SOME SAGE COMMENTS ABOUT EXCHANGE ON POSSIBLE OD BOOK
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 19, 2012
REFERENCE:
The possibility of my writing a book on OD or organizational development has generated some interest. I find this reassuring because responses have been from rank and file workers who have had their lives turned inside out and upside down because of some of the practices of management in the private sector, and by extension, some of the actions or inactions of government vis-à-vis their respective interests.
There is no way I can answer all these responses, but I do takes pains to share with readers those that might best resonate with them, along with my candid comments. Thank you all for your comments. What follows is a brief attempt to respond to the reader and explain OD, a term with which many of you are not familiar.
THE ESSENCE OF WHAT A READER WRITES (he wished to remain anonymous) follows:
With precise clarity, this hourly worker shared with me his disgust with the “creative CEO rape of his company” via lateral executive moves to cover the position and financial needs of the few, providing them with golden parachutes, while he and the rest of the powerless many watched their jobs disappear.
He was speaking of a large manufacturing facility but said he also had first hand knowledge of the same shenanigans occurring in the grocery industry.
He also referred to a good profit sharing retirement program that was summarily replaced by IRA’s by edict rather than any discussion or vote of the rank and file.
Most intriguing, he found his union shouldering some of the blame. He noted that his union, AFL-CIO, played footsy with the UAW, and at his company’s and the workers’ expense.
He has seen good paying jobs disappear while being forced to keep a low profile and his mouth shut because it might jeopardize his wife’s job with one of these two unions. He doesn’t want his remarks associated with him as “corporate America has long arms.”
That said he wonders what I have to say about this.
DR. FISHER REPLIES:
The possibility of an OD book generated this exchange. OD is my profession. I am an OD psychologist. An OD psychologist is a clinician to the organization the way a clinical psychologist is clinician to the individual. There is nothing that an organization does, or thinks of doing that is not germane to OD
OD is the eyes and ears and mirror of the organization. OD is apolitical and is not interested in who is right or who is wrong, but what is wrong and what needs to be done to rectify the situation.
Unfortunately, OD is often buried in personnel or human resource management, which deals with people as things (hiring, placing, paying, evaluating, training, promoting, and statistically tracking). As important as this is, OD as physician to the organization monitors its health in terms of culture and commitment to satisfy its mission.
Management over the last several decades has been under siege as its leadership has been often out of sync with the demands of the marketplace. OD is equipped to present a comprehensive picture of the situation and the possible options available to get back on track.
History has shown that management too often prefers cosmetic rather than surgical intervention to reestablish its essence and efficacy. Quick to provide these cosmetic corrections has been human resources (HR). As a result, HR has become “management’s union” with little sense of proportion and rationale of composition.
The hard lesson that OD has learned is that the treatment of organizational problems can be entirely impersonal and objective, but the concern of workers must be completely personal.
There has always been a certain animosity between OD and HR because of this differentiation. HR’s function is administrative, the management of things. OD’s function is diagnostic and ergonomic concerned with the synergistic activity of people. The two functions should be complementary but often are not.
Although OD’s client is the organization, its consultancy is with those in charge. OD has no advocacy. It is the conscience of the organization revealed through observation, psychometrics, intervention and assessment.
An organization is a distinct entity with discrete characteristics, history, culture, perceptions and perspectives. Like the individual, it changes with age and circumstance, or should, as new variables manifest changing proportions and compositions. Just as an individual ages, and must constantly reinvent him or herself, an organization experiences entropy, or deterioration, and must find ways to create negative entropy or renewal to survive.
Since I have written eight books on the subject looking at these aspects in some detail, suffice me to say that organizations are constantly in flux and must have diagnostic check ups to give attention to chronic problems the same, as individuals require periodic check ups to enjoy maximum health.
“Aspirin management,” unfortunately, has often been offered to the comatose organization avoiding reality as long as possible. The result is likely to be irrevocable damage. Should you read “Work Without Managers” (1991), “The Worker, Alone!” (1995), “Six Silent Killers” (1998), or “Corporate Sin” (2000), you will see nobody gets a free pass, not management, the workers nor the unions.
* * *
That said in our creative destructive system of capitalism we are bound to have fall out “When getting fired looks pretty good to some and is an economic holocaust to others” (see “Six Silent Killers,” pp. 145-146).
Discussed in this book is the 1986 leverage buyout (LBO) of the grocery chain of Safeway Stores, Inc. by LBO specialists Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), where 63,000 men and women lost their jobs. Those who were lucky to find work several months later were paid on average $4 per hour versus their previous $12 per hour.
The bank that handled the buyout received a total of $65 million; an accounting firm shared another $25 million, while the CEO of Safeway received $5.7 million with $28 million going to 60 other Safeway executives.
* * *
This is the “Corporate Sin” (2000) of which I write, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Leaderless leadership has been a chronic problem in our system for some time especially since top down management has become increasingly irrelevant. The answers are no longer in mahogany row. Everything now moves too fast with the knowledge and decision-making power likely to be located in the trenches.
The OD challenge is that workers are not programmed to take risks, learn new skills, or invest in their own self-education. They are waiting for someone else to take that responsibility. Too long they have been prodded and pushed like spoiled children to do the right thing. They are convinced obsolescent skills are not their fault, although they are the only ones who suffer.
I’ve been a witness to organizations at all levels, and the culture of complacency is what I see most prominent. Parents have not been good custodians of seeing their children excel in school. They blame the teachers. Teachers have been reticent to push the envelope. They blame the school board, and so on. The can gets kicked down the road until the federal government steps in and throws money at it, of course, with disastrous results. We are a corporate society dominated by a disease called “corpocracy.”1 The faster we work the further we get behind, which appears to mystify us. .
Finally, a reader writes with a correction to his previous remarks:
“I made a mistake on the UAW employment number of 35,000. It was actually 350,000 hourly workers at GM. Today the current hourly workforce in North America is 52,000. It is sad to report GM is producing about the same number of vehicles as it was in 1981 with the much larger workforce.”
That is reality. That is a factor of technology, global economic and competition. It is also the case of unsustainable entitlement programs as well as obsolescent skills. Moreover, it is a product of atavistic leadership in an industry too caught up in its own hubris to gauge the temper of the times. OD, I suspect, was timid in this affair by its failure to practice diagnostic and persuasive OD.
* * *
1 Corpocracy is a virus common to the corporate organization. It has metastasized through the American model of business since WWII.
It has now spread to Europe and Asia, primarily India, China, Japan and South Korea, and has commenced to spread throughout Latin American, most notably Brazil.
Common to this virus is:
(1) Management is insensitive to employees other than rhetorically,
(2) Internal politics dominate and negatively impact productivity,
(3) Secrecy and paranoia are a measure of what is communicated,
(4) The principal activity is nonproductive electronic dalliance,
(5) Endless meetings, boards, committees and task groups are a blind to avoid tackling problems,
(6) Trapped in business as usual practices as potential markets disappear,
(7) Short term planning creates an inability to think beyond the next quarter,
(8) Individual initiative is the mantra, but those who get promoted follow the party line,
(9) Bottom up partnerships is the talk but the top down power is the walk, and
(10) Transparency is advocated but covert hostility rules the game.
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