Psychic Prison

Psychic Prison Quotes

2009-10-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

[Evans2003] Evans, P. 2003. Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You.

"Other people's definitions of us are not just absurd--if unchallenged, they erect prison walls around us. As they rise higher, the light of awareness fades. The world darkens. We lose freedom, safety, confidence, conviction, and sometimes ourselves." (p. 77)

[Foucault1995] Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison.

"The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue to multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that the prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (p. 227)

[Morgan1986] Morgan, G. 1986. Images of Organization.

As we examine the bureaucratic form of organization, therefore, we should be alert to the hidden meaning of close regulation and supervision of human activity, the relentless planning and scheduling of work, and the emphasis on productivity, rule following, discipline, duty, and obedience. The bureaucracy is a mechanistic form of organization, but an anal one too. And not surprisingly, we find that some people are able to work in this kind of organization more effectively than others. If bureaucracies are anal phenomena encouraging an anal style of life, then such organizations will probably operate most smoothly when employees fit the anal character type and can derive various hidden satisfactions from working in this context." (p. 209)

[Morgan1998] Morgan, G. 1998. Images of Organization: The Executive Edition.

"The groupthink phenomenon has been reproduced in thousands of decision-making situations in organizations of aIl kinds. It may seem overly dramatic to describe the phenomenon as reflecting a kind of psychic prison. Many people would prefer to describe it through the culture metaphor, seeing the pathologies described in all the above examples as the product of particular cultural beliefs and norms. But there is great merit in recognizing the prisonlike qualities of culture." (p. 186)

[Zuboff1988] Zuboff, S. 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

"Bentham's extensive plans for reform of prison management created both controversy and interest within the British Parliament. Though his management proposals were not implemented, the central principle of continuous observation made possible by technical arrangements was to influence the administrative and architectural orientation of bureaucratic organizations from schools, to hospitals, to workplaces in which individuals are taken up as unique problems to be managed and measured up against appropriate norms:

"Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline....What are required are mechanisms that analyze distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare....It is polyvalent in its application....Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used." (p. 322)

[Schwartz1990] Schwartz, H. 1990. Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal.

"This is the fundamental dynamic of totalitarianism. It alienates people from themselves and gives them over to others. Whatever victories ensue must be pyrrhic. Whatever happiness is to be attained here is not the happiness of the individual. Indeed, it is not happiness at all. It is the drama of happiness attaching to a role that the person performs in a play that is written and directed by others." (p. 16)

[Maurer1981] Maurer, H. 1981. Not Working: an Oral History of the Unemployed.

"There are people in this book whose living rooms have turned into prisons without bars, and others who gleefully feel they have escaped jobs that were jails. There are people who have been broken by years of idleness, and others who have discovered emotional resources that allow them to endure--even, in a way, to triumph. In short, the men and women in this book vary enormously. Yet amid the variety there is a common feeling, stated with bitter clarity at times, only half spoken at others, and occasionally not yet formed as a thought but rather a troubled notion whispering behind the words. It is a crime that has been committed." (p. 1)

Healing the Workplace Culture

2008-09-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

Danna Beal:

What I'm seeing in the workplace today is a web of egos that battle and compete for power. I see managers disempower employees. I see coworkers hurt and sabotage one another. This internal competiveness, this rivalry is based in fear. But, I believe that if we replace fear with trust and compassion, people everywhere can be restored to their true identities...

A lose-lose game

2008-08-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

Advice from a former employment attorney:

"In the end, employment litigation is a lose-lose game. Plaintiffs I represented who received hundreds of thousands of dollars were usually broke within three years. And companies I sued didn't end up treating employees more fairly; they just made their employee handbook thicker. I truly believe the system causes more damage than benefit, and that's why I'm glad I have been out of it for the last 10 years."

In regard to making the employee handbook thicker, William L. White writes:

"'The last act of a dying organization is a thicker rule book.' The need for rules to control staff members marks a dramatic change in mutual respect, loyalty, and the esprit de corps that characterized earlier stages of organizational life."

