ADVANCE COPY OF SPEECH
TO BE OR NOT TO BE STUCK, THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.© August 2007
Best Western Frontier
Clinton, Iowa
Address & Book Signing - A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
Wednesday, 6 PM, September 12, 2007
How many of you walk for twenty to thirty minutes once a month? Twice a month? Three times a month? Once a week? Twice a week? Three times a week? Or more? How many times? Give that person an autographed copy of my book.
Our brains are hard wired for another time. We are dancing naked in a mind field, m-i-n-d, while our consciences have taken a holiday. We are not in charge and our society is ailing.
We are stuck, and as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD argues; it is not a recent condition.
Some years ago, my work took me to Fairfax County Virginia, outside Washington, DC. The county police department had grown from 84 to 840 officers in a little over a decade. Yet, citizen complaints were hand counted while a massive computer sat idly by. A junior officer in the field was computer literate, but he had to complete the requisite years in patrol before transferring to administration.
This same sense of being stuck was experienced on my return to university as a mature student. I had worked at all levels of the complex organization through a good part of the world, and had returned to academia to corroborate and clarify my experience.
My professors weren't interested in my empirical insights. I was part of the production line of the academic factory, and was not to interfere with that process.
We are stuck doing things "the way they've always been done," or "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Corporate "Mahogany Row" has this in common with academia's "Ivory Tower." Meanwhile, both wait until something breaks down, and then it is often too little too late for damage control.
The subprime real estate collapse, Virginia Tech student murder rampage, and recent Minnesota-St. Paul bridge collapse come to mind.
We always have answers after the fact. We are a reactive society. Surprise goads us into action. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US into WWII; the launching of Sputnik to get the US into the space race; disappearing American markets and jobs to recognize the economic threat from South East Asia; and the Katrina debacle by the Office of Home Land Security to alert us to government impotence in national crisis.
Disturbing as this is, we never seem to learn as today is a mirror image of yesterday and an omen of tomorrow.
Thirty-five years ago I wrote an essay registering my disenchantment. It stayed in a drawer until last Christmas, when my wife had to return to Minnesota to attend her ailing parents. I was shocked to see how little had changed except for the names of people, places and things. Otherwise, it was all the same.
This coincidental recognition has become the book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
In 1972, American youth escaped into psychedelic drugs; today electronic tools have become escape toys. Virtual reality of the Internet and cyberspace now eclipses reality, while chance and luck are treated as synonyms.
Forgotten is "we make our own luck," but "take a chance." Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity; chance is buying a lotto ticket or running off to a casino.
We have misplaced our moral compass and lost our way. We are stuck attempting to cure obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with drugs, diet books and weight watcher programs without acknowledging the problem of our hard wiring.
Our minds are stuck in another time in wrong thinking.
In fairness, there are exceptions. Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin understood that problems are never solved but only controlled. They used this distinction to attack a dreaded disease, poliomyelitis. Today, polio no longer terrifies us as it once did, as Salk developed and Sabin perfected a vaccine to control the disease, a triumph of preventive medicine.
Some of you may remember when the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool was closed all summer long because of the threat of polio. You may also remember that former President Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio as a young man, never to walk again. Yet, no one ever saw the ugly steel braces that held up his useless legs.
A chronic problem was identified, addressed and dispatched.
Our sick culture is now our chronic problem.
Disease prevention isn't always as dramatic as a miracle vaccine. Several years ago, The Reader's Digest ran an article on Canadian mailmen in one province who still delivered mail by riding bicycles. In that province's long history, there had never been a single case of heart disease or stroke, not even after retirement.
We have not always been so wise.
Few economic forecasters noticed American markets were fast eroding in the 1960s, or if they did, even fewer listened. The United States was at the height of its hubris. American products were in demand everywhere. The working middle class had never been healthier; jobs were plentiful. Employers were willing to give workers anything but control of their work.
In a short 15-year period since 1945, workers had become management dependent and programmed to react to management's demands. Management had inadvertently assumed the role of surrogate parent to the workforce.
Wages and entitlements escalated. Management, once lean, was now caught up in the fever. During the war, factories operated with a single supervisor for a hundred workers. Now there were department heads, specialty managers, supervisors and group leaders with every ten or twelve workers reporting to someone.
Management empires were being built as pay and perks were based on the size of the reporting staff. Organizations got stuck in glut.
Meanwhile, the GI Bill was turning out a new professional class of workers, armed with knowledge power and maturity with no place to go, as position power was still king. That infrastructural war contributed to American woes when US commerce was already on a slippery slope. Unhappily, it continues to this day. It was 1960 and Japan, Inc. was roaring into American markets with quality products when it previously had a reputation for producing useless items.
What caused this miraculous transformation?
The answer is W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker.
Deming taught the Japanese statistical quality control and introduced them to quality control circles in which workers joint problem solved work related problems.
Juran introduced them to process quality control by identifying chronic operating problems. And
Peter Drucker introduced them to just-in-time inventory control and effective management practices.
These three Americans were working for Japanese companies because they failed to convince American companies of the benefits to their technology. We suffer to this day for that failure.
One night in 1980 this all exploded into our consciousness. We knew Japan was making inroads into US markets in lighting fixtures, large appliances and automobiles, but we didn't know how. That is, until NBC television ran a program called "Japan Can, Why Can't We?"
Tom Brokaw hosted the program. It profiled Japan's total quality management, and quality control circle programs. At the time, I was directing the largest QC Program in the nation at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. Two years earlier, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth had brought quality circles to Honeywell. We had over one hundred circles of hourly assembly workers with ten or twelve in each QC circle.
Overnight, after the NBC awakening, a stampede swept the country with literally tens of thousands of companies introducing QC circles with little idea what they were much less what they could and couldn't accomplish. A bevy of carpetbagging consultants and QC societies sprung up everywhere. One reached more than 100,000 members in six months.
A magic elixir had been discovered to get us out of the rut, but was that true?
In our national frenzy, three things were ignored:
(1) Japan is a group-oriented society; the US is an individualistic culture.
(2) The Japanese workforce at the time was 80 percent blue collar and 20 percent white collar. The US was the reverse of these percentages.
(3) The American white-collar workers did not respond to the QC program. They identified with management and decision-making. Unskilled workers enjoyed the attention and embraced QC circles, but solved only cosmetic problems (e.g., assembly lightning, work station design, procedural manuals).
Today, professionals have an expertise management lacks, yet we are stuck in another time as they are managed, motivated and mobilized as if work, workers and the workplace had not changed.
This forward inertia is not new, but finds us running faster and faster in place. It all comes back to our hard wiring. It doesn't take a scholarly tome to note this.
In 1900, 90 percent of Americans were farmers or in work related to farming. Today, less than 3 percent are. In 1900, few had electricity or indoor plumbing, much less automobiles. We were an agrarian society. In a sense, we still are in an agrarian mindset. We still eat as if our jobs require expanse of great amounts of physical energy.
Statistics indicate we abhor exercise. When we go to the mall, we park as close to the mall as possible. If we play golf, we go from hole to hole in an electric golf cart. Many airports even provide automatic walkways that carry us from point to point. Yet, we eat as if it is 1900 working from sun up to sun down bailing hay.
Denny's has a "grand slam" breakfast; so does Country Kitchen, Perkins and Village Inn. The big breakfast is topped off with a diet drink. You laugh, but we are stuck in a diet of another time. Small wonder only the Bible outsells cookbooks.
In a recent study by the University of South Florida of my county, Hillsborough, 66 percent of Hillsborough citizens were found to be overweight to obese, or roughly 900,000 people. Diabetes, strokes, and heart disease are common in this population.
What about Clinton County, Iowa?
We are stuck in a time when exercise was a necessity, not an option.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD illustrates how the mind is slow to change, stubbornly resists it, and changes only when forced to do so. This is shown dramatically when 1972 is compared to today. The more frustrated we become the more likely we are to throw our hands up and say, "Why bother?" It is hoped that the reader will say, "Because it is necessary to preserve our way of life." Thank you very much, and God bless.
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available with the publisher: www.authorhouse.com, www.amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.
Friday, August 24, 2007
ARE YOU STUCK?
ARE YOU STUCK?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
"If I could change my circumstance, I would have preferred different parents, a different religion and a different wife."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Are you stuck?
That's kind of a threatening question, isn't it?
We are not supposed to be stuck. Yet I claim in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD that we are stuck and have been stuck for a long time. In fact, I build a case that between 1972, when I first wrote this essay and now, a period of 35 years, little has changed only the names have changed.
We're again in an unpopular war. We have a president that hunkers down. We have a congress that missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.
Businesses are disappearing from the American continent faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson."
The other day an engineer making a six-figure income called me and said his workplace was sick and he was unhappy.
How so, I asked.
I think I suffer from malicious obedience, he replied.
Immediately, I knew he had read one of my books. Malicious obedience is withholding information critical to the success of an operation, hiding information required by colleagues to do their job, doing what you're told even if you know it's wrong, or circulating misinformation or disinformation to vent your hostility without anyone being the wiser.
If it is so bad, I asked, why don't you leave?
He answered. Well, let me put it this way. If I left right now, there would be such a huge hole in the bucket that it couldn't hold water.
I let that pass, clearly he sees himself as indispensable. He doesn't recognize that he's stuck. But he is stuck. He wants from his company what it cannot give him, leadership. He wants it to do the right thing when it doesn't know how. It is locked stepped in the past, obsessed with the future, and frozen in the present.
It is a phenomenon experienced across the board but nobody wants to admit it. We are overwhelmed with the complexity of the times. So, we play the lotto or lose ourselves in the casino.
You see, you're stuck if you are in a job you hate, in a relationship you hate, in a profession you hate, in a community you hate, in a religion you hate, in a school you hate, and so on. Hate is a failure to accept things as they are.
As soon as we fail to accept things as they are, we have come to own the problem.
If you hate the way I look, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I act, the way I live, the way I am, I don't have a problem. You have a problem.
I'm perfectly content with what and who and where I am. You're not, and therefore, by definition, you have a problem. You are stuck with me as I am because you want me to change. You want me to be like you want me to be.
But that is impossible because you are not me and I am not you. We have different wills, different constructions, different experiences, and we are different persons.
So, if there is some behavior of another person that drives you up the wall, you are stuck. If you cannot accept what you encounter, you're stuck. It can extend to a person, place or thing beyond your control.
I'll go beyond that.
