LESSONS LEARNED – THE GENESIS OF FINDING AN AUDIENCE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 30, 2010
* * *
“There are three classes of people in the world. The first learn from their own experience, these are wise. The second learn from the experience of others, these are the happy. The third neither learn from their own experience nor the experience of others, these are fools.”
Lord Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), English courtier, orator and wit.
* * *
REFERENCE:
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), written by William L. Livingston IV, has been an epiphany for me. I have known the author for twenty years. We became friends when we exchanged books we had written those many years ago.
Livingston has devoted 2010 to testing D4P to find its audience. A test completed has been with his peers (professional engineers. It has been a disappointment, but not a surprise.
A mismatch has surfaced between content, context and process and systemic programming. "The compass of competency covered in this manual must of necessity encircle both technological (content) and sociological (context) realms," he states simply in an effort to focus on ends rather than to be obsessed with means in the process.
Cultural programming is powerful stuff.
The "Pied Pipers" of convention, or business as usual find us metaphorically marching blindly off the cliff. This is literally mirrored as crude oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico with little abeyance.
Natural Law has no conscience.
We defy Nature at our peril. Livingston reminds us of this dramatic fact. Nature rarely walks in a straight line yet we often address her as if she does.
We get caught up in our semantics of truth. Validity does not equal credibility. Nature pounds this at our senses. Truth does not shrine of its own light. It involves understanding and, yes, accepting the undercurrent subtleties of Nature. She has given us a brain with two lobes, a bicameral mind, but we choose to use only one, confining us in the prison of our thoughts.
Everything we are is an invention, science, religion, art, while Nature has no need to invent anything. Nature is.
Livingston attempts to bring us out of our darkness by bringing us back into compliance with Nature. DESIGN TO PREVENT complements Nature’s forces. We have gotten off Nature’s track, he is telling us, and the force of that friction accelerates entropy, which is destroying us.
These things I am thinking as I walk today.
* * *
AUTHORS, TITLES AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Perhaps Livingston's intended audience is wide of the mark.
This was true of the Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift some three hundred years ago.
The original title of Swift's GULLIVER’S TRAVELS (1726) was “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.”
Swift was an angry man. He was alleged to have hated Man, but loved individual men. Hatred is masked in GULLIVER, which was meant as a caustic, polemical political and social satire novel directed at the English people, whom he parodied as representing mankind in general, and the Whig political party in particular.
With disarming simplicity of style and language, but careful attention to detail, he cut through British pomposity and injustice to strip its society naked.
GULLIVER, which has never been out of print, was aimed at society but has survived as a children’s classic.
Many writers over the centuries have copied his content and context, but never with the impact of the original process.
Swift was not a brave man. He feared social ostracism and even criminal prosecution so published his classic novel anonymously using a nom de plume, even disguising his handwriting.
Today is another time but an equally fragmented society. Authors, now as then, who take risks are seldom applauded. We jump on the bandwagon when authors reconfirm what we already know and already think, while we choose to ignore those who would suggest otherwise.
* * *
LIVINGSTON AS PHILOSOPHER ENGINEER
I’ve given a copy of this book to a young man who is not an engineer but has a passionate interest in science. He is just starting to read the book. I am thinking of our conversation as I walk today.
* * *
“It’s more a less a manual, isn’t it?” he offers.
“It could be seen as such I suppose, certainly a manual for engineers in prevention strategy, but I see it as much more.”
“But there’s not a lot of engineering in it," he insists.
“By engineering, you mean mathematical algorithms and such. No. That is understood and, therefore, not the book's premise. The book is meant to get inside the engineer's head to understand the content, context and process of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION. To design to prevent it is necessary to know what obstructs that possibility.”
“Oh, I’ve missed that but I haven’t read but 50 pages. I do find the charts and schematics quite interesting.”
“You haven’t missed anything. Read it and let it speak to you where you are and how you are and then let us discuss the book."
"But I'm not an engineer like you."
"My background and life’s work has been largely in human engineering. While this book is designed for professional engineers who deal with control theory and systemic design in mechanistic systems, Livingston is something of a philosopher engineer.”
“How so?”
“He looks at institutional society as a philosopher would only from an engineering perspective. We live in an engineered society, a society that owes as much to the engineer in the last two centuries that Western society previously owed the church, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment period.
"Engineers were, of course, a force from Roman times on, but engineers over the last two centuries have defined the modern world. Unfortunately, they have also allowed it to drift on secular enlightenment without the benefit of a moral compass.
"The structure, order and control emblematic of engineering with its reverence for natural law have failed to penetrate institutional society.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Bear with me.
"Livingston in an effort to engage the professional engineer in the rationale of design for prevention exposes the maladies of institutional society.
"He demonstrates how this is so with its passionate defense of the status quo, and the practice of business as usual in the face of its collision with first principles and natural law. This has led to societal dysfunction.
"Livingston argues that its stance of infallibility, hierarchical rigidity and closed approach to the problem solving has accelerated entropy and therefore signaled collapse.”
“I've not read far enough to integrate them as you have expressed it here, but I have noticed he repeats the same ideas again and again.”
“Mind you, I am sharing with you my interpretation, not his, not yours. I bring my life experience to this book. It resonates with me especially the statement: the purpose of an organization is what it does.
“I have often found the stated purpose of the organization in absolute conflict with what it actually accomplished. Personalities, politics, hidden agendas, cognitive biases, and the cardinal sins of institutional infallibility, defense of the status quo and business as usual invariably got in the way.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Yes, of course. I spent nine months in Fairfax, Virginia after a riot broke out in the county at a place called Herndon. A white police officer unloaded his service revolver on a young African American in a Seven-Eleven store, after the man grabbed the officer’s nightstick when he was pushed violently into a beverage cooler
“The officer had followed him to the convenient store when he saw the young man driving a car knowing his license had been revoked. The young man denied he had been driving, and everyone in the store supported the lie. This infuriated the officer who had a running feud with the young man, shooting him six times and wounding him fatally.
“A riot followed in the shopping center with angered blacks throwing Molotov cocktails at police. It was a standoff until a discredited junior officer stepped into the fray and negotiated a settlement.
"American Management Association brought me in after the fact to make sense of what had transpired and why.
“Several factors were apparent, which complicated the function of the Fairfax County Police Department’s ability to serve and protect.
"For one, the department had grown from 84 to 840 sworn officers in ten years, but continued to operate with the pastoral consistency of its earlier size. Senior officers micromanaged, and complaints were hand counted at headquarters while computers remained idle."
"When was this?"
"1975."
"Why?"
"It was a matter of policy. All recruits were expected to spend five years in patrol before being given permanent assignments. Two recruits in the field actually had graduate degrees in computer science but had years left on patrol duty before being reassigned.
“Add to this the fact that 1,000 African Americans were relocated from Washington, DC to Fairfax County with little planning. Unemployment among black youths was over fifty percent, and the only recreational opportunity for them was to hang out at the shopping center, where they drove their cars around and around, or congregated in the parking lot listening to the music blaring from amplifiers on the roofs of businesses.
“The Herndon city council reacting to complaints from whites imposed a curfew on the complex, requiring the lowering of the music volume, and when this didn't work, disallowing music in the shopping center altogether. The angst of this black community festered, and then exploded that hot summer day in 1975, as the shopping center was torched and the businesses looted.
“A comedy of errors followed. Officers didn’t have protective flack vests and firemen were afraid to enter the fray for fear of being hit with fire missiles.
"The African Americans burned down their only comfort center in contempt for their collective deprivation, while a demoted officer came forward to save the day, and restore some sanity.
“The white police officer had come into disrepute previously for stealing a hunting knife out of the evidence locker. His connection with the African American community, however, was good. He was known and respected for his attention to their complaints, and the fact that he made it his business to serve and protect them as best he could.
"While ostracized from the police community -- he was never invited to police functions -- he was trusted by this otherwise ostracized community.
“The rioters would negotiate with only him, and so for a time he became the acting chief of police, chief negotiator and the face of Fairfax County authority. Once calm had been restored and the rioters returned to their homes, his original exclusion was reinstated.”
“That is some story.”
“I wish it was. It is life when the purpose of the organization is clouded and no one knows what has gone wrong or why.”
“Until an outsider comes along?”
“I’m afraid that isn’t even true. Every OD crisis I’ve been invited to work has had the incendiaries of which Livingston writes, but what of those that no one intervenes?
"Incompetence is seldom noted because institutions are no better than individuals in knowing they are incompetent.
"Livingston is not saying institutions are bad. He is not sullying institutional purpose but the reason for its faulty function. He is saying to the engineer, and to the outsider that knowledge and expertise is imperfect, that everyone's tool kit needs retooling, and that it should start with an appreciation of natural law.
"He is not advocating pressing because pressing in any case doesn’t work. When you get into the book, you’ll see what I mean. He is emphatic when he has to be. Take the chart 'Routinely Encountered Pursuits of the Impossible.’ Really study it in terms of my example.”
“Okay. I sense that it dovetails with your books.”
“You might say I've covered similar territory, but never this well.”
“I disagree. You attack dysfunction just as vigorously if you ask me.”
“Attacking dysfunction, and getting inside it are worlds apart.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Livingston shows why institutions are failing. It is the stance of infallibility that cripples them. Moreover, their hierarchical structure of presumed infallibility puts a burden on them they cannot fulfill. It becomes pure folly to defend the status quo and conduct business as usual.
“I call it the American disease of corpocracy. Livingston gets inside the disease to reveal its fatal symptoms. He has entered unchartered territory with the confidence of having Natural Law on his side.”
“I think I see. Contempt for natural law with infallibility is the same as contempt for the environment with pollution.”
“If you like.”
“Quite frankly, he is not the first to make this comparison. How is he different?”
I chuckle. “In every way. Just as he sees institutional society clearly, he also recognizes an inherent problem is the way we think.”
“You mean yin-yang and hindsight and foresight, all that stuff. He repeats that mantra a lot. Why is that?”
I chuckle again. “I’ve been accused of that as well. It is why you pound on the door when nobody answers knowing somebody is in there.”
“What if they never answer?”
“Livingston isn’t the first to encounter that nor will he be the last. Ideas eventually get through. But you take me away from the thrust of what he is saying about thinking.”
“Which is?”
“We are a vertical thinking society, top down, linear logic, rational, concrete and palpable. It is deductive reasoning, analytical, the exercise of pure reason, from cause to effect, objective, from a general law to a particular instance.
"This is the scientific method devised by Kant and perfected by Wittgenstein and Russell in the modern era. It is a priori thinking, or left-brain thinking, the so-called masculine brain.
"Kant claimed if it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist. It is a hindsight orientation with the focus on what is known or knowable. It is the thought pattern of the Western mind.”
“Livingston has a problem with that?”
“No, that is not his concern. It is rather that it is not enough. Vertical thinking has led to the haughty infallibility upon which institutional society is constructed.
"I call it forward inertia, having the foot on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere while looking through the rearview mirror unaware of being stuck or courting disaster.”
“Hindsight thinking?”
“Exactly! We see it personified in crisis management and the paralysis of analysis.
"Livingston is focusing on DESIGN FOR PREVENTION for professional engineers but I view his work through the broader lens of human engineering.”
“How is that?”
“Bear with me again.
"This is my take on vertical thinking. It is how we are programmed to think. It has served us well, but now we need to complement this thinking with horizontal or lateral thinking.
"Lateral thinking is inductive thinking, which is not scientific, not cognitive, but intuitive, conceptual and holistic. It is analogic, from effect to cause, subjective, experiential, and from a particular instance to a general theory. It is a posteriori thinking.
"This is right brain thinking, which is sometimes called the feminine mind. It is the thought pattern of the Eastern mind.”
“Wait a minute. This is a lot to absorb. As far as I’ve read, Livingston isn’t exactly saying this.”
“No, not exactly. As I said, this is my take on his wonderful book. He has a particular focus while I have a more general one. His clarity has cut through some barriers in my programming, and yes, my cognitive biases. It has allowed me to make these connections.
"For example, I would interpret what he is saying regarding institutional command and control infallibility as representative of a broken society because of a broken brain.”
“Broken brain?”
“Broken because we go off half cocked all the time perceiving the world from a left brain perspective while essentially ignoring the right brain.
"The world is exploding around us because the right and left-brain are not connected, not working as one.
"Science is important (left brain) but so is religion (right brain). We live in a material world that we can explain away, but also a spiritual world, which we cannot.
"The left brain is verbally dependent while the right brain is metaphorically so. Both worlds exist in our brains.
"We are moving beyond the analytical and analytical philosophy because it is not enough. Existence is now a merry dance of myths and mechanisms in a computational age, which requires the creative mind, and the creative mind can only function when both right and left brains are speaking to each other.”
“And they are not?”
“They are not.”
“And Livingston is correcting this?”
“No, Livingston is simply asking the right questions, looking at a fundamentals.”
“Which is?”
“I think I’ve already told you. In any case, when you’ve read the book, you’ll be able to tell me. Good reading!”
* * *
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.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
PRAYER IS NOT ALL HOCUS POCUS, NOR IS PSYCHOTHERAPY -- CHARLIE ROSE -- BRAIN SERIES -- EPISODE NINE!
PRAYER IS NOT ALL HOCUS POCUS, NOR IS PSYCHOTHERAPY – CHARLIE ROSE – BRAIN SERIES – JUNE 22, 2010
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 28, 2010
* * *
Charlie Rose, the ubiquitous and eclectic interviewer of our times, has a twelve part series on the BRAIN on PBSTV. He brings together the best minds on all aspects of brain research in hour-long discussions.
Episode Nine was on mental illness. You can download a transcript of this program on google if you like. Type in “Charlie Rose, Brain Series, Episode Nine.”
* * *
My purpose here is to mention that there is apparently evidence that psychotherapy can be identified with certain “biological markers” in the brain. In other words, that talking cures not only connect people but may also change brain chemistry.
Two people on the panel, who had once been psychotic but are now leading productive lives, provide evidence that talking cures are also biological. If this is true, then it doesn’t take much of a leap to suggest that prayer can change brain chemistry as well.
Not to confuse my point, these two professional people have had extensive psychiatric care, taking prescribed medications in addition to participating in psychotherapy.
* * *
The impression you get from this series is that we not only have a thinking brain but a quite daunting emotional brain as well. Mind maps are all a matter of biology.
That said prayer is perhaps the most powerful psychedelic drug in our possession, and a doctor or a pharmacist does not dispense it.
As for psychotherapy, if you are good listener, and can get past your own vanity when a person is confiding in you, that person will find connection, and connection is what life is all about.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 28, 2010
* * *
Charlie Rose, the ubiquitous and eclectic interviewer of our times, has a twelve part series on the BRAIN on PBSTV. He brings together the best minds on all aspects of brain research in hour-long discussions.
Episode Nine was on mental illness. You can download a transcript of this program on google if you like. Type in “Charlie Rose, Brain Series, Episode Nine.”
* * *
My purpose here is to mention that there is apparently evidence that psychotherapy can be identified with certain “biological markers” in the brain. In other words, that talking cures not only connect people but may also change brain chemistry.
Two people on the panel, who had once been psychotic but are now leading productive lives, provide evidence that talking cures are also biological. If this is true, then it doesn’t take much of a leap to suggest that prayer can change brain chemistry as well.
Not to confuse my point, these two professional people have had extensive psychiatric care, taking prescribed medications in addition to participating in psychotherapy.
* * *
The impression you get from this series is that we not only have a thinking brain but a quite daunting emotional brain as well. Mind maps are all a matter of biology.
That said prayer is perhaps the most powerful psychedelic drug in our possession, and a doctor or a pharmacist does not dispense it.
As for psychotherapy, if you are good listener, and can get past your own vanity when a person is confiding in you, that person will find connection, and connection is what life is all about.
* * *
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
THE SON OF AN IRISH ROMAN CATHOLIC BRAKEMAN ON THE RAILROAD LOOKS BACK ON FOUR DECADES AS A CORPORATE EXECUTIVE AND CONSULTANT -- PART ONE!
