OBAMA IS NOT YET A MAJOR LEAGUER: THE PRESIDENT AFTER A YEAR IN OFFICE -- HE STILL CAN’T HIT THE CURVE BALL!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 28, 2010
* * *
When I was a boy living IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), also the name of one of my books, I had a friend, Bobby Witt, who was quite a baseball player and used the metaphor of baseball to explain things to me.
“Rube,” he would say which was my sobriquet, “you are a thinker who can’t hit the curve ball.” I had confessed to him one day that my dying father had said of his four children I was the one he worried most about, me being so different than he was.
“Your dad is talking about your weakness. You can’t hit the curve ball. He has scouted your weakness living with you all these years, and sees people throwing curve balls at you and you striking out again and again.
“If you want to make the majors, you’ll have to hit the curve ball. You want to be a writer. Well, readers are your curve ball. You love big words; big ideas and can throw them around with ease. People aren’t interested in big words or big ideas. People want to be entertained, to forget, not be reminded. I’m not sure you understand that.
“You have to cut down your swing, speed up your bat, not sit on your back leg, and bail out on the curve. Rube, you don’t get it. Readers want to escape thinking. They want to feel smart without being smart. Big ideas big thoughts will tank you every time.”
* * *
I was thinking about this advice I had from my best friend more than a half century ago as I attempted to assess President Barak Obama’s first year in office. He can’t hit the curve ball. He is doing everything that Bobby advised me not to do, and he is tanking. It is sad to say that it appears he doesn’t get it.
You can make the majors if you aren’t fast, have a poor arm and are a so-so fielder as long as you can hit the curve ball.
The curve ball is the metaphor for leadership.
Leadership is what Andrew Jackson showed.
Leadership is what Abraham Lincoln showed.
Leadership is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed. But presidents since, including John F. Kennedy, looked pretty at the plate but couldn’t hit the curve ball, and the United States of America has suffered for it, and continues to tank so badly against the opposition.
It is not too late for President Obama to learn how to hit the curve ball, but it means he can no longer hide behind soothing rhetoric, a facile mind, and looking good.
Jackson, Lincoln and Roosevelt were ugly by standards of our celebrity culture, and didn't look all that good at the plate, but they could sure hit the curve ball!
* * *
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
OVERWHELEMED AND LOST IN THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™
OVERWHELEMED AND LOST IN THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim -
A Don Quixote moment; a Socratic Academy moment; a Walter Mitty moment.
I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and one son lives on Capitol Hill.
(He works at the Library of Congress, no less.)
I once had the responsibility (at Bellcore, now Telcordia)
To support the creation of a new applications architecture
For the worldwide mesh of telecommunications capabilities.
My experience there was that the vocabulary of the applications space
Became a roadblock.
It seems to me that the Member of Congress have trod on their individual and
collective cranks (political correctness be damned) over just such a conundrum.
The character of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) reflects this "in spades",
Not to say "doubled, redoubled, and vulnerable".
The resolution of the short-haul and long haul telecom carriers back in the 80s is just one example.
Would it be plausible to establish an academy on Capitol Hill focused on?
Forwarding the cause of truth and transparency?
It might have a subcurrent of Legislators' Anonymous.
Your thoughts. ...
Norman
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Norman,
I am taken by your reference in this piece to Don Quixote, who was fencing against windmills, Socrates, whose academy should be committed to history, and Walter Mitty, who lives in his imagination finding the real world too formidable to enter much less contemplate.
In a curious way, you have hit on the theme of a mutual friend of ours in his book "The New Plague" (1985) by William L. Livingston, which relates to organizations in the postmodern world unable to cope much less deal appropriately with the challenges of the times. It is why I created THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™.
* * *
It has happened before. Western Society has often been overwhelmed because of its inability to recognize or deal with its own toxicity.
It happened in the fifth century when the Visigoths sacked Rome.
It happened at the end of the "Dark Age" in the sixteenth century when modernity was born.
It happened again in the nineteenth century when post modernity was coming into view.
It is happening now when complexity to quote Livingston "exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal."
We think the Electronic Age is our salvation when it is only part of the problem. It is part of the problem because it fails to address our real problem. Simple? Yes, but only too true.
We have opted for entertainment when reality is too stultifying. The fact that the human race is now using drones instead of bows and arrows to fight its wars is no improvement on the status of man.
Reality is too daunting so we live in the pixel world of "Avatar," which incidentally has far more significance in identifying our times than a mere entertaining film.
We are a failed society, not just the United States of America, but also the entire Western World. We are programmed to fail because we live in an invisible world unaware of what is imprisoning us to our status.
A fish lives in the invisible world of water not knowing what or who is polluting its existence.
Our invisible world is culture and it is our culture that is toxic. The origin of that toxicity is hubris and folly of man, who keeps creating "things," applauding himself while making him increasingly irrelevant to his ambience, the invisible world that surrounds him, his culture.
There is no need to go into the specifics of this because you are an architect of one of the irrelevancies. Einstein could see where he was architect of another when atomic energy and nuclear power became the gunpowder of the postmodern era. Technology is not a solution when it exacerbates the underlying problem, which is how we think.
I have written a book, not subtle, not esoteric, but designed to inch us out of this sick world, this toxicity called CONFIDENT THINKING. It cannot find a publisher.
You see, Norman, our failure is that Socratic thinking still dominates and Socratic thinking is anachronistic in most instances.
(1) Socratic thinking has failed because it is not appropriate for most of the problems we face. It is inadequate to deal with change because it does not offer creative and constructive designs forward but instead propagates forward inertia.
(2) Socratic thinking has failed because it forces us to look at the world in harmful rather than helpful ways. It is obsessed with dangerous judgments and discriminations, which tend to make things worse (as in Congress and its politics). No nation or institution is the center of the universe but only one of its many stars. Post modernity is forcing us to realize this.
(3) Socratic thinking has failed because it encourages complacency and is geared to defending itself and to reify what is already known but is no longer appropriate. This prevents seeing the extent of its failure retreating into defensive arrogance.
(4) Socratic thinking has failed because its purpose is to solve problems with critical thinking, or with what is already known. We have to get beyond logic and rational thinking to consider complex interactive systems and how we can design a realistic approach to our problems within such frameworks.
That means getting beyond thinking in terms of process only and entertaining perception, valuing subjective thinking as complement to objective analysis, seeing the critical worth of ideas over simply reams of information, valuing creativity over deduction, and yes, encouraging provocative thinking over excessive analysis.
It is possible to describe something and propose a prescription to deal with the described problem without ever dealing with or understanding the underlying perturbation.
(5) Socratic thinking has failed because it sets out "to discover" the true definitions of its perturbations such as "justice." Your justice is not my justice, just as your freedom is not my freedom. Your truth is not my truth. It is the main problem of religion and philosophy that looks for the universal paradigm or system when no such animal exits.
(6) Socratic thinking has failed because it looks to develop "ideal norms" or rules that will apply to all when that is never the case. Isaiah Berlin has taught us that pluralism not relativism is the essence of humanity.
(7) Socratic thinking has failed because you can't build a society much less a civilization on discovery, and we are an obsessively oriented society of this genre.
(8) Socratic thinking has failed because its emphasis, indeed, its total dedication is to analysis and evaluation instead of design and creativity.
I know this brief description leaves you up in the air but I must get back to my novel. I am getting older by the minute and I would like to finish it while I am still able.
The last several years I have dedicated myself to explaining how Western thinking has failed because of its complacent arrogance, which prevents it from getting inside the extent of its failures. I have limited this to a primary focus on the complex organization writing several books on the subject, not to mention hundreds of articles, while always thinking in the context of what I have said here.
It is interesting that you suggest an academy that focuses on forwarding the cause of truth and transparency.
I was or am a founding member of an incipient think tank called THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. It has fizzled out because of internal jockeying, conventional thinking, and an inability to entertain creative thought.
You see the problem is not forwarding the cause of truth because truth cannot be discovered. It must be created, and the creation may defy every single tenet of what is now currently established as "truth."
As to transparency, how can there be transparency when we fail to recognize the culture is toxic, that we are swimming in this toxicity, and the culture must be radically restructured, indeed, reinvented for our survival?
My fear is that conventional thinking and wisdom will not disappear until the modern Visigoths invade and destroy everything that is now precious to us as they did some 1500 years ago.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim -
A Don Quixote moment; a Socratic Academy moment; a Walter Mitty moment.
I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and one son lives on Capitol Hill.
(He works at the Library of Congress, no less.)
I once had the responsibility (at Bellcore, now Telcordia)
To support the creation of a new applications architecture
For the worldwide mesh of telecommunications capabilities.
My experience there was that the vocabulary of the applications space
Became a roadblock.
It seems to me that the Member of Congress have trod on their individual and
collective cranks (political correctness be damned) over just such a conundrum.
The character of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) reflects this "in spades",
Not to say "doubled, redoubled, and vulnerable".
The resolution of the short-haul and long haul telecom carriers back in the 80s is just one example.
Would it be plausible to establish an academy on Capitol Hill focused on?
Forwarding the cause of truth and transparency?
It might have a subcurrent of Legislators' Anonymous.
Your thoughts. ...
Norman
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Norman,
I am taken by your reference in this piece to Don Quixote, who was fencing against windmills, Socrates, whose academy should be committed to history, and Walter Mitty, who lives in his imagination finding the real world too formidable to enter much less contemplate.
In a curious way, you have hit on the theme of a mutual friend of ours in his book "The New Plague" (1985) by William L. Livingston, which relates to organizations in the postmodern world unable to cope much less deal appropriately with the challenges of the times. It is why I created THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™.
* * *
It has happened before. Western Society has often been overwhelmed because of its inability to recognize or deal with its own toxicity.
It happened in the fifth century when the Visigoths sacked Rome.
It happened at the end of the "Dark Age" in the sixteenth century when modernity was born.
It happened again in the nineteenth century when post modernity was coming into view.
It is happening now when complexity to quote Livingston "exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal."
We think the Electronic Age is our salvation when it is only part of the problem. It is part of the problem because it fails to address our real problem. Simple? Yes, but only too true.
We have opted for entertainment when reality is too stultifying. The fact that the human race is now using drones instead of bows and arrows to fight its wars is no improvement on the status of man.
Reality is too daunting so we live in the pixel world of "Avatar," which incidentally has far more significance in identifying our times than a mere entertaining film.
We are a failed society, not just the United States of America, but also the entire Western World. We are programmed to fail because we live in an invisible world unaware of what is imprisoning us to our status.
A fish lives in the invisible world of water not knowing what or who is polluting its existence.
Our invisible world is culture and it is our culture that is toxic. The origin of that toxicity is hubris and folly of man, who keeps creating "things," applauding himself while making him increasingly irrelevant to his ambience, the invisible world that surrounds him, his culture.
There is no need to go into the specifics of this because you are an architect of one of the irrelevancies. Einstein could see where he was architect of another when atomic energy and nuclear power became the gunpowder of the postmodern era. Technology is not a solution when it exacerbates the underlying problem, which is how we think.
I have written a book, not subtle, not esoteric, but designed to inch us out of this sick world, this toxicity called CONFIDENT THINKING. It cannot find a publisher.
You see, Norman, our failure is that Socratic thinking still dominates and Socratic thinking is anachronistic in most instances.
(1) Socratic thinking has failed because it is not appropriate for most of the problems we face. It is inadequate to deal with change because it does not offer creative and constructive designs forward but instead propagates forward inertia.
(2) Socratic thinking has failed because it forces us to look at the world in harmful rather than helpful ways. It is obsessed with dangerous judgments and discriminations, which tend to make things worse (as in Congress and its politics). No nation or institution is the center of the universe but only one of its many stars. Post modernity is forcing us to realize this.
(3) Socratic thinking has failed because it encourages complacency and is geared to defending itself and to reify what is already known but is no longer appropriate. This prevents seeing the extent of its failure retreating into defensive arrogance.
(4) Socratic thinking has failed because its purpose is to solve problems with critical thinking, or with what is already known. We have to get beyond logic and rational thinking to consider complex interactive systems and how we can design a realistic approach to our problems within such frameworks.
That means getting beyond thinking in terms of process only and entertaining perception, valuing subjective thinking as complement to objective analysis, seeing the critical worth of ideas over simply reams of information, valuing creativity over deduction, and yes, encouraging provocative thinking over excessive analysis.
It is possible to describe something and propose a prescription to deal with the described problem without ever dealing with or understanding the underlying perturbation.
(5) Socratic thinking has failed because it sets out "to discover" the true definitions of its perturbations such as "justice." Your justice is not my justice, just as your freedom is not my freedom. Your truth is not my truth. It is the main problem of religion and philosophy that looks for the universal paradigm or system when no such animal exits.
(6) Socratic thinking has failed because it looks to develop "ideal norms" or rules that will apply to all when that is never the case. Isaiah Berlin has taught us that pluralism not relativism is the essence of humanity.
(7) Socratic thinking has failed because you can't build a society much less a civilization on discovery, and we are an obsessively oriented society of this genre.
(8) Socratic thinking has failed because its emphasis, indeed, its total dedication is to analysis and evaluation instead of design and creativity.
I know this brief description leaves you up in the air but I must get back to my novel. I am getting older by the minute and I would like to finish it while I am still able.
The last several years I have dedicated myself to explaining how Western thinking has failed because of its complacent arrogance, which prevents it from getting inside the extent of its failures. I have limited this to a primary focus on the complex organization writing several books on the subject, not to mention hundreds of articles, while always thinking in the context of what I have said here.
It is interesting that you suggest an academy that focuses on forwarding the cause of truth and transparency.
I was or am a founding member of an incipient think tank called THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. It has fizzled out because of internal jockeying, conventional thinking, and an inability to entertain creative thought.
You see the problem is not forwarding the cause of truth because truth cannot be discovered. It must be created, and the creation may defy every single tenet of what is now currently established as "truth."
As to transparency, how can there be transparency when we fail to recognize the culture is toxic, that we are swimming in this toxicity, and the culture must be radically restructured, indeed, reinvented for our survival?
My fear is that conventional thinking and wisdom will not disappear until the modern Visigoths invade and destroy everything that is now precious to us as they did some 1500 years ago.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
Saturday, January 23, 2010
FAHRENHEIT 451 by RAY BRADBURY -- A REVIEW!
FAHRENHEIT 451 by RAY BRADBURY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 23, 2010
* * *
Ray Bradbury published this novel in 1953 after WWII. The world was entering the “Cold War” period between the West, mainly the United States and capitalism, and the East, the Soviet Union and communism. It was not a shooting war as much as it was a period of massive build up of military arsenals on both sides with the threat of worldwide nuclear confrontation and WWIII.
It was in this climate that Bradbury wrote his book thinking, as it turned out correctly, that the world was descending into a forty year stalemate in which irrationality might take over with someone setting off a nuclear holocaust.
He thought, and again I say correctly, that Americans, indeed, citizens of the world were so tuned into their own tastes and compunctions that they were oblivious to any possible upset of this tradition.
The novel presents a future American society that is into senseless self-indulgence and oblivious to the fact that critical thought and book reading is outlawed. That is the central theme of the book, and the reason it was written – to shock the reading audience awake to the dangers or possible dangers in the future if they took their liberty and pursuit of happiness for granted.
THE CHARACTERS
Guy Montag is a fireman, firemen are trained to put out fires and protect material (i.e., “things”) combustibles, whereas the police are trained to serve and protect and control personal combustibles (i.e., “people”).
The number “451 degrees Fahrenheit” refers to the temperature at which book paper will burn.
Nothing is straightforward in this novel so you have to be on the alert. For example, Guy Montag burns books instead of protecting books from being burned. If you happen to have read “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess you will see he has the criminals becoming the police to dramatize his point of the evolution of corruption.
“Fahrenheit 451”) is known as a dystopian novel, which is a pessimistic view of the future, whereas the famous novel of Sir Thomas More “Utopia” is an optimistic view of an ideal society. .
Bradbury wrote this book as the Cold War and threatening conflict with Soviet Union was heating up. What he feared most, and what he was writing about in this science fiction treatment of the idea was the danger of censorship.
He was saying in 1953 that television was destroying interest in reading, in literature, in ideas, and by doing so it was analogous to “burning books.” He could see how the State was manipulating the masses to conform to its dictates, and he wasn’t eliminating the United States from this comparison.
In this Information Age, a similar threat is upon us with the symbolic burning of books by the sheer volume of information which is often silly, redundant, inconsequential, repetitive and simply irrelevant. Often it promotes horror stories with the drumbeat of the last days of cable news programs. These programs discourage rational engagement, problem solving, creative thinking, which is dealing with what is not known but can be found out, spinning instead around the fabric of critical thinking, which only deals with what is known, discouraging embracing what is not known.
We have become a society imprisoned in crisis management solving problems in the main that we have created by our failure to anticipate and deal with issues before they become of a crisis magnitude. We stay the same miss the changes and let the future up for grabs. This may sound like a digression but it is precisely what Bradbury was trying to communicate. He anticipated the era of the electronic universe with Facebook, texting, and all the rest while the world collapses into forward inertia.
THE PLOT.
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a time much like the 1990s when this entire electronic mumble jumble was being created. The unspecified time is one in which pleasure is the diet of choice, making money, and looking down on intellectuals while losing self-control and surrendering to self-indulgent.
America is out of control. Crime is rampant. Teenagers do as they please without consequences. They crash cars into people. And fireman for the hell of it having nothing to do at fire stations except set their mechanical hounds to hunt animals and then watch them die.
Anyone caught reading a book is sent to an asylum while firemen burn the books.
Then there is Clarisse McClellan who Montag meets. Clarisse is the exact opposite of the fireman. He is a free thinker, an idealist, who questions the status quo. He asks why. Such a man can’t survive. He is hit by a car and killed.
Montag’s wife, Mildred, overdoses. The medics treat her so inhumanly that the fireman starts to rethink and reevaluate his lot in life.
Montag accidentally comes across a book and reads a line, “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” This prompts him to steal the book. The owner of the books burns herself alive rather than leave her books when they catch fire. This disturbs Montag.
Here you see his awareness is surfacing from the shock of his wife and then the old lady with all her book who chose martyrdom to giving them up.
