PREFACE TO CONFIDENT SELLING -- THE MOST IMPORTANT SALE OF ALL!

The Most Important Sale Of All

It's not what you were told. The first sale each of us makes, whatever our occupation, is to ourselves. We must believe, unequivocally, that we possess something valuable and essential for providing substance to others. When we deliver that value, we catalyze our sense of self-worth, which is priceless to us.

Selling is not confined, as many think, to the selling professions. It's in play in most human interactions.  Robert Louis Stevenson, the esteemed author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, put it this way: “Everyone lives by selling something.”

Again, the most important and difficult sale we ever make is to that skeptical person in the mirror.  How so, you wonder? To explain, sincerity about ourselves requires that we accept what we see through our mind’s eye, without sugar coating it.  For most of us, that is not an easy proposition. The primary obstacle to sincerity is self-acceptance; that is, liking ourselves as we are, not as we tell ourselves we are or must be.  We must be comfortable in our own skin, able to acknowledge weaknesses (where we need help) in the same fashion as strengths (what we do well).

We are all imperfect, but with enormous potential. Activating this potential is our mission. The prerequisite for personal progress is that we see ourselves clearly, that we understand our starting point going forward.

Self-acceptance causes amazing things to happen.  We develop a tolerance and understanding of people who differ with and from us.  This fosters an open-mindedness that spares us from crippling self-contempt, since where we find fault in others is the same fault we find in ourselves.  With unfiltered sight, we see others and the world around us more lucidly.

A neutral frame of reference allows us to evaluate situations and relationship fairly, and to engage more effectively. In part, it's about reserving judgments, which are expressions of what we know. Obsessive “knowers”, are self-limited by what is already known, whereas empathetic “learners” are open to what is not known, but can be discovered. Not surprisingly, learners tend to be good “listeners,” while knowers are apt to be aggressive know-it-all “tellers.”

Selling has much more to do with listening than other business skills. You can pay another no higher compliment than to listen actively to what that person has to say. The struggle between being a knower-teller or learner-listener is a daily one, especially in the field of sales.  A boss, a peer, a customer, or a life partner can throw us off stride, with frustration or fear tipping the scale away from our better side, a recipe for poor performance, if not disaster.

CONFIDENT SELLING is written for those who, until now, are prone to being their own worst enemy, instead of their own best friend.  To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself.  No one else walks in your shoes.  No one else is privy to the high adventure that is your life.  Everyone’s life without exception is unscripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with one actor who never leaves the stage.

When readers grasp this reality, confidence becomes axiomatic, as they get out of their own way; ousting hidden self-contempt to reveal their true nature.  Once an inner problem is exposed to the light of day, it begins to shrivel. Self-trust, representing honesty to oneself, fills the void.  This in turn triggers authentic engagement; we are what we project and believe in what we do.  We discover our center, our moral compass, which guides us to act confidently, with sincerity, having the best interests of others at heart.

 CONFIDENT SELLING introduces us to ourselves through chapters devoted to “the nature of confidence”, “how a positive attitude leads to empathetic understanding”, “overcoming obstacles to success”, along with “skillful persuasion.”

Confidence is the antidote to fear; fear rooted in self-ignorance.  With self-understanding comes confidence, followed by tolerance for our own false steps and failures. As we face down our fears, we rise above obstacles we once thought were utterly beyond our control.

In selling and life, it is a classic faux pas to pursue success as an end when, invariably, success is the outcome of a process.  To set our sights on the prize and not the customer is to erect a formidable barrier, one which will negate any potential sale.

The psychology involved in selling a product is fundamentally the same as it is in any relationship. It is not what we get, but what we give that elevates the spirit and allows us to understand the other side. In either selling ourselves or our product, our initial task is to establish rapport, to understand the other, before going any further.

Selling, as a purposeful activity, is widely misunderstood. And, it's no wonder. A profusion of clichés surround the field like a dense fog; “believe in yourself,” “think positively”, "always be closing", and other unhelpful advice. While these clichés are meant to bolster our confidence, they instead seed false hope.

When we are engaged in dialogue with a customer, it's not at all like staring into our mirror at home, repeating hopeful mantras. In selling, we are looking into the eyes of another person, and must strive to view the world through those selfsame eyes. It's not an easy task, but it is achievable.

In the final chapter, “Finishing Touch”, we explore the pitfalls of self-absorption, and identify gains in self-assurance and insight beyond.

Consider that we live in a society, in a world, obsessed with competition; preoccupied with comparing and competing.  This mindset naturally compels us to search for answers outside ourselves. Given this inclination, we are prone to take others at face value, failing to appreciate the masks people wear, their protective shields; reflecting self-absorption.

Seeing through these masks becomes possible once we discard our own. Mask aside, we see and represent ourselves accurately, allowing us to recognize others under their masks. As we process their smiles, words and gestures, we evaluate these signals instinctively, noticing how they correlate with where that person is, how they look, how they relate and how they behave. People telegraph their biases. We need only observe carefully and register the significance of each clue. With genuine insight, we learn to qualify information received and build rapport, confidently.

CONFIDENT SELLING is a great deal more than a how-to manual for selling. It's a new paradigm for dealing more effectively with the world you encounter; with people.

James R. Fisher, Jr.

