WHO PUT YOU IN A CAGE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 10, 2009
“A job should be avoided which is not conducive to your physical, emotional and psychological well being. A climate that is not fun to be in is not a climate in which to work effectively, no matter how much money you are being paid. We sometimes fail to realize that psychological security is as equally important as economic security. When we sacrifice psychological security for economic security, we place ourselves in a cage. Then the question arises, who put you in the cage?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996)
REFERENCE: This discussion relates to the short story “Who Put You In The Cage” included in the essay, “Why Writers Write: Eclectic Reflections and Reminiscence.” The short story appears at the end of this exchange.
* * * * * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
I think I get the essence of this story. In a Rod Serling-esque manner, there is doubt over whether the writer in the story is being welcomed into heaven or sent into exile. The preface and reference to a cage kind of telegraphs the end.
There are many among us who proudly, or smugly, wage this battle fueled by a belief in the nobility of our willingness to speak truth to power. But, whose truth is it?
Your man in this story rages against the machine, its inhumanity, and its toxicity. The lord of the estate revels in the opulent rewards from running the machine.
The letter writer’s display of insight brings notice.
It is important to recognize the game if you want to play it well. Understanding the unspoken and even hidden rules ultimately leads to one of two reactions. One becomes angered by the duplicity and naively attempts to expose it. Or, one buys into the process and slowly but steadily begins the rung-by-rung climb passing from where there is wood beneath his feet to where the supports are of gold. But, the man is misled in his thinking
Your man is given the option to play on that side of the corporate world. His soul fuels the paranoia that leads to destructive behavior. Rather than accept suppressing his “truth,” which will allow him to maintain it, he opts to express his ongoing distrust overtly to the point of being politely banished. He continues to wail, drowned out by the drone of wealth and the men who desire to keep it.
One moral – you can’t play on both teams.
Or, maybe the more appropriate moral is - Rebellion without sacrifice is noise.
Either of those is too simple. The undertone of the story is hidden by the expressed. It teases the imagination of those who believe they are rebels with a cause, harboring a desire to martyr one’s career for the sake of exposing the duplicity of leadership.
But in the end it’s a sucker bet because, you don’t know the game. Stevie Wonder wrote, “When you believe in things you don’t understand then you suffer”. When you think you’ve bought in and are climbing on the golden rungs, it’s only gilt.
The true manipulators are much higher up. They are masters at creating the scarcity environment that pits the rest of us against each other.
It makes me think of Alfie Kohn, author of "Punishment by Rewards." His premise was based on a compilation of studies performed to statistically show the benefit of monetary incentives and rewards. As none of them could show a link, each was quashed, buried and hidden in dark archives.
The people at the top are driven by the desire to capture all of the “pay-at-risk” that is dangled in front of them. Or, so they believe. They couldn’t accept empirical data that proved most “normal” people are inspired by intrinsic values of fairness, accomplishment for the common good, and self-satisfaction.
The “climbers” (those who opted for your man’s first house) did all they could to refute Kohn’s work. But, the data never proved otherwise. So, they just refuse to believe it. They create bonus (pay at risk) programs, award Plant, Department, Employee of the Year recognition to perpetuate the scarcity mentality that keeps them at the top. Then, of course, they name one of their ilks CEO of the Year. It keeps the fountains safe.
"I find my silent sentinels consoling." That is such rich imagery. That brief passage provides a view deep into the psyche of corporate governance distinct from the technocrats who manage the business. The best technocrats are silent sentinels who protect the wealth and power flowing up from the blood and sweat of the masses. Does that sound too Marxist?
I, as I believe many of your readers to be, am glad you did not opt for the cage.
Peace and wonder,
Michael
* * * * * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It has been my experience that all of us, inevitably, place ourselves in some kind of a cage. The cage can be of our appetites, pride, biases, or beliefs. It can be the cage of marriage, career, religion, ethnicity, culture, or politics. It can be the cage of anger, vengeance, or some other obsession. I have witnessed these cages and have seen how they limit a person. I will refer to only one here, the cage of corpocracy, which is the theme of the story.
I have described corpocracy widely in my writing as a disease. So, I am not surprised, Michael, that you have been able to extrapolate from the story of its biographical source.
THE SURPRISE (ECONOMIC) ATTACK OF JAPAN, INC.
In 1980 when Tom Brokaw of NBCTV presented “Japan Can, Why Can’t We,” I was directing the largest Quality Control Circle (QCC) Program in the United States. This was a new concept for most American enterprises save for the space and aeronautic industries such as Boeing, McDonald Douglas, and Martin Marietta. The most extensive QCC program, however, was at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth recruited six other Ph.D.’s to run his extensive Organization Development (OD) interventions, which included Quality Circles. In 1980 QQC’s were already four-years-old in this Honeywell facility of 4,000 with 1,000 engineers, 2,000 other professionals, and 1,000 clean room and assembly workers.
The six OD Ph.D's were Dr. Michael Donovan of Case Western Reserve, adjunct professors Dr. Thomas Brown and Dr. Mick Sheppech, Dr. Blondel Senior a professor at the University of South Florida, and Ed Buck, a management consultant who was completing his doctorate, and yours truly. It fell to me to assume the reigns of the QCC Program, which Donovan mainly organized, when he left to ride the QCC hysteria to a new career as a consultant, forming his own company.
* * * * * *
Whatever you do in life, you bring your geography with you. While with Nalco Chemical Company, I had had a series of articles published and had written a book for the new operation in South Africa, “Sales Training & Technical Development” (1968), which covered technologies of the new company being formed along with strategies for marketing.
Following Nalco, I wrote “Confident Selling” (Prentice-Hall 1970), along with a series of articles in national sales magazines, published some poetry, and had several newspaper editorial articles published on South Africa Apartheid, the Vietnam War, and Watergate.
It was then not so surprising someone would get wind of this at Honeywell, and exploit it to advantage. One of my monographs was delivered at the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas in October 1981 on technical and engineering successes I collected and collated, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation Through Participative Management.”
A director at MIT’s Charles Stark Draper Laboratories read the paper and invited me to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with CSDL's scientists and engineers who were designing the ring laser gyros being produced in Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater. A book was written for that assignment, “Teaming – Productivity Through Cooperation” (1983). I then spent the better part of a month training this elite MIT group to connect more effectively with their production team a thousand miles away.
* * * * * *
While I was recording these positive aspects of QQC’s and “participative management,” I was increasingly feeling I was the front man for a charade. Engineers didn’t take quality circles seriously, while workers were going along for the ride.
I was in a country club atmosphere with a sweetheart deal with the Department of Defense and NASA in “cost plus” contracts, where the more people committed to a program the juicier the contract. Adding to this clubby climate, I discovered that the engineers attending “continuing education” seminars at exotic places were the same people over and over again. Nor was there necessarily technical relevance to these jaunts with the work at hand. It was called “continuing engineering education” when it was not much more than another holiday.
After directing the QCC Program at Honeywell Avionics for four years (1980 – 1984), the Honeywell people in Defense Contract Administration Services (DCAS) asked me to be the keynote speaker for the 1984 DCAS Forum being held at the Caribbean Gulf Resort on Clearwater Beach on Friday, March 30, 1984. The theme of the conference was “Participative Management.”
By that time, I had collected more than a score of notebooks of unobtrusive observations, which assessed QCC, participative management, total employee involvement, and total quality management, themes which were hatching anew every week. I had become quite jaded with these in actual practice.
We were making only hygiene or cosmetic changes as the hourly workers in QCC had no real power to change anything, coming to consider the downtime cynically as coffee and smoke breaks. I was meeting each week for one hour with some 110 QCC’s, each with 8 to 12 workers. This required scheduling meetings on the first and second shift. It was a daunting task but workers were candid with me about their frustrations.
Professionals were haphazardly introduced to QCC’s, often canceling scheduled meetings, because of this or that emergency. It was evident they felt it an imposition and of little consequence. I started visiting them in their cubicles, only to find many were using Honeywell as a base to pursue parallel careers in real estate, jewelry, cosmetics, stocks & bonds, Amway, among other endeavors, and using the phone and franking privileges for personal non-Honeywell purposes. Amazingly, they made no attempt to hide these activities. In fact, I even found people selling fruits and vegetables inside the door to the five main plants on campus under the noses of security. You could even go to the cafeterias almost any time of day and find people smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee as if it were a café on the Seine.
So when I was asked to be the keynote speaker for DCAS, I said I would do it if I had cart blanche on what I could say. “Fine,” they said, satisfied that another action item had been checked off.
I then wrote a 53-page document (double spaced) titled “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.” (I plan on publishing this on my blog on March 30, 2009, which will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of that speech.)
To say this speech was career changing contradicts its significance. It was prophetic. We never seem to learn from our follies.
Technical publishing made 100 copies of the speech, which disappeared in less than two minutes after it was delivered. More than 300 were in attendance: avionics defense contractor executives from the private sector, admirals and generals and other military officers from the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, and Department of Defense and NASA officers and their support staffs.
As soon as I completed the speech, Otto Coldiron, a chief engineer at Honeywell Avionics, ran up to me and stuck his fingers against my chest and said that I had embarrassed Honeywell and humiliated Carl Vignali, HI’s CEO and General Manager, and should be fired.
I looked at him levelly. “Otto,” I said, “this talk was not about Honeywell, this was about a failing system.” He walked away shaking his head talking to himself with the words drifting towards me, “You haven’t heard the end of this.”
About that same time, Admiral John Donovan came up and asked me to sign his copy of the speech, inviting me to dinner with him that evening. I learned that he was in charge of Naval Ordinance and had some of the same misgivings about QCC’s and participative management, while having high hopes for the possibilities of OD. I left that evening for the weekend buoyed by our conversation.
One of the privileges of working for Dr. Pesuth is that I had creative license to do my OD work without interference. That was to end. He was waiting for me in his office with a document in his hands. Without preamble, he said, “I want you to sign this.”
“What’s up Francis?” I said.
“Please sign it,” he insisted.
“Can I read it first?”
“If you like.”
The document stipulated:
(1) You will not give anymore speeches for the next 18 months;
(2) You will not publish any articles for the next 18 months;
(3) Your compensation will remain frozen at its current rate;
(4) You will receive no merit increases for the next 18 months;
(5) You will turn in your engineering notebooks every Friday for review.
He then told me I was a disappointment, an embarrassment and betrayed his trust. “Francis,” I protested, “I haven’t betrayed you. On the contrary, I have protected the legitimacy of your mission. You’re the most honorable man I’ve ever met.”
That didn’t mollify his anger. “I’d fire you if it were up to me, but Carl (Vignali) wouldn’t here of it.” That surprised me, and gave me hope for the future.
By the third month with a mountain of my engineering notebooks on his desk, he said, “Take these. I don’t know how the hell you find so much to write about, or the time, and still get your work done.” The secret was I stopped for coffee after work every day and wrote for an hour or so.
“I do get it done, don’t I?”
“Yes, how do you do it?” I explained. He raised his hands above his head. “Well, I can’t handle this anymore. Take them!” And I did. “I’ll just have to trust you.” And he did. “By the way,” he added, “everything else stands. We’re not reducing the 18 months by even a day.” And he didn’t.
THE GESTATION PERIOD
Reviewing my returned notebooks, I saw a pattern. “I’ve got the seeds of a book here,” I said to myself. It was the summer of 1984. These were the recurrent patterns:
(1) Management is anachronistic,
(2) Managers are atavistic,
(3) Engineers are out to lunch,
(4) Workers are dissident and disloyal (to self/org),
(5) 75 percent of HI workers are professional, 25 percent not,
(6) 80 percent of work done by 20 percent of workers,
(7) QCC’s have little impact other than the (Elton) Mayo effect,
(8) QCC’s don’t work with professionals (find out why?),
(9) Too many layers of management, too many meetings, too much posturing,
(10) Management styles a farce, order Department of Commerce publications.
(11) Culture seems key – develop a typology.
I was on to something:
(1) Strength of HI is engineers and technicians,
(2) Weakness they want to be managers or program managers,
(3) Dilutes their efficacy,
(4) Management/managers damaging to competitive advantage,
(5) Culture wrong (why wrong?),
(6) Corporation sick getting sicker (why?),
(7) Work devolved to non-doer doers doing non-thing things (explain),
(8) Army of managers supervises the folly (alternative?).
* * * * * *
Overhearing workers talking about the mounting scrap in production, I learned that many mistakes were being made on the line when processes were changed. “People don’t read the changes,” one worker said. Another said, “It’s because they can’t read.”
My first reaction was disbelief, but upon checking with several others this was confirmed. I shared it with Dr. Pesuth. He warned me not to have this blow up in our faces. I got him to sign off on creating an After Hours Continuing Education Program on helping workers get their high school diplomas, expecting it would show up there, which it did. The problem was marginally successful as only women who couldn’t read very well signed up, no men.
* * * * * *
This triggered my memory of engineers padding their comfort zone with exotic conferences from work. I decided to create a Task Force to explore technical education. I circulated an internal memo to all chief engineers, engineering managers, program managers and staff engineers announcing its formation. One veteran engineer, Bill McNabb showed up, who was soon to retire, but no one else. We talked and I confessed my suspicions regarding technical education.
“Write that up as if we had a big discussion of the subject,” he said.
“But there’s just the two of us.”
“You’re the writer; who’s to know.” And I did. Only Bill showed up for the second meeting. He came prepared, however, with some hooks that would spike an engineer’s interest. I laced my next memo with them.
The third meeting Dr. Bill Poe, a chief engineer, came along with seven of his people. McNabb was ecstatic, as Dr. Poe was considered the quintessential engineer on campus. After a brief introduction, I handed Dr. Poe the marker, and asked him to give us some idea of the possible scope of this project. He went to the flip chart and outlined the engineering disciplines that required continuing education:
(1) Computers/Software
(2) Mechanical Engineering
(3) Test Engineering
(4) Systems Engineering
(5) Chemical, Nuclear, Biological Engineering
(6) Electrical Engineering
(7) Systems Effectiveness
(8) Control Systems Engineering
(9) Guidance & Navigation
(10) Mathematics & Engineering
(11) Honeywell Engineering Systems
(12) Engineering Management
(13) Logistics Engineering
(14) Communications & Signal Processing
(15) Product Assurance
(16) Manufacturing Processes
(17) Engineering Analysis
(18) RF, IR, Laser Optics Technology
This was a list beyond the pale of my comprehension, but I could see Bill McNabb nodding his head in agreement. The next meeting more than forty engineers showed up, and we had to go to a conference room. Thereafter, my role in OD was mainly as facilitator, organizing action items for various task force groups to report back the next meeting.
The position of technical coordinator was established to run the program. Tenure would be for one year allowing the engineer to put his or her stamp on the program for that period. All technicians were eligible for participation. Courses were at first conducted “during work hours” by the cadre of Ph.D. engineers, physicists and mathematicians. I wrote a monograph, "Training the Occasional Instructor” for these non-academic professionals.
* * * * *
After about three months, a routine was established which, unfortunately, became meetings for meeting sake. At that point, I wrote another monograph, “Effective Meetings.” Thereafter, we didn’t meet unless there was an agenda and purpose.
Still, I had to agree with Product Assurance Geoff Davis, my co-coordinator when he said, “This thing is about ready to die. It is sad because a lot of these guys are working on technologies developed long after they left school.”
“You’re serious?”
“Oh, yes, everyone of these current programs is state-of-the-arts in engineering, which has all been developed in the last couple or so years, and if you haven’t noticed the guys coming to these meetings are a little long in the tooth.”
“I noticed.”
“Well, eighty percent of our engineers have been fifteen or twenty years out of school if not more, and only twenty percent or less are recent college graduates with the latest tools. It’s too bad we can’t do something about that.”
“I’m not so sure we can’t.”
“Have you got some ideas?”
“Well, technical education was the reason for this Task Force, but I didn’t think of it exactly in these terms. No offense, Geoff, but I’ve got to confirm your claims.”
I went back to Dr. Pesuth remembering I was on “house arrest.” “Francis,” I said, “I would like to talk to the people in personnel and gain access to personnel records of engineers.” Before I could finish, I thought he was going to swallow his tongue. “Francis,” I continued, “I have no ulterior motive. It is for a good reason.”
