MORNING REFLECTIONS OF THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER

We want our politicians to lie!

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

© May 11, 2015

After sharing with readers my take on the exhaustive study a Canadian friend has made on the Canadian Parliament and government, I reviewed what presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have had to say on immigration.  It is clear to me we force our candidates to be people of the lie.

Candidate Clinton has reversed herself coming out strongly for what amounts to amnesty, paving a way for citizenship for illegal immigrants “because they are here and contributing to our society.” 

Rubio has waffled just a bit but is far less enamored of the straight Yellow Brick Road to citizenship that Clinton is only lately espousing, while Bush is even right to Rubio in that his immigration policy, and is unlikely to generate enthusiasm in the illegal immigrant community for his candidacy. 

Who is likely to win the Hispanic vote? 

Why, Hillary, of course.  Her lie resonates. 

While she is closer in her immigration policy in actual fact to Bush than Rubio, she is comfortable in the lie because she won’t have to eat it.  When (and if) she assumes the Office of the President of the United States, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate will not support amnesty, and so she can lie as a candidate with impunity.

We want her to lie.  We want our politicians to lie for we want them to tell us what we want to hear not what we need to hear. 

What we need to hear is that we as voters have been ambivalent for the past thirty-five years, the so called “boom and bust years,” not concerned with illegal immigrants or other testy issues as long as it didn’t appear to hurt us in our wallets or pocketbooks. 

We have taken comfort in the rhetoric we are a nation of immigrants, which we are, and these illegal immigrants are like us, which they appear to be, and therefore we should give them a free pass to citizenship because they are here.

My family, that is, my ancestors came from Celtic country, Ireland and Norway via the route of satisfying quotas.  My Irish ancestors were not lace curtain Irish but shanty Irish.  It might be useful to establish what this means.

Lace Curtain Or Shanty Irish -- Hoi Polloi or Hoity Toity?

All immigrants have had major issues coming to America. There was no road paved in gold, which they could follow. 

There was no road in fact, leading to a sure supply of food for their families.  They had heard and believed their lot would be better in the New World, America.  This is the rationale for all immigrants.

So they came despite no roads paved in gold or caviar. Yet, in the end, all immigrants from years back at least, embraced America and loved to become Americans and they found their place.  They didn’t try to make the United States into the Irish Republic or Norwegian culture.

The Irish gave up their Gaelic and learned to speak American.  They allowed themselves to be integrated at the lowest levels taking jobs, if they could get jobs that nobody else wanted. They were waiters, bartenders, bell hops, domestics, ditch diggers, and fruit pickers, policemen and firemen, priests and politicians, prize fighters and criminals. 

It was people like this that bred the stock of the country we know simply as America. The stock for the melting pot consisted of many types of immigrants. The Irish were just one variety that melted in, not out. 

As the Irish were immigrating to America, like most newcomers in this new strange land, most were poorer than dirt. As ship after ship came to America from overseas, the Irish got numerous enough to form various sections, which today might be called ghettos and they lived in small homes that were not more than shanties. Some chicken coops might have been larger than the first homes of these immigrants.

As time went on, the Irish began to separate as to their degree of upward mobility. When some Irish moved up the ladder of success into larger frame houses for example, those still in the shanties saw this as taking on fancy airs, and they were dubbed "lace curtain."

The lace curtain Irish in turn, labeled their less fortunate countrymen as "shanty" or sometimes "pigs in the parlor Irish." I come from this stock.  I know the feeling of the lace curtain looking down on my type.  They were now attorneys and doctors and local politicians and union leaders who thought their business no longer stunk; that they had left the hoi polloi for good. 

There were yet other derogatory terms used. They were called “Micks” and “Murphys” and “Cathlicks” for the Irish could not escape the tough times or the annoying terms regardless of which side of the tracks they might be living on.

In many cases, the "lace curtain Irish" were as poor as the shanty Irish but they had their own notions that they were more respectable.  

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in an upscale neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, but at the end of the block decidedly poorer and less well connected than his neighbors down the street, many who were “lance curtain Irish,” a fact that he never forgot and which bled into every word he ever wrote, best remembered in “The Great Gatsby” (1925). 

When there was no frame house per se, some were called lace curtain simply because they would put up lace curtains for appearances' sake, and dollies on every surface in the sitting room.  They would do this even in a shanty town.

Thus both the terms, lace curtain Irish and shanty Irish, are far from being compliments to any Irish.

Yet, over time, as food and jobs became more plentiful, the Irish overcame their own labels and most today do not care whether they are shanty or lace curtain Irish.  Some might dispute this when it comes to my written commentaries as I wear my shanty Irish roots as a badge of honor. 

Along with the terms shanty Irish and lace curtain Irish we have the terms  hoi polloi, a Greek term referring to the many, i.e., the common people and hoity-toity, an adjective used to describe those who would have others believe they are elite and enlightened.

It has always amused me to see people who come from my stock, station and circumstance who have somehow forgotten their Irish roots of poverty, neglect, humiliation and discrimination.

Many of us get the two terms (hoi polloi and hoity toity) mixed up and consider the lace curtain Irish to be hoi polloi, thinking it means people who think they are big shots. But, that is not at all the meaning of hoi polloi.

The big shots, or big shot wannabes are the hoity-toity and if they are Irish, they would be of the lace curtain variety.

The common folk, as in we the people or the many, are the hoi polloi and if they are Irish, they would be known as the shanty Irish. But, then again, who cares?  We are Americans, right? 

Well, a lot of us that are Irish still wear the scars of that race and that distinction as we cannot disavow our links to our ancestors any more than a zebra can deny its stripes.

MY PROBLEM WITH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Only Jeb Bush, for whatever reason, and he is married to a Hispanic, refuses to lie.  He would be relatively tough on illegal immigrants, but not nearly as tough as I would like him to be.

That more than any other reason is likely to derail his bid for the Republican nomination for president. 

Yet, paradoxically, it is his immigration policy, which doesn’t include a free pass to illegals that ultimately will be President Hillary Clinton’s policy.  Not only is Bush not for a free pass, but for deporting those who continue to flood our borders into this country, illegally.

It is common knowledge that many illegals refuse to learn the American language, insist on a dual language policy or at the very least have schools, churches, workplaces, commercial establishments, medical facilities, and even the military be able to relate to them in their native language.

Irish immigrants, many of whom spoke only Gaelic, were at first hesitant to learn American English their hatred of Great Britain was so visceral, but they did learn to speak American.  They got through that barrier. 

Early Irish immigrants had an unsavory reputation, which included fighting, drinking, brawling and crime.  It was no accident that many working establishments posted, Jobs available, Irish need not apply!    

So, it wasn’t a smooth transition from one culture to another for them, but they came to American – in the first and second quarter of the nineteenth century – when the United States of America was not so soft headed.  Bleeding hearts were in short supply, especially for Irish Catholics in a predominantly Protestant country.

But now the separation of church and state is more ambiguous and politicians are more ambivalent, trying to please both sides of the street, but pleasing no one, creating the mess that we have on immigration and on other fundamental cultural issues such as the symbolic importance of Christmas and Easter and Christian verities on our identity as a society. 

People now feel self-conscious saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter,” if you have any doubt to how pervasive this absurdity is.

Being born and reared as an Irish Roman Catholic, I know something of the experience of immigrants that follow Islam and other religions and cultures. 

But at no time was I forced to become Protestant to actively participate in sports, to get good grades in a public high school and a land grant university, or a good paying job, or to be promoted. 

As readers know, I wear my culture on my sleeve and that has not been too comfortable for many who have had to deal with me along the way, but no one has ever attempted to change me.

If I sound unsympathetic with illegal immigrants, so be it. 

This is America.  This is not Cuba, not Mexico, not Brazil, not Venezuela, not Russia, not Germany, not France or Spain, not China or Japan, not Iraq or Iran, but the United States of America.   

Come here through legal channels, or don’t come at all!  Then once here, become Americans!  Don’t try to make America into what it isn’t nor can it be.  

Should America lose the idea that is its only great distinction, God help the world!

*     *     *

AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

Content of Character in a World Gone off the Rails!

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

© May 10, 2015

Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist, philosopher

A READER WRITES:

Just about makes one cry, doesn’t it?

You are writing about business management.  I am up against the same kind of thing in political management. (Well, they don’t call it that, but it boils down to pretty much the same thing.)

My country, Canada, has now for years been deeply involved in Senate scandals.  After pretty well all of my life having given politicians and politics hardly a sideways glance, I began looking into our Senate. 

I found that right here in the 21st century we are saddled with a 19th century institution. Why could that situation endure so long? Because Senators’ positions, pensions, prestige and perks are all protected by our Constitution.  No competition here! 

We have when all seats are filled some 105 Senators who all just about have the same mindset.  And with all thinking along similar tracks, one might ask: why 105? One would suffice. The other 104 could simply be office staff.

Well, I could go on on this subject, but no need for that because I already did in my essay about the Senate, http://fleabyte.org/My-2-cents/senate.html

I know you are too busy to read it, but if you were to do so, you are likely to find you are on familiar territory.

Few Senators and Members of Parliament have responded in such terms as “Thank you for your valued contribution.”

Most recently our Minister of Democratic Reform did, more likely a staffer, devoted part of a sentence to “valuing” what I wrote and the rest of a two-page letter about how committed his government is to reforming the Senate. 

They had introduced eight bills to that effect, the last one shot down by our Supreme Court.  I had to tell the minister that it must have been very disappointing to have done so much work and it all having gone down the drain. 

Why not simply read my essay instead of ‘valuing’ it? All the kinds of problems our government encountered can easily be side-stepped.  Problem is: our Senators, MPs and ministers, even though they are much smarter than I am, come out of similar moulds, 19th-century-way-of-doing-things-in-politics-moulds. 

Always reacting instead of proacting.  And none daring to step out of line, sorry, “going against the grain.”  After all, it would be so much easier to call me a crackpot.

Well, I am inviting the lot to find any error of fact or of logic in my essay.  After all, there must be some.  But I doubt they are capable of finding any.

But what is the use of crying?

Henry

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

Dear Henry,

Yes, it could make you cry, and as you say, there is no point in doing so.  When push comes to shove, we can only nourish, protect and sustain our own individual character.  We cannot save the world when it has left the tracks.  The world improves one person at a time.

That said your thoughtful response is much appreciated.  It is also a bit overwhelming in its scope and problematic concerns. 

It has been my experience that lengthy detail is beyond the pale of most audiences, even those especially privy to such detail.  You reference Gustave le Bon and Karen Armstrong, and the French Revolution.  These writers and this event are, indeed, relevant to today. 

While you weave your concerns around such comments, people in government differ little I suspect with people in general.  People have the attention span of a gnat.  Even when comments from a knowledgeable, concerned citizen resonate, I suspect they will be judged on the basis of costs/benefits to those in power, which means they are likely to be dismissed, ignored, or dispatched.  

TOO MUCH TOO MANY TOO SOON!

I am the last man who should say too much given I go on and on only too frequently, but my sense is that your salient argument is buried in the detail. 

Three things I’ve learned about technocrats in the complex organization:

(1)  They are tacticians not strategist, programmed to focus on the part, never the whole.  They fail to acknowledge much less see the forest for the trees;

(2)  They are pleasers not challengers to authority or the status quo.  They interpret what those in charge think and fear and are at the ready to sustain those interests or appease or neutralize those forebodings; 

(3)  They are apologists for the brand and for people who carry the flag of the brand.

But before I continue, allow me a bit of a chuckle. 

What you encountered with the “valuing” comment for your effort from the Canadian government’s foil is par for the course.   

We who live in the world of ideas should note song writers Bob Dylan’s approach to influencing those asleep at the wheel. How does he do it?

He writes serious stuff in throwaway lyrics but with cogent hooks buried in the songs.  He has been doing this for fifty years.  His repertoire is so impressive that Simon & Schuster has published these lyrics in a book of 963 pages at an asking price of $299 (The Lyrics, Bob Dylan, 2015). 

The irony is that his fans repeat his lyrics unaware that these lyrics have in turn changed their lives.  Dylan is a philosopher without protocol, a change agent without a political platform, a cultural anomaly in a time with nobody in charge.

*     *     *

The words of a writer seldom register.  It is the code that does. 

The code dances with the mischief already in the reader’s (or listener’s) head, but never with the overarching message the writer is endeavoring to communicate. 

Dylan knows this, and is comfortable with it.  He is dealing with his angst and if others can identify with his torment that is their problem, not his.  He is so well centered that if they place him on a pedestal it means nothing.   It is not about him; it is about them.  

If only those of us who write seriously could understand this, what a difference it would make!

Words and ideas rush out of our heads like volcanic ash, hot and heavy, consume our emotions, peak, then descend and ultimately cool to become the germinating soil of ideas for the next generation, or one in the distant future.  

That is why what you say is important, perhaps not today, but tomorrow.

I’ve paid dearly for getting all the extant published works of Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931), some only left in fragments, as publishers didn’t see fit to preserve his rambling but yet lucid ideas intact on such subjects a mass movements, the psychology of peoples and the popular mind.   

Within these reference codes, people respond to cues not unlike our beloved pet or circus animals.  This was the appeal of the “One Minute Manager” (1982). 

Writer Catherine Tritsch observed that the formula was precisely what Sea World used in training Shamu, the killer whale: “Shamu may be better trained than most U.S. workers.” (Successful Meetings, August 1983).

Sometimes I think we couldn’t survive as a society if not for being on automatic pilot most of the time.   

That said your reference to the Canadian government’s fixation with the nineteenth century registered with me. 

This is an indicator of a wider issue, the obsession with what is already known.  I call it plunging into the future looking through the rearview mirror, always surprised when we run into clearly visible objects up ahead.

Obviously, there are people in positions of influence who agree with your premise(s), but agreeing and putting that agreement into action are worlds apart. 

When in command and control roles, those in charge constantly run into themselves, then throw their minions into the fray to play apologists for them.  It would surprise me if this weren’t happening in the Canadian government, as it is happening everywhere else.  It is the minions who tell us they “value” our efforts, when clearly they don’t. 

PBS TELEVISION’S “WOLF HALL”

In recent weeks, I have been watching the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) television series “Wolf Hall,” which deals with the Court of King Henry VIII of England in the sixteenth century.  

Change the costumes and it could be a twenty-first century drama without changing the dialogue.   

Thomas Cromwell is the king’s right hand man playing very much the role of an (OD) psychologist commanding all that he surveys while being obsequious to a fault to his master, the king.  Why this reference?

The Twilight Zone was a television series created by Rod Serling, who constantly ran into the censors in the 1960s.  These were the paranoid years in America of the “Red Scare” (i.e., communism), when first amendment rights were summarily violated by the US Government, while the Supreme Court went along with the charade.  I was a big fan of this program during this most hysterical period. 

Serling got around these restrictions and got his message across by placing his dramas in the “twilight zone” without sacrificing the content or his character.  

I see “Wolf Hall” applying the same strategy.  Who could object to what happened five hundred years ago, right?

Alas, the more things go around they come around, as the French remind us. 

So, it is today with your Canadian government, as it is seemingly immersed in the equivalent of the oligarchic “Court of King Henry VIII.”  

Ideologies differ but people don’t. 

Your considerate essay reminds me of our oligarchic Western World of which your Canadian government is but a bland prototype to our own.

By a curious coincidence, “Wolf Hall” as it is now unfolding on television would not have had much appeal to the boomer, hippie or “X” generations, but a mock appeal to the Millenials.  Why?

Millennials cue on the things they understand and in a code that resonates with them.  They understand that the oligarchic one percent own and control everything and then there is the rest of us, yet we do nothing.  There are protests but no revolution (Le Bon also wrote on this).

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was such a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park in New York City's Wall Street financial district.  It received global attention and spawned the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide, but it has mainly fizzled because of a lack of coordinated leadership and support.  

Millennials learned in watching this that it is the difference between smoke and fire.

THE GENESIS OF OLIGARCHIC AUTHORITY

Since WWII, the management class has become the most viable contingent of a self-appointed elite.  Managers are employees like workers but from the beginning have acted as if owners, which created an aspiring propensity for climbing up the hierarchy.  

Let us call them “pyramid climbers.”  You have encountered an aspiring one with your “valuing” response.

The boomer generation as climbers were always vying for the next job, not having time to do the job paid to do.  Unabashed sycophants to power, be it corrupt or otherwise, they longed only for the next rung on the pyramid.  I worked for a few perhaps you have as well. 

Millennials are the latest common denominator in this sequential development, only they are not interested in pyramids or climbing.  Quite frankly, they are not interested in a lot.  Either they have seen the damage second hand, or they have been born into a family with the baggage, and are looking for a way out not knowing for sure what that might be.

They are content to be currently drifting certain they don’t want the world of their parents.  They don't see the situation as a matter of blood but more a matter of the content of their character. 

With no power, or no drive to attain power, they may be the greatest danger of all to oligarchic authority because the oligarchs have no idea how to spin this generation.  Back to “Wolf Hall.”

Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son, was a Millennial of his time, while the Royal Court that King Henry VIII made peripheral to power, did their pyramid climbing building sand castles in the air.  Pyramid climbers today are returning to this fate of differentiation if you prefer.

Cromwell’s virtues were competence and cunning; those of the Royal Court were blood and privilege.  His involved hard work, self-discipline, domestic responsibility, kindness within limits, perspicacity to a fault, and stability above all else, avoiding being caught up in the intrigue.      

The Royal Court relished its position power, perks, privileges and inheritance not unlike “pyramid climbers” today. 

Just as management symbolically disdained the working population with its designated parking, isolated offices, bonuses, executive concessions, Cromwell's OD astutely wreaked of “middle class,” or nineteenth century code, “bourgeois orthodoxy.” 

Oligarchic authority and bourgeois orthodoxy go in sync apparently in Canadian government, as they do in the United States government and corporate society.  WWII nostalgia will just not dissipate.    

The content of character virtues have dissipated as has middle class values (see The Worker, Alone!).  They have been dismissed as boring lacking in the chutzpah of upward mobility and progress being instead identified with playing it “safe,” as if that were a sin.

We have moved beyond pyramid climbers to entrepreneurs, but is that the answer to the climber’s legacy for it seems to hang on and not leave our minds. 

But, Henry, we are not safe anymore.  

We are not in control.  We generate chaos and call it business as usual practices.  Governance in the public and private sector operates with infallible authority denying that everything we have (and are) can be whipped away from us at any moment. 

We are not at the pleasure of bullies and terrorists; we are at the pleasure of our protectors.    

The West is frozen in Vladimir Putin’s headlights unable to get out of the way much less move to safety.  He understands our terror and exploits it at will.  

Pusillanimity pretty well covers it.

The terror that grips us in the West is not our weakness but our extraordinary strength.

We have lost our ability to look out the window and see “what is,” but instead look in the mirror and see only our terror.      

Millennials seem to understand this without knowing.  

Perhaps this is because they refuse our conditioning.  Perhaps they have endured abusive parents, absent parents, self-indulgent parents, immature parents, hypocritical parents, parents chasing the buck while fleeing their mortality, parents looking for connections, always connections, for an easy score, always an easy score, and they want none of it.

It would seem we have progressed as a society in a mad dash away from parenting since WWII.  This retreat has been continuous from the Hippie Generation to the “Me” Generation to the “X” Generation, stopping with Millennials.

Is it any wonder Millennials are not interested in authority – they ignore it; not interested in culture – don't see the point of it; don’t feel victimized – don’t have time for it; and are not religious or irreligious – don’t feel the need?    

We are back to the “self-made” man (or woman) mold solely reliant on ourselves, tired of the rhetoric of parents, false promises of bosses and politicians and others who don’t have a scintilla of understanding of us.

But this “follow your dream” meritocracy that is implicit in this retreat can only go so far as explanation.  It always comes down to doing something, now! 

There is little chance that those in command & control positions, as one observer put it, are ready “to loosen the screws even one turn.”  We have to do it for them. 

The West is crumbling from the inside because it continues to stay the same, can’t seem to face the changes, which means it leaves the future up for grabs.  A Putin type was bound to step into the breach. 

We desperately need a socioeconomic Middle Class as the oligarchs once again come to bully Western society.  I am betting on the Millennials.

 *     *     *

 

  

  

EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

Going Against the Grain!

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

© May 7, 2015

PART TWO

(Concluding segment of Career Changing Speech)

STUCK IN MACHINE AGE THINKING

– Erik Erikson’s Model of Human Development

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw in Maxims for Revolution (1903)

Labor unions are in sharp decline, while management’s union, Human Resources (HR) is soaring with its cosmetic interventions. Workers feel betrayed by labor unions as management’s adversary, and exploited by HR as management’s advocate. The “best and brightest” have become cynical and turned to making money rather than making a difference. That legacy has contributed to the economic crisis.

