Wyatt Ehrenfels is pleased to announce the endorsement of management consulting maven, R. Mallory Starr. A certified management consultant (CMC), Starr runs a mentoring program for the Institute of Management Consultants (IMCUSA) of which he is a member, putting chapter members seeking CMC status or professional development in relationships with seasoned professionals.

Starr specializes in corporate development with an emphasis on management auditing, management and leadership development, planning and marketing research and development, critical incident debriefing, and change management. Starr served as a consultant and Board Member of several nonprofit organizations on board and fund development projects. Starr is past President of the Senior Professional Foundation, Inc. - an affiliate of George Mason University's consulting arm, The Professional Group, Inc. He was a Director of Prodesse Associates, LLC Business and Engineering Consultants, and served 15 years as an internal consultant and psychologist for a large health maintenance organization (Group Health Association) in Washington, DC. Early in his career he worked on market research projects at J. Walter Thompson and in Personal Trust Administration at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. His undergraduate education was at Boston University and graduate level education at Springfield College, Pennsylvania State, and Pacific Western Universities.

According to Wyatt Ehrenfels, Starr fits the profile of seasoned veterans who support his effort to improve Psychology. "I had the pleasure of meeting Mallory Starr personally at his office in the Watergate Building, and I am impressed with his keen insights into the nuances of organizational culture. Referring to me as a classic 'cut dog,' he discussed what he thought were similarities between my diagnosis of modern Psychology and guru Tom Peters's assessment of corporate America. Starr introduced me to a number of colleagues and potential employment contacts in the management consulting industry, and it was during the course of these fruitful discussions that I learned just how similar my analysis of Psychology is to the audits of NASA's organizational culture ('Roach Motel') in the wake of the most recent shuttle tragedy. These management analysts are in the business of diagnosing obstacles to innovation, flexibility, product value, and efficiency, as when asked to apply what they've learned to academic communities, they are prepared to declare, and with a keen wit I might add, some of the same short falls they find in government agencies and dysfunctional businesses."

Starr cited his "broad experience background" and "interdisciplinary education" as advantages in his maturation as a management consultant. Mallory Starr, in his own words: "I have worked for a variety of organizations -- my post college experience began with a management training program at a large international bank as well as part time project work in marketing research for a large advertising agency -- both organizations in New York City. After that experience, I returned to academia to continue graduate school education, achieving a masters degree in psychological services and later a doctorate degree in the area of human resources development. My education has been in the areas of psychology, sociology, and business. After leaving the university setting my career has progressed from human developmental research and psychological services in mental health centers and private practice to, as of the last 20 years, management consulting as a partner in two firms and Board memberships and officer positions in non-profit and business organizations. My work has evolved into specialty areas -- management auditing, marketing research and development, manager development and consultation, critical incident work and coaching programs.

"As a result of my experience, I have developed and implemented methodologies that have contributed to significant success for a variety of companies, family businesses, and non-profit organizations. In my work as a consultant, a first step is a review of presenting problems with focus on confirming and surfacing problems, failures, successes, strengths, and weakness areas. There is focus on objectives, goals, plans, targets, steps to achieving objectives and goals. Part of my work involves interviews targeted to asset identification and development, insight development, and enhancement of strengths and capabilities. I have developed some consulting programs -- titles are How to Manage Your Boss: Upward Management; and Reactions to Implementation of New Systems and Technology: People Problems - Organizational Problems."

Starr collaborated with Integrated Marketing Corporation president Brian Keedwell on a review of a world wide marketing information and communication system (A Marketing Information and Communication System: Results and Consequences, European Society of Marketing and Research (ESOMAR), Berlin, Germany, 1983), citing AI applications for use in "marketing intelligence and sales functions by sales people, marketing and sales teams and at executive levels for tactical, short range and long range planning for Pharmacia -- a large diagnostic and reagent drug company in Uppsala, Sweden. Major features of MICS were computer applications to the marketing and sales arenas as well as a team based management system accompany implementation of MICS. Mechanically, sales persons were trained to assume dual roles as market researchers doing buying cycle studies of hospitals, laboratories and profiling physician prescribing practices, and sales professionals doing competitive intelligence and sales work. Data resulting from marketing research and sales interactions were sent by telecom, satellite, and on data cards for input to IBM 36s. The result was output of profiles of sales interactions, buying cycles, major purchase decision parameters, and local, national, and international area profiles. These results were used for feedback in the form of seminars, and consultation as needed, to executives, managers, sales professionals."

Starr's consulting report addressed the application of corporate developmental theory to a U.S. information sciences corporation (Phases of Organizational Development: Implications for Future Planning, Society of Professional Management Consultants, Englewood, New Jersey, 1987). "The model for the article was based on that authored by Larry E. Greiner which was first published in Harvard Business Review. The publication I authored reviewed phases of corporate development in U.S. and European companies, presented a case study of a U.S. company going through some of the phases rapidly, and focused on why developmental phases are important to understand in terms of management style, leadership development and crisis, and future planning."

Starr also published an interview in which he reviewed his work as a Critical Incident Debriefing (CID) consultant working with police-related traumatic incidences as part of stress management, incident audits, and witness cultivation and preparation programs (Dealing with stress: a practical guide for police officers, The Journal of Fraternal Order of Police, Spring-Summer, 1994).