Ritual loss of creativity

2008-06-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

Howard Schwartz writes about how the ritualization of work leads to a loss of creativity:

The Transposition of Work and Ritual

When work, the productive process, becomes display, its meaning be comes lost. Its performance as part of the organizational drama becomes the only meaning it has. Accordingly, the parts it plays in the organization's transactions with the world become irrelevant. When this happens, work loses its adaptive function and becomes mere ritual.
At the same time, the rituals that serve to express the individual's identification with the organization ideal, especially those connected with rank, come to be infused with significance for the individual. They become sacred. Thus, reality and appearance trade places. The energy that once went into the production of goods and services of value to others is channeled into the dramatization of a narcissistic fantasy in which the organization's environment is merely a stage setting.
Consider how this shows up in the matter of dress. One can easily make a case that patterns of dress among organizational participants often have some functionality. But when the issue comes to be invested with great meaning, one must suspect that ritual has supplanted function…
The dynamics of the ways in which ritual comes to assume the importance work should have help to explain the dynamics of the ritualization of work. For the willingness to allow one's behavior to be determined by meaningless rituals comes to be justified by an idealiza tion of the organization that elevates its customs above and discredits one's values--one's sense of what is important.

Loss of Creativity

The delegitimation of one's sense of what is important gives rise to a special case of the ritualization of work--the loss of creativity. Schein (1983) describes the condition of "conformity" that follows from an insistence by the organization that all of its norms be accepted as being equally important. Under that condition, the individual "can tune in so completely on what he sees to be the way others are handling themselves that he becomes a carbon-copy and sometimes a caricature of them." Consequently, Schein notes: "The conforming individual curbs his creativity and thereby moves the organization toward a sterile form of bureaucracy" (1980).
The lack of creativity, since it is a lack of something, cannot be positively demonstrated. As an experience, it makes itself known as a feeling of missing something different that has not occurred, even though one does not know what the different element would have been.

When the devaluation of the individual’s sense of what is important is enforced by organizational power, this can constitute a form of abuse. Emily Bassman writes about the same unmeasurability of something that is lacking:

It should be clear that organizations make unmeasurable sacrifices in productivity and profitability by tolerating employee abuse. What makes the losses unmeasurable is the concept of opportunity costs. One cannot measure something that isn’t there; no one knows how productive a person can be under different circumstances. As Ryan and Oestreich (Ryan and Oestreich 1991) point out, in organizations where fear is prevalent, the organization generally will survive and may even be reasonably successful. The important question is, how much more successful could it be? No one can say, because lost opportunities cannot be measured, especially if their possible existence is not even considered. (Bassman 1992)

Schwartz continues about the loss of creativity:

In benign times, one may experience boredom: the consciousness of a sameness, a lack of originality. When circumstances are harsh, partly as a result of the lack of creativity that the organization needed if it was to have adapted, one may simply experience the intractability of the situation….In the hard times, I suspect, one rarely comes to recognize that the ideas that the organization needed in order to have avoided its present hopeless state may have been upon the scene a long time ago. But the individuals who had them might have been passed over for promotion because they were not "team players," or perhaps they were made to feel uncomfortable because they did not fit it in, or maybe they were scapegoated whenever the organization needed a victim. Indeed, ironically, the very ideas that were needed might have been laughed at or ignored because they were not "the way we do things around here." (Schwartz 1990)

Schwartz writes about the horror of a working life where one’s own creative self must be repressed. Further than this, what happens on an individual level when the scapegoating he mentions becomes full-blown workplace mobbing, or on a broader scale when the opportunity costs happen to encompass major unmet societal needs? Who else out there is asking these kinds of questions?

Breaker of horses

2008-05-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

The following is excerpted from David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

A NEW LANGUAGE, A NEW WORLD
The inherited language of the corporate workplace is far too small for us now. It has too little poetry, too little humanity, and too little good business sense for the world that lies before us. We only have to look at the most important word in the lexicon of the present workplace--manager--to understand its inherent weakness. Manager is derived from the old Italian and French words maneggio and manege, meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse. It is strange to think that the whole spirit of management is derived from the image of getting on the back of a beast, digging your knees in, and heading it in a certain direction. The word manager conjures images of domination, command, and ultimate control, and the taming of a potentially wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and reined in. All appropriate things if you wish to ride a horse, but most people don't respond very passionately or very creatively to being ridden, and the words giddy up there only go so far in creating the kind of responsive participation we now look for.

Sometime over the next fifty years or so, the word manager will disappear from our understanding of leadership, and thankfully so. Another word will emerge, more alive with possibility, more helpful, hopefully not decided upon by a committee, which will describe the new role of leadership now emerging. An image of leadership which embraces the attentive, open-minded, conversationally based, people-minded person who has not given up on her intellect and can still act and act quickly when needed. Much of the wisdom needed to create these new roles, lies not in our empirical, strategic disciplines but in our artistic traditions. It is the artist in each of us we
must now encourage into the world...

The winning metaphor

2008-04-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

Allan Revich, in his Work it Out Blog, writes about finding an answer to the question "what does winning look like?" in a recent blog post.