THE SON OF AN IRISH ROMAN CATHOLIC BRAKEMAN ON THE RAILROAD LOOKS BACK ON FOUR DECADES AS A CORPORATE EXECUTIVE AND CONSULTANT – PART ONE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
Sometime in September 2010, after Labor Day, I hope to return to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa to visit friends of my youth; to have dinner with fellow Clintonians from all walks of life, and to share with them what a native son without portfolio now in the autumn of his life has experienced. The lessons learned cover four continents and more than four decades. What follows here is a sample of this reminiscence.
* * *
THE MIND IS ITS OWN PLACE
If we are part of a human web, and I think we are, then it makes sense that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth. This has been described as “six degrees of separation.”
Given this, it should come as little surprise that a lower class Clinton, Iowa boy could have the life experiences that he has had.
* * *
In a strange way, his life has made the fantasy drama of Forrest Gump seem real. Can you identify with his experience? Here succinctly and selectively is an ordinary man’s odyssey of sorts.
* * *
In high school, as a member of Iowa Hawkeye Boys State (1950), he was campaign manager for the Federalist Party, and on the dais nightly with such notables as the Iowa governor, a US Senator, or an Iowa member of Congress. He also managed to be elected to the office of Secretary of State, and held that office in the Iowa State Capitol in Des Monies for one day.
* * *
A university education (1951 – 1956) was possible through summer employment at a Clinton, Iowa chemical plant during his college years, merit scholarships, conscientious study and great frugality. He had no college loans to pay when he graduated.
* * *
A chemist at Standard Brands, Inc., while attending a 1956 conference in Chicago, he accidentally encountered the world beyond his crescent city confines, being abruptly pushed aside as he attempted to enter the elevator in the Palmer House.
Media flash bulbs blinded him as Adlai Stevenson appeared out of the darkness, and said, “Excuse me, young man,” and entered the elevator followed by a swarm of colleagues and reporters. Stevenson was running for the presidency of the United States, and was to speak that night in the Palmer House Ball Room.
* * *
Later that year, now as a hospital corpsman striker on the USS Salem CA-139, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean, he found himself part of a Marine contingent set to invade Port Said, Egypt.
It was the fall of 1956. The Sixth Fleet was on military alert as the British and French bombers were obliterating the Suez Canal over an international political dispute with Egypt.
President Eisenhower in the eleventh hour told Sixth Fleet Commander, Admiral “Cat” Brown, to stand down.
He remembers that incident to this day. The Marines were gung-ho and not a man afraid while he was shaking in his boots. The president chose not to fight. This proved an historic moment for the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in WWII. Prudence won over pride.
This military fiasco would mark the end of the British Empire in the Middle East.
* * *
In February 1957, the Sixth Fleet arranged a military audience in Rome with Pope Pius XII in his private quarters. A Salem photographer caught him reaching out to touch the pontiff’s chair as the pope was carried by, a picture he cherishes to this day.
Irish Roman Catholicism was his primary anchor in those days as he precariously moved from innocence into adulthood.
* * *
Later in 1957, on another Salem tour, he met Bishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Lisbon, Portugal. He kissed the bishop’s ring, had his picture taken with him, and said, “Your excellency, I am a big reader of your books.”
The Bishop, who was a prolific author in philosophy and theology, looked askance at the sailor, as if to say, “Really!” Instead, the bishop said, “What books would they be?” The sailor rattled them off, causing the bishop to smile broadly. “You do read me!”
Condescending? Yes, but he took no offense. After all, he was a white hat, an enlisted man, not a naval officer, and young, but older than he looked, as he was already a college graduate. No doubt the good bishop would have been incredulous had he confessed to the fact that he first started to read him when he was in eighth grade.
* * *
By a combination of serendipity and compassion, Admiral “Cat” Brown, Commander of the Sixth Fleet, invited him to share his helicopter off the Salem when he was granted emergency leave late in 1957. His da was dying of multiple myeloma.
It became quite an adventure. The helicopter took him to Corsica, a pontoon plane to Sardinia, and then it was off to the United States in a military transport.
The return to the Salem and the Mediterranean was equally venturesome. A commercial flight took him to Port Leyote, Africa (Morocco). There he boarded a navy jet fighter that landed on the aircraft carrier, USS Franklin, and was high lined to the Salem during Six Fleet maneuvers, and unceremoniously dumped into the Med as the line sagged, but he was not injured.
* * *
Spending nearly two years in the Mediterranean, taking every tour available, books he had previously read came to life, by visiting such places as Baalbek and Beirut (Lebanon), Istanbul (Turkey), and Rhodes, Cyprus, Piraeus and Athens (Greece).
While once on liberty in Piraeus, someone yelled, “Look! There is Alan Ladd and Sophia Loren!” Coming towards us was a tall beautiful lady, and a taller man, holding up a short blond man between them, all smiling and singing. They didn’t break stride as they passed us. Later, we learned they were making a film called, “Boy and a Dolphin.”
* * *
The Mediterranean is like a giant bathtub with the Sixth Fleet patrolling it like the coastguard. This allowed this sailor to tour such places he had only read about in novels such as Venice, Naples, Capri, Sicily, Genoa, Portofino and Rome. Villefranche, on the French Riviera, was the Salem’s homeport, and close to Nice, Antibes and Cannes, which he also visited frequently.
The Salem was forced to go into dry dock at Malta, a British Protectorate, for six weeks to repair the screws. This meant nearly constant liberty. He met British sailors and learned that while the Six Fleet was constantly at sea; British ships were at sea only a few days a month because of the necessity to conserve fuel.
* * *
Active duty completed, he returned home to his da’s bedside, which was now a hospital bed supplied by the American Red Cross. One of his duties was to administered morphine to his dying father in the shadow of the courthouse where he had spent his youth. They watched his da’s favorite television show, “Wagon Train,” on a nine-inch black and white TV screen, a drama starring Ward Bond.
Dr. Joseph O’Donnell, who was a constant presence in the Fisher home, signed his bill, “paid in full,” when he was never paid a dime. In many ways, the doctor and my da were polar opposites in Irish temperament but had great respect for each other.
My da was not yet fifty. He never complained about the hand he had been dealt although in obvious pain, pain apparent in his bloodshot eyes, and the ugly bedsores on his back.
It was a defining moment for his son.
The man had pushed the rock of Sisyphus up the hill, only to be buried by it again and again as it tumbled down over him. The man had monumental physical courage, which held fast to the end, but was emasculated by institutional authority.
The son resolved as he watched the man expire to live the life denied this man, to take on institutional authority in all its forms with emotional courage that had escaped this man. Education was his sword and his mind its own place.
* * *
In 1958, he left Clinton for good, joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer relocating to Indianapolis, Indiana. He became a field manager in 1964, active in politics and community affairs in Marion County (Indianapolis), in the process getting to know Mayor Settles, Governor Welsh and Congressman Lee Hamilton.
Hamilton would go on to be a ranking member of the 9/11 Commission after the terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001.
* * *
While living in Indianapolis, he joined the Great Books Club of the Broadripple Library (1962), which was chaired by Bill Ruckleshaus, a man captive to destiny.
In April 1973, Ruckleshaus was appointed acting directed of the FBI. Subsequent to that on October 20, 1973, he, along with his boss, Attorney General Eliot Richardson, would resign from the Justice Department, after refusing to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox at President Nixon’s request. Cox had been investigating the “Watergate” scandal. These twin resignations would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
* * *
In the late 1960s, Nalco elevated him to international corporate executive status, working South America and Europe, eventually assigning him to South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company.
South Africa since 1948 replaced British rule with the Afrikaner government. Shortly thereafter, a policy of apartheid was established, which represented the separation of the races into European (whites) and non-European (Bantus and Coloreds). The indentured workers in Natal, originally from India, were also included in the non-European population, while the Japanese, who were trading partners with the government were considered European.
The experience of apartheid, its duplicity and injustice, combined with the insouciance of corporate imperialism proved too wrenching. He would resign and retire at the end of this assignment although only in his thirties and at the peak of his career.
* * *
Corporate executive status introduced him to a new lifestyle and deferential treatment, light years away from his humble beginnings, and a style with which he was never comfortable. His family traveled first class, occupied suites at five-star hotels, and was blessed with company sponsored tour guides in major cities along their travels.
In Rome, they stayed at the Hilton. Franco, a driver for Nalco, was their guide. He had once been the driver for Pope Paul VI. This connection gave him cart blanche access to the private confines of the pope, allowing him to take the Fisher family on a rare visit within the sacrosanct walls of Vatican City.
Moreover, he saw that the Fishers were given delegate status as the pope celebrated the “Mass of the Pilgrims.” Reserved seating was near the main altar while some 30,000 worshipers stood in the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica during the three-hour ceremony.
Sitting next to the Fishers was president Mobuto of Zaire (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), his family and entourage.
* * *
A two-year (1969 – 1971) sabbatical followed, which was given to reading and the writing of one book, a book that remained in print for twenty years. This was followed by a stint at the university for the next six years (1971 – 1977) to earn a terminal degree in industrial and organizational psychology.
Consulting followed along with teaching as an adjunct professor for several universities. In 1980, he joined a client, Honeywell, Inc., as an organizational development (OD) psychologist where he operated as an internal consultant. Over the next five years he would write a spate of monographs, journal articles and give an occasional keynote speech for a Honeywell client or event.
Serendipity elevated his profile months later when Tom Brokaw of NBCTV narrated a program, “Japan Can Why Can’t We?” (1980). At the time, he was directing Honeywell Avionics’ quality circle program, then the largest in the United States. Quality circles were the focus of Brokaw’s narrative.
Hysteria followed with seemingly every company in America wanting to jump on board the quality circle bandwagon. Companies failed to note the differences in culture, climate and workforce between Japan and the United States: Japan was a group culture with a rigid hierarchy and largely blue-collar workforce, while the United States was an individualistic culture with an indulgent hierarchy and largely a white-collar workforce.
* * *
The 1980s was irrational to the extreme, and he was in the middle of it, with “participative management,” “lifetime employment,” “employee empowerment,” and “management style” the constant drum roll. This medicine proved more a poison, or “iatrogenic,” the cure being worse than the disease.
He said as much in a keynote speech in 1984 to assembled defense contractors and the military. It nearly got him fired. Two years later (1986), he was instead promoted once again to corporate executive status moving to a directorship in Honeywell Europe Ltd.
* * *
As director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, he would discover Europe was more regressive in its work, worker, and workplace policies than the United States.
Ideas would ferment. He would retire for the second time in 1990, and write several books and scores of articles on the anachronistic organization, atavistic management, the emerging but lost professional class, and one novel.
* * *
It is now 2010 and he sees Western man still a knower more than a learner, still driven exclusively by vertical thinking, still solving problems with the thinking that caused them, still fixated on crisis management, and still falling into the same muck again and again. A mind is, indeed, its own place.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
Sometime in September 2010, after Labor Day, I hope to return to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa to visit friends of my youth; to have dinner with fellow Clintonians from all walks of life, and to share with them what a native son without portfolio now in the autumn of his life has experienced. The lessons learned cover four continents and more than four decades. What follows here is a sample of this reminiscence.
* * *
THE MIND IS ITS OWN PLACE
If we are part of a human web, and I think we are, then it makes sense that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth. This has been described as “six degrees of separation.”
Given this, it should come as little surprise that a lower class Clinton, Iowa boy could have the life experiences that he has had.
* * *
In a strange way, his life has made the fantasy drama of Forrest Gump seem real. Can you identify with his experience? Here succinctly and selectively is an ordinary man’s odyssey of sorts.
* * *
In high school, as a member of Iowa Hawkeye Boys State (1950), he was campaign manager for the Federalist Party, and on the dais nightly with such notables as the Iowa governor, a US Senator, or an Iowa member of Congress. He also managed to be elected to the office of Secretary of State, and held that office in the Iowa State Capitol in Des Monies for one day.
* * *
A university education (1951 – 1956) was possible through summer employment at a Clinton, Iowa chemical plant during his college years, merit scholarships, conscientious study and great frugality. He had no college loans to pay when he graduated.
* * *
A chemist at Standard Brands, Inc., while attending a 1956 conference in Chicago, he accidentally encountered the world beyond his crescent city confines, being abruptly pushed aside as he attempted to enter the elevator in the Palmer House.
Media flash bulbs blinded him as Adlai Stevenson appeared out of the darkness, and said, “Excuse me, young man,” and entered the elevator followed by a swarm of colleagues and reporters. Stevenson was running for the presidency of the United States, and was to speak that night in the Palmer House Ball Room.
* * *
Later that year, now as a hospital corpsman striker on the USS Salem CA-139, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean, he found himself part of a Marine contingent set to invade Port Said, Egypt.
It was the fall of 1956. The Sixth Fleet was on military alert as the British and French bombers were obliterating the Suez Canal over an international political dispute with Egypt.
President Eisenhower in the eleventh hour told Sixth Fleet Commander, Admiral “Cat” Brown, to stand down.
He remembers that incident to this day. The Marines were gung-ho and not a man afraid while he was shaking in his boots. The president chose not to fight. This proved an historic moment for the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in WWII. Prudence won over pride.
This military fiasco would mark the end of the British Empire in the Middle East.
* * *
In February 1957, the Sixth Fleet arranged a military audience in Rome with Pope Pius XII in his private quarters. A Salem photographer caught him reaching out to touch the pontiff’s chair as the pope was carried by, a picture he cherishes to this day.
Irish Roman Catholicism was his primary anchor in those days as he precariously moved from innocence into adulthood.
* * *
Later in 1957, on another Salem tour, he met Bishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Lisbon, Portugal. He kissed the bishop’s ring, had his picture taken with him, and said, “Your excellency, I am a big reader of your books.”
The Bishop, who was a prolific author in philosophy and theology, looked askance at the sailor, as if to say, “Really!” Instead, the bishop said, “What books would they be?” The sailor rattled them off, causing the bishop to smile broadly. “You do read me!”
Condescending? Yes, but he took no offense. After all, he was a white hat, an enlisted man, not a naval officer, and young, but older than he looked, as he was already a college graduate. No doubt the good bishop would have been incredulous had he confessed to the fact that he first started to read him when he was in eighth grade.
* * *
By a combination of serendipity and compassion, Admiral “Cat” Brown, Commander of the Sixth Fleet, invited him to share his helicopter off the Salem when he was granted emergency leave late in 1957. His da was dying of multiple myeloma.
It became quite an adventure. The helicopter took him to Corsica, a pontoon plane to Sardinia, and then it was off to the United States in a military transport.
The return to the Salem and the Mediterranean was equally venturesome. A commercial flight took him to Port Leyote, Africa (Morocco). There he boarded a navy jet fighter that landed on the aircraft carrier, USS Franklin, and was high lined to the Salem during Six Fleet maneuvers, and unceremoniously dumped into the Med as the line sagged, but he was not injured.
* * *
Spending nearly two years in the Mediterranean, taking every tour available, books he had previously read came to life, by visiting such places as Baalbek and Beirut (Lebanon), Istanbul (Turkey), and Rhodes, Cyprus, Piraeus and Athens (Greece).
While once on liberty in Piraeus, someone yelled, “Look! There is Alan Ladd and Sophia Loren!” Coming towards us was a tall beautiful lady, and a taller man, holding up a short blond man between them, all smiling and singing. They didn’t break stride as they passed us. Later, we learned they were making a film called, “Boy and a Dolphin.”
* * *
The Mediterranean is like a giant bathtub with the Sixth Fleet patrolling it like the coastguard. This allowed this sailor to tour such places he had only read about in novels such as Venice, Naples, Capri, Sicily, Genoa, Portofino and Rome. Villefranche, on the French Riviera, was the Salem’s homeport, and close to Nice, Antibes and Cannes, which he also visited frequently.
The Salem was forced to go into dry dock at Malta, a British Protectorate, for six weeks to repair the screws. This meant nearly constant liberty. He met British sailors and learned that while the Six Fleet was constantly at sea; British ships were at sea only a few days a month because of the necessity to conserve fuel.
