WHAT ABOUT THIS THING CALLED “PROFESSIONAL WORKERS”?

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

© December 7, 2012

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Seriously, at what levels do these "professionals” exist?  Are they at all levels?  Who are these professionals?

Take GM are those at GM headquarters professional people at the Group level?  Or are those at the plant level professionals, too?  Then, how about non-management plant level workers?  Could you include them?

What exactly distinguishes professionals from the levels I noted?  What are their job descriptions?  Are you and Bill Livingston saying that engineers are the new Philosopher Kings or that engineers are currently not doing their jobs?  To quote from a movie "who are those guy's"?

Dick

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dick,

Professionals are the new technocrats.  They have special skills, expertise and knowledge that are value added in a different sense than we have ever known before.  Therefore, they don’t fit into any of the categories or situations to which you refer.

Most of them are college educated having invested up to quarter million dollars or more in their education as opposed to craftsmen and artisan who first become apprentices and then fulfilled the requirements of some trade. 

Your reference to their relationship to the management class is also misleading because that role and function are quickly being assimilated into the broader non-delineating role of professionals where function dictates not position authority.

Professionals are a class of workers who have evolved since WWII and have changed what we call work.  They have destroyed the traditional organization but don't seem to know it, wanting from it what they believe it refuses to give them when it is incapable of addressing much less satisfying such demands.

In places such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, et al, they are nine out of every ten workers.  By the nature of work, which no longer can be defined in job descriptions, position power, hierarchies and chain of commands, they are essentially individual contractors working in systems where cooperation is the predicate of existence, as they are equal partners as well as performers.

Professionals have shattered the concept of work, workers and the workplace, but have been forced to fit into an archaic system that stifles creativity and contribution. 

Professionals have allowed this antiquated work structure to reduce them to babbling children when they have trained themselves through diligence, patience, determination and discipline to acquire skills and knowledge that can only be dispensed by mature adults. 

Professionals have been programmed to believe that control of work belongs to significant others, meaning management.  Going back to the bloody 1930s, the union movement unwittingly prostituted workers and work by accepting from management wage and benefit concessions that literally resulted in counter dependency.  These workers gave up their most precious advantage for a price, which was the intangible wealth and power and control of what they did, or work. 

The professional class has been managed, motivated, manipulated and monitored consistent with this blue-collar worker paradigm.  Who are these professionals? 

Professionals are the antithesis of traditional workers (but don't know it) who have been management dependent, and counter dependent on the company for their total well being as they sold their soul to the company store. 

Traditional workers have functioned within the narrow constraints dictated by management and gravitated to being more interested in pleasing a boss then in focusing on the mission.  There is a total absence of ownership.  Professionalism is all about ownership.

Professionals are also the antithesis of the philosopher king, which is the idea of magnanimously dispensing power to the benefit of others. 

Professionals are self-interested but realize the objective of their effort is bigger than they are as work is a collaborative process to a given end.  Ideally, they use their discipline and expertise synergistically.

Professionals are also the antithesis of Thomas Kidder's brilliant book "The Soul of the New Machine" (1981) where they allowed themselves to be exploited to build a supercomputer, and then thrown to the side so the venture capitalists that organized them could then reap the rewards without sharing.

My sense is that executive power just like union power will dissipate over the next several years until there will no longer be those at the top making 1,000 times what those in the trenches make.  The pyramid hierarchy is crumbling and with it the weight of power at the top.  How this will exactly play out I don't know. 

But I cannot believe that people that put so much effort into stretching that muscle between their ears that heightens their consciousness and awareness and leverages their minds to do great things will continue to be disinclined to take charge of work and therefore of life in self-interested ways.

My some forty years of trying to make sense of the workplace, appealing to reason with those in the cushy positions and who wanted me to fear them, and therefore do their bidding, who wanted me to be a well paid gigolo and be satisfied with that designation, had no idea who they were dealing with.  I say modestly I am the first professional only because I never cowered and survived because I understood what they were doing and they knew that I did, and so it was a never ending war with me retreating into writing books on professionalism.

Be always well,

Jim

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