AMERICAN LEADERSHIP – SUBSTANCE OR STYLE, RHEORIC OR RITUAL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 30, 2010
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The History Channel has created a series of biographies of American presidents. Watching these biographies, having had an interest in presidential biographies for a good part of my life, I must say I was amazed at what liberties were taken with the so-called biographical truth.
I’ve also had an interest in leadership over the span of my working and reading life. Both biography and leadership have much to do with myth. They reflect the needs of the times, the quality of the people, the quality of life, the structure of society at that moment in history.
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George Washington was painted as a “great general” on the History Channel. He was not a great general, having only one significant victory in the entire Revolutionary War, but he was a great leader.
Style, not substance was the meter of the man. He looked like a leader, like a general. He was tall, stately, and impressive in his uniforms many of which he himself designed. He had many peculiarities; one was he did not like to be touched. His chief quality, other than his unassailable integrity was his courage. To his credit, he recognized his intellectual limitations and left much of the thinking to the great minds of his time.
Americans have a nascent affection for monarchy, for the pomp and circumstance of leadership, although they would be the first to deny this. They like their presidents to be presidential which means somewhat imperial.
Washington was presidential. The new nation needed a symbol and he qualified in every respect. John Adams thought he was more qualified, which he was, but lacked the size, glamour and mythical stature of his contemporary. Style won over substance.
Washington was however a wise man. He declined the invitation to be “president for life,” and scoffed at the idea of being the new nation’s monarch. Alexander Hamilton and many others were of such a mind.
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John Adams, like Alexander Hamilton, liked the European model of leadership. A little man with a big brain, Adams was a man who made friends with men of substance and ideas such as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and James Monroe. The Federalist Papers, the basis of our American Constitution and authority were created in this intellectual climate. This coterie of men believed in a strong central government. Adams was a quintessential leader of substance.
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Even in those early years of the New Republic there was the matter of slavery. Adams never owned slaves, never believed in slavery, and that was one reason he was president for only one term. His archenemy, Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. A slave counted three-fifths of a vote, and Jefferson earned 82 percent of the electoral slave vote. Even then, he only squeezed into office with a narrow margin. It is safe to say he could not have been elected president without the slave vote.
Never a popular president in the same sense as Washington, Jefferson was nonetheless the quintessential Renaissance man as leader and president. Evidence of this was the creation of his own Bible at variance with his Christian Bible.
Jefferson was advocate of an agrarian society with states rights taking precedence over central federal authority. He had a utopian vision of an expanding America, commissioning Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific North West. He also made the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the United States.
Jefferson like Washington lived in a regal estate while Adams never was so inclined. Hundreds of biographies have been written on Washington and Jefferson but few on Adams. Yet the United States today looks more like the nation Adams envisioned. Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, our Nation's birthday. They were both leaders of substance but Jefferson's style has lived on to this day, and Adams lack of style has left him largely forgotten.
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The first six presidents were members of the American gentry, part of the American aristocracy and ruling class. Andrew Jackson changed all that.
Jackson was actually robbed of being the sixth president when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Although winning the popular vote by a wide margin, he lacked the electoral votes, where his opponent, John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, was chosen as president.
John Quincy Adams was a remarkable man in his own right and became more famous after his presidency. He defended the slaves on The Amistad, who had mutinied on the Spanish slave ship, and won their acquittal.
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Whereas Jackson's six predecessors were well schooled in European traditions and culture, Jackson had no formal education. He fought in the American Revolution as a teenager, was taken prisoner by the British, and demonstrated bravery from the beginning.
Jackson was a man of the frontier, became a frontier lawyer, military man, slave owner, property owner, and in every sense the quintessential American self-made man.
He identified with the people and the people identified with him. Jefferson thought him the most calloused uncouth man he had ever met and a danger to society. Jackson thought Jefferson a pompous ass and hypocrite. He was never impressed or intimidated by culture, erudition, reputation or symbolic power.
Jackson was Scotch Irish with ancestors from Northern Ireland. He was in no way a European but the quintessential American from the expanding frontier.
Every chapter of his career was bold, brutal and unforgiving. There is an Irish saying it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. He personified this saying. He won the Battle of New Orleans, the last great battle of the War of 1812, where the British tried to take back the American colonies. He also marched into Florida destroying the British and Spanish colonies and taking the state for the United States without permission from President Monroe.
Jackson loved the frontier and the people of the frontier but loathed the Eastern Establishment. He couldn't abide their fine manners, palatial estates, and what he considered senseless posturing. He took on the heavyweights of his time such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun, as well as the American Bank, and obliterated them all.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called his time, “The Jackson Age." He did so because he saw that Jackson had placed his peculiar stamp on the presidency, on executive authority, indeed, on the modern presidency and its imperial character that exists to this day.
Jackson’s was an American president that historians find something of a rascal for lying to Native Americans, taking their land, and relocating them to the Pacific North West in what became known as “the trail of tears.”
Historians also note that he energized the common people into an identity that was uniquely American. Love or hate him, he was a man of substance with little patience with points for style.
What is easy to forget is that he saved the nation from division when John Calhoun promoted the Nullification Act, which would have allowed states to pay the taxes they wanted, and not to pay the taxes they didn’t. It would have compromised the presidency, federal authority, and the role of Congress. By successfully fighting this act, he postponed the Civil War for a generation.
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Abraham Lincoln, who was very different than Jackson in many ways, but very much like him in so many others. Both were self-educated lawyers, self-made men soaring to prominence on their plebeian origins and their virtues, both from the hinterland. That is where their commonality ends, or does it?
Lincoln had been a soldier but not one of great distinction. When his generals failed him in the Civil War, however, he was in fact commander in chief in a military as well as presidential sense.
Lincoln extols the virtues of the autodidact. It is reflected in his eloquence and temperament, his courage and vision. He is the quintessential leader of substance.
That said style seems to interest historians and most Americans. Perhaps this is because he was never able to complete the substance of his presidency. He was a man with demons, a melancholy man, perhaps a clinically depressed man in the modern psychiatric sense, a sick man like many artists of substance.
One can only imagine what the modern press would have done with the likes of Lincoln and Jackson, two of our greatest presidents, two men of great substance and leadership, two men with little in common with the European model.
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Fast-forward again to the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy came into prominence in the television age where Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the expression “the media is the message," or "it's all about style, baby!"
Kennedy was quintessential style with little acquaintance much less interest in substance.
He was made an iconic hero of World War Two in a book called “PT 109,” a torpedo book he commanded that sunk largely due to his incompetence, or was it a lack of attention to detail? In any case, he nearly fell into Japanese hands.
Later, he reached celebrity proportions with his book, “Profiles in Courage,” a book largely written by a devoted aid. It became a national best seller by his father purchasing hundreds of books across the nation in major markets to get it on the bestseller list.
Kennedy was an indifferent senator from Massachusetts with no prominent legislation to his credit while a US Senator. Yet, he ran and won a controversial presidential election – controversial because he had to win Illinois to have the necessary electoral votes, and Mayor Daley of Chicago saw that he got them by hook or by crook.
Kennedy won the 1960 presidential television debates with his opponent, Richard Milhous Nixon. He didn't have to win on debate points but on style, presence, charm, and being more photogenic than five o’clock shadow Nixon.
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Kennedy proved that leadership had moved into a new zone, a new nomenclature, and a new identity with the led. From the beginning, his wife Jackie saw them right out of the pages of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. She envisioned her husband's presidency as Camelot, and the American people loved it.
It was “American Idol” only a couple generations early. Kennedy was master of the media and cultivated close relationships with the Washington, DC press corps. He had them eating out of his hand at his table, and they adored him for making them feel something other than scribblers.
This found them suspending criticism of his presidential dalliances turning a blind eye to his affairs with women as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, a 19-year-old intern, and an East German spy. He became a “what if” president, safely in the arms of history without having to enact sweeping change in Civil Rights, to deal with Vietnam, violence across American cities, or an ambivalent economy. He failed to show any of the legislative skills to brokering such initiatives when a US Senator.
He proved that leadership in the age of mass television communication had become as much symbolic as real, as much rhetoric as ritual, a carefully orchestrated phenomenon that need have little to do with real substance. What you see is not what you get. McLuhan said television was a cold medium with its only warmth what the viewer puts into it.
* * *
With Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson took office as the quintessential dealmaker, which was his previous role in the US Senate. He attempted to take care of Kennedy’s “what if” unfinished business, using his legislative skills to rally a tax reduction bill through Congress, and to free up his Civil Rights Bill from the quicksand of the House of Representatives.
Johnson was the great force that brought disenfranchised African Americans into the mainstream with voting rights and access to affordable higher education.
Johnson was the quintessential leader of substance without the symbolic clout necessary for the age. He was in the imperial presidency that Jackson had so carefully created, and which Kennedy had made his own breathing new life into it.
Johnson was handicapped from the first. He had contempt for the media, undermined it, and was incompetent in dealing with it. His Great Society, which was a grand scheme, fell on the sword of massive military expenditures in an unwinable war in Vietnam. He literally starved the Great Society of the funds critical to its success by a policy of “guns and butter.”
One of the low points of his presidency which conveyed his lack of the imperial aura of Kennedy was when he lifted his shirt to show his gallbladder operation scar to the Washington press like a decadent Roman emperor.
* * *
Leadership has always been high drama. It is the reason for the appeal of Shakespearian plays. Leaders today as leaders throughout history have pivoted on the horns of the dilemma between tragedy and comedy, actors in the realm of rites, ritual and symbols, performers who must know the media in which they operate or the play cannot but end as tragedy.
Johnson dwarfed Kennedy in the realm of legislation, he dwarfed him in substance with an ability to translate ideas into actions, but he was out of his depth when it came to the world of symbolism, the world of Camelot, the world of myth and media, where sound bites are the medium of the message.
* * *
Fast-forward again to the presidency of Barak Obama.
Obama is the Internet darling of the times, the face on FaceBook, and the technological wind up doll of text messages, BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and laptops.
Obama is the trained intellectual that wants to be seen as just folks like those across the street, who is the quintessential symbol of rhetoric as reality, ritual as performance, open shirt, no coat, no tie, easy gate like that of the jock with the insouciance of having all day to just hang out, the possessor of the memory and eclectic omniscience of a Charlie Rose, the everyman with a synthetic identity as an African American when he more resembles the United Nations, a man who has come to power when power means radically different things than it has ever meant before.
Power is entering the end of the age of hierarchies, of infallible authority, of regal deference to the once powerful, and to the beginning of a new age where a few no longer decide for the many, but the many decide for themselves.
It is obvious that this is not clear to President Barak Obama, but time will make it so. Will he have the prescience and luck of Jackson, the deep pondering depth of Lincoln, or will he be a celebrity president of the X, Y, and Z generations? Stay tuned because leadership is a changing.
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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.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
DR. FISHER'S EPILOGUE to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION -- AUTHOR LIVINGSTON'S ENGINEER AS PRAGMATIST!
DR. FISHER’S EPILOGUE to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION
AUTHOR LIVINGSTON’S ENGINEER AS PRAGMATIST!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 25, 2010
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REFERENCE:
This is submitted as Epilogue to William L. Livingston IV’s second edition of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
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PREAMBLE:
Daniel H. Pink, in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” (2006), states, “We may not all be Dali or Degas, but today we must all be designers.” Pink claims the future belongs to a different sort than left-brain thinkers such as lawyers, accountants and engineers. He envisions the cerebral baton being handed off to designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers, creative and empathic “right-brain” thinkers.
That is all very well to envision, but the world has been created and built, the world we all enjoy, by left-brain thinking engineers. The problem, and author William L. Livingston IV addresses this, is that barriers to the sustainability of engineering design have been mounting as they encounter social cultural constraints. Pink's "right-brain" thinkers have encountered these same barriers. Livingston recognizes this as the “compass of competency” realizing the technological (content) and sociological (context) realms must be met and satisfied to complete the process (ends intended).
Engineers are problem solvers, and Livingston is an engineer and inventor holding more than one hundred patents. He systematically, and I would add courageously, undresses institutional society to its natural naked state. He does this by uncovering manmade barriers that affect all society, non-engineers as well as engineers, right brain thinkers as well as left brain thinkers. In the process, DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is an empathic story of our times.
Although I come out of the discipline, my life’s work has been mainly in human engineering. That said D4P is the most compelling reading I have encountered in decades.
This is not to suggest the book is about barriers. Rather, it is a guide to and appreciation of the inevitability of natural law in all aspects of life. In the process, it shows how natural law works in the most mundane of circumstances, and how to use it more effectively, especially as designers of prevention systems blindsided by litigation.
We live in a time when things are falling apart, when safety and security issues are put on the back burner or on hold with more attention given to immediate profit and self-aggrandizement. The engineer is not alone in suffering for this attention, but the engineer is central to our manmade universe. The lessons natural law teaches the engineer apply to us all.
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NATURAL LAW AND ENGINEERING
The laws of nature are irrefutable and often ignored but always at our peril. It is as consequential for humanistic engineers as it is for professional engineers. Livingston shows how institutional infallibility, command and control authority, rigorous policies and procedures, and the maintenance of business as usual practices in the face of changing demands can prove disastrous. My organizational development (OD) consultancy work confirms his thesis. Here is one example:
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The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) outside Washington, DC grew from 84 to 840 sworn officers in ten years. The department, despite its appreciation, was run as if it had remained its original size. It was micromanaged to the extreme by a resolute command staff. In addition, every new officer, whatever the skill base, spent three years on patrol before reassignment.
One thousand African Americans were transferred from metropolitan Washington, DC to Herndon, a small community in the county’s jurisdiction, without a clear design, plan or objective. Herndon African Americans came, over time, to congregate around a shopping center in their isolated community with spontaneous social activities forming something of a ritual. It was the place to hang out for the youth as no recreational facilities had been provided. Unemployment among young adults was over fifty percent.
With no separate youth center, entertainment took the form of mounting loud speakers on the roofs of some shops in the center blaring out music day and night. Young people would drive cars around the center, car horns a blasting.
This practice riled the white community. It eventually resulted in the city council issuing a noise ordinance necessitating the dismantling of the loud speakers along with imposing a curfew on the black youth. Anger simmered.
The more aggressive young males vented their spleen by ignoring the curfew. A 27-year-old man in particular was the boldest. Seemingly always in trouble with the law, he acquired something of hero status among his peers and younger boys.
The cocky black man became a special case to one particular white FCPD officer. One day this officer caught the youth driving with a suspended license and followed him to the 7/11 store in the center. There the youth and officer had a confrontation. The officer pushed the black man into the convenient store’s cooler. The youth grabbed the officer’s nightstick to defend himself hitting the officer on the shoulder and arm. The officer unloaded his service revolver on the man killing him. A riot followed.
Word spread about what had happened. Fires were started. The shopping center went up in flames. FCPD was not organized to deal with a civil disturbance of this magnitude. It lacked the training, protocol, leadership, and even equipment including flack vests. Several hours passed before flack vests were acquired from another county. Meanwhile, firefighters threatened with a rain of Molotov cocktails retreated to safety. The center continued to burn and the chaos grew as firefighters waited for police protection.
A stalemate ensued as black leaders refused to talk to police negotiators. Hours went by before a white police officer, a man demoted for stealing a hunting knife out of stolen properties, came forward. He had a good relationship with the black community, the only officer that did, and was able to eventually quell the riot.