* * *
Active duty completed, he returned home to his da’s bedside, which was now a hospital bed supplied by the American Red Cross. One of his duties was to administered morphine to his dying father in the shadow of the courthouse where he had spent his youth. They watched his da’s favorite television show, “Wagon Train,” on a nine-inch black and white TV screen, a drama starring Ward Bond.
Dr. Joseph O’Donnell, who was a constant presence in the Fisher home, signed his bill, “paid in full,” when he was never paid a dime. In many ways, the doctor and my da were polar opposites in Irish temperament but had great respect for each other.
My da was not yet fifty. He never complained about the hand he had been dealt although in obvious pain, pain apparent in his bloodshot eyes, and the ugly bedsores on his back.
It was a defining moment for his son.
The man had pushed the rock of Sisyphus up the hill, only to be buried by it again and again as it tumbled down over him. The man had monumental physical courage, which held fast to the end, but was emasculated by institutional authority.
The son resolved as he watched the man expire to live the life denied this man, to take on institutional authority in all its forms with emotional courage that had escaped this man. Education was his sword and his mind its own place.
* * *
In 1958, he left Clinton for good, joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer relocating to Indianapolis, Indiana. He became a field manager in 1964, active in politics and community affairs in Marion County (Indianapolis), in the process getting to know Mayor Settles, Governor Welsh and Congressman Lee Hamilton.
Hamilton would go on to be a ranking member of the 9/11 Commission after the terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001.
* * *
While living in Indianapolis, he joined the Great Books Club of the Broadripple Library (1962), which was chaired by Bill Ruckleshaus, a man captive to destiny.
In April 1973, Ruckleshaus was appointed acting directed of the FBI. Subsequent to that on October 20, 1973, he, along with his boss, Attorney General Eliot Richardson, would resign from the Justice Department, after refusing to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox at President Nixon’s request. Cox had been investigating the “Watergate” scandal. These twin resignations would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
* * *
In the late 1960s, Nalco elevated him to international corporate executive status, working South America and Europe, eventually assigning him to South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company.
South Africa since 1948 replaced British rule with the Afrikaner government. Shortly thereafter, a policy of apartheid was established, which represented the separation of the races into European (whites) and non-European (Bantus and Coloreds). The indentured workers in Natal, originally from India, were also included in the non-European population, while the Japanese, who were trading partners with the government were considered European.
The experience of apartheid, its duplicity and injustice, combined with the insouciance of corporate imperialism proved too wrenching. He would resign and retire at the end of this assignment although only in his thirties and at the peak of his career.
* * *
Corporate executive status introduced him to a new lifestyle and deferential treatment, light years away from his humble beginnings, and a style with which he was never comfortable. His family traveled first class, occupied suites at five-star hotels, and was blessed with company sponsored tour guides in major cities along their travels.
In Rome, they stayed at the Hilton. Franco, a driver for Nalco, was their guide. He had once been the driver for Pope Paul VI. This connection gave him cart blanche access to the private confines of the pope, allowing him to take the Fisher family on a rare visit within the sacrosanct walls of Vatican City.
Moreover, he saw that the Fishers were given delegate status as the pope celebrated the “Mass of the Pilgrims.” Reserved seating was near the main altar while some 30,000 worshipers stood in the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica during the three-hour ceremony.
Sitting next to the Fishers was president Mobuto of Zaire (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), his family and entourage.
* * *
A two-year (1969 – 1971) sabbatical followed, which was given to reading and the writing of one book, a book that remained in print for twenty years. This was followed by a stint at the university for the next six years (1971 – 1977) to earn a terminal degree in industrial and organizational psychology.
Consulting followed along with teaching as an adjunct professor for several universities. In 1980, he joined a client, Honeywell, Inc., as an organizational development (OD) psychologist where he operated as an internal consultant. Over the next five years he would write a spate of monographs, journal articles and give an occasional keynote speech for a Honeywell client or event.
Serendipity elevated his profile months later when Tom Brokaw of NBCTV narrated a program, “Japan Can Why Can’t We?” (1980). At the time, he was directing Honeywell Avionics’ quality circle program, then the largest in the United States. Quality circles were the focus of Brokaw’s narrative.
Hysteria followed with seemingly every company in America wanting to jump on board the quality circle bandwagon. Companies failed to note the differences in culture, climate and workforce between Japan and the United States: Japan was a group culture with a rigid hierarchy and largely blue-collar workforce, while the United States was an individualistic culture with an indulgent hierarchy and largely a white-collar workforce.
* * *
The 1980s was irrational to the extreme, and he was in the middle of it, with “participative management,” “lifetime employment,” “employee empowerment,” and “management style” the constant drum roll. This medicine proved more a poison, or “iatrogenic,” the cure being worse than the disease.
He said as much in a keynote speech in 1984 to assembled defense contractors and the military. It nearly got him fired. Two years later (1986), he was instead promoted once again to corporate executive status moving to a directorship in Honeywell Europe Ltd.
* * *
As director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, he would discover Europe was more regressive in its work, worker, and workplace policies than the United States.
Ideas would ferment. He would retire for the second time in 1990, and write several books and scores of articles on the anachronistic organization, atavistic management, the emerging but lost professional class, and one novel.
* * *
It is now 2010 and he sees Western man still a knower more than a learner, still driven exclusively by vertical thinking, still solving problems with the thinking that caused them, still fixated on crisis management, and still falling into the same muck again and again. A mind is, indeed, its own place.
* * *
Monday, June 21, 2010
THE MYTH OF LEADERSHIP: WHY LEADERS DON'T LEAD, FOLLOWERS WON'T FOLLOW, AND EVERYTHING FALLS APART IN THE END!
THE MYTH OF LEADERSHIP: WHY LEADERS DON’T LEAD, FOLLOWERS WON’T FOLLOW, AND EVERYTHING FALLS APART IN THE END!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 18, 2010
* * *
“I can’t answer that question. I can’t recall. That’s a decision I was not party to. I don’t know. I’m not stonewalling.”
Answers given by BP CEO Tony Hayward on Capitol Hill on June 16, 2010, after 57 days of oil spurting into the Gulf of Mexico.
* * *
MANAGING AND LEADING
The day before President Barak Obama gave his first speech to the nation from the Oval Office. It was meant to be tough on BP and to placate the nation, especially people of the Gulf region, but reminded me how ineffective symbolic leadership can be.
We have a president-in-training more comfortable in the intimate confines of adulating students in an academic forum than from what Marshall McLuhan called “the cold medium of television” where the audience has to supply the warmth.
A chief executive officer is mainly a symbolic role.
Obama demonstrated finesse in running a campaign for election, which is logistical and tactical, whereas a CEO’s role is theatrical and strategic. As we have seen, Obama has failed on both counts as a CEO.
Put another way, Obama managed his campaign, but management is not leadership. Institutional America has long confused the two. Former ITT CEO, Harold Geneen, a quintessential manager, declares in “Managing” (1984), “a good manager can manage anything.”
We have had countless examples of this wrong-headed assertion. Geneen saw managing of things (e.g., Obama’s Internet campaign contribution drive) and leading people as interchangeable. They are not.
Management won WWII, not leadership, and management, not leadership, won the Cold War, as many historians continue to point out. Yet, management and leadership have been treated as synonyms ever since 1945.
Apple, Inc. nearly went under when Steven Jobs stepped down from Apple Computer, and installed John Sculley of Pepsi fame to take over. Different industries different cultures different histories and different people proved too monumental and almost ended in disaster for the company. Jobs came back and the company has been soaring ever since.
The culture, climate, politics and the idiosyncrasies of personnel are as indigenous to a company as DNA differs from individual to individual.
THIS THING ABOUT EMPATHY
CEOs are performers, actors on a stage. They are not doers. They are not even thinkers. They are an exaggerated presence not unlike the monarchs a thousand years ago. The “Divine Right of Kings” was no more a ploy than the infallibility of corpocracy in the modern era. It was the clergy and then the scribes who could write and think, and therefore manipulate illiterate monarchs, as techies are doing CEOs today.
As bloodlines ruled succession in monarchies, succession in corpocracy today is that of like-minded pyramid climbers. Power promotes what pleases power, which is another way of saying gross weaknesses in power are likely to promote entropy and therefore quicken organizational demise.
Empathy, then as now, is the mass hysteria of true believers. It was the leadership of monarchs in the feudal system. It is the leadership of CEOs in the capitalistic system.
Empathy on the campaign trail is orchestrated and thematically controlled like a well arranged television production by qualified hands behind the scenes while the campaigner acts as speaker-as-leader. Rhetoric is not leadership.
Empathy changes to a more demanding form once the CEO is in office. Behavior in crisis becomes dramaturgic.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claims President Obama is quite empathetic at a personal level, but finds it difficult to project to a wide audience in the cold medium of television. She goes on to say, the role of “making empathetic” is largely that of an actor. She points out that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could wax empathetic on cue while hardly feeling so. They understood the role and limitations of symbolic leadership.
On the other hand, President George W. Bush found it impossible to be empathetic and dropped the ball symbolically when he procrastinated with Hurricane Katrina. No one expected President Barak Obama to repeat his error with the BP Oilrig Disaster, but he did.
Goodwin says that when the oilrig exploded Bill Clinton would be down there in a rubber suit within hours, not days or weeks after the disaster. Jeb Bush, brother of President Bush, then Governor of Florida was at the Command Center before hurricanes landed with a full arsenal of methods, manpower and materials to meet anticipated needs. He was helpless to do much more than lead symbolically. Being there, on the spot, he rallied true believers in our mass marketing culture that respond so well to such leadership.
Empathetic leaders know there is little measurable influence with “I feel your pain,” but tremendous clout being found in the trenches when disaster hits. President Bush learned that lesson flying safely above the carnage of Hurricane Katrina, clearly distancing him from tens of thousands traumatized below. His administration never recovered.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
This is the title of a new book by Andrew Keen. He disparages the rise of the amateur who has failed to appreciate his place in the scheme of things. Keen is the current darling of the media and has no trouble confessing his belief in elitism. I suspect there will be a spate of books on the same theme, given literally millions are now self-publishing books on demand (POD), creating blogs, and websites, and, yes, failing to know their place.
We are seeing the approaching demise of such elitism as the journalistic press in The New York Times and Washington Post. We are seeing our elite university system crumbling in its walls as on-line universities are taking students and capital from its coffers. We are witnessing the disintegration of major corporations such as General Motors and now once invincible Toyota
* * *.
No doubt the amateur is on the rise. Why not? More than a millennium ago he first gave us our science, history, literature, geography, geology, astronomy and philosophy. We have lost our moral compass and our way, while still attempting to solve our problems with the thinking that caused them. The amateur without credentials steps into the void.
* * *
The people of the Gulf and nation will survive British Petroleum and Tony Hayward. The Gulf of Mexico will regain its estuary health and the good people of the region will restore their culture and jobs.
We have had the best minds in America, indeed, in the Western world working the problem of the Gulf, showing just how far you can go with experts, which usually is backwards.
Experts are hindsight thinkers, finding safety in the infallibility of their disciplines and programming, and it has failed them. Despite their reminding us how smart they are it has been business as usual for them as well as BP. Indeed, Tony Hayward profiles the limits of CEOs as he has been returned to Great Britain where he perfects his corporate vision by immediately attending a sailing regatta.
* * *
Often I have found the columns of David Brooks informative and perceptive, but not his Sunday column (June 20, 2010) in the St. Petersburg Times. His column headline is, “Trim the ‘experts,’ trust the locals,” which doesn’t match the message. He calls attention to several “leaders” and “experts” in the column, and then offers this hiccup:
“We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.”
Brooks claim of “really smart” national officials rings false with me, as I would like to have him define “smart.”
I would define it as what smart does, not what smart is. I also take offense to his patronizing and condescending claim that the fisherman, restaurateurs, citizens, workers “are not as expert, but have the advantage of being there on the ground.” Please!
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 18, 2010
* * *
“I can’t answer that question. I can’t recall. That’s a decision I was not party to. I don’t know. I’m not stonewalling.”
Answers given by BP CEO Tony Hayward on Capitol Hill on June 16, 2010, after 57 days of oil spurting into the Gulf of Mexico.
* * *
MANAGING AND LEADING
The day before President Barak Obama gave his first speech to the nation from the Oval Office. It was meant to be tough on BP and to placate the nation, especially people of the Gulf region, but reminded me how ineffective symbolic leadership can be.
We have a president-in-training more comfortable in the intimate confines of adulating students in an academic forum than from what Marshall McLuhan called “the cold medium of television” where the audience has to supply the warmth.
A chief executive officer is mainly a symbolic role.
Obama demonstrated finesse in running a campaign for election, which is logistical and tactical, whereas a CEO’s role is theatrical and strategic. As we have seen, Obama has failed on both counts as a CEO.
Put another way, Obama managed his campaign, but management is not leadership. Institutional America has long confused the two. Former ITT CEO, Harold Geneen, a quintessential manager, declares in “Managing” (1984), “a good manager can manage anything.”
We have had countless examples of this wrong-headed assertion. Geneen saw managing of things (e.g., Obama’s Internet campaign contribution drive) and leading people as interchangeable. They are not.
Management won WWII, not leadership, and management, not leadership, won the Cold War, as many historians continue to point out. Yet, management and leadership have been treated as synonyms ever since 1945.
Apple, Inc. nearly went under when Steven Jobs stepped down from Apple Computer, and installed John Sculley of Pepsi fame to take over. Different industries different cultures different histories and different people proved too monumental and almost ended in disaster for the company. Jobs came back and the company has been soaring ever since.
The culture, climate, politics and the idiosyncrasies of personnel are as indigenous to a company as DNA differs from individual to individual.
THIS THING ABOUT EMPATHY
CEOs are performers, actors on a stage. They are not doers. They are not even thinkers. They are an exaggerated presence not unlike the monarchs a thousand years ago. The “Divine Right of Kings” was no more a ploy than the infallibility of corpocracy in the modern era. It was the clergy and then the scribes who could write and think, and therefore manipulate illiterate monarchs, as techies are doing CEOs today.
As bloodlines ruled succession in monarchies, succession in corpocracy today is that of like-minded pyramid climbers. Power promotes what pleases power, which is another way of saying gross weaknesses in power are likely to promote entropy and therefore quicken organizational demise.
Empathy, then as now, is the mass hysteria of true believers. It was the leadership of monarchs in the feudal system. It is the leadership of CEOs in the capitalistic system.
Empathy on the campaign trail is orchestrated and thematically controlled like a well arranged television production by qualified hands behind the scenes while the campaigner acts as speaker-as-leader. Rhetoric is not leadership.
Empathy changes to a more demanding form once the CEO is in office. Behavior in crisis becomes dramaturgic.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claims President Obama is quite empathetic at a personal level, but finds it difficult to project to a wide audience in the cold medium of television. She goes on to say, the role of “making empathetic” is largely that of an actor. She points out that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could wax empathetic on cue while hardly feeling so. They understood the role and limitations of symbolic leadership.
On the other hand, President George W. Bush found it impossible to be empathetic and dropped the ball symbolically when he procrastinated with Hurricane Katrina. No one expected President Barak Obama to repeat his error with the BP Oilrig Disaster, but he did.
Goodwin says that when the oilrig exploded Bill Clinton would be down there in a rubber suit within hours, not days or weeks after the disaster. Jeb Bush, brother of President Bush, then Governor of Florida was at the Command Center before hurricanes landed with a full arsenal of methods, manpower and materials to meet anticipated needs. He was helpless to do much more than lead symbolically. Being there, on the spot, he rallied true believers in our mass marketing culture that respond so well to such leadership.
