Fifty Years of Filling a VOID
Ever hear the expression “to draw a blank”? It’s a textbox without text or a frame without a picture. In organizations, it’s the Midlevel without a group to staff it—a VOID—and not good!
When not filled by a group for the common good, the desire for individual power & prestige in this VOID corrupts. It’s immortalized in myth. Theseus (Greek for institution and the mythic founder of Athenian democracy) enters a labyrinth with a group and slays the Minotaur asleep at the center. Going back fifty years to 1976 and how I structured my accounting practice as a CPA, up to 1986 when I earned a PhD in organizational behavior, to how student groups filled this VOID by teaching college classes at A levels, to work as controller in Native American and other disadvantaged organizations, to interventions in companies today—Blue Organizational Solutions staffs this missing Midlevel (this VOID) with a group, so vital to near-term stability and long-term success. Dr. Tom Blue
That VOID is a gold mine!
Our intervention more than pays for itself.
Our intervention passes the torch across generations.
Our intervention saves us all from ourselves.
Our intervention more than pays for itself.
In Blue Organizational Solutions’ workman-like, blue-collar fashion; we staff a missing Midlevel in organizations with a group. As part of that staffing process, we take the lead with the group on high-value projects. Given my PhD in organizational behavior, specialized training in group development, and feel for figures as a CPA, these projects vary widely. Employees that try this typically lose their jobs!
Companies pay for our staffing work and get the project work at no additional cost. Even though these projects have high returns, busy companies can’t seem to find the time. The group at the Midlevel makes the time. You might already have some projects in mind. One example is Succession Planning with other projects spinning off. If you click on “About Us” on the Menu bar you’ll find Succession Planning along with other popular projects.
Our intervention passes the torch across generations.
“Are you Otto Pracejus’ grandson?” he asked. “Yes I am”, I replied. “I have just one thing to tell you”, he said. “When we had a problem, your grandfather took us to coffee.” In the 1920s and 30s he had worked in my grandfather’s general contracting business in Solon, located in the Connecticut Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio. In neighboring Twinsburg Jack Harley, PE founded Harley Pump in 1979. He had worked for Ingersoll Rand as a district sales manager for 18 years. When he had proposed rebuilding oil pumps, and not just manufacturing new ones, Ingersoll turned him down. So, he started Harley Pump.
In the mid-1980s, when Harley Pump relocated to its present location, I intervened there. I met with its 15 employees for little over an hour once a week over three months. After the meeting, we all went to lunch at a local restaurant in Twinsburg, where we sat around a long table. Before, during and after that intervention, Jack attended the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. During the intervention, Harley Pump successfully added rebuilt air-blast compressors to its product line of rebuilt oil pumps to cool contact points in substation transformers. The secret to profitably rebuilding the compressors to the high quality standards turned out to be having a team crosscheck each member’s work. Also during the intervention, Jack Harley initiated a joint venture with Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. (now part of FirstEnergy Corp.) for the sonic monitoring of the bearing wear on Harley’s rebuilt oil pumps. The monitoring proves critical since, should metal flakes from worn bearings fall into the oil, they short out contact points in substation transformers and million dollar transformers explode. Plastic bearings avoid the problem, but don’t last nearly as long as metal bearings.
Some years later, Jack put it this way, “90% is putting one foot in front of the other.” He said this not long before he formed FirstPower Group LLC in 2007 with Frank Ricard, the former Manager of Engineering and Quality at GE Harley—GE having acquired Harley Pump for an undisclosed amount in 1999—in the closing years of Jack Welch’s reign as CEO at GE. As stated on FirstPower’s website, FPG “regained the High Voltage Circuit Breaker and Compressor segments of the business.”
Prior to the move, Jack Harley earned his EMBA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It was at Case where I statistically controlled for the quantum condition across organizations and received a PhD in organizational behavior in 1986. As I have found, that condition lies behind just about every activity and function in organizations. Harley Pump employees participated in the research. They also participated in my mid-1980s intervention there, as did employees at Sunbelt Plastics in West Monroe, Louisiana (then the largest blown-film plastics plant in the continental U.S.). Saul Mintz and David Cattar co-founded Sunbelt in 1979, the same year that Jack Harley founded Harley Pump. The GM headlight plant in West Monroe and its taillight plant in Anderson, Indiana opted out in the control group.
As you might expect, without the intervention both GM plants closed—suddenly and simultaneously—20 years later in a backhanded celebration of their Centennial Year. In contrast with the intervention, Harley Pump thrived, as did Sunbelt Plastics until its sale for $85 million in cash to Tyco International in 1999 (in the same year that GE purchased Harley Pump). Not long after, an internal fraud ravaged Tyco.
