CONVERSATION WITH A PUBLISHER – THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 19, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
A publisher has shown some interest in one of my manuscripts, but feels THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® detracts rather than enhances my message. Also, it is not seen as sufficient to stand alone as a publication. That said I woke up in the middle of the night and submitted what follows.
* * *
My reason for mentioning THE FISHER PARADIGM was only because the examples are demonstration of right brain or intuitive thinking, which complements conventional critical thinking and is instrumental to creative thinking.
Alexander the Great is alleged to have solved the mystery of the Gordian knot by slicing it apart with a sword. Plutarch disputes that saying he pulled it out of its pole pin. In either case, whatever is true, Alexander the Great wasn't confined to conventional thinking. He acted outside the box. Edward de Bono would say he embraced lateral thinking.
FDR came into office after the Great Depression had been raging for going on four years. More than 25 percent of American workers were unemployed. President Hoover was log jammed as he attempted to break the Gordian knot of the depression with the same thinking that caused it -- unregulated speculation and unbridled commerce without government intervention.
Ideology took precedence over the demands of reality. Matters only got worse.
If you study history, you will see that FDR had no idea what to do but knew he had to do something. The cognitive Gordian knot was not being undone. FDR launched a program of acronyms (WPA, NRA, CCC), many were of only marginal success, but were breakthroughs nonetheless because it changed the psychological dynamic of the nation. Double-digit unemployment mocked his efforts right up to the Second World War, but people were working again!
Scientists and economists, schooled in cognitive thinking, have been writing for some time now that exclusive dependence on left-brain thinking has become a weakness of Western problem solving and a crippling impediment to progress.
If Congress had gotten past the impasse of cognitive or left brain thinking -- worrying about getting reelected or playing with voodoo economics of costs -- healthcare would have been passed long ago. Everyone or nearly everyone seems confounded by the Gordian knot of media.
The Western Ship-of-State is taking on water if not sinking, and what are we doing? We are obsessed with bailing out the water rather than fixing the leak.
You have to go no further than look at the current impasse in Congress to see the limits of critical thinking. Congress, whether on the right or left side of the aisle, is paralyzed with brain freeze inertia.
THE FISHER PARADIGM is but a gauge to look past critical thinking to the possibilities of creative thinking. It introduces the bicameral mind's left lobe to its right lobe, and attempts to get the two sides working together towards the same end.
Women have been using both sides of their brains for years, but, alas, few women are in power positions, and those that are often feel compelled to think like men, which neutralizes their power and contribution.
The three spheres of influence of THE FISHER PARADIGM -- personality, geography and demographics -- clash and burn when limited to critical thinking, but clash and produce insight when acknowledged and used in creative thinking. Several illustrations in THE FISHER PARADIGM attempt to show this from an empirical perspective.
Freud introduced the idea of quid pro quo, something gained for something given. It was an idea that resonated with the Western mind, especially the American mind that could see relations as transactions. Others followed to get beyond critical thinking into the maze of creative engagement.
Eric Berne's wrote "The Games People Play," using transactional analysis to get psychiatry out the funk of attempting to solve irrational problems with pure rationality.
R. D. Laing did the same, even going to the point of sitting down naked with a naked patient to talk to him.
Thomas Szasz went so far as to write "The Myth of Mental Illness." Each was attempting to break through the wall of conventional thinking to make empathetic connection with people as persons.
Berne's provided a psychological skeletal structure to get people to look at their problems in other than two-dimensional terms, bringing into the language the power of "warm fuzzies." Such books followed his as, "I'm OK You're OK" by Thomas Harris. This resonated with a wider audience that could see itself in his schematics.
Each of them put hooks into the song we all sing with little lyrical variation. Whatever your regard for their effectiveness, they got people thinking differently on purpose.
I am an idea guy, who has had many careers by not following convention and not thinking as I was programmed to think. My attempt is to share, not with scholars, but with ordinary workingmen and women alternatives to their difficulties beyond the limits of Socratic thinking.
Packaged right, promoted effectively, and targeted to the right audience people could benefit.
I accept your call that THE FISHER PARADIGM is not sufficient to stand-alone. My reason for sending it was for you to see what it contained, and whether or not it could be integrated into the narrative to possibly enhance it. If not, then I agree it should be tabled.
I've been writing continuously since 1990 and have learned one thing if nothing else, and that is writing is the easiest part of the publishing process.
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
THE DESCHOOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL
THE DESCHOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2010
* * *
“Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it, yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora’s box.”
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harper & Row 1970), p.151.
* * *
“For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”
John Copperman, “Inside American Education” by Thomas Sowell (The Free Press 1993)
* * *
BRACKET THIS -- THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT ATHLETE IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL!
Economic watchers estimate that several $Billion is lost in productivity during the “March Madness” of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The top 64 teams in the country compete for the national championship.
People will be watching the game on some electronic contraption, twitting or texting, or skipping work altogether to attend some games, not to mention betting on the games at work, or standing around talking about their favorite team.
Damaging as all this may be, and I’m not minimizing it, the greater travesty is to consider the fact that these college players are athletes’ first and college scholars second, or not at all. There are exceptions but I'm speaking of the rule.
Dedicated college basketball players are essentially in the minors, or the Grapefruit League of Professional Basketball. Their drive to get to the big dance is mainly to profile their talents for the NBA. That is where the travesty lies.
* * *
Observers of education such as Page Smith (“Killing the Spirit” Penguin Books 1990) have been decrying the lame dogmatic and counterproductive travesty that is college education with Smith referring to it as “mapping out the desert.”
That said if you like sport, and I happen to have played and liked basketball, being four years on the varsity in high school, education was always my primary motivation with basketball a recreational alternative. Also, in my day, if you weren’t a reasonable student, you couldn’t even practice much less play in games.
* * *
At university, I was president of my dormitory where all “student-athletes” on scholarship resided. Many of them were already entering the university with only a vague notion of schoolwork much less scholarship. Some could not even read well enough to have completed a rigorous high school program.
