The Corporate Rebels community, based in Heeze in the Netherlands, has done more than most to popularize self-management, curating cases and convening practitioners at its Rebel Forum. Enthusiasm is the movement's fuel. The most useful thing anyone attending can bring is the evidence that separates the parts of the story that hold from the parts that need a caveat.
The flagship case is genuinely strong
The movement's anchor is Buurtzorg, and it earns its place. The Corporate Rebels network describes Buurtzorg, founded by Jos de Blok, as the care organization that reshaped Dutch community nursing, operating with roughly 15,000 nurses in small autonomous teams, and situates it within a broader movement catalyzed by Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations (Corporate Rebels, 2025). That enthusiasm is backed by peer-reviewed work. Frank Martela and Sharda Nandram (2024) document more than 900 self-managing teams and around 14,700 staff run with two directors, no middle managers, and administrative overhead near 8 percent against a sector average around 25 percent. When the Forum celebrates Buurtzorg, it is celebrating something the research supports.
The principle has academic footing
The broader idea the movement promotes is not just anecdote either. Michael Lee and Amy Edmondson (2017) provide the scholarly definition of a self-managing organization, one that radically and systematically decentralizes authority away from the manager-subordinate relationship, and explain why it can outperform: hierarchy executes known tasks well in stable conditions but inhibits non-routine, cross-boundary problem-solving. The Rebel Forum's core claim, that many organizations would do better with authority distributed to teams, has genuine theoretical and empirical grounding.
The caveat the enthusiasm tends to skip
Here is where an honest attendee adds value. Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein (2022) warn that flat or bossless organizations can work under stable conditions but tend to struggle with innovation, scale, and longevity in dynamic environments, and, crucially, that many firms which call themselves flat still retain real bosses, only informal or renamed. Formal hierarchy is replaced by informal hierarchy rather than eliminated. This is not an argument against the movement. It is the discipline the movement needs: distributing authority is a design problem, and a poorly designed flat structure hides power rather than sharing it. The cautionary tale of Zappos, which imposed holacracy by ultimatum and then quietly retreated, is the version of this the movement rarely puts on the main stage.
The practical read
The Rebel Forum is worth attending, and worth attending with a skeptic's notebook. The flagship case is real and documented (Corporate Rebels, 2025; Martela and Nandram, 2024), the principle that distributed authority suits non-routine work has scholarly support (Lee and Edmondson, 2017), and the honest caveat, that flatness struggles at scale and quietly regrows informal hierarchy when left undesigned, is equally real (Foss and Klein, 2022). The right posture toward the movement is neither cynicism nor discipleship. It is to take the principle seriously, copy the design intent rather than the org chart, and build the explicit structures, open information, clear decision rights, coaching, that keep a flat organization from collapsing into an unaccountable one.
Sources
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Corporate Rebels Summit 2025. Describes Buurtzorg's roughly 15,000 nurses in autonomous teams and situates the movement around Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025
- Martela and Nandram (2024). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Documents the structure and low overhead behind the movement's flagship case. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations. Defines the self-managing organization and explains where distributed authority outperforms hierarchy. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Foss and Klein (2022). Who's the boss? The persistence of entrepreneurial hierarchy in flat organizations. Flat firms struggle at scale and often replace formal hierarchy with informal, unaccountable hierarchy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8