Empathetic leaders know there is little measurable influence with “I feel your pain,” but tremendous clout being found in the trenches when disaster hits. President Bush learned that lesson flying safely above the carnage of Hurricane Katrina, clearly distancing him from tens of thousands traumatized below. His administration never recovered.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
This is the title of a new book by Andrew Keen. He disparages the rise of the amateur who has failed to appreciate his place in the scheme of things. Keen is the current darling of the media and has no trouble confessing his belief in elitism. I suspect there will be a spate of books on the same theme, given literally millions are now self-publishing books on demand (POD), creating blogs, and websites, and, yes, failing to know their place.
We are seeing the approaching demise of such elitism as the journalistic press in The New York Times and Washington Post. We are seeing our elite university system crumbling in its walls as on-line universities are taking students and capital from its coffers. We are witnessing the disintegration of major corporations such as General Motors and now once invincible Toyota
* * *.
No doubt the amateur is on the rise. Why not? More than a millennium ago he first gave us our science, history, literature, geography, geology, astronomy and philosophy. We have lost our moral compass and our way, while still attempting to solve our problems with the thinking that caused them. The amateur without credentials steps into the void.
* * *
The people of the Gulf and nation will survive British Petroleum and Tony Hayward. The Gulf of Mexico will regain its estuary health and the good people of the region will restore their culture and jobs.
We have had the best minds in America, indeed, in the Western world working the problem of the Gulf, showing just how far you can go with experts, which usually is backwards.
Experts are hindsight thinkers, finding safety in the infallibility of their disciplines and programming, and it has failed them. Despite their reminding us how smart they are it has been business as usual for them as well as BP. Indeed, Tony Hayward profiles the limits of CEOs as he has been returned to Great Britain where he perfects his corporate vision by immediately attending a sailing regatta.
* * *
Often I have found the columns of David Brooks informative and perceptive, but not his Sunday column (June 20, 2010) in the St. Petersburg Times. His column headline is, “Trim the ‘experts,’ trust the locals,” which doesn’t match the message. He calls attention to several “leaders” and “experts” in the column, and then offers this hiccup:
“We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.”
Brooks claim of “really smart” national officials rings false with me, as I would like to have him define “smart.”
I would define it as what smart does, not what smart is. I also take offense to his patronizing and condescending claim that the fisherman, restaurateurs, citizens, workers “are not as expert, but have the advantage of being there on the ground.” Please!
* * *
Thursday, June 17, 2010
THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE -- BP CHAIRMAN SLIP OF THE TONGUE!
THE PROBLEM WITH LANGUAGE -- BP CHAIRMAN SLIP OF THE TONGUE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 17, 2010
* * *
“The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), English author, lexicographer, conversationalist, and author of the Oxford English Dictionary.
* * *
Nerves are on edge, people are suffering, tempers are about to explode. This describes the provincial indigenous peoples of the Deep South that hug the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
People of this region are hard working, passionate, and for generations fisherman, oilrig workers, entertainers, restaurateurs, and craftsmen.
* * *
Hurricane Katrina knocked them to the floor, but they got up, only to be knocked back down with the Great Recession of 2008, which is still on going, with nearly 10 percent unemployment across the nation. Unemployment, before the oilrig disaster, was even greater than this along the Gulf coastline.
Now oil in the Gulf has robbed them of everything while blackening their future and horizons.
* * *
So, it is understandable that many become exercised when British Petroleum Chairman of the Board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, a Swede, with American English most likely his third language, said, “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people.”
* * *
Samuel Johnson knew how proverbial and provincial was language. It can cut like a knife when it is actually trying to butter our bread.
My sense is that Chairman Svanberg misspoke. Language is idiosyncratic full of nuances and hidden meanings, meanings that can offend when the intention is quite the opposite. I think that was the case here. He meant to convey that BP cares about all people. Freud would see it as an unconscious slip, but I don’t.
* * *
I am an American who has had the advantage of a long and involved academic experience. Yet, I can offend in the only tongue I know, which is American English, and regional at that, being a Midwesterner.
Imagine what I could do if I could actually converse in another language. Goethe once said, “A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is ignorant of his own.” My limitations often remind me of that fact.
Hopefully, the good people of the Gulf region will look past this faux pas with the grace and generosity of spirit of which they are famous.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 17, 2010
* * *
“The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), English author, lexicographer, conversationalist, and author of the Oxford English Dictionary.
* * *
Nerves are on edge, people are suffering, tempers are about to explode. This describes the provincial indigenous peoples of the Deep South that hug the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
People of this region are hard working, passionate, and for generations fisherman, oilrig workers, entertainers, restaurateurs, and craftsmen.
* * *
Hurricane Katrina knocked them to the floor, but they got up, only to be knocked back down with the Great Recession of 2008, which is still on going, with nearly 10 percent unemployment across the nation. Unemployment, before the oilrig disaster, was even greater than this along the Gulf coastline.
Now oil in the Gulf has robbed them of everything while blackening their future and horizons.
* * *
So, it is understandable that many become exercised when British Petroleum Chairman of the Board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, a Swede, with American English most likely his third language, said, “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people.”
* * *
Samuel Johnson knew how proverbial and provincial was language. It can cut like a knife when it is actually trying to butter our bread.
My sense is that Chairman Svanberg misspoke. Language is idiosyncratic full of nuances and hidden meanings, meanings that can offend when the intention is quite the opposite. I think that was the case here. He meant to convey that BP cares about all people. Freud would see it as an unconscious slip, but I don’t.
* * *
I am an American who has had the advantage of a long and involved academic experience. Yet, I can offend in the only tongue I know, which is American English, and regional at that, being a Midwesterner.
Imagine what I could do if I could actually converse in another language. Goethe once said, “A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is ignorant of his own.” My limitations often remind me of that fact.
Hopefully, the good people of the Gulf region will look past this faux pas with the grace and generosity of spirit of which they are famous.
* * *
Monday, June 14, 2010
SEICHEL, SCHIZOPHRENIA, HEBEPHRENIA, AND ZEITGEIST OF OUR TIMES!
SEICHEL, SCHIZOPHRENIA, HEBEPHRENIA, AND ZEITGEIST OF OUR TIMES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 13, 2010
* * *
Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass published a prescient novel more than fifty years ago titled, THE TIN DRUM (1959). If you have not read it, I suggest you do. Most people who have not read the book still know of it, perhaps having seen the movie in which Oskar Matzerath receives a shiny new tin drum on his third birthday, and vows never to grow up or get bigger.
Matzerath in the book tells his story from the insane asylum where he is being held for a murder he didn’t commit. The question of his sanity is pointless as he lives in an insane world where violence and treachery are the only vision imaginable. It is the world of rising Nazism, a world that formulates its destructive nonsense in empty language and senseless genocide.
THE TIN DRUM is a mock-epic chronicle of Western Europe’s (and by extension the world’s) twentieth century madness, a world in upheaval. Values become inverted. The tragic is indistinguishable from the comic, the agonizing from the ludicrous. Chaos is the outward appearance and inner principle of the world it seeks to capture. Imagined vitality creates its own decorum, which is an affirmation of its dissolution.
Although only a novel, it passages how the world would limp into the twenty-first century to a chorus of natural and manmade disasters.
* * *
Ron Fournier writes of the recent oilrig blow up in the Gulf of Mexico, “Nobody led. Not the president of the United States. Not the chief executive of British Petroleum. Not Congress, federal agencies or local elected officials. From its fiery beginning, the gulf oil spill has stood as a concentrated reminder of why, over four decades, Americans have lost faith in nearly every national institution.” He concludes Americans have lost faith in and trust of their leadership.
AP Chief Fournier is talking about “blind faith,” the faith programmed into us over the last half century, a faith where we psychologically don’t have to take responsibility for things as they are, a faith when something goes wrong it is somebody else’s fault and somebody else has to fix it.
* * *
Since World War Two, we have been living in Disney Land where nothing was real especially the consequences of our actions.
Parents lost control of the home, and joined their children in frivolous behavior.
Teachers lost control at school and automatically promoted students who could neither read nor write.
Churches lost control of message and tried to be groovy becoming as unconscionable as parishioners.
Employers lost control of productivity by giving workers everything but control of what they did while blindly robbing the corporate bank because they could.
Government lost control because it never got beyond the psychology of the Great Depression, expanding the economic safety net to the point of creating a society of whimpering children always looking for a handout.
We have eloquent speakers but no leaders because we no longer have control of our own lives.
Obesity, drug addiction, gang wars, terror in the streets, homicides and patricides, the surreal-picaresque world of pornography, Ponzi schemes, pederasty, corruption, duplicity and mendacity are symptoms, not causes, of a sick society that feeds on its sickness.
* * *
We have refused to grow up.
A number of years ago a street survey was taken in New York City with a disproportionate number of respondents claiming to suffer from disorganized thinking and speech, loss of train of thought, periodic incoherence, and even some of the more telling symptoms of schizophrenia such as hallucinations and delusions. This was not a scientific study but indicated that symptoms of mental illness were common to many New Yorkers.
* * *
There is a form of schizophrenia called “hebephrenia,” which has something in common with Oskar Matzerbath of THE TIN DRUM. The person suffering from this disease grows up physically but not emotionally. It is a Peter Pan like complex in which the highly sensitive person can literally stop maturing emotionally in puberty.
Hebephrenia can be triggered by extreme trauma experienced when very young and helpless to intercede, say when the child’s father physically and psychologically abuses his mother. The child lives in fear and feels responsible to protect his mother because there is no one else to do so, but is unable.
* * *
This is something I’m thinking about while walking today.
Many people of my generation born in the 1930s have known war and deprivation as a constant diet. Now in the last decades of our lives, we are faced with terrorism. This pervading threat has no face, no country, no standing army, and no national allegiance.
Terrorism is a miniscule presence on the body politic but does extreme psychological damage to our collective psyche, which is preoccupied with nonspecific fear. There is no safe haven from this terror, not in the sanctuary of a church, temple, synagogue, or mosque. Nothing is sacred with terrorists.
* * *
In this climate of fear, no one is in charge as everything is fragmented. No one is carrying the mantle because it is too heavy and ill defined. It is as if there is a gigantic hole in our collective psyche and no one can fill it. It is not that we don’t have people with intelligence and perspective attempting to bring sense to our nonsense. The problem is too often their sense is only more nonsense. There are exceptions.
Yiddish author Michael Chabon can look at the Israeli botched raid on the Gaza flotilla, Mavi Marmara, and register shock and confusion as he attempts to get his head around this display of blockheadedness.
“There is a Yiddish word,” he writes, “seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: it connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person who possesses this looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way, blunt force, often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.
Chabon goes on to say Jews are chosen but not special, and the myth that has them special is the hole in which they constantly fall when buying into this rubbish. “We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes.”
He goes on to say, “In the 62-year history (1948 – 2010) of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, it has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.”
* * *
The zeitgeist or spirit of our times plays havoc with our limited attention span, which has surrendered our brains to computer dalliance, and for it, writes Matt Richtel of the New York Times:
“We are paying a price. While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information scientists say, and they experience more stress.”
People will argue this point, and more warnings will materialize on the dangers of technology, but one thing is clear. Our survival as a human race seems more a matter of luck than pluck.
We create chaos and burrow through it, suffer pandemics and come out of them, if briefly revitalized, discover new ways to fail and new sources of human weakness, new methods of carnage, and doomsday scenarios, and yet the indomitable zeitgeist once again surfaces and stares destiny down. Alas, man prevails despite his constant dance with folly.
This is what I’m thinking today as I walk.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 13, 2010
* * *
Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass published a prescient novel more than fifty years ago titled, THE TIN DRUM (1959). If you have not read it, I suggest you do. Most people who have not read the book still know of it, perhaps having seen the movie in which Oskar Matzerath receives a shiny new tin drum on his third birthday, and vows never to grow up or get bigger.
Matzerath in the book tells his story from the insane asylum where he is being held for a murder he didn’t commit. The question of his sanity is pointless as he lives in an insane world where violence and treachery are the only vision imaginable. It is the world of rising Nazism, a world that formulates its destructive nonsense in empty language and senseless genocide.
THE TIN DRUM is a mock-epic chronicle of Western Europe’s (and by extension the world’s) twentieth century madness, a world in upheaval. Values become inverted. The tragic is indistinguishable from the comic, the agonizing from the ludicrous. Chaos is the outward appearance and inner principle of the world it seeks to capture. Imagined vitality creates its own decorum, which is an affirmation of its dissolution.
Although only a novel, it passages how the world would limp into the twenty-first century to a chorus of natural and manmade disasters.
* * *
Ron Fournier writes of the recent oilrig blow up in the Gulf of Mexico, “Nobody led. Not the president of the United States. Not the chief executive of British Petroleum. Not Congress, federal agencies or local elected officials. From its fiery beginning, the gulf oil spill has stood as a concentrated reminder of why, over four decades, Americans have lost faith in nearly every national institution.” He concludes Americans have lost faith in and trust of their leadership.
AP Chief Fournier is talking about “blind faith,” the faith programmed into us over the last half century, a faith where we psychologically don’t have to take responsibility for things as they are, a faith when something goes wrong it is somebody else’s fault and somebody else has to fix it.
* * *
Since World War Two, we have been living in Disney Land where nothing was real especially the consequences of our actions.
Parents lost control of the home, and joined their children in frivolous behavior.
Teachers lost control at school and automatically promoted students who could neither read nor write.
Churches lost control of message and tried to be groovy becoming as unconscionable as parishioners.
Employers lost control of productivity by giving workers everything but control of what they did while blindly robbing the corporate bank because they could.
Government lost control because it never got beyond the psychology of the Great Depression, expanding the economic safety net to the point of creating a society of whimpering children always looking for a handout.
We have eloquent speakers but no leaders because we no longer have control of our own lives.
Obesity, drug addiction, gang wars, terror in the streets, homicides and patricides, the surreal-picaresque world of pornography, Ponzi schemes, pederasty, corruption, duplicity and mendacity are symptoms, not causes, of a sick society that feeds on its sickness.
* * *
We have refused to grow up.
A number of years ago a street survey was taken in New York City with a disproportionate number of respondents claiming to suffer from disorganized thinking and speech, loss of train of thought, periodic incoherence, and even some of the more telling symptoms of schizophrenia such as hallucinations and delusions. This was not a scientific study but indicated that symptoms of mental illness were common to many New Yorkers.
* * *
There is a form of schizophrenia called “hebephrenia,” which has something in common with Oskar Matzerbath of THE TIN DRUM. The person suffering from this disease grows up physically but not emotionally. It is a Peter Pan like complex in which the highly sensitive person can literally stop maturing emotionally in puberty.
Hebephrenia can be triggered by extreme trauma experienced when very young and helpless to intercede, say when the child’s father physically and psychologically abuses his mother. The child lives in fear and feels responsible to protect his mother because there is no one else to do so, but is unable.
* * *
This is something I’m thinking about while walking today.
Many people of my generation born in the 1930s have known war and deprivation as a constant diet. Now in the last decades of our lives, we are faced with terrorism. This pervading threat has no face, no country, no standing army, and no national allegiance.
Terrorism is a miniscule presence on the body politic but does extreme psychological damage to our collective psyche, which is preoccupied with nonspecific fear. There is no safe haven from this terror, not in the sanctuary of a church, temple, synagogue, or mosque. Nothing is sacred with terrorists.
* * *
In this climate of fear, no one is in charge as everything is fragmented. No one is carrying the mantle because it is too heavy and ill defined. It is as if there is a gigantic hole in our collective psyche and no one can fill it. It is not that we don’t have people with intelligence and perspective attempting to bring sense to our nonsense. The problem is too often their sense is only more nonsense. There are exceptions.
Yiddish author Michael Chabon can look at the Israeli botched raid on the Gaza flotilla, Mavi Marmara, and register shock and confusion as he attempts to get his head around this display of blockheadedness.
“There is a Yiddish word,” he writes, “seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: it connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance.” A person who possesses this looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way, blunt force, often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.
Chabon goes on to say Jews are chosen but not special, and the myth that has them special is the hole in which they constantly fall when buying into this rubbish. “We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes.”
He goes on to say, “In the 62-year history (1948 – 2010) of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, it has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.”
