TOO LATE SMART – FINALLY GETTING SOME THINGS RIGHT WHILE CONTINUING TO GET OTHERS THINGS WRONG!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 17, 2009
“Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path. Ten lessons for succeeding in the new American workplace.”
Time, “The Future of Work,” May 24, 2009
REFERENCE:
For the past thirty years, I, among others, have been writing books and articles that journalists such as TIME magazine finally have subsumed to the point that perhaps someone will pay attention. The American workplace has been out of whack for more than a quarter century, and it has been during that period that the roof has fallen in on American industry and commerce, education and morality, confidence and relevance.
One of the things that confounded me when I returned to graduate school, as a mature adult was how much effort sociology and psychology spent to reify the obvious, or what everyday people in everyday situations knew to be true. I remember having to read a treatise in sociology on “Why Prisoners Attempt to Escape from Prison?” Several studies supported by complex statistical correlations were offered to corroborate this behavior, when I know for sure were I incarcerated that would be my motivation without the necessity for such verification.
Likewise, I puzzle why journalists are so far behind the curve and yet have the temerity to offer findings revealing few new clues to the subject at hand that had not been reported years ago by myself and others in several books and articles.
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NUMBER ONE, JOBS – High Tech, High Touch, High Growth
I thought of this when Time offered a McKinsey &Company study that pointed out that nearly 85 percent of new jobs being created between 1998 and 2006 involved complex “knowledge work” like problem solving. Now, the majority of the workforce is in "knowledge type jobs," but yet problem solving remains the problem!
Sure, jobs are going to grow in computer software engineering, systems analysts, and so on, but that does not insure the problem solving. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):
“(The problem) is the American culture is deeply impaled in a deterministic approach, or the ‘Blitzkrieg School of Problem Solving' (i.e., assault the problem, spare no money or resource). Being only comfortable with nitty-gritty deductive reasoning, we expect the effect to the follow the cause. Rest assured medical science has spent most of its resources on trying to isolate the AIDS virus through research to develop a miraculous vaccine. Yet, the cause does not lie exclusively in the subatomic world of microbiology, but in the social psychology of human relationships.” (pp. 244 – 245)
NUMBER TWO: TRAINING MANAGERS TO BEHAVE
Time mentions that 77 percent of schools with full-time MBA programs found their enrollments increasing last year. It then lists changing the moral climate, dealing with greed, talking about developing a “license” for management as a profession, or posting ethical oaths.
Readers know how I feel about the MBA program so we can skip that consideration. The focus of this brief outline in Time is still on “the management of things” and using the same platform for "the motivation of people." It doesn't work! You can license managers. You can make the curriculum as rigorous as the licensing board for medical physicians, and it still will not matter. The mindset is all wrong.
Managers, per se, are atavistic. In a corporate environment, breaking down but still here, mega corporations are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. There has to be a change in psychology.
This is what I wrote in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction:
“What’s in it for me is being displaced by what’s in it for us? This is not driven by altruism, but economics. Crossing the no man’s land between individualism and collective identity, admittedly, is a precarious one.
"You don’t change a one hundred year practice over night. With this in mind, consider these crystal ball reflections -- the I go into compensation, cooperation, communication, culture and end with celebration: a vision: the work week now requires only 30 – 32 hours. Employees may choose from a number of options – working at home, working split schedules, working five 6-hour days, four 8-hour days, three 10-hour days, or other variations. They keep their own time, and are not judged on number of hours worked but on the results of their work." (pp. 273 – 296)
Then in THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995):
“Managers as a profession, for the past fifty years, have been essentially expediters and paper pushers. The nostalgia of their role in WWII never was relinquished. Nostalgia for that mythic time simply grew like a cancer, metastasizing through every fissure of the organization’s body until it was bloated with disease, and on every kind of support system, chief of which was the Federal Government. For every ten workers, there was a supervisor, for every three supervisors, a manager, for every four managers, a director, for every five directors, a vice president, and so on. Workers were lost in the equation.” (pp. 98 – 99)
NUMBER THREE: THE SEARCH FOR THE NEXT PERK
Time reports that 57 percent of employers have stopped offering a traditional pension plan. For more than twenty years, I have reported it was a bit of insanity for corporations to give benefits and perks not tied to performance.
