The Great Barrier

Getting tired of the precarious way of life?

When a healthy you gets your act together, it’s a straight road from there to Plan B. You will be delighted with the windfall benefits, social and personal, from having cause/effect competency with the operational reality. The purpose of this page is to put your GYAT achievement in context and prepare you for your unavoidable encounter with the final riddle. If the great barrier wasn’t there in ambush, you’d already be living the Plan B dream.

Being naïve, we were knocked silly by the irrational, incoherent impasse. That the Establishment wants an unhealthy workforce was a conclusion too absurd for us to imagine. Forewarned, you can prepare for the unsolved riddle using the knowledge won by those who  collided with the barrier before you. You guessed it, the final barrier, 100% psychological, is manned by people, entitled consumers, who are in denial of reality.

Just what did we bring to society in 2013 with Plan B? Ours was not the first occasion of a flourishing social system. History makes mention of them, popping up and fading away. What we brought to humanity eight years ago was a scientific, explicit derivation of Plan B.  Its framework was in hand when Plan B came to life in 2013. Recognized instantly for what it was, we had  the mathematical physics causation why it was working. The A/B transposition process was proven generic as it had to be, by subsequent implementations in unrelated cases.

What we call the impasse that shouldn’t be is the aggressive rejection of emulating Plan B success by the Establishment, the upper-hierarchy consumers, as well as the masses. The size and variety of your benefit packages, no matter how ugly Plan A consequences have become, does nothing to bridge the chasm. It’s impossible to exaggerate the challenge of bringing social intelligence (Plan B) into general use. Everything about the remaining barrier, 100% psychological, is stacked against you fractally.  The head shed has a delusional sense of its role as infallible that has repelled every assault made on it throughout mankind’s existence.

You don’t have to guess what the barrier looks like. Getting a peek at the great impasse is easy. As discussed on the opening page of the website, just run the following test sequence:

1. Tell the target that Plan B, the antidote to Plan A. exists
2. Recite workforce health benefits of Plan B as appropriate to the target
3. Invite the target to examine and evaluate Plan B implementations first hand, to host a demonstration inhouse
4. When the target refuses to follow up, and he will, end the encounter remarking that failure to follow up does not controvert the Plan B paradigm

Catatonia is the typical response. You don’t have to understand a thing about Plan B to run the test. The very idea of an alternate ideology to business as usual, to the ruling class, is shocking by itself. The fact it delivers a flourishing society, is terrorism.

Run the test as many times as you need to validate the ubiquity and depth of fear of change for the better (achievemephobia) of a non-MitM person. Every one will leave the assured benefits on the table and take the imposter syndrome with them.

The only learning process available for closing in on a workaround to this impasse, if there is one, is the process of elimination. For us, fifty years of trying a hundred conventional strategies have produced zero. Total failure has been a brutally honest teacher. The residuum of possibilities is already small. Our provisional solution includes keeping the upper hierarchy out of the action.

Each failed strategy was tracked against our massive social behavior library. Over time, we learned that when we scored zero, comparative attempts in the past scored zero as well. After trying all conventional strategies in all the flavors, we noted that none of our brilliant mentors succeeded in cracking the great impasse either. The literature abounds with examples of failed assaults. There is no need for you to repeat their strategies. It is noteworthy that the head sheds of the planet tried to find monetary incentives to entice the workforce to abandon Ca’ canny for over a century. Hundreds of thousands of failures with hundreds of incentive schemes and the Establishment learned nothing!

The Plan A organization is not capable of morphing to Plan B on its own. Consumers trapped in Plan A are pursuits of the impossible. Workers in Plan A dysfunction are, by role, helplessly incoherent. Hostile responses to Plan B are reflexive, instant, a sure sign of an anxious subconscious mind.

