DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD -- A RESPONSE

DRIVEN OFF THE ROAD – A RESPONSE

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

© July 20, 2011

A READER RESPONDS:

Highly interesting article. I read the Time piece about Bob Lutz yesterday, by coincidence. The notion that the US could abandon manufacturing and prosper instead by providing services ignored that if the people who took up manufacturing as the result of the US ignoring it are smart enough to do so, they are smart enough to provide "services," too.  Already the Big Four accounting companies and many law firms are outsourcing tax returns and document discovery responses, respectively. 

The Germans have identified high value added manufacturing they think they can accomplish better than third world countries and found a way to make things at prices, albeit high ones, that others are willing to pay. They have also identified new manufactured products, train their workers to make them, and let labor representatives sit on company boards and see the books, too.

Perhaps regrettably, present American law provided an almost automatic conflict of interest as a matter of law in coming on corporate boards. The American director is required to discharge a fiduciary obligation to the corporation.  Representing and advocating the interests of labor is seemingly accomplished in breach of the fiduciary obligation to the corporation. That could be changed quickly by providing for divided obligations, but don't count on our getting that accomplished in this or other recent Congresses.

Tom

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your response indicates some MBA training in your past.  I mention this because I believe, unwitting but systematically, we have programmed ourselves out of the competition by misreading our strengths and compounding our weaknesses.  Corporate speak is your language and it is driving us off the cliff. 

We see ourselves as a competitive society when cooperation is our strength.  Several years ago, there was a national best seller titled WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION (1974), which fostered the idea that selling, indeed, entrepreneurship and commerce, was all about “you.”  A few years earlier, there was a book CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), which was all about the customer and how to develop a partnership.  In other words, it was about cooperation.  The latter had a modest success compared to the former, but remained in print for twenty years.  The two books are like polar coordinates of the bifurcated spirit of American enterprise.  By the irony of circumstances, cooperation is the only legitimate game in town, but we Americans still don’t get it, and MBA programs and our culture aren’t helping. 

In SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), chapter six has the titled, “Six Silent Killers: The Manic Monarchs of the Merry Madhouse.”  The reference to the “madhouse” was how the United States was then seen.  .            

The reason the Time magazine article (July 18, 2011) resonated with me is simply because it has been a theme I have been singing for thirty-one years.  What follows are the opening paragraphs of chapter six of that 1998 book.  You be the judge if we are not stuck in over intellectualizing the problem, when the world moves away from our interests:

The crippled genius of American workers contains many paradoxes.  Contrast when workers are full of themselves with when they are not.

In the case of the former, they are obsessed with self, preoccupied with things.  With the latter, they are concerned with others and their well-being.

Workers have an essential drive to acquire, but an equal need to serve.  Their paradoxical natures take on many forms.  A few years ago, after a winter thaw, the Mississippi River at Waterloo, Iowa, threatened to flood the city.  Faced with this crisis, the city mobilized its resources, and people of all ages filled sandbags, mounted them on trucks, and distributed them throughout the city to form manmade dikes.  Hundreds of citizens worked around the clock beside neighbors and friends, and yes, beside strangers as well.  The separate identities of age, race, religion, values, and professions dissolved into a faceless common challenge.  For one brief moment, a sense of community possessed their consciousness.

After the crisis had passed, several volunteers were asked why they did it.  The consensus was “because it had to be done.  The city had to be saved!”

Would they do it again?  Without hesitation, they replied in union.  They would submit themselves to the demands of crisis management.

Waterloo at that moment had no insiders and outsiders.  It was a community with a common mission. 

This is but one event in the kaleidoscopic spectrum of self-forgetfulness in times of perceived crisis.  Whenever physical survival is at stake (World War Two), or psychological survival is at issue (launching of Russia's Spunik), whenever the threat comes from the outside, the sense of belonging to a communal tribe is at its strongest.  The key words are “perceived crisis.”

Throughout history, tension invariably produces tribal music, while relaxation typically generates tribal noise.  If we don’t feel it, can’t see it, or it doesn’t touch us, as with the current economic world instability, it doesn’t exist.

Yet, tension is as natural to the spirit as joy is unnatural.  We Americans are a tense and intense lot.  We find it difficult to deal with ourselves when things are going well.  We are always waiting for the other shoe to fall.  For some reason, we have to work very hard at not working at all.  Leisure is intimidating.  Work is our sanctuary.