He takes sick leave, fights with his superiors and wife who still remained programmed in the repressive system. Montag goes on to steal many books.
Then there is Faber, the English professor, who Montag seeks. Montag learns from the books they discuss about life, literature, and how books play a part in explaining human existence.
Eventually, Montag’s fire captain Beatty goes to his house to burn his books, claiming he knew all along about his secret reading. Montag flees to Faber’s house, and by this time you’re well into the book. The rest is a surprise and so I’ll leave it at that.
“Fahrenheit 451” is as relevant to day as it was more than a half century ago. Read it and weep.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 23, 2010
* * *
Ray Bradbury published this novel in 1953 after WWII. The world was entering the “Cold War” period between the West, mainly the United States and capitalism, and the East, the Soviet Union and communism. It was not a shooting war as much as it was a period of massive build up of military arsenals on both sides with the threat of worldwide nuclear confrontation and WWIII.
It was in this climate that Bradbury wrote his book thinking, as it turned out correctly, that the world was descending into a forty year stalemate in which irrationality might take over with someone setting off a nuclear holocaust.
He thought, and again I say correctly, that Americans, indeed, citizens of the world were so tuned into their own tastes and compunctions that they were oblivious to any possible upset of this tradition.
The novel presents a future American society that is into senseless self-indulgence and oblivious to the fact that critical thought and book reading is outlawed. That is the central theme of the book, and the reason it was written – to shock the reading audience awake to the dangers or possible dangers in the future if they took their liberty and pursuit of happiness for granted.
THE CHARACTERS
Guy Montag is a fireman, firemen are trained to put out fires and protect material (i.e., “things”) combustibles, whereas the police are trained to serve and protect and control personal combustibles (i.e., “people”).
The number “451 degrees Fahrenheit” refers to the temperature at which book paper will burn.
Nothing is straightforward in this novel so you have to be on the alert. For example, Guy Montag burns books instead of protecting books from being burned. If you happen to have read “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess you will see he has the criminals becoming the police to dramatize his point of the evolution of corruption.
“Fahrenheit 451”) is known as a dystopian novel, which is a pessimistic view of the future, whereas the famous novel of Sir Thomas More “Utopia” is an optimistic view of an ideal society. .
Bradbury wrote this book as the Cold War and threatening conflict with Soviet Union was heating up. What he feared most, and what he was writing about in this science fiction treatment of the idea was the danger of censorship.
He was saying in 1953 that television was destroying interest in reading, in literature, in ideas, and by doing so it was analogous to “burning books.” He could see how the State was manipulating the masses to conform to its dictates, and he wasn’t eliminating the United States from this comparison.
In this Information Age, a similar threat is upon us with the symbolic burning of books by the sheer volume of information which is often silly, redundant, inconsequential, repetitive and simply irrelevant. Often it promotes horror stories with the drumbeat of the last days of cable news programs. These programs discourage rational engagement, problem solving, creative thinking, which is dealing with what is not known but can be found out, spinning instead around the fabric of critical thinking, which only deals with what is known, discouraging embracing what is not known.
We have become a society imprisoned in crisis management solving problems in the main that we have created by our failure to anticipate and deal with issues before they become of a crisis magnitude. We stay the same miss the changes and let the future up for grabs. This may sound like a digression but it is precisely what Bradbury was trying to communicate. He anticipated the era of the electronic universe with Facebook, texting, and all the rest while the world collapses into forward inertia.
THE PLOT.
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a time much like the 1990s when this entire electronic mumble jumble was being created. The unspecified time is one in which pleasure is the diet of choice, making money, and looking down on intellectuals while losing self-control and surrendering to self-indulgent.
America is out of control. Crime is rampant. Teenagers do as they please without consequences. They crash cars into people. And fireman for the hell of it having nothing to do at fire stations except set their mechanical hounds to hunt animals and then watch them die.
Anyone caught reading a book is sent to an asylum while firemen burn the books.
Then there is Clarisse McClellan who Montag meets. Clarisse is the exact opposite of the fireman. He is a free thinker, an idealist, who questions the status quo. He asks why. Such a man can’t survive. He is hit by a car and killed.
Montag’s wife, Mildred, overdoses. The medics treat her so inhumanly that the fireman starts to rethink and reevaluate his lot in life.
Montag accidentally comes across a book and reads a line, “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” This prompts him to steal the book. The owner of the books burns herself alive rather than leave her books when they catch fire. This disturbs Montag.
Here you see his awareness is surfacing from the shock of his wife and then the old lady with all her book who chose martyrdom to giving them up.
He takes sick leave, fights with his superiors and wife who still remained programmed in the repressive system. Montag goes on to steal many books.
Then there is Faber, the English professor, who Montag seeks. Montag learns from the books they discuss about life, literature, and how books play a part in explaining human existence.
Eventually, Montag’s fire captain Beatty goes to his house to burn his books, claiming he knew all along about his secret reading. Montag flees to Faber’s house, and by this time you’re well into the book. The rest is a surprise and so I’ll leave it at that.
“Fahrenheit 451” is as relevant to day as it was more than a half century ago. Read it and weep.
* * *
Friday, January 22, 2010
COLLAPSE -- WE SHOULDN'T BE SURPRISED BY THE SHAPE WE'RE IN!
COLLAPSE – WE SHOULDN’T BE SURPRISED BY THE SHAPE WE’RE IN!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
© January 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
Forty-two years ago we didn’t have the technology we have today. Forty-two years ago we occupied a world that was already slipping away. We lived in a cloud of psychedelic dreams in 1968 and now we live in a cloud of electronic wizardry. We have a $14 trillion debt, which increases $1 trillion every year. The all-time best grossing picture will likely be “Avatar,” a pixel creation to challenge an acid trip forty-two years ago. We didn’t like reality forty-two years ago and we don’t like it any better forty-two years later. Our youth spend on average according to the latest studies seven hours a day on some electronic contraption. They know a lot but consequently understand little. We have made more progress in brain biology, chemistry and genetics in the past five years than in the previous half-century. Yet, love and hate, which make the world go around are as much a mystery to us today as they ever were.
* * *
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
* * *
Early in 1968 before going to South Africa, I was invited by my employer, Nalco Chemical Company to speak in San Francisco at a Regional Meeting.
In the course of that visit, I went to Golden Gate State Park, and Haight Asbury.
Here I was young, successful, working close to seven days a week traveling across the United States, Europe and South America, and I come across literally scores of young people my age doing absolutely nothing, wearing tie-dyed clothes hair down to their waists -- men as well as women -- smoking something that smelled like burnt rope, a smell I had never encountered before.
If this were not remarkable enough, my cab driver asked me, "Do you want me to take you to a college sex club, cab fare is free if you do." I answered, "What in the world for?" He tossed his hands in the air, "Had to ask."
* * *
My audience at the Regional Meeting was people like myself, young and energetic, but who couldn't grasp what I was saying.
You see they wanted to know why I had been so successful, what my formula was. They wanted a simple step process to reach my numbers, when all I could tell them was this:
"Once I realized the problem was not the buyer but the seller, my sensors exploded and I found I could read buyers where they were that moment, not before or after, but right then. That point forward we were on the same side of the desk working together."
I also told them that I took copious notes after each call, which I later typed with schematic diagrams of the plants, operating systems, and offices as I remembered them, and what they told me about the buyer and his operations. If there were handout booklets of the company history in the lobby, I read them and annotated them with my notes.
In the calm of my study or motel room, looking at these notes and memos, I would profile the person and the place for developing a strategy. I would use this on my next call with a major and minor goal for that call. I did this religiously despite how hectic my schedule might be. I told them it was a practice that got me a Phi Beta Kappa key in college, and a nice income now.
I had not read selling book, knew little or nothing about psychology, but was inclined to be introspective and to notice things that others were apparently inclined to miss.
I told the group that the buyer is crying out in so many ways to tell the seller precisely where he is and how he is and why he is that way. All the buyer wants is a sympathetic and understanding audience, which you, the seller can be. And just possibly, you may have what he needs but not necessarily what he wants.
The selling comes in persuading him to want what he needs. The barrier to this penetration is the difference between his expectations and what is possible; between his pocketbook and the relative costs, in other words, between needs and wants.
When I got through, they complained almost in unison, "That sounds complicated," when it was the antithesis of complexity. It might be hard work at first, I said, but the dividends are real. They weren’t convinced. They wanted a “how to” approach when I am not a “how to” man.
What I was saying and what they were unprepared to grasp is:
(1) It is more important to listen than to talk.
(2) It is more important to sell what the buyer needs and can afford than to sell the buyer what he is willing to buy but does not need and cannot afford.
* * *
If you sell “need,” it will augur better for the buyer and seller in the long run.
They thought it heresy when I admitted what they had heard was true, that is, that I had recommended a competitor’s system to ours because it was a better fit. "We don't cooperate with competitors," they almost shouted, "what does the word competition mean to you, anyway?"
“What it means to me,” I said, “is to serve the customer.” I left it at that, as I knew there was no point in mentioning “at all cost.”
Nor did I mention what I wrote about in one of my books.
Nalco did not make feeding equipment except very primitive slug by-pass feeders. This was neither economical nor effective chemical treatment. I found a positive displacement pump manufacturer whose pumping equipment was the best in the industry, and also the most expensive. My hardest selling job was persuading the buyers to buy these pumps when we gave ours away free. All my customers eventually had these pumps.
One night I got a call in my home, and the pump seller asked, "What split do you expect from my commissions on these pump sales? You've sold more pumps for me this month than I did myself."
I answered, "I just want the pumps to keep working as effectively as they have," and hung up. I kept selling the pumps and never heard from him again.
Many of you weren't born by 1968, but I've felt that in that particular year things started to unravel.
Young people were full of themselves and used the Vietnam War to justify being irresponsible. Many of these rebels such as Abbie Hoffman (1936 - 1989) are now long dead having burned the candle at both ends.
Subsequent generations have followed their lead as the Hippies, Yuppies, Generation X and Y, and the "Me" generation.
When they have had no other choice but to grow up, at least a little, they didn't find it necessary to combine this with ethics and emotional maturity.
We find them today in jobs in real estate, Wall Street, and other occupations where "they were entitled," and used scams and questionable practices selling homes, insurance, real estate and credit cards, cooking the books, and of course many of them eventually found their way unto Mahogany Row, and into brokerage houses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and elected offices as well as lobbyists, and jobs in industry and commerce, education and the church to continue their slate of hand tricks.
What do you think fueled the electronic age? It was people who didn’t want to work but preferred messing around making electronic toys. Eric Hoffer correctly noted that all things start first with playthings, and then they become forms of work, but not the other way around. It is my wish that these tools that are still treated as toys eventually augment society rather than dictate its character. Meanwhile, we should not be surprised at all with the mess we are in.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008
© January 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
Forty-two years ago we didn’t have the technology we have today. Forty-two years ago we occupied a world that was already slipping away. We lived in a cloud of psychedelic dreams in 1968 and now we live in a cloud of electronic wizardry. We have a $14 trillion debt, which increases $1 trillion every year. The all-time best grossing picture will likely be “Avatar,” a pixel creation to challenge an acid trip forty-two years ago. We didn’t like reality forty-two years ago and we don’t like it any better forty-two years later. Our youth spend on average according to the latest studies seven hours a day on some electronic contraption. They know a lot but consequently understand little. We have made more progress in brain biology, chemistry and genetics in the past five years than in the previous half-century. Yet, love and hate, which make the world go around are as much a mystery to us today as they ever were.
* * *
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
* * *
Early in 1968 before going to South Africa, I was invited by my employer, Nalco Chemical Company to speak in San Francisco at a Regional Meeting.
In the course of that visit, I went to Golden Gate State Park, and Haight Asbury.
Here I was young, successful, working close to seven days a week traveling across the United States, Europe and South America, and I come across literally scores of young people my age doing absolutely nothing, wearing tie-dyed clothes hair down to their waists -- men as well as women -- smoking something that smelled like burnt rope, a smell I had never encountered before.
If this were not remarkable enough, my cab driver asked me, "Do you want me to take you to a college sex club, cab fare is free if you do." I answered, "What in the world for?" He tossed his hands in the air, "Had to ask."
* * *
My audience at the Regional Meeting was people like myself, young and energetic, but who couldn't grasp what I was saying.
You see they wanted to know why I had been so successful, what my formula was. They wanted a simple step process to reach my numbers, when all I could tell them was this:
"Once I realized the problem was not the buyer but the seller, my sensors exploded and I found I could read buyers where they were that moment, not before or after, but right then. That point forward we were on the same side of the desk working together."
I also told them that I took copious notes after each call, which I later typed with schematic diagrams of the plants, operating systems, and offices as I remembered them, and what they told me about the buyer and his operations. If there were handout booklets of the company history in the lobby, I read them and annotated them with my notes.
In the calm of my study or motel room, looking at these notes and memos, I would profile the person and the place for developing a strategy. I would use this on my next call with a major and minor goal for that call. I did this religiously despite how hectic my schedule might be. I told them it was a practice that got me a Phi Beta Kappa key in college, and a nice income now.
I had not read selling book, knew little or nothing about psychology, but was inclined to be introspective and to notice things that others were apparently inclined to miss.
I told the group that the buyer is crying out in so many ways to tell the seller precisely where he is and how he is and why he is that way. All the buyer wants is a sympathetic and understanding audience, which you, the seller can be. And just possibly, you may have what he needs but not necessarily what he wants.
The selling comes in persuading him to want what he needs. The barrier to this penetration is the difference between his expectations and what is possible; between his pocketbook and the relative costs, in other words, between needs and wants.
When I got through, they complained almost in unison, "That sounds complicated," when it was the antithesis of complexity. It might be hard work at first, I said, but the dividends are real. They weren’t convinced. They wanted a “how to” approach when I am not a “how to” man.
What I was saying and what they were unprepared to grasp is:
(1) It is more important to listen than to talk.
(2) It is more important to sell what the buyer needs and can afford than to sell the buyer what he is willing to buy but does not need and cannot afford.
* * *
If you sell “need,” it will augur better for the buyer and seller in the long run.
They thought it heresy when I admitted what they had heard was true, that is, that I had recommended a competitor’s system to ours because it was a better fit. "We don't cooperate with competitors," they almost shouted, "what does the word competition mean to you, anyway?"
“What it means to me,” I said, “is to serve the customer.” I left it at that, as I knew there was no point in mentioning “at all cost.”
Nor did I mention what I wrote about in one of my books.
Nalco did not make feeding equipment except very primitive slug by-pass feeders. This was neither economical nor effective chemical treatment. I found a positive displacement pump manufacturer whose pumping equipment was the best in the industry, and also the most expensive. My hardest selling job was persuading the buyers to buy these pumps when we gave ours away free. All my customers eventually had these pumps.
One night I got a call in my home, and the pump seller asked, "What split do you expect from my commissions on these pump sales? You've sold more pumps for me this month than I did myself."
I answered, "I just want the pumps to keep working as effectively as they have," and hung up. I kept selling the pumps and never heard from him again.
Many of you weren't born by 1968, but I've felt that in that particular year things started to unravel.
Young people were full of themselves and used the Vietnam War to justify being irresponsible. Many of these rebels such as Abbie Hoffman (1936 - 1989) are now long dead having burned the candle at both ends.
Subsequent generations have followed their lead as the Hippies, Yuppies, Generation X and Y, and the "Me" generation.
When they have had no other choice but to grow up, at least a little, they didn't find it necessary to combine this with ethics and emotional maturity.
We find them today in jobs in real estate, Wall Street, and other occupations where "they were entitled," and used scams and questionable practices selling homes, insurance, real estate and credit cards, cooking the books, and of course many of them eventually found their way unto Mahogany Row, and into brokerage houses, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and elected offices as well as lobbyists, and jobs in industry and commerce, education and the church to continue their slate of hand tricks.
What do you think fueled the electronic age? It was people who didn’t want to work but preferred messing around making electronic toys. Eric Hoffer correctly noted that all things start first with playthings, and then they become forms of work, but not the other way around. It is my wish that these tools that are still treated as toys eventually augment society rather than dictate its character. Meanwhile, we should not be surprised at all with the mess we are in.
* * *
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
CREATIVE SELLING!
CREATIVE SELLING!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 13, 2010
CONFIDENT IS SELF-CONTROL
I have had the good fortune to look back on a long and productive life in which many things have gone my way. I do this without conceit but with a sense of sharing what is possible if you believe in yourself in a self-aware, self-reliant, self-accepting, and self-directing way, a way in which what you do is to your benefit rather than detriment. After all, you are all you have in the final analysis, as you come in alone and you leave alone. No one, absolutely no one has a right to disrespect you, including yourself.
It has been my experience that there are two motors operating within our consciousness. One is self-creation and the other is self-destruction.
Chances are we are always somewhere between these two extremes, vacillating back and forth, often losing precious energy going nowhere. You cannot be in control and confident if you are always trying to please others at the expense of pleasing yourself, or doing what others think is best for you finding little time to pursue what you would prefer. If you don’t know whether you are afoot or horseback, coming or going, between a rock and a hard place, or on the horns of dilemma, someone else is managing your life, you surely aren’t.
Confidence is a self-control mechanism that comes into play to put the mind in concert with the will so that self-creation triumphs over self-destruction. No stage more dramatically presents this conflict than in selling.
THE THEATRE OF COOPERATION
The “theatre of cooperation” is the theatre of life, not only those with selling careers, but for everyone. All of us are dedicated to giving value added status to whatever our endeavors might be. This theatre is a special place. That is why this book has been prepared for a twenty-first century audience.
In this theatre, you determine whether you are the buyer or the seller, whether you have something to share as the seller or something you need as the buyer. It is this theatre that determines whether you are going to give or receive something worthwhile, or are going to be imprisoned in a second-hand, second-rate life in which someone else does all the buying and selling for you. I am thinking of the media for one and the Internet for another. There is no substitute for selling and buying in the flesh on a first-hand, first-rate basis. Then the opinions you have are self-generated and not manufactured for your consumption. In any case, it is a quid pro quo theatre.
Now, in the theatre of selling, you are going to encounter a certain number of people who are bent on seeing you fail rather than succeed. They believe there is not enough room for everyone to be successful when there is always more than enough room.
A person needs to define the situation clearly and manage its nuances sensibly to cope in this theatre.
