The Peripatetic Philosopher announces: Fisher's books have gone VIRAL!

Work Without Managers Has Gone Viral!

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

© February 1, 2019

Man’s inventiveness and his flashes of insight come not when he grubbing for necessities but when he reaches out for the superfluous and the extravagant.  Play is older than work, art older than production for use.  Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments (author’s bold emphasis).

Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey, Calvin Tomkins, 1967

Nearly thirty years ago, I wrote what was then considered an “angry book” while being named “One of the Ten Best Business Books of 1991” by Industry Week (December 2, 1991).  Business Book Review Journal (April 1991), however, named it “One of the Four Major Works of the Year in its Genre,” while adding: “Work promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental change in the American workplace.”    

These many years later there are discernible cracks in the corporate power structure and the architecture of the workplace, but only cracks.  That said professional athletics, mainly the players in the National Basketball League (NBA), are however about to open the floodgates to change. 

THE LABORATORY OF EXPERIENCE

It would be safe to say that I have been in the corporation most of my working life, but not of the corporation as I have never joined it in spirit.  The corporation has been a work environment of necessity that I had no other option but to join.  At the same time, I have never identified with or paid allegiance to the corporation, per se.  It has essentially been my laboratory.   

My introduction to the complex organization was first as a laborer in a chemical plant where I worked summers while attending the University of Iowa, familiarizing myself with chemical processes working in virtually all departments, while observing the management structure and how it used workers as if well-oiled machine parts.  Upon graduation, I was hired as a chemist with the same company’s Research & Development department. 

After a stint in the US Navy, as an enlisted man, impressed how naval personnel were treated at all levels. I joined another chemical company as a chemical sales engineer calling on all manner of complex chemical operations, public utilities, paper mills, automotive and other hi-tech manufacturing facilities in my role as service engineer and chemical consultant. 

During this period I experienced something that I would never experience again: that is, a level of freedom in the corporate world that otherwise does not exist. 

I was totally my own boss for as long as I was productive as a sales engineer with no one to bother me at all.

Success, however, led to promotion into the Industrial Division’s management team, where I rose to corporate management in the company’s International Division.  I would work in South America, Europe and South Africa. 

Only in my thirties, frustrated with the pettiness and peccadilloes of corporate management’s compensation, entitlements and incentives which I felt were totally unearned, offending my working class mind, I retired to pursue the soft sciences in graduate school totally abandoning the hard sciences.  I had reached the point where the workplace made no sense to me and I wanted to learn why. 

To my astonishment, graduate school was as much a corporate factory as the one I had left.  My professors preached the priestly message mainly from books they had read or had written without a scintilla of doubt although devoid of empirical work in-the-trenches or empathetic understanding of the workers who were so engaged.

With no interest in being an academic, upon acquiring my Ph.D. in social, industrial/organization psychology, I launched a consulting career joining other established firms as an organizational development (OD) specialist.

Consulting appeared a strange game.  Management paid a handsome fee to be told how best to run their operations, information attained by consultants asking workers-in-the-trenches what the problems were and how they thought they best be fixed.  

This worker and workplace intelligence was then fed back to management, along a justification of the consultants’ impressive fees by either furloughing or discharging a certain number of employees but never the “Winning Side Saddlers” (see this author’s The Chronic Problem: Typology of Leaderless Leadership, Journal of Quality & Participation, 2000, pp. 20-24). 

For nearly ten years, I consulted Fortune 500 companies in the private sector and large and small state and federal institutions in the public sector.  Common thinking supports the idea that “for profit” operations in the private sector display much greater meritocracy and accountability than do public sector operations.  That has not been my experience.  The two cultures appear equally inclined to favoritism. 

After a lapse of several years, I joined a Fortune 100 hi-tech company as an industrial psychologist on a campus complex of 1,000 engineers, 2,000 support professionals, 480 supervisors, managers and executives, and 520 hourly workers in clean rooms and machine tool operations. 

Here I conducted seminars and OD interventions, did counseling of employees at all levels, including management, developed Assessment Centers, and designed a Technical Education Program that addressed professional skill competency issues, while providing technicians with a roadmap to full engineering status.   

The success of these endeavors led to a promotion as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European operations in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe was transitioning to the European Economic Community with the company interested in applying an OD specialist to its European operations.    

The curious thing about my European OD experience is that corporate management expected OD to operate as other consultants of the company had operated.  In other words, that OD would see management as its client and not the organization, per se.  It soon became apparent, since management held the purse strings, that OD was expected not to forget this fact in its deliberations or conclusions.  Alas, OD was expected to operate as Human Resources operates, and that is as management's union.

OD, however, is a diagnostic tool beholding neither to labor nor to management in the assessment process, but only to the organization as if it were a viable organism. 

But the fault, in any case, did not lie entirely with management as it was clear OD had failed to educate management in what it did or what management could expect from a successful OD intervention.  

In OD's detection and detective work, feelings becomes facts as morale (group feelings) and motivation (individual feelings) merge in functional purpose.  In other words, group will and individual competence are complements to successful performance as a collective sense of belief and belonging are critical to the task at hand.  OD knows and explores this from the vantage point of looking beyond the obvious, which I have called elsewhere, "exploring the problem in subtext."    

Returning from this assignment, still in my 50s, I decided to retire a second time to turn my attention to writing what I had learned over the years working in virtually every level of the complex organization as well as on four continents.  It has been from these notes, studies, profiles, published articles, interviews and interventions that have been the primary sources of my work and basis of my several books in this and related genres.

Others have been there before me pruning this same garden, but often with a special client or relationship in mind such as that of academia, government, industry or other special interests.  My approach has been more catholic as I have operated like a medieval priest in his secret laboratory worrying about the little man in this mammoth corporate world who is often smashed like a bug into inescapable compliance.  Whatever his education or prowess, submission is complete while he chooses to deny the regiment that has become his life.  Paradoxically, while everything on the surface seems to be humming along without a glitch, incipient catastrophe lurks ahead and the reason for these books.      

THE RATIONALE FOR A SPATE OF BOOKS FROM A WORKER IN THE TRENCHES

Management has been the architect of a failed system in virtually every institution of society from the family, the school, the community, the company, the government, the church and the environment.  It has fumbled along in narcissistic self-indulgence seemingly without a clue as to its creative destruction, while celebrating its technological hubris.   

America is an optimistic society and continues to believe the glass half full no matter what economic calamity, social upheaval, cultural conflagration, spiritual crisis, psychological embarrassment or military collapse occurs to threaten the very foundation of American society and its substantive history. 

America is a violent society and has been since its conception.  It is a reactive society to crisis with an inability to anticipate threats to its survival because its attention is always on another circuit.  It is a skin deep culture that prefers others to fight its battles electing “feel good” people to public office who echo the superficial sentiments by which most Americans live. 

Americans congratulate themselves on their ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit and ability to turn their play into functional tools as has been the case with the explosion of our electronic wonders by college drop outs such as Jobs and Gates, who liked to play games in their garages, and in the process changed the world forever.  Meanwhile, the corporate world appears a slow learner.

General Electric, IBM, General Motors and old standby corporations such as Montgomery Wards and Sears got caught with their pants on fire.  GE and IBM recovered at the 11^th hour, while GM had to be “bailed out” because it was “too big to fail.”  Montgomery Wards, however, is gone, and Sears is on the cutting block.

Ordinary citizens working paycheck to paycheck have assumed that these people running things are a lot smarter than they are, and know what they are doing, when the evidence paints a far different picture. 

Clever advertisers have made diamonds a precious mineral which they are not.  A diamond is actually an extremely simple material.  It is pure carbon and is the hardest naturally occurring mineral, but the only thing separating it as a precious stone from coal is its molecular structure. 

Likewise, top executives of Fortune 500 companies are paid (with bonuses) 500 to 1,000 times as much as their hourly laborers.  Workers have accepted this differential if reluctantly believing these executives are critical to the success of the company, and therefore to their livelihood working in the trenches. 

