Early responses to COLD SHOWER No. 2
RESPONSE NO. 1:
Dr. J -
You make me g-d mad. I have to tell you that. I don't agree with you at all.
unsigned
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 1:
It is okay to get g-d mad at me. I have no problem with your anger. I do have a problem when you say I make you mad and don't explain why I make you mad, or the rational supporting for you thinking otherwise than how I think. What produces such anger. My desire is to make you think; make you better understand why you think the way you do. Is it because it is popular to think that way; is it because everyone in your group thinks that way; is it your self-interest to think that way; is it because of your job to think that way; is it because of your affiliation with a social, religious or political group to think that way. It is not important for you to be honest with me. It is important for you to be honest with yourself. You see, my problem at this time in my life when my lights are dimming is to penetrate the darkness that I see all around me. It is the treachery of self-ignorance that makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. We cannot escape ourselves. If we live a lie, the lie owns us. If the lie owns us, then we are not more than a slave to it. The perpetrators of the lie are always there waiting in the darkness to exploit our vulnerability to the lie.
JRF
==========
RESPONSE NO. 2:
Jim,
As always, you have put down an excellent paper which I read carefully.
Again, it is not a typical American problem, but one of the Western world. And I am afraid, it is a problem caused by our political system.
One paragraph of your paper jumped into my eyes:
"Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world."
The vast majority of the population is not interested in the complex political world, but in the comfort of such gadgets as you have pointed out (cars, fancy clothing, casinos, movie glamour, BlackBerries, laptops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3's, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders). And each of them are voters who determine the outcome of the governmental race.
It is not only back to the 1970s, it is even further back to the old Romans "panem et circenses" (give them food and entertainment).
What does this tell us?
If you want to become elected, you have simply to make attractive promises to please the lower masses, not to ask for challenges -- which necessarily leads to a deplorable lack of intellect and other virtues.
As the unions and the workers force better conditions from the companies, the politicians oblige to the primitive masses. The is the result of a political system which doesn't fit anymore the 21st century.
Be well
M
=========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 2:
Response: This is from a European colleague and friend of mine who was forced to be a Brown Shirt in World War II as only a boy of eight in order to eat. He knows a time and a danger and life that I can capture only in books. I am a self-confessed Germanophile with Berlin my favorite city in Europe. He was executive vice president human resources of Honeywell International, while I was a director of human resources out of Brussels. He knows of my serious criticisms of things HR as well as my serious criticism of things MBA, but tolerates my ways. He has traveled the world and is a student of history. I am always enlightened by his exchanges.
Incidentally, it is true that Rome slept, as did Great Britain slept marking the end of their empires. Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" claims logistics and internal self-indulgence (as M points out) led to its demise so the Visigoths could storm Rome. We are playing the same game with troops in Korea now for more than 50 years, and the Iraq War costing us from $33.8 billion (2002) to $171 billion (2007) without even including Afghanistan.
Finally, Nicholson Baker in his new book HUMAN SMOKE (Simon & Schuster) suggests we weren't the good guys, that FDR and Churchill did some funny stuff. The reason I mention this is that the history we read always favors the victors, and doesn't tell the whole story. I just read a novel by a Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo titled "The Redbreast" which gives yet another view of that terrible war.
We should be always open to new ideas, not necessarily to buy them, but to complete the soundness of our reasoning.
JRF
========
RESPONSE NO. 3:
Jim,
Hope your shingles are better.
My opinion: In the last 6 – 12 months, your writing has reached some kind of personal critical mass in both quality and content. It’s as if your decades of pondering have somehow all come together to make a single picture. I think everything you’ve written is spot on. (that could imply you have dementia and your thinking has dropped to my level, but I hope not. )
I’ve often wondered if success carries within it the seeds of the next failure. Those who grow up amongst affluence don’t learn the lessons that created that affluence, and that’s what’s happening to America.
If you ever find out what made your respondent g-d mad; that’d be interesting. Me thinketh thou hit a nerve there.
Still working on the missive; just have been swamped.
Cya
e
========
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 3:
My shingles are about 80 percent gone. I'm a slow healer. Thank you for asking.
And thank you for your comment about my writing. I appreciate it. I look forward to reading your missive for the "Enlightened Leadership." My interest in the project has waned.
I am an individualistic thinker and not a group thinker, nor am I one that adjusts my focus or intensity to satisfy a group goal. I guess you could say I'm not a team player.
I think we are in a mess and it is a mess those that publish don't want to examine. I am not a do gooder or a crusader. I am a thinker. I'll examine questions of my time until I die without let up or reservation.
I have reached the point where I write to be writing, thinking that maybe some of it will stick when I'm gone.
I don't think a single presidential candidate, for example, has a clue as to where we are, how we got here, where we are going, or why, and therefore even less clue as to how to get us out of it. Leaderless leadership never had such a fertile soil.
I have been attacked on my stand on HR/MBA professionals, whom I don't fault for making a living in this manner, but they are monsters we have created without thought.
No, I'm not going to share with what I've received. It will come out in my writing.
My novel goes well but slowly.
On another subject, our current pope, and his itemized selection of "new" mortal sins, indicates how low we have sunk in the leadership firmament.
Religion has done what all disciplines do when they cease to be relevant or competent. They get where the action is; they become what Eric Hoffer once called "true believers," feverishly jumping on the current social-cultural bandwagon to discover their relevance because they have lost their sense of authenticity. Sad.
I have no trouble with people who have the gumption to express themselves. It means they have broken through that wall within the brain that holds us back from looking stupid to finally say something intelligent and meaningful. That person will read what I have said, and perhaps for the first time, be introduced to himself.
I was once teaching a graduate seminar in the theory of organization development (OD) for Golden Gate University. This graduate student came up to me after class in total frustration, and gave me a thorough piece of his mind, and a comprehensive picture of his frustration with the course, with me, and with life in general.
When he was through, I said, "Welcome to OD. You just broke through. Your intervention has been successful."
He looked at me his face red with emotions, breathing hard, not expecting my comment. For the longest time, he just stood there saying nothing, and I didn't interrupt his silence.
Finally, he picked up his books, and left. I never talked to him again the rest of the semester.
Then about two years later, I got a letter from him. "You won't believe this," he said, "but that session (with me) changed my life. It has been smooth sailing ever since."
And then he said the most important thing of all, something that I don't think many people today (sadly) ever reach, "I'm no longer a stranger to myself." I closed the letter and said to myself, "No, you're not."
Always be well,
Jim
==========
RESPONSE NO. 4:esponse 2:
Dear Jim:
Seems like you touched a nerve of someone who's sold on the status quo or is comfortable with the way things have been.
After watching the demise of Bear Sterns this weekend, I wonder how long we will be so kind to the folks who control our economy that has been leveraged with greed to the hilt. We are now seeing the "Perfect Storm" developing with 2 wars being waged with our kid's blood, sacrifice and money, housing bubble bursting, corporations shedding jobs, $5 gallon gas coming by summer, dollar trading at all time low, feds bailing out investments banks who made stupid investments in high risk mortgages, and so on.
We send our manufacturing jobs over seas and get back tainted toys, pharmaceuticals, that kill us and our kids and we are happy as a lark to let it continue to happen.
Keep up the great work Jim. Maybe someone will get mad enough to start doing something about it.
B
___________
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO NO. 4:
Were I never to have left Clinton, Iowa; had I never seen my Roman Catholic Church up close and personal; had I not worked for two major Fortune 200 corporations at the corporate executive level across the Americas and the Western world; had I not experienced education from the private Catholic grammar school, the public high school, or the land grant university, at every level from under graduate to a terminal Ph.D., had I not consulted private and public sector companies across these United States, had I not benefited from corporate entitlements, and had I not participated in the whimsical world of a stock portfolio investments, I would have no problem with Federal Reserve bailouts, but, unfortunately, I did leave Clinton, Iowa.
What is happening -- dare anyone say it -- capitalism is not an infallible institution and is vulnerable to the caprice of the wealth controllers. By the nature of its construction, it will always have excesses, and those that pay for the excesses will always be those least able to absorb the shock.
I am so glad that I was born poor, and able to watch how men like my da were treated during the Great Depression, indeed, how his family was treated when he died, and left no estate, and the railroad didn't want to give my mother the puny compensation she deserved.
Many people write to me and say such things, as, "I was poor, too, but didn't know it." Well, this boy had a sensitivity since he came out of the womb to note and remember ever slight, every innuendo, every imperious gesture that was directed at my parents, and to sublimate it into my art and thinking.
My problem, B, is that little people like us think those people like Bear Stern and other holders of real estate mortgages, and all those hedge fund operators are smarter than the common Joe, AND THEY ARE NOT! They are just more greedy, and they translate their greed into being astute guardians of our capitalistic system.
We have a financial system which is supported by Putin's Russia and Communist China, among others, and most major European nations, who hold our note. We are a debtor nation, and if each of us operated the way our government operates, we would all be in deep yogurt to say the least. We are conducting wars on borrowed money, and running our society on borrowed money, and if Russia, China and Europe, not to mention several other countries from South East Asia were to ask for their money NOW, the world would devolve into the greatest depression ever known to man. IT COULD HAPPEN! It is unlikely to happen, and here is the irony, because of GREED. Yes, greed, keeps these investors in the US of A not withdrawing their money, because it they did, they, too, would collapse.
We make high finance like it is some beyond our comprehension system that only experts can understand, monitor and appreciate, but boil it all down, and it is grade school arithmetic.
What is the answer? It is implicit in your response.
(1) DON'T DRIVE SO MUCH!
(2) RUN A CHEAP ECONOMICAL AUTOMOBILE.
(3) DON'T BUY WHAT YOU DON'T NEED!
(4) SAVE IN GOLD OR OTHER HIGH SECURITIES!
(5) BE YOUR OWN FEDERAL RESERVE!
(6) THE RICHEST PEOPLE ARE NOT THOSE WITH THE MOST MONEY, BUT WITH THE MOST SENSIBLE AND CONTROLLED TASTES.
(7) DON'T WORRY ABOUT SAVING THE WORLD.
(8) CONCENTRATE ON SAVING YOUR SELF, WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.
(9) DON'T READ 99.9 PERCENT OF ALL THE GARBAGE YOU GET IN THE MAIL TO BUY THIS OR THAT.
(10) START RECOGNIZING IF YOU ARE NOT A LEADER NO ONE IS.
(11) READ, READ, READ!
(12) DON'T READ WHAT OTHERS SAY YOU SHOULD READ, READ WHAT YOU LIKE, AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS THINK.
(13) WATCH LITTLE TELEVISION.
(14) REMEMBER, CELEBRITIES ARE BY DEFINITION NARCISSISTIC, AND THEREFORE SYMPTOMATIC OF OUR CULTURAL DISEASE, NOT ITS CURE.
(15) USE YOUR CELL PHONE FOR EMERGENCIES, NOT AS A PACIFIER.
(16) DON'T LET THE INTERNET BE THE MAIN SOURCE OF YOUR INFORMATION. (17) DON'T BELIEVE 99.9 PERCENT OF WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET OR BLOGS ON GROUPS OR RELIGIONS UNFAMILIAR TO YOU.
(18) FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, CULTURES AND RELIGIONS.
(19) REMEMBER, IN THE END, WE AS THE HUMAN RACE HAVE MUCH MORE IN COMMON WITH EVERYONE ELSE THAN WE HAVE DIFFERENCES.
(20) DON'T BELIEVE BECAUSE YOU HAVE THIS OR THAT DEGREE THAT YOU ARE EDUCATED.
(21) EDUCATION IS A FACTORY AND NOT A TOO EFFICIENT ONE.
(22) IN THE END AS IN THE BEGINNING, ALL YOU HAVE IS YOU.
(23) SO, IT IS ALL UP TO YOU!
Be always well,
Jim
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
WHILE AMERICA SLEPT, HER ADVANTAGE WAS STOLEN!
Cold Shower™
While America Slept
Her Advantage Was Stolen:
“Six Silent Killers” &
Other Indices Telegraphing Her Decline
No. 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2008
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial /organization psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern professional workers everywhere. His latest book captures the fixation of the times, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Question:
Dr. Fisher, you argued years ago that GATT and NAFTA were not the problem, that they were not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, that it was American leadership. Now, in your new book, you claim corporate leadership from government to industry has “missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.” You turn former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s words around to claim the “six silent killers” are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise along with American leadership stuck in the past. I’m familiar with the “six silent killers,” but I’m not convinced of your argument on GATT and NAFTA. Help me!
Dr. Fisher replies:
You will recall I’ve used the metaphor of “social termites” to describe the mass behavior of American workers. Termites destroy a home with no one the wiser, until too late for damage control. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working beyond our awareness.
We note with alarm the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse. So, now most workplaces are smoke free and workers have to submit to drug tests. These are positive steps of a recognized problem dealt with effectively.
Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and mental illness. These problems contribute to diminishing capacity to work productivity due to overeating, lack of exercise, and stress. These problems are visible and consequential but more difficult to deal with because healthful behavior cannot be enforced. Many firms have Employee Assistant Programs and volunteer exercise and diet programs as well, but this can have only limited success.
It doesn’t help that obesity, diabetes, heart trouble and mental illness are global workplace problems. China is now dealing with these health issues while experiencing sophisticated versions of the “six silent killers” through Chinese ingenuity.
In the current quadrennial madness of election politics 2008, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have resurfaced, and once again, are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad.
Two formerly powerful manufacturing states of Michigan and Ohio have loss nearly a half million high paying manufacturing jobs to this mass industrial exodus to Asia. This problem can be broken down into three parts: (1) the changes in the last forty years; (2) the missed opportunities; and (3) staying the same.
(1) CHANGES
The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine jumped started European recovery after WWII.
In the Far East, especially Japan, General Douglas MacArthur’s leadership turned Japan and the Japanese people into a modern productive industrial nation. He led the way towards its rapid industrial and technological development.
American management scholars such as W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker provided the quality management strategy, acclimating their designs to the group conscious Japanese culture. The gestation period was not long. WWII ended in 1945, by the early 1970s, Japan, Inc. was making inroads into cherished American industries such as automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, radios and televisions.
In 1980, as if awaken from a dream, Tom Brokaw of NBCTV anchored an hour long program titled, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” The program focused on the amazing quality of Japanese products and how workers in what were called “quality circles,” solved jointly work related problems. It was an old idea similar to the pre-industrial European guilds wrapped in a new culture.
Indonesia and India followed Japan’s lead, and soon there appeared not only a mad dash to buy products from the Far East, but a hysterical drive in the USA to replicate the Japanese success formula without a second thought. Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), and Six Silent Killers (1998) deal with the mounting nature of this problem, and the insane and counterproductive USA response.
Briefly, there were compelling differences between the USA and Japanese culture in the 1990s, noted here, which are even more pronounced today:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented, group think society; the USA is an individualistically oriented and creative society.
(2) Only 15 percent of Japanese major industry has a thousand employees or more compared to 50 percent of USA major industry.
(3) Nearly 90 percent of Japanese workers are blue collar, while less than 25 percent of USA workers are.
(4) Close to 100 percent of major Japanese industries have plants and equipment less than 25 years old; nearly 80 percent of major USA industries have plants and equipment well over 50 years old.
(5) Senior management in major Japanese industry is slim but very powerful with only four levels and a common informal link between workers and top management. Major USA management in industry is top heavy with ten to twelve levels of management with a sharp formal demarcation between managers and workers at all levels, distinguished by perks.
(6) Japanese top management earns 10 – 20 times as much as the line worker; USA top management earn from 500 – 1000 times as much as the line worker.
(7) Senior management delegated the problem of quality and productivity to human resources (HR) management. I have described HR as management’s union, telling it what it wants to hear, and making cosmetic interventions that don’t upset the pay structure, the formality, or the organization status quo.
(8) Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Employee Involvement (TEI), Quality of Work (QW), Participative Management (PM), Lifetime Employment (LE), Empowering Programs (EP), Quality of Work Life (QWL), and Quality of Management (QW) have produced interesting acronyms. They have not produced positive change. Instead, they have resulted in typical major USA industry going from a culture of comfort (management dependent) to a culture of complacency (workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being). These programs missed the intended target, the culture of contribution (manager-worker interdependence).