I learned this the hard way. Married, with a young family, working as a chemist in research and development with Standard Brands, Inc., a food processing company, operating in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, the prospects were not good with a bachelor’s degree. So, I considered graduate school, being granted a fellowship to an eastern university. One has weaknesses as well as strengths. I was good at manipulating chemical symbols, but a bust in the laboratory. My quest for further training in chemistry had to be away from the laboratory and toward teaching or theoretical research. Knowing this was not a problem because the better we know ourselves the better we tend to know and understand others, and the less likely they can manipulate us away from our strengths.
An examination of my finances made it clear that I had to supplement this stipend in order to assume the fellowship. I checked CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS for job opportunities, and one stuck out. It pictured a field test kit with positions for chemical sales engineers. I interviewed and was hired by Nalco Chemical Company. It seemed not too far a jump from the lab into the field.
Not knowing anything about selling or fieldwork, I discovered quickly that my natural tendency to be direct was a handicap. I also learned that it was not my nature to be devious, or political. Nor was I concerned about collateral damage to sensitive egos.
After extensive technical training in Chicago at the company’s headquarters, I was shipped off to Indianapolis, Indiana. There, I traveled the first month with the area manager. At the end of this period, he asked me what I had learned. Like the chemist I had been, and having had an analytical disposition, I answered him bluntly.
In my critique, I referenced the fact he never asked for a single order; that calls appeared social calls with us mainly spinning our wheels. Looking at my notes, I mentioned that he never inquired about what problems they were having, or how we could help. Instead, he had a set spiel about the company’s technical leadership and its commitment to research and development, even including the self-congratulations of our having the best-trained field engineers in the business. This, I added, made some of our contacts squirm uncomfortably.
The following Monday I came to the office with only the area and district manager present. They sat there behind adjoining desks with stone faces as if high priests of the Inquisition. I shivered as I entered knowing this was not good.
With somber nods, they motioned for me to sit, which I did on a chair in front of them. Then they proceeded to tell me I was not cut out for fieldwork, not temperamentally suited to sales, too insensitive to other people’s feelings. It was clearly a shock because I had passed the psychiatric interview, psychology tests, and executive interviews without sounding alarm bells. “Do you know we hire only one of every two hundred interviewed?” I failed to see the point, sat there passively, and didn’t even shrug my shoulders.
The district manager said I should look for another job, taking a long drag on his cigarette, adding magnanimously, “We are giving you some marginal accounts to service; you can upgrade them if so inclined, and call on competitor accounts in the area.” Then waxing serious again, laid down the gauntlet. “After two months, if you’ve not acquired another position, we’ll have no other option but to let you go.”
This put me in something of a swoon. I collected the service accounts, a map designating my area of operation, samples of literature, and expense account report forms. Then the stone faces told me without a word I should exit immediately.
I had a wife and two small children, with another on the way; cut off from the security of the laboratory with no job prospects on the horizon, and little chance of supplementing my fellowship with sufficient funds to assume it. I was in survival mode.
My first thought was masochistic, as I felt somehow relieved. Failure was a new experience. I went to a bar, and I don’t drink. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and the bar was full of customers, which I found curious. I ordered a Seven-Up, and got a look from the bartender that resembled the stone faces I had just left. I nursed the drink with my eyes downcast, which must have telegraphed understanding for no one disturbed me.
Once outside the bar, I didn’t return to my car, but went for a walk that must have been four or five miles because I didn’t return for nearly an hour and a half. I was trying to decide what I was going to tell my wife when I got home. And as is my nature, I chose to tell her nothing.
Instead, I went about scheduling my service calls, and studying the product literature. These were not very profitable accounts, and had been neglected. Not surprisingly, they were glad to see me. It also proved possible to service them from early in the morning until late at night across the state, as many operated around the clock, seven days a week. Twelve hour days became routine, and unexpectedly, enjoyable.
Engineers were anxious to discuss problems they were having, and how our products performed or failed to perform. They proved able teachers as they familiarized me with complex mechanical systems from a practical operational point of view. My training was strong on theory but weak on application, so this proved invaluable.
I would sit with operators in the power plant, the control room of the air conditioning system, or stand with them on the deck of a cooling tower and discuss operating problems. We were partners. I found I had a facility to explain chemical technology simply and to draw meaningful schematics of systems that made my customers attentive students.
This mutual enrichment made each call an anticipated event. Chronic problems were located and dealt with as we found some of my products improved and others worsened conditions because they were poorly applied. One of the early findings was that dosage control was poor.
Chemicals were being fed through bypass feeders that resulted in mechanical surges of chemical dosage, which made control difficult. Needed were electrical positive displacement pumps that could feed chemicals at the prescribed dosage on a continuous basis. Once the equipment was installed, operations improved dramatically.
My first real selling experience was selling a product we didn’t produce, positive displacement pumps. I surveyed the literature on pumps, and came to recommend a certain company’s product, showing my customers how this would improve their operations, reduce downtime, save costs of chemicals, and advance overall efficiency.
So successful was I in selling these pumps that I got a call one day from a manufacturer’s representative. He wanted to know how much commission I expected from the selling of the pumps. This floored me, as this never entered my mind. I answered my concern was for controlled chemical feed, and nothing more. He thought I was putting him on, but I insisted. Thus a colleague in another company came to complement my work. He was the first of many through the years.
My very first sales calls sticks in memory, largely because it wasn’t a prospect, but a milk distribution center. I noted the large semis coming in, and thought they must have scale and corrosion problems, not thinking of my chemicals being contaminants; actually, not thinking at all. I wanted to get beyond my nervousness.
I gave a hurried sales presentation to the manager of this center. Afterward, he explained he could not use me, and then added, “Can I make a suggestion?” I said yes, confessing I was new to selling. “Don’t ever lose your openness. It is refreshing. I’m telling you this as someone who just met you. You’re not here to barrel me over, but to help me. That is clear, but as I explained, that is not possible.”
My lack of selling sophistication was common in a company that had a three-year technical sales training program in which no one was expected to sell before the end of that period. Here I was out making sales calls after a month on the job. I was out of my depth on that proverbial plank about to have it sawed off behind me. I had no choice but to find my own way.
FORCED ON A FAST TRACK FOR SURVIVAL
It may seem strange but during those first two months on my own I never turned on the television in my motel, never did anything but prepare for the next day. I came to develop matrixes in an attempt to understand the nuances of the sales calls. I commenced to notice that there was a consistency between the way I was greeted and treated at the reception desk, and beyond.
I also noted that everyone carries their geography with them no matter who they are. Work areas were not even subtle in reflection of this geography; nor were the manners, language and thought processes of those contacted. It was as if everyone was trying to tell me who and what they were if I would only listen. This was taken in and recalled later, often with surprising insight.
No matter how insignificant or troubling the call had been I would write down briefly what I had experienced after the call. I created notebook after notebook about these observations, which I would review periodically to glean some insight into my approach.
Another thing, I became a student of my competitors’ products and services. I gained a sense of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as I learned of the strengths and weaknesses of my company’s products and services.
In that first two-month period, I devised a plan of minor and major objectives for each call, feeling that I was not ready for the major objective, or the order, but that I should diagram it as if I were.
A routine was established in which I planned two calls each day on competitor accounts during business hours because I could make two or three calls after business hours on my own accounts.
A schematic was developed of competitors: how long with the account; frequency of service; and sense of satisfaction. I even checked to see how often my company called on these competitor accounts. To my surprise, I found companies that had been with competitors for up to ten years hadn’t seen someone from my company in a year; more than ten years, no calls at all, not even courtesy calls. As much as that astonished me, I knew there was little point in sharing it with my management.
Increasingly, it became apparent: selling was the most natural of enterprises, but sellers and buyers often had a low opinion of the process. I wondered why. I had never done anything that was more refreshing and satisfying, nor had I ever experienced such freedom or invigorating contact.
One day, after a terrible call in which I felt insulted by a customer, I got my dander up and walked out of his office in a huff. It was an ill-advised move as the person contacted my company and I nearly lost my two-month cushion before being terminated.
Fortunately for me, it blew over and I learned a great deal. I learned: “the sales call was not all about me, but the problem of selling was.” A light turned on that would ultimately lead to CONFIDENT SELLING, as I became a student of the profession, not only of the how, but the why of selling as well, which is all about CONFIDENT THINKING.
During that first two-month period until the time of my first retirement ten years later, I learned from my mistakes. That learning can be reduced to a statement:
“I (seller) must accept myself as I am, and others as I find them.” And a corollary to that statement: “If I am capable of doing this, I will be self-aware, self-reliant, self-directed and self-assertive because there will be no false gods in my path.”
Once I came to that realization, I saw the problem was not selling to another, but my selling myself on my value to another.
I saw I was the only barrier to my success, not someone else. It wasn’t the resistance of another that I had to overcome but my own resistance to my worthiness to be the vehicle to someone else’s success, and thus to my own.
From that epiphany, things started to break for me.
I called on accounts that had been with competitors from anywhere from ten to twenty-five years and amazing things started to happen. Before the two-months were up, I was the leading seller in a seven-man district sales force of veteran sales engineers. I had sold the largest account that had been sold in the district in the last ten years. It was an account that had been with a competitor longer than that period. I continued to sell, so much so that the formula of compensation had to be changed, or I would be making more than the veterans.
Within a year on the job, word spread about my success, and I was invited to speak at regional sales meetings to share my “magic” formula. There was no magic formula. I wasn’t quite sure what it was because I lacked a sales vocabulary to describe my success. It was in reading selling books that I found they had it all wrong, leastwise in my case.
This presented another problem. My approach was intuitive and conceptual rather than mechanical and manipulative. I was reading the buyer and his needs and not riding shotgun hoping to hit something with a blitzkrieg approach.
There was psychology and sociology to my approach, yet, at that time, I had not been a student of either discipline. I was a reader of novels, and novels are about people in human situations attempting to cope with life’s complexities. Novelist Somerset Maugham claims novels are only for entertainment not edification. Yet novels did help me gain insight into real people in real situations.
Typically, engineers scoff at the idea of reading fiction, preferring nonfiction technical books. As my methodology came clearer to me, knowing this, I put it in a format that would match as much as possible the way my colleagues preferred to think.
SERENDIPITY
This did not escape senior management. Nalco was a small chemical company in an ambitious international growth mode. They were looking for ways to be more effective sellers throughout the world. The word spread of my work first in Indiana and then Kentucky. People were sent to travel with me to observe my selling approach, which was to take technical selling problems and reduce them to people perception problems.
As a seller, I saw myself as a problem solver with the buyer as my partner. This unique orientation led to confident selling and thinking. The serendipity of this approach found me rising from a field technical sales manager to a line executive in international operations for Nalco Chemical Company, working in South America, Europe and South Africa. It was after South Africa, only in my mid-thirties, that I retired and wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). Forty years later, CREATIVE SELLING and CONFIDENT THINKING now follow, two highly original works, which are testimony to what can be accomplished when we (1) are our own best friend; (2) accept ourselves as we are, and (3) deal with others as we find them. It has worked wonders for me. To that end I wish you well, and hope that this helps change not only your career, but your perspective on life as well.
* * * * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 13, 2010
CONFIDENT IS SELF-CONTROL
I have had the good fortune to look back on a long and productive life in which many things have gone my way. I do this without conceit but with a sense of sharing what is possible if you believe in yourself in a self-aware, self-reliant, self-accepting, and self-directing way, a way in which what you do is to your benefit rather than detriment. After all, you are all you have in the final analysis, as you come in alone and you leave alone. No one, absolutely no one has a right to disrespect you, including yourself.
It has been my experience that there are two motors operating within our consciousness. One is self-creation and the other is self-destruction.
Chances are we are always somewhere between these two extremes, vacillating back and forth, often losing precious energy going nowhere. You cannot be in control and confident if you are always trying to please others at the expense of pleasing yourself, or doing what others think is best for you finding little time to pursue what you would prefer. If you don’t know whether you are afoot or horseback, coming or going, between a rock and a hard place, or on the horns of dilemma, someone else is managing your life, you surely aren’t.
Confidence is a self-control mechanism that comes into play to put the mind in concert with the will so that self-creation triumphs over self-destruction. No stage more dramatically presents this conflict than in selling.
THE THEATRE OF COOPERATION
The “theatre of cooperation” is the theatre of life, not only those with selling careers, but for everyone. All of us are dedicated to giving value added status to whatever our endeavors might be. This theatre is a special place. That is why this book has been prepared for a twenty-first century audience.
In this theatre, you determine whether you are the buyer or the seller, whether you have something to share as the seller or something you need as the buyer. It is this theatre that determines whether you are going to give or receive something worthwhile, or are going to be imprisoned in a second-hand, second-rate life in which someone else does all the buying and selling for you. I am thinking of the media for one and the Internet for another. There is no substitute for selling and buying in the flesh on a first-hand, first-rate basis. Then the opinions you have are self-generated and not manufactured for your consumption. In any case, it is a quid pro quo theatre.
Now, in the theatre of selling, you are going to encounter a certain number of people who are bent on seeing you fail rather than succeed. They believe there is not enough room for everyone to be successful when there is always more than enough room.
A person needs to define the situation clearly and manage its nuances sensibly to cope in this theatre.
I learned this the hard way. Married, with a young family, working as a chemist in research and development with Standard Brands, Inc., a food processing company, operating in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, the prospects were not good with a bachelor’s degree. So, I considered graduate school, being granted a fellowship to an eastern university. One has weaknesses as well as strengths. I was good at manipulating chemical symbols, but a bust in the laboratory. My quest for further training in chemistry had to be away from the laboratory and toward teaching or theoretical research. Knowing this was not a problem because the better we know ourselves the better we tend to know and understand others, and the less likely they can manipulate us away from our strengths.
An examination of my finances made it clear that I had to supplement this stipend in order to assume the fellowship. I checked CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS for job opportunities, and one stuck out. It pictured a field test kit with positions for chemical sales engineers. I interviewed and was hired by Nalco Chemical Company. It seemed not too far a jump from the lab into the field.
Not knowing anything about selling or fieldwork, I discovered quickly that my natural tendency to be direct was a handicap. I also learned that it was not my nature to be devious, or political. Nor was I concerned about collateral damage to sensitive egos.
After extensive technical training in Chicago at the company’s headquarters, I was shipped off to Indianapolis, Indiana. There, I traveled the first month with the area manager. At the end of this period, he asked me what I had learned. Like the chemist I had been, and having had an analytical disposition, I answered him bluntly.
In my critique, I referenced the fact he never asked for a single order; that calls appeared social calls with us mainly spinning our wheels. Looking at my notes, I mentioned that he never inquired about what problems they were having, or how we could help. Instead, he had a set spiel about the company’s technical leadership and its commitment to research and development, even including the self-congratulations of our having the best-trained field engineers in the business. This, I added, made some of our contacts squirm uncomfortably.
The following Monday I came to the office with only the area and district manager present. They sat there behind adjoining desks with stone faces as if high priests of the Inquisition. I shivered as I entered knowing this was not good.
With somber nods, they motioned for me to sit, which I did on a chair in front of them. Then they proceeded to tell me I was not cut out for fieldwork, not temperamentally suited to sales, too insensitive to other people’s feelings. It was clearly a shock because I had passed the psychiatric interview, psychology tests, and executive interviews without sounding alarm bells. “Do you know we hire only one of every two hundred interviewed?” I failed to see the point, sat there passively, and didn’t even shrug my shoulders.
The district manager said I should look for another job, taking a long drag on his cigarette, adding magnanimously, “We are giving you some marginal accounts to service; you can upgrade them if so inclined, and call on competitor accounts in the area.” Then waxing serious again, laid down the gauntlet. “After two months, if you’ve not acquired another position, we’ll have no other option but to let you go.”
This put me in something of a swoon. I collected the service accounts, a map designating my area of operation, samples of literature, and expense account report forms. Then the stone faces told me without a word I should exit immediately.
I had a wife and two small children, with another on the way; cut off from the security of the laboratory with no job prospects on the horizon, and little chance of supplementing my fellowship with sufficient funds to assume it. I was in survival mode.
My first thought was masochistic, as I felt somehow relieved. Failure was a new experience. I went to a bar, and I don’t drink. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and the bar was full of customers, which I found curious. I ordered a Seven-Up, and got a look from the bartender that resembled the stone faces I had just left. I nursed the drink with my eyes downcast, which must have telegraphed understanding for no one disturbed me.
Once outside the bar, I didn’t return to my car, but went for a walk that must have been four or five miles because I didn’t return for nearly an hour and a half. I was trying to decide what I was going to tell my wife when I got home. And as is my nature, I chose to tell her nothing.
Instead, I went about scheduling my service calls, and studying the product literature. These were not very profitable accounts, and had been neglected. Not surprisingly, they were glad to see me. It also proved possible to service them from early in the morning until late at night across the state, as many operated around the clock, seven days a week. Twelve hour days became routine, and unexpectedly, enjoyable.
Engineers were anxious to discuss problems they were having, and how our products performed or failed to perform. They proved able teachers as they familiarized me with complex mechanical systems from a practical operational point of view. My training was strong on theory but weak on application, so this proved invaluable.
I would sit with operators in the power plant, the control room of the air conditioning system, or stand with them on the deck of a cooling tower and discuss operating problems. We were partners. I found I had a facility to explain chemical technology simply and to draw meaningful schematics of systems that made my customers attentive students.
This mutual enrichment made each call an anticipated event. Chronic problems were located and dealt with as we found some of my products improved and others worsened conditions because they were poorly applied. One of the early findings was that dosage control was poor.
Chemicals were being fed through bypass feeders that resulted in mechanical surges of chemical dosage, which made control difficult. Needed were electrical positive displacement pumps that could feed chemicals at the prescribed dosage on a continuous basis. Once the equipment was installed, operations improved dramatically.
My first real selling experience was selling a product we didn’t produce, positive displacement pumps. I surveyed the literature on pumps, and came to recommend a certain company’s product, showing my customers how this would improve their operations, reduce downtime, save costs of chemicals, and advance overall efficiency.
So successful was I in selling these pumps that I got a call one day from a manufacturer’s representative. He wanted to know how much commission I expected from the selling of the pumps. This floored me, as this never entered my mind. I answered my concern was for controlled chemical feed, and nothing more. He thought I was putting him on, but I insisted. Thus a colleague in another company came to complement my work. He was the first of many through the years.
