Excerpt -- THE WORKER, ALONE!

Going Against the Grain!

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

© May 6, 2015

PART ONE

BIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE:

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 true of Curtis Flood and Martin Luther, as well as this author. 

Taking a stand is visceral.  It involves having a center and a moral compass that says the prevailing norm is 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.  It may be as selective as DNA.   

In 1958, I left the R&D lab 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 I was to find other employment. 

During this 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 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, played tennis, and attempted, 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 episode.  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 tow the company line, or else! 

Not known to be a company man, it came as no surprise that the human resource director suggested shortly after my settling in that I don’t believe you’re cut out for this kind of work, while my OD boss stated more emphatically, find your role within 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. 

My approach to OD was as eccentric as my methodology had been to selling.  I met with groups not as an expert or with an agenda, strategy, or Honeywell’s proprietary line, but to find out what got in the way of their productive effort and what they 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, might have caused a protest, as the rank and file worker, professional or blue collar, was not used to being taken seriously, or to have their best interests taken to heart. 

Honeywell groups asked me to give speeches to their associations, while for management, I wrote monographs, presented papers and gave speeches at technical conferences, and made significant interventions, 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 his 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 on this topic, stipulating that I be allowed to be critical of the value of this intervention.  The group 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 freedom 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 atmosphere. 

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. 

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 or “management’s advocate.”  

He saw 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 bosses. 

So, in a not too subtle way, going against the grain expresses an intellectual perspective, which is consistently conveyed thematically in my books and articles. 

The reader will find in this 1984 seminal work ideas that will reappear in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991, 2^nd edition 2014), The Worker, Alone: Going Against the Grain (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000, 2^nd edition 2013) and Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2007, 2^nd edition 2015). 

The germ of ideas that leads to books is active in the subconscious mind as a working life unfolds and is therefore basically a recording of that fact. 

  GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN!

“Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock, for when it is once passed there is no recalling it.”

—Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and poet

Sometimes it is necessary to step out of the shadows and take a stand, not because it is a courageous act, but because it is necessary.  Martin Luther did it early in the sixteenth century, many others have done it along the way. Some are as modest as this one, but all involve personal and professional risk.

A CAREER CHANGING KEYNOTE SPEECH

This speech was given on March 30, 1984 to a Conference of Department of Contract Administration Services (DCAS), which included an audience of some 200 government officials, senior military officers of U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and consultants, as well as Honeywell Avionics’s CEO and senior managers. At the time, I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist for the Honeywell’s Clearwater, Florida facility, the host of the conference.

This conference convened during the collective hysteria of the time. Japan and South East Asia had quietly captured a significant portion of pristine American manufacturing markets. 

In 1980, Tom Brokaw of NBC television, bringing attention to this fact, presented an hour-long tutorial, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Japan, Inc.’s growing dominance in manufacturing, included the automotive industry, machine tools, electronics, home appliances, light fixtures, and steel production. Human Resources (HR) stepped into the breach with Quality Control Circles (QCC), teaming, employee empowerment and participative management, not as a carefully framed design of the problem, but in an attempt to replicate the Japanese miracle.

One of my functions was to direct the QCC Program, which at the time, was one of the largest in the country. Honeywell Avionics was a facility of 4,000 with 80 percent professionals or white collar workers and 20 percent blue-collar. Among the professionals were 1,000 engineers many with advanced degrees in their respective disciplines. Blue-collar workers responded to quality circles, professionals did not. 

Little note was made of the fact that Japan was a group oriented culture versus America’s individual oriented society. Nor did many stop to consider that 80 percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar whereas 20 percent of ours were. NBC pricked the nation’s denial button flooding its conscience with collective hysteria.

From my perspective in the trenches, this was a charade.  Workers had little power and less participation beyond cosmetic change, which had little bearing on performance or outcomes. Even blue-collar workers with the best of intentions were essentially treading water and going nowhere. I felt it was time to speak out, and go against the grain. 

To Honeywell’s credit, no limitation was put on what I might say. It had become routine to have me present papers, write monographs and represent Honeywell by giving speeches at technical conferences in the genre of industrial and organizational psychology relative to this facility’s operations.

