EVERYONE A LEADER OR NO ONE IS

EVERYONE A LEADER OR NO ONE IS

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

© October 25, 2011

The paradoxical dilemma of our times is that we cannot lead and we do not want to follow.  Why is it most people don’t like to be led?  They want to believe they are in charge.  Then, why don’t most people lead?  Because they simply don’t know how to lead.  And so, most American organizations have a management system and call it leadership.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 276.

For the past score of years I have been writing about what I call corpocracy.  I called it the American disease in Work Without Managers. 

We had reached, in my view, corporate excess by 1990 when I retired for the second time from the corporate world, and decided to write about it. 

Work Without Managers became that book.  I had no idea at the time it would prove so prophetic as so many reviewers saw it as an angry book of someone a little half cocked. 

Instead of challenging that mindset, I proceeded to write The Worker Alone, Going Against the Grain (1995), Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1997), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000), and A Look Back To See Ahead (2007).

My wife, BB, claims I keep beating an already dead horse to death, and I guess she has a point.  I’m an introvert who prefers to write out my angst rather than proselytize a sleepy constituency that for the past twenty years has allowed corpocracy to feudalize its world without complaint.  That is until the bubble burst in 2008 with the real estate meltdown compounded by the realization that Wall Street was playing monopoly with real money.

CORPOCRACY

Corporate society I determined twenty years ago was diseased.  In Work I described that disease as a management insensitive to its employees, supportive of company politics at the expense of productivity, secretive as a measure of communication, ritualistic as a gag on productivity, continually meeting as and end in itself, unaware of its internal focus until markets disappear, propensity for short term planning, advocating a rhetoric supportive of initiative until it goes in an unexpected direction, increasingly isolated – business as usual – with a covert hostility to anyone who threaten its infallible authority no matter how muddleheaded that authority might be.

Corporate society has gotten away with this for one hundred years, but now people are hurting as they did before the Great Depression in 1929, when the privileged few were living high on the hog while most others were unable to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck if they in fact had a job. 

Corpocracy, it might be said, has created a modern feudalistic state; unfortunately, the state is now a global entity.

This brings me to what is happening on Wall Street with people camping out there in protest with a smorgasbord of complaints, a situation that has spread throughout the United States and to cities around the globe. 

I don’t know what to make of it, but I hear smatterings of comments that sound consistent with what I have attempted to say over the past several years, about the arrogance and hubris of corpocracy as well as the decline of the middle working class, the idea we all have to be college graduates with a degree often with no value added skills, and therefore making our employability difficult if not impossible. 

I am not opposed to liberal arts, but most of that you can get by simply reading books, going to museums, watching programs on PBS, traveling and having stimulating friends from other cultures. 

The irony and paradox is that the skill base that we think traditionally for workers is not only being outsourced abroad but disappearing in the wake of this new electronic age. 

Leaderless leadership, which I have often written about unsympathetically, might actually be the answer.  Perhaps leaderless leadership is the prescription for the future as we negotiate the difficult terrain going forward.  Perhaps my little phase repeatedly expressed in my missives is finally blooming into something real: Everyone is a leader or no one is.  Perhaps all of those camped out on Wall Street are leaders.

Let us believe that this movement, and it is increasingly looking to be just that, is a peaceful one and not a bloody revolution.  Another irony is that the systemic nature of our problems are so deep and pervasive that even those at the top, the so-called “1 percent,” have no corrective mechanism to abrogate or reverse the situation even if they have a passionate interest in doing so.  I fear revolution is in the air, and I have no idea where it will go.  I do know revolution also hurts those already suffering the most.

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