American Management Association brought me in to study the situation after the fact. It was soon apparent that the design of operations was decades behind current police requirements. Several anomalies were discovered including the hand counting of complaints while computers at headquarters were sitting idle. A computer specialist with a master’s degree was in the field but hadn’t as yet completed his three years of patrol. The intervention became the subject of my master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot).
What has this to do with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION? It is offered to show D4P is as relevant to human combustibles as to material combustibles, as much a guide and source of appropriate algorithms as the physical system designs by engineers.
* * *
Natural law cannot be ignored for a second in the social or material world. If it is ignored, all hell threatens to break loose. Entropy alerts us to the fact that everything is in a state of flux returning to stasis, or zero energy. We know also that spontaneous combustion is a type of combustion, which occurs without an external ignition source. It is usually a slow process that can take several hours of decomposition/oxidation with heat built up to a point of ignition. The emotional climate in the African American community of Herndon was primed for and parallel to such ignition.
Nature is unrelenting. It has no conscience. It has no morality other than natural law. Nature simply “is.”
The great benefit of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), beyond looking at design and legal challenges professional engineers face, is how the social and cultural fabric of society complicates such efforts.
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WHEN ENGINEERING RISKS EXCEED NATURE’S LAWS
D4P was published before the British Petroleum oilrig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven men, and spewing hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil over a three-month period. A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oilrig exploded indicates that many concerns about safety practices were not voiced for fear of reprisals.
In this survey commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and they often saw unsafe behavior on the rig. Some workers mentioned poor equipment reliability and the lack of priority for planned maintenance. “Run it, break it, fix it,” is the way one worker put it. “That’s how we work.”
Much of the controversy centered around blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves, which failed to stop the surging well. Why this was so remains one of the biggest remaining mysteries of the disaster.
Curiously, essentially all rig workers felt able to voice safety concerns, but these were restricted to issues that could be resolved directly on the rig. No one was to challenge the thinking of the chain of command hierarchy or its conduct of business. It speaks to the infallibility of authority that Livingston so carefully elucidates. It was considered unwise to report actions leading to potentially “risky” situations without reprisals.
As one worker put it, “The company is always using fear tactics. All these games and your mind gets tired.” Nearly everyone among the workers believed the Transocean system of tracking health and safety issues on the rig was counterproductive. Rhetoric and reality were on different pages.
Many workers admitted to entering fake data to try to circumvent the system. This is known as “See, think, act, reinforce, track.” The consensus was safety was a charade. The disaster unfortunately proved this to be the case. Livingston captured the essence of this in his “ready, fire, aim” and “run, break, fix” discussion in “Have Fun At Work” (1988). I mention it here because it is not a new problem of concern to him. He does not see the corporate learning curve appearing in an ascending arc. Rather, it seems relegated to repeating the same errors in judgment and the same crisis management routine as if devoted to the same circular logic. Livingston puts a human face on this conundrum.
* * *
LOOKING BACK TO THE FUTURE – THE GULF COAST IN 2030
Now that the oilrig is capped, the cleanup is in progress, national media is camped on the site reporting daily on the evening news the status of the cleanup, the US Coast Guard is a palpable presence, and British Petroleum is acting as a concerned if not fully apologetic participant in the disaster cleanup pouring mega dollars into the mix, there is little sense that all of this will be played out in the not too distant future, but history suggests otherwise.
Cleanup will retreat to hit and miss, the national media will be long gone, the US Coast Guard off to other adventures, while British Petroleum will be playing coy with all its promises as the only ones getting rich in the affair now are carpet bagging lawyers.
* * *
Even the university crowd, all those scientific experts that have played a role in this drama, who have used their science and laboratories to minimize the damage and to put the best face on the disaster, will fade into oblivion, as funding for the science now underway will be withdrawn.
* * *
Every indicator is that we are a knower not a learner society, a crisis management society, a society in the present panic of now. We are consumed with concern during a crisis, but are apt to quietly retire off stage to business as usual once the crisis is over.
It is why DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is so significant. Livingston understands and gets inside the psychodrama, the collusion, the greed, the litigation, the corporate posturing, the promises and dodges to reveal how professional engineers can anticipate, navigate and circumvent the societal predilection to the heroic at the expense of the mundane. Nothing is more important than defining manmade problems in real terms before they go awry.
* * *
Some twenty-one years ago on March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker struck a reef near Valdez, Alaska. The ship spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, destroying billions of fish eggs, crippling the salmon fishery industry, and virtually wiping out the Sound’s herring. This happened when the ship’s captain was declared legally drunk.
Twenty-one years later:
(1) Exxon’s endless lawsuits continue with millions of pages of documents. Fishermen, cannery workers and others have yet to find out how much they may ultimately receive in compensation for their losses.
(2) The payout of $1.6 billion represents what Exxon Mobil Corporation will make to plaintiffs, maybe. The company continues to fight the matter.
(3) Some 6,000 litigants have died since the first lawsuits were filed. Some 32,000 plaintiffs remain.
(4) Twenty (20) percent of what the plaintiffs will get will be vacuumed up by some 80 law firms that have represented the plaintiffs.
(5) No scientific study was conducted for the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers. The possible health risks and hazards to cleanup workers resulting from an oil spill remains a mystery.
In point of fact, going back to 1989, Exxon made nice for months after the disaster but once the bloom faded from public outrage Exxon brought in its heavy hitters and played hardball with litigants and continues to do so to this day.
* * *
BP Oilrig Disaster of 2010 will look a lot like Exxon Valdez Redux in 2030 for a few simple reasons.
(1) Institutions are organized as corporations with the sense of being a law unto themselves.
(2) Institutions are not learning but knowing organizations.
(3) Institutions will go back to that knower role once the murky waters clear a little.
(4) Institutions are committed to hindsight thinking and that is why they are always entertaining new disasters.
(5) Institutions are built around the idea of infallibility with a rigorous chain of command, a definitive protocol where loyalty and obedience are vigorously enforced, and where the status quo and business as usual are maintained as if the disaster never happened.
(6) Self-regulated individuals obedient only to their own muse and creative thinking threaten institutions with their penchant for foresight thinking.
* * *
Lawyers have a symbiotic connection with this closed corporate institutional system. Lawyers feed off it on a rich diet of collusion with corporate alliances. A combination of industry recklessness and failure to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION led to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. It was as much a failure of the Federal Government as it was British Petroleum, as much a failure of our individual unquenchable thirst for oil as it was for our reluctance to change.
As sobering as the failure for action after the crisis response was for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and is likely to be for the BP Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster, it is not a new pattern, and therefore is likely to be repeated.
The evidence is that the blame game takes precedence over learning and responsibility. On May 11, 2010, leaders of major oil companies acted like middle aged little boys in dark suits who could never envision failing as did British Petroleum. The Chairman of the Boards of four of the largest oil companies broke their nearly two-month silence on the major spill in the Gulf of Mexico before a Congressional hearing. In unison, they blamed BP for mishandling the well that caused the disaster.
Seeking to insulate their companies from the continuing crisis in the Gulf, and the political backlash in Washington, the leaders of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips insisted that they would not have made the same mistakes that led to the well explosion and the deaths of eleven rig workers on April 20, 2010.
Yet, sad to say, on closer inspection not a single one of these oil companies had a DESIGN FOR PREVENTION plan anymore sophisticated than what BP had, nor did any of these companies have a strategy to deal with such a disaster should it occur.
* * *
ALL TOO HUMAN – WHEN NATURE IS DISREGARDED
The value of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is that it recognizes that the problem of intention and delivery cannot escape the human dimension or its labyrinth of false turns and comedic interludes. It has always been the case, as demonstrated in this eclectic collection of disasters of the past, all of which could have been prevented.
The SS SULTANA was a Mississippi River steamboat paddle wheeler destroyed in an explosion on April 27, 1865. It was carrying Yankee officers and men to their homes in the north. They had been in Confederate prisons. The ship had a capacity for less than one-half of its 2,400 passengers. An estimated 1,800 passengers were killed when the ship’s four boilers exploded. The boilers had been ill repaired for this load. The boat had to zigzag north to combat the raging currents of the Mississippi’s swollen spring waters. This forced the overworked boilers to bang against each other. Add to this the captain deactivated the boilers’ safety valves to attain maximum speed. The disaster received little attention in the press as President Lincoln had been assassinated a few days earlier.
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The BHOPAL, INDIA UNION CARBIDE disaster of December 2, 1984, was the worst industrial catastrophe ever. A leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas initially killed 2,259 with the government’s death toll estimate surpassing 16,000. Some 8,000 died within the first week and another 8,000 from gas-related diseases. The Bhopal complex is still a toxic site today.
During the night of December 2, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate. The resulting exothermic reaction increased the temperature inside the tanker to over 392 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the pressure to a level the tank was not designed to withstand. This forced the emergency venting of pressure from the MIC holding tank, releasing a large volume of toxic gases into the atmosphere. The gas flooded the city of Bhopal, people waking with a burning sensation in their lungs, thousands dying almost immediately.
* * *
The CHICAGO FLOOD occurred on April 13, 1992, when the damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opened into a breach at the Kinzie Street Bridge. It flooded the basements of retail stores and an underground shopping district in Chicago’s Downtown Loop with an estimated 250 million gallons of water.
New pilings were required at the bridge. Unbeknown to the work crews there was an abandon tunnel under the bridge that had once transported coal and goods. A piling did not actually punch through the tunnel wall, but caused it to crack with mud oozing out. Inspectors noted the seeping and issued a work order calling for a repair job costing $7,000. This was delayed because of bureaucratic red tape. Once the tunnel was breeched and the downtown flooded, the clean up cost the city of Chicago nearly $2 billion. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed.
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SAMPOONG DEPARTMENT STORE in Seoul, South Korea collapsed on June 29, 1995. It was the largest peacetime disaster in South Korea history with 501 people killed and 937 injured.
The fifth floor literally cracked around the stanchions with the store full of shoppers. These cracks had been noted months before but nothing was done about them other than to move displays to hide the eyesore. When the cracks spread and the floor finally gave way, the entire building collapsed falling like a house of cards. Some 40,000 shoppers visited the store daily.
Several design factors came to light after the fact. The original building was designed to be four floors, but the owners wanted a fifth floor. The first architectural firm declined the job stating the building couldn’t support another floor. A second architectural firm disagreed and went ahead with the fifth floor.
In addition, the building’s air conditioning unit of some 50 tons was installed on the roof of the fifth floor, imposing a load of four times the building’s design limit. The building was also constructed on unstable ground. It also came to light that inferior concrete was used with the iron rods in the concrete, which were poorly placed especially in the upper floors. The building was less than six years old.
* * *
Each disaster was accompanied by the appearance of complicity between engineering design and operations, between builders and architects. The contingencies in each instance signaled the potential for disaster, yet poor maintenance and excessive risk management were allowed to continue. It is impossible to imagine ethical professional engineers knowingly exceeding the limits of natural law.
This brings me to why D4P is so valuable. In my book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I attempt to show how we stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs. I describe the untenable social constructs of our society that keep us stuck. I failed to get inside these constructs and to show their faulty construction.
Livingston does not have this problem. It is truly remarkable the way he gets inside the very nature of what prevents us from making real, sustainable and constant progress. He reveals what is there if we but have eyes to see. If we don’t have such eyes, he gives us such eyes. He does so without flinching, without apology and without mercy. He is not a prophet of doom but an advocate of engagement. He takes the reader through the social minefield and deposits him safely on the other side of good sense. He does this with such breadth and depth that new mysteries are uncovered to create a roadmap of discovery.
THE RELEVANCE OF HUMAN ENGINEERING IN D4P
Livingston peals away the societal onion to reveal it has no core, as it is a total invention of the genius of man but without any possible escape from the laws of nature. In German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’s book, “Peeling the Onion” (2008), he says, “Peeled, the onion renews itself, it brings tears, only during the peeling does it speak the truth.” Livingston’s D4P is a book like that onion. These are a few of such truths:
Society has invented institutions that operate as if infallible, meaning neither institutional authority nor operations are to be questioned.
A hierarchy has been created to dispatch this infallible authority with due diligence to maintain the status quo and conduct business as usual whatever the countermanding requirements might be.
Since infallibility implies without error, there is little or no learning from false steps. They are repeated again and again, unresolved in circular certitude.
Institutional behavior is contrived at the expense of candor with charisma taking precedence to purpose, rhetoric to action, cosmetic change to real change.
Creativity is stultified because it requires an open, fallible, corrective, learning climate and this is not possible in the conventionally constructed organization.
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The beauty of science is that when some lesson of nature is revealed it can be replicated with unerring consistency. Once you factor man in the equation, as Livingston points out, cognitive biases immediately contaminate the process. “Universal Law,” he points out, “is a universal language, reading the same to lawyers and engineers alike.” It reads the same to artists and artisans as well.
Livingston devotes a great deal of attention to the conundrum that exists between hindsight and foresight thinking. His compelling argument is to find a common ground between the hard transparency of natural law and civil law, between ethics and engineering practices, between the hindsight of strict rules and pragmatic foresight.
My take on D4P is something of a departure from its central thrust but on a parallel track, and that track is human engineering. The human side of engineering has been my beat. It is ironic if not surprising, knowing the man as I do, that he has been able to crystallize the disturbances that throw modern man off stride and into the paradox of his dilemma.
D4P provides a concise and usable frame of reference to human engineering that should serve the pragmatic engineer well.
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
If there is a criticism of this work, it is there is too much of too many. Livingston has distilled a complete library in a single volume. D4P represents the challenge of professional engineers in the age of litigation. It does so by introducing the engineer to the dynamics of human engineering, dynamics that may at first blush appear to have little to do with engineering, but Livingston is directing the engineer’s mind to its most vulnerable aspect, the constant collision between polar opposites, Yin and Yang.
It is not that the engineer is unfamiliar with this litany of complementary opposites. It is that he fails to get inside them, as we all do, as Livingston is working at a conceptual level that is not germane to most of us. He turns the polar opposites inside out, as he would an engineering problem and thus gains control of complexity instead of, what is all too common with Yin and Yang, having complexity controlling us.
When unions came to power immediately after WWII, they became as hierarchical, bureaucratic and hindsight oriented as such employers as General Motors. If anything killed American manufacturing over the last sixty years, it has been unions mirroring the face of corporate management and then acting in collusion with it.
Livingston writes, “In Yin (hindsight thinking), there is only one political sin: independence; and only one political virtue: obedience. In Yang (foresight thinking), politically there are neither sins nor virtues, only self-motivated goal-seeking.”
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If this were offered as rationale for where we are and how we got there, the reader could go oh-um, but it is not. Livingston is explaining the autopoietic and homeostatic dynamic, the paradox central to the complementary opposites of Yin and Yang:
(1) Yin is hindsight oriented and looks to what it already knows; Yang is foresight oriented and looks to what it can find out.
(2) Yin is infallible and looks to perpetuating that mystique; Yang is intelligent and therefore vulnerable to change, changing conditions, and contradiction.
(3) Yin is obsessed with means; Yang is committed to ends.
(4) Yin develops hierarchies if more than four people are involved; Yang is flat and interdependent when less than five people are involved.
(5) Yin seeks answers in analysis; Yang discovers answers in synthesis.
(6) Yin says, “yes” to the Nash Equilibrium; Yang says “no” to it.
An entire seminar could be devoted to exploring these interfering gaps between Yin and Yang by pealing the onion of institutional infallibility, authority, self-righteous omniscience, and hindsight thinking. It is of no value to push an institution to act in a way contrary to its nature, anymore than it is possible to redirect a hurricane from its destructive path. Livingston knows cultures cannot be changed, but they can be avoided.
