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Thursday, January 30, 2020

NEVER TOO LATE!


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

© January 29, 2020 


Reference:

Henry, a retired teacher of chemistry and something of a prolific author, especially on matters of governance and community action. I was moved by this remark recently from him:

Currently working on a piece about my younger years and how things appear to follow from other happenings. Not an agreeable assignment I laid upon myself. Hope it will work out reasonably well some time.

I wrote this to him:

Trust me, Henry, it will! You will find evidence in a very real sense of why that is so in this chapter from my book CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT (2017), published on Amazon’s KINDLE. It is priced at $66 so I don’t expect you to purchase the book.

Your modesty is becoming. It is apparent in all your missives which are universally stimulating. But it also causes me a little trepidation. Contrast your this style with my own.

I read a lot, as do you, often of people with sterling reputations as thinkers and philosophers and often scientists as well. I read them from what I can learn from them, but never to put them above myself, never!

No one can be a better expert in my laboratory, which is my life, than myself. It amuses me when people think they can.

People want to be saved from themselves by others when others often cannot save themselves. It is a losing proposition to imitate what is important to others at the expense of discovering what is important to you.

As a consequence, I don’t apologize to readers for using myself as reference in describing my position on this or that subject. Nor do I mount causes, join crusades, or campaign for this or that person, or this or that special interest.

If the reader cannot resonate with me, that is okay. It means we have little in common. I am not looking for an army of believers, only a few learners who have a common interest in growing.

Charles D. Hayes, whom I consider the best writer I know, personally, has much to say.  I have encouraged him for years to give his wisdom a personal touch.

It is not important to be anointed by society, but is important to share your special gifts with society. If everything revolves around imitation, no one will ever get off the dime.

The toxic disease of modern society is comfort and complacency where people think life is all about having “fun.”

My twin grandsons turned 15 on the 28th of January 2020. One is very tall – six-five – blond and beautiful, and everyone dotes on him. I wrote him in my card, “Your grandpa remembers when people made a big deal about him. Don’t fall for that malarkey! Follow your own passions, not someone else’s.”

My other grandson, also tall – six-one – has his head more firmly on his shoulders as his twin brother gets most of the attention. I wrote him, “I share your grandmother’s sentiments (she encourages him to follow his passion for music). Live life to bring your natural music to the surface.”

These and other Centennials are the innocent who will be inheriting a hundred yearlong mess of self-indulgence where politicians, the media, pundits, educators, industrialists, theologians and entertainers act as if they never left the sixth grade.

Can Centennials right this sinking ship? I don’t know. I won’t be around to find out. What I do know is that the world is plum out of excuses for doing so little.

Everyone dies. Why are so many people afraid to live?

Your sincerity, and the lessons you have learned over your long life may not resonate with Centennials until they are thirty, which they now believe is an eternity away.

Write of the lessons learned when you were young, and they and others will find them! That is what Ben Franklin did with his Almanac. He wrote about his “lessons learned,” not from other people but from his own life. I believe that is the case with Harry Louis Bernstein in the chapter that follows, and with you as well.

Be always safe,

Jim




Chapter from CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT (2017):

GENIUS REALIZED: 

GETTING FIRST PUBLISHED AT AGE 96


“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in. In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”


Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915), American pragmatic philosopher


IT IS NEVER TOO LATE!


Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer with his first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007) at the age of ninety-six.


The novel dealt with Bernstein’s long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children while putting up with Yankel, her abusive and alcoholic husband.


It is also the story about the anti-Semitism that Bernstein and his family experienced growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in a Cheshire mill town called “Stockport” (now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England.


Stockport was a community of Jews and Christians many of whom were lost in World War I. Bernstein shapes his story around the Romeo and Juliet-like romance that his sister Lily experienced with her Christian boyfriend.


The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable. She falls in love with a Christian boy. But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other.


Harry Bernstein at home in New Jersey in 2007, age 96, when “The Invisible Wall” appeared. He holds a portrait of his wife, Ruby. Mike Mergen, New York Times.


When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own mind.


The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and was published in 2007, three years later. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for him to begin working on his book.


His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.


In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012. Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey. He died four days past his 101st birthday.


Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS


From Harry Bernstein’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write. Through grammar school and high school, composition was his favorite subject.


As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips. He persisted, finding work editing the works of other writers, but the passion to be an author in his own right never left him.


He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight. He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely.


They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.


The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was only too familiar – constant rejections. He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.


After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday.


Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of the book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write. In an amusing aside, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.


In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing. He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.


Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.


Columnists from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews. He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines. He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.


Other publishers wanted to publish his works. So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published novel of his family history during his lifetime, with one published posthumously.


Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with his whole heart that genius was not rare, but common. The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those who say “you’re wasting your time” and not enough time listening to those who hear an inner voice telling them success is right around the corner!


CONFIDENCE & SUBTEXT – THE ETERNAL KEYS


Harry Bernstein lived in his subtext. It was personified in the love he had for his wife, Ruby, which as he explained was love at first sight. With such love, he escaped self-consciousness and self-regard, and although he wanted to be a writer, adjusted to the reality of his circumstances and enjoyed a very happy and productive life with her and his two children while working on the creative works of others for a living.


All the while, the writing bug or his ability to write – “I am a bit cocky,” he says – never left him. His love of his wife that emanates from his subtext fueled his mind and gave purpose to his life. When she was gone, with a hole in his heart, he reached down into his subtext where all his stories were incubating finding new purpose in living.


The stories started with the forbidden love of his sister with a Catholic boy, which he remembered with crushing horror as he was a devout Jew equal in devotion to that of his parent’s. Only a child, he had to make a terrible choice between being loyal to his faith and his parents, or loyal to his sister with her great secret. He chose to be loyal to her with no idea that this was the response of a healthy subtext.


For nearly ninety years, the creative juices in subtext would come to produce a fine wine of stories in his last years as he approached the age of 100. Like Golda Meier, Stephen Jay Gould, Yehudi Menuhin and many others (see chapter Twenty Six), the confidence of subtext was apparent at a young age, but only in reflection as these stories epitomized what his life was all about.





Monday, January 27, 2020

THE REST OF THE STORY


A READER WRITES

Jim,

Reading your latest with great interest (so much so that it need to read it again.)

Unfortunately, what I received broke off in the par. beginning with “Control is the sequential product of order ...”

Your line about how we mirror the universe rung a bell, but I wonder whether we have the same universe in mind. Mine is not the human universe, it is the universe with all there is in it. Might call it God, but that again leads to misunderstanding. Language is a such a useful tool, but it too often is disastrously ineffective.

I’ll leave it here.

Best,

Henry




MY RESPONSE

Henry,

I apologize for my missive not being complete. Here I am providing not only that last paragraph but the rest of the conversation with Stanley that appears in THE WORKER, ALONE! (TWA).

That book was published 25 years ago; it was my briefest book, a book I gave to European friends on one of my visits to Belgium, Austria and Germany. It was my favorite book written to date, perhaps because of the conversation with Stanley Reeves, a brilliant and delightfully wonderful human being.

I first met him in 1993 during my quest to write IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), a book about growing up in the middle of the country, in the middle of my community (Clinton, Iowa in "the shadow of the courthouse"), in the middle of the century, and in the middle of World War Two. Those incidental circumstances would come to form me.



Now, regarding my soliloquy, which concludes TWA, my training in chemistry, study of neuroanatomy, and my reading of Carl Sagan, has no doubt influenced me. Regarding Sagan, I appreciate his impudence causing me, paradoxically, to believe more not less in God, a God, however, not necessarily an anthropomorphic God.

It is through this process that I have gotten the idea that the single atom in a matrix of billions of atoms approximates Sagan’s idea that in billions of planets in the universe, there must be some similar if not the same as our own.

Sagan always has interesting titles: The Cosmic Connection (1973), Broca’s Brain (1974), The Dragons of Eden (1977), Cosmos (1980), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992), The Demon-Haunted World (1996), and Billions & Billions (1997). I celebrate his short life where his fellow scientists refuted him for popularizing science, while given to self-aggrandizement. Since I could be similarly accused, I only smile.

Now regarding the soliloquy that ends “THE WORKER, ALONE!”:

It follows at the conclusion of this book thusly:

Control is a sequential product of order, and order comes from within, one person at a time. The multiple of this process leads to communal order. And so it is as well for life in a world out of sync with its times.

Everything is connected. The macro is precisely the same as the micro, only many times more. A true leader knows this in his bones. The structure of the human cell mirrors the universe. We explore the micro to understand the macro.

A "changed society" is an evolutionary process, which starts with an idea. There is no ideal plan or strategy to the growth of an idea. It is a factor of climate, opportunity and time. An idea may undergo several mutations before maturity is reached and bear little resemblance to the initial idea. There is no "right or true" course, only movement from moment to moment.

Ideas have a growth period the same as every other living thing. It is slow and tortuous with no clear path to the future. Ideas grow like cracks in the cement as weeds, wild flowers or grass. One day an idea experiences a transmutation from a puzzling perturbation into a clarifying insight that resonates with mean­ing to the times, which is not unlike a shoot bursting into bloom as a beautiful flower. Ideas are not separate but part of nature.

As for consultants, they are bystanders. Like multifaceted sensors, they derive their function from listening and observing. The answers are not with them, but are the filtered product of the organization's collective mind, a mind which is often ignored until a consultant repeats its intrinsic wisdom. Consultants pro­vide connection between organizational knowers and learners.

Consultants are symptomatic of a culture that doesn't trust itself, a culture willing to pay for "a second opinion." Companies insist on seeing the controller and the controlled as separate enti­ties. Consultant are often the arbitrary intermediary between the controller (management) and the controlled (workforce), which is a contrived dichotomy and therefore inauthentic. Were society not so uncertain of its priorities and ambivalent on how to handle them, consultants might just fade away.

Stanley reflects:

In your chapter, “'A Life Without A Cause," why can't change be a combination of outside forces as well as inside forces? Does it always have to be either... or? Wouldn't it be desirable for some things to come true that workers expect to come true, not because they expect it, but because they are desirable?

Change is always a combination of inside and outside forces. That is not the problem. The problem is what initiates the change process, stimulus from outside or motivation from inside? Chaos and order are part of the same whole. This dynamic created our universe.

Order starts with the individual deciding to change, to put his house in order, and therefore the change process is an inter­nal commitment. Change is a reply to the demands of reality or outside forces.

What precipitates change is usually some disturbance, some­thing that makes the individual or the company more alert. Attentiveness is the precursor to change. The decision to act is a response to that stimulus — take a death in the family. That was the case with me.

My father died three days past his fiftieth birthday. His whole life was one of repeated labor to push the stone of Sisyphus up the hill, only to have it roll back downhill and crush him again and again. He never had his own agenda. He was afraid to. He had great physical courage, but little moral backbone. It was impossible for him to take a stand if his rights clashed with the rights of his "betters."

With his death, my insides changed almost immediately. A cautious, conservative, sensitive person launched an immediate pilgrimage to gamble on himself, to do what his lights would have him do, and to let the chips fall where they may.

