THE FISHER TRILOGY -- EXPLAINED!

THE FISHER TRILOGY -- EXPLAINED!

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

“In my experience, time is a shadow that we never notice until it’s missing, comfortable in the sun of our excesses. When the sky turns dark and there is no shadow, or a sun to create it, we seem to panic in the same predictable way. It would be madness if it weren’t so common.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Time Out For Sanity,” an essay (1976)

* * *

OVERVIEW

Napoleon Hill published “Think and Grow Rich” in the jaws of the Great Depression, when people like myself were coming into the world, and sold 30 million copies worldwide almost overnight. It was a sage idea to think about growing rich when you were worried about putting food on the table or having a roof over your head. But it is the nature of people and the quality of hope of which dreams are made. We seldom appreciate our health until we lose it. Likewise, we take our good fortune for granted until we have a career reversal.

In 1970, as we were on the doorstep of a decade long slide, which ultimately ended in double digit unemployment and double digit inflation, I published with Prentice-Hall, Inc. a book titled simply, “Confident Selling.” The book sold 25,000 copies the first quarter, and continued to sell from 1,000 to 5,000 copies a year for the next twenty years until it went out of print in 1990.

This is mentioned because in the book publishing business timing is everything. In my case, the timing was serendipitous because I had retired after coming back from South Africa where I formed a new company, and I wanted to explore the possibility of becoming a writer.

The book was written in six weeks, a single draft, and sent off to Prentice-Hall without portfolio, and was accepted immediately. It was so easy that I thought this writing business was a snap, not realizing I had submitted my manuscript when the sun had set, and a gathering storm was on the horizon.

“Confident Selling” was the first of nine published books and by far the most successful, and incidentally, the only one that was published when all the economic indicators were down, and unemployment and breadlines loomed in the future.

THE FISHER TRIOLOGY, published over a five-year period, was published during the greatest economic boom in the history of the United States, or from 1990 to 1995. After a ten-year sabbatical (1969 - 1979), during which time I acquired a Ph.D., I returned to industry first as an organization/industrial psychologist and later as international corporate executive.

By 1980, I was six-tenths a writer and four-tenths a professional worker, using the next ten years (1980 – 1990) essentially as my laboratory observing and recording the many problems of the complex organization in terms of workers, work, the workplace, the workplace culture, management and leadership.

Out of that came came THE FISHER TRILOGY, which was not the message a booming economy wanted to hear. So, for the effort, crticis saw the work as “angry” or “out-of-touch” or “pessimistic” or simply, the work of "a naysayer."

What follows is a brief synopsis of each book, followed by the opening lines of each, ending in a brief final comment, along with chapter titles. It is a question of the books catching up with the times, or the times being reflected by the books.

These books are available on this blog (www.fisherofideas.com) or www.alibris.com, www.borders.com, www.barnes&noble.com, or www.amazon.com, or you may ask for them at your local library or bookstore.


WORK WITHOUT MANAGER: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990)

SYNOPSIS:

This is a shocking look at American business and why eighty percent of the productive work is accomplished by twenty percent of the workforce. The author provides ample evidence that the corporation, which now dominates American society, remains in celebratory 1945 nostalgia, still basking in the world's appetite for “buying American.” Global success after WWII was in no small part due to the lack of competition in a world devastated by war. Unfortunately, this success lulled American enterprise into complacency, and the workforce into counter dependence on its employers for its total well being.

In the past forty-five years (1945 – 1990), the complexion of the workforce has changed radically from blue collar to pink and white collar where brains not brawn are the main requirement of work. Yet, the workplace operates and management leads as if nothing has changed. One chapter of this book identifies this as "Incipient Catastrophe,” or a formula for disaster.

Business Book Review Jouranl named it one of the “four best business books of the year,” while Industry Week named it “among its top ten business books of the year.”

OPENING LINES:

“The era of the free lunch has ended. This century, which began with such paternal control and obedience for America, has run amuck. Now, nothing and no one is in control. Take Corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”

COMMENT:

The author formed a publishing company (The Delta Group Florida) to publish this book with no idea, or appreciation of the demands beyond writing that publishing required. The success of any book is about one-third in the writing and about two-thirds in the promoting and promulgating.

National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, the Business Book Review Journal, Industry Week and Business Perspectives from Innsbruck, Austria provided generous reviews, but it takes the effort of the publisher to sustain interest. That was made more difficult because of the timing of publication. Books of the genre at the time were riding the economic boom. Americans don’t like to look for dark clouds, or to be told they're not in control.

CHAPTER TITLES

(1) A Need for a New Organizational Paradigm; (2) Incipient Catastrophe; (3) Echoing Footsteps; (4) The Mad Monarchs of the Madhouse; (5) The Three Dominant Cultures of the Organization, or Why We Can’t Get From Here to There; (6) So What?


CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s & BEYOND (1992)

SYNOPSIS:

We are in a world where challenge and change pale in comparison with the past. The whole idea of selling is going through a metamorphosis. No longer is intimidation appropriate; no longer is selling controlled by the slick fast-talking salesperson with all the answers. Selling today is a partnership between seller and buyer.

