JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D., BIOGRAPHY AND BODY OF WORKS!

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D. BIOGRAPHY and BODY OF WORK

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 24, 2009

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Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. started out as a chemist, then chemical sales engineer, then a Nalco Chemical Company executive. He retired the first time in his mid-thirties went back to school for six years, year around, to acquire his Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology, consulting on the side followed by becoming an adjunct professor. He then reentered the corporation as a psychologist for Honeywell, Inc., again being promoted to executive status by Honeywell Europe, Ltd., retiring for the second time in 1990.

He put himself through college working as a laborer in a chemical plant, has experienced college at all levels, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education. In the late 1950s, he was a member of the crew of the USS Salem CA-139 operating in the Mediterranean Sea. As a professional, he has worked at every level of the complex organization in both line and staff positions from production, research & development, sales & marketing, to mid-level and top management to the boardroom. He has lived and worked across the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa. He is now writing a novel of his time in South Africa during the reign of apartheid.

Everything he writes, whether nonfiction or fiction, emanates from his empirical experience. He identifies his work as "cultural capital," seeing Western society and its economy, social, industrial and cultural life in radical transition. Western institutions from the family, church, school, government, business and leisure are in shambles looking for a Sphinx to bring them back from their ashes.

Others have written about such things, but with Dr. Fisher there is a personal bite to his prose that ordinary people cannot escape, as they no longer have masters but are now masters of their own fate, something they would still rather pass on to others. They like to believe they have had no complicity in the collapse of the automotive industry or the failure of Wall Street in the recent past, that they were innocent and helpless victims of the charade. He will have none of it.

Dr. Fisher claims everyone is a leader or no one is, that "cultural capital" relates to the risk-taking, self-esteem, social cohesion, work ethics and habits, and relationships to power of everyone. The workforce, he writes, has changed from primarily manual power to predominantly brainpower, from blue-collar to white-collar, from unskilled to professionals. Yet, despite this changing workforce and climate, with power shifting from management to workers with decision-making primarily at the level of consequences of work, workers continue to be managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as if it is 1945 except cosmetically. The system, he says, is anachronistic and management is atavistic.

The hierarchical organizational structure is no longer effective much less relevant. Workers have the power but want to enjoy the fruits of such power without the responsibilities or accountability of such power. They want security and have traditionally been willing to sacrifice power for guarantees, but in the postmodern world no such reality exists except in virtual reality.

Dr. Fisher looks at problems from the perspective of ordinary people and therefore his books are not entertaining but gut wrenching.

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CONFIDENT SELLING (1970) was written in six weeks and sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc. without protocol as "Let's Take The Worry Out Of Selling." He discovered going from a lab rat or chemist to a chemical sales engineer that the greatest problem in selling was not the buyer, but the seller. He never read sales books but taught himself to sell on the basis of this premise, and became the most successful salesmen in his district, being promoted to an area manager, and then to an international corporate executive in a brief six years. Confident Selling was in print for twenty years (1970 - 1990), serialized in a national sales magazine, airline magazine, and the basis of college courses in sales psychology.

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WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990) signals the rise of the worker and the demise of the manager in the work environment. It predicts the collapse of the automotive industry and the reluctance of management in every endeavor to share power with workers, and the consequences of this reluctance. It introduces to the reader the "social termites" that invade the workplace as six passive silent behaviors that destroy the workplace from within while remaining essentially invisible. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of 1991, the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four best, The Wall Street Journal alerted management to its provocative indictment, while National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" gave it a positive review.

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CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is an elaboration of Confident Selling with a more sophisticated toolbox and tool kit for the reader. It claimed that everyone whatever the nature of the work is in the business of selling, and that the buyer is not the problem but the seller, often failing to package, promote, and persist in the competitive struggle of putting the best face on his or her efforts. The idea that selling is "that profession" equivalent to intimidators and manipulators is characterized as not only a myth but the most destructive force of all in the failure of the individual to make adequate progress in his or her career and life. Confident Selling for the 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for 1992. It is as relevant today as it was in the 1990s as awareness of the individual's challenge has not receded but intensified.

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THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN! (1995) is a call to battle of professionals claiming they have no choice but to get beyond the charade of empowerment and cosmetic change and to take charge by taking action. The chapter headings alone tell the story: (1) An Upside Down World; (2) Silent Invasions; (2) 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! Alas, virtually everything Dr. Fisher felt might transpire has, and yet professionals are still looking for someone else to blame or provide the miracle. The book is a wake up call and a description of the dilemma if it is not heeded.

