ARE WE ALREADY BEING PUNISHED IN ABSTENTIA? A WRITER COMMENTS ON "END OF SINCERITY?"

ARE WE ALREADY BEING PUNISHED IN ABSTENTIA?

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

© May 1, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is with reference to: “End of Sincerity?  Is the Constitution of the NBA to trump the Constitution of the United States?”

Many have written saddened by the despicable and racial comments of the L A Clippers’ owner, Donald Sterling, of that NBA franchise, but they wonder at its constitutional implications.  Undoubtedly, African Americans, NBA fans or not, feel for once that they have attained a modicum of social justice, but the question remains, at what price? 

A READER WRITES:

Hi Jim,

Haven't responded to one of your missives in a while. I do read them and occasionally disagree with what you say, but I've been busy rehabbing and flipping houses as, due to age, I am no longer welcome in my chosen profession. I surmise 55 is the new 75 in manufacturing.

When I was earning an MBA (a degree you have panned many times) one of the required courses was business ethics.

Father McMahon stood at the front of the class with his pointer reviewing a list of business practices important to a budding manager. Some were well understood.

We don't vote on who leads us nor on their decisions.

One person assembles input from subordinates and data from Finance, mulls it over, then issues a decision.

We cannot remark on another's appearance lest it be considered sexually discomforting.

During a union campaign, or contract vote we cannot threaten or promise to sway the vote.

We can't even listen in on employee conversations.

Typically, we are not allowed to express our religious views or openly pray because another might find it offensive.

We can be hired or fired at will, just because they didn't like something, not work-related, that you did.

Maybe you drank too much at the Christmas party. Oops, Holiday party.

There were more things on the list. As he finished, Fr. McMahon turned to the class and said, "So, what does this mean?" I raised my hand. He pointed to me. I said, "When you pass through the company's front door, the Constitution is suspended."

Fr. McMahon threw down his pointer and said, "I just spent fifteen minutes to say what you just said in a few words. Class dismissed."

The Constitution is a wonderful document. The framers were wise men who could not have anticipated manufacturers would be able to make enough guns so every man, woman and child in America could carry one and have another at home; that an Internet would develop to spew hate messages from any bigot with a modicum of keyboard skill and, to a lesser extent, various types of pornography; that, through interpretations of a Supreme Court, our democracy would evolve into an oligarchy where rich corporations, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, control most of the laws issued by Congress.

We are already being punished in abstentia because fifty percent or more of us are absent on Election Day. We get the Constitutional interpretation we deserve.

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

First of all, I don't write to persuade readers to my point of view, but to get them in touch with their own.  I see myself as an enabler and facilitator not as a promulgator of “universal truth.” It is my point of view.

A boyhood friend of mine, Robert McMahon, became a priest.  I could imagine him teaching a course in ethics, but I have no knowledge where his priesthood took him.

Father McMahon's comment that you got there in one sentence that took him a whole lecture made me smile.  A good friend reminded me recently that I use "100 times as many words" as he does to say something to which he agrees.  My BB has accused me of the same.

Yes, I am hard on MBA's, perhaps in part because I taught as an adjunct professor for ten years for several colleges and universities in their graduate MBA programs, and often found many of them -- some with Ph.D.'s in chemistry and engineering -- who didn't know a gerund from a participle and couldn't write a simple declarative sentence, much less craft a comprehensive conceptual idea.

Many of these students not only couldn’t express themselves convincingly and therefore persuasively, but they had contempt for the whole business of self-expression, seeing it as not necessarily a primary skill, when none could be more important.

One of the reasons we are in the trouble we find ourselves today is because good minds cannot connect with a wider audience that might benefit from their wisdom.  And so the self-conscious mechanics rule the day. 

Language isn't a sun tan; not a stunning physique or figure, not what you see but what you are. 

Writers struggle, sometimes valiantly, to match what is inside with what people see on the outside. That is a personal perspective. 

In a macro sense, writing is an attempt to match what the eyes see, the heart feels, and what resonates with the soul as an expression of thought.  It is a quiet mind speaking to itself.

Once this was a thing of beauty as it was of a single cloth -- body, mind, soul -- as if touched by God in the expression of some universal truth.  But no more. 

Writing, like nearly everything else, is now self-conscious, written for affect and effect, written to an audience, written as cache to a job, career, or simply to get a B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D. or MBA after your surname.

If you read biographies, and I suspect you do, great writers claim they were writing only to themselves in an effort to discover the language of their heart.

I am speaking of authors before the twentieth century.  Authors such as Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were self-conscious writers who perfected peculiar styles indigenous to their natures, creating a whole army of copiers such as Norman Mailer, John Updike, et. al. 

Writing became mechanistic, as cold and calculating and as brittle as the times.

Read Freud, perhaps one of the best writers of the twentieth century, who invented a discipline that described only his own neuroses if not psychoses, and the world accepted his self-consciousness as its own.  He couldn't have done it if he hadn't had the genius of expression for what he thought.

Freud understood that despite what we might think we are all pretty much the same, as we operate with the same limited equipment.  He reminded people of this and captured their anxieties; other self-conscious authors helped us forget these limitations, and we rewarded them with celebrity. 

The world of ideas, and the expression of them today is not a pretty place. 

My effort, which is sometimes alluded to as that of a provocateur, is to get people to get in touch with themselves, to get beyond that cold steel of the “Tin Man” to the rhythm of their warm hearts.  Not an easy chore for I -- by measure of my success as a writer -- have been a miserable failure, yet I keep trying, as that is all I know.

Thank you for getting beyond your MBA as you express yourself very well, and always have.

Be always well,

Jim    

END OF SINCERITY? IS THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NBA TO TRUMP THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES?

THE END OF SINCERITY?  IS THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NBA TO TRUMP THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES?

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

© April 30, 2014

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa, after a physics lecture, Rex Jamison invited me to have coffee with him. 

Rex was valedictorian of his high school class at Story City, Iowa.  He was also number one in my class at Iowa as well.  He would go on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Cambridge in Great Britain, and subsequently to graduate from Harvard University from the School of Medicine at the top of his class.

Rex and I were acquaintances taking many of the same courses, living in Hillcrest Dormitory, and often involved in bull sessions on various topics.

Deeply religious at the time, a devout Irish Roman Catholic, attending mass and communion several times a week, I suppose I wore my religion on my sleeve.  Rex was not religious.

One night the bull session turned to religion and Rex had the floor.  He challenged me among all our friends to justify the tenets of Catholicism, the relevance of Papal Encyclicals, the basis of Papal Infallible Authority and the church's dogmatic teachings.  I was no match for him.

    

Rex had been a debater in high school, and he fairly reduced me to incredulity.  He never let up even when my responses were reduced to stutters.  I felt naked with all my clothes on.

Therefore, I was surprised when he invited me for coffee after our class in physics.  I couldn’t imagine what he wanted of me as my only contact with him was when he had an audience, when he could hold court with his peers and demonstrate his intellectual superiority by punishing one of us with it.  

He was not a good listener, and always seemed to have to be “on.”  My wonder was how he could feel “on” with only me as his audience.

After our second cup of coffee, he looked into my eyes deeply, and said to me, “Jim, teach me how to be sincere.”

I thought he was kidding, so I laughed and said, “Right!”

“I’m serious.  I watch, hell, I study you.  Did you know that?”

