YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE?

  YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2011

Ten months ago, my daughter Jeanne Marie Fisher, two days before her fifty-first birthday, crossing 66th Street in Pinellas Park, Florida was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver. 

Jeannie was a tall, blond pretty woman, a single parent, a waitress and one of four siblings, all of whom were high achievers but none of whom had her passion for life, predisposition to humor, quality of love, artistic temperament, sense of the absurd or unconditional tolerance for the shenanigans of other members of her family.  She often said, “I have far less than any of you, but more of a capacity for happiness.  Thank God I don’t have to worry about what I have or what I am, like you all do.”

Jeannie would often call her father up on the telephone, and he could tell as soon as she started to talk whether she had had a few drinks or not.  She would say, “You’re my dad.  Do you know that?  You’re my dad.”  It brings tears to my eyes now, but I must admit I would be impatient with her, and ask what she had on her mind.  It was always the same.  She didn’t want anything.  She just wanted to connect with her father.  She just wanted to bridge the void of her loneliness.  Most of her adult life was spent alone having little tolerance for men, other than as disposable lovers and then not too frequently. 

Her one crowning achievement was a son, Taylor Fisher, who carries her surname, a son who was the whole world to her, and a son, now nineteen, who never gave her a single moment of anxiety, a son, now in college, who had his mother taken from him when he most needed her. 

Jeannie told me in one of her frequent telephone calls that Taylor wished that she would stop drinking and smoking because he wanted her to be around when he married and had children.  She would make little confessions like this on the phone.  There would be a void of silence when her father could hear the intake of breath, and the drag on the constant cigarette. 

Part of her unconditional love was to accept her father, oddball that he was, who lived in his little cocoon who never drank, never smoked, and was always lecturing her about the irrevocable importance of the choices we make in life.  “You should like yourself, Jeannie,” her father would say, “you should be important to yourself and not do things that harm you.”

She would reply always the same, “I’m working on it,” when he knew she never did.  She never saw herself as others saw her, never was as kind to herself as she was to others, never appreciated herself like she appreciated others, especially her family. 

Each Thanksgiving, she would look forward to having her picture taken with her father.  It was one of the crowning moments of that annual festivity.  She wasn’t here this Thanksgiving, and so her father had his picture taken with his arm out as if around her, knowing her spirit was in his midst.

When she was born, her eyes turned inward, and she had to have surgery to correct the fault.  She had her first surgery, and then her father was very busy and seldom home, traveling over a good part of the world.  She never had that second operation.  Whether it would have restored her vision or not, it is a moot question.  The point is that Jeannie never had good eyesight.  Her vision became increasingly worse as she got older.

Eyesight is very important for a waitress, and she struggled with the problem so much so that she was constantly losing a job and seeking another over the years.  What was singularly evident with her, however, was that she displayed a resilience that none of the rest of us have.  We didn’t hear about “Woe is me,” as is typical of our Irish race, for she pressed on. 

Little as she had, her apartment was a display of an artistic temperament.  She could turn crates into colorful furnishings, common prints into beautiful montages, flower arrangements into botanical gardens, and second and third hand furniture into the appearance of regal splendor. 

My wife Betty and I would visit her in her home in Pinellas County (Florida), and take her out to buy groceries and then to lunch, and you would think it was a grand vacation the way she treated us.  That was another quality of Jeannie.  We never knew how much she was hurting financially because she never asked for a penny.

The last time we went to see her for this little excursion, she said, “Let’s not go anywhere.  Let’s just sit and talk,” and we did for nearly three hours.

Similarly, her big sister, Laurie, who was there for her since she was a little girl, always bonding with her whether Laurie was in Gainesville, Florida going to school at the University of Florida, going to school in Chicago at the University of Chicago, or modeling in some metropolitan area.  Jeannie would be sure to find a reason to be with her.  Two siblings couldn’t be closer.  Taking Jeannie from her has put a kind of hurt on Laurie for which there is no cure, no satisfaction, and no relief.  The pain never stops because there is nothing that can fill the void.

It is the same with her little brother, all six-foot three and 265 pounds of him.  Michael has always lived in Pinellas County since he returned with his parents and siblings from South Africa as a little boy.  Since he lived close by, he could get a call at any time, day or night, when she had a need for him.  She might have fallen down the stairs, needed to have some furniture picked up, needed a ride to somewhere for a job interview, or a myriad of other little needs, and she would not hesitate to contact him, and he would be there for her. 

She would ride from Pinellas County to Hillsborough County and Tampa, a distance of some fifty miles, for family get-to-gathers with Michael, his wife, Chrissy, and their twin boys, Killian and Keaton.  

Michael and Jeannie are natural comedians being able to see the absurd in the most everything.  They would entertain each other on these sorties back and forth between counties with slapstick high jinx entertainment.  She would run her hand through Michael’s hair that is still long and blond like a legendary Celt, and tell him how handsome he was.  She has left a void with him as well that cannot be filled, a void that he keeps more to himself than does his sister, Laurie, but a void nonetheless that causes him great and constant pain.

There is another brother, Robert, who lives in Philadelphia.  Robert is the big brother.  He is the brother who has constantly reinvented himself like his father has, and has made a good living hitting a tennis ball.  He has fared better than those once on the tour as the tennis pro of an exclusive tennis club.

Robert is close to a member of the so-called “one percent” that the Occupy Wall Street moment so detests.  He lost his silver spoon when his father retired in his thirties and no longer made the big salary that would have supported a tennis player on the tour.  He was that good, and knew it, and held certain resentment for his father for denying him that dream.  Despite that, through hard work, discipline, and persistence, he has been a constant value added component to his successful tennis club. 

Robert was there for Jeannie in her early adult years when she would go off the wagon and the on the rails somewhere, and need help, immediately.  He would be there for her no questions asked.  As his career soared, and the distance between Jeannie and him grew, it was not possible to be there for her in the same manner.  At her funeral, he confessed that he had let her down, which was not true.  He simply handed off the model of attention that he had displayed so well to his other siblings, and they did not let Jeannie or him down.

Robert is very much like his father, remote, a loner, and a demander of himself far in excess of what is reasonable, and therefore a person who is as deep a feeler as it is possible to be, which is another way of saying in constant torment.  As much as the loss is to his other siblings, the loss to him is a mortality slap in the face that sends shutters through him as it does his father.   

As I write these words, I think of the number of times Jeannie has thanked me and thanked her mother for bringing her into the world.  “I have this dream, daddy,” she would say, “that I am in Limbo, and I want desperately to be born, and somehow I can’t seem to escape my confinement, and then finally I am in the world.  I am born.  I am alive.  I am your daughter.” 

Who knows what goes on with a child in the womb?  Who knows what life is about before birth or after death?  Who knows if a dream is a dream or if what we are now experiencing is a dream, and the reality we so cling to doesn’t actually exist? 

Jeannie’s mother went to the hospital three times in false labor.  She was a breached baby, and suffered as I’ve expressed here the malady of her eyes.  No person ever had more beautiful eyes than Jeannie, sky blue and warm as a summer sky. 

Heather Mayo, a 32-year-old woman with a history of drug abuse, driving without a license and without auto insurance in a neighbor’s truck, saw Jeannie Marie Fisher on the island on Pinellas Park Boulevard, hoping that she would not step off the island, going too fast to stop, knowing she was going to hit her, shutting her eyes and hitting her at full throttle, knocking her into the air, and then running over her again. 

It was at this point Heather Mayo made a series of poor choices.

She made a U-turn, and stopped in a parking lot across the street, thinking everyone had seen what she had done as they rushed to see Jeannie sprawled out in the street.  When none questioned her involvement, she drove away.

She had come to Pinellas Park to buy six ounces of marijuana for her boyfriend in Palm Harbor, some thirty miles north of Pinellas Park.  He saw the blood and damage to the truck, and asked her what happened, and she said she had hit a deer.

Subsequently, it is my understanding that she and her boyfriend watched Laurie and Michael on television pleading on February 5, 2011, the day after Jeannie’s death, for whomever did this to turn him or herself in.  Heather Mayo didn’t.  That was ten months ago.

As life often imitates fiction, the Pinellas Park Police Department kept the case file open, kept Laurie and Michael informed, and eventually solved the case by what would appear serendipity, but which actually amounted to astute police work.  I know good police work, as I was a police consultant across the nation during the 1970s and worked closely with scores of police departments. 

Just days ago, Heather Mayo was having trouble with her boyfriend, and dialed 911 with the police coming to investigate the domestic disturbance.  As the boyfriend was arrested, she hollered at him, “I’m thinking of filing a restraining order against you.”

He yelled back, “Well, I’m telling the police you hit and killed that girl in February.”

It was 3 a.m. in the morning, and the police officer, used to these kinds of accusatory exchanges in the heat of the moment, could have filed it under, "more of the same," but he didn’t.  He looked up on his computer and found there was a cold case for a hit-and-run death in Pinellas Park in February 2011 of Jeannie Marie Fisher.  He asked for backup, and stayed at the home until other officers arrived, and worked out what was what, arresting Heather Mayo, as well as her boyfriend, and working out the details until after 5 a.m.

Apparently, in one of their marijuana induced sessions, Heather Mayo had confessed to her boyfriend that she was the one who had hit and killed that girl in February.  He held that against her, and used it as blackmail to have her get him drugs until that fateful confrontation mentioned here.

Remarkably, the truck that was damaged in February had never been repaired with the pieces of the truck left at the scene of the hit-and-run matching perfectly with the vehicle.

Heather Mayo has made a two-hour written confession of the crime, along with a video confession as well.  She says she is remorseful for what she has done, and obviously would like to put this behind her and go on with her life, hoping to get her seven-year-old daughter back who has been taken from her.

Were this all a dream, and were it possible for Jeannie Marie Fisher to reappear out of the midst, and were all the hurt over the past ten months able to miraculously disappear, and were it possible to erase the bad choices made by Heather Mayo, not only at the time of this tragedy, but over her past thirty-two-years, I would be the first to forgive and forget.  Unfortunately, it is not possible. 

We are all sinners, and we all must pay for our sins.  There are no winners and losers in this affair, only damaged people.  Being remorseful runs shallow because it was not arrived at voluntarily or timely when it would have demonstrated remorse.  I am not accepting of the remorse in any measure or in any way.  Heather Mayo was found out and now she must suffer for her crime.  Whatever that punishment is, it will not bring back Jeannie Marie Fisher, or ease the pain of her loved ones.  That will continue as long as they are alive.  That is their life sentence.  What should Heather Mayo’s be?

As I’ve said, I’ve been around law enforcement in one of my former careers, and have been a professor of many who have had or are having careers in the various functions of law enforcement from serving and protecting to criminal justice to incarceration.  What is most sad to report from that exposure and experience is that few learn from their mistakes.  To put it another way, they seldom make better choices once they serve their time, find new friends, and seek new surroundings and careers.  Recidivism is so shockingly high that our incarcerating institutions are always overcrowded.  Chances are whatever Heather Mayo’s sentence, she will come out an equally damaged or more damaged person than when she went into the correction facility, more a dreg on society than she already is.

So, what should Heather Mayo’s punishment be?  Ideally, it should be a place where she would likely be able to learn a trade, become drug free, learn to make better choices, and to grow up.  Society’s interest should be to save her from the damaged heap of her kind that people a good part of society, a part that it is easier to look the other way than to deal with the problem.  I am for anything approaching that possibility.  This is not because I am lenient; anyone who knows me knows that is not part of my DNA.  It is because I want to believe that she can be saved because in saving her we save something of Jeannie Marie Fisher, which is worth saving.

*     *     *

THE CHALLENGE OF MORAL LEADERSHIP

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

© December 1, 2011

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.  As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.

Abraham Lincoln, 1864

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the work culture (values); the work culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior determines whether moral leadership will take hold or it will be replaced by corruption.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership, AQP Journal, Winter 2002

*     *     *

We are struggling to do the right thing when we are organized to do the wrong thing.  We are organized for another time, place and space, another situation and value system.  We are organized for an agrarian-industrial society that is long past.  We are in the Internet Age and are overwhelmed with complexity.

*     *     *

My grandson, Ryan Carr is a senior at Tampa Preparatory School in Tampa, Florida.  He has been studying leadership, specifically moral leadership.  He knew I had written on the subject and asked if he could share some of my works with his teacher. 

The teacher read these works and shared them with Ryan’s class.  He asked Ryan if I would speak to the class on the subject.  It is Ryan’s first class in the morning.  I am not a morning person.  In fact, I am writing this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving at three in the morning, and will be writing until the sun comes up. 

I have a tendency to be wordy.  What is more, there are many ways to look at leadership, especially moral leadership, that I thought I should compose this draft of the subject.  This is my take on the subject along with troubling disturbances that have occurred.  Students may not be familiar with these or the impact they have had.  It is my hope that this discussion will encourage further exploration.

Abraham Lincoln, our great moral leader, was weary at the height of the Civil War that our moral fabric might unwind.  Many writers have addressed this problem, which is a system’s problem.  They claim our system has become ossified controlled by special interests.  Writers don’t unshackle us from a problem but create awareness of its existence.  Awareness is the necessary, but not sufficient condition to generate change.  Change takes action.  Action takes the will of moral authority.  Have no doubt you will be called on to display moral leadership in your professional careers.    . 

THE MORAL CHALLENGE

We live today in a climate of gray, not black and white, not right and wrong.  We push the limits of what is legal without a backward glance at what is ethical.  Those in positions of leadership worry more about how to finesse the system than to reduce its toxicity, more about competitive advantage than serving the customer, more about exploiting than developing trust.  The evidence is overwhelming. 

Lost in this declining moral climate is this: The purpose of an organization is not to preserve the status quo at the expense of its function but to honor its function.  It is why it exists.

Cover-ups are founded in confusing survival with function.  You can see this clearly in William Livingston’s “The New Plague” (1985).  The purpose of an organization is what it does, not what it says it will do or hope to do, but what it is doing now.  “The quantity of scientific facts is now doubling every seven years,” he writes, “we are not structured to deal with this complexity,” and so we often go off the rails focusing on secondary problems leaving primary problems unattended. 

We live in a declining moral climate.  Rhetoric competes with reality, telling takes precedence over listening; knowing over learning; posturing over doing, credentials over people with answers.  Christopher Lasch in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978) claims that we have retreated into a cosmetic culture.  This has the appearance of dealing with problems while dealing with them only cosmetically, as window dressing.

Abraham Lincoln saw moral leadership requiring courage, not hope to penetrate the natural resistance to change.  Courage is active; hope is passive. 

We live in an existential age.  This is displayed in having little patience with delayed gratification, that is, a disinclination to spend sufficient time, energy and treasury on the front-end of problems, which is the problem defining stage.  We prefer to avoid complexity, which demands a great deal of front-end attention, settling on reacting to the consequences of our misspent actions in crisis management. 

We solve problems we believe we can solve, while complexity whirls around us unattended causing us to be stuck in forward inertia.  Metaphorically, this is like having the foot to the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere.  It is why corruption happens.  What you see is not what you get.  That is what happened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and is a clear and present danger in the twenty-first century. 

We are committed to circular linear logic, cause-effect cyclic resolution of problems, while ignoring the impact of deviant behavior, what I have called “Six Silent Killers” (1998).  Deviant behavior is as invisible in the organization as social termites are in the woodwork.  Moral leadership eradicates this by listening and positive intervention.

Nothing changes without structural change.  Leadership, as I point out in “Corporate Sin” (2000) has been reduced to leaderless leadership.  Compensation bonuses for successful crisis management have compounded the problem.  Crisis managers solve the problems they create.  Gridlock exists in institutions because of this narrow-mindedness.