Let's say you have a problem with yourself. You've been programmed to be a perfectionist, and you know you're not. You've been programmed to always have answers for everything and of course you don't. You've been programmed to wax secure when you're not, and so you're not self-accepting. You're stuck in denial and loathe yourself for being stuck.
See my point.
We have drifted away from our foundation. Forgotten is how we came to be Americans. We originally left Europe in the 17th century to escape religious tyranny. In America we felt free to believe and behave as we willed. We entered a harsh environment and had to embrace its risks and endure its pain, as it was unforgiving. We had to cope with disease, hardship, hunger, and yes, even starvation.
But our will was huge against these forces of nature. We grew resilient, resolute, and strong embracing, not denying our weakness.
That is our legacy. It would come to pass one day for that constitution to find us the strongest nation in the world.
Now, how did that happen?
That happened because the focus was on the process not the outcome. There was no comfort zone, no home in the suburbs. We were all on the same page pushing off the same dime. We were united in hardship not so much because we loved each other so dearly, but because we needed each other so desperately to survive.
We had no time for petty complaints, for saying Harry has advantages Joe doesn't. We worked from sun up to sunset and collapsed in a cold bed with the sleeping sedative of exhaustion.
We had no time to be stuck.
We had no choice but to use our creative intelligence, which deals with what is not known but can be discovered instead of critical intelligence, the intelligence of being stuck, which deals with what is already known.
Critical intelligence solves problems with the same thinking that caused the problems in the first place. We are very familiar with that.
We go round and round in circular logic with cause effect analysis solving problems by identifying and treating symptoms, wondering why they are never resolved. We look for the magic bullet that will cure our lifestyle excesses: eating, drinking, and smoking too much, doing drugs and sexual dalliance. Stuck.
We've come to call it the paralysis of analysis feeling more inclined to describe a problem ad infinitum than to take action.
We are stuck in Socratic hierarchical vertical thinking when the complement of lateral thinking is required. Moreover, we fail to realize problems are never solved, but only controlled.
We're stuck everywhere. We're stuck in a war. We're stuck in a congress that blames the president for the war, and a president that blames the congress for its lack of patriotism and being supportive of our troops in harms way.
In my work, I've often dealt with professionals: engineers, scientists, and specialists. These people go to school a long time, come into industry and commerce only to find they have to work for somebody that doesn't have their knowledge base, but who exerts position power over them.
What do you think they do?
Do they attempt to bridge the gap and bring their bosses up to speed?
They become frustrated, anxious, angry, and yes, retreat into such behaviors as malicious obedience. They don't use their intelligence to school their superiors into seeing the wisdom of doing things differently.
Why?
They are stuck with protocol and programming.
Leadership is supposed to come from the top, down, not the bottom, up. They have been programmed to be passive, reactive and submissive as if nothing has changed. Stuck.
In 1950, 80 percent of workers were blue-collar and 20 percent were white-collar. Today nearly 90 percent are white collar and 10 percent are blue collar. Yet we are stuck managing, motivating and mobilizing workers as if the color of their collar has not changed.
We are stuck with position power while knowledge power dangles in the wind.
If I'm going to change the system, I've got to change me. And if I change me and I'm unhappy, I've got to leave.
Those of you who have read my ten questions will see I've done many things. I've done those many things because I believe in the formula:
On the other hand, the failure to embrace risk and endure pain equals atrophy.
Nothing stays the same; you either grow or waste away.
If you are wasting away, it suggests it is because you are unhappy. You are not getting what you want; you're not going where you prefer. You are stuck.
Now, an individual can be stuck. A corporation can be stuck. A country can be stuck. A society can be stuck. Such things have often happened.
We don't have time to go into the history but I am sure your filter processing what I am saying would immediately block the penetration of the information because we are all stuck on certain things.
We continue to believe what we've been programmed to believe, and don't want new information that challenges such beliefs. Everyone here has core beliefs, beliefs that may be so rooted as if a tree.
Yet, everything is moving. There has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300. We have an exponential acceleration of change that is making it very difficult for us to be on the same page and getting off on the same dime.
The problem can be reduced to three words: what and who and why.
We like simple answers to complex problems.
We are still stuck in the terrible tragedy of 9/11 attempting to determine what caused it, and who was responsible. We are forever stuck on the what and the who, but never seem to get around to the question of why.
Why has been ignored. It would challenge our core beliefs. It would force us to see the terrorists not as demons and murderers, both of which they are deemed to be, but as people believing they have nothing more to lose and, rightly or wrongly, have been disrespected, their culture and religion slandered.
Terrorism is not new and is always a matter of perspective. Desperate people take desperate measures to right imagined or real wrongs. The Minute Men of our American Revolution picked off the British Red Coats marching proudly in a row. George Washington had his greatest victory crossing the Delaware completely surprising the British who expected a secession of hostilities during the holiday season. Menachem Begin had the reputation of a terrorist in the 1940s against British authority in Palestine, only to rise to a celebrated prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Tecumseh Sherman torched the earth and left the South barren and burning in his march to the sea demoralizing and breaking the will of the Confederate Army.
Terrorism is a dehumanizing strategy. And as shown throughout history, it is effective.
Just think, in this little bit of time, I have managed to offend Christians and Jews and patriots, and indeed, western civilization. Minds close when so threatened and become stuck.
We will remain stuck and never progress off the dime or find ourselves on the same page if we continue as we are. The mega force of change has made us one people in a "rainbow coalition."
The United States of America increasingly resembles Europe with multi cultures and languages spoken and costumes on display in virtually all points of the nation. It is not time to resist this trend but to embrace it.
The need to have a token understanding of these languages and acceptance of these differences is no longer a luxury but increasingly a fundamental need to get along.
Why say all these things and stir up the dust?
We once possessed a moral compass of tolerance. We have misplaced it. We have lost our way. To find our way we cannot turn to an authority figure or leader to find it for us. Leaders are as lost and stuck as we are. President John F. Kennedy once said he was born with the wrong parents in the wrong religion and to the wrong wife. It would be hard to improve on a better definition of being stuck.
We are all leaders or none of us are.
We cannot afford to be stuck in this modern world looking for someone else to lead us to safety. Our history indicates that many want to wrest that power from us, and we've paid dearly for the attention.
The answers are not in the media, although the media loves that sense of power; the answers are not in our institutions that programmed us for another time; nor are the answers in our leaders as leadership is no longer top down, but bottom up.
We are stuck asking top down leaders to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. You see, leadership has changed but no one wants to admit it, and so we have dissolved to leaderless leadership and crisis management, stuck.
It is time we take charge, grow up, and embrace our resistance to the present. The future will take care of itself.
Thank you very much.
__________
This is another possible talk composed during my peripatetic walk today for inclusion during my book tour in Clinton, Iowa next month.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
"If I could change my circumstance, I would have preferred different parents, a different religion and a different wife."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Are you stuck?
That's kind of a threatening question, isn't it?
We are not supposed to be stuck. Yet I claim in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD that we are stuck and have been stuck for a long time. In fact, I build a case that between 1972, when I first wrote this essay and now, a period of 35 years, little has changed only the names have changed.
We're again in an unpopular war. We have a president that hunkers down. We have a congress that missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.
Businesses are disappearing from the American continent faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson."
The other day an engineer making a six-figure income called me and said his workplace was sick and he was unhappy.
How so, I asked.
I think I suffer from malicious obedience, he replied.
Immediately, I knew he had read one of my books. Malicious obedience is withholding information critical to the success of an operation, hiding information required by colleagues to do their job, doing what you're told even if you know it's wrong, or circulating misinformation or disinformation to vent your hostility without anyone being the wiser.
If it is so bad, I asked, why don't you leave?
He answered. Well, let me put it this way. If I left right now, there would be such a huge hole in the bucket that it couldn't hold water.
I let that pass, clearly he sees himself as indispensable. He doesn't recognize that he's stuck. But he is stuck. He wants from his company what it cannot give him, leadership. He wants it to do the right thing when it doesn't know how. It is locked stepped in the past, obsessed with the future, and frozen in the present.
It is a phenomenon experienced across the board but nobody wants to admit it. We are overwhelmed with the complexity of the times. So, we play the lotto or lose ourselves in the casino.
You see, you're stuck if you are in a job you hate, in a relationship you hate, in a profession you hate, in a community you hate, in a religion you hate, in a school you hate, and so on. Hate is a failure to accept things as they are.
As soon as we fail to accept things as they are, we have come to own the problem.
If you hate the way I look, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I act, the way I live, the way I am, I don't have a problem. You have a problem.
I'm perfectly content with what and who and where I am. You're not, and therefore, by definition, you have a problem. You are stuck with me as I am because you want me to change. You want me to be like you want me to be.
But that is impossible because you are not me and I am not you. We have different wills, different constructions, different experiences, and we are different persons.
So, if there is some behavior of another person that drives you up the wall, you are stuck. If you cannot accept what you encounter, you're stuck. It can extend to a person, place or thing beyond your control.
I'll go beyond that.
Let's say you have a problem with yourself. You've been programmed to be a perfectionist, and you know you're not. You've been programmed to always have answers for everything and of course you don't. You've been programmed to wax secure when you're not, and so you're not self-accepting. You're stuck in denial and loathe yourself for being stuck.
See my point.
We have drifted away from our foundation. Forgotten is how we came to be Americans. We originally left Europe in the 17th century to escape religious tyranny. In America we felt free to believe and behave as we willed. We entered a harsh environment and had to embrace its risks and endure its pain, as it was unforgiving. We had to cope with disease, hardship, hunger, and yes, even starvation.
But our will was huge against these forces of nature. We grew resilient, resolute, and strong embracing, not denying our weakness.
That is our legacy. It would come to pass one day for that constitution to find us the strongest nation in the world.
Now, how did that happen?
That happened because the focus was on the process not the outcome. There was no comfort zone, no home in the suburbs. We were all on the same page pushing off the same dime. We were united in hardship not so much because we loved each other so dearly, but because we needed each other so desperately to survive.
We had no time for petty complaints, for saying Harry has advantages Joe doesn't. We worked from sun up to sunset and collapsed in a cold bed with the sleeping sedative of exhaustion.
We had no time to be stuck.
We had no choice but to use our creative intelligence, which deals with what is not known but can be discovered instead of critical intelligence, the intelligence of being stuck, which deals with what is already known.
Critical intelligence solves problems with the same thinking that caused the problems in the first place. We are very familiar with that.
We go round and round in circular logic with cause effect analysis solving problems by identifying and treating symptoms, wondering why they are never resolved. We look for the magic bullet that will cure our lifestyle excesses: eating, drinking, and smoking too much, doing drugs and sexual dalliance. Stuck.
We've come to call it the paralysis of analysis feeling more inclined to describe a problem ad infinitum than to take action.
We are stuck in Socratic hierarchical vertical thinking when the complement of lateral thinking is required. Moreover, we fail to realize problems are never solved, but only controlled.
We're stuck everywhere. We're stuck in a war. We're stuck in a congress that blames the president for the war, and a president that blames the congress for its lack of patriotism and being supportive of our troops in harms way.
In my work, I've often dealt with professionals: engineers, scientists, and specialists. These people go to school a long time, come into industry and commerce only to find they have to work for somebody that doesn't have their knowledge base, but who exerts position power over them.
What do you think they do?
Do they attempt to bridge the gap and bring their bosses up to speed?
They become frustrated, anxious, angry, and yes, retreat into such behaviors as malicious obedience. They don't use their intelligence to school their superiors into seeing the wisdom of doing things differently.
Why?
They are stuck with protocol and programming.
Leadership is supposed to come from the top, down, not the bottom, up. They have been programmed to be passive, reactive and submissive as if nothing has changed. Stuck.
In 1950, 80 percent of workers were blue-collar and 20 percent were white-collar. Today nearly 90 percent are white collar and 10 percent are blue collar. Yet we are stuck managing, motivating and mobilizing workers as if the color of their collar has not changed.
We are stuck with position power while knowledge power dangles in the wind.
If I'm going to change the system, I've got to change me. And if I change me and I'm unhappy, I've got to leave.
Those of you who have read my ten questions will see I've done many things. I've done those many things because I believe in the formula:
RISK + PAIN = GROWTH
On the other hand, the failure to embrace risk and endure pain equals atrophy.
Nothing stays the same; you either grow or waste away.
If you are wasting away, it suggests it is because you are unhappy. You are not getting what you want; you're not going where you prefer. You are stuck.
Now, an individual can be stuck. A corporation can be stuck. A country can be stuck. A society can be stuck. Such things have often happened.
We don't have time to go into the history but I am sure your filter processing what I am saying would immediately block the penetration of the information because we are all stuck on certain things.
We continue to believe what we've been programmed to believe, and don't want new information that challenges such beliefs. Everyone here has core beliefs, beliefs that may be so rooted as if a tree.
Yet, everything is moving. There has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300. We have an exponential acceleration of change that is making it very difficult for us to be on the same page and getting off on the same dime.
The problem can be reduced to three words: what and who and why.
We like simple answers to complex problems.
We are still stuck in the terrible tragedy of 9/11 attempting to determine what caused it, and who was responsible. We are forever stuck on the what and the who, but never seem to get around to the question of why.
Why has been ignored. It would challenge our core beliefs. It would force us to see the terrorists not as demons and murderers, both of which they are deemed to be, but as people believing they have nothing more to lose and, rightly or wrongly, have been disrespected, their culture and religion slandered.
Terrorism is not new and is always a matter of perspective. Desperate people take desperate measures to right imagined or real wrongs. The Minute Men of our American Revolution picked off the British Red Coats marching proudly in a row. George Washington had his greatest victory crossing the Delaware completely surprising the British who expected a secession of hostilities during the holiday season. Menachem Begin had the reputation of a terrorist in the 1940s against British authority in Palestine, only to rise to a celebrated prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Tecumseh Sherman torched the earth and left the South barren and burning in his march to the sea demoralizing and breaking the will of the Confederate Army.
Terrorism is a dehumanizing strategy. And as shown throughout history, it is effective.
Just think, in this little bit of time, I have managed to offend Christians and Jews and patriots, and indeed, western civilization. Minds close when so threatened and become stuck.
We will remain stuck and never progress off the dime or find ourselves on the same page if we continue as we are. The mega force of change has made us one people in a "rainbow coalition."
The United States of America increasingly resembles Europe with multi cultures and languages spoken and costumes on display in virtually all points of the nation. It is not time to resist this trend but to embrace it.
The need to have a token understanding of these languages and acceptance of these differences is no longer a luxury but increasingly a fundamental need to get along.
Why say all these things and stir up the dust?
We once possessed a moral compass of tolerance. We have misplaced it. We have lost our way. To find our way we cannot turn to an authority figure or leader to find it for us. Leaders are as lost and stuck as we are. President John F. Kennedy once said he was born with the wrong parents in the wrong religion and to the wrong wife. It would be hard to improve on a better definition of being stuck.
We are all leaders or none of us are.
We cannot afford to be stuck in this modern world looking for someone else to lead us to safety. Our history indicates that many want to wrest that power from us, and we've paid dearly for the attention.
The answers are not in the media, although the media loves that sense of power; the answers are not in our institutions that programmed us for another time; nor are the answers in our leaders as leadership is no longer top down, but bottom up.
We are stuck asking top down leaders to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. You see, leadership has changed but no one wants to admit it, and so we have dissolved to leaderless leadership and crisis management, stuck.
It is time we take charge, grow up, and embrace our resistance to the present. The future will take care of itself.
Thank you very much.
__________
This is another possible talk composed during my peripatetic walk today for inclusion during my book tour in Clinton, Iowa next month.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
SUMMARY OF BOOK PRODUCTION TO DATE
This is a summary of my book production to date.
This is shared with you as I plan to move into a new iteration of idea sharing. An author, who reviewed my website, has introduced me to new possibilities for networking my ideas. Since networking is not a natural inclination, and since writing is as much as end in itself as anything else, he got my attention.
"Ten years ago I was able to quit my day job and simply write and sell books, and I don't have the range you do."
At his suggestion, I am adding akonboard software so that readers and I can have animated discussions. I am also making contact with radio stations.
"You were made for idea exchange," he offered.
We shall see. More immediately, I will be returning to Iowa September 1 with BB with me until September 9, when she will fly back to Tampa. I will stay as long as there is an interest in my new book, which this author, a former academic, claims was made for senior level and graduate seminar level discussion.
If anyone reading this has access to colleges and universities, please let me know with a name and address of someone I might contact.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SUMMARY OF BOOKS BY JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.:
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches:
Aggressive education after WWII has produced professional workers, who continue to be managed and motivated by corpocracy as if nothing has changed. Workers have lost their identity while companies have become 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. In this climate, US markets have crumbled or disappeared. Enter management's union, human resources, with cosmetic interventions (with no loss of power or control by management) that have backfired, turning the workplace into a playground where the dominant culture is comfort or complacency rather than contribution. The answer? Purge dependence on hierarchical management and focus on decision-making at the level of consequences.
The Worker Alone! Going Against the Grain!
Workers are operating without a center or moral compass. The charade of empowerment has changed nothing. Ventilation won't do it nor will pointing fingers. Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work. They have invested heavily in education only to find a disappointing return on investment. Angry and confused, they take downsizing and redundancy exercises on the chin as if they can do nothing about it. This is crunch time. Workers can no longer expect the company to take care of them if they don't take care to see that the company survives. It is time to break through the forces of denial and retreat to expose the workplace naked and launch a structural change in the way workers think and behave.
Confident Selling for the 90s:
Confidence is a matter of how we think. How we think is a product of how we are programmed to think. Too frequently we are inclined to be self-critical rather than self-accepting. If we are self-accepting, which means we don't impose psychological barriers to what we can do or can achieve, then we are likely to see others as they are, potential partners in enterprise, not as we expect them to be, obstacles to overcome. Translated, we see problems as opportunities not restrictions. Whatever your profession, you are selling, and will know you have the key to open new doors to opportunity. You will have a self-image of success because you have made the biggest sale of your life, belief in yourself.
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend:
To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Taboo deals with the adverse conditioning which programs a person into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but one's own self. Too long we have worried too much about what other people think but too little about what we think and feel. This has often led to us being our own worst enemy instead of our own best friend.
Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge:
Invisible forces have invaded the workplace like social termites only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These social termites are six passive behaviors. Disgruntled workers quietly and silently sabotage work by simply showing up for work and doing as little as possible to get by. The cause is clear. The structure of the work is for another time and workforce. Now, knowledge power makes the difference. Power has shifted from management to professional workers but management shows reluctance to recognize the shift employing cosmetic change that only worsens the situation. The book explores these passive behaviors in depth and suggests radical change is necessary if American industry and commerce is to survive in a global economy.
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers:
Leadership has retreated into self-aggrandizement and the cynicism of self-indulgence. It pervades every institution of society. Families have abandon their responsibility for the actions of their children, the church has covered the abuses of its priests, educators have abandoned discipline in the classroom, while corruption in government and industry has become so common as to approach the pathology of normalcy. In this climate, workers have focused on getting rather than giving, on avoiding the consequences of their actions, retreating into technology, while children, students, workers and citizens have been reduced to statistical numbers in computer grids. As a result, society has lost its moral center and compass. People have become things to address, evaluate and manage. This is the essence of corporate sin.
In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel:
Imagine growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and in the middle of a farm belt industrial community of 33,000, while WWII was raging. No television, mega sports, new automobiles, or manicured lawns. Automakers were making tanks and lawns had been turned into victory gardens. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and industrial league baseball, played by young boys and men too old to go to war. It was a time when the four-faces of the courthouse clock chimed every half hour so no one could excuse being late for meals. It was a working class neighborhood in which both parents were likely to work in one of the many defense industries along the Mississippi River. What sets it apart from today is self-reliance was as natural as breathing.
A Look Back To See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s:
We are stuck. Today resembles the 1970s with such frightening consistency that it is maddening to think otherwise. Then as now young people fought an unpopular war; social upheaval was in the air; corrupt politicians lied and deceived the electorate; drugs were ruining lives; morality was on holiday; new bigotry and old hatreds were hatching; the automotive industry was in sharp decline; energy was in crisis; a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, while Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs. The book breaks through our cool façade and canned rhetoric to expose this chronic disease, and ask what we plan to do about it?
__________
For direct contact, email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
This is shared with you as I plan to move into a new iteration of idea sharing. An author, who reviewed my website, has introduced me to new possibilities for networking my ideas. Since networking is not a natural inclination, and since writing is as much as end in itself as anything else, he got my attention.
"Ten years ago I was able to quit my day job and simply write and sell books, and I don't have the range you do."
At his suggestion, I am adding akonboard software so that readers and I can have animated discussions. I am also making contact with radio stations.
"You were made for idea exchange," he offered.
We shall see. More immediately, I will be returning to Iowa September 1 with BB with me until September 9, when she will fly back to Tampa. I will stay as long as there is an interest in my new book, which this author, a former academic, claims was made for senior level and graduate seminar level discussion.
If anyone reading this has access to colleges and universities, please let me know with a name and address of someone I might contact.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SUMMARY OF BOOKS BY JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.:
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches:
Aggressive education after WWII has produced professional workers, who continue to be managed and motivated by corpocracy as if nothing has changed. Workers have lost their identity while companies have become 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. In this climate, US markets have crumbled or disappeared. Enter management's union, human resources, with cosmetic interventions (with no loss of power or control by management) that have backfired, turning the workplace into a playground where the dominant culture is comfort or complacency rather than contribution. The answer? Purge dependence on hierarchical management and focus on decision-making at the level of consequences.
The Worker Alone! Going Against the Grain!
Workers are operating without a center or moral compass. The charade of empowerment has changed nothing. Ventilation won't do it nor will pointing fingers. Workers must get off the dime and take charge of work. They have invested heavily in education only to find a disappointing return on investment. Angry and confused, they take downsizing and redundancy exercises on the chin as if they can do nothing about it. This is crunch time. Workers can no longer expect the company to take care of them if they don't take care to see that the company survives. It is time to break through the forces of denial and retreat to expose the workplace naked and launch a structural change in the way workers think and behave.
Confident Selling for the 90s:
Confidence is a matter of how we think. How we think is a product of how we are programmed to think. Too frequently we are inclined to be self-critical rather than self-accepting. If we are self-accepting, which means we don't impose psychological barriers to what we can do or can achieve, then we are likely to see others as they are, potential partners in enterprise, not as we expect them to be, obstacles to overcome. Translated, we see problems as opportunities not restrictions. Whatever your profession, you are selling, and will know you have the key to open new doors to opportunity. You will have a self-image of success because you have made the biggest sale of your life, belief in yourself.
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend:
To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Taboo deals with the adverse conditioning which programs a person into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but one's own self. Too long we have worried too much about what other people think but too little about what we think and feel. This has often led to us being our own worst enemy instead of our own best friend.
Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge:
Invisible forces have invaded the workplace like social termites only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These social termites are six passive behaviors. Disgruntled workers quietly and silently sabotage work by simply showing up for work and doing as little as possible to get by. The cause is clear. The structure of the work is for another time and workforce. Now, knowledge power makes the difference. Power has shifted from management to professional workers but management shows reluctance to recognize the shift employing cosmetic change that only worsens the situation. The book explores these passive behaviors in depth and suggests radical change is necessary if American industry and commerce is to survive in a global economy.
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers:
Leadership has retreated into self-aggrandizement and the cynicism of self-indulgence. It pervades every institution of society. Families have abandon their responsibility for the actions of their children, the church has covered the abuses of its priests, educators have abandoned discipline in the classroom, while corruption in government and industry has become so common as to approach the pathology of normalcy. In this climate, workers have focused on getting rather than giving, on avoiding the consequences of their actions, retreating into technology, while children, students, workers and citizens have been reduced to statistical numbers in computer grids. As a result, society has lost its moral center and compass. People have become things to address, evaluate and manage. This is the essence of corporate sin.
In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel:
Imagine growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and in the middle of a farm belt industrial community of 33,000, while WWII was raging. No television, mega sports, new automobiles, or manicured lawns. Automakers were making tanks and lawns had been turned into victory gardens. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and industrial league baseball, played by young boys and men too old to go to war. It was a time when the four-faces of the courthouse clock chimed every half hour so no one could excuse being late for meals. It was a working class neighborhood in which both parents were likely to work in one of the many defense industries along the Mississippi River. What sets it apart from today is self-reliance was as natural as breathing.
A Look Back To See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s:
We are stuck. Today resembles the 1970s with such frightening consistency that it is maddening to think otherwise. Then as now young people fought an unpopular war; social upheaval was in the air; corrupt politicians lied and deceived the electorate; drugs were ruining lives; morality was on holiday; new bigotry and old hatreds were hatching; the automotive industry was in sharp decline; energy was in crisis; a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, while Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs. The book breaks through our cool façade and canned rhetoric to expose this chronic disease, and ask what we plan to do about it?
__________
For direct contact, email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
CHRONIC PASSIVITY, THE DIET OF THE TIMES?
CHRONIC PASSIVITY, THE DIET OF THE TIMES?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“December 7, 1941, Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor; December 7, 1989, Japan Buys Pearl Harbor”
Op-ed cartoon in The Tampa Tribune, December 7, 1989.
Note: As often is the case, my thoughts are triggered by a colleague who states a situation, in this case the bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis-St. Paul over the Mississippi River. George D. shares with me a published piece, and asks for my comment. The discussion he quotes differentiates between the “blame game” and accountability. As you will see from my response, I find it much more troubling than a matter of semantics.
George,
Thank you for sharing. I do have some thoughts on this, but they are not original, but are indicative of our 50-year slide into passivity. Americans have taken the meaningless terms of being the lone superpower and "Numero Uno" to the point of obsession. As a consequence, we have lost our identity as a maintenance driven society and have become preoccupied with electronic tools treated as toys of distraction. Permit me to explain.
Eric Hoffer once wrote in the 1960s that the difference between the United States and the rest of the Western world was that Americans paid attention to preventive maintenance.
Hoffer used the example of the implausible yet spectacular record of railway transportation safety across the US. "In plain language, we don't have track failures in the United States because our railroads are maintained."
A decade later this was no longer true, nor has it proven so since. Railroad track failures have become a chronic problem, contributing to many derailments, but this receives little attention because the emphasis and dollars are put to other uses.
Vance Packard, again in the 1960s, in "The Waste Makers," suggested we had become a totally "throw away culture" in which we tired of an item long before it was no longer useful. Manufacturers noting this, he offered, had produced items, such as light bulbs, television sets and radios to approximate this inclination, doing their part to make durable goods more perishable justifying the mounting wastefulness.
As early as 1970 with the writing of "Confident Selling," I suggested that our inclination to look at our selling problems from only one perspective contributed to our fixation with failure. “Think the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” Pessimism joined passivity.
I went on in that book to claim that people fail in selling not because sellers don't believe in the product or service they are selling. They don't believe in themselves. They are trying to succeed when they have failed to accept themselves as they are, or others as they find them. Translated: to read the motivation of others, we must first understand our own. Otherwise, it is the blind leading the blind. It is demonstrated in problems being seen as barriers rather than opportunities.
This has proven metaphorically true in a broader cultural and contextual sense today.
In 1990 with the writing of "Work Without Managers," the American character was exposed to its nearly total passive identity. Monday morning quarterbacking had come to extend well beyond football.
It took our reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to get the US into WWII, the successful launching of the Soviet Union of Sputnik to get the US into the space race, and for the Japanese to successfully use Total Quality Control Management (technology created by Americans), taking away markets dominated by the US, to change our manufacturing techniques.
Markets, once dominated by the US have continued to crumble, most notably the automotive industry for this procrastination. Ironically, books on "competitive edge" and "competitive advantage" by HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) scholars came out when the horse was already out of the barn.
In "Corporate Sin," I went on to show how in the last fifty years this syndrome of passivity had come to contribute and then control the nature of leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.
Thanks to aggressive education since WWII, the US had the best-trained professional workforce in the world with the most anachronistic management by 1980.
It was strange how this played out. Disgruntled professional workers, who were now numbered three out of every four in the workforce, went on to earn MBAs, thinking that further education was the key to their rise. It wasn’t.
Management, senior management in particular, which had been surprisingly frugal and temperate up to and immediately following WWII, adopted a new strategy of greed. This necessitated the painting of an unrealistic picture of "things as they are" during its watch, then voting itself pay increases and bonuses inconsistent with precedence and its performance.
Senior management, with a submissive board of directors, escalated the pay differential between it and workers from single digits, then double digits, then triple digits and beyond. Even Peter Drucker, a supporter of senior management, was appalled and said so in print.
This travesty has never stopped. The question is not its legality but its ethics. Why so much greed? Why, indeed!
Perhaps when you no longer believe in anything getting is the only thing. No surprise, this mentality has trickled down to the lowest ranks where there was once pride in work because there was pride in self, has now been reduced to getting, not giving, while the getting is good.
Americans have always been somewhat skeptical of the future. Now they have become cynical of it. This translates into how they behave.
You may recall my mention in my last missive about Chrysler's new head, Bob Nardelli, who is entering an industry he knows nothing about, and intends to be successful. Well, he left Home Depot with a slumping stock price, but with a $210 million golden parachute. Chrysler will find him difficult to bargain with as he apparently equates pay with a sense of worth, not a very reliable index of performance.
In "Six Silent Killers," I outlined in some detail the angst of professional workers who are paid a dollar more an hour than they have the gumption to confront and complain to management politely and frequently with their concerns. Instead, they have retired into six passive behaviors, behaviors with which I have repeatedly made reference, behaviors, which continue to cripple American industry and commerce.
Now, in my latest, "A Look Back To See Ahead," I address the chronic sickness of our culture and the fact that we are stuck. Why do I do this when I know most readers will take a pass? Good question.
Better than thirty percent of our bridges, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being safe, are considered secure and efficient. Many have ratings close to 1 to 3.
Still, bridge maintenance and safety represent only the tip of the iceberg.
In the 1980s, economist Robert L. Heilbroner wrote a series of articles on the collapsing nature of the American infrastructure, pointing out the deplorable condition of railroad tracks, bridges, roads, dams and airport runways. Little changed.
George, we are a reactive society. We are that way in our personal life, and our society is but an extension of us as individuals.
I have devoted the past seventeen years to saying what I have heard many say to me privately, but were afraid to say to someone in authority for fear of losing their job. I am not original as I stated earlier, but a chronicler of the times collating the common angst and perspectives of ordinary souls.
The irony is that they are looking for leaders and not seeing themselves as leaders. They are looking for someone else to carry the burden, for someone else to blame when things go wrong, for someone else to worry at night and on the weekends that all will go well while they do their thing in the safety and comfort of ignorance and indulgence, being quick to blame authority figures for being greedy, but never expecting to do anything about it other then complain amongst their own kind; to be down on politicians and demonstrate their anger by not voting; to wait for something terrible to happen before they accept part of the burden.
