TOLSTOY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 26, 2010
Reference: I write about Tolstoy in the missive TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US (February 24, 2010).
* * *
As I said in this recent piece, myth surrounds our heroes, what I didn’t say, "And then they make films about these people."
I have not yet seen the new film on Tolstoy, “The Last Station,” but I did read a review of the film, which was positive (three and one half stars).
It stars two of my favorites: Christopher Plummer in the role of Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Tolstoy's long-suffering wife, Sofya.
The review claims the movie centers on the last year of Tolstoy’s life, 1910, when he was 82. He did die at Astapovo Station, which was a train station.
As I point out in my piece, Tolstoy, great writer that he was, left only two great works, WAR AND PEACE and ANNA KARENINA.
The film is apparently based on the battle to get Tolstoy to sign over rights to his works. It was some battle fraught with jealousy, revenge, furtiveness, treachery, and always, Tolstoy's bad temper.
The battle for control of the rights was between Sofya and Tolstoy's agent and friend, Cherkov, whom Sofya hated, and others as well.
I don’t know if the film shows he ultimately signed the rights over to his youngest daughter, Alexandra, but it should. Royalties for these works in the last one hundred years (1910 – 2010) have run into the millions of dollars.
So much for accuracy.
* * *
It appears that the film captures what I have tried to say in a few words in my piece, and that is that Tolstoy was contradictory, hypocritical and somewhat of a buffoon, a brilliant buffoon, to be sure, but nonetheless a buffoon.
(1) He was a moralist who led a deeply immoral life;
(2) He advocated and practiced celibacy when he lost an interest in sex;
(3) He became a vegetarian when he no longer had a taste for food; and
(4) He practiced his own kind of Christianity where Jesus was a brother and no more God than he was.
If the film captures this, it will provide a service to history.
* * *
What prompted me to make these remarks was David Cavanaugh, a friend from my youth, and an original member of the Courthouse Tigers that I write about IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).
David reminded me in an email that we remember our teachers but we don’t remember who won the last Nobel Prize in Literature. David put things in perspective.
* * *
This film will, too, if it depicts this great author as the flawed human being that he was. We have arrived at the point in our culture in which the extraordinary lives of ordinary people are seldom chronicled, but they hold us together and on course. Without them, we would perish.
This will not be the last film on Tolstoy, but if it is authentic, it should make us feel lucky that we’re not in the limelight.
Be always well,
Jim
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC
POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 25, 2010
* * *
Before you become exercised about the title of this piece, please allow me to explain. To my request for input as to how I could engage people in considering THE FISHER PARADAIGM©™®, a writer responded:
The only problem with the Fisher Paradigm is its name:
1. 80% of people don't have a clue what paradigm means so it seems inaccessible.
2. To those who know what it means, don't have a clue who you are and may wonder why you are proclaiming something you present as a paradigm. They may think you are putting yourself in the same category as Einstein or Darwin, Kepler or pick your famous theorist.
* * *
I appreciated his response, and new only too well he was correct, as he was the only one that responded.
Before I go on, having somewhat of a weakness for Latin expressions, perhaps a holdover from my days as a Roman Catholic altar boy, the Latin expression has to do with the fallacy argument that insists that something is the effect of a certain cause whereas no such connection may actually exist.
It is the footprint of our explanatory society that always understands why something happens after the fact. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” translates as “after this, therefore, because of it.” But that is not necessarily so.
* * *
COMPLEXITY AND COLLAPSE
Niall Ferguson of Harvard has a thoughtful piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010) that deals with “Decline and Fall: When the American Empire Goes, It Is Likely To Go Quickly.”
Now Ferguson is an economist not a polemicist. He is not waving a red flag, but pointing out the flaw in explanatory models that have been penciled through our history suggesting that decline is a life cycle phenomenon and not an unforeseen abrupt change.
I've mentioned the works of William L. Livingston before on these pages with regard to complexity. Check him out and his books on www.amazon.com.
Ferguson, after briefly covering all of the best known cyclic theories, suggests that history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly. He asks the question: “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly like a thief in the night?”
Read the article, which should be available at your public library if you do not subscribe to the periodical.
COMPLEXITY AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®
Ferguson sees the world, as does Livingston in terms of complex systems with a large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. He uses the analogy of the termite hill, which operates somewhere between order and disorder and on the edge of chaos. To the observer, the termite hill seems to be operating quite stably and even seems to be in equilibrium, but it is in fact constantly adapting, that is, until the complex system “goes critical,” and collapses. A single grain of sand could be the trigger to set off the transition from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.
Now, what this has to do with my paradigm is this:
The story line on all our models is deterministic our minds are not. These models do not represent unanticipated perturbations, and therefore are unlikely to respond appropriately to the breakdown of complex systems.
Our minds are complex systems with a capacity for spontaneous organization. One neuroscientist calls our brains “an enchanted loom.”
When confronted with conflict, challenge, danger, or unanticipated discord, the interaction of dispersed agents of the brain come into play. There is no central control, no cause and effect analysis, no linear interpretation of the situation, but multiple levels of activity gearing up for a spontaneous response.
Virtually all research in social and economic endeavors is with trend analysis, sampling and general deterministic theories from these data.
Yet complex systems, either created by man, or man as a complex system, are wholly nondeterministic, meaning it is impossible to predict how a system or a person will respond when the assumed stability is confronted with a maladaptive challenge.
This was the case I describe in my paradigm when I was walking in Washington, D.C. at 2 o’clock in the morning and was confronted by three black youths.
When a complex system is disrupted from its routine, it is nearly impossible to anticipate what the response will be, or what the correct response should be. Intuition in the personal sense takes over.
There is another term taken out of physics that applies here. It is “self-organized criticality.” We are always teetering on the verge of breakdown, no matter if it is a physical or personal system, but we have this survival mechanism in our brain that allows course corrections and adaptation when disruptions occur.
A FINAL NOTE
Ferguson points out, after carefully outlining his thesis that economic collapse is still unlikely to occur no matter how much the data suggest it is impossible to avoid if people maintain their confidence in the system.
It is panic that kills, that destroys and reduces the complex system to ash. It is why civilizations have disappeared, empires have been extinguished and people have experienced nervous collapse.
We are complex self-organized self-adaptive systems that have life and health challenges every day. And no, I am not comparing myself to Darwin, Einstein or Kepler with my paradigm, but celebrating the incredible capacity of the human mind to heal itself as well as thwart danger.
If we believe, if we have faith, if we remain positive, if we wear a smile on our face no matter what, and can say and mean it:
“What a beautiful day. Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” the fractal geometry of all those molecules and neurons will produce “annus mirabilis,” a Latin expression that means "an astonishing year."
* * *
.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 25, 2010
* * *
Before you become exercised about the title of this piece, please allow me to explain. To my request for input as to how I could engage people in considering THE FISHER PARADAIGM©™®, a writer responded:
The only problem with the Fisher Paradigm is its name:
1. 80% of people don't have a clue what paradigm means so it seems inaccessible.
2. To those who know what it means, don't have a clue who you are and may wonder why you are proclaiming something you present as a paradigm. They may think you are putting yourself in the same category as Einstein or Darwin, Kepler or pick your famous theorist.
* * *
I appreciated his response, and new only too well he was correct, as he was the only one that responded.
Before I go on, having somewhat of a weakness for Latin expressions, perhaps a holdover from my days as a Roman Catholic altar boy, the Latin expression has to do with the fallacy argument that insists that something is the effect of a certain cause whereas no such connection may actually exist.
It is the footprint of our explanatory society that always understands why something happens after the fact. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” translates as “after this, therefore, because of it.” But that is not necessarily so.
* * *
COMPLEXITY AND COLLAPSE
Niall Ferguson of Harvard has a thoughtful piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010) that deals with “Decline and Fall: When the American Empire Goes, It Is Likely To Go Quickly.”
Now Ferguson is an economist not a polemicist. He is not waving a red flag, but pointing out the flaw in explanatory models that have been penciled through our history suggesting that decline is a life cycle phenomenon and not an unforeseen abrupt change.
I've mentioned the works of William L. Livingston before on these pages with regard to complexity. Check him out and his books on www.amazon.com.
Ferguson, after briefly covering all of the best known cyclic theories, suggests that history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly. He asks the question: “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly like a thief in the night?”
Read the article, which should be available at your public library if you do not subscribe to the periodical.
COMPLEXITY AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®
Ferguson sees the world, as does Livingston in terms of complex systems with a large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. He uses the analogy of the termite hill, which operates somewhere between order and disorder and on the edge of chaos. To the observer, the termite hill seems to be operating quite stably and even seems to be in equilibrium, but it is in fact constantly adapting, that is, until the complex system “goes critical,” and collapses. A single grain of sand could be the trigger to set off the transition from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.
Now, what this has to do with my paradigm is this:
The story line on all our models is deterministic our minds are not. These models do not represent unanticipated perturbations, and therefore are unlikely to respond appropriately to the breakdown of complex systems.
Our minds are complex systems with a capacity for spontaneous organization. One neuroscientist calls our brains “an enchanted loom.”
When confronted with conflict, challenge, danger, or unanticipated discord, the interaction of dispersed agents of the brain come into play. There is no central control, no cause and effect analysis, no linear interpretation of the situation, but multiple levels of activity gearing up for a spontaneous response.
Virtually all research in social and economic endeavors is with trend analysis, sampling and general deterministic theories from these data.
Yet complex systems, either created by man, or man as a complex system, are wholly nondeterministic, meaning it is impossible to predict how a system or a person will respond when the assumed stability is confronted with a maladaptive challenge.
This was the case I describe in my paradigm when I was walking in Washington, D.C. at 2 o’clock in the morning and was confronted by three black youths.
When a complex system is disrupted from its routine, it is nearly impossible to anticipate what the response will be, or what the correct response should be. Intuition in the personal sense takes over.
There is another term taken out of physics that applies here. It is “self-organized criticality.” We are always teetering on the verge of breakdown, no matter if it is a physical or personal system, but we have this survival mechanism in our brain that allows course corrections and adaptation when disruptions occur.
A FINAL NOTE
Ferguson points out, after carefully outlining his thesis that economic collapse is still unlikely to occur no matter how much the data suggest it is impossible to avoid if people maintain their confidence in the system.
It is panic that kills, that destroys and reduces the complex system to ash. It is why civilizations have disappeared, empires have been extinguished and people have experienced nervous collapse.
We are complex self-organized self-adaptive systems that have life and health challenges every day. And no, I am not comparing myself to Darwin, Einstein or Kepler with my paradigm, but celebrating the incredible capacity of the human mind to heal itself as well as thwart danger.
If we believe, if we have faith, if we remain positive, if we wear a smile on our face no matter what, and can say and mean it:
“What a beautiful day. Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” the fractal geometry of all those molecules and neurons will produce “annus mirabilis,” a Latin expression that means "an astonishing year."
* * *
.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
RESPONSE TO ARTICLE -- TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY, AND THE MONSTER IN US!
RESPONSE TO ARTICLE – TIGER WOODS, THE RAGE OF SOCIETY, AND THE MONSTER IN US!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Good article Jim.
I'm glad someone finally pointed this out. Our rage, collectively, at Tiger Woods is really anger at ourselves. As you say, he never was the deity we imagined he was. Clay feet is a great way to put it. Poor guy! He was forced all these years to try to live up to the superman image created by and for him. This applies to many situations I believe, not just celebrities.
For example, we elevate certain professions far beyond the reality of their actual worth and skill. Last evening after a game of tennis three couples, including my wife and I, were enjoying a beer.
One couple mentioned their son, a 13 year old strapping athletic boy, also a tennis player, had broken his back during a tournament a few months previous. This got everyone's attention. Evidently, an extreme move he attempted on the tennis court damaged some vertebrae.
Now he was facing surgery, this very week in fact. The surgery would be performed by an orthopedic surgeon. We all know how risky back surgery can be, so the group enquired as to whether they'd sought more than one opinion concerning the necessity of the operation. They'd had three it turned out, two in favour and one surgeon who advised first waiting to see if the injury, which was not now bothering the young man, recurred in the future. The dissenting doctor had said the risk presented by simply waiting was not great.
Now, coincidentally, my wife and I had just played a match against a gentleman who was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. After the match the fellow mentioned that had we tried to play this match one night earlier, he would not have been able to play at all because he had been so ill.
He had, he explained, a serious infection affecting his nasal and respiratory system. It had been ongoing for 10 days, keeping him on his back for the most part. To underline this point he recounted that during surgery the previous day he had been stricken so severely by this illness he was forced to call for a gurney himself to lie down for 20 minutes.
Thus, the surgery, well underway, was put on hold, the patient kept waiting, fully anaesthetized I presume, pending the doctor's own treatment and recovery; fluids and rest. With a smile I asked him, "Did you manage to operate on the correct limb?" And just as casually he laughed and said he had. This is not the usual image we have of our surgeon, entrusted with our well-being in potentially life-altering circumstances.
Although my wife, who knew the story too, tried to muzzle me, I felt compelled to tell this little tale to our friends having the ailing 13 year old. They were incredulous, which surprised me a bit, because I do not put doctors in a higher class than other skilled artisans.
They are fallible despite their esteemed status. There are poor surgeons, and great ones and a whole lot in between, I am quite sure. I hope our friends believed the story. I would estimate there's a 50/50 chance.
Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this little story Jim. It seems in line with what you're saying. We set ourselves up for big disappointments with our delusions of supermen and superwomen. People, it seems, hate reality. Is it just too boring for us maybe?
Thank you once again for sharing your insights.
Your friend,
George
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
BB was a little upset when I wrote this piece, taking my attention away from my novel, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA. I hate to disappoint her ever, but I’ve been writing like a demon and needed a break. I’m glad I took it because of this response. Thank you.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Good article Jim.
I'm glad someone finally pointed this out. Our rage, collectively, at Tiger Woods is really anger at ourselves. As you say, he never was the deity we imagined he was. Clay feet is a great way to put it. Poor guy! He was forced all these years to try to live up to the superman image created by and for him. This applies to many situations I believe, not just celebrities.
For example, we elevate certain professions far beyond the reality of their actual worth and skill. Last evening after a game of tennis three couples, including my wife and I, were enjoying a beer.
One couple mentioned their son, a 13 year old strapping athletic boy, also a tennis player, had broken his back during a tournament a few months previous. This got everyone's attention. Evidently, an extreme move he attempted on the tennis court damaged some vertebrae.
Now he was facing surgery, this very week in fact. The surgery would be performed by an orthopedic surgeon. We all know how risky back surgery can be, so the group enquired as to whether they'd sought more than one opinion concerning the necessity of the operation. They'd had three it turned out, two in favour and one surgeon who advised first waiting to see if the injury, which was not now bothering the young man, recurred in the future. The dissenting doctor had said the risk presented by simply waiting was not great.
Now, coincidentally, my wife and I had just played a match against a gentleman who was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. After the match the fellow mentioned that had we tried to play this match one night earlier, he would not have been able to play at all because he had been so ill.
He had, he explained, a serious infection affecting his nasal and respiratory system. It had been ongoing for 10 days, keeping him on his back for the most part. To underline this point he recounted that during surgery the previous day he had been stricken so severely by this illness he was forced to call for a gurney himself to lie down for 20 minutes.
Thus, the surgery, well underway, was put on hold, the patient kept waiting, fully anaesthetized I presume, pending the doctor's own treatment and recovery; fluids and rest. With a smile I asked him, "Did you manage to operate on the correct limb?" And just as casually he laughed and said he had. This is not the usual image we have of our surgeon, entrusted with our well-being in potentially life-altering circumstances.
Although my wife, who knew the story too, tried to muzzle me, I felt compelled to tell this little tale to our friends having the ailing 13 year old. They were incredulous, which surprised me a bit, because I do not put doctors in a higher class than other skilled artisans.
They are fallible despite their esteemed status. There are poor surgeons, and great ones and a whole lot in between, I am quite sure. I hope our friends believed the story. I would estimate there's a 50/50 chance.
Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this little story Jim. It seems in line with what you're saying. We set ourselves up for big disappointments with our delusions of supermen and superwomen. People, it seems, hate reality. Is it just too boring for us maybe?
Thank you once again for sharing your insights.
Your friend,
George
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
BB was a little upset when I wrote this piece, taking my attention away from my novel, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA. I hate to disappoint her ever, but I’ve been writing like a demon and needed a break. I’m glad I took it because of this response. Thank you.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US!
TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010
In football, there is an expression “telegraphing the pass,” meaning what is to happen is a fait accompli because of the precondition of the act. The same is true with the history of ideas. Where we are today is a materialization of the preconditions of ideas generated over the past three hundred years.
* * *
There is currently much drama associated with a professional golfer, Tiger Woods, a golfer who happens to be the best in the world, possibly the best that has every played the game. It has been discovered he has clay feet like the rest of us. This is not acceptable as we expect our heroes to be more like gods than men. When our heroes appear mere mortals, then they differ little with the rest of us. This is impossible for us to fathom. We are stuck with the unsavory fact that no one escapes the telegraph pass. No one.
* * *
So, what is the good doctor talking about? He’s talking about the weight of ideas over time that have made society and therefore us as we are
* * *
A more basic question is why do we need heroes? The answer can be found in our admiration of others who generate power, are purposeful and manifest combination in superior performance. The athletically gifted have the same biology and chemistry as we all do while those who excel in thought have the same brains that we possess but are more driven to make use of these gifts. It is easier for us to admire than to get up off the couch. Heroes are engaged and we are spectators to such engagement. Otherwise, they are the same as us reacting to the same 300 years of programming unconsciously as we are.
Heroes have a drive to prove they are different, and to be different they must stand out from the rest of us. It is an obsession that has become the rule. They step out of the norm and become representatives of the extremes of our nature. It is not Darwinian. It is conceit. It is arrogance. And it has always been so.
* * *
One of the peculiar things about human nature is that we think of it in terms of weakness. We that go with the flow and never leave the crowd are said to lack the discipline, the passion, the motivation, and the commitment to be outstanding, as if being outstanding or becoming a super duper hero makes life more meaningful. It doesn’t. It makes us more controlled vulnerable and dependent and living up to the expectations of others for us without ever discovering what makes us tick in and of and for ourselves.
We live for accolades, or we dedicate ourselves to being fans of others thinking our heroes are different when they are drowning in the same human foibles as the rest of us. The problem is that heroes may think they have escaped even when repeatedly reminded that they have not. This is such a case with Tiger Woods. Those we place among the exulted ranks have the same clay feet as us all. Nature is not arbitrary. Nature has no special allegiance no special lobby. Nature has no free lunch. You overdraft Nature on one scale you pay for it on another. A nest egg of a $ trillion cannot change Nature’s exactitude.
* * *
Yet our inclination is to put certain people on pedestals and celebrate them until they slip and fall from these heights. We expect them to be more than human so that when they fall we can treat them as less than human. Such is the folly of man.
* * *
Our society did not become so hyper, self-indulgent and permissive in a generation. It has taken centuries for us to reach the level of self-absorption and permissiveness that exists today. We have gone from a God fearing spiritual focus where the Church and clergy ruled the roost to a secular society where skepticism has led to a whole new set of isms from agnosticism to atheism to capitalism to communism to socialism to full blown materialism in less than three hundred years. We now have the oxymoron of China with a communistic political system and a capitalistic economy, and celebrate it as the wave of the future when it carries the diseases of the two isms in the name of progress.
Intellectuals that might not be on the tip of our tongue have changed the furniture of our minds and thus our behavior over the centuries.
We are a product of their preoccupation and are now saddled with their collective madness. They are names we may come across in some college course, but they were (or are) very real very flawed and very decisive in their influence to this day. This is but a sample of a few of them.
* * *
JEAN-JCQUES ROUSSEAU (1712 – 1778):
It was Rousseau who wrote the “Social Contract” we love to quote: “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” He possessed an interesting madness. His great gift to society was to make those chains real by giving a philosophy adopted by Lenin to mount the madness that led to communism and totalitarianism.
He invented the cult of nature, introduced the critique of urban sophistication, and branded civilization as artificial. He rejected the idea of gradual improvement and looked for a more radical ideal that was more intuitive and not confined to reason.
We can thank Rousseau for discovering the individual and leading to the Renaissance, the delving into the self and presenting it for public inspection and consumption.