“Now you’re Machiaveli?” How could I answer? I waited. “Well, I’m certainly glad you came to me before pursuing this lame brain idea. If you hadn’t, I’d of canned your ass.”
“Francis, that still doesn’t answer my question.”
“What do you want to do?” I handed him a piece of paper which I had itemized what I wanted:
(1) Age, education, university attended, engineering specialty,
(2) How long with Honeywell Avionics,
(3) Programs they worked on, for how long, current program, how long,
(4) When technology they are currently working on was first developed,
(5) Compensation throughout Honeywell history,
(6) Promotions, awards, records of achievement, performance appraisals.
Dr. Pesuth was getting red around the ears. "Francis, it is necessary, as I’ve been told most of the technology they're working on was developed after they left school.”
“Of course, it was. We’re at the cutting edge of technology.”
“That’s my point.”
“What’s your point?”
“I fear we’re paying more and more for less and less and have been for years.” Then I showed him a book I had been reading. “You’ll see here if you have time to read this we’re not alone in dealing with technical obsolescence.”
“I don’t have time.”
“Well, just look at these graphs here.” The graphs indicated the short life of an engineer’s technology with his income soaring as his competency declined precipitously. “I want to see if there is a statistical correlation with these data.”
“So now you’re a statistician?”
“Of course, Francis, I’m a statistician and psychometrician; it’s part of my training.”
“And a voodoo specialists.”
“Yes, that, too.”
He smiled now, as his rancor dissipated. “Fisher,” he shook his head. “I’ll have to clear anything we do with Dave Larson.” Larson was Director of Human Resources.
“Francis,” I said, “Before you see Dave we ought to meet with Carl (Vignali).” Carl had been Director of Engineering, but was now CEO. “I can outline what I’ve learned in my reading, and with the Task Force. I suspect he’s pretty aware of the problem. If we get his approval, Dave can hardly object.” And that is what we did.
The CEO approved enthusiastically, and I did the research, which created a starker picture than I imagined:
(1) 72 percent of the engineers were over 35, up to 15 years out of college
(2) 50 percent were over 45 years of age
(3) 15 percent were over 55
(4) 28 percent were under 35
(5) 5 percent under 25
Moreover, I learned
(1) 10 percent of engineers lacked a BS degree
(2) 90 percent of engineers held a BS degree
(3) 55 percent of engineers held a BSEE
(4) 15 percent of engineers held a MS or MBA
(5) 2 percent of engineers held a Ph.D.
I was also able to track job performance (performance appraisals), job complexity, salary and salary increases, and average annual salaries over their careers.
These data were presented to the Director of Engineering, Chief Engineers and Program Managers. I was asked how much money was needed to design, implement and maintain the program, and I said $1 million. It was approved in that meeting, thus launching technical education.
I would write a monograph titled ‘Combating Technical Education: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program,” and present it at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida, May 9, 1986.
It is often true in OD work there is a modicum of luck. Carl Vignali, went from Director of Engineering to CEO and General Manager of Honeywell Avionics, and then Group Vice President. Dr. Bill Poe went from Chief Engineer to Director of Engineering to CEO and General Manager of Honeywell Avionics after Vignali, later, joining him as a Group Vice President.
Vignali and Poe took with them a dedication to continuing engineering education, and for that, the program through the years has become more sophisticated and comprehensive. Technicians were now earning engineering degree credits taking courses on campus from Honeywell Ph.D.’s in conjunction with the University of South Florida’s School of Engineering, creating a new motivational stream of competence.
SERENDIPITY INTERVENES
As the 18 months of quarantine came to an end, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth was gone having been promoted, and Dr. Ed Buck was my new boss. Ed came to Honeywell in 1981 and I was his mentor for more than a year.
Dr. Buck was aware of my personality peccadilloes but equally cognizant of my many OD breakthroughs. His first efforts were to see me made a Senior Fellow with the equivalency in compensation and entitlements of a manager. That fell through, but he was undaunted. He saw an opening for the Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, an OD position, for Honeywell Europe Ltd., and asks if he could submit my name for consideration. I said yes, and I got the job. Once again, I was a corporate executive.
Honeywell Europe, I discovered, was stuck in a culture of post WWII malaise with the new European Economic Community being formed. It was 1986, or forty-one years since the end of the war, but European countries still held animosities towards each other, especially Germany, while Germany was the most economically viable of Honeywell’s European operations as well as the largest.
It was a perfect OD challenge. Affiliates operated like fiefdoms out of the feudal ages, rigid, inflexible and increasingly irrelevant.
Dr. Buck thought I would thrive in that environment. What he did not realize, and I was soon to learn, was that the American European management team that included President Michael Bonsignore, and my boss, John Buck, no relation to Ed, had little appreciation of OD, while they were technocrats of the anachronistic system I abhorred. I no longer had the range or freedom enjoyed earlier, and was constantly at loggerheads with John Buck.
Eventually, I would retire in 1990, but European operations confirmed all the patterns I had at first uncovered at Honeywell Avionics, only to be amplified and exaggerated in support of my hypotheses.
Those ideas had developed into what I was now calling “work without managers, a view from the trenches.” I was looking at the problem not top-down but bottom-up. I could see everything was changing but there was a natural resistance to the inevitable.
Although I could do little, I could write about it. From that point forward, my notebooks grew supported by primary and secondary sources with constant trips to the American branch of the Brussels, Belgium library.
The evenings I was on Brussels at home with my wife, Beautiful Betty, I would walk around the room dictating and she would be keeping up with me on our computer. Not only that, BB proved to be an excellent researcher, data collector, and collator. I left Europe with a complete manuscript with graphs, statistics, case histories, and a compilation of my empirical work covering 600 single space pages.
It was pared down from 600 to 350 pages and published. I was not prepared for its reception. It was reviewed as an angry, powerful, prophetic book, receiving a spot on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” The Wall Street Journal, Industry Week, and Business Book Review Journal, which named it “one of the four best business books of the year.”
After receiving scores of calls after NPR’s review, and an invitation to speak in Brazil, and request from Ingram for more books than I had, everything died after the fourth week. I had published the book with the imprimatur of The Delta Group Florida, a company I had formed with no knowledge of the publishing industry. To this day, I loathe the business end of book publishing including public appearances.
Consequently, most people reading this have never heard of WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), or its more elaborate presentation SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998). I am not surprised or disturbed. As I’ve said before, I am first a chemist. My stoichiometric equations are no longer of molecules or radicals in ionized solutions, but of the conflicts and confrontations of characters in the cauldron of work and life.
There is moral authority to Nature, as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only transposed from one state to another. It is the same with work and life. Institutions die and out of their ashes the new Sphinx arises.
We are in such a transitional period, ending 600 years of Sensate Culture moving tentatively into a new 600 year Ideational Culture. In transition, we encounter the inevitable moral collapse displayed in chicanery, duplicity, corruption, malfeasance and denial.
These displays are sometimes quite infantile. To illustrate, as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, I was asked by my boss, John Buck, to organize and conduct a European campaign to have the various affiliates, offices, and factories nominate their preferred candidate to be honored as “Manager of the Year.” Specific criteria were provided for making their selection.
From the more than 18,000 employees in 13 countries and municipalities came scores of nominees. My people were busy going through these nominees when the campaign ended, only to have my boss conclude none of those nominated “deserved” the distinction.
He had the late Dr. Helmut Hoss, President of Germany’s Honeywell Operations belatedly nominated for the award. Dr. Hoss, a man of distinction and whom I admired, had not been nominated during the official campaign. No problem! He received the award at the Annual Honeywell Europe Meeting, thus making the whole process a sham.
This behavior was symptomatic of my transition out of the corporation, which I must confess I used as my laboratory, and back to the writer’s life. And so it has been for the past twenty years, writing and recording my insights and laying out patterns for change agents to consider as they go forward.
* * * * * *
The essay, “Who Put You In The Cage?” is metaphor for all this, which you have correctly discerned. I now follow this essay with that story for those who have not yet seen it and for which your comments, Michael, have been directed.
* * * * *
WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
I once wrote a novel, which was never published. What follows is a scene in that novel, which appears as a story within a story. It is taken out of context here, but essentially carries the sense of this reflective and reminiscent piece here.
* * * * * *
There was this man in the corporation who could see things most clearly. He wrote about them, spoke about them, and even published them. He did this innocently, naively, even sending copies to those in authority positions in the corporation to familiarize them with the dark side of corporate life he had uncovered. He hoped they would acknowledge and act on this darkness to bring light into operations. Although they failed to respond to his entreaties, he continued to write, speak and publish.
Then one day one of the corporation’s principal stockholders dropped by his cubical, and invited him to visit him at his estate on the seacoast. He had heard of this place, which was described as 20,000 acres of paradise high on a promontory overlooking the bay with ragged cliffs dropping a thousand feet into the sea, breathtaking he was sure. So, he was at first stunned, then flattered, but finally suspicious. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” the cherubic gentleman said, “Why you are the most prolific man I’ve ever read. I wonder when you sleep.”
The gentleman said this as he tapped his huge cigar on a tiny cup sized container that was ludicrously laced in diamonds. The gentleman was so kind and so insistent that the writer eventually agreed to a brief visit.
Once through the ornate gates, and into the estate, he couldn’t take his eyes off the manicured lawns that seemingly stretched forever, stately fountains with sculptured sentinels saluted them as they past. He had never seen so many species of flowers, and all in bloom, and the trees that seemed to climb to heaven. Then it occurred to him that they were climbing, too, as the landscape was tilted upward to meet the sky, and then suddenly a mansion came into view white as snow and arched in triumph like a cathedral nestled naturally among the trees. He thought heaven must be like this.
A manservant resplendent in white stood at the door to greet them. He smiled graciously, but without a word, took his overnight bag, nodded to the gentleman and departed. A host of servants were busy preparing dinner, all dressed in uniforms of white with such intensity that it reminded him of a carpet of falling snow viewed through a noonday sun. Everyone was smiling and bowing as if he were royalty.
Fine dining was not his experience but he followed the gentlemen’s lead, and said to himself, I could get used to this. Seemingly reading his mind, the gentleman said,
“How would you like to live here? I have a beautiful cottage picked out for you overlooking the sea. It is yours as well as all the amenities of the estate.”
“But I have no money!”
“None needed. This is a gift for your diligence and conscientious service to the corporation.”
“But the corporation has not listened to me; it has done nothing with what I’ve said.”
“True, but it is all under advisement.”
“No one has ever told me that.”
“Trust me as a loyal stockholder, your works have not gone unnoticed.”
The writer smiled. “They haven’t?”
The gentleman didn’t answer but offered the writer a cigar. “I don’t smoke.”
“I noticed at dinner you also don’t drink, not even wine?”
“No.”
“The wine was from my 19th century cellar, what a pity!"
“Where am I staying? I’m a bit tired from the long trip.”
“Of course, how calloused of me. You are staying here tonight and tomorrow I have a surprise.”
The surprise was a beautiful cottage with a complete library, computer and all the writing aids that he had only seen in books. It was as if the gentleman had read his mind and materialized his deepest longings. “What do you think? Do you like it?”
The writer was completely confused. “What is this? I mean, why are you showing me this?”
“It is all yours, every bit of it, as far as the eye can see is yours.”
“This beautiful house, too?”
“Indeed.”
The writer rushed over to the computer and puts in his code and, voila! All his files, all his writings appeared, “But how could, can this be? I’ve never given my code to anyone.”
The gentleman drew on his cigar. “It must be a miracle.”
Days passed and the novelty of the place started to wear. He couldn’t get out of his mind that someone knew his code. He begun to look for listening devices, for bugs in his phone, lamps, curtains, drapery, books, blindly rips them to pieces. He stripped away the carpet and looked for wiring in the floorboard. He tore through the walls. Nothing. Then he went into the garden and dug it up destroying exotic plants, shrubs and the immaculate turf. He scaled the roof and removed shingles. Nothing. He hadn’t slept or eaten in 18 hours.
Morning came and he looked at his beautiful cottage, its rich furnishings, which he had ripped apart, its elegant paintings, which he has cut to pieces, its finely plastered and papered walls, which now lay naked and scarred with wires snaking to the floor, everything was in shreds.
As he surveyed the ruin, the gentleman appeared out of nowhere. The writer bowed his head in shame and humiliation. “I don’t know what to say, what got into me.”
“There’s no need to say anything.”
“But I’ve ruin this place.”
“It can all be restored have no doubt.”
“But?”
“No buts about it.” The gentleman put his arm around the writer. “Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening. I have a special surprise for you.”
“After what I’ve done?” The gentleman said nothing but walked away in a cape of cigar smoke.
That evening the gentleman drove over to the writer’s home, then they both strolled across the rising turf until the mansion appears on the horizon as if a beatific vision with the fading sun framing it in radiant burgundy. “That is awesome,” said the writer, “truly awesome.” The gentleman whispered, “Indeed.”
As they walked up the long driveway, the writer noticed a large flatbed truck with black tarpaulin covering a massive object. Once they reach the truck, the writer lifted one of the tarp's flaps and saw what threw a shock into him. “This looks like a cage.”
“It could be considered as such,” said the gentleman.
“But what is it doing here?”
“Let us leave that for after dinner. A crew will be setting it up while we enjoy our meal.” The writer now noticed a crew of at least thirty men in coveralls standing near a giant rig, and four trucks with no labeling but which appeared to be furniture haulers or moving vans.
After dinner, they retired into the study where the gentleman had an aperitif and the writer a coffee. If I didn’t know better, he thought, I’d think the gentleman was stalling, first for having such an early dinner, and then this boring ritual of after dinner formalities. He could never understand rich people and their constant dalliance. Take this gentleman. With all his composure, he has nothing to say about art, music, literature, or science, only business, and nothing is more boring to me than business. “I’m ready for a bit of exercise,” the gentleman said finally, lighting his fourth cigar in the writer’s presence, “how about you?”
“Yes,” the writer said wishing to escape the cloying aroma of the cigar for fresh air. They walked into the garden while the gentleman explained why the bronze sentinels were standing at attention around each fountain. “It is perhaps whimsical of me, but I find my silent sentinels consoling, don’t you know?” The writer said nothing.
Thinking they were walking aimlessly, the writer was at first confused when he thought he saw on the horizon the outline of the tip of a giant helmet. It was no mistake. It was a helmet that grew more prominent and visible as they approached. “My God,” he said, “it is magnificent!” Shining in the early evening light was this remarkable helmet about fourteen feet high with gleaming bars in the fading sun like the discarded helmet of a giant Praetorian Guard.
The gentleman asked, “What do you think of it?”
The writer’s heart was racing. He didn’t know what to think. It was fascinating beyond belief. The hair on the back of his head quivered to attention. He found himself walking into the helmet, a space of twenty by fifteen feet, but with all the amenities that were so precious to him including his computer, his library which reached high above his head on three walls, and all the incidentals with which he identified his person.
The helmet was a cage furnished with a comfortable bed, reading lamp, a sofa, reclining chair, desk, kitchen table and chair, a television, computer, a printer, and an armoire. It also had a shower and commode, heater and air conditioner, and state-of-the-arts sound system with a complete collection of his symphonic records and favorite operas, along with a library of CDs and DVDs that he had always dreamed of having but could never afford. Thousands of books were organized just as he had had them organized in his modest home back on the continent.
How could they know? The thought left his head as soon as it arrived. He noticed on the fourth wall a small window that gave him a limited view of the sea, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t much into nature anyway. His world was that of ideas. He found his chest swelling with excitement like a psychosexual thrill, and was embarrassed at the thought. What is happening to me? “I like this place,” he blurted out, “is this mine?”
“If you would have it be.”
“Could I live here?”
“If you like.”
“Let me think about it.” So they left with the door wide open.
The next morning as the sun was coming up the writer rushed to the mansion, climbed up the stairs to the gentleman’s bedroom, and pounded on the door. The sleepy gentleman looked at his clock. It was 5:30 a.m. He put on his robe, opened the door and saw the wild-eyed writer practically foaming at the mouth in excitement. “I want to live there. I want to live in my new home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“Excuse me while I dress,” said the gentleman. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No, but I could have breakfast there, could I not?”