Thus was born my motivation to plant seeds that others were too timid to plant, or who feared it might lose them friends and jeopardize their careers. I am not constrained by such consid­erations. Nor am I concerned with whether these seeds reach fruition within my lifetime. I am a planter, not a harvester. My father's death convinced me of that fact.

Each worker has to decide who and what he is. If he doesn't, it will be decided for him. Desirable things come out of pur­poseful behavior. The purpose of life is to live it. How each of us might choose to live it is an expression of that purpose. The rest is academic.

Thank you for bringing this error to my attention.

Be always safe,

Jim

What a delightful tribute -- re: MIND, MEMORY, THOUGHT.....



Quote of the Year!



"What a time Shakespeare would have with our times. While rejecting the idea of God, many in the political, social and economic sphere attempt to be like God in quest of wealth, celebrity, identity, power and invincibility" Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.

Amen, Bro.

Ken Shelton, editor, agent, CEO

Executive Excellence, LLC

Sunday, January 26, 2020

MIND, MEMORY, THOUGHT, THINKING, AND BEING KIND TO OURSELVES AS WE AGE


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 24, 2020 


A READER WRITES

Jim.

Had a wonderful book by Giulio Tononi; gave it to a friend. Will search for his “integrated information theory.”

Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking ... I believe I do some of that; makes it hard for others to get my drift about topics. Correlates a bit with quantum theory as it sits alongside the simple “yes or no” dualism.

The reptilian mind... reminds me of a book by Carl Sagan, written way back when.

Jim, it seems that our paths crosses at many a junction where my low road touches your high one. Funny as it goes ...

Henry

MY RESPONSE

Henry,

There is no high road or low road, at the moment. There is no road at all.  We are stumbling through the chaos of a dark forest trying to purchase order, but not too wisely.

That is because the road to the future no longer emanates from within.  Existence today bombards our senses from without with incessant clatter devoid of music.

We both know this. Our long lives have taught us to respect our consciences that give credence to our moral centers and our natural guidance system from within. Consequently, we take failure and setbacks in stride, as we do modest achievements, because we have never lost our way.

On the other hand, we can smell a phony across the room or across the airwaves, waxing genuine with false sincerity revving up hedonistic appetites with empty promises.

Henry, we are outliers with opinions; not to attract idolaters or indulgent readers but to open minds to the dangers, and yes, possibilities of the times.

Life has been a struggle but we have persevered with insights learned that we would like to share, but alas, there is no audience.

People don’t want to be reminded of their sins of omission or commission. They want to be reassured, entertained and lifted out of morass. Politicians are at the ready to fill that void. They are selling the mitigation of our sins without the penalty of consequences or necessity of penance. They preach pleasure without pain, benefits without sacrifice, something for nothing, happiness without sorrow.

One political party is as guilty of this deception as the other as neither has any sense of the painful consequences of false hope, as each cynically believes mendacity is the only way to being electable.

They may call themselves “liberals” or “conservatives,” but they are neither. They have more in common with Shakespeare’s Shylock of the “Merchant of Venice,” driven more by self-interest and validation then love and compassion.  Ironically, they aspire to change the world without the necessity of changing themselves.

Culture, identity, role relationships, the place of God, church and state in society have been shattered. Like the two faces of Janus, no one seems to know whether they are coming or going.  Decay and decadence stand tall on the hill while love and compassion cower obsequiously in the bushes in the valley.  Small wonder, we find ourselves in Nowhere Land.

You and I have lived the better part of the last century, and are now in this new century in the late evening of our lives.

We are survivors who have been able, despite all the pressures to do otherwise, to hold on to our values, beliefs, passions, and sense of history and humanity. We are neither do-gooders nor detached from doing, but feel most people can figure out things for themselves.

After a century of suicidal warfare in which more than 100 million lives were lost, not on the battlefields as soldiers, but as collateral damage during the insanity of two World Wars, we have lost our way, without discernible insight as to where we are much less where we are going.  This is demonstrated with outrageous force on the Internet, in social networks, on television and in film, in music and literature, as communal and community life has no sense of embarrassment or appreciation of the absurd.

Ordinary people during the last century attempted to live private modest lives but have become unwitting victims of cultural insanity. With war, historical and sacred landmarks have disappeared, as have the magnificent architecture of churches, monuments and stately buildings across Europe and Asia.

While this destruction has been visible and palpable, the emotional toll on civilians across the globe lingers in fractured lives; lives that escaped the dread in one sense only to fall victim to it in another.  Civilization has become unglued with profligate addiction, permissiveness, pornography, hedonism, materialism, surrealism, which has in turn fostered bizarre behavior as the new norm, not to overlook mental illness, hate crimes and gratuitous violence.

Children are born innocent but often take on the social contagions of their culture and time. The nightly television news of any metropolitan city in the United States offers a litany of the carnage that has occurred in the previous 24 hours with young people often the perpetrators of such acts.  Why?

My! What a time Shakespeare would have with our times. While rejecting the idea of God, many in the political, social and economic sphere attempt to be like God in quest of wealth, celebrity, identity, power and invincibility.

Meanwhile, we have a tragic comedy going on in Washington, DC at the moment giving people an escape from their own miseries, and an opportunity to fixate on our national collective biases.

Henry, we are limping into the future without a guidance system as the United States gravitates to the high theater of the absurd.

Indeed, we no longer have a clear sense of what it means to be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, a boy or a girl, a teacher or a student, a worker or a manager, a member of a group, be it a church, a school, a family, or a profession, or, what it means to be an individual, or even what is the difference between right and wrong, or good and bad behavior.

Evidence of this anxiety is apparent in the number of books being written on identity, while the lack of identity is demonstrated provocatively in the explosive growth of the tattoo industry.  It would seem everyone desires to become a human billboard advertising who they are.

Speaking of advertising, we gravitate to what advertisers tell us is important even if it is not self-serving but that is a subject for another time.

You mention quantum theory. I led with that reference in my previous missive. I failed, however, to mention German Nobel Laureate in Physics, Werner Heisenberg, who found holes in Einstein’s theory of relativity with his “Uncertain Principle.” This shattered the precision once thought to exist in the subatomic world.

Einstein, who sought but unsuccessfully, to develop a “Unified Theory,” had a problem from the beginning with quantum mechanics because it was not tidy with him suggesting that “God didn’t believe in throwing the dice.”

But we find God is not tidy, He is not a good housekeeper, and He has treated Nature as if a gambler, purposely making it a habit like “throwing the dice,” causing embarrassment to those who still believe they have a handle on existence.

Perhaps that is our salvation, imprecision, or recognizing that life is primarily existence in a fog, suggesting that we best make the most of it "as is."

Finally, Carl Sagan refers to Paul D. MacLean’s “triune brain” in “The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence” (1977), which relates to the Reptilian Complex, the Limbic System and the Neocortex. 

My interest in the Reptilian Brain (for The Fisher Paradigm©™) is in the context of the mechanisms of intuitive and survival instincts, whereas Sagan goes off on a tangent about the reptilian brain's dinosaur function and dream world where “dragons can be heard, hissing and rasping, and the dinosaurs thunder still.”  Perhaps this is the book of Sagan's that you read.  I'll say more about this in my new book.

Thank you for listening.

Be always safe,

Jim








Saturday, January 25, 2020

A WORLD OUT OF SYNC WITH ITS TIMES

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 24, 2020

Everything is connected. The macro is precisely the same as the micro, only many times more. A true leader knows this in his bones. The structure of the human cell mirrors the universe. We explore the micro to understand the macro.

A "changed society" is an evolutionary process, which starts with an idea. There is no ideal plan or strategy to the growth of an idea. It is a factor of climate, opportunity and time. An idea may undergo several mutations before maturity is reached and bear little resemblance to the initial idea. There is no "right or true" course, only movement from moment to moment.

Ideas have a growth period the same as every other living thing. It is slow and tortuous with no clear path to the future. Ideas grow like cracks in the cement as weeds, wild flowers or grass. One day an idea experiences a transmutation from a puzzling perturbation into a clarifying insight that resonates with mean­ing to the times, which is not unlike a shoot bursting into bloom as a beautiful flower. Ideas are not separate but part of nature.

James R. Fisher, Jr.The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995)

An established author, philosopher and social critic writes:

Jim,

I find Ken Shelton’s (conservative author and publisher) worry over socialism stupefying. We are much closer the fascism. The number of people who can fit into a local movie theater own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. We have the greatest income inequality since the 1920s and the current low employment numbers hide the realty that income inequality is still increasing exponentially, as millions of people work two and three jobs and still can’t make ends meet.

Taxpayers fund food stamps from some of our largest employers who pay slave wages. We have socialism in the top tiers of our society with what we call the financialization of the economy as executives continue to loot public corporations as effectively as 21st century feudalism. No doubt we owe some of the above to the reality that civics education has gone the way of the buffalo.
In an age of omnipresent social media, a country founded upon the Constitutional principles of knowledge-based reasoning cannot be sustained by tribalistic emotion, and yet, fully a third of our population relates politically in tribalistic fashion, which is why they are impervious to information. Blind obedience is antithetical to democracy and it can quickly lead to fascism, world history makes this point clear.

If low-information citizens ever become a substantial majority, any chance for achieving democracy will be doomed because contempt and ethnocentric prejudice, will foreclose the opportunity for common ground. The only avenue for the uninformed, is to up the ante of loyalty, because they don’t know enough about anything important to engage in constructive dialog. They don’t reason, they relate.

Myriad forms of racial and misogynist bias are embedded in our culture. Partiality is written into law, it’s programmed via algorithms, in our literature, our entertainment and our break-room chatter, and unfortunately, a red state education renders one incapable of noticing, therefore, Texas school textbooks, for example, are intellectually sterile, so complexity is off limits and the emotional ostracizing of the other, becomes a polarizing distraction, and a formidable barrier to the kind of thinking that questions power.

When education is heavily influenced by fundamentalist religion, and right-wing culture, obedience is considered evidence of successful learning, and thus, conduct and conformity become more important than the critical thinking democracy requires.

The result of such an indoctrination is that people grow up believing that being a good citizen is demonstrated, not by reasoned deliberation, but by submissiveness, so symbols and icons become more important than the values they are supposed to represent, and hence the familiar cry “America love it or leave it.”
We are on the cusp of an AI technology that is radically reshaping our economics, in which, prejudices and manifestations of political power are being surreptitiously preprogrammed via the algorithms that automate our governance—and a population incapable of discerning sophisticated oppression, will eventually render our Constitutional rights null and void, because they will be incapable of deconstructing the injustices in a backdrop posing as pseudo patriotism.

Never has it been easier for the powerful to stoke the fear and existential insecurities of uninformed citizens, and to persuade them to vote against their own interest, and to genuflect rage on cue.

We need a citizenry capable of critical thinking now more than any time in our history, and yet there is nothing on the horizon that suggests we are up to the task. Donald Trump’s presidency is a global embarrassment of epic proportion, his campaign rallies are disgraceful exhibitions of bigotry and racism, they reek the tenor and tone of fascism, and the effect that they have on our standing in the world as defenders of freedom and democracy are both psychologically devastating and morally debilitating.