When people have undergone some significant physical and/or emotional trauma, even if it’s to some degree of their own causing, hypervigilance is a common outcome. So, the skills required to help clients at The Center For Victims of Torture in Minneapolis may be different, I’m thinking, than straight conflict management and negotiation skills. Can psychological workplace injuries rise to that level? Reading William L. White’s “The Incestuous Workplace” and his discussion about his clients who had become "victims of professional distress" in their workplaces and subsequently been painfully extruded from their jobs, still suffering years later from the aftermath, one might be tempted to say “yes”.

I wonder whether the work of James Carse has informed the conflict management community, in particular his book: "Finite and Infinite Games". Winning is just another metaphor, after all. To have no losers, we can either modify the metaphor to make everyone a winner, or allow for the continuation of play, as in Carse's notion of infinite games, such that the play does not come to an end, and so the winning metaphor thus loses its meaning.

To review the thesis of finite and infinite games, as Carse says, "in the simplest possible manner":

A finite game is a game you play to win.
An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.
James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game ...

Cheese as metaphor

2008-04-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

From the bestselling business book with cheese in its title:

"What did you do with the Hems who didn't change?" Frank wanted to know. "We had to let them go," Michael said sadly. "We wanted to keep all our employees, but we knew if our business didn't change quickly enough, we would all be in trouble."

Laura Lemay, in her essay "The Cheese Stands Alone", writes about that aspect of the book:

"Ahhh. You will read the cheese book, and you will like the cheese book. It will change your life. Or we will fire your ass."

Jon Carroll from the San Francisco Chronicle offers another critical view of the book in his article "I got your cheese right here". He says that employees forced to read the book discern that "cheese" is a metaphor for "continued employment". Carroll delivers this hard-hitting conclusion:

"Reading 'Who Moved My Cheese?' I was reminded of another book about 'littlepeople' who were constantly required to survive in a mazelike environment characterized by cruel and arbitrary change, another place where the search for cheese was constant. That book is 'The Gulag Archipelago.'

Scared Happy

2008-02-25T15:43:00.000-08:00

From a comment posted to an online article:

"People in Singapore do not have a right to be unhappy, technically speaking we do not have civil liberties, namely we do not have the right to free speech, nor the right to assemble, nor the right to protest, etc. The Singapore people are afraid of the government, we cannot speak up and voice our unhappiness since it would clearly breach an OB marker. Being 'unhappy' is a serious matter in Singapore since it implies the authorities are not doing something right and they do not take such matters lightly. Growing up in Singapore, we are conditioned to accept the Singapore way of life as is, unquestioning and unopposing. Essentially we are technically 'happy' because we are afraid. In the end, happiness is subjective and for me, 'I am a happy Singaporean'. Trust me, you would be too if you grew up here; and no I'm not kidding."

This reminded me of one definition for totalitarianism: it is the process of defining other people's happiness for them. I came across this definition in Howard Schwartz's writings on organizational psychodynamics. Schwartz gives the original credit for this definition to Earl Shorris, who wrote about totalitarianism so defined as a central theme in his book, Scenes from Corporate Life. Here is one critical review of Shorris' book.

A striking fictional representation of being "scared happy" that I remember seeing long ago is a scene from an old science fiction movie, where, as I recall, weary wayfarers ala Grapes of Wrath are led into to a new camp. In stark contrast to the memorable scene in the film Grapes of Wrath in which Jane Darwell's character reacts to the unexpected generosity of the camp leader, the sci fi movie's leader offers this chilling remark: "People are happy here. And if they're not happy, then we kill them."

Letting go

2008-02-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

Venture Chronicles: Manage your team: "Most -- if not all -- companies lose momentum and efficiencies when they let employees go. Any employee. Even if those employees challenge the corporate culture status quo. There is artful resonance in the reevaluation, continuous development, redeployment, and ongoing incentive motivation of your existing employee base. Even for those employees that are the most challenging."

Panopticism revisited

2008-02-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software - Times Online: "Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help."

