A Way of Looking at Things: No. 11 – Where have all the Catholics gone?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2001
Sometimes the most prosaic of issues manages to elicit the response, “Citizen, cure thy soul,” with apologies to the apotheosis medical profession (“Physician, cure thyself”), which has custody of this distinguished metaphor because, quite falsely, it assumes to have control over “life and death” issues, when, in truth, each of us has more control over this than we would admit.
We like to look outside ourselves for sanctuary, be it the temple of the “Holy Ghost,” “God,” or other possible answers to the conundrum of life, death, and immortality.
We are slaves to time and conceive it as a measurable construct much like spatial dimensions. But life is not experienced in time but rather as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness, something that can measured, not quantitatively, but only qualitative, not objectively, but subjectively, not cognitively, but intuitively.
Religion is a mark-off state of consciousness. It is a metaphor that is schooled in mystery and treated as historic when, in truth, it is its mythology, which holds a body and soul together. People distinct from each other have the same soul but come to understand and appreciate that soul in a unique style which, again, is shrouded in mystery with “God” having a thousand different faces.
By the accident of my birth, I was born in an Irish Catholic culture. It permeates my soul and is beyond my capacity to change its hold on me. Some thirty years ago, when I felt my religion had lost respect for my struggle, I wrote a book called The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It was a terrible book, and to my eternal relief, never published. It was the cry of a confused man attempting to find catharsis by forming his pain into words. It didn’t work.
Next, I read of my church’s enemies, Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, and the Gnostics. I read on Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, naturalism, and my own Catholicism during its tainted history. I became acquainted with Freud, Jung, Krishnarmurti, Gibran, Nietzsche, and many others. I found they all had more in common than not. Then, again, by the accident of my work, I saw many of these different faces of God up close and personal through my travels and quest for self-understanding.
Religion as mythology, I discovered, has more power to hold us to ourselves and to our beliefs than any dogma, for it is dogma that divides us from sharing a common soul whatever face we put on our God.
In my religion, for instance, the Immaculate Conception is perceived by many Catholics, quite erroneously as it turns out, to relate to the virgin birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ, when actually it is dogma by papal encyclical that states that the Blessed Virgin Mother came into the world without Original Sin on her soul. It matters little that this was declared nearly 2,000 years after the mother of Jesus left this world. Likewise, again by papal encyclical, in a like period of her absence from life, the Holy See created the beautiful imagery as dogma of her bodily Assumption into Heaven. Non-Catholics have great difficulty with such mysteries, but they are truths to Catholics under the pain of Mortal Sin. If this seems extreme, people of other religions hold just as firmly to their mythologies. Mythology is sinew to muscular Christianity as it is to other religions.
This brings me to my first point. Religion was once the center of man’s life whatever face God was given to have. Religion was a way to cope in an insane world. And the world has always been insane. Religion was a way for virtue to triumph over vice, compassion over cruelty, life over death, quality over quantity, generosity over greed, spiritualism over materialism. A small body of religious was given the responsibility to act as sentinel to our souls. When the religious proved as human we all, many of us lost confidence in it.
The religious – in my religion, nuns, priests, and brothers – once carried the burden of virtue. Since they often found vice, cruelty, death, quantity, greed, and materialism more to their liking than its other face, we blamed them for losing our faith. The fact that the religious proved more like than different from the laity made them subject to ridicule and loathing instead of understanding and compassion. Once the religious no longer were given the respect they deserved, they no longer (in many cases) enjoyed the armor of self-respect, leaving them essentially defenseless to deal with life’s temptations and ill prepared to accept ecclesiastical burdens.
What an opportune moment for Papal Authority to enter the fray and demonstrate leadership by asking the questions, why and where: why have we so few priests, nuns, and brothers carrying out the Will of the Church; and where have all the Catholic souls gone? The body count is still high, more than a billion, but where are the souls?
As a layman, I have my thoughts which I form into questions of why and where: why can priests not marry and why can’t women be priests; where are the tenets of faith which show respect for the struggle of contemporary Catholics in an essentially Godless world and where are the souls of Catholics when their bodies attend Mass on Sunday?
It would seem that the church hierarchy has little respect for contemporary man, that is, for man who thinks like an adult and not like a child. What seems apparent is a failure to understand thinking man. Thinking man can accept mythology as doctrine as long as it is not promulgated as historical truth.
Thinking man needs religion as much as ignorant man, perhaps even more. Having contempt for the head does not discover the route to the heart.
In my lifetime, with the exception of Pope John XXIII, there has been little papal leadership other then the hubris and hegemony of dogma, which brings me to my second point.
Again, by the accident of my birth, I was born in the second quarter of the 20th century, a simpler time, a less crowded world, a time when a bomb in a war in which 60 million people lost their lives shattered innocence.
Free will has been tabled replaced by an obsession with time. Everything is reduced to mathematical constructs, which justify cloning, stem cell research, abortion, life without consequences, and living faster and more on the edge with a cell phone in the ear and a laptop on the legs.
Science is the new religion and it is not fairing any better than the old religions. Science would supplant free will and forgive wickedness whatever behavioral form it may choose to take – be it eating and drinking to excess, promiscuity, or any other form of addiction – by creating a miraculous drug for obesity, AIDS, cancer, and other maladies which are chiefly behavioral in context. Life style is killing us, not religion.
Words have lost their magic, too, as the profane has been made sacred, and the sacred profane. It is nigh impossible to see a single film, be it a comedy, romance, mystery, or drama without the constant bombardment of the senses with the non-word-word better known as the “f---“ word. You can hear children using it on the playground, and even clerics and the religious at unguarded moments. It has lost its shock value because shock has been reduced to a drug.
This brings me to my final point. In the face of all this, in a tiny community that is shrinking faster than water evaporates, a small contingent of souls has protested the planned demolition of one of its churches – St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Clinton Iowa.
This small contingent of what one person calls CAVEMEN (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) is looking for leadership, alas, in all the wrong places. It has, by default, assumed that role as it sees five parishes in this community shrinking to one. A mark-off state of consciousness is embodied in these churches with four of the five tagged for demolition, starting with St. Patrick’s.
A quite intelligent person tells me, and I believe rightly, that there are perhaps 100,000 churches in the country, which are more beautiful and could be saved at a great and worthy cost. This is his head speaking. He is missing the character of these troubled hearts. Rational argument is fodder for the head but not necessarily for the heart. These hearts are bleeding and they are not embarrassed to show it.
Has anyone asked why this small contingent puts itself on stage to public scorn, ridicule, contempt and disgust? I think the answer might be quite revealing. Bricks and mortar, stain glass and mahogany, incense and candles are not what St. Patrick’s Catholic Church means to these people. The church is a marked-off state of consciousness, something that mirrors the continuity of their lives in the community, a benchmark on the continuum of their life experience, a symbol of solace, trust and meaning. It was a place they went to light a candle, pray, and feel renewed. As one 74-year-old woman puts it, “We were five parishes, five families with the same Father. Now, the family feeling is gone.” You can discount her sentiment as myopic, but is it?
For the past forty years I have spent my life in the corporation as corporate executive, internal and external corporate consultant. The Germans call this corporate society of ours, “corpocracy,” the American disease (Wirtschaft Woche, January 16, 1987; Work Without Managers, pp. 13 – 15):
The church demonstrates the identical problem to that of Corporate America, which I rephrase here in the ten characteristics of the “American disease” in the context of church authority:
(1) The church is insensitive to its parishioners.
(2) The church supports internal politics at the expense of its spiritual function.
(3) Secretiveness is the measure of communication.
(4) The principal product of divine intervention is paperwork.
(5) Endless meetings are the way to avoid making a decision.
(6) An internal focus is maintained at the expense of accelerating external demands.
(7) Short-term focus is preferred to embracing long-term challenges.
(8) Individual initiative is never supported for you never know where it might lead.
(9) The church has isolated itself from the vicissitudes daily faced by parishioners.
(10)A covert hostility is maintained to innovative thinking while it is overtly praised.
The irony and paradox are that the Catholic hierarchy is proving atavistic and the church anachronistic, as it stubbornly refuses to change. The church coffers everywhere are diminishing because of this, and the church would tear away the only remaining symbolic tether to the faithful in this small community because of economic exigencies. This move is consistent with corporate society’s inane obliteration of 100-year-old companies for short-term advantage, and I trust, with similar long-term consequences. I call this Corporate Sin (2000) in my book whereas Garry Wills calls it Papal Sin (2000) in his. Wills sees a comparable gap between the religious and laity that I have observed between management and professional workers.
The so-called “Cavemen” should take heart in the words of Eric Hoffer:
The exceptional adaptability of the human species is chiefly a peculiarity of its weak. The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear . . . Only when, after a clumsy and wasteful struggle, they have somehow bound and tamed the unknown do their betters move in and take charge. The plunge into the new is often an escape from a familiar pattern that is untenable and unpleasant . . . The role the unfit play in human affairs should make us pause whenever we are prompted to see man as a mere animal and not a being of an order apart (Corporate Sin, p.10).
And what is the new? It is an active laity not afraid of church authority. It is a laity in which humility remains a virtue born of weakness and expressed in strength. I wonder how much humility is possessed by those who fail to see these protesters for what they are, parishioners who feel abandoned, and are clinging to this sliver of hope in a building which they call a church, when in reality it mirrors their souls.
* * * * *
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Friday, March 04, 2005
An Interview: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.'s Views on Leadership
An Interview
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.’s Views on Leadership
AQP Journal Editor
Prepared April 06, 2001
Christina: What roles do today’s manager’s fill? Is it that of leader or is it that of a guide?
Dr. Fisher: It certainly isn’t that of a leader. There is a painful dearth of leadership in society much less management, per se. The role of leadership is the vision to see present and future challenges clearly, and the desire to serve in the interest of rallying people and resources to those challenges. Management has never been programmed to lead and people need to be led. Management has been culturally conditioned to manage things. Managers are good at management people only when people behave as things. Fortunately, for the better part of the 20th century, people behaved as things-to-be-managed. People were polite, obedient, obsequious, reactive, conforming, punctual, and submissive. Their most important job was to show up for work on time. People reacted essentially to external stimuli, as if they had no moral compass or center. The manager was their guidance director. The resultant passivity worked reasonably well in a staid organizational climate where the knowledge base was mainly skewed towards the manager. It fails to work today, however, in an ever-changing work climate where the knowledge base is increasingly in the hands of doers. What is disconcerting is that little reality testing of this power shift is evident with academics, consultants, or operations management, except cosmetically.
Christina: Could you amplify on this?
Dr. Fisher: Management has taken a semantic page from psychology and sociology and created psychobabble to rival both. Language is a code, either spoken or written, that stands for things. Words are not things. “Empowerment,” for example, is a word. The word is not self-actualizing, self-direction, or indeed, a power shift. We have had a plethora of word concepts: “total quality management,” “total employee involvement,” “self-directed work teams,” and so on. Verbal concepts are not the real thing. They are abstractions, which is to say meaningless. Workers know this, which only heightens their skepticism. We should try to keep our language as close to reality as possible.
Christina: You see these interventions as cosmetic?
Dr. Fisher: Most interventions of the past thirty years have been little more than cosmetic attempts to maintain the status quo, but a wink at reducing management’s control, influence, authority, and power. This has proven a myopic strategy. It has resulted in a work force conditioned in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility when initiative and accountability are critical components to survival. Consequently, when management preemptively reverses itself, and gives people their power back, the intended don’t have the slightest notion what to do with it. Management without leadership is now paying for its corporate sins.
Christina: Would it be fair to say, then, from your point of view, that the manager is acting as parent to employees?
Dr. Fisher: Precisely! The manager has unwittingly become the surrogate parent to the worker, the caretaker and caregiver to satisfying basic needs originally provided by parents. I will go even further. I suggest that in the typical organization, either high or low tech, it doesn’t matter, the majority of employees are either management dependent or counterdependent on the company for their total well being. They behave as if still in adolescence with the emotional maturity of obedient twelve-year-olds, or they complain and criticize management as if they have no power to change their situation, when they have most of the power in their knowledge, skills, and competence.
Christina: What then is a manager’s role?
Dr. Fisher: A manager’s role is to lead. Self-management is the role of the worker. Dependent workers are a luxury no company can any longer afford. Leadership takes vision. Vision is two phasic. First, vision requires an assessment of the situation in terms of the manager’s specific function in the enterprise, followed by a careful evaluation of workers’ competence, adapting this skill base to synergistic action. Workers need to be personally coached and counseled. This enables workers to do what they can and will do. Coaching is an assessment tool. It is adapting assignments congruent with workers’ skills and interests. Counseling is a listening tool. It is hearing the inner voice of workers where their spirits reside. Today’s workers are problem-solvers and doers. They have enormous talent, but excess emotional baggage due to cultural conditioning. The manager who gets in the way of work often cripples productive effort. Once the vision aspect is firmly in place, the manager’s role is that of servant to the organization. This is achieved by acting as a partner with workers bringing the proper mix of skills and competence to the problem solving.
Christina: Do today’s managers, as matters now stand, earn their keep?
Dr. Fisher: Not only do most managers fail to earn their keep, they are essentially atavistic, vestigial organs without a viable function. This was my thesis in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990). My research indicates that the bromides of MBOs, performance appraisal, sensitivity training, job descriptions, organizational charts, staff meetings, and even the vaulted “management by walking around” are actually impediments to performance. They particularized effort into fragmentary pursuits of confusing purpose. These interventions result in little change in the efficacy of the work population: 15-20 percent are hard chargers, another 15-20 percent foot draggers, with the remaining 60-70 percent going with the flow, and hoping to stay out of trouble. Translated – roughly 80 percent of the work accomplished is by 20 percent of the work force. Incidentally, few performers are managers because their main focus is on the next job. For them, it is imperative to make an impression rather than a difference. This creates a climate for what I describe in Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) as killing covert passive behaviors, which destroy a company from within as if managers and workers were social termites. Too often the problem is not recognized until it is too late for damage control.
Christina: Given this assessment, do you see managers disappearing from today’s workplaces?
Dr. Fisher: Yes, and no. There are less levels of management in most organizations. But the behavior of managers has changed little. Most managers believe their job is to “manage,” to “supervise,” and make “decisions” for workers. Otherwise, why are they there? On the other hand, today’s workers want to know why: what is expected of them, what resources are required, special perimeters of the job, and what is the time line? Workers have the knowledge, and creative skills to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, but they lack the authority, or leastwise, perceive that they do. So, they defer to the manager who is often ignorant of the complex nuances of the problem, which delays appropriate and timely response. Productive work is the casualty. Frustration fills both sides of the void.
Christina: But can today’s professional workers actually manage themselves?
Dr. Fisher: That is the crux of the problem. No, they can’t. They have not been trained to lead, and they no longer know how to follow. They want to enjoy the perks of management without the responsibilities. They cry, “Let management handle it!” They fail to see “They are the company!” This puts them and the company in no man’s land. It is the essence of my book Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (2000). A century ago, when the Industrial Revolution took hold, compulsory education established explicit skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, while generating an implicit curriculum of punctuality, conformity, and obedience to authority. This created the passive monster of learned helplessness that plagues enterprise today. Additionally, as more of the work force pursues college and graduate education, convergent thinking dominates. Convergent thinking is deferential to authority, less trusting of feelings and impulses, more mannered and self-controlled. Convergent thinkers are less sure of their personal opinions, more prisoners of institutional biases. These traits are consistent with finding pre-existent technical solutions to problems set by authorities. Essentially critical thinkers, these managers and workers are limited to what they already know. They are knowers rather than learners, tellers rather than listeners, and neither leaders nor followers.
Christina: You paint a bleak picture. It would seem that you imply our whole societal culture is antithetical to leadership?
Dr. Fisher: But it is, isn’t that apparent? The subtitle of Corporate Sin of “leaderless leadership and dissonant workers” makes it apparent that neither management nor workers can be exonerated. These are the two faces of Janus. What is needed for managers and professionals to show leadership is creative thinking. This is the complement to critical thinking. Creative thinking involves two sequential stages of processing information -- divergent or lateral thinking followed by convergent or vertical thinking. Our culture is obsessively solution driven (convergent thinking) often at the expense of defining the problem (divergent thinking) properly – “Ready, fire, aim!” The dominant vertical hierarchy of authority and thought is gone but not yet buried. Vertical thinking is limited to logic, cause and effect analysis, objective quantification, and what is known. It is reflected in the paralysis of analysis. Lateral or divergent thinking is intuitive, conceptual, subjective, and embraces the unknown. Vertical thinking exercises the masculine (left) brain, while the feminine (right) brain -- where lateral thinking resides -- passively complies. It is not enough in a dynamic, chaotic, ever changing society to be half-witted. Before men and women can truly work together, however, both halves of their brains must first be in conversation with each other. In contrast to convergent thinking, divergent thinking is rebellious towards authority, never accepts things at face value, and is more trusting of feelings, more independent of attitude, with an easy self-esteem and spontaneous self-expression. The divergent thinker has a fire in its belly. The convergent thinker needs a fire under its behind. Convergent thinking is the basis of institutional education and sustainer of the status quo. Divergent thinking is the domain of the artist and the humanist where people are treated as persons and not as things.
Christina: What other evidence do you have that managers lack an understanding of the leadership/followership continuum?
Dr Fisher: What I have just described is a one-dimensional society dominated by the masculine aspect. To have a two-dimensional society requires equal participation of the masculine and feminine aspect, first in each of us as individuals, then by extension in society collectively. There is little evidence that this is understood. Just as the masculine and feminine aspect are two sides of the same brain; leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. Complete followership precedes perceptive leadership. A leader can only take people where they already want to go. Cooperation is always voluntary, while compliance is always coercive. To know where people want to go leaders must first immerse themselves in followership. It is not authority that drives leadership. It is humility and a passion to serve. By implication, then, charismatic leadership is not leadership but “leaderless leadership,” or manipulation. Charismatic leadership appeals to the vanity of a one-dimensional society, a society like ours, where leaders lend themselves to caricature. Charisma is a function of form, or manipulation. Leadership is a function of content, or enabling. Leadership is making in the mind of many from one. Most managers are culturally programmed to please their superiors at the expense of being immersed in servant leadership. They see themselves as crossing the great divide. Evidence? It is everywhere. This is why polls are popular, best selling lists of books, films, music, and lifestyles, why communities all seem to look alike, why pretty people present non-news news on television, why people are other-directed rather than self-directed, bent on pleasing others than in pleasing themselves, why competition is practiced while cooperation is advocated, why imitation marks most identity, why there are few great philosophers, composers, novelists, or thinkers in our time, why materialism competes with spiritualism, why science is the new religion, equally as dogmatic as any institutional religion, why the environment is polluted with economic justification, why AIDS, drug addiction, obesity, violence, obsessive drinking and gambling look for miraculous palliatives, why a mania for self-control finds most out-of-control, why people don’t want to grow up or grow old, why ethnocentric blinders shade reality, why crisis management is personified in redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, plant closings, mergers, and reengineering without collective protest.
Christina: You imply the leadership/followership continuum is a societal problem.
Dr. Fisher: I think it is. Leadership is not just a boss in the corner office holding court, a CEO promulgating a video message about the globe, or a president, governor, or congressman on the stump. It is the corpocracy disease of our time. It is the professor who reads little more than the general public, and whose class notes are ancient. It is the medical doctor who prescribes drugs he hasn’t researched. It is the engineer who can’t see beyond the discipline. It is the scientist who doesn’t consider the consequences of research. It is the lawyer who worries more about billing hours than litigants.
Christina: Yet, given all these “Corporate Sins,” you still appear to insist in your writing that professional workers are equal partners with managers, and should be treated as such.
Dr. Fisher: I do. Because it is the only way the organization can survive. The answers are no longer one-dimensional or the exclusive domain of managers. Every organization must be two-dimensional as answers to problems are now distributed throughout operations. Nor is one functional group more elite or important than another. The second half of the 20th century was dominated by management centered operations. Workers were either management dependent (Culture of Comfort), displaying the temperament of well-behaved children, or counterdependent on the company (Culture of Complacency) for their total well being as spoiled brats. Workers forfeited control of what they did for security, i.e., “lifetime employment” and entitlements. This fixation with security suspended workers in adolescence, where most workers are found today, whatever their education or profession. Corporate leadership, when challenged by Japan, the Pacific Rim countries, and Europe in the 1970s, thought it could purchase motivation without sacrificing control. It failed to understand emerging mature adult workers and what motivated them. Mature adult workers are not afraid to ask questions. They don’t expect something for nothing. They resent being micromanaged. Campaigns, fads, and slogans make little sense to them. Nor do they have much patience with executive gamesmanship. They don’t see themselves as part of “one big happy family.” Family is personal and separate from work. They have little interest in working hard, only in working smart. They are confrontational and don’t back away from a necessary conflict. Nor are they intimidated by position power. Yet they are annoyed with cosmetic change because it fails to change anything. They are threatening to the status quo, to mediocrity, to bosses who use feint praise to motivate. They are the new emerging work force driven by interdependent management (Culture of Contribution), expecting full participation in the fruits of their labors. They focus on the vital few “right things” rather than the “trivial many.” They are the 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference. They are in short supply, and getting shorter.
Christina: I sense in you a deep frustration. Some might call it a rage. How do you respond?
Dr. Fisher: Meaning no disrespect, this is how my critics neutralize what I have to say. They put the focus on me, not on what I say. The subtitle of Work Without Managers of “a view from the trenches” is also literally true. I came out of the trenches, starting out as a laborer in a chemical plant summers while going to college, working in research & development as a chemist, then on the line as a manager, then a field sales engineer, followed by a field sales manager, then a corporate executive, working on several continents across the globe, then again as a student taking a Ph.D. in the soft sciences (psychology) to match my hard science (chemistry) training, then working as a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation as an organizational development psychologist, and finally as an executive on the staff side as a director of human resources in Europe to match my line executive experience. It was at this point that I turned to conducting seminars across the country, publishing articles and books, and forming a consulting and publishing company. So, yes, in a word, I’ve been in the trenches and boardrooms. From this experience, always listening, I am saying what most workers have said to me over the years at every organizational level, but were afraid to say. Others have said, “You don’t give us any solutions.” They are right. Americans love solutions. They are far less interested in defining problems. They like studies of exquisitely successful companies so that they can copy them. That seldom if ever works. You don’t search for excellence. You create it. You create a workplace culture that fits your company’s values:
Structure of work + function of work = workplace culture = dominant company behavior
A company culture is unique to it. Like a person, a company can become fixated with counterproductive cultural practices that eventually spell its doom. Thus the challenge and the paradox: the need for cultural change comes from the bottom, but only those at the top can orchestrate cultural change. We are in the midst of a quiet revolution with the color of workers’ collars changing rapidly, but the workplace culture lagging badly. This could become explosive. The key to everything is people. People are the spiritual embodiment of a Culture of Contribution. This culture cannot happen unless the leadership is ready to commit to such a cultural change, and is willing to become totally involved in the design, promulgation, and implementation of the cultural change. This takes leadership, not management. I see senior management reluctance to heed this challenge, and that is why I deem management the architect of a failed system. This is its challenge.
Christina: Thank you, Dr. Fisher, you have given our readers much to think about. I find the energy of your personality matching your published works. It has, indeed, been enlightening.
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.’s Views on Leadership
AQP Journal Editor
Prepared April 06, 2001
Christina: What roles do today’s manager’s fill? Is it that of leader or is it that of a guide?
Dr. Fisher: It certainly isn’t that of a leader. There is a painful dearth of leadership in society much less management, per se. The role of leadership is the vision to see present and future challenges clearly, and the desire to serve in the interest of rallying people and resources to those challenges. Management has never been programmed to lead and people need to be led. Management has been culturally conditioned to manage things. Managers are good at management people only when people behave as things. Fortunately, for the better part of the 20th century, people behaved as things-to-be-managed. People were polite, obedient, obsequious, reactive, conforming, punctual, and submissive. Their most important job was to show up for work on time. People reacted essentially to external stimuli, as if they had no moral compass or center. The manager was their guidance director. The resultant passivity worked reasonably well in a staid organizational climate where the knowledge base was mainly skewed towards the manager. It fails to work today, however, in an ever-changing work climate where the knowledge base is increasingly in the hands of doers. What is disconcerting is that little reality testing of this power shift is evident with academics, consultants, or operations management, except cosmetically.
Christina: Could you amplify on this?
Dr. Fisher: Management has taken a semantic page from psychology and sociology and created psychobabble to rival both. Language is a code, either spoken or written, that stands for things. Words are not things. “Empowerment,” for example, is a word. The word is not self-actualizing, self-direction, or indeed, a power shift. We have had a plethora of word concepts: “total quality management,” “total employee involvement,” “self-directed work teams,” and so on. Verbal concepts are not the real thing. They are abstractions, which is to say meaningless. Workers know this, which only heightens their skepticism. We should try to keep our language as close to reality as possible.
Christina: You see these interventions as cosmetic?
Dr. Fisher: Most interventions of the past thirty years have been little more than cosmetic attempts to maintain the status quo, but a wink at reducing management’s control, influence, authority, and power. This has proven a myopic strategy. It has resulted in a work force conditioned in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility when initiative and accountability are critical components to survival. Consequently, when management preemptively reverses itself, and gives people their power back, the intended don’t have the slightest notion what to do with it. Management without leadership is now paying for its corporate sins.
Christina: Would it be fair to say, then, from your point of view, that the manager is acting as parent to employees?
Dr. Fisher: Precisely! The manager has unwittingly become the surrogate parent to the worker, the caretaker and caregiver to satisfying basic needs originally provided by parents. I will go even further. I suggest that in the typical organization, either high or low tech, it doesn’t matter, the majority of employees are either management dependent or counterdependent on the company for their total well being. They behave as if still in adolescence with the emotional maturity of obedient twelve-year-olds, or they complain and criticize management as if they have no power to change their situation, when they have most of the power in their knowledge, skills, and competence.
Christina: What then is a manager’s role?
Dr. Fisher: A manager’s role is to lead. Self-management is the role of the worker. Dependent workers are a luxury no company can any longer afford. Leadership takes vision. Vision is two phasic. First, vision requires an assessment of the situation in terms of the manager’s specific function in the enterprise, followed by a careful evaluation of workers’ competence, adapting this skill base to synergistic action. Workers need to be personally coached and counseled. This enables workers to do what they can and will do. Coaching is an assessment tool. It is adapting assignments congruent with workers’ skills and interests. Counseling is a listening tool. It is hearing the inner voice of workers where their spirits reside. Today’s workers are problem-solvers and doers. They have enormous talent, but excess emotional baggage due to cultural conditioning. The manager who gets in the way of work often cripples productive effort. Once the vision aspect is firmly in place, the manager’s role is that of servant to the organization. This is achieved by acting as a partner with workers bringing the proper mix of skills and competence to the problem solving.
Christina: Do today’s managers, as matters now stand, earn their keep?
Dr. Fisher: Not only do most managers fail to earn their keep, they are essentially atavistic, vestigial organs without a viable function. This was my thesis in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990). My research indicates that the bromides of MBOs, performance appraisal, sensitivity training, job descriptions, organizational charts, staff meetings, and even the vaulted “management by walking around” are actually impediments to performance. They particularized effort into fragmentary pursuits of confusing purpose. These interventions result in little change in the efficacy of the work population: 15-20 percent are hard chargers, another 15-20 percent foot draggers, with the remaining 60-70 percent going with the flow, and hoping to stay out of trouble. Translated – roughly 80 percent of the work accomplished is by 20 percent of the work force. Incidentally, few performers are managers because their main focus is on the next job. For them, it is imperative to make an impression rather than a difference. This creates a climate for what I describe in Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) as killing covert passive behaviors, which destroy a company from within as if managers and workers were social termites. Too often the problem is not recognized until it is too late for damage control.
Christina: Given this assessment, do you see managers disappearing from today’s workplaces?
Dr. Fisher: Yes, and no. There are less levels of management in most organizations. But the behavior of managers has changed little. Most managers believe their job is to “manage,” to “supervise,” and make “decisions” for workers. Otherwise, why are they there? On the other hand, today’s workers want to know why: what is expected of them, what resources are required, special perimeters of the job, and what is the time line? Workers have the knowledge, and creative skills to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, but they lack the authority, or leastwise, perceive that they do. So, they defer to the manager who is often ignorant of the complex nuances of the problem, which delays appropriate and timely response. Productive work is the casualty. Frustration fills both sides of the void.
Christina: But can today’s professional workers actually manage themselves?
Dr. Fisher: That is the crux of the problem. No, they can’t. They have not been trained to lead, and they no longer know how to follow. They want to enjoy the perks of management without the responsibilities. They cry, “Let management handle it!” They fail to see “They are the company!” This puts them and the company in no man’s land. It is the essence of my book Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (2000). A century ago, when the Industrial Revolution took hold, compulsory education established explicit skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, while generating an implicit curriculum of punctuality, conformity, and obedience to authority. This created the passive monster of learned helplessness that plagues enterprise today. Additionally, as more of the work force pursues college and graduate education, convergent thinking dominates. Convergent thinking is deferential to authority, less trusting of feelings and impulses, more mannered and self-controlled. Convergent thinkers are less sure of their personal opinions, more prisoners of institutional biases. These traits are consistent with finding pre-existent technical solutions to problems set by authorities. Essentially critical thinkers, these managers and workers are limited to what they already know. They are knowers rather than learners, tellers rather than listeners, and neither leaders nor followers.
Christina: You paint a bleak picture. It would seem that you imply our whole societal culture is antithetical to leadership?
Dr. Fisher: But it is, isn’t that apparent? The subtitle of Corporate Sin of “leaderless leadership and dissonant workers” makes it apparent that neither management nor workers can be exonerated. These are the two faces of Janus. What is needed for managers and professionals to show leadership is creative thinking. This is the complement to critical thinking. Creative thinking involves two sequential stages of processing information -- divergent or lateral thinking followed by convergent or vertical thinking. Our culture is obsessively solution driven (convergent thinking) often at the expense of defining the problem (divergent thinking) properly – “Ready, fire, aim!” The dominant vertical hierarchy of authority and thought is gone but not yet buried. Vertical thinking is limited to logic, cause and effect analysis, objective quantification, and what is known. It is reflected in the paralysis of analysis. Lateral or divergent thinking is intuitive, conceptual, subjective, and embraces the unknown. Vertical thinking exercises the masculine (left) brain, while the feminine (right) brain -- where lateral thinking resides -- passively complies. It is not enough in a dynamic, chaotic, ever changing society to be half-witted. Before men and women can truly work together, however, both halves of their brains must first be in conversation with each other. In contrast to convergent thinking, divergent thinking is rebellious towards authority, never accepts things at face value, and is more trusting of feelings, more independent of attitude, with an easy self-esteem and spontaneous self-expression. The divergent thinker has a fire in its belly. The convergent thinker needs a fire under its behind. Convergent thinking is the basis of institutional education and sustainer of the status quo. Divergent thinking is the domain of the artist and the humanist where people are treated as persons and not as things.
Christina: What other evidence do you have that managers lack an understanding of the leadership/followership continuum?
Dr Fisher: What I have just described is a one-dimensional society dominated by the masculine aspect. To have a two-dimensional society requires equal participation of the masculine and feminine aspect, first in each of us as individuals, then by extension in society collectively. There is little evidence that this is understood. Just as the masculine and feminine aspect are two sides of the same brain; leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. Complete followership precedes perceptive leadership. A leader can only take people where they already want to go. Cooperation is always voluntary, while compliance is always coercive. To know where people want to go leaders must first immerse themselves in followership. It is not authority that drives leadership. It is humility and a passion to serve. By implication, then, charismatic leadership is not leadership but “leaderless leadership,” or manipulation. Charismatic leadership appeals to the vanity of a one-dimensional society, a society like ours, where leaders lend themselves to caricature. Charisma is a function of form, or manipulation. Leadership is a function of content, or enabling. Leadership is making in the mind of many from one. Most managers are culturally programmed to please their superiors at the expense of being immersed in servant leadership. They see themselves as crossing the great divide. Evidence? It is everywhere. This is why polls are popular, best selling lists of books, films, music, and lifestyles, why communities all seem to look alike, why pretty people present non-news news on television, why people are other-directed rather than self-directed, bent on pleasing others than in pleasing themselves, why competition is practiced while cooperation is advocated, why imitation marks most identity, why there are few great philosophers, composers, novelists, or thinkers in our time, why materialism competes with spiritualism, why science is the new religion, equally as dogmatic as any institutional religion, why the environment is polluted with economic justification, why AIDS, drug addiction, obesity, violence, obsessive drinking and gambling look for miraculous palliatives, why a mania for self-control finds most out-of-control, why people don’t want to grow up or grow old, why ethnocentric blinders shade reality, why crisis management is personified in redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, plant closings, mergers, and reengineering without collective protest.
Christina: You imply the leadership/followership continuum is a societal problem.
Dr. Fisher: I think it is. Leadership is not just a boss in the corner office holding court, a CEO promulgating a video message about the globe, or a president, governor, or congressman on the stump. It is the corpocracy disease of our time. It is the professor who reads little more than the general public, and whose class notes are ancient. It is the medical doctor who prescribes drugs he hasn’t researched. It is the engineer who can’t see beyond the discipline. It is the scientist who doesn’t consider the consequences of research. It is the lawyer who worries more about billing hours than litigants.
Christina: Yet, given all these “Corporate Sins,” you still appear to insist in your writing that professional workers are equal partners with managers, and should be treated as such.
Dr. Fisher: I do. Because it is the only way the organization can survive. The answers are no longer one-dimensional or the exclusive domain of managers. Every organization must be two-dimensional as answers to problems are now distributed throughout operations. Nor is one functional group more elite or important than another. The second half of the 20th century was dominated by management centered operations. Workers were either management dependent (Culture of Comfort), displaying the temperament of well-behaved children, or counterdependent on the company (Culture of Complacency) for their total well being as spoiled brats. Workers forfeited control of what they did for security, i.e., “lifetime employment” and entitlements. This fixation with security suspended workers in adolescence, where most workers are found today, whatever their education or profession. Corporate leadership, when challenged by Japan, the Pacific Rim countries, and Europe in the 1970s, thought it could purchase motivation without sacrificing control. It failed to understand emerging mature adult workers and what motivated them. Mature adult workers are not afraid to ask questions. They don’t expect something for nothing. They resent being micromanaged. Campaigns, fads, and slogans make little sense to them. Nor do they have much patience with executive gamesmanship. They don’t see themselves as part of “one big happy family.” Family is personal and separate from work. They have little interest in working hard, only in working smart. They are confrontational and don’t back away from a necessary conflict. Nor are they intimidated by position power. Yet they are annoyed with cosmetic change because it fails to change anything. They are threatening to the status quo, to mediocrity, to bosses who use feint praise to motivate. They are the new emerging work force driven by interdependent management (Culture of Contribution), expecting full participation in the fruits of their labors. They focus on the vital few “right things” rather than the “trivial many.” They are the 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference. They are in short supply, and getting shorter.
Christina: I sense in you a deep frustration. Some might call it a rage. How do you respond?
Dr. Fisher: Meaning no disrespect, this is how my critics neutralize what I have to say. They put the focus on me, not on what I say. The subtitle of Work Without Managers of “a view from the trenches” is also literally true. I came out of the trenches, starting out as a laborer in a chemical plant summers while going to college, working in research & development as a chemist, then on the line as a manager, then a field sales engineer, followed by a field sales manager, then a corporate executive, working on several continents across the globe, then again as a student taking a Ph.D. in the soft sciences (psychology) to match my hard science (chemistry) training, then working as a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation as an organizational development psychologist, and finally as an executive on the staff side as a director of human resources in Europe to match my line executive experience. It was at this point that I turned to conducting seminars across the country, publishing articles and books, and forming a consulting and publishing company. So, yes, in a word, I’ve been in the trenches and boardrooms. From this experience, always listening, I am saying what most workers have said to me over the years at every organizational level, but were afraid to say. Others have said, “You don’t give us any solutions.” They are right. Americans love solutions. They are far less interested in defining problems. They like studies of exquisitely successful companies so that they can copy them. That seldom if ever works. You don’t search for excellence. You create it. You create a workplace culture that fits your company’s values:
Structure of work + function of work = workplace culture = dominant company behavior
A company culture is unique to it. Like a person, a company can become fixated with counterproductive cultural practices that eventually spell its doom. Thus the challenge and the paradox: the need for cultural change comes from the bottom, but only those at the top can orchestrate cultural change. We are in the midst of a quiet revolution with the color of workers’ collars changing rapidly, but the workplace culture lagging badly. This could become explosive. The key to everything is people. People are the spiritual embodiment of a Culture of Contribution. This culture cannot happen unless the leadership is ready to commit to such a cultural change, and is willing to become totally involved in the design, promulgation, and implementation of the cultural change. This takes leadership, not management. I see senior management reluctance to heed this challenge, and that is why I deem management the architect of a failed system. This is its challenge.
Christina: Thank you, Dr. Fisher, you have given our readers much to think about. I find the energy of your personality matching your published works. It has, indeed, been enlightening.
A Way of Looking at Things No. 32: Religion and the Ways of Man
A Way of Looking at Things: No. 32 – Religion and the Ways of Man
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2003
As those of you have read my stuff know that I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. I grew up in the insular community of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the 20th century and at a time of war, and had no doubt as to the nobility of my nation or the veracity of my religion. It never occurred to me to entertain any doubts. I thought those in positions of trust, whatever their station, were to be respected, revered and followed.
In school I took what the teachers said to be true to be so, and in books that I read to be the unvarnished truth. It was axiomatic in my mind that goodness rose to the top, and evil sunk to the bottom no matter what the medium. My life was devoid of experience. I was an open bucket, a receptacle in which information was poured into me and accepted indiscriminately. Along the way I became acquainted with such names as Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, St. Augustine, and Descartes, and many more who I was told had pondered the hard questions of life and were in the know as to who I was, where I was, why I was, and what I should be about.
Religion was pushed aside to focus on mathematics, physics, chemistry and logic. As my education progressed from grammar to high school to college and then into life I found myself finally in touch with experience, experience no doubt different than all those I had read but at the same time very much the same. I discovered that I had a brain, a mind that had a capacity to wonder and yes wander, a mind that wasn’t an open bucket in which ideas poured into from knowers and were processed by my senses with little active participation of my own, but that I could think with my whole body and what we call our soul.
Religion found me entering a loveless marriage, and staying because its dogma insisted that I do, and I did, that is, until not only my mind wandered away from what was poured into it, but my body found itself in different places and spaces, in different countries and cultures, and in different circumstances in the realm of power, position, prestige and importance, and suddenly life made no sense to me at all. It was an upside down world and I was standing on my head.
Being born in humble circumstances, I learned matters of class by how my parents were treated, which was essentially that they were safe, non-threatening and of no account.
It is part of our British heritage that the order is first hierarchically described individualistically as an interlinked, finely layered and elaborately graded procession from the haves to the have nots, me being a member of the latter. The second evidence of class is triadic in which we are all divided into three collective constituencies, upper, middle and lower. The third is dichotomous in which society polarizes the two extremes of the haves from the have nots or “them from us.”
I thought these distinctions only existed in books, but found they even existed in my hometown. And of course, they existed in the church, which I was aware of but not concerned about when I was young. It was almost as if I expected it to be that way.
Likewise, I thought when I was a neophyte professional that as I went up the corporate tree I would find more magnanimity. I discovered less. Again by the accident of circumstances, I found myself rising quickly in a growth industry and a growth-minded company, when I was quite young, being dispatched about the world to accelerate this growth. In the course of this work I found my company’s banner was a kind of religion, not unlike the one upon which I was reared, a religion driven to conquer and exploit the infidels to enlarge our material coffers, all in the spirit of competitive enterprise. I saw it in Suriname, Jamaica, Venezuela, Italy, South Africa, Rhodesia, Lebanon, and many other places in the course of my work. It gave me pause, and ultimately led to my retiring in my early thirties. Having been trained as an athlete, I considered it a well deserved “time out,” which lasted two and one-half years, during which time I read greatly on religion and mythology and such off-the-wall writers as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, Gibran, to name only a few.
I also wrote tons spending 18 months writing an unpublishable book on my take on Roman Catholicism, realizing now these many years later how naïve and uninformed my thoughts and angers were. It was a catharsis in a sense, but in another sense it made me aware of something that has mystified me ever since – the impossibility of escaping one’s conditioning.
Cultural programming is as indelible as a fingerprint or one’s DNA. I have read writers such as Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, and many others that claimed they had escaped the noose of their upbringing, but I see it through their words, loud and clear. The wisest thing that I’ve ever done, and I’ve done many stupid things, is to accept myself as I am, which is surprisingly hard for many to do, given self-acceptance seemingly so foreign to their programmed natures.
This is preamble to a new book by David Sloan Wilson Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press 2002).
Wilson attempts to give an evenhanded account of religion and the ways of man. I’m sure it will offend some even though it is not meant to, but will provide perspective to many others. I know it did for me. At this late stage in my life, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that man is essentially a comedic figure on this hostile planet and often acts less wise than a colony of ants.
To the paleontologist, our human ancestors diverged from our ancestors the chimpanzees around six million years ago. Whatever religion is we can agree the chimps didn’t have it. Apparently religion was practiced among our Cro-Magnon ancestors about 40,000 years ago. Were there different historical stages in the development of religions with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism or were tribal belief systems more representative?
Scholars, Wilson tells us, confess they don’t know but wonder in view of the recent terrorist attacks. Like us, scholars are struggling to understand the fanaticism that drives them. We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side. Yet why does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide? Western man has had much bloodshed in his history and one wonders if early Christians went willingly to their deaths.
Wilson emphasizes the fact that religions are human institutions and belief systems evolved by the process of group selection. Religions offer practical, social, and motivational benefits to their adherents. But religions differ within these practices and even in matters of having and rearing children, not to mention converting or killing competing religions.
Wilson writes, “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone.”
Demographics (birth, death, immigration) play an important part, as does proselytizing zeal. This places Judaism at a disadvantage as it is not a proselytizing faith, but has a high birth rate, low death rate, and low emigration.
Most engaging is Wilson’s pondering of why Christianity, when innumerable tiny Jewish sects were constantly competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire, was able to break away from the pack. The reasons he proffers are: (1) proselytizing zeal (unlike mainstream Judaism); (2) high birth and low mortality rate; (3) opportunities for women in the ministry (in contrast to both Roman paganism and contemporary Judaism); (4) social institutions resulting in lower death rates than Romans from plagues; and (5) the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. Regarding the latter, Wilson says it was far more complex and context-dependent than might be assumed as it also included the right for vengeance with cause.
Religion here is shown to encompass four different and originally unrelated elements which doesn’t lessen the contentious nature of the discussion, but does leaven it with ample material for discussion: (1) explanation; (2) standardized organization; (3) moral rules of good behavior toward in-groups; and (4) all too often moral rules of bad behavior toward out-groups.
In my fascination for these considerations I could not help but see parallels in the complex organization. Salient comments relative to this enchantment adorn this retrospective.
(1) Explanation
Most religions begin with belief in a god or gods, but that immediately, says Wilson, plunges us into difficulty:
“Religion is sometimes defined as a belief in supernatural agents. However, other people regard this definition as shallow and incomplete. The Buddha refused to be associated with any gods. He merely claimed to be awake (my italics) and to have found a path to enlightenment.”
Some Jews and Unitarians are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves to belong to a religion. Conversely, many tribal societies believe in agents that we Westerners think of as spirits rather than gods.
An essential feature shared by the Judeo-Christian God, ancient Greek gods, and tribal spirits is a “supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give evidence, but which our senses do give us evidence.”
Creationists invoke God to explain everything – including the existence of every plant and animal species, but most creationists wouldn’t invoke God to explain every sunrise, tide and wind.
Clearly, Wilson observes, in modern Western society religion’s explanatory role has gradually become usurped by science. Where Old Testament believers invoke origin myths like the Tower of Babel to explain linguistic diversity, modern linguists invoke historical processes of language change.
(2) Standardized Organization
Most modern religions have full-time priests, rabbis and ministers who receive a salary and life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques. Within these sects, all use standardized sacred books (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.). They also have rituals, rites, art, music, architecture and particular identifying clothing.
These organizational features arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer and more populous. We think of Europe as states today, but after 1492 AD, and the discovery of America, Europeans spread over the world. They encountered peoples living under simpler and less populous political systems – chiefdoms, tribes and bands.
Kings emerged from chiefdoms around 3500 BC as bands and tribal societies were too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, or specialists of any sort.
The inevitable happened as a result of the confluence of three factors: (1) heavily populated societies defeated small societies; (2) these societies required full-time leaders to manage them; and (3) bureaucracies to run them.
Wilson again: “(From) purely the group-level functional standpoint, societies must become differentiated into leaders and followers as they increase in size. Thirty people can sit around a campfire and arrive at a consensual decision; thirty million people cannot.”
But here comes the rub. Leaders and managers, bureaucrats and priests are not productive citizens in the sense that they are hunting, gathering, harvesting or making anything. Wilson asks, how does the chief get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites?1 How indeed!
The problem obsessed Marx and is familiar to citizens and workers to this day, who ask themselves the same question each election of politicians and each time they cross the threshold of their employ:
· What have incumbents done since the last election to justify their fat salaries and all the perks that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?
· What have executives and managers done to justify their perks, privileges, bonuses, stock options, salaries, and incomes that often are multiples of 200 to 500 times normal incomes of working wage earners who produce the goods and services?
The successful selling of executive omnipotence is based on the epithet that CEOs are a breed apart and as rare as Hooping Cranes. It takes tenets of faith to embrace this myth. The Cathedral of the Fortune 500 entertains few doubters among its ranks.
Corpocracy, however, took its cue from organized religion. The solution devised by every known chiefdom and early state societies, from ancient Egypt to the Inca Empire, was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets:
· The chief or king is related to the gods (religious).
· The man-in-charge or CEO has economic power over you (secular).
· The chief or king can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants (religious) to ensure a good harvest.
· The man-in-charge or CEO can make you redundant, move your place of employment or intercede to see that you have a job and can afford to eat (secular).
In return for these services, the reasoning goes, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and his tax collectors (religious), while the worker should work for 1/200th of what his main bosses receive so that they can live in a style to which they have become accustomed (secular) without complaint or redress.
Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach these religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Likewise, standardized policies and procedures, carried out at standardized workplaces, serve vaulted corporate principles to which workers are expected to subscribe in abeyance to the corpocracy of the management class.2
As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became ever more elaborate. Likewise, in an economic sense, as job shops turned into tool and die guilds and then into small factories, and finally into giant corporations such as General Motors, General Electric, AT&T and so on, the ivory tower became disconnected from the secular life of the workers who were light years away.
An assumption was made. It was assumed that the duty and loyalty owed by workers to their feudal lords was sacrosanct; that those in charge knew best. Thus was created the compelling temptation to treat corporate wealth as its own, and to do with workers what it may. Likewise, the clergy became obsessed with their own apotheosis and came to behave in a spiritual sense the way CEOs behaved in a material sense, or without constraints.
Within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been accentuated in a secular sense. The civil religion of society is money and class, and this is not the class of fine manners, haute cuisine, broad knowledge of art and artistry, but the pursuit of happiness, greed and the insatiable desire for more. The green goddess of wealth has corrupted in ways that have skewered society in particular and the world in general into camps of few haves and many have-nots. This has also sown the seeds that have enriched the soil of fanaticism. Why does no one ask the question: How did my actions or the actions of my society and nation contribute to this terrible social disease of fanatical behavior?
(3) Moral Rules of Good Behavior the In-Group
We take for granted that our moral rules of good behavior fit all. It justifies our enforcement of moral precepts. True, all major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave.
Some 7,500 years ago Wilson tells us, when tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals, tribal rules of behavior, which were unstated but understood, no longer sufficed. Likewise, a man’s word was once as good as his bond, and most everyone once struggled within the limits of what they could and would do. No longer. Secular society echoing the problems of religious governance has seen the modern world turn inside out with a kind of barbarism that has become as common as rain with cascading conflict, smoldering dissension, murderous brawls and even sabotage and murder in the workplace. It is as if society has returned to prehistoric barbarism.
The solution to this dilemma were rules ordained by chiefs, kings and priests, rules applied to all members of the society (religious) and enforced by political leaders (chiefs, kings) and their agents who justified these rules as a new function of religion. On the secular side, in the modern world the axiom exists: the greater the chaos the more the need for rules & regulations. We find managers applying these rules as corporate decrees with the implication that they are inviolable.
With religion, the gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules. With secular society, all that had to be said was that the “rules came from the top.”
Wilson is correct. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods, or the venerated CEO in the workplace. Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments, while for workers, they are orientation, a short film and a little blue book that leaves no doubt what goes and what doesn’t.
Nonbelievers scoff at religious accounts of moral authority emanating from some code of supernatural origin. This is hard for a Christian or Jew to reconcile – who can doubt Moses and the Ten Commandments?
Yet that same Christian or Jew may have severe doubts about Joseph Smith’s claim that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823 to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester Village in western New York State awaiting translation. Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of eight witnesses (Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and six others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. But what is the difference between this and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Moses and Jesus, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from differing upbringing?
As Wilson points out, the success of a religion’s moral code depends on whether the code motivates the religion’s adherents to function effectively. Its veracity or fiction has little relevance: “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”3
This is also true in the corporate sense. Some companies are successful in creating a hagiographic portrait of the CEO that wouldn’t stand up in the light of day, but if such an image rallies the troops and results in collective motivation than it demonstrates the CEOs apotheosis.
Moral rules first ordained in the religious have a way of touching secular society. The reason atheists as well as many believers don’t kill their enemies derives from values instilled by society, and of course from the fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God.
(4) Moral Bad Behavior of the In-Group toward the Out-Group
Tribes used relationships by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify moral rules. The killing of members of other tribes represented no moral dilemma. But once the state invoked religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens who have no relationship by blood or otherwise, this all changed, that is, with the exception of war.
The state permits; indeed the state commands its citizens to kill citizens of other states once it exercises a declaration of war.
Imagine the moral dilemma. The state teaches a boy for 18 years, “Thou shalt not kill,” and then turns around and says, “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances.” Why is it such a surprise when young boys are trained to kill, and then experience the killing, and bring back that confused state into peaceful society, and then are expected to fit and forget and no longer be inclined to express that animal rage against the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens) when they lose it?
Likewise, the wonder is the same for 18-year-olds indoctrinated into a behavior system of being polite, obedient, obsequious, conforming, reactive, passive, and dependent in school and on the job, and then castigated, demoted, or let go for not being more creative, self-initiating and proactive. Equally, they are bombarded with the virtues of honesty, frugality, generosity, temperance and good will only to see their authority figures – teachers, priests, parents, employers, politicians, and educators -- indicted for embezzlement, corruption, malfeasance, sexual misconduct and moral turpitude. Small wonder young people withdraw into themselves.
Wilson tells us religion comes to the rescue with the last of these four elements – the Ten Commandments apply only to one’s in-group.
Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth (companies do as well) and that all other religions are wrong. Too often we see in recent times that believers are permitted or even obliged to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals – for God and country (substitute company as well) – for they are often at the expense of the out-group. This in no way exonerates the current crop of murderous religious fanatics, but it does point out the basic hypocrisy of religions when it comes to in-groups and out-groups.
I am an Irish Roman Catholic and I cannot deny the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, or the dark periods of church history. There have been many evils perpetrated in God’s name by every religion known to man. The Koran is often mentioned as having scripture citing hatred of Westerners or infidels, but so is the Bible guilty of the same, especially the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens - Deuteronomy 20:10 – 18, where it explains the obligations of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city.
The Book of Joshua describes how he became a hero by carrying out those instructions.
The Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill (believers in thing own God)” and “Thou must kill (believers in another god).” In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. Similarly, the Koran is too often interpreted in terms of millennia before instead of in terms of today’s world.
Not to put too much of a blight on the Old Testament, the New Testament in Revelations 9: 4 – 5 says that it is okay to torture heathens for five months, but not to kill them.
In war God is always on our side. The religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey the moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). Imagine what that must have been like when the North faced the South in the Civil War, and families often fought against each other by the accident of their circumstance.
Wilson’s book is contentious to be sure, and covers subject matter not usually presented to a broader public. But these are unusual times and if we don’t understand them in the context of the times then there is little hope for any of us.
Wilson is saying that the ambiguity of the moral doctrines of the world’s major religions, placing one set of moral behaviors for the in-group and justifying a whole other set for the out-group has solidified a small contingent of religious fanatics to die for a cause in which thousands of innocent members of another society have their lives snuffed out (e.g., 3,025) because they are perceived enemies.
These religious fanatics are motivated by the fictitious belief that they are to be embraced by a heaven populated by beautiful virgins awaiting those that die for the cause.
It pleases me that Wilson doesn’t dodge the bullet. He admits religion is important to society, and that as society has moved away from religion and toward modern science the vacuum created has not been filled, not only has it not been filled, but he goes on to say, “There is no evidence that scientific understanding replaces religious beliefs in modern cultures. America has become more religious over the course of its history, not less, despite the influence of science and engineering. A very high proportion of scientists themselves professes a belief in God and participates in organized religions. Clearly, we must think of religious thought as something that coexists with scientific thought, not as an inferior version of it.”
Wilson’s thought-provoking book will stimulate you and enrich your own personal views of how you see and interpret your life. He makes it clear that religion is human and filled with the foibles and follies of human beings.
It is no accident that the moral fiber of society is being strained in all its orchestrations at this moment in our history. We know of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the more than million killed in bloody civil wars in West Africa, the starvation in Ethiopia, not because food and medicine were not available but because of rebel forces withholding its distribution. We know of how the white landowners have been driven from their land in Mozambique or murdered by the state for resisting the takeover. And now most recently we know of a man and a teenager killing ten innocent people in the Washington DC area with sniper bullets, for what reason it is impossible to speculate. Perhaps there is none. In some ways it seems that we are retrogressing to primitives.
What Wilson never states in his scholarly work is the one word that holds all religions true if they would but practice the tenets of their faith equally with out-groups as well as with in-groups and that word is love.
Be always well and always kind. That is the true wealth of the individual and his society.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s new website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2003
As those of you have read my stuff know that I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. I grew up in the insular community of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the 20th century and at a time of war, and had no doubt as to the nobility of my nation or the veracity of my religion. It never occurred to me to entertain any doubts. I thought those in positions of trust, whatever their station, were to be respected, revered and followed.
In school I took what the teachers said to be true to be so, and in books that I read to be the unvarnished truth. It was axiomatic in my mind that goodness rose to the top, and evil sunk to the bottom no matter what the medium. My life was devoid of experience. I was an open bucket, a receptacle in which information was poured into me and accepted indiscriminately. Along the way I became acquainted with such names as Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, St. Augustine, and Descartes, and many more who I was told had pondered the hard questions of life and were in the know as to who I was, where I was, why I was, and what I should be about.
Religion was pushed aside to focus on mathematics, physics, chemistry and logic. As my education progressed from grammar to high school to college and then into life I found myself finally in touch with experience, experience no doubt different than all those I had read but at the same time very much the same. I discovered that I had a brain, a mind that had a capacity to wonder and yes wander, a mind that wasn’t an open bucket in which ideas poured into from knowers and were processed by my senses with little active participation of my own, but that I could think with my whole body and what we call our soul.
Religion found me entering a loveless marriage, and staying because its dogma insisted that I do, and I did, that is, until not only my mind wandered away from what was poured into it, but my body found itself in different places and spaces, in different countries and cultures, and in different circumstances in the realm of power, position, prestige and importance, and suddenly life made no sense to me at all. It was an upside down world and I was standing on my head.
Being born in humble circumstances, I learned matters of class by how my parents were treated, which was essentially that they were safe, non-threatening and of no account.
It is part of our British heritage that the order is first hierarchically described individualistically as an interlinked, finely layered and elaborately graded procession from the haves to the have nots, me being a member of the latter. The second evidence of class is triadic in which we are all divided into three collective constituencies, upper, middle and lower. The third is dichotomous in which society polarizes the two extremes of the haves from the have nots or “them from us.”
I thought these distinctions only existed in books, but found they even existed in my hometown. And of course, they existed in the church, which I was aware of but not concerned about when I was young. It was almost as if I expected it to be that way.
Likewise, I thought when I was a neophyte professional that as I went up the corporate tree I would find more magnanimity. I discovered less. Again by the accident of circumstances, I found myself rising quickly in a growth industry and a growth-minded company, when I was quite young, being dispatched about the world to accelerate this growth. In the course of this work I found my company’s banner was a kind of religion, not unlike the one upon which I was reared, a religion driven to conquer and exploit the infidels to enlarge our material coffers, all in the spirit of competitive enterprise. I saw it in Suriname, Jamaica, Venezuela, Italy, South Africa, Rhodesia, Lebanon, and many other places in the course of my work. It gave me pause, and ultimately led to my retiring in my early thirties. Having been trained as an athlete, I considered it a well deserved “time out,” which lasted two and one-half years, during which time I read greatly on religion and mythology and such off-the-wall writers as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, Gibran, to name only a few.
I also wrote tons spending 18 months writing an unpublishable book on my take on Roman Catholicism, realizing now these many years later how naïve and uninformed my thoughts and angers were. It was a catharsis in a sense, but in another sense it made me aware of something that has mystified me ever since – the impossibility of escaping one’s conditioning.
Cultural programming is as indelible as a fingerprint or one’s DNA. I have read writers such as Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, and many others that claimed they had escaped the noose of their upbringing, but I see it through their words, loud and clear. The wisest thing that I’ve ever done, and I’ve done many stupid things, is to accept myself as I am, which is surprisingly hard for many to do, given self-acceptance seemingly so foreign to their programmed natures.
This is preamble to a new book by David Sloan Wilson Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press 2002).
Wilson attempts to give an evenhanded account of religion and the ways of man. I’m sure it will offend some even though it is not meant to, but will provide perspective to many others. I know it did for me. At this late stage in my life, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that man is essentially a comedic figure on this hostile planet and often acts less wise than a colony of ants.
To the paleontologist, our human ancestors diverged from our ancestors the chimpanzees around six million years ago. Whatever religion is we can agree the chimps didn’t have it. Apparently religion was practiced among our Cro-Magnon ancestors about 40,000 years ago. Were there different historical stages in the development of religions with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism or were tribal belief systems more representative?
Scholars, Wilson tells us, confess they don’t know but wonder in view of the recent terrorist attacks. Like us, scholars are struggling to understand the fanaticism that drives them. We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side. Yet why does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide? Western man has had much bloodshed in his history and one wonders if early Christians went willingly to their deaths.
Wilson emphasizes the fact that religions are human institutions and belief systems evolved by the process of group selection. Religions offer practical, social, and motivational benefits to their adherents. But religions differ within these practices and even in matters of having and rearing children, not to mention converting or killing competing religions.
Wilson writes, “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone.”
Demographics (birth, death, immigration) play an important part, as does proselytizing zeal. This places Judaism at a disadvantage as it is not a proselytizing faith, but has a high birth rate, low death rate, and low emigration.
Most engaging is Wilson’s pondering of why Christianity, when innumerable tiny Jewish sects were constantly competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire, was able to break away from the pack. The reasons he proffers are: (1) proselytizing zeal (unlike mainstream Judaism); (2) high birth and low mortality rate; (3) opportunities for women in the ministry (in contrast to both Roman paganism and contemporary Judaism); (4) social institutions resulting in lower death rates than Romans from plagues; and (5) the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. Regarding the latter, Wilson says it was far more complex and context-dependent than might be assumed as it also included the right for vengeance with cause.
Religion here is shown to encompass four different and originally unrelated elements which doesn’t lessen the contentious nature of the discussion, but does leaven it with ample material for discussion: (1) explanation; (2) standardized organization; (3) moral rules of good behavior toward in-groups; and (4) all too often moral rules of bad behavior toward out-groups.
In my fascination for these considerations I could not help but see parallels in the complex organization. Salient comments relative to this enchantment adorn this retrospective.
(1) Explanation
Most religions begin with belief in a god or gods, but that immediately, says Wilson, plunges us into difficulty:
“Religion is sometimes defined as a belief in supernatural agents. However, other people regard this definition as shallow and incomplete. The Buddha refused to be associated with any gods. He merely claimed to be awake (my italics) and to have found a path to enlightenment.”
Some Jews and Unitarians are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves to belong to a religion. Conversely, many tribal societies believe in agents that we Westerners think of as spirits rather than gods.
An essential feature shared by the Judeo-Christian God, ancient Greek gods, and tribal spirits is a “supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give evidence, but which our senses do give us evidence.”
Creationists invoke God to explain everything – including the existence of every plant and animal species, but most creationists wouldn’t invoke God to explain every sunrise, tide and wind.
Clearly, Wilson observes, in modern Western society religion’s explanatory role has gradually become usurped by science. Where Old Testament believers invoke origin myths like the Tower of Babel to explain linguistic diversity, modern linguists invoke historical processes of language change.
(2) Standardized Organization
Most modern religions have full-time priests, rabbis and ministers who receive a salary and life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques. Within these sects, all use standardized sacred books (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.). They also have rituals, rites, art, music, architecture and particular identifying clothing.
These organizational features arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer and more populous. We think of Europe as states today, but after 1492 AD, and the discovery of America, Europeans spread over the world. They encountered peoples living under simpler and less populous political systems – chiefdoms, tribes and bands.
Kings emerged from chiefdoms around 3500 BC as bands and tribal societies were too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, or specialists of any sort.
The inevitable happened as a result of the confluence of three factors: (1) heavily populated societies defeated small societies; (2) these societies required full-time leaders to manage them; and (3) bureaucracies to run them.
Wilson again: “(From) purely the group-level functional standpoint, societies must become differentiated into leaders and followers as they increase in size. Thirty people can sit around a campfire and arrive at a consensual decision; thirty million people cannot.”
But here comes the rub. Leaders and managers, bureaucrats and priests are not productive citizens in the sense that they are hunting, gathering, harvesting or making anything. Wilson asks, how does the chief get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites?1 How indeed!
The problem obsessed Marx and is familiar to citizens and workers to this day, who ask themselves the same question each election of politicians and each time they cross the threshold of their employ:
· What have incumbents done since the last election to justify their fat salaries and all the perks that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?
· What have executives and managers done to justify their perks, privileges, bonuses, stock options, salaries, and incomes that often are multiples of 200 to 500 times normal incomes of working wage earners who produce the goods and services?
The successful selling of executive omnipotence is based on the epithet that CEOs are a breed apart and as rare as Hooping Cranes. It takes tenets of faith to embrace this myth. The Cathedral of the Fortune 500 entertains few doubters among its ranks.
Corpocracy, however, took its cue from organized religion. The solution devised by every known chiefdom and early state societies, from ancient Egypt to the Inca Empire, was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets:
· The chief or king is related to the gods (religious).
· The man-in-charge or CEO has economic power over you (secular).
· The chief or king can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants (religious) to ensure a good harvest.
· The man-in-charge or CEO can make you redundant, move your place of employment or intercede to see that you have a job and can afford to eat (secular).
In return for these services, the reasoning goes, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and his tax collectors (religious), while the worker should work for 1/200th of what his main bosses receive so that they can live in a style to which they have become accustomed (secular) without complaint or redress.
Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach these religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Likewise, standardized policies and procedures, carried out at standardized workplaces, serve vaulted corporate principles to which workers are expected to subscribe in abeyance to the corpocracy of the management class.2
As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became ever more elaborate. Likewise, in an economic sense, as job shops turned into tool and die guilds and then into small factories, and finally into giant corporations such as General Motors, General Electric, AT&T and so on, the ivory tower became disconnected from the secular life of the workers who were light years away.
An assumption was made. It was assumed that the duty and loyalty owed by workers to their feudal lords was sacrosanct; that those in charge knew best. Thus was created the compelling temptation to treat corporate wealth as its own, and to do with workers what it may. Likewise, the clergy became obsessed with their own apotheosis and came to behave in a spiritual sense the way CEOs behaved in a material sense, or without constraints.
Within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been accentuated in a secular sense. The civil religion of society is money and class, and this is not the class of fine manners, haute cuisine, broad knowledge of art and artistry, but the pursuit of happiness, greed and the insatiable desire for more. The green goddess of wealth has corrupted in ways that have skewered society in particular and the world in general into camps of few haves and many have-nots. This has also sown the seeds that have enriched the soil of fanaticism. Why does no one ask the question: How did my actions or the actions of my society and nation contribute to this terrible social disease of fanatical behavior?
(3) Moral Rules of Good Behavior the In-Group
We take for granted that our moral rules of good behavior fit all. It justifies our enforcement of moral precepts. True, all major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave.
Some 7,500 years ago Wilson tells us, when tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals, tribal rules of behavior, which were unstated but understood, no longer sufficed. Likewise, a man’s word was once as good as his bond, and most everyone once struggled within the limits of what they could and would do. No longer. Secular society echoing the problems of religious governance has seen the modern world turn inside out with a kind of barbarism that has become as common as rain with cascading conflict, smoldering dissension, murderous brawls and even sabotage and murder in the workplace. It is as if society has returned to prehistoric barbarism.
The solution to this dilemma were rules ordained by chiefs, kings and priests, rules applied to all members of the society (religious) and enforced by political leaders (chiefs, kings) and their agents who justified these rules as a new function of religion. On the secular side, in the modern world the axiom exists: the greater the chaos the more the need for rules & regulations. We find managers applying these rules as corporate decrees with the implication that they are inviolable.
With religion, the gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules. With secular society, all that had to be said was that the “rules came from the top.”
Wilson is correct. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods, or the venerated CEO in the workplace. Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments, while for workers, they are orientation, a short film and a little blue book that leaves no doubt what goes and what doesn’t.
Nonbelievers scoff at religious accounts of moral authority emanating from some code of supernatural origin. This is hard for a Christian or Jew to reconcile – who can doubt Moses and the Ten Commandments?
Yet that same Christian or Jew may have severe doubts about Joseph Smith’s claim that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823 to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester Village in western New York State awaiting translation. Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of eight witnesses (Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and six others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. But what is the difference between this and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Moses and Jesus, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from differing upbringing?
As Wilson points out, the success of a religion’s moral code depends on whether the code motivates the religion’s adherents to function effectively. Its veracity or fiction has little relevance: “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”3
This is also true in the corporate sense. Some companies are successful in creating a hagiographic portrait of the CEO that wouldn’t stand up in the light of day, but if such an image rallies the troops and results in collective motivation than it demonstrates the CEOs apotheosis.
Moral rules first ordained in the religious have a way of touching secular society. The reason atheists as well as many believers don’t kill their enemies derives from values instilled by society, and of course from the fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God.
(4) Moral Bad Behavior of the In-Group toward the Out-Group
Tribes used relationships by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify moral rules. The killing of members of other tribes represented no moral dilemma. But once the state invoked religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens who have no relationship by blood or otherwise, this all changed, that is, with the exception of war.
The state permits; indeed the state commands its citizens to kill citizens of other states once it exercises a declaration of war.
Imagine the moral dilemma. The state teaches a boy for 18 years, “Thou shalt not kill,” and then turns around and says, “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances.” Why is it such a surprise when young boys are trained to kill, and then experience the killing, and bring back that confused state into peaceful society, and then are expected to fit and forget and no longer be inclined to express that animal rage against the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens) when they lose it?
Likewise, the wonder is the same for 18-year-olds indoctrinated into a behavior system of being polite, obedient, obsequious, conforming, reactive, passive, and dependent in school and on the job, and then castigated, demoted, or let go for not being more creative, self-initiating and proactive. Equally, they are bombarded with the virtues of honesty, frugality, generosity, temperance and good will only to see their authority figures – teachers, priests, parents, employers, politicians, and educators -- indicted for embezzlement, corruption, malfeasance, sexual misconduct and moral turpitude. Small wonder young people withdraw into themselves.
Wilson tells us religion comes to the rescue with the last of these four elements – the Ten Commandments apply only to one’s in-group.
Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth (companies do as well) and that all other religions are wrong. Too often we see in recent times that believers are permitted or even obliged to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals – for God and country (substitute company as well) – for they are often at the expense of the out-group. This in no way exonerates the current crop of murderous religious fanatics, but it does point out the basic hypocrisy of religions when it comes to in-groups and out-groups.
I am an Irish Roman Catholic and I cannot deny the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, or the dark periods of church history. There have been many evils perpetrated in God’s name by every religion known to man. The Koran is often mentioned as having scripture citing hatred of Westerners or infidels, but so is the Bible guilty of the same, especially the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens - Deuteronomy 20:10 – 18, where it explains the obligations of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city.
The Book of Joshua describes how he became a hero by carrying out those instructions.
The Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill (believers in thing own God)” and “Thou must kill (believers in another god).” In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. Similarly, the Koran is too often interpreted in terms of millennia before instead of in terms of today’s world.
Not to put too much of a blight on the Old Testament, the New Testament in Revelations 9: 4 – 5 says that it is okay to torture heathens for five months, but not to kill them.
In war God is always on our side. The religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey the moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). Imagine what that must have been like when the North faced the South in the Civil War, and families often fought against each other by the accident of their circumstance.
Wilson’s book is contentious to be sure, and covers subject matter not usually presented to a broader public. But these are unusual times and if we don’t understand them in the context of the times then there is little hope for any of us.
Wilson is saying that the ambiguity of the moral doctrines of the world’s major religions, placing one set of moral behaviors for the in-group and justifying a whole other set for the out-group has solidified a small contingent of religious fanatics to die for a cause in which thousands of innocent members of another society have their lives snuffed out (e.g., 3,025) because they are perceived enemies.
These religious fanatics are motivated by the fictitious belief that they are to be embraced by a heaven populated by beautiful virgins awaiting those that die for the cause.
It pleases me that Wilson doesn’t dodge the bullet. He admits religion is important to society, and that as society has moved away from religion and toward modern science the vacuum created has not been filled, not only has it not been filled, but he goes on to say, “There is no evidence that scientific understanding replaces religious beliefs in modern cultures. America has become more religious over the course of its history, not less, despite the influence of science and engineering. A very high proportion of scientists themselves professes a belief in God and participates in organized religions. Clearly, we must think of religious thought as something that coexists with scientific thought, not as an inferior version of it.”
Wilson’s thought-provoking book will stimulate you and enrich your own personal views of how you see and interpret your life. He makes it clear that religion is human and filled with the foibles and follies of human beings.
It is no accident that the moral fiber of society is being strained in all its orchestrations at this moment in our history. We know of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the more than million killed in bloody civil wars in West Africa, the starvation in Ethiopia, not because food and medicine were not available but because of rebel forces withholding its distribution. We know of how the white landowners have been driven from their land in Mozambique or murdered by the state for resisting the takeover. And now most recently we know of a man and a teenager killing ten innocent people in the Washington DC area with sniper bullets, for what reason it is impossible to speculate. Perhaps there is none. In some ways it seems that we are retrogressing to primitives.
What Wilson never states in his scholarly work is the one word that holds all religions true if they would but practice the tenets of their faith equally with out-groups as well as with in-groups and that word is love.
Be always well and always kind. That is the true wealth of the individual and his society.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s new website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
A Way of Looking at Things No. 27: Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, R.I.P.
A Way of Looking at Things – No. 27: Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, R.I.P.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2001
We all die, that as they say is as certain as taxes. But some deaths affect us differently than others. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard professor and prolific writer, died recently and I surprised myself by weeping real tears. I found he was as close to me as family, perhaps closer, because I am moved by his passion for life and ideas.
I know the evolutionist only through his books and articles (he wrote a monthly article for a quarter century in Nature). He’s one of that rare breed in science: a person who can think and write like an angel.
Gould’s gift for expression is matched by his passion, conviction, insight and daring. Last summer when my wife Betty and I took a long trip I exposed her to nine hours of tapes of his book Full House in which he presents the truth about progress, evolution and excellence from Plato to Darwin. She surprised herself by enjoying much of it. What is fascinating about Gould, among other things, is that he uses common metaphors, such as baseball and baseball statistics, to illustrate his points.
Two books of his that I consider “must” reading are The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and Wonderful Life (1989). In the first he takes I.Q. on with abandon and shows how scientists and charlatans have skewed their reading of intelligence to fit their preconceived biases. In the latter book he uses the burgess shale as his metaphor for the nature of history.
My eight-year-old grandson loves dinosaurs and has wanted to be a paleontologist since he was four. Not surprising, Gould had a similar interest at that age. Recently, I took Ryan to the Barnes & Noble Bookstore and put into his hands Gould’s last book, his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). It is 1,433 pages of commentary (and always statistics) of Gould’s reading of the family tree of life. I am thinking of purchasing ($40) it for his next birthday and telling him to read it when he is ready.
Gould came from very common stock and climbed to prominence with casual ease. He dedicates Wonderful Life to Norman D. Newell with the caption, “Who was, and is, in the most noble word of all human speech, my teacher.” I can identify with this.
Francis Xavier Pesuth was my teacher. Son of immigrant Croatian parents, devout Roman Catholic, perspicacious psychologist, Honeywell executive, my mentor, counselor, coach and friend, I have a similar if more personal connection with him than of course Gould, albeit both are my teachers.
I am letting my soul surface here and letting the words follow, as they well in my reflections on this great man in the most sincere since of this expression.
One day at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) he was called for an emergency Pinellas County (Florida) School Board Meeting, where he was chairman, and found he was without a suit coat.
“Fisher, can I borrow your jacket?”
“Sure.”
So he puts my jacket on and it fits him like a dress, breaking at mid-knee. Francis being about five-eleven, looks at himself in a mirror and says,
“How can this be? You’re only about four or five inches taller than me!”
“Francis,” I laugh, “it’s because you have no shoulders.”
“It’s that is it?”
“Yep.”
A broad smile breaks across his face; he shakes his head, then that pleasant guttural laugh of his rises from his diaphragm. “No shoulders!” Then growing pensive, he adds,
“Maybe that explains why I was never a jock.” Still, with the jacket on, he leaves the office and heads for the parking lot, looking a whole lot like Charlie Chaplin sans the cane but with the same crooked knees.
It was that quality of self-enfacement, despite his considerable gifts, that made him special. He died earlier this year (as did Gould) at the age of 78.
I miss him. I don’t want to be maudlin about it, but he was important to me, and I find myself thinking often about him. He was a marvelous boss who guided me through some tough personal terrain while introducing me to my peculiar strengths and weaknesses.
His early assessment of me ran something like this: “You’re chaotic, compulsive, creative and conceptual. The first two piss me off, the last two save your ass.”
When I came to Honeywell, I was already a mature professional with all the success and baggage that goes with it. My recent history found me cynical, self-centered and narcissistic. I had the typical Irish complaint, which is that the world is against me. Francis cut through all that malarkey by being firm, fair, consistent and honest with me, something that I had not experienced before in a supervisor.
Francis not only walked the talk but also walked the life. He was a man of his word, but also a man of unabashed principles and beliefs and had no interest in being a proselytizer.
It is rare to find a man of both profound intelligence and marked humility, but he was such a man. Never one to punish you with his knowledge, he saw nothing unusual in his being a competent and dedicated employee without complaint. As Honeywell executive Ken LaPorte puts it, “No company ever had a more loyal employee.”
It is high praise, but Francis was key to LaPorte’s success as he was to such people as Dave Larson, Drs. Thomas Brown, Mick Sheppick, Mike Donovan, Ed Buck, Blondel Senior, many others, as well as myself.
It hurts me that in retirement he was largely ignored by the Honeywell contingent with the exception of Ken LaPorte. Often, you are not appreciated in your own shop the way you are esteemed in your profession. This was the case with Francis. Several of Honeywellers were like his sons, perhaps Prodigal sons that never found their way back home.
And it saddens me also that Honeywell didn’t avail itself of his expertise in retirement. He was years ahead of his time introducing quality circles, participative management, total employee involvement, psychometrics, assessment processes, organizational development interventions, employee-centered management, employee-assistant programs, while at the same time convincing management to staff his efforts with Ph.D.’s. All of this was being done as early as the 1970s, long before all of this became standard operating spin.
When I joined Honeywell in 1980, Francis was an adjunct professor at both the Pinellas County (Florida) campus of the University of South Florida and St. Petersburg Junior College (Florida), chairing the Pinellas County School Board, organizing Honeywell Avionic’s Management & Executive Development Center in Minneapolis with Dr. Thomas Brown, co-founding the Suncoast Management Institute (St. Petersburg Florida), supervising six Ph.D.’s in industrial psychology and management development at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater Florida), while overseeing organizational development (OD) interventions through Ned Munger in Honeywell Avionics in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A man of 56 at the time, where he found the energy and enlightenment to do all this was beyond me.
That said, what I liked especially about Francis was his directness which I experienced in my first days as a Honeywell employee.
“Fisher,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what your role will be here, but if you don’t find it in the next six weeks you’re history.”
On another occasion, I was outlining a strategy I had devised for a major program management intervention, quipping, “Francis, I’m trying to think outside the box.”
He laughed heartedly, “Fisher that’s funny, very funny. You’ve never been inside the box.”
Shortly before he retired, with me just back from a stint with Honeywell Europe, he invited me into his office. “I don’t know what you’re going to do when I’m gone, and I’m not able to run interference for you.” Then with one of his typical mixed metaphors, he added, “I suspect the HR piranha will come out of the woodwork after you.” He was of course right, and another reason why he was so endearing to me.
One day, for some reason, I was particularly angst, and asked him boldly, “Why do you always call me ‘Fisher’? I have a given name you know, James Raymond. You can call me James, Raymond, Jim, Ray, or even Seamus (pronounced Shay – mus), Gaelic for James that I was called in college.”
He looked at me in amazement. “Fisher, you’re lucky that I call you at all.”
I rolled my shoulders. “I guess you’ve got a point.” My da referred to me as “your son,” when talking to my mother about me, never “Jimmy.” Yet speaking to me directly, I was always Jimmy to him. So there was precedence and somewhat of a bond between my father and surrogate father, Francis.
It may seem strange that I found Francis so engaging. Having gone through an expensive, traumatic and wrenching divorce, no longer sure of my direction, or myself, and joining Honeywell only after becoming totally disenchanted with consulting, I welcomed his no nonsense approach to me.
My whole executive career had been in industrial and international line management where I enjoyed an unencumbered hand to create essentially as I pleased. You sank or swam on the basis of results and only results.
To put this in perspective, I had never been confined in a box called a “plant” where the order of the day was “to compare and compete.” So, it was a new experience, to say the least, to run into immediate interference from other department Ph.D.’s. It never occurred to me that I might be imposing myself on the turf and constituency of others. Even their sandbagging and sabotaging was a new experience. Francis recognized this and also knew I had an inclination to underestimate my colleagues and their impact on my efforts, and therefore he managed me accordingly.
“Fisher,” he said one day, “do you believe in team effort?”
“Francis, is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“Do you want spin or what I think?”
“I know what you think, humor me. Give me spin so I can get through the rest of the day.” And so I did.
Then there was the Human Resources (HR) department. I marveled at its ineptness, while appearing to be proficient. It gave new meaning to duplicity, chicanery, deception and legerdemain. Having been trained in line management, I marveled at its existence. In fairness I had encountered HR in my consulting work but mainly as the contact, not the client. If HR didn’t invent spin, it certainly perfected it. Its principle role seemed to be endorsing senior management’s peccadilloes rather than clearing the table of them. I’ve written several books and articles on this amazing entity of organization.
The career of Francis rose out of HR but he was the delightful exception, a learner and not a knower, a listener, not a teller, a student, not a pontificator, and in addition, a devoted husband, father, and humble servant of his church, school, community and company. He was a man’s man, and a tough one at that, not in any way Mr. Milquetoast, a beautiful man, a kind person and a man of dimension.
I miss you, Francis. I’m glad I had an opportunity and the courage to tell you I love you, and I’m glad that we had a chance to talk nearly every month after your retirement in 1989.
One day he hit me with this salvo, “Fisher, I’m taking chemo, got an inoperable tumor on the brain. May not make it. Good chance I won’t.”
“How do you feel about that Francis?” I asked stupidly, forgetting how calloused the remark must sound.
“Fisher, you’re something else.”
“The reason I said that,” trying to cover my idiocy, “is that I don’t know anyone more prepared to meet his Maker than you. We’re all going to die, Francis, but few of us have lived our lives in a way that puts a smile on God’s face as yours surely must.”
Silence. Then, “The reason why I tell you this is because I would like for you to be one of my pallbearers.”
“Francis, please,” I said with a catch in my voice.
“Fisher, I’m serious.”
“Of course. I’d be devotedly honored.”
“Well, skip the ‘devotedly’ if you would.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping, “any chance of beating this thing?”
Instead of answering directly, he confessed, “This chemotherapy knocks my socks off. Soon as I complete the series I’m visiting my sister and our family home in Illinois, retracing the steps of my youth, and attempting to get closure on my life.”
“Closure is important to you.”
“Fisher now why do you say that?”
“Well, never known you to tolerate incomplete staff work. So it follows.”
“Never thought of it that way.” He laughed. “Never applied to you though, did it?”
“Now Francis be nice.” But nothing could be truer. (I once advised one of his administrators. “If he tells you to do something, ignore it. If he repeats it, keep it in mind. If he puts it in writing, do it.” He came back to me later with rage in his eyes, after this lady explained that I was the cause of her being dilatory in an oral assignment. Remarkably, when I admitted my deception, he simply turned and went about what he was doing. We both understood each other’s weaknesses.)
“Okay,” he laughed again. With that, we ended the conversation.
We talked several times in the last months of his life, with him being especially animated sharing with me the joy of his trip home to Illinois. Up to then, little travel was devoted to personal interests, being primarily a business-oriented traveler.
So, Francis, up there with St. Peter, Michael the Archangel, and all the others, pray for me and keep guiding me through this maelstrom of hell on earth. God bless and keep you forever. You are in my heart and will remain so until I join you, hopefully, in the same Paradise where you can give me a performance appraisal without disturbing your ulcers.
Amen.
PS Even in Paradise, you can still call me “Fisher.”
* * * * *
See Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2001
We all die, that as they say is as certain as taxes. But some deaths affect us differently than others. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard professor and prolific writer, died recently and I surprised myself by weeping real tears. I found he was as close to me as family, perhaps closer, because I am moved by his passion for life and ideas.
I know the evolutionist only through his books and articles (he wrote a monthly article for a quarter century in Nature). He’s one of that rare breed in science: a person who can think and write like an angel.
Gould’s gift for expression is matched by his passion, conviction, insight and daring. Last summer when my wife Betty and I took a long trip I exposed her to nine hours of tapes of his book Full House in which he presents the truth about progress, evolution and excellence from Plato to Darwin. She surprised herself by enjoying much of it. What is fascinating about Gould, among other things, is that he uses common metaphors, such as baseball and baseball statistics, to illustrate his points.
Two books of his that I consider “must” reading are The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and Wonderful Life (1989). In the first he takes I.Q. on with abandon and shows how scientists and charlatans have skewed their reading of intelligence to fit their preconceived biases. In the latter book he uses the burgess shale as his metaphor for the nature of history.
My eight-year-old grandson loves dinosaurs and has wanted to be a paleontologist since he was four. Not surprising, Gould had a similar interest at that age. Recently, I took Ryan to the Barnes & Noble Bookstore and put into his hands Gould’s last book, his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). It is 1,433 pages of commentary (and always statistics) of Gould’s reading of the family tree of life. I am thinking of purchasing ($40) it for his next birthday and telling him to read it when he is ready.
Gould came from very common stock and climbed to prominence with casual ease. He dedicates Wonderful Life to Norman D. Newell with the caption, “Who was, and is, in the most noble word of all human speech, my teacher.” I can identify with this.
Francis Xavier Pesuth was my teacher. Son of immigrant Croatian parents, devout Roman Catholic, perspicacious psychologist, Honeywell executive, my mentor, counselor, coach and friend, I have a similar if more personal connection with him than of course Gould, albeit both are my teachers.
I am letting my soul surface here and letting the words follow, as they well in my reflections on this great man in the most sincere since of this expression.
One day at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater, Florida) he was called for an emergency Pinellas County (Florida) School Board Meeting, where he was chairman, and found he was without a suit coat.
“Fisher, can I borrow your jacket?”
“Sure.”
So he puts my jacket on and it fits him like a dress, breaking at mid-knee. Francis being about five-eleven, looks at himself in a mirror and says,
“How can this be? You’re only about four or five inches taller than me!”
“Francis,” I laugh, “it’s because you have no shoulders.”
“It’s that is it?”
“Yep.”
A broad smile breaks across his face; he shakes his head, then that pleasant guttural laugh of his rises from his diaphragm. “No shoulders!” Then growing pensive, he adds,
“Maybe that explains why I was never a jock.” Still, with the jacket on, he leaves the office and heads for the parking lot, looking a whole lot like Charlie Chaplin sans the cane but with the same crooked knees.
It was that quality of self-enfacement, despite his considerable gifts, that made him special. He died earlier this year (as did Gould) at the age of 78.
I miss him. I don’t want to be maudlin about it, but he was important to me, and I find myself thinking often about him. He was a marvelous boss who guided me through some tough personal terrain while introducing me to my peculiar strengths and weaknesses.
His early assessment of me ran something like this: “You’re chaotic, compulsive, creative and conceptual. The first two piss me off, the last two save your ass.”
When I came to Honeywell, I was already a mature professional with all the success and baggage that goes with it. My recent history found me cynical, self-centered and narcissistic. I had the typical Irish complaint, which is that the world is against me. Francis cut through all that malarkey by being firm, fair, consistent and honest with me, something that I had not experienced before in a supervisor.
Francis not only walked the talk but also walked the life. He was a man of his word, but also a man of unabashed principles and beliefs and had no interest in being a proselytizer.
It is rare to find a man of both profound intelligence and marked humility, but he was such a man. Never one to punish you with his knowledge, he saw nothing unusual in his being a competent and dedicated employee without complaint. As Honeywell executive Ken LaPorte puts it, “No company ever had a more loyal employee.”
It is high praise, but Francis was key to LaPorte’s success as he was to such people as Dave Larson, Drs. Thomas Brown, Mick Sheppick, Mike Donovan, Ed Buck, Blondel Senior, many others, as well as myself.
It hurts me that in retirement he was largely ignored by the Honeywell contingent with the exception of Ken LaPorte. Often, you are not appreciated in your own shop the way you are esteemed in your profession. This was the case with Francis. Several of Honeywellers were like his sons, perhaps Prodigal sons that never found their way back home.
And it saddens me also that Honeywell didn’t avail itself of his expertise in retirement. He was years ahead of his time introducing quality circles, participative management, total employee involvement, psychometrics, assessment processes, organizational development interventions, employee-centered management, employee-assistant programs, while at the same time convincing management to staff his efforts with Ph.D.’s. All of this was being done as early as the 1970s, long before all of this became standard operating spin.
When I joined Honeywell in 1980, Francis was an adjunct professor at both the Pinellas County (Florida) campus of the University of South Florida and St. Petersburg Junior College (Florida), chairing the Pinellas County School Board, organizing Honeywell Avionic’s Management & Executive Development Center in Minneapolis with Dr. Thomas Brown, co-founding the Suncoast Management Institute (St. Petersburg Florida), supervising six Ph.D.’s in industrial psychology and management development at Honeywell Avionics (Clearwater Florida), while overseeing organizational development (OD) interventions through Ned Munger in Honeywell Avionics in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A man of 56 at the time, where he found the energy and enlightenment to do all this was beyond me.
That said, what I liked especially about Francis was his directness which I experienced in my first days as a Honeywell employee.
“Fisher,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what your role will be here, but if you don’t find it in the next six weeks you’re history.”
On another occasion, I was outlining a strategy I had devised for a major program management intervention, quipping, “Francis, I’m trying to think outside the box.”
He laughed heartedly, “Fisher that’s funny, very funny. You’ve never been inside the box.”
Shortly before he retired, with me just back from a stint with Honeywell Europe, he invited me into his office. “I don’t know what you’re going to do when I’m gone, and I’m not able to run interference for you.” Then with one of his typical mixed metaphors, he added, “I suspect the HR piranha will come out of the woodwork after you.” He was of course right, and another reason why he was so endearing to me.
One day, for some reason, I was particularly angst, and asked him boldly, “Why do you always call me ‘Fisher’? I have a given name you know, James Raymond. You can call me James, Raymond, Jim, Ray, or even Seamus (pronounced Shay – mus), Gaelic for James that I was called in college.”
He looked at me in amazement. “Fisher, you’re lucky that I call you at all.”
I rolled my shoulders. “I guess you’ve got a point.” My da referred to me as “your son,” when talking to my mother about me, never “Jimmy.” Yet speaking to me directly, I was always Jimmy to him. So there was precedence and somewhat of a bond between my father and surrogate father, Francis.
It may seem strange that I found Francis so engaging. Having gone through an expensive, traumatic and wrenching divorce, no longer sure of my direction, or myself, and joining Honeywell only after becoming totally disenchanted with consulting, I welcomed his no nonsense approach to me.
My whole executive career had been in industrial and international line management where I enjoyed an unencumbered hand to create essentially as I pleased. You sank or swam on the basis of results and only results.
To put this in perspective, I had never been confined in a box called a “plant” where the order of the day was “to compare and compete.” So, it was a new experience, to say the least, to run into immediate interference from other department Ph.D.’s. It never occurred to me that I might be imposing myself on the turf and constituency of others. Even their sandbagging and sabotaging was a new experience. Francis recognized this and also knew I had an inclination to underestimate my colleagues and their impact on my efforts, and therefore he managed me accordingly.
“Fisher,” he said one day, “do you believe in team effort?”
“Francis, is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“Do you want spin or what I think?”
“I know what you think, humor me. Give me spin so I can get through the rest of the day.” And so I did.
Then there was the Human Resources (HR) department. I marveled at its ineptness, while appearing to be proficient. It gave new meaning to duplicity, chicanery, deception and legerdemain. Having been trained in line management, I marveled at its existence. In fairness I had encountered HR in my consulting work but mainly as the contact, not the client. If HR didn’t invent spin, it certainly perfected it. Its principle role seemed to be endorsing senior management’s peccadilloes rather than clearing the table of them. I’ve written several books and articles on this amazing entity of organization.
The career of Francis rose out of HR but he was the delightful exception, a learner and not a knower, a listener, not a teller, a student, not a pontificator, and in addition, a devoted husband, father, and humble servant of his church, school, community and company. He was a man’s man, and a tough one at that, not in any way Mr. Milquetoast, a beautiful man, a kind person and a man of dimension.
I miss you, Francis. I’m glad I had an opportunity and the courage to tell you I love you, and I’m glad that we had a chance to talk nearly every month after your retirement in 1989.
One day he hit me with this salvo, “Fisher, I’m taking chemo, got an inoperable tumor on the brain. May not make it. Good chance I won’t.”
“How do you feel about that Francis?” I asked stupidly, forgetting how calloused the remark must sound.
“Fisher, you’re something else.”
“The reason I said that,” trying to cover my idiocy, “is that I don’t know anyone more prepared to meet his Maker than you. We’re all going to die, Francis, but few of us have lived our lives in a way that puts a smile on God’s face as yours surely must.”
Silence. Then, “The reason why I tell you this is because I would like for you to be one of my pallbearers.”
“Francis, please,” I said with a catch in my voice.
“Fisher, I’m serious.”
“Of course. I’d be devotedly honored.”
“Well, skip the ‘devotedly’ if you would.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping, “any chance of beating this thing?”
Instead of answering directly, he confessed, “This chemotherapy knocks my socks off. Soon as I complete the series I’m visiting my sister and our family home in Illinois, retracing the steps of my youth, and attempting to get closure on my life.”
“Closure is important to you.”
“Fisher now why do you say that?”
“Well, never known you to tolerate incomplete staff work. So it follows.”
“Never thought of it that way.” He laughed. “Never applied to you though, did it?”
“Now Francis be nice.” But nothing could be truer. (I once advised one of his administrators. “If he tells you to do something, ignore it. If he repeats it, keep it in mind. If he puts it in writing, do it.” He came back to me later with rage in his eyes, after this lady explained that I was the cause of her being dilatory in an oral assignment. Remarkably, when I admitted my deception, he simply turned and went about what he was doing. We both understood each other’s weaknesses.)
“Okay,” he laughed again. With that, we ended the conversation.
We talked several times in the last months of his life, with him being especially animated sharing with me the joy of his trip home to Illinois. Up to then, little travel was devoted to personal interests, being primarily a business-oriented traveler.
So, Francis, up there with St. Peter, Michael the Archangel, and all the others, pray for me and keep guiding me through this maelstrom of hell on earth. God bless and keep you forever. You are in my heart and will remain so until I join you, hopefully, in the same Paradise where you can give me a performance appraisal without disturbing your ulcers.
Amen.
PS Even in Paradise, you can still call me “Fisher.”
* * * * *
See Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
A Way of Looking at Things No. 30: The Country is being run by 14-year-old Mentalities
A Way of Looking at Things – No. 30:
The Country is being run by 14-year-old Mentalities
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002
Jack Welch, venerated former CEO of General Electric, you could say was larger than life. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman recently reported that he confessed that looking at a picture of his high school sports team he never realized how short he was.
Welch became the ultimate workaholic, an American disease, to compensate for this “shortcoming,” and one day found himself “like a man standing 6 feet 4 with a full head of hair” on the pinnacle of the corporate ladder of ladders, the quintessential executive and corporate leader.
The bald little fellow had his management team as well as the rank and file membership of GE basking in his reflected sunlight with soaring accomplishments with Daedalus wings. The Minotaur of competition couldn’t escape his Labyrinth. What of the 300,000 GE employees? What part did they have in this success? Apparently little. The Caesars of Rome never enjoyed such adoration, such privilege, and such envied omniscience.
More cool heads, buried in academia, such as Dr. Rahesh Khurana of Harvard are not so easily impressed. Dr. Khurana had the audacity recently on the “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS to suggest that leadership at GE has been superb over the past 100 years and that Welch’s contribution to that leadership is consistent with but not an excessive departure from that reputation. The “system,” he points out created the climate for such leadership to evolve; the “system” created Jack Welch, Jack Welch did not create the system.
But the hungry media knows that copy is not a function of such ambiguous terms as “culture” and “system,” but of personality. Copy is based on celebrity, which is a function of the fantasy of leadership where the mystique of the brash, brazen 14-year-old in the 60-year-old body suit becomes the prototype of what the media would constitute as “leadership.” Welch has been on the cover of more business magazines than Madonna has been on those of her cult.
Welch fits the mold with his semi-literate lingo, dumbing down to create the impression that he is just a regular guy and working stiff like everybody else, even if he is making 700 times more, describing how it feels at the top as “being a CEO is the nuts!” Welch writes books that are national bestsellers, which describe “his leadership” in language and appeal of a romance novel with as much long-term staying power.
MBA’s – The Program Learning of Obeisance
Given this scenario, one has to wonder how could a single man or CEO at the top of an organization be treated as if God reincarnate, when organizations that thrive are organizations in which intelligent decision making is accomplished close to the level of consequences, and intelligent feedback is produced in a timely fashion to generate intelligent strategies with positive outcomes. The answer is a revealing one.
Corporate success is indeed a collaborative model but produced not unlike pyramid building with obedient serfs sacrificing their well-being to the Pharaoh’s narcissistic desires for immortality with little material benefit to the serfs themselves. We can make allowances for the Egyptian serfs because they were programmed to be nonpersons, but what of 21st century well-educated employees? Ah, now there is the rub!
You look at the implicit curriculum of an MBA program and you see that it differs little with the programming of the Egyptian serfs. They are taught to be “team players” and “loyal to the corporation” and “dutiful models for other employees” in the pursuit of their profession. And what is their profession? The management of things with only a passing attention to the management of people as persons. People are an expendable critical mass necessary to accomplish a given goal; the less people involved the better the financial advantage. The engine of career is financial advantage.
One executive took his Harvard MBA and this philosophy to heart and instituted a “20-40-60” plan: reevaluate all employees with twenty years or more of service for possible redundancy, look at people of 40-years-of-age and older and/or making $60,000 or more with the same objective in mind. He is no longer CEO of this company, but the damage is done. The company continues to flounder and is unlikely to survive.
The model is a mechanical one with a lexicon “driving towards profits with all engines burning.” It is also the philosophy of war with winners and losers and no prisoners taken. In this war there is the necessity of the suspension of humanity with forgiveness for plant closings, redundancy exercises, reengineering, streamlining, moving plants and equipment at will with the loss of jobs and the disruption of lives with nary a protest of any consequence from the consequential.
It is the love of total war where competition cannot simply be beaten but must be obliterated. It is the mindset of the 14-year-old playing with plastic guns in my generation and now video games where “the enemy” is destroyed and no mercy granted and “collateral damage” is a condition of the game and easily justified.
It doesn’t stop there!
If only companies were engaged in these war games with the mindset of 14-year-olds, it would be one thing. But when the country is run by men who think and behave like 14-year-olds, it is quite another. This puts everyone at risk.
Make no mistake about it; we Americans developed an appetite for virtuous hate in World War Two. Many reading this were not yet born, but such a venerated leader as Sir Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, piously rumbled in 1943 that “the Germans must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smoldering ruin,” and as for the Japanese “we shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women and children.” It was our jihad when evil had no room for compassion and it gave rise to the refined pleasure of virtuous hate.
Virtuous hate has appeal to the 14-year-old mindset that wants answers to complex problems in simplistic terms, terms that can be digested whole without the necessity or inconvenience of chewing on them.
This hatred is spawned and sustained by the geography of fear, the fear that I have been programmed to embrace all my life from the Great Depression to Nazism and Japanese Imperialism to the “Red Scare” and Communism to the Soviet Union to Détente to McCarthyism to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Korean War to the Viet Nam War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Watergate to the Gulf War to 9-11 to now with no peace in this geography of fear throughout my adolescence, adulthood and middle age. Gunter Grass was on to something when he wrote The Tin Drum.
You look at these episodic developments throughout our history and you see the 14-year-old reacting to the situation with the same juvenile insight into the situation of well, a 14-year-old who is not expected to think but simply to be loyal and patriotic without reflection or protest
So, when wronged, with a 14-year-old mindset, it is time to react with vengeance, not to reflect with insight into what factors contributed to the situation. Obliteration is an escape from reflection by dehumanizing those things that we don’t understand and don’t want to contemplate. It is the love of total war fueled by virtuous hate.
We have a president, a popular president, who talks in sound bites, and simple black and white terms that a 14-year-old understands viscerally. He is Jack Welch with another mask, a former CEO, a former MBA, and a man who understands how the dumbing down works and where its mass appeal lies. He has the support of a Viet Nam war hero in Senator John McCain, who has that same 14-year-old esprit de corps vigor that once did him honor. I would have expected more of him, but I suppose I shouldn’t, given that he has admirals in his gene pool.
Now we are about to go to war against a sovereign nation with a preemptive strike policy of engagement based upon little more than the geography of fear, a fear that dominated the 20th century, and a fear that still motivates those that operate this country at all levels as if we were obedient 14-year-olds, which I guess we are.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
The Country is being run by 14-year-old Mentalities
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002
Jack Welch, venerated former CEO of General Electric, you could say was larger than life. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman recently reported that he confessed that looking at a picture of his high school sports team he never realized how short he was.
Welch became the ultimate workaholic, an American disease, to compensate for this “shortcoming,” and one day found himself “like a man standing 6 feet 4 with a full head of hair” on the pinnacle of the corporate ladder of ladders, the quintessential executive and corporate leader.
The bald little fellow had his management team as well as the rank and file membership of GE basking in his reflected sunlight with soaring accomplishments with Daedalus wings. The Minotaur of competition couldn’t escape his Labyrinth. What of the 300,000 GE employees? What part did they have in this success? Apparently little. The Caesars of Rome never enjoyed such adoration, such privilege, and such envied omniscience.
More cool heads, buried in academia, such as Dr. Rahesh Khurana of Harvard are not so easily impressed. Dr. Khurana had the audacity recently on the “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS to suggest that leadership at GE has been superb over the past 100 years and that Welch’s contribution to that leadership is consistent with but not an excessive departure from that reputation. The “system,” he points out created the climate for such leadership to evolve; the “system” created Jack Welch, Jack Welch did not create the system.
But the hungry media knows that copy is not a function of such ambiguous terms as “culture” and “system,” but of personality. Copy is based on celebrity, which is a function of the fantasy of leadership where the mystique of the brash, brazen 14-year-old in the 60-year-old body suit becomes the prototype of what the media would constitute as “leadership.” Welch has been on the cover of more business magazines than Madonna has been on those of her cult.
Welch fits the mold with his semi-literate lingo, dumbing down to create the impression that he is just a regular guy and working stiff like everybody else, even if he is making 700 times more, describing how it feels at the top as “being a CEO is the nuts!” Welch writes books that are national bestsellers, which describe “his leadership” in language and appeal of a romance novel with as much long-term staying power.
MBA’s – The Program Learning of Obeisance
Given this scenario, one has to wonder how could a single man or CEO at the top of an organization be treated as if God reincarnate, when organizations that thrive are organizations in which intelligent decision making is accomplished close to the level of consequences, and intelligent feedback is produced in a timely fashion to generate intelligent strategies with positive outcomes. The answer is a revealing one.
Corporate success is indeed a collaborative model but produced not unlike pyramid building with obedient serfs sacrificing their well-being to the Pharaoh’s narcissistic desires for immortality with little material benefit to the serfs themselves. We can make allowances for the Egyptian serfs because they were programmed to be nonpersons, but what of 21st century well-educated employees? Ah, now there is the rub!
You look at the implicit curriculum of an MBA program and you see that it differs little with the programming of the Egyptian serfs. They are taught to be “team players” and “loyal to the corporation” and “dutiful models for other employees” in the pursuit of their profession. And what is their profession? The management of things with only a passing attention to the management of people as persons. People are an expendable critical mass necessary to accomplish a given goal; the less people involved the better the financial advantage. The engine of career is financial advantage.
One executive took his Harvard MBA and this philosophy to heart and instituted a “20-40-60” plan: reevaluate all employees with twenty years or more of service for possible redundancy, look at people of 40-years-of-age and older and/or making $60,000 or more with the same objective in mind. He is no longer CEO of this company, but the damage is done. The company continues to flounder and is unlikely to survive.
The model is a mechanical one with a lexicon “driving towards profits with all engines burning.” It is also the philosophy of war with winners and losers and no prisoners taken. In this war there is the necessity of the suspension of humanity with forgiveness for plant closings, redundancy exercises, reengineering, streamlining, moving plants and equipment at will with the loss of jobs and the disruption of lives with nary a protest of any consequence from the consequential.
It is the love of total war where competition cannot simply be beaten but must be obliterated. It is the mindset of the 14-year-old playing with plastic guns in my generation and now video games where “the enemy” is destroyed and no mercy granted and “collateral damage” is a condition of the game and easily justified.
It doesn’t stop there!
If only companies were engaged in these war games with the mindset of 14-year-olds, it would be one thing. But when the country is run by men who think and behave like 14-year-olds, it is quite another. This puts everyone at risk.
Make no mistake about it; we Americans developed an appetite for virtuous hate in World War Two. Many reading this were not yet born, but such a venerated leader as Sir Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, piously rumbled in 1943 that “the Germans must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smoldering ruin,” and as for the Japanese “we shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women and children.” It was our jihad when evil had no room for compassion and it gave rise to the refined pleasure of virtuous hate.
Virtuous hate has appeal to the 14-year-old mindset that wants answers to complex problems in simplistic terms, terms that can be digested whole without the necessity or inconvenience of chewing on them.
This hatred is spawned and sustained by the geography of fear, the fear that I have been programmed to embrace all my life from the Great Depression to Nazism and Japanese Imperialism to the “Red Scare” and Communism to the Soviet Union to Détente to McCarthyism to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Korean War to the Viet Nam War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Watergate to the Gulf War to 9-11 to now with no peace in this geography of fear throughout my adolescence, adulthood and middle age. Gunter Grass was on to something when he wrote The Tin Drum.
You look at these episodic developments throughout our history and you see the 14-year-old reacting to the situation with the same juvenile insight into the situation of well, a 14-year-old who is not expected to think but simply to be loyal and patriotic without reflection or protest
So, when wronged, with a 14-year-old mindset, it is time to react with vengeance, not to reflect with insight into what factors contributed to the situation. Obliteration is an escape from reflection by dehumanizing those things that we don’t understand and don’t want to contemplate. It is the love of total war fueled by virtuous hate.
We have a president, a popular president, who talks in sound bites, and simple black and white terms that a 14-year-old understands viscerally. He is Jack Welch with another mask, a former CEO, a former MBA, and a man who understands how the dumbing down works and where its mass appeal lies. He has the support of a Viet Nam war hero in Senator John McCain, who has that same 14-year-old esprit de corps vigor that once did him honor. I would have expected more of him, but I suppose I shouldn’t, given that he has admirals in his gene pool.
Now we are about to go to war against a sovereign nation with a preemptive strike policy of engagement based upon little more than the geography of fear, a fear that dominated the 20th century, and a fear that still motivates those that operate this country at all levels as if we were obedient 14-year-olds, which I guess we are.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
A Way of Looking at Things No. 26: What is this world coming to?
A Way of Looking at Things – No. 26: What is this world coming to?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002
I just completed a ten-day vacation including a seven-day cruise to Alaska on the cruise ship the Norwegian Sky. In my somewhat charmed life, I still had never been exposed to such continuous obsequious and indulgent service. Nor had fine dining been my experience virtually every meal a day. Once a year on our wedding anniversary was the rule. But no elegant restaurant in the Tampa Bay area topped what was the normal fare on this ship every meal.
The ship was comparable to the Titanic of the movie with its comfortable compartments (with cable TV), five stylish restaurants, glass-enclosed elevator in the atrium, winding stairways, plush bars and Broadway type entertainment every night. I love art and the art director of the ship had four shows during the trip, with my wife Betty and I attending every one, and even purchasing some original artwork. I’m not a collector but found I could be easily talked into becoming one.
Indeed, the Norwegian Sky was a floating commercial with a thousand places to spend your money including a Las Vegas type casino, cigar emporium, boutiques, photo gallery (like the paparazzi, photographers were constantly taking your picture, then posting them in the photo gallery at $10-20 per picture), jewelry stores, and beauty/massage vanity shops, to name only a few of such venues.
Once on shore, the coastal cities and towns of Juneau, Haines, Skagway, and Ketchikan along the way have dreamy tourist traps to disgorge you of your money, along with other diversions such as train trips, helicopter rides, all kinds of tours, hydroplane rides, and on and on to relieve you of several more hundreds of dollars. The appointed amenities on board are all free but with beguiling temptations beyond these amenities always waiting to collect your lucre. On shore nothing is free.
We took a dreamy ride through the mountains in Skagway for only $184, but spent most of our time in the very reasonable and accessible museums along the way in tours designed by us simply by reading the free tourist maps provided by the ship.
It was on these private excursions where reality soaked through our fraudulent temporary opulent suspension to give us pause and appreciation of this place.
Our capitalistic system is built on greed, and greed is built on comparing and competing. It is not enough to be doing well. We must be doing better than others. We are a restless people who believe happiness is somewhere “out there” to be attained. Movies and magazines provided this stimulating imagery for my generation. Now, it is television and the Internet that provide it for my children and my children’s children. It is the same disease wrapped in different tantalizers.
It so happens that the route of our cruise was identical to the “Alaskan Gold Rush” of 1897. A few prospectors discovered gold in the Yukon in 1896, but it took them eleven months to get to Seattle with their booty. Gold then was the standard upon which the American dollar was based. These prospectors had accumulated over $100,000 in gold nuggets, which would be tens of millions today. A Seattle newspaper ran the headline “Gold, Gold, Gold!” This accident of history turned Seattle into a boomtown, and in time into the largest city in the Pacific North West, which it remains today.
One hundred thousand people left what they were doing to join the gold rush – doctors, lawyers, engineers, politicians, farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers. The mayor of San Francisco was on vacation when the news hit, left his family, and didn’t even bother to resign from office but instead took off immediately for Alaska to pan for gold.
Of the 100,000 that arrived in Alaska, 50,000 saw what an ordeal it would be and immediately turned around and went home. Of the 50,000 left, only 30,000 actually made the adventure. Of that 30,000 only about 3,000 stayed the course until their two-year required complement of staples ran out. And of that 3,000 less than 100 ever discovered much gold. And of that 100, only about 7 or 8 struck it rich, which is about average today for people who believe in “get rich quick” schemes such as the lottery.
Fortunately, along the way, buried in modest museums in these surviving Alaskan boomtowns are the artifacts of the indigenous peoples. The Inuit or Eskimo people, like the American Indian, lived in harmony with nature, and took from nature only what they needed to survive as a people. Their skill in boat building and canoe making rivaled any engineering that I have encountered. The same was true of the use of animal skins to make clothes, and tents, paints, artwork, and oil for their lamps.
Totem poles, which are not religious icons but expressions of feelings, made a special impression on Betty. They still grace burial sites, but are also produced to embarrass someone who has failed to pay a debt, or who has behaved poorly. Once the debt is paid or the bad behavior bridged the totem pole goes down.
Considering how much work went into one of these massive sculptures, it gave me special pause. I am one that never forgets and seldom forgives someone who has treated a loved one or me poorly. Perhaps I should work on constructing totems.
Being something of a wordsmith, I was especially moved by the eloquence, brevity, charm, mystery and mystique of Inuit storytelling.
I read these Inuit stories on woodcuts in a museum in Haines, Alaska. Haines is a small ocean side community (2,500) embraced by white-capped mountains, and snuggled in an insular bay. I fell in love with the place.
In Haines I met a young folk singer that had been in Haines for eight years, a motorcycling shopkeeper, a 25-year resident, who made jewelry while his wife maintained an eloquent flower garden and painted with equal eloquence, and a former diplomat from the State Department who has lived in Haines for fifteen years.
It occurred to me that Haines would be a perfect place to think and write about America's incessant bungee jumping into one form or another of craziness. Haines has access to the Alaskan Highway, and so the appearance of isolation is more psychological than real.
What was strangely missing from this idyllic environment (except in the curiosity shops in porcelain, rubber or plastic models) was the Inuit or Eskimo child. Only occasionally would I see a face with the slanted eyes, dark hair, sharp straight nose, angular face, and dark skin the color of earth. I would smile. They would study my Nordic features suspiciously and look away. I was an intruder on their sacred soil, a fact that long ago their people have come to accept but never learned to live with comfortably.
These momentary glances were full of meaning, which still resonates with me as I recall some of the marvelous stories read on woodcuts in the museum. Here are two of them:
Caribou and Raven
Raven was flying around one day when he saw a caribou. He flew down and picked some low-bush cranberries near the caribou, filling up his pockets. The caribou then charged the Raven, attacking him with fangs. In those days, caribou had fangs like bears and some other animals. Raven fought back with the berries though, and caribou lost his fangs forever. After the fight was over, Raven asked the caribou why he couldn’t smell. Without waiting for an answer, Raven flew away and gathered pieces of birch bark. Putting them in his pocket, he came back to the caribou, rolled up the bark and put it in the caribou’s nostrils. That is how the caribou became able to smell, so when people are upwind of him, he knows they are there.
The Birds’ Bear Hunt
Raven went bear hunting with Magpie, Blackbird, Dipper and Camp-robber. The birds put out fish tails and hid inside them. Raven was the first to be picked up by the bear, but he got frightened and flew away, so the other birds laughed at him. Dipper then hid in the tail, was swallowed, and killed the bear by cutting a hole from inside it. Seeing how it worked, Raven used the same trick to kill many bears. The birds began rendering the bears’ fat to get grease to eat. Raven left to get wood and came back disguised as a brown bear, frightening the birds away so he could eat the grease himself. The birds figured out what Raven had done, however, because they had hit the bear with a stick and when next they saw Raven, he was cut. Without knowing he’d been found out, Raven arranged a big feast, inviting all the other birds and animals to come. After they ate up all the food, the other animals and birds stomped all over Raven and killed him. Then they went home.
I find multiple meanings to these exquisite stories applicable to our contemporary world, as I’m sure you do as well. Human nature and the folly of humanist is not a recent discovery, and how better to show this than through the metaphor of animals. Incidentally, the Raven has great prominence among the Inuit for its cleverness and yes, blameworthiness as well. Poe of course immortalized The Raven for us in his famous poem, which beginning lines are in the back of all our memories:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –
Only this and nothing more.
Remember now? Of course you do. If you believe in sociobiology, and I do, the idea that we all have a common ancestor, and that the culture of the human ancestry is carried in our blood, then the Inuit spirit is rising to Poe’s consciousness in celebration of this wondrous bird.
As many of you know, I have been working several years on a novel of my youth. In a museum in Seattle I found myself studying a fading photograph of Chief Seattle (1786 – 1866), for whom the city is named, along with the Indian Chief’s sayings which resonate with the landscape of my novel:
At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent,
And you think them deserted,
They will throng with returning hosts that once filled
And still love,
This beautiful land.
No words better capture my nostalgia for the place of my birth than these. Also Chief Seattle reminds me of another aspect of my novel with these lines,
And when your children’s children shall think themselves alone,
In the fields, the store, the shop upon the highway,
Or in the silence of the pathless woods,
They will not be alone.
For me who has been somewhat of a serious student of the human condition, progress as America’s most important product, has always been somewhat flawed leaving me bewildered.
Progress has built this monument of technology on the Indian carcass of what is for me a much more sane and better world, a world which we have all but destroyed save for the remnants of it in museums.
This fortuitous trip into the frenzy of a “gold rush mania” that has never left the American psyche, this desire for more at any price, while ostensibly cruising in luxury to forget, if only momentarily, of a mundane existence has left me with more a sense of loss than of peace. This is hypocrisy; to be sure, as I still exist pretty much in the lap of luxury, comfortably surrounded by the instruments of technology.
The irony of what the world is coming to seems to be that we are attempting, yes, at all cost, to avoid struggle, when struggle is life’s only teacher.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2002
I just completed a ten-day vacation including a seven-day cruise to Alaska on the cruise ship the Norwegian Sky. In my somewhat charmed life, I still had never been exposed to such continuous obsequious and indulgent service. Nor had fine dining been my experience virtually every meal a day. Once a year on our wedding anniversary was the rule. But no elegant restaurant in the Tampa Bay area topped what was the normal fare on this ship every meal.
The ship was comparable to the Titanic of the movie with its comfortable compartments (with cable TV), five stylish restaurants, glass-enclosed elevator in the atrium, winding stairways, plush bars and Broadway type entertainment every night. I love art and the art director of the ship had four shows during the trip, with my wife Betty and I attending every one, and even purchasing some original artwork. I’m not a collector but found I could be easily talked into becoming one.
Indeed, the Norwegian Sky was a floating commercial with a thousand places to spend your money including a Las Vegas type casino, cigar emporium, boutiques, photo gallery (like the paparazzi, photographers were constantly taking your picture, then posting them in the photo gallery at $10-20 per picture), jewelry stores, and beauty/massage vanity shops, to name only a few of such venues.
Once on shore, the coastal cities and towns of Juneau, Haines, Skagway, and Ketchikan along the way have dreamy tourist traps to disgorge you of your money, along with other diversions such as train trips, helicopter rides, all kinds of tours, hydroplane rides, and on and on to relieve you of several more hundreds of dollars. The appointed amenities on board are all free but with beguiling temptations beyond these amenities always waiting to collect your lucre. On shore nothing is free.
We took a dreamy ride through the mountains in Skagway for only $184, but spent most of our time in the very reasonable and accessible museums along the way in tours designed by us simply by reading the free tourist maps provided by the ship.
It was on these private excursions where reality soaked through our fraudulent temporary opulent suspension to give us pause and appreciation of this place.
Our capitalistic system is built on greed, and greed is built on comparing and competing. It is not enough to be doing well. We must be doing better than others. We are a restless people who believe happiness is somewhere “out there” to be attained. Movies and magazines provided this stimulating imagery for my generation. Now, it is television and the Internet that provide it for my children and my children’s children. It is the same disease wrapped in different tantalizers.
It so happens that the route of our cruise was identical to the “Alaskan Gold Rush” of 1897. A few prospectors discovered gold in the Yukon in 1896, but it took them eleven months to get to Seattle with their booty. Gold then was the standard upon which the American dollar was based. These prospectors had accumulated over $100,000 in gold nuggets, which would be tens of millions today. A Seattle newspaper ran the headline “Gold, Gold, Gold!” This accident of history turned Seattle into a boomtown, and in time into the largest city in the Pacific North West, which it remains today.
One hundred thousand people left what they were doing to join the gold rush – doctors, lawyers, engineers, politicians, farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers. The mayor of San Francisco was on vacation when the news hit, left his family, and didn’t even bother to resign from office but instead took off immediately for Alaska to pan for gold.
