PROFILES OF LEADERS AS ARTISTS

This is the table 

das wirtschaftsbuchmagazin (business bestseller magazine), Fruhjahr.Sommer (Spring. Summer, 2004, pp. 38 – 47) as edited by Alex Krunic of Innsbruck, Austria and published in German.  The article appears in its entirety in A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS, 2020, only in English.  

WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© May 18, 2020

The past is prologue to the future

Andrew Jackson was born before the Declaration of Independence was signed for the United States of America. He fought in the Revolutionary War as a mere boy, became an Indian fighter, lawyer, judge, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, and General of the U.S. Army before becoming President of the United States.

This colorful leader defied the modality of his times. His victory against Great Britain in the Battle of New Orleans (1815) saved the Mississippi River basin and forever stifled the expansionistic threats from both Great Britain and Spain.

Jackson rode his popularity to the presidency. As president, his new frontier "take no prisoners" style of leadership resonated with the common man in the heartland of this young nation.

Jackson's leadership released pent up energy in the populace, and changed the course of American history from the conduct of the presidency to the commerce and industry of the nation.

The American frontiersmen and women personified the nature of the struggle against the native Indian population indigenous to the land while increasingly claiming this virgin undeveloped continent as their home.

Even with Andrew Jackson’s follies, which were sometimes monstrous, Jackson never became stuck, never questioned the intuitive character of his mind, but forged constantly ahead. Reality was his companion, national survival his focus.

Critics, then as now, point to Jackson's flawed character, but he was also real. We have come to be more comfortable with leaders who are charismatic, look good, and behave predictably as scripted.  Jackson was never predictable. He was a man of immense passion who was committed to obliterating the frontier barriers of his age, and in the process, once in power, reinvented the role of the American presidency.

We now confront a new frontier, the Information Age. As Jackson personified the leadership of an emerging frontier nation, the Information Age seeks new leadership against declining expectations. This new age requires Jackson's boldness, yet we are stuck in the leaderless leadership of leading from behind. Such leadership drives a stake into the collective national psyche.

Our addiction to numbers and analytics finds "numbers addicts" hypothesizing with a sense of being in control. Such a society resists a "wake up" call as it finds comfort living in the surreal world of virtual reality. In that state, no matter the calamity our collective hubris neutralizes whatever threat may occur that might jeopardize this imagined security. Undermining conventional leadership, as Jackson demonstrated, proved leadership matters.

Why Leadership Matters, Yet  . . .

One wonders how men and women are induced to seek public office when journalists with agendas hound them implying or suggesting they are guilty of untoward behavior, while the church and the corporate world protect their leadership often hiding their blatant malfeasance. 

That said, the dominant themes of the time call for the constant reinvention of leadership to match the surreptitious and/or ambivalent demands of the led.

We are now in the postindustrial postmodern age driven by a different revolution that features the Internet and social networking moving uncertainly beyond capitalism for doing business as we know it, and into a wilderness we never anticipated and therefore fail to understand. We are in a state of chaos with seemingly no one in charge.

Influence resides with those who provide information. This is no longer old geezers but spunky kids, neophytes, working in their parents' garages rewriting the codes by which we all now live.

Institutions of higher learning are lost in the maze of convention, unable to see beyond the brick and mortar of their buildings to capture what is salient and vital. Meanwhile, the government instigates wars it cannot win, and responds late to social and natural disasters it cannot control.

Power no longer resides with those who control the means of production as it has tectonically shifted to intellectual properties often emanating from modest facilities. These pathfinders are inheritors of the future from institutional society that is now moribund, archaic and obsolete.

Leadership is individualistic with everyone a leader or no one is. Stated another way, a leader is a complete follower because he must know where his followers wish to go.

Leaders sense the role long before it is clear to the led.  By definition, leaders are narcissistic and solipsistic with one eye on the opportunity and the other on the future, embracing supporters as a mirror reflection of their own self-image.

Followers are attracted to a leader's edginess, entranced by his use of abstract ideas converted into the concrete language of the possible.  If this sounds duplicitous, that is because it is.  While being professed as a marriage of love, it is  a marriage of convenience.  Both leaders and followers have hidden agendas.  This is reality.

Likewise, leaders are actors on the stump, displaying the confidence, appearing clear headed, informed, never seeming to waffle, with an implicit “take charge” demeanor, displaying the ability to seem just like “us.”      

A leader is seldom brilliant or especially creative, but when effective, amiably a self-directed doer. This, alone, is not enough to stand out as a leader. To lift followers out of their funk, a leader must first convince himself that he can lead.

Although a leader is apt to be selfish and self-interested, he finds it necessary to feign selflessness to ease his way through his followers’ barriers of suspicion.

Even so, there is no certainty that he will succeed.  A leader must possess a singular ambition fueled by his ego and high sensitivity to carry him across the threshold of credibility. Ambition can be quiet or loud, whichever resonates most affectively with the mind of the times. Talent is never enough.

A leaders has a clear responsibility to his followers, but the led have an equal responsibility to the leader. Unfortunately, the led tend to take a pass on that requirement preferring to hold the leader accountable but not themselves when things go awry. It is for this reason that followers get the leadership they deserve.

A leader must realize that people vote with their hearts, not their heads. The Information Age and the Internet has made this even more pronounced. The leadership that brought the country through the New Frontier of Jackson's time will not suffice to carry the nation through this newest frontier that has no physical barriers or definable turf.

What made Jackson a popular president is that he could relate to people in terms of how, what and where they were. Thomas Jefferson thought Jackson a buffoon. But Jefferson’s sense of the American mind of the time was then however passé.

Admittedly, Jackson’s approach to leadership was untidy, explicit, with comments sprinkled with earthy language but always with a message clear to followers rising out of the earth and not from the stateroom, a message always in a language they understood and trusted.  He was one of them and he was on top, which meant that they were on top, too.

Jackson was an effective communicator not so much for what he said, but how it was said. His vigorous personality caught fire in the moment as he acted out his impulses as if thoughts were actions, always seemingly knowing what nerves to touch. Confrontational by nature, he was in your face without disguise or guile.

Nor was he much given to reflection for he was confident that his sturdy principles would never steer him wrong. He showed little inclination to the free exchange of ideas or in improving the quality of his mind, as he was not a reader of books, but a man of action.

The only laws he respected were the laws he made. He had no qualms about using questionable means if he felt the ends were justified. Nor did he have a concept of social justice because his justice only reaffirmed his own impulses and experience. This found him confident to handle any problem that may arise.

Brilliant men from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Clay, Daniel Webster to John Calhoun constantly underestimated Jackson. They repeatedly painted him into a corner and yet his countermoves invariably proved them wrong, diminishing their esteem while causing them grief.  Jackson had the intuitive sense that earthy America was on a march to an American identity with little in common with European civility.

What Leaders Can Learn from Andrew Jackson

What leveraged President Andrew Jackson to such popularity was that he made his triumphs the triumphs of common folk, his courage against all odds their courage, his heroics their heroics. Being able to touch people's lives became more than a display of guile but a viable platform for the people to believe in themselves.

What matters is how we perceive our leader.

We will follow our leader to the death if he makes us feel more real than we are, and who stands for what we say we believe but don't always practice.  Such a leader provides a well-crafted persona that suggests to us an invincibility that we know we don't possess, removing the trauma of uncertainty that haunts us daily providing us with a reliable stanchion in the storm of life.

Alas, a leader cannot be packaged through institutional education or be well-horned through a network of prominent friends. A leader rises out of the muck of life and percolates to the top through the combustibles emotions of the confused. He often emerges as the answer to a real or imagined crisis which is however real in the collective mind.  He can be explained in no other way.

A leader who is most astute can understand our pain that comes from our struggles to comprehend the incomprehensible with language that reaches our hearts to lessen the discomfort of our heads.  He can do this because tragedy to him is an old friend.

Andrew Jackson's father died about the time he was born. His mother and two brothers died in the American Revolutionary War. This found him an orphan without prospects as he turned 14. What followed was constant privation, little formal education, and no chance to develop the normal self-esteem modern psychologists claim essential to our well-being.

During Jackson's climb to prominence, America was also finding its own moral center, unshackling itself from Great Britain, and climbing with him to where, no one was certain. So, it is with all leaders who know and understand their times, and who have the drive, focus, courage, élan and tenacity to resonate with the people.

In adulthood, despite his many feats, Jackson's enemies ridiculed his inability to write with panache or to spell common words correctly or compose sentences grammatically. Such critics would point to his inscrutable ignorance. Yet, Jackson changed the presidency, changed leadership as it was then known  and practiced, giving birth to a political party, and creating what became known as "The Age of Jackson" with a series of like minded presidents to follow.

His intuitive vision allowed him to reach conclusions by short cutting the problem solving while others were beating about the bush indecisively lost in the game. His strength translated intellect into action. He understood most people had a need to vent before they were in a mood to act. He was not however a man of reflection but a man of doing.

The new Information Frontier is much more psychologically rather than physically dangerous as was the case in Jackson’s time. It is a kind of intimidation Jackson obviously faced, but never found limiting.

This electronic age is changing work, displacing millions of breadwinners used to conventional jobs in making a living. Government has become high political theatre where it attempts to be the constant parent providing economic relief rather than gutting conventional education, and retraining and retooling people to meet the new demands.