Marching good people out the door

2008-02-02T10:11:00.000-08:00

CIO - Firing Line: "For an example of a common, yet inadvisable procedure, McCausland says look no further than the practice of ushering departing employees off the premises. Far from preventing people from stealing data or lashing out in some other manner at their former employers, this process might actually be encouraging them. 'Employers sometimes ask me: 'Should we escort people out?' And I say to them: 'Why? Are they going to damage something on the way out? Or steal something? No. Treating people like a suspect is more likely to cause them to retaliate.'
'Treating a terminated employee as a serious security risk - by escorting them out of the building under guard, for example - increases the likelihood that they will be a danger,' agrees David Creelman, chief of content and research at human resources management portal HR.com. 'Terminated employees don't have guns to pull at the termination interview. But if they feel betrayed and humiliated then they may go home, get a gun and come back. Most companies overreact on security. They march good people out the door under security escort, which simply damages morale in the company and greatly enhances the likelihood of a wrongful termination suit or other retaliatory action.'
Top security executives chime in as well on this point. 'You probably are asking people to retaliate,' says Grant Crabtree, vice president of corporate security at Alltel, an $US8 billion telecom service company. 'Under some circumstances it might be warranted, but it would have to be exceptional for us to do that. I think many of my colleagues would agree.'"

The highest aspiration

2008-01-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

The following is quoted from a corporate annual report:

Beauty is intrinsic in nature and existed before Man did. All the most beautiful things that a human is capable of making are merely conscious or unconscious imitations of what is already present in nature. The beauty of nature is a source of inspiration not only for human endeavours, but also for human sentiments – and therefore ethics can be considered to be the transfer of beauty to human behaviour. The quest for beauty -- in this wider meaning of the term -- is the highest aspiration of any human.
Similarly, the quest for socially responsible management is the highest aspiration of any company wishing to fulfill its natural function, i.e. satisfaction of human needs.

Yearning for Learning

2007-12-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

"I've come to believe that teaching is impossible: one can only try to make someone want to learn. Often, it seems, what is most important is not the answers you try to provide, but the questions you raise."
John Burton

Since, as Deming and others point out, learning is an innate desire we are all born with, the task changes a bit from that of "making" to one of "restoring" that desire. As Deming says, "we must restore the individual...release the power of human resource contained in intrinsic motivation that people are born with". Deming sees the damage done by extrinsic motivation:

"Extrinsic motivation in extreme replaces intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity. One is born with intrinsic motivation, self esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, a yearning for learning. These attributes are high at the beginning of life, but are gradually crushed out, diminished, year by year, throughout life. Crushed out by the forces of destruction along the top. The forces of destruction build up these undesirable qualities, characteristics, listed here [I can't see the slide in the video], and crush out what one is born with, intrinsic motivation, self esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, yearning for learning. Why crush them out, why not nuture them? Mere change will not do it. We cannot just remodel the prison. No, we've got to get out of it." --W.E. Deming

W. Edwards Deming on the Future of Capitalism

No Name-Calling Rule

2007-08-12T00:50:00.000-07:00

Business professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton from Stanford have written extensively on business issues, in some cases as a team. I really should familiarize myself with more of their work before I comment here, but I wanted to state some preliminary concerns. Perhaps others can inform and clarify my thinking in this regard.

Sutton has written a new book ,"The No Asshole Rule", and he promotes the book on his Workplace Matters blog.

Pfeffer wrote a recent article in Business 2.0 magazine where he praises the elimination of physicians from Kaiser Permanente.

An underlying theme I see shaping up here is the labeling and elimination of individuals deemed to be a "cancer" on the organization. I think when equating a person to a "malignant tumor" or "festering boil" on the organization, it’s invoking the kind of coarse imagery from the biological realm that longstanding epithets such as "asshole", "shit", and "turd" have come from.

The way it’s looking to me right now is that, though I see much to praise about both Pfeffer’s and Sutton’s desire to make workplaces nicer and more humane, I think the solutions involving selection and elimination of scapegoats--even where the scapegoat may not be entirely innocent--and the associated name-calling do not appear to reflect particularly progressive thinking.

Pfeffer's article praised the efforts of administrators who, he writes, "using a new evaluation process, began removing 10 to 20 doctors a year, about 2 percent of the total. [One administrator] argued that the toxic behavior of some doctors--those who ducked responsibility or lacked anger management skills--infected the organization. Attitudes and not technical skills, she discovered, were the biggest determinant of performance..."

So, what is a better solution? I’m thinking de-fang rather than eliminate. To minimize the negative psychological impact that others may have on us it helps to remember that there are such situations that lead people to behave in ways that they otherwise might not. When someone is grieving over the loss of an important relationship such as a after a death in the family, resultant appearance may involve the person in being incorrectly labeled as having a "negative attitude." It’s not hard to see how that misinterpretation can compound an already tragic situation. This compounding leading to loss of a job was first mentioned on an public radio program I only caught part of a couple years ago, and that I’m now looking for again. If anyone can help me identify that program in NPR’s archives, it would be much appreciated.