“Noooo," I said.  That felt weird.  He studied “me,” me of all people, a person he had destroyed before our peers.

“Yeah, I do.  You listen to others.  You listen to me.  I tried to make you mad the other night when we were discussing religion, and I could see pain in your eyes, sincere pain, not phony pain, not contrived pain.  I got to you, but I couldn’t stop.  I also saw anger, and thought he’s going to hit me, and you started to stutter, yeah, stutter!  That was the damnedest thing.  You’re a mountain compared to me and could crush me like a bean, and what do you do?  You stutter!

“Now, that’s sincerity, and I want to learn it, teach me, be my rabbi.”

“Rex, sincerity can’t be taught.  Sincerity can only be felt.  It doesn’t come out of the head.  It comes out of the heart.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really!”

He gathered up his books, turned and left, looked back and said, “I’ll owe you for the coffee, okay?”

THE END OF SINCERITY?  IS THE NBA CONSTITUTION TO TRUMP THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION?

I thought of this conversation when Adam Silver, the Commissioner of the NBA,  told a press conference that Donald Sterling, the owner of the L A Clippers NBA Basketball Team, would be banned for life from the NBA, exacted a $2.5 million fine, and could never again step into an NBA arena.

Donald Sterling’s crime was having said some outrageous and despicable things about African Americans in general and NBA players and former players, such as Magic Johnson, in particular in disparaging language to his former mistress. 

He made these remarks in the privacy of his own home, not knowing that he was being recorded.  But the remarks were of such a heinous nature that the NBA Players Association, of which more than 80 percent are African American, as well as NBA fans throughout the league, demanded the commissioner come down hard on the LA Clippers owner, and they were not disappointed.

If fact, I don’t imagine most NBA players or fans expected the commissioner to be so draconian, or his wrath to be so personal against the Clippers’ owner.  The commissioner made it emphatic that his ultimate objective was to strip Donald Sterling of ownership of the LA Clippers with an early sale of the franchise.

To accomplish this, the commissioner needs three-quarters of the 30 NBA franchise owners to vote for such an action.  He claimed it was within the NBA constitution to exercise such an action.

FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH – WHERE IS THE NBA IN ALL THIS?

Donald Sterling has a history or racism, and has paid fines before for his shameful bigotry.  What makes this different?   Charles Krauthammer on the “Bill O’Reilly Show” of Fox TV claims the groundswell of reaction to this tape recording is evidence of the huge shift in public opinion in the past 50 years. 

That said what is disturbing to me is the invasion of privacy, the violation of free speech, and the overwhelming emotional piling on that everyone seems to be engaged in without a moment’s reflection on what it may mean – down the road – to everyone else in terms of freedom of speech.

So, Donald Sterling is a despicable human being, but even a despicable human being under the United States Constitution has certain rights, among which are found in the Bill of Rights with the first amendment of those rights the Freedom of Speech.

Can the NBA franchise owners vote a franchise owner out of his ownership because he made some racist remarks in the privacy of his own home?

If this emotional madness is taken to its logical conclusion, and Donald Sterling is forced to sell because of these remarks, what does that say for the rest of us that are not billionaires, not millionaires, indeed, working paycheck to paycheck?

Can we lose our jobs, lose our homes, or be ostracized from our community if a son or daughter, brother or sister, uncle or aunt, or other friend or relative uses an iPhone to record what we say in the privacy of our own home about anything or anybody? 

Is there no sanctuary where we can express ourselves, vent our spleens, damn the world, damn the boss, or our company, the cat or dog, neighbor next door, or down the street for any imagined or real slight that gets our dander up?

If that is the case, more people will be like Rex, finding it impossible to understand sincerity, because sincerity will have died, for no one will be able to afford to say what they think or trust anyone to keep the confidence of their most private thoughts.  It will mark the end of spontaneity. 

By punishing a reprobate for his sick mind and hostile spirit who happens to be an NBA owner, could we be punishing us all in abstentia? 

A COUNTER INTUITIVE IDEA -- "PLEASING-SELF" OR SELFISHNESS IN A CULTURE OF SELF-NEGATION

A COUNTER INTUITIVE IDEA – "PLEASING- SELF" OR SELFISHNESS IN A CULTURE OF SELF-NEGATION

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

© April 29, 2014

REFERENCE:

Another vignette from “Six Silent Killers.”

THE “PLEASING-SELF MENTALITY” EXPLAINED

Is the please-self mentality the ultimate in selfishness? Not necessarily.  Unselfishness is at root a cultural condition. A counter intuitive case could be made that the ultimate in selfishness is found in the unselfish.

The unselfish allows himself to be exploited by being taken for granted, taken advantage of, given faint praise, and treated as a gopher.

When a person permits others to bankrupt him emotionally, physically, and spiritually, he does himself no favor, or anybody else. The unselfish redistributes his pain, agony, and self-pity where it is least deserved, on family members and loved ones. This causes deep unhappiness everywhere. In a zero-sum game, those who are the takers are the unhappiest of all.

Takers never get enough, always demanding more—more attention, more sympathy, and more time, more everything. Worse yet, takers have little respect for givers. There is only one way to be truly unselfish, and that is by being totally selfish.

Look at the evidence. If we first meet our own personal needs before we meet the needs of others, we do so with a generous spirit and a sense of freedom. Yet it is considered virtuous to meet the needs of others at the expense of our own. That is how we have been conditioned. It fails to work in the chemistry of being, because it is dishonest and self-abusing.

More virtuous is to assert ourselves by meeting our own needs, then meeting the needs of others with a light heart. To submit to social conformity at the expense of one’s own free choice does not engender a kind heart.

Sainthood defies the human condition, placing itself above the vanities while reinforcing cultural vagaries. Sainthood is perhaps the most narcissistic of postures.

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) may not be considered a saint, but many consider him the noblest figure of the twentieth century for his altruism. He lost patience with what he called a “jackass society”—the bourgeoisie of Europe, which included his own intellectual community—leaving a brilliant career as a theologian, musicologist, and organist to study medicine. Upon completion of his studies, he abandoned Europe for Africa, where he undertook the task to build hospitals and clinics.

There is no question that Schweitzer was a gentle and deeply religious man. Only 31, he set up his paternalistic service to Africans in a deserted mission at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa, in a spirit “not of benevolence, but atonement” to fight leprosy and sleeping sickness. Even his newly discovered ethical principle, “reverence for life,” was fully worked out in relation to the defects of European civilization.

Schweitzer’s selflessness has always been troubling to me. He turned his back on a “jackass society,” but brought European arrogance to Africa. Africans managed to live for centuries without European progress. Moreover, his reverence for life was confusing to the natives, for he couldn’t kill the smallest of insects. His hospitals, as a consequence, would never receive the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Conceivably, Schweitzer went to Africa to find himself and to expiate his guilt for being European. Characteristic of the Christian-Judaic culture is for the individual to identify with society, not with nature. The religious animism of Africans is to yield to nature, not control it. Schweitzer had the arrogance of intellect and predisposition to elitist control making him a totally Western man.

Perhaps a sense of life’s futility drove him there to pay a humanistic debt to atone for these misgivings. By sacrificing his life to the natives, perhaps he felt he could realize his salvation. Western man is consumed with the idea of debt and repayment, in contrast to the Eastern man who prefers moving from ignorance to illumination. Whatever the motivation, European society, far from being incensed at his rebuke, celebrated him as an altruist.

