WHY WORK HAS GOTTEN A BAD NAME! MANAGEMENT LOST IN THE SHUFFLE!

WHY WORK HAS GOTTEN A BAD NAME

MANAGEMENT LOST IN THE SHUFFLE

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

© April 18, 2014

 

REFERENCE:

The response across the globe to these little vignettes from my proofreading and editing of “Six Silent Killers” finds me supplying another. 

You may be in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, the Ukraine, South Korea, China, or Taiwan for you are part of this vast audience and constant viewers of this blog.

Each workplace has its own unique culture, which either works for workers and managers, or it doesn’t.  This vignette may give some insight into the problem as discussed in this book.  For within each of these nations, the workplace has an indigenous culture that reflects its history, industry and its workers and managers.  Chances are it is experiencing contretemps especially in these difficult times.  We may speak many different languages, live in various national cultures, but the culture, wherever we are on the globe, is most likely to be unique to that particular workplace.

 

EFFECTIVENESS IS A MATTER OF CULTURE

Culture, as defined here, is the workplace climate and the shared values, beliefs, and expectations of workers and managers.

Culture is a recent managerial obsession, triggered by its emphasis by the human resources department (HRD). Over the past several years, HRD has attempted, unsuccessfully, to untangle the sins of organization with cultural manipulation.

Senior management can now mouth the words, such as climate and culture, without understanding their meaning. What is not communicated is that cultural bias dictates behavior. Unless the focus is on cultural bias, all cultural modification will be essentially cosmetic and ineffective.

Established rites, rituals, and rhetoric dominate the will of the organization, with the informal group controlling the ebb and flow of how these established practices are working. Inherent in this informal structure is the current mindset, not only toward these cultural biases but toward the organization as well.

The combination of this mindset and these biases dictates behavior—what is tolerated, expected, believed, valued, and experienced. There can be no discernible change without first understanding and then dealing with this reality. It is natural for the organization to resist change no matter how good the change might be—logic does not operate at this level—because it prefers to sustain its known value and belief system. To ignore this fact and to go plunging ahead without first dealing with it is to spell inevitable doom for the change process.

The formal organization is essential to generate an appropriate operating philosophy, consistent policy with a mission focus, and a fair-minded value system for growth and development. It creates the rites of passage, the rituals of operation, and the message of the mission. Once this is done, the informal group reacts to these directives and interprets them in its own best interest.

The interpretation and reaction to this set of interventions determine the workplace culture. It is this relationship between senior management and operating personnel that spells success or failure in any organization. Culture is always created from above and interpreted from below. If both are on the same page, everything runs as smooth as silk; if not, operations bound out of control.

Management exerts little real influence on informal behavior once the cultural variables are defined and assimilated. Should they be changed, workers must be involved in the process for verification, acceptance, and support.

What we have seen in recent times is that circumstances have forced organizations to change quickly to stay afloat. Expediency became policy. Panic was reflected in a series of faddish activities—from “T” (sensitivity) groups to Quality Control Circles (QCCs), from team building to sensitivity training, from Muzak to ergonomic work centers, from worker-wellness programs to company-sponsored beer blasts on Friday night, from Managing by Objectives (MBOs) to Total Quality Management (TQM), from 40-hour work weeks to flex time, from company daycare centers to employee assistance programs (EAPs), from shared management to symbolic management… and on it goes!

There is nothing wrong with any of these interventions except for one thing—they were done to the workers and for the workers with little or no input from the workers before the fact. They were gratuitous interventions—like giving candy to a baby not to cry—which made workers feel even less in charge than ever before. Workers didn’t show their resentment up front. They went underground and surfaced with the “six silent killers”: passive aggression, passive defensive, passive responsive, approach avoidance, obsessive compulsive and malicious obedience behaviors.

These interventions were tactics, not grand strategies. They demonstrated the panic of buying time.

Work has changed. Workers have changed. Real work has gotten a bad name or gotten lost in the shuffle. Value change, which is essential to behavioral change, is served poorly by cosmetic changes. Fad merchants know their clients and their impatience. The quickest way for them to lose a sale is to tell senior management that it has to change first, which means the structure and function of work,  before anything else changes. Management, consequently, has gotten what it expected and wanted—quick fixes and non-involvement.

Management remains obsessed with the idea of culture while becoming compulsive in its actions toward it. There is no point in assessing blame. No one could have predicted the incredible changes or the demands of these changes in the workplace in so short a time. Management, in its naiveté, thought that whatever it did would get it to where it wanted to go. That has proven false.  Preoccupation with fads has found the workplace going from the Culture of Comfort (management dependent) to the Culture of Complacency (counter dependent on the company or organization), at the expense of the Culture of Contribution (interdependence between workers and managers).

HOW COMMON IS THE UNCOMMON! HOW EASY IT IS TO FALL OFF OUR STOOL, OR OUR MOUNTAIN!

HOW COMMON IS THE UNCOMMON!

HOW EASY IT IS TO FALL OFF OUR STOOL, OR OUR MOUNTAIN!

 

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

© April 17, 2014

 

REFERENCE:

As many readers know, I am in the proofreading and editing stage in preparing my published works for TATE Publishing to re-release them in Second Editions. 

The segment shown here is taken from “Six Silent Killers” and deals specifically with passive defensive reckless abandon behavior.  It is shown here because ordinary people, good people, can get caught up in extraordinary circumstances, losing their moorings, and as they say, become history. 