My very first sales calls sticks in memory, largely because it wasn’t a prospect, but a milk distribution center. I noted the large semis coming in, and thought they must have scale and corrosion problems, not thinking of my chemicals being contaminants; actually, not thinking at all. I wanted to get beyond my nervousness.
I gave a hurried sales presentation to the manager of this center. Afterward, he explained he could not use me, and then added, “Can I make a suggestion?” I said yes, confessing I was new to selling. “Don’t ever lose your openness. It is refreshing. I’m telling you this as someone who just met you. You’re not here to barrel me over, but to help me. That is clear, but as I explained, that is not possible.”
My lack of selling sophistication was common in a company that had a three-year technical sales training program in which no one was expected to sell before the end of that period. Here I was out making sales calls after a month on the job. I was out of my depth on that proverbial plank about to have it sawed off behind me. I had no choice but to find my own way.
FORCED ON A FAST TRACK FOR SURVIVAL
It may seem strange but during those first two months on my own I never turned on the television in my motel, never did anything but prepare for the next day. I came to develop matrixes in an attempt to understand the nuances of the sales calls. I commenced to notice that there was a consistency between the way I was greeted and treated at the reception desk, and beyond.
I also noted that everyone carries their geography with them no matter who they are. Work areas were not even subtle in reflection of this geography; nor were the manners, language and thought processes of those contacted. It was as if everyone was trying to tell me who and what they were if I would only listen. This was taken in and recalled later, often with surprising insight.
No matter how insignificant or troubling the call had been I would write down briefly what I had experienced after the call. I created notebook after notebook about these observations, which I would review periodically to glean some insight into my approach.
Another thing, I became a student of my competitors’ products and services. I gained a sense of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as I learned of the strengths and weaknesses of my company’s products and services.
In that first two-month period, I devised a plan of minor and major objectives for each call, feeling that I was not ready for the major objective, or the order, but that I should diagram it as if I were.
A routine was established in which I planned two calls each day on competitor accounts during business hours because I could make two or three calls after business hours on my own accounts.
A schematic was developed of competitors: how long with the account; frequency of service; and sense of satisfaction. I even checked to see how often my company called on these competitor accounts. To my surprise, I found companies that had been with competitors for up to ten years hadn’t seen someone from my company in a year; more than ten years, no calls at all, not even courtesy calls. As much as that astonished me, I knew there was little point in sharing it with my management.
Increasingly, it became apparent: selling was the most natural of enterprises, but sellers and buyers often had a low opinion of the process. I wondered why. I had never done anything that was more refreshing and satisfying, nor had I ever experienced such freedom or invigorating contact.
One day, after a terrible call in which I felt insulted by a customer, I got my dander up and walked out of his office in a huff. It was an ill-advised move as the person contacted my company and I nearly lost my two-month cushion before being terminated.
Fortunately for me, it blew over and I learned a great deal. I learned: “the sales call was not all about me, but the problem of selling was.” A light turned on that would ultimately lead to CONFIDENT SELLING, as I became a student of the profession, not only of the how, but the why of selling as well, which is all about CONFIDENT THINKING.
During that first two-month period until the time of my first retirement ten years later, I learned from my mistakes. That learning can be reduced to a statement:
“I (seller) must accept myself as I am, and others as I find them.” And a corollary to that statement: “If I am capable of doing this, I will be self-aware, self-reliant, self-directed and self-assertive because there will be no false gods in my path.”
Once I came to that realization, I saw the problem was not selling to another, but my selling myself on my value to another.
I saw I was the only barrier to my success, not someone else. It wasn’t the resistance of another that I had to overcome but my own resistance to my worthiness to be the vehicle to someone else’s success, and thus to my own.
From that epiphany, things started to break for me.
I called on accounts that had been with competitors from anywhere from ten to twenty-five years and amazing things started to happen. Before the two-months were up, I was the leading seller in a seven-man district sales force of veteran sales engineers. I had sold the largest account that had been sold in the district in the last ten years. It was an account that had been with a competitor longer than that period. I continued to sell, so much so that the formula of compensation had to be changed, or I would be making more than the veterans.
Within a year on the job, word spread about my success, and I was invited to speak at regional sales meetings to share my “magic” formula. There was no magic formula. I wasn’t quite sure what it was because I lacked a sales vocabulary to describe my success. It was in reading selling books that I found they had it all wrong, leastwise in my case.
This presented another problem. My approach was intuitive and conceptual rather than mechanical and manipulative. I was reading the buyer and his needs and not riding shotgun hoping to hit something with a blitzkrieg approach.
There was psychology and sociology to my approach, yet, at that time, I had not been a student of either discipline. I was a reader of novels, and novels are about people in human situations attempting to cope with life’s complexities. Novelist Somerset Maugham claims novels are only for entertainment not edification. Yet novels did help me gain insight into real people in real situations.
Typically, engineers scoff at the idea of reading fiction, preferring nonfiction technical books. As my methodology came clearer to me, knowing this, I put it in a format that would match as much as possible the way my colleagues preferred to think.
SERENDIPITY
This did not escape senior management. Nalco was a small chemical company in an ambitious international growth mode. They were looking for ways to be more effective sellers throughout the world. The word spread of my work first in Indiana and then Kentucky. People were sent to travel with me to observe my selling approach, which was to take technical selling problems and reduce them to people perception problems.
As a seller, I saw myself as a problem solver with the buyer as my partner. This unique orientation led to confident selling and thinking. The serendipity of this approach found me rising from a field technical sales manager to a line executive in international operations for Nalco Chemical Company, working in South America, Europe and South Africa. It was after South Africa, only in my mid-thirties, that I retired and wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). Forty years later, CREATIVE SELLING and CONFIDENT THINKING now follow, two highly original works, which are testimony to what can be accomplished when we (1) are our own best friend; (2) accept ourselves as we are, and (3) deal with others as we find them. It has worked wonders for me. To that end I wish you well, and hope that this helps change not only your career, but your perspective on life as well.
* * * * * * * *
CONFIDENT THINKING
CONFIDENT THINKING
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 13, 2010
“All grand thoughts come from the heart.”
Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747), French moral philosopher
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from my book CONFIDENT THINKING soon to be published.
* * * * * *
CONFIDENT THINKING CONFIRMED
Throughout this book, you are introduced to yourself in terms the power of your emotions. We are increasingly moving into a comfort level with the bicameral mind or the mind that is emotional as well as rational, a mind that thinks intuitively as well as doggedly deterministically. The latest confirmation of the power of emotions is Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” (2009), which is a book about how the brain works.
Lehrer makes a systematic study of how the brain functions and makes decision. He takes issue with neuroscientists who focused almost exclusively on the rational brain paying little homage to the emotional brain. What he does in this book, which is comprehensible to the layman, is make the reader conscious of his brain. He makes you aware, in other words, that you are processing information as you are reading, primarily using the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
He argues throughout the book that most assumptions made about the brain by philosophers and writers of the past were faulty. They championed rational thought as the desired goal, trumping our emotions that lead us astray. He considers that unfortunate as some of our best decisions come through our emotional brain.
As I have attempted to do here, Lehrer also uses examples from life to illustrate how powerful feelings, or the nature of those feelings can be in our decision-making. We have the expression in sport that the person “choked,” meaning the pressure got too great and the person “lost it.” Jean Van de Velde choked on the final hole of the 1999 British Open largely because he started to think too much about his swing. The same thing happened to opera star Renee Fleming who began to flub songs when she started wondering if she could hit the proper note, something she had done a thousand times before. Professional athletes know this only too well.
It can also happen to a group. The Tampa Bay Bucs, of the National Football League, were 9 and 3 going into the last month of the season. Three of their final four games were at home against only one team with a winning record. Yet, they lost all four games. They were expecting to win the divisions championship, to get a first round bye in the playoffs, and have home field advantage throughout with a good chance of making the Super Bowl, which was being played in Tampa in February 2009. What happened?
The legendary defensive coach and coordinator Monty Kiffin announced he was leaving to join his son, Lane Kiffin, who was to be the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. The Bucs, known for their defense, and the reason for their success, collapsed defensively the month of December 2008. They missed the playoffs entirely. This led to the firing of head coach Jon Gruden and general manager George Allen.
Confidence went out of the team once it became emotionally preoccupied with defending how “we’re all professionals” taking coach Kiffin’s departure “in stride.” The evidence suggested otherwise. Kiffin was tantamount to their surrogate father as well as leader. Yet they argued passionately that they would not lose their edge, but they did. Lehrer would say they spent too much time thinking about not losing it.
Research has shown that once the brain knows how to do something, the best thing is to stop obsessing and let the brain and body take over and do their work. My own life is riddled with episodes of this being true.
Once I was taking a calculus final in university. I was a bit of grind, meaning I studied my ass off for every course. The calculus examinations were passed out, and I read the first question, then the second question, and then the third. By that time, I was in a state of total panic – I had no idea how to start much less complete the questions. I was hyperventilating, my hands were clammy, and I had broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was about to faint.
I had long known, long before the good professor had written “How We Decide,” that I was emotional, and couldn’t handle stress well. That was the reason I prepared so thoroughly. It was the only way I could relax, could have confidence that I would do well. My insecurity welled up in me as I thought for sure I had blown it.
Then I did something that was masochistic, something without thinking. I jammed my pencil into the back of my left hand, breaking off the tip. My hand was bleeding. I wrapped my handkerchief around it, raised my hand, and asked for another pencil. A calm fell over me. I looked back at my test, and as if by magic, everything appeared clear, not only clear, but elementary. I raced through the exam, set the curve, and have remembered that episode all my life. Those who read me know that I don’t back away from declarative statements, or from the composition of my peculiar emotional motor.
If there is a central theme to all my works it is to pay attention to your feelings. Our feelings are the result of years of the programming of our brains in how to respond to certain situations. The brain makes instantaneous computations of which we are not aware or for which we have placed barriers to deny, and always at our disadvantage.
The neural transmitter (dopamine) stimulates the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. This can happen after strenuous exercise, listening to music that resonates with us, eating a favorite food, or watching our beloved sport’s team come through in victory. Unfortunately, dopamine is what addictive drugs activate. It triggers a massive release of the neurotransmitter that overwhelms the brain with ecstasy. Dopamine produces more than feelings of happiness. It assists in regulating our emotions from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. Put otherwise, there are no such things as good or bad emotions. What is unfortunate is to deny the emotions or fail to be aware of what triggers them and why.
Dopamine is at the ready to stimulate whichever part of the brain that your brain feels should be stimulated. This is another way of saying the instinctual feelings you have for a situation kick in. On the other hand, we can become slaves to our emotions and addicted to “feeling good” so that we don’t accept and move naturally with the random fluctuations inevitable in a life of ups and downs.
People have been known to make a great deal of money, and then to become obsessed with making more, taking inordinate risks denying the chronic downs that accompany the occasional ups. We have seen this with day traders on the stock market, chronic gamblers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others.
Lehrer also delves into the limits of the brain, a subject covered by author, inventor William L. Livingston in “Friends in High Places” (1990) and “Have Fun At Work” (1988). Scientists confirm what Livingston has uncovered in his research in our problem solving. That is the maximum number of issues one brain can consider at the same time is limited. This explains why so many of us are overwhelmed when we are distracted by a much larger number of issues than our minds can handle on a daily basis. Here is what Livingston has to say on the subject:
“There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to Hell.” (Have Fun At Work, p. 32).
“Problems are systems moving in a trajectory shaped by the force field of natural law. Problem systems are as coherent as natural law itself. The stuff sloshing around in the human cranium masquerading as solutions, however, is sterile and incoherent. Until the magic of human genius assembles elements into a system married to a problem system, there is no such thing as a solution candidate. Solutions only obtain coherency by being wed to problems. When vocabulary is limited to solution-speak, communication is incoherent.” (Friends In High Places, p. 98)
“Life is complicated. Like it or not, the substance of life is deceptively intricate. The bulk of things we take for granted are labyrinthine, non-linear and beyond causal understanding. Bid farewell to the trivialization of rules. The threshold of problem solving competence is accepting reality for what it is --- the passage of a complication through Nature’s flux. All substitutes for this perspective precipitate failure.” (Ibid, p 184)
Lehrer confirms what others have referenced more empirically such as Livingston and that is the computation powers and limits to the brain.
He then goes on to provide evidence of how food can affect our thinking. He writes of an experiment regarding a “sugar fix” given to students drinking sugar rich lemonade. It stimulated the prefrontal cortex (where rational thinking occurs) resulting in students being more successful in problem solving than those not getting the sugar fix. This may be counterintuitive to what you have been told about sugar making children hyperactive. This research, he claims, explains why we get cranky when we’re hungry and tired. The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. “A bad mood,” he insists, “is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.”
PROBLEM SOLVING WITHOUT CONFIDENT THINKING IN THE MIX
It is a small leap from we are what we eat to we are what we think. Confident Thinking, given its powers and limitations, breaks temporarily free of these, if only occasionally, when we engaged in thinking creatively. Livingston insists that the problems we solve are not necessarily the problems we face, but the problems we feel confident we can solve. No surprise, problems not addressed eventually gang up on us, and cause such troubles as the global economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, or personal collapse such as a mental-physical breakdown in us individually.
We are familiar and comfortable with critical thinking, or rational thinking in terms of what is already known. But as Einstein has pointed out we are unlikely to be able to solve a problem with the same thinking that was its cause. That takes creative thinking, which engages the emotional as well as the rational ordering centers of the brain, and considers what is not known but can be found out.
It is my view that creative thinking has been on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to explore and discover by embracing the unknown, not regurgitating the “right answer.” We have moved as an enlightened society beyond the reiterative tests of critical thinking that dominate our textbooks. The word “education” after all means to “to lead forth,” not to retreat back. Simply regurgitating information is not education, at least, not in the twenty-first century.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses?
If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities? Are our schools that poor that the student has to cheat to look good because these crib courses can be called a lot of things but obtaining an artificial edge is cheating is it not?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect there is something to this. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects not causes.
In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
There are exceptions to this rule. Educator Melvin Freestone has created a tactical program, “Thinking for Understanding” (2007), which deals systematically with what is advocated here. Freestone gets inside issues discussed in Confident Thinking, and reveals a strategy for multi-layered thinking, intentions for thinking, and processes for thinking, all in order to establish thinking and understanding. He moves out of the mechanics of conventional thinking to bring out the imagination to think conceptually, creatively and aggressively. It would be a good beginning to embrace his ideas as they deal with the cause of our dilemma, false programming.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 13, 2010
“All grand thoughts come from the heart.”
Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747), French moral philosopher
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from my book CONFIDENT THINKING soon to be published.
* * * * * *
CONFIDENT THINKING CONFIRMED
Throughout this book, you are introduced to yourself in terms the power of your emotions. We are increasingly moving into a comfort level with the bicameral mind or the mind that is emotional as well as rational, a mind that thinks intuitively as well as doggedly deterministically. The latest confirmation of the power of emotions is Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” (2009), which is a book about how the brain works.
Lehrer makes a systematic study of how the brain functions and makes decision. He takes issue with neuroscientists who focused almost exclusively on the rational brain paying little homage to the emotional brain. What he does in this book, which is comprehensible to the layman, is make the reader conscious of his brain. He makes you aware, in other words, that you are processing information as you are reading, primarily using the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
He argues throughout the book that most assumptions made about the brain by philosophers and writers of the past were faulty. They championed rational thought as the desired goal, trumping our emotions that lead us astray. He considers that unfortunate as some of our best decisions come through our emotional brain.
As I have attempted to do here, Lehrer also uses examples from life to illustrate how powerful feelings, or the nature of those feelings can be in our decision-making. We have the expression in sport that the person “choked,” meaning the pressure got too great and the person “lost it.” Jean Van de Velde choked on the final hole of the 1999 British Open largely because he started to think too much about his swing. The same thing happened to opera star Renee Fleming who began to flub songs when she started wondering if she could hit the proper note, something she had done a thousand times before. Professional athletes know this only too well.
It can also happen to a group. The Tampa Bay Bucs, of the National Football League, were 9 and 3 going into the last month of the season. Three of their final four games were at home against only one team with a winning record. Yet, they lost all four games. They were expecting to win the divisions championship, to get a first round bye in the playoffs, and have home field advantage throughout with a good chance of making the Super Bowl, which was being played in Tampa in February 2009. What happened?
The legendary defensive coach and coordinator Monty Kiffin announced he was leaving to join his son, Lane Kiffin, who was to be the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. The Bucs, known for their defense, and the reason for their success, collapsed defensively the month of December 2008. They missed the playoffs entirely. This led to the firing of head coach Jon Gruden and general manager George Allen.
Confidence went out of the team once it became emotionally preoccupied with defending how “we’re all professionals” taking coach Kiffin’s departure “in stride.” The evidence suggested otherwise. Kiffin was tantamount to their surrogate father as well as leader. Yet they argued passionately that they would not lose their edge, but they did. Lehrer would say they spent too much time thinking about not losing it.
Research has shown that once the brain knows how to do something, the best thing is to stop obsessing and let the brain and body take over and do their work. My own life is riddled with episodes of this being true.
Once I was taking a calculus final in university. I was a bit of grind, meaning I studied my ass off for every course. The calculus examinations were passed out, and I read the first question, then the second question, and then the third. By that time, I was in a state of total panic – I had no idea how to start much less complete the questions. I was hyperventilating, my hands were clammy, and I had broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was about to faint.
I had long known, long before the good professor had written “How We Decide,” that I was emotional, and couldn’t handle stress well. That was the reason I prepared so thoroughly. It was the only way I could relax, could have confidence that I would do well. My insecurity welled up in me as I thought for sure I had blown it.
Then I did something that was masochistic, something without thinking. I jammed my pencil into the back of my left hand, breaking off the tip. My hand was bleeding. I wrapped my handkerchief around it, raised my hand, and asked for another pencil. A calm fell over me. I looked back at my test, and as if by magic, everything appeared clear, not only clear, but elementary. I raced through the exam, set the curve, and have remembered that episode all my life. Those who read me know that I don’t back away from declarative statements, or from the composition of my peculiar emotional motor.