The uncoupling of workers from managers has widened as managers no longer lead and workers no longer follow. Surprisingly, we have survived despite management’s insensitivity and workers’ immaturity during the Machine Age.

To understand this, let us walk through a cultural no man’s land guided by Erik Erikson’s six styles of human personality development: (1) autonomy; (2) trust; (3) initiative; (4) accomplishment; (5) identity; and (6) intimacy.

Erikson’s model supports the premise that management is dealing with a wrongly conditioned workforce for the times, a workforce that enjoys little autonomy, only contrived trust, little opportunity to take the initiative or to sense personal accomplishment, which leads to a crisis in identity and an inability to demonstrate intimacy.

The workforce experiences from the crib to the company a high need to please which marks its arrested development. When workers as adults are needed, they are nowhere to be found. It was surreal but nonetheless true when management thought it could construct arbitrary systems, such as Quality Circles and empowerment programs such as Participative Management and workers would respond with maturity and satisfaction. Obviously, this has not been the case.

Instead, the new wave of challenges and opportunities have been met with confusion if not shame, mistrust, guilt, a sense of insecurity, and isolation. This has perplexed management as it has failed to see how more than fifty years of co-dependency has resulted in a workforce essentially mired in terminal adolescence. What needs to be done, fortunately, is revealed in Erikson’s model. Management needs to maintain patience with the process.

It needs to cut back on its demands, and look for ways to cultivate workers for the long haul. This can be done by encouraging workers to do the right things rather than everything right. Workers know what makes the difference. Management needs only to solicit their views on common problems, which will gradually turn workers around from passive to active responders.

If this sounds like making workers full partners in the process, we are on the same page. Reality, when it is positive and reinforcing, finds workers at the ready, but when reality is negative and demanding it is another story. It will not be easy for workers to become more responsive and responsible. If they do, the dividends are considerable:

• A sense of autonomy will build self-control, which will lead to self-management demonstrating the willpower of disciplined behavior;

• A sense of trust will fuel the drive and motivation to have faith in the future;

• A sense of initiative will give self-direction and purpose to work;

• A sense of accomplishment will lead to competence;

• A sense of identity will lead to loyalty and fidelity;

• A sense of intimacy will promote affiliation and love

• Personality development involves the formation of trust. Obviously, the trust in the best of organizations is only slightly above the “dog eat dog” level.

• A sense of autonomy is constantly denied until most adults are products of learned helplessness with a high need to please others without any idea how to please themselves. The sense of accomplishment is also thwarted because expediency dictates there is a right way, which is translated the only way.

This leaves little room for initiative or for failure, which is the learning phase. In the absence of initiative and accomplishment, there is little room for personal satisfaction.

Identity is a stage that most would admit not handling too well. Role confusion and role demands lead to identity crises.

When so handicapped, we become other directed with little idea what makes us tick other than being dependent or counter dependent on what we do for a living.

The psychological shrinking of America has created an industry for mid-life identity crises. One in every three Americans seeks psychotherapy or counseling from a psychiatrist, psychologist, physician, psychotherapist, guidance counselor, teacher, preacher, guru or friend.

Yet perhaps the hardest is to attain a sense of intimacy. Sex is not intimacy. Love is. Sex and love can merge into intimacy but the problem is not only intimacy with others but with ourselves.

We are interested in having good friends, but the most important friendship must be with ourselves. If we cannot be intimate with ourselves, then intimacy with others in a sham.

THE SEARCH FOR A QUICK CURE

The modern worker is a new entity. He is more skilled, better educated and self-confident. He also has different values, beliefs and expectations as well as interests. He doesn’t respond well to blarney.

He has power in his knowledge and is self-motivated and the new kid on the block. When he comes into an organization, it is like hitting a wall when he is expected to be management dependent or counter dependent on the company for his total well-being.

He is not timid, insecure, unskilled, undereducated, and naïve, but it is soon clear to him that he is expected to take orders, be polite, obedient, punctual, and passive and appreciate being taken care of.

When he is unresponsive to charismatic leadership, and doesn’t see the company as “his family,” and fails to follow company policies and procedures to the letter he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The irony is that he may just be what the company needs.