Was Africa improved? Is it better now? It is impossible to say.  What is more remarkable about this man is not what he did, but that he had the courage to do it. He had the courage to please self by serving others. In that sense, he escaped European society and its shackling culture.

The most significant characteristic of the please-self mentality is the need to be purposeful. The world outside may be in disarray, but that has little impact on the deliberate individual. The resonance of the individual depends on a separate dynamic—chaos and order. Chaos synergize effort, as it did Schweitzer, to restore some sense of order, which launches the person into the dynamic of change. One wonders what Schweitzer could have done if he had stayed in Europe and turned his zeal on his own society, a more monumental task.

In the corporate world everywhere, managers and workers are trying to please customers, bosses, stockholders, suppliers, subordinates, peers, community leaders, even confessors, and ending up pleasing no one. They are at their wit’s end and still manage to smile through clenched teeth. So, what do they do? Do they say, “Damn it? Time out! Enough already!” No, they open another pack of cigarettes, have a couple of double martinis at lunch, go on a health kick, giving up one narcotic for another, punishing themselves into a condition they never had when they were half the age. 

They acquire younger significant others, while carrying a pack of Rolaids in their briefcase, alongside a deluxe container of Extra Strength Excedrin. They drink gallons of coffee, looking forlorn and perplexed, then they have a cerebral hemorrhage, myocardial infarction, peptic ulcer, colon cancer, kidney failure, liver complaint, prostatitis, or simply retire on the job. Were these same people inclined to please self, the outcome would be quite different, but they are not, and that’s the problem.  Albert Schweitzer deserted Europe for Africa and lived to be 90.  Think about it.

THE PRICE OF “PLEASING-SELF”

Not everyone has their Lambarene to escape to. Like Desiderius Erasmus (Catholic Counter Reformation), most people with a please-self inclination must seek their destiny inside the system, rather than outside as did Martin Luther (Protestant Reformation).

The clash of culture between feudalism, which was first economic and then religious (Roman Catholicism versus Protestantism), and capitalism, which was first religious (Protestantism) and then economic (progressive capitalism), is once again upon us. We are in the post-modern, post-capitalistic period, and what is evolving is the please-self mentality, which is neither particularly economic nor religious, yet quite chaotic and somewhat dysfunctional.  Nowhere Man is in Nowhere Land.

It is a time for personhood. The please-self mentality in today’s organization stands out like a sore thumb. People of the please-self orientation might agree with naturalist Stephen Jay Gould’s message in “An Urchin in the Storm” (1987) that all organic life is programmed to survive only when it is threatened with extinction.  Otherwise, there is no instinctual mechanism that preserves a species. Only the sense of danger precedes activation of the survival behavior.

Likewise, with people, if there is no sense of danger, or if the danger is felt exaggerated, it will be ignored. The human species has a herd mentality that necessitates being frightened to death to act. Biologist Richard Dawkins relates in his book “The Selfish Gene” (1976) that selfishness is indigenous to survival.  

Dawkins studies single-cell organisms and sees an interesting correlation between biology and social theory. He suggests that selfishness is neither good nor bad, but is simply inherently robotic. Evolution, he claims, has always been selfish, and all organic life is a survival machine, on both a molecular (genetic) and mechanistic (human) scale. So, why are we so afraid to be selfish when it is so critical to our well-being?

THE AVERSION TO GREATNESS OF A ONE-DIMENSIONAL SOCIETY

THE AVERSION TO GREATNESS OF A ONE=DIMENSIONAL SOCIETY

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

© April 29, 2014

REFERENCE:

Another vignette from “Six Silent Killers.”

THE HUNT FOR THE AUTHENTIC AMERICAN CHARACTER

To discover the source of this aversion to greatness, you need look no further than our educational system. In its quest for egalitarianism, education has substituted skill-building for knowledge building and diversionary entertainment for challenging study.

Instrumental education has taken precedence over classical education.

Workers and managers have received vocational training at the expense of a humanities foundation. Page Smith in “Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America” (1991) accuses our most prestigious universities of reducing education from thinking to technique and from teaching to instructing.

Because you can only deal with what you know, the organization and its people are vocationally led and trained. This presents a problem.  If management and workers think primarily in terms of utility or from a vocational perspective—with management thinking what it can get out of the individual, and the worker thinking what he can get out of the organization—they share a common cynicism about work. At another level, vocational education puts the emphasis on doing only what makes people successful, not necessarily what is best for the organization. “That is what the company values,” workers and managers tell themselves, “and that is what I am going to do.” This attitude existed before the downsizing and redundancy panic, which only reinforced it. “Hey, I could be out of here next month,” the survivor thinks, “If you’re not out for yourself, who are you out for, right?” And thus workers and managers gravitate toward a one-dimensional society.

The MBA degree is essentially a vocational degree in the same sense as a trade school education. MBAs scoff at the idea that their work has cultural implications. They find the concept of workplace culture suspect—too abstract. Being trained in a set of skills—finance, information systems, macroeconomics, statistics, computers, and management practices—they find little time and less inclination for background reading on culturally related subjects. “What’s the point?” one young man said to me in exasperation, “Why should I read a lot of dead authors?” Because the masters of the ages dealt with many similar perturbations in their times. Here is a short list:

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey

The Bible

The Trojan Women by Euripides

The Torah

The Birds by Aristophanes

The Bhagavad Gita

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

The Holy Crusades (History of) by Joseph F. Michaud

The works of William Shakespeare

The Republic by Plato

Alexander the Great by John K. Anderson

The Gallic Wars (Commentaries) by Julius Caesar

The Epistles of St. Paul

Paul: Mind of the Apostle by A. N. Wilson

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Reading these works reminds you of the French saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” This cultural tip of the iceberg would probably surprise the novice reader, reflecting as did Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

We are the product of thousands of years of acculturation, and yet, our evolution is seemingly incomplete. Knowing something about our heritage is much more useful than being obsessed with our family genealogy. The family of man is technically and culturally a true family. We are all related. The better we understand this, the greater the possibility we have to live and work together in harmony.

Given our one-dimensional mentality, it comes as little surprise that the answers sought to poor performance of the workforce are likewise one-dimensional. Trust is placed in the rational solution to purposeful performance. Half the brain is put to the problem, resulting in half-baked solutions. Circular logic dominates as we attempt to solve the problems with the same type of thinking that caused them—like a dog endlessly chasing its own tail. Over the years, the deficiency in this approach has produced Reader’s Digest minds and McCult-type systems for closing the gap between the left and right brain:

There is the Aspen Institute approach in which executives gather in picturesque surroundings to get in touch with Nature over cocktails and the drone of glassy-eyed consultants in accustomed psychobabble.

The Great Books Clubs in which a common herd mentality of like-minded culturally deficient minds ponder the syllabus of their misspent education.

The satellite cultural-fix operations, such as The Center for Creative Leadership (Greensboro, NC) and The Tom Peters Group (Silicon Valley, CA), which attempt to make a difference, but only make an impression.

As Edward de Bono writes in “Parallel Thinking” (1994), “They are in the business of attempting to discover a solution when the only way out is to create one.”  