* * *
The zeitgeist or spirit of our times plays havoc with our limited attention span, which has surrendered our brains to computer dalliance, and for it, writes Matt Richtel of the New York Times:
“We are paying a price. While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information scientists say, and they experience more stress.”
People will argue this point, and more warnings will materialize on the dangers of technology, but one thing is clear. Our survival as a human race seems more a matter of luck than pluck.
We create chaos and burrow through it, suffer pandemics and come out of them, if briefly revitalized, discover new ways to fail and new sources of human weakness, new methods of carnage, and doomsday scenarios, and yet the indomitable zeitgeist once again surfaces and stares destiny down. Alas, man prevails despite his constant dance with folly.
This is what I’m thinking today as I walk.
* * *
Thursday, June 10, 2010
THE ANODYNE OF "THE COMICS," or TORCHING THE LIE WITH THE VENOM OF TRUTH!
THE ANODYNE OF “THE COMICS,” or TORCHING THE LIE WITH THE VENOM OF TRUTH!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 10, 2010
* * *
Readers, who still read newspapers, are likely as not to read “the comics” if they read newspapers at all.
There is something about reading comics that assuages tension and guilt of “things as they are.”
Graphic arts can get away calling "a spade a spade," without bringing grief to the artist.
It occurred to me today reading the ST. PETERSBURG TIMES that the comics should be taken more seriously because they have more meaning in them than the pomposity of op-ed writers, and cleaner prose.
* * *
Doonesbury, for example, writes about the new lexicon with such meaningless words associated with the British Petroleum fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico as “top kill,” and “junk shot,” and “hot tap.”
Today’s comic goes on to remind us of the words common to the Obama administration such as “study,” and “review,” and “commission” in addressing this oily disaster with words in the scheme of things.
Nature pays words no mind as oil spurts out its poisonous liquid into the gulf with killing impunity.
Other words in the game such as “liability,” and “crime,” and “jail” are also bandied about without meaning or moment.
Doonesbury says, "We want words to motivate us not put us to sleep."
* * *
Meanwhile, 633 dead birds have been collected from the Gulf Coast, along with 272 dead turtles, 36 dead porpoises, while as many as 50,000,000 gallons of crude oil have polluted these waters since the rig exploded.
This happened in the Gulf of Mexico, in the lazy South, the semi-tropical climate of the Big Easy, Cajun country, where blood and culture mix into a smorgasbord of taste, far from the WASP country of the East where life is reduced to fine manners and sartorial splendor. One wonders what would have been the response of the oil company and the government had the oilrig disaster occurred off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. This comparison doesn’t escape Doonesbury.
* * *.
Dilbert punches giant holes into corporate duplicity, chicanery and hubris.
Today the comic has the CEO looking at a display chart that applauds “employee satisfaction,” which is the result of firing smart people.
Dilbert is often on such an attack. Unfortunately, the corporate world sees the humor and not the pathos in this, as Delbert fails to penetrate the psyche of those in charge.
Everyone knows who has worked for a corporation that the “safe hires” survive while the smart independent and self-regulating “trouble-making” people are vulnerable to dismissal once economic tension invades the premises.
Corporations applaud creativity but award compliance; applaud an open door policy as long as those that cross that threshold resonate with the company message.
Dilbert is often ridiculous but never as ridiculous as that of everyday corporate behavior.
* * *
Non Sequitur is often off-the-wall, and is meant to be. Today it has a man in a straw hat with an American flag sticking out of the top, sitting at a desk passing out petitions to return America to the original constitution.
A black woman says, “Ok,” she’ll accept the petition, and then adds, “But how about this time, we make it legal for Black People to own White People, and only Women have the right to vote?”
The comic shows the petitioner worker losing his head, “Foom!”
How powerful this simple cartoon!
With a few words, the Black lady turned pomposity on a dime. I found I couldn’t move beyond this anecdotal suggestion.
* * *
Being male and white, but a serious student of my time, it is hard to imagine that Women much less Black People could muck up things worse than my gender and race have.
We want change as long as we are in charge and as long as it doesn’t cost us anything.
The comics remind us of this fact. They get away with it because they are anodyne to our dilemma. I pray that newspapers will always be extant if for no other reason than to perpetuate the comics!
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 10, 2010
* * *
Readers, who still read newspapers, are likely as not to read “the comics” if they read newspapers at all.
There is something about reading comics that assuages tension and guilt of “things as they are.”
Graphic arts can get away calling "a spade a spade," without bringing grief to the artist.
It occurred to me today reading the ST. PETERSBURG TIMES that the comics should be taken more seriously because they have more meaning in them than the pomposity of op-ed writers, and cleaner prose.
* * *
Doonesbury, for example, writes about the new lexicon with such meaningless words associated with the British Petroleum fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico as “top kill,” and “junk shot,” and “hot tap.”
Today’s comic goes on to remind us of the words common to the Obama administration such as “study,” and “review,” and “commission” in addressing this oily disaster with words in the scheme of things.
Nature pays words no mind as oil spurts out its poisonous liquid into the gulf with killing impunity.
Other words in the game such as “liability,” and “crime,” and “jail” are also bandied about without meaning or moment.
Doonesbury says, "We want words to motivate us not put us to sleep."
* * *
Meanwhile, 633 dead birds have been collected from the Gulf Coast, along with 272 dead turtles, 36 dead porpoises, while as many as 50,000,000 gallons of crude oil have polluted these waters since the rig exploded.
This happened in the Gulf of Mexico, in the lazy South, the semi-tropical climate of the Big Easy, Cajun country, where blood and culture mix into a smorgasbord of taste, far from the WASP country of the East where life is reduced to fine manners and sartorial splendor. One wonders what would have been the response of the oil company and the government had the oilrig disaster occurred off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. This comparison doesn’t escape Doonesbury.
* * *.
Dilbert punches giant holes into corporate duplicity, chicanery and hubris.
Today the comic has the CEO looking at a display chart that applauds “employee satisfaction,” which is the result of firing smart people.
Dilbert is often on such an attack. Unfortunately, the corporate world sees the humor and not the pathos in this, as Delbert fails to penetrate the psyche of those in charge.
Everyone knows who has worked for a corporation that the “safe hires” survive while the smart independent and self-regulating “trouble-making” people are vulnerable to dismissal once economic tension invades the premises.
Corporations applaud creativity but award compliance; applaud an open door policy as long as those that cross that threshold resonate with the company message.
Dilbert is often ridiculous but never as ridiculous as that of everyday corporate behavior.
* * *
Non Sequitur is often off-the-wall, and is meant to be. Today it has a man in a straw hat with an American flag sticking out of the top, sitting at a desk passing out petitions to return America to the original constitution.
A black woman says, “Ok,” she’ll accept the petition, and then adds, “But how about this time, we make it legal for Black People to own White People, and only Women have the right to vote?”
The comic shows the petitioner worker losing his head, “Foom!”
How powerful this simple cartoon!
With a few words, the Black lady turned pomposity on a dime. I found I couldn’t move beyond this anecdotal suggestion.
* * *
Being male and white, but a serious student of my time, it is hard to imagine that Women much less Black People could muck up things worse than my gender and race have.
We want change as long as we are in charge and as long as it doesn’t cost us anything.
The comics remind us of this fact. They get away with it because they are anodyne to our dilemma. I pray that newspapers will always be extant if for no other reason than to perpetuate the comics!
* * *
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE -- COMMENT AND COMMENTARY -- WHAT IS A GERUND?
ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE – COMMENT AND COMMENTARY – WHAT IS A GERUND?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 9, 2010
* * *
A READER COMMENTS:
Hello Jim,
Having read your latest today, I find Betty and I have a lot in common with her remark regarding reading your writings. I don't have time to read all that you write. Give me the shortened version or something like that. You write more than Betty and I can find the time to read ... and then to think through it all and try to gain the same understanding of what you say that you are attempting to convey. But, we keep trying.
I apologize. Yes, I did get your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), and have made an attempt to read it, but have not succeeded. Thank you for the book.
Keep up the emails.
Ron
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ron,
I hear you. I know in these hectic times it is difficult to savor the moment with the luxury of reflection, or the time to devour words and ideas much less complete required tasks. My wonder, though, is if we have our priorities in order.
A recent column by New York Times columnist David Brooks caused me to reflect on this. People, he finds, gravitate to where the money is and bypass such studies as English, History and the Humanities for the meaty curriculums in college that put them on track to the big engineering, computer and finance jobs.
He writes, “Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.”
But then Brooks zeros in on the problem: “Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose).”
* * *
When I was in college and a chem.-major, two required courses, MODERN LITERATURE, and GREEKS AND THE BIBLE introduced me to the humanities. Although having four years of math, four years of science, and four years of English in high school, I discovered I was an illiterate when it came to the humanities. Every chance I had to take an elective I took it in the humanities. That included courses in Shakespeare, the American Novel, Understanding Poetry, Greek, and Understanding and Writing Fiction.
Exposure to Joyce, Chekhov, Aristophenes, Euripides, Dostoyevsky, and so on, familiarized me with the language of emotion. It also gave me a taste for the simple declarative sentence. I might add it influenced by organizational development (OD) work much later.
* * *
One such program I set up at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) was Technical Education.
I discovered that more than fifty percent of the thousand engineers were working on technology developed after they left school. All engineers participated in this program with the chairperson designate to run the program changing every year.
It was possible to upgrade the skills of engineers and for technicians to acquire engineering credits in association with the University of South Florida’s School of Engineering. A plus was that technicians could do this without leaving the Honeywell campus.
Fortunately, more than twenty Honeywell engineers had earned Ph.D.’s in their respective disciplines. I wrote a monograph to assist them in teaching titled, TRAINING THE OCCASIONAL INSTRUCTOR (1984). Additionally, I presented a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education (May 1986) titled, COMBATING TECHNICAL OBSOLESCENCE: THE GENESIS OF A TECHNICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM (1986).
It was working with engineering chairpersons, however, that I discovered that many could not spell or write a clear and concise memo to their fellow engineers. They scoffed at the suggestion that this was a handicap, or that an enormous power escaped them.
As a consequence, when I was asked to interview prospective engineers, I invariably asked the question: What is a gerund?
I never found an engineer who could answer that question. Many, I must confess, asked what this had to do with engineering. I always wanted to say, “Everything!” But of course I never did.
* * *
In my many books, I have dealt with my frustration that professionals refuse "to take charge," especially engineers when the game belongs to them. I write in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007):
"The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet while engineers created this world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them."
David Brooks has hit on the reason why. Ideas drive behavior; technology only exploits it and not always to our advantage.
* * *
I have a grandson going into his junior year in high school. He has a great facility for math and science, but finds English, History, Literature, and Geography boring. I suspect one day he will discover, as I did, that science and technology are not very effective in explaining human behavior. Deep down we have passions and emotions that drive behavior, which can launch or cripple us in life. It was the reason I wrote THE TABOO.
Be always well,
Jim
P.S. A gerund is like a participle, but it is actually a verb (in its “ing” form) used as a noun. “Running is fun” displays such usage. This also happens to be a simple declarative sentence. Three such sentences in THE TABOO described the essence of that book: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass, our moral center. We have lost our way.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 9, 2010
* * *
A READER COMMENTS:
Hello Jim,
Having read your latest today, I find Betty and I have a lot in common with her remark regarding reading your writings. I don't have time to read all that you write. Give me the shortened version or something like that. You write more than Betty and I can find the time to read ... and then to think through it all and try to gain the same understanding of what you say that you are attempting to convey. But, we keep trying.
I apologize. Yes, I did get your book, THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), and have made an attempt to read it, but have not succeeded. Thank you for the book.
Keep up the emails.
Ron
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ron,
I hear you. I know in these hectic times it is difficult to savor the moment with the luxury of reflection, or the time to devour words and ideas much less complete required tasks. My wonder, though, is if we have our priorities in order.
A recent column by New York Times columnist David Brooks caused me to reflect on this. People, he finds, gravitate to where the money is and bypass such studies as English, History and the Humanities for the meaty curriculums in college that put them on track to the big engineering, computer and finance jobs.
He writes, “Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.”
But then Brooks zeros in on the problem: “Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose).”
* * *
When I was in college and a chem.-major, two required courses, MODERN LITERATURE, and GREEKS AND THE BIBLE introduced me to the humanities. Although having four years of math, four years of science, and four years of English in high school, I discovered I was an illiterate when it came to the humanities. Every chance I had to take an elective I took it in the humanities. That included courses in Shakespeare, the American Novel, Understanding Poetry, Greek, and Understanding and Writing Fiction.
Exposure to Joyce, Chekhov, Aristophenes, Euripides, Dostoyevsky, and so on, familiarized me with the language of emotion. It also gave me a taste for the simple declarative sentence. I might add it influenced by organizational development (OD) work much later.
* * *
One such program I set up at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) was Technical Education.
I discovered that more than fifty percent of the thousand engineers were working on technology developed after they left school. All engineers participated in this program with the chairperson designate to run the program changing every year.
It was possible to upgrade the skills of engineers and for technicians to acquire engineering credits in association with the University of South Florida’s School of Engineering. A plus was that technicians could do this without leaving the Honeywell campus.
Fortunately, more than twenty Honeywell engineers had earned Ph.D.’s in their respective disciplines. I wrote a monograph to assist them in teaching titled, TRAINING THE OCCASIONAL INSTRUCTOR (1984). Additionally, I presented a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education (May 1986) titled, COMBATING TECHNICAL OBSOLESCENCE: THE GENESIS OF A TECHNICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM (1986).
It was working with engineering chairpersons, however, that I discovered that many could not spell or write a clear and concise memo to their fellow engineers. They scoffed at the suggestion that this was a handicap, or that an enormous power escaped them.
As a consequence, when I was asked to interview prospective engineers, I invariably asked the question: What is a gerund?
I never found an engineer who could answer that question. Many, I must confess, asked what this had to do with engineering. I always wanted to say, “Everything!” But of course I never did.
* * *
In my many books, I have dealt with my frustration that professionals refuse "to take charge," especially engineers when the game belongs to them. I write in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007):
"The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet while engineers created this world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them."
David Brooks has hit on the reason why. Ideas drive behavior; technology only exploits it and not always to our advantage.
* * *
I have a grandson going into his junior year in high school. He has a great facility for math and science, but finds English, History, Literature, and Geography boring. I suspect one day he will discover, as I did, that science and technology are not very effective in explaining human behavior. Deep down we have passions and emotions that drive behavior, which can launch or cripple us in life. It was the reason I wrote THE TABOO.
Be always well,
Jim
P.S. A gerund is like a participle, but it is actually a verb (in its “ing” form) used as a noun. “Running is fun” displays such usage. This also happens to be a simple declarative sentence. Three such sentences in THE TABOO described the essence of that book: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass, our moral center. We have lost our way.”
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE!
ECOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ERGONOMICS AND CULTURE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 7, 2010
* * *
BB and I were having a discussion the other night. She was talking about renovations being made in the school where she is the business manager, tearing down walls, replacing them with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and opening up the classroom to uninterrupted transparent space where teachers and students have no barriers between them. Some of the older teachers are having trouble with the concept, which is understandable.
* * *
I can relate to the teachers' difficulty with this, BB said, as I worked from a cubicle in accounting at Honeywell. You had a private office with a secretary because you were an executive.
Honey, at Clearwater I was designated a management and organizational development psychologist, not an executive. That said it is true I have always had my own office.
Well, I’ve never had that.
I know. But you do now. Can you imagine doing the multitasks you do operating out of a bullpen? You have your own secretary, direct reports and can come and go as you please.
Is that why I work such long hours?
The difference, my dear, is you are committed to ends and don't sweat the small stuff such as the many hours required. You are qualitatively not quantitatively driven. I have watched you grow, find your niche, and make a difference. Yet, you’ve not lost your touch for relating to others.
Jim, where is this going? I get my work done because I have an office?
No not necessarily.
Then what?
I’m not really sure. I was just thinking about the challenge and opportunity you have at your school, and how it translates in a broader sense.
Is this going to take a long time because I have to get some sleep?
