The Peripatetic Philosopher

WHEN WILL "A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA" BE PUBLISHED?

2012-01-20T06:16:00.000-08:00

WHEN WILL “A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA” BE PUBLISHED?

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

REFERENCE:

Readers have read the exchange between Billy and Mary with me after completing the manuscript, and have inundated me with when can I get a copy of the book. This is representative of that reaction:

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

OK, you have me hooked.

When will I be able to purchase a copy of A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA?

Wayne (:>))

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Wayne,

Thank you for your comment. The book is only in manuscript form.

You are one of many who found this exchange interesting. The process of book writing-to-publication, at least in my experience, is a time consuming and lengthy one.

You, like many others, have been kind enough to write, and will be alerted when and if this manuscript reaches publication. My sense is that it will not be this year. Sorry.

A book tells a story, but the process of scribbling framed in some form finally reaching closure tells a more interesting story. The operational word is "process" and it has its own denouement.

I have been trained in both the hard and soft sciences to maintain a focus on process not results, on the means not the ends, as the correct process, and not the reverse of this dictate the results and ends.

As I write these words, I am still working on process seeing if the story I wish to tell in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is the story I am telling.

Once this idea of process and framing the problem (i.e., defining it) was not a radical idea, but somehow we have lost sight of this fact.

I don't know if you have watched the insanity of the Republican Debates, which reached the bizarre last night, but that comedy speaks to my point and is indicative of societal drift.

Book publishing, as with everything else, is symptomatic of this frenzied state of affairs, that is, of getting the story out before the story is ready, telling the wrong story completely, the old saw of the cart ahead of the horse, or indeed, appealing to the lowest common denominator in our collective psyche. Take the debate last night.

The focus of the debate veered off process immediately, away from “How do we get the economy back on course and more people back to work,” to run off the road and into the ditch with the CNN moderator asking a soap opera question of infidelity to Newt Gingrich, and then compounding this error by asking an equally inappropriate question of Mitt Romney: “When was he going to release his income tax returns?”

Such questions are titillating if the objective is gossip on a reality show, but irrelevant to process when the problem is assessing competence to be president. The media have lost their moral compass and their way, and it is embarrassing for the viewer to see.

When the focus is on the person and not on the problem, the future is left up for grabs whoever is elected. This is not very heartening.

Returning to writing, mentioned in that exchange with Billy and Mary was Aldous Huxley's book, "Point Counterpoint" (1928). I read it 55 years ago when I was a sailor on the USS Salem (CA-139) in the Med, and still have my annotated copy.

The book made an impression on me showing how much conversation (i.e., process) is the music of life, and dictates outcomes (i.e., results) when it has a palpable focus. Artists often appear to be going nowhere in conversation, and this book is no exception, but it stuck with me -- they were involved in process and clarification.

If I have a skill as a writer to that of many other scribblers, I believe it is in dialogue, as I remember the rhythm and yes, point counterpoint to conversations that I have heard over my long life. Aldous Huxley had a recorder in his head, as did author John O'Hara. I think I do as well.

Be always well,

Jim.

A PAINFUL STING, CRUEL AFFRONT, A MARGINALIZER, NOT AN INSPIRER

2012-01-19T13:36:00.000-08:00

A PAINFUL STING, CRUEL AFFRONT, A MARGINALIZER, NOT AN INSPIRER

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

The first television debate in South Carolina of Republican hopefuls to win the party’s nomination for President personified moral fatigue. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stepped into the void to offer odious overkill.

Fox Television News panel baited the Speaker with softball questions about food stamps and unemployment compensation for out-of-work Americans. Gingrich has a talent for going for the jugular expressing the pent up angst of his party, which for me represented a painful sting and cruel affront to the marginalized, the people powerless to protest, and I am a registered Republican.

Raucous applause greeted his reference to 99 weeks of unemployment compensation being the time required to earn an Associate of Arts college degree.

One of the panelists suggested that the Speaker’s criticism was directed at African Americans, a charge the Speaker dodged with agility pointing out that unemployment benefits should be tied to some kind of work or training program for everyone. Who could argue with that?

The Speaker waved his pudgy arms magnanimously and said he was sure his colleagues on the dais agreed. They were silent. He then said Republicans believed “work is good,” implying Democrats do not.

Words are incendiary, words such as “work” or “food stamps” or “unemployment compensation.” Incendiary words have been the arsenal of demagogues throughout history, words that suggest leadership but appeal to the rabble, not the reasonable.

Food stamps and unemployment compensation are indicators of the failure of governance, an embarrassment to takers as well as givers. The Speaker added ceremoniously, “I’ll help you if you’re willing to help yourself.” Pretty words empty of meaning. People drowning in debt and in psychological and economic depression have little to say in the matter but to accept their marginalized status.

THE PUNISHING WASTE OF CORPORATE SPEAK

The human mind is a fragile instrument, and puppet masters dance on that mind as if they own it, believing they have reached their own elevated status as if by osmosis. Heredity, environment, culture and programming are imperious masters of the individual’s fate. So it has been throughout history.

The soul of a race is docile or competitive, reactive or engaged, servile or challenging. Each race carries the heavy chains and the lasting links of its ancestors. Gustave le Bon, more than one hundred years ago, put it this way: “We are the children at once of our parents and our race. Our country is our second mother for physiological and heredity as well as sentimental reasons.” He went on to say, “A people are guided far more by its dead than by its living members. It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.” Our ancestors fashion our ideas, our approach to our problems, and the motives of our conduct. We bear the burden of their mistakes and reap the rewards of their virtues.

A people of many races, as is our own constituency, develop common sentiments, common interests, and common beliefs. Within these sentiments a character develops with a mental constitution, which is not rigid. It may waver between a capacity for prudence or a tendency to rely on impulse, a demonstration of will power or an inclination to follow the crowd, the stoicism of perseverance or the passivity of giving up at crunch time, the energy to do what is necessary or the need to be carried, a respect for rules or an obsession with avoiding them. In the end, the level of morality determines if a race is to survive and prosper.

We have many examples in history to show us the truth of this. Rome fell after 500 years, overrun by barbarians, when its morality and character unraveled.

We also have bifurcated evidence of race bending but not breaking. The Anglo-Saxon of northern Europe had the character and constitution to challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to the Protestant Reformation.

This did not happen in southern Germany or the southern tier of Europe, or indeed, in any of the Latin countries of Europe. Five hundred years after Martin Luther, southern Germany remains essentially Roman Catholic, but not northern Germany, northern Europe or England. The birthplace of the present pope, Benedict XVI, incidentally, is from Bavaria in southern Germany.

African Americans have resided in southern Florida for more than three hundred years. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s, Cubans fled to the United States, and became naturalized citizens of this country. They have produced a Florida governor and two United States Senators, Congressmen and Congresswomen. The southern peninsula of Florida has been turned into little Cuba, culturally, economically, intellectually and commercially. It has the character and soul of Cuba. Meanwhile, African Americans still struggle in the region for a toehold.

Cubans brought their individual culture with them, the visible expression of their invisible soul. Moreover, they assimilated the American culture and made it work for them. They possessed at once a personal life and a collective life, the latter being of their race. The mindset has not been modified, but merely the objects that have brought it into play have changed. So, it has been with many other cultures that make up America. Why not the African American?

This brings me to why I take umbrage at the Speaker’s comments.

Not only are his remarks to raucous applause patronizing and snide, they illustrate the problem. Modern society clashes with the prospects of the marginalized realizing the American dreams of social justice and equality of opportunity.

“I am willing to work with you” the speaker proclaims, implying those dependent on food stamps and unemployment compensation are the problem.

These recipients are casualties of the problem. The system is broke. The Speaker corroborates this by speaking one language while practicing another, a breach of trust. For instance, did his $1.6 million earned consulting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac help or hurt these people?

The Speaker is not alone. Educators and politicians speak of a dumbing down of American society. Heads nod in agreement.

Yet, if you get inside this situation, you see that modern industrial society, and now the information age endeavor to program people to increasingly specialized labor at the expense of developing their intelligence and character to engage an ever changing world.

When people are honed like machines, they respond like machines, which is a dumbing down process.

When these machines are considered anachronistic and discarded, the people manning them are as well, putting them out in the cold, jobless, clueless, and powerless. A speaker standing behind a dais pontificating steps of amelioration cannot correct the problem because it is in the people's DNA.

Everything for at least the last century has been turned inside out and upside down by developments in the last twenty years, and now we are paying the price for that development. People have been programmed to feed the whimsical needs of society's machine rather than society being dedicated to feed the needs of the people.

This is palpably evident in education, which is boring and out of date for students from pre-K to graduate school, in job classifications, which favor the credentialed rather than the competent, where the emphasis is on nourishment of the brain as if it doesn’t have a body, and it explains why leaders who cannot lead and followers who can, never take the reins.

The compelling story of the Republican Presidential Debates has been the power of transparency. But transparency is not enough. Democracy demands more.

Democracy demands a rallying message that embraces us all. FDR often wrote his own speeches. He labored over what he would say to Congress the day after the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He first wrote, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in history – the United States was deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan….” When he proofread his speech, he crossed out “history” and scribbled in “infamy.” The word was electrifying, and immediately rallied the nation behind his leadership. We are desperate for such a word and voice now.

* * *

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

2012-01-19T05:53:00.000-08:00

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

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

READERS WRITE:

Jim,

I have finished your book and have had some trouble forming my thoughts.

I definitely enjoyed the inter play with your household staff, the exchange with the lady at the train station, and your sales retreat sections. It gave me a better understanding of what and with whom you were dealing.

As I have said before, I think the book needs to be shortened and my suggestion would be in the area of the detailed and explicit sexual encounters.

I do understand where you are coming from but a casual reader might not necessarily have the same insight. Reading the January 16 issue of Time Magazine and finding the article “How the ANC Lost its Way,” I concluded that not much has changed since you left South Africa.

You are truly an outstanding individual who is able to reveal, express, and share your most inner self, a respected friend for 70 years.

Bill

* * *

Jim,

I, too, have finished the manuscript and found the book enlightening about the area, the times, the conflicts within the country and within the main characters.

It is a good story. There are so many issues that have stayed with me and made me want to learn more.

I plan to reread it again as I mentioned before. This time stopping and reflecting on the references knowing it will lead to another level of understanding.

We both, Bill and I, appreciate and admire your skill and ability and thank you for giving us the opportunity to read and comment on your project.

We wish you well knowing it is truly a labor of love.

Our best to you and BB.

Mary

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Billy and Mary,

Thank you. You are the only ones who have completed the manuscript, and for that I owe you a debt of gratitude.

For my readers, I should mention you are husband and wife. I have known Billy almost all my life. Mary I have known only a few years.

Billy and I grew up only doors from each other, went to high school together, took the same classes which included four years of mathematics, four years of English, two years of history, along with a year of physics and chemistry, psychology and social science, two years of Latin, and four years playing football and running track together

We were first students and second athletes. The course of study we took had no special name such as “college prep” or “advanced placement.” We gravitated to such studies because of interest, and represented about 10 percent of our class. Most of us, quite remarkably, graduated from college and pursued successful careers.

We came out of the middle of the United States, growing up in the middle of the twentieth century, living in the middle of a community along the Mississippi River on the crescent of the State of Iowa, a state then and still with a rate of literacy of 99 percent, a state never caught up in the economic bubble of 2008 with an unemployment rate of around 5 percent today against a national average of 8.5 percent or more.

The world we were born into was in the middle of the Great Depression. We were in our adolescent years during World War Two when we went from deprivation of circumstances (Great Depression), to national rationing (WWII), to taking our places in life knowing the reality of scarcity, believing in the equality of opportunity, and the wisdom of frugality. This was the character of our collective soul. We were also white.

As a writer, I admit to being more comfortable as an essayist and cultural critic than a novelist. That said I took the character of Dirk Devlin, the protagonist of the story, into an alien culture as a young man because his knowledge and expertise had relevance.

It was 1968, a year I believe marked the end of the twentieth century a little early. It also marked the year America’s hegemony was starting to assert itself a score of years after World War Two. Devlin was right in the middle of this surge.

This young naïve engineer was stepping into the collapsing decadence of British colonialism, and into the defiant and misguided policy of apartheid of the Afrikaner government. Paradoxically, the Afrikaner culture was similar to his Iowa experience. If this was not challenging enough, he was stepping into a caldron of nature where the artificial rules and taboos of his conditioning had no purchase with its laws.

This “point counterpoint” rhapsody plays on his conscience, and not too far a field from that great novel by Aldous Huxley of the same name.

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA references this musical technique of counterpoint as the story is constructed after the fashion of a work of music.

Instead of an obvious single plot, there are a number of interlinked storylines and recurring themes to display the characters, and to illustrate such things as corporate hegemony, Bantu multiculturalism, colonialism, Afrikaner isolationism, the soul of race, (Afrikaner and Bantu), the contretemps of clueless hedonism (the British), the disconnect between religion (Catholicism) and morality, the naked turmoil of loveless marriages, the divine rights of executive husbands and the feudalistic dependence of their spouses.

Yes, it is earthy, and earthy without apologies because it is the earthiness in the novel that is real while everything else are shards of shifting and collapsing artifacts of synthetic construction; translated: modernity on display.

The protagonists are meant to carry the weight of this novel in point counterpoint. This is revealed as Dirk’s subconscious periodically surfaces with insights and small epiphanies producing music and sometimes only white noise.

My concern is if Seamus “Dirk” Devlin at “point” and Nina van Polanen Petal at “counterpoint” succeed in carrying the story, or does the deluge within the frame of the story overwhelm them and the reader?

Mary, I would be interested in learning this from you upon your rereading the manuscript.

Your comment that the story can be read on several levels is encouraging, as that is my intention.

As for you, Billy, I am often told that my writing could use serious editing, and that may include the earthy parts. But I must confess, were I to have an editor, which I do not have, I doubt seriously if I could be persuaded to excise any of these parts. You must remember I come from the same tree as James Joyce, the author of ULYSSES.

Thank you again, and always be well,

Jim

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE -- COMMENTS & RESPONSE

2012-01-12T12:31:00.000-08:00

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE – COMMENTS & RESPONSE

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

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

Well said and the last four paragraphs are the best writing I have seen from you in awhile.

I haven't read Hoffer, but must as I have noted that, for me at least, some of your clearest writings over time have been those associated with references to him.

My view of the problem for leaders, or would be leaders, that exists today as a result of all the intrusiveness you spoke of is this: in order to have heroes (the leader is always your potential hero) you must see the person in gross relief only. For example, if you know of the one shining hour he spent in some rabbit warren of huts in some misery hole on the other side of the world where he earned the right to wear the Medal of Honor a soldier is a hero, but if you know also of his womanizing, boozing, and anger management issues both before and after that hour it is hard to retain an heroic view of him; especially when that bit of heroics occurred in a conflict to which you were morally opposed.

The process our would be leaders must go through to get the job today, largely because of the intrusiveness technology makes possible, so dirties or blemishes them with the details of their imperfections that they lose the ability to be our hoped for untarnished heroes. Hence we are routinely reduced to choosing for our leaders those we find least obnoxious and that makes it hard to see them as real leaders. To put perspective on it, how many folks do you suppose voted for FDR all four times and still did not know that he used a wheelchair? How many who voted for him would not have had his invalid status been used as fodder 24/7 to question his ability to lead?

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

For readers of my missives, I would inform them that you are a retired Colonel in the United States Army, and know a thing or two about command and leadership.

That said author Charles D. Hayes of Alaska has, on occasion, compared my writing to Eric Hoffer, and so I take the mantle of working class philosopher with a degree of humility.

Some respondents were puzzled with my closing comment of this piece: We behave like puppets on a string with the puppet master a puppet as well. To clarify this declarative statement, I have added to this missive on my blog: Nobody is in charge. Events control the day.

We have the benefit of biographies today on such heroes of our times as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his First Lady, the eminent Eleanor Roosevelt in which it is reported that the president had an affair with the First Lady’s secretary, and she had a lesbian affair herself. Imagine how that would be exploited today.

Moreover, Democratic presidential candidate Wendell Willkie campaigned across the United States in 1940 with his mistress. Not a word of that fact was mentioned in the newspapers of the time, although the campaign was not otherwise unblemished with dirty politics.

There was apparently a code among journalists of the day that has been lost over time. Yellow journalism, so called, seemingly has gone to bed with the scandal magazines at the checkout counters of supermarkets with no apparent palpable disgust.

Human beings, heroes included as you point out, are interesting because, not in the absence of their human foibles.

We have a straightjacket president that is seemingly above reproach, who lacks the common touch, and who will most likely be opposed by a Republican straightjacket candidate, who also lacks that common touch, or two Harvard wonks that have little in common with any of us, and yet are expected to lead us to the promise land, which are jobs.

We made a terrible mistake after World War Two when we sacrificed individualism for collective self-esteem, when the best students in lower grades were all treated as equally gifted, when that was never the case, then or now, when we abandoned the idea of elitism to a dumbing down process with the focus on flaws in those that excelled as a way to cut them down to size, rather than using these models as inspiration to climb the steep curve to excellence.

We have had more than a half-century of this programming, and now are saddled with the product, which is, in my view, “leaderless leaders” in virtually all walks of life, all disciplines from education to commerce, from religion to industry, from music to literature, from science to philosophy.

We have descended to a celebrity culture, which, hopefully, is dying the death of satiety. This is not a new harangue on my part. On January 1, 1976, this caption was on the front page of the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, “America is dead! Long live America!” with my essay featured on the editorial page in a more extended form:

America is dead! Long live America! . . . On the eve of our 200^th birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child’s fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. . . America remains like a child. And like a child, the focus of America’s existence has always been on becoming, rather than on being; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than on reality . . . But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died . . . And in doing so . . . we have embraced despair . . . we will not grow up. Thus, on the eve of our 200^th birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies . . . In the end, time runs out on a nation’s adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, America is dead! Long live America!

This piece appeared in this abbreviated form in “Work Without Managers” (1990) and again in “Six Silent Killers” (1998). It was repeated in these two works as I am still waiting for us to turn that corner.

Be always well, and Ted, may you and Mary have a wonderful New Year,

Jim

* * *

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE -- GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

2012-01-12T03:07:00.000-08:00

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE – GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

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

Some sixty years ago a longshoreman turned author, a man with little formal education but a passionate taste for the word, wrote “The True Believer” (1951). The book was about mass movements and the fanatical spirit of the person compelled to join a cause, any cause, to quiet the collapsing boredom that imprisoned him in the mundane.