© November 26, 2012   

Edited by George Edward Daly, Calgary Alberta Canada, November 30, 2012

ANGER IN THE BLUE-COLLAR TRENCHES

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

© November 28, 2012

I've been writing updates to my books for conversion to Amazon's Kindle.  Responses to these new essays reveal surging anger from blue-collar workers in the trenches.  It is obvious they have not read my books, and don’t consider themselves part of my audience.  This is fair as my efforts have been directed at the new majority, the professionally college trained workers. 

Why this is important to relate is that there is an apparent disconnect between soaring professionals and tailing blue-collar assembly workers.  It suggests a subtle class distinction in terms of syntax, lexicon, language, and conceptual orientation.   It is as if these two groups spoke and thought in different languages.

Beyond that, the two groups have radically different cognitive biases. 

Professionals, despite all the evidence to the contrary, see themselves as owners not renters, as part of the managerial class and wealth creators.  They expect to naturally ascend to positions of power and prestige. 

Blue-collar workers feel they have been taken for granted, exploited, and left out of participating in the wealth created through their efforts.

Professionals have accepted that they are individual contractors and might have as many as five to seven or more employers in the span of a career. 

Blue-collar workers like to lay down firm roots in one place and stay in place for the duration of their employment. 

Professionals are geared to the fickle hand of desultory economics and its implicit ambiguities riding the crest of good times and hankering down philosophically during bad times.  

An engineer may take a position at Home Depot to ride out a recession without protest at a fraction of his normal pay.  The majority of recent college graduates know this only too well.  They wait for the downturn to hit bottom girded by the optimism that an upturn will follow.  They believe their credentials are a ticket to the future no matter how bleak the present.

Blue-collar workers have seen their jobs, benefits and retirement packages shrink.  They don’t blame it on having obsolescent skills, or that plants and equipment in the workplace are obsolete.  Neither do they want to hear that their compensation package is not competitive nor that the cost of doing business is skyrocketing as the economic pie in shrinking.  They want it, as it was.  Yet, it will never be that way again. 

Blue-collar workers are angry and spiteful because they feel betrayed by the company, by the capitalistic system and by consumers who prefer products made by foreign countries, or products made with cheap labor abroad and imported which once were made in the United States.  

Blue-collar workers blame everything and everybody but surprisingly, not their unions, which sold them down the river with pay and benefit packages that couldn’t be sustained at the price of worker control of what they did. 

Blue-collar workers blame the profit motive as the ugliest sin in the books, failing to consider that they wouldn’t have any jobs at all were it not for their employer making a profit. 

Blue-collar workers talk of solidarity and socialism as utopian ideals without apparent interest in the how worker-centered control functions without a profit scheme.   They want because they need, and needs are legitimate.  But when needs are treated as wants, there are no limits with companies spiraling into bankruptcy.  Once individual effort and reward is taken out of the equation the progression is to totalitarian dependence.  Did we learn nothing from the fall of the USSR? 

Most professionals today have risen out of this blue-collar assembly line factory class.  They found the gumption to enter the unknown territory of higher education where words and ideas were painted in an unfamiliar vocabulary that required the use of a dictionary.  They left their comfort zone where routine was as predictable as the rising and setting sun. 

Blue-collar workers who stayed the same were confined to the factory mentality where little stretching was required.  Now, they feel betrayed and handicapped.  They don’t understand, don’t comprehend they are fighting the tide, fighting against their own kin that have escaped the factory floor for the uncertain world of ideas, which are the new machines.

*     *     *

There is nostalgia for the past when people could come right out of high school and acquire a good paying job without any special training or skill and ride the job to a comfortable retirement.  This progression was treated as a right and not as a privilege.  Since these jobs have disappeared, unions have become paper tigers, no longer capable of covering their backs. 

The government bailed out GM and Chrysler (not Ford) in the automotive industry.  As that industry limps along, one thing is certain.  Jobs will never again be treated as rights. 

Projecting the villain simply as "the corporation" or "the company" or "management" and, or “the profit motive” or “the capitalistic system” won’t resolve anything.  It is time workers assess their strengths (what they do right) and weaknesses (what they do wrong) instead of pointing fingers.

My focus has been on professionals developing assessment tools.  Still, I have failed to stimulate neither passion nor anger among professionals.  They have become social termites retiring into silent and difficult to quantify behaviors of what I call "The Six Silent Killers” (see CRC Press, 1998):

(1)     Passive aggression – coming in late leaving early doing as little necessary to get by;

(2)     Passive responsive – doing only what told to do even if it is wrong;

(3)     Passive defensive – always having an excuse why something isn’t done on time;

(4)     Approach avoidance – accepting an assignment with no intention of completing it;

(5)     Obsessive compulsive – being obsessed with what others have and you don’t;

(6)     Malicious obedience – spreading vicious lies about operations or others.

Blue-collar workers are not immune to these behaviors.  This is however standard operating procedure for contentious professionals.

Chemistry, mathematics and physics are increasingly required of blue-collar workers.  But that is not all.  They are finding out what engineers have been reluctant to acknowledge, which is that is equally important to be able to communicate ideas effectively in words.   This utilizes the “feminine brain,” explaining why women are rising so quickly among the ranks. 

Being limited to the "masculine brain," or linear logic and cognitive comprehension has ill prepared workers for a sick, confused and irrational transitory workplace.   Hard cognitive wiring leads to stay and not stray from consistent experience.  The common complaint then is of being underutilized or under appreciated.  It never occurs that this might be their fault.  They expect their value to be self-evident. 

