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
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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
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