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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.