In addition, there are conditions that manifest themselves as what some call "disorders of empathy", as in an autism spectrum disorder such as Asperger’s Syndrome, believed to be widely prevalent to some degree (shading into normal) in technological as well as artistic fields. According to a story in Time magazine: "There is no question that many successful people--not just scientists and engineers but writers and lawyers as well--possess a suite of traits that seem to be, for lack of a better word, Aspergery." But, as the article suggests, had we gotten rid of these people because they were different it may very likely have caused us all to be living more impoverished lives for the lack of their important contributions. Being aware of these kinds of factors and others may go a long way to instilling a greater sense of non-reaction built on patience, tolerance for diversity, and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

So before calling people names consider whether you’re on some level doing it in a mean-spirited, vengeful manner. And remember, anyone who would readily destroy another’s career as punishment for some relatively minor perceived transgression--well, one might say that’s being a real asshole.

We don’t take our toxic waste and dump it in the river for others downstream to deal with. Neither should we do the same with people. Detoxify at the source, as that’s often the best approach in either situation. In the latter case, that detoxification begins with a change in our own perceptions.

Workplace mingi

2007-07-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

I recall seeing a fascinating but also chilling documentary many years ago about the Hamar and Karo tribes in Africa. Recently I came across a related video clip from National Geographic, from which I transcribed the following:

Narrator: "Their survival is due to an unquestioning belief in an omen called mingi. Mingi is a sign that bad things will happen to the tribe: war, famine, failed crops. It is an omen that comes in the most innocent of forms. It is a child whose upper teeth come through before the lower teeth, or [who has] any physical defect, like a cleft palette. Twins are also seen as mingi. Or a child born out of wedlock. In each of these cases, the child will be thrown into the river or left out in the bushes to die."
Professor John Burton, who teaches anthropology at Connecticut College in New London: "Mingi provides these people of a way of understanding what's happened and what should be done. So, for example, a man may say, 'Because we didn't get rid of this child last year, and it was a mingi child, that's why we have drought right now.'"
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/taboo/episodes.html

Fortunately--the horrors of famine and war facing African tribes today notwithstanding--the system of mingi that leads to such tragic loss of life is fading into history. However, the notion of negatively labeling and then cutting an individual loose from his moorings in society or organization may be finding something of a resurgence in some circles. I will try to provide supporting references in future posts. A parallel to mingi within the culture of modern organizations might go something like this:

Corporate survival is due to an unquestioning belief in an omen called "problem employees". Having problem employees is a sign that bad things will happen to the company: ruthless competition, stock decline, failed products. It is an omen that comes in the form of an individual. It is an employee who may be seen as being somehow different, whose difference is a defect whereby he doesn't quite fit in with the others, who furthermore may have once displayed what appeared to be a negative attitude, and who, after thus being labeled a problem employee, is feared will become a cancer on the organization if collective action is not taken. The employee will then be terminated or at least isolated until he resigns.
Problem employees provide an organization with a way of understanding what's happened and what should be done. So, for example, an executive might say, "Because we didn't get rid of a certain employee last year, her negative attitude has infected her coworkers, and that's why we have poor morale now."

Unleashing creativity

2007-07-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

The following is exemplary of unleashing creativity by way of setting aside worries over time and cost. Time stands still when you are creating, and cost becomes insignificant in relation to the eventual payoff realized.

On the 40th anniversary of the recording of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, Guitar World Magazine (June 2007) published a special tribute section to what it says is an album that "has been hailed repeatedly as one of the most influential albums of all time."

The main article quotes from an interview with the recording engineer about the process of creating the album:

It was a time of great experimentation.
There were no time limits,
and as far as cost--their attitude was,
'Sod the cost! We're making a masterpiece.'

Employee termination made easy

2007-06-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

So I keep getting these emails from Kevin Muir trying to sell me his $247.00+shipping "Employee Termination Guidebook". I thought I'd look him up on linkedin.com, but there were multiple matches--the Kevin Muir who initially looked most promising was:

Kevin Muir
Employment Coordinator

However, reading further, I see this listed under his past positions:

Regional Director - New York and New Jersey Chapter at American Foundation For Suicide Prevention

I discern I've likely got the wrong guy. Here is the text of a recent email:

Hi John,

You requested my Termination Triggers report about a month
ago. You were likely having trouble with one of your
subordinates and coworkers.

Since some time has gone by and I have not heard from you, I
just want you to know I'm still here to assist you.

Do you continue to deal with a problem employee? How much
damage in morale, results and frustration does the employee
continue to cause?

If you remain frustrated, you should read my Employee
Termination Guidebook. The techniques and methods in the
Guidebook have worked for so many others -- They will work
for you, too.