This has been the dilemma. Professionally trained workers find themselves being treated as if blue-collar workers when they see themselves as decision-makers and not passive responders.

Rather than admit the workforce is dominated by this new worker with fully eight out of ten, and soon nine out of ten workers being of such a mindset and temperament, companies have attempted to make them fit. Many pundits and writers have been at the ready to oblige management.

Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy in “Corporate Culture” (1982) see the problem in terms of knowing what the company stands for; Bob Waterman and Tom Peters in “Search for Excellence” (1982) claim the best bet is to copy successful companies; and John Naisbitt in “Megatrends” (1982) sees visions beyond the pale of the cockeyed optimist.

These prescriptions fail to deal with Erikson’s six stages which can flourish only in a culture that supports them.

ELEVEN CORPORATE HABITS IN THE WAY

The Problem with Top-Down Communications.

Operationally, strategic planning doesn’t necessarily translate into tactical communications. What is proposed in the Boardroom is compromised with too many filters to pass through to the operations level. Consequently, internal stress and accelerating external demands mount to the point that problems go unreported or are misconstrued and timely decisions are not made.

Management by Objectives (MBOs), in Practice, Has Proven Counterproductive, Time Consuming, Expensive and Ineffective.

Compartmentalizing objectives, and then rewarding each department for accomplishing its objectives has proven illusory. As systems analyst Russell Ackoff has shown, if you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components as well as possible, the system as a whole will not behave as well as it could. It is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but nonetheless true, if you have a system that is behaving as well as it could, then none of its parts will be.

The Problem with the Non-Confrontational Style of Management

Tension and conflict are normal fare in an organization. Asking questions, or disputing the problem solving strategy are necessary to have a vibrant, engaged and energetic work climate. Harmony is the antithesis of efficacy as managed conflict is the glue that holds an operation on task. Americans tend to protest infrequently but violently instead of frequently and politely. It is not necessary that everyone like each other for an operation to be successful, but it is important that everyone respect and esteem each other’s contribution.

Management Manages the Way it is Paid.

When lip service is given to quality, it is understood that compensation and promotion depend upon meeting schedule at any cost. Corners are cut, and ethical standards compromised to meet the bottom line. Workers see this and become cynical.

Management Has Outsourced Personnel Management to Human Resources with Dire Consequences.

Feeling international competition, decaying infrastructure of plants and equipment, and especially obsolescent manpower technical skills, and demotivated workers, management turned to human resources to solve its problems. The result has been a series of cosmetic interventions that have made the workplace like a playground at the expense of performance.

Management Is Preoccupied with Order, which, Paradoxically, Makes it the Victim of Chaos.

In the Machine Age, when everything was in its place and there was a place for everything, this made sense. Work, workers and the workplace were like a well-oiled machine with predictable outcomes and little variance, as it was essentially a robotic environment with workers behaving like interchangeable parts. That has all changed in the era of the professional worker, except in the workplace.

The Company attempting to be “All Things” to its People has ended in being a Disappointment to Everyone.

When things were going smoothly and profits were soaring, management flirted with lifetime employment, and entitlement programs that had little to do with performance. Now when markets are shrinking, and costs are soaring, management plays the heavy. US Steel and Alcoa learned this the hard way. A program was initiated in the 1960s in which every five years veteran employees would be given an additional 13-weeks paid furlough.

The objective was to leverage employees to greater productivity. Instead of traveling or honing their skills, most workers got second jobs. When back to work at US Steel and Alcoa, now enjoying the income from two jobs, many attempted to work both jobs, which diminished performance, and led instead to anger with management.

The John Wayne “Lone Ranger” Mindset.

Some company brass take pride in going it alone, taking big risks, cutting out new territory with a flamboyance that nothing untoward can touch them, until it does sending the company into an economic tailspin with workers in the end to pay. These no nonsense cowboys of reckless enterprise led to the Savings & Loan scandal where the books were cooked and people went to prison.

The Problem of Professionalism.

Professionalism has evolved as we have moved through the postindustrial to modernity and into postmodernity all within a generation or so. We have become an acquisitive society not only in materialism but also in terms of credentials. We measure capability by those who have degrees, and give little consideration to those who do not, as if a degree holder has a right to a job simply for being credentialed. Intelligence is what it does, not a BS or BA designation. Credentials are not a shorthand for competence.  Typically, when a professional runs into career stagnation, he goes back to school to get an MBA or Ph.D.