Counterproductive strategies

• Anyone above the 2½ rule
  • Head sheds, top down
• Drive management

Morbidly corrupt

• Government agencies, bureaucracies
• Regulators, Law, judiciary
• Media
• Politicians
• Academia
• Finance
• Medicine
• Unions
• Venture capitalists
• Historians

The general aversion to changing for the better has been studied in many ways by science. The active attempt by a group to change beliefs, attitudes, or reasoning in others is a major enterprise in commerce, globally consuming about a trillion dollars per annum. Understanding the fundamental processes underlying attitude and behavioral change is in its infancy. Silicon Valley learned how to highjack your mind for commercial purposes but not how to persuade you to improve your way of life. The fact that tall hierarchies take possession of your inalienable rights does not in the least impound your clear title of natural ownership.

Behaviors refer to observable action while attitudes refer to general and enduring predispositions toward a stimulus for the serial operations of attention, comprehension, yielding, and retention. There are many ways to reach the same attitude, equifinality, by automatic and controlled components. The routes can include high and low effort processes, high and low degrees of thinking. Many variables feed into the process and can differ across conditions. Persuasive appeals are complex stimuli. Antecedent conditions, social norms and core values play a significant role. Connection to a personal goal is requisite. It’s the platinum rule writ large.

Nine years of failed assaults on the impasse with Plan B in hand have suggested some clues about the black holes of social behavior to be faced. Since humanity has never cracked the final riddle, a safe assumption is that the root cause is deeply embedded within the invariant Stone Age genome we all possess. This common denominator, achievemephobia, we surmise, is far more likely to originate in our social system genes than in our personal core value system. Individuals have such a variety of attitudes and beliefs that chance alone would suggest that, out of several thousand assaults, there would at least be a handful of eccentrics eager to follow up. These days they don’t exist.

While the fear of success phobia (Achievemephobia) may seem weird to many; it is a very real social phobia. It can make things difficult for the phobic, making him a prisoner in this situation. For those experiencing the fear of success, nothing is holding you back more in life. The fear of success phobia is very much like the fear of failure: both prevent the sufferer from achieving his goals. It is a simple matter to demonstrate achievemephobia in the head shed. Its exhibit is the imposter syndrome.

It might seem strange to fear success; but the fear is about change. He wants to continue to live the Plan A life despite hating it. Many CEOs and presidents of banks have Achievemephobia. The fear of success is deeply rooted. Unlike the fear of failure, where social media brings sufferers together to console each other, there are no achievemephobia clubs to join.

One’s success is naturally bound to be displeasing to others around him. Success comes at a cost such as envy, jealousy, hurt, notoriety, limelight etc. Other reasons include:

• Fearing getting what one wants and being unable to handle it.
• Getting ahead of friends, colleagues, and close family members can be intimidating and threatening: one might fear breaking ties with these people.
• Guilt or self-doubt. Success comes with responsibilities which can lead to fear.

Fear of failure and fear of success phobia are often related and have the same anxiety symptoms. Achievemephobia is an unconscious phobia: often an individual is unaware that he has it. The same applies to the imposter syndrome.

If we assume that social status is the paramount core value and Plan B is perceived as a threat to the status you have, the zero record we have established would make sense. People weigh the loss of something they value double that of an opportunity to benefit. Add to that the plagues of achievemephobia and the imposter syndrome and the final barrier begins to make some sense. Note that workforce health decline was never an actionable item for the head shed – to this day.

We surmise the genome of human social behavior is as uniform throughout the population as individual characteristics are variant. While these conjectures are empirically-based and not scientific proof, science cannot controvert our guesswork either. The lesson is that the human genome, just like a law of Nature, indifferent, always prevails.

An important clue to the impasse is that human nature is as compatible to Plan B as it is to Plan A. Every instinct to go Plan A is matched by an equal and opposite instinct to go Plan B. Plan A is wildly popular with the ruling class, to be sure, but we know now that when Plan B latches in, it is just as “natural” and stable as Plan A. Plan B is not going against the grain of Plan A, it is placing the conscious mind as gatekeeper of the impetuous subconscious mind. The material difference is glucose consumption. The rest is psychological. The differences in glucose usage in the cranium between running on subconscious autopilot and conscious-mind vigilance as its gatekeeper and always-first decision-maker are substantial.