For giving this paper, I was essentially put on “house arrest” for 18 months, during which time I was not to give any speeches, write any monographs, or sit for outside interviews. I was also asked to hand in my engineering notebook weekly to check its content. 

I was not fired although some executives, program managers, and a chief engineer thought that I should have been. At the end of my 18-month house arrest, I was not let go, but promoted to Human Resource Director for Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., and relocated to Honeywell Europe’s Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

THE SPEECH

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW

INTRODUCTION

Man is a pragmatic animal. He does what he does because he thinks it is the best way to do it. He may listen to a contrary way of doing it. If his heart is not in it, there is little chance he’ll give his best.

During the past several years, I have attempted to facilitate the shift from paternalistic to participative management, from centrally located decision-making to autonomous work groups. This work was conducted in an ideal environment here at Honeywell.

For one, the team concept had been employed among the hourly workforce since 1972. For another, all of the operations of this 4,000-employee facility were on one beautiful campus in the Florida Sunbelt. For yet another, management had been educated in the Quality Control Circle concepts with countless organizational development (OD) interventions, resulting in a significant number of changes. 

These were however essentially cosmetic changes: e.g., changing the lighting in workstations, having more flexibility in dress code, providing longer breaks, changing work hours, and so on.

In any case, this facility has perhaps the longest sustained participative working climate in the continental United States. There are 110 Quality Circle teams with more than 1,000 members of the workforce participating in the process. Additionally, there is a pilot program of some 200 professional workers and their managers immersed in “Shared Management,” which is touted as a “step beyond Quality Circles.”

Virtually everything management could reasonably be expected to do has been done for the workforce. Are workers happy? Reasonably so. Are they productive? Relatively speaking, yes. Are they doing as much as they are capable of doing? No. Do they have the entrepreneur spirit? Not on a bet.

Then are you saying all this has been for naught? Compliance is not cooperation, and this is compliance. Fear or coercion is the motivator. Workers are aware of the Great Depression in the Steel and Automotive Industries, and say, “There go I but for the grace of my employer.”

Meanwhile, management has been in a long slump, thinking in terms of 1955 competition and been close to panic. It has resulted in turning OD from a hybrid of psychology, sociology and industrial engineering into a burgeoning profession without portfolio. Undaunted by this fact management has stopped everything to listen to what we have to say.

“Process” has become the magic word, along with “systemic problems,” in other words, explanatory rather than operational approaches. Jargon gets the attention of most managers. The irony is that this shock wave that has gone through management has escaped the attention of the workforce. They are huddled in passivity willing to do whatever without complaint.

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT’S HIDDEN AGENDAS

Paternalistic management was authoritative, task oriented and bottom line driven. Conversely, the workforce was management dependent, authoritatively compliant, selfishly motivated and bottom line indifferent. Enter the sobriquet, “Participative Management.”

This implies that management is people centered and process conscious with the workforce expected to be cooperative and motivated. No surprise the workforce for this renewed attention felt good about itself and its workplace – even happy – but still bottom line disinterested. The good intentions did not translate into an entrepreneur spirit or productive work.

A recent experience illustrates my point. I was talking to a production line supervisor, who thinks these changes are terrific.  I asked him about a colleague. “Have you seen him lately?” I asked “Oh, yeah. Over the weekend.”

“How are things going in his operation?” I continued.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We didn’t talk about the company business. We talked about the new businesses we’re starting.”

After he told me a bit more about this, I offered, “I guess it’s the American spirit to be in business for yourself.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “You could say that, you want to be independent. Be your own boss. Have something of your own.”

Here was a supervisor who could see through cosmetic changes without knowing he was doing so, and was keeping his options open if things didn’t work out. Imagine the mindset of the people working for him.

THE RISE OF THE NON-DOER DOERS

The organization is made up of those that manage and those that do. Those that manage have grown into a force unto themselves with layer on layer of middle management created to move the paperwork while acting as a buttress between the feudal lords of industry and the masses.

Next there has been created parallel organizations, which support and serve management, but who neither manage nor do (I belong to this exalted community). These non-doer doers have been called “professionals,” the white-collar class and “staff” to “line” (i.e., to the doers). You find these workers in personnel, finance, security, maintenance, marketing, and even engineering.