He saw the advantage to being outwardly frank and inwardly full of guile. He concluded from this trend that man is corrupted and naturally selfish, that he is controlled by vanity and self-esteem.
From this came the obsession with what others thought of him leading to his being competitive and acquisitive. This led in turn to a tragic divergence between appearance and reality, and to the creation of the artificial man.
He saw the coming Industrial Revolution and capitalism leading to avarice and alienation.
Like others who will follow, Rousseau was obsessively self-absorbed, in effect, only a petulant child who loved people but had little use for individuals. He had a strong sense of self-pity and deprivation and a monstrous ego with an obsessive need for the world to take notice of him.
Like others that will follow, he had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity and self-promotion, but unlike others he was a born writer and the prototype of the self-made man.
It should be mentioned at this point that all these men were autodidactic. They had various levels of formal education but were constant students all their lives.
Rousseau, as is the case with the others, was vain just short of madness saying, “I love myself too much to hate anybody,” yet in truth he was a virulent hater, another characteristic of them all, self-deception.
Still, what sets them all apart is that they didn’t deny or conceal their weakness, but emphasized it as a virtue. In the case of Rousseau, it was his vulgarity. He admitted he was uncouth, unpleasant and rude but on principle. “I am a barbarian,” he declared but had a higher calling that necessitated its expression.
* * *
Rousseau, like the others, was incapable of repaying his debts, borrowing from those who could least afford it, but doing so callously without conscience. He would make the indebted feel guilty while he the borrower was incapable of feeling so. “However much it may have cost you to give to me,” he would say to the loaner, a debt he never planned to repay, “you are actually in my debt as it has cost me more.” Anyone who helped him was doing himself a favor because he was a great man.
* * *
Paranoia is so huge among heroes and the great, and none more so than Rousseau. He quarreled ferociously with friends and belittled them before others. Being a scalawag himself, and untrustworthy to a fault, he projected this in others.
Love and truth were often on Rousseau’s tongue but neither found their way into his personal life. Again, this is common among those who promulgate lofty ideals. It is fundamental to their script and but commonly toxic in their personal and professional lives.
* * *
Rousseau like others who are to follow was an indifferent parent. He was an original mind but a sick personality and, unfortunately, shares these attributes with these others. Our modern society is set on a foundation of this madness.
* * *
KARL MARX (1818 – 1883):
Marx we know from his “Communist Manifesto,” which was written mainly on secondary information, as he led a secondary life in the British Museum Library. Incredible as it may seem, he never actually collecting valid primary research data for the ideas he espoused and took up right where Rousseau left off.
* * *
Everything we know about Marx was borrowed. There was apparently not an original bone in his body.
His research, which he claimed to be scientific, was not. It was eclectic and secondary. He was not a vigorous scholar but a persistent one.
St. Augustine, who is celebrated in a similar fashion, influenced society as well as the church from the fifth to the thirteenth century with the institutionalization of his ideas on sin, hell, heaven and salvation.
In modern times, Marx has had a similar impact, not because he was right or had answers, but because his ideas were institutionalized into communism. Marx, a Jew, was baptized a Protestant but drifted away from that faith to be mainly atheistic. He never became an orthodox Jew but the Jewish influence is very much present in scholarship and writing. I can relate to this, as I am a renegade Catholic but know I am very much a Catholic writer.
Common to Marx as others discussed here is that he was not interested in finding truth but proclaiming truth.
He is a giant because he was a poet, journalist and moralist and had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity of his ideas. Perhaps no one in the annals of man was more persistent in formulating his ideas.
On balance, though, he drifted from a doomsday scenario to an economic scenario with an artistic rather than a scientific vision.
Like Freud and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the concept of science was casually stated but dogmatically presented which of course refutes the possibility of scientific disputation.
Marx greatest gift was that of a polemical journalist.
He was a great reader, as were all the others, and has been given credit for many sayings he never invented.
Heinrick Heine (1997 – 1856) first said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”
We should not be surprised. Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was the first to say, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” He said it to the Lebanese people fifty years before John F. Kennedy said it in his inaugural address.
The irony of Marx, and he is not alone in this tribute, is that he was for the cause of the workingman but never worked at a job a day in his life. He was incorrigibly deskbound to his ideas.
Moreover, he wrote about the squalid conditions in cotton mills but never visited one. He wrote about the suffering of the laboring poor but never interviewed a single soul in such straights. His style was not that of the investigator researcher but the polemical vindicator of his proclaimed beliefs. He showed little interest and less inclination to acquire scientific evidence of boots on the ground.
It is true he was a moral philosopher with a wide interest in humanity writ large but little interest in individuals writ small. He was an indifferent husband, father and parent at home. His long-suffering wife lived the disparity between high ideals and attention to wife and children.
Marx, like Rousseau, thought he was owed allegiance because of his important work. No matter how great the sacrifice of others, he thought it appropriate to expect more.
* * *
We now know some scientists have played tendentiously with select facts regarding their research. This is true of global warming at the moment. Marx was an expert at bending and blending information to corroborate his thesis. Vigorous or careful researcher had little appeal to him.
He looked for verification of the truth he had already decided existed and not the other way around.
His crimes against truth are his use of outdated data, selective study of industries, quotes only of bad conditions ignoring reports to the contrary, and totally disregarding progress being made with capitalism. His works were structurally dishonest.
* * *
We mere mortals who are subjected to these giants of intellect, and who must suffer for the conclusions they make. This goes back as far as St. Augustine and now beyond Marx as ideas of thinkers are institutionalized as the way it is, when the way it is, is only that way because they have said it was so.
Skepticism was once a cherished filter that screened out the toxic intellectual waste thrown at us so that we could breathe the purified truth as we came to know it.
We have chosen to forget, perhaps because we are too busy, that truth and freedom and love and meaning do not spring from abstract workings of the mind and imagination of products we purchase on a shelf, but are deeply rooted in the personality and melancholy of the thinkers.
We have abdicated thinking to others like we have abdicated exercise to top athletic performers. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose. Could anything be more tragic?
Thinkers and doers are often exploiters and more often than not their works and lives are structurally dishonest. We are complicit in the affair when we become spectators to life, and let them dictate our existence as our equipment rusts and atrophies in the attic of our minds.
* * *
We know that Rousseau was something of a dandy, and that Marx was a permanent exile.
The pattern of men who have made our world shows them to frequently be outsiders, and with few exceptions, men of deep reflection and little action. They consistently displayed poor hygiene, handling of money, and being insensitive to the needs of others. They were controlling, often bohemian, difficult to work for or live with, given to being idle and dissolute, and seldom, and this may surprise, systematic thinkers.
Outside the mainstream, while craving its attention, they lead secret lives that ultimately were their undoing. The irony in death is that a mystic image developed around them and helped to perpetuate their ideas and to romanticize their lives. They have added to this mystique by carefully constructed autobiographies, which have proven in their mendacity that no one escapes the figment of their imagination.
What they did do is step away from the crowd in their thinking and action and made up rules to suit their inclinations.
* * *
We are a species enamored of the idea of “greatness” with some mounting the quest to save humanity from itself when they cannot save themselves from humanity. They talk much about truth but have proven to be great liars, talk about perfection and flaunt their imperfections with impunity. They burn with a desire to create a better world when their own personal world is falling apart for lack of attention. The daughter of the great psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote at piece in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1999) complaining her father never had time for her mental problems when she was growing up.
* * *
HENRIK IBSEN (1828 – 1906):
What Rousseau did for the eighteenth century Ibsen did for the nineteenth century. Henrik, a contemporary of Tolstoy, created the theatre that we enjoy today. His work became a powerful source to women’s liberation yet he was horrible to women in his personal life. He used women to dramatize his ideas and cared little what it did to them or their reputations. You see the pattern here. He saw himself outside the constrictions of ordinary souls. There was a contrary strain in him:
(1) He preached women's rights but hated their independence.
(2) He wanted women to get ahead but not to compete with men in any form. He preferred their freedom be limited to the stage.
(3) He was for workingman, and workingman rights, but knew nothing about workingmen. He thought it repugnant to be associated with them or their causes, again limiting his association to the stage. His approach to art was creative selfishness. The little guy was prominent in his plays but he had nothing to do with him in h is life.
* * *
LEO TOLSTOY (1828 – 1910):
Tolstoy was a true intellectual giant, but also the biggest puzzle. His two great novels, written over 100 years ago, still sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year but writing was an embarrassment to him.
No one has ever put words together better than he has. Read pieces of “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina” – anywhere – and it will melt your heart. He had a gift like Dickens and Flaubert but preferred to “save the world” from itself, than write, when he could not save himself from the world.
If you know anything about Tolstoy, you know he was a religious zealot, but a profligate human being. He was a compulsive gambler and drinker, and was cruel to his long-suffering wife who he treated like a serf. To the very end he was dastardly, secretly signing the copyrights of all his works over to a daughter and leaving his widow out in the cold, penniless.
Our greatest writer was a bastard. He wanted to lead the world in a crusade, when he had no aptitude for leadership. It is one of the peculiar predilections of intellectuals. They think they can lead, and no one was more self-deluded in this sense than Tolstoy.
* * *
With greatness what you see is never what you get, or what the great produce is seldom a reflection of what they are. It is more likely a profile of the opposite extreme. The great have a will to power with a feeling of being anointed with something the rest of us lack.
Tolstoy was born into the Russian aristocracy. This was a form of slavery known as serfdom. Aristocrats owned the land and the serfs came with it. There were aristocrats in Tolstoy’s time that had as many as 200,000 serfs. Tolstoy inherited only about 700 with his land. He was never comfortable with the idea of serfdom.
* * *
Another pattern of people who get above the radar is that they seldom believe in conventions such as marriage and fidelity. Nor do they believe in paying their bills or living within their means. Their most grievous error is forgetting who helped them get to where they have gotten.
Tolstoy, by the way, penned the line, “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He knew a lot about such unhappiness because he orchestrated it.
* * *
Like the others mentioned, Tolstoy was great at celebrating the theme of love. He embraced the concept in the abstract, but had little acquaintance with it other than as self-love. You get the impression these great men were incapable of love, but yet claimed love was the ultimate value of humanity.
* * *
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 – 1961):
Whereas Rousseau changed politics, Henrik Ibsen changed theatre, Tolstoy defined prose, it was Hemingway who created a new ethical style as a novelist and short story writer. His influence exceeded the boundaries of literature in that he defined modern American man.
The whole macho craze has Hemingway’s footprint. He coined that expression, “grace under pressure.” He was speaking about writing but he could just as well have been speaking about the exploits of Tiger Woods or Larry Bird when he said,
“Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement, everything must be done in brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs and short sentences (he could have been saying golf strokes or handling the basketball) do nothing superfluous or for effect.”
Hemingway saw prose as an architect. He became the model of an age for attention grabbing action. Look at film and television drama today. Plot has evaporated replaced by pyrotechnics and hard breathing like the television drama, “24.”
* * *
The story I’m telling is that each of these men of achievement became prisoner of their own imagination and celebrity.
They came to believe they were different, that the rules didn’t apply to them, that they were practicing anarchists outside the law of restrictions, that they had a right to live huge not realizing this amounted to ritualistic isolation.
Most high achievers are loners surrounded by sycophants; private persons with no privacy; control freaks out of control; shy to the point of mania but craving idolatry, bored to tears all the way to the bank.
When they fall on their petard, they expect understanding and empathy when it doesn’t exist in their makeup. They believe they deserve it because of their many sacrifices as if it were we that had put their feet to that fire.
These patterns have become society’s collective DNA, which means there is no comfort in pointing fingers.
* * *
BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872 – 1970):
Take Bertrand Russell who epitomizes the whole lot.
Russell lived almost one hundred years, a trained mathematician, who wrote as if an expert on everything. He did so because he was a "genius," and a genius has no limitations. Genius is an equally meaningless word as is greatness, both words of which we seem enraptured.
He wrote books on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social construction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, ABC of atoms (long before the atomic bomb) science, relativity, education, skepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, love, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future of disarmament, peace, war, crime and many other topics.
* * *
Now, there is nothing wrong with writing books about subjects of which the writer is not actually an expert. What is wrong is when such writing is valued as “brilliant” – another non-word – and taken seriously without close examination.
One thing of which you can be certain is that people of brilliance are stupid in many other ways, as extremes in one direction have a natural counterbalance of extremes in the opposite direction. Nature did not create any perfect human beings.
The danger with Russell, and I have read many of his books, is that his character comes through when he departs from what he knows well replaced by his hyper and meddling personality with something of the odor of the crackpot. “Why I am Not A Christian” (1957) is an example. When I read the book, I couldn’t believe him serious, until I saw him on television. I have no problem with him not being Christian but I do have a problem with his puerile arguments in obtuse syllogisms.
* * *
Like the others, Russell was an incredibly creative self-promoters.
He craved the limelight and managed to stay in it most of his adult life. He was not good at doing anything but thinking and even then he could go off the rails. A completely pampered man, he loved women only insofar as they would indulge him. For example, he never learned to make tea although he was addicted to the beverage.
Russell was an outsider, too, who forced his way in as an insider never content living in the isolated world of pure mathematics. Gregarious and everywhere, he thought logic and mathematics could explain everything and solve anything. Logic was the fire of the gods.
What is surprising, and biographers are having fun with this, is that in all of his writings there is one consistent theme – he had little regard for accuracy or for verifiable sources. He, like his predecessors in far less scientific endeavors, made many of his facts fit his preconceived theses without apologies, although tantamount to heresy in science and mathematics.
* * *
All of the men described here were vain but some to comedic extremes. Henrik Ibsen loved medals and honors and would seek them to the point of embarrassment. Once in his possession, he would wear them around the house as part of his wardrobe. .
* * *
Another thing in common is that they saw themselves as moralists against evidence of lecherous personalities. They used women to their purposes sexually and otherwise. Common as well is that these men were generally physically ugly. Women throughout history have looked past this to be romantically attracted to minds of brilliance. These men were no exception. Once discarded, these women often attempted suicide causing these great men little guilt or discomfort.
* * *
All were either first born or the only child. When they were the first born in a family of many other siblings, invariably they were treated as if an only child. Moreover, at maturity, they were often diminutive in stature, physically plain bordering on ugly but were never wanting for beautiful female companions.
* * *
JEAB0OAYK SARTRE (1905 – 1980):
No one was more diminutive or ugly than Jean-Paul Sartre. At five-two with bulging eyes, he became the darling of the permissive age with his doctrine of existentialism.
This gave the individual the right of self-responsibility, the right to criticize everything and everybody, and the responsibility for nothing. Young people were encouraged to live in the moment and take from it what they will and not to have to apologize for anything.
In his existential philosophy, he created the justification for permanent adolescent. It is the reason we have no adults running anything anywhere today.
No one need ever grow up or therefore grow old.
Like many other myths, Sartre didn’t invent the word “existentialism,” the press did. It is one of those meaningless journalistic inventions that reached the credibility of truth. Now, politicians; pundits, professors and psychotherapists are doctrinaire existentialists, which means we are all saddled with the immaturity that no one can escape.
* * *
Great thinkers are great drinkers so one wonders how many ideas have the aroma of the spirits that gave birth to them.
I say this because none of thinkers I have profiled – including the scientists and mathematicians – are systematic thinkers. They are doers crowd pleasers puppets on a string dancing for the crowd in which they periodically reinforce their judgments into the fabric of alcoholic or drug induced doctrines.
We endorse their silliness with behavior defiant of our roots and call it progress.
You could say despite the adulation, attention and celebrity we have awarded them, they periodically stand on their head, so to speak, and look ridiculous.
Sartre wrote much about boredom and absurdity as if it were our problem when he was bored or absurd. It is not his fault that we took him at his word, as we did Freud, and made their sickness our own.
Sartre, in old age with a coterie of idealistic youth following him and mimicking his every grunt, was the Pied Piper of the times as society departed from good sense into a psychedelic haze.
In three hundred years we have gone from spiritual values to secular materialism, from utopian idealism to runaway hedonism, from self-responsibility to permissiveness, and from confidence in reality to a flight from reason.
It all started back in the time of Rousseau but Sartre and others in recent times have provided the catalyst that was added after World War Two to bring everything to this mockery fruition.
* * *
Today, when so much is going wrong, when the explainable is no longer making sense, when everything is in a state of flux, a state that it has always been in, but previously it was more tectonic, the fault is not in the stars but in man.
There is not one person reading this that does not live in a messed up family, not one that does not know of the sins described here, or the violence and trauma that is associated with such excesses. We live in a sick age and a sick society, which is not new, as every age has its societal diseases. Being messed up has become the norm. Instead of being charitable to those that stumble, we engage in schadenfreude, which is the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others as compensation and distraction from our own.
* * *
GEORGE ORWELL (1903 – 1950):
A word that is common to all those described here is “childish.” Not one of them could be described as an adult mature or otherwise. Adulthood seems anathema to thinkers who feel more comfortable in the puerile world of attention. There are exceptions.
George Orwell published “1984” in 1949. The book like the man was truthful and prescient. It was Orwell who said,
“Ordinary people have a stronger sense of what is common decency, a greater attachment to simple virtues such as honesty, loyalty and truthfulness than the highly educated.”
He was an adult and he was right. Over my long career working at every level of organization I have seldom encountered an exception to these words.
Orwell stepped away from his privileged class and public education to see and write about the world he was in working as a policeman in India, among other jobs. He saw the real world without apologies or hidden agenda.
He didn’t glorify the Spanish Civil War as Hemingway and others did, but wrote about it in a balanced view in “Homage to Catalonia” (1938).
He saw the collapse of traditional morality and spiritual certitude leading to permissiveness and violence and a new language to justify it all in his novel, “1948” with the newspeak.
He previously had published “Animal Farm” (1945), at the end of WWII, addressing the corruption of revolution and the wickedness and indifference that corrupt leadership leads to no matter how utopian the cause.
Not only have I found Orwell’s words true, but I am astounded with his honesty. When other thinkers would bend the facts to suit their premises or promote their celebrity, he could and would not.
Orwell saw how language was misused to the point of meaningless. He was appalled with such words as “great” or “brilliant” or “genius” as they were used in his day. Imagine what he would think more than fifty years later.
Commentators today use these as throwaway words as preface to their remarks. Orwell was suspect of formal education when it was used to warrant listening. He saw political behavior as largely non-rational and not rule susceptible to solutions generated and therefore impossible to hold water. We see this in Washington, D.C. today.
* * *
Our permissive society didn’t just happen. It is a three hundred year program in our retreat from good sense. It has even invaded sport. But why should sport be any different than the rest of society? Tiger Woods is a mathematician on the golf course, but a failed student in arithmetic in life. So, what is new?
Creators of our permissive society have:
(1) A penchant for patriotisms and the greater good but no answer to senseless wars.
(2) Perpetuated violence by qualifying what is good and bad terrorism.
(3) An appetite for leadership but no one who can lead.
(4) A platform for prisoner rehabilitation without consulting prisoners.
(5) Urban renewal plans for clearing the slums but no place for the slum dwellers.
(6) Plans for subsidizing low cost housing with funny money.
(7) Grand schemes for free food, free medicine, free clothing and free housing for the disadvantage but no jobs.
(8) Utopian schemes to ensure security but at the expense of destroying privacy.
* * *
We are messed up, people, and we’re not going to be able to correct it if we don’t know why we are, or what has contributed to the status. A chronic problem is one that keeps slapping us down, we pay it no mind, get back on our feet, proud of our courage, but learning nothing, get slapped down again, then repeating it again and again, ad infinitum.
When a “role model” falls from grace, we are always surprised. Why? Do we think, “There go I but for the grace of God,” or do we say, “Not my problem,” or do we try to imagine the pressures of having to live in the caldron of constant fame? I know what I think. Do you?
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010
In football, there is an expression “telegraphing the pass,” meaning what is to happen is a fait accompli because of the precondition of the act. The same is true with the history of ideas. Where we are today is a materialization of the preconditions of ideas generated over the past three hundred years.
* * *
There is currently much drama associated with a professional golfer, Tiger Woods, a golfer who happens to be the best in the world, possibly the best that has every played the game. It has been discovered he has clay feet like the rest of us. This is not acceptable as we expect our heroes to be more like gods than men. When our heroes appear mere mortals, then they differ little with the rest of us. This is impossible for us to fathom. We are stuck with the unsavory fact that no one escapes the telegraph pass. No one.