Hoffer became something of a guru of the 1950s when Eric Sevareid on CBS TV interviewed him during prime time in 1963. Hoffer wrote a series of books and became something of a celebrity, but nothing topped his first book, “The True Believer.”

What is a true believer?

According to Hoffer, a true believer is a guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to Communism. He is a fanatic not comfortable in his own skin, needing a Stalin or a Christ or a Hitler to worship and die for. The true believer is a mortal enemy of things as they are, and thinks nothing of sacrificing himself for a dream or a hope or a cause that is impossible to define and more incomprehensible to attain. He sees the true believer everywhere on the march from early Christianity to his era of the 1950s. Self-educated as a philosopher, he clarifies in this work the motives and hatreds of the crowd, which has seething contempt for the individual who is uninspired by their holy cause.

Hoffer was the darling of the liberal movement of the time until he commenced to criticize African Americans for their indolent ways, and to defend President Lyndon Johnson and his policies during the Viet Nam War.

* * *

Society moves forward in mysterious ways, and sometimes that movement resembles a flat line when the oscillating rhythms of life creep forward with neither a blip up or down, positive or negative, resembling a static curve on the oscilloscope. We are in such a moribund period now.

Hoffer’s focus was on true believers, but he used the motives and hatreds of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and the love of the Christ to illustrate the latticework to which true believers clung to in their fanaticism.

Were the longshoreman to have been able to think outside the box, which Edward de Bono would not introduce as "lateral thinking" for another quarter century, he would have seen that society was breaking down at its core because there were no longer leaders, only managers, and the crowd was a symptom of this development. Leaders guide people; managers manipulate people as things to be managed.

Leaders were no longer bigger than life villains like Hitler nor saviors like the Christ, only insensitive tyrants like Caligula in chief executive roles that managed companies and countries as if they were selling an inanimate product. In this climate, profit was more important than people, as people were only a vehicle to the bottom line, and a necessary but cumbersome consideration to that focus; translated: expendable.

We read daily in the headlines of our newspapers, on our blogs and on television news of the current intransigence on Wall Street, in Congress, in Brussels in the European Economic Community, as the fabric of economic, political, social and cultural life of an increasingly global society is seen to be unraveling. Yet, no leaders rise out of the trenches to right the situation, as polarity has become the name of the game, and puerile bickering the state of governance.

We see in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.

Two things are at work in this transformation. Traditional religious, political, economic and social institutions are crumbling no longer able to support themselves much less those that look for them for guidance.

The pyramid of hierarchical authority has collapsed and everyone including those who have the title of “leader” is scampering about with no clue as to what has happened much less where they are, as the chain-of-command is now only a chain around the neck of society slowing everyone’s progress.

Indicative of this scurrying are the Republican Party debates for the Presidency of the United States. They resemble Keystone Cop skits as they vie for the most powerful position in the world with no idea how to lead. They personify the problem and the scope of its intrusive character on contemporary life, but they are not the problem. Too much too many too soon has been the mantra of the day as we are on the cusp of an entirely new condition of existence and thought as the result of information technology and this exploding scientific age.

Our beliefs and values are tottering and disappearing, the pillars of society are giving way one by one, and into this vacuum has inevitably come the power of the crowd, the only force that nothing menaces and which has a momentum of its own. It is mindless because a crowd is leaderless. It coalesces around impressions in a tectonic shift of strangers who willingly sacrifice their identity and personality to a collective mind that can be as easily criminal as heroic.

Where this is going is difficult to say. What is certain is that we are in the grip of the crowd where there is no room for the individual, and leadership is only possible from individual not collective consciousness.

We fail to see this erosion in individualism because we fail to see 24/7 news coverage as an invasion of our privacy, neither do we see the constant polling of our collective mind by pundits and politicians, marketers and advertisers, political and social scientists, and other pollsters as such invasions, nor do we protest vociferously at 24/7 surveillance at seemingly every stop light, shopping mall, school, church or even our homes as a manifestation of this intrusive removal of our individualism. We behave like puppets on a string with the puppet master a puppet as well. Nobody is in charge. Events control the day.

* * *

FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- CLASH OF IDEAS -- A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- Snippets from the 90th Anniversary Edition

2012-01-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – CLASH OF IDEAS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

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

PREAMBLE:

A quarter century ago, I became a regular subscriber to “Foreign Affairs.” Not a political scientist, diplomat, academic, politician, think tank aficionado, nor a pundit or journalist, I am simply a reader. It is my hope that sharing these snippets with you will find you interested in becoming a reader, too.

The thoughtful ruminations reminds me of what philosopher Gustave Le Bon called in his day, some hundred years ago, the contemplation of society's "chimera of dilemmas," which invariably result in revolutions.

While revolutions claim to be founded on rational thought fueled by deliberate reason, in Le Bon's view, this is never the case. The cognitive biases of political scientist and economists cannot be faulted for trying to steer a measured course through the chaos and conflict of their times. Words are no substitute for action, but words trigger action, and on occasion prove prophetic.

The January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs features, "The Clash of Ideas." It provides snippets of earlier essays, and in some cases the ideological battles in those periods up to the present, ideas that have made the modern world, and are shaping the future.

In 1888, novelist Edward Bellamy published “Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887.” His little book was an attempt to find a solution to most of the ills of his time caused by the Long (business) Depression from 1873 until 1893, the longest economic contraction in history. Bellamy, a socialist and follower of Marx envisioned the United States in the year 2000 being a totally socialistic state.

In this world, there is no money, the state provides jobs and work cards that contain the same amount of credit for a year’s expenses, be you a domestic, doctor or bricklayer.

There is no opportunity for anyone to spend this stipend foolishly and starve as the government steps in and supervises the spending when necessary.

Everyone is educated to the age twenty-one with a broad cultural course so that inte4lectual snobbery is not only discouraged, but impossible.

Everyone engages in an apprentice program such as waiting on tables or similar tasks for three years, then competitive examinations are given to determine qualification for such professions as medicine, engineering, teaching, etc. To advance to these professional schools the individual must show the germane aptitude and attitude required, or be otherwise slotted in some other activity.

This utopian novel may seem farfetched but it was a resounding success in its day, and has been read up to the present as are other utopian novels such as Plato’s “Republic” Thomas More’s “Utopia,” and William Morris’s “News from Nowhere.”

At the end of this "Foreign Affairs" abridgment, the reader is introduced to Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution." It reads like a utopian novel, as twenty-first century society is on the brink of a world Bellamy envisioned, as competing ideologies are moving toward complementary partnerships. Utopia is moving increasingly from "Nowhere Land" to the social and economic order of tomorrow.

"Foreign Affairs" has been dealing with social and economic order and disorder for the past ninety years, making its own contribution to the course of human history, as these snippets indicate.

MAKING MODERNITY WORK

Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, 2012

He sees the true narrative of the times more a matter of policies than principles, as the ideological wars have given ground to stability. The clamor of the times is on the symptoms, not the problem, on the fact the US is trapped in political deadlock and dysfunction, Europe is broke and breaking, authoritarian China is on the rise, Occupy Wall Street protesters are on the streets, while movers and shakers search for “new models” to shape the future. The issue shares contributions of writers who have attempted to deal with modernity to reconcile capitalism and mass democracy, increasing economic inequality and declining social mobility. The question he poses is not what to do but how to do it.

The ideas and words that follow are all those of the authors indicated, and not my own.

HOW WE GOT HERE: THE RISE OF THE MODERN ORDER

Lenin and Mussolini

Harold T. Laski, September 1923

(Professor in London School of Economics)

A revolution in Russia was doubtless implied in the logic of events. No government, which is vicious in principle and corrupt in practice, can hope to retain the allegiance of those who do not share in the benefits of its dishonesty. But the Russian Revolution differs from all its predecessors in that it came in the name of a consistent system of doctrine; and it was largely made by men to whom that system contained the quintessence of social truth . . .

The state is in fact a method of protecting the owners of property; and the true division of men into those who own and those who do not own possessions other than their power to labor. The life of the state is an eternal struggle between them.

Just as the social order of the past has secreted within its womb the germ of its successor, as, for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does the latter contain within itself the germ of its communist successor. Capitalism, as Marx said, produces its own gravedigger….

Leninism has been the dictatorship of a party, Fascism (Mussolini) is the dictatorship of a man . . .For liberty, indeed, Mussolini professors no affection. He has called it a nineteenth century concept which has exhausted its utility. Liberty, for him, is the parent of anarchy…

LENIN

Victor Chernov, March 1924

(Russian Social-Revolutionary writer)

Lenin was a great man … Lenin’s intellect was energetic, but cold. It was above all an ironic, sarcastic and cynical intellect … Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple. Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise … Lenin always felt his audience ... . .. Yes, Lenin was good-natured. But good natured does not mean good hearted … He devoted his whole life to the working class…

STALIN’S POWER

Paul Scheffer, July 1930

(Foreign correspondent)

Stalin is not a man who appeals to the sympathies of crowds or stirs their imagination. He is not an electric person. Let us be more blunt: he is frankly unattractive, and all the more since he knows he is, and shows by his demeanor he does not care! Even his voice, a voice as hard and brittle as glass, lacks the undertones, the rhythm, that work so powerfully upon the music-loving populace of Russia … You feel at once that he is “dangerous”….Stalin is the dictator of dictators…

Making the Collective Man in Soviet Russia

William Henry Chamberlin, January 1932

(Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor)

The individual personality is fighting a losing battle against heavy odds in Russia today…What is perhaps not generally realized is that man himself is the firs and most important objective of Soviet planning and that the tendency to replace man, the individual, by collective man, is the product of social groups and forces, is one of the most important and interesting currents in Soviet life…Young pioneers (children about eight on) are not only taught to disbelieve religion; they are encouraged at Christmas time to go around and convert those “backward” children who may still want to have Christmas trees and celebrate the holidays in the traditional manner …So the individual personality is attacked from every side by forces which are all controlled from a common center and which are working in accordance with a prearranged plan to make the traditional human individualist into a collective man, a citizen of the future communist society …

The Philosophic Basis of Fascism

Giovanni Gentile, January 1928

(Italian philosopher)

In the definition of Fascism …concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation .. Fascism is not a philosophy .. Much less a religion. It is not even a political theory… It is eminently anti-intellectual .. if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence … It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men but rather creates pedants and aesthete, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent … For Fascism … the State is a wholly spiritual creation…

Radical Forces in Germany

Erich Koch-Weser, April 1931

(Former Minister of Justice of the German Republic)

The world is not ruled by reason, but by passion, and when a man is driven to despair he is ready to smash everything in the vague hope that a better world may arise out of the ruins….Intelligent and orderly as the German people are, patiently as they have borne the sufferings of war and of inflation, they are in danger today of falling into this reckless state of mind…. The watch-word is not the Christian one, “What is mine shall be thine,” but rather one of envy, “What is thine shall be mine.” The blind submission shown by the leaders of the party towards edicts issued by Soviet Russia increases its danger to Germany.. Greater danger is threatened at the present time from the National Socialists, popularly called the Nazis….

Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent

Paul Scheffer, April 1932

(Foreign correspondent)

Hitler is the most successful orator that Germany has ever possessed .. It is an interesting and a stirring experience to listen to Hitler, his bitterest enemies have often fallen under his spell … The hall where he is to speak often closes its doors and hour before the meeting is scheduled to begin because it is already filled to overflowing. One always sees a clean, neatly dressed crowd with faces that betray intellectual pursuits of one kind or another: clerks, professors, engineers, schoolteachers, students, civil service employees. These audiences are preoccupied, chary of words, quiet. Their faces are tense, often drawn. The only bustle in the room will come from the “hall guards,” a typical product of these times, rough young fellows, the Sturm Abteilungen, or “shock troops.”

Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, July 1933

(The editor of Foreign Affairs)

A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone…There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea…Not merely is he (the German) wiped out, but the memory of him is wiped out. It is pretended that he never was…. This does not merely apply to Jews and Communists, fled or imprisoned or detained “for their own protection” in barbed-wire concentration camps. It applies to men like Otto Braun, leader of the great Social Democratic Party, perennial Premier of Prussia . ...... Federal Germany is gone….But the final determining condition which caused the Republic’s death was that it had no nourishment from below. As an eminent German said to the writer two or three years ago: “We made a republic; but there were no republicans…

Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century

Isaiah Berlin, April 1950

(Fellow of New College, Oxford)

The practice of Communist states and, more logically of Fascist states is not at all the training of the critical, or solution finding powers of their citizens, not yet the development in them of any capacity for special insights or intuitions regarded as likely to reveal the truth. It consists in something which any nineteenth century thinker with respect for science would have regarded with genuine horror, the training of individuals incapable of being troubled with questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system; the building and elaboration of a strong framework of institutions, “myths,” habits of life and thought intended to preserve it from sudden shocks or slow decay. This is the intellectual outlook which attends the rise of totalitarian ideologies, the substance of the hair raising satires of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the state of mind in which troublesome questions appear as a form of mental perturbations, noxious to the mental health of individuals, when too widely discussed, to the heath of societies…This is truly a for reaching conception, and something far more powerful than the pessimism or cynicism of thinkers like Plato or Machiavelli, Swift or Carlyle, who looked on the majority of mankind as unalterably stupid or incurably vicious…

Of Libety

Benedetto Croce, October 1932

(Italian senator)

Communism, it is the fashion to claim, has passed from theory to practice and is being applied in Russia. But it is a practice not as communism but in keeping with its inner contradiction as a form of autocracy as its critics had always predicted would be the case…The Russian Communists have not solved, nor will their violent and repressive methods ever enable them to solve, the fundamental problem of human society, the problem of freedom. For in freedom only can human society flourish and bear fruit. Freedom alone gives meaning to life … stirs in the souls .. And on the day that this problem is faced, the materialistic foundations of Soviet structure will crumble and new and very different supports will have to be found for it….For liberty is the only ideal which unites the stability that Catholicism once possessed with the flexibility which it could never attain, the only ideal which faces the future without proposing to mould it to some particular form, the only ideal that can survive criticism and give human society a fixed point by which from time to time to reestablish its balance…..

The Position and Prospects of Communism

Harold T. Laski, October 1932

(Professor in London School of Economics)

For a brief period, the sudden prosperity of America concealed from many the realities of the situation. It was argued that the condition of Russia was a special one; that elsewhere the problem was rather one of dealing with the excrescences of the capitalistic system than with capitalism itself. As late as 1928 President Hoover felt able to announce to an awestruck world that America had (under God) solved the problem of poverty…A hundred years ago the votaries of capitalism had a religious faith in its prospects…But those triumphs could not conceal the fact that the idol had feet of clay. The price to be paid for their accomplishment was a heavy one. The distribution of the rewards was incapable of justification in terms of moral principle…Its danger was foreseen by Tocqueville nearly a century ago. “The manufacturer,” he wrote, “asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages. The one contracts no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not permanently connected either by habit or by duty… The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public … Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations but no real partnership”..They realize that the essence of a capitalistic society is its division into a small number of rich men and a great mass of poor men … there should be no proportion between effort and reward…

Nationalism and Economic Life

Leon Trotsky, April 1934

(Leader of the October Russian Revolution in 1917)

The nineteenth century was marked by the fusion of the nation’s fate with the fate of its economic life; but the basic tendency of our century is the growing contradiction between the nation and economic life. In Europe this contradiction has become intolerably acute ..The League of Nations attempted to translate from the language of militarism into the language of diplomatic pacts the task which the war left unsolved. After Ludendorff (German military leader) had failed to “organize Europe” by the sword, Briand attempted to create “the United States of Europe” by means of sugary diplomatic eloquence. But the interminable series of political, economic, financial, tariff, and monetary conferences only unfolded the panorama of the bankruptcy of the ruling classes in face of the unpostponable and burning task of our epoch…How many unified Europe be included within a coordinated world economy? The solution to the question can be reached not by deifying the nation, but on the contrary by completely liberating productive forces from the fetters imposed upon them by the nation state …decadent fascist nationalism, preparing volcanic explosions and grandiose clashes in the world arena, bears nothing except ruin…

The Reconstruction of Liberalism

C. H. McIlwain, October 1937

(Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University)

The preservation of the status quo is a solution that can satisfy none but the contented; and just now most men are not contented…Liberalism means a common welfare with a constitutional guarantee…So-called liberals have ignored the first part of the definition and have fouled the nest by invoking the guarantee for privileges of their own, conducive only to the destruction of any true common weal. None have ever prated more of guarantees than these so-called liberal; but they have forgotten, if they ever believed, that these guarantees must secure the rights of all, not the selfish interests of a few. They are traitors within the gates who have probably done more than all others to betray liberalism to its enemies and put it to its defense …De minimis non curat lex; there is little or no safe guard for the weak against the strong; protection of the public against an adulterated product would be unthinkable, Caveat emptor…

The Economic Tasks of the Postwar World

Alvin H. Hansen and C. p. Kindleberger, April 1942

(Hansen, Littauer Professor, Harvard, Kindleberger, Economist, Federal Reserve)

There are still a good many people concerned with problems of international security who think exclusively in terms of political arrangements and economic mechanisms such as tariffs and currencies. We would call that the passive approach…Many questions at once arise. What will be the role of government in postwar economic life?…It can merely be said that in time of war governments must and do assume more direction of economic life; after this war they will probably be given increased responsibility for trying to get rid of unemployment in their respective nations and to establish higher minimum standards for the low income group; and that while the degree of control exercised in the postwar period will be less than that exercised during the war, it nevertheless will be greater than it used to be before the war…

Freedom and Control

Geoffrey Crowther, January 1944

(Editor, The Economist)

It is the thesis of E. C. Carr’s influential book, “Conditions of Peace,” that the dominant ideas of the nineteenth century are dead, or at least that they no longer have sufficient validity to serve as our guiding lights…if not dead, are so battered that they will not serve us any longer as our main props. We are, indeed, living in a vacuum of faith. But the trouble about a vacuum is that it gets filled, and if there are no angels available to fill it, fools, or worse, rush in…The trend away from liberal democracy has been a trend towards totalitarian dictatorship. The trend away from individualist capitalism has been a trend toward rigid state control .. The trend away from the sovereignty of the nation-state has been a trend towards the concentration of aggressive strength in the hands of a few Great Powers…The central dilemma of the present age is that we can no longer rely on the old principles alone, but that we abominate the alternatives that time and tide, if it is left to them, will produce. This dilemma can be solved in only one way, by the birth of a new faith, adjusted in its instrumentalities to the needs of the new century, but preserving the ultimate objectives of the old. The only way to avoid the murder of nineteenth century liberalism by twentieth century Fascism is through the birth of a twentieth century faith by the new out of the old…What we need is not a compromise between the old ideas and the new, but a fusion, not a mixture but an amalgam…

The Split Between Asian and Western Socialism

David T. Saposs, July 1954

(Statistician, European Labor Division)

Western Socialism has ceased to be class conscious and become reformist. It seeks the welfare state, but not revolution. The growing Christian (predominantly Catholic) labor movement in Western Europe has also arrived at maturity, and its social philosophy is likewise oriented toward the welfare state…The former sacred tenet that the workers are the class chosen to fulfill the holy mission of bringing about the inevitable capitulation of capitalism has fallen into limbo. The central theme of the new official pronouncements revolves about problems of social justice, economic planning, full employment, democracy and human rights. Emphasis is placed on the need to avoid deflation with its consequent depression and unemployment, and of course, on the role of the trade union movement in promoting social justice.

