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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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