Jim and Tammy Bakker represent such an example.  This is not presented to judge, but to remind the reader we are all vulnerable to deception and no deception more readily than self-deception.

 

JIM BAKKER’S LADDER IS GONE!

Irish poet William Butler Yeats writes, “Now that my ladder is gone, I must lie down where all ladders start, in the fowl rag and-bone shop of the heart.”

Some of us scale to great heights, only to avoid ever running into ourselves. But, there is a time when crashing reality cuts through the fog for many others, and they come face-to-face with their own humble selves as naked, exposed, and truly wretched beings.

It is a wonder we don’t have more compassion in our hearts for those that fall because everyone falls at some time in their lives, be it off a footstool or a mountain. Jim and Tammy Bakker were designed for falling off a footstool, but somehow found themselves falling off a mountain.

How such totally ordinary people could rise so high and fall so far is a telling index of our times. Their “Praise the Lord” (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to its commonplace familiarity and genius for understanding what may broadly be called the spiritual or emotional life of individuals as ordinary people.

Jim Bakker possessed something that intellectuals scorn as “common con,” when it is actually an exceptional sensitivity to the heart of the lonely and lost, which includes most of us. He possessed antennae to troubled souls, something perfectly ordinary, empirical, and quasi-aesthetic. This gift entails the capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing events—too many, too swift, and too intermingled to be caught and pinned down — as elements in a single pattern where simple prayer is the pragmatic answer.

Denomination, dogma, liturgical scripture, and even the Bible were not the common focus. Indeed, Bakker brought followers into his flock beyond Christianity. To be able to do this well seems to be a gift akin to that of the creative artist.

He gave the impression that he was directly acquainted with his listeners’ pain and texture of their lives, not just the sense of the chaotic flow of experience, but a highly developed discrimination of what matters most to the wounded. Above all this, he had an actual sense of what fits with what, what springs from what, what leads to what, how things seem to vary to different people, what the effect of such experience upon them may be, and what the result is likely to be in a concrete situation of the interplay of human beings and impersonal forces.

No, this was not the raving of a “common con.” Bakker demonstrated a sense for what is qualitative rather than quantitative, for what is specific rather than general in the lives of his listeners. Bakker epitomized a direct acquaintance with pain, distinct from a capacity for description of pain or calculation of what the pain might mean to a Freudian psychoanalyst or a social engineer. He presented no credentials as an expert. Nor did he attempt to present himself as beyond being flawed. He possessed what is sometimes called “natural wisdom” as opposed to scholarly erudition. What he possessed was an imaginative understanding, insight, perceptiveness, and intuition into the matter of ordinary lives of ordinary people.

With this practical wisdom, he demonstrated a capacity for synthesis rather than analysis. His troubles began when he tried to analyze his own success and, with it, his audience’s tolerance for his family’s flaunted, blatant, and escalating eccentricities.

Somewhere between the Bakker home and the homes of millions of Americans, Tammy’s mascara and war paint and Jim’s cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people in common with most, the Bakkers got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite for more glorious projects, which required more and more television dollars. Long before Jim’s sex escapade and scandal surfaced, the PTL club had become “show biz,” departing from its practical message and spiritual intent.

The PTL club became entertainment with a capital “E.” There is no way to substitute the perceptual gift, the capacity for taking in the total pattern of the human condition, or an understanding of the way in which things hang together—a talent which Bakker possessed, then neglected—and expect to stay on course.

When Bakker started listening to advisers with uncanny gifts for analysis and stopped using his natural wisdom, he embraced alien if not hostile forces. When that happened, the Bakkers commenced to behave like superstars with other people’s money. The mansions, the Mercedes, the elaborate vacations, Tammy’s shopping sprees—all became part of a growing scam that led to Jim’s dalliance with Jessica Hahn, or to reckless abandon passive defensiveness— “you can’t touch me!” When that came to dominate their lives and lifestyle, when that happened, the Bakkers became a “born again disaster.”

Jim Bakker forgot that his rise had little to do with him personally and everything to do with his acquaintance with the ghosts that haunt us all. Failure came from his resistance to what worked best for him and from ignoring it in favor of systematic verification—polls and ratings—and then becoming enamored of and overwhelmed by his own genius.

What happened to Jim Bakker could happen to anyone who climbs off the stool and starts trekking up the mountain oblivious to its obstacles if not its danger.

 

EXCHANGES BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND A READER ABOUT THE NOVEL: A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

EXCHANGES BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND A READER ABOUT THE NOVEL:

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

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

© April 16, 2014

 

READER:

I am reading A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  Many distractions, in and out all day, finally warm enough for a sweatshirt instead of three layers, so gardening possible.  Found a hawk of some kind dead under the triple white pines, such beautifully mottled feathers, head and beak in good shape.  I won’t touch it because it is protected.  I am at a loss as to how it came to die there.  Appears no stress like from a battle, so curious the cause of its demise.

My review of GREEN ISLAND will go something like this: “For a history and biography reader, just having finished the last volume of Game of Thrones, taking up James Fisher’s A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA provided a riveting experience.  It felt like tumbling down a mountain never knowing where the course was taking you, surely not straight down!  It is a book to be savored not simply read.  It fits no form, coursing akin to pinball.  You are whacked quite suddenly just when you think a course has been set.  For a thought provoking read, I would recommend this revolving door, a book casting you repeatedly beyond an unsettled comfort zone.  A book that the mind returns to repeatedly.  I get the BLACK SEA.”