Our perfect record with this impasse calls all our conjectures and assumptions about it into question. Only finding an answer to the final riddle will settle the matter. The solution, we believe, will not come from learning how to get through to the closed-minded potentates. If it’s going to take place at all, it will be through the keystones. Stay tuned.

In the case of COVID, fear mongering collided with reality long enough for intelligent victims to come to their senses. We reckoned the lag between fear imposition and organized pushback in the COVID example to be about a year. The Establishment does not have an alternative strategy to defend itself from honest citizen rebellion. Doubling down on fear mongering and punishments is throwing gasoline on the flames.

The Battle Over Loss Reduction

Even though we have significant practical experience in the industrial loss-reduction/safety field, the fact that social intelligence and preventable loss were covariants never entered our minds. When implementing Plan B in 2013 cut these losses in half, however, the covariance was immediately recognized. It was the first time we could measure the full scope of preventable losses impacting the collective. Besides the reduction of injuries, the amounts of money at stake in the A to B transposition are stunning. Stakeholder satisfaction joins the positive reciprocity movement. Safety is an example of the Plan B windfall.

Insurance premiums for property and casualty (P&C) coverage, together with Workman’s Compensation provide an actionable ballpark measure of the size of the “business” of unnecessary loss, to wit:

• The gross insurance premiums paid in the USA for all kinds of insurance in 2020 was $5T/yr, about 25% of the nation’s GNP. It grew by $1T since 2010
• Approximately 20% of gross premiums ($5T) is the published, traditional P&C piece of the action, $1T/year. P&C covers accidental losses, caused by various perils, including sabotage, and Workman’s Comp
• Workman’s Comp gross premiums for 2020 are published at $57B

Insurance does not cover all the corresponding losses actually sustained by the insured. These loses can be substantial.

• Business interruption
  • Availability of production
• Administration
• Health
  • Pain and suffering
  • Occupational disease and morbidity
  • Psychological damage

The reduction in administrative costs brought about by the 50% reduction in loss events is considerable. Along with a massive drop in turnover, another covariant of Plan B, administrative overhead is reduced by 30%. As far as the value of Plan B to the collective, loss reduction alone justifies Plan B, no matter how you compute it. Audit a Plan B implementation and review these windfalls for yourself. Plan B beneficiaries are happy to relate their experience.

Reckoning the premiums of P&C amounts to a USA gross value of Plan B of $555M/week. When you realize the amount of dollars at stake, it is easier to account for the insurance industry’s reluctance to assemble and advertise the full cost of the problem it partially insures. The intentional failure to organize and report the facts to the insured also reveals their utter disregard of loss prevention. The earliest mention of this condition in the thumbdrive OD .pdf library goes back to 1760 CE.

The cost of organizational dysfunction (OD) has never been an incentive for the Establishment to address workforce health. So when the upper hierarchy refuses Plan B, it validates their class war on the workforce. The same covariance occurs with product and service quality.

The only way to handle knowledge of this deception of business as usual is to make it clear and public just what it is that the head shed is refusing to improve – workforce health. This is a matter of incontrovertible fact, grounded in reality, that cannot be explained away. It is a well-known tenet of class warfare.

The upper class depersonalizes the lower class so it can force them into poverty and ill health without feeling responsible. This predisposition is an artifact of human nature, an attribute of the subconscious mind. No consideration of reality is involved. Although Plan B is exclusively a conscious-mind affair, it is entirely congruent with human nature as well.

The efforts of the Establishment to deny the reality of Plan B have been recognized and documented for more than a century. The years right after WWI brought a flood of on-target literature. Some excerpts from the thumbdrive library on intentional waste of stakeholder value follow:

Restriction on output, withholding of efficiency

One of the byproducts of the uneven class warfare between the Establishment (winner) and labor (loser) is a reduction in health, security, and safety of the workforce, not experienced by the authoritarians. The ubiquitous practice of Ca’canny, deliberate productivity reduction, is covariant with loss prevention and safety. It is invariant human nature that powers the incessant battle between the elected authorities and the producers of wealth. It is human nature for the rich to depersonalize and abuse labor. It is human nature for labor to reciprocate oppression of the “entitled” class of consumers. Their reflex to the head shed abuse is to sabotage productivity in ways that cannot be detected. Everyone has engaged sabotage in response to a betrayal of trust and violation of the square deal.