“Indeed, I’ll make arrangements.”
So, the kitchen staff served breakfast there in elegant fashion bringing in a separate chair for the gentleman. When breakfast was completed, and the gentleman was about to leave the writer’s new home, he said, “There are certain rules to this residence.”
“Like what?”
“You will be able to write to your heart’s content, but not to publish a word. You will be able to listen to any kind of music you desire, but watch only select television mainly old movies even pornographic if you like and no one will interrupt your pleasure. You have the most sophisticated computer and software, but no access to the Internet. There is one other condition,” the gentleman paused. “Once we close this door, you shall remain here the rest of your life, is that clear?”
“Yes, yes, yes, now leave me alone.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve been unhappy all of my life wherever I’ve been, men have never listened to me and I’m fed up with them, and life, so why not, I’m dead already anyway, okay? So, close the door and get on about your business.”
“You’re sure this is what you want?”
Impatiently, his voice a strident cry, the writer said, “How can I make myself any clearer?” He pushed the gentleman out and as he did so, he said, “I want to rest, read my books, write a little, and enjoy my new life. Please,” he pleaded as he closed the door.
Within a fortnight, he told the manservant when he brought his breakfast that he had had a change of heart. He would like to return to his first home on the estate, and if that was not possible, to his old position at the corporation. The manservant did not speak, but dropped his eyes in understanding as he left the cage.
Thereafter, meals were no longer brought by anyone but slid through a mechanized slot that the writer had not realized was there before. As the days turned into months, and the wind whistled through the trees and passed over the rocky cliffs to the sea, his wailing blended with the wind into a chilling harmony of inanimate sighs, until one day it stopped. On that same day, the wind stopped, too, as if it understood that life’s torment was over for the writer.
The flatbed truck returned, removed the cage into its sanctuary at far side of this oasis, waiting its next candidate, which the corporation said had not yet been selected as there were several candidates being considered.
* * * * * *
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Monday, February 09, 2009
CONFIDENT THINKING CONFIRMED!
CONFIDENT THINKING CONFIRMED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 9, 2009
“All grand thoughts come from the heart.”
Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747), French moral philosopher
REFERENCE: This is yet another excerpt from my book CONFIDENT THINKING, which is yet to be published.
* * * * * *
Throughout this book, you have been introduced to yourself in terms the power of your emotions. We are increasingly moving into a comfort level with the bicameral mind or the mind that is emotional as well as rational, a mind that thinks intuitively as well as doggedly deterministically. The latest confirmation of the power of emotions is Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” (2009), which is a book about how the brain works.
Lehrer makes a systematic study of how the brain functions and makes decision. He takes issue with neuroscientists who focused almost exclusively on the rational brain paying little homage to the emotional brain. What he does in this book, which is comprehensible to the layman, is make the reader conscious of his brain. He makes you aware, in other words, that you are processing information as you are reading, primarily using the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
He argues throughout the book that most assumptions made about the brain by philosophers and writers of the past were faulty. They championed rational thought as the desired goal, trumping our emotions that lead us astray. He considers that unfortunate as some of our best decisions come our emotional brain.
As I have attempted to do here, Lehrer also uses examples from life to illustrate how powerful feelings, or the nature of those feelings can be in our decision-making. We have the expression in sport that the person “choked,” meaning the pressure got too great and the person “lost it.” Jean Van de Velde choked on the final hole of the 1999 British Open largely because he started to think too much about his swing. The same thing happened to opera star Renee Fleming who began to flub songs when she started wondering if she could hit the proper note, something she had done a thousand times before. Professional athletes know this only too well.
It can also happen to a group. The Tampa Bay Bucs, of the National Football League, were 9 and 3 going into the last month of the season. Three of their final four games were at home against only one team with a winning record. Yet, they lost all four games. They were expecting to win the divisions championship, to get a first round bye in the playoffs, and have home field advantage throughout with a good chance of making the Super Bowl, which was being played in Tampa in February 2009. What happened?
The legendary defensive coach and coordinator Monty Kiffin announced he was leaving to join his son, Lane Kiffin, who was to be the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. The Bucs, known for their defense, and the reason for their success, collapsed defensively the month of December 2008. They missed the playoffs entirely. This led to the firing of head coach Jon Gruden and general manager George Allen.
Confidence went out of the team once it became emotionally preoccupied with defending how “we’re all professionals” taking coach Kiffin’s departure “in stride.” The evidence suggested otherwise. Kiffin was tantamount to their surrogate father as well as leader. Yet they argued passionately that they would not lose their edge, but they did. Lehrer would say they spent too much time thinking about not losing it.
Research has shown that once the brain knows how to do something, the best thing is to stop obsessing and let the brain and body take over and do their work. My own life is riddled with episodes of this being true.
Once I was taking a calculus final in university. I was a bit of grind, meaning I studied my ass off for every course. The calculus examinations were passed out, and I read the first question, then the second question, and then the third. By that time, I was in a state of total panic – I had no idea how to start much less complete the questions. I was hyperventilating, my hands were clammy, and I had broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was about to faint.
I had long known, long before the good professor had written “How We Decide,” that I was emotional, and couldn’t handle stress well. That was the reason I prepared so thoroughly. It was the only way I could relax, could have confidence that I would do well. My insecurity welled up in me as I thought for sure I had blown it.
Then I did something that was masochistic, something without thinking. I jammed my pencil into the back of my left hand, breaking off the tip. My hand was bleeding. I wrapped my handkerchief around it, raised my hand, and asked for another pencil. A calm fell over me. I looked back at my test, and as if by magic, everything appeared clear, not only clear, but elementary. I raced through the exam, set the curve, and have remembered that episode all my life. Those who read me know that I don’t back away from declarative statements, or from the composition of my peculiar emotional motor.
If there is a central theme to all my works it is to pay attention to your feelings. Our feelings are the result of years of the programming of our brains in how to respond to certain situations. The brain makes instantaneous computations of which we are not aware or for which we have placed barriers to deny, and always at our disadvantage.
The neural transmitter (dopamine) stimulates the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. This can happen after strenuous exercise, listening to music that resonates with us, eating a favorite food, or watching our beloved sport’s team come through in victory. Unfortunately, dopamine is what addictive drugs activate. It triggers a massive release of the neurotransmitter that overwhelms the brain with ecstasy. Dopamine produces more than feelings of happiness. It assists in regulating our emotions from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. Put otherwise, there are no such things as good or bad emotions. What is unfortunate is to deny the emotions or fail to be aware of what triggers them and why.
Dopamine is at the ready to stimulate whichever part of the brain that your brain feels should be stimulated. This is another way of saying the instinctual feelings you have for a situation kick in. On the other hand, we can become slaves to our emotions and addicted to “feeling good” so that we don’t accept and move naturally with the random fluctuations inevitable in a life of ups and downs.
People have been known to make a great deal of money, and then to become obsessed with making more, taking inordinate risks denying the chronic downs that accompany the occasional ups. We have seen this with day traders on the stock market, chronic gamblers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others.
Lehrer also delves into the limits of the brain, a subject covered by author, inventor William L. Livingston in “Friends in High Places” (1990) and “Have Fun At Work” (1988). Scientists confirm what Livingston has uncovered in his research in our problem solving. That is the maximum number of issues one brain can consider at the same time is limited. This explains why so many of us are overwhelmed when we are distracted by a much larger number of issues than are minds can handle on a daily basis. Here is what Livingston has to say on the subject:
“There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to Hell.” (Have Fun At Work, p. 32).
“Problems are systems moving in a trajectory shaped by the force field of natural law. Problem systems are as coherent as natural law itself. The stuff sloshing around in the human cranium masquerading as solutions, however, is sterile and incoherent. Until the magic of human genius assembles elements into a system married to a problem system, there is no such thing as a solution candidate. Solutions only obtain coherency by being wed to problems. When vocabulary is limited to solution-speak, communication is incoherent.” (Friends In High Places, p. 98)
“Life is complicated. Like it or not, the substance of life is deceptively intricate. The bulk of things we take for granted are labyrinthine, non-linear and beyond causal understanding. Bid farewell to the trivialization of rules. The threshold of problem solving competence is accepting reality for what it is --- the passage of a complication through Nature’s flux. All substitutes for this perspective precipitate failure.” (Ibid, p 184)
Lehrer confirms what others have referenced more empirically such as Livingston and that is the computation powers and limits to the brain.
He then goes on to provide evidence of how food can affect our thinking. He writes of an experiment regarding a “sugar fix” given to students drinking sugar rich lemonade. It stimulated the prefrontal cortex (where rational thinking occurs) resulting in students being more successful in problem solving than those not getting the sugar fix. This may be counterintuitive to what you have been told about sugar making children hyperactive. This research, he claims, explains why we get cranky when we’re hungry and tired. The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. “A bad mood,” he insists, “is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.”
PROBLEM SOLVING WITHOUT CONFIDENT THINKING IN THE MIX
It is a small leap from we are what we eat to we are what we think. Confident Thinking, given its powers and limitations, breaks temporarily free of these, if only occasionally, when we engaged in thinking creatively. Livingston insists that the problems we solve are not necessarily the problems we face, but the problems we feel confident we can solve. No surprise, problems not addressed eventually gang up on us, and cause such troubles as the global economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, or personal collapse such as a mental-physical breakdown in us individually.
We are familiar and comfortable with critical thinking, or rational thinking in terms of what is already known. But as Einstein has pointed out we are unlikely to be able to solve a problem with the same thinking that was its cause. That takes creative thinking, which engages the emotional as well as the rational ordering centers of the brain, and considers what is not known but can be found out.
It is my view that creative thinking has been on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to explore and discover by embracing the unknown, not regurgitating the “right answer.” We have moved as an enlightened society beyond the reiterative tests of critical thinking that dominate our textbooks. The word “education” after all means to “to lead forth,” not to retreat back. Simply regurgitating information is not education, at least, not in the twenty-first century.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses?
If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities? Are our schools that poor that the student has to cheat to look good because these crib courses can be called a lot of things but obtaining an artificial edge is cheating is it not?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect there is something to this. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects not causes.
In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
There are exceptions to this rule. Educator Melvin Freestone has created a tactical program, “Thinking for Understanding” (2007), which deals systematically with what is advocated here. Freestone gets inside issues discussed in Confident Thinking, and reveals a strategy for multi-layered thinking, intentions for thinking, and processes for thinking, all in order to establish thinking and understanding. He moves out of the mechanics of conventional thinking to bring out the imagination to think conceptually, creatively and aggressively. It would be a good beginning to embrace his ideas as they deal with the cause of our dilemma, false programming.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 9, 2009
“All grand thoughts come from the heart.”
Luc de Clapiers Vauvenargues (1715 – 1747), French moral philosopher
REFERENCE: This is yet another excerpt from my book CONFIDENT THINKING, which is yet to be published.
* * * * * *
Throughout this book, you have been introduced to yourself in terms the power of your emotions. We are increasingly moving into a comfort level with the bicameral mind or the mind that is emotional as well as rational, a mind that thinks intuitively as well as doggedly deterministically. The latest confirmation of the power of emotions is Jonah Lehrer’s “How We Decide” (2009), which is a book about how the brain works.
Lehrer makes a systematic study of how the brain functions and makes decision. He takes issue with neuroscientists who focused almost exclusively on the rational brain paying little homage to the emotional brain. What he does in this book, which is comprehensible to the layman, is make the reader conscious of his brain. He makes you aware, in other words, that you are processing information as you are reading, primarily using the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
He argues throughout the book that most assumptions made about the brain by philosophers and writers of the past were faulty. They championed rational thought as the desired goal, trumping our emotions that lead us astray. He considers that unfortunate as some of our best decisions come our emotional brain.
As I have attempted to do here, Lehrer also uses examples from life to illustrate how powerful feelings, or the nature of those feelings can be in our decision-making. We have the expression in sport that the person “choked,” meaning the pressure got too great and the person “lost it.” Jean Van de Velde choked on the final hole of the 1999 British Open largely because he started to think too much about his swing. The same thing happened to opera star Renee Fleming who began to flub songs when she started wondering if she could hit the proper note, something she had done a thousand times before. Professional athletes know this only too well.
It can also happen to a group. The Tampa Bay Bucs, of the National Football League, were 9 and 3 going into the last month of the season. Three of their final four games were at home against only one team with a winning record. Yet, they lost all four games. They were expecting to win the divisions championship, to get a first round bye in the playoffs, and have home field advantage throughout with a good chance of making the Super Bowl, which was being played in Tampa in February 2009. What happened?
The legendary defensive coach and coordinator Monty Kiffin announced he was leaving to join his son, Lane Kiffin, who was to be the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. The Bucs, known for their defense, and the reason for their success, collapsed defensively the month of December 2008. They missed the playoffs entirely. This led to the firing of head coach Jon Gruden and general manager George Allen.
Confidence went out of the team once it became emotionally preoccupied with defending how “we’re all professionals” taking coach Kiffin’s departure “in stride.” The evidence suggested otherwise. Kiffin was tantamount to their surrogate father as well as leader. Yet they argued passionately that they would not lose their edge, but they did. Lehrer would say they spent too much time thinking about not losing it.
Research has shown that once the brain knows how to do something, the best thing is to stop obsessing and let the brain and body take over and do their work. My own life is riddled with episodes of this being true.
Once I was taking a calculus final in university. I was a bit of grind, meaning I studied my ass off for every course. The calculus examinations were passed out, and I read the first question, then the second question, and then the third. By that time, I was in a state of total panic – I had no idea how to start much less complete the questions. I was hyperventilating, my hands were clammy, and I had broken out into a cold sweat. I thought I was about to faint.
I had long known, long before the good professor had written “How We Decide,” that I was emotional, and couldn’t handle stress well. That was the reason I prepared so thoroughly. It was the only way I could relax, could have confidence that I would do well. My insecurity welled up in me as I thought for sure I had blown it.
Then I did something that was masochistic, something without thinking. I jammed my pencil into the back of my left hand, breaking off the tip. My hand was bleeding. I wrapped my handkerchief around it, raised my hand, and asked for another pencil. A calm fell over me. I looked back at my test, and as if by magic, everything appeared clear, not only clear, but elementary. I raced through the exam, set the curve, and have remembered that episode all my life. Those who read me know that I don’t back away from declarative statements, or from the composition of my peculiar emotional motor.
If there is a central theme to all my works it is to pay attention to your feelings. Our feelings are the result of years of the programming of our brains in how to respond to certain situations. The brain makes instantaneous computations of which we are not aware or for which we have placed barriers to deny, and always at our disadvantage.
The neural transmitter (dopamine) stimulates the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. This can happen after strenuous exercise, listening to music that resonates with us, eating a favorite food, or watching our beloved sport’s team come through in victory. Unfortunately, dopamine is what addictive drugs activate. It triggers a massive release of the neurotransmitter that overwhelms the brain with ecstasy. Dopamine produces more than feelings of happiness. It assists in regulating our emotions from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. Put otherwise, there are no such things as good or bad emotions. What is unfortunate is to deny the emotions or fail to be aware of what triggers them and why.
Dopamine is at the ready to stimulate whichever part of the brain that your brain feels should be stimulated. This is another way of saying the instinctual feelings you have for a situation kick in. On the other hand, we can become slaves to our emotions and addicted to “feeling good” so that we don’t accept and move naturally with the random fluctuations inevitable in a life of ups and downs.
People have been known to make a great deal of money, and then to become obsessed with making more, taking inordinate risks denying the chronic downs that accompany the occasional ups. We have seen this with day traders on the stock market, chronic gamblers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others.
Lehrer also delves into the limits of the brain, a subject covered by author, inventor William L. Livingston in “Friends in High Places” (1990) and “Have Fun At Work” (1988). Scientists confirm what Livingston has uncovered in his research in our problem solving. That is the maximum number of issues one brain can consider at the same time is limited. This explains why so many of us are overwhelmed when we are distracted by a much larger number of issues than are minds can handle on a daily basis. Here is what Livingston has to say on the subject:
“There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they don’t, things go to Hell.” (Have Fun At Work, p. 32).
“Problems are systems moving in a trajectory shaped by the force field of natural law. Problem systems are as coherent as natural law itself. The stuff sloshing around in the human cranium masquerading as solutions, however, is sterile and incoherent. Until the magic of human genius assembles elements into a system married to a problem system, there is no such thing as a solution candidate. Solutions only obtain coherency by being wed to problems. When vocabulary is limited to solution-speak, communication is incoherent.” (Friends In High Places, p. 98)
“Life is complicated. Like it or not, the substance of life is deceptively intricate. The bulk of things we take for granted are labyrinthine, non-linear and beyond causal understanding. Bid farewell to the trivialization of rules. The threshold of problem solving competence is accepting reality for what it is --- the passage of a complication through Nature’s flux. All substitutes for this perspective precipitate failure.” (Ibid, p 184)
Lehrer confirms what others have referenced more empirically such as Livingston and that is the computation powers and limits to the brain.
He then goes on to provide evidence of how food can affect our thinking. He writes of an experiment regarding a “sugar fix” given to students drinking sugar rich lemonade. It stimulated the prefrontal cortex (where rational thinking occurs) resulting in students being more successful in problem solving than those not getting the sugar fix. This may be counterintuitive to what you have been told about sugar making children hyperactive. This research, he claims, explains why we get cranky when we’re hungry and tired. The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances. “A bad mood,” he insists, “is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.”
PROBLEM SOLVING WITHOUT CONFIDENT THINKING IN THE MIX
It is a small leap from we are what we eat to we are what we think. Confident Thinking, given its powers and limitations, breaks temporarily free of these, if only occasionally, when we engaged in thinking creatively. Livingston insists that the problems we solve are not necessarily the problems we face, but the problems we feel confident we can solve. No surprise, problems not addressed eventually gang up on us, and cause such troubles as the global economic meltdown of 2008 – 2009, or personal collapse such as a mental-physical breakdown in us individually.
We are familiar and comfortable with critical thinking, or rational thinking in terms of what is already known. But as Einstein has pointed out we are unlikely to be able to solve a problem with the same thinking that was its cause. That takes creative thinking, which engages the emotional as well as the rational ordering centers of the brain, and considers what is not known but can be found out.
It is my view that creative thinking has been on holiday. Education focuses on grades rather than creative thinking. Creative thinking encourages students to explore and discover by embracing the unknown, not regurgitating the “right answer.” We have moved as an enlightened society beyond the reiterative tests of critical thinking that dominate our textbooks. The word “education” after all means to “to lead forth,” not to retreat back. Simply regurgitating information is not education, at least, not in the twenty-first century.
What exactly is the function of SAT and GRE cram review courses?
If they are necessary for students wanting to qualify for the best colleges or graduate schools, what are these examinations actually measuring? Certainly they are not measuring conceptual skills. Better yet, what did these test takers learn in their degree programs in preparation for these opportunities? Are our schools that poor that the student has to cheat to look good because these crib courses can be called a lot of things but obtaining an artificial edge is cheating is it not?
Since course work is largely regurgitation, I suspect there is something to this. Chances are once a course is completed it is soon forgotten. This backdoor cram-exam preparation for qualification personifies a reactive society that never gets on top of its problems because its focus is always on effects not causes.
In my day, students bragged about never taking a book home in all of high school. Today nearly every child has homework from preschool on, but I wonder if it is more ritual than self-motivated conceptual learning. I sense that it is reprogramming with the same old critical thinking criteria. This spills over into life.
There are exceptions to this rule. Educator Melvin Freestone has created a tactical program, “Thinking for Understanding” (2007), which deals systematically with what is advocated here. Freestone gets inside issues discussed in Confident Thinking, and reveals a strategy for multi-layered thinking, intentions for thinking, and processes for thinking, all in order to establish thinking and understanding. He moves out of the mechanics of conventional thinking to bring out the imagination to think conceptually, creatively and aggressively. It would be a good beginning to embrace his ideas as they deal with the cause of our dilemma, false programming.
* * * * * *
Sunday, February 08, 2009
"DON'T YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW, YOUKNOWYOUKNOW...!"
"DON’T YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW, YOUKNOWYOUKNOW...!"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 8, 2009
“The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women is owning to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words, for whoever is a master of language and has a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of his words.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 –1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels.”
* * * * * *
I’ve made an unscientific study of people whom we often see and hear speaking through our television screen. They are people in the news, people of reputation, people who have had the luxury of affluence, a good education, and the reinforcement of believing themselves if not special well above average, people who we come to claim are our leaders, our heroes, and our – in this murky times of ours – change makers and change masters.
As I’ve indicated, I’ve made a very unscientific study of these faces that pour out of the television screen being interviewed by other people of equal or greater fame because they control the microphone, people, too, who have had the advantages of our culture to be all that they could be.
Before I did this very unscientific study of these faces that pour out of the television screen, I said to myself, why are you so irritated? What right do you have to disparage their celebrity, their accomplishment, and their stature? If you don’t like it, you can lump it, so why don’t you lump it? I thought long and hard about this because that voice within me has a definite point. Who am I to judge?
Well, about that time I found myself getting a little angry, because I should confess anger is my prime motivator, not money, not pride, not possessions, not anything you can think of but raw unadulterated anger. Why? Or better yet what is the basis of my anger?
It is because I want to hear what they have to say and what they have to say may have importance to me, personally, and contribute to my better understanding of the world they dominate, and possibly control, because if that is true, and I have little doubt that it is, then it affects me.
What is my point? See, you lack patience. I’ve discovered rather than wanting me to explain the context of the signatory phrase I am about to allude to, you would press me to get on with it, to get to the content of this piece. You would have me lay out naked, and assume, now that is an important word, assume, that I the listener are privy to something that may be of interest to you. I will say only at this point that the signatory phrase is repeated ad infinitum ad nauseam.
What is this phrase? Well, in my unscientific survey reflecting the faces on my television screen then listening to people in supermarkets, shopping malls, people talking on the street as I walk through my neighborhood interrupting my speaking into my cassette recorder, listening to people in conversation as I have my coffee at MacDonald’s, and then of course listening to members of my own family.
The phrase is a variation of “don’t you know,” which of course I don’t and I am certain I am never to be told. It is assumed I know.
Now, in my very unscientific study, I have concluded that people born in the 1930s, who didn’t have the luxury of flippant speech much less few if any luxuries at all, never were provided with this extravagance. You can go into the foothills of Tennessee, the backwaters of the Missouri, the rolling river towns along the Mississippi, the Blue Hills of Virginia and many other places too many to mention, and people born in the 1930s had no choice but to say what they meant and mean what they said without the comfort of “don’t you know.”
Now, people born in the 1940s and 1950s, people like former President Bill Clinton, and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others of their generation, especially those who had the luxury of attending our great universities of the East and Far West, abbreviated this “don’t you know” to a clipped “you know.”
I would imagine those people holding the television microphones interviewing people of all generations, by the accident of their birth, having been born in the 1940s and 1950s, had to have verbal surgery to correct their speech to excise this abbreviated “you know.”
Yet, as life is determined by its nature to be what it is rather than what it prefers to be, they have slips, not measured slips, but slips nonetheless. I’ve heard “you know” in the speech of the most photogenic Brian Williams, and in his mentor, the venerated Tom Brokaw. This signatory phrase becomes a parody of perplexity when they are interviewing someone who cannot say three words without “you know” as they combat the speaker with their own “you know.” Perhaps that is because the verbal surgery was not totally successful.
Again, admitting my very unscientific survey cannot be taken seriously, I must register my disappointment bordering on disbelief of those born in the 1960s and 1970s, and now joining them, those born in the 1980s who grace the television screen from academia to Hollywood, from Wall Street to Washington, from amateur to professional sport, from low to high income neighborhoods to the whole face of our public humanity. “Don’t you know” has progressed to “You know” to YouKnowYouKnow….”
Vice President nominee, the much maligned Governor Sarah Palin, has used the “You Know,” but so has her running mate, Senator John McCain, who would add to the confusion as to what he means by a constant “my friends. “ God be my witness, this is also true of the most eloquent of all speakers, our own President Barak Obama. Can you imagine Lincoln hyphenating his speech with “you know” or “don’t you know?” Neither can I?
Perhaps it is cultural, or cool, or a way to break speech like bread with us to suggest the common clothe. No, I don’t think so. I think it is generational, addictive, and most concerning of all, an impossible speech virus with no ready antidote in sight.
The first time I heard Caroline Kennedy speak on her interest in replacing Senator Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat, she said so many “YouKnowYouKnowYouKnows” that I lost track at 32, and she couldn’t have said more than 300 words or so. Again, I apologize for the lack of the science to my survey.
Than I heard Robert Wood, Press Secretary of the State Department, give what occurred to me a slightly modified rendition of “youknow.” It was so quiet as to be almost imperceptible. This was also true of Michael Phelps in his public apology for smoking a bong, which I believe is marijuana. It would seem professional athletes must take a course in “youknowyouknowyouknow,” as they seemingly are the most adept at the signatory phrase.
Is this a nervous tick or is it symptomatic of a tired sluggish and indolent culture? Is speech the first indicator that our society is dying?
I noticed it appears more frequently when the person is lying, has no idea what to say, hasn’t done his or her homework, is pissed off, or is having an especially bad day.
I was born in the 1930s, and envied these people for the longest time. There was a certain eloquence when the speaker would pause, and say, “Don’t you know.” I didn’t know, had no idea, but thought it was something I missed along with other luxuries in my struggle to grow up with scarcity. Now, I’m not sure. There is a dark side to me I must admit, and my judgment might be quite impaired for it but I’ve come to the conclusion that Shakespeare has it about right, “What a spendthrift he is of his tongue.”
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 8, 2009
“The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women is owning to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words, for whoever is a master of language and has a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of his words.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 –1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels.”
* * * * * *
I’ve made an unscientific study of people whom we often see and hear speaking through our television screen. They are people in the news, people of reputation, people who have had the luxury of affluence, a good education, and the reinforcement of believing themselves if not special well above average, people who we come to claim are our leaders, our heroes, and our – in this murky times of ours – change makers and change masters.
As I’ve indicated, I’ve made a very unscientific study of these faces that pour out of the television screen being interviewed by other people of equal or greater fame because they control the microphone, people, too, who have had the advantages of our culture to be all that they could be.
Before I did this very unscientific study of these faces that pour out of the television screen, I said to myself, why are you so irritated? What right do you have to disparage their celebrity, their accomplishment, and their stature? If you don’t like it, you can lump it, so why don’t you lump it? I thought long and hard about this because that voice within me has a definite point. Who am I to judge?
Well, about that time I found myself getting a little angry, because I should confess anger is my prime motivator, not money, not pride, not possessions, not anything you can think of but raw unadulterated anger. Why? Or better yet what is the basis of my anger?
It is because I want to hear what they have to say and what they have to say may have importance to me, personally, and contribute to my better understanding of the world they dominate, and possibly control, because if that is true, and I have little doubt that it is, then it affects me.
What is my point? See, you lack patience. I’ve discovered rather than wanting me to explain the context of the signatory phrase I am about to allude to, you would press me to get on with it, to get to the content of this piece. You would have me lay out naked, and assume, now that is an important word, assume, that I the listener are privy to something that may be of interest to you. I will say only at this point that the signatory phrase is repeated ad infinitum ad nauseam.
What is this phrase? Well, in my unscientific survey reflecting the faces on my television screen then listening to people in supermarkets, shopping malls, people talking on the street as I walk through my neighborhood interrupting my speaking into my cassette recorder, listening to people in conversation as I have my coffee at MacDonald’s, and then of course listening to members of my own family.
The phrase is a variation of “don’t you know,” which of course I don’t and I am certain I am never to be told. It is assumed I know.
Now, in my very unscientific study, I have concluded that people born in the 1930s, who didn’t have the luxury of flippant speech much less few if any luxuries at all, never were provided with this extravagance. You can go into the foothills of Tennessee, the backwaters of the Missouri, the rolling river towns along the Mississippi, the Blue Hills of Virginia and many other places too many to mention, and people born in the 1930s had no choice but to say what they meant and mean what they said without the comfort of “don’t you know.”
Now, people born in the 1940s and 1950s, people like former President Bill Clinton, and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others of their generation, especially those who had the luxury of attending our great universities of the East and Far West, abbreviated this “don’t you know” to a clipped “you know.”
I would imagine those people holding the television microphones interviewing people of all generations, by the accident of their birth, having been born in the 1940s and 1950s, had to have verbal surgery to correct their speech to excise this abbreviated “you know.”
Yet, as life is determined by its nature to be what it is rather than what it prefers to be, they have slips, not measured slips, but slips nonetheless. I’ve heard “you know” in the speech of the most photogenic Brian Williams, and in his mentor, the venerated Tom Brokaw. This signatory phrase becomes a parody of perplexity when they are interviewing someone who cannot say three words without “you know” as they combat the speaker with their own “you know.” Perhaps that is because the verbal surgery was not totally successful.
Again, admitting my very unscientific survey cannot be taken seriously, I must register my disappointment bordering on disbelief of those born in the 1960s and 1970s, and now joining them, those born in the 1980s who grace the television screen from academia to Hollywood, from Wall Street to Washington, from amateur to professional sport, from low to high income neighborhoods to the whole face of our public humanity. “Don’t you know” has progressed to “You know” to YouKnowYouKnow….”
Vice President nominee, the much maligned Governor Sarah Palin, has used the “You Know,” but so has her running mate, Senator John McCain, who would add to the confusion as to what he means by a constant “my friends. “ God be my witness, this is also true of the most eloquent of all speakers, our own President Barak Obama. Can you imagine Lincoln hyphenating his speech with “you know” or “don’t you know?” Neither can I?
Perhaps it is cultural, or cool, or a way to break speech like bread with us to suggest the common clothe. No, I don’t think so. I think it is generational, addictive, and most concerning of all, an impossible speech virus with no ready antidote in sight.
The first time I heard Caroline Kennedy speak on her interest in replacing Senator Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat, she said so many “YouKnowYouKnowYouKnows” that I lost track at 32, and she couldn’t have said more than 300 words or so. Again, I apologize for the lack of the science to my survey.
Than I heard Robert Wood, Press Secretary of the State Department, give what occurred to me a slightly modified rendition of “youknow.” It was so quiet as to be almost imperceptible. This was also true of Michael Phelps in his public apology for smoking a bong, which I believe is marijuana. It would seem professional athletes must take a course in “youknowyouknowyouknow,” as they seemingly are the most adept at the signatory phrase.
Is this a nervous tick or is it symptomatic of a tired sluggish and indolent culture? Is speech the first indicator that our society is dying?
I noticed it appears more frequently when the person is lying, has no idea what to say, hasn’t done his or her homework, is pissed off, or is having an especially bad day.
I was born in the 1930s, and envied these people for the longest time. There was a certain eloquence when the speaker would pause, and say, “Don’t you know.” I didn’t know, had no idea, but thought it was something I missed along with other luxuries in my struggle to grow up with scarcity. Now, I’m not sure. There is a dark side to me I must admit, and my judgment might be quite impaired for it but I’ve come to the conclusion that Shakespeare has it about right, “What a spendthrift he is of his tongue.”
* * * * *
Friday, February 06, 2009
WHY WRITERS WRITE -- ECLECTIC REFLECTIONS & REMINISCENCE!
WHY WRITERS WRITE – ECLECTIC REFLECTIONS & REMINISCENCE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 5, 2009
“A writer is dear and necessary to us only in the measure which he reveals the inner workings of his soul.”
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Russian novelist
* * * * * *
IT IS GOOD COMPANY!
When I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, in my mid-twenties, in order to get a jump on the next day to make sales calls, I would conduct chemical engineering service calls as late as the customer would allow. I mapped out those so obliging and planned my work around them.
There was an engineer who dealt with automatic systems to my chemical systems who had a similar strategy, as we would constantly run into each other well after the dinner hour, still working. We laughed about it. He was about my age, a tall good-looking man, thick brown curly hair, trim build, and a casual manner. I said one time, “I’ve never seen you without a cigarette in your mouth.”
He took it out of his mouth, looked at it fondly, and said, “It’s good company!” Then he looked at me. “Can I make an observation?” I nodded. “I’ve never seen you without a book in your hands.”
I smiled. “Point taken.”
I thought, then, we weren’t so different. His company was his cigarette. This was his pacifier on this lonely journey across miles of geography in his consulting work. Since my work was about 80 percent consulting and 20 percent sales, I was guilty of using books as my company. He would see me sitting there in the recession area of security reading while waiting to me admitted into the plant, and I would see him breezing by with a cigarette in his mouth.
He’d always ask me what I was reading, and as I started to tell him he’d be off to check another system. My books may have been pacifiers but it seemed a natural leap to go from reading to writing. Yet, I’ve always stayed away from my most natural inclination, storytelling. My writing has focused on breaches in the workplace culture, but even then I lace these diatribes with personal stories. I sometimes wonder if readers bypass these tales seeing them as padding when they are meant to be integral to the text.
WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO? NOTHING EVERYTHING!
The other day I read an email in which a person confessed she adored a particular lady because she was an upper class woman. It offended me because I don’t like to see people placed in categories, leastwise myself.
My son, when he was seven years old, was asked by his teacher, “What does your father do?”
“Nothing everything,” he answered with a shrug.
So when the teacher and I met, she mentioned this as entrée into a discussion of my son. “Michael has a mystifying ways of describing his life. He says he has traveled throughout Europe and Africa, and has lived in South Africa. He has a whimsical imagination, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t” I said, “because he has lived in those places.”
“But he’s only seven.”
“Well, he and his father have been on a fast track.”
“By the way, what do you do?”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, nothing, I’ve retired.”
“You’re not very old, are you?”
“I’ll be thirty-seven on my next birthday. I’m completing the second year of my retirement or sabbatical, whatever you want to call it, and plan to go back to school in the fall to work on a Ph.D. But before that, I was a chemist, engineer, salesman, manager, executive and international consultant.”
“All that?”
“Yes, all that.”
“No wonder your son doesn’t know what to call you. So how are you spending your sabbatical?”
“I’m attempting to learn how to write. I have a book coming out next year.”
“Just like that you’ve written a book and it’s being published?”
“Yes, just like that.”
“Who’s publishing it?”
“Prentice-Hall.”
“What’s it about?”
“Well, the title is about selling, but it is actually about being aware, accepting and understanding of ourselves as we are.”
“Then you’re a psychologist, too?”
“No.”
“Well, what right do you have to address these issues?”
“Oh, I suppose because I’m a human being with a mind and a certain backlog of experience.”
“You say that so levelly but I sense an impertinence in your voice.”
“That’s fair enough, but we’re getting away from the subject of my son, Michael.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, pausing. “Well, the reason I wanted to see you is because your son is the brightest child I’ve ever taught, but he’s lazy.”
“I see.”
“I wanted to find out what you plan to do about that.” She was interrupted then, as I had taken up much of her time and other parents were waiting to visit with her. So, I let it just pass. Once away from her, I reflected on the fact that no one jump-started my motor. When he’s ready to start his, I told myself, he will. It was bad counsel. I should have been more cognizant, more proactive in his life. I had taken Gibran too literally when he said,
‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.’
I did not prepare Michael for life. I am sorry, Michael, and wish to apologize here to you now and not wait until I’m on my dying bed.
THE DARK SIDE, THE WRITER’S PARADISE
There are two professions in which the occupant lives more on the dark side than on the light side. They are creative writers/philosophers, and comedians. They see what other people refuse to see and what they see they deal with as the tools of their trade. In the case of the comedian, the dark side is the mother lode of his humor, which he carefully extracts and polishes to lift his audience out of its darkness by dispelling it with calculated levity
With regard to the writer, he uses it to compose his novels, short stories, and poetry, even his philosophy because philosophy doesn’t come out of the light side but out of the dark side, as do most things in art and literature that last. It is the dark side denied that envelops us and controls us and keeps us in cages of our own making.
WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
I once wrote a novel, which was never published. What follows is a scene in that novel, which appears as a story within a story. It is taken out of context here, but essentially carries the sense of this reflective and reminiscent piece here.
* * * * * *
There was this man in the corporation who could see things most clearly. He wrote about them, spoke about them, and even published them. He did this innocently, naively, even sending copies to those in authority positions in the corporation to familiarize them with the dark side of corporate life he had uncovered. He hoped they would acknowledge and act on this darkness to bring light into operations. Although they failed to respond to his entreaties, he continued to write, speak and publish.
Then one day one of the corporation’s principal stockholders dropped by his cubical, and invited him to visit him at his estate on the seacoast. He had heard of this place, which was described as 20,000 acres of paradise high on a promontory overlooking the bay with ragged cliffs dropping a thousand feet into the sea, breathtaking he was sure. So, he was at first stunned, then flattered, but finally suspicious. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” the cherubic gentleman said, “Why you are the most prolific man I’ve ever read. I wonder when you sleep.”
The gentleman said this as he tapped his huge cigar on a tiny cup sized container that was ludicrously laced in diamonds. The gentleman was so kind and so insistent that the writer eventually agreed to a brief visit.
Once through the ornate gates, and into the estate, he couldn’t take his eyes off the manicured lawns that seemingly stretched forever, stately fountains with sculptured sentinels saluted them as they past. He had never seen so many species of flowers, and all in bloom, and the trees that seemed to climb to heaven. Then it occurred to him that they were climbing, too, as the landscape was tilted upward to meet the sky, and then suddenly a mansion came into view white as snow and arched in triumph like a cathedral nestled naturally among the trees. He thought heaven must be like this.
A manservant resplendent in white stood at the door to greet them. He smiled graciously, but without a word, took his overnight bag, nodded to the gentleman and departed. A host of servants were busy preparing dinner, all dressed in uniforms of white with such intensity that it reminded him of a carpet of falling snow viewed through a noonday sun. Everyone was smiling and bowing as if he were royalty.
Fine dining was not his experience but he followed the gentlemen’s lead, and said to himself, I could get used to this. Seemingly reading his mind, the gentleman said,
“How would you like to live here? I have a beautiful cottage picked out for you overlooking the sea. It is yours as well as all the amenities of the estate.”
“But I have no money!”
“None needed. This is a gift for your diligence and conscientious service to the corporation.”
“But the corporation has not listened to me; it has done nothing with what I’ve said.”
“True, but it is all under advisement.”
“No one has ever told me that.”
“Trust me as a loyal stockholder, your works have not gone unnoticed.”
The writer smiled. “They haven’t?”
The gentleman didn’t answer but offered the writer a cigar. “I don’t smoke.”
“I noticed at dinner you also don’t drink, not even wine?”
“No.”
“The wine was from my 19th century cellar, what a pity!"
“Where am I staying? I’m a bit tired from the long trip.”
“Of course, how calloused of me. You are staying here tonight and tomorrow I have a surprise.”
The surprise was a beautiful cottage with a complete library, computer and all the writing aids that he had only seen in books. It was as if the gentleman had read his mind and materialized his deepest longings. “What do you think? Do you like it?”
The writer was completely confused. “What is this? I mean, why are you showing me this?”
“It is all yours, every bit of it, as far as the eye can see is yours.”
“This beautiful house, too?”
“Indeed.”
The writer rushed over to the computer and puts in his code and, voila! All his files, all his writings appeared, “But how could, can this be? I’ve never given my code to anyone.”
The gentleman drew on his cigar. “It must be a miracle.”
Days passed and the novelty of the place started to wear. He couldn’t get out of his mind that someone knew his code. He begun to look for listening devices, for bugs in his phone, lamps, curtains, drapery, books, blindly ripping them to pieces. He stripped away the carpet and looked for wiring in the floor board. He tore through the walls. Nothing. Then he went into the garden and dug it up destroying exotic plants, shrubs and the immaculate turf. He scaled the roof and removed shingles. Nothing. He hadn’t slept or eaten in 18 hours.
Morning came and he looked at his beautiful cottage, its rich furnishings, which he had ripped apart, its elegant paintings, which he has cut to pieces, its finely plastered and papered walls, which now lay naked and scarred with wires snaking to the floor, everything was in shreds.
As he surveyed the ruin, the gentleman appeared out of nowhere. The writer bowed his head in shame and humiliation. “I don’t know what to say, what got into me.”
“There’s no need to say anything.”
“But I’ve ruin this place.”
“It can all be restored have no doubt.”
“But?”
“No buts about it.” The gentleman put his arm around the writer. “Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening. I have a special surprise for you.”
“After what I’ve done?” The gentleman said nothing but walked away in a cape of cigar smoke.
That evening the gentleman drove over to the writer’s home, then they both strolled across the rising turf until the mansion appears on the horizon as if a beatific vision with the fading sun framing it in radiant burgundy. “That is awesome,” said the writer, “truly awesome.” The gentleman whispered, “Indeed.”
As they walked up the long driveway, the writer noticed a large flatbed truck with black tarpaulin covering a massive object. Once they reach the truck, the writer lifted one of the tarp's flaps and saw what threw a shock into him. “This looks like a cage.”
“It could be considered as such,” said the gentleman.
“But what is it doing here?”
“Let us leave that for after dinner. A crew will be setting it up while we enjoy our meal.” The writer now noticed a crew of at least thirty men in coveralls standing near a giant rig, and four trucks with no labeling but which appeared to be furniture haulers or moving vans.
After dinner, they retired into the study where the gentleman had an aperitif and the writer a coffee. If I didn’t know better, he thought, I’d think the gentleman was stalling, first for having such an early dinner, and then this boring ritual of after dinner formalities. He could never understand rich people and their constant dalliance. Take this gentleman. With all his composure, he has nothing to say about art, music, literature, or science, only business, and nothing is more boring to me than business. “I’m ready for a bit of exercise,” the gentleman said finally, lighting his fourth cigar in the writer’s presence, “how about you?”
“Yes,” the writer said wishing to escape the cloying aroma of the cigar for fresh air. They walked into the garden while the gentleman explained why the bronze sentinels were standing at attention around each fountain. “It is perhaps whimsical of me, but I find my silent sentinels consoling, don’t you know?” The writer said nothing.
Thinking they were walking aimlessly, the writer was at first confused when he thought he saw on the horizon the outline of the tip of a giant helmet. It was no mistake. It was a helmet that grew more prominent and visible as they approached. “My God,” he said, “it is magnificent!” Shining in the early evening light was this remarkable helmet about fourteen feet high with gleaming bars in the fading sun like the discarded helmet of a giant Praetorian Guard.
The gentleman asked, “What do you think of it?”
The writer’s heart was racing. He didn’t know what to think. It was fascinating beyond belief. The hair on the back of his head quivered to attention. He found himself walking into the helmet, a space of twenty by fifteen feet, but with all the amenities that were so precious to him including his computer, his library which reached high above his head on three walls, and all the incidentals with which he identified his person.
The helmet was a cage furnished with a comfortable bed, reading lamp, a sofa, reclining chair, desk, kitchen table and chair, a television, computer, a printer, and an armoire. It also had a shower and commode, heater and air conditioner, and state-of-the-arts sound system with a complete collection of his symphonic records and favorite operas, along with a library of CDs and DVDs that he had always dreamed of having but could never afford. Thousands of books were organized just as he had had them organized in his modest home back on the continent.
How could they know? The thought left his head as soon as it arrived. He noticed on the fourth wall a small window that gave him a limited view of the sea, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t much into nature anyway. His world was that of ideas. He found his chest swelling with excitement like a psychosexual thrill, and was embarrassed at the thought. What is happening to me? “I like this place,” he blurted out, “is this mine?”
“If you would have it be.”
“Could I live here?”
“If you like.”
“Let me think about it.” So they left with the door wide open.
The next morning as the sun was coming up the writer rushed to the mansion, climbed up the stairs to the gentleman’s bedroom, and pounded on the door. The sleepy gentleman looked at his clock. It was 5:30 a.m. He put on his robe, opened the door and saw the wild-eyed writer practically foaming at the mouth in excitement. “I want to live there. I want to live in my new home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“Excuse me while I dress,” said the gentleman. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No, but I could have breakfast there, could I not?”
“Indeed, I’ll make arrangements.”
So, the kitchen staff served breakfast there in elegant fashion bringing in a separate chair for the gentleman. When breakfast was completed, and the gentleman was about to leave the writer’s new home, he said, “There are certain rules to this residence.”
“Like what?”
“You will be able to write to your heart’s content, but not to publish a word. You will be able to listen to any kind of music you desire, but watch only select television mainly old movies even pornographic if you like and no one will interrupt your pleasure. You have the most sophisticated computer and software, but no access to the Internet. There is one other condition,” the gentleman paused. “Once we close this door, you shall remain here the rest of your life, is that clear?”
“Yes, yes, yes, now leave me alone.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve been unhappy all of my life wherever I’ve been, men have never listened to me and I’m fed up with them, and life, so why not, I’m dead already anyway, okay? So, close the door and get on about your business.”
“You’re sure this is what you want?”
Impatiently, his voice a strident cry, the writer said, “How can I make myself any clearer?” He pushed the gentleman out and as he did so, he said, “I want to rest, read my books, write a little, and enjoy my new life. Please,” he pleaded as he closed the door.
Within a fortnight, he told the manservant when he brought his breakfast that he had had a change of heart. He would like to return to his first home on the estate, and if that was not possible, to his old position at the corporation. The manservant did not speak, but dropped his eyes in understanding as he left the cage.
Thereafter, meals were no longer brought by anyone but slid through a mechanized slot that the writer had not realized was there before. As the days turned into months, and the wind whistled through the trees and passed over the rocky cliffs to the sea, his wailing blended with the wind into a chilling harmony of inanimate sighs, until one day it stopped. On that same day, the wind stopped, too, as if it understood that life’s torment was over for the writer.
The flatbed truck returned, removed the cage into its sanctuary at far side of this oasis, waiting its next candidate, which the corporation said had not yet been selected as there were several candidates being considered.
EXTREME UNCTION, WHEN YOU GO FROM BAD TO WORSE
I thought of this story when I listened to Harry Markopolos testify on Capitol Hill last Wednesday (February 4, 2009) regarding the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. I was surprised the network television news that evening gave Markopolos’s testimony short shrift and that included PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” only the BBC gave substantial coverage to this private investigator’s remarks.
In print, this investigator has been described as a “geek” and a product of “central casting,” as the attention has been directed to his persona and not to the nine years of careful and accurate reporting that Madoff was dirty, and running a Ponzi scheme.
This whistle blower claims that when he first reported Madoff’s activity to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2000 the investment banker had only bilked his clients of about $3 – 7 billion. Later, reports to the SEC were made when it climbed to $10 billion, then $20 billion, and finally to $50 billion.
Unfortunately, each time he delivered his findings to the SEC he did so without signing his name. He contributed further to his incredulity by doing his investigations in cloak and dagger style accepting no compensation, claiming to have done it “for the flag.” He understood the math, and the intricacies of these transactions, as he once had been a hedge fund manager, but diminished his credibility by appearing something of a flake.
He reported on Capitol Hill, “I don’t know if it was ignorance, incompetence or fear of the clout of Madoff, or a combination of these that kept the SEC from investigating him.” Markopolos suggested Madoff had free reign to do his dirty work with too many powerful people in influential positions on his side that the SEC decided to look the other way, and hope for the best.
Whatever label you prefer, Markopolos has exposed another form of cage, another example of the dark side. Here in the Tampa Bay area an investment consultant has bilked investor out of $50 million; the credit manager of the Tampa Tribune used his job to steal more than a $1 million from the newspaper’s advertisers, and so it goes.
These things, which are on going, seem only to show up when times are bad. An economic recession is a kind of death, and exposes the bad and ugly in societal behavior, which is constantly festering under the surface in good times, but no one pays attention except isolated individuals such as Markopolos.
The corporation didn’t pay attention with the writer in the story, which is fiction, and the SEC didn’t pay attention with this financial investigator, which is not fiction.
In the Catholic religion, the last rites are called “Extreme Unction.” The soul is given its last absolution before it tarries from its earthly confines. In a way, our society operates in a similar fashion, only it doesn’t absolve or resolve, but buries its deceptions and builds edifices over them.
Society’s dark side is its sin for which there is no absolution as it is not only tolerated but also cultivated, why else would it flourish so? My wonder is if this will ever change. I doubt it. That is why there are writers writing about the dark side and will continue until the end of time.
Writers on the light side entertain us; help us forget about our darkness, the darkness that possesses us all, and the darkness that ultimately destroys us. It destroyed Rome, also the empires of the Dutch, British, Spanish, French, Austrians, and Greeks, it is destroying the Roman Catholic Church, and even Islam as it is about to reach new prominence. Will it ever change? Will human beings ever come to their senses?
I am a writer from the dark side and I’m not privy to such intelligence, but I have my suspicions.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 5, 2009
“A writer is dear and necessary to us only in the measure which he reveals the inner workings of his soul.”
Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Russian novelist
* * * * * *
IT IS GOOD COMPANY!
When I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, in my mid-twenties, in order to get a jump on the next day to make sales calls, I would conduct chemical engineering service calls as late as the customer would allow. I mapped out those so obliging and planned my work around them.
There was an engineer who dealt with automatic systems to my chemical systems who had a similar strategy, as we would constantly run into each other well after the dinner hour, still working. We laughed about it. He was about my age, a tall good-looking man, thick brown curly hair, trim build, and a casual manner. I said one time, “I’ve never seen you without a cigarette in your mouth.”
He took it out of his mouth, looked at it fondly, and said, “It’s good company!” Then he looked at me. “Can I make an observation?” I nodded. “I’ve never seen you without a book in your hands.”
I smiled. “Point taken.”
I thought, then, we weren’t so different. His company was his cigarette. This was his pacifier on this lonely journey across miles of geography in his consulting work. Since my work was about 80 percent consulting and 20 percent sales, I was guilty of using books as my company. He would see me sitting there in the recession area of security reading while waiting to me admitted into the plant, and I would see him breezing by with a cigarette in his mouth.
He’d always ask me what I was reading, and as I started to tell him he’d be off to check another system. My books may have been pacifiers but it seemed a natural leap to go from reading to writing. Yet, I’ve always stayed away from my most natural inclination, storytelling. My writing has focused on breaches in the workplace culture, but even then I lace these diatribes with personal stories. I sometimes wonder if readers bypass these tales seeing them as padding when they are meant to be integral to the text.
WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO? NOTHING EVERYTHING!
The other day I read an email in which a person confessed she adored a particular lady because she was an upper class woman. It offended me because I don’t like to see people placed in categories, leastwise myself.
My son, when he was seven years old, was asked by his teacher, “What does your father do?”
“Nothing everything,” he answered with a shrug.
So when the teacher and I met, she mentioned this as entrée into a discussion of my son. “Michael has a mystifying ways of describing his life. He says he has traveled throughout Europe and Africa, and has lived in South Africa. He has a whimsical imagination, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t” I said, “because he has lived in those places.”
“But he’s only seven.”
“Well, he and his father have been on a fast track.”
“By the way, what do you do?”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, nothing, I’ve retired.”
“You’re not very old, are you?”
“I’ll be thirty-seven on my next birthday. I’m completing the second year of my retirement or sabbatical, whatever you want to call it, and plan to go back to school in the fall to work on a Ph.D. But before that, I was a chemist, engineer, salesman, manager, executive and international consultant.”
“All that?”
“Yes, all that.”
“No wonder your son doesn’t know what to call you. So how are you spending your sabbatical?”
“I’m attempting to learn how to write. I have a book coming out next year.”
“Just like that you’ve written a book and it’s being published?”
“Yes, just like that.”
“Who’s publishing it?”
“Prentice-Hall.”
“What’s it about?”
“Well, the title is about selling, but it is actually about being aware, accepting and understanding of ourselves as we are.”
“Then you’re a psychologist, too?”
“No.”
“Well, what right do you have to address these issues?”
“Oh, I suppose because I’m a human being with a mind and a certain backlog of experience.”
“You say that so levelly but I sense an impertinence in your voice.”
“That’s fair enough, but we’re getting away from the subject of my son, Michael.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, pausing. “Well, the reason I wanted to see you is because your son is the brightest child I’ve ever taught, but he’s lazy.”
“I see.”
“I wanted to find out what you plan to do about that.” She was interrupted then, as I had taken up much of her time and other parents were waiting to visit with her. So, I let it just pass. Once away from her, I reflected on the fact that no one jump-started my motor. When he’s ready to start his, I told myself, he will. It was bad counsel. I should have been more cognizant, more proactive in his life. I had taken Gibran too literally when he said,
‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.’
I did not prepare Michael for life. I am sorry, Michael, and wish to apologize here to you now and not wait until I’m on my dying bed.
THE DARK SIDE, THE WRITER’S PARADISE
There are two professions in which the occupant lives more on the dark side than on the light side. They are creative writers/philosophers, and comedians. They see what other people refuse to see and what they see they deal with as the tools of their trade. In the case of the comedian, the dark side is the mother lode of his humor, which he carefully extracts and polishes to lift his audience out of its darkness by dispelling it with calculated levity
With regard to the writer, he uses it to compose his novels, short stories, and poetry, even his philosophy because philosophy doesn’t come out of the light side but out of the dark side, as do most things in art and literature that last. It is the dark side denied that envelops us and controls us and keeps us in cages of our own making.
WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?
I once wrote a novel, which was never published. What follows is a scene in that novel, which appears as a story within a story. It is taken out of context here, but essentially carries the sense of this reflective and reminiscent piece here.
* * * * * *
There was this man in the corporation who could see things most clearly. He wrote about them, spoke about them, and even published them. He did this innocently, naively, even sending copies to those in authority positions in the corporation to familiarize them with the dark side of corporate life he had uncovered. He hoped they would acknowledge and act on this darkness to bring light into operations. Although they failed to respond to his entreaties, he continued to write, speak and publish.
Then one day one of the corporation’s principal stockholders dropped by his cubical, and invited him to visit him at his estate on the seacoast. He had heard of this place, which was described as 20,000 acres of paradise high on a promontory overlooking the bay with ragged cliffs dropping a thousand feet into the sea, breathtaking he was sure. So, he was at first stunned, then flattered, but finally suspicious. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” the cherubic gentleman said, “Why you are the most prolific man I’ve ever read. I wonder when you sleep.”
The gentleman said this as he tapped his huge cigar on a tiny cup sized container that was ludicrously laced in diamonds. The gentleman was so kind and so insistent that the writer eventually agreed to a brief visit.
Once through the ornate gates, and into the estate, he couldn’t take his eyes off the manicured lawns that seemingly stretched forever, stately fountains with sculptured sentinels saluted them as they past. He had never seen so many species of flowers, and all in bloom, and the trees that seemed to climb to heaven. Then it occurred to him that they were climbing, too, as the landscape was tilted upward to meet the sky, and then suddenly a mansion came into view white as snow and arched in triumph like a cathedral nestled naturally among the trees. He thought heaven must be like this.
A manservant resplendent in white stood at the door to greet them. He smiled graciously, but without a word, took his overnight bag, nodded to the gentleman and departed. A host of servants were busy preparing dinner, all dressed in uniforms of white with such intensity that it reminded him of a carpet of falling snow viewed through a noonday sun. Everyone was smiling and bowing as if he were royalty.
Fine dining was not his experience but he followed the gentlemen’s lead, and said to himself, I could get used to this. Seemingly reading his mind, the gentleman said,
“How would you like to live here? I have a beautiful cottage picked out for you overlooking the sea. It is yours as well as all the amenities of the estate.”
“But I have no money!”
“None needed. This is a gift for your diligence and conscientious service to the corporation.”
“But the corporation has not listened to me; it has done nothing with what I’ve said.”
“True, but it is all under advisement.”
“No one has ever told me that.”
“Trust me as a loyal stockholder, your works have not gone unnoticed.”
The writer smiled. “They haven’t?”
The gentleman didn’t answer but offered the writer a cigar. “I don’t smoke.”
“I noticed at dinner you also don’t drink, not even wine?”
“No.”
“The wine was from my 19th century cellar, what a pity!"
“Where am I staying? I’m a bit tired from the long trip.”
“Of course, how calloused of me. You are staying here tonight and tomorrow I have a surprise.”
The surprise was a beautiful cottage with a complete library, computer and all the writing aids that he had only seen in books. It was as if the gentleman had read his mind and materialized his deepest longings. “What do you think? Do you like it?”
The writer was completely confused. “What is this? I mean, why are you showing me this?”
“It is all yours, every bit of it, as far as the eye can see is yours.”
“This beautiful house, too?”
“Indeed.”
The writer rushed over to the computer and puts in his code and, voila! All his files, all his writings appeared, “But how could, can this be? I’ve never given my code to anyone.”
The gentleman drew on his cigar. “It must be a miracle.”
Days passed and the novelty of the place started to wear. He couldn’t get out of his mind that someone knew his code. He begun to look for listening devices, for bugs in his phone, lamps, curtains, drapery, books, blindly ripping them to pieces. He stripped away the carpet and looked for wiring in the floor board. He tore through the walls. Nothing. Then he went into the garden and dug it up destroying exotic plants, shrubs and the immaculate turf. He scaled the roof and removed shingles. Nothing. He hadn’t slept or eaten in 18 hours.
Morning came and he looked at his beautiful cottage, its rich furnishings, which he had ripped apart, its elegant paintings, which he has cut to pieces, its finely plastered and papered walls, which now lay naked and scarred with wires snaking to the floor, everything was in shreds.
As he surveyed the ruin, the gentleman appeared out of nowhere. The writer bowed his head in shame and humiliation. “I don’t know what to say, what got into me.”
“There’s no need to say anything.”
“But I’ve ruin this place.”
“It can all be restored have no doubt.”
“But?”
“No buts about it.” The gentleman put his arm around the writer. “Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening. I have a special surprise for you.”
“After what I’ve done?” The gentleman said nothing but walked away in a cape of cigar smoke.
That evening the gentleman drove over to the writer’s home, then they both strolled across the rising turf until the mansion appears on the horizon as if a beatific vision with the fading sun framing it in radiant burgundy. “That is awesome,” said the writer, “truly awesome.” The gentleman whispered, “Indeed.”
As they walked up the long driveway, the writer noticed a large flatbed truck with black tarpaulin covering a massive object. Once they reach the truck, the writer lifted one of the tarp's flaps and saw what threw a shock into him. “This looks like a cage.”
“It could be considered as such,” said the gentleman.
“But what is it doing here?”
“Let us leave that for after dinner. A crew will be setting it up while we enjoy our meal.” The writer now noticed a crew of at least thirty men in coveralls standing near a giant rig, and four trucks with no labeling but which appeared to be furniture haulers or moving vans.
After dinner, they retired into the study where the gentleman had an aperitif and the writer a coffee. If I didn’t know better, he thought, I’d think the gentleman was stalling, first for having such an early dinner, and then this boring ritual of after dinner formalities. He could never understand rich people and their constant dalliance. Take this gentleman. With all his composure, he has nothing to say about art, music, literature, or science, only business, and nothing is more boring to me than business. “I’m ready for a bit of exercise,” the gentleman said finally, lighting his fourth cigar in the writer’s presence, “how about you?”
“Yes,” the writer said wishing to escape the cloying aroma of the cigar for fresh air. They walked into the garden while the gentleman explained why the bronze sentinels were standing at attention around each fountain. “It is perhaps whimsical of me, but I find my silent sentinels consoling, don’t you know?” The writer said nothing.
Thinking they were walking aimlessly, the writer was at first confused when he thought he saw on the horizon the outline of the tip of a giant helmet. It was no mistake. It was a helmet that grew more prominent and visible as they approached. “My God,” he said, “it is magnificent!” Shining in the early evening light was this remarkable helmet about fourteen feet high with gleaming bars in the fading sun like the discarded helmet of a giant Praetorian Guard.
The gentleman asked, “What do you think of it?”
The writer’s heart was racing. He didn’t know what to think. It was fascinating beyond belief. The hair on the back of his head quivered to attention. He found himself walking into the helmet, a space of twenty by fifteen feet, but with all the amenities that were so precious to him including his computer, his library which reached high above his head on three walls, and all the incidentals with which he identified his person.
The helmet was a cage furnished with a comfortable bed, reading lamp, a sofa, reclining chair, desk, kitchen table and chair, a television, computer, a printer, and an armoire. It also had a shower and commode, heater and air conditioner, and state-of-the-arts sound system with a complete collection of his symphonic records and favorite operas, along with a library of CDs and DVDs that he had always dreamed of having but could never afford. Thousands of books were organized just as he had had them organized in his modest home back on the continent.
How could they know? The thought left his head as soon as it arrived. He noticed on the fourth wall a small window that gave him a limited view of the sea, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t much into nature anyway. His world was that of ideas. He found his chest swelling with excitement like a psychosexual thrill, and was embarrassed at the thought. What is happening to me? “I like this place,” he blurted out, “is this mine?”
“If you would have it be.”
“Could I live here?”
“If you like.”
“Let me think about it.” So they left with the door wide open.
The next morning as the sun was coming up the writer rushed to the mansion, climbed up the stairs to the gentleman’s bedroom, and pounded on the door. The sleepy gentleman looked at his clock. It was 5:30 a.m. He put on his robe, opened the door and saw the wild-eyed writer practically foaming at the mouth in excitement. “I want to live there. I want to live in my new home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“Excuse me while I dress,” said the gentleman. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No, but I could have breakfast there, could I not?”
“Indeed, I’ll make arrangements.”
So, the kitchen staff served breakfast there in elegant fashion bringing in a separate chair for the gentleman. When breakfast was completed, and the gentleman was about to leave the writer’s new home, he said, “There are certain rules to this residence.”
“Like what?”
“You will be able to write to your heart’s content, but not to publish a word. You will be able to listen to any kind of music you desire, but watch only select television mainly old movies even pornographic if you like and no one will interrupt your pleasure. You have the most sophisticated computer and software, but no access to the Internet. There is one other condition,” the gentleman paused. “Once we close this door, you shall remain here the rest of your life, is that clear?”
“Yes, yes, yes, now leave me alone.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve been unhappy all of my life wherever I’ve been, men have never listened to me and I’m fed up with them, and life, so why not, I’m dead already anyway, okay? So, close the door and get on about your business.”
“You’re sure this is what you want?”
Impatiently, his voice a strident cry, the writer said, “How can I make myself any clearer?” He pushed the gentleman out and as he did so, he said, “I want to rest, read my books, write a little, and enjoy my new life. Please,” he pleaded as he closed the door.
Within a fortnight, he told the manservant when he brought his breakfast that he had had a change of heart. He would like to return to his first home on the estate, and if that was not possible, to his old position at the corporation. The manservant did not speak, but dropped his eyes in understanding as he left the cage.
Thereafter, meals were no longer brought by anyone but slid through a mechanized slot that the writer had not realized was there before. As the days turned into months, and the wind whistled through the trees and passed over the rocky cliffs to the sea, his wailing blended with the wind into a chilling harmony of inanimate sighs, until one day it stopped. On that same day, the wind stopped, too, as if it understood that life’s torment was over for the writer.
The flatbed truck returned, removed the cage into its sanctuary at far side of this oasis, waiting its next candidate, which the corporation said had not yet been selected as there were several candidates being considered.
EXTREME UNCTION, WHEN YOU GO FROM BAD TO WORSE
I thought of this story when I listened to Harry Markopolos testify on Capitol Hill last Wednesday (February 4, 2009) regarding the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. I was surprised the network television news that evening gave Markopolos’s testimony short shrift and that included PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” only the BBC gave substantial coverage to this private investigator’s remarks.
In print, this investigator has been described as a “geek” and a product of “central casting,” as the attention has been directed to his persona and not to the nine years of careful and accurate reporting that Madoff was dirty, and running a Ponzi scheme.
This whistle blower claims that when he first reported Madoff’s activity to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2000 the investment banker had only bilked his clients of about $3 – 7 billion. Later, reports to the SEC were made when it climbed to $10 billion, then $20 billion, and finally to $50 billion.