In one instance, a basketball player who would one day play in the NCAA Championship Game asked me to take a final for him. I was the wrong color and also had never taken the course. Putting aside the ethics of the situation, and to put him down gently, I said, “I don’t know anything about this course. I’ve never studied this material.”
“That may be true,” he said, “but you’d do better than I would because I haven’t had much of a chance to study the material at all.”
Now, that may or may not be true, but I knew how hard these athletes worked in their jobs to make the basketball team. It was a full-time job. Moreover, he wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was quite a bright guy but sport was his whole curriculum and his coaches and the athletic director supported this.
This was in the “Big Ten” conference, which was alleged to uphold high academic standards. As you will see below, that is not always true.
* * *
Fast-forward 50 years and what follows is the graduation rate of members of the “Final 64 College Team” in 2010:
Graduation rates of 100 percent
1. Marquette (100)
2. Utah State (100)
3. Notre Dame (100)
4. BYU (100)
5. Wake Forest (100)
Graduation rates in the 90 percent range
6. Lehigh (92)
7. Vermont (92)
8. Butler (90)
9. Duke (92)
10. Villanova (92)
Graduation rates in the 80 percent range
11. Georgetown (82)
12. Ohio (85)
13. Oklahoma St. (82)
14. UCSB (82)
15. Florida St. (80)
16. Vanderbilt (85)
17. Xavier (89)
18. Oakland (82)
19. Sienna (86)
20. Richmond (85)
Graduation rates in the 70 percent range
21.Kansas (73)
22. N. Iowa (78)
23. Murray St. (73)
24. Pittsburgh (75)
25. Winthrop (75)
26. Wisconsin (78)
27. Gonzaga (78)
28. UTEP (71)
Graduation rates in the 60 percent range
29. Ohio St. (60)
30. Florida (60)
31. Kansas St. (62)
32. N. Texas (60)
33. Purdue (64)
34. Montana (67)
35. R. Morris (67)
36. E. Tenn. St. (61)
Graduation rates in the 50 percent range
37. Michigan St. (58)
38. San Diego St. (58)
39. Syracuse (55)
40. Texas A&M (56)
41. Old Dominion (53)
42. St. Mary’s (57)
43, Sam Houston (50)
Graduation rates in the 40 percent range
44. UNLV (46)
45. Houston (42)
46. Minnesota (44)
47. Texas (47)
48. Temple (43)
49. New Mexico (43)
50. W. Virginia (44)
51. Morgan St. (42)
Graduation rates in the 30 percent range
52. Tennessee (30)
53. Ga. Tech (38)
54. Clemson (37)
55. Missouri (36)
56. Louisville (38)
57. Baylor (36)
58. N. Mexico St. (36)
59. Kentucky (31)
Graduation rates in the 20 percent range
60. Arkansas P. B. (29)
61. Washington (29)
62. California (20)
Graduation rates below 10 percent range
63. Maryland (8)
64.Cornell (Ivy League Schools do not report graduation rates)
* * *
I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), “The Japanese seem obsessed with people and realize profits. Americans seem obsessed with profits, but realize problems with people. The irony is the Japanese understand and play the business game far better than Americans who invented it.” (p. 138)
Alfred Sloan, the legendary leader of General Motors, once boasted that GM, although forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, continued to pay stockholders dividends. Ultimately, as we know in 2010, GM has collapsed and is suffering for its hubris and insensitivity to people.
Toyota followed the American model while still focusing on people to realize profits until it got caught up in the same American economic “win,” translated be “Numero Uno.”
College athletics, mainly football and basketball, are big business. Colleges build quarter billion stadiums and have 100,000 fans attending college football games. College basketball arenas have likewise growing in size to seat tens of thousands of fans.
College sports no longer recruit scholar athletes like some that I know from my generation, students first and foremost and athletes after the fact. That is no longer true as the breakdown of graduation rates indicate here. My words aren’t going to change anything, that is, unless and until presidents of universities are no longer general managers of professional programs being touted as amateurs.
* * *
We have seen the Olympics become a mockery of amateur athletics. The International Olympic Governing Committee has finally conceded amateurism was a travesty of the facts allowing professional athletes to compete.
These sports programs in colleges and universities are not doing the athletes any favor by not insisting on them being students first and athletes second. Why? Because less than 10 percent of them will ever make a living as athletes, but they all can make a living with the skills, knowledge and understanding of a college education that ends in a degree.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2010
* * *
“Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it, yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora’s box.”
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harper & Row 1970), p.151.
* * *
“For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”
John Copperman, “Inside American Education” by Thomas Sowell (The Free Press 1993)
* * *
BRACKET THIS -- THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT ATHLETE IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL!
Economic watchers estimate that several $Billion is lost in productivity during the “March Madness” of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The top 64 teams in the country compete for the national championship.
People will be watching the game on some electronic contraption, twitting or texting, or skipping work altogether to attend some games, not to mention betting on the games at work, or standing around talking about their favorite team.
Damaging as all this may be, and I’m not minimizing it, the greater travesty is to consider the fact that these college players are athletes’ first and college scholars second, or not at all. There are exceptions but I'm speaking of the rule.
Dedicated college basketball players are essentially in the minors, or the Grapefruit League of Professional Basketball. Their drive to get to the big dance is mainly to profile their talents for the NBA. That is where the travesty lies.
* * *
Observers of education such as Page Smith (“Killing the Spirit” Penguin Books 1990) have been decrying the lame dogmatic and counterproductive travesty that is college education with Smith referring to it as “mapping out the desert.”
That said if you like sport, and I happen to have played and liked basketball, being four years on the varsity in high school, education was always my primary motivation with basketball a recreational alternative. Also, in my day, if you weren’t a reasonable student, you couldn’t even practice much less play in games.
