James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
April 19, 2018
In 1991, I published WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES, a distillate of forty years of personal and professional experience in the complex organization. A series of books in that genre followed.
Since a boy, I have endeavored to integrate intuitive and counter intuitive experience into the structure and function of work. Work has been my life, and my laboratory.
Sometimes that experience has seemed to accelerate at Mach speed. It is therefore not surprising that many are inclined to retreat rather than embrace the situation, escaping into digital technological tools as “Toys of the Mind.” The evidence is overwhelming: silence is intimidating, being alone is threatening, as noise and connection are the new palliatives.
Dystopian novelists have been elevated to distinction as our new prognosticators of doom. Work, as once known, is changing rapidly either fading, declining or disappearing. In concert with this development, the structure and function of man is changing. Robotics have already replaced routine tasks formerly provided by workers with sophisticated electronic digital platforms threatening to further marginalize man. This has been met with ubiquitous retreat into passivity, but not by everyone.
Perspective of Due Diligence
Like many others of my generation, we did not have the luxury of passivity. Nor could we escape responsibility by seeking public assistance or be consoled by anger management therapy. We were bottom feeders and the nation was bankrupt. It was The Great Depression of the 1930s.
Through due diligence as students in grammar school, high school, and at university we raised ourselves out of poverty. These lessons learned, however, have not resonated with baby boomers, generations “X” and “Y,” the “Me” generation, or now with millennials.
To suggest that such deprivation of the 1930's forced self-responsibility and accountability in the making of "the greatest generation" that won World War Two would be considered the reminiscences of a tired old man.
In my case, I put myself through university without incurring any student debt or from acquiring any financial help from anyone. I did so by qualifying for an academic merit scholarship that paid my tuition, while spending five summers working as a laborer at a large chemical plant in the food processing industry that paid for my clothes, books and dormitory fees.
Upon graduation, I worked as a chemist for the same company, then spent two years on active duty in the United States Navy on the Flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Taking that opportunity to visit Spain, Portugal, France, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt and Libya, as well as Sardinia, Malta, Rhodes, and Cyprus. Shipmates called me a “culture vulture” for using my liberty to take tours of Mediterranean communities, impressions that have lasted a lifetime.
Returning to the United States, I took a position with a chemical company in its industrial division as a chemical sales engineer, rising to an executive position in less than six years, working in South America, Europe and South Africa during the Afrikaner period of apartheid.
In South Africa, my assignment was to facilitate the formation of a new specialty chemical company merging my company’s affiliate, a British subsidiary, and a South Africa specialty chemical company into a new conglomerate (see DELVIN, A Psychological Novel, 2018).
Upon completing that assignment, I retired in my thirties to return to university, full-time, year-around to pursue a Ph.D. in industrial/organization psychology. Upon graduation, I formed my own consulting firm with clients along the Atlantic coastline from Connecticut to Florida, while also acting as an adjunct professor for several colleges and universities as well as a contract consultant to a professional institute conducting management and executive development seminars across the United States.
After ten years of that activity, I rejoined industry as an organizational development (OD) psychologist for a Fortune 100 corporation, rising again to the executive ranks as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company's European operations.
At the conclusion of that assignment, I retired for a second time to write Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991).
The book is a composite of my experience in the complex organization from that of a student; to a manual laborer to chemist in a Fortune 200 corporation; to a sales engineer to an executive in a burgeoning specialty chemical company; then retiring and transitioning to a graduate student; upon graduation to a consultant; to an OD psychologist for a Fortune 100 corporation; to again rising to an executive in that corporation; to retiring once again in my fifties to write full time.
By the accident of my birth, I have experienced The Great Depression and WWII in my youth and formative years, attended high school and university during the Korean War followed by the Vietnam War, and have worked and lived in many places across the globe to arise in 2018 sensing that the world has progressed technologically but has retrogressed spiritually.
This was evident twenty seven years ago in Work Without Managers:
The era of the Free Lunch has ended. This century (20th), which began with such paternal control and obedience for Americans, has run amuck. Now, nothing (and no one) is in control.
Take Corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.
An undeclared psychological war is being waged within most major enterprises today, with bodies falling on all sides with nobody paying attention. The principle players are worrying about what’s in, what’s out, who’s in, who’s out, who’s making points, who isn’t . . . while the marketplace is disappearing into the sunset.
The American Dilemma & the Phantom Challenge
That was then. This is now. The United States of America is no longer a united nation, but a United States of Anxiety.
This is not new. In the early days of this Republic, once independence was won from Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War, the thirteen colonies acted as if independent nations, even tiny Rhode Island (see The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1783 - 1789 by Joseph J. Ellis, 2015).
It was only through the efforts of George Washington, James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton that America as a people came out of the fray as the United States of America. Currently, California is acting as if a separate nation without the formality of succession. In doing so, it has a lot in common with Rhode Island in 1783.
We are flummoxed as a nation by opioid addiction, attention deficit disorder and many other epidemics, symptomatic of the United States of Anxiety (see Time Out for Sanity: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age, 2015).
Media journalism has become an entertainment industry of tabloid sensationalism. Politicians, educators, scientists and leaders of every industry are careful to protect their brand while participating in this charade.
This behavior would never have gained traction in 1945, but now in 2018 it is the main show. The evidence is everywhere.
The Special Counsel for the Department of Justice, who has the signatory authority to investigate possible Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election, has seemingly forgotten the parameters of his mandate. He is now involved in bedroom politics of the duly elected president.
After more than a year finding nothing of substance regarding Russian collusion, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ship is drifting without a rudder from the absurd to the ridiculous as the investigation appears out-of-control.
Meanwhile, fired FBI Director James Comey has just published a telltale scandal rag on the president contributing further to this farce. Where have all the grownups gone?
College Dropouts as the New Grownups
While adults are acting like children in leadership roles, children are behaving as grownups long before they have reached full maturity.
We see this in leaders of all persuasions as they cling desperately to how things worked in the past, while young people as the new grownups, mainly in their thirties and forties, forge ahead into the new Ideational Culture of a creative tomorrow.
These emerging grownups don’t necessarily have answers but they are not afraid to extend their horizons to explore what is beyond their grasp. Nor are they intimidated by conventional logjams that preoccupy their elders in trivia pursuits and obsession with the incidental.
These leaders, freeze framed in the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent yesterday, appear blindsided by their egos and personal agendas unable to see much less admit we are in a new dawn.
Failure to acknowledge this is evident in the American home; in the corporate boardroom; in the offices of government; in industry and commerce; in the classroom; in the media; in the entertainment industry; in the medical field, alas, in all aspects of American life as the shadows of the past distort the vision of the present.
In this time warp, individualism and self-responsibility are playing on another circuit with workers mainly suspended in arrested development, terminal adolescence, and learned helplessness with an obsessive compulsive need to please others. The casualty of this is the atrophy of free will.
John Strothmeyer addressed this atrophy in Crisis in Bethlehem (1986) when ALCOA and Bethlehem Steel gave their respective workers "everything but the kitchen sink." Not only did this fail to make workers happy and more productive, but less so. Strothmeyer claims the cripple genius of this corporate strategy was to make the decision-makers the "goose that laid the golden egg."
Conditioned to be other directed rather than self-directed; to avoid failure and therefore success; to look for shortcuts rather do the homework; and to rely on second and third hand information rather than find meaning in experience has led instead to anger and frustration.
When greed is the appetite, more is never enough as always more is wanted.
Debilitating dependency is as much “a disease” of our times as drug addiction and alcoholism for it leads to slothfulness and passive aggression, to despair and gratuitous violence, and to mass movements of true believers.
To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.
Society has been sliding down this decline of dependency for the last seventy-five years and is evident in our escalating national debt.
