CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP & DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) -- FORWARD TO THE BOOK

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP & DISSONANT WORKERS (2000)


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2000
This essay © April 26, 2009

Reference: This is the forward to this book published in 2000. It is offered here, exactly as it appeared, to give you my readers a sense of why this book is now flying off the shelves.


FORWARD TO CORPORATE SIN (2000)


“In a society without a moral compass, we easily become addicted to affluence and obsessed with irrelevance.”

James R. Fisher, Jr.

“As soon as you are born you are old enough to die.”

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), German philosopher

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LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP

More books are written on leadership than any other subject with the possible exception of mystery novels and romances. The symbols of leadership are everywhere while leadership is practices nowhere. It doesn’t take a genius to downsize, merge, reengineer, streamline, or whatever else you want to call the mania of the moment.

Obsession is everywhere, but especially in corporate HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitism) is the order of the day, but it has little to do with either leadership or followership. HYPE inculcates context into a winning style with a nod to content. HYPE sounds good so it must be good! HYPE professors write books on the “competitive edge” after the competitive advantage is lost, but no one seems to mind. The university community is as much a good ole boy and good ole girl network as the corporate world.

Where is leadership in the media? Several anxious moments followed once the O. J. Simpson soap opera came to an inconclusive end, only to be refilled with the gonadal ambiguities of a sitting president, which set the stage for the grandest of soap operas, the Impeachment Trial of the President of the United States, only to be followed by the ludicrous custody battle over the six-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez, and the beat goes on. The media doesn’t seem able to get above the story line of a Harlequin Romance.

Where is the leadership in the church? There is not a church in existence that is not constantly fighting scandals. The church experiences all the excesses of corporations because it is saddled with the same megalomania being more interested in protecting its image than dealing honestly with its challenges, more in the practice of deceit than truth-telling.

Where is leadership in science and technology? Does anyone in science wonder about the consequences of its discoveries? And if it does, what do scientists do about it? Do the technologists who turn science into toys of distraction register concern about the impact of these on society? One day in this 21st century 12 billion souls will be walking on this planet. That is double the world’s population today. We have long passed the stage of a sane world. What will it be like then? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?

Leaderless leadership is skewed to special interests. Here pragmatics take precedence over passions. Thus we have a dichotomy between those who do because of a passionate point of view, and those who governed by polls. Leaderless leaders are vulnerable because they can be bought or frightened into action. They have no moral center, no moral compass, and they cannot find their way. This is the essence of corporate sin.

KILLING THE SPIRIT

Something is missing in work. Everyone knows it. It is not the pay. It isn’t the working conditions. It isn’t the management. Management, as we know it, is quietly disappearing. So what is it? The spirit is being driven out of work. Work is no longer fun. Work is no longer good for the soul, no longer “love made visible” as Kahlil Gibran suggests.

Not only has work become more mechanical. It has become more nonsensical. Most work is the non-doing of non-thing things, or make-work. Work is no longer mainly by the sweat of the brow, but the merry dance of the little gray cells. To exercise these little gray cells, work needs to be treated as creatively as play. Otherwise, work leads to stress, burnout, and ultimately, moral and physical collapse.

Even the ethics of work have changed. What once was considered work, working hard and being loyal like good little Boy and Girl Scouts, is now obsolete. Working smart is the order of the day. Compliance is not enough. The command and control dictates of management are dinosaurs, no longer sufficient to meet the changing and accelerating demands of the marketplace. In fact this management practice gets in the way of productive work.

Even if it takes more brains than brawn, there still is a problem. Work has lost its poetry. Work is like a dime store novel. It has gotten a bad name. Companies, as incredible as it may seem, are making the workplace more like a playground for kids. Adults have been shrunken to the emotional equivalent of adolescence and fixated there. As a consequence, workers have gravitated to “learned helplessness and nonresponsibility.” Most workers are suspended in terminal adolescence whining about how bad they have it, when they’ve never had it so good. They berate their bosses and the company with a “woe-is-me” helplessness while they’re too self-indulgent to realize they have the power.

