THANK GOD FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

THANK GOD FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 16, 2011

Tuesday, December 13, we arrived at St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida, run by the Sisters of St. Francis of Allegany, an order founded in 1934, a few minutes after 5 a.m.  We would be at that hospital for the next seventeen and one-half hours. 

At 8 a.m., Jennifer, our daughter, was rolled into the operating room where she would remain for the next ten hours undergoing radical bilateral mastectomies and reconstructive surgery.  She would spend another hour in recovery after which we would see her, groggy and somewhat nauseous.  Her vital signs (blood pressure, temperature, color and breathing) were in normal ranges, as she settled into her spacious private room.

This is a new wing of the hospital with all the rooms private and with a veritable army of nurses, nurses’ aids and other specialists attending to Jennifer as she spends the first hours of recovery after this radical surgery.

During this long waiting period, we were directed to an open visitors’ area off the main lobby where a board called “family legend,” much like the electronic board at the airport provided the surgical status of patients.  We could check the legend to see periodic updates on Jennifer’s status:

“Pre-op in,” “OR in,” “Recovery In,” “Phase II in,” “Recovery Out,” and “In Diagnostic Area.”

In addition, Linnin, Jennifer’s husband, was given a special cell phone that looks a lot like what you get in a restaurant as you await your table.  He was given updates as the surgery progressed.  This included reference to the lymph nodes being okay, when surgery on one breast was completed, and the other started, and then finished.  The routine was repeated with the reconstructive surgery.  This public relations service couldn’t have been more appreciated.

So, going on six o’clock a perky, petite little woman comes by our area, and I was the first she encountered reading away.  An outstretched hand was put in my face.  “Jennifer is doing fine.  It won’t be long until you can see her in room 5101.”

If you can imagine, this pretty little women looked like a high school freshman, yet I learned later that she was 38, or a year older than Jennifer.  It stood to reason after four years of pre-med in undergraduate school, four years of medical school, three or four years of specialized training in surgery, and then a two-year residency that she had to be much older than she looked.  She was still in her jumper suit and could have easily been taken for a nurse’s aid.  It was the first time I met her but I could see why Jennifer liked her and had such confidence in her.

*     *     *

The good Sisters of St. Francis, instead of having visitors of patients in surgery quartered off in some remote area, considered the anxious state of such visitors and thought creatively.  They designed a waiting area in the main lobby accessible to the cafeteria, coffee shop, specialty shops, and on this day, to a charity bizarre where they were selling beautiful costume jewelry and accessories for $5 a piece.  BB spent $48.77, as she liked the variety available and knew it was for a good cause.  I tagged along, as she looked and registered approval, which was my role, but not difficult as I liked everything she liked, which should be no surprise.

Most of the people in this visitors’ area could be seen to be talking on cell phones, watching CNN on the large television screen, texting, sleeping or incessantly talking.  I like to read with classical music in the background or an opera playing quietly. 

This one lady, I swear she talked for three solid hours without as much as taking a breath, a medical miracle.  But for me, it was perfect background noise as if I had Aida drumming into my ears as I read.  I managed to read “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” a 400-page novel by the Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and a good part of “The Psychology of Revolution” (1896) by Gustave Le Bon, a current favorite of mine.  I also managed to read my back issues of The London Review and The New York Review, and so I was not too far out of my element although in different ambient circumstances. 

It is also my nature to ensconce myself as far away from and parallel or behind the television screen so I can read.  My other motivation for such a vantage point is to watch the people.  I am not at all into talking to people but into writing stories in my head as I study them, their dress, expressions, ethnic origins, manners, and how they relate to each other. 

There was a large Indian woman with her son, and his three children snuggled so close together on two chairs across from me that they seemed to be a single heap.  The children, all small, were drape like a shawl around her, while the son stared blankly at the television screen as if in a hypnotic trance.  Tired.  They all spelled tired, bone aching exhaustion.  My wonder is how far they had to travel to this hospital.  They also looked impoverished but with no evidence of complaint. 

Although they were sitting right next to the non-stop talking machine, it didn’t seem to disturb them but rather to put the grandmother and children to fitful sleep. 

Illness is democratic, and is blind to socio-economic status.  To confirm this, there was a bell curve from struggling to well off people looking anxiously at the Family Legend and checking the status of loved ones.  It was a quiet group even the children were quiet.  It was as if they understood a common bond ran through everyone like they were in church. 

A little African American boy broke the spell running, laughing, jumping, stumbling, falling, picking himself up, and repeating the whole process again as if it was his job to put some levity into our weary faces.  He looked at me momentarily, cocked his head aside, said nothing, and then went on.  I wondered if I was ever like that little boy.

*     *     *

Linnin, BB and I went out for lunch.  Linnin wanted to go to a Spanish restaurant and my expression indicated that was not my choice.  Bland describes my diet, and I am not adventuresome when it comes to food, while Linnin and BB are something of connoisseurs.  We settled for The Village Inn, where I had breakfast at 3 p.m. and so did Linnin, while BB had a soup and sandwich.  Dinner was in the hospital cafeteria for BB and me, while Linnin went out and brought his Cuban food back, where we ate together. 

Linnin is a tall, slim and handsome young man, two years younger than Jennifer, and of a happy disposition and loving nature, and absolutely a joy to be around.  He doesn’t have to say a word but creates positive vibes.  As difficult as this is for us, I can only imagine what he is going through.

Forty years ago BB’s mother had radical bilateral mastectomies.  By radical, I mean they destroyed the breasts by vertical incisions through the breasts and the nipples, removing manually the cancer, lymph nodes, some muscle, connective and fatty tissue.  Today, through medical science surgical advances, they make small incisions under each breast saving the nipples, followed immediately with reconstructive surgery.  Once Jennifer is in full recovery it will appear as if she never had the procedures at all. 

Meanwhile, she will have a challenging recovery period once she starts her chemotherapy.  I must add at this point that approaching this surgery she was more stoic, composed and accepting than we were.  It is her nature to accept problems as they occur, to deal with them, and to move on.  She has been a little adult most of her life, and now it augurs especially well for her.  No anxiety, no gnashing of teeth, no hyperventilation, no heart palpitations, only, “let’s get on with it and get it over with.”

*     *     *

When I was a boy, we looked up to our doctors as if they were some kind of gods.  We trusted them, respected them, believed in them, and followed their instructions as being wiser, more informed and our medical anchor to health and well being. 

Over the last sixty years, I have seen this confidence in their competence eroding.  I have seen doctors and nurses, nurses’ aids, and other specialists treated poorly.  Yet, the science and art and care of medicine have continued to improve and evolve despite this building negative legacy of feeling. 