These retrofitted strategies sell well, but nothing changes. We are in the throes of a cultural dilemma. We need change, but we would prefer to adjust the limits and call it “change.” Integrative thinking, cultural awareness, service oriented leadership, and value change will take many years. The only thing that might accelerate the rate of change would be a cultural catastrophe, the size of which the workplace has never experienced. You cannot overcome a century of progressive cultural neglect by the miracle of some McCult-type solution. Only time and attention, and much patience, will overcome the cultural biases that no longer serve the American character. It will be decades before the American psyche will:

Re-establish the sanctity and stability of the family or some appropriate alternative.

Advocate creativity over discovery.

Accept the necessity of disobedience over conformity.

Prefer cooperation over competition.

Celebrate greatness over mediocrity.

Encourage students with original ideas over “A” students.

Award high school diplomas only to students who are proficiently bilingual.

Promote, mobilize, and utilize diversity in support of effectiveness.

Sponsor, recognize, and reward team performance over individualism.

Promote a global perspective over a parochial point of view.

Support fine arts in high school as much as athletics.

Support high school debate, essay, and speech events as much as athletics.

Start language education in French, German, and Spanish in preschool.

Make the teaching profession the highest paid profession of all.

If this sounds ambitious, compare it to what our world competitors are doing today.  This would be a start and put us into the company of Europe and Asia, and many rising Third World nations. 

TAKING CHARGE! THE BEST EXPERT IS ONE'S EXPERIENCE - THE CULTURE OF CONTRIBUTION

TAKING CHARGE!

THE BEST EXPERT IS ONE’S OWN EXPERIENCE

THE CULTURE OF CONTRIBUTION

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

© April 27, 2014

RESEARCH:

This is yet another vignette from “Six Silent Killers.”  Today, reading the Sunday newspaper I am reminded how inauthentic existence has become, how dependent we all are, from our national leaders to what we do as ordinary individuals every day.

David Brooks writes “How leaders get to ‘yes,’ ‘no’ and ‘maybe'.”  It is disheartening to read as the jest of the piece is the predominance of “experts” and “consultants” in decision making from the President of the United States, to CEOs of most companies, to leaders in academia to the religious.  This finds, according to Brooks, that in government the difference between campaigning and governing has faded away, as corporate leadership has faded from the mission to promoting the brand, while academia and religious institutions have managed, on occasion, to make 180-degree pivots when it suits them, causing little alarm.

Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist who happens to be African American, takes Attorney General Eric Holder to task, who also happened to be black, on the rhetoric that comes out of the Attorney General’s office, rhetoric Pitts claims “we have swallowed whole.”  For example, the “War on Drugs,” which commence in 1971 has not seen a decrease in drug crime but instead an increase in drug crime of 2,800 percent, and Pitts adds, “this is not a typo.” 

Elsewhere I read in the Sunday newspaper that people are afraid to state their views based on experience if those views clash with those of science.  Religion has never had the dogmatic impact of science, not even in the 12^th and 13^th century when the fear was that of The Inquisition. 

There is a Sunday review of the young French economist Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the 21^st Century” (2014).  Piketty apparently excoriates Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalism and communism in equal measure, while his critics excoriate him for being “naïve.”  Bully for him following his inter-disciplinarian research wherever it takes him.

Piketty has a problem with American economists whom he sees having tunnel vision, being too quantitative, and economically purists, while he peruses histories and novels to gain an intuitive as well as cognitive fix on the inequality in the distribution of income.  He sees the rate of return on capital could go on forever while Marx claimed the rate of return on capital would eventually fall to near zero, spawning revolution.  Likewise, he punches holes in Adam Smith’s laisser-faire capitalism with the idea that "wealth raises all boats."  Piketty, not surprisingly, falls off the grid to some economists.

Then there is a review of “John Wayne: The Life and Legend” (2014) by Scott Eyman.  Wayne, a fellow Iowan, born Marion Morrison, 1907, crafted his brand in Hollywood before brand consciousness was apparent.  I had read previously Garry Wills's biography of the actor (“John Wayne’s America,” 1997).

Wills's subtitle was "The Politics of Celebrity."  Wayne managed to become the prototype of the American as the “lone ranger” of individualism, dispensing his brand of justice, but apparently without a moral compass or center.  Unfortunately, too many Americans thought Wayne representative the quintessential American and imitated his swagger and bravado when he was only a celluloid image on the screen.

Reading these stories in the Sunday newspaper is one of the reason I write these books.  I’m not interested in people buying my ideas, but as it says elsewhere in this Sunday’s edition, “learning by connecting new information with old information already there” (Robert Frost, engineer and instructor at NASA).  I would substitute “experience” for information, but that is only me speaking.

TAKING CHARGE: CULTURE OF CONTRIBUTION

Proof that the workplace culture supports contribution is not straightforward but is enveloped in myriad behavioral indicators, among which there are:

Workers have a sense of purpose with a short-term minor goal and a long-term major goal. They are natural planners without portfolio. Once they have a clear objective, they don’t return to confirm and report every little iota of progress made. They have a plan, a schedule, benchmarks to monitor their progress, and a target date to complete. As long as they are working within time constraints and “on plan,” they stick to their work. No one develops this schedule for them. It is of their own design and construction and serves their peculiar style of operation.

Workers move with confidence, but not cockiness. They don’t hesitate to seek help and assistance when they have questions or problems. They are available to help others who have the need of their expertise. The work they turn out is user-friendly and shows evidence of understanding the needs of colleagues in that connection.

Workers are learners, not knowers. When someone asks them a question, they don’t punish the person with their knowledge, nor are they afraid to say, “I don’t know.” If they know an alternative source, they add, “but you might check with so and so.”

Workers have opinions and are not afraid to express them. If they disagree with someone, they tell them. They express their disagreement directly and politely and focus on the subject, not on the person.

There are no secrets. Trust is the foundation of all relationships in this culture. There is no claptrap of “on a need to know basis.” Information is up front and available.

The focus is on designing and building concepts that lace together the important ideas necessary to get the job done. Out of this grow practices that are flexible, relevant, and changeable. Nothing is written in concrete.  

The frame of reference is broad, deep, and diverse. Conventional problem-solving is passé, where the emphasis previously was on cause and effect analysis, linear logic and linear curves, and quantitative analysis. Creative thinking is in vogue, not critical thinking. Critical thinking leaves out constructive possibilities and creates adversarial relationships—winners and losers.

Parallel thinking is in, which explores the problem at several levels and perspectives and creates a solution. It does not "discover" a solution.

Change is a natural phenomenon, not an artificial construct with workers in collegial engagement without being pretentious.  Cooperation is not the attention-getter, but the product of joint exploration in the problem solving. 

Workers are self-organized and are no longer externally controlled.  The fire is within, not under them. They understand that their perceptions are constantly in a state of flux, self-organizing, and changing, as they work and experience new things.

Workers are free to personalize their work, founded on the trust that they will do a good job. They are in control. Should they fall short of the mark, however, they seek help and correct their errors accordingly.

In the Culture of Contribution, you sense that it is fun to be at work. Problems occur, but there is no panic. 

What is conspicuously absent is the too controlling, too defining, and too overwhelming manager, who in his effort to motivate instead kills the worker’s spirit. Here the focus is on creating a performance climate by reinforcement of the values of contribution: (a) providing the training and tools necessary, (b) presenting workers with an objective and the time constraints to do the job, and (c) then backing off and allowing workers to achieve the objective on their own. What is remarkable about this formula is that (a) and (b) are commonly provided, only to be thwarted by (c).

