HITTING THE WALL -- WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

HITTING THE WALL – WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 7, 2009

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Today I had lunch with a friend who I have known for nearly two decades, a man for whom I have been mentor, coach, counselor, consultant, as well as personal friend. We first met when I was consulting the organization in which he worked. I have watched him grow in competence and confidence, and watched his character flourish.

He recently contacted me by email, a man now in his mid-fifties, at the zenith of his career, making an excellent living, confessing he had hit a wall and was taking a month leave of absence.

Now, you would think this outrageous behavior in these perilous economic times when jobs are scarce and unemployment in Florida is more than 11 percent. You would expect him to fear being replaced.

That is the logical rational perspective, but when you hit the wall, that emotional barrier, that has no give and you constantly bounce off it bruised, battered, and disillusioned, fatigued, and depressed, you don’t think logically. You are looking for relief, as your body and soul are at war with each other.

Failure to recognize this, to deny this reality can result in physical and emotional collapse. When our health breaks, we are forced to take a time out, sometimes never to recapture our original momentum.

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NO ONE ESCAPES THE WALL

Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals, suffered a concussion three games ago. He chose to sit out the next game. He is one of the premier quarterbacks in the NFL and has Super Bowl rings to prove it. Yet, his toughness was questioned when he sat out the game.

In an interview, he said that he was near the end of his career, had a wife and seven children, and didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances on his health that might jeopardize a long and productive life after football. That was a rational answer.

The irrational part was that although he hit a physical wall it made him aware of the emotional possibility of brain damage. Scientists now see a high statistical correlation between concussions of professional athletes in sport and early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. That was enough for him.

When you are that individual, and have to weigh where you are and what you are and what your real motivation for the future is, you back away from that wall. You do a retreat. In the case of Kurt Warner, it was for one game, or a week’s recuperation after the concussion.

Sunday night (December 5, 2009), the Arizona Cardinals played the Minnesota Vikings and Warner out dueled another great quarterback, Bret Favre, to a 30 to 17 victory. These two premier quarterbacks came from schools never in the national limelight, Warner from Northern Iowa, and Favre from Southern Mississippi, two individuals that have encountered and negotiated many walls in their careers, but have had the poise and creative skills to confront and dispatch them successfully.

Warner is now in the best graces of the team and fans, but has made a statement. His health and well being and that of his family comes first and everything else after that.

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THE WISDOM OF RETREAT

Warner took the respite of a game while my friend has taken a month off to gain a fresh perspective before he goes forward. I was twenty years younger than my friend, only in my mid-thirties when I hit the wall in South Africa where I was facilitating the formation of a new company in 1968, taking a two-year sabbatical.

Living in South Africa's "apartheid society," being treated with colonial splendor by British South Africans, surrounded by the rich and beautiful, I no longer knew what I was working for as nothing made sense to me anymore.

I was making the equivalent of a half million dollars in today’s currency, lived on an estate in the city of Johannesburg, with four servants, including a chauffeur, gardener, house manager, and maid, all Bantu Africans, provided with two automobiles for the family, paying no taxes, and being treated as a very important person, when I knew better.

I never forgot I was the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, and had nothing in common with these British public school colonialists other than my organizational and technical skills. Making my confusion more intense was the fact that I felt a kinship with Afrikaners, the Boers, the farmers, the white South Africans, who were very much like my down to earth people of Iowa.

Afrikaner came to power in 1948 and had instituted the draconian and appalling practice of apartheid, or separate development of the races. I could never reconcile my affection for Afrikaners with apartheid. It proved to be one of my walls.

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WHAT IS THE WALL?

Walls are emotional barriers that we run into when we can no longer escape ourselves. We may delight in distractions such as toys, promiscuity, or other dalliances but ultimately there is no escape.

In such instances, we don’t engage the wall the wall engages us. We can go bankrupt because we cannot afford our toys, or our dalliances are discovered, and we are shamed, embarrassed and suffer the consequences of a costly divorce, for once trust is broken it cannot be repaired.

When we fail to acknowledge the wall, the wall acknowledges us with unintended consequences.

The wall forces us to leave the ghost of ourselves to reveal the person we have become despite our attempts to disguise that reality in so many ways. We may attempt to postpone that confrontation with alcohol, drugs, gambling, or other aberrant behaviors, but all attempts will fail. The breadth of the wall is beyond comprehension and therefore impossible to avoid. The wall extends from the beginning of our life to its end.

So, whether we encounter it forthwith or deny its existence, the wall will have its due. That is what the wall is.

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WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THE WALL?

My friend has always been creative. Throughout his life and career, he has been able to reengineer his approach to things, indeed, to reinvent himself over and over again as circumstances changed. He would develop new processes to attain his objectives.

