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

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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.

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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.

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Note: This is “Part One” of a two-part response to “Iatrogenic – Yet Another Exchange.”