COMMENTARY ON NEW DR. FISHER TITLES (TATE PUBLISHING COMPANY)

COMMENTARY ON NEW DR. FISHER TITLES

(TATE PUBLISHING COMPANY)

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

© May 14, 2014

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES  (Second Edition)

WWMs punctures the underbelly of a complacent society that has spawned the dysfunctional complex organization, while watching markets and jobs disappear to elsewhere on the globe.

Management knows something is wrong, but has been unable to move away from its “business as usual practices” and infallible authority. 

When WWMs was originally published, Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of the year.  The Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four best books of the year in its genre of industrial and organizational psychology.

The JOURNAL went on to say:

"It is in our opinion that Dr. Fisher has more than accomplished his goal to stimulate discussion and debate, and that WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental change in the American workplace.”

A quarter century later, we see many of the trends disturbing to Dr. Fisher have transpired into major crises, including the economic meltdown of 2008, which required a bailout of the automotive industry, the insurance and real estate industry, and Wall Street by the Federal Government to avoid another Great Depression.

Syndicated columnist James R. Wright of the Dallas Morning News, wrote, “I find WORK the most insightful and perceptive examination of the American workforce today.”

From Europe, The Business Perspective of Innsbruck, Austria declared, 

“Dr. Fisher argues the key to the future is the empowerment of professional workers.  The suggestions made here are bound to spark controversy on all levels of organization and therefore should be high on the reading list of anyone interested in understanding the present day American business dilemma.”

This second edition updates the premise of WWMs with suggestions on how to reverse this trend, while indicating that institutional society is still leaving the future up for grabs.

MEET YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND (Second Edition)

MEET YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND declares, 

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life is sacred, unique, scripted high drama played out before an audience of one, but with one actor on stage.  The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.

Executive Eric Michael Rodts writes of his favorite quote in the book: 

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.”  Rodts adds, “Bingo!  Amen!  Oh, yeah!”

The central message of the book is “to have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.”

This is not easy as our cultural programming finds us often self-estranged, looking for answers outside ourselves and in others, not in our own instinct for survival, which is founded on experience.

No greater taboo exists in our society than to place friendship with self before all others.  This is deemed selfish and narcissistic.  

Dr. Fisher argues this could not be further from the case.  

No relationship, he insists, is more fundamental to our happiness and well being not to mention our successful relationship with others.  The fact that this declaration seems so radical indicates how rigid and self-effacing is our cultural programming.

Our whole world has changed, Dr. Fisher writes, but we are reluctant to change with it.  Being reactive and other directed rather then proactive and self-directed.      

THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN! (Second Edition)

“Not since The Affluent Society was written by John Kenneth Galbraight has a work so intimately described an age,” writes Dr. Billy G. Gunter, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of South Florida.  “What truly separates THE WORKER, ALONE from being a pedantic exercise is its common sense appeal.  It breaks through the conflict between the forces of denial and reality to express the worker and the workplace naked.”

THE WORKER, ALONE claims workers have no choice, but to go against the grain and take charge!  

Dr. Fisher sees the rhetoric of empowerment a sham and total employee participation a shell game that changes nothing and costs those in positions of power even less. 

That said the organizational costs of mismanagement and dysfunctional practices are absorbed unfortunately by the troops, who now are mainly college trained professionals.  

Not until workers realize no one will rescue them from their angst, or restore order from the chaos are they likely to take charge, if ever.  

Ventilation won’t do it, nor will pointing fingers.  Professionals must endure the pain, take the risks and assume the responsibilities that management has been shouldering for nearly a century, but is no longer capable of doing, as the whole complexion of organization has changed.

For this reason, Dr. Fisher elaborates on this premise by presenting his Feminine Paradigm.  Women are not only assuming more important roles in work, but men are learning the importance of feminine consciousness in their own thinking and doing.

 

Two essays complement this premise to further demonstrate the current juggernaut of forward inertia:  A Leadership Manifesto and Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.

