So you're not going to get off that easy. I'll wade through it eventually.

???

Get off of what?   You're the guy with the big plan for solving the world's problems.  I'm just suggesting some organizational impediments you might run into.  This is all just hypothetical to me.

I tell you what, when you get it off the ground and working, why don't you give me a call, if I'm still on this planet.  I'll be happy to come check it out.

If you are confused, or if you aren't interested, it hardly matters to me in the slightest.  But here's what you said that seems to be causing you confusion:

A corporation can be subject to democratic decision making, as when the board of directors of a syndicalist corporation is elected by the workforce (sometimes including, sometimes excluding the management) on the basis of one workshare, one vote. It can be quasi-democratic, as when the board of directors is formally voted by a collective of equity owners, but in reality a majority of the board of directors is selected by the executive management that is in turn hired by the board of directors. That latter situation is what we tend to have now among large transnational commercial corporations, which is subject to less accountability and control than most military hierarchies.

So using hierarchy as a shorthand for those types of hierarchies where ultimate authority runs from top-down confuses me, since in general terms ultimate authority can run in either direction, depending on the system of governance in place.

All those "can be, what ifs" and so forth are included in what I was pointing out.  The can be's have to solve a problem of complexity, and I don't see you addressing that.  Maybe you are in your mind.  But raising a bunch of what ifs I've already included isn't getting you anywhere near it I can see.

I didn't use hierarchy as a shorthand for authority, as you suggested in your above quote, you did.  Here are a couple of the things I said to explain why I'd say that:

Hypothetically the hierarchies that are similar to a military command hierarchy would be in my paraphrase "tyrannical." But that can be a semantic quibble we can dismiss for now.

----->

The main comparison I'm making has to do with a general problem of groups of humans organizing for a purpose.  How can that be achieved? I'm suggesting that historically there have been a range of human organizational options experimented with, from various forms of democratic decision making, which is potentially quite efficient on a small scale, to a more managed hierarchical form that generally ends up with some pyramidal decision making shape, correlated with authoritarian organizing, when the scale of the project and the group involved grows to substantial size.

I was overly hasty, I see, and I used "forms of democratic decision making" and I see I needed to be more specific in order not to be confusing. I should have begun with "individual participatory decision making," which is in my mind democratic, but there is a range of decision making in what's referred to as "democratic" that goes into various degrees of separation from participation to representative.

Again, the quibble here would seem to be with semantics, and I would suggest not simply democracy, then, as a base line, but participatory democracy.

As the core problem, I'd point out that I merely suggested that, as the problem solving and the the size and differentiation of group activity gets more complex, the tendency is towards top down management and CEO style decision making, because of the efficiencies of that style over a participatory decision making style, which I said is messy.  To make that point I called attention to the possibility that militaries that could make their decisions by participatory means in the heat of battle, or by hierarchical chain of command structures.  I didn't think it would take that much imagination to figure out what would happen if every decision was made by group discussion and put to a vote in the heat of battle.  I'm thinking there's a correlation to heat of battle when for profit corporations are under intense competition.

If you know of any large multi tiered and complex corporate organization, it could be for profit or governmental, organized on a participatory decision making basis, I'd like to know about at least one that can work.  Give me an example.  I've been a participant observer in some in corporate training programs and I'm aware of a range of modernizing tactics designed to attempt to improve the information flow so that it will also come from bottom up.  But all of those I'm aware of always have the default for emergencies that resort to command style decision making, just as the US government has its war time president default.

I asked that you explain what you mean by "dynamic efficiency" with regards to this problem of complexity and decision making, you haven't offered anything yet.  If you have some literature to reference, I asked that you would, again you haven't.  To refresh your memory, here's what I wrote:

Now, if you are equating that with "tyrannical, totalitarian regimes" I am wondering what you might mean by "static efficiency" when applied to corporate form of organizing?  I don't see that organizational form as a carefully considered element of the discussions in the comparisons of, say, the efficient firms versus monopolistic firms, in my review of "dynamic efficiency vs. static efficiency." (Here are a couple of several sources I just looked at to refresh my memory:  Dynamic versus Static Efficiency, Interpreting Sustainability in Economic Terms: Dynamic Efficiency Plus Intergenerational Equity) If you have some resources that discuss this, I'd appreciate seeing them.  (note that the links to those two sources can be found in my post further up)

What I'm wondering is this: Are you suggesting a modern, transnational corporation as organized equates to static efficiency?  Because that's the organizational structure I'm referring to.  These organizational structures compose much of the basis for competition for control and allocation of resources, and as organizational structures, they are much more competitive in harvesting the world's "resources" than any other form devised so far. "Competition" is a dynamic feature in the discussions on efficiency.  So organizational form itself seems like a worthy point to examine, and why I've brought it up.

While you've noted the owners might have some quasi democratic something or another to say about the organization of these corporate entities (usually has to do with how they get repaid for their investment), you haven't exactly addressed the fact that the functional bureaucracy of the corporation, from the top management to the individual workers, remains this sort of command hierarchy for most of these major transnationals.

By the way, your convergent version of a syndicalist  corporate democracy with a transnational corporations confuses an ownership of investors with an ownership of workers in the same paragraph sort of blended those features.  I would think they need to be looked at separately and in the context of size and complexity that I'm suggesting, which is the problem I see that groups face in organizing to achieve a purpose.

You've described some things about hierarchy and you've mentioned some possibilities that appear to me to be well within the spectrum I am referring to.  But it doesn't seem to me you have really heard what I'm saying about the problem of complexity and group organization.  

Hierarchy, whether it's a democratic form or whether it's a chain of command organization, is what occurs with a complexity of coordinating tasks in a group problem solving set of events.  With that goes a specialization process, as the solution involves more and more elements.  That's what I see as the key force driving the evolution of hierarchies.  

I've suggested that the movement has been towards an authoritarian management style when efficiency becomes a factor.  The pressure for efficiency can be described in terms of margins of return. This is merely a body of theory I've encountered, if you are interested, I can steer you to better minds than mine.  If you aren't, it wouldn't bother me in the least.

"I would pillow myself on the stream, for I'd like to cleanse my ears" - Sun Chu (218-293) Chinese recluse