THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY

THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 19, 2010

* * *

Someone wrote and asked if I was acquainted with Dr. Michael Beer of Harvard Business School. I replied in an email that, “No, I had never met him but knew someone who had once worked with him, and it didn’t work out too well.”

The writer emailed me back immediately, “That’s interesting. It appears Dr. Beer has lifted your SIX SILENT KILLERS for his purposes, including a video on them, but he calls them ‘six barriers to performance.’ What do you think of that?”

I replied, “I don’t think anything. I don’t know the man, don’t plan on contacting the man, and if he has to steal from me of all people, welcome to the cue.”

* * *

Some of my readers are writers. I suspect that they have had material lifted as well. Every once in a while someone brings this lifting to my attention. In fact, I broke contact with a national periodical that had published a piece of mine that I had not authorized. That ended that connection.

Over the last forty years, my schematics have been lifted, and sometimes credited, and sometimes not. I am a visual writer and find schematics help to clarify what I am trying to communicate.

I am also a conceptual writer, meaning I construct buildings of thought (e.g. The Fisher Paradigm) that readers can then identify and use in their lives.

An author asked permission to publish one of my concepts, my mentoring paradigm, promising once the book was published to send me a copy. I am still waiting for the book, which was published several years ago. The irony is that the author and the book in question are featured on pages of www.google.com devoted to my works. Other authors piggyback on those pages as well.

* * *

It is hard for BB to understand my motivation in publishing these missives when Ben Johnson said only a fool writes for pleasure and not for coin. However, I have good company. It was Melville who said, “It is now my settled purpose to write novels that are said to fail.” He knew MOBY DICK was too philosophical with a depth and style that would not appeal to conventional critics or a public that feasted on sentimental fiction and pulp romances, yet he could not stop himself from writing such challenging prose.

Emily Dickinson, who went virtually unpublished in her lifetime, and who now qualifies as the greatest poet who ever failed, was considered a closet eccentric.

Another proud failure was Walt Whitman, whose magnificent 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS met with wide spread vilification from critics as being a mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity and nonsense.

All three of these writers are now considered geniuses of American literature.

* * *

Incidentally, this is not an invitation to send me references to my works being plagiarized. I am flattered that people feel I have something useful to say. I am too old to suffer umbrage.

* * *