In 2000, Starr designed an introductory psychology text for use by Japanese students preparing for undergraduate and graduate study at U.S. universities. (Introduction to Psychology, Yoko Sakae, 2000, printed in Japan). "The format of the book is one page English and the next page Japanese for a total of 250 pages providing an overview of several areas of psychological theory, research, and practice." The book was a collaborative effort among Starr, Sakae Institute (Japan), and Washington-based translation and interpretation team Transemantics, Inc.

Ehrenfels Explores Starr's Insights

R. Mallory Starr compared the conceptual architecture of my message for Psychology with that of business guru/innovator Tom Peters and found a common denominator that gave me a fresh perspective on things. With the results of my survey tickling my fondness for Jungian ideas, I posted them to the alt.psychology.jung news group. Starr and I fell out of touch in the months after he referred me to Peters, owing primarily to preparations for the release of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. I was pleasantly surprised that he would pick up the phone after the hiatus to inquire into my welfare and pay me high compliments for my post about Peters, on which he stumbled during an Internet search on Tom Peters.

Having been urged by what Starr deemed "remarkable similarities" to read Peters, I took the time to download the second chapter to Peters's Re-Imagine, where Peters calls attention to a natural bifurcation between practices that yield corporate survival (i.e., companies that last) and practices that yield corporate success (paroxysmal value creation through innovation). Here were some of Peters's remarks, which seem to address an antimonian structure of sorts reminiscent of Jung.

• "Large companies are incapable of ongoing innovation, of ongoing flexibility. Increasingly, successful businesses will be ephemeral. They will be built to yield something of value, and once that value has been exhausted, they will vanish...The ultimate aim of a business organization, an artist, an athlete, or a stockbroker may be to explode in the dramatic frenzy of value creation during a short space of time, rather than to live forever...Everywhere you look the model of greatness comes down to this...Make a Big Impact...then a Quick Exit."
  

• "Companies built to last underperform their market."
  

• "Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies. They found that none of the long-term survivors managed to outperform the market. Worse, the longer companies had been in the database, the worse they did. Foster's conclusion: "It's just a fact. Survivors underperform." Big guys had an inevitable tendency to get sluggish, and if they didn't disappear, they performed in a way that could be described as 'pitiful.'"
  

• "Good management was the most powerful reason leading firms failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their position of leadership."
  

• "Good management was the most powerful reason leading firms failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these giant, bureacratic firms listened to their giant, bureacratic, largest customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they already had and therefore wanted more of, and because they carefully studied market trends, which always say "do more of what you're already doing with a micro-twist or two," and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, which are always the most conservative innovations, they lost their position of leadership."
  

• "Powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products, which may take the old technology to unheard of heights, but in most cases is a sign of impending death."
  

• "Describing an exception to the rule, "conglomerates fail," Peters cites GE. Yes, there was bureaucracy, but "lots of innovative people in the company were happily...and productively...beyond the reach of that bureaucracy. GE bosses may have genuflected to HQ as required...but only so that they could then go their...Own Merry Way. In the hinterland, the hallmark of operations was...disrespect. GE is a self-destructing company and always has been and cites strategy maven Gary Hamel's "20 Ways to Self-Destruct."
  

Many of the paradoxes (or what Jung called enantiodromiatic processes) addressed by Peters are applicable to that academic and professional institution known as Psychology. For some time now I have been writing about the ways the academic community of Psychology self-sabotages through its more bureaucratic mechanisms. My diagram is an admittedly rudimentary, schematic model of the field's "malignant" organizational structure and dynamics. I mention this because some of my readers have asked me to produce something simple and visual to supplement my account.

I think the above paragraphs from Tom Peters capture the reason why Psychology no longer produces "admirable psychologists" (if ever produced admirable psychologists if you consider the founding fathers of Psychology emerged from other fields. Psychology has been dying from the moment it was born). But my point is that the current state of affairs in Psychology (hence my banner headline: "Psychology in Organized Disarray") could be aptly described as "organization as a catalyst for entropy." There is an "entropy through organization" at work in contemporary Psychology, with certain practices and attitudes (e.g., decisions by committee) built to lay the foundation for a lasting paradigm that brings together an enormous community (and in the process wash out the individual differences in interests, skills, etcetera). Where paradigms in Psychology "shift," you're not seeing innovation at work, you're seeing collapse. And so we jump from one sinking ship to the next. This is why I have always called attention to what I call "essential science" as an minimal common and open framework within which individual researchers can operate according to their own wits to drive innovation in thinking and research. Our current system of reiforcement and selection punishes exploratory, fluid, flexible, and divergent projects and without these tools, we have nothing with which to truly investigate the heart of the human condition. My analysis seeks to reveal those stodgy norms and attitudes (often celebrated and enforced in the name of some tasteful things [science, standards, ethics, professionalism, public interest] but which work against real progress, undermine adaptability, and prevent Psychology from realizing its true self (i.e., individuating in its own right). Here I speak of active ingredients in the field's systematic unwinding or de-volution. Not all organization is natural and healthy. Some organizational tendencies are harbingers of (or last stands against) death. For an analogy, we need look no further than the Gompertzian growth in malignant tumors. When a tumor reaches a certain size, blood can longer reach the center. The center dies (necrosis), hollowing out, and the tumor begins to change shape as its outer, blood-rich banks continue to stretch outward. Well, the center of Psychology has been cut off from anything that would be effective enough to probe or penetrate it. Now Psychology has changed shape, and in the wake of these developments, statements like I am making now seem utterly absurd because the Psychology I am defending is long dead.