* * *
So, what is the good doctor talking about? He’s talking about the weight of ideas over time that have made society and therefore us as we are
* * *
A more basic question is why do we need heroes? The answer can be found in our admiration of others who generate power, are purposeful and manifest combination in superior performance. The athletically gifted have the same biology and chemistry as we all do while those who excel in thought have the same brains that we possess but are more driven to make use of these gifts. It is easier for us to admire than to get up off the couch. Heroes are engaged and we are spectators to such engagement. Otherwise, they are the same as us reacting to the same 300 years of programming unconsciously as we are.
Heroes have a drive to prove they are different, and to be different they must stand out from the rest of us. It is an obsession that has become the rule. They step out of the norm and become representatives of the extremes of our nature. It is not Darwinian. It is conceit. It is arrogance. And it has always been so.
* * *
One of the peculiar things about human nature is that we think of it in terms of weakness. We that go with the flow and never leave the crowd are said to lack the discipline, the passion, the motivation, and the commitment to be outstanding, as if being outstanding or becoming a super duper hero makes life more meaningful. It doesn’t. It makes us more controlled vulnerable and dependent and living up to the expectations of others for us without ever discovering what makes us tick in and of and for ourselves.
We live for accolades, or we dedicate ourselves to being fans of others thinking our heroes are different when they are drowning in the same human foibles as the rest of us. The problem is that heroes may think they have escaped even when repeatedly reminded that they have not. This is such a case with Tiger Woods. Those we place among the exulted ranks have the same clay feet as us all. Nature is not arbitrary. Nature has no special allegiance no special lobby. Nature has no free lunch. You overdraft Nature on one scale you pay for it on another. A nest egg of a $ trillion cannot change Nature’s exactitude.
* * *
Yet our inclination is to put certain people on pedestals and celebrate them until they slip and fall from these heights. We expect them to be more than human so that when they fall we can treat them as less than human. Such is the folly of man.
* * *
Our society did not become so hyper, self-indulgent and permissive in a generation. It has taken centuries for us to reach the level of self-absorption and permissiveness that exists today. We have gone from a God fearing spiritual focus where the Church and clergy ruled the roost to a secular society where skepticism has led to a whole new set of isms from agnosticism to atheism to capitalism to communism to socialism to full blown materialism in less than three hundred years. We now have the oxymoron of China with a communistic political system and a capitalistic economy, and celebrate it as the wave of the future when it carries the diseases of the two isms in the name of progress.
Intellectuals that might not be on the tip of our tongue have changed the furniture of our minds and thus our behavior over the centuries.
We are a product of their preoccupation and are now saddled with their collective madness. They are names we may come across in some college course, but they were (or are) very real very flawed and very decisive in their influence to this day. This is but a sample of a few of them.
* * *
JEAN-JCQUES ROUSSEAU (1712 – 1778):
It was Rousseau who wrote the “Social Contract” we love to quote: “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” He possessed an interesting madness. His great gift to society was to make those chains real by giving a philosophy adopted by Lenin to mount the madness that led to communism and totalitarianism.
He invented the cult of nature, introduced the critique of urban sophistication, and branded civilization as artificial. He rejected the idea of gradual improvement and looked for a more radical ideal that was more intuitive and not confined to reason.
We can thank Rousseau for discovering the individual and leading to the Renaissance, the delving into the self and presenting it for public inspection and consumption.
He saw the advantage to being outwardly frank and inwardly full of guile. He concluded from this trend that man is corrupted and naturally selfish, that he is controlled by vanity and self-esteem.
From this came the obsession with what others thought of him leading to his being competitive and acquisitive. This led in turn to a tragic divergence between appearance and reality, and to the creation of the artificial man.
He saw the coming Industrial Revolution and capitalism leading to avarice and alienation.
Like others who will follow, Rousseau was obsessively self-absorbed, in effect, only a petulant child who loved people but had little use for individuals. He had a strong sense of self-pity and deprivation and a monstrous ego with an obsessive need for the world to take notice of him.
Like others that will follow, he had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity and self-promotion, but unlike others he was a born writer and the prototype of the self-made man.
It should be mentioned at this point that all these men were autodidactic. They had various levels of formal education but were constant students all their lives.
Rousseau, as is the case with the others, was vain just short of madness saying, “I love myself too much to hate anybody,” yet in truth he was a virulent hater, another characteristic of them all, self-deception.
Still, what sets them all apart is that they didn’t deny or conceal their weakness, but emphasized it as a virtue. In the case of Rousseau, it was his vulgarity. He admitted he was uncouth, unpleasant and rude but on principle. “I am a barbarian,” he declared but had a higher calling that necessitated its expression.
* * *
Rousseau, like the others, was incapable of repaying his debts, borrowing from those who could least afford it, but doing so callously without conscience. He would make the indebted feel guilty while he the borrower was incapable of feeling so. “However much it may have cost you to give to me,” he would say to the loaner, a debt he never planned to repay, “you are actually in my debt as it has cost me more.” Anyone who helped him was doing himself a favor because he was a great man.
* * *
Paranoia is so huge among heroes and the great, and none more so than Rousseau. He quarreled ferociously with friends and belittled them before others. Being a scalawag himself, and untrustworthy to a fault, he projected this in others.
Love and truth were often on Rousseau’s tongue but neither found their way into his personal life. Again, this is common among those who promulgate lofty ideals. It is fundamental to their script and but commonly toxic in their personal and professional lives.
* * *
Rousseau like others who are to follow was an indifferent parent. He was an original mind but a sick personality and, unfortunately, shares these attributes with these others. Our modern society is set on a foundation of this madness.
* * *
KARL MARX (1818 – 1883):
Marx we know from his “Communist Manifesto,” which was written mainly on secondary information, as he led a secondary life in the British Museum Library. Incredible as it may seem, he never actually collecting valid primary research data for the ideas he espoused and took up right where Rousseau left off.
* * *
Everything we know about Marx was borrowed. There was apparently not an original bone in his body.
His research, which he claimed to be scientific, was not. It was eclectic and secondary. He was not a vigorous scholar but a persistent one.
St. Augustine, who is celebrated in a similar fashion, influenced society as well as the church from the fifth to the thirteenth century with the institutionalization of his ideas on sin, hell, heaven and salvation.
In modern times, Marx has had a similar impact, not because he was right or had answers, but because his ideas were institutionalized into communism. Marx, a Jew, was baptized a Protestant but drifted away from that faith to be mainly atheistic. He never became an orthodox Jew but the Jewish influence is very much present in scholarship and writing. I can relate to this, as I am a renegade Catholic but know I am very much a Catholic writer.
Common to Marx as others discussed here is that he was not interested in finding truth but proclaiming truth.
He is a giant because he was a poet, journalist and moralist and had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity of his ideas. Perhaps no one in the annals of man was more persistent in formulating his ideas.
On balance, though, he drifted from a doomsday scenario to an economic scenario with an artistic rather than a scientific vision.
Like Freud and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the concept of science was casually stated but dogmatically presented which of course refutes the possibility of scientific disputation.
Marx greatest gift was that of a polemical journalist.
He was a great reader, as were all the others, and has been given credit for many sayings he never invented.
Heinrick Heine (1997 – 1856) first said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”
We should not be surprised. Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was the first to say, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” He said it to the Lebanese people fifty years before John F. Kennedy said it in his inaugural address.
The irony of Marx, and he is not alone in this tribute, is that he was for the cause of the workingman but never worked at a job a day in his life. He was incorrigibly deskbound to his ideas.
Moreover, he wrote about the squalid conditions in cotton mills but never visited one. He wrote about the suffering of the laboring poor but never interviewed a single soul in such straights. His style was not that of the investigator researcher but the polemical vindicator of his proclaimed beliefs. He showed little interest and less inclination to acquire scientific evidence of boots on the ground.
It is true he was a moral philosopher with a wide interest in humanity writ large but little interest in individuals writ small. He was an indifferent husband, father and parent at home. His long-suffering wife lived the disparity between high ideals and attention to wife and children.
Marx, like Rousseau, thought he was owed allegiance because of his important work. No matter how great the sacrifice of others, he thought it appropriate to expect more.
* * *
We now know some scientists have played tendentiously with select facts regarding their research. This is true of global warming at the moment. Marx was an expert at bending and blending information to corroborate his thesis. Vigorous or careful researcher had little appeal to him.
He looked for verification of the truth he had already decided existed and not the other way around.
His crimes against truth are his use of outdated data, selective study of industries, quotes only of bad conditions ignoring reports to the contrary, and totally disregarding progress being made with capitalism. His works were structurally dishonest.
* * *
We mere mortals who are subjected to these giants of intellect, and who must suffer for the conclusions they make. This goes back as far as St. Augustine and now beyond Marx as ideas of thinkers are institutionalized as the way it is, when the way it is, is only that way because they have said it was so.
Skepticism was once a cherished filter that screened out the toxic intellectual waste thrown at us so that we could breathe the purified truth as we came to know it.
We have chosen to forget, perhaps because we are too busy, that truth and freedom and love and meaning do not spring from abstract workings of the mind and imagination of products we purchase on a shelf, but are deeply rooted in the personality and melancholy of the thinkers.
We have abdicated thinking to others like we have abdicated exercise to top athletic performers. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose. Could anything be more tragic?
Thinkers and doers are often exploiters and more often than not their works and lives are structurally dishonest. We are complicit in the affair when we become spectators to life, and let them dictate our existence as our equipment rusts and atrophies in the attic of our minds.
* * *
We know that Rousseau was something of a dandy, and that Marx was a permanent exile.
The pattern of men who have made our world shows them to frequently be outsiders, and with few exceptions, men of deep reflection and little action. They consistently displayed poor hygiene, handling of money, and being insensitive to the needs of others. They were controlling, often bohemian, difficult to work for or live with, given to being idle and dissolute, and seldom, and this may surprise, systematic thinkers.
Outside the mainstream, while craving its attention, they lead secret lives that ultimately were their undoing. The irony in death is that a mystic image developed around them and helped to perpetuate their ideas and to romanticize their lives. They have added to this mystique by carefully constructed autobiographies, which have proven in their mendacity that no one escapes the figment of their imagination.
What they did do is step away from the crowd in their thinking and action and made up rules to suit their inclinations.
* * *
We are a species enamored of the idea of “greatness” with some mounting the quest to save humanity from itself when they cannot save themselves from humanity. They talk much about truth but have proven to be great liars, talk about perfection and flaunt their imperfections with impunity. They burn with a desire to create a better world when their own personal world is falling apart for lack of attention. The daughter of the great psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote at piece in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1999) complaining her father never had time for her mental problems when she was growing up.
* * *
HENRIK IBSEN (1828 – 1906):
What Rousseau did for the eighteenth century Ibsen did for the nineteenth century. Henrik, a contemporary of Tolstoy, created the theatre that we enjoy today. His work became a powerful source to women’s liberation yet he was horrible to women in his personal life. He used women to dramatize his ideas and cared little what it did to them or their reputations. You see the pattern here. He saw himself outside the constrictions of ordinary souls. There was a contrary strain in him:
(1) He preached women's rights but hated their independence.
(2) He wanted women to get ahead but not to compete with men in any form. He preferred their freedom be limited to the stage.
(3) He was for workingman, and workingman rights, but knew nothing about workingmen. He thought it repugnant to be associated with them or their causes, again limiting his association to the stage. His approach to art was creative selfishness. The little guy was prominent in his plays but he had nothing to do with him in h is life.
* * *
LEO TOLSTOY (1828 – 1910):
Tolstoy was a true intellectual giant, but also the biggest puzzle. His two great novels, written over 100 years ago, still sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year but writing was an embarrassment to him.
No one has ever put words together better than he has. Read pieces of “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina” – anywhere – and it will melt your heart. He had a gift like Dickens and Flaubert but preferred to “save the world” from itself, than write, when he could not save himself from the world.
If you know anything about Tolstoy, you know he was a religious zealot, but a profligate human being. He was a compulsive gambler and drinker, and was cruel to his long-suffering wife who he treated like a serf. To the very end he was dastardly, secretly signing the copyrights of all his works over to a daughter and leaving his widow out in the cold, penniless.
Our greatest writer was a bastard. He wanted to lead the world in a crusade, when he had no aptitude for leadership. It is one of the peculiar predilections of intellectuals. They think they can lead, and no one was more self-deluded in this sense than Tolstoy.
* * *
With greatness what you see is never what you get, or what the great produce is seldom a reflection of what they are. It is more likely a profile of the opposite extreme. The great have a will to power with a feeling of being anointed with something the rest of us lack.
Tolstoy was born into the Russian aristocracy. This was a form of slavery known as serfdom. Aristocrats owned the land and the serfs came with it. There were aristocrats in Tolstoy’s time that had as many as 200,000 serfs. Tolstoy inherited only about 700 with his land. He was never comfortable with the idea of serfdom.
* * *
Another pattern of people who get above the radar is that they seldom believe in conventions such as marriage and fidelity. Nor do they believe in paying their bills or living within their means. Their most grievous error is forgetting who helped them get to where they have gotten.
Tolstoy, by the way, penned the line, “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He knew a lot about such unhappiness because he orchestrated it.
* * *
Like the others mentioned, Tolstoy was great at celebrating the theme of love. He embraced the concept in the abstract, but had little acquaintance with it other than as self-love. You get the impression these great men were incapable of love, but yet claimed love was the ultimate value of humanity.
* * *
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 – 1961):
Whereas Rousseau changed politics, Henrik Ibsen changed theatre, Tolstoy defined prose, it was Hemingway who created a new ethical style as a novelist and short story writer. His influence exceeded the boundaries of literature in that he defined modern American man.
The whole macho craze has Hemingway’s footprint. He coined that expression, “grace under pressure.” He was speaking about writing but he could just as well have been speaking about the exploits of Tiger Woods or Larry Bird when he said,
“Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement, everything must be done in brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs and short sentences (he could have been saying golf strokes or handling the basketball) do nothing superfluous or for effect.”
Hemingway saw prose as an architect. He became the model of an age for attention grabbing action. Look at film and television drama today. Plot has evaporated replaced by pyrotechnics and hard breathing like the television drama, “24.”
* * *
The story I’m telling is that each of these men of achievement became prisoner of their own imagination and celebrity.
They came to believe they were different, that the rules didn’t apply to them, that they were practicing anarchists outside the law of restrictions, that they had a right to live huge not realizing this amounted to ritualistic isolation.
Most high achievers are loners surrounded by sycophants; private persons with no privacy; control freaks out of control; shy to the point of mania but craving idolatry, bored to tears all the way to the bank.
When they fall on their petard, they expect understanding and empathy when it doesn’t exist in their makeup. They believe they deserve it because of their many sacrifices as if it were we that had put their feet to that fire.
These patterns have become society’s collective DNA, which means there is no comfort in pointing fingers.
* * *
BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872 – 1970):
Take Bertrand Russell who epitomizes the whole lot.
Russell lived almost one hundred years, a trained mathematician, who wrote as if an expert on everything. He did so because he was a "genius," and a genius has no limitations. Genius is an equally meaningless word as is greatness, both words of which we seem enraptured.
He wrote books on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social construction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, ABC of atoms (long before the atomic bomb) science, relativity, education, skepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, love, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future of disarmament, peace, war, crime and many other topics.
* * *
Now, there is nothing wrong with writing books about subjects of which the writer is not actually an expert. What is wrong is when such writing is valued as “brilliant” – another non-word – and taken seriously without close examination.
One thing of which you can be certain is that people of brilliance are stupid in many other ways, as extremes in one direction have a natural counterbalance of extremes in the opposite direction. Nature did not create any perfect human beings.
The danger with Russell, and I have read many of his books, is that his character comes through when he departs from what he knows well replaced by his hyper and meddling personality with something of the odor of the crackpot. “Why I am Not A Christian” (1957) is an example. When I read the book, I couldn’t believe him serious, until I saw him on television. I have no problem with him not being Christian but I do have a problem with his puerile arguments in obtuse syllogisms.
* * *
Like the others, Russell was an incredibly creative self-promoters.
He craved the limelight and managed to stay in it most of his adult life. He was not good at doing anything but thinking and even then he could go off the rails. A completely pampered man, he loved women only insofar as they would indulge him. For example, he never learned to make tea although he was addicted to the beverage.
Russell was an outsider, too, who forced his way in as an insider never content living in the isolated world of pure mathematics. Gregarious and everywhere, he thought logic and mathematics could explain everything and solve anything. Logic was the fire of the gods.
What is surprising, and biographers are having fun with this, is that in all of his writings there is one consistent theme – he had little regard for accuracy or for verifiable sources. He, like his predecessors in far less scientific endeavors, made many of his facts fit his preconceived theses without apologies, although tantamount to heresy in science and mathematics.
* * *
All of the men described here were vain but some to comedic extremes. Henrik Ibsen loved medals and honors and would seek them to the point of embarrassment. Once in his possession, he would wear them around the house as part of his wardrobe. .
* * *
Another thing in common is that they saw themselves as moralists against evidence of lecherous personalities. They used women to their purposes sexually and otherwise. Common as well is that these men were generally physically ugly. Women throughout history have looked past this to be romantically attracted to minds of brilliance. These men were no exception. Once discarded, these women often attempted suicide causing these great men little guilt or discomfort.
* * *
All were either first born or the only child. When they were the first born in a family of many other siblings, invariably they were treated as if an only child. Moreover, at maturity, they were often diminutive in stature, physically plain bordering on ugly but were never wanting for beautiful female companions.
* * *
JEAB0OAYK SARTRE (1905 – 1980):
No one was more diminutive or ugly than Jean-Paul Sartre. At five-two with bulging eyes, he became the darling of the permissive age with his doctrine of existentialism.
This gave the individual the right of self-responsibility, the right to criticize everything and everybody, and the responsibility for nothing. Young people were encouraged to live in the moment and take from it what they will and not to have to apologize for anything.
In his existential philosophy, he created the justification for permanent adolescent. It is the reason we have no adults running anything anywhere today.
No one need ever grow up or therefore grow old.
Like many other myths, Sartre didn’t invent the word “existentialism,” the press did. It is one of those meaningless journalistic inventions that reached the credibility of truth. Now, politicians; pundits, professors and psychotherapists are doctrinaire existentialists, which means we are all saddled with the immaturity that no one can escape.
* * *
Great thinkers are great drinkers so one wonders how many ideas have the aroma of the spirits that gave birth to them.
I say this because none of thinkers I have profiled – including the scientists and mathematicians – are systematic thinkers. They are doers crowd pleasers puppets on a string dancing for the crowd in which they periodically reinforce their judgments into the fabric of alcoholic or drug induced doctrines.
We endorse their silliness with behavior defiant of our roots and call it progress.
You could say despite the adulation, attention and celebrity we have awarded them, they periodically stand on their head, so to speak, and look ridiculous.
Sartre wrote much about boredom and absurdity as if it were our problem when he was bored or absurd. It is not his fault that we took him at his word, as we did Freud, and made their sickness our own.
Sartre, in old age with a coterie of idealistic youth following him and mimicking his every grunt, was the Pied Piper of the times as society departed from good sense into a psychedelic haze.
In three hundred years we have gone from spiritual values to secular materialism, from utopian idealism to runaway hedonism, from self-responsibility to permissiveness, and from confidence in reality to a flight from reason.
It all started back in the time of Rousseau but Sartre and others in recent times have provided the catalyst that was added after World War Two to bring everything to this mockery fruition.
* * *
Today, when so much is going wrong, when the explainable is no longer making sense, when everything is in a state of flux, a state that it has always been in, but previously it was more tectonic, the fault is not in the stars but in man.
There is not one person reading this that does not live in a messed up family, not one that does not know of the sins described here, or the violence and trauma that is associated with such excesses. We live in a sick age and a sick society, which is not new, as every age has its societal diseases. Being messed up has become the norm. Instead of being charitable to those that stumble, we engage in schadenfreude, which is the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others as compensation and distraction from our own.
* * *
GEORGE ORWELL (1903 – 1950):
A word that is common to all those described here is “childish.” Not one of them could be described as an adult mature or otherwise. Adulthood seems anathema to thinkers who feel more comfortable in the puerile world of attention. There are exceptions.
