Return-to-office battles and a new wave of employee monitoring have pushed many firms back to command-and-control. Yet a different map exists, one that routes around supervisors. In three very different settings, large organizations are operating with minimal hierarchy. The evidence is not experimental and it does not settle causation, but it is specific enough to serve as a guide to where self-management works and why.
Netherlands: scale without middle managers
Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care provider, runs more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses each, with roughly 14,700 employees as of January 2021 (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The corporate core is deliberately thin: two directors, about 50 people in the back office, and no middle managers or supervisors at all (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Instead of line bosses, the company sustains scale with just 21 internal coaches supporting roughly 950 teams, about one coach for more than 45 teams, and these coaches hold no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The financial footprint is unusual. A KPMG assessment from around 2015 put Buurtzorg’s overhead at 8 percent, compared with a 25 percent sector average in Dutch home care at that time (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That historical comparison supports the claim that self-management can be administratively lean. It does not mean the service is cheaper per hour. The same case reports Buurtzorg’s hourly cost at €54.47 versus €48.74 elsewhere, a reminder that autonomy and professional discretion may raise unit costs while improving other outcomes that the case does not quantify experimentally (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The boundary conditions matter. The authors identify three: relatively low interdependence between teams, frontline professionals who are both motivated and competent, and services where quality depends on local judgment rather than centralized direction (Martela and Nandram, 2025). This is a design principle, not a slogan. It explains why Buurtzorg’s small, locally accountable teams can plan schedules, coordinate with GPs, and respond to patient needs without a layer of middle managers. Where interdependence is high or skills are uneven, the same structure may not travel.
China: a giant splits into entrepreneurs
Haier, the Chinese appliance maker, reorganized into a network of microenterprises under the RenDanHeYi model. A formal Harvard Business School teaching case documents that shift and is explicit that platform owners did not act as supervisors of the microenterprises that sat on top of those business platforms (Kanter and Dai, 2018). The point was to remove internal walls and move toward what CEO Zhang Ruimin framed as “zero distance” between employees and users, so that teams operated as entrepreneurs accountable to customers rather than to bosses inside a chart (Kanter and Dai, 2018).
Unlike Buurtzorg’s single-sector focus, Haier spread the model across several platforms that included white goods transformation, investment and incubation, financial holdings, real estate, and a cultural industry portfolio at the time of the case (Kanter and Dai, 2018). That breadth suggests self-management can be an architecture, not only a unit-level practice. It also complicates attribution. The case is not a randomized trial and it does not isolate which elements drive performance. What it does show, with institutional detail, is how a large manufacturer stripped supervisory roles from internal platforms and treated operating units as self-steering businesses within a wider ecosystem (Kanter and Dai, 2018).
United States: no bosses in the tomato business
Morning Star, the California-based tomato processor, has operated for decades with no bosses, no titles, and no promotions. Decisions on pay are made by peers, not by managers, and the company reported more than US$700 million in revenue in 2010 with about 400 full-time employees at the time (Hamel, 2011). It is repeatedly cited as the largest processor of tomatoes in the world, accounting for 25 to 30 percent of all processed tomatoes in the United States, which confronts the idea that self-management cannot handle scale or heavy industry (Hamel, 2011).
The growth story in that account is striking and should be read with care. Founder Chris Rufer described volumes, revenues, and profits growing at double-digit rates over 20 years, versus an industry that grew around 1 percent per year, with expansion largely financed internally (Hamel, 2011). This is a case narrative, not audited causal evidence. Still, the operational mechanisms are specific enough for practitioners to examine: clear peer commitments, decision rights pushed to people doing the work, and no supervisory layer to resolve disputes by fiat. The lesson is not that managers never add value. It is that in certain settings, disciplined peer governance can substitute for them.
The network behind the map
These cases are not isolated curiosities. A global community has formed around them. Corporate Rebels, a Netherlands-based network, convenes a 2025 summit in Barcelona that brings together roughly 200 organizations experimenting with self-management. Speakers include Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations, Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok, and Lisa Gill, host of the Leadermorphosis podcast, a lineup that signals both the pedigree and the diversity of the field (Corporate Rebels, 2025). This is reportage, not peer review, yet it captures a fact on the ground. The movement now spans healthcare, manufacturing, and agriculture, and it has enough critical mass to compare notes in public.
What leaders should take from this map
Three reads stand out. First, structure follows work. Buurtzorg’s model depends on loosely coupled teams of skilled professionals who do not need tight cross-team synchronization, which is why 21 coaches without authority can support hundreds of teams (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Second, remove supervisors only if you replace them with credible mechanisms. Haier’s platform architecture and Morning Star’s peer-based commitments are different answers to the same question of coordination without bosses (Kanter and Dai, 2018; Hamel, 2011). Third, check your cost logic. Administrative overhead can be low while hourly service costs are high, as the Buurtzorg case shows, which means the case for self-management rests on value delivered, not on a promise of across-the-board savings (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
None of this says self-management is a cure-all. The evidence here is case-based, not experimental, and some claims are self-reported. It does say there is a credible map. If your teams do judgment-heavy work with modest interdependence, the Dutch route is open. If you run a diversified enterprise and want entrepreneurship at the edge, the Chinese route offers an architecture to study. If you are in a capital-intensive business and want to test peer governance, the Californian route shows it can be done. Start by naming the coordination problems your managers actually solve. Then decide, with the cases in view, whether peers and platforms can solve them better.
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 900+ self-managing teams, two directors, 21 non-authority coaches, historical 8% overhead vs 25% sector, and higher hourly costs, plus boundary conditions. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Kanter and Dai (2018). Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant, HBS Case 318-104. Describes Haier’s RenDanHeYi model with platform owners not supervising microenterprises across multiple sectors. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- Hamel (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers, Harvard Business Review. Reports Morning Star’s no-boss structure, peer-based pay decisions, 2010 revenue over $700M with ~400 employees, and scale in U.S. tomato processing. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Big News: Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill at Corporate Rebels Summit 2025. Notes a 2025 Barcelona summit convening about 200 organizations and profiles leading figures in the self-management movement. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025