(9) HR’s disastrous history has failed to be highlighted. The reason is obvious. Senior management delegated blindly and thus spawned the “six silent killers,” which has crippled major USA industry. American business and industry could not stand the hit. It was already handicapped with a workforce and culture out-of-step and out-of-date with an emerging industrial world from the devastation of World War II. By 1945, USA plants and equipment were obsolete, while the rest of world was building from scratch. USA workers in 1945 had the best skills and management the most astute practices in the world, but it stayed the same.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family. Real income of American workers has been diminishing at a frightening pace from the 1950s to the present or 2008.
American workers instead of improving their skills to enhance the chances to higher paying jobs by becoming students of changing technology, got second jobs of similar or lower demanding skills, and put their partners to work. By this short-term strategy, the pain of diminishing purchasing power was put to rest.
Similarly, when a plethora of studies indicated American schools were slipping precipitously in basic skills of math and science, reading and language, against other advanced societies of the world, parents put the weight of the problem on educators.
This changed the whole dynamic of the family.
Parents spent most of their time working so the family infrequently sat down to a shared meal; infrequently were involved in joint social activities; and infrequently found parents giving guidance and direction to their children.
Children became their own parents.
The school became a combat zone in which discipline and punctuality got more attention than the curriculum as teachers had little energy left after attempting to keep order.
Junk food and empty calories became the diet of children leading to attention deficit and disruptive disorders for many, and leading in turn to a regiment of Ritalin related products, masking but not dealing with the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the quality and effectiveness of work continued to deteriorate in the workplace against an emerging more competitive world. It called for insightful and authentic leadership.
What major USA industry got instead was a new regiment of bean counters with MBAs.
MBAs and HRs are the bookends to the magnificent shrinkage of USA’s industrial and manufacturing might.
Whereas HR became management’s union, protecting its status quo while ensuring its atavistic construction and anachronistic practices, the MBA took up where Frederick Winslow Taylor left off, treating workers as disposable “things” to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and motivated by bribing them with money and benefits to be more productive. It didn’t work. Workers only got more adolescent and less productive.
MBAs engineered the entitlement programs, the liberal medical and sick leave policies, along with generous vacation schedules, having few qualms as entitlements approached the trillions in dollars and flirted with the national debt.
Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world.
The consequence of this inept action can be expressed in two words, “leaderless leadership.” Because of this we are becoming a second rate nation, while continuing the hubristic belief that all our problems can be solved with money.
If that were the case, we would have the best secondary school test scores instead of the near the worst across the board against other advanced nations of the world.
If that were the case, we would have the highest productivity rates in the world as American workers remain the highest paid while China, India and South East Asia are among the lowest paid.
We have the most technological advanced universities in the world with the most gifted and competent staffs to teach, conduct research and development, and create cutting edge technology; the only problem is that most of the students in these advanced curriculums are foreign exchange students.
We love our cell phones, BlackBerries, labtops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders, most likely made somewhere else. We also love our big cars and our fancy homes, our indulgent lifestyles, our obsessive celebrity tracking, and appetite for fantasy films. We don’t like to study if it doesn’t translate into big bucks, or heady dreams, or Hugh Hefner viagara experiences.
STAYING THE SAME
We have currently a presidential campaign between senators Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. It is the first time an African American or a woman has vied at this late stage for that position.
This is new, and this is good. Obama has painted himself the candidate for change, while Clinton has painted herself as the candidate for experience. This is not new. This is the old wrapped in the new with the same mothball scent.
Indeed, there is absolutely not one new idea, or morsel of thinking beyond the obvious in the campaign of either candidate, and that is sad.
These candidates epitomize the nature of the Sisyphus Mountain that has become the construct to our declining society and perhaps our true destiny.
We want these candidates to offend no one, please everyone, promise everything, and tell us what great minds we have, how wonderful we are, when chances are we don’t think at all, and could do better for ourselves if we weren’t so robotic.
These candidates flatter us by painting wants in dreamlike needs meant to capture our attention and impulse to vote, and of course for them. It is a popularity contest in which leadership is not even part of the exercise. Leadership is action, not words; results, not promises.
What we see, and it has always been so, is process and the process is fueled by the hysteria, and we know what hysteria gives us: polls! The pundits and television anchors are obsessed with delegate count. What has that to do with leadership, or problem solving? It demonstrates once again our reduction of people to poll percentages and things.
We are stuck. We have not left the 1970s. We insist in staying the same. We cannot even escape repeating the same problems, dotting the same “i’s” and crossing the same “t’s” with the same social penmanship, only the faces have changed.
(1) In 1970s we had the Viet Nam War; now we have the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq, with the same crushing unpopularity, the same endless debilitating costs with no light at the end of the tunnel. We do not learn from our failures, but insist on repeating them. We do not understand the world of which we are only a small part;
(2) In the 1970s, political corruption was in the air; first there was Watergate, then regime change from Nixon to Ford to Carter with Iran Hostage Crisis, OPEC Embargo, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Then as now, we have the distraction of an endless parade of leadership sex scandals: Clinton, Packwood, Frank, Hart, Vitter, Craig, Foley, McGreevey, down to Spitzer. People who were supposed lead us and couldn’t even lead themselves. Drugs were running wild in the 1970s. We declared “War on Drugs,” with the same impotency of our success in shooting wars. We had a paranoid president in the 1970s, and a paranoid president now. The 1970s were called the “age of anxiety,” and now we use the same term to describe this age. New forms of hatred and bigotry were hatching then, and hatching again now. We wrenched our hands at the decline of the automotive industry then; we wrench our hands now with it on life supports. We looked to science to solve the problems of our self-indulgent lifestyle then; we look to science to solve the same problems now. They are no different, only more pronounced. We were addicted to optimism in the midst of our crises in the 1970s. Carter told the truth and said we had a “crisis in confidence,” and he was nearly tarred and feathered. We don’t like to be reminded of how we are, only how we like to think ourselves to be. We are a crisis-managed society. We don’t anticipate our problems. We wait until they become crises, then we attempt to solve them with the thinking that caused them. Or we choose to totally ignore our problems and turn our attention to solvable ones. So, the more things change the more they don’t.
(3) We set up our leaders to be more than human and when they operate with reckless abandon, we treat them less than human.
Staying the same is a chronic cultural neurosis that has not left us. If anything, over time, it is more intense. The material-technological hard wiring in our brains has become part of our natural spontaneity for gadgetry and escape, and likewise, our appetite for rhetoric and good presentation skills.
We have allowed ourselves to be swallowed up in culturally consistent patterns and perceptions that no longer serve us, but have allowed them to become such a part of us that they are no longer recognized.
Time magazine (March 24, 2008) titles its featured piece, “Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.” Reading them you realize Time has no more clue than the average Joe. There is not one word on a changing Africa, a lot about the environment, the economy and technology, even a bit about religion, all consistent with the evasive strategy of counting Democratic delegates, as America remains fast asleep.
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com
While America Slept
Her Advantage Was Stolen:
“Six Silent Killers” &
Other Indices Telegraphing Her Decline
No. 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2008
This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial /organization psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern professional workers everywhere. His latest book captures the fixation of the times, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Question:
Dr. Fisher, you argued years ago that GATT and NAFTA were not the problem, that they were not the primary cause of tens of thousands of American workers losing their jobs, that it was American leadership. Now, in your new book, you claim corporate leadership from government to industry has “missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.” You turn former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s words around to claim the “six silent killers” are the “sucking sound” destroying American enterprise along with American leadership stuck in the past. I’m familiar with the “six silent killers,” but I’m not convinced of your argument on GATT and NAFTA. Help me!
Dr. Fisher replies:
You will recall I’ve used the metaphor of “social termites” to describe the mass behavior of American workers. Termites destroy a home with no one the wiser, until too late for damage control. Termites are invisible to the naked eye working beyond our awareness.
We note with alarm the tens of billions of dollars lost to sick leave caused by substance abuse. So, now most workplaces are smoke free and workers have to submit to drug tests. These are positive steps of a recognized problem dealt with effectively.
Tens of billions more are lost due to stress and emotional problems resulting in accidents, heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and mental illness. These problems contribute to diminishing capacity to work productivity due to overeating, lack of exercise, and stress. These problems are visible and consequential but more difficult to deal with because healthful behavior cannot be enforced. Many firms have Employee Assistant Programs and volunteer exercise and diet programs as well, but this can have only limited success.
It doesn’t help that obesity, diabetes, heart trouble and mental illness are global workplace problems. China is now dealing with these health issues while experiencing sophisticated versions of the “six silent killers” through Chinese ingenuity.
In the current quadrennial madness of election politics 2008, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have resurfaced, and once again, are convenient scapegoats for downsizing, redundancy exercises, reorganization, reengineering, and relocation of plants and jobs abroad.
Two formerly powerful manufacturing states of Michigan and Ohio have loss nearly a half million high paying manufacturing jobs to this mass industrial exodus to Asia. This problem can be broken down into three parts: (1) the changes in the last forty years; (2) the missed opportunities; and (3) staying the same.
(1) CHANGES
The Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine jumped started European recovery after WWII.
In the Far East, especially Japan, General Douglas MacArthur’s leadership turned Japan and the Japanese people into a modern productive industrial nation. He led the way towards its rapid industrial and technological development.
American management scholars such as W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker provided the quality management strategy, acclimating their designs to the group conscious Japanese culture. The gestation period was not long. WWII ended in 1945, by the early 1970s, Japan, Inc. was making inroads into cherished American industries such as automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, radios and televisions.
In 1980, as if awaken from a dream, Tom Brokaw of NBCTV anchored an hour long program titled, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” The program focused on the amazing quality of Japanese products and how workers in what were called “quality circles,” solved jointly work related problems. It was an old idea similar to the pre-industrial European guilds wrapped in a new culture.
Indonesia and India followed Japan’s lead, and soon there appeared not only a mad dash to buy products from the Far East, but a hysterical drive in the USA to replicate the Japanese success formula without a second thought. Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), and Six Silent Killers (1998) deal with the mounting nature of this problem, and the insane and counterproductive USA response.
Briefly, there were compelling differences between the USA and Japanese culture in the 1990s, noted here, which are even more pronounced today:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented, group think society; the USA is an individualistically oriented and creative society.
(2) Only 15 percent of Japanese major industry has a thousand employees or more compared to 50 percent of USA major industry.
(3) Nearly 90 percent of Japanese workers are blue collar, while less than 25 percent of USA workers are.
(4) Close to 100 percent of major Japanese industries have plants and equipment less than 25 years old; nearly 80 percent of major USA industries have plants and equipment well over 50 years old.
(5) Senior management in major Japanese industry is slim but very powerful with only four levels and a common informal link between workers and top management. Major USA management in industry is top heavy with ten to twelve levels of management with a sharp formal demarcation between managers and workers at all levels, distinguished by perks.
(6) Japanese top management earns 10 – 20 times as much as the line worker; USA top management earn from 500 – 1000 times as much as the line worker.
(7) Senior management delegated the problem of quality and productivity to human resources (HR) management. I have described HR as management’s union, telling it what it wants to hear, and making cosmetic interventions that don’t upset the pay structure, the formality, or the organization status quo.
(8) Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Employee Involvement (TEI), Quality of Work (QW), Participative Management (PM), Lifetime Employment (LE), Empowering Programs (EP), Quality of Work Life (QWL), and Quality of Management (QW) have produced interesting acronyms. They have not produced positive change. Instead, they have resulted in typical major USA industry going from a culture of comfort (management dependent) to a culture of complacency (workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being). These programs missed the intended target, the culture of contribution (manager-worker interdependence).
(9) HR’s disastrous history has failed to be highlighted. The reason is obvious. Senior management delegated blindly and thus spawned the “six silent killers,” which has crippled major USA industry. American business and industry could not stand the hit. It was already handicapped with a workforce and culture out-of-step and out-of-date with an emerging industrial world from the devastation of World War II. By 1945, USA plants and equipment were obsolete, while the rest of world was building from scratch. USA workers in 1945 had the best skills and management the most astute practices in the world, but it stayed the same.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
For the past 100 years, or up to 1973, the rate of productivity growth in terms of the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.4 percent. Since then, it has been around 2.3 percent. That single percentage drop has caused the loss of $12 trillion in the GDP in the past 20 years, or the loss of $50,000 in income to every American family over that period. This has dampened the American dream and impacted negatively on the standard of living of the American family. Real income of American workers has been diminishing at a frightening pace from the 1950s to the present or 2008.
American workers instead of improving their skills to enhance the chances to higher paying jobs by becoming students of changing technology, got second jobs of similar or lower demanding skills, and put their partners to work. By this short-term strategy, the pain of diminishing purchasing power was put to rest.
Similarly, when a plethora of studies indicated American schools were slipping precipitously in basic skills of math and science, reading and language, against other advanced societies of the world, parents put the weight of the problem on educators.
This changed the whole dynamic of the family.
Parents spent most of their time working so the family infrequently sat down to a shared meal; infrequently were involved in joint social activities; and infrequently found parents giving guidance and direction to their children.
Children became their own parents.
The school became a combat zone in which discipline and punctuality got more attention than the curriculum as teachers had little energy left after attempting to keep order.
Junk food and empty calories became the diet of children leading to attention deficit and disruptive disorders for many, and leading in turn to a regiment of Ritalin related products, masking but not dealing with the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, the quality and effectiveness of work continued to deteriorate in the workplace against an emerging more competitive world. It called for insightful and authentic leadership.
What major USA industry got instead was a new regiment of bean counters with MBAs.
MBAs and HRs are the bookends to the magnificent shrinkage of USA’s industrial and manufacturing might.
Whereas HR became management’s union, protecting its status quo while ensuring its atavistic construction and anachronistic practices, the MBA took up where Frederick Winslow Taylor left off, treating workers as disposable “things” to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and motivated by bribing them with money and benefits to be more productive. It didn’t work. Workers only got more adolescent and less productive.
MBAs engineered the entitlement programs, the liberal medical and sick leave policies, along with generous vacation schedules, having few qualms as entitlements approached the trillions in dollars and flirted with the national debt.
Workers, with the guidance of unions, who had their own regiment of MBAs, sued for higher and higher wages, and more and more benefits, while taking a pass on giving workers more control of what they did, or increased skills training and development so they might compete more effectively to a changing postmodern technological world.
The consequence of this inept action can be expressed in two words, “leaderless leadership.” Because of this we are becoming a second rate nation, while continuing the hubristic belief that all our problems can be solved with money.
If that were the case, we would have the best secondary school test scores instead of the near the worst across the board against other advanced nations of the world.
If that were the case, we would have the highest productivity rates in the world as American workers remain the highest paid while China, India and South East Asia are among the lowest paid.
We have the most technological advanced universities in the world with the most gifted and competent staffs to teach, conduct research and development, and create cutting edge technology; the only problem is that most of the students in these advanced curriculums are foreign exchange students.
We love our cell phones, BlackBerries, labtops, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, and continually more sophisticated electronic wonders, most likely made somewhere else. We also love our big cars and our fancy homes, our indulgent lifestyles, our obsessive celebrity tracking, and appetite for fantasy films. We don’t like to study if it doesn’t translate into big bucks, or heady dreams, or Hugh Hefner viagara experiences.
STAYING THE SAME
We have currently a presidential campaign between senators Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. It is the first time an African American or a woman has vied at this late stage for that position.
This is new, and this is good. Obama has painted himself the candidate for change, while Clinton has painted herself as the candidate for experience. This is not new. This is the old wrapped in the new with the same mothball scent.
Indeed, there is absolutely not one new idea, or morsel of thinking beyond the obvious in the campaign of either candidate, and that is sad.
These candidates epitomize the nature of the Sisyphus Mountain that has become the construct to our declining society and perhaps our true destiny.
We want these candidates to offend no one, please everyone, promise everything, and tell us what great minds we have, how wonderful we are, when chances are we don’t think at all, and could do better for ourselves if we weren’t so robotic.