These times parallel to an amazing degree those of Andrew Jackson's, when it was clear a new kind of leadership mattered.

AFTERWORD to "A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS"

Everything is temporary, nothing is permanent, not even ideas, alas, especially ideas.

In the 1970s, psychologist B. F. Skinner expressed the belief that all problems facing this beautiful planet (famine, disease, wars, and the threat of nuclear holocaust) could be solved in his school of behaviorism.

Like his pigeons, which he trained to do his bidding, he saw human beings as autonomous agents or biological organisms that could be controlled by responding to external stimuli and modified by their environment. His theory, known as Operant Conditioning, spread across the land into every school curriculum and workplace. Ironically, it still has a life in our handheld electronic gadgets.

That said it has been largely abandoned in the classroom as we are now into neuroscience which claims to be able to illuminate the distinct pathways taken to our thoughts and judgments.

The fascination for this new theory is quite compelling as fMRI technology analyze people's brains in the interest of determining how the brain works and the nature of our moral decision-making.

Fast forward on this enthralling track is evolutionary psychology and its interest in tracing how primitive human beings encountered and dealt with physical danger, and how that mindset has evolved to dealing with psychological perils today with the same set of possibilities with this reactive equipment.

While religion has been caught napping, psychology has entered the vacated space looking at people's adaptive and maladaptive behavior while inching its way to a philosophical theory of morality. 

Just as we have had the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale and possibility thinking of Robert H. Schuller from the church pulpit, we now have positive psychology from Martin Seligman and others from the couch.

Psychologist Jonathan Hadith (born 1963), one of the positive psychology pioneers, is into the primitive reptilian brain and its intuitive construction. He sees reason has no part in moral judgment but comes into play, after the fact, to justify our intuitions that are quickly and unreflectively formed. 

This idea has something in common with The Fisher Paradigm©™ (see book of that title, 2020).  Haidt's work is however considered scientific while this paradigm makes no such claims as it is empirical, experiential and intuitive.

Whereas I have created an intuitive typology of personality, demographic, and geographic profiles of people as persons, Hadith has developed a moral system for people in general with six pairs of moral intuitions: care vs. harm; fairness vs. cheating; loyalty vs. betrayal; authority vs. subversion; sanctity vs. degradation; and liberty vs. oppression.

If this sounds a little like horse sense, it is because the soft sciences deal inscrutably with the obvious in a quest to penetrate and predict man's social nature and behavioral proclivities.

Hadith’s typology endeavors to capture our intuition’s flawed affect that seems to take precedence over rational purposeful modes of conduct.

The Fisher Paradigm©™ takes a totally different approach to expose the folly of our conscious strutting and repressive reliance on our reptilian brain.

But like theology before modern psychology, our uncertainty and ambivalent nature is clashing with multiple cultures while racing towards homogeneity.  Consequently, attempts to make sense of all this are often left with post ad-hoc explanations.

In a word, given the fallacy of the belief that because one event follows another that the first event must have been the cause of the second is seldom the case as invariably other factors intervene.

Biology is not morality, but behavior is dependent on biology, as we behave in terms of the integrative forces of personality, geography and demographics in response to cultural imperatives that impact our sense of identity and our take on morality.

We have not departed too far from our ancient primitive ancestors who viewed a situation in terms of fight, flight, adapt or submit in an effort to survive.  Then as now, the reptilian brain was employed in the decision-making but largely unconsciously and intuitively as instinct became the integrative response to the circumstances. 

Assuming that biology has equipped us with the rudimentary capacity to develop morality and empathy, it would appear that psychologists as practitioners of this art form are limited to a descriptive discipline being otherwise confined to explanations of what is morally right or wrong, not unlike religion, but still unable to determine much less predict behavior.  

We can take some comfort in the fact that -- The poetry of Goethe and Byron, the philosophy of Rousseau, the poetry and novels of Shelley, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, while easing the anxiety of our mortality, fail to present a clear set of ideas when it comes to shaping our movements into the future as fear still remains our most reliable guidance system.

We inch forward as vulnerable man and must accept our status with good humor as do those who pretend to have insight into our plight.

CAGE WE ALL SHARE -- DENIAL OF DEATH!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 6, 2020

REFERENCE

This is the first chapter of my book, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? (2018). Author Ken Shelton has published a piece titled “Joe Death,” based on the film of that name. He is much more acquainted with pop culture than I am, but his missive reminded me of this reflective piece that opens my book.