Over the years, I have heard doctors accused of making too much money, which is terribly misleading, that medical care is too expensive, which it is, but not the fault of medical staffs, that doctor practitioners, not licensed physicians, are the ones that see most patients, and on and on.  No mention of their dedication and concomitant fatigue, or that there is a shortage of doctors.

Spending seventeen plus hours at this hospital seeing doctors in their color coded jump suits, walking through the halls with bent shoulders, ashen complexions, tired eyes, but resolute spirits staving off their tiredness with light banter among them, I marveled at how inconspicuous they were, and how little they stood on protocol. 

These physicians understood what engineering philosopher William Livingston calls the “purpose of a system is what it does” (P0ASIWID).  They carry out their role unobtrusively, quietly, effectively and efficiently, spending long hours in surgery, visiting hospital patients, and seeing patients in their offices, leaving little time for themselves. 

It is not only a long and expensive preparatory process to become a physician, but a requirement to constantly update skills as new technology and techniques are developed.  Then there is always the threat of malpractice suits brought on by carpet bagging lawyers.  

While watching these physicians drag themselves through the hospital, and out to their cars, I wondered how many visitors sitting here have any idea how grueling and demanding this profession, a profession that many envy from afar, but few appreciate up close the sacrifices that have had to be made along the way to reach this pentacle of achievement, or the astronomical student debt that may accrue in the process.

On Wednesday at 6 p.m., we were able to bring Jennifer home, only twenty-four hours after her surgical ordeal because of the skill and competence of everyone at St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital.

Pivotal to everything were her doctors.  It wasn’t simply their ability, which obviously they must have as well as the required aptitude, but their resourcefulness, resilience, energy and compassion to self-forget their own needs to deal with those of others.  Medicine is a noble profession of everyone in the chain of service from building maintenance to healthcare deliverers.  I was moved to write about it, as I pondered those seventeen plus hours when our Jennifer came through a difficult operation with flying colors.   Thank God for the medical profession.

*     *     *

OUR COMMON AFRICAN HERITAGE

OUR COMMON AFRICAN HERITAGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 15, 2011

We were all black before some of us were white.  That is the implication in Chris Stringer’s new book, “The Origin of our Species” (2011). 

There is little we don’t know about our remote ancestors by analyzing the chemistry of their bones, or by examining the structure of minute features such as the inner ear bones of fossil skulls by means of computerized tomography, or luminescence techniques to date single grains of sand.  Stringer’s mobile phone has more processing power than the multi-room University of Bristol computer he once used in the 1970s where he processed human fossils data with multivariate statistics, now a common tool for college freshman.

Over the last forty years, astounding advances have been made with Recent African Origin studies and multi-regional models resulting in new fossil discoveries and archaeological excavations, dating methodologies, and new procedures for the extraction of ancient DNA. 

The major players in our common African heritage are Homo erectus, the first human to disperse out of Africa sometime after two million years ago.

Homo heidelbergensis, a descendant of Homo erectus, is most probably the common ancestor of the Neanderthal man and us.

Homo neanderthalensis remains have been found in Europe and South-West Asia.  They appear so biologically similar and yet so culturally different from us that there still remains a gap to be explored and explained before Homo sapiens.  Once Homo sapiens arrived on the scene they populated the world first narrowly then more widely.

Springer charts the advances in our understanding of the fossil, archeological and genetic evidence before bringing all the evidence together in the most up to date synthesis available.  This is the main thesis of his book.

Genetics, both ancient and modern, is said to be impressive but to show little new light on what was already known of our ancient ancestors in terms of language, thought, symbolism and behavior.  One thing seems abundantly clear, Homo sapiens had a single origin in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and that the common human race, at that time, was black, all black with no white race yet to evolve.

The vast research now is into analysis and interpretation of the genetic diversity of living people not only in terms of what is called MtDNA, but also in terms of autosomal DNA.  The later makes up the chromosomes contained in the nuclei of our body cells, and the male Y chromosome.  Stringer describes the male Y chromosome as being boring and full of junk (DNA junk). 

Genetics are not expected to replace the analysis of fossil and archaeological remains, but it has already transformed the way researchers interpret these findings, and therefore is likewise expected to lead to an avalanche of studies in that respect.

Already, this research has led to the discovery of some fascinating details about Homo sapiens.  For example, blue-eyes were selectively evolved along with paler skin color in Europe around the peak of the last Ice Age, which appeared 20,000 years ago.

Springer warms that genetic diversity complemented by ancient DNA extracted from fossils must be interpreted with caution because of the small number, and size of the samples, and the risks of contamination by modern DNA. 

That said more than twenty Neanderthal specimens confirm that they probably shared a common ancestor with us between 350,000 and 500,000 years ago.  There is also strong evidence for some degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals.  Stringer concludes, “If you are European, Asian or New Guinean, you probably have a bit of Neanderthal in your make up.” 

To corroborate this hypothesis, samples of Neanderthal DNA from skeletal remains in Spain and Italy indicate that southern European Neanderthals would have had paler (white) skin and red hair, which is a departure from the black skin and black hair of more common Neanderthal fossils. 

Surprises abound in Springer’s “The Origin of Our Species.”  No one expected to find “primitive” looking Homo erectus fossils at Dmanisi in Georgia in 1991, as it was assumed only larger-brained hominids could have dispersed from Africa.  Yet, in 2004, a fossil of a small-brained hominid with weird limbs was found in Flores, an Indonesian island, dating back 18,000 years.

Paleontologists-anthropologists have to live with the risks that new discoveries will overturn their most cherished theories.  Given the fossil record is so sparse, it is unfortunate that the Japanese destroyed the rich collection of Homo erectus fossils near Beijing during WWII. 

Mysteries remain, and fossil and archaeological evidence continue to turn up new discoveries.  For example, DNA of a molar tooth and finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia was dated 40,000 years ago, but it was not the DNA of Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis, but of a completely new human species living in eastern Asia, and a derivative of Homo heidelbergensis, who lived well over 500,000 years ago.

Springer concludes that, in any case, these specie identifications are artificial constructs to approximate our understanding of the complexities of our human evolutionary process. He argues for Homo sapiens being African in origin dispersed in a global Diaspora around 55,000 years ago.  The human race evolved in its many complexions, body types, and structural differences many of which are now known, but many of which are not.  Climate, topography, interbreeding, and occupation have influenced these complexities of gradient differences.  What’s more, he claims we are still evolving.  The emergence of settled farming communities some 12,000 years ago produced selective new pressures influencing diet, adaptation, socializing, reproductive practices and sheltering schemes.  Changes in individual DNA sequences suggest human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years.  We are evolving a hundred times faster than we were when we split from the lineage of chimpanzees around six million years ago. 

