© July 2, 2022
Times have changed; now parents don't educate their children anymore, but
the children educate their parents.
Manfred Fiedler, a German citizen, former Honeywell Europe colleague, and
friend for more than 30 years.
Manfred's reflection on my “Conditional & Unconditional Love” follows my
comment on author Ken Shelton’s “Conditional Love: I grew up thinking it was
universal.” Ken and I were formed as writers by our parents as children; he
with a strong father; I with a resolute mother. This eclectic rant however does
not deny the validity of Manfred’s evaluation.
THE SENSE OF SELF IN A WORLD OF NONSENSE
The Austrian-American management Guru Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) dismisses the
idea of culture saying, “I have no idea what it is,” while
creating his philosophical and practical foundation for the modern business
management corporation but as it turns out without legs.
Culture is in and about everything because everything is a consequence of
culture be it what we call God to the diverse vehicles of religious belief
systems to the way we behave in groups.
We have had one hundred years of military and Cultural Revolution including two
world wars. Revolutions produce qualitative change. These revolutions have
resulted in directional, behavioral, and psychological changes as defined by
many things including work, workers, and the workplace.
The world is now one place with a myriad of cultural intersections to make a
person, a person whatever his original ethnicity and culture. What existed
before is gone; what exists now is shaping what comes next.
Higher levels of power have atrophied giving rise to lower levels of power
concentration. Power at this new level although not well defined can unleash
violence and disruption rather than harmony and stability as the shift in the
distribution of power from upper to lower levels is at first erratic. Once
power stabilizes, however, it will elicit a new set of cultural assumptions. We
are amid this cultural dynamic forgetting that more often than not what appears
at first different seldom means better.
When you are as old as I am, you tend to reflect somewhat eclectically about
the strangeness of your time denoting the strangeness of how consistently your
contemporaries keep pushing against the water.
We are by nature social animals with a strong urge to belong to the dominant
group. Leaders for eternity have exploited the wisdom of this simple equation:
Belief + Belonging = Behavior
Since a small child,
when I didn’t know what parents were, I lived with my sister, first with a
foster mother and then with relatives. What I felt in my aloneness was
complemented by the consistency of my Irish Roman Catholicism.
Once my birth mother and birth da appeared and were there for us at the age of
five and three, my self-direction was influenced by my mother. This has
provided the freedom I would not otherwise have enjoyed impacting my life as a
person, and as a writer.
Given this predilection, I marvel at how much people gauge their lives on what
others think failing to imagine how they think.
WE HAVE BECOME A ROBOTIC SOCIETY
We increasingly exist on automatic pilot sustained by a juvenile culture
celebrating what others define as achievements seemingly unaware of how hope controls
our behavior. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) suggests:
“When courage is lost all is lost. It would be better to never be
born.”
We rely on hope to intervene and correct our situation passing the
responsibility to leaders when too frequently they have another agenda. Hope is
a passive virtue; courage is an active asset.
Some ideas pass through the filters of our perceptual prism, others do not.
Many of us can relate to philosopher Eric Hoffer’s (1902 – 1983) observation
that many workers busy themselves doing other people’s jobs without having sufficient
time to do their own, while others cannot relate to psychologist Stephen Pinker’s
(born 1954) assertion claims that world violence is on the decline (Better
Angels of our Nature, 2011).
Philosopher Rene Girard’s (1923 – 2015) “Mimetic Theory of Desire” has
an explanation. He sees people are vulnerable to what other people claim to be
true. Girard insists this is so since we don’t have an inner desire of our own
that finds us desiring what we see others around us desiring. In other words,
people imitate models who endow objects with value. Girard writes:
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to
others to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate
their desires.”
This leads to a natural rivalry between individuals, and groups, and eventual
scapegoating through media outlets, political parties, religious pulpits, and
even nations. An American general once said of Vietnam, “We have to destroy
Vietnam to save it.”
We now see Vladimir Putin of Russia repeating that general's refrain in
Ukraine. Rene puts it in these words:
“Societies unify their imitative desires around the destruction of a
collectively agreed upon scapegoat.”
This scapegoat mechanism as hypothesized by Girard sees societies unifying
their imitative desires around the destruction of a collectively agreed-upon
scapegoat.
The innocent, often unaware of this mechanism, march to the slaughter. The
July/August 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs (What is Power?)
devotes several articles to Putin and how he has misread history, failing to
see the limits of military power while gravitating to the folly of strength.
Putin's Russia with its preemptive invasion of Ukraine has as a consequence
become a dangerous nation.
In a more minuscule sense, behavioral experimental psychologists find mice
trapped in a limited space eventually attack each other. The world population
took tens of thousands of years to reach 2 billion in the third decade of the
20th century. Today in the early 21st century, or less than one hundred years
the world population is now 8 billion with genocide, homicide, suicide, famine,
and senseless wars sporadically reoccurring across the globe.