THE ODYSSEY OF AMERICAN WORKERS

Consequently, the quest for satisfaction has not been a particularly happy one. When you see joy on the faces of workers, it is likely a mask concealing the tension of struggle and fear within – struggle to become what they are not and fear of being found out for what they are.

Pretend and pretension, derivatives of tension, are prominent features of the American character.  Show me a youngster smiling easily in play.  Instead, America has seven-year-olds playing organized football as if they were in the NFL.  Parents-as-coaches can be heard yelling at their prepubescent youngsters, whose bones are not yet mature enough for such punishment.  “Put your head down and take him out,” or.  “Hey, hey, hey!  What’s your problem, fellah, where’s your toughness?”

Would that such energy and enthusiasm were directed at their studies.  Young minds are quite nimble for such challenge if their bodies are not ready for such abuse.

The mania of forcing maturity on youngster is programmed at a very early age.  My grandson, Ryan James Carr, is two.  He is a big boy for his age, about the size of many four-year-olds, but his mother is 6’1”, so that is not too much of a surprise.1  He is attending a religious-sponsored preschool for two-year-olds, which is run like an army boot camp.  These two-year-olds are expected to go to the bathroom precisely at 10 a.m., to play prescribed games without stepping out of line, to neither cry nor fuss with their peers, and to clean up their play area or be given demerits.

God forbid, one of these little tykes should have an accident and go in their pants.  First, they are scolded in front of the group, then asked to sit outside the group, and, worst of all, to manage in soiled drawers until a parent comes along.2

The teacher sees nothing wrong with this.  Listening to her, you would think she was talking about teenagers.  What she is doing could not be more wrong.  If a child is not allowed to have fun and be a child, the child will likely be a problem for society when he is older.

It doesn’t stop here.  Watch six-year-old baton twirlers, toothy grins barely covering absent teeth, displaying little joy in the exercise.  How many of these little girls chose to be so regimented?  How many of them are playing out their parents’ fantasies?

There is a greater pull in the American culture to “please others” than to “please self.” 

This programming is justified by “it is good for you.”  More often than not, pleasing others is simply “parental authority” over adolescent powerlessness, and its need to be pleased.

What this creates in a developing youngster is self-doubt, bordering on self-contempt – internal conflict when the child is starting to learn to be a friend to himself.

Translated, this manufacturers tension to replace natural nurturing.  It is an American disease, orchestrated by well-meaning parents on the young. 

“Doing what is good for you” is inadvertently interpreted as “doing what is expected of you.”  Disquieting at best, the whole process turns to viciousness when the aspect of “competition” is added.

Americans workers assume that competition is as inherently good as breathing is natural.  Competition is worn as though a badge, and workers swagger with a sense of what they think it means.  Economist W. W. Rostow belies that before Americans can compete, they must first learn how to cooperate.3

Americans attempt to outdo each other.  Rostow even goes further.  He fears America might go the way of Great Britain, which, between 1870 and 1971, went from 32 percent of the world’s industrial production to generating only 4 percent.  Rostow suggest that the only way to avoid that catastrophe is for the American workplace to develop an organizational infrastructure that champions cooperation over competition (Six Silent Killers, pp 83 – 85).

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Obviously, when I refer here to “American workers,” I am referring to everyone, including movers and shakers in Congress, Wall Street and Main Street.  I have argued that the MBA degree is a misapplication of our common interests forcing our eye on the wrong ball.  Your comments confirm that fact. 

Why did I share this passage with you?  It has not lost its relevance, and we are still encamped on the same dime.  Elsewhere, I have been writing RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD.  Sociologist Erich Fromm captures the sense of this with these lines:

Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing practices of life, which in turn is determined by his mode of production.4

Our education system is a factory, and we are all products of that factory for better or worse.

Be always well,

Jim

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1 Ryan has just turned seventeen here in 2011 and is 6’6” tall and weighs more than 260 pounds.

2 Ryan enters his senior year next month at a prestigious prep school that is run much like that preschool was those many years before.

3 W. W. Rostow, “To Compete, Americans Must First Cooperate,” International Herald Tribune, March 16, 1987.

4 Erich Fromm, BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSIONS  (1962 p, 41).