VOX POPULI

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 27, 2020

There is no field of leadership. Never in the history of humankind have so many, for so long, opined so much, to so little effect. This "field" of consequences cannot and does not contain its cause. First investigate the failure of leadership. Then, rise up a level of abstraction and test your ideas for a cause.

William L. Livingston, IV, engineer, inventor, social scientist, and social industrial commentator

In THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ (2020), reference is made to personal occasions when situations put me into what I would call “field leadership,” but which I explain (in this book of that title) in terms of the integration of intuition and instinct to manifest insight utilizing my reptilian brain.

In another book, CONFIDENCE IN SUBTEXT (2017), I explore the psychology of the subconscious where “cause,” if you want to call it that, resides, and which often surfaces when you might otherwise be at your wits end.

Critics might assert that my empirical data is bias as it is not methodologically scientific and uses no mathematical algorithms, or independent studies for justification. In other words, it is not cause dependent.

Where Sir William is right, I have spent my lifetime of thought attempting to understand my inordinate success, which seemingly has had no justification in terms of cause and might better be construed as intuitive or counterintuitive.

This brief essay is not the place to explain how a young American executive managed to successfully launch a new enterprise in South Africa in 1968 of three competing specialty chemical companies with no prior training in this field of leadership, yet he pulled it off while being psychologically conflicting in a personal sense.

DEVLIN, A Psychological Novel,  pondered over the past fifty years, was published in 2018.

Near the end of my career with Honeywell, Inc. in 1990, I noticed a book on an executive’s desk at Honeywell corporate headquarters in Minneapolis, “Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness” (1977).

I asked my colleague, “What exactly is this book about?” “No idea,” he said, and went on to something else. It was like a coffee table book. I bought a copy and read it, and was astounded how much I had been practicing this form of leadership.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase "servant leadership," an approach that had been around for centuries. A servant leader is a servant first to those he serves with the focus on the needs of others. The traits of a servant leader are listening, empathy, awareness, insight, and the conceptual vision to understand the needs of others. Greenleaf writes:

A new moral principle is emerging which holds that the only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proposition to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader (Servant Leadership, p. 10).

My career, all the way back to those halcyon days as a chemical sales engineer, the problem solving, on reflection, was handled mainly symbolically and psychologically.  My focus was on those with whom I was working, which was conducted intuitively as I was neither trained in sales nor in my executive functions as I came of age in the corporation before someone of my sort was exposed to such sophisticated approaches.

Those who have read me know that I have written about this experience to the point of exhaustion.

Historian and political scientist George McGregor Burns (1918 – 2014) in LEADERSHIP (1978) claims, Leadership is mainly symbolic and that the true leader is actually the complete follower of the wishes of the people he serves.  

That is consistent with my experience.  In fact, I have come to believe everyone is a leader or no one is.

Sir Williams may be right, but my own personal experience seemingly is in conflict with his assertion.