If there is a central theme to all my works it is to pay attention to your feelings. Our feelings are the result of years of the programming of our brains in how to respond to certain situations. The brain makes instantaneous computations of which we are not aware or for which we have placed barriers to deny, and always at our disadvantage.
The neural transmitter (dopamine) stimulates the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. This can happen after strenuous exercise, listening to music that resonates with us, eating a favorite food, or watching our beloved sport’s team come through in victory. Unfortunately, dopamine is what addictive drugs activate. It triggers a massive release of the neurotransmitter that overwhelms the brain with ecstasy. Dopamine produces more than feelings of happiness. It assists in regulating our emotions from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. Put otherwise, there are no such things as good or bad emotions. What is unfortunate is to deny the emotions or fail to be aware of what triggers them and why.
Dopamine is at the ready to stimulate whichever part of the brain that your brain feels should be stimulated. This is another way of saying the instinctual feelings you have for a situation kick in. On the other hand, we can become slaves to our emotions and addicted to “feeling good” so that we don’t accept and move naturally with the random fluctuations inevitable in a life of ups and downs.
People have been known to make a great deal of money, and then to become obsessed with making more, taking inordinate risks denying the chronic downs that accompany the occasional ups. We have seen this with day traders on the stock market, chronic gamblers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others.
Lehrer also delves into the limits of the brain, a subject covered by author, inventor William L. Livingston in “Friends in High Places” (1990) and “Have Fun At Work” (1988). Scientists confirm what Livingston has uncovered in his research in our problem solving. That is the maximum number of issues one brain can consider at the same time is limited. This explains why so many of us are overwhelmed when we are distracted by a much larger number of issues than our minds can handle on a daily basis. Here is what Livingston has to say on the subject:
“There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to Hell.” (Have Fun At Work, p. 32).
“Problems are systems moving in a trajectory shaped by the force field of natural law. Problem systems are as coherent as natural law itself. The stuff sloshing around in the human cranium masquerading as solutions, however, is sterile and incoherent. Until the magic of human genius assembles elements into a system married to a problem system, there is no such thing as a solution candidate. Solutions only obtain coherency by being wed to problems. When vocabulary is limited to solution-speak, communication is incoherent.” (Friends In High Places, p. 98)
“Life is complicated. Like it or not, the substance of life is deceptively intricate. The bulk of things we take for granted are labyrinthine, non-linear and beyond causal understanding. Bid farewell to the trivialization of rules. The threshold of problem solving competence is accepting reality for what it is --- the passage of a complication through Nature’s flux. All substitutes for this perspective precipitate failure.” (Ibid, p 184)
Lehrer confirms what others have referenced more empirically such as Livingston and that is the computation powers and limits to the brain.
He then goes on to provide evidence of how food can affect our thinking. He writes of an experiment regarding a “sugar fix” given to students drinking sugar rich lemonade. It stimulated the prefrontal cortex (where rational thinking occurs) resulting in students being more successful in problem solving than those not getting the sugar fix. This may be counterintuitive to what you have been told about sugar making children hyperactive. This research, he claims, explains why we get cranky when we’re hungry and tired. The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. “A bad mood,” he insists, “is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.”
PROBLEM SOLVING WITHOUT CONFIDENT THINKING IN THE MIX
It is a small leap from we are what we eat to we are what we think. Confident Thinking, given its powers and limitations, breaks temporarily free of these, if only occasionally, when we engaged in thinking creatively. Livingston insists that the problems we solve are not necessarily the problems we face, but the problems we feel confident we can solve. No surprise, problems not addressed eventually gang up on us, and cause such troubles as the global economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, or personal collapse such as a mental-physical breakdown in us individually.
We are familiar and comfortable with critical thinking, or rational thinking in terms of what is already known. But as Einstein has pointed out we are unlikely to be able to solve a problem with the same thinking that was its cause. That takes creative thinking, which engages the emotional as well as the rational ordering centers of the brain, and considers what is not known but can be found out.
It is my view that creative thinking has been on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to explore and discover by embracing the unknown, not regurgitating the “right answer.” We have moved as an enlightened society beyond the reiterative tests of critical thinking that dominate our textbooks. The word “education” after all means to “to lead forth,” not to retreat back. Simply regurgitating information is not education, at least, not in the twenty-first century.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses?
If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities? Are our schools that poor that the student has to cheat to look good because these crib courses can be called a lot of things but obtaining an artificial edge is cheating is it not?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect there is something to this. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects not causes.
In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
There are exceptions to this rule. Educator Melvin Freestone has created a tactical program, “Thinking for Understanding” (2007), which deals systematically with what is advocated here. Freestone gets inside issues discussed in Confident Thinking, and reveals a strategy for multi-layered thinking, intentions for thinking, and processes for thinking, all in order to establish thinking and understanding. He moves out of the mechanics of conventional thinking to bring out the imagination to think conceptually, creatively and aggressively. It would be a good beginning to embrace his ideas as they deal with the cause of our dilemma, false programming.
* * * * * *
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS – A READER COMMENTS!
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS – A READER COMMENTS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 12, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
You have hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Our political system works no better than our health care system. The "two party" system is just the party not in power against everything the party in power is for. This has been going on for decades and I, for one, am sick of it.
Perhaps we should throw out the party system and vote for people who "say" they are for particular ideas and ideals (although we will never know if they really believe what they say unless it is backed up by former votes).
Let people vote for whomever they wish in the "primaries" and let that be a way to winnow the candidates to 2 people to choose from with no party affiliation whatsoever. Yes, we are all bound by our regional upbringing and prejudices, but it is past time to look beyond what we are comfortable with and to what we truly needed to occur in our nation.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your comment. The problem I see with your suggestion is that we would invite further chaos, not less. As dysfunctional as you see Congress, it is still “our Congress!”
We, as voters, have put the 535 members of Congress into office. Do we really want to invite the chaos that is in French and Italian politics? I don’t think so.
The system is not the problem.
The problem is the general apathy of the eligible voting public.
When it is considered a good turnout when 50 percent of registered voters actually do vote, then we are likely to get the Congress we deserve.
I’ve spoken to people, some of them the most vociferous critics of past and present administrations, and I’ve asked an obvious question: “When was the last time you voted?” We “assume” critics are the first in line to vote. Not so.
Most recently I had a conversation with a person who is disgusted with the Obama Administration. I asked him that question. He replied proudly, “I’m not registered to vote. I’ve never voted.” Then seeing my disappointment, he added, “It doesn’t make any difference anyway, you still get the same bums elected to office.”
This nonvoter is now forty-seven. He doesn’t know it but he just opened the gates of totalitarianism a little wider for us all to slip through to a new kind of hell, make no mistake about it.
The onus is not on Congress, alone, but all of us who put Congressmen and Congresswomen into office. It is time we own up to that fact and do somethin about it.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 12, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
You have hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Our political system works no better than our health care system. The "two party" system is just the party not in power against everything the party in power is for. This has been going on for decades and I, for one, am sick of it.
Perhaps we should throw out the party system and vote for people who "say" they are for particular ideas and ideals (although we will never know if they really believe what they say unless it is backed up by former votes).
Let people vote for whomever they wish in the "primaries" and let that be a way to winnow the candidates to 2 people to choose from with no party affiliation whatsoever. Yes, we are all bound by our regional upbringing and prejudices, but it is past time to look beyond what we are comfortable with and to what we truly needed to occur in our nation.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your comment. The problem I see with your suggestion is that we would invite further chaos, not less. As dysfunctional as you see Congress, it is still “our Congress!”
We, as voters, have put the 535 members of Congress into office. Do we really want to invite the chaos that is in French and Italian politics? I don’t think so.
The system is not the problem.
The problem is the general apathy of the eligible voting public.
When it is considered a good turnout when 50 percent of registered voters actually do vote, then we are likely to get the Congress we deserve.
I’ve spoken to people, some of them the most vociferous critics of past and present administrations, and I’ve asked an obvious question: “When was the last time you voted?” We “assume” critics are the first in line to vote. Not so.
Most recently I had a conversation with a person who is disgusted with the Obama Administration. I asked him that question. He replied proudly, “I’m not registered to vote. I’ve never voted.” Then seeing my disappointment, he added, “It doesn’t make any difference anyway, you still get the same bums elected to office.”
This nonvoter is now forty-seven. He doesn’t know it but he just opened the gates of totalitarianism a little wider for us all to slip through to a new kind of hell, make no mistake about it.
The onus is not on Congress, alone, but all of us who put Congressmen and Congresswomen into office. It is time we own up to that fact and do somethin about it.
* * *
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and United States CONGRESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
January 12, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
It would be interesting to see the Fisher Paradigm in action, as it might be applied to the people's Congress of the U.S.A. for example. Or is that dysfunctional body just a product of idealism vs. pragmatism? Any OD-inspired suggestions?
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your response. Simple as The Fisher Paradigm©™ is, it is not our natural inclination to think in non-linear and irrational terms or to bridge the linear and rational towards a holistic perception.
We are programmed from birth to be elemental thinkers when all our behavior is controlled by systems. As a consequence, we behave in non-linear and irrational terms, while we are prone to deal with this behavior in linear and rational interventions. No one escapes this net.
The "rich and famous" are caught behaving irrationally because they are in the limelight, but we are all guilty of such behavior to a greater or lesser degree. We cannot separate ourselves from those that we would call "our idols," "our heroes," much less “our leaders.” Everyone is cut from the same stock.
* * *
We can take polls, develop psychometrics to check beliefs, attitudes and values, make assessments of organizations such as Congress, all in the interest of deriving a better appreciation of how things are, but always failing to reduce our frustration. The failure is to realize Congress is “us.”
In a way, you could say we are a conundrum and Congress reflects that mystery:
(1) We talk endlessly about change, but seek stability;
(2) We say we are up to the challenge, while busy defending the status quo;
(3) We support progress, but we have never left the past;
(4) We applaud humility, but are always attracted to the most arrogant of celebrities (Simon Cowell of American Idol);
(5) We have standards of performance in school, work, Congress and life but judge people and performance always in subjective terms;
(6) We don’t mind someone describing a problem but we are offended when that description is provocative and hits us where we live;
(7) We are externally organized by where we live, when we were born, where we were born and grew up, and what we eventually do in life.
(8) We are totally externally organized but feel a need to preach self-organizing concepts until we are blue in the face.
I could go on and will.
(9) We are in an Information Age that is bereft of ideas;
(10) We celebrate the deductive reasoning of scientists and Sherlock Holms' character, but there hasn’t been an original idea in any form since the beginning of the last century.
(11) We are dedicated to innovation, which is not creativity; it is just making what we already know, better;
(12) We have a mania for identifying trends but are controlled by the flow of non-trend things. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a powerful book on this proposition called simply, “Flow”(1990), which has been quickly ignored.
* * *
In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I said Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Congress wasn’t alone. We are Congress!
* * *
(13) We talk about “thinking outside the box” when we are constantly reifying and reinforcing the box to which there is apparently no escape.
(14) We are programmed in school and life to become critical thinkers, which is to think in terms of what we already know. We call it getting an “education.”
(15) We have little patience and less interest in creative thinking – what Einstein did – because we didn’t learn to do it in school and, besides, it means taking risks and considering what we don’t know but could find out.
* * *
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS
The Fisher Paradigm©™ takes note of these paradoxes. It does so only in the interest of throwing some light on our problems. Look at the Congress of the United States, 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators, and what do you see?
(1) PERSONALITY PROFILE:
Members of Congress are urbane, essentially extroverts, reasonably well educated, mostly lawyers, and have a modicum of the colloquial banner of their native states, when they want to use it, so can change the intonation to favor the dominant accent of their audience wherever they are.
The “acquired self,” which is the personality is something that they have been working on since grammar school, when they first campaigned for becoming a patrol boy, class monitor, or class representative.
Campaigners are what they are and what they do, and as a consequence, what you see is never what is there. They are actors on a stage in which the play they are in is life that affects us all.
Members of Congress learn never to tell the truth when a lie would be more efficacious, or say what they really think and mean because that is politically incorrect and can get them in hot water.
Vice President, Irishman Joseph Biden, knows this well. House Majority Leader Harry Reid has felt the whiplash himself of late. Reid got into trouble when he said he thought President Obama could get elected because “he was a light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Reid's comment is in a new book that will fly off the shelves. What he said everyone knows is true because as much as we like to preach we don’t have a bias the moment we say so we express it.
Notice Reid said he didn’t have a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Obama, like Kennedy and Nixon before him, is a consummate politician, and consummate politicians are never what you see. You only see the shadow of their personality and its inclination they want to show at the moment.
(2) GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE:
Member of Congress come from all parts of the nation from Hawaii to New York, from Alaska to California, from Minnesota to Florida but they dress alike, speak in the same tongue, and even think alike.
One of the great mysteries, geographically speaking in terms of “blue” and “red” states, is that we have a two-party system, Republicans and Democrats, who appear all to be in the same party.
We don’t have a two party system but a one-party system in which the party out of power has the role of being against everything even if it is for everything. Meanwhile, the party in power promotes everything even if it is against some things. For example:
(1) We have the “Obama War” in Afghanistan, a war that he abhors but promotes;
(2) We have Health Care Legislation that Republicans oppose that looks amazingly like the health care Republican John McCain advocated on the campaign trail.
This may seem odd, but this is quite appropriate in a one-party system playing the charade of a two-party Congress.
Should the Republicans become the majority in Congress, the roles will be reversed but with the same histrionics and stage performances.
We have lost our appetite for regional politicians. There are no more Andrew Jackson’s, no more Harry Truman’s. Our presidents since John F. Kennedy have come out of the stage casting offices of Hollywood.
Candidates have to be war heroes (Eisenhower), urbane (Kennedy), or consummate politicians (L. Johnson). Wouldn’t it be something if the “rogue,” politician, Sarah Palin, who is not urbane or educated beyond her dress size were to slip through the cracks and become president? It could happen! She is a frontier woman, and in your face politician like Andrew Jackson. What has happened before can happen again. It would be a break with the one-party system that has been in place all my lifetime.
(3) DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE:
Member of Congress are largely male (90 percent), largely white (90 percent), largely wealthy (80 percent), largely educated in prestigious schools (55 percent), largely lawyers (80 percent), largely over the age of 55 (80 percent), largely overweight (80 percent), largely white headed (90 percent) as if this is a requirement to look wise, largely Protestant (80 percent), largely from cities or metropolitan areas (80 percent), and largely in the pocket of lobbyists (100 percent).
Where they are most like us is in the range of their intelligence, which is very average. That includes John F. Kennedy, who was thought to be so brilliant, but didn’t have an I.Q. much different than George W. Bush. Look it up!
We don’t feel comfortable with people who appear smarter than we are. We are comfortable with people who sound like us, think like us, and value what we value, even though we know they probably don't. It's all a matter of performance. We give surprising high marks to performance. That is why television debates are so important.
Joseph Wambaugh said, “You get the kind of police department you deserve.” Does that extend to Congress? I think it does.
* * *
Cleverness is not wisdom. We like cleverness, and like to think of ourselves as clever. Congressmen are often clever but seldom wise.
Wisdom takes hard work; wisdom takes staying with a problem longer; wisdom takes failing frequently before succeeding; wisdom takes going against the grain of popular thought; wisdom takes being politically incorrect; wisdom takes getting beyond traditional thinking. I don’t think we are ready for wisdom.
We would prefer to criticize and complain about our two party system that is one party, and to keep reelecting the same clever people that reinforce this one-party concept.
You see we are the problem, and we can’t slough it off to the 535 members of Congress. We can't but we will, and that is the problem.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
January 12, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
It would be interesting to see the Fisher Paradigm in action, as it might be applied to the people's Congress of the U.S.A. for example. Or is that dysfunctional body just a product of idealism vs. pragmatism? Any OD-inspired suggestions?
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your response. Simple as The Fisher Paradigm©™ is, it is not our natural inclination to think in non-linear and irrational terms or to bridge the linear and rational towards a holistic perception.
We are programmed from birth to be elemental thinkers when all our behavior is controlled by systems. As a consequence, we behave in non-linear and irrational terms, while we are prone to deal with this behavior in linear and rational interventions. No one escapes this net.
The "rich and famous" are caught behaving irrationally because they are in the limelight, but we are all guilty of such behavior to a greater or lesser degree. We cannot separate ourselves from those that we would call "our idols," "our heroes," much less “our leaders.” Everyone is cut from the same stock.
* * *
We can take polls, develop psychometrics to check beliefs, attitudes and values, make assessments of organizations such as Congress, all in the interest of deriving a better appreciation of how things are, but always failing to reduce our frustration. The failure is to realize Congress is “us.”
In a way, you could say we are a conundrum and Congress reflects that mystery:
(1) We talk endlessly about change, but seek stability;
(2) We say we are up to the challenge, while busy defending the status quo;
(3) We support progress, but we have never left the past;
(4) We applaud humility, but are always attracted to the most arrogant of celebrities (Simon Cowell of American Idol);
(5) We have standards of performance in school, work, Congress and life but judge people and performance always in subjective terms;
(6) We don’t mind someone describing a problem but we are offended when that description is provocative and hits us where we live;
(7) We are externally organized by where we live, when we were born, where we were born and grew up, and what we eventually do in life.
(8) We are totally externally organized but feel a need to preach self-organizing concepts until we are blue in the face.
I could go on and will.
(9) We are in an Information Age that is bereft of ideas;
(10) We celebrate the deductive reasoning of scientists and Sherlock Holms' character, but there hasn’t been an original idea in any form since the beginning of the last century.
(11) We are dedicated to innovation, which is not creativity; it is just making what we already know, better;
(12) We have a mania for identifying trends but are controlled by the flow of non-trend things. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a powerful book on this proposition called simply, “Flow”(1990), which has been quickly ignored.
* * *
In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I said Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Congress wasn’t alone. We are Congress!
* * *
(13) We talk about “thinking outside the box” when we are constantly reifying and reinforcing the box to which there is apparently no escape.
(14) We are programmed in school and life to become critical thinkers, which is to think in terms of what we already know. We call it getting an “education.”
(15) We have little patience and less interest in creative thinking – what Einstein did – because we didn’t learn to do it in school and, besides, it means taking risks and considering what we don’t know but could find out.