CHAPTER ONE

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which he reveals the inner working of his soul.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Russian novelist


Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must work out his own salvation.George Horace Lorimer (1868 – 1937), American editor

Life Death & Dignity

All writing is out of experience, even that of novelists. They write out of what they know, and that knowledge is from their cage. Whatever the genre, words emanate from life and its trials. Novelist William Faulkner said these words upon receiving the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature:

I believe man will not merely endure. He will survive. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. [1]

Someone wrote to me with this voice of durability. He remarked that he was ready for death, although not in the sense that he wanted to die, but in the sense that his house was in order. He was leaving two well-educated children, both of whom were yet to marry with no extended family with which to be concerned. His wife had died when his children were young and he had never remarried. He had provided for them and was now ready to die with dignity. We all die, but not necessarily with dignity.

He followed up the letter with a telephone call. “I have had a wonderful life.” Six months before, he was the picture of health, looking ten years younger than his age. He called it a “genetic thing,” being number one in his age group in tennis at his club, a position he had maintained for more than a decade. Then one day he fell off a ladder at home, and everything changed. Doctors found he had a brain tumor, which was inoperable.

Ernest Becker (1924 – 1974) won the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death (1973). When a reporter came to interview him on the book, having hidden the fact that he himself was dying, he rushed quickly to his study from his sofa to appear as if having been interrupted from work. To the end, he didn’t want it assumed that he was lazy. He was forty-nine when he died. What causes us to be so self-conscious in this denial?

No one escapes death. Why are we so afraid of life that we build cages around us? Pondering that puzzle is why this book has been written.

The Cage and the Power of “No!” 

For many, life is a journey not taken and therefore a road less traveled. Such people wait. They exist, they don’t live. They wait for retirement when all passion is spent. They hide in obsessions or search for answers. They think happiness is a place when it is only a mindset.

Cage avoidance is best described in the ability to say “no” when pressured to say “yes.” There is amazing freedom when you say “no” when it is not in your best interest to say “yes.” It is a matter of choice.

Our cages have the bars of making misguided choices. Often such choices involve saying “yes” to carry someone else’s burden when they best carry it themselves. Codependency is a vicious cage.

It is not love when you say “yes” to your children when “no” is more prudent and instructive. Eventually, children will need to live and survive on their own wits, and that is not likely to happen if such wits are never developed.

Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider (1956), found he enjoyed his own company and was little inclined to yield to peer pressure. He realized quite young that it gave him enormous freedom. He put this to words and created an international sensation:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others, their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth. [2]

Discipline apparently came natural to Wilson, but I suspect his parents played a role. They gave him room, but not too much room, for if they had he would have found that the cage is a homeless mind.

Celebrating Individual Choices 

We live in a corporate society. So this book is about people caged in corporate society. Such people often lose their sense of power, identity and purpose for the corporate cage.

When the corporation makes no sense to you, personally, when the workplace culture is not consistent with what makes you look forward to work, when you start to have health and behavioral issues, something is wrong. A choice needs to be made, and that choice may be to retreat, to take a “time out” to assess where you are, where you are going, and where you prefer to go.

Few people in the course of their lives are ready to meet this challenge. Many bury the problem in the justification that “I have no choice but must stick it out.” Others attempt to convince themselves that “Things will get better with time,” and still others retire on the job, give up and give out. Sickness becomes a kind of relief.

Appreciating an Authentic Life 

Each of us walks the walk, talks the talk, and thinks the thought that is indigenous to our cultural programming. We have had little to do with its construction as it permeates our delicate psyche unconsciously when we are quite young. Thereafter, it is reinforced constantly to the point that we come to believe it is truth personified, which it is not.

Now in this media age, the Internet and constant bombardment of subliminal stimuli from every media outlet, we have come to resemble an Andy Warhol painting where the same picture is repeated frame after frame after frame.

Corporate society is not going to fade away, but that does not mean we cannot lead authentic lives despite it.

The aim here is not to make the reader comfortable in his cage. Nor are there any escape routes promulgated. Authenticity is one of those things that once you define it you lose it, for what is authentic to you is not authentic to me.

Yet, we are inevitably drawn to those who would ease our conscience with simple solutions to complex problems with no need for us to change. An authentic individual cannot be duped by such palliatives.

Being reminded of what once was free 

A reader of the “Great Depression generation” writes that he has pangs of nostalgia for a simpler time, a less complicated time, when things were quiet with less distractions.

He says he has grown to maturity in a small town that now resembles every other place, and has lost its identity for him. “The open country that once filled my lungs with fresh air,” he writes, “now is penciled with pastel colored tiny houses and acres of cement.”

He goes on to say that dense forests are now naked hills, the train station and freight yards have been abandoned, and now are eye sores. All this saddens him with a feeling of hopelessness.

