THE ROMAN CATHOLIC LAITY IN SEARCH OF ITS CHURCH!

The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out

A Plebian View of the Roman Catholic Church in Decline

PART ONE

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC LAITY IN SEARCH OF ITS CHURCH

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Written in 1968
© November 2005

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NOTE: This was never published. It was written just before I took on a life changing assignment. Only in my early 30s, I was being sent to South Africa to facilitate the merger of our South African affiliate with a British subsidiary and a South African chemical company.

This essay was written only days before going to South Africa. The Church was in turmoil trying to assimilate the tenets of Vatican I and II, while the United States was in chaos over saber rattling in Viet Nam.

The disenfranchised generation of American youth born to baby boomer parents was now eligible for the draft. My generation went into the military without protest, but this generation was inclined to burn their draft cards or escape to Canada. I was leaving this all behind to take on the South African assignment. It was early April 1968.

A devout Catholic, I would emerge from this experience a different man. I went into Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and came out of it aware of the darkness in my own heart. I am now writing a novel of that experience.

Religion was one of my anchors as a youth, and I would imagine if I were a Jew I would have been considered orthodox. Garry Wills wrote a book in 2002 titled “Why I Am A Catholic.” I found the title amusing.

Roman Catholic indoctrination is so strong that if you receive it while very young there is little chance you can ever escape it no matter what games you play with your mind. I came to South Africa sure of my faith and my identity, and left in search of the real parents of my soul.

I make no apologies for the sophomoric style of this essay. Recording it now, unchanged, for the record, I see that I was a Catholic writer before publishing my first essay or book, and I think it is fair to say, after eight books and more than 350 published essays to date, I remain true to that identity.

My novel, which is to be titled “Green Island in a Black Seas,” relates to my struggle with South African Apartheid, my company’s duplicity, my Irish Roman Catholic faith, my marriage vows, my wife and four children, and a life that brought to the fore one word to describe everything: betrayal.

Writing has provided sanctuary and retreat from confusion. Writing has made me aware you don’t have to be published to be a writer. You just have to make connection with yourself by connecting the letters of the alphabet. It is published here as an invitation to readers to ponder their own situation.


Note recorded this date: November 20, 2005


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To a casual observer, it would seem that the Roman Catholic Church has always taken itself seriously. With an air of omniscience, it has conducted affairs of the Catholic world in a somewhat unapproachable, even unimpeachable hauteur. Wasn’t the Church man’s only means to eternal salvation?

Not long ago, this question would have been considered academic, in fact absurd, in the eyes of the average Catholic. Ecclesiastical thinking and activity had not trickled down to his level. This was not surprising. He had become conditioned to being spoon fed a definitive, catechetical approach to religious education. A comprehensive and conceptual understanding of the Church, her theology, philosophy, and history was not promulgated to the general laity.

The reason for this was quite simple. An authoritarian and paternal Church hierarchy did not feel it was needed. That is why the present remedial and ameliorating steps being simultaneously considered and implemented have been found both stultifying and confusing to many on both sides of the altar.

Church history indicates that this current situation is actually following precedence. Crises in the Church have invariably been followed by Vatican Councils, which in turn have led to new doctrines and dogma. The present contingency is similar to its historic predecessor but yet different. It differs in scope, mood, and ambition.

A very real threat that mid-twentieth century man will finally reject Christianity has put the Church in a most conciliatory frame of mind. Worthy and necessary as Christian unity may be, there exists cold realities, which must be faced.

Catholicism has instilled beliefs, attitudes, habits, and practices with which only Catholics have been identified. Much of this has been somewhat symbolic, like not eating meat on Friday. Nevertheless, these are real and fixed in the minds and hearts of many who call themselves, “Catholic.” Such a preconditioned laity may attract obfuscation and conflict instead of harmony and a spirit of ecumenicism if they do not see Church history and thought in true perspective, as well as understand what is taking place today. The silent man in the pew must identify with the Church in transition, or all is for naught.

Born more than thirty years ago a congenial member of the Roman Catholic Church, this observer has no claim to authority. However, raised and inculcated in Catholicism in the traditional fashion has produced its effects and memories. For example, a dependence on dogma and doctrine is remembered instead of the beauty of Christianity. Even after reason prevailed, these tenets have merged and submerged, often obliterating rational clarity.

That is why an issue like birth control languishes in the mind of the Catholic, waiting, desperately waiting for Church sanction, even though logic and reason has already bombarded his mind with the answer.

Consequently, it is quite typical for the average Catholic to accept trauma, doubt, confusion, thought, and education as the natural progression to truth, understanding, and meaning as he is able to glean it.

This experience is necessarily private and usually committed to silence. But the times dictate that this must change. It is not the individual but the entire Church, which is now going through a painful reappraisal. Ultimately, it will be the cataclysm of all Catholic and Christian thought and interpretation, which will prove the destiny of this FAITH, and its relevance to this time.

Seldom does the silent man in the pew, the true plebian, express his will. This must not be. Perhaps one plebian view may encourage many others to unshackle their minds from wondering in silence about their world and their fate. Their responsibility to contribute to the dialogue has been obviated by history.

Three centuries after Christ’s death this did not seem so certain. The Church faced a great test. A Greek monk named Arius was preaching a doctrine that Christ was the Son of God, but neither consubstantial nor coeternal with the Father. This doctrine called Arianism was the reason for the Council of Nicaea. Here the Church solemnly proclaimed her belief in “ . . .one Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, born of the Father before all time, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not created, the same in Being with the Father (consubstantial) . . .”

Today we know this as the Nicene Creed, which has become a touchstone of sound orthodoxy and Church unity.

A period of grace, power, and growth followed for the Church, only to be tainted by the spoils of such good fortune. It was the Middle Age. Simony in the papacy and the episcopacy; marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy, and sporadic incontinence among monks contributed to the view that the popes and the religious were vulnerable, fallible men; that the papacy was not a fortress of order and a tower of salvation. Even so, it would be centuries before the doctrine of infallibility and celibacy would be postulated as dogma and doctrine respectively.

Simony was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics. Although concubinage and marriage weren’t openly condoned among the general clergy, the practice was common and not subject to the pressure of public ridicule and scorn. Nonetheless, this situation did test the fiber and substance of the Church’s unity and challenge its security. Quiet reform followed, complemented by a series of wise, scrupulous and discerning pontiffs.

The nadir of the papacy gave way to a new day in papal authority, supremacy, and popularity. Its splendor and magnificence greatly affected the temporal states and their balance of power. Even culture, education, and wealth were somewhat in the control of the Church. So great was her dominance that the temptation to dictate to the temporal community on mundane matters was a very real problem. On occasion, she would yield to this pressure, but never without finally retreating to a less advantageous position. This would be a lesson painfully learned.

Meanwhile, our progenitors of that day were satisfied to accept the Church’s dictums and doctrines with blind faith. They embraced a primitive type of ritualism and colorful pageantry with veneration. Lacking education and the opportunity to better themselves, they were moved less by the reality and drama of Jesus than by the chimerical preaching of fear.

Prepossessed with the negative, sin and hell was understood and preferred over the positive of grace and heaven. The existence of these uncomplicated souls, in fact their culture, was totally God-centered. This would not last.

Much like a centrifugal force, the villain, time, would come to act on man’s conscience to drive Him out of his centric position, ultimately to the periphery of man's mind. More on this later.

The intrigue of the Church hierarchy and royalty was completely foreign to the laity of the Middle Ages. Faith was a simple and pure commitment unshackled by lust, greed, and pride. The clergy and laity were essentially of two separate worlds.

These humble brethren considered the secular clergy several stations above them and the episcopacy beyond classification. Perhaps this explains why public protest of corruption in the Church was not proffered from this quarter. Unschooled, subjugated, controlled, they went through life isolated from the storm gathering overhead, sheltered in their simple, dedicated and honest Faith. The church would not receive its challenge from them. They were, indeed, the Children of God.

Much like a vintage wine aging gave the Church a delicate bouquet. Unfortunately, it was also intoxicating. The Church became more and more indurate to the realities of contemporary life. She lost touch with her people and control of her clergy.

It was at this moment in history that a distraught monk, Martin Luther, tortured by a hatred of authority, nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church door. The Reformation followed, concomitantly an equally significant evolvement, The Renaissance.

This explosion was of sufficient magnitude to dislodge God from the center of man’s conscience and to trigger the centrifugal force of attending events. Truly, a new day was at hand.

The rebirth of learning and culture kindled in man a new awareness of the genius within him. It marked a time when he became preoccupied with his own glorification at the expense of Christ.

In such an innocent and innocuous manner, the seeds of existentialism were planted, only to wait centuries for man to harvest them.

Though the center of man’s existence shifted to man, this was indeed a self-conscious change. A taint of guilt was manifested in his preoccupation with religious themes in a disproportionate share of his creative endeavors. Science and the “Age of Reason,” which was yet to come, would ease his conscience and liberate his intellect from this confining abstraction.

Another factor contributing to and supporting Church reform was the industrial and economic revolution. Perhaps this sustained and polarized the Church split more than the theological and ecclesiastical questions of the day.

The agrarian nature of the Church was neither prepared for nor able to cope with the emergence of nationalism. Thus, while her spiritual control was being tested, a struggle for power and national identity was further usurping her influence over the state. Accordingly, the issue of Church-State separation would come to be tete-beche obfuscated by devious maneuvering on both sides.

Frustration of this age would lead to schisms, wars, and much suffering, a pattern repeated to this day. Man’s tempo of living would continue to escalate with passing time. The formula would change little:

Progress giving birth to new wealth, exposing old poverty; freedom producing a mutated form of servitude; opportunity awakening sleeping discrimination; growth inadvertently causing atrophy; contentment discovering and exposing misery . . . . . .

would concatenate its way in a quasi-convoluted fashion into mid-twentieth century life. Skepticism, nihilism, isolationism, and unbridled apathy would come to be discovered, then forgotten, and again rediscovered with a new and frenetic frenzy.

Point-counterpoint would come to weave a melody maddening in its intensity through the conscience of man’s mind to snuff out forever the pure and the simple, never again an innocent and unconscious love of God.

Were it possible to go back, one might contemplate the effect the Soul of sixteenth century man might have on modern man. Would it assist him in channeling his energetic driving renewal spirit, and simplify the priority of his preferences? One must wonder.

So often trees and forest seem to merge and submerge into unity for him that bewilderment appears to be his constant companion. Twenty centuries of Church guidance has neither allayed his fears nor reconciled him to accept Christ’s simple changeless and ETERNAL TRUTHS.

The growing complexity of life around him acts as an endless distraction. Only two horrendous world wars have staggered him to attention and awareness of the grave dangers confronting him.

The Holocaust might be imagined:

Completely shipwrecked, the flotsam and jetsam of all ages appear before us. Fragments of cherished beliefs and ideals of centuries can be seen surfacing, but only fragments. The heavy bulky awkward shackles of righteous Christianity; lugubrious and somber mores; stiff and pretentious society; and presumptuous and greedy colonialism seem to coalesce, producing new densities of meaning and relevance. Mired in the mud of time, the tissue of man’s fantasies.

Civilized man was finally discovering how fragile, what a put on, his civility. The atrocities of war had given him a new awareness of his depravity and the bestial character existing within his nature.

A critical focus on what he was as well as what he pretended to be, precipitated by this terrifying revelation, was inevitable. Everything now was suspect. It was now considered essential to disinvest himself from the trappings of society and the conventional ideals of civilization.

Change, departure from his modus operandi, would be his first step. This would overcome man’s characteristic inertia and establish the required momentum to bring him into a new day. We now find ourselves in that day.

This collision of change had to strike a cornerstone of man’s foundation, religion. It can be said that the Roman Catholic Church did not ignore the tremors nor fail to record the vibrations. Aware that the laity and secular clergy were restless, and in a changing mood, the Church allowed a questioning of basic Catholic tenets. This is still in progress.

Final positions on celibacy, papal authority, infallibility, birth control, and many other issues are yet to be given. Even so, it appears safe to assume that a new religiosity may be added to a growing list of modern improvisations, which include a new sociology, economics, and technology. A more flexible viable one is replacing the staid structure. Moreover, a new disposition has been manifested:

What has been is truly passé; what is now is of central interest; what is to be is truly blasé.

Christianity, and its promise of eternal salvation, is no longer centermost in man’s life but rather on the periphery of his existence. He is quite active and busy, not in search of God, but of himself. Truly, man is unknown, causing him to grope and stumble in the darkness of his identity. Thus, this paradox unfolds:

Hope born out of despair; opportunity out of inequity; power out of the collapse of order and authority.

Perplexed, he is a sometime tyro pretending to be the epicurean. Whereas he once understood the “good life” to be the purifying experience of hard work, he now pays some tribute to the philosophy of hedonism as if he understood it.

Since man is happier at work than at play, this has in effect made him an alien to himself as well as an emotional cripple. The overflow of this spirit and dilemma appears to have seeped into the Church.

From this progression, a new laity has come into being, dominated by affluence and quasi-intellectualism. It seeks a new role, new image, new sense of fulfillment, and a new power.

A cry for change, for renewal, has reverberated from every quarter. Vatican I and Vatican II gave it the hope it needed and the promise for a new quintessence. Time, patience, and understanding will determine if this is a true bridge to hope and a new unity or just another ephemera. It will also put Martin Luther and Protestantism in a new perspective. Surely, today personifies the mode and thinking of this giant of a man in the Church.

A strong and vibrant middle class has suddenly discovered Luther. Nearly five hundred years late, the laity and secular clergy are intrigued with Luther’s challenge to the papacy, the doctrine of infallibility, celibacy, freedom of conscience, and even the liturgy. Perhaps the only thing that is constant is change itself.

Summarily excommunicated and painted a devil by the then Catholic world, Luther now shines out in God’s heavenly firmament. Perhaps he knows that the contemporary of his celebrated antagonist, the Catholic theologian, is presently his staunchest ally and stoutest defender. Theologians are not only listening, reading and studying Luther’s one-time-heresies, but are considering ways to implement them quickly into Roman Catholicism. Even though this may prove to be a providential strategy and a sound policy, one must still wonder why the rush.

Many pat and reasonable answers might be given, and in many cases, have been. It has been suggested that the Church has frankly been in error; that it has been out of touch with the present world; that it is horribly out of date. It has been suggested that, indeed, the Church is a pillar blindly standing in the road of progress.

Despite whatever validity these evaluations may have, they are not acceptable to this observer. That is why the picture of man in continuous struggle with his heart, mind, and yes, soul, has been proffered here.

Much more is at stake. Simple easy answers will no longer suffice. Christianity, not only Roman Catholicism, has been losing popularity with the common man in this uncommon age. The essence of this challenge is that Christianity, not only Catholicism, is on the block with survival in the balance. Why?

Out of the maze of conflict and confusion has arisen a new man with a new sense of destiny. He sees himself walking among gods. His genius has created the ultimate weapon, synthetic life, interplanetary machines, transplantation of human organs, etc.

This discovery of god-like powers has moved him naturally into a new sense of cosmology and theology. He now sees himself as having the power of greatness within him, reasoning that he is truly the temple of the Universal God, or more traditionally, of Jesus Christ. His body is his church. A peripatetic philosophy of introspection has seized his mind. He welcomes no guidance, no interference, and certainly no authoritative control.

An eternal adolescent, man seeks privilege without responsibility, power without control, peace without sacrifice or restrain, and contentment without struggle.

History appears to have been surgically removed from his conscience by the scalpel of pride, and candid self-glorification.

Quite often, man is found wearing the façade of contentment, the veneer of complacency, betraying the fever which continuously rages within him. Might this fever be that of total disenchantment?

Whether it is fair to say that modern man is wandering aimlessly, uprooted and anchorless, certainly his direction, action and predilection give credence to such speculation. Arius must have felt his antichrist theology was ripe for the society of his day when it behaved in a similar fashion. The necrologists of today have sensed that society is now running concurrently with this philosophy, and therefore has boldly published the obituary of God. Perhaps they have something.

Irrational as it may seem, society appears bent on feeding the fever with which it is being consumed. Once panacea were panacea were panacea. No longer would this seem to be so. Simple answers to man’s complex illusions sans struggle, sans searching, sans doubting, sans fear, and sans the idea of God are offered to a deliriously receptive, hopelessly battered mankind. Man is too numb and preoccupied to question their validity.

Such an attractively wrapped package of essence was certain to jar the very foundation of Christendom. Perhaps the effects it would come to have on the clergy as well as the laity, and their respective reactions to it, should have been predicted. No one was apparently watching the store.

This is not surprising. Society has come to expect professionals of all endeavors to maintain a frigid detachment in the heat of involvement. That is why the antithetical response of many religious to this situation leads one to wonder if they really understood what has taken place. Witness priests, brothers, and apostolate exhibiting their dismay and disillusion, and in many cases, defeat trying to compete for souls with the rampant iconoclasts.

Thus broken, a steady stream of religious can be seen quitting their rectories, convents, and monasteries for either the eerie promise of the sybarite, or to still the Siren’s call. For this lack of professionalism, they solicit sympathy and assurance while they proselytize a more comfortable faith.

Their new appeal is not to the strength in man’s heart, but to the weakness in man’s loins. Meanwhile, less conspicuous, but equally despairing are those who continue to wail from their sanctuaries and cloisters that, indeed, the religious life and priesthood of Jesus Christ are dead.

No longer is there a marriage of vocation to avocation for them, but rather a struggle betwixt the two. Perhaps there is no quiet, no true isolation. Could the clamor of the time be too much for the contemplative life? Too distracting to see what is happening and who is involved?

To a concerned plebian, this is difficult to fathom. It would seem that the mask of the time, the façade of intemperate indulgence has been accepted as the true face in the crowd, and not the disguise that it is. That a certain faction of the secular clergy has been so misled is a matter of record. Unfortunately, it seems to have cast even a larger shadow.

This is suggested sententiously from what appears to be a movement in the Church. Cautious, temperate, and enlightened practices seem to have lost their appeal at discovering root causes, as a wave of more dynamic, and expedient methods are being employed to appease the laity.

This is disconcerting, but not the problem. The actual riddle is that compromise appears to be entertained when one knows that TRUTH cannot be mollified nor abated. Such a dilemma has developed because the Church and its obvious imperfections has become centermost when the ETERNAL TRUTHS should be.

One wonders if this rush to action is not an attempt to ameliorate symptoms rather than to treat causes. Could it be that defining the cause of man’s bewilderment in mid-twentieth century is more elusive than the problem? Perhaps this is why we hear a cry for a prophet to come forth.

Certainly, it would be reassuring to have a kind, affable, witty and sophisticated intelligence such as that of Desiderius Erasmus to step forward. The German’s had their Luther, but the Dutch had their Erasmus. In retrospect, it might be said that Luther was a good patient for his time, but a poor doctor. Erasmus might be said to have been that doctor.

This quiet man, Erasmus, sympathized with much of Luther’s thinking, but chose to remain in the Church. Which man showed the greater courage?

Today this question might generate considerable discussion among the erudite, but not the common man. Luther touched man’s spirit and imagination. Erasmus touched only his mind. Albeit this tells us something of the propensities of man, it does not assuage Erasmus’s loss.

The temperament, genius and cold intellect of Erasmus produced a beautiful satirical study, “The Praise of Folly.” In a day when man was angry and threatening to his Church, Erasmus generated light rather than heat, giving man a new insight into the nature of his being. He wanted to call attention to the fact that the Church exists despite the combined inadequacies of the clergy and laity; that the Church was true because it was HIS, not ours; that the Church lived and lives because of and for HIM, not us.

Since FAITH is responsive to man’s deepest needs, he wanted to penetrate the blindness of our personal pride to see the light of the eternal Jesus. Practically forgotten today, this very slender volume is significantly apropos at this very moment in man’s history.

Erasmus illustrated man’s cynical flippancy and irresponsibility. He contented that this appears in man as the uninhibited force of natural instinct, and as the immense effort with which man struggles to achieve his ends, valueless though they may be.

“Folly” reminds us that when people grow up, they suffer a loss of youthful energy and flexibility. Seeking the stoic ideal of god-like rationalism brings in its stead a sort of marble monsterism. “Folly” could also be a name for all man’s misdirected effort, for all his elaborate pains to gain the wrong thing:

There we see a woman dressed and pained, pretending to be young, valiantly chasing a man and her spent youth; here can be seen a young man, collecting degrees, developing impressive credentials, while responsibility and manhood fade from his sight; over there we notice a respectable businessman, lying, cheating, misleading, and swindling the public in order to make money so that his children can spend it in purposeless glee; and here again we see a priest, the sacerdotal commitment found wanting, emerged in temporal life and causes, pontificating his new theology and morality as he sinks into the quicksand of life.

This kind of contemporary imagery comes rapidly to mind as one invades the pages of “Folly.” The compulsion to wonder how Erasmus would view today is also there. Probably, it is safe to say that he would note mankind’s fumbling towards eternity with a tinge of sadness, but little surprise.

He would no doubt register only mild protestation at man’s arrogance before man. But before God? Surely, he would be somewhat alarmed. Perhaps he might indeed believe man had retrogressed. For comprehending the comedic figure of man before God was the quintessence of humility in his age. Puncturing the prideful pomposity of man was essential to understanding and tolerating oneself in the sixteenth century. Hopefully, this is not anachronistic nor hors de saison.