The reason is because we are all sellers and all buyers, and the more discriminating we are at both ends of the equation the better it is for everyone.

What complicates this problem is our natural fear of confrontation. Conflict is natural to human exchange, and managed conflict is where the area of agreement is found. Yet, the tendency is to fear conflict. So, it is denied, ignored or projected on to other things or other people instead of being embraced. Fear embraced leads to confidence. Why?

The realization is almost Zen like: the best way to control a situation is to let go of it, and let natural flow develop; the best way to sell is not by telling but listening; the best way to create a happy buyer is to persuade him to want what he needs instead of being mesmerized by what he thinks he wants but doesn't need.

The book attempts to breakthrough fear to confidence by asking a set of questions, and having a conversation with the reader about the possible answers:

(1) Why am I my own worst enemy?
(2) Why do I fail to find fulfillment in my life and work?
(3) Why do I lack a clear purpose in life?
(4) Why do I not live up to my potential?
(5) Why do I torture myself with self-doubt while giving others the benefit of the doubt?

If you know how to observe and how to learn, then the key is in your hand to unlock that door to opportunity. Only you can open that door to your fulfillment. Enjoy the journey!

OPENING LINES:

“You are the possessor of a legacy, and that legacy is selling. Salesmanship is essential to our character. Why something so central to our lives and happiness should be marginal to what we treasure is a cultural oddity. Selling is the most noble and human of all civilized activities.”

COMMENT

The publisher of this book was Top of the Mountain Publishing. Although “Confident Selling” (1970) was published twenty-two years before, the publisher decided to piggyback on the title.

In 1970, we were entering the “bust economic period,” whereas in 1992, when “Confident Selling for the 90s” was published, we were in the midst of a “boom economic period." People behave very differently in boom and bust periods.

Despite that, the book received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for nonfiction, and was compared by New Awareness Magazine to John Naisbitt’s “Magatrends,” which was an international best seller. Naisbitt looked at the global possibilities with zest and optimism. This author looked at the individual and his potential for self-realization. Perhaps a more appropriate title might have been, “Pragmatic Psychology in Everyday Life.”

FIRST & LAST CHAPTER TITLES:

(1) Selling and Setting Realistic and Purposeful Goals; (7) The Final Touch Toward Selling with Confidence; (Afterword) Leadership & Excellence in the 21st Century.


THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAISNT THE GRAIN! (1995)

SYNOPSIS:

In the midst of constant restructuring, redeployment, and reengineering, often ending in redundancy exercises and the elimination of complete job categories, American workers have taken it on the chin as if they had no recourse.

In a slim volume, the author claims workers have no choice but to reverse their passive programming, or go against the grain of the status quo for nothing changes until they do.

He further claims that the continuing games of charade, including empowerment, have been mounted by management because these games are safe, cosmetic, and don’t require any fundamental or radical change in the structure of the complex organization, vis-a-vis work, the workplace, workplace culture, or the relationship of workers and managers to each other.

As a consequence of this lethargy, workers absorb all the risks and costs when the corporation leaves its tracks. The author says, “It is time for workers to put their house in order and no longer behave as renters but owners of what they do. Ventilation won’t do it, pointing fingers won’t do it, slowing down or stopping work won’t do it, only workers getting off their duffs and off the dime and taking charge will do it.”

The call is for workers, especially professionals, who have invested heavily in their education, only to find a disappointing “return on their investment.” There is no profit, he says, in being angry and confused, or to act as fatalists when jobs disappear, or the company resorts to downsizing, redundancy exercises, or some conglomerate comes in and takes over. A few get rich for the practice and many lose their jobs, while workers wail, “We have done nothing wrong.” But they have; they have been passive participants in what they do.

This is “crunch time.” Workers can no longer place their faith in the company, in their profession, or their situation as everything is rolling to a constant change. It takes more than good intentions, a good attitude or an optimistic outlook to seize the day. It takes a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers view the world and their place in it. The new order requires individual workers “going against the grain.”

OPENING LINES:

"The English poet John Donne was wrong. He once wrote 'No man is and island unto himself.' Everyman today is an island unto himself, and his only redemption is the full knowledge and acceptance of this fact. The answers are not in government, nor industry and commerce, no longer in religion, and certainly not in science. So, you ask, 'Where does that leave the worker?' I reply, 'Very much alone!'"

COMMENT:

James R. Wright, columnist for The Dallas Morning News, writes: “Not since THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY has a work so intimately described an age – or combined its powerful insight with such stinging clarity. What truly separates Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.’s THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN from being a pedantic exercise is its common sense appeal. It breaks through the conflict between the forces of denial and reality to expose the worker and workplace naked.”

CHAPTER TITLES

(1) An Upside Down World; (2) Silent Invasions; (3) The Price of Innocence; (4) Late Blooming Roses; (5) Architects of a Failed System; (6) Not Happy Campers; (7) The Challenge of Learning; (8) A Question of Control; (9) Going Against the Grain; (10) Life Without a Cause.