A field guide to Zero Distance: 100+ ZeroDX Award 2026 nominees

10Pines

10Pines is a software development company founded in Buenos Aires in 2009, when four developers set out to close what they saw as a gap in the industry: companies that talked about Agile values like trust and collaboration while still running on ordinary hierarchy underneath. They chose not to compromise on that. Managers, fixed titles, and approval chains never existed at the company; they weren't phased out later, they were simply left out from the start. Seventeen years on, 10Pines is close to 100 employees, holds B Corp certification, and has built software for clients including Starbucks, Burger King, Claro, and JP Morgan.

10Pines runs on circles: small working groups people join by interest rather than by assignment, covering areas such as recruitment, wellbeing, and finance. No single person represents a circle to the rest of the company, and nobody sits above another circle in a chain of command. The result works more like a network of overlapping groups than a management structure, with people moving between circles as their interests shift.

That structure is what makes Action possible. Anything that affects the whole company goes to a monthly meeting open to every employee, and a proposal only moves forward once every strong objection to it has been resolved. A strong objection is something a person genuinely cannot live with: a real risk, or a real conflict with the point of the decision, not a personal preference. Each objection gets built into a new draft of the proposal, and the group keeps iterating until nothing is left unresolved. For anything that doesn't need the whole company in a room, 10Pines runs the same process through Loomio, an online tool that lets people raise and settle proposals as they come up instead of waiting for the next monthly meeting.

Jorge Silva, founder, points to one example that shows the mechanism working end to end. A wellness working group proposed a company gym membership for the staff. The proposal reached the monthly meeting, and one person objected: she swam at a local club, and the plan didn't cover that, so approving it as written would have left out someone the benefit was meant to help. Nobody voted to overrule her. Instead the group folded her objection into a new version of the proposal, a fixed monthly amount employees could put toward any physical activity of their choosing, whether a club membership, a pool, or even home workout equipment, which some people ended up buying. The result reached more people than the original plan, precisely because one person's objection was treated as something to design around rather than overrule.

Partners for 10Pines comes with a specific frame. As a certified B Corp, 10Pines gives preference to other certified B Corps when buying office supplies, event materials, or consulting services, partly to keep its own spending consistent with its values and partly to help grow that certification network. 

Half of the company's annual profit, tracked and shared with staff every month as it accrues, gets divided among every employee at year end. The formula weighs three things: how many years someone has worked in the industry, how many hours they logged that year, and how long they've been at 10Pines. It isn't an equal split, and Silva is upfront that it was never meant to be; the goal is fairness, and the formula gets revisited every year to check it still produces the distribution the company wants. There are no bonuses tied to individual or team performance, only this single, company-wide pool. Whether the resulting payout regularly clears a meaningful share of someone's total compensation, and whether employees hold any direct equity stake, wasn't covered in the material and isn't confirmed here.

The clearest number 10Pines can point to is turnover: about 5% a year, against a 30 to 35% industry average. An independent profile of the company from a few years earlier puts that same contrast closer to 25 to 30%, and notes that only four people had ever been let go from the company at that point. 

10Pines knows this is not a finished system. The hardest problems left aren't structural, they're personal: the company's practices can only be as mature as the people running them. As 10Pines has scaled toward 100 people with full financial transparency and no formal bosses, the challenge is strengthening individual maturity, accountability, and honest feedback as the areas where the model is still being tested, skills that don't automatically show up just because a hierarchy was removed.

Aalba

At Aalba's biscuit workshop in Tàrrega, a worker named Lluís, who has a disability, could never get the traditional wafer-thin biscuits to come out right; the dough kept wrinkling into small, uneven balls instead of the smooth sheets the recipe called for. Rather than scrap the failed batches, his colleagues at the El Rosal workshop tasted them, found them unexpectedly good, and started selling them under an informal name, Lluisets. The line took off, earned its own packaging and new varieties, and today the resulting product, now called Arrugats (Catalan for "wrinkled"), accounts for roughly three-quarters of everything the workshop produces. It is the kind of story Alba tells about itself: not a top-down plan, but a mistake someone was close enough to the work to notice, and an organization willing to let that noticing turn into a product line.

Aalba is a Catalan nonprofit that has spent fifty years supporting people with disabilities, mental health conditions and other forms of vulnerability, along with their families, across the rural Urgell and Segarra districts around Tàrrega and Lleida. What began in 1975 as a five-child classroom, funded by a donation from the local Junior Chamber, grew over five decades into a network of schools, occupational centers, group homes, an insertion company and a set of commercial services, including laundry, catering, cleaning, gardening and the century-old El Rosal biscuit brand, that together employ 363 professionals and reach 1,410 people a year. The turning point for how Alba organizes itself came with the 2020 pandemic. Most services were concentrated in two towns, Tàrrega and Cervera, and lockdown made painfully clear how many people in surrounding villages struggled simply to reach them. Rather than wait for things to normalize, Aalba chose to decentralize, opening resource centers in additional municipalities so services could reach people instead of the other way around, a choice the organization has acknowledged costs more in logistics and coordination than concentrating everything would.

That same logic reshaped how Aalba runs itself internally. The organization retired its general manager position and replaced it with an approval committee whose members it helped select itself. A team once made up of separate managers for each residential and day service, Projectes de Vida, became a single shared management team that distributes budget, staffing and coordination responsibilities across its members rather than concentrating them in one role. Housing followed the same path, moving away from larger residences toward homes of six or seven people and a fast-growing personal assistant model that went from 7 professionals serving 16 people in earlier years to 15 professionals serving 54 people in 2025, logging more than 9,000 hours of direct support.

Mission and strategy show up in decisions Aalba admits were not the cheapest ones available. Its stated mission, ‘accompanying people in vulnerable situations through their own life projects and building an inclusive, committed territory’ drove the 2020 decision to decentralize and, later, the shift from larger residences to small, personalized housing units and the individualized personal-assistant model. Both moves added coordination and cost; Alba frames both as the organization adapting to the person rather than the person adapting to the organization. The Alba 2030 strategic framework that now guides this work was itself built from twelve participatory workshops involving more than 200 staff, service users, families and volunteers.

Opportunities are democratized through Premis InnovAlba, an internal prize open to any employee regardless of role, which sets aside real budget, not just recognition, to test winning proposals. The clearest recent product of that culture is the Espai Comunitari La Bassa in Sant Martí de Maldà, which grew out of a question a team asked itself: why build a service for one group when the same space could serve the whole community? The result mixes housing for people with disabilities, a day center for older residents and wellbeing facilities open to the public; 843 people took part in its community activities in its first year.

Customers, in Alba's own broad definition, include both the people and families who use its care services and the businesses that buy its commercial ones. Quarterly Consells de Participació, participation councils led by families themselves, run in every resource center and residence and have produced changes ranging from meal-time scheduling to larger investments. On the commercial side, when young art students lost their usual hangout, Alba's El Gat restaurant introduced student pricing and loyalty cards in response, and switched its breakfast service to a buffet after customers asked for it; when its biggest laundry client, a public hospital that supplies 45 percent of the laundry's volume, raised its quality bar, the team upgraded its equipment to match.

Leaders have moved from approving decisions to enabling them. Direction now positions itself, in the organization's own account, in the background, helping teams interpret costs and indicators rather than deciding for them, and a 2026 internal diagnosis of 65 professionals rated strategic thinking at 4.47 out of 5 and participatory decision-making at 3.95 out of 5. The same diagnosis was candid about the gap that remains: some staff still feel they need approval to act, and Alba names closing that gap as its next test of the model rather than a finished result.

Colleagues coordinate laterally through standing cross-functional groups rather than up a chain of command; an ethics network and a dedicated group for sensitive sexuality and relationship cases both pull in whoever has relevant expertise instead of routing problems through a single service. Teams also reorganize around opportunities rather than staying fixed: previously separate cultural initiatives merged into one Projectes Culturals team, and new roles such as community connector and community animator were created specifically to knit services and residents together. Staff rate overall satisfaction with the organization at 8.1 out of 10 and workplace climate at 8.2, according to Alba's 2025 social balance sheet.

Data, tools and skills flow more openly than they once did. Alba reports full internal access to its budget, work plans, code of ethics and governance minutes, hiring is run directly by each service rather than a central HR department, and 2025 saw 4,515 hours of staff training, up nearly 35 percent on the year before. Some services shape their own tools outright: the CDIAP early-intervention center runs its own case-management system, built for its specific caseload rather than adopted from a generic corporate platform.

Partners are brought in before, not after, Aalba decides what to build. Before ground broke on La Bassa, the organization met with residents and local groups in Sant Martí de Maldà to understand what the village itself needed; a similar co-creation process in Verdú, run with the Fundació Carulla, involved roughly seventy local participants shaping the future of a shared cultural space. By 2025 Alba was working with 96 local partners, administrations, federations, schools and businesses among them, and taking part in cross-regional projects such as MERAKI and MITECO.

Action at the edges is real enough that a three-person international projects team decided on its own to expand Alba's mobility programs beyond Europe into Latin America, without waiting for a mandate from above, securing partners and funding as it went; the team's existing European program alone completed 126 mobility placements in 2025, including 22 young people sent abroad and 63 hosted from partner countries. Frontline teams also set their own standards: the central kitchen switched unprompted from disposable plastic trays to reusable glass and steel, and the El Rosal bakery reworked a traditional recipe to remove palm oil, both decisions made inside the teams that run those operations, not handed down to them.

Results and rewards had to be rebuilt almost from scratch: Alba once ran on as many as five different labor agreements across its services, and only consolidated a single, participatively negotiated one in 2017, most recently renegotiated with staff input into the 2026-2030 agreement. Because a large share of Alba's income comes from publicly financed, price-capped services, it has deliberately widened what counts as a reward beyond pay, toward flexibility, training and wellbeing support, and every team's annual plan must now name which Alba 2030 strategic objective its work serves, tying recognition to outcomes rather than activity counts.

Beyond the scores already cited, Alba's 2025 numbers give a sense of scale: 1,410 people used its services, 588 of them people with disabilities, older dependents or people at risk of exclusion, a 13.5 percent rise on 2024; total income reached €12.3 million, 44 percent of it earned through sales rather than grants or donations; and the organization became an accredited "Accredited NGO" under Fundación Lealtad's transparency standard in 2025, alongside its existing ISO 9001 certification.

The organization's own account of its hardest stretch is candid rather than triumphant: bureaucracy and funding cycles that move slower than the needs Alba sees every day, made sharper by operating across a rural territory that most regulations were not designed with in mind. Alba's response has not been to wait out the mismatch but to keep pushing on it, through advocacy, new alliances and alternative funding, describing the posture simply as not accepting that something "cannot be done" when a workable solution exists. That same instinct sits behind the organization's chosen identity, “Persones amb empenta”, "people with drive."

Fifty years ago, Alba began as one class of five children with disabilities, made possible by a donation from Tàrrega's Junior Chamber. Its mission was simple then and remains simple now: accompany people in vulnerable situations through their own life projects, and build a more inclusive, committed territory around them. That mission, not a org chart, is what now reaches 1,410 people a year, runs through 363 professionals working across 96 local partnerships, and stretches as far as Latin America through a mobility program a three-person team built entirely on its own initiative. The Arrugats are still on the shelf, imperfect and unmistakably Alba's own: proof that an organization willing to let its mission do the deciding can grow very large without losing the habit that got it there.

AIT

Most of Vietnam works a five and a half or six day week. At AIT, a family-owned manufacturer that builds the signage, displays and printed material behind other companies' brands, the working day is now seven and a half hours, production staff take two Saturdays off every month, and office staff take another two off while working the remaining two from home. Over the same period revenue rose 30 per cent and overtime costs fell by more than half. AIT did not buy that time. It found it by rebuilding how the work is organised.

The idea began with something unremarkable: people said they wanted more time to rest and recover. The unremarkable answer would have been to grant a day off and absorb the cost. AIT asked a harder question instead, which was how it could work fewer hours while creating the same value for customers, or more. Framed that way, time off stopped being a benefit to be funded and became a test of whether the system was any good. If waste, waiting and unnecessary approval could be taken out, the hours would follow.

AIT was founded more than three decades ago as a family business by Chau Lien Uong and Canh Thang Le, designing and producing signs, shop displays, promotional items and publications for advertisers. Its customers include Toyota, Lexus, Honda, VinFast, BYD, MB Bank, HSBC, FujiFilm, Asus and Vietnam Airlines. It ran for most of its life on a conventional model: divided departments, instructions travelling downward, people performing their own roles without seeing the flow of work they sat inside. As the market began demanding speed and originality, the costs showed: cumbersome process, weak transparency between functions, decisions that depended on particular individuals, inflexible budgeting, and technology that had fallen behind the business. When something went wrong, people protected their department or looked for someone to carry it. AIT's leadership then reached the diagnosis that made the rest possible: the company was not short of capability, it was short of a system that let capability be used. Working with the New Zealand consultancy Teal Unicorn, run by Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ, it began adopting their Open Management practice, and in September 2025 was named a winner in the Emergent Excellence category of the ZeroDX Awards in Beijing, one of very few manufacturers among winners drawn mostly from software and services.

Mission and strategy, meaning what a company exists to do and how it settles where to go, is captured at AIT in a phrase its people use: Better Work, Better Life. What keeps it from being a slogan is the order of the two halves. Better life is the outcome, and better work is the only route to it AIT will accept, which is why changing working hours was folded into a redesign of the operating system rather than announced as a perk.

Leaders had the most to unlearn, and AIT is candid about which part was hardest. It was not persuading employees to be more proactive. It was leaders learning not to intervene when a team was already capable of deciding for itself. Authority moved to the people closest to the work, and leaders moved from controlling work to clearing obstacles, supplying resources and making it safe to try things. Empowerment here did not mean delegating and stepping away: leaders became more present, not less, holding regular one to one and team conversations to find out what people were struggling with as the change went on. Openness, in AIT's view, is not the removal of discipline but the pairing of trust with accountability.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, shifted from managing presence to managing results. Individuals, teams and projects set daily and weekly objectives on Kanban, and priorities, progress and bottlenecks are visible to everyone rather than reported upward. Teams also make their own commitments on progress, productivity and quality visible, which is what makes the next part workable: when a project misses, responsibility does not revert to the manager. The team examines how it has been working, moves its own resources and time, and brings the result back. AIT states the principle plainly as empowerment always coming with personal accountability. In parallel the company has been deleting work that creates nothing, cutting unnecessary approvals, removing waiting time and redundant steps, and applying automation where it releases capacity.

The working time arrangement rests on all of that. The day came down from eight hours to seven and a half. Customer work is concentrated Monday to Friday and weekend work is avoided unless it cannot be. Production runs a rotating Saturday so each person has two Saturdays free a month; office staff work online on two Saturdays and take the other two, instead of everybody attending every week. Where overtime is unavoidable, teams arrange time off in lieu themselves, and teams and managers hold the authority to organise their own patterns around what works. The arrangement is also conditional: if a department or project falls behind, the Saturdays off can be suspended until performance recovers. That condition is what makes it an operating model rather than a benefit, because it keeps time and results tied to each other in both directions.

Data, tools and skills exist to serve that judgement rather than to document it. Effectiveness is assessed against project objectives daily and weekly through Kanban, using questions a workshop supervisor would recognise: is the project on schedule, what is the quality of the output, what is the error rate, how often does work have to be redone, are customers satisfied. Teams collect the data themselves. The intent is explicitly not another reporting layer; AIT has been cutting reports that create no value while increasing the data teams actually use to decide. Skills moved the same way, because colleagues who cannot cover for each other cannot absorb the decisions being handed to them. Too much at AIT had depended on particular people, so cross-training was strengthened, project leads became responsible for training new members joining their projects, cross-checking protects quality, and cover arrangements mean work no longer stalls because one person is on leave. The aim is not that everyone can do everything. It is that the organisation is not locked into a few individuals.

Customers sit at the front of that design rather than at the end of it. Concentrating client work Monday to Friday was a service decision before it was a scheduling one, and error rate, rework and customer satisfaction are treated as ordinary operating data rather than gathered at review time. Clients such as Toyota and Honda increasingly want a partner who co-creates rather than quotes, which is only possible when the person in the conversation can decide something. Suppliers and media agencies were drawn into the same transparency, working inside shared planning cycles and carrying responsibility for the outcome.

The cultural change is the one AIT says everything else depends on. The question "who made the mistake" is being replaced by what happened, why, where the system is not working, and what needs to change so it goes better next time. This is not a softening of accountability: everyone is still answerable within their own area, but answerability no longer means locating a person to blame. Problems surface early because surfacing them is not dangerous.

Results and rewards, in the first phase, came out as a 30 per cent rise in revenue with profit rising accordingly, overtime costs down by more than half, working hours reduced and quality of life improved. What matters is not the size of those numbers but their direction relative to effort: AIT produced them without asking anyone to work more.

The arrangement is deliberately fragile: Saturdays off are held in place month by month by teams that have to keep earning them, and a company that spent three decades depending on particular individuals has not finished spreading that dependence out. But something has been settled here that is easy to miss underneath the numbers. AIT gave back half an hour of every day and two Saturdays of every month, and grew revenue by thirty per cent while halving what it spent on overtime. Nothing was traded away to do it. The time had been there the whole while, sitting inside the waiting, the approving, the redoing, and the asking upward for permission that already existed below. What a family manufacturer in Vietnam has shown its own industry is that the hours a business believes it needs are mostly the hours its system wastes.

Alqvimia 

Alqvimia's most recent product launch, a significant one for a beauty and wellness company that treats new products as a core part of its business, happened without its former CEO knowing it was coming. They weren't consulted. They weren't briefed in advance. They found out the same way everyone else did, after the decision had already been made and the team had already moved. Their own reaction wasn't frustration. It was closer to pride: proof, in their words, of having built a team capable of acting entirely on its own.

That story only makes sense against what Alqvimia actually is now. A Spanish beauty and cosmetics company that has been in business for 41 years, it switched to Holacracy in January 2019, becoming the first organization in Spain to run on the framework, and has stayed with it for seven years since. Under Holacracy, the company is organized into circles rather than departments. Each one built around its own defined purpose that ladders up to Alqvimia's overall mission, stated internally as "fostering personal and social transformation towards a more beautiful, wiser, and more respectful world." There is no CEO in the conventional sense anymore. The person who once held that title now holds a handful of roles like anyone else in the company, distinguished mainly by the fact that people still use the old title out of habit.

Zero distance to mission and strategy shows up most clearly in who Alqvimia is willing to say no to. The commercial team routinely walks away from beauty centres, distribution partners, and hotels that don't share the company's commitment to sustainability and ethics, even when the numbers on the deal look good. It's a policy that costs revenue in the short term and the company keeps it anyway, on the belief that the math works out over a longer horizon than any single contract.

Zero distance to opportunity runs through how freely people inside Alqvimia are able to act on their own ideas without asking permission first. The company's Marketing circle decided, entirely on its own initiative, to build a limited-edition bottle and matching silk scarf around a designer the team admired, working within a set budget to source sustainable silk, negotiate directly with the artist, and even repurpose leftover packaging from an underperforming gift set rather than order something new. Nobody outside the circle signed off on any of it. Around the same time, the person holding Alqvimia's sole IT role noticed that the sales team avoided updating the company's CRM software and complained every time they had to pull numbers for reporting, so he simply built a new version himself, folding in AI and redesigning it to be simpler and better looking, without asking anyone for approval to start.

Zero distance to customers became urgent enough last year to force a specific fix. Feedback from beauty centres had mostly been filtered through individual sales representatives, leaving the company without much direct signal from the people actually using its products in their businesses. Alqvimia responded by running a facilitator-led focus group, and within a week had already settled on three concrete actions in response to what they heard, one of them addressing a broader feeling that its B2B beauty-centre partners needed to feel more genuinely cared for. The plan that followed adds a yearly visit inviting all of Alqvimia's customers to company headquarters, with staff across the business expected to help host, so that people who use the products can put faces to the names behind them and the team that rarely meets customers gets to see who they're actually working for.

Zero distance to leaders is close to structural at Alqvimia. Nobody sits between a frontline role and the person who used to run the company, and hasn't for seven years. The equivalent of a manager, called a Lead Link inside each circle, exists to make sure people, time, and projects are allocated well enough to serve that circle's purpose, not to give orders, and typically spends more of the working day inside other, more hands-on roles than acting as anyone's boss.

Zero distance to colleagues shows in the ordinary rhythm of a circle's meetings, which build in space for shared mindfulness, open problem-processing, and a closing round where anyone can say how the meeting actually felt, not just what got decided. One colleague of more than fifteen years told the former CEO, after the switch to Holacracy, that he no longer thought of his job as an eight-hour shift to get through. He thought of it as a responsibility he wanted to see done properly, willingly staying later when something mattered. The company's sales structure took years to find a shape that actually worked, cycling through one unified circle, then splitting by geography, then by B2B versus B2C, before landing on a single sales circle with a smaller B2B sub-circle for the more complex national accounts, and a standing rule that no meeting there runs longer than an hour.

Zero distance to data and tools runs through Glassfrog, the platform Alqvimia uses to power its entire Holacracy structure. Every role, every circle's purpose, every live project, every policy, and every meeting note lives there, fully searchable by anyone in the company, closing off the kind of who-does-what confusion that used to require asking around to resolve. Backing that transparency is real investment in capability: external coaches, an internal circle dedicated purely to teaching Holacracy and self-management, and a standing supply of books and courses, so that transparency isn't just visibility without the skill to act on it.

Zero distance to partners is the one dimension Alqvimia is most candid about being uneven. Being the first Spanish company to run on Holacracy has opened real doors, university research studies, speaking invitations across the country's business circles, and steady press interest in how the model works in practice, all of which the company sees as part of its own purpose: being visible proof that another way of working is possible. What hasn't happened as much is bringing outside partners in early to help solve internal problems, something the former CEO names plainly as more occasional than routine, and worth building out further.

Zero bureaucracy and zero distance to action both explain why the person who used to run Alqvimia now works about six hours a day. Fewer decisions route through that person at all, so there are simply fewer emails, fewer approvals, and fewer problems waiting on a single signature. Governance meetings give anyone in the company standing to create, change, or retire a role or policy, as long as it can be shown to serve the purpose behind it, and that authority is what let the year's biggest product launch happen without any input from the top at all.

Zero distance to results and rewards is the one area Alqvimia openly admits it hasn't solved yet. Recognition today leans on soft judgment, teamwork, contribution, service to a circle's purpose, rather than any fixed formula, and the former CEO says building something more objective is a priority for the year ahead. Where ownership already shows up clearly is in moments like a recent large order from an Asian distributor that arrived while manufacturing was short-staffed: employees across departments built their own volunteer schedule to help finish it on time, and by every account felt genuinely invested in seeing that specific order succeed.

None of this arrived easily. Middle managers who weren't fully willing to let go of control made the shift harder for everyone around them, new hires arrive carrying habits from more conventional workplaces and need extra time to unlearn them, and the former CEO admits to still having to consciously resist the urge to jump in and solve a problem in the time it takes to say so, rather than let the organization work through it on its own. A company forty-one years old just shipped a major product that its own former chief executive only heard about afterward, which is either a strange way to run a business or the clearest evidence that it no longer needs running the old way at all.

Alumipres

Nearly fifty workers gathered in a warehouse near Barcelona to vote, one by one, on whether to sell their company. The vote was not a formality: Krisos, the investment fund proposing the acquisition, had committed in advance to proceed only if at least 80% of the workforce approved. Before the vote, Krisos invited employees from Indaero, a company it had previously acquired, to share their own experience directly with Alumipres staff, so the workforce could hear what to expect from someone who had already lived it. Eighty-seven percent voted yes.

That vote marked the start of a transformation at Alumipres, a high-pressure aluminum die-casting company near Barcelona with approximately 48 employees. Beginning in May 2025, Xavier Costa, co-founder of Krisos and leader of the transformation consultancy Full Circle Team, coordinated the process from the outset. Krisos treats this workforce vote as essential to how it invests, arguing that it gives people a voice from the very beginning; the fund frames its motivation for acquisitions like this one around creating better jobs, promoting equality, and changing how company ownership and leadership work, rather than around extracting value.

A year later, Alumipres applied that same logic to a company of its own. On March 3, 2026, eight representatives from Alumipres’ Lliçà d’Amunt plant travelled to Vilassarenca, a metalworking company in Barberà del Vallès that had entered insolvency proceedings in 2025. They came not to pitch an acquisition, but to describe, in their own words, what it had been like to replace a traditional hierarchy with a network of forums and a sovereign employee assembly, acting as the team put it, “as a mirror so the Vilassarenca team could see its own potential future.” All 37 Vilassarenca employees present at the resulting assembly voted to join the Alumipres project.

Vilassarenca’s employees describe their previous culture as “militarized”: information was withheld, parts of the factory were off-limits to staff, and decision-making sat with a single family. Internal accounts suggest the ownership transition before the sale reinforced rather than loosened those habits, part of why a mirrored vote, rather than a conventional handover, mattered to the people casting it.

The first change Alumipres made, well before Vilassarenca joined, was to the organizational mindset itself. It replaced the habit of deferring upward with three standing forums (Steering, Commitment, and Care) small, collegial groups that took over what a management hierarchy used to do. In ZeroDX terms, this is the colleagues dimension: a network of teams in place of a pyramid, and the same structure Alumipres later extended to Vilassarenca.

The Full Circle Team, which is supporting the transformation, describes the leaders dimension as minimal hierarchy with leaders accountable to their teams: “Don’t ask Xavi, Quim, or Albert for permission. Ask us for advice, but the power is yours.” That principle is not yet universal on the shop floor — the organization acknowledges that some former supervisors in the foundry still act as traditional bosses, a gap it has not yet closed.

The partners dimension extends the same logic outward. Alumipres treats the people who support it from outside, Lean Manufacturing consultants, IESE business school researchers, and its transformation partners, as inside partners rather than external vendors, regarding them as integral members of the project rather than hired help.

Results and rewards remain the dimension Alumipres has made the least progress on. When Krisos introduced its plan in May 2025, it promised a fair, peer-driven salary model; that model has not yet been built. For now, the company is focused on stabilizing its accounts and making them sustainable through a difficult market for aluminum.

Alumipres does not claim to have closed the distance on all nine dimensions. It presents itself instead as an organization working through those gaps one at a time, in the middle of a merger, rising aluminum prices, and the integration of two distinct cultures. One year after the original acquisition, that ongoing work, not a finished model, is what the company points to as its day-to-day reality.

Anigami

A friend once photographed one of Anigami's two founders, Pep, all black, just a silhouette. "I'm sorry, it came out awful," the friend told him. Pep and his childhood friend Gerard Costa loved it. It showed nothing anyone already knew; it only suggested, and invited you to imagine. That photo gave the company its first name, Imagina, and its logo: Pep's dark silhouette against the light. Years later, when the two decided to make a living from what they were already doing for free, they simply reversed the word, from “Imagina” (which means ‘Imgine’ in Spanish) to Anigami, and added a compass to the silhouette so they would never lose their original purpose.

Gerard and Pep met at age five in a nursery school in Catalonia's Collsacabra region and grew up among the area's mountaineers. In 1992, at seventeen, they started taking local kids climbing for free, borrowing ropes and harnesses from the village hiking club; there was no company, no paperwork, no intention of making money. They formalized the group as a nonprofit association in 1998, mostly because they needed insurance and a tax number to keep doing what they were already doing. In 2003 they converted it into a cooperative so they could earn a living from it, and today it operates as a limited company, a change their accountant recommended for administrative simplicity rather than one that reflects any shift in how they actually run it. The original nonprofit, Imagina, still exists and still runs environmental projects.

Thirty-four years on, Anigami is not organized around departments; it describes itself as an ecosystem of projects. It has been ‘La Fura dels Baus's’ technical rigging team for nearly twenty years, staging aerial spectacles in more than sixty countries. It runs summer camps, an adventure park and restaurant in L'Esquirol, and a converted textile mill turned arts venue in Masies de Roda. It has founded Miceli Social and Cardant Cultura to support rural regeneration and culture, Santuaris Naturals to manage overtourism in natural spaces, and Talaya Systems, a technology spin-off building environmental sensors. There is also a theater company, an artist residency, an escape room and a stake in several European research projects. No conventional org chart could hold all of that together, which is close to the point.

Mission and strategy are written collectively, by the whole team's own account, and show up in choices that cost money. When covid froze all activity, the team decided its people were its most important asset and kept paying full salaries to hold the team together, draining its financial reserves and forcing a small bridge loan. Since 2008, the ecotourism team has returned 7 percent of tourism revenue to the Collsacabra landscape every year without exception, first through a free cultural space called Sala Oxigen and, since 2018, through Santuaris Naturals.

Opportunities open around whoever is most driven to pursue them, not around a job title. Leadership at Anigami is not assigned, it emerges: Pep leads rigging and spectacle, Gerard leads nature and regeneration work, and Montse Galobardes, the company's in-house clown, leads its people team and also runs her own theater company inside the business. A group of employees who wanted to build an escape room now run it themselves, and a team of young regional engineers leads Talaya Systems, the tech spin-off, of which Anigami holds a 50 percent stake. When a project needs leadership the group doesn't have, it looks for it, inside the company or out.

Customers shape solutions from the start. The clearest example began at the 2012 London Paralympics, where Anigami helped stage an aerial spectacle with disabled volunteers and had to improvise safety systems that weren't certified for people with disabilities. Letters from families followed, including one mother who wrote that she could no longer see her daughter as a disabled person. That response led to Dreams, a bank-funded program letting people with disabilities perform as aerial artists at their own hometown festivals in front of family and neighbors; Anigami ended the program once the bank wanted to commercialize its success.

Leaders don't supervise; nobody watches to see whether people are doing their jobs. Decisions are made by consent rather than consensus: nobody needs to be enthusiastic, only for no one to hold a well-founded objection, and if someone does, the decision improves for hearing it. All ten permanent staff make company-level decisions together, review the finances jointly every year, and decide together whether raises are affordable.

Colleagues operate more like an extended household than a hierarchy. If someone goes through a breakup, the rest of the team quietly covers shifts and steers the best assignments their way; if someone needs to move, the company lends trucks and shows up to help; if someone is short on cash, salary gets advanced. Seasonal staff pick their own shifts from an open calendar, which the team says builds commitment rather than eroding it, since almost nobody fails to show. When Anigami let a permanent team member go for the first time in 2025, the whole team made the decision together, with her in the room, then helped arrange five job interviews at partner companies before finalizing her departure.

Data, tools and skills are shared without gatekeeping. Anigami's 2025 revenue, 946,000 euros, and its cost structure, 59 percent of spending on personnel across 10 permanent and 96 project-based staff, are known to the whole team rather than treated as confidential. New hires are chosen for attitude, availability and life fit rather than formal credentials, on the premise that skills can be built once someone is in.

Partners extend Anigami well past its own walls. Cardant Cultura, a second-degree cooperative founded with La Fura dels Baus and seven other partner organizations, promotes rural arts and won the Fundació Carulla prize in 2024. Miceli Social, a similar cooperative with more than twenty member entities, advocates nationally for rural regeneration and links into international networks including Ecolise and the Regenesis Institute. Talaya Systems has partnered with Azolla Projects to develop Carbon Booster, a European-patented soil-carbon sensor, and Anigami takes part in EU research projects alongside teams in France, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece and Colombia.

Action at Anigami often means building the capability a challenge demands rather than waiting to already have it. When local mayors asked for help with overtourism, the team had to learn environmental mediation and conflict resolution on the fly. When Santuaris Naturals needed to count visitors in remote natural areas and no off-grid technology existed for the job, the team built its own with young regional engineers, work that later produced a European patent and Talaya Systems itself.

Results and rewards follow one hard rule: everyone is paid the same, regardless of role or tenure, and any raise applies to everyone at once. The founders say the logic is that they pay people, not positions, and that removing salary negotiation lets the whole team row in the same direction; they also acknowledge it creates tension, since not everyone earns what they would like. In 34 years, neither founding partner has ever taken profit out of the company; everything has been reinvested in the business and the team.

Beyond the figures already cited, Anigami says it generates more than 5,000 workdays a year for young people and students from rural Catalonia, and that Santuaris Naturals now reaches more than 70,000 visitors annually across nine natural areas, work that won an international award in 2023. The company also lists a 2003 award from the Barcelona provincial government for environmentally respectful business, a 2007 tourism diploma from the Catalan government, a 2023 sustainability award for Santuaris Naturals, and Biosphere Tourism and European Charter for Sustainable Tourism certifications.

By its own account, Anigami's weakest point is selling itself. The company says it maintains more than ten underused websites, largely inactive social media, and relies mostly on word of mouth; marketing hires have repeatedly not stuck, though the team says it is making a fresh attempt this year. It is a candid gap for an organization that otherwise documents its own model in unusual detail.

The logo has never changed since that overexposed photograph: Pep's dark silhouette rappelling down, a compass drawn beside it. "In 34 years we've never had a map," Gerard Costa says. "But we've never lost north."

ARNI

Since 2014, ARNI has enabled hospitals to focus on medicine instead of logistics, handling patient care support, patient transfers, the cleaning of intensive care units and operating rooms, and the outsourcing of junior medical roles. In less than a year, ARNI achieved what many companies would build an entire marketing campaign around: client satisfaction surged from 68 to 96 percent, client loyalty from 15.9 to a full 100 percent, and today, nearly every one of its more than 3,000 employees can explain exactly how that happened. 

The company now generates over 5 billion rubles in annual turnover. Yet behind these figures is the story of an organization that lost its footing in 2023, only to spend the following year regaining it. This time, it was on its own terms.

This transformation was no accident. By 2023, the warning signs were everywhere: client loyalty was slipping, staff departures were mounting, and administrative costs kept rising even as service levels stagnated. ARNI’s board responded by enrolling in training at Beyond Taylor’s School of Strategic Leadership. By February 2024, the company had begun to rebuild its management model from the ground up, centering it on Clientocracy, an approach that shifts decision-making authority to those closest to the client, rather than leaving it in the hands of distant managers. The training partnership itself stands as a clear example of zero distance to partners: external expertise brought in not to temporarily steer the company, but to equip ARNI with a lasting, self-sustaining management approach.

The first step was to answer a deceptively simple question: who, exactly, is ARNI’s client? The answer proved to be twofold: patients themselves, and the mid-level medical staff at partner institutions. To understand what mattered most to each group, a dedicated research team, made up of three sociologists and a medical department representative, conducted structured studies with samples of up to 300 respondents. Patients prioritized cleanliness and attentive care, while medical staff valued rapid responses and outsourced workers who arrived fully prepared, requiring no additional training from the institution.

Out of that research came a system of explicit promises: ARNI staff now commit, for example, to disinfecting every surface for patients, and to doing no harm in the eyes of the nursing staff they support, with feedback flowing back constantly through Yandex Maps reviews, Telegram, and QR codes posted in hallways and wards. It is zero distance to customers built into the daily rhythm of the work.

A similar transformation unfolded inside ARNI itself. The company had operated with seven layers of hierarchy, including a three-tier chain of site manager, administrator, and manager at every location. Information became distorted as it moved upward, and decisions often arrived too late, disconnected from the realities on the ground. ARNI replaced this structure with autonomous teams and introduced an autonomy index, which is a straightforward measure of how many decisions each team makes independently, without waiting for managerial approval.

A Council of Managers now holds much of the authority that used to sit with a single executive layer. On one site, standing up six autonomous teams cut management costs by 45 percent, a saving of 2.34 million rubles a year; on another, the saving reached 53.5 percent, or 4.15 million rubles annually. CEO and co-founder Pyotr Nelepa has described what that meant for him personally: where 60 percent of his time once went to administration, accounting, HR and legal matters, he now spends at most 5 percent of his time on operations, freeing the rest for the company's development. It is zero distance to leaders, measured in hours spent leading.

Even ARNI’s staffing shortage was addressed by extending trust to teams, rather than tightening central control. Recruitment had been slow, costly, and mired in a cycle of mutual blame: managers criticized the central hiring team for weak candidates, while recruiters pointed to poor onboarding by managers. ARNI’s solution was to apply what it calls the optionality principle. Instead of relying on a single central recruiting team, it created five, embedding a hiring role directly within autonomous teams so that those closest to a vacancy could help fill it themselves. As a result, headcount rose from 2,460 to 3,050, and the cost of closing a vacancy dropped from 48,000 to 30,000 rubles. This is zero distance to action: decision rights placed exactly where the problem exists.

Not every change came from a consulting framework. A year and a half ago, a handful of employees started a book club, working through everything from Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team to Jim Collins' Good to Great, which the group liked enough to read twice. It now runs on its own steam, with a volunteer leader, Daria Drobnitsa, a dedicated channel on the company's Bitrix24 platform, and sessions that regularly run four to five hours with five to twelve regulars, plus newcomers hoping to become regulars themselves. It has become exactly the kind of informal, cross-level gathering that a seven-layer hierarchy used to make impossible, a plain case of zero distance to colleagues: community built on shared reading rather than shared reporting lines.

One of those books changed how ARNI handles its own mistakes. After reading The Black Box Principle, borrowed from aviation's habit of investigating failure without assigning blame, the company's change management team turned the idea into an actual internal product. Teams across ARNI can now request a formal, anonymized review of their own errors through a corporate channel, and there is a small backlog of teams waiting their turn, a sign of how far the instinct has shifted from hiding mistakes to volunteering them. One review, triggered by a string of smoke incidents in hospital microwaves, traced the cause to missing instructions in a workforce that speaks several different first languages; the fix was multilingual safety guidance and a shift from reactive repairs to scheduled equipment checks. It is zero distance to opportunities, run by the people who actually encounter the problem rather than a committee reviewing it later.

ARNI’s Innovation Laboratory channels that same instinct toward generating new ideas, not just correcting errors. Anyone can submit a proposal, whether through an ideas bank, a company chat, by phone, or directly to the care department. If an idea advances, its originator is paired with a mentor to ensure the proposal aligns with the company’s long-term purpose before a team forms to define clear hypotheses and success metrics. In 2025, ARNI launched 20 such experiments; 10 have concluded, and half of those delivered positive results.

One team discovered that a part for the company's ASKO washing machines, unavailable from its usual supplier for six months, could be manufactured domestically instead, freeing ARNI from an unreliable import. Another, tackling high turnover in production roles, brought experienced staff into candidate screening itself and measurably reduced early departures as a result. It is zero distance to mission and strategy, since no idea moves forward without first answering to the same long-term purpose, and zero distance to data, tools and skills, since every experiment lives or dies by a metric someone agreed to in advance.

None of this relies on goodwill alone. Successful experiments are rewarded tangibly: 10,000 rubles for an idea that succeeds in someone else’s hands, 100,000 rubles for a team whose experiment did not scale but still contributed by running the test, and up to 200,000 rubles for a team that implements a result across the business. 

ARNI is now redesigning this reward system to make it even more compelling, seeing these efforts as just the beginning. The same momentum is visible throughout the organization: employee loyalty climbed from 73 to 98.1 percent, and turnover dropped by 60 percent, with thousands choosing each day to stay and build something they are proud of. That pride is now ARNI’s true product. The company has transformed attentive listening, honest mistakes, and genuine ownership into a culture people want to be part of, with its most promising chapters still to come.

AWO Mönchengladbach

In June 2026, almost two-thirds of AWO Mönchengladbach’s 300 staff arrived, unprompted, for the annual congress. No one was required to attend. By the end, colleagues had delivered a frank verdict on the structure they had spent years shaping: too many internal units lacked a clear market, a broad enough mix of skills, or, in some cases, a compelling reason to exist at all. The group chose, together, to rebuild every unit, setting their own September deadline. No order came from above. There was no one above them to give it.

AWO Mönchengladbach is a nonprofit branch of a national welfare federation, running day-care centers, nursing services, family counseling, adult education, and landscaping across a mid-sized German city and the neighboring Rhein-Kreis Neuss district. Its five charitable subsidiaries employ about 300 staff and serve 1,300 members. Most of its work is funded by public authorities, often at rates with little room for negotiation. German law requires the charity to cover 7.8 percent of every day-care center’s costs from its own resources. As public budgets tighten nationwide, many similar social enterprises are being pushed toward insolvency. For AWO, self-management is not an ideology but a necessity. An organization with margins this thin cannot afford to waste resources.

Self-organization is not language borrowed from a management book here, it is the organization's own founding idea, turned inward. Arbeiterwohlfahrt, literally Workers' Welfare, and known by its initials AWO, was founded in 1919 by Marie Juchacz, one of the first women elected to the German parliament, on the premise that people should organize to solve their own economic and social problems together rather than receive charity from above. The Nazis banned it in 1933; Juchacz kept it alive from exile in New York, and it was rebuilt after the war. The Mönchengladbach branch dates to 1924. As the organization puts it, self-organization was always the mission; it has simply, finally, applied that mission to itself.

That application began quietly in 2020 and went live in 2021, through an annual congress open to every colleague which, since 2025, runs on a method called OpenSpace Beta, developed by Niels Pfläging and Silke Hermann: an opening congress launches ninety days of concrete change work, and a closing congress ends each cycle, built entirely without an outside consulting firm. Underneath sits a structure of cells, small self-running teams of four to eight people, which AWO calls market cells because each one operates directly in its own part of the market, and a small center of roughly twenty who serve them, can give them no orders, and can turn neither a profit nor a loss of their own. Decisions go to whoever has the deepest mastery of a question after required consultation with the people it affects, not to a vote or a title, and only two people, by law, hold formal signing authority at all, including the executive director, whose German title, Vorstand, is a matter of legal record rather than a description of daily authority; both describe their own signatures as, in their words, a legal act, not a substantive approval.

At AWO, mission and strategy are measured not by whether a purpose statement is memorized, but by whether it survives contact with financial reality. The mission is simple: making participation possible for everyone; inside the organization through shared information and decisions, outside through access to education, prosperity, and social life, regardless of background. At the June 2026 congress, colleagues faced their sector’s perennial temptation head-on: with government bodies setting prices, it is easy to chase whichever funding program offers cash, whether or not the work meets real needs. Their answer was to reverse that logic, starting from documented need and only then seeking funding to match, while revisiting funded services that draw money but deliver little visible impact. All five of this year’s strategic priorities; rebuilding the cell structure, freeing up time lost to internal process, building their own impact metrics, entering Germany’s coal-transition region, and turning an internal training format into a paid product, emerged from colleague-led sessions, not a leadership plan. RenDanHeYi treats half of new initiatives coming from the front line as a strong signal. AWO’s count this year: five for five.

That training format is also the clearest example of opportunity in action. German law requires about 1.3 million people working with children to spot and respond to warning signs of danger, yet the standard two-day classroom course rarely sticks. Colleagues working directly with children, together with the learning platform qomenius, built something different: small groups of four to six, seventy-five-minute sessions focused on reflection rather than lecture, tested first on AWO’s own staff before becoming one of this year’s five priorities and a paid product for other organizations. Smaller ideas move at three speeds: inside a cell, spend only what it can carry over an eighteen-month horizon, no budget required; company-wide, a Wednesday all-hands that can, within about a week, hand a question to a Könnerinnenrunde, a circle of those with mastery, colleagues pulled together on the spot because they know the subject best; and for questions affecting the whole organization, a slower weekly forum called the Wissenskonferenz, or knowledge conference. For a genuinely new venture, a temporary volunteer team is funded by the whole organization, not just one cell, with a fixed mandate and end date.

Proximity to the people AWO serves is built into the structure. More than nine in ten colleagues work directly and daily with children, families, care recipients, or learners. Cells hold full authority over staffing, spending, and invoicing, so no approval layer stands between a need and a solution. When day-care staff noticed parents raising family questions beyond childcare, the usual route, a counseling office across town, set a bar high enough that many families never made the trip. The day-care cells simply agreed with the family-counseling cell to bring counselors on site instead. Two cells, one arrangement, nothing in between. That proximity runs inward as well: the center’s roughly twenty staff sell services like bulk purchasing to the cells, who are free to buy elsewhere, so even the back office feels real commercial pressure. Every cell, center included, takes a turn at the reception desk. AWO is candid that this is not fully solved. Whether a child feels safe today is visible immediately; whether their life actually improves shows up only years later. Since public money, not the client’s own wallet, usually pays, the ordinary market signal of price barely exists. Building real impact measurement from the client’s perspective is one of this year’s five priorities precisely because it is not finished.

Leadership at AWO isn't a position anyone occupies; it's a function that moves to whoever holds the most relevant mastery, and the only thing that accumulates is reputation earned by creating value, never a title. The organization's one remaining formal officer describes their working life this way: once a year, as sponsor, they ask the single question that opens the annual cycle, then work inside the sessions like anyone else, sign only what German law requires, and reserve an override for genuine legal or safety emergencies the system itself cannot resolve, which they call rare. Accountability runs both directions: candidates for the panels that set pay ranges are proposed by the two formal officers but can be rejected outright by the weekly all-hands, and the executive director answers not to anyone above but to a supervisory body called the Präsidium, elected by delegates of the organization's 1,300 members, inverting the usual chain entirely. RenDanHeYi treats four layers between front line and top as an acceptable ceiling. AWO's honest count, day to day, is zero. The plainest proof is a number: management figures that used to take six to eight weeks, by which point, in the organization's own words, they were perfect and useless, now reach every cell by the fourth working day of the month.

With no chain of command to climb, coordination between teams runs sideways, through a tool AWO calls a Nahtstellenvereinbarung, literally a "seam agreement." The organization deliberately avoids the more common German word for interface, because that word contains the word for cut, and a seam is sewn together rather than cut apart. Every day-care center is actually run jointly by two to four separate cells sharing a building and hours, negotiating handovers through these seam agreements, visible to everyone, with nobody above them to referee. When a decision touches several cells at once, a Könnerinnenrunde of up to eight colleagues, the same fast mastery circle used to resolve smaller questions elsewhere in the organization, convenes on the spot, and if they can't agree, the final call goes to whoever is closest to the situation and has to live with it, since there's no higher authority to hand it to.

Teams stay deliberately small, four to eight people, smaller than the roughly fifty-person ceiling RenDanHeYi treats as its benchmark, and once a cell grows past eight it divides in two. Hiring moved, only in the past year, out of individual cells and into mixed groups drawn from different fields, after colleagues admitted an uncomfortable pattern: cells left to hire alone kept choosing people who resembled the people already there, making every cell more similar rather than more capable. Almost two thirds of the workforce turning up voluntarily to the June congress is the plainest evidence of how much belonging this generates, alongside an honest admission that people settle into one cell and stay longer than the design technically allows, since habit runs deep, and staying, the organization says, is a legitimate choice too.

Data, tools, and skills at AWO start with the Wertflussrechnung, or value flow statement, a monthly account per cell, deliberately simple, of what came in, what went out, and what remains, delivered by the fourth working day and visible to everyone alongside the whole organization's own budget and balance sheet. Nothing in the internal channel is filtered, and the organization is now extending that openness to something most companies hide entirely, each cell's accumulated overtime, treated explicitly as hidden cost and hidden strain. Reading those numbers together monthly, in a review built to learn rather than assign blame, functions as business literacy without being labeled training. Deciding itself is taught as an explicit craft: decide as late as credibly possible but never so late the chance disappears; build big calls to stay reversible, since nobody can see the future; and separate an avoidable mistake from a reasonable call about a future that simply turned out differently, since blame isn't a category the organization says it thinks in. Cells choose and buy their own tools; only a company phone for everyone and one shared collaboration platform are set centrally, and cells have used that freedom to jointly adopt shared course software and build their own databases for anything the center doesn't need to touch.

AWO's clearest partnership is the same one behind its opportunities story: qomenius was involved in the child-protection format from day one, working directly with the frontline colleagues who knew the problem, no steering committee in between. The same posture shows in ordinary contracting, where a new day-care center gets designed in joint sessions with the architecture firm rather than handed over as a brief. Structurally, the organization is a participation platform in a fairly literal sense: 1,300 members elect delegates who elect the Präsidium, the supervisory body that in turn appoints its own formal officers, a loop running the opposite direction from an ordinary hierarchy, and unpaid volunteers take part on the same no-orders-given basis as paid colleagues. Toward the city, AWO co-runs the statutory working group for child and youth services with the local youth welfare office as declared equals rather than a contracted vendor. Its newest partnership is with the public authorities of the Rheinisches Revier, a major lignite-mining region nearby where Germany's coal phase-out is forcing tens of thousands of people to rebuild their working lives; AWO is contributing the small-group learning method it tested on itself rather than conventional retraining. By its own account, this openness is why the nomination exists at all: visitors from Corporate Rebels came and saw the system exactly as it is, unfinished parts included.

AWO's biggest operating decisions, what services to run, how many people they need, what to spend, now belong to the cells every day, with nothing above them to ask except for a rare commitment binding the whole organization or a spend beyond one cell's own means. A hiring decision that once traveled through several layers of budget approval is now simply a cell's own call. The single biggest decision of 2026 proves the same point at scale: colleagues themselves, not an executive board or a consultant, concluded their own cell structure wasn't good enough and agreed to rebuild all of it by September, a reorganization that elsewhere would arrive as an announcement rather than a diagnosis made by the people it affects. Cutting bureaucracy is a daily habit, called internally "the flip": notice one pointless procedure and remove it, leaving behind only a few lines recording what was decided and when it will be checked. AWO doesn't oversell this. It says plainly it cannot erase the bureaucracy German law imposes on regulated social work, and that this year's congress found colleagues still losing real time to internal process, which is exactly why one of the five priorities exists purely to win back hours for direct work with people.

Results and rewards is usually measured in bonus pools and equity, and AWO, a charitable association with no shareholders, genuinely has neither. It treats that absence as a choice rather than a limitation, arguing incentive pay pushes people to optimize whatever the bonus measures instead of the person in front of them, and uses what it calls genuine ownership of the decisions as its substitute for equity. What did change grew out of an admitted failure of fairness: cells used to set their own members' pay from whatever the cell's own work brought in, which sounded consistent but wasn't, since some fields simply carry fatter margins than others, producing gaps that had nothing to do with effort. AWO replaced the system itself, agreeing the new design in November 2025 and switching it on that April: a mixed panel sets a market-based salary band for each of seven broad roles annually, using regional pay data and the organization's own finances, and where a person lands within that band comes from two ratings, mastery and responsibility from their own cell, contribution to the whole from an organization-wide panel. Pay follows those scores arithmetically rather than negotiation, panels rotate so no one's judgment calcifies into power, and once a level is reached, it never goes back down. Accountability runs through the same value flow statement used everywhere else, with one hard rule: run a deficit over eighteen months and the rest of the organization is effectively subsidizing you, a fate it says it hasn't had to force on anyone yet, though everybody knows the option exists.

AWO's own account of the past year does not start with a win, it starts with an admitted failure: the very first full annual cycle of this method, in 2025, produced three priorities that the organization now admits fizzled out, under ambitious and never really carried through. Rather than bury that, colleagues used that year's closing congress to name the deeper mistake underneath it: in their enthusiasm for self-management, they had tried to dissolve even the parts of the organization that legally cannot be dissolved, the narrow formal backbone of statute and ultimate liability, and the result was not more freedom but less security, for colleagues and for its two legal officers alike. What followed runs through everything else here: a formal structure clarified rather than denied, a pay system judged unfair and rebuilt within a year of noticing, and, this past summer, the harder admission still, that its own year-old cell structure wasn't good enough, made by the people inside it rather than anyone looking in. AWO calls that last one the moment it knew the transformation would hold, not because it got something right, but because it proved it could catch itself being wrong.

German welfare providers are folding under the same funding squeeze AWO operates inside, and AWO has instead posted small, reliable surpluses since its transformation began, money that by law flows straight back into the same mission Marie Juchacz set out in 1919: that people can organize to look after each other rather than wait to be looked after. A charity that once waited six to eight weeks for numbers nobody could act on is now rebuilding its entire structure in ninety days, on its own initiative, because the people running its day-care centers and nursing wards decided the families depending on them deserved better than what they had built. That is what it looks like when an organization believes its own mission: not a plaque in the lobby, but three hundred people willing to tear down their own best work and build it again, for the people still waiting on the other side of it.

Babykit

Between 2016 and 2020, Kaku Sunday, a refugee living in Bidibidi settlement in northern Uganda, lost two babies to pneumonia. Since she began using warmers made by Babykit, she has raised two healthy children, and she says she can see pneumonia cases falling around her because of the warm textiles.

Bidibidi is one of the world's largest refugee settlements, home to an estimated 270,000 to 285,000 people, most of them South Sudanese women and children who fled civil war from 2016 onward.

Housing is improvised, and nights are cold. According to 2021 UNHCR data, 25 to 30 babies are born each week across the settlement's 22 health centers, and SINA Loketa, the Social Innovation Academy's Bidibidi-based program that incubated Babykit, estimates that roughly 13 infants die weekly from pneumonia linked to cold exposure and families' inability to afford warm bedding. Babykit was founded in Bidibidi in 2020 to close that gap directly, with a mission the company states as providing affordable, dignified warmth to lactating and expecting mothers and their infants aged 0 to 3 months.

Babykit produces two core products: a wearable infant warmer, known locally as Sifo, meaning “good,” and a heavier blanket warmer. Both are sewn from cotton grown by community farmers and from donated used textiles, not imported material. This sourcing decision was intentional. While imported material would have offered speed and consistency, choosing local cotton and reused textiles keeps the value chain within Bidibidi, generating income for smallholder farmers and artisans. It also means production is slower and quality can be harder to control, but the trade-off is clear. The warmers sell for about 20,000 Ugandan shillings, roughly a third of the price of comparable imported products.

That same principle (prioritizing community income over convenience) runs through the way this 20-person company operates. In RenDanHeYi’s terms, it is visible in ‘Mission and Strategy’: the company’s purpose is not just a statement but a driver of real decisions, as seen in the sourcing of cotton, a choice that carries real costs. It is also evident in ‘Opportunities’, which asks whether good ideas can move forward without waiting for top-down approval. When a team member saw banana fiber going to waste locally and developed a new product on her own initiative, leadership chose to support the idea and pursue certification, rather than claim credit. The same approach shapes how Babykit connects with its ‘Customers’. Recognizing that buyers were scattered across a wide, disconnected area, the company shifted from waiting to be found to working directly through all of Bidibidi’s health centers as points of contact and distribution.

