Return-to-office mandates lean on control. Talent markets lean on autonomy. In between sits a quieter revolution: organizations that run without conventional managers. This is not philosophy. It is a set of operating choices that some firms have used at national and even global scale.
What scale without bosses actually looks like
Start in Dutch home care. Buurtzorg runs more than 900 self-managing teams of up to 12 nurses, serving with around 14,700 employees as of January 2021, and operates without middle managers or supervisors (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The corporate center is small: two directors, roughly 50 people in the back office, and a cadre of 21 internal coaches who support about 950 teams. Crucially, those coaches hold no formal authority and are not responsible for the teams’ productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The organization’s earlier overhead ratio was cited at 8 percent versus a sector average of 25 percent in Dutch home care, a comparison based on a KPMG analysis from around 2015 rather than a current figure (Martela and Nandram, 2025). The same case also notes a less comfortable fact: Buurtzorg’s cost per hour was higher than peers in that period, €54.47 versus €48.74 (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
That pair of facts is the point. Self-management is not free efficiency. It is a structural bet that more decisions made closer to patients, with minimal bureaucratic drag, will pay off in outcomes that matter, even if some unit costs rise. The boundary conditions are explicit in the case: the model works better when teams can operate with low interdependence across units and when front-line professionals are both motivated and highly competent (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Home care fits that pattern. Much of modern knowledge work does too.
Factories and fields, without supervisors
Skeptics say this only travels in small service firms. Morning Star, a tomato processor, complicates that story. As reported in Harvard Business Review, the company has operated for more than two decades without managers. About 400 full-time employees and more than $700 million in revenue in 2010 were coordinated not by bosses but by peer commitments and peer-set compensation, with no titles and no promotions in the conventional sense (Hamel, 2011). The piece also reported that Morning Star accounted for an estimated 25 to 30 percent of all processed tomatoes in the United States at the time, and that the founder, Chris Rufer, described decades of double-digit growth largely funded internally (Hamel, 2011).
Treat those numbers as what they are: case reportage and founder claims, not randomized evidence. Still, they matter because they rebut a common objection. Industrial operations with heavy capital and seasonality can run without supervisors so long as two mechanisms are strong. First, people make clear, written commitments to one another about roles and outputs. Second, decisions that would normally sit with managers, including pay adjustments, are handled by peers, which creates direct accountability inside the team rather than through a chain of command (Hamel, 2011).
A Chinese giant’s experiment in entrepreneurial cells
On the other side of the world, Haier reframed the large-firm problem altogether. A Harvard Business School teaching case documents CEO Zhang Ruimin’s RenDanHeYi model, in which the company incubated microenterprises on business platforms that spanned five sectors at the time of the case: white goods transformation, investment and incubation, financial holdings, real estate, and the cultural industry (Kanter and Dai, 2018). Platform owners were explicitly not supervisors of the microenterprises. The structure was non-hierarchical by design, with microenterprises treated as entrepreneurial cells rather than departments (Kanter and Dai, 2018). The case also emphasizes Zhang’s ambition to eliminate internal walls and bring employees into “zero distance” with users.
This again points to the map. Self-management at Haier did not mean chaos. It meant a market-like architecture inside the firm where small units pursue opportunities on shared platforms. That is different from Buurtzorg’s professional guild model and Morning Star’s peer contract model, but the family resemblance is clear: small autonomous units, light central scaffolding, and decision rights shifted to the front.
A movement with global hubs
The spread of these practices is no longer a niche curiosity. The Corporate Rebels community has announced its second annual summit for November 20–21, 2025, in Barcelona, gathering around 200 organizations that identify with self-management and related models (Corporate Rebels, 2025). Speakers include Jos de Blok of Buurtzorg and Frederic Laloux, whose book Reinventing Organizations is often cited as a catalyst for the broader movement, alongside Lisa Gill, host of the Leadermorphosis podcast (Corporate Rebels, 2025). The same note describes Buurtzorg as operating with roughly 15,000 nurses organized in small autonomous teams and credits the model with transforming Dutch community care, a qualitative judgment that underscores the perceived impact rather than proving it (Corporate Rebels, 2025).
This matters because adoption patterns travel through networks. When 200 organizations trade playbooks, the outliers become templates. More important, the conversation has crossed sectors and regions, from European public services to Chinese manufacturing to American agribusiness.
How to read the map
Three implications stand out for leaders wrestling with autonomy and accountability.
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Start where the structure fits. The Buurtzorg case highlights the importance of low interdependence between units and strong professional competence (Martela and Nandram, 2025). Look for modular work where a small team can own a customer journey or asset end to end. Do not start with functions that depend on heavy cross-team handoffs.
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Replace bosses with scaffolding, not with nothing. Buurtzorg’s 21 coaches support about 950 teams without formal authority. Morning Star relies on peer commitments and peer-set pay. Haier uses platforms that enable microenterprises without supervising them (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Hamel, 2011; Kanter and Dai, 2018). Each case substitutes a lightweight mechanism for a managerial layer. Choose one, make it explicit, and staff it well.
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Measure what improves, and what may not. Buurtzorg’s earlier overhead comparison suggested lean administration, yet its hourly cost ran higher than peers at that time (Martela and Nandram, 2025). That is not a contradiction if the model delivers better outcomes or retention, but it is a reminder to track both costs and value, and to cite dated benchmarks with care.
The upshot is practical. Self-management is not an all-or-nothing creed. It is a portfolio of design choices that can be matched to the work. The cases from the Netherlands, the United States, and China show that when teams are small, roles are explicit, and the center is thin, autonomy can scale. If your return-to-office policy is really about performance, not presence, these models offer a sharper question. Where can you push decisions closer to the customer and retire a layer of supervision without sacrificing coordination? Answer that, then pilot it in one slice of the business. The map is usable if you read the contours.
Sources
- Martela and Nandram (2025). Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self-managing teams but no middle managers. Documents Buurtzorg’s structure, scale, coaching model, boundary conditions, and dated overhead and cost-per-hour figures that frame what self-management trades off. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-024-00184-y
- Hamel (2011). First, Let's Fire All the Managers. Reports Morning Star’s managerless model, peer-set commitments and pay, and its scale in U.S. tomato processing, illustrating industrial self-management. 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 RenDanHeYi model of microenterprises on non-supervisory platforms across five sectors, showing a large-firm variant of self-management. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- Corporate Rebels (2025). Corporate Rebels Summit 2025 — Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill (rede Rebel Cell). Notes a global community of about 200 organizations gathering around self-management and names key figures, signaling the movement’s reach. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025