AUTHOR JAMES RAYMOND FISHER:

Yes, I believe you do “get it.” 

I struggled for forty years to tell the story as it unfolded in my mind.  It started out as therapy in 1969 and progressed as I unraveled my self-deception.  Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg (Florida) became an oasis that I frequented nearly every day.  It is where I was introduced to Krishnamurti, and his personal brand of mysticism, and Alan W. Watts, and his outrageous blending of Eastern and Western philosophy. 

Religion had failed me or I had failed religion.  I wasn’t sure.  So, I read on Catholicism, Protestantism, Islamism, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.  I found Buddhism the sanest of the lot.  Books were medicine for my sick soul, a soul that failed to extricate itself from South Africa although I was no longer in South Africa.

It is perceptive of you to sense South Africa was like riding a roller coaster, or falling off a mountain, only to reappear on another before you could sense the danger.  It was like that for me. 

The people of the story are real, as real as life itself.  Sad as one reader found its lack of redeeming characters, they all vibrate with sine qua non exuberance.  Alas, there are no really good or bad people, only people largely on automatic pilot doing the best they can to survive until the next day.

There is the Bantu Daniel, who is Devlin’s driver; Josiah, his Bantu gardener and “friend”; Asabi, the Devlins' Bantu maid; Gabriel, the Devlins' Bantu chef and house manager; the outrageously honest and erotic Afrikaner Nina, who was Devlin’s teacher, muse and god, as she was able to penetrate the tinsel façade of his propriety American society and culture. 

There was the Matthews brothers, managing director and regional director of Polychem’s subsidiary, Devlin’s employer.  There was also Frieda, the transplanted German, who was the MD'a secretary, as well as the predatory and sensuous Heather Matthews, the managing director’s wife, while Birgitte Matthews, the regional director’s wife, represented the British leisure class with a seductive fragility that Devlin found intoxicating. 

This and assorted others, British, Bantu and Afrikaner, along with a few Americans provided the metaphorical montage of a time and place and space that vibrated with uncontrolled excess, a green island in a black sea.  It was a play within a play, as the world was having a nervous breakdown at the precise moment that Devlin and South Africa were having theirs.

GREEN ISLAND also profiles the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa during apartheid with something akin to the political schizophrenia that Pope Pius XII showed toward Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Seamus “Dirk” Devlin is in the center of this vortex, and it is through his nightmarish narrative that the story of deceit, betrayal, and intrigue unfolds.  And yes, the Devlin's narrative is constantly interrupted by his guilty reflections, dreams, introspections, and assessments, many of which suggest his crumbling spirit as he rides his erotic dance into denouement. 

This erotic dance is meant as a metaphor to South Africa in 1968, with nothing spared to show it as if on camera.

Devlin’s constant spiritual companions are such travelers as Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, and Jesus.   Devlin who doesn’t smoke or drink, and never has, nor does he swear, while expletives are the common language of this contentious place and time. 

If I were to describe the novel in one word, it would be “life.”

THE READER RESPONDS:

I am at a loss as to how to identify your audience.  My sense is that your readers are not honest with themselves, and that their shock value is phony or simply, they choose to be blind.  “Life,” as you put it, IS what we are here for.   My hope is for the day the book is in print, the Kindle market, at present, is narrow.  I must confess I prefer a book in my hand.

How this can come about I don’t know; pray that the book takes off on Kindle, and makes its own market. 

Another snow and blow day here in the middle of April, ugh!  It puts one into pondering what is spring? 

We have lived a long and interesting time, my friend.  That in itself is an accomplishment.  Be well.

 

AUTHOR FISHER RESPONDS:

I’ve just finished Robert Goddard’s “Set in Stone.”  I never started to read novels seriously until I came back from South Africa, first reading the classics and then more popular novelist, but always in an attempt to get their sense of telling a story without inhibition. 

At the University of Iowa, I sandwiched “understanding the American novel,” “understanding American poetry,” “a course on Shakespeare,” between my studies in physics and chemistry, calculus and statistics, as I have always wanted to be a writer.  Largely, in courses with English or humanities majors or graduate students, I only wanted to get a sense of context not content from these detours.  Substance and style were guarded zealously as my proprietary product. 

People compliment me when they say “you don’t write like anyone else I know.”  I don’t want to write like anyone else because no one else has lived my life, or experienced what I have, but they might be able to identify with some aspects of that journey.

The reason I like Goddard is because he writes of loss, always loss, as do I.  Someone wrote me today and said, “You’re one of the very few in the world I know, still alive, that speaks truth out of habit.” 

It is a moving compliment.  I hope the reader gets this sense from A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, as there are no detours here.

Be always well yourself.

Jim

A WRITER RESPONDS TO READERS' COMMENTS: RE: A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

 

A WRITER RESPONDS TO READERS’ COMMENTS

RE:

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

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

© April 13, 2014

 

 

REFERENCE:

This is a note to my editor at Amazon.com’s Kindle.  I will be eternally grateful to this man for publishing this novel that I wanted to be in print before I died.  It is a story no one else could tell because no one else experienced it as I did.  He took a chance, and it is an e-book today, a book that is blatant, in-your-face and which it is likely to upset and offend, and, indeed, cause the reader to defend every value and belief with which he or she harbors with such programmed resolution.   I predict one day it will be a classic not unlike Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” because it frames a condition that has led to the aftermath of the troubles in South Africa today.

