Why professionals can't lead and what to do about it

Fisher, James R Jr

Their training and individualism has disabled professionals. Read how to reprogram them for leadership.

It is so easy to be misunderstood when broaching the subject of professional workers and managerial leadership. As workers, professionals introduce an entirely new dimension to the work climate. Professionals differ from other workers in their distinctive knowledge, which is their power base.

Knowledge is the vital fuel, which runs the engine of post-- modern enterprise. Since professionals have a corner on this unique fuel, it necessitates their understanding the nuances in the leadership-followership continuum. Indications are that they lack the maturity to understand. While professionals may like the sound of inclusion in leadership, they are less enamored of its demands, especially accountability for results. They would prefer to fantasize about leadership, envisioning escalating pay, perks, and privileges, along with its celebrity. That will not do. It is a luxury no organization can any longer afford.

Meanwhile, position power has become anachronistic, appropriated by knowledge power. Management, as we know it, has become atavistic. Knowledge in the form of information is the critical mass. Its timely employment is the essence of organizational viability. The redistribution of knowledge is the single most dynamic change in the past half century, largely due to the explosion in information and electronic technology. Now, the 21 st century organization must reprogram leaders and followers to stay in business.

No matter the extent or quality of the education of professionals, they are all handicapped with 20th century programming, and are ill prepared to deal with 21st century challenges:

Their conditioning in self-- centered individualism is now a burden as culture converges on a cliche - that everyone is part of a common good, with a common heritage, and a common need for each other. This goes in the face of their quest for personhood.1

Most professionals are suspect of this renewal of collegiality as it sounds too contrived, too much like the rhetoric that drove them from the common good into personhood in the first place.

What professionals need is an underpinning of philosophy of leadership that resonates with them, that allows the visible (concrete) and invisible (abstract) worlds to come together. But the literature of leadership is devoid of such philosophy. Leadership literature is pragmatic, cognitive, and rational, which gives little credence to the irrational world in which everyone lives. This literature assumes that enterprise is concrete and driven mainly by enduring greed. It is not. Enterprise is driven by passion, which is spiritual and symbolic. We have to turn to philosophers for the evidence.

Philosophers remind us that we are an animal like any other animal on the face of the earth, and are inclined to behave very much as one of them. How we differ is that we are conscious of the fact that we are here, and other animals are not. We are conscious of a yesterday, today, and a tomorrow. Moreover, we are conscious that we are fragile, weak, and that we will die, and that the use of our minds is our most precious weapon for survival.

We are not only conscious of the good in us, but the evil as well. Like other animals, we are creatures of instinct and instinct finds we are capable of killing, even of our own. But the manner of our killing is more often symbolic, than physical. Philosophers tell us what drives us to this behavior is often our dread of death, a finality with which they claim we have never come to terms. The killing, then, in which we become involved is most often of the spirit, our own or that of others, which compromises existence and turns dread into depression, and dependency into a state of terminal adolescence. We see this in professionals who are intellectually sophisticated, but never grow up.2 Author Cheryl Merser insists the present generation is in fact in search of adulthood.3

What I am suggesting is that a latent fear of corporate death lingers in the consciousness of every professional: Will my discipline be relevant tomorrow; will my skills be adequate; will my company still be in business? Professionals sense, as never before, that at any point in their career they may become obsolete and their place of employment may die.

Dread is a palpable shadow that looms over the new organization as it attempts to find its identity and role in the market place. Dread becomes more pronounced as the organization settles into a routine and soars in prosperity. The worry is unfortunately always there as to how to sustain the growth. And dread takes on the character of ambivalence when the organization senses that it is dying, and feels helpless to deal with this finality.

In the first six months of the year 2000, 5,000 professionals lost their jobs in Internet companies. In the last six months of the year, more than 36,000 were given pink slips.' Decades before, hundreds of thousands of automotive workers, steelworkers, and non-skilled workers in allied industries saw their jobs disappear. Today, there isn't a safe industry, profession, or discipline where survival is certain. Imagine the sense of dread of those retained as well as those let go. So far, this dread is ignored as if it doesn't exist. The only way to deal with dread is to embrace it. This is the first step to leadership in the new reality.