TRUST AND SELF-CREATION IN THE DIALETIC OF STRUCTURE/FUNCTION
What can we do? We can design to prevent the damage from being catastrophic. Problems are controlled, not solved, and treating chronic problems at their source materially improves outcomes.
Livingston exposes a number of human engineering myths with operational alternatives to make D4P a possibility. With Yang attractors, rules and the chain of command are considered impediments to goal seeking. Self-control and self-regulation replace hierarchies with the core element of trust, which is reciprocity. A cultural climate of trust reinforces and supports trust. It is not that there is no room for hidden agendas. There is no necessity for them.
The application of intelligence can neither be sold nor embraced by an institution. Intelligence only functions in a fallible system, and such a system cannot be an institution. Scary stuff?
Livingston writes, “Anything that clings to the doctrine of infallibility, cannot also be intelligent.” This can be an academic institution, an ideological organization, or scientific consortium. Only workers can assemble the best criteria for shelving the rulebook and going with intelligence. Rules originate from hindsight thinking. Put another way, the deification of hindsight is necessarily attended by the persecution of foresight.
Paradoxically, we must have Yin to have Yang, and Yang, Yin. They are two social system attractors and complementary opposites that together constitute a greater whole.
* * *
D4P can be studied at many levels far removed from engineering and litigation, per se. Leadership, for example, is assumed to be a top down hierarchy. Yet, today the art of warfare is not being advanced by generals, but by engineers. Nor is the explosion in commerce and industry being advanced by CEOs, but by technologists. Still, the anachronistic models persist.
The very idea of a hierarchy signifies the institution holds infallibility as its centerpiece. No hierarchy has survived without its rules, its business as usual practices, its infallible authority, and its unsullied loyalty. Management, whatever the institution, calls loyalty to rules, a display of “intelligence,” when it means “obedience to authority.”
* * *
In hindsight, information is gathered, not created. Ever since the Peters and Waterman book, “In Search of Excellence” (1982), we have been off the rails thinking excellence was something that could be sought, not created. The popularity of the book, and all like it that followed, indicate how deeply entrenched we are in our social programming of hindsight thinking. Livingston is merciless as he peals this onion to reveal it has no core.
“Core truths in life lay deeper than verbal descriptions,” he writes, “what we perceive as true is organized into belief systems.” We all come to believe them to be true when in fact they are inventions. Belief systems bring more attention to describing rather than defining problems. We have seen this in the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. It took nearly three months to cap the well after millions of gallons of crude spewed into the Gulf while countless descriptions of what to do were considered. Imagine if foresight had such a device ready in its failsafe prevention.
* * *
There is an army of minds in this D4P that step out of the shadows to take a stand and enlighten us.
William Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety reduces complexity to manageable levels.
Rudy Starkermann devises ways to avoid what he calls “multiplicity” by going around it.
Alan Turning of World War II decoding fame explains his mathematical proof of “Joint Restriction,” which is that “rules of action held as infallible cannot also be intelligent.”
Kurt Godel’s “Incomplete Theorem” is mentioned in support of Turning’s thesis to demonstrate an absolute mathematical cleavage between infallibility and intelligence.
John Forbes Nash, the subject of the film, “A Beautiful Mind,” and winner of the Nobel Prize for his contribution to Game Theory, introduces us to the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
We also are introduced to the “Abilene Paradox,” an expression that may be strange to us, but not the concept. The Abilene Paradox represents a group of people collectively who decide on a course of action that is counter to the preference of any of the individual members of the group. Sound familiar?
Then there are strange words such as “autopoiesis” that you may not find in your dictionary. It means “auto (self)-poiesis (creation), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.
Complexity is another word with which we are all familiar but it is more like a mountain we never plan to climb. It is there and always has been there. Livingston sees complexity differently. He looks at complexity not as that mountain but in terms of our limited capacity to fit it into our limited cranial limits. “Goal seeking is productive to purpose only when it is within the realm of the achievable.”
If we cannot climb the mountain, we can find a path around or through it with the appropriate tool kit. Complexity need not overwhelm us if we weigh the interference. It is important to respect boundaries for “To end right you must start right.” You don’t fight Mother Nature but live in the now with her. This is pragmatic.
D4P is the epistle of the pragmatic engineer living in the “now” in terms of the god Janus looking both ways at once in the present, while Yin (hindsight) and Yang (foresight) complement each other. Livingston illustrates the dilemma with this: “An institution emphasizes its past into a barstool and then sits on it?” It is time to get off the barstool. Enjoy a good read!
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AUTHOR LIVINGSTON’S ENGINEER AS PRAGMATIST!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 25, 2010
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REFERENCE:
This is submitted as Epilogue to William L. Livingston IV’s second edition of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.
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PREAMBLE:
Daniel H. Pink, in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” (2006), states, “We may not all be Dali or Degas, but today we must all be designers.” Pink claims the future belongs to a different sort than left-brain thinkers such as lawyers, accountants and engineers. He envisions the cerebral baton being handed off to designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers, creative and empathic “right-brain” thinkers.
That is all very well to envision, but the world has been created and built, the world we all enjoy, by left-brain thinking engineers. The problem, and author William L. Livingston IV addresses this, is that barriers to the sustainability of engineering design have been mounting as they encounter social cultural constraints. Pink's "right-brain" thinkers have encountered these same barriers. Livingston recognizes this as the “compass of competency” realizing the technological (content) and sociological (context) realms must be met and satisfied to complete the process (ends intended).
Engineers are problem solvers, and Livingston is an engineer and inventor holding more than one hundred patents. He systematically, and I would add courageously, undresses institutional society to its natural naked state. He does this by uncovering manmade barriers that affect all society, non-engineers as well as engineers, right brain thinkers as well as left brain thinkers. In the process, DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is an empathic story of our times.
Although I come out of the discipline, my life’s work has been mainly in human engineering. That said D4P is the most compelling reading I have encountered in decades.
This is not to suggest the book is about barriers. Rather, it is a guide to and appreciation of the inevitability of natural law in all aspects of life. In the process, it shows how natural law works in the most mundane of circumstances, and how to use it more effectively, especially as designers of prevention systems blindsided by litigation.
We live in a time when things are falling apart, when safety and security issues are put on the back burner or on hold with more attention given to immediate profit and self-aggrandizement. The engineer is not alone in suffering for this attention, but the engineer is central to our manmade universe. The lessons natural law teaches the engineer apply to us all.
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NATURAL LAW AND ENGINEERING
The laws of nature are irrefutable and often ignored but always at our peril. It is as consequential for humanistic engineers as it is for professional engineers. Livingston shows how institutional infallibility, command and control authority, rigorous policies and procedures, and the maintenance of business as usual practices in the face of changing demands can prove disastrous. My organizational development (OD) consultancy work confirms his thesis. Here is one example:
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The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) outside Washington, DC grew from 84 to 840 sworn officers in ten years. The department, despite its appreciation, was run as if it had remained its original size. It was micromanaged to the extreme by a resolute command staff. In addition, every new officer, whatever the skill base, spent three years on patrol before reassignment.
One thousand African Americans were transferred from metropolitan Washington, DC to Herndon, a small community in the county’s jurisdiction, without a clear design, plan or objective. Herndon African Americans came, over time, to congregate around a shopping center in their isolated community with spontaneous social activities forming something of a ritual. It was the place to hang out for the youth as no recreational facilities had been provided. Unemployment among young adults was over fifty percent.
With no separate youth center, entertainment took the form of mounting loud speakers on the roofs of some shops in the center blaring out music day and night. Young people would drive cars around the center, car horns a blasting.
This practice riled the white community. It eventually resulted in the city council issuing a noise ordinance necessitating the dismantling of the loud speakers along with imposing a curfew on the black youth. Anger simmered.
The more aggressive young males vented their spleen by ignoring the curfew. A 27-year-old man in particular was the boldest. Seemingly always in trouble with the law, he acquired something of hero status among his peers and younger boys.
The cocky black man became a special case to one particular white FCPD officer. One day this officer caught the youth driving with a suspended license and followed him to the 7/11 store in the center. There the youth and officer had a confrontation. The officer pushed the black man into the convenient store’s cooler. The youth grabbed the officer’s nightstick to defend himself hitting the officer on the shoulder and arm. The officer unloaded his service revolver on the man killing him. A riot followed.
Word spread about what had happened. Fires were started. The shopping center went up in flames. FCPD was not organized to deal with a civil disturbance of this magnitude. It lacked the training, protocol, leadership, and even equipment including flack vests. Several hours passed before flack vests were acquired from another county. Meanwhile, firefighters threatened with a rain of Molotov cocktails retreated to safety. The center continued to burn and the chaos grew as firefighters waited for police protection.
A stalemate ensued as black leaders refused to talk to police negotiators. Hours went by before a white police officer, a man demoted for stealing a hunting knife out of stolen properties, came forward. He had a good relationship with the black community, the only officer that did, and was able to eventually quell the riot.
American Management Association brought me in to study the situation after the fact. It was soon apparent that the design of operations was decades behind current police requirements. Several anomalies were discovered including the hand counting of complaints while computers at headquarters were sitting idle. A computer specialist with a master’s degree was in the field but hadn’t as yet completed his three years of patrol. The intervention became the subject of my master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot).
What has this to do with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION? It is offered to show D4P is as relevant to human combustibles as to material combustibles, as much a guide and source of appropriate algorithms as the physical system designs by engineers.
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Natural law cannot be ignored for a second in the social or material world. If it is ignored, all hell threatens to break loose. Entropy alerts us to the fact that everything is in a state of flux returning to stasis, or zero energy. We know also that spontaneous combustion is a type of combustion, which occurs without an external ignition source. It is usually a slow process that can take several hours of decomposition/oxidation with heat built up to a point of ignition. The emotional climate in the African American community of Herndon was primed for and parallel to such ignition.
Nature is unrelenting. It has no conscience. It has no morality other than natural law. Nature simply “is.”
The great benefit of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), beyond looking at design and legal challenges professional engineers face, is how the social and cultural fabric of society complicates such efforts.
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WHEN ENGINEERING RISKS EXCEED NATURE’S LAWS
D4P was published before the British Petroleum oilrig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven men, and spewing hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil over a three-month period. A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oilrig exploded indicates that many concerns about safety practices were not voiced for fear of reprisals.
In this survey commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and they often saw unsafe behavior on the rig. Some workers mentioned poor equipment reliability and the lack of priority for planned maintenance. “Run it, break it, fix it,” is the way one worker put it. “That’s how we work.”
Much of the controversy centered around blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves, which failed to stop the surging well. Why this was so remains one of the biggest remaining mysteries of the disaster.
Curiously, essentially all rig workers felt able to voice safety concerns, but these were restricted to issues that could be resolved directly on the rig. No one was to challenge the thinking of the chain of command hierarchy or its conduct of business. It speaks to the infallibility of authority that Livingston so carefully elucidates. It was considered unwise to report actions leading to potentially “risky” situations without reprisals.
As one worker put it, “The company is always using fear tactics. All these games and your mind gets tired.” Nearly everyone among the workers believed the Transocean system of tracking health and safety issues on the rig was counterproductive. Rhetoric and reality were on different pages.
Many workers admitted to entering fake data to try to circumvent the system. This is known as “See, think, act, reinforce, track.” The consensus was safety was a charade. The disaster unfortunately proved this to be the case. Livingston captured the essence of this in his “ready, fire, aim” and “run, break, fix” discussion in “Have Fun At Work” (1988). I mention it here because it is not a new problem of concern to him. He does not see the corporate learning curve appearing in an ascending arc. Rather, it seems relegated to repeating the same errors in judgment and the same crisis management routine as if devoted to the same circular logic. Livingston puts a human face on this conundrum.
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LOOKING BACK TO THE FUTURE – THE GULF COAST IN 2030
Now that the oilrig is capped, the cleanup is in progress, national media is camped on the site reporting daily on the evening news the status of the cleanup, the US Coast Guard is a palpable presence, and British Petroleum is acting as a concerned if not fully apologetic participant in the disaster cleanup pouring mega dollars into the mix, there is little sense that all of this will be played out in the not too distant future, but history suggests otherwise.
Cleanup will retreat to hit and miss, the national media will be long gone, the US Coast Guard off to other adventures, while British Petroleum will be playing coy with all its promises as the only ones getting rich in the affair now are carpet bagging lawyers.
* * *
Even the university crowd, all those scientific experts that have played a role in this drama, who have used their science and laboratories to minimize the damage and to put the best face on the disaster, will fade into oblivion, as funding for the science now underway will be withdrawn.
* * *
Every indicator is that we are a knower not a learner society, a crisis management society, a society in the present panic of now. We are consumed with concern during a crisis, but are apt to quietly retire off stage to business as usual once the crisis is over.
It is why DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is so significant. Livingston understands and gets inside the psychodrama, the collusion, the greed, the litigation, the corporate posturing, the promises and dodges to reveal how professional engineers can anticipate, navigate and circumvent the societal predilection to the heroic at the expense of the mundane. Nothing is more important than defining manmade problems in real terms before they go awry.
* * *
Some twenty-one years ago on March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker struck a reef near Valdez, Alaska. The ship spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, destroying billions of fish eggs, crippling the salmon fishery industry, and virtually wiping out the Sound’s herring. This happened when the ship’s captain was declared legally drunk.
Twenty-one years later:
(1) Exxon’s endless lawsuits continue with millions of pages of documents. Fishermen, cannery workers and others have yet to find out how much they may ultimately receive in compensation for their losses.
(2) The payout of $1.6 billion represents what Exxon Mobil Corporation will make to plaintiffs, maybe. The company continues to fight the matter.
(3) Some 6,000 litigants have died since the first lawsuits were filed. Some 32,000 plaintiffs remain.
(4) Twenty (20) percent of what the plaintiffs will get will be vacuumed up by some 80 law firms that have represented the plaintiffs.
(5) No scientific study was conducted for the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers. The possible health risks and hazards to cleanup workers resulting from an oil spill remains a mystery.
In point of fact, going back to 1989, Exxon made nice for months after the disaster but once the bloom faded from public outrage Exxon brought in its heavy hitters and played hardball with litigants and continues to do so to this day.
* * *
BP Oilrig Disaster of 2010 will look a lot like Exxon Valdez Redux in 2030 for a few simple reasons.
(1) Institutions are organized as corporations with the sense of being a law unto themselves.
(2) Institutions are not learning but knowing organizations.
(3) Institutions will go back to that knower role once the murky waters clear a little.
(4) Institutions are committed to hindsight thinking and that is why they are always entertaining new disasters.
(5) Institutions are built around the idea of infallibility with a rigorous chain of command, a definitive protocol where loyalty and obedience are vigorously enforced, and where the status quo and business as usual are maintained as if the disaster never happened.
(6) Self-regulated individuals obedient only to their own muse and creative thinking threaten institutions with their penchant for foresight thinking.
* * *
Lawyers have a symbiotic connection with this closed corporate institutional system. Lawyers feed off it on a rich diet of collusion with corporate alliances. A combination of industry recklessness and failure to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION led to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. It was as much a failure of the Federal Government as it was British Petroleum, as much a failure of our individual unquenchable thirst for oil as it was for our reluctance to change.
As sobering as the failure for action after the crisis response was for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and is likely to be for the BP Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster, it is not a new pattern, and therefore is likely to be repeated.