Once a need is created for their services, it is impossible to imagine being without it or them. Since WWII, pyramid building has become something of a natural phenomenon in all professions. Translated, the organization has too many people doing too many non-thing things.

So, the first problem that should have been noted when our competitive edge was slipping was this organizational excess baggage, that is, one manager to every ten-twelve workers (industrial average) and one staff employee per every four managers (industrial average). 

Scaling down this pyramid, alone, amounts to megabucks in savings not to mention a much sprier and leaner organization. So, what have we done? Where has the focus been?

On the doers, of course. The powerful on the powerless. In transactional terms, the Parent on the Child.  Since the ownership spirit is precisely what we are trying to instill and since the referenced supervisor had been sent to a considerable number of courses and laboratories to develop his consciousness concerning such ownership, I said, “How does this differ from what you are doing here?”

He looked at me in amazement. “I don’t want to do this all my life.” Sensing that I wanted to know more, he continued. “My wife is my partner in this.” He started to laugh. “She has a real problem paying the help $4.00 an hour.”

“Joe, that’s not even a living wage,” I responded. His expression was defiant – 

“So?”

This intrigued me. “As you know from your own people,” I continued, “They want more money not because they have done more, but because they need more. It seems you are faced with the same problem in your private enterprise that we are facing here.”

He scratched his head. “I never thought of it like that.”

“No, possibly not,” I offered. “Perhaps because it is coming out of your own pocket now and you can feel the pinch.”

“Yeah. I see what you mean,” he replied. And this was an experienced supervisor who had been given all the training and tools, which were designed to create a feeling of ownership, but he, too, was bottom line disinterested.

ENTER INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF QUALITY CIRCLES

(IAQC)

A whole organization has sprung into being, IAQC, with a strategy to get the “most out of the least” – and they have. Dr. J. M. Juran calls this the problem solving strategy of the “trivial many.”

Juran and others point out, given the scope of what quality circles encompass, if doers knock out all the fat and become lean as a tooth, they still have solved only 15 percent of the problems facing the organization.

Meanwhile, management, which has become too much and too many has difficulty turning the microscope on itself for fear it will see the “big C” – Capital neglect.

Management has purposely established a caste and class system of non-doers who are confused. Just as doers are inclined to be bottom line disinterested, they are more inclined to mistake self-interested outcomes (department goals) as bottom line, which could be even worse.

THE ANSWER TO BOTTOM LINE DISINTEREST –

SERIAL OR PARALLEL CAREERS

Add to this the fact that in this changing work climate where all sorts of wonderful programs are being sponsored, the workforce sees its benefits shrinking, its pay frozen, its promotional opportunities disappearing and its job security eroding. Is it any wonder that workers and managers go out and start businesses on the side?

I was writing this in the cafeteria the other day and there in the booth next to me was a company staff engineer selling an insurance policy to an administrative worker – two non-doers doing personal business on company time without apology, guilt or concern. It was as if “I have the right. I get this opportunity in lieu of pay…,” or whatever.

For comparative purposes, out of this population of 4,000, there are 800 production workers (20%), 1,000 engineers (25%), 400 managers (10%), and 1,800 other professionals (45%). No less than one quarter of these professional workers are believed to have serial or parallel careers, much of which is conducted on company time. From selling real estate to selling diamonds, from pet fish to insurance, from restaurant to management consulting, from private teaching to private investigating, from motel operations to hardware store managing.

What all this seems to indicate is that a great number of attractive solutions have been developed without a clear understanding of what the problem is. Meanwhile, the rank and file are oblivious to the anguish and pain common to the organization.

They fail to care because they don’t see it as their problem. Let the “organization” solve it. They see the organization as distinct from them, as if it has life without their blood in it. If the organization bleeds, they would be hard pressed to see themselves bleeding with it, that is, until the organization goes out of business or moves elsewhere.  To understand how this dilemma has evolved one must revisit the history of the complex organization.

THE SEEDS OF THE PROBLEM

Two hundred years ago, when most of the business of business was conducted in small guilds, there was great informality. People did what they did best. Somebody was in charge but it was an additional role besides being a line contributor. There were no job descriptions, no performance appraisals, no reward and recognition programs, no staff support, nobody else to blame if a product did not sell because it was made poorly or overpriced.

