SAN JOSE — Meridian Solutions, the enterprise-software firm that spent fourteen months and approximately $4 million on a consultancy-led "organizational renaissance," has emerged from the process with a fully flat corporate hierarchy containing twenty-three discrete and carefully maintained levels, the company confirmed Thursday.

The restructuring, which the firm's leadership has described in three separate press releases as "a seismic dismantling of legacy power structures," preserves every management tier that existed under the previous org chart while ensuring that no tier is referred to as management. Senior Vice Presidents are now "Principal Synthesis Collaborators." Their direct reports are "Senior Delivery Collaborators." Below them sit "Delivery Collaborators," followed by "Associate Delivery Collaborators," followed by "Collaborator Candidates," a title that applies exclusively to interns and which, sources confirm, still requires two rounds of approval to access the supply closet.

"What we've built here is something genuinely radical," said Meridian Solutions Chief People Experience Architect Donovan Presswell, who previously held the title of Chief Human Resources Officer and whose salary, responsibilities, and parking spot have remained unchanged. "There are no bosses at Meridian anymore. There are only collaborators collaborating at different collaborational altitudes."

"The org chart is flat in the sense that we printed it on flat paper." — Renata Quigg, Associate Synthesis Collaborator (Level 11)

Dr. Fionnuala Brecht, Senior Research Fellow in Nomenclature-Based Governance at the Zurich Institute for Workplace Ontology, said the structure was consistent with a pattern her team has studied extensively. "What firms like Meridian discover is that the path to a flat hierarchy runs directly through the construction of a new hierarchy," she said. "You can remove every rung from a ladder. You simply have to replace each rung with a platform, give it an inspiring name, and tell employees the ladder is gone."

Employees interviewed for this article largely agreed the new structure was identical to the old one, with the added complexity of needing to determine, in any given meeting, whether the most senior person present was a Meridian Fellow, a Principal Synthesis Collaborator, or a Legacy Alignment Steward, which is a title that exists only for two people and which no one, including those two people, can fully define.

The company's CEO has not received a new title as part of the restructuring. His business cards still read "CEO," which Presswell described as "a deliberate act of radical transparency."

Meridian Solutions plans to host an all-hands celebration of the flat hierarchy next Tuesday. Attendance is optional. Attendance records will be reviewed during performance calibration, which is now called a "growth resonance conversation" and takes place between a Collaborator and whichever of their seventeen indirect managers schedules it first.