It has gotten more complicated over the last several decades.  Professionals go into engineering and the sciences seeking employment in some solid Fortune 500 company, hoping one day to get into management, not because they love the idea of playing the power game, but because the pay structure euphemistically implies that managers are more valuable to the company than workers, whatever their education, when clearly this is not the fact.  It is an idea that died forty years ago but has been kept alive on life support by management ever since. 

That worked immediately following World War Two, when only 40 percent of Americans graduated from high school, but today, 80 percent are high school graduates with 40 percent college graduates with 20 percent of those graduates holding engineering degrees.

In terms of the hi-tech organization, 75-80 percent of the workforce holds academic credentials with 25 percent (as in the example given above) engineers.

The complex organization is dependent on knowledge power possessed by workers while position power the province of management often gets in the way of productive work.

To my sorrow, I watched highly qualified professionals retreat into “Six Silent Killers” (the title of one of my books) in passive but undetected behaviors that penalized the company contributing $ billions of lost productivity.  

All indicators are that management is anachronistic and managers atavistic but they hold on like Sears denying the inevitable.   

BOOKS BELOW THE RADAR THAT MAY BE LAUNCHING A REVOLUTION

It is rather ironic that someone such as myself would write a rash of polemically inspired books on the subject of work, workers and the workplace, indeed, on the complex organization when I’ve never been comfortable in its confines over my long career.  Yet, that has indeed been my fate.  I have neither had a privileged education nor an exemplary following to encourage such an endeavor.  Indeed, my message in the bottle has been largely ignored with a blip here or there by discerning readers or critics who have been paying attention to the colossal dysfunction of the complex organization with which modern society has been indulged. 

These in summary are some of my books that address this incipient catastrophe:

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991)

Joining a hi-tech company as an OD psychologist in 1980, the timing couldn’t have been more propitious.  The company had a Quality Control Circle (QCC) program for hourly employees, who represented only 10 percent of the workforce, designed to inspire greater motivation.   

At the same time, NBC television had an hourly program, “Japan Can! Why can’t We?”  Japan had this same QCC program and was eating America’s lunch in quality manufacturing of automobiles, electronics, household appliances and glass products.  A tsunami followed across the nation as everyone had to have the program my company already had in place and knew well its limitations. 

The main problem was that Japan is a group minded culture and the United States is an individualistic minded culture. 

Ignoring this discrepancy, corporations across America spent millions of dollars launching signatory programs such as “Participative Management.”  It was like pouring money down a rabbit’s hole as the problem of performance was never defined, and so employees took advantage of their companies’ laxity acting like spoiled children. 

In 1984, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference of executives, managers and military leaders who were caught up in this fever.  My subject was “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.”   

[As a result of that provocative presentation, for two years, I was on the equivalent of house arrest not allowed to give any speeches or to write any articles, having to turn in my engineering notebooks every week for review.  These notebooks that grew to nearly forty would become the basis of Work Without Managers.]

In 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.  Europe would become my sanctuary and laboratory where I would commence to collate my notes into WWMs.

In 1990 I retired from the company, and published the WWMs in 1991.

The focus of the next book in this genre was The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain.  Professionals continued to be phlegmatic despite now being in the driver’s seat in the 1990s with knowledge power which had already superseded position power.  

While management continued to get the perks, the promotions, the salary bonuses, and the largest percentage of the corporate pie, professionals were the architects of the world that only management enjoyed.  This slender volume addresses this discrepancy with a bit of reality.  It was published in 1995.

Professionals, while being non-confrontational in conflict avoidance with management at every turn, were passively demonstrating their angst in what I came to call “six silent killers”: (1) passive aggression, coming in late and leaving early doing as little as possible to get by; (2) passive responsive: never doing anything until told what to do, and then doing little more; (3) passive defensive: always having an excuse why a job doesn’t get done or done on time; (4) approach avoidance: accepting assignments with no intention of completing; (5) obsessive compulsive: always wanting what others have failing to attend to the work paid to do; (6) malicious obedience: spreading rumors and disinformation, withholding information critical to operations, and misusing company property.  SSKs was published in 1996:

CORPORATE SIN, originally published in 2000, addressed the masochistic clash of management and professionals that literally devolved into leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. 