An easy test for trustworthiness is personal choice-making process knowledge. We have learned, somewhat in horror, that the majority of people are clueless about how they allocate their efforts. Judiciously asking the question cuts through the mystery. Being unaware of how you make choices assures that your subconscious choice-making apparatus, in full control, is making bad choices. For many indisputable reasons, intuition can’t do otherwise. That’s why intuition, prayer, and hope always flunk reality testing. The test works both ways. Those that know their thinking method will be animated and full of stories about their experience. Those that don’t know go silent.

What the Establishment also doesn’t want you to know is that Plan B is also congruent with invariant human nature. The difference expressed by Plan B is its relatively huge and protracted cognitive demand. It’s not unnatural at all, but it’s a cranial glucose hog.

To wit:

• Plan A is the outcome of human nature as expressed by subconscious minds, reflex, impulse, no-brainer spontaneous, business as usual, tradition, policy, and rules. The Plan A brain consumes less glucose than the available trickle-charge supply entering the brain case across the magnificent blood/brain barrier. There is no comparable interruption in processing for Plan A.
• Plan B is the outcome of human nature as expressed by conscious minds, gatekeeping the stream of subconscious imperatives and deliberately following a proven template for creating and sustaining a flourishing society. The brain on Plan B routinely consumes more glucose than the available supply trickle charge. That uncomfortable event calls for a diversion of attention at low cognitive activity while the nervous system replenishes the glucose across the blood-brain barrier from larger reservoirs in the body proper.

To engage Plan A on autopilot is no strain on your brain. Since feedback is not cognitively processed in autopilot mode, you can function indefinitely on your subconscious mind without a loss of intensity. To engage Plan B, autopilot off, requires considerable, protracted cognitive effort. Like a lithium battery, there’s no warning when the glucose runs out.  If you don’t stop when the cognitive lights dim, your conscious mind turns into mush. To engage reality successfully, you have to be as informed and intelligent as reality itself. Feedback of reality to your Plan B collaboration, so you can make appropriate mid-course adjustments, takes truth, cognition and logical processing.

The natural creativity of the workforce, expressed in sabotage

Just because the ruling class considers the workforce as blockheaded dolts, doesn’t make it so. The truth is that workers have just as much creativity as any academic and with fewer hesitations to use it. When workforce creativity is unleashed in the competitive advantage functionality of Plan B, it floods the context. Just imagine the talent going into sabotage being directed to improving productivity. The contrast in productivity is dramatic.

Some of the best descriptions of workplace human-nature-driven sabotage were published more than a century ago. Their relevancy to current social behavior remains undiminished. Sabotage is just as old as human exploitation. Some excerpts are provided for your entertainment:

Of all the words of an esoteric taste which have been purposely denaturalized and twisted by the capitalist press in order to terrify and mystify a gullible public, “Direct Action” and “Sabotage” rank easily next to Anarchy, Nihilism, Free Love, Neo-Malthusianism, etc., in the hierarchy of infernal inventions.

To be sure, the capitalist class knows full well the exact meaning of these words and the doctrines and purposes behind them, but it is, of course, its most vital interest to throw suspicion on and raise popular contempt and hatred against them as soon as they begin to appear and before they are understood, for the purpose of creating an antagonistic environment to them, and thus check the growth of their propaganda.

