When a manager anywhere in the world goes looking for proof that companies can run without bosses, the trail leads with surprising regularity to a small country on the North Sea. That is not a coincidence of a single famous firm. The Netherlands has built the infrastructure of a movement, and the mix of ingredients explains why the idea keeps taking root there while it struggles to spread elsewhere.
A flagship case that others study
Every movement needs an existence proof, and Dutch self-management has an unusually strong one. Buurtzorg, the community nursing organization founded by the former nurse Jos de Blok, is the case that skeptics have to answer. Martela and Nandram (2025) document it running more than 900 self-managing teams with about 14,700 employees, two directors, roughly fifty back-office staff, and no middle managers at all, coordinated by a thin ring of coaches who hold no formal authority. Corporate Rebels (2025) describe the same organization, with its roughly 15,000 nurses, as the one that revolutionized community care in the Netherlands.
What makes Buurtzorg powerful as a flagship is not that it is bossless but that it is large, regulated, and in a sector where mistakes have consequences. It is hard to dismiss self-management as a toy for creative agencies when the exemplar is a home care provider at national scale. A country that produces one such case gains a reference point. A country whose researchers, writers, and practitioners then organize around that case gains a movement.
The scale is what makes the case impossible to wave away. Martela and Nandram (2025) document teams capped at around twelve nurses, supported by only 21 coaches across the whole network, coaches who hold no formal authority and are not accountable for productivity. That is not a small, forgiving structure that works because everyone knows everyone. It is a deliberate architecture that has held at the scale of a mid-sized corporation. When a skeptic asks whether self-management survives contact with regulation, staffing shortages, and clinical risk, the Netherlands has a documented answer sitting on the table.
The network around the case
The second ingredient is the ecosystem. Corporate Rebels (2025), the writing and research outfit run by the Dutch pair Pim de Morree and Joost Minnaar, has spent years cataloguing pioneering firms and connecting them. They convene the Corporate Rebels Summit, whose second edition gathered roughly 200 organizations experimenting with self-management, and they anchor a wider network of practitioners. Around that hub sit the movement's recognizable voices: Frederic Laloux, whose book Reinventing Organizations is widely credited as the catalyst of the global wave of self-managed, so-called Teal organizations and who rarely accepts speaking invitations, and Lisa Gill, who hosts the Leadermorphosis podcast and works closely with self-managing teams.
Naming these figures is the point, but so is a warning that this article respects: they are voices, not data. Corporate Rebels (2025) is a community and reportage source, not a controlled study, and nothing here should be read as evidence that the Dutch approach measurably outperforms conventional management. What the ecosystem provides is something subtler and still valuable: a place where an isolated experiment stops feeling reckless because two hundred other organizations are trying versions of the same thing, and where a leader can find a mechanism to borrow and a practitioner to ask.
Why geography matters more than it should
The uncomfortable truth is that ideas need a home before they can travel. Morning Star, the American tomato processor Hamel (2011) made famous, is every bit as radical as Buurtzorg, arguably more so, having run for over two decades with no managers, no titles, and peer-set pay. Yet Morning Star has spawned no comparable American movement. It sits as a brilliant, somewhat lonely case in a business culture that admired it and moved on. The difference is not the quality of the example. It is the presence or absence of the surrounding network that turns an example into a practice others adopt.
The Netherlands assembled all three ingredients at once: an undeniable flagship in Buurtzorg, a documented body of evidence in work like Martela and Nandram (2025), and an organizing hub in Corporate Rebels (2025) that gathers the pioneers and the writers in one room every year. That combination is why the Low Countries function as the axis of the self-management world, and why a leader elsewhere so often ends up reading Dutch material.
The practical implication cuts against the usual advice. A company that wants to try self-management should invest less energy in finding the perfect internal design and more in plugging into a community that has already made the mistakes. Buurtzorg did not emerge from a vacuum, and neither did the confidence to copy it. If the model is going to spread beyond one small country, other regions will need to build their own version of the Dutch ecosystem: a credible local case, honest documentation of it, and a gathering where the people trying it can compare notes without being told they are crazy.
Sources
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Big news: Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill at Corporate Rebels Summit 2025. Primary source for the Dutch ecosystem: the Summit's ~200 organizations, the Rebel Cell network, and the named voices Laloux, de Blok and Gill. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025
- Martela, F. and Nandram, S. (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Provides the documented flagship case that anchors the Dutch movement. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Hamel, G. (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers. Morning Star serves as the equally radical American case that never grew a comparable movement. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers