Your organization has a hole in it,
and we’re the ones to fill it.
What psychiatrist M. Scott Peck head of the My Lai massacre investigation called “The Hole in the Mind” in his book on organizational behavior titled A World Waiting to be Born .
That hole is a gold mine!
Our approach
more than pays for itself
Our approach
goes back generations
Our approach
saves us all from ourselves
Our approach 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 with specialized training in group development and my feel for figures as a CPA, these projects vary widely.
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 approach goes back 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. Jack had worked for Ingersoll Rand as a district sales manager for 18 years. When he proposed rebuilding oil pumps, rather than just manufacturing new ones, Ingersoll turned him down. So, he started his own company.
In the mid-1980s, when Harley Pump relocated to its present location, I intervened there. I met with about 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 and after that intervention, Jack attended the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. During my intervention, Harley Pump successfully added rebuilt air-blast compressors to its product line of rebuilt oil pumps for cooling substation transformers. 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 oil pumps. 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—two years before Jack Welch’s reign ended at GE’s CEO. As stated on FirstPower’s website, FPG “regained the High Voltage Circuit Breaker and Compressor segments of the business.”
Prior to making the move, Jack Harley got his EMBA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It was at Case where I discovered the quantum condition underlying organizations and received a PhD in organizational behavior. Harley Pump employees participated in that research. They also participated in the mid-1980s along with employees from Sunbelt Plastics in Monroe, Louisiana in the intervention. It was a controlled experiment with GM’s headlight plant in Monroe and its taillight plant in Anderson, Indiana having opted out of the intervention. As you might expect, 20 years later both lamp plants closed—suddenly and simultaneously—in a backhanded celebration at the start of their Centennial Year. On the other hand with the intervention, Harley Pump thrived, as did Sunbelt Plastics until its 1999 sale to Tyco International for $85 million in cash. Soon after, scandalous fraud at the company decimated Tyco.
In an email a few years ago, Jack acknowledged the long-term 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 approach 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 diverse groups and evolved an instinctive proclivity for taking advantage of the quantum condition that underlies organizations. Trouble is, having eliminated other hominids of lesser organizational means, not to mention other species that we hunted to extinction, we now neglect this inbred capacity. Moreover, along with this capacity came the instincts and guile to use the quantum condition to disassemble enterprises that stand in the way. To think that we can survive much longer having jettisoned the very trait that gave rise to our species’ success is sheer folly. Surrounded by organizations that obstruct this capacity, we are bred to unconsciously and unwittingly disassemble them. Blue Organizational Solutions staffs a missing Midlevel in organizations so, once again, organizations benefit from the underlying quantum condition, rather than being instinctively hounded, torn apart and bankrupted by this condition.