It has been a concern of which I have written often and passionately, not because I am against workers but because it is an expense that has never turned into positive performance.
It was the reason I identified three dominant cultures of the organization, COMFORT, COMPLACENCY and CONTRIBUTION with most corporations within my experience as an employee, executive and consultant, dominated by COMFORT.
When push came to shove, and the bottom started to fall out of the marketplace, corporations simply upped the perks and drove their operations into COMPLACENCY. This is precisely what led to the demise of the automotive industry.
I first covered this in great detail in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), became more specific with THE WORKER, ALONE (1995), then elaborated on it even more specifically in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), and pulled out all stops in CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP &DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), but, alas, to no avail.
NUMBER FOUR: WE’RE GETTING OFF THE LADDER
Time mentions that 80 percent of employees claim they would want flexible work schedules if it wouldn’t hurt their careers.
The mere fact that workers are still thinking of work in terms of “career” indicates that implicitly they are still envisioning a ladder in a corporation. If the ladder is gone, then career in that conventional context is meaningless. It was the reason I wrote THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995) The whole focus of the book was the worker as an independent contractor. This was the books imperative:
“Workers have no choice but TO GO AGAISNT THE GRAIN, for nothing changes until they do. The game of charades of empowerment continues because it is safe. It changes nothing and costs those in power even less. Workers absorb the costs. Not until THE WORKER, ALONE, realizes it is up to him to put his house in order, will change occur. Ventilation won’t do it, or pointing fingers. The worker must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life.”
Workers cannot have it both ways: expect the ladder to disappear and expect to have a career in the traditional sense.
We are moving back in a sense to the pre-industrial revolution guilds where the driver of commerce was cooperation in small groups. Even with all the sophistication of an electronic age of computer networking among independent contractors, cooperation and teaming are necessary components on an intimate scale.
It was evident in 1992 that the "goose that laid the golden egg" had left the building, but it was also obvious that workers were reluctant to change no matter what. Now they have no choice, and consequently, it is too late for many.
NUMBER FIVE: WHY BOOMERS CAN’T QUIT
Time points out that among baby boomers only 13 percent have saved enough for retirement, and that most boomers will have to work until their dying days. I’ve written so much on baby boomers that suffice they chose not to grow up because they had no intentions of getting old. What is worse, their children now are the worse for wear for that indulgence, and it isn’t going to get any easier.
For fifty years Americans have been caught up in the hubris of being Numero Uno, as if that meant anything, consuming 25 percent of the world’s natural resources, keeping up with the Jones, spending more than they made, loving and buying bigger and bigger gas guzzlers, partying as if there were no tomorrow, and now that chicken has come to roost. The party is over. The world has caught up.
The nation as well as the individual American is fighting a bankruptcy of confidence as well as of coin. The world conceded the twentieth century to the United States, as the “American Century,” and then the United States fell prey to that notion in the twenty-first (see chapter six, “Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon” in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, pp 210 – 253).
NUMBER SIX: IT WILL PAY TO SAVE THE PLANET
Time estimates 2.5 million new jobs in the green job industry.
NUMBER SEVEN: WOMEN WILL RULE BUSINESS
Time mentions an 8 percent growth of women in the workforce over the next 10 years compared to 5 percent for men. This is not new data as this has been going on for more than forty years. I reported in THE TABOO (1996):
“Women who view life through the feminist prism imply a gender bias favors men, especially with regard to education. The facts paint a different picture:
(1) While boys get higher scores in mathematics and science, girls get higher scores in reading and writing.
(2) Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade, and boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population.
(3) 67 percent of female high school graduates go to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates.
In 1970, women were only 41 percent of all college students. Today, women account for 55 percent of all undergraduates, and they receive 54 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States. Regarding graduate school in 1970:
(1) Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today they are 59 percent of all master’s degree students and earn 53 percent of all master’s degrees.
(2) Women earned 6 percent of all professional degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 39 percent.
(3) Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women, but that figure is up to 39 percent today.
(4) The medical degree earned during that period by women jumped from 8 to 36 percent. In 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women.