Please bear with me. There were a thousand engineers at Honeywell when I was there. Each of them had a cubicle. Chief engineers across this ten-acre campus had private offices. The two thousand professionals that supported these engineers also had cubicles. Their managers had private offices.
Meaning?
I’m not sure. It represents a dichotomy, a vertical and horizontal separation. I don’t think I could have functioned in a cubicle.
Why is that?
For one, I’m a private person. Even as a chemist, I worked best alone. For another, I have been criticized for always having my door shut.
You didn’t believe in an open door policy?
Having your door open has little to do with being open, I assure you. People could come anytime night or day and I would hear them out, and I would stay as long as they liked.
But you were a psychologist!
Only one part of my career, but I've acted much the same in other parts as well.
I’ll bet you even had a private room in the dorm at university.
As a matter of fact, I did.
And you say you were a poor boy.
I was but I always worked a way to acquire a private room.
What was the benefit to that?
It was the best way for me to function, as you should know.
I should know?
Yes, you should. I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) mainly while we were in Brussels, Belgium working for Honeywell Europe. You did the secondary research, collating and classifying references not to mention typing as I walked about my study dictating the book, and then editing the final draft. It gave the book spontaneity and freshness I’ve not been able to duplicate. Come to think of it, ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a study separate from everyone else.
You wrote about it IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).
Yes, it was the chicken coop at the back of our house that I converted into a study.
So, you treated me like a secretary.
No, that’s not fair. I treated you as a collaborator. However, I did dictate a book to my secretary when I was living in South Africa. It was called SALES TRAINING & TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT (1968). She was not a collaborator.
So, you’ve always had someone to assist you.
Not true, as you know, once we were back in the States, and you went on to your own career, I had to do my own research, and all the rest, and my writing has suffered for the lack of your participation. I’m mainly an idea guy and not all that proficient in the editing department, as you well know. You were superb!
Flattery will get you nowhere. Jim I need to get some sleep.
It is not meant as flattery. Writing takes a lot of energy something I have in short supply.
But you’ve always written. You’ll write until you die.
I suppose that’s true. I am an idea guy who writes.
You’re telling me all this because?
I’m trying to understand what is the ideal situation for people to be creative.
And you think it is a private office?
No, it worked for me, but I’m not sure about others. In the early 1980s, I spent nearly a month at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of MIT working with engineers and scientists who designed the ring laser gyros produced at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida). They all had private offices and arrogance to match.
Like someone else I know.
Perhaps. In any case, I never saw a place of work so designed to discourage collaboration. CSDL was housed in twin circular towers connected by a bridge. Engineers and scientists had offices around the periphery of that circular space. To make matters worse there was a discrete pecking order: physicists, mathematicians, systems analysts, electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, physical chemists, chemists down to technicians.
Your point?
They didn’t communicate outside their disciplines. For example, I was talking to a physical chemist who had an office next door to a biochemist. We discussed the design-production problem between Cambridge and Clearwater. The scientist next door was not in, so I asked, how does your neighbor feel? I have no idea, he said, I haven’t spoken to him in years. Why, I asked. He’s a biochemist, he answered, he doesn’t even belong here.
How juvenile.
Well, I found this mindset repeated throughout CSDL. Ergonomically, people were situated in these two circular towers according to technological status. Small wonder they hardly communicated with each other.
But why were you there?
The managing director at CSDL was exasperated. He had read a paper of mine given at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (October 1981) on “Motivation Through Participative Management.” He met with me and asked my management to allow me to come to MIT and work with his people.
So you were there to save them from themselves.
You know I don’t work that way. I first interviewed the managers and engineers at Clearwater to get their sense of the design-production problem. Then I happened on a report written by a product assurance engineer who claimed production at Clearwater was generating $5 million worth the scrap in an effort to produce the gyro for the Navy. Since it was a Department of Defense contract and a cost-plus program, no one gave it much attention. He did and nearly lost his job for the effort. I wrote a long piece on this in the AQP Journal (July/August 1999), and then included the study in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), calling the Clearwater-Cambridge separation, "A Bridge too Far.” Don’t you remember?
When do I have time to read all your stuff? Please, give me the short version so I can go to sleep.
For starters, I put together a book of my articles published by Honeywell calling it TEAMING: PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH COOPERATION (1983).
Jim! I mean it. I've got to get some sleep!
I mention this for background. I wanted something to engage this group. Management assembled some thirty scientists and engineers into the conference room in a circular fashion. Predictably, they started chipping away at me from the first. One said, why are you here, another, who invited you? I listened, and finally said, “You did,” explaining the failure of their designs to be producible. I felt it was a bridge too far, more than 1,000 miles between the two critical phases. I must add, at this point, that I did not know it was a bridge too far between towers and disciplines. You want the short version, okay. I handed out my book, then counted them out “one-two-three-four-five,” to separate those sitting together, and called them “teams.” I gave them the assignment to read the book, and to return the next day. Having read the book, they had a sense of how a team works. I then had them work in teams on the design-production snafu, reassembled them in a group and discussed aspects of the book and its relevance to the team building. We did this for days. Then I had each team control a session ensconced in the middle of the circular assembly with discussions following each presentation.
Like a play?
I suppose, or a play within a play.
And it worked?
Indeed. Had I outlined this approach to my management it would have been deemed absurd. And it was. But what is more childish than bias, and what better way to expose it than to put it on display? I couldn’t compete with their brilliance but I could redirect it away from their collective hubris, and I did.
So, you knew exactly what you were going to do before you got there.
No, not at all. Once the managing director introduced me, I could tell nobody wanted me to be there. I could feel what I once felt when I was an athlete when somebody new came on board. Show me something new! Well, I didn’t have anything new, did I? My book was meant as an icebreaker as was dividing them up into teams of multiple disciplines, away from comfortable biases. To a person they claimed the design phase was perfection and that production problems were due to the incompetence of Clearwater.
How did you answer that?
I didn't. I couldn’t could I? I was not competent to make that determination nor could I accept the perfection of the gyro design to which they alluded.
So, you had a stalemate?
Not necessarily. You see I had a secret weapon.
Really!
Well, maybe not a secret weapon, but I knew they were all trained in deductive reasoning, quantitative or vertical thinking, and unlikely to integrate this thinking into inductive reasoning, qualitative or horizontal thinking. As a result, they were naked and vulnerable to my synthetic subjective climate.
Translate that into English.
Deduction is the process of reasoning from the general to the particular. It is used in the Scientific Method where specific hypothesis are derived from broader theoretical principles. Induction, on the other hand, is the process of reasoning from the particular to the general. We are all basically inductive thinkers in that we come to hold certain things to be true based upon our experience.
Give me an example of deduction.
We like to watch Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries on TV, right? Well, he meets a stranger and tells Watson precisely who the stranger is by his deductive thinking process. I’ve already described inductive thinking. Deductive thinking is scientific, critical and vertical. Inductive thinking is subjective, creative and horizontal. Deductive thinking is hindsight thinking or hierarchical thinking. Inductive thinking is foresight thinking or horizontal thinking. My job was to get these people beyond these limitations to see Clearwater as an indispensable partner in this enterprise.
And I suppose you did.
No, they did. They worked out that a delegation of engineers should go to Clearwater to see what was the problem with the production of their design, and have Clearwater engineers come up to MIT to see how the design was created to better understand how it could be modified to be more successfully produced.
So everyone was happy ever after.
I don’t know about that, but the bridge was narrowed between Cambridge and Clearwater, and scrap was reduced substantially.
How about the bridge between the towers?
That was another problem. You don’t change cultures. Cultures see the necessity for change and act accordingly. CSDL management saw the problem a manpower one, and not a management problem. The irony is that vertical management and decision-making at both CSDL and Clearwater contributed to the problem. That product assurance engineer nearly lost his job for identifying the $5 million of scrap being generated. Vertical-horizontal integration of technology and management remains the challenge.
You still haven’t answered the question of the ideal work environment.
Oh, that! I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone is. Given the territorial imperatives of groups, that is a tough one. It might be useful to create cubicles in a circular pattern open in the center with workers able to spin their chairs around to ask someone in the circle a question. Moreover, the arrangement should be no more than five and preferably four individuals in a cubicle grouping. But that is just a thought. I’m surprised you’re still with me.
I’m wide a wake now. I think I’ll read for a while.
Me, too!
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 7, 2010
* * *
BB and I were having a discussion the other night. She was talking about renovations being made in the school where she is the business manager, tearing down walls, replacing them with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and opening up the classroom to uninterrupted transparent space where teachers and students have no barriers between them. Some of the older teachers are having trouble with the concept, which is understandable.
* * *
I can relate to the teachers' difficulty with this, BB said, as I worked from a cubicle in accounting at Honeywell. You had a private office with a secretary because you were an executive.
Honey, at Clearwater I was designated a management and organizational development psychologist, not an executive. That said it is true I have always had my own office.
Well, I’ve never had that.
I know. But you do now. Can you imagine doing the multitasks you do operating out of a bullpen? You have your own secretary, direct reports and can come and go as you please.
Is that why I work such long hours?
The difference, my dear, is you are committed to ends and don't sweat the small stuff such as the many hours required. You are qualitatively not quantitatively driven. I have watched you grow, find your niche, and make a difference. Yet, you’ve not lost your touch for relating to others.
Jim, where is this going? I get my work done because I have an office?
No not necessarily.
Then what?
I’m not really sure. I was just thinking about the challenge and opportunity you have at your school, and how it translates in a broader sense.
Is this going to take a long time because I have to get some sleep?
Please bear with me. There were a thousand engineers at Honeywell when I was there. Each of them had a cubicle. Chief engineers across this ten-acre campus had private offices. The two thousand professionals that supported these engineers also had cubicles. Their managers had private offices.
Meaning?
I’m not sure. It represents a dichotomy, a vertical and horizontal separation. I don’t think I could have functioned in a cubicle.
Why is that?
For one, I’m a private person. Even as a chemist, I worked best alone. For another, I have been criticized for always having my door shut.
You didn’t believe in an open door policy?
Having your door open has little to do with being open, I assure you. People could come anytime night or day and I would hear them out, and I would stay as long as they liked.
But you were a psychologist!
Only one part of my career, but I've acted much the same in other parts as well.
I’ll bet you even had a private room in the dorm at university.
As a matter of fact, I did.
And you say you were a poor boy.
I was but I always worked a way to acquire a private room.
What was the benefit to that?
It was the best way for me to function, as you should know.
I should know?
Yes, you should. I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) mainly while we were in Brussels, Belgium working for Honeywell Europe. You did the secondary research, collating and classifying references not to mention typing as I walked about my study dictating the book, and then editing the final draft. It gave the book spontaneity and freshness I’ve not been able to duplicate. Come to think of it, ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a study separate from everyone else.
You wrote about it IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003).
Yes, it was the chicken coop at the back of our house that I converted into a study.
So, you treated me like a secretary.
No, that’s not fair. I treated you as a collaborator. However, I did dictate a book to my secretary when I was living in South Africa. It was called SALES TRAINING & TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT (1968). She was not a collaborator.
So, you’ve always had someone to assist you.
Not true, as you know, once we were back in the States, and you went on to your own career, I had to do my own research, and all the rest, and my writing has suffered for the lack of your participation. I’m mainly an idea guy and not all that proficient in the editing department, as you well know. You were superb!
Flattery will get you nowhere. Jim I need to get some sleep.
It is not meant as flattery. Writing takes a lot of energy something I have in short supply.
But you’ve always written. You’ll write until you die.
I suppose that’s true. I am an idea guy who writes.
You’re telling me all this because?
I’m trying to understand what is the ideal situation for people to be creative.
And you think it is a private office?
No, it worked for me, but I’m not sure about others. In the early 1980s, I spent nearly a month at Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of MIT working with engineers and scientists who designed the ring laser gyros produced at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida). They all had private offices and arrogance to match.
Like someone else I know.
Perhaps. In any case, I never saw a place of work so designed to discourage collaboration. CSDL was housed in twin circular towers connected by a bridge. Engineers and scientists had offices around the periphery of that circular space. To make matters worse there was a discrete pecking order: physicists, mathematicians, systems analysts, electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, physical chemists, chemists down to technicians.
Your point?
They didn’t communicate outside their disciplines. For example, I was talking to a physical chemist who had an office next door to a biochemist. We discussed the design-production problem between Cambridge and Clearwater. The scientist next door was not in, so I asked, how does your neighbor feel? I have no idea, he said, I haven’t spoken to him in years. Why, I asked. He’s a biochemist, he answered, he doesn’t even belong here.
How juvenile.
Well, I found this mindset repeated throughout CSDL. Ergonomically, people were situated in these two circular towers according to technological status. Small wonder they hardly communicated with each other.
But why were you there?
The managing director at CSDL was exasperated. He had read a paper of mine given at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (October 1981) on “Motivation Through Participative Management.” He met with me and asked my management to allow me to come to MIT and work with his people.
So you were there to save them from themselves.
You know I don’t work that way. I first interviewed the managers and engineers at Clearwater to get their sense of the design-production problem. Then I happened on a report written by a product assurance engineer who claimed production at Clearwater was generating $5 million worth the scrap in an effort to produce the gyro for the Navy. Since it was a Department of Defense contract and a cost-plus program, no one gave it much attention. He did and nearly lost his job for the effort. I wrote a long piece on this in the AQP Journal (July/August 1999), and then included the study in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), calling the Clearwater-Cambridge separation, "A Bridge too Far.” Don’t you remember?
When do I have time to read all your stuff? Please, give me the short version so I can go to sleep.
For starters, I put together a book of my articles published by Honeywell calling it TEAMING: PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH COOPERATION (1983).
Jim! I mean it. I've got to get some sleep!
I mention this for background. I wanted something to engage this group. Management assembled some thirty scientists and engineers into the conference room in a circular fashion. Predictably, they started chipping away at me from the first. One said, why are you here, another, who invited you? I listened, and finally said, “You did,” explaining the failure of their designs to be producible. I felt it was a bridge too far, more than 1,000 miles between the two critical phases. I must add, at this point, that I did not know it was a bridge too far between towers and disciplines. You want the short version, okay. I handed out my book, then counted them out “one-two-three-four-five,” to separate those sitting together, and called them “teams.” I gave them the assignment to read the book, and to return the next day. Having read the book, they had a sense of how a team works. I then had them work in teams on the design-production snafu, reassembled them in a group and discussed aspects of the book and its relevance to the team building. We did this for days. Then I had each team control a session ensconced in the middle of the circular assembly with discussions following each presentation.
Like a play?
I suppose, or a play within a play.
And it worked?
Indeed. Had I outlined this approach to my management it would have been deemed absurd. And it was. But what is more childish than bias, and what better way to expose it than to put it on display? I couldn’t compete with their brilliance but I could redirect it away from their collective hubris, and I did.
So, you knew exactly what you were going to do before you got there.
No, not at all. Once the managing director introduced me, I could tell nobody wanted me to be there. I could feel what I once felt when I was an athlete when somebody new came on board. Show me something new! Well, I didn’t have anything new, did I? My book was meant as an icebreaker as was dividing them up into teams of multiple disciplines, away from comfortable biases. To a person they claimed the design phase was perfection and that production problems were due to the incompetence of Clearwater.
How did you answer that?
I didn't. I couldn’t could I? I was not competent to make that determination nor could I accept the perfection of the gyro design to which they alluded.
So, you had a stalemate?
Not necessarily. You see I had a secret weapon.
Really!
Well, maybe not a secret weapon, but I knew they were all trained in deductive reasoning, quantitative or vertical thinking, and unlikely to integrate this thinking into inductive reasoning, qualitative or horizontal thinking. As a result, they were naked and vulnerable to my synthetic subjective climate.
Translate that into English.
Deduction is the process of reasoning from the general to the particular. It is used in the Scientific Method where specific hypothesis are derived from broader theoretical principles. Induction, on the other hand, is the process of reasoning from the particular to the general. We are all basically inductive thinkers in that we come to hold certain things to be true based upon our experience.