These candidates flatter us by painting wants in dreamlike needs meant to capture our attention and impulse to vote, and of course for them. It is a popularity contest in which leadership is not even part of the exercise. Leadership is action, not words; results, not promises.
What we see, and it has always been so, is process and the process is fueled by the hysteria, and we know what hysteria gives us: polls! The pundits and television anchors are obsessed with delegate count. What has that to do with leadership, or problem solving? It demonstrates once again our reduction of people to poll percentages and things.
We are stuck. We have not left the 1970s. We insist in staying the same. We cannot even escape repeating the same problems, dotting the same “i’s” and crossing the same “t’s” with the same social penmanship, only the faces have changed.
(1) In 1970s we had the Viet Nam War; now we have the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq, with the same crushing unpopularity, the same endless debilitating costs with no light at the end of the tunnel. We do not learn from our failures, but insist on repeating them. We do not understand the world of which we are only a small part;
(2) In the 1970s, political corruption was in the air; first there was Watergate, then regime change from Nixon to Ford to Carter with Iran Hostage Crisis, OPEC Embargo, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Then as now, we have the distraction of an endless parade of leadership sex scandals: Clinton, Packwood, Frank, Hart, Vitter, Craig, Foley, McGreevey, down to Spitzer. People who were supposed lead us and couldn’t even lead themselves. Drugs were running wild in the 1970s. We declared “War on Drugs,” with the same impotency of our success in shooting wars. We had a paranoid president in the 1970s, and a paranoid president now. The 1970s were called the “age of anxiety,” and now we use the same term to describe this age. New forms of hatred and bigotry were hatching then, and hatching again now. We wrenched our hands at the decline of the automotive industry then; we wrench our hands now with it on life supports. We looked to science to solve the problems of our self-indulgent lifestyle then; we look to science to solve the same problems now. They are no different, only more pronounced. We were addicted to optimism in the midst of our crises in the 1970s. Carter told the truth and said we had a “crisis in confidence,” and he was nearly tarred and feathered. We don’t like to be reminded of how we are, only how we like to think ourselves to be. We are a crisis-managed society. We don’t anticipate our problems. We wait until they become crises, then we attempt to solve them with the thinking that caused them. Or we choose to totally ignore our problems and turn our attention to solvable ones. So, the more things change the more they don’t.
(3) We set up our leaders to be more than human and when they operate with reckless abandon, we treat them less than human.
Staying the same is a chronic cultural neurosis that has not left us. If anything, over time, it is more intense. The material-technological hard wiring in our brains has become part of our natural spontaneity for gadgetry and escape, and likewise, our appetite for rhetoric and good presentation skills.
We have allowed ourselves to be swallowed up in culturally consistent patterns and perceptions that no longer serve us, but have allowed them to become such a part of us that they are no longer recognized.
Time magazine (March 24, 2008) titles its featured piece, “Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.” Reading them you realize Time has no more clue than the average Joe. There is not one word on a changing Africa, a lot about the environment, the economy and technology, even a bit about religion, all consistent with the evasive strategy of counting Democratic delegates, as America remains fast asleep.
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website and blog: www.fisherofideas.com
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Reaction to COLD SHOWER No.1
REACTION TO "COLD SHOWER" No. 1
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
Reaction to COLD SHOWER No.1
REACTION TO "COLD SHOWER" No. 1
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED
First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.
YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.
I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.
First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.
I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:
(1) during The Great Depression;
(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and
(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.
Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.
(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.
(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.
(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.
(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.
(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.
(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.
(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.
(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.
Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.
(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.
We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:
(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;
(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and
(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.
We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.
With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.
We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.
Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.
That all changed after WWII.
We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.
True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.
So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.
It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."
Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
COLD SHOWER - How To Ensure You Never Get Fired!
Notice: This is the first of 30 articles that have previously been published in newspapers. They are for your enjoyment, but cannot be reprinted or used without permission. Most of the people in my address book are retired, but they have children and grandchildren that I think will benefit from these missives. That is my aim.
JRF
COLD SHOWER™
HOW TO ENSURE YOU NEVER GET FIRED!
(Article no. 1)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 11, 2008
_____________
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial/organization psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls CULTURAL CAPITAL, that is, risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power for a changing work force in a changing workplace. His focus is on the modern professional worker.
Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college to become a laboratory chemist and field chemical sales engineer. He retired in his mid-thirties, went back to school and received his Ph.D. in I/O psychology, became an OD consultant and adjunct professor, eventually returning to the corporation from which he retired in 1990 to devote himself to writing.
These columns in another form were first published in newspapers in the late 1990s. They have been updated and reissued on his website (www.fisherofideas.com) to provoke thought and discussion.
_________________
Question: Dr. Fisher, I understand you've written a book about how never to get fired? Is that possible in these times?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Absolutely! The key to ensuring you never get fired rests with the way you think about work. If you don't see yourself as part of the problem, then you are not going to be part of the solution.
You must see yourself as an owner of what you do, not a renter who brings his body to work but leaves his mind at home. Nor can you afford to turn your head when colleagues or bosses exploit the company. You are the company!
As to writing a book about this problem, I've actually written several books on the subject. SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998) and THE WORKER, ALONE! (The Delta Group Florida 1995) dealt specifically with the problem of being employed and remaining employable.
When workers are dissatisfied or miserable at work, they think and behave as social termites burrowing in and silently destroying the infrastructure of the place of their employment. More than $100 billion is lost every year for:
(1) Workers coming in late and leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by;
(2) Workers doing only what told to do and then waiting around for more instructions;
(3) Workers always having an excuse why something isn't done or done on time;
(4) Workers accepting assignments they don't have any intentions of completing;
(5) Workers obsessed with what other workers are and have and how they are treated;
(6) Workers spreading disinformation or holding back critical information to complete the job.
Eventually, the economic walls of the company come crashing in requiring it to resort to downsizing; moving to a cheaper place of operation, or totally imploding by filing for bankrutcy protection.
Social termites exist in virtually every operation, but when they are ignored and allowed to run rampant, the company will inevitably go into distress at some point, and no longer be competitive.
Too many workers are into comfort not contribution, retiring on the job, reacting to circumstances not anticipating them, searching for excellence not creating it, seeing themselves as part of the solution not part of the problem, behaving as renters not owners, bringing their bodies to work not their minds, behaving as counterdependent children not interdependent adults.
Far too frequently workers fall into a job or career, they don't plan for one.
They pursue a line of work because it pays the most, has the best benefits, is considered prestigious having little idea what they love to do, or why.
They play the blame game. To their mind, the reason they are miserable and not making satisfactory progress is because of the work, the boss, or the company. Wrong!
Workers make their own misery. A clerk's job can only pay so much. An engineer's job pays a lot better. But that means hitting the books when you are young, and sacrificing along the way to receive a quality education. No excuses. Anyone can improve their skill level, anyone! That's cultural capital! It is the only ticket.
It is a simple formula:
The more training you have and the higher your skill level the better your chances are for job security. The higher your skill level is in critical jobs the higher your pay and the more secure your future.
All jobs are limited by what the industry can afford to pay. If you need higher pay, then you need to be better qualified in high risk jobs because the highest pay is always in the highest risks categories, such as stockbrokers, salesmen, actors, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Far too many workers have bought into the idea that the way to get ahead is to please others not to please themselves. They fail to see the limits to opportunity but stubbornly push it beyond reality, and invariably experience disenchantment for the effort.
Work, so generated, becomes a contest of will rather than an expression of love. It becomes the dance of a whirling dervish.
In the midst of this social maelstrom, "scientific performance indices" are created to deal with incipient cultural disaster. Many of them have worn thin, but are still around:
1. Empowerment
2. Teamwork,
3. Seeing the company as family,
4. Company pride,
5. Professionalism,
6. Reengineering,
7. Just-in-time production,
8. Management by objectives,
9. Total employee involvement,
10. Participative management,
11. Total quality management,
12. Open-door policy,
13. Pay for performance,
14. Performance appraisal,
15. Professional pride,
16. Assessment centers,
17. Profiling for performance,
18. Personality inventory,
19. Value assessment, and so on.
Admittedly, they sound nice and are cosmetically attractive, but they are designed "for" workers but not "about" workers.
They measure workers as "things," which clearly are meant to produce "profits." This suggests profits are more important than people. It is the main reason they have not worked. Workers are not stupid.
A rule-of-thumb:
A healthy focus on people (process factor) and the profits will follow (product factor).
Everyone seems to be looking for the magic word, magic test, and magic bullet to turn things around. Notice it is always a thing that is sought not something "by" the workers but "for" the workers!
Yet, without workers, there are no products, no profits, no company, and workers have the answers. They have always had the answers.
The problem is that you have to ask workers the right questions to glean these answers. It is not an automatic proposition, where the company says, "Workers, what do you think?" Such questions are met always with silence.
Stoichiometry in chemistry teaches us that in order for a reaction to go to completion it must have the correct mix of mole fractions (workers) with the proper catalyst (worker involvement) to realize the results desired (meet the needs of the company and workers alike).
This represents a balanced equation.
Life is all about chemistry, and chemistry is all about life.
To ensure you never get fired there must be a place to work. You must own what you do; be a student of the job; a learner not a knower; a listener not a teller; a doer not a complainer; a thinker not an imitator.
No company on the face of the earth can any longer support a 40-year career in which the worker is a student of the job for 4-years and a coaster 36.
This does not mean you should point fingers at others who fall short of the mark. You should help them get better. You don't dodge problems. You embrace them. You appreciate your job. If you don't appreciate it, you should leave!
You do your best, pat yourself on the back, don't look for recognition or appreciation elsewhere. You are the total deal.
You accept peaks and valleys, good and bad days, and take surprises in stride.
You don't expect reward without risk, gain without pain, accomplishment without help.
You buy a ticket to adulthood and embrace your natural resistance to pain, self-doubt, confusion, and all the other idiosyncrasies that make you, you.
You become a leader by pushing the driver out of your chair, taking over the controls, and then driving yourself to your destiny. It will be a joyous ride because you are in charge.
To summarize:
1) Treat yourself as an employer not an employee. Think how to grow the business. It is your investment in cultural capital.
2) Don't manage up! Manage your boss by educating the boss on the tools, training and opportunities you need to do a good job. Be persistent and don't accept any excuses for not being trained in new skills. Nothing stays the same especially work.
3) Remember everyone has feelings and needs. That includes bosses. Tread lightly on others, as you would have them tread lightly on you.
4) Treat coworkers as customers. Make what you do user friendly to everyone.
5) Be more concerned about being useful than fearing being used. The reason you have a job is that you are value added to what is being done. Quit complaining!
6) Don't get buried in gender or ethnic politics. Losers use this to distract. Don't confuse role demands (the job) with self-demands (personal concerns). If the job is making you sick, leave! There is a near perfect job for all of us if we have the honesty to know ourselves as well as others do.
7) When you have a complaint, don't advertise it. Direct it to the source politely and in a timely fashion with emphasis on politely. Don't let anger fester. It will if you don't address the cause of your misery promptly. Manage your conflict. Conflict is the natural glue that holds work and workers together. You don't have to like everybody, but you do need to respect and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
8) Say what you will do. Do what you say. Trust is built on doing, not promising to
do. A dependable, trustworthy, and resourceful person is three-people-in-one.
9) Do what you love, love what you do. There is no job, no amount of money worth existing in misery. Work is love made visible. When it isn't, it destroys, as hate is a disease of the soul. It weakens the body and poisons the mind against being effective.
10) Be part of the problem. If you foul up, admit it. If someone else fouls up, help get him or her back on track. If the company falls on bad times, thank it for the good times, and help it get back on its feet.
11) Take work seriously not yourself. Have a sense of humor about the flawed person you are. Humor gives balance and perspective, and others will love you for it.
12) Make others better for your being there. Share knowledge, good will and cheer with others. Bring out their best and you'll feel better about yourself.
13) Be a student of whatever you do, a learner in quest of all that you could be.
14) Be a performer not a personality, a doer not a pleaser, a problem solver not a pyramid climber, make a difference; don't worry about making an impression. Let your work speak for itself.
15) Don't hesitate to share critical information essential to a project. If you feel you have been taken advantage of or passed over for promotion, fight for it, but don't punish your colleagues or the company for your angst.
16) Don't misuse or misappropriate company property be it a single postage stamp or an expensive tool. You are stealing from yourself.
17) Be ever on guard that the six silent killers don't bite you in the ass!
______________
See the books listed in this article, and similar essays on Dr. Fisher's blog and website (www.fisherofideas.com.
JRF
COLD SHOWER™
HOW TO ENSURE YOU NEVER GET FIRED!
(Article no. 1)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 11, 2008
_____________
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial/organization psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls CULTURAL CAPITAL, that is, risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power for a changing work force in a changing workplace. His focus is on the modern professional worker.
Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college to become a laboratory chemist and field chemical sales engineer. He retired in his mid-thirties, went back to school and received his Ph.D. in I/O psychology, became an OD consultant and adjunct professor, eventually returning to the corporation from which he retired in 1990 to devote himself to writing.
These columns in another form were first published in newspapers in the late 1990s. They have been updated and reissued on his website (www.fisherofideas.com) to provoke thought and discussion.
_________________
Question: Dr. Fisher, I understand you've written a book about how never to get fired? Is that possible in these times?
Dr. Fisher replies:
Absolutely! The key to ensuring you never get fired rests with the way you think about work. If you don't see yourself as part of the problem, then you are not going to be part of the solution.
You must see yourself as an owner of what you do, not a renter who brings his body to work but leaves his mind at home. Nor can you afford to turn your head when colleagues or bosses exploit the company. You are the company!
As to writing a book about this problem, I've actually written several books on the subject. SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998) and THE WORKER, ALONE! (The Delta Group Florida 1995) dealt specifically with the problem of being employed and remaining employable.
When workers are dissatisfied or miserable at work, they think and behave as social termites burrowing in and silently destroying the infrastructure of the place of their employment. More than $100 billion is lost every year for:
(1) Workers coming in late and leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by;
(2) Workers doing only what told to do and then waiting around for more instructions;
(3) Workers always having an excuse why something isn't done or done on time;
(4) Workers accepting assignments they don't have any intentions of completing;
(5) Workers obsessed with what other workers are and have and how they are treated;
(6) Workers spreading disinformation or holding back critical information to complete the job.
Eventually, the economic walls of the company come crashing in requiring it to resort to downsizing; moving to a cheaper place of operation, or totally imploding by filing for bankrutcy protection.
Social termites exist in virtually every operation, but when they are ignored and allowed to run rampant, the company will inevitably go into distress at some point, and no longer be competitive.
Too many workers are into comfort not contribution, retiring on the job, reacting to circumstances not anticipating them, searching for excellence not creating it, seeing themselves as part of the solution not part of the problem, behaving as renters not owners, bringing their bodies to work not their minds, behaving as counterdependent children not interdependent adults.
Far too frequently workers fall into a job or career, they don't plan for one.
They pursue a line of work because it pays the most, has the best benefits, is considered prestigious having little idea what they love to do, or why.
They play the blame game. To their mind, the reason they are miserable and not making satisfactory progress is because of the work, the boss, or the company. Wrong!
Workers make their own misery. A clerk's job can only pay so much. An engineer's job pays a lot better. But that means hitting the books when you are young, and sacrificing along the way to receive a quality education. No excuses. Anyone can improve their skill level, anyone! That's cultural capital! It is the only ticket.
It is a simple formula:
The more training you have and the higher your skill level the better your chances are for job security. The higher your skill level is in critical jobs the higher your pay and the more secure your future.
All jobs are limited by what the industry can afford to pay. If you need higher pay, then you need to be better qualified in high risk jobs because the highest pay is always in the highest risks categories, such as stockbrokers, salesmen, actors, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Far too many workers have bought into the idea that the way to get ahead is to please others not to please themselves. They fail to see the limits to opportunity but stubbornly push it beyond reality, and invariably experience disenchantment for the effort.
Work, so generated, becomes a contest of will rather than an expression of love. It becomes the dance of a whirling dervish.
In the midst of this social maelstrom, "scientific performance indices" are created to deal with incipient cultural disaster. Many of them have worn thin, but are still around:
1. Empowerment
2. Teamwork,
3. Seeing the company as family,
4. Company pride,
5. Professionalism,
6. Reengineering,
7. Just-in-time production,
8. Management by objectives,
9. Total employee involvement,
10. Participative management,
11. Total quality management,
12. Open-door policy,
13. Pay for performance,
14. Performance appraisal,
15. Professional pride,
16. Assessment centers,
17. Profiling for performance,
18. Personality inventory,
19. Value assessment, and so on.
Admittedly, they sound nice and are cosmetically attractive, but they are designed "for" workers but not "about" workers.
They measure workers as "things," which clearly are meant to produce "profits." This suggests profits are more important than people. It is the main reason they have not worked. Workers are not stupid.
A rule-of-thumb:
A healthy focus on people (process factor) and the profits will follow (product factor).
Everyone seems to be looking for the magic word, magic test, and magic bullet to turn things around. Notice it is always a thing that is sought not something "by" the workers but "for" the workers!
Yet, without workers, there are no products, no profits, no company, and workers have the answers. They have always had the answers.
The problem is that you have to ask workers the right questions to glean these answers. It is not an automatic proposition, where the company says, "Workers, what do you think?" Such questions are met always with silence.
Stoichiometry in chemistry teaches us that in order for a reaction to go to completion it must have the correct mix of mole fractions (workers) with the proper catalyst (worker involvement) to realize the results desired (meet the needs of the company and workers alike).
This represents a balanced equation.
Life is all about chemistry, and chemistry is all about life.
To ensure you never get fired there must be a place to work. You must own what you do; be a student of the job; a learner not a knower; a listener not a teller; a doer not a complainer; a thinker not an imitator.
No company on the face of the earth can any longer support a 40-year career in which the worker is a student of the job for 4-years and a coaster 36.
This does not mean you should point fingers at others who fall short of the mark. You should help them get better. You don't dodge problems. You embrace them. You appreciate your job. If you don't appreciate it, you should leave!
You do your best, pat yourself on the back, don't look for recognition or appreciation elsewhere. You are the total deal.
You accept peaks and valleys, good and bad days, and take surprises in stride.
You don't expect reward without risk, gain without pain, accomplishment without help.
You buy a ticket to adulthood and embrace your natural resistance to pain, self-doubt, confusion, and all the other idiosyncrasies that make you, you.
You become a leader by pushing the driver out of your chair, taking over the controls, and then driving yourself to your destiny. It will be a joyous ride because you are in charge.
To summarize:
1) Treat yourself as an employer not an employee. Think how to grow the business. It is your investment in cultural capital.
2) Don't manage up! Manage your boss by educating the boss on the tools, training and opportunities you need to do a good job. Be persistent and don't accept any excuses for not being trained in new skills. Nothing stays the same especially work.
3) Remember everyone has feelings and needs. That includes bosses. Tread lightly on others, as you would have them tread lightly on you.
4) Treat coworkers as customers. Make what you do user friendly to everyone.
5) Be more concerned about being useful than fearing being used. The reason you have a job is that you are value added to what is being done. Quit complaining!
6) Don't get buried in gender or ethnic politics. Losers use this to distract. Don't confuse role demands (the job) with self-demands (personal concerns). If the job is making you sick, leave! There is a near perfect job for all of us if we have the honesty to know ourselves as well as others do.
7) When you have a complaint, don't advertise it. Direct it to the source politely and in a timely fashion with emphasis on politely. Don't let anger fester. It will if you don't address the cause of your misery promptly. Manage your conflict. Conflict is the natural glue that holds work and workers together. You don't have to like everybody, but you do need to respect and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
8) Say what you will do. Do what you say. Trust is built on doing, not promising to
do. A dependable, trustworthy, and resourceful person is three-people-in-one.
9) Do what you love, love what you do. There is no job, no amount of money worth existing in misery. Work is love made visible. When it isn't, it destroys, as hate is a disease of the soul. It weakens the body and poisons the mind against being effective.
10) Be part of the problem. If you foul up, admit it. If someone else fouls up, help get him or her back on track. If the company falls on bad times, thank it for the good times, and help it get back on its feet.
11) Take work seriously not yourself. Have a sense of humor about the flawed person you are. Humor gives balance and perspective, and others will love you for it.
12) Make others better for your being there. Share knowledge, good will and cheer with others. Bring out their best and you'll feel better about yourself.
13) Be a student of whatever you do, a learner in quest of all that you could be.
14) Be a performer not a personality, a doer not a pleaser, a problem solver not a pyramid climber, make a difference; don't worry about making an impression. Let your work speak for itself.
15) Don't hesitate to share critical information essential to a project. If you feel you have been taken advantage of or passed over for promotion, fight for it, but don't punish your colleagues or the company for your angst.
16) Don't misuse or misappropriate company property be it a single postage stamp or an expensive tool. You are stealing from yourself.
17) Be ever on guard that the six silent killers don't bite you in the ass!
______________
See the books listed in this article, and similar essays on Dr. Fisher's blog and website (www.fisherofideas.com.
Monday, March 10, 2008
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND HIS SPECIAL BRAND OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND HIS SPECIAL BRAND OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 9, 2008
"His words were smoother than oil and yet be they very swords."
The Book of Common Prayer
"Through all the doubt and darkness, the danger and long tempest of war, I think it was only the American leader's (George Washington) indomitable soul that remained entirely constant."
English novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray ((1811 - 1863)
"I hope that calm counsel and constructive leadership will provide the steadying influence and the time necessary for the coming of new and more practical forms of representative government throughout the world wherein privilege will occupy a lesser place and welfare a greater."
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), message to Congress, January 4, 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression.
I BACKGROUND
Only a week ago I was in New York City enjoying its total ambiance with Beautiful Betty, my wife, when I was struck with a dominant presence that kept reminding me of this city's history, and its relationship with America's first president, George Washington. There is a bridge here named for him, parks and streets and circles, as well as buildings and monuments celebrating his connection to the isle of Manhattan.
There are literally hundreds of books written on Washington, and sometimes I think I've read most of them, which clearly cannot be the case. My interest in our first president is how he became the leader that he became. I would like to share some of my thoughts on this subject with you now and the possible lessons learned from his leadership.
II CHARACTER
George Washington was born of an affluent family, the first son of his father's second wife, Mary Ball Washington. She doted on her son as he doted on his half brother, Lawrence, who had military adventures and shared them with his brother.
Little is known about Washington's formal education, but it is agreed that it was meager. He showed a facility for arithmetic early on, and was a surveyor when he was 15, no longer in school.
Following his brother's footsteps, he rose to a major in the Virginia militia, training recruits in military discipline and weaponry. He was not yet 21.
His brother died of tuberculosis at 34, and Washington inherited part of his estate. Later, he inherited much of his father's estate. A young man, independently wealthy, he was no slave to baser appetites.
He was blessed by circumstances but circumspect about revealing his ambitions. Already, he understood the less he used his power the greater his influence; and the less he revealed his ambitions the less threatening he would be and the more likely they would be achieved.
He participated in the French and Indian Wars and had his first military victory at Fort Necessity when he surprised a small body of French troops. The French avenged this defeat on July 3, 1754. The twenty-two-year-old Washington reported dejectedly, "I went out and was soundly defeated."
LESSON: Washington was a learner, not a knower. He assessed all his activities without camouflage or rancor. He made it his business to determine the building blocks to character that would serve him for the long haul. He was a religious man in his commitment to excellence.
III DISCIPLINE
From his earliest childhood, he admired his father's discipline and his half-brothers use of self-discipline to promote his growth and development. He kept ledgers of what he did right and what he did wrong, and how he might rectify his errors. His ambition was not only for political and military prominence, but also for social distinction.
He practiced before a mirror with how he used his hands and body to express himself, and then studied the guide to correct manners and conduct in society.
He knew he was taller and better proportion than most men of his day at six feet two inches tall and 215 pounds, and so he used this as a conduit to satisfy his ambitions, feigning modesty to the contrary so as not to reveal his motivation.
Somewhat critical of his voice and command of English, he studied the language and practiced his elocution as if his life depended on it.
Early on, he concluded he was not a remarkable thinker, but felt satisfaction in the way men responded to him as commander. He analyzed this as if he were an independent source separate from himself, and concluded he had a capacity to take success and failure in stride without hubris or complaint.
This resilience was a measure of demonstrative courage and morale. It became his boilerplate.
LESSON: He was the quintessential didactic all his life. He kept track of his progress as if it were a report card with him the teacher and student recording the grades. His reserve, which was so characteristic of him, was something he coached into being. It supported his ramrod character.
IV USES OF SYMBOLISM
From his look, stance, how he carried himself and the manner of his walk, people said, "That fellow will go far." He was known for his manner and dress, but most importantly for his presence.
One of his initial goals was to become the best horseman in the colonies. He didn't simply ride a horse; he rode it with authority and command. Already at twenty, his horsemanship was noted as a surveyor. This became part of his mystique when later he was in command of troops.
Already as a young man, he demonstrated the persona of command, and a person that stood apart. A notable peccadillo was his aversion to be touch. Touching indicated familiarity, which was antithetical to his personality.
In the late 1770s, when the Continental Congress had formed, and it was on the verge of declaring its independence from Great Britain, an army had to be created and a commander-in-chief chosen.
John Hancock, then president of the Continental Congress, campaigned for the position; Washington did not. Hancock thought surely he would be chosen for such a command. John Adams thought differently. He designated that role for George Washington instead. He did this with a carefully presented dossier of Washington's achievements, which won approval.
Washington attended these Continental Congress meetings in the full regalia of the uniform of a general of the Virginia militia.
He accepted the position of Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army with modesty and humility, and wrote his wife, Martha, that he did everything possible to avoid this travail when, clearly, he had been quietly and symbolically campaigning for the command.
LESSON: Great ambition is a product of character and discipline, but great ambition that is palpable and brooding neutralizes its effective. Symbolism is the single most powerful weapon of the ambitious. It is expressed in a language beyond words or bellicose but in symbolic interaction. This metaphor breeds allegiance and enthusiasm, which is distilled into passionate followership.
V AS A LISTENER
Washington was aware as a child that he was surrounded by people with casual grace and gymnastic intellect, who could discuss and argue critical questions of the day beyond the purview of his limited education and comprehension. He found it natural to be a listener than a talker. It was equally natural to ask polite questions to inspire learning. This would spur the conversation on, and people would say how bright and affable Washington was, when he had hardly said a word. Making people feel wise is the most powerful kind of flattery.
Listening was characteristic of Washington as a boy, effectively using it throughout his social, military and political career. He would gauge the quality of what he heard, and process it to his benefit.
John Adams appreciated Washington, in part, because he was a good listener. Adams was a thinker who loved to talk; loved to command the attention of an audience, but hated to listen. Thomas Jefferson loved to hear his own voice, too, and was never threatened by Washington, but was by Adams. They were both cut from the same cloth.
LESSON: There is no learning when you are talking expressing what you already know. You learn by reading, doing, and listening. Listening is the hardest work of all. It is why most of us are poor listeners. Washington decided listening would be an important contributor to his didactic progress. Listening is the hallmark of good leadership
VI GRACE UNDER PRESSURE
The courageous stance of the colonial militia at Breed's Hill has come to be known as the "battle of Bunker hill." The Americans ran out of ammunition but lost only 200 men out of 1,000 whereas the British lost 1,000 out of a force of 2,000. This heightened colonial resistance and morale. It also relieved general Thomas Gage of his command for general John Howe.
General Howe then retook Boston, and had victory after victory the rest of 1775 and through most of 1776. It was the Continental Armies darkest hour.
In August 1776, Washington was unable to hold New York against General Howe, then losing Long Island, Harlem Heights, and White Plains.
Howe was set to capture Washington's total army, and thus quash the rebellion, but an impenetrable Manhattan fog rolled in from the harbor to completely cover the Continental Armies retreat.
Morale couldn't be lower, the army had inadequate food, clothing, and ammunition. This produced rumbling all the way to Philadelphia for Washington to step down.
In the midst of this, the Continental's general Charles Lee, who wanted Washington's job, relished his many defeats, while failing to send his troops when Washington requested reinforcements.
Lee was in constant conversation with his coconspirators including colonel Joseph Reed.
Accidentally, Washington opened a letter from Lee to Reed, which included reference to Washington's crumbling command and "it was time for a change in leadership."
Washington penned a note to it, "I opened this by accident. I thought it was office business," and sent it on to Lee.
This ended the intrigue. Lee was later captured by the British and imprisoned in England. Colonel Reed remained loyal to Washington during the rest of the war. He was never sanctioned or rebuked.
LESSON: Picture the darkest of times with little or no evidence of resolving the difficulty. Imagine accidentally uncovering a plot to dislodge you from command, and you have an appreciation of Washington's situation.
He had little difficulty separating self-demands (his fragile ego) from role-demands (the job at hand), or his "ideal self" (how he ought to be) from his "real self" (how he actually was).
When you have such balance, such extraordinary equilibrium, you cannot help but see the situation clearly, which Washington did.
He didn't become paranoid; didn't go off halfcocked; knew he had to maintain the rectitude symbolically consistent with his character and office; knew he needed every man.
He willed his men on by dressing every day resplendently in his uniform with all its campaign ribbons and with the care of a victorious general.
Washington's intuitive sense spoke volumes: never is one so much at the top of his game than at the moment of supreme distress.
VII THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
New York City and New York State were in the hands of the enemy. 1776 was the Continental Army's darkest hour. Washington knew Howe would be launching a major campaign in 1777 to control the Hudson and end the war.
It is December 1776, and a terrible dismal 1776 shows no prospects for a better 1777. Howe has stationed troops along the Hudson River at strategic points but has batten down for a spring offensive.
It is one of the worst winters in memory, and the temperature is consistently in the teens to low thirties.
Washington assesses his progress and setbacks and invites his generals and other officers to join him in this assessment.
He listens and sees a pattern: the Continental Army has always done what the British expect. Now, Hessians or German mercenaries, hired by the British, are doing much of the fighting and they have proven to be brutal adversaries.
Washington decides to cross the Delaware River at Trenton, New Jersey on the night of December 24, 1776 and to arrive before dawn.
He is looking for a surprise attack thinking the Hessians would have been celebrating Christmas Eve.
But before they embark, he has his officers read Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis" to their men. This is what the pamphlet says in part:
"These are the times that try men's souls. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value . . .Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before."
It was written from Paine's talented pen, but spoke to the soul of Washington.
Washington launches the boats at 11 p.m. and finds the river badly frozen making it nearly impossible to move horses and canons across. Instead of arriving in the predawn, they cross the river by 4 a.m., and don't arrive at Valley Forge until 8 a.m., with little chance of surprise.
Washington considers abandoning the campaign and returning to the other side of the river. He counsels with his officers, and they agree to go forward with Paine's words echoing in their minds:
"It is not necessary to win the war on the battlefield; he must not lose it there."
The Hessians are surprised, sleeping off their partying Christmas Eve. It is a stunning victory with over 1,000 Hessians prisoners captured and the fort's commander Colonel Henry Knox killed. The fighting was over in less than an hour.
A Hessian colonel failed to arrive with the reinforcement promised. He decided instead to visit a young widow in Mount Holly, New Jersey, 20 miles away. The lady that delayed the Hessian colonel is reputed to have been Betsy Ross, designer of the American flag.
LESSON: This was consistent with Edward de Bono's now famous "lateral thinking," or thinking outside the box. Washington decided that speed and stealth, and striking the enemy where it is weak and hitting it hard there would have to be their strategy.
His other generals would follow his lead, and no one more successful than general Benedict Arnold, more about him shortly.
VIII SALESMANSHIP
The Continental Army has shrunken to only 5,000 men with the British more than 30,000 strong. It is December 31, 1976, and most of the fight has been taken out of the men despite this latest victory. Most of Washington's troops have completed their enlistment obligation, and are ready to return to their homes.
On this day, he assembles his troops, and addresses them candidly. He commends them for their loyal and courageous service. And then says,
"Your country is at stake. We know not how to spare you. If you stay, each man will be given a $10 bonus."
This was more than a month's pay, and money that the Continental Congress did not have to give. It sounds as if a paltry sum, but more than half of his men stayed, and as the word spread of the victory at Valley Forge, new recruits flooded in.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was attempting to sell Louise XVI on entering the war in support of America. This was the court of Marie Antoinette, who like the king, would lose her head during the French Revolution of 1789, during the Reign of Terror.
LESSON: The fundamental nature of selling is that you sell the sizzle not the steak. The buyer translates the sizzle into the steak-of-his-mind.
Washington appealed to the patriotic spirit of his men who were walking with rags on their feet. He sold the sizzle of the steak with the promise of a financial bonus.
All they needed was a little sizzle to support their fragile wings of conviction, and that was the promise of money.
Franklin's problem in France was more challenging. He had to make the sizzle representative of victory, not only of the battle, but also of the war. He played on the French's hatred of everything British. This hatred was part of the sizzle, but it needed to be seasoned with a suitable victory. That would come with the Battle of Saratoga.
IX MANNERS, MORALS & VANITY
Imagine the British army the most powerful army in the world, and the British navy ruler of the seven seas, and then imagine an army of 12, 13, 14, and 15 year-old-boys, and old men, and you have the Continental Army for the most part.
Americans were ill trained, if trained at all, undisciplined, unsophisticated, poorly educated, and primarily farmers with little interest in city life or people of power.
These citizen soldiers don't like rules and regulations. They find Washington a hard taskmaster, but fair, consistent and unwavering. It rallies them.
Now consider general John Burgoyne. He loves the good life and travels with an ample supply of his favorites foods and liquors, in fact, with 30 carts of both. He likes to gamble and is known as "Gentleman Johnny." He also has a reputation as a playwright.
The Saratoga Campaign of October 1777 was meant to end the rebellion instead it turned the rebellion into an American Revolution that would last another five years.
Burgoyne's 8,000 troops were to move down the Hudson River to join Howe's 13,000 troops moving up the Hudson to take control of the Hudson River at Saratoga, and thus cut the Continental Army in half and take control of all its supply lanes.
It didn't happen.
Burgoyne failed to capture the fort because Howe didn't show up.
Howe was fixated on recapturing Philadelphia. He succeeded with his 13,000 men on 260 ships, but it was a victory that may have cost the British the war.
Word of Burgoyne's defeat was what Franklin needed to persuade the French to declare war on Great Britain and join the Americans in its fight for independence, which France did.
LESSON: Leaders are human, and perhaps even more human than most people. Therefore, it is likely that they have gigantic talents and equally gigantic shortcomings.
We tend to applaud their strengths or what they do well, and forgive their weaknesses, or what they do poorly.
We make them more than human so that we can treat them as less than human if they fail to perform as gods and only as men.
Generals Burgoyne and Howe were very capable generals but flawed human beings.
Burgoyne was a hedonist and Howe was an obsessive compulsive.
Washington was neither. Nor was he as brilliant a general as Burgoyne or as great a strategist as Howe. Equally true, he wasn't weighed down with their baggage.
X FATE
General William Howe could chalk it up to fate that the fog saved the Continental Army when it successfully retreated from New York under siege.
It may have been fate as well when officer Patrick Ferguson of the British army had Washington on horseback in his sights at Brandywine Creek and did not shoot. It was 18th century protocol not to kill the commanding officer on the battlefield as he roamed up and down his troop lines.
Then was it fate that general Benedict Arnold, the great strategist and bold warrior on the battlefield at Saratoga, should see the credit for his victory go to general Horatio Gates?
Arnold fought Indian style, putting snipers in trees and in blinds, causing the British army to constantly retreat and regroup.
It marked the most significant victory of the Continental Army. More than 6,000 British troops were captured and sent home.
But the celebrity went to general Horatio Gates, who was made senior officer of the combined Gates-Arnold command although he was an ineffective field commander.
Was it fate, then, when Benedict Arnold had the British general Simon Fraser in his sights and killed him with three shots disregarding 18th century protocol, which cemented the Saratoga victory?
Arnold was then shot but in the leg. When asked where he was hit, Arnold said, "It's my leg I wish it was my heart."
It was a prophetic reply. He would have been the hero of that battle and the Revolutionary War, but instead lived, and eventually became a traitor joining the British. To this day we call someone who has betrayed a trust, "a Benedict Arnold."
LESSON: The fickle finger of fate is not an honest or sympathetic Indian.
Any of us can look at moments in our life that pure luck or circumstance changed our plight and not necessarily because of our pluck.
Read any history of a prominent member of society and were it not for this or that fickle finger of fate he or she might never have made the cut to notice.
Fate touches all our lives, but we give it other names such as luck, bad fortune, karma, or simply s___ happens.
Washington felt from his earliest recollections that the hand of Providence guided him. It was something he believed in so completely that at his darkest hours came his greatest calm. He wanted from the beginning to make his mark and to be remembered as if an actor on a stage reading lines Providence provided.
XI Summary
When you think of leaders and leadership, wonder how they stack up in terms of character and discipline, as a listener, grace under pressure, thinking outside the box, salesmanship, manners, morals & vanity, and fate. Our first president used them all and well. My wonder is why they have fallen into disrepute. What do you think?
________
See John Buchanan's "The Road To Valley Forge: How Washington Built the Army that Won the Revolution" (John Wiley & Sons 2004), or any other of hundreds of books on the subject. This is an overview from my perspective and reading.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 9, 2008
"His words were smoother than oil and yet be they very swords."
The Book of Common Prayer
"Through all the doubt and darkness, the danger and long tempest of war, I think it was only the American leader's (George Washington) indomitable soul that remained entirely constant."
English novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray ((1811 - 1863)
"I hope that calm counsel and constructive leadership will provide the steadying influence and the time necessary for the coming of new and more practical forms of representative government throughout the world wherein privilege will occupy a lesser place and welfare a greater."
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945), message to Congress, January 4, 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression.
I BACKGROUND
Only a week ago I was in New York City enjoying its total ambiance with Beautiful Betty, my wife, when I was struck with a dominant presence that kept reminding me of this city's history, and its relationship with America's first president, George Washington. There is a bridge here named for him, parks and streets and circles, as well as buildings and monuments celebrating his connection to the isle of Manhattan.
There are literally hundreds of books written on Washington, and sometimes I think I've read most of them, which clearly cannot be the case. My interest in our first president is how he became the leader that he became. I would like to share some of my thoughts on this subject with you now and the possible lessons learned from his leadership.
II CHARACTER
George Washington was born of an affluent family, the first son of his father's second wife, Mary Ball Washington. She doted on her son as he doted on his half brother, Lawrence, who had military adventures and shared them with his brother.
Little is known about Washington's formal education, but it is agreed that it was meager. He showed a facility for arithmetic early on, and was a surveyor when he was 15, no longer in school.
Following his brother's footsteps, he rose to a major in the Virginia militia, training recruits in military discipline and weaponry. He was not yet 21.
His brother died of tuberculosis at 34, and Washington inherited part of his estate. Later, he inherited much of his father's estate. A young man, independently wealthy, he was no slave to baser appetites.
He was blessed by circumstances but circumspect about revealing his ambitions. Already, he understood the less he used his power the greater his influence; and the less he revealed his ambitions the less threatening he would be and the more likely they would be achieved.
He participated in the French and Indian Wars and had his first military victory at Fort Necessity when he surprised a small body of French troops. The French avenged this defeat on July 3, 1754. The twenty-two-year-old Washington reported dejectedly, "I went out and was soundly defeated."
LESSON: Washington was a learner, not a knower. He assessed all his activities without camouflage or rancor. He made it his business to determine the building blocks to character that would serve him for the long haul. He was a religious man in his commitment to excellence.
III DISCIPLINE
From his earliest childhood, he admired his father's discipline and his half-brothers use of self-discipline to promote his growth and development. He kept ledgers of what he did right and what he did wrong, and how he might rectify his errors. His ambition was not only for political and military prominence, but also for social distinction.
He practiced before a mirror with how he used his hands and body to express himself, and then studied the guide to correct manners and conduct in society.
He knew he was taller and better proportion than most men of his day at six feet two inches tall and 215 pounds, and so he used this as a conduit to satisfy his ambitions, feigning modesty to the contrary so as not to reveal his motivation.
Somewhat critical of his voice and command of English, he studied the language and practiced his elocution as if his life depended on it.
Early on, he concluded he was not a remarkable thinker, but felt satisfaction in the way men responded to him as commander. He analyzed this as if he were an independent source separate from himself, and concluded he had a capacity to take success and failure in stride without hubris or complaint.
This resilience was a measure of demonstrative courage and morale. It became his boilerplate.
LESSON: He was the quintessential didactic all his life. He kept track of his progress as if it were a report card with him the teacher and student recording the grades. His reserve, which was so characteristic of him, was something he coached into being. It supported his ramrod character.
IV USES OF SYMBOLISM
From his look, stance, how he carried himself and the manner of his walk, people said, "That fellow will go far." He was known for his manner and dress, but most importantly for his presence.
One of his initial goals was to become the best horseman in the colonies. He didn't simply ride a horse; he rode it with authority and command. Already at twenty, his horsemanship was noted as a surveyor. This became part of his mystique when later he was in command of troops.
Already as a young man, he demonstrated the persona of command, and a person that stood apart. A notable peccadillo was his aversion to be touch. Touching indicated familiarity, which was antithetical to his personality.
In the late 1770s, when the Continental Congress had formed, and it was on the verge of declaring its independence from Great Britain, an army had to be created and a commander-in-chief chosen.
John Hancock, then president of the Continental Congress, campaigned for the position; Washington did not. Hancock thought surely he would be chosen for such a command. John Adams thought differently. He designated that role for George Washington instead. He did this with a carefully presented dossier of Washington's achievements, which won approval.
Washington attended these Continental Congress meetings in the full regalia of the uniform of a general of the Virginia militia.
He accepted the position of Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army with modesty and humility, and wrote his wife, Martha, that he did everything possible to avoid this travail when, clearly, he had been quietly and symbolically campaigning for the command.
LESSON: Great ambition is a product of character and discipline, but great ambition that is palpable and brooding neutralizes its effective. Symbolism is the single most powerful weapon of the ambitious. It is expressed in a language beyond words or bellicose but in symbolic interaction. This metaphor breeds allegiance and enthusiasm, which is distilled into passionate followership.
V AS A LISTENER
Washington was aware as a child that he was surrounded by people with casual grace and gymnastic intellect, who could discuss and argue critical questions of the day beyond the purview of his limited education and comprehension. He found it natural to be a listener than a talker. It was equally natural to ask polite questions to inspire learning. This would spur the conversation on, and people would say how bright and affable Washington was, when he had hardly said a word. Making people feel wise is the most powerful kind of flattery.
Listening was characteristic of Washington as a boy, effectively using it throughout his social, military and political career. He would gauge the quality of what he heard, and process it to his benefit.
John Adams appreciated Washington, in part, because he was a good listener. Adams was a thinker who loved to talk; loved to command the attention of an audience, but hated to listen. Thomas Jefferson loved to hear his own voice, too, and was never threatened by Washington, but was by Adams. They were both cut from the same cloth.
LESSON: There is no learning when you are talking expressing what you already know. You learn by reading, doing, and listening. Listening is the hardest work of all. It is why most of us are poor listeners. Washington decided listening would be an important contributor to his didactic progress. Listening is the hallmark of good leadership
VI GRACE UNDER PRESSURE
The courageous stance of the colonial militia at Breed's Hill has come to be known as the "battle of Bunker hill." The Americans ran out of ammunition but lost only 200 men out of 1,000 whereas the British lost 1,000 out of a force of 2,000. This heightened colonial resistance and morale. It also relieved general Thomas Gage of his command for general John Howe.
General Howe then retook Boston, and had victory after victory the rest of 1775 and through most of 1776. It was the Continental Armies darkest hour.
In August 1776, Washington was unable to hold New York against General Howe, then losing Long Island, Harlem Heights, and White Plains.
Howe was set to capture Washington's total army, and thus quash the rebellion, but an impenetrable Manhattan fog rolled in from the harbor to completely cover the Continental Armies retreat.
Morale couldn't be lower, the army had inadequate food, clothing, and ammunition. This produced rumbling all the way to Philadelphia for Washington to step down.
In the midst of this, the Continental's general Charles Lee, who wanted Washington's job, relished his many defeats, while failing to send his troops when Washington requested reinforcements.
Lee was in constant conversation with his coconspirators including colonel Joseph Reed.
Accidentally, Washington opened a letter from Lee to Reed, which included reference to Washington's crumbling command and "it was time for a change in leadership."
Washington penned a note to it, "I opened this by accident. I thought it was office business," and sent it on to Lee.
This ended the intrigue. Lee was later captured by the British and imprisoned in England. Colonel Reed remained loyal to Washington during the rest of the war. He was never sanctioned or rebuked.
LESSON: Picture the darkest of times with little or no evidence of resolving the difficulty. Imagine accidentally uncovering a plot to dislodge you from command, and you have an appreciation of Washington's situation.
He had little difficulty separating self-demands (his fragile ego) from role-demands (the job at hand), or his "ideal self" (how he ought to be) from his "real self" (how he actually was).
When you have such balance, such extraordinary equilibrium, you cannot help but see the situation clearly, which Washington did.
He didn't become paranoid; didn't go off halfcocked; knew he had to maintain the rectitude symbolically consistent with his character and office; knew he needed every man.
He willed his men on by dressing every day resplendently in his uniform with all its campaign ribbons and with the care of a victorious general.
Washington's intuitive sense spoke volumes: never is one so much at the top of his game than at the moment of supreme distress.
VII THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
New York City and New York State were in the hands of the enemy. 1776 was the Continental Army's darkest hour. Washington knew Howe would be launching a major campaign in 1777 to control the Hudson and end the war.
It is December 1776, and a terrible dismal 1776 shows no prospects for a better 1777. Howe has stationed troops along the Hudson River at strategic points but has batten down for a spring offensive.
It is one of the worst winters in memory, and the temperature is consistently in the teens to low thirties.
Washington assesses his progress and setbacks and invites his generals and other officers to join him in this assessment.
He listens and sees a pattern: the Continental Army has always done what the British expect. Now, Hessians or German mercenaries, hired by the British, are doing much of the fighting and they have proven to be brutal adversaries.
Washington decides to cross the Delaware River at Trenton, New Jersey on the night of December 24, 1776 and to arrive before dawn.
He is looking for a surprise attack thinking the Hessians would have been celebrating Christmas Eve.
But before they embark, he has his officers read Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis" to their men. This is what the pamphlet says in part:
"These are the times that try men's souls. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value . . .Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before."
It was written from Paine's talented pen, but spoke to the soul of Washington.
Washington launches the boats at 11 p.m. and finds the river badly frozen making it nearly impossible to move horses and canons across. Instead of arriving in the predawn, they cross the river by 4 a.m., and don't arrive at Valley Forge until 8 a.m., with little chance of surprise.
Washington considers abandoning the campaign and returning to the other side of the river. He counsels with his officers, and they agree to go forward with Paine's words echoing in their minds:
"It is not necessary to win the war on the battlefield; he must not lose it there."
The Hessians are surprised, sleeping off their partying Christmas Eve. It is a stunning victory with over 1,000 Hessians prisoners captured and the fort's commander Colonel Henry Knox killed. The fighting was over in less than an hour.
A Hessian colonel failed to arrive with the reinforcement promised. He decided instead to visit a young widow in Mount Holly, New Jersey, 20 miles away. The lady that delayed the Hessian colonel is reputed to have been Betsy Ross, designer of the American flag.
LESSON: This was consistent with Edward de Bono's now famous "lateral thinking," or thinking outside the box. Washington decided that speed and stealth, and striking the enemy where it is weak and hitting it hard there would have to be their strategy.
His other generals would follow his lead, and no one more successful than general Benedict Arnold, more about him shortly.
VIII SALESMANSHIP
The Continental Army has shrunken to only 5,000 men with the British more than 30,000 strong. It is December 31, 1976, and most of the fight has been taken out of the men despite this latest victory. Most of Washington's troops have completed their enlistment obligation, and are ready to return to their homes.
On this day, he assembles his troops, and addresses them candidly. He commends them for their loyal and courageous service. And then says,
"Your country is at stake. We know not how to spare you. If you stay, each man will be given a $10 bonus."
This was more than a month's pay, and money that the Continental Congress did not have to give. It sounds as if a paltry sum, but more than half of his men stayed, and as the word spread of the victory at Valley Forge, new recruits flooded in.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was attempting to sell Louise XVI on entering the war in support of America. This was the court of Marie Antoinette, who like the king, would lose her head during the French Revolution of 1789, during the Reign of Terror.
LESSON: The fundamental nature of selling is that you sell the sizzle not the steak. The buyer translates the sizzle into the steak-of-his-mind.
Washington appealed to the patriotic spirit of his men who were walking with rags on their feet. He sold the sizzle of the steak with the promise of a financial bonus.
All they needed was a little sizzle to support their fragile wings of conviction, and that was the promise of money.
Franklin's problem in France was more challenging. He had to make the sizzle representative of victory, not only of the battle, but also of the war. He played on the French's hatred of everything British. This hatred was part of the sizzle, but it needed to be seasoned with a suitable victory. That would come with the Battle of Saratoga.
IX MANNERS, MORALS & VANITY
Imagine the British army the most powerful army in the world, and the British navy ruler of the seven seas, and then imagine an army of 12, 13, 14, and 15 year-old-boys, and old men, and you have the Continental Army for the most part.
Americans were ill trained, if trained at all, undisciplined, unsophisticated, poorly educated, and primarily farmers with little interest in city life or people of power.
These citizen soldiers don't like rules and regulations. They find Washington a hard taskmaster, but fair, consistent and unwavering. It rallies them.
Now consider general John Burgoyne. He loves the good life and travels with an ample supply of his favorites foods and liquors, in fact, with 30 carts of both. He likes to gamble and is known as "Gentleman Johnny." He also has a reputation as a playwright.
The Saratoga Campaign of October 1777 was meant to end the rebellion instead it turned the rebellion into an American Revolution that would last another five years.
Burgoyne's 8,000 troops were to move down the Hudson River to join Howe's 13,000 troops moving up the Hudson to take control of the Hudson River at Saratoga, and thus cut the Continental Army in half and take control of all its supply lanes.
It didn't happen.
Burgoyne failed to capture the fort because Howe didn't show up.
Howe was fixated on recapturing Philadelphia. He succeeded with his 13,000 men on 260 ships, but it was a victory that may have cost the British the war.
Word of Burgoyne's defeat was what Franklin needed to persuade the French to declare war on Great Britain and join the Americans in its fight for independence, which France did.
LESSON: Leaders are human, and perhaps even more human than most people. Therefore, it is likely that they have gigantic talents and equally gigantic shortcomings.
We tend to applaud their strengths or what they do well, and forgive their weaknesses, or what they do poorly.
We make them more than human so that we can treat them as less than human if they fail to perform as gods and only as men.
Generals Burgoyne and Howe were very capable generals but flawed human beings.
Burgoyne was a hedonist and Howe was an obsessive compulsive.
Washington was neither. Nor was he as brilliant a general as Burgoyne or as great a strategist as Howe. Equally true, he wasn't weighed down with their baggage.
X FATE
General William Howe could chalk it up to fate that the fog saved the Continental Army when it successfully retreated from New York under siege.
It may have been fate as well when officer Patrick Ferguson of the British army had Washington on horseback in his sights at Brandywine Creek and did not shoot. It was 18th century protocol not to kill the commanding officer on the battlefield as he roamed up and down his troop lines.
Then was it fate that general Benedict Arnold, the great strategist and bold warrior on the battlefield at Saratoga, should see the credit for his victory go to general Horatio Gates?
Arnold fought Indian style, putting snipers in trees and in blinds, causing the British army to constantly retreat and regroup.
It marked the most significant victory of the Continental Army. More than 6,000 British troops were captured and sent home.
But the celebrity went to general Horatio Gates, who was made senior officer of the combined Gates-Arnold command although he was an ineffective field commander.
Was it fate, then, when Benedict Arnold had the British general Simon Fraser in his sights and killed him with three shots disregarding 18th century protocol, which cemented the Saratoga victory?
Arnold was then shot but in the leg. When asked where he was hit, Arnold said, "It's my leg I wish it was my heart."
It was a prophetic reply. He would have been the hero of that battle and the Revolutionary War, but instead lived, and eventually became a traitor joining the British. To this day we call someone who has betrayed a trust, "a Benedict Arnold."
LESSON: The fickle finger of fate is not an honest or sympathetic Indian.
Any of us can look at moments in our life that pure luck or circumstance changed our plight and not necessarily because of our pluck.
Read any history of a prominent member of society and were it not for this or that fickle finger of fate he or she might never have made the cut to notice.
Fate touches all our lives, but we give it other names such as luck, bad fortune, karma, or simply s___ happens.
Washington felt from his earliest recollections that the hand of Providence guided him. It was something he believed in so completely that at his darkest hours came his greatest calm. He wanted from the beginning to make his mark and to be remembered as if an actor on a stage reading lines Providence provided.
XI Summary
When you think of leaders and leadership, wonder how they stack up in terms of character and discipline, as a listener, grace under pressure, thinking outside the box, salesmanship, manners, morals & vanity, and fate. Our first president used them all and well. My wonder is why they have fallen into disrepute. What do you think?
________
See John Buchanan's "The Road To Valley Forge: How Washington Built the Army that Won the Revolution" (John Wiley & Sons 2004), or any other of hundreds of books on the subject. This is an overview from my perspective and reading.
Friday, March 07, 2008
AN IOWAN IN NEW YORK CITY, WHERE ALL ROADS MEET, FALL APART & COME TOGETHER!
AN IOWAN IN NEW YORK CITY,
WHERE ALL ROADS MEET, FALL APART & COME TOGETHER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 5, 2008
“Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,
And always blind, and often tipsy;
Sometimes for years and years together,
Bestowing honour, pudding, pence,
You can’t imagine why or whence;
Then in a moment – Presto, pass!
Your joys are withered like the grass.”
Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802 – 1839), poem titled “The Haunted Tree.”
The fickle finger of fate touches us all, even if we don’t believe in such things as fate. I was reminded of this most recently on my return to our Eternal City, the Big Apple, New York City.
I
Beautiful Betty (BB), my wife, was attending a conference of school executives for the National Association of Independent Schools. She is Business Manager of Hillel, a Jewish Day School, preschool through eighth grade, located in Tampa, Florida.
The theme of BB’s conference was “Schools of the Future: Embracing The Educational Renaissance.”
The conference had some great speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative”; Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind”; Roland Fryer, author of “Economics of Incentives”; and Faith Popcorn, author of “The Trend Oracle,” among other notable educators and thinkers. I would have loved to hear them speak, but I came in our Friday to stay the weekend as the conference was ending.
II
Friday night we attended the Broadway musical “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theatre, a play, which has received rave reviews and been on Broadway for sometime. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the “Lion King,” which I saw with BB in Toronto earlier in 2003 when I was there to speak at the Conference Board of Canada on the “Fisher Paradigm.”
Not being familiar with television’s “American Idol,” I found it interesting that BB thought the singing in “Wicked” resembled the screaming of contestants on that show. I thought it sounded more like screeching.
“Wicked” is the story of the Good Witch and Bad Witch as prelude to Dorothy and “The Wizard of Oz.” The story line was interesting, but the play was mediocre, in my view, but I’m certainly no expert when it comes to musicals.
III
On Saturday, we took a bus tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, Harlem, Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, Central Park, Greenwich Village and several points between. We could get off the bus wherever we wanted to and visit some site, and get another bus later as tour buses would come on the half hour.
In Manhattan, we got off and took a tour of the Guggenheim Museum. Featured were the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, born in China, resident of Japan, and now a New Yorker since 1995.
The title of his exhibition was “I want to believe.” The exhibition was a little heavy for my tastes, mainly because it was so strategically provocative. I suffer from the same heavy hand.
Cai is creative and an assimilator of ancient mythology, military history, Taoist metaphysics, cosmological science, Maoist revolutionary tactics, and most demonstrative of all, pyrotechnic technology and terrorist violence.
He puts blunt images on canvas of burnt impressions of the world as he sees and has experienced it. This is shocking, disturbing, and not a pretty sight. Cai is telling us, “Welcome to the violent modern world.”
For example, suspended from the ceiling in the center of the museum are two automobiles with rods of light as arrows penetrating the vehicles from every angle, illustrating the combative clash of cultures between the East and West for this lucrative market.
If that is not disturbing enough, there are lions suspended along the passageway to the next level with hundreds of arrows penetrating their bodies. My mind thought of the nature of overkill that is unique to our postmodern society.
Everything is symbolic. Nothing is more symbolic than the work titled, “Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows.” It illustrates China’s dramatic new and dominant role on the world stage. Displayed is an excavated fishing boat with the hull pierced with 3,000 arrows as its support structure, and decorated with a Chinese flag that flutters at the stern from the wind of an electric fan. Imagine, if you will, only the frame of this fishing boat is covered with “Western” arrows to make it viable. This is powerful imagery to say the least.
I am neither an art critic nor a connoisseur of art, but as disturbing as these works the pyrotechnic displays were more disturbing. It reminded me that the East has never forgotten or forgiven the United States for its nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was dropped on those cities in 1945 to bring World War II to an end. Tens of thousands of civilians perished in that mushroom cloud
Cai uses the mushroom cloud to deftly transmute pejorative nuclear tropes into “art” and “culture.”
There are several videos along the way that you can view which comprise gunpowder-exploding events. At first, I could not comprehend the sense of these until I studied the several canvases with imprints of these explosions as montages.
Remember the Rorschach inkblot test, where you were shown inkblot patterns, and invited to interpret them in terms of images, which you thought the blots might represent. Such interpretation was meant to unlock the unconscious mind. Cai is attempting to do this with these canvases. He uses the violence of our times with atomic explosion and suicide bombing to underscore his overall strategy of art as a tool of cultural provocation. He succeeds.
Cai is a student of history and paradigm shifts. He sees violence inextricably linked to creativity with violence a transformation phenomenon. He does this by taking us back to the invention of gunpowder and a new kind of warfare, and then moving swiftly to the development of nuclear weaponry. Now he sees in the confusion and chaos the current shift away from high science to the current rash of suicide bombings. He does with visual art what I attempted to do with words in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).
He understands the fragility of human nature and its penchant for oscillating paradigm shifts within the history of civilization. He uses his art to display the dialectical nature of man as a self-creator and self-destroyer in a climate of constant change oblivious to his ultimate race to self-extinction.
I told BB when I left that I did not like the show. It was too disturbing; too much; too clearly provocative of our turbulent times on our way to eternity, wrenching the mind from its complacency to its benign and terrifying nature.
IV
We waited to be picked up by our tour bus and dropped off shortly thereafter at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had been many years since I had last visited this museum having forgotten how mammoth an undertaking it is to take it all in. We were there for more than three hours and hardly touched the surface.
This was BB’s first visit to New York City and therefore to this museum. No one enjoys art, sculpture, architecture and antique artifacts more than she does. I am less cosmopolitan in my tastes than she is. She loves everything. I am impressed with the artifacts that are thousands of years old, illustrating the genius of man over the centuries. This includes the works of artisans making jewelry out of precious stones, elaborate paintings on the surface of clay pottery, hand formed metallic arms and armor, eating and drinking utensils, but after a while it is too much. BB never tires of studying such craftsmanship. Sometimes I think she approaches the monumental patience of those that once produced them.
Man is storyteller and all art is telling a story. In the Greek and Roman Art gallery, I overheard a mother asking her daughter, no more than ten or eleven, what story a Greek vase was telling. She answered her mother promptly explaining the Greek mythology it depicted and the story it told. I was embarrassed that I didn’t pay more attention to this aspect of my education.
It isn’t only the Greeks and Romans that adored the human form, it is apparent in the Arts of Africa, Egyptian Art, and Modern Art, all different art forms and cultures, and all with an eye rising out of their respective cultures.
Now Medieval Art, which I have seen tons of in museums across Europe, idealizes the human form in almost a beatific way that makes it seem less human. It is art that tires me whereas these other expressions, which are less idyllic and more primitive, do not. I wonder if it is because these other art forms are more honest, or less iconic.
In any case, it is apparent that innovation, creativity and great craftsmanship are a natural expression of the human spirit throughout time.
It happened to me again while I was walking through this museum. I felt timeless. I felt as if I could step into Einstein’s time warp and go back to the future where the future and past collide into a common collage. People like myself produced all this, finding some way to get beyond their petty problems to touch eternity.
In the Guggenheim, you had a headset with a panel of 15 numbered commentaries that accompanied you around the gallery. This was also available at The Metropolitan, as well as guided tours, but we chose to go wandering about on our own.
My favorite gallery was Modern Art, not BB’s favorite, but she tolerates my preference. Unfortunately, it was in our final hour when fatigue was visiting us, and I was becoming increasingly aware of my shingles, which I put out of my mind to take this trip. Antibiotics and painkillers kept the shingles abated, but also sapped my strength.
That said the abstract and impressionism wing of Modern Art once again transfixed me. Each artist tells a different story. Matisse shows his joy of life in nudes dancing in a ring, playing musical instruments, or standing or lying in indolent grace. He captures the same verve with his still lives of a basket of fruit or a view of the sea through a curtain.
The gallery also displays works of O’Keefe and Dali. I sometimes thought the work of O’Keefe’s was that of Dali. O’Keefe’s depiction of skeletal horns titled “From the Faraway Nearby” had the florid flow of Dali. I had the same problem with Matisse and Gauguin. I looked for Munch, Hopper and Peter Max, but if they were there I didn't see them.
Then we were in the middle of abstract art of Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Klee, Klimt, Braque, Modigliani, and Rouault. Most of the cubism on display was created before or early in the twentieth century up to World War II. It was a period of ripeness and decay, many highs and many more lows. That is what I like about this art. It flourishes in the worst of times, moving away from sensible landscapes and impressive nude studies to color patterns on flat surfaces that speak volumes moving on to the crazy quilt of cubism, which has been called “the sum of destructions.” This art is a record of chaos and confusion, which I find calming perhaps because it seems most honest and naked.
As I was thinking this, BB asked me, “Why do you like abstract art?”
“I think for two reasons. I think in a strange way it speaks to me. That is not to say I necessarily understand it, but it speaks to me in a language beyond words, or what the camera eye sees.
“I think artists see far more than we see. The intensity of their soul gives them a vision into life as it evolves and devolves, which they translate into art.
“Take a Picasso abstract of a woman. It is like looking at a woman from several perspectives simultaneously, all of which collide into a kind of violence and incoherence that can be expressed in no other way.
“I see abstract sculptures in the same sense. There was one of a giant leaf that was designated a bird in flight. I think that was accurate.”
Then I mentioned the architecture of Manhattan buildings. “These look like giant sculptures to me, some like birds ready to rupture from the surface and take to flight, and others like Modigliani flat planes of colored squares and rectangles.”
These artists used their whole system to display what lies beyond the eyes and in the mind. They have given much. I find it interesting and restful. It is eerie but a piece of art can lose its separation from you, if that makes any sense.
V
Aside from the beauty and transcendence of New York City, you cannot escape the more pragmatic fact that it is amazingly expensive.
This is no abstraction as virtually everyone has a hand out waiting for greenbacks to grace their palms. If you come to NYC, bring buckets of cash.
It cost us $100 for the tour bus, and $5 every time we got off as a tip for the tour guide and bus driver. Then you pay to get into the art museums, and then an inflationary price for any postcards or knickknacks you acquire from the museum.