These essays derived from empirical data illustrate how organizations have come to be derailed from their mission when they asked the wrong questions and therefore implemented the wrong strategy.

We are in a competitive global marketplace with instant communications necessitating self-direction and proactive interventions to survive personally as well as collectively.

 

In the past, work drove deeds; now deeds drive work.

The Information Age separates the past from the future with a dynamic and challenging present.  THE WORKER, ALONE acknowledges this in surprising and reassuring ways.

 

PURPOSEFUL SELLING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY – IT STARTS WITH CREATIVE CONFIDENCE (Second Edition)

PURPOSEFUL SELLING, in its original form, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.  

It introduced a new concept with the buyer and seller as partners instead of adversaries.  Selling no longer can be construed, according to Dr. Fisher, as a contest of wills by winning through intimidation, for the seller and buyer are engaged in joint problem solving.

A climate of cooperation changes the dynamic for both the seller and buyer who are navigating to a win-win proposition. 

PURPOSEFUL SELLING goes beyond establishing selling accord by framing the problem in terms of complementing personal needs, confronting common barriers to those needs, bypassing such barriers in order to find the fix that establishes self-confidence and mutual satisfaction.

Since everyone is in the business of selling themselves, whether it is in an interview for a job, getting a promotion, developing a relationship, or selling a product, the chief barrier is overcoming self-doubts.  With this in mind, these questions are addressed in PURPOSEFUL SELLING:            

Why am I my own worst enemy?

Why do I fail to find fulfillment in my work and in my life?

Why do I lack a clear purpose in life?

Why do I not live up to my true potential?

Why do I torture myself with self-doubt while giving others the benefit of the doubt?

PURPOSEFUL SELLING is a conversation with the reader on these questions to release intuitive and counterintuitive wisdom that resides within, which is likely to be the solution to whatever is troubling.

TIME OUT FOR SANITY! BLUEPRINT FOR DEALING WITH AN ANXIOUS AGE (Second Edition)

Dr. Fisher argues that the 21st century mirrors the United States of the 1970s in many disturbing ways. 

“Everything changed in 1969,” he notes, “man landed on the moon, students across the nation took over college campuses, the first artificial heart was transplanted, and it was the year of the first computer network connection.  Nothing was as it was before, and never would be again.”

Traumatized, having lost our anchor and cultural moorings, we as a society went supposedly forward without going forward at all.  It was as if we were running in place, our foot to the accelerator, and on the brake at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere.

It was this paradoxical situation that has intrigued Dr. Fisher for half a century causing him to declare, TIME OUT FOR SANITY!

We watched in the 1970s as our major manufacturing markets disappeared finessed first by Japan and then the Pacific Rim countries of the South East, then Europe, and now in the 21st century, as this trend has continues, by Brazil, China and India.

 

Dr. Fisher shines a bright light on our complacency to find us hiding in the shadows of our self-denial.  People are busy as ever, moving faster and faster, not unlike the 1970s, but whereas they escaped into psychedelic drugs and hedonistic lifestyles then; today the escape is into psychotherapy or some mobile electronic device.  He asks the question:

“Has our society changed, and if so, why have we not changed with it?”

He concludes we are obsessed with the future at the expense of a nostalgic present.  

America is a relatively young society, which shows little inclination to grow old and therefore grow up.  For many, he argues, they are suspended in terminal adolescence in learned helplessness.  

The Information Age, with all its possibilities, if anything, has postponed growing up to the point of not making it necessary.  Instead, comfortable in our immaturity, we depend on science to find miraculous cures for our debilitating self-indulgences, which implies we believe in a life without consequences.  It is time that we got back on the rails and considered a blueprint to a saner present while letting go of the past.

CONFIDENT SELLING (Second Edition)

CONFIDENT SELLING in its original form caught the world by surprise.  It insisted that selling technique and intimidating strategies were not the key to success; that that key was the person selling him or herself on their value added contribution in the service of others. 

