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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