* * *
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS
The Fisher Paradigm©™ takes note of these paradoxes. It does so only in the interest of throwing some light on our problems. Look at the Congress of the United States, 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators, and what do you see?
(1) PERSONALITY PROFILE:
Members of Congress are urbane, essentially extroverts, reasonably well educated, mostly lawyers, and have a modicum of the colloquial banner of their native states, when they want to use it, so can change the intonation to favor the dominant accent of their audience wherever they are.
The “acquired self,” which is the personality is something that they have been working on since grammar school, when they first campaigned for becoming a patrol boy, class monitor, or class representative.
Campaigners are what they are and what they do, and as a consequence, what you see is never what is there. They are actors on a stage in which the play they are in is life that affects us all.
Members of Congress learn never to tell the truth when a lie would be more efficacious, or say what they really think and mean because that is politically incorrect and can get them in hot water.
Vice President, Irishman Joseph Biden, knows this well. House Majority Leader Harry Reid has felt the whiplash himself of late. Reid got into trouble when he said he thought President Obama could get elected because “he was a light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Reid's comment is in a new book that will fly off the shelves. What he said everyone knows is true because as much as we like to preach we don’t have a bias the moment we say so we express it.
Notice Reid said he didn’t have a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Obama, like Kennedy and Nixon before him, is a consummate politician, and consummate politicians are never what you see. You only see the shadow of their personality and its inclination they want to show at the moment.
(2) GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE:
Member of Congress come from all parts of the nation from Hawaii to New York, from Alaska to California, from Minnesota to Florida but they dress alike, speak in the same tongue, and even think alike.
One of the great mysteries, geographically speaking in terms of “blue” and “red” states, is that we have a two-party system, Republicans and Democrats, who appear all to be in the same party.
We don’t have a two party system but a one-party system in which the party out of power has the role of being against everything even if it is for everything. Meanwhile, the party in power promotes everything even if it is against some things. For example:
(1) We have the “Obama War” in Afghanistan, a war that he abhors but promotes;
(2) We have Health Care Legislation that Republicans oppose that looks amazingly like the health care Republican John McCain advocated on the campaign trail.
This may seem odd, but this is quite appropriate in a one-party system playing the charade of a two-party Congress.
Should the Republicans become the majority in Congress, the roles will be reversed but with the same histrionics and stage performances.
We have lost our appetite for regional politicians. There are no more Andrew Jackson’s, no more Harry Truman’s. Our presidents since John F. Kennedy have come out of the stage casting offices of Hollywood.
Candidates have to be war heroes (Eisenhower), urbane (Kennedy), or consummate politicians (L. Johnson). Wouldn’t it be something if the “rogue,” politician, Sarah Palin, who is not urbane or educated beyond her dress size were to slip through the cracks and become president? It could happen! She is a frontier woman, and in your face politician like Andrew Jackson. What has happened before can happen again. It would be a break with the one-party system that has been in place all my lifetime.
(3) DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE:
Member of Congress are largely male (90 percent), largely white (90 percent), largely wealthy (80 percent), largely educated in prestigious schools (55 percent), largely lawyers (80 percent), largely over the age of 55 (80 percent), largely overweight (80 percent), largely white headed (90 percent) as if this is a requirement to look wise, largely Protestant (80 percent), largely from cities or metropolitan areas (80 percent), and largely in the pocket of lobbyists (100 percent).
Where they are most like us is in the range of their intelligence, which is very average. That includes John F. Kennedy, who was thought to be so brilliant, but didn’t have an I.Q. much different than George W. Bush. Look it up!
We don’t feel comfortable with people who appear smarter than we are. We are comfortable with people who sound like us, think like us, and value what we value, even though we know they probably don't. It's all a matter of performance. We give surprising high marks to performance. That is why television debates are so important.
Joseph Wambaugh said, “You get the kind of police department you deserve.” Does that extend to Congress? I think it does.
* * *
Cleverness is not wisdom. We like cleverness, and like to think of ourselves as clever. Congressmen are often clever but seldom wise.
Wisdom takes hard work; wisdom takes staying with a problem longer; wisdom takes failing frequently before succeeding; wisdom takes going against the grain of popular thought; wisdom takes being politically incorrect; wisdom takes getting beyond traditional thinking. I don’t think we are ready for wisdom.
We would prefer to criticize and complain about our two party system that is one party, and to keep reelecting the same clever people that reinforce this one-party concept.
You see we are the problem, and we can’t slough it off to the 535 members of Congress. We can't but we will, and that is the problem.
* * *
Monday, January 11, 2010
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™
The Fisher Paradigm © ™
Organizational Development1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.
Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)
* * *
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is anchored in the nominative case, or noun -- name of a person, place or thing - with the verb or action implied from the analysis of the subject.
* * *
ABSTRACT – OD is not HR!
The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool that is primarily intuitive. It is cognitive in the sense that it describes problems but mainly intuitively from a meta-rational basis. It provides a descriptive blueprint for meaningful intervention. Stated differently, there are no algorithmic verifications, yet it is an authentic organizational development (OD) diagnostic tool. It is not the mind that disrupts or destroys an organization but its mindset or culture.
* * *
The purpose of an organization is what it does. Purpose relates to strategy. What it does relates to tactics. Both are essential to organizational success, but they are not the same.
OD is a strategic tool leveraged to realize operational success and therefore fulfill organizational purpose.
HR is a tactical tool concerned with organizational practices such as policies and procedures, rules and regulation, motivation and morale, job descriptions and performance standards, training and development, authority and discipline, or operational protocol supportive to organizational purpose.
OD grew out of a need to bring oversight into tactical operations, as purpose got lost in counterproductive activities.
HR grew out of human relations and human rights in the management of operating personnel.
* * *
Over the last half century of the twentieth century, the complex organization realized unfettered growth and development without a clear understanding of its shifting character (personality), changing construction (geography) and transforming culture (demographics), and therefore sustaining viability.
What is called “work” today has been revolutionized from being primarily brawn or manual doing to essentially brain or strategic thinking. What is called “management” has matured from being primarily giving orders and assessing performance to being redundant.
So, in the twenty-first century, managers are basically atavistic and management, per se, is effectively anachronistic. The fact that manpower is managed, manipulated, motivated and mobilized with little change over the previous century, other than cosmetically, illustrates the severity of the problem.
In today’s complex organization, there is a discernible breach between what an organization does (purpose) and what it accomplishes (performance).
* * *
OD evolved rather than being systemically designed, developed, marketed and implemented into the system as a strategic organizational tool. Instead, OD has become an appendage of and subordinate to the function of HR. The consequence of this slipshod accretion has been to find OD underused or misused as a tactical function at the expense of its strategic mission.
OD is a terminal function (purpose) whereas HR is an instrumental value (activity).
OD is a qualitative assessment tool that looks at people, places and things, as well as management, objectively vis-Ã -vis organizational purpose, whereas HR is a quantitative evaluative process that looks at workers and management subjectively vis-Ã -vis operational indices (hiring/firing, placement, training & development, goals and objectives).
HR is an insider discipline with its client operations via senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the organization via operations.
HR, in practice, reflects the values of current management. OD, in practice, reflects the values of the accrued organizational mindset (culture).
HR is primarily cognitive and quantitative; OD is primarily intuitive, counterintuitive and qualitative.
HR uses critical thinking to solve problems; OD uses creative thinking to complement critical thinking in solving problems.
The “Morality Principle” (dependent management) as surrogate parent guides HR, whereas the “Reality Principle” (interdependent management) as the adult guides OD. The consequences of this disparity in manager-worker relationships are that HR has been prone to unwittingly sponsor the “Culture of Comfort” (management dependent) or “Culture of Complacency” (submissive management) in its quest to realize the “Culture of Contribution” (purposeful management).
HR revolves around instrumental relations (policies); OD revolves around terminal values (performance).
* * *
The task of OD is to establish a mnemonic culture that operates intuitively with overt synchronicity in support of the organization’s strategic goals. OD does this by assessing the cultural system in terms of its efficacy in support of its mission. Counterintuitive thinking suggests that if any one phase of the system is operating as well as it might than the overall system is unlikely to perform as well as it should. HR in its awards programs inadvertently promotes this discrepancy.
* * *
Organizational culture in the complex organization is critical since the structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture predicates organizational behavior; and organizational behavior determines performance levels.
* * *
Culture represents the conscience or mindset of the organization. Since culture is an irrational and subjective aspect of organizational life, it requires tools that are familiar and comfortable with unobtrusive exploration of operations. The Fisher Paradigm©™ is such a tool. It bridges critical thinking, what we already know with creative thinking, what we don’t know but can find out, and applies them in practical economic interventions.
* * *
The complex organization has been placed at risk by relying solely on critical thinking and cognitive reasoning, which has found it often spinning out of control into crisis management schemes, reacting to organizational issues rather than identifying and dealing with chronic problems.
The Fisher Paradigm ©™ identifies the unconscious mindset of the organizational culture, which is often the site of conscious operational discord. It explores the conscious organization (personality) to uncover the organization’s collective unconscious (essence), which is teleological influence on the character and performance of the organization by assessing and calibrating these two forces to see if they are supportive and synergistic, or not. .
* * *
1 The Fisher Paradigm © as of October 10, 2002 has sought copyright protection. The Fisher Paradigm™ has also trademark certification protection for “consulting and advisory services with respect to infrastructure organizational development in commercial, educational, industrial, military, government and religious institutions as well as for individuals therein and separate from same.” No one may use The Fisher Paradigm©™ or a variation of it in writing or application without the expressed written approval of the author and The Delta Group Florida. Licensing agreements are available as well as application seminars in the innovative use of this design by contacting The Delta Group Florida, 6714 Jennifer Drive, Temple Terrace, FL 33617, Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631, or by cell phone (813) 990 – 7472, or by email: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com.
Organizational Development1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.
Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)
* * *
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is anchored in the nominative case, or noun -- name of a person, place or thing - with the verb or action implied from the analysis of the subject.
* * *
ABSTRACT – OD is not HR!
The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool that is primarily intuitive. It is cognitive in the sense that it describes problems but mainly intuitively from a meta-rational basis. It provides a descriptive blueprint for meaningful intervention. Stated differently, there are no algorithmic verifications, yet it is an authentic organizational development (OD) diagnostic tool. It is not the mind that disrupts or destroys an organization but its mindset or culture.
* * *
The purpose of an organization is what it does. Purpose relates to strategy. What it does relates to tactics. Both are essential to organizational success, but they are not the same.
OD is a strategic tool leveraged to realize operational success and therefore fulfill organizational purpose.
HR is a tactical tool concerned with organizational practices such as policies and procedures, rules and regulation, motivation and morale, job descriptions and performance standards, training and development, authority and discipline, or operational protocol supportive to organizational purpose.
OD grew out of a need to bring oversight into tactical operations, as purpose got lost in counterproductive activities.
HR grew out of human relations and human rights in the management of operating personnel.
* * *
Over the last half century of the twentieth century, the complex organization realized unfettered growth and development without a clear understanding of its shifting character (personality), changing construction (geography) and transforming culture (demographics), and therefore sustaining viability.
What is called “work” today has been revolutionized from being primarily brawn or manual doing to essentially brain or strategic thinking. What is called “management” has matured from being primarily giving orders and assessing performance to being redundant.
So, in the twenty-first century, managers are basically atavistic and management, per se, is effectively anachronistic. The fact that manpower is managed, manipulated, motivated and mobilized with little change over the previous century, other than cosmetically, illustrates the severity of the problem.
In today’s complex organization, there is a discernible breach between what an organization does (purpose) and what it accomplishes (performance).
* * *
OD evolved rather than being systemically designed, developed, marketed and implemented into the system as a strategic organizational tool. Instead, OD has become an appendage of and subordinate to the function of HR. The consequence of this slipshod accretion has been to find OD underused or misused as a tactical function at the expense of its strategic mission.
OD is a terminal function (purpose) whereas HR is an instrumental value (activity).
OD is a qualitative assessment tool that looks at people, places and things, as well as management, objectively vis-Ã -vis organizational purpose, whereas HR is a quantitative evaluative process that looks at workers and management subjectively vis-Ã -vis operational indices (hiring/firing, placement, training & development, goals and objectives).
HR is an insider discipline with its client operations via senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the organization via operations.
HR, in practice, reflects the values of current management. OD, in practice, reflects the values of the accrued organizational mindset (culture).
HR is primarily cognitive and quantitative; OD is primarily intuitive, counterintuitive and qualitative.
HR uses critical thinking to solve problems; OD uses creative thinking to complement critical thinking in solving problems.
The “Morality Principle” (dependent management) as surrogate parent guides HR, whereas the “Reality Principle” (interdependent management) as the adult guides OD. The consequences of this disparity in manager-worker relationships are that HR has been prone to unwittingly sponsor the “Culture of Comfort” (management dependent) or “Culture of Complacency” (submissive management) in its quest to realize the “Culture of Contribution” (purposeful management).
HR revolves around instrumental relations (policies); OD revolves around terminal values (performance).
* * *
The task of OD is to establish a mnemonic culture that operates intuitively with overt synchronicity in support of the organization’s strategic goals. OD does this by assessing the cultural system in terms of its efficacy in support of its mission. Counterintuitive thinking suggests that if any one phase of the system is operating as well as it might than the overall system is unlikely to perform as well as it should. HR in its awards programs inadvertently promotes this discrepancy.
* * *
Organizational culture in the complex organization is critical since the structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture predicates organizational behavior; and organizational behavior determines performance levels.
* * *
Culture represents the conscience or mindset of the organization. Since culture is an irrational and subjective aspect of organizational life, it requires tools that are familiar and comfortable with unobtrusive exploration of operations. The Fisher Paradigm©™ is such a tool. It bridges critical thinking, what we already know with creative thinking, what we don’t know but can find out, and applies them in practical economic interventions.
* * *
The complex organization has been placed at risk by relying solely on critical thinking and cognitive reasoning, which has found it often spinning out of control into crisis management schemes, reacting to organizational issues rather than identifying and dealing with chronic problems.
The Fisher Paradigm ©™ identifies the unconscious mindset of the organizational culture, which is often the site of conscious operational discord. It explores the conscious organization (personality) to uncover the organization’s collective unconscious (essence), which is teleological influence on the character and performance of the organization by assessing and calibrating these two forces to see if they are supportive and synergistic, or not. .
* * *
1 The Fisher Paradigm © as of October 10, 2002 has sought copyright protection. The Fisher Paradigm™ has also trademark certification protection for “consulting and advisory services with respect to infrastructure organizational development in commercial, educational, industrial, military, government and religious institutions as well as for individuals therein and separate from same.” No one may use The Fisher Paradigm©™ or a variation of it in writing or application without the expressed written approval of the author and The Delta Group Florida. Licensing agreements are available as well as application seminars in the innovative use of this design by contacting The Delta Group Florida, 6714 Jennifer Drive, Temple Terrace, FL 33617, Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631, or by cell phone (813) 990 – 7472, or by email: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com.
Friday, January 08, 2010
THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™ -- Intellectual Capital & Power of People
The Fisher Paradigm © ™
Organizational Development1
Intellectual Capital & Power of People
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.
Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)
Abstract
The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool. What is different is that it is of a primarily intuitive rather than cognitive design. There are no algorithms or mathematical models of verification, yet it is the most authentic tool of a discipline that has suffered from the beginning with an identity crisis.
OD grew out of a need to bring some order and comprehension to the complex organization, which grows more incomprehensible with the passing of time. Managers and management attempt to give it direction and purpose while becoming increasingly atavistic and anachronistic.
OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management. The function of HR is instrumental (productivity) while that of OD is terminal (continuous growth & development). HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development, firing of people), while OD is an assessment tool of the integrity of leadership. HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the integrity of the organizational leadership.
HR reflects the values of senior management. OD represents the conscience of organization. HR is primarily cognitive; OD is primarily intuitive. HR reflects the moral authority, while OD reflects the ethical authority of organization. Being moral is a required operational good. Being ethical is an optional good.
HR revolves around expedient relations in which obligations depend on nothing more than the shared experiences of the moment. Expedient relations are instrumental, mechanized, means-to-ends, fitting, good, timely and useful – in other words, a resource.
OD revolves around enduring relations in which workers are dependent on a special relationship with others and the past – in other words, with history. Expedient relations represent a morality of demand. Enduring relations represent the ethics ask of relationships. The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership, the obligation to remember people and events from the past that gave integrity and purpose to the organization. That said, corporate memory is at the heart of corporate identity, and OD is all about corporate identity. Still, the metaphor of memory is just that, a metaphor.
Corporations have no minds of the past. The corporate memory consists of stories from the past, kept alive in the present to draw on as a basis for the willingness of workers to work a life in corporate togetherness.
OD as the conscience of the organization is at once possessor of the rich legacy of memories, while maintainer of the history that provides continuity with the future. This depends on the value and not the fact of community, on the actual vitality of organization and not on the propaganda of its existence. As such, a new dimension of enterprise is called for that represents the irony of being less instrumental but more relevant. It is the organization’s total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning that has placed it at risk. This is evident in the tedium of crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking being stubbornly employed at the expense of the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking.
OD exercises the unconscious reservoir of possibilities, while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ postulates that the unconscious has an enormous teleological sense and essence that moves it towards ethical goals, that it has a real sense of what is happening beyond rational explanatory limits.
Introduction to the Idea
We are in a 2,000 year old cognitive groping of reality, and it is extremely doubtful that the empirical evidence upon which the Fisher Paradigm is based, leastwise in the short term will prove convincing to those obsessively cognitive.
Given that anticipated objection, I would suggest that most leaders of science, government, education, the religious, as well as of business and industry are using the Fisher Paradigm, but are unaware of it. The efforts of this brief is to encourage its use and build confidence in its exercise by providing the framework and context of its design. It is a diagnostic tool available to lay people as well as professionals.
The Fisher Paradigm proposes that virtually everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or present a roadblock to learned experience, as can cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:
· Immanence – something “inside the individual.”
· Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”
I further argue that the content of consciousness contains more than what it actually contains. There is something invisible in everything that is visible, an absence at the heart of all presence. Yet, because of cultural programming, there is the tendency to view rich tangible experience exclusively in logical, cognitive, intellectual and scientific terms because that is how answers are found.