Finally, blue-collar workers have much in common with the profession of engineering.  It is no accident that a majority of the professional class of engineers today has come from blue-collar working families.  Perhaps this provides a clue as to why the modern world the engineering mind created does not belong to it, but to the ruling class of CEOs, generals, politicians and educators. 

*     *     *

THE MOST IMPORTANT SALE WE EVER MAKE

The first sale we make, whatever the profession, is to believe in ourselves, to convince ourselves that we possess value to others, which in turn confirms our own self-worth. 

This is not confined to the selling profession but to any kind of work or relationship.  Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame put it simply, “Everyone lives by selling something.” 

The most important and difficult sale we will ever make is to that face of ours in the mirror.  Why?  Sincerity demands we accept what we see through our mind’s eyes without sugar coating.  Not an easy proposition.

Our first obstacle to sincerity is self-acceptance, that is, liking ourselves as we are not as we believe we are supposed to be.  We are comfortable in our own skin able to accept our weaknesses (where we need help) in the same fashion as our strengths (what we do well). 

We are imperfect but perfectible, but cannot improve if we do not see ourselves clearly.

With self-acceptance, an amazing thing happens.  We develop a tolerance and understanding of people who differ with and from us.  This fosters an open-mindedness that saves us from crippling self-contempt as what we hate in others we first hate in ourselves.  The fresher our eyes the more lucid we see others and the world around us.

An unequivocal frame of reference allows us to define situations and relationships more clearly and to engage them more skillfully. 

Obsessive “knowers” are limited by what is already known whereas empathetic “learners” are open to what is not known but can be found out.    Not surprisingly, learners are inclined to be good “listeners,” while knowers are apt to be know-it-all “tellers.”  Selling has much more to do with listening than any other skill, as you can pay another no higher compliment than to listen effectively to what that person has to say. 

The struggle between being a knower-teller or learner-listener is a daily one especially in the field of sales.  A boss, a peer, a customer, or a life partner can throw us off stride with frustration or fear tipping the scale away from our better side, a recipe for poor performance if not disaster.

CONFIDENT SELLING is written for those inclined to be their own worse enemy instead of their own best friend.  To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.  No one else walks in your shoes.  No one else is privy to the high adventure that is your life.  Everyone’s life without exception is scripted high drama played out before an audience of one with but one actor on stage.

When readers take hold of this reality, confidence becomes axiomatic as they get out of their way and inside hidden self-contempt to uncover their true nature.  Once a problem has the light of day its intensity diminishes and self-trust fills the void with honesty with self.  This in turn establishes authentic engagement.  We are what we say and believe what we do.  We have discovered our moral center and are guided by our moral compass to have the best interests of others at heart. 

Confidence is the palliative to fear.  Fear is embedded in self-ignorance.  With confidence comes self-understanding and tolerance for our false steps and failure.  When we embrace our fears, we soar over obstacles once thought beyond our comprehension.

CONFIDENT SELLING introduces us to ourselves through chapters devoted to “the nature of confidence,” “how a positive attitude leads to empathic understanding,” “overcoming obstacles to success,” along with steps to “skillful persuasion.” 

It is quite wrong to assume success is an end when it is a process.  It is not what we get but what we give that delights the spirit.  To have our eyes on the prize and not the customer creates a barrier between us, which quite often kills the sale. The psychology is the same in all relationships as the initial task is to find common ground between two distinct personalities who differ widely in perspective.

A cornucopia of clichés will not suffice such as “believe in yourself,” “think positively,” and so on.  We are not looking into a mirror repeating a mantra when we are engaged.   We are looking into the eyes of another person and must see those selfsame eyes seen in that mirror.  Not an easy task, but while clichés are meant to boast morale, they sponsor false hope. 

The “Finishing Touch” takes the reader inside the fallacy of self-absorption to reveal the self-assurance that lies beyond. 

We live in a society of compare and compete.  This finds us looking for answers outside ourselves.  Given this orientation, we are prone to take others at face value failing to appreciate the masks they wear in public.  Better that we get inside these masks, which is impossible until we get beyond our own.  In seeing ourselves more clearly, we see others as they appear under their masks.  We process their smiles and words to compare them with how they compute with where they are and how they look, relate and behave.  People telegraph their passes.  All we have to do is pay attention and intercept their meanings, and use them to constructive ends. 

CONFIDENT SELLING is your guide for dealing more effectively with the world you encounter.  Be well in that pursuit.

James R. Fisher, Jr.

© November 26, 2012     

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY REALITY CHECK

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY REALITY CHECK

This is the era of the professional worker, a worker more often than not trained for jobs that no longer exist.  Compounding the problem, while everything is changing, our place of employment and we are not. 

Workers are assigned, evaluated and promoted on the basis of criteria designed for another time with protocols that have little to do with skill base or job requirements.  Corporations have the hubris to believe profits take precedence to workers notwithstanding the rhetoric to the contrary. 

Once in the workplace, workers are managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated to fit the mindset of outdated forms from position power hierarchies to ritualistic routines and practices, forms that contribute little to the bottom line.