 

Chris,

Someone wrote to me and asked how I felt about my reviews (4) of A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA on Amazon.com. 

Frankly, it gave me pause.  Surprise comes quickly to mind. 

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is a story I experienced and is told as truthfully and as completely and as honestly as I have the capability of telling a story, and I am quite satisfied that I have honored that commitment. 

South Africa was a wrenching experience and changed my life, and I think I convey that well.

It is the story of a man of certain capabilities that was spinning into a vortex of self-deceit and self-destruction as well as self-loathing finding all the stanchions that he thought supported his crumbling intellect fading away.  I think I convey that stream of consciousness extremely well. 

South Africa in 1968 -- for the British contingent of which I was a part -- was in sexual hedonistic hell that Hugh Hefner could never fathom much less fantasize about because it was totally a defensive mechanism of fear, fear that a native servant might lop off one's head in sleep at any time on any night, fear that there was no tomorrow.

I suppose you had to experience it to sense it and then you had to have the novelistic flair for telling the riddle and then the talent to wrap the mystery inside an enigma, which it was.  Perhaps I am a failure in that regard. 

That said I confess to being a fan of my writing, of all of my published works, for errors and malapropos notwithstanding, the substance of the story is my guide and not the style. Notice style is the charge and substance is used to compare with other works, works with which I am not familiar in most cases.

The most salient comment is that there are no redeeming characters, no heroes only demons and villains.  There were no heroes in South Africa in 1968, none!  Perhaps it is one of the reasons South Africa limps along today in 2014.  You cannot deprive the majority of any voice for 300 years and expect that contingent to take hold in a generation once in power. 

Thank you for publishing this novel.  I would hope some Bantu readers in South Africa would pick it up.  As you see, it is dedicated to them.

Jim

EXCERPT FROM THE PAGES OF "SIX SILENT KILLERS" or WHY MANAGEMENT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG!

EXCERPT FROM THE PAGES OF “SIX SILENT KILLERS,”

OR WHY MANAGEMENT ALWAYS GETS IT WRONG!

 

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

© April 11, 2014

REFERENCE:

I am in the process of editing “Six Silent Killers” for TATE Publishing, which is putting it out as a Second Edition.  This excerpt deals with the inability of management, in all pursuits, academic and religious institutions as well as industry and government to think differently on purpose.

 

The ambiguity of empowerment is well known but rarely gets much attention. This is not totally the fault of management. Well meaning executives have turned to social engineers for help. What they too often have received is psychobabble. The 30-something crowd has found its own answer. Currently, Deepak Chopra, a psychiatrist, is very popular with them. His entertaining message has an Eastern flavor and relates to heightened consciousness.

“The new intelligence is a female intelligence,” he insists, “which is nonlinear, holistic, intuitive, creative, nourishing, and wise. It is non-predatory, not about winning or losing, and needs to be embraced in society by both men and women. Half the U.S. Congress has prostate cancer,” he advises, “because they express their male energy only through predatory intelligence.”

Imagine a worker going into his boss with that kind of message. What Chopra is saying has merit. In an isolated context, however, it is certainly open to misinterpretation. Werner Erhard and his Erhard Seminar Training (EST) filled a similar need in the 1970s.  Anxious people were looking for neat little boxes with answers.  EST proved it was a need impossible to fill.  It remains to be seen how Chopra will fare. It isn’t wise to get caught up too quickly in the latest craze. Human Resources has too often taken half-baked ideas and sold them to management as finished goods. These fads, once disseminated, go through a phasic chain from excitement, euphoria, acclaim, critical review, confusion, and disappointment to termination. Cultural change is not witchcraft.

Management is receptive to new ideas as long as it doesn’t involve too much of its time. Unfortunately, if management doesn’t have a substantial role in the process, it is a waste of everybody’s time. There are no miracles or magic formulas—only hard work and persistent effort.

Thanks largely to Isaac Newton, management sees the organization as a fine-tuned clock, as a mechanistic mind, breaking everything down and then applying experts to take care of the parts. This is a masculine mind, a linear mind, a mind that can never get enough detail. Its obsession with data predisposes it to distort reality—if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist! More energy can be spent in dysfunctional quantification than is appropriate.

Chopra calls this “predatory intelligence,” while writer Alan Valentine advises, “Whatever else may be made mechanical, human values cannot.”

So that is the intrigue. Executives are known for their no-nonsense quantitative thinking, for their ability to “stay in the kitchen and take the heat,” as President Harry S. Truman put it, while being disinclined to invest much time in what they see as frivolous qualitative thinking. “Give me the facts and get on with it,” they cry, the implication being “my powers of reasoning will do the rest.” This makes them vulnerable to the tyranny of judgment. They are, much like their traditional workers, more inclined to be reactive than proactive, finding it easier to criticize ideas than create them. The pattern of their thinking is usually confined to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which represents only a fraction of their creative potential. This inductive thinking is little more than a shorthand summary of past experience.

Consequently, they are completely unprepared when an adviser comes in with an off-the-wall idea, an idea which might just be what the doctor ordered. Instead, they buy into a rehash of dated schemes: incentive plans, pay-for-performance, empowerment, or project skills training. Experience is fossilized into a roster of the familiar.