In Haier’s framework, ‘Leaders’ asks whether those at the top have moved from directing work to enabling it. The founder describes his own role in these terms: he focuses less on giving instructions and more on raising funding, reviewing ideas brought forward by the team, and representing Babykit to donors, refugee welfare councils, and government. Day-to-day production and outreach are run by named field staff, not by the founder.

Two further RenDanHeYi dimensions are visible in Babykit’s daily operations. ‘Colleagues’ considers whether teams coordinate directly, rather than routing decisions through management. At Babykit, the sales and marketing team manages its own work without waiting for leadership. When it comes to equipping people with the skills and tools they need, Babykit invests in direct training (measuring, sewing, fixing, cutting, branding) so that those making the product also make the decisions about it.

‘Partners’ asks whether outside organizations are treated as collaborators, not just vendors. Babykit highlights its relationship with the International Rescue Committee, which began in 2024 and progressed quickly because staff adapted across tasks as needed, rather than sticking to fixed roles.

Teams act without waiting for approval from the top, ensuring the business stays responsive to its customers. When an order for 1,500 units arrived, the production team began work immediately, a decision that once would have required sign-off from senior management.

‘Results and Rewards’ asks whether pay and recognition are linked to real outcomes, not just activity, and Babykit closes the loop here. Performance is tracked in a daily record book that logs every unit produced and sold, avoiding unnecessary complexity. Profits are shared directly with the team, with the remainder reinvested in production capacity, materials, and market reach. The system delivers: about 250 warmers produced each month, around 200 sold, nearly full sell-through, 50 held as stock, and income for all 20 employees every month.

The impact of Babykit’s work is tangible for the community. Betty Yangi credits the products with saving her daughter from pneumonia, while Jabuga Stephen, expecting a child with his wife, bought two warmers after seeing a neighbor’s baby stay healthy through the cold season.

Babykit is open about its ongoing challenges. The hardest part remains balancing consistent product quality with sourcing from smallholder farmers and used textiles. Paying staff reliably while building basic systems (record keeping, registration, formal structure) in a settlement with limited infrastructure is another persistent difficulty. Production plans are now built around what is actually available locally, rather than what would be ideal.

Babykit’s distinction is not in its scale. It lies in the fact that a 20-person company, founded by refugees inside one of the world’s largest settlements, has built a functioning internal market, decentralized decision making, and a profit-sharing system, all while keeping production rooted in the community it set out to serve.

Baki Food

At the height of the Mid-Autumn season, Baki Food turns out around 40,000 mooncakes a day. Three years ago it managed about 5,000. Its factory has gone from just over 400 square metres to more than 2,500, its customers have roughly tripled, and revenue in each of its two big seasons is about four times what it was. Over the same three years its full-time headcount went down, from more than 30 people to 27.

That last number is the one Nguyễn Ngọc Quốc Thịnh, Baki's chief executive, points to first. The company grew eightfold in output without growing its permanent team, which means the growth came from what those 27 people are now able to do rather than from hiring more of them.

Baki Food was established in Hanoi in 2018 to make confectionery that is less sweet and built from the healthiest ingredients available, an unusual position in a market where festival cakes are traditionally rich. Eight years of investment in machinery and people have turned it into a modern manufacturer, and it runs with more than a hundred seasonal workers alongside the permanent team when the Mid-Autumn Festival and Tết arrive.

The change did not begin with the factory. Thịnh had been running the company conventionally: the leader assigns the work, each person handles their piece and concerns themselves mainly with that piece. The result was that he was constantly delegating, reminding, checking and occasionally imposing, and he was tired. Staff showed little initiative and less motivation, and found not much joy in the work. The question he put to himself is the one that started everything: if the leader is not happy and the employees are not happy, what is the business being built for. He set out instead to make an organisation where, as he puts it, "every day at work can really be a fun day." Working with Two Hills (previously known as Teal Unicorn), the New Zealand practice of Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ, Baki began moving to Open Management.

Leaders had to change before anything else could, and Thịnh is candid that the hardest part was not his employees but his own habits. His specific worry was transparency. He had always assumed that revenue, profit and the real state of the business were information for leaders only, and opening the books felt genuinely risky. He did it anyway, and describes the rest of the organisation as changing once trust had been extended rather than promised. His statement of what empowerment actually requires is worth repeating precisely because it is not permissive: agree the goals together, keep the information transparent, define who is responsible for what, and then trust people to use their capability fully. Empowerment, in his account, is not letting go.

Colleagues took on the work differently as a result. Previously each person was assigned a task and got on with their own. Now the team is given a shared goal, and takes up the work, divides it and supports each other to reach it. The effect on the permanent staff is the mechanism behind the headcount figure. A full-time employee at Baki is no longer someone who completes their own portion; each has developed the ability to run a group of seasonal workers, direct their work, control quality and answer for the results of that group. When the seasonal workforce grew, the permanent team absorbed it rather than needing to be enlarged.

Action runs on a small, visible routine. Work sits on Kanban boards, and the day starts with a 15-minute meeting to update progress, see where things are stuck, and clear the blockage together. What makes this more than a stand-up is what it replaced: the leader assigning tasks, chasing them and giving orders. People now take work on, coordinate and divide it between themselves.

Customers were what forced the departments to stop being departments. Production used to care about finishing the cakes, packaging about finishing the packing, and delivery was somebody else's problem. Baki replaced those separate goals with one: the team's work is complete only when the product reaches the customer in full, on time and at the right quality. It is a modest-sounding redefinition that removes the possibility of a department succeeding while the customer is failed, and it is why the customer count could triple while the product range stayed disciplined.

Data, tools and skills carry the part of this that is genuinely unusual. Baki reassesses each person's capability after every season, judged on actual effectiveness, on how thoroughly they have mastered the work, and on the value they bring, mapped against the Shu-Ha-Ri framework, which moves a person from learning a practice, to adapting it, to setting better ones. Pay follows that assessment. Previously salaries were largely fixed, varying between individuals without any clear standard behind the variation. Tying income to a capability model that people can see, and reassessing it on the natural rhythm of the business rather than on an annual calendar, turns development into something with a direct financial consequence.

Results and rewards are shared on the same principle. Employee income no longer comes mainly from salary and overtime; it comes from assessed capability plus a share of profit, and across a year the average employee receives total income equivalent to 18 to 20 months of the old salary. Beyond pay, staff travel twice a year at the company's expense and have external course fees covered when the course serves the work. When the business has a hard period, the arrangement runs the other way: the team looks at the problem together and works through it. Profits at Baki have risen faster than revenue, which Thịnh attributes not only to selling more but to continuously improved process and a great deal of cost taken out.

The lessons Thịnh draws are the ones most useful to anyone attempting this. The hardest thing was not learning a new model but abandoning old ways of working that had become habit. No single model transfers intact to every business, and a transformation has to fit the scale, people, sector and stage of the organisation, because forcing people through a rigid template contradicts the whole idea. And leaders have to mean it: you cannot claim to empower a team and then take the authority back the moment someone does something differently. What is owed in return is a safe environment to experiment and a leader who shares responsibility when something goes wrong.

What is unresolved is mostly a function of what Baki is. The business is concentrated in two festival seasons, which makes the year lumpy and puts enormous weight on getting each peak right, and it depends on a seasonal workforce four times the size of its permanent team. Thịnh's ambition is to replicate the model as Baki opens further locations across Vietnam, and a way of working that has been proved once, in one factory, with a team that grew into it together, is not the same thing as one that transfers.

Still, the arithmetic is hard to argue with. A company multiplied its output eightfold and its seasonal revenue fourfold while employing three fewer permanent people and paying each of them close to double. Baki's growth, in its chief executive's reading, came from its people growing rather than from its machines, and the machines were bought with what the people produced.

Bayer

A Bayer group tasked with sourcing, making, and delivering a medicine for heart failure used to judge itself purely on operational terms: shipments on schedule, consistent quality, a supply chain that never broke down. Then a handful of them left the plant for a day, sat inside a clinic that treats heart-failure patients, and talked with the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who prescribe and dispense the medicine, along with someone taking it, whose day-to-day health had turned around because of it. They came back seeing their own job differently, not as manufacturing a product and handing it off, but as one link in something that reached all the way into a hospital room. Once they were looking for it, they started noticing real, fixable problems, clumsy packaging, awkward handling procedures inside hospitals, that a team that never left the factory floor would have had no reason to catch. That's zero distance to customers doing exactly what it's meant to do: closing the gap between people who make a product and the people whose lives depend on it.

That shift in perspective has a name inside Bayer: Dynamic Shared Ownership, or DSO, a redesign of how decisions get made across a company built around the mission of "Health for all, Hunger for none." The mission itself isn't new. What DSO changed is how much the day-to-day machinery of the company serves it. Work is organized into rolling 90-day cycles, authority is pushed toward whoever is closest to the problem, and teams are expected to own outcomes rather than simply execute instructions handed down to them. The heart-failure team's changed perspective is one small proof point among many that have surfaced since.

Zero distance to mission and strategy, the gap between what an organization claims to stand for and the decisions it makes day to day, shows up clearly in Bayer's corn business in Sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of working toward hectare targets set centrally, the team shifted the call closer to the ground, letting local colleagues determine what they could realistically deliver against real farmer demand. With room to pursue relationships with new growers and push into territory the business hadn't farmed before, the team nearly two-and-a-half-timed its seed output, from roughly 30,000 to 72,000 metric tons in a single year, while also lowering unit costs. Bayer expects that additional supply to eventually expand its reach among smallholder farmers by something like 300 percent, a scale of impact that followed directly from moving a decision away from headquarters and into the hands of the colleagues who know those farmers best.

Zero distance to opportunity, the gap between spotting something worth pursuing and being allowed to pursue it, shows up in a story that starts smaller still. A field-based employee visiting rice farmers noticed they kept buying two 60-gram packs of a crop-protection product and taping them together by hand, because that combined quantity matched how they loaded their drones. Instead of writing that up for someone further up the chain to consider, the employee raised it with a small team pulled from several functions at once, who confirmed the pattern and designed a single 120-gram pack built around it. From that first observation to the product reaching shelves took about 45 days. It went on to become the highest gross-profit contributor in its entire portfolio, evidence that the fastest path to margin sometimes runs through paying attention to what customers are already improvising.

Zero distance to leaders, the idea that authority should sit with whoever is closest to the work rather than whoever holds the highest title, has had to change how leadership itself is shaped at Bayer. In the Packaging Technology organization, a traditional management structure gave way to teams that set their own direction, organized around what they were trying to achieve rather than who they reported to. Leaders stepped back on purpose, handing the reins to the teams themselves. In one workshop, those teams looked hard at their own priorities and killed off a handful of old initiatives that had quietly stopped delivering any value, sending the freed-up resources somewhere more useful instead. The role that remains for leadership is closer to coaching than commanding: providing context, clearing obstacles, and trusting people to make calls that leadership itself might not have made, but that often turn out better.

Zero distance to colleagues, replacing a vertical chain of command with people solving problems sideways, shows up in how far that habit now extends inside Bayer. When a supplier abruptly stopped delivering a raw material that two cardiovascular treatments depend on, with limited stock on hand and no qualified backup in place, nobody waited for a formal escalation process. Specialists spanning roughly half a dozen functions, from sourcing and quality to manufacturing and technical development, simply pulled themselves into a response group on the spot, split the work by expertise, and tracked down existing approved-source material that was already sitting elsewhere in the supply chain. Colleagues in regulatory and manufacturing then moved fast to get it qualified and into use. Both medicines kept reaching patients without interruption, decided and executed entirely by the people who felt the risk most directly.

Zero distance to data and tools, giving people the information they need without a manager filtering it first, shows up in how teams now use information day to day. Rather than waiting on periodic reports filtered through management, teams have started building their own shared dashboards for tracking performance, customer engagement, and forecasts, and making calls straight off what they see. Bayer has backed that shift with a support system built to grow the skills it requires: coaches who work alongside teams on real problems, informal networks that pass practical lessons between groups, and transformation specialists who help people build confidence through the work itself rather than through classroom training. The clearest sign of success isn't a training completion rate. It's colleagues who used to focus narrowly on their own function now taking part in business decisions they would once have waited to be told about.

Zero distance to partners, treating outside collaborators as part of the value-creation process rather than as vendors to be managed, has started running in both directions rather than one. The clearest recent example comes from the North American consumer brand One A Day, which rebuilt its product line and brand identity by shipping small, testing with real shoppers, and adjusting fast, instead of running the usual sequence of internal research and stage-gate reviews. Team members visited stores like Walmart and Target directly, watching how new packaging looked on shelves and gathering shopper reactions on the spot rather than waiting weeks for a formal report. That steady drip of real-world feedback let the team fold retailers into the development process itself. Inside a single 90-day cycle, the team built a new brand identity and launched a new product through Amazon, a timeline that would previously have run closer to a year.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action that comes with it, explains why bureaucracy keeps shrinking at Bayer instead of quietly growing back. Early in the transformation, the company stripped out 1,300 pages of internal rulebooks and administrative requirements in one sweep, a useful symbol but not, on its own, a lasting fix, since organizations tend to regrow the complexity that gets cut unless something actively resists it. The 90-day operating rhythm is that resistance: teams reassess their own priorities on a fixed cadence and are expected to make trade-offs themselves rather than escalate them out of habit. A cross-functional team exploring how artificial intelligence could solve real business problems put that authority to the test directly, choosing, on its own judgment and without asking permission upward, to advance two of its solutions into production while shutting down a third. Deciding what to fund and what to kill used to be a senior leadership call by default. Now it belongs to whoever is staring at the results.

Zero distance to results and rewards, tying recognition directly to the value someone created rather than to their title, is where the clearest financial proof of shared ownership shows up. The U.S. team behind NUBEQA, a prostate cancer treatment, ran its business as roughly nine disciplines working as one group instead of separate functional lanes, commercial, medical, and patient-facing work among others, free to redirect resources as new opportunities appeared. The team crossed a significant commercial threshold five months earlier than planned and delivered roughly 60 percent growth year over year in 2025, and patients and doctors now ask for NUBEQA more than any other option in its category. Recognition has moved to match that shift in how work gets done: Bayer's Impact Awards let any employee, at any level, recognize a colleague's contribution directly, rather than routing praise through a management chain, which means credit now tends to land closest to whoever created the value.

Nobody will ever put the heart-failure team's changed outlook in a headline the way a 60 percent revenue jump or a doubled seed harvest gets one. That's exactly why it belongs at the center of this story. A group of people who used to think of their job as ending at the factory gate now think of it as ending in a hospital room, and changed real things, packaging, handling, small daily frictions, because of what they saw when they got there. Multiply that same instinct, noticing something real and acting on it inside a 90-day cycle instead of waiting for a five-year plan to catch up, across a company working in medicine, agriculture, and consumer health all at once, and the transformation stops looking like one big decision made at the top. It looks like thousands of smaller ones, made by the people who were closest to the problem all along.

Berezka 

For years Berezka tried to widen its shelves. The logic looked sound: stock more of what Romanian shoppers already recognise, and a specialist Slavic food chain becomes a grocery chain with a much larger addressable market. Every attempt underperformed, and every time the conclusion was that the effort simply had not been pushed hard enough. Then the company did something it had never systematically done in a decade of trading, which was to ask its customers directly. The answer was almost the opposite of the strategy. What people valued was the assortment with a distinctly Slavic character, the products they could not buy anywhere else. Breadth was not what brought them through the door. Distinctiveness was. From that point the company stopped spending money on directions that diluted the one thing it was uniquely able to offer.

Berezka, which means ‘birch tree’ in Russian, is a chain of Slavic food stores in Romania, founded in 2014 by Arseny Burlakov and his wife Natalia Frol. It employs around 160 people: 100 in retail, 35 in production, 12 in the distribution centre and 12 in the management team. It runs its own production facility and distribution centre alongside the shops. Its customers are Romania's Russian-speaking population and anyone looking for Eastern European products that mainstream Romanian retail does not carry. In European terms the nearest relatives are founder-led convenience chains such as Żabka in Poland or the regional grocery discipline of Rimi in the Baltics; the closest mirror image sits in Harbin, where Russian bakeries and delicatessens have served a Chinese audience for generations on exactly the same principle, that the competitive advantage lies in what nobody else stocks.

The problem that triggered the change was not the market. It was the shape of the company. Arseny held the chief executive role for the Romanian operation and had accumulated responsibility across economics, marketing, digitalisation and wholesale, going deep enough in none of them. Direction leaders existed, but none were independently hunting for growth or working on optimisation. Every initiative traced back to the same two people. The mission and strategy he set himself was therefore unusually concrete for a founder: build a management product in which each department generates its own development agenda, so that opportunities are found at the edges of the business rather than handed down from its centre, and the company no longer needs his hands on it, and then transfer that model to teams in other European markets. He is explicit that the destination is not a company that sells beautifully. It is a company governed by its Management Council, earning enough for everyone to work comfortably, able to expand without running short of capital, growing by its own logic, and free of toxicity.

The route to it ran through a set of concrete mechanisms rather than a change of tone. A Management Council was formed and responsibility was distributed across several leaders. Customer development interviews were carried out, which is how the assortment question was settled. The company worked out who it is and what precisely it brings to a customer, and turned its values into something specific rather than decorative. Metrics were set for each direction, along with a system for tracking them continuously, so that they would pull the business towards full value for the customer rather than sit unread in a spreadsheet. Data of that kind is only as good as the skills around it, which is why the harder half of the work has been managerial rather than technical. None of this was one person's work, and Arseny describes it as a collective achievement.

Two insights carried the rest. The first is philosophical: clientocracy, in his reading, is a functioning parliamentary republic inside a business, with governance handed to a community of stakeholders. He had believed something like it for a long time without ever seeing commercial proof, and VkusVill supplied the proof. The second is almost embarrassingly plain: ask the customer. He had proposed exactly that years earlier, when a differently branded store in Bulgaria was not working, and had been told that customers say one thing and do another, so the question was never put. The lesson stuck when it came back to him from the outside.

Partners mattered at the point where a small company needed a method it could not invent alone. Berezka found Beyond Taylor through an interview with Andrey Krivenko, and the scepticism a retailer might reasonably have about training programmes was dissolved by contact with the people rather than the material: the company had a link to VkusVill, visited them, and met Valery Razgulyaev in person. Trust in those people produced trust in the methodology, and the methodology produced the tools.

Leadership was the variable that had to change for any of it to hold. Arseny's own account of his shift is that he stopped trying to be a specialist in every direction, which sounds simple and is not, because letting go is difficult in a business built on personal drive. What arrived when he did was real trust in his colleagues, and with it a kind of efficiency that cannot be declared into existence. The Management Council is where that trust is now formalised, and the next step he describes for it is precise: when the council looks at a direction that is out of balance, its job is to help the direction leader correct their own metrics rather than to solve the problem for them.

The results arrived in a year when Romanian retail was not a forgiving place to test a new operating model. Retail revenue rose from about one million euros a month to 1.25 million, a quarter more than the year before. Production revenue went from 100,000 to 175,000 euros a month, and wholesale from 150,000 to 250,000. Production moved from an EBITDA of minus 10 per cent to plus 7. The chain grew from 16 stores to 20, with four more due before the year ends. The number that matters most, though, is a negative one. After Romania changed its tax structure, the retail sector experienced it as a crisis and lost around 20 per cent of turnover. Berezka came through the same period down 2 per cent. Having been growing like for like at 20 to 25 per cent before the change, the company reads that near-flat line as the direct product of what it had built, and notes without much difficulty that if the market had kept growing, the same machinery would be flying.

Two things remain unfinished, and both are named openly. Working with metrics properly has a technical half, which is how exactly to measure, and a managerial half, which is a person accepting that a given metric is theirs, that they are fully responsible for it, and that their actions genuinely move it. That work continues. The harder one is rewards. Setting salaries and distributing bonuses among Management Council members has proved the most difficult decision in the whole change, because comparing the load carried by someone who has been in the company for eight years with someone who joined recently, or someone switched on day and night with someone who works eight hours, produces a sense of unfairness that money does not resolve. Everyone earns well. The question is one of principle, and it is not yet settled. By Arseny's own estimate the company is about 70 per cent of the way to the model it wants inside Romania.

What makes Berezka worth studying is how ordinary the ingredients are. A niche retailer in a foreign market, with no venture capital and no change of personnel, moved from a structure where everything depended on two people to one with distributed accountability and its own growth logic. It did it by forming a council, asking its customers what they actually valued, giving every direction a metric it owns, and having a founder willing to stop being the answer to every question. 

Beyond Taylor

Frederick Taylor focused on the factory floor when he published his influential management ideas in 1903. Over a century later, a grocery chain VkusVill challenged this approach, transforming its management style and founding a consultancy named ‘Beyond Taylor’.

VkusVill’s transformation success is evident in its results. In 2013, the company faced stagnation. Seven years later, it operated over 1,300 stores, processed more than two million online orders monthly, and achieved 40 percent annual growth. A quarter of its revenue came from employee-initiated projects, with over sixty launched independently, a direct expression of the ZeroDX opportunities dimension, where employees across the business actively identify and pursue ways to improve it. Management overhead dropped to less than ten percent of payroll, decision-making authority having moved to the frontline rather than stayed at the top, the same shift the ZeroDX action dimension describes. This shift reflects a distinct management philosophy.

Andrei Krivenko, who led VkusVill during this period, acknowledges the process was not planned in advance. He adopted effective practices from various sources, iterated as needed. Recognizing others were exploring similar ideas globally, Krivenko and colleagues Andrey Ivashchenko, Yury Alasheev, Nikolai Popovich, and Valera Razgulyaev developed the Clientocracy model and established Beyond Taylor to share it, treating the wider community of practitioners working on the same problem as partners to build with rather than competitors to outpace, the instinct behind the ZeroDX partners dimension.

Beyond Taylor was founded on the hypothesis that Clientocracy is effective regardless of a company’s size, industry, or location. To validate this, the firm tested the model broadly. Over 550 companies have participated in Beyond Taylor’s training, with more than 180 completing full implementation across 20 industries, the scale of that training a concrete measure of the ZeroDX data, tools and skills dimension in action. The results have consistently supported the hypothesis.

Clientocracy is guided by a single principle: employees prioritize customer needs over managerial preferences. Beyond Taylor defines this as maximizing value for the end user, applying it as a core strategy that is clear and actionable at every level of the organization, precisely the standard the ZeroDX mission and strategy dimension sets: a strategy every employee can hold and apply, not just recite.

The model is built on six principles, each challenging common business habits. First, avoid reliance on a single supplier by ensuring optionality. Second, maintain redundancy rather than operating at full efficiency without slack. Third, replace long-term planning with rapid, low-cost experiments accessible to all employees. Fourth, default to trust rather than suspicion, reserving scrutiny for rare cases of abuse. Fifth, empower teams to self-manage instead of increasing management layers. Finally, prioritize humanity, recognizing people as individuals rather than functions.

These principles are applied in practice. For example, VkusVill cashiers are authorized to correct pricing errors directly, as the cost of lost trust outweighs potential misuse, the kind of frontline authority the ZeroDX customers dimension calls for. During COVID-19, when 200 development staff became underutilized, they were reassigned to delivery, strengthening that division. The company operates without a traditional hierarchy, relying instead on a council of leaders from self-managing teams, a structure closer to a network than an org chart and a clear match for the ZeroDX colleagues dimension. A quarter of revenue now originates from projects initiated by these teams.

Mistakes are analyzed rather than punished. Beyond Taylor refers to this approach as the ‘black box’ method. The primary concern is whether an error was intentional. If not, blame is set aside, and attention shifts to identifying and addressing systemic issues, leaders defaulting to transparency rather than secrecy in the way the ZeroDX data, tools and skills dimension describes. For example, one client used this method to recover a major order by correcting a process gap. Pyaterochka, a retail chain, now awards a prize twice a year for the most instructive mistake.

Clientocracy’s principles are applied internally as well. VkusVill once experimented with reordering its shopping catalogue based on predicted preferences. Although initial results were positive, further research revealed this change violated a key customer promise: consistent product placement. The team promptly reversed the change, retained unaffected personalization features, and acknowledged the oversight, the kind of close, current read on customer needs the ZeroDX customers dimension asks every employee to hold. Similarly, Beyond Taylor treats resistance to change as valuable feedback, encourages information sharing, and allows trust to develop gradually.

Implementing a model is distinct from teaching it, and Beyond Taylor holds itself to the same standards it promotes. The effectiveness of Clientocracy is most evident within Beyond Taylor’s own operations.

Beyond Taylor does not have a traditional management layer above its consultants. Its Management Council, representing Consulting, Client Experience, Learning, and Methodology, consists of individuals directly accountable to clients, leadership staying close enough to the work to be judged by it, the essence of the ZeroDX leaders dimension. Project managers have full authority over their engagements, including design, budgeting, and client relationships, requiring additional approval only for complex cases. Each team manages its own profit and loss, with the Council coordinating results rather than exerting control, a textbook case of the ZeroDX action dimension, where self-managing teams carry real authority over real business decisions. Key decisions, such as pricing and resource allocation, are made by those directly involved in the work.

This approach extends to team building. Hiring decisions are made by the relevant team, not a central HR function, keeping team formation itself inside the small, collegial units the ZeroDX colleagues dimension describes. As the company expanded, traditional hiring tools proved insufficient, so Beyond Taylor developed a 17-point checklist that evaluates candidates based on values and decision-making, rather than solely on experience. If a candidate aligns with Clientocracy’s values but not a specific team, they may join another team. If no suitable position exists, the individual enters a ‘circle without a role’ for up to two months, during which they remain employed while seeking a new role internally or externally. The organization manages mismatches constructively rather than terminating employment immediately.

Financial rewards and error management follow the same principles internally as those taught to clients. Twenty percent of each team’s net profit is allocated to a shared bonus pool, distributed among team members and not linked to individual sales or billing targets, a direct application of the ZeroDX results and rewards dimension, where teams share in what they produce rather than compete as individuals. There is no penalty system. After each project, teams conduct retrospectives, and serious incidents are reviewed using the black box method, focusing first on whether support or context was needed rather than assigning blame. Minor issues are addressed through direct conversations.

Beyond Taylor applies the same standards to its clients as it expects them to apply to their own. The firm does not operate on a retainer model; each engagement is tailored to the client’s specific needs. If Clientocracy is not suitable for a client, Beyond Taylor declines the contract. Fees are often performance-based, with some engagements tying up to half the fee to client growth and up to 30 percent as a discretionary goodwill payment, structuring the relationship as a shared stake in the outcome, the same gain-sharing logic behind the ZeroDX partners dimension. The firm also refuses to work with businesses whose practices are harmful. This business model is designed to ensure success is defined by the client’s independence, not ongoing dependency.

Beyond Taylor acknowledges areas for improvement. Formal commitments to staff, mirroring those it recommends to clients, are still being developed. The company is transparent about this ongoing process, demonstrating its commitment to openness. In cases where a project has not met expectations, the firm has returned its fee in full.

What makes Beyond Taylor a compelling case is not that it teaches zero distance, but that it has proven it three times over: by accident, inside a grocery chain with nothing left to lose; by design, inside the consultancy built to carry the lesson forward; and by repetition, inside more than a hundred companies that had no reason to trust the model beyond the results in front of them. Each of the nine dimensions shows up here not as a policy on a page but as a decision someone made under real pressure: a cashier fixing a price, a team reversing a change it had already shipped, a founder giving away an idea instead of guarding it. That is a difficult thing to fake, and, once a company has felt what it is like to work this way, an even harder thing to walk back.

Biblioteka Aromatov

In 2009, a friend told Alexander Lushin about a perfume that smelled like chewing gum. He didn't believe something like that could exist. Then he tried it, and realized the product wasn't a novelty but an entire market. By 2010, Lushin and two partners had registered a trading company, signed with a Western supplier, and launched a range of about twenty scents. The idea carried them anyway: scent not as a marker of status, but as a mood and a surprise.

That idea scaled itself for over a decade. Word of mouth, an active urban social-media community, and retail placements in venues like the Respublika bookshop chain turned a novelty into a habit; once the range passed fifty scents, customers came back not for one moment of shock but to find a different feeling each time. By 2024, that growth had quietly built a ceiling, and Lushin describes what it felt like: "Ideally you'd have two or three clear indicators in front of you, but instead you've got twenty-five gauges on the dashboard." Every significant call, especially on money, still ran through the three founders. There was no P&L the wider team could use. The company had more capacity than its own system could express.

The fix arrived through 3 STREAMS, a fund Lushin chose specifically because it wasn't just capital. "They were willing to get into the operational weeds, help change the system, rather than simply watch from the sidelines or issue directives," he says. The transformation itself was led by Beyond Taylor, a consultancy whose approach grew substantially out of its work with VkusVill, a grocery chain far larger in scale; together with 3 STREAMS, it brought Clientocracy into Biblioteka Aromatov, shifting decisions toward customer data and frontline teams rather than the founders alone. Zero distance to partners here meant more than funding: both partners functioned as operators embedded in the business, not observers reviewing it from outside.

Lushin's first instinct was skepticism, the classic worry that customers, taken literally, only ever ask for a faster horse. What changed his mind was redefining what listening meant: not fulfilling every request, but learning to interpret what customers were actually telling the company. That shift became the foundation of zero distance to customers at Biblioteka Aromatov. The Customer Care team was tasked with actively gathering insight rather than just resolving tickets, and one discovery reshaped how the company thinks about its own product: customers weren't buying perfume so much as a tool for managing their mood across the day.

Turning that insight into product meant rebuilding how ideas got tested, which is where zero distance to opportunities and zero distance to action converge. Before, a new scent was born from taste, trend-watching and instinct, an approach that worked when the brand was young and rewarded boldness. Now, a concept becomes a mock card, image and label in the online store, with customers voting on whether they'd buy it before a single bottle is produced; only after two weeks of real signal does the company decide to launch. The scent "Relaxation Therapy" ran through several rounds of CustDev interviews and a focus group testing different fragrance versions before it reached shelves. Lushin is precise about what changed: "The launch became no less creative, but significantly less random."

Zero distance to leaders and zero distance to colleagues show up in the same structural change: the Board of Leaders. Where financial and operational calls once collected at the top, three founders in a group chat they nicknamed "the three musketeers," the Board of Leaders now carries collection and analysis of customer data, cross-functional prioritization, and a growing share of day-to-day judgment calls. Two or three months in, Lushin noticed members leaning on numbers not because they were told to but because it had become normal practice. Finance was the hardest thing for the founders to release; what got them there wasn't willpower so much as patience, repeating the reasoning until the team trusted it enough to run without a founder's sign-off.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills followed the same arc. P&L moved from a finance-only document into something the wider team reads and works from, and that visibility surfaced a fact the company hadn't fully reckoned with: across a company that now runs roughly 1,700 SKUs and a team of about ninety, marketplaces account for 63 percent of sales, against 24 percent for the branded online store and 13 percent for retail, out of more than 200,000 marketplace orders and 50,000 direct orders in 2025. Rather than treating every channel the same, the team now assigns each one its own role and its own investment logic, purchasing, assortment and promotion sized to what the numbers actually show.

Zero distance to results and rewards is visible less in a compensation formula than in a changed sense of ownership. People increasingly understand how their specific work links to the company's outcomes, and Lushin watches for a particular behavioral tell: colleagues who now "bring not just a problem, but a proposed solution." Revenue grew 1.5 times in 2025 over 2024, but the number he returns to is qualitative, a team that has started thinking like owners of a result rather than executors of a task.

None of this arrived smoothly. Lushin admits the company underestimated how hard the transformation would be, expecting the same fast, organic pace at which Biblioteka Aromatov normally moves from idea to shelf. P&L literacy across a team with very different backgrounds is still a work in progress. Some Board of Leaders members chose to step back once the role's real weight became clear, a self-selection Lushin treats as the system maturing rather than failing.

The "three musketeers" chat where Biblioteka Aromatov's whole business once got decided still sits on Lushin's phone. What changed is what happens outside it: a Board of Leaders that reads its own P&L, a fragrance that survives a customer vote before it survives production, and a company that grew revenue 1.5 times in 2025 without routing a single one of those decisions back through a founder's approval.

Bold2Move

Most of Bold2Move's work has been advisory: helping other organizations change how they make decisions. This year the Stuttgart based consultancy did something more direct. It launched a Search Fund to acquire a small or mid sized company in the Stuttgart and Kirchheim region that is facing a succession problem, with the stated goal of turning that business into a working example of the Zero Distance principles the firm normally teaches from the outside. The fund's investors and timeline are not yet public, but the move says something about how Bold2Move is now willing to back its own claims: rather than only advising on decentralization, it is putting its own capital behind it.

Jochen Göser and Stephanie Dahl-Wissmann met while running the agile transformation inside Bosch Power Tools, a widely discussed self-management experiment in German industry that Corporate Rebels has covered separately. That work convinced them a large, traditional engineering company could genuinely decentralize decision making, and it became the founding premise of Bold2Move, the consultancy they built afterward. Bold2Move was nominated for a ZeroDX Award in 2025 and went on to win the Emergent Excellence category when winners were announced in Beijing last year.

Three developments mark the past year for the consulting firm. Bold2Move says its active client portfolio, which now includes DAX corporations, German Mittelstand firms and public authorities working on decentralized organizational design, has roughly doubled. It launched the Search Fund to directly transform an organisation from the inside, and Corporate Rebels Cell Germany, the peer network Göser coordinates, has grown to 40 member organizations, making it one of the more active nodes in a global Rebel Cell.

On mission and strategy, Bold2Move says its purpose now actively filters which clients it takes on. The firm says it turns down financially attractive engagements when a prospective client shows no real appetite to change governance or decision rights, on the reasoning that consulting on structure without touching who holds authority produces only cosmetic change. The firm also learned, over the past year, that the language of transformation carries its own resistance: framing change as ‘Selbstorganisation’ (self-management) put off some German Mittelstand leaders, while describing the same shift as ‘Dezentrale Entscheidungskraft’, distributed decision power, opened conversations that had previously stalled.

Among colleagues, the clearest evidence is Cell Germany itself. What Corporate Rebels described in 2025 as a small peer group meeting monthly, with companies such as Bayer, BMW, Würth and Fujitsu among its early members, has grown into a network of 40 organizations that trade practices directly. In June 2026 the Cell held a Germany and Global gathering at Bayer's headquarters in Leverkusen, a two day event, with over 70 attendees from eight countries.

As a partner, Bold2Move positions itself as one node inside a larger transformation ecosystem. It recognises local and international collaborators and describes thought leaders such as Bill Fischer, the IMD professor and long time chronicler of Haier's RenDanHeYi model, as a mentor. 

In its own operations, the firm applies what it calls a simple test to any internal process: does it create value for the client, or comfort for the firm. Bold2Move runs without approval chains, internal sign off committees or mandatory templates, and treats the Search Fund as the boldest expression of that instinct: an unprompted, self funded move built from inside the firm rather than a plan commissioned by anyone above it, since there is no one above it.

The firm is candid about the tension that comes with its own success. As Bold2Move becomes better known, it feels pressure to grow into the kind of central authority it was built to dismantle, and it has had to consciously resist adding headcount, building proprietary frameworks or centralizing what it knows. In the founders' words, Zero Distance is not a destination, it is a discipline, a line that reads as much like a warning to themselves as a description of their clients.

What stands out about Bold2Move is the consistency between what it teaches and what it is willing to risk with skin in the game. The firm already carries independent recognition, having won the Emergent Excellence category of the 2025 ZeroDX Awards, and it has built Cell Germany into one of the more active nodes in the global Rebel Cell network, a community that increasingly runs itself. Launching the Search Fund extends that same conviction into new territory: rather than waiting for a client to commission change, the founders acted on their own judgment and backed it with their own capital. That instinct, to lead by doing rather than only advising, is what continues to set Bold2Move apart.

CareHome

Four years ago the director of CareHome reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the thing most in need of changing at her company was her. Đào Hồng Hà had believed that tighter control and more of her own decisions would make the business run better. What she observed was the reverse. The more she took on, the more the organisation depended on her, and the less her team did on its own initiative.

CareHome repairs and maintains the electrical and refrigeration equipment in Vietnamese homes: air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, water heaters. In August 2022 it was one maintenance station with about twenty employees, and from the outside it looked like a normal small service company. Inside, revenue was only genuinely positive in the summer peak and in the final month of the year, and the remaining months ran at a loss simply to keep operating. Processes kept being written and efficiency kept not improving. Technicians worked to instruction, were not engaged with the overall result, and their income suffered accordingly. Service quality was not meeting what customers expected. The most exhausted people in the business were its owners, Hà and her husband Quách Văn Giang, who spent their days on a stream of small operational decisions and finished no better off.

By August 2026 CareHome runs four maintenance stations and a training academy, employs 41 people, serves 23,000 customers rather than 6,000, and turns a profit above 10 per cent. The turn came from changing how the company is managed, working with Teal Unicorn, the New Zealand practice of Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ, who coached Hà and Giang and worked directly with their people.

Leaders is where it started and it is the dimension that carries the case. Hà's own description of what she had to learn is specific: to listen more instead of answering immediately, to ask questions instead of solving every problem, and to let the people doing the work analyse the situation and choose the solution rather than deciding on their behalf. She also had to revise what she thought about her staff. She had assumed some of them were unmotivated or lazy, and concluded later that most people are not lazy, they have simply never been given the goal, a part in finding the answer, or permission to try. Her summary of the shift is the plainest statement of it: "leaders don't have to be the ones with the most answers."

Action, meaning how change actually happens, was deliberately small and continuous. CareHome did not require anyone to change at once. It began with minor improvements and made room for people to discuss, experiment and learn from each attempt. That took time to work. In the early days meetings were quiet, because staff who had spent years receiving instructions were afraid to make a wrong suggestion, afraid of the responsibility that came with a proposal, and inclined to treat discussion as wasted time. Gradually the meeting stopped being a place to report and became a place to solve problems, and the direction of proposals reversed: technicians began putting forward new ways of working because they are the ones standing in the customer's house, and the office team adjusted process to match.

Data, tools and skills changed through one decision that most owner-managed businesses never take. CareHome opened its revenue and costs to its staff. The reaction was not the one Hà had feared. People were surprised by how much was being spent on things nobody had noticed, and the team itself proposed cutting the waste, using resources better and coordinating differently. Handing over the numbers converted a management problem into a shared one.

Customers are close enough to the work to shape it, because in this business the employee is physically inside the customer's home. Mistakes made on site are now discussed openly so the whole team can learn from them, rather than traced back to the person who made them. The company's customer count moving from about 6,000 to 23,000 over four years, on a headcount that only doubled, is the clearest evidence that the service itself changed rather than just the sales effort.

Opportunities emerged from the same people, and the most telling example concerns time that used to be wasted. A technician with no scheduled job was previously idle. Technicians now use those gaps to call customers, support the sales team, or record videos showing customers how to deal with simple faults themselves. Recording instructions that reduce future call-outs is not an obvious act for someone whose work is call-outs, and it happens because the person doing it is measured on the result rather than on the visit. Colleagues cover for one another on the same logic: when someone is unexpectedly busy, the office team redistributes the work itself so the service is not interrupted.

Partners entered through the training academy, which CareHome now runs alongside vocational colleges so trainees learn while working, gain real experience and enter the trade with confidence after graduating. For a company whose growth is limited by the supply of trustworthy technicians, building the supply rather than competing for it is a structural answer rather than a recruitment tactic.

Mission and strategy have been rewritten around that constraint. CareHome is working toward a network of self-managed maintenance stations across Vietnam, and states its aim as a thousand honest technicians caring for a million families. The word doing the work in that sentence is honest, because in home repair the customer cannot verify what they are told and the industry's reputation reflects it. A model built on transparency inside the company is being pointed at the same problem outside it.

Results and rewards make the argument. CareHome was loss-making in 2022, reached break-even in 2023, and now runs at a profit above 10 per cent. Annual service capacity went from about 3,500 orders to about 12,000. Productivity per technician came close to doubling, and this did not come from anyone working longer: it came from improved process, better coordination between departments and people acting on their own initiative. Technician income nearly doubled in step, which is what makes the arrangement stable, since a productivity gain that stays with the company buys one good year and then stops.

The distance still to travel is considerable and the company is direct about it. A thousand technicians is a long way from 41, the academy is new and unproven at scale, and self-managed stations are easier to describe than to replicate across a country. The underlying seasonality of appliance repair has not been abolished either; what has changed is that the quiet months no longer have to be funded out of the busy ones.

What CareHome demonstrates is narrower than a theory of management and more useful. A small service company with no capital advantage, no proprietary technology and no special market position moved from loss to double-digit profit largely by letting the people who do the work decide how it should be done. Hà's own account of the lesson puts the emphasis where the evidence does: what changed most was not the management model but how she looks at people.

CGénial

The Fondation CGénial team in Paris was about to try its first candidate-free election, a Holacracy practice new to everyone there. The person chosen for the facilitator role didn’t know it yet either. An hour later, that colleague was leading the meeting. This experience showed the power of peer-driven decision-making and how Holacracy can surface new leaders and perspectives that might not emerge in a traditional hierarchy. "When you see that your peers promote you, it's magnificent to witness."

‘CGénial’ means ‘brilliant’ in French, which suits an organization dedicated to showing French teenagers that science is for them too. From its Paris office, the foundation connects with middle and high school students across the country through hands-on programs that make STEM subjects feel real, not just theoretical. Girls are especially encouraged to join, since they are still underrepresented in science. CGénial’s journey toward a more participatory structure began when its leadership recognized that traditional hierarchies were not the only way to organize. Experiences in less hierarchical environments abroad helped inspire a shift in mindset, demonstrating that strict hierarchies are a choice, not a necessity.

In its early years, CGénial was small enough for informal collaboration. As the foundation grew, the need for more structure became clear, but there was a strong desire not to replicate rigid hierarchies. Exposure to new organizational ideas, such as Holacracy and the concept of being 'safe enough to try', provided a compelling alternative. In 2018, the team voted to experiment with Holacracy for six months. The approach stuck. Today, about 25 people work at CGénial, and both its budget and reach have tripled since that first vote.

As CGénial expanded, new challenges emerged. By 2022, most HR decisions, such as performance reviews and raises, were still centralized. To address this, the foundation launched a working group called '(R)évolution RH,' aimed at decentralizing these processes and finding practical, participatory solutions. The resulting changes have fundamentally shifted how CGénial handles feedback, evaluations, and pay, moving toward a more collective and transparent approach.

Instead of traditional departments, CGénial uses Holacracy’s circles, which are groups of responsibilities. One circle, now called "Richesses Humaines" or Human Wealth, handles feedback, development, and pay. For many years, these tasks were overseen by Hélène Chahine, who has served as CGénial’s director since 2012. As the organization adopted Holacracy, these responsibilities became more distributed across the team.

Zero distance to leaders is clear in a story Hélène shares about her own salary. The president of the larger organization that oversees CGénial once mentioned that her pay hadn’t changed in four or five years and needed to go up. She told him directly that it wasn’t his decision or hers; it was up to the collective process the foundation now uses. Bastoun says the president was surprised. This small moment shows something bigger. At CGénial, leaders have responsibility, but not the power to make decisions alone, even about their own pay. There are no manager-led performance reviews at CGénial. Each person chooses two or three colleagues who actually work alongside them, called Échollègues, to prepare and deliver feedback directly. A second role, the Yoda, sits alongside each person all year, not to judge or evaluate but to hold what Hélène calls the frame, the safe container that keeps a session from turning into either a tribunal or empty flattery. Four people currently hold that role. She describes watching people leave those sessions changed: "For me it is a moment that I feel they found constructive with a lot of joy and gratitude."

Zero bureaucracy is most visible in CGénial’s governance meetings, though it’s not always easy to achieve. Meetings follow a set order: someone makes a proposal, others ask clarifying questions, share reactions, and finally raise objections. The last step can be tough, especially since in French, the word for objection feels very formal and can seem confrontational. Bastoun compares traditional workplaces to youth soccer, where the coach assigns roles and no one questions it. In governance meetings, people are encouraged to question and suggest changes to the organization, something most adults have never been asked to do. She has experienced this discomfort herself. Once, a colleague proposed and won a new sub-role she wouldn’t have chosen, but her objection wasn’t valid. "It's difficult as a leader," she says, "but okay, they chose. I have no valid objection, so I have to accept it's going to be done differently. And in the end it was a good choice." She often repeats a phrase that has become a group motto: decisions made in governance can always be revisited, so there’s little reason to fear trying something new.

Zero distance to partners is part of how CGénial trains people to use this system. HappyWork.pro has stayed involved since 2018, running Holacracy sessions for new hires and supporting the internal Holacracy Lead role, which two people hold to keep the practice going every day. Everyone at CGénial, not just new staff, has attended three two-day workshops on nonviolent communication. This training helps make sure feedback and objections are seen as helpful, not as conflict. As Hélène says, none of this happens automatically. "It's absolutely necessary to have regular things even after integration."

Zero distance to opportunity is clear in how CGénial hires new people. Traditional reference checks don’t work well here, since most past colleagues haven’t worked in a Holacracy and can’t say if someone will do well without a manager. The foundation instead looks for signs of psychological safety, such as whether someone feels comfortable speaking up and pushing back when needed. While the process is more instinctive than scientific, it has resulted in a team that thrives in a manager-free environment. Raises are decided collectively, through a no-candidate election. Employees see the full salary pool available, write up what they accomplished and learned over the past period, and request a specific raise as a percentage. The collective decides. Full salary transparency remains a work in progress, since people submit requests without knowing what colleagues actually earn, and this is acknowledged openly as unfinished business rather than hidden.

None of this happens automatically. The whole system depends on people who are willing to keep it going through daily commitment and collective attention. If the team stopped engaging in governance and training, the system would likely fade within a year or two. It lasts because members of the foundation keep choosing to maintain it and welcome newcomers. That honesty is important. The things that work, like peer-elected roles, collective pay decisions, and feedback from colleagues, aren’t automatic. They exist because the foundation decided, nine years ago and many times since, that not knowing what comes next isn’t a reason to wait for permission. That’s the same message every teenager hears at CGénial: not knowing yet is where everything starts.

Clarasys

Every consultancy claims to trust its people. Clarasys got the rare, unwanted chance to prove it during the worst run the consulting sector has had in years, and came out the other side with the trust still standing. In practice, it turned into the clearest evidence yet that Clarasys's zero-distance model isn't a slogan reserved for good times.

It started, as these things do, with money. A brutal run across the consulting sector forced Clarasys to pause pay rises, delay pay cycles, freeze promotions for six months, and tighten a flexible leave policy that had quietly become the firm's proudest experiment in trust. All of it was necessary. And it is exactly the kind of pressure that tends to expose whether a company's stated principles are structural or merely decorative.

What held first was mission. Employees didn't just receive OKRs from above, they were expected to explain them, and most could. Seventy percent of colleagues say they can describe, in their own words, how their daily work ladders up to the firm's goals, an unusually concrete number for something as soft-sounding as “alignment.” Clarasys reinforced that understanding on purpose: junior consultants and the CEO were sent to the same external conferences on progressive management, and a dedicated three-person team now exists solely to keep the thinking behind self-management alive company-wide, rather than trusting it to survive on its own.

Zero distance to opportunity showed up next, in how the company chose to fix its own problems. When the leave policy needed rethinking, nobody above simply issued a new one. Clarasys ran an internal experiment, held a full company town hall, and benchmarked practice against UK and US peers before changing anything. The new pay-conversation process got the same treatment: designed by a “design authority” made up mostly of working consultants, not executives, so the people closest to the friction got to shape its resolution.

Then came the clients, the reason any of this exists in the first place. If a senior client instinctively looks for whoever seems most important in the room, Clarasys's house rule is for someone else on the team to answer anyway, a small, deliberate refusal to let seniority substitute for relevance in front of the person paying the bill. The firm backs that instinct with what it calls its triangle, weighing firm success, client outcome, and people fulfilment as one decision rather than three competing ones, and says it now shapes workforce planning every month. Seventy percent of staff say they can make calls in line with it, drawn, this time, from a different question about a different kind of judgment call.

Leaders, for their part, gave up ground on purpose. Authority over sales, accounts, and reporting moved further down toward the people actually running them day to day, and the new pay process was built to run both ways, feedback flowing upward as readily as downward, checked by a panel whose entire remit is catching bias before it calcifies into unfairness. The openness reaches the very top: 81% of colleagues report a psychological safety that lets people show vulnerability even at senior levels, a harder thing to fake than a mission statement.

Colleagues came next, quite literally. Instead of imposing a blunt cap of twelve people per team, Clarasys got more intentional about how teams form in the first place: proposal teams now run as small, named, accountable groups with genuine ownership of their own goals. And because the firm now spans borders, it invested in the same closeness at greater distance: a dedicated culture lead in the US, more travel between offices, deliberately mirrored socials, and a calendar that runs well past the pub (sport, shared meals, new skills like pottery and bouldering, and an ongoing partnership with Age UK).

None of that means much without the data and tools to back it up, and here the numbers are almost startling for a company mid-downturn: 92% of colleagues say they know exactly where to find the firm's financial picture, and 87% feel they can get whatever information they actually need. Feedback became a tracked habit rather than an occasional event, with a monthly target of one piece sent and received; by May 2026 the average stood at 1.16 sent and 0.77 received — real, measurable movement toward something that used to happen only when someone remembered to.

Where the model showed up most plainly was in action. Senior consultants divide up priorities themselves through sprint planning, with nobody assigning it to them, and when something breaks, the fix runs through an internal “advice process” that pulls in views from across the business instead of waiting for one senior verdict. The firm's “fuck-up championships”, public deliberate celebrations of failure, sit inside a culture that scores 82% positive on psychological safety overall, proof that owning a mistake out loud is safer here than hiding one.

Clarasys is employee-owned, and 2026 gave that fact some teeth: with nobody asking them to, some employees voluntarily took a salary sacrifice to help the firm through the worst of it. People stayed even when the immediate reward for staying was delayed.

None of this erases a hard year. But it answers the question last year's case left open: whether Clarasys would fall back on hierarchy the moment things got difficult. The model held and it came out sharper than it went in.

Codewave

When Claude introduced autonomous coding agents and AI started to impact the software services industry, only a few people on Codewave’s business team noticed how quickly things were changing. Many senior colleagues preferred to wait for clear changes in demand before accepting that the disruption was real.

Within just a few months, Codewave turned the conversation into a new business model. For a company that relies on people trusting each other’s judgment, this was the biggest test yet of whether that trust could hold up when people were worried about their jobs and pay.

Codewave is a technology and design consultancy based in Bangalore. Over the past decade, it has grown to about 200 people, organized into self-managed teams of 21 called ‘Fractas’, a term inspired by natural fractals. The company has no CXOs or board members separated from day-to-day work.

Opportunities, decisions, and even the company’s brand story flow through a system where no one needs to wait for permission to act. This approach faced its toughest challenge this year, as Codewave shifted from being a “digital transformation” firm to what it now calls an agentic transformation company. The focus is still on design, but now it centers on emerging intelligence instead of just app development.

The quick shift to the new model goes back to a tough decision made a few years earlier. During the pandemic, Codewave’s revenue doubled, but the company’s culture suffered because of remote hiring. New employees never experienced the in-person culture that self-management relies on, and work started to feel more transactional.

Instead of chasing more growth, the company paused and brought in mentors from SEMCO Style India. They rebuilt what they call “boundaries of action,” a system that encouraged senior staff to let their teams make decisions. This same approach shapes how the company handles its mission and strategy today. Opportunities are shared openly on Glue, the company’s internal platform, and volunteers, not appointed leaders, are chosen to lead negotiations across Fractas. The best example came this year, when a public Fracta leaderboard turned the AI shift into a company-wide contest, and teams started trying out new tools on their own before leadership even suggested it.

This openness is also seen in how Codewave handles opportunities. Harsh, a new product owner, built a Slack app in just one week that now connects directly to Glue. Employees can text what they worked on, and Glue creates an AI-generated summary of their impact. No one needed approval from multiple managers, and the idea came from someone who was new to the company.

According to the company, two things keep this kind of initiative going: open competition between Fractas and rewards like monthly peer-voted recognition and peer-decided raises or career growth, all given openly. When an employee mentioned during a Peerly check-in that she wanted to run an education business someday, Codewave connected her with Codewave Foundery, its upskilling arm. She now divides her time between her product role and running Foundery.

The customer focus at Codewave is clear in decisions that don’t need a manager’s approval. When Alessa Group, a pre-IPO company from the Middle East, asked the Bangalore team for more overlapping work hours, the team changed its schedule, moved its weekend to Friday-Saturday, and shifted its skills toward full-stack development, all without asking for approval. They kept both profits and customer satisfaction steady. Even teams without direct client contact have the same mindset. For example, when the recruiting team noticed extra capacity and saw a client hiring on LinkedIn, they offered to find candidates through Foundery, created their own pitch, and brought in new revenue.

At Codewave, there are no layers between frontline employees and the CEO. The founders see themselves as working peers, not just reviewers, showing a leadership style focused on enabling others. Karthik is a clear example of this change. He joined from a traditional, hierarchical company and got direct feedback about his management style. Since then, he has become a coach in radical candour, taken on roles from consultative sales to information security lead, and became an equity partner faster than anyone before him. The founders work the same way: Harsh, the new hire who built the Slack app, found prospects through his own network and went with co-founder Abhijith to pitch them. Co-founder Vidhya works directly with the brand team, co-writing a Gen Z brand song instead of just reviewing it.

Coordination between Fractas happens side by side, without a manager making decisions, which shows the practical side of how colleagues work together. When Codewave started the Fracta model, the leads decided to keep Peerly, the company’s feedback system, at the company level instead of splitting it by Fracta. They believed people needed feedback from outside their own teams. Fracta leads also negotiate the total raise budget among themselves, using transparent profit numbers from projects, Fractas, and the company. Each Fracta then decides how to split the budget, with some being more generous and others stricter, and no manager steps in to settle disagreements. Ten months into the Fracta model, no Fracta has split in two, but people have moved between them. For example, Karthik left his Fracta to work at the company-wide level.

