Return-to-office mandates and AI rollouts have given leaders a pretext to recentralize. Yet the most interesting organizational experiments of the past two decades have moved the other way, stripping out layers and handing decisions to the edge. Skeptics say this cannot scale, or that it only works in quirky startups. The map says otherwise: the Netherlands, the United States, and China all offer mature, if differently shaped, proofs of concept.
What scale without managers looks like in Dutch health care
Buurtzorg’s home-care model is the clearest large-scale case. According to Martela and Nandram (2025), by January 2021 the organization had about 14,700 employees working in more than 900 self-managing teams, each capped at roughly 12 nurses. There were just two directors and around 50 people in the back office, with no middle managers or supervisors at all. Teams are supported by a very lean internal coaching pool—21 coaches for roughly 950 teams—whose role is developmental and advisory. The coaches have no formal authority and no responsibility for team productivity (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
Cost structure is often where bureaucracy hides. On that score, the case documents an earlier KPMG estimate that Buurtzorg’s overhead was 8 percent compared with a sector average of 25 percent in Dutch home care, a historical figure rather than a current one. The same source notes a countervailing fact: Buurtzorg’s hourly rate was higher than peers (€54.47 versus €48.74), a reminder that lower administrative layers do not automatically mean cheaper unit prices (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The authors are explicit about boundary conditions. The model performs best where interdependence between teams is low, frontline professionals are both motivated and competent, and work can be owned locally without constant cross-team coordination (Martela and Nandram, 2025). In other words, Buurtzorg’s design matches its product: care delivered in neighborhoods by small teams that can respond quickly to patient needs.
A U.S. processor shows it is not just for services
If self-management were only for services, the story would end there. Morning Star, the largest tomato processor in the United States, suggests otherwise. As reported by Hamel (2011), the company operated for more than two decades with no bosses, no titles, no promotions, and peer-based compensation. At the time of that report, Morning Star had around 400 full-time employees and revenue above $700 million in 2010. The firm accounted for roughly 25 to 30 percent of all tomatoes processed annually in the U.S., and the founder, Chris Rufer, stated that volumes, revenues, and profits had grown at double-digit rates for 20 years, compared with an industry average near 1 percent per year. Those are case-based claims rather than experimental evidence, but they are hard to dismiss given the firm’s market share (Hamel, 2011).
Mechanism matters. Morning Star runs on explicit peer contracts called Colleague Letters of Understanding, which specify commitments and performance expectations between individuals and teams. That design replaces a manager’s coordinating role with transparent agreements and social accountability (Hamel, 2011). It is a factory-floor answer to the question Buurtzorg answers in home care: who decides, and on what basis, when no boss does?
China’s platform twist on autonomy at scale
Haier adds a third variant. An HBS teaching case by Kanter and Dai (2018) documents how the company reorganized into self-managed microenterprises under CEO Zhang Ruimin’s RenDanHeYi philosophy. At the time of the case, Haier incubated microenterprises on business platforms across five sectors. Crucially, the platform owners were not supervisors of the microenterprises. The structure is non-hierarchical in the supervisory sense, with platform governance and market-like relationships rather than line management. Zhang’s aim, summarized in the case, was to eliminate internal walls so employees could achieve “zero distance” to users (Kanter and Dai, 2018).
This is a different route to the same destination. Instead of small local teams serving neighborhoods, Haier built entrepreneurial units connected by platforms that set standards and enable resource sharing without acting like bosses. The case confirmation matters less as proof and more as signal: a global manufacturer made autonomy the organizing logic, and the model merited formal treatment for executive classrooms (Kanter and Dai, 2018).
A movement with its own venues and vernacular
Anecdotes do not add up to a field until there are places to compare notes. The Corporate Rebels community reports that its 2025 summit in Barcelona brings together around 200 organizations that practice self-management, with figures such as Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, and Lisa Gill on the roster (Corporate Rebels, 2025). Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations is often credited as a catalyst for the movement. The point here is not to add another case but to note that self-management now has stable forums, a shared vocabulary, and peer exchange across countries and industries (Corporate Rebels, 2025).
What ties these cases together is not ideology, it is fit. Three patterns recur in the evidence and reportage.
- Modular work with clear customer seams. Buurtzorg’s neighborhood teams, Morning Star’s process units bound by explicit peer contracts, and Haier’s microenterprises linked to user outcomes all keep decision rights close to where value is created (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Hamel, 2011; Kanter and Dai, 2018).
- Governance substitutes for supervision. Coaches without authority at Buurtzorg, peer letters at Morning Star, and platforms that enable rather than command at Haier show how roles and rules can coordinate work without managers in the middle (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Hamel, 2011; Kanter and Dai, 2018).
- Boundary conditions matter. Where interdependence is high and skills are uneven, self-management strains. The Buurtzorg case states this plainly, and the industrial and platform variants suggest why: autonomy is easiest to scale when the work can be partitioned and standards can be codified without daily escalation (Martela and Nandram, 2025; Kanter and Dai, 2018).
The practical implication is narrow but powerful. Do not debate self-management in the abstract. Map your work. Start pilots where interdependence is lowest and customer proximity is clearest. Replace monthly supervisory check-ins with one of three concrete mechanisms: a small internal coach group that has no authority but real expertise, peer-to-peer commitment letters published internally, or a platform team that sets standards and provides shared services without approving day-to-day choices. Track two numbers side by side: administrative share of costs and response time to end users. The Buurtzorg evidence warns that lower overhead in one period does not guarantee lower unit prices in another, so watch both cost-to-serve and speed-to-serve rather than assuming one follows the other (Martela and Nandram, 2025).
The broader lesson for leaders wrestling with hybrid work and AI is about confidence in the edge. These cases do not prove that hierarchy should vanish. They do show that large organizations in very different contexts can push authority to the front line and still coordinate at scale. If your next reorg begins by counting managers, you are asking the wrong first question. Ask where a customer would draw the boundaries of the work, then build the lightest governance you can to make those boundaries hold.
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, lean overhead as estimated circa 2015, coach model without authority, and boundary conditions. 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 system, peer contracts, market share, and growth claims from the founder. 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), Harvard Business School. Describes Haier’s microenterprise system on platforms where owners are not supervisors and the goal of “zero distance” to users. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54098
- Corporate Rebels (2015). Corporate Rebels Summit 2025 — Laloux, Jos de Blok, Lisa Gill (Rebel Cell). Notes a Barcelona summit hosting around 200 self-management pioneers and highlights Laloux’s catalytic role. https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/big-news-frederic-laloux-jos-de-blok-lisa-gill-at-corporate-rebels-summit-2025