Executives seldom escape cultural biases any better than anyone else. Faced with a problem, our programming commits us to judge, categorize, analyze, and dissect the problem to death. Few of us are inclined to explore it qualitatively.

This involves considering several possibilities, generating a series of options, outlandish and otherwise, and then arriving at some experimental methodology to test its relevance to our requirements.  We prefer to test an individual’s thinking ability, and place his I.Q. score in a neat little box, rather than to design a climate in which he might increase his thinking ability.

Most CEOs of American Fortune 500 companies were educated in finance, science, or engineering. With rare exception does a CEO of a major corporation have a liberal arts background, which might be the best education of all for the twenty-first century executive? Their predominant educational programming is on what things can do rather than what they can make people be and become.

The arrogance of this education is in the belief that if you have knowledge, then action is easy. Well, it isn’t. Being susceptible to thinking in boxes is painfully illustrated in such programs as Quality of Work (QW), Quality of Work Life (QWL), Quality of Management (QM), etc.  With so much time, energy, and expense spent on packaging, few resources remain for action.

Take the venerated Malcolm Baldrige Award for Quality.

Florida Power Corporation pulled out all stops to attain this award, only to have the award become an all-consuming end in itself, not the intended means to a cultural change. It couldn’t have been otherwise because the award was a test instrument, a judgmental device to measure quality, not a creative design to establish a quality culture. The same thing happens in education. A problem is identified, and a new curriculum is generated; another problem spins off this curriculum, with still another curriculum generated, ad infinitum. So, each of the initiatives listed above, with few exceptions, has sputtered to death, only to be replaced by yet another. These imperfect practices indicate our preference for interpretation to exploration, analysis to design.

There isn’t a CEO in industry or commerce, an administrator in education or government, or command personnel in the military, who doesn’t have the social termites of the Six Silent Killers eating away at the infrastructure of the operation.  Yet, each of these organizations can produce an impressive Power Point documentation to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to change. Yet seldom is there a perceptible departure from the familiar.  Such a departure could be career-limiting.

There seems a passion for information, but an aversion to ideas; a need to discover, but a reluctance to create.  We are more apt to describe a problem than take action on it.  Cleverness has a higher value than wisdom. The clever person is often an adept problem-solver; the wise person more apt to be an insightful problem preventer. 

Cleverness is like a sharp focus lens blind to what is not within the parameters of the scope.  Wisdom is like a wide-angle lens. We seem more comfortable with the extroverted thinker than with the person who displays introspection. Yet, in the end, advises Edward de Bono, “It is the inner world which makes life worth living. The real purpose of the outer world is to keep us alive and to feed the dreams (visions and objectives) of the inner world.”

Unfortunately, the only workers who respond to the mechanistic by-the-numbers agenda are the fast-disappearing blue-collar workers. They were regimentally conditioned to take orders. We can no longer afford this type of worker. Society in general and the workplace in particular require mature adult workers, not conforming children who become uninspired, unimaginative, complying adults. The Hawthorne Effect is a benchmark of note.

In that famous study at Western Electric (1927–32) in Chicago, no matter how conditions were altered, workers responded positively.  Professional workers are less responsive to manipulation.  Since manipulation still goes on, professionals play their own sly game of “what you see is not necessarily what you get.”

In essence, the dichotomy between professional and blue-collar workers is as real as that between the common good and personhood.  Patriotism is obvious among rank and file workers, less so among professionals. Management, despite this, insists on interpreting worker motivation along familiar lines as though there were a homogeneous workforce. It frequently magnifies its effectiveness by saluting the achievements of blue-collar workers, seeing them as soldiers of enterprise while overlooking the underachievement of professionals.  Perhaps there is a disconnect because professionals view themselves through the lens of command and control, and not obedience.

VIABILITY, THE NEW ESSENCE OF NATURE

 

William L. Livingston, IV, author of THE NEW PLAGUE

© May 3, 2014.

REFERENCE:

This is written by a friend, an author of several books and scores of patents, a person who has engineered nuclear power facilities as far away as South Korea.  It is written by a person who has paid attention, literally as well as figuratively, reducing the lessons of life to their simplest modalities.  Occam's razor comes to mind when you think of content in the context of its viable essence.  My respect for him is fundamental because he has paid his dues with rigorous study, unending patience, using the quality of his mind to probe the mysteries of nature to unearth her viability.  I share this with readers across the globe as an introduction to him with this synopsis.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.    

 Overview and Synopsis

This journal is about viability – the essence of life, of existence, of being. It is a study of viability’s material fundamentals, not of its poetry. It measures our competency to endure as an independent creature in the world as it is.

Nature took some two billion years to create and nurture viability here on earth and two billion years more of evolution to produce species Homo sapiens. It might seem strange that Mother Nature, after going to all that time and trouble to initialize viability, is also the instrument of its extinction. We wonder aloud at Nature’s scheme of “dust-to-dust.” Why does she bother? Aren’t we just a skit in her “Interstellar Follies?”

Since Nature relentlessly eats away at our viability margin, self evident, viability will not stay put by itself. Everyone “ages.”  Nothing material in the universe escapes its appointment with extinction. Nothing.

Neglecting to maintain your vigor and verve is a choice to let them decay, self-evident. If your viability margin is not being elevated against the forces of rot, down it goes. In the end, understanding the zest of life as Nature would have it is no more complicated than that.

