Executives are still arguing about offices and oversight. The harder question sits underneath: must coordination rely on layers of managers, or can it live closer to the work? A surprising global map says the second path is viable in more places than most leaders assume, though it comes with boundaries and trade-offs.
The Dutch blueprint: thousands working without middle managers
Buurtzorg, the home care organization founded in the Netherlands, runs on small, self-managing teams and almost no hierarchy at scale. As of January 2021 it had more than 900 self-managing teams, each with at most 12 nurses, and about 14,700 employees, all supported by only two directors and roughly 50 back-office staff, with no middle managers or supervisors at all (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The mechanism is lighter than most firms would dare: just 21 internal coaches for roughly 950 teams, about one coach for more than 45 teams, and these coaches have no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The economics are not the caricature of autocracy-free utopia. A KPMG estimate from around 2015 put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent compared with a 25 percent sector average in Dutch home care, a dated but notable contrast that the authors cite (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Yet the cost per hour at Buurtzorg has been higher than peers, reported as €54.47 versus €48.74, a reminder that lower administrative cost does not automatically yield the lowest unit prices (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
Most important are the boundary conditions the case authors identify. The model works best when interdependence between teams is low and when frontline professionals are both highly motivated and competent, conditions that fit district nursing particularly well (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That is the portable lesson for leaders: push decisions to the edge where tasks can be owned locally and the people closest to customers are capable of running the system.
A manufacturing outlier in the United States
If self-management were only a public services story, skeptics could dismiss it as a professional enclave. Morning Star, the tomato processor profiled in Harvard Business Review, undercuts that move. According to the report, the company has operated for more than two decades with no bosses, no titles, and no promotions. Compensation decisions are made by peers. It had about 400 full-time employees and revenue above $700 million in 2010, while processing an estimated 25 to 30 percent of all the tomatoes handled annually in the United States (Hamel, 2011). The article attributes sustained double-digit growth in volumes, revenues, and profits over 20 years to the founder’s approach, contrasting it with a roughly 1 percent industry average, and notes that growth was largely financed internally, though these are the company’s self-reported outcomes (Hamel, 2011).
Treat the Morning Star example for what it is: credible reportage, not experimental science. Even so, the scale, capital intensity, and commodity economics make it a useful counterpoint. It shows that peer commitments and local accountability can coordinate large seasonal operations without a supervisory spine when the work can be specified clearly and measured in output.
China’s giant and the platform logic of autonomy
Haier offers a different pattern again. A Harvard Business School teaching case documents the company’s shift under CEO Zhang Ruimin to a network of self-managed microenterprises situated on business platforms across five sectors, with the platform owners explicitly not acting as supervisors to these units (Kanter and Dai, 2018). The authors’ treatment signals academic interest in the approach, even if a teaching case is not peer-reviewed research. The structure is notable because it reframes the corporate center from a command hub into an enabling platform, and it does so at a scale few Western firms would attempt.
Where Buurtzorg pushes discretion to clinical teams and Morning Star to production cells and peers, Haier distributes it to entrepreneurial microenterprises that live and die by customer response. The throughline is consistent. Authority migrates to the edge when the organization designs for it, and when the center removes the obligation to supervise in favor of the obligation to enable (Kanter and Dai, 2018).
The movement dimension, and what actually travels
This is not a fringe. The practitioner community that studies and practices self-management continues to widen. The Corporate Rebels network, for instance, convenes its 2025 summit in Barcelona on 20–21 November, bringing together about 200 organizations that experiment with these models, and highlights voices such as Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, and Lisa Gill (Corporate Rebels, 2025). Anecdote is not evidence, but it is a signal of diffusion across sectors and geographies.
So what travels across these cases, and what does not?
- Push decision rights to the smallest viable unit that touches customers. Buurtzorg’s teams own their caseloads. Morning Star’s peers own roles and commitments rather than job titles. Haier’s microenterprises own market-facing bets within platform constraints (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Hamel, 2011; Kanter and Dai, 2018).
- Replace supervision with transparent agreements and support. In each case, the center supplies services or coaching without formal authority to command. Buurtzorg’s coaches serve many teams and cannot direct them. Haier’s platform owners do not supervise microenterprises. Morning Star relies on peer review for compensation decisions instead of manager ratings (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Kanter and Dai, 2018; Hamel, 2011).
- Accept trade-offs and context limits. Lower overhead does not guarantee lower prices, as Buurtzorg’s higher hourly rate illustrates, and dated comparisons should be treated with caution (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The approach fits best where work can be modularized and done by skilled practitioners, which is why nursing teams, production units with clear throughput metrics, and entrepreneurial microenterprises appear repeatedly (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Hamel, 2011; Kanter and Dai, 2018).
The practical read for leaders
Three moves emerge for any executive exploring self-management in 2026. First, map your work by interdependence. Start where units can own a customer outcome end to end with minimal handoffs, a condition highlighted in the Buurtzorg case (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Second, swap managers for enabling services. Concentrate scarce central talent on platforms, tooling, and coaching without the right to command, a pattern visible at Buurtzorg and Haier (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Kanter and Dai, 2018). Third, formalize peer accountability where measurement is clean. Morning Star’s account shows that in output-rich environments, peers can set and review commitments, even for pay, when the system makes expectations explicit (Hamel, 2011).
Self-management is not ideology. It is organizational design tuned to context, backed by cases in health care, manufacturing, and consumer goods. The promise is not manager-free romance, it is proximity to the customer and faster learning. The test is whether leaders can specify the unit of ownership, remove supervisory clutter, and invest in supports that help teams run themselves. That is the real map.
Sources
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers, Journal of Organization Design. Documents Buurtzorg’s scale, coach model without authority, boundary conditions, dated overhead comparison, and higher hourly cost, grounding the Dutch case and its limits. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Hamel (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers, Harvard Business Review. Reports Morning Star’s managerless model, scale, peer-based pay decisions, market share, and growth claims, illustrating self-management in manufacturing. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- Kanter and Dai (2018). Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant (HBS Case 318-104). Describes Haier’s microenterprise model on platforms where platform owners do not supervise, indicating a large-scale, non-supervisory structure. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Corporate Rebels Summit 2025 — Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill. Notes a 2025 Barcelona summit with about 200 organizations and key figures, signaling the spread of self-management practices. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025