The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a consideration:

A Project in Mind!

Work without Workers!

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© August 25, 2017

For your information:

I don't usually do this -- telegraph what I'm considering -- but I'm not certain when I will complete this missive.  Currently, I'm just thinking about it.

Over the last quarter century, I've focused on work, the worker, the workplace, and management deriving the source of such efforts from personal knowledge, work experience, observations of work on four continents, and reflections on what it all seems to mean to me.  The irony is that many of these efforts have clearly anticipated trends that materialized, sometimes people using my data, insights and even conceptual models with or without acknowledgement of my having been the source.  

This has disturbed my BB for my apparent reticence to the point of indifference as this journey for me has been largely a personal entertainment -- researching, collating, writing and publishing -- than anything resembling a career as a writer. That notwithstanding, trends have been identified, assessments verified, and perturbations explored extensively and unapologetically so.  A summary review of my publishing history corroborates this contention. 

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES was published in 1991.  

WWMs was a critical review of the redundancy of management, especially middle management, finding its only apparent function that of processing paperwork and getting in the way of productive work.  

It was also apparent that since WWII the complex organization has gotten fat, lazy and self-indulgent with layer on layer of management with no purpose other than self-perpetuation.  

Meanwhile, management, largely an invention of the corporate approach to WWII, developed the convenient belief that it was indispensable, voting itself extraordinary salary, perks and benefits at first only five to ten times more than workers in the trenches only to escalate to one hundred times and beyond to the take home pay of the average worker.

Management guru Peter Drucker, often management's pet, was even appalled at this excess, but of course to no avail.  The practice had become part of the corporate culture, and once that culture was firmly in place it became ubiquitous and omniscience.   

WWMs by one trade journal was considered an "angry book" but it still designated the book one of the ten best business books of 1991; another journal said it was one of the four best business books of the year.  

WWMs was self-published and without an agent or an advertising budget, and so to no one's surprise, went quietly into journals and books of other established writers, of course judiciously watered down for easy mastication, but still without 
acknowledgement of the source of these ideas.  

THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN came out in 1995 in an effort to remind professionals that the die had been cast and the balance of power had shifted from "position power" to "knowledge power," reminding them that they were now the possessors of that power and not management.  

The book also reminded the reader that at the end of WWII, ninety (90) percent of workers were blue collar and that in 1995, eighty (80) percent of them were now white collar or professionals.  

The book claims that professionals have no choice but to "go against the grain" and TAKE CHARGE! 

But of course that didn't happen because these professionals instead believed in PYRAMID CLIMBING, which is to say always filling all the boxes to win promotion to the next job showing general indifference to the job they were paid to do, now!  

Obviously, these professionals identified with management, not workers, showing a desire for the perks but not the responsibilities of leadership.  The book was largely ignored by professionals to the delight of management.

SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE was picked up by a large trade journal publisher with the CEO of that firm delighted with the book, publishing it in 1998. 

The publisher unfortunately died of a sudden heart attack and the new publisher backed away from the book after publication as fast as he could, claiming "it is not our typical readership."  

Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal and other responsible journals saw merit in the book and gave it a soft endorsement.  

The basic premise of SIX SILENT KILLERS was passive behaviors, previously outlined in WWMs, claiming they were now killing the organization's mission.

These passive behaviors were consuming professionals who pouted and complained as the spoiled brats that they were while seeming to be engaged in work when they were quietly practicing the "six silent passive behaviors" as the embodiment of the equivalent of social termites, destroying the infrastructure of the organization from within only to be discovered when it was too late for damage control.

These behaviors were identified as "corpocracy" (a term coined to capture corporate bureaucracy) costing companies $billions of dollars in unproductive work.  How so?

SSKs identified a 53 year (1945 - 1998) creep of increasingly worker dependence, first on management in reactive behavior, and then on an absolute counter dependence on the company for that worker's total well being.  

This resulted in the "worker syndrome" of workers becoming essentially suspended in permanent adolescence in learned helplessness.  As a consequence, they would bring their 20-50-year-old bodies to work with 12-13-year old mindsets in blind obedience leaving their minds at home.  

When companies could no longer compete, and had to downsize or relocate, it was "management's problem," not theirs, even though they were now the ones out of work.  Management always finds a "safe landing" somewhere else.

Workers with such an infantile mindset would protest infrequently but violently rather than frequently and politely when management was moving in the wrong direction.  Why?  Because workers chose to see it as "management's problem," and not theirs as well.

   

Both corporate management and corporate unions were complicit in this development as management would give anything to placate workers' demands as long as corporate management was able to maintain complete and absolute organizational control.  Union leaders unwittingly gave up on workers' control of their work for pay, benefits and other entitlement concessions in lieu of that control.  

The irony and paradox is that management now needs workers to take the initiative, to be innovative and to show bold intuitive action at the level of consequences, where real work occurs, when this has been literally bled out of these workers over the last half century.

Human Resources, otherwise known as "management's union," was also complicit in this trend as work and workers went from a Culture of Comfort to a Culture of Complacency while pontificating a Culture of Contribution.

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS was published by AuthorHouse in 2000.  

This book was an indictment of management for its excesses and lack of leadership and of workers, now 90 percent professionals, for remaining passive and unresponsive to the challenges and opportunities that were (and still are) quickly slipping away from American enterprise.  

CS identified the rise of the FEMININE PARADIGM in terms of "right brain" thinking as compared to exclusive "left brain" thinking, and the importance of nonlinear and intuitive engagement as well as the complement of the previously dominance of linear logic and cognitive thinking in the problem solving.    

CS also demonstrated the importance of PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME as opposed to obsessive dependence on CHRONOLOGICAL TIME.  The book made the bold prediction that capitalism as a system was in trouble because like greed it was dedicated to progress and like greed you can never have enough progress.

With a series of KINDLE BOOKS, I have returned to these themes in various venues in an effort to get the attention of professionals as they are our future.  The books in paperback as well as e-books on Amazon's Kindle are:

THE VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST © February 11, 2017; 

A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS © February 24, 2017; 

CONFIDENT IN SUBTEXT © April 25, 2017; and 

TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING © June 29, 2017.

Another irony of this personal journey is that in 2012 TATE PUBLISHING gave me a contract for second editions of nine of my books and one first edition.  

For the last more than five years, I have spent revising, editing, expanding and collating new data of these second editions with no help from anyone in my advanced years, spending literally seven days a week at this machine, only to have the publisher go belly up and disappear overnight with these second editions all having been published except the second edition of THE WORKER, ALONE!  

Now, the books, although listed on amazon.com, are essentially in limbo.  Perhaps God is trying to tell me something.

In any case, as I mentioned in these opening lines, I plan on writing a short missive that is the final denouement of this journey and the title of this effort is to be WORK WITHOUT WORKERS.  It will deal with robotics and the changing nature of not only work but life itself. 

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), a journalist and science fiction writer, wrote a utopian novel LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 (1888).  It deals with a society in which everyone has the same amount of credit whatever their station in life and whether they do any constructive work or not.  Moreover, there is little crime and even less tolerance for it.  It was socialism as author Bellamy saw things.  If a person failed to handle his credit wisely, the government stepped in and supervised him closely.  People had much leisure with everyone a potential poet, writer, composer, musician, and so on. 

LOOKING BACKWARD, which I read some forty years ago, may not be familiar to many readers, although the book claims to be the third bestseller of all time after UNCLE TOM’S CABIN and BEN-HUR.  

WORK WITHOUT WORKERS will make some references to this Bellamy work in the present context of today.  So stay tuned.