Even though we may not have spiritual heavyweights like Erasmus around to deflate man’s ego and give him balance, this is not so disturbing as is the knowledge that the need is neither accepted nor recognized. Rather a cult is developing to pay it homage.

New symbols, signs and aphorisms have been hastily created to demean conventional concepts, traditions and practices. Worthy as some of these new ideal and ideas may be, to summarily and willfully negate one’s heritage with a wave of hostility and condescension suggests paranoia. The symptoms are there.

Man is riding the crest of prosperity and a state of real, ideal and/or contrived euphoria envelops him. Once a slave to time, he now finds it weighs heavily on his hands. The fruits of his efforts have made time a luxury, producing a surplus of idleness, and this has made him uneasy.

Many jobs have been created with no productive end in mind, but only to fill the void. This has not been enough. Consequently, play has become hectic, demanding, serious, and more important than work. The awful rush to fill the dismal void of hours hangs like a sickness over man’s head. Consumption and possession have become obsessions; a compulsion to satiate oneself with food, sex, and material things is now viewed as a necessity. In man’s quest for life, meaning, peace, and purpose, man has often been left frantic, supported only by nerve pills and other placebos. His attention to Church, religion, family, society, state, and the old fashion values has been casually shifted to a perfunctory plateau of his mind. “Folly” is still his name.

One hears that times have changed, but that the Church’s life and function is petty, silly, anachronistic, irrelevant, and hypocritical by today’s standards. What is not said is closer to the nerve of the matter:

The Church and Christianity in general has been used by man as a crutch to shore him up when the going got rough; when he was alone and desperate and had no one to turn to, he could always find solace in his Church and with his God. The two were synonymous in his mind.

Not so today. Comfortable, prosperous, modern man looks within himself for the answers. Prayer and supplication are not for him. Yet, with all that he is and has, he will readily admit to being empty, unfulfilled, and seeking, continuously seeking. This is an age when public confession of the most intimate thoughts is common. Nothing appears sacred or private between man and his God, a phenomenon that has produced an identity syndrome composed of anxiety, frustration and the essence of alienation. A common observation:

Thrusting out contemptuously, he projects and substitutes this sense of guilt to causes outside himself. He cries for change but hopes to extricate himself from personal involvement. His demands are implicitly or explicitly focused on the Church and her responsibility to him.

Somehow, he has forgotten or erased from his memory that if the Church falls, he fails. If Jesus Christ is the TIMELESS TRUTH, then the answers must be there. Certainly, renewal will not suffice if man does not understand that the Church has not failed him, but that he has failed it. The Church reflects him. The bromides, platitudes, and formulae to instant happiness have never been relevant to man’s needs. They only compound his illusions and delusions. There is a danger that man’s caprice will tempt him to advocate the diminution of the Church, an ersatz Lord of Life being hastily put into focus.

A happening is not surprising in religion today. The last two generations have endured as much change as the balance of man’s history. That this ordeal of change has been a baffling experience is irrefutable. Losing his self-image, man appears to have developed myopia and a loss of depth perception as well, throwing him into punishing melancholy.

Man is restless for action, any action. One wonders if this affliction has not penetrated the staid structure of Roman Catholicism. It is one thing to articulate the ETERNAL TRUTHS in man’s vernacular, but quite another to adulterate them for palatability.

One theologian conversing with another might construe this statement to be unfair. It is, however, made by a plebian to reflect the silent dilemma of the Catholic laity. Truth is the essence of anything and cannot be altered is a dialectic he understands.

The silent man in the pew does not want to be considered a proponent of empiricism. If new insights into the TIMELESS TRUTHS of Jesus are discovered, he would prefer that they be carefully and definitively defined, painstakingly weighed, systematically categorized, and then providentially implemented into his religion. Filling the air with waves of speculation and testing the currents of acceptance will always be considered suspect and only produce chaos.

Personal involvement in change is a demanding emotional experience. One must give up that which he knows and understands relative to himself for that which is unknown and perhaps feared. Shedding one’s personal integument and assuming a new posture, image, association, status quo, and identity are painless only when done without conscious insight.

Just as one is ever losing and replacing his epidermis, contented man changes bits and pieces all the time without knowing it. Each time one accepts a new idea, new concept, something is quitted, something is lost. That is why the revolution of ideas is preceded by intellectual speculation. It prepares the way.

Mounting the current Christian renewal and ecumenical movement without such cultivation would seem absurd. Yet, this is the prima facie situation at the moment. After a wave of emotional altruism and generosity of spirit, it appears that the chill of self-doubt has set in, producing a silent retreat to the more comfortable known and understood ground.

If this is questioned, one need only observe who still controls and initiates the ecumenical: the clergy. This has been frustrating for the secular clergy, but what of the bewilderment of the laity?

No improvement has ever been made in the conventional and laborious process of making wine. The implementation of a more streamlined, truly catholic FAITH is analogous to wine making. No steps can be left out or hurried.

Christianity and Roman Catholicism are not going out of business. The link between them and the non-Christian world is likely to improve, as improve it must. Nonetheless, man’s self-image and identity with his God, now more nebulous than ever, must first receive attention.

Emotional posturing and psychological speculating have proven of little value. Though he needs guidance badly, this does not mean that he wants his Church to become entombed in his quagmire. Rather, he prefers that his Church view and understand his needs with providential detachment.

An Erasmus recognized this. A Thomas Aquinas provided the rationale for making Christian theology and philosophy a viable formula for a timeless Church. Why have their voices not been heard in modern times?

Modern man is a complex and enlightened individual, disciplined and cultivated, but nonetheless a child, always a child in his religiosity. Seeing his priests caught up in the period’s social and political activism, kneeling to the pragmatic cries of the day, does not contribute to his sense of essence nor does it give him a fix on his eternal salvation.

Man wants renewal, enlightened renewal, but not necessarily change, per se. This might mean the digesting of Thomistic theology and philosophy, and the essence of revelations, that is, getting inside the thoughts and ideas of the FAITH. The laity has never been fed these before. This type of renewal would require energetic pursuit on the part of the laity but would give it a foundation of essence, something now missing. True ecumenicism could then proceed with speed.

The Roman Catholic Church in transition must accept her history, understand her laity, and patiently implement a more substantive educational program before true ecumenicism might be broached. Otherwise, the body Christendom could be weakened by her arrogant disregard for the dilemma of the silent man in the pew.

The End

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Completed: 8 April 1968
Anchorage, Kentucky
USA

WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE -- PART ONE

When The Leadership Lost Its Tribe
So, You want to be a Leader!

When The Leadership Lost Its Tribe

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005

This is one of a series of essays on leadership in all its aspects, from scientific to intellectual, social to political, moral to spiritual, economic to industrial. One of the great myths of management is that as long as you understand the fundamentals of management you can manage anything. That has proven a costly societal error. Likewise, management is often treated as if synonymous with leadership when management as leadership has constantly failed. Leadership, in the same, is considered a linear concept that can be easily plugged into a discipline or function and succeed. We are experiencing the unhappy consequences of this thinking in the twenty-first century with worldwide corruption, chaos and seemingly no one is in charge. Leadership, like most things in human experience, is multi-dimensional and a complement of many perspectives.



"Either order in the cosmos is real or chaos exists. If chaos reigns then the fragile equalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance: for in the vortex of chaos only force and appetite satisfy."

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), British statesman and political philosopher


An imperceptible shift in what constitutes work and how it is managed has occurred over the past 150 years. As is our habit; we have addressed it with the flippancy of sleepwalkers. Consequently, at a critical time in our history, when leadership should most be in evidence, it is nonexistent.

Leadership has lost connection with its tribe, and therefore its way. The tribal nation is floundering because there is a new partner in the mix, the professional. This partner builds little of stone or steel, cement or plastic but is wrought from his own light and placid environment, as compared to the hard and harsh environment of the conventional worker.

This partner’s qualities of spirit evoke admiration and envy, but not understanding, nor, indeed, integration into the tribal nation of work. Where machines and mathematics, science and technology, strategy and tactics are involved, there is little that leadership can teach and much that leadership can learn from him. He is passionate, masochistic, and hides his angst in malicious passive behaviors, which is transformed into six silent killers of organization (see Six Silent Killers St. Lucie Press 1998).

The professional is by nature patient, long-suffering and courteous, cerebral and critical, but seldom confrontational. He is capable of great generosity to his profession and kind. College trained with many years in preparation to making a living, he has been brought up to believe that diligence to duty is sufficient to find his way, finding instead that he must conform and comply, be obeisant and obedient, political and polite to make even snail's progress in his career. He is a rebel without a cause and the reason for this essay.

The professional has grown into prominence since World War II, and is unconsciously destroying the organization from within when he is its last hope. Let us now consider why.

Context and Theme of Change over Time

The United States from 1850 to 1900 was in explosive transition. American society was emerging from an agrarian society to an industrial society. The Civil War was the first technological war. It displayed such technological wonders as submarines and steel battleships. Historians point to the supreme industrial advantage of the north in that war. Less obvious is the leadership of a president, Abraham Lincoln, and a general, Ulysses S. Grant, who recognized and exploited the devotion of the tribe to advantage.

America was a tribal nation. Lincoln constantly reminded his audience at Gettysburg of this fact. He and general Grant understood its most evasive nuances, and were able to rally with risk and daring the most common soldier. They knew the cause ran deep in the soldier’s blood. In the tribal nation, there is a seamless connection between the leader and the led, between the vision and the doing, between the body and the soul, between decision-making and execution. This was missing in the Confederacy. It is missing in America today.

From 1850 to 1900, the theme in the United States was open borders. The context was new opportunity for disillusioned peoples. Immigrants were flocking to the American shores from Ireland to escape the potato famine, settling in such places as Lowell, Massachusetts to run the textile mills; from Mexico to escape poverty to pick fruit and vegetables from Texas to New England; and from China to escape repression to build the transcontinental railroad linking the west with the east. A nation of immigrants became involved, too, as speculators panning for gold in California and Alaska. The “get rich quick” theme would always be the American Achilles’ heel, while the American dream of getting ahead with diligence and determination was not.

During this period, more than 90 percent of American workers were employed in farming, living and working on family farms. The complexity and depth of their Christian beliefs, their conception of community as the extended family, their delight in children and reverence for the aged, their view of education continuing through life, their dislike of autocracy, and their conservative political views formed a tribal outlook that pervaded the nation.

A man’s word was as good as his bond. Identity was associated with the land, the family, the Christian faith, and the authority of Mother Nature. Working from dawn to dusk eking out a precarious living was accepted without complaint. Formal education was the experience of less than 10 percent of Americans, as public education was just emerging.