The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos

G. John Ikenberry, May/June 1996

(Professor of Political Science University of Pennsylvania)

The world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever. The challenge for American foreign policy is not to imagine and build a new world order but to reclaim and renew an old one … The end of the Cold War was a historical watershed. The collapse of communism brought the collapse of the order that took shape after World War II. While foreign policy theorists and officials scramble to design new grand strategies, the United States is rudderless on uncharted seas. The common wisdom is wrong. What ended with the Cold War was bipolarity; the nuclear stalemate; and decades of containment of the Soviet Union….But the world order created in the middle to late 1940s endures, more extensive and in some respects more robust than during the Cold War years … Its basic principle …are alive and well… commitment to an open world economy and its multilateral management, and the stabilization of socioeconomic welfare…World War II produced two postwar settlements .. The containment order, which was based on the balance of power, nuclear deterrence, and political and ideological competition. The other, a reaction to the economic rivalry and political turmoil of the 1930s and the resulting world war, which can be called the liberal democratic order…The problems the liberal democratic order confronts are most problems of success, foremost among them the need to integrate the newly developing and post-communist countries…Today economic globalization is producing much greater inequality between winners and losers, the wealthy and the poor …this will affect the stability of the liberal world order more than regional conflict…

The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers

Azar Gat, July/August 2007

(Professor of National Security, Tel Aviv University)

Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam …The second, and more significantly, challenge emanates from the rise of non-democratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia. Now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist regimes…Capitalism has expanded relentlessly since early modernity, its lower priced goods and superior economic power eroding and transforming all socioeconomic regimes, a process most memorably described by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, capitalism had the same effect on communism, eventually “burying” it without the proverbial shot being fired. The triumph of the market, precipitating and reinforced by the industrial-technological revolution, led to the rise of the middle class, intensive urbanization, the spread of education, the emergence of mass society, and ever greater affluence. In the post-Cold War era (just as in the nineteenth century and the 1950s and 1960s), it is widely believed that liberal democracy naturally emerged from these developments, a view famously espoused by Francis Fukuyama. Today, more than half of the world’s states have elected governments, and close to half have sufficiently entrenched liberal rights to be considered fully free…By shifting from communism to capitalism, China has switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism….the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower….

How Development Leads to Democracy

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, March/April 2009

(Inglehart, Professor Political Science, Michigan, Welzel, Professor Political Science Jacobs University Bremen in Germany)

A democratic boom has given way to a democratic recession. Between 1985 and 1995, scores of countries made the transition to democracy, bringing widespread euphoria about democracy’s future. But more recently, democracy has retreated … These developments, along with the growing power of China and Russia, have led many observers to argue that democracy has reached its high water mark … That conclusion is mistaken. The underlying conditions of societies around the world point to a more complicated reality. The bad new is that it is unrealistic to assume that democratic institutions can be set up easily … The good news, however, is that the conditions conducive to democracy can and do emerge, and the process of “modernization,” advances them . . In retrospect, it is obvious that .. early versions of modernization theory were wrong on several points. Today, virtually nobody expects a revolution of the proletariat that will abolish private property .. Nor does anyone expect that industrialization will automatically lead to democratic institutions; communism and fascism also emerged with industrialization. Nonetheless, a massive body of evidence suggests that modernization theory’s central premise was correct: economic development does tend to bring about important ..changes in society, culture, and politics…First, modernization is not linear. It does not move indefinitely in the same direction … Second, social and cultural change is path dependent: history matters… a society’s heritage, whether shaped by Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism, or communism, leave a lasting imprint on its worldview…Fifty years ago, the sociologist Seymour Lipset pointed out that rich countries are more likely to be democracies …it has held up against repeated tests …But growing mass pressures for liberalization are beginning to appear, and repressing them will bring growing costs in terms of economic efficiency and low public morale…

The Post-Washington Consensus

Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, March/April 2011

(Birdsall, President of Center for Global Development, Fukuyama. Stamford)

The Great Depression set the stage for a shift away from strict monetarism and laissez-faire polices toward Keynesian demand management…paving the way for the rise of radical and antiliberal movements across the world.. This time around, there has been no violent rejection of capitalism, even in the developing world. In early 2009, at the height of the global financial panic, China and Russia …made it clear to their domestic and foreign investors that they had no intention of abandoning the capitalist model....Why has the reaction in developing countries been so much less extreme after this crisis than it was after the Great Depression? For one, they blame the United States…Thus, The American version of capitalism is, if not in full disrepute, then at least no longer dominant … What the crisis did …was to underscore the instability inherent in capitalist systems, even ones developed and sophisticated as the United States …Capitalism is a dynamic process that regularly produces faultless victims …This is a lesson that politicians in developing country democracies are not likely to forget….

The Future of History

Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?

Francis Fukuyama, January/February 2012

(Author and Professor at Stanford University)

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism … Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction. But…the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move…serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding…Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures…Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature…The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and than an industrial middle class …mature capitalism generated middle class societies, not working class ones.. Median incomes in the United States have been stagnating…most U.S. households have shifted to two income earners…Americans are reluctant to engage in straightforward redistribution, the United States has instead attempted a highly dangerous and inefficient form of redistribution…by subsidizing mortgages for low-income households…There was a lot of happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy, and how dirty, dangerous manufacturing jobs would inevitably be replaced by highly educated workers doing creative and interesting things. This was a gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrialization…What would that (new) ideology look like? It would have at least two components, political and economic… .redesign the public sector … more redistribution … the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism … It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change … The product would be a synthesis of ideas from both the left and the right, detached from the agenda of the marginalized groups that constitute the existing progressive movement….That mobilization will happen, however, as long s the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the pass generations … The alternative narrative is out there waiting to be born.

The Democratic Malaise

Globalization and the Threat to the West

Charles A. Kupchan, January/February 2012

(Professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University)

A crisis of governability has engulfed the world’s most advanced democracies…Voters in industrialized democracies are looking to their government to respond to the decline in living standards and the growing inequality resulting from unprecedented global flows of goods, services, and capita … But Western governments are not up to the task…. The international system is in the midst of tectonic change due to the diffusion of wealth and power to new quarters… the shift of economic stability from the developed to the developing world … Globalization has expended aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity … the main source of the West’s current crisis of governability: Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles, these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not experienced for generations … for the better part of two decades, middle class wages in the world’s leading democracies have been stagnant and economic inequality has been rising sharply … “The Way Forward,” a consequence of the integration of billions of low wage workers into the global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of information technology to the manufacturing sector. These developments have pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West… the industrialized West have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness. First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much blunter instruments…Second, many of the problems ..require a level of international cooperation that is unattainable … Third, democracies … are clumsy and sluggish when their citizens are downcast and divided … Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle class wages .. making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world .. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebook’s estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class… What is needed is nothing less than a compelling twenty-first century answer to the fundamental tensions among democracy, capitalism, and globalization …

FINAL THOUGHTS

Segments of these essays appearing here are meant to interest the reader in perusing this issue, as there is much more to ponder. Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World” (2012) is a fitting complement as revolution implied or stated was the issue’s focus.

Rifkin views economic revolutions as having two components: the convergence of technology and energy. Revolutions come, he claims, when we create new energy regimes, and then we create new communication revolutions to manage the new energy regime.

In the nineteenth century, steam and coal were the energy regime leading to cheap print technology, and mass transit through railroads with steam power and a communication revolution in public school education to create a literate workforce to organize and manage society around these two components.

In the twentieth century, electrical power provided the energy for the communication revolution of telephone, radio and television, with oil the energy for fuel to run our automobiles, power our airplanes, which led to mass consumption, a ubiquitous interstate highway system connecting suburbs to shopping malls and cities coast-to-coast

Fossil fuel is now on life support. When crude oil rises to nearly $150 a barrel the price of everything goes up, incomes go down, jobs are lost, and ultimately, as in 2008, this leads to economic collapse, and social disruption.

Rifkin sees us on the cusp of a new power shift in the twenty-first century with the Internet communication revolution seeding a social, political, cultural and economic shift from the hierarchical organization where the few dictate to the many to a lateral distributive collaborative paradigm where everyone is a leader.

Private enterprise here is not a building or factory or consortium but the providence of two billion souls on the planet literate in computer technology with Silicon Valley imaginations.

Utopian? I don’t think so. Rifkin’s focus is on an economic model involving green energy complemented by the Internet revolution. Only the last “Foreign Affairs” essay in this 90^th Anniversary issue compares Facebook with General Motors to underscore the energy-communication revolution now at full throttle.

* * *

THANK GOD FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

2011-12-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

THANK GOD FOR THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

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

Tuesday, December 13, we arrived at St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida, run by the Sisters of St. Francis of Allegany, an order founded in 1934, a few minutes after 5 a.m. We would be at that hospital for the next seventeen and one-half hours.

At 8 a.m., Jennifer, our daughter, was rolled into the operating room where she would remain for the next ten hours undergoing radical bilateral mastectomies and reconstructive surgery. She would spend another hour in recovery after which we would see her, groggy and somewhat nauseous. Her vital signs (blood pressure, temperature, color and breathing) were in normal ranges, as she settled into her spacious private room.

This is a new wing of the hospital with all the rooms private and with a veritable army of nurses, nurses’ aids and other specialists attending to Jennifer as she spends the first hours of recovery after this radical surgery.

During this long waiting period, we were directed to an open visitors’ area off the main lobby where a board called “family legend,” much like the electronic board at the airport provided the surgical status of patients. We could check the legend to see periodic updates on Jennifer’s status:

“Pre-op in,” “OR in,” “Recovery In,” “Phase II in,” “Recovery Out,” and “In Diagnostic Area.”

In addition, Linnin, Jennifer’s husband, was given a special cell phone that looks a lot like what you get in a restaurant as you await your table. He was given updates as the surgery progressed. This included reference to the lymph nodes being okay, when surgery on one breast was completed, and the other started, and then finished. The routine was repeated with the reconstructive surgery. This public relations service couldn’t have been more appreciated.

So, going on six o’clock a perky, petite little woman comes by our area, and I was the first she encountered reading away. An outstretched hand was put in my face. “Jennifer is doing fine. It won’t be long until you can see her in room 5101.”

If you can imagine, this pretty little women looked like a high school freshman, yet I learned later that she was 38, or a year older than Jennifer. It stood to reason after four years of pre-med in undergraduate school, four years of medical school, three or four years of specialized training in surgery, and then a two-year residency that she had to be much older than she looked. She was still in her jumper suit and could have easily been taken for a nurse’s aid. It was the first time I met her but I could see why Jennifer liked her and had such confidence in her.

* * *

The good Sisters of St. Francis, instead of having visitors of patients in surgery quartered off in some remote area, considered the anxious state of such visitors and thought creatively. They designed a waiting area in the main lobby accessible to the cafeteria, coffee shop, specialty shops, and on this day, to a charity bizarre where they were selling beautiful costume jewelry and accessories for $5 a piece. BB spent $48.77, as she liked the variety available and knew it was for a good cause. I tagged along, as she looked and registered approval, which was my role, but not difficult as I liked everything she liked, which should be no surprise.

Most of the people in this visitors’ area could be seen to be talking on cell phones, watching CNN on the large television screen, texting, sleeping or incessantly talking. I like to read with classical music in the background or an opera playing quietly.

This one lady, I swear she talked for three solid hours without as much as taking a breath, a medical miracle. But for me, it was perfect background noise as if I had Aida drumming into my ears as I read. I managed to read “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” a 400-page novel by the Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and a good part of “The Psychology of Revolution” (1896) by Gustave Le Bon, a current favorite of mine. I also managed to read my back issues of The London Review and The New York Review, and so I was not too far out of my element although in different ambient circumstances.

It is also my nature to ensconce myself as far away from and parallel or behind the television screen so I can read. My other motivation for such a vantage point is to watch the people. I am not at all into talking to people but into writing stories in my head as I study them, their dress, expressions, ethnic origins, manners, and how they relate to each other.

There was a large Indian woman with her son, and his three children snuggled so close together on two chairs across from me that they seemed to be a single heap. The children, all small, were drape like a shawl around her, while the son stared blankly at the television screen as if in a hypnotic trance. Tired. They all spelled tired, bone aching exhaustion. My wonder is how far they had to travel to this hospital. They also looked impoverished but with no evidence of complaint.

Although they were sitting right next to the non-stop talking machine, it didn’t seem to disturb them but rather to put the grandmother and children to fitful sleep.

Illness is democratic, and is blind to socio-economic status. To confirm this, there was a bell curve from struggling to well off people looking anxiously at the Family Legend and checking the status of loved ones. It was a quiet group even the children were quiet. It was as if they understood a common bond ran through everyone like they were in church.

A little African American boy broke the spell running, laughing, jumping, stumbling, falling, picking himself up, and repeating the whole process again as if it was his job to put some levity into our weary faces. He looked at me momentarily, cocked his head aside, said nothing, and then went on. I wondered if I was ever like that little boy.

* * *

Linnin, BB and I went out for lunch. Linnin wanted to go to a Spanish restaurant and my expression indicated that was not my choice. Bland describes my diet, and I am not adventuresome when it comes to food, while Linnin and BB are something of connoisseurs. We settled for The Village Inn, where I had breakfast at 3 p.m. and so did Linnin, while BB had a soup and sandwich. Dinner was in the hospital cafeteria for BB and me, while Linnin went out and brought his Cuban food back, where we ate together.

Linnin is a tall, slim and handsome young man, two years younger than Jennifer, and of a happy disposition and loving nature, and absolutely a joy to be around. He doesn’t have to say a word but creates positive vibes. As difficult as this is for us, I can only imagine what he is going through.

Forty years ago BB’s mother had radical bilateral mastectomies. By radical, I mean they destroyed the breasts by vertical incisions through the breasts and the nipples, removing manually the cancer, lymph nodes, some muscle, connective and fatty tissue. Today, through medical science surgical advances, they make small incisions under each breast saving the nipples, followed immediately with reconstructive surgery. Once Jennifer is in full recovery it will appear as if she never had the procedures at all.

Meanwhile, she will have a challenging recovery period once she starts her chemotherapy. I must add at this point that approaching this surgery she was more stoic, composed and accepting than we were. It is her nature to accept problems as they occur, to deal with them, and to move on. She has been a little adult most of her life, and now it augurs especially well for her. No anxiety, no gnashing of teeth, no hyperventilation, no heart palpitations, only, “let’s get on with it and get it over with.”

* * *

When I was a boy, we looked up to our doctors as if they were some kind of gods. We trusted them, respected them, believed in them, and followed their instructions as being wiser, more informed and our medical anchor to health and well being.

Over the last sixty years, I have seen this confidence in their competence eroding. I have seen doctors and nurses, nurses’ aids, and other specialists treated poorly. Yet, the science and art and care of medicine have continued to improve and evolve despite this building negative legacy of feeling.

Over the years, I have heard doctors accused of making too much money, which is terribly misleading, that medical care is too expensive, which it is, but not the fault of medical staffs, that doctor practitioners, not licensed physicians, are the ones that see most patients, and on and on. No mention of their dedication and concomitant fatigue, or that there is a shortage of doctors.

Spending seventeen plus hours at this hospital seeing doctors in their color coded jump suits, walking through the halls with bent shoulders, ashen complexions, tired eyes, but resolute spirits staving off their tiredness with light banter among them, I marveled at how inconspicuous they were, and how little they stood on protocol.

These physicians understood what engineering philosopher William Livingston calls the “purpose of a system is what it does” (P0ASIWID). They carry out their role unobtrusively, quietly, effectively and efficiently, spending long hours in surgery, visiting hospital patients, and seeing patients in their offices, leaving little time for themselves.

It is not only a long and expensive preparatory process to become a physician, but a requirement to constantly update skills as new technology and techniques are developed. Then there is always the threat of malpractice suits brought on by carpet bagging lawyers.

While watching these physicians drag themselves through the hospital, and out to their cars, I wondered how many visitors sitting here have any idea how grueling and demanding this profession, a profession that many envy from afar, but few appreciate up close the sacrifices that have had to be made along the way to reach this pentacle of achievement, or the astronomical student debt that may accrue in the process.

On Wednesday at 6 p.m., we were able to bring Jennifer home, only twenty-four hours after her surgical ordeal because of the skill and competence of everyone at St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital.

Pivotal to everything were her doctors. It wasn’t simply their ability, which obviously they must have as well as the required aptitude, but their resourcefulness, resilience, energy and compassion to self-forget their own needs to deal with those of others. Medicine is a noble profession of everyone in the chain of service from building maintenance to healthcare deliverers. I was moved to write about it, as I pondered those seventeen plus hours when our Jennifer came through a difficult operation with flying colors. Thank God for the medical profession.

* * *

OUR COMMON AFRICAN HERITAGE

2011-12-15T16:31:00.001-08:00

OUR COMMON AFRICAN HERITAGE

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

We were all black before some of us were white. That is the implication in Chris Stringer’s new book, “The Origin of our Species” (2011).

There is little we don’t know about our remote ancestors by analyzing the chemistry of their bones, or by examining the structure of minute features such as the inner ear bones of fossil skulls by means of computerized tomography, or luminescence techniques to date single grains of sand. Stringer’s mobile phone has more processing power than the multi-room University of Bristol computer he once used in the 1970s where he processed human fossils data with multivariate statistics, now a common tool for college freshman.

Over the last forty years, astounding advances have been made with Recent African Origin studies and multi-regional models resulting in new fossil discoveries and archaeological excavations, dating methodologies, and new procedures for the extraction of ancient DNA.