The evidence is that the blame game takes precedence over learning and responsibility. On May 11, 2010, leaders of major oil companies acted like middle aged little boys in dark suits who could never envision failing as did British Petroleum. The Chairman of the Boards of four of the largest oil companies broke their nearly two-month silence on the major spill in the Gulf of Mexico before a Congressional hearing. In unison, they blamed BP for mishandling the well that caused the disaster.
Seeking to insulate their companies from the continuing crisis in the Gulf, and the political backlash in Washington, the leaders of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips insisted that they would not have made the same mistakes that led to the well explosion and the deaths of eleven rig workers on April 20, 2010.
Yet, sad to say, on closer inspection not a single one of these oil companies had a DESIGN FOR PREVENTION plan anymore sophisticated than what BP had, nor did any of these companies have a strategy to deal with such a disaster should it occur.
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ALL TOO HUMAN – WHEN NATURE IS DISREGARDED
The value of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is that it recognizes that the problem of intention and delivery cannot escape the human dimension or its labyrinth of false turns and comedic interludes. It has always been the case, as demonstrated in this eclectic collection of disasters of the past, all of which could have been prevented.
The SS SULTANA was a Mississippi River steamboat paddle wheeler destroyed in an explosion on April 27, 1865. It was carrying Yankee officers and men to their homes in the north. They had been in Confederate prisons. The ship had a capacity for less than one-half of its 2,400 passengers. An estimated 1,800 passengers were killed when the ship’s four boilers exploded. The boilers had been ill repaired for this load. The boat had to zigzag north to combat the raging currents of the Mississippi’s swollen spring waters. This forced the overworked boilers to bang against each other. Add to this the captain deactivated the boilers’ safety valves to attain maximum speed. The disaster received little attention in the press as President Lincoln had been assassinated a few days earlier.
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The BHOPAL, INDIA UNION CARBIDE disaster of December 2, 1984, was the worst industrial catastrophe ever. A leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas initially killed 2,259 with the government’s death toll estimate surpassing 16,000. Some 8,000 died within the first week and another 8,000 from gas-related diseases. The Bhopal complex is still a toxic site today.
During the night of December 2, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate. The resulting exothermic reaction increased the temperature inside the tanker to over 392 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the pressure to a level the tank was not designed to withstand. This forced the emergency venting of pressure from the MIC holding tank, releasing a large volume of toxic gases into the atmosphere. The gas flooded the city of Bhopal, people waking with a burning sensation in their lungs, thousands dying almost immediately.
* * *
The CHICAGO FLOOD occurred on April 13, 1992, when the damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opened into a breach at the Kinzie Street Bridge. It flooded the basements of retail stores and an underground shopping district in Chicago’s Downtown Loop with an estimated 250 million gallons of water.
New pilings were required at the bridge. Unbeknown to the work crews there was an abandon tunnel under the bridge that had once transported coal and goods. A piling did not actually punch through the tunnel wall, but caused it to crack with mud oozing out. Inspectors noted the seeping and issued a work order calling for a repair job costing $7,000. This was delayed because of bureaucratic red tape. Once the tunnel was breeched and the downtown flooded, the clean up cost the city of Chicago nearly $2 billion. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed.
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SAMPOONG DEPARTMENT STORE in Seoul, South Korea collapsed on June 29, 1995. It was the largest peacetime disaster in South Korea history with 501 people killed and 937 injured.
The fifth floor literally cracked around the stanchions with the store full of shoppers. These cracks had been noted months before but nothing was done about them other than to move displays to hide the eyesore. When the cracks spread and the floor finally gave way, the entire building collapsed falling like a house of cards. Some 40,000 shoppers visited the store daily.
Several design factors came to light after the fact. The original building was designed to be four floors, but the owners wanted a fifth floor. The first architectural firm declined the job stating the building couldn’t support another floor. A second architectural firm disagreed and went ahead with the fifth floor.
In addition, the building’s air conditioning unit of some 50 tons was installed on the roof of the fifth floor, imposing a load of four times the building’s design limit. The building was also constructed on unstable ground. It also came to light that inferior concrete was used with the iron rods in the concrete, which were poorly placed especially in the upper floors. The building was less than six years old.
* * *
Each disaster was accompanied by the appearance of complicity between engineering design and operations, between builders and architects. The contingencies in each instance signaled the potential for disaster, yet poor maintenance and excessive risk management were allowed to continue. It is impossible to imagine ethical professional engineers knowingly exceeding the limits of natural law.
This brings me to why D4P is so valuable. In my book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I attempt to show how we stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs. I describe the untenable social constructs of our society that keep us stuck. I failed to get inside these constructs and to show their faulty construction.
Livingston does not have this problem. It is truly remarkable the way he gets inside the very nature of what prevents us from making real, sustainable and constant progress. He reveals what is there if we but have eyes to see. If we don’t have such eyes, he gives us such eyes. He does so without flinching, without apology and without mercy. He is not a prophet of doom but an advocate of engagement. He takes the reader through the social minefield and deposits him safely on the other side of good sense. He does this with such breadth and depth that new mysteries are uncovered to create a roadmap of discovery.
THE RELEVANCE OF HUMAN ENGINEERING IN D4P
Livingston peals away the societal onion to reveal it has no core, as it is a total invention of the genius of man but without any possible escape from the laws of nature. In German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’s book, “Peeling the Onion” (2008), he says, “Peeled, the onion renews itself, it brings tears, only during the peeling does it speak the truth.” Livingston’s D4P is a book like that onion. These are a few of such truths:
Society has invented institutions that operate as if infallible, meaning neither institutional authority nor operations are to be questioned.
A hierarchy has been created to dispatch this infallible authority with due diligence to maintain the status quo and conduct business as usual whatever the countermanding requirements might be.
Since infallibility implies without error, there is little or no learning from false steps. They are repeated again and again, unresolved in circular certitude.
Institutional behavior is contrived at the expense of candor with charisma taking precedence to purpose, rhetoric to action, cosmetic change to real change.
Creativity is stultified because it requires an open, fallible, corrective, learning climate and this is not possible in the conventionally constructed organization.
* * *
The beauty of science is that when some lesson of nature is revealed it can be replicated with unerring consistency. Once you factor man in the equation, as Livingston points out, cognitive biases immediately contaminate the process. “Universal Law,” he points out, “is a universal language, reading the same to lawyers and engineers alike.” It reads the same to artists and artisans as well.
Livingston devotes a great deal of attention to the conundrum that exists between hindsight and foresight thinking. His compelling argument is to find a common ground between the hard transparency of natural law and civil law, between ethics and engineering practices, between the hindsight of strict rules and pragmatic foresight.
My take on D4P is something of a departure from its central thrust but on a parallel track, and that track is human engineering. The human side of engineering has been my beat. It is ironic if not surprising, knowing the man as I do, that he has been able to crystallize the disturbances that throw modern man off stride and into the paradox of his dilemma.
D4P provides a concise and usable frame of reference to human engineering that should serve the pragmatic engineer well.
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
If there is a criticism of this work, it is there is too much of too many. Livingston has distilled a complete library in a single volume. D4P represents the challenge of professional engineers in the age of litigation. It does so by introducing the engineer to the dynamics of human engineering, dynamics that may at first blush appear to have little to do with engineering, but Livingston is directing the engineer’s mind to its most vulnerable aspect, the constant collision between polar opposites, Yin and Yang.
It is not that the engineer is unfamiliar with this litany of complementary opposites. It is that he fails to get inside them, as we all do, as Livingston is working at a conceptual level that is not germane to most of us. He turns the polar opposites inside out, as he would an engineering problem and thus gains control of complexity instead of, what is all too common with Yin and Yang, having complexity controlling us.
When unions came to power immediately after WWII, they became as hierarchical, bureaucratic and hindsight oriented as such employers as General Motors. If anything killed American manufacturing over the last sixty years, it has been unions mirroring the face of corporate management and then acting in collusion with it.
Livingston writes, “In Yin (hindsight thinking), there is only one political sin: independence; and only one political virtue: obedience. In Yang (foresight thinking), politically there are neither sins nor virtues, only self-motivated goal-seeking.”
* * *
If this were offered as rationale for where we are and how we got there, the reader could go oh-um, but it is not. Livingston is explaining the autopoietic and homeostatic dynamic, the paradox central to the complementary opposites of Yin and Yang:
(1) Yin is hindsight oriented and looks to what it already knows; Yang is foresight oriented and looks to what it can find out.
(2) Yin is infallible and looks to perpetuating that mystique; Yang is intelligent and therefore vulnerable to change, changing conditions, and contradiction.
(3) Yin is obsessed with means; Yang is committed to ends.
(4) Yin develops hierarchies if more than four people are involved; Yang is flat and interdependent when less than five people are involved.
(5) Yin seeks answers in analysis; Yang discovers answers in synthesis.
(6) Yin says, “yes” to the Nash Equilibrium; Yang says “no” to it.
An entire seminar could be devoted to exploring these interfering gaps between Yin and Yang by pealing the onion of institutional infallibility, authority, self-righteous omniscience, and hindsight thinking. It is of no value to push an institution to act in a way contrary to its nature, anymore than it is possible to redirect a hurricane from its destructive path. Livingston knows cultures cannot be changed, but they can be avoided.
TRUST AND SELF-CREATION IN THE DIALETIC OF STRUCTURE/FUNCTION
What can we do? We can design to prevent the damage from being catastrophic. Problems are controlled, not solved, and treating chronic problems at their source materially improves outcomes.
Livingston exposes a number of human engineering myths with operational alternatives to make D4P a possibility. With Yang attractors, rules and the chain of command are considered impediments to goal seeking. Self-control and self-regulation replace hierarchies with the core element of trust, which is reciprocity. A cultural climate of trust reinforces and supports trust. It is not that there is no room for hidden agendas. There is no necessity for them.
The application of intelligence can neither be sold nor embraced by an institution. Intelligence only functions in a fallible system, and such a system cannot be an institution. Scary stuff?
Livingston writes, “Anything that clings to the doctrine of infallibility, cannot also be intelligent.” This can be an academic institution, an ideological organization, or scientific consortium. Only workers can assemble the best criteria for shelving the rulebook and going with intelligence. Rules originate from hindsight thinking. Put another way, the deification of hindsight is necessarily attended by the persecution of foresight.
Paradoxically, we must have Yin to have Yang, and Yang, Yin. They are two social system attractors and complementary opposites that together constitute a greater whole.
* * *
D4P can be studied at many levels far removed from engineering and litigation, per se. Leadership, for example, is assumed to be a top down hierarchy. Yet, today the art of warfare is not being advanced by generals, but by engineers. Nor is the explosion in commerce and industry being advanced by CEOs, but by technologists. Still, the anachronistic models persist.
The very idea of a hierarchy signifies the institution holds infallibility as its centerpiece. No hierarchy has survived without its rules, its business as usual practices, its infallible authority, and its unsullied loyalty. Management, whatever the institution, calls loyalty to rules, a display of “intelligence,” when it means “obedience to authority.”
* * *
In hindsight, information is gathered, not created. Ever since the Peters and Waterman book, “In Search of Excellence” (1982), we have been off the rails thinking excellence was something that could be sought, not created. The popularity of the book, and all like it that followed, indicate how deeply entrenched we are in our social programming of hindsight thinking. Livingston is merciless as he peals this onion to reveal it has no core.
“Core truths in life lay deeper than verbal descriptions,” he writes, “what we perceive as true is organized into belief systems.” We all come to believe them to be true when in fact they are inventions. Belief systems bring more attention to describing rather than defining problems. We have seen this in the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. It took nearly three months to cap the well after millions of gallons of crude spewed into the Gulf while countless descriptions of what to do were considered. Imagine if foresight had such a device ready in its failsafe prevention.
* * *
There is an army of minds in this D4P that step out of the shadows to take a stand and enlighten us.
William Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety reduces complexity to manageable levels.
Rudy Starkermann devises ways to avoid what he calls “multiplicity” by going around it.
Alan Turning of World War II decoding fame explains his mathematical proof of “Joint Restriction,” which is that “rules of action held as infallible cannot also be intelligent.”
Kurt Godel’s “Incomplete Theorem” is mentioned in support of Turning’s thesis to demonstrate an absolute mathematical cleavage between infallibility and intelligence.
John Forbes Nash, the subject of the film, “A Beautiful Mind,” and winner of the Nobel Prize for his contribution to Game Theory, introduces us to the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
We also are introduced to the “Abilene Paradox,” an expression that may be strange to us, but not the concept. The Abilene Paradox represents a group of people collectively who decide on a course of action that is counter to the preference of any of the individual members of the group. Sound familiar?
Then there are strange words such as “autopoiesis” that you may not find in your dictionary. It means “auto (self)-poiesis (creation), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.
Complexity is another word with which we are all familiar but it is more like a mountain we never plan to climb. It is there and always has been there. Livingston sees complexity differently. He looks at complexity not as that mountain but in terms of our limited capacity to fit it into our limited cranial limits. “Goal seeking is productive to purpose only when it is within the realm of the achievable.”
If we cannot climb the mountain, we can find a path around or through it with the appropriate tool kit. Complexity need not overwhelm us if we weigh the interference. It is important to respect boundaries for “To end right you must start right.” You don’t fight Mother Nature but live in the now with her. This is pragmatic.
D4P is the epistle of the pragmatic engineer living in the “now” in terms of the god Janus looking both ways at once in the present, while Yin (hindsight) and Yang (foresight) complement each other. Livingston illustrates the dilemma with this: “An institution emphasizes its past into a barstool and then sits on it?” It is time to get off the barstool. Enjoy a good read!
* * *
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
This is written in response to an invitation from The Journal of Technology and Investment “call for papers.” Over the past forty years working and living on four continents as a chemist, chemical sales engineer, and corporate executive, I have witnessed and participated in the transformation of the workforce from blue collar to professional, but with lagging institutional support. My published works have drawn attention to this as economics behave badly if the psychology and cultural programming of corporate systems fail to be in sync with change.
* * *
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
CORPORATE MYOPIA
We recently saw Goldman Sachs of Wall Street fined $550 million for suspect investment practices. Goldman Sachs took the slap on the wrist admitting no culpability. We have also seen Steven Jobs of Apple, Inc. reacting to criticism of the latest iteration of the iPhone. Jobs went public providing a menu of options for customers including a complete refund of the purchase. Goldman Sachs will pay the fine and go back to business as usual, which is how the crisis developed in the first place.
Goldman Sachs is a traditionally managed corporation structured to function with a hierarchical chain of command with the appearance of infallible authority firmly entrenched in the status quo. It is a closed system with well-defined roles and relationships, policies and procedures. The climate is constructed to support business as usual practices where loyalty is construed to mean obedience.
Apple is open and fluid in roles and relationships enabling it to be responsive to changing demands in a timely fashion. Workers are self-regulated in a creative environment with the free exchange of ideas.