* * *
At university, I was president of my dormitory where all “student-athletes” on scholarship resided. Many of them were already entering the university with only a vague notion of schoolwork much less scholarship. Some could not even read well enough to have completed a rigorous high school program.
In one instance, a basketball player who would one day play in the NCAA Championship Game asked me to take a final for him. I was the wrong color and also had never taken the course. Putting aside the ethics of the situation, and to put him down gently, I said, “I don’t know anything about this course. I’ve never studied this material.”
“That may be true,” he said, “but you’d do better than I would because I haven’t had much of a chance to study the material at all.”
Now, that may or may not be true, but I knew how hard these athletes worked in their jobs to make the basketball team. It was a full-time job. Moreover, he wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was quite a bright guy but sport was his whole curriculum and his coaches and the athletic director supported this.
This was in the “Big Ten” conference, which was alleged to uphold high academic standards. As you will see below, that is not always true.
* * *
Fast-forward 50 years and what follows is the graduation rate of members of the “Final 64 College Team” in 2010:
Graduation rates of 100 percent
1. Marquette (100)
2. Utah State (100)
3. Notre Dame (100)
4. BYU (100)
5. Wake Forest (100)
Graduation rates in the 90 percent range
6. Lehigh (92)
7. Vermont (92)
8. Butler (90)
9. Duke (92)
10. Villanova (92)
Graduation rates in the 80 percent range
11. Georgetown (82)
12. Ohio (85)
13. Oklahoma St. (82)
14. UCSB (82)
15. Florida St. (80)
16. Vanderbilt (85)
17. Xavier (89)
18. Oakland (82)
19. Sienna (86)
20. Richmond (85)
Graduation rates in the 70 percent range
21.Kansas (73)
22. N. Iowa (78)
23. Murray St. (73)
24. Pittsburgh (75)
25. Winthrop (75)
26. Wisconsin (78)
27. Gonzaga (78)
28. UTEP (71)
Graduation rates in the 60 percent range
29. Ohio St. (60)
30. Florida (60)
31. Kansas St. (62)
32. N. Texas (60)
33. Purdue (64)
34. Montana (67)
35. R. Morris (67)
36. E. Tenn. St. (61)
Graduation rates in the 50 percent range
37. Michigan St. (58)
38. San Diego St. (58)
39. Syracuse (55)
40. Texas A&M (56)
41. Old Dominion (53)
42. St. Mary’s (57)
43, Sam Houston (50)
Graduation rates in the 40 percent range
44. UNLV (46)
45. Houston (42)
46. Minnesota (44)
47. Texas (47)
48. Temple (43)
49. New Mexico (43)
50. W. Virginia (44)
51. Morgan St. (42)
Graduation rates in the 30 percent range
52. Tennessee (30)
53. Ga. Tech (38)
54. Clemson (37)
55. Missouri (36)
56. Louisville (38)
57. Baylor (36)
58. N. Mexico St. (36)
59. Kentucky (31)
Graduation rates in the 20 percent range
60. Arkansas P. B. (29)
61. Washington (29)
62. California (20)
Graduation rates below 10 percent range
63. Maryland (8)
64.Cornell (Ivy League Schools do not report graduation rates)
* * *
I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), “The Japanese seem obsessed with people and realize profits. Americans seem obsessed with profits, but realize problems with people. The irony is the Japanese understand and play the business game far better than Americans who invented it.” (p. 138)
Alfred Sloan, the legendary leader of General Motors, once boasted that GM, although forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, continued to pay stockholders dividends. Ultimately, as we know in 2010, GM has collapsed and is suffering for its hubris and insensitivity to people.
Toyota followed the American model while still focusing on people to realize profits until it got caught up in the same American economic “win,” translated be “Numero Uno.”
College athletics, mainly football and basketball, are big business. Colleges build quarter billion stadiums and have 100,000 fans attending college football games. College basketball arenas have likewise growing in size to seat tens of thousands of fans.
College sports no longer recruit scholar athletes like some that I know from my generation, students first and foremost and athletes after the fact. That is no longer true as the breakdown of graduation rates indicate here. My words aren’t going to change anything, that is, unless and until presidents of universities are no longer general managers of professional programs being touted as amateurs.
* * *
We have seen the Olympics become a mockery of amateur athletics. The International Olympic Governing Committee has finally conceded amateurism was a travesty of the facts allowing professional athletes to compete.
These sports programs in colleges and universities are not doing the athletes any favor by not insisting on them being students first and athletes second. Why? Because less than 10 percent of them will ever make a living as athletes, but they all can make a living with the skills, knowledge and understanding of a college education that ends in a degree.
* * *
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
THE FALLACY OF GETTING AHEAD BY BEING A JERK!
THE FALLACY OF GETTING AHEAD BY BEING A JERK!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 9, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
“Mission,” mentioned by the reader below is to my current project of writing a novel of my experience in South Africa in the late 1960s during the reign of apartheid.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Dr. Fisher.
Sorry to distract you from your mission. Sorry Betty.
Re the link below: I'm sure you have written about this topic, probably embedded in one of your essays Jim, but I could not locate it. Can you point me in the right direction?
A friend sent this to me. Intuitively, I think the author is being contrary to appeal to a particular audience. And, if this gentlemen or his philosophy is gaining credence, I might be a bit concerned. I mean, how can one be human if one is inclined to be deliberately insensitive? I understand however, corporate fads being what they are, sensitivity training is likely overdone.
Any thoughts Jim? I want to give my friend a helpful response.
Regards,
George
* * *
WHAT GEORGE’S FRIEND WROTE TO HIM:
We are so afraid of being cast aside that we do our best to think as everyone else thinks and to feel as everyone else feels.
We have learned all this in our sensitivity training workshops. We want to develop our emotional intelligence and our capacity for empathy. We have made a fetish of fellow-feeling. We are convinced that it is the key to worldly success.
