The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a pristine perspective:

How the Fisher Paradigm©™

Came to be conceived

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

© October 26, 2014 

Discharged from the US Navy in 1958, after serving on the Flagship of the USS Salem (CA-139) in the Mediterranean, now back in my job as a chemist in R&D for Standard Brands, Inc., I got the wanderlust to do more, see more and I suppose, be more.

Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut had granted me a fellowship to earn my MS in biochemistry with my Ph.D. at Harvard University.  It was an established program between the two universities.

We had two small children, one nearly two and a newborn, and my wife wouldn’t be able to work, so I needed to make more than I was making in the laboratory.  I saw an advertisement for chemical sales engineers in Chemical & Engineering News along with a photograph of field test kits, which gave me the impression it would not be too drastic a jump from the laboratory to the field.

After taking the job with Nalco Chemical Company, and a month’s training in proprietary chemicals in its Chicago headquarters, I was sent to the Indiana district to operate out of Indianapolis. 

A series of contretemps developed, perhaps in part because of my hidden agenda (short term commitment), and my misunderstanding of my new employer. 

Nalco had a three-year training program in which the sales engineers were expected to become competent consultants to utilities, power facilities of major manufacturers, paper mills, pharmaceutical companies, and other sophisticated complex organizations including chemical manufacturers and oil refineries.  

You were also expected to acquire your professional engineering license during this period.  Nalco sold specialty chemicals and consulting engineering services.

Only six weeks into the job, and after traveling with the area manager for two weeks, I was asked by him, “What did you learn traveling with me?”

Candid to the point of being blunt as is my nature, I said, “They were all social calls, you never asked them how our systems were working, and you didn’t ask for an order.”

The next Monday I came in only to find the District and Area Manager present, along with the secretary.  The other seven sales engineers were not to be seen.

It was then that I heard a mantra I would hear again, “We don’t think you are cut out for this kind of work.” 

This came only days after I learned my wife was pregnant with our third child, which meant that it would be impossible to take the fellowship at Wesleyan.  

Standing in the center of the room with DM and AM sitting, smoking, I was so shocked that I couldn’t sit down.  I did something that I’ve perfected to a science.  I remained silent.  

They waited for me to respond and they could have waited all day because I wasn’t going to say a word until they did.  Finally, the DM said, “We’re going to give you some marginal accounts to service, but at the end of six weeks, we expect you to have found other employment.”

The area manager chimed in, “He can upgrade these accounts can’t he Jack?”  This was said with a chuckle.  The DM nodded, “if he likes.”

THE ODYSSEY BEGINS

Something in me said despite my upset, “Fine, give me the accounts and I’ll start right away.” 

Clearly, they didn’t expect this.  The accounts weren’t ready.  I had to come back for them.  When I did, I asked, “Are the accounts throughout the district?"  They were.  Then I asked, “Can I call on competitors’ accounts?"  This shocked them.  They looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “why not.”

In two weeks on my own, I had upgraded every single marginal account I called on.  This was the result of a weakness turned into a strength.  

I’ve always been good with mathematical and chemical theory, but not very good in applying that theory to practical problems such as setting up experiments because I am practically devoid of mechanical skills. 

From the beginning, I would ask the plant engineer to explain how his systems worked, where they were having problems, and what they were doing about these problems.  

Moreover, I have always had exceptional visual skills, which includes drawing schematics to represent what I was seeing or being told.  I found that this impressed my customers who seemed mesmerized as I reduced their systems to line diagrams. 

In my third week on my own, I called on a company in Connersville, Indiana. Philco had three major manufacturing facilities there producing refrigerators.  It was a competitor’s customer and had been so for 25 years.  Nalco, I learned, no longer bothered to call on this prospect.

A man escorted me to the center of the main plant, seven acres under roof, to the bullpen which was the superintendent’s office.  

I was left there for the better part of an hour.  The phone rang constantly, harried men would come in have a smoke and cup of coffee and drop off some failing part of a system, and ask me where “the super” was.  I, of course, didn’t know. 

Studying a place was natural to me.  A place and space was like a framed photograph of the people in it.  

Finally, Thayer Maxwell, the superintendent, came into the bullpen, lit a cigarette, and said, “You’ve got five minutes, sport, what have you got for me?”

I said, "I’m here to save your job.”  Why I said that only God knows, but I did.

He looked at me, tall, blond, young, looking younger than I was, shook his head, and laughed, “That’s a good one.  Got to give that to you.  You’re going to save my job?”

“Yes sir.”

“How are you planning on doing that?”

