CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000): Corporate Sin deals with the mortal sin of anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership. Leaders don’t lead. Followers don’t follow. Because they don’t know how in the present work climate. Consequently, it is a standoff with precious time, money, energy, and resources wasted at the expense of productive work. Leaderless leadership seems to be limited by a penchant for critical thinking, which is the prison of what is already known. Followers are frustrated with leadership at a time when leadership is required of them. Given this situation, leadership resorts to emergency measures or panic tactics, and calls them “strategies.” Meanwhile, followers act as if the corporation owes them a living, behaving as if spoiled brats, waiting to be rescued. It is a case of the leadership unable to relinquish the role of surrogate parent to workers as dependent children. Fifty years of this counterdependency is a luxury no organization can any longer afford. Rather then deal with deal with this inclination, leadership instead resorts to precipitous corrections – downsizing, redundancy exercises, mergers, and the like. Dr. Fisher tabs this “schizophrenic management,” as he sees the leadership having lost its moral compass, and therefore its way. Fisher claims this can be traced to its nostalgia for “1945 management,” where workers behaved as obedient children, and no one challenged authority. Not anymore. The book outlines this problem, and offers a blueprint for rectifying the situation. Corporate Sin is admittedly iconoclastic, but at the same time, ameliorative in its assessment and correction. Professionals and senior managers will find it an invaluable resource to getting off the time and on the same page.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Charles D. Hayes, author of Beyond the American Dream: No one is spared in this forthright analysis, neither the self-righteous leaders nor the self-indulgent followers.
It is like a “left cross” to the Psyche. Franz Kafka said that if the book you are reading doesn’t affect you with force as a blow to the side of the head, then reading might be a waste of your time. In that light, reading Corporate Sin, by James R. Fisher, Jr., is an experience similar to receiving steady left jabs, frequent left hooks, and an occasional overhand right that you don’t always see coming and that continues to send shock waves long after it connects. Corporate Sin is a kind of book that will get you out of the middle of the road, and into your own lane. It is a rare find in the management genre, as few in the field write with such passion and honesty. Not many people have the guts to tell the truth as they see it, which is why we’re so startled when someone articulates it. If you are going to read only one book on management this year, make it Corporate Sin.