expression.

The only time I was ever confined to a place was as a chemist and before and after that as a student. I had never been confined to an “office” or to being surrounded by the bureaucratic dandies that collect in an office environment until I joined Honeywell Avionics in 1980 in the midst of the QCC hysteria.

I’ve always preferred to work alone, but intimately with my clients. The “compare and compete” game has never worked or appealed to me. And I’m not a team player. Most creative people aren’t, and when you force them to be, well, there goes the store!

Honeywell was no exception. I ran QCC and saw it was mainly a sham (I’m publishing my March 30, 1984 speech to that effect on the 25th Anniversary of that date later this month), then created Technical Education and found “reading people” and “reading situations” worked with engineers, who are as territorial as tribes in Africa with a greater hierarchical pecking order than the Holy See of Rome and the College of Cardinals.

I was trained like them, but never joined the jargon, as I was an experienced executive but never joined the club. I am not into joining. I am into using my gift, the gift that in my frustration I’ve spent my life trying to explain.

Well, my interventions at Honeywell worked. They worked so well that my boss thought that I should go to Europe and help Honeywell Europe with its nascent European Economic Community. He forgot that I don’t play politics.

“Reading people” and “reading situations” worked there as well, but as has been my experience throughout my many careers, I tend to piss people off. I am not into money; I am not into power; and I am not into pressing the flesh with the powers that be. I don’t care for them, and they don’t care for me. Most of them are pyramid climbers, which is a waste of talent and a sycophantic game.

When my European boss got tired of me, and was sending me back to the states, I asked him if I could ask him one question. ‘What?” he said.

“What did you learn from me?”

His answer? “To be more selective in who I hire.”

So, when I get a short note like yours, my first reaction is anger – I’m good at anger. My next reaction, which is more meaningful, and that is, I guess I’m going to die without ever getting a handle on what this gift is that I have been given, or ever being able to pass it on.

One time, a colleague of mine, a former professor at the University of South Florida, who joined my team in OD at Honeywell Clearwater, went into an absolute tirade at an offsite because “Fisher never tells us how he does it.”

I sat there listening to him, a person I had attempted to explain what I was doing in articles published by Honeywell, in seminars I gave for Honeywell, and in joint seminars we gave together. Yet, I failed to succeed in giving him an insight.

Most of my reading today, as you can probably tell if you read my stuff, and I know you do, is not written for people in OD work, as I don’t read them and they don’t read me, or do I write for a specific discipline or audience or educational level. BB has helped me write more down to earth, but alas, I still don’t think I’m getting through. My audience I think is the ordinary Joe or Jane because I am very ordinary with the exception of my gift, and have never claimed otherwise.

As for my reading, I find my mind resonates more with people who wrote some time ago. I am quite fascinated of late with Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, who seems to have matched me in pissing people off. Our difference is that he had a great hatred, philosopher George Hegel, and I’ve never been able to generate hatred of anyone. I might be a better explainer if I could.

On the other side of the coin, there is one person – I guess I am ahead of the curve for that – who reads me and gets it, or gets what I am attempting to say. I have published him often in this format, and his name is “Michael” and he resides in Chicago. I hope Michael writes some day, and when he does, I hope he crystallizes what I have attempted to say, and can ask the reader, “What did you learn from Dr. Fisher?”

Be always well,

Jim