The major players in our common African heritage are Homo erectus, the first human to disperse out of Africa sometime after two million years ago.

Homo heidelbergensis, a descendant of Homo erectus, is most probably the common ancestor of the Neanderthal man and us.

Homo neanderthalensis remains have been found in Europe and South-West Asia. They appear so biologically similar and yet so culturally different from us that there still remains a gap to be explored and explained before Homo sapiens. Once Homo sapiens arrived on the scene they populated the world first narrowly then more widely.

Springer charts the advances in our understanding of the fossil, archeological and genetic evidence before bringing all the evidence together in the most up to date synthesis available. This is the main thesis of his book.

Genetics, both ancient and modern, is said to be impressive but to show little new light on what was already known of our ancient ancestors in terms of language, thought, symbolism and behavior. One thing seems abundantly clear, Homo sapiens had a single origin in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and that the common human race, at that time, was black, all black with no white race yet to evolve.

The vast research now is into analysis and interpretation of the genetic diversity of living people not only in terms of what is called MtDNA, but also in terms of autosomal DNA. The later makes up the chromosomes contained in the nuclei of our body cells, and the male Y chromosome. Stringer describes the male Y chromosome as being boring and full of junk (DNA junk).

Genetics are not expected to replace the analysis of fossil and archaeological remains, but it has already transformed the way researchers interpret these findings, and therefore is likewise expected to lead to an avalanche of studies in that respect.

Already, this research has led to the discovery of some fascinating details about Homo sapiens. For example, blue-eyes were selectively evolved along with paler skin color in Europe around the peak of the last Ice Age, which appeared 20,000 years ago.

Springer warms that genetic diversity complemented by ancient DNA extracted from fossils must be interpreted with caution because of the small number, and size of the samples, and the risks of contamination by modern DNA.

That said more than twenty Neanderthal specimens confirm that they probably shared a common ancestor with us between 350,000 and 500,000 years ago. There is also strong evidence for some degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals. Stringer concludes, “If you are European, Asian or New Guinean, you probably have a bit of Neanderthal in your make up.”

To corroborate this hypothesis, samples of Neanderthal DNA from skeletal remains in Spain and Italy indicate that southern European Neanderthals would have had paler (white) skin and red hair, which is a departure from the black skin and black hair of more common Neanderthal fossils.

Surprises abound in Springer’s “The Origin of Our Species.” No one expected to find “primitive” looking Homo erectus fossils at Dmanisi in Georgia in 1991, as it was assumed only larger-brained hominids could have dispersed from Africa. Yet, in 2004, a fossil of a small-brained hominid with weird limbs was found in Flores, an Indonesian island, dating back 18,000 years.

Paleontologists-anthropologists have to live with the risks that new discoveries will overturn their most cherished theories. Given the fossil record is so sparse, it is unfortunate that the Japanese destroyed the rich collection of Homo erectus fossils near Beijing during WWII.

Mysteries remain, and fossil and archaeological evidence continue to turn up new discoveries. For example, DNA of a molar tooth and finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia was dated 40,000 years ago, but it was not the DNA of Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis, but of a completely new human species living in eastern Asia, and a derivative of Homo heidelbergensis, who lived well over 500,000 years ago.

Springer concludes that, in any case, these specie identifications are artificial constructs to approximate our understanding of the complexities of our human evolutionary process. He argues for Homo sapiens being African in origin dispersed in a global Diaspora around 55,000 years ago. The human race evolved in its many complexions, body types, and structural differences many of which are now known, but many of which are not. Climate, topography, interbreeding, and occupation have influenced these complexities of gradient differences. What’s more, he claims we are still evolving. The emergence of settled farming communities some 12,000 years ago produced selective new pressures influencing diet, adaptation, socializing, reproductive practices and sheltering schemes. Changes in individual DNA sequences suggest human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years. We are evolving a hundred times faster than we were when we split from the lineage of chimpanzees around six million years ago.

Springer concludes the most compelling model of our human origins, whatever our color, race, body type, heritage, is one of a common African origin. Future science will either confirm or refute his hypothesis.

* * *

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- IS THIS A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

2011-12-12T05:16:00.000-08:00

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – IS THIS A NOVEL OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WESTERN WHITE MAN?

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

REFERENCE:

A select few are reading this in manuscript form. I confess I have been impatient to hear their reaction to what they have read. An acquaintance reacts to this.

* * *

Someone who has read this manuscript has noted my lament at not hearing back from readers, that is, with the exception of two. That said the comments from these readers have been appreciated and useful. At first, I hesitated to share what follows, but then thought, is it true what he says? My sense is what he sees as my intent is just my limits as a writer. I am simply trying to tell a story climbing to truth as best I can without apologies. A writer writes:

Fisher, you can't have it both ways, ask readers to read you than dump all over them when they don't read you as you would like. I'm not sure what your instructions were but I'm confident they were vague.

You write like you read and most people, me included, don't read all that esoteric stuff you do, well, not all of it. For example, I can see the influence of Sigmund Freud here. Obviously, you have had some indoctrination with his doublespeak.

Less obvious, but I'm sure you would argue the contrary; the influence of James Joyce is here. I read "Portrait as an Artist as a Young Man," liked it and think you capture the double bind that Catholicism could put on the human soul. I tried to read "Ulysses," which you apparently devoured. I did read all the dirty parts, which I found delicious, but not nearly as delicious as your dirty parts. Nina is fabulous. She almost makes Devlin human. Joyce's Molly Bloom doesn't hold a candle to her.

One of my favorite authors is Pete Dexter whom I doubt many of your readers know, although he won the National Book Award for "Paris Trout." Dexter obviously reads Joyce and shows the same devilish delight you show at men and women colliding with psycho-sexual energy.

There is evidence of the influence of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," which you acknowledge, but also I can see the influence of "The Nigger of 'Narcissus'" and "Nostromo" here as well. How many readers do you think read Conrad? I would say between slim and few.

But the presence of Dostoyevsky, which pulsates through the book in dreams and innuendos, guilt and self-flagellation, betrayal and greed may be a bit much for readers that are reading the story on one level when you throw two others at them. Why did you do this? Or did you feel it added to the story?

Green Island does have the feel of madness, and how normal madness is in the conscience of civilized man. That was Dostoyevsky's ploy. You are as much a moralist as he is without the same pathos. I've read "Notes from the Underground" and "The Brothers Karamazov," and promised myself one day to read "The Possessed" and "The Idiot" and "Crime and Punishment," but haven't got around to them.

See what I'm saying? I'm what you would call a reader of some patience with these obtuse authors, but you relish their company. Although Green Island is clearly biographical, it is a novel of depth and depression, enlightened leadership and stubborn resolve. On the other hand, although this might not have been your intention, it offers a view of the decline and fall of Western white man. Clever.

My advice, and you've never taken my advice before, is publish it yourself, and then bind up copyright protection for your family for the next fifty years, when it will be "current," and I suspect considered prophetic like Edward Bellamy's late nineteenth century novel "Looking Backward" predicted life in the early twenty-first century.

Given what I've said here, I doubt if you will sell ten copies now, but you're loaded so who cares, right?

W.E.B.D

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT -- A FURTHER EXCHANGE

2011-12-09T12:35:00.001-08:00

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT – A FURTHER EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 10, 2011

MY FRIEND, JORGE, WRITES:

Jim,

Building on my last message: I could careless if the writers come down hard on management. That is not the important point and too easy a case to make. The Hogans actually argue that there are recognized principles of management (this aligns with Natural Law) and they cite the Bloom et al study (see paragraph one, page 2) to illustrate their point. Interestingly enough, per the Bloom study which is international in scope the best run companies are multi-nationals; the worst run entities are government agencies, nonprofits and outfits run by 2nd generation family members. This is worth pondering, I'd say.

When I first read your remarks, I got the distinct impression you all too quickly filtered things through your own model and spend most of your energy poopooing what you read (distancing and distinguishing yourself) and little time appreciating the similarities with your perspective. Case in point, the "six silent killers" are immature ego defenses that ruin organizations. The Hogans similarly, catalog the damage done by sub clinical personality disorders in working adults especially those who hold management positions.

Jorge

* * *

DR. FISHER REPONDS:

Jorge,

My model was developed in 1980, published in a Honeywell paper in 1984, and in book form in 1990, a non-academic who is a thinker based not on academia but on empirical work in the fields of Europe, South America, South Africa and the United States.

The insights were gleaned from below not above. It is why the secondary title to "Work Without Managers" was "A View from the Trenches."

People steal from me. Fortune Magazine had a cover piece a number of years ago on "Work Without Managers" after the book was published. I wrote to the magazine, never received a reply. I was giving a seminar in Annapolis and a manager came up and showed me where some of my schematics appeared in a book, where the author wrote, “permission granted by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.” I had never heard of the author, the book and certainly never gave permission. Ideas are stolen cloaked in academia and this has become par for the course. So, t do look at works through my lens when what is said is an offshoot of what I said years earlier.

To your credit, and this is true of many others, you recognize my ideas in other people’s works and mean to share your joy at finding it so. Likewise, people are constantly telling me to read this book and that book that says similar things to what I say. I am at the stage of my life where I read no literature in management. Actually, I’ve never been so inclined because so often I found the authors more interested in an audience than the authority of their views.

A coterie of educators, consultants, writers and professionals use my stuff, and I am happy that they do. Occasionally, writers and publishers (mostly foreign) ask permission than promise a copy of the work once published. Such promises are seldom kept.

I am an outsider, but a diligent outsider that gets a little wary when I see my work disguised in another form. I confess I don’t jump through hoops of joy at the notice. On the other hand, I am too old to protest but not too old to care. My family, after I am gone, should benefit from what I created, not be content to see doctored treatments of my stuff in some kind of cult.

BB says it is my own fault because I like my anonymity and she is right. Peter Drucker, it is alleged, would not give an autograph without a quid pro quo. In fact, up to his death, it is said he was campaigning for his celebrity as an organizational bystander. I am an organizational grunt, and have been all my life having worked at virtually every level of organization from dirt-covered factory worker to top executive.

It is that environment that has been my laboratory, and the caldron of my creativity.

I've read the article, and you can be assured it has that academic patina that anesthetizes the reader from feeling any pain of actual experience. My prose bite you like a piranha on the loose. Speaking metaphorically, Hogan, et al are like looking at the problem at arms length, like the backup quarterback with the clipboard and the clean uniform on the sideline under a protective parka while the starting quarterback is out in the field wet-cold and covered in mud.

Management being anachronistic is a problem for me because the little guy gets caught up in self-flagellation, and becomes the victim when the system is the culprit. If I have contempt, it is for the waste of time and self-destructive and social destructive behavior that creates economic disequilibria as capitalism has grown to be.

I will not allow those in authority whatever the discipline to feel comfortable flaunting their style and seeing themselves as superior to others. I come out of the seed of that Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad and I have never left my roots.

My whole attention (e.g., "The Worker, Alone," my best book and shortest) is directed not at CEOs, academics or scholars, but at the people who rise out of the swamps of despair in an attempt to find their way against a rigged system. I see the Hogans, et al, as unwittingly part of that rigging implicitly if not explicitly, because they never get their psyches dirty. Mine is very dirty from digging through the trenches. I thought you knew this.

Think of the “Occupy Wall Street” moment in the context of what was written in “The Worker, Alone” some sixteen years ago:

The call is to workers everywhere, but especially professionals. They have invested heavily in their education, only to find a disappointing “return on investment.” Angry, confused, they suffer downsizing, redundancy exercises and conglomerates take over like fatalists. Those employed wonder “when the other shoe will fall.” Never have workers been more distrustful of “the system.” Ironically, “they are the system.”

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT: THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RUMINATES

2011-12-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

MANAGEMENT DERAILMENT: PERSONAL ASSESSMENT AND MITIGATION by Joyce Hogan, Robert Hogan, Robert B. Kaiser: THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RUMINATES

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

JORGE FERNANDEZ WRITES:

Jim,

After reading your talk to the high school seniors, I thought you would be interested in the following:

http://www.hoganassessments.com/sites/default/files/Management%20Derailment%205-1-l2009%20%282%29_0.pdf

PS - I've been using the Hogan tools since the late 90's

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Jorge,

It is not the best of times for me at the moment to peruse this document, but I have examined the first ten pages and see a pattern here. I think "executive derailment" is an oxymoron and you will see why.

I've been invited to submit a paper for a conference on Management and Service Science to be held in Shanghai, China August 10 - 12, 2012. Reading the Hogan's document, which I find misleading, encourages me to do the hard work to putting together a system's theory on 21st century management, as I've pretty well dispatched all the ideas of Peter Drucker, et al, over the past twenty years. Moreover, I've never been past the Middle East in that direction, and it would be nice to have that experience. No doubt the paper will be the equivalent of a small book, but we shall see. Stay tuned. Here I will make comments on the pages I have read:

Page One

The authors say, "Modern study of management is stagnant and out of date." They go on to say attempts to create a science of management have failed. Then they make reference to the fact that "well established management practices" find financial firms operating at a high level of performance.

Comment:

Of course, the study of management is stagnant. We've never graduated beyond the MBA mindset, which makes bean counters out of everyone, and then brags about it. Frederick Winslow Taylor tried to create "scientific management" by treating people "to more resemble an ox than any other type." Alfred Sloan, the legendary head of GM during the Great Depression, laid off tens of thousands of workers, but boasted about never missing a dividend to stockholders, putting profits before people. MIT to this day has the "Sloan School of Management" echoing his sentiments.

Finance is a thing to be managed and obviously performance management has some success here, but flippantly impetuous Jon Corzine of Goldman Sachs lost more than $1 billion on a whim that Europe was going to solve the problem of Greece and the euro. Even the managers of things occasionally go a little heywire.

Steven Jobs built Apple, Inc. into one of the largest corporation in the world, as well as into his own image and likeness. He never graduated from college much less a business school. It would have ruined him. He defied conventional wisdom on organizational structure by creating eccentric but highly challenged teams. This is reminiscent of the Skunk Works at Lockheed, and earlier, the guilds in pre-industrial Europe.

Page Two

The authors say "management incompetence has serious moral implications because bad managers cause great misery for their subordinates."

Comment:

Let's get rid of the term "subordinates" altogether, okay? It should be excised from the language.

Managers are incompetent because they think their job is to manage, so they go to management schools and learn how to manage things, then return to treat people as things to be managed.

Managers look bad, the people look bad, and productive work falls between the cracks. Again, the authors quote all kinds of literature, and a few figures as to this cost. I wish academics would get away from making writing a veritable jigsaw puzzle of parentheses (authors and references). Think, brothers and sisters, and let us decide if what you write has merit.

Page Three

The authors: "40 percent of American workers report that their jobs are very or extremely stressful."

Comment:

Dr. Hans Selye put it best: "Stress is the spice of life, if it were not for stress you would be a vegetable, or dead!"

It is stressful to write these words, to submit articles and books to publishers and receive rejections, but the purpose of my life is what I do and that is I write. Were I not under this wonderful umbrella of stress I would be a couch potato and watch mindless television all day, or sit in front of a computer screen and play senseless games.

Grow up, Americans! Stress is your invitation to life, not a retreat from it. Selye goes on to say the problem is "distress," or worrying about what never happens or worrying just to be worrying because you're not recognized for your value, not making as much as you think you should, and on and on. It is the complaining mentality of the comfort and complacent worker who would rather be doing something else, but that something else he has no idea what it is.

Control is the problem, and control is a matter of choices.

If you're not happy where you are doing what you are doing, do something else. Don't retreat into the palaver you can't afford to, or you have too many responsibilities, all this is a con job on yourself. I have absolutely no patience with people that tell me their lives are too stressful. They created the circumstances of their lives either by commission or omission. The studies referenced here make no impression on me.

Page Four

The authors quote a 30-year study of managerial derailment. People were said to be uniformly bright and socially skilled, but lacked business skills, unable to deal with complexity, were reactive, unable to delegate, unable to build teams, unable to or slow to learn, unable to network, let emotions cloud their judgment, and had overriding personality defects. One other thing they had in common, their halted progression wasn't voluntary.

Comment:

I read this and wept. My wonder is why I have written all these books, books that are not quoted in these studies, but books that have shown that fear of the parent-as-manager has made workers management dependent, afraid to take a toilet break, afraid to initiate any action for fear it would not be what was wanted or expected, fear of stepping out of line for fear of being demoted or fired, fear in all its stripes. The most comfortable thing to do "is not make waves." It is why I call it "the culture of comfort."

The consequence of this has been to suspend mature workers in permanent adolescence with the quaking recalcitrant mood of a spoiled twelve-year-old child in a 30, 40 or 50-year-old body, and then they wonder why management is derailed.

Of course, it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with adapting to the predominant culture, and halted programming of this culture is a function of that system and nothing else.

Page Five

The authors now direct their attention to derailed executives, who fail because of business problems, insensitivity, arrogance, betrayed trust, over managing, overly ambitious, failing to staff effectively, unable to think strategically, unable to adapt to different management style, overly dependent on a mentor.

Comment:

This is the other side of the same coin. The previous problem -- of that coin side -- was culture. The problem of this side of the coin is the shift in power without any shift in structure. Now eighty to ninety percent of the workforce is better educated than its management in terms of knowledge, electronic know how and in level of sophistication. Yet, the negative attributes listed here for managers are indicative of this shift without the organization adjusting intellectually, emotionally, operationally and strategically to it.

In point of fact, managers are atavistic and the management system is anachronistic.

Since it will not change, these bright and sociable workers, as the study accurately noted, retreat into what I have called "six silent killers," of which you are most familiar as you were instrumental in finding a publisher for that book, a book that I think is still relevant, but unfortunately, has a price tage of $74 a copy.

Elsewhere, especially on my blog, actually several years ago, I wrote of a program management system that included career roadmaps, mentoring, and computer programming to track workers in terms of training (education), skill level (gradient index), job complexity (job level), readiness (for promotion or organizational needs assessment), and adaptability (emotional intelligence).

I never did anything with it but I might dust it off, polish it up, and include it in my soiree for China.

Page Six

Authors discuss other surveys of what upper level managers should be able to do behaviorally, including handling complexity, directing-motivating-developing, honoring, driving for excellence, savvy, composure, sensitivity, and staffing.