Social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980) writes in “Escape from Freedom” (1941) that we fear the responsibilities of
freedom preferring to enslave ourselves to some authoritarian authority to
control our lives hopefully in a positive way.
Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer” (1951) called this in
essence the “herd mentality.” Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin
(1909 – 1997) in “Four Essays on Liberty” (1969) defines the
nature of freedom in terms of “negative liberty” or what Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1802 – 1882 defines as “self-reliance.” With “positive
liberty” we voluntarily sacrifice freedom to an external authority
that places limits on what we can and cannot do.
A complement of the two is necessary for a community or state. Still, the
authority of government, labor unions, the church, and the social will of the
community can put us in a cage. I present this issue in pragmatic terms
in “Who Put You in the Cage” (© 1998, 2nd edition © 2018). A
book review columnist writes:
Whether of our own making or not, we all reside in some kind of cage. There
is an exit ramp but few acknowledge much less take it. It can be the cage of a
bad relationship that we endure as if there is no other option; a mountain of
biases that confines us within its walls, refusing to see how they are
self-imprisoning; a job we hate in which we feel trapped by its demands; the
cage of debt that wreaks havoc with our lives for our lack of prudence; the
cage of ill health brought on by eating, drinking, or smoking too much while
avoiding exercise; the cage of never being able to say “no” to our children or
friends when that would be best for everyone; the failure to cut ties with
people who distract us from our purpose; the cage of status and celebrity
worship that makes strangers more real to us than family and friends; the
assuming of a lifestyle we cannot afford that finds us always anxious and
tense. These are cages with which we are all familiar. Social psychologist
James R. Fisher, Jr. penetrates these cages and provides a strategy for
acknowledging the cage, then shows us how to extricate ourselves from that
confinement. The second edition has been revised, edited, and enhanced with
illustrations, photographs, graphics, schematics, tables, and graphs out of the
author's empirical work and personal life for the reader's pleasure.
THE NATURE OF MORALITY
Morality is in the mind of the times. Some follow the rules of the church,
others follow the civil authority of the state, while still others find a way
to walk the difficult line between the two as Desiderius Erasmus (1469 - 1536)
did some five hundred years ago with sarcasm, wit, humor, and the celebration
of the absurd thus avoiding the risk of being mortally punished. The behavior
of Erasmus is the morality of today.
Consequently, morality, as dictated by the decision-makers of the state and the
church, is hardly morality.
We are all at heart opportunists with survival instincts in play rising from
our unconscious minds. Psychoanalyst inventor Sigmund Freud has provided the
language for this justification. Many are willing to sell their souls for the price
of belonging as dictated by significant others as demonstrated by those who
stormed the United States Nation’s Capital buildings on January 6, 2021.
Why? Not to satisfy
their angst but that of their deposed leader, President Donald Trump, failing to
think how stupid an act this would turn out to be while having no sense of the consequences
in terms of their own survival.
Erasmus was a Rotterdam priest and scholar, who chose to embrace negative freedom amidst the moral
dilemma of his times (i.e., The Protestant Reformation) by simply
writing “In Praise of Folly” (1511) at the home of his friend
Sir Thomas More in England then publishing it anonymously in France. He claimed later that it was written as an
amusement for More by celebrating the satirical pleasures of youth and the intoxicating
piety and foibles of the aged as exemplified by theologians consumed with
secular power and personal ambition.
His specific targets
were bishops, monks, and the Roman Papacy itself which had reduced Christian
ideals to pomp & circumstance through pilgrimages, festivals, relics, and
devotional aids. In his bald acerbic style, he attacked superstitions and the
abuses of Christian doctrine satirizing people and groups of the 15th century
who had exercised power in Europe.
Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, was a Renaissance humanist, and King Henry
VIII’s Lord Chancellor of England until 1532 when he refused to sign an oath in
support of the king’s request for special dispensation to divorce and remarry
in defiance of church law.
After More refused to
rebuke the Roman Papacy, he was beheaded on July 6, 1535. Four hundred years
later, Pope Pius XI (1857 – 1939) canonized More as a saint in 1935. Pope
Pius XI canonized many others as saints while he was a bit of a rascal as the Supreme
Pontiff (see “The Pope Who Would Be King,” by David I Kertzer,
2018). Sainthood has always given me pause.
More’s martyrdom suggests his internal spiritual belief system came to clash
precipitously with the civil authority of the state. Given this, how should we
appraise the countervailing actions of Erasmus?
More was idealistically
“other-directed” while Erasmus was pragmatically “self-directed.” Erasmus was
essentially guided by negative freedom with a pragmatic
appreciation of positive freedom while More seems to have had
only an exclusive appreciation of positive freedom as
exercised by the church.