The quest described in this journal seeks to learn the limits of building up viability margin to the level which Nature will allow. Sustaining viability margin is in everybody’s interest and it is only sustained by increasing it.

While Nature will never go for perpetual viability, we seek to discover just how far she will tolerate our shenanigans to reach toward eternity before taking vengeance. This tightrope act makes it a dangerous pursuit, for sure.

The reason for measuring her tolerance is that a practical method for increasing viability margin exists. It works through increasing productivity so that there are always extra resources available to replenish what the processes of existence consume.

The approach that works for productivity improvement is incontrovertible and well proven in application. Accordingly, it can be demonstrated quickly in whole or in part, anywhere. When the method is put in service, benefits begin to flow immediately. Nature is like that.

So, isn’t this matchup of need-to-fix a nobrainer? What’s the fuss about? Why does anyone need a trip report?

Yes, it is self-evident truth that viability margin is of paramount importance to the survival of our species. Yes, it is demonstrably true that a practical method exists which will increase productivity – the currency by which viability’s pantry is kept stocked.

The marriage is happy. It is the ideal situation of challenge met by response, of need by remedy. Why know anything else? 

Well, when you go to apply the “fix,” incontrovertible, to the need, self-evident, surprise‼ You are bushwhacked. You collide head on with what we characterize as the Dark Barrier and stopped dead in your tracks.  

This “wall” you hit in ambush has the same properties as the dark matter and the dark energy of astrophysics. The Dark Barrier to increasing productivity is everywhere, invisible, material and measurable. Like gravity, there’s nothing you can do about it. The Dark Barrier? It consists of a dense, teaming network of lies.

All the stuff in the journal is tied to the laws of Nature. The fundamental need for sustaining viability margin is tied to the laws of thermodynamics. The basic process by which that need is fulfilled is tied to natural law, from whence it inherits Nature’s incontrovertibility.

Because the Dark Barrier sits directly between our viability problem and its solution, it must be addressed before the work of increasing productivity can begin. Interestingly, the Dark Barrier issue is handled by the same technological platform used to advance productivity. It is derived and explained in the journal.

The core matter at stake is truth. The need for viability margin is a truth beyond dispute. The need for truth to increase productivity is also beyond debate. The Dark Barrier effectively prevents the truth of the “fix” from reaching the truth of the need. The fiction that does come through is useless in building productivity. For real problems, fiction does not work.

 

While the composition of the Dark Barrier is certain, determining its origin and span of influence is a work in process. Since it’s ubiquitous, anyone can detect and measure the Dark Barrier in action. Everyone collides with the Dark Barrier several times a day at the same time everyone is an accomplice to its maintenance.

You must prepare yourself to look behind the great blind spot that conceals the Dark Barrier from your awareness. Implanted by genetic inheritance and social conditioning, the blind spot for deception is notoriously difficult to lift. Once you do, nothing will look the same. Think Toto pulling the curtain hiding the arm-waving wizard of Oz. Oh my!

There are about fifty different words associated with the various forms that lying can take. For the sake of keeping things simple, we lump the bill of particulars into the word fiction - defined as a confection of the imagination purported to represent reality. Think The Matrix.

The fiction composing the Dark Barrier is a product of willing collaboration. Lying is habitual across every level of society and in every transaction between levels. Once a lie is sent into the communications network, like gossip, it goes viral and irreversible. The barrier of lies prevents the truth of the fix from reaching the truth of the need.

Why do we sabotage our own viability upkeep? Why do we unleash a cavalcade of constraints, obstacles and barricades to our own best interests – by choice?

There is a credible theory why we punch these holes in our own boats. Deception was standard humanoid practice before the dugout canoe was invented. Since Nature can’t lie to us, other factors masquerading as truth are deceiving us. It is self-deception on the pay-as-you-go plan.

The biology premise authored and documented by Trivers (The Folly of Fools) reasons from the fact that civilization has evolved in recent centuries very much faster than natural selection evolves genes. The genetic instructions Nature provided to our hunter-gatherer ancestors have been provided intact to us. Far exceeding their sell-by date, we are saddled with these genes that encourage us to make viability choices inappropriate to 21^st century reality.

Unlike any other species caught in the same bind, we have an option.  We can use our intelligence to trump the inappropriate instincts of our biology. Or not.

You can recognize the significant, free-choice forks-in-the-road where truth and fiction part company. At those forks, you know that if intelligence loses out to biology, the cause is lost. From there, you can forecast trajectories of consequences with total confidence.

Assimilating the knowledge in this journal, knowing the mechanisms of action driving your experience, is personally beneficial in several ways. You can recognize and avoid situations that reduce your viability margin. You can add to your viability cushion in a straight-forward manner.

When you engineer a choice for truth, you can get to work raising productivity in ambush-free conditions. The three domains of viability – need, remedy and Dark-Barrier management – comprise the scope of the journal.

WHY I WRITE!

WHY I WRITE

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

© March 28, 2014

 

REFLECTIONS THIS MORNING:

To all of you who read my blog, and you are on every continent of the globe, my general comment to your question of why do I write is that I write because I can.  As long as my mind works, I will continue to write. 

I don't know how my work will be received.  Notice I say in the future tense.  I’m living in the past imperfect and will not be around for the future perfect tense. 

Ergo, the reader decides in this present past imperfect world what value my words and ideas have to him or her. 

If my writing doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you.  Go on to something else. 