You shouldn't have to go to work every day and deal with a
non-performing and badly behaving employee. You can start
the termination process today. Read more about all this at

http://www.EmployeeTerminationGuideBook.com

All the best,

Kevin Muir, Turnaround Central
Author of the 'Employee Termination Guidebook'

Going to the website, one learns that whether you want to fire someone for legal or not legal reasons, no problem, there are techniques you can utilize, including "ingenious tricks to get the employee to fire himself." You will learn to "only document when you are terminating (and disciplining) for a legitimate and legal reason. And don’t document when you are firing for an illegal reason." You will further learn to not waste your time on efforts to rehabilitate, because if "you decide to rehabilitate the problem employee, he’ll drain all the energy from you". Remember, "a bad apple remains a bad apple".

Termination Principles

The cost of excess

2006-08-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Long working hours linked to high blood pressure

Just a simple misunderstanding

2006-08-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

This is indeed hilarious, in an all-too-painfully-close-to-the-truth kinda way:

http://www.workingamerica.org/badboss/franken.cfm

Reader feedback

2006-08-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

I received a personal response to an earlier post to the DEN list. I have removed identifying information to protect the privacy of the sender. My reply is after:

----- Original Message -----
From: <anonymous>
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Subject: Thank You
John:
Thank you for posting your comments on Taylor and Deming of Wed, 2 Aug 06. It is most appropriate and directly on the money. I couldn't agree with you more. Your views and the article on "Social Elimination" are bang on for me at this time. As I face all of this and more because I've grown faster than the organization on Dr Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. I have even used this line on numerous occasion to date, "forgive them because they don't know what they are doing". At least someone understands.
Thanks again,
Anon
----------------------------------------
Anon,
I appreciated receiving your email very much. It's nice to know that mine is not a lone voice in the wilderness.

I too have felt such social eliminative forces. [self-censored content]. I think I need to tread very carefully, however. I'm trying to speak in general terms and refer to unidentified others (spanning multiple employers) who I think were unfairly treated, without publicly suggesting details about [self-censored content]. Unfortunately, that's hard to do, and speaking out about workplace mobbing at all I think entails some amount of career risk. It's easy to become labeled a "difficult" or "angry" employee:

http://www.mosaicsystem.com/matw.htm

Just as some of Deming's views may come up against persuasive detractors (Hoopes was one I identified), so I think will some of Westhues' views. Gavin De Becker is one such candidate. His book, "The Gift of Fear", is a powerful one, as it uses genuine tragedies as examples. But his chapter, titled "Occupational Hazards", on dealing with so-called "problem employees" I find very problematic in itself. When juxtaposed with Westhues' book, "Eliminating Professors", the contrast is disturbing. De Becker's advice is to eliminate a problem employee sooner rather than later, almost at the first signs that he makes others uncomfortable, the reasoning being that this could be a prelude to violence. No mention is made of workplace situations such as unfair treatment or accusations, which could justifiably make someone angry, at least temporarily.

My current plan is, when I get time to pursue it, is to contrast further the perspectives of Westhues' and De Becker or at least the conclusions reached for courses of action re: the workplace. It is interesting to note that of DeBecker's clients, university administrations are among the biggest, the ones most requesting his company's services, while Westhues' five [most recent] books are primarily about workplace mobbing in university settings.

One thing that DeBecker advocates is the use of some deception when terminating an employee. I think that this may contrast sharply with the writings of Sissela Bok, who wrote "the trilogy": "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life", "Secrets", and "Mayhem" (about violence). Bok, like De Becker, is very interested in causes of violence in society. I think that between the two of them, some particular suggestions for action are likely to be widely divergent, however. I have more reading to do to elucidate this, and that's another key area of research interest for me.

John

Images of Taylor

2006-08-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

In previous posts on Taylor, I believe I presented my opinion without proper qualification. While I would oppose "Neo-Taylorism" as it might be imposed upon creative endeavors, especially my own (e.g. software development), Taylor's scientific management is still highly applicable and desirable in some circumstances (e.g. managing the software code itself). Gareth Morgan, in his excellent book Images of Organization, makes that point well and helps point out some other circumstances:

"Surgical wards, aircraft maintenance departments, finance offices, courier firms, and other organizations where precision, safety, and clear accountability are at a premium are also able to implement mechanistic approaches successfully, at least in certain aspects of their operations." (p. 35)

"But in others it can have many unfortunate consequences. It is thus important to understand how and when we are engaging in mechanistic thinking, and how so many popular theories and taken-for-granted ideas about organization support this thinking." (p. 22)