Comment:

This has the sound of 21st century stuff but not the feel of 21st century requirements because nothing anymore is either manager or workers, but especially workers who are now in charge as Jobs showed. Remember he was fired from his own company, a company he co-founded. "His style" was considered out of sink with that Pepsi Cola guy, John Sculley, who practically drove Apple into oblivion with his MBA approach.

The attributes listed here are fine, but not a guide to "top management," but rather a guide to all managers-workers in the system from top to bottom. The key is development.

Page Seven

The authors talk of derailment research, generally, across time, organizations and cultures.

Comment:

There is too much timidity collectively in the organization to depart from business as usual practices, from the reign of infallibility of the hierarchy, from the promotional schemes that don't go anywhere other then to shore up a deteriorating image. The madness still exists that endless meetings are a way to network and keep people on task.

Time, organization and culture have entered a new dimension, not only because of the Internet and the global economy, but because diversity and heterogeneity mean dealing with, respecting and adjusting to peoples of different cultures in a timely fashion. It will never happen if profits are always put before people. Nor if our schools continue to operate as if we are still an agrarian society.

A long time ago, when I was an organizational psychologist in a high tech company, I did a study of waste, and found that the emphasis was placed on the back end (the product) and not on the front end (the process).

The study indicated that scrap and rework was costing the division as much as $5 million at the product end. The program manager with whom I was working reported this to management. He could not move it to operate more strategically (i.e., focus on chronic process problems in the system). In fact, he lost some favor with his management over this initiative.

Page Eight

The authors quote a study that verifies the above. Managers failed because of poor administrative skills, difficulty making correct choices, lack of strategic thinking, failure to build a team, lack of interpersonal savvy, low self-awareness, poor political skills, inability to deal with conflict, questionable integrity.

Comment:

Attitude, aptitude and attributions are locked into what I have said elsewhere as "being winning side saddlers," that is, not taking risks for fear of failure and therefore failing, not wanting to share power and therefore not being able to build teams, not wanting to show vulnerability and therefore being mainly a stranger to self, while trying too hard to fit in and therefore shying away from conflict and confrontation and therefore pleasing no one, especially politically.

As you know in my paradigm, I show how the organization has gone from being "manager dependent" with workers reactive and motivated by fear (culture of comfort or unconscious incompetence) to managers as "permissive pleasers," giving workers everything but the kitchen sink with workers motivated by security (culture of complacency or unconscious incompetence).

Management's intentions were to buy positive performance with the generosity of pay, perks and entitlements only to find it backfired into worker complacency, which was counterproductive.

Actually, what management wanted but was not mature enough to accept were self-directed, self-managed and self-disciplined workers who would need little or no supervision. These workers would be able to work in project teams (culture of contribution or conscious competence) where the motivation was work itself, and where workers were not afraid of conflict but preferred managed conflict, and who would not hesitate to confront management when the mission was in jeopardy or threatened to be aborted for some selfish managerial angst.

Page Nine

The authors next dealt with the increased complexity and pace of change as well as the need for cross-cultural exposure where workers likely will have to work abroad sometime in their careers.

Comment:

This is apropos to the future and is quite relevant. I spent a good deal of my life working abroad and had little orientation, indoctrination or schooling in these assignments. Moreover, I was limited in language skills and cultural understanding of the situations with which I had to deal. No race of people is more xenophobic than Americans when it comes to other cultures, yet, paradoxically, Americans have little trouble merging cross culturally at home.

As for complexity and pace, this is huge and, again, it is not something that can remain at the level of explanation. William L. Livingston III has written widely and wisely on the subject of complexity, as I've pointed out before. No writer understands the demands of complexity better or how to deal with it. He points out that most of our complex problems we avoid, and solve the problems we can understand and believe solvable. This has led to the mess we are in financially, politically, institutionally and, yes, culturally.

Page Ten

The authors summarize the habits of unsuccessful people, which includes, overestimating their strengths, and underestimating their competition, putting personal interests before company, being arrogant and reckless in decision making (Jon Corzine comes to mind), sabotaging challengers, ignoring the company's purpose and concentrating on managing the company's image, minimizing obstacles and planning accordingly, relying on outdated strategies and tactics.

Comment:

My first reaction is that they should read Dov Seidman's "How" (2011) and David Brooks' "The Social Animal" (2011), as these authors cover the waterfront. Seidman is an optimist; Brooks is a cautionary pessimist, both are right.

The page ends with the authors calling attention to why CEOs fail.

It occurred to me that the authors describe little boys and girls that never left the sixth grade (incidentally, I wrote an article to this effect). They are arrogant, melodramatic, volatile, and cautious to sneaky, distrustful, aloof, mischievous, odd, passive resistant, anal, and eager to please. Scary, huh?

Jorge, I apologize for going on, but I knew when I started commenting on the pages that I was hooked. In conclusion, I don't see derailment. You have to be on the rails to derail. We long ago left them.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

THE CYBER CROWD -- FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE -- A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

2011-12-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

THE CYBER CROWD – FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE – A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

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

REFERENCE:

My grandson, Ryan Carr, asked me to give a talk to his senior class in “ethics and leadership.” I handed out the missive "The Challenge of Moral Leadership," which was prepared for this talk. What follows is a transcript of my recorded remarks.

* * *

My name is Jim Fisher. I am Ryan’s grandfather. I’ve taught graduate school, undergraduate school, and have conducted executive seminars over a good part of the world, but have never addressed a high school class. So, I hope you will forgive me if I sound nervous.

In route here, I told Ryan that the most important thing for a speaker is to know his audience. Quite frankly, I don’t know you but will endeavor to bridge this void.

The subject is leadership. I planned to bring books on the subject that I have written but put them in Ryan’s grandmother’s car, and didn’t discover the error until I reached your school. It would be safe to say, in any case, that these ten books are but chapters in the same book as leadership, like human behavior, hasn’t changed in millenniums.

To illustrate my point, allow me to quote Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist who specialized in crowd theory. He writes in “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896):

The thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation. Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

This idea of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transformation and anarchy … While all the ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS (the author’s use of higher case).

Now, 105 years later, my wonder is how he would define the crowd today. What do you think?

Silence. (This is not unusual when a stranger enters the midst of young scholars, twelve seniors, seven boys and five girls.)

Let me help you. Le Bon would be fascinated with an interest common to you all. What do you think that might be given what I quoted him as saying?

Silence.

It is the cyber crowd epitomized by FaceBook and YouTube. More than a billion souls participate, speaking many languages, engaged in many disciplines, with diverse perspectives and cultures, beliefs and values, forced by the pressure of the era onto this stage.

Without conscious awareness, without the discernible screen of intelligence, there has been a transformation and collectivization of the will and sentiment, for better or worse. There has been a retreat from the individual to the clamor of the crowd as hero in this innocuous social electronic connection.

We are witnessing the vanishing of the conscious personality to the collective mind. Doubtlessly, this transition is unconscious by yet has a conscious organization to form the psychological crowd. It differs little with that of Le Bon’s a century ago. Eric Hoffer called the herd mentality in “The True Believer” (1951).

This phenomenon is not simply an accidental cyber space communication of a few individuals with families and friends about the sense and nonsense of their daily lives but of tens of millions with an agenda. The “Arab Spring” movement and “Occupy Wall Street” moment are expressions of anguish, the Arab Spring with totalitarian rule, and the Occupy Wall Street with inequity of income and opportunity. Crowds are leaderless with no infrastructure, organization or hierarchy, the modern definition of the cyber crowd.

Media see these as innocent. A few people, even a single individual touches the feelings and thoughts of the many in a definite direction and launches the spontaneous disruption and ultimate disappearance of the conscious personality replaced by the clamor of the crowd.

My purpose is to alert you to what begins in innocence can spin off into lawlessness. It happened in Nazis Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler. I’m not making that connection here but alerting you to the fact that the immoral can be disguised in the rhetoric of moral and ethical leadership, as was the case with Hitler as he came to power.

This paper (handing out “The Challenge of Moral Leadership”) complements my talk today.

WHERE DOES THAT PUT YOU AS STUDENTS?

Your focus is on the scintillating world of ideas, concepts, theories, the beauty of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, history and the arts. You will draw on this base as you process life experiences. Education provides you with armament against illusion and inclusion into moments and movements designed to entice you.

Education protects you from dreamily being seduced by half-baked ideas or someone’s hidden agenda to perpetuate collective needs at your individual expense. To belong to a movement (Arab Spring) or moment (Occupy Wall Street), it is necessary to unflinchingly espouse selective prejudices, preconceived ideas and opinions, radical measures for implementation, and a mania for reform. Otherwise, you are like sheep to the slaughter caught up in a delirium and you have no idea why.

Education is a lifelong process in the development of a point of view, hopefully, derived from study, personal experience, supportive values, and a perspective that enables you to get where you intend to go.

If this sounds like moral leadership, it is. The most critical job of leadership is the nurturing individual essence and experience leavened with free will to meet the challenges of life. Everyone is a leader or no one is. It starts with you now.

One of the first challenges in life is to straddle the breech between what is ethical and what is legal. Most corporate enterprises favor the legal such as competitive industries and Wall Street, which are directed and driven by the so-called one percent.

As I say in the paper you have in your hands, once the focus is on the legal, it is likely to be at the expense of what is ethical. We are all caught in a legalistic society as morality is in the mind of the times. Given this, we attempt to persuade ourselves that what is legal is also ethical, but alas, seldom does that twain meet.

Given possible examination questions before the test may be legal, but ethically, does it measure learning? What is the ethical value of a designed review course in preparation for the taking of the Standard Achievement Test (SAT)? Again, it certainly doesn’t measure learning, but as we all know it is quite legal.

Our minds are constantly bombarded with information to dislodge pure reason from practical reason, fictitious shapes from real shapes, unreal truth from real truth, theoretical values from practical values, doubtful facts from obvious facts, destiny from providence until our solitary minds are so confused to be vulnerable to the genius of the crowd.

Mass media and the Internet with such vehicles as FaceBook and YouTube have combined in cyber space to shape the mind of today to resemble that of the crowd. Consequently, what seems conscious participation is largely unconscious and represents the secret strength of the crowd. The complexity of the modern world astounds us finding us retreating to instinct and maneuvering on automatic pilot.

We make celebrities of people who read the news, and fill our minds with the provocative horrors of the day, media pundits that tell us who we are, what we should think, how we should live, while encouraging us to buy their CD’s and books that we never read. We make them best selling authors, attend lectures that awards them six figure honorariums, and often elect them to public office. We equate their sanguine and glib delivery with wisdom and clarity of thought. Their other qualification is they look like us.

I have watched all twelve of the Republican Presidential Debates as entertainment. I see none of them an improvement on the present occupant of the White House, who admittedly is not very effective but is a known entity. How many of you have watched these debates? (No hands go up)

That is understandable given your full academic schedules, extracurricular activities and active social lives. I mention it here for a reason, and that I would like to discuss now.

THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF MAKING CHOICES

What do you think is the most important quality of leadership? (No response) It is the ability to make sensible choices.

We see with the alleged personal false steps of presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, among others, that if the whispers of impropriety exist, they will surface as deliciously as gossip and promulgated as fact. In the court of public opinion, you are guilty until proven innocent, and even then few are likely to buy your innocence.

We are all fallible, sinful, incomplete human beings who in the course of our lives make choices we later regret, but hopefully more right than wrong choices. The irony is we expect our leaders to be better than we are. We put them on pedestals to make them more than human then knock them off treating them as less than human. This encourages dissembling, corruption, cover up and conspiracy among their ranks, and we wonder why.

If we look at this from a personal standpoint – I’m speaking to you now as individuals – and buy the idea we are special because we are told we are brighter, more gifted, taller, more attractive, more vivacious, more cunning and likeable than others than we lose connection with other people. More importantly, we lose connection with ourselves. We are vulnerable to flatterers who can manipulate us to their purposes. They tell us we are a special race, group, contingent or class. This finds us surrendering our personal identity for a collective one. The genius of the crowd depends on this.

One of the first rules of leadership is awareness of whom you are where you are why you are here as opposed to somewhere else. This perspective provides you with the vision to see and the capacity to serve, while being able to evaluate accurately what is going on right now.

In that paper I’ve handed out, I mention General Motors. GM in the 1950s, likely before your parents were born, the CEO of GM, Charles Wilson said, “As GM goes so goes America.” This arrogance was pretty much treated as fact. Detroit was the economic center of a burgeoning American economy after WWII.

GM was a law unto itself, or saw it thought. Its moral leadership was tested in the person of Ralph Nader, a young Lebanese American attorney who wrote a book about the GM’s Corvair titled “Unsafe At Any Speed”(1959).

To neutralize the impact of this assessment, GM did not check Nader’s findings for validity but instead attempted to compromise his character by uncovering a seedy past. GM had an army of private investigators examine every aspect of Nader’s life, placing electronic bugs in his apartment, clocking every moment of his existence to find dirt, only to confirm his integrity. The media caught GM in the act, reporting this harassment, which led to the death knell of the Corvair while sullying GM’s reputation.

GM confused management and leadership. Management is good at managing things, inanimate things; leadership is good at leading people. Management quantifies things leadership develops people. Your teacher is in the leadership of student development.

Our institutions are aging and crumbling in their effectiveness. They have become defensive aspiring to infallibility and operating with dogmatic authority in the spirit of business as usual despite the taint of corruption, scandal or wasteful practices. They do as they please with impunity, as they have become a law unto themselves.

Indicative of this is Penn State where a celebrated coach, Joe Pattern, who was treated like a god on campus, failed to take action when his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was first accused of child abuse in 2002. Recently, Sandusky was caught abusing a boy in the shower of the athletic complex. Paterno and the college president were abruptly fired when this came to light. Sandusky now faces charges of some forty counts of child abuse, some of which occurred as early as the 1990s.

How could that happen? In South Africa during the time of apartheid, I asked my Catholic Church pastor, “How can the church not take a stand on apartheid?” He answered, “The church is not political,” when no institution could be more so.

In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Cardinal Pacelli was the Nuncio of Munich, later Pope Pius XII in the same decade, yet he did nothing when the “Jewish Question” materialized into the Holocaust, nor did President Roosevelt. FDR could have authorized the bombing of railroad lines to prevent the transport of Jews to some 20,000 concentration camps. He didn’t, not wanting to upset his ally, the Soviet Union, which had its own problem with Jews.

These are examples of lapses in moral leadership.

Abraham Lincoln worried about inevitable corruption to follow the Civil War (I read the quote from the missive on the subject). What does the word “corruption” mean to you?

Student answers: collapse of morality, money, abuse of power, and loss of morality.

These are good answers. Since morality is in the mind of the times, you might think corruption never changes, but it does (questioning expressions on student faces). You don’t think so? Well, greed has been treated as good, and greed often has the aspect if not the taint of corruption.

In his book “How” (2011), Dov Seidman attempts to get past this cynicism of:

(1) It’s not my job to it’s everyone’s job.

(2) Just do it, to do it right.

(3) Business as usual to thinking outside the box.

(4) Too big to fail to cultivating the small.

(5) Greed is good, to good is good.

(6) Let the stick and carrot extract maximum performance to the pleasure of work itself.

(7) Man is rational to man is in search of meaning and happiness.

Student: I understand all these but the stick and carrot.

The stick is the use of fear to motivate. The carrot is the use of incentives to excel in performance.

While we are talking about jobs, your job is to get an education. When you complete your education, you go out into the world as the next generation of leaders. It is why you are here. It is why I am here.

Innovative leadership will have to deal with the cyber crowd and its future iterations, as FaceBook and YouTube are only the current renditions of mass appeal.

The cyber crowd perpetually hovers on the borderline of our unconscious. None of us are impervious to its heroic or cowardly dimensions.

The individual is patiently and patently discriminating. The crowd is incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time on a subject. Individuals admit doubt and learn from their mistakes. Crowds are incapable of doubting their existence or the validity of their demands. Individuals are alert to reality checks. Crowds are impulsive, irritable, and incapable of reason, devoid of judgment and live on existential sentiment. Is it too much of a stretch to see cyber crowds in this context? (No response)

I am of an age unlikely to find out.

In any case, moral leadership at the personal level will be reduced to a matter of making choices. I never drank or smoked, a choice. I come from an Irish clan in which excess was the custom. Two years spent in the US Navy in the Mediterranean as a white hat sailor, where drinking and carousing was the modus operandi on liberty, I went on tours across Europe to acquaint myself with my roots. A choice. Perhaps it was because I saw too many ruinous lives in my extended family.

Tim Tebow, former Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida, and now quarterback of the Denver Broncos in the NFL, is deeply religious with a strict moral code, which he wears on his sleeve to the irritation of many. No matter how you feel about him, he is up front about his choices. People look for a chink in his armor as GM looked for a chink in Ralph Nader’s.

It might be inferred from this that we are cynical of someone making consistent moral choices. The herd mentality abhors individualism and is more interested in belonging than in being self-willed.

Belief is an important value when it comes to choices. What else influences our choices?

Students: Someone said, morality, and then there was silence.

Come on now, you know the answer. It is our peers. They dare us.

“Take a few puffs (on a cigarette or marijuana) it won’t hurt you. Don’t be a sissy.”

Guys in my day felt manly smoking; girls felt adventuresome if they did. The same was true with alcohol. All addictions start innocently.

Sixty years ago, it was cigarettes and booze. Today it is mind-altering drugs that can quickly induce such dependency that users engage in prostitution, breaking and entering, robbery and other crimes, even murder to feed the habit. Here in Tampa there are more murders every month related to addiction than Japan suffers in an entire year. Choices.

My mother died of emphysema after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes from the age of twelve to seventy-nine. It is not a pretty death. Family members were around her hospital bed with her naked, not being able to stand anything on her body because even with oxygen she couldn’t breathe. As shocking and embarrassing as it was, I found myself saying to her nurse, “Seeing this must cure you of the idea of smoking.”

She said almost defiantly, “I smoke!” Choices.

People who make bad choices don’t think it is going to happen to them. Personal smugness fed by optimism finds them denying a downside. The statistics on smoking are staggering:

(1) Smoking causes 443,000 deaths annually including 49,400 exposed to secondhand smoke.

(2) 269,655 men die annually from smoking.

(3) 173,940 women die annually from smoking.

(4) Some 25 million Americans still smoke, the majority from lower socio-economic status.

(5) One of every five deaths in the United States annually is caused from cigarette smoking.

(6) Cigarette smoking is contributory to breast cancer, strokes, heart disease, and heart attacks.

(7) Smoking only one cigarette a day can reduce a person’s life by ten years.