Environmental degradation is not a modern phenomenon. It was apparent in the 18th and 19th century and took hold in 20th century after WWII in the name of progress, and continues with that momentum into the 21st century.

The Romans were involved in creative destruction in the first millennium of the Common Era. Geologists have discovered mining for iron was common in the mountains of Italy before the time of Christ. Such exploitation polluted rivers and streams, and created deep fissures in the mountain landscape.

It didn’t get any better when the Roman Empire became Christian in 312 AD.

Genesis reads: 

Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.
A more definitive policy for progress could not have been conceived. The conquest of nature is nearly complete with little left of Nature to support its many species, including man. In conquering Nature, nature has conquered us. It is now our ultimate cage.

So, as this man laments the sorrow of his last years, and Global Warming fails to be a consensus concern, I think of Nietzsche’s words: “I love only what people write with their own blood.” Is there any other way?

Notes

[1] Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century, Turner Publishing, p. 381.

[2] Colin Wilson, The Outsider, Delta Book, 1956, p. 13

ANNOOUNCEMENT -- THE FISHER PARADIGM -- NOW AVAILABLE @ $4.16!

Is available for pre-orders as an e-Book at $4.16 including the complete text and this complete   

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

AN EPIPHANY

FOREWORD

What is a paradigm?

I - OUR AMAZING REPTILIAN BRAIN

Origin of the Reptilian Brain

The Reptilian Brain in the Modern World

Take Away

II - RIGHT BRAIN – LEFT BRAIN

LEFT BRAIN

RIGHT BRAIN

EXCERPT NO. 1

RUTHIE’S CONTEMPTUOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NUNS OF HER SCHOOL  (from Devlin, “A Biographical Novel,” pp. 438 – 439)

III - THE FISHER PARADIGM©™9

ABSTRACT

Introduction of an Idea

Case in Point

The Fisher Paradigm©™ Incorporates

Rationale for The Fisher Paradigm©™

IV - TWELVE SITUATIONAL SCENARIOS AND LESSONS LEARNED

Scenario 1 - THOMAS MAXWELL - HOW INTUITIVE OD FIRST SURFACED

Scenario No. 1 What actually happened?

Scenario No. 1:   Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 2 - THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR

Scenario No. 2: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 2:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 3 - ASSIGNMENT SOUTH AFRICA:

Scenario No. 3: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 3:  Lessons Learned

EXCERPT NO. 2

THREE SOUTH AFRICAN TURKS & THE TEST KIT DILEMMA  (From Devlin, “A Biographical Novel,” pp. 331 - 334)

Scenario No. 4:

What actually happened? Intuition and the Phantom Gun

Scenario No. 4:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 5 - MUTINY MINDED POLICE OFFICERS:

Scenario No. 5: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 5:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 6 - THE CASE OF MR. BLUE:

Scenario No. 6: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 6:   Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 7 - TECHNICAL OBSOLESCENCE & INTUITION:

Scenario No. 7: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 7:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 8 - A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

Scenario No. 8:  Lessons Learned

The Fisher Paradigm©™ is not Abstract

Scenario No. 9: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 9:  Lessons Learned

EXCERPT NO. 3

THE FRIEDA HARANGUE  (From Devlin, “A Biographical Novel,” pp. 165 – 172).

Scenario No 10 - A BRILIANT EXECUTIVE MEETS HIS WATERLOO:

Scenario 10: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 10:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 11 - WHEN MOTIVATION OF COLOR & CULTURE ARE ASSUMED TO DIFFER

Scenario No. 11: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 11:  Lessons Learned

Scenario No. 12 -  ASSIGNMENT EUROPE

Scenario No. 12: What actually happened?

Scenario No. 12  Lessons Learned

V-THE FISHER PARADIGM^©™  APPLIED TO MENTORING

ABSTRACT

A MENTORING SYSTEM

AN ASSESSMENT PROFILE AND PROCESS

ASSESSMENT CENTER PROCESS

INDIVIDUALIZED CAREER ROADMAP

The Mentoring Training System

VI - THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ LOOKS AT WHY SMART PEOPLE FAIL

Four Harmful Unconscious Features

VII - A SIGN OF THE TIMES

FROM SPONTANEOUS CONNECTION TO FORCED SEPARATION

Fear and panic steal the mind in a pandemic

AFTERWORD

CONFESSION & CONCLUSION

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE WORLD OF BUSINESS IN CONTROL -- CONTINUED!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

HENRY WRITES:

Well, Jim, people have neither the time nor inclination to read just about the same stuff over and over again. And as a reverse to the previous sentence, it behooves us to respect the time of others.

I remember writing this on a blackboard — a greenboard, really — while a meeting was delayed because some people hadn’t arrived yet.