It should be noted that Erasmus followed the exploits of Martin Luther and the
Protestant Reformation but chose to act as a reformer within Roman Catholicism
leading to the Counter-Reformation.
This rant now spins off onto other ideas.
NIETZSCHE: GOD IS DEAD!
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is given credit for the "God is dead" declaration signaling mankind's retreat
from the spiritual with a new kind of material secularism as a consequence of
The Protestant Revolution of the 16th century and the concomitant rise
of a capitalistic society, first in the West and then today throughout the
Eastern world anchored by the communistic state.
Nietzsche was simply stating an obvious mantra of the “The Age of
Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries and
the arrival of the secular age.
Once Christianity no longer dictated social mores through parents, a flood of
thinkers surfaced most notably Freud and Jung and their army of interpreters.
The “Industrial Revolution”
accelerated this Enlightenment with the American
Civil War (1961 – 1865) changing social consciousness only to be further
disruptive with WWI and WWII.
Everything changed after 1945 in the United States in the 20th century.
The 1960s were marked by soaring college dropouts such as Steve Jobs, Stephen
Wozniak, and Bill Gates who would change the world, leaving behind GM, IBM,
academia, and other societal institutions, except corporate management now better
known as “Corporate America.”
Management became empirical with its pyramidal structure, infallible hierarchy,
and authority, successfully selling America on the idea it was necessary as the
new civil religion of American society. Corporate Management enjoyed
infallibility once only enjoyed by the Roman Papacy and the Roman Catholic
Church and Roman Emperors.
Remarkably, although
managers are today atavistic in the 21st century and management
mainly anachronistic, it still stirs society’s drink remaining the seat of
power in academia, commerce, industry, politics, the military, and the
government.
THIS INVISIBLE RANTER IN A TRANSITIONAL AGE
When young having grown up in the era of The Great Depression and WWII, the
simple life has always had much appeal to me. We of that age never questioned
our biological identity of male and female nor was our sex-role identity
complicated. We were too busy in survival mode with little time for
self-conscious self-indulgence. Gender and sex-role identity has become
ghoulish confusion ever since. Society seemingly has become a free-floating
phantom bringing to mind the American educator and poet Hughes Mearns’s (1875 –
1965) poem, Antigonish:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish I wish he’d go away
Society now chases phantoms such as wealth, prestige, celebrity, fame, and
power only to release ghoulish paranoia, anxiety, depression, cynicism,
antagonism, jealousy, envy, hatred, and despair.
A PERSONAL ASIDE
WWII launched an explosive rise in technology moving inexorably from the atomic
age to the electronic age into the information age and the Internet where
privacy and freedom have disappeared replaced by ubiquitous Big Brother
surveillance with frantic incessant gossip with the mundane mutating to the superfluous
and ridiculous.
Trained as a chemist, my Periodic Table, alas, has proven to be more abstract
than the Chemical Periodic Table. Still, having to make a living to support my
young family, I spotted an enticing advertisement in Chemical &
Engineering News that the National Aluminate Corporation was
looking for chemical sales engineers. C&E News displayed
an attractive field test kit in its ad that found me rationalizing that the
bridge between the lab and the field was not too far.
National Aluminate Corporation was a water treatment company
started by a salesman and a chemist in 1920 after WWI with a close association
with The Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA). ALCOA used
this fledgling company to treat its steam power plants and water systems across
the globe.
I joined the company in 1958 after returning from serving in the US NAVY on the
flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean with a graduate
fellowship in my pocket to study theoretical chemistry at Wesleyan University
in Middletown, Connecticut the following fall. I needed to find additional
income in the short term to complement the fellowship as I had a wife and two
small children ages two and six months to support.
Never having sold anything before, I went off to Nalco Chemical
Company (as the company was now called) for a month’s technical
training at Nalco’s Chicago headquarters with not a minute of training on
selling.
There had been no mention when hired that I was on a three-year technical
training program expecting to acquire my professional engineering license
before its conclusion at a current salary less than I had been making in the
R&D laboratory.
Two things happened simultaneously, I pissed off the area manager when I road
with him, answering what I had learned after traveling with him for a
week, “Nothing,” I said, “They
were all social calls. You never asked for an order.” On the
other, we were expecting our third child scuttling the possibility of honoring
the chemistry fellowship.
The Monday after riding with the area manager I came to Nalco’s district office
to be greeted by the district and area managers, “We don’t think you
are cut out for this kind of work. We’ll give you some marginal accounts to
service for a month, given you have a family, by then you had better line up
another job.”
An incongruity in my personality surfaced. I tend to be high-strung but in
crisis, everything seems to slow down. I found myself saying, “Can I
upgrade these accounts and get the commission?”
The two managers snickered through the smoke of their cigarettes, looking at
each other, and nodding, why not. Not done, I asked, “Can I
call on our competitor accounts?” The “why not” reappeared.