The leadership of professionals is the appropriate balm to stop corporate bleeding, to end these wild fluctuations, and this insane carnage. Companies are operating as if limited by instinct, ignoring the fact that the mind is the key to their survival, and professionals possess that mind. Collective enterprise is ready to be revitalized, reinvented, and born again. This revitalization seldom, if ever, comes from the corporate leadership, which tends to be frozen instinctively in place thinking critically, whereas a stimulus to professionals finds them comfortable thinking creatively. Professionals have the answers because they understand the problems. In the main they haven't been given permission to make decisions, and so invariably remain passively employed. We see this as professionals watch a company like Montgomery Ward or a product line like Oldsmobile disappear, or scores of other companies and product lines fated for the trash heap.

Professionals are the key to redemption and resurrection of 90 percent of the troubled companies. They possess the skills, knowledge, technology, energy, will, and spirit to produce miracles. They can make it happen because problem solving is their profession. But there is a problem within this problem solving.

Professionals, like all workers, have spent most of the 20th century being treated essentially as dumb animals. The most important job they had was showing up for work on time and not causing any trouble. They were programmed to be punctual, polite, obedient, conforming, obsequious, reactive, and humbly committed to arbitrary standards. This nullified their self-confidence, and weakened their wills to contribute on their own terms with their unique abilities in a meaningful way.

What blunted their efforts was an agenda driven by a mania for control with the semblance of robotic harmony. The ghost of "scientific management" still looms in the corporate psyche with this haunting refrain from its architect, Frederick Winslow Taylor:

"One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that be more resembles an ox than any other type. '

And for this clammy sinister shadow, professionals fail to perform to their capabilities, and organizations continue to die when they need not.

We are seeing vintage companies of 100 years giving up the ghost, and surrendering to the forces around them. We are seeing startup companies with great vigor and determination soaring then quickly disappearing like fading stars. And we are seeing companies weighted down with cost laden plants, antiquated equipment, and workers with obsolescent skills, waiting for the inevitable hostile takeover.

Add to this the killing passive behaviors of professionals in every company in every corner of this great society, workers who come in late and leave early, and do as little as possible to get by (passive aggression); workers who always have an excuse why something doesn't get done or done on time (passive defensive); workers who do only what they are told to do, and no more, and never take the initiative (passive responsive); workers who accept assignments that they have no intentions of completing, or completing on time (approach avoidance); workers who do exactly what they are told, even when they know it is wrong, spread disinformation, withhold valuable information to stall the efforts of others, or misuse company property (malicious obedience); and workers who always want to have and to be what others have and are, failing to be content with themselves, and blaming the company for their frustration (obsessive compulsive).6 Like jackals pouncing on a dying doe, these bent workers take as much as they can get while the getting is good, and think nothing of how they are destroying themselves as they are killing the company.

To reconcile this disastrous situation there has to be more than a modicum of reality. The power of dread must be understood. It is the unconscious dance that gives birth to dissonant workers as social termites, who burrow away silently into the marrow of organizational life and kill the spirit long before the corporate body dies. And all because they are treated as if robots to be manipulated and controlled. But there is precedence for this inclination. It didn't happen by accident.

As individuals, we are programmed to live a lie, and by extension, so also are organizations. The inclination is to retreat from reality rather than to embrace it, to substitute artificial (individual) joy, and cosmetic (organizational) change.7

Individually and organizationally, we cover our precious deceptions with heroes. As individuals, we make gods of our entertainers and sports heroes. And in our jobs we make gods of our CEOs. We put our heroes on pedestals to be knocked off when they disappoint, failing to see disappointment as failure in ourselves. We run from ourselves, both individually and collectively, and take residence in homeless minds. When we encounter dread, as anthropologist Ernest Becker puts it, we tranquilize ourselves in trivial pursuit of normality, which is actually a refusal of reality.8

Long before problems become problems, answers are biting the corporate ankle with professional teeth. Only in the awareness of this discomfort can problems be identified, defined, and timely solved. Without such identification, the problems solved are not the problems faced. As professional engineer and author William Livingston puts it, strategy is reduced to "Ready, Fire, Aim!"9

The thinking that put organizations in the mess that they find themselves will not get them out. Professionals know this, and have the skills to reverse the trend. The only problem is professionals don't know how to lead.

What was is not anymore!