A corporate carryover from the twentieth century discouraged workers from taking charge of what they did.  Early in the last century, workers built it right, built it safe and dependable, took pride in work and wasted little effort.  They sued for safe, healthy and humane working conditions, and won, and were given pay and entitlement concessions, but at the price of control of work. 

Now, when brainpower more than muscle power is in demand, when creativity and initiative are called for, workers are suspect of management if not paranoid and reactive.  They feel ripped off in an assortment of ways, from overpriced meals in the cafeteria to stolen seconds of coffee breaks to denial of personal days off for emergencies to arbitrary discipline to hazing and harassment by number-driven managers. 

This used to be confined to blue-collar workers.  Now, professionals are feeling the same aggravation, and taking it by retreating into paralyzing passivity, doing as little as possible to get by not as much as they are capable of doing.  It is the same old Swan Song, only more crushingly debilitating today.

Blame it on the explosion in technology, which has only widened the gap between people and profits, professionals and performance since “The Worker Alone!” was first published.  Palpable corporate distrust has resulted in spiraling costs to employers and constant frustration to workers.  The purpose of a company is what it does, and what it does often is not consistent with that mission.

Against this reality, the “system” engages intractably in “business as usual” practices with implacable mulishness despite setback after setback, operating as knowing institutions rather than learning establishments.

It is easy to point fingers why this is so, but that does not address the issue.  Nor does it deal with the larger problem of corporate obsessive fixation with the status quo. 

Workers wait for someone to take charge and lift them out of this malaise when only they can.  They wait for someone to lead when only they possess the tools.  They wait for the vested powers to finally come to their senses when they have too much invested in things as they are. 

There is neither an upside to hope nor a downside to courage, as courage is the engine of survival and the instrument to prevail.  Does this call for revolution, for replacing our capitalistic profit system for some utopian idea such as socialism?  Would workers than take command?  I don’t think so.

History tells us that the wealth and power of a nation remains essentially in the hands of the upper two percent of society whether the system is feudalism, monarchy, communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism or a democratic republic, or with hybrid of economic systems. 

Ideology caused little concern when we had a vibrant working middle class after the boom years following WWII.  But like a profligate spender, corporations were willing to give workers everything but the kitchen sink when “buy America” was the cry across the globe. 

Corporate minders and well-paid workers colluded in the faulty utopian belief that the status quo would last forever.  Not considered was that Europe and Japan would climb out of the rubble of war, or that new places with find their legs such as China, Indonesia, Korea, India and Brazil. 

The American Century is over.  The United States is no longer safely separated from the rest of the world by two giant bodies of water.  While America slept, the world caught up.  Against this reality, we find America’s energy and ingenuity bottled up then dissipated in senseless conflict and animosity, contemptuous discord and gridlock, often between labor, which is mainly professional and management, which is mainly redundant.  It is not a pretty picture, but change is the only option. 

Change has its own momentum but no conscience.  It simply is.

Change in the workplace is of only secondary importance.  Change will come about naturally once workers and managers first bring about change within.  Order comes from having a center, as it is a behavioral construct. 

To establish order takes more than a change in attitude, more than good intentions, more than catchy slogans, a positive work climate, or a generous confection of incentives.  Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers perceive their role vis-à-vis each other. 

Order calls for the individual to go against the grain of the status quo.  It is time for workers to take charge!  That does not mean to sabotage the system.  Workers have already done that with their passive aggressive behaviors.  The times call for quiet heads to prevail.  The factory mentality that has dominated our schools, churches, associations and workplaces is now passé.  Time will tell if this also true of our corporate infrastructure.

*     *     *

The luxury of “do everything you can for workers and workers will do everything for the company” is a mantra companies can no longer afford, a strategy that has proven counterproductive to the extreme. 

Entitlements and perks were meant to increase worker creativity and productivity.  These confections instead have resulted in reactive counter dependent workers trapped in learned helplessness. 

When the connection between contribution and compensation was lost, workers became isolated from the reality of company dynamics.  In a capitalistic society, if an enterprise fails to make a profit, it goes under.  Traditionally, workers have not been interested in this detail as they saw themselves as renters not owners.  Moreover, they worked 8 to 5, unaware or indifferent to internal stresses and strains of daily operations or the accelerating demands in the marketplace.  Treating workers like children, management saw such details only the domain of grown ups. 

Consequently, contribution saw workers drifting toward management dependent comfort, which has led to the complacency of workers counter dependent on the company for their total well being.  Unwittingly, companies created a work force in arrested development suspended in terminal adolescence. 

The American society that strives to be eternally young and therefore never to grow up has little interest in taking charge.  

Workers across the land bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home at a time when most companies are struggling to stay afloat in a competitive global economy.

Harmony is not the glue that holds a company on task.  Managed conflict is.  Workers have shied away from confrontation, from managed conflicts, from taking risks. 

After a half-century of programming, we have a passive, reactive workforce unwilling or incapable of taking the initiative for fear of losing their jobs.  Now when creativity is required companies are now paying for sins of the past.   

*     *     *

In the new reality, workers and managers are equal partners, but not before this happens:

(1)   The performance appraisal system is phased out.  PAS is an elitist management practice that defines its power, which has essentially gotten in the way of productive work.  The new relationship is organic and interdependent. 

Preferred is for workers to set personal and professional goals consistent with company objectives with the provision that management provides the coaching and counseling, and career development.