George Orwell published “1984” in 1949. The book like the man was truthful and prescient. It was Orwell who said,
“Ordinary people have a stronger sense of what is common decency, a greater attachment to simple virtues such as honesty, loyalty and truthfulness than the highly educated.”
He was an adult and he was right. Over my long career working at every level of organization I have seldom encountered an exception to these words.
Orwell stepped away from his privileged class and public education to see and write about the world he was in working as a policeman in India, among other jobs. He saw the real world without apologies or hidden agenda.
He didn’t glorify the Spanish Civil War as Hemingway and others did, but wrote about it in a balanced view in “Homage to Catalonia” (1938).
He saw the collapse of traditional morality and spiritual certitude leading to permissiveness and violence and a new language to justify it all in his novel, “1948” with the newspeak.
He previously had published “Animal Farm” (1945), at the end of WWII, addressing the corruption of revolution and the wickedness and indifference that corrupt leadership leads to no matter how utopian the cause.
Not only have I found Orwell’s words true, but I am astounded with his honesty. When other thinkers would bend the facts to suit their premises or promote their celebrity, he could and would not.
Orwell saw how language was misused to the point of meaningless. He was appalled with such words as “great” or “brilliant” or “genius” as they were used in his day. Imagine what he would think more than fifty years later.
Commentators today use these as throwaway words as preface to their remarks. Orwell was suspect of formal education when it was used to warrant listening. He saw political behavior as largely non-rational and not rule susceptible to solutions generated and therefore impossible to hold water. We see this in Washington, D.C. today.
* * *
Our permissive society didn’t just happen. It is a three hundred year program in our retreat from good sense. It has even invaded sport. But why should sport be any different than the rest of society? Tiger Woods is a mathematician on the golf course, but a failed student in arithmetic in life. So, what is new?
Creators of our permissive society have:
(1) A penchant for patriotisms and the greater good but no answer to senseless wars.
(2) Perpetuated violence by qualifying what is good and bad terrorism.
(3) An appetite for leadership but no one who can lead.
(4) A platform for prisoner rehabilitation without consulting prisoners.
(5) Urban renewal plans for clearing the slums but no place for the slum dwellers.
(6) Plans for subsidizing low cost housing with funny money.
(7) Grand schemes for free food, free medicine, free clothing and free housing for the disadvantage but no jobs.
(8) Utopian schemes to ensure security but at the expense of destroying privacy.
* * *
We are messed up, people, and we’re not going to be able to correct it if we don’t know why we are, or what has contributed to the status. A chronic problem is one that keeps slapping us down, we pay it no mind, get back on our feet, proud of our courage, but learning nothing, get slapped down again, then repeating it again and again, ad infinitum.
When a “role model” falls from grace, we are always surprised. Why? Do we think, “There go I but for the grace of God,” or do we say, “Not my problem,” or do we try to imagine the pressures of having to live in the caldron of constant fame? I know what I think. Do you?
* * *
Sunday, February 14, 2010
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE -- LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE --- LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 14, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Have you read any books by Robert Crais? Here is a quote from THE WATCHMAN:
“With her asleep, Pike believed he was seeing her Original Person. Pike believed each person created himself or herself; you built yourself from the inside out, with the tensions and will of the inside person holding the outside person together. The outside person was the face you showed the world; it was your mask, your camouflage, your message, and, perhaps, your means. It existed only so long as the inside person held it together, and when the inside person could no longer hold the mask together, the outside person dissolved and you would see the original per son. Pike had observed that sleep could sometimes loosen the hold. Booze, dope, and extreme emotions all loosen the hold; the weaker the grasp, the more easily loosened. Then you saw the person within the person. The trick was to reach a place where the inside person and the outside person were the same. The closer someone got to this place, the stronger they would become. Pike believe that Cole was such a person, his inside and outside very close to being one and the same. Pike admired him for it. He also wondered whether Cole had accomplished this through design and effort, or was one with himself because oneness was his natural state. Pike’s inside person had built a fortress. The fortress had served, but Pike hoped for ore. A fortress was a lonely place to live.”
How does this sit with your philosophy?
Mary
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Yes, I have read books by Robert Crais, but not recently.
He is not saying the same thing I am, or in exactly the same way. He is saying, "you build" yourself from the inside out. That is true. Unfortunately, you don't become the person you are from that perspective. You come the person others have told you are from the “outside to the inside” by a cacophony of noises directed at you as stimuli.
Some of us never escape that identity. The irony is the more we deny, “We are like our mother” or “like our father” the more we become so. The more others try to drive “sin” out of us the deeper it buries itself in our unconscious and dictates the puppetry of our lives.
In THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), I show how necessary rebellion is in establishing authentic identity. Even then, we never escape the scar of our programming and early inculcation.
If a person never rebels, never challenges the laws by which he is judged, then that person is likely to be a pleaser at the expense of ever pleasing him or herself.
We are a society of pleasers because most incentives are directed at pleasing in order to receive the concomitant rewards that pleasing give.
Pleasing is not a zero sum game. It is distorted by a magnitude of from 70 to 90 percent in the direction of those that we would please because no addiction is greater than having others please us. This is the whole mantra of corpocracy.
* * *.
Our current economic crisis is proof positive that we live in a world of pleasing others with the puppet masters taking full advantage of this inclination.
I know a bright young lady who is now in the eighth grade who told her father she wanted to be a medical doctor and specialize in pediatrics. His response, “Why would you want to be that? There’s no money in medicine.”
Fortunately, from a very early age, this child has had her own mind and has resisted attempts of others to define her and what she is and isn’t, should and shouldn’t be, so chances are she will go on to reach her career goal of serving others rather than making money, what the puppeteers claim is the most important and most worthy of pursuits.
* * *
When I was in college, there was a boy I knew who loved farming, but his father wanted him to be a dentist where he would have job security. A bright boy, he hated science other than as it related to farming, and hated dentistry even more. He flunked out of school rather than challenge his father’s design for him thus defeating them both.
* * *
The whole idea of the plastic world of buying is to get us to buy something we don’t need but must have because it is marked down “50%” when it could be marked down 100 percent and the company would still make a profit.
We receive constant offers in the mail to sign up for new credit cards which hide the exorbitant interests rates they will charge if we default on any regular bill from electric to water or anything in which we find ourselves slightly in arrears.
But plastic credit cards are a painless way to keep up with the Jones and to buy into the phoniest of all ideas ever perpetrated on the American conscience, “the American Dream!” It is as phony as "diamonds are a girl's best friend." And why? It is not because dreaming is bad or that diamonds are bad, but the disconnect it can make between sense and sensibility, between want and need.
* * *
There has always been a solid silent majority in America now a minority that didn’t need to bother with definitions or ideas about rebellion. I come from that world although have departed from it, the world that has always held America together, connected and real against the extremes of both the East Coast and the West Coast, where nothing is ever real or if real at all not for very long.
That said the happiest, healthiest, most content people are those that you would never know they could rub two dimes together but pay their bills on time, go to church, read the newspaper, vote, and never get a traffic ticket.
They are the heroes of American society yet invisible and disappearing. They are as important a factor to our collective future as is global warming and pollution.
If you do come across them by chance, they are common looking, wholesome, pleasant and draw no attention to themselves. They have most likely worked for forty years at the same job, lived in the same house, keep the house and property neat and tidy, drive a ten-year-old car which is kept in tip top shape, and have no strong opinions on anything.
They are loyal to the things they consider important such as their beliefs and values. And despite all the pressures to the contrary, they raise good kids that go to school to learn, and not to mess around, and then go off to college to become doctors, teachers, scientists, and homemakers, living much as they were raised.
* * *
We could learn so much from them but choose to see them as unsophisticated uninformed even backward and living in the past. In fact, opinion makers would see them as unpatriotic in a consumer driven economy in which people constantly buy things they don’t need such as new high ticket items every year: cars, appliances, furniture, gadgets and the like. Small wonder that sixty-six and two-thirds percent of the Gross Domestic Product depends on spendthrifts.
Most Americans have adequate furniture, adequate living space, live in an adequate house in an adequate neighborhood, have an adequate automobile, but buy into the idea that “this is not good enough for us.” So, they purchase new furniture, new cars, new appliances, and so on.
Companies selling high-ticket items such as furniture and appliances have interest free loans and no payment schedules for 12, 24, or more months, but then BOOM! It all comes due including skyrocketing payments and interest rates.
* * *
We are in a world of pleasers and the puppet masters have taken full advantage of that, as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate of Economics (2001), points out in his new book FREEFALL (2010).
Stiglitz says only about 58 percent of able body Americans are fully employed in the present economy. Compare this to the published figures of unemployment being around 10 percent.
He also says that the income of Middle Americans from 1999 to 2007 has actually shrunk considerably, while the upper 5 percent has increased in multiples of 100 percent, that the Federal Reserve has been a tool of Wall Street and Big Banks since the end of the longest sustained capitalistic economy in history (1939 - 1989).
Then all hell broke loose. Constraints, regulation and so on were imposed but they might as well been figments of the imagination because they weren’t enforced or even regarded.
Peter Drucker wrote about this in somewhat nostalgic shock when he said, “Up through and immediately after World War Two, executive pay and benefits were modest compared to workers,” but then they shot up until today they can be as high as 10,000 percent higher than workers. What happened?
We have been in a free fall according to Stiglitz due to corporate greed, lack of regulation, incompetence and incapacity of Congress to take appropriate action, ambivalence of the presidency, and a system rigged for corporations to cherry pick to their hearts’ content while taxpayers get the bill.
I take this non sequitur for reason as I hope to show shortly.
* * *
Oneness is the true state when our insides and outsides approximate each other. I have no argument with that. As I’ve attempted to show in my published works, it has not been a trouble free connection when those that would influence us in our early years are so disconnected in their own maturity.
Several years ago on the Johnny Carson Show, Carson asked the late George Carlin why he wore a beard. At the time people who wore beards were persona non grata except in show business. "Well, Johnny," Carlin said in that droll way of his, "my outsides finally caught up with my insides."
Carlin, who was near genius if not so, not only in comedy but also in thinking, had struggled mightily over many things including depression to establish his persona. One of those ways was with facial hair.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote a lot about the "authentic human being," finding few if any in sight. Sartre hit you between the eyes with some of his ideas, whereas his friend Albert Camus brushed you back with the strength of his wit. The two Nobel Laureates (Sartre refused his) thought deeply about being authentic. I have always been a big fan of Sartre, but now am rereading Camus after some fifty years.
I'm currently reading "THE PLAGUE" (1948) by Camus, whereas my friend William L. Livingston wrote a wonderful book called, "THE NEW PLAGUE” (1985).
Livingston’s book doesn’t deal with the same vermin as Camus’s. The new vermin, the new plague according to Livingston, is “complexity." It has signaled the death knell economically for many Americans not to mention people across the globe. And why?
Livingston would say the complexity of our problems is so great that we solve problems we think we can solve leaving the problems we face to exacerbate. Stiglitz would agree.
The author of "FREEFALL" says we've lost our balance between economic resources and human development. "So many of my most gifted students," he says, "have gone into finance instead of medicine, the arts, teaching, science or other necessary and innovative careers, careers that are necessary to ensure growth." Making money ensures no growth only avarice.
* * *
The quote you lifted from Robert Crais's book is another reason I think people should read novels. Novelists can get away with truth telling without turning people off from their primary aim, which is to escape truths and the demands of life for entertainment.
* * *
One final note on the subject of inner and outer health and well being.
As you know, I come from very humble circumstances, and have schooled myself in the best minds that I might come across in libraries and bookstores, finding formal education, although I have had a lot of it, very disappointing in the extreme.
As Emerson had predicted, most learning is through experience and most experience is understood through reading.
On occasion in my life, I have spoken to large groups of learned bodies and have been treated as if I belonged. Most people from such circumstances acquired learning as if by osmosis with large libraries in their homes along with the inculcation of culture, climate and the concomitant privilege that breeding, especially breeding gives to such individuals. Only a privilege few, with notable exceptions, can afford an education that flirts with six figure academic costs per year.
I did not come from such circumstances and yet I have worked with and competed with graduates of such experience. I don't mention this to throw kudos at myself. Quite the contrary.
As author Crais points out in his novel, the outside mask can vanish revealing the inside character behind it. Someone would see evidence of this if I were extremely tired, distressed, overworked, and overwhelmed by the demands of my schedule.
Then my language would break down, my vocabulary would desert me, my grammar and syntax be that of an unschooled person, and I would misuse and mispronounce words. It would be as if I were again that child in the company of my mother, my greatest inspiration and critique, who was very hard of hearing most of her life, and all of mine and she could do a real job on the American language.
That language echoes in my soul and comes out of my mouth when I’m extremely tired. I don’t necessarily fall apart as the character Robert Crais is describing, but I do become totally transparent. Knowing this, understanding this, has humbled me to appreciate how lucky I am to express myself knowing who and what I really am.
Be always well, and Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 14, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Have you read any books by Robert Crais? Here is a quote from THE WATCHMAN:
“With her asleep, Pike believed he was seeing her Original Person. Pike believed each person created himself or herself; you built yourself from the inside out, with the tensions and will of the inside person holding the outside person together. The outside person was the face you showed the world; it was your mask, your camouflage, your message, and, perhaps, your means. It existed only so long as the inside person held it together, and when the inside person could no longer hold the mask together, the outside person dissolved and you would see the original per son. Pike had observed that sleep could sometimes loosen the hold. Booze, dope, and extreme emotions all loosen the hold; the weaker the grasp, the more easily loosened. Then you saw the person within the person. The trick was to reach a place where the inside person and the outside person were the same. The closer someone got to this place, the stronger they would become. Pike believe that Cole was such a person, his inside and outside very close to being one and the same. Pike admired him for it. He also wondered whether Cole had accomplished this through design and effort, or was one with himself because oneness was his natural state. Pike’s inside person had built a fortress. The fortress had served, but Pike hoped for ore. A fortress was a lonely place to live.”
How does this sit with your philosophy?
Mary
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Yes, I have read books by Robert Crais, but not recently.
He is not saying the same thing I am, or in exactly the same way. He is saying, "you build" yourself from the inside out. That is true. Unfortunately, you don't become the person you are from that perspective. You come the person others have told you are from the “outside to the inside” by a cacophony of noises directed at you as stimuli.
Some of us never escape that identity. The irony is the more we deny, “We are like our mother” or “like our father” the more we become so. The more others try to drive “sin” out of us the deeper it buries itself in our unconscious and dictates the puppetry of our lives.
In THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), I show how necessary rebellion is in establishing authentic identity. Even then, we never escape the scar of our programming and early inculcation.
If a person never rebels, never challenges the laws by which he is judged, then that person is likely to be a pleaser at the expense of ever pleasing him or herself.
We are a society of pleasers because most incentives are directed at pleasing in order to receive the concomitant rewards that pleasing give.
Pleasing is not a zero sum game. It is distorted by a magnitude of from 70 to 90 percent in the direction of those that we would please because no addiction is greater than having others please us. This is the whole mantra of corpocracy.
* * *.
Our current economic crisis is proof positive that we live in a world of pleasing others with the puppet masters taking full advantage of this inclination.
I know a bright young lady who is now in the eighth grade who told her father she wanted to be a medical doctor and specialize in pediatrics. His response, “Why would you want to be that? There’s no money in medicine.”
Fortunately, from a very early age, this child has had her own mind and has resisted attempts of others to define her and what she is and isn’t, should and shouldn’t be, so chances are she will go on to reach her career goal of serving others rather than making money, what the puppeteers claim is the most important and most worthy of pursuits.
* * *
When I was in college, there was a boy I knew who loved farming, but his father wanted him to be a dentist where he would have job security. A bright boy, he hated science other than as it related to farming, and hated dentistry even more. He flunked out of school rather than challenge his father’s design for him thus defeating them both.
* * *
The whole idea of the plastic world of buying is to get us to buy something we don’t need but must have because it is marked down “50%” when it could be marked down 100 percent and the company would still make a profit.
We receive constant offers in the mail to sign up for new credit cards which hide the exorbitant interests rates they will charge if we default on any regular bill from electric to water or anything in which we find ourselves slightly in arrears.
But plastic credit cards are a painless way to keep up with the Jones and to buy into the phoniest of all ideas ever perpetrated on the American conscience, “the American Dream!” It is as phony as "diamonds are a girl's best friend." And why? It is not because dreaming is bad or that diamonds are bad, but the disconnect it can make between sense and sensibility, between want and need.
* * *
There has always been a solid silent majority in America now a minority that didn’t need to bother with definitions or ideas about rebellion. I come from that world although have departed from it, the world that has always held America together, connected and real against the extremes of both the East Coast and the West Coast, where nothing is ever real or if real at all not for very long.
That said the happiest, healthiest, most content people are those that you would never know they could rub two dimes together but pay their bills on time, go to church, read the newspaper, vote, and never get a traffic ticket.
They are the heroes of American society yet invisible and disappearing. They are as important a factor to our collective future as is global warming and pollution.
If you do come across them by chance, they are common looking, wholesome, pleasant and draw no attention to themselves. They have most likely worked for forty years at the same job, lived in the same house, keep the house and property neat and tidy, drive a ten-year-old car which is kept in tip top shape, and have no strong opinions on anything.
They are loyal to the things they consider important such as their beliefs and values. And despite all the pressures to the contrary, they raise good kids that go to school to learn, and not to mess around, and then go off to college to become doctors, teachers, scientists, and homemakers, living much as they were raised.
* * *
We could learn so much from them but choose to see them as unsophisticated uninformed even backward and living in the past. In fact, opinion makers would see them as unpatriotic in a consumer driven economy in which people constantly buy things they don’t need such as new high ticket items every year: cars, appliances, furniture, gadgets and the like. Small wonder that sixty-six and two-thirds percent of the Gross Domestic Product depends on spendthrifts.
Most Americans have adequate furniture, adequate living space, live in an adequate house in an adequate neighborhood, have an adequate automobile, but buy into the idea that “this is not good enough for us.” So, they purchase new furniture, new cars, new appliances, and so on.
Companies selling high-ticket items such as furniture and appliances have interest free loans and no payment schedules for 12, 24, or more months, but then BOOM! It all comes due including skyrocketing payments and interest rates.
* * *
We are in a world of pleasers and the puppet masters have taken full advantage of that, as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate of Economics (2001), points out in his new book FREEFALL (2010).
Stiglitz says only about 58 percent of able body Americans are fully employed in the present economy. Compare this to the published figures of unemployment being around 10 percent.
He also says that the income of Middle Americans from 1999 to 2007 has actually shrunk considerably, while the upper 5 percent has increased in multiples of 100 percent, that the Federal Reserve has been a tool of Wall Street and Big Banks since the end of the longest sustained capitalistic economy in history (1939 - 1989).
Then all hell broke loose. Constraints, regulation and so on were imposed but they might as well been figments of the imagination because they weren’t enforced or even regarded.
Peter Drucker wrote about this in somewhat nostalgic shock when he said, “Up through and immediately after World War Two, executive pay and benefits were modest compared to workers,” but then they shot up until today they can be as high as 10,000 percent higher than workers. What happened?
We have been in a free fall according to Stiglitz due to corporate greed, lack of regulation, incompetence and incapacity of Congress to take appropriate action, ambivalence of the presidency, and a system rigged for corporations to cherry pick to their hearts’ content while taxpayers get the bill.
I take this non sequitur for reason as I hope to show shortly.
* * *
Oneness is the true state when our insides and outsides approximate each other. I have no argument with that. As I’ve attempted to show in my published works, it has not been a trouble free connection when those that would influence us in our early years are so disconnected in their own maturity.
Several years ago on the Johnny Carson Show, Carson asked the late George Carlin why he wore a beard. At the time people who wore beards were persona non grata except in show business. "Well, Johnny," Carlin said in that droll way of his, "my outsides finally caught up with my insides."
Carlin, who was near genius if not so, not only in comedy but also in thinking, had struggled mightily over many things including depression to establish his persona. One of those ways was with facial hair.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote a lot about the "authentic human being," finding few if any in sight. Sartre hit you between the eyes with some of his ideas, whereas his friend Albert Camus brushed you back with the strength of his wit. The two Nobel Laureates (Sartre refused his) thought deeply about being authentic. I have always been a big fan of Sartre, but now am rereading Camus after some fifty years.
I'm currently reading "THE PLAGUE" (1948) by Camus, whereas my friend William L. Livingston wrote a wonderful book called, "THE NEW PLAGUE” (1985).