The governor of Minnesota twice vetoed a bill to increase the gasoline tax five cents to pay for infrastructure improvements including roads and bridges. It was such a stance that got him elected governor. Now, the man and woman in the street says that they will be glad to support a five cent tax on gasoline, and I suspect the governor will now promote the bill he once vetoed.
Reaction. After the fact.
Blame and accountability are just words, neither apply. It is just rhetoric. We operate in a leaderless society in which the focus is on what will people think instead of what action is called for. Politicians with gumption don’t get elected; and they never reach the status of CEO. Politicians are slaves to polls in the same way CEOs are slaves to stockholders.
In the simplest terms, we are all leaders or none of us are.
Leaders anticipate problems, they don't wait to react to them; leaders don't point fingers at who is wrong but what is wrong and what we can be done; leaders don't retreat into video games, BlackBerrys, iPods, or whatever; leaders don't write letters to the editor, but start behaving and thinking differently on purpose.
While calamity that is man made often brings out the worst in us, calamity that is by an act of Mother Nature always brings out the best in us. This bridge collapse should give us pause, but I expect it will do little more.
Be always well,
Jim
___________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: http://www.fisherofideas.com/ or order his latest book, A Look Back To See Ahead from your favorite book provider.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
“December 7, 1941, Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor; December 7, 1989, Japan Buys Pearl Harbor”
Op-ed cartoon in The Tampa Tribune, December 7, 1989.
Note: As often is the case, my thoughts are triggered by a colleague who states a situation, in this case the bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis-St. Paul over the Mississippi River. George D. shares with me a published piece, and asks for my comment. The discussion he quotes differentiates between the “blame game” and accountability. As you will see from my response, I find it much more troubling than a matter of semantics.
George,
Thank you for sharing. I do have some thoughts on this, but they are not original, but are indicative of our 50-year slide into passivity. Americans have taken the meaningless terms of being the lone superpower and "Numero Uno" to the point of obsession. As a consequence, we have lost our identity as a maintenance driven society and have become preoccupied with electronic tools treated as toys of distraction. Permit me to explain.
Eric Hoffer once wrote in the 1960s that the difference between the United States and the rest of the Western world was that Americans paid attention to preventive maintenance.
Hoffer used the example of the implausible yet spectacular record of railway transportation safety across the US. "In plain language, we don't have track failures in the United States because our railroads are maintained."
A decade later this was no longer true, nor has it proven so since. Railroad track failures have become a chronic problem, contributing to many derailments, but this receives little attention because the emphasis and dollars are put to other uses.
Vance Packard, again in the 1960s, in "The Waste Makers," suggested we had become a totally "throw away culture" in which we tired of an item long before it was no longer useful. Manufacturers noting this, he offered, had produced items, such as light bulbs, television sets and radios to approximate this inclination, doing their part to make durable goods more perishable justifying the mounting wastefulness.
As early as 1970 with the writing of "Confident Selling," I suggested that our inclination to look at our selling problems from only one perspective contributed to our fixation with failure. “Think the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” Pessimism joined passivity.
I went on in that book to claim that people fail in selling not because sellers don't believe in the product or service they are selling. They don't believe in themselves. They are trying to succeed when they have failed to accept themselves as they are, or others as they find them. Translated: to read the motivation of others, we must first understand our own. Otherwise, it is the blind leading the blind. It is demonstrated in problems being seen as barriers rather than opportunities.
This has proven metaphorically true in a broader cultural and contextual sense today.
In 1990 with the writing of "Work Without Managers," the American character was exposed to its nearly total passive identity. Monday morning quarterbacking had come to extend well beyond football.
It took our reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 to get the US into WWII, the successful launching of the Soviet Union of Sputnik to get the US into the space race, and for the Japanese to successfully use Total Quality Control Management (technology created by Americans), taking away markets dominated by the US, to change our manufacturing techniques.
Markets, once dominated by the US have continued to crumble, most notably the automotive industry for this procrastination. Ironically, books on "competitive edge" and "competitive advantage" by HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) scholars came out when the horse was already out of the barn.
In "Corporate Sin," I went on to show how in the last fifty years this syndrome of passivity had come to contribute and then control the nature of leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.
Thanks to aggressive education since WWII, the US had the best-trained professional workforce in the world with the most anachronistic management by 1980.
It was strange how this played out. Disgruntled professional workers, who were now numbered three out of every four in the workforce, went on to earn MBAs, thinking that further education was the key to their rise. It wasn’t.
Management, senior management in particular, which had been surprisingly frugal and temperate up to and immediately following WWII, adopted a new strategy of greed. This necessitated the painting of an unrealistic picture of "things as they are" during its watch, then voting itself pay increases and bonuses inconsistent with precedence and its performance.
Senior management, with a submissive board of directors, escalated the pay differential between it and workers from single digits, then double digits, then triple digits and beyond. Even Peter Drucker, a supporter of senior management, was appalled and said so in print.
This travesty has never stopped. The question is not its legality but its ethics. Why so much greed? Why, indeed!
Perhaps when you no longer believe in anything getting is the only thing. No surprise, this mentality has trickled down to the lowest ranks where there was once pride in work because there was pride in self, has now been reduced to getting, not giving, while the getting is good.
Americans have always been somewhat skeptical of the future. Now they have become cynical of it. This translates into how they behave.
You may recall my mention in my last missive about Chrysler's new head, Bob Nardelli, who is entering an industry he knows nothing about, and intends to be successful. Well, he left Home Depot with a slumping stock price, but with a $210 million golden parachute. Chrysler will find him difficult to bargain with as he apparently equates pay with a sense of worth, not a very reliable index of performance.
In "Six Silent Killers," I outlined in some detail the angst of professional workers who are paid a dollar more an hour than they have the gumption to confront and complain to management politely and frequently with their concerns. Instead, they have retired into six passive behaviors, behaviors with which I have repeatedly made reference, behaviors, which continue to cripple American industry and commerce.
Now, in my latest, "A Look Back To See Ahead," I address the chronic sickness of our culture and the fact that we are stuck. Why do I do this when I know most readers will take a pass? Good question.
Better than thirty percent of our bridges, on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being safe, are considered secure and efficient. Many have ratings close to 1 to 3.
Still, bridge maintenance and safety represent only the tip of the iceberg.
In the 1980s, economist Robert L. Heilbroner wrote a series of articles on the collapsing nature of the American infrastructure, pointing out the deplorable condition of railroad tracks, bridges, roads, dams and airport runways. Little changed.
George, we are a reactive society. We are that way in our personal life, and our society is but an extension of us as individuals.
I have devoted the past seventeen years to saying what I have heard many say to me privately, but were afraid to say to someone in authority for fear of losing their job. I am not original as I stated earlier, but a chronicler of the times collating the common angst and perspectives of ordinary souls.
The irony is that they are looking for leaders and not seeing themselves as leaders. They are looking for someone else to carry the burden, for someone else to blame when things go wrong, for someone else to worry at night and on the weekends that all will go well while they do their thing in the safety and comfort of ignorance and indulgence, being quick to blame authority figures for being greedy, but never expecting to do anything about it other then complain amongst their own kind; to be down on politicians and demonstrate their anger by not voting; to wait for something terrible to happen before they accept part of the burden.
The governor of Minnesota twice vetoed a bill to increase the gasoline tax five cents to pay for infrastructure improvements including roads and bridges. It was such a stance that got him elected governor. Now, the man and woman in the street says that they will be glad to support a five cent tax on gasoline, and I suspect the governor will now promote the bill he once vetoed.
Reaction. After the fact.
Blame and accountability are just words, neither apply. It is just rhetoric. We operate in a leaderless society in which the focus is on what will people think instead of what action is called for. Politicians with gumption don’t get elected; and they never reach the status of CEO. Politicians are slaves to polls in the same way CEOs are slaves to stockholders.
In the simplest terms, we are all leaders or none of us are.
Leaders anticipate problems, they don't wait to react to them; leaders don't point fingers at who is wrong but what is wrong and what we can be done; leaders don't retreat into video games, BlackBerrys, iPods, or whatever; leaders don't write letters to the editor, but start behaving and thinking differently on purpose.
While calamity that is man made often brings out the worst in us, calamity that is by an act of Mother Nature always brings out the best in us. This bridge collapse should give us pause, but I expect it will do little more.
Be always well,
Jim
___________
Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: http://www.fisherofideas.com/ or order his latest book, A Look Back To See Ahead from your favorite book provider.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
WHEN THE RATIONAL & IRRATIONAL MARRY, WE HAVE THE FAMILY OF BUSINESS!
WHEN THE RATIONAL & IRRATIONAL MEET & MARRY, WE HAVE THE FAMILY OF BUSINESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“There is a foolish corner even in the brain of the sage.”
Aristotle
Yesterday, I was television channel hopping when I came across a pithy panel of profundity discussing the nature of the rational and irrational. The only man on the panel I recognized was Edward de Bono of lateral and parallel thinking fame. I am somewhat of a devotee to his ideas.
The panel discussed the nature of deductive and inductive reasoning, of heuristic and algorithmic mechanisms, the size of the brain, the nature of perception and its limitations, and of course, how science will augment man’s mental deficiencies in a future of computer nirvana
Edward de Bono proved the exception to this forecast. He sees man escaping the net of his delimiting capacities by thinking differently on purpose.
Perhaps so. But in the meantime it would appear we will remain stuck in the hubris of seeing man as a thing to be defined and then controlled with the precision of virtual reality. It is the nature of the business psyche.
Panic, we see, pervades possibilities when there is no escape from the grid of this mindset. The fact that it is everywhere every day makes it unremarkable as push comes to shove, and panic becomes the “crisis management” practice of the moment.
Most recently, the automotive industry of the United States has profiled this panic. For the first time in automotive history, American car manufacturers own less than fifty percent of the American automotive market.
Band-Aids have been applied without changing this hemorrhaging. This has included putting family members in charge of the business; producing imitations of foreign competitors’ product lines; merging with foreign automakers; renegotiating contracts with union workers who have lost their appetite for battle; and even bringing foreign automakers to head American automotive companies, always, however, to no avail. The bleeding would not stop.
The American automotive industry reveals the best and worst in the relationship of workers to their employers.
Henry Ford created the working model of this industry in accordance with the scientific management scheme of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who believed workers were to be treated as things to be managed, not as thinking men and women to be led.
Henry Ford created the $5 dollar eight-hour working day when most workers made only $1 for ten hours of work in most industries. He also created a pension program before there was such a thing as Social Security.
He did this out of self-interests, establishing a ready-made market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford. No one is more responsible for creating the working middle class.