What is also absent in the Culture of Contribution is finger-pointing. The focus is on what is wrong, not who is wrong.  Humility is more common than arrogance—“We accomplished” rather than “I accomplished.” Wisdom is much more appreciated than cleverness, so workers don’t waste their time being crafty. 

To an outsider immersed in the flow of this casual chaos, it might seem people are goofing off, but this could not be further from the truth. Work is fluid and dynamic, with action evident by the rate of completion of tasks, with no one standing around waiting to be told what to do next. They know their complementary roles and move to fill them. There is a lot of give-and-take humor but little evidence of complaining. Workers pride themselves in anticipating and dealing with problems. 

Crisis management is an embarrassment. Managers and workers hold each other in equal esteem and support each other to the point that their roles seem indistinguishable.

The most subtle characteristic of the Culture of Contribution is presence. It is that unspoken quality that you feel more than you see. You have the sense that people wouldn’t be here doing this work if they didn’t want to and that they have a high personal regard for themselves and feel no need to assert their dignity.

Workers are selfish in the sense that they have a high need to please themselves, but not at the expense of co-workers. If they didn’t enjoy the work or like their co-workers, they would clear out and not become a nuisance. They are far less self-centered than those of the please-other mentality. Those with an obsessive need to please derive their satisfaction by complaining and drawing attention to themselves. Those of a please-self mentality are more inclined to enlightened self-interests. This is displayed in their enthusiasm for work, which is catching, and is directed toward the service of others, not because it is the thing to do but because it is how they feel.

Workers in the Culture of Contribution see managers and workers as there to serve each other as first customers. They feel traditional management fails to see workers and managers in complementary roles. Some have attempted to educate management into understanding this new relationship. 

No organization, within my experience, has been completely successful in this regard. Most success thus far of the Culture of Contribution is ad hoc or in the realm of informal group activity. Yet cultural change of this nature is not likely to be accidental. Without the direct involvement of senior management, the full benefits of this culture will continue to linger. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom still holds most organizations to conventional practices, which are described here as

Level I -- The Culture of Comfort;
Level II -- The Culture of Complacency.

Level III, The Culture of Contribution, requires conscious competence to establish its behaviors. This compels the organization to make a supreme effort and, yes, a radical departure from the conventional approach to doing business. 

What we have, at Level III, is mature adult workers, not sniveling workers in suspended adolescence, nor do we have codependent bonds between employers and employees. Obviously, the Culture of Contribution threatens the status quo. With this culture, control shifts from a select few to a network of managers and workers throughout the workplace.

The technology is already here begging for this cultural development, but the social dynamics lag, as one might expect, because workers and managers are not ready, nor are they mature enough to fathom its implications.

TALKING TO MY GRANDSON - PAY ATTENTION, STAY FOCUSED, FOLLOW THROUGH!

TALKING TO MY GRANDSON

PAY ATTENTION, STAY FOCUSED, FOLLOW THROUGH!

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

© April 25, 2014

Over the Easter weekend, my daughter had an Easter Hunt at her home for all the grandchild.  After it was over, my grandson, Killian, nine, tall for his age, blond, and somewhat of a carbon copy of his grandfather those many decades ago, came over and sat by me, counting his loot, plastic eggs with chocolate candy inside.

He stopped and told me about school, how much he liked it, and how he was sad that the year was coming to an end.  In contrast, his twin brother, Keaton, cannot wait until school is out, and is counting the days.

“Why do you like school so much, Killian?” I asked.

He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders as if that was a silly question, and said, “I just do.”

Knowing his grandfather writes books, last Christmas he created a video, drew pictures for it, and wrote captions like a cartoonist.  His brother is a better drawer, which Killian admits, “but I still like to draw,” he offered.  Keaton begged off making a video considering it too much work.

I smiled.  “There are a lot of things I do that I don’t do very well that I like to do, too.”

“There are?” he said in disbelief. 

“Oh, yes, many things.”

“But you write books.  That must be hard?” with a question in his eyes.

“Killian, nothing is hard if you enjoy doing it for doing’s sake.”

“I don’t understand that.  What does that mean?”

“To write books, to do well in school, or to do anything well, you must pay attention, stay focused and follow through.”

“I pay attention.  Keaton has trouble paying attention.”

“What does paying attention mean to you?”

“I listen.”

“Exactly.  You listen.”

“Grandpa, what do you mean by staying focused?”

“The teacher is giving you instructions on the lesson plan.  Someone starts to giggle or creates a commotion, and everyone laughs, but you.  The reason you don’t laugh is that you are translating what the teacher is saying to what the assignment will demand you do, not later, but now.”

“I take notes.  Keaton thinks that’s funny.”

“Perhaps Keaton doesn’t take notes because he doesn’t think it is necessary.”

“He doesn’t do it because he’s always kidding around with his friends.  That’s why.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Did you take notes when you were my age?”

“Killian, I’d like to tell you I did but I think I was more like Keaton than you when I was nine.”

“More like Keaton?” disappointment in his voice.

“I’m afraid so.  It took me a long time to learn to be focused, but once I learned it I couldn’t be any other way.”

“Should I be more like Keaton?”

I ignored the question.  “Let me ask you a question.”  He nodded.  “Could you be more like Keaton?” 

He laughed, “Never!”

“There you have it.  You couldn’t be more like Keaton because you are not Keaton, nor can Keaton be more like you because he is not Killian.”

His eyebrows raised forming a question mark stare. 

“Let me ask you another question, and please, no reference to Keaton.  We are just talking about you.  Is that a deal?”

He shook his head, yes.

“Okay.  Do you always get your homework done, and done on time?”

He nodded.

“Do you always complete your assignment, and turn them in on time?”

He nodded again.

“Are you ever late for school or for completing work assigned to you that is due on a future date?”

“You mean like a school project?”

“Yes, it could be that.”

“No.  I always get my work done.”

“Why do you think that is so?”  He waited for me to give him the “correct” answer.

I waited, too.  Finally, he said, “Because I like school?”

“That is part of it.  How about tasks around the house assigned to you by your mother.  Do you do them when she asks, and complete them on time?”

He shrugged his shoulders again.  “I guess.”

“Well, that might be a bit unfair because the same formula might not be working all the time at home, although it should be.”

“The same formula?”

“What we have been discussing is like a plan, one that I have used to measure myself, and one that I have used to measure other people.  When people tell me they will do something, and they don’t, they are likely to experience my anger.  I have little patience with people so inclined.”  His face took on that same puzzled expression.  “Killian, I am talking about paying attention, staying focused, and following through.  To make this clearer, let’s take you.

“You have told me you pay attention, that taking notes in school helps you pay attention.  It helps me to this very day to do the same. 

"I would say the reason your grandfather has had the wonderful life that he has enjoyed is because he has paid attention, and yes, learned the importance of taking notes, that you have already learned at this early age.

“You don’t let distractions disturb your concentration, distractions that everyone encounters and can get in the way of what you are supposed to do.

“You stay focused, which is much harder than most people think, but once you make it a habit you can be no other way. 

“The combination of paying attention and staying focused makes following through to complete a task or assignment or what you have committed yourself to do all the more easy. 

“More people than I can count are bound to disappoint because they don’t follow through.  The reason is often if not always because they don’t pay attention or stay focused.  Do you see my point?”

“Grandpa, sometimes you make my head hurt.”

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA: WHY SO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT?

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA:

WHY SO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT?