As for business in control, we might begin by distinguishing businesses run by those the true entrepreneurs, i.e. those who set them up, from those who got into them on daddy’s coat tails, from cooperatives run by cliques of buddy-buddies, from those ultimately controlled by almost invisible financiers.

Best,

H.

JIM REPLIES

Henry,

Point well taken. You sound like my wife. She claims I sometimes beat a dead horse to death as if that is possible. I suspect you are both right. I do repeat myself.

I've studied entrepreneurs, however, such as Steven Jobs and Bill Gates, and both of them (as well as many others) stole ideas created by others, both were sued many times, and both settled at a fraction of the cost to them, but substantially for budding entrepreneurs-in-the-making with whom we have never heard from again.

Such disclosures are buried in my books and blog, and one of the reasons, despite the wisdom of what you say being true, I am reluctant to do otherwise. As a writer and interpreter of my times, few know I exist. I have no problem with that as what I have recorded will likely live on well beyond my life.

Perhaps it is because my perspective is different than yours, I don't know, but I have seen the profit motive in business always, and I mean always skewed towards the legal at the expense of the ethical. Sure, once wealth is established, the wealthy become well known philanthropists. That was the case of Alfred Sloan at General Motors, who bragged to GM stockholders that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, GM never missed giving a dividend. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a College of Business that carries his name to this day.

If the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it is that capitalism as a system is on its last leg. The answer is not socialism or communism or some other ism. But rest assured, it will first survive as a hybrid as in the case of Communist China and Indonesia, and then branch off into something entirely new, as Jacques Barzun suggests in his magnum opus FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE: 1500 to the Present (2000), incidentally published when he was 93 (see pages 768 and 800). 

Everything has been reduced to econometrics. Over the last 200 years those in business leadership have been close to a final formula to capture the essence of capitalism. He writes:

"It is from this class that the governors and heads of institutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain -- clerics in one case, cybernists in the other . . . the Deschooling Society movement rapidly converted everybody to its view . . . business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency" (p. 800).

I live in the State of Florida. Of the 50 states of these United States, it has the poorest economic support system for workers seeking financial aid quarantined by the current pandemic.

If that were not enough, of the millions who qualify for this aid in this state's hospitality dependent industry, less than 20 percent have received financial relief, although over 80 percent of those eligible have made such claims for months, without even able to get on line to submit their claims, despite many attempts.

Some $71 million dollars were spent to fix this system when Governor Rick Scott, a businessman turned politician, was in office.  While this initiative failed, he managed to cut the dollar aid such workers would get along with reducing the number of weeks of support as well. Now, the majority don't even get that.

Finally, Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize winning author of “The Gods of Small Things” (1997), has written a devastating little book, CAPITALISM: A Ghost Story (2014).

This book covers the December 2, 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India of a Union Carbide chemical plant, a plant similar to the kind I serviced here in the United States when I was in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company.

In fact, in an explosion at a Monsanto Chemical plant in Louisville, Kentucky, I left only an hour before an eruption sprayed life threatening gases into the air. So, I know a little about what author Roy covers here.

Forty (40) tons of highly toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) were released from this plant with 3,598 dying almost immediately, two weeks later, there were another 8,000 deaths, an additional 8,000 subsequently died from gas related diseases.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story is about how Union Carbide, the Government of India, and the United States diplomatic corps handled the affair.  It is not a comforting story.

People as persons have become expandable when economic issues encounter some jeopardy, always with the justification that “without economics, what would support the population?”

I am not suggesting changing anything, as Sir William might say, circumstances eventually become the driver as they have throughout human history.  I am simply explaining my redundancy.

Be always well,

Jim

THE WORLD WITH BUSINESS IN CONTROL

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 1, 2020

 

 

A READER COMMENTS

 

Thank you, Jim, for your generous wallop of education in your essay, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!”

 

Your bringing together what you learned from many authors and what you got out of personal experiences gives us (well, I mean me) something to reflect on, think about, evaluate from my own point of view of the world (what it is, what it should strive for to be).

 

It came to me at an opportune moment, when I am trying to examine the line between society and the individual, or between social thinking and conduct vs. selfishness/social Darwinism.

 

Just a relevant comment I ran into scanning BBC news, by a medical doctor who faults the fact that healthcare has turned into a business, which he said was not the case not so long ago. I might add to this the delivery of news about the world, our fellow men that is.

 

Ok, it can be argued that medicine and news have always been a business, but then there is a spectrum between extremes or simplifications.

 

And soon ....