Livingston’s book doesn’t deal with the same vermin as Camus’s. The new vermin, the new plague according to Livingston, is “complexity." It has signaled the death knell economically for many Americans not to mention people across the globe. And why?
Livingston would say the complexity of our problems is so great that we solve problems we think we can solve leaving the problems we face to exacerbate. Stiglitz would agree.
The author of "FREEFALL" says we've lost our balance between economic resources and human development. "So many of my most gifted students," he says, "have gone into finance instead of medicine, the arts, teaching, science or other necessary and innovative careers, careers that are necessary to ensure growth." Making money ensures no growth only avarice.
* * *
The quote you lifted from Robert Crais's book is another reason I think people should read novels. Novelists can get away with truth telling without turning people off from their primary aim, which is to escape truths and the demands of life for entertainment.
* * *
One final note on the subject of inner and outer health and well being.
As you know, I come from very humble circumstances, and have schooled myself in the best minds that I might come across in libraries and bookstores, finding formal education, although I have had a lot of it, very disappointing in the extreme.
As Emerson had predicted, most learning is through experience and most experience is understood through reading.
On occasion in my life, I have spoken to large groups of learned bodies and have been treated as if I belonged. Most people from such circumstances acquired learning as if by osmosis with large libraries in their homes along with the inculcation of culture, climate and the concomitant privilege that breeding, especially breeding gives to such individuals. Only a privilege few, with notable exceptions, can afford an education that flirts with six figure academic costs per year.
I did not come from such circumstances and yet I have worked with and competed with graduates of such experience. I don't mention this to throw kudos at myself. Quite the contrary.
As author Crais points out in his novel, the outside mask can vanish revealing the inside character behind it. Someone would see evidence of this if I were extremely tired, distressed, overworked, and overwhelmed by the demands of my schedule.
Then my language would break down, my vocabulary would desert me, my grammar and syntax be that of an unschooled person, and I would misuse and mispronounce words. It would be as if I were again that child in the company of my mother, my greatest inspiration and critique, who was very hard of hearing most of her life, and all of mine and she could do a real job on the American language.
That language echoes in my soul and comes out of my mouth when I’m extremely tired. I don’t necessarily fall apart as the character Robert Crais is describing, but I do become totally transparent. Knowing this, understanding this, has humbled me to appreciate how lucky I am to express myself knowing who and what I really am.
Be always well, and Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
Jim
Saturday, February 13, 2010
THE NAPLES INSTITUTE -- WHY IT FAILED -- A REALITY CHECK TODAY!
THE NAPLES INSTITUTE – WHY IT FAILED – A REALITY CHECK TODAY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 13, 2010
REALITY CHECK:
I wrote this piece hurriedly not able to get the images of those thoughtless murders in northern Nigeria out of my mind (missive follows) only to be shocked this morning to learn the son of one of the original COURTHOUSE TIGERS who was profiled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was one of the victims of the shootings at the University of Alabama Medical School in Huntsville, Alabama yesterday.
Dr. Joseph Leahy, the son of Phil Leahy, a professor of microbiology was one of the six victims, all professors of the School of Medicine. Three are dead, two are in critical condition, and one professor is in stable condition. Dr. Leahy is one of the critically wounded.
Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard educated, and a professor in the medical school, who failed to win tenure, is the shooter.
Readers don’t like me to generalize about the depravity of our society, of the god of progress that we worship, or that we go zany over something like “American Idol” or all these wonderful handheld contraptions we possess. Well, folks, no apologies here. We are messed up, people, and this is brought home when our best educated and leaders of our society go berserk.
* * *
DR. FISHER WROTE:
Dear Ted,
I want to applaud you for your efforts along with Bernie to launch THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. That said I think there are a number of reasons why it failed.
(1) I think its niche, social justice, although commendable, was too ambiguous. Social justice should be an absolute but we are in the age of relativism and therefore many have different and conflicting definitions of what that might be.
Therefore, I think it was wrong to attempt to specify the niche when it would be better not to be identifying with a niche at all.
(2) A think tank needs a benefactor, a person with deep pockets that can get it off the ground no strings attached, and finance it for several years as it attempts to define its role and contribution to this troubled world.
(3) You have to have the right kind of people, and by that I mean thinkers, not doers not entrepreneurs not people that are capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals but who are driven by ideas and ideals not power.
It takes a very different mind to make money than a mind to change the world.
(4) THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, from the many memos I have read, were not the right people for the purposes of which I outlined in a long piece to you several months ago.
* * *
Most people in this electronic age get 99 percent of their information either through the Internet,on television, or radio. Ironically, the entrepreneur spirit and not what I outline above drive media, electronic and print journalism.
Recently, only this past week, PBS's "World Focus," the "German News" and the "BBC News" showed video evidence of the police and military in northern Nigeria singling out a total of thirteen men, two on crutches, and having them prostrate themselves on the ground while uniformed officers shot them in the back of the head, one officer telling a shooter not to shoot the man in the head because he wanted his hat, another man started to get up and turn around and an officer said "pose for the camera," and then shot him dead.
I'm an old man and this wrenched my soul. This brutality has happened before and will happen again but I always have had the filter of reading about it in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The New York Review, or in some book, not seeing it naked before my eyes. This is the horror of the world we live in.
Meanwhile, the air waves are concerned about former president Bill Clinton's stent implants, Sarah Palim's writing discussion points on her hand, or some other inconsequential nonsense. More people are dying in Afghanistan and more troops are there to contribute to the death toll, collateral and otherwise, and nothing changes.
Border towns in Mexico have scores of deaths every day because of drug wars with weapons from the United States. These large drug cartels are in business because of Americans insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. Thousands of Mexican soldiers police these towns but to no avail. We seem to always look at problems ass backwards.
You cannot legislate morality, decency, dignity or belief in a common humanity. I feel it sad to say that I will most likely leave this world in far worse shape than when I entered it. If this is progress, I don't want any of it.
The last hope of some sensibility in society are think tanks that are not fronts for lobbyists, special interests, bleeding hearts, religious organizations or for that matter, political parties. The world is in a mess. It has taken a crazy pill and cannot overcome its addiction. I had hope for THE NAPLES INSTITUTE because I didn't think it was afraid of ideas. I think ideas killed it, and that is sad.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER REPLIES:
Hello Jim,
I liked the brief commentary on our times, its brevity and liked for its being a further commentary on our times. What was the old Marxist belief? Religion is the opiate of the masses. Your piece made me think in the 21st Century mass media is the new opiate of the masses. People desire to numb themselves to the inhumanity of man rather than being disgusted by it. Disgust requires action. Think Nazi Germany.
I think of the Bruce Springsteen lyric:
In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
Unfortunately, we don't really leave the cage we just go to another room. Our escape is imaginary and we don't want it fettered with hard truth. Even when the hard truth is accompanied by solutions, as messy as those solutions can be.
As much as I dislike the tea party solutions, they have one thing right. Throw the bums out. This last turn in congress, in which a super majority couldn't pass meaningful legislation because its own members held it hostage while their grubby, pork stained hands grabbed for more pork is indicative of how badly broken our government really is.
Social justice may only come from an active revolt of those who believe social justice is important. Think tanks are fine, but only if their thoughts are capable of fueling the disgust and rage needed to change the world.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for sharing.
My aim is not to defend think tanks but to note their possible usefulness. Historian Paul Johnson who has written many books suitable to the laymen, two of which I have read, “The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830”(1991) and “Intellectuals” (1988) says of President Barak Obama (that also may be true of most of us), “President Obama talks too much and thinks too little.”
Thinking no longer has the predicate of importance it once enjoyed. We think in words but as long as we can use words well there is little reason to think past what the words imply if they imply anything.
The president has his own hiccup which is slightly different from the most common hiccup, which is “you know you know you know,” when of course we don’t know.
The president’s hiccup is “let me make one thing perfectly clear” when what is perfectly clear is not clear at all. I don’t mean to be picking on the president but he has the bully pulpit and is a constant voice and model for us all.
A think tank, if it functions like a think tank, gets inside language, inside ideas, inside the meaning not only of words but styles of life and values within those lives. Philosophy once provided that service but philosophy has gotten into mechanics and semiotics, which is different than what I am implying, and into relativism and deconstructionism. We are in the tearing apart and putting back together phase of existence. Historians such as Paul Johnson will have none of that, and therefore he is on the fringe of his profession.
We as a society have a broken wing and still are attempting to fly without repairing the wing.
You are right to quote Bruce Springsteen. I am not much into popular culture, but know such artists often cut through the malarkey to reveal fundamental truths.
Your reference to the cage intrigues me. I wrote a book titled, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? I couldn’t find a publisher as I cannot find a publisher for most of my books. One day my daughter, Jennifer, asks me how many manuscripts, that is, complete books I had written that had not been published? I was embarrassed to tell her more than the nine books I have found into print.
Finally, my enthusiasm for the TEA PARTY movement is no more enthusiastic than any other. We vote the bums out and replace them with new bums, who we vote out to replace them with newer bums, ad infinitum.
The snowstorm in Washington, D.C. found 300,000 government workers unable to get to their offices, and yet the nation ran okay. We could get rid of 300,000 CEOs across the nation and everything would go on okay as well. We have the mistaken idea, placed in our heads of course by this contingent that the nation and society could not operate without these folks, but it can and does and has and will.
The inescapable idea that democracy and totalitarianism share is that leaders make the difference and not the people, that ideas percolate down from on high and catch hold in the bowels of society when the actual reverse is true.
Those at the top, that 300,000 or so on Wall Street and in corpocracy are holding to the myth for dear life, not only in the United States but everywhere. People make the difference and they always have. They choose not to accept the fact because then whom would they blame?
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
ANOTHER READER REPLIES TO THIS MISSIVE:
Jim,
I guess not only your # 2 is a major reason for success, but also such idealistic tasks are generally too broad and fluffy to get people really excited. It has to have a specific target that can be reached in a certain timeframe.
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Manfred,
What you say is true, but I fear the problem is that old saw, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
To me, a think tank is the egg. It has to be incubated with ideas and leavened with subtle care before it hatches into anything meaningful, useful or in your words, specific.
There are conservative and liberal think tanks, medical and scientific think tanks, and so on, but they fail my test which I describe above, that is, they are preternaturally idealized before they are hatched, and therefore they have a bias that limits thought and frames ideas in a peculiar way.
It has always amused me when scientists would say to me, “What right do you have to comment on science? You are not a scientist?”
I have parried with, “Sir, you are wrong. We are all scientists. We just don’t all wear the white coat and straight jacket.”
Commentators are now in their total explanatory mode trying to explain President Obama’s loss of support from Americans out in the tundra, those without high school educations that Sarah Palim is supposedly reaching in her illiterate ramblings.
One of the benefits of a long life is that some of the smartest people I have known never graduated from high school, one was my da. I’ve known many others. School doesn't make a person wise, life does.
The professor at the University of Alabama Medical School who murdered three of her professor colleagues, and critically wounded three others was educated at Harvard University. Motivation for the crime is alleged to be her failure to win tenure.
Tenure for an academic is job security and the equivalent of lifetime employment that cannot be denied the tenured person unless convicted of some moral or criminal turpitude.
* * *
Back in the 1970s, a Dr. Fisher in the chemistry department of Florida State University was murdered by a student whose dissertation was not accepted, a necessary fulfillment to be awarded a Ph.D. He murdered Dr. Fisher, who was on his committee, for this failure. Perhaps as many as fifty telephone calls came to my house thinking it was I that had been murdered. It gave me pause.
* * *
My book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2003) was all about the madness of our times, a book that people didn’t want to read to be reminded of the fact.
* * *
Can think tanks change this? No. But think tanks can have the integrity to keep up the pressure.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 13, 2010
REALITY CHECK:
I wrote this piece hurriedly not able to get the images of those thoughtless murders in northern Nigeria out of my mind (missive follows) only to be shocked this morning to learn the son of one of the original COURTHOUSE TIGERS who was profiled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was one of the victims of the shootings at the University of Alabama Medical School in Huntsville, Alabama yesterday.
Dr. Joseph Leahy, the son of Phil Leahy, a professor of microbiology was one of the six victims, all professors of the School of Medicine. Three are dead, two are in critical condition, and one professor is in stable condition. Dr. Leahy is one of the critically wounded.
Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard educated, and a professor in the medical school, who failed to win tenure, is the shooter.
Readers don’t like me to generalize about the depravity of our society, of the god of progress that we worship, or that we go zany over something like “American Idol” or all these wonderful handheld contraptions we possess. Well, folks, no apologies here. We are messed up, people, and this is brought home when our best educated and leaders of our society go berserk.
* * *
DR. FISHER WROTE:
Dear Ted,
I want to applaud you for your efforts along with Bernie to launch THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. That said I think there are a number of reasons why it failed.
(1) I think its niche, social justice, although commendable, was too ambiguous. Social justice should be an absolute but we are in the age of relativism and therefore many have different and conflicting definitions of what that might be.
Therefore, I think it was wrong to attempt to specify the niche when it would be better not to be identifying with a niche at all.
(2) A think tank needs a benefactor, a person with deep pockets that can get it off the ground no strings attached, and finance it for several years as it attempts to define its role and contribution to this troubled world.
(3) You have to have the right kind of people, and by that I mean thinkers, not doers not entrepreneurs not people that are capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals but who are driven by ideas and ideals not power.
It takes a very different mind to make money than a mind to change the world.
(4) THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, from the many memos I have read, were not the right people for the purposes of which I outlined in a long piece to you several months ago.
* * *
Most people in this electronic age get 99 percent of their information either through the Internet,on television, or radio. Ironically, the entrepreneur spirit and not what I outline above drive media, electronic and print journalism.
Recently, only this past week, PBS's "World Focus," the "German News" and the "BBC News" showed video evidence of the police and military in northern Nigeria singling out a total of thirteen men, two on crutches, and having them prostrate themselves on the ground while uniformed officers shot them in the back of the head, one officer telling a shooter not to shoot the man in the head because he wanted his hat, another man started to get up and turn around and an officer said "pose for the camera," and then shot him dead.
I'm an old man and this wrenched my soul. This brutality has happened before and will happen again but I always have had the filter of reading about it in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The New York Review, or in some book, not seeing it naked before my eyes. This is the horror of the world we live in.
Meanwhile, the air waves are concerned about former president Bill Clinton's stent implants, Sarah Palim's writing discussion points on her hand, or some other inconsequential nonsense. More people are dying in Afghanistan and more troops are there to contribute to the death toll, collateral and otherwise, and nothing changes.
Border towns in Mexico have scores of deaths every day because of drug wars with weapons from the United States. These large drug cartels are in business because of Americans insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. Thousands of Mexican soldiers police these towns but to no avail. We seem to always look at problems ass backwards.
You cannot legislate morality, decency, dignity or belief in a common humanity. I feel it sad to say that I will most likely leave this world in far worse shape than when I entered it. If this is progress, I don't want any of it.
The last hope of some sensibility in society are think tanks that are not fronts for lobbyists, special interests, bleeding hearts, religious organizations or for that matter, political parties. The world is in a mess. It has taken a crazy pill and cannot overcome its addiction. I had hope for THE NAPLES INSTITUTE because I didn't think it was afraid of ideas. I think ideas killed it, and that is sad.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER REPLIES:
Hello Jim,
I liked the brief commentary on our times, its brevity and liked for its being a further commentary on our times. What was the old Marxist belief? Religion is the opiate of the masses. Your piece made me think in the 21st Century mass media is the new opiate of the masses. People desire to numb themselves to the inhumanity of man rather than being disgusted by it. Disgust requires action. Think Nazi Germany.
I think of the Bruce Springsteen lyric:
In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
Unfortunately, we don't really leave the cage we just go to another room. Our escape is imaginary and we don't want it fettered with hard truth. Even when the hard truth is accompanied by solutions, as messy as those solutions can be.
As much as I dislike the tea party solutions, they have one thing right. Throw the bums out. This last turn in congress, in which a super majority couldn't pass meaningful legislation because its own members held it hostage while their grubby, pork stained hands grabbed for more pork is indicative of how badly broken our government really is.
Social justice may only come from an active revolt of those who believe social justice is important. Think tanks are fine, but only if their thoughts are capable of fueling the disgust and rage needed to change the world.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for sharing.
My aim is not to defend think tanks but to note their possible usefulness. Historian Paul Johnson who has written many books suitable to the laymen, two of which I have read, “The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830”(1991) and “Intellectuals” (1988) says of President Barak Obama (that also may be true of most of us), “President Obama talks too much and thinks too little.”
Thinking no longer has the predicate of importance it once enjoyed. We think in words but as long as we can use words well there is little reason to think past what the words imply if they imply anything.
The president has his own hiccup which is slightly different from the most common hiccup, which is “you know you know you know,” when of course we don’t know.
The president’s hiccup is “let me make one thing perfectly clear” when what is perfectly clear is not clear at all. I don’t mean to be picking on the president but he has the bully pulpit and is a constant voice and model for us all.
A think tank, if it functions like a think tank, gets inside language, inside ideas, inside the meaning not only of words but styles of life and values within those lives. Philosophy once provided that service but philosophy has gotten into mechanics and semiotics, which is different than what I am implying, and into relativism and deconstructionism. We are in the tearing apart and putting back together phase of existence. Historians such as Paul Johnson will have none of that, and therefore he is on the fringe of his profession.
We as a society have a broken wing and still are attempting to fly without repairing the wing.
You are right to quote Bruce Springsteen. I am not much into popular culture, but know such artists often cut through the malarkey to reveal fundamental truths.
Your reference to the cage intrigues me. I wrote a book titled, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? I couldn’t find a publisher as I cannot find a publisher for most of my books. One day my daughter, Jennifer, asks me how many manuscripts, that is, complete books I had written that had not been published? I was embarrassed to tell her more than the nine books I have found into print.
Finally, my enthusiasm for the TEA PARTY movement is no more enthusiastic than any other. We vote the bums out and replace them with new bums, who we vote out to replace them with newer bums, ad infinitum.
The snowstorm in Washington, D.C. found 300,000 government workers unable to get to their offices, and yet the nation ran okay. We could get rid of 300,000 CEOs across the nation and everything would go on okay as well. We have the mistaken idea, placed in our heads of course by this contingent that the nation and society could not operate without these folks, but it can and does and has and will.
The inescapable idea that democracy and totalitarianism share is that leaders make the difference and not the people, that ideas percolate down from on high and catch hold in the bowels of society when the actual reverse is true.
Those at the top, that 300,000 or so on Wall Street and in corpocracy are holding to the myth for dear life, not only in the United States but everywhere. People make the difference and they always have. They choose not to accept the fact because then whom would they blame?
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
ANOTHER READER REPLIES TO THIS MISSIVE:
Jim,
I guess not only your # 2 is a major reason for success, but also such idealistic tasks are generally too broad and fluffy to get people really excited. It has to have a specific target that can be reached in a certain timeframe.
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Manfred,
What you say is true, but I fear the problem is that old saw, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
To me, a think tank is the egg. It has to be incubated with ideas and leavened with subtle care before it hatches into anything meaningful, useful or in your words, specific.
There are conservative and liberal think tanks, medical and scientific think tanks, and so on, but they fail my test which I describe above, that is, they are preternaturally idealized before they are hatched, and therefore they have a bias that limits thought and frames ideas in a peculiar way.
It has always amused me when scientists would say to me, “What right do you have to comment on science? You are not a scientist?”
I have parried with, “Sir, you are wrong. We are all scientists. We just don’t all wear the white coat and straight jacket.”
Commentators are now in their total explanatory mode trying to explain President Obama’s loss of support from Americans out in the tundra, those without high school educations that Sarah Palim is supposedly reaching in her illiterate ramblings.
One of the benefits of a long life is that some of the smartest people I have known never graduated from high school, one was my da. I’ve known many others. School doesn't make a person wise, life does.
The professor at the University of Alabama Medical School who murdered three of her professor colleagues, and critically wounded three others was educated at Harvard University. Motivation for the crime is alleged to be her failure to win tenure.
Tenure for an academic is job security and the equivalent of lifetime employment that cannot be denied the tenured person unless convicted of some moral or criminal turpitude.