We are far better at describing something than anticipating its happening, far better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, far better at generating data than pursuing ideas, far more deductive than inductive, far more inclined to critical than creative thinking, far more disposed to protect sacred biases than to move beyond them, far more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, far more given to ape the organizations (personalities) of others than to uncover our own indigenous essence. And I say for reason.
We are in a world of constant change and the desire is for stability and permanence both of which have an instrumental focus. Our senses are constantly bombarded with feelings that expose the arbitrariness of this mind set. Why is that?
Without having to think at all, we perceive certain structures that in the truest sense are not given to our awareness. They are assumed because we are taught such assumptions. What we sense, what pounds at our subconscious to breakthrough is expressed in this litany: “Did I really see what I believe I saw, might I be fooling myself?”
What we usually do when faced with this dilemma is to reject our intuition, our insight into the moment, rather than integrate the disparate information into a conceptual framework of some palpable significance and of use to us. We fall back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says what is “is.”
This is a pardonable sin for most everyone, but not for OD practitioners. If OD embraces its doubt, if it ignores the intuitive sense boiling in it for attention, the experience OD believes it has had will not be really its, since without being aware of it OD will have been literally “outside itself,” or “beside itself,” but not in possession of the insight crying for attention. OD would have been in a state of transcendence but either unable or unwilling to grasp its significance because “it was just too, too weird.” Consider the cube as illustration of this phenomenon.
A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three sides of the cube. Our immanence or “something inside” tells us there are three faces, not a cube itself. But if we embrace our transcendence or “something outside” in clear subjective reporting, we know we are looking at a cube. We don’t say, “I am looking at three faces and deduce I’m looking at a cube.” So, it is not false to say that our perceptions contain more than they contain.
Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace it. That is why OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing have a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work.
But alas, what prevents this so often from happening is the barrier of cultural programming. The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Several significant others from parents to teachers to preachers and on define the individual before learned experience kicks in. To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in opposing the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics, and more recently by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman whose playful vision reinvented quantum mechanics and grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him.2
Both these accomplished scientists relied more on their internal dialogue than the constraints of their cultural programming to define themselves and orchestrate their minds to new scientific truths.
The Fisher Paradigm acknowledges this barrier and proposes a model meant to engage insight, promote intuition, and integrate this into conceptual understanding. Such understanding is only possible when transcendence is realized. The Fisher Paradigm promotes this understanding by postulating that learned experience centers around three discrete spheres of influence: personality, geographic and demographic. These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses with understanding beyond the visible three surfaces of the cube.
Case in Point
Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the most remarkable in recent times. James Watson and James Crick were co-discoverers of the DNA molecule. That enormous breakthrough was managed through conventional painstaking laboratory research. This is well documented in Watson’s best selling book The Double Helix (1969), or with methodology representative of the prototype of what we expect from scientists. Not so for Kary B. Mullis, Nobel laureate for Chemistry, 1993.
Mullis departs from the furrowed brow stabbing in the dark of this mystifying lot to be more like everyman. Yet all he did was invent the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science.
Mullis is a surfer, a bar hopper, strip club patron, veteran of Berkeley in the 1960s, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to fit the mold of “scientist,” or to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, yet embraces the chiaroscuro of life in all its shades and patterns, not from a distance but as part of him.
In his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (2000) he challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma and every other kind of authority as he reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind. His words fit comfortably in the Fisher Paradigm © ™:
Suddenly, I knew how to do it. ”Holy shit!” I hissed and let off the accelerator. The car coasted into a downhill turn. I pulled off. A giant buckeye stuck out from the hill. It rubbed against the window where Jennifer, my girlfriend was asleep. I found an envelope and a pencil in the glove compartment. Jennifer wanted to get moving. I told her something incredible had just occurred to me. She yawned and leaned against the window to go back to sleep.
We were at mile marker 46.58 on Highway 128 (Malibu, California), and we were at the very edge of the dawn of the age of PCR. I could feel it. I wrote hastily and broke the lead. Then I found a pen. I confirmed (my intuition). I must have smiled. I could still smell the buckeyes, but they were drifting a long way off. I pulled back onto the highway, and Jennifer made a sound of approval . . .
About a mile down the canyon, I pulled off again. The thing had just exploded again. Not only could I make a zillion copies, but they would always be the same size. I had just solved the two major problems in DNA chemistry. Abundance and distinction. And I had done it in one stroke. I stopped the car at a nice comfortable turnout and took my time working my way through the consequence. Everybody on Earth who cared about DNA would want to use it. It would spread into every biology lab in the world. I would be famous. I would get the Nobel Prize.3
The Fisher Paradigm is common yet rare, common because the innate capacity is there for everyone, rare because it goes against societal cultural programming and expectations. If anything, society kills the intuitive drive, as the process of unabashed intuition is too incomprehensible to contemplate. This is displayed in the Washington Post’s crass assessment of Dancing Naked in the Mind Field on the books back cover:
“Kary Mullis, perhaps the weirdest human ever to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has written a chatty, rambling, funny, iconoclastic tour through the wonderland that is his mind.”
Dancing naked in the mind field, indeed. Mullis was considered by his scientific colleagues to be a flake, if not incompetent, for the ways he behaved against how he was expected to behave as a scientist. Thus he was not only able to think outside the box but beyond the limits of what the Scots like to call the meinie or the multitude. He was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically was even more perverse in the scientific community.
The Fisher Paradigm © ™
Stated simply, the Fisher Paradigm incorporates the organization whole, its
personality, geography and demographics, assimilates this wholeness subconsciously, and comes to understand its insights intuitively.4 From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rationalistic mode, but this is resisted as absorbing the situation whole is fundamental to the process.
Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm registers empirically on the reader’s mind, the temptation is to say, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” Many have said that of the Mullis discovery. This doesn’t make it any less cogent.
There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic: between the person, the place and the thing. These spheres may be derived from the organization’s:
· Personality (person) profile: personal eccentricities, culture, circumstances…
· Geographic (place) profile: situational dynamics, time, circumstances…
· Demographic (thing) profile: population, age, gender, education, status, circumstances…
Each of these spheres of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two, where they intercept is the domain of intuition, which alerts the observer to what is actually happening if the observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight. For this to occur the observer becomes the observed, inseparable from the dynamic. Like a heat sensor, the observer is drawn through the distracting camouflage always present to the target, and becomes one with the target in an eruption of understanding. Take the familiar story of Archimedes and his principle as reported by Plutarch:
Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a way to compute the proportion of gold in King Heiron’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leaped up as one possessed, crying eureka! (I’ve found it”). After repeating this several times, he went his way.5
The Sicilian mathematician (ca. 287 – 212 B.C.) was the classic absentminded professor, a brilliant thinker often oblivious to the real world and its expectations. He died while tracing a geometric diagram in the dust, as Rome was conquering Syracuse. So absorbed was he in his speculation that he didn’t hear the command of a Roman soldier to rise; the soldier, infuriated, ran him through.
Rationale for the Fisher Paradigm©™
Most briefly, the Fisher Paradigm is art rather than science, impressionistic rather than cognitive. Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of play as plan. Given this, the Fisher Paradigm doesn’t separate cause from effect, subject from object, thinking from feeling. It is consistent with Thought and Extension as proposed by Spinioza.6
Spinoza infers natural order must be undivided to be comprehended. When he was tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, he was one with the diagram and not from it, "outside the box."
He was outside the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of that world. The fundamental features of that order, as we perceive them, emerge from within that order, not separate from it. The observer isn’t considering the subject observed from a distance but is integral to it.
The Fisher Paradigm abandons the bucket theory of the mind, as in the philosophy of Descartes and other empiricists, according to which, in perception, ideas arrive through the senses into a receptacle, or bucket, where they are processed. This is the wrong picture.
The Fisher Paradigm encompasses Edward de Bono’s "lateral thinking."7 It argues that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box, offering no opportunity to think outside it.
The emphasis, de Bono claims, is to lionize critical thinking, which is limited to the box or what is already known, whereas lateral thinking introduces the possibility of creative thinking, which doesn’t search for answers but creates them out of experience and what lies beyond.
While the Fisher Paradigm shows evidence of following the prospects of creativity, it does so by thinking with the whole body, not simply the mind.
That said, there is no perception without activity and thought. All perception is in an interaction with an eternal reality, a reality more often intuitively sensed than cognitively understood, especially as it relates to persons, places and things. I use the plural here because that defines organization, which indeed has a personality, geography and encompasses demographics. It is a mistake to see organization as different than what it is, a most human entity.
This separates intuitive OD from all other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious in being aware of itself as the subject initiating movement and observing the environment. OD’s knowledge of its own movement is not primarily to be found in observation, but in its sense of its own purpose and intension, which is thought, and which follows the laws of thought but intuitively so.
This subjective knowledge is continuously available to OD, whenever OD is conscious of the wholeness embodied in people, places and things.
Trying to understand OD as a straightforward, naturalistic description of action is bound to disappoint and paint the wrong picture. What people are doing is not what OD must see, but the metaphysical connection of how this picture fits together to perceive what is actually taking place beyond appearances.
This means OD must accustom itself to the fact that mind-body-soul are intertwined in Thought and Extension as two universal features in the common order of Nature. This relationship is an active, involved interaction and not a dispassionate observer disconnected from the subject at play.
Presentation of OD in Everyday Life
Recently I accompanied my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I watched a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim physique and prominent calves that suggested a jogger. His salt and pepper beard gauged his age at about 46.
The woman was tan, trim and athletic looking in a blouse, shorts and sneakers, age about mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about thirteen, a little on the heavy side, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and sneakers.
The man kept bringing clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing. The woman didn’t participate, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, forcing a smile whenever the man looked at her.
When my wife acquired her purchase, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a family shopping. Why?”
“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a minute. Now tell me what you see.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you want and it wouldn’t change anything. So, tell me! What do you see?”
“I see a father and his son, and a woman not the mother. The boy is from up north, visiting his father and his trophy wife, and she would like to be elsewhere.”
“Okay, smart guy,” she said, then walked over and started a conversation with the woman, who was even younger looking up close.
“Handsome boy!” my wife opened. “What is he 12, 13? You don’t look old enough to be his mother.”
“I’m not,” she answered tartly and then recovered quickly. “Donny is my husband’s son visiting us from Chicago.” Then to put a lid on the conversation added, “We have no children.” With that, my wife politely withdrew.
“How did you do that?” she asked shaking her head.
“You already know,” I answered. “You were just too busy shopping.” Then I explained.
It involved marrying the mind to the moment to become one with what was being observed in terms of the three spheres of influence to understand what they implied together. It is the clash of these spheres that can produce a chain reaction of intuition.
· Personality profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;
· Geographic profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;
· Demographic profile – father clearly of an age to have a teenage son, not the woman, man and woman in comparable physical health, not the boy. But it was the boy’s pallid complexion, which spelled separation.
The Fisher Paradigm is designed to advance intuition. It provides an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting problems in impressionistic terms that OD practitioners, executives and change agents can understand and aptly apply without confusion. A more in depth discussion is provided in the Fisher trilogy:
· Personality Profile
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (The Delta Group Florida, 1999) deals with the taboos that invade our consciousness and throw us off the scent of what we actually observe and experience.
Social, cultural and psychological conditioning blinds us from perceiving accurately what we see as we are all programmed to reflect our belief system, our values and even what interests us.
We have been led to believe that "you search for excellence," when you can find excellence only by creating it out of your own experience. We are searchers and solution driven when this reduces our lives to collapsing cycles to see and experience only what we have been programmed to realize. This is our reality.
· Geographic Profile
Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press, 1998) deals with the social termites burrowing silently into the infrastructure of our organization life weakening its efficacy to the point of being too late for damage control.
The culprit? The geography of fear generated in precipitous decision-making that spawns the venom of hate, contempt, envy and jealousy that can creep into existence to poison the collective will of a company and its workers to lead to ultimately to its demise.
· Demographic Profile
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker (1stBooks Library, 2000) deals with labor and management not being on the same page. The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, and yet most workers are still treated as well paid serfs.
Something is wrong when society is blessed with the most able workforce in the history of man, yet managers act as if leadership is their exclusive domain in the dispensing of orders with the expectation of obsequious compliance without complaint. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share the guilt.
The Fisher Paradigm is not theoretical but empirical. I have been practicing this paradigm for more than forty years. The chronology of my OD experiences with it that follows is representative of what led to this epiphany.
Thayer Maxwell & How Intuitive OD First Surfaced
Three weeks into my new job with Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, and a comparable time away from the security of the research laboratory with Standard Brands, Inc., I am told by my district manager, “I don’t think you’re cut out for this type of work.”
Only the previous week when asked by my area manager, whom I was traveling with, to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask the accounts what they were experiencing or needed; didn’t give reasons to upgrade services; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be a big deal as if that had anything to do with anything.
This was the first time my young family of a wife and two small children had been out of Iowa. She hated Indiana, was homesick and complained, rightly so, that I was making less money than in the laboratory.
My district manager's words stung me like a slap in the face. “We’ll give you some accounts to service,” he said. “You’re solid technically, but you should find something else within the month.”
From somewhere in my reeling mind I asked if I could call on competitor accounts. “If you like,” he answered with annoyance as if my departure were already a fait accompli.
One of the first competitor accounts I called on was Philco in Connersville, Indiana. The plant was situated on a seven acre rambling plant manufacturing refrigerators. Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, had been servicing this account free of challengers for decades.
The secretary at the reception desk informed me that someone would take me to Thayer Maxwell's office, the plant superintendent.
I am escorted to a glassed enclosed bullpen in the center of this huge factory. Mr. Maxwell is not there. I sit for nearly two hours with a cadre of folks coming and going, always looking for the superintendent, and always leaving frustrated.
The super's desk, chair, as well as cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains are everywhere with papers scattered across the desk, the floor encased in broken floor tiles and even broken glass walls of the bull pen.
Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, severely damaged heat exchangers glared at me with crusted red rust haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, or the super's desk. It made me think of the "morgue of the machine" without even the dignity of chaos.
The extent of my knowledge of Nalco after three-weeks of orientation on chemical water treatment technology at Nalco's Chicago headquarters left me still without a clue as to Nalco's products or their application. Plus, I knew nothing about the business of selling of Nalco’s products or anything else.
Finally, Mr. Maxwell comes in, lights a cigarette, props one leg over the desk, smiles, and says, “Okay, sport, you’ve got five minutes. What you got for me?”
I say without flinching, “I’m going to save your job.”
Mr. Maxwell threw his head back and laughed, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve got spunk.”
Relief registers as his voice tells me he’s not angry, but amused. I back around his desk, and he follows.
I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of a facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training. A red marker is used to indicate areas where he’s having trouble as revealed by the samples across his office.
This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I don’t show any flashy literature but explain the how and why of his troubles, and talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco can provide. When I finish, he thanks me, lights another cigarette and heads for the door.
“Mr. Maxwell,” I say, the timber of my voice rising, “your operation’s in trouble now.”
I look around the room. “Now! I’ve been sitting here for a long time and heard of breakdowns across the plant.” I pick up a blocked piece of pipe. “This is packed with suspended solids, carryover from the boilers. Not normal. Shouldn’t happen. Give me a three-month trial and I’ll prove it.” My mind is not thinking of what’s in it for me, but solving problems I believe correctible. Perhaps my naked intensity was disarming.
“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.
“I know I can fix this.” I looked about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.
“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I had no idea. I had yet to make a survey, and had never calculated an actual chemical dosage.
“A lot less than it’s costing you now in breakdowns, lost production, and missed schedules, but we’ll have to survey the plant first. That will take a full day.” The “we” is I’ll need the help of my area manager who I had previously disparaged.
“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”
* * * * *
· Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.
· Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.
· Demographic Profile – focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board on the bullpen wall complement 1,200 plant employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.
The trigger to initial intuition
It came from my lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training program. I could see science working here and got excited about the problem solving. Everything I saw and felt (re: persons, places, things) told me the superintendent was overwhelmed, possibly incompetent. Meeting him I sensed his need and exploited it. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Perhaps I thought I had nothing to lose, given my boss’s ultimatum. When I called to inform my boss of the sale, he checked with Philco’s purchasing to confirm the order. Skepticism was not limited to him.
The area manager surveyed the plant with me the next day, shaking his head in disbelief as he calculated the astronomical daily chemical dosages required.
The situation was made even more incredulous when asked by the superintendent to survey Philco’s other two plants in the city and include them in the billing. It was the biggest order in the district’s history by someone within the company for less than two months.
Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year apprenticeship of gradually increasing technical complexity and sales responsibility. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered with sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s product lines. I had neither.
Intuitive OD, which I was using and would continue to use with consistent success made me out to be lucky rather than skilled, which also seems apparent in the following episode.
Thomas Crown Affair
It is two years later and a stifling hot summer in Terre Haute, Indiana with several days at or near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Indiana State University’s campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this 75,000 community.
The summer session is in full swing, but classroom and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on lawns. I see several chemical trucks rigged with acidizing equipment which indicates that air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” with calcium carbonate scaling and units are down.
Acidizing will put these units back in service but only temporarily. Confident in my chemical water treatment technology, I drive to the office of the physical plant.
Mr. Thomas Crown, Superintendent, Plant Engineering is stenciled on the frosted glass door. I knock and he says, “Come in.”
The office is a workplace with a drafting board with white-lined blue pages of architectural drawings, and on the wall framed B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.
There is also a picture of several children of various ethnicity smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, I would imagine ages three to six. Tacked to the wall directly behind the desk is a child’s stick figure drawing that says, “Hi daddy! This is me! This is you!” An American flag is on a stanchion to the left of the desk and another kind of flag I don’t recognize is to the right near the corner.
I’m able to take all this in because Mr. Crown busies himself cutting his nails and doesn’t look up for nearly a minute. When he does, I explain my business noting the activity on campus, and saying this is the perfect time to establish a sound chemical treatment program, which not only would be cost effective but also could eliminate such inconveniences in the future. He listens attentively, and then gives me permission to survey his facilities across the campus and to come back with a recommendation.
Six hours later I return proposing a chemical treatment program including a $10,000 consulting agreement for monthly service calls.
