EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

 BIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

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

© May 30, 2015

Note: In the chapter, “Going Against the Grain” in The Worker, Alone, it was thought wise to include a speech given that literally changed my career, and is consistent with the theme of this book.

Just as going along to get along may be natural to most people, going against the grain is equally as inherent as breathing for others. 

This seems to have been the case with the Major League baseball player, Curtis Flood, as it was for the German Roman Catholic cleric, Martin Luther.  It was also true for this author.

Taking a stand is visceral.  It involves having a center and a moral compass that says the prevailing norms are wrong.  Such a position often defies reason and good sense as its costs are quickly apparent.

Consequently, going against the grain is not for everyone.  For those so predisposed, there is no other recourse.  They have to act to live with themselves.

While it may be self-defining, it is invariably at the expense of self-alienation from the herd.  Such ostracism may be as selective as social Darwinism.   

In 1958, I left the R&D laboratory as a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, never having sold anything before.  Two weeks in the field after a month of training at the home office in Chicago, I was told I was not cut out for this kind of work.

I had offended the area manager by answering his question: What have you learned after traveling with me for two weeks?  I told him nothing as he never ask for an order, never listened to customers, never found out what they needed, and mainly wasted their time and ours socializing.

This resulted in my being given marginal accounts to service, and the right to call on competitors, but for only six weeks after which time I was to find other employment.

During that painful period, however, I sold the largest account of the district’s operation in years – taking it from a major competitor – by listening, asking what the customer needed, and was not getting, while working closely with engineering and operations as a partner, an advocate, not as an adversary.

Nalco would send 78 sales engineers (yes, I kept track) from other districts to work with me.  They also ask me to make presentations at various Nalco conclaves across the country to share my approach to selling technical systems to highly savvy prospects, as the word was out that Fisher doesn’t sell “technically”!  

Such opportunities gave me corporate exposure and a chance to capture my ideas on paper.  This led to rapid promotion and elevated me to executive status in the international division when barely thirty.

The momentous ride found me working in South America, Europe and finally facilitating the creation of a new company in South Africa.  It was there I hit a wall, that is, South Africa apartheid. 

This clashed with my values and a reality foreign to my cultural programming.   

At the top of my career, father of four young children, in my mid-thirties, I resigned from Nalco, resettled in Florida, wrote a book, did little else for two years but read books, play tennis, and attempt, however unsuccessfully, to write for a living.

When nearly broke, I went back to school full-time, year around, to earn a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, consulting on the side. 

Once I had my Ph.D., I joined one of my clients, Honeywell, Inc., as an organizational development (OD) psychologist.

Honeywell proved a repeat of the Nalco experience.  Having been a free-wheeling line executive, it was a new experience to be relegated to an “in house” staff function in human resources of a large facility (4,000 employees) on a scenic campus in sunny South Florida, and expected to echo the company line without variance, or else!

Not known to be a policy wonk, it came as no surprise that the human resource director suggested shortly after my settling in, “We don’t believe you’re cut out for this kind of work,” while my OD boss stated more accurately, “Find your role here in the next few weeks or you’ll be gone!” 

A clinical psychologist deals with an individual client and addresses problems in terms of behavior.  An OD psychologist deals with the organization as his client and addresses performance problems in terms of workers and managers in the workplace.   He exercises no bias towards either group, as he attempts to observe them unobtrusively in action.

My approach to OD was as eccentric as my methodology had been in selling.  I met with groups not as an expert or with an agenda, but with a desire to find out what got in the way of their productive efforts and what they, as a group, thought needed to be done.             

At first, I was distrusted, then challenged, then accepted as the real deal and a breath of fresh air.  For Honeywell to have gotten rid of me, then, it might have caused a protest, as rank and file workers, professionals and blue collars alike, were not used to being taken seriously, or to have their best interests taken to heart.

Honeywell groups asked me to give speeches to various technical and professional associations, while for management, I wrote monographs, presented papers and gave speeches to technical conferences, and made interventions based on worker consensus ideas, one of which was the creation of an “in house” technical education program to address systemic deficiencies. 

The director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read one of these publications, and invited me to Cambridge to work with CSDL's designing team for the ring laser gyros being manufactured at Honeywell Avionics facility in Clearwater, Florida.

So, it wasn’t unusual for the Department of Contracts Administration Services (DCAS) to approach me in 1984 to give the keynote speech at a department sponsored conference on Participative Management, when that theme was the flavor of the month across corporate America.

Having given "off site" seminars for this group before, I felt it necessary to make clear my reservations about "Participation Management," asking to be allowed to be critical of the value of this intervention.  The selective committee said in unison, “No problem!”  

That proved to be in error.  My speech became a major problem, for me, as I explain in this segment "Going Against the Grain."

This was 1984.  My manager, a very capable man understood OD, and granted me creative license to practice the discipline.  In the next segment (Typology of Leaderless Leadership), he might best be described as the “Happily in Harness.”  He loved his work, and was loyal to a fault to Honeywell, always at the ready to satisfy its demands whatever they might be.  Not surprisingly, he considered my speech a personal betrayal.

The United States in the 1980s experienced an artificial economic boom (e.g., Reagan “Star War” years) against a plethora of scandals (e.g., Savings & Loan), while corporate America never stumbled upon a fad it didn’t love as long as it was simple, inexpensive and didn’t disturb its power (e.g., Participative Management).

Panic was in the air, which I came to call, The Prison of Panic called “Now”!

America’s hard goods markets at home and abroad were fast disappearing, while, paradoxically, the American workforce had seemingly changed overnight to a professional class of workers, only management still treated them as if nothing had changed. 

During these years of panic, rather than step back, pause, take inventory and study the changing tide of events, it was "do anything, everything now!" 

The speech which follows was given in that climate.

For my punishment, I was placed on the equivalent of “house arrest,” banned from writing papers or giving speeches for 18-months.  But by something akin to serendipity, I emerged from this to be promoted in 1986 to Honeywell Europe’s management team in its Brussels, Belgium headquarters.

There I saw first-hand that corporate Europe was as messed up as corporate America.  Honeywell’s European national franchises had retrogressed to operating essentially as feudal fiefdoms after WWII with the managing directors as lords and masters of all that they surveyed. 

As passive and hierarchically inert as were American workers, European workers, country to country, were even more so.  It was a perfect situation for an OD study, which I quickly launched into with the idea of a subsequent book in mind (see Work Without Managers, 1991, 2nd edition, 2014)..

As Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, an OD position, it was soon apparent, however, that my new boss in Brussels had no idea what OD was or what it could do. 

Whereas in the States I had been given carte blanche to practice OD, he saw my role as that of a traditional technocrat with management as OD's client, failing to understand that OD assesses equally the efficacy of management as it does the workforce. 

This conflict in perspective didn’t make for a happy marriage.

His persona appears in the next segment as the “Winning Side Saddler,” or the constant pleaser but with a hidden agenda as opposed to “Happily in Harness” of my boss in the States who had no agenda at all other than that of his Honeywell.

So, in a not too subtle way, going against the grain expresses an intellectual perspective that the reader will find in this 1984 speech and subsequently conveyed thematically in this and other books and articles of mine in this genre. 

Title, time and place of speech:

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW,

March 30, 1984,

Caribbean Gulf Resort Hotel,

Clearwater Beach, Florida.