The United States was an insular society where the theme was isolation secure in the context of separation from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Loyalty to the tribal nation was the foundation of American agrarianism and the explanation of its behavior and moral sense.

The question was not whether one action was good and another bad, but whether the action was in the interests of the tribe. That mentality survives and permeates every segment of the nation today, but in confusion rather than congruence.

From 1900 to 1945, while the world was being decimated with two world wars, the collapse of royal sovereignties across Europe, and the emergence of the Soviet Union and Communist China, the United States found itself a reluctant superpower on a world stage. It could no longer remain blissfully adrift in isolated idealism.

The United States had moved from an agrarian society to a major industrial nation. War had forced men off the farm into the military. Now in peacetime, farming was no longer a viable option forcing many to seek employment in urban centers. War had forced women out of the home into defense factories. Now they were reluctant to give up economic freedom to assume confining domestic roles.

Major technological changes had been a constant theme on every front between 1900 and 1945. Such names as Edison, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Einstein, Von Braun, Marconi, Bell, and the Wright brothers come to mind as having had a hand in these changes. The context was the emergence of a technological society on an agrarian foundation with the new business theme, specialization.

Compulsory Education Established

Industrial workers required basic skills. Therefore, every child had to become proficient in the three r’s: reading, riting, and rithmetic. This enabled them to read the instructions, operate the machines and report the results of the work performed. Along with the three r’s, children were also schooled in discipline, punctuality and obedience to authority.

Workers were being molded to conform to the machine with a factory mentality rather than to have the machine conform to them as individuals. First separated from the land, they were now being separated from themselves.

Once workers related closely to the land, where the results of their efforts could be easily identified. Now, the assembly line had been perfected and workers were engaged in piecework in the manufacturing of everything from automobiles to dishwashers to radios to the making of garments.

New words were coined to explain this phenomenon such as anomie, self-estrangement, and alienation. Where idealism and identity had once been the theme of an agrarian society, now specialization was the context of an industrial society.

Initially, this model had a modest agenda as it prepared essentially uneducated farm hands for industrial jobs. As soon as trained, however, these workers enjoyed remarkable freedom. They organized their own work, set up their own machines, ordered their own parts, kept records of their productivity, and had a voice in decisions involving their work. In short, they had control of what they did.

Early in the twentieth century, there were two reasons for such control: work was most likely in a job shop, such as tool and die, with the owner working beside his workers. He valued their input and treated them with respect. Although clearly employees, they were participants in the decision making. General Motors started out in this fashion.

Once General Motors formed into a company of many small job shops, and adopted the assembly line refined by Henry Ford, this was one of the first casualties. The union movement accelerated rather than impeded this transition. The United Auto Workers, for example, stepped in to collective bargain with automakers, and sued for higher wages and benefits at the sacrifice of the control these workers previously enjoyed. Workers have never regained this control.

While the industrial worker remained in place, new disciplines were being created to meet the demands of specialization. Today, there are scores of disciplines in psychology, medicine, dentistry, law, engineering, sociology, anthropology, education, and management.

For a brief interval, the leadership and the tribe forgot their progressive difficulties and renewed their earlier dedication to each other. The nation was at war and survival was in the balance.

World War II: The Miraculous Interlude of the Tribal Nation

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 hardened the United States again into a tribal nation.

Nationalism is often treated as a political phenomenon, but in fact after December 7 the roots went much deeper. The sources that fed these roots were remote, diverse, and contiguous elements of the national soul. The individuality of groups of men and women, now committed to the war effort, either in the military or in defense factories on the home front, were as genuine a fact of life as personality itself.

While the military fought in Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific, the assembly lines at home, protected by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean, became the industrial arsenal unmatched in history.

In 1942 and 1943, the United States alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944, Americans were producing one ship a day, and an airplane every five minutes (David Halberstram’s The Next Century). American Heritage’s Picture of World War Two provides even more remarkable statistics:

From January 1, 1941 (less than a month after Pearl Harbor) until the end of the war in August 1945, the United States produced 6,500 naval vessels, 64,500 landing craft, 5,400 cargo ships, 296, 601 military aircraft, 86, 388 tanks and 2.7 million machine guns.

To do this in less than three and one half years was a miracle. It was American management’s finest hour and American leadership’s most profound connection with its tribe at every level, and in every quadrant of American society.

There was neither time for grandstanding, appetite for egotistical greed, nor any patience with nonproductive impediments between the command and the commanded at home or on the battlefield. Labor and management at home, and officers and enlisted personnel in the military had a tribal mission with a clear objective: win the war and restore the peace. Role demands and self demands merged into clear identities between the leadership and the led.

The moral authority of this tribal leadership lost none of its momentum after the war. Whereas the Allied victors in World War I had imposed humiliating reparations on the defeated, this was not now the case. The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan paved the way for Europe’s recovery from its devastation, while General Douglas MacArthur was doing the same in Japan.

In 1945, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in the Far East, MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender on board the battleship Missouri. He then demonstrated remarkable moral leadership and executive vision by choosing to exercise his unlimited authority over this defeated nation with perceptive prudence.

MacArthur's first act was to restore the Emperor of Japan as titular head of state. He followed this by giving the Japanese people a new constitution with sweeping cultural, political, and economic reforms. His notable leadership would turn Japan into a world-class economic power and staunch ally of the United States.

Truman, Marshall and MacArthur were all born in the 1880s, and epitomized the moral leadership and executive restrain of the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the United States was still a tribal nation. They grew out of the soil of duty, country and the common good, virtues of America’s tribalism.

This tribalism was evident during the flu epidemic of 1918, splintered during the Great Depression of 1929, and again coalesced during World War II. Moral authority always emerged out of the tribe in crisis to show the way. That, too, would change.

America Loses its Moral Compass and its Way


From 1945 to 1960, the United States experienced unprecedented growth as it came to dominate world markets in automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, processed steel, and heavy equipment. Anybody who wanted a job could find a job anywhere in the nation.

However, what had led to victory in the war now became the villain of the peace. The villain was mass production and the assembly line. Now, everything was being mass-produced to realize the lowest possible price. This made it possible for the lowest paid assembly workers to be consummate consumers, first of their own products, and then everyone else’s. Consuming became the therapy for anxious Americans.

Out of this grew an appetite for more of everything for everyone. The mantra became “buy now, pay later,” as plastic credit cards were introduced. This allowed people to spend for things before they had earned the money to pay for them. Instant gratification killed the Protestant Work Ethic, which had glorified work and encouraged saving.

It was no accident that the United States, one of the richest nations in the world, would soon become the poorest saver. Nor would the profile stop there, as the nation would become one of the world’s greatest debtors. America was on a slippery slope, but there was no rush to band together to prevent the slide. Although the evidence was everywhere, there was little sense of crisis, and therefore even less moral leadership. The threat before was always visible, palpable, but now it was not. There was no tribal response because tribal leadership had disappeared.

Instead, wages and benefits of workers continued to escalate, while the girth of management ballooned. No position of authority seemed unachievable. Empire building became a routine activity of managers as they were paid on the basis of their direct reports. Greed became addictive to both workers and managers. Workers always wanted a higher hourly wage, and more benefits; managers wanted more perks, bigger bonuses, and endless promotions. Reality was not factored into this equation.

Incredibly, despite this trend the bond of trust between workers and managers remained in tact through the 1950s, primarily because of momentum of the war, and management’s inability to say “no” to wage and benefit demands of workers. The sky was the limit to an ever-expanding economy.

Then, in the 1960 – 1970 timeframe, many factors intervened. Europe was recovering nicely from the war, rebuilding its infrastructure and economy. Japan and Pacific Rim countries were producing quality products, and finding world markets. At home, veterans of World War II were taking advantage of the GI Bill and acquiring professional credentials in medicine, law, education, engineering, management, accounting, and manufacturing.

Upward mobility no longer was an American dream, but a constant fixation of a nation’s people on the move. By 1970, baby boomers, or children born after 1945, were receiving college educations at an impressive rate, and coming into the workforce. A college education was no longer a rarity in a family.

While a new professional class of American workers was emerging, the business climate was shrinking. Germany and Japan were manufacturing many of the products they once bought, and were now exporting them to the United States. Every fourth new automobile on American streets was foreign made.

A short seventy years before, 90 percent of Americans were farming. Now, only 4 percent called farming their occupation, and this number was shrinking fast.

An economic crisis not perceived was threatening the nation. How could that be? Times were too good, weren’t they?

Then in the late 1970s, OPEC launched an oil embargo, Iran held Americans hostage, and the nation spiraled down into double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. The bubble had burst. The United States believed itself invulnerable to what the rest of the world experienced. It could not fathom the idea of World War III being an economic war, and so it remained placid.

Professionals -- the Homeless Army of the Night

In this climate, Americans did not want to be reminded by their president that they had “a crisis in confidence.” These were not consoling words expected of a nation in denial. Progress was America’s most important product, was it not, and was not America custodian of progress?

Didn’t everyone envy America? Didn’t everyone want to be an American? Didn’t the world clamor for American products and American know how?

Ethnocentrism was not an American malady. It was an American mindset. Progress had, indeed, accelerated during the war, but it had super accelerated during the peace. By the 1980s, vanquished nations across the globe had caught up, and now enjoyed their own form of progress. Americans looked for any evidence to quiet their doubt.

They rushed to believe that the US military build up during the 1980s bankrupted the Soviet Union, which couldn’t keep pace, and collapsed the Iron Curtain. A more engaging possibility was that the US exercised influence on Saudi Arabia’s oil production in 1985. Saudi Arabia announced that it would no longer limit production to support oil prices. Oil prices plummeted seventy percent. Oil and gas exports kept the Soviet Union afloat for years. The fall of oil prices started its economic downfall. With that momentous collapse, Russian borders would shrink to what they had been in 1613.

But fixated on false readings of history can and has proven fatal to the American tribe.

To wit, managers and workers had come together with much synergy in a short miraculous four years (1941 – 1945), or during World War II. This miracle has become mythic and drenched in nostalgia. It still holds American enterprise hostage today with atavistic management and anachronistic workers with an organization to match.

Much of work today is conducted without a manager, while workers of the past no longer fit in the dominant scheme of things, replaced by robotics, computers of professionals.

Yet, it was during this brief mythic period that managers and workers understood each other, trusted each other, and were supportive of each other. They had the luxury of common identities and common bonds. Then professionals entered the mix, and everything should have changed, but didn’t, and that is why we are having the problems or organization today.

What is now apparent is that professionals are neither managers nor workers in the conventional sense.

Yet, professionals identify with management while displaying contempt for being grouped with workers. This has generated instinctive suspicions of their motives by both managers and workers, creating polarity and division, with the leadership and the tribe going their separate ways.