(2)   Reward and recognition programs (i.e., cash and prizes) are marginalized.  Meant to be incentives, they have proven to have a short life span feeding worker wants, which have no satiety, at the expense of worker needs, which fuel self-worth. 

Workers prefer ownership of what they do provided they are given the tools to do the job, and the liberty (control) to perform the task in their own inimitable style, measured against agreed upon parameters.  Reward is then in the work, alone.

(3)   Inter group competition is suspended as intra organization collaboration is embraced.

Setting up departments or functions to compete against each other for some prize or recognition thwarts creativity and enhances imitation at the expense of the overarching objective.  It is counterintuitive but nonetheless true that when each function or department is performing as well as it can, then the overall complex is not. 

Conversely, when these functions complement each other, then the organization soars beyond its expectations.  It is the nature of synergy.  

(4)   Cease and desist with micromanagement.

Over control creates reactionary workers.  When failures occur, it is “not their problem!”  They wait for management to solve problems only they have the moxie and tools to do so.  Micromanagement weakens workers resolve and creates a vacuum where chaos takes residence. 

Crisis management follows, perpetual cycle of management solving problems it creates, while workers take pleasure in the charade, failing to see they are its victims.

On the other hand, when workers are given ownership of what they do, they address chronic problems at their source, not waiting for management to intervene. 

(5)   Cease to see management as distinct from workers.

Managers are atavistic and management, as we know it, is anachronistic.  No longer are eighty (80) percent of the work force unskilled blue-collar workers, and twenty (20) percent management and administrative support. Now, less than twenty percent of workers are unskilled while eighty percent are professionally trained.

Management today is essentially everybody.  Therefore, workers need to have a sense of this new role and accountability where no partitions exist.  Quality is not only a quality departmental function separate from human resources, engineering, production, administration, and sales and marketing.  Quality is everyone’s responsibility, as all functions are now interdependent.

(6)   Refrain from faddism.

There was a time when companies were “searching” for excellence, imitating successful companies to the nth detail.  Many of these companies in the end failed.  Duplication was often at the expense of the immutable cultural distinctiveness.

A company is as unique from one company to another as one individual is unique to another individual. 

Each company has a distinctive history, value and belief system, infrastructure and relational heritage, along with proprietary highs and lows, and matchless secrets. Its essence stokes its (internal) aspirations revealed in its (external) propensities. 

As fixated as people may be, this is more the case with companies.  They run on the momentum that has brought them to this time, place and space.  Mergers often end poorly because intrinsic ambient rigidity is not addressed.

The seeds for rejuvenation are never “out there!”  The better wisdom is to create the new out of the ashes of the old.  This taps the collective mind.  Answers for survival are often revealed in the reticent majority.  Too frequently in panic mode these voices are dismissed as unimportant and therefore ignored.

Instead, grandiose schemes and quick fixes are entertained.  They range from “hot house” training programs to cutting edge technologies to tantalizing shortcuts said to ensure instantaneous course corrections to decades old faux pas.  Stopgap measures carry the seductive scent of cosmetic change, merely postponing the inevitable.  Change for change’s sake is no change at all.

*     *     *

Twenty years ago it was “crunch time” for workers as professionals.  This was essentially ignored.  Professionals were too busy complaining to take hold.  They populate an inherited dysfunctional system, which they failed to improve with characteristic insouciance.  Now a new crop of professionals is coming into the system with heir heads down as well.  They have invested heavily in education realizing a disappointing return on that investment. Once they have a job, there is little sense of security as the wrecking train of conglomerates can always be heard in the distance.  They are as angry at “the system” as were their elders, failing to realize they are the system.

The Worker, Alone! is committed to the proposition that nothing changes until workers change.  The game of catchy themes such as “empowerment,” “partnership,” “team concept,” and “communications” continue because they are safe, and they cost those in power nothing.  It is up to workers to put this house in order.  Neither ventilation nor pointing fingers will do.  Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life. 

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

© November 26, 2012

THE ULTIMATE REJECTION!

THE ULTIMATE REJECTION!

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

© November 8, 2012

When I came to Honeywell Avionics, Inc. (Clearwater, Florida) in 1980 as an inside no longer an outside consultant, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, my boss, had won election to the Pinellas County (Florida) School Board during the previous November.

Dr. Pesuth would go on to be reelected and to become its chairman with his name embossed permanently on steel plates on the entry way to new schools across the county. 

Having seen one of these plagues at a nearby school, I mentioned it to him one morning.  He smiled, “It was the second time I ran,” then shaking his head with the memory of that defeat, confessed, “Running for an elected office and losing is the ultimate rejection.”

Looking at him curiously, he continued, “You don’t see all those who voted for you.  You see only those who voted against you.”

As I got to know my boss, a disciplinarian to the nth degree and the hardest working professional I had ever known, I could imagine the effort he had put into that defeat.

That thought came to me as I saw that Mitt Romney was going to lose his quest for the White House, knowing he had left it all out there on the field holding nothing back.  President Obama did the same, but he had won.  There is a decided difference here.   

I had a reference point.  In the 1964 presidential campaign between Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, I was President of the Young Republicans of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana). 

Part of my responsibility was organizing rallies, dinners and assemblies out in Lawrence Township when elected officials or other dignitaries visited this part of the county.  This included Senator Goldwater’s son who was campaigning for his father.