It cost $40 for the cab to the city from the airport. Our hotel was the Grand Hyatt next door to Grand Central Station, and in the heart of Manhattan, for which you pay dearly.
Our tour bus didn’t stop for us outside The Metropolitan Museum because we weren’t standing precisely where we should for being picked up. So, we waited for nearly 30 minutes in sub freezing temperatures, and decided to take a cab, which was only a few blocks away: another $12.
We were a bit cold, so we got a cup of soup, no coffee or milk or tea, just soup: $24. We went out to dinner at a nice Irish Pub where we had a nice dinner and coffee, and since neither of us drink, no booze: $100.
Then the next day, Sunday, we checked out of the hotel, paid our bill, and checked our bags for a few hours: $10. We then walked from the hotel to the United Nations Building, only to find none of the flags were up.
We then stopped in at a small Catholic Church on the way back, the Church of the Holy Family. This church was dedicated to Pope Paul VI. He was pope when I was an executive with Nalco Chemical Company. My driver in Rome, who now drove for my company, had driven for the pope. He used his influence to get my family and me into Vatican City, extremely rare for tourists. It was 1968. Unfortunately, the pope was not in residence but at his summer home.
Back in the hotel, we showed our baggage stub to another bell captain, and he took our bags to the curb: $5. A doorman opened the taxicab door for us while the cab driver put our bags in his taxi: $2. Then we were off to the airport where there was some confusion about what I paid the driver. BB thinks he slipped a $5 aside claiming I didn’t pay him, so that was $45. We ate some junk food in the airport, got on the plane, were met by our towering grandchildren and their mother, my daughter, and went to dinner, and arrived safely home, very happy, and a lot lighter in the wallet. My granddaughter, Rachel, asked if we went shopping. We didn’t. We didn’t even go to a bookstore.
VI
I would love to live in Manhattan, but that will never happen. When I was first here, it was more than forty years ago, and I was with Nalco. I would stop off here on my itineraries to South America, Europe or South Africa. People from Nalco’s regional office would treat me as if a celebrity, picking me up at the airport, making arrangements for my accommodation, and taking me to dinner, and picking up the tab. They would even out do themselves when my family accompanied me. That all changed when I retired in my mid-thirties to become a writer.
I let Nalco know I was coming to New York to promote my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and no one showed up. I called to set a luncheon date with the regional manager, and he never returned my calls. Power is a diminishing construct.
VII
New York City is a very safe city, and you feel secure going about Manhattan at any time during the day or night. Everywhere we went we saw New York’s finest, NYPD.
Manhattan is also a very clean city. Nearly every block you see men and women in attractive orange uniforms picking up trash and keeping the streets and sidewalks sparkling clean.
People are generally polite if not always. We all have good and bad days and so allowances have to be made for that whenever you encounter someone out of sorts.
Members of the tour company were stationed at all the critical stops in Manhattan. I asked one young man how long he had to stand out there in the 20 – 30 degree cold, and he said, “Nine hours.” He didn’t say it with sarcasm or resentment, but as fact.
The tour guides on the bus were courteous to a fault with one exception. We failed to put $5 in the coffer in our initial drop off, not knowing the procedure, and this Irishman (I have to admit that, unfortunately) had to say, “Look at those people! They didn’t leave a tip!” So embarrassed, I wanted to crawl under the payment if I could.
The weather in New York City during our stay was in the teens to the low forties. The night we went to the play it was supposed to snow, and we were looking forward to it not having seen snow for years. But instead of snowing it was a cold, sleeting-like rain, which we endured in our mile walk back to the hotel. Tampa was in the low 80s.
Cabs don’t like short fares so it is better to walk the short distance than constantly be turned down by cabbies.
There are black cabs and yellow cabs. We stuck with yellow cabs because they have a meter which shows what you owe as you go. The black cabs may be okay, but we heard stories, and so stuck with what we knew. Yellow cabs also have union licensed drivers.
People that hold the door for you, make up your room, carry your bags, carry you about the city, wait on you in restaurants and so on are my people. I come from their station. I have left money for maids in hotels since I was in my twenties. Every time someone serves me, I pay 20 percent or more for their service.
BB says, “You’re generous, but that’s okay.”
I answer, “No, I’m not. This is how these people make their living. Even if I’m generous, they still don’t make that great a living.” So, we let it go at that.
VIII
We took a night tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chinatown and Little Italy. The Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Bridge were lit up, as were the cafes and restaurants along the shores of the Hudson River. Many of the skyscrapers are lit up at night as well, and appear as if majestic towers of power and purpose. Then there are the nightclubs, the theatre district, the movie theaters, and Time Square, a psychedelic montage of flashing marques of moving images, along with a colorful flow of streaming people.
The crowning jewel is New Yorkers themselves. They move so fast it is hard to believe they are doing this without running. It is why you seldom see an overweight New Yorker. Always on the move, they are like an abstract painting, a changing blur of color.
New York women seem especially beautiful as they crash out of skyscraper doors into the streets in droves as if connected to each other in a single train of movement. It is a wonder how they can move so fast without looking up or at anyone and avoid running into the flow from the opposite direction. They weave in and out with a cell phone, or a contraction strapped to their ears, text messaging without colliding, amazing!
When we went to the play, we dressed to the teeth, only to find most people in jeans, sneakers and anoraks, even older people. Since it cost a ton to see this play, you know it wasn’t because there wasn’t a different wardrobe at home.
What I especially like about New York City is that you can have green hair, black lips, and a purple beard and no one pays you special notice. There is a kind of individualism and independence that pervades New Yorkers’ consciousness. People fly by talking about finance and philosophy, art and politics, in several languages and dialects, leaving a word dangling in the wind like a participle.
The cacophony of sounds, the staccato of workmen drilling through concrete, sirens of police and ambulances, voices from the four corners of the earth, and in the midst of this, the cries of children who cry in a common language to all. You feel you are in the center of the earth where all roads meet, fall apart and come together.
Then there are joggers of all shapes and sizes, all ages, too, running as if their lives depended on it in weather not far above the teens, and you marvel at their dedication. There are cyclists, too, that weave in and out of traffic oblivious to the weather and with the apparent same goal in mind. Some of them, of course, could be working as messengers.
We learned from our tour guides that the Upper West Side has all the millionaires, and the Upper East Side has all the billionaires. The Irish tour guide pointed out the “largest cathedral in the world,” which was about the size of the kitchen at St. Peters Basilica in Rome. So I took these things with a grain of salt.
We also saw John Lennon’s Dakota Building where he lived and was killed by the gate. It was a somber moment for me because he was a favorite of mine.
IX
We never did see Ground Zero or the Statue of Liberty on this trip. In an earlier iteration, when I came out with my second book (Work Without Managers 1990), I was invited by William L. Livingston, also an author, to visit him at the Twin Towers where he was an international consultant designing nuclear power plants for South Korea.
My second time in the Twin Towers was in the late 1990s, when I was invited by Solomon Brothers of Wall Street to be considered as director of organizational development (OD) for the firm. I didn’t get the job, but I did conduct a seminar for about thirty stockbrokers, all of whom I was told later made at least $1 million in bonuses that year. Incidentally, had I gotten the job, I would have most likely been in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
X
Another time when I was in New York in the 1970s I was hired to conduct a company search for Jacque Leviant, a New York Board Member of the Stock Exchange, and an entrepreneur. I gave a seminar for his staff of stockbrokers as well on his Lexington Avenue offices, which took up two floors.
I had retired from Nalco, but he heard of me and asked if I would survey about 15 – 20 specialty chemical companies for him for possible purchase by Leviant’s firm.
My advance airfare for that jaunt was $12,000, which gives you some idea of my traveling plans. It was as if I was running for public office. One of the memorable places I visited was Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Green Bay Packers. It was in the middle of winter and I had to take a small play from Chicago to Green Bay because there was no easy access.
When I completed my survey, Leviant went into negotiation to purchase one company with stock, alone, and asked me if I wanted to run the start up operation. I said, “No, Mr. Leviant, I want to be a writer.” That may seem strange to those who know me realizing thirty-five years later, after publishing nine books and hundreds of articles I have failed to establish myself as a writer. I could have made enough in that one year working for Mr. Leviant that is several multiples over which I have earned as a writer.
Instead, I went back to school, and became a contract consultant with the Professional Institute of the American Management Association. That work became fodder for my Master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, 1976). I spent nine-months in Fairfax, Virginia, the richest county in the US, where a white police officer shot and killed a young African American in a 7-11 Convenient Store in Herndon over an altercation concerning an expired driver’s license. The police officer nearly pushed the man through a cooler. In self-defense, he grabbed the police officer’s nightstick and attempted to club him over the head, but hit only his shoulder, at which the police officer unloaded his service revolver on him killing him. A riot followed, and I was called in to sort out what happened and why. I wrote my thesis on this work.
My doctorate dissertation (The Paradoxical Dilemma Between the Police and the Policed 1978) was based on work from John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York City, to an OD intervention in Fairfax, Virginia, to an OD intervention in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a police force of 350 sworn officers went on mutiny to work conducted in Richmond, Virginia to Dade County and Miami through the auspices of Biscayne University.
Joseph Wambaugh, former police officer of Los Angeles Police Department, and novelist, once said, “A community gets the police force it deserves.” I found that corroborated in this research. For example, Fairfax County Police Department had less than 5 percent of its officers living in the county, as it was too expensive. Consequently, they were policing a county in which they had little sense of ownership.
XI
The Free Press Publishing Company of New York City considered publishing my master’s thesis as a book, but one of its readers said it read too much like fiction and should be better placed in the New Yorker magazine or the New York supplement to the New York Times Sunday edition. It never happened.
One of the members of dissertation committee was a former Harvard professor currently at the University of Southern Illinois. He thought I had written the best dissertation he had ever read, and made that same comment about the flow having the consistency of fiction. It, too, has never been published.
Still, Prentice-Hall of Long Island did publish my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and gave me the courage to continue writing. In rambling on about New York City and what it has meant to this aging Iowan, it has had a permanent impermanence that is consistent with the fickle finger of fate that I have shown here has often touched me. I have been moved to write this because New Yorkers are resilient, as they have been since the dawn of our history. I find it catching.
XII
At the darkest hour things can change and New Yorkers know such times – remember the New York City “black out” in the last century – but they have always risen from the ashes to create a better tomorrow. We see this resilience in their faces since 9-11. So, revisiting the city is like a booster shot of courage.
New Yorkers can be falling apart, in foreclosure; in bankruptcy; their kids out of control or in trouble with the law; their marriages falling apart; having difficulty making ends meet; having lost their job or made redundant; having trouble living for another day; thinking why not give up the ghost and end it all; but staying the course; muddling through with a cocky strut looking at what they have built and what they are; and what they have endured to come together; and take control. They go to a play, a ballgame, a film, a neighborhood bar, or simply walk the streets and take energy from the passersby.
You see it in their faces where they show their determination but not their hand. There are millionaires and billionaires but they can never rise above being simply New Yorkers whomever or whatever they are. There is power in this. It is truly “The Haunted Tree,” and Praed’s magic poem captures this, “Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,” indeed.
______________________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com, where you will find more than 300 essays such as this free for your enjoyment.
WHERE ALL ROADS MEET, FALL APART & COME TOGETHER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 5, 2008
“Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,
And always blind, and often tipsy;
Sometimes for years and years together,
Bestowing honour, pudding, pence,
You can’t imagine why or whence;
Then in a moment – Presto, pass!
Your joys are withered like the grass.”
Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802 – 1839), poem titled “The Haunted Tree.”
The fickle finger of fate touches us all, even if we don’t believe in such things as fate. I was reminded of this most recently on my return to our Eternal City, the Big Apple, New York City.
I
Beautiful Betty (BB), my wife, was attending a conference of school executives for the National Association of Independent Schools. She is Business Manager of Hillel, a Jewish Day School, preschool through eighth grade, located in Tampa, Florida.
The theme of BB’s conference was “Schools of the Future: Embracing The Educational Renaissance.”
The conference had some great speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative”; Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind”; Roland Fryer, author of “Economics of Incentives”; and Faith Popcorn, author of “The Trend Oracle,” among other notable educators and thinkers. I would have loved to hear them speak, but I came in our Friday to stay the weekend as the conference was ending.
II
Friday night we attended the Broadway musical “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theatre, a play, which has received rave reviews and been on Broadway for sometime. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the “Lion King,” which I saw with BB in Toronto earlier in 2003 when I was there to speak at the Conference Board of Canada on the “Fisher Paradigm.”
Not being familiar with television’s “American Idol,” I found it interesting that BB thought the singing in “Wicked” resembled the screaming of contestants on that show. I thought it sounded more like screeching.
“Wicked” is the story of the Good Witch and Bad Witch as prelude to Dorothy and “The Wizard of Oz.” The story line was interesting, but the play was mediocre, in my view, but I’m certainly no expert when it comes to musicals.
III
On Saturday, we took a bus tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, Harlem, Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, Central Park, Greenwich Village and several points between. We could get off the bus wherever we wanted to and visit some site, and get another bus later as tour buses would come on the half hour.
In Manhattan, we got off and took a tour of the Guggenheim Museum. Featured were the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, born in China, resident of Japan, and now a New Yorker since 1995.
The title of his exhibition was “I want to believe.” The exhibition was a little heavy for my tastes, mainly because it was so strategically provocative. I suffer from the same heavy hand.
Cai is creative and an assimilator of ancient mythology, military history, Taoist metaphysics, cosmological science, Maoist revolutionary tactics, and most demonstrative of all, pyrotechnic technology and terrorist violence.
He puts blunt images on canvas of burnt impressions of the world as he sees and has experienced it. This is shocking, disturbing, and not a pretty sight. Cai is telling us, “Welcome to the violent modern world.”
For example, suspended from the ceiling in the center of the museum are two automobiles with rods of light as arrows penetrating the vehicles from every angle, illustrating the combative clash of cultures between the East and West for this lucrative market.
If that is not disturbing enough, there are lions suspended along the passageway to the next level with hundreds of arrows penetrating their bodies. My mind thought of the nature of overkill that is unique to our postmodern society.
Everything is symbolic. Nothing is more symbolic than the work titled, “Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows.” It illustrates China’s dramatic new and dominant role on the world stage. Displayed is an excavated fishing boat with the hull pierced with 3,000 arrows as its support structure, and decorated with a Chinese flag that flutters at the stern from the wind of an electric fan. Imagine, if you will, only the frame of this fishing boat is covered with “Western” arrows to make it viable. This is powerful imagery to say the least.
I am neither an art critic nor a connoisseur of art, but as disturbing as these works the pyrotechnic displays were more disturbing. It reminded me that the East has never forgotten or forgiven the United States for its nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was dropped on those cities in 1945 to bring World War II to an end. Tens of thousands of civilians perished in that mushroom cloud
Cai uses the mushroom cloud to deftly transmute pejorative nuclear tropes into “art” and “culture.”
There are several videos along the way that you can view which comprise gunpowder-exploding events. At first, I could not comprehend the sense of these until I studied the several canvases with imprints of these explosions as montages.
Remember the Rorschach inkblot test, where you were shown inkblot patterns, and invited to interpret them in terms of images, which you thought the blots might represent. Such interpretation was meant to unlock the unconscious mind. Cai is attempting to do this with these canvases. He uses the violence of our times with atomic explosion and suicide bombing to underscore his overall strategy of art as a tool of cultural provocation. He succeeds.
Cai is a student of history and paradigm shifts. He sees violence inextricably linked to creativity with violence a transformation phenomenon. He does this by taking us back to the invention of gunpowder and a new kind of warfare, and then moving swiftly to the development of nuclear weaponry. Now he sees in the confusion and chaos the current shift away from high science to the current rash of suicide bombings. He does with visual art what I attempted to do with words in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).
He understands the fragility of human nature and its penchant for oscillating paradigm shifts within the history of civilization. He uses his art to display the dialectical nature of man as a self-creator and self-destroyer in a climate of constant change oblivious to his ultimate race to self-extinction.
I told BB when I left that I did not like the show. It was too disturbing; too much; too clearly provocative of our turbulent times on our way to eternity, wrenching the mind from its complacency to its benign and terrifying nature.