Sometimes we purposefully engage in mechanistic thinking with regard to ourselves:

"Taylorism was typically imposed on the work-force. But many of us impose forms of Taylorism on ourselves as we train and develop specialized capacities for thought and action and shape our bodies to conform with preconceived ideals." (p. 32)

Taylor, of course, figures prominently into Morgan's chapter on the metaphor of "organizations as machines." With regard to Taylor's contribution, Morgan writes:

"History may well judge that Taylor came before his time. His principles of scientific management make superb sense for organizing production when robots rather than human beings are the main productive force, when organizations can truly become machines." (p. 33)

Taylor shows up again in Morgan's chapter on the metaphor of "organizations as psychic prisons":

"Taylor's life provides a splendid illustration of how unconscious concerns and preoccupations can have an effect on an organization. For it is clear that his whole theory of scientific management was the product of the inner struggles of a disturbed and neurotic personality. His attempt to organize and control the world, whether in childhood games or in systems of scientific management, was really an attempt to organize and control himself." (p. 205)

According to Morgan, Taylor's "aggressive authoritarian relationship with the worker was accompanied in his own mind by the idea that he was a friend."

A suicide note?

2006-08-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

I just came across a blog author's farewell blog entry that I found to be very disturbing. I can find no other reference to it on the internet so am left wondering what happened to him. Before the alarming final entry the author chronicles losing his job and looking for work in IT:

http://computerdiaries.blogspot.com/

Censorship and censure

2006-08-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."
--Noam Chomsky

I came across that quote recently and was struck by it. When it's not your ideas that are discredited, but when you yourself are discredited for expressing them, I believe a similar dynamic may take effect.

"A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace..."

2006-08-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, Cao Maobing attempted to organize his fellow workers at a state-owned silk factory into a trade union. He was sent to the No. 4 psychiatric hospital in Yancheng [China] the day after he spoke to Western reporters. His fellow workers, according to an American who knows Cao, described him warmly: “Mr. Cao is an upright, kind, and law-abiding citizen. He is a brave and intelligent worker. He made a lot of personal sacrifice to help other workers to uphold their right to basic living.” Cao’s wife said he was being forcibly medicated. “He’s absolutely not insane and refuses to take the medicine. But eventually they force him to take it.” She said she was told to leave the hospital after her husband was medicated. According to other reports, he was also given electroshock treatment on several occasions. Cao was released after six months and has never returned to trade union activity.
JONATHAN MIRSKY
(U.S. journalist), “China’s Psychiatric Terror,”
New York Review of Books,
27 February 2003.

The title quote to this blog entry is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

More Taylor and Deming

2006-08-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

The following was a recent post I made to the DEN discussion list:

I fear I am like a small annoying creature scurrying at the feet of giants. I gather you are mostly all long-term practitioners with impressive pedigrees, whereas I am just an interested lay person with perhaps an unusual perspective--sounded kinder than 'lunatic' :-) Thanks for your continued indulgence.

Perhaps I was not being fair regarding Taylor. I did not mean to malign him as a person, but rather to join in the chorus against "Neo-Taylorism" as it has been defined in the reference that the moderator of this list has included as a bracketed note in response to more than one post about Taylor. That reference I'll include again here for convenience: Deming's Profound Changes - When will the Sleeping Giant Awaken? by Delavigne & Robertson, ISBN 0-13-292690-3

My further reading reveals Taylor himself was concerned about the mis-application of his scientific management, and warned that it "it is impossible to hurry it beyond a certain speed". He argued against those who would use time studies "more or less as a club to drive the workmen into doing a larger day's work for approximately the same pay that they received in the past." He emphasized friendly cooperation between management and worker, which is, if not quite to the level of "reciprocity" advocated by Martin Buber, seems to be a good step in the right direction.

To sum up, in the words of Taylor himself: "Scientific management, in it's essence, consists of a certain philosophy, which results, as before stated, in a combination of the four great underlying principles of management." He includes those principles in a footnote: "First. The development of a true science. Second. The scientific selection of the workman. Third. His scientific education and development. Fourth. Intimate friendly cooperation between management and the men." (p. 130)

He goes on to write that "When, however, the elements of this mechanism, such as time study, functional foremanship, etc., are used without being accompanied by the true philosophy of management, the results are in many cases disastrous." I think we can assume that Taylor was well-intentioned, and hated to see the hurried and careless misapplication of his mechanisms that resulted in "strikes, followed by the downfall of the men who attempted to make the change, and by a return to conditions throughout the establishment far worse than those that had existed before the effort was made." (p. 134)