Of the 100,000 that arrived in Alaska, 50,000 saw what an ordeal it would be and immediately turned around and went home. Of the 50,000 left, only 30,000 actually made the adventure. Of that 30,000 only about 3,000 stayed the course until their two-year required complement of staples ran out. And of that 3,000 less than 100 ever discovered much gold. And of that 100, only about 7 or 8 struck it rich, which is about average today for people who believe in “get rich quick” schemes such as the lottery.
Fortunately, along the way, buried in modest museums in these surviving Alaskan boomtowns are the artifacts of the indigenous peoples. The Inuit or Eskimo people, like the American Indian, lived in harmony with nature, and took from nature only what they needed to survive as a people. Their skill in boat building and canoe making rivaled any engineering that I have encountered. The same was true of the use of animal skins to make clothes, and tents, paints, artwork, and oil for their lamps.
Totem poles, which are not religious icons but expressions of feelings, made a special impression on Betty. They still grace burial sites, but are also produced to embarrass someone who has failed to pay a debt, or who has behaved poorly. Once the debt is paid or the bad behavior bridged the totem pole goes down.
Considering how much work went into one of these massive sculptures, it gave me special pause. I am one that never forgets and seldom forgives someone who has treated a loved one or me poorly. Perhaps I should work on constructing totems.
Being something of a wordsmith, I was especially moved by the eloquence, brevity, charm, mystery and mystique of Inuit storytelling.
I read these Inuit stories on woodcuts in a museum in Haines, Alaska. Haines is a small ocean side community (2,500) embraced by white-capped mountains, and snuggled in an insular bay. I fell in love with the place.
In Haines I met a young folk singer that had been in Haines for eight years, a motorcycling shopkeeper, a 25-year resident, who made jewelry while his wife maintained an eloquent flower garden and painted with equal eloquence, and a former diplomat from the State Department who has lived in Haines for fifteen years.
It occurred to me that Haines would be a perfect place to think and write about America's incessant bungee jumping into one form or another of craziness. Haines has access to the Alaskan Highway, and so the appearance of isolation is more psychological than real.
What was strangely missing from this idyllic environment (except in the curiosity shops in porcelain, rubber or plastic models) was the Inuit or Eskimo child. Only occasionally would I see a face with the slanted eyes, dark hair, sharp straight nose, angular face, and dark skin the color of earth. I would smile. They would study my Nordic features suspiciously and look away. I was an intruder on their sacred soil, a fact that long ago their people have come to accept but never learned to live with comfortably.
These momentary glances were full of meaning, which still resonates with me as I recall some of the marvelous stories read on woodcuts in the museum. Here are two of them:
Caribou and Raven
Raven was flying around one day when he saw a caribou. He flew down and picked some low-bush cranberries near the caribou, filling up his pockets. The caribou then charged the Raven, attacking him with fangs. In those days, caribou had fangs like bears and some other animals. Raven fought back with the berries though, and caribou lost his fangs forever. After the fight was over, Raven asked the caribou why he couldn’t smell. Without waiting for an answer, Raven flew away and gathered pieces of birch bark. Putting them in his pocket, he came back to the caribou, rolled up the bark and put it in the caribou’s nostrils. That is how the caribou became able to smell, so when people are upwind of him, he knows they are there.
The Birds’ Bear Hunt
Raven went bear hunting with Magpie, Blackbird, Dipper and Camp-robber. The birds put out fish tails and hid inside them. Raven was the first to be picked up by the bear, but he got frightened and flew away, so the other birds laughed at him. Dipper then hid in the tail, was swallowed, and killed the bear by cutting a hole from inside it. Seeing how it worked, Raven used the same trick to kill many bears. The birds began rendering the bears’ fat to get grease to eat. Raven left to get wood and came back disguised as a brown bear, frightening the birds away so he could eat the grease himself. The birds figured out what Raven had done, however, because they had hit the bear with a stick and when next they saw Raven, he was cut. Without knowing he’d been found out, Raven arranged a big feast, inviting all the other birds and animals to come. After they ate up all the food, the other animals and birds stomped all over Raven and killed him. Then they went home.
I find multiple meanings to these exquisite stories applicable to our contemporary world, as I’m sure you do as well. Human nature and the folly of humanist is not a recent discovery, and how better to show this than through the metaphor of animals. Incidentally, the Raven has great prominence among the Inuit for its cleverness and yes, blameworthiness as well. Poe of course immortalized The Raven for us in his famous poem, which beginning lines are in the back of all our memories:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –
Only this and nothing more.
Remember now? Of course you do. If you believe in sociobiology, and I do, the idea that we all have a common ancestor, and that the culture of the human ancestry is carried in our blood, then the Inuit spirit is rising to Poe’s consciousness in celebration of this wondrous bird.
As many of you know, I have been working several years on a novel of my youth. In a museum in Seattle I found myself studying a fading photograph of Chief Seattle (1786 – 1866), for whom the city is named, along with the Indian Chief’s sayings which resonate with the landscape of my novel:
At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent,
And you think them deserted,
They will throng with returning hosts that once filled
And still love,
This beautiful land.
No words better capture my nostalgia for the place of my birth than these. Also Chief Seattle reminds me of another aspect of my novel with these lines,
And when your children’s children shall think themselves alone,
In the fields, the store, the shop upon the highway,
Or in the silence of the pathless woods,
They will not be alone.
For me who has been somewhat of a serious student of the human condition, progress as America’s most important product, has always been somewhat flawed leaving me bewildered.
Progress has built this monument of technology on the Indian carcass of what is for me a much more sane and better world, a world which we have all but destroyed save for the remnants of it in museums.
This fortuitous trip into the frenzy of a “gold rush mania” that has never left the American psyche, this desire for more at any price, while ostensibly cruising in luxury to forget, if only momentarily, of a mundane existence has left me with more a sense of loss than of peace. This is hypocrisy; to be sure, as I still exist pretty much in the lap of luxury, comfortably surrounded by the instruments of technology.
The irony of what the world is coming to seems to be that we are attempting, yes, at all cost, to avoid struggle, when struggle is life’s only teacher.
* * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
A Way of Looking at Things No. 23: Real Leaders Might Have Saved Enron
A Way of Looking at Things – No. 23
Real Leaders Might Have Saved Enron1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2002
Author of Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers
TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
Enron Corporation, the seventh largest in the United States, failed in the last quarter of 2001. Its immolation sparked by slumping energy prices, and piles of debt, surprised everyone from regulators to investors to employees. Now, huge questions loom as to how widespread the damage will be, who is to blame, and what will be done about it.
This much is clear: Enron’s fatal flaw was management hubris, tacitly encouraged by board members, regulators, politicians, and stock analysts, many with financial ties to Enron who looked the other way as warning lights flashed.
When leadership is practiced as it is meant to be practiced, leadership never looks the other way, but always looks the problem in the face. Leadership is about cultural reformation and how to best leverage resources and assets for competitive advantage. Senior leaders are responsible to turn enlightenment into action, and see that commitment is not limited to rhetoric. The focus is always on the efficacy and wellness of the organization, knowing that individual behavior is influenced by the culture and systems in place. Individuals behave as they are programmed to behave. An organization always gets the workers it deserves. It is no accident that worker collusion, sabotage, passivity, and violence occur in some organizations and not in others.
When morale, job satisfaction, and management approval are low, HR often devises a “money and love” campaign. The company newspaper profiles employees of the month; involvement groups are created, along with special events, an open-door policy, a bonus plan, and suggestion program. Such HR interventions are usually reduced to cosmetic effects, as they change nothing.
Motivation, job satisfaction, morale, and loyalty are found in the job itself, or they are not found at all. Workers thrive on meaningful work, on a sense of achievement, and recognition for the work done, along with a sense of responsibility commensurate with authority, and a chance to grow in the job. All fringe benefits in the world won’t boost performance. It is the health of the worker’s spirit that is critical to performance, and this cannot be bought or bribed into agreement. It must be earned.
Leaders must weigh the health of the organization before taking corrective action. You cannot one day treat workers as necessary evils and the next as assets, and expect enthusiastic compliance. In many cases employees are programmed in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. It takes diligence, patience, and persistence to override this fatal flaw.
Ergo, a process of reprogramming must be created to first ease anxiety and earn trust one-step at a time. Typically, HR bandages wounds with programs, campaigns, public relations, training and seminars. Training seldom translates into either timely problem solving or decision-making. HR is more concerned with membership development – company loyalty, employee morale, adaptation to policies and procedures – in the interest of establishing order and control.
The structure and function of work determine processes, and these systemic processes dictate organizational behavior. Creating the appropriate culture makes the whole more and different from the sum of its parts. An institution tends to take on the character of its leadership. If the leaders are attuned to social forces and social change, there is hope of creating a high performance system. Many negative influences are mired in tradition and corporate history. For example, if the culture believes that position power is sacrosanct; that wisdom resides in management decision-making; that obedience, politeness, punctuality, and loyalty are inviolable; that appraisal is a feasible tool to measure performance; and that professional workers can be summarily subsumed, leaders cannot expect high performance.
Change will occur naturally over time once workers and managers change themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions and positive attitudes. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers view the world.
Obviously, not all individuals want the freedom to innovate and to self-actualize. Becoming sensitive to individual values, beliefs, and expectations is a first step in adopting an enlightened approach to managing people.
Corporate paternalism – doing more for workers, giving them more social security, economic welfare, greater recreational non-work related outlets, and looking after them better – has neither produced happier and healthier workers nor more secure and progressive businesses. The needs of employer and employee can only be realized by giving workers the responsibility and dignity warranted mature adults, and desisting in treating them as dependent obedient children. Only when creature comforts are earned do they hold meaning.
Unionism has also failed to give workers citizenship. The effectiveness of unions lies largely in their concentration on economic issues at the expense of workers’ control of what they do. The basic nature of unionism is a negative strategy. Unions are designed to protect workers against management rather than to develop a common ground with them. This negativism handicaps unions in moving toward social integration by sponsoring jurisdictional strikes, not permitting equal opportunity, and penalizing efficiency and progress.
Monotony and insecurity are not anathema to job satisfaction although most workers cannot bear up well to extremes of either. Most workers require some routine to remain sane. The more creative the workers or the more responsibility they are willing to assume the less monotony they need.
The upsurge of autonomous units is driven by cultural integration. Each unit may be a separate business, but its goal is the success of the whole business. Workers need responsible participation in their own jobs and in those units that concern them directly. The autonomous, self-managed community is not a social panacea, but establishes a community within and between units that can relate to the corporate center.
This much is obvious: 1) the management function cannot be seen separate from the worker function; 2) the hierarchical structure of management must disappear; and 3) the perceptual difference in vision and work between levels of management must fade away. Otherwise, the right hand won’t ever know what the left hand is doing, which might have been the case with Enron.
Every successful enterprise has a collective spirit sponsored by individual motivation. To realize this spirit and its collective engagement requires that both leaders and followers grow up.
Leadership is lifting people’s vision to higher sights than creature comforts. Leadership is raising people’s performance to higher standards of expectation. The leader’s role is to leverage intellectual capital to achieve competitive advantage. Leadership’s failure can be traced to the misapplication of this intellectual capital, which actually dominates the processes that control the financial outcomes.
Senior leaders at Enron failed to stop the runaway train. Many people inside Enron sensed trouble long before it occurred, but didn’t want to become the messenger who got shot. Enron was not short of brilliant people who had many good ideas on possible remedies. But there was no forum with the theme, “Together we can find the answers.”
The financial loss, human carnage, and psychological fallout of the Enron debacle will scar the lives of people for years to come. With the exercise of real leadership, it need never have happened.
* * * * *
Real Leaders Might Have Saved Enron1
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2002
Author of Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers
TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
Enron Corporation, the seventh largest in the United States, failed in the last quarter of 2001. Its immolation sparked by slumping energy prices, and piles of debt, surprised everyone from regulators to investors to employees. Now, huge questions loom as to how widespread the damage will be, who is to blame, and what will be done about it.
This much is clear: Enron’s fatal flaw was management hubris, tacitly encouraged by board members, regulators, politicians, and stock analysts, many with financial ties to Enron who looked the other way as warning lights flashed.
When leadership is practiced as it is meant to be practiced, leadership never looks the other way, but always looks the problem in the face. Leadership is about cultural reformation and how to best leverage resources and assets for competitive advantage. Senior leaders are responsible to turn enlightenment into action, and see that commitment is not limited to rhetoric. The focus is always on the efficacy and wellness of the organization, knowing that individual behavior is influenced by the culture and systems in place. Individuals behave as they are programmed to behave. An organization always gets the workers it deserves. It is no accident that worker collusion, sabotage, passivity, and violence occur in some organizations and not in others.
When morale, job satisfaction, and management approval are low, HR often devises a “money and love” campaign. The company newspaper profiles employees of the month; involvement groups are created, along with special events, an open-door policy, a bonus plan, and suggestion program. Such HR interventions are usually reduced to cosmetic effects, as they change nothing.
Motivation, job satisfaction, morale, and loyalty are found in the job itself, or they are not found at all. Workers thrive on meaningful work, on a sense of achievement, and recognition for the work done, along with a sense of responsibility commensurate with authority, and a chance to grow in the job. All fringe benefits in the world won’t boost performance. It is the health of the worker’s spirit that is critical to performance, and this cannot be bought or bribed into agreement. It must be earned.
Leaders must weigh the health of the organization before taking corrective action. You cannot one day treat workers as necessary evils and the next as assets, and expect enthusiastic compliance. In many cases employees are programmed in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. It takes diligence, patience, and persistence to override this fatal flaw.
Ergo, a process of reprogramming must be created to first ease anxiety and earn trust one-step at a time. Typically, HR bandages wounds with programs, campaigns, public relations, training and seminars. Training seldom translates into either timely problem solving or decision-making. HR is more concerned with membership development – company loyalty, employee morale, adaptation to policies and procedures – in the interest of establishing order and control.
The structure and function of work determine processes, and these systemic processes dictate organizational behavior. Creating the appropriate culture makes the whole more and different from the sum of its parts. An institution tends to take on the character of its leadership. If the leaders are attuned to social forces and social change, there is hope of creating a high performance system. Many negative influences are mired in tradition and corporate history. For example, if the culture believes that position power is sacrosanct; that wisdom resides in management decision-making; that obedience, politeness, punctuality, and loyalty are inviolable; that appraisal is a feasible tool to measure performance; and that professional workers can be summarily subsumed, leaders cannot expect high performance.
Change will occur naturally over time once workers and managers change themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions and positive attitudes. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers view the world.
Obviously, not all individuals want the freedom to innovate and to self-actualize. Becoming sensitive to individual values, beliefs, and expectations is a first step in adopting an enlightened approach to managing people.
Corporate paternalism – doing more for workers, giving them more social security, economic welfare, greater recreational non-work related outlets, and looking after them better – has neither produced happier and healthier workers nor more secure and progressive businesses. The needs of employer and employee can only be realized by giving workers the responsibility and dignity warranted mature adults, and desisting in treating them as dependent obedient children. Only when creature comforts are earned do they hold meaning.
Unionism has also failed to give workers citizenship. The effectiveness of unions lies largely in their concentration on economic issues at the expense of workers’ control of what they do. The basic nature of unionism is a negative strategy. Unions are designed to protect workers against management rather than to develop a common ground with them. This negativism handicaps unions in moving toward social integration by sponsoring jurisdictional strikes, not permitting equal opportunity, and penalizing efficiency and progress.
Monotony and insecurity are not anathema to job satisfaction although most workers cannot bear up well to extremes of either. Most workers require some routine to remain sane. The more creative the workers or the more responsibility they are willing to assume the less monotony they need.
The upsurge of autonomous units is driven by cultural integration. Each unit may be a separate business, but its goal is the success of the whole business. Workers need responsible participation in their own jobs and in those units that concern them directly. The autonomous, self-managed community is not a social panacea, but establishes a community within and between units that can relate to the corporate center.
This much is obvious: 1) the management function cannot be seen separate from the worker function; 2) the hierarchical structure of management must disappear; and 3) the perceptual difference in vision and work between levels of management must fade away. Otherwise, the right hand won’t ever know what the left hand is doing, which might have been the case with Enron.
Every successful enterprise has a collective spirit sponsored by individual motivation. To realize this spirit and its collective engagement requires that both leaders and followers grow up.
Leadership is lifting people’s vision to higher sights than creature comforts. Leadership is raising people’s performance to higher standards of expectation. The leader’s role is to leverage intellectual capital to achieve competitive advantage. Leadership’s failure can be traced to the misapplication of this intellectual capital, which actually dominates the processes that control the financial outcomes.
Senior leaders at Enron failed to stop the runaway train. Many people inside Enron sensed trouble long before it occurred, but didn’t want to become the messenger who got shot. Enron was not short of brilliant people who had many good ideas on possible remedies. But there was no forum with the theme, “Together we can find the answers.”
The financial loss, human carnage, and psychological fallout of the Enron debacle will scar the lives of people for years to come. With the exercise of real leadership, it need never have happened.
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