We are continually told to be sensitive to others. See the attached for key to success in business. Insensitivity training.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I couldn’t successfully reference the blog that your friend mentioned, but I have a couple thoughts on sensitivity training.
You are correct. We as human beings need to be sensitive to others in terms of how our behavior enhances or deters them from feeling comfortable about themselves.
Your friend is also right in that this sensitivity training charade is overdone and has become a pejorative when it attempts to be a palliative to social discord, especially in business.
When the wheels come off, as they have now, anyone can get attention by taking an adverse perspective on the problem. Remember the book, “Winning Through Intimidation.” I thought that was a crock of baloney then – it was at the zenith of my career – but it sold like gold at the bookstores.
* * *
A friend sent a story about two ferocious foxes. One was docile the other hostile. What determined the docile character of the one fox given both foxes had the same genetic code? He was fed.
* * *
Social life is one of being fed, and in the absent of receiving sufficient nutrition all sorts of aberrant and hostile behaviors can be manifested.
You don’t make people happier by sending them to self-esteem courses or preaching self-worth. You give them opportunity in which they feel they have earned something that is esteeming and as a consequence gives them a sense of self-worth.
Likewise, you don’t send an asshole boss off to a sensitivity seminar and expect him to come back peachy-cream and all altruistic.
We create assholes in the work environment from the Board of Director down through the ranks because assholes get promoted, and everyone sees this and follows suit.
So, you don’t correct the problem with sensitivity training or insensitivity training. You correct the problem, and here I have written tons on the subject, by becoming your own best friend. I wrote a book called THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
We sometimes forget each of us embodies a corporation. If we’re always looking to melt in, to be accepted, to belong, there is little energy left to find out what we are about or how to lead.
Leadership has little to do with the elected or the people at the headpin of the corporation. Leadership has everything to do with the rest of us. Everyone is a leader or no one is. You can’t wait for city hall to make the right decision.
And no one can lead if we are governed by polls, by best sellers, by privileged education, by approval ratings, fads, popular jargon or the latest electronic wonder. This is the metaphorical equivalent of a beautiful vehicle with an empty tank. We are currently an empty tank society.
That is why these silly debates on such subjects as sensitivity training are a waste of energy. It would be a bizarre idea to think insensitivity key to anything much less success.
Your friend’s mention of emotional intelligence is obviously a reference to a popular book. If it helps him understand himself, fine, but it is a very flimsy concept, and we currently like very flimsy concepts because we want easy answers to complex problems. This is not new. A half century ago or earlier there were such bromides as, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “Think and Grow Rich,” and “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” They were buttered popcorn and didn’t help much with the digestion.
Not having a point of view is like tumbleweed directed by the prevailing winds. Without a set of values, and yes, moral principles, which represent the spine of one's existence, the inclination are to look for answers outside one’s own experience. They are never there. As Confucius says, we should treat others, as we would have them treat us, recognizing none of us is better or more important than anyone else, ever.
The one discipline that has wreaked more devastation on corporate America than any other has emanated from human resource management. I don’t know what your friend’s experience has been, but I for years was a corporate consultant dealing with HR types, and they were boorish to the point of bullish in the discharge of their function, and created more havoc than help with their various interventions, also a subject of which I have written tons.
Elton Mayo created the nonsense with his Hawthorne Studies in Chicago in the 1930s and then the management gurus took up the calling with works such as those of Douglas McGregor, and Blake and Mouton, et al, where using cosmetic interventions and promoting management style was meant to cure corporate ills, and lead to maximum efficiency and efficacy, when as a result of all this we have the sorry mess of corporacy today which goes all the way to the White House.
Sensitivity is not only important in terms of working with others. Sensitivity is important as part of our animal instinct to know when a deal is bad, when our social company is bad, or the workplace we find ourselves in is bad for us, and to do something about it. You don’t bed down in a lion’s pride but we do let a poor choice of life partners, friends and workplaces corrupt us, and sometimes destroy us without doing anything constructive about it.
The whole basis of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ is intuitive in some instances and counterintuitive in others, but always thinking which is sensitive to the demands of the situation in terms of people, places and things.
My conceptual framework is hard to perceive because readers are conditioned to the problem of working together effectively through a litany of what I call cosmetic interventions including sensitivity training.
One time when I was a young man and far more successful selling with Nalco Chemical Company than anyone else, a colleague said to me, “Fisher, I’m sure you’d agree the most important thing to be successful in this business is to have a thick skin.”
“I don’t agree at all,” I answered, “the thinner the skin the better.”
He shook his head and walked away not allowing me to explain myself. So, I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970).
Be always well,
Jim
PS Virtually everything I have said here is in the books I’ve mentioned above that I’ve written and also in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) and CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 9, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
“Mission,” mentioned by the reader below is to my current project of writing a novel of my experience in South Africa in the late 1960s during the reign of apartheid.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Dr. Fisher.
Sorry to distract you from your mission. Sorry Betty.
Re the link below: I'm sure you have written about this topic, probably embedded in one of your essays Jim, but I could not locate it. Can you point me in the right direction?
A friend sent this to me. Intuitively, I think the author is being contrary to appeal to a particular audience. And, if this gentlemen or his philosophy is gaining credence, I might be a bit concerned. I mean, how can one be human if one is inclined to be deliberately insensitive? I understand however, corporate fads being what they are, sensitivity training is likely overdone.
Any thoughts Jim? I want to give my friend a helpful response.
Regards,
George
* * *
WHAT GEORGE’S FRIEND WROTE TO HIM:
We are so afraid of being cast aside that we do our best to think as everyone else thinks and to feel as everyone else feels.
We have learned all this in our sensitivity training workshops. We want to develop our emotional intelligence and our capacity for empathy. We have made a fetish of fellow-feeling. We are convinced that it is the key to worldly success.
We are continually told to be sensitive to others. See the attached for key to success in business. Insensitivity training.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I couldn’t successfully reference the blog that your friend mentioned, but I have a couple thoughts on sensitivity training.