American Capitalism having succeeded in making the word Anarchism synonymous with disorder, chaos, violence and murder in the popular mind — with the complicity of the cowardly silence of so-called revolutionists — it is now the turn of Syndicalism, Direct Action and Sabotage to be equally misrepresented, lied about and defamed. Arturo M. Giovannitti 1895

“This unavoidable consequence of the conflict that divides society was brought to light three quarters of a century ago by Balzac in his “Maison Nucingen,” apropos of the bloody riots of Lyons in 1831. He has given us a clear and incisive definition of sabotage. “Much has been said,” writes Balzac, “of the Lyons revolt and of the Republic shot down in the streets but nobody has said the truth. The Republic had seized the movement just as a rebel seizes a gun. The commerce of Lyons is a commerce without courage, it does not manufacture an ounce of silk without its being demanded and promptly paid for. When the demand is low the worker starves — when he works he has barely enough to live on. The galley slaves are happier than he is.”

After the July revolution, poverty had reached such a stage that the workers raised a flag with this motto: Bread or Death — a flag which the government should have seriously considered. Instead of that, Lyons wanted to build theatres to become a capital — hence a senseless squandering of money.

The republicans smelled through the increasing misery the coming revolt and organized the spinners who fought a double battle. Lyons had its three days, then order prevailed again and the beggar went back to his kennel.

The fact is that modern society rests only on appearances and illusions, and derives its raison d’etre not from the existence or nonexistence of certain things, but on the general accepted credence that these things do or do not exist. Truth becomes a menace to society and hence a crime, not when it is seen and felt by personal experience, though everybody see and feel it, but only when it is told and exposed, for then only it becomes subversive by being discussed and reasoned over.” Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1898)

“The spinner who had up to then transformed into threads the silk that was weighed to him in cocoons, put fairness out of the door and began to oil his fingers. Of course, he gave back with fastidious scrupulosity the exact weight, but the silk was all stained with oil and the silk market was thus infested with defective merchandise which could have caused the ruin of Lyons and the loss of a goodly share of the French commerce.

Balzac had been careful to bring out that the spinners’ sabotage was nothing but a reprisal of victims. By putting oil in the spindles the workers were getting even with the heartless manufacturers who had promised them bayonets to eat instead of bread and had so lavishly kept their promise.

Indeed, when isn’t an act of sabotage the equivalent and consequence of a suffered wrong? Isn’t perhaps in the origin and causes of each act of sabotage revealed the capitalist exploitation which often reaches to cruelty? And this reaction against exploitation, in whatever condition it manifests itself, isn’t it even an attitude or action of revolt whatever form it may take? And here we are brought back to our affirmation that sabotage is as old as human exploitation.

Neither must it be believed that sabotage is a product with a Parisian trade mark. It is, indeed, if anything, a theory of English importation and it has been practiced across the Channel for a long time under the name of “Go Cannie” — a Scotch expression which means literally “Go slow.” An example of the persuasive efficiency of the “Go Cannie” is given by the periodical, “The Social Museum”:

“In 1889 the Glasgow dockers went on strike asking an increase of two cents an hour.   “The contractors and stevedores flatly refused and imported at great expense a considerable number of farm hands to take the place of the strikers, with the conclusion that the dockers had to give up the fight and return to work on the same conditions.

Just before resuming work their general secretary gathered them once again and said: ‘Boys, you must go back today on the same scale of wages prevailing before. The contractors have expressed and repeated all their satisfaction for the work done by the farmers who have scabbed on us during these last weeks. We have seen them at work and know full well what kind of satisfactory work was theirs, we saw indeed that they could not even keep their balance on the bridges and saw how they dropped in the sea half the cargo they loaded and unloaded. In one word, we have seen that two of them could not do as much work as one of us. Nevertheless, the bosses said they were satisfied with their labour, therefore, we have one thing left yet; let us give them the same kind of labour. Work then just like the farm hands did, they often pushed their incapacity to the point of falling overboard, but it is not necessary for you to do this, of course.” Emile Pouget (1898)

The cooks of a great Parisian cafe, having some unsettled grievances with their employers, remained the whole day at their places before the red hot stoves — but in the rush hours when clients were swarming the dining rooms, nothing was found in the pots but stones that had been boiling for hours, together with the restaurant clock.

This behavior demonstrates that the masters treat their workers worse than their machines. Indeed, the latter are bought on a guarantee of a certain specified production in a specified running time, and owners do not pretend to demand a larger output; whilst, when they engage workers, they demand from them, as we have said, the maximum of their productive capacity — both in strength and skill. This discordance, which is the basis of relations between workers and masters, throws a light on the fundamental opposition of interests between the two parties — the struggle of the class which owns the instruments of production against the class which, deprived of capital, possesses no wealth outside of its labour power.

On the economic field, as soon as exploited and exploiters come face to face, we see the ineradicable antagonism that drives them to the two opposite poles and consequently renders always unstable and short-lived their agreements. Between these two parties, to be sure, it is impossible to close a contract in the precise and fair sense of the term. A contract implies the equality of the contracting parties and their full freedom to act — indeed, the specific characteristics of a contract conflict in bringing together two parties who agree on and sign something to the real interest of both of them, either for the present or for the future. Now, when a worker offers his labour power to an employer, the two parties are far from being on the same footing of independence and equality.

The worker, obsessed by the urgency of securing his daily bread — if not already in the clutches of hunger — does not possess the serene freedom to act, which his employer enjoys. Moreover, the benefit which he derives from the letting out of his labour is only temporary, inasmuch as, whilst he secures an immediate gain, it is not difficult to realize, on the other hand, that the risk he exposes himself to, with the sort of work that is imposed on him, may endanger his health and his future. Therefore, between the workers and their employers there cannot be any agreements deserving to be qualified as contracts.

From this state of facts it necessarily follows that in the labour market there are nothing but two belligerent armies in a state of permanent warfare. Consequently, all agreements and all business relations between the two must be precarious and short-lived, inasmuch as they are vitiated beforehand by the graduation of the greater or smaller resistance of the antagonists on which they rest.

The truth is that, as there exist two classes in society, so there exist two moralities, the bourgeois morality and the proletarian morality. “The natural or zoological morality” — writes Max Nordau — “affirms that rest is the supreme merit and does not define labour as pleasant and glorious except that it is indispensable to material existence.”

But the exploiters do not find any profit in this morality. Their interests, indeed, demand that the masses toil more than is necessary and produce more than they need. It is because the exploiters want to seize the surplus product. Thus they have suppressed the natural morality and invented another one in its stead, developed by their philosophers, praised by their demagogues, sung by their poets — a morality whereby idleness figures as the source of all vices and labour as virtue.

From birth to death the proletarian is tainted with it. He sucks it — in the more or less adulterated milk of the nursing bottle, which too often replaces for him the mother’s breast. Later the vices of the same morality are injected into him in careful doses, and the absorption continues in a thousand processes until, buried in the common grave, the proletarian sleeps at last his eternal sleep. The poisoning derived from this morality is often so deep and resistant that men of sharp wits and keen and clear reasoning are contaminated. Emile Pouget 1899

 

“On the other hand how can the “technical value” and skill of these hypothetical workers be endangered when, having realized on a certain day, that they are the victims of an inhuman exploitation, they strive to break away from it and consent no more to submit their muscles and their brains to an indefinite drudgery, to the total advantage of their masters? Why should they scatter this “technical value and skill which constitutes their wealth?” Why should they make of it a free present to the capitalist? Isn’t it more logical, indeed, that the workers, instead of sacrificing themselves like lambs on the altar of capitalism, struggle and rebel and, valuing at the very highest possible price their “technical skill,” let — all or in part — this “true wealth” of theirs on the very best terms obtainable? How is it possible that producers are fully entitled to all they produce and then not entitled to a part of it?

Now, plain common sense suggests that, since the boss is the enemy of the worker, the latter by preparing an ambush for his adversary, does not commit a bad or disloyal act. It is a recognized means of warfare, just as admissible as open and face to face battle. Therefore not one of the arguments borrowed from the bourgeois morality is competent to judge sabotage, just as none of these arguments has any weight and bearing on the judgment, acts, deeds, thoughts and aspirations of the working class.”