The reason executives cannot lead is because the game has changed. Group dynamics have changed. The leader is still the putative leader, but the power base has shifted practically and dramatically toward professionals. What was the power base is now distributed throughout the organization.

Whereas professionals have looked to the leader for guidance, protection, and security, and for blame as well, that too has been redistributed. Now professionals have accountability. They must abandon their childhood, and give up their childishness, and take hold as responsible adults committed to relevant action.

Instead of transferring all their adolescent baggage to their leader, as they have in the past, expecting room to be made for it, that, too, has changed. By the dent of their expertise, professionals can no longer pass the buck. They are part of the problem and not separate from its solution.

Leadership has replaced management as the key to corporate operations. Before, leadership was individualistic, managerial, and distinct from people in the organization. Leadership is now a collective will, vision, and intent to serve collective objectives.

The dynamic won't change-the group dynamic of leaders and followers -but the roles within this dynamic must change. The triad of leadership, responsibility, and accountability must now be shared. Professionals can no longer be passive and passive responsive and expect to share in the leadership. They can no longer symbolically kill their leaders when they fail to direct them to success, because failure, like success, is a collective enterprise. Nor can professionals expect safety and security without acceptance of risk and failure. Failure, in any case, is a function of fear, and fear is a function of retreat from the problem or from reality.

What is the problem?

It may sound simplistic but the problem is culture. Now culture is many faceted, multi-dimensional, and pervasive in every quadrant of organizational life. It is the invisible hand that controls behavior by touching everything and everyone. The way an organization is structured is the way it functions. This establishes the culture, which in turn dictates the predominant behavior. We are referring to workplace culture here, but the same dynamic applies to the organization of the family, the company, the community, and the country. Culture, in every instance, is the key to behavior, both desirable and undesirable, productive and nonproductive.

Culture, once established, is slow to change, as organizations are reluctant to radically change the structure of work. Expediency finds organizations resorting to cosmetic change. This often exacerbates the problem because the problem is not addressed.

Having said that, cultures are constantly changing as new variables are introduced and assimilated, but these changes are seldom perceived and even less seldom managed, as the leadership is generally not schooled in the nuances of culture.

This mismanagement of culture becomes a significant problem, as the architects of the structure and function of work, and therefore culture, are the organization's senior management." Suffice it to point out here that the authoritarian model of command and control leadership is anachronistic replaced by a relational leadership. Here managers and workers perform as partners, not adversaries, and as mutual supporters of the same objectives.

The macho leader as singular hero is now atavistic. There is too much at stake to rest the load on one person, or even a cadre of organizational elite. The idea of leadership is sullied by leaderless leaders and dissonant workers. It is time for a change.

This change starts with the leadership reconciling itself to the new dynamic of organizational life where timely decisions at the level of consequences are critical to success. It continues with a dilution of executive authority; and a modification of special perks and privileges of position power. Power of traditional leadership is still considerable but exercised mainly in symbolic leadership.

When this power shift is not recognized and dealt with accordingly, a monster is created that sits on its hands and blocks organizational progress. The monster is not only intractable management, but also the blatant indifference of professionals, who still have a lust for comfort and security. Adding bulk to this monster is a leadership that insists on shielding professionals from the pain of their failures, and from the consequences of their blunders.

The answer is in the problem!

Professionals act the way they are programmed to act. This finds them in a rush to be liked, to impress, to please, to campaign for the next position, and inclined to be indifferent to performance. Programmed to operate mainly on automatic self-aggrandizing pilot, they flatter themselves that they are godlike thinkers as they sit on their knowledge. This dulling illusion is taken to be reality when it is reality from which they are running. Ernest Becker writes:

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive."

Professionals appear to be afraid of their uniqueness, afraid to be different, afraid to be authentic in their own right. Technologists and technicians display these misgivings, as they see themselves as the last to be hired, and the first to be fired. Increasingly, they see themselves as being treated as if indentured workers, vagabonds with a cell phone and a laptop."2

Despite being regarded as possessors of rarefied knowledge, they still behave as if they have no power, when they have it all. Consider these five dimensions of professionals that I have observed:

1. Intelligence. They have an uncanny ability to analyze, digest, and assimilate information put before them. Information they can see they grasp with facility. Information that is abstract and requires conceptual understanding is often not important to them and therefore beyond their pale. It is this information that is not carefully conceptualized and insightfully applied that often kills a project. Moreover, they fail to understand the impact of their symbolic behavior, the unguarded behavior that reflects their true character.