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

© April 24, 2014

Readers of my latest novel, A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, have commented to me directly by e-mail, and implicitly in the limited reviews on www.amazon.com’s Kindle that they consider the content too explicitly sexual.  

Others have e-mailed me, “Why is the book not in hard copy?”  I’ll try to answer both questions here.

As to the reason it is not in hard copy, the simple answer is, “Nobody would publish it.”  The second question is more difficult to explain, but I’ll try.

Aside from those who find the novel chaotic, which it is supposed to be, given it was a chaotic time, chaotic situation, and there were no redeeming characters in point of fact.  I know because I was there and part of the show.

Others claim, “their sensitivities have been offended,” and still others,” “the sex and tangential detours got in the way of the story.”

These are legitimate criticisms because the book is explicit, it does offend, and the detours could get in the way of the story.  It is not a book to be read only once, as I have found many other books.

The story starts out with the hypersensitive Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, an angry young man and narcissistic to a fault, looking for some place to hang his angst and anger, as he leaves his American comfort zone for the unknown in South Africa.  He is damaged goods and neither he nor anyone else knows this as he assumes this assignment.

Personally, he considers himself a different engineer than his executive colleagues because he reads books, books on everything, books he cannot share with them much less his wife, as none are readers or interested in searching-seeking the meaning of existence while such matters plague his temperament.

His success in the company, at so young an age, is legendary.  The company and its people accept him as different, labeling him as their “token intellectual,” leaving it at that.  He is close to no one, prefers books to people, doesn’t drink or smoke or swear, but knows how to get things done as no one else in the company.

Tall, blond, straight-as-an-arrow, a devout Irish Roman Catholic, he comes to feel his country, his company, his church, and his family have betrayed him with his only anchor his mind and his books to keep him from going totally mad. 

Through his reading, he has found many who have accomplished much but lived in a constant agitated or equally chaotic state – from Lincoln to Dostoyevsky, from Jesus to Freud – functioning well on the operational level if not always successfully on the emotional or person level.

Henry Miller, early in his career, not yet a successful or acclaimed novelist, wrote for a publication that published little green books full of pornographic imaginings.  Miller’s effort was rejected because the salacious detail was buried in the intellectual and abstract so that the normal reader with prurient interests would have little idea what he was driving at.  Miller later admitted he was too self-conscious to write honestly about sex.

Later, he wrote “Tropic of Cancer” (1934) and “Tropic of Capricorn” (1939), books I read with a red face.  After reading them, I went to confession feeling I had sinned in my heart.  Although a father of two, and in my early twenties, having left the comfort of the Research and Development Lab of Standard Brands, Inc. for working as a chemical sales engineer, I was introduced to my artistic side that I never knew existed.   

Nearly sixty years later, and forty years after experiencing South Africa during the era of apartheid, I finally wrote A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA that is reminiscent of that initial experience.

Like these two works of Henry Miller, my novel involves social criticism (apartheid and Irish Roman Catholic politics), philosophical reflections (ostentatious Catholicism and the simplicity of Jesus), explicit language (I’ve always had an ear for what people say as if a recorder in my head), sex (explicit, too, without camouflage), surrealistic free association (Devlin often dreams while awake, for sample, seeing the Bantu natives naked as they serve a seven-course dinner), mystical (a cavalcade of players provides this introspective), and always, about the author’s real life only written as fiction.

We can watch the gore on CSI or the Follower on television, or the terrible things people are doing to each other about the world on television in living color, and yet we have much more trouble with people exploring each other’s bodies and souls in print than these images of mayhem.

As an author, I can find no justification for this other than fear, fear of embracing our human nature, fear of seeing what comedic creatures we all are, and fear that we might not be special compared to other animals on this planet.  

Were I never to have had the experience of South Africa during apartheid, were I not to have had my gardener murdered on my estate, were I not to have seen the Catholic Church backpedal in the wake of green card imprisonments for Bantus not having these papers on their person or up to date, were I not to have discovered the rogue and rascal side of my nature, chances are I would be equally contemptuous of the audacity to write such a book as A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  But I did see South Africa naked and myself as well, and my penance has been my life, which is the last sentence of the novel.

MEN LIKE TO SOAR, WOMEN LIKE TO STAY PLANTED, WHY THE POSTMODERN WORLD BELONGS TO WOMEN!

MEN LIKE TO SOAR, WOMEN LIKE TO STAY PLANTED,

WHY THE POSTMODERN WORLD BELONGS TO WOMEN!

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

© April 24, 2014

REFERENCE:

The global interest in these vignettes on “Six Silent Killers” suggest this book may be of some value.

Work and workers have changed dramatically, while management and the measurement of work have lagged behind. This cannot be blamed on management exclusively, for many workers would rather work hard than take risks and work smarter.

Being culturally conditioned to results, they want personal guarantees, to know what they are going to get for what they give. Nor are they likely to be inclined to take a three-, four-, or five-year apprenticeship in electronics, computers, or some other technician program, which pays them less than they would make on the assembly line of some automotive company. Within a company, they are unlikely to bid on a demanding job, which includes high risk and possible failure.

With medicine becoming a high-risk profession due to the rising tide of lawsuits, women are replacing men in medical school. In 1970, only 14 percent of medical school graduates were women. Today, half all medical students are women.

Women have shown they are more willing to take risks and work the process than men, as more than 60 percent of all graduate students are women, with more than 55 percent of all master’s degrees issued are to women.

In 1970, only 5 percent of women earned law degrees; now that number is 50 percent. There is even a greater gender imbalance growing in higher education for minority students. Among black students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1990, fully 60 percent were female; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female; and among white students, 53 percent were female.   All of these numbers continue to increase in the twenty-first century, while men wait for, God only knows.

This may have broader implications.

Women have always preferred to work smart over brute force. Women don’t have the physical strength. Their powers are more subtle. Moreover, women are less prone to be shamed into capitulation than men.

In my experience, an upper level female executive was demoted and given a non-functioning job. She maintained an office, but no longer had a secretary or a private parking space. Otherwise, she continued to draw the same salary and benefits. I would often pass her office, see her doing her nails, smiling broadly, or talking animatedly on the telephone. She continued to dress to the teeth and displayed all the aplomb as if she was still an active power broker.

In contrast, a male colleague of mine, once a revered chief engineer, was demoted because of a drinking problem. He suffered a similar fate with a totally different reaction. He was given an office, kept his parking space, but no longer had chief engineering duties.  What did he do?  He took on the role of rabblerouser, attempting to organize the engineers into a union. When that failed, he became a political activist, campaigning throughout the facility.

When that, too, failed, he became despondent, lost his sense of humor, seldom spoke to anyone, wore a permanent frown, and moped about. One day he had a heart attack at age 50 and died.

The female executive spent seven happy years in limbo, giving no indication that she felt any remorse at her demotion, or psychological damage, then retired at 65. Today, she is still going strong and still looks well groomed and beautiful.

It is no mere coincidence that women are adjusting to the new cultural demands more rapidly than men. Women are used to being in charge, not on mahogany row, not in command and control positions, but as mothers and wives on the home front.

Women, without titles or portfolios, have had to be the family problem-solvers with limited resources and have learned to make the most of what they have had to work with finding no benefit in complaining.