In a tribal sense, workers have always looked to the leadership to survive giving it the responsibility to worry about progress. This mindset does not sit well with professionals. Workers have taken the common sense approach to making their survival as pleasant as possible. Professionals have been forced to adapt to this but have done so resentfully.

Workers fit nicely into how Jeremy Bentham described the tribe in the late 18th century:

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne."

The rational guide for workers has been personal duty in accordance with company policy. They expected management to deal with things beyond their understanding, yielding to its tribal authority with loyalty, obedience and submissiveness. In return, they expected the company to provide them with security.

From workers’ perspective, the company had always been fair in the past and they trusted its leadership would be fair in the future. Trust was basic to their well being. Workers had little sense of business turmoil and even less interest. They took comfort in the sentiment, “That’s management’s problem.”

By the accident of being employed during the business boom following the war, however, they enjoyed middle class status without the involvement or commitment, pressure or anxiety of professionals. Paid an hourly wage, workers punched in, punched out, and forgot about it. Professionals, on salary, were expected to work limitless hours without additional compensation, and on occasion, even to take their work home with them.

The combination of a generous seniority system and a management reluctant to say “no” to their demands, workers often enjoyed comparable economic clout to professionals without the agony. This was unsettling to professionals. They had taken years to acquire their credentials, and now were being harrassed by creditors for unpaid student loans, which reminded them of their years of lost income, a predicament only other professionals would understand.

So, from the beginning, there developed antagonism between workers and professionals, implicit distrust and contempt for each other, and nearly a total lack of understanding of their complementary roles. Workers felt professionals punished them with their knowledge. Professionals felt workers had it made in the shade, and didn’t appreciate their sacrifices.

As for management, professionals distrusted it for its failure to appreciate and compensate them to the level of their worth.

The rational guide for professionals was to protect their self-interests and professional status, looking always for new opportunities. They expected to be involved in the decision-making process, and were inclined to be critical when their input was ignored. Accordingly, loyalty was first to self, then to their profession, and finally to their careers. If their current jobs enhanced their careers, all the better, but such status was never taken for granted. It was a marriage of convenience, never one of love.

While workers toiled in submissive collaboration with the leadership, professionals challenged the leadership at every turn, more often covertly than overtly. Professionals showed a distain for position power, while hungering for its perks. Curiously, a lack of interest in responsibility and accountability resembled that of workers. Yet, to suggest this comparison to professionals would drive them to anger. They believed knowledge power superseded position power, which had other demands and created other nuances.

When professionals came on the scene, the tribe was still the organization. They represented a foreign intrusion compared to management and workers as a common entity, a fact you might have thought they would have perceived.

Everything the tribe possessed, including the lives of the workers, was the implicit property of the company. The leadership of the company was not only symbolic, but the supreme recognized authority. Cooperation and harmony were dictated by the like-mindedness of individual workers complicit in this scheme.

Everything changed when professionals entered the mix. At the same time, nothing changed at all, and that is the problem. Professionals were assumed to be workers with a different colored shirt. They were expected to be loyal to their employer and to fall into line with the organization’s protocol, as workers had.

There was no sense that the value system of professionals might differ with that of workers in terms of authority, loyalty, discipline and motivation.

There was no attempt to treat them differently, or to develop a strategy to make them more agreeable to a tribal culture. Since workers had never questioned these dictates, professionals were expected to respond in kind to the reward and punishment system; to motivation by fear and intimidation; and to be polite, obedient, conforming, and submissive to the company’s rhetoric and policies consistent with workers. They weren’t.

From that point forward, the leadership lost the tribe, and derailed into leaderless leadership.


The Fall Out and Its Consequences

Why so? Eighty percent of the workers were now professionals, and as high as ninety percent of costs of a product were in indirect expensing. Put otherwise, four out of five workers, or more never touched the actual product manufactured, but were still treated as if they did. Work Without Managers (1990) addressed this problem, repeated it with The Worker, Alone! (1995), again with Six Silent Killers (1998), and finally with Corporate Sin (2000).

Earlier, a television program got the nation’s attention, but unfortunately, response to it took the country down another road to leaderless leadership.

Tom Brokaw of NBC television alerted the nation to a major US problem in his 1980 broadcast of “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” He profiled Japan, Inc.’s growing market share of America’s automotive business. Japan was doing it with the quality technology developed by America’s Edwards W. Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker.

This technology was spurned by American industry so they took it abroad. Detroit was too busy making huge gas-guzzlers to recognize that neither the roads of other countries nor their pocket books could accommodate their automobiles.

The technology in question was statistical quality control and total quality management. Industries across the country soon came to imitate Japanese quality control practices with quality control circles. Workers in these circles identified and solved work related problems relative to quality performance. There were several reasons why these practices became less effective in this country.

For one, Japan is a group-oriented society and groupthink is natural to its people. America is an individualistic society and less comfortable in an orchestrated setting such as quality circles.

Even a greater difference was the composition of the workforce. Eighty percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar workers acclimated to a feudalistic system where the feudal lords were now its management. Eighty percent of American workers in high tech companies in the 1980s were professionally trained, and found it demeaning to be programmed to such practices as if elementary school students.

I can attest to this fact as I directed the largest quality circle program in the country at the time in a 4,000-employee facility. More than eighty percent of the workers were professionals. They did not take to the quality circle approach to quality. However, workers in some 120 quality circles did appreciate the attention, and the opportunity to have some input into the design of their workstations. Unfortunately, they represented less than twenty percent of the workforce.

It is clear that panic set in when American markets disappeared. The Brokaw television program proved a wake up call, but failed to generate reflection and insight. Instead, it fed a fanatic frenzy to catch up.

A hodgepodge of human resources interventions followed designed to ignite performance by improved policies and procedures, empathic supervision, better working conditions, employee empowerment, as well as increased entitlement benefits and implicit security. Regarding the latter, “lifetime employment” became a buzz word. Unfortunately, none of these interventions were necessarily tied to improved performance. They became “givens.”

Consequently, workers went from being management dependent in a culture of comfort to counter dependent on the company in a culture of complacency with the company responsible for their total well being. Entitlements grew to rival the national debt without any perceptible improvement in productivity.

Meanwhile, professionals benefited from the company’s largesse but continued to bide their time, looking for escape. In the 1990s that came with the electronic boom, which continues to grow exponentially with the Internet, cell phones, lap tops, and every conceivable electronic invasive system. There are no secrets anymore for anything.

Some estimates have professionals spending as much as forty percent of company time today on personal business, using electronic equipment for personal advantage at the expense of the company.

This is not revenge but further evidence that the leadership has lost its tribe. The indiscipline of professionals, the lack of respect for authority, and general permissiveness are assumed to be phenomena of the 1970s. Actually, such conditions have never left enterprise. If anything, permissiveness continues to feed the chaos in which as Edmund Burke observed, “only force and appetite satisfy.”

Today, professionals in the full flush of their new prominence, see the leadership descending to their level. This plays out in their insolence towards the leadership no longer having any fear of it. The teacher now stands in awe of his pupil, the leader in awe of the professional. Knowledge speaks in tongues. As a result, the pupil and professional despise their teacher and leader, and so do pretty much as they please without fear of sanction or retribution.

Experience has come to count for little as young and old are equal, with the young ready to compete with the old in word and deed, while the old feebly imitate the young. So, what is the result of the leadership mimicking the professional? Leaderless leadership.

Can the Problem be Fixed?

Solidarity of authority had grown over 150 years in American society as it transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial society. It had no expectation of the present phenomenon of professionals differing with other workers, and therefore failed to understand the threat of a technological society of professionals.

It anticipated no impetiment to its harmony and tranquility, to its progress and productivity. How so? Because there was no precedence to follow, no models in which to compare its predicament. There are still none today. The United States is the lone nation with such a dynamic, needy, and demanding workforce of professionals as it still sets the bar in the new technological world.

That said the leadership failed to appreciate professionals as being unique even though emerging from the tribe, not outside it. It failed, too, to fathom the impact of a century of cataclysmic war and exploding technological development in the creation of this new order of professionals.

Workers from the beginning were instinctively suspicious of these interlopers, and still are. Deviation from the norm continues to disturb their equilibrium. The leadership was their link between work and that technological world. Now professionals own that world, and speak a language in jargon foreign to them, and have no reverence for their tribal home, its leadership or in fact, them, and now professionals intrude into every aspect of their daily lives.

Can it be fixed? A better question would be, do we have any choice?

Note: This article focuses on professionals in the United States, but similar problems are no doubt being experienced in technological societies in Europe, Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well.
About the author: James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is an organizational development psychologist and author of several books in the genre. He is available for consulting work and seminars throughout the world.

MORE ON ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT or "OD" from WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE -- PART THREE

MORE ON ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OR “OD” from WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE – PART THREE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005






As is my wont, I've pruned this piece (WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE -- PART THREE), and suddenly realized I had the kernel of a book here.

That is another subject I'll take up with my agent. For my purposes here, besides providing you with a more clearly written copy of this piece, I want to elaborate on organizational development psychology, more commonly known as "OD."

Perhaps the best way for me to explain OD is to recreate conversationally my career in OD going back to before I knew what it was. I start this process with five of my experienced OD situations here.

I have been practicing OD all my life, and the books I have read on the subject still don't get it. I say that because I was practicing it before I knew I was, or what it was.

OD does not fit nicely like a hand in a glove, nor can you make the eclectic discipline of OD into a silk purse.

OD is that delightful pull Darwin understood, and surely his chief interpreter of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, and that is that it is not science, art, literature or pulp fiction, but all of these without being any of them in a growing evolutionary chain of awareness.

OD is that indefinable world beyond language, yet it is of language. There once was a television program called "What's My Line?" The celebrity participants had to guess the occupation of the mystery guest by asking, "Is it animal, fruit or vegetable?" Well, often it was all of these, and so is OD.

Since the advent of the Internet, people who visit my blog find it fascinating that it is "so conversational" about so many things. Others who write me formally by email, ask permission to use this or that; and still others just steal from me, as there is no price tag on my basket of goodies with my words coming up on their blogs as if they had written them themselves.

My literary agent thinks I am generous to a fault, and perhaps naively so. I've been trading on that assumed naivete all my life.

I'm getting older so I'm going to tell you a secret. I know exactly what I am about, only I hide my mercenary spirit better than most.

You see, I know I am saying important things, valuable things, useful things, and my reward is influence. So, there you have it.

I've never actually been interested in a career, a promotion, making money, and so on, but what I've always wanted is not youth as Faust did, but influence.

What drives me? Why am I so prolific? I'm asked that a lot. Where does my discipline come from? Only last night a lady asked me, "When did you get the way you are?" Does anyone really know? Anyway, I answered, "I've been this way as long as I can remember, maybe at age four or five it took hold."