You would think this incentive to change behavior, yet one of every twelve Americans is a smoker.

THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM

My premise thus far is that moral leadership is individualistic. We are all leaders or none of us are. We must have control of this organism called “self,” and in that control be able to perceive and deal with reality, not as we would have it be, but as it actually is.

A Gallup Poll asked young people in 1950 if they thought they were a very important person. What percent of the respondents’ do you think thought they were important?

Students: 50 percent?

Actually, 12 percent thought they were. The same poll was taken in 2005, what do you think the response was then?

Students: 25 percent?

No, it was 80 percent.

Time magazine did a recent study, asking people if they considered themselves in the top 1 percent of earners: 19 percent claimed they were in this income bracket.

Who we are has gone from being taken for granted six decades ago to what Christopher Lasch calls in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978), “narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”

Think of it, a child born into the world feels it is the center of the universe and the world revolves around it, and is there to meet its every demand. In a strange way, a juvenile fixation has become a cultural norm. There is great pressure never to grow old and so little societal inclination to grow up. Growing up requires struggle, pain, disappointment, delay, and failure on the way to some level of success. Juvenility shows an inclination to avoid risks, to play it safe, cheat or retreat into recreational drugs and lifestyles to live on maxed out credit cards and borrowed time

A study asked people to respond to statements similar to these:

(1) I’m a very impressive person.

(2) I can manipulate people to fulfill my needs without any trouble.

(3) I live to show off for other people.

This was part of “The Narcissistic Test” given to a national audience over the past several years. It has seen a 30 percent spike since 1990.

Another reflection of self-importance is reflected in executive compensation. In 1950, it was 43 percent of GDP to 143 percent of GDP in 2005.

The social norms of the 1950s were against disproportionate executive compensation. Should some executives realize exceptional incomes, however, they would hardly flaunt it by pretentious living or lifestyle.

Executive compensation remained flat despite impressive company profits after WWII and up to the 1970s, and then incomes took off. In the 1970s and 1980s, executives became impressed with themselves, reflective of these narcissistic studies. They campaigned for increasing salaries and bonuses, and saw themselves as indispensable. So today, it is not uncommon for CEOs to earn $20 million a year with retirement incomes in excess of $5 million annually for only being in the top role for a few years.

In the 1990s, and again in the first decade of the twenty-first century, institutional polarity saw the dot.com bubble, and the subsequent real estate and Wall Street bubble. Greed became protocol and restrain took a holiday. Institutional integrity, integration and efficiency were supplanted by high finance. It became more rewarding to move money than to produce goods.

Name an institution, including the academic institution of which you are a part, and you will see a regressive decline of function and purpose across the board.

In the 1950s, when reality was gray, when you thought your opinions were weak or only partially right, you were inclined to seek the input of others to correct your errors and to get matters more right than wrong. You not only encouraged feedback, you depended on it.

In the 1970s and beyond, as compensation packages went through the stratosphere, executives not only believed they deserved them, but felt a need to prove they did. They came to believe they possessed one hundred percent of the truth, that they were not only astute managers, but infallible; that they possessed something akin to genius, and so they looked for “yes” men and women, and tended to kill messengers who questioned their authority or brought them bad news. Whistle blowers were treated as pariah, and added to their enemy’s list.

CYBER CROWD

Is FaceBook and YouTube part of the cyber crowd or a respite from the moral retrenchment of our times? Do these electronic conduits fad the lines between fantasy and fad, or blur the lines between innocent connection and senseless preoccupation? True, they bring loved ones and friends together, an opportunity to keep abreast of activities, and a touchstone for a sense of belonging to something bigger than self.

With all this upside, my wonder is if it is incipiently cultivating the heard mentality, the view that this cyber connection, which is images, words and cliché, is all innocence.

Could it ultimately become a vehicle for destabilization? The power of words is bound up with images that can evoke volatile reactions quite independent of their real significance.

We have seen how the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” has used FaceBook and YouTube to their purposes. Images, words and clichés delivered insouciantly and spontaneously, but are ill defined can lead to good and bad influences. Reason has no role in the cyber crowd. Indeed, the cyber crowd aborts reason to cavort in the privacy of irrational space. Forgive me, I’m just thinking out loud.

Attention has been given the fact that the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” have no leaders. Leaders in cyber crowds are likely to first surface as ringleaders and agitators. They rise out of the crowd, as they are first complete followers.

Crowd leaders hypnotize by expressing what is collectively felt with images, words and clichés’. Videos supply images – placards and pamphlets – that are words of affirmation, which are repeated with cacophony zeal to become contagions. The individual ceases to be isolated and falls prey to the spell of the leader and the crowd.

A quarter century ago, I wrote a book (Work Without Managers) that profiled my concerns and what I thought would follow. Regrettably, it has all materialized. Referencing the cyber crowd now is cautionary, as our collective unconscious invariably becomes the motive for the actions ultimately forged.

FaceBook and YouTube are contagions. Few are bold enough to run counter to the fashion of checking or sending messages hourly. Personal interest is sacrificed to collective interest with little conscious understanding of why. People can’t get their work done for this irresistible magnet, that is, until the company install restrains or the boss is breathing down their neck.

In crowd speak, suggestibility feeds contagions with a conscious loss of personality replaced by the compelling influence of frenetic texting to find the individual in a paralyzed state of irresistible impetuosity. It drives causes against repression (“Arab Spring”) and inequity (“Occupy Wall Street”) among other crusades, and it hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

My respect for the unconscious mind, which knows so much more than I know, is too great to become enslaved to this supposedly innocuous medium, which I see as a possible conduit to the cyber crowd. Doubtless the cyber crowd is addictive, the evidence is too overwhelming to think otherwise with more than a billion members. My aim is none other than to cause you to think. You are our leaders of tomorrow, which is a very different world than it was when I was your age. Good luck, God bless and peace.

* * *

YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE?

2011-11-30T04:43:00.000-08:00

YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2011

Ten months ago, my daughter Jeanne Marie Fisher, two days before her fifty-first birthday, crossing 66th Street in Pinellas Park, Florida was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Jeannie was a tall, blond pretty woman, a single parent, a waitress and one of four siblings, all of whom were high achievers but none of whom had her passion for life, predisposition to humor, quality of love, artistic temperament, sense of the absurd or unconditional tolerance for the shenanigans of other members of her family. She often said, “I have far less than any of you, but more of a capacity for happiness. Thank God I don’t have to worry about what I have or what I am, like you all do.”

Jeannie would often call her father up on the telephone, and he could tell as soon as she started to talk whether she had had a few drinks or not. She would say, “You’re my dad. Do you know that? You’re my dad.” It brings tears to my eyes now, but I must admit I would be impatient with her, and ask what she had on her mind. It was always the same. She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to connect with her father. She just wanted to bridge the void of her loneliness. Most of her adult life was spent alone having little tolerance for men, other than as disposable lovers and then not too frequently.

Her one crowning achievement was a son, Taylor Fisher, who carries her surname, a son who was the whole world to her, and a son, now nineteen, who never gave her a single moment of anxiety, a son, now in college, who had his mother taken from him when he most needed her.

Jeannie told me in one of her frequent telephone calls that Taylor wished that she would stop drinking and smoking because he wanted her to be around when he married and had children. She would make little confessions like this on the phone. There would be a void of silence when her father could hear the intake of breath, and the drag on the constant cigarette.

Part of her unconditional love was to accept her father, oddball that he was, who lived in his little cocoon who never drank, never smoked, and was always lecturing her about the irrevocable importance of the choices we make in life. “You should like yourself, Jeannie,” her father would say, “you should be important to yourself and not do things that harm you.”

She would reply always the same, “I’m working on it,” when he knew she never did. She never saw herself as others saw her, never was as kind to herself as she was to others, never appreciated herself like she appreciated others, especially her family.

Each Thanksgiving, she would look forward to having her picture taken with her father. It was one of the crowning moments of that annual festivity. She wasn’t here this Thanksgiving, and so her father had his picture taken with his arm out as if around her, knowing her spirit was in his midst.

When she was born, her eyes turned inward, and she had to have surgery to correct the fault. She had her first surgery, and then her father was very busy and seldom home, traveling over a good part of the world. She never had that second operation. Whether it would have restored her vision or not, it is a moot question. The point is that Jeannie never had good eyesight. Her vision became increasingly worse as she got older.

Eyesight is very important for a waitress, and she struggled with the problem so much so that she was constantly losing a job and seeking another over the years. What was singularly evident with her, however, was that she displayed a resilience that none of the rest of us have. We didn’t hear about “Woe is me,” as is typical of our Irish race, for she pressed on.

Little as she had, her apartment was a display of an artistic temperament. She could turn crates into colorful furnishings, common prints into beautiful montages, flower arrangements into botanical gardens, and second and third hand furniture into the appearance of regal splendor.

My wife Betty and I would visit her in her home in Pinellas County (Florida), and take her out to buy groceries and then to lunch, and you would think it was a grand vacation the way she treated us. That was another quality of Jeannie. We never knew how much she was hurting financially because she never asked for a penny.

The last time we went to see her for this little excursion, she said, “Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just sit and talk,” and we did for nearly three hours.

Similarly, her big sister, Laurie, who was there for her since she was a little girl, always bonding with her whether Laurie was in Gainesville, Florida going to school at the University of Florida, going to school in Chicago at the University of Chicago, or modeling in some metropolitan area.  Jeannie would be sure to find a reason to be with her. Two siblings couldn’t be closer. Taking Jeannie from her has put a kind of hurt on Laurie for which there is no cure, no satisfaction, and no relief. The pain never stops because there is nothing that can fill the void.

It is the same with her little brother, all six-foot three and 265 pounds of him. Michael has always lived in Pinellas County since he returned with his parents and siblings from South Africa as a little boy. Since he lived close by, he could get a call at any time, day or night, when she had a need for him. She might have fallen down the stairs, needed to have some furniture picked up, needed a ride to somewhere for a job interview, or a myriad of other little needs, and she would not hesitate to contact him, and he would be there for her.

She would ride from Pinellas County to Hillsborough County and Tampa, a distance of some fifty miles, for family get-to-gathers with Michael, his wife, Chrissy, and their twin boys, Killian and Keaton.

Michael and Jeannie are natural comedians being able to see the absurd in the most everything. They would entertain each other on these sorties back and forth between counties with slapstick high jinx entertainment. She would run her hand through Michael’s hair that is still long and blond like a legendary Celt, and tell him how handsome he was. She has left a void with him as well that cannot be filled, a void that he keeps more to himself than does his sister, Laurie, but a void nonetheless that causes him great and constant pain.

There is another brother, Robert, who lives in Philadelphia. Robert is the big brother. He is the brother who has constantly reinvented himself like his father has, and has made a good living hitting a tennis ball. He has fared better than those once on the tour as the tennis pro of an exclusive tennis club.

Robert is close to a member of the so-called “one percent” that the Occupy Wall Street moment so detests. He lost his silver spoon when his father retired in his thirties and no longer made the big salary that would have supported a tennis player on the tour. He was that good, and knew it, and held certain resentment for his father for denying him that dream. Despite that, through hard work, discipline, and persistence, he has been a constant value added component to his successful tennis club.

Robert was there for Jeannie in her early adult years when she would go off the wagon and the on the rails somewhere, and need help, immediately. He would be there for her no questions asked. As his career soared, and the distance between Jeannie and him grew, it was not possible to be there for her in the same manner. At her funeral, he confessed that he had let her down, which was not true. He simply handed off the model of attention that he had displayed so well to his other siblings, and they did not let Jeannie or him down.

Robert is very much like his father, remote, a loner, and a demander of himself far in excess of what is reasonable, and therefore a person who is as deep a feeler as it is possible to be, which is another way of saying in constant torment. As much as the loss is to his other siblings, the loss to him is a mortality slap in the face that sends shutters through him as it does his father.

As I write these words, I think of the number of times Jeannie has thanked me and thanked her mother for bringing her into the world. “I have this dream, daddy,” she would say, “that I am in Limbo, and I want desperately to be born, and somehow I can’t seem to escape my confinement, and then finally I am in the world. I am born. I am alive. I am your daughter.”

Who knows what goes on with a child in the womb? Who knows what life is about before birth or after death? Who knows if a dream is a dream or if what we are now experiencing is a dream, and the reality we so cling to doesn’t actually exist?

Jeannie’s mother went to the hospital three times in false labor. She was a breached baby, and suffered as I’ve expressed here the malady of her eyes. No person ever had more beautiful eyes than Jeannie, sky blue and warm as a summer sky.

Heather Mayo, a 32-year-old woman with a history of drug abuse, driving without a license and without auto insurance in a neighbor’s truck, saw Jeannie Marie Fisher on the island on Pinellas Park Boulevard, hoping that she would not step off the island, going too fast to stop, knowing she was going to hit her, shutting her eyes and hitting her at full throttle, knocking her into the air, and then running over her again.

It was at this point Heather Mayo made a series of poor choices.

She made a U-turn, and stopped in a parking lot across the street, thinking everyone had seen what she had done as they rushed to see Jeannie sprawled out in the street. When none questioned her involvement, she drove away.

She had come to Pinellas Park to buy six ounces of marijuana for her boyfriend in Palm Harbor, some thirty miles north of Pinellas Park. He saw the blood and damage to the truck, and asked her what happened, and she said she had hit a deer.

Subsequently, it is my understanding that she and her boyfriend watched Laurie and Michael on television pleading on February 5, 2011, the day after Jeannie’s death, for whomever did this to turn him or herself in.  Heather Mayo didn’t. That was ten months ago.

As life often imitates fiction, the Pinellas Park Police Department kept the case file open, kept Laurie and Michael informed, and eventually solved the case by what would appear serendipity, but which actually amounted to astute police work. I know good police work, as I was a police consultant across the nation during the 1970s and worked closely with scores of police departments.

Just days ago, Heather Mayo was having trouble with her boyfriend, and dialed 911 with the police coming to investigate the domestic disturbance. As the boyfriend was arrested, she hollered at him, “I’m thinking of filing a restraining order against you.”

He yelled back, “Well, I’m telling the police you hit and killed that girl in February.”

It was 3 a.m. in the morning, and the police officer, used to these kinds of accusatory exchanges in the heat of the moment, could have filed it under, "more of the same," but he didn’t. He looked up on his computer and found there was a cold case for a hit-and-run death in Pinellas Park in February 2011 of Jeannie Marie Fisher. He asked for backup, and stayed at the home until other officers arrived, and worked out what was what, arresting Heather Mayo, as well as her boyfriend, and working out the details until after 5 a.m.

Apparently, in one of their marijuana induced sessions, Heather Mayo had confessed to her boyfriend that she was the one who had hit and killed that girl in February. He held that against her, and used it as blackmail to have her get him drugs until that fateful confrontation mentioned here.

Remarkably, the truck that was damaged in February had never been repaired with the pieces of the truck left at the scene of the hit-and-run matching perfectly with the vehicle.

Heather Mayo has made a two-hour written confession of the crime, along with a video confession as well. She says she is remorseful for what she has done, and obviously would like to put this behind her and go on with her life, hoping to get her seven-year-old daughter back who has been taken from her.

Were this all a dream, and were it possible for Jeannie Marie Fisher to reappear out of the midst, and were all the hurt over the past ten months able to miraculously disappear, and were it possible to erase the bad choices made by Heather Mayo, not only at the time of this tragedy, but over her past thirty-two-years, I would be the first to forgive and forget. Unfortunately, it is not possible.

We are all sinners, and we all must pay for our sins. There are no winners and losers in this affair, only damaged people. Being remorseful runs shallow because it was not arrived at voluntarily or timely when it would have demonstrated remorse. I am not accepting of the remorse in any measure or in any way. Heather Mayo was found out and now she must suffer for her crime. Whatever that punishment is, it will not bring back Jeannie Marie Fisher, or ease the pain of her loved ones. That will continue as long as they are alive. That is their life sentence. What should Heather Mayo’s be?

As I’ve said, I’ve been around law enforcement in one of my former careers, and have been a professor of many who have had or are having careers in the various functions of law enforcement from serving and protecting to criminal justice to incarceration. What is most sad to report from that exposure and experience is that few learn from their mistakes. To put it another way, they seldom make better choices once they serve their time, find new friends, and seek new surroundings and careers. Recidivism is so shockingly high that our incarcerating institutions are always overcrowded. Chances are whatever Heather Mayo’s sentence, she will come out an equally damaged or more damaged person than when she went into the correction facility, more a dreg on society than she already is.

So, what should Heather Mayo’s punishment be? Ideally, it should be a place where she would likely be able to learn a trade, become drug free, learn to make better choices, and to grow up. Society’s interest should be to save her from the damaged heap of her kind that people a good part of society, a part that it is easier to look the other way than to deal with the problem. I am for anything approaching that possibility. This is not because I am lenient; anyone who knows me knows that is not part of my DNA. It is because I want to believe that she can be saved because in saving her we save something of Jeannie Marie Fisher, which is worth saving.

* * *

THE CHALLENGE OF MORAL LEADERSHIP

2011-11-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

THE CHALLENGE OF MORAL LEADERSHIP

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

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.

Abraham Lincoln, 1864

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the work culture (values); the work culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior determines whether moral leadership will take hold or it will be replaced by corruption.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership, AQP Journal, Winter 2002

* * *

We are struggling to do the right thing when we are organized to do the wrong thing. We are organized for another time, place and space, another situation and value system. We are organized for an agrarian-industrial society that is long past. We are in the Internet Age and are overwhelmed with complexity.

* * *

My grandson, Ryan Carr is a senior at Tampa Preparatory School in Tampa, Florida. He has been studying leadership, specifically moral leadership. He knew I had written on the subject and asked if he could share some of my works with his teacher.

The teacher read these works and shared them with Ryan’s class. He asked Ryan if I would speak to the class on the subject. It is Ryan’s first class in the morning. I am not a morning person. In fact, I am writing this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving at three in the morning, and will be writing until the sun comes up.

I have a tendency to be wordy. What is more, there are many ways to look at leadership, especially moral leadership, that I thought I should compose this draft of the subject. This is my take on the subject along with troubling disturbances that have occurred. Students may not be familiar with these or the impact they have had. It is my hope that this discussion will encourage further exploration.

Abraham Lincoln, our great moral leader, was weary at the height of the Civil War that our moral fabric might unwind. Many writers have addressed this problem, which is a system’s problem. They claim our system has become ossified controlled by special interests. Writers don’t unshackle us from a problem but create awareness of its existence. Awareness is the necessary, but not sufficient condition to generate change. Change takes action. Action takes the will of moral authority. Have no doubt you will be called on to display moral leadership in your professional careers. .