Data, tools, and skills are the foundation for everything else at Codewave. Every employee can see the company’s revenue and profit, right down to their own project’s numbers and their own revenue-to-salary ratio, including the CEO’s. This transparency led to open questions during a recent raise cycle, when employees with higher revenue-to-salary ratios than others asked why their raises were smaller. The company treated these as real conversations about why dependability, teamwork, and self-management are three of the five performance criteria, instead of shutting down the discussion. On the tools side, engineer Dhanush saw AI costs rising, so he built and tested his own local orchestrator using open-source coding models on his personal computer. He showed it could handle about 80 percent of routine engineering tasks and is now rolling it out across the company. All of this is shared on Codewave’s AI Radar for anyone to see and use.

The way Codewave works with partners is designed to keep the boundary between the company and the outside world open. Its partnership with SEMCO Style Consultants India began because Codewave saw that AI only adds value in organizations ready to use it, while SEMCO wanted AI expertise to help its clients build ongoing systems. Both now see Glue, Codewave’s WorkOS, as the shared language that made the partnership work. With more than 100 external partners over five years, Codewave also hosts a Democracy at Work conference for companies interested in less hierarchical models. Two more partnerships started this year because outsiders saw the opportunity first: Growthfactors, a brand strategy firm, suggested helping Codewave sharpen its post-AI positioning and signed on within two months, while Madhu, an existing customer, noticed a communication skills gap and offered a six-month coaching program.

The action dimension, or autonomy at the edge, also applies to spending money. Karthik and Gurjinder planned and carried out an entire international travel program themselves, including visas, markets, budget, and itinerary, without needing approval from the founders. This effort generated over a million dollars in potential business this year. The founders traveled to another region under the same rules. Codewave’s finance team, which operates as its own revenue-generating group, reviews every expense claim, including those from founders, just like any other claim. The company also holds open “elephant in the room” meetings, where anyone can bring up issues they might usually avoid, including their own mistakes. These meetings help prevent bureaucracy from returning.

Codewave has shifted from giving quarterly spot awards to a monthly, peer-nominated and peer-voted “most valuable player” title, chosen on Glue instead of by a manager. Accountability is based on real financial results, not just activity. Product owners are responsible for milestone invoices, delivery owners for maintaining customer satisfaction, and Fracta leads for keeping their teams profitable, since bonuses depend on it. The company highlights Harsh and Karthik as examples that anyone can take ownership: Harsh, a new hire, rebuilt part of the company’s processes in his first year, while Karthik changed his management style and became a partner faster than anyone before.

The shift to AI was not easy for Codewave. The company openly admits that it spent weeks debating whether the disruption was real, and that employees worried about pay and job security when the company switched to being paid for outcomes instead of hours. What Codewave learned is that a truly aligned team can move through fear faster than expected. The same systems built to share opportunities—like Fractas, Glue, Peerly, and cNPS—also helped Codewave have tough debates, make decisions together, and come out of industry-wide disruption feeling more confident about the future.

Conomica 

Conomica, a company focused on buying unpaid debts, made a surprising discovery in 2023: most clients were not interested in debt recovery. Instead, large businesses said they worked with Conomica because they needed quick cash for any purpose. This difference between what Conomica thought it offered and what clients actually wanted led to the company’s biggest transformation.

Since 2016, Conomica has paid over 7 billion rubles to clients who sell their hard-to-collect debts. Conomica buys these debts, gives clients instant cash, and then tries to recover the money using funds from investors. Investors earn a return when the debt is collected. This model depends on speed: clients want fast cash, and investors need to trust that their money is being used wisely.

By 2023, Conomica’s growth had stalled. Managing Partner Kirill Panov joined the Beyond Taylor Strategic Leadership School to find a way to focus the business on real client needs. In October, the company started using Clientocracy, a model from VkusVill’s founders, which replaces top-down approvals with small teams that answer directly to customers. They set up a new Management Council and created independent teams focused on client results instead of internal roles.

The breakthrough came from simply asking clients what they wanted. "Before conducting CustDev research, we were convinced that our job was helping businesses recover debts," Panov said. "But once we started talking to customers, we found that almost no one actually mentioned debt recovery." Clients wanted liquidity: a set amount of money, delivered quickly and reliably. Conomica changed its focus to provide this, making regular customer conversations a core part of its business. "CustDev is an inseparable part of running a business," Panov said, "like a diet you follow for life to stay healthy." This shift brought Conomica closer to its customers and changed its mission, not just its messaging.

Knowing what clients wanted didn’t mean Conomica could deliver it. Every deal needed approval from the project director and a risk team that saw each transaction as a potential problem. “A deal couldn’t be approved without a sign-off from the project director. People would sit in his office all day, sometimes five at a time,” Panov said. Terms often changed, timelines stretched to one or two months, and the sales team had little power to speed things up. For comparison, a bank loan took two to three months, so Conomica was only slightly faster than the banks.

Instead of routing every deal through one central risk team, Conomica gave each unit its own risk assessment capability. Rather than waiting on a central gatekeeper, the judgment and the data needed to make a call moved to wherever the deal actually sat. The former risk team didn’t disappear; it shifted into an internal service role, reviewing documents quickly for the teams now trusted to close deals on their own.

The new Management Council replaced single-person approval with shared authority, making leadership more accessible to the teams doing the work. "As soon as we made that change, everything just took off," Panov said. "Our old structure had simply been getting in the way of people doing their jobs." This change brought four benefits: teams can now act quickly, work closely with each other, access leaders easily, and use the data and tools they need to make decisions themselves.

Conomica’s two-sided model adds another benefit: zero distance to partners. Investors who fund each debt purchase also rely on speed and good judgment. By giving frontline teams the power to assess risk, the people closest to each deal can vouch for it directly to the investors, instead of relying on a distant committee.

Once the structure changed, results improved quickly. Deal cycle time dropped from 62 days to 11, making Conomica much faster than a bank loan. Deal volume grew by 46.9 percent, from 697 million to 994 million rubles. The biggest sign of client trust was that repeat deals went from zero in 2023 to 41.6 percent in 2024. This shows two more benefits: growth came from existing opportunities, and results improved as soon as the new model was in place.

The days of waiting in line for one person’s signature are over. Deals that once took two months now close in eleven days. Four out of ten clients return for more business, and the growth Conomica wanted finally arrived when the company started listening to its clients.

Cyberclick

When Cyberclick's own SEO and content team realized that clients increasingly cared less about ranking on a results page and more about whether an AI chatbot mentioned them at all, the team didn't write a proposal and wait for a green light. It tested more than twenty-five specialized tools to figure out what actually moves the needle on visibility inside AI-generated answers, ran the experiments on Cyberclick's own website and content first, and only then carried what it learned into client work. Within a year that internal experiment had become a full-service line, with its own landing page, more than thirty published articles, two ebooks, and several webinars. Nobody at the top assigned that project. A twenty-seven-year-old Barcelona-based marketing agency simply let the team closest to the problem build the answer, and then sell it.

Cyberclick was founded in 1999 by David Tomas, who still runs it as CEO, and has since grown into a group with offices in Barcelona, Madrid, and Bogotá, twice recognized in a row as one of the best companies to work for in Spain. Its own stated mission is blunt about what it thinks drives good work: excellence is only possible with a team of happy people.

Zero distance to customers is where that AI-visibility story pays off twice over. What began as a one-time audit product has become a recurring content and authority strategy built for an internet increasingly read by AI systems rather than only people, spanning not just articles but public relations, social platforms, and communities like Wikipedia and Reddit. Cyberclick treats client relationships the same way over a longer horizon: some clients have stayed with the agency for twenty years and more, in an industry that reinvents itself every few years, which only happens if the relationship is built on understanding how a client's business evolves rather than on executing a fixed scope of services. That same instinct to adapt ahead of the client is what pushed the company to position itself as an AI partner rather than a traditional agency, and to build its own applied methodology for it, AI CORE by Cyberclick.

Zero distance to opportunities asks whether a good idea needs permission from the most experienced people in the building before it can become real. At Cyberclick, the honest answer is that most of its recent AI capability, automation, predictive analysis, content generation, AI-era search optimization, and internal process improvements, came from individual teams running their own tests rather than a centralized AI strategy handed down. Anyone can propose an initiative, share it with the teams it touches, and run a trial without climbing several layers of approval; if it holds up, it gets time, tools, and help from other specialists to prove itself further. The company's own shorthand for this, one of its three stated values, is ‘Always Find a Better Way’, and it's framed as a responsibility on everyone, not an invitation to a select few.

Zero distance to data, tools, and skills means teams get to test what they use, not just what they're told to use. Cyberclick has long encouraged teams to try new tools and judge for themselves whether something actually improves their work, a habit that accelerated sharply once AI tools multiplied, with people specifically dedicated to testing options for data analysis, code and page generation, SEO and AI-search optimization, video and image production, and sales operations; whatever proves useful gets rolled out more broadly. That access comes bundled with a monthly, company-wide session called “This Month I Learned…”, plus recent company-wide training on using Claude and the AI features inside Google Workspace, all aimed at making sure people don't just adopt new technology but understand it well enough to apply it with judgment.

Zero distance to colleagues shows up in how Cyberclick deliberately runs two organizational logics at once rather than picking one. Fixed teams built around specialties, finance, paid media, accounts, development, design, video, marketing, sales, people operations, and more, hold deep expertise, while separate teams built around a specific client or project pull people across those specialties as needed. A biweekly meeting called Team of Teams lets leads from different areas trade what matters without convening the entire company, and a parallel Team of Teams AI does the same specifically for AI experiments and tools, so that a lesson learned in one part of the business doesn't stay stuck there.

Zero distance to partners is where Cyberclick's own self-description has changed the most. The company has long treated technology partners like HubSpot, Google, and Meta as more than platforms to use, building joint training, running events, and bringing them into projects early enough to help solve a technical problem rather than just supply the software behind it. That habit is what made a much bigger move possible: in June 2026, Cyberclick joined Siloy, a European group built around CRM, go-to-market, and AI-driven growth with a strong HubSpot orientation, turning the company into one node inside a network of more than 300 specialists across several companies, sharing methodology and collaborating across countries without losing local autonomy. As David Tomas puts it, Cyberclick shouldn't be understood any longer as a standalone company but as a node inside a wider network where knowledge and opportunity get built jointly rather than owned by one office.

Zero distance to leaders at Cyberclick is a problem of scale rather than of intent. Staying horizontal was simple when the whole team could be in direct contact with each other; growing meant finding a way to organize without stacking on the layers that usually come with size. Today most teams are guided by someone more experienced who facilitates and coordinates rather than directs, and that role isn't necessarily fixed to one person, it can be shared or rotate depending on the project. Those leads meet in smaller groups specifically to avoid the alternative, company-wide meetings that swallow time without giving teams the context and autonomy they actually need. David Tomas describes his own job in similar terms: increasingly about removing obstacles and connecting teams rather than approving their decisions.

Zero distance to action at Cyberclick is honest about where it stops. Day to day, people and teams are expected to be resolutive on their own or with peers, without constant oversight from senior staff or the CEO, and that expectation starts at hiring: candidates go through four to six interviews assessing both capability and cultural fit specifically so that trust can be extended immediately once someone joins. But autonomy here doesn't mean isolation, and Cyberclick doesn't pretend every decision belongs to a single team. Anything genuinely cross-cutting or strategically significant is still worked through alongside whoever holds the broader view of the business, a deliberate boundary rather than a gap in the model.

Zero distance to mission and strategy is usually tested by whether a stated purpose can survive an actual, monetizable decision, not by whether people can recite it. The Siloy deal is Cyberclick's clearest test of its own sentence about happy people driving excellence: a company could have taken outside capital and treated culture as a line item to renegotiate later, and instead built the negotiation around keeping culture intact, expanding what the team could do and accelerating its bet on AI without diluting Cyberclick's identity in the process. Strategy underneath that also isn't the property of whoever has the most seniority; teams identify client needs, propose new services, and launch their own AI, data, training, and content initiatives without waiting to be told to. Since Cyberclick's 2025 nomination, the purpose itself has taken on a second job: it now doubles as the filter for how much international scale and outside collaboration the company takes on, without giving up the closeness and autonomy the company built its name on.

Zero distance to results and rewards runs on quarterly OKRs set for every team and tied to company-wide priorities, so a person can trace their own target to what the business needs rather than to an isolated task list, measured against actual business and client impact rather than raw activity. Progress against annual revenue and profitability goals, along with the criteria for keeping HubSpot's Elite partner status, is shared daily on Slack rather than saved for a quarterly meeting, so teams can catch a problem while it's still small. When the company hits a good result, a profit-sharing system spreads it across everyone at Cyberclick, not a management layer, which is what turns those shared numbers from information into something people have an actual stake in.

None of this reads as a company that solved autonomy and then stopped paying attention to it. The Siloy integration is only weeks old as this is written, and folding a 300-person European network into a culture built for twenty-seven years without hierarchy is a harder test than any single AI tool the company has adopted so far. What's already on the record is the instinct underneath it: an agency that tested AI visibility on its own site before it ever sold the service, and that treated a continental merger as a negotiation over keeping its culture rather than a transaction to survive. A company that keeps testing its own answers on itself before handing them to anyone else is the kind of company likely to catch its own mistake before a client does.

Digital Hangar

The question that started Digital Hangar's best product story of the year was about cats and dogs. Customers wanting to fly with a pet kept asking whether the animal could travel on a given flight and what paperwork it needed, and nobody could answer quickly. The rules vary by airline, by country and by vaccination status, so passengers rang support, agents worked through policy documents, and bookings stalled while they did.

A team close to that friction mapped the whole journey and then asked whether the digging could be done by software instead of by the customer or the agent. What they built reads a pet's passport by optical character recognition, checks it against airline rules, country requirements and the International Air Transport Association's travel information database, and returns a clear yes or no in minutes. It began as an attempt to eliminate one recurring support ticket. It is now heading for rollout across Lufthansa Group's digital channels, with projected savings of up to 1.2 million euros a year in support costs, alongside fewer denied boardings and more confident bookings. Nobody commissioned it from above.

Digital Hangar is the Lufthansa Group's digital products organisation. Its ecosystem has grown from around 1,300 people to more than 2,000, and in September 2025 it was named a winner in the Emergent Excellence category of the ZeroDX Awards in Beijing.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what an organisation exists to do and how it settles where to go, produced the decision the unit was built on. Each Lufthansa Group airline used to have its own app, developed separately, with different features, different maturity and different technology. Digital Hangar's founding mission put that arrangement in question, and the answer was to build one shared app platform for the group while keeping the individual airline brands intact. The alternative, continuing to optimise each app on its own, would have meant duplicated work and slower development. Strategy is not written only at the centre either. Each area within Digital Solutions has colleagues working with the central strategy team, a Strategy Roadshow lets employees in every location hear departments present their targets and question leadership directly, and a transition team made up of employee representatives from across the business, rather than a group of managers, is steering the current reorganisation. Four pillars, Trusted, Seamless, Human Touch and Transformation, give the organisation a shared vocabulary, and teams use them in increment planning to connect their own features to the wider direction.

Opportunities, the question of how an idea becomes a real initiative, is supported by several routes rather than one. Communities of Practice hold their own budgets and members are expected to commit up to a fifth of their capacity to community work, which is where the time to explore something usually comes from. The Innovation community runs sprints, workshops, courses and hackathons, and has introduced a game to teach innovation management. Ideas that surfaced this way include a set of quick filters for finding the best flight options and a baggage calculator that shows what a passenger can pack for their particular fare and destination instead of leaving them to read a table of irrelevant rules. Where an idea needs more than that, any employee can book a slot in the monthly executive management meeting to pitch it directly and ask for budget, resources or introductions. How much room a team has varies with what its value stream is delivering at the time.

Customers reach the teams through a User Lab that handles recruitment, incentives, facilities, moderation and the research process, so that testing an idea is easy rather than exceptional. Teams watch sessions live from an observation room or by remote stream. Testing a prototype of a new app home screen showed participants leaving it immediately to check their flight status: they wanted reassurance and flight information, while the prototype was built around exploration and offers. The team changed direction and made the booked trip the persistent focus of the home screen. Other teams have acted on the same kind of evidence. One paused development of a chat assistant flow after users read suggested alternatives as bookable rebooking options. Another widened the scope of its hotel tool once interviews showed that a voucher is only one part of what a stranded passenger needs, and two teams then formed a community around disruption support after finding that customers did not expect it to exist in the app at all. An artificial intelligence tool the organisation built in house now gathers thousands of customer comments daily and puts them within reach of any team for prioritisation and journey mapping.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and what they do with it, has been rebuilt around communities as well as reporting lines. Marc Lutz leads the Community of Practice for more than a hundred Product Owners, none of whom report to him. "I have to earn the right to be listened to every single day," he says of the change. His work is designing peer clinics and exchange sessions, pairing newer Product Owners with people who have already solved the same problem, and representing what the community needs to other units and to leadership. There are on average two layers between the chief executive and an employee. That number is deliberate in both directions: fewer layers had left people without enough access to mentorship, more had made management feel inflated and put strategy out of reach. The career model was changed to match, removing disciplinary leadership as a major driver of a role's grading so that building hierarchy was no longer rewarded for its own sake. Alongside this sit weekly all hands sessions, open slots in management strategic meetings, pulse checks whose results leadership discusses with the whole organisation, and an office where people greet the chief executive at the coffee machine.

Colleagues coordinate sideways by design. Teams work in value streams aligned to the Scaled Agile Framework, so the teams that depend on one another already share a rhythm and a common set of objectives for each delivery increment, and dependency calls surface cross-team commitments before increment planning starts. Most coordination then happens inside the sprints. When a product team found mid-sprint that its objective depended on a change to a software interface owned by a team in another Agile Release Train, one of the groupings of teams that have to deliver together, the Product Owner contacted their counterpart directly rather than escalating. Within a day the two Product Owners, the engineers and a business analyst had agreed the interface contract and a delivery sequence that kept both teams moving, logged the revised timeline on the shared dependency board, and delivered inside the same increment. Teams also re-form around opportunity. When the Corporate Evolution train in the business-to-business value stream moved to maintenance mode, the value stream took two teams that would otherwise have closed and moved them onto corporate.com, a new booking interface, without a formal restructuring.

Data, Tools and Skills is where the autonomy is made usable. Dashboards showing key performance indicators, and the objectives and key results that sit behind them, are open across the organisation, and teams help define what goes into them. Technical and product documentation sits in a shared documentation space, and information that used to be held inside departments is now reachable. The capability framework applies business acumen, delivering results, and autonomy and accountability to every role, so business literacy is a baseline rather than a finance specialism, and the career model lets a Product Owner or engineer grow in scope and influence without managing anyone. Tooling has moved the same way. Communities of Practice encourage members to trial what suits their work and submit requests through a portal, which is how GitHub Copilot, Claude and other tools entered the organisation rather than by an enterprise-wide mandate, and a technology radar is used to judge what is worth adopting at scale.

Partners are treated as part of the ecosystem rather than as suppliers. External collaborators sit inside the product teams, working alongside employees with the same access to context, product and customer, rather than receiving packaged tickets from outside.

Action, meaning how far a team can go without asking, is best shown by the Night Accommodation Product. A product team noticed that passengers could book hotels through several disconnected routes, each airline having owned its own answer to the same need. The team developed a single product, pitched it to stakeholders including every Lufthansa Group airline, and launched it across the group. Leadership supported it, but its development had not waited for approval. Standards work the same way: Communities of Practice run horizontally across all product teams and value streams and are where guardrails and guidelines get written, by the practitioners themselves, with community leads who steer without disciplinary authority.

Results and Rewards ties pay to shared outcomes. A meaningful part of what someone earns now depends on how their team and the company perform, through objectives and key results shared across the organisation and rewarded equally regardless of seniority or role, and the career model rewards expert progression on the same terms as management progression. Teams carry a local profit and loss or an equivalent measure of the economics of their product, so the question at the end of a quarter is whether what they built created value rather than whether they shipped what they promised. Variable pay of this kind carries real risk for people used to a fixed salary.

The model is now being asked to travel. Digital Hangar's operating model is being extended into further Lufthansa Group departments, which is how the ecosystem reached more than 2,000 people. Some of those units work on flight operations rather than customer-facing products, on software that calculates fuel or plans flights, and they see themselves as operations rather than as digital businesses. Taking an operating model built for app teams into work of that kind, at corporate scale and across units with different measures of success, is the test Digital Hangar has set itself next.

Divan

The first thing Divan ever sold was a sofa called Singapore, ordered online in 2015 by a customer who had no idea they were buying from a company that would, within a decade, run its own factories, let shoppers preview furniture in photorealistic detail before it was ever built, and post a loss large enough to force a total rethink of how the business made decisions. The sofa itself is a small detail. What grew out that first purchase was something worth telling.

Divan builds and sells furniture directly to customers, running its own production alongside its online storefront rather than outsourcing the physical side of the business the way most e-commerce furniture brands do. Founder and CEO Anton Makarov has grown the company to roughly 2,000 people, more than 13,000 products, and over 100 showrooms. Its 60,000 square meters of manufacturing space now cover three quarters of all customer orders in-house. A Red Dot Design Award arrived in 2016, alongside a habit of moving fast that has stuck ever since: a new furniture concept can go from sketch to catalogue in under four months, and customers configure their own pieces through a tool that renders every change in real, photorealistic 4K before anything gets built.

None of that speed came free. Financial year 2023 closed with an EBITDA of negative 189.9 million rubles, a margin of negative 5.8 percent, and cost of goods eating 78 kopeks out of every ruble that came in the door. Small adjustments weren't going to fix a hole that size. What needed to change was how the company made decisions in the first place, not just the numbers those decisions produced.

What Divan chose to do next is where this case earns its place in the Transformational category. Facing a real loss, the instinct in most companies is to tighten the reins, cut costs, or cut people. Divan went the other way, on the reasoning that a business whose entire stated mission is "to inspire people to change for the better" couldn't credibly ask that of its customers while running its own staff on fear. In 2024 the company broke itself into autonomous units, each one responsible for its own area of the business and answerable for its own profit and loss, with company-wide strategy set not by a single founder's call but by a Management Council built to hold a shared, working view of what actually mattered most.

That shift is zero distance to leaders in practice: authority spread across a council rather than concentrated in the person who built the company. It's a pattern the furniture industry has seen before in China's QunarHome, which pursued its own management reforms explicitly to cut founder dependency and protect margins. Divan's version amounted to the same bet, that a company grows more resilient when no single person is the bottleneck for every important call.

What that bet actually felt like from the inside is zero distance to colleagues. Employees who joined from other companies describe the difference plainly: minimal control, maximum initiative, decisions made without waiting on layers of approval, and something rarer still, real room to try an idea and be allowed to fail at it. The company's own hiring line, "the right people will find us," reads less like a slogan than a filter for who actually wants to work that way. Giving each unit its own profit and loss account is what made that culture more than a talking point. It clarified exactly who owned which outcome, and it closed the distance between spotting an opportunity and acting on it: projects that once ran for months before anyone discovered they weren't worth doing now get filtered out earlier, measured against a framework of priorities every unit actually shares rather than one imposed from a head office. Teams stopped drifting in different directions and started converging on the same handful of things that mattered.

Zero distance to customers shows up in how directly a shopper's own choices reach the factory floor. The 4K configurator lets someone design their own sofa before a single board is cut, and the same four-month pipeline that takes a concept to catalogue means those choices don't sit in a queue for long once an order is placed. Divan now counts 680,000 members in its loyalty programme and a net promoter score of 53.4 percent, numbers that track a company whose furniture increasingly gets built around the person ordering it rather than around whatever was already sitting in a warehouse.

Zero distance to partners helped pay for the physical side of that shift. A government-backed Industrial Development Fund programme financed new equipment at a 3 percent loan rate against a market rate north of 16 percent, funding that helped push total production space from 20,000 to 60,000 square meters. Dealers and franchise partners extended the company's reach further still, carrying Divan's furniture into markets its own showrooms don't directly cover.

Zero distance to data and tools is what actually turned autonomy into cash. Once decisions moved to the people who could see the underlying numbers and lived with the consequences of them, direct production costs on the company's own marketplace sales channel dropped to 38 percent of revenue in that channel, and monthly output of case furniture, cabinets, shelving, and similar pieces, climbed from 80 to 165 million rubles. Neither improvement required new investment so much as new visibility, people making calls with the actual cost data in front of them, rather than a summary handed down after the fact.

Zero distance to results and rewards is where the turnaround becomes undeniable. The company that closed 2023 at an EBITDA margin of negative 5.8 percent posted a positive 108.5 million rubles, a 2.7 percent margin, by fiscal year 2025. Gross margin climbed from 21 percent to 30 percent, then to 34 percent by the first half of 2026. Cost of goods against revenue fell from 78 percent to 70 percent to 66.8 percent over that same stretch, while the share of revenue eaten by raw materials dropped from 54.8 percent to 42.1 percent. Labour productivity rose 38 percent, from 205,000 to 284,000 rubles generated per person each month. None of that reads like a one-time fix. It reads like a company that learned to manage its own cost structure as an ongoing discipline rather than a periodic emergency.

Divan isn't the only furniture company to have hit this particular wall. What makes Divan's version of that story worth telling isn't that the crisis was unique. It's that the fix ran toward trust rather than away from it, at the exact moment trust is hardest to extend.

A company that once needed four months to turn a sketch into a sellable sofa needed roughly the same span of time, one restructuring cycle, to turn a loss-making balance sheet into a profitable one. The sofa named Singapore started this company on a promise about helping people live differently. Nine years and one very public loss later, the company finally figured out how to extend that same promise to the people building the furniture, not only the people buying it.

DO.BRO Coffee

When Egor Matveyev, DO.BRO Coffee's managing partner, was asked at a business event co-hosted by Drinkit and Beyond Taylor how far along the company's move toward Clientocracy really was, he didn't reach for a success metric. "Not much time has passed," he said, "and the majority of the planned changes are still formulated as hypotheses." Coming from the managing partner of a company with more than 500 employees, a company-owned café chain, and 106 franchise partners, that kind of candor is rare, and it sets the tone for how DO.BRO talks about its own transformation.

The company traces back to 2005, when it started in Blagoveshchensk trading coffee and tea. A first roasting facility followed in 2015, and the following year DO.BRO turned its internal operating standards into a franchise model. Two decades on, the brand runs its own cafés alongside a franchise network and production sites the company places in Moscow, Kaliningrad, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. In 2023, DO.BRO adopted Clientocracy, the management model Beyond Taylor built out of retailer VkusVill's own transformation, in which employees answer to a customer rather than to a manager.

Nowhere does that shift get closer to zero distance to the customer than in Vmeste, the café chain DO.BRO built from scratch that year specifically to test the model. Before opening a single location, the team spent three months training with Beyond Taylor and came away with a lesson Matveyev still leads with: "our customer is multi-dimensional, a student, an office manager, a mother with a young child, and their needs are different." Rather than guess, DO.BRO sent people to run CustDev interviews in the neighborhoods where it planned to open.

The answers rewrote the format. People wanted a space cosy enough to work in and relaxed enough to bring a child to without disrupting anyone else, which meant the spaces needed to be versatile rather than single purpose. The split that mattered most turned out to be geography, not demographics: residential neighborhoods wanted a place to work and mind children, while city center locations wanted somewhere to grab a coffee, unwind, and disconnect for a few minutes. "Customer feedback gives a far broader picture than our own assumptions," Matveyev said, a modest way of describing how much of the original plan the research quietly rewrote.

That same research became DO.BRO's mission and strategy dimension in practice. The team built a strategic canvas directly from the CustDev data to find where it could be genuinely distinctive, rather than competing in what Matveyev called the "red ocean," a crowded, low margin market where every player looks the same.

The opportunities dimension took its first real shape in the one part of DO.BRO Matveyev runs himself: the technical department that handles design coordination, franchisee design projects, and equipment. He noticed outsourced designers weren't always listening closely to franchisees, were slow to answer when questions came up, and were earning poor feedback as a result. That made it a partners dimension problem too, since franchisees are DO.BRO's closest external collaborators, not just contract holders. The fix cut the distance directly: a questionnaire asking franchisees what they needed, what was unclear, and what should change, paired with a faster loop for acting on what came back.

That one department's fix is turning into something bigger: a dedicated customer relations function inside the parent company, and the clearest evidence yet of the data, tools and skills dimension spreading past a single team. The same combination of surveys and CustDev interviews Vmeste used to open its first café is now reaching other departments and shaping how DO.BRO deals with its franchisees generally. "We are asking more questions and gathering more feedback," Matveyev said.

Three dimensions still have real room to grow, and DO.BRO says so plainly rather than glossing over it. Leaders and colleagues are still shaped by what Matveyev calls, without much hedging, "a bureaucratic and slow moving business with more than five hundred people," where the shift toward Clientocracy is being driven top down by the managing partners themselves, "gradually and at their own pace." It is a distance between intention and structure the company names openly rather than one it has closed. Action is following a similar path: teams don't yet hold real budget authority or run anything like a local P&L, and the instinct Matveyev describes as the old default, "give me a budget estimate, I'll give you the money, show me the result," is still closer to a chain of approval than the chain of accountability to the customer that Clientocracy asks for.

What DO.BRO is putting forward is not a company that has already closed the distance to its customers, its franchisees, or its own people. It is a company that can point to exactly where that distance has narrowed already, inside one department, and exactly where the work is only just beginning. Matveyev doesn't dress that up, and he doesn't need to: a five hundred person, bureaucratic coffee business choosing to rebuild itself around the customer is, on its own, a story worth telling honestly. "It needs to be explained," he said of the model he's betting on. For now, doing that explaining, one department, one questionnaire, one CustDev interview at a time, is the whole of DO.BRO's case, and the clearest sign that the explaining is working is that it has already started to spread.

DocDeti

Twice in three years, Marina Demidova intentionally restructured her clinic network. DocDeti underwent significant changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and again in 2022, which Demidova describes as "like a Rubik's cube." Each time, the network emerged stronger. This readiness to rebuild, rather than maintain the status quo, is central to how DocDeti, the evidence-based medical clinic network for children and adults, has developed what Demidova calls a system of compassionate medicine.

Demidova's first independent project was Lab24, a laboratory aggregator she presented to TilTech Capital in 2017, an investment fund established by VkusVill's Andrei Krivenko and partners. Lab24 became one of the fund's initial projects. A few months later, she proposed DocDeti. The second pitch was successful not only due to her existing relationship with TilTech, but also because she and the founders shared a belief that business should be kind and improve people's lives.

The first DocDeti clinic opened in 2018. The network now includes six clinics, a seventh under construction, and a team of approximately 700 employees operating under the DocDeti, DocMed, DocMed ECO, and DocDent brands.

When Krivenko launched the Beyond Taylor Strategic Leadership School to teach Clientocracy, a management model developed from VkusVill's transformation, Demidova felt her team needed to participate. Clientocracy requires organisations to structure their hierarchy and processes around the value delivered to those they serve. For DocDeti, this starts with mission and strategy: the network aims for medicine to play as small a role as possible in people's lives. Clinics do not promote unnecessary services, and they focus on patients who seek recovery and a return to normal life.

Customer dimension is lived rather than declared. At DocDeti, Demidova says, the patient stands alongside the doctor as an equal, partners in her words, neither one lecturing the other. Doctors are not pressured to hit sales targets, inflate a bill, or generate unnecessary referrals. A decision is made on what benefits the patient, full stop. This trust strengthens the action dimension. Doctors have the authority to make clinical decisions without managerial interference regarding commercial outcomes, a responsibility Demidova says "cannot be transferred to someone else." The network applies this approach organizationally as well. During the COVID-19 pandemic and again in 2022, DocDeti reorganized itself incrementally, redistributing roles, realigning teams, and redefining responsibilities. Each time, the network became more effective.

The partners dimension is evident from the beginning in DocDeti's relationship with its investor. TilTech Capital is viewed not just as a funding source, but as a like-minded partner. When Krivenko launched the Beyond Taylor school, joining felt like a natural extension of their existing collaboration.

A key outcome of this training was the creation of a Board of Leaders, composed of representatives from medical, finance, operations, sales, HR, IT, and marketing. Members are selected based on their understanding of the organization's values, not their rank. This small, cross-functional team exemplifies the colleagues dimension by fostering collaboration across functions rather than relying on a traditional hierarchy.

DocDeti has taken a systematic approach to the data, tools, and skills dimension. Over six months, the network implemented a metrics system based on the Beyond Taylor framework, starting with the Marketing Director and expanding to other directors. Before launching the system, the team defined each department's value, identified internal clients, and mapped departmental interactions, ensuring thoughtful planning before implementation.

The opportunities dimension shows up in who was asked to write the network's Ethics Code: not senior managers, but frontline employees. Using Beyond Taylor methodologies, the team refines the document through continuous feedback, revisiting any clause that raises concerns such as one of Beyond Taylor's core positions, that managers should be paid equally. Marina believed the network needed stars who would pull the team forward. She arrived somewhere else instead: a business matures when people stop competing to be the individual star and start building what she calls a collective star together. What that looks like next, in variable pay or ownership beyond management salaries, is the clearest room to grow in DocDeti's account, the place its own reasoning points toward even if the mechanism is not built yet.

Demidova attributes the organisation growth in part to the network's management approach. More importantly, she highlights the underlying principle that DocDeti is willing to restructure itself for improvement and prioritizes patient trust over sales pressure. This commitment defines what closing the distance means at DocDeti.

Dodo Pizza

For years, Anatoly Murashev's team took pride in one number: 22 minutes, the time it took to get a pizza from oven to doorstep. It turned out almost nobody cared. Rushing to hit that number was producing wrong toppings, wrong sizes and mistakes customers quietly resented, and once the team actually asked what guests wanted, the fix wasn't speed at all. It was getting the order right.

Murashev and his business partner, Yuri Kostin, run 16 Dodo Pizza franchise locations and a coffee shop. In December 2023 the two completed the Beyond Taylor Strategic Leadership School, and starting in 2024 they began applying Clientocracy tools across the franchise. Their graduation project set a specific target for what they called their Board of Leaders: 54 new Dodo Pizza restaurants opened by the end of 2028.

That board became the core of the new structure, an autonomous management team where each member owns one customer value outright: wait time, product availability, order accuracy, in-restaurant comfort, or how easy a location is to find. In eighteen months the roster has changed only twice. The facilities manager gave way to a brand awareness lead focused purely on making sure residents know where to find a Dodo location, and a second growth lead was added to speed up openings. It is zero distance to leaders and zero distance to mission and strategy together, a small team owning both the goal it set for itself and the specific promises behind it.

The board's first real discovery came from simply asking guests what they wanted, something Murashev admits the team hadn't done before. They had assumed speed was the priority. Customers told them otherwise. "I come once a week because you only ever have one or two pizza slices on display," one guest said. "I'd love to come for lunch more often, but I can't eat pepperoni every day." The team expanded the display and kept a varied slice menu available at all times. In the four weeks from September 8 to October 5, 2025 alone, slice sales brought in 4,422,336 rubles with a profit of 2,894,220 rubles, and the parent company liked the results enough to roll the practice out across the entire Dodo network. It is zero distance to customers doing exactly what it promises: a fix nobody would have found by guessing.

The delivery habit fell next. Pushing every order out in 22 minutes had been a point of pride, but it was producing rushed prep and assembly mistakes that mattered far more to customers than a few extra minutes ever would. The team let delivery times slip slightly in exchange for getting orders right, and the average customer rating climbed from 4.772 to 4.859 between September 2024 and September 2025. That kind of change is only possible because Dodo logs a rating and comment after every order, visible to staff in real time rather than buried in a quarterly report. It is zero distance to data, tools and skills underneath a decision that looks, on the surface, like simple common sense.

Watching how customers used the slice display led the team to revisit an old idea: a 20-centimeter pizza, smaller than Dodo's standard 25 centimeters and sized for one person to fold and eat on the move. A similar test had stalled out three years earlier. This time the team refined it, priced it lower, which answered another common complaint that Dodo was too expensive, and found it sold well both in-restaurant and for delivery without cutting into sales of the standard size. They piloted it in their own restaurants over the winter, and by summer the parent company had scaled it to other franchisees. It is zero distance to opportunities working as intended, an idea that failed once, got picked back up by the team closest to the customer.

None of this moves as fast as the team would like. As franchisees, Murashev and Kostin can't unilaterally change a recipe, adjust pricing, or even redesign a courier uniform. Every change like that needs sign-off from the parent company, which can take one to six months. Customers have complained for a while about the bacon in the carbonara, and the franchisee still can't just swap the ingredient; they have to wait for feedback to build up across the network before headquarters acts. That's an honest limit on zero distance to action, but the parent company is starting to listen as results are very clear.

Where the franchise model does work in the team's favor is as a platform. Their Flattis coffee shop, in partnership with Lenta supermarkets, put the brand inside another company's foot traffic. And the parent company's own willingness to scale the slice display and the 20-centimeter pizza network-wide shows a franchisor increasingly acting like a partner rather than a gatekeeper. That's zero distance to partners taking shape on both ends of the relationship.

The numbers add up quickly. In one year, the franchise opened ten new pizzerias and two coffee shops, added seven new cities, and opened four pizzerias in Bulgaria. Two customer-driven ideas, the slice display and the smaller pizza, are now standard practice across the entire Dodo network, not just Murashev's restaurants, and both changes cost the franchise almost nothing to implement. What they returned was measured in revenue and in a rating that kept climbing instead of stalling.

The 22-minute promise that once defined the business is gone, and the numbers are better without it: a higher rating, a slice display that now pays for itself many times over, and a pizza size that almost didn't survive its first test years ago now running in a national campaign. Ten pizzerias open, forty-four still ahead of the 2028 target, Murashev's team is getting there by asking customers first and building second.

Earthshot Labs

An engineer and a project lead at Earthshot Labs built the company's central operating system without asking anyone first. They called it Dash, they built it with Claude, and it now carries what the company calls its unified ways of working: project management, time tracking, and the financial transparency that has since changed how people behave at work.

There was friction while they were doing it. Earthshot sells to external customers, and here were two of its people spending their time on an internal tool instead. The company's own assessment is that a formal approval process would likely have stopped Dash before anyone understood what it was for. What the tool produced instead was enough clarity and alignment across the organization that the objection dissolved on its own: people can now see their work in relation to everyone else's, and how it connects to the whole.

Earthshot Labs is a climate technology company working in reforestation, conservation and ecological restoration, with a team of around 30 people across the United States, Spain, Colombia and Peru. It was founded in 2021 with deliberately flat intentions, hired quickly after a seed round the following year, and then met the wall that closed on the whole climate tech sector: its Series A fell through in 2023, and the resulting liquidity crunch cost it people. What came out of that reckoning was not a retreat into conventional management but the opposite. Guided by General Coordinator Andrea Dennis, the company rebuilt itself around autonomous project teams, expert groups and coordinating circles, replacing a hierarchy of job titles with a set of defined roles. That was the story of the 2025 nomination. The question since has been what the model does once the novelty wears off and the financial pressure stays on.

The answer, two years in, is that it has settled. Earthshot now runs on a Rep Circle, a Coordinator Circle and Facilitator roles, and this is the year the distinction stopped needing explanation: colleagues understand that Reps carry goals and strategy up from their teams while Coordinators hold operations. More than the specific mechanics, what has landed is the underlying idea that this is a role-based organization. External titles still exist where they are useful for dealing with the outside world, but internally the work moves through roles, and authority comes from the role and the work someone has taken responsibility for rather than from a position above someone else.

That has changed what leaders are for, including the ones who would once have been called that. Earthshot has deliberately stopped treating leadership as something a particular group possesses, on the reasoning that everyone should know they can lead within their own domain. People who would conventionally have been the decision-makers now spend less time directing and approving and more time supplying context, support and clarity, which is a smaller job in appearance and a harder one in practice.

Underneath all of it sits the question of what people can see, and this is where data, tools and skills has moved furthest. Financial transparency, delivered through Dash, has changed behaviour across the organization: people take more ownership, negotiate their roles more explicitly, and treat time and money as things they are accountable for rather than things someone else manages. The company paired this with a financial matrix introduced during the year. Rather than requiring approval for individual decisions, the matrix makes Earthshot's financial position visible and spells out what that position means in practice for travel, for hiring, for how the company works. Climate tech has been a hard sector to raise in, and the matrix is the company's answer to needing discipline without reinstalling a permission structure to enforce it.

The effect on action is that teams have wider autonomy inside clearer guardrails. They can make decisions about their own projects, and they can see for themselves when something has gone off track and when they need to ask for help, which is a different arrangement from being watched. It also settles the question of how opportunities surface here: not granted from above but taken by whoever sees the need. Dash is the strongest evidence for why that latitude is worth its costs, a piece of infrastructure the organization did not know it needed, which exists because nobody could stop it before it was fully developed.

In the organisation, the open tension is how to give people enough room to pursue what they believe matters while still holding a coherent strategy, and the company describes itself as getting more comfortable in the space between freedom and chaos rather than having found the line. Mission and strategy is precisely where that tension bites, and the next move is an attempt to answer it with information rather than authority: an impact dashboard connecting daily work to the theory of change, so that alignment comes from people seeing where their work lands instead of from being told where to aim it.

That dashboard exists because the last one told the company something it did not want to hear. Reading its own data, Earthshot found it had become too focused on survival and not focused enough on recognizing its people or reconnecting their work to the impact it is meant to produce. Survival matters, particularly in this sector at this moment, but it is not what motivates people who came to work in this sector. So results and rewards is being rethought from that finding: what recognition should look like, and how to make impact visible enough to function as its own reward.

Compensation and growth are harder, and the company is candid that it has not solved them. People reasonably want to know how they progress and how they earn more, inside an organization that is resource-constrained and has deliberately dismantled the career ladder and title progression that usually answer those questions. The most useful thing the past year produced here was not a solution but a decision to stop pretending: the leadership insight offered is that trying to make both paradigms work simultaneously was the mistake, and that growth at Earthshot has to be defined openly on its own terms, as expanding scope, capability, mastery, responsibility and opportunity rather than as movement up a ladder that no longer exists.

What can be said about the year as a whole is that the company reports being in the best position it has ever been in, both financially and in how it operates. Roles are understood. Teams hold more information and more authority. Transparency has produced ownership rather than anxiety. The tensions around strategy, compensation, growth and recognition are real and unresolved, but Earthshot is working through them without quietly rebuilding the system it left behind, which is the failure mode that claims most organizations attempting this.

There is a neat way to summarize Earthshot's second year of self-management, and it is a tool that nobody commissioned. A company that had spent two years telling people authority comes from the work rather than the position was tested on that claim by two of its own engineers, who decided something was necessary and simply built it, over some objection, for a company that did not know it wanted it. Earthshot passed, and the proof is that Dash now sits at the centre of how everyone works. The forests are the mission. The way of working is what makes the mission a true testament of collaborative effort.

Enreach

Nine years after signing Holacracy's constitution, the founders of a thousand-person European technology company have decided to stop using the word. Not because the underlying practice failed, but because a company built through eighteen acquisitions across nine countries now has too many colleagues who hear the term and immediately switch off. Co-founders Stijn Nijhuis and Koen van Geffen estimate that roughly 70 percent of what Holacracy gave Enreach is worth keeping permanently. The label itself is the one piece they are willing to let go of.

Enreach builds cloud telephony and unified communications software out of the Netherlands, selling almost entirely through partners who resell its technology under their own brand names rather than Enreach's. Nijhuis and van Geffen built the business together over two decades, starting as a student web project before moving into web hosting and eventually a cloud-based phone system launched around 2008, years before internet-based calling went mainstream. By 2016, the company had scaled to somewhere between 200 and 250 people, and a familiar problem showed up: operations, development, and support each did excellent work behind its own walls, then blamed each other when something broke between them. As Nijhuis puts it, "from around 120 people, it's no longer possible for everyone to know each other." Personal relationships had stopped being enough to smooth over friction between teams.

Their first fix, borrowed cross-functional product teams modeled on Spotify's approach, didn't hold. Teams either lacked enough leadership to reach a decision and stalled out, or a product manager quietly became a new kind of boss and collided head-on with the department heads still nominally in charge. Nijhuis doubted Holacracy at first, having picked up a distorted impression, secondhand through a competitor, that its whole point was getting rid of managers. Digging into it properly changed his mind, and not because it promised less hierarchy. What won him over was role clarity: knowing precisely what a given position owed, and to whom. He and van Geffen, joined by a colleague from HR, spent several days learning the framework directly from its creator, Brian Robertson, at a course in Amsterdam. They walked in ready to poke holes in it and walked out persuaded. On January 1, 2017, Enreach signed the constitution.

Zero distance to mission and strategy, at Enreach, has meant refusing to treat any single management framework as gospel. The company is now deliberately retiring the word Holacracy itself while keeping most of its architecture, precisely because strategy at Enreach answers to what works for a thousand people across nine countries rather than to loyalty toward a method. What survives the transition, role transparency, a living organizational chart, tactical meetings, and company-wide OKRs, was chosen by testing it against real coordination problems, not by ideological commitment to self-management as a philosophy.

Zero distance to opportunity shows up in how decisions get made day to day, through a process Enreach calls Integrative Decision Making. Authority sits with the role itself, not with a layer of management above it, so anyone can act inside their own accountabilities without first securing permission from someone higher up. Proposals only get tested against valid, specific objections rather than put to a vote, which means an idea can move from raised to acted on inside a single structured conversation instead of waiting for a scheduled approval cycle.

Zero distance to leaders is where Enreach diverged most visibly from Holacracy's original blueprint. The framework, in its strict original form, insists a circle lead should look nothing like a conventional boss. Enreach couldn't hold that line for long and let circle leads pick up genuine management duties instead, because that was simply the shape the job kept taking once real work landed on it. Leadership at Enreach bent to match what people needed from it in practice, rather than the other way around.

Zero distance to colleagues rests on role clarity, the single element both founders name as having mattered most: anyone can see exactly what a colleague's role is accountable for, and hold them to it directly. But the bank of trust that peer accountability depends on doesn't build itself, and Enreach is honest about where that has broken down. When a return-to-office policy after the pandemic went unevenly followed, colleagues complained privately rather than raising it inside their own circle, where Holacracy's design assumes tensions are supposed to surface. 

Zero distance to data and tools runs through Holaspirit, the platform that keeps every role, accountability, and project visible and current across the company, functioning as a living org chart that never needs a separate documentation project to stay accurate. Skill-building sits with a dedicated Self-Organization Circle, whose only job is keeping the way of working alive: running the onboarding curriculum, hosting open question sessions, and staffing roles such as Holacracy Coach and Constitution Guru. New colleagues get a two-hour introduction session built around three questions, understanding, doing, and being self-organization, followed by a self-paced toolkit of eight articles available in five languages, designed to be worked through in about fifteen minutes a week.

Zero distance to partners at Enreach cuts two ways. Commercially, the company reaches its market entirely through partner businesses that resell under their own names, an arrangement built on trust in those partners' judgment rather than tight central control. Internally, Enreach's growth since 2018 has run through a partnership with private equity firm Waterland, which backed an acquisition-led expansion that has since brought eighteen companies and their employees into the fold, each one arriving with its own culture and its own relationship to self-management still to be worked out.

Zero bureaucracy shows in how rarely formal governance meetings happen anymore. Most governance runs asynchronously through Holaspirit itself, with a meeting only called when someone specifically asks for one. What has proven more durable is the tactical meeting, a standing, structured format that keeps teams aligned on active projects and blockers without sprawling into the status-update meetings most companies default to. Real limits exist too: as circles multiply across a growing company, accountability inside each one gets thinner, and circle leads can end up holding budget responsibility they were never trained to carry. 

Zero distance to results and rewards runs through Enreach's own adaptation of the Baarda compensation methodology, which the company calls its Value Model. Rather than paying for a fixed job title, Baarda assesses the actual problem-solving ability and knowledge someone brings to their work, mapped across eight archetypes running from Helper through Strategist, and scored across mastery, autonomy, collaboration, and accountability. Pay follows demonstrated contribution rather than a static grade, which fits naturally with a company where one person can carry several roles simultaneously and where the shape of someone's accountability can change more than once a year.

Sustaining any of this has taken real, continuous effort. When Enreach's roster of internal coaches shrank from around a dozen down to just a few, the practice noticeably lost steam, since Holacracy requires continuous investment to stay more than a document nobody reads. Rolling the model out to newly acquired companies has proven especially hard: buying a business means inheriting people, culture, and leadership that never asked to change. 

What Enreach is building now isn't a retreat from any of this, and it isn't a quiet return to ordinary hierarchy either. It is a company confident enough in nine years of evidence to separate the parts of Holacracy that earned their place, transparency, tactical discipline, pay tied to real contribution, from a label that had started working against the very culture it was meant to describe. Enreach is proof that self-management can outgrow its own name without losing what mattered underneath it.

Epoch

Inside Epoch’s purchasing department, a small team gathered around a handful of integrated circuits and made a call that no policy demanded. They read the market, sensed prices were set to rise, and committed nearly $100,000 of company funds to buy ahead. They took on the risk themselves rather than passing it to customers. When component costs later soared almost sixfold, that quiet move became more than $500,000 in savings for clients who likely never realised a bet had been placed on their behalf. No executive needed to sign off.

Epoch describes this approach as the ‘Galaxy’ model: small, self-managed cells, each guided by its own handbook that spells out what it can decide independently and where it needs support. That early commitment earned Epoch a ZeroDX Award for Emerging Excellence in 2025. Over the past year, the company has focused on showing the model works when real money, real customers and real deadlines are at stake. The purchasing team’s bet stands as one of the clearest examples.

Epoch’s mission has taken similarly tangible form elsewhere. When the company opened a new facility in India, many organizations might have treated it as a quiet shift away from China. Instead, Epoch’s China team stepped in to support the new site, sharing knowledge, assisting with setup, and forging the personal relationships that turn a mission into something shared, not simply assigned. It is a clear example of what RenDanHeYi describes as zero distance to mission and strategy: people aligning with a goal because they helped shape it, not because they were told to.

That same sense of ownership appears in quieter moments. When Epoch’s engineering team realized commercial in-line test fixtures were costly, they simply designed and built their own, cutting expenses without seeking management approval or even mentioning it. Leadership only learned about it in passing, during an unrelated meeting. It is a small story, but it illustrates zero distance to opportunities, as those closest to the problem just solved it.

None of this is accidental. Epoch has deliberately rebuilt its leadership model around facilitation, not authority. Former managers now hold titles like facilitator; the Vice President, for example, serves as Purchasing Facilitator. In China, the President’s role is now largely advisory, with day-to-day decisions made by those closest to the work. That is what enabled the purchasing team’s six-figure bet to happen without a chain of approvals. The authority to decide was already theirs. It is zero distance to leaders, made structural, not just aspirational.

Collaboration at Epoch is shaped to fit the work. Alongside its permanent cells, the company creates temporary Continuous Improvement Cells for specific projects, especially when launching a new product. These cross-functional teams bring together people from across the business, manage the project from planning through documentation, and then dissolve once the work becomes part of daily operations. It is a practical answer to a familiar challenge: how to gain the benefits of collaboration without locking the org chart in place. It is also a clear expression of zero distance to colleagues.

Tools have had to evolve to match that flexibility. Epoch’s quotations once depended on a handful of people in China, which meant speed was limited by their available hours. Now, an automated quotation system connects directly to the company’s ERP platform and supplier pricing databases, allowing employees in the United States and India to generate accurate customer quotes on their own. It is a quiet but significant shift: zero distance to data, tools and skills, spreading capability rather than concentrating it.

Epoch has also begun sharing its thinking beyond its own walls. Over the past year, the company hosted more than 70 business executives interested in how spiritual values can shape organizational life, and its president spoke at the Indian Institute of Science on building scalable, purpose-driven organizations. Internally, these are not seen as marketing exercises but as opportunities for mutual learning, which is a two-way form of zero distance to partners.

Ownership over decisions at Epoch reaches into matters as personal as retirement. When the company decided to add a 5 percent retirement contribution above the legal minimum, management set only the budget. Employees elected a committee from Finance, Production and Human Resources to research options, consult colleagues and select the plan themselves, with no management involvement in the final decision. It is zero distance to action in a way that touches people’s financial futures, not just their daily work.

Beneath it all, Epoch has spent the past year rethinking how it measures success. Instead of applying a single scorecard across the company, teams have refined objectives cell by cell. A new behavioral assessment framework, with its own handbook and training, now runs alongside performance metrics, reinforced by repeated rounds of peer feedback. It is an effort to make zero distance to results and rewards mean more than a shared bonus pool: recognition tied to how people actually treat one another, not just what they produce.

Epoch’s founders once described the Galaxy model as a way to give structure to a spirit employees already possessed. A year later, that structure is tangible. It appears in a purchasing bet made without approvals, in test fixtures built without permission, and in a retirement plan chosen solely by employees. The next chapter, which involves connecting these cells across China, India and the United States into a single organization rather than three, is still unfolding. If this year is any guide, the people shaping it will not wait for instructions.

EPPO

Before EPPO expanded a hygiene program to 236 women working in its street operations this year, it started with something much smaller: fifteen conversations. A small pilot group of women doing physically demanding outdoor work were asked, plainly, what their daily difficulties were. The answers led to a kit built around what they had described, sanitary pads, wet wipes, panty liners and soft toilet paper, paired with medical guidance. What makes the story worth telling is not the kit itself, but how the budget for it got approved: not as an HR line item, but because it was tied directly to the company's mission of environmental services delivered with humanization. At EPPO, that connection is treated as a real financial argument, not a slogan.

The company has been building toward that kind of decision for over a decade. Since economist João Ventre founded EPPO in 1995 to improve Brazilian cities through waste collection, and since his son Rodrigo took over restructuring efforts in 2013, the company has moved through a long unwinding of hierarchy, culminating in 2020 with a governance system called O2 that dissolved the CEO role entirely. That transformation earned EPPO a ZeroDX Award for Innovation and Governance last year. What has followed since is less about redesigning structure and more about testing what that structure can actually do when real money and real people are involved, and this year gave EPPO plenty of tests to run.