I am optimistic from habit not from experience or my expectation about the future. I hope I am wrong, but I have grave doubts about the outlook for democracy because our technology and our echo chamber media are proving to be much better at polarization and indoctrination than inspiring critical thinking. A sham impeachment trial as a cover up, may very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We may have to take to the streets in Hong Kong fashion to wake this country up.

My age group is about to exit, but the generations to follow must realize what responsible citizenship requires and not simply be cheerleaders for despots.

The critical thinking needed today to sustain democratic rule, is equal to or greater than, the intellectual efforts upon which this country were founded, which is to my thinking a very frightening reality, given the current lack of civic education, and the regressive mentality holding red state America hostage, via a strain of ethnocentric contempt, fueled and spurred on by an incompetent and morally bankrupt president, whose breathtaking ignorance makes him egregiously unfit for office and whose erratic mental instability means his continuation as president, represents a clear and present danger to our national security and quite possibly world peace.

Charles

MY RESPONSE

Charles,

What you say here is at least partially true:

We are on the cusp of an AI technology that is radically reshaping our economics, in which, prejudices and manifestations of political power are being surreptitiously preprogrammed via the algorithms that automate our governance—and a population incapable of discerning sophisticated oppression, will eventually render our Constitutional rights null and void, because they will be incapable of deconstructing the injustice in a backdrop posing as pseudo patriotism.

We have a surfeit of critical thinking, which is limited to cause and effect analysis and logic, or what is already known. We need creative thinking which explores what is not known but can be found out in the pursuit of discovery,

That was the problem with Tom Peters’s and Bob Waterman’s bestselling book, “In Search of Excellence” (1982). It fostered imitation, which Business Week slammed two years later (November 5, 1984) with the headline story, “Who’s Excellent Now?” Many companies superimposed this book’s ideal examples on their own culture with sometimes disastrous results.

There are good people on the right and the left, and it turns out the ideas and passions of the one side tend to be as flawed as the excesses of the other side. You cannot persuade the other side that their views are faulty any more than they can convince you them that your views are faulty.

Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote Confident Selling (1971) in 1969 after returning from South Africa where I had facilitated the formation of a new specialty chemical company.  Earlier, I had been a successful chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company with my approach to find out what the customer needed then partnering with him to realize that end. I wrote the book in a friend’s plumbing catalogue publishing office on his IBM electric typewriter from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m., Monday through Friday for six weeks, sending the first draft to Prentice-Hall (P-H) in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where it was accepted two weeks later, then published in the fall of 1970 with P-H’s 1971 copyright.  It would be in print for 20 years and become a modest national bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies. 

Twenty years later, after ending my executive career and retiring from Honeywell, I wrote my second book on the labor/management phenomenon.  This project started while working for Honeywell Europe, SA in 1986 while living in Brussels, Belgium.  BB collected my research in a dozen three-inch loose leaf notebooks, creating the schematics, graphics, tables and visuals that went with the text.  She would type on our Honeywell computer in a Microsoft Word document while I walked around my study and dictated the book to her.  It would become Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, and be published five years later in 1991 and listed as one of the ten best business books of 1991 by Industry Week.

WWMs made a minor rumble and then faded being decades early as the electronic revolution had yet to take hold confirming its thesis. Five years after publication of WWMs, economist Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era” (1995) came out. It seemed evident author Rifkin had perused my book but without acknowledgement. The same was true of Fortune Magazine.  It had a cover story WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS a year after my book was published, but again without acknowledgement.

Critical thinking and critical thinkers represent an army at the ready to latch on to any creative work that serves its fancy.  Otherwise, the problem solving is to circular logic.

When you’re not in the power grid you can be exploited with impunity by a celebrated economist or an established magazine.  This son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad never joined that crowd much less given to pay it homage.

Charles, you are schooled in philosophy, economics, politics, work, and social justice while “working in the trenches.” I had only a spell in the trenches spending five summers laboring in a chemical plant while going to university. This work plus an academic scholarship provided the funds to attend a land grant institution (University of Iowa) after completing a public high school education.

No doubt from the urging of my mother, I pursued educational goals without any special talent for academics as athletics came more naturally. I studied hard in high school and college, while receiving no free passes at either level because I am not easy to take.  I am in your face challenging (as is true in my writing) to those reliant on special crutches, who expect gain without pain, success without failure, and a comfortable lifestyle without any effort.

The masses don’t like upstarts who succeed especially while choosing to be different. Jealousy and envy and a potpourri of justifiers surface when driven by a “compare and compete” mania.  This sponsors imitation, which is a weakness of critical thinking. So, outliers are finding a way outside the main stream, not expecting anyone to carry their baggage or displaying any interest in carrying other people’s. They prefer to think creatively knowing to think otherwise corrupts everyone involved.

My da once told me I’d never make it because I had too much asshole in me. My mother responded, “Asshole or not, Ray, if Jimmy brings something new to the table that is wanted, rest assured, they’ll find a place for him,” and she was of course right as my long career has shown.

In high school, taking the toughest courses, I was an “A” student, and went up for “National Honor Society” every semester from my sophomore year on, and never made it, whereas my Beautiful Betty (BB) made it on her first try. I was in the top 10 percent of my high school graduating class, and made every honor society offered in undergraduate through graduate school, being elected into Phi Beta Kappa at Iowa, an honor only 1 percent of college graduates achieve.

Academic honors are based on academic achievement, not personality.

Charles, unfortunately, much of life is however based on personality, on being connected, or in the desirable crowd, not simply achievement. Read J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography, “American Prometheus,” and you will see it happens to our geniuses as well as ordinary sorts like myself.

Charles, I have often thought that you and William L. Livingston IV are the only geniuses I know, personally. Like Walt Whitman, you are cut from a common stock. The same is true of Ben Franklin, another genius simpatico with Whitman.

Whitman used poetry in the “celebration of self” to create a new prosody; Franklin used curiosity to demonstrate the source of electricity with his kite, using humor and guile to create his niche in history with his diplomatic skills in Paris during the American Revolution.  This helped to transform a rebellious people into the mindset of a nation.

You have used the celebration of self-university through self-initiative, which is what learning is about whether experienced formally or informally.

My parents were staunch Democrats, my mother a devote Roman Catholic, saying her Rosary every day, while my da identified with the Irish Roman Catholic culture but preferred, with his Irish cronies, to take false comfort in being dealt an unfair hand by being Irish, making no attempt to change their circumstances.  I did, and have had the life I have enjoyed using my world, small as it is, as my learning zone.

I have no plans to contest what you have said, or to persuade you to think otherwise, knowing people who think just as passionately obverse to your views, and they are, like you, equally nice people.

Economic and political systems change with war or when they are no longer useful or relevant. It has been so for the past 2,000 years. Our time is no different. Free public education is more than 100 years old and yet 30 million Americans cannot read these words. Since public education is free many if not the majority look on it as a right rather than the privilege that it is.

Many of these nonreaders are immigrants, people who don’t want to assimilate the American culture or its traditions, such as learning English, observing its sacred and secular holidays, or going to school. They want to continue living in their conclaves as if they are still “back home.”

Consequently, we have cultural and societal conflict in our cities and small communities rife with violence. In the midst of this insanity, some politicians want to offer free college education to all Americans as if this is a solution when a quarter of Americans don’t appreciate free public education.

There are cheaters at the top, but cheaters at the bottom as well. The former CEO of Wells Fargo was recently fined $17.5 million for encouraging employees to create false accounts to provide a fake bottom line. And yes, the 1 percent control the wealth of the United States; and yes, Walmart and MacDonald’s do not provide a living wage, but these businesses are not built to provide a living wage, essentially offering entry level jobs, like I had at the A&P Supermarket when I was a boy.

When you have a permissive society, when the culture looks for what it doesn’t have with hard eyes on those who do, a President, a Congress or a Corporation is expected to assuage angst and anxiety as surrogate parent.

Statistics and analytics, notwithstanding, communism is the extreme of socialism and fascism of capitalism. Democrats, incidentally, became a political power when they engineered the repeal of prohibition. Ironically, there was more drinking during prohibition than after its repealed. Go figure!

Still, you are right. Your generation is moving off stage; mine has already departed. The masses ultimately move the dial either to self-responsibility or self-absorption.  Painting a President as the epitome of evil or his election as illegitimate has the taste of sour grapes. How can one person who came into office only three years ago be held responsible for the nation’s decline since the 1960s?

With reference to Artificial Intelligence or AI, it started its creep into our midst in the 1930s, spirited by the code busters in WWI and WWII. As a result, today we have robotics, drones, and automatic assembly lines, invasive ubiquitous surveillance, laptops, iPhones, the Internet, automobiles without drivers, and airline pilots “managing” automated electronic dashboards. These pilots, always suing for more pay and benefits, have jobs that have become as anachronistic as coal tenders to railroad locomotives after diesel fuel replaced that function. These sinecure positions in the engineer’s cabin still existed for thirty years after they became redundant. 

We have had nearly 100 years to prepare for this information electronic invasion, but our schools, churches, businesses, workplaces, homes, and, indeed, our politicians still live in nostalgia forever denying encroaching reality, which is now here.

It seems unreasonable to blame this all on a sitting President, or the Republican Party, religion in general or the church in particular, or on the rich. Fully 3 to 4 billion people believe in and practice some form of religion, and that is half the world’s population, while half of Americans are either Republicans or Independents who are equally inclined to paint economic issues as black and white as are many Democrats.

It doesn’t make any difference when society is out of sync because nothing diminishes polarity. 

My generation, The Great Depression Generation preceded the “Spoiled Brat” generation of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, into the cynical generations that have followed, who believe in nothing and are willing to ignore the nation in its free fall.

Even members of my own generation, when I was a sacker at the A&P Supermarket, forced to lie about my age when I was 14, saying I was 16, to get a job to help support the family, already nearly 6’2” tall, people would ask, “Why do you always have a book in yours hands? Don’t you know we’re all going to be blown to smithereens by the atomic bomb?” This ambiguity that there is no point to anything has gotten legs.

My philosophy of life is to leave something that might prove useful. I have no interest in recruiting people to this or any other philosophy while I suspect I write for a generation not yet born.

Finally, in a conversation with Stanley Reeves, an educator, the Afterword posits the idea the controller and the controlled are one and the same in The Worker, Alone!

Stanley:

"I wish we could think of the controller as the leader. It is my belief that the majority of people will respond to good leadership. They resent being managed. . . controlled. You suggest a changed society may take a century. Are we sure enough of the right course? Can we remain firm of resolve for that long? Not trying doesn't present a very pretty picture. It seems a given that to succeed managers and workers must share each step of the process. As to consultants, shouldn't they be part of the process instead of outside it?"

With control, Stanley, as with everything, it starts with the indi­vidual. The individual is the controller, or the leader, if you prefer, or of that which is controlled, which is himself. The two cannot be separated. The individual cannot depend on a "leader" to rescue him from chaos and disorder. It is his individual responsibility.