These complimentary opposites in business development, both autopoietic and homeostatic, compose the greater whole of enterprise as the past confronts the future:
(1) Hindsight thinking (Goldman Sachs); foresight thinking (Apple)
(2) Rigid collective conformity (Goldman Sachs), individualism (Apple)
(3) Infallible (Goldman Sachs), fallible (Apple)
(4) Rules (Goldman Sachs), process (Apple)
(5) General (Goldman Sachs), local (Apple)
(6) Means emphasis (Goldman Sachs), ends orientation (Apple)
(7) Heavy emphasis on analysis (Goldman Sachs), synthesis (Apple)
Most corporations, including Goldman Sachs, although replete with professionals, have never left the “Golden Age” of American capitalism. This age extended from the end of World War II through the 1970s when college drop outs such as Jobs and Bill Gates made their presence known. Robert Reich in “Supercapitalism” (2007) sees these innovators as the wrecking ball of the common culture.1 What he marks as the collapse of core values of institutional society, such as the notion of the “common good,” only changed to self-interest and “personhood.”2
The infallible, closed-minded, status quo authority oriented corporation is losing its traction. Everyone seemingly wants to climb on the nonexistent managerial pyramid. The times are replete with such contradictions. The working middle class is disappearing while the wealth gap has grown the widest since 1929. Meanwhile, an army of college "drop out" innovators has created the new electronic economy that marches to a different drummer. Corporate society over the last quarter century has not only lost its steam but its way.
* * *
Apple and firms like it have left the institutional model. There is no special ethics for professionals. They do not have a special moral status. Obedience to moral law of self-creative individuals is by taking responsibility and is motivated by respect for the moral law. Obedience to civil law is by giving duties and is motivated by fear of punishment. .
A generation ago, Jobs stepped down and back to the traditional institutional model by elevating John Scully of Pepsi fame to run Apple. The corporation nearly went under. Jobs came back in 1997. He restored the open innovative climate and business stability. Easily missed in this transition was a clash of cultures between institutional hindsight and progressive foresight thinking. Not only has institutional infallibility been stultifying for young Turks such as Jobs and Gates, it was not organized to respond to accelerating external demands.
Two decades earlier, Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get H-P to produce or market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, the way, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.3
* * *
In 1980, IBM was asleep at the wheel when hit with the personal computer surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete engineering scheme, having the most sophisticated facilities in the industry. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for pc’s at the time.
IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, met with IBM and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do something posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid SC nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.4
In all this excitement, missed was the fact that IBM, the quintessential infallible institution with a bible of prudent industrial practices, was yesterday’s story because it was molded in an early twentieth century mindset.5
* * *
We have watched the automotive industry spin out of control with General Motors going bankrupt and having to be bailed out by the Federal Government. It was clear in the number of appearances of GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner before Congress in 2009 that GM was paralyzed to do anything. GM’s rise to power and decline towards insolvency parallels the rise and fall of infallible institutional authority.
An indicator of the slow motion death of big institutions such as GM is that decades pass between the first authoritative portents of erosion and the end. In the case of GM, a candidate for GM's CEO, Elmer Johnson, on January 21, 1988 wrote this memo to his peers:
“We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” 6
The mindsets are passed down year after year, intact, giving free reign to accumulate. Even a drop in market share in 1988 from 54 percent to 19 percent failed to trigger remedial action.
THE NEW REALITY
Obedience to authority is blind to operational consequences and indifferent to both stated goals and damage inflicted on clients. In the new reality, pragmatic foresight has no hierarchy. Autonomy is packaged with responsibility only for outcomes. On the other hand, strict rules are essential to maintain a hierarchy with a preoccupation with means.
Since nearly all corporations preserve the command configuration that defines them, autonomous individualism becomes a center of heresy. The choice is not a wide one, submit and be crushed, or find your way to another disposition.
Jobs and Gates did so by forming their own companies. Individuals that stay on are in the system but not of it. They cannot change the culture. The core values of operative life lie deeper than verbal descriptions and are organized into belief systems that never have to be stated. Conformity is an exacting pressure.
Individuals, confounded by this programming yet defying of it, retreat into passive behaviors.7 This is especially true of professionals. They believe themselves trained to lead, but forced to fit. Nothing cripples an organization more than its corporate sins.8
Unfortunately, when corporations confront out-of-scope disturbances, they often confuse what has become a poison with medicine. Several iterative steps over the last eighty years have come to roost.
In 1927, Elton Mayo did an industrial engineering study at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. Workers responded to the attention, launching the humanistic movement. Human resource management followed.
It seems clearly evident now that the tealeaves were misread. In 1929, the Great Depression hit throwing the world into economic chaos. The Robber Barons of the nineteenth century had clashed with workers. They felt forced to hire strike busters, which sullied their reputations. To distance themselves from this daily confrontation, they created a new mechanism called “management.” Managers rose out of the dark days of the depression when unemployment reached twenty-five percent of the labor force.
Desperate to get people back to work, the Roosevelt Administration launched a number of public works projects. These only met with modest success. World War II changed the dynamic. The civilian population was mobilized into industrial production in support of the military. This succeeded in lifting the economy out of the depression where government intervention had failed. David Halberstam captured this remarkable performance in “The Next Century” (1991):
“With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944 we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.”9
It was American management’s greatest hour. Management as much as any other single factor proved instrumental in winning World War II. Typically, there were only three levels of management. Workers often enjoyed some independence and control of their work, workstations, setting up machines, purchasing materials, planning schedules and even charting their productivity.
This all disappeared following the boom years of the 1950s.10 The union movement gained steam with such leaders as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The UAW sued for wage and benefit concessions at the expense of control of work. Management, which was in its ascendancy was willing to concede massive entitlements.
Management believed this would lead to greater loyalty, productivity, and labor peace. It did just the opposite. The UAW’s demands of automakers could not stem the growing disconnect between workers and work.
In a strange way, the automotive industry and the UAW became mirror images of each other in corporate style and greed. The problem with entitlements was that workers felt entitled to them irrespective of the level of productivity.
John Strohmeyer captured the essence of this disconnect in “Crisis in Bethlehem” (1986). The steel industry created a “furlough program” in the 1960s. The senior half of the workforce was given an additional 13-week paid leave every five years. Steel workers already had about every benefit and financial concession imaginable. The idea was to manage manpower requirements more effectively, provide the workforce with the incentive to pursue self-enhancing interests, and ultimately, to improve productivity.
Most workers got a second job. The program was a colossal failure. Strohmeyer muses, “The steel industry’s excesses crippled the goose that laid the golden egg.”11
THREE DOMINANT WORKPLACE CULTURES
Over the last forty years, the systematic process of making workers management dependent and increasingly counter dependent on the corporation resulted in learned helplessness and passive behaviors.
Many workers have become suspended in terminal adolescent, immature and reactive with wants treated as needs seeing themselves as victims of circumstances.
Such programming cannot be changed overnight. Cultural change is not brought about by war or plague, but in using the new artifacts instead of the old. Cultural change proceeds when corporations assimilate new artifacts. The old ways are not displaced but wither away by disuse.
In the present climate, it is best to allow the culture to die out. There is no point trying to change the unchangeable, but to engineer around the unmovable constraints. Once the signature constraints are identified, and the ironies accepted, a bypass highway can be built.
Workers are sensitive to the power structure of the organization and to their own personal goals and welfare. Company policies are followed on the presumption they are infallible and will solve problems. Too often the policies describe a system that causes the problems with practices responsible for creating problems it then fails to solve.
We have seen this demonstrated with the Culture of Comfort. A downward spiral is fashioned in which the presumed solution makes matters worse, causing a redoubling of efforts to resolve driving operations instead into the Culture of Complacency and not the Culture of Contribution.12
Complicating the picture further, management and organizational dominance was tolerable for decades by workers when position power and knowledge power were assumed to be the province of management. Blue collar workers were understood to be poorly educated, and as Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of “The Principles of Scientific Management,” (1911) once put it:
“Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”13
Granted, it is a cognitive bias, and Taylor is not alone in having his. The significance of such biases operates to displace information from its axis of truth. Cognitive biases have proven counterproductive.
For one, the workforce in 1950 was ninety percent blue collar and ten percent white collar; in 1960 it was already fifty percent blue collar and fifty percent white collar, in 2010, it is ten percent or less blue collar and ninety percent white or pink collar. The professional class has arrived but is essentially managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if it is still the 1950s.
It is the expediency of decisions making at the level of consequences that is critical to corporate success. Bottom up communication has functionally displaced top down operations even if the corporate and military organizational charts stay the same.
Alas, this is reflected in the dominant cultures in the workplace. They vary from a Culture of Comfort with workers management dependent to a Culture of Complacency with workers counter dependent on the organization for their total well being when the workforce is primed with professionals for the Culture of Contribution.14
Author William Livingston claims this is a cultural predilection to a hindsight orientation at the expense of foresight. He writes:
“The snub of intelligence-based foresight can be seen embedded throughout society. For example, more than 99% of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university and hindsight is all you take out of it.”15
We have cosmetic change instead of real change because we have failed to understand:
(1) The structure of work determines the function of work;
(2) The function of work creates the workplace culture;
(3) The workplace culture dictates the organizational biases and behaviors;
(4) The organizational biases and behaviors establish the vitality and viability of the organization.
An invisible hand guides the process. You only have to step back and observe to see how effective it is.
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
There has been a nearly imperceptible shift in business development that has been going on since the beginning of the last century. That shift has been very much in line with a variance of the predictions of Marx and Engel. Workers have not gained control of the means of production as they insisted, but the means of information, which has proven even more dramatic, as this is the Age of Information.
Organizational scholars have for the past half-century focused on management and the corporation giving far less attention to the individual worker and the transformation of the American workforce from predominantly unskilled to predominantly professional.
Douglas McGregor led the charge with “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960) with his Theory “X” and “Y” style of management; Blake and Mouton followed with “The Managerial Grid” (1964) with managers either task or people centered; years later there was William Ouchi’s “Theory Z” (1981) where he applied Japanese management to the American corporate culture; and then Peters and Waterman following with “In Search of Excellence” (1982) profiling the best run companies; and Harold Geneen in “Managing” (1984) with the audacious claim a good manager could manage anything.
Strangely missing was the worker in the trenches, a worker who no longer needed management, motivators, elaborate schemes to put him in the mix, but only required a positive work climate to do creative work in an open system. Work Without Managers (1991) was written with this in mind, recognizing the passive behaviors toxic to operations.16
* * *
“In Search of Excellence” proved the opposite of its own hypothesis. Business Week illustrated this in its cover story “Who’s excellent now?” (November 5, 1984), as two years after its publication many of the companies profiled were struggling. As for Geneen’s declaration that a good manager can manage anything, John Scully of Apple proved the exception to this idea.
Fast forward to today. Commentators on business, management and leadership still write books only obliquely directed to the new professional. Most have management in the center of the story. The exception are such books as “Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace” by Dennis Reins, “Succeed on Your Own Terms” by Patrick Sweeney, “The Versatile Leader” by Robert Kaplan, and “BeliefWorks” by Ray Dodd.
When it comes to personhood, such books as “Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture” by Christian Smith and “A Whole New World” by Daniel Pink get it about right, especially Pink.
Pink has the professional clearly in his sights. He recognizes that exclusive left-brain vertical thinking with deductive reasoning is not sufficient to transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, which is just ahead.
The paradoxical dilemma is that perhaps only twenty percent of the professional workforce works in a climate and workplace culture conducive to creative thought. It is the reason for this discussion and other efforts to that end.17
* * *
1 Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Knopt, 2007.
2 James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, The Delta Group Florida, 1991, pp. 33-36.
3 Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, Atheneum, 1994; David Sheff, Game Over, Random House, 1994; Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars, Time Books, 1994.
4 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in the World, Touchstone Books, 1994.
5 Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmasking of IBM, Crown, 1994.
6 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 89.
7 James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, CRC Press, 1998.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers, AuthorHouse, 2000.
9 David Halberstam, The Next Century, William Morrow & Company, 1991, p. 59.
10 Management swelled to as many as twelve levels. Executive compensation rose from five to ten times that of workers in 1945 to sixty six times that of the typical GM worker for the CEO at General Motors in 1968. Today this would be considered modest.
11 John Strohmeyer, Crisis in Bethlehem, Adler & Adler, 1986.
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., “ The Three Dominant Cultures of the Workplace, National Productivity Review, Spring 1997, pp. 37 – 48.
13 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, W. W. Norton & Company, 1911, first published by Norton Library, 1967, p. 59.
14 James R. Fisher, Jr., “How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-Up Call,” AQP Journal, July/August 1999, pp. 7 – 11.
15 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 14.
16 See "Six Silent Killers."
17 James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Need for Lateral Thinking in the New Century,” National Productivity Review, Spring 2000, pp. 1-12.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
REFERENCE:
This is written in response to an invitation from The Journal of Technology and Investment “call for papers.” Over the past forty years working and living on four continents as a chemist, chemical sales engineer, and corporate executive, I have witnessed and participated in the transformation of the workforce from blue collar to professional, but with lagging institutional support. My published works have drawn attention to this as economics behave badly if the psychology and cultural programming of corporate systems fail to be in sync with change.
* * *
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
CORPORATE MYOPIA
We recently saw Goldman Sachs of Wall Street fined $550 million for suspect investment practices. Goldman Sachs took the slap on the wrist admitting no culpability. We have also seen Steven Jobs of Apple, Inc. reacting to criticism of the latest iteration of the iPhone. Jobs went public providing a menu of options for customers including a complete refund of the purchase. Goldman Sachs will pay the fine and go back to business as usual, which is how the crisis developed in the first place.
Goldman Sachs is a traditionally managed corporation structured to function with a hierarchical chain of command with the appearance of infallible authority firmly entrenched in the status quo. It is a closed system with well-defined roles and relationships, policies and procedures. The climate is constructed to support business as usual practices where loyalty is construed to mean obedience.
Apple is open and fluid in roles and relationships enabling it to be responsive to changing demands in a timely fashion. Workers are self-regulated in a creative environment with the free exchange of ideas.
These complimentary opposites in business development, both autopoietic and homeostatic, compose the greater whole of enterprise as the past confronts the future:
(1) Hindsight thinking (Goldman Sachs); foresight thinking (Apple)
(2) Rigid collective conformity (Goldman Sachs), individualism (Apple)
(3) Infallible (Goldman Sachs), fallible (Apple)
(4) Rules (Goldman Sachs), process (Apple)
(5) General (Goldman Sachs), local (Apple)
(6) Means emphasis (Goldman Sachs), ends orientation (Apple)
(7) Heavy emphasis on analysis (Goldman Sachs), synthesis (Apple)
Most corporations, including Goldman Sachs, although replete with professionals, have never left the “Golden Age” of American capitalism. This age extended from the end of World War II through the 1970s when college drop outs such as Jobs and Bill Gates made their presence known. Robert Reich in “Supercapitalism” (2007) sees these innovators as the wrecking ball of the common culture.1 What he marks as the collapse of core values of institutional society, such as the notion of the “common good,” only changed to self-interest and “personhood.”2
The infallible, closed-minded, status quo authority oriented corporation is losing its traction. Everyone seemingly wants to climb on the nonexistent managerial pyramid. The times are replete with such contradictions. The working middle class is disappearing while the wealth gap has grown the widest since 1929. Meanwhile, an army of college "drop out" innovators has created the new electronic economy that marches to a different drummer. Corporate society over the last quarter century has not only lost its steam but its way.
* * *
Apple and firms like it have left the institutional model. There is no special ethics for professionals. They do not have a special moral status. Obedience to moral law of self-creative individuals is by taking responsibility and is motivated by respect for the moral law. Obedience to civil law is by giving duties and is motivated by fear of punishment. .
A generation ago, Jobs stepped down and back to the traditional institutional model by elevating John Scully of Pepsi fame to run Apple. The corporation nearly went under. Jobs came back in 1997. He restored the open innovative climate and business stability. Easily missed in this transition was a clash of cultures between institutional hindsight and progressive foresight thinking. Not only has institutional infallibility been stultifying for young Turks such as Jobs and Gates, it was not organized to respond to accelerating external demands.