The Confusion between Tasks and Structures.

No one is likely to argue that the norms for one company would apply equally to another. There are discrete cultures to every company. When the lights are dimmed at 6 p.m., it tells workers it is time to go home. If there are staff meetings routinely every morning, it means work is secondary to your expected presence. If you want to stay after six, the dimming of the lights tells you it can wait until tomorrow. If you prefer to work alone but everything is done in teams, then it is in team meetings where you should be. If none of this appeals to you, then it is best that you move on, but most people don’t.

The structure of work determines the task of work; those tasks create the workplace culture; that culture dictates organizational behavior; and that behavior if it is consistent with your drives will be enhancing; if it is not you are in the wrong place.

What does it mean for the company? It means some companies will soar, some will vegetate, and others will flounder and expire. It depends on how much the structure supports the tasks at hand.

Human Resources Has Unwittingly Become Management’s Union.

Management is remarkably dependent on a buffer between it and its people. Be that buffer an adversary or advocate is immaterial, the function is basically the same. Moreover, just as the labor union movement grew out of an erosion of worker power in the industrial organization, the Human Resources movement has grown out of an erosion of management power in the complex organization. Labor unions and human resources have had a similar function: insuring organizational survival. The reason for drawing special attention to this “new unionism” is that it reveals, once again, how precariously the organization is in transition. Also, it indicates the void between the workforce and management is growing wider.

With the labor unions, you may recall, union leaders bought into management’s emphasis on productivity. Their attention was diverted from the erosion of worker power or control of what they did to sacrificing this for entitlements, compensation and job security. Now that has also eroded. Labor unions were willing to give management increasing control as long as management made pay and entitlement concessions. This has hurt workers and management alike. Management believed that paying workers more would motivate them to do more. One need look no further than the steel and automotive industries to see that this did not work.

Now, we have the “New Union,” Human Resources, orchestrating interventions that have turned the workplace into a playground. Just as management gave the labor unions the money they said they needed, management is now giving Human Resources the power to promote morale with cosmetic perks:

(1) From parking to work concessions;

(2) From touchy-feely supervision to extraordinary fringe benefits;

(3) From beautiful work areas to wonderful group programs.

Whereas the labor union got management and the worker to think in terms of money concessions, Human Resources has gotten management and the worker to think in terms of comfort and climatic luxury. The net result has been in both cases a demotivated workforce vacillating between comfort and complacency.

It is time management becomes less dependent on advocacy (Human Resources) or adversary (Labor Unions) relationships, and more on workers and management becoming partners in enterprise.

And So Where Do We Go From Here?

What I have attempted to do here is admittedly a risky analysis of a complex problem. There is no way such an analysis can be made without stepping on some toes including the hand that feeds me. Be that as it may, I have been waiting for someone to surface these realities:

(1) The modern complex organization is out of balance and has got to regain that balance;

(2) That balance cannot be discovered by ignoring history or by embracing untested new ideas;

(3) That workers work the way they have been programmed to work, and that conditioning cannot be summarily rejected by instituting prosthetics corrections (re: Quality Circles and Participative Management Programs);

(4) That management has had a haughty dependence on technology (or things), and a horrifying disregard and ignorance of workers (as persons);

(5) That workers have a fundamental need to contribute and own what they do because work provides identity;

(6) That workers need to experience growth in order to feel worthwhile;

(7) That workers will behave as children when treated like children;

(8) That the organization in the modern era has become increasingly immature in the home, church, school, and community as well as the workplace;

(9) That immaturity is a product of believing what is best for the individual without knowing what the individual needs, values, believes and expects.

(10) That Participative Management hasn’t a ghost of a chance until the gap is closed between an adolescent and an adult oriented organization;

(11) That Participative Management demonstrates we are basically ignorant in organizational terms of what motivates the individual worker.

Having said all this, I think a first step is to recognize that the “management of things” and the “management of people” are discretely different functions. That managers and consultants must realize that listening is more powerful than telling. That framing the problem is more important than generating solutions. That we are on the threshold of a wonderful tomorrow if we can “let go” of all our precous assumptions and let a little reality guide our way.