You are correct. We as human beings need to be sensitive to others in terms of how our behavior enhances or deters them from feeling comfortable about themselves.
Your friend is also right in that this sensitivity training charade is overdone and has become a pejorative when it attempts to be a palliative to social discord, especially in business.
When the wheels come off, as they have now, anyone can get attention by taking an adverse perspective on the problem. Remember the book, “Winning Through Intimidation.” I thought that was a crock of baloney then – it was at the zenith of my career – but it sold like gold at the bookstores.
* * *
A friend sent a story about two ferocious foxes. One was docile the other hostile. What determined the docile character of the one fox given both foxes had the same genetic code? He was fed.
* * *
Social life is one of being fed, and in the absent of receiving sufficient nutrition all sorts of aberrant and hostile behaviors can be manifested.
You don’t make people happier by sending them to self-esteem courses or preaching self-worth. You give them opportunity in which they feel they have earned something that is esteeming and as a consequence gives them a sense of self-worth.
Likewise, you don’t send an asshole boss off to a sensitivity seminar and expect him to come back peachy-cream and all altruistic.
We create assholes in the work environment from the Board of Director down through the ranks because assholes get promoted, and everyone sees this and follows suit.
So, you don’t correct the problem with sensitivity training or insensitivity training. You correct the problem, and here I have written tons on the subject, by becoming your own best friend. I wrote a book called THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
We sometimes forget each of us embodies a corporation. If we’re always looking to melt in, to be accepted, to belong, there is little energy left to find out what we are about or how to lead.
Leadership has little to do with the elected or the people at the headpin of the corporation. Leadership has everything to do with the rest of us. Everyone is a leader or no one is. You can’t wait for city hall to make the right decision.
And no one can lead if we are governed by polls, by best sellers, by privileged education, by approval ratings, fads, popular jargon or the latest electronic wonder. This is the metaphorical equivalent of a beautiful vehicle with an empty tank. We are currently an empty tank society.
That is why these silly debates on such subjects as sensitivity training are a waste of energy. It would be a bizarre idea to think insensitivity key to anything much less success.
Your friend’s mention of emotional intelligence is obviously a reference to a popular book. If it helps him understand himself, fine, but it is a very flimsy concept, and we currently like very flimsy concepts because we want easy answers to complex problems. This is not new. A half century ago or earlier there were such bromides as, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” “Think and Grow Rich,” and “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” They were buttered popcorn and didn’t help much with the digestion.
Not having a point of view is like tumbleweed directed by the prevailing winds. Without a set of values, and yes, moral principles, which represent the spine of one's existence, the inclination are to look for answers outside one’s own experience. They are never there. As Confucius says, we should treat others, as we would have them treat us, recognizing none of us is better or more important than anyone else, ever.
The one discipline that has wreaked more devastation on corporate America than any other has emanated from human resource management. I don’t know what your friend’s experience has been, but I for years was a corporate consultant dealing with HR types, and they were boorish to the point of bullish in the discharge of their function, and created more havoc than help with their various interventions, also a subject of which I have written tons.
Elton Mayo created the nonsense with his Hawthorne Studies in Chicago in the 1930s and then the management gurus took up the calling with works such as those of Douglas McGregor, and Blake and Mouton, et al, where using cosmetic interventions and promoting management style was meant to cure corporate ills, and lead to maximum efficiency and efficacy, when as a result of all this we have the sorry mess of corporacy today which goes all the way to the White House.
Sensitivity is not only important in terms of working with others. Sensitivity is important as part of our animal instinct to know when a deal is bad, when our social company is bad, or the workplace we find ourselves in is bad for us, and to do something about it. You don’t bed down in a lion’s pride but we do let a poor choice of life partners, friends and workplaces corrupt us, and sometimes destroy us without doing anything constructive about it.
The whole basis of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ is intuitive in some instances and counterintuitive in others, but always thinking which is sensitive to the demands of the situation in terms of people, places and things.
My conceptual framework is hard to perceive because readers are conditioned to the problem of working together effectively through a litany of what I call cosmetic interventions including sensitivity training.
One time when I was a young man and far more successful selling with Nalco Chemical Company than anyone else, a colleague said to me, “Fisher, I’m sure you’d agree the most important thing to be successful in this business is to have a thick skin.”
“I don’t agree at all,” I answered, “the thinner the skin the better.”
He shook his head and walked away not allowing me to explain myself. So, I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (1970).
Be always well,
Jim
PS Virtually everything I have said here is in the books I’ve mentioned above that I’ve written and also in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) and CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX!
LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 7, 2010
* * *
“The American dilemma and the phantom challenge, the trauma of the modern organization. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winner only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, the once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)
* * *
Toyota is a corporation in the news at the moment with all kinds of horror stories about uncontrollable speeding cars in which computer glitches cause the manufacturer’s vehicles to accelerate up to 90 to 100 mph, or the gas peddle to stick, or the floor mat to get in the way of the brake, or God only knows what will be next. Twenty years ago, I wrote:
“An undeclared psychological war is being waged within most major enterprises today with bodies falling on all sides and nobody’s paying attention. The principal players are worrying about what’s in and what’s out; who’s in and who’s out; who’s making points and who isn’t while the marketplace is disappearing into the sunset.” (WWMs 1990, p. 13). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
It has happened to the Roman Catholic Church, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well, costing young men and women the loss of their innocence at the hands of lecherous priests. It has cost parishioners $billions in their Sunday offerings, money that they have given generously and money that was given at a sacrifice. It has seen landmark churches, hundred-year-old churches, torn down to sell the property to pay attorneys and the families of the abused children. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We have had the economic meltdown and the worldwide recession/depression of 2007-2009, and now continuing into 2010 with Congress asleep at the switch, while the president is out to establish a legacy with healthcare reform legislation, while not 9.7 percent are unemployed but perhaps as much as double that number. Statistics don’t lie but statisticians do lie and they keep statistics. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We are quick to report the corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq, but most recently it appears the House of Hell, the House of Representatives with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee playing to that corruption tune. He has a far bigger whip than any of those corrupt politicians in those distant lands. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
A virtual nobody without any journalistic credentials much less an economic specialist pedigree waved a red flag twenty years ago by self-publishing what was called by some an “angry book” and by others even worse. The book made a twenty-four hour blip on the collective conscience and then was quickly forgotten. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
That book was WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), a concept that cottoned to no special interest as opposed to IN SEARCH FOR EXCELLENC that did. I read this book and found the concept was all-wrong.