Ford didn’t believe in magnanimity, but in the pragmatics. In a way, his organization model was an extension of feudalism only in a benign rendition of it.
Uncannily, this model was repeated by other car manufacturers and became in hierarchical terms an imitation of the Roman Church, and in operational terms an imitation of the military. Nearly a century later, it has become the predominant model of American industry across the board. The Austrian Peter Drucker reified it into a corporate model.
This model is failing today, has failed, and will continue to fail because it is not a working model consistent with the times, the people, the circumstances, and, indeed, the nature of international commerce.
The automotive industry has the distinction of being a bellwether to what is bound to happen to the Wal-Marts and other giants of the time, despite the perspicacity of their computer inventories and just-in-time logistics.
People have been left out of the equation and now only people can make the difference.
It is apparent that this reality is not going to sink in any time soon. Struggling Ford Motor Company late last year hired a new CEO from outside the automotive industry to rescue the company from its bleeding to death.
Ford named Alan Mulally, former Boeing Company executive, as its president and chief executive officer last September. Boeing is riding high at the moment eclipsing Air Bus with burgeoning orders for its new 787.
Not long before that breakthrough, Boeing looked as if it, too, would tank.
Now, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management LP, has rescued Chrysler, finally separating it from its unhappy German marriage with Daimler-Chrysler.
Chrysler, too, has named an outsider to the automotive industry to bring it back to life. Bob Nardelli, who by reputation has given greed a new name, and who fought for more and more pay at Home Depot, which he headed, took a nose dive on the Big Board on his watch. He promises now to accelerate downsizing and to engage in massive restructuring. Translated: more of the same.
The United Auto Workers Union, created in the 1930s, and made and managed in the image and likeness of the industry it serves, has often chosen its battles unwisely, striking when it should stay the course, and accepting reduction in hours and pay when it should stand its ground.
I have observed the culture of this industry and its characteristic American spirit. The brains of auto making are not in the ivory tower, but on the line. This culture has a language, value and belief system that is indigenous to its work with subtle nuances that can be misread, misunderstood and miscalculated from another perspective.
Traditional workers in this culture have been content to be well-paid serfs in a benign feudal system, but no longer.
Mullaly and Nardelli are moving into a lion’s den in which the appetite to devour them is not unlike that experienced by John Sculley of Pepsi fame. Sculley was handpicked by Steven Jobs to run Apple. He then proceeded, largely because he failed to understand or relate successfully to the workers in their culture, to grind Apple Computer into the ground. Only the return of Jobs rescued Apple, and brought it back to its current health and prominence.
It wasn’t that Steven Jobs was such a genius. He was one of them. Consequently, he benefited from the serendipity of being comfortable in eclectic chaos. Here creativity flourishes, which is fundamental to success in this industry.
Benign feudalism wouldn’t work here because it has little respect for the genius of communication, relying instead on intimidation. Eclectic chaos allows ideas buried in the minds of the workers to surface and flourish unimpeded by directives, proclamations, patronizing procedures, or the regal authority of performance appraisals.
The automotive industry is failing because a long time ago it attempted to bribe workers into productivity with entitlement schemes, which were not earned, not tied to productivity, but were welfare packages that implied “we own you because you depend on us for your comfort and security.”
This never worked too well, but it worked a lot better with a less well-educated, less well-informed, and less self-reliant workforce.
Nardelli plans to accelerate the cutting of 13,000 hourly and salaried jobs at Chrysler. Imagine what would happen if 100,000 Chrysler workers chose not to show up for work. Look what happened when scores of pilots of North West Air Lines called in sick recently: hundreds of flights were canceled across the nation.
One day, sooner or later, the broad based fact will come home to rouse: i.e., that CEOs are paid employees and perhaps of less consequence than workers on the job. This is apparent because cutting employees, restructuring jobs, creating a more attractive balance sheet is accounting, not leadership, and in no instances in my memory has it sustained growth.
It lacks imagination, as college football once did, resembling rugby, until Knute Rockne used the forward pass to change the game and the sport forever.
That was leadership. So, today, no one in football gets more attention than the quarterback, not the coach, not the owner, not the stockholders, but that leader on the field, who is supported by a cadre of folks that determines whether he will succeed or fail.
As I claim in A Look Back To See Ahead (2007), we are stuck in the pathology of normalcy where the rational and irrational are joined in an unhappy marriage. This is our Berlin Wall that may surprise us when it comes tumbling down.
_________________
For more information on Dr. Fisher and his books, check with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or his website, http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
“There is a foolish corner even in the brain of the sage.”
Aristotle
Yesterday, I was television channel hopping when I came across a pithy panel of profundity discussing the nature of the rational and irrational. The only man on the panel I recognized was Edward de Bono of lateral and parallel thinking fame. I am somewhat of a devotee to his ideas.
The panel discussed the nature of deductive and inductive reasoning, of heuristic and algorithmic mechanisms, the size of the brain, the nature of perception and its limitations, and of course, how science will augment man’s mental deficiencies in a future of computer nirvana
Edward de Bono proved the exception to this forecast. He sees man escaping the net of his delimiting capacities by thinking differently on purpose.
Perhaps so. But in the meantime it would appear we will remain stuck in the hubris of seeing man as a thing to be defined and then controlled with the precision of virtual reality. It is the nature of the business psyche.
Panic, we see, pervades possibilities when there is no escape from the grid of this mindset. The fact that it is everywhere every day makes it unremarkable as push comes to shove, and panic becomes the “crisis management” practice of the moment.
Most recently, the automotive industry of the United States has profiled this panic. For the first time in automotive history, American car manufacturers own less than fifty percent of the American automotive market.
Band-Aids have been applied without changing this hemorrhaging. This has included putting family members in charge of the business; producing imitations of foreign competitors’ product lines; merging with foreign automakers; renegotiating contracts with union workers who have lost their appetite for battle; and even bringing foreign automakers to head American automotive companies, always, however, to no avail. The bleeding would not stop.
The American automotive industry reveals the best and worst in the relationship of workers to their employers.
Henry Ford created the working model of this industry in accordance with the scientific management scheme of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who believed workers were to be treated as things to be managed, not as thinking men and women to be led.
Henry Ford created the $5 dollar eight-hour working day when most workers made only $1 for ten hours of work in most industries. He also created a pension program before there was such a thing as Social Security.
He did this out of self-interests, establishing a ready-made market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford. No one is more responsible for creating the working middle class.
Ford didn’t believe in magnanimity, but in the pragmatics. In a way, his organization model was an extension of feudalism only in a benign rendition of it.
Uncannily, this model was repeated by other car manufacturers and became in hierarchical terms an imitation of the Roman Church, and in operational terms an imitation of the military. Nearly a century later, it has become the predominant model of American industry across the board. The Austrian Peter Drucker reified it into a corporate model.
This model is failing today, has failed, and will continue to fail because it is not a working model consistent with the times, the people, the circumstances, and, indeed, the nature of international commerce.
The automotive industry has the distinction of being a bellwether to what is bound to happen to the Wal-Marts and other giants of the time, despite the perspicacity of their computer inventories and just-in-time logistics.
People have been left out of the equation and now only people can make the difference.
It is apparent that this reality is not going to sink in any time soon. Struggling Ford Motor Company late last year hired a new CEO from outside the automotive industry to rescue the company from its bleeding to death.
Ford named Alan Mulally, former Boeing Company executive, as its president and chief executive officer last September. Boeing is riding high at the moment eclipsing Air Bus with burgeoning orders for its new 787.
Not long before that breakthrough, Boeing looked as if it, too, would tank.
Now, a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management LP, has rescued Chrysler, finally separating it from its unhappy German marriage with Daimler-Chrysler.
Chrysler, too, has named an outsider to the automotive industry to bring it back to life. Bob Nardelli, who by reputation has given greed a new name, and who fought for more and more pay at Home Depot, which he headed, took a nose dive on the Big Board on his watch. He promises now to accelerate downsizing and to engage in massive restructuring. Translated: more of the same.
The United Auto Workers Union, created in the 1930s, and made and managed in the image and likeness of the industry it serves, has often chosen its battles unwisely, striking when it should stay the course, and accepting reduction in hours and pay when it should stand its ground.
I have observed the culture of this industry and its characteristic American spirit. The brains of auto making are not in the ivory tower, but on the line. This culture has a language, value and belief system that is indigenous to its work with subtle nuances that can be misread, misunderstood and miscalculated from another perspective.
Traditional workers in this culture have been content to be well-paid serfs in a benign feudal system, but no longer.
Mullaly and Nardelli are moving into a lion’s den in which the appetite to devour them is not unlike that experienced by John Sculley of Pepsi fame. Sculley was handpicked by Steven Jobs to run Apple. He then proceeded, largely because he failed to understand or relate successfully to the workers in their culture, to grind Apple Computer into the ground. Only the return of Jobs rescued Apple, and brought it back to its current health and prominence.
It wasn’t that Steven Jobs was such a genius. He was one of them. Consequently, he benefited from the serendipity of being comfortable in eclectic chaos. Here creativity flourishes, which is fundamental to success in this industry.
Benign feudalism wouldn’t work here because it has little respect for the genius of communication, relying instead on intimidation. Eclectic chaos allows ideas buried in the minds of the workers to surface and flourish unimpeded by directives, proclamations, patronizing procedures, or the regal authority of performance appraisals.
The automotive industry is failing because a long time ago it attempted to bribe workers into productivity with entitlement schemes, which were not earned, not tied to productivity, but were welfare packages that implied “we own you because you depend on us for your comfort and security.”
This never worked too well, but it worked a lot better with a less well-educated, less well-informed, and less self-reliant workforce.
Nardelli plans to accelerate the cutting of 13,000 hourly and salaried jobs at Chrysler. Imagine what would happen if 100,000 Chrysler workers chose not to show up for work. Look what happened when scores of pilots of North West Air Lines called in sick recently: hundreds of flights were canceled across the nation.
One day, sooner or later, the broad based fact will come home to rouse: i.e., that CEOs are paid employees and perhaps of less consequence than workers on the job. This is apparent because cutting employees, restructuring jobs, creating a more attractive balance sheet is accounting, not leadership, and in no instances in my memory has it sustained growth.
It lacks imagination, as college football once did, resembling rugby, until Knute Rockne used the forward pass to change the game and the sport forever.
That was leadership. So, today, no one in football gets more attention than the quarterback, not the coach, not the owner, not the stockholders, but that leader on the field, who is supported by a cadre of folks that determines whether he will succeed or fail.