Springer concludes the most compelling model of our human origins, whatever our color, race, body type, heritage, is one of a common African origin.  Future science will either confirm or refute his hypothesis.

*     *     *

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- IS THIS A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – IS THIS A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 11, 2011

REFERENCE:

A select few are reading this in manuscript form.  I confess I have been impatient to hear their reaction to what they have read.  An acquaintance reacts to this.

*     *     *

Someone who has read this manuscript has noted my lament at not hearing back from readers, that is, with the exception of two.  That said the comments from these readers have been appreciated and useful.  At first, I hesitated to share what follows, but then thought, is it true what he says?  My sense is what he sees as my intent is just my limits as a writer.  I am simply trying to tell a story climbing to truth as best I can without apologies.  A writer writes:

Fisher, you can't have it both ways, ask readers to read you than dump all over them when they don't read you as you would like.  I'm not sure what your instructions were but I'm confident they were vague. 

You write like you read and most people, me included, don't read all that esoteric stuff you do, well, not all of it.  For example, I can see the influence of Sigmund Freud here.  Obviously, you have had some indoctrination with his doublespeak. 

Less obvious, but I'm sure you would argue the contrary; the influence of James Joyce is here.  I read "Portrait as an Artist as a Young Man," liked it and think you capture the double bind that Catholicism could put on the human soul.  I tried to read "Ulysses," which you apparently devoured.  I did read all the dirty parts, which I found delicious, but not nearly as delicious as your dirty parts.  Nina is fabulous.  She almost makes Devlin human.  Joyce's Molly Bloom doesn't hold a candle to her.  

One of my favorite authors is Pete Dexter whom I doubt many of your readers know, although he won the National Book Award for "Paris Trout."  Dexter obviously reads Joyce and shows the same devilish delight you show at men and women colliding with psycho-sexual energy. 

There is evidence of the influence of Joseph Conrad's  "Heart of Darkness," which you acknowledge, but also I can see the influence of "The Nigger of 'Narcissus'" and "Nostromo" here as well.   How many readers do you think read Conrad?  I would say between slim and few.

But the presence of Dostoyevsky, which pulsates through the book in dreams and innuendos, guilt and self-flagellation, betrayal and greed may be a bit much for readers that are reading the story on one level when you throw two others at them.  Why did you do this?  Or did you feel it added to the story? 

Green Island does have the feel of madness, and how normal madness is in the conscience of civilized man.  That was Dostoyevsky's ploy.  You are as much a moralist as he is without the same pathos.  I've read "Notes from the Underground" and "The Brothers Karamazov," and promised myself one day to read "The Possessed" and "The Idiot" and "Crime and Punishment," but haven't got around to them.

See what I'm saying?  I'm what you would call a reader of some patience with these obtuse authors, but you relish their company.  Although Green Island is clearly biographical, it is a novel of depth and depression, enlightened leadership and stubborn resolve.  On the other hand, although this might not have been your intention, it offers a view of the decline and fall of Western white man. Clever.

My advice, and you've never taken my advice before, is publish it yourself, and then bind up copyright protection for your family for the next fifty years, when it will be "current," and I suspect considered prophetic like Edward Bellamy's late nineteenth century novel "Looking Backward" predicted life in the early twenty-first century.  

Given what I've said here, I doubt if you will sell ten copies now, but you're loaded so who cares, right?

W.E.B.D

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT -- A FURTHER EXCHANGE

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT – A FURTHER EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 10, 2011

MY FRIEND, JORGE, WRITES:

Jim,

Building on my last message: I could careless if the writers come down hard on management. That is not the important point and too easy a case to make. The Hogans actually argue that there are recognized principles of management (this aligns with Natural Law) and they cite the Bloom et al study (see paragraph one, page 2) to illustrate their point. Interestingly enough, per the Bloom study which is international in scope the best run companies are multi-nationals; the worst run entities are government agencies, nonprofits and outfits run by 2nd generation family members. This is worth pondering, I'd say. 

When I first read your remarks, I got the distinct impression you all too quickly filtered things through your own model and spend most of your energy poopooing what you read (distancing and distinguishing yourself) and little time appreciating the similarities with your perspective.  Case in point, the "six silent killers" are immature ego defenses that ruin organizations. The Hogans similarly, catalog the damage done by sub clinical personality disorders in working adults especially those who hold management positions.

Jorge

*     *     *   

DR. FISHER REPONDS:

Jorge,

My model was developed in 1980, published in a Honeywell paper in 1984, and in book form in 1990, a non-academic who is a thinker based not on academia but on empirical work in the fields of Europe, South America, South Africa and the United States. 

The insights were gleaned from below not above.  It is why the secondary title to "Work Without Managers" was "A View from the Trenches."  

People steal from me.  Fortune Magazine had a cover piece a number of years ago on "Work Without Managers" after the book was published.  I wrote to the magazine, never received a reply.  I was giving a seminar in Annapolis and a manager came up and showed me where some of my schematics appeared in a book, where the author wrote, “permission granted by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.”  I had never heard of the author, the book and certainly never gave permission.  Ideas are stolen cloaked in academia and this has become par for the course.  So, t do look at works through my lens when what is said is an offshoot of what I said years earlier. 

To your credit, and this is true of many others, you recognize my ideas in other people’s works and mean to share your joy at finding it so.  Likewise, people are constantly telling me to read this book and that book that says similar things to what I say.  I am at the stage of my life where I read no literature in management.  Actually, I’ve never been so inclined because so often I found the authors more interested in an audience than the authority of their views. 

A coterie of educators, consultants, writers and professionals use my stuff, and I am happy that they do.  Occasionally, writers and publishers (mostly foreign) ask permission than promise a copy of the work once published.  Such promises are seldom kept. 

I am an outsider, but a diligent outsider that gets a little wary when I see my work disguised in another form.  I confess I don’t jump through hoops of joy at the notice.  On the other hand, I am too old to protest but not too old to care.  My family, after I am gone, should benefit from what I created, not be content to see doctored treatments of my stuff in some kind of cult.

BB says it is my own fault because I like my anonymity and she is right.  Peter Drucker, it is alleged, would not give an autograph without a quid pro quo.  In fact, up to his death, it is said he was campaigning for his celebrity as an organizational bystander.  I am an organizational grunt, and have been all my life having worked at virtually every level of organization from dirt-covered factory worker to top executive. 

It is that environment that has been my laboratory, and the caldron of my creativity. 

I've read the article, and you can be assured it has that academic patina that anesthetizes the reader from feeling any pain of actual experience.  My prose bite you like a piranha on the loose.  Speaking metaphorically, Hogan, et al are like looking at the problem at arms length, like the backup quarterback with the clipboard and the clean uniform on the sideline under a protective parka while the starting quarterback is out in the field wet-cold and covered in mud. 