It is claimed that Sabotage would injure the cause of the workers before the public and that it would degrade the moral value of those that practice it. As to the first objection we may answer that if by public opinion we mean the people at large, these are and always will be favorable to the cause of any class of workers, whatever their actions, simply because they are workers themselves. If, on the other hand, we mean by public opinion that part of the public which comes under the daily influence of the press, we are willing to say that little we care for it. The capitalist press will never champion the workers’ cause; it will never tell the truth about them, no matter how nice and gentlemanly they may behave and, Sabotage or no Sabotage, it will continue persistently to lie about them.

It is, indeed, to be expected that it will lie still more and more and distort and falsify facts ever and ever on a larger scale as fast as the workers become more revolutionary in their attitude, and the labor movement more conscious of its destined end, which is the overthrow of the capitalist system. The workers must get used to consider themselves absolutely isolated in their struggles (they were ever so in their real ones) and the sooner they cease to believe in the myth of the omnipotence of public opinion, the more will they rely on their own strength exclusively and the nearer will they be to their emancipation, which can be brought about only by themselves.” Harold J. Ruthenberg 1901

The capitalist opposes a golden breastplate to the blows of the adversary who, knowing beforehand his offensive and defensive inferiority, tries to remedy it by having recourse to the many ruses of war. Indeed, when isn’t an act of sabotage the equivalent and consequence of a suffered wrong? Isn’t perhaps in the origin and causes of each act of sabotage revealed the capitalist exploitation which often reaches to cruelty? In truth sabotage is to the social war what guerrillas are to national wars. It arises from the same feelings, answers to and meets the same necessities and bears the same identical consequences on the workers’ mentality. Balzac 1820

“Fraud, sophistication, lie, theft, fake and humbug are the warp and woof of capitalist society; to suppress them would be equal to the killing of society itself. It is useless to nurse any illusions; the day when it would be tried to introduce into social relations, in all their strata, a strict honesty and a scrupulous good will, nothing would remain standing — neither industry nor commerce nor finance — absolutely nothing!

Now, it is evident that to disregard safely his underhand manipulations the employer needs help, which in this case means accomplices. And he finds them in his workers and other employees. It follows logically that, wishing to associate the workers in these maneuvers — but not in his benefits and profits — the boss, whatever the field of his activity, exacts from them a complete submission to his private interests and forbids them to pass any judgment on his operations or to “interfere with his business.” Emile Pouget 1895

The Brit Hugh Clegg wrote about the social treatment of the foreman, 1885-1925, as the forgotten man of industry. “The foreman was symbolized by a bowler hat and a watch chain, neither management nor worker, the man in the middle.” Clegg noted that after WWI, management stifled the foreman, “under which the whole efficiency of the enterprise depended.”

In England, the problem of foremanship introduced by the size of the industrial enterprise erupted in 1839 in the Naysmyths foundries. Foremen were responsible for quality and the pace of work. The harmony of the foreman-worker relationship was destroyed when management imposed piecework prices late in the 19^th century, putting foremen in direct conflict with their workers. Unionism was the child of that blunder.

For a century, management convinced itself that orchestrating bonus systems would lead to increased productivity. This attempt to bypass the foreman failed from the start. Management considered each failure to be a reason to change the bonus system, not the concept itself. The goal of management to eliminate decision-making in production by financial incentive design was a colossal, protracted experiment that wasted trillions of dollars. No lessons were learned by management from the experience. Sumner Slichter 1910

A work in progress

As you peruse the website, keep in mind that our knowledge development on the dynamics of tall hierarchies is active because it is extremely productive. Every Plan B implementation is a unique opportunity to experiment with cause and effect. Productivity in Plan B installation and performance has gone up by 18% since 2013. Accordingly, only the first four galleries are updated to include the latest advances. When reading the pages prepared years ago, keep in mind that the concepts in them can be immature and may be overtaken by better ones. We refer to them to measure our progress above the mentor line. When we reread our 1980s books today, we cringe at our naivete.

There is a “news” page maintained on this website for savvy collaborators. Read it at your own risk.

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