(5) 5 percent of women earned law degrees; today that figure is more than 40 percent.
(6) Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees, compared to 32 percent in 1991.
(7) Women today earn a majority of the degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
"There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 62 percent were; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female. Among white students, the imbalance is 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women.” (pp. 14 – 15)
Women in 2009 are the majority in medical school and is the majority being licensed as physicians. Similar gains are to be noted in law, dentistry, and other disciplines among women. We are moving increasingly into a matriarchal society, as men of all ethnicities are too busy pounding their chests to risk embarrassment and do a little work in the classroom. THE TABOO was published in 1996 and every one of the categories mentioned above is more soundly in the favor of women over men.
NUMBER EIGHT: WHEN GENERATION X RUNS THE SHOW
Time predicts 40 percent of the workforce will be individual contractors. This is covered in some detail in all the books listed above, but not because “Generation X” is known for its flexibility but rather because of the flexibility of technology and improved education of workers, which makes it a competitive necessity.
NUMBER NINE: YES, WE’LL STILL MAKE STUFF
Time projects 15 percent of the total growth in jobs will be in manufacturing. The figure is based upon highly skilled workers, worker innovation, consumer demand, and adaptation to technology. I think it is overly optimistic as I see the United States leading the way in a totally different direction, the leisure industry. I envisioned that future in CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“Company increasingly recognize themselves as microcosms of the community with companies commonly sponsoring projects in positive structuring of leisure. These include community service, creative workshops, speaking bureaus, new skills training programs, courses on becoming entrepreneurs, high school and college educational programs, vocational workshops, recreational activities, daycare centers, comparative religious exchanges, sponsoring educational trips within USA, and abroad, to mention a few.
“Leisure and work have become inseparable. Companies celebrate leisure because they have discovered it serves their mission. By participating in volunteer organizations – where rank, role, socioeconomic status are irrelevant – employees develop a collegial orientation. They come to appreciate the beauty of difference, and the challenges of diversity. It is refreshing to be accepted for what you are, not who you are. This celebration fosters self-enhancing collaboration. Work and life become a single joyful pursuit.
“Cultural pursuits – art, architecture, music, travel, history, theater, reading, participative sport, gardening, and leisure for itself – are more natural to other older societies. We appear reluctant to make the mental shift investment required to see work as the equivalent of play. We persist in seeing it as a duty – even while a real work ethic eludes us. We are the last advanced society that sees work this way.
“Technology offers more than comfort and play. It offers freedom from the drudgery of life, which has been misrepresented so long as work. With technology and society on a collision course most of the 20th century; the marriage of the two was inevitable. The consequences and possibilities of that marriage are now just beginning to be felt. It is clear they will change the world forever, altering the way we relate to each other as human beings. Those who do not understand history are destined to reinvent it. That may be the ultimate triumph in organizational learning.” (pp 294 – 296)
So, I see us less and less a “manufacturing society” and instead leading a renaissance into a new age of celebration through cooperation, making the United States an amusement park for the world.
NUMBER TEN: THE LAST DAYS OF CUBICAL LIFE
Time reports telecommunication has increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 28 percent today. It reports the increasing work in teams, another theme of CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992):
“The pressure to perform is real, but no longer draconian. The work climate is more relaxed because of the spirit of cooperation. Cooperation builds to success, which is measured in psychological as much as economic terms. What is different is that individual enterprise has given ground to group enterprise – two heads are better than one, and working that way is more fun, too – something which has to be experienced to be appreciated.
“Collegial support, the environment filled with good cheer and congeniality, is not a public relations gimmick. Teaming – vertical and horizontal integration – is crucial to organizational life.” (p. 285)
SO WHAT?
It simply proves once again why conventional media are years behind the curve. FORTUNE magazine featured a piece on “work without managers” several years after my book was published on the subject without acknowledgement. I wrote the publication, and never received the courtesy of a reply. During the Vietnam War, TIME magazine featured a piece, “What you should think about Vietnam.” I wrote TIME and told them I didn’t want them to tell me what to think, just report the news. To TIME magazine’s credit, they replied to my letter explaining that interpreting the news was its job.
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