“No way Jose! Board will scream to high heaven with such a proposal. We don’t pay consulting fees.”
I ask for an hour to reconfigure another option. He agrees. Once the new proposal is in his hands, he says, “Be here at 8 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll see if we can do business.”
The next morning I arrive with high expectations. As soon as I enter his office, he hits me instead with his thunder, “Get your ass out of here before I break every bone in your body.” I hesitate, more out of panic than anything. He is a big man, but so am I. “I mean it, God damn it,” he bellows, “this new proposal costs as much as the original only you buried the costs in the chemicals.”
* * * * *
I wasn’t thinking of the Fisher Paradigm or of the three spheres of influence. Yet I was processing information subconsciously. I know because I stood there. I didn’t leave. Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak any more.
I looked at his tired eyes, deep dark circles etched around them in half moons. I wondered if he’d been to bed and decided he hadn’t. He slumped forward in his chair, stretching his massive arms over his head, and then through his thick black hair. Suddenly he noticed me standing, waved me silently to sit, and then collapsed forward on his desk.
A lapel pin on his jacket became prominent as it bunched up around his bull neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.
“You a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted with the hint of a minute sparkle in them. I made the connection of the pin, the unknown flag and the picture of the children of diversity on the wall. “Lions do a lot for kids,” I continued fatuously remembering something about sponsoring children’s hospitals.
For seemingly the longest time, he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the void with words but resisted. Nearly an eternity of two minutes transpired.
“You know ‘bout Lions International?” he asked finally sotto voce, fingering his pin, his voice little more than a whisper.
I shrugged. “Not much. Know of its eye bank. Have a daughter with eye problems.” I felt my answer disappointing. I was wrong.
Instead he broke into a big grin, an upturn smile line across his face. “Giving city a new ambulance tonight.”
“Wow!” I heard myself say.
Then he launched into a spirited history of Lions International, his face flushed with pride. The exercise was cathartic for us both. I jumped when he banged his fist on the desk. “Tell you what! How ‘bout you being my guest at the Terre Haute Club tonight?”
I cowered. “Sure.” But actually I wasn’t. What’s going on here? The guy has gone from rage to rapture just like that! I’d never studied psychology. Something told me, however, to stay cool and quiet during his rage. It helped coming from a home where my da often lost it. I was audience to his fury, one with it, not separate from it. I didn’t become defensive. I couldn’t explain why. I’m not a meek guy. Perhaps I attributed his rage to a lack of sleep, constant system failures, mounting complaints of students and faculty, and perhaps, as well, to a little guilt for deceiving him. But I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time.
At the dinner, he introduced me to everyone from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor as his friend. As we were leaving, he whispered in my ear, “I sent in a blanket order for that stuff you recommended. They’re to rush it over night. Your boss will be calling you.” He chuckled. “Don’t expect to see your family for a few days.” Then he added in a friendly voice, “Believe me I know the feeling.”
· Personality Profile:
A man is at his wits end with a problem I am trained to handle. His office defines him, efficient, pragmatic, and functional -- his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.
· Geographic Profile:
High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning system failures.
· Demographic Profile:
A student-faculty population of 10,000 unable to function in classrooms or dorms because of these failures spells a crisis situation.
Role of Intuition in Thomas Crown Affair
Initial greeting was warm, open. Candor about the consulting agreement reinforced this. Survey indicated a serious lapse in water treatment application and control. Major revamping translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical program. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively presented. Discussion was expected, but not rage. Intuition told me to weather the rage although I had no such training. Spheres of influence separately were clueless. It was all of them clashing like thunder that submerged me into the problem, not only technically but emotionally.
Culture + Test Kit = Intuitive Symbology
My success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brought me to the attention of senior management. No one could put a finger on the reason for my success given my unconventional approach. I didn’t sell benefits, didn’t deflect objections or use “penalty of delay” tactics to close sales.
I essentially merged myself with the customer in an attempt to become one with his needs. The vice president of Nalco’s International Division was so intrigued with my success that he one day traveled with me in the field.
At the conclusion of the day, he said, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for me in South Africa?”
Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I could think about it. I did and became mesmerized with the country and its history.
My job in South Africa was to to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and the South African Special Chemical Division of South African Explosives, Ltd.
South Africa had no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from forming and dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water was a precious commodity in South Africa with clarification in the gold and diamond mines critical to profitable business.
Nalco had cutting edge technology and products in this field and was anxious to leverage its product lines to full advantage here.
Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, the Alexander Martin Company. They had no college training in either chemistry or business, but had the colonial manners, hauteur and elocution of the British business class.
Likewise, the Alfloc people were mainly British and derived their business acumen primarily from experience. The only extensively college trained people were Afrikaners, mainly associates of South African Explosives. Afrikaners are descendants of the 17th century Dutch settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.
It was 1968 and Afrikaners had control of the South African government while the British still controlled business and industry.
The Afrikaner government, since coming to independence, created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which was rigorously enforced.
Meanwhile, nearly a million Bantu workers would come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in such places as the South African Township of “Soweto.”
This was the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies were now acting temporarily as a technical management team. They asked me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I studied them feeling their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?
“Here is my suggestion,” I offered. “Go back, consider the needs of the field, build your test kit, and come back in two weeks with a recommendation.”
Three days later they presented a Rube Goldberg facsimile of a test kit. It was mainly a Afrikaner test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine," I said, "package it and send it to the field.” They looked at me stunned. “Anything else? If not, good luck!”
It isn’t a month later that radical modifications are made to this basic test kit, and Nalco’s sedimentation test kit is being used without modification. When Nalco’s chairman of the board comes to Johannesburg and asks me to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary.
· Personality Profile.
A clash of cultures was felt from the moment South Africa customs officials at Jan Smuts International airport confiscated Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, A Very Strange Society (1968) to the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendants who looked to England as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of Dutch descendants who considered South Africa home.
Afrikaners in this new company being formed tended to be better educated, yet English speakers occupied most of the leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship was notable between the two peoples with the Bantu majority of the country treated as non-citizens and outside the power grid.
· Geographic Profile:
Apartheid divided the country into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands possessed little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing African men to leave their families to live and work in the industrial centers of Johannesburg, Durban, East London and Cape Town.
Apartheid of a different sort was palpable between British and Afrikaner South Africans in that the Brits showed nearly total indifference towards this majority.
· Demographic Profile:
South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 12 million Bantu, 6 million white (4 million Afrikaner, 2 million British), and 2 million colored including Indians, descendants of indentured workers from India. This newly formed company was slightly more Afrikaner than British.
The voice of intuition speaks to the outsider
Before taking on this assignment, I read all I could about South Africa and found the country’s history surprisingly similar to that of the United States. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers.
Still, my intuition told me I was an intruder. I looked much younger than my years and knew I was not likely to be taken seriously. Therefore, my intuition told me to put the risk of failure on the technical team not realizing I was symbolically telling all employees this was “their company,” not Nalco’s. The action elevated the three diverse companies above their petty differences into a common culture, and what could have been a colossal failure, became a budding success.
Fisher Paradigm © saved my life!
In 1974, I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which occurred in Fairfax County Virginia. A white police officer killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, Virginia, which led to a riot.8
My job was to find the source of this riot, which included interviewing senior officers, detectives and command personnel.
During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of one of these seminars, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa was a Kansas City participant. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play at the Ford Theater.
D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City. A Fairfax County police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when my new friend and I parted. The police officer, however, couldn’t pick me up until 1:30 a.m. I said that was okay, as I was a walker.
This found me briskly walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, a November chill in the air, dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue Hickey Freeman cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece Hickey Freeman suit, wearing black leather gloves.
Suddenly, I noticed three African American youths across the street who were laughing and jiving walking parallel to me. At firs, I paid them no mind as eight lanes of traffic separated us, that is, until they raced ahead, crossed the street, and started hanging out at the corner under the light.
Some time earlier, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed in this area. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that crossed my mind. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:
· Personality Profile
Three young people were up to no good and I, being alone, were over matched.
· Geographic Profile
This was no place for young boys to be out at this hour.
· Demographic Profile
These three boys were teenagers; I was in my late thirties. They were black, slender, one about six feet tall, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in relatively good shape.
I feel the rush of their excitement (Personality). How do they see me? I sense danger but imagine they sense opportunity. Somehow (Geographic), my feet continue their aggressive stride. More incongruous still, I have a sense of calm. Why? I know I can’t take the three of them (Demographic) if they have a knife or gun, I have no weapon. No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!
Intuition and the phantom gun
I remembered that during intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with authority. When I am ten yards from them, I make an elaborate move to adjust my phantom shoulder holster through my open topcoat. Not a boy misses this.
They open a path for me to pass. Without looking back, I hear them giggle, “There goes the fuzzzz!”
Not leaving it at that, I heard myself saying, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning.” They chortled, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool's what we’re about! Dig it!” Without further ado, they retreated in the opposite direction.
When I explained this episode to my ride, the police officer said, “Man, you might have just saved your ass.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.
Mutiny Minded Police Officers
In 1975, the Public Safety Institute contracted me to investigate the unauthorized labor union being formed by the Raleigh Police Officers Association, which was threatening to strike the City of Raleigh, North Carolina if the current Chief of Police was not removed from office.
Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy makers were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work.
· Personality Profile:
A clear dichotomy existed between police command and patrol line operations. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief when interviewed and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me – a disconnect.
They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.
· Geographic Profile:
Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It had the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.
· Demographic Profile:
Raleigh is a community of more than 200,000 with several colleges and universities within and around the city, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Only 5 percent of the 350 sworn officers are college trained, the rest are high school graduates or have GED equivalences; 80 percent are between the ages of 25 and 35 with an average of five years on the police force, while 60 percent live outside Raleigh city limits. None of the command officers, including the chief, are college trained.
While the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demands for new leadership, while television news programs nightly echoed the same sentiments.
Meanwhile, I continued to ride with angry patrol officers on three shifts, interviewed command staff, wandered around city hall, and sent out a questionnaire with the water bill. This was not a scientific study, yet the response was more than 30 percent, indicating citizens wanted resolution of this stalemate.
Intuition as serendipity
We were several weeks into the intervention, and getting nowhere. I had spent scores of hours with police, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started here.
My previous interviews with the city manager, members of the city council and the chief of police were not insightful. I thought I must dig deeper. So I wandered the halls some more. That is how I came to see a distinguished looking man with a white mane sitting in an office devoid of trappings reading The Wall Street Journal. I asked if I might talk to him. “Sure, make yourself at home,” he said with the fastidious gesture and diffident manner of antebellum civility.
For the next two hours I listened to an intriguing story that made everything fall into place.
He informed me he was the prior city manager. His best friend was the previous chief of police. “First college graduate ever to be a Raleigh police chief,” he said proudly.
But there was a problem. His friend had an incurable heart condition and could tolerate no stress. To make certain his friend acquired his full police chief pension, he made him a sinecure while rotating the three majors every four months to run the police department.
This created "three islands of authority," three different and competing police departments, and three distinct power cells.
After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. As city manager with the approval of the City Council, he appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, then convincing the City Council to hire his deputy city manager as City Manager. Once these changes were implemented, he resigned.
The new chief, to solidify his power, promoted his favorite sergeant to major over patrol, the most powerful wing of police operations, placed one major in administration and the other in community service – both non-power positions.
The new Chief of Police then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error. This meant that the captain had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong.
As these patrol officers rotated shifts, and came under his wing, he painted the new chief a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them.
When this scenario was disclosed in a Report to the Public Safety Institute, it took the air out of the threatened siege as these Patrol Officers could see how they had been used. Order was restored. The union became a social club, and the chief ended his career with dignity.
Technical Obsolescence & Intuition
It is 1980. I am now a Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology with ten years of consulting experience. OD consulting failed to be fulfilling – no sense of fruition – so I wasdelighted when an opportunity came to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist, only to have my new boss say almost immediately, “If you don’t find your role here in six weeks, you’re history.”
It was a directness with which I was familiar from my Nalco initial experience. So, I went to work to create a role for me.
· Personality Profile:
Honeywell Avionics Engineers were the elite of this facility, and treated with cloying deference, which was manifested in their cavalier attitude toward everyone – cowboys can do no wrong.
· Geographic Profile:
The facility is mainly a government contractor with work centered on large defense contracts in space and strategic operations. Program managers are engineers and dictate the tempo of work. All accede to their needs.
The ten-acre campus is graced with seven attractive white sun baked buildings including a recreation center on manicured lawns, and complemented by an artificial lake, picnic areas and several parking lots in the heart of Florida's leisure-centered tourist industry.
· Demographic Profile:
The working population of 4,000 includes 1,000 engineers, 2,400 support technicians and administrative personnel, and 600 production workers. More than 3,000 workers are college trained with 400 with advanced degrees among whom more than 30 have Ph.D.’s.
After three weeks in the company, I experienced the wall between Human Resources (HR) and Engineering.
Engineers would requisition courses, seminars, and other professional meetings but would take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits of these expensive offsite jaunts.
Their elitist attitude was reflected when they would say, "Would you know if I told you?"
An examination of these requests, however, revealed a pervasive incident of duplication unnecessarily multiplying costs. I asked HR Compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering population which it did.
Most striking with this profile was that pay continued to increase for engineers as their job competence decreased; 75 percent of these engineers were working on technology developed long after they left engineering college. Moreover, many engineers were receiving engineering pay while doing little or no engineering work.
This suggested some level of technical obsolescence, a problem that was correctable with training.
A memo was prepared that went out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo followed to forty engineers representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response. He was an engineer nearing retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claimed to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education. We would meet every week as if we wear a full-fledged task force.
Intuition and the power of the pen
Trained as a chemist, I can relate to technical arrogance. Knowing this, and being a writer by inclination, I embellished our weekly sessions with statistics, graphs and studies and copied everyone on the original listings. One day a chief engineer joined us.
Mention was made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers showed up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters.
The chief engineer took over the meeting outlining how a Technical Education Program might work. The memo that followed his attendance religiously reported his recommendations
Thereafter, a diverse group from the engineering community attended with a holistic view of what might be established developing.
Serendipity surely in evidence, this chief engineer first became Director of Engineering, then later CEO and General Manager of this facility with technical education key policy to his administration.
Today technical education at Honeywell Avionics is a highly developed program. Technicians in conjunction with the Engineering College of the University of South Florida are able to pursue engineering degrees on the Honeywell campus, while all engineers may continue to upgrade their skills. No engineer need be left behind.9
A Bridge Seemingly Too Far
The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while visiting Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, asked to see me.
They had read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management,”10 and expressed an interest in my coming to Cambridge to work with their people in team building.
CSDL designed the ring laser gyros that were being manufactured in Clearwater. The concern was that there appeared to be a breakdown between the design and production phase of these gyros in this $50 million U.S. Navy program leading to excessive rework and scrap.
· Personality Profile:
The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL, in other words, perfectionists.
· Geographic Profile:
There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design and production team.
My first impression that this was "a bridge too far” was geographic. CSDL workplace consisted of twin circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street, housing CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus.
The design was apparently meant to provide privacy but it also promoted separation and isolation.
· Demographics:
There was a discernible pecking order among these engineers and scientists. Physicists were of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians followed with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and then chemists and biologists, or whatever the other disciplines, to complete the ranks.
Many were Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials caused less friction than seniority, status and personality. The mean age of the group was late thirties but the mindset was closer to that of the spoiled child.
Intuition as anticipation
My anticipation was that I would be perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained in a second-rate school (state university), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11
It was composed of articles previously published on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, stress management and how to conduct a meeting.
Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell Avionic’s Technical Publication Services, I journeyed to CSDL. Once there, I outlined how to use the book, divided people into groups of ten with the balance acting as audience, and then sent them off to plan their respective meetings on topics of burning concern.
They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the previous session, and in the process, ventilated pressing concerns common to all.
The following week, again in teams conducting meetings, they developed corrective strategies. Pleased with their solutions, they decided I could now go home.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” I asked. “I don’t see Clearwater in the picture.”
Busy arriving at consensus on how to work better together they overlooked the breakdown between the design and production phase teams.
That was partially my fault for I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting CSDL people first to talk to each other and to be thinking of shared aims before embracing the larger issue.
“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody offered. And that is what happened.
The CSDL team learned that their precise design was not reproducible in the factory, and the production team found they could propose suggestions to the CSDL lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles apart proved not a bridge too far.
Workings of the Fisher Paradigm ©™
These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern that the Fisher Paradigm originated in a sales discipline.12
It was in sales I learned the fallacy of the mechanistic A, B, C linear approach to persons, places and things, and that a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to it.
These three spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we only erase the line between cause and effect, thinking and feeling, observer and the observed to witness what is happening without bias and allow the small voice of reality to resonate with its need.
The Fisher Paradigm is conceptual, self-conscious and self-organizing. Instead of forcing the world it observes to fit into pre-imposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or boxes, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking or understanding.
By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique pattern and find their own way forward to move off the dime together. The quick response is that “the Fisher Paradigm is just common sense,” but common sense is so rare.
Even more rare is to see a situation whole and integral rather than separate from itself or to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe what is observed in terms of how it should be or is expected to be. The workings of the Fisher Paradigm are as much in evidence in the small as in the large as I close with this episode.
Bottling Plant Fiasco
A major bottling company of soft drinks replaced its bottling handling conveyor with a top of the line electronic conveyor system during a Christmas vacation while 200 employees were on holiday.
The new design was meant to cut operating costs in half and reduce employees by a third. The exact opposite happened. A productive workforce with virtually no labor problems (Personality Profile), situated in a low-tech community (Geographic Profile) with most employees otherwise unskilled (Demographic Profile) registered shock, then anger, when reporting back to work after the Christmas break.
Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t but kept that to themselves, displaying their anger in work slowdown that practically killed the company. Operations did not again become productive until an OD intervention convinced management to level with employees, admit its mistake, form a management-employee team to ensure that such a surprise would not happen again.
Employees conceded that they could see the benefit of more sophisticated operations, but would like to be first informed of such changes, then given the proper training to improved their competence in dealing with the new system.
Management mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt deceived and betrayed.
Intuition was staring management in the face but was ignored. Intuitive OD gave management the eyes to see, but the mind and will to understand is likely to remain its constant challenge.
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