But then he found he could no longer come up with new approaches that gave him satisfaction. He could no longer muster the motivation to take risks and endure the pain of possible failure. He had reached success and was a victim of the status quo whereas he had made his reputation helping people with bold new strategies. Now, he found himself simply going with the flow, and he resented it.

When he reached this wall, he did the wisest thing of all. He went to his boss and said, “I’m taking a month off.”

“Why?” she countered.

“I’ve run out of ideas. I’ve run out of ways to reinvent my job.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“You say that, but you are not me.”

“Pardon me?”

“No offense intended, I’m just saying I no longer am satisfied with the job I’m doing.”

“You satisfy me and I’m your boss.”

“I’m glad I do but that’s not the bottom line. The bottom line is satisfying myself and if I can’t satisfy myself I need a time out to look at where I am, where I’ve been, where I want to go, and what I have to do to get there." He continued,

“A friend once told me when you take a time out miraculous things happen. The wall opens up and allows you to pass through and go on, happier, healthier, wiser, and more motivated than ever before.

“He warmed me that I will continue to run into walls as all creative people do as they go forward. It is not running into walls that is the problem, but what we do when we encounter yet another wall.

“The walls, he says, are simply stop signs demanding our attention. They comfort us once we are running on automatic pilot, not hitting on all our cylinders, drifting towards calamity.

“When a creative person is drifting, he says, the person is unhappy, in fact, he can become deeply depressed as nothing makes sense to him anymore: his job, marriage, family, friends, business associates, his socioeconomic status. Nothing can renew his vitality, as all his resilience is gone. He claims a person has no choice but to step back, to take a respite, not so much to think ponderously, but to relax and let his soul settle back into its normal place and space in his center.”

His boss may have been curious about his friend, but she didn’t probe. She has too much respect for him, and is looking forward to his return in a month.

* * *

THE WALL CAN BE A LIFE CHANGING EVENT

A forty-year perspective gives me the advantage of seeing how a wall can be a life-changing event.

I didn’t understand the wall the way I understand it today. Consequently, I kept battering against it hiding behind my work and my Roman Catholicism as if workaholism and faith would furnish a breakthrough. They didn’t. Instead, they exacerbated the situation.

My values, beliefs, loyalties and perspectives were disintegrating. My character was splintered and I was in shambles. It was in this quagmire that I found I was forgetting things and I had a memory like an elephant. My memory was a source of pride and it was abandoning me.

My marriage and family were in chaos; everything I held sacred was gone. When calamity clustered into a cancer, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to resign with no idea what the future would hold.

Even then, I had never forgotten my roots, never forgotten how my da’s employers had exploited him, never forgotten how the powerful treat the powerless. The irony is that I was part of the powerful but never joined the club.

My boss said, “How can you do this to us when we have done so much for you?”

“If I wasn’t doing my job, you’d fire me,” I answered, “I’m firing the company for the same reason.”

“James, you have a lot to learn,” my boss parried. “I doubt if you’ll ever be this successful again.”

He was talking about economic not spiritual success, the way he was trained to think. At the time, I didn’t understand the difference. I just sought relief from an untenable situation. I needed breathing room.

Incidentally, my boss was right about financial success. I’ve never reached that equivalent in income again, but I have been modestly successful financially. My rejuvenation has been spiritual which cannot be measured quantitatively.

Over a long life, I have gravitated to where I am now. It is where a professor told me when I was a twenty years old student at the University of Iowa I should have been from the beginning, a thinker and writer. I am not only a late bloomer but also a post late bloomer and I have to live with that. I may not live to complete my South Africa novel, as Vladimir Nabokov failed to complete his novel, “Laura” (2009), now absurdly offered in pasted together version by his son, Dmitri.

As an idea guy and writer, I’ve never been happier, never been more in tuned to my nature. I am, by nature, an introvert, not very sociable, finding people wear me out quite quickly. It took me a long time after hitting many walls to realize that I prefer privacy to social engagement, books and ideas to people, things that are free in nature rather than can be purchased in a store, that I am more a student of things than a doer of things even though my life has been engaged in doing with little time or energy left for contemplation, until these late innings of life with my Beautiful Betty, now in our twenty-fourth year of marriage.

* * *

There was a time when people would ask me what I thought, and I was so good at reading people that I would tell them what they wanted to hear. They would smile, I would get big orders, promotions, and be told, “You’re a very lucky man, James,” when I was increasingly miserable. After hitting the wall in South Africa, that all changed.

When people ask me now what I think, I tell them. The secretary to the CEO at Honeywell Avionics, when I was a psychologist there, asked me one day what I thought of her hairdo. I said it looked like a hornet’s nest. She cried. I moved on, only to be chewed out by my boss and to receive a scathing memo from the CEO, who happened to like me.