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THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) is an attack on the fact that American culture programs its young to be self-hating. The book was a response to an article by Dr. Fisher published in the June 1993 issue of The Reader's Digest, which opens with the line: "To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself." It generated thousands of requests for reprints, and a call by The Reader's Digest for Dr. Fisher's opinion on such matters. Unfortunately, some readers saw it as a guide to self-assertion. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was instead a conversation with the reader to understand how he or she has become programmed to be so negative and self-hating, and what can be done about it. Self-assertion is not an end but a process, which requires reprogramming. The book shows how this can happen.

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SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998) looks inside all the fault lines, all the end runs, and hapless interventions of human resources management that have resulted in a passive, reactive and dependent workforce. For the past sixty years or since World War II, corporate management and the unions have been complicit in destroying the will and independence of workers to (1) make choices; (2) make decisions; (3) act as individual contractors; and (4) mature into contributing adults. Systematically, management and unions have contrived, Dr. Fisher insists, to make workers counterdependent upon the organization for their total well being, which has found workers - both blue-collar and white-collar -- self-indulgent and suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset of a twelve-year-old. Now, when workers are needed as independent contractors and partners in enterprise, the sixty years of programming are all wrong for the demands of the times. Consequently, workers have retreated into the arms of the "six silent killers" of passive behavior. The Conference Board of the Wall Street Journal advocates that SIX SILENT KILLERS is a book every executive in America should read and resolve to change, or suffer the consequences. The first decade of the twenty-first century has made those consequences quite palpable.

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CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) indicates there is no payoff in pointing fingers as managers and workers have both approached the abyss in equal ignorance. While the East and Wall Street continue to see themselves as the center of the universe, circumstances have proven them wrong. There isn't an institution that Dr. Fisher doesn't find guilty of "corporate sin." And what is corporate sin? It is the failure of leaders and workers to understand and deal diligently and effectively with the times. He shows how Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (HYPE) have driven society into the ground while celebrating their crisis management strategies, which he claims only solve the problems they create. We have gone from a culture of comfort (unconscious incompetence) to a culture of complacency (conscious incompetence) while believing the Ship of State was being steered to a culture of contribution (conscious competence). Meanwhile, the initiative has shifted from the United States to the Far East, just as it did a hundred years ago from Europe to America. Meanwhile, he claims we have lost our moral compass and our way: "In a society without a moral compass, we easily become addicted to affluence and obsessed with irrelevance." Ten years after it was published, the Federal Reserve bailed out banks "too big to fail," and once functioning again, what did these banks do? They paid themselves $billion bonuses with the rationale, if they hadn't they couldn't compete. So, the more things go around they come around.

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) is a personal snapshot of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the community and during World War II from the perspective of working class families and the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. Clinton was a thriving industrial community on the banks of the Mississippi River with a population of 33,000 dedicated to and involved in the war effort. There was no television, no mega sports, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played baseball for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens where their front lawns once were, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bikes to work. It was a time when the four faces of the Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed every half hour, and therefore young people had no excuse not to be home in time for meals prepared from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in the Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather people often slept in Riverview Park, left windows of their homes open, and doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house unchained, and if they had a car, knowing neither stranger nor neighbor would disturb their possessions, left the keys in the car. In winter, schools never closed even when shoveled snow banks were four feet high. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too busy or tired to be involved. Clinton youngsters would never again know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality. There was no point in crying or running to mother if you weren't chosen. Kids learned to find their own alternatives. It was a different time with people of a different mindset and it has been lost to nostalgia.

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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) shows a remarkable repeat of the same sins, the same misadventures, the same false steps as were true in the 1970s, when this original essay was first written. Dr. Fisher shows how young people were forced to participate and die in an unpopular Vietnam War, a time when political upheaval was in the air, when corrupt politicians and change agents had lied and deceived the public with the Watergate fiasco, when drugs were ruining lives, when morality took a holiday, when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching, when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the country with the OPEC embargo, when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Dr. Fisher uses the device of a look backward because the indicators were all there that we were heading for trouble, a trouble that now consumes us at every level.

This is his body of work to date, which you can see is consistent with the theme of "cultural capital," which he pursues with unrelenting zeal.

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