The premise is that you are the world, and if you know how to look and learn, then that key is in your hand and the door is there before you to a promising future.  All you have to do is take the key and open that door.  No one can give you that key or open that door for you.

Another premise is that no matter what your career is, you are in the business of selling.  We are all selling something, and therefore we are all sellers as well as buyers.

If selling is your primary profession, and you have what it takes to be successful, but haven’t reached your potential, then CONFIDENT SELLING is for you.

CONFIDENT SELLING is a guide designed to assist you in developing your confidence and competence so that you may go from success to continuing success. 

By opening that door with that key, you become self-reliant, self-assertive, and self-directed because you have made the biggest sale of your life, and that is belief in yourself!

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP & DISSONANT WORKERS (Second Edition)

Something is wrong.  Everyone feels it.  Company after company, institution after institution is found losing its focus, its identity, its stability, indeed, the essence of its mission.  

Organizational dysfunction has been projected into a debilitating blame game.  Pointing fingers at management or at workers will not resolve the issue, as they are both equally culpable.

Given this trauma, the inclination of those in charge is to reduce everything to rhetoric and corporate speak.  

Instead of embracing problems, those in charge are likely to dispatch crises with infallible authority in business as usual practices.  

If you have your doubts, examine corpocracy in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown that took a government bailout.  Once the crisis was over, corporate behavior returned to its usual sins of commission and omission across the board.  

Meanwhile, professionals, who now dominate the workplace, waited along with management for the rescue package.  Once it was received, and calm was restored, they returned to their cynical dissonance more interested in making an impression than a difference, more assertive in personality than performance, more inclined to silent passivity than taking risks or thinking outside the box.  

CORPORATE SIN gets inside this co-dependent malaise and ferrets out why it is happening and what can be done about it.  In the process, it introduces a more appropriate strategy that involves the Feminine Paradigm.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (Second Edition)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE invites the reader to the rites and rituals of passage of a boy and his neighborhood friends during the Second World War, in the middle of the century, in the middle of a working class neighborhood in the middle of a small industrial town of 33,000 on the banks of the muddy Mississippi River. 

Featured in the story is the courthouse, a towering edifice of 130 feet above the town, sparkling with a green copper dome and a four-sided clock that chimed every half hour, insuring young people that they had no excuse for being late for meals made largely from patriotic victory gardens.

It was a time when working class families IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE struggled to make a living while the nation struggled in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

There was no television, no mega sports, no big automobiles, and no manicured lawns.  There was radio, movie theaters, high school sports, and the industrial league in baseball, played mainly by men too old or boys too young to go to war.  Parents took the bus, drove old jalopies, or road their bicycles to work.

Most families had stay-at-home moms of two-parent families.  Few parents in this working class neighborhood got past grammar school, most worked in the many factories or on the railroad.  Divorce was as rare as a foreign ancestral language.

It was a time when during the summer to get away from the heat families would sleep in Riverview Park and watch the river barges past through the night.  Back home, it was not uncommon to leave the windows of their homes open, doors unlocked, keys in the car if they had a vehicle, and bikes alongside the house unsecured.  No one felt the danger of a neighbor or a stranger disturbing or taking their private property.

In the winter, no matter how cold it got, or how much snow was on the ground, school never closed.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is a snapshot of a time and place when Darwinian struggle was quite real for parents and children alike, as there were no artificial support systems.  

Parents came out of the Great Depression and were glad to have a job.  Children invented their own play, created their own games, and were brutal as to who would play and who wouldn’t.  There was no Little League, no adult supervision of children's activities as parents after working all day were too tired to pay them much mind.

It is the recollections of the author as he grew up from the age of eight to thirteen IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.