Honeywell Avionics, at the time, had one thousand engineers and scientists, two thousand professional support personnel, and one thousand blue-collar workers model building in manufacturing while creating instruments in the clean rooms.

In 1984, Honeywell Avionic’s Department of Contracts Administration (DCAS) was sponsoring a major seminar on Clearwater Beach, Florida for its customers among who were senior officers in the U. S. Air Force, U. S. Navy, Department of Defense, as well as other DCAS customers. The topic was “Participative Management,” the buzz expression of the day. A committee contacted me to give the keynote address. I said I would if I could say what I thought about participative management. The committee agreed.

In my capacity as Director of the Quality Control Circle Program, the largest at the time in the nation, I found participative management was a joke. It didn’t work because it wasn’t sincere. It was impossible to implement a system that worked in Japan, with a group oriented culture, when American workers were individualistic and resistant to enforced group norms.

Moreover, eighty percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar and only twenty to twenty five percent of American workers were. Most American workers were professionally trained and white-collar workers.

Participative management worked modestly well with blue-collar workers who were programmed to be reactive and management dependent, whereas white-collar workers saw themselves as independent contractors or in league with management.

That said the problem solving of blue-collar workers was limited to cosmetic change such as modification of workstations or the like but no substantive change in processes or procedures. White-collar workers were resistant to the idea of a contrived meeting climate of brainstorming and problem solving, feeling a sense of being patronized instead of reaffirming a partnership with management.

My speech was titled, “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View” (It was given on March 30, 1984, and was published in this blog on its 25th anniversary).

For that speech, I was put on house arrest. My salary was frozen for 18 months. I could give no more speeches, publish no articles, and had to submit my notebooks weekly to my boss for checking. They became so voluminous that he quit checking in the third week.

Out of that 18-month confinement, the germ of a book surfaced in the notebooks. Then, as incredible as it may seem, once the eighteen months came to a close in 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. I did not seek this assignment, but was pursued for me by my new boss whom I had mentored when he first came to Honeywell in 1980. He thought it especially suited to my organizational development (OD) expertise.

Even so, I found Europe suffering an exaggeration of what I experienced in the United States. Honeywell Europe had an equal reluctance to change. This was equally true of the American management team in Europe as it was for Honeywell's European executives. I knew then I was on to something.

* * *

A good part of the book, previously only a germ, was written while on that assignment. I returned to the United States, resigned in 1990, and published “Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches.”

The Business Book Review Journal claimed "Work Without Managers" was the most insightful and prophetic book written on management to date, a book that predicted the demise of the automotive industry and the telling consequence of a workforce suspended in terminal adolescence, which applied as much to the white-collar as the blue-collar workforce.

The importance of the book has not been acknowledged readily except for the efforts of Dr. Thomas Brown of Industry Week and The Wall Street Journal.

In a strange way, the book is even more relevant and viable in 2009 than it was when written in 1990.

It is quite apparent companies can run into walls again and again until they go bankrupt as General Motors and Chrysler, unable or unwilling to change, or go out of business, as did 100-year-old Montgomery Wards.

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People write books to be published, and they publish books that will not be deemed offensive to the hand that feeds them. That is management. The real estate industry and Wall Street were running into walls, walls not acknowledged, but walls they still attempted to circumvent with suspect practices, walls that always win in the end when they are ignored whether it is in a personal or corporate sense.

Voices on the periphery cried out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were heading for trouble; voices sounded the alarm for the reckless practices of Wall Street and the insurance industry. Some voices published their views, but nothing changed. Economists were asleep at the switch, as was the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasurer. Now these appointed office holders are celebrated for their eleventh hour rescue of banks too big to fail.

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Much of “Work Without Managers” addresses the fact that we are a crisis-managed society that the crises we solve are only the crises we create, having little time or inclination to look outside the box. We are a knowing rather than learning society, and suffer for the malaise.

* * *

So, I said to my friend the fact that you recognized the wall is a tribute to your integrity, your authenticity, to your dedication to make a difference. You stopped and took a time out to reassess your status when you confronted the wall, and for that the wall will open up and let you through.

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I wasn’t going to write this missive; wasn't even going to walk because it was rainy and cold. I was just going to work on my novel.

Once in a while a message hits you that whether you are a bricklayer or architect, a custodian or contractor, housewife or school teacher, whether you are retired or still working, that you cannot avoid encountering walls.

We run into walls in marriage, in dealing with our children, in relating to friends and relatives, in work and in play. In one sense, we are alone as we come into the world alone, and leave the world alone, so we cannot expect others to deal with our walls. The connection with ourselves is sometimes the last connection we acknowledge, the connection that confronts the walls. Ignore the walls and love can turn to hate and hate to boredom and boredom to depression. Such thoughts came to mind today as I walked.

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