A leader can only symbolize what is already established. There are no miracles. Should this be construed as minimizing the tra­ditionally understood power of the leader, per se, in leadership, so be it.

Leadership has attempted to buy, bargain, cajole and/or coerce workers into the desired behavior without success. The quest for freedom, control and order rests with the worker, alone.

Control is a sequential product of order, and order comes from within, one person at a time.  The multiple of this process leads to communal order.  And so it is as well for life in a world out of sync with its times.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

THE ROAD MOST TRAVELED

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 29, 2006


Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist


I’m living the American Dream!

Taylor Hicks, Winner of the “American Idol” singing contest during the television’s May 2006 sweeps.  More than 50 millions Americans voted in the finals of this contest.


NOTE: This is taken from the PROLOGUE of my new book “NOWHERE MAN” in “NOWHERE LAND.” The manuscript is with my agent looking for a publisher.

Society appears to be coming apart at its cultural seams. Shattering dissembling fear is on the rampage. People are acting in strange ways. The psychological plates of faith and rationality are shifting tectonically with little notice. Noticed are natural disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, mudslide, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes, reminding man something is amiss. Weather has become the most important news of the day.

Yet man insists he is in charge. Nature is his domain to control. He imposes regularity, consistency, continuity, and conformity in defiance of Mother Nature’s intrinsic rhythm in his quest to subdue her to his bidding. Nature erupts with a vengeance in defiance of this conceit in one natural disaster after another.

So, does he wake up one morning, finally seeing the light, saying, “The world is not as I see it; the world I have constructed is in chaos, my existence in ruins; I must act differently?”

No, he moves out of the real and quietly into the dreamlike. He does this in a way that makes him think nothing has changed. He becomes inauthentic to himself and his world. He moves into “Nowhere Land” as “Nowhere Man.”

The indicators are always there, sometimes subtle such as erosion over time of an entire coastline or shockingly tragic such as Hurricane Katrina. Katrina set off alarm bells, which instead of waking man from his utopian dream seem to drive him further into it. But it is not only natural disasters that can drive man further from himself. Sometimes it is the diversion of an entertaining novel such as "The Da Vinci Code" (2003) written by Dan Brown, which has provided welcome escape from the real to contemplate the myths surrounding Jesus. It is easy to debate what has no definitive answer.

Still, even so, timing is everything. Take novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930). He was dying and wrote a controversial novel of Jesus titled "The Man Who Died" (1928). Lawrence believed his Christian culture had impoverished and deranged Western man. The Man Who Died was his attempt to draw attention to this fact in this provocative work of fiction. With profound spiritual insight, deep reverence, and sense of blood kinship and sympathy for the crucified Jesus, Lawrence humanizes him beyond the Cross. He chose to see his final fulfillment in perfected and untroubled physical love with a woman named Madeleine. Lawrence writes:

"Risen from the dead, he had realized at last that the body, too, has its little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was a virgin, in recoil from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity is a form of greed. Now he knew that he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take, and with whom he could mingle his body."

This book created not a ripple. Why was that? Lawrence was a giant literary figure of his time, a voice of liberation for his boldness, while Brown is an adventure novelist and hardly an intellectual. Lawrence failed to provoke because it was not the right time or circumstances. Society, might it be said, was not quite mad enough? The madness enveloping society then was just breaking free of rigorous Puritanical convention with Sigmund Freud in the mix. Had Lawrence said that Jesus had died and married and had progeny it would hardly have been reported. Critics might have said, “Well, that’s Lawrence,isn't it?” and left it at that with readers doing the same.

The timing was off for religious hysteria. The timing is right for it now. The world has grown much smaller with three billion more souls and with more technology to drive these souls further from each other and from themselves . . . into “Nowhere Land.” There is less prudence, less sensual control, less reverence of persons. The American Catholic Church, alone, has paid billions in retribution to scarred individuals abused, sometimes decades ago, by the religious, mainly priests.

It has become a time not only of uncertainty, but a time when relationships are less naturally reinforcing. They are now more contrived and devious. It has become a time when becoming somebody is more important than being someone. It has become a time when life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are only words on a scroll and often mean the exact opposite in practice. It has become Orwell’s “1984,” only in the twenty-first century. It has become a time when rights are confused with privileges and lives are wasted in extravagant behavior.

So, what should we do? A big first step would be to accept that it has happened; that its source is not “out there,” but in the duplicitous heart of man. Resolution is not to be found in robotics, MP3’s, cell phones, iPods or other digital miracles of the times, but in the naked acceptance that man is increasingly anxious and has lost his moral compass.

What of morality? That is a good question. Morality that is constructed for man with the Koran, the Bible, Talmud, I-Ching, the Tao, or Confucian ethics has proven the road less taken, corrupting these sacred texts with contrary objectives to their respective tenets. Morality is in the mind of the times. The morality of these times is essentially amoral if not immoral. You don’t bomb abortion clinics, suicide bomb innocent civilians, or preemptively invade sovereign states if conventional morality is intact. The problem is much simpler, however, than a case of morality versus amorality.

Morality is not on trial. Civility is, that is, arbitrary standards of behavior are on trial. Lifestyle is killing our planet. We live a bizarre superficial existence and will do anything to escape responsibility for our plight. Fifty million residence of the United States voted for their choice on television’s “American Idol,” a fact that got front-page coverage in local and national print and television outlets in May 2006, while only 100 million citizens voted in the national election for president of the United States in 2004. Fame is apparently more important than purpose, fluff more commanding than substance. We live in the prison of our minds, which appears a surreal playground of frivolous images. D. H. Lawrence in Apocalypse (1931):

"Man thought and still thinks in images. But now our images have hardly any emotional value. We always want a “conclusion,” and end, we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full stop. This gives us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in stages, like our sentences, and every full stop is a milestone that marks our “progress” and our arrival somewhere. On and on we go, for the mental consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to."

This mania for getting somewhere, being someone, soaring above the crowd has only driven us deeper into “Nowhere Land.” This is apparent with graphic clarity, not as a question of morality, but as an expression of improvident waste. Society’s “Wonder of the World” is a garbage dump, and we are all heedless contributors to its construction. If sin there is, and I see no profit in that speculation, then waste is the only sin: waste of talent, waste of time, waste of social chemistry, waste of energy, waste of spirit, and waste of reason.

Taboo has been lifted from our behavioral grammar. There is no ideal, no consensus benchmark, everything is fluid. To force an ideal on man at this time is not to gain his attention much less energy to grapple with the problem. It would only make him more defensive, chasing him deeper into “Nowhere Land.” A better strategy might be to describe the problem by telling a story, letting the reader decide whether he is on this road most taken, or living compatibly with Nature, on the road less taken.

Man is blessed with a mind, a conscience, and a memory with the ability to displace conscience and erase memory allowing him to act as if he is above everything that imprisons him, a god almighty that needs no other. We know this is so because we are a society of strangers who are as much self-estranged as xenophobic. We have lost our connection with the cosmos. Again Lawrence observes in Apocalypse:

"We have lost the sun. And he only falls on us and destroys us, decomposing something in us: the dragon of destruction instead of the life-bringer. And we have lost the moon, the cool, bright, ever-varying moon. It is she who would caress our nerves, smooth them with the silky hand of her glowing, soothe them into serenity again with her cool presence. For the moon is the mistress . . . The sun, the moon, the planets, instead of being the communers, the comminglers, the life-givers, the splendid ones, the awful ones, had already fallen into a sort of deadness; they were the arbitrary, almost mechanical engineers of fate and destiny. The Christians escaped this prison by denying the body altogether. But alas, these little escapes! especially the escapes by denial! – they are the most fatal of evasions. Christianity and our ideal civilization have been one long evasion. It has caused endless lying and misery, misery such as people know today, not of physical want but of far more deadly vital want. Better lack bread than lack life. The long evasion, whose only fruit is the machine! We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is as sackcloth."

The God of Christianity, as Nietzsche has said, is dead, replaced by secularism where the cosmos is something to study with no since of divine connection to it. Secular society that has replaced God in the god of science is on trial. There is little sense that we are healthy, happy, hopeful, or humble. Instead, there is more evidence we are arrogant, solipsistic and vain, displaying a confidence that we do not feel but can only construct as an illusion to itself.

It is so easy, and this is not new but is common to man for millennia, and that is to do what is expedient and satisfying in the now, and to give little mind to consequences in the future. We have split the atom and now find we have split our conscience from ourselves. Rather than rethinking the use of nuclear power, or indeed nuclear weapons, scientists at the WASTE ISOLATION PILOT PLANT, one of the United States’ repositories for long-lasting waste from nuclear weapon production, are preparing a warning system designed to be legible and understandable for 500 future generations, marked “Stay Out” forever. Future shock, according one panelist, is real: “Civilization is so interdependent that any massive global catastrophe might lead to reversion to at least a pre-industrial era.” Does such a warning resonate with man today? Not if he is in “Nowhere Land.”

If man were to stand his ground as Jesus is alluded to have, advocating to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s, and mean it not only in words but show it in deeds, we would be a different society and these would be different times. The same might be said of followers of Moses, Mohamed, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, and all the other men who stepped outside “Nowhere Land” with their eyes on the road less traveled.

We have been trapped in our minds, as Krishnamurti has put it, intoxicated with ideas to show us the way out of “Nowhere Land.” His followers wanted to make him their Messiah, which he refused, reminding them, “he who is lost cannot be found by another.” He saw the mind the source of this handicapping problem, a mind that is never quiet but always engaged, a mind that enslaves and imprisons itself in an eternal "now" serenaded by constant noise.

Krishnamurti believed the quiet mind is the only path to peace, fulfillment and freedom. This is a mind that is at home in the body and in rhythm with the universe. It is not a prideful mind, not an acquisitive mind, not a self-conscious mind, nor an aggressive mind, but a mind that is one with itself and Nature. Indeed, the self no longer exists in such a mind. It is a mind that weeps and wonders and moves like the metronome to the syncope of the river with no beginning or end, and which survives the torrents of the time to find its home not in “Nowhere Land,” nor as “Nowhere Man,” but as man, the animal, a creature who has much in common with other creatures, and in which these animals have as much right to exist as does he.

God is not an anthropomorphic being riding the clouds with His outstretched hands but is more likely in a mythic sense a Universal Mind enclosed in the universe and connected like a laser being to the human heart. The secret of being is that this connection gives us the opportunity of being as opposed to becoming, of creating as opposed to destroying. It provides the freedom to connect with others or to detach us from them. This Universal Presence is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is in our human hearts that some call “God,” and religions construct road rules, that has become the road less traveled.