I walked up to his desk.  He was sitting on its edge and proceeded to draw a schematic of his steam generating system, indicating as I did the plugged condensate condensers scattered on tables and chairs, the corroded heat exchanger tubes on the floor, and whole panels in production against the wall that had to be replaced.    

“And how exactly do you plan to do that?” he repeated.

Describing the technology from a layman’s point of view, I picked up from listening to the operators of my marginal accounts.  Mr. Maxwell put out his cigarette, lit another, and asked, “When will you be back?  We’ll take this up then when I have more time.”

Boldly, I said, “We both know that will never happen.  You'll never have more time.  Your problem is now, and you need to do something about it, now.  I am prepared to put a system in place, not products, but a system that will do that, now.  All I need is a blanket order.”

Mr. Maxell shook his head, “Blanket order?  How much are we talking about?”

“Three month’s supply, about the same that you are now paying with your present consultant.”

The superintendent went behind his desk, did some quick calculations, came up with a number, and said, “This is what we spend now in three months.” 

The amount shocked me.  They were clearly over feeding chemicals.  “Our first order will be much less than that.”  I explained that I had calculated his system’s requirements while waiting based on his operating load as told to me by his men.    

He scribbled a note, “Take this to purchasing.  Now get out of here.”

I called in the order to my District Manager.  It was the biggest account in the district in many years.  “You’re sure?” he asked. 

“I just gave you the purchase order number, yes, I’m sure.”

When I returned to install the system, Mr. Maxwell told me that purchasing had told him that Nalco called to confirm the order.  He got a big kick out of that.  "Company doesn't trust you, huh?"  

The Area Manager was needed as I was still not that familiar with Nalco’s proprietary chemical catalog.  You could see the AM wasn't happy with that assignment.  

This success continued through the next four years with my leading the district every year in new sales, earning an Area Manager’s position, being asked to give presentations of my sales approach to regional meetings throughout the United States, with some 78 sales engineers coming to travel with me, along with the National Sales Manager.  At the end of that time, I was promoted to run the Louisville, Kentucky area. 

Rather than being fired after six weeks, eight years later I jumped three intermediate positions to report directly to the Executive Vice President of Nalco's International Division.  This would take me to four continents where Nalco had facilities.  I was only in my early thirties.

THE ODYSSEY CONTINUES

After the assignment in South Africa where I facilitated the formation of a new chemical company, I resigned in my mid-thirties and took a two year sabbatical to read, write a book, and find my emotional legs.  

Life had no meaning to me other than making money.  The Afrikaner “apartheid” policy of separate development of the races had taken a lot out of me.

After that two year period, I went back to the university full-time, year around, for six years to earn my Ph.D., not in biochemistry, but in industrial-organizational psychology, consulting on the side for the American Management Association.

A riot occurred in Herndon, Virginia, after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed African American youth in a 7/11 convenient store.  AMA contacted me to work the problem.

This was in the jurisdiction of the Fairfax County Police Department.  I would spend nine months imbedded in that department to unravel the cause of the riot. I would write my master's thesis on that work: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot (1976).  

This necessitated having extensive interviews with command staff, all the plainclothes detectives, and the troops numbering 840 sworn officers, conducting seminars and traveling extensively with them on patrol.

In conducting one of the executive development AMA seminars that fed off this assignment, I found myself in Kansas City, Missouri, one of the participants was the Secretary of State of the State of Iowa, my home state.  

He invited me to dinner and a play when he was next in Washington, DC, the nation's capitol being twelve miles from Fairfax, Virginia where I stayed in a Holiday Inn.

A police officer took me to Washington, DC in a cruiser and said he would pick me up about midnight.  He got an emergency call and left a message that he couldn’t pick me up until after 1 a.m.

Being a walker, I said “No problem.”  

After walking about forty-five minutes, now on Pennsylvania Avenue of the Nation’s Capitol, I spotted three African American youths walking parallel to me across several lanes of that boulevard separating us, surprised at their presence at this early hour, but not yet disturbed. 

Suddenly, they rushed ahead, crossed the street and stood laughing and jiving with the distance between us shrinking as I walked towards them.

A Mississippi United States Senator had been accosted in this area, injured badly by robbers, and left for dead.  He recovered but was never the same.  I thought of that as I could now see these three boys clearly, without however breaking my stride.

Then I remembered something that I had found unusual in interviewing Fairfax County Police Detectives.  When I would ask them a sensitive question, they would adjust their concealed shoulder holster as if for reassurance.  I had no holster or gun but was dressed in a Hickey Freeman suit and topcoat, which I unbuttoned and made a move as if adjusting my mock shoulder holster as I was less than ten yards from these boys. 