As the United States became an industrial power in the early 20^th century with 95 percent of the workforce blue collar with little formal education, the formula for success was that “the very first requirement for man is that he be so stupid and phlegmatic that he more resemble an ox than any other type.” 

While Frederick Winslow Taylor could make that statement in his 1911 book, Scientific Management, it would not be politically correct today.  Even so, it could be argued that many workers are still held hostage to this same industrial engineering grid. 

Early in the 20th century, management programmed workers to be polite, obedient, loyal, punctual, passive, and reactive to management’s authority.  It was tantamount to suborn perjury to attempt to bypass one’s direct supervisor to seek answers from top management.

It is 90 years later with only 20 percent of the workforce blue collar and 80 percent white collar or professional, yet this prevailing behavioral norm still holds sway in many organizations.   

Incredibly, management took on the airs of a self-appointed aristocracy voting themselves larger and larger salaries and benefits, and then camouflaging these excesses by seemingly demonstrating benevolence in offering morsels to workers in the trenches.  

This CORPORATE SIN has been manifested and institutionalized at every level of American society with the possible exception of professional sport.  CORPORATE SIN was published in 2000.

EVIDENCE THAT THIS, TOO, WILL CHANGE

As Eric Hoffer has advised, play not work defines us, and play always gives us a clue as to the work climate of tomorrow.  

Kurt Flood, a much acclaimed Major League Baseball player, sued the league when it attempted to trade him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies without his permission.  He felt like chattel in a medieval feudal system and took offense to the policy.   

It was 1970 and his legal success ended his professional baseball career but owners, general managers and managers could no longer treat players without dealing with the players or their agents. 

Despite this, MLB remains a top heavy and top down management industry.  

Not so the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its professional players.  

We have seen in recent years Lebron James go from an 18-year-old high school graduate to an NBA star first with the Cleveland Cavaliers while gradually evolving to the coach of the team as a player on the court, carrying this distinction further bypassing the coach, general manager and owner  to take in the reins to manage his own career.  

Indeed, he left Cleveland for the NBA’s Miami Heats where he earned an NBA Championship, then returned to Cleveland, enduring the protests of the Heats' management, to win a second NBA Championship for the Cleveland Cavaliers.  

Now, in 2019, he is with the NBA Los Angeles Lakers, again demonstrating he is in control of his career and intends to go wherever the basketball gods direct him.

Lebron James knows not only basketball but its entertainment value.  He is a successful entrepreneur and adept at performing many of the functions of coaches, general managers, and even owners.  He demonstrates this in being an effective recruiter of basketball talent to improve his team's chances of winning, while also studying the changing demographics of his sport and its audience.  

He is representative of the knowledge worker who has a full sense of his power and potential.  He stirs the drink and controls its content.  

Fully 80 percent of NBA players are African American or of color.  This has reached palpable significance in this league and promises to have widespread impact in professional enterprise beyond sport down the road.  

Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of NFL players are black, but without the freedom or control of their destiny exhibited by NBA players.  Billionaire owners of the NFL remain like corporate feudal lords over the sport.  NFL owners pay the NFL Commissioner 40 million large to keep it that way, while ironically, sportscasters and sports analysts, many of whom once were NFL stars, fall in line to promote this corporate mindset.  In a word, the NFL is identical to corporate America to the extreme.

On the other hand, black players, once climbing in Major League Baseball, are now declining as many are choosing the NFL or the NBA for their professional career.  Neither the NFL nor MLB has reached the power grid of player dominance displayed in the NBA. 

NBA players, who pretty much choose who they will play for, may mimic Lebron James in his career management, but they have not reached his level of work without management that surely will be the measure of professional sport if not the wider society in the future.

Meanwhile, Corporate America pays professional engineers, chemist, accountants, programmers, psychologists and other credentialed knowledge workers a dollar more an hour than they believe they can afford to quit, or test the market for interest in their skills.  There is movement, to be sure, among the ranks and files, but it is pathetic compared to what is displayed in sport.