The road more traveled is the one marked off with the “seven deadly sins,” the road of disease, pain, war, and pestilence with a God above with folded arms looking down in righteous judgment. It is the God that atheists and agnostics reject. They see the “god within” and the Universal Mind have a rhythm that has nothing to do with this road more traveled, but everything to do with the rhythm of the human heart in sync with the cosmos. If man moves to the rhythm of this cosmic beat, then everything in the micro and macro sense must be in syncope with it. Joseph Campbell captures the Indian sense of this in The Mythic Image (1974):

"One Brahma year is reckoned as 360 Brahma days and nights, each night and each day consisting of 12,000,000 divine years. But each divine year, in turn, consists of 360 human years; so that one full day and night of Brahma, or 24,000,000 times 360 or 8,640,000,000 human years, just as in our own system of reckoning the 24 hours of a day contain 86,400 seconds – each second corresponding to the length of time, furthermore, of one heartbeat of a human body in perfect physical condition. Thus it appears not only that the temporal order written on the faces of our clocks is the same as that of the Indian god Vishnu’s dream, but also that there is built into this system the mythological concept of a correspondence between the organic rhythms of the human body as a microcosm and the cycling eons of the universe, the macrocosm."

Mystics of other cultures might remind us that human beings are kin to the moose and elk, the buffalo and bear, swamp rat and beaver, carp and eagle, and all other organic and inorganic manifestations of Nature from the tree to soy grass, from parched earth to fertile plains, from ranging mountains to cascading glaciers, from polar bears to seals, from penguins to porpoises, from sublime transcending splendor to incredibly shocking conflagration; from time to timeliness, from day to night, from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, from white man to black man, from yellow man to brown man, from red man to all combinations thereof; from the East to West, North to South, from the small village to the refugee camp in Africa, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the banks of the Amazon, from ox and plow farming to electronic robotic agribusiness. They would say, “This is his entire home. There is no where else for him to go.”

“Nowhere Man” would deny this and take comfort in wealth accumulation where he imagines he cannot be touched, cannot be hurt, that he is above the fray, outside its limitations and demands, only to find himself a resident of “Nowhere Land.” Members of this community subscribe to the same deceit that they are different taking satisfaction in that illusion when we are all the same. We all are born, live for a little while, and die, fertilizing the earth with our nitrogen. Then as Hindu or Buddha mystics might suggest we satisfy our Karma being born again as a deer or a tree or a horse or a child in a home of a mother without affection, or a home that is like stepping into royalty with a golden spoon in the child’s mouth. But it is all the same the mystics would tell us, all part of the same recycling, a perpetual transmigration of ethical consequences to satisfy the debt of our souls.

Much as we would like to think otherwise, we are more alike than different, meeting ourselves every day in the person of another. Were we to accept our connection to everyone and everything on this small planet chances are we would act more like owners than renters.

So, with this litany as background, I move on to my story in this little book. What do I hope to gain in the writing? Nothing. Then what do I hope to realize? Again, the answer is nothing. So, why write the book? Like a burr in the saddle, a sliver in the toe, a pain in the neck, an ache in the stomach, a flutter in the heart, I am aware my days are numbered as they are for us all, and the urge to share this perspective has become frankly overwhelming. What I say may have little moment with you, the reader, but I say it nonetheless, knowing in any case words don’t move the world, only deeds that translate into action do.

Lifestyle is killing our planet and us with it. Likewise, a change in lifestyle will redeem us, not modern medicine. It is lifestyle that is corrupting us and causing these tectonic shifts in the fissures of our minds, giving birth to disruptive overindulgent. An associated Press poll (2006) found the United States is an “impatient nation,” growing antsy after five minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes max in a line. People complain about Department of Motor Vehicle lines, post office lines, waiting in check out lines in supermarkets and discount stores. Veteran residence of communities threaten “to move on” to somewhere else.

Early in the last century the United States was 100 million; early in the twenty-first century it is nearly 300 million. Before the beginning of the next century it will be 500 million. Where will people go? The answer is already apparent despite the frantic hat tricks of technologists and merchandisers. The impatient nation is taken up residence in “Nowhere Land” with identity cards with their pictures on them for “Nowhere Man.”

So, I invite you to consider my little thesis, which you may reject out of hand, or gain new insight into the “you” that you are that rides the rails of life every day. Am I right? Am I wrong? It is not for me to make that determination, but for you, the reader. To that end, I wish you well.

* * * * *

Monday, January 13, 2020

THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ of INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL and POWER OF PEOPLE

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

© January 9, 2020 

(Originally published January 8, 2010)

Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)

Abstract

The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool. What is different is that it is of a primarily intuitive rather than cognitive design. There are no algorithms or mathematical models of verification, yet it is the most authentic tool of a discipline that has suffered from the beginning with an identity crisis.

OD grew out of a need to bring some order and comprehension to the complex organization, which grows more incomprehensible with the passing of time. Managers and management attempt to give it direction and purpose while becoming increasingly atavistic and anachronistic.

OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management. The function of HR is instrumental (productivity) while that of OD is terminal (continuous growth & development). HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development, firing of people), while OD is an assessment tool of the integrity of leadership. HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the integrity of the organizational leadership.

HR reflects the values of senior management. OD represents the conscience of organization. HR is primarily cognitive; OD is primarily intuitive. HR reflects the moral authority, while OD reflects the ethical authority of organization. Being moral is a required operational good. Being ethical is an optional good.

HR revolves around expedient relations in which obligations depend on nothing more than the shared experiences of the moment. Expedient relations are instrumental, mechanized, means-to-ends, fitting, good, timely and useful – in other words, a resource.

OD revolves around enduring relations in which workers are dependent on a special relationship with others and the past – in other words, with history. Expedient relations represent a morality of demand. Enduring relations represent the ethics ask of relationships. The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership, the obligation to remember people and events from the past that gave integrity and purpose to the organization. That said, corporate memory is at the heart of corporate identity, and OD is all about corporate identity. Still, the metaphor of memory is just that, a metaphor.

Corporations have no minds of the past. The corporate memory consists of stories from the past, kept alive in the present to draw on as a basis for the willingness of workers to work a life in corporate togetherness.

OD as the conscience of the organization is at once possessor of the rich legacy of memories, while maintainer of the history that provides continuity with the future. This depends on the value and not the fact of community, on the actual vitality of organization and not on the propaganda of its existence. As such, a new dimension of enterprise is called for that represents the irony of being less instrumental but more relevant. It is the organization’s total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning that has placed it at risk. This is evident in the tedium of crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking being stubbornly employed at the expense of the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking.

OD exercises the unconscious reservoir of possibilities, while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ postulates that the unconscious has an enormous teleological sense and essence that moves it towards ethical goals, that it has a real sense of what is happening beyond rational explanatory limits.

Introduction to the Idea

We are in a 2,000 year old cognitive groping of reality, and it is extremely doubtful that the empirical evidence upon which the Fisher Paradigm is based, leastwise in the short term will prove convincing to those obsessively cognitive.

Given that anticipated objection, I would suggest that most leaders of science, government, education, the religious, as well as of business and industry are using the Fisher Paradigm, but are unaware of it. The efforts of this brief is to encourage its use and build confidence in its exercise by providing the framework and context of its design. It is a diagnostic tool available to lay people as well as professionals.

The Fisher Paradigm proposes that virtually everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or present a roadblock to learned experience, as can cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:

· Immanence – something “inside the individual.”

· Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”

I further argue that the content of consciousness contains more than what it actually contains. There is something invisible in everything that is visible, an absence at the heart of all presence. Yet, because of cultural programming, there is the tendency to view rich tangible experience exclusively in logical, cognitive, intellectual and scientific terms because that is how answers are found.

We are far better at describing something than anticipating its happening, far better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, far better at generating data than pursuing ideas, far more deductive than inductive, far more inclined to critical than creative thinking, far more disposed to protect sacred biases than to move beyond them, far more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, far more given to ape the organizations (personalities) of others than to uncover our own indigenous essence. And I say for reason.

We are in a world of constant change and the desire is for stability and permanence both of which have an instrumental focus. Our senses are constantly bombarded with feelings that expose the arbitrariness of this mind set. Why is that?

Without having to think at all, we perceive certain structures that in the truest sense are not given to our awareness. They are assumed because we are taught such assumptions. What we sense, what pounds at our subconscious to breakthrough is expressed in this litany: “Did I really see what I believe I saw, might I be fooling myself?”

What we usually do when faced with this dilemma is to reject our intuition, our insight into the moment, rather than integrate the disparate information into a conceptual framework of some palpable significance and of use to us. We fall back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says what is “is.”

This is a pardonable sin for most everyone, but not for OD practitioners. If OD embraces its doubt, if it ignores the intuitive sense boiling in it for attention, the experience OD believes it has had will not be really its, since without being aware of it OD will have been literally “outside itself,” or “beside itself,” but not in possession of the insight crying for attention. OD would have been in a state of transcendence but either unable or unwilling to grasp its significance because “it was just too, too weird.” Consider the cube as illustration of this phenomenon.

A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three sides of the cube. Our immanence or “something inside” tells us there are three faces, not a cube itself. But if we embrace our transcendence or “something outside” in clear subjective reporting, we know we are looking at a cube. We don’t say, “I am looking at three faces and deduce I’m looking at a cube.” So, it is not false to say that our perceptions contain more than they contain.

Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace it. That is why OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing have a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work.

But alas, what prevents this so often from happening is the barrier of cultural programming. The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Several significant others from parents to teachers to preachers and on define the individual before learned experience kicks in. To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in opposing the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics, and more recently by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman whose playful vision reinvented quantum mechanics and grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him.2

Both these accomplished scientists relied more on their internal dialogue than the constraints of their cultural programming to define themselves and orchestrate their minds to new scientific truths.

The Fisher Paradigm acknowledges this barrier and proposes a model meant to engage insight, promote intuition, and integrate this into conceptual understanding. Such understanding is only possible when transcendence is realized. The Fisher Paradigm promotes this understanding by postulating that learned experience centers around three discrete spheres of influence: personality, geographic and demographic. These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses with understanding beyond the visible three surfaces of the cube.

Case in Point

Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the most remarkable in recent times. James Watson and James Crick were co-discoverers of the DNA molecule. That enormous breakthrough was managed through conventional painstaking laboratory research. This is well documented in Watson’s bestselling book The Double Helix (1969), or with methodology representative of the prototype of what we expect from scientists. Not so for Kary B. Mullis, Nobel laureate for Chemistry, 1993.

Mullis departs from the furrowed brow stabbing in the dark of this mystifying lot to be more like everyman. Yet all he did was invent the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science.

Mullis is a surfer, a bar hopper, strip club patron, veteran of Berkeley in the 1960s, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to fit the mold of “scientist,” or to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, yet embraces the chiaroscuro of life in all its shades and patterns, not from a distance but as part of him.

In his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (2000) he challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma and every other kind of authority as he reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind. His words fit comfortably in the Fisher Paradigm © ™:

Suddenly, I knew how to do it. ”Holy shit!” I hissed and let off the accelerator. The car coasted into a downhill turn. I pulled off. A giant buckeye stuck out from the hill. It rubbed against the window where Jennifer, my girlfriend was asleep. I found an envelope and a pencil in the glove compartment. Jennifer wanted to get moving. I told her something incredible had just occurred to me. She yawned and leaned against the window to go back to sleep.