 

Best,

 

Henry

 

 

JIM RESPONDS

 

There are several levels with which I would like to respond to your generous and perceptive remarks: (1) excerpt from Devlin, a novel (2018); (2) excerpt from Confident Selling (1971), my first book; (3) the devastating myopic view of the world from a business perspective; and (4) talking to senior high school students at a high end private school. 

Excerpt from DEVLIN, A Psychological Novel (2019):

 

I would like to share a passage from DEVLIN, my biographical novel that takes place in South Africa.  Devlin is young, an American executive with a big job, and he is constantly associated with very wealthy young Brits, in this instance, it is in attending the Gold Cup Races in Durban.  Tom Devoushire is 32, a horse breeder and active in his father’s import/export business.  This is Devlin's first meeting with him where he is being entertained at the palatial estate of the host's after the races.  A big fellow with a large paw, Tom Devoushire greets Devlin with a flaccid handshake and then commences to lecture him.

 

“Your country is having a nervous breakdown.  Know what the cure is?”

 

“Before you enlighten me, tell me what your country is experiencing.”  Devlin waited.

 

Devoushire ignored the question.  “The cure is to let businessmen take over the world and stability would be restored immediately if you catch my drift.”

 

“Businessmen who inherited the business from their parents?”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“Businessmen who have never done a single day’s work in their lives; or haven’t had to worry about how to make a house or car payment, or to worry about being on the short list to being surplused; businessmen who know nothing about business.  That is what it is supposed to mean.”

 

“It’s pretty clear you don’t respect me, yet you’re a guest in my house.”

 

“I don’t know you.  But I can tell you this.  I don’t buy this crap that colonial lords in the land of apartheid have the magic formula on how to make the world a more equitable place in which to live.  You say the United States is having a nervous breakdown.  How would you describe South Africa today?”

 

“You don’t give a shit what I think, do you?” Devoushire said.  “I like that.  I’m not used to that.  Obviously, you don’t agree business has the answers.  Is it you don’t equate the sizzle with the steak?”  He laughed hilariously again.

 

Oh my God! He’s quoting Elmer Wheeler’s selling strategy as his source.  Mother of Mercy, save me!  Taking a deep breath, Devlin said evenly, “I equate equity with reality.  As I’m sure you know with your Wharton MBA, that it was business that caused the Long Depression of 1873 to 1893, which peaked in 1879 fed by the panic of businessmen of 1873.  This caused the continuous contraction until 1893, the longest in western economic history. 

 

“Low business growth and general deflation found Great Britain losing its industrial leadership that it would never regain.  The recession and economic decline continued in the United States until 1901.  Then we had the business boom of the Roaring Twenties, only to suffer the Great Depression of 1929.  Businessmen in bed with politicians every inch of the way were architects of that sequence of disasters.”

 

Devoushire smiled.  “When you complete your assignment here, look me up.  Ever thought of staying in South Africa?”

 

DEVLIN, the novel (2018, pp. 570-571)

 

It is obvious that Devlin doesn’t subscribe to Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936), which was the rage for six decades in the United States.  Devlin has two gauges: silence which he employs as if it were a stiletto cutting through the dissonant noise, or being “in your face” when he encounters pomposity imagining the scarlet letters of “insincerity” written across the brow.

 

All my adult life working across the globe, I have never run into a businessman who could think much less talk on any subject other than money.   In Nalco Chemical Company, I was known as the company’s token intellectual because I read books not about money, business or power, but about ideas expressed in art, music, literature and philosophy.

CONFIDENT SELLING (an excerpt)

  

CONQUERING FEAR OF FAILURE

 

When I was in industry, we had a policy in my firm of holding quarterly seminars composed of four districts.  It fell to one district manager to be the host, once per year.  Each manager, of course, tried to outdo his peers.  After one such meeting, which had been a particular success, everyone was congratulating the host.  He took this praise well enough, but then turned the focus back on his would be adulators with this question: “Why do you think I worked so hard on this meeting, anyway?”  Surprised by this remark, there followed dead silence matched only by many puzzled expressions. 

 

He continued, “I’ll tell you why.  It was simply a matter of fear – fear of failure, period.” 

 

This candid admission cracked open the silence to some frank exchanges.  They all followed the fear line and were summed up in this comment: “I guess you could say that the shoe fits me as well.  No one likes to get hammered.” 

 

Finally, as if an afterthought, I was asked my view.  I had the great temptation to concur with the others – to fit snugly into their fear syndrome.  But I had thought too much about this subject, fear, and had worked too hard to conquer fear to con myself now.  “I suppose what drives me to do my best more than anything else,” I said seriously, “is the effective utilization of my inherent ability.”

 

The reaction quite predictably was immediate.  It was echoed around the room with this needling phrase.  “How did we ever get a guy like you in this outfit?”