In an email a few years ago, Jack acknowledged the staying power of the intervention:
We still do not control breaks, we do allow meetings as people think necessary, and people decide on at least some of their own training. An example of the latter is that we have a field job scheduled for September that requires man-lift certification. The two people that will be using the man-lift on the job Googled for man-lift training, signed up and took it last week.
As he recently wrote, “I still have my business, now FirstPower Group LLC. And working with some of the same people, which is very nice.”
Our intervention saves us all from ourselves.
On the savannas of Africa, our hominid line began as a meager prey species, a snack for hungry predators on the prowl. So how did we survive and rise in hunting bands to become a dominate predator? We banded together in groups and evolved an instinctive talent for taking advantage of the quantum condition that underlies organizations. Modern-day examples of the potential come from what Richard Feynman showed in his dissertation that photons of light follow every conceivable path, including going back in time and across the universe. Expanding on this, Google’s quantum computer facility found the computer’s solutions follow multiple paths, including the insertion of missing variables and rewritten data sets to fit solutions, the combination of the multiple solutions being the most effective.¹ Such solutions fit the quantum insight of Feynman’s dissertation advisor, John Wheeler, of delayed choice (future actions determining past events). When Wheeler proposed delayed choice in a 1979 lecture at the University of Maryland, he gave an example of light from a distant start curving around a galaxy on its way to Earth. If the light is observed by a single telescope on the Earth light years later, it would have gone around one side of the galaxy as particles. But if observed simultaneously by multiple telescopes, simulating a huge screen, the light would have gone around both sides of the galaxy in waves. Just imagine the power that determining and rewriting past events holds, when accessed instinctively and collectively by groups at the Midlevel!
Trouble is, having eliminated other hominids of lesser organizational means, organizations find little use for this quantum ability in groups, resident at the Midlevel—written records having long ago displaced myth, storytelling, poetry and song as repositories of knowledge. Notice too that the knowledge base went from being oral and subconscious to literate and conscious. The Midlevel when shutdown negatively activates archetypes in the subconscious, a collective state of mind universally shared throughout our species, and found in myth with Medusa (the mother) menacing,² Icarus (the son) incendiary,³ and Daedalus (the father) detrimental (as Ingersoll Rand was in rejecting Jack Harley’s proposal to rebuild oil pumps).⁴ Activated and negative, these archetypes have us all unwittingly disassembling organizations, unwilling to nurture the Midlevel. This disposition to disassemble took form in the scandalous fraud at Tyco and culminated in the simultaneous shutdown of GM’s two former lamp plants—GM’s century-old beacons of light.
Without intervention across industries, as occurred with the sudden shutdown of GM’s two lamp plants, U.S. manufacturing dropped by over 43% in 20 years—from 23% of Gross Domestic Product in the mid-1980s during the Harley and Sunbelt interventions down to 10% by 2023. Attributing the loss of market to lower wages in foreign lands is a lame excuse. As Edwards Deming—father of quality management—said, mocking American management, “‘Lost the market, can’t hold it.’ It’s so ridiculous to me!”⁵
Bucking the trend with the intervention, Harley Pump and Sunbelt until its sale to Tyco thrived amid this 43% decline—Harley Pump reinventing itself as FPG in 2007, in the same year that the two GM lamp plants shut down . To think that our economy and democracy can thrive, while organizations neglect the Midlevel—the very level that enables our species to thrive—is sheer folly. With the Midlevel shut down at every turn, as the therapist Isabel Menzies Lyth found with problem solvers shunned,⁶ we continue to do what we were born to do—to instinctively disassemble organizations that ignore the Midlevel. Blue Organizational Solutions reactivates this level so once again organizations can thrive and routinely reinvent themselves—Medusa motivating not menacing, Icarus inventive not incendiary, and Daedalus disruptive not detrimental ², ³, ⁴ (as in the disruptive technology that Jack Harley employed with sonic monitoring to detect bearing wear and make Harley’s rebuilt pumps superior to Ingersoll’s new pumps).
References:
¹ Kaku, M. (2025), (April 12), “What we Found in Google’s Quantum Facility Left Me Speechless!”, viewed 4 May 2025, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In5UfhJrS1Y&t=7s>.
² Hillman, J. (1985), ANIMA: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, Spring Publications, Woodstock, CN, page 39; Hillman, J. (2005), Senex & Puer, Slater, G. (Ed.), Spring Publications, Putnam, CN, page 53.
³ Hillman, J. (2005), Senex & Puer, Slater, G. (Ed.), Spring Publications, Putnam, CN, pages 56-57.
⁴ Hillman, J. (2005), Senex & Puer, Slater, G. (Ed.), Spring Publications, Putnam, CN, pages 43-46.
⁵ Deming, W.E. (1984), “Interview with Bill Scherkenbach”, viewed 28 April 2025, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yGhR1ybmN8&t=8s>.
⁶ Menzies Lyth, I. (1960), “A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital”, Human Relations, Vol. 13, pages 95-121.