WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990): This was a shocking look at American business and why eighty percent of the productive work was being accomplished by less than twenty percent of the workers. It concluded that the organization in most cases still operated in 1945 nostalgia, which was management’s greatest hour as it had a decisive role in the winning of World War Two. But over the last six decades, since that war over, there has been a shift in work from being mainly manual to mainly mental, from dependence on management to call the shots to knowledge workers at the level of consequences making the decisions. Too often, however, position power has remained stubbornly at the controls, reluctant to face the new reality. The book systematically looks at the consequences of this anachronistic behavior, including an examination of all the failed cosmetic attempts to improve the situation without changing anything. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of the year, while the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four major works of the year. It was reviewed extensively including on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

READERS’ COMMENTS

Dr. Thomas L. Brown, editor, Industry Week: “Work Without Managers is one of the Top 10 Business books of 1991. “Fisher opens by declaring that any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation, and he has yet hit his stride.”

James R. Wright, columnist, Dallas Morning News: “I find Work Without Managers the most insightful and perceptive examination of the American workplace today.”

Alex Krunic, editor, Business Perspective, Innsbruck, Austria: “Dr. Fisher argues the key to the future is the empowerment of professional workers. The suggestions made here are bound to spark controversy on all levels of organization and therefore should be on the reading list of any interested in understanding the present day American dilemma.”

Business Book Review Journal: “It is our opinion that Fisher has more than accomplished his goal to stimulate discussion and debate, and that Work Without Managers promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental changing in the American workplace.”

National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”: Ten years ago, many were calling for a direction in business that called for less management, less managers. In the early 80s, USC professor Warren Bennis said that American businesses were “over-managed and under-led.” And, sure enough, many businesses chopped layer upon layer of managers from the ranks. Now Tom Brown has found a book that argues that, fear not, Work Without Managers can be far from chaos: it might even be better. Work Without Managers is the angriest book I have read about business and management since Dick Cornuelle’s early 80’s book, De-Managing America.

Angry? Let me just read you the first 50 words: “The era of the free lunch has ended. This century, which began with such paternal control and obedience for America, has run amuck. Now, nothing and no one is in control. Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”

Jim Fisher, an ex-blue collar laborer, chemist, scientist, and industrial psychologist, no doubt means every mean word. This is not casual corporate bashing; Work Without Managers is premeditated capital punishment of standard managerial systems that Fisher thinks have outlived their prime, and may not have been useful even then.

You’ll find the book and its author a compelling challenge. This is a roller coaster in print. At its peak, like when he talks about the “Six Silent Organizational Killers,” you’ll find points where you’ll exclaim, “why hasn’t someone said this before?” For example, Fisher argues that people don’t show hustle, don’t do things that need to be done, and have reasons for feeling this way. On the other hand, when he talks about the MBA as “merely a vocational degree,” and lists 16 classics in literature that MBAs probably never studied, but should, some readers will recoil and demand the head of “this scoundrel author.”

Work Without Managers is one of those almost self-published books, which evoke pictures of its author furiously banging away on the keyboard at 3 a.m., hand grasping for more coffee. It is a wide-ranging indictment of the way tradition has taught us to define “management” and has taught us to allow ourselves to “be managed.”

But Fisher’s argument, off-beat as it will seem to most readers, has this to commend it: no one is print today is on “the other soapbox” arguing for keeping things as they are.

Jim Fisher’s style in this book may be a controlled rant, but he seems to be ranting in the right direction.