Self-management gets caricatured as a coastal, tech-sector affectation, the kind of thing that works for a startup with free snacks and nowhere else. The documented cases refuse that caricature. They are industrial, international, and in several instances decades old.
United States: no managers in a tomato plant
The least glamorous case is one of the most instructive. Morning Star, the world's largest tomato processor, has run without managers for more than two decades. As Gary Hamel (2011) documented, its several hundred full-time employees have no bosses, no titles, and no promotions, compensation decisions are made by peers, and coordination runs through self-authored commitments between colleagues. At the time of writing the firm had revenue above 700 million dollars and handled a quarter to a third of the tomatoes processed in the United States. This is not knowledge work with soft edges. It is heavy, seasonal, capital-intensive processing, run without the layer everyone assumes such an operation requires.
China: a giant broken into microenterprises
The largest-scale example comes from China. Under Zhang Ruimin, Haier reorganized itself into thousands of self-managed microenterprises, a model formal enough to receive a full Harvard Business School teaching case by Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Nancy Hua Dai (2018). Each microenterprise carries its own profit and loss and contracts with others internally, replacing managerial hierarchy with an internal market. That a company of Haier's size and origin built this deliberately, and that Harvard treats it as a serious case rather than a curiosity, is evidence that self-management is neither culturally Western nor limited to small firms.
Netherlands: 14,000 nurses, almost no managers
In the Netherlands, Buurtzorg delivers home care through self-managing nurse teams. Frank Martela and Sharda Nandram (2024) document more than 900 teams and around 14,700 staff run with just two directors, roughly 50 back-office people, and no middle managers, at an administrative overhead near 8 percent against a sector average around 25 percent from earlier KPMG analysis. The practitioner network around it describes Buurtzorg, founded by Jos de Blok, as the care organization that reshaped Dutch community nursing, and situates it within a broader movement catalyzed by Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations (Corporate Rebels, 2025).
Brazil: the case that started the conversation
And the tradition has a Brazilian anchor. Semco, under Ricardo Semler, became the reference point for workplace democracy, with self-set hours, profit sharing, and open books that let employees read the monthly accounts. It is the case that made the argument thinkable for a generation of managers, and it emerged not in Palo Alto but in Sao Paulo, in manufacturing.
What travels, and what does not
The map carries a caution. Several of these cases are documented as teaching cases and practitioner accounts rather than controlled studies, so they show existence and endurance rather than proof of superiority. And regional context shapes the terrain. Gallup's regional data put employee engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean at 30 percent, above the global figure, with 56 percent of workers thriving in life, the highest in over a decade (Gallup, 2026). High well-being alongside moderate engagement suggests fertile but uneven ground for participative models. What appears to travel is the principle, authority attached to teams and decisions rather than to a fixed hierarchy. What does not travel unchanged is the implementation, which each of these organizations tuned to its own work, sector, and culture.
The practical read
Stop treating self-management as a local eccentricity. The documented cases span US processing (Hamel, 2011), Chinese manufacturing at scale (Kanter and Dai, 2018), Dutch healthcare (Martela and Nandram, 2024), and Brazilian industry, which is a wide enough spread to retire the it-only-works-here objection. Read the cases for the principle rather than the template, because the principle generalizes and the template does not (Corporate Rebels, 2025). The right question is not whether self-management can work in your country or your industry. Some version already has in one very like it. The question is which version fits your work.
Sources
- Hamel (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers. Documents Morning Star running without managers for over two decades at 700 million dollars in revenue and a quarter to a third of US tomato processing. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- Kanter and Dai (2018). Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant. A Harvard Business School case documenting Haier's self-managed microenterprise model under Zhang Ruimin. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- Martela and Nandram (2024). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Documents 900-plus nurse teams and 14,700 staff with two directors and no middle managers. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Corporate Rebels Summit 2025. Situates Buurtzorg within a broader self-management movement catalyzed by Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025
- Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace, Regional Data. Latin America and the Caribbean show 30 percent engagement and 56 percent of workers thriving. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697850/state-of-the-global-workplace-regional-data.aspx