IV
We waited to be picked up by our tour bus and dropped off shortly thereafter at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had been many years since I had last visited this museum having forgotten how mammoth an undertaking it is to take it all in. We were there for more than three hours and hardly touched the surface.
This was BB’s first visit to New York City and therefore to this museum. No one enjoys art, sculpture, architecture and antique artifacts more than she does. I am less cosmopolitan in my tastes than she is. She loves everything. I am impressed with the artifacts that are thousands of years old, illustrating the genius of man over the centuries. This includes the works of artisans making jewelry out of precious stones, elaborate paintings on the surface of clay pottery, hand formed metallic arms and armor, eating and drinking utensils, but after a while it is too much. BB never tires of studying such craftsmanship. Sometimes I think she approaches the monumental patience of those that once produced them.
Man is storyteller and all art is telling a story. In the Greek and Roman Art gallery, I overheard a mother asking her daughter, no more than ten or eleven, what story a Greek vase was telling. She answered her mother promptly explaining the Greek mythology it depicted and the story it told. I was embarrassed that I didn’t pay more attention to this aspect of my education.
It isn’t only the Greeks and Romans that adored the human form, it is apparent in the Arts of Africa, Egyptian Art, and Modern Art, all different art forms and cultures, and all with an eye rising out of their respective cultures.
Now Medieval Art, which I have seen tons of in museums across Europe, idealizes the human form in almost a beatific way that makes it seem less human. It is art that tires me whereas these other expressions, which are less idyllic and more primitive, do not. I wonder if it is because these other art forms are more honest, or less iconic.
In any case, it is apparent that innovation, creativity and great craftsmanship are a natural expression of the human spirit throughout time.
It happened to me again while I was walking through this museum. I felt timeless. I felt as if I could step into Einstein’s time warp and go back to the future where the future and past collide into a common collage. People like myself produced all this, finding some way to get beyond their petty problems to touch eternity.
In the Guggenheim, you had a headset with a panel of 15 numbered commentaries that accompanied you around the gallery. This was also available at The Metropolitan, as well as guided tours, but we chose to go wandering about on our own.
My favorite gallery was Modern Art, not BB’s favorite, but she tolerates my preference. Unfortunately, it was in our final hour when fatigue was visiting us, and I was becoming increasingly aware of my shingles, which I put out of my mind to take this trip. Antibiotics and painkillers kept the shingles abated, but also sapped my strength.
That said the abstract and impressionism wing of Modern Art once again transfixed me. Each artist tells a different story. Matisse shows his joy of life in nudes dancing in a ring, playing musical instruments, or standing or lying in indolent grace. He captures the same verve with his still lives of a basket of fruit or a view of the sea through a curtain.
The gallery also displays works of O’Keefe and Dali. I sometimes thought the work of O’Keefe’s was that of Dali. O’Keefe’s depiction of skeletal horns titled “From the Faraway Nearby” had the florid flow of Dali. I had the same problem with Matisse and Gauguin. I looked for Munch, Hopper and Peter Max, but if they were there I didn't see them.
Then we were in the middle of abstract art of Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Klee, Klimt, Braque, Modigliani, and Rouault. Most of the cubism on display was created before or early in the twentieth century up to World War II. It was a period of ripeness and decay, many highs and many more lows. That is what I like about this art. It flourishes in the worst of times, moving away from sensible landscapes and impressive nude studies to color patterns on flat surfaces that speak volumes moving on to the crazy quilt of cubism, which has been called “the sum of destructions.” This art is a record of chaos and confusion, which I find calming perhaps because it seems most honest and naked.
As I was thinking this, BB asked me, “Why do you like abstract art?”
“I think for two reasons. I think in a strange way it speaks to me. That is not to say I necessarily understand it, but it speaks to me in a language beyond words, or what the camera eye sees.
“I think artists see far more than we see. The intensity of their soul gives them a vision into life as it evolves and devolves, which they translate into art.
“Take a Picasso abstract of a woman. It is like looking at a woman from several perspectives simultaneously, all of which collide into a kind of violence and incoherence that can be expressed in no other way.
“I see abstract sculptures in the same sense. There was one of a giant leaf that was designated a bird in flight. I think that was accurate.”
Then I mentioned the architecture of Manhattan buildings. “These look like giant sculptures to me, some like birds ready to rupture from the surface and take to flight, and others like Modigliani flat planes of colored squares and rectangles.”
These artists used their whole system to display what lies beyond the eyes and in the mind. They have given much. I find it interesting and restful. It is eerie but a piece of art can lose its separation from you, if that makes any sense.
V
Aside from the beauty and transcendence of New York City, you cannot escape the more pragmatic fact that it is amazingly expensive.
This is no abstraction as virtually everyone has a hand out waiting for greenbacks to grace their palms. If you come to NYC, bring buckets of cash.
It cost us $100 for the tour bus, and $5 every time we got off as a tip for the tour guide and bus driver. Then you pay to get into the art museums, and then an inflationary price for any postcards or knickknacks you acquire from the museum.
It cost $40 for the cab to the city from the airport. Our hotel was the Grand Hyatt next door to Grand Central Station, and in the heart of Manhattan, for which you pay dearly.
Our tour bus didn’t stop for us outside The Metropolitan Museum because we weren’t standing precisely where we should for being picked up. So, we waited for nearly 30 minutes in sub freezing temperatures, and decided to take a cab, which was only a few blocks away: another $12.
We were a bit cold, so we got a cup of soup, no coffee or milk or tea, just soup: $24. We went out to dinner at a nice Irish Pub where we had a nice dinner and coffee, and since neither of us drink, no booze: $100.
Then the next day, Sunday, we checked out of the hotel, paid our bill, and checked our bags for a few hours: $10. We then walked from the hotel to the United Nations Building, only to find none of the flags were up.
We then stopped in at a small Catholic Church on the way back, the Church of the Holy Family. This church was dedicated to Pope Paul VI. He was pope when I was an executive with Nalco Chemical Company. My driver in Rome, who now drove for my company, had driven for the pope. He used his influence to get my family and me into Vatican City, extremely rare for tourists. It was 1968. Unfortunately, the pope was not in residence but at his summer home.
Back in the hotel, we showed our baggage stub to another bell captain, and he took our bags to the curb: $5. A doorman opened the taxicab door for us while the cab driver put our bags in his taxi: $2. Then we were off to the airport where there was some confusion about what I paid the driver. BB thinks he slipped a $5 aside claiming I didn’t pay him, so that was $45. We ate some junk food in the airport, got on the plane, were met by our towering grandchildren and their mother, my daughter, and went to dinner, and arrived safely home, very happy, and a lot lighter in the wallet. My granddaughter, Rachel, asked if we went shopping. We didn’t. We didn’t even go to a bookstore.
VI
I would love to live in Manhattan, but that will never happen. When I was first here, it was more than forty years ago, and I was with Nalco. I would stop off here on my itineraries to South America, Europe or South Africa. People from Nalco’s regional office would treat me as if a celebrity, picking me up at the airport, making arrangements for my accommodation, and taking me to dinner, and picking up the tab. They would even out do themselves when my family accompanied me. That all changed when I retired in my mid-thirties to become a writer.
I let Nalco know I was coming to New York to promote my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and no one showed up. I called to set a luncheon date with the regional manager, and he never returned my calls. Power is a diminishing construct.
VII
New York City is a very safe city, and you feel secure going about Manhattan at any time during the day or night. Everywhere we went we saw New York’s finest, NYPD.
Manhattan is also a very clean city. Nearly every block you see men and women in attractive orange uniforms picking up trash and keeping the streets and sidewalks sparkling clean.
People are generally polite if not always. We all have good and bad days and so allowances have to be made for that whenever you encounter someone out of sorts.
Members of the tour company were stationed at all the critical stops in Manhattan. I asked one young man how long he had to stand out there in the 20 – 30 degree cold, and he said, “Nine hours.” He didn’t say it with sarcasm or resentment, but as fact.
The tour guides on the bus were courteous to a fault with one exception. We failed to put $5 in the coffer in our initial drop off, not knowing the procedure, and this Irishman (I have to admit that, unfortunately) had to say, “Look at those people! They didn’t leave a tip!” So embarrassed, I wanted to crawl under the payment if I could.
The weather in New York City during our stay was in the teens to the low forties. The night we went to the play it was supposed to snow, and we were looking forward to it not having seen snow for years. But instead of snowing it was a cold, sleeting-like rain, which we endured in our mile walk back to the hotel. Tampa was in the low 80s.
Cabs don’t like short fares so it is better to walk the short distance than constantly be turned down by cabbies.
There are black cabs and yellow cabs. We stuck with yellow cabs because they have a meter which shows what you owe as you go. The black cabs may be okay, but we heard stories, and so stuck with what we knew. Yellow cabs also have union licensed drivers.
People that hold the door for you, make up your room, carry your bags, carry you about the city, wait on you in restaurants and so on are my people. I come from their station. I have left money for maids in hotels since I was in my twenties. Every time someone serves me, I pay 20 percent or more for their service.
BB says, “You’re generous, but that’s okay.”
I answer, “No, I’m not. This is how these people make their living. Even if I’m generous, they still don’t make that great a living.” So, we let it go at that.
VIII
We took a night tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chinatown and Little Italy. The Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Bridge were lit up, as were the cafes and restaurants along the shores of the Hudson River. Many of the skyscrapers are lit up at night as well, and appear as if majestic towers of power and purpose. Then there are the nightclubs, the theatre district, the movie theaters, and Time Square, a psychedelic montage of flashing marques of moving images, along with a colorful flow of streaming people.
The crowning jewel is New Yorkers themselves. They move so fast it is hard to believe they are doing this without running. It is why you seldom see an overweight New Yorker. Always on the move, they are like an abstract painting, a changing blur of color.
New York women seem especially beautiful as they crash out of skyscraper doors into the streets in droves as if connected to each other in a single train of movement. It is a wonder how they can move so fast without looking up or at anyone and avoid running into the flow from the opposite direction. They weave in and out with a cell phone, or a contraction strapped to their ears, text messaging without colliding, amazing!
When we went to the play, we dressed to the teeth, only to find most people in jeans, sneakers and anoraks, even older people. Since it cost a ton to see this play, you know it wasn’t because there wasn’t a different wardrobe at home.
What I especially like about New York City is that you can have green hair, black lips, and a purple beard and no one pays you special notice. There is a kind of individualism and independence that pervades New Yorkers’ consciousness. People fly by talking about finance and philosophy, art and politics, in several languages and dialects, leaving a word dangling in the wind like a participle.
The cacophony of sounds, the staccato of workmen drilling through concrete, sirens of police and ambulances, voices from the four corners of the earth, and in the midst of this, the cries of children who cry in a common language to all. You feel you are in the center of the earth where all roads meet, fall apart and come together.
Then there are joggers of all shapes and sizes, all ages, too, running as if their lives depended on it in weather not far above the teens, and you marvel at their dedication. There are cyclists, too, that weave in and out of traffic oblivious to the weather and with the apparent same goal in mind. Some of them, of course, could be working as messengers.
We learned from our tour guides that the Upper West Side has all the millionaires, and the Upper East Side has all the billionaires. The Irish tour guide pointed out the “largest cathedral in the world,” which was about the size of the kitchen at St. Peters Basilica in Rome. So I took these things with a grain of salt.
We also saw John Lennon’s Dakota Building where he lived and was killed by the gate. It was a somber moment for me because he was a favorite of mine.
IX
We never did see Ground Zero or the Statue of Liberty on this trip. In an earlier iteration, when I came out with my second book (Work Without Managers 1990), I was invited by William L. Livingston, also an author, to visit him at the Twin Towers where he was an international consultant designing nuclear power plants for South Korea.
My second time in the Twin Towers was in the late 1990s, when I was invited by Solomon Brothers of Wall Street to be considered as director of organizational development (OD) for the firm. I didn’t get the job, but I did conduct a seminar for about thirty stockbrokers, all of whom I was told later made at least $1 million in bonuses that year. Incidentally, had I gotten the job, I would have most likely been in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
X
Another time when I was in New York in the 1970s I was hired to conduct a company search for Jacque Leviant, a New York Board Member of the Stock Exchange, and an entrepreneur. I gave a seminar for his staff of stockbrokers as well on his Lexington Avenue offices, which took up two floors.
I had retired from Nalco, but he heard of me and asked if I would survey about 15 – 20 specialty chemical companies for him for possible purchase by Leviant’s firm.
My advance airfare for that jaunt was $12,000, which gives you some idea of my traveling plans. It was as if I was running for public office. One of the memorable places I visited was Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Green Bay Packers. It was in the middle of winter and I had to take a small play from Chicago to Green Bay because there was no easy access.
When I completed my survey, Leviant went into negotiation to purchase one company with stock, alone, and asked me if I wanted to run the start up operation. I said, “No, Mr. Leviant, I want to be a writer.” That may seem strange to those who know me realizing thirty-five years later, after publishing nine books and hundreds of articles I have failed to establish myself as a writer. I could have made enough in that one year working for Mr. Leviant that is several multiples over which I have earned as a writer.
Instead, I went back to school, and became a contract consultant with the Professional Institute of the American Management Association. That work became fodder for my Master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, 1976). I spent nine-months in Fairfax, Virginia, the richest county in the US, where a white police officer shot and killed a young African American in a 7-11 Convenient Store in Herndon over an altercation concerning an expired driver’s license. The police officer nearly pushed the man through a cooler. In self-defense, he grabbed the police officer’s nightstick and attempted to club him over the head, but hit only his shoulder, at which the police officer unloaded his service revolver on him killing him. A riot followed, and I was called in to sort out what happened and why. I wrote my thesis on this work.
My doctorate dissertation (The Paradoxical Dilemma Between the Police and the Policed 1978) was based on work from John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York City, to an OD intervention in Fairfax, Virginia, to an OD intervention in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a police force of 350 sworn officers went on mutiny to work conducted in Richmond, Virginia to Dade County and Miami through the auspices of Biscayne University.
Joseph Wambaugh, former police officer of Los Angeles Police Department, and novelist, once said, “A community gets the police force it deserves.” I found that corroborated in this research. For example, Fairfax County Police Department had less than 5 percent of its officers living in the county, as it was too expensive. Consequently, they were policing a county in which they had little sense of ownership.
XI
The Free Press Publishing Company of New York City considered publishing my master’s thesis as a book, but one of its readers said it read too much like fiction and should be better placed in the New Yorker magazine or the New York supplement to the New York Times Sunday edition. It never happened.
One of the members of dissertation committee was a former Harvard professor currently at the University of Southern Illinois. He thought I had written the best dissertation he had ever read, and made that same comment about the flow having the consistency of fiction. It, too, has never been published.
Still, Prentice-Hall of Long Island did publish my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and gave me the courage to continue writing. In rambling on about New York City and what it has meant to this aging Iowan, it has had a permanent impermanence that is consistent with the fickle finger of fate that I have shown here has often touched me. I have been moved to write this because New Yorkers are resilient, as they have been since the dawn of our history. I find it catching.
XII
At the darkest hour things can change and New Yorkers know such times – remember the New York City “black out” in the last century – but they have always risen from the ashes to create a better tomorrow. We see this resilience in their faces since 9-11. So, revisiting the city is like a booster shot of courage.
New Yorkers can be falling apart, in foreclosure; in bankruptcy; their kids out of control or in trouble with the law; their marriages falling apart; having difficulty making ends meet; having lost their job or made redundant; having trouble living for another day; thinking why not give up the ghost and end it all; but staying the course; muddling through with a cocky strut looking at what they have built and what they are; and what they have endured to come together; and take control. They go to a play, a ballgame, a film, a neighborhood bar, or simply walk the streets and take energy from the passersby.
You see it in their faces where they show their determination but not their hand. There are millionaires and billionaires but they can never rise above being simply New Yorkers whomever or whatever they are. There is power in this. It is truly “The Haunted Tree,” and Praed’s magic poem captures this, “Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,” indeed.
______________________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com, where you will find more than 300 essays such as this free for your enjoyment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)