Survival was predicated on doing the best you were able to do with the skills you had, the materials and mechanics you had to work with, and pride and sense of ownership you brought to the work. Work was love made visible.

People knew who they were by what they did. Often, the work was dirty, grimy, exhausting with little profit, hardly a living wage.  We romanticize this period now, but in reality, it was a harsh, hard existence. The guild workers had to work long hours, seventy hours a week was not uncommon. There were few if any entitlements, only work.

Were they happy? Not particularly. Were they productive? Extremely so. Were they doing as much as they were capable? Generally speaking, yes. Did they have the entrepreneur spirit? In buckets! They had no choice. The wolf was always gaining ground on them.

Then the Industrial Revolution exploded into their midst. These self-directed, self-managed, self-motivated workers were forced by necessity into a strange environment of huge machines and masses of people.

There was no model that fit the purposes of the complex organization. The closest model was the Roman Catholic Church and the National Army. The goal of the church was to save your soul; the goal of the army was to save your life. No confusion there. Everyone knew, understood, and could relate to those common goals.

But the complex organization was an organization of sub-organizations and sub-sub-organizations, all with their own goals along with every individual’s hidden agenda. Meanwhile, workers, who were never comfortable with all these goals, dreamed in terms of their own private agenda. 

They saw themselves as renting their bodies for a price, leaving their minds safely at home, which included their motivation. They saw the factory as a voluntary prison that they entered because they had no other choice.

They couldn’t compete with the factory from the guild, nor from the farm. They had given up their freedom out of economic fear, the fear of survival. And so, from the opening chapters of the Industrial Revolution to the Post-Industrial Age, the worker has never identified with the factory as “his” factory, or as an extension of his will and dreams.

This has been the domain of only a precious few, the senior managers of the organization. This is where the power rests, not in the stockholders nor, indeed, in capitalistic society. Curiously, senior management operates very similarly to the management of the guilds. There is a common will dedicated to the same set of principles and a consensus bottom line. It is their organization and their hide if it falls on hard times.

More curious still, the doers and the senior managers are cut from the same atavistic cloth. They both speak the language of the guilds. What makes for the problem of the modern organization is that there are ten or twelve layers of bodies between senior management and these doers.

What these doers hear, then, is a language that is remote and beyond their interests and comprehension. Instead, what they hear is demands, threats, and candy-coated enticements, directives that a child hears from a concerned or frustrated parent.

And appropriately, like a child, the expected behavior follows:

• Testing the firmness of the demand.

• Accepting punishment as justification for challenging the demands.

• Learning to say the right words while continuing to misbehave.

• Treating the machines (toys) with disdain, neglect and contempt.

• Seeing the organization as blocking them from what they want to do.

• Crying and embarrassing the organization into submitting to their will.

• Feeling angry and hostile and unfulfilled after getting their own way.

• Telling the organization what it wants to hear rather than needs to know.

Behaving in a way that says, “I want more” – when more is given – “I still want more” – “I will always want more.”  

The workforce is frozen in the adolescent-infantile state notwithstanding all the programs and slogans, which would suggest otherwise. Put another way, the modern organization gets very little real productivity out of its people – perhaps only about 30 percent of what they could do.

Does this mean most workers don’t care? Of course not. It means that the structure of the organization does not fit the tasks – the structure should enhance the accomplishment of the tasks, which too often it does not.

More importantly, workers are not treated as adults, as full partners in the enterprise. Oh! The words are used, but management’s behavior does not compute with the words.

Granted, a great deal of attention is being given the environment in terms of Quality Circles, Quality of Work Life, and Quality of Work. There are also cross-cultural awareness programs designed to get this blueprint on to the factory floor. Management styles are being modified in quest of the magic formula that will make the organization more productive.

What have these activities achieved? At best, marginal if ephemeral results. Why? The majority still march to the programmed cadence of terminal adolescence that has been the organization’s drumbeat for decades. Why should anyone be surprised for their inability to respond with maturity?

NOTE:

Part Two will follow soon: STUCK IN MACHINE AGE THINKING – Erik Erikson’s Model of Human Development