The Peripatetic Philosopher asks:

   Why is it we never seem to learn?

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

© October 25, 2015

When you write because you can, have a website with a blog, and readers across the globe that have access to your books on Kindle, or in print on line or in bookstores, you can still become exasperated even through the process of venting. 

You sometimes wonder, when you read others who have similar access and an academic, political, economic as well as general audience, how powerless and frustrating they must also feel.

Two themes I have repeated with consistency are:

·      Management is anachronistic and managers are atavistic.  

Competency has been transferred from position power to knowledge power, and the professional workforce is in possession of that power, not management.  This has been the theme of Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, and Corporate Sin, all now in 2014-2015 second editions (TATE Publishing Company).

·      Consultants, when it comes to the functioning of the complex organization, are not needed. 

In the majority if not in all instances, the organization has the people it needs, as well as the expertise to solve work related problems.  No one knows what works and what fails to work better than the personnel in the organization.  The problem is that voice invariably is ignored to bring in consultants to filter that voice to keep management in power.

We are in the dog days of the management class and it is holding on for dear life, and using consultants to shore up its infallible authority and business as usual practices as irrelevant as that authority and those practices may be, until ultimately the inevitable occurs, and it experiences its demise. 

CRISIS IN BETHLEHEM: BIG STEEL’S STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE (1986)

John Strohmeyer won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of this title.   Bethlehem Steel had human resources hire consultants to develop a formula that would energize the workforce and jettison the company out of the red into the happy land of satisfied workers and profitability.

The plan was to give veteran employees thirteen weeks paid vacation every five years.  The Aluminum Company of America, learning of the program, hired consultants as well to establish a copycat program with its workers.

John Strohmeyer explains how such steel industry excesses actually “crippled the goose that laid the golden egg. 

Steel workers in the 1960s, when the 13 week furlough program was inaugurated, already had every benefit and financial concession imaginable, the most generous in working class America.

The program allowed the senior half of the workforce to use this free time as it desired.  Most workers got second jobs.  This was not the intention.  It was assumed that a certain fraction would go back to school, others would travel, still others would pursue hobbies they never had time for before. 

When it came time to go back to their regular jobs, many attempted to balance the furlough job with their regular job, as they had acquire a higher standard of living, which they hoped to maintain.

Attempting to manage two jobs soon resulted in poor performance on both.  So, for many, instead of gratitude for the company’s generosity, failing to broaden their horizons, their frustration was expressed in compressed anger and resentment, not at themselves, but the company. 

Work was all that they knew and work was what they filled the free time with.  The program was dropped unceremoniously at Bethlehem Steel and ALCOA.

    HOW BILL GATES GRANT BUSTED THE BUDGET

By a curious coincidence, my most recent blog featured “Second Dialectic: Economics” (October 21, 2015).  It amazes me to the point of being unsettling how economists with their algorithms and analytics can fail to understand the American psyche. 

My books mentioned (above) express this frustration ad nauseum.  We have had at least one hundred years of failure in throwing money at a societal problem, hoping that some of it will stick to solve the problem without the gumption to get self-involved and self-committed totally to understanding the problem from the point of view of those experiencing the problem. 

Is this because we are afraid of failing, or is it because we will find we are not needed and fear that we will lose our corporate power? 

As long as there have been millionaires and billionaires, people once they acquire great wealth, for whatever reason, be it guilt and seeking a sense of atonement, they have energetically gone into the profession of philanthropy.  Bill and Melinda Gates are no exception.

In 2009, they announced along with the Hillsborough County Superintendent of Public Schools, that they were willing to give the Florida County $100 million if the county would raise matching funds, for the purposes of reforming the way teachers were evaluated and paid. 

It was a bonanza for the eighth largest school district in the nation with many failing schools, especially in the poorer sections of the country. 

Six years later, there are more failed schools than ever before.  So critical has this crisis become that last week the National Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration visited Tampa, Florida. 

Above I have shared with you what happened at Bethlehem Steel and ALCOA when money was thrown at a crisis in surviving.  I have also mentioned several of my books where I share data from other sources that mimic the same experience.  It is as if we never learn.  

Today, Sunday, October 25, 2015, reporter Marlene Sokol, staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times writes:

·      Gates funded program resulted in the creation of huge new bureaucracy of mentors and “peer evaluators” who don’t happen to work with students.

·      Nearly 3,000 employees got one-year raises of $8,000 to $15,000, or 25 percent of the budget.

·      Raises went to a wider group than envisioned, including close to 500 people who don’t work at all with students.

·      The greater share of the large raises went to veteran teachers in stable upscale suburban school districts despite the program’s stated goal of channeling better teachers with better pay into the high needs areas of poorer districts where many schools had been failing.

·      More than $23 million went to consultants who set up the program funneling the majority of the money to veteran teachers in upscale districts and not to the poorer districts, which was Gates original intention for the program.

·      Predictably, the program costs, failing to be monitored properly, has ballooned to $271 million when related programs are factored in, or well beyond the budget. 

·      Millions of dollars were pledged to parts of the program that had little to do with education, per se, and more to do with investing in peer evaluations to improve teaching and district leaders.  The School Board is making a quick retreat from the original model of the consultants.

·      Meanwhile, Gates is withholding $20 million after deciding he does not favor teacher performance bonuses. 

Author Sokol euphemistically says the results are a “mixed bag,” but closer to the truth it has been a disaster as a series of Tampa Bay Times articles with the expression of “failed factory” for Hillsborough County Schools.

WHY IS IT THAT WE NEVER LEARN?

Repeated industrial studies have shown hygiene factors, such as a bump in pay or benefits, have only an ephemeral effect on performance, in other words, the last no more than a day or so after being received.  Frederick Herzberg has written widely on the subject including:

·      Work and the Nature of Man (1966),

·      Abraham Maslow in Motivation and Personality (1970),

·      Rensis Likert in The Human Group (1967),

·      Jack Gibb in Trust (1978),

·      Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard in Management of Organizational Behavior (1972), and many others.

What motivates teachers and workers in any industry or setting is the same, something that has been ignored with a consistency that approaches a conspiracy.  People are motivated by:

·      The work itself.  The sense of achievement, the joy in making love visible, the sense of having control of the work being done with a voice in its design, evaluation, and measurement against goals that are well stated, understood, consistently executed and not arbitrarily dispatched and controlled.

·      The challenge of the work, having a sense of being energized to do the best that one can do, satisfied in the doing, and willing to learn when the results fall short of the mark.

·      Having control of the work being done, knowing that when it is done well one knows that the tasks has been accomplished without the need for someone in authority to confirm or subjectively conclude otherwise.

·      Management not getting in the way of productive work to justify its existence, but to stay clear so that the work can get done.

·      Compensation and recognition consistent with the work accomplished but not arbitrarily rewarded as everyone else is awarded.

·      Given increased responsibility and challenges as a level of success has been established on a consistent basis.

·      Given an opportunity to grow and develop consistent with one’s inherent abilities.

·      Being treated as an adult and not as a child.

·      Being recognized as an integral part of the overall organization’s success.

One of the great myths of work is that workers don’t like to be measured.  They so.  They like to have a sense that they are growing in competence and meaningful work, and from this having a more positive frame of mind, and a healthier identity of who and what they are.

It differs little if the job is in education, industry, politics, the religious, or the professional such as engineering, medicine, academia, politics, or any other field. 

We don’t grow if things are given to us that have little or nothing to do with how we perform, not in the past, but with what we are doing, right now!