Unfortunately, each time he delivered his findings to the SEC he did so without signing his name. He contributed further to his incredulity by doing his investigations in cloak and dagger style accepting no compensation, claiming to have done it “for the flag.” He understood the math, and the intricacies of these transactions, as he once had been a hedge fund manager, but diminished his credibility by appearing something of a flake.
He reported on Capitol Hill, “I don’t know if it was ignorance, incompetence or fear of the clout of Madoff, or a combination of these that kept the SEC from investigating him.” Markopolos suggested Madoff had free reign to do his dirty work with too many powerful people in influential positions on his side that the SEC decided to look the other way, and hope for the best.
Whatever label you prefer, Markopolos has exposed another form of cage, another example of the dark side. Here in the Tampa Bay area an investment consultant has bilked investor out of $50 million; the credit manager of the Tampa Tribune used his job to steal more than a $1 million from the newspaper’s advertisers, and so it goes.
These things, which are on going, seem only to show up when times are bad. An economic recession is a kind of death, and exposes the bad and ugly in societal behavior, which is constantly festering under the surface in good times, but no one pays attention except isolated individuals such as Markopolos.
The corporation didn’t pay attention with the writer in the story, which is fiction, and the SEC didn’t pay attention with this financial investigator, which is not fiction.
In the Catholic religion, the last rites are called “Extreme Unction.” The soul is given its last absolution before it tarries from its earthly confines. In a way, our society operates in a similar fashion, only it doesn’t absolve or resolve, but buries its deceptions and builds edifices over them.
Society’s dark side is its sin for which there is no absolution as it is not only tolerated but also cultivated, why else would it flourish so? My wonder is if this will ever change. I doubt it. That is why there are writers writing about the dark side and will continue until the end of time.
Writers on the light side entertain us; help us forget about our darkness, the darkness that possesses us all, and the darkness that ultimately destroys us. It destroyed Rome, also the empires of the Dutch, British, Spanish, French, Austrians, and Greeks, it is destroying the Roman Catholic Church, and even Islam as it is about to reach new prominence. Will it ever change? Will human beings ever come to their senses?
I am a writer from the dark side and I’m not privy to such intelligence, but I have my suspicions.
* * * * * *
Thursday, February 05, 2009
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD), A HIT IT DIDN'T NEED!
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD), A HIT IT DIDN’T NEED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 4, 2009
“Refined policy has ever been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman
* * * * * *
I was disappointed when former Senator Tom Daschle decided not to seek confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary. I was confident he would do a good job. It may surprise you, however, I was more disappointed when Nancy Killefer withdrew her name from nomination as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the new post of Federal Chief Performance Officer.
The performance post President Obama has created is an OD position. It is possibly the highest profile OD has ever enjoyed in its brief history. What theatre and what a platform for OD to display its smorgasbord of disciplines: science, art, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy.
Killefer is a high profile consultant with McKinsey & Associates. My best friend in South Africa, an American with McKinsey, specialized in industrial engineering, which is closely related to OD. So, I have some appreciation of the quality of the firm’s people.
The reason for Killefer to drop out was the fact that she faced a $946 lien in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.
Daschle’s withdrawal came after escalating criticism from watchdog groups, Senate colleagues, and the general public. He had failed to pay what became $146,000 in back taxes, largely for accepting the use of a car and driver donated to him by a private-equity firm that he served as a consultant.
That service was valued at $255,000 over three years. In the recent past, he has received more than $200,000 in after dinner speeches varying from $15,000 to $50,000 per appearance. In fact, in the past two years, Daschle has leveraged his former role as Senate Majority Leader into $5 million, including providing policy advice to corporate clients, one of which was a health insurance giant. He never registered as a lobbyist but for all intent and purpose he was such an animal. As health czar, he would, indeed, be regulating clients who had made him a rich man.
The irony is that he would most likely still have been confirmed even given his egregious breach of good sense, but for Nancy Killefer’s withdrawal for a $1,000 snafu.
Before you become judgmental about these folks, I can tell you from personal experience it would be easy to be complicit in such affairs. When I was in South Africa, our subsidiary wanted me to stay beyond my assignment, and offered to duplicate my salary without reporting it, and to build me a luxurious home, again without paying for it. I said “no” in both cases, but I can understand how someone might say “yes.”
It is my hope that President Obama does replace Ms. Killefer with an equally qualified OD or Performance Specialist. She would have been able to assess the people and the culture in terms of efficacy. Whatever deficiencies she might uncover, she could organize training, alternate processes, or develop strategies that would complement strengths and compensate for weaknesses. She could calibrate the culture in terms of requirements and performance by blind electronic surveys, unobtrusive observation, counseling, coaching, creating indices to measure what is expected to what is achieved, developing personality, geographic and demographic profiles, reviewing individual and group histories now against previous careers.
In a sense, her work could be an assessment center process gauging the handling of complexities, pressures, surprises and quick turnarounds. Morale is a group norm; motivation is an individual norm. She would apprise these and be alert to changes, as both are relevant to work.
The same goes for team building. Team building is good for creating a climate of consensus, communication and cooperation, but it is not known for its creativity. Then again, some people work better alone than in brainstorming activities. She would note this and act accordingly. Statistics would be important to her as she charts progress towards performance goals and the president’s agenda.
To give you a deeper appreciation of the power of OD, permit me to discuss one of my cases.
A major program at Honeywell Avionics was derailing and I was called in to investigate a brouhaha that ensued. A systems analyst had been reduced in grade, denied a merit increase and put on notice by his supervisor.
The reason? He never seemed to talk to anyone, just sat in his cubicle, smoking cigarettes, tapping his pencil on his desk, and humming, constantly humming. This was all in the performance appraisal report. “I haven’t seen him do a lick of work since I’ve been over here,” was the way the supervisor put it. He didn’t like the guy, thought he was a slacker, and decided to put him in his place. “Maybe he’ll get the message now!”
What the supervisor didn’t anticipate is that the whole program stopped. The engineers, program specialists, planners, administrators and the other systems analysts had a sit down, and threatened to leave.
They considered this was a serious breach of fairness. They saw the supervisor making an example of someone who didn’t deserve it.
In a preliminary conversation with the supervisor, I found he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what systems analysts did, or their role in this most engineering sensitive program.
Systems analysts are primarily mathematicians and key to engineering programs. Although an engineer himself, the supervisor had acted as a staff engineer most of his career with little empathetic understanding for this elite group. He confessed they made him edgy, especially the one he singled out, going by his desk every day and seeing him goofing off as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Without further investigation, the supervisor decided the systems analyst wasn't contributing when, in fact, he was considered the brains of the group. Interviewing his colleagues separately, they confessed to me that they all fed off him. They knew it, didn’t dispute it, and reluctantly admitted it because it would put each of them in a lesser light.
Once the ruckus took over, worked stopped, and I started asking questions, the systems analysts as a group decided they had no choice but to admit their colleague was key to everything. Having discovered that, with the supervisor humiliated by the work stoppage, it was soon apparent the supervisor was not a bad person, he simply didn’t understand his people.
My next task was to persuade one of the systems analysts to become the supervisor -- all of them initially rejected the idea -- and to place the current supervisor in a comparable position where it would be a better fit. The latter was relatively easy to do the former seemed near impossible.
I confirmed one of the supervisor’s claims and that was that the systems analysts were prima donnas. They loved their work, loved the fact that no one else understood what they were doing, loved their independence, loved their critical role in the scheme of things, and being essentially a law unto themselves.
None of them had great social skills, and seemed to take a quiet pride in the fact. I had them write out their take on the incident, only to discover they couldn't express themselves well in words, either literally, conceptually, grammatically or spelling wise. That surprised me. Their basic language and competence was in mathematics and that was apparently good enough for them.
Going to lunch with the ultimate prima donna, who drove a Porsche convertible, where I learned he had a girlfriend half his age, and a seven-year-old daughter with serious medical problems, whom he was rearing her on his own, I couldn’t help but think how beneficial it might have been if the supervisor were here instead of me.
For the better part of two hours, I listened to his struggle to get an education, his love of math since a kid, his scheming to get grants to complete his Ph.D., his attempt to be an academic where his social skills practically road him out of town, and then finally landing with Honeywell, first on the West Coast, and then in Clearwater, where he liked the work, the weather, and where he felt comfortable with other misfits like him.
It occurred to me listening to him that it was his time to be a leader, and so I told him so. At first, in the middle of his soliloquy, I wanted to say it was his time to grow up, but am glad I didn’t. If I had not listened to his complete story – two hours for lunch is not normally acceptable – if I had said “grow up,” I’m sure I would have been back to square one, but I didn’t.
His face flashed a smile at the idea of “leader,” something that appealed to him and something, perhaps, that rolled around in the back of his mind. I’ve often found truly intelligent people think they have competencies in areas they have absolutely no expertise at all simply because they are intelligent.
I told him I would work with him, and I could tell he didn’t find it necessary, and so changed it a bit and said, “Let me buy you lunch every other week and meet like this,” which we did.
It was good that we did because he was at first more draconian than the former supervisor desiring the same perfection in people as he expected in his algorithms. Gradually, he backed off and gained the rapport necessary with the group with things getting back on track. The program, which was a contract proposal, came in on time and under budget.
The systems analysts who had been demoted was restored to grade, got his merit increase, and happened to be a buddy of the new supervisor, all of which melted into the success.
In OD, often the story line of the successful effort is counterintuitive, and this was no exception. All the indicators were that Porsche Man would be a terrible choice for supervisor, his being so full of himself.
But listening to him talk about his child, about the medical expenses, the times he didn’t know she would make it, the sacrifices he made at all costs, including his job and his career, and the look in his eyes, told me he hid the loving side of his nature, the tolerant side, the understanding side, the patient side, the accepting side, for his child, alone.
That meant that it was part of him. My job was not to put something in him that wasn’t there – I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to -- but to encourage him to use what was there in a more wide-reaching sense. He became an excellent supervisor.
I mention this case history because that’s the kind of problems a Performance Specialist is likely to encounter. A workplace is a system, and a systems approach is necessary to make it holistic and purposeful in order to hit on all cylinders. But herein lies a riddle wrapped around an enigma. To control the system, you don’t impose your will on the work but find a way of getting the collective will working. Systems researcher Russell Ackoff expressed this poetically and counterintuitively:
“If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be certain. The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now that is counterintuitive in Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking. The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.”
OD understands this and it is why it opposes having one department competing against another, or one individual competing and comparing him or herself to another. It is why I have written two books due out later this year on a marriage of “Creative Selling” and “Confident Thinking,” which are very much in line with this theme.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 4, 2009
“Refined policy has ever been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman
* * * * * *
I was disappointed when former Senator Tom Daschle decided not to seek confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary. I was confident he would do a good job. It may surprise you, however, I was more disappointed when Nancy Killefer withdrew her name from nomination as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the new post of Federal Chief Performance Officer.
The performance post President Obama has created is an OD position. It is possibly the highest profile OD has ever enjoyed in its brief history. What theatre and what a platform for OD to display its smorgasbord of disciplines: science, art, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy.
Killefer is a high profile consultant with McKinsey & Associates. My best friend in South Africa, an American with McKinsey, specialized in industrial engineering, which is closely related to OD. So, I have some appreciation of the quality of the firm’s people.
The reason for Killefer to drop out was the fact that she faced a $946 lien in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.
Daschle’s withdrawal came after escalating criticism from watchdog groups, Senate colleagues, and the general public. He had failed to pay what became $146,000 in back taxes, largely for accepting the use of a car and driver donated to him by a private-equity firm that he served as a consultant.
That service was valued at $255,000 over three years. In the recent past, he has received more than $200,000 in after dinner speeches varying from $15,000 to $50,000 per appearance. In fact, in the past two years, Daschle has leveraged his former role as Senate Majority Leader into $5 million, including providing policy advice to corporate clients, one of which was a health insurance giant. He never registered as a lobbyist but for all intent and purpose he was such an animal. As health czar, he would, indeed, be regulating clients who had made him a rich man.
The irony is that he would most likely still have been confirmed even given his egregious breach of good sense, but for Nancy Killefer’s withdrawal for a $1,000 snafu.
Before you become judgmental about these folks, I can tell you from personal experience it would be easy to be complicit in such affairs. When I was in South Africa, our subsidiary wanted me to stay beyond my assignment, and offered to duplicate my salary without reporting it, and to build me a luxurious home, again without paying for it. I said “no” in both cases, but I can understand how someone might say “yes.”
It is my hope that President Obama does replace Ms. Killefer with an equally qualified OD or Performance Specialist. She would have been able to assess the people and the culture in terms of efficacy. Whatever deficiencies she might uncover, she could organize training, alternate processes, or develop strategies that would complement strengths and compensate for weaknesses. She could calibrate the culture in terms of requirements and performance by blind electronic surveys, unobtrusive observation, counseling, coaching, creating indices to measure what is expected to what is achieved, developing personality, geographic and demographic profiles, reviewing individual and group histories now against previous careers.
In a sense, her work could be an assessment center process gauging the handling of complexities, pressures, surprises and quick turnarounds. Morale is a group norm; motivation is an individual norm. She would apprise these and be alert to changes, as both are relevant to work.
The same goes for team building. Team building is good for creating a climate of consensus, communication and cooperation, but it is not known for its creativity. Then again, some people work better alone than in brainstorming activities. She would note this and act accordingly. Statistics would be important to her as she charts progress towards performance goals and the president’s agenda.
To give you a deeper appreciation of the power of OD, permit me to discuss one of my cases.
A major program at Honeywell Avionics was derailing and I was called in to investigate a brouhaha that ensued. A systems analyst had been reduced in grade, denied a merit increase and put on notice by his supervisor.
The reason? He never seemed to talk to anyone, just sat in his cubicle, smoking cigarettes, tapping his pencil on his desk, and humming, constantly humming. This was all in the performance appraisal report. “I haven’t seen him do a lick of work since I’ve been over here,” was the way the supervisor put it. He didn’t like the guy, thought he was a slacker, and decided to put him in his place. “Maybe he’ll get the message now!”
What the supervisor didn’t anticipate is that the whole program stopped. The engineers, program specialists, planners, administrators and the other systems analysts had a sit down, and threatened to leave.
They considered this was a serious breach of fairness. They saw the supervisor making an example of someone who didn’t deserve it.
In a preliminary conversation with the supervisor, I found he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what systems analysts did, or their role in this most engineering sensitive program.
Systems analysts are primarily mathematicians and key to engineering programs. Although an engineer himself, the supervisor had acted as a staff engineer most of his career with little empathetic understanding for this elite group. He confessed they made him edgy, especially the one he singled out, going by his desk every day and seeing him goofing off as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Without further investigation, the supervisor decided the systems analyst wasn't contributing when, in fact, he was considered the brains of the group. Interviewing his colleagues separately, they confessed to me that they all fed off him. They knew it, didn’t dispute it, and reluctantly admitted it because it would put each of them in a lesser light.
Once the ruckus took over, worked stopped, and I started asking questions, the systems analysts as a group decided they had no choice but to admit their colleague was key to everything. Having discovered that, with the supervisor humiliated by the work stoppage, it was soon apparent the supervisor was not a bad person, he simply didn’t understand his people.
My next task was to persuade one of the systems analysts to become the supervisor -- all of them initially rejected the idea -- and to place the current supervisor in a comparable position where it would be a better fit. The latter was relatively easy to do the former seemed near impossible.
I confirmed one of the supervisor’s claims and that was that the systems analysts were prima donnas. They loved their work, loved the fact that no one else understood what they were doing, loved their independence, loved their critical role in the scheme of things, and being essentially a law unto themselves.
None of them had great social skills, and seemed to take a quiet pride in the fact. I had them write out their take on the incident, only to discover they couldn't express themselves well in words, either literally, conceptually, grammatically or spelling wise. That surprised me. Their basic language and competence was in mathematics and that was apparently good enough for them.
Going to lunch with the ultimate prima donna, who drove a Porsche convertible, where I learned he had a girlfriend half his age, and a seven-year-old daughter with serious medical problems, whom he was rearing her on his own, I couldn’t help but think how beneficial it might have been if the supervisor were here instead of me.