Management being anachronistic is a problem for me because the little guy gets caught up in self-flagellation, and becomes the victim when the system is the culprit.  If I have contempt, it is for the waste of time and self-destructive and social destructive behavior that creates economic disequilibria as capitalism has grown to be. 

I will not allow those in authority whatever the discipline to feel comfortable flaunting their style and seeing themselves as superior to others.  I come out of the seed of that Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad and I have never left my roots.

My whole attention (e.g., "The Worker, Alone," my best book and shortest) is directed not at CEOs, academics or scholars, but at the people who rise out of the swamps of despair in an attempt to find their way against a rigged system.  I see the Hogans, et al, as unwittingly part of that rigging implicitly if not explicitly, because they never get their psyches dirty.  Mine is very dirty from digging through the trenches.  I thought you knew this.

Think of the “Occupy Wall Street” moment in the context of what was written in “The Worker, Alone” some sixteen years ago:

The call is to workers everywhere, but especially professionals.  They have invested heavily in their education, only to find a disappointing “return on investment.”  Angry, confused, they suffer downsizing, redundancy exercises and conglomerates take over like fatalists.  Those employed wonder “when the other shoe will fall.”  Never have workers been more distrustful of “the system.”  Ironically, “they are the system.”

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT: THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RUMINATES

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT: PERSONAL ASSESSMENT AND MITIGATION by Joyce Hogan, Robert Hogan, Robert B. Kaiser: THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RUMINATES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 10, 2011

JORGE FERNANDEZ WRITES:

Jim,

After reading your talk to the high school seniors, I thought you would be interested in the following:

http://www.hoganassessments.com/sites/default/files/Management%20Derailment%205-1-l2009%20%282%29_0.pdf

PS - I've been using the Hogan tools since the late 90's

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Jorge,

It is not the best of times for me at the moment to peruse this document, but I have examined the first ten pages and see a pattern here.  I think "executive derailment" is an oxymoron and you will see why. 

 I've been invited to submit a paper for a conference on Management and Service Science to be held in Shanghai, China August 10 - 12, 2012.  Reading the Hogan's document, which I find misleading, encourages me to do the hard work to putting together a system's theory on 21st century management, as I've pretty well dispatched all the ideas of Peter Drucker, et al, over the past twenty years.  Moreover, I've never been past the Middle East in that direction, and it would be nice to have that experience.  No doubt the paper will be the equivalent of a small book, but we shall see.  Stay tuned.  Here I will make comments on the pages I have read:

Page One

The authors say, "Modern study of management is stagnant and out of date."  They go on to say attempts to create a science of management have failed.  Then they make reference to the fact that "well established management practices" find financial firms operating at a high level of performance.

Comment:

Of course, the study of management is stagnant.  We've never graduated beyond the MBA mindset, which makes bean counters out of everyone, and then brags about it.  Frederick Winslow Taylor tried to create "scientific management" by treating people "to more resemble an ox than any other type."  Alfred Sloan, the legendary head of GM during the Great Depression, laid off tens of thousands of workers, but boasted about never missing a dividend to stockholders, putting profits before people.  MIT to this day has the "Sloan School of Management" echoing his sentiments.

Finance is a thing to be managed and obviously performance management has some success here, but flippantly impetuous Jon Corzine of Goldman Sachs lost more than $1 billion on a whim that Europe was going to solve the problem of Greece and the euro.  Even the managers of things occasionally go a little heywire.

Steven Jobs built Apple, Inc. into one of the largest corporation in the world, as well as into his own image and likeness.  He never graduated from college much less a business school.  It would have ruined him.  He defied conventional wisdom on organizational structure by creating eccentric but highly challenged teams.  This is reminiscent of the Skunk Works at Lockheed, and earlier, the guilds in pre-industrial Europe.

Page Two

The authors say "management incompetence has serious moral implications because bad managers cause great misery for their subordinates."

Comment:

Let's get rid of the term "subordinates" altogether, okay?  It should be excised from the language. 

Managers are incompetent because they think their job is to manage, so they go to management schools and learn how to manage things, then return to treat people as things to be managed. 

Managers look bad, the people look bad, and productive work falls between the cracks.  Again, the authors quote all kinds of literature, and a few figures as to this cost.  I wish academics would get away from making writing a veritable jigsaw puzzle of parentheses (authors and references).  Think, brothers and sisters, and let us decide if what you write has merit.

Page Three

The authors: "40 percent of American workers report that their jobs are very or extremely stressful."

Comment:

Dr. Hans Selye put it best: "Stress is the spice of life, if it were not for stress you would be a vegetable, or dead!" 

It is stressful to write these words, to submit articles and books to publishers and receive rejections, but the purpose of my life is what I do and that is I write.  Were I not under this wonderful umbrella of stress I would be a couch potato and watch mindless television all day, or sit in front of a computer screen and play senseless games. 

Grow up, Americans!  Stress is your invitation to life, not a retreat from it.  Selye goes on to say the problem is "distress," or worrying about what never happens or worrying just to be worrying because you're not recognized for your value, not making as much as you think you should, and on and on.  It is the complaining mentality of the comfort and complacent worker who would rather be doing something else, but that something else he has no idea what it is.

Control is the problem, and control is a matter of choices. 

If you're not happy where you are doing what you are doing, do something else.  Don't retreat into the palaver you can't afford to, or you have too many responsibilities, all this is a con job on yourself.  I have absolutely no patience with people that tell me their lives are too stressful.  They created the circumstances of their lives either by commission or omission.  The studies referenced here make no impression on me.

Page Four

The authors quote a 30-year study of managerial derailment.  People were said to be uniformly bright and socially skilled, but lacked business skills, unable to deal with complexity, were reactive, unable to delegate, unable to build teams, unable to or slow to learn, unable to network, let emotions cloud their judgment, and had overriding personality defects.  One other thing they had in common, their halted progression wasn't voluntary.

Comment:

I read this and wept.  My wonder is why I have written all these books, books that are not quoted in these studies, but books that have shown that fear of the parent-as-manager has made workers management dependent, afraid to take a toilet break, afraid to initiate any action for fear it would not be what was wanted or expected, fear of stepping out of line for fear of being demoted or fired, fear in all its stripes.  The most comfortable thing to do "is not make waves."  It is why I call it "the culture of comfort."

The consequence of this has been to suspend mature workers in permanent adolescence with the quaking recalcitrant mood of a spoiled twelve-year-old child in a 30, 40 or 50-year-old body, and then they wonder why management is derailed. 

Of course, it has nothing to do with intelligence.  It has everything to do with adapting to the predominant culture, and halted programming of this culture is a function of that system and nothing else.