2. Support. Technology is their god and they expect support to their purposes from everyone, while not necessarily being user friendly in support of others. When support is not forthcoming, they become restive and petulant, demonstrating the maturity of a pampered child.

3. Conformity. Professionals are the consummate conformists. They would reject this charge quite vociferously. They like to think of themselves as nonconformists. Yet their knowledge base is essentially the product of a programmed education where they acted as passive receptacles to the information provided. The evidence? As much as they strut their stuff, professionals seldom fall out of line. They have a fatal attraction for being punished rather than rewarded for excellence. They claim the company pays them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit. Trapped by conformity, they choose to see it as economic prudence.

4. Achievement. Perfection and achievement get confused. A drive toward perfection may have little to do with achievement. Professionals see themselves as being underutilized and fault management and the system for this redress. They fail to see "they are the system." On the other hand, the quest for perfection may mask their failure to be in control, and this perfection is their revenge. Or curiously, they may hide their angst in being slave to a project. Then who is in charge? The project becomes first, second, third, and every other priority. Achievement is the rationale for this insanity but it seldom has the feel of achievement. Instead, there is a sense of being exploited.

5. Decisiveness. Professionals are not decisive. They like to think they are, but they are actually programmed to be indecisive, tentative, and circumspect, with a mania for more data to cover their asses. Perfection is still the rationale for their lack of actual achievement.

Many professionals, as a consequence, have a sense of powerlessness, which quickly devolves into victimization. You can

measure this by their inclination to complain, and behave passively, without an inclination to do anything about it. As Plato observes, they are looking (for answers) in (all) the wrong directions.

This must change, as professionals are crucial to organizational success. But behavior is difficult if not impossible to change when only conforming behavior is promoted.

So, the first obstacle professionals have to overcome is their counterproductive cultural programming.

The second obstacle professionals have to overcome is the traditional nature of their education. Professionals have been trained as knowers, not learners, doers, nor thinkers. They have a tendency to be jealous of their special knowledge and reluctant to share it in user-friendly terms with others outside their discipline or function. This inclination has handicapped the organization.

The third obstacle professionals must overcome is their passive nature. Professionals, sheltered in presumed powerlessness, are inclined to project blame when confronted with accountability. They want a guaranteed paycheck without the necessity to perform. This is no longer satisfactory.

So professionals have to overcome their education. They need to become their own parents, and act as organizational owners, not renters. It behooves them to understand that anything less than their best puts the organization in jeopardy.

A dynamic working environment will involve conflict, disagreement, and confrontation, which calls for frequent but polite exchange, rather than infrequent and violent argument. The focus needs to be on what is wrong, not who is wrong, supported by risk taking and individual initiative.

Synergistic leadership - a climate of continuity, connection, and collaboration -needs to be established to get professionals off automatic pilot and beyond the obvious. Synergism provides a mighty platform for soaring above the tedium of routine.

The fourth thing professionals need to do is the reverse of mentoring which is to become consultants to the leadership. This is more than feedback, more than closing the communications loop. This is schooling senior management in how things get done, or don't get done, and why, persuading this management to take the calculated risks to get operations off the dime. This requires that professionals learn to speak the language of money. Typically, professionals go to management with problems with little idea of the costs involved, or the cost-benefits that might accrue to their solutions. Professionals as consultants don't come to management with a laundry list of what they need, but with specific proposals to what they can do.

For far too long, professionals have only come to management with laundry lists, which has turned it off from listening, much less acting on their advice. Besides, senior management has its own handpicked advisers, which limits its access, in the main, to these sycophants. The ivory tower of mahogany row still exists even if outmoded. Novelist Robert Ludlum in The Prometheus Deception (2000) captures this incongruity:

Who invented the modern corporation? Men like John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, and Alfred Sloan of General Motors. In the postwar era of economic expansion, you had Robert McNamara at Ford and Harold Geneen at ITT, Reginald Jones at General Electric. It was the heyday of multiplex managerial strata, with chief executives assisted by staffs of planners, auditors, and operations strategists. Rigid structures were necessary to conserve and manage the scarcest resource of all, the most valuable asset of all: information. Now, what happens if information becomes as free and copiously available as the air we breathe or the water we drink? All that becomes unnecessary. All that gives.13

The old way was the vertical hierarchy; which is reluctant to get off stage, while the new way is the forging of horizontal networks, cutting across organizational boundaries. Far-sighted corporations are building networks of companies that collaborate with each other, not directed from above. For these corporations, the boundaries are down. The logic of networking puts a premium on self-- monitoring, information-driven systems. Continual monitoring means the elimination of risk factors within the organizational structure and outside it as well.