In the afternoon, perhaps better still, the evening of my life, the Internet miraculously appeared and my ideas now have a theater, a center stage, even floodlights, and open doors with no admission charge, and they say there isn't a God?

I have friends who worry about not being taken seriously, who have fallen off the giving stage "because the world doesn't deserve their brilliance." They ask me, "Why bother?"

Well, I come back to influence again. There is a lot to that old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive."

Now, the teacher may be dead and buried, but his ideas are preserved on the Internet or on somebody's hard disk, or perhaps in a book or two, and a surviving article or three.

Ah, that is influence! That is immortality! That is living and walking and talking and stalking alongside all the teachers that ever were. Now, that is influence!

In this revised regurgitated rewritten piece that is on my blog as DESIGN IS DESTINY under the rubric "Why the Leadership has lost the Tribe - Part Three," I say some things that are simple but clearly profound, starting with "design is destiny." In its most naked form, that is what OD is.

Because some of you will not have time or the inclination to download this piece or go to the blog, I am providing you with some of the OD gems in this particular piece.

____________________________________

WHAT YOU WILL FIND ON OD IN THIS PIECE:

"OD is not interested in command or administration, staff or line, professional or working class workers, per se, but in assessing the relative wellness of organizational life, objectively, and then doing something about it. OD never owns the problem."

Translated: OD is not personal. To highlight this point, I wrote:

"As a specialist in OD, I was expected to behave like a corporate executive (when I was elevated to director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe), while assuming my OD role as an unobtrusive observer, which amounts to an oxymoron."

Translated: Unfortunately, for my boss as well as me, when I had this position, he didn't have a clue as to what OD was, and I didn't take the time to educate him in the art form. He was most political, and I couldn't have been more apolitical. An OD specialist that is political is like the debauching priest who preaches continence.

Also, in this piece:

"Methodologically, OD calls for the study of patterns, the evaluation of trends, the relationship of demands to their discharge, and the assessment of the consequences of various interventions with little interest in corporate or national politics outside these constructs."

Translated: The client isn't the guy who pays you but the organization under study. If the guy who pays you thinks that you will protect him or make him look good, than the fee is a bribe.

I had a client in which the cover title of my report was, "Why the agency can't get its work done." The director "short changed me" $3,750 because she could, only because the report didn't show her walking on water. On the contrary, it showed she wasn't walking at all.

What did I do about it? What I am doing right now, reminding myself that the client that pays you thinks he/she owns you, and if he/she does, then you are in the wrong discipline. In other words, I did nothing; licked my wounds and went on.

In yet another place in this piece, I write:

"The function of OD is to enable organizations to calibrate their health, not to manage change; to get inside another's culture and understand it from the inside out, not the outside in, and share that with the client."

Translated: The answers are always in the problem, not in the OD specialist's head.

What OD does is what the leadership could do if it hadn't lost the tribe.

Now, I read where Microsoft with its 60,000 people is struggling to hold on to its brains. The complaint? Corpocracy has won out. Microsoft is now a closed rather than an open system.

Believe it or not, General Motors was once far more open than Microsoft ever was. Look at GM today and you see Microsoft tomorrow.

Success is a slippery slope, and the more the skids are oiled with stentorian hubris the faster the slide into decline.

Also in this piece:

"Change is client specific and not client relative as some writers would suggest.

"Change is built out of the existing culture, and therefore is indigenous to it. This is not clear when cosmetic change is substituted for real change.

"You do not search for excellence, and attempt to duplicate the success of another company. You build excellence out of the indigenous culture. Ergo, leadership is not about making power point slides to impress stockholders or management, or to launch interventions that look good on paper but seldom pan out in fact."

Translated: The corporate culture took a very wrong turn when it was mesmerized by Japan's success with quality control circles (QCCs), and this was then compounded when it made "Search for Excellence" the bible to corporate success.

QCC's fit the Japanese culture of group think and feudalistic obeisance, not American individualism and entrepreneurialism.

As for "Search for Excellence," this book became the corporate bible and gave the impression that if you did "a,b,c,d & e" that ABC did, then XYZ would likely enjoy the same success.

What was left out of the equation was culture, which is the genetic code of an organization.

Quality circles never took, not only because of the different mindset and culture, but the different composition of the workforce. Japan and the US were opposites: Japan 80 percent blue collar, 20 percent white collar: US 80 percent white collar, 20 percent blue collar. As I've recorded in my books, going back to 1990, Total Quality Management consequently has been a charade.

As for search for excellent imitators, the results two years after this book was a sensational best seller, as reported by Business Week, indicated that companies that had attempted to morph themselves into clones of those profiled invariably rejected the transplant, many of them floundering or on life supports.

Also included in this piece:

"An OD psychologist is physician to the organization and can be no more successful than a medical physician who has identified a disease, shared his prognosis with the client, and then left that client to manage his own destiny."

Translated: To go from illness to wellness, the person or the company cannot expect to make the transition by taking placebos or resorting to cosmetic change, and expect to get well.

Moreover, if the prognosis is not taken seriously, and the behavior that led to it continues, all bets are off.

A physician can say, "Quit smoking or you will die," as he did to a friend of mine. She told him she quit, but she didn't, and she died of emphysema.

Again, OD, as it is with the physician, cannot get personal. In the end, it is always up to the individual or the organization to choose the design of their destiny.

The piece concludes with this:

"If there is one thing OD interventions reveal, it is the human nature of the human group. Sometimes the problem is as simple as how the office space and plant facilities are laid out; sometimes it is the territorial imperatives that the design allows elite groups to exercise; sometimes it is only a matter of simple senility that charts an organization's destiny.

"Organizations die if they don't constantly reinvent themselves. Nor is it only individuals who play fast and easy with existence. Organizations have been known to do so as well. We are often shocked when brilliant people do stupid things. Brilliant companies do stupid things everyday, especially when they forget 'design is destiny.'

"These three easy words, 'design is destiny,' roll off the tongue, but how profound when all passion has been spent.

"If there is a common theme to these five accounts (covered here), it is events didn't make or break these organizations. It was the misreading of events and inappropriate reaction to them that caused the unraveling. In any case, it is the reason for sharing it with you."

Translated: none needed.

When The Leadership Lost The Tribe: Part Three DESIGN IS DESTINY!

When The Leadership Lost The Tribe

Part Three

Design is Destiny!

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether an organization is going to succeed, fail, vegetate, flounder, expire, or survive.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
AQP Journal, Winter 2002


In the previous two parts, I developed my thesis that the professional has not been adequately integrated into organizational life. Consequently, most organizations are not operating as effectively as they might.

It is now time to cite examples that illustrate this unhappy fact. First, a word of caution. This is not meant to impugn the motivation of organizations “to do the right thing.” It is rather an indictment that they are culturally strapped down as Gulliver was by an army of self-created Lilliputians.

THE ANATOMY OF A POLICE RIOT: Account No. 1

She comes! She comes! The sable Throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)


During the 1970s, one of the preoccupations of American society was “law and order.” The explosion in self-indulgence, hedonism, narcissism and permissiveness had taken society to the wall. And typical of society, without seeing the implosive duplicity to such strategy, it turned to police to make order of chaos, harmony of conflict, and peace of neglect without changing anything, except cosmetically.

As an organizational development (OD) psychologist, I was frequently called on to assist police with crisis intervention tactics, always unfortunately after the fact. Law enforcement during the 1970s was a major theme of national and local politics.

Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) in Fairfax County, Virginia, the county adjoining Washington, D.C. was and is one of the most affluent counties in the United States.

As urban populations increased, so did police departments. FCPD had some 240 sworn officers in the 1950s, but more than 840 in the 1970s. Approximately eighty percent of these officers lived outside Fairfax County, as housing and living expenses exceeded their police salaries. In the 1950s, many officers lacked high school diplomas. In the 1970s, everyone was at least a high school graduate, and many held college degrees. However, no member of the command staff was a college graduate.

FCPD operated much as it had always operated with a modus operandi consistent with a distant past. This included routinely expecting all officers to submit to the same ritualistic training whatever their credentials. This meant that every officer had to spend a mandatory three years on patrol.

Officers with credentials in such disciplines as accounting, computer science, planning, administration, public relations, personnel and psychology had to first complete this line function before being considered for positions more compatible with their respective educations.

Veteran police officers manned these infrastructure positions, hand counting complaints, and manually developing demographics and geographic crime statistics, while IBM computers sat idle, as officers most familiar with their operation were in the field writing traffic tickets.

As Alexander Pope suggests, “the gilded clouds decay, and all its varying rainbows die away.” That happened when more than a thousand African Americans were relocated to Herndon in Fairfax County from Washington, D.C.

This was an experiment to redistribute the population and address over crowding in the national capital. Unfortunately, there were not enough jobs in the new location for this population. There were no skills training programs to address the problem. Nor were recreational facilities constructed in the short term to ease the transition for these people to their new surroundings. They were literally hung out to dry and to fend for themselves.

It was not simply a problem of seeing the forest for the trees, but of being lost in an Atlantis of the past. The command staff of FCPD micromanaged to the extreme. This was evident in my conferences with it. An officer would interrupt the proceedings to report on a burglary, highway pileup, a fire, and other crimes and misdemeanors that could and should be handled at the functional level.

While the command staff’s attention was focused on such petty matters, there was little or no attention given to the rising discord in the Herndon community.

Two months before I arrived local Herndon politicians had imposed a curfew on blacks and shut down their shopping center at 10 p.m. This ordinance was imposed because of loud music blaring into the parking lot from the strip stores, and the constant circling of automobiles in and out of the shopping mall. The shopping center had become by default their community center. It is where they met, socialized, and entertained themselves with music from loud speakers.

Once the curfew was imposed, once the music stopped, the modest rights that they had enjoyed were now taken away. It was only a matter of time before social unease would fester into an social combustion.

American Management Association (AMA) sent me to Fairfax County after a white police officer unloaded his service revolver on a young black man in a convenient store in this strip mall. There had been a running feud between the officer and the young man. The officer thought he saw him drive into the convenient store parking lot, knowing the man had a suspended license. The young black taunted the officer saying, “You see me driving anything?” This so angered the officer that he pushed his mocker into a refrigerated cooler, breaking the glass. The man grabbed the officer’s nightstick to defend himself, according to witnesses, causing the officer to shoot and kill him. A riot followed.

African Americans burned down the shopping center, and held the police at bay with bricks and Molotov cocktails. This went on for several days.

FCPD command staff was impotent to quell the situation. The black leadership refused to deal with it, finding it insincere and ignorant of its grievances. Then, a remarkable thing happened, something that you might expect in a novel but not in a real situation.