Page Five

The authors now direct their attention to derailed executives, who fail because of business problems, insensitivity, arrogance, betrayed trust, over managing, overly ambitious, failing to staff effectively, unable to think strategically, unable to adapt to different management style, overly dependent on a mentor.

Comment:

This is the other side of the same coin.  The previous problem -- of that coin side -- was culture.  The problem of this side of the coin is the shift in power without any shift in structure.  Now eighty to ninety percent of the workforce is better educated than its management in terms of knowledge, electronic know how and in level of sophistication.  Yet, the negative attributes listed here for managers are indicative of this shift without the organization adjusting intellectually, emotionally, operationally and strategically to it. 

In point of fact, managers are atavistic and the management system is anachronistic. 

Since it will not change, these bright and sociable workers, as the study accurately noted, retreat into what I have called "six silent killers," of which you are most familiar as you were instrumental in finding a publisher for that book, a book that I think is still relevant, but unfortunately, has a price tage of $74 a copy.

Elsewhere, especially on my blog, actually several years ago, I wrote of a program management system that included career roadmaps, mentoring, and computer programming to track workers in terms of training (education), skill level (gradient index), job complexity (job level), readiness (for promotion or organizational needs assessment), and adaptability (emotional intelligence). 

I never did anything with it but I might dust it off, polish it up, and include it in my soiree for China.

Page Six

Authors discuss other surveys of what upper level managers should be able to do behaviorally, including handling complexity, directing-motivating-developing, honoring, driving for excellence, savvy, composure, sensitivity, and staffing.

Comment:

This has the sound of 21st century stuff but not the feel of 21st century requirements because nothing anymore is either manager or workers, but especially workers who are now in charge as Jobs showed.  Remember he was fired from his own company, a company he co-founded.  "His style" was considered out of sink with that Pepsi Cola guy, John Sculley, who practically drove Apple into oblivion with his MBA approach.

The attributes listed here are fine, but not a guide to "top management," but rather a guide to all managers-workers in the system from top to bottom.  The key is development.

Page Seven

The authors talk of derailment research, generally, across time, organizations and cultures.

Comment:

There is too much timidity collectively in the organization to depart from business as usual practices, from the reign of infallibility of the hierarchy, from the promotional schemes that don't go anywhere other then to shore up a deteriorating image.  The madness still exists that endless meetings are a way to network and keep people on task. 

Time, organization and culture have entered a new dimension, not only because of the Internet and the global economy, but because diversity and heterogeneity mean dealing with, respecting and adjusting to peoples of different cultures in a timely fashion.  It will never happen if profits are always put before people.  Nor if our schools continue to operate as if we are still an agrarian society.

A long time ago, when I was an organizational psychologist in a high tech company, I did a study of waste, and found that the emphasis was placed on the back end (the product) and not on the front end (the process). 

The study indicated that scrap and rework was costing the division as much as $5 million at the product end.  The program manager with whom I was working reported this to management.  He could not move it to operate more strategically (i.e., focus on chronic process problems in the system).  In fact, he lost some favor with his management over this initiative.  

Page Eight

The authors quote a study that verifies the above.  Managers failed because of poor administrative skills, difficulty making correct choices, lack of strategic thinking, failure to build a team, lack of interpersonal savvy, low self-awareness, poor political skills, inability to deal with conflict, questionable integrity. 

Comment:

Attitude, aptitude and attributions are locked into what I have said elsewhere as "being winning side saddlers," that is, not taking risks for fear of failure and therefore failing, not wanting to share power and therefore not being able to build teams, not wanting to show vulnerability and therefore being mainly a stranger to self, while trying too hard to fit in and therefore shying away from conflict and confrontation and therefore pleasing no one, especially politically.

As you know in my paradigm, I show how the organization has gone from being "manager dependent" with workers reactive and motivated by fear (culture of comfort or unconscious incompetence) to managers as "permissive pleasers," giving workers everything but the kitchen sink with workers motivated by security (culture of complacency or unconscious incompetence).

Management's intentions were to buy positive performance with the generosity of pay, perks and entitlements only to find it backfired into worker complacency, which was counterproductive. 

Actually, what management wanted but was not mature enough to accept were self-directed, self-managed and self-disciplined workers who would need little or no supervision.  These workers would be able to work in project teams (culture of contribution or conscious competence) where the motivation was work itself, and where workers were not afraid of conflict but preferred managed conflict, and who would not hesitate to confront management when the mission was in jeopardy or threatened to be aborted for some selfish managerial angst.

Page Nine

The authors next dealt with the increased complexity and pace of change as well as the need for cross-cultural exposure where workers likely will have to work abroad sometime in their careers.

Comment:

This is apropos to the future and is quite relevant.  I spent a good deal of my life working abroad and had little orientation, indoctrination or schooling in these assignments.  Moreover, I was limited in language skills and cultural understanding of the situations with which I had to deal.  No race of people is more xenophobic than Americans when it comes to other cultures, yet, paradoxically, Americans have little trouble merging cross culturally at home.

As for complexity and pace, this is huge and, again, it is not something that can remain at the level of explanation.  William L. Livingston III has written widely and wisely on the subject of complexity, as I've pointed out before.  No writer understands the demands of complexity better or how to deal with it.  He points out that most of our complex problems we avoid, and solve the problems we can understand and believe solvable.  This has led to the mess we are in financially, politically, institutionally and, yes, culturally.

Page Ten

The authors summarize the habits of unsuccessful people, which includes, overestimating their strengths, and underestimating their competition, putting personal interests before company, being arrogant and reckless in decision making (Jon Corzine comes to mind), sabotaging challengers, ignoring the company's purpose and concentrating on managing the company's image, minimizing obstacles and planning accordingly, relying on outdated strategies and tactics.

Comment:

My first reaction is that they should read Dov Seidman's "How" (2011) and David Brooks' "The Social Animal" (2011), as these authors cover the waterfront.  Seidman is an optimist; Brooks is a cautionary pessimist, both are right.

The page ends with the authors calling attention to why CEOs fail.  

It occurred to me that the authors describe little boys and girls that never left the sixth grade (incidentally, I wrote an article to this effect).  They are arrogant, melodramatic, volatile, and cautious to sneaky, distrustful, aloof, mischievous, odd, passive resistant, anal, and eager to please.  Scary, huh?

Jorge, I apologize for going on, but I knew when I started commenting on the pages that I was hooked.  In conclusion, I don't see derailment.  You have to be on the rails to derail.  We long ago left them.

Be always well,

Jim

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THE CYBER CROWD -- FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE -- A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

THE CYBER CROWD – FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE – A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 2,2011

REFERENCE:

My grandson, Ryan Carr, asked me to give a talk to his senior class in “ethics and leadership.”  I handed out the missive "The Challenge of Moral Leadership," which was prepared for this talk.  What follows is a transcript of my recorded remarks.

