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Employee Empowerment Software:

1. The software monitored employee productivity in a server/client environment.
2. On a monthly basis, cost of employees pay and benefits was deducted from cash generated by employee to determine individual's profit or loss.
3. If employee had a profit,
   • Half went into retirement account (indexed on lifehour value).
   • Half was divided by number of hours worked to determine a pay raise.
   • Constituted self-profit-sharing between long-term savings and short-term pay-hike.
   • In effect, within a business environment, the employee became an entrepreneur of self-determined income based on improved skills.
4. If employee had a loss, wages were cut proportional to losses.
5. The software had an integrated timeclock and payroll service with lazer-printed checks.

Unintended Consequences:
Two good female workers gave two-week notice which did not make sense. After several approaches to crack the "I can't tell you" answer, each said their husband told them to quit or else. A by-product of encouraging and empowering employees to more often question their actions was that the questioning carried over into the home settings. The husbands did not like their increasingly independent-minded wives. The gals were adopting the attitude encouraged by Socrates, "The unquestioned life is not worth living."

Investors come a-calling:

1. First investor offered $500,000 if I removed employee empowerment.
2. Second investor offered $1,000,000 if I removed employee empowerment.
3. Third investor was financial advisor to a famous actor and comedian, Bill Cosby. I shared a common friend with Cosby's best friend and music master. Was told my operation needed to grow and get some legs (other offices). Cosby was trying to put together a package to buy NBC at the time.
4. Fourth investor reviewed the package and said he would not buy. Since I had not required a confidentially agreement, he said he would develop a similar package for the time clock/payroll/printing applications. A year later he had the biggest booth at the annual business convention. Two years later, ironically, he died of cancer--a happy co-incidence.

Some events prompted an end to Managing w/o Managers:

1. A devastating fire on April 1, 1992, caused a halt in seeking investors.
2. A satellite resume services never made a profit with evidence of theft. In the main office, the check/cash revenue was 70/30 which was initially the same at the satellite office. In six months, the satellite's ratio dropped to 90/10 while the main office kept the 70/30 ratio. I closed down the satellite operation as the resume writer was skimming the cash revenue.
3. Walking in one day, I glanced at the server which ran the "Micro-Second Manager", a monitoring software showing employees activity. None of the dozen employees were on the clock. Calling a meeting, some of the excuses were pathetic, e.g., "I asked so-and-so to sign me in on the job." How can a person setting at a computer with management software think it is better to have someone else sign them in? If they were not going to self-manage and I was not going to manage them then that was the end of Managing w/o Managers. I felt like Sisyphus.
4. Feeling dumber than Don Quixote, I eliminated all services and employees except printing. Printing was highly profitable. I modified a common printing press (AB Dick) to produce perfect medical forms. I took off the speed control handle so the presses ran at the slowest speed. They rarely had the one-hour cleanup job from a pressman speeding up till a paper jam. In April, 1997, my firm printed over six million carbonless sheets. An NCR contest offered a NCR cup if you bought two cases of NCR carbonless paper. The contest top had Caribbean cruises and European trips. I won 6 cruises and 4 trips. I told NCR that it could keep the cups. A year after an AB Dick salesman visited my shop, AB Dick came out with the modification.
5. In 1999, I closed down printing so as to focus on Timism, moving to Minneapolis which was an internet hotspot teaming with nerds and fast broadband (I had a 100meg link in 2000). I lived like a homeless baby chicken--cheap, cheap, cheap.

An irony: The business was called AESOP--American Employee Stock Option Plan. The original 1982 hand-painted sign for a home-based typing service to support computer costs that were greater than the 1979 11.5% home mortgage.

I figured I'd use my 100wpm for more than being a dreamer. Later, a vanity plate for some rolling advertisement.

Like the fable-master, AESOP's Managing without Managers was believed to teach valuable lessons, but, One can lead a horse to water but not make it drink.

AESOP and Managing w/o Managers are part of my lifelong effort to share Timism to benefit more than just me. Brainbees for better democracy were first tested on touch-tone phones in 1989.

Over 30 years ago, Ross Perot, the independent US President in 1992, was offered the Tools of Timism: Dallas Morning News ad. I got a nasty phone call as a reward for my foolish $1,400 ad cost. Repeatedly, habitual politicians have said they do not like Timism's reforms of simple primaries, term limits, staggered elections and citizen legislation. They were like the two husbands who did not like independent-minded wives.

On a larger scale, Timism's multi-level reform effort (economics, politics and morality) has the goal of empowering "We, the people" with Daily Democracy, Capitalism per Capita, and Morality of More Time. Long-standing friends will tell you that my sense of wealth and worth is not measured in funny numbers on funny paper. The developing financial wealth from brainbees and grassroots gerrymandering will mostly go into the Global Democracy Tax for Ukraine's fight for Democracy.

On a personal scale, several years ago I became a de facto godfather. My wife and I did not have children because of her health problems and what might be called my mental health problem: My lifelong obsession with elucidating Timism and edifying others. For my godchild, I chose one who was at the bottom of the totem pole of opportunity--a black female. Were it not for Timism, I would be putzing around my century-old house wherein I have dwelled for 50 yearts with my goddaughter in-tow teaching her, tutoring her and mentoring her in cooking, home-ownership and school.

With her, it has been a joyful duty with an unexpected intellectual benefit--seeing and understanding Black Culture in the white man's world. I also saw first-hand the self-inflicted limitation of what is a "Project Person"--people who subsist on the emotional and financial methodone of welfare. Needed are viable reforms that end the addiction to public assistance. The reforms must observe that "Help that does not help the helpless to self-help is not help."

The deep secrets of Timism require better democracy to prevent their being maimed, mangled and murdered. There are hacks that all will want but few will deserve. Democracy will separate the wheat from the chaff. Noah's ark is only so big. The accelerating synergistic existential meltdown increasingly make Timism's inner-most pearls irrelevant like expensive fur coats in desert climate refugee camps.

Other printed books.