Give me an example of deduction.
We like to watch Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries on TV, right? Well, he meets a stranger and tells Watson precisely who the stranger is by his deductive thinking process. I’ve already described inductive thinking. Deductive thinking is scientific, critical and vertical. Inductive thinking is subjective, creative and horizontal. Deductive thinking is hindsight thinking or hierarchical thinking. Inductive thinking is foresight thinking or horizontal thinking. My job was to get these people beyond these limitations to see Clearwater as an indispensable partner in this enterprise.
And I suppose you did.
No, they did. They worked out that a delegation of engineers should go to Clearwater to see what was the problem with the production of their design, and have Clearwater engineers come up to MIT to see how the design was created to better understand how it could be modified to be more successfully produced.
So everyone was happy ever after.
I don’t know about that, but the bridge was narrowed between Cambridge and Clearwater, and scrap was reduced substantially.
How about the bridge between the towers?
That was another problem. You don’t change cultures. Cultures see the necessity for change and act accordingly. CSDL management saw the problem a manpower one, and not a management problem. The irony is that vertical management and decision-making at both CSDL and Clearwater contributed to the problem. That product assurance engineer nearly lost his job for identifying the $5 million of scrap being generated. Vertical-horizontal integration of technology and management remains the challenge.
You still haven’t answered the question of the ideal work environment.
Oh, that! I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone is. Given the territorial imperatives of groups, that is a tough one. It might be useful to create cubicles in a circular pattern open in the center with workers able to spin their chairs around to ask someone in the circle a question. Moreover, the arrangement should be no more than five and preferably four individuals in a cubicle grouping. But that is just a thought. I’m surprised you’re still with me.
I’m wide a wake now. I think I’ll read for a while.
Me, too!
* * *
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
WHY I HAVE HOPES FOR "DESIGN FOR PREVENTION"
WHY I HAVE HOPES FOR “DESIGN FOR PREVENTION”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2, 2010
* * *
AN ENGINEER WRITES
Some years ago, I wrote a one-page screed to Bill (author William L. Livingston) entitled Mihama Beach with a subtitle about the uniform toxic posture of management the world over. The centerline is the readiness of management to ignore outright technical requirements. The minor event I witnessed in Japan at Mihama Nuclear Generating Station Unit #2 (in 1972) presaged Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Norman
* * *
MIHAMA BEACH, OR MANAGEMENT IS THE SAME THE WORLD OVER!
Norman Dorn © June 2, 2010
In the early 1970s I accepted a field assignment from Westinghouse Electric to shoehorn process control computers into two nuclear power stations, Mihama Ichi-Go and Mihama Ni-Go.
These power stations (Unit 1 and Unit 2) shared buildings in a cove formed of decomposed lava, at the end of a peninsula into Wakasa Bay (Wakasa Wan) off of the Sea of Japan. The site was at Mihama-Cho (the village), Mikata-Gun (the township), Fukui-Ken (the prefecture), Kansai (the region), Honshu (the home island), Nihon or Nippon (Japan, the country).
These stations incorporated “pressurized water” type power reactors (PWRs). Unit 1 was of an earlier design (using 10’ long fuel pins) and Unit 2 was of a later design (using 12’ long fuel pins). The pressurized water reactor design uses (isotope U235) enriched fuel. Safety properties of this reactor design include self-regulating characteristics arrayed logically as defense in depth. The principal (very short reaction time) self-regulator is the so-called Doppler reactivity reduction that occurs in response to the heating of the fuel. At the point of initial criticality (first chain reaction and power production) the fuel is highly reactive as a result of being enriched, having no burn-in-created neutron poisons, and being physically cool for not having any decaying fission-products in it. The “physics testing” done during power production startup includes monitoring of the effectiveness of the “burnable” neutron poisons deliberately incorporated in the fuel and the “chemical shim” neutron poisons in solution in the pressurized primary coolant. One consequence of this startup balancing-act is that in the beginning-of-life of the initial load of fuel in a PWR, reactivity has a small positive feedback from temperature increase excursions.
* * *
The process monitoring computer in each station has the purpose of recording the operating history of the reactor and the steam turbine plant and providing guidance to the operators about station safe operation with regard to design criteria design basis events (Tech Specs).
The Unit 1 computer was installed and started up by my immediate supervisor. For fun he augmented the programming with a “task” that monitored the (neutron flux) intermediate range (log scale) sensor for an exponential flux growth rate (the external definition of a chain reaction that is just above the critical point). This task activated a “trouble location annunciator (and its associated alarm bell)”, printed an alarm message reading, in part, “Approaching Criticality, SCRAM!” and activated the computer console alarm bell. This went over like a lead cloud in a station control room full of dignitaries when it occurred at initial criticality.
I installed and started up the Unit 2 computer (which had some significant implementation changes in addition to the differences due to the station design differences), without that task. Because the prime contractor for Unit 2 had been told not to allow a repetition of that event, the contractor’s contract technicians secured (Shut Down) the Unit 2 computer for initial criticality just when it would logically have been of most value.
Similar technical contexts and similar managerial errors have been identifiable in the much more public events at Three Mile Island (Harrisburg PA, USA) and at Chernobyl, Ukraine).
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Norman,
I have known you and Bill Livingston for many years, and respect your engineering minds, and solid characters. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION reconnects us once again.
* * *
The engineering mind is nearly as exquisite as the mind itself. I have been a student of the discipline and a fan of practitioners for many years.
I am especially enamored of Dr. Nikola Tesla. He was the genius of many things not least of which was the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Edison, whom he had worked for, refused to let him use his incandescent light bulb. So, he had to invent his own practically overnight and produce it to the tune of some 200,000 bulbs to create the magnificence lighting display at that World's Fair.
* * *
In the 1980s, I had the privilege of attending a week’s seminar in New York City in which Joseph Moses Juran conducted the entire affair. He was in his mid-eighties and sharp as a tack. I never saw anyone who could use an overhead projector and create such powerful and illuminating schematics as he did that week.
Juran was an devotee of Pareto focusing on the "vital few" problems rather than the "trivial many." He was an advocate of process in identifying and handling chronic problems at their source. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION supports his thesis but in a more sophisticated manner.
Juran was an immigrant like Tesla, only he was educated in Minneapolis where he went to high school and received his electrical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota. He worked for Bell Labs, and was part of that famous team at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Chicago, teaching statistical quality control. It was 1925 and he was 21. He would live to be 103.
The industrial engineer, Elton Mayo, joined the team at Hawthorne in 1927, and thus was born the “human relations movement,” and social engineering. Mayo noted that work improved whatever cosmetic changes were made. He built his thesis on manipulating workers for greater productivity, which then was refined in the human resources movement to the pusillanimous end of productivity in HR hands today.
* * *
The disconnect between context (culture) and process has failed to be repaired. Engineers have given us our modern society, but engineers have not been as attentive to the social context and cognitive biases of enterprise. Livingston treats this shortfall with care, profundity and ruthless clarity in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
* * *
My wife BB is business manager at a Jewish Day School. The head of school is opening up and changing severely the physical environment to teaching. Her eclectic ideas are all taken from engineering regarding openness and foresight. The problem with this strategy is that the teaching staff is old and familiar with a culture of command and control, the status quo, and business as usual.
Livingston recognizes this dilemma. He argues quite forcefully that you cannot change culture, and you can’t. But culture can change as the content, context and process of the design has a propitious time frame and a prevention strategy that takes into account proper cognizance of human factors. Culture proceeds consistent with natural law, and cannot be forced.
* * *
I have neither the competence nor the training to fully understand the toxic posture of management at the Japanese nuclear power facilities. What I do know, and Livingston’s book is a discourse on the challenge, is that engineering acumen must, and I emphasize must, consider social cultural aspects of operations as part of the DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
Culture is not something to slough off to human resources, or industrial engineering. Culture is something that must be designed into prevention. No one understands this better than Livingston.
Engineers have created our wonderful world, and watched it blow up in our faces in the Gulf of Mexico with the BP oilrig explosion on April 20, 2010, some forty-two days ago. My wonder is if they were victims of the Abilene Paradox.
* * *
At Honeywell, I worked closely with engineers in creating the Technical Education Program, after discovering that most of the technology engineers were working on had been developed after they had left school. Moreover, the highest paid engineers were the least competent because of their obsolescent skills. I persuaded management to fund a $ million training program for all engineers that was thriving when I retired in 1990.
* * *
We are past the point of criticizing management. Engineers must think like leaders and managers or we will never get on firm ground. The irony is that many CEOs were educated as engineers, but once in management, became guilty of all the things Livingston presents in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
* * *
Great engineering minds have captured human folly as well as the limits of institutional protocol. Alan Turning, William Ashby, and Rudy Starkermann, among others, have observed institutions dying from entropy, and society with them. It is why I would like to see non-engineers read this book.
* * *
Many years ago I published in a SHORT-CIRCUIT NEWSLETTER an article on the “Soul of the Engineer.” In that piece, I charged engineer were conformists, comfortable in their technology but indifferent to taking a step into the world beyond. It is that world that is inextricably connected to their world today.
Not to be misconstrued, I don’t expect engineers to become social engineers. Social engineers have accelerated entropy. I expect them to “take charge” at the level of consequences, to find a way to use control theory and reconnect enterprise to purpose in an open system.
* * *
Livingston writes, “If you knew so much about the impending train wreck, why didn’t you prevent it? It is unclear why we are so willing to accept the crisis response proposals from the same people that stood back and let the crisis unfold.” Think BP and the Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster.
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION can be read at many levels. My desire is that engineers no longer avoid conflict and confrontation, but become schooled in the politics of people as well as mathematical physics.
With confrontation avoidance, engineers create the habit of the ABILENE PARADOX. That is where the group decides on a single course of action, which every member of the group privately opposes, but embraces because it protects their jobs, is safe, and is much less wrenching. Think the BP oilrig disaster again.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2, 2010
* * *
AN ENGINEER WRITES
Some years ago, I wrote a one-page screed to Bill (author William L. Livingston) entitled Mihama Beach with a subtitle about the uniform toxic posture of management the world over. The centerline is the readiness of management to ignore outright technical requirements. The minor event I witnessed in Japan at Mihama Nuclear Generating Station Unit #2 (in 1972) presaged Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Norman
* * *
MIHAMA BEACH, OR MANAGEMENT IS THE SAME THE WORLD OVER!
Norman Dorn © June 2, 2010
In the early 1970s I accepted a field assignment from Westinghouse Electric to shoehorn process control computers into two nuclear power stations, Mihama Ichi-Go and Mihama Ni-Go.
These power stations (Unit 1 and Unit 2) shared buildings in a cove formed of decomposed lava, at the end of a peninsula into Wakasa Bay (Wakasa Wan) off of the Sea of Japan. The site was at Mihama-Cho (the village), Mikata-Gun (the township), Fukui-Ken (the prefecture), Kansai (the region), Honshu (the home island), Nihon or Nippon (Japan, the country).
These stations incorporated “pressurized water” type power reactors (PWRs). Unit 1 was of an earlier design (using 10’ long fuel pins) and Unit 2 was of a later design (using 12’ long fuel pins). The pressurized water reactor design uses (isotope U235) enriched fuel. Safety properties of this reactor design include self-regulating characteristics arrayed logically as defense in depth. The principal (very short reaction time) self-regulator is the so-called Doppler reactivity reduction that occurs in response to the heating of the fuel. At the point of initial criticality (first chain reaction and power production) the fuel is highly reactive as a result of being enriched, having no burn-in-created neutron poisons, and being physically cool for not having any decaying fission-products in it. The “physics testing” done during power production startup includes monitoring of the effectiveness of the “burnable” neutron poisons deliberately incorporated in the fuel and the “chemical shim” neutron poisons in solution in the pressurized primary coolant. One consequence of this startup balancing-act is that in the beginning-of-life of the initial load of fuel in a PWR, reactivity has a small positive feedback from temperature increase excursions.
* * *
The process monitoring computer in each station has the purpose of recording the operating history of the reactor and the steam turbine plant and providing guidance to the operators about station safe operation with regard to design criteria design basis events (Tech Specs).
The Unit 1 computer was installed and started up by my immediate supervisor. For fun he augmented the programming with a “task” that monitored the (neutron flux) intermediate range (log scale) sensor for an exponential flux growth rate (the external definition of a chain reaction that is just above the critical point). This task activated a “trouble location annunciator (and its associated alarm bell)”, printed an alarm message reading, in part, “Approaching Criticality, SCRAM!” and activated the computer console alarm bell. This went over like a lead cloud in a station control room full of dignitaries when it occurred at initial criticality.
I installed and started up the Unit 2 computer (which had some significant implementation changes in addition to the differences due to the station design differences), without that task. Because the prime contractor for Unit 2 had been told not to allow a repetition of that event, the contractor’s contract technicians secured (Shut Down) the Unit 2 computer for initial criticality just when it would logically have been of most value.
Similar technical contexts and similar managerial errors have been identifiable in the much more public events at Three Mile Island (Harrisburg PA, USA) and at Chernobyl, Ukraine).
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Norman,
I have known you and Bill Livingston for many years, and respect your engineering minds, and solid characters. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION reconnects us once again.
* * *
The engineering mind is nearly as exquisite as the mind itself. I have been a student of the discipline and a fan of practitioners for many years.
I am especially enamored of Dr. Nikola Tesla. He was the genius of many things not least of which was the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Edison, whom he had worked for, refused to let him use his incandescent light bulb. So, he had to invent his own practically overnight and produce it to the tune of some 200,000 bulbs to create the magnificence lighting display at that World's Fair.
* * *
In the 1980s, I had the privilege of attending a week’s seminar in New York City in which Joseph Moses Juran conducted the entire affair. He was in his mid-eighties and sharp as a tack. I never saw anyone who could use an overhead projector and create such powerful and illuminating schematics as he did that week.
Juran was an devotee of Pareto focusing on the "vital few" problems rather than the "trivial many." He was an advocate of process in identifying and handling chronic problems at their source. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION supports his thesis but in a more sophisticated manner.
Juran was an immigrant like Tesla, only he was educated in Minneapolis where he went to high school and received his electrical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota. He worked for Bell Labs, and was part of that famous team at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Chicago, teaching statistical quality control. It was 1925 and he was 21. He would live to be 103.
The industrial engineer, Elton Mayo, joined the team at Hawthorne in 1927, and thus was born the “human relations movement,” and social engineering. Mayo noted that work improved whatever cosmetic changes were made. He built his thesis on manipulating workers for greater productivity, which then was refined in the human resources movement to the pusillanimous end of productivity in HR hands today.
* * *
The disconnect between context (culture) and process has failed to be repaired. Engineers have given us our modern society, but engineers have not been as attentive to the social context and cognitive biases of enterprise. Livingston treats this shortfall with care, profundity and ruthless clarity in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
* * *
My wife BB is business manager at a Jewish Day School. The head of school is opening up and changing severely the physical environment to teaching. Her eclectic ideas are all taken from engineering regarding openness and foresight. The problem with this strategy is that the teaching staff is old and familiar with a culture of command and control, the status quo, and business as usual.
Livingston recognizes this dilemma. He argues quite forcefully that you cannot change culture, and you can’t. But culture can change as the content, context and process of the design has a propitious time frame and a prevention strategy that takes into account proper cognizance of human factors. Culture proceeds consistent with natural law, and cannot be forced.
* * *
I have neither the competence nor the training to fully understand the toxic posture of management at the Japanese nuclear power facilities. What I do know, and Livingston’s book is a discourse on the challenge, is that engineering acumen must, and I emphasize must, consider social cultural aspects of operations as part of the DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
Culture is not something to slough off to human resources, or industrial engineering. Culture is something that must be designed into prevention. No one understands this better than Livingston.
Engineers have created our wonderful world, and watched it blow up in our faces in the Gulf of Mexico with the BP oilrig explosion on April 20, 2010, some forty-two days ago. My wonder is if they were victims of the Abilene Paradox.