Two decades earlier, Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get H-P to produce or market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, the way, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.3
* * *
In 1980, IBM was asleep at the wheel when hit with the personal computer surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete engineering scheme, having the most sophisticated facilities in the industry. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for pc’s at the time.
IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, met with IBM and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do something posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid SC nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.4
In all this excitement, missed was the fact that IBM, the quintessential infallible institution with a bible of prudent industrial practices, was yesterday’s story because it was molded in an early twentieth century mindset.5
* * *
We have watched the automotive industry spin out of control with General Motors going bankrupt and having to be bailed out by the Federal Government. It was clear in the number of appearances of GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner before Congress in 2009 that GM was paralyzed to do anything. GM’s rise to power and decline towards insolvency parallels the rise and fall of infallible institutional authority.
An indicator of the slow motion death of big institutions such as GM is that decades pass between the first authoritative portents of erosion and the end. In the case of GM, a candidate for GM's CEO, Elmer Johnson, on January 21, 1988 wrote this memo to his peers:
“We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” 6
The mindsets are passed down year after year, intact, giving free reign to accumulate. Even a drop in market share in 1988 from 54 percent to 19 percent failed to trigger remedial action.
THE NEW REALITY
Obedience to authority is blind to operational consequences and indifferent to both stated goals and damage inflicted on clients. In the new reality, pragmatic foresight has no hierarchy. Autonomy is packaged with responsibility only for outcomes. On the other hand, strict rules are essential to maintain a hierarchy with a preoccupation with means.
Since nearly all corporations preserve the command configuration that defines them, autonomous individualism becomes a center of heresy. The choice is not a wide one, submit and be crushed, or find your way to another disposition.
Jobs and Gates did so by forming their own companies. Individuals that stay on are in the system but not of it. They cannot change the culture. The core values of operative life lie deeper than verbal descriptions and are organized into belief systems that never have to be stated. Conformity is an exacting pressure.
Individuals, confounded by this programming yet defying of it, retreat into passive behaviors.7 This is especially true of professionals. They believe themselves trained to lead, but forced to fit. Nothing cripples an organization more than its corporate sins.8
Unfortunately, when corporations confront out-of-scope disturbances, they often confuse what has become a poison with medicine. Several iterative steps over the last eighty years have come to roost.
In 1927, Elton Mayo did an industrial engineering study at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. Workers responded to the attention, launching the humanistic movement. Human resource management followed.
It seems clearly evident now that the tealeaves were misread. In 1929, the Great Depression hit throwing the world into economic chaos. The Robber Barons of the nineteenth century had clashed with workers. They felt forced to hire strike busters, which sullied their reputations. To distance themselves from this daily confrontation, they created a new mechanism called “management.” Managers rose out of the dark days of the depression when unemployment reached twenty-five percent of the labor force.
Desperate to get people back to work, the Roosevelt Administration launched a number of public works projects. These only met with modest success. World War II changed the dynamic. The civilian population was mobilized into industrial production in support of the military. This succeeded in lifting the economy out of the depression where government intervention had failed. David Halberstam captured this remarkable performance in “The Next Century” (1991):
“With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944 we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.”9
It was American management’s greatest hour. Management as much as any other single factor proved instrumental in winning World War II. Typically, there were only three levels of management. Workers often enjoyed some independence and control of their work, workstations, setting up machines, purchasing materials, planning schedules and even charting their productivity.
This all disappeared following the boom years of the 1950s.10 The union movement gained steam with such leaders as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The UAW sued for wage and benefit concessions at the expense of control of work. Management, which was in its ascendancy was willing to concede massive entitlements.
Management believed this would lead to greater loyalty, productivity, and labor peace. It did just the opposite. The UAW’s demands of automakers could not stem the growing disconnect between workers and work.
In a strange way, the automotive industry and the UAW became mirror images of each other in corporate style and greed. The problem with entitlements was that workers felt entitled to them irrespective of the level of productivity.
John Strohmeyer captured the essence of this disconnect in “Crisis in Bethlehem” (1986). The steel industry created a “furlough program” in the 1960s. The senior half of the workforce was given an additional 13-week paid leave every five years. Steel workers already had about every benefit and financial concession imaginable. The idea was to manage manpower requirements more effectively, provide the workforce with the incentive to pursue self-enhancing interests, and ultimately, to improve productivity.
Most workers got a second job. The program was a colossal failure. Strohmeyer muses, “The steel industry’s excesses crippled the goose that laid the golden egg.”11
THREE DOMINANT WORKPLACE CULTURES
Over the last forty years, the systematic process of making workers management dependent and increasingly counter dependent on the corporation resulted in learned helplessness and passive behaviors.
Many workers have become suspended in terminal adolescent, immature and reactive with wants treated as needs seeing themselves as victims of circumstances.
Such programming cannot be changed overnight. Cultural change is not brought about by war or plague, but in using the new artifacts instead of the old. Cultural change proceeds when corporations assimilate new artifacts. The old ways are not displaced but wither away by disuse.
In the present climate, it is best to allow the culture to die out. There is no point trying to change the unchangeable, but to engineer around the unmovable constraints. Once the signature constraints are identified, and the ironies accepted, a bypass highway can be built.
Workers are sensitive to the power structure of the organization and to their own personal goals and welfare. Company policies are followed on the presumption they are infallible and will solve problems. Too often the policies describe a system that causes the problems with practices responsible for creating problems it then fails to solve.
We have seen this demonstrated with the Culture of Comfort. A downward spiral is fashioned in which the presumed solution makes matters worse, causing a redoubling of efforts to resolve driving operations instead into the Culture of Complacency and not the Culture of Contribution.12
Complicating the picture further, management and organizational dominance was tolerable for decades by workers when position power and knowledge power were assumed to be the province of management. Blue collar workers were understood to be poorly educated, and as Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of “The Principles of Scientific Management,” (1911) once put it:
“Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”13
Granted, it is a cognitive bias, and Taylor is not alone in having his. The significance of such biases operates to displace information from its axis of truth. Cognitive biases have proven counterproductive.
For one, the workforce in 1950 was ninety percent blue collar and ten percent white collar; in 1960 it was already fifty percent blue collar and fifty percent white collar, in 2010, it is ten percent or less blue collar and ninety percent white or pink collar. The professional class has arrived but is essentially managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if it is still the 1950s.
It is the expediency of decisions making at the level of consequences that is critical to corporate success. Bottom up communication has functionally displaced top down operations even if the corporate and military organizational charts stay the same.
Alas, this is reflected in the dominant cultures in the workplace. They vary from a Culture of Comfort with workers management dependent to a Culture of Complacency with workers counter dependent on the organization for their total well being when the workforce is primed with professionals for the Culture of Contribution.14
Author William Livingston claims this is a cultural predilection to a hindsight orientation at the expense of foresight. He writes:
“The snub of intelligence-based foresight can be seen embedded throughout society. For example, more than 99% of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university and hindsight is all you take out of it.”15
We have cosmetic change instead of real change because we have failed to understand:
(1) The structure of work determines the function of work;
(2) The function of work creates the workplace culture;
(3) The workplace culture dictates the organizational biases and behaviors;
(4) The organizational biases and behaviors establish the vitality and viability of the organization.
An invisible hand guides the process. You only have to step back and observe to see how effective it is.
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
There has been a nearly imperceptible shift in business development that has been going on since the beginning of the last century. That shift has been very much in line with a variance of the predictions of Marx and Engel. Workers have not gained control of the means of production as they insisted, but the means of information, which has proven even more dramatic, as this is the Age of Information.
Organizational scholars have for the past half-century focused on management and the corporation giving far less attention to the individual worker and the transformation of the American workforce from predominantly unskilled to predominantly professional.
Douglas McGregor led the charge with “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960) with his Theory “X” and “Y” style of management; Blake and Mouton followed with “The Managerial Grid” (1964) with managers either task or people centered; years later there was William Ouchi’s “Theory Z” (1981) where he applied Japanese management to the American corporate culture; and then Peters and Waterman following with “In Search of Excellence” (1982) profiling the best run companies; and Harold Geneen in “Managing” (1984) with the audacious claim a good manager could manage anything.
Strangely missing was the worker in the trenches, a worker who no longer needed management, motivators, elaborate schemes to put him in the mix, but only required a positive work climate to do creative work in an open system. Work Without Managers (1991) was written with this in mind, recognizing the passive behaviors toxic to operations.16
* * *
“In Search of Excellence” proved the opposite of its own hypothesis. Business Week illustrated this in its cover story “Who’s excellent now?” (November 5, 1984), as two years after its publication many of the companies profiled were struggling. As for Geneen’s declaration that a good manager can manage anything, John Scully of Apple proved the exception to this idea.
Fast forward to today. Commentators on business, management and leadership still write books only obliquely directed to the new professional. Most have management in the center of the story. The exception are such books as “Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace” by Dennis Reins, “Succeed on Your Own Terms” by Patrick Sweeney, “The Versatile Leader” by Robert Kaplan, and “BeliefWorks” by Ray Dodd.
When it comes to personhood, such books as “Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture” by Christian Smith and “A Whole New World” by Daniel Pink get it about right, especially Pink.
Pink has the professional clearly in his sights. He recognizes that exclusive left-brain vertical thinking with deductive reasoning is not sufficient to transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, which is just ahead.
The paradoxical dilemma is that perhaps only twenty percent of the professional workforce works in a climate and workplace culture conducive to creative thought. It is the reason for this discussion and other efforts to that end.17
* * *
1 Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Knopt, 2007.
2 James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, The Delta Group Florida, 1991, pp. 33-36.
3 Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, Atheneum, 1994; David Sheff, Game Over, Random House, 1994; Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars, Time Books, 1994.
4 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in the World, Touchstone Books, 1994.
5 Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmasking of IBM, Crown, 1994.
6 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 89.
7 James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, CRC Press, 1998.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers, AuthorHouse, 2000.
9 David Halberstam, The Next Century, William Morrow & Company, 1991, p. 59.
10 Management swelled to as many as twelve levels. Executive compensation rose from five to ten times that of workers in 1945 to sixty six times that of the typical GM worker for the CEO at General Motors in 1968. Today this would be considered modest.
11 John Strohmeyer, Crisis in Bethlehem, Adler & Adler, 1986.
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., “ The Three Dominant Cultures of the Workplace, National Productivity Review, Spring 1997, pp. 37 – 48.
13 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, W. W. Norton & Company, 1911, first published by Norton Library, 1967, p. 59.
14 James R. Fisher, Jr., “How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-Up Call,” AQP Journal, July/August 1999, pp. 7 – 11.
15 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 14.
16 See "Six Silent Killers."
17 James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Need for Lateral Thinking in the New Century,” National Productivity Review, Spring 2000, pp. 1-12.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE TIMES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
This is written in response to an invitation from The Journal of Technology and Investment “call for papers.” Over the past forty years working and living on four continents as a chemist, chemical sales engineer, and corporate executive, I have witnessed and participated in the transformation of the workforce from blue collar to professional, but with lagging institutional support. My published works have drawn attention to this as economics behave badly if the psychology and cultural programming of corporate systems fail to be in sync with change.
* * *
CORPORATE MYOPIA
We recently saw Goldman Sachs of Wall Street fined $550 million for suspect investment practices. Goldman Sachs took the slap on the wrist admitting no culpability. We have also seen Steven Jobs of Apple, Inc. reacting to criticism of the latest iteration of the iPhone. Jobs went public providing a menu of options for customers including a complete refund of the purchase. Goldman Sachs will pay the fine and go back to business as usual, which is how the crisis developed in the first place.
These different responses give the impression Goldman Sachs puts profits before clients while Apple gives the opposite impression. Goldman Sachs stock took a hit, Apple’s stock inched up. Apple has a human face on its product recognized the world over; Goldman Sachs is a nondescript shadowy presence. Why is that?
Goldman Sachs is a traditionally managed corporation structured to function with a hierarchical chain of command with the appearance of infallible authority firmly entrenched in the status quo. It is a closed system with well-defined roles and relationships, policies and procedures. The climate is constructed to support business as usual practices where loyalty is construed to mean obedience.
Apple is open and fluid in roles and relationships enabling it to be responsive to changing demands in a timely fashion. Workers are self-regulated in a creative environment with the free exchange of ideas.
These complimentary opposites in business development, both autopoietic and homeostatic, compose the greater whole of enterprise as the past confronts the future:
(1) Hindsight thinking (Goldman Sachs); foresight thinking (Apple)
(2) Rigid collective conformity (Goldman Sachs), individualism (Apple)
(3) Infallible (Goldman Sachs), fallible (Apple)
(4) Rules (Goldman Sachs), process (Apple)
(5) General (Goldman Sachs), local (Apple)
(6) Means emphasis (Goldman Sachs), ends orientation (Apple)
(7) Heavy emphasis on analysis (Goldman Sachs), synthesis (Apple)
Most corporations, including Goldman Sachs, although replete with professionals, have never left the “Golden Age” of American capitalism. This age extended from the end of World War II through the 1970s when college drop outs such as Jobs and Bill Gates made their presence known. Robert Reich in “Supercapitalism” (2007) sees these innovators as the wrecking ball of the common culture.1 What he marks as the collapse of core values of institutional society, such as the notion of the “common good,” only changed to self-interest and “personhood.”2 Loyalty was no longer obedient to an outside authority but primarily to self.
Capitalism is no longer simply about making money, but making a difference. The infallible, closed-minded, status quo authority oriented corporation is losing its traction. Ironically, at the same time, academic institutions have become factories producing MBA’s in droves against the trend. Everyone seemingly wants to climb on the nonexistent managerial pyramid. The times are replete with such contradictions. The working middle class is disappearing while the wealth gap has grown the widest since 1929. Meanwhile, an army of college "drop outs" innovators has created the new electronic economy that marches to a different drummer. Corporate society over the last quarter century has not only lost its steam but its way.
* * *
Apple and firms like it have left the institutional model. There is no special ethics for professionals. They do not have a special moral status. Obedience to moral law of self-creative individuals is by taking responsibility and is motivated by respect for the moral law. Obedience to civil law is by giving duties and is motivated by fear of punishment. .
A generation ago, Jobs stepped down and back to the traditional institutional model by elevating John Scully of Pepsi fame to run Apple. The corporation nearly went under. Jobs came back in 1997. He restored the open innovative climate and business stability. Easily missed in this transition was a clash of cultures between institutional hindsight and progressive foresight thinking. Not only has institutional infallibility been stultifying for young Turks such as Jobs and Gates, it was not organized to respond to accelerating external demands.
Two decades earlier, Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get H-P to produce or market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, the way, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.3
* * *
In 1980, IBM was asleep at the wheel when hit with the personal computer surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete engineering scheme, having the most sophisticated facilities in the industry. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for pc’s at the time.
IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, met with IBM and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do something posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid SC nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.4
In all this excitement, missed was the fact that IBM, the quintessential infallible institution with a bible of prudent industrial practices, was yesterday’s story because it was molded in an early twentieth century mindset.5
* * *
We have watched the automotive industry spin out of control with General Motors going bankrupt and having to be bailed out by the Federal Government. Yet, in 1953, at the peak of GM’s dominance, CEO Charles Wilson told Congress “What was good for GM was good for the country, and visa versa.” GM had grown to the largest corporation in the world. What happened?
It was clear in the number of appearances of GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner before Congress in 2009 that GM was paralyzed to do anything. GM’s rise to power and decline towards insolvency parallels the rise and fall of infallible institutional authority, overconfident, lacking courage, making foolish decisions with crucial decisions deferred hoping circumstances would intervene to make them less momentous.
