AN OD SOJOURN
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2012
READER WRITES:
Jim,
"How" you turned into an OD practitioner is a story worth telling. I can picture you writing a textbook that reads like a novel or better said, a novel that makes for a good textbook. I believe Steve Piersanti at Berret Koehler (BK) would find such a treatise enticing. Provide me with a missive and I’ll introduce you to BK.
Your friend,
Jorge
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Jorge,
What can I say? You are a very persistent and persuasive guy. What follows is in three parts: my OD odyssey in brief, noted highlights, and highlights of some of my published works.
OD ODYSSEY
It has been a comfort to develop a discipline under the radar, a discipline that was as natural as breathing to me. Quite frankly, even returning to academia and taking a terminal degree in social, industrial and organizational psychology proved no match for my actual empirical work. Indeed, my sense is that academics might spend some years in the field.
.
By a peculiar connection, William L. Livingston III and I converged as we have attempted to make sense of what our long journey has taught us, knowledge perhaps of value to others.
We are both working through this process, I suppose, to keep our sanity.
Some twenty-two years ago, Livingston was at a book fair in New York City and came across "Work Without Managers" (1990), and sent me a note, "Send me your book and I'll send you mine."
His book was called "The New Plague" (1985). It electrified me with its dense genius, a book that demonstrated how we have come to embrace complexity at the expense of control theory and natural law.
In that instance, I realized we were looking at the same societal and economic problem from opposite ends of the spectrum, mine was behavioral and his was technological. Today, as we both realize, social-cultural and technological form a common fabric.
“Work Without Managers” was a punch to the stomach, while “The Coming Plague” was an incontrovertible treatise on natural law, and how denying first principles has led to self-generated complexity with which we are currently overwhelmed.
In both cases, we have created a narrative outside mainstream OD and control theory, a paradoxical dilemma as our empirical evidence confirmed natural law, while conventional textbooks give it only passing significance.
Control theorist Russell Ackoff has plundered the depths of this discipline to note it is often counterintuitive:
If you take apart a system, then operate those components in such a way that they behave as well as they can, then the system as a whole will not. Conversely, if a system is behaving as well as it can, then none of its parts are.
Or,
It is impossible to solve a problem, the best you can ever do is control the problem.
* * *
Long before I studied OD formerly in an academic setting, I understood OD intuitively, how I don’t know, but for certain OD dictated my work at every level of organization.
The only way I can explain this is that natural law has had a hold on my conscience and well being practically from the beginning. My OD, as a consequence, is a manifestation of my empirical experience.
When young, I soon realized that although trained as a chemist I would never find happiness as a bench chemist. Then as a neophyte chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, I discovered that you take your first discipline with you, whatever it is, and tailor it to your situation. So, once a chemist always a chemist!
This caused me much grieve as I tend to be direct and in your face, which was no problem with inanimate work in the laboratory, but quite a problem in personal relationships.
In reflection, I noted that like many chemical reactions few problems reach completion, or the completion expected. This was supportive of the idea that problems are controlled, not solved.
Livingston and I dovetailed, he as architect of framing the problem with the emphasis on front-end attention and I addressing chronic operational problems in the system as a result of front end neglect.
With Nalco, now as an international executive, with neither formal schooling in OD nor training on how to deal with system problems generated by people of diverse cultures, I often found myself out of my depth without a reliable reference point.
Only six-years out of the laboratory after a successful sales and technical service career dealing with conventional customers often unconventionally (I’ve written two books on the subject), I found myself reporting to my mentor, the executive vice president as an international executive.
In my early thirties, I was assigned to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company in South Africa in the draconian political climate of apartheid (the subject of my unpublished novel, "A Green Island in a Black Sea"). If necessity is the mother of invention, in retrospect, I can't imagine a less likely person to succeed, as it proved a watershed moment.
People at Nalco called my mentor and I, the "velvet glove and the iron fist," he being the velvet glove and I being the iron fist. Managing conflict and confrontation were natural to me as diplomacy was to him.
We were both trained in the sciences, both academic achievers, he enjoyed bench chemical work, and I did not.
It was the 1960s during the boom years of post-WWII. Nalco, like many other small companies, was exploding in growth and soon would become an international mega corporation. We were two ordinary souls pushed into executive roles that at an earlier or later age would never have materialized.
Neither of us had ever taken a business or management course, both of us treated our roles consistent with stoichiometry, as if we were dealing with chemical equations. And it worked.
He succeeded because of his tact, and I because of my brand of self-invented OD, which was perceived as “luck” as it was often counterintuitive. Situations were treated as if a process flow analysis.
To explain, framing and defining a problem (the cause) was impersonal like the chemist I once was, but the solution (effect) was very personal.
Where I differed with Livingston is that he solved his perturbations with his head and I solved mine with my gut.
NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS (TWO EXAMPLES)
Alcoa was major international account of Nalco’s. Its Suriname refinery advised Nalco’s Chicago headquarters it was terminating Nalco’s chemical and service contract in Paramaribo. I was sent not to save the account but to placate the managing director.
My meeting with him was testy with him pointing out that an electrical storm had knocked out the turbine generators forcing all smelting operations to shut down. The plant superintendent was in Europe on holiday, and he left no one trained to take his place. It took a week to locate him and two more days to get him back to the refinery, which he was able to get back on line in a matter of hours.
