Compassion is what makes accountability possible.
How to hold people to a standard without running the place on fear, and without letting it slide.
Forty-one essays, a validated instrument, and thirty years in the job, worked into a single argument you can read straight through. It refuses both extremes an American organization offers a manager. Control produces fear, and fear produces bad work. Abdication produces chaos — a genuinely kind chief executive who holds no one to anything can bleed forty percent of his people a year. The middle is not the average of those two. It is a third thing, and it is harder than either.
It is written for the manager with eleven people, a number to hit, a boss with a boss, and a mortgage. It is a practice for the building you are actually in, not the one you would have designed.
191 pages, 6 × 9. Shoreline Publishing Group, September 2026. Links go to Amazon.
Middle Way Management was built in the open, one essay at a time. Forty-one of them ran here between March 2009 and June 2013, written while the author was managing technology teams inside American organizations — the problem in the essay was usually the problem on his desk. Every one of them is still on this site.
It was tested, not just argued. A Delphi panel of working leaders cut 100 candidate items to 25, a field test followed, and a full administration drew 303 respondents; the instrument came back with a Cronbach’s alpha of .972 and two components, Leadership / Management Skills and Trust. The author holds a PhD in organization and management with a specialization in leadership, has taught MBA and doctoral courses, and has spent thirty years doing the job.
Twenty-six chapters in four parts, and five appendices.
- Part One
The Argument
What the practice actually claims, the five precepts it rests on, the five assumptions people bring to it, and why it is not a soft approach.
- Part Two
The Practice
Where it starts, which is with yourself: the anchor, reflective thought, the magic mirror, boundaries and the word no, equanimity under creative tension.
- Part Three
The Hard Cases
Holding someone accountable without cruelty. The team member you cannot reach. Managing up when your boss is not decent. Fear. Whether to stay.
- Part Four
Measurement and Method
The instrument and what it measures, how it was built and validated, how a habit actually changes, and the eight cognitive domains.
The appendices carry the working material: the twenty-five items of the MWM-AI with its scoring, the eight cognitive domains, the eleven practices, the precepts and percepts in full, and a source note for every chapter.
Everything the book is built from is on this site, complete and at no cost: all 41 essays in the order they were written, the study behind the instrument, and the instrument itself. Nothing has been moved behind the book.
What the book adds is shape. Forty-one separate posts become one continuous argument, ordered by the problem you are trying to solve rather than by the order they were written, with the repetition taken out and the practice separated from the theory. The appendices put the working material in one place: the instrument and its scoring, the cognitive domains, the eleven practices, the precepts and the percepts, and the sources. If you would rather have the raw material, start here instead.