As I claim in A Look Back To See Ahead (2007), we are stuck in the pathology of normalcy where the rational and irrational are joined in an unhappy marriage. This is our Berlin Wall that may surprise us when it comes tumbling down.
_________________
For more information on Dr. Fisher and his books, check with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or his website, http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007
LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Where is a leader when you want one?”
“He is at your mind’s door waiting to be invited in.”
I was eating my lunch today and tuned into PBS's Charlie Rose show. He was interviewing some young man who is an "expert" on leadership. I didn't get his name because I didn't stay with the program long.
Rose asked him what constituted a great executive and he spieled off something about a CEO that walked through his shop with a pad and pencil taking down observations and comments.
I lived through that phase. I also lived through the phase where the CEO would have a worldwide television hookup, and "talk to the troops" in the manner of a pontiff with well rehearsed remarks and many smiles.
I lived through off sights and training seminars where "experts" and HR professionals would take a group through this or that fad-of-the-moment. One of the longest such engagements was Quality Control Circles, which was a good idea, but for the wrong audience and the wrong time with very mixed results.
If it were the 1945-1955 period, it would have been a colossal idea, but it was launched in the 1980s when the workforce had changed the color of its color from blue to white, and 80 to 90 percent of a company’s employees were in the process of getting a higher education degree or already degreed, often in technical fields.
This, mind you, was before the computer took over and the personal became even more impersonal.
It isn't only people like Dan Brown who have successfully chased myths and made bundles for the trouble. Brown is famous for the de Vinci Code, but Tom Peters is equally famous for "a search for excellence" fame. Most of the companies he profiled, however, have crashed and burned or have been absorbed by hedge funds, split up and sold for huge profits. No leadership in this equation.
Leadership cannot be found in what a CEO did or didn't do, nor can excellence be searched for like a pony in a haystack.
Leadership has always been about people, not persons; and excellence is something you create, not something you search for.
You only have to look at the mess the federal government has made in attempting to manage the unmanageable with the broad umbrella of "Homeland Security," or the military trying to solve ancient political and tribal problems with military might, alone. Indeed, when you think things can't get worse, they do.
So, what is the answer?
The answer has been staring us in the face forever.
People are the key, not markets, not global economies, but people.
People are the leaders of what they do. They need the training, support, trust, consistency in policy and fairness in promotion and discipline to make them feel in charge of their work and therefore in charge of and responsible for the results.
Well, you’ve heard all that before so tell me something new?
The new is that people are the key, and this is simply an introduction to what lies behind that door. But before we turn the lock, we need to examine some detritus.
It all went haywire when children were all awarded is school and play equally for unequal performance. Fairness is a brutal concept.
When I was a freshman in college, there were about 3,000 of us. A little more than a third of those that started with me graduated with me. Many flunked out. In those days, students couldn't take the course over to change their grade. They had to live with their failure, and move on.
Today hardly anyone fails at anything and therefore few actually succeed in a real sense. They cope. They hang in there to retirement, or they become hardened and bitter and recalcitrant.
I'm not just talking about working stiffs on the line and in administration. I'm talking about CEOs that fail again and again, but never suffer for their failure, because, you see, there is this old boys' club that doesn't want to strangle the golden goose.
While people are writing books on leadership, and always thinking of it in terms of persons in the singular and not people in the plural, a false economy moves higher and higher on imported cheap goods and tighter and tighter bottom lines that only impact the people in the plural, not persons in the singular, not the CEOs, not the so-called "leaders."
We don't have leaders. We have pontiffs. And pontiffs are always attempting to solidify their power, confident that tradition will support them, while accepting collateral damage such as redundancy, merging, streamlining, and whatever new nomenclature is invented to cover their failure as the price of doing business.
I am heading for Europe, which is a microcosm of the US in about every way, and is apparently caving in to the same detritus. Take the Roman Catholic Church of Rome.
We don't have enough trouble with Islam, but Pope Benedict XVI has taken this moment to claim the primacy of Catholicism. He now is driving a wedge between Catholics and Protestants and Jews that Pope John XXIII attempted to repair with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Pope Benedict is even going further by bringing back the Latin Mass to the enthusiastic approval of such conservatives as Patrick Buchanan, who incidentally once ran for president of the US.
In the more than seven decades of my life, leaders of the church and state and business have played quick and dirty with my conscience and loyalty, and I am not alone. Science has done the same by saying "we should do this" and then later say "we shouldn't," as they float in the same surreal world of their collective hubris.
People in the plural are caught in this quagmire.
There is a syndicated voice, a man named David Brooks, who seems to sees this with engaging clarity. He writes a syndicated column from his New York Times desk, and can be seen weekly on the "News Hour with Jim Leherer" on PBS television.
Today's column wasn't about leaders, but people in the plural, specifically young women and their music. He mentioned three songs and how these songs depict modern women in terms of dissonance and disconnection. He writes:
“This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette.
“This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate of the decade.”
He continues, “Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of ‘friends.’ That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.”
I mention this column and these remarks in this context because these young people are the litmus test of our society. It has gravitated to this, and it won’t change by declaring the primacy of a faith, or bringing back a Latin Mass. Nor will it change by celebrating the achievements of a few who have led businesses to profitabilty, often under suspect clouds.
Society, and the people that make up society are being punished by their leaders for not behaving instead of the leaders attempting to understand how things have gotten out of hand.
People need intimacy, need to belong, need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. They need to love in order to be loving. They need to trust themselves and often the reason they distrust themselves so badly is because of misplaced trust in their leadership.
If it sounds as if I have a harangue against the Roman Catholic Church, I would be misread. My soul has been cauterized by this faith, and I have come to accept that its programming, discipline, and continuity are as much apart of my writing as my spirit. I mention this only to gauge the context of this content. It is because of my church that I’ve always been fascinated with leadership.
Leadership, I have found, does not know itself because it projects the ideal of being rational, cognitive, disciplined and temperate, when all the transitions from stuckness to unstuckness have come when the temperate spirit was let loose into a fire in the mind. Martin Luther comes to mind in that sense. He would not be happy with Pope Benedict.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check with the publisher for more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Where is a leader when you want one?”
“He is at your mind’s door waiting to be invited in.”
I was eating my lunch today and tuned into PBS's Charlie Rose show. He was interviewing some young man who is an "expert" on leadership. I didn't get his name because I didn't stay with the program long.
Rose asked him what constituted a great executive and he spieled off something about a CEO that walked through his shop with a pad and pencil taking down observations and comments.
I lived through that phase. I also lived through the phase where the CEO would have a worldwide television hookup, and "talk to the troops" in the manner of a pontiff with well rehearsed remarks and many smiles.
I lived through off sights and training seminars where "experts" and HR professionals would take a group through this or that fad-of-the-moment. One of the longest such engagements was Quality Control Circles, which was a good idea, but for the wrong audience and the wrong time with very mixed results.
If it were the 1945-1955 period, it would have been a colossal idea, but it was launched in the 1980s when the workforce had changed the color of its color from blue to white, and 80 to 90 percent of a company’s employees were in the process of getting a higher education degree or already degreed, often in technical fields.
This, mind you, was before the computer took over and the personal became even more impersonal.
It isn't only people like Dan Brown who have successfully chased myths and made bundles for the trouble. Brown is famous for the de Vinci Code, but Tom Peters is equally famous for "a search for excellence" fame. Most of the companies he profiled, however, have crashed and burned or have been absorbed by hedge funds, split up and sold for huge profits. No leadership in this equation.
Leadership cannot be found in what a CEO did or didn't do, nor can excellence be searched for like a pony in a haystack.
Leadership has always been about people, not persons; and excellence is something you create, not something you search for.
You only have to look at the mess the federal government has made in attempting to manage the unmanageable with the broad umbrella of "Homeland Security," or the military trying to solve ancient political and tribal problems with military might, alone. Indeed, when you think things can't get worse, they do.
So, what is the answer?
The answer has been staring us in the face forever.
People are the key, not markets, not global economies, but people.
People are the leaders of what they do. They need the training, support, trust, consistency in policy and fairness in promotion and discipline to make them feel in charge of their work and therefore in charge of and responsible for the results.
Well, you’ve heard all that before so tell me something new?
The new is that people are the key, and this is simply an introduction to what lies behind that door. But before we turn the lock, we need to examine some detritus.
It all went haywire when children were all awarded is school and play equally for unequal performance. Fairness is a brutal concept.
When I was a freshman in college, there were about 3,000 of us. A little more than a third of those that started with me graduated with me. Many flunked out. In those days, students couldn't take the course over to change their grade. They had to live with their failure, and move on.
Today hardly anyone fails at anything and therefore few actually succeed in a real sense. They cope. They hang in there to retirement, or they become hardened and bitter and recalcitrant.
I'm not just talking about working stiffs on the line and in administration. I'm talking about CEOs that fail again and again, but never suffer for their failure, because, you see, there is this old boys' club that doesn't want to strangle the golden goose.
While people are writing books on leadership, and always thinking of it in terms of persons in the singular and not people in the plural, a false economy moves higher and higher on imported cheap goods and tighter and tighter bottom lines that only impact the people in the plural, not persons in the singular, not the CEOs, not the so-called "leaders."
We don't have leaders. We have pontiffs. And pontiffs are always attempting to solidify their power, confident that tradition will support them, while accepting collateral damage such as redundancy, merging, streamlining, and whatever new nomenclature is invented to cover their failure as the price of doing business.
I am heading for Europe, which is a microcosm of the US in about every way, and is apparently caving in to the same detritus. Take the Roman Catholic Church of Rome.
We don't have enough trouble with Islam, but Pope Benedict XVI has taken this moment to claim the primacy of Catholicism. He now is driving a wedge between Catholics and Protestants and Jews that Pope John XXIII attempted to repair with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Pope Benedict is even going further by bringing back the Latin Mass to the enthusiastic approval of such conservatives as Patrick Buchanan, who incidentally once ran for president of the US.
In the more than seven decades of my life, leaders of the church and state and business have played quick and dirty with my conscience and loyalty, and I am not alone. Science has done the same by saying "we should do this" and then later say "we shouldn't," as they float in the same surreal world of their collective hubris.
People in the plural are caught in this quagmire.
There is a syndicated voice, a man named David Brooks, who seems to sees this with engaging clarity. He writes a syndicated column from his New York Times desk, and can be seen weekly on the "News Hour with Jim Leherer" on PBS television.