We were at mile marker 46.58 on Highway 128 (Malibu, California), and we were at the very edge of the dawn of the age of PCR. I could feel it. I wrote hastily and broke the lead. Then I found a pen. I confirmed (my intuition). I must have smiled. I could still smell the buckeyes, but they were drifting a long way off. I pulled back onto the highway, and Jennifer made a sound of approval . . .

About a mile down the canyon, I pulled off again. The thing had just exploded again. Not only could I make a zillion copies, but they would always be the same size. I had just solved the two major problems in DNA chemistry. Abundance and distinction. And I had done it in one stroke. I stopped the car at a nice comfortable turnout and took my time working my way through the consequence. Everybody on Earth who cared about DNA would want to use it. It would spread into every biology lab in the world. I would be famous. I would get the Nobel Prize.3

The Fisher Paradigm is common yet rare, common because the innate capacity is there for everyone, rare because it goes against societal cultural programming and expectations. If anything, society kills the intuitive drive, as the process of unabashed intuition is too incomprehensible to contemplate. This is displayed in the Washington Post’s crass assessment of Dancing Naked in the Mind Field on the books back cover:

“Kary Mullis, perhaps the weirdest human ever to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has written a chatty, rambling, funny, iconoclastic tour through the wonderland that is his mind.”

Dancing naked in the mind field, indeed. Mullis was considered by his scientific colleagues to be a flake, if not incompetent, for the ways he behaved against how he was expected to behave as a scientist. Thus he was not only able to think outside the box but beyond the limits of what the Scots like to call the meinie or the multitude. He was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically was even more perverse in the scientific community.

The Fisher Paradigm © ™

Stated simply, The Fisher Paradigm incorporates the organization whole, its personality, geography and demographics, assimilates this wholeness subconsciously, and comes to understand its insights intuitively.4 From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rationalistic mode, but this is resisted as absorbing the situation whole is fundamental to the process.

Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm registers empirically on the reader’s mind, the temptation is to say, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” Many have said that of the Mullis discovery. This doesn’t make it any less cogent.

There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic: between the person, the place and the thing. These spheres may be derived from the organization’s:

· Personality (person) profile: personal eccentricities, culture, circumstances…

· Geographic (place) profile: situational dynamics, time, circumstances…

· Demographic (thing) profile: population, age, gender, education, status, circumstances…


Each of these spheres of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two, where they intercept is the domain of intuition, which alerts the observer to what is actually happening if the observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight. For this to occur the observer becomes the observed, inseparable from the dynamic. Like a heat sensor, the observer is drawn through the distracting camouflage always present to the target, and becomes one with the target in an eruption of understanding. Take the familiar story of Archimedes and his principle as reported by Plutarch:

Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a way to compute the proportion of gold in King Heiron’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leaped up as one possessed, crying eureka! (I’ve found it”). After repeating this several times, he went his way.5

The Sicilian mathematician (ca. 287 – 212 B.C.) was the classic absentminded professor, a brilliant thinker often oblivious to the real world and its expectations. He died while tracing a geometric diagram in the dust, as Rome was conquering Syracuse. So absorbed was he in his speculation that he didn’t hear the command of a Roman soldier to rise; the soldier, infuriated, ran him through.

Rationale for the Fisher Paradigm©™

Most briefly, the Fisher Paradigm is art rather than science, impressionistic rather than cognitive. Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of play as plan. Given this, the Fisher Paradigm doesn’t separate cause from effect, subject from object, thinking from feeling. It is consistent with Thought and Extension as proposed by Spinioza.6

Spinoza infers natural order must be undivided to be comprehended. When he was tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, he was one with the diagram and not from it, "outside the box."

He was outside the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of that world. The fundamental features of that order, as we perceive them, emerge from within that order, not separate from it. The observer isn’t considering the subject observed from a distance but is integral to it.

The Fisher Paradigm abandons the bucket theory of the mind, as in the philosophy of Descartes and other empiricists, according to which, in perception, ideas arrive through the senses into a receptacle, or bucket, where they are processed. This is the wrong picture.

The Fisher Paradigm encompasses Edward de Bono’s "lateral thinking."7 It argues that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box, offering no opportunity to think outside it.

The emphasis, de Bono claims, is to lionize critical thinking, which is limited to the box or what is already known, whereas lateral thinking introduces the possibility of creative thinking, which doesn’t search for answers but creates them out of experience and what lies beyond.

While The Fisher Paradigm shows evidence of following the prospects of creativity, it does so by thinking with the whole body, not simply the mind.

That said, there is no perception without activity and thought. All perception is in an interaction with an eternal reality, a reality more often intuitively sensed than cognitively understood, especially as it relates to persons, places and things. I use the plural here because that defines organization, which indeed has a personality, geography and encompasses demographics. It is a mistake to see an organization more different than what it is, a human entity.

This separates intuitive OD from all other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious in being aware of itself as the subject initiating movement and observing the environment. OD’s knowledge of its own movement is not primarily to be found in observation, but in its sense of its own purpose and intention, which is thought, and which follows the laws of thought but intuitively so.

This subjective knowledge is continuously available to OD, whenever OD is conscious of the wholeness embodied in people, places and things.

Trying to understand OD as a straightforward, naturalistic description of action is bound to disappoint and paint the wrong picture. What people are doing is not what OD must see, but the metaphysical connection of how this picture fits together to perceive what is actually taking place beyond appearances.

This means OD must accustom itself to the fact that mind-body-soul are intertwined in Thought and Extension as two universal features in the common order of Nature. This relationship is an active, involved interaction and not a dispassionate observer disconnected from the subject at play.

Presentation of The Fisher Paradigm in Everyday Life

Recently I accompanied my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I watched a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim physique and prominent calves that suggested a jogger. His salt and pepper beard gauged his age at about 46.

The woman was tan, trim and athletic looking in a blouse, shorts and sneakers, age about mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about thirteen, a little on the heavy side, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and sneakers.

The man kept bringing clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing. The woman didn’t participate, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, forcing a smile whenever the man looked at her.

When my wife acquired her purchase, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy. Tell me what you see.”

“I see a family shopping. Why?”

“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a minute. Now tell me what you see.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you want and it wouldn’t change anything. So, tell me! What do you see?”

“I see a father and his son, and a woman not the mother. The boy is from up north, visiting his father and his trophy wife, and she would like to be elsewhere.”

“Okay, smart guy,” she said, then walked over and started a conversation with the woman, who was even younger looking up close.

“Handsome boy!” my wife opened. “What is he 12, 13? You don’t look old enough to be his mother.”  

“I’m not,” she answered tartly and then recovered quickly. “Donny is my husband’s son visiting us from Chicago.” Then to put a lid on the conversation added, “We have no children.” With that, my wife politely withdrew.

“How did you do that?” she asked shaking her head.

“You already know,” I answered. “You were just too busy shopping.” Then I explained.

It involved marrying the mind to the moment to become one with what was being observed in terms of the three spheres of influence to understand what they implied together. It is the clash of these spheres that can produce a chain reaction of intuition.

· Personality profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;

· Geographic profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;

· Demographic profile – father clearly of an age to have a teenage son, not the woman, man and woman in comparable physical health, not the boy. But it was the boy’s pallid complexion, which spelled separation.


The Fisher Paradigm is designed to advance intuition. It provides an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting problems in impressionistic terms that OD practitioners, executives and change agents can understand and aptly apply without confusion. A more in depth discussion is provided in the Fisher trilogy:

· Personality Profile

The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (The Delta Group Florida, 1999) deals with the taboos that invade our consciousness and throw us off the scent of what we actually observe and experience.

Social, cultural and psychological conditioning blinds us from perceiving accurately what we see as we are all programmed to reflect our belief system, our values and even what interests us.

We have been led to believe that "you search for excellence," when you can find excellence only by creating it out of your own experience. We are searchers and solution driven when this reduces our lives to collapsing cycles to see and experience only what we have been programmed to realize. This is our reality.

· Geographic Profile

Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press, 1998) deals with the social termites burrowing silently into the infrastructure of our organization life weakening its efficacy to the point of being too late for damage control.

The culprit? The geography of fear generated in precipitous decision-making that spawns the venom of hate, contempt, envy and jealousy that can creep into existence to poison the collective will of a company and its workers to lead to ultimately to its demise.

· Demographic Profile

Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker (AuthorHouse, 2000) deals with labor and management not being on the same page. The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, and yet most workers are still treated as well paid serfs.

Something is wrong when society is blessed with the most able workforce in the history of man, yet managers act as if leadership is their exclusive domain in the dispensing of orders with the expectation of obsequious compliance without complaint. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share the guilt.

The Fisher Paradigm is not theoretical but empirical. I have been practicing this paradigm for more than forty years. The chronology of my OD experiences with it that follows is representative of what led to this epiphany.


Thayer Maxwell & How Intuitive OD First Surfaced

Three weeks into my new job with Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, and a comparable time away from the security of the research laboratory with Standard Brands, Inc., I am told by my district manager, “I don’t think you’re cut out for this type of work.”

Only the previous week when asked by my area manager, whom I was traveling with, to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask the accounts what they were experiencing or needed; didn’t give reasons to upgrade services; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be a big deal as if that had anything to do with anything.

This was the first time my young family of a wife and two small children had been out of Iowa. She hated Indiana, was homesick and complained, rightly so, that I was making less money than in the laboratory.

My district manager's words stung me like a slap in the face. “We’ll give you some accounts to service,” he said. “You’re solid technically, but you should find something else within the month.”

From somewhere in my reeling mind I asked if I could call on competitor accounts. “If you like,” he answered with annoyance as if my departure were already a fait accompli.

One of the first competitor accounts I called on was Philco in Connersville, Indiana. The plant was situated on a seven acre rambling plant manufacturing refrigerators. Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, had been servicing this account free of challengers for decades.

The secretary at the reception desk informed me that someone would take me to Thayer Maxwell's office, the plant superintendent.

I am escorted to a glassed enclosed bullpen in the center of this huge factory. Mr. Maxwell is not there. I sit for nearly two hours with a cadre of folks coming and going, always looking for the superintendent, and always leaving frustrated.

The super's desk, chair, as well as cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains are everywhere with papers scattered across the desk, the floor encased in broken floor tiles and even broken glass walls of the bull pen.

Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, severely damaged heat exchangers glared at me with crusted red rust haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, or the super's desk. It made me think of the "morgue of the machine" without even the dignity of chaos.

The extent of my knowledge of Nalco after three-weeks of orientation on chemical water treatment technology at Nalco's Chicago headquarters left me still without a clue as to Nalco's products or their application. Plus, I knew nothing about the business of selling of Nalco’s products or anything else.

Finally, Mr. Maxwell comes in, lights a cigarette, props one leg over the desk, smiles, and says, “Okay, sport, you’ve got five minutes. What you got for me?”

I say without flinching, “I’m going to save your job.”

Mr. Maxwell threw his head back and laughed, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve got spunk.”

Relief registers as his voice tells me he’s not angry, but amused. I back around his desk, and he follows.