Limits, and not being taken seriously, are new experiences for men. Women have been saddled with this role for centuries.  From the age of four or five on, men learn the game of bullying and choose their leaders on that basis. Physical prowess, until age 18, commands the attention, respect, and following, especially athletic ability. Gradually, from that point forward, leadership takes on more of a cerebral and psychological character, but hardly intellectual. Men as doers, talkers, and shakers get noticed. With women:

The cerebral has always been more enchanting.  They have been used to giving men the credit when they came up with the ideas that solved the home front problems.  They have often listened to their most successful husbands and partners, their fathers and brothers act like spoiled children when the world failed to go their way, southing their feathers when their wings no longer could take them to where they wanted to go.

It has been their role to listen, to plant the seed of an idea into their sons’ or husbands’ or brothers’ heads, and watch them go forward with the idea without acknowledgment, soaring into the blue feeling no one could touch them.

It has been necessary to be real and to deal realistically with what they have had, not with what their husbands, fathers, or brothers dreamed of having.  They had to make do, and have done so, without being derailed for the lack of acknowledgment or appreciation.

Men like to soar like birds. Women prefer to feel the solid earth under their feet. Women have kept the culture extant by practicing the tenets of the culture religiously and consistently, and yes, courageously.

Men fall back on the culture when in dire straits; otherwise they ignore it. Women are unabashedly spiritual because they carry a soul with them wherever they go, out of which have come their sons and daughters.

Men argue the metaphysics of soullessness without evidence of having a soul. Where men and women are more alike than different is that their cultural conditioning finds them more driven to please others than to please themselves. With women, their drive is to please men. With men, their drive is please power, which usually resides with men.  This has handicapped women, who remain still more man-conscious than woman-conscious, perpetuating the myth that handicaps us all.

There is no danger of a unisex gender. It seems clear that the scales are turning toward many of the attributes that are commonly associated with women. These attributes are becoming essential to organization—listening skills, acceptance of limits, dealing pragmatically with reality, using the whole brain, being as comfortable in the abstract as the concrete, not needing to promote “action for action’s sake,” and not being afraid to respect and play hunches.

There is something else going on in organization that is less intimidating to women than men. It is the assertion of individualism in pursuit of collective identity. Collective identity is a mockery unless the individual first relates honestly and completely with himself. He must expand his consciousness without apology before he can relate meaningfully to others. Most workers don’t know what they want as they have spent their lives pleasing others:

It is more acceptable to be a grind or mediocre than to step out of the crowd and be great.

Only “geeks” love what they do regardless of pay.

Audacity is discouraged, as is conflict. A person who is willing to admit that he values his own opinion more than what others think about him is considered arrogant.  The mask of humility is encouraged.

Those full of pleasing self above pleasing others are put on notice that this is not acceptable.

Yet the mindset of pleasing others at the expense of pleasing self comes out of the cultural landscape of comfort and complacency, not contribution. The Culture of Contribution is a very different place. It is the land of giants, giant achievers, giant pains-in-the-asses, and giant contradictions. It is the land where giant inconsistencies rest next to giant consistencies, where there is no such thing as a status quo, and where giant breakthroughs are so common they don’t have a name.

THE FALLACY OF HARD WORK IN THE INFORMATION AGE!

THE FALLACY OF HARD WORK IN THE INFORMATION AGE!

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

© April 23, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is another vignette from “Six Silent Killers” sure to clash with cultural biases that have been programmed into the mindset of many.  On the other hand, those who have taken charge of their lives, rejecting such programming, are doing swimmingly well in this uncertain economic climate.

“The Work Ethic Lives! Americans labor harder and at more jobs than ever.” 

This was an attention grabbing Time magazine (September 7, 1987) lead-in to an article which, curiously, insisted that hard work is ennobling and that people forced to work two and three jobs to live in style is proof positive that the American work ethic is alive.  I don’t think so. It suggests quite the opposite, for hard work is scarcely relevant, much less exalted today. 

Working hard is like treading water in place, knowing if you ever stop treading you will drown. There is a community of workers in conventional jobs who feel precisely like they are treading water. There is a limit to endurance, then what? Working two and three jobs is avoiding the issue. It is not evidence of a work ethic, but of unconscious incompetence or the search for the easy way out.

There is no easy way out. Workers who have seen their jobs vanish must either be retrained in more productive work or retire. 

They cannot keep treading water. If they are unable or unwilling to learn new skills, they may well become a casualty. Conscious competence demands that workers make reality checks periodically, and that they assess their competence against that reality.

Moralizing is not the answer. The economics of warfare has no heart. The question every worker must ask himself is this: What can I do now that I am not doing to get out of deep water and onto firm soil? Workers are under siege, and this is no time for half measures.

Unfortunately, there is a jaundiced appetite in worker consciousness for a strenuous schedule. Even if a worker is not making progress, he gets social sympathy for working hard: “Isn’t it just wonderful how hard Sam (Sally) works. Why, I believe he (she) is working two jobs.” Workers take pride in boasting about how hard they work. It is much less acceptable to boast of how smart one is working: “I only work 20 hours a week and make a good living. Isn’t that great?” Most people would not think so.

First, they would be suspect of your boast, next they would put you down for bragging, and then they would hate you for making them feel a fool. Few are likely to tell friends it is taking them half the time it once took to earn a living. People take exception to those who show themselves as clever, while the same people welcome someone who complains of working hard. They can identify with the latter, but not the former. Why?

Workers hate to make hard choices. The fact that hard choices make it easy for them eventually has little impact on their decisions, nor are they aware that easy choices eventually make for hard lives. Research shows that most careers of workers are accidental, not planned. Most workers fall into their jobs and don’t consciously seek out their careers. They stumble into their destinies. 

So, workers recite to colleagues how tough their schedules, how many hours they work, how many jobs they juggle, failing to see the imbecility of this. Many workers prefer self-deception to committing to some kind of work they passionately believe in.  Instead, their energy is engaged in menial diversions.

There is graphic evidence of this. The graduate schools of many American universities are the best in the world, especially in the pure sciences and technologies. The students that dominate these graduate school populations are foreign students, primarily Oriental. The mathematics, physics, chemistry, and graduate engineering programs, especially in electronic and computer engineering, have anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of their graduate students from foreign countries.

Obviously, one of the reasons for this brain drain is that these curricula require extensive preparation, from grammar school, high school, and through undergraduate school. Europe and Asia excel at preparing students from preschool on for rewarding careers in science and technology. Meanwhile, Americans exalt students with athletic prowess who can throw a ball through a hoop, kick it through a goal post, or hit it out of the park.

If not athletics, Americans exalt students who chase the buck in business or law schools. We produce more MBAs than the rest of the graduate schools of the world combined, and in Washington, D.C. alone there are 65,000 lawyers. American universities have some of the finest liberal arts and fine arts colleges in the world, which again draw widely from foreign lands. Schools are here, opportunity is here, but where are the American students?  

Chances are they are looking to find a way to acquire a degree with the least amount of psychic and intellectual effort.  Or the more cynical approach is to find a way into a prestigious university, preferably an Ivy League university, cough up a quarter million dollars, then coast to a degree.  Once the degree is in hand the prestige of the pedigree will speak for itself.    

This, of course, is equally asinine as is the bravado of working hard doing two or three jobs.  Both extremes give work a bad name.  Clearly, such people are not in charge and have contempt for the idea of work.  That is not the point of this piece.  Work can be love made visible, a spiritual and enhancing endeavor as these two Indian Masters suggest:

“Every one has been made for some particular work, and the drive for that work has been put into his heart.”  