Today's column wasn't about leaders, but people in the plural, specifically young women and their music. He mentioned three songs and how these songs depict modern women in terms of dissonance and disconnection. He writes:
“This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette.
“This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate of the decade.”
He continues, “Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of ‘friends.’ That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.”
I mention this column and these remarks in this context because these young people are the litmus test of our society. It has gravitated to this, and it won’t change by declaring the primacy of a faith, or bringing back a Latin Mass. Nor will it change by celebrating the achievements of a few who have led businesses to profitabilty, often under suspect clouds.
Society, and the people that make up society are being punished by their leaders for not behaving instead of the leaders attempting to understand how things have gotten out of hand.
People need intimacy, need to belong, need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. They need to love in order to be loving. They need to trust themselves and often the reason they distrust themselves so badly is because of misplaced trust in their leadership.
If it sounds as if I have a harangue against the Roman Catholic Church, I would be misread. My soul has been cauterized by this faith, and I have come to accept that its programming, discipline, and continuity are as much apart of my writing as my spirit. I mention this only to gauge the context of this content. It is because of my church that I’ve always been fascinated with leadership.
Leadership, I have found, does not know itself because it projects the ideal of being rational, cognitive, disciplined and temperate, when all the transitions from stuckness to unstuckness have come when the temperate spirit was let loose into a fire in the mind. Martin Luther comes to mind in that sense. He would not be happy with Pope Benedict.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check with the publisher for more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING -- GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING – GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of former smokers suffering from cancer sued the tobacco companies for having misled them about just how dangerous smoking was.
For a corporation to withhold accurate health information is not only against the law, it is also a violation of human rights, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Facing ruin, tobacco companies launched an army of corporate attorneys on these former smokers and won many of their cases, and even when they lost, the resulting settlements forced them to change their message but not their devious tactics.
The cigarette industry’s main legal defense was based on an illogical set of assumptions: the risks of smoking were “unproven”; that consumers had been sufficiently warned about whatever risks existed, and thus the companies were not responsible for health problems. Some juries were actually convinced by these arguments.
WHEN DID IT ALL START?
The first mass-produced cigarettes appeared on the market in the 1880s in the United States. But cigarette smoking in America really took off after World War I. The nation was changing rapidly from ethnic concentrated communities into local communities with largely local economies driven by a new mass consumer culture.
The corporation was born which increasingly fed, clothed, transported, and entertained the masses under the broad umbrella of corpocracy.
Assembly-line production in everything from hand tools to automobiles to toothpaste enabled companies to produce goods ever more cheaply with brand advertising through newspapers, magazines and the radio vastly expanding their markets into every cranny of society.
At the same time, America’s moral climate was also changing becoming increasingly secular and individualistic. Smoking once considered vulgar and a degenerate habit, limited to people on the fringe such as merchant marine sailors, bourgeoisie artists and the dregs of society, came to symbolize the new liberated optimists of the 1920s. Everybody who was anybody smoked!
The themes of cigarette advertising were carefree, slick and therapeutic. Chesterfield cigarettes associated its product with sex, depicting couples languishing in the moonlight. “Blow my way,” the woman says, to her man who is smoking a cigarette. Philip Morris aimed at the sophisticated smoker; Lucky Strikes appealed to women on the rise with playfully rebellious slogans: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Already in the 1930s, with suspicion about the damaging health effects of smoking and cancer, there began to grow more of a reassuring and “scientific” tone to the marketing of cigarettes.
Doctors were featured heavily in advertisements. In one ad for Camels, a handsome young physician wearing a head-mirror advises, “Give your throat a vacation. Smoke a Camel.” In another ad, an older doctor with a warm smile and a pince-nez holds a pack of Lucky Strikes and states, “20,679 Physicians say, ‘Luckies are less irritating.”
In the 1950s, when I was in college, practically every professor smoked in class as well as 90 percent of the women. Curiously, far less men appeared to smoke in class for some reason. Everything was seen through the smoke of this classroom haze. You would think a nonsmoker, such as myself, would complain, but we took it as part of the ambience to a college education.
Even so, by the 1950s, a link was revealed between smoking and lung cancer by epidemiological studies in England (Richard Doll and Austen Bradford Hill) and the United States (Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham). Moreover, they discovered lung cancer had tripled in just thirty years (1920 – 1950).
People were dying, but strangely enough, it failed to create much excitement, although an article in “The Reader’s Digest” had the caption “Cancer by the Carton.” Not to worry,
Americans demonstrated their insouciance by increasing their smoking rate in the 1950s by 20 percent.
WHY DON’T PEOPLE LISTEN TO HEALTH WARNINGS?
There is still no clear answer today. Some claim Americans are fatalistic, “You’ve got to die from something, why not enjoy it with cancer sticks?”
The clearest evidence -- despite the attempts of health promoters to direct volumes of research to the mind of the smoker, and to show the clear habitual nature of smoking -- is that the tobacco companies have cut them off at the pass.
Cigarette manufacturers have been highly successful in launching campaigns of half-truths and outright falsehoods to cast doubt on lung cancer studies. This has given people the impression that the habit cannot be all that dangerous if there is so much controversy around these studies.
Yet, smokers and nonsmokers, alike, know of someone within their intimate circle that has died of emphysema or some other smoking related illness. The danger is huge and there is little justification for controversy.
My own mother died of emphysema. Otherwise, she was the picture of health. It was not pretty to watch her die, as I have written (In the Shadow of the Courthouse AuthorHouse 2003). Yet, when I talked to my mother’s nurse, and said, “Seeing this would convince any smoker to quit.” She looked at me, and said simply, “I smoke,” and walked away.
Tobacco companies in 1953 issued a frank statement to cigarette smoking, which was published across the country in newspapers. The statement claimed emphatically that cigarette smoking was not injurious to heath, and that more research was needed into the question.
In typical corpocracy fashion, the industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). This was meant to create the impression the industry was taking the health issue seriously. Its main function proved however to be public relations.
Having once been in research & development, I can imagine some underpaid scientists willing to receive tobacco company grants “to find possible evidence of a link between smoking and cancer,” and then to publish their “findings” with the full support of their grantors.
Part of my work in R& D was to find ways to circumvent patents held by competitors, whereas these scientists working for tobacco companies were often subtly encouraged to use these grants to search for causes of cancer other than cigarettes, for example, possible genetic or environmental linkages. They were even encouraged to find beneficial effects of smoking.
When these tobacco company-funded researchers found evidence that cigarette smoke was loaded with carcinogens, their results were suppressed. Incredibly, none of these scientists complained.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a small number of tobacco-industry “whistle-blowers” came forward. Still, nothing changed. TIRC continued to issue the mantra: “There is no conclusive proof of a link between smoking and cancer,” although the tobacco industry had such proof locked safely away.
In the midst of this, the tobacco industry benefited from a general skepticism on the part of the public concerning statistics, and from the opposition of doctors toward the science of epidemiology, a relatively new discipline.
At the time, few doctors were trained in either statistics or epidemiology, and some may have sensed that the epidemiologists posed a threat to their position as the premier authorities on health issues.
In fact in the 1960s, the American Medical Association, a corpocracy in its own right, accepted $15 million in research grants from the TIRC, and then maintained from this research that the links between smoking and cancer were “unproven.”
This was despite the US Surgeon General in 1964 issuing a report confirming the linkage. The following year Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling Act, which eventually was watered down to a “warning” by the successful lobbying of tobacco companies.
The charade continued. A growing number of brands now came out with filtered versions. Filters are cosmetic and do not reduce the risks of smoking, but half of smokers believed they did.
“Light” cigarettes were marketed as “milder” when they were more addictive because the increased nicotine. Interestingly enough, the tobacco industry never claimed “low-tar” cigarettes were safer. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association did it instead, claiming low-tar brands “were below the critical threshold of risk of disease.” There was scant evidence at the time in support of this claim, which we now know to be absolutely false.
In the midst of all this jockeying, tobacco companies put doctors and health on the shelf and returned to their original theme of cigarette smoking being more fun and an expression of freedom, rebellion and a ticket to inclusive company.
WHEN THE FANTASY BUBBLE BURST
By the 1980s, a smoker was dying every eight seconds somewhere in the United States. Cigarettes were killing more than 400,000 Americans every year.
Meanwhile, individuals and states launched suits against the tobacco companies. Not to be deterred, CEOs of these companies appeared imperiously confident before the US Congress, and challenged these figures while claiming cigarette smoking was safe.
Too many people were dying, many of them public figures, for this performance to prevent the fantasy bubble from bursting. In 1985, a New Jersey judge ruled that the public had a “right to know what the tobacco companies knew and know about the risks of cigarette smoking and what it did or did not do with regard to that knowledge.”
It turned out that the industry had for years suppressed its own research linking cigarettes to cancer.
In the 1970s, it had developed a cigarette that was safer but never marketed because it would amount to admitting guilt.
Then there was the problem that “low-tar” cigarettes contained less nicotine, and therefore were less addictive. So what did some companies in the industry do? They added more nicotine to their “Light” brands.
Today, smoking rates are down by 50 percent from the high of the 1960s. Some 40 million Americans have quit smoking; yet million of Americans still smoke.
More importantly, it appears that lung cancer rates have finally peaked. It is now apparent that changes in behavior are possible when people have the right warnings and sufficient supportive information to convince them that they should change. The horror is that until the twenty-first century most Americans had neither; nor do billions of people around the world that continue to smoke at alarming rates.
GENIUS OF CORPOCRACY
The genius of tobacco companies is that the industry continues to be successful in attracting “replacement smokers,” a euphemism for teenagers and young adults. These smokers have a sense of immortality with years ahead of them “to quit,” failing to realize they are being ticketed to replace dead smokers.
One of the many cruelties of smoking-related illnesses today is that smokers have a sense of shame for being so crippled by the disease of smoking, as if they deserve their fate, as if they, alone, are responsible for their cupidity. The disembodied corporation is by implication exonerated, after all, it is just a business confined to legal and not moral statues.
Few realize how heartlessly corpocracy has lied to smokers, how it has confused them with its campaign of reassurance; how it has abandoned them with this cavalier sentiment:
“Nobody forced smokers to smoke. In accordance with the law, we posted warnings on the cigarette cartons for them to read.” Therefore, we are neither complicit in nor responsible for their fate. It belongs wholly to them, the smokers.”
_______________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back To See Ahead (2007). For information regarding this book, contact http://www.authorhouse.com/.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)