I'm hearing from some that my books are difficult.  They are not meant to be difficult. 

True, some might be less taxing if the reader knows a little Freudian psychology.  But I sense that is not the problem.  The problem is people don’t want to get under the hood of their existence and look at how dirty and poorly maintained is that engine.  I  have the hood up and am always looking underneath at its corruption, wondering how it manages to turn over much less run.

Yes, I am something of a fan of Goethe, Camus, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Isaiah Berlin, Emerson, and others, but my ideas come out of my own life and experience, and are the foundation of my works.

I don’t like injustice, and I know a lot about it because I was reared Irish Roman Catholic and born on the wrong side of the tracks.  I am "shanty Irish" as opposed to "lace curtain" Irish.  By the accident of my circumstances, I rose rather high in a couple of Fortune 500 companies, but never joined the club.

One of the things I’ve never quite understood is this:

Why do successful people still have to bully people who have no power? 

When they do it in my presence, they have an enemy for life.  I identify with people who have no power.  They are my people.  I come from them.  Yes, I've had the titles and the perks and the privileges, but I have never left my roots.  

I have tried to establish with my works the foundation that leads to thought.  I have never been interested in creating "answer books."  I have no answers.  I am not you and am not privy to your life or experience, but you are.  I can tell you what I've learned and perhaps it may resonate with you and your experience.

Stated another way, I am not in the business of winning friends and influencing people, but again, hopefully, getting others to think in terms of their own experience and lights. 

Today there is a disturbing column in the newspaper on the incredible poor return to many college graduates on their investment in higher education.  The writer looks at the bottom feeders not the cream eaters at the top. 

The writer suggests it would have been better for these people to put their money in the bank or stock market, at least then the “Return on Investment” would be somewhat positive, as the evidence he cites indicates negative ROIs.

We have made two major wrong turns when it comes to a college education:

We have insisted, as a society, that everyone should be a college graduate.

We have made a college education the equivalent of vocational job training which has nothing to do with enlightenment other than as skills training for the Information Age.

One hundred years ago, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, public education was made compulsory so that workers could read and write and do simple mathematical calculations.  It had nothing to do with cultural enhancement. 

It is clear that we have never escaped this mechanistic model of society much as we protest, much as we shout about the best and the brightest, and so on.  Consequently, you can be making $1 billion a year and you’d rather see an NFL game than go to the opera. 

My writing makes no reader comfortable with this disposition.  I do this by profiling the contributing elements to the coarseness of our society.  By our cultural programming, we have developed a vicarious appetite for violence in all its imaginable forms. 

We love murder and mayhem in our novels, television and films, and the gorier the better, and then we wonder why we are the way we are.  Even our comedic novels, television and films follow the same format, mechanistic. 

My writing attempts to be transitional and transformational.  Whether it succeeds or not, only the reader can decide.  Take my recent novel.

GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is not about murder and mayhem, but about life and sex and religion and work and betrayal, all that business under that hood I mentioned earlier that isn’t mechanistic but intuitive and counterintuitive, where slimy reality lives and the human spirit breaks down.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Devlin tests that theory in Green Island with his personal and professional life on a collision course, showing every sign that he is able to function at a high level, only to have the denouement of the story suggest otherwise.  If you read it, let me know what you think. 

Incidentally, Fitzgerald’s boast proved suspect as his own life was cut short due to his inability to manage his addiction to alcohol and maintain his writing career as a novelist.  He died at age 44.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMING HOME!

COMING HOME

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

© March 24, 2014

 

On August 27, 1990, I had just completed a book that had been germinating in me for many years.  I called it “Work Without Managers,” and it was published later that fall. 

But on this date, my mind was not one of satisfaction or relief.  It was a call from my sister, Pat Waddell that my boyhood friend, Bobby Witt, had died.  He was in his fifties, a Hall of Fame high school basketball coach, and a high school all-stater in the same sport, playing with me.  We played high school football, baseball, and ran track together.  We also lived three houses apart in the shadow of the Clinton County Courthouse.

I, also in my fifties, had retired for the second time, the first time in my mid-thirties.  Life had always been a chore for me, which had nothing to do with success after success.  Perhaps that was because success also meant stress after stress, which for me led to distress. 

I’ve always been a bit of a grind.  I suppose because I’m not too confident, always felt that I was one great big phony, putting on a front to being what I wasn’t and pretending to feel what I didn’t.  My happiest times have always been alone, not with people, yet my many careers have always put me in the center of a lot of people doing what people in such centers do, which is pretend.

It got to me so badly when I was in my mid-thirties that I turned my back on what was considered a “brilliant career” and financial security to sit around and read books, write poetry, play tennis, watch the ships come into port and leave, watch the people frantically rushing about, thankful that I was no longer on that freight train.

Late in life, in my early fifties, I discovered something that I thought only existed in books, love.  I met a creature that was so real she was surreal, and I have spent these many years since with her.  I was married to her when my friend died, she a generation younger than I am, had little sense of why I was so blue.  At least, that is what I thought.  She said simply, “Jim, your mind is just going home.”

That was a most kind way of saying I was thinking of my mortality.  No doubt I was thinking of my beginnings because I was moving towards my end.  The death of my friend was a stark reminder of that fact.  My beautiful Betty didn’t say that because she is far too kind, but that was the essence of her comment.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach an advanced age, and that age can be in our 40s, 50s or beyond, the mind is given to looking back over one’s lifetime, as I was doing and didn’t know it. 