On January 26, 2016, the US National Debt held by the public was $13.62 trillion, or about 75 percent of the previous 12 months Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Intra-governmental holdings stood at $5.34 trillion, giving a combined total GDP of $18.96 trillion or about 104 percent of the previous 12 months of GDP.
Costs are spiraling. The cost of a college education continues to rise irrespective of its quality; workers want more money and governmental benefits, so corporations increase wages regardless of performance, and the government obliges by increasing benefit packages. Although this spiral of wage and benefit concessions makes little sense, the focus is on new job reports and the climbing Dow Jones Industrials.
The reality is that neither the Democrats or Republican leadership nor a president of either party in the White House has had the courage to save the economy from becoming a runaway train.
Social Security today comprises more than a third of mandatory spending and around 23 percent of the total federal budget, while Medicare makes up 23 percent of the mandatory spending and 15 percent of the federal budget.
Synthetic connections and artificial relationships are now real. In the last twenty years, the therapy of our anxious age has been to roam our fingers across a small rectangular glass surface to bridge personal disconnection with what is construed as connection.
Children of the New “Army of the Night”
Many of these children are dropouts from the inanity of the times, failing to find meaning or relevance from traditional incentives, refusing to be willing soldiers to a failing system and culture. As precocious children, they are creating a narcissistic universe in which their center defies the commands and demands of convention. They are inventing a world that did not exist. In doing so, they are changing our world.
Over the last forty years, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates operating out of their garages took the play away from mega corporations and their multi-billion dollar research & development facilities which were lock-stepping to the past. Such corporations as General Electric, IBM and GM were caught with egg on their faces. Meanwhile, these children not only took the game away from these giants, but have enjoyed the compliment of seeing them copy and adapt to their discoveries.
Only a short fourteen years ago (2004), Mark Zuckerman and fellow students at Harvard University launched Facebook, something beyond the pale of these corporate tycoons. This invention in mass communication has changed personal behavior across the planet.
Then a quarter century ago (1993) Jeff Bezo created Amazon.com, at first modestly as an Internet bookstore, but now a multifaceted giant eclipsing department stores and other major retailers across the globe.
Adding to this disturbance of the status quo, a short twenty years ago (1998), Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded www.google.com that has changed how we learn, accumulate knowledge and think. Google has come to own the Internet as an information source with an impact on academia that is yet to be successfully assessed.
Zuckerman changed the nature of relationships, Bezo changed commerce, while Page and Brin have changed academia.
Face-to-face personal contact and brick-and-mortar places of work and study are fading. Children of this new “Army of the Night” are pathfinders without a clear frame of reference or strategy. The difference with them and vanguards of the past is that their impact happens in months, not years or centuries. Small wonder the world is anxious and confused. Our brains are not wired for such a frontal assault.
Hundreds if not tens of thousands are mimicking these change agents making the situation even more absurd and incomprehensible. For instance, arenas are being built for thousands of humans to sit and watch and interact with digital figures on a giant screen playing basketball, football, hockey or soccer. This prompted a television reporter to frivolously comment on the Network News, “Doesn’t that look like fun?” It is as if we weren't couch potatoes enough!
On the horns of this dilemma our reactive nature finds us ill suited to deal with these sweeping changes. While we rightly fear a nuclear holocaust, we fail to fear marginalizing ourselves as human beings. This is evident as our spiritual side is treated as if it does not exist.
Man throughout history has depended on his resilience no matter the nature of the stressor. This resilience once was located in the absolute authority of what was called an all-knowing “God.” This has taken a hit as religion now wavers in its maintenance of our spiritual connection. Alas, some claim religion has lost its mission and its way. Closer to the truth is that man has moved from a “God centered" to a “man centered universe.”
It is no accident that none of the men profiled here are passionate churchgoers or synagogue attenders.