But in reading some of Taylor's writings, I am given pause. The second element of "the four elements which constitute the essence of scientific management" posits "the elmination of all men who refuse to or are unable to adopt the best methods." (p. 85) Regardless of Taylor's intention in using the word "elimination", this term is personally disturbing to me, particularly as I have seen over the course of my long career situations where people were "set up" for failure, where certain key information or assistance was seemingly selectively withheld in order to effect such elimination. In struggling to make sense of what seemed to me as such perplexing cruelty, I came across Westhues' writings:

"In lectures on social elimination, I have sometimes said that in every human being are three appetites: for food, for sex, and for humiliating somebody else. The third craving is not ordinarily grouped with the first two. All agree that hunger and sexual desire have a physiological basis, that they drive human behavior in overt and hidden ways, and that they are at times so strong as to preoccupy a person ompletely, turning him or her into a raging beast, a creature we scarcely recognize as human.

"Notwithstanding its less evident basis in biology, the eliminative impulse, the lust to wipe another person out, is categorically similar. It can consume a person to the point of obsession, spread like a virus through a group, and become the driving force behind collective energy. Yet unlike the appetites for food and sex, this one has come to be proscribed in the process of civilization. It is supposed to be held in check by a universal compassion, common allegiance to the 'brotherhood of man.' The eliminative impulse, when it does seize control of human behavior, is therefore almost always denied, obscured by the pretense of serving some lofty goal. Girard posits a 'persecutory unconscious' in those caught up in the snowballing process (2001, p. 126). It is, he says, what Jesus referred to in his prayer on the cross, 'Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing' (Luke 23: 34)."
--http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/socialelim.htm

I do beg your indulgence, as I come to the Deming list after my reading and understanding of Deming--though completely and apologetically inadequate--causes me to have the inkling that Deming was concerned with human beings and their treatment as much as the statistical underpinnings of his principles. With regard to ratings, he quotes the effect: "it leaves people bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed..." (Out of the Crisis, p. 102). Certainly this is the opposite of joy in one's work, something which Deming strongly advocated enabling, and of which I can think of no better ongoing reward for a lifetime of devotion to one's craft and career.

Deming's work expresses his caring insights into human behavior and fulfillment in the workplace, and I think some of these insights may even help in identifying possible examples of what Westhues calls the eliminative impulse. Deming wrote "Failure to make a good grade in the annual rating leads a man to look around for better opportunities elsewhere. It is not unusual for the strongest competitor to be someone that split off on failure to receive a promotion." ( p. 121) Another outcome might be that the employee does not immediately quit, but after a time is fired, resulting in--what does not kill us only makes us stronger and in some instances pissed off to boot--high motivation to become an even stronger competitor. Harvey Mackay may have done well to read the above quote from Deming. In the brief excerpts from his book below, Mackay seems to contradict himself in that the advice he gives (lesson 49) conflicts with his own experience (lesson 67)--how could a consuming bitterness that lasted for nearly five years be anything but miserable??

Lesson 49
*****
"IT ISN'T THE PEOPLE YOU FIRE WHO MAKE
YOUR LIFE MISERABLE, IT'S THE PEOPLE YOU DON'T
"When I use this line in speeches, I get more 'amens' than a Billy Graham sermon. You can't put a little plaque with those words on your desk, but if you are a manager, you would be well advised to engrave them on your psyche."
Lesson 67
*****
"....I once fired an employee who then went into competition with me and began using what I thought were unfair business tactics. The psychic energy and accumulated bitterness that went into my thoughts of revenge consumed me for the better part of five years."
--Harvey Mackay, Swim with the Sharks

I think my question may be answered by the title of Chris Hedges great book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (shorter lecture here: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1123). Whether real battles or figurative ones, we derive meaning from the struggle. People who are shot at and people who are "eliminated" from their workplace environment I'd guess have similar psychic responses, fear being the most obvious. Deming, in his concern about the negative effects of fear in the workplace, I think was on to an important principle. James Hoopes flippantly dismisses Deming's exhortation to "drive fear out of the workplace" by sarcastically remarking: "Yeah, scare the hell out of it!"

Hoopes might do well to pick up a copy of "Oxymoronica, paradoxical wit and wisdom from history's greatest wordsmiths" by Dr. Mardy Grothe. Though Deming was not quoted in Grothe's book, I think Deming's "drive fear out of the workplace" quotation has that quality Grothe describes: "Many examples of oxymoronica appear illogical or self-contradictory on the surface. But at a deeper level, they usually make a great deal of sense and are often profoundly true."