New Giants Rising

The greatest concern for all Americans today - leaders and followers alike – is how their prosperity seems to depend on a shrinking foundation of technology-only growth. And the onset of artificial intelligence only threatens to marginalize people even more with job loss and increasing isolation inside the few remaining jobs that it will leave behind.

This book helps us understand that business growth fueled by labor productivity does not rely on leadership as we’ve come to celebrate it, but on our ability to sustain loyalty and commitment to one another– a following if you will - inside and outside our workplaces. When we recognize and understand our historical Followership Cycles, we can begin to restore our workplaces to their lost role as a place to meet the demand of all Americans for a better future.

This illuminating book:

• Provides a new, sustainable growth model based in the socioeconomic realities of modern America and the world it wants to lead – a new Followership System.
• Tells the story of how one profession, on the brink of disappearing into irrelevance, will lead the new Decision Economy into the 21^st century.
• Demonstrates the development of the "leaderless" specialists who will manage evidence together to pursue a Reason-to-Grow.
• Stresses the importance of charging all C-Suite executives with leading a continuous process of discovering, articulating and then defending those stakeholder agreements to share purpose.
• Reveals, not the technology infrastructure, but the social architecture that organizations will use to build new social capital – the Followership that will propel our New Giants to future greatness.

New Giants Rising takes us on a journey of the Followership Cycles of our recent past. And, more importantly, it puts forth a plan of action - voiced very simply by Henry Ford during the last cycle over a century ago when he faced the same moment then as we do now: "Coming Together is the Start. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success."

Paul Fisher’s career in business had its organic beginnings in his lead-guitar-playing, singing, and fry-cooking days in that hotbed of a cultural maelstrom that was Western Wisconsin in the 1970s. He eventually graduated with a degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire in 1984 and, inexplicably to some, found employment as a CPA, eventually migrating to the Twin Cities in 1989.

Paul spent the next twenty-two years in public accounting practice there. Along the way, he was bought and sold, merged, and generally reorganized so many times that he considered having barcode installed on his forehead to facilitate the continuous vertical integration exercises. In order to bring stability to his professional life, he organized the Metro Firm Leadership Group, a best-practices consortium made up of Twin Cities Metro Area CPA firms currently representing over 1,000 employees.

In 2011, Paul left his practice in order to write his first book and form New Giants Consulting, an organization dedicated to building the value-creation capabilities of our New Giants.