LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX!

LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP REDUX

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 7, 2010

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“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)


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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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