Professionals in these intuitive corporations now must operate as entrepreneurs since venture capital leads to atomize capital markets. This radically disperses labor markets and puts a new premium on collective enterprise and diverse partnerships.

Pyramid organizations are being forced to yield to the fluid, selforganizing means of collaboration. This means that companies must exploit connectivity, not just internally but externally as well, arriving at common strategies with partners in and outside the company. This extends control, as we know it, beyond the purview of conventional ownership.

Where there had previously been opaque barriers between positions, functions and disciplines, there must now be transparency at all levels. Where boundaries are truly permeable, there isn't any place for a conventional company. For nearly a half-century, we've lived through an era of manageralism answerable to no one. Consequently, ownership is fragmented as risks can be separated into component parts only for so long. What is needed between professional disciplines and functions within the organization are walls that you can see through, walls that can be moved like partitions whenever they need to be moved. This marks the end of sealed off business units - and the advent of true integration.

It could be argued that the organization is turning back to the pre-corporate world to move forward, or to the time before the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was about the division of work into compartmentalized tasks in which no one had a sense of ownership, and in which alienation became the cry of disenchanted workers. That mindset, although now irrelevant, still poisons the air professionals breathe in the workplace.

Professionals are assuming roles similar to the pre-industrial guild workers in this post-industrial period, as tasks evolve to collective enterprise where the focus is on process in the domain of absolute visibility.

Yet the problem remains. Before professionals can function in this new climate, they must first be deprogrammed. For the past century, the illusion of individualism has found them crying for independence while becoming increasingly dependent. Control of their actions has always been outside themselves. Management, in order to have dominion over control, preferred to put a fire under workers rather than in them for fear of where that might lead.

Now, paradoxically, the only way for management to effectively direct organizational behavior is to let go of control. A mania for control has led to the arrested emotional development of many workers, including professionals, with the majority suspended in terminal adolescence paralyzed by fear to act without management's permission. This has crippled many organizations and led to the demise of many others.

Deprogramming entails repealing worker adolescent dependence on management for guidance, direction, and control on the job, and nullifying the same workers' counter dependence on the organization for their total well being. Once deprogrammed, the next step is reprogramming.

Reprogramming is difficult and time consuming. This involves moving professionals away from the culture of comfort and complacency to the culture of contribution, or to a state of interdependent management and accountability.

What makes reprogramming seem counterintuitive is the need to retool professionals in selfdirection, self-reliance, selfdiscipline, self-determination, and self-control. Self-management is the prerequisite to functioning successfully in a dynamic collaborative climate where surprise is part of the routine.

For this to happen, however, senior management must be attuned to these demands and convinced of their need. After all, senior management is the architect of the structure and function of work and creators of the workplace culture, either by design or default.

Given this predicament, many companies sue for delay, and remain controlled by a management more comfortable in a climate of imposed harmony rather than energetic chaos, more at ease where its hands are ostensibly on the controls than not.

The fifth thing that professionals are going to have to do, and this is going to be very difficult for them, is to think both as leaders and as followers; both in taking and giving orders; both in being committed to what is wrong and dealing with colleagues obsessed with who is wrong; both in feeling accountable for one's own actions and the actions of others; both in being in control and not controlling.

The sixth thing, and it ties in with being both a leader and a follower, is to appreciate and understand the metaphysical nature of the organization.

Pervasive symbolic constructs, ix, the collective spirit of organization, drive behavior, not edicts nor policies and procedures. This goes beyond the visible, beyond everything that can be stated, defined, tied down, and understood in concrete terms. Passion drives behavior, and passion, like love, is mainly in the heart and not the head.

The seventh thing, and again this ties in with the spirituality of the organization, is the realization that dread is a component of existence in every organization. Dread or anxiety is a given. It is our most palpable fear. Yet it is only in embracing fear that we can realize any freedom.