They chuckled nervously, allowing me to pass.  As I did, I found myself saying in an even voice, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning, don’t you think, boys?”

“School, yeah, school,” they laughed acting totally like boys their age.  But once I was past them, they chirped, “There goes the fuzz.”  The trick had worked.

When the police officer picked me up, I shared this experience with him.  “Hate to tell you this, Fisher, but I think you just might have saved your life.  They were up to no good, and I doubt if you would be able to tell me so.”

THE ODYSSEY REVEALED

While with Nalco, I was sent to Paramaribo, Suriname to calm down a major ALCOA account. I found myself using the same guile I had used with Thayer Maxwell.  This not only calmed the client but was able to save the account at this aluminum mine and refinery. 

Also as a consultant, variations of this formula were used in uncovering the key to the Raleigh, North Carolina police officer boycott and subsequent mutiny.  Once the faulty premise of this precipitous action was revealed, everything fill into place returning to essentially normal.   

Eventually, now with a Ph.D., I joined a client as an internal organizational development (OD) psychologists.  That client was Honeywell, Inc. 

After only six weeks on that job with Honeywell, the Director of Human Resources said to me, something that I had heard before, “We don’t think you are quite cut out for this kind of industrial work,” despite my having been a vice president of Nalco’s international operations.

Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, Director of the OD Program, intervened and said, “If you don’t find your role in six weeks, you’ll be gone.” 

One of the other OD psychologists, a favorite of this division, had asked me to make a slide presentation to manufacturing of the Quality Control Circle miracle of Japanese industry. 

The Honeywell manufacturing unit was designed to support hi-tech engineering program managers with prototypes for engineering proposals. 

Honeywell Avionics, Inc. had 4,000 at this facility: 1,000 engineers, 3,000 technical support professionals, 600 in clean rooms, manufacturing and operations, and 400 managers.  There were seven Ph.D.’s in OD operations.

It was 1980, and many in manufacturing were veterans of World War Two.  It was clear to me after the third slide that I had a hostile audience.  

Later, I realized the OD psychologist had set me up to fail.

Looking at these angry faces, sensing they had been forced to attend this presentation, I dramatically started to put my equipment away, realizing that no one had left.  I said finally, “I have obviously hit a raw nerve, tell me about it.”

For the next two hours they talked.  I listened.  Clearly, they felt like chopped liver.  No one from personnel (Human Resources) gave them as much as a smile, until now.  HR was forcing the Japanese "system" down their throat and they didn't like it.   

Later, one of the mechanics said that when I stopped the slide projector, turned it off, and started to pack up my equipment, they knew I was different.  

Listening to them I realized they took pride in their skills, which were never acknowledged to their satisfaction.  Talking about the "Japanese miracle" was like pouring salt into an open wound until I stopped.  

I made no promises.  I was new to Honeywell, but I did tell them I would come again and listen to them some more, which I did. 

The word spread that I was okay, which got back to management.  I was still not home.  Literally taking the words of my boss and mentor, Dr. Pesuth, “Find a role or you won’t be around,” I looked for a project.

At Standard Brands, not being a very good bench chemist, I was asked to do library searches of patented processes for proprietary chemicals to discover ways to circumvent patents to produce the same chemicals.  It was fascinating work but not a career. 

That exposure however crystallized ideas that I thought might apply now to competency levels in the engineering community.  

I did an engineering demographic and salary review finding the results fascinating as well as disturbing.  

Three-quarters (75%) of the engineers were working on technology developed long after they had completed their formal education.  

Doing a series of interviews with new as well as veteran engineers, I learned that neophytes were often the lead on complex proposal teams, but veterans, many said to be incompetent or lacking in motivation or skills to do the work, were making the big bucks. 

Always the writer, I sent out a memo to all engineers in the interest of forming a technical education program.  No one responded.  

I worded it differently and sent out a second.  A Product Assurance manager responded and said he would like to team up with me on the project.  He had some ideas of how such a program would look developing a preliminary grid work.  

I polished this up with schematics and national data and sent it only to chief engineers (12) and the Director of Engineering.   One of the chief engineers came and discussed the idea with me and the P.A. manager.  

This particular chief engineer would become Director of Engineering, and eventually the CEO and Vice President of this Division. 

I sent out yet another memo mentioning that this C.E. and P.A. manager were in attendance.  Over one hundred engineers showed up for the next meeting, far more than we could accommodate.