There are two obvious problems here.  Management is not leadership.  Management deals with things to be managed.  Leadership deals with people to be led.  Leadership is a moral and morale problem because it deals with behavior.  When behavior is treated as a thing to control, problems fester, bubble and eventually burst, throwing everyone and everything into chaos.  This is what we have experienced since 2008 in the economic meltdown and the subsequent recession.  Economics is all about behavior.

If moral leadership could be established by only treating symptoms, there would be no point in this discussion.  The cause of our moral dilemma is a combination of ossified institutions and exploitation of them by special interests.  These institutions, as William Livingston points out, operate with infallibility, dogmatic authority, and impunity.  We see this with BP in the aftermath of the oilrig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the high bonuses on Wall Street after the malfeasance leading to the 2008 economic crash, and now “business as usual” after the pedophile scandal at Penn State.  Institutions return to operations as if these disturbances had not taken place.  If there is no self-evident correction to flagrant violation of social norms, no learning has taken place. 

The problem goes deeper.  We “are” the institutional system.  We cannot separate ourselves from it.  Our passivity, dependence and counterdependence on institutions are manifested in our inclination to comfort and complacency at the expense of contribution.  Stated another way, behavior is in the mind of the times, and a company, community and country get the behavior it deserves.  Pointing fingers is irrelevant and counterproductive

At this point, it would be fair for you to ask, what has this to do with me a high school senior?  I would suggest, “Everything!” 

Ordinary people make history while society treats some as extraordinary.  This is unfortunate.  It is safe to say nearly every person who rises to a position of trust, responsibility, accountability, and authority has every intention of doing the right thing.  The fact that so often they fail is indicative of the tenuous climate of moral leadership.  Not only is life hard, but also the temptation to deviate from social norms has never been greater.  Lord Acton was correct: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A CASE IN POINT

Imagine a person who came from humble circumstances and rose to a corporate executive position barely in his thirties with solid ethical training in his culture, but with an extreme level of trusting naiveté. 

Picture him in a foreign country forming a new company.  In the process, he discovers his American company CEO has taken an illegal “finder’s fee” in the equivalent of seven-figures (2011) from this venture, which is unreported in expense allocations, but hidden. 

At the same time, this young executive’s wife overdraws his personal account in this foreign bank to the tune of $40,000 (2011 evaluation).  Because of his executive status the bank allows this overdraft to grow to this figure before reporting it to him.

The managing director of the foreign operation, knows he is troubled with this “finder’s fee,” but sees a way to deal with it by offering to pay the overdraft, no questions asked, and to duplicate his already generous salary if he would forget about the “finder’s fee.” 

The venture is an extremely sensitive enterprise with no upside to a possible scandal involving three multinational firms.  The merger largely eliminates competition in the marketplace.  There are no anti-trust regulations in this foreign country with which to deal. 

What does this young man do?  He resigns, takes a two year sabbatical although he has a wife and four small children, and then goes back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D. in another discipline.

TIME LINE OVER THE PAST 80 YEARS

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the “Jewish Question” tested the moral leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.  Cardinal Pacelli was papal nuncio in Munich at the time.  He would later become Pope Pius XII.  In those two roles, historians suggest he was negligent in displaying moral leadership as the Holocaust took root (see “Hitler’s Pope” by John Cornwell 1999). 

Moral leadership involves ordinary people as well as leaders.  Some historians see the German people complicit in the Holocaust by their tacit behavior (see Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen 1996).  Commission and omission is often a tangled web in moral dilemma.  We don’t know how we would act until faced with it.

Early in WWII, President Roosevelt knew of the Holocaust and was encouraged to bomb the railroads that linked to some 20,000 concentration camps, and at the same time, to accept Jewish refugees with due haste.  He did neither, and justified dragging his feet (see “Traitor to His Class” by H. W. Brands 2000) because Soviet Russia, America’s ally, was alleged to be involved in similar activities.

After WWII, the United States was the only viable industrial nation as bombing had leveled cities and factories across Europe, South East Asia and Japan.  Post WWII produced economic boom.  It also saw the corporate structure grow from four levels of management during the war to as many as twelve levels by the 1960s.  Moreover, top management went from earning 30 - 40 times what line workers earned in the 1950s and 1960s to earning several times that differential by the 1970s and 1980s.  Today, executive compensation has risen as high as 400 times what line workers earn.   

Shame and social norms controlled compensation in the 1950s and 1960s.  That shame diminished in the 1970s and 1980s to be nonexistent today. 

Arrogance and hubris, a belief in being invincible and untouchable, developed in CEOs and corporate Boards of Directors to become a law unto themselves.  CEO Charlie Wilson of General Motors said in the 1950s, “As GM goes so goes America.”  This mantra was challenged in the 1970s by a 25-year-old Lebanese American lawyer, Ralph Nader, who wrote a book that the GM Corvair was “Unsafe at Any Speed” (1959).

Rather then listen and probe the validity of the charge, GM set an army of private investigators on Nader to dig up dirt to neutralize him and his critical study of the automobile. 

Nader proved to be sparkling clean no matter how many attempts to impugn his moral character.  Eventually, this came to haunt GM as the press got wind of the harassment.  Nader became a celebrity of consumer rights, while Corvair production was terminated.

MORAL TURPITUDE ON STEROIDS

In the 1970s and 1980s and now being mirrored in the new century, accountants held no one accountable, governments abandoned their regulatory functions, media turned blatant cheaters into superstars, and a culture of self-righteous mendacity was allowed to flourish as long as the stock prices were high.

Jeff Miller, April 27, 2005

This is representative of what Jeff Miller is referring:

ENRON

Fortune Magazine (2000) “Enron Best Managed and Most Innovative Company”

Enron people indicted and sentenced to prison terms:

(1)   Jeffrey Skilling

(2)   Kenneth Lay

(3)   Andrew Fastow

(4)   Bernard Ebbers –WorldCom

(5)   Dennis Koslowski (TYCO)

(6)   Samuel Waksal (IMCLONE)

(7)   John Rigas – Adelphia

(8)   Martha Stewart

December 2, 2001

Enron files for bankruptcy, 4,000 employees fired, 20,000 other workers lose their jobs, $73 billion in stock value – gone!

What happened?  Enron used thousands of off-the-books entities to overstate corporate profits, understate corporate debts, and inflate Enron’s stock price.

WORLDCOM

(1)   $3.9 billion in expenses hidden

(2)   $3.3 billion in accounting irregularities

(3)   Company applied for bankruptcy

(4)   Market value lost: $100 billion

TYCO

(1)   Tax evasion

(2)   Evidence tampering

(3)   1,500 jobs lost

(4)   4,500 laid off

(5)   Down $86 billion in one year from peak share price

WALL STREET ANALYSTS

(1)   Investment banking firms biased research

(2)   10 firms fined $1.4 billion by SEC.  Among them:

Citigroup Salomon Smith Barney

            Credit Swisse Groups CSFB

Merrill Lynch

            Goldman Sachs

Morgan Stanley

The list goes on and on and on, and this is only during the last decades of the twentieth century.  Many of these same firms repeated the corrupt behavior leading to the economic collapse of 2008, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Merrill Lynch even provided deceptive books when merging with Bank of America, while Lehman Brothers disappeared totally.  Bank of America is in a tenuous state today for this among other reasons.

Media financial superstars during the 1970s and 1980s such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken went to prison, while Charles Keating never recovered from the Savings & Loan debacle after losing $200 million of investors’ money.  This seems like peanuts as companies and brokerage houses lose $ billions today for reckless abandon practices.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

It proves moral leadership is personal and individual, corporal and organizational.  A community, company, state, and the nation are connected and inner connected morally and ethically in values.  Culture is an expression of values.  Values dictate behavior in terms of honesty, integrity, truth and trust. 

Technology and complexity have outstripped our grasp of our values and our common civility.  Moral leadership is needed to restore the balance.

We have gone through an eighty-year patch of moral decline as our values have eroded into the cynicism of:

(1)   “It’s not my job.”

(2)   “Just do it even if it is wrong.”

(3)   “It’s just business as usual.”

(4)   “Too big to fail.”

(5)   “Greed is good.”

(6)   “Let the stick and carrot extract maximum performance.”

(7)   “Do the job any which way to put the best face on it.”

(8)   “Man is rational so forget about feelings.”

(9)   “Fear sells, intimidation sells better.”

Dov Seidman has captured this theme in his “How” (2011).  This book presents a positive platform to deal with cynicism by reestablishing our core values. 

Seidman is a moral philosopher who has turned his attention to changing the mindset from:

(1)   Greed is good to good is good.

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

(3)   Just doing it to doing it right. 

David Brooks references scientists who show how important feelings are in behavior (see “The Social Animal” 2011).  William L. Livingston sees retreat from natural law at our peril.  Our intellectual, psychological, economic, and social behavior are subject to natural law.  Optimism and pessimism are not methods.  They are culture or values.

That is to say we are not happy campers.  We have lost our moral compass and our way.  Our values have a hole in them, and only we can individually and collectively repair that damage through moral leadership.  Books and ideas can provide incentive but we must define and frame the problem to exercise behavioral change.

Occupy Wall Street (OCW) is an eclectic, spontaneous eruption out of the angst with the status quo.  It would be unwise to dismiss it as deviancy but better to see it as an attempt to reestablish social norms beginning with one’s inalienable rights.     

A polarity has developed in America with little patience to understand why.  Seidman says OCW movement is all about meaning and a perceived sense of injustice.  Occupiers feel they played by the rules, got an education, did what was expected, but are not on track to participate in society, and they have done nothing wrong.

Onlookers may see OCW as angry when they are in anguish.  They want to play, to participate but cannot.  They see the institutional system as the culprit and they want to tear it down.  President Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  OCWs cry differs little with this.  David Brooks sees institutions ossified including the government.  OCWs see it the same way.

The problem with OCW is that they have no idea what they are for but only what they are against.  Should our institutional system collapse releasing freedom without a suitable alternative, then a moral, political and economic vacuum would result.  Seidman sees the new day requires a system of values based on principles and a workable framework guided by moral leadership.  That takes work and patience, but most of all a viable methodology.

Brooks, Seidman, Livingston and others are not suggesting a retreat from hard work, struggle, disappointment, failure, but resilience to deal with collapse and catastrophe.  The irony is that the one percent that the ninety-nine percent so despise, have displayed the work ethic, dealt with scarcity, demonstrated resilience in disaster, and kept economically afloat under the most trying circumstances.  Many have worked in factories, something few OCWs are likely to have experienced.  The ninety-nine percent haven’t avoided social norms (values), but have used them to soar.  The fact that these values are in tatters and need to be revised is the basic justification for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Immediately after WWII, people had the attitude I’m no better than anyone else and nobody is better than me.  They weren’t impressed with the celebrity or exhibitionist.  They would think “Reality Television” and the “Celebrity Culture” crass and wasteful.  They wouldn’t brand themselves with body billboards of tattoos to declare their identity or to establish inclusion.  They would be embarrassed by such a display as few scarred their bodies in that manner.  Nor were they into displaying or broadcasting themselves.  They would find it hard to fathom why tens of thousands wanted to appear on “American Idol” to become famous; being famous would not have occurred to them.

In 1950, a Gallup Poll asked young people if they thought they were a very important person: 12 percent said they thought they were.

In 2005, Gallup asked the same question of young people: 80 percent said they were.

In a recent Time magazine article, people were asked if they considered themselves in the top 1% of earners: 19% claimed they were.

“Who we really are” has gone from being taken for granted six decades ago, to what Christopher Lasch calls “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”  A child born into the world is demanding, feels it is the center of the universe that everything revolves around it, that nothing is more important than its demands.  In a strange way, this juvenility has become society’s norm.  Few people want to grow old and therefore to grow up.  They desire pleasure without pain, immediate gratification, while retreating from guilt and embracing anxiety.  They personify the Test for Narcissism:

(1)   I’m a very impressive person.

(2)   I like to show off for other people.

(3)   I can manipulate people to fulfill my needs and demands.

Studies show test results for narcissism have increased 30 percent since 1990.

Likewise, executive compensation in 1950 was 43 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  In 2005, it ballooned to 143 percent of GDP. 

1950 executives would be ashamed to ask for compensation more than 30 to 40 times that of the lowest paid person in operation as it was against the prevailing social norms.  Today, in 2011, top executives and Wall Street CEOs demand compensation packages in excess of $20 million per year. 

Corruption was rampant in the 1970s to 1990s, long before the economic meltdown of 2008 and the crash on Wall Street.  Inside trading and circumventing the law became common practice as outlined above.

At the same time, there was a communications breakdown and cultural polarization. 

(1)   In the 1950s, people in positions of trust and power recognized they had an imperfect grasp of reality that their opinions were weak or only partially right, and therefore needed the input of different views to compensate for possible error.  FDR, during his first administration (1933 – 1937) in the midst of the Great Depression, tried countless ideas to move the nation economically forward, many generated by adversaries.  He never actually uncovered the key, as WWII lifted the American economy out of its economic doldrums.

(2)   The Nixon administration, believing it had the absolute solution to Vietnam and the national economy, hunkered down against mounting protests, treating those who disagreed as part of its “enemies list.”  Watergate followed.  True believers thought anything goes that stood in the way.

Unfortunately, the problem cannot be made exclusively a government problem.  People retired now in their seventies will have put into the system, on average, $150,000 to cover the cost of social and medical benefits, but will take out, on average, $450,000 in their lifetime.  We don’t want to be reminded of this, or to have these benefits reduced.  We just don’t want to pay for them.  It is a “Catch 22.”

Dov Seidman points out when people are looking to blame they should keep in mind, “We now live in a corporate theatre, and we ought not to shout, fire!” 

The challenge of moral leadership is therefore caught in a moral dilemma.  We all want to continue with all the benefits that accrue to our society, but we don’t want to pay for them.  We want elected officials to be miracle workers, when they are only citizens like ourselves, and have no more leverage than that provided by what we are willing to do.

Consequently, many retreat into optimism no matter how pessimistic the climate.  Those that exploit us depend on this.  There is evidence we have lost our capacity to struggle, believing we can somehow get to where we want to go without hard work, pain, failure, inadequacy or self-doubt.  History suggests we are wrong.

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Note: “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007) by the author covers this segment in some detail.

THE POWER OF REFLECTION -- DR. FISHER'S INTRODUCTION TO "PERSONHOOD"

THE POWER OF REFLECTION – DR. FISHER’S INTRODUCTION TO "PERSONHOOD"

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

© November 7, 2011

You will forgive me if I often feel like Chicken Little announcing that the “Sky is falling,” but that has been the case since I took to writing passionately for what I was feeling and experiencing in the flesh some two decades or more ago.  The OCCUPY WALL STREET phenomenon is not a surprise to me, but a manifestation of what I envisioned some time ago.

This was written in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES in 1990, after returning to the United States after working in Europe since 1986 as director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe Ltd. 

It was my second experienced quagmire as a corporate executive at the pinnacle of power the first being in 1968 in South Africa.  Obviously, I am not cut out for this corporate game as I retired that first time in serious disenchantment with the corporate scheme of things along with the draconian nature of Afrikaner apartheid.  I would go back to school and tried to fill the other side of my brain with software of the social sciences to complement the hardware of physical sciences, earning a Ph.D. in social, industrial and organizational psychology (1978).  After two years of consulting, I rejoined the corporation as a management & organizational development psychologist, only again ultimately rejoined the executive ranks in 1986 now assigned to Europe operating out of corporate headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. 

There are two ways to look a gift horse in the mouth: gratitude at your good fortune or as a platform to provide a laboratory of experience.  I’ve always chosen the latter.  My loyalty has never been to the corporation, but always to the integrity of my mind and what that limited vision was able to apprehend from experience. 

The experience of South Africa found me writing and rewriting a novel of South Africa over the next forty years, which has not yet been published.  In the case of the European experience, I retired for the second time and continued writing, then publishing the book that I was writing while in Europe, that is, Work Without Managers.

This is preamble to my remarks, which follow.  Over my career, both at home and abroad, I saw a change in Western values, a change that has been so contagious in this Internet age that it gave birth to the Arab Spring, but more directly into a serious challenge to the Western advances in women’s rights especially as they related to free choice or pro life.  There is an organization now called PERSONHOOD that has launched an attack on these rights most notably in the state of Mississippi, which plans to have a referendum or constitutional change outlawing abortion.  I have no interest in taking sides on this issue, but only in pointing out that “personhood” has been quite apparent to me over the last quarter century, and reference to it was included in Work Without Managers (1990) and in an article in PERSONAL EXCELLENCE (1997). 

A NEW LOOK AT OLD VALUES (Re: Work Without Managers, 1990)

“Not unlike Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, subtle but massive changes in American society and the individual have led to a cultural breakdown.

“The main cause of this breakdown is denial.  The secondary cause is attempting to make traditional approaches to work in the face of these cultural changes.

“The established culture of American society, the common good, has failed to support the society that it would define.  Yet, many of the advocates often located in American think tanks stubbornly insist it is the only way.  Against this reality, the culture of personhood now struggles to establish itself.

“Americans of World War II vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country, state, church, school, family, and company is good enough for me!” 

“But Americans of the post-Vietnam Ware think more in terms of “the right to know the right to an opinion the right to be wrong the right to fail the right to work, civil rights and civil disobedience.”  In a word, they think in terms of controlling their own destiny rather than having it dictated to them.  Traditional American workers continue to value the common good, while modern professional workers increasingly value personhood.  This is becoming a distinct difference:

“With the common good authority is position power; with personhood it is knowledge; with loyalty the common good is to the organization; with personhood it is to self; with discipline the common good is controlled by rewards and punishment; with personhood is it is caring and respect; with motivation the common good is motivated by fear; with personhood it is challenge and the desire to make a contribution.

“This difference has already had pivotal ramifications across America from the home to the workplace.  Adversaries have been made of parents and children, teachers and students, the clergy and laity, managers and workers, leaders and followers in all walks of life.  It has also produced a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements in the organization.

“So traumatic has the situation become that many parents, educators, executives, clergy and leaders are abandoning the conflict.  They have abdicated in frustration, proclaiming that they are ‘powerless.’

“Meanwhile, the few who are still hopeful remain convinced that the answer lies in the common good.  They invariably turn to quick-fix fads and techniques involving ‘change’ in the way we train, work and manage.  What is missing is looking at the person differently.” (pp 33-34)

“Human resources professional, supposedly the employee’s advocate, have had the opportunity to educate management to the cultural shading of personhood and the relationship of those shadings to professionals.  They have also been in a position to create a psychological climate to facilitate this educational process.  But, due to a lack of comprehension or courage, they have contributed instead to organizational strife and dysfunctionality.

Is it any wonder, then, that nonfunctional behavior dominates the organization, and that those so disposed rule with contemptuous disregard for the organization’s mission?  Professionals have learned how to appear busy without being gainfully employed; how to please the boss without doing anything productive.  This behavior clearly results from telling management what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to do. 

“Human resources has been at the center of this deception and in the process has become by default, management’s union.  It has lost its identity and role.” (pp. 40-41)

PERSONAL EXCELLENCE (November 1997)

“PERSONHOOD.  Generation X is rebuilding its life out of the chaos, excess, greed, deceit, corruption, waste, hypocrisy and sanctimony of an authoritarian society.  They look at their parents and grandparents and see a pattern: “Be loyal, quiet, obedient, polite, conforming, and all will go well!”

“Well, it hasn’t!  It is the submissiveness and compliance of the child, the person suspended in terminal adolescence.  The rituals, rites of passage, protocol, politics, and sundry elements of the common good are not likely to have much impact.

“The common good envisions man as a dependent child counterdependent on man-made institutions, a thesis of other-directedness and selflessness.  For that, dignity is sacrificed to social assurance. 

“Personhood combats this social erosion, not because self-reliance is morally right, but because it is spiritually necessary.” (p 15)

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Should these words resonate with you it speaks to how little we manage to get off the dime seemingly always to choose to kick the can down the road. 

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THE INEVITABLE PAIN OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL SOCIETY

THE INEVITABLE PAIN OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL SOCIETY

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

© November 3, 2011

Guilt is a powerful motivator.  It is now playing out in the finance districts of our principal cities as protesters of the “99 percent” (have nots) stubbornly occupy the streets and parks in deviance of the “1 percent” (haves).

We born during the Great Depression, when safety nets were first introduced for society in general and for the have nots in particular, witnessed the nation getting caught up in the largesse of others doing more for us than we were expected to do for ourselves.  We watched as our nation lost its moral compass and its way so that today we, as a society, are not happy campers. 

We forgot that Horace Mann found the key to ending poverty and it was education. 

Horace Mann led the Massachusetts legislature in 1838 to create public school education paid for and maintained through taxation.  It was for all children thus underpinning individual success, and by extension our collective national success. 

Education is the hegemony of our international prominence over the past two centuries.  But by an unwitting paradox, however, we now are well off the pace in educational achievement of many nations across the globe that have copied our design.

Somehow guilt watered down this in the last century, especially after World War Two, when we forgot why we won the war.  We forgot about how the citizenry picked itself up by the bootstraps after the Great Depression with an appreciation of education, honest hard work and national unity.  But we forgot in particular that education provided value added status in the workplace, in the community, and in our individual lives.

We born during the Great Depression appreciated that our first job, our most important job was getting an education.  We had teachers who were dedicated to creating value added status in our little minds so that we could go out into the working world as thinkers, problem solvers, and doers, not looking for what we could get but for what we could give to society. 

We were into the common good as opposed to the watered down version that would supersede this culture and mindset, which I have come to call personhood.

Personhood became palpable when the emphasis was placed on protecting our delicate psyches, in treating us all alike in the classroom, in promoting the idea of self-esteem, being careful not to distinguish between winning and losing, succeeding and failing, winners and losers. 

Grading and performance became increasingly superfluous so that today an “A” grade, which once was designated with a “four,” can now be found worth five or six or more points in the grading system.  An indication of how meaningless grades have become is the necessity for competitive achievement tests such as SAT’s and GRE’s.   Even these tests have provided faulty benchmarks because most students are taught to the tests, or take review courses so that they perform well on them. 

We have taken the most wonderful discovery of all from people and that is self-discovery.  We have made school a prison if not a factory, and we have made the factory or workplace an entertainment center, a place to go to on a regular basis, socialize, hang out and let our machines do most of the work while we wile our time away surfing the Internet, texting or talking on our cell phones.  We have gone from hardware to software and from brawn or muscle power to brainpower, but imperfectly.

Unions of our major industries pressed management for more and more entitlements and wage concessions, principally during the post-WWII years, not looking to worker productivity, worker identity or making work more worker centered.  As a result, most factory workers brought their bodies to work and left their minds at home.  They were punched and prodded, badgered and intimidated to react to instructions from the few (management) to often do what the many (workers) knew was counterproductive, “but not their problem.”

Apparently, no one in labor or management envisioned the world catching up and then eating our lunch, which it has been doing for half a century.  It was easier to give in than to call out.  Consequently, we have not only gotten flabby as a nation but flabby as thinkers, problem solvers and doers. 

When you take people essentially out of the equation, when you attempt to do for them what they might better do for themselves, you weaken them and their resolve and diminish them individually as persons and collectively as an intellectual capital resource. 

All this has been discussed to the point of nauseam many times before, but I indicate it here to emphasize how ridiculous and shortsighted educators, politicians, parents and students have become as the basis of what and who they are has become increasingly inauthentic to the point of irrelevance.

At the same time, we have gone from a creditor to a debtor nation.  This is as true at the state as at the national level.  State legislatures are not able to maintain the entitlements to public employees because they now far exceed what private sector employees receive in compensation, benefits and retirement accretions. 

Countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain have taken this entitlement fiasco to ridiculous extremes.  The incentive to work in the private sector in these European nations was taken out of the equation as public employees faired far better than workers in the private sector, that is, until the economic house came crashing down, putting these nations on the brink of bankruptcy, possibly destabilizing the world economy.

So, we may be approaching a Great Depression far in excess of the 1929 world economic and banking crash.  Against this scenario, there are still winners and losers.  Some commentators have the insight and courage to point this out, David Brooks among them.

DAVID BROOKS AS SEER

David Brooks is a New York Times syndicated columnist who tempers his conservative remarks quite frequently with statistical or demographic data that says less offensively what he is attempting to communicate more aggressively.  He has been quite concerned about the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd and its copiers across the United States, and now across the Western world.

In his column today, he mentions Blue Inequity and Red Inequity.  Blue Inequity is the 1 percent that have stirred up the “Occupy Wall Street” 99 percent crowd.  The 99 percent occupiers represent Red Inequity.  They resent the 1 percent millionaire/billionaire club that they see as the problem. 

The economic superstars are located in our major cities and financial centers, and are paid much more than good or average performers.  Blue Inequity is distributed mainly among non-financial managers, doctors, financiers, lawyers, engineers, athletes, entertainers and media personalities. 

This exclusive club was extant, but smaller when this republic was founded, but it has always existed, and will continue to exist whatever the economic circumstances of the nation.  Inequity of the type described here has existed in every form of government since the beginning of civilization.  Likewise, this group designation has consistently included only 10 percent or less of the constituency of the republic.  What is interesting is the take David Brooks has on the other 90 percent, which includes most of us.

I will now quote him in italics because I cannot improve upon what he has to say, a message that should resonate with us all, and if it doesn’t, shame on us!

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Crucial inequality (among Red Inequity) is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without.

Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen.  In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate (my highlighting), according to the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke.  Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more (my highlighting).

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children.  If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent.  If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads.  In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures.  Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock (my highlighting). 

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home . . .

Over the past few months (re: Occupy Wall Street), attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequity.

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident.  That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money.  That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns, and educational attainment.  That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

But the fact is that Red Inequity is much more important.  The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college.  It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock.  It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent (that pay no income taxes and therefore have no vested interest in the country – my comment).

If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and CEOs.  If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda (David Brooks: “Inequality is more than percentages,” Tampa Bay Times, op-ed page, November 3, 2011).

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