* * *
Back in the 1970s, a Dr. Fisher in the chemistry department of Florida State University was murdered by a student whose dissertation was not accepted, a necessary fulfillment to be awarded a Ph.D. He murdered Dr. Fisher, who was on his committee, for this failure. Perhaps as many as fifty telephone calls came to my house thinking it was I that had been murdered. It gave me pause.
* * *
My book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2003) was all about the madness of our times, a book that people didn’t want to read to be reminded of the fact.
* * *
Can think tanks change this? No. But think tanks can have the integrity to keep up the pressure.
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Fisher Paradigm©™® -- INTUITION -- THE MAGIC POWER WITHIN!
NOTICE TO VISITORS:
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THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™ OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) -- Intellectual Capital & Power of People1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 10, 2010
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 of organizational development (OD). It is primarily an intuitive rather than cognitive model. There are no algorithms to master, no mathematical verifications, yet it is an authentic tool of the discipline.
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. Management attempts to give it direction and purpose while management itself becomes increasingly anachronistic.
OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management (HR).
The function of HR is instrumental (operations) while that of OD is terminal (cultural).
HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development), while OD is an assessment tool of organizational health and the integrity of organizational leadership.
HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the collective called, organization.
HR reflects the values of senior management. OD assesses the culture and integrity of the organization vis-Ã -vis its mission.
HR is primarily cognitive; OD is cognitive and intuitive.
HR reflects position power. OD reflects the mindset and moral authority of organization. Position power meets operational and tactical requirement. Moral authority sees that the organization stays the course.
HR revolves around expediency of demand and is driven by instrumental values, or the means-to-ends commitment of resources.
OD revolves around the mindset, or shared culture and history of the organization. It is expressed in unconscious behavior.
The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership. The past gave integrity and purpose to the organization. Corporate memory is corporate identity. OD assesses this identity as to whether it is functional or in crisis.
The corporate memory draws on the will of workers to commit to a common purpose. This depends on qualitative values (culture) and spiritual vitality. This leads to the counterintuitive idea that the less instrumentally driven the organization the more terminally relevant it is. Permit me to explain.
Total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning has placed the organization at risk. This is demonstrated in crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking employed exclusively to solve problems. In an imperfect world, it calls for the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking.
OD engages intuition while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ suggests that the unconscious is key to moving beyond rational explanatory limits.
INTRODUCTION OF AN IDEA
We are in a 2,000-year-old cognitive funk. It is doubtful the empirical evidence of the Fisher Paradigm©™ will prove convincing to the obsessively cognitive.
Yet, I would suggest that most leaders are using the Fisher Paradigm©™ but are unaware of the fact. The efforts of this brief is to encourage them to apply its wider use. It is a diagnostic tool everyman as well as trained professionals use every day.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ argues everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or impede that experience as a product of cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:
(1) Immanence – something “inside the individual.”
(2) Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”
Consciousness contains more than what it is assumed to be apparent. There is something felt which has no language. The feeling can be misinterpreted because of cultural programming. The inclination is to explain feelings rather than to acknowledge and use them to advantage.
We talk too much and think too little. Instead of allowing feelings to speak to us, we rush to describe them. This has resulted in an explanatory society. It imposes limits to our understanding.
We seem obsessed with what has occurred rather than why it has occurred and what it is bombarding our senses to tell us. Consequently, we are better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, better at generating data than producing ideas, more inclined to deductive rather than inductive reasoning, more given to critical than creative thinking, more disposed to defend sacred biases than to interpret them in terms of modern challenges, more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, more driven to imitate success than to create our own, and for reason.
We are in constant flux and desire stability and predictability both of which have an instrumental means-to-an-end focus. Our senses constantly alert us with feelings that confound this arbitrariness.
That said we prefer rule-of-the-thumb justifications to thinking through our problems, to assume what is evident rather than question its validity because we have been programmed with such assumptions. Meanwhile, our senses struggle to breakthrough this barrier:
“Did I really sense what I believe I sensed, or am I fooling myself?”
When faced with this dilemma, the tendency is to reject the intuition instead of mounting some type of action falling back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says, “is.”
This is a pardonable offense in most cases, but not for OD practitioners. OD by ignoring intuition forces itself “outside itself” at the expense of insight. In that posture, OD would have been unable to grasp the significance of the experience because “it was just too weird or unreal.”
CONSIDER THE CUBE AS ILLUSTRATION OF THIS PHENOMENON
A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three. 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 meets the eye.
Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience, that is, if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace what we know is there but cannot see. OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing possess a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work.
But alas, possession of these attributes is not nine-tenths of the law. It often requires penetrating the barrier of our cultural programming.
* * *
The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Parents, teachers, preachers, friends, relatives, peers and so on define the individual and what that individual perceives as true, just and right before learned experience kicks in to refute or confirm that programming.
To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in challenging the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics. More recently Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman playfully 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:
(1) Personality,
(2) Geographic and
(3) Demographic.
These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses comparable to the three invisible surfaces of the cube, that is, they are always there but not seen.
CASE IN POINT:
Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the more remarkable discoveries in recent times.
James Watson and Francis 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). The methodology was representative 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.
His discovery was that of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. Known more widely as a surfer, a bar hop, strip club patron, and veteran of Berkeley’s rebellious 1960s, he is perhaps the only Nobel Laureate to ever 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, preferring to embrace 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 © ™. To wit:
”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. It is common because the innate capacity for intuition is there for everyone, rare because intuition goes against societal cultural programming in this cognitive age.
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 book’s 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.”
The critic focused on the person demonstrating little interest in or curiosity about how a highly trained scientist. Mullis stepped out of the stereotype of a scientist and what is perceived to be science to make this incredible breakthrough.
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 multitude.
Mullis was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically has become more perverse in the scientific community than in such self-regarded institutions as theology, philosophy and academia.
THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ looks at the organization whole from its
Personality (character), Geography (baggage) and Demographics (make up), then assimilates this wholeness into intuitive insights as complement to more conventional criteria.4
From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rational mode. This is resisted. Thinking with the whole body is fundamental to this OD process. Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm©™ registers empirically on the 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. It was said, incidentally, of my “Six Silent Killers” (1998), where I claimed passive and defensive behaviors were like social termites in the infrastructure of the complex organization destroying it from within.
Currently, there is a popular medical show on television called, “House.” Dr. House is a contrary sort, temperamentally infantile, given to polarizing his group on purpose by sending them off to analyze complex cases with their superior medical knowledge, only to step in at the last minute and solve the case with a eureka like insight, something of which the group had not considered.
* * *
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:
(1) Personality (person) Profile, that is, personal eccentricities, culture, and circumstances;
(2) Geographic (place) Profile, or situational dynamics on the ground, time, and circumstances;
(3) Demographic (things) Profile, which relates to population, age, gender, race, religion, education, status, experience, competence and 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.
The observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight.
For this to occur the observer becomes the observed. The subject and object become inseparable in the dynamic.
Landscape painters often use this device. They observe a scene they are interested in painting. They study it, absorb it, and allow their senses to gradually reduce the distance between what is seen with the eye and what is experienced with the whole body. When subject and object become as close as possible to one and the same, landscape painters put brush to canvas but not before.
OD operates in somewhat similar fashion. The mind is like a heat sensor. An OD practitioner is contracted to solve some organizational problem. Before that can be done, however, like the painter the OD practitioner must absorb (sense) how an organization “listens.”
OD moves about in no certain pattern penetrating the distracting camouflage that has been erected consciously and sometimes inadvertently to distort the listening. This wandering about appears as if OD doesn’t have a clue, which it doesn’t, that it is wasting time, which it isn’t. OD is in the process of becoming one with the organization, not cognitively but intuitively. Eventually, OD, if it has the patience, experiences the eruption of insight with understanding and problem solving following.
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 II’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leapt 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©™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is more art than science, more impressionistic 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. Archimedes, tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, was one with
the diagram and not separate from it, outside the box and the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of it.
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 a limited picture.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ encompasses Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking,7 which insists that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box,
and offer 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.
An organization has a personality, a certain geography and encompasses specific demographics.
It is a mistake to see organization as different than what it is, a most human entity. OD recognizes the organization is the collective conscience of individual sensibilities with a mindset that either enhances positive activity, or neutralizes and impedes such action.
The emphasis on intuition separates OD from other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious. Its authority is calibrating the organizational mindset (culture) in terms of comfort, complacency and contribution.
This is critical for this reason:
The structure of the organization determines the function of the organization, the function of the organization creates the work culture, the work culture dictates organizational behavior, organizational behavior establishes whether an organization will succeed, vegetate, flounder, expire or survive.
Trying to understand OD as a straightforward naturalistic discipline of action and answers is bound to disappoint and paint an ambiguous picture.
What people are doing is not what OD must see, but what they are not doing and should be doing. OD must see beyond appearances. This means OD accustoms itself to the fact that structure and function are not always what they seem.
An organization that is devoid of conflict, confrontation or disharmony is not a dynamic and healthy organization, but quite the opposite. Conflict not harmony is the glue that holds the organization to its task. Moreover, when the components of an organization are behaving as well as they possibly can, the organization as a whole will not behave as well as it can. This is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but is absolutely essential to organizational thinking. Conversely, when the organization is behaving as well as it can, none of the parts will be. Why? They are sacrificing individual achievement for collective success.
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 purchases, 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 like 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, smarty pants,” 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.”
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 produces the chain reaction to intuition.
(1) Personality Profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;
(2) Geographic Profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another space with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;
(3) 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:
(1) Personality Profile – “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (The Delta Group Florida, 1999) deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural and psychological conditioning, which program people away from their essence or essential self.
At the organizational level, it finds inclination to look for answers in all the wrong places. An organization has a collective essence as well but is inclined to search for excellence elsewhere when sustainable excellence is right under its nose and can be created out of the organization’s own reality.
(2) Geographic Profile – “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (CRS Press, 1998) describes the social termites that burrow silently into the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered too late for damage control. These social termites are dissonant workers.
Are the workers the culprit? No! The toxic culture of the workplace is the culprit. It spawns passive behaviors, cover ups, malicious obedience, defensive postures, and obsessive compulsive complaining. This poisons the collective will to cope much less manage to survive. It finds 100-year-old companies expiring at a record rate because they no longer have the energy or will to reinvent themselves.
(3) Demographic Profile – “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker” (1stBooks Library, 2000) unmasks the problem. The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, yet most workers are still managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as well paid serfs.
Something is wrong when a society is blessed with the most able bodied workforce in history, but insists on managing and leading these workers as if they cannot find their way. We are in the digital age which is changing everything, but the way and how we work. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share in 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, which 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 was 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 to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask for the order; didn’t give reasons to change suppliers; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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 lab.
The words of my boss 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 next six weeks.” 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 is seven acres under a single roof and manufactures refrigerators.
Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, has serviced this account “challenge free” for years. The front desk secretary informs me that she has not seen a Nalco salesman since joining Philco three years before.
Someone escorts me to the office of Thayer Maxwell, the plant superintendent. The office is a glassed in 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 desk, chairs, cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains everywhere, on papers scattered across the superintendent’s desk, on broken floor tiles and even on the glass walls of the bull pen.
Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, and severely damaged heat exchangers glare at me from the four corners of the office. These red rusted casualties of operations are haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, and on top of papers on the desk, even under the desk. It makes me think of the “Morgue of the Machine” – a picture of total chaos.
The extent of my knowledge of Nalco is a three-week intensive technical training course on water treatment technology at Nalco’s Chicago headquarters.
I know little actually about Nalco’s products and nothing about selling. 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?”
Where it came from, I’m not sure. Nalco’s Chicago laboratories, pilot plant operations, and technical service personnel impressed me during my training. It was like being indoctrinated into a new faith. I believed in Nalco only on the strength of this limited exposure. I found myself saying to the superintendent without flinching, “I’m here to save your job.”
Mr. Maxwell throws his head back and laughs heartedly, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you sport. You’ve got spunk.”
Relief registers on his face as his voice tells me he’s not angry, only amused. I move to be on the business side of his desk, and he follows. I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of the facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training.
A red marker is used to indicate areas where I assume he’s been having chronic problems as revealed by the samples across his office. This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I show him no flashy literature. I don’t talk about my fabulous company. Instead, I explain the how the why and the approach to dealing with his troubles.
I talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco’s products and technology 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, problems I believe are correctible. Perhaps my naked intensity is disarming.
“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.
“I know I can fix this.” I look about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.
“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I have no idea. I have never made a survey, 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. We will have to devote a full day to this.” The “we” implies I’ll need Nalco’s technical expertise. I’ll need the area manager.
“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”
* * * * *
(1) Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.
(2) Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.
(3) Demographic Profile – the focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board of the bullpen wall indicate an overworked maintenance engineering staff as complement to 1,200 factory employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.
THE TRIGGER TO THIS INITIAL INTUITION
My lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training gave me the confidence that identifying and treating chronic problems would in this system lead to success. I had no doubt about that. The technical level is the most comfortable level because it is totally dealing with things. I had left the security of the laboratory and was in the realm of people.
People are totally another matter. 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 who had never sold in his life, had no training in sales, and was to be given his walking papers in less than a month.
Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year comprehensive technical training program. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered customer friendly service with your sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s many 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
Two years later still with Nalco, after a stifling hot summer day in Terre Haute, Indiana, I find myself on the campus of Indiana State University. The temperature is nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit as it has been for several days.
The campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this community of 75,000. The summer session is in full swing, but classrooms and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on the campus lawns, and many professors are lecturing outdoors in the stifling heat.
Several chemical trucks with toxic hydrochloric acid are rigged with hoses and acidizing pumps. This means air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” and are down. This is due to calcium carbonate scaling in the condensers because of improper chemical water treatment.
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 ethnicities smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, seemingly age’s 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.
“It would not only be cost effective but could eliminate the inconvenience or need for periodic downtimes to acidize the condensers.”
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 refigure 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 shouts in a thunderous voice, “Get your ass out of here before I kick it from here to Lafayette.”
I hesitate, stunned, but 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 goddamn costs in the chemicals.”
* * * * *
I wasn’t thinking of the Fisher Paradigm©™ or of the three spheres of influence. I wasn’t thinking at all. Yet I must have been processing information subconsciously because I stood there. I didn’t leave.
Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak anymore. 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 like neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.
“You’re a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted, a minute sparkle in them. In that moment I made the connection of the pin, the unknown flag in the corner, 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 the longest time he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the vacuum with words but I 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 lined 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 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 as his friend. He did this from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor. 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.”
* * *
(1) 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. The workplace is his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.
(2) Geographic Profile: High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, student-faculty sweltering in the heat conducting classes on campus lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning failures.
(3) 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 THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
Someone might argue that I was programmed to deal with an explosive personality having had a father of that temperament. That would not be accurate.
Superintendent Crown was warm and open in his greeting. He was real. Candor was displayed when he admitted he couldn’t sell a consulting agreement to the board.
It was clear that for this air conditioning system to function effectively, however, it required high-end technical service. Nalco had two options to provide this service, one via the consulting contract and the other by incorporating the cost of such service in the chemicals.
The plant survey of the air conditioning system indicated a serious breach in water treatment application and control. This translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical service commitment. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively they were 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.
We carry our geography with us. We carry it in our heads, and surround ourselves with it for comfort’s sake at work. Mr. Crown did this so carefully that the clues to the man spoke so loudly I could not hear him, until I did.
CULTURE + TEST KIT = INTUITIVE SYMBOLOGY
Success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brings me to the attention of senior management. No one can put a finger on my incredulous success given my unconventional approach. My method has:
(1) Nothing to do with intimidation;
(2) Nothing to do selling the sizzle instead of the steak;
(3) Nothing to do with finessing the buyer with assumptive closes, penalty of delay or scarcity of product;
(4) Nothing to do with selling benefits to deflect objections.
My method has everything to do with becoming one with the buyer merging complementary interests into a partnership.
The vice president of Nalco’s International Division is so intrigued with my success that he comes into the field to travel with me. At the conclusion of the day, he says, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for us in South Africa?”
Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I can think about it. I do and am intrigued with the country’s history. My job there is to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, The Alexander Martin Company, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and South African Explosives, Ltd.’s Specialty Chemical Division.
South Africa has no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water is a precious commodity. Water clarification in the gold and diamond mines is critical to profitable business. Nalco has cutting edge technology in this field and is anxious to leverage its product line to full advantage here.
Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, Alexander Martin. They have no college training in either chemistry or business, but have the colonial manners and elocution of the British business elite. Likewise, the Alfloc people are mainly British and derive their business acumen primarily from colonial history and culture. College trained people are mainly Afrikaners, primarily from South African Explosives.
Afrikaners are descendents of the 17th century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.
It is 1968. Afrikaners have had control of the South African government since 1948, while the British still remain the major player in business and industry.
The Afrikaner government has created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which is rigorously enforced. Nearly a million Bantu workers come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in the South West African Township of “Soweto.”
This is the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies are now acting, temporarily, as the technical management team. They ask me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I study them and sense their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?
“Here is my suggestion,” I offer. “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 return with a Rube Goldberg concoction. It is mainly a South African test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine, package it and send it to the field.” They look 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 to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary. It was an intuitive decision that I would not be able to articulate until long after I had left Nalco.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clash of cultures is felt from the moment customs confiscates my copy of Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, “A Very Strange Society” (1968). This is magnified as I feel the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendents who look to Great Britain as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of the Afrikaners, Dutch and French descendents, who consider South Africa, home.
Although Afrikaners in this new company tend to be better educated, it is the English speakers who occupy most leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship is rumbling between the two groups with the Bantu majority treated as non-citizens.
(2) Geographic Profile: Apartheid divides the Bantu majority into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands have little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing Bantu 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 exists between the British and Afrikaner as these two groups share little in common but maintain a necessary tolerance of each other as whites represent only 20 percent of South Africa’s population.
(3) Demographic Profile: South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 14 million Bantus, 4 million whites (2.5 million Afrikaners, 1.5 million British), and 2 million coloreds (mixed race) including Indians, descendents of 19th century indentured workers from India.
This newly formed company, Anikem Ltd., is 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 parallel to that of ours. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers (Afrikaans word for “farmer”) in their down to earth approach to life unimpressed with the pretentious.
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. My intuition told me to put the risk of failure and the burden of success on this new company, not on Nalco. It was after all “their company.” It wasn’t until later that I realized this symbolic move proved consequential.
The action elevated the three diverse companies above petty differences into the possibility of a common culture. What could have been a colossal snafu became an opportunity for a promising success.
* * *
Too often when companies merge, the dominant company in the merger assumes its culture should prevail at the expense of the less dominant company. This puts a wrench in the works crippling the transition and often signaling ultimate collapse.
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ SAVED MY LIFE!
In 1974, I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which had occurred in Fairfax County Virginia.
A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, after the young man grabbed the officer’s nightstick and hit him with it. This led to a riot.8
My job was to interview senior officers, detectives and command personnel to get a sense of how the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) operated and how this might have contributed to this debacle.
During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this work, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa participated in one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play.
Washington, D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City where I was residing at the Holiday Inn. A FCPD police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when the Iowa official 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.
It was a brisk evening and I found myself walking along Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a November chill in the air, but I was comfortably dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece suit, and wearing black leather gloves.
I noticed three African American youths across the street that were jiving and laughing as they walked parallel to me. I paid them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they raced ahead, crossed the street, and started hanging out at the corner under the light.
Some time ago, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that crossed my mind. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile – three young people up to no good at this hour and I am alone.
(2) Geographic Profile – this is no place for young boys to be out at this hour.
(3) Demographic Profile – they are teenagers; I am in my late thirties. They are black, slender, one about six feet, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in 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 can’t define it.
I know the three have the advantage (Demographic) especially if they have a knife or gun. I have no weapon.
No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!
INTUITION AND THE PHANTOM GUN
During my intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably squirm and adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with the same authoritative gate.
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 hear myself say, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning isn’t it boys?”
They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool what we is all about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction.
When I explain this episode to my ride at half past two in the morning, the police officer says, “You just might have saved your ass.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.
MUTINY MINDED POLICE OFFICERS
In 1975, the Public Safety Institute (PSI) was contracted to investigate and dismantle the unauthorized labor union of the Raleigh Police Officers Association, and to defuse its threat of striking the city of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy experts were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work. In the course of riding with officers, attending roll call during the three shifts, walking around city hall, and interviewing citizens, the spheres of influence begin to materialize:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clear dichotomy appeared to exist between police command and the ranks of police patrol, or between staff and line authority and function. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me, an outsider – a disconnect.