An indicator of the slow motion death of big institutions such as GM is that decades pass between the first authoritative portents of erosion and the end. In the case of GM, a candidate for GM's CEO, Elmer Johnson, on January 21, 1988 wrote this memo to his peers:
“We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” 6
The attitudes, mindsets and relationships patterns are passed down year after year, intact, giving free reign to accumulate. Even a drop in market share in 1988 from 54 percent to 19 percent during this period failed to trigger remedial action.
* * *
THE NEW REALITY
Obedience to authority is blind to operational consequences and this loyalty is indifferent to both stated goals and damage inflicted on clients. In the new reality, pragmatic foresight has no hierarchy. Autonomy is packaged with responsibility only for outcomes. On the other hand, strict rules are essential to maintain a hierarchy with a preoccupation with means.
* * *
Since nearly all corporations preserve the command configuration that defines them, autonomous individualism becomes a center of heresy. The choice is not a wide one, submit and be crushed, or find your way to another disposition.
Jobs and Gates did so by forming their own companies. Individuals that stay on are in the system but not of it. They cannot change the culture. The core values of operative life lie deeper than verbal descriptions and are organized into belief systems that never have to be stated. Conformity is an exacting pressure.
Individuals, confounded by this programming yet defying of it, retreat into passive behaviors.7 This is especially true of professionals. They believe themselves trained to lead, but forced to fit. Nothing cripples an organization more than the corporate sins of leaderless leaders and dissonant workers.8
* * *
Unfortunately, when corporations confront out-of-scope disturbances, they often confuse what has become a poison with medicine. Several iterative steps over the last eighty years have come to roost.
In 1927, Elton Mayo did an industrial engineering study at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. Workers responded to the attention, launching the humanistic movement. Human resource management followed.
It seems clearly evident now that the tealeaves were misread. In 1929, the Great Depression hit throwing the world into economic chaos. The Robber Barons of the nineteenth century had clashed with workers. They felt forced to hire strike busters, which sullied their reputations. To distance themselves from this daily confrontation, they created a new mechanism called “management.” Managers rose out of the dark days of the depression when unemployment reached twenty-five percent of the labor force.
Desperate to get people back to work, the Roosevelt Administration launched a number of public works projects. These only met with modest success. World War II changed the dynamic. The civilian population was mobilized into industrial production in support of the military. This succeeded in lifting the economy out of the depression where government intervention had failed. David Halberstam captured this remarkable performance in “The Next Century” (1991):
“With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944 we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.”9
* * *
It was American management’s greatest hour. Management as much as any other single factor proved instrumental in winning World War II. Managers and workers were synergistic. Typically, there were only three levels of management. Workers often enjoyed some independence and control of their work, workstations, setting up machines, purchasing materials, planning schedules and even charting their productivity.
This all disappeared following the boom years of the 1950s.10 The union movement gained steam with such leaders as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The UAW sued for wage and benefit concessions at the expense of control of work. Management, which was in its ascendancy in power, was willing to concede massive entitlements. It could afford them.
Management also chose to believe this would lead to greater loyalty, productivity, and labor peace. It did just the opposite. The UAW found its mantra in increasing corporate demands could not diminish the growing disconnect between workers and work.
In a strange way, the automotive industry and the UAW became mirror images of each other in corporate style and greed. The problem with entitlements was that workers felt entitled to them irrespective of the level of their productivity. Nothing could satisfy the loss of pride in work, and so the demands escalated.
John Strohmeyer captured the essence of this disconnect in “Crisis in Bethlehem” (1986). The steel industry created a “furlough program” in the 1960s. The senior half of the workforce was given an additional 13-week paid leave every five years. Steel workers already had about every benefit and financial concession imaginable. The idea was to manage manpower requirements more effectively, provide the workforce with the incentive to pursue self-enhancing interests, and ultimately, to improve productivity.
Most workers got a second job. They were miffed when they struggled to maintain both jobs when they came back to their regular job. The program was a colossal failure. Strohmeyer muses, “The steel industry’s excesses crippled the goose that laid the golden egg.”11
* * *
THREE DOMINANT WORKPLACE CULTURES
Over the last forty years, the systematic process of making workers management dependent and increasingly counter dependent on the corporation for their total well being has resulted in learned helplessness and passive behaviors.
A good majority of workers, as a consequence, have been suspended in terminal adolescent, immature and reactive with wants treated as needs, while seeing themselves as the victims of circumstances.
Such programming cannot be changed overnight. Cultural change is not brought about by war or plague, as history clearly teaches, but in using the new artifacts instead of the old. Cultural change proceeds when corporations assimilate new artifacts. The old ways are not displaced but wither away by disuse.
It is a slow and painful process. In the present climate, it is best to allow the culture to die out. There is no point to attempt to change the unchangeable, but to engineer around the unmovable constraints. Once the signature constraints are identified, and the ironies accepted, a bypass highway can be built. The trick for the mature worker is to make a contribution without causing undue commotion.
Workers are sensitive to the power structure of the organization, to tradition, and to their own personal goals and welfare. Company policies are followed on the presumption they are infallible and will solve its problems. Too often the policies describe a system that actually causes the problems, that is, the intended practices are responsible for creating the problems it then fails to solve.
We have seen this demonstrated with the Culture of Comfort. A downward spiral is fashioned in which the presumed solution makes matters worse, thereby causing a redoubling of efforts with the presumed solution now the Culture of Complacency when what was intended was the Culture of Contribution.12
The belief that more money or a more involved intervention will solve the problem takes attention away from correcting the underlying causes so the problems grow to the limits of the available money and resources, whatever they might be.
* * *
Complicating the picture further, management and organizational dominance was tolerable for decades by workers when position power and knowledge power were assumed to be the province of management. Blue collar workers were understood to be poorly educated, and as Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of “The Principles of Scientific Management,” (1911) once put it:
“Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”13
Granted, it is a cognitive bias, and Taylor is not alone in having his. The significance of such biases operates to displace information from its axis of truth. Cognitive biases have proven counterproductive.
For one, the workforce in 1950 was ninety percent blue collar and ten percent white collar; in 1960 it was already fifty percent blue collar and fifty percent white collar, in 2010, it is ten percent or less blue collar and ninety percent white or pink collar. The professional class has arrived but is essentially managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if it is still the 1950s. Small wonder we have problems.
It is the expediency of decisions making at the level of consequences that is critical to corporate success, as it is the engineer rapidly advancing unmanned performance in combat, not the general, who determines how the next conflict will be engaged. Bottom up communication has functionally displaced top down operations even if the corporate and military organizational charts stay the same.
* * *
Alas, this is reflected in the dominant cultures in the workplace. They vary from a Culture of Comfort with workers management dependent to a Culture of Complacency with workers counter dependent on the organization for their total well being when the workforce is primed with professionals for the Culture of Contribution. These professionals are being forced to fit in a climate not conducive to their synergy.14 This is not an isolated but an institutional problem.
Author William Livingston claims this is a cultural predilection to a hindsight orientation at the expense of foresight. He writes:
“The snub of intelligence-based foresight can be seen embedded throughout society. For example, more than 99% of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university and hindsight is all you take out of it.”15
We have cosmetic change instead of real change because we have failed to understand:
(1) The structure of work determines the function of work;
(2) The function of work creates the workplace culture;
(3) The workplace culture dictates the organizational biases and behaviors;
(4) The organizational biases and behaviors establish the vitality and viability of the organization.
An invisible hand guides the process. You only have to step back and observe to see how effective it is.
* * *
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
There has been a nearly imperceptible shift in business development that has been going on since the beginning of the last century. That shift has been very much in line with a variance of the predictions of Marx and Engel. Workers have not gained control of the means of production as they insisted, but the means of information, which has proven even more dramatic, as this is the Age of Information.
It seems curious in retrospect, but organizational scholars have for the past half-century focused on management and the corporation giving far less attention to the individual worker and the amazing transformation of the American workforce from predominantly unskilled to predominantly professional.
* * *
Douglas McGregor led the charge with “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960) with his Theory “X” and “Y” style of management; Blake and Mouton followed with “The Managerial Grid” (1964) with managers either task or people centered; Frederick Herzberg came out with “Work and the Nature of Man” (1966) with his take on motivators and hygiene factors; Rensis Likert followed with “The Human Group” (1967) with his schematics on values and management; Hersey and Blanchard surveyed the literature producing “Management of Organizational Behavior” (1972) adding their own situational leadership; then there was William Ouchi’s “Theory Z” (1981) where he applied Japanese management to the American corporate culture; Deal and Kennedy continued this theme in “Corporate Culture” (1982); with Peters and Waterman following with “In Search of Excellence” (1982) profiling the best run companies; Harold Geneen then in “Managing” (1984) made the audacious claim a good manager could manage anything; while Peter Block’s “The Empowered Manager” (1989) provided a prescription for managers to demonstrate political skill in the workplace.
Strangely missing was the worker in the trenches, a worker who no longer needed management, needed motivators, needed elaborate schemes to put him in the mix, but only required a positive work climate of managed conflict, no hierarchies, self-regulation, self-assessment, but an opportunity to do creative work in an open system vulnerable to failure and therefore accessible to success.
Work Without Managers (1991) was written with this in mind, recognizing the passive posture of workers and the inclination to disruptive and toxic behaviors. These behaviors came to be identified as “the six silent organizational killers.”16
* * *
“In Search of Excellence” proved the opposite of its own hypothesis. Business Week illustrated this in its cover story “Who’s excellent now?” (November 5, 1984), as two years after its publication many of the companies profiled were struggling. As for Geneen’s declaration that a good manager can manage anything, John Scully of Apple proved the exception to this idea.
* * *
Fast forward to today. Commentators on business, management and leadership still write books only obliquely directed to the new professional. Most of them still have management in the center of the story with professionals on the fringe. The exception are such books as “Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace” by Dennis Reins, “Succeed on Your Own Terms” by Patrick Sweeney, “The Versatile Leader” by Robert Kaplan, and “BeliefWorks” by Ray Dodd.
When it comes to personhood, and the new orientation eschewed from the traditional “common good,” such books as “Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture” by Christian Smith and “A Whole New World” by Daniel Pink get it about right, especially Pink.
Pink has the professional clearly in his sights. He recognizes that exclusive left-brain vertical thinking with deductive reasoning is not sufficient to transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, which is just ahead.
Right brain thinkers, he sees, as ruling the future with inductive lateral thinking and intuitive problem solving. Right-brainers are synthesizers open to contradictions and holistic wisdom. They are not locked into the paralysis of analysis and circular logic, the territory of infallibility, business as usual and the status quo where crisis management is routine.
Thinking is complementary with left and right brains working in harmony, not conflict. Stated otherwise, creative thinking is the new landscape necessary for the creative professional. The paradoxical dilemma is that perhaps only twenty percent of the professional workforce works in a climate and workplace culture conducive to creative thought. It is the reason for this discussion and other efforts to that end.17
* * *
1 Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Knopt, 2007.
2 James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, The Delta Group Florida, 1991, pp. 33-36.
3 Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, Atheneum, 1994; David Sheff, Game Over, Random House, 1994; Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars, Time Books, 1994.
4 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in the World, Touchstone Books, 1994.
5 Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmasking of IBM, Crown, 1994.
6 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 89.
7 James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, CRC Press, 1998.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers, AuthorHouse, 2000.
9 David Halberstam, The Next Century, William Morrow & Company, 1991, p. 59.
10 Management swelled to as many as twelve levels. Executive compensation rose from five to ten times that of workers in 1945 to sixty six times that of the typical GM worker for the CEO at General Motors in 1968. Today this would be considered modest. Peter Drucker found executive compensation the most predatory aspect of corporate capitalism (John E. Flaherty, Shaping the Managerial Mind, Jossep-Bass, 1999, p. 379). The CEO of Wal-Mart earned in 2009 earned one thousand times the average Wal-Mart employee.
11 John Strohmeyer, Crisis in Bethlehem, Adler & Adler, 1986.
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., “ The Three Dominant Cultures of the Workplace, National Productivity Review, Spring 1997, pp. 37 – 48.
13 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, W. W. Norton & Company, 1911, first published by Norton Library, 1967, p. 59.
14 James R. Fisher, Jr., “How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-Up Call,” AQP Journal, July/August 1999, pp. 7 – 11.
15 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 14.
16 Passive aggression coming in late and leaving early doing as little as possible to get by; passive responsive always having an excuse why something isn’t done, and on time; passive defensive playing cover-your-ass and showing-your-ass games by putting your accusers on the defensive; approach avoidance accepting assignment you don’t intend to do or to complete on time; obsessive compulsive always wanting what you don’t have and aren’t instead of what you do have and are; and malicious obedience seeming to obeying orders from headquarters while withholding information vital to projects or spreading disinformation to paralyze the efforts of others.
17 James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Need for Lateral Thinking in the New Century,” National Productivity Review, Spring 2000, pp. 1-12.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 22, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
This is written in response to an invitation from The Journal of Technology and Investment “call for papers.” Over the past forty years working and living on four continents as a chemist, chemical sales engineer, and corporate executive, I have witnessed and participated in the transformation of the workforce from blue collar to professional, but with lagging institutional support. My published works have drawn attention to this as economics behave badly if the psychology and cultural programming of corporate systems fail to be in sync with change.
* * *
CORPORATE MYOPIA
We recently saw Goldman Sachs of Wall Street fined $550 million for suspect investment practices. Goldman Sachs took the slap on the wrist admitting no culpability. We have also seen Steven Jobs of Apple, Inc. reacting to criticism of the latest iteration of the iPhone. Jobs went public providing a menu of options for customers including a complete refund of the purchase. Goldman Sachs will pay the fine and go back to business as usual, which is how the crisis developed in the first place.
These different responses give the impression Goldman Sachs puts profits before clients while Apple gives the opposite impression. Goldman Sachs stock took a hit, Apple’s stock inched up. Apple has a human face on its product recognized the world over; Goldman Sachs is a nondescript shadowy presence. Why is that?
Goldman Sachs is a traditionally managed corporation structured to function with a hierarchical chain of command with the appearance of infallible authority firmly entrenched in the status quo. It is a closed system with well-defined roles and relationships, policies and procedures. The climate is constructed to support business as usual practices where loyalty is construed to mean obedience.
Apple is open and fluid in roles and relationships enabling it to be responsive to changing demands in a timely fashion. Workers are self-regulated in a creative environment with the free exchange of ideas.
These complimentary opposites in business development, both autopoietic and homeostatic, compose the greater whole of enterprise as the past confronts the future:
(1) Hindsight thinking (Goldman Sachs); foresight thinking (Apple)
(2) Rigid collective conformity (Goldman Sachs), individualism (Apple)
(3) Infallible (Goldman Sachs), fallible (Apple)
(4) Rules (Goldman Sachs), process (Apple)
(5) General (Goldman Sachs), local (Apple)
(6) Means emphasis (Goldman Sachs), ends orientation (Apple)
(7) Heavy emphasis on analysis (Goldman Sachs), synthesis (Apple)
Most corporations, including Goldman Sachs, although replete with professionals, have never left the “Golden Age” of American capitalism. This age extended from the end of World War II through the 1970s when college drop outs such as Jobs and Bill Gates made their presence known. Robert Reich in “Supercapitalism” (2007) sees these innovators as the wrecking ball of the common culture.1 What he marks as the collapse of core values of institutional society, such as the notion of the “common good,” only changed to self-interest and “personhood.”2 Loyalty was no longer obedient to an outside authority but primarily to self.