A college-trained officer, who was persona non grata in the eyes of the department, stepped forward. He had done a terrible thing; he had stolen a hunting knife out of police property, which was evidence in a crime. Since that transgression, he had been ostracized from departmental activities. Police show amazing tolerance for ambivalent behavior among the rank and file, but it stops at stealing police property.

Incredibly, when the riot became chaotic and increasingly an embarrassment to the department and county, this police officer crossed the line between the police and the rioters, and walked into the rioters’ camp, unarmed. He did it without instruction, putting his life in jeopardy. The command staff was struck dumb. He talked to the rioters by listening to their grievances. He helped them formulate these grievances into reassuring language, and then presented them to county officials. By the accident of circumstance, he was the acting chief of police, the only one the rioters would negotiate with, and why?

They trusted him. He had been a regular presence amongst them and had listened to them before. He knew the legitimacy of their complaints, pouring calm water on the fires of their contempt, and ended by settling the riot with dignity. Regrettably, once order was restored, a concerted effort was made to minimize his role.

Over the nine months I spent in Fairfax County after the riot, it was clear little learning had taken place. My report included what is here, along with an outline of more progressive policies to better utilize personnel, and anticipate future potential explosive situations. They were largely ignored. I wrote my master’s thesis on this subject titled, “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot” (1976).

THE ANATOMY OF A POLICE MUTINY: Account No. 2

Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated, as to cheat
As lookers-on feel most delight,
That least perceive a juggler’s sleight,
And still the less they understand,
The more th’ admire his sleight of hand.

Samuel Butler
(1612 – 1680)


Again, during the 1970s, reality more resembled fiction, as folly became a bizarre dance of self-deception. I was contracted by the Public Safety Institute to investigate the “walk off” mutiny of a substantial segment of the 550 sworn officers of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) of Raleigh, North Carolina.

A group of renegade officers formed a bogus union demanding better working conditions, and a more equitable pay and promotion system. This was only window dressing for what they actually demanded: the immediate removal of the chief of police with a voice in his replacement.

The situation had already become a fiasco by the time I arrived. Print and television journalists couldn’t have dreamed of a better scenario. A media blitz featuring the rift between the chief and his officers was big news. Newspapers and nightly television news featured the rift as the lead story. Spokesmen for the bogus union paraded before the city council, gave print and television interviews, and campaigned throughout the community. No one seemed to appreciate how bizarre this was.

The mutineers were flying in the face of North Carolina law, which did not allow police officers to unionize. Yet, they remained quite brazen and disruptive in the face of this.

The officers still serving would share their angst with me as I rode with them on all three shifts. It was on the graveyard shift that I discovered where the "sleight-of-hand juggler" resided. He was a soft spoken, articulate and crafty captain who held the duty roster for the graveyard shift as a permanent assignment. I found that odd because I had never encountered it before in all my police work. What made it even odder is that this captain seemed competent, respected, and definitely in charge.

No shift was better organized, or the officers more attentive to their roster assignments. The climate was open, cordial, relaxed and electric. Then something hit me. His phraseology was precisely the same as that of the mutineers being interviewed. They were his clones!

He would compliment the troops for hanging tough in these difficult times, and then add, “you deserve leadership that not only protects you, life and limb, but gives you a sense of dignity and identity on the job,” the exact words I had heard coming out of a clone on television.

“What’s going to happen, captain?” someone ventured that first night. “What would you like to happen?” he answered with a sensual grin. Like a rowdy college crowd, they roared, “Everything!” Foot stomping followed. Now serious, he added, “Only if you let it.” On that note, police officers would head for their cruisers, hitting the streets walking on air. I saw this a number of times, and the impact never varied.

What I found incredulous is that the captain allowed me to see his naked contempt and obvious biased laden indoctrination of the troops. I finally got the courage to ask an officer I was riding with, “What goes with the captain?”

He said, “You know that expression the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Well, we complete the circle for the captain. He hates the chief and so do we!”

”Are you sure of that?”

“Oh, yeah! Absolutely!”

“You know what you’re saying?”

“I know. He’s using us. We’re his heavy lifters. That’s why I’m still on the job and not waving placards and giving television interviews. ”

But why were others playing the captain’s game? This still didn’t compute. The chief and the command staff were not helpful. The more questions I asked the more evasive they became. I was getting nowhere.

Then one day I was in city hall, and I stopped at an office without a nameplate on the door. I knocked and was greeted by a cherubic white haired man with an easy smile. “Come in,” he said, “take a load off your feet. You don’t have to tell me who you are. I already know.” Then he added, “Have you solved our mystery?” I confessed I hadn’t. “Well, that is because you don’t have the right information.”

He put his feet up on his desk, lit a cigarette, blew a smoke ring in the air, and then told me an amazing story. Three years ago, this gentleman retired as the city manager, persuading the city council to appoint his deputy to his post.

“I would have retired earlier,” he confided, “but I was holding out to see that the police chief, a good friend of mine, retired with his full pension. He no longer could function as the chief, his heart was that bad. But I felt we owed him after thirty years of service, and I wanted to see that he got it.”

Then he elaborated on a convoluted plan he devised to do just that.

“My friend was the first chief of police with a college degree in Raleigh history.” He let that register, and then continued. “Where we once recruited anybody who could walk, the chief insisted on upgrading the force with college people. It changed the place, or was changing the place until he got sick.

“So, when his health gave out, I kept him on the job, but rotated the department’s three majors as acting chief on a four month rotational basis. We did this for three years, or until my friend died, and then I made the senior major the permanent chief and retired.” He paused and looked to see if I was following him.

“His death took a lot out of me. Perhaps I acted impulsively, I don’t know. In any case, that is the can of worms I gave my deputy to sort out.”

I sat there nearly in shock. “You know what you did, don’t you?” I said caustically.

With a sigh, he said, “You’re going to tell me I created a monster.”

“I don’t know about that, but you did create three separate police departments. Now, I understand when a sergeant tells me he was once a major, and a major tells me he was once a sergeant.”

“Yes, it’s true. Each chief had his own gang.”

Everything fell into place. Once the senior major was given the chief’s job permanently, he neutralized his competitors. He placed one majors in charge of administration, the other in charge of community affairs, both positions of limited clout. He then elevated his duty sergeant to major in command of all line operations with the two former chiefs reporting to him.

The captain on permanent nights had been a constant aggravation to the chief over the years. He must have enjoyed sticking him on permanent nights to get him out of his hair, when what he had actually done was ensure that 90 percent of the force would be exposed to the captain’s bias as shifts rotated.

Every college-trained officer in the department was eventually exposed to the captain’s ritualistic indoctrination. He would remind them as they came into the department that the chief had little simpatico for college-trained officers when it came to advancement, which, as it turned out, was actually true.

In this climate, I published my findings with a surprising outcome. Once the community knew the origin of this mutiny, it was as if a boil had been lanced, the poison released, allowing healing to take place.

Even the chief saw where he had allowed his clouded bias to master his better judgment; the men saw how the captain had manipulated them; and everyone could see how the former city manager’s love of a friend had colored his misguided strategy.

The rotating majors had created three separate police departments leading to division and separate identities. Now, it was obvious to all what had happened, and why it had stoked so much antipathy.

The mutineers, once the source of the problem came out, were old news. The chief made a prudent move welcoming them back into the department without recrimination. Some didn’t return. The chief, himself, served out his days to retirement leaving with dignity a few years later. The new chief was a college graduate.

THE MIT AND HONEYWELL AVIONICS DISCONNECT:

The Head Has No Body, The Body No Head! Account No. 3

Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.

The Epistle of Paul to the Romans


In the 1980s now as an OD psychologist with Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida, a paper of mine was presented at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits in Dallas, Texas (1981) on “Motivation through Participative Management.”

The Research Director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had read the paper, and was visiting Clearwater and asked to see me. He invited me to Cambridge, MA to meet with his scientists and engineers to discuss a “teaming problem” they were having with Avionics production workers.

CSDL designed a ring laser gyro that Clearwater built in its production facility. In other words, there was a thousand miles between the design and building phase of this device.

Each considered the other the source of the problem, and not their operation. Arriving in Cambridge, I was shown how perfectly the design of the ring laser gyro performed in the laboratory. CSDL personnel insisted that the design should be easily replicated. “Obviously,” they chortled, “it must be shoddy production methods in Florida.”

Since my role was team building, I conducted a series of seminars with systems analysts, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, and their managers. Although not qualified to assess the legitimacy of their claims, I was not intimidated by their conceit, having worked in research as a chemist, and knowing something of the mindset.

Anticipating this attitude, I had developed a manual beforehand titled “Teaming: Productivity Through Cooperation” (1983). It included a team building process, assessment of team building competence, choosing a leadership style, knowing how to read people and run a team, effective communication skills, active listening, motivation through cooperation, how to run a meeting, effective stress management, and an expose on the changing nature of organizational life.

It was amusing to watch these brilliant people struggle to make contact with their right brain or intuitive nature. They were like fish out of water and sometimes became quite irrational in declaring their rationality. I let them rant without comment until they finally worked their way through their insecurities and could act like normal people. Incidentally, it was hard work for them.

This was a multi-phase two-week process. They resisted at first, attempting to focus on me, but that failed because everything was built around them and their participation. I was merely a bystander. As competent and confident as they were in their respective technologies, they were anything but when it came to relating to each other.

One of glitches that surfaced was that the teaming difficulty of the MIT scientists wasn’t only the separation of 1,000 miles, or “a bridge too far,” but the office or laboratory next door.

CSDL is housed in two imposing twin circular towers of several stories. A bridge high above the ground connects these structures. The offices and laboratories are designed so that work is always “right around the bend” from a colleague. No one can look into a co-worker’s office. This might have merit if creative work were done in a vacuum, but this ergonomic design magnified division, separation, and isolation.

Many interviewed confessed that interaction was uncommon rather than common. Perhaps because of this many were found to be shameless gossipmongers, while others were quite paranoid, sensing all kinds of plots against them and their work. In a word, cut through their polish, and they were quite normal.

One physical chemist stated with considerable pride that he hadn’t spoken to the biochemist next door in twenty years. “Don’t you have to work together?” I asked innocently. “Of course,” he sniggered, “but we have messengers to handle that.”

It was obvious to me at this point that CSDL looked down its nose at the body, in this case the Avionics clean room production workers in Clearwater with their high school diplomas, and working class minds, and with supervisors who were no better.

The question was how to bridge this disconnect.

Fortunately, a CSDL scientist came up with a proposal: “Why don’t we visit Clearwater and see what the problems are with replicating our design?” Another scientist echoed these sentiments, adding, “I think it would be helpful, too, if a team of Clearwater people paid us a visit.”

Within a matter of weeks, it was learned that the CSDL design was, indeed, too pure for Clearwater to replicate. CSDL provided some helpful suggestions to make the design more production friendly, while Clearwater engineers and production workers were equally helpful in their visit to Cambridge with suggestion to make the design more pristine. And that is what happened.