There is a good chance you’re one of these dissonant workers. If so, you’re likely to be suffering from one addiction or another to cover your numbing frustration. Meanwhile, the economic landscape is painted with optimism. “Can’t be anything wrong,” you say, “look at the Gross Domestic Product! The United States is going great guns, right?” If this is so, why don’t you have a happy face?

Obviously, the present economic climate is impressive. So what? Inside the figures tells another story. Pareto still reigns supreme. It is very likely that 80 percent of your effectiveness comes from 20 percent of your effort. Put another way, 80 percent of the productive work in your workplace is probably accomplished by 20 percent of the workers. It doesn’t stop there.

The way you work, and your attitude towards what you do spills over into what you are, and how you behave in society. You are not a separate entity from your work. You are your work. Chances are you don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re not working, so you fill the void with white noise.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE

Do you have too much time on your hands? If so, your life revolves around nonsense that is called “normal,” making you an unhappy camper. In a word, you’ve lost your moral compass, too. When you’ve lost your place and can’t find your space, you are apt to blame it on everything but the cause. It is your culture conditioning. You have been molded into the helpless toad you are, dependent on forces outside yourself, and you’re probably not aware of it.

Yet you are your culture, and your culture is serving you poorly.

What is your culture? Good question. Culture is everything that bombards your senses from the time you wake until you go to sleep, day in and day out. It’s your collective values, or your collective unconscious. It dictates the way you behave without thinking.

Things function the way they are structured to perform. It is the structure of work, which defines the function of work, which creates the workplace culture, which in turn dictates behavior like a house of tumbling cards. Culture is the way you behave on automatic pilot. It is that silent hand that gently pushes you into action or inaction as if you were a robot.

Once the family provided this cultural mechanism, assisted by the church, but no longer. The family is lost. The church is confused. Together, they are as lost and confused as you are. Consequently, your culture has a migraine and is pushing you right into the arms of dissonance. You don’t agree? Good, go against the grain and prove me wrong. Don’t pull out a book and find comfort with some dead authors. Look to your own life. How much of your history can you see through those rose colored glasses?

Make up your mind to take control. Don’t wait for someone else to make it up for you. My hope is that you will prick your ambivalence. My aim is to force you to think. My ambition is for you to take a stand as an owner, not a renter.

You have been programmed to believe what is best for you. This robs you of your own point of view. Life is short and can be sweet. It is well to remember this. Life gives no guarantees. Few will remember you when you’re gone. This is your show, your opportunity to “work with joy.”

What you think is likely to be second hand information, impressions from a popular press, television programming, your favorite pundit or guru, a charismatic politician, firebrand preacher, or any number of other impressionistic wizards. The irony is that your saviors are as lost as you are. Listen to yourself. Do you sound like them? Have you been too busy to think, wonder, and take control of your life?

Nobody knows for sure. That’s the key. Certainty has been lost to doubt. Nothing is taken at face value. The paradox is the more educated you are the less certain. That is why intellectual arrogance is so pervasive. Intellectuals need an audience to reassure themselves. They want to define you without an iota of thought on your part. Knowledge has become the greatest trap of personal enslavement. Don’t ever confuse knowledge with wisdom.

Do you challenge this? When someone puts you on the defensive, do you hide behind a knowledge barrier, or do you play a racial or religious card? If you don’t, you are the exception.

Insincerity has ruled too long. Deceitful behavior is endemic to everything. My beat is the corporation and therefore it is my focus. But insincerity extends from corporations to communities, from sacred institutions to profane associations. The dissonance of workers and leaderless leadership of managers reflect the times. My sense is that you have had enough of the gamesmanship, that it is time to go against the grain and look at the dissonance of work and deal with it. If you feel the same way, welcome aboard! You are about to ride the Fisher express.

Please leave your toys behind. This is a grow-up call. It is time to take responsibility and deal with it.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Tampa, Florida
November 30, 2000