Julai al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)

”If you wish to work properly, you should never lose sight of two great principles.  First, a profound respect for work undertaken; and second, a complete indifference to its fruits.  Thus only can you work with the proper attitude.” 

Swami Brahmananda (1863-1922)

WHEN CORPORATE INFLUENCE FALLS BETWEEN THE CHAIRS!

WHEN CORPORATE INFLUENCE FALLS BETWEEN THE CHAIRS!

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

© April 20, 2014

 

REFERENCE:

Another vignette from Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (2014)

 

The complex organization is a twentieth century phenomenon. If society doesn’t have it quite right regarding the relationship between workers and managers, it is because the organization is still in a learning mode.

Once management was tapped to be surrogate owner as operator, the relationship between workers and managers changed. Managers took on the responsibility for the organization’s success. From that sense of duty, it is easy to see how management might take advantage of workers or take them for granted. Management became the stick that stirred the drink. Wrong or right, that is what evolved.

Workers went along with it, to a point. Then the unions stepped in to complain that all wasn’t quite kosher. The union movement was meant to look out for the interests of workers. It contributed instead to the current dilemma by surrendering to management the control of work in exchange for wage and benefit concessions. Unions are disintegrating at an alarming rate because that function is no longer necessary.

That said workers are adrift psychologically, however, and remain essentially reactive, hurting spiritually, if not only or always economically.

They hunger for the nostalgia of work when they controlled what they did.  To understand this shift, consider William H. Whyte, Jr.’s The Organization Man (1956).  Whyte profiled a new breed of elite managers dedicated to the goals of their leaders without question.

 

[Sloan Wilson, about the same time, came out with THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT, a novel about the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business.  Tom and Betsy Rath share a struggle to find contentment in their hectic material world while several others are fighting essentially the same battle, but differently.

The novel was made into a film in 1956, starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, as Tom and Betsy Rath, with Frederic March (actor Lee J. Cobb) as Tom Rath’s boss.

In the end, it is a story of taking charge, taking responsibility for one’s own life.  The book was largely biographical, drawing on Wilson’s experiences as assistant director of the U.S. National Citizen Commission for Public Schools. 

The title of the book became part of the American vernacular, as the book was breaking new ground at looking at conformity in the executive suite, and its toll on marriage, family, and, indeed, culture as the company came to believe it “owned” executives when they reached a certain pay grade.

Such notable as presidential candidate (1956) Adlai Stevenson described the organization man culture as “a collectivism colliding with American individualism.”  Professors of sociology used the book in their courses addressing corporate discontent, while executives across the country claimed to have learned “an important lesson” from the book and film.

Alas, not only did nothing change, but that the problem today, nearly sixty years later, is exponentially greater.]  

 

These managers sacrificed family, personal comfort, and ego for the company. The organization man was loyal, obedient, conforming, hardworking, dutiful, and dedicated. He put the concerns of the company ahead of his own.

Over time, a peculiar thing happened. The organization man came to feel “he was the company!”—that the company belonged to him because he had more of a stake in it than anyone else. As organization men moved up the ladder, they perpetuated the myth of ownership.

Leaders, such as Lee Iacocca, were custodians of the myth. With the shift in the knowledge base of the organization in the 1990s, and with knowledge base being much more critical to success, this arrogance has often found organization men literally running their respective companies into the ground.

The organization man mentality persists in Fortune 500 companies. It is revealed every time a reporter asks a senior manager how he can justify an eight figure income.  A typical response: “When I came into this company, the company had lost money for five years, the stock price and market share had been cut in half. We just had our second record year in a row, the stock price is at an all-time high and we have regained our position in the market. Considering that, I am underpaid.”

An organization man thinks he does it alone and feels little guilt for doing whatever to put the company back on its feet.

Nor does he apologize for taking the compensation derived for his efforts. He sees his obligation to stockholders, not stakeholders—not the workers. Yet the role of the organization man has faded. His influence has shifted to institutions that manipulate the symbolic economy. Money, credit, and capital are no longer tightly bound to the real economy of produced goods, services, and trade. We are seeing the collapse of traditional power and the introduction of synthetic power.

Who would have thought that multibillion-dollar corporations could end up on the trading block or be driven to criminal activities for survival? Archer-Daniels-Midland was fined $100 million for price fixing of lysine, a feed additive. Meanwhile, Texaco agreed to a record $176 million settlement for racial biases. It is relevant to this discussion as to how that came about.

Richard Lundall, a senior personnel executive, lost his job in a Texaco cutback in 1994. In 1996, he released tape recordings of a Texaco senior management meeting, which took place in 1994. These recordings depicted him and other company officers belittling black employees and plotting to destroy evidence in a race discrimination suit. It became the basis of the nine-figure settlement. Now, it seems portions of these tape recordings were erased, reminiscent of the famous 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.

The plot thickens! Indeed, who would have thought the Age of Capitalism would descend to such vulgarity? But it may be happening in your own backyard. In the Tampa Bay area, Publix Supermarkets, Inc., which dominates the food supermarket business in the Southeast (Florida in particular) and enjoys a reputation of being a first-class, first-rate employer, agreed to pay its 150,000 women employees $81.5 million to settle a sex and race discrimination lawsuit brought on by 12 former and current female store employees.

With Texaco and Publix alike, senior management first took the class action suits as a joke and behaved badly. Senior management overrated its importance, while it underrated the impact of modern workers once they get their dander up.  Profits have taken on the appearance of imagined power.

Organizations are either more or less profitable, so traditional leaders are either enhancing or losing their imagined power base.  The frantic search for profits finds many companies surviving on the basis of how well they play the money market.

Kenneth Galbraith predicted this catastrophe many years ago, envisioning capitalism giving way to a mandarin like technocracy, where moving money would take precedence over making things.  Sony Corporation chairman Akio Morita, addressing the 1990 graduating class of the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, warned that America will never get back on course if its best continue to “chase the buck” instead of producing quality goods.

Only 50 out of an MBA graduating class of 840 planned to get into manufacturing, keeping Galbraith’s prophecy extant.  Peter Drucker, while more philosophical than Galbraith, sees the world economy in a state of flux, with classical economic theories no longer applying. “The new symbolic economy of financial flow,” he says, “outweighs by a ratio of more than 35 to 1 the real economy of traded goods and services.” 

What is causing the demise of the real world economy is the uncoupling of the primary products economy from the industrial economy and of the industrial economy from employment. The result is that capital movement rather than trade is driving the economy.

Moreover, information technology and services are taking precedence over traditional labor. In light of these shifts, we are seeing a steady shedding of blue-collar jobs, with more than 7 million such jobs disappearing in the United States since 1975. America is experiencing what the world economy will eventually experience, and that is an accelerating substitution of knowledge and capital for manual labor. “Without such a substitution,” Drucker argues, “no modern nation can remain competitive.”  Yet, the obsessive attempt to first preserve blue-collar jobs and then to treat all workers as if they are blue-collar workers has become a prescription for disaster.

The problem, then, is that the professional worker, who has made both the blue-collar worker and the organization man obsolete, continues to be treated as if it is still 1945. While professionals have an edge on the knowledge curve and, therefore, influence, and managers are now the equivalent of co-workers, the cultural biases of organizations insist on treating management as if it still has the power. The result is the donnybrook we see and the reason why the six silent killers are thriving. Management valiantly attempts to exercise control and cannot, so influence falls between the chairs.