 

Once the laughter subsided, I smiled and offered my own brand of levity.  “Gentlemen, isn’t it a matter of chemistry – opposite charges attracting?”

 

Yet, even in this jesting, there was a grain of truth.  What I was actually expressing was the positive counterpart to the negative fear.

Confident Selling, 1971 (pp. 168 – 169)

MYOPIC BUSINESS LEADERSHIP

 

The irony of my working life is that I worked at all levels of the complex organization from laborer in a specialty chemical plant during five summers while attending university, as a chemist in R&D, then sales engineer, field sales manager and corporate executive for a specialty chemical company working on four continents as well as spending two years on active duty in the Mediterranean on the US Flagship of the Sixth Fleet, then consulting after acquiring a Ph.D. in the social & behavioral sciences, after previously being trained and working in the field of science and engineering.  Subsequent to this, there was another departure from line authority to staff function as I became an in-house OD corporate psychologist, and later corporate executive in a high tech firm, completing a tour to what has become known as the complex organization. 

 

In all this activity, I never joined the club, that is, I never identified with the business of business because, at every level, and that includes academia, profits, status, prestige and clout were always put above people.

 

It is a strange experience for me now with the Coronavirus Pandemic to see people from whom I have come, poor people, uneducated or undereducated people suffering at the hands of the State.  While I am not hurting at all, people today in the equivalent circumstances of my parents, find the State of Florida cannot get them the financial relief that they qualify for because the previous governor, Rick Scott, now Senator Rick Scott, cut the safety net for the poor into sheds.  Nothing but incompetence is demonstrated by those processing the data for these struggling people.  Journalist Craig Patrick has been tracking this with painful reporting.

 

Previously, like President Donald Trump, when he was in business, Scott developed the myopia to exploit the system to his benefit, taking that skill set to the public sector as governor and senator. 

 

What the business community has never understood is that most Americans either work or are supported by the public sector, not the private sector, and so when the public sector has businessmen such as President Trump and Senator Scott to show the public sector “how it should get done,” we have the current situation exaggerated by the pandemic.

CLASSROOM DEBACLE

 

My grandson, Ryan, invited me to address his small class on any subject I would like.  He told his teacher that I wrote books on stuff.  The class was only about 12 students in this private school that costs many more times than my college education.  It was clear the students were smug and somewhat bored that they had to listen to this old man that was Ryan’s grandfather.  I felt this as I entered the room.  There was a star athlete, an African American, who slept without either his teacher or fellow students minding, except me.  I interrupted his sleep when I wrote this on the white board and asked him for a comment on what is your thoughts on:

  

WHAT IS LEGAL …………WHAT IS ETHICAL?

 

Obviously, a bright young man, he straightened up, rubbed his eyes to get the sleep out of them and asked, “Define the terms?”

 

This brought a chuckle across the room, and a smile on my face.  He smiled back, as if to say, 'I’ve gotcha!'  He waited for me to answer and I said, “It is not how I define these terms that is important, but how you define them.’’

 

“Legal,” he said instantly, “is what you can get away with, and ethical is what you want people to think you’re about.”  This brought another chuckle.

 

It was clear the air in this classroom was filled with cynicism.  My sense was that they were used to their parents speaking out of both sides of their mouths with the concepts of “what is legal, and what is ethical” being interchangeable. 

 

I asked, “How many of you have driven a car before acquiring your learner’s permit?”  All hands went up.  “Was that either legal or ethical?” I asked.  Somebody said, perhaps from remembering a bad movie, “It was necessary.”  More laughter.

 

It was clear I wasn’t getting anywhere with them as the 50 minute period ended.  I would have liked to have had them answer 1-10 questions without giving their names on blank pieces of paper: (1) ever cheated on a test; (2) ever lied to your parents or teachers; (3) drank alcoholic beverages; (4) smoked; (5) stolen anything in a store; (6) stolen someone else’s phone; (7) told a lie about someone you disliked; (8) snuck into a movie house, concert; (9) used someone else’s work as your own; and (10) stolen money from parents or classmates?

 

These questions have been asked on national surveys and 80 percent of respondents admitted to at least four of these questions.  This suggests the "morality of the times" is quite flexible regarding your concerns, Henry, about social thinking and ethical conduct.  But of course, as we know, when it comes to what is "legal" or what is "ethical," honesty has had an uneven history.  

 

That said, what I would like to leave with you is this.  I found these young people far more honest and confident than I remember my generation being.  They don't kowtow to authority as we once did; nor are they inclined to mass hysterical movements as previous generations have been.  They are into "personhood," and yes, they are cynical, if that term is appropriate, because they recognize these are counterfeit times and trust is the precious casualty.  

 

Be always safe,

 

Jim