I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of a facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training. A red marker is used to indicate areas where he’s having trouble as revealed by the samples across his office.

This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I don’t show any flashy literature but explain the how and why of his troubles, and talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco can provide. When I finish, he thanks me, lights another cigarette and heads for the door.

“Mr. Maxwell,” I say, the timber of my voice rising, “your operation’s in trouble now.”

I look around the room. “Now! I’ve been sitting here for a long time and heard of breakdowns across the plant.” I pick up a blocked piece of pipe. “This is packed with suspended solids, carryover from the boilers. Not normal. Shouldn’t happen. Give me a three-month trial and I’ll prove it.” My mind is not thinking of what’s in it for me, but solving problems I believe correctable. Perhaps my naked intensity was disarming.

“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.

“I know I can fix this.” I looked about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.

“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I had no idea. I had yet to make a survey, and had never calculated an actual chemical dosage.

“A lot less than it’s costing you now in breakdowns, lost production, and missed schedules, but we’ll have to survey the plant first. That will take a full day.” The “we” is I’ll need the help of my area manager who I had previously disparaged.

“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”

* * * * *

· Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.

· Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.

· Demographic Profile – focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board on the bullpen wall complement 1,200 plant employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.

The trigger to initial intuition

It came from my lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training program. I could see science working here and got excited about the problem solving. Everything I saw and felt (re: persons, places, things) told me the superintendent was overwhelmed, possibly incompetent. Meeting him I sensed his need and exploited it. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Perhaps I thought I had nothing to lose, given my boss’s ultimatum. When I called to inform my boss of the sale, he checked with Philco’s purchasing to confirm the order. Skepticism was not limited to him.

The area manager surveyed the plant with me the next day, shaking his head in disbelief as he calculated the astronomical daily chemical dosages required.

The situation was made even more incredulous when asked by the superintendent to survey Philco’s other two plants in the city and include them in the billing. It was the biggest order in the district’s history by someone within the company for less than two months.

Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year apprenticeship of gradually increasing technical complexity and sales responsibility. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered with sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s product lines. I had neither.

Intuitive OD, which I was using and would continue to use with consistent success made me out to be lucky rather than skilled, which also seems apparent in the following episode.

Thomas Crown Affair

It is two years later and a stifling hot summer in Terre Haute, Indiana with several days at or near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Indiana State University’s campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this 75,000 community.

The summer session is in full swing, but classroom and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on lawns. I see several chemical trucks rigged with acidizing equipment which indicates that air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” with calcium carbonate scaling and units are down.

Acidizing will put these units back in service but only temporarily. Confident in my chemical water treatment technology, I drive to the office of the physical plant.

Mr. Thomas Crown, Superintendent, Plant Engineering is stenciled on the frosted glass door. I knock and he says, “Come in.”

The office is a workplace with a drafting board with white-lined blue pages of architectural drawings, and on the wall framed B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.

There is also a picture of several children of various ethnicity smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, I would imagine ages three to six. Tacked to the wall directly behind the desk is a child’s stick figure drawing that says, “Hi daddy! This is me! This is you!” An American flag is on a stanchion to the left of the desk and another kind of flag I don’t recognize is to the right near the corner.

I’m able to take all this in because Mr. Crown busies himself cutting his nails and doesn’t look up for nearly a minute. When he does, I explain my business noting the activity on campus, and saying this is the perfect time to establish a sound chemical treatment program, which not only would be cost effective but also could eliminate such inconveniences in the future. He listens attentively, and then gives me permission to survey his facilities across the campus and to come back with a recommendation.

Six hours later I return proposing a chemical treatment program including a $10,000 consulting agreement for monthly service calls.

“No way Jose! Board will scream to high heaven with such a proposal. We don’t pay consulting fees.”

I ask for an hour to reconfigure another option. He agrees. Once the new proposal is in his hands, he says, “Be here at 8 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll see if we can do business.”

The next morning I arrive with high expectations. As soon as I enter his office, he hits me instead with his thunder, “Get your ass out of here before I break every bone in your body.” I hesitate, more out of panic than anything. He is a big man, but so am I. “I mean it, God damn it,” he bellows, “this new proposal costs as much as the original only you buried the costs in the chemicals.”

* * * * *

I wasn’t thinking of The Fisher Paradigm or of the three spheres of influence. Yet I was processing information subconsciously. I know because I stood there. I didn’t leave. Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak any more.

I looked at his tired eyes, deep dark circles etched around them in half-moons. I wondered if he’d been to bed and decided he hadn’t. He slumped forward in his chair, stretching his massive arms over his head, and then through his thick black hair. Suddenly he noticed me standing, waved me silently to sit, and then collapsed forward on his desk.

A lapel pin on his jacket became prominent as it bunched up around his bull neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.

“You'er a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted with the hint of a minute sparkle in them. I made the connection of the pin, the unknown flag and the picture of the children of diversity on the wall. “Lions do a lot for kids,” I continued fatuously remembering something about sponsoring children’s hospitals.

For seemingly the longest time, he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the void with words but resisted. Nearly an eternity of two minutes transpired.

“You know ‘bout Lions International?” he asked finally sotto voce, fingering his pin, his voice little more than a whisper.

I shrugged. “Not much. Know of its eye bank. Have a daughter with eye problems.” I felt my answer disappointing. I was wrong.

Instead he broke into a big grin, an upturn smile line across his face. “Giving city a new ambulance tonight.”

“Wow!” I heard myself say.

Then he launched into a spirited history of Lions International, his face flushed with pride. The exercise was cathartic for us both. I jumped when he banged his fist on the desk. “Tell you what! How ‘bout you being my guest at the Terre Haute Club tonight?”

I cowered. “Sure.” But actually I wasn’t. What’s going on here? The guy has gone from rage to rapture just like that! I’d never studied psychology. Something told me, however, to stay cool and quiet during his rage. It helped coming from a home where my da often lost it. I was audience to his fury, one with it, not separate from it. I didn’t become defensive. I couldn’t explain why. I’m not a meek guy. Perhaps I attributed his rage to a lack of sleep, constant system failures, mounting complaints of students and faculty, and perhaps, as well, to a little guilt for deceiving him. But I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time.

At the dinner, he introduced me to everyone from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor as his friend. As we were leaving, he whispered in my ear, “I sent in a blanket order for that stuff you recommended. They’re to rush it overnight. Your boss will be calling you.” He chuckled. “Don’t expect to see your family for a few days.” Then he added in a friendly voice, “Believe me I know the feeling.”


· Personality Profile:

A man is at his wits end with a problem I am trained to handle. His office defines him, efficient, pragmatic, and functional -- his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.

· Geographic Profile:

High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning system failures.

· Demographic Profile:

A student-faculty population of 10,000 unable to function in classrooms or dorms because of these failures spells a crisis situation.

Role of Intuition in Thomas Crown Affair

Initial greeting was warm, open. Candor about the consulting agreement reinforced this. Survey indicated a serious lapse in water treatment application and control. Major revamping translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical program. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively presented. Discussion was expected, but not rage. Intuition told me to weather the rage although I had no such training. Spheres of influence separately were clueless. It was all of them clashing like thunder that submerged me into the problem, not only technically but emotionally.

Culture + Test Kit = Intuitive Symbolism

My success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brought me to the attention of senior management. No one could put a finger on the reason for my success given my unconventional approach. I didn’t sell benefits, didn’t deflect objections or use “penalty of delay” tactics to close sales.

I essentially merged myself with the customer in an attempt to become one with his needs. The vice president of Nalco’s International Division was so intrigued with my success that he one day traveled with me in the field.

At the conclusion of the day, he said, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for me in South Africa?”

Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I could think about it. I did and became mesmerized with the country and its history.

My job in South Africa was to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and the South African Special Chemical Division of South African Explosives, Ltd.

South Africa had no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from forming and dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water was a precious commodity in South Africa with clarification in the gold and diamond mines critical to profitable business.

Nalco had cutting edge technology and products in this field and was anxious to leverage its product lines to full advantage here.

Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, the Alexander Martin Company. They had no college training in either chemistry or business, but had the colonial manners, hauteur and elocution of the British business class.

Likewise, the Alfloc people were mainly British and derived their business acumen primarily from experience. The only extensively college trained people were Afrikaners, mainly associates of South African Explosives. Afrikaners are descendants of the 17th century Dutch settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.

It was 1968 and Afrikaners had control of the South African government while the British still controlled business and industry.

The Afrikaner government, since coming to independence, created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which was rigorously enforced.

Meanwhile, nearly a million Bantu workers would come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in such places as the South African Township of “Soweto.”

This was the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies were now acting temporarily as a technical management team. They asked me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I studied them feeling their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?

“Here is my suggestion,” I offered. “Go back, consider the needs of the field, build your test kit, and come back in two weeks with a recommendation.”

Three days later they presented a Rube Goldberg facsimile of a test kit. It was mainly an Afrikaner test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine," I said, "package it and send it to the field.” They looked at me stunned. “Anything else? If not, good luck!”

It isn’t a month later that radical modifications are made to this basic test kit, and Nalco’s sedimentation test kit is being used without modification. When Nalco’s chairman of the board comes to Johannesburg and asks me to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary.


· Personality Profile.

A clash of cultures was felt from the moment South Africa customs officials at Jan Smuts International airport confiscated Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, A Very Strange Society (1968) to the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendants who looked to England as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of Dutch descendants who considered South Africa home.

Afrikaners in this new company being formed tended to be better educated, yet English speakers occupied most of the leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship was notable between the two peoples with the Bantu majority of the country treated as non-citizens and outside the power grid.

· Geographic Profile.

Apartheid divided the country into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands possessed little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing African men to leave their families to live and work in the industrial centers of Johannesburg, Durban, East London and Cape Town.

Apartheid of a different sort was palpable between British and Afrikaner South Africans in that the Brits showed nearly total indifference towards this majority.

· Demographic Profile.

South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 12 million Bantu, 6 million white (4 million Afrikaner, 2 million British), and 2 million colored including Indians, descendants of indentured workers from India. This newly formed company was slightly more Afrikaner than British.

The voice of intuition speaks to the outsider


Before taking on this assignment, I read all I could about South Africa and found the country’s history surprisingly similar to that of the United States. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers.

Still, my intuition told me I was an intruder. I looked much younger than my years and knew I was not likely to be taken seriously. Therefore, my intuition told me to put the risk of failure on the technical team not realizing I was symbolically telling all employees this was “their company,” not Nalco’s. The action elevated the three diverse companies above their petty differences into a common culture, and what could have been a colossal failure, became a budding success.

Fisher Paradigm © saved my life!

In 1974, I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which occurred in Fairfax County Virginia. A white police officer killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, Virginia, which led to a riot.8

My job was to find the source of this riot, which included interviewing senior officers, detectives and command personnel.

During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of one of these seminars, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa was a Kansas City participant. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play at the Ford Theater.

D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City. A Fairfax County police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when my new friend and I parted. The police officer, however, couldn’t pick me up until 1:30 a.m. I said that was okay, as I was a walker.