On occasion, I found myself sitting in the homes of Republican boosters across the room or the table from Indiana’s Republican Governor, or a Congressmen or Republican Senator.  Campaigns are built on energy and optimism as well as hype.  For some reason in that campaign I felt the hype but not the energy or optimism.  There was a reason.

President Johnson’s campaign had successfully painted Senator Goldwater as a shooting from the hip warmonger.  Television commercials accentuated this image showing him as president authorizing the detonation of an atomic bomb in Vietnam with a rising mushroom cloud in the background to drive the effect home.

The irony here is that an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in Northern Vietnam gave the president justification in August 1964 to bomb North Vietnam, and escalate the war on the Vietcong.  History would later prove the incident bogus.  Tens of thousands of troops followed growing to hundreds of thousands in a war that could not be won no matter how much man or firepower was added.  Vietnam in the end would prove the president’s albatross.   

Johnson, however, won in 1964 in a landslide.  Romney didn’t suffer a Goldwater type loss, but my sense is that his narrow defeat has given him little comfort.  Since the election, Monday morning quarterbacks are now busy picking up the pieces to describe why he lost.  Soon there will be a cadre of folks on both sides of the political spectrum launching campaigns for the presidency four years hence.  It never ends.

My sense is that despite this most fatiguing campaign cycle Romney and Ryan will find new challenges and worlds to conquer.  It is not as if they have never been here before.  I suspect some readers can relate to what follows.

The spring of 1964 a contingent of Republicans came to my house and asked me to run for congress in my congressional district.  I sat there looking at them incredulously across my living room, as if they were mad.

“No, absolutely not!”  I said, then went on to say that I didn’t want my family exposed to innuendos bordering on slander, and then have the same attacks directed at my opponents in my name. 

Memory of that experience has found me applauding all candidates with the nerve, passion and patriotism, whatever their ideological persuasion, to run for public office.  Were it not for them, and their sacrifice, we would not have the democratic republic that we enjoy.  Think of that the next time you disparage people who have submitted themselves to this often inhuman sometimes humiliating grind, but what can also be an awesome exhilarating experience.

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THE ELECTION IS OVER; LET US NOW CONCENTRATE ON THE STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE!

THE ELECTION IS OVER; LET US NOW CONCENTRATE ON THE STEROIDS OF THE FUTURE!

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

© November 7, 2012

REFERENCE:

This is a reader’s response to “The Dreamer and the Mechanic vie for the presidency of the United States.”  It was written before President Obama had been sucessfully reelected.  My response is after he had won.

A READER WRITES:

We're entitled to our differing opinions. -  Here was mine of Romney to a newspaper editor:

Dear Editor,

Mitt Romney says he wants to create U.S. jobs. Why, then, doesn't he save Sensata-- the Freeport, IL, plant being sent to China by Bain Capital?  OK, maybe Mitt didn’t make the decision to close it but, as the owner of Bain, wouldn’t he have the influence to stop it?

That would seem the patriotic (as well as the Christian) thing to do. - The greedy corporatist thing to do is move a profitable U.S. company to China solely to squeeze out more bottom-line profit… while ignoring the plight of 200 Freeport families ABOUT TO LOSE EVERYTHING!  How does closing countless companies and pirating their pension funds make someone a good businessman??

The Bain folks aren’t entrepreneurs, building something from nothing.  They are vulture capitalists…  one-trick ponies that can buy and sell and strip and flip to maximum advantage, primarily, because they lack human decency and compassion. They’re snake-oil salesmen, only giving lip service to core values. Is that the type of person we want running our country?

Foreign countries & global corporations are spending billions to elect Romney/ Ryan for their own reasons, not ours. Please show them that your vote’s not for sale. - Vote to keep America moving forward with Obama/Biden for four more years.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

What you say in a sense is true, and certainly from your perspective.  I've no doubt of your sincerity.  The president has won reelection.  Let us pray that his last four years are successful.  My remarks here are “My Way of Looking at Things.”

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Mitt Romney misrepresented himself as a "job creator."  He might better have addressed the nation with the skills with which he had succeeded so well (not at Bain Capital) in running the Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts.  Those skills are in short supply in our nation's capital. 

Not being an ideologue, either Democrat or Republican, my views range closer to his, which are those of the moderate.  We need moderates now but seem disinclined to be enamored of them.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller comes to mind; a Republican that could never get nominated much less elected, but probably would have been an FDR like president.  Oh, well!   

He is a good and decent man, and as a mechanic, the quintessential manager.  He is perhaps not exactly right for the times, but my sense is neither is the dreamer I describe President Barak Obama to be. 

President Obama is a lame duck president now, and can do some real things, but as I point out subsequently here much of it can only be initiated because we have far too deep a hole to dig ourselves out of, and it is not only economic but also technological. 

I was a consultant, certainly not in the realm of Romney, but all consulting is more about efficiency then anything else.

Consultants are hired to do what those in charge either lack the moxie or the courage to do on their own.  It is easier to pass it off to outsiders. 

Yes, with consulting, jobs are lost and/or combined, obsolescent plants and equipment or practices are scuttled, operations are merged to make them more competitive. 

I got out of mega consulting early because I found myself increasingly seeing that we justified our fees on the basis of the "savings" accrued mainly through job elimination.  Obviously, we made recommendations beyond such contretemps but recommendations largely ignored as our consulting -- for those in charge -- was too often an end in itself to show workers and executive boards "that they were doing something" when they weren't at all.