I was with Bobby Witt again, he was pitching and I was catching, I was handing the baton off to him in a relay race in track, he was going around end with the football in a key game with Davenport, that we won, and I was his lead blocker, we were sneaking into the professional baseball game, going over the fence, we were hanging out at Rastrelli’s  having a chocolate marshmallow peanut sundae with a cherry on top.   We were at the movies seeing our fighting G.I.’s in Iwo Jima or Bataan during the war, watching Dean Burridge, our coach at St. Patrick’s, star in football and basketball at Clinton High, serving Mass together for Father Harvey Finefield, or listening to Sister Cecile read “Brass Knuckles” to the class, or letting us listen to a couple innings of the World Series with broadcaster Red Barber. 

Bobby would never go to the YMCA because “Father Finefield said that was not a place for Catholic boys,” but I went there all the time.  Bobby was equally poor as I was but he never worked, and I always did, with a newspaper route, or stacking shelves at the A&P Supermarket.  Bobby was also brighter than I was, but he never read books, and I was always reading.  He found it funny with my head always in a book, and told me so.  But he always had his head in some sporting magazine.  He wanted to be a Major League Baseball Player, but he had two things working against him, living in Iowa where we had eight months of winter, and seemingly two weeks of summer, and what baseball scout would ever think of coming to Clinton, Iowa? 

Bobby went to college on a basketball scholarship that paid everything.  I went to college working five summers in a chemical plant, and on a merit academic scholarship that only paid tuition.  He became a coach and didn’t leave the Midwest, not even when he was in the army.  I became a chemist, which was not a good fit, went into the navy and spent two years on active duty in the Mediterranean, and that changed everything for me.  While most guys hit the beach and got drunk and laid, I went on tours, finding myself something of a culture vulture.  I wanted to know everything about everything that ever happened to my native continent, the home of my ancestors in Ireland and Norway. 

In the process, I wrote copious letters finding that my da was right – I didn’t write a very good letter – but passion doesn’t always burn with good sense.  I wanted to be a writer!  But of course, without any talent, only this strange passion. 

Since I couldn’t write well, and had to work, I had to substitute reading successful authors and their biographies as surrogate for my writing aspirations, finding that many writers, perhaps most, were as confused about their talent or lack of talent as I was about mine.  I found most writers wanted desperately to connect with other people so that they could in turn connect with themselves.  I never read a serious writer who was not plagued with that malady.

All of this strange thinking was tripping through my head as I thought about my boyhood friend who was no longer with us. 

Schopenhauer claimed everything that happens in our lifetime -- everything! – has a consistent order even when it seems it doesn’t, and that in that order there is a plan, and that plan is as if it were composed by a novelist. 

Things that seem accidental, hurtful, shameful, discouraging, regrettable, surprising, he said, things that seem to have little moment are indispensable factors in the composition of our own unique plot. 

Aspects of ourselves of which we are conscious, that become conscious to us when we think of our dreams, are part of a grand design that is recorded in our unconscious and composed by the will within us.

A shock to our system finds us going home, as my wife Betty suggested, which was obvious to her when I was mooning over the loss of my friend.  It was my mortality coming to the fore.  It was also the process of coming home surfacing to take charge of my attention. 

Life constantly blows us off course and into troubled waters that are of little consequences in the scheme of things, but alas, we make them momentous when they are only moments. 

Coming home reorients us back to ourselves recapturing the essence that has made us unique from everyone else, a uniqueness that cannot be dissuaded by someone saying “you have no talent,” or “you don’t even write a good letter,” or “you’ll never amount to anything,” or any number of other discouraging things, things, unfortunately, that our minds are so ready to accept as fact when they couldn’t be more fictive.

Three years ago last February I lost a daughter to a hit-and-run driver as she was crossing a street in Pinellas County, Florida.  That was different than my reaction to my boyhood friend's death.  He was a friend.  My daughter was part of the chemistry of my soul. 

Some writers would turn that pain into a book, but I instead savored it then as I do now, as it is a connection that has no interruption.  Bobby was my past, and my mind drifted to those halcyon days of that quiet time.  Jeannie was my life with another face.  She was never quiet, not in her mother, and never during life, and she is not quiet in my soul now. 

There was no pretend in that girl.  As my granddaughter, Rachel, might say, “Jeannie had no filter.”  She said what was on her mind without editing.  There wasn’t an expletive that she didn’t know, and couldn’t bring to the fore creatively at a moment’s notice.  She could make a sailor blush. 

Strangely, I had an unease with who I am and who I purport to be with Bobby, but not with Jeannie.

Any parent who has lost a child knows exactly what I am talking about.  Only the real is remembered, and it is in more than three dimensions. 

There are no words to describe the hurt or the joy or the love that reverberates in your soul.  There is no language to remind you of coming home again to nestle that child in your arms. 

With Bobby Witt there are coherent moments but with Jeannie there is only loss.  Memory of Bobby moved me to eventually write IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) about our days as children.  Jeannie death recaptured something that was missing in my memory of that childhood, that is, my life with her moment to moment in joy and sorrow, frustration and disappointment, but always, love.  Bobby gave me eyes to see my childhood self.  Jeannie circled deeper into my soul to reveal the child in the man, and the adult in the child with eyes that looked down from above on us both.