THE MORAL CHALLENGE

We live today in a climate of gray, not black and white, not right and wrong. We push the limits of what is legal without a backward glance at what is ethical. Those in positions of leadership worry more about how to finesse the system than to reduce its toxicity, more about competitive advantage than serving the customer, more about exploiting than developing trust. The evidence is overwhelming.

Lost in this declining moral climate is this: The purpose of an organization is not to preserve the status quo at the expense of its function but to honor its function. It is why it exists.

Cover-ups are founded in confusing survival with function. You can see this clearly in William Livingston’s “The New Plague” (1985). The purpose of an organization is what it does, not what it says it will do or hope to do, but what it is doing now. “The quantity of scientific facts is now doubling every seven years,” he writes, “we are not structured to deal with this complexity,” and so we often go off the rails focusing on secondary problems leaving primary problems unattended.

We live in a declining moral climate. Rhetoric competes with reality, telling takes precedence over listening; knowing over learning; posturing over doing, credentials over people with answers. Christopher Lasch in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978) claims that we have retreated into a cosmetic culture. This has the appearance of dealing with problems while dealing with them only cosmetically, as window dressing.

Abraham Lincoln saw moral leadership requiring courage, not hope to penetrate the natural resistance to change. Courage is active; hope is passive.

We live in an existential age. This is displayed in having little patience with delayed gratification, that is, a disinclination to spend sufficient time, energy and treasury on the front-end of problems, which is the problem defining stage. We prefer to avoid complexity, which demands a great deal of front-end attention, settling on reacting to the consequences of our misspent actions in crisis management.

We solve problems we believe we can solve, while complexity whirls around us unattended causing us to be stuck in forward inertia. Metaphorically, this is like having the foot to the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere. It is why corruption happens. What you see is not what you get. That is what happened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and is a clear and present danger in the twenty-first century.

We are committed to circular linear logic, cause-effect cyclic resolution of problems, while ignoring the impact of deviant behavior, what I have called “Six Silent Killers” (1998). Deviant behavior is as invisible in the organization as social termites are in the woodwork. Moral leadership eradicates this by listening and positive intervention.

Nothing changes without structural change. Leadership, as I point out in “Corporate Sin” (2000) has been reduced to leaderless leadership. Compensation bonuses for successful crisis management have compounded the problem. Crisis managers solve the problems they create. Gridlock exists in institutions because of this narrow-mindedness.

There are two obvious problems here. Management is not leadership. Management deals with things to be managed. Leadership deals with people to be led. Leadership is a moral and morale problem because it deals with behavior. When behavior is treated as a thing to control, problems fester, bubble and eventually burst, throwing everyone and everything into chaos. This is what we have experienced since 2008 in the economic meltdown and the subsequent recession. Economics is all about behavior.

If moral leadership could be established by only treating symptoms, there would be no point in this discussion. The cause of our moral dilemma is a combination of ossified institutions and exploitation of them by special interests. These institutions, as William Livingston points out, operate with infallibility, dogmatic authority, and impunity. We see this with BP in the aftermath of the oilrig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the high bonuses on Wall Street after the malfeasance leading to the 2008 economic crash, and now “business as usual” after the pedophile scandal at Penn State. Institutions return to operations as if these disturbances had not taken place. If there is no self-evident correction to flagrant violation of social norms, no learning has taken place.

The problem goes deeper. We “are” the institutional system. We cannot separate ourselves from it. Our passivity, dependence and counterdependence on institutions are manifested in our inclination to comfort and complacency at the expense of contribution. Stated another way, behavior is in the mind of the times, and a company, community and country get the behavior it deserves. Pointing fingers is irrelevant and counterproductive

At this point, it would be fair for you to ask, what has this to do with me a high school senior? I would suggest, “Everything!”

Ordinary people make history while society treats some as extraordinary. This is unfortunate. It is safe to say nearly every person who rises to a position of trust, responsibility, accountability, and authority has every intention of doing the right thing. The fact that so often they fail is indicative of the tenuous climate of moral leadership. Not only is life hard, but also the temptation to deviate from social norms has never been greater. Lord Acton was correct: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A CASE IN POINT

Imagine a person who came from humble circumstances and rose to a corporate executive position barely in his thirties with solid ethical training in his culture, but with an extreme level of trusting naiveté.

Picture him in a foreign country forming a new company. In the process, he discovers his American company CEO has taken an illegal “finder’s fee” in the equivalent of seven-figures (2011) from this venture, which is unreported in expense allocations, but hidden.

At the same time, this young executive’s wife overdraws his personal account in this foreign bank to the tune of $40,000 (2011 evaluation). Because of his executive status the bank allows this overdraft to grow to this figure before reporting it to him.

The managing director of the foreign operation, knows he is troubled with this “finder’s fee,” but sees a way to deal with it by offering to pay the overdraft, no questions asked, and to duplicate his already generous salary if he would forget about the “finder’s fee.”

The venture is an extremely sensitive enterprise with no upside to a possible scandal involving three multinational firms. The merger largely eliminates competition in the marketplace. There are no anti-trust regulations in this foreign country with which to deal.

What does this young man do? He resigns, takes a two year sabbatical although he has a wife and four small children, and then goes back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D. in another discipline.

TIME LINE OVER THE PAST 80 YEARS

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the “Jewish Question” tested the moral leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Pacelli was papal nuncio in Munich at the time. He would later become Pope Pius XII. In those two roles, historians suggest he was negligent in displaying moral leadership as the Holocaust took root (see “Hitler’s Pope” by John Cornwell 1999).

Moral leadership involves ordinary people as well as leaders. Some historians see the German people complicit in the Holocaust by their tacit behavior (see Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen 1996). Commission and omission is often a tangled web in moral dilemma. We don’t know how we would act until faced with it.

Early in WWII, President Roosevelt knew of the Holocaust and was encouraged to bomb the railroads that linked to some 20,000 concentration camps, and at the same time, to accept Jewish refugees with due haste. He did neither, and justified dragging his feet (see “Traitor to His Class” by H. W. Brands 2000) because Soviet Russia, America’s ally, was alleged to be involved in similar activities.

After WWII, the United States was the only viable industrial nation as bombing had leveled cities and factories across Europe, South East Asia and Japan. Post WWII produced economic boom. It also saw the corporate structure grow from four levels of management during the war to as many as twelve levels by the 1960s. Moreover, top management went from earning 30 - 40 times what line workers earned in the 1950s and 1960s to earning several times that differential by the 1970s and 1980s. Today, executive compensation has risen as high as 400 times what line workers earn.

Shame and social norms controlled compensation in the 1950s and 1960s. That shame diminished in the 1970s and 1980s to be nonexistent today.

Arrogance and hubris, a belief in being invincible and untouchable, developed in CEOs and corporate Boards of Directors to become a law unto themselves. CEO Charlie Wilson of General Motors said in the 1950s, “As GM goes so goes America.” This mantra was challenged in the 1970s by a 25-year-old Lebanese American lawyer, Ralph Nader, who wrote a book that the GM Corvair was “Unsafe at Any Speed” (1959).

Rather then listen and probe the validity of the charge, GM set an army of private investigators on Nader to dig up dirt to neutralize him and his critical study of the automobile.

Nader proved to be sparkling clean no matter how many attempts to impugn his moral character. Eventually, this came to haunt GM as the press got wind of the harassment. Nader became a celebrity of consumer rights, while Corvair production was terminated.

MORAL TURPITUDE ON STEROIDS

In the 1970s and 1980s and now being mirrored in the new century, accountants held no one accountable, governments abandoned their regulatory functions, media turned blatant cheaters into superstars, and a culture of self-righteous mendacity was allowed to flourish as long as the stock prices were high.

Jeff Miller, April 27, 2005

This is representative of what Jeff Miller is referring:

ENRON

Fortune Magazine (2000) “Enron Best Managed and Most Innovative Company”

Enron people indicted and sentenced to prison terms:

(1) Jeffrey Skilling

(2) Kenneth Lay

(3) Andrew Fastow

(4) Bernard Ebbers –WorldCom

(5) Dennis Koslowski (TYCO)

(6) Samuel Waksal (IMCLONE)

(7) John Rigas – Adelphia

(8) Martha Stewart

December 2, 2001

Enron files for bankruptcy, 4,000 employees fired, 20,000 other workers lose their jobs, $73 billion in stock value – gone!

What happened? Enron used thousands of off-the-books entities to overstate corporate profits, understate corporate debts, and inflate Enron’s stock price.

WORLDCOM

(1) $3.9 billion in expenses hidden

(2) $3.3 billion in accounting irregularities

(3) Company applied for bankruptcy

(4) Market value lost: $100 billion

TYCO

(1) Tax evasion

(2) Evidence tampering

(3) 1,500 jobs lost

(4) 4,500 laid off

(5) Down $86 billion in one year from peak share price

WALL STREET ANALYSTS

(1) Investment banking firms biased research

(2) 10 firms fined $1.4 billion by SEC. Among them:

Citigroup Salomon Smith Barney

Credit Swisse Groups CSFB

Merrill Lynch

Goldman Sachs

Morgan Stanley

The list goes on and on and on, and this is only during the last decades of the twentieth century. Many of these same firms repeated the corrupt behavior leading to the economic collapse of 2008, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Merrill Lynch even provided deceptive books when merging with Bank of America, while Lehman Brothers disappeared totally. Bank of America is in a tenuous state today for this among other reasons.

Media financial superstars during the 1970s and 1980s such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Miliken went to prison, while Charles Keating never recovered from the Savings & Loan debacle after losing $200 million of investors’ money. This seems like peanuts as companies and brokerage houses lose $ billions today for reckless abandon practices.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

It proves moral leadership is personal and individual, corporal and organizational. A community, company, state, and the nation are connected and inner connected morally and ethically in values. Culture is an expression of values. Values dictate behavior in terms of honesty, integrity, truth and trust.

Technology and complexity have outstripped our grasp of our values and our common civility. Moral leadership is needed to restore the balance.

We have gone through an eighty-year patch of moral decline as our values have eroded into the cynicism of:

(1) “It’s not my job.”

(2) “Just do it even if it is wrong.”

(3) “It’s just business as usual.”

(4) “Too big to fail.”

(5) “Greed is good.”

(6) “Let the stick and carrot extract maximum performance.”

(7) “Do the job any which way to put the best face on it.”

(8) “Man is rational so forget about feelings.”

(9) “Fear sells, intimidation sells better.”

Dov Seidman has captured this theme in his “How” (2011). This book presents a positive platform to deal with cynicism by reestablishing our core values.

Seidman is a moral philosopher who has turned his attention to changing the mindset from:

(1) Greed is good to good is good.

(2) Man is rational to man is in search of meaning and happiness.

(3) Just doing it to doing it right.

David Brooks references scientists who show how important feelings are in behavior (see “The Social Animal” 2011). William L. Livingston sees retreat from natural law at our peril. Our intellectual, psychological, economic, and social behavior are subject to natural law. Optimism and pessimism are not methods. They are culture or values.

That is to say we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way. Our values have a hole in them, and only we can individually and collectively repair that damage through moral leadership. Books and ideas can provide incentive but we must define and frame the problem to exercise behavioral change.

Occupy Wall Street (OCW) is an eclectic, spontaneous eruption out of the angst with the status quo. It would be unwise to dismiss it as deviancy but better to see it as an attempt to reestablish social norms beginning with one’s inalienable rights.

A polarity has developed in America with little patience to understand why. Seidman says OCW movement is all about meaning and a perceived sense of injustice. Occupiers feel they played by the rules, got an education, did what was expected, but are not on track to participate in society, and they have done nothing wrong.

Onlookers may see OCW as angry when they are in anguish. They want to play, to participate but cannot. They see the institutional system as the culprit and they want to tear it down. President Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” OCWs cry differs little with this. David Brooks sees institutions ossified including the government. OCWs see it the same way.

The problem with OCW is that they have no idea what they are for but only what they are against. Should our institutional system collapse releasing freedom without a suitable alternative, then a moral, political and economic vacuum would result. Seidman sees the new day requires a system of values based on principles and a workable framework guided by moral leadership. That takes work and patience, but most of all a viable methodology.

Brooks, Seidman, Livingston and others are not suggesting a retreat from hard work, struggle, disappointment, failure, but resilience to deal with collapse and catastrophe. The irony is that the one percent that the ninety-nine percent so despise, have displayed the work ethic, dealt with scarcity, demonstrated resilience in disaster, and kept economically afloat under the most trying circumstances. Many have worked in factories, something few OCWs are likely to have experienced. The ninety-nine percent haven’t avoided social norms (values), but have used them to soar. The fact that these values are in tatters and need to be revised is the basic justification for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Immediately after WWII, people had the attitude I’m no better than anyone else and nobody is better than me. They weren’t impressed with the celebrity or exhibitionist. They would think “Reality Television” and the “Celebrity Culture” crass and wasteful. They wouldn’t brand themselves with body billboards of tattoos to declare their identity or to establish inclusion. They would be embarrassed by such a display as few scarred their bodies in that manner. Nor were they into displaying or broadcasting themselves. They would find it hard to fathom why tens of thousands wanted to appear on “American Idol” to become famous; being famous would not have occurred to them.

In 1950, a Gallup Poll asked young people if they thought they were a very important person: 12 percent said they thought they were.

In 2005, Gallup asked the same question of young people: 80 percent said they were.

In a recent Time magazine article, people were asked if they considered themselves in the top 1% of earners: 19% claimed they were.

“Who we really are” has gone from being taken for granted six decades ago, to what Christopher Lasch calls “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” A child born into the world is demanding, feels it is the center of the universe that everything revolves around it, that nothing is more important than its demands. In a strange way, this juvenility has become society’s norm. Few people want to grow old and therefore to grow up. They desire pleasure without pain, immediate gratification, while retreating from guilt and embracing anxiety. They personify the Test for Narcissism:

(1) I’m a very impressive person.

(2) I like to show off for other people.

(3) I can manipulate people to fulfill my needs and demands.

Studies show test results for narcissism have increased 30 percent since 1990.

Likewise, executive compensation in 1950 was 43 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2005, it ballooned to 143 percent of GDP.

1950 executives would be ashamed to ask for compensation more than 30 to 40 times that of the lowest paid person in operation as it was against the prevailing social norms. Today, in 2011, top executives and Wall Street CEOs demand compensation packages in excess of $20 million per year.

Corruption was rampant in the 1970s to 1990s, long before the economic meltdown of 2008 and the crash on Wall Street. Inside trading and circumventing the law became common practice as outlined above.

At the same time, there was a communications breakdown and cultural polarization.

(1) In the 1950s, people in positions of trust and power recognized they had an imperfect grasp of reality that their opinions were weak or only partially right, and therefore needed the input of different views to compensate for possible error. FDR, during his first administration (1933 – 1937) in the midst of the Great Depression, tried countless ideas to move the nation economically forward, many generated by adversaries. He never actually uncovered the key, as WWII lifted the American economy out of its economic doldrums.

(2) The Nixon administration, believing it had the absolute solution to Vietnam and the national economy, hunkered down against mounting protests, treating those who disagreed as part of its “enemies list.” Watergate followed. True believers thought anything goes that stood in the way.

Unfortunately, the problem cannot be made exclusively a government problem. People retired now in their seventies will have put into the system, on average, $150,000 to cover the cost of social and medical benefits, but will take out, on average, $450,000 in their lifetime. We don’t want to be reminded of this, or to have these benefits reduced. We just don’t want to pay for them. It is a “Catch 22.”

Dov Seidman points out when people are looking to blame they should keep in mind, “We now live in a corporate theatre, and we ought not to shout, fire!”

The challenge of moral leadership is therefore caught in a moral dilemma. We all want to continue with all the benefits that accrue to our society, but we don’t want to pay for them. We want elected officials to be miracle workers, when they are only citizens like ourselves, and have no more leverage than that provided by what we are willing to do.

Consequently, many retreat into optimism no matter how pessimistic the climate. Those that exploit us depend on this. There is evidence we have lost our capacity to struggle, believing we can somehow get to where we want to go without hard work, pain, failure, inadequacy or self-doubt. History suggests we are wrong.

* * *

Note: “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007) by the author covers this segment in some detail.

THE POWER OF REFLECTION -- DR. FISHER'S INTRODUCTION TO "PERSONHOOD"

2011-11-06T13:58:00.000-08:00

THE POWER OF REFLECTION – DR. FISHER’S INTRODUCTION TO "PERSONHOOD"

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

You will forgive me if I often feel like Chicken Little announcing that the “Sky is falling,” but that has been the case since I took to writing passionately for what I was feeling and experiencing in the flesh some two decades or more ago. The OCCUPY WALL STREET phenomenon is not a surprise to me, but a manifestation of what I envisioned some time ago.

This was written in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES in 1990, after returning to the United States after working in Europe since 1986 as director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe Ltd.

It was my second experienced quagmire as a corporate executive at the pinnacle of power the first being in 1968 in South Africa. Obviously, I am not cut out for this corporate game as I retired that first time in serious disenchantment with the corporate scheme of things along with the draconian nature of Afrikaner apartheid. I would go back to school and tried to fill the other side of my brain with software of the social sciences to complement the hardware of physical sciences, earning a Ph.D. in social, industrial and organizational psychology (1978). After two years of consulting, I rejoined the corporation as a management & organizational development psychologist, only again ultimately rejoined the executive ranks in 1986 now assigned to Europe operating out of corporate headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

There are two ways to look a gift horse in the mouth: gratitude at your good fortune or as a platform to provide a laboratory of experience. I’ve always chosen the latter. My loyalty has never been to the corporation, but always to the integrity of my mind and what that limited vision was able to apprehend from experience.

The experience of South Africa found me writing and rewriting a novel of South Africa over the next forty years, which has not yet been published. In the case of the European experience, I retired for the second time and continued writing, then publishing the book that I was writing while in Europe, that is, Work Without Managers.

This is preamble to my remarks, which follow. Over my career, both at home and abroad, I saw a change in Western values, a change that has been so contagious in this Internet age that it gave birth to the Arab Spring, but more directly into a serious challenge to the Western advances in women’s rights especially as they related to free choice or pro life. There is an organization now called PERSONHOOD that has launched an attack on these rights most notably in the state of Mississippi, which plans to have a referendum or constitutional change outlawing abortion. I have no interest in taking sides on this issue, but only in pointing out that “personhood” has been quite apparent to me over the last quarter century, and reference to it was included in Work Without Managers (1990) and in an article in PERSONAL EXCELLENCE (1997).