You don’t search for excellence. You create excellence. It made Tom Peters a national figure. As I point out in WWMs, most of the companies that copied those profiled in that book eventually failed! See Business Week, “Who’s Excellent Now?” (November 5, 1984). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
When you are small and insignificant and are like Chicken Little yelling, “The sky is falling,” you are apt to be seen as a polemicist, yet are equally apt to see your message stolen and soft pedaled commercially with a thematic treatment in Fortune Magazine – of course with no acknowledgement to WWMs as happened in 1990s. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
Joe Klein in the current issue of Time magazine (March 15, 2010) writes of “leaderless Democrats,” as if Democrats in Congress have a corner on the leaderless leadership market. They don’t.
The Republicans are doing their best to be equally leaderless. Klein talks of incompetence derailing healthcare. Sometimes derailment is a good thing. It gives the train a chance to get on the right track.
Healthcare is not the main issue of the day. The main issue of the day is jobs! Congress needs to show some leadership in banking regulation and getting people back to work instead of counting the pratfalls of the powerless powerful and keeping score of them in the press.
* * *
We have reached the pusillanimous stage in which society is on automatic pilot. Nobody is at the helm and the Ship of State is being fueled by white noise. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
The most egregious sin I imply in my book CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIPS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) is the collective predicament of everyone rushing to the high ground as if they had nothing to do with the encroaching tsunami.
What is corporate sin? It is that no one is in charge! Workers blame management. Management blames the market. And the market is an artificial entity that cannot defend itself against the charges. I write:
“The working world is upside down. It demands working against the grain to put work back on its foundation. What is killing this country in particular and the working world in general is too much HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elitism) in law, politics, government, commerce, religion, education, entertainment, and industry.
“These institutions take themselves too seriously. They attempt to carry the 19th century mantle of the James brothers, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the like, as if the center of the country is the East Coast. They are disruptive today because they don’t get it. They actually believe the rich and knowing are Ivy Leaguers, and that they have an obligation to guide and protect us from ourselves.
“These institutions of lazy scholars and recidivistic professors, of inflated grading and solipsistic egos, would restore order from chaos by cosmetic surgery (crime bills), revitalize trust by synthetic measures (declarations of ethics), establish economic parity and stability by treaty (NAFTA and GATT), rejuvenate accountability by modification of rites of passage (term limits in Congress). None of this touches the sick soul of our American society. It is all pomp with a dash of circumstance. No more.” (Corporate Sin, p. 14). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
It is easy to criticize the automotive industry for its failure to lead, to criticize the Federal Reserve for its hokey pokey policies, to blame illegal immigrants for eating into the social welfare largesse, and on and on.
Somewhere on the road after 1945 we got lost. We walked into Alice’s Wonderland or onto the yellow brick road of the Wizard of Oz, and departed from self-responsibility.
We have come to blame everyone but ourselves for living beyond our means, burning the candle at both ends, buying into the idea of a free lunch, expecting our employer to be our nanny for life, accusing everyone but ourselves for our lifestyle excesses that have contributed to the soaring cost of healthcare insurance.
We have declared war on drugs yet there would be no need for such a war if recreational drugs were not so popular with the self-indulgent. We can blame the poppy growers of Afghanistan or the drug lords of Columbia for the drug problem but that is like trimming the toenails of the issue, when supply will always find a way to meet demand. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We didn’t save for a rainy day because “that was not our responsibility.” That was our employer’s or the government’s or our parent’s responsibility. People too young to fight in WWII have contributed to the problems of today by not being able to say “no” to their children, or their children’s children.
Now, those children are parents and sometimes even grandparents. They have created a generation of weak minded, weak willed, weary eyed, confused and escape artists of impressive skill in laying a guilt trip for their predicament on those children of 1945, who became parents and wanted to give their children everything except the freedom to fail.
Baby boomers were given too much too many too soon. They were given everything and forgiving anything that might have helped them to grow up and take charge of their lives. Baby boomers, may I remind you, are now running everything. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We are in the Information Age, the Electronic Age, the Communication Age with entrepreneurs creating every conceivable device to escape the fact that Nature is unimpressed. Nature has no conscience. Nature destroys those that ignore her laws. No device is more powerful than Nature or first principles.
Meanwhile, while we are texting or whatever that is we do, society is going into the toilet, literally, as haste makes more than waste. It has become self-fulfilling prophecy.
That is because leadership is about the ability to self-sustain, self-manage, self-discipline and self-direct yourself to a meaningful, useful and honorable life consistent with Nature and an acknowledgement of her demands and limits. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
You don’t feed the poor. You give the poor training and jobs. You don’t give people jobs because they have a degree. You give them jobs because they are learners not knowers. You don’t make progress by forming a group and becoming a true believer. You do so by changing your lifestyle and stepping outside the blame game of seeing society as the culprit. You are society!