* * *
At Honeywell, I worked closely with engineers in creating the Technical Education Program, after discovering that most of the technology engineers were working on had been developed after they had left school. Moreover, the highest paid engineers were the least competent because of their obsolescent skills. I persuaded management to fund a $ million training program for all engineers that was thriving when I retired in 1990.
* * *
We are past the point of criticizing management. Engineers must think like leaders and managers or we will never get on firm ground. The irony is that many CEOs were educated as engineers, but once in management, became guilty of all the things Livingston presents in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
* * *
Great engineering minds have captured human folly as well as the limits of institutional protocol. Alan Turning, William Ashby, and Rudy Starkermann, among others, have observed institutions dying from entropy, and society with them. It is why I would like to see non-engineers read this book.
* * *
Many years ago I published in a SHORT-CIRCUIT NEWSLETTER an article on the “Soul of the Engineer.” In that piece, I charged engineer were conformists, comfortable in their technology but indifferent to taking a step into the world beyond. It is that world that is inextricably connected to their world today.
Not to be misconstrued, I don’t expect engineers to become social engineers. Social engineers have accelerated entropy. I expect them to “take charge” at the level of consequences, to find a way to use control theory and reconnect enterprise to purpose in an open system.
* * *
Livingston writes, “If you knew so much about the impending train wreck, why didn’t you prevent it? It is unclear why we are so willing to accept the crisis response proposals from the same people that stood back and let the crisis unfold.” Think BP and the Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster.
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION can be read at many levels. My desire is that engineers no longer avoid conflict and confrontation, but become schooled in the politics of people as well as mathematical physics.
With confrontation avoidance, engineers create the habit of the ABILENE PARADOX. That is where the group decides on a single course of action, which every member of the group privately opposes, but embraces because it protects their jobs, is safe, and is much less wrenching. Think the BP oilrig disaster again.
* * *
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS -- APOLOGIES & COMMENTARY
THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS – APOLOIGIES & COMMENTARY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
READERS WRITE:
Publishing is not what it was forty years ago, one writer writes, when you published your first book. Only too true. Others have mentioned an error in my missive. Still others wonder if I am self-conscious about being so personal. The answer is “no.” I confess that I do give a lot of personal information, but as one person said a long time ago, "Fisher, you manage to make candor the best blind of all." I suppose that is true. I am a very private person who uses candor as a narrative mechanism.
MY RESPONSE:
First of all, apologies are called for, as I failed to correctly name Truman Capote's book, which was IN COLD BLOOD, not "In True Blood.”
By a peculiar set of circumstances, I suppose, which perhaps has much to do with my first five years of life, I have had great comfort as a loner, reader and observer. It colors everything that I am and say.
For example, years ago, when I was an executive with Nalco, and constantly on the road, I took special comfort in reading my copy of SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, especially the columns of Granville Hicks. I can recall to this day what he said about John Updike, "He writes beautifully but has little to say." I happened to agree with Hicks but fortunately for Updike, not most readers.
There was a similar comfort with THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY in those days, which like Saturday Review is only a chiaroscuro shadow of what it once was.
During that halcyon period, I was known in Nalco as its "token intellectual." This charge was largely because I preferred reading to jawboning with my colleagues. It didn't help that the books they saw me reading were about such people as Erasmus, or books written by the likes of Camus and Sartre.
It was the age of psychedelic drugs, when I was a non-drinker and non-smoker, but knew much about the chemistry of these drugs through my reading of this mind-expanding culture. I was curious as to where it was going, but had no interest in climbing aboard.
Guys would see me reading and query me even about the word, psychedelic, which was foreign to them, as the range of their interests was chemical engineering, period.
In high school, on a football trip, eating training table in a restaurant on the road after a game, the shop teacher, who was also the bus driver, yelled at me from another table, "Fisher, you're so smart, what is osmosis?"
Without turning my head, I said, "passing of a fluid through a semi-permeable membrane to restore hydrostatic balance." Everyone laughed, except him.
I tell you this because I was out-of-step with my time, then, and am out-of-step with my time now. Go figure!
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
READERS WRITE:
Publishing is not what it was forty years ago, one writer writes, when you published your first book. Only too true. Others have mentioned an error in my missive. Still others wonder if I am self-conscious about being so personal. The answer is “no.” I confess that I do give a lot of personal information, but as one person said a long time ago, "Fisher, you manage to make candor the best blind of all." I suppose that is true. I am a very private person who uses candor as a narrative mechanism.
MY RESPONSE:
First of all, apologies are called for, as I failed to correctly name Truman Capote's book, which was IN COLD BLOOD, not "In True Blood.”
By a peculiar set of circumstances, I suppose, which perhaps has much to do with my first five years of life, I have had great comfort as a loner, reader and observer. It colors everything that I am and say.
For example, years ago, when I was an executive with Nalco, and constantly on the road, I took special comfort in reading my copy of SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, especially the columns of Granville Hicks. I can recall to this day what he said about John Updike, "He writes beautifully but has little to say." I happened to agree with Hicks but fortunately for Updike, not most readers.
There was a similar comfort with THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY in those days, which like Saturday Review is only a chiaroscuro shadow of what it once was.
During that halcyon period, I was known in Nalco as its "token intellectual." This charge was largely because I preferred reading to jawboning with my colleagues. It didn't help that the books they saw me reading were about such people as Erasmus, or books written by the likes of Camus and Sartre.
It was the age of psychedelic drugs, when I was a non-drinker and non-smoker, but knew much about the chemistry of these drugs through my reading of this mind-expanding culture. I was curious as to where it was going, but had no interest in climbing aboard.
Guys would see me reading and query me even about the word, psychedelic, which was foreign to them, as the range of their interests was chemical engineering, period.
In high school, on a football trip, eating training table in a restaurant on the road after a game, the shop teacher, who was also the bus driver, yelled at me from another table, "Fisher, you're so smart, what is osmosis?"
Without turning my head, I said, "passing of a fluid through a semi-permeable membrane to restore hydrostatic balance." Everyone laughed, except him.
I tell you this because I was out-of-step with my time, then, and am out-of-step with my time now. Go figure!
Be always well,
Jim
THESE INCORRIGIBLE TIMES!
THESE INCORIGIBLE TIMES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
* * *
There is no excuse for bad manners or bad behavior whatever the color of our skin, or whatever the socioeconomic circumstances of our plight. Never!
I have a friend, an educator, Ph.D. type, and language specialist in the Pinellas County School District of Pinellas County, Florida. Emails to her at school are constantly returned to me for “explicit language,” when the most profane language I use is damn or hell.
* * *
In my hour walk today, as I walked past Greco Junior High, I encountered six African Americans and Hispanics blocking the sidewalk. I weaved my way between them without comment, only to be greeted with these words once I had past.
“You have f—ken hair, bitch,” a girl said. I didn’t break my stride or look back. “Yeah, I mean you you tall SOB (only she said the words), you’re a f—ken, bitch, bitch with f—ken hair, I ought to…” Then apparently someone restrained her saying, “Don’t Tina” (or Tinicia, something like that).
I kept walking and was about to call the police on my cell phone because I was already exercised about the confetti on our pristine wall along Fowler Avenue. Greco students do this every year at the end of the school term, disfiguring private property for sport.
If I were an educator, they wouldn’t want me to be their principal, as they wouldn’t be able to hide behind their ethnicity, on their parents or their parents’ parents.
There is a modicum of decency and respect everyone warrants. I know I am tall still blond with short hair, and in reasonably good shape for my age. I also walk straight as if I have a board in my back. I suppose I epitomize the typical white male. I probably deserve some rebuke for not saying, “Pardon me,” as I moved between them, but I didn’t deserve this language.
This outburst is not only indicative of a small mind, but of someone heading for trouble and most likely a future burden on society. God help us, as the sixth graders I remember turned out pretty much as they were in sixth grade!
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
* * *
There is no excuse for bad manners or bad behavior whatever the color of our skin, or whatever the socioeconomic circumstances of our plight. Never!
I have a friend, an educator, Ph.D. type, and language specialist in the Pinellas County School District of Pinellas County, Florida. Emails to her at school are constantly returned to me for “explicit language,” when the most profane language I use is damn or hell.
* * *
In my hour walk today, as I walked past Greco Junior High, I encountered six African Americans and Hispanics blocking the sidewalk. I weaved my way between them without comment, only to be greeted with these words once I had past.
“You have f—ken hair, bitch,” a girl said. I didn’t break my stride or look back. “Yeah, I mean you you tall SOB (only she said the words), you’re a f—ken, bitch, bitch with f—ken hair, I ought to…” Then apparently someone restrained her saying, “Don’t Tina” (or Tinicia, something like that).
I kept walking and was about to call the police on my cell phone because I was already exercised about the confetti on our pristine wall along Fowler Avenue. Greco students do this every year at the end of the school term, disfiguring private property for sport.
If I were an educator, they wouldn’t want me to be their principal, as they wouldn’t be able to hide behind their ethnicity, on their parents or their parents’ parents.
There is a modicum of decency and respect everyone warrants. I know I am tall still blond with short hair, and in reasonably good shape for my age. I also walk straight as if I have a board in my back. I suppose I epitomize the typical white male. I probably deserve some rebuke for not saying, “Pardon me,” as I moved between them, but I didn’t deserve this language.
This outburst is not only indicative of a small mind, but of someone heading for trouble and most likely a future burden on society. God help us, as the sixth graders I remember turned out pretty much as they were in sixth grade!
* * *
THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS!
THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
REFERENCE:
You all know I write a lot. Most of you don't know, however, that I am one of those authors who continues to write despite the stonewall he continues to run into with spectacular regularity.
I share this with you because I think the most important thing is not SUCCESS, but PASSION.
My passion doesn't seem to diminish with age, but percolates at a steady and commanding rate. So often I am asked, "How much money do you make with all your books and articles?"
The sense is that I am a rich man from writing. The fact of the matter is that I am reasonably well off because I have not let my passions run amuck, plus I live modestly, and always have.
At this late stage in life, I know there is only one kind of sustaining wealth, and that is LOVE, and I found it some twenty-four years ago with BB. I am just as irascible as I ever was, just as direct and brutal in my comments, only now this is tempered by an angel at my side
To give credence to these comments, I offer an email to a friend in the publishing business. He has always been there when my confidence wavered, but not with bromides but with truth. It is why I respect him so.
JRF
* * *
LETTER TO AN EDITOR FRIEND:
Ned,
I was fascinated reading the piece on Harper Lee and her novel "To Kill A Mockingbird," which appears in the current (June) issue of SMITHSONIAN.
The novel is now fifty years old. Lee was implored to write other novels but declined. She did agree to help Truman Capote with his "In Cold Blood," and some say she essentially wrote it for him, which she has never claimed. The counter claim of course was that Capote wrote her book. The little twerp never discouraged the rumor. So much for rumors. Now 84, she is just as serene as she ever was.
It so happens I was reading the article while staying in line sending my CD to Simon & Schuster, MacMillan and Anchor Press. I didn't send it to St. Martin's Press, or Harper & Row on your advice, or to Prentice-Hall. BB looked up P-H and they don't actually exist anymore, leastwise as I remember the publisher.
Imagine, coming back from South Africa in 1969, sitting down and writing CONFIDENT SELLING in six-weeks, a single draft, sending it off to Prentice-Hall because it had published SELF-IMAGE PSYCHOLOGY by Maxwell Smaltz, and having it accepted within two weeks, and published in the following year.
The book was in print for twenty years, went through several reprints both in hard and soft copy, was serialized in a national magazine, and was included in an article in an American Air Line magazine on self-development. Moreover, once published, it brought people from the East and West coast and the Midwest to meet with me here in Florida, and talk about the book.
I was also the single guest on PBS's local affiliate's WEDU for one hour to discuss the book. Haslam's, which then was a famous independent bookseller, sold more than one hundred copies at the time.
What could be easier, right? Wrong! I've never gotten into that stream again.
The only time I've been paid for magazine articles was in conjunction with that serializing of the book, and some fifteen or twenty articles with SALES & OPPORTUNITY magazine in the 1970s.
BB has suffered greatly for my passion, as you could say I've been close to a total failure, as I've been unable to find a sustainable audience. I don't say this with regret because my passion is still high and I've written nearly every day since 1990, published eight book since CS, and more than 350 articles in national publications. My blog, alone, has some 500+ missives. I wonder how many more millions like myself are out there?
To this moment, however, no matter how much I have failed to make connection with others I continue to write from heart and head and with a singular passion.
Herman Melville quit writing for twenty years when an audience didn't materialize for MOBY DICK. Now, it sells in the hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Incidentally, Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD continues to sell about a million copies a year, worldwide. It has been translated into forty languages.
Thank you for your help and patience,
Always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010
REFERENCE:
You all know I write a lot. Most of you don't know, however, that I am one of those authors who continues to write despite the stonewall he continues to run into with spectacular regularity.
I share this with you because I think the most important thing is not SUCCESS, but PASSION.
My passion doesn't seem to diminish with age, but percolates at a steady and commanding rate. So often I am asked, "How much money do you make with all your books and articles?"
The sense is that I am a rich man from writing. The fact of the matter is that I am reasonably well off because I have not let my passions run amuck, plus I live modestly, and always have.
At this late stage in life, I know there is only one kind of sustaining wealth, and that is LOVE, and I found it some twenty-four years ago with BB. I am just as irascible as I ever was, just as direct and brutal in my comments, only now this is tempered by an angel at my side
To give credence to these comments, I offer an email to a friend in the publishing business. He has always been there when my confidence wavered, but not with bromides but with truth. It is why I respect him so.
JRF
* * *
LETTER TO AN EDITOR FRIEND:
Ned,
I was fascinated reading the piece on Harper Lee and her novel "To Kill A Mockingbird," which appears in the current (June) issue of SMITHSONIAN.
The novel is now fifty years old. Lee was implored to write other novels but declined. She did agree to help Truman Capote with his "In Cold Blood," and some say she essentially wrote it for him, which she has never claimed. The counter claim of course was that Capote wrote her book. The little twerp never discouraged the rumor. So much for rumors. Now 84, she is just as serene as she ever was.
It so happens I was reading the article while staying in line sending my CD to Simon & Schuster, MacMillan and Anchor Press. I didn't send it to St. Martin's Press, or Harper & Row on your advice, or to Prentice-Hall. BB looked up P-H and they don't actually exist anymore, leastwise as I remember the publisher.
Imagine, coming back from South Africa in 1969, sitting down and writing CONFIDENT SELLING in six-weeks, a single draft, sending it off to Prentice-Hall because it had published SELF-IMAGE PSYCHOLOGY by Maxwell Smaltz, and having it accepted within two weeks, and published in the following year.
The book was in print for twenty years, went through several reprints both in hard and soft copy, was serialized in a national magazine, and was included in an article in an American Air Line magazine on self-development. Moreover, once published, it brought people from the East and West coast and the Midwest to meet with me here in Florida, and talk about the book.
I was also the single guest on PBS's local affiliate's WEDU for one hour to discuss the book. Haslam's, which then was a famous independent bookseller, sold more than one hundred copies at the time.
What could be easier, right? Wrong! I've never gotten into that stream again.
The only time I've been paid for magazine articles was in conjunction with that serializing of the book, and some fifteen or twenty articles with SALES & OPPORTUNITY magazine in the 1970s.
BB has suffered greatly for my passion, as you could say I've been close to a total failure, as I've been unable to find a sustainable audience. I don't say this with regret because my passion is still high and I've written nearly every day since 1990, published eight book since CS, and more than 350 articles in national publications. My blog, alone, has some 500+ missives. I wonder how many more millions like myself are out there?
To this moment, however, no matter how much I have failed to make connection with others I continue to write from heart and head and with a singular passion.
Herman Melville quit writing for twenty years when an audience didn't materialize for MOBY DICK. Now, it sells in the hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Incidentally, Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD continues to sell about a million copies a year, worldwide. It has been translated into forty languages.
Thank you for your help and patience,
Always be well,
Jim