Some of the clearest answers came from the edges of the business rather than its offices. An employee operating brush-cutting equipment, tired of physically carrying a mobile protective screen across a work site, proposed adding lockable wheels so it could be dragged instead. The idea reached the company's work safety team and was implemented company-wide within the year. It is a small fix, but exactly the kind that only shows up when the people closest to the work are trusted to notice it and act, a plain case of zero distance to opportunities.

Speed shows up in bigger stakes too. When a client needed 30 extra workers on short notice for an urgent service, a process that normally takes 30 to 45 days, EPPO's team temporarily reassigned experienced colleagues into roles built to accelerate hiring, cutting the timeline to 10 days. It is a concrete demonstration of zero distance to customers: treating hiring speed itself as something the organization can design for, rather than a fixed constraint to work around.

Authority at EPPO keeps moving further from any single desk. The company now runs on three levels, administrative, technical management and essential, its name for frontline operations, with titles like manager and coordinator gone entirely. Decisions on hiring, promotion and dismissal run through a circle called ColaboraEPPO, using consent rather than consensus, meaning people actively confirm what they are and are not accepting rather than simply not objecting. One safeguard stands out: a role called Bob Esponja, created specifically to represent colleagues who face barriers to advocating for themselves within the system, whether due to cognitive, mobility or social difficulty. It is a structural answer to a fair question about self-management, what happens to people who cannot easily speak up for themselves within it. Climate surveys now show the fear of the boss has largely disappeared, a fittingly human measure of zero distance to leaders.

None of this works without information moving freely. Every employee at EPPO, regardless of role, has access to the company's income statement and cash flow, a level of transparency many companies still treat as confidential. Programs like PDA train people in the practical skills self-management demands, an internal publication called OPA keeps information flowing in plain language, and a new ESG circle, created this year, replaced individual judgment calls with a shared system for tracking environmental and social performance. It is zero distance to data, tools and skills, treated as a condition for autonomy rather than a reward for seniority.

EPPO has also become someone other organizations study rather than simply someone that studies others. In the past year the company hosted nine visits through its Vem EPPO programme and has 45 executives scheduled for October 2026; Professor Michael Y. Lee documented the company's self-management journey in an INSEAD case study, and Dr. Paula Foroni examined it for doctoral research. EPPO also became a certified B Corporation this year and continues recruiting through Buscare, a program connecting people facing social vulnerability with roles at the company, more than 100 hired since it began. It is zero distance to partners, running in both directions.

Financially, ownership shows up in specifics. A recognition fund of R$40,000, proposed and approved entirely between two teams without any senior sign-off, has already distributed R$24,600 to 12 people this year. Salary adjustments, once the call of a single HR manager, now run through a policy anyone can propose to change. Consent on most proposals happens within a single meeting; where it can't, an asynchronous process resolves it within seven days. Across five years, employee satisfaction has held around 90 percent, and EPPO has been named one of Brazil's best places to work every year since 2019. 2025 alone brought the Employer Branding Brasil award for diversity and inclusion, on top of that ZeroDX Award. It is zero distance to results and rewards, backed by numbers rather than sentiment.

EPPO is candid about what still isn't solved. The people who built this system learned it by living through the discomfort of inventing it, and the company knows it has not yet found a reliable way to bring newcomers to that same depth of understanding, or to put a number on what it's worth when nobody has to wait for approval to act. That honesty is, in its own way, some of the most convincing evidence that the culture is real: an organization confident enough in what it has built to admit, plainly, what it hasn't finished.

EverGrow

On 23 May 2025, EverGrow Organics sent what was meant to be the last batch of EM Super organic fertilizer to its Gulu District hub. Sales had been low and the investment did not seem worthwhile, so the directors decided to leave the region. However, the two agents in Gulu asked them to reconsider. They did not dispute the sales figures, but felt they had not had enough time to reach out to farmer groups, teach better farming methods, and show farmers how to invest in ways that would pay off. The directors agreed to give them another chance. Now, the Gulu hub is busier and more profitable than before, and Opiro Fred, one of the agents who spoke up, is in charge.

This example shows a small company changing its own leadership decision about where to invest. It is clear proof that EverGrow’s mission and strategy are active in practice. The company’s mission is to support sustainable farming in Uganda. The choice to leave a district was made for financial reasons by the directors, but was reversed by two agents who work directly with farmers. 

EverGrow Organics started in 2021 to help Ugandan small farmers use agroecological methods, such as improving soil health, managing organic matter, practicing agroforestry, rotating crops, and using permaculture. The company sells organic fertilizers, pesticides, and animal immune boosters, with EM Super as its main product. It works through district hubs in Mpigi, Mityana, Gulu, Kayunga, Buikwe, Masaka, Bushenyi, and Mukono.

The founders started the company while attending the Social Innovation Academy (SINA). Instead of a business plan, they learned a new way to run an organization. They saw Holacracy in action, where people were not burdened by too many rules, and noticed that SINA kept working even when leaders gave no direct orders. They decided that if this approach worked at SINA, it could also work in rural hubs where the head office cannot always see what is happening. All the hub setups described below come from this decision.

EverGrow’s product line has grown because of new ideas from its team. At first, the company only supplied organic inputs. Then, Ainomugisha Lincoln, the Kayunga District hub manager, began offering quality seeds and seedlings to help farmers get better harvests. This idea was later adopted in the Buikwe hub and is spreading to other districts. A local decision by one hub manager has now become part of the company’s overall product strategy.

Customer feedback has led to real improvements at EverGrow. Over about four and a half months, farmers told the company that the EM Super label did not give them enough information. They wanted to know how the fertilizer works, how to use it for different crops, and which crops it is best for, preferably with pictures. EverGrow redesigned the label and announced the change on May this year. Since then, the company says sales have increased, showing that meeting customer needs has paid off.

There is little distance between field agents and directors at EverGrow. Senior leaders, including director Solomon Ssekamanya, join hub staff on farmer outreach campaigns. This shows that leaders are involved and present, rather than staying in the main office in Mpigi. 

Each hub manages itself using its own guidelines, but must follow a few core company values: do not cheat customers and do not raise prices unfairly. Hubs choose when to hold farmer group sessions and when to visit fields to check progress. At monthly team meetings, hubs share their progress, successes, and failures with each other. These meetings are meant for learning, not for getting approval.

The Bushenyi District team first tried delivering fertilizer door to door, but found it too costly to keep doing. They switched to holding group sessions for farmers, which allowed them to reach more people at once. In response, the head office provided training manuals to help run these sessions well. The important point is that the local team identified the problem and changed their approach before the company invested in supporting the new method.

EverGrow’s way of organizing has attracted partners. For example, Akeyo Africa, an agricultural group that helps small farmers use climate-smart practices, reached out to the organisation directly. This partnership has led to more sales, a network that reaches hundreds of farmers, and new connections in the sector. The company’s hub structure is exactly what organizations with district-level goals look for in a partner, which explains why partners approach EverGrow.

Hub managers handle day-to-day decisions, but major financial and regulatory choices are still made by the directors. The company explains that a mistake by one hub could cause big problems for everyone. EverGrow says it is still working toward giving more decision-making power to others.

About 90% of what agents earn comes from commission, not salary or wages. This setup was chosen to keep the company financially stable. For every litre of EM Super sold at 10,000 shillings, the agent earns 1,000. This means agents’ income depends on their sales, and the Gulu example shows it can motivate them to protect their own markets. 

The story of EverGrow Organics is a reminder that real change often starts at the grassroots, with people willing to challenge assumptions and fight for their communities. When local voices are heard and trusted, even a company on the brink of closing a chapter can find new energy, new ideas, and new hope. EverGrow’s journey proves that empowering local leaders is not just good business; it’s the key to lasting impact.

Everoze

The most significant decision co-founder Joe Phillips has guided colleagues through with Everoze's core decision-making tool was whether to work four days a week or four and a half. On the surface, it seems minor, but that is precisely the point. Everoze encourages people to take on real responsibility in low-stakes situations first, so that when a truly consequential decision arises, the process of weighing impact, gathering input, and owning the outcome is already second nature rather than intimidating.

Everoze began as an energy consultancy in 2015, founded by seven colleagues who had already worked together inside a much larger firm. That company spent years expanding, reorganizing, and changing hands through acquisition, each shift pulling the group further from client work and deeper into managing other managers. Phillips recalls how this drift took them away from the hands-on work they valued most, out in the market, making a tangible difference in the energy transition. There was no grand manifesto behind their decision to leave. The founders did not set out to build a Teal organization or immerse themselves in self-management theory; by Phillips's own account, they had no exposure to those ideas and were building their structure as they went. What they did know was more focused and personal: stay close to the market, work directly with clients, spend less time managing up and down a hierarchy, and rediscover the enjoyment in their work.

Nearly a decade on, Everoze employs around 85 people directly, with a wider network of spin-out companies bringing the total closer to 150. Its offices now span Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and this year the firm established its first presence outside Europe, in Australia. Fewer than half of Everoze's people are based in the UK; the rest are intentionally distributed across these other markets, a deliberate choice to balance regional cycles rather than chase the highs and lows of any single market.

Zero distance to mission and strategy is evident in how little Everoze has tried to universalize its own approach. Spin-out companies are not required to mirror the core business, and Phillips is clear that this is intentional. The founders never set out to champion a particular structure, only the principle of staying close to the work. What works for Everoze at its current size and in this industry is treated as a solution for Everoze alone, not a prescription for others.

Zero distance to customers is woven directly into how people spend their time. Most colleagues dedicate 70 to 80 percent of their hours to project teams, which are temporary, client-facing groups that last from a month to about five months. Within each team, one person manages day-to-day delivery, another takes responsibility for client satisfaction, and a group of consultants brings the technical expertise required. The structure is real, but it exists only to serve a specific delivery and dissolves as soon as the work is complete. Authority does not carry over from one project to the next by default, keeping the focus firmly on the client relationship rather than on hierarchy.

At Everoze, zero distance to leaders is really about zero distance to expertise. Credibility, not job title, determines whose voice carries weight on any given issue, most clearly within the company's Tech Teams. These are communities built around a single technical subject, such as wind power, solar, hydrogen, or grid flexibility, where those with deep knowledge guide resourcing, training, and research, rather than a manager removed from the field. This same principle shapes how the business operates day to day. Functions like accounting, communications, IT, and payroll are handled mainly by the consultants who also serve clients, with a few specialists supporting as needed, rather than by a separate layer of administrators. The people steering the firm's internal direction are the same ones who live with its consequences in front of clients.

Zero bureaucracy at Everoze is anchored in what the company calls the Advice Process, its standard way of making decisions outside a project's own remit. Anyone can make a decision, provided they first consult those with real expertise and those who will be affected by the outcome. The decision remains with the person who raised it; advice informs but does not override. New colleagues often test this principle right away, usually with the same question: can anyone really make any decision? The answer is yes, but not without care, which is why people are encouraged to start with something low-stakes and personal, such as Phillips's own request to change his working pattern, before moving on to bigger calls. Larger decisions, such as investments or acquisitions, still follow the Advice Process but with more structure: detailed business cases, direct input from finance and legal, and sometimes an informal temperature check across the company before moving forward. Phillips acknowledges the boundaries are not always clear. Overruling a company that has voiced concern would require real conviction, even if the formal authority rests with one person, and he is open that the practice sits somewhere between individual authority and a more collective approach.

Zero distance to results and rewards is most visible in how Everoze approaches pay. Each year, every colleague selects five to eight peers to weigh in on their salary. Reviewers propose an actual number, not just a grade; the highest and lowest are dropped as outliers, and the average of the rest becomes that year's outcome, with a finance safeguard to ensure the total remains sustainable. Profit sharing follows a different logic: when the company meets its annual target, everyone receives the same flat amount, whether they are a founding partner or a recent hire. Phillips sums it up simply: sharing really means sharing. Ownership follows a similar path over time. Anyone who has been with the firm for more than two years can buy or sell a stake each year through an internal market at a fixed, transparent valuation. About a fifth of all shares are set aside in a scheme to help earlier-career colleagues build a stake without needing significant capital up front, supporting a gradual, generational transfer of ownership rather than a single transaction at the top.

None of this is presented as a finished formula. Phillips is clear that there is no guarantee this way of working will always be the right fit, and Everoze continues to question whether the tradeoffs still justify the path they have chosen. Above all, the founders wanted to enjoy their working lives while remaining useful to an industry in need of steady expertise. A decade later, the firm stands out in its sector: senior, flat rather than hierarchical, and growing without chasing scale for its own sake. It shows that leaving behind a pyramid does not require a manifesto; it just takes a group of people determined to build the kind of company they want to work in.

Fabrica Social

In 2020, Argentina's economy was in freefall, and Fábrica Social's biggest client stopped buying houses overnight. Nobody at the top announced layoffs. Instead, the whole team sat down together and decided they needed to find new ways to bring in money, or close the plant. The carpenters who normally built houses started building something else entirely: small wooden furniture for Montessori classrooms, holders for toothbrushes, whatever people would still buy. It was not a graceful pivot. It was survival, decided together rather than handed down. It held the company together long enough to get back to building houses once the crisis passed.

Fábrica Social makes and sells prefabricated houses in Argentina, built to be paid off gradually by the families who live in them. It grew out of Techo, the Latin American housing NGO that has built free and subsidized emergency homes with volunteer labor since 1997, and began separating into its own organization around 2018. The split was about focus, not distance. Techo works with families who cannot pay anything at all. Fábrica Social works with families a step above that line, financing homes through payment plans built around how people living in poverty really earn money, not around a bank's standard mortgage terms. The two organizations still share a founding mission, and describe themselves less as two separate companies than as one story told in two chapters.

Fábrica Social now runs a plant in Posadas, in Argentina's Misiones province, which turns ten years old this September. About twenty people work there permanently, with another fifteen or so tied to specific projects, led today by a three-person coordination team that includes longtime leader Virgilio Gregorini.

Zero distance to mission and strategy shows in how Fábrica Social's purpose came to exist in the first place. It was not written by a single founder and posted on a wall. It was built together with sister organizations across the wider Techo network, and the company describes its purpose as being "to enable access to affordable and adequate housing for families facing vulnerability." Two years ago, the Teal philosophy of self-management that had already been shaping how the team worked was written directly into the organization's bylaws. That is a small but telling choice: a value that only lives in a slide deck can be quietly ignored, but one written into a legal document must be answered for.

Zero distance to colleagues is what the opening pandemic story in this case is really showing. It shows up in smaller ways too. Many of Fábrica Social's staff previously worked at Techo, so they arrive already familiar with a more open, less hierarchical way of working. That makes it easier for them to notice what is different, and what is not yet different enough, once they join. When someone feels stuck or unhappy with how the team operates, a common response is to encourage them to go work somewhere else for a while and compare. People tend to come back more appreciative of how Fábrica Social runs, not less.

Zero distance to customers looks different depending on who the customer is. With Techo, the relationship is closer to a standing partnership than a sale: Techo sits on Fábrica Social's board, the two hold weekly meetings on planning and costs, and together they built a formal quality process, modeled on ISO 9000, to catch problems before houses leave the plant. With individual families, the closeness is more physical. Every family is now required to visit the plant and see an actual model home before buying, a rule born from noticing that families who had never seen the real materials were often disappointed, since most home construction in Argentina uses wet, traditional methods while Fábrica Social builds dry, prefabricated ones. Maia Irazu, who works directly with families at the plant, put it simply while a new colleague was mid-sale with a family in the showroom: "Zero distance with the family. Zero distance with the customer."

Zero distance to opportunity runs through how the house itself keeps changing after it is sold. Fábrica Social surveys every family six months and again a year after they move in, and those answers have driven real changes to the product: an electrical kit became mandatory once the team saw families wiring their own homes unsafely, and flooring became something the company installs itself for the same reason. None of this came from a research department. It came from watching what happened after the sale, and being willing to change the product because of it. The company is equally open that its shortened loan terms, built to fit the real, less predictable income of families living in poverty, were not invented internally. The idea came from watching similar organizations in India, Mexico and elsewhere solve the same problem first.

Zero distance to data and tools began the same way many of Fábrica Social's habits did: as something inherited from Techo, where information was treated as available by default. That instinct met real friction as Fábrica Social grew and started writing down procedures. Salaries turned out to be the hardest case: some people simply were not comfortable having every number visible to everyone. The compromise the team settled on is that financial information, including salaries, is available to anyone who asks for it, even though it is not posted openly for anyone to browse. A monthly, hour-long meeting walks the whole team through the numbers before the same information goes to the governance committee. Tools follow a similar logic. Nearly every shared document has a named owner responsible for keeping it usable, a fix for an earlier period when documents broke and nobody felt responsible for repairing them. Any new system under consideration, from a customer database to enterprise software, gets shaped by input from whichever teams will end up using it.

Zero distance to leaders is visible in Virgilio Gregorini's own career at the company. In 2019 he ran the organization as its executive director, with the plant's general manager reporting to him. When that manager eventually left, Fábrica Social did not hire a replacement. It split the role three ways, promoting two people who had previously reported to Virgilio's own report, so that people two levels below him in 2019 now coordinate the company as his peers. He has since given up the board presidency as well, after two terms, to someone the team is careful to describe not as a new boss but as someone who widens the table rather than sitting above it.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action it produces, follows from that same 2021 decision to retire the general manager role in favor of a three-person coordination team working by mutual advice rather than instruction. Day-to-day coordination between sales, production and construction happens directly between those teams now, and rarely needs to reach the coordination group at all except to help resolve a conflict. Working groups form around live problems and dissolve once the problem is solved: a project to fix how raw materials are managed meets every two weeks and will stop meeting once it succeeds. 

Each year the whole company also rallies around a single focus project with its own dedicated weekly slot. Sales was the focus last year. Financing is the focus this year. One of Fábrica Social's own coordinators is candid that this works today partly because the company is still small enough that its three-person leadership team is close to almost everything. 

That same instinct to work by advice rather than instruction does not automatically extend to outsiders. Zero distance to partners at Fábrica Social is genuinely mixed, and the company says so plainly rather than smoothing it over. With Techo, and with a key materials supplier whose own co-owners sit at Fábrica Social's governance table, the relationship is open and collaborative, down to the supplier's finance chief sharing information freely. Elsewhere it has been harder. A different partner organization stopped buying from one day to the next without explanation, and a financing partner that promised open collaboration on lending and credit scoring ultimately kept its own data closed. Fábrica Social names this honestly as a cultural gap it has not yet closed, between organizations built to co-create and more conventional ones built to guard information as a competitive asset.

Zero distance to results and rewards is, by the company's own admission, its least developed dimension. Today only sales roles carry any variable pay tied to performance, and a company-wide annual bonus has been discussed for years without a final decision. The bigger ambition sits further out. Because Fábrica Social is legally structured as a nonprofit with no shareholders, the people who built it currently hold no formal equity in it at all. "We are emotional owners today," is how the team describes that gap. The plan for closing it is to spin off future ventures, such as a dry-construction company or a lending arm, as separate for-profit entities where colleagues could become actual legal owners. What is not in doubt is the scale of what the current model already produces: direct sales to families roughly multiplied tenfold in a single year, from about five homes to about fifty-five, a jump the team treats as a collective achievement worth building the next stage of growth around.

The hardest part of this journey, in the company's own words, is not operational at all. It is that not everyone close to Fábrica Social, including some people at its own governance table, is fully convinced that this way of working is the right one. Some would rather convert the company into a conventional shareholder-owned business. Total agreement, one of the founders says, will probably never arrive, only more people convinced over time than the year before.

Fábrica Social's plant in Posadas turns ten this September. A decade in, the company has done what few offshoots manage: it defined its own chapter, serving families who can pay something, without losing the thread that ties it back to Techo's chapter, serving families who can pay nothing. It keeps building, keeps adapting, and keeps proving that a story can grow a second chapter without ending the first. The same carpenters who once made toothbrush holders to survive are still building houses today, one family at a time.

Fajar Ben Group

Fajar Benua makes the components that keep industrial plant sealed: gaskets, gland packing, mechanical seals, expansion joints, fluoroplastic linings and metallic flexible hose, supplied to refineries, power stations, cement works, mines and petrochemical sites. Pertamina, Chevron, Petronas and Unilever appear among its customers, and it works from Indonesia and from offices in Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Ivory Coast.

Some years ago it told two of its own departments to start charging the rest of the company for their work. That is where the change began. The group started in 1983 as a trading company distributing engineering products. It began working with the Korean sealing manufacturer Jeil E&S in 1987, and in 1991 moved from reselling to making, opening its own plant, Tri Graha Sealisindo, using technology transferred through that relationship. A second plant, Jeil Fajar Indonesia, followed in 1993 as a joint venture with Jeil E&S. Fabric expansion joints were developed from 1995 and manufactured from 1997, and metallic flexible hose was added in 2008. The group's plant and head office are at Cibinong, in Bogor Regency, West Java, and around the factories it built out companies in hydraulics, trading, engineering services and, later, software.

The first step towards the current model came in 2019, when the group separated its strategy and IT division into a venture called HumanTechno and gave employees a share in it. Pande Kadek Yuda Bakti, then chief strategy officer, has written that the venture was slow to take off. In 2022, after working through the Corporate Rebels Academy, the group rebuilt it around a principle taken from Viisi, a Dutch mortgage firm: employees first, customers second, shareholders last. Profit sharing of up to thirty per cent was proposed, Glassfrog was adopted so that roles and decisions were visible, and the change was put to an employee vote rather than announced. Meeting time per person fell from around twenty three hours a week to four.

In 2024 the group's chief executive, the only successor to the founding family, died suddenly in an accident, at a point when the business was still carrying liquidity problems left by the pandemic. Pande, who is not a member of the family and had spent twenty years at the company after starting in entry-level sales, was appointed to lead it. He has said that the people who left and went on to build successful businesses of their own were not the ones who had won employee of the year, and that this was what drew him to the RenDanHeYi model.

Action, which is how a decision becomes work, was rebuilt first and on a small scale. Rather than announce a redesign of the whole company, Pande converted two departments, strategic planning and maintenance, from cost centres into profit centres. Each was given its own profit and loss account and asked to treat the rest of the group as paying clients, with revenue targets outside the group as well. His stated aim was to reach the point where the two departments cost the company nothing. He has been direct about why he moved gradually. In Indonesia, he says, people prefer to walk in a group and power distance is very high, and change cannot be forced.

Opportunities, meaning how new work is found and who is free to pursue it, widened in 2024 when the model reached the eleven sales branches. Each branch took on its own books, managing its own cash, hiring its own people and answering for its own result. Pande's reason for starting there was that the branches were the unit in direct contact with customers. The difference showed in behaviour. Before, he says, nobody cared once an order had gone to production; now salespeople ring the plant themselves to chase it. During a period when salaries were delayed by the liquidity squeeze, branch staff worked between themselves to bring in receivables and cover their own unit's wages, a level of initiative he says had not been seen there before.

Customers therefore sit with the unit. The branch that commits to a delivery date is the same unit that carries the financial consequence of missing it. Colleagues and Leaders changed alongside each other. Middle management thinned through natural attrition rather than redundancy. Pande's own role became narrower: he says he does not control access to the company's money "because everybody holds the money", and describes colleagues approaching him for feedback rather than for decisions. Weekly check-ins replaced top-down reviews. He has said the shift he notices is in mindset, from asking how the company survives to aiming at the leading target. He traces part of his own conviction to meeting Zhang Ruimin at the 2024 RenDanHeYi annual meeting in Qingdao, where he asked how everyone could be expected to lead and was told that while not everyone will run an organisation, "everyone can at least lead themselves."

Data, Tools and Skills is supplied by the group itself. Activity across the business is monitored through its digital platform, and Pande describes the control the centre keeps as sitting in the process and the result rather than in the decision. HumanTechno provides the group with enterprise resource planning and business intelligence systems and sells the same to outside clients.

Partners has been part of how the group works since 1987, when the relationship with Jeil E&S brought in manufacturing technology it did not have, and which became a joint venture in 1993. The group now describes itself as a coordinator of digital supply chains, with more than 500 suppliers connected through a shared platform covering procurement, cloud manufacturing, international trade, supply chain financing and project management. Its own micro-enterprises take on internal contracts in competition with one another and work together within the product groupings they share. Pande's own preparation came through Haier's model and the Corporate Rebels Academy.

Results and Rewards reached the factories in 2025. On 9 May that year Jeil Fajar Indonesia formally adopted the model, opening its books, taking control of its own finances and putting a share of the profit into the hands of the people making the product. Pande described production as very complex and said the journey had begun that day. On 19 September 2025, in Beijing, Fajar Benua was named a winner in the Transformational category of the ZeroDX Awards, cited for the supplier platform and for its shift towards a network of micro-enterprises. S&P Global's Indonesia manufacturing index returned to expansion in July 2026 after four months of decline, while new export orders fell for a fifth month running.

What is distinctive here is the order in which the group moved. It began by asking two internal departments to sell to their own colleagues, established the arithmetic, then extended the model to the branches and afterwards to the factory floor, building the digital platform alongside. In a sealing manufacturer in West Java, decentralisation has taken the form of profit and loss accounts handed over one at a time, and the clearest sign of it is a salesperson calling production directly to chase an order.

FarmPlus

In 2025, heavy rain and strong winds destroyed the FarmPlus production facility in Bugayi Village in a single night. Production stopped for more than three months. Stock was lost, and customers moved to other suppliers. Jesca Nayebare, who founded the company after dropping out of school, describes it as the period when the team lost hope.

What they did not do was wait for a formal recovery plan. They went to the people already connected to the business, customers, supporters, partners and the wider network, told them plainly what had happened, and asked for help. About 4,000 euros came back. The team rebuilt the damaged infrastructure and production resumed in June 2025. The lesson the company draws from it is blunt: action mattered more than process, and a business that only grows in good conditions is exposed to higher risks.

That answer was available because of what FarmPlus already was. Founded in 2022, FarmPlus Agrovets Uganda Limited is a women and youth led social enterprise that farms black soldier fly larvae on organic food waste and converts them into affordable protein feed supplements for livestock, alongside organic fertilizers and training in insect and circular farming. It works out of Bugayi Village in Mpigi District, sells well beyond the district, and has created nine direct jobs.

Nayebare, its founder, grew up in a farming family and watched the cost of livestock feed press on households that depended on their animals; when she left school she found the same problem repeated across Uganda, sitting next to a national food waste stream she puts at over 300,000 metric tons a year. The company's skills base was built through SINA and through relationships with other insect-farming organizations, and SINA's model of self-organization and learning by doing is visible in how nine people run a working factory between them.

Nothing shows how mission and strategy operate here better than what FarmPlus decided to do with its own rubbish. Insect production leaves behind frass, the residue from the larvae, and the obvious thing was to dispose of it. Kaddu George, who leads production, had been talking with farmers and saw something else: the growing pile could replace synthetic fertilizer on their fields. He raised it, and rather than send the idea up through a management process, the team simply started, working out how to collect, process, package and position the material with equipment already on site while asking farmers directly what they made of it. Organic fertilizer is a product line now. This is what the opportunities dimension looks like in a company with no experimentation budget: what FarmPlus can give people is time inside their existing responsibilities and permission to begin with whatever is at hand. The decision came from a purpose built on circularity and affordability rather than from a market study, which is the only real test of whether a mission is doing any work.

The company's relationship with customers changed when it stopped selling to them. Farmers were wary of insect-based feed, and the instinct would have been to advertise harder. Instead FarmPlus began taking interested farmers out to meet farmers already using the product, so they could see the animals, ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions. The effect ran further than sales. Farmers started arriving not only to buy feed but to ask about livestock problems that had nothing to do with it, and the team now understands its job as supplying practical knowledge rather than moving product.

With nine people there is essentially no management layer between the frontline and the founding team, though it is clear roles rather than small numbers that make that workable. Nayebare handles fundraising, partnerships and planning; her co-founder Ainembabazi Vicky leads finance and bookkeeping. What the leaders do daily is remove obstacles, get people the resources they need, listen to farmers and partners, and make sure everyone holds enough information to decide without waiting for a founder. Colleagues, in turn, gather around problems rather than sitting inside departments: a packaging or production fault pulls in production, sales and leadership at once instead of climbing a chain, and a farmer's complaint lands directly on whoever can act on it. The storm tested that arrangement to destruction and it held. Rebuilding pushed people well outside their usual responsibilities, coordinating with suppliers and supporters on their own initiative, and what everyone could see afterwards was that solving the problem had outranked staying inside a job description.

The company now tracks sales, cash, expenses, inventory and production deliberately, so that it works from a picture rather than an assumption: production and inventory records show which packaging sizes exist and what needs making or buying, and financial tracking separates revenue, expenses and working capital needs into a monthly report. Skills arrive through training programmes including SINA and Anzisha (a pan-African fellowship for entrepreneurs under 22 run by African Leadership Academy) and through exchanges with other insect farmers. 

Flybox, which operates in Uganda and South Africa, is the clearest case for a great partnership: their team went to Bugayi several times, FarmPlus went to their facility in Masindi, and what came back was a set of black soldier fly technologies and practices the company could adapt gradually to its own operation. FarmPlus has published the relationship openly rather than guarding its supplier links as competitive information, which is the behaviour of a company expecting to learn more than it gives away.

The same preference for moving shows in how action is handled the rest of the time. People closest to the operation identify problems and propose solutions directly, with no sign-off step in between. FarmPlus is honest that this is informality at small scale rather than a designed system, and that it will have to become one as the company grows.

FarmPlus offers is responsibility, learning, recognition and the chance to grow with the organization for all employees while it acknowledges that a formal performance structure is still to be built. It measures itself instead on farmers reached, jobs created, waste converted, production and revenue growth. To date it reports more than 8,000 farmers reached, nine direct jobs created, and over 1,000 tons of waste converted through its circular model, with farmers using the feed reporting cost reductions of up to 30%. 

FarmPlus was put together by someone who left school early, in a village, on the premise that what other people throw away can feed animals other people cannot afford to keep. When the weather took the building down, what brought it back was not capital or insurance but the fact that enough farmers, partners and neighbours had reason to want the company to exist. That is the return on working the way FarmPlus works. A business measured only in good conditions would count the storm as three months lost. Measured properly, it was the season FarmPlus found out what needed to build for sustainability and growth.

Frappe

In 2022, the employees of Frappe, an open source software company founded in Mumbai in 2008, opened their own pay proposals and wrote down whatever number they believed was fair. Collectively, they gave themselves a 62 percent raise. The mood, founder and CEO Rushabh Mehta later admitted, was giddy: the company felt for a moment like it had turned into an overnight unicorn. Nine months later, having missed its own sales targets by a wide margin, Frappe had let more than a third of its people go. That a company would publish both halves of that story, the raise and the reckoning, rather than quietly editing out the second part, is a better introduction to how Frappe actually works than any description of its org chart.

There isn't much of an org chart to describe. Since 2022, Frappe has run without reporting managers. People choose their own projects, plan their own time off, and set their own pay under a written constitution that puts people ahead of capital. The idea did not arrive from a management consultant. Mehta traces its roots to democratic schools such as Summerhill in the United Kingdom and Sudbury Valley in the United States, where children choose what to study and vote on the rules that govern them. The question that stuck with him, and now runs through Frappe's own culture pages, is blunt: if 10-year-olds can handle these responsibilities, why do we treat adults at work like they can't?

The 2022 pay round was unmoderated, unlike the more cautious process the year before, and it landed at the peak of a global tech hiring frenzy, with venture-funded startups paying almost any price for talent. When Frappe opened its own gates, people took what the market seemed to say they were worth. Mehta set an informal target of 15 percent profit, which meant revenue needed to roughly double. It didn't. Sales grew only 25 percent in the first half of the year, and the company was simultaneously winding down a services line that had made up 30 percent of its revenue. Frappe put the fix to a vote: cut everyone's pay, or let underperformers go. The team chose headcount. Mehta applied what he calls the Keeper's Test, asking of each person whether anyone would fight to keep them if they resigned, and by year end more than a third of the company was gone. Full year revenue growth landed at 45 percent, roughly half the original ambition, but the company survived the year it had almost outspent itself.

Those departures fell hardest on senior lateral hires, and that is worth naming honestly rather than glossing over, since it is the one place where Frappe's networked structure, its collegial teams operating more like a web than a hierarchy, genuinely struggles. People who join expecting the authority a senior title usually carries find there is very little of it to have. Getting things done at Frappe means convincing colleagues in conversation, not issuing instructions, and several experienced outside hires never adapted to a model where responsibility for a team's outcome comes with none of the formal leverage that responsibility is supposed to buy. Frappe's own account of the year treats this as a lesson learned rather than a footnote to skip past: onboarding into a genuine network takes longer than onboarding into a hierarchy, and the company has not pretended otherwise.

The 2023 round was built to correct the excess without abandoning the freedom that caused it. Everyone set measurable annual goals so contribution had a visible, countable component alongside the harder to measure quality of the work. Pay proposals were checked against two market benchmarks, an average and a premium figure for each role. Planning itself became a blend of bottom-up team and individual plans layered under a shared top-down narrative built around three business lines, Enterprise Support, Partner Ecosystem, and Frappe Cloud. Every finished pay proposal then went through an anonymous peer feedback poll before anyone banked it.

Mission and strategy at Frappe is not a slide deck handed down once a year and forgotten. The company deliberately runs without an annual plan, on the belief that fixed plans crowd out individual initiative and instead treats its mission as something closer to a working principle: quality is strategy. That single phrase does real work. It is the reason Frappe has repeatedly chosen to keep investing in its products rather than diverting profit into sales and marketing, and it is specific enough that teams at the edges of the company, not just leadership, use it to decide where new products, events, and tools get built without asking permission first.

The discipline showed up in the numbers. Average pay hikes settled at 15 percent in 2023, a fraction of the 62 percent the company had awarded itself the year before, and the new growth target dropped to a more modest 50 percent. In the anonymous feedback poll, most people rated their colleagues' pay as fair, with only a handful flagged as too low or too high. That is the sound of a system correcting itself in public rather than being corrected from above.

Results and rewards for Frappe's version is more literal: compensation is entirely at risk because employees set it themselves and then live with the consequences, good or bad, of their own optimism. Because the process runs on one person, one vote regardless of tenure, and because the company skews younger, seniority carries less pull than performance, which compresses the pay curve rather than letting a handful of long serving executives capture an outsized share. The result is a ratio of roughly 1:2 between Frappe's median and highest paid employee. 

Financial numbers, aside from customer data, are visible to everyone at Frappe, and the company's weekly all hands opens not with a highlight reel but with the lowest rated customer feedback and churn figures, the least flattering material a company can choose to lead with. A standing "teach and learn" session, open to anyone, is how most people pick up the business literacy that self-managed pay and self-managed work both require. Engineers choose their own operating system, editor, and even which AI model they use, reimbursed rather than dictated by a policy. Most companies ration financial visibility and standardize tooling because it reduces risk. Frappe is betting the opposite: that judgment improves when people can see the whole picture and choose their own instruments for acting on it.

Because nearly all of Frappe's products are open source, the customer dimension does not depend on a dedicated support function to relay what users think. Product decisions trace back to public GitHub issues and community requests rather than an internal roadmap document, and the company keeps a deliberately thin layer of product managers so that most engineers talk with users directly instead of through an intermediary. That weekly ritual of opening all-hands with churn and negative feedback is what keeps that proximity from eroding as the company has grown past fifty employees.

Opportunity at Frappe tends to look like someone building the thing they wanted to exist rather than pitching it first. Aditya Hase joined as an intern, working on the Frappe Framework and a Tally migration tool, and grew restless enough to start a small side project, a hosting tool he called Press, simply because he wanted to build something that felt like his own. It grew, without a formal pitch or roadmap review, into Frappe Cloud, now one of the company's three core business lines. On the commercial side, Michelle Alva joined straight out of college into customer support, noticed small broken gaps in how the company operated, and started fixing them without waiting to be asked. One of those fixes produced a 20 percent jump in revenue for her team, and she went on to lead Frappe's ISO certification effort. Neither story began with a memo asking for permission to innovate; both began with someone deciding a problem was theirs to solve.

Frappe treats its partners the same way it treats its own people, as participants rather than vendors. The company co-founded FOSS United, now India's largest open-source community, runs open-source meetups in more than ten cities, and draws over a thousand participants to its own flagship event, Frappeverse. Building products that are open source by default turns every user, contributor, and integrator into a potential co-creator of the roadmap rather than a account to be managed at arm's length, which is a genuinely different starting posture than most software companies take toward the people who depend on them.

Leadership and action are where the freedom described everywhere else in this case becomes structural rather than aspirational. There are no reporting managers at Frappe, hiring and budget proposals pass by default through open, global votes rather than a signature at the top, and every meeting runs open by default so that the distance between a new hire and the CEO is a message, not an org chart. Because nobody outranks anyone by title, leadership at Frappe means facilitation: providing context, feedback, and cover for people to take risks, rather than approving their decisions. That absence of formal power is precisely what tripped up the lateral hires who left in 2022, and precisely what makes the company's fastest growing products the work of people nobody assigned to build them.

None of this has gotten easier with practice, and Frappe does not claim otherwise. Mehta describes the hardest part of the model as the ongoing discomfort of raising the bar: having direct, critical conversations with people. A model built on trust does not remove the need for that conversation. It just means everyone, not only a manager, must be willing to have it.

Full Circle 

Somewhere in Xavier Costa's pocket this year sits a notebook, filled with what he sees and hears from inside the workshop floor at Alumipres. Full Circle, the transformation consultancy he co-founded with Marina Revuelta, has never believed in leading change from a distance, and that notebook is proof of it. What makes 2026 different is not where Xavier stands. It is what Full Circle chose to do once it realized how much of its own impact still depended on them standing there.

Full Circle has walked organizations such as Fundación Dau, and now Alumipres, through the shift from hierarchy to self-management and received an ZeroDX Emergent Excellence Award in 2025. This year the team asked itself a generous question rather than a defensive one: how much further could this purpose travel if it did not need Full Circle in the room every time? The honest answer was, not far enough. Rather than treat this as a ceiling, Full Circle treated it as an invitation.

That invitation became a partnership. Full Circle joined forces with Corporate Rebels, the group that has spent a decade studying progressive organizations and that co-founded the investment fund ‘Krisos’ alongside Xavier Costa, Dunia Reverter, and Jabi Salcedo, choosing to open its method to others rather than hold it close. Together with Corporate Rebels, the Full Circle Team have built the Transformation Programme. The program consists of seven months of work carried on two tracks at once, the personal transformation of whoever leads the process and the systemic transformation of the organization itself, anchored by two in person immersions in Barcelona. The first cohort, fifteen to twenty leaders, owners, founders, and consultants, begins in September 2026, and each participant will apply what they learn to a real organization of their own or a client's.

The purpose behind all of this, transforming the world through organizations, is something the whole Full Circle team shapes together rather than receives from above. Strategic decisions are made in a shared monthly meeting, and roles are filled by intuition, energy, and personal alignment rather than assignment. That same spirit shows up in the tools and processes for this year: a monthly tracking instrument to measure how an organization is evolving, an environmental impact measurement inside Alumipres that opened the door to a renewable electricity provider, and a more agile way of reorganizing the team itself, dissolving and recomposing project pairings the way cells naturally do.

By September, the listening usually done by the team, turns into practice. The first cohort will apply the method directly to a real organization, carrying the same tensions and stakes as any process Full Circle has led itself, the clearest test yet of whether this way of working can travel without them. "The simple thing would be to go in with a plan and implement it. But that only guarantees one thing: failure," Xavier Costa says, describing the improvisation the method actually runs on. Rocío Maronna offers a recent example from a client in Canada, where a carefully designed governance forum was dismantled the very next day, without resistance, because the client no longer needed it. "That freedom to let go, to say how good it is that idea gets dismantled, means the system is alive," she says.

The team is candid that the hardest part of the year was not designing the programme or closing the partnership. It was admitting that part of them resisted letting go. "Being needed in every organization we accompany feeds something that isn't just about the business," they say. That honesty is itself the point. Full Circle is not bringing a finished success story to this candidacy. It is bringing the moment a small, deeply committed team chose to multiply what it knows rather than keep it small, trusting that the depth they have built over a decade can travel just as far without them in the room.

Gaiax

Gaiax's chief executive lives in a share house, and he doesn't live there alone. Family, close friends, employees and people from the startups Gaiax has invested in are all welcome under the same roof. Gaia functions as exactly that: relationships form before any hierarchy gets the chance to put distance between people.

Gaiax is a Japanese company built around the mission of empowering people to connect, now twenty-five years old and structured less like a single business than a cluster of internal divisions, independent startups it has invested in, and former divisions it has spun out as their own companies while staying loosely connected to the group. Its own account of how it decides what to pursue treats that mission less as a slogan and more as an entry test: before Gaiax builds or backs anything, the real question is whether the idea deepens some genuine connection between people, not whether it fits a particular business format.

Zero distance to leaders at Gaiax starts with what the chief executive's job doesn't include: a unilateral vote on which ideas get funded. He pitches proposals and builds support the same way any other member has to, and investment decisions go to a vote inside a management committee rather than to his desk. In everyday terms, that means someone brand new to the company can reach the very top of it without passing through a single intermediate layer. Nobody needs to work their way up to get a hearing; they can simply start the conversation, in the office or, just as often, at his kitchen table.

Zero distance to colleagues shows in how loosely Gaiax treats the idea of who belongs to a team. People join new initiatives by negotiating a handoff of their current responsibilities, not by asking permission to leave one reporting line for another, and engineers have moved into completely different divisions simply because they liked the product or the people involved. That looseness extends past the payroll: when Gaiax marked twenty-five years in business, 180 people turned up to celebrate, and nearly three-quarters of them no longer worked there. A private alumni network of 256 people, about eight out of every ten of them former staff, keeps swapping job leads, mentorship and introductions long after anyone's name has left the payroll system. Belonging at Gaiax reads less like a place on an org chart and more like an ongoing set of relationships people choose to keep maintaining.

Zero bureaucracy and the zero distance to action that comes with it are visible in a story about an office nobody was supposed to need. Gaiax runs remotely by default, but a group of younger employees felt that being physically together would help them learn faster and stay motivated, so they organized themselves across departments, built a plan and a budget, and rented a space, informing senior management only after the fact that the company now had an office any division could use for a fee. They even built a small internal market around it, charging divisions only for the seats they use rather than treating the space as a fixed company asset. New ventures get funded on the same logic: rather than routing a proposal through Japan's traditional layered approval process, known as ringi, teams get a validation budget and a clear deadline for proving the idea works, swapping permission for evidence.

Zero distance to opportunity is best captured by NEWB, a venture-building team that formed specifically to stop good ideas from getting stranded inside one division when the customers, technology or expertise needed to build them sat somewhere else in the company. Selected projects receive a modest validation budget, weekly mentoring and clear criteria for when to keep going or stop. In 2025, three projects went through that process and two became real services, among them Komorebi Estate, which helps overseas buyers purchase, renovate, operate and eventually resell homes in Japan. The path from a cross-divisional conversation to a functioning business ran through a small, fast, disciplined pilot rather than a formal strategic planning cycle.

Zero distance to customers plays out fastest inside CREAVE, the team behind a virtual short-drama franchise called Majiasu that launched in 2025. Viewer numbers, comments and follower growth told the team within weeks that people had gotten attached to specific characters and wanted an ongoing story, not another disposable promo clip, and the team restructured its output around that signal almost immediately: longer-form content, original merchandise, and eventually promotional work for outside brands. The franchise passed 100 million views in three months and a billion views with 400,000 followers within ten. For teams that don't sit as close to an audience, Gaiax leans on regular study groups where people comparing notes on AI tools sometimes bring clients directly into the room, so technical staff hear expectations and concerns firsthand instead of through a summary written by someone else.

Zero distance to partners shows most clearly in how CREAVE's success turned into an external alliance rather than staying an internal win. In December 2025, CREAVE and the broadcaster TV Tokyo launched a joint short-drama account aimed at global audiences, with CREAVE bringing tested digital fan-building expertise to the table rather than showing up as a vendor waiting for direction. The same posture toward outside partners runs through Gaiax's regional projects, where local governments, residents and investors get pulled in at the point a problem is first defined rather than after a solution is already built. In Gunma, a community-owned winery project attracted 84 prospective backers and roughly ¥3.91 million, most of it from people outside the prefecture; in Mitoyo, a shopping-street revival project raised close to ¥14.8 million from 118 participants before any renovation began. Across its wider ecosystem, Gaiax has put money into upwards of three dozen startups, and more than fifteen of those trace back directly to a Gaiax division or a Gaiax alumnus.

Zero distance to data and tools runs through a shared library of working notes that any division can read, copy and improve. When one team works out how to safely deploy an AI agent on client work, it writes the method down; another division picks it up, adapts it to a different client, and sends the improved version back to where it started. Monthly presentations and one-on-one follow-ups keep that knowledge moving instead of sitting inside whichever team discovered it first. Skill-building follows the same logic through Keiei College, an internal program that puts participants inside real operating businesses alongside structured mentoring, an archive of dozens of recorded lectures, and milestone check-ins that connect someone's day-to-day work to their longer-term career and financial goals, so capability gets built through live decisions rather than a classroom sitting apart from them.

The clearest single proof of mission and strategy shaping a real business decision is PlanetDAO, a project born out of Gaiax's own investee Planet Labs to preserve historic buildings without simply turning them into conventional real estate. Locals who live near a building can be handed a governing stake in it without contributing a single yen of their own money, putting them on equal footing with investors backing the project from anywhere on the planet. By April 2026, 289 people across 23 countries had put in more than one hundred million yen, and the project won the top prize in its category at Japan's Tourism NFT Awards. A conventional developer would have kept ownership and decision-making to itself; Gaiax built a structure that couldn't work any other way but shared.

Zero distance to results and rewards is where Gaiax makes ownership close to literal. Through a carve-out option, the team behind a business unit can incorporate it as its own company and keep 30 to 40 percent or more of the new entity, deciding for itself how governance works and whether value flows back through salary or dividends. Business units also carry their own profit responsibility, which means a small team is effectively running a company-within-a-company rather than completing tasks for someone above them, and NEWB's built-in withdrawal criteria mean walking away from a bet that isn't paying off reads as good judgment, not as somebody's personal defeat. The scale shows in Gaiax's education and startup-building work: its programs have reached more than 15,000 participants, produced founders behind five separate companies that went public, and a three-year run of work with Hyogo Prefecture on its own has touched 30 schools and upwards of 2,100 students.

Gaiax is honest that all of this autonomy has a cost: when divisions move this independently, information spreads out rather than staying centralized, and no single team always knows what every other part of the company is doing, especially as AI tools spread faster than any central group can track them. The company's own answer isn't tighter control from the center. It's more of the same lightweight infrastructure already carrying everything else, shared study groups, shared notes, and short feedback loops, on the theory that a decentralized company doesn't need less coordination, just a different kind. Some ideas tried this way haven't worked, and Gaiax says so plainly rather than quietly dropping them from the record.

A company that lets an intern challenge the CEO's own proposal, and a CEO who would rather host that same intern for dinner than wait for them to earn a meeting, has built something sturdier than an open-door policy. It has built an organization where the door was never really the point, because nobody had reason to believe it was closed in the first place.

Garti

Garti was founded in 2016 by Alina Sukhoguzova, an engineer who started making cutting boards out of the artificial-stone offcuts left over from her husband's custom kitchen-countertop workshop, pieces too small to cut a countertop from but too good to waste. The boards outgrew the offcuts, and Garti built its early customer base on social media and blogger partnerships rather than paid advertising, an approach that carried the company for years, until marketplaces reshaped how shoppers found and bought everyday goods. The company's answer was Clientocracy, a management methodology built around customer promises and distributed leadership.

The quality of the boards is excellent, and each one is made to last up to 15 years. That means a constant flow of new customers is vital to the business. It is an unusual problem for a company to have: the more durable Garti's cutting boards turn out to be, the more the business depends on people who have never bought one before, because nobody who already owns one is coming back anytime soon.

For years that dependency was manageable, since the social-media channel converted well and customers trusted what they saw. Then Ozon and Wildberries absorbed local retail. Shoppers went where the selection was wider, the prices lower, and the ordering, delivery and returns simpler, and Garti's old promotional playbook stopped bringing in new customers at the rate the business needed. Inside the company, the response was slowed by its own structure: departments worked in isolation, and layers of process made it hard to redirect the organization toward the customer at the moment that mattered most.

Garti's answer was to abandon the way it had been managing itself and commit to Clientocracy, still a new idea in the local market at the time, through the Beyond Taylor school. Leadership walked into training with a specific list of what they wanted from it: stable growth, a lower cost of goods, a more engaged team, a way to win back customers drifting to competitors, and a way to protect direct and wholesale sales while still building a presence on marketplaces. That list is where zero distance to mission and strategy starts for Garti, a shared, specific direction rather than a vague ambition to improve, and one the company has since anchored in a simple belief that has spread well beyond leadership: mistakes are normal, and they are how the business gets better.

Lilia Budaeva, who leads the Customer Care team, says the appeal of the methodology was less about learning something foreign than putting a name to instincts the company already had. "Luckily enough, some processes in the company were already intuitively being done the right way," she says, pointing to returns: Garti had always refunded a customer who was unhappy, long before Clientocracy gave that instinct a framework to sit inside.

The rollout followed Beyond Taylor's nine-step framework, moved through in stages rather than announced as a company-wide overhaul on day one, a decision aimed at keeping resistance low while the team adjusted to a new vocabulary and a new way of making decisions. Garti is currently working through steps seven and eight, building out team economics and financial motivation, having already defined its customer, mapped their pain points, and formulated the promises and metrics meant to answer them. That customer work is where zero distance to customers shows up most directly: pain points converted into concrete promises, promises tied to metrics, and both left open to revision as conditions change. CustDev interviews, unfamiliar territory for the team not long ago, are now standing practice, run to keep hearing directly from the people who decide whether to buy a board.

Zero distance to leaders took shape through a Board of Leaders, four people, one for each function, who have had to learn to negotiate with each other, divide up responsibility, and put their own promises into the methodology's language. Individually, leaders now ask their colleagues what they need in order to feel motivated, rather than assuming they already know. That is also where zero distance to colleagues resides: a company that used to run in functional silos now has a small cross-functional group making decisions together, and the staged rollout across departments, rather than a single reset, was designed to build that trust one department at a time. Leaders are working toward a specific marker of their own progress too, moving from a first level of leadership, where they personally carry out key tasks and train others to do the same, to a second, where they delegate and track results instead.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills shows up in a shift Garti made early: performance tracking that used to happen monthly now happens weekly, closing the gap between a problem appearing and someone noticing it. The company also opened its books internally, talking plainly with the team about money so that every employee understands how their work connects to profit. That transparency changed behavior, evidence of zero distance to opportunities: staff started finding their own ways to cut costs without giving up quality and flagging growth ideas on their own, because they could now see how those decisions landed in their own pay. Zero distance to results and rewards runs through the new motivation model, where the sales team's base salaries were equalized and bonuses now track sales performance and cost savings directly. Together with weekly monitoring, that redesigned incentive structure is also where zero distance to action lives: decisions about cost and pricing get made and adjusted close to where the numbers actually move, instead of waiting for the next monthly review.

None of this came easily. Mapping customer pain points took more time and energy than anything else in the process, and building a strategy across three channels at once, retail, wholesale and marketplaces, while accounting for Garti's full product range, was demanding work. Team economics and profitability modeling were confusing before they clicked into place. 

Within the first three weeks of monitoring costs weekly instead of monthly, Garti cut production costs from 81 percent of revenue to 43 percent. Additional overhead fell from 7 percent of revenue to 5.5 percent within two weeks of the same change. A four-person Board of Leaders is fully operational, financial information now moves openly through the company, and the new sales compensation model, equal base pay plus performance and savings bonuses, is live.

Garti's boards will still outlast their owners' kitchens by a decade or more, and that was never the problem. What changed is everything the company built around that fact once its old way of finding new customers stopped working: a Board of Leaders arguing its way to real decisions, a cost line that moved 38 points of revenue in three weeks once someone started checking it every week instead of once a month, and a sales team paid on results it can see for itself. A durable product finally has a business built to match it.

Generous Designs Africa

Within the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in Yumbe, Uganda, Generous Designs Africa has collected more than 10 tons of plastic waste, recycled or upcycled seven of them, and sold over 90,000 products. Along the way, it has trained 60 people, some of whom have joined its production team. The organization operates with a lean structure: three full-time employees and twenty part-time staff drive this effort.

Lomoro Emmanuel founded GDA in 2020, drawing on his own experience living in the settlement. He noticed two persistent challenges: plastic waste piling up in the community, and a lack of livelihood opportunities for young people and women. GDA emerged as a response, collecting plastic and transforming it into school bags, cups, rulers, pegs and buttons, while equipping youth and widows with skills so that recycling becomes a source of income, not just a service. Beyond plastics, GDA repurposes discarded tarpaulins from UNHCR and aid agencies, cutting usable sections into waterproof school bags. Since 2021, the organization has operated machinery to shred, melt and remould plastic waste into new products. GDA stands as part of the broader impact created by social enterprises within the Social Innovation Academy (SINA).

Over the past year, GDA’s mission and strategy have shifted in a way that goes beyond procedure. The team recognized that limiting recycling to its own premises kept the community at arm’s length, treating it as a source of waste rather than a partner in the solution. In response, GDA began involving community volunteers in collecting plastic and bringing it in to be sorted, washed and prepared for recycling and upcycling. Lomoro is clear that this was a collective decision: the team reached consensus, the secretary recorded it, and input came from trainers, waste collectors, beneficiaries and community members, who understand the challenges firsthand.

Ideas at GDA are brought forward by anyone and discussed openly among all members, who then decide together and translate those ideas into action. The durable waterproof bags now produced by women from plastic waste are a direct result of this collaborative process, born from a shared drive to create products that generate income while reducing waste. The main constraint is not permission but resources: GDA cannot fund every idea, so when possible, it bootstraps a test rather than prolonging debate.

At GDA, the guiding principle is that a product must be genuinely useful, not just recycled; a higher bar than many recycling ventures set. When the bag line launched, customer feedback was clear: buyers wanted bags that were strong, affordable and waterproof, all at once. That insight reshaped how the team evaluated materials and production, and today, the organization checks what people want before deciding what to make.

Few layers separate frontline workers from the founder, who remains closely involved in community activities (meeting beneficiaries, overseeing waste collection, supporting training, engaging with partners, seeking funding and backing up staff). Lomoro sees this not as a virtue but as a challenge, acknowledging the strain of carrying many responsibilities himself. Building a stronger team and delegating more are priorities he is actively working on.

By contrast, colleagues at GDA coordinate independently. The organization does not operate in silos; instead, its process is a chain where each link relies on the previous one. On clean-up and collection days, volunteers bring in plastic waste, which others then sort, wash and dry before it moves to production. Because every step is essential, those involved communicate directly and often coordinate across stages without waiting for the founder’s input on every detail.

When it comes to data, tools and skills, GDA is candid about its progress and its gaps. The organization has begun using information from its activities to track progress, producing the cumulative figures above. Skills are developed hands-on: people learn by collecting, sorting, washing, drying and making products, which is how 60 trained individuals became a production team. What remains is the need for consistency, and Lomoro is direct about it: GDA still requires better systems for recording production, sales, waste volumes and impact.

Its primary partners are the community itself, with volunteers and members collecting and delivering waste. Beyond this, the organization collaborates with community-based organizations and stakeholders who support awareness, training and environmental activities, extending GDA’s reach and impact.

The organisation takes a deliberate approach, choosing not to pursue blanket empowerment but to act quickly where decisions fit within available resources. Once a community waste collection activity is agreed, volunteers and focal persons organize themselves to collect and deliver, without layers of approval. Yet Lomoro is clear that some procedures must remain: when money, procurement or organizational commitments are at stake, he insists on proper accountability and approval. 

Performance is measured through outcomes rather than activity: plastic collected and recycled, products made and sold, people trained, community members drawn into the process. There is no bonus or equity system, because the organization is small and its income is not yet stable. What it can offer instead is participation in projects, training, and leadership opportunities for people who work hard, and the founder is clear that building a proper system for measuring and rewarding performance is something the organization wants to do as it grows rather than something it has done.

The greatest challenge, as Lomoro sees it, is running a recycling business with limited resources while striving for both environmental and social impact. GDA has the waste, the ideas and the people ready to work; the challenges are machinery, working capital and reliable markets for its recycled and upcycled products. Lomoro’s approach is pragmatic: waiting for perfect conditions is not an option. He starts with what exists, listens to the community, tests, and improves. As Bida Moses, a plastic waste collector for GDA, puts it, collecting waste may seem like a small task, but it keeps the community clean and supplies the materials recycling depends on. A small organisation that changes daily lives with limited resources but impressive effort.

Gejja Women Foundation

A client approached Gejja Women Foundation with an urgent request: 10,000 disposable sanitary pads, and a cash offer of 70,000,000 Ugandan shillings on delivery. At a time when the organization needed funds, the temptation was real. Yet, after a collective discussion with the founder, the team chose to decline. Disposable pads run counter to the reusable products Gejja stands for and undermine the environmental commitment at the heart of its mission. Instead, the team channelled its efforts into upgrading the production space, staying true to its principles.

Refusing a sum that could have defined the year is a decision that carries weight only when the organization is honest about the risks. Gejja did not hide its need for cash. What sets this choice apart is not just the principle, but the process: the decision emerged from the team as a whole, not as a directive from the founder. Here, strategy is shaped from the ground up. Community outreach teams bring insights from the field, while the marketing team tracks the movement of Safe Girl reusable pads. Together, these perspectives drive the priorities for each quarter.

Gejja is registered as an NGO in Uganda and trades as a social enterprise from Bulyasi Village, with 32 full-time employees and five or six volunteers a year. It works on education, entrepreneurship and livelihoods, regenerative agriculture, and menstrual health under the Safe Girl Initiative. Angella Marjorie Atuhurra founded it in 2017 and registered it in 2019. She was the daughter of two school-going children, her mother 14 and her father 16. Angella herself became pregnant and dropped out of school at 18. She joined the Social Innovation Academy (SINA), where she was asked what it would mean to start her own business instead of collecting the 375,000 shillings she was then being paid. The salary meant a great deal to her at the time and the alternative sounded unreal. SINA's model, which puts marginalized young people in charge of self-organized hubs and expects them to build enterprises from their own experience, is the training she names as her only formal preparation for the years that followed.

Mission and strategy at Gejja are tested not only by what the organization chooses to pursue, but by what it refuses to sell. The products that do reach people are delivered through structures designed to distribute authority outward. Gejja has adopted Holacracy, a governance model where each person holds decision-making power within her own sphere of work, eliminating the need for management to step in.

Opportunities at Gejja have led to outcomes that go beyond internal projects. Nankabirwa Angella, who leads the Seedloan programme and trains women in the startup accelerator, worked alongside a woman struggling to keep a small nursery school afloat in Kafumu Village, Mpigi. Instead of remaining an external coach, Angella stepped in to take over and manage the school herself, without seeking permission from Gejja to become an entrepreneur. Nearly a year later, the school continues to operate, with Angella serving both as its director and as a social worker at Gejja. The organization sees this not as a conflict, but as evidence that the lessons it imparts to women in the community are taking root within its own team.

When it comes to customers, Gejja has shown a willingness to put mission ahead of margin. At the Kyaka II refugee settlement, the Safe Girl team partners with refugee women to produce and sell reusable pad kits. Initially, the kits were priced at 7,000 shillings, in line with the main Mpigi production centre. But direct conversations with users revealed that many women and girls simply could not afford this price. In response, the refugee team reduced the local price to 5,000 shillings, breaking from the standard pricing model to ensure that those most in need were not left behind.

Leaders here have moved toward enabling in a way that is easiest to see in something mundane. The welfare role is responsible for feeding all 32 employees, breakfast through dinner. What senior leadership does is raise the money and make it available at the start of each month. Planning, scheduling and allocation belong entirely to the welfare team. Angella describes her own shift as moving from doing to directing to enabling, and states the goal plainly: an organization that keeps working when she is not in the room.

Collaboration at Gejja is built on self-assembly. The organization runs two or three acceleration programmes each year, drawing 50 to 100 participants over eight weeks. While the women's startups team leads planning and delivery, the model farm team provides food from Gejja's own farm, the educational support team organizes training, and the welfare team manages catering. Management does not approve every handoff or assign roles. Angella likens the process to termites: coordination happens through local signals, not top-down instruction.

Access to data, tools, and skills has shifted real authority to program leads. Nakagwa Barbra, who heads the educational support programme, decided at the start of 2026 to move two sponsored girls, Nalubega Daphine and Namuwonge Alice, to different schools based on their improved performance and the fee structures. Her understanding of sponsorship funding allowed her to act independently and report the decision at month end. Teams now have visibility over their targets, budgets, beneficiary feedback, activity plans, and expected results, making such decisions possible without the need for escalation.

Partnerships at Gejja are built on integration, not just collaboration. Since 2023, the HerStart programme, supported by the Government of Canada, has worked alongside Gejja on projects spanning innovation, gender equality, and community awareness in childcare. Canadian volunteers are embedded in daily operations, including welfare and school outreach, rather than delivering services from the outside. A community steward coordinates directly with them, bypassing the founder. Gejja expects reciprocity: it shares both successes and challenges, and expects its community knowledge to be valued in return.

In practice, the Safe Girl team now manages production centres at Kyaka II and Kalangala Island. Previously, decisions about production quantities, material purchases, distribution schedules, and community engagement would travel back to Mpigi, sometimes waiting for the CEO. Now, the team's lead link coordinates the centres directly. When materials run low, production adjusts, notifies procurement, and procurement requests funds from finance. The guiding principle is clear: if the person closest to the problem has the information, skills, and responsibility to solve it, the decision should stay with them. Gejja acknowledges that this approach is still being implemented and that some departments are yet to adapt.

At Gejja, results and rewards are intentionally non-financial. There are no bonuses or equity schemes; instead, recognition, learning, exposure, increased responsibility, and professional development serve as incentives. Each month, at least two employees attend an incubation programme or symposium in their field, and quarterly staff appraisals measure progress against individual responsibilities and programme targets. The end-of-year peer recognition system carries real weight: employees vote openly for two colleagues they consider outstanding, with management having no more influence than any other staff member. In 2025, Chandiru Mariam and Kasuku Godfrey were chosen. Gejja's review process focuses on learning, growth, support, and readiness for greater responsibility, rather than output alone. 

For the founder, the greatest challenge has been founder dependency. Her answer has been to return to school. She is now completing a bachelor's degree in human resource management, set to graduate in January 2027, while her two co-founders pursue studies in accounting and project planning. Starting at 18 with only SINA as formal preparation, she once believed that responsibility meant knowing and approving every decision. Today, she recognizes that the organization's limits are her own, should she remain at the centre of every choice.

The journey of Gejja Women Foundation is a testament to the power of purpose, resilience, and collective leadership. Every decision made, no matter how difficult, is a step toward a future where integrity is valued above convenience and where the courage to stand by one’s principles is rewarded with real, lasting change. Though the path is not always clear and the work is never truly finished, Gejja’s story proves that transformation is possible when ordinary people come together with extraordinary determination. Their unfinished journey is an invitation to dream boldly, act bravely, and trust that every principled choice can light the way forward.

Golden Communication Group

Golden Communication Group went to Beijing in September 2025 to collect a ZeroDX award and came home with unfinished business. It had just been named in the Transformational category, the only Vietnamese organisation among eight winners that also included Bayer and GE Appliances, for a restructuring already two years old. What its chief executive, Nguyễn Minh Hương, took from the event was not confirmation but a further idea: Haier's micro-enterprise model, seen up close. Golden has since organised itself into seven micro enterprises, each with its own visible profit and loss account. The company that won the award for changing itself used the award as a reason to change again.

Golden was set up in 1998 and is one of Vietnam's oldest media and communications businesses. It ran for twenty-five years on a conventional shape: clear hierarchy, functional departments, and five separate companies sitting alongside a central system. As the communications market accelerated, that shape produced its own problems. People completed their own tasks without seeing the flow of value they sat inside, teams could be extremely busy without being effective, work waited between hands, and decisions climbed through layers. In the fourth quarter of 2023, working with the New Zealand consultancy Teal Unicorn, run by Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ, Golden began the programme its people named the Rebirth of the Phoenix, and dissolved the five companies into one entity, One Golden.

Mission and strategy, meaning what an organisation exists to do and how it settles where to go, was rewritten before the structure was. The first change Golden made was not to its org chart but to what it expected of people: not that they perform assigned tasks well, but that they see problems, contribute ideas, take initiative and share responsibility for outcomes. The structure followed from that expectation rather than the other way round, which is why the unification held. A single stated vision, to move the world with good things, then gave the merged teams a basis for arbitrating between competing demands other than which unit booked the revenue.

Colleagues, meaning how people are grouped and how they relate, is where the arithmetic of this case sits. Golden today has 109 people working across seven micro enterprises. Before the transformation began it had 175. Roles are deliberately fluid, so a strategist, producer or designer flows to the work where their capability creates the most value rather than staying inside a discipline, and the boundaries between former departments have lost most of their meaning. A company that has shed a third of its headcount while raising what it produces has not simply cut costs; it has changed what the remaining people are able to do.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, moved down to the teams. Each micro enterprise is responsible not only for delivering work but for organising itself to create the most value for its customers, and self-managed teams hold authority over budgets, timelines and creative direction without routing those choices upward. Value Stream Mapping and Kanban make the work visible, so a team sees where a job is stuck rather than discovering it at a review, and short stand-ups align priorities daily.

Data, tools and skills is the dimension Golden has invested in most heavily since Beijing, and it answers a problem autonomy created. A leaner organisation running many projects at once raised questions the old structure had answered badly but had at least answered: who has capacity for more work, what is happening inside another team, what is actually going on without a leader asking around and consolidating the replies. Golden's conclusion was that self-management is impossible while information sits scattered across emails, spreadsheets, separate tools and a few people's heads. So it built a human resources information system and dashboards drawing on the tools people already used daily, Outlook and Planner among them. An Availability Calendar now shows who is free, who is overloaded and who could join a new project, without anyone being asked, and information about projects, contracts, people and revenue is connected rather than consolidated on request. Hương puts the point precisely: "when information becomes visible, autonomy has a real opportunity to become an organisational capability."

Skills follow the same logic of visibility. Golden uses the Teal ShuHaRi capability framework, in which Shu is learning and mastering foundational practice, Ha is understanding the principles well enough to adapt them, and Ri is holding enough capability to act autonomously and create better ways of working. What makes it more than a competency ladder is who operates it. People are not managed through job descriptions or manager assessments. Teams identify the capabilities they need, individuals assess themselves and their colleagues, 360-degree feedback feeds in, and each person builds their own development path. It is explicitly not a ranking system, which matters because a framework used to sort people would undo the trust the rest of the model runs on.

Customers were redefined in a way that changes daily behaviour. Golden treats every team as having its own customers, which may be a colleague, another team, or whoever receives the output of the work. Finishing your own task is therefore not the end point; the question is what value it created for the next person in the flow and, eventually, for the client who pays. This is what dissolved the departmental boundaries in practice, because a person accountable to the next step cannot hide behind having completed their own. Partners sit inside the same arrangement: creative agencies, technology providers and production houses work within Golden's shared tools and are judged on outcomes rather than on delivery against a purchase order.

Opportunities, the question of how an idea becomes something real, no longer belong to the leadership group. Hackathons became a standing practice, open across roles and levels, used to explore technologies, redesign processes and propose new client services. Beyond those events, a team that sees an opportunity can experiment without commissioning it first. Improvement stopped being a programme leaders start: weekly, people reflect on the value they created and what should come next, with deeper reflection cycles running periodically alongside the capability assessments.

Leaders had the most to give up, and Hương is direct about her own change of mind. She previously understood a leader as the person who knew the most, decided the most and controlled the most. She now takes the job to be providing direction, context, transparency and the conditions in which others can work well. When people hold information, capability and the authority to act, nobody needs to stand behind them pushing each task along, which frees leaders to look ahead and develop the organisation.

Results and rewards were shared rather than retained. In the year following the change, revenue rose 5 to 8 per cent, profit rose 80 per cent, and labour productivity measured per employee rose 110 per cent, the profile of a company that stopped wasting itself rather than one that simply sold more. Every employee received an additional bonus equivalent to three months' salary, and outstanding contributors received a further four to five months. Business results and employee income have both continued to rise in the years since. Making profit and loss visible at project and micro-enterprise level carries the same principle into daily work, so a team sees the value it creates against the cost it consumes.

Golden does not present this as finished, and the harder parts are recent enough to be unresolved. Seven micro enterprises with their own P&Ls reintroduce the risk the One Golden merger was designed to remove, units optimising for their own numbers, and the company is relying on shared information and internal-customer accountability to hold that in check. The capability framework also demands a great deal of people who joined an agency expecting a career ladder. The question Golden answered in 2023, whether its shape still fits its market, will be asked of it again, and what the company has built is less an answer than the capacity to keep answering.

GPTW NL

When the person who acted as CEO at Great Place to Work (GPTW) Netherlands came back from two months away, nobody rushed to hand the job back. The team sat with the role, decided it no longer fit the company they had become, and rebuilt it together, with the person it belonged to sitting right there in the room. That kind of trust does not happen by accident. It is the clearest sign of how deliberately this organization has been built.

The company has been in business since 2002, plugged into the global Great Place To Work network that dates back to 1991. Their focus is on survey workplace culture, crunch the data, hand back insight and recognition to clients ranging from scrappy startups to household name multinationals. 

How the Dutch office runs itself is where things get more interesting, and where that opening story starts to make sense. There is no management chain in the usual sense, just Holacracy: circles, Circle Leads, Circle Reps, and a lot of trust. It is, in practice, Haier's RenDanHeYi (RDHY) philosophy showing up in daily life, the idea that when employees and the value they create are tied directly together, the whole organization gets sharper and more alive. 

GPTW in Netherlands has a team of 25, which runs inside a global network of roughly 1,300 people. Their structure is nothing new. What has changed since last year is the discipline behind it. Rather than treating self-organization as finished business, they spent the past year actively hunting down the moments old hierarchical habits crept back in, and the clearest evidence of that effort is a new cross-organizational growth team, Circle Leads and Circle Reps pooling strategic themes for open debate and feeding them into a strategy-to-OKR cascade that lets every circle translate company direction into its own plan. 

The commercial segmentation push came straight out of that process, a call made at circle level that ended up steering the whole company. The same instinct showed up smaller and closer to home when a Circle Lead left Marketing and the team simply picked its own replacement, no memo from above required. The sentiment showed up again when a new circle called FLAIR folded Finance, Legal, Audits, IT, and Risk formed into one group, when Customer Impact reorganized itself, and in the Strategy circle now taking shape. And when Circle Leads inside the growth team started drifting back into old-school top-down habits, the organization did not sweep it under the rug. It named the pattern out loud and used it to redesign the whole circle model. 

That habit of catching drift and correcting it in the open now has a formal home in Mission and Strategy, which has moved from a general sense of purpose to an actual routine. An Impact Strategy Canvas and an Impact Execution Canvas get reviewed every month, and three priorities carry the year: sharper segmentation and more predictable revenue, an employer brand built on real clients and frontrunners rather than ad spend, and technology chosen for what it returns rather than how new it looks.

There is no form to fill out for budget or time to chase a new idea. Circles simply run on their own OKRs, and the Marketing team choosing its own leader is this year's clearest example of that freedom in motion. The honest catch, which the organization does not dodge, is that when initiatives spring up independently across circles, the hard part stops being generating ideas and becomes keeping them pointed in the same direction.

That same bottom up instinct shapes how the company stays close to its customers. Proximity is not outsourced to a research team, it is lived: employees from every role show up at client events and inside the company's community, and a client feedback agent built this year gives everyone, not just customer-facing staff, a direct line to what clients are saying. The organization admits the loop is not yet on a fixed rhythm for circles further from the customer, and says so plainly rather than dressing it up.

Nowhere is that same honesty tested harder than in Leadership, which loops back to where this case began. No more than two layers separate any employee from the CEO or Circle Lead, unchanged since 2025, because the model was never really about counting layers, it was about where accountability actually sits. There is no arc here of a boss learning to coach, since command-and-control was never the starting point. The sharpest proof of that accountability is the same one this case opened with: the CEO/Circle Lead's own role, rebuilt by the collective after a sabbatical instead of simply handed back.

That accountability plays out sideways too, among Colleagues, who organize themselves into a web of small circles, usually five to seven people, forming, splitting, and regrouping wherever the work actually is. The segmentation project is lateral coordination in action: one person started a project group, and colleagues from other circles joined in, with no manager assigning anyone. The FLAIR consolidation and Customer Impact's self-driven reorganization make the same point from a different angle. Structure here keeps moving because the work does.

That same autonomy extends past people and into how the company handles Data, Tools and Skills. Circles set their own Kept Promise Indicators and track them through Hubspot and Holaspirit, giving each group real-time visibility into how it is doing. Marketing picked up Notion on its own initiative, every circle chooses its own AI agents, and a dedicated Data and Tech circle builds them to spec. A Go-To-Market role now exists purely to spread commercial fluency across circles, backed by financial data the whole company gets to see regularly.

Where that same openness has not fully caught up yet is with Partners. External collaboration is still becoming a deliberate practice rather than a platform strategy, and partners tend to arrive after a need is already identified rather than helping shape it from the start. When partnerships do happen, though, they run on the same self-management logic as everything else. The collaboration with agency Bright to support Marketing was shaped entirely by that circle, which set its own budget, scope, and follow-up with no procurement function in the way.

All of this becomes most visible from the outside in Action. Multiple circles jointly pulled the plug on a large, resource-heavy event this year because it was eating too much capacity, folding it into a new format instead of protecting it out of habit. Sales and Customer Impact keep setting their own local standards, segmentation approach included, without waiting for a green light from above. Bureaucracy gets checked less by policy than by the organization's willingness to call out its own drift, which is exactly what happened when Circle Leads started leaning back toward old-school leadership inside the growth team.

Results and Rewards, by contrast, has barely moved, and that stillness is its own kind of statement: still no individual bonuses, still shared profit-sharing, unchanged since 2025. Ownership is starting to reach past the founders, with a colleague recently buying a 5% stake in the company. Circles are not judged on a local P&L, but they are fully on the hook for their own Kept Promise Indicators. The achievement the team is proudest of this year, though, is not a number at all. After a colleague left, the team worked through the tension that created on purpose, asking everyone what they needed to close the chapter well. That same openness carried into warm campfire conversations about the office and the salary model, proof the organization takes psychological safety exactly as seriously as it takes commercial results.

None of this means the model is finished, and GPTW NL is honest enough to say so. The pull toward old hierarchy still shows up now and then, even among people fully committed to this way of working. What makes the case genuinely inspiring is not the absence of that pull, but what the organization does with it: naming it out loud, in growth-team meetings, circle redesigns, and campfire conversations, and treating that honesty itself as the discipline that keeps everything centered. The CEO's own role, rebuilt from scratch after a sabbatical, is the clearest proof that this is not a policy sitting in a binder somewhere. It is RenDanHeYi (RDHY) in motion: people and purpose, continuously realigned by the people who actually live it. Which is exactly why, at GPTW Netherlands, the circle keeps the centre.

Green at Mind

Green at Mind earliest cookstoves in Turkana County, in Kenya's arid north, were welded from reclaimed metal drums and sheeting, sold out of an operation that started without formal registration or outside capital, built, in the founder's own account, on determination rather than paperwork. Today the same enterprise holds a micro-insurance partnership with APA Insurance, a project relationship with the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV), and distribution across two Kenyan counties.

In 2023, after a household member fell ill from the smoke of open cooking fires, a common source of indoor air pollution in rural Kenya, the founder set out to build a solution that would spare other families the same illness. What began as an unregistered, refugee-run operation gradually earned recognition from local authorities and grew into the compliant enterprise it is today.

What Green at Mind built is a bundle, not a single product: a smokeless cookstove made from upcycled materials, briquettes made from food and agricultural waste, a green-credit mechanism, and micro-insurance cover, sold through local distributors rather than direct retail. 

On mission and strategy, the company's public cooking demonstrations, backed by its insurance offer, have reshaped how the community sees the business. What started as a way to sell stoves has become, in the company's own words, a community sensitization strategy to accelerate the adoption of clean cooking practices among low-income household. That shift reframed cooking from a matter of cost to one of social and environmental benefit and helped establish Green at Mind as one of the more visible clean cooking companies in the Turkana region.

On opportunities, the company's founding is itself the clearest evidence. An operation that began without proper documents or resources grew on conviction rather than approval, into an enterprise with over $130,000 in revenue across the past three years, 25 staff, and 62 local distributors. Local authorities eventually recognized and supported the effort, but the initiative came first.

On customers, the company's community champion model is the strongest example. Sales agents could not cover Turkana's dispersed settlements alone, so the company began working through leaders of existing community groups, who now act as an informal extension of the field team and feed user feedback directly back into product decisions.

On leaders, Green at Mind has just two layers between frontline staff and its most senior team, and leadership describes its role as participative rather than managing, staying close enough to operations to share the same understanding of the business as the people doing the work. One senior team member started as a security guard and moved into his current role by learning the company's other functions along the way. As he put it, “today I am the operations lead” says Innocent.

The production department coordinates directly with procurement on raw materials, while operations checks quality alongside marketing, and all four departments have to work in step to get a product ready for sale, without routing decisions upward first.

On data, tools and skills, weekly report forms and a sales ledger, tracked in a shared Google Sheet with admin-controlled access, give every department the same information going into the company's Monday planning meetings, where the team reviews the past week's results and plans the next one.

On partners, the company's relationship with SNV, the Netherlands Development Organisation, is the clearest result. A contract signed for two months in 2025 has continued informally well past its term, with SNV still referring Green at Mind to other organizations. The company is more candid about its vendor relationships, describing them as still “in development” beyond simple commission-based reselling, with an ambition to make vendors among the first beneficiaries of its micro-insurance program rather than treating them purely as a sales channel.

On action, the company's current stove design came from the field team, who built it around the company's mission rather than waiting for direction from above, and it went straight into production. Green at Mind followed up by creating a cash reward for staff who bring forward ideas that improve the product or the operation, a mechanism meant to keep that kind of unsupervised initiative happening rather than treating it as a one-off.

On results and rewards, performance is measured against units produced, sales made, target achievement, and revenue growth compared with the prior period, and staff who contribute an idea with real impact on the product or the market are rewarded first with cash, and considered for promotion or a raise. Marketing Supervisor Kiyo Dominic summed up the trade-off this way: “I prefer working for the company, generating the result expected” rather than being paid regardless of outcome.

Independently, Kenya Climate Innovation Centre corroborates the broad shape of this growth, citing more than 5,800 stoves produced and over 2,000 households reached in Turkana County alone. Vincent Ubeling, the company's founder and CEO, described the underlying approach to the Kenya Climate Innovation Centre this way: “we develop practical solutions using resources that are already available” (Kenya Climate Innovation Centre, 2026).

The company is candid about what isn't solved. Its account of the hardest part of the journey describes a founder who has redesigned the product more than once after finding that personal passion for the mission didn't match what customers actually needed, plus ongoing strain in personal and company financial management while the business went without steady revenue. From that, the company says, came a lesson that entrepreneurship is not a one-person affair but a team effort, down to how resources are managed.

What makes this case distinctive is not scale. It is the fact that a company built by one person's determination to spare his neighbors a preventable illness has already learned to let its best ideas come from wherever they happen to be: a field team designing the stove customers actually needed, a security guard who studied his way into running operations, community leaders shaping the product before any executive saw the feedback. Green at Mind simply started acting the way a zero distance company acts, long before it had a name for what it was doing.

Happy 

When Happy Ltd changed hands this year, becoming a company owned by its own staff through an Employee Ownership Trust, the people living through it used an unusual word for it: seamless. Major ownership changes do not usually go that quietly. At Happy, they did, and the reason has less to do with luck than with a set of habits the company had been building long before anyone at the top decided to hand the keys over.

Those habits start with why Happy exists in the first place. Since 1987, the London based training and consultancy company has run on a single bet: that people do their best work when they are genuinely happy, not merely managed well. Founder Henry Stewart borrowed the instinct from Ricardo Semler's experiments in self-management at the Brazilian manufacturer Semco, built a company around it, and gave the top job the title Chief Happiness Officer without any apparent self-consciousness. That founding claim is Happy's mission and strategy dimension in one sentence, and it has now outlasted several decades of management fashion, which is a fairer test than any survey question could be.

A mission survives a hard year, or it doesn't, and 2025 was the test. Staff credit the company's stated values, not a communications plan, with holding the ownership transition together. When Happy's own internal survey asked whether those values genuinely guide how work gets done, every single respondent agreed. Inclusion sits at the top of that list on purpose, described by staff as something applied to real decisions rather than printed on a wall.

That same instinct shapes who has authority at Happy, and how they use it. Traditional line managers do not really exist here. Employees are paired instead with what they call an M&M, part coach, part mentor, and the way people describe the relationship is strikingly consistent: not being told what to do, but being helped to work it out for themselves. One person sets objectives with their M&M each cycle, then owns the outcome and tracks their own progress against it. It is the leaders dimension in practice, authority that exists to develop someone rather than instruct them, and it shows up directly in how people answer when asked whether they feel micromanaged. They don't.

That same trust extends outward, not just inward. Staff working directly with clients are empowered to adapt a service, fix a problem, or make a call on the spot, without waiting for sign off from someone above them. It keeps the distance between a client's actual need and Happy's response about as short as it can get, which is what the customers dimension is supposed to look like when it is real rather than aspirational.

None of that autonomy would hold together without a steady rhythm for surfacing what is actually happening on the ground, which is where the data, tools and skills dimension comes in. Formal check ins, called Snapshot, happen three times a year instead of the usual once, each one built to surface friction and new thinking rather than confirm that everything is fine. A stop, start, continue format runs through every probation review and then annually across the whole company, keeping feedback current instead of saving it all for one dreaded conversation at year end. Training sessions close with a formal evaluation, including a Net Promoter Score tracked across departments, so quality does not quietly drift depending on who happens to be teaching that day. The result, an Investors in People score of 6.7 out of 7, is really just a lagging indicator of all that listening.

Money is where all of this becomes hardest to fake, and Happy makes it the most transparent part of the business rather than the least. An elected panel of staff sets the salary pool each year based on what the business can genuinely afford, a real business decision made by the people closest to it rather than handed down, the action dimension doing exactly what it is meant to do. Employees vote on what the Chief Happiness Officer is paid, and anyone can look up what everyone else earns on a shared spreadsheet. A fifth of profit is split evenly across the team every year, with a further slice handed to charities the staff themselves choose, and under the new Employee Ownership Trust, staff are not just paid by the business, they own it. That is the results and rewards dimension without needing any translation.

Owning the business only pays off if people keep getting better at the work, and that depends on how Happy treats learning and failure. Every person who answered Happy's internal survey agreed they have real opportunities to learn on the job, and the hiring philosophy behind it, hire for attitude and train for skill, explains why the number holds. Mistakes are treated as material to learn from rather than something to hide. When a training course goes sideways, the response is to work out what didn't land and fix the next one, not to find someone to blame. That is the opportunities dimension: improvement available to anyone, not reserved for whoever sits furthest up the org chart.

The clearest evidence that all of this actually holds under pressure is a pair of numbers that moved together this year, while the ownership structure itself was being rebuilt underneath everyone. Internal satisfaction with how well people feel supported climbed from 87 to 94 percent. Satisfaction with how departments work with each other, the colleagues dimension in its plainest form, rose from 82 to 94 percent over the same period. 

Happy people have a clear plan for what comes next: growing income enough to keep the model sustainable now that ownership sits with the people doing the work. Put it all together and seamless stops sounding like luck. It sounds like the payoff of decades spent building the exact systems a transition like this would eventually need.

HOLIS Group

Over the past year, one of HOLIS Group's business units in Japan's Aichi Prefecture opened a head-spa service, and ten months later, closed it. No one was blamed. The unit had weighed location, customer acquisition, and hiring prospects, concluded the venture would not reach sustainable scale, and walked away rather than protect the money already spent. For a company built around 12 legal entities, 35 businesses and 107 stores, most of them small consumer-facing retail and service operations across central Japan, that kind of clean, fast exit is not an exception. It is closer to the operating system.

HOLIS did not start out this way. The Toyoake, Aichi–based group grew for years as a conventional, hierarchical retailer of used golf equipment, bridal wear, and recycled goods before growth stalled. In November 2018, CEO Takuya Katagiri restructured the company around Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations and Mike Michalowicz's Profit First, trading a management chain for role-based teams and a transparent, five-account cash system (profit, owner pay, tax, expenses, loan repayment) that lets every employee see how money moves.

Over the last year, HOLIS pushed the model further in three concrete ways. It rebuilt its internal business-management system so any employee, not just finance staff, can view sales, profit, and performance for every business in the group, meant to let teams borrow ideas from one another instead of routing comparisons through head office. It standardized business-skills training so onboarding now covers sales, customer acquisition, profit management, problem-solving, and decision-making for every new hire, not only those headed for management. And each business unit mapped the skills it needs to succeed and published that map internally, so employees can see which skills they already have and which they are missing, turning performance conversations into self-assessment rather than a manager's verdict.

HOLIS opened and closed its head-spa venture within ten months, a cycle that would ordinarily involve committee reviews and sunk-cost pressure at a company with layered approvals. The group runs acquisitions on the same clock: when Hanakinu Co. joined HOLIS Group in July 2025 and Sawasei Co. followed in February 2026, HOLIS removed the reporting hierarchy from day one, folding each company directly into its network of autonomous teams rather than running a multi-year integration plan.

There is no middle-management layer, no mandatory sales meetings, and no top-down annual plan; decisions run through an advice process in which employees consult peers rather than seek sign-off. Ami Nomura's account says this default has only strengthened: decisions on launches, operational fixes, acquisition integration, and exits are increasingly made “by the people closest to the work,” which HOLIS credits with faster decisions and stronger ownership.

An internal deposit system lets employees lend money to the company and earn a return from the shared profit pool, turning personal savings into working capital that would otherwise sit idle, with some retirees still drawing profit-account distributions after they leave.

HOLIS points to speed and structure more than to newly disclosed financial metrics. The group has grown from 27 businesses at the time of its 2025 ZeroDX nomination to 12 legal entities, 35 businesses, and 107 stores today, with group business value previously reported at more than ¥7 billion and over 500 employees.

The challenge HOLIS names for itself is cultural, not structural. Systems and reporting lines change quickly at new acquisitions, but the habits employees bring from hierarchical previous employers: waiting for manager approval, expecting top-down direction, do not disappear on the day a company joins the group. HOLIS's own account is candid that this has been its hardest and slowest work, requiring patience, coaching, and repeated dialogue rather than a policy change.

It is not any single practice but the willingness to apply the same standard to growth and to failure. A group that will close a ten-month-old business as readily as it opens one, absorb two new companies without ever building a hierarchy for them, and let a junior employee see the same profit-and-loss numbers as its CEO is treating zero distance, zero bureaucracy, and zero idle resources as a standing operating discipline, not a checklist assembled for an award submission.

That confidence is what HOLIS is really scaling. Two acquisitions absorbed without ever building a hierarchy for them, a head-spa closed without blame, and a shared ledger and skills map that put ownership in every employee's hands are not isolated wins, they are evidence of a group that gets faster and more capable each time it takes on something new. HOLIS is candid that the cultural work is unfinished, but that same candor, paired with a demonstrated habit of deciding close to the ground, is what makes this a group built to keep compounding those gains rather than one hoping to repeat a single success. 

Hoxby

The number that defines Hoxby's past year is twenty one. That is how many unemployed people the Workstyle Pioneers programme is placing into six month paid roles designed around their lives rather than around a schedule. It is a small number set against an organisation that has spent a decade arguing that the nine to five is the problem. What makes it serious is the second thing Hoxby built alongside it: a five-year longitudinal study with King's College London, sponsored by the audio firm Jabra, whose first wave ran in May 2026 and drew responses from twenty one countries.

Hoxby began in London in 2015, founded by Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst, as a creative and consulting agency with no offices, no fixed hours and no hierarchy, staffed by a distributed community of professionals who chose when and how they worked. The founders named the idea workstyle and wrote the book on it in 2022. The company has been a certified B Corporation since September 2020, scoring 80.5 against a median of around 51 for businesses that complete the assessment, and it won a Zero Distance Award in 2024.

Hoxby made a structural commitment rather than a statement of intent. In August 2024 it moved the teaching and inclusion work out of the agency and into a separate organisation, Workstyle Revolution, registered as a community interest company at Hoxby's north London address. The legal form is the point. A community interest company cannot pay its surplus out to shareholders, so whatever the training business earns has to stay inside the social mission. That mission is also unusually specific. Instead of talking in general terms about the future of work, the organisation has named the seven groups it exists to serve and published the employment gap it wants to close for each one: 29 per cent for disabled people, 31 per cent for people with mental health conditions, 30.5 per cent for carers, 51 per cent for neurodiverse people, 50 per cent for people with long-term illness, 61 per cent for older workers and 37 per cent for parents. Those figures turn a purpose into a target that someone can check.

The Workstyle Monitor is Workstyle Revolution's own research programme, and the roles in it are worth separating. The organisation set it up, recruits the employers who take part and owns the initiative; King's Business School is the academic partner, where Professor Michael Clinton leads on work psychology; the audio firm Jabra sponsors it. Penny and Hirst front it publicly, as they do everything else. The design is an employee survey repeated over four weeks each May for five years, covering personalised working patterns, autonomy and trust, wellbeing, perceived productivity and experience of inclusion. Employers join free with no cap on how many staff take part, and those with a hundred or more employees receive anonymised benchmarking against the whole dataset in return. The launch for employers was held at King's on 22 April 2026. For an organisation of this size, that is an ambitious commitment: rather than keep making its case in its own words, it has built the evidence base the argument deserves, with a university alongside it and a five year horizon.

The Workstyle Academy teaches personal productivity and leadership, and the balance it asks people to hold is what makes autonomy work in practice: responsibility for your own delivery on one side, reliability towards colleagues on the other. A pioneer placed with an employer is not being granted flexibility as a concession; they are being asked to own an outcome and decide the when and the how themselves. The organisation has also been developing an assessment framework aimed at employers rather than candidates, so a company can find out whether it is ready to work with people trained this way, which inverts the usual arrangement in inclusion programmes.

Partners are core to keep on growing and having an impact in organisations. Alongside Scope, Workstyle Revolution works with Mind on mental health, Autistica on autism and Astriid on chronic illness, four bodies that already hold the trust and the contact with the people the programme is for. Adding King's College London and a corporate sponsor to the research side follows the same logic: rather than construct its own credibility, it plugs into institutions that have it.

Penny and Hirst operate as joint chief executives who are mostly visible as authors, speakers and advocates rather than as an executive layer, and both were listed among HR Magazine's fifty most influential people in HR in 2025. They submitted written evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into the UK labour market, arguing for autonomy over when and where people work in sectors facing staffing crises, and for simpler self-employment legislation. Underneath sits the workstyle community itself, coordinating largely through an open Slack workspace rather than a management structure, and functioning as both the collegial network and the talent pool for Hoxby's client work. Someone can learn the method in the Academy and apply it on a paid assignment through the same network.

What Hoxby has done over the past year is turn a conviction into infrastructure. A decade of proving on itself that people can be trusted to choose when and how they work has become something others can adopt: a training programme with a price attached, twenty one jobs designed around real lives, a legal structure that cannot quietly profit from the mission, and a five year study to find out what actually changes. The gaps the organisation publishes are not marketing. A 61 per cent employment gap for older workers is a description of experience going unused, and a 51 per cent gap for neurodiverse people is talent the labour market keeps declining to organise itself around. The answer being offered is not a campaign or an appeal but a method, and the ambition behind it is modest in the best way: not to convince the world that work is broken, but to show, one placement and one dataset at a time, that it was only ever badly designed, and that design can be changed.

HR-ON

Ali E. Cevik started HR-ON in Odense in 2012, believing that employees who manage themselves are more productive than those who are closely supervised. Instead of traditional bosses, HR-ON uses small, self-organized teams led by coordinators. In 2021, the company made this approach official with an employee manifesto that values trust over control, results over hours, and open dialogue over hierarchy. This philosophy helped HR-ON win the ZeroDX Award in 2025 as a Benchmark Innovator. Today, with about 70 employees, HR-ON is considering whether its trust-based model can keep up with changes in law, company culture, and its impact on the environment.

A key test for HR-ON is its new employment contract, which is simple but marks a big change in labor law. Earlier contracts focused on control, giving the company power over notice periods and holiday planning. The new contracts, introduced in 2026, encourage team discussions: teams now coordinate holidays themselves, and employees only need to inform management about extra time off. Legal rights stay the same, but trust is now central. This contract makes official what teams were already doing, setting their own hours and leave. It also tells employees to turn to their teams instead of a manager, which supports teamwork.

Another step HR-ON is taking is updating its 2021 manifesto. Cevik and his team are working on what he calls "manifesto version two." He admits the first version was very idealistic and maybe a bit naive. The new version is meant to be stronger and more practical, based on three years of learning where self-management faced challenges. The main goal is for the company culture to stand on its own, without needing Cevik’s daily input. Like before, employees are writing the manifesto themselves, not management, so the company’s mission and strategy stay in the hands of those who live it every day.

Trust hasn’t been easy for everyone. Some employees left after the 2021 manifesto, expecting that self-management would bring formal titles. Others departed following acquisitions, as new leaders preferred traditional management despite claiming otherwise. Cevik notes that, while HR-ON receives plenty of external praise, the true challenge is internal, in how its people dive deeper into their progressive way of working.

HR-ON sees this as a sign of leadership accountability. People who stay are responsible to their teams, not to a job title. Cevik has set himself a one-year deadline to make sure the company’s culture can work on its own, so trust continues even if he is not involved.

This way of working also extends outside the company. Since the beginning, HR-ON has kept direct contact with customers. Support requests go straight to the engineer in charge, even as the company has grown into four countries and made two acquisitions.

Another big step for HR-ON this year is its first ESG report, published in early 2026 and following the VSME standard for small and medium businesses. The report uses 2025 as a starting point and is the first time HR-ON has measured itself with hard numbers, just as it asks its customers to do. Revenue was just over 30.9 million Danish kroner, total assets were 41.5 million, all employees finished their annual compliance training, and the staff was 61 percent men and 39 percent women. In a February 2026 survey, 81 percent of employees said their work is interesting and engaging, a bit below the company’s 90 percent goal. 

The lack of dramatic results is on purpose. By sharing these numbers before it is required, HR-ON is being as transparent in its reporting as it is in its contracts, showing what is already true.

The employment contract, HR-ON 2.0 Manifesto, and the ESG report are the three documents that crystalize on paper why trust, accountability and self-management are key pillars in their organisation. The contract puts that trust into legal language. Manifesto 2.0 puts three years of hard lessons into practice. The ESG report puts numbers next to what HR-ON has always claimed about itself. 

Cevik calls the year ahead an exam, the test of whether the culture can run without him in the room. What he is really writing isn't paperwork at all. It's a company that won't need him to keep its own promises and take care of itself via its people.

Indaero

Indaero, a supplier of parts, tools, and components to the aerospace sector, has undergone a fundamental shift since its acquisition by the investment fund Krisos in 2023. The company moved deliberately away from a conventional, manager-led hierarchy, embracing a model where self-organizing teams coordinate through mutual agreement and financial transparency is the norm for all employees. This transition aligns with two RenDanHeYi dimensions at once: zero distance to leaders, where authority is defined by temporary roles rather than permanent ranks, allowing decisions to move without bureaucratic delay; and zero distance to data and tools, where financial and performance information is accessible to anyone who needs it, not filtered from above. By 2025, this new way of working was already taking root. The real test, however, came over the past year, as Indaero faced the combined pressures of tight cash flow, ambitious sales targets, and a major construction project, all at once.

Only a handful of people at Indaero used to understand the company's finances in real depth, and that gap turned into a real liability once cash got tight. Over the past year, closing it became a priority. 

The finance team built a new cash-flow forecasting tool that shows the company's financial position across the whole year rather than a single profit number, and an external advisor with aerospace experience is now working with a small internal team to build performance metrics from scratch, a project still in progress. In steering and general meetings, coordinator Dunia Reverter and other leaders have pushed to review cash scenarios together rather than leaving that job to one person, which is what zero distance to data and tools looks like once it is tested by real pressure rather than treated as a principle. People describe the result less as better information and more as a different relationship to uncertainty. Understanding how a number is calculated turns fear of it into something closer to control, even when, for stretches of the year, the numbers stayed genuinely uncomfortable.

That financial discipline faced a real test, not a hypothetical one. Indaero had bought a factory building in 2025, and 2026 was the year it worked to finish moving in, renovating the site so that production and offices could finally sit under one roof instead of split across separate locations. Choosing to keep building through a year when cash stayed tight was a decision the company made together, with open eyes rather than as a foregone conclusion. 

This is exactly the kind of self-managed risk-taking a company built this way has to be able to own honestly. Consolidating two locations into one also meant that space, logistics, and attention once split across sites could finally serve a single site directly. By early summer the move was largely done. Colleagues held an internal celebration after their first general meeting in the new space, and a fuller public inauguration followed soon after, with factory tours built into the event itself. More than one visitor who hadn't been back in a while said the change was striking. The new space fits the company Indaero is working to become, even though the financial pressure that paid for it hasn't fully let up.

Leadership at Indaero is increasingly built to outlast whoever happens to be holding it, and that shows in how the company handles both routine friction and structural change. The coordinating role, once an informal center of authority, is now written down like every other role: defined by its purpose, not by the person filling it, so responsibility can pass from one colleague to the next without the organization losing its footing. Over time, authority has moved from resting with a single coordinator to being shared across a wider group of representatives and leaders in different areas. That structure gets used, not just designed. 

Moreover, the organization has gotten more comfortable naming its own collective mood, the tension or low energy that shows up before a hard conversation, instead of pretending it isn't there. A new visual board, built around Lean and Kaizen-style methods, is being put together to track day-to-day commitments and catch communication breakdowns early, with its own dedicated lead so the practice does not depend on any one person's memory or attention. When a project lead recently moved on to start a research and development initiative elsewhere in the company, the handover was accepted as a moment to accept that people can travel the transformational journey at different pace. None of that initiative or acceptance made friction disappear. What has changed is what the company does with it: name it, work through it in the open, and keep the handover running rather than let one person's exit stall progress.

Zero distance to colleagues follows the same principle. Where conflict mediation once fell squarely to the coordinating role, it is now a responsibility that others across the organization are willing to take on, often with greater effectiveness than a single point of contact could offer. Teams have begun to self-organize around challenges, acting without waiting for facilitation from above. Recently, a cross-functional group came together on its own initiative to address productivity concerns affecting a few colleagues, explicitly requesting to handle the process themselves rather than be guided by anyone in a higher position. This kind of request only emerges in an environment where speaking openly about problems has become routine. Even when a full resolution is not reached, the willingness to engage in difficult conversations is itself a sign of organizational maturity.

Indaero's growth this year also leaned on relationships built the same collaborative way, inside its corporate group and beyond it, a working version of zero distance to partners. Meeting formats and planning tools have moved sideways between sister companies inside the NER Group self-management network rather than down from a head office: a steering-meeting format came from one, a cash-flow model from another, borrowed in no small part because Indaero genuinely needed the help during a tough year. The company also joined a regional working group of aerospace businesses for the first time, and came away proposing a joint session where smaller suppliers could compare notes on building up their civil aviation business together, rather than each chasing the same narrow slice of defence work alone. 

The clearest sign the model is working, even if the hardest part isn't over, sits in the order book, where zero distance to customers and zero distance to opportunities meet. Indaero secured delegated quality status from Airbus this year, a milestone that opens doors across Airbus's civil aviation business rather than just the defence-linked work the company was built on, a more direct route to a customer that used to require more layers in between. By July, after months of financial pressure, the company was on track for the best sales month in its history, a result that mattered more, not less, set against a year when every decision felt weighted.

Growth also showed up in smaller, more human ways that touch zero distance to results and rewards. A marketing and communications function exists now that didn't exist a year ago, built because the company had outgrown the point where sales could carry its own storytelling. Peer recognition has become a genuine ritual rather than a formality: at one recent all-hands meeting, a colleague who had led much of the renovation work was recognized by the team and, in turn, surprised colleagues with personalized tokens of appreciation of her own, each one specific rather than generic. 

Reward for contribution now travels directly to those who have earned it. None of this has come easily, and Indaero makes no attempt to suggest otherwise. Cash remained tight for much of the year, even as results improved, and the anxiety that comes with financial strain has not disappeared, even after a record sales month. The organization is candid about the fact that overcoming this financial unease is still ongoing work. The salary system, too, has been openly debated in meetings rather than quietly resolved behind closed doors. Performance metrics, developed with the help of an external advisor, are still a work in progress. What has shifted is the underlying instinct: to move beyond emotional reactions, to ground decisions in real numbers and honest sentiment rather than fear, and to trust that clarity, even when uncomfortable, propels people forward more reliably than the illusion of certainty. Not everyone has reached this mindset, but the fact that some have is evidence of real progress.

Three years after the acquisition that started this experiment, there is no single dramatic result, and the story isn't finished. The evidence is a production line that checks its own numbers before finance has to, a factory floor and an office finally under one roof after a year spent choosing, together, to keep building through the pressure, and a company that increasingly manages itself the same way no matter who is holding the reins on any given day. Most of the ways Indaero describes zero distance were tested by real strain this year, not just claimed, and the company is still closing the gap one decision at a time.

Infants' Health Foundation

Maternal and child healthcare is free in Uganda. Getting to it is not. A mother in a remote village of Namayingo District pays between 15,000 and 20,000 shillings for the journey to her nearest health centre, and if she lives on Sigulu Islands she pays a boat fare before she pays for transport on the other side. She may lose two days, one travelling and one recovering, and if she runs a stall or a garden the family eats less that week. For a household living on under a dollar a day, a service that costs nothing can still be out of reach.

Infants' Health Foundation begins from that arithmetic. Rather than asking why families do not come to healthcare, it asks why healthcare does not go to them. Government health workers leave their facilities for the day and hold a clinic in a village school, church, mosque, community hall, market hall, someone's home or under a tree. Mothers and children receive antenatal and postnatal care, immunisation, family planning, HIV testing, treatment for common illnesses, referrals and health information, all of it free, within walking distance. The organisation runs around thirty of these one-day clinics every month, each seeing roughly 480 patients including returning ones. It does this with four full-time staff and more than sixty community volunteers, about eighty per cent of them women and most of them living in the villages where the clinics are held.

The reason it works this way goes back further than the organisation, which was registered in Uganda in 2019. Its founder, Sylivia Kyomuhendo, grew up in Syanyonja, a village where reaching healthcare could mean walking more than fifty kilometres. Her sister Sarah delivered at home, bled heavily afterwards and died. Sarah's newborn daughter, Malaika, was born with spina bifida; her family and neighbours understood the condition as witchcraft and took her to a traditional shrine rather than to a clinic, and she died too. Kyomuhendo's conclusion was that telling a poor rural mother to go to the health facility is not enough when the road is impassable, the fare is unaffordable, there are children at home and nobody has explained which symptoms are dangerous.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what an organisation exists to do and how it decides where to act, shows up here in where the next clinic goes. Holding outreaches near trading centres and along good roads would be cheaper and would let one vehicle reach far more people. IHF has continued to prioritise the opposite: isolated villages, islands, mountainous areas and places beyond roads that turn to mud in the rainy season, where families are typically twenty five kilometres or more from a facility. Reaching fewer people who have almost no access is treated as worth more than reaching larger numbers close to services that already exist. The choice of village is not made in the office either. Community members, local volunteers and mobilisers identify who is being left out and why, and where a clinic should be held.

Customers, in the sense of the people the work exists for, are in most cases the volunteers' own neighbours. That proximity changed the model early on. It is easy to assume that because government services are free, families can use them; mothers explained that the journey, the fares and the lost income made them unaffordable in practice. IHF's response was to stop referring people back towards facilities and instead bring the facilities' staff out, and to stop assuming a clinic requires a clinic building. Scovia, a farmer who uses the outreaches, describes the difference simply: "The health workers always find me here." Nekesa Phionah, who works in a shop, can now "just take a break and go get my medicines" rather than losing a day's trading. Okura Dan, a farmer whose wife attends, used to pay 17,000 shillings for transport and welfare. "Now it can cost us nothing because the services are nearer us."

Partners is where the model gets its leverage, and it rests on a small payment. For each outreach, a government health facility supplies three or four trained health workers and the medicines. IHF pays their transport and an allowance of around eight dollars per health worker. The community supplies the rest: mobilisation, a suitable venue, and the desks, tables, chairs, benches, jerrycans and cups that turn an ordinary room into a clinic for a day. Afterwards the furniture goes back to its owners and the health workers return to their posts until the next visit. Nothing new is built and no parallel health service is created; existing public capacity is moved a few kilometres closer to the people it was funded to serve. Diana, a midwife at Buyinja Health Centre IV, describes what changes and what does not: "We are the same government health workers, providing the same care." Beyond the districts and facilities, IHF's documented relationships include PEPFAR, the Government of Iceland, Namayingo District, Peace Corps, Vitamin Angels Alliance, Echoing Green and The Pollination Project.

Colleagues describes how the work is organised, and on an outreach day it is organised as a temporary team rather than a hierarchy. Village Health Team members and local volunteers mobilise families and flag who has missed care. Government midwives and health workers examine, immunise, test and treat. Community members prepare the venue and lend what is needed. Mobilisers manage the flow of families and the follow-up. Nobody performs the same role and nobody waits for a single organiser. If more mothers arrive than expected, someone finds more chairs. If rain makes the planned location hard to reach, the people standing in it choose a better one.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and what they do with it, is shaped by the size of the organisation. With four core staff and sixty volunteers there are effectively no layers between the founder and the villages, and a mobiliser can raise a problem directly. Leadership's work is building relationships with government, raising resources, coordinating partners and clearing obstacles. Kyomuhendo does not tell a midwife how to conduct an antenatal examination, the midwife does not tell a Village Health Team member which household has a pregnant woman who has missed care, and nobody in the office decides which tree or hall is easiest for mothers in a particular village to reach.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, follows a line the organisation draws deliberately. Clinical judgements belong to qualified health workers: when an outreach finds a woman with a serious pregnancy complication, the midwife assesses and refers without calling anyone for permission. Practical judgements belong to whoever is closest to them. Financial commitments and major organisational decisions stay with management. Coordinating thirty clinics a month across scattered terrain would not survive an approval chain for anything smaller.

Opportunities, meaning how new ideas get found and acted on, has tended to come from the mobilisers rather than the office. They noticed that some pregnant women were still missing clinics even once the distance problem had been solved, because they did not know when the next one was, or heard too late to leave a garden or a business. The local teams moved mobilisation into the networks people already trust, through Village Health Teams, community leaders, churches, gatherings and word of mouth between mothers, so that news of a clinic arrives from a neighbour rather than as an announcement from an organisation.

Data, Tools and Skills is used to decide rather than to report. Outreach teams record which services people actually use, and combine that with surveys and health facility records. A large attendance figure on its own tells IHF little; a pattern of many first antenatal visits and few return visits tells it a great deal, and turns into a question about timing, distance, information or how the service is being delivered. Alongside the numbers sits what a volunteer says about the women on the far side of a village who cannot come because the road floods. The organisation has also trained more than 130 nurses and midwives in safe and respectful care.

Results and Rewards is measured by what happened rather than by what was held. IHF's records show more than 300,000 people reached through community meetings, campaigns and mobile clinics, over 850 women taking up voluntary family planning, more than 250 people who tested HIV-positive referred to antiretroviral treatment, and more than 50,000 cases of pneumonia, malaria and malnutrition treated. A good outreach is not one where 480 people attended but one where a woman who had missed antenatal care is seen, a child with suspected pneumonia is treated, or someone testing positive is connected to treatment. With no bonuses or equity to offer, recognition takes the form of trust and responsibility: a volunteer who mobilises well, follows up the people who need care and holds the confidence of the community becomes someone the team relies on. IHF says it is still working out how to connect individual performance, learning and recognition more formally.

What holds this case together is a decision about who moves. The public system in Uganda already has trained midwives and medicines, and communities already have trusted leaders, volunteers and the everyday furniture of a clinic. What was missing was the connection, and IHF supplies it for the cost of a fare and an eight dollar allowance. As the volunteer Nabwire Esther puts it of the mothers she goes to find, "These are not strangers to us.". Hence their distance is always zero to customer. The organisation's own summary of the principle is that the hardest community to reach should not automatically become the easiest one to leave behind.

Inforyde

In September 2025, Inforyde received the ZeroDX Emergent Excellence Award for a model it had spent four years building: no managers, no HR department, and no barriers between employees and decision-making. The recognition came before the real test. Within months, the Madrid software firm faced its first long period of negative financial results since becoming fully self-managed in 2021. This case looks at how a self-governing company's principles hold up after the award is won and new challenges appear.

The mission stayed strong, partly because it had already been tested before the crisis. In 2025, Inforyde worked with its people to create a formal purpose, taking time to do it carefully. For years, the company had quietly wondered whether to stick to the energy sector or branch out. The purpose process brought this question into the open, and after discussion, the team decided to stay specialized. This year, the company printed these conclusions in a small booklet and gave a copy to everyone at its Assembly in February, along with a list of concrete actions for the four cross-functional teams: Culture, Economy and Salary Bands, Training, and Product. These teams are responsible for making sure the actions happen.

Opportunities came from the teams themselves, even when the company had little good news. With production down, the client-satisfaction and sales teams took the initiative. They suggested and launched a series of video testimonials for LinkedIn and YouTube to attract new business, asking colleagues to volunteer. It was a small step, and Inforyde doesn't exaggerate its impact, but it's the kind of action that often gets blocked in traditional hierarchies when money is tight.

The company stayed close to its customers because it always has. Client teams run their own meetings, choose who should join each call, and talk directly with users. There is also an internal Teams channel called “Compartamos” (‘Let’s Share’) that shares positive client feedback with everyone in the company.

Leadership continued to be shared among the group instead of being held at the top. Years ago, the project-manager role, which once had a lot of authority, became a shared team responsibility. Inforyde has never had a senior executive layer, just a coordination team that works with everyone and considers all input before making decisions. Ana Pérez, who has led the structure since the transformation, admits that finding the right balance is still a work in progress. Leaders can sometimes take over or stay too quiet, and the company is still learning how to find the middle ground.

The network among colleagues stayed strong even without a chain of command. Teams bring important issues to the Steering meeting or the Assembly, depending on how much they affect the company. Two years ago, the company created four cross-functional teams so more people would focus on the common good, not just their own area. According to Pérez, the sense of belonging is now stronger than it was before the transformation.

Inforyde kept its data transparent, even when the numbers were bad, which is the harder part of being open. Every number is public, including team minutes, project margins, client rates, and individual pay levels. The company also makes sure this information is easy to understand. This year, two new colleagues joined and soon attended an Assembly where the negative results were shared openly. Pérez calls this maturity: showing the truth from the start is a bet that honesty, not just good news, builds trust. People continued to join, and those already there stayed.

The company treats its partners as part of the same trust, not as a separate area. This year, the Sustainability team joined the UN Global Compact, and the Client Satisfaction team worked with two larger firms to bid for a contract that none could win alone. Pérez says this partnership is designed to benefit everyone equally, not just those who contribute more.

Action is where the model sometimes slows down, and Inforyde is open about it. Decisions that affect only one or two teams move quickly and stay with those closest to the issue, like vacations, training, hardware, or promotions. Decisions that affect the whole company must go through the Steering Meeting and then the Assembly, needing 80 percent support, which can slow things down. This year, for example, the national cost-of-living index used for client billing rose more slowly than the Madrid index used for salaries, creating a gap of about 0.8 points that could have hurt margins. Instead of making a top-down decision, the company split the difference for this year and asked the Economy and Salary Bands team to review fifteen years of history and suggest a long-term rule. This slower process lets everyone help set the rule.

The real test this year was in results and rewards. Inforyde shares 30 percent of its profit with everyone, paid in two parts: 80 percent in December and the rest in March. In December, profits were too low for a payout, so Pilotaje suggested skipping the December payment and waiting for the full year's results. The proposal went to an Assembly vote; not everyone agreed, but it passed with over 80 percent support. The year ended better than expected, so the March payment went ahead. As Ana Pérez said, describing what the model asks of people, “it's not a change in your job. It's a change in your life.

Inforyde does not claim a dramatic transformation this year. Pérez says the company mostly strengthened habits it already had instead of finding new ones. But deepening a self-managed model during its first real financial challenge in five years, after winning recognition, is a sign of its strength. It shows the award reflected something lasting, not just a good year that was about to end.

Innovation Hub 110

Innovation Hub 110 would rather not tell you what it builds. The products are confidential, and in any case the Hub does not think they are the interesting part. What it offers instead is an account of how roughly 250 people work differently inside a police force of some 23,000, and the claim that an organisation can run a zone with its own rules inside itself without either zone destroying the other.

One detail carries more of that than any technology would. German has a formal and an informal way of addressing another person, and in a rank-based organisation the choice normally follows rank. Inside the Hub everyone is on first-name terms, at every level. To a reader outside Germany that may look like a nicety. In a police force it is among the clearest available signals that the rules in this room are not the rules outside it.

The Hub is the innovation unit of the Hessian Police, opened on 13 August 2020 with about 1,000 square metres of space and now occupying roughly 4,000 across several floors in Frankfurt, with a second site in Wiesbaden. By April 2022 it was running eleven teams serving all eleven of the state's police administrations. In September 2023 the force's own information technology department merged into it, putting technologists and officers under one roof and one rhythm rather than leaving two departments to coordinate by handover. In January 2024 its remit widened again. Its mandate is to create services for police officers and administrative staff. Its actual work, in its own description, is running an organisation whose operating logic differs from the one it sits inside.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what an organisation exists to do and how it settles where to go, begins from a friction the Hub states rather than hides. A police force is built for reliability, accountability and control, and those are not defects to be engineered away; they are the preconditions of public safety. Innovation runs on a different logic, requiring experimentation, transparency, distributed decisions and permission to question established practice. The Hub's founding premise is that the answer is not to replace one logic with the other but to hold both. It frames the underlying task as the pairing every organisation faces, doing today's work well while working out what tomorrow requires, and argues that for a security agency the second half has become urgent, because technology, society and crime are changing faster than conventional structures adapt.

Direction still comes from above, and the Hub is explicit that it should because of the context they are working in. Strategic guidance flows from the state police leadership and the state's digitalisation strategy, and the Hub's leadership extracts from it the direction teams aim at before any planning starts. The principle is stated in one line: innovation has to be mandated from the top but executed from the bottom.

Action is where that principle is given a machine to run on. Three years ago the Hub decided that objectives and key results would stop being a planning methodology used by some teams and become the operating system through which all teams work together. A quarter now follows a set rhythm. It opens with the strategy update. Then comes review and retrospective, run at two levels, once across the organisation with all team leads and once inside each team, with the learning from both feeding the next round of planning. Leadership and team leads then define the company set together, each team bringing at most two key results for each strategic priority. Teams build their own boards from the strategic update, the company results they are guiding, and what they themselves want to achieve. A cross-functional alignment week follows, in which teams re-point their drafts at the final company set and negotiate every cross-team commitment to a close. The quarterly workshop, in other words, is a negotiation between strategic direction and operational reality rather than a cascade of instructions.

Colleagues explains why those negotiations are worth having. The Hub's teams deliberately mix serving police officers with external professionals, among them developers, project managers and innovation specialists. Officers bring operational reality, hard experience and credibility inside the force. The outsiders bring methods and perspectives the public sector does not generate on its own. The Hub describes what results as a productive tension between the existing system and the new ways of working it is trying to establish, and treats that tension as the point rather than a problem to be smoothed. When teams depend on one another they settle it directly instead of escalating through the hierarchy, so lateral coordination sits alongside rank rather than replacing it.

Data, Tools and Skills is where the Hub takes on the hardest of its three deliberate frictions. A police organisation needs controlled information flows, and confidentiality is often essential. Innovation needs people to see what others are working on. All eighteen team boards inside the Hub are therefore transparently accessible to everybody, relevant stakeholders included, and every quarter each team states publicly what outcomes it is chasing, what its priorities are and how it will measure progress. The Hub is clear that the difficulty here is not the method. People who have spent careers in an environment where discretion is a professional virtue are being asked to make their priorities, dependencies and progress visible to all. Transparency, as it puts it, is not a technical feature of the system but a change in behaviour.

Leaders are correspondingly narrow in what they decide. Monthly open office hours are run explicitly as coaching and explicitly not as control or reporting. Every two to four weeks each team meets Hub leadership to walk its board, talk through confidence levels on each key result, flag where support is needed and surface what is going well. The Hub is candid about where authority sits: the head of the Hub follows the recommendations of the team that runs the system most of the time, and the authority over what a team commits to stays with the team.

That system is owned by three people, part of the Hub's Innovation Academy. They design the formats, run the workshops and coach the teams, and they do not decide content. Their own account of the work is the most useful sentence in the Hub's self-description: half the craft is textbook method, and the other half is the emotional work of asking people to give up a way of working they were rewarded for. They revise the method every quarter on what the last one taught them, deliberately in small increments, because this is an organisation that absorbs change better in small steps than in leaps.

Opportunities depend on the third friction, which is the right to be wrong. In policing, mistakes can carry consequences for citizens and officers alike, so precision and accountability are part of the job rather than bureaucratic drag. That same logic obstructs the work when the task is to find something that does not yet exist. Inside the Hub teams are expected to aim at outcomes ambitious enough to contain real uncertainty. Progress is reviewed during the quarter, and at the end of it teams are assessed on what they learned as well as what they achieved. The retrospective asks four questions: what did we achieve, what did we learn, how did we work, and what should we change next time. Changing direction is therefore not read automatically as failure. The aim is not to remove accountability but to make responsible experimentation possible.

Customers are in the building. The Hub exists to serve police officers and administrative staff, and it staffs its teams so that the people who will use what is built are inside the team building it, rather than consulted at the end through a requirements document.

Partners, in an organisation of this kind, means the force itself. The Hub was designed to sit alongside the conventional administrations rather than inside them, keeping two operating logics running in parallel so that the Hub's pace is protected from the slower cadence of a command structure while remaining answerable to it. The 2023 absorption of the police information technology department shows the traffic running the other way as well, with a conventional department moving into the agile network rather than the network being absorbed into the line.

Results and Rewards is measured by the Hub in changes of behaviour rather than in delivery counts. Police officers are trained with a deep instinct for tasks and activity lists, and the shift from asking what will you do to asking what will be different in three months is slow, individual work. Self-organisation cannot be ordered, so the Hub educates towards it, working from the assumption that people can define what they want to achieve in a quarter and then pursue it. Closed offices became open space, which for colleagues accustomed to a door was a transformation in itself. Formal address became first names. And the change the Hub says it would most like to be judged on is that people who would once have said nothing now speak, and expect it to count.

The Hub is honest that liking the idea of innovation and keeping your old methods are entirely compatible, and that the gap between the two is where most of its work happens. Transparency and focus draw the most resistance, and not because they are misunderstood. They are resisted because they are understood exactly. What the Hub is attempting is deliberately narrower than reforming a police force and considerably harder than running a lab: to keep a zone of different rules alive inside an organisation built for control but bold enough to innovate with transparency, zero distance to their customer and a leadership built from an open space.

Ivy Global

Ivy Global operates through self-managing teams spread across Delft, Amsterdam and Eindhoven, linking young engineering talent directly with industry projects. In the summer of 2022, the company made a decisive shift by removing its director role and has since functioned without formal managers, entrusting small teams to take full responsibility for sales, recruitment, operations and finances.

A year ago, the most significant gap in Ivy Global’s self-management model was financial: while teams could chart their own course and manage their own costs, there was no formal mechanism for sharing in the company’s success. That changed in 2026, when Ivy introduced quarterly profit sharing for the first time. Now, 20 percent of profit is directed to an innovation fund, another 20 percent to employees, 10 percent to shareholders, 20 percent reserved for corporate tax, and the remaining 30 percent reinvested to fuel growth. Of the portion allocated to employees, three quarters is distributed as share certificates rather than cash, so people build a genuine ownership stake that grows alongside the company, rather than simply receiving a one-off bonus. This is the results and rewards dimension made tangible: compensation that is truly at risk and directly linked to performance, with non-executive employees now holding a real financial interest in Ivy’s future.

Within the company, Ivy Global has restructured how people are organized and supported over the past year. The homegrown pay model has been replaced by the Baarda model, an external, behavior-based approach to setting salaries. Alongside this, a three-phase process for addressing underperformance now ensures that when a colleague begins to struggle, they move explicitly into phase one, prompting the team to actively support their recovery, rather than waiting until issues have lingered unaddressed.

Every person at Ivy has now completed a Talent Motivation Analysis, and many teams have undertaken the exercise collectively, using the insights to shape individual growth paths and to map out where each team’s strengths and blind spots lie. The most visible structural outcome of this focus is the regional split: where 40 permanent staff were once grouped into three regional teams in Amsterdam, Delft and Eindhoven, they are now organized into six smaller teams (three in Delft, two in Amsterdam and one in Eindhoven) because teams that outgrow their size are divided rather than allowed to sprawl. To maintain consistency as the organization expands, Ivy established a network of Guardians, each embedded within a team, responsible for ensuring that shared practices like decision making and retrospectives remain aligned across the company, making movement between teams seamless.

When it comes to opportunities, Ivy Global notes that the right to act on an idea was always present, though informally. Making this right explicit, however, has changed how often people take initiative. Now, anyone with an idea can form a strategic intention team (up to two people plus an experienced sponsor) without needing prior approval, supported by an innovation fund that receives 20 percent of profit, currently around 400,000 euros. The company points out that neither the freedom to start nor the funding itself is new in principle, but by naming both and attaching a concrete figure to the fund, people have become far more likely to seize these opportunities.

That same instinct for action shapes how spending decisions are made. Any individual can commit up to 5,000 euros independently; requests between 5,000 and 25,000 euros require only a cash flow check, with no questions asked about rationale. For amounts up to 100,000 euros, the finance team provides input on alternatives considered, while anything above that is reviewed by the Ivy Circle for strategic alignment. At no point does anyone have the authority to simply veto a decision and end the discussion; instead, the process is designed to prompt better questions. The person initiating a purchase remains fully accountable at every stage, ensuring that the authority to decide is matched by responsibility for the risk.

Taken together, the changes introduced this year reach across four of Ivy Global’s Zero Distance dimensions at once: results and rewards are realized through quarterly profit sharing; opportunities are unlocked by a clear, funded path from idea to action; action is enabled by a spending system that keeps decision rights close to the edge; and colleagues are supported through smaller teams and a Guardian network that maintains shared practice as the company grows. What remained an open question a year ago, how self-managed teams would ultimately share in the company’s financial success, now has a clear and tangible answer.

JetBrains

In December 2025 JetBrains stopped distributing Fleet, an editor it had spent years building. The announcement was unusually plain about why. The company had been unable to make Fleet a replacement for its flagship IntelliJ IDEA, and equally unable to narrow it into a distinct niche, and another artificial intelligence editor in a market already full of them would not have stood out. What the announcement then said about the people is the part worth noticing: the technology, the team and the long-term direction all continued, while the product identity and the target market changed. Five months later that same platform reappeared as Air, an agentic development environment.

This is a company that closes products without dispersing the people who built them. It had done the same in 2024 with Space, its collaboration platform, and again that November with SpaceCode.

JetBrains was founded in Prague in February 2000 by three developers, Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipyatkov and Eugene Belyaev, and its first product was a Java refactoring tool called IntelliJ Renamer. It has never raised outside capital. It now employs more than 2,600 people across thirteen offices, has more than 12.5 million recurring active users, counts 88 of the Fortune Global 100 among its customers, and created the Kotlin programming language. Revenue grew by 25.69 per cent in 2025, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa both the fastest growing region and the largest contributor at 464.1 million dollars.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what a company exists to do and how it decides where to go, is shaped by who owns it. JetBrains says its private ownership is the reason it can pursue real value rather than short-term profit, and that it is guided by a long-term commitment to the developers who rely on it rather than by market pressure. The practical expression of that is a willingness to take years over a thing. Kotlin was begun in 2010 to solve a problem the company had itself, since IntelliJ IDEA was written in Java and rewriting a decade-old codebase was not an option. It was opened under an Apache licence in 2012, adopted by Google as a first-class Android language in 2017, and made Google's preferred Android language in 2019. By 2023 Google reported that more than 95 per cent of the top thousand Android applications used it.

Opportunities, meaning where new work comes from, follows the same pattern. JetBrains has described its tools as generally born of its own need, Kotlin included, and the mechanism that produces them is daily use. Engineers, designers, product managers and technical writers all work in IntelliJ IDEA and track their projects in YouTrack, the company's own issue tracker. Problems found this way are often fixed the same day or the same hour rather than waiting for a customer to report them. The Rider team ran unstable builds daily and fixed the crashes they hit. Junie, the company's coding agent, was in internal use from December 2024, entered closed preview in January 2025 and became generally available that April, by which point the internal users had already been living with it for months.

Customers have twice changed a decision the company had already announced. In September 2015 JetBrains announced a subscription-only licensing model and met immediate resistance from developers. Three days later the chief executive, Maxim Shafirov, published an open letter reversing key terms and saying the company "had failed to properly account for all considerable groups of our customers." The remedy was concrete: an annual subscription would immediately confer a perpetual licence for the version current at the time of purchase, with continuity discounts of twenty per cent after a year and forty per cent after two. The same posture is visible in the ordinary machinery. Anyone can file into the public issue tracker. Early Access Programs put pre-release builds of every product in front of users. When the unified IntelliJ IDEA distribution was announced in July 2025, the announcement carried an open invitation to comment and a dedicated feedback address, and the version that shipped that December included more capability free of charge than the old Community Edition had. JetBrains also runs an annual Developer Ecosystem Survey, which drew 23,262 developers in its 2024 edition.

Leaders is thinner here than in a conventional software company of this size, though not absent, and JetBrains does not claim otherwise. There are team leads, hiring managers, department heads and a senior executive team. What the company says is that decisions are made by the people who know the work, that job titles matter less than craft, and that anyone can lead from where they sit. Its current chief executive is evidence of how far that can carry someone. Kirill Skrygan joined in 2010 as a junior developer, led the Rider team for about ten years, then ran the integrated development environment departments covering roughly 650 people, and became chief executive on 1 February 2024. He describes JetBrains as "the place for people who see something broken and just fix it." Authority also has to be earned rather than exercised: in 2018 the company's human resources lead, Natalia Chisler, described managers as expected to sell their ideas to their teammates rather than pass them down, and said that persuading colleagues an idea is worth doing usually means being the one who then leads the work.

Colleagues are organised into small teams by design, on the reasoning that a person's contribution stays visible. The team, rather than a central function, does the choosing. The engineering hiring process runs through a recruiter screen, an interview with one to three team members and the hiring manager including a live technical exercise, a take-home task, a discussion of the trade-offs the candidate made, and three references, before an offer. New arrivals are given two named people rather than a document: a Team Partner who coordinates their entry into the team, and a Buddy for everything informal. Probation criteria are set jointly by the new joiner and their manager, with the stated intention that nothing at the end of it comes as a surprise.

Data, Tools and Skills is where a notable absence sits. In 2018 Chisler was direct about the company doing without key performance indicators, saying it used "common sense rather than KPIs!" What it had in their place were work cycles in which people either chose the tasks they wanted or were assigned them by a team lead, with feedback at the end. Teams also select their own methods and tooling; some run strict Scrum, others take pieces of it. Because everyone works inside the company's own products, the instrumentation of the business and the product being sold are the same thing, and internal project status across the organisation is tracked in YouTrack.

Partners, for a company that sells tools rather than services, means the platforms its work rides on. The most consequential of these is Google, whose adoption of Kotlin for Android took a JetBrains language and made it the default of an entire mobile ecosystem. The pattern is being repeated deliberately. JetBrains Central, announced in March 2026, is presented as an open system for agentic software development, entering early access with a limited group of design partners rather than as a finished product. Hadi Hariri, now senior vice president of operations, and Oleg Koverznev, who leads the agentic platform, are the people attached to it publicly.

Action is visible in what the company is willing to stop. Space was closed to new subscriptions in May 2024 with the reason given plainly, that adoption had not been what the company hoped and that the integrations being requested did not fit its view of the product. AppCode was discontinued in 2022, Code With Me is being retired with the relay shutting down in early 2027, and Fleet ended in December 2025. In each case the decision was published with its reasoning attached rather than allowed to fade. Against that, the same period produced Mellum, the company's own code completion model released free in 2025, the open-source agentic framework Koog, the no-code builder Kineto previewed in August 2025, and Air in May 2026.

Results and Rewards, at the level of the business, is a long compound rather than a spike: twenty six years of operation without outside investment, more than 12.5 million recurring active users, around 3.2 million paying customers as of 2024, 88 of the Fortune Global 100, and revenue growth of just over a quarter in 2025. At the level of the individual, advancement does not require becoming a manager. Skrygan's own route from junior developer to chief executive ran through fourteen years of building products, and his account of the transition is that being a manager is not like writing code and requires being empathetic and working with people. On mass redundancy as a response to the artificial intelligence transition, his stated position is that he does not believe in it.

What makes JetBrains worth studying is the length of its memory. The company has spent a quarter of a century selling tools to people who can tell immediately whether the person who built them writes code, and it has protected that by making its own staff the first users of everything it ships. It has killed four products in four years and carried the teams forward each time. Fleet did not survive as a product but the people who built it are building Air with feet on the ground and strong commitment.

JiuDuoRouDuo

JiuDuoRouDuo employs between four and five thousand people. Around a hundred of them work at head office. Everyone else stands in a store, a factory or a delivery vehicle, which means the company's shape had already placed almost its entire workforce within arm's reach of a customer. What had not moved out with them was the authority to decide anything. Stores waited for instructions from headquarters, because for nearly three decades headquarters had always supplied them.

The company was founded in 1997 by Yang Shufeng and his wife, who built it from nothing in Henan province, and it is approaching its thirtieth year. It sells braised and marinated cooked meat, the kind bought by weight at a counter and carried home for the evening meal, and its signature braised pork-head delicacy has been a bestseller for twenty-eight years and leads the national market. Behind that sits a central factory on thirty-three acres at Yuanyang in Henan with its own sixty-thousand-tonne cold store, daily nationwide delivery built on central China's transport position, and a network of more than two thousand stores plus over a thousand retail channel outlets reaching twenty-eight provincial-level regions. The mission is stated without decoration: to let everyone enjoy delicious food of high quality at truly affordable prices.

Mission and strategy, meaning what a company is for and how it settles where to go, is where the second generation set the terms. Jiajia inherited something genuinely unusual for a Chinese retail chain of this size: few rules, high trust, a family atmosphere, and people who were loyal, engaged and proud to work there. The same culture had produced its own constraints. Stores had learned to wait rather than judge. Middle managers had settled into acting as inspectors and controllers rather than coaches and supporters. Decisions leaned on experience and intuition rather than on customer insight and data. As competition intensified across a braised-food category where several of the largest listed chains have been closing stores by the thousand, the model that had carried nearly thirty years of growth stopped being sufficient on its own.

The response was deliberately not a demolition. The stated task was to help the existing culture evolve, so that stores think like business owners, managers become coaches rather than controllers, and the company moves from working by feel to putting the customer at the centre and letting data and experiments settle arguments. Jiajia leads the transformation personally, alongside international consulting partners, on a single governing principle: never force change from the top down, but invite the management team to co-create it. The leader sets direction and the team walks the path.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, followed a deliberate sequence. Eight online coaching sessions came first, in which the management team systematically mapped the company's real strengths and bottlenecks and was introduced to Clientocracy and decentralised management, building a shared picture before anything was designed. A one-day workshop then turned that picture into commitments. The team mapped concrete customer profiles, needs and pain points, and reached genuine consensus for the first time on who the customer actually is. It translated customer value into specific promises. And it defined each role's responsibilities by working backwards from the customer rather than downwards from the organisation chart.

That last exercise exposed the structural mismatch the whole redesign turns on. Store teams were already making promises to customers, every day, across the counter, in the ordinary course of selling. The middle managers above them had been positioned to police whether those promises were kept rather than to help keep them. Nobody had designed it that way; it was what three decades of growth had left behind, and it became visible only when the leadership stopped describing the chart and started describing what the company owes the person buying dinner.

Customers had to be defined precisely for any of it to work. The teams moved from a vague sense of "our buyers" to concrete profiles with real needs, which is the practical lever rather than a philosophical one: a team that knows exactly who it serves can decide for itself what to do, while a team working from a blurred picture has no option but to ask. JiuDuoRouDuo's customer is a household deciding what to put on the table tonight, not a passer-by making an impulse purchase, and that is a customer a store team can learn to read.

Data, tools and skills are what make the reading possible. Store teams were taught to read the revenue, costs and profit of their own store, on the straightforward logic that a team which cannot see its own economics cannot responsibly be handed a decision, because it has nothing to decide against. They also studied HADI, a cycle of hypothesis, action, data and insight, which gives a good idea a route into reality without requiring an approval first. Since the workshop the practices of the best stores have been turned into standards everyone can use, and the company has opened access to digital and AI tools to all employees as infrastructure rather than as a pilot.

Leaders changed function accordingly. Headquarters is shifting from controlling the front line to serving it, and the front line has gained more authority to make decisions on the spot. For middle managers this is a substantial change, because it replaces the thing their role was measured on, checking compliance, with something harder to score, enabling delivery.

Colleagues turned out to be less of an obstacle than expected. One of the clearest outcomes was that store teams recognised authority they already possessed and became willing to use it. The constraint had never really been permission; it was that the boundary had never been stated aloud, so asking was the safe default and the safe default had hardened into habit. What makes that plausible at JiuDuoRouDuo is that the company has a long record of letting young people carry real weight. A young team built the supermarket channel to 600 million yuan in annual revenue. A two-person team took the business-to-business custom channel past 100 million yuan in a single year. Headquarters and regional management positions are open to competition across the whole company, and among today's regional leaders are former frontline store staff, a driver from the logistics team, and store development specialists. A graduate trainee store-manager programme is now being piloted.

Partners are worth naming because the route the thinking travelled is an unlikely one. The transformation is supported by Corporate Rebels, by Bold2Move, and by Beyond Taylor, who introduced the company to Clientocracy. Clientocracy is a customer-centred management structure that grew out of retail, in which people work for an external customer or an internal client rather than for a boss or for rules handed down from above, and its principles are trust in place of hierarchy, autonomy paired with responsibility, and experiments in preference to long-range plans. A Chinese family meat business adopting a structure developed in a Russian grocery chain sounds improbable until the shared problem is stated plainly: a store network that waits on the centre looks the same in either country.

Results and rewards are at an early stage and the company says so directly. What has changed so far has changed where it matters most, in the thinking of the people closest to the customer. Frontline colleagues used to concentrate on hitting targets, following instructions and avoiding mistakes. They have started instead to ask what this particular customer needs, what matters to her, and whether her dinner table can be made a little better today. Jiajia's own account of the shift is that her frontline people are learning "to ask, to listen, and to understand what really matters" to the people walking into the stores. A second effect has arrived from outside: when the company made its transformation direction and its values public, job applications began arriving from strong candidates across the country, drawn by what the company believes rather than by salary and brand alone.

What JiuDuoRouDuo has not done is import somebody else's operating system. The eight sessions and the workshop were spent identifying strengths the company already had, few rules, high trust, people who are proud of the place, and building a new way of working on top of them. Most transformation stories open with a broken culture and set out to replace it. This one opens with a culture that works and the intention not to spoil it. The company is not moving from control to trust, because the trust was never absent. It is adding the two things the trust never came with: authority that is stated rather than assumed, and numbers a store can actually see. In a category where the largest chains have been shutting stores in their thousands, being able to make that call at the counter rather than at headquarters is not a soft benefit. The direction is set, and the path is under their feet.

Kidzink

In 2017 Charlotte and Paolo Borghesi purchased the nursery that their children went to, and with it they acquired a furniture trading licence which neither of them had requested or known how to deal with. Since Charlotte had twenty years' experience in multinational consumer goods and the couple as a whole had no background in education, architecture or manufacturing, they kept the licence, employed one person and started making school furniture. That first employee is still with the company today. Eight years on, the business now employs more than four hundred people in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Singapore and India, carrying out projects in over twenty countries. The company has never accepted outside investment.

Kidzink is in charge of designing and manufacturing learning environments, and the architectural firm Koda, which was set up at the same time and consists of about sixty architects, educators, engineers and project managers, designs the schools in which these environments are located. Together, they deal with a school from the master plan all the way through to the interior, down to the chair that a six-year-old child sits in, and the furniture is made in the company's own 20,000 square metre facility, which has prototyping labs and 3D printing facilities on site. The business is owned and managed by members of the family: about one in six of the staff are relatives, including some of the seven children of the founders, who among them have attended over twenty schools in different parts of the world.

The way a business defines its mission and strategy, that is to say, what it exists for and the way it decides where to go next, can be seen by simply walking into most schools. As Paolo Borghesi says, "Children still learn in schools that are very similar to those of their grandparents." In response to this, Kidzink has pursued a steady progression up the hierarchy rather than trying to hold on to a particular niche. It began with furniture, moved on to interiors, then to architecture through its company Koda, and more recently has turned its attention to the research underpinning all of this. Since the strategy is self-funded, the rate of growth is determined by the amount the business earns rather than by what investors desire. It has grown at a rate of about forty per cent a year nevertheless.

Opportunities frequently came at inconvenient times and were accepted all the same. The company's first complete order from a school, amounting to six million dirhams in 2019, was obtained from Qatar while there was a regional diplomatic blockade. A special partnership with the British company Ocee Design enabled access to universities, offices and hospitality businesses as well as schools. Work was secured in Saudi Arabia through NEOM. The offices in Singapore and India came next. The Harrow International School Abu Dhabi, a seventy thousand square metre campus for eighteen hundred students located on Saadiyat Island and opening in 2026, resulted from a partnership with Harrow International Schools and the Abu Dhabi Investment Office.

The level of engagement an organisation has with the people it serves is the area in which the company goes beyond what most design firms merely claim. Prior to designing a school, Kidzink holds workshops with the students, teachers and families who will be using it. These workshops include engagement surveys, hands-on activities and prototyping, addressing all aspects such as the arrangement of classrooms, the provision of custom furniture and the way technology will be used. The firm provides accredited professional development for the educators it works with in order that the relationship lasts beyond the handover. It also looks to young people outside of its client group: a global initiative involving the 29th sailing class organised design workshops and a forward-looking competition for more than eight hundred young sailors. The input from these young people was incorporated into the company's research.

The aspect that Kidzink has most clearly invested in is Data, Tools and Skills, which refers to the information and abilities that people need in order to make good decisions. The company has come up with something unusual: in collaboration with Ana Mombiedro, a neuroarchitect who teaches at the University of Alicante and heads up applied research at the firm, it has developed the Enriched Environment Model. This design approach is based on more than a hundred scientific studies, the analysis of a thousand learning environments, and consultations with two hundred educators from around the world. It takes into account the cognitive, emotional, sensory and social needs of the people who will be using the buildings. The model was shown to the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in California and published as Beyond the Box, a 312-page illustrated book co-written by Mombiedro and Charlotte Borghesi. It was first made available to the schools with which the firm works as well as to a broader audience in 2026. It can be used as a quick reference checklist or as the core of a full planning process and is intentionally written for architects who are not employed by Kidzink.

As for who has the authority and the way in which it is exercised, the answer lies in subtraction. There is no hierarchy in the ordinary sense, no key performance indicators and no formal performance appraisals. Decisions are left to the person who is close enough to the problem to be able to solve it. Charlotte Borghesi places a greater value on critical thinking than on micromanagement. The basic idea is that a team given a problem together with its context will come up with a better solution than a manager would if he or she looked at it later on. In place of the review process there is frequency: instead of having a scheduled decision once every two years, there is quick feedback and daily conversation.

Colleagues, covering how people are grown and treated, follows from that and is the company's boldest bet. Kidzink hires for mindset rather than credentials, taking on fresh graduates and building around their strengths. The reasoning is that attitude and adaptability are harder to teach than technique. Integrity, innovation and generosity are the traits it screens for. The result is a voluntary retention rate above ninety-nine per cent across eight years. For a fast-growing design and manufacturing business, this is the more striking half of the story. Staff call themselves Kidzinkers, run structured internship programmes, and have a dedicated learning and development lead brought in from Emirates.

Action, meaning how a decision actually becomes work, is where vertical integration earns its keep. Because master planning, interior design, furniture design and manufacturing all sit inside the same company, an idea raised in a workshop with a class of ten-year-olds can be drawn, prototyped in the firm's own lab, tested and put into production without leaving the building or crossing a contractual boundary. Project values run from fifty thousand dirhams to over thirty million, and the same route serves both.

Partners is a short list held closely rather than a long one held loosely. Taaleem is the clearest example, a school operator that has come back repeatedly: Dubai British School Jumeira, the Mangrove Café, and work at Harrow Abu Dhabi. Ocee Design supplies the manufacturing partnership; the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and Harrow International Schools the Saadiyat campus; the 29er class the youth research. The academic connection runs through Mombiedro's university post rather than through an institutional agreement. Fast Company Middle East named the company the most innovative in education in 2023, and Charlotte Borghesi appears in Design Middle East's Creative 30. Underneath the trophies, the number the founders return to is that the firm's work has reached close to half a million children.

Kidzink began with a licence nobody wanted, in a category where firms compete on price and delivery dates, and it has spent eight years insisting on something quieter and harder: that the room a child sits in is never neutral. It shapes what they notice, what they attempt, and what they remember. Close to half a million children have now spent their days inside spaces this company designed. And the argument no longer rests on taste. It rests on evidence gathered over years and then set down in print for any architect to pick up, including the ones bidding against them for the next school. That is a strange thing for a furniture business to do, and a serious one, because schools are among the most conservative buildings we put up, and no single firm changes them by winning work. Built in the UAE, without investors, by a family whose own seven children have sat in more than twenty schools between them and know exactly how much the room matters. The ambition now is simply stated and very large: to make the next generation of classrooms worth the childhoods spent inside them.

Kimua 

After Kimua’s engineers built a test bench that could certify lifting tools up to 5,100 tons, which was the largest of its kind at the time, they named it Basajaun, inspired by a protective giant from Basque mythology called the Lord of the Forest. This name wasn’t just for show. The decision to build Basajaun didn’t come from a strategy department or a single executive. Instead, the whole team made the call during a year when Kimua invited everyone to join its annual planning process, which led to tripling production. The bench itself is an engineering achievement, but what stands out even more is what it represents: a company that has spent five years sharing the power to make big decisions and is still learning how far that trust can go.

Designing, manufacturing, testing, and assembling solutions for complex load-handling problems is Kimua’s specialty. This is the kind of engineering work where mistakes are costly and trust is earned project by project. Since 2021, the company has been on a deliberate journey toward self-management, driven by a specific worry: that a handful of individuals, however capable, might unintentionally become the ceiling for everyone else’s growth. The goal was continuity that didn’t depend on any one person, a company sustained by shared knowledge and shared responsibility rather than by whoever happened to be in charge.

Previously, the company’s mission and strategy were mostly set by the finance team, using a few financial indicators and the CEO’s judgment. Things changed when the company decided to involve the whole team in creating the annual production forecast, instead of just passing down a target. Everyone discussed what the company could really achieve and how ambitious they wanted to be. That year, production tripled, not because Kimua was struggling (it has always been profitable and shared profits with employees), but because including everyone in planning sparked new ambition that a small group hadn’t considered before.

In 2026, the company made its mission clear by running a process led by an outside facilitator. Founding members and then the whole team took part, and together they created a shared purpose statement: “With people and teamwork as our driving force, we innovate for collective well-being.”

This purpose is evident in how the company approaches opportunity and innovation. The company brings these ideas together under the term KIMUALITY, which combines four pillars: people, technology and innovation, customers, and quality through continuous improvement. Basajaun is the best example of this. Instead of a standard capital request, the bench came from a shared discussion about market trends and what the team could build together. Kimua calls this collective courage, which is the belief that people take bigger risks together than they would on their own.

Customers are truly at the center of the company. This is shown in a wheel-shaped chart where every team is organized around the client. Because Kimua controls design, manufacturing, testing, and final assembly, it can respond to customer needs directly, without decisions getting stuck in extra layers of approval.

This close relationship with customers is also reflected in how the company leads. Before 2021, the company had only a few management layers, mostly because it was smaller. Now, there are six layers instead of three, which might sound like more hierarchy, but in reality, it means more specialization and capacity. Kimua has done this without going back to a strict top-down approach.

A previous management team of about eight people has been replaced by a steering team of twelve. These team leaders are elected by their own teams, and their roles change over time. In a unanimous vote, the company decided to stop using the word “bosses” and instead use “leaders.” The CEO now acts as a coordinator. At Kimua, leading means supporting and representing a team, not being above it.

Sharing authority changes how people organize their daily work. The company works more like a network than a set of separate departments, with teams that connect infrastructure, people, culture, and ongoing improvement.

One of the clearest signs of trust is the team that manages salary balance and the collective bargaining agreement. Neither the coordinator nor the company’s owners take part in those talks. Building the relationships that support this trust is a top priority. The company organizes quarterly outings, such as electric bike rides, drumming sessions, and rowing traditional bateles at the beach. Each event ends with a shared meal for everyone.

None of this works without data. Transparency is a real practice, not just a saying. After monthly team meetings, the coordinator shares company and project results with everyone. The company also teaches people how to understand this information, so terms like gross margin, production, and project result are clear. Teams even help build Kimua’s planning software, because the company believes that people who use a tool should help design it.

The company doesn’t claim to have done all this on its on. Its partners include Basque technology centers that support its engineering, the Basque Government, which backs its innovation and management model, and the consultancy K2K, whose team has helped guide the company’s transformation.

Action is part of everyday business. Each team creates its own annual budget, combining numbers with a plan for how they will help meet the company’s goals. Hiring involves two interviews: first, the coordinator explains how Kimua works and checks if the candidate is comfortable with self-management. Then, the team that will work with the new hire does the professional interview and makes the final decision. Working hours are set based on service needs, not a single policy. Sales teams work around customers, purchasing teams around suppliers, and everyone else has flexible hours as long as commitments are met.

Profit sharing with employees has been a tradition since the beginning, but the company recently changed how it calculates those rewards. Instead of basing them on invoicing, the company now uses production, which it believes better reflects the team’s real effort. This technical change is guided by a simple idea: rewards should match the work people do together.

Kimua is honest about what is still most difficult. The challenge isn’t the org chart, the votes, or the new pay model. It’s making sure that the sense of a shared project lasts as new people join. As the company says, continuity doesn’t come from control; it must be passed on from one generation to the next, until it is truly lived, not just followed.

Kimuli Collections

In 2018, just a few months after Kimuli Collections started at the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) in Uganda, the company received its first big order: more than 200 upcycled makeup and cosmetic bags for a buyer in Berlin. To fulfill the order, the team borrowed some of the needed funds. The tailors, all of whom have disabilities, completed the work. But when the bags reached Germany, the buyer was unhappy with the colors, designs, and quality. Only two bags were sold. Before production, one team member had suggested getting a prototype approved, but the founder, Juliet Namujju, decided against it.

That order changed how Kimuli Collections works today, and Namujju openly shares the story. The loss involved borrowed money, and the main lesson was clear: the team member closest to the work had the right idea, but leadership didn’t take it. Since then, the company’s focus on shared decision-making comes from that experience.

Kimuli Collections is based in Maya Town, Uganda. The company turns plastic and textile waste into fashion products and accessories, while also training and employing people with disabilities. About 25 people are involved, including five core team members, tailors, waste collectors, women who sort and wash the waste, and volunteers. Namujju grew up as an orphan, raised by her grandmother, who was a tailor. As a child, she made her own dolls from fabric scraps and plastic she found on the street because she could not afford toys. 

She joined SINA in 2016 and started the company at age twenty. SINA’s approach, which gives marginalized young people responsibility for running community hubs, helped Namujju learn to share authority instead of keeping it to herself.

Kimuli’s mission and strategy are shaped as much by what the company chooses not to do as by what it creates. The company’s goal is to turn waste into opportunity and to give people with disabilities and marginalized groups access to meaningful work and the chance to run their own businesses. After the Berlin setback, Kimuli made a structural change instead of just trying harder. The company adopted Holacracy, which gives team members clear roles and responsibilities so they can contribute and make decisions. Namujju says that now she treats her team’s feedback as part of the strategy, not just as comments.

Opportunities are most visible among the deaf tailors, who have led product development over the past year. They try out different mixes of discarded materials and African fabrics, and test new designs based on what they see in production and what customers say. They discuss and try out ideas together instead of waiting for directions. When they need more materials, the company provides what is available. There is no set budget for innovation, but everyone can use the workshop and materials freely, without needing to ask for permission.

Customer feedback has also shaped Kimuli’s products. One customer encouraged the team to use textile waste, not just plastic. Kimuli tried making conference tote bags and lanyards from discarded textiles and showed them to more customers. When the response was good, the company shifted its focus. This change led to bulk orders from GGGI, GIZ, SINA, and UGEFA, showing how one customer’s suggestion turned into a new source of revenue.

At Kimuli, leaders and colleagues work closely together because the company has a very flat structure. There is only one layer between most frontline workers and the founder. Namujju says her role is to set direction, connect the team with customers and partners, find resources, help solve problems, and step in when a decision needs broader input. The team works in small groups that support each other without needing instructions. Young waste collectors bring materials to the center on their own; women sort and wash the waste; tailors create new designs from what is available; and the sales team shares these designs with customers through messages and social media. If customers respond well, production begins.

Rose Nakaungu, who is deaf, is the Creative Director and Head of Production and Innovation. She leads the production team, guides design choices, and decides how materials are used and how products can be improved. The company helps people build skills through hands-on training, learning by doing, open feedback, and encouraging everyone to try out ideas and see what works. Nakaungu also trains others in these skills.

Kimuli treats its partners as co-developers. The company has worked with the National Union of Disabled Persons of Uganda (NUDIPU) for several years. NUDIPU connects Kimuli with people with disabilities and helps explain their needs, while Kimuli shares skills and sustainable solutions with NUDIPU’s communities. Recently, this partnership led to a new product that neither group could have created alone. NUDIPU suggested using banana fiber for reusable sanitary pads for people with disabilities who have trouble getting menstrual products. Kimuli developed the idea, and NUDIPU will help distribute the pads and train users to make them.

One big change is that production and sales no longer go through the founder. Tailors now create new designs from available waste, and the sales team shares them with customers. If customers respond positively, those designs go into production without needing approval. Before, most decisions had to go back to Namujju, which slowed things down and caused the company to miss some opportunities.

Performance is measured by product quality and quantity, customer satisfaction, sales, teamwork, and impact, such as waste collected, skills taught, and jobs created. Instead of financial rewards, people are given more responsibility, like leadership roles, new projects, training, and the chance to train others. Nakaungu is a clear example of this path. She now runs her own workshop in Mpigi, supporting five deaf women, while still working with Kimuli. "Kimuli changed my life by giving me the skills and opportunity to grow," she says.

The toughest time for Kimuli was not the Berlin order. The company started as Kimuli Fashionability and had already gained attention, including a CNN documentary about its inclusive fashion work. Namujju eventually realized that the previous leadership’s direction no longer fit her original mission. In 2022, she rebranded the company as Kimuli Collections and built a new team from the ground up.The current company was built on purpose, with shared responsibility, clear roles, and accountability, because Namujju saw what happened when those things were missing.

Now, one design at a time, this organisation is changing fashion and sustainability. 

Kitamoc

Two years ago, an Kitamoc employee walked in wanting to quit. He loved bicycles and thought he wanted a job at a bike shop. Today he is the lead on Kitamoc’s new mountain-bike ride park, built with Yamaha Motor, opening this July, with a first-year hope of drawing 5,000 people into a fresh relationship with the forest. 

Kitamoc aimed very high, it searched for the connection between his “what I want to do” and the company’s “what we must do,” and grew a business around the person. Turning that single move into something repeatable is what the company spent the past year doing, converting last year’s declaration into a working mechanism, and the mechanism into proof.

For readers meeting it for the first time: Kitamoc is a forest enterprise in Kita-Karuizawa, on the northern foothills of the volcano Mount Asama in Gunma, Japan. It grew from the Sweet Grass campground, opened in 1994, into a web of interlocking businesses, self-managed forestry across 240 hectares (firewood, charcoal, woodworking, beekeeping, the campground, and TAKIVIVA, a fire-centred gathering venue) all guided by LUOMU, a Finnish phrase it reads as living in accordance with nature. A year ago, having won a ZeroDX 2025 Emergent Excellence Award, Kitamoc pointed three “distances” it wanted to close: to the future of its locality, between the individual and the organization, and between itself and peers of like aspiration. This year it returned with the operating system behind them.

That system has a name: CHAOS, the Cooperative Autonomous Organization. Its single posture is to cultivate the organization like a forest and grow the business like a tree; as the company puts it, no one can build a forest to a blueprint; you can plant and tend, but not command the soil or hurry time. In practice it looks concrete rather than mystical. 

Visualized profit-and-loss figures are shared with the whole team every month, built around the flow of goods and money rather than abstract numbers. Ten employees each now carry a role of real responsibility and run their own initiatives: a “starter culture” meant to set new behaviour in motion. And the company has built a repeatable way to find each person’s “vein”: raising the resolution of what an individual wants and what the business needs until the underground stream where they cross becomes visible, then shaping a venture around it.

Kitamoc’s sharpest interpretation of zero distance to customer is internal and local, proximity to employees and to the place itself, but genuine end-user contact shows up at the frontline, where teams respond in real time to who walks through the gate. With Japan’s camping market shrinking, the campground’s food-and-beverage manager grew his sales to 111% of the prior year through measures he devised himself, even as overnight lodging sat at 92%. The forthcoming ride park is the same instinct aimed outward: a way to bring guests into the forest as play, not just scenery.

On zero bureaucracy, authority sits with the people closest to the work. The food and beverage result came from frontline autonomy rather than instruction; open monthly P&L lets staff act on what they can see; and the culture is explicitly safe-enough-to-try, with employees proposing and acting rather than waiting for sign-off. 

Zero time to market is served by an engine the company built precisely to repeat the kind of emergence the bicycle venture showed: a platform it calls Kitakaru Village. It began as a writers' residency at the campground, inviting people who work with words to stay among the trees and the fire for a few days. It has grown, over three years, into an open ground where employees lay their own ambitions over the company's needs and make them real, run as experiment and revenue at once. 

Zero idle resources is the dimension easiest to miss elsewhere, and here it is the strongest. The businesses are deliberately interconnected so that little is wasted: off-cuts and thin wood become firewood and charcoal, processing chips become compost made with local farmers, and the forest feeds the campground, the venue and the workshops in turn. Capital moves dynamically too as profits from the service businesses are reinvested into primary industry like forestry, and people are shaped around their individuality rather than slotted into fixed posts, on the view that letting the business dictate placement stifles potential. Even the residence venue is dual-purpose by design, refusing to be only welfare or only commerce. As the company’s own principle has it, “it is the shallow-rooted tree that falls in a great wind.”

What makes Kitamoc distinctive is that it refuses the usual trade-off between valuing the individual and belonging to the whole, holding both as a productive tension rather than a problem to solve. “We continue to distribute profits equally,” as CEO Keiichiro Tsuchiya puts it, “ensuring that no one is left behind.” By growing many interconnected businesses around the grain of its people and its land, Kitamoc is betting that closeness to employees, to guests, to place, to peers is not a slogan but a way of tending, and that an organization cultivated like a forest is, in the end, the more resilient one.

Klinika Fomina

In late autumn 2022, the company behind a fast-growing private medical networks made a deliberate shift: it changed its own name. The management company at the heart of Klinika Fomina's 20-clinic network became the supporting company. For founder Dmitry Fomin, this marked the point when his team recognized that clinics did not need managers, but helpers.

Fomin, an OB-GYN by training, began building the network in 2011, starting with just four outpatient rooms. By 2023, it had become a multi-region holding specializing in reproductive medicine, women's health, and genetic testing. Klinika Fomina stood out in private medicine for its remarkably low physician turnover, a notable achievement in a sector where clinics routinely compete to attract doctors from rivals. This reputation was rooted in a conviction Fomin held well before the transformation: he consistently favored open, horizontal team relationships over hierarchy, convinced that people reveal their true capabilities only in an environment of trust. What he lacked was a systematic approach to make that conviction real.

Over four years, Fomin developed a working relationship with Andrei Krivenko, founder of the VkusVill grocery chain, and Yuri Alasheev, founder of Agama. Both were advocates of 'clientocracy,' a management model VkusVill began shaping in 2016, where every team serves an external or internal customer, not a boss or a rulebook. This relationship gave Fomin's instinct both a name and a method. When Krivenko's team formalized the approach into a consultancy, Beyond Taylor, Fomin joined, bringing his management team along. He has since tailored the philosophy for medicine, coining his own term: patientocracy, an organization structured around the patient, not bureaucracy.

The full rollout began within the holding's central management company in late autumn 2022, then expanded as a live experiment to clinics across four regions. Importantly, adoption at the clinic level was never imposed. Headquarters set the tone: 'We live by these principles. How you run your clinic is your decision.' Both rapid adopters and those who held back were seen as valid outcomes. Several concrete mechanisms followed: the creation of a first-ever Board of Leaders with its own transparent motivation system in early 2023; company-wide open-book finance, giving every physician visibility into business earnings and expenses; a bonus formula that paid out 20% of any profit above the network's average annual profit for 2022; and a practice of teams making explicit promises to their internal clients, other departments, before the bonus system was finalized, ensuring expectations and results stayed aligned.

That same drive for shared ownership shaped how Fomin articulates the company's purpose. He frames it in collective terms: 'We want to unite the medical community so that medicine in Russia becomes one of the best in the world.' The Board of Leaders stands as the clearest structural embodiment of that purpose, created to give the network a transparent, participatory strategy-setting function it had previously lacked.

The mission statement was not just rhetoric. Staff began to initiate conversations, bring forward new ideas, and form working groups independently. In Fomin's words, employees 'stopped waiting for permission and started acting.' This shift stands as the most tangible change within the network.

That same initiative reached outward, toward patients. Patientocracy, as Fomin defines it, is an organization that puts the patient before internal bureaucracy. He has taken that message to the broader medical community through public events and social media, building his public brand around this principle.

The same logic shaped leadership itself. Renaming the management company as the supporting company was a direct, symbolic redefinition of what leadership owes the organization. Fomin reinforced the symbolism with action, paying the full bonus despite employee scepticism. Many leaders, he noted, 'promise everything, then change their tune when it's time to pay.' This was a clear, attributable moment of building trust.

Trust also depended on transparency. Full financial visibility became the clearest evidence that practical tools, not just intentions, were driving the company forward. Every employee, including physicians, can see company-wide revenue and expense data and calculate their own earning potential. The training pipeline, with nine Beyond Taylor graduates and four more enrolled, was a second concrete investment in that capability.

That same transparency influenced how authority flowed through the organization. Patientocracy is defined by its opposition to bureaucracy: patients first, not bureaucracy first. The non-mandatory rollout, with headquarters modeling behavior instead of imposing it on clinics, became a clear example of decision-making authority moving outward rather than remaining centralized.

All of this came together in how people were paid. Compensation was linked to team and individual performance, not fixed roles, and the results were clear. Some managers earned two to three times their base salary in bonuses, with base pay remaining unchanged. The bonus program itself was framed as having doubled employee bonuses across the network. Beyond the numbers, the business continued to grow: revenue rose from about 930 million rubles in 2020 to an estimated 2.8 to 3 billion rubbles in 2022, and to 4.3 billion rubbles in 2023. The network's ranking among Russia's top private multidisciplinary clinics climbed from 26th to 19th place during 2022.

What sets this case apart is the direction the idea travelled. A management philosophy originally designed for a grocery retailer became, in Fomin's hands, a philosophy for medicine, renamed and rooted in the relationship between doctor and patient, not cashier and customer. Fomin did not simply implement patientocracy within his own clinics; he projected it outward, using his network's credibility to bring the model into the wider profession. What started as a single holding company renaming itself has become an effort to reshape how an entire industry serves the people at its core.

Kopernicana 

Kopernicana bases some of its biggest strategic decisions on the ideas of a physicist, not a business expert. Inspired by Ilya Prigogine, they believe that staying open and away from equilibrium is essential for any living system to thrive. Kopernicana treats this as a practical guide, not just a metaphor. This thinking led to two major moves: co-founding Decentral, a network of independent partner firms, and creating LeapFrog, a joint venture with a major client. Both efforts aim to keep expanding the organization's boundaries instead of letting them become fixed.

Kopernicana uses Holacracy and, in early 2025, reorganized itself into small units called Micro-Enterprises, or MEs. The logic follows Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety from cybernetics: to survive and thrive, a business needs enough internal diversity to match the complexity of its environment. Initially, Kopernicana set up two main MEs: one focused on radical transformation, the other on gradual change, recognizing that no single approach could serve all client needs. Over time, new MEs emerged, specializing in areas like AI adoption, supporting small and mid-sized businesses, coaching, and exporting Kopernicana's transformation methods. Every employee, known as a Kopernican, belongs to at least one ME, creating a dynamic structure that evolves alongside the market.

Zero distance to mission and strategy at Kopernicana is visible in how closely the company's economics are tied to its stated purpose. There is no executive layer dictating strategy from above; instead, Circles at the market interface are expected to interpret, challenge, and develop the broader strategic direction. The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is used here as a living conversation, not a top-down scorecard. This philosophy extends into compensation: every Kopernican earns through four income streams: a guaranteed baseline for ecosystem membership, income from client project delivery, income from internal capability-building, and a share of commercial fees distributed among those who deliver at the client site. In Kopernicana, purpose is not just a slogan; it's embedded directly into how people are rewarded for their work.

Zero distance to opportunity comes alive in the story of PancIA, Kopernicana's internal AI assistant. It was born from frontline consultants who were frustrated by the time lost searching for scattered organizational knowledge while working directly with clients. Instead of escalating the issue to management, the team invoked an internal rule, "safe enough to try," and built a prototype without waiting for approval. PancIA quickly became a core knowledge tool and was later commercialized as a paid module by the AI-adoption Micro-Enterprise. The same pattern repeated elsewhere: a team working for the city of Milan transformed a single public-sector engagement into a repeatable offering for public administration, opening a new business line. Both cases were possible thanks to a self-funding financial rule: forty-five out of every hundred units of client revenue go directly to the Micro-Enterprise that earned them, and teams that deliver efficiently keep the savings to reinvest, with no need for upstream permission. This operational DNA ensures that initiative is rewarded and opportunity is seized in real time.

Zero distance to customers is not just a principle at Kopernicana: it's a lived practice. On the Milan Municipality project, client representatives were brought directly into the team's governance rituals, shifting the experience from vendor oversight to genuine co-ownership of outcomes. In a major enterprise engagement, the client's OKR lead participated in Kopernicana's Holacratic tactical meetings, allowing real-time resolution of tensions. When two different clients requested advice on evolutionary organizational models, the team didn't wait for a long internal design process, they immediately assembled a new workshop format by leveraging modular offerings from their partner network. Even Kopernicana's internal IT infrastructure, the Kopernican Operating System, has been offered to clients, treating daily operations as a live product demonstration, not just a support tool. This openness brings the company's mission and customers into immediate contact, dissolving traditional boundaries.

Zero distance to leaders begins with the company's founder, who no longer holds a majority stake in the business and has spent recent years redirecting energy outward, orchestrating the Decentral partner network, building the LeapFrog joint venture, and helping develop a piece of governance software called Nestr, rather than holding on to internal control. Leadership inside project teams follows context rather than seniority: a junior member with closer proximity to a client's reality routinely leads a project that includes far more senior specialists, and some of those same senior specialists have moved from doing expert work themselves to running whole Micro-Enterprises as entrepreneurial business owners. Structurally, nobody holds command-and-control authority over anyone else purely by title. A Circle Lead is responsible for a team's strategic alignment, not for approving what its members do, and within the boundaries of their own role, any member is free to decide and act without seeking a manager's sign-off.

Zero distance to colleagues is evident in how teams at Kopernicana assemble and dissolve fluidly around real work, rather than being anchored to rigid reporting structures. Client projects give rise to what the company calls Ecosystem Micro-Communities, each led by an integrator who brings together the right mix of skills, even reaching into partner firms when that's the best fit. Kopernicans often work with Micro-Enterprises beyond their main affiliation, and teams constantly reconfigure as projects begin and end. This fluidity generates ongoing tension: Micro-Enterprises develop their own independent identities, while the broader organization must maintain enough shared purpose and infrastructure to remain unified. Kopernicana embraces this tension as a feature to be managed continuously, not a flaw to be eliminated.

Zero distance to data and tools has been the norm since Kopernicana's earliest days rather than a recent initiative: how much money is coming in, what each project really costs, what every fee is worth, and how every governance decision across every Circle got made, have all been visible to every member from day one. That habit shows up bottom-up in its own tooling too. One Micro-Enterprise built itself a dashboard to track its financial health, and it worked well enough that the company's General Coordination Circle adopted it as a shared standard for every other unit to use. AI capability-building follows the same distributed pattern: one Micro-Enterprise, Fairfly, leads organization-wide AI adoption work, while a separate team built PancIA entirely on its own initiative, evidence that useful tools tend to arrive from whoever felt the need most directly rather than from a central technology function.

Zero distance to partners runs through Decentral, the consortium of independent, self-governing firms Kopernicana helped found specifically to reassemble capability quickly for large clients such as UniCredit, Italy's largest banking group, without carrying the overhead of a formal joint company. The same instinct produced the LeapFrog joint venture with a major systems integrator client, an internal Coaching Micro-Enterprise built as a joint venture that now coordinates more than seventy outside coaches, and ongoing collaboration on the Nestr governance platform, where real client cases feed directly back into how the software gets built. Kopernicana is candid that this openness creates friction as well as value: project leads sometimes choose an external partner from the Decentral network over an internal colleague when the skills fit better, a call that generates real internal debate about how work should be allocated across the boundary between the company and its wider ecosystem.

Zero bureaucracy and the zero distance to action that comes with it show up in decisions that would take months elsewhere but get settled inside a single hour-long governance meeting at Kopernicana. One recent example came from a member with no seniority in the traditional sense, who proposed and passed a real change to how commercial fees get split, shifting a larger share toward the delivery team doing the client work rather than leaving it concentrated with sales roles. Frontline Micro-Enterprises hold real authority over their own internal pay splits, review rhythms and how directly clients get pulled into team meetings. To stop that freedom from fragmenting into total inconsistency, the company relies on what it calls Defaults: baseline approaches nobody is forced to follow, but which every member has to review first before choosing to do something different.

Zero distance to results and rewards lives inside the arithmetic of Kopernicana's own revenue formula. For every hundred euros a Micro-Enterprise brings in through client delivery, forty-five stays with that unit to fund its own work and reinvestment, fifteen splits between sales and delivery roles as a commercial fee, twenty-five funds the shared baseline income and services every member relies on, and the remaining fifteen feeds ecosystem-wide profit distribution and equity returns. Compensation itself runs on four tracks rather than one fixed salary, including a self-set daily rate benchmarked against real market data. The clearest expression of ownership sits inside Fairfly, a Micro-Enterprise built from scratch with its own members' time and capital, which uses a dynamic equity system to value unpaid hours and assets, paired with performance-linked contracts that vest equity against real revenue and profitability milestones rather than the passage of time.

None of this runs without friction, and Kopernicana names the friction rather than papering over it. Balancing each Micro-Enterprise's pull toward independence against the whole ecosystem's need for shared purpose is a permanent, ongoing act of management, not a problem the company expects to close out. Trading a fixed salary for four separate income streams demands a level of financial fluency the company has had to build deliberately across its whole network, and moving from top-down instruction to genuine role sovereignty keeps asking more personal maturity of people than a traditional job ever did. Prigogine taught that life begins where stillness ends, and twenty years on, Kopernicana is proof that the same is true for a company brave enough to keep growing.

Kraft Heinz

A large food company usually decides what a retailer ought to stock. At Costco Canada, Kraft Heinz worked the other way round. This story began with a question Kraft Heinz put to Costco: what do your shoppers actually need?

What came back were pack formats nobody had drawn in advance: club-channel sizes for Classico, Kraft Dinner, Maxwell House and Heinz, built with the retailer instead of presented to it. Carolina Wosiack, who leads the company's transformation, borrows Haier's phrase for what happened there: zero distance to the customer.

Getting closer was not a matter of intent, and this is worth slowing down for. In the Zero Distance framework, ‘Customers’ is not a department but a measurement: how little separates the people doing the work from those they serve. At Costco Canada that distance closed because four unglamorous things about the team changed. It was given one locked list of priorities, an integrated backlog, replacing the disconnected project plans a matrix organisation accumulates. Its quarterly objectives were tied to net sales value and margin and agreed with the country president and chief financial officer, so the team's targets and the company's numbers became the same. Decision rights were granted outright and the team was freed from the usual governance. Touchpoints were cut: sign-offs became a quarterly review with two or three people, while anything else a colleague might want to know sits on a self-service dashboard any function can open at will. Nobody summons the team to explain itself. Its weekly reviews focus on learnings.

Fifteen million Canadian dollars of net sales value has been delivered so far, against two hundred million tracked over three years, with shorter execution cycles and less rework. Wosiack values something beyond the money. She saw a shift in the team from compliance to ownership.

Kraft Heinz was formed in 2015 from Kraft Foods Group and H. J. Heinz, runs from Chicago and Pittsburgh, and carries more than 200 brands across 40 countries with around 35,000 employees. Net sales in 2025 were 24.9 billion dollars. In an organisation of that scale, a good idea is usually a year of approvals away from becoming anything at all.

The route to Canada's success ran through Brazil, and it began with an uncomfortable number. Launching a new product at Kraft Heinz could take thirty-six months, a long time for a fast-moving consumer goods company. Teams were carrying too much. A traditional stage-gate governance sat above them, and decision rights, funding logic and incentives were all conventional. Leaders missed targets because everything took too long, and most competitors moved faster. The conclusion was unusual for a company under pressure: the people were not the problem, the system was.

Testing that required a senior person to put their name to it. A business unit president in emerging markets volunteered, which Wosiack notes is significant inside a twenty-five billion dollar organisation. The pilot, called Pipa, ran on two Brazilian brands, Quero and Heinz. Time allocation and decision rights were redesigned, and the work was handed to a small unit with real autonomy. The pasta sauce was expected in eighteen months but launched in six, a company record, with the same people who would have taken three years before. Time in meetings fell by 31 per cent, freeing capacity. Employee engagement rose by 55 per cent. That single pilot has since grown to roughly 130 teams and more than a billion dollars in cumulative value, a combination of revenue generated and cost reduction.

None of that came from a better project methodology. It came from what the RenDanHeYi framework calls ‘Mission and Strategy’, which asks whether a company's purpose genuinely drives its decisions rather than just describing them. The programme began five years ago with an admission: Kraft Heinz was lagging its industry on innovation. The brands were strong and the strategy sound. What failed was the distance between strategy and outcome. Agile, in most companies then, meant a way of running projects. Kraft Heinz defines it differently: a means of delivering strategy while transforming the operating model at the same time. The operating model is part of the strategy, not plumbing fitted afterwards.

The first thing the new definition demanded was that teams do less. ‘Opportunities’, in this framework, means whether a good idea can become real work without permission from five layers above, and at Kraft Heinz it improved by subtraction. Pipelines were halved, following Wosiack's principle that strategy is as much what you decline as what you pursue. The first estimate was wrong in an instructive way: twenty projects per team seemed feasible, but seven was what a team could actually carry. Seven became the golden number. Narrowing produced more new business, not less, and innovation as a share of organic net sales nearly doubled between 2022 and 2024, from 1.6 per cent to 2.9 per cent.

Halving a pipeline means somebody senior must stop asking for things, which is the test the Leaders dimension sets: whether the people at the top have moved from directing to enabling. Wosiack broke her own habit before asking anyone else to break theirs. When her people brought her decisions for approval, she began asking what they wanted to do about it, and they eventually stopped expecting an answer. Her explanation runs to six words: "I know you know the answer." Hire the right people and they are equipped to make the decisions themselves. What they need is to know their leader is in the game with them, and occasionally a good question where the data is thin. The sign-off culture is what Kraft Heinz started dismantling, and it is the same shift that changed the team in Canada.

Leaders are not left to figure it out alone. The Colleagues dimension in the Zero Distance approach describes how people organise around one another rather than through reporting lines. At Kraft Heinz it takes the form of support rather than supervision. About fifty full-time people and twenty partly allocated, from mixed backgrounds, work as close partners to whoever drives change rather than as auditors. Learning happens inside daily work. This journey reinforced a lesson and a practical response: not everyone moves at the same pace, so a maturity model lets different parts of the business progress at their own speed while knowledge still travels between them.

Autonomy needs two things: capability, and sight of the numbers. ‘The Data, Tools and Skills’ dimension supplies both. The first move came deliberately through a familiar door. Kraft Heinz had a strong culture of management by objectives, so shifting to objectives and key results was a step leaders already recognised. From there came the integrated backlog and the dashboards, which replaced reporting as a favour granted by whoever held the file with information anyone could access.

That openness runs outward too. ‘Partners’ distinguishes between collaborator and supplier, and Kraft Heinz started treating organisations outside its walls as co-designers. Costco Canada is a clear example. The partnership logic extends upstream as well: Kraft Heinz Canada's co-manufacturing agreement with Highbury Canco in Leamington, Ontario, runs through 2027 and covers a significant part of the Canadian portfolio.

Action asks whether a team can move without waiting for permission, and Kraft Heinz applies the same rule to the transformation itself: no business unit is made to adopt it. Wosiack's phrase is “pull, not push”. What makes that self-selection possible is the playbook, which comes in three levels. A business that only wants to test the idea takes Light and tries a few practices. One that already knows its problem takes Flex and picks the practices that match its challenge and its maturity. One that is committed takes Full, with Wosiack's team working alongside it and its performance benchmarked.

Creating the playbook was questioned at the beginning. The concern from Wosiack was that a document would tell people what to do and leave them no room to think. A colleague put the opposite case: people cannot choose what they cannot see, and a playbook is what lets them make it their own. Wosiack wrote it, and it is now the thing that lets a business in the organisation pick its own depth rather than be handed a transformation that feels imposed from the top.

The dimension the programme does not yet claim is Results and Rewards. Teams answer for net sales value and margin rather than for activity, which is a different kind of accountability and not simply a firmer one, but nobody's pay follows the performance of their team, and Kraft Heinz does not present that as finished. A team can set its own priorities and answer for its own numbers. It cannot yet own its own economics, and that is the distance still open.

The outcomes are documented. Six months against a three-year norm. Meetings down 31 per cent and engagement up 55 per cent. Roughly 130 teams and more than a billion dollars of cumulative value out of one pilot. And in Chile, where the managing director invited the team in after Brazil, the first Kraft-branded ketchup ever launched in an emerging market took a high double-digit market share inside a couple of months. Putting a second company brand into a category the first already owns is the textbook way to eat your own sales. Cannibalisation of Heinz ketchup was very small.

Not everything the programme knows came from what worked. The model cannot be pushed, and Kraft Heinz knows because it tried. The teams the transformation office pressed took up least of it. Rather than read that as an execution failure, the company made it a design rule: the model travels only where it is wanted. That puts the emphasis on generating demand rather than issuing instructions, which is why results are treated as the recruitment tool. Costco Canada is now the example Wosiack reaches for with any team in North America, and every proof point makes the next business easier to reach. The development ahead is simple to state and harder to do: build enough visible evidence that the businesses which have not yet asked, ask.

The most useful insights in this case are also the least intuitive. Kraft Heinz gained more innovation by attempting less. Twenty projects per team was the plan; seven was what a team could handle. Pipelines were halved, and innovation as a share of organic net sales nearly doubled. Nothing was added to achieve that. Instead, things were removed: projects, approval layers, meetings, competing plans.

Each market in Kraft Heinz’s story taught a different lesson. Brazil showed the constraint was never the people. The same team that would have needed three years shipped in six once the work around them was redesigned. Chile showed the model travels. Invited in by a managing director, the first Kraft-branded ketchup in an emerging market took a high double-digit share within a couple of months, and took it without eating the Heinz standing beside it. The share came from buyers Heinz had not been reaching. Canada showed what the whole thing is for. The team did not close the distance to Costco by aiming at it, and nobody asked it to care more. What changed was the system around it: who it answered to, what it could decide alone, and which figures it would be judged on. 

Lancor

For two decades, Lancor has done more than deliver profits. It has shared them with the people who make them possible. On an industrial estate near Bilbao, around 115 people manufacture electric motors for elevators used by some of the world’s leading lift companies, including Orona, TKE and Schindler. In a sector where precision is non-negotiable, Lancor’s distinguishing feature is not the absence of discipline but the location of authority: there are no line managers, and changes to manufacturing procedures are validated directly with customers.

Founded in Bilbao in 1943 as Talleres Elorriaga and later renamed Lancor 2000, the company took its decisive turn nearly twenty years ago. It embraced self-management and joined the NER Group, a Basque network built around a “new style of relationships” in which hierarchy gives way to autonomy, transparency and shared responsibility.

In 2013, Lancor became a worker cooperative. By 2025, the model had moved well beyond aspiration: it had become the operating system of the business.

The work is organised around six autonomous mini-factories, each built as a customer-line team that brings together production and support roles around actual client demand. Each team is guided by two rotating facilitators, one from production and one from support. Their task is not to supervise from above, but to keep commitments visible, information moving and decisions close to the work.

Transparency is not treated as a value statement pinned to a wall. It is built into the company’s routines: monthly assemblies open to everyone, steering meetings that review shared indicators, and communication channels that run from Slack and a custom internal app to printed updates on the shop floor.

Decision-making follows the same logic. Consent is sought first in small groups, while general assemblies require at least 80% approval. Recent refinements have made the process both faster and more demanding: objections must now be substantive, but dissent is not treated as obstruction. When one recent proposal passed with 80% support, the remaining objections were gathered and used to improve the next version rather than quietly set aside.

What stands out is that the culture has not settled into ritual. Since its 2025 nomination, Lancor has continued to adjust the machinery of self-management while pursuing a shared ambition to reach 30 million euros in revenue within a few years. That goal is being discussed openly across assemblies, with significant investment absorbed through a three-year strategy rather than imposed from the top.

To feed that growth, Lancor has introduced Kantera: a rotating transversal team of six or seven people that examines opportunities from every necessary angle. Anyone inside the cooperative, and even external collaborators, can bring an idea forward. The team then guides it through evidence-based, customer-focused stages, building a documented map of opportunities that informs major investment decisions. Still in prototype, Kantera now sits alongside a Tractor Team, a steering team and seven transversal teams in which more than 80% of staff participate.

Seen through the four ZeroDX dimensions, the model becomes easier to understand. On zero distance to customer, Lancor’s customer-line teams shorten the path between those who design, produce and deliver motors and the clients who use them. The relationship with their client, Orona, makes that visible: when the client visits, they go directly to the production line, know the teams by name and work with them on continuous improvement.

On zero time to market, the company’s response to rare-earth supply risk shows how quickly the model can move. Annual strategic planning identified the exposure, and the creation of Lancor China, in the coastal city of Qidong, was placed on the Common Challenges Plan. Teams reviewed and approved the move together in assembly before the cooperative acted to secure its supply chain and open a new platform for growth. Internally, the absence of routine sign-off allows teams to move at the speed of opportunity rather than the pace of permission.

On zero bureaucracy, NER membership reinforces a style that is already visible on the shop floor. In that regard, Lancor has invested in developing the facilitator role as a rotating, representative responsibility rather than a fixed managerial rung. A cultural team and facilitation training support the role, but the deeper shift is the steady removal of unnecessary validation steps, allowing good decisions to keep moving.

Lancor is especially strong on zero idle resources, often the least visible of the four dimensions. Profits have been shared for two decades, and the cooperative dedicates an additional share of annual profit and working time to social and community initiatives. Teams choose their own indicators, form and dissolve as needs change, and use Kantera to direct capital and effort toward the most promising opportunities. Capacity is not left waiting for instruction; it is expected to find useful work.

The performance case is hard to ignore. In 2024, the cooperative achieved record turnover of 28 million euros and produced more than 50,000 motors and generators. It joined the EU-funded Harmony project on circular economy and expanded its work in renewable energy and vertical transport. Annual investment ranges from 1.5 to 3 million euros in R&D, with about 4 million euros directed to plant digitalisation and robotisation. The company reports a 99.9% quality index and 100% on-time delivery.

Lancor’s story is not one of a factory abandoning discipline for idealism, but of a manufacturer proving that trust can sharpen industrial performance. Its motors still have to meet the exacting demands of the world’s leading elevator companies; its teams still answer to customers, deadlines and quality standards. What has changed is where authority sits. Nearly twenty years into its transformation, Lancor appears less like an experiment reaching its conclusion than a company still testing how far self-management can go when people are given both responsibility and a stake in the outcome.

Latro

When Latro brought a production facility into its collective structure, the first design decision was to make sure nothing about the relationship became mandatory. Any of Latro's product hubs could still take their manufacturing to an outside supplier, and the new production hub was free to take on customers who had nothing to do with Latro at all. A factory that has to compete for its own owner's business is an unusual choice for an industrial acquisition, and it is one clear sign of how far Latro has pushed its operating model since 2025.

Latro is a Turkish company, founded in Istanbul in 2010 as a textile-chemicals supplier and now active across cosmetics, electronics, aerospace and agriculture. It runs without an organization chart, job titles or managers; people organize into autonomous, startup-like teams called hubs, and the only formal role in the company is "explorer." Two specialized hubs keep the wider system coherent: Habitat, which handles finance, systems and operations, and Gardening, a rotating group of culture ambassadors who coach and mentor across the ecosystem. Between 2025 and 2026, that structure absorbed three developments significant enough to stand as their own evidence of how the model performs under pressure: an industrial acquisition, an international growth push, and the birth of two consumer brands with no direct roots in Latro's original chemical business.

The first test was industrial. Latro's newly acquired production hub and its government-certified R&D Center, 250 square meters of lab space backed by roughly one million euros of infrastructure, were integrated into the same decentralized system as everything else, rather than placed under a conventional command chain. Production workers, whom Latro calls explorers like everyone else, became participants in decisions about process risk, quality, maintenance scheduling and capital spending, not just executors of instructions handed down from sales or R&D. Coordination runs through short, recurring rhythms rather than approval chains: Daily meetings surface the day's production reality, quality deviations and material risks so that production, R&D and the relevant product hub can respond the same day, and Weekly Progress sessions cover capacity, cost, lessons learned and who owns the next step.

The internal market this created is the clearest zero-bureaucracy evidence in the whole update. Because product hubs can still choose another manufacturer and the production hub can serve outside customers, internal work must be earned rather than assigned, and neither side can hide behind an org chart. Latro reports that this shift, together with a closer R&D-to-plant loop, coincided with real change in the period it treats as 2025-2026 evidence: the production facility runs at about 350 tonnes of monthly capacity, R&D intensity reached 6.65% of revenue against a sector range the company cites as roughly 2 to 3%, and the company was running 24 active R&D projects and three patent applications. The share of sales coming from Latro's own know-how-based products, rather than resold or commodity chemicals, rose from about 20% to about 70%. Project throughput increased by roughly 60% with about 30% fewer people than the prior structure, and EBITDA improved by 32%, though Latro is careful to present these last two figures as outcomes of the wider system rather than results with one single cause.

The second development was international. Export revenue grew from roughly USD 1.5 million to a realized USD 2.5 million, a 66.7% increase, with a year-end ambition of USD 3.0 million that would double the baseline if reached. Latro reached that scale without building a conventional export hierarchy: instead of routing market decisions up to headquarters and back down, it extended the same hub logic across borders, letting regional teams and product hubs keep ownership of customer relationships and commercial decisions across a network that now spans more than a dozen countries, including clusters in Russia and the CIS, North Africa, the Gulf, Poland and South Africa.

What makes the growth notable is what didn't grow alongside it: headcount rose by only about 8.5%, from 47 to 51 people, while export revenue rose by 66.7%, moving export revenue per employee from roughly USD 31,900 to USD 49,000, a figure Latro itself describes as a scale-efficiency proxy rather than a true productivity measure, since export revenue is the product of commercial, technical and production teams working together. The company frames the deeper shift as one from selling commodity access to selling expertise: it estimates that know-how-led sales grew from about a fifth to about two-thirds of its export mix, the same shift visible in the production data, and evidence that autonomy and technical depth are reinforcing each other rather than working separately.

The third development shows the model reaching furthest from Latro's original business. InoBeauty and Flatter both grew out of expertise developed inside Latro's hubs, and rather than being folded back into the existing B2B chemical business, both were given room to become their own companies. InoBeauty turned beauty and personal-care know-how into a standalone venture with its own market identity and outside investor backing. Flatter took Latro's textile and polymer science and built a consumer living-care brand around it, entering the market through a fabric-care and ironing-spray innovation but describing its ambition more broadly, around fabric renewal, odor neutralization, pet care and surface care for everyday life.

Neither venture is presented as a diversification decision made from the top. Latro's account is that people with direct knowledge of an opportunity assembled what they needed to test it and earned the right to give it its own identity, with outside investors and partners joining around the opportunity itself rather than around a fixed position in an org chart. It is a different form of the same principle running through the production and export stories: authority sits with the people closest to the knowledge, and the system is built to let a good idea outgrow its original department, function or industry.

None of these three developments looks like the others. One is a factory floor with patents and tonnage, one is a network of export contracts spanning a dozen countries, and the last ones are consumer brands with no obvious link to industrial chemistry. What connects them is the same zero distance logic running through Latro as a whole: no new department was built to manage any of them, no committee approved them into existence, and no capacity sat idle waiting for permission to be useful. Latro extended the same hubs, the same radical transparency and the same insistence that every relationship, internal or external, be earned rather than assigned, and let each opportunity take exactly the shape it needed. A company that started sixteen years ago as a textile-chemicals supplier now runs a factory that has to compete for its own business, sells expertise instead of commodities across a dozen countries, and has watched two of its own explorers become founders. That is what zero distance looks like when a system is built to let it compound.

Lavsit

At Lavsit, the number that stands out first isn't revenue. Over eighteen months starting in 2024, the company's operational team nearly quadrupled, growing from twelve people to forty-two, while annual revenue grew by half, from 500 million to 750 million rubles. That gap, headcount growing far faster than sales, is deliberate. Lavsit, a premium furniture brand founded in 2017 by interior designers Anastasia Lobova and her brother, spent those eighteen months building a company that no longer needed the two of them to approve every decision.

Lobova describes the years before that shift plainly: she and her brother founded the company together and stayed deeply involved in every process themselves. By 2024 that involvement had become a ceiling. The business had grown to a point where being immersed in every task was no longer possible, yet employees had grown used to bringing every question straight to the founders. What Lobova and her brother wanted wasn't distance from the business, it was a way to hand off operational load without losing what had always defined Lavsit's mission: putting the customer first in every decision, never trading a short-term gain for a promise made to a client. That mission, easy for Lobova to state in one sentence, is zero distance to mission and strategy in practice, specific enough that employees can repeat it back.

The search for a new model led to Beyond Taylor, the consultancy built by veterans of VkusVill, the grocery chain whose customer-first management system, Clientocracy, became Beyond Taylor's core export. The connection wasn't accidental: Lobova and her brother had followed VkusVill's development for years as customers themselves, and when VkusVill founder Andrei Krivenko spoke about Clientocracy in an interview, the ideas resonated with them immediately. In 2024, Lobova enrolled in Beyond Taylor's Strategic Leadership School alongside Lavsit's HR Business Partner, Lyudmila Glushenkova, rather than sending a manager in her place. Zero distance to partners here meant the company's own leadership sat in the training room, not a delegate reporting back secondhand.

Zero distance to customers was not new territory for Lavsit. It just got a name. The company had never made decisions based on short-term gain, prioritizing the customer from the outset. What Beyond Taylor's training added was vocabulary for that instinct, "keeping promises," every commitment made to a client delivered in full, not partially and not late.

Zero distance to leaders shows up in a specific absence: employees no longer treat the founder as the default answer. They no longer come to her asking to be told what to do; instead they've started building dialogue with each other. The clearest evidence sits in the company's regular Board of Leaders meetings, where founders now hear questions that were normally only their load and worry: why are we doing this, what are we trying to achieve, does the customer actually need what we want to do. That last question is zero distance to opportunities in practice at Lavsit, a habit of testing an idea against customer need before committing resources to it rather than a formal pipeline, but a real shift from a model where ideas moved forward simply because the founders liked them.

Zero distance to colleagues and zero distance to action show up together at the team level. "Clientocracy makes the company a single organism, where each team is autonomous yet influences the overall result," Lobova says. Teams now raise their own questions and decide how to act on them without routing the decision back through founders. At Lavsit, a problem in one team now prompts questions across others, how it affects the economics, how it affects the overall result, rather than staying contained inside a single reporting line.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills at Lavsit started as an act of transparency almost too literal to plan around. When Lobova and Glushenkova went through Beyond Taylor's training, they didn't summarize it for the team afterward. They posted every course material into a general Telegram channel open to all employees and worked through how to apply the tools together. There was no meeting where managers announced a shift to a new way of working; the transition happened in the open, in real time, because everyone had access to the same material the founders were learning from.

Zero distance to results and rewards is where the Lavsit story is most concrete and least complete. The results are real and specific: revenue up 50 percent and the operational team up 3.5 times in eighteen months. 

Lobova is candid that none of this feels fast from inside it. "Fast means slow but consistent," she says of Clientocracy, admitting that day to day the pace can feel glacial. It's only in looking back over the full eighteen months that the small daily steps add up to what she now calls real change.

In 2026, Lavsit expanded into commercial and business furniture, supplying projects for clients including the menswear brand Henderson, the SberCity development and developer MR Group, work that requires a different kind of planning than a private living room: load, traffic, durability, delivery logistics. It is a small, independently verifiable sign that the operational capacity built through 2024 and 2025 is now doing new kinds of work.

Eighteen months ago, every question at Lavsit ended up in Anastasia Lobova's inbox. Now the operational team that answers those questions is 3.5 times larger, the Board of Leaders asks whether the customer needs something before Lobova has to, and the company that once needed two siblings to approve every decision is building furniture for lobbies it never had the bandwidth to bid on before.

Lucca

A colleague on Lucca's Paris team wanted to relocate closer to family and had noticed how much the tech scene in Marseille was picking up. Rather than pitching a regional expansion plan to anyone above him, he added a single line to a survey the company already runs every quarter to check in with its own people: would you move to a Marseille office if Lucca opened one there? Twenty colleagues answered yes. Within six months the office was real, with no profit-and-loss projection behind it and no chain of executive sign-offs slowing it down. Looking back on it later, after reading the management book Reinventing Organizations, colleague Alexandre Imbeaux realized the company had been running this way for years without naming it: "we were already doing this."

Lucca builds HR software in France with roughly 800 people, with more than 15 interconnected tools that cover everything from leave requests to compensation for thousands of organizations across Europe. What makes the Marseille story typical rather than exceptional is how long the company waited before writing any of its principles down at all. Twenty-three years passed with no values poster on a wall and no culture deck in a slideshow, until last year, when Lucca finally put its principles into words for the first time. Gilles, the company's co-founder and CEO, has his own way of explaining the delay: in his telling, a family doesn't need its values written on the kitchen wall, because everyone living there already knows them by how the household behaves. 

That patience traces back to how badly Lucca's early years went. At the company's founding in 2002, Gilles bet that workplace software could be technically solid and genuinely well designed at the same time, in a market where most competitors were still shipping clunky, on-premise tools without much thought for the person using them. For roughly the company's first decade and a half, that bet didn't pay off, and Lucca stayed a team of four people working off one table, laptops open, salaries visible to everyone by default simply because there was no reason to hide anything among four people building something together. One of the company's first customers was the French Ministry of Education, a client with essentially zero tolerance for mistakes around payroll and public holiday rules. Communication Director Céline Bitauld traces the company's later appetite for risk back to those lean years of staying largely self-funded rather than chasing outside capital, an approach that gave Lucca room to make bold calls precisely because its finances stayed sound throughout. Growth eventually arrived, roughly a decade ago, and arrived fast: 30 to 50 percent a year, taking the company from 80 to 800 people across seven years.

Zero distance to mission and strategy at Lucca shows in the restraint the company applied to its own culture document once it finally sat down to write one. The rule was to describe only behavior that already existed inside the company, not to dress it up or make it sound more aspirational than daily practice supported. Strategy at Lucca was never a slide deck handed down from leadership. It was a description of habits the company had already been living for two decades before anyone bothered to write them down.

Zero distance to opportunity is the clearest lens for the Marseille story: a colleague spotted something worth pursuing and had a direct, same-week channel to test it against the rest of the company, with no layered approval process sitting between the idea and the decision. Growth at Lucca has never moved in one smooth line either. Some years the company hires aggressively, other years it slows down almost entirely so teams can settle and consolidate. Head of Talent Management Products Alexandre Imbeaux calls the resulting spread of culture "capillarity," the idea that norms travel gradually through direct contact between people rather than through a memo.

Zero distance to customers is built into Lucca's founding obsession with getting the small details right rather than simply covering more features than competitors. The company's early ambition to build something close to a perfect tool for every workplace annoyance only means something because its first serious customer, the French Ministry of Education, left almost no margin for error around leave and public holiday rules. Meeting that bar first, in an unforgiving setting, set a standard of precision the rest of Lucca's product line still gets measured against.

Zero distance to leaders runs through Lucca's decision to stop treating people management as the default reward for seniority. Someone can gain scope, influence, and recognition by going deeper into a domain of expertise, taking on more complex problems, or expanding their impact inside a product team, without ever needing to manage anyone. Where managers do exist, their job looks more like a support function than a command post: backing individual growth, helping colleagues work through feedback, and maintaining trust as teams expand, rather than sitting as an approval layer between an idea and a decision. An Executive Committee sits above the product teams but keeps its own mandate narrow on purpose, reading onboarding feedback gathered two months into every new hire's tenure, watching how processes hold up in practice, and tweaking structures or routines whenever the business outgrows them, without overriding a manager's hiring calls or a team's ownership of its own work.

Zero distance to colleagues is visible in how openly disagreement is invited at Lucca, no matter who holds the more senior title. Debate is framed internally as something aimed at ideas rather than people, captured in one line used across the company: "everyone and anyone can challenge Gilles, me, whoever." The expectation is that people push hard on a topic while still treating each other with basic respect.

Zero distance to data and tools shows up in something as ordinary as that quarterly survey. Lucca didn't build a separate expansion-planning system to test whether a Marseille office made sense. The tool the company already used to gather everyday feedback from its own people simply carried one new question, and the answer came back within days rather than months, a small proof that useful information at Lucca tends to travel through systems people already touch rather than through something built specially for leadership's benefit.

Zero distance to partners takes an unusual shape here, since Lucca's own word for its equity holders is simply "partners." Around 150 people across different teams, countries, and seniority levels own a stake and sit on the company's shareholder register, and there is no single ceremony where someone gets formally named one. Each year Lucca adds a fresh group of partners, typically somewhere between ten and thirty people, chosen for how they already behave day to day: taking responsibility, thinking beyond their own short-term interest, acting for the whole company rather than just their corner of it. The internal expectation guiding who gets asked is blunt: "if you want to be a partner, act as a partner." Ownership, in other words, tends to follow a pattern people were already living rather than reward a title they were chasing.

Zero bureaucracy and the zero distance to action that comes with it explain why the Marseille office could open on the strength of one survey question rather than a formal business plan. Rules at Lucca tend to show up late, once real scale makes them unavoidable, rather than up front as a default precaution against risk. The Executive Committee's own narrow mandate is itself an exercise in restraint: rather than centralizing approvals, it keeps stepping back so that decisions stay with the product teams and managers closest to the work.

Zero distance to results and rewards became concrete during Lucca's one significant outside fundraising round, in 2021 and 2022, when the company raised sixty-five million euros. Roughly thirty-five million stayed inside the business to fund growth, and the remaining thirty million was paid out to people who already held shares, not only the founders but roughly twenty individuals who had spent more than a decade helping build the company from the inside. Recognition in that moment followed tenure and contribution rather than title, landing on the people who had actually put in the years.

Lucca never set out to be Teal, bossless, or ideological, and nobody there would claim its hierarchy has vanished. Managers still exist. An Executive Committee still exists. What has disappeared is the assumption that either one needs to stand between a good idea and the person capable of acting on it. A company that spent fifteen quiet years failing before it ever grew loudly has learned exactly the kind of patience that lets a Marseille office open on a single yes-or-no question, and that patience, more than any written manifesto, is what its culture runs on.

Metafinanz

Metafinanz does not set its teams performance targets. Each of its roughly eighty teams works instead inside a margin corridor, a band derived from what that team's own market pays. Corridors differ by market: work in artificial intelligence carries a higher one, software development a lower one. Within the corridor, a team settles the rest for itself, choosing what it offers, which clients it serves, what it charges and who it takes on. Contract-signing authority sits with the consultants themselves rather than with a manager.

Metafinanz is a business and IT consultancy founded in 1990 in the Black Forest and part of the Allianz Group since 1994. It employs 849 people from more than fifty nationalities, works from Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Vienna, and reported revenue of 150 million euros for 2025. In September 2025 it was named a winner in the Transformational category of the ZeroDX Awards in Beijing.

For its first twenty seven years the company was built around business lines and middle management, with a restructuring every year. By 2016 the pressure was commercial: competitors were responding faster, preparing an offer took too long, consultants could not commit without approval, and recruiting was slow and expensive.

Chief executive Rainer Göttmann then set out, at a company gathering, a firm without hierarchical control, run as a network of teams that direct themselves. He brought no implementation plan and no slides to the session, only his account of what the company might become. On 1 May 2017 the business lines were dissolved and around seventy senior and middle management roles ended with them. Most of the people in those roles stayed and worked out what they would do next.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what a firm exists to do and how it settles where to go next, is set thinly at the centre. Metafinanz describes its work as bringing an organisation's future viability to light and groups what it sells under six themes: artificial intelligence and data, connected platforms, environmental and social transformation, future organisation, resilient business, and transformation strategy. Each Business Area writes its own purpose and its own business plan, subject to one shared condition, that the work fits the direction of the firm as a whole.

Opportunities, the question of how new work is found and taken up, is governed by four entry conditions. Anyone proposing a Business Area has to show why it should exist, gather at least five people willing to commit to it, demonstrate that it can turn a profit, and fit it to where the company is going. Once trading, a team is expected to reach market viability within three years. Teams that do not reach it are wound up and their people move into other teams. 

Customers are served by whoever holds the work. The consultant signs the contract and the team that wins the work carries the profit and loss on it. In its 2025 customer survey Metafinanz reported a net promoter score of 94, after 94.4 in 2024 and 96 in each of the two years before that. Clients identified artificial intelligence, modernisation, regulation, cybersecurity and organisational change as their main concerns. Jürgen Kalkbrenner, one of three managing directors, described the survey response as "a spur and an obligation at the same time."

Colleagues can be measured here against an external benchmark. In the 2026 Great Place to Work survey Metafinanz placed second among Germany's best employers in the 501 to 2,000 band, second among employers in information and communications technology, and first in Bavaria in the 501 to 1,000 band. Ninety four per cent of the staff who took part said it was a very good place to work. Ninety eight per cent said a great deal of responsibility is given to employees, and ninety seven per cent said leaders trust employees to do good work without constantly supervising them. Pay is settled in a conversation the employee starts, joined by a staff development manager of their own choosing and a compensation lead selected by their team, weighed against market comparisons and the company's own salary structure. Metafinanz won Germany's Equal Pay Award in 2024 and is certified as a Fair Pay Analyst under the Universal Fair Pay Check.

Data, Tools and Skills sits behind the corridors. Every team keeps a dashboard, and what it earns, what margin it holds and how fully it is booked can be read by any other team. Metafinanz has been a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data and Artificial Intelligence since January 2025. Its own argument about artificial intelligence, set out across its 2025 publications and in the Mission Transition podcast it launched that October, is that adopting it is a cultural undertaking rather than an IT project.

Partners gives a team access to capabilities it does not hold. Metafinanz draws on more than 150 network partners, reaching around 8,000 specialists it does not employ. Recent additions include HackerOne for ethical hacking in the German-speaking market from July 2025, Freshworks for cloud service management aimed at the southern German Mittelstand from April 2026, and, from April 2025, the skills platform Cobrainer, with whom Metafinanz advises client organisations on building skill-based job architectures. It also has existing arrangements in cyber risk quantification and green IT. Inside the building the same option exists. Five internal service units, known as shops, cover functions such as human resources, IT and legal, and no team is required to use them. A team that prefers an outside offer can take it.

Action, meaning how a decision turns into work, involves no approval chain. A team acts on its own judgement, with its figures, its corridor and its viability horizon visible to it and to everyone else. Results and Rewards runs on the same terms: a team that reaches viability continues on its own account, and one that does not is wound up, which the company frames as ending a business case rather than ending people.

Nine years after the restructuring, Metafinanz runs on a set of mechanisms rather than a chain of command. A margin corridor, an open dashboard, an internal supplier a team is free to decline and a viability horizon carry the coordination that management structures used to carry. The company employs 849 people, reported 150 million euros of revenue in 2025 and a customer score of 94, and is now applying the same structure to a business in a second country.

Nation Partners

Around 2018, Matt Nation was carrying fifteen performance plans and setting his colleagues' pay in a spreadsheet, including for people he barely worked alongside. The judgements felt arbitrary to him, and they felt like the first rung of a ladder his firm had no intention of climbing. He had also worked something out about himself after years in large consultancies. "I kind of just don't like being a manager," he says, while being equally clear that he likes leading people. The conventional fix at that size is to hire a layer of managers. Nation Partners deleted the role instead.

The firm is an Australian consultancy founded in 2013, now around seventy people, advising on contaminated land, climate and sustainability, planning, environment and heritage, stakeholder relations, and infrastructure and investment. It is a certified B Corporation that names the planet as a stakeholder in its corporate constitution, and it directs four per cent of all profits to climate action and to the communities most affected by environmental change: more than AUD $300,000 granted so far towards Indigenous cultural burns, ocean clean-ups, clean energy and biodiversity. Alan Hunter joined later as Managing Director.

The redesign began with a question rather than a restructure. In 2018, at around twenty to twenty-five people, the team brought in organisational ecologist Dayle O'Brien and, using Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations as a reference, went back to first principles: what is this business for, what beliefs should run it, and what outcomes does it want to create. Only then did they map the capabilities the firm would need, deliberately refusing the default answers of hierarchy and approval layers. What emerged was a network of three kinds of team. Practice teams are long-lived homes for technical expertise, five of them covering environment and heritage, sustainable development and climate change, contaminated land, infrastructure and business advisory, and stakeholder relations. Project teams assemble around client work and dissolve when it is finished. Working groups are voluntary, open to anyone, and hold the responsibilities a conventional consultancy would park with partners or department heads. The firm calls these teams the branches and leaves of a living ecosystem, and has spent the past year strengthening them: clarifying roles, contribution and collective responsibility so that a system deliberately light on structure has enough scaffolding to carry more weight.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what a business exists to do and how it works out where to go next, is where Nation Partners parts company with its industry most sharply, because it largely declines to write a strategy. Reviewing what had actually shaped the firm, the team found that its most significant clients and directions had arrived through conversations and coincidences rather than through any plan. So in place of forecasts and pursuit pipelines, teams run sensing exercises: collective sessions to notice the patterns, frustrations and signals already present in the business. Outcomes are defined; the route to them is not. Direction is set through co-design and open space sessions that anyone can shape, and the firm has begun presenting at industry events on how purpose sits inside its commercial decisions rather than beside them.

Opportunities, the dimension covering how new possibilities get spotted and pursued, follows directly from that. They are noticed rather than manufactured. At a recent team day, artificial intelligence surfaced as something the firm needed to engage with, and within hours a suitable partner appeared, someone who already understood how the business was built. The Genuine Partnerships working group is the same instinct applied to clients. Staff formed it to answer one question: what would it actually take to delight a small set of clients whose values are deeply aligned with the firm's own. Rather than invent a definition, the group has been running discovery conversations across every practice area and collecting case studies, working backwards from experience to identify what trust, shared purpose and mutual value look like when a relationship runs in both directions.

Customers, which asks how close an organisation works to the people it serves, is answered partly by that method and partly by the shape of the work. Fifty-seven per cent of the firm's time over the past year went to assessing and reducing environmental impact, a quarter to energy transition projects, and more than fifty engagements involved climate risk assessment or advice on adaptation and resilience. Client work runs through the project teams, some lasting weeks and some years, pulling people from different disciplines. Leadership inside them is contextual rather than positional: a project manager holds the budget, the resourcing and the client relationship, and a project director will often sit alongside offering advice and experience rather than instruction.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and how they use it, is the dimension the firm has thought hardest about, because it removed the usual answer. There are no managers, no partner pyramid and no positional authority. People step into leadership because a piece of work requires it, not because a chart says so. The one role that could easily have become management under another name is deliberately fenced off: everyone has a Capability Builder, a coach who supports their development and explicitly does not rate their performance. What holds the whole thing together is the advice process. Anyone making a decision must first seek advice from people with relevant experience and consult anyone materially affected, and then they decide. Not a manager, not a committee. The logic is that management sits at a remove from the work and is therefore the worst-placed party to make the call.

Colleagues, covering how people are grown, paid and treated, is where this gets concrete and, for most consultancies, uncomfortable. Salaries are set by the people earning them, and every salary is visible internally. The system, built in the early months of COVID, is called Bright Minds. A person reflects on their own contribution using open project feedback and business performance data, meets an Advisor Collective of peers who hold up a mirror rather than deliver a verdict, and then acts on what they hear. More than sixty per cent of the team submitted an advancement request in the past year, and the advice that came back guided the largest increase to the firm's salary pool in its history, with no managers and no escalation point anywhere in the process. Development works the same way: culture and performance are stewarded collectively, and teams have started sharing individual growth plans with one another so that development is a group conversation rather than a private one with a boss. The phrase the firm uses for all of this is dialling up clarity over hierarchy. Ownership follows the identical logic. Anyone who completes probation can become a shareholder, with no partner track and no seniority gates. That was not an easy settlement: when the firm co-designed it, one group wanted performance-weighted equity while another argued that this would rebuild the pyramid they had spent years dismantling. As Nation puts it, anyone who wants to own part of the business can.

Data, Tools and Skills, meaning the information and capability people need in order to decide well, is what makes the rest workable. Self-set pay and open shareholding depend on salaries, dividends and business metrics being visible to everyone, which strips out the lobbying and guesswork that usually surround money. Teams are now specifying their own dashboards, on the reasoning that a group cannot decide for itself without the information a manager would otherwise be holding. Bright Minds supplies a shared vocabulary for capability, so people can talk honestly about what they do well without being ranked.

Partners, which looks beyond the firm's own boundary, has moved past writing cheques. The philanthropy sits in a Profit with Purpose Fund at the Australian Communities Foundation, and the firm has now formed its first strategic partnership with a not-for-profit rehabilitating land, supporting it through paid volunteering rather than donations alone. A pro bono framework being co-designed will direct more than $80,000 of time and expertise, joining philanthropy, culture and capability building into one system rather than three separate gestures. A Reconciliation Action working group carries the commitments to Aboriginal self-determination. 

Action, meaning how decisions actually become work, lives in the working groups. They are voluntary and self-organised, and they hold real responsibility: diversity and inclusion, environmental impact, commercial performance, brand, giving and volunteering, health and safety, reconciliation, and Bright Minds itself. Someone who sees a need starts one. Nothing waits for approval, because there is nobody to approve it.

Results and Rewards asks what all this produced and who shared in it. Growth of more than ten per cent in the past year, a B Corp recertification at the firm's highest score to date, and the largest salary pool increase it has ever made. The rewards are unusual mainly in who controls them: capability argued in the open moves pay, and ownership is open to anyone who stays past probation.

The honest difficulty is scale. At around seventy people the firm hit a pressure point: coordination grew heavier and informal agreement stopped being enough. The response was to slow growth and add clarity rather than add hierarchy, which sits a little awkwardly against a year of double-digit expansion and is worth watching.

What distinguishes this case is that Nation Partners keeps choosing the harder version of its own principle. It could have reserved ownership for a few, put a manager's signature on pay decisions, or met a growth crisis with an org chart. It did none of those, and it now has the more interesting problem of working out what a manager-free consultancy needs at a hundred people that it did not need at seventy.

Net Protections

After two decades at the helm of Net Protections' technology organisation, its long-serving leader arrived at a conclusion that many executives spend their careers avoiding: the company would gain autonomy, not lose it, by moving beyond reliance on a single person to coordinate every technology decision. The response was decisive. The central technology function was dismantled and reformed into business-level units, allowing engineers to work directly with the service teams they support, rather than funnelling everything through a central office. 

Where zero distance to leaders is often defined as leaders staying close to their teams, here the principle is sharper: leadership measured by how intentionally one steps back, not by how visibly one remains. This thinking now shapes the company's approach to engineering careers, which are framed as multiple parallel paths rather than a single ladder to management. Specialists can continue to grow and be recognised without needing to become someone's boss. All of this is anchored in what Net Protections calls Natura, its role-based operating philosophy, and a default of open information sharing, not information guarded by titleholders.

Net Protections has been publicly known for years as a company that abolished conventional management positions, formalising that history in November 2025 with a book, "We Abolished All Management Positions," that made over a decade of organisational learning explicit and shareable. The 2026 story the company is telling moves past that headline. It is not only that Net Protections has no managers in the traditional sense; it is that the Tokyo-based payments and credit-services group, which employed 336 people as of 31 March 2026, has kept scaling a self-managing organisation while pushing decision-making further into specialist and frontline teams and building value through partnerships beyond its own walls.

Zero distance to mission and strategy is not just about whether purpose is stated, but whether it genuinely shapes decisions and whether strategy is forged beyond the executive suite, not simply handed down to it. Net Protections defines its mission, creating the next normal, as a commitment to business model and organisational innovation, treated as a single, unified agenda. The FY2026/3 results presentation makes this explicit, setting out the group's ambition to build innovative systems in both its business and its organisation. Now, that ambition is quantified: a three-year plan targets JPY 1.4 trillion in gross merchandise value and JPY 6.0 billion in operating profit by March 2029, alongside a push beyond payment processing into data-driven scoring and buyer services. These are goals for 2029, not achievements yet, and the company is clear that reaching them will require ongoing redesign of how people work and make decisions, not just what they deliver.

Zero distance to colleagues is measured by whether people work in small, dynamically forming units with strong lateral connections, not just by the absence of hierarchy. Net Protections supports this with a concrete structure, not just a claim of flatness. Over 90 percent of employees participate in its internal family system, which is designed to foster relationships and organisational vitality beyond formal reporting lines. New hires and graduates start their onboarding by building relationships before they begin task training. This same lateral approach led to a 2026 cross-business sales learning session, drawing around 80 employees, including many from outside sales, to explore what selling should mean for the company, grounded in the experiences of four mid-career hires.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills follows a similar path. Net Protections has amassed around 650 million proprietary transaction records and is building a cross-business data foundation, enabling people across five distinct businesses to treat information as a single, connected system rather than isolated silos. This is supported by about six months of structured graduate training and ongoing development for both new and experienced employees.

Zero distance to opportunities is about whether ideas can move from an employee's observation to a real initiative without being stalled by lengthy approval chains. At Net Protections, specialists, not a central innovation team, are the drivers. Engineers are now seen internally as business architects, expected to help shape how the business grows and is structured, not just to deliver on requests. The company is expanding into new commercial territory through installment options, non-physical commerce, offline use cases and platform integrations, rather than following a single, fixed product roadmap.

Zero distance to customers is not about how quickly a support ticket is resolved, but whether teams are willing to redesign their own operating models around the real constraints customers face. For GO BUSINESS, the challenge was not invoicing, but strict credit conditions and growing administrative burdens that limited customer growth. By overhauling the credit and billing operation, the company cut billing work to about a third and extended service to companies previously excluded by those conditions, resulting in significant transaction growth. For Timee, Net Protections positions itself as an integral part of the customer's back office, supporting faster expansion and steadier cash flow, not just acting as an external vendor. atone's expansion, from e-commerce merchandise into digital services, ticketing, travel and physical retail, shows the same approach applied to evolving payment needs.

Zero distance to partners takes the same principle beyond the company's own walls. In 2026, Net Protections launched strategic B2B payment collaborations with JCB and Sumitomo Mitsui Card, integrating its credit, billing and collection infrastructure with two of Japan's major financial networks. The company's growth roadmap calls for deeper partnerships with payment service providers, cart systems, agents and software platforms, rather than building every channel internally. The most recent evidence is the CYBOZU AWARD 2026, where Net Protections received the New Wave Award in the product-partner category for its kintone-integrated billing product, recognised for bringing digital billing to sectors that had long resisted it, such as home-repair services and the funeral industry.

None of this is presented as a finished system. Growth is bringing real strain: more specialist functions to coordinate, more mid-career hires without the company's shared history, heavier governance demands as a listed company, and increasingly complex, multi-party partnerships. The company's own conclusion is measured: a flat structure does not guarantee a self-managing system, and as complexity increases, purpose, information, role clarity, decision rights and relationships all need to be redesigned, not taken for granted. Practices like fluid staffing, the family system, cross-business learning and distributed specialist capability are seen internally as infrastructure for ongoing redesign, not as cultural add-ons. While a detailed account of what broke and how it was fixed in 2025 or 2026 has not been made public, what is clear is the company's intent to keep testing its model against the realities of growth, rather than assume the two will always fit together.

The technology organisation that one leader held together for two decades now operates as business-level units without him at the centre. In the same year, the business those units support grew its gross merchandise value by nearly a fifth and its operating profit by more than a third. Net Protections does not claim that giving away authority directly made the company money. Instead, it points to something more difficult to manufacture: it continued to grow at scale while distributing power, and the next step is to show, decision by decision, how those two forces can work together.

Niverplast

At one point, Niverplast had a project running through fifty different people, each one a tiny link in a chain so long that nobody could see from one end of it to the other. The company had grown to 180 employees by then, and the leadership team noticed something they didn't like: a lot of tired, sagging faces walking the halls. Departments had multiplied. Handovers between them had multiplied faster. What should have been straightforward work was crawling through a maze of walls the company had built for itself, one well-meaning department at a time. That image, fifty people strung along a single chain, is where Niverplast's real transformation begins.

Gerrit Jan Nieuwenhuis walked away from a job at a packaging firm back in the mid-1980s to trade packaging materials on his own, a one-man operation with his wife doing the books. The business grew first into film production, then into something more distinctive: a way of placing bags quickly and ergonomically into crates and boxes, a system that became the seed of an international machine-building business. Today Niverplast designs and builds automated packaging lines for producers of both food and non-food goods, selling into more than ten countries and employing around 300 people out of Nijverdal in the Netherlands.

Two separate pressures pushed the company toward change. On the commercial side, the original film business had turned into a commodity grind, chasing volume on thin margins that left little room to actually make money. On the human side, the shift went back further, to how the founder himself was raised. He grew up working class; his father worked a factory job and dealt in cattle on the side, and taught him early that people rise to the level of trust you give them. Running a growing company, Gerrit Jan found himself acting out a version of leadership he didn't actually believe in, offices, dividends, the assumption that bigger always means better, and coming up empty despite the outward signs of success. Stepping back from that role, deliberately answering questions with questions instead of handing down decisions, is what he now calls a very freeing feeling: "I didn't need the podium."

Zero distance to mission and strategy is the clearest lens for what Niverplast has built since. The company's own shorthand for its purpose, happy colleagues first, then a happy customer, and doing all of it in a non-violent way, isn't a poster in the break room. It shapes concrete choices: no fixed managerial titles, because titles create the kind of power dynamic the company considers a form of violence against the people beneath them, and a redesigned operating model built specifically to protect people's energy rather than extract more of it.

That redesign came in 2020, once the company had reached the point where a project genuinely needed fifty hand-offs to get finished. Rather than layer in more managers to coordinate the chaos, as many growing companies do by default, Niverplast rebuilt its own architecture. As the team put it at the time, the goal was blunt: "We just need to make that chain as short as possible." Instead of departments and handovers, the company split into small, end-to-end cells, roughly thirty people each, built to run almost like independent businesses. Reading Ricardo Semler's Maverick around this same period gave the team something they hadn't had before, proof from outside that the instincts they were already following weren't naive. It didn't hand them a blueprint. It handed them the confidence to say what they valued out loud.

Zero distance to customers shows up directly in how those cells are drawn. Rather than organizing around internal functions, Niverplast built its roughly seven cells around specific product-market combinations, one focused on e-commerce customers, others on bakeries or system integration, so that a customer in a given segment deals with a team built entirely around understanding that segment, not a rotating cast of departments. Each cell carries its own profit-and-loss account, which the company calls radical autonomy: teams see, in real numbers, exactly what their choices cost or earn, and they answer for both. Colleagues there don't describe their cells as departments. They describe them as small companies of their own.

Zero distance to leaders runs through how Niverplast replaced management without leaving a vacuum. Each cell selects what the company calls a natural leader, someone trusted to handle the harder commercial side of the business, forecasting, financing, strategic calls. That person holds responsibility, not authority in the traditional sense, and answers to peers rather than commanding them. The same logic now governs ownership. The company remains legally in family hands, but decision rights have shifted toward a small group of stewards chosen for long-term commitment to the business rather than bloodline. The founder describes himself as wearing a double hat, both family member and steward, but is clear that legitimate authority has to come from inside the company rather than from ownership on paper.

Zero distance to colleagues is built into two mechanisms working side by side. Roughly one in ten people at Niverplast is chosen by peers for a two-year term as what the company calls a buddy, offering coaching-level support on the interpersonal and emotional side of work that a purely technical, engineering-heavy company might otherwise ignore. Buddies work inside their cells, not above them. The second mechanism, the Rollenhuis, literally the Role House, gives every colleague a structured way to map what they actually do, using a visual model the company calls the Niverplast Flower, rather than relying on a job title that quickly falls out of date. Two invited peers, guided by a trained facilitator, help build that picture together. When a workplace tension needs airing, the same process carries the conversation, and the people doing the talking are always colleagues who actually work alongside the person in question, never a manager once removed from the work itself.

Zero distance to data and tools shows in how plainly Niverplast treats pay. Salary bands still borrow from the Dutch metalworking sector's collective labor agreement, but the company stripped out automatic raises tied to age or tenure; pay now moves with responsibility and peer-recognized contribution instead. The internal test for whether the system is working is refreshingly literal: if the full salary list were printed and pinned to the wall, nobody should be shocked. Hiring works on the same transparency. Interviews are run by groups of future colleagues rather than a single manager, and every promising candidate spends a full day actually working inside the company before anyone decides anything, a two-way audition rather than a one-sided interview.

Zero bureaucracy is easiest to see in what Niverplast refused to build. There is no traditional HR department, which the company associates with policy-writing and cleanup rather than people. Recruitment and people questions instead sit partly inside the cells and partly with a small support group the company calls colleagues and the organization, there to help, not to gatekeep. Not every experiment has landed cleanly. An early attempt to fold customer service fully into the cells met resistance and was paused, only for teams to ask for that same integration themselves a couple of years later. Niverplast treats that kind of reversal as normal, not failure, part of a running cycle of trying something, pausing when it doesn't fit, and returning to it once the organization is ready.

Zero distance to results and rewards is where the company's convictions show up most starkly. Once reserves are funded, the remaining profit splits between colleagues, family, and charity, using a formula nobody has to guess at because nothing about it is negotiated behind closed doors. The colleagues' share is split exactly equally per person, regardless of salary, seniority, or role, so a machine assembler and a company director receive the identical amount. "It's a profit share that is exactly the same per head," as one colleague described it. The model has run for nearly a decade, missing only one year when results didn't allow it. The family still shares in the profit but has deliberately given up the power to direct it, describing the business itself as something closer to a fifth child to be cared for than an asset to extract from.

None of this arrived by design from day one. Niverplast didn't set out to build a self-managing company; it set out to solve a chain that had grown too long and a founder who no longer believed in the role he was playing. Cells, buddies, stewards, and the Rollenhuis all emerged from specific, practical problems rather than a theory imported wholesale. Asked what the whole journey has meant to him personally, Gerrit Jan takes more satisfaction now in what he built and then let go of than in what he originally started, on the belief, as he puts it, that "everyone is just the best version of themselves." A company that once needed fifty people to move one project forward now runs on cells nobody has to manage into moving at all.

OpenNexus

Roughly one in three public tenders awarded in Poland runs through software built by a company that has no boss. OpenNexus, a software company headquartered in Poznań, Poland, runs the digital plumbing connecting public buyers and suppliers across the country's procurement market, a market worth close to 587 billion Polish złoty in 2024, more than 16 percent of the country's entire economic output. Contracts specifically governed by Poland's Public Procurement Law alone were worth 330.4 billion złoty, over 9 percent of GDP. All of that runs through a company of roughly forty people that has deliberately never replaced the manager role it once had.

OpenNexus started, like most companies, with a founder at the center of every decision. It moved through a looser period the company itself now calls intuitive self-organization, before settling into something more deliberate: a network the company calls circles, small teams that manage themselves, cross functional and built around their own purpose, along with a system of shifting role assignments, open finances and results shared across the business. "Where others see procedure, we see impact," is how the company describes its own reason for existing. In 2026, co-founder Grzegorz Klimarczyk published a book about the journey, Firma bez szefa (A Company Without a Boss), and Poznań University of Technology is separately studying the model through doctoral research. OpenNexus treats the entire model, mistakes included, as open material for anyone to study, on the theory that other organizations should be able to learn from it faster than OpenNexus itself did.

Zero distance to leaders begins with the plainest fact about OpenNexus: it has no chief executive and no managers. Authority is not attached to a person's seniority or job title. It is attached to a role, and a role only exists as long as the system that defines it says it does. Even the founder cannot push someone out of a role on their own say-so. Doing that requires first changing the rule that created the role in the first place, a process open to anyone, not reserved for leadership. Two circles anchor the structure. The Strategic Circle handles the practical side: market conditions, financial data, legal boundaries, defining where the organization can safely act. The Transformation Circle, twelve of the company's longest-serving people, handles something closer to the organization's memory, safeguarding its values, watching the health of its culture, building the systems that help people grow, without managing a single person directly. Because neither circle sits above the other in a chain of command, the distance between someone doing frontline work and the top of the organization is, quite literally, zero. There is no ladder to climb, because there is no ladder. Klimarczyk has set himself a public deadline for stepping away from that job entirely: 2028. There is no successor waiting in the wings. What takes his place instead is the system itself, and every colleague who works inside it.

Zero distance to data and tools started earlier than the rest of the model, before the role structure that now supports it was even finished. OpenNexus opened its salaries first, full transparency on every individual's pay, and only built the rest of the architecture around that decision afterward. Today the same openness covers revenue, costs, profit, how each circle is performing, and how every major decision got made. The guiding principle is not to drown people in numbers; it is to make sure each person has exactly the information their own role requires. Circles read their own profit-and-loss figures directly, and the formulas behind every raise and bonus are published and simple enough that anyone can check the math themselves. New colleagues tend to move through the same sequence: disbelief that this much is really visible, relief once they realize open numbers put an end to office gossip and quiet backroom negotiating, and finally the harder realization that transparency also takes away what the company calls "the comfort of not knowing."

Zero distance to colleagues shows in how OpenNexus organizes itself, as a web of circles coordinating directly with each other rather than a stack of departments reporting upward. People often hold roles in more than one circle at once, wherever their skills create value, so the organization's shape tends to follow whatever the work needs, not the reverse. If a role ends up carrying too much, or two circles start pulling against each other, or ownership of a decision goes unclear, that gets raised as a tension at a Strategic Circle meeting. What comes out of that meeting is not a verbal reassurance or a decision pushed up to somebody senior. It is a concrete edit to a role, a rule or a policy, something anyone can point to afterward. The organization repairs itself in public, one visible agreement at a time.

Zero distance to mission and strategy rests on a simple test OpenNexus applies to itself: if two people in different circles run into a similar situation, a good strategy should lead them toward compatible decisions without either one needing to ask permission first. Three levels of circles share that responsibility. One circle, Transformation, exists to protect the mission and keep the culture intact. Another, Strategic, turns market conditions, financial data and legal limits into concrete direction and boundaries for everyone else. Tactical and operational circles translate that direction into their own targets, including harder tensions like protecting quality while the company grows quickly. OpenNexus is candid that this took real trial and error. Early attempts at building strategy by stitching together whatever bottom-up ideas different circles wanted produced something that looked participatory but gave nobody real direction, a pattern the company now calls, not entirely seriously, a "Frankenstein strategy." Naming that failure openly, rather than quietly dropping it, is part of how the company protects the clarity that makes the rest of its structure work.

Zero distance to customers is easiest to see in a single decision made inside the company's finance circle. When a client's payment ran late, the standard move would have been to apply an automatic interest charge. The circle called the client instead, to find out what was really going on. In the public procurement world, a mechanical penalty risked souring an ongoing relationship with the public official handling that account, a relationship worth more over time than one late fee. The circle made that call itself, gave up the short-term revenue, and never needed anyone's approval to do it. The same directness runs through the product: what thousands of buyers and suppliers say about the platforms goes straight to the circles building them, with nobody in a management role standing in between.

Zero distance to opportunity means nobody at OpenNexus needs a title to try something new. Anyone who spots a real tension can propose an initiative, pull in people from outside their usual circle, and start building a solution. The only real hurdle is persuasion: convincing the relevant circle that the idea genuinely serves the mission, not climbing a chain of approvals. Circles and roles are built the same way opportunities are found, created when a real need justifies them, closed or redesigned once that need changes. Every circle keeps a public charter spelling out its purpose, its roles, how it makes decisions and its own backlog of open tensions, enough structure to move fast without autonomy turning into dozens of separate side projects with nothing holding them together.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action that comes with it, means people and circles can make real decisions without waiting for anyone's sign-off, as long as they stay inside a clear mandate, check in with whoever is affected, and answer for what happens next. Autonomy here is not the absence of rules. It works because the purpose, the decision rights and the boundaries are spelled out clearly enough that people do not need to ask. Salary increases have followed this logic since 2020, first decided by autonomous teams, now decided by the circles themselves, scaled to how well the business is doing and whether its targets were met.

Zero distance to partners follows from treating OpenNexus as a platform other people can build on, not a closed shop that only buys services when it needs them. With an outside partner, 313C, the company co-built a psychometric simulation game that judges job candidates against seven behaviors instead of leaning mainly on a CV and an interview. Poznań University of Technology is running independent doctoral research into the model through an anonymous survey of the people living inside it. Through a newsletter, free webinars and public panels with local government practitioners, OpenNexus shares not just what works but what has not, publishing its full operating model, compensation rules included, for anyone to study, competitors among them. The company's own reasoning is that useful knowledge makes the whole ecosystem stronger the more freely it moves.

Zero distance to results and rewards took its clearest shape in 2020, when OpenNexus abolished individual sales commissions entirely. The goal was to stop rewarding whoever optimized their own small corner of the business and start rewarding value the whole company created together. Two mechanisms replaced the old commissions. Growth funds permanent raises: a quarter of any year-on-year revenue increase permanently enlarges the total salary pool. Efficiency funds the annual bonus, through a fixed, public formula that splits net profit three ways: half reinvested in the company, a quarter paid out as a shareholder dividend, and a quarter shared across the entire team, with no separate bonus pools carved out for sales, engineering or anyone else. Someone who thinks the standard formula undervalues their own contribution can ask for more, but has to make that case openly to the peers they work with rather than negotiate it behind a closed door. All of this supports a deliberate choice to hold the team near forty people, leaning on automation and early AI adoption to grow revenue instead of adding headcount, a pattern the company calls its "technology dividend." Salaries have grown faster than the market as a result, and by the end of 2025 the gap between the company's highest and lowest salary had narrowed to a ratio of 3.3 to 1.

The hardest period in OpenNexus's history was not leaving its old hierarchy behind. It was the two years afterward. Energy and bottom-up initiative were everywhere, but coordination was not, and the founder kept swinging from handing people freedom to quietly grabbing the wheel back. The turning point came at a 2023 workshop, when the team admitted that good intentions and close working relationships could not carry a business on their own. What followed reversed their original instinct: structure was not what had been holding autonomy back. It was what let autonomy hold up over time. OpenNexus now draws a sharp line between self-organization and self-management, treating them as genuinely different operating systems rather than two names for the same idea. Take a boss away, and the need for direction, accountability and discipline does not disappear with him. It only gets heavier.

OpenNexus still describes its own model as unfinished, and treats that openly as part of what makes it credible rather than something to hide. A company moving close to a tenth of Poland's GDP through its platforms, with a pay gap of 3.3 between its highest and lowest earner and not a single manager on the payroll, is proof that public money and flat structure are not opposites. So far, it is evidence that they can run on the same rails.

PCS

On 26 January 2026 the several businesses trading under the PCS name in Vietnam changed dramatically. The express delivery company, the warehousing operation and the e-commerce arm, which had grown up over fifteen years as member companies of a general corporation, were merged into one legal entity, PCS Logistics Joint Stock Company, and the new name reached customers a month later. For a company that had spent six years pulling its own hierarchy apart, the merger answered a question that had been open the whole time: whether autonomous teams need separate companies to sit inside. PCS decided they do not. The teams stayed autonomous and the corporate scaffolding around them came down.

The business began in Hanoi in October 2010 as a courier service built to connect Vietnamese exporters to buyers abroad. Direct lanes to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore followed in 2011, Seoul in 2014, then a Tokyo branch and membership of the Skynet network in 2017. The decisive turn came in 2019, when PCS entered domestic parcel delivery. Domestic delivery is a volume business with thin margins, and the gap between a good day and a bad one is closed by drivers, warehouse staff and customer service agents acting in the moment. A structure that routed every exception upward could not survive in it. The pandemic then removed any remaining appetite for slow decisions, and PCS committed to what it calls its Open model, developed with the New Zealand consultancy Teal Unicorn, run by Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ. Three commitments carry it: the customer sits at the centre, employees are the core of the company's development, and the culture is transparent and fair. In September 2025 the company was named a winner in the Emergent Excellence category of the ZeroDX Awards in Beijing.

Mission and strategy, meaning what a company exists to do and how it settles where to go next, is unusually concrete at PCS because it has been reduced to two questions. Every decision must answer what value it creates for the customer, and what benefit it brings to the employee. A proposal that cannot answer both does not proceed. Around those questions sits a motto the company has used since its founding, to sow human values and deliver journeys of happiness, and a three-phase roadmap that is public and dated. The first phase established a flat management model and an agile culture. The second, running through 2025 and 2026, is building a micro-enterprise model in which each unit plans for itself. The third, set for 2027 and 2028, is a green and digital supply chain with intermediary management removed. Naming the removal of middle management as a scheduled phase, four years ahead, is a harder commitment than most companies make.

Action, meaning how a decision turns into work, is where the model is most visible on the warehouse floor. PCS describes its structure as an inverted pyramid, with frontline staff and customers at the top. Work is organised into cross-functional teams of three to five people drawn from warehousing, transport, customer care and information technology, and those teams hold the authority to settle specific problems themselves: a customer complaint, a route that needs changing, a shipment that has to be rebuilt. The company also abandoned linear process for cycles of one to two weeks, so a change to how a lane runs is tested and judged inside a fortnight rather than proposed and queued.

Leaders at PCS are measured on whether people can act without them. Chairwoman Lê Thị Thu and chief executive Đỗ Vũ Dương stopped assessing managers on compliance with instructions and moved them onto developing skills and clearing obstacles. Coordination happens in short stand-ups and open conversation rather than in reporting lines. Thu's own account of the early period is not a claim about results but about patience. "I believe 200% on the road we are travelling," she told her people, asking them to wait for the results to arrive. They did arrive, but the interesting part is that she asked for time in public rather than promising a return by a date.

Colleagues and the way skills are built run together at PCS, because the company treats capability as the thing that makes autonomy safe. Rigid departments gave way to mixed teams that move toward whatever needs them most, and development became continuous rather than annual, combining technical training with mentoring and the Shu-Ha-Ri progression, which moves a person from following a rule, to adapting it, to setting a better one. The effect of that sequence is that a team is only given decisions it has been equipped to make. Data, tools and skills reinforce the same point: PCS runs its own warehouse and order management systems, so real-time operational data reaches the people closest to a problem, and shared visual boards make priorities and progress legible to everyone rather than to a manager. One early test of the approach was narrow and fast. After Dr Vũ trained the sales team in daily stand-ups, a shared kanban board and Shu-Ha-Ri, that single team grew new customers by 52 per cent and revenue by 22 per cent inside one week.

Partners are treated as part of the operation rather than as suppliers to it. PCS moves freight through DHL, UPS and FedEx, works inside the Skynet network, and runs fulfilment through overseas centres in California, Incheon and Hertfordshire alongside domestic hubs in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Bình Dương. Information is shared with these partners and solutions are designed jointly, which is how the company has cut customs delays on lanes it does not itself control. Reach now extends to more than 220 countries.

Opportunities, meaning how a new idea becomes a real line of business, tend to start at the edge of PCS rather than in a strategy meeting. A hackathon festival held in Hanoi in June 2022 put employee proposals in front of the whole company, and two finalists, an e-commerce platform and a shipping solutions website, came from staff rather than from leadership. The ePacket service, which lets Vietnamese sellers reach Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop US and Wayfair, grew out of that same period of frontline experiment, as did specialist handling for difficult freight such as VinFast electric vehicle batteries. PCS Ecommerce was founded as a distinct business in 2024. In 2025 the company added halal logistics, building hygiene and compliance processes for Muslim markets, an unusual bet for a Vietnamese courier and one that no competitor had made.

Customers are close enough to change the service. PCS serves more than two thousand customers in international express alone, most of them foreign-invested enterprises, and counts VinFast, Hòa Phát, Thiên Long and SAIC Motor among the brands that rely on it. Its business-to-business international express solutions cut customer costs by up to 30 per cent and process orders 20 per cent faster, with on-time delivery at 99 per cent.

Results and rewards close the loop, and PCS has been deliberate about not letting them stop at the top. Six separate profit and loss accounts were merged into one shared account, so divisions could no longer win at each other's expense, and 33 per cent of annual profit is distributed among employees. The company now runs on charter capital of 80 billion Vietnamese dong with more than 300 staff, handling over 3,000 orders and 30 to 40 tonnes a day. Domestic delivery grew 98.9 per cent in 2024. New large-enterprise customers have been arriving at an average of 20 per cent a year, and revenue across the system has risen by more than 50 per cent.

The work is not finished, and PCS says so in its own roadmap. The micro-enterprise phase, in which every unit plans and answers for itself, is still being built and will not be complete until the end of 2026. The removal of intermediary management is scheduled rather than done. The company also operates in a country where logistics costs run at 16 to 18 per cent of gross domestic product, well above developed economies, which means much of what determines a Vietnamese courier's performance sits outside its own walls, in ports, roads and customs. What PCS has proved so far is narrower and more useful than a claim about the industry: that a fifteen-year-old family of companies can be dismantled into small teams, then reassembled as one, without putting the decisions back at the top.

Portal

Portal runs contactless robotic car washes that customers start from a phone app, with a wash taking roughly three to eleven minutes. Founded in 2018, the network reported 49 locations by the end of 2025, revenue above one billion rubles, with more than 180 people employed. Portal also franchises its washes: since 2022 it has offered partners a turnkey robotic wash for a lump-sum fee plus an ongoing royalty, a model listed independently across franchise catalogues.

By 2024 the growth was real but slower than the owners wanted, and the reasons were structural. Every important decision flowed up to the two founders. Staff poured energy into internal processes while the product itself stalled, because almost no one was looking at it from the customer’s side. Teams had little authority, competed with each other for budget and people, and no one could say cleanly who owned a given result. The owners took a course in Clientocracy, a customer-first management model popularised by the grocery chain VkusVill and guided by the consulting firm BeyondTaylor, and began rebuilding the company around it.

Two structures did most of the work. First came a Management Council made up of leaders who each owned a specific Client Value. From those values they derived Promises (the concrete result a customer should get) and metrics to check whether each promise held: wash speed, waiting time, number of open sites, and each site’s revenue and profitability. The exercise exposed a telling gap. Until they mapped it out, no one in the company had been accountable for wash quality itself. Second came Autonomous Teams, each owning a slice of the customer experience: a retail team for availability and speed of service, a quality team for the wash result, a development team for opening locations. Every team set its own promises, metrics and decision rights, and the owners rebuilt the economics and incentive system so that each team could see how its work fed the company’s profit.

Zero bureaucracy is where Portal has many examples. The Management Council was given real authority to act without the founders, its members became intrapreneurs. Lower down, the change is just as concrete: a field employee who once could not replace a 10,000-ruble lock without hunting for someone to approve the budget can now simply do it. When one wash needed repairs, the retail team skipped the old process and found a way to fix it for 300,000 rubles in three days.

Zero time to market shows up in that same repair and in decision speed generally: choices that used to wait for the founders now happen at the edge. The honest qualifier is that time to market here is mostly about operational and repair cycles rather than launching new products, and the cleanest speed figure, downtime falling from 25.5 hours to 0.5, is a recovery-time metric, not a product-launch one.

Zero distance to customer is built into the design: the whole structure hangs off Client Values and Promises, and complaints and wash quality now have named owners.

Zero idle resources is more present than it first looks. Each Autonomous Team functions like a small P&L-owning unit, accountable for the revenue and profitability of its patch, and the redesigned incentives reward teams for helping each other rather than hoarding. Capital is handled the same way. Because Portal runs a genuine franchise arm, the Management Council could sell a company-owned wash into that model, turning a fixed asset into cash and redeploying it into new sites; the 300,000-ruble repair likewise kept an asset earning instead of sitting dark. What the case does not yet show is a true internal market or a dynamic pool that moves people between teams on demand, so the dimension is evidenced through capital reallocation and unit-level ownership more than through fluid staffing.

The reported outcomes are striking: annual revenue up 85%, franchise revenue up fourfold, average check doubled, terminal complaints down 33%, and service downtime cut from 25.5 to 0.5 hours. They should be read as correlation rather than proven cause. The network also roughly expanded its footprint over the same period, so the operating model is one driver among several, and the figures want independent confirmation against Portal’s own records.

Some teams adopted the model in three months; others needed more than a year, with restarts and outside support, and success hinged on whether a team’s leader truly believed in delegating. The Management Council itself started slowly: about half its members were reluctant to speak up at first, and early meetings burned time on internal conflict and tentative decisions.

What makes Portal a strong example of Zero Distance is that the founders built a network capable of making a sixty-million-ruble decision without them present, with the founders learning about it only afterward.

Pradke

Andre Pradke, founder and owner of the German software company Pradtke, came back from vacation one week to find his own company had quietly reorganized around him. Developers had been sorted into two new categories: people authorized to write technical specifications, and people authorized to build them. Andre checked the list for his own name. He wasn't on either side of it. He hadn't been ruled out maliciously, and nobody was trying to make a point. He simply wasn't the right fit for either role, and the team said so plainly. For a founder, that is a strange thing to sit with. For a company trying to prove that authority should follow skill rather than title, it was close to the whole idea working exactly as intended.

Pradtke, based in Bochum in western Germany, builds workforce management software, mainly shift and duty rostering, with parts of the payroll process built in, for hospitals, nursing homes, fire services and other organizations in the social and care sector. The company employs around 60 people. For years its finances lurched between feast and famine: long-term contracts kept a baseline of revenue stable, but new business arrived in large, unpredictable lumps, and some months the company posted an outright loss. Andre has described that volatility as something that wore him down personally, not just financially. Somewhere in that period he picked up a book by systems theorist Niels Pflaeging, found that it matched how he already thought about organizations far more than it matched how his own company ran day to day, and eventually reached out. A slow-burning conversation followed. About a year later, it turned into a full transformation, and then into a second one, and then a third.

Zero distance to leaders is what put Andre's own name on the wrong side of that authorization list, and he treats the story as one worth telling rather than one to smooth over. The company's overall direction, and Pradtke's participation in the wider research the transformation grew out of, still runs through him. But which specific person gets to design a piece of software is no longer his call, or anyone's title. He describes his own current role less as owner-in-charge and more as a stakeholder and idea generator, someone who can argue for what belongs on the company's near-term work list but who does not get final say over it. That distinction, between having a voice and having authority, is not a formality at Pradtke. It shapes daily decisions about the product.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action it produces, shows most clearly in how Pradtke now builds software, after two organizational shifts had already taken hold. The company dismantled its old scrum process entirely, along with its dailies, its weeklies, its retrospectives and its ever-growing backlog, and replaced it with a short, finite list of specific work items, each sized to take one to three days. A designated list owner, the company's CTO, curates it constantly. People capable of writing a clear technical concept for an item are recognized as such by their colleagues, not appointed; people who build what's been conceptualized are recognized the same way. The two roles can overlap in one person, and an item only moves to being built once both sides agree the concept is genuinely ready. Nothing gets batched. Finished work reaches production the same day it's done, sometimes the next, rather than waiting for a release scheduled months out.

Zero distance to colleagues followed naturally once the company had already decentralized once before touching software. Developers who used to sit together in a single department were split up and placed inside the small, largely self-running teams, one or two per team, that now run each part of the business. It changed what those developers spent their days doing. People who had only ever written code started sitting in on conversations about subscription pricing with clients, something Andre says would have been unthinkable under the old structure, and several of them say they've come to enjoy it.

Zero distance to customers runs through the same shift. When Pradtke rebuilt its pricing around a simple monthly plan, the rollout wasn't centrally managed. Each small team handled the conversation with its own clients directly, and most customers had switched over within the first month. On the product side, developers embedded in teams now hear directly what a client needs, and because finished work reaches production within days rather than being saved for an annual release, a client who raised an issue can often see it addressed within the same week.

Zero distance to data and tools shows in how precisely Pradtke can now say where a project stands. Unlike a backlog, which tends to hide most of its true size behind a handful of well-described items and a long tail of vague ones, Pradtke's work list is fully mapped from the start, so the company can name an exact date when a major technical project will be finished, something Andre calls close to unheard of in software work. Testing is built into each item rather than bolted on afterward: every item ships with its own automated tests, checked through a build pipeline before anything reaches production.

Zero distance to partners is visible in how far the relationship with Niels Pflaeging and the BetaCodex Network has moved past ordinary consulting. Pradtke's CTO joined the underlying research project directly, and the company's own months of real-world practice became raw material for a published methodology used elsewhere, feeding a second research paper on patterns of adoption. 

Zero distance to mission and strategy is easiest to see in what Pradtke chose to fix, and in what order. Every one of its three transformations, organizational restructuring first, then the pricing model, then how software itself gets built, was triggered by the same underlying complaint: promises the company made were not reliably being kept. Fixing that, rather than adopting a management trend for its own sake, is what Andre points to as the actual throughline connecting all three changes.

Zero distance to opportunity shows in how directly one transformation kept exposing the need for the next. Decentralizing the organization didn't fix software delivery on its own, so the team designed a new development process to close that specific gap. That process then surfaced a live opportunity to experiment with AI-assisted coding, which the company tried, quickly, in the open, and which initially backfired.

Zero distance to results and rewards is where the numbers do the talking. Before decentralizing, the company had months with a net loss on the books. Since running as small, semi-autonomous teams, it hasn't had one. 

None of this arrived without a real stumble. Eager to move faster with AI tools, Pradtke briefly let developers draft technical concepts in bulk instead of one at a time, and within days had roughly 300 half-finished concepts stacked up instead of the usual 20 or 30. The whole system seized. Output, for a stretch, approached zero. The company diagnosed it quickly, restored its one-at-a-time discipline and moved on, but Andre tells the story openly rather than editing it out. 

What makes Pradtke worth watching isn't that a mid-sized German software firm reorganized itself, plenty of companies do that. It's that a founder was willing to be told, by name, that he wasn't the right person for either of the two jobs at the center of his own product, and treated that as proof the system was working rather than a threat to override. A company willing to tell its own owner where he doesn't belong is a company that has genuinely redistributed authority, not just talked about doing so.

Premium Minds

Every team at Premium Minds has an Agile Coach but the coach never belongs to that team. They come from somewhere else in the company and spend eight hours a week on the role, on top of their own full-time job and their own deadlines. The coach for the payments team, say, sits on a completely different team. That team's own coach comes from a third team. And so it goes, all the way around the company, forming one continuous loop. Nobody planned that loop from the top down. It emerged because Premium Minds believes something specific: a coach with no stake in a team's daily politics can see that team more clearly than someone sitting inside it. The company calls this pollination. It is the clearest window into how the whole organization is built.

Premium Minds is a 24-year-old software house founded in Lisbon. It has stayed independent and self-funded throughout, and had grown to 143 people by the end of 2025. In all that time, it never inserted a rung of supervisors between its project teams and the people running the company. That gap is deliberate, not an accident of slow growth. Years ago, once headcount passed thirty, someone inside the company circulated a slide showing how much weight management adds to a typical organization. It started a debate that shaped everything afterward. The company decided against adding supervisory layers. Instead, it would keep pushing autonomy outward, toward the people doing the work itself. 

Two things came out of that decision instead of a management pyramid: the Agile Coach role, and a small, eighteen-person support group, called "estrutura," that handles finance, recruitment, IT and people operations for the roughly 120 people doing client work. The company's current CEO, Rodrigo Dias, took the role three and a half years ago from his older brother, the company's founder. Rodrigo had spent the years before that running the people function himself, so the handover kept the same instincts in charge without a formal outside search.

Zero distance to mission and strategy shows in a choice Premium Minds made early on: write a Manifesto, not the usual mission-vision-values slide. The company spent 2019 and 2020 drafting it, eventually pulling in every employee along the way. The Manifesto reads as a single paragraph in the first person. It says "I do this," never "we believe this." Ten Guiding Principles expand on it, grouped under four plain-spoken headings people use in everyday conversation. None of this is printed on a wall or posted on the company website. That's on purpose: a value written in the first person can be revised without ceremony. One already has been. In 2022, a volunteer group reopened it, and the whole company weighed in again. Premium Minds never adopted a named framework like Holacracy or sociocracy to get here. CEO Rodrigo Dias describes the approach as closer to tending a garden than following a blueprint, building practices only once the need for them became obvious. "We're just letting things grow and trying to tend to them," he says, "more like a gardener than an architect."

Zero distance to opportunity is about how fast an idea can travel, from a hallway conversation to something people use every day. A recurring creative day, later reshaped into two company-wide hackathons a year chosen by vote with no outside judge, has produced a run of tools still in daily use: a holiday-planning tool called Rolodex, a people directory called Tribo, and, more recently, a small suite of AI tools, including a documentation generator and a task-estimation assistant trained on the company's own project history. Nobody has to pitch a business case to try something for a day. They just show up.

Zero distance to customers is where Premium Minds' instincts are most literal. There are no account managers and no separate maintenance organization. Either one, the company believes, would recreate the very distance it is trying to remove. Every person, regardless of role, carries a principle that reads, in part, "I actively create a relationship with the client so they don't become a distant entity." In practice, that means clients see the same project boards, bug trackers and documentation the internal team works from, instead of a status report written just for them. Most of the company's revenue today comes from clients who have stayed on for the better part of a decade, and its single oldest account has run for more than twenty years.

Zero distance to leaders starts with the Agile Coach system, but it doesn't end there. Premium Minds is honest that the coach model has real costs. Someone splitting attention between two jobs struggles when either one hits a crisis, and being outside a team's daily rhythm means missing the exact moments of conflict or celebration that matter most. The company tried alternatives anyway: a dedicated coach inside each team, one coach shared across all teams, even a single full-time coach for a year. Each time, it went back to the cross-team model, judging the trade-off worth it. The only other role with a public written description, Tech Lead, works on similar logic. Each team chooses its Tech Lead jointly with the CTO, and the role rotates on no fixed schedule, sometimes landing with someone quite junior. Whoever holds it is expected to make the hard technical calls happen, without absorbing the rest of the team's responsibility for them.

Above the teams sits a five-person leadership group: the CEO, plus four people he invited, each owning one lens on the business. One tracks client relationships. One tracks technology and AI. One tracks infrastructure and security. And one person's only job is asking how a decision will land on people. Nothing significant gets decided without all four of those perspectives in the room. Deciding who sits on which project team, an exercise colleagues nickname ‘the puzzle’, stays with that five-person group rather than the teams themselves. Today, the company pulls in more people for input while keeping the final call centralized.

Zero distance to colleagues shows in small details the company chose to write down rather than leave to habit. Everyone, from new hire to chief executive, addresses everyone else with the informal form of "you." The monthly all-company meeting always closes with an open floor for questions, including the uncomfortable ones nobody wants to ask first. A whistleblowing channel is run exclusively by the people-operations team, specifically so management never learns who raised what. Even the office kitchen has a Guiding Principle: don't grab more than your share of the communal fruit in the morning, in case there isn't enough left later. Once a year, at the Christmas party, colleagues write letters to whichever coworkers mattered to them. The resulting basket, handed out at random in front of the whole company, reliably produces what the company itself calls a very emotional moment.

Zero distance to data and tools runs through two things: an internal wiki holding everything from expense procedures to every past meeting's minutes, and ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions where management answers any question in a shared channel, archived permanently for anyone to search later. Training got the same direct treatment once employees flagged it as weak in an internal survey. The company responded by putting a senior person on it full time and building an internal academy that now runs dozens of sessions a year, guided by a standing survey of the engineering team's own skill gaps. The same instinct shaped how the company approached artificial intelligence. Instead of management deciding a company line and announcing it, discipline-by-discipline sessions asked people to place themselves on a visible board according to their own AI experience. They then wrote down their fears about the technology exactly as they felt them, unedited. One internal summary of those sessions reached a blunt conclusion: hands-on exposure was doing more good than the awareness campaign built to sell people on the technology.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action that comes with it, shows most clearly in what Premium Minds simply never built: no clock-in system, no career ladder or job-level matrix despite years of trying to design one, and, for a long stretch, no fixed number of holiday days at all. That last policy didn't survive the company's growth in its original form. With ten or twenty people talking constantly, an undefined holiday policy worked fine. Past a certain size, it backfired: people took fewer days than the law entitled them to, and newer hires grew quietly anxious because nobody had told them where the boundary sat. The fix kept the original spirit but gave it a shape. Anyone can take 26 days of holidays, the legal minimum plus four, without asking permission. Anything beyond that needs nothing more than a short conversation about why. There is still no formal approval step for booking time off.

The same instinct runs through a standing mechanism called the consultative group. It convenes whenever a real tension surfaces, whether that's burnout, office space, or how profit should be split. The group is staffed by people invited specifically for holding a strong, relevant opinion, and every option gets argued out loud, with disagreements kept on the record rather than smoothed over. Management still makes the final call, and the company doesn't pretend otherwise. But every one of those calls comes back to the whole company with a plain explanation of which part of the argument shaped it.

Zero distance to results and rewards played out fully in the 2025 consultative group tasked with redesigning the company's profit-sharing pool. The group tested nearly every criterion imaginable: equal shares, individual performance, tenure, function, days worked. It rejected only two outright, rewarding popularity, and rewarding whichever project someone happened to be staffed on. What it settled on split the pool three ways: an equal share for everyone, a seniority component, and a piece tied to salary. The whole company heard the decision the day before it took effect. What that open process doesn't touch is the size of the pool itself. Performance reviews run on a more visible, parallel logic: no scores, no grades, just a two-way conversation about the work itself instead of a number handed down.

None of this happened because Premium Minds drew a perfect chart and followed it. It happened because the company kept handing authority to whoever stood closest to the work: a coach with nothing to gain from a team's politics, a Manifesto written in the first person, a consultative group willing to argue its reasoning out loud in front of everyone. Twenty-four years on, Premium Minds is still more gardener than architect, and that may be exactly why it keeps growing into a place worth working for.

PTHR

A year earlier, PTHR’s story had been one of quiet deepening: a self-managed consultancy treating work systems as living organisms, mapping its own web of relationships, planning to widen employee ownership. Then the market turned. When a small consultancy starts losing clients, the reflex is to pull the reins in. In 2025 PTHR did close to the opposite. As its team shrank from seven people to three during the toughest commercial year in its history, the UK firm pushed authority further out rather than in, and turned the lived experience of changing shape under pressure into a new management idea it now calls the Polymorphic Organisation.

For readers meeting PTHR for the first time: People and Transformational HR is an organisation design and effectiveness consultancy set up in 2012 by Perry Timms, with one stated ambition: to help create better business for a better world. It is a certified B Corporation that ranked in the top 5% of B Corps globally in 2022, and in 2024 the Haier Model Institute named it among the world’s Top 50 self-managed enterprises; Timms received WorldBlu’s Lifetime Achievement Award the same year. Through 2025 the firm had been intensifying its systems thinking and learning to read early signals, noticing, as Timms put it, when something feels slightly off before it grows into a real problem. That attentiveness met a genuine test when reduced client spending produced PTHR’s leanest commercial year yet.

PTHR had never run on hierarchy. Its work was organised not into departments but into interlocking Operating Model Stacks (Strategy, Sustainability, Intelligence, Finance, Operations and others) each owned and co-owned by two people, so authority sat with those closest to the work. The firm had even begun drawing this out visually: a constellation map of how people and projects connect, and a basketball-court-style model of how roles shift and overlap. 

When the team contracted, it did not bolt a management layer back on. The three who remained widened their roles across strategy, delivery, innovation and ecosystem-building, and responsibilities flexed week to week. That experience of an organisation deliberately reshaping itself became the seed of the Polymorphic Organisation: an enterprise built to change its form, operating logic and leadership energy as demands change, while staying anchored to purpose. PTHR now treats itself as the first live example.

On zero distance to customer, PTHR works as a co-creator rather than a vendor, immersing itself in a client’s world rather than advising from outside it; Timms is careful to say “not out of neediness, but to understand them well enough to help”. Most of its signature frameworks (HR 3.0, Organisational Oscillation, Proficiency Stacks, and the Polymorphic model itself) grew directly out of live client problems. The firm also describes a free AI companion, Poly, that lets anyone explore the Polymorphic principles with no transaction attached: value exchanged through participation rather than invoice. It is a striking expression of closeness to users, by PTHR’s own account of how the tool works.

On zero bureaucracy, the most telling evidence is what PTHR did not do under stress: rather than centralising authority when money got tight, it kept decisions collective and financial information open, on the view that hard times are never when a hierarchy actually helps. 

On zero time to market, a three-person team published a remarkable amount in one year (the Polymorphic framework, advances to HR 3.0, dozens of long-form essays, keynotes and the Poly bot) because an idea can travel from a client insight to a published model with no approval chain in between. Tellingly, Timms found that getting clearer about revenue sparked fresh offerings rather than stifling them.

Zero idle resources is the dimension easiest to miss, and here PTHR is genuinely interesting rather than merely tidy. Its Stacks model is designed to turn internal capability into new ventures: the Sustainability Stack, for instance, spun out a separate regenerative-culture enterprise called ARC. People function as dynamically allocated capacity ( three individuals covering the surface area of many roles) and intellectual property is recycled into client work, writing and tools rather than left on a shelf. 

Open financials and a stated move toward fully self-set pay point the same way, treating reward as something the team allocates itself. The honest qualifier is scale: at three people, the “internal market” for talent and the P&L ownership of units are lived informally rather than formalised, so this is a real strength with clear room to mature.

The outcomes need to be told straight, because the celebratory parts and the hard parts are the same story. Commercially, 2025 was down: revenue fell and the team halved. Against that, PTHR recertified as a B Corporation, held its climate-positive commitments, advanced or published four management frameworks, and kept its global standing in the self-management community and, by Timms’s own account, found that financial clarity generated ideas rather than killing them. It would overreach to claim the operating model caused the firm to come through the year; a different firm with the same model might not have. But it is fair to say PTHR met a real stress test without discarding the principles it sells itself.

The commercial base still has to be rebuilt at a sustainable size. The plan to reach fully self-set pay, once targeted for 2026, has had its timeline adjusted for stability, and the longer ambitions (full employee ownership and new ventures in education and digitisation) remain ahead rather than achieved. 

The Polymorphic Organisation is a young idea whose main proof point is, for now, PTHR itself; it needs other organisations to test it before it earns the weight of a model. And the firm reports an invitation from Ricardo Semler to contribute to the next chapter of his Semco work.

What makes PTHR distinctive is the question it puts to the self-management movement: is distributed, freedom-centred organisation only a model for good times, or also for hard ones? Plenty of firms practise it while growing. PTHR practised it while shrinking, choosing to change shape rather than direction, with a continuing mission and an openness to what comes its way. His test for all of it is disarmingly plain: “Work has got to be something that brings people to life.” Meeting a hard year on those terms is the more demanding test, and the more interesting one to pass.

Quadero

At the end of last year, Quadero hit a rough patch. The Dutch IT consultancy suffered some negative results for a stretch spanning the final months of 2025 and the start of 2026. Rather than cut people to fix the numbers, the roughly twenty person firm did something less common: it opened its books. Every employee now knows the single number that determines whether Quadero is healthy as a company, 85 percent of hours billed to a client, and can see for themselves how close the firm is to it at any given time. That number is Quadero's clearest expression of zero idle resources: the discipline of keeping people's time pointed at paying work rather than letting it sit unassigned.

Quadero began in early 2023, when Roeland Vermeulen and several colleagues left an established IT consultancy after a merger they felt compromised the culture they valued. They built the new firm around a simple line that still guides it, to do “nice things with nice people.” Within about a year and a half the team grew from three founders to twenty.

The financial scare became the catalyst for a shift the founders describe as radical transparency. Instead of keeping utilization targets and margins with the leadership team, Quadero now shares them company wide, so a consultant on a client site understands the same numbers a founder does. The founders treat the message that comes with that transparency as a guardrail rather than a rule: know the number, and decide together how to hit it.

Among colleagues, that shift shows up most clearly in a new weekly capacity meeting, built around a comparison Roeland keeps coming back to. A conversation with someone who had previously worked at KPMG made the contrast explicit: there, capacity management is its own department, separate from the consultants doing the client work. Quadero decided it wanted the opposite. If it expects a consultant to act like an owner at a client site, it should expect the same behavior internally, so the weekly capacity meeting is run by the consultants responsible for each client relationship rather than by a dedicated resource manager. That is zero distance to customer turned inward: the people closest to a client are also the people deciding how the firm responds, which means a project ending or an opportunity opening gets acted on the same week it is spotted rather than routed through someone else first, a small but real expression of zero time to market. Roeland says the clearest sign the culture is changing is what happens on a Friday: someone flags that they are overloaded, and colleagues volunteer to help or to train them, without anyone assigning the work. An internal planning tool, built in house, makes everyone's hours visible, so that offer of help is based on real information rather than guesswork.

That same instinct extends to how the firm makes decisions. There is no formal approval process at Quadero, a deliberate expression of zero bureaucracy, but there is a habit of giving whoever is closest to a problem the room to solve it. One consultant, responsible for the company's car leasing, noticed that tax changes were about to make gas vehicles more expensive to run and came back with a recommendation to move the fleet to electric. He did not have full authority over a decision that size, but he had done the analysis and was trusted to bring the answer rather than the question. Larger financial commitments still involve the four owners, whom Quadero now calls its core, but day to day, the person with the clearest view of a decision is usually the one making it.

On structure, the firm is still working out how much of that habit to formalize. It is building toward a model of circles and guilds, with guilds responsible for client value and for developing consultants, but with only twenty people including four owners and a handful of freelancers, it is deliberately moving slowly rather than importing a framework wholesale. Roeland's own role reflects that in between stage: he is an owner, a member of the core that sets financial direction, and, in his words, also just a person working inside the company from a circle.

Quadero is also thinking about where AI fits into an hours based business. The firm uses it for note taking, research, and drafting, and on one client project moved 300 dashboards from an old system to a new one using a mix of roughly 80 percent AI and 20 percent human review. This is the combination the team found more reliable than trying to automate the work fully. In Quadero’s view, AI makes information and speed available to everyone, the advantage shifts toward the parts of consulting that stay human: context, trust, and the kind of connection a client remembers. That belief is still untested against Quadero's own pricing model, since billing by the hour gets harder to justify once AI makes the same work faster.

The founders are candid that most of this is still being built rather than finished. Decision making at Quadero remains informal by design, and Roeland says openly that separating his role as owner from his role as a colleague inside a circle is new territory he has not worked through before.

What the past year shows is not a finished structure but a company that responded to a real financial setback by giving people more information and more responsibility instead of less, and kept its team together while doing it.

Recaredo

Garnatxa negra is normally a red grape. At Recaredo, a winery in the Corpinnat region south of Barcelona, a team decided to make it white instead. They bottled it alongside two grapes barely used anymore in local sparkling wine, malvasia de Sitges and xarel·lo vermell. The result is called Recaredo l'Infinit. By 2026 it exists as two finished wines, a 2023 vintage and a 2021 rosat, both built around that reworked garnatxa negra. In May 2025, the critic Luis Gutiérrez of The Wine Advocate tasted an early sample of the 2023 and scored it 92 points or higher. He described it as carrying "a smoky, lees-driven nose, young and fresh, clean, elegant and precise."

Recaredo marked its hundredth harvest in 2024. By then it had already spent three years running itself through self-organizing teams instead of a conventional management structure, a shift covered in an earlier account of the company. L'Infinit grew out of that same habit of pushing decisions outward. In the company's own words, the project came from the creative and restless character of the team and the family together, not from one vintner's idea handed down to others. It launched publicly in October 2025.

What backs the project is a list of ten practices, all independently audited by Bureau Veritas. Every grape comes from within the Corpinnat territory. The vineyards are farmed organically, without irrigation, using only native varieties. The grapes are picked by hand and made into wine on site. Recaredo ferments them with its own yeasts, in both the first and second fermentation. That second fermentation happens inside the bottle, using grape must rather than added sugar. The wine ages a minimum of eighteen months, under natural cork instead of a crown cap, and is disgorged by hand without freezing the bottle. Recaredo chose to publish these as ten checkable facts rather than as marketing language, which says something on its own.

That instinct speaks to what the ZeroDX framework calls zero distance in mission and strategy, the gap between what an organization claims to stand for and what it actually risks doing. Recaredo describes l'Infinit as an invitation to see a familiar landscape differently, not as a finished answer. It backed that claim with a certificate rather than leaving it as a slogan.

The same instinct shows up in zero distance to opportunity, the gap between where value gets created and who notices it first. No market study pointed Recaredo toward garnatxa negra vinified white, or toward malvasia de Sitges. Someone inside the company, and the growers around it, noticed underused plots and varieties within Corpinnat and decided they deserved a second look, rather than repeating what already sold.

Those growers matter to the partner side of the story. L'Infinit draws fruit from vineyards beyond Recaredo's own estate, chosen because their farmers already share the winery's approach to the land. That continues a practice Recaredo built years earlier, when it began paying outside growers above-market rates and helping them convert to organic and biodynamic methods. Every one of those growers still has to meet the same standard now written into the certificate: organic, dry farmed, and grown within Corpinnat.

That sense of partnership reaches past the growers and into the landscape itself, and into the towns around it. Recaredo was the first winery in Penedès to earn Demeter's international certification for biodynamic farming. For more than a decade it has worked with biologists from the Natural Sciences Museum of Granollers, tracking bats and butterflies in its vineyards as signs of how healthy the land actually is. Between the vines, cover crops and legumes are left to grow on purpose, sainfoin and a local chickpea variety called Cigronet de l'Anoia among them. They restore nitrogen to the soil, so the vineyard needs no synthetic fertilizer. Even pest control comes from plants: infusions of horsetail, nettle, and chamomile, applied by hand instead of chemical sprays. None of this stays confined to Recaredo's own fields. Corpinnat, the collective designation Recaredo helped found, describes its member wineries as businesses rooted in the associative, cultural, and sporting life of their towns, not just producers renting land from them. For Recaredo, caring for the environment and belonging to the community around it have become close to the same commitment.

Zero distance to colleagues and to leaders shows up in who gets credit for the project's origin. Recaredo names l'Infinit as belonging jointly to its team and its family, not to a single founder or head winemaker. That fits a company that had already spread decision-making across self-managing groups before this project began.

Zero distance to customers is visible in where the wine has actually been served this year. It was the official Corpinnat of the 37th America's Cup in 2024. This summer it was poured as part of the Skywine Experience 125 meters above Barcelona, at the Torre Glòries lookout. It was also named the official Corpinnat of the new Blaumarí Music Port Vell festival in June 2026. Each placement puts the wine directly in front of the curious, adventurous drinker the brand says it wants, rather than leaving that job to distribution alone.

Zero distance to action runs through the winemaking itself. Every step that could be automated was kept manual instead: hand harvest, hand disgorgement performed without freezing the bottle, aging left to run its course under natural cork rather than sped up. Zero distance to data shows in how much of that process Recaredo made public. The technical sheet lists 11.5 percent alcohol, no added sugar, and total sulfites of 29 milligrams per liter, well under the European ceiling of 150 for organic white wines. All ten commitments went to an outside auditor instead of asking drinkers to take the label's word for it.

Recognition has arrived from two directions this year. Critics weighed in through the Wine Advocate score. The trade weighed in directly too. On June 12, 2026, Recaredo brought more than a hundred industry professionals, journalists, and communicators to Vinya la Benita in Torrelavit. The wines were presented among the vines, with a shared meal and live music, instead of a standard tasting.

Five years ago, Recaredo had never made garnatxa negra white, and no Corpinnat had been chosen to represent an America's Cup. Now the winery has both. It has a certificate that turns an invitation into ten auditable facts, and a decade of tracking bats and butterflies to prove its own land is healthier for the effort. It also has a glass of that wine poured on a rooftop 125 meters above Barcelona, proof of a vision the team, the family, and the growers around them decided, together, was worth their hard work.

Red42 

Most consulting firms are built to keep a client coming back. Red42 was built to do the opposite: every advisory engagement carries a fixed price agreed before work starts and a closing date agreed alongside it, so nobody spends the relationship wondering when it stops. The company's own advisory page puts the logic behind that bluntly, promising that once the work is finished, both sides simply move on. For a business whose entire revenue depends on people wanting to hire it, advertising a built-in expiration date on every project is a strange choice, unless the actual product being sold is the transformation itself, not the ongoing relationship.

Red42 was formed in 2018 by Silke Hermann and Niels Pflaeging, two consultants who had each already spent more than fifteen years advising organizations before deciding to build something together. Around that core, Red42 has grown a small constellation of related, semi-independent ventures: a personality-diagnostic tool called ‘Myself at Work’, a learning-technology startup called ‘qomenius’, a publishing arm called BetaCodex Press, and a fast-growing practice around Time-Oriented Software Development. Both founders remain associates of the wider BetaCodex Network, the open research movement whose principles their advisory work is built on, and which they help organize and advance internationally.

The theory behind that work, the BetaCodex, is deliberately built from principles rather than rules: a rulebook has to anticipate every situation in advance, while the BetaCodex's twelve laws, covering team autonomy, transparency and resource discipline, are meant to be applied fresh to whatever a team runs into, closer to a constitution than a manual. The network that developed it traces its roots to the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a research body Pflaeging helped direct starting in 2003, renamed the BetaCodex Network in 2009 specifically to stop people mistaking the model for a finance topic. Its central diagnostic borrows from quality theorist W. Edwards Deming, who estimated that roughly 96 percent of problems inside an organization come from the system itself and only 4 percent from the individual people working in it, a ratio Red42 cites as the reason its advisory work targets structure rather than managing people harder. That conviction, that a fix belongs to the structure and not to the individuals trapped inside it, is the clearest thread running through the company's mission and strategy: Red42's stated position is that organizational failure is rarely a matter of individual effort, so its advisory work is built to redesign how a team operates rather than coach people to try harder within a design that was never built to let them succeed.

Between 2018 and 2025, that conviction turned into a portfolio of five named socio-technologies, each developed by Red42 and then released under an open license so any organization, including competitors, could use it without paying or asking permission. That willingness to give away the intellectual core of the business before ever charging a client to help apply it well is where the distance to data, tools and skills shows most plainly: the frameworks Red42 charges to help implement are the same ones it publishes for free, and it qualifies outside practitioners in them through its own certification programs and low-cost sessions.

The same logic carries over to customers: the client stays in charge throughout an engagement, and the company says its own internal spirit of self-organization runs through how it works with the people who hire it, not only through what it tells them to change internally. Before any engagement begins, Red42 commits to a frank, upfront conversation about what value means for that specific client, rather than selling a standard package first and clarifying scope later. Where action is concerned, that same discipline is close to the entire commercial pitch: every engagement is time-boxed from the outset, with a fixed fee settled before work begins so nobody has to keep negotiating or tracking hours once it starts. A single clarifying conversation can be booked and paid for directly through the company's own online shop, no proposal process, no procurement cycle, sometimes no more than one virtual session with a founder. Workshops follow the same pattern: built around whatever problem a client brings in