SIX SILENT KILLER: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (Second Edition)

Dr. Thomas Brown in the Wall Street Journal’s “Across the Board” magazine states that all top executives across the United States should read SIX SILENT KILLERS.  He writes:

“Invest the time, really read the book, and you’ll probably agree the central reason for an unhappy workforce are some well-defined ‘killers.’  Every so handily, Dr. Fisher will lead you to one more (albeit unstated) conclusion that there is a seventh killer somewhere here.  It is a management profession failing to move forward with the times, that talks endlessly about ‘visions’ and ‘empowerment’ while refusing to loosen ‘the command and control screws’ even one turn.”

SIX SILENT KILLERS is a frontal attack on a management system that is crashing.  It starts with management failing to ask the right questions.

We saw this in the George W. Bush administration after the Twin-Tower terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.  

The administration asked, where are the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, when the proper question should have been, are there WMDs in Iraq.

Scores of books are written on the failure of people to perform and not on the failure of the institutions, that is, the systems themselves to perform.  Are they organized to perform in a postmodern world that is accelerating at incomprehensible speed?

Dr. Fisher gets inside these concerns and demonstrates how the structure and function of work are out of sync with requirements of work, workers and the workplace, and what can be done about it.

SIX SILENT KILLERS explores the silent war that goes on in most workplaces that cripples productive effort.  A thorough examination is made of the needs of the organization, the barriers commonly encountered in managers and workers, companies and institutions, presenting bypasses to avoid these barriers and execute a fix.  

CONFIDENT THINKING: A SILVER BULLET FOR AN UNCONSCIOUS AGE (First Edition)

This new century, in a sense, appears to be an hypnotic age in which people move about unconsciously as if in a robotic stupor supported by crumbling cultural moorings.

CONFIDENT THINKING addresses this situation, but not as a radical theory of semantics or cognitive psychology.  Rather, it is a systematic sharing of some common sense keys to a more confident and competent experience.

We have reached the limits of “value free” analysis and the idea that no data is valid that cannot be substantiated objectively.  

We are finally growing comfortable with the realization that thinking emanates from feelings, and not despite them.  Stated another way, we are an intuitive as well as cognitive animal.

CONFIDENT THINKING takes measure of the gap between thinking and feeling that is so often ignored.  It is no longer enough to be only critical thinkers, if it were ever the case.  We must also be creative thinkers.  Critical thinking is limited to what we know and/or have already experienced.  Creative thinking involves what we don't know but can be found out.

The complement of creative thinking to critical thinking is prudent, which is CONFIDENT THINKING, as it involves embracing what we fear and deny.

Critical thinking produces knowers.  Our educational system is a "knowing" universe. Creative thinking produces learners, which sponsors a learning universe.  

This shift has been necessitated by the increasing acceleration of change.  

It is impossible to keep up with the demands of change, and therefore we no longer can have the luxury of being tellers when we need to be listeners and observers; knowers when we need to be learners and creators.

It is no longer cant to be searchers for solutions for now we must be creators of solutions, as all of what we know has proven inadequate to deal with the challenges of the times.  We must become creators of solutions by first carefully framing and defining the problem before we jump to a conclusion. 

Critical thinking focuses on solutions.  As a consequence, we have a surfeit of solutions looking for problems.

CONFIDENT THINKING leaves behind the paralysis of analysis and the societal addiction to prescriptions for lifestyle excesses.  The soft sciences have been adequate in explaining what is wrong, but inadequate in dealing with what is wrong.    

It is time we leave behind our exclusive dependence on objectivity at the expense of the subjectivity that plays a role in our decision-making.  Feelings are often facts to people experiencing them.

 

CONFIDENT THINKING ‘s most telling focus is in redirecting the reader’s orientation from being other-directed to being self-directed, from being enamored of information for information’s sake to seeing the value of exploring new ideas, from being obsessed with linear logic to engaging in nonlinear thinking, from breaking problems down into particular fragments to seeing them holistically. 

CONFIDENT THINKING, then, is a new orientation, looking forward rather than back, embracing problems and fears rather than retreating from them, challenging the status quo rather than being stymied by it.  This is a silver bullet meant to penetrate an unconscious age with some conscious common sense.