Capitalism is no longer simply about making money, but making a difference. The infallible, closed-minded, status quo authority oriented corporation is losing its traction. Ironically, at the same time, academic institutions have become factories producing MBA’s in droves against the trend. Everyone seemingly wants to climb on the nonexistent managerial pyramid. The times are replete with such contradictions. The working middle class is disappearing while the wealth gap has grown the widest since 1929. Meanwhile, an army of college "drop outs" innovators has created the new electronic economy that marches to a different drummer. Corporate society over the last quarter century has not only lost its steam but its way.
* * *
Apple and firms like it have left the institutional model. There is no special ethics for professionals. They do not have a special moral status. Obedience to moral law of self-creative individuals is by taking responsibility and is motivated by respect for the moral law. Obedience to civil law is by giving duties and is motivated by fear of punishment. .
A generation ago, Jobs stepped down and back to the traditional institutional model by elevating John Scully of Pepsi fame to run Apple. The corporation nearly went under. Jobs came back in 1997. He restored the open innovative climate and business stability. Easily missed in this transition was a clash of cultures between institutional hindsight and progressive foresight thinking. Not only has institutional infallibility been stultifying for young Turks such as Jobs and Gates, it was not organized to respond to accelerating external demands.
Two decades earlier, Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get H-P to produce or market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, the way, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.3
* * *
In 1980, IBM was asleep at the wheel when hit with the personal computer surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete engineering scheme, having the most sophisticated facilities in the industry. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for pc’s at the time.
IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, met with IBM and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do something posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid SC nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.4
In all this excitement, missed was the fact that IBM, the quintessential infallible institution with a bible of prudent industrial practices, was yesterday’s story because it was molded in an early twentieth century mindset.5
* * *
We have watched the automotive industry spin out of control with General Motors going bankrupt and having to be bailed out by the Federal Government. Yet, in 1953, at the peak of GM’s dominance, CEO Charles Wilson told Congress “What was good for GM was good for the country, and visa versa.” GM had grown to the largest corporation in the world. What happened?
It was clear in the number of appearances of GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner before Congress in 2009 that GM was paralyzed to do anything. GM’s rise to power and decline towards insolvency parallels the rise and fall of infallible institutional authority, overconfident, lacking courage, making foolish decisions with crucial decisions deferred hoping circumstances would intervene to make them less momentous.
An indicator of the slow motion death of big institutions such as GM is that decades pass between the first authoritative portents of erosion and the end. In the case of GM, a candidate for GM's CEO, Elmer Johnson, on January 21, 1988 wrote this memo to his peers:
“We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” 6
The attitudes, mindsets and relationships patterns are passed down year after year, intact, giving free reign to accumulate. Even a drop in market share in 1988 from 54 percent to 19 percent during this period failed to trigger remedial action.
* * *
THE NEW REALITY
Obedience to authority is blind to operational consequences and this loyalty is indifferent to both stated goals and damage inflicted on clients. In the new reality, pragmatic foresight has no hierarchy. Autonomy is packaged with responsibility only for outcomes. On the other hand, strict rules are essential to maintain a hierarchy with a preoccupation with means.
* * *
Since nearly all corporations preserve the command configuration that defines them, autonomous individualism becomes a center of heresy. The choice is not a wide one, submit and be crushed, or find your way to another disposition.
Jobs and Gates did so by forming their own companies. Individuals that stay on are in the system but not of it. They cannot change the culture. The core values of operative life lie deeper than verbal descriptions and are organized into belief systems that never have to be stated. Conformity is an exacting pressure.
Individuals, confounded by this programming yet defying of it, retreat into passive behaviors.7 This is especially true of professionals. They believe themselves trained to lead, but forced to fit. Nothing cripples an organization more than the corporate sins of leaderless leaders and dissonant workers.8
* * *
Unfortunately, when corporations confront out-of-scope disturbances, they often confuse what has become a poison with medicine. Several iterative steps over the last eighty years have come to roost.
In 1927, Elton Mayo did an industrial engineering study at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. Workers responded to the attention, launching the humanistic movement. Human resource management followed.
It seems clearly evident now that the tealeaves were misread. In 1929, the Great Depression hit throwing the world into economic chaos. The Robber Barons of the nineteenth century had clashed with workers. They felt forced to hire strike busters, which sullied their reputations. To distance themselves from this daily confrontation, they created a new mechanism called “management.” Managers rose out of the dark days of the depression when unemployment reached twenty-five percent of the labor force.
Desperate to get people back to work, the Roosevelt Administration launched a number of public works projects. These only met with modest success. World War II changed the dynamic. The civilian population was mobilized into industrial production in support of the military. This succeeded in lifting the economy out of the depression where government intervention had failed. David Halberstam captured this remarkable performance in “The Next Century” (1991):
“With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944 we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.”9
* * *
It was American management’s greatest hour. Management as much as any other single factor proved instrumental in winning World War II. Managers and workers were synergistic. Typically, there were only three levels of management. Workers often enjoyed some independence and control of their work, workstations, setting up machines, purchasing materials, planning schedules and even charting their productivity.
This all disappeared following the boom years of the 1950s.10 The union movement gained steam with such leaders as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The UAW sued for wage and benefit concessions at the expense of control of work. Management, which was in its ascendancy in power, was willing to concede massive entitlements. It could afford them.
Management also chose to believe this would lead to greater loyalty, productivity, and labor peace. It did just the opposite. The UAW found its mantra in increasing corporate demands could not diminish the growing disconnect between workers and work.
In a strange way, the automotive industry and the UAW became mirror images of each other in corporate style and greed. The problem with entitlements was that workers felt entitled to them irrespective of the level of their productivity. Nothing could satisfy the loss of pride in work, and so the demands escalated.
John Strohmeyer captured the essence of this disconnect in “Crisis in Bethlehem” (1986). The steel industry created a “furlough program” in the 1960s. The senior half of the workforce was given an additional 13-week paid leave every five years. Steel workers already had about every benefit and financial concession imaginable. The idea was to manage manpower requirements more effectively, provide the workforce with the incentive to pursue self-enhancing interests, and ultimately, to improve productivity.
Most workers got a second job. They were miffed when they struggled to maintain both jobs when they came back to their regular job. The program was a colossal failure. Strohmeyer muses, “The steel industry’s excesses crippled the goose that laid the golden egg.”11
* * *
THREE DOMINANT WORKPLACE CULTURES
Over the last forty years, the systematic process of making workers management dependent and increasingly counter dependent on the corporation for their total well being has resulted in learned helplessness and passive behaviors.
A good majority of workers, as a consequence, have been suspended in terminal adolescent, immature and reactive with wants treated as needs, while seeing themselves as the victims of circumstances.
Such programming cannot be changed overnight. Cultural change is not brought about by war or plague, as history clearly teaches, but in using the new artifacts instead of the old. Cultural change proceeds when corporations assimilate new artifacts. The old ways are not displaced but wither away by disuse.
It is a slow and painful process. In the present climate, it is best to allow the culture to die out. There is no point to attempt to change the unchangeable, but to engineer around the unmovable constraints. Once the signature constraints are identified, and the ironies accepted, a bypass highway can be built. The trick for the mature worker is to make a contribution without causing undue commotion.
Workers are sensitive to the power structure of the organization, to tradition, and to their own personal goals and welfare. Company policies are followed on the presumption they are infallible and will solve its problems. Too often the policies describe a system that actually causes the problems, that is, the intended practices are responsible for creating the problems it then fails to solve.
We have seen this demonstrated with the Culture of Comfort. A downward spiral is fashioned in which the presumed solution makes matters worse, thereby causing a redoubling of efforts with the presumed solution now the Culture of Complacency when what was intended was the Culture of Contribution.12
The belief that more money or a more involved intervention will solve the problem takes attention away from correcting the underlying causes so the problems grow to the limits of the available money and resources, whatever they might be.
* * *
Complicating the picture further, management and organizational dominance was tolerable for decades by workers when position power and knowledge power were assumed to be the province of management. Blue collar workers were understood to be poorly educated, and as Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of “The Principles of Scientific Management,” (1911) once put it:
“Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”13
Granted, it is a cognitive bias, and Taylor is not alone in having his. The significance of such biases operates to displace information from its axis of truth. Cognitive biases have proven counterproductive.
For one, the workforce in 1950 was ninety percent blue collar and ten percent white collar; in 1960 it was already fifty percent blue collar and fifty percent white collar, in 2010, it is ten percent or less blue collar and ninety percent white or pink collar. The professional class has arrived but is essentially managed, mobilized, motivated and manipulated as if it is still the 1950s. Small wonder we have problems.
It is the expediency of decisions making at the level of consequences that is critical to corporate success, as it is the engineer rapidly advancing unmanned performance in combat, not the general, who determines how the next conflict will be engaged. Bottom up communication has functionally displaced top down operations even if the corporate and military organizational charts stay the same.
* * *
Alas, this is reflected in the dominant cultures in the workplace. They vary from a Culture of Comfort with workers management dependent to a Culture of Complacency with workers counter dependent on the organization for their total well being when the workforce is primed with professionals for the Culture of Contribution. These professionals are being forced to fit in a climate not conducive to their synergy.14 This is not an isolated but an institutional problem.
Author William Livingston claims this is a cultural predilection to a hindsight orientation at the expense of foresight. He writes:
“The snub of intelligence-based foresight can be seen embedded throughout society. For example, more than 99% of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university and hindsight is all you take out of it.”15
We have cosmetic change instead of real change because we have failed to understand:
(1) The structure of work determines the function of work;
(2) The function of work creates the workplace culture;
(3) The workplace culture dictates the organizational biases and behaviors;
(4) The organizational biases and behaviors establish the vitality and viability of the organization.
An invisible hand guides the process. You only have to step back and observe to see how effective it is.
* * *
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA
There has been a nearly imperceptible shift in business development that has been going on since the beginning of the last century. That shift has been very much in line with a variance of the predictions of Marx and Engel. Workers have not gained control of the means of production as they insisted, but the means of information, which has proven even more dramatic, as this is the Age of Information.
It seems curious in retrospect, but organizational scholars have for the past half-century focused on management and the corporation giving far less attention to the individual worker and the amazing transformation of the American workforce from predominantly unskilled to predominantly professional.
* * *
Douglas McGregor led the charge with “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960) with his Theory “X” and “Y” style of management; Blake and Mouton followed with “The Managerial Grid” (1964) with managers either task or people centered; Frederick Herzberg came out with “Work and the Nature of Man” (1966) with his take on motivators and hygiene factors; Rensis Likert followed with “The Human Group” (1967) with his schematics on values and management; Hersey and Blanchard surveyed the literature producing “Management of Organizational Behavior” (1972) adding their own situational leadership; then there was William Ouchi’s “Theory Z” (1981) where he applied Japanese management to the American corporate culture; Deal and Kennedy continued this theme in “Corporate Culture” (1982); with Peters and Waterman following with “In Search of Excellence” (1982) profiling the best run companies; Harold Geneen then in “Managing” (1984) made the audacious claim a good manager could manage anything; while Peter Block’s “The Empowered Manager” (1989) provided a prescription for managers to demonstrate political skill in the workplace.
Strangely missing was the worker in the trenches, a worker who no longer needed management, needed motivators, needed elaborate schemes to put him in the mix, but only required a positive work climate of managed conflict, no hierarchies, self-regulation, self-assessment, but an opportunity to do creative work in an open system vulnerable to failure and therefore accessible to success.
Work Without Managers (1991) was written with this in mind, recognizing the passive posture of workers and the inclination to disruptive and toxic behaviors. These behaviors came to be identified as “the six silent organizational killers.”16
* * *
“In Search of Excellence” proved the opposite of its own hypothesis. Business Week illustrated this in its cover story “Who’s excellent now?” (November 5, 1984), as two years after its publication many of the companies profiled were struggling. As for Geneen’s declaration that a good manager can manage anything, John Scully of Apple proved the exception to this idea.
* * *
Fast forward to today. Commentators on business, management and leadership still write books only obliquely directed to the new professional. Most of them still have management in the center of the story with professionals on the fringe. The exception are such books as “Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace” by Dennis Reins, “Succeed on Your Own Terms” by Patrick Sweeney, “The Versatile Leader” by Robert Kaplan, and “BeliefWorks” by Ray Dodd.
When it comes to personhood, and the new orientation eschewed from the traditional “common good,” such books as “Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture” by Christian Smith and “A Whole New World” by Daniel Pink get it about right, especially Pink.
Pink has the professional clearly in his sights. He recognizes that exclusive left-brain vertical thinking with deductive reasoning is not sufficient to transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, which is just ahead.
Right brain thinkers, he sees, as ruling the future with inductive lateral thinking and intuitive problem solving. Right-brainers are synthesizers open to contradictions and holistic wisdom. They are not locked into the paralysis of analysis and circular logic, the territory of infallibility, business as usual and the status quo where crisis management is routine.
Thinking is complementary with left and right brains working in harmony, not conflict. Stated otherwise, creative thinking is the new landscape necessary for the creative professional. The paradoxical dilemma is that perhaps only twenty percent of the professional workforce works in a climate and workplace culture conducive to creative thought. It is the reason for this discussion and other efforts to that end.17
* * *
1 Robert B. Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Knopt, 2007.
2 James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, The Delta Group Florida, 1991, pp. 33-36.
3 Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, Atheneum, 1994; David Sheff, Game Over, Random House, 1994; Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars, Time Books, 1994.
4 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in the World, Touchstone Books, 1994.
5 Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmasking of IBM, Crown, 1994.
6 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 89.
7 James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, CRC Press, 1998.
8 James R. Fisher, Jr., Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers, AuthorHouse, 2000.
9 David Halberstam, The Next Century, William Morrow & Company, 1991, p. 59.
10 Management swelled to as many as twelve levels. Executive compensation rose from five to ten times that of workers in 1945 to sixty six times that of the typical GM worker for the CEO at General Motors in 1968. Today this would be considered modest. Peter Drucker found executive compensation the most predatory aspect of corporate capitalism (John E. Flaherty, Shaping the Managerial Mind, Jossep-Bass, 1999, p. 379). The CEO of Wal-Mart earned in 2009 earned one thousand times the average Wal-Mart employee.
11 John Strohmeyer, Crisis in Bethlehem, Adler & Adler, 1986.
12 James R. Fisher, Jr., “ The Three Dominant Cultures of the Workplace, National Productivity Review, Spring 1997, pp. 37 – 48.
13 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, W. W. Norton & Company, 1911, first published by Norton Library, 1967, p. 59.
14 James R. Fisher, Jr., “How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-Up Call,” AQP Journal, July/August 1999, pp. 7 – 11.
15 William L. Livingston IV, Design for Prevention, FES Publishing, Ltd., 2010, p. 14.
16 Passive aggression coming in late and leaving early doing as little as possible to get by; passive responsive always having an excuse why something isn’t done, and on time; passive defensive playing cover-your-ass and showing-your-ass games by putting your accusers on the defensive; approach avoidance accepting assignment you don’t intend to do or to complete on time; obsessive compulsive always wanting what you don’t have and aren’t instead of what you do have and are; and malicious obedience seeming to obeying orders from headquarters while withholding information vital to projects or spreading disinformation to paralyze the efforts of others.
17 James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Need for Lateral Thinking in the New Century,” National Productivity Review, Spring 2000, pp. 1-12.