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My name is Jim Fisher.  I am Ryan’s grandfather.  I’ve taught graduate school, undergraduate school, and have conducted executive seminars over a good part of the world, but have never addressed a high school class.  So, I hope you will forgive me if I sound nervous.

In route here, I told Ryan that the most important thing for a speaker is to know his audience.  Quite frankly, I don’t know you but will endeavor to bridge this void.

The subject is leadership.  I planned to bring books on the subject that I have written but put them in Ryan’s grandmother’s car, and didn’t discover the error until I reached your school.  It would be safe to say, in any case, that these ten books are but chapters in the same book as leadership, like human behavior, hasn’t changed in millenniums.

To illustrate my point, allow me to quote Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist who specialized in crowd theory.  He writes in “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896):

The thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.  Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation.  The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted.  The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries. 

This idea of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transformation and anarchy … While all the ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase.  The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS (the author’s use of higher case).

Now, 105 years later, my wonder is how he would define the crowd today.  What do you think?

Silence.  (This is not unusual when a stranger enters the midst of young scholars, twelve seniors, seven boys and five girls.)

Let me help you.  Le Bon would be fascinated with an interest common to you all.  What do you think that might be given what I quoted him as saying?

Silence.

It is the cyber crowd epitomized by FaceBook and YouTube.  More than a billion souls participate, speaking many languages, engaged in many disciplines, with diverse perspectives and cultures, beliefs and values, forced by the pressure of the era onto this stage.

Without conscious awareness, without the discernible screen of intelligence, there has been a transformation and collectivization of the will and sentiment, for better or worse.  There has been a retreat from the individual to the clamor of the crowd as hero in this innocuous social electronic connection.

We are witnessing the vanishing of the conscious personality to the collective mind.  Doubtlessly, this transition is unconscious by yet has a conscious organization to form the psychological crowd.  It differs little with that of Le Bon’s a century ago.  Eric Hoffer called the herd mentality in “The True Believer” (1951).

This phenomenon is not simply an accidental cyber space communication of a few individuals with families and friends about the sense and nonsense of their daily lives but of tens of millions with an agenda.  The “Arab Spring” movement and “Occupy Wall Street” moment are expressions of anguish, the Arab Spring with totalitarian rule, and the Occupy Wall Street with inequity of income and opportunity.  Crowds are leaderless with no infrastructure, organization or hierarchy, the modern definition of the cyber crowd.   

Media see these as innocent.  A few people, even a single individual touches the feelings and thoughts of the many in a definite direction and launches the spontaneous disruption and ultimate disappearance of the conscious personality replaced by the clamor of the crowd.

My purpose is to alert you to what begins in innocence can spin off into lawlessness.  It happened in Nazis Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler.  I’m not making that connection here but alerting you to the fact that the immoral can be disguised in the rhetoric of moral and ethical leadership, as was the case with Hitler as he came to power.

This paper (handing out “The Challenge of Moral Leadership”) complements my talk today. 

WHERE DOES THAT PUT YOU AS STUDENTS?

Your focus is on the scintillating world of ideas, concepts, theories, the beauty of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, history and the arts.  You will draw on this base as you process life experiences.  Education provides you with armament against illusion and inclusion into moments and movements designed to entice you.

Education protects you from dreamily being seduced by half-baked ideas or someone’s hidden agenda to perpetuate collective needs at your individual expense.  To belong to a movement (Arab Spring) or moment (Occupy Wall Street), it is necessary to unflinchingly espouse selective prejudices, preconceived ideas and opinions, radical measures for implementation, and a mania for reform.  Otherwise, you are like sheep to the slaughter caught up in a delirium and you have no idea why.

Education is a lifelong process in the development of a point of view, hopefully, derived from study, personal experience, supportive values, and a perspective that enables you to get where you intend to go.

If this sounds like moral leadership, it is.  The most critical job of leadership is the nurturing individual essence and experience leavened with free will to meet the challenges of life.  Everyone is a leader or no one is.  It starts with you now.

One of the first challenges in life is to straddle the breech between what is ethical and what is legal.  Most corporate enterprises favor the legal such as competitive industries and Wall Street, which are directed and driven by the so-called one percent.

As I say in the paper you have in your hands, once the focus is on the legal, it is likely to be at the expense of what is ethical.  We are all caught in a legalistic society as morality is in the mind of the times.  Given this, we attempt to persuade ourselves that what is legal is also ethical, but alas, seldom does that twain meet.

Given possible examination questions before the test may be legal, but ethically, does it measure learning?  What is the ethical value of a designed review course in preparation for the taking of the Standard Achievement Test (SAT)?  Again, it certainly doesn’t measure learning, but as we all know it is quite legal.  

Our minds are constantly bombarded with information to dislodge pure reason from practical reason, fictitious shapes from real shapes, unreal truth from real truth, theoretical values from practical values, doubtful facts from obvious facts, destiny from providence until our solitary minds are so confused to be vulnerable to the genius of the crowd.

Mass media and the Internet with such vehicles as FaceBook and YouTube have combined in cyber space to shape the mind of today to resemble that of the crowd.  Consequently, what seems conscious participation is largely unconscious and represents the secret strength of the crowd.  The complexity of the modern world astounds us finding us retreating to instinct and maneuvering on automatic pilot. 

We make celebrities of people who read the news, and fill our minds with the provocative horrors of the day, media pundits that tell us who we are, what we should think, how we should live, while encouraging us to buy their CD’s and books that we never read.  We make them best selling authors, attend lectures that awards them six figure honorariums, and often elect them to public office.  We equate their sanguine and glib delivery with wisdom and clarity of thought.  Their other qualification is they look like us.

I have watched all twelve of the Republican Presidential Debates as entertainment.  I see none of them an improvement on the present occupant of the White House, who admittedly is not very effective but is a known entity.  How many of you have watched these debates?  (No hands go up)

That is understandable given your full academic schedules, extracurricular activities and active social lives.  I mention it here for a reason, and that I would like to discuss now.

THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF MAKING CHOICES

What do you think is the most important quality of leadership?  (No response)  It is the ability to make sensible choices.

We see with the alleged personal false steps of presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, among others, that if the whispers of impropriety exist, they will surface as deliciously as gossip and promulgated as fact.  In the court of public opinion, you are guilty until proven innocent, and even then few are likely to buy your innocence. 

We are all fallible, sinful, incomplete human beings who in the course of our lives make choices we later regret, but hopefully more right than wrong choices.  The irony is we expect our leaders to be better than we are.  We put them on pedestals to make them more than human then knock them off treating them as less than human.  This encourages dissembling, corruption, cover up and conspiracy among their ranks, and we wonder why. 