For the better part of two hours, I listened to his struggle to get an education, his love of math since a kid, his scheming to get grants to complete his Ph.D., his attempt to be an academic where his social skills practically road him out of town, and then finally landing with Honeywell, first on the West Coast, and then in Clearwater, where he liked the work, the weather, and where he felt comfortable with other misfits like him.
It occurred to me listening to him that it was his time to be a leader, and so I told him so. At first, in the middle of his soliloquy, I wanted to say it was his time to grow up, but am glad I didn’t. If I had not listened to his complete story – two hours for lunch is not normally acceptable – if I had said “grow up,” I’m sure I would have been back to square one, but I didn’t.
His face flashed a smile at the idea of “leader,” something that appealed to him and something, perhaps, that rolled around in the back of his mind. I’ve often found truly intelligent people think they have competencies in areas they have absolutely no expertise at all simply because they are intelligent.
I told him I would work with him, and I could tell he didn’t find it necessary, and so changed it a bit and said, “Let me buy you lunch every other week and meet like this,” which we did.
It was good that we did because he was at first more draconian than the former supervisor desiring the same perfection in people as he expected in his algorithms. Gradually, he backed off and gained the rapport necessary with the group with things getting back on track. The program, which was a contract proposal, came in on time and under budget.
The systems analysts who had been demoted was restored to grade, got his merit increase, and happened to be a buddy of the new supervisor, all of which melted into the success.
In OD, often the story line of the successful effort is counterintuitive, and this was no exception. All the indicators were that Porsche Man would be a terrible choice for supervisor, his being so full of himself.
But listening to him talk about his child, about the medical expenses, the times he didn’t know she would make it, the sacrifices he made at all costs, including his job and his career, and the look in his eyes, told me he hid the loving side of his nature, the tolerant side, the understanding side, the patient side, the accepting side, for his child, alone.
That meant that it was part of him. My job was not to put something in him that wasn’t there – I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to -- but to encourage him to use what was there in a more wide-reaching sense. He became an excellent supervisor.
I mention this case history because that’s the kind of problems a Performance Specialist is likely to encounter. A workplace is a system, and a systems approach is necessary to make it holistic and purposeful in order to hit on all cylinders. But herein lies a riddle wrapped around an enigma. To control the system, you don’t impose your will on the work but find a way of getting the collective will working. Systems researcher Russell Ackoff expressed this poetically and counterintuitively:
“If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be certain. The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now that is counterintuitive in Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking. The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.”
OD understands this and it is why it opposes having one department competing against another, or one individual competing and comparing him or herself to another. It is why I have written two books due out later this year on a marriage of “Creative Selling” and “Confident Thinking,” which are very much in line with this theme.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
MAN IN THE MIDDLE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 3, 2009
“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.”
Ben Franklin
* * * * * *
I have listened to the pundits; I have listened to the scholars; I have listened to corporate executives; I have listened to bankers; I have listened to journalist, and I have read many of them as well, but I have been waiting, it would be too dramatic to say, desperately, for someone to step outside the box and look at the current economic problem other than in the conventional manner.
Imagine you are an ordinary consumer in everyday life, and for years, perhaps all of your life, you have been told you’re a reckless and self-indulgent spendthrift and materialistic to a fault. You don’t save; you don’t treat your possessions with care; and as Vance Packard charged, you’re a waste maker. You’d rather buy a new car than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new television set than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new refrigerator and stove, washer and dryer than fix the old ones. You rather spend $20,000 remodeling your kitchen than acclimating yourself to the old one. You are obsessed, we are told, with spending, spending gratuitously, automatically and impulsively. Christopher Lasch attempted to get our attention by impertinently suggesting consuming was our therapy, but it didn’t slow us down.
So, the moment there is a downturn in the economy, and the value of our stocks plummets; the value of our real estate plummets; the value of all our material possessions plummets; gas prices increase; utilities increase; the packages in the supermarket grow smaller but the prices stay the same; the price of life, medical, and homeowner insurance increases; and on and on, we consumers, who have always been labeled out of control, show a little prudence, and we discover we’re still the bad guys. Missed is that we have always been discriminating spenders only it was based on desire not necessarily need.
Now, in this downturn when we’re finally saving, it is our fault not only that the American economy is deep in recession but the whole global economy. We are reminded that two-thirds of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States depends on us not saving a penny and spending every last dime. We have been patriotically living paycheck to paycheck, mortgaging our home beyond what we can afford, buying automobiles beyond our budget to maintain, maximizing our credit cards by eating out continuously, refurnishing our wardrobe and home with clothes and furniture we don’t need but are tired of what we have.
It doesn’t stop there. We have been faithfully spending buckets of cash on films, sporting events, concerts, and all the products celebrities generate from these activities so as to identify ourselves with them. This celebrity worship has not dried up but prudence has entered the equation.
We have been programmed in our culture to be conformist, polite, submissive, reactive, and we have been. Now, the moment we show a few stones, a little courage, a little more self-interest, the world collapses around us like a shroud. It is our fault; we have done it. But have we?
We have seen bailouts of the big banks, the big commercial and investment institutions, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Max, and none of this has stopped the leak in the damn. But it is still our fault. We shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be duped by the subprime lenders; we shouldn’t have been so obliging when we were hit with subliminal stimuli to buy, buy, and buy. We should have been more self-reliant, self-directed, showing initiative, keeping our house in order. But we were behaving precisely as we had been programmed to behave.
Now, when we are attempting to deprogram ourselves from such passivity, we’re again the bad guys. Whether spending or saving, coming or going, we can’t win for losing. We’re always in the eye of the storm. Just now, when we finally have a situation, which shows we have a chance to get beyond our dependent programming, the attention is elsewhere, chasing symptoms.
We are ready for reprogramming to greater self-management, self-direction, self-reliance, self-control, self-initiative and being proactive. We are ready to grow up, to take charge, and act adult instead of remaining terminally suspended in adolescence counter dependent on our employers, the government and society. But apparently our leaders are not.
We are all in this mess because we have always attempted to solve our problems with the same thinking that got us into the mess. Nothing has changed in that regard. Nothing.
Our spirits as workers and consumers were not broken in 2006, 2007, or 2008; our spirits were broken forty years ago when Corporate America panicked.
It saw Japan, Inc. and South East Asia taking away US venerated markets in automobiles, appliances, steel and other hardware. Corporate America thought it could motivate us as workers and consumers by more entitlements, more free time, and changing the workplace into a playpen. We were expected to say, “Gee whiz, thanks, I’ll show my appreciation by working harder, smarter and more effectively so you’ll be proud of me.” Didn’t happen.
The workplace became a Love Boat and Recreation Center. Work went from the culture of comfort and management dependent to the culture of complacency with a counter dependence on the company for the worker’s well being. We accepted sick leave as a right and took every day; we accepted the ninety percent life and health insurance benefit as a right or as untaxed income; we took the liberal conditions in the workplace to use the facilities as an extension of our private life, using company time and property to do personal business, failing to see these benefits as the privileges they were. No one paid attention. It is remarkable on unwise Corporate America insists in being, the present crisis no exception.
We have had several bumps in the road since the late 1950s, always reacting never anticipating situations, and constantly failing to learn our way is the wrong way. There was Sputnik (1957), then in the 1960s, three Americans: Peter Ducker, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran who couldn’t interest Detroit in their organizational designs, set up statistical quality control and total quality management in Japan. It was to make Japan the envy of the world in Quality.
The 1970s saw double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the OPEC Embargo, and still little changed.
It took Tom Brokaw of NBC television in 1980 to ask, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Pandemonium followed. Deming and Juran had created Quality Control Circles (QCC) where employees were involved in solving quality problems. Americans were buying Japan because it was of superior quality. Now Corporate America rushed to duplicate the Japanese miracle.
The only problem is that Japan is a group culture, the US and individual culture. Japan large industry was only 20 percent of its industry, 90 percent of these employees was blue-collar. Already, in the 1980s, seventy-five percent of American workers were professionals, and less than twenty-five percent blue-collar. Blue-collar workers were used to taking orders and responded to the cosmetic changes of QCC, professionals thought of themselves as part of management and resisted. I know as I directed the largest QCC Program in the nation in the early 1980s with 1,000 blue-collar and 3,000 professionals at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
I’ve written scores of articles and eight books on the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and management. We have atavistic management and anachronistic programming for workers and managers alike. As matters now stand, American workers are not great, the president notwithstanding. They are not programmed to be great. They are programmed to wait for iconic leadership to appear to miraculously bail them out of their doldrums. That is old school and it won’t wash now or in the future.
Recent behavior of Americans indicates a sense that the shackles of traditional programming are fragmenting. This does not mean they are buoyed by hope but by a new courage. Hope is passive courage is active. This is a good sign. A bad sign is Wall Street’s justification for the $18 billion bonuses of taxpayer’s money handed out in December 2008 with the malarkey, “we need these people and if we don’t pay them they’ll go somewhere else.” There is something wrong when the real economy produces things and the financial economy makes money from money and produces nothing but holds all the cards and gets all the attention. I said my piece on my walk today, and I’ll leave it at that.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Tampa, FL 33617
Cell Phone: (813) 990 –7472
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Books: Confident Selling (1970); Work Without Managers (1990), Confident Selling for the 90s (1992), The Worker, Alone! (1995), The Taboo Against Being Our Own Best Friend (1996), Six Silent Killers (1998), Corporate Sin (2000), In the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003), A Look Back To See Ahead (2007).
MAN IN THE MIDDLE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 3, 2009
“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.”
Ben Franklin
* * * * * *
I have listened to the pundits; I have listened to the scholars; I have listened to corporate executives; I have listened to bankers; I have listened to journalist, and I have read many of them as well, but I have been waiting, it would be too dramatic to say, desperately, for someone to step outside the box and look at the current economic problem other than in the conventional manner.
Imagine you are an ordinary consumer in everyday life, and for years, perhaps all of your life, you have been told you’re a reckless and self-indulgent spendthrift and materialistic to a fault. You don’t save; you don’t treat your possessions with care; and as Vance Packard charged, you’re a waste maker. You’d rather buy a new car than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new television set than fix the old one; you’d rather buy a new refrigerator and stove, washer and dryer than fix the old ones. You rather spend $20,000 remodeling your kitchen than acclimating yourself to the old one. You are obsessed, we are told, with spending, spending gratuitously, automatically and impulsively. Christopher Lasch attempted to get our attention by impertinently suggesting consuming was our therapy, but it didn’t slow us down.
So, the moment there is a downturn in the economy, and the value of our stocks plummets; the value of our real estate plummets; the value of all our material possessions plummets; gas prices increase; utilities increase; the packages in the supermarket grow smaller but the prices stay the same; the price of life, medical, and homeowner insurance increases; and on and on, we consumers, who have always been labeled out of control, show a little prudence, and we discover we’re still the bad guys. Missed is that we have always been discriminating spenders only it was based on desire not necessarily need.
Now, in this downturn when we’re finally saving, it is our fault not only that the American economy is deep in recession but the whole global economy. We are reminded that two-thirds of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States depends on us not saving a penny and spending every last dime. We have been patriotically living paycheck to paycheck, mortgaging our home beyond what we can afford, buying automobiles beyond our budget to maintain, maximizing our credit cards by eating out continuously, refurnishing our wardrobe and home with clothes and furniture we don’t need but are tired of what we have.
It doesn’t stop there. We have been faithfully spending buckets of cash on films, sporting events, concerts, and all the products celebrities generate from these activities so as to identify ourselves with them. This celebrity worship has not dried up but prudence has entered the equation.
We have been programmed in our culture to be conformist, polite, submissive, reactive, and we have been. Now, the moment we show a few stones, a little courage, a little more self-interest, the world collapses around us like a shroud. It is our fault; we have done it. But have we?
We have seen bailouts of the big banks, the big commercial and investment institutions, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Max, and none of this has stopped the leak in the damn. But it is still our fault. We shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be duped by the subprime lenders; we shouldn’t have been so obliging when we were hit with subliminal stimuli to buy, buy, and buy. We should have been more self-reliant, self-directed, showing initiative, keeping our house in order. But we were behaving precisely as we had been programmed to behave.
Now, when we are attempting to deprogram ourselves from such passivity, we’re again the bad guys. Whether spending or saving, coming or going, we can’t win for losing. We’re always in the eye of the storm. Just now, when we finally have a situation, which shows we have a chance to get beyond our dependent programming, the attention is elsewhere, chasing symptoms.
We are ready for reprogramming to greater self-management, self-direction, self-reliance, self-control, self-initiative and being proactive. We are ready to grow up, to take charge, and act adult instead of remaining terminally suspended in adolescence counter dependent on our employers, the government and society. But apparently our leaders are not.
We are all in this mess because we have always attempted to solve our problems with the same thinking that got us into the mess. Nothing has changed in that regard. Nothing.
Our spirits as workers and consumers were not broken in 2006, 2007, or 2008; our spirits were broken forty years ago when Corporate America panicked.
It saw Japan, Inc. and South East Asia taking away US venerated markets in automobiles, appliances, steel and other hardware. Corporate America thought it could motivate us as workers and consumers by more entitlements, more free time, and changing the workplace into a playpen. We were expected to say, “Gee whiz, thanks, I’ll show my appreciation by working harder, smarter and more effectively so you’ll be proud of me.” Didn’t happen.
The workplace became a Love Boat and Recreation Center. Work went from the culture of comfort and management dependent to the culture of complacency with a counter dependence on the company for the worker’s well being. We accepted sick leave as a right and took every day; we accepted the ninety percent life and health insurance benefit as a right or as untaxed income; we took the liberal conditions in the workplace to use the facilities as an extension of our private life, using company time and property to do personal business, failing to see these benefits as the privileges they were. No one paid attention. It is remarkable on unwise Corporate America insists in being, the present crisis no exception.
We have had several bumps in the road since the late 1950s, always reacting never anticipating situations, and constantly failing to learn our way is the wrong way. There was Sputnik (1957), then in the 1960s, three Americans: Peter Ducker, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran who couldn’t interest Detroit in their organizational designs, set up statistical quality control and total quality management in Japan. It was to make Japan the envy of the world in Quality.
The 1970s saw double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the OPEC Embargo, and still little changed.
It took Tom Brokaw of NBC television in 1980 to ask, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” Pandemonium followed. Deming and Juran had created Quality Control Circles (QCC) where employees were involved in solving quality problems. Americans were buying Japan because it was of superior quality. Now Corporate America rushed to duplicate the Japanese miracle.
The only problem is that Japan is a group culture, the US and individual culture. Japan large industry was only 20 percent of its industry, 90 percent of these employees was blue-collar. Already, in the 1980s, seventy-five percent of American workers were professionals, and less than twenty-five percent blue-collar. Blue-collar workers were used to taking orders and responded to the cosmetic changes of QCC, professionals thought of themselves as part of management and resisted. I know as I directed the largest QCC Program in the nation in the early 1980s with 1,000 blue-collar and 3,000 professionals at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
I’ve written scores of articles and eight books on the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and management. We have atavistic management and anachronistic programming for workers and managers alike. As matters now stand, American workers are not great, the president notwithstanding. They are not programmed to be great. They are programmed to wait for iconic leadership to appear to miraculously bail them out of their doldrums. That is old school and it won’t wash now or in the future.
Recent behavior of Americans indicates a sense that the shackles of traditional programming are fragmenting. This does not mean they are buoyed by hope but by a new courage. Hope is passive courage is active. This is a good sign. A bad sign is Wall Street’s justification for the $18 billion bonuses of taxpayer’s money handed out in December 2008 with the malarkey, “we need these people and if we don’t pay them they’ll go somewhere else.” There is something wrong when the real economy produces things and the financial economy makes money from money and produces nothing but holds all the cards and gets all the attention. I said my piece on my walk today, and I’ll leave it at that.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Tampa, FL 33617
Cell Phone: (813) 990 –7472
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Books: Confident Selling (1970); Work Without Managers (1990), Confident Selling for the 90s (1992), The Worker, Alone! (1995), The Taboo Against Being Our Own Best Friend (1996), Six Silent Killers (1998), Corporate Sin (2000), In the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003), A Look Back To See Ahead (2007).
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