Building Profitable Futures for over 30 Years
A vital level in management structures remains unstaffed, complicating and raising the cost of operations. We meet weekly with a group over 3-6 months to train members to direct this misguided Midlevel. Once staffed, the corporate community jells and takes the path of least action to peak profit and productivity. Sound too good to be true? Read on.
Step one is for management to acknowledge that they’re nowhere near maximum productivity and profit. If they were, everyone would be part of a vibrant corporate community naturally on the path of peak efficiency and effectiveness throughout the entire operating cycle—that path being the well-established curve of least action (less being better). Imagine throwing a ball in the air; it always goes up and comes down in an arc. Why not a wiggly path? It’s because of the principle of least action, which “dictates that objects will (unless interfered with) always move along the route that requires the least amount of action.”⁴⁰
We’ve all been in workplaces where problems that negatively affect productivity and profit just won’t go away. In fact, they just seem to get worse no matter how much time, energy and money gets thrown at them. You might have noticed similar problems in your organization: issues with workflow, breakdowns in communication between departments and management levels, chronic absenteeism, to name just a few. The loss of revenue from such unresolved problems staggers the imagination:
- The American Society for Quality (ASQ) reports that inefficiencies cost organizations from 15% to as much as 40% of their revenue³⁶
- Inefficiencies, such as waste and delay, substantially reduce revenue, as well, as highlighted by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI)³⁷
Perhaps your organization has tried to address these problems through project groups and/or by hiring consultants, even through ASQ and LEI. Those approaches generally fail because they focus on symptoms, rather than on the underlying problem. Believe it or not, even the likes of ASQ and LEI miss this structural problem: the vital, virtual but vacant level, wide open in the management structure—the missing Midlevel. This Virtual Midlevel impacts (mediates) the other levels: positively when staffed, and negatively when not staffed (as in the Before diagram below). Left open, the organization is subject to a host of additional problems, including problems that ASQ and LEI lock in on, to the neglect of the Midlevel void. Once staffed, the Midlevel takes care of these problems too.
Before
An Organization as a Broken Management Hierarchy
After
An Organization in as an Intact Corporate Community
What distinguishes BOSS from other firms?
BOSS‘s focus might surprise you, given what run-of-the-mill consultants do. They spend hours studying and analyzing symptoms, which is costly, unnecessary, and ultimately doesn’t address the real issue of the vacant Midlevel. Then there are those long, drawn out meetings and training sessions with little to show for the time spent, other than an eye-popping consulting bill.
The reason we approach the situation directly is because our background, training, and experience are different. Dr. Blue’s PhD in organizational behavior and additional training in group dynamics, along with his background in finance as a CPA and having been a controller in many organizations enable him to get to the heart of the problem—the missing Midlevel. He takes a group through formation and development to fully prepare the members to staff the Midlevel. He meets weekly with them, online, for about an hour a week for three to six months, so its economical.
Without this intervention, unsolved problems outweigh those solved³² as the Before diagram shows. With the intervention, the group at the Midlevel solves problems so that, sooner or later, the script flips with the solved problems outnumbering the ones left unsolved (as in the After diagram). In 3 to 6 months with the script flipped from Before to After, BOSS becomes obsolete and we leave.
What next evolves, often after we’ve left, is a full-blown corporate community³⁸ with the natural ability to follow the path to maximum productivity and profit, called the path of least action. It’s what enabled our distant ancestors not only to survive, but to thrive, as little more than a prey species. The weekly meetings with the Midlevel group cover how the organization originally fell off the path, proves invaluable, later on, in avoiding these pitfalls.
It’s rather obvious that such a path, which takes the least action, would be the most efficient and effective (as in less is better). Moreover, a corporate community with its large number of diverse members comes to decisions in ways that cancel out individual error.²⁷ The path also minimizes cost and coordinates the work, since wherever and whenever people step onto this path, they arrive at the end—at the completion of their work—all at the same time.
As you might have already guessed, clients report that performance improves almost immediately.