Does a Midlevel group evolve into a corporate community?
Just as the Midlevel impacts the entire corporate culture, so does our Midlevel intervention. That makes the corporate community just as large and diverse as the entire organization. Such a diverse community has a decided competitive advantage: It follows the red curve of least action on the graph that maximizes productivity and profit.²⁷
A corporate community naturally follows this curve, shown above in a square with the length of time that people commit resources along the vertical axis and the management levels along the horizontal axis in a 1:1 relationship. This community path of maximum productivity and profit supersedes:
- the quality approach of an organization like the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and
- the lean approach of an organization like the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI).
As in the diagram above, the Four Ps of productivity and profit naturally fall into place along this path of least action with Plan the last piece, since planning takes the other three: People, Place and Purpose. The same path also minimizes cost, since everyone arrives at the end of the path at the same time, no matter when and where they started. This path also conserves energy. In technical terms, the path smoothly makes the transition from an object’s energy of motion (kinetic energy), based on its mass and velocity, to that object’s potential energy, based on its position or makeup without an unnecessary loss of energy. Translated to business speak, the path of least action produces a good or delivers a service at top quality (with minimal variation from what the customer ordered) and as lien as possible (with minimal waste). With the Midlevel staffed, the four puzzle pieces reflect the simplicity that a corporate community’s path of least action brings to the production and purveying of goods or services without the time-consuming necessity and expense of ASQ certifications and LEI consulting.
The next graph uses the same two axes of Maximum Length of Resource Commitments in Months on the vertical axis, and the Management Levels on the horizontal axis from the previous graph. Fitting the red path to the trendline stretches the horizontal axis by around 1.67 times.¹³ The time multiplier for the stretch is 0.40 = 1 – 1/1.67 which adds 24 (dilated) minutes every hour (0.40⨯60 minutes). (An infinite stretch would add a full 60 minutes every hour.) So not only the path, but also the time stretches. The extra 24 minutes make up for the flatter path, so that the flatter path still leads to maximum productivity and profit:
- At Glacier Metal in London, Jaques²³ had discovered the maximum time-span structure shown in the graph that employees intuitively consider an equitable, felt-fair measure of their positions and pay.
- That minimizes variations in performance due to perceived inequities (such as producing more when people perceive their pay as comparatively low, or producing less at a higher quality when they perceive their pay as comparatively high).
- Jaques went on in his career to document this time-span structure in no less than 100 organizations across 15 countries.
- The trendline consists of 537 months for an average career length of 45 years, e for the base of a natural log, 0.76 for the ratio of energy to mass in microbes to mammals, and n for eight management levels from n = 1 for the CEO to 8 for the Lower Levels.¹⁴
- Dr. Blue derived the y -squared formula for the trendline with its R² = 99.7% accuracy using Elliott Jaques’ n = 1 to 5 observations. That trendline revealed the n = 6 Virtual Midlevel that Jaques had not observe. So there’s no bar
on the graph for the Midlevel. - The Midlevel becomes vacant and virtual when the founding group exceeds around 15 members and they disperse to the individual positions that Jaques had observed.
- With the Midlevel range of commitments from its six-month maximum down to a Supervisor’s three-month maximum, the Virtual Midlevel impacts/mediates all the other levels.
- Jaques found a time span of 48 hours or less associated with the avoidance of error, which proves so critical in emergency rooms and operating rooms, in firefighting, on battlefields, in rescue work, and in policing.²³
- Then there are the affects of the horizontal stretch by 1.67 in the red path of least action and the long-term, consequential need for a bonus plan:
- To reinforce the stretch, managers make longer resource commitments. For example, the Facility Manager in the graph (such as a Plant Manager) commits resources for up to seven years, rather than just five.
- With the longer duration of the resource commitments in the golden area, the existing people and facilities support higher volumes of production.
- The higher volumes in the golden area might be needed to breakeven and any margins, there beyond breakeven, would be all profit.
- Short term, the tolerance that managers have for commitments—beyond what their felt-fair pay supports—determines the extent, if any, of the golden area and the higher volumes.
- Long term in order to maintain the higher volumes, a bonus system needs to compensate the managers for the greater risks that they take with their longer commitments. Just paying these managers more throws felt-fair pay out of whack at the lower levels.
- The vast majority of employees work at the lower levels. They would respond to being underpaid (compared to the "overpaid" managers) with higher volumes. But a felt-unfair resentment would drive people to produce these higher volumes, a far cry from the felt-fair higher volumes in the golden area of a community drawn together along the natural path of least action to maximize productiviey and profit.
- The Midlevel group at Lincoln Electric rolled out their now famous bonus plan during the Great Depression—with bonuses paid every year, ever since.²⁸
- Given this level of sophistication, it can take a Midlevel group quite some time to devise a suitable bonus plan with a comprehensive system of performance evaluation. It took the Midlevel group of Lincoln department heads, meeting biweekly and led by James Lincoln, twenty-five years to rolled out Lincoln Electric's plan. Attesting to his hands-on leadership skills, he had played every minute of every football game as captain of the 1906 Ohio State team that didn't allow a single touchdown all season.
How does the path of least action lead to other competitive advantages?
Looking at the equation for the 
trendline, if you replace 537 with 1, you get the probability of finding people at the various levels. Furthermore, 
then equals the sine wave for both authority and responsibility. At 90 degrees to one another, the two sine waves form an electromagnetic wave. As with the electrification of the United States (mainly from the late-19th to the mid-20th century) the social-psychological electrification of a management structure has great potential.
Dr. Blue covers this potential in his course and textbook, titled Tool Making to Making Time. The design of the course proves just as valuable as the content. Participants do the teaching in teams with Dr. Blue’s support. As a result, they retain the information at an A level.³⁹ The teams also conduct exercises and compete over which exercises were the most memorable. These same teams can then adapt the content and conduct the course across the organization.
What impact has disorder and decay in and around organizations had?
Trouble is everything decays including organizations.³² By looking at the particulars in a Minoan myth, circa 2000-1500 BCE, we not only learn about the Minotaur, but also about a major event in the evolution of today’s management hierarchies:
- On a day every 19 years, when the female-associated lunar and male-associated solar cycles coincide, a young group of seven males from Athens got eaten alive by the Minotaur.
- Their sacrifice was in retribution for infuriated Athenians having killing King Minos’ son, Androgeus, following the Panathenaic Games in which he had won multiple events. You might compare the anger surrounding Androgeus to that surrounding Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn , who won the decathlon with its multiple events at the 1976 Olympic Games.
- The group-eating Minotaur was held in a labyrinth, designed to confuse and confine this monster. So, the mythical labyrinth, like the Midlevel in organizations, was mindboggling due to the mechanics that take nothing less than the collective mind of a group to handle.²⁷
- Theseus (from thesmós for institution) entered the labyrinth as part of a group and slayed the Minotaur (the bull of Minos) asleep at the center. Being half bull, the Minotaur embodied Zeus, who sometimes takes on the form of a bull in myth.
- Theseus’ killing of the Minotaur underscores how a person, even if part god and headstrong, is no match for the mindboggling Midlevel—and inevitably fired.⁶
- Theseus led the group out of the labyrinth by following a line of twine that he had tied to the door. Once out, he and the group set sail for Athens. Arriving a hero, he ascended his father’s throned, as the new King, and along with the group set up democratic institutions in Athens.
Those mythical snippets provide some basic information on the decay and today’s recovery of corporate communities in organizations:
- A likely reason for the myth’s historical prominence is how Midlevel groups got squeezed out (“eaten alive” by the Minotaur in the myth) as patriarchal hierarchies supplanted matriarchal communities about 4000 years ago (judging from the time of the myth).
- In the sequence of events, first came writing, 1000 to 2000 years later came the myth, and 3000 years after the myth came the first coins.
- Having BOSS place and train groups at the Midlevel puts groups in a position to once again solve problems, there, and to impact all the other levels positively, as the intervention does.²⁷
- Such a corporate community provides the institutional bedrock for democracy, as King Theseus and his group did in the myth for Athenian democracy.
Concluding remarks
To a CPA and PhD like Dr. Blue, the pathway of least action is much more than simply being quality minded like ASQ or lean oriented like LEI. Maximizing productivity and profit—inexpensively and soon—makes all the difference.³⁸