A NEW LOOK AT OLD VALUES (Re: Work Without Managers, 1990)

“Not unlike Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, subtle but massive changes in American society and the individual have led to a cultural breakdown.

“The main cause of this breakdown is denial. The secondary cause is attempting to make traditional approaches to work in the face of these cultural changes.

“The established culture of American society, the common good, has failed to support the society that it would define. Yet, many of the advocates often located in American think tanks stubbornly insist it is the only way. Against this reality, the culture of personhood now struggles to establish itself.

“Americans of World War II vintage generally think in terms of “what is good for the country, state, church, school, family, and company is good enough for me!”

“But Americans of the post-Vietnam Ware think more in terms of “the right to know the right to an opinion the right to be wrong the right to fail the right to work, civil rights and civil disobedience.” In a word, they think in terms of controlling their own destiny rather than having it dictated to them. Traditional American workers continue to value the common good, while modern professional workers increasingly value personhood. This is becoming a distinct difference:

“With the common good authority is position power; with personhood it is knowledge; with loyalty the common good is to the organization; with personhood it is to self; with discipline the common good is controlled by rewards and punishment; with personhood is it is caring and respect; with motivation the common good is motivated by fear; with personhood it is challenge and the desire to make a contribution.

“This difference has already had pivotal ramifications across America from the home to the workplace. Adversaries have been made of parents and children, teachers and students, the clergy and laity, managers and workers, leaders and followers in all walks of life. It has also produced a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements in the organization.

“So traumatic has the situation become that many parents, educators, executives, clergy and leaders are abandoning the conflict. They have abdicated in frustration, proclaiming that they are ‘powerless.’

“Meanwhile, the few who are still hopeful remain convinced that the answer lies in the common good. They invariably turn to quick-fix fads and techniques involving ‘change’ in the way we train, work and manage. What is missing is looking at the person differently.” (pp 33-34)

“Human resources professional, supposedly the employee’s advocate, have had the opportunity to educate management to the cultural shading of personhood and the relationship of those shadings to professionals. They have also been in a position to create a psychological climate to facilitate this educational process. But, due to a lack of comprehension or courage, they have contributed instead to organizational strife and dysfunctionality.

Is it any wonder, then, that nonfunctional behavior dominates the organization, and that those so disposed rule with contemptuous disregard for the organization’s mission? Professionals have learned how to appear busy without being gainfully employed; how to please the boss without doing anything productive. This behavior clearly results from telling management what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to do.

“Human resources has been at the center of this deception and in the process has become by default, management’s union. It has lost its identity and role.” (pp. 40-41)

PERSONAL EXCELLENCE (November 1997)

“PERSONHOOD. Generation X is rebuilding its life out of the chaos, excess, greed, deceit, corruption, waste, hypocrisy and sanctimony of an authoritarian society. They look at their parents and grandparents and see a pattern: “Be loyal, quiet, obedient, polite, conforming, and all will go well!”

“Well, it hasn’t! It is the submissiveness and compliance of the child, the person suspended in terminal adolescence. The rituals, rites of passage, protocol, politics, and sundry elements of the common good are not likely to have much impact.

“The common good envisions man as a dependent child counterdependent on man-made institutions, a thesis of other-directedness and selflessness. For that, dignity is sacrificed to social assurance.

“Personhood combats this social erosion, not because self-reliance is morally right, but because it is spiritually necessary.” (p 15)

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Should these words resonate with you it speaks to how little we manage to get off the dime seemingly always to choose to kick the can down the road.

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THE INEVITABLE PAIN OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL SOCIETY

2011-11-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

THE INEVITABLE PAIN OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL SOCIETY

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

Guilt is a powerful motivator. It is now playing out in the finance districts of our principal cities as protesters of the “99 percent” (have nots) stubbornly occupy the streets and parks in deviance of the “1 percent” (haves).

We born during the Great Depression, when safety nets were first introduced for society in general and for the have nots in particular, witnessed the nation getting caught up in the largesse of others doing more for us than we were expected to do for ourselves. We watched as our nation lost its moral compass and its way so that today we, as a society, are not happy campers.

We forgot that Horace Mann found the key to ending poverty and it was education.

Horace Mann led the Massachusetts legislature in 1838 to create public school education paid for and maintained through taxation. It was for all children thus underpinning individual success, and by extension our collective national success.

Education is the hegemony of our international prominence over the past two centuries. But by an unwitting paradox, however, we now are well off the pace in educational achievement of many nations across the globe that have copied our design.

Somehow guilt watered down this in the last century, especially after World War Two, when we forgot why we won the war. We forgot about how the citizenry picked itself up by the bootstraps after the Great Depression with an appreciation of education, honest hard work and national unity. But we forgot in particular that education provided value added status in the workplace, in the community, and in our individual lives.

We born during the Great Depression appreciated that our first job, our most important job was getting an education. We had teachers who were dedicated to creating value added status in our little minds so that we could go out into the working world as thinkers, problem solvers, and doers, not looking for what we could get but for what we could give to society.

We were into the common good as opposed to the watered down version that would supersede this culture and mindset, which I have come to call personhood.

Personhood became palpable when the emphasis was placed on protecting our delicate psyches, in treating us all alike in the classroom, in promoting the idea of self-esteem, being careful not to distinguish between winning and losing, succeeding and failing, winners and losers.

Grading and performance became increasingly superfluous so that today an “A” grade, which once was designated with a “four,” can now be found worth five or six or more points in the grading system. An indication of how meaningless grades have become is the necessity for competitive achievement tests such as SAT’s and GRE’s. Even these tests have provided faulty benchmarks because most students are taught to the tests, or take review courses so that they perform well on them.

We have taken the most wonderful discovery of all from people and that is self-discovery. We have made school a prison if not a factory, and we have made the factory or workplace an entertainment center, a place to go to on a regular basis, socialize, hang out and let our machines do most of the work while we wile our time away surfing the Internet, texting or talking on our cell phones. We have gone from hardware to software and from brawn or muscle power to brainpower, but imperfectly.

Unions of our major industries pressed management for more and more entitlements and wage concessions, principally during the post-WWII years, not looking to worker productivity, worker identity or making work more worker centered. As a result, most factory workers brought their bodies to work and left their minds at home. They were punched and prodded, badgered and intimidated to react to instructions from the few (management) to often do what the many (workers) knew was counterproductive, “but not their problem.”

Apparently, no one in labor or management envisioned the world catching up and then eating our lunch, which it has been doing for half a century. It was easier to give in than to call out. Consequently, we have not only gotten flabby as a nation but flabby as thinkers, problem solvers and doers.

When you take people essentially out of the equation, when you attempt to do for them what they might better do for themselves, you weaken them and their resolve and diminish them individually as persons and collectively as an intellectual capital resource.

All this has been discussed to the point of nauseam many times before, but I indicate it here to emphasize how ridiculous and shortsighted educators, politicians, parents and students have become as the basis of what and who they are has become increasingly inauthentic to the point of irrelevance.

At the same time, we have gone from a creditor to a debtor nation. This is as true at the state as at the national level. State legislatures are not able to maintain the entitlements to public employees because they now far exceed what private sector employees receive in compensation, benefits and retirement accretions.

Countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain have taken this entitlement fiasco to ridiculous extremes. The incentive to work in the private sector in these European nations was taken out of the equation as public employees faired far better than workers in the private sector, that is, until the economic house came crashing down, putting these nations on the brink of bankruptcy, possibly destabilizing the world economy.

So, we may be approaching a Great Depression far in excess of the 1929 world economic and banking crash. Against this scenario, there are still winners and losers. Some commentators have the insight and courage to point this out, David Brooks among them.

DAVID BROOKS AS SEER

David Brooks is a New York Times syndicated columnist who tempers his conservative remarks quite frequently with statistical or demographic data that says less offensively what he is attempting to communicate more aggressively. He has been quite concerned about the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd and its copiers across the United States, and now across the Western world.

In his column today, he mentions Blue Inequity and Red Inequity. Blue Inequity is the 1 percent that have stirred up the “Occupy Wall Street” 99 percent crowd. The 99 percent occupiers represent Red Inequity. They resent the 1 percent millionaire/billionaire club that they see as the problem.

The economic superstars are located in our major cities and financial centers, and are paid much more than good or average performers. Blue Inequity is distributed mainly among non-financial managers, doctors, financiers, lawyers, engineers, athletes, entertainers and media personalities.

This exclusive club was extant, but smaller when this republic was founded, but it has always existed, and will continue to exist whatever the economic circumstances of the nation. Inequity of the type described here has existed in every form of government since the beginning of civilization. Likewise, this group designation has consistently included only 10 percent or less of the constituency of the republic. What is interesting is the take David Brooks has on the other 90 percent, which includes most of us.

I will now quote him in italics because I cannot improve upon what he has to say, a message that should resonate with us all, and if it doesn’t, shame on us!

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Crucial inequality (among Red Inequity) is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without.

Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate (my highlighting), according to the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more (my highlighting).

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock (my highlighting).

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home . . .

Over the past few months (re: Occupy Wall Street), attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequity.

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns, and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

But the fact is that Red Inequity is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent (that pay no income taxes and therefore have no vested interest in the country – my comment).

If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and CEOs. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda (David Brooks: “Inequality is more than percentages,” Tampa Bay Times, op-ed page, November 3, 2011).

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EVERYONE A LEADER OR NO ONE IS

2011-10-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

EVERYONE A LEADER OR NO ONE IS

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

The paradoxical dilemma of our times is that we cannot lead and we do not want to follow. Why is it most people don’t like to be led? They want to believe they are in charge. Then, why don’t most people lead? Because they simply don’t know how to lead. And so, most American organizations have a management system and call it leadership.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 276.

For the past score of years I have been writing about what I call corpocracy. I called it the American disease in Work Without Managers.

We had reached, in my view, corporate excess by 1990 when I retired for the second time from the corporate world, and decided to write about it.

Work Without Managers became that book. I had no idea at the time it would prove so prophetic as so many reviewers saw it as an angry book of someone a little half cocked.

Instead of challenging that mindset, I proceeded to write The Worker Alone, Going Against the Grain (1995), Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1997), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000), and A Look Back To See Ahead (2007).

My wife, BB, claims I keep beating an already dead horse to death, and I guess she has a point. I’m an introvert who prefers to write out my angst rather than proselytize a sleepy constituency that for the past twenty years has allowed corpocracy to feudalize its world without complaint. That is until the bubble burst in 2008 with the real estate meltdown compounded by the realization that Wall Street was playing monopoly with real money.

CORPOCRACY

Corporate society I determined twenty years ago was diseased. In Work I described that disease as a management insensitive to its employees, supportive of company politics at the expense of productivity, secretive as a measure of communication, ritualistic as a gag on productivity, continually meeting as and end in itself, unaware of its internal focus until markets disappear, propensity for short term planning, advocating a rhetoric supportive of initiative until it goes in an unexpected direction, increasingly isolated – business as usual – with a covert hostility to anyone who threaten its infallible authority no matter how muddleheaded that authority might be.

Corporate society has gotten away with this for one hundred years, but now people are hurting as they did before the Great Depression in 1929, when the privileged few were living high on the hog while most others were unable to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck if they in fact had a job.

Corpocracy, it might be said, has created a modern feudalistic state; unfortunately, the state is now a global entity.

This brings me to what is happening on Wall Street with people camping out there in protest with a smorgasbord of complaints, a situation that has spread throughout the United States and to cities around the globe.

I don’t know what to make of it, but I hear smatterings of comments that sound consistent with what I have attempted to say over the past several years, about the arrogance and hubris of corpocracy as well as the decline of the middle working class, the idea we all have to be college graduates with a degree often with no value added skills, and therefore making our employability difficult if not impossible.

I am not opposed to liberal arts, but most of that you can get by simply reading books, going to museums, watching programs on PBS, traveling and having stimulating friends from other cultures.

The irony and paradox is that the skill base that we think traditionally for workers is not only being outsourced abroad but disappearing in the wake of this new electronic age.

Leaderless leadership, which I have often written about unsympathetically, might actually be the answer. Perhaps leaderless leadership is the prescription for the future as we negotiate the difficult terrain going forward. Perhaps my little phase repeatedly expressed in my missives is finally blooming into something real: Everyone is a leader or no one is. Perhaps all of those camped out on Wall Street are leaders.

Let us believe that this movement, and it is increasingly looking to be just that, is a peaceful one and not a bloody revolution. Another irony is that the systemic nature of our problems are so deep and pervasive that even those at the top, the so-called “1 percent,” have no corrective mechanism to abrogate or reverse the situation even if they have a passionate interest in doing so. I fear revolution is in the air, and I have no idea where it will go. I do know revolution also hurts those already suffering the most.

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HOPE IS NOT A METHOD, BELIEF A DESTINATION, BUT LOVE THE PALLIATIVE TO ALL

2011-10-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

HOPE IS NOT A METHOD, BELIEF A DESTINATION, BUT LOVE THE PALLIATIVE TO ALL

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

Eight months ago my daughter Jeannie was removed from life by a hit and run driver. Yesterday, we found out my daughter Jennifer was hit by the diagnosis she has grade 3, breast cancer. Only 36, with her career soaring even in these difficult times, and in a solid supportive relationship, the cold words on the report were as impersonal as a weather report. Glaring on the page as if written in red were the words “carcinoma” and “grade 3,” the most aggressive form of this cancer, but buried in multi-syllable jargon.

You wonder why the agents of the body that work so hard in our defense quietly doing their thing from moment to moment suddenly become perverse, and work against our nature. The disease and the impersonal words seem an act of collusion. Anger mixed with repressed tears tells you this is a moment to be strong no longer a need to hide your weakness. It is not all about you. It is about your daughter whom you love more than life itself.

Our Jennifer is stoic, and has faced many challenges in her young life with resolve and will. It is as if she has been in training to combat one adversary after another, and as Kafka says in The Trial, “she has done nothing wrong.” But it is not a matter of ethics.

Neither is it a time to get lost in remorse and the palaver “this is not fair,” nor in hope that it may reverse the situation, when hope is not a method. Jennifer will continue her MRI’s, pet scans, biopsies and doing what a regiment of MD’s in this diagnostic clinic are trained to advise her to do, but alas, belief in them is not a destination. She is on a journey familiar to a multitude at various stages of the same situation, and she is not alone.

The sentinels in her body that will realign themselves like the soldiers they were meant to be, abandoning their mutiny, will not be limited to the possible necessity of surgery, not the possible regiment of chemotherapy, not the constant visits to the clinic to update the status of her interior lymphatic battlefield, nor even her will and resignation to get better and put all this behind her. Love is the antidote, ultimate medicine that emanates from all sides bombarding her cardio vascular and autonomic nervous system, her physical world with spiritual components as indefinable as the soul.

It feels as if God has given us a second chance with this hit and run driver, this perpetrator as much a mystery as in the one that fell Jeannie. Love is the cure, the medicine that will corral these renegade forces because it is the inexhaustible fuel of the will to live.

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IT'S A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

2011-10-17T03:37:00.000-07:00

IT’S A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

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

It will come as no surprise to many of you that when I write one of my long missives I am soon greeted with an avalanche of comments, criticisms and conversations.

At one point in my life, all of these were answers, but now when over 300 are on my everyday email address book that is not possible. Then there is the fact that I am getting long in the tooth. I do respect all the comments and relish reading them.

It always surprises me when people read these long missives and still have the energy to give feedback. As I have repeated, I am not looking for converts to my point of view. My interest is in telling stories that may have some relevance to the times. Such is the case with "Profiles of the Leader-as-Artist."

Rereading Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People without College Degrees (1995) and The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning (2004) by Charles D. Hayes, I thought of these profiles. Retrieving the missive from my archives, I put it on my website (http://www.theperipateticphilosopher.com/) and blog, then sent it to you.

These books are all about self-university and the didact, or the self-learner. The men profiled in my missive were all students of this philosophy if some have not been around for five centuries. Hayes has a remarkable understanding of the temper of our times. Give his work a look. You won't regret it.

Another factor that found me going back to my original 2004 missive was the death of Steven Jobs, the quintessential self-learner. Then I realized all those profiled fit that mode.

Invitations come to me on a regular basis to submit a paper for peer review and possible inclusion in scholarly journals; specialists, I suspect, only read thee instruments. I don’t consider myself a specialist. .

In any case, MODERN ECONOMY is one such journal. It would like to consider my work for the Journal of Service Science and Management or the Journal of Intelligent Learning Systems and Applications. Perhaps these profiles would fit. Stay tuned.

After publishing in trade journals and popular periodicals for years, including The Reader's Digest, I decided to limit my missives to emails and my blog. A journal published a missive of mine some time ago without permission. It was published with my byline, but skipped the step of asking permission. This offended me. It was a matter of principle, which, incidentally, is the reason for this brief missive.

BB and I watched A Man For All Seasons (1966 film) last Saturday, starring Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More. I have written about Sir Thomas as well as his best friend, the Rotterdam priest and Catholic scholar, Desiderius Erasmus. Sir Thomas wrote Utopia (1516), his idea of an ideal society, and Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly (1511), his take on the vanities of men of his time, and the limitations of convention on human experience, problems we still face today.

The two men illustrate aspects of what I call "a matter of principle."

Principles with Sir Thomas were palpable, less so with Erasmus. Erasmus hid his behind clever words, publishing his book surreptitiously and anonymously. This brings me to playwright Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons."

Sir Thomas More was an English statesman and friend of King Henry VIII, who wanted to divorce his wife and marry Ann Boleyn. More’s refusal to accept the divorce and the king’s remarriage, or to acknowledge the king as head of the Church of England, cost him his head.

His allegiance, on principle, was to the Vatican, the Papacy, and the Roman Catholic Church. He could not forsake his conscience, his God or his church. Remember this was the time of the Protestant Reformation in which all of Europe was on the brink of a radical paradigm shift, again somewhat like our time.

Once the film was over, I turned to BB and said, "Honey, what is really sad about this film is that Taylor, Ryan and Rachel would have no idea what all the fuss was about." Ryan, 17, Rachel, 15, and Taylor, 19 are our grandchildren.

She looked at me and nodded. "No, it wouldn't make any sense at all to them."

Indeed, Sir Thomas More sacrificed life, limb and family for principle, an idea that has lost its energy today.

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