If we look at this from a personal standpoint – I’m speaking to you now as individuals – and buy the idea we are special because we are told we are brighter, more gifted, taller, more attractive, more vivacious, more cunning and likeable than others than we lose connection with other people.  More importantly, we lose connection with ourselves.  We are vulnerable to flatterers who can manipulate us to their purposes.  They tell us we are a special race, group, contingent or class.  This finds us surrendering our personal identity for a collective one.  The genius of the crowd depends on this. 

One of the first rules of leadership is awareness of whom you are where you are why you are here as opposed to somewhere else.  This perspective provides you with the vision to see and the capacity to serve, while being able to evaluate accurately what is going on right now. 

In that paper I’ve handed out, I mention General Motors.  GM in the 1950s, likely before your parents were born, the CEO of GM, Charles Wilson said, “As GM goes so goes America.”  This arrogance was pretty much treated as fact.  Detroit was the economic center of a burgeoning American economy after WWII. 

GM was a law unto itself, or saw it thought.  Its moral leadership was tested in the person of Ralph Nader, a young Lebanese American attorney who wrote a book about the GM’s Corvair titled “Unsafe At Any Speed”(1959). 

To neutralize the impact of this assessment, GM did not check Nader’s findings for validity but instead attempted to compromise his character by uncovering a seedy past.  GM had an army of private investigators examine every aspect of Nader’s life, placing electronic bugs in his apartment, clocking every moment of his existence to find dirt, only to confirm his integrity.  The media caught GM in the act, reporting this harassment, which led to the death knell of the Corvair while sullying GM’s reputation.

GM confused management and leadership.  Management is good at managing things, inanimate things; leadership is good at leading people.  Management quantifies things leadership develops people.  Your teacher is in the leadership of student development.

Our institutions are aging and crumbling in their effectiveness.  They have become defensive aspiring to infallibility and operating with dogmatic authority in the spirit of business as usual despite the taint of corruption, scandal or wasteful practices.  They do as they please with impunity, as they have become a law unto themselves.

Indicative of this is Penn State where a celebrated coach, Joe Pattern, who was treated like a god on campus, failed to take action when his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was first accused of child abuse in 2002.  Recently, Sandusky was caught abusing a boy in the shower of the athletic complex.  Paterno and the college president were abruptly fired when this came to light.  Sandusky now faces charges of some forty counts of child abuse, some of which occurred as early as the 1990s.

How could that happen?  In South Africa during the time of apartheid, I asked my Catholic Church pastor, “How can the church not take a stand on apartheid?”  He answered, “The church is not political,” when no institution could be more so.

In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Cardinal Pacelli was the Nuncio of Munich, later Pope Pius XII in the same decade, yet he did nothing when the “Jewish Question” materialized into the Holocaust, nor did President Roosevelt.  FDR could have authorized the bombing of railroad lines to prevent the transport of Jews to some 20,000 concentration camps.  He didn’t, not wanting to upset his ally, the Soviet Union, which had its own problem with Jews.

These are examples of lapses in moral leadership.

Abraham Lincoln worried about inevitable corruption to follow the Civil War (I read the quote from the missive on the subject).  What does the word “corruption” mean to you?

Student answers: collapse of morality, money, abuse of power, and loss of morality.

These are good answers.  Since morality is in the mind of the times, you might think corruption never changes, but it does (questioning expressions on student faces).  You don’t think so?  Well, greed has been treated as good, and greed often has the aspect if not the taint of corruption. 

In his book “How” (2011), Dov Seidman attempts to get past this cynicism of:

(1)   It’s not my job to it’s everyone’s job.

(2)   Just do it, to do it right.

(3)   Business as usual to thinking outside the box.

(4)   Too big to fail to cultivating the small.

(5)   Greed is good, to good is good.

(6)   Let the stick and carrot extract maximum performance to the pleasure of work itself.

(7)   Man is rational to man is in search of meaning and happiness.

Student: I understand all these but the stick and carrot.

The stick is the use of fear to motivate. The carrot is the use of incentives to excel in performance.

While we are talking about jobs, your job is to get an education.  When you complete your education, you go out into the world as the next generation of leaders.  It is why you are here.  It is why I am here. 

Innovative leadership will have to deal with the cyber crowd and its future iterations, as FaceBook and YouTube are only the current renditions of mass appeal.

The cyber crowd perpetually hovers on the borderline of our unconscious. None of us are impervious to its heroic or cowardly dimensions. 

The individual is patiently and patently discriminating.  The crowd is incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time on a subject.  Individuals admit doubt and learn from their mistakes.  Crowds are incapable of doubting their existence or the validity of their demands.  Individuals are alert to reality checks.  Crowds are impulsive, irritable, and incapable of reason, devoid of judgment and live on existential sentiment.  Is it too much of a stretch to see cyber crowds in this context? (No response)

I am of an age unlikely to find out.

In any case, moral leadership at the personal level will be reduced to a matter of making choices.  I never drank or smoked, a choice.  I come from an Irish clan in which excess was the custom.  Two years spent in the US Navy in the Mediterranean as a white hat sailor, where drinking and carousing was the modus operandi on liberty, I went on tours across Europe to acquaint myself with my roots.  A choice.  Perhaps it was because I saw too many ruinous lives in my extended family. 

Tim Tebow, former Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida, and now quarterback of the Denver Broncos in the NFL, is deeply religious with a strict moral code, which he wears on his sleeve to the irritation of many.  No matter how you feel about him, he is up front about his choices.  People look for a chink in his armor as GM looked for a chink in Ralph Nader’s. 

It might be inferred from this that we are cynical of someone making consistent moral choices.  The herd mentality abhors individualism and is more interested in belonging than in being self-willed.

Belief is an important value when it comes to choices.  What else influences our choices?

Students: Someone said, morality, and then there was silence.

Come on now, you know the answer.  It is our peers.  They dare us. 

“Take a few puffs (on a cigarette or marijuana) it won’t hurt you.  Don’t be a sissy.” 

Guys in my day felt manly smoking; girls felt adventuresome if they did.  The same was true with alcohol.  All addictions start innocently.

Sixty years ago, it was cigarettes and booze.  Today it is mind-altering drugs that can quickly induce such dependency that users engage in prostitution, breaking and entering, robbery and other crimes, even murder to feed the habit.  Here in Tampa there are more murders every month related to addiction than Japan suffers in an entire year.  Choices.

My mother died of emphysema after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes from the age of twelve to seventy-nine.  It is not a pretty death.  Family members were around her hospital bed with her naked, not being able to stand anything on her body because even with oxygen she couldn’t breathe.  As shocking and embarrassing as it was, I found myself saying to her nurse, “Seeing this must cure you of the idea of smoking.”

