THE POSTMODERN WORKER EXPOSED!

THE POSTMODERN WORKER EXPOSED! UNMASKING THE UNDER-ACHIEVING WORKFORCE, 422 pages, illustrations, statistics, tables, graphics, photographs, schematics, graphs and excerpts of five Fisher books in this genre, $19.95, paperback; $5.99 e-book.

THE FORWARD & AFTERWORD 

FOREWORD

By Ken Shelton CEO of Executive Excellence, LLC, author of Beyond Counterfeit Leadership, and editor-publisher of Leadership Excellence magazine for 30 years.

Spoiler alert: As you pick up a book with the word “exposed” in the title and “unmasking” in the subtitle, you should expect to find the naked truth, Rated R for its Revealing portrayals and portraits, in this case of working professionals, along with their managers and leaders in the milieu of modern organizational mania and madness.

However, here author Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is not publishing pornography nor writing a lurid tell-all autobiography; rather, he is crafting lithography in which the image to be printed is ink-receptive and the blank area ink-repellent. Ergo, in reading his words, you will either be receptive or repellent to his ideas and images, depending in part on your own life experience and point of view.

Warning: In this book, Dr. Jim is not shooting blanks but live bullets, meaning you could be injured or influenced. Indeed, he aims both for the mind and the heart, and, in the end, he wants you to take action.

My Take on Dr. Jim Fisher

Having known Jim Fisher for at least two decades, having read much of what he has written, and having published more than a score of his commentaries on this and related subjects for my Leadership Excellence magazine, I can attest: he is a prolific word machine, but not because he is vain and verbose but rather because he is a rare Renaissance man of ideas and ideals, motived by his diminishing time in mortality to share them more widely. In this sense, he serves like James, the apostle of Jesus, as a “fisher of men”.

This “expose” provides further evidence of his excellence, as he aims to expose the plight of the postmodern professional worker (most of us). This is not easy reading. You may well toss this book across the room (or delete it from your screen), and that’s fine, as long as you then pick it up again. Fisher is an acquired taste, as he is not writing like Norman Vincent Peale, in public relations mode to “win friends and influence people”; nor illustrating nostalgic notions like Norman Rockwell; rather, he writes more like Norman Lear, to reveal discrepancies and expose hypocrisies and paints word pictures like Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch post-modern impressionist known for his bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork.

With his deft brush, Fisher calls out the worst sins of corporate leaders and silent killers in management waste bins. But along with the description of the problem, we also find here real solutions, such as the healing balm to loneliness and isolation—being your own best friend.

In reading this book, I hope you gain the same kind of respectful relationship with Jim and his writings as I have: I deeply respect this man and applaud his messages. Clearly, he is a man who is comfortable in his own skin and skull, skillful in sketching out manuscript skeletons and then fleshing out ideas. He is both a technician and artist, writing as much for the craft as for change. He is not seeking entertainment or recreation but attainment and re-creation. He asks his readers not only to think but also to act; not only to transition but also to transform.

While Jim is a stanch Catholic, he appears to be writing to refine organizational theology and reform management/leadership ideology. He is a Saint James, and yet he writes in the style of Martin Luther and John Calvin, as he too is bold in publishing his grievances.

As a professional, Jim is the rarest of breeds: a company man who succeeded in many organizations but always as his own man, perhaps because his answers are as valuable as his questions. For example, while working in Human Resources at Honeywell, even when he saw that the Honey was all about the Money, his well of resourcefulness never ran dry.

My Take on This Book

Like Joseph Conrad, James Fisher is writing his own Heart of Darkness, as one who has penetrated the mind and soul of managers and leaders. He finds that “executive excellence” is at best a humorous contradiction and at worst a heinous oxymoron, with an emphasis on ox and moron—the executive elites who exploit the professional expendables.

While Jim pumps out paragraphs, he is full of powerful one-liners. For example, in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, he writes: “Take charge of your work! It is the best way to take charge of your life. Damn the torpedoes! We don’t need managers. They need us!”

Real power, he notes, has shifted dramatically from management to the worker domain, “But workers behave as if management still possesses the power. The organization waffles like a rag doll in the wind. Uncertainty reigns supreme, and power is falling between the chairs.”

In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain, Jim argues that nothing changes at work until working professionals change. “Games of trendy themes like empowerment continue. It is now urgently up to workers to put this house in order. Neither house cleaning nor finger pointing will do. Professionals must get off the dime and boldly take charge of work, their work, which is the path to taking charge in life.”

In Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, Jim writes: “Termites destroy a person’s home with no one the wiser until irreparable damage is done. And social termites, the six silent killers of the infrastructure, are eating away the hand that feeds them. Social termites choose to deny reality; to become inauthentic to themselves; and to become obsessively negative to others. Social termites look for what is wrong, not right; for what they can get; not give; for what they don’t have, not possess; and the glass for them is always near empty. Social termites develop amazing political cunning, displaying an incredible facility to manage, influence, and manipulate colleagues and superiors indiscriminately. They conveniently choose to see themselves as victims of a system that fails to appreciate them or satisfy their needs.