English American poet T. S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Man” (1925) after the abysmal peace treated of World War I at Versailles with these prophetic words: This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Robotics have been an obsession of man since prehistoric times, but have failed to replace man. In Work Without Workers, we will explore this fear, and attempt to bring some clarity to the situation. Fear drives our anxious age as compromise cripples our rational pursuits. Taking a stand and having a point of view has lost its luster. When every man is like every other man, nowhere man personifies common man. We are dangerously close to that persuasion.
Paradoxically, when fear is acknowledged and addressed, it can be enabling. Balance is what is needed which is discovered by getting beyond the obvious and embracing the unknown. Mark Elliot Zuckerman demonstrated this balance as the klieg lights zoomed in on him during the Congressional Hearings.
The Mark Elliot Zuckerberg Phenomenon
It is easy for us to forget that we exist in an amazing moment in history. While we pay homage (still) to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, persons of similar distinction now walk among us.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is only one of many who are forging the new world of tomorrow, a world that will compare with the wonders of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment Period, the 19th century Industrial Revolution, and the birth of Communism, Socialism and Capitalism.
We are no longer captive to the fading light of two world wars in 20th century. Even the Atomic & Nuclear Age which threatens our extinction fails to justify moral turpitude.
That said while many retreat into the rationale that there is no tomorrow, so why bother to do anything now, a quiet and unassuming idealistic young man has stepped into the breach to provide new connections with citizens across the world. Facebook is an idea not without flaws but clearly a departure from the status quo.
Mark Zuckerberg, born May 14, 1984, does not have the veneer of a “giant,” not in stature, presence or command of personality. Yet, his net worth at age 33 is beyond $62 billion as of March 2018. Like others of his quiet and unassuming disposition, he has excelled as a student at all levels of academia. While only a teenager, he was able to state on his application to the summer camp of Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth that he could read and write in French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.
On February 4, 2004, he along with fellow Harvard students -- Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes -- launched Facebook that now has more than two billion subscribers world-wide. As you might expect, as squabbles were reported between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci over originality and ownership, legal disputes have arisen among these initial collaborators. That notwithstanding, Zuckerman today is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Facebook.
Zuckerberg, along with those others mentioned, has driven the world society into the future and off its comfortable axis and traditional power grid. The once dominant Roman Empire has faded in time as has the Roman Catholic Church declined in history, along with European monarchies and once legendary empires. Now, even nation states across the globe appear in jeopardy.
The world is in flux. Those in power feel the crush of change perhaps more than ordinary citizens. Nothing is for certain anymore. For example, Zuckerman appears to be speaking a language unfamiliar if not incomprehensible to those conducting the Congressional Hearings as if he were addressing them in hieroglyphics.
This was apparent during the April 10-11, 2018 hearings as members of the United State Senate and House of Representatives interrogated Zuckerman for nearly ten hours, five hours in each session. They seemed to be talking passed him as the cameras rolled. The television viewer marveled at Zuckerman’s composure.
There was no evidence in either the House or the Senate that a clear understanding of what Facebook represents, which is the birth of a new age, as interrogators made one inane comment after another, making the whole process little more than comic theatre.
Senators, who consider it their jobs to write appropriate legislation to stem the tide of embarrassing or frustrating events, appeared to have had little sense of the man, the industry or the problem. There was little evidence that anyone had done much homework before these sessions.
Rather than have Zuckerman share his concerns in dealing with the complexity of this new technology, no one asked: Given this problem, what do you consider a reasonable first (second, third) step to improving the situation if not totally ameliorating the problem?
Homework no longer has the appeal it once had. Why should it have other than protean appeal to Senators and Members of the House?
To his credit, Mark Zuckerman behaved as an adult throughout the proceedings. Alas, Congress could have benefited from having a grownup exchange with this young man. The problems looming ahead are too critical to point fingers at individuals. Such young men as mentioned here are a new breed. They are rich but not only in money, but in resolve. Curiosity, not wealth, was and remains their driver.
More to Follow Soon
