THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995): This book claims workers have no choice but to go it alone for nothing changes until they do something. Expecting the company to carry them is over; expecting the economy to go smoothly into the future is a thing of the past; and expecting others to have answers for them that fit their needs no longer has any relevance or currency. The game of charades continues, however, where managers still exercise the power they don’t have and workers continue to refuse to assume the power that they do have by rights of their skills and knowledge. Corpocracy remains bent on cosmetic change, which changes nothing and costs those in power less. Workers absorb the costs for this delay. Not until the Worker, Alone realizes it is up to him or her to put the house in order will change occur. Ventilation won’t accomplish it; nor will finger pointing. The worker must get off the dime and grow up and take charge of work, which is another way of taking charge of life. The call is to workers everywhere. They invested heavily in their education only to find disappointing returns on their investment. Angry and confused, they suffer like fatalists through downsizing, redundancy exercises, reengineering, restructuring, conglomerate takeovers, relocation of jobs abroad, and wonder only when the other shoe will fall. Never have workers been more distrustful of the system, failing in this distrust to recognize they are the system. They are the power. They are the company. Nothing happens until they do something. This is crunch time and this little book puts workers on notice that if they don’t manage their lives and careers then nobody will.

Charles D. Hayes, author and philosopher, whose book The Rapture of Maturity: The Worker, Alone is indeed a book alone, in a category by itself. “In it, Fisher calls for an awakening of America’s workforce as fundamentally profound as Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay was to the nineteenth century.”

Jim Komar, The Information Management Professionals: “I came across this book in a peculiar way. A friend gave me a copy written by her dad. I was not looking for another book on the state of business. So many of these have taken what is and tried to make it a bit more palatable for those who seem to blindly comply with what their management currently dictates. Few do what Dr. Fisher suggests, go against the grain. What is the purpose of going against the grain? Perhaps Dr. Fisher captures the essence of the ideas with this: ‘Order is first established inside the individual, once person at a time, before any behavioral change is manifested outside in society-at-large. Change the man from a passive person to an active personality with a social conscience, involved in the management of society, and you change the world.’”