Social philosopher Erich Fromm sees a powerful inclination for people to escape from rather than to embrace freedom. Freedom involves not being afraid to grow, not being afraid to change, not being afraid of uncertainty, not being afraid of a climate that is constantly in a state of chaos, conflict, and flux. Fromm claims embracing fear is the difference between existing and living:

Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what we have, we know; we can hold onto it, feel secure in it. We fear, and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have taken it, before we take that step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky; and hence fightening. Only the old, the tried, is safe; or so it seems. Every new step contains the danger of failure, and that is one of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom. 14

An organization, as a collection of individuals, must constantly reinvent itself, recreate itself, renew itself, be not afraid to die and be reborn under new circumstances where the model of leadership is ever changing. Leadership cannot be rigid, dogmatic, or authoritarian. Nor can followership be that of a horde mentality and expect to generate success.

The eighth thing, which ties back with all of these, is the recognition that an organization is a living entity. It has a soul as well as a corporate body, a spirit as well as a will. An organization has a psychology and needs a philosophy. It is, at once, sturdy and tenuous for, like an individual, as soon as an organization is born it is old enough to die.

There is continuity between the people of an organization, and the soul of the organization, as generation after generation attempts to replicate and modify itself to fit the needs of the time. A corporate entity is very much dependent on the wellness of those in charge and those who follow to recognize that everyone is a leader or follower at some time in the daily dynamic of organizational life.

References

1 James R. Fisher, Jr., Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (www.1st Books.com 2000), p. 182. Personhood evolved in Generation X as a reaction to the presumed deception and duplicity of management on several fronts, at home, on the job, in the media, community, church, and government.

2 James R Fisher, Jr., "Give Your Company a Grow-Up Call,"Journal of Quality and Participation, July/August 1999, pp. 6-13.

3 Cheryl Merser, "Grown-Ups": A Generation in Search of Adulthood (G. P. Putnams's Sons, New York, 1987).

4 time, " Numbers, " January 8, 2001, p. 12

5 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1911), p. 59.

6 James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press, Boga Raton, FL., 1998).

7 See Fisher, op. cit.

8 Ernest Becker, The Denial ofDeath (Free Press, New York, 1973), p. 178.

9 William L. Livingston, Friends in High Places (F. E. S. Ltd. Publishing, Bayside, NY 1990). Livingston insists the purpose of an organization is what it does, not what it says it does, but what it actually does, and what it actually does is "ready, fire, aim!" See chapter 12, "The Enemies of Problem Solving," pp. 251-278.

10 See James R Fisher, Jr., "Culture of Contribution," Executive Excellence, January 1997, p. 16; "Leaderless Leadership," Executive Excellence November 1998, p. S; "Merging Cultures,"

Executive Excellence, April 1999, p. 12; "Three Dominant Workplace Cultures," National Productivity Review, Spring 1997, pp. 37-48; "Envisioning A Culture of Contribution," Journal of Organizational Excellence, Winter 2000, pp. 47-54.

11Becker, op. cit., p. 66.

12 James Rt Fisher, Jr., "The Lost Soul of the Engineer," Short-Circuit. The Newsletter of Engineering Empowerment, Spring, 1993, p. 25.

13 Robert Ludlum, The Prometheus Deception (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2000), p. 237.

14 Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (Harper & Row, New York, 1976), p. 95.

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

Dr. Fisher is an organizational development psychologist, author of seven books, the most recent Six Silent Killers (St. Lucie Press 1998) and Corporate

Sin (1stBooks. com 2000), 300+ published articles, recent/relevant: journal of Quality and Participation (November/December 1999), National Productivity Review (Spring2000), Executive Excellence (June 2000), Personal Excellence (August 2000), Personal Excellence (November 2000), and journal of Organizational Excellence (Winter 2000).

He spent ten years as a corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company's International Division, working in the United States, South America, Europe, and South Africa, and a combined 10 years as a management psychologist for Honeywell, Inc., and Director of human resources Honeywell, Inc., and development of human resources planning and development James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., can be contacted at 6174 Jennifer Drive, Temple Terrace, FL 33617, by phone/fax 813-989-3631, or via e-mail: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com.

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