Regarding the bridge too far between offices and labs next door to each other at CSDL. That is a work in progress.

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

Europe attempts to escape its own shadow! Account No. 4

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774)

In the late 1980s, I found my OD shingle now hung out in Honeywell Europe’s headquarters as director of human resources planning & development. Honeywell was attempting to bring its European operations into the twenty-first century without fully appreciating that Europe had not yet left the nineteenth century.

As fixated as corporate America continues to be on the nostalgic 1950s, Europe had maintained fidelity to its magnificent nineteenth century culture with reluctant concessions to modern and postmodern demands. If anything had changed since WWII, it was that work in Europe had been reduced to a welfare system with social and economic guarantees not necessarily tied to performance. Now, in the 1980s, there were courageous attempts to change that.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was taking hold, but reluctantly so, and Honeywell Europe’s operation was consistent with that. As a specialist in OD, I was expected to behave like a corporate executive, while acting as an unobtrusive observer, which amounts to an oxymoron.

OD is not interested in command or administration, staff or line, professional or working class workers, per se, but in assessing the relative wellness of organizational life, objectively, and then doing something about it. OD never owns the problem.

Methodologically, OD calls for the study of patterns, the evaluation of trends, the relationship of demands to their discharge, and the assessment of the consequences of various interventions with little interest in corporate or national politics outside these constructs.

Unfortunately, politics were center stage, and most interventions were of cosmetic construction. I would detail this in “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches” (1990) after this experience, and add subsequent iterations to the same theme in several other books and articles over the next two decades.

It was clear that the tribe in Europe had retrogressed back into feudalism, with leadership acting as princes of principalities with work a casualty of enterprise.

To site an example, Honeywell Europe’s Residential Division was making record sales but losing money. A demographic study revealed that only 10 percent of the Honeywell Residential sales force had college degrees while 90 percent of the buyers it called on were college trained. Translated, the sales force was being finessed by its buyers.

A program designated “upgrade the skills of the work force” was created with an emphasis on hiring, training and retaining college graduates. Competency profiles for Honeywell Europe’s principal job categories were used for the purposes of hiring, developing career tracks, and coaching workers. This was more easily formulated than promulgated.

What made the effort most difficult is that only a minority of European students has easy access to a college education. Formal education in most European countries can end as early as fifteen years of age. Such students may have an opportunity for trade school training, but many attempt to find their way to a paying job while still being very much underaged children.

Another common problem was that highly skilled nationals of one country were either unknown to another, or were reluctant to work in that country. The scars of war sometimes heal slowly.

A computerized European talent bank was developed. It graded the readiness of professionals across Europe in several disciplines and this was made available to all nationals. Less than 10 percent of Honeywell affiliates took advantage of this manpower tool.

Typically, manpower management was a sideline for the finance director, a discipline concerned with “profit and loss statements,” which is far a field to the management of “people.” A performance management system was created to familiarize finance directors with people management, including a comprehensive guide to organization culture, human resources practices, and feedback to management.

You would think that these complementary interventions would make a difference, that they would dovetail, that is, that upgrading the workforce, creating a talent pool, and monitoring performance would provide a handle on people management. It didn’t.

They made an impression; they got people promoted, and they even fueled the elevation of Honeywell Europe’s president to CEO and Chairman of Honeywell International, Inc., and my boss was made a vice president. Otherwise, nothing on the ground changed.

Honeywell would decline on this new CEO’s watch; break up into another company while retaining the Honeywell name, with my boss moving on to greener pastures. I would retire to write books about this disconnect between leaders and workers.

With the retrospective of nearly twenty years, I see the EEC still in crisis. European countries such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy are still experiencing massive unemployment and mounting deficits, while Great Britain is not far behind in this muddy wake.

The function of OD is to enable organizations to calibrate their health, not to manage change; to get inside another’s culture and understand it from the inside out, not the outside in, and share that with the client.

Change is client specific and not client relative as some writers would suggest. Change is built out of the existing culture, and therefore is indigenous to it. This is not clear when cosmetic change is substituted for real change. You do not search for excellence, and attempt to duplicate the success of another company. You build excellence out of the indigenous culture. Ergo, change management is not about making power point slides to impress management, or to launch interventions that look good on paper but seldom pan out in fact.

An OD psychologist is physician to the organization and can be no more successful than a medical physician who has identified a disease, shared his prognosis with the client, and then left that client to manage his own destiny.



CLOSER TO HOME

When a conveyor belt stops running. Account No. 5

Hast thou betrayed my credulous innocence
With vizor’d falsehood, and base forgery?

John Milton (1608 – 1674)

In the 1990s, and now as a writer-consultant, I observed the transparent arrogance of leadership with little regard for the tribe. Take the case of good intentions giving birth to unintended consequences.

An independently owned beverage bottling company in Sarasota, Florida maintained a successful business with several major corporate soft drink companies. A conveyor belt salesman persuaded management that by installing a computer controlled electronic conveyor system it could reduce its workforce by 25 percent and increase its profits by 50 percent in the first year.

Management was ecstatic. So, without hesitation, it scheduled the installation over the Christmas holidays when its one hundred production workers would be on vacation. When the workers returned, and found the workplace totally changed with new light fixtures, glistening new metallic conveyors, and intimidating workstations wrapped in Christmas ribbons, they stood in shock horror.

Management unaware of their discomfiture smiled broadly and exhorted, “Happy New Year!” Still not getting it, the chorus added, “Surprise, a belated Christmas present!”

The workers were beyond being dismayed. They were disoriented, confused, with the confusion unable to connect to feelings. Adding to the incongruity, piping hot food was wafting with steam on decorated tables, while the climate descended from cold to hostile.

“How could you do this to us?” somebody cried. “How could you?”

Now, it was management’s turn to register disorientation.

A manager shouted, “What did you say?” There was now anger in his voice.

The worker shrugged his shoulders, and said, almost in a whisper, “Nothing. It was nothing.”

“Then I suggest we get to work.” Anger had tabled all the prepared ceremony. “We have a major deadline to meet by the end of the week.” Then as if an afterthought, “There’s food if you want it.”

Quickly, the managers disappeared from the scene, while a quiet hiss buzzed through the group like swarming insects. Some nibbled at the food, others wandered about attempting to get their bearings. The New Year was not starting well.

The week ended and the deadline wasn’t met. Management assumed that it was a fluke, that it was simply the workers being unfamiliar with the new control panels, operating systems, and all the buttons. Few were computer literate. Management resisted panic, instead displayed executive patience.

But the following week, production volume was not only low, but also below the normative standard of the old conveyor system. This was repeated over the next several weeks with management becoming increasingly frustrated. The company had never lost money. “This calls for draconian measures,” stated the production manager angrily, “I’m fed up with them.”

One of the managers said, “You’ve got to be kidding, right? This place has worked like a charm until we got the new system, or have you forgotten that? When was the last time we failed to meet a deadline? I’ll tell you when, never!”

The senior partner in the firm declared, “I think we need help.” The other managers nodded in agreement.

When the consultant was contacted, the first question he asked the management team was this: “Did anyone ask any of the workers what was wrong?” No one had.

The consultant insisted, “I’m not talking about action, accusations, or intimidation. I’m talking about simply asking the workers how they feel about the new system. Enough time has passed for them to be able to qualify their passive behavior. There is absolutely no point in going to them with mea culpas. It is time for dialogue.”

“Well, we know that,” someone offered, “they don’t like the new system; they don’t like us, and we’re losing money hand over fist.” Then as if he needed justification for his frustration, added, “Anything new they reject; they are fixed in their old ways.” Nods of agreement.

“If you believe that, you are worse off than I thought. It is not the newness of the system. It is the surprise. It is the sense of betrayal, the sense of being taken for granted, of not being included in a monumental decision. It drives home the point that they don’t count for anything more than bodies doing a job.”

“We don’t feel that way,” someone named Tim said, “I’ve worked with these people for more than ten years and I know them like family.”

“Then start treating them like they count.”

Silence.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate, the consultant continued, “I sense that you knew they would react negatively to the new system. So, why didn’t you consult them?”

“You want to know the truth?” someone confessed, “We could see greater profits and bigger bonuses. They weren’t a blip on our radar. ”

“As damning as that is, I don’t think that is the whole picture.”

Again silence. Everybody waited.

“I think you were angry because they didn’t appreciate the risks or the investment you were making. What do you say to that?”

“I was a little miffed,” admitted one, “but I felt a tinge of guilt, too. I’ve worked with these guys and gals almost as long as Tim, who has been here forever.” Everyone laughed with relief. “You used the word betrayal before. I think I felt a bit of that, too.”

“Tell them!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I’m not. They can see that this new system used to capacity will eliminate jobs, jobs they now have. But it could just as likely create jobs as the company expands. Training programs would need to be launched. Workers love to learn new things once they get past their insecurities.

"Instead of seeing the company shrinking, sell them on its expansion. Make them a partner to new opportunities. That is, after all, why you made this investment, right?”

Then the senior partner chimed in. “That is true. It has happened to bottlers across the country. I think we took the wrong message from the salesman’s pitch,” then he paused, “and now our silence is giving the wrong message to our people.”

At this point, there was no longer a need for the consultant.

The talk grew animated. Worker-manager teams would be formed to look at ways to get through the bottleneck. A management-employee team would be created to explain anticipated changes.

The senior partner told the workers it was not management’s intent to blindside them, but it had to admit that it had. There were time constraints in making the decision, but that did not justify bypassing the workers. The senior partner took responsibility for the faux pas and promised it would not happen again. And it didn’t.

The consultant organized a joint worker-management team to discuss new training programs to improve communications, feedback, conflict management, and decision-making. That was in the 1990s. The company has grown. It is now more than twice its original size, and continues to grow.

ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

If there is one thing OD interventions reveal, it is the human nature of the human group. Sometimes the problem is as simple as how the office space and plant facilities are laid out; sometimes it is the territorial imperatives that the design allows elite groups to exercise; sometimes it is only a matter of simple senility that charts an organization’s destiny.

Organizations die if they don’t constantly reinvent themselves. Nor is it only individuals who play fast and easy with existence. Organizations have been known to do so as well. We are often shocked when brilliant people do stupid things. Brilliant companies do stupid things everyday, especially when they forget “design is destiny.” These are three easy words that roll off the tongue, but how profound when all passion has been spent.

If there is a common theme to these five accounts, it is events didn’t make or break these organizations. It was the misreading of events and inappropriate reaction to them that caused the unraveling. In any case, it is the reason for sharing it with you.

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This is one in a continuing series of articles by Dr. Fisher on "When the Leadership Lost the Tribe." See his books for more details.