They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.
(2) Geographic Profile: Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It has the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.
(3) 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.
As the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demand for a change in 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 officers, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started there.
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 city hall 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 gestures 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 full police chief pension benefits, he made him a sinecure while he rotated the three majors in the department every four months to run the police department, creating three islands of authority, three different and competing police departments, three different work cultures, and three distinct power cells.
After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. He then appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, convinced the city council to hire his deputy as city manager, and 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. He then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error.
This meant that the captain on permanent nights had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong. As they rotated shifts and came under his wing, he painted the chief as a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them. I saw this first hand. He used nuance and innuendo, humor and bravado to cultivate the officers’ collective dissonance and project their frustration and contempt on to the chief of police.
When I disclosed this scenario in a report to the Public Safety Institute, which was in turn published, it took the air out of the siege. Officers could see how they had been duped and 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 mainly because there was no sense of fruition.
An OD intervention can uncover chronic systemic problems, and make recommendations, but then the OD practitioner usually moves on, and is not there for the implementing stage. So, I was delighted when an opportunity came to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist.
My new boss gave me what sounded a lot like an ultimatum, reminding me of my initial days with Nalco a decade earlier. “If you don’t find your role here in the first six weeks,” he said, “you’re history.”
Directness is akin to my own personality. I liked the unabashed clarity of my marching orders. He, too, had first been trained in the hard sciences before studying the soft sciences, and was not inclined to beat about the bush when he had something on his mind. His directness established immediate trust as he was to become my mentor.
So off I go to create an OD role and identity in this new environment. It soon became apparent that the spheres of influence were blatantly obvious:
(1) Personality Profile: Engineers here are the elite, treated with deference, which is manifested in a cavalier attitude by engineers toward everyone. They are cowboys who can do no wrong. Human Resources personnel, where OD is located, are intimidated by these engineers and obsequious to their demands, mainly because they speak a different language and have that hauteur and mystique of their special power.
(2) 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 this leisure driven tourist paradise called Clearwater, Florida.
(3) 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 there are more than 30 Ph.D.’s.
After three weeks in the company, I experience the wall between Human Resources and engineering. Engineers requisition courses, seminars, and professional meetings but take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits.
Their elitist attitude says, would you know if I told you? A pervasive duplication of courses is noted. This unnecessarily multiplies costs. I ask HR Compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering community.
Most striking in this profile is that pay continues to increase for engineers as job complexity decreases; 75 percent of these engineers are working on technology developed long after they have left engineering college. Moreover, many engineers receive engineering pay for non-engineering work. Technical obsolescence is apparent, a problem correctible with training.
A memo is prepared that goes out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo follows to forty of the top engineers who are representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response.
The single engineering responder is an engineer near retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claims to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education.
We meet every week as if we are a full-fledged task force with me mainly the audience to his delivery. All of this is dutifully written up and sent out in memos to the chief engineers and the top forty engineers.
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 embellish our weekly sessions with statistics, schematics, graphs and studies and copy everyone on the original listings.
One day a chief engineer joins us. Mention is made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers show up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters. The chief engineer takes over the meeting outlining how technical education might work.
Each gathering thereafter finds greater and more diverse attendance from the engineering community. A holistic view is developing. In time, the chief engineer becomes director of engineering, and then general manager of the facility with technical education key 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 studies while working on the Honeywell campus. All engineers come to see the benefit of upgrading their skills as no engineer need be left behind.9
A BRIDGE TOO FAR
The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) makes its routine visit to Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater and asks to see me. They have read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management.”10 The CSDL director says he would like me to come to Cambridge to work with his people in team building.
CSDL designs the ring laser gyros that are manufactured in Clearwater. It is evident that a breakdown exists between the design phase in Massachusetts and production phase in Clearwater. This is a $50 million U.S. Navy program.
Before going off to MIT, I create a book out of my published works at Honeywell that cover all phases of OD that relate to operations. I do this with the full realization that MIT is unlikely to take me seriously. I didn’t anticipate the elitism would be any less in Cambridge than it was in Clearwater. Yes, this is an anticipated bias, but a protective one.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL. These scientists are perfectionists. If there is a problem, they are certain it is not with them.
(2) Geographic Profile: There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design team and production team.
This was before the digital age and the Internet and so that distance was an obvious barrier. What was not so obvious until I arrived at CSDL is that another barrier existed that further crippled this collaboration.
The CSDL facility was designed around twin circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street. This housed the CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus. The design was meant to provide privacy but it also promoted separation and isolation.
(3) Demographics: There is a distinct CSDL pecking order. Physicists are of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians of the second rank with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and chemists and biologists completing the ranking corps. Many are Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials cause less friction than seniority and status.
The mean age of the group is late thirties but the mindset is closer to that of the spoiled child.
INTUITION AS ANTICIPATION
Although an OD psychologist is not a clinician, per se, I anticipated being perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained at second-rate schools (state universities), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11 composed of articles I had written on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, stress management and how to conduct meetings. Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell’s technical 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 ranging from conflict management to how to sell an idea. My anticipated rejection never occurred.
They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the other. In the process, they ventilated pressing concerns and created an agenda on how to address them. The following week, again in teams, they conducted meetings, developed corrective strategies and allowed ideas to surface without interference. Sad to report, but it was quite apparent these well-trained minds had never had an opportunity to demonstrate leadership.
Pleased with their solutions, anxious to implement their ideas, 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 teams, between Massachusetts and Clearwater. That was partially my fault. I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting for them to bring up the subject. No one, up to this point, had made the connection that something was awry between the two operations that they might consider and even resolve.
“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody finally said. 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 lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles was no longer a bridge too far nor were the labs in the two towers across the bridge.
WORKINGS OF THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™
These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern of the reader 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. It was in working as an OD consultant that I learned a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to itself.
These spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we can only erase the lines 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 a presupposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or inside the box, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking and understanding.
By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique patterns 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 and elemental, to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe “what is,” not as it is but as 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 system 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 work force 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, and finally disgust when reporting back to work to find everything had changed.
Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t. This is important. Workers kept their bad feelings to themselves. They displayed their contempt for the company silently and indirectly in passive behaviors: that is, work slowdowns, failure to repair equipment immediately, failure to report outages in the new system, coming in late and leaving early and doing just enough to get by. Production levels plummeted, schedules were missed, product wastes increased and costs soared. The company was on the verge of collapse.
In panic mode, an OD intervention was initiated. This included interviewing all the workers. A sense of betrayal and being taken for granted was palpable. Employees wanted to hurt the company, as they had been hurt, failing to realize it was hurting them as well.
The management team was advised to level with employees, to explain the basis of its thinking, and its surprise at the reaction. Teams of management-employees were set up to voice concerns and to ensure this didn’t happen again.
Economic challenges had never been discussed with employees before. OD advised that this take the form of problem solving and brainstorming sessions. These teams looked at cost cutting measures and innovative ways to increase production, improve quality, and reduce waste. Management was at first reluctant to discuss such matters, but found when it did that workers were reasonable, understanding and more enthusiastic than they had expected.
Management had mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt locked out, 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 are likely to require more time.
Production eventually increased to its former levels with every indication that the new technology would perform as advertised. The workforce was cut by only 10 percent rather than the projected 30 plus percent. Trust was still an issue. Management’s challenge now was to earn it.
* * *
1 The Fisher Paradigm © as of October 10, 2002 has sought copyright protection. The Fisher Paradigm™ has also applied for trademark registration pursuant to certification 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.”
In the interim, no one may use it 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, Tsmpa, FL 33617, Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631, or by email: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
2 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon Books 1992). Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber, architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission. He forever changed science, and what it means to know something in this uncertain world. He was also a scientist with an intense emotional nature and used it.
3 Kary B. Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Vintage Books 2000), pp. 6 – 11.
4 As Emerson insists, experience is crucial. Dr. Fisher’s life represents an OD progression: he was reared in an Irish Catholic home, educated by the Sisters of St. Francis in grammar school (St. Patrick’s), attended public high school (Clinton, Iowa), state university (Iowa), spent five summers as a laborer in a chemical food processing plant (Clinton Foods, Inc.), worked as a bench chemist in research & development (Standard Brands, Inc.), entered U.S. Navy (enlisted man) with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean during Eisenhower Administration, then became chemical sales engineer (Nalco Chemical Company). It was at Nalco that he commenced to practice OD without knowing it. Forty years later intuitive OD (Fisher Paradigm ©™)would take shape in his mind. With Nalco, he advanced from a field manager to an international corporate executive, retired (in his 30s), returned to school (University of South Florida/Walden University) to earn his Ph.D., consultant (Psyche-ology, Inc.), adjunct to several universities, contract consultant (American Management Association, Public Safety Institute), OD psychologist (Honeywell, Inc.), international corporate executive (Honeywell Europe, Ltd.) and for the past thirteen years, full-time author/consultant/publisher (The Delta Group Florida).
5 Michael Macrone, Eureka! 81 Key Ideas Explained (Barnes & Noble 1994), pp. 77 – 78.
6 Oxford don Stuart Hampshire describes this as “the Spinoza solution,” The New York Review, October 24, 2002, p. 55.
7 Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking (Penguin Books 1970), Parallel Thinking: From Socratic to de Bono Thinking (Penguin Books 1994). The author decries the limitations put on thinking imposed by vertical or cognitive and critical thinking (cause/effect, linear logic) in a changing world. Thinking “inside the box” (or thinking based on what is already known) is no longer adequate, the author insists, with it necessary for vertical thinking to be complemented with lateral thinking, or conceptual and creative thinking.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Master of Arts thesis, “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot,” University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1976.
9 James R. Fisher, Jr., paper titled “Combating Technical Obsolescence: the Genesis of a Technical Education Program.” This paper was presented at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 8, 1986.
10 James R. Fisher, Jr., “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participation,” paper presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas, October 17, 1981.
11 James R. Fisher, Jr., Teaming: Motivation through Cooperation (© 1983 by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida).
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., Confident Selling for the 90s (The Delta Group Florida 1992), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, is comprehensively OD. It is a sequel to his earlier best selling Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1971) in which the intuitive OD framework of the Fisher Paradigm ©® was first displayed in its embryonic form.
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posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 5:47 PM
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THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™ OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) -- Intellectual Capital & Power of People1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 10, 2010
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 of organizational development (OD). It is primarily an intuitive rather than cognitive model. There are no algorithms to master, no mathematical verifications, yet it is an authentic tool of the discipline.
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. Management attempts to give it direction and purpose while management itself becomes increasingly anachronistic.
OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management (HR).
The function of HR is instrumental (operations) while that of OD is terminal (cultural).
HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development), while OD is an assessment tool of organizational health and the integrity of organizational leadership.
HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the collective called, organization.
HR reflects the values of senior management. OD assesses the culture and integrity of the organization vis-Ã -vis its mission.
HR is primarily cognitive; OD is cognitive and intuitive.
HR reflects position power. OD reflects the mindset and moral authority of organization. Position power meets operational and tactical requirement. Moral authority sees that the organization stays the course.
HR revolves around expediency of demand and is driven by instrumental values, or the means-to-ends commitment of resources.
OD revolves around the mindset, or shared culture and history of the organization. It is expressed in unconscious behavior.
The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership. The past gave integrity and purpose to the organization. Corporate memory is corporate identity. OD assesses this identity as to whether it is functional or in crisis.
The corporate memory draws on the will of workers to commit to a common purpose. This depends on qualitative values (culture) and spiritual vitality. This leads to the counterintuitive idea that the less instrumentally driven the organization the more terminally relevant it is. Permit me to explain.
Total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning has placed the organization at risk. This is demonstrated in crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking employed exclusively to solve problems. In an imperfect world, it calls for the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking.
OD engages intuition while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ suggests that the unconscious is key to moving beyond rational explanatory limits.
INTRODUCTION OF AN IDEA
We are in a 2,000-year-old cognitive funk. It is doubtful the empirical evidence of the Fisher Paradigm©™ will prove convincing to the obsessively cognitive.
Yet, I would suggest that most leaders are using the Fisher Paradigm©™ but are unaware of the fact. The efforts of this brief is to encourage them to apply its wider use. It is a diagnostic tool everyman as well as trained professionals use every day.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ argues everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or impede that experience as a product of cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:
(1) Immanence – something “inside the individual.”
(2) Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”
Consciousness contains more than what it is assumed to be apparent. There is something felt which has no language. The feeling can be misinterpreted because of cultural programming. The inclination is to explain feelings rather than to acknowledge and use them to advantage.
We talk too much and think too little. Instead of allowing feelings to speak to us, we rush to describe them. This has resulted in an explanatory society. It imposes limits to our understanding.
We seem obsessed with what has occurred rather than why it has occurred and what it is bombarding our senses to tell us. Consequently, we are better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, better at generating data than producing ideas, more inclined to deductive rather than inductive reasoning, more given to critical than creative thinking, more disposed to defend sacred biases than to interpret them in terms of modern challenges, more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, more driven to imitate success than to create our own, and for reason.
We are in constant flux and desire stability and predictability both of which have an instrumental means-to-an-end focus. Our senses constantly alert us with feelings that confound this arbitrariness.
That said we prefer rule-of-the-thumb justifications to thinking through our problems, to assume what is evident rather than question its validity because we have been programmed with such assumptions. Meanwhile, our senses struggle to breakthrough this barrier:
“Did I really sense what I believe I sensed, or am I fooling myself?”
When faced with this dilemma, the tendency is to reject the intuition instead of mounting some type of action falling back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says, “is.”
This is a pardonable offense in most cases, but not for OD practitioners. OD by ignoring intuition forces itself “outside itself” at the expense of insight. In that posture, OD would have been unable to grasp the significance of the experience because “it was just too weird or unreal.”
CONSIDER THE CUBE AS ILLUSTRATION OF THIS PHENOMENON
A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three. 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 meets the eye.
Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience, that is, if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace what we know is there but cannot see. OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing possess a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work.
But alas, possession of these attributes is not nine-tenths of the law. It often requires penetrating the barrier of our cultural programming.
* * *
The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Parents, teachers, preachers, friends, relatives, peers and so on define the individual and what that individual perceives as true, just and right before learned experience kicks in to refute or confirm that programming.
To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in challenging the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics. More recently Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman playfully 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:
(1) Personality,
(2) Geographic and
(3) Demographic.
These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses comparable to the three invisible surfaces of the cube, that is, they are always there but not seen.
CASE IN POINT:
Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the more remarkable discoveries in recent times.
James Watson and Francis 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). The methodology was representative 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.
His discovery was that of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. Known more widely as a surfer, a bar hop, strip club patron, and veteran of Berkeley’s rebellious 1960s, he is perhaps the only Nobel Laureate to ever 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, preferring to embrace 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 © ™. To wit:
”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. It is common because the innate capacity for intuition is there for everyone, rare because intuition goes against societal cultural programming in this cognitive age.
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 book’s 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.”
The critic focused on the person demonstrating little interest in or curiosity about how a highly trained scientist. Mullis stepped out of the stereotype of a scientist and what is perceived to be science to make this incredible breakthrough.
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 multitude.
Mullis was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically has become more perverse in the scientific community than in such self-regarded institutions as theology, philosophy and academia.
THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ looks at the organization whole from its
Personality (character), Geography (baggage) and Demographics (make up), then assimilates this wholeness into intuitive insights as complement to more conventional criteria.4
From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rational mode. This is resisted. Thinking with the whole body is fundamental to this OD process. Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm©™ registers empirically on the 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. It was said, incidentally, of my “Six Silent Killers” (1998), where I claimed passive and defensive behaviors were like social termites in the infrastructure of the complex organization destroying it from within.
Currently, there is a popular medical show on television called, “House.” Dr. House is a contrary sort, temperamentally infantile, given to polarizing his group on purpose by sending them off to analyze complex cases with their superior medical knowledge, only to step in at the last minute and solve the case with a eureka like insight, something of which the group had not considered.
* * *
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:
(1) Personality (person) Profile, that is, personal eccentricities, culture, and circumstances;
(2) Geographic (place) Profile, or situational dynamics on the ground, time, and circumstances;
(3) Demographic (things) Profile, which relates to population, age, gender, race, religion, education, status, experience, competence and 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.
The observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight.
For this to occur the observer becomes the observed. The subject and object become inseparable in the dynamic.
Landscape painters often use this device. They observe a scene they are interested in painting. They study it, absorb it, and allow their senses to gradually reduce the distance between what is seen with the eye and what is experienced with the whole body. When subject and object become as close as possible to one and the same, landscape painters put brush to canvas but not before.
OD operates in somewhat similar fashion. The mind is like a heat sensor. An OD practitioner is contracted to solve some organizational problem. Before that can be done, however, like the painter the OD practitioner must absorb (sense) how an organization “listens.”
OD moves about in no certain pattern penetrating the distracting camouflage that has been erected consciously and sometimes inadvertently to distort the listening. This wandering about appears as if OD doesn’t have a clue, which it doesn’t, that it is wasting time, which it isn’t. OD is in the process of becoming one with the organization, not cognitively but intuitively. Eventually, OD, if it has the patience, experiences the eruption of insight with understanding and problem solving following.
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 II’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leapt 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©™
The Fisher Paradigm©™ is more art than science, more impressionistic 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. Archimedes, tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, was one with
the diagram and not separate from it, outside the box and the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of it.
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 a limited picture.
The Fisher Paradigm©™ encompasses Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking,7 which insists that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box,
and offer 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.
An organization has a personality, a certain geography and encompasses specific demographics.
It is a mistake to see organization as different than what it is, a most human entity. OD recognizes the organization is the collective conscience of individual sensibilities with a mindset that either enhances positive activity, or neutralizes and impedes such action.
The emphasis on intuition separates OD from other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious. Its authority is calibrating the organizational mindset (culture) in terms of comfort, complacency and contribution.
This is critical for this reason:
The structure of the organization determines the function of the organization, the function of the organization creates the work culture, the work culture dictates organizational behavior, organizational behavior establishes whether an organization will succeed, vegetate, flounder, expire or survive.
Trying to understand OD as a straightforward naturalistic discipline of action and answers is bound to disappoint and paint an ambiguous picture.
What people are doing is not what OD must see, but what they are not doing and should be doing. OD must see beyond appearances. This means OD accustoms itself to the fact that structure and function are not always what they seem.
An organization that is devoid of conflict, confrontation or disharmony is not a dynamic and healthy organization, but quite the opposite. Conflict not harmony is the glue that holds the organization to its task. Moreover, when the components of an organization are behaving as well as they possibly can, the organization as a whole will not behave as well as it can. This is counterintuitive to Machine Age Thinking, but is absolutely essential to organizational thinking. Conversely, when the organization is behaving as well as it can, none of the parts will be. Why? They are sacrificing individual achievement for collective success.
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 purchases, 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 like 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, smarty pants,” 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.”
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 produces the chain reaction to intuition.
(1) Personality Profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;
(2) Geographic Profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another space with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;
(3) 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:
(1) Personality Profile – “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (The Delta Group Florida, 1999) deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural and psychological conditioning, which program people away from their essence or essential self.
At the organizational level, it finds inclination to look for answers in all the wrong places. An organization has a collective essence as well but is inclined to search for excellence elsewhere when sustainable excellence is right under its nose and can be created out of the organization’s own reality.
(2) Geographic Profile – “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (CRS Press, 1998) describes the social termites that burrow silently into the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered too late for damage control. These social termites are dissonant workers.
Are the workers the culprit? No! The toxic culture of the workplace is the culprit. It spawns passive behaviors, cover ups, malicious obedience, defensive postures, and obsessive compulsive complaining. This poisons the collective will to cope much less manage to survive. It finds 100-year-old companies expiring at a record rate because they no longer have the energy or will to reinvent themselves.
(3) Demographic Profile – “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker” (1stBooks Library, 2000) unmasks the problem. The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, yet most workers are still managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as well paid serfs.
Something is wrong when a society is blessed with the most able bodied workforce in history, but insists on managing and leading these workers as if they cannot find their way. We are in the digital age which is changing everything, but the way and how we work. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share in 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, which 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 was 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 to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask for the order; didn’t give reasons to change suppliers; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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 lab.