“Without knowing it, they are seduced by the six silent killers; behaviors that can kill a career before it is underway; undermine all that they could become; and destroy the enterprise for which they work. Organizations plagued with these social termites find management preoccupied with damage control without dealing with the source of the problem. Managers, as manic monarchs, take ownership of the wreckage, while the social termites treat the workplace as their merry madhouse. It is like the plague all over again, a disease that contaminates everyone and everything, but no one seems to recognize the source.”

In Be Your Own Best Friend, Jim writes: “No greater taboo exists than the one that prevents us from being our own best friend. Tragically, instead of cultivating loyalty, trust and belief in ourselves, we elevate the opinions of others above our own; trust experts rather than cherishing our own experience; search for heroes to worship, rather than celebrating our own lives.

“We yearn for outside approval, while it is within us. Widely, we are counseled about the critical importance of self-knowledge, while popular culture incessantly promotes self-indulgence. Self-help books feed this self-indulgence by the devious ploy of inferring that personal progress comes at the expense of self-rejection. This rejection feeds self-doubt. Ironically, the more self-conscious we are, the less genuine we are with ourselves, eventually leading to a desperate search for self by avoiding personal self-responsibility and positive change.”

And in Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers, Jim writes: “Management is not leadership. It has opted for pyramid climbing by always campaigning for the next position never having time to do the job paid to do. Now that the pyramid is collapsing and with it, its position power, the workplace has become dysfunctional to the extreme. Why, then, should there be any surprise when those that climb to the top can’t lead?”

While Jim has his research and references, this work is mostly in-search and reflections. His arguments appeal to both reason and passion, and his is a tough love: “Life’s hard rule is that everyone is responsible for their own actions, and to learn from the consequences of those actions. Everyone gets a report card on their performance every day of their life.”

Jim’s Closing Argument
Jim admits this attempt is “a risky analysis of a complex problem” since “there is no way such an analysis can be made without stepping on some toes and the hands that feed me.”

A first step, he says, is “to recognize that the ‘management of things’ and ‘management of people’ are discretely different functions. That managers and consultants must realize that listening is more powerful than telling; that framing the problem is more important than generating solutions; that we are on the threshold of a wonderful tomorrow if we can ‘let go’ of all our precious false assumptions of the past, and allow a little reality to guide our way.”

He notes that while “happy ignorance” rules the head if not the heart of most workers, there is a rapidly building movement against the grain. “The focus of this natural fault is apparent — the worker, alone! Were we only to pause a moment we would realize we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone. What transpires between the coming and the going is our own individual affair as we are in the constant company of ourselves.”

“Minds that can make technology soar are not minds without the capacity for self-mastery. The plunge into chaos has been a gratuitous retreat into self-indulgence. Instead of changing their ways and taking matters into their own hands, professional workers have allowed themselves to be treated as interchangeable parts in a giant economic machine, gravitating to the pathetic role of victims of circumstances. Professional workers have all the power, but they act as if they have none. They could stop this manic drift with a simple statement, ‘Hell, no, I won’t go!’ People still count for more than robots, that is, if they can see themselves as counting more.”

In his “happy intelligence”, Jim cries out: “We need each other more than we need money. By ignoring our biological and spiritual programmed needs, and substituting artificial material needs, we risk physical and mental distress.”

Jim, I salute you for your courage in exposing sins and explaining solutions, and I invite all to read your insightful writings and heed your warnings.

AFTERWORD

By Eric Michael Rodts, an executive and international consultant with Honeywell, Inc.

Dr. James Fisher, “Jim” to me, has been observing, studying, dissecting, theorizing and writing about American corporations for over four decades. Like the Dilbert cartoon, any employee reading Jim’s works will immediately say, “That’s my company!! He has been studying MY COMPANY!!”

I’ve been with the same organization for forty-one years, and the accuracy of his assessments are uncanny, almost as if he has the whole place wired.;

THE POST MODERN WORKER EXPOSED is the distillation of Jim’s life’s work. The knowledge density of this work is profound, the espresso version if you will. The reader should come prepared to think and be intellectually stimulated.

Jim’s perspective has always been from that of the worker. As I stand at the end of my career, I am convinced that human organizations exist to serve the interests of those who run them; not the stakeholders, not the workers. As Jim points out, the workers could have the power, but I believe they don’t want it. More specifically, the workers do not want to become what they must become to succeed in the palatine political games that go with the pursuit of organizational power. They’d rather have a comfortable life and be true to their own values.

Decades of focus on education over experience have created a tremendous thinking imbalance favoring the hypothetical over the pragmatic. We are all marching lock step (perhaps staggering) into the Age of the Absurd. It will be for those who come behind us to sort it out. Perhaps Jim’s work will give them a solid starting point to move forward.