The people you manage carry your decisions home.
the practice
American-style organizations have long operated on the assumption that people are resources to be spent. The cost of that assumption is not abstract. It shows up as suffering — in the person who has stopped saying what he thinks, in the team that has quietly settled for the minimum, in the manager who has become someone he would not have recognized ten years ago.
This site is for managers who want no part of that and still have to make payroll. Its spine is Middle Way Management™ — a framework Dr. Darin R. Molnar worked out in the open between 2009 and 2013, put through a mixed-methods study, and has practiced with organizations since.
It is not a soft approach. It holds people to the highest standard it can name, and holds the manager to a higher one. It reduces, in the end, to a question you can answer on a Tuesday afternoon in a bad meeting: what sort of person am I?
Forty-one essays is a lot to walk into cold. These are the ways in, arranged by what is actually in front of you.
Everything here rests on four documents. Read them in order and you have the whole of it.
What Is Middle Way Management?
The founding statement, published March 2009.
Precepts of Middle Way Management
Five statements the practice rests on.
Percepts of Middle Way Management
Five assumptions people bring to it, answered.
The Middle Way Management Assessment Instrument (MWM-AI) Study
The mixed-methods study behind the MWM-AI.
The framework produced an instrument. A Delphi panel cut 100 candidate statements to 25; those went to a field test, then to 303 respondents, returning a reliability coefficient of .972.
It asks the people on the receiving end of management what they actually observe, which is the only place a management practice is real. Five minutes, scored in your browser, nothing stored unless you choose to contribute.
Compassion, mindfulness, suffering. The vocabulary invites an assumption, and the assumption is wrong. It was answered at the outset, in 2009, before anyone had the chance to raise it.
- Not a soft approach. It leaves no wiggle room for lapses in ethics or responsibility. Percept #1
- Not a Buddhist apologetic. It recruits no one to anything. Percept #4
- Not New Age. It is closer to a tradition with a 2,500-year record. Percept #5
41 essays, March 2009 to June 2013, written as one continuous argument — each one closes by naming what the next takes up. Republished in full, nothing cut, in the order they were written.
One of those essays, in July 2010, promised a book and named it: Middle Way Management: Where Compassion Meets the Bottom Line. It was published in September 2026.
The whole argument in one pass, with the hard cases worked through and an accounting of what the original claims got wrong. The essays, the study and the instrument stay here, free.
Managers underestimate what their position actually is. The founding statement puts it plainly: the social, emotional, and spiritual gravity of the positions held by managers is largely underestimated by managers themselves. A word, a look, a gesture from someone with authority lands harder than they know, and it keeps traveling — through the person, through their household, through everyone they meet that day.
That is the whole reason this site exists.