This found me briskly walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, a November chill in the air, dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue Hickey Freeman cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece Hickey Freeman suit, wearing black leather gloves.

Suddenly, I noticed three African American youths across the street who were laughing and jiving walking parallel to me. At first, I paid them no mind as eight lanes of traffic separated us, that is, until they raced ahead, crossed the street, and started hanging out at the corner under the light.

Sometime earlier, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed in this area. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that thought crossed my mind.

Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:

· Personality Profile.

Three young people were up to no good and I, being alone, were over matched.

· Geographic Profile.

This was no place for young boys to be out at this hour.

· Demographic Profile.

These three boys were teenagers; I was in my late thirties. They were black, slender, one about six feet tall, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in relatively good shape.

I feel the rush of their excitement (Personality). How do they see me? I sense danger but imagine they sense opportunity. Somehow (Geographic), my feet continue their aggressive stride. More incongruous still, I have a sense of calm. Why? I know I can’t take the three of them (Demographic) if they have a knife or gun, I have no weapon. No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!

Intuition and the phantom gun

I remembered that during intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with authority. When I am ten yards from them, I make an elaborate move to adjust my phantom shoulder holster through my open topcoat. Not a boy misses this.

They open a path for me to pass. Without looking back, I hear them giggle, “There goes the fuzzzz!”

Not leaving it at that, I heard myself saying, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning.” They chortled, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool's what we’re about! Dig it!” Without further ado, they retreated in the opposite direction.

When I explained this episode to my ride, the police officer said, “Man, you might have just saved your ass.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.

Mutiny Minded Police Officers

In 1975, the Public Safety Institute contracted me to investigate the unauthorized labor union being formed by the Raleigh Police Officers Association, which was threatening to strike the City of Raleigh, North Carolina if the current Chief of Police was not removed from office.

Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy makers were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work.

· Personality Profile:

A clear dichotomy existed between police command and patrol line operations. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief when interviewed and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me – a disconnect.

They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.

· Geographic Profile:

Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It had the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.

· Demographic Profile:

Raleigh is a community of more than 200,000 with several colleges and universities within and around the city, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Only 5 percent of the 350 sworn officers are college trained, the rest are high school graduates or have GED equivalences; 80 percent are between the ages of 25 and 35 with an average of five years on the police force, while 60 percent live outside Raleigh city limits. None of the command officers, including the chief, are college trained.

While the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demands for new leadership, while television news programs nightly echoed the same sentiments.

Meanwhile, I continued to ride with angry patrol officers on three shifts, interviewed command staff, wandered around city hall, and sent out a questionnaire with the water bill. This was not a scientific study, yet the response was more than 30 percent, indicating citizens wanted resolution of this stalemate.

Intuition as serendipity

We were several weeks into the intervention, and getting nowhere. I had spent scores of hours with police, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started here.

My previous interviews with the city manager, members of the city council and the chief of police were not insightful. I thought I must dig deeper. So I wandered the halls some more. That is how I came to see a distinguished looking man with a white mane of hair sitting in an office devoid of trappings reading The Wall Street Journal. I asked if I might talk to him. “Sure, make yourself at home,” he said with the fastidious gesture and diffident manner of antebellum civility.

For the next two hours I listened to an intriguing story that made everything fall into place.

He informed me he was the prior city manager. His best friend was the previous chief of police. “First college graduate ever to be a Raleigh police chief,” he said proudly.

But there was a problem. His friend had an incurable heart condition and could tolerate no stress. To make certain his friend acquired his full police chief pension, he made him a sinecure while rotating the three majors every four months to run the police department.

This created "three islands of authority," three different and competing police departments, and three distinct power cells.

After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. As city manager with the approval of the City Council, he appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, then convincing the City Council to hire his deputy city manager as City Manager. Once these changes were implemented, he resigned.

The new chief, to solidify his power, promoted his favorite sergeant to major over patrol, the most powerful wing of police operations, placed one major in administration and the other in community service – both non-power positions.

The new Chief of Police then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error. This meant that the captain had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong.

As these patrol officers rotated shifts, and came under his wing, he painted the new chief a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them.

When this scenario was disclosed in a Report to the Public Safety Institute, it took the air out of the threatened siege as these Patrol Officers could see how they had been used. Order was restored. The union became a social club, and the chief ended his career with dignity.

Technical Obsolescence & Intuition

It is 1980. I am now a Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology with ten years of consulting experience. OD consulting failed to be fulfilling – no sense of fruition – so I was delighted when an opportunity came to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist, only to have my new boss say almost immediately, “If you don’t find your role here in six weeks, you’re history.”

It was a directness with which I was familiar from my Nalco initial experience. So, I went to work to create a role for me.

· Personality Profile:

Honeywell Avionics Engineers were the elite of this facility, and treated with cloying deference, which was manifested in their cavalier attitude toward everyone – cowboys can do no wrong.

· Geographic Profile:

The facility is mainly a government contractor with work centered on large defense contracts in space and strategic operations. Program managers are engineers and dictate the tempo of work. All accede to their needs.

The ten-acre campus is graced with seven attractive white sun baked buildings including a recreation center on manicured lawns, and complemented by an artificial lake, picnic areas and several parking lots in the heart of Florida's leisure-centered tourist industry.

· Demographic Profile:

The working population of 4,000 includes 1,000 engineers, 2,400 support technicians and administrative personnel, and 600 production workers. More than 3,000 workers are college trained with 400 with advanced degrees among whom more than 30 have Ph.D.’s.

After three weeks in the company, I experienced the wall between Human Resources (HR) and Engineering.

Engineers would requisition courses, seminars, and other professional meetings but would take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits of these expensive offsite jaunts.

Their elitist attitude was reflected when they would say, "Would you know if I told you?"

An examination of these requests, however, revealed a pervasive incident of duplication unnecessarily multiplying costs. I asked HR Compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering population which it did.

Most striking with this profile was that pay continued to increase for engineers as their job competence decreased; 75 percent of these engineers were working on technology developed long after they left engineering college. Moreover, many engineers were receiving engineering pay while doing little or no engineering work.

This suggested some level of technical obsolescence, a problem that was correctable with training.

A memo was prepared that went out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo followed to forty engineers representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response. He was an engineer nearing retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claimed to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education. We would meet every week as if we wear a full-fledged task force.

Intuition and the power of the pen

Trained first as a chemist, I can relate to technical arrogance. Knowing this, and being a writer by inclination, I embellished our weekly sessions with statistics, graphs and studies and copied everyone on the original listings. One day a chief engineer joined us.

Mention was made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers showed up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters.

The chief engineer took over the meeting outlining how a Technical Education Program might work. The memo that followed his attendance religiously reported his recommendations

Thereafter, a diverse group from the engineering community attended with a holistic view of what might be established developing.

Serendipity surely in evidence, this chief engineer first became Director of Engineering, then later CEO and General Manager of this facility with technical education key policy to his administration.

Today technical education at Honeywell Avionics is a highly developed program. Technicians in conjunction with the Engineering College of the University of South Florida are able to pursue engineering degrees on the Honeywell campus, while all engineers may continue to upgrade their skills. No engineer need be left behind.9

A Bridge Seemingly Too Far

The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while visiting Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, asked to see me.

They had read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management,”10 and expressed an interest in my coming to Cambridge to work with their people in team building.

CSDL designed the ring laser gyros that were being manufactured in Clearwater. The concern was that there appeared to be a breakdown between the design and production phase of these gyros in this $50 million U.S. Navy program leading to excessive rework and scrap.

· Personality Profile:

The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL, in other words, perfectionists.

· Geographic Profile:

There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design and production team.


My first impression that this was "a bridge too far” was geographic. CSDL workplace consisted of twin circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street, housing CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus.

The design was apparently meant to provide privacy but it also promoted separation and isolation.

· Demographics:

There was a discernible pecking order among these engineers and scientists. Physicists were of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians followed with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and then chemists and biologists, or whatever the other disciplines, to complete the ranks.

Many were Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials caused less friction than seniority, status and personality. The mean age of the group was late thirties but the mindset was closer to that of the spoiled child.

Intuition as anticipation

My anticipation was that I would be perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained in a second-rate school (state university), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11

It was composed of articles previously published on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, and stress management and how to conduct a meeting.

Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell Avionic’s Technical Publication Services, I journeyed to CSDL. Once there, I outlined how to use the book, divided people into groups of ten with the balance acting as audience, and then sent them off to plan their respective meetings on topics of burning concern.

They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the previous session, and in the process, ventilated pressing concerns common to all.

The following week, again in teams conducting meetings, they developed corrective strategies. Pleased with their solutions, they decided I could now go home.

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” I asked. “I don’t see Clearwater in the picture.”

Busy arriving at consensus on how to work better together they overlooked the breakdown between the design and production phase teams.

That was partially my fault for I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting CSDL people first to talk to each other and to be thinking of shared aims before embracing the larger issue.

“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody offered. And that is what happened.

The CSDL team learned that their precise design was not reproducible in the factory, and the production team found they could propose suggestions to the CSDL lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles apart proved not a bridge too far.

Workings of the Fisher Paradigm ©™

These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern that the Fisher Paradigm originated in a sales discipline.12

It was in sales I learned the fallacy of the mechanistic A, B, C linear approach to persons, places and things, and that a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to it.

These three spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we only erase the line between cause and effect, thinking and feeling, observer and the observed to witness what is happening without bias and allow the small voice of reality to resonate with its need.

The Fisher Paradigm is conceptual, self-conscious and self-organizing. Instead of forcing the world it observes to fit into pre-imposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or boxes, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking or understanding.

By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique pattern and find their own way forward to move off the dime together. The quick response is that “The Fisher Paradigm is just common sense,” but common sense is so rare.

Even rarer is to see a situation whole and integral rather than separate from itself or to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe what is observed in terms of how it should be or is expected to be. The workings of the Fisher Paradigm are as much in evidence in the small as in the large as I close with this episode.

Bottling Plant Fiasco

A major bottling company of soft drinks replaced its bottling handling conveyor with a top of the line electronic conveyor system during a Christmas vacation while 200 employees were on holiday.

The new design was meant to cut operating costs in half and reduce employees by a third. The exact opposite happened. A productive workforce with virtually no labor problems (Personality Profile), situated in a low-tech community (Geographic Profile) with most employees otherwise unskilled (Demographic Profile) registered shock, then anger, when reporting back to work after the Christmas break.

Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t but kept that to themselves, displaying their anger in work slowdown that practically killed the company. Operations did not again become productive until an OD intervention convinced management to level with employees, admit its mistake, and form a management-employee team to ensure that such a surprise would not happen again.

Employees conceded that they could see the benefit of more sophisticated operations, but would like to be first informed of such changes, then given the proper training to improve their competence in dealing with the new system.

Management mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt deceived and betrayed.

Intuition was staring management in the face but was ignored. Intuitive OD gave management the eyes to see, but the mind and will to understand is likely to remain its constant challenge.