You examine your own conscience and see where you have gone off the rails and what it will take to get back on them. Everyone is a leader of his or her own life or no one is a leader. That is where leaders are found.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 7, 2010
* * *
“The American dilemma and the phantom challenge, the trauma of the modern organization. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winner only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, the once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)
* * *
Toyota is a corporation in the news at the moment with all kinds of horror stories about uncontrollable speeding cars in which computer glitches cause the manufacturer’s vehicles to accelerate up to 90 to 100 mph, or the gas peddle to stick, or the floor mat to get in the way of the brake, or God only knows what will be next. Twenty years ago, I wrote:
“An undeclared psychological war is being waged within most major enterprises today with bodies falling on all sides and nobody’s paying attention. The principal players are worrying about what’s in and what’s out; who’s in and who’s out; who’s making points and who isn’t while the marketplace is disappearing into the sunset.” (WWMs 1990, p. 13). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
It has happened to the Roman Catholic Church, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well, costing young men and women the loss of their innocence at the hands of lecherous priests. It has cost parishioners $billions in their Sunday offerings, money that they have given generously and money that was given at a sacrifice. It has seen landmark churches, hundred-year-old churches, torn down to sell the property to pay attorneys and the families of the abused children. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We have had the economic meltdown and the worldwide recession/depression of 2007-2009, and now continuing into 2010 with Congress asleep at the switch, while the president is out to establish a legacy with healthcare reform legislation, while not 9.7 percent are unemployed but perhaps as much as double that number. Statistics don’t lie but statisticians do lie and they keep statistics. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We are quick to report the corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq, but most recently it appears the House of Hell, the House of Representatives with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee playing to that corruption tune. He has a far bigger whip than any of those corrupt politicians in those distant lands. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
A virtual nobody without any journalistic credentials much less an economic specialist pedigree waved a red flag twenty years ago by self-publishing what was called by some an “angry book” and by others even worse. The book made a twenty-four hour blip on the collective conscience and then was quickly forgotten. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
That book was WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), a concept that cottoned to no special interest as opposed to IN SEARCH FOR EXCELLENC that did. I read this book and found the concept was all-wrong.
You don’t search for excellence. You create excellence. It made Tom Peters a national figure. As I point out in WWMs, most of the companies that copied those profiled in that book eventually failed! See Business Week, “Who’s Excellent Now?” (November 5, 1984). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
When you are small and insignificant and are like Chicken Little yelling, “The sky is falling,” you are apt to be seen as a polemicist, yet are equally apt to see your message stolen and soft pedaled commercially with a thematic treatment in Fortune Magazine – of course with no acknowledgement to WWMs as happened in 1990s. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
Joe Klein in the current issue of Time magazine (March 15, 2010) writes of “leaderless Democrats,” as if Democrats in Congress have a corner on the leaderless leadership market. They don’t.
The Republicans are doing their best to be equally leaderless. Klein talks of incompetence derailing healthcare. Sometimes derailment is a good thing. It gives the train a chance to get on the right track.
Healthcare is not the main issue of the day. The main issue of the day is jobs! Congress needs to show some leadership in banking regulation and getting people back to work instead of counting the pratfalls of the powerless powerful and keeping score of them in the press.
* * *
We have reached the pusillanimous stage in which society is on automatic pilot. Nobody is at the helm and the Ship of State is being fueled by white noise. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
The most egregious sin I imply in my book CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIPS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) is the collective predicament of everyone rushing to the high ground as if they had nothing to do with the encroaching tsunami.
What is corporate sin? It is that no one is in charge! Workers blame management. Management blames the market. And the market is an artificial entity that cannot defend itself against the charges. I write:
“The working world is upside down. It demands working against the grain to put work back on its foundation. What is killing this country in particular and the working world in general is too much HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elitism) in law, politics, government, commerce, religion, education, entertainment, and industry.
“These institutions take themselves too seriously. They attempt to carry the 19th century mantle of the James brothers, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the like, as if the center of the country is the East Coast. They are disruptive today because they don’t get it. They actually believe the rich and knowing are Ivy Leaguers, and that they have an obligation to guide and protect us from ourselves.
“These institutions of lazy scholars and recidivistic professors, of inflated grading and solipsistic egos, would restore order from chaos by cosmetic surgery (crime bills), revitalize trust by synthetic measures (declarations of ethics), establish economic parity and stability by treaty (NAFTA and GATT), rejuvenate accountability by modification of rites of passage (term limits in Congress). None of this touches the sick soul of our American society. It is all pomp with a dash of circumstance. No more.” (Corporate Sin, p. 14). Where were the leaders there?
* * *
It is easy to criticize the automotive industry for its failure to lead, to criticize the Federal Reserve for its hokey pokey policies, to blame illegal immigrants for eating into the social welfare largesse, and on and on.
Somewhere on the road after 1945 we got lost. We walked into Alice’s Wonderland or onto the yellow brick road of the Wizard of Oz, and departed from self-responsibility.
We have come to blame everyone but ourselves for living beyond our means, burning the candle at both ends, buying into the idea of a free lunch, expecting our employer to be our nanny for life, accusing everyone but ourselves for our lifestyle excesses that have contributed to the soaring cost of healthcare insurance.
We have declared war on drugs yet there would be no need for such a war if recreational drugs were not so popular with the self-indulgent. We can blame the poppy growers of Afghanistan or the drug lords of Columbia for the drug problem but that is like trimming the toenails of the issue, when supply will always find a way to meet demand. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We didn’t save for a rainy day because “that was not our responsibility.” That was our employer’s or the government’s or our parent’s responsibility. People too young to fight in WWII have contributed to the problems of today by not being able to say “no” to their children, or their children’s children.
Now, those children are parents and sometimes even grandparents. They have created a generation of weak minded, weak willed, weary eyed, confused and escape artists of impressive skill in laying a guilt trip for their predicament on those children of 1945, who became parents and wanted to give their children everything except the freedom to fail.
Baby boomers were given too much too many too soon. They were given everything and forgiving anything that might have helped them to grow up and take charge of their lives. Baby boomers, may I remind you, are now running everything. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
We are in the Information Age, the Electronic Age, the Communication Age with entrepreneurs creating every conceivable device to escape the fact that Nature is unimpressed. Nature has no conscience. Nature destroys those that ignore her laws. No device is more powerful than Nature or first principles.