“To drop Nalco was his call,” the managing director told me. He left no doubt as to the indispensable role the superintendent filled.
I asked if I could see him. I was informed he didn’t want to see anyone from Nalco. I asked if I could go to the refinery, some 50 miles away, and verify that “for my report.” He consented warning me should I upset the superintendent he’d have my job.
When I got to the refinery, the guard echoed the sentiments of the managing director. I wrote a note. “Call him and give him this message.”
Soon the superintendent showed up and engaged me in a four-hour slide presentation of his complaints. I relocated to the compound, and worked with him for days until his problems were manageable. We re engineered his chemical feeding system. He awarded Nalco with a new consulting and chemical supply agreement.
It was obvious he felt frustrated and alone with little technical support. We provided it, and saved the account. This is covered in “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992) in “The Case of Mr. Blue” – to sell Mr. Blue what Mr. Blue will buy you must see Mr. Blue through Mr. Blue’s eyes (pp. 62-66).
What did my note say? “Do you have the guts to tell me off to my face after I’ve traveled all this way to see you?” It was not as much of a gamble as it might seem, but an OD moment.
* * *
In South Africa my role was to facilitate the creation of a new entity composed of a British affiliate, a South African specialty chemical company and Nalco's subsidiary.
One of the early tensions came when the three technical directors, now operating as “a team” came to me to ask what test kit they were to use in the field.
To their surprise, I asked them what they preferred. This took them back neutralizing their hostility against the American interloper. The ball was in their court.
They came back with a montage of the South African specialty chemical company's test kit, the largest participant in the new company, but totally lacking the analytic possibilities that Nalco's test kit provided.
It didn’t take long for the “new” test kit to prove a disaster in the field. Eventually, Nalco’s test kit was adopted in its entirety, but not before an expensive trial with the other.
The episode succeeded in demonstration that Nalco’s role was to facilitate and not to dictate, which was actually my job. Was this OD? Of course, it was. Inexperienced as I was with no training in cultural matters, much less in OD, I embraced the hostility in that room with the three technical directors, which was palpable, and in that action, defused it.
* * *
My working life from Standard Brands in the lab to Nalco in the domestic industrial division and then the international division was followed by six years returning to academia to acquire my Ph.D., going from the hard to the soft sciences.
Once I earned those credentials, I acted as an adjunct professor and OD consultant, and then joined Honeywell, a client, as an internal consultant and OD psychologist. This was followed by being promoted to Honeywell Europe, Ltd. as director of human resources planning and development.
My writing, consulting and speaking career have been a consistent cloth of OD, which at times has been bold, other times subtle, and often intuitive or counterintuitive.
Like the velvet glove and iron fist of my Nalco days, Livingston and I complement each other as a control theorist and an OD wordsmith.
Were I to share my OD story it would include:
(1) OD and the institution of education and its resemblance to a factory;
(2) How OD can trace the fifty year drift from leadership to leaderless leadership in specific empirical episodes;
(3) How an intervention of the police department in Raleigh (North Carolina) inconspicuously stopped a police mutiny;
(4) How African American riot in a shopping center led to a social psychological study of the police organization (and an MA thesis);
(5) How a Performance Management System in Europe was precipitated by runaway sales but diminishing profits;
(6) How an intervention at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Honeywell Florida became a bridge too far;
(7) How a minority/majority study proved culture dictates conduct;
(8) How an intervention into soaring salaries of engineers accompanying diminishing competencies was dealt with and neutralized;
(9) How mentoring and readiness dealt with morale as well as competency issues;
(10) How a common brush paints motivation/demotivation.
The lessons learned are applications of empathetic understanding from OD practitioner.
REPRESENTATIVE OD PUBLICATIONS
These examples are not listed in chronological order:
(1) “How a culture of contribution gives a company a grow-up call” (AQP Journal, July/August 1999)
(2) “What will it take to transform your organization in the 21st century?” (AQP Journal, November/December 1999)
(4) “Leaders as artists” (Executive Excellence, June 2004)
(5) “Primer on leadership” (Executive Excellence, July 2004)
(6) “The worker, alone” (Short-Circuit, Summer 1995)
(7) “Envisioning a culture of contribution” (Journal of Organizational Excellence, Winter 2000)
(8) “Three dominant cultures of the workplace” (National Productivity Review, Spring 1997)
(9) “Mentoring your way to greatness” (Executive Excellence, May 1998)
(10) “Dealing with the litigious employee” (Human Resource Professional, May/June 1998)
(11) “Combating Technical Obsolescence” (paper give at the World Conference Continuing Engineering Education, Orlando, Florida, May 7-9, 1986)
(12) “Work without managers” (Bucher Perspektiven Summer 2000)
(13) “Leadership manifesto: typology of leaderless leadership” (AQP Journal, Winter 2002)
OD RELATED BOOKS
Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970)
Work Without Managers (Delta Group Florida 1990)
Confident Selling for the 90s (Top of the Mountain 1992)
The Worker, Lone! (Delta Group Florida 1995)
Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (Delta Group Florida 1996)
Six Silent Killers (St. Lucie Press 1998)
Corporate Sin (AuthorHouse 2000)
In the Shadow of the Courthouse (AuthorHouse 2003)
A Look Back to See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007)
* * *
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Posted By Blogger to The Peripatetic Philosopher at 10/22/2012 05:45:00 AM
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