Two weeks later, I sold the largest competitor's account in the district in ten
years by saying to the superintendent of the three-plant complex of Philco in
Connersville, Indiana when asked by Philco’s superintendent, “Sport,
you’ve got five minutes, what do you have for me?”
After spending an hour alone in the operations bullpen in the center of this
seven-acre plant, all the technical problems that can occur in an industrial
high-power boiler system were on display.
I said simply, “I’m here to save your job.” And I did, getting
a three-month blanket order when I didn’t know Nalco’s products and had never
surveyed any system much less a complex one. The area manager was needed to
assist me but was never able to fathom how I sold the account.
That success was not a fluke as success followed success with Nalco sending a
total of 78 other sales engineers to ride with me for a week, along with two
executives from Nalco’s Chicago headquarters one of whom would become the Director
of the Industrial Division, and eventually Executive Director
of Nalco’s International Operations, and my boss when I was elevated to
V.P. reporting to him.
Now at age 30 and the father of four, the West Coast Regional Director asked me
to come to San Francisco to address the Regional Managers Meeting on how I sold
Nalco’s products.
I had read widely but never on selling. As a consequence, I had no
cohesive selling methodology. For the better part of a month, I pondered my
reading of such authors as St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Eric Fromm, Eric Berne,
Erik Erikson, Goethe, Gurdjieff, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Rollo May,
Alan W. Watts, Nietzsche, Bruno Bettelheim, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward de Bono,
Gustave Le Bon, Jacque Barzun, William James, Sholem Asch, Abraham Maslow, Rene
Girard, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, James Joyce, B. F. Skinner,
Joseph Campbell, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Aldous Huxley, Sartre, Camus, et al,
finding these authors fed my intellectual curiosity but would put this group to
sleep.
Several of the guys who traveled with me went back to their districts and
said, "Fisher doesn't sell as we do." True, I didn't
emphasize the prowess of Nalco, a leader in the specialty chemical industry, a
company with only $50 million in sales but growing. Dow Chemical made a bid to
acquire Nalco, but management at the time said "If successful, Dow
would acquire empty plants and offices as Nalco workers weren’t for sale." To
put this in perspective, Nalco is now Ecolab, a company that acquired Nalco for
$5.38 billion in 2011.
In the early 1960s, Nalco's selling strategy was consistent with selling in
general irrespective of the industry. Selling was "winning through
intimidation," anticipating and overcoming objectives,
penetrating the prospect’s resistance with the penalty of delay, or wowing the
prospect with the company's technical prowess, none of which were appealing to
me.
THE WISDOM OF CONFIDENT SELLING
From the beginning, I sensed that the selling situation was a partnership
between the buyer and seller that was mutually enhancing and not an adversary
relationship.
It is an inordinate advantage to the seller if he is self-accepting, that is,
he likes himself as he is, warts and all, and as a consequence is inclined to
accept the buyer as he is. This state of tolerance allows the seller to see the
buyer as an individual and not as a mark.
I knew from my Nalco service work that the problems prospects were likely to
encounter mirrored the problems of my customers.
Trained as a chemist, I knew a product was not sufficient to reduce systemic
problems but a system’s approach could. With a natural proclivity to
schematics, I would often get behind the desk of a prospect with him peering
over my shoulder and create a diagram of his system highlighting possibly
troubling areas. This approach proved something of a hypnotic selling strategy.
Some other colleagues who traveled with me went back to their district managers
and said, “Fisher reads minds, and that is why he is so lucky.”
Untrue, what I was doing was reading behavior. I also read the culture of a
prospect’s office space. A chief engineer, superintendent, powerhouse foreman,
or operations manager creates a work or office climate consistent with how he
thinks and feels. This is not difficult to interpret if you trained yourself to
make the connection between interests, beliefs, values, and yes, biases, which
are on display.
Then there is the use of language which indicates a person’s level of
curiosity; whether he is primarily visual, verbal, linear, conceptual,
abstract, logical, or intuitive, and whether a left brain or right brain
thinker.
I did not share too much of this with my San Francisco audience; nor how people
contradict themselves forgetting what they had said before which is inconsistent
with what they claim to believe. We call it lying but it is much more complex
than simply lying. How could I explain this to an audience of salesmen who lie
for a living? Nor how could I describe the spiritual connection I often feel in
the selling situation? The buyer frequently reveals his soul without knowing it
as the plant superintendent did at Philco in Connersville, Indiana. These
themes were developed in my first book, Confident Selling (©1971,
2nd edition © 2014).
I ended my talk emphasizing the partnership between seller and buyer with this
little cliché:
Find a way of accepting yourself as you are, and you will be inclined to
accept others as you find them. With this state of tolerance, all barriers to a
profitable exchange are removed.