The words of my boss 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 next six weeks.” 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 is seven acres under a single roof and manufactures refrigerators.
Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, has serviced this account “challenge free” for years. The front desk secretary informs me that she has not seen a Nalco salesman since joining Philco three years before.
Someone escorts me to the office of Thayer Maxwell, the plant superintendent. The office is a glassed in 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 desk, chairs, cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains everywhere, on papers scattered across the superintendent’s desk, on broken floor tiles and even on the glass walls of the bull pen.
Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, and severely damaged heat exchangers glare at me from the four corners of the office. These red rusted casualties of operations are haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, and on top of papers on the desk, even under the desk. It makes me think of the “Morgue of the Machine” – a picture of total chaos.
The extent of my knowledge of Nalco is a three-week intensive technical training course on water treatment technology at Nalco’s Chicago headquarters.
I know little actually about Nalco’s products and nothing about selling. 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?”
Where it came from, I’m not sure. Nalco’s Chicago laboratories, pilot plant operations, and technical service personnel impressed me during my training. It was like being indoctrinated into a new faith. I believed in Nalco only on the strength of this limited exposure. I found myself saying to the superintendent without flinching, “I’m here to save your job.”
Mr. Maxwell throws his head back and laughs heartedly, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you sport. You’ve got spunk.”
Relief registers on his face as his voice tells me he’s not angry, only amused. I move to be on the business side of his desk, and he follows. I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of the facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training.
A red marker is used to indicate areas where I assume he’s been having chronic problems as revealed by the samples across his office. This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I show him no flashy literature. I don’t talk about my fabulous company. Instead, I explain the how the why and the approach to dealing with his troubles.
I talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco’s products and technology 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, problems I believe are correctible. Perhaps my naked intensity is disarming.
“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.
“I know I can fix this.” I look about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.
“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I have no idea. I have never made a survey, 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. We will have to devote a full day to this.” The “we” implies I’ll need Nalco’s technical expertise. I’ll need the area manager.
“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”
* * * * *
(1) Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.
(2) Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.
(3) Demographic Profile – the focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board of the bullpen wall indicate an overworked maintenance engineering staff as complement to 1,200 factory employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.
THE TRIGGER TO THIS INITIAL INTUITION
My lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training gave me the confidence that identifying and treating chronic problems would in this system lead to success. I had no doubt about that. The technical level is the most comfortable level because it is totally dealing with things. I had left the security of the laboratory and was in the realm of people.
People are totally another matter. 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 who had never sold in his life, had no training in sales, and was to be given his walking papers in less than a month.
Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year comprehensive technical training program. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered customer friendly service with your sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s many 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
Two years later still with Nalco, after a stifling hot summer day in Terre Haute, Indiana, I find myself on the campus of Indiana State University. The temperature is nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit as it has been for several days.
The campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this community of 75,000. The summer session is in full swing, but classrooms and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on the campus lawns, and many professors are lecturing outdoors in the stifling heat.
Several chemical trucks with toxic hydrochloric acid are rigged with hoses and acidizing pumps. This means air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” and are down. This is due to calcium carbonate scaling in the condensers because of improper chemical water treatment.
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 ethnicities smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, seemingly age’s 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.
“It would not only be cost effective but could eliminate the inconvenience or need for periodic downtimes to acidize the condensers.”
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 refigure 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 shouts in a thunderous voice, “Get your ass out of here before I kick it from here to Lafayette.”
I hesitate, stunned, but 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 goddamn costs in the chemicals.”
* * * * *
I wasn’t thinking of the Fisher Paradigm©™ or of the three spheres of influence. I wasn’t thinking at all. Yet I must have been processing information subconsciously because I stood there. I didn’t leave.
Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak anymore. 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 like neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.
“You’re a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted, a minute sparkle in them. In that moment I made the connection of the pin, the unknown flag in the corner, 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 the longest time he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the vacuum with words but I 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 lined 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 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 as his friend. He did this from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor. 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.”
* * *
(1) 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. The workplace is his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.
(2) Geographic Profile: High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, student-faculty sweltering in the heat conducting classes on campus lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning failures.
(3) 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 THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
Someone might argue that I was programmed to deal with an explosive personality having had a father of that temperament. That would not be accurate.
Superintendent Crown was warm and open in his greeting. He was real. Candor was displayed when he admitted he couldn’t sell a consulting agreement to the board.
It was clear that for this air conditioning system to function effectively, however, it required high-end technical service. Nalco had two options to provide this service, one via the consulting contract and the other by incorporating the cost of such service in the chemicals.
The plant survey of the air conditioning system indicated a serious breach in water treatment application and control. This translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical service commitment. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively they were 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.
We carry our geography with us. We carry it in our heads, and surround ourselves with it for comfort’s sake at work. Mr. Crown did this so carefully that the clues to the man spoke so loudly I could not hear him, until I did.
CULTURE + TEST KIT = INTUITIVE SYMBOLOGY
Success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brings me to the attention of senior management. No one can put a finger on my incredulous success given my unconventional approach. My method has:
(1) Nothing to do with intimidation;
(2) Nothing to do selling the sizzle instead of the steak;
(3) Nothing to do with finessing the buyer with assumptive closes, penalty of delay or scarcity of product;
(4) Nothing to do with selling benefits to deflect objections.
My method has everything to do with becoming one with the buyer merging complementary interests into a partnership.
The vice president of Nalco’s International Division is so intrigued with my success that he comes into the field to travel with me. At the conclusion of the day, he says, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for us in South Africa?”
Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I can think about it. I do and am intrigued with the country’s history. My job there is to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, The Alexander Martin Company, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and South African Explosives, Ltd.’s Specialty Chemical Division.
South Africa has no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water is a precious commodity. Water clarification in the gold and diamond mines is critical to profitable business. Nalco has cutting edge technology in this field and is anxious to leverage its product line to full advantage here.
Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, Alexander Martin. They have no college training in either chemistry or business, but have the colonial manners and elocution of the British business elite. Likewise, the Alfloc people are mainly British and derive their business acumen primarily from colonial history and culture. College trained people are mainly Afrikaners, primarily from South African Explosives.
Afrikaners are descendents of the 17th century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.
It is 1968. Afrikaners have had control of the South African government since 1948, while the British still remain the major player in business and industry.
The Afrikaner government has created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which is rigorously enforced. Nearly a million Bantu workers come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in the South West African Township of “Soweto.”
This is the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies are now acting, temporarily, as the technical management team. They ask me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I study them and sense their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?
“Here is my suggestion,” I offer. “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 return with a Rube Goldberg concoction. It is mainly a South African test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine, package it and send it to the field.” They look 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 to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary. It was an intuitive decision that I would not be able to articulate until long after I had left Nalco.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clash of cultures is felt from the moment customs confiscates my copy of Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, “A Very Strange Society” (1968). This is magnified as I feel the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendents who look to Great Britain as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of the Afrikaners, Dutch and French descendents, who consider South Africa, home.
Although Afrikaners in this new company tend to be better educated, it is the English speakers who occupy most leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship is rumbling between the two groups with the Bantu majority treated as non-citizens.
(2) Geographic Profile: Apartheid divides the Bantu majority into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands have little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing Bantu 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 exists between the British and Afrikaner as these two groups share little in common but maintain a necessary tolerance of each other as whites represent only 20 percent of South Africa’s population.
(3) Demographic Profile: South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 14 million Bantus, 4 million whites (2.5 million Afrikaners, 1.5 million British), and 2 million coloreds (mixed race) including Indians, descendents of 19th century indentured workers from India.
This newly formed company, Anikem Ltd., is 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 parallel to that of ours. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers (Afrikaans word for “farmer”) in their down to earth approach to life unimpressed with the pretentious.
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. My intuition told me to put the risk of failure and the burden of success on this new company, not on Nalco. It was after all “their company.” It wasn’t until later that I realized this symbolic move proved consequential.
The action elevated the three diverse companies above petty differences into the possibility of a common culture. What could have been a colossal snafu became an opportunity for a promising success.
* * *
Too often when companies merge, the dominant company in the merger assumes its culture should prevail at the expense of the less dominant company. This puts a wrench in the works crippling the transition and often signaling ultimate collapse.
THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ SAVED MY LIFE!
In 1974, I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which had occurred in Fairfax County Virginia.
A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, after the young man grabbed the officer’s nightstick and hit him with it. This led to a riot.8
My job was to interview senior officers, detectives and command personnel to get a sense of how the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) operated and how this might have contributed to this debacle.
During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this work, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa participated in one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play.
Washington, D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City where I was residing at the Holiday Inn. A FCPD police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when the Iowa official 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.
It was a brisk evening and I found myself walking along Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a November chill in the air, but I was comfortably dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece suit, and wearing black leather gloves.
I noticed three African American youths across the street that were jiving and laughing as they walked parallel to me. I paid them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they raced ahead, crossed the street, and started hanging out at the corner under the light.
Some time ago, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that crossed my mind. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile – three young people up to no good at this hour and I am alone.
(2) Geographic Profile – this is no place for young boys to be out at this hour.
(3) Demographic Profile – they are teenagers; I am in my late thirties. They are black, slender, one about six feet, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in 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 can’t define it.
I know the three have the advantage (Demographic) especially if they have a knife or gun. I have no weapon.
No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!
INTUITION AND THE PHANTOM GUN
During my intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably squirm and adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with the same authoritative gate.
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 hear myself say, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning isn’t it boys?”
They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool what we is all about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction.
When I explain this episode to my ride at half past two in the morning, the police officer says, “You just might have saved your ass.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.
MUTINY MINDED POLICE OFFICERS
In 1975, the Public Safety Institute (PSI) was contracted to investigate and dismantle the unauthorized labor union of the Raleigh Police Officers Association, and to defuse its threat of striking the city of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy experts were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work. In the course of riding with officers, attending roll call during the three shifts, walking around city hall, and interviewing citizens, the spheres of influence begin to materialize:
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: A clear dichotomy appeared to exist between police command and the ranks of police patrol, or between staff and line authority and function. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me, an outsider – a disconnect.
They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.
(2) Geographic Profile: Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It has the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.
(3) 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.
As the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demand for a change in 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 officers, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started there.
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 city hall 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 gestures 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 full police chief pension benefits, he made him a sinecure while he rotated the three majors in the department every four months to run the police department, creating three islands of authority, three different and competing police departments, three different work cultures, and three distinct power cells.
After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. He then appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, convinced the city council to hire his deputy as city manager, and 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. He then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error.
This meant that the captain on permanent nights had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong. As they rotated shifts and came under his wing, he painted the chief as a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them. I saw this first hand. He used nuance and innuendo, humor and bravado to cultivate the officers’ collective dissonance and project their frustration and contempt on to the chief of police.
When I disclosed this scenario in a report to the Public Safety Institute, which was in turn published, it took the air out of the siege. Officers could see how they had been duped and 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 mainly because there was no sense of fruition.
An OD intervention can uncover chronic systemic problems, and make recommendations, but then the OD practitioner usually moves on, and is not there for the implementing stage. So, I was delighted when an opportunity came to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist.
My new boss gave me what sounded a lot like an ultimatum, reminding me of my initial days with Nalco a decade earlier. “If you don’t find your role here in the first six weeks,” he said, “you’re history.”
Directness is akin to my own personality. I liked the unabashed clarity of my marching orders. He, too, had first been trained in the hard sciences before studying the soft sciences, and was not inclined to beat about the bush when he had something on his mind. His directness established immediate trust as he was to become my mentor.
So off I go to create an OD role and identity in this new environment. It soon became apparent that the spheres of influence were blatantly obvious:
(1) Personality Profile: Engineers here are the elite, treated with deference, which is manifested in a cavalier attitude by engineers toward everyone. They are cowboys who can do no wrong. Human Resources personnel, where OD is located, are intimidated by these engineers and obsequious to their demands, mainly because they speak a different language and have that hauteur and mystique of their special power.
(2) 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 this leisure driven tourist paradise called Clearwater, Florida.
(3) 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 there are more than 30 Ph.D.’s.
After three weeks in the company, I experience the wall between Human Resources and engineering. Engineers requisition courses, seminars, and professional meetings but take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits.
Their elitist attitude says, would you know if I told you? A pervasive duplication of courses is noted. This unnecessarily multiplies costs. I ask HR Compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering community.
Most striking in this profile is that pay continues to increase for engineers as job complexity decreases; 75 percent of these engineers are working on technology developed long after they have left engineering college. Moreover, many engineers receive engineering pay for non-engineering work. Technical obsolescence is apparent, a problem correctible with training.
A memo is prepared that goes out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo follows to forty of the top engineers who are representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response.
The single engineering responder is an engineer near retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claims to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education.
We meet every week as if we are a full-fledged task force with me mainly the audience to his delivery. All of this is dutifully written up and sent out in memos to the chief engineers and the top forty engineers.
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 embellish our weekly sessions with statistics, schematics, graphs and studies and copy everyone on the original listings.
One day a chief engineer joins us. Mention is made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers show up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters. The chief engineer takes over the meeting outlining how technical education might work.
Each gathering thereafter finds greater and more diverse attendance from the engineering community. A holistic view is developing. In time, the chief engineer becomes director of engineering, and then general manager of the facility with technical education key 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 studies while working on the Honeywell campus. All engineers come to see the benefit of upgrading their skills as no engineer need be left behind.9
A BRIDGE TOO FAR
The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) makes its routine visit to Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater and asks to see me. They have read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management.”10 The CSDL director says he would like me to come to Cambridge to work with his people in team building.
CSDL designs the ring laser gyros that are manufactured in Clearwater. It is evident that a breakdown exists between the design phase in Massachusetts and production phase in Clearwater. This is a $50 million U.S. Navy program.
Before going off to MIT, I create a book out of my published works at Honeywell that cover all phases of OD that relate to operations. I do this with the full realization that MIT is unlikely to take me seriously. I didn’t anticipate the elitism would be any less in Cambridge than it was in Clearwater. Yes, this is an anticipated bias, but a protective one.
* * *
(1) Personality Profile: The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL. These scientists are perfectionists. If there is a problem, they are certain it is not with them.
(2) Geographic Profile: There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design team and production team.
This was before the digital age and the Internet and so that distance was an obvious barrier. What was not so obvious until I arrived at CSDL is that another barrier existed that further crippled this collaboration.
The CSDL facility was designed around twin circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street. This housed the CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus. The design was meant to provide privacy but it also promoted separation and isolation.
(3) Demographics: There is a distinct CSDL pecking order. Physicists are of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians of the second rank with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and chemists and biologists completing the ranking corps. Many are Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials cause less friction than seniority and status.
The mean age of the group is late thirties but the mindset is closer to that of the spoiled child.
INTUITION AS ANTICIPATION
Although an OD psychologist is not a clinician, per se, I anticipated being perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained at second-rate schools (state universities), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11 composed of articles I had written on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, stress management and how to conduct meetings. Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell’s technical 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 ranging from conflict management to how to sell an idea. My anticipated rejection never occurred.
They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the other. In the process, they ventilated pressing concerns and created an agenda on how to address them. The following week, again in teams, they conducted meetings, developed corrective strategies and allowed ideas to surface without interference. Sad to report, but it was quite apparent these well-trained minds had never had an opportunity to demonstrate leadership.
Pleased with their solutions, anxious to implement their ideas, 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 teams, between Massachusetts and Clearwater. That was partially my fault. I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting for them to bring up the subject. No one, up to this point, had made the connection that something was awry between the two operations that they might consider and even resolve.
“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody finally said. 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 lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles was no longer a bridge too far nor were the labs in the two towers across the bridge.
WORKINGS OF THE FISHER PARADIGM ©™
These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern of the reader 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. It was in working as an OD consultant that I learned a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to itself.
These spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we can only erase the lines 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 a presupposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or inside the box, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking and understanding.
By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique patterns 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 and elemental, to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe “what is,” not as it is but as 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 system 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 work force 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, and finally disgust when reporting back to work to find everything had changed.
Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t. This is important. Workers kept their bad feelings to themselves. They displayed their contempt for the company silently and indirectly in passive behaviors: that is, work slowdowns, failure to repair equipment immediately, failure to report outages in the new system, coming in late and leaving early and doing just enough to get by. Production levels plummeted, schedules were missed, product wastes increased and costs soared. The company was on the verge of collapse.
In panic mode, an OD intervention was initiated. This included interviewing all the workers. A sense of betrayal and being taken for granted was palpable. Employees wanted to hurt the company, as they had been hurt, failing to realize it was hurting them as well.
The management team was advised to level with employees, to explain the basis of its thinking, and its surprise at the reaction. Teams of management-employees were set up to voice concerns and to ensure this didn’t happen again.
Economic challenges had never been discussed with employees before. OD advised that this take the form of problem solving and brainstorming sessions. These teams looked at cost cutting measures and innovative ways to increase production, improve quality, and reduce waste. Management was at first reluctant to discuss such matters, but found when it did that workers were reasonable, understanding and more enthusiastic than they had expected.
Management had mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt locked out, 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 are likely to require more time.
Production eventually increased to its former levels with every indication that the new technology would perform as advertised. The workforce was cut by only 10 percent rather than the projected 30 plus percent. Trust was still an issue. Management’s challenge now was to earn it.
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1 The Fisher Paradigm © as of October 10, 2002 has sought copyright protection. The Fisher Paradigm™ has also applied for trademark registration pursuant to certification 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.”
In the interim, no one may use it 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, Tsmpa, FL 33617, Phone/Fax: (813) 989 –3631, or by email: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
2 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (Pantheon Books 1992). Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber, architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission. He forever changed science, and what it means to know something in this uncertain world. He was also a scientist with an intense emotional nature and used it.
3 Kary B. Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Vintage Books 2000), pp. 6 – 11.
4 As Emerson insists, experience is crucial. Dr. Fisher’s life represents an OD progression: he was reared in an Irish Catholic home, educated by the Sisters of St. Francis in grammar school (St. Patrick’s), attended public high school (Clinton, Iowa), state university (Iowa), spent five summers as a laborer in a chemical food processing plant (Clinton Foods, Inc.), worked as a bench chemist in research & development (Standard Brands, Inc.), entered U.S. Navy (enlisted man) with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean during Eisenhower Administration, then became chemical sales engineer (Nalco Chemical Company). It was at Nalco that he commenced to practice OD without knowing it. Forty years later intuitive OD (Fisher Paradigm ©™)would take shape in his mind. With Nalco, he advanced from a field manager to an international corporate executive, retired (in his 30s), returned to school (University of South Florida/Walden University) to earn his Ph.D., consultant (Psyche-ology, Inc.), adjunct to several universities, contract consultant (American Management Association, Public Safety Institute), OD psychologist (Honeywell, Inc.), international corporate executive (Honeywell Europe, Ltd.) and for the past thirteen years, full-time author/consultant/publisher (The Delta Group Florida).
5 Michael Macrone, Eureka! 81 Key Ideas Explained (Barnes & Noble 1994), pp. 77 – 78.
6 Oxford don Stuart Hampshire describes this as “the Spinoza solution,” The New York Review, October 24, 2002, p. 55.
7 Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking (Penguin Books 1970), Parallel Thinking: From Socratic to de Bono Thinking (Penguin Books 1994). The author decries the limitations put on thinking imposed by vertical or cognitive and critical thinking (cause/effect, linear logic) in a changing world. Thinking “inside the box” (or thinking based on what is already known) is no longer adequate, the author insists, with it necessary for vertical thinking to be complemented with lateral thinking, or conceptual and creative thinking.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Master of Arts thesis, “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot,” University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1976.
9 James R. Fisher, Jr., paper titled “Combating Technical Obsolescence: the Genesis of a Technical Education Program.” This paper was presented at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 8, 1986.
10 James R. Fisher, Jr., “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participation,” paper presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas, October 17, 1981.
11 James R. Fisher, Jr., Teaming: Motivation through Cooperation (© 1983 by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida).
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., Confident Selling for the 90s (The Delta Group Florida 1992), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, is comprehensively OD. It is a sequel to his earlier best selling Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1971) in which the intuitive OD framework of the Fisher Paradigm ©® was first displayed in its embryonic form.
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posted by The Peripatetic Philosopher | 5:47 PM