On the positive side, it was a learning experience. 

This was work after I came back from South Africa and before I earned my Ph.D. but while going to school consulting on the side.  In graduate school, I was studying social, organizational and industrial psychology.  The answers sought in that work were best found in the trenches talking to workers, not in academia and certainly not with management.

The doers in the trenches not the executives at the top knew what was working and what was not, who was working and who was not, what needed to be changed and how that could best be done.  You find this incredible?  Well, it was true.

It is the basis of "Work Without Managers" (1991), which was to be written a score of years later. 

Most of what I learned about organizational development (OD) was on the job as a consultant talking to workers, not managers, not to academics in graduate school.  I never had a professor who knew the working world I had come out of first hand.  Academia and academics were therefore a disappointment.  I found academia very much the same factory cage that enclosed the executive ranks of most companies in boardrooms.    

We had since WWII created a workplace culture in which those that knew what was what had been programmed, because they were in the trenches, to take orders not to confront management, to be safe hires not trend setters, to let management make demands that might prove counterproductive while feeling no compunction to challenge those work orders.  Workers instead echoed the refrain, "Not my job!"

On the other hand, I discovered I had a gift -- perhaps because of my working class roots -- to get these perceptive workers to talk to me.  I would in turn relay that to the head of the consulting company to which I was a member, some of it was then filtered at that level before being presented to management -- because the consulting company wanted to get paid and it knew its employer was not geared to accept hard truths.   

When I consulted on my own, I used no filter, and must confess I had mixed results. 

Companies then and companies now don't want to hear of their incompetence.  They have a set of fall guys including the previous management, the economic times, foreign competition, on and on, never current existing practices.   They would rather sell their interest, merge with another company, and carry their winnings off to the bank, then admit any betrayal either of the company or to the workers. 

Consequently, over the decades, workers have become cynical, and the quality of work has faltered because of it.  The greatest motivator in the workplace is not money, not job security.  The greatest motivator is trust.

My experience has been most businesses could be saved if management leveled with workers, asked for their help, and then assimilated that help into actual practices.  My sense is that the best brains in most operations are those quiet faces on the line.

Was Mitt Romney solely responsible for Bain Capital?  My sense is that Bain was doing what such firms do, and that is to find a way to save or convert businesses into being profitable. 

Long before an operation dies, perhaps that is true of the Freeport plant you mention, it is likely to be dying and on life support.  Everyone sees it, the workers, the managers, and the merchants in the area who derive benefit from its operation.  Little or nothing is done.  It is easier to cry "foul" then fight and embrace our fears, easier to complain then to construct positive alternatives, easier to reduce operations to the polarity between labor and management than to pull together, easier to drift toward the dole than make sacrifices now for benefits later. 

The Freeport plant seems a microcosm of small businesses across the country.  Bailouts are not the answer, gut-wrenching reality is.  We are a debtor nation because not only do we live in a dream world much of our enterprise does as well.  We expect optimism to be sufficient currency at the grocery store and scoff at pessimism when both have the same currency value. 

When such a plant is salvaged, usually there isn't much to be salvaged.  To find a way to give it new life, which is the creative destructive formula of capitalism, chances are it will move towards cheap labor.  In our culture, the one who picks up the pieces of a failed enterprise, not the sleeping dogs who operated the obsolescent operations for years, are the bad guys.  You cannot run a business on the audacity of hope, but can on the courage of fiscal policies that show a profit.  Romney did create companies that made it into the competitive ranks (Staples for one), and of course jobs were a result of that success. 

The consulting business is one of those corporate creations that have grown out of specialization and fragmentation.  My sense is that we are now moving back to the cottage industries of the past but with a science fiction toolkit where mega corporation prove increasingly anachronistic. 

The current issue of Foreign Affairs (November/December 2012) has a tantalizing article, "How to Make Anything: The Digital Fabrication Revolution That's Turning Science Fiction into Industrial Fact" (Neil Gershenfeld of MIT, pp 43-57). 

This article is telling us that cumbersome factories are of the past and that precise manufacturing is going to science fiction perfection.  It means far far less workers doing grunt work, far far less workers who bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home, and far far more systemically skilled workers with brains and manual dexterity with 3-D perception. 

We don't have many such workers today.  Our schools are not turning them out.  A president cannot make a wish list and see it transmute into instant super manpower reality.  Our dreamer-reelected president must keep this in mind.

Tom Friedman of "The World is Flat" fame reported the other day that a small metal fabrication plant in Wisconsin advertised for welders with very specific requirements in the ad for what skill base was needed.  They expected at least 800 responses; they got twelve with only one welder having the math (geometry/trigonometry acumen) and engineering (mechanical) skills to do the work required. 

Even welding isn't welding anymore. 

We are in for a very bumpy road which cannot be avoided because parents aren't doing their jobs motivating their children to study the tough courses in school, and schools are not offering much less presenting these courses to students in a way that they might be appealing other than to the college bound.  Everyone today should appreciate that they are part of the technology age.  Math and science are the steroids to the future.

Thank you for your candor and well defined views.  I always appreciate hearing from you.