Meanwhile, while we are texting or whatever that is we do, society is going into the toilet, literally, as haste makes more than waste. It has become self-fulfilling prophecy.
That is because leadership is about the ability to self-sustain, self-manage, self-discipline and self-direct yourself to a meaningful, useful and honorable life consistent with Nature and an acknowledgement of her demands and limits. Where were the leaders there?
* * *
You don’t feed the poor. You give the poor training and jobs. You don’t give people jobs because they have a degree. You give them jobs because they are learners not knowers. You don’t make progress by forming a group and becoming a true believer. You do so by changing your lifestyle and stepping outside the blame game of seeing society as the culprit. You are society!
You examine your own conscience and see where you have gone off the rails and what it will take to get back on them. Everyone is a leader of his or her own life or no one is a leader. That is where leaders are found.
* * *
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
TOYOTA, FROM THE CULTURE THAT ONCE SAID, "NO" -- TOO LATE SMART!
TOYOTA, FROM THE CULTURE THAT ONCE SAID “NO” -- TOO LATE SMART!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2, 2010
Toyota is coming in for bashing, as well that it should, but what has happened to Toyota is endemic to our capitalistic system.
I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990):
The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years later (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing. Barry Stavro of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:
“It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet or Pontiac Firebird. But Larry Barker, a welder, one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars.
“One night last fall Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel near the motor compartment. The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the last, and when the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped.
“A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.
“The Rube Goldberg-fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided “it wasn’t worth it, so then they sent us home. But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, they probably would have run the assembly line." (WWMs, pp 145 –146)
* * *
The United States hubris is classical while Japanese humility is also legendary. But in 1989, two Japanese executives decided Japan didn’t need the US anymore, that the US was holding Japan back. I write in SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998):
A document surfaced in 1989, The Japan that Can Say ‘No’: The Case for a New US/Japanese Relationship by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, gives credence to the warning that Americans must understand the ‘Japanese Goliath’ better. This document passionately xenophobic, written exclusively for a Japanese audience, is tacitly nostalgic for the dominance of the Emperor and a return to the feudalistic consistency of such a society: “Our honest and sincere emperor is the tribal symbol within our national policy and our culture, indeed, he is like the father of our family.” (SIX SILENT KILLERS p. 77)
* * *
In a short twenty years (1990 – 2010), Toyota, the giant of Japanese car manufacturers, has gone from value, safety, and profit to profit, profit, profit in the old GM formula.
We should not be surprised. The industrial paradigm is structured to support and only support such a system, especially when the drive is for industrial dominance. It is axiomatic that when you MUST be NUMERO UNO of anything, everything else not only is secondary but evaporates in the quest.
Now China and India are following the American paradigm. It appears the future is prisoner of the past.
* * *
In 1990 I published my first book as a wake up call in this regard because I saw first hand on four continents over a thirty year career this fundamental organizational problem and corporate strategy. Subsequent books have been published, and disregarded with similar consistency. What I have written about has come from the trenches, not the boardrooms, and every worker knows of what I speak. Larry Barker is typical.
Incidentally, over 50 percent of Toyotas sold in America have been produced in America. One wonders if the GM syndrome has crept into the process.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2, 2010
Toyota is coming in for bashing, as well that it should, but what has happened to Toyota is endemic to our capitalistic system.
I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990):
The General Motors assembly plant in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles instituted the Japanese approach to the team concept in 1987. Three years later (1990), an incident indicated how badly it was failing. Barry Stavro of the Los Angeles Times tells the story:
“It was only one of the 3,000 or so parts that go into a new Chevrolet or Pontiac Firebird. But Larry Barker, a welder, one part summed up all that is wrong with the way GM builds cars.
“One night last fall Barker, along with the rest of the shift was sent home early after GM ran out of a reinforcement panel that is welded next to the wheel near the motor compartment. The panels come in pairs, one for the right side, one for the last, and when the plant ran out of panels for one side, the assembly line stopped.
“A night shift supervisor came down and actually took one of the panels from the other (wrong) side and literally tried beating it into place with a hammer and then welding it.
“The Rube Goldberg-fix-it took so long, Barker said, that GM decided “it wasn’t worth it, so then they sent us home. But if the wrong part could have been forced into place faster, he believes, they probably would have run the assembly line." (WWMs, pp 145 –146)
* * *
The United States hubris is classical while Japanese humility is also legendary. But in 1989, two Japanese executives decided Japan didn’t need the US anymore, that the US was holding Japan back. I write in SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998):
A document surfaced in 1989, The Japan that Can Say ‘No’: The Case for a New US/Japanese Relationship by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, gives credence to the warning that Americans must understand the ‘Japanese Goliath’ better. This document passionately xenophobic, written exclusively for a Japanese audience, is tacitly nostalgic for the dominance of the Emperor and a return to the feudalistic consistency of such a society: “Our honest and sincere emperor is the tribal symbol within our national policy and our culture, indeed, he is like the father of our family.” (SIX SILENT KILLERS p. 77)
* * *
In a short twenty years (1990 – 2010), Toyota, the giant of Japanese car manufacturers, has gone from value, safety, and profit to profit, profit, profit in the old GM formula.
We should not be surprised. The industrial paradigm is structured to support and only support such a system, especially when the drive is for industrial dominance. It is axiomatic that when you MUST be NUMERO UNO of anything, everything else not only is secondary but evaporates in the quest.
Now China and India are following the American paradigm. It appears the future is prisoner of the past.
* * *
In 1990 I published my first book as a wake up call in this regard because I saw first hand on four continents over a thirty year career this fundamental organizational problem and corporate strategy. Subsequent books have been published, and disregarded with similar consistency. What I have written about has come from the trenches, not the boardrooms, and every worker knows of what I speak. Larry Barker is typical.
Incidentally, over 50 percent of Toyotas sold in America have been produced in America. One wonders if the GM syndrome has crept into the process.
* * *