James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 7, 2012 (71 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor)
REFERENCE
A writer who wishes to remain anonymous asked this question.
BLAME IT ON GEORGE DAY OF CALGARY CANADA (not really!)
George Day has done a superb job on editing three of my essays to improve the flow. It has resulted in me writing, rewriting, and rewriting again these essays. The latest take on my Genesis essays is his with the catchy heading, “The Conundrum of Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers.”
Most of the changes are near the beginning, some middle and end, again, he writes, I'm trying to make it flow, to clarify. I was tempted to shorten (this essay), he continues, but wasn't sure of your intentions, or purpose of this document.
I wrote him back.
I think your treatment is terrific. Thank you. (He wrote back again of more changes he made, and could see I made some changes back as well.) It is a non-ending process until the final cut, exhausting! But yet exhilarating.
He asked what my intentions were. That was a fair enough question. What I'm trying to do with these essays in front of the seven books is to give the reader something of a mental map of the geography included in the pages of the book. The most recent book was written seven years ago (A Look Back to See Ahead), which is already on Kindle by the publisher without my awareness.
The most recent with which I have control was published nine years ago (In the Shadow of the Courthouse). It is a period piece and I've made no effort to update it although it is a benchmark to control theorist Russell Ackoff's theory that 1945 represented the birth of the Second Revolution. In the Shadow corresponds to 1942 - 1947.
In my novel, A Green Island in a Black Sea, I suggest that the end of the "American Century" was 1968 for all the reasons that book attempts to show. When I came to that conclusion I thought it was an original idea, only to find after the fact that several scholars and historians are of a similar mind. Tom Brokaw, however, who has a bully pulpit, as a celebrity journalist would differ vehemently with that assessment.
Would that George Daly had materialized earlier in my writing career, who knows what might have been. Truth be known, I wasn’t ready for even editorial assistance, as I am by nature not a collaborator in any sense of the word. Call it my immaturity, call it my pride, call it my stupidity, all of which are no doubt true, the facts of the matter cannot be changed.
Some people are in love with money, others in love with fast cars, still others with the magic chips at the casino, but I am in love with my words. So, I’ve said it! Sue me!.
FICKLE FINGER OF FATE
Now, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe had the great editor at Scribner & Sons, Maxwell Perkins, but alas, that wasn’t to be my fate. Fitzgerald was a terrible speller, Hemingway deficient in grammar, Lewis a better editor than writer, perhaps the reason he locked horns with Perkins, and Wolfe was in love with his own words. William Faulkner said he couldn’t read Wolfe without a dictionary, and claimed the North Carolina native was in a different stratosphere. I think Faulkner was a better writer than critic.
Hemingway and Lewis won Noble Prizes for Literature (as did Faulkner), Hemingway for his short declarative sentences and Lewis for his social commentary of mid-century man caught in the dichotomy between agrarian traditionalism and urban progression (e.g., his novel, “Main Street”).
Perkins brutally cut Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel” in half, and made him an international bestseller. Critics today claim the longer version was a better book. I’ve read it and agree, but I think his mother and I were its only readers. Wolfe wasn’t around to complain as he died in his 30’s long before that assessment was made.
In any case, it would seem the hand of fate stirs in these matters. To wit, a consortium of businessmen, including the News Anchor on ABCTV in Tampa, Florida wanted to promote “Confident Selling” by putting it on audiotapes and video (VHS), but Prentice-Hall balked at the idea. P-H held the copyright then, I do now.
St. Lucie Press was excited about “Six Silent Killers.” The publisher thought it would be a bestseller, but he had a heart attack and died before that could happen. St. Lucie Press was absorbed by CRC Press, which published it reluctantly (I had a contract!), but gave it no advertising budget.
For the past several weeks, I have done little else then work on these essays. I haven’t even been doing my Monday thru Friday 76-minute walk. Obviously, I’m not a multi-task individual, but very much Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog as opposed to his fox. The fox knows many things and is a multi-task-er; a hedgehog knows one big thing and focuses on it, alone.
I was telling BB as I came to the end of finishing these seven essays I felt a lot like I used to feel after final examinations at university. I defied to be asked anything I didn’t prepare for, always feeling that I aced these exams, and usually did. The exhilaration afterwards always put me in a celebratory mood.
BB asked me what I did. I would go to some foreign film showing in the town next to the university campus.
She asked, alone? I said, of course alone, as if that was the most natural thing to do. She shook her head. You were one strange duck. And of course, I was.
WHY KINDLE? WHAT WILL BE THE FATE OF MY KINDLE BOOKS?
I see Kindle as a remarkable opportunity. I don’t own a Kindle, find reading a book on a screen, well, weird, but I know it is the wave of the future, and that the Kindle is only embryonic in that future.
Researchers will have easy access to my ideas in my books to pick and choose, ponder and peruse for value. My books won’t waste away space in libraries or garages, or collect moisture or wear out, but will remain in pristine condition, plus they will be available to my great, great, great grandchildren to read and assess what that strange fellow in their family tree was like. Now, you can’t beat that!
George Daly has done a superb job of editing (1) Confident Selling, (2) The Worker, Alone, (3) Corporate Sin. I hope he has a chance to do the same to (4) Creative Selling.
Daniel H. Pink informed me in an e-mail that he was working on a book on selling with a unique twist. My suspicions are that it will be close to the way I sold and have attempted to explain in my books. It is an intuitive approach, an approach contrary to all the sales literature, but one I used successfully as a chemical sales engineer in the field and as a corporate executive in the international arena.
By a strange coincidence, it comes more alive in my novel (A Green Island in a Black Sea). I’ve attempted in a brief essay to capture it for (4).
My Author’s Note for “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (5) is essentially what was composed on the flyleaf of that book. Kindle doesn’t have flyleaves or, in fact, indexes.
Work Without Managers (6) is a short essay, which dramatized control theorist Russell Ackoff’s idea that we are in the Second Industrial Revolution. In 1991, when it was first published, nobody wanted to admit that managers were atavistic and management anachronistic, fast forward to 2012, and they still don’t. In praise of folly didn’t end with Erasmus in the sixteenth century.
My essay for “Be Your Own Best Friend” (7) is short but could use the magic touch of George Daly. He is an engineer and has had a career in sales and marketing, but he is a talent well beyond those restrictions.
This book failed to define its audience or its intentions. Readers, who expected it to teach them self-assertion or to see it in the self-help genre were bound to be disappointed. It is a conceptual book as to how we programmatically become our own worst enemy, place ourselves in cages of our own making, and then wonder why we have a miserable life.
It can be read on at least three (sometimes four) levels: the struggle with self; the struggle of organization with itself; the naïveté of a company (through its management and administration) to do for the individual what the individual best do for him or herself, and an internal focus for the company or an introspective one for the individual is the only way anything can change or anyone can take charge.
The book argues that we are not happy campers, that we have lost our moral compass and therefore our way, at the societal, corporate, governmental and personal level. It is the reason for the continuing high jinx in Washington, DC and throughout the country.
Kindle sought my works out. Now we are partners in enterprise. Stay tuned.
Be always well,
Jim
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