Assisted by the chief engineer and product assurance manager, we developed a $1 million budget to present to the CEO of the division along with his direct reports.  It was approved in that meeting. 

Previously, NBC TV’s “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” created a veritable pandemonium with its Participative Management format to mimic the Japanese Quality Circle Program.  I was made director of this initiative at this facility with 1,000 employees participating, being (at the time) the largest American QCC Program.

To my horror, I watched as this was implemented with the facility going from the Culture of Comfort to the Culture of Complacency with all kinds of abuses, when the intention was to establish a Culture of Contribution.  

In the face of this, the Technical Education Program became a crowning success with me presenting a paper at the International Conference of Continuing Education in Orlando in 1986, but not before a major snafu by me in 1984.

Often, I was asked to give keynote speeches for departmental conferences outside Honeywell.  Contracts Administration was holding a conference of the four branches of the military, along with other suppliers and clients in the US Department of Defense business, of which Honeywell Avionics was a part.  

I said I would speak if I could address the conference with the problems of this mass hysteria and its consequences.  

The committee agreed.  My speech was, “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View” (the speech in its entirety is included in the second edition of The Worker, Alone!).

For this speech, I nearly lost my job, but the CEO would not see me fired.  He however went along with HR sanctioning me, putting me essentially under “house arrest” for two years, along with the necessity of my submitting engineering notebooks every week for review.  Nor was I allowed to give any outside speeches to other groups as was my custom.  

At the end of this period, not unlike my experience at Nalco, I was promoted.  This time to Human Resources Director of Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd.  Europe was at the experimental stage of European Economic Community. 

In 1990, I left Honeywell and retired, publishing Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991), and several books since.        

  

 THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ MATERIALIZES

After the success of Work Without Managers, The Conference Board of Canada (Canada’s Wall Street Journal), asked me to give a seminar to its members on “intellectual capital and the power of people.”   That was 2001.  It became The Fisher Paradigm©™.

While writing, searching for what had triggered my success and sustained my career, granted it required periodic rejuvenation, I stumbled on the simplicity nomenclature of persons, places and things, which is also in the English language the definition of a noun.  

What had worked as a selling novice never changed in its simplicity or its insightful synergy.   

I studied people as persons, allowing with what I felt about the experience at the time to seep into me intuitively or counterintuitively as the case may be.  

Simultaneously, I would take in any place I found myself as an extension of the person or persons working there.  I would study them and their environment as I had once studied specimens in situ and in petri dishes under a microscope.

This gave me an indication of how the person saw himself while not realizing he was doing so.  

Then, the total package of what that person was and wasn’t settled into my unconscious mind. I never tried to force the process or even analyze the information.  It would surface when ready and activate the process.  It worked again and again and again.

To give you one more instance of this, I made a proposal to a university having major air conditioning downtime due to scaling of condensers.  

A proposal with a $10,000 consulting agreement, the chemical treatments in addition, was presented.  The director of engineering said he could not get approval of such a contract, and asked me refigure a proposal without a consulting agreement, which I did.  

The services required were in the chemicals.  He looked at the proposal, went to his calculator, and then threw the proposal across the table at me and had the worst tirade I had ever experienced.  He went totally ballistic for several minutes.  I sat there, not moving.  He called me every insult in the book, but didn’t throw me out.

He put his head on his desk, exhausted, then looked up finally, saying nothing.  I had lived in an Irish household with a screaming da that once the tirade was spent, a kind of delicious calm replaced it.  

“I see,” I said, “you are a member of the Lions Club.”  Two flags to his right, stood behind his desk, an American flag, and a Lions Club flag.      

“You know the Lions Club?” he asked.

“I know they do a lot of good.”

He smiled, his composure back.  “What are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“How would you like to come to a Lions Club dinner?  We’re giving the City of Terre Haute (Indiana) an ambulance.”

“I’d like that.”

He introduced me at the dinner to all the members as his friend.  When I was leaving, he took me aside and said, “I sent in a blanket order for your stuff.  I’m looking forward to working with you.”

The simplicity of the Fisher Paradigm©™ may be why it is so incomprehensible.  I show it as three spheres or profiles of integrated significance: 

Personality (sense of worth of the person), 

Geographic (person's sense of place) and 

Demographic (person's sense of self). 

This could be redesigned as Personality (Acquired Self), Geography (Environmental Self) and Demographic (Hereditary Self).  The point is that this has worked surprisingly well for me, and I want to share it with others.  It is the reason I am writing Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness.