EXCERPT FROM THE PAGES OF "SIX SILENT KILLERS" or WHY MANAGEMENT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG!

EXCERPT FROM THE PAGES OF “SIX SILENT KILLERS,”

OR WHY MANAGEMENT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG!

 

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

© April 11, 2014

REFERENCE:

I am in the process of editing “Six Silent Killers” for TATE Publishing, which is putting it out as a Second Edition.  This excerpt deals with the inability of management, in all pursuits, academic and religious institutions as well as industry and government to think differently on purpose.

 

The ambiguity of empowerment is well known but rarely gets much attention. This is not totally the fault of management. Well meaning executives have turned to social engineers for help. What they too often have received is psychobabble. The 30-something crowd has found its own answer. Currently, Deepak Chopra, a psychiatrist, is very popular with them. His entertaining message has an Eastern flavor and relates to heightened consciousness.

“The new intelligence is a female intelligence,” he insists, “which is nonlinear, holistic, intuitive, creative, nourishing, and wise. It is non-predatory, not about winning or losing, and needs to be embraced in society by both men and women. Half the U.S. Congress has prostate cancer,” he advises, “because they express their male energy only through predatory intelligence.”

Imagine a worker going into his boss with that kind of message. What Chopra is saying has merit. In an isolated context, however, it is certainly open to misinterpretation. Werner Erhard and his Erhard Seminar Training (EST) filled a similar need in the 1970s.  Anxious people were looking for neat little boxes with answers.  EST proved it was a need impossible to fill.  It remains to be seen how Chopra will fare. It isn’t wise to get caught up too quickly in the latest craze. Human Resources has too often taken half-baked ideas and sold them to management as finished goods. These fads, once disseminated, go through a phasic chain from excitement, euphoria, acclaim, critical review, confusion, and disappointment to termination. Cultural change is not witchcraft.

Management is receptive to new ideas as long as it doesn’t involve too much of its time. Unfortunately, if management doesn’t have a substantial role in the process, it is a waste of everybody’s time. There are no miracles or magic formulas—only hard work and persistent effort.

Thanks largely to Isaac Newton, management sees the organization as a fine-tuned clock, as a mechanistic mind, breaking everything down and then applying experts to take care of the parts. This is a masculine mind, a linear mind, a mind that can never get enough detail. Its obsession with data predisposes it to distort reality—if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist! More energy can be spent in dysfunctional quantification than is appropriate.

Chopra calls this “predatory intelligence,” while writer Alan Valentine advises, “Whatever else may be made mechanical, human values cannot.”

So that is the intrigue. Executives are known for their no-nonsense quantitative thinking, for their ability to “stay in the kitchen and take the heat,” as President Harry S. Truman put it, while being disinclined to invest much time in what they see as frivolous qualitative thinking. “Give me the facts and get on with it,” they cry, the implication being “my powers of reasoning will do the rest.” This makes them vulnerable to the tyranny of judgment. They are, much like their traditional workers, more inclined to be reactive than proactive, finding it easier to criticize ideas than create them. The pattern of their thinking is usually confined to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which represents only a fraction of their creative potential. This inductive thinking is little more than a shorthand summary of past experience.

Consequently, they are completely unprepared when an adviser comes in with an off-the-wall idea, an idea which might just be what the doctor ordered. Instead, they buy into a rehash of dated schemes: incentive plans, pay-for-performance, empowerment, or project skills training. Experience is fossilized into a roster of the familiar.

Executives seldom escape cultural biases any better than anyone else. Faced with a problem, our programming commits us to judge, categorize, analyze, and dissect the problem to death. Few of us are inclined to explore it qualitatively.

This involves considering several possibilities, generating a series of options, outlandish and otherwise, and then arriving at some experimental methodology to test its relevance to our requirements.  We prefer to test an individual’s thinking ability, and place his I.Q. score in a neat little box, rather than to design a climate in which he might increase his thinking ability.

Most CEOs of American Fortune 500 companies were educated in finance, science, or engineering. With rare exception does a CEO of a major corporation have a liberal arts background, which might be the best education of all for the twenty-first century executive? Their predominant educational programming is on what things can do rather than what they can make people be and become.

The arrogance of this education is in the belief that if you have knowledge, then action is easy. Well, it isn’t. Being susceptible to thinking in boxes is painfully illustrated in such programs as Quality of Work (QW), Quality of Work Life (QWL), Quality of Management (QM), etc.  With so much time, energy, and expense spent on packaging, few resources remain for action.

Take the venerated Malcolm Baldrige Award for Quality.

Florida Power Corporation pulled out all stops to attain this award, only to have the award become an all-consuming end in itself, not the intended means to a cultural change. It couldn’t have been otherwise because the award was a test instrument, a judgmental device to measure quality, not a creative design to establish a quality culture. The same thing happens in education. A problem is identified, and a new curriculum is generated; another problem spins off this curriculum, with still another curriculum generated, ad infinitum. So, each of the initiatives listed above, with few exceptions, has sputtered to death, only to be replaced by yet another. These imperfect practices indicate our preference for interpretation to exploration, analysis to design.

There isn’t a CEO in industry or commerce, an administrator in education or government, or command personnel in the military, who doesn’t have the social termites of the Six Silent Killers eating away at the infrastructure of the operation.  Yet, each of these organizations can produce an impressive Power Point documentation to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to change. Yet seldom is there a perceptible departure from the familiar.  Such a departure could be career-limiting.

There seems a passion for information, but an aversion to ideas; a need to discover, but a reluctance to create.  We are more apt to describe a problem than take action on it.  Cleverness has a higher value than wisdom. The clever person is often an adept problem-solver; the wise person more apt to be an insightful problem preventer. 

Cleverness is like a sharp focus lens blind to what is not within the parameters of the scope.  Wisdom is like a wide-angle lens. We seem more comfortable with the extroverted thinker than with the person who displays introspection. Yet, in the end, advises Edward de Bono, “It is the inner world which makes life worth living. The real purpose of the outer world is to keep us alive and to feed the dreams (visions and objectives) of the inner world.”

Unfortunately, the only workers who respond to the mechanistic by-the-numbers agenda are the fast-disappearing blue-collar workers. They were regimentally conditioned to take orders. We can no longer afford this type of worker. Society in general and the workplace in particular require mature adult workers, not conforming children who become uninspired, unimaginative, complying adults. The Hawthorne Effect is a benchmark of note.

In that famous study at Western Electric (1927–32) in Chicago, no matter how conditions were altered, workers responded positively.  Professional workers are less responsive to manipulation.  Since manipulation still goes on, professionals play their own sly game of “what you see is not necessarily what you get.”

In essence, the dichotomy between professional and blue-collar workers is as real as that between the common good and personhood.  Patriotism is obvious among rank and file workers, less so among professionals. Management, despite this, insists on interpreting worker motivation along familiar lines as though there were a homogeneous workforce. It frequently magnifies its effectiveness by saluting the achievements of blue-collar workers, seeing them as soldiers of enterprise while overlooking the underachievement of professionals.  Perhaps there is a disconnect because professionals view themselves through the lens of command and control, and not obedience.