Be always well,

Jim

PS I voted for Mitt Romney.  I see a lot of myself in him and see little of myself in the president.  Some think me more the dreamer, but I believe BB will tell you I am more the mechanic.  I wish the president well, and at the same time, am proud of the vigorous campaign that Mitt Romney conducted.  The people have decided, so lets get on with it!

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THE DREAMER AND THE MECHANIC VIE FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES

THE DREAMER AND THE MECHANIC VIE FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 6, 2012 (election day)

A READER WRITES:

I was attracted to an article by the word "attractor," but I found something even more interesting buried within it.  Towards the end of the first page the author basically argues that, immediately after the election, the President and the Congress get together and perform The Front End:

So What If on Wednesday November 7th - the day after the election – our next elected President called for a radical new approach to governing where the President and Congress govern according to a shared vision, mission and objectives they come together to agree to within the first 100 days in office? Just rid ourselves of governance through opinion polling and lobbyist control and require our leaders to work together. If they don't agree, then the President (by Executive order) triggers government shut down. Can you imagine that?

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I appreciate your sentiment but fail to share your confidence that all will turn out well in the end.

We have two candidates that have spent a combined total of some $2 billion, and as historian David McCullough put it on "60 Minutes" Sunday, neither the president nor his challenger has told us a coherent story. 

It got me to thinking, why?  They are both decent men, but decent men must display leadership qualities congruent with the times.  It is there where I have a problem. 

We needed a George Washington to create the template of what a president should be.  For his remarkable restrain and stable personality, David McCullough sees him as our greatest president.  He could have been king; Europe was still run by monarchs.  He could have been president for life, but he chose to be president for two terms and then retired to Mount Vernon. 

We needed an Andrew Jackson who was “Old Hickory” in more than namesake.  He was tough when many in the eastern establishment still looked to see if their reflection in the mirror still resembled Europe.

He took on the Second Bank of the United States, and Senators Clay and Webster, and in the process established the imperial presidency.  The Age of Jackson followed.  His leadership was for the times, as the nation was expanding westward, and the South was already promoting states rights as if the federal government had no authority or role in the matter.  Jackson clipped John Calhoun’s wings, and the Civil War was put off for a generation. 

We needed an Abraham Lincoln when the Civil War became a necessary chapter in the American experience.  He used the imperial presidency effectively to push through the “Emancipation Proclamation” and win that war.  Lincoln was draconian or dictatorial when it was called for, and took command of the Army of the Potomac when General George McClellan faltered.  He had an iron fist but often wore velvet gloves that were necessary to romance Congress when it brooked his will.

Name a critical time in our American history and a FDR or LBJ surfaces. 

These flawed men demonstrated the leadership needed for the times. 

Different leadership is required when the times change, like now. It is a different world, a world it would seem no one understands.  We have become a drifting society, a disconnected society, a society that welcomes the freedom to be left alone which has contributed to the drift, a society that wants to be told everything will work out in the end, when the evidence suggests otherwise.  We want others to tighten their belts as long as we don’t have to tighten ours.   

*     *     *

I see President Obama a dreamer and Mr. Romney a mechanic.

The novelistic style of Obama’s story of his father is that of a dreamer, someone who imagines a life that words could make real.  Author Michael Lewis saw the president as an exhilarating and combative man on the basketball court, but author Bob Woodward didn’t see that same exhilarating and combative man dealing with Congress. 

The president could suck up his energy and play it back as if a gift to those on the basketball court, but was disinclined to do so with Congress.  He is more Plato’s philosopher king than a president spoiling to tangle in the muddy swamp of Congressional internecine politics. 

Mitt Romney’s success with the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, his success as governor of Massachusetts, as well as in his success in management consulting and the investing business are all aspects of the mechanic.

Clearly, he is a very good mechanic.  The mechanic designation is the best description of executive leadership since WWII.  The corporation that rose out of that war is a well-tooled enterprise in which all the designed pieces are engineered to fit to perfection.

That was fine when the corporation resembled an erector set, a skeletal structure in which all the bolts were secure and the assembly held fast.  When gravity loosened the bolts, and the system seemed to totter, not to worry, new reinforced rubber threaded bolts were installed. 

If this metaphor seems absurd, take a close look at all the reengineering schemes over the past decades and you will see the relevance.  Temporary was written large on all these schemes, as no one wanted to face the fact that work was changing, that management as meddler was a luxury that no longer could be afforded, indeed, the relevance of top heavy corporations had become anachronistic.  

The rubber threaded bolts of Congress are the lobbyists for special interests in society, promulgating the idea that they make everything more secure, more economical, and better, when anyone can see that is not the case at all.   

The granite foundation is gone.  In this nightmare of the last six months with the constant crackle and cacophony of campaign ads on television, on the web, in our mailboxes, we have not so much absorbed the candidates’ ideologies as to catch the infection that lay beneath them.  They took away our quiet with slogans and promises so that our world has become more driven by instinct than reason.

We have gone from an agrarian society to an industrial society to information society and now to a society that has less to do with mechanics and mechanical nomenclature and more to do with string theory, where atoms don’t behave as expected, nor do we, and where nothing is what it seems, and therefore isolation and control in the normal sense is now only chaos. 

Chaos today is the byword, and chaos needs to be embraced not avoided.  Can a dreamer or a mechanic latch unto this concept?  God help us if they can’t.

Be always well,

Jim

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