She said almost defiantly, “I smoke!”  Choices.

People who make bad choices don’t think it is going to happen to them.  Personal smugness fed by optimism finds them denying a downside.  The statistics on smoking are staggering:

(1)   Smoking causes 443,000 deaths annually including 49,400 exposed to secondhand smoke.

(2)   269,655 men die annually from smoking.

(3)   173,940 women die annually from smoking.

(4)   Some 25 million Americans still smoke, the majority from lower socio-economic status.

(5)   One of every five deaths in the United States annually is caused from cigarette smoking.

(6)   Cigarette smoking is contributory to breast cancer, strokes, heart disease, and heart attacks.

(7)   Smoking only one cigarette a day can reduce a person’s life by ten years.

You would think this incentive to change behavior, yet one of every twelve Americans is a smoker.

THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM

 My premise thus far is that moral leadership is individualistic.  We are all leaders or none of us are.  We must have control of this organism called “self,” and in that control be able to perceive and deal with reality, not as we would have it be, but as it actually is.

A Gallup Poll asked young people in 1950 if they thought they were a very important person.  What percent of the respondents’ do you think thought they were important?

Students: 50 percent?

Actually, 12 percent thought they were.  The same poll was taken in 2005, what do you think the response was then?

Students: 25 percent?

No, it was 80 percent.

Time magazine did a recent study, asking people if they considered themselves in the top 1 percent of earners: 19 percent claimed they were in this income bracket.

Who we are has gone from being taken for granted six decades ago to what Christopher Lasch calls in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978), “narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” 

Think of it, a child born into the world feels it is the center of the universe and the world revolves around it, and is there to meet its every demand.  In a strange way, a juvenile fixation has become a cultural norm.  There is great pressure never to grow old and so little societal inclination to grow up.  Growing up requires struggle, pain, disappointment, delay, and failure on the way to some level of success.  Juvenility shows an inclination to avoid risks, to play it safe, cheat or retreat into recreational drugs and lifestyles to live on maxed out credit cards and borrowed time

A study asked people to respond to statements similar to these:

(1)   I’m a very impressive person.

(2)   I can manipulate people to fulfill my needs without any trouble.

(3)   I live to show off for other people.

This was part of  “The Narcissistic Test” given to a national audience over the past several years.  It has seen a 30 percent spike since 1990. 

Another reflection of self-importance is reflected in executive compensation.  In 1950, it was 43 percent of GDP to 143 percent of GDP in 2005. 

The social norms of the 1950s were against disproportionate executive compensation.  Should some executives realize exceptional incomes, however, they would hardly flaunt it by pretentious living or lifestyle. 

Executive compensation remained flat despite impressive company profits after WWII and up to the 1970s, and then incomes took off.  In the 1970s and 1980s, executives became impressed with themselves, reflective of these narcissistic studies.  They campaigned for increasing salaries and bonuses, and saw themselves as indispensable.  So today, it is not uncommon for CEOs to earn $20 million a year with retirement incomes in excess of $5 million annually for only being in the top role for a few years. 

In the 1990s, and again in the first decade of the twenty-first century, institutional polarity saw the dot.com bubble, and the subsequent real estate and Wall Street bubble.  Greed became protocol and restrain took a holiday.  Institutional integrity, integration and efficiency were supplanted by high finance.  It became more rewarding to move money than to produce goods. 

Name an institution, including the academic institution of which you are a part, and you will see a regressive decline of function and purpose across the board.

In the 1950s, when reality was gray, when you thought your opinions were weak or only partially right, you were inclined to seek the input of others to correct your errors and to get matters more right than wrong.  You not only encouraged feedback, you depended on it.

In the 1970s and beyond, as compensation packages went through the stratosphere, executives not only believed they deserved them, but felt a need to prove they did.  They came to believe they possessed one hundred percent of the truth, that they were not only astute managers, but infallible; that they possessed something akin to genius, and so they looked for “yes” men and women, and tended to kill messengers who questioned their authority or brought them bad news.  Whistle blowers were treated as pariah, and added to their enemy’s list.

CYBER CROWD

Is FaceBook and YouTube part of the cyber crowd or a respite from the moral retrenchment of our times?  Do these electronic conduits fad the lines between fantasy and fad, or blur the lines between innocent connection and senseless preoccupation?  True, they bring loved ones and friends together, an opportunity to keep abreast of activities, and a touchstone for a sense of belonging to something bigger than self. 

With all this upside, my wonder is if it is incipiently cultivating the heard mentality, the view that this cyber connection, which is images, words and cliché, is all innocence.

Could it ultimately become a vehicle for destabilization?   The power of words is bound up with images that can evoke volatile reactions quite independent of their real significance. 

We have seen how the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” has used FaceBook and YouTube to their purposes.  Images, words and clichés delivered insouciantly and spontaneously, but are ill defined can lead to good and bad influences.  Reason has no role in the cyber crowd.  Indeed, the cyber crowd aborts reason to cavort in the privacy of irrational space.  Forgive me, I’m just thinking out loud.

Attention has been given the fact that the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” have no leaders.  Leaders in cyber crowds are likely to first surface as ringleaders and agitators.  They rise out of the crowd, as they are first complete followers. 

Crowd leaders hypnotize by expressing what is collectively felt with images, words and clichés’.  Videos supply images – placards and pamphlets – that are words of affirmation, which are repeated with cacophony zeal to become contagions.  The individual ceases to be isolated and falls prey to the spell of the leader and the crowd. 

A quarter century ago, I wrote a book (Work Without Managers) that profiled my concerns and what I thought would follow.  Regrettably, it has all materialized.  Referencing the cyber crowd now is cautionary, as our collective unconscious invariably becomes the motive for the actions ultimately forged.  

FaceBook and YouTube are contagions.  Few are bold enough to run counter to the fashion of checking or sending messages hourly.  Personal interest is sacrificed to collective interest with little conscious understanding of why.  People can’t get their work done for this irresistible magnet, that is, until the company install restrains or the boss is breathing down their neck. 

In crowd speak, suggestibility feeds contagions with a conscious loss of personality replaced by the compelling influence of frenetic texting to find the individual in a paralyzed state of irresistible impetuosity.  It drives causes against repression (“Arab Spring”) and inequity (“Occupy Wall Street”) among other crusades, and it hasn’t changed in thousands of years. 

My respect for the unconscious mind, which knows so much more than I know, is too great to become enslaved to this supposedly innocuous medium, which I see as a possible conduit to the cyber crowd.  Doubtless the cyber crowd is addictive, the evidence is too overwhelming to think otherwise with more than a billion members.  My aim is none other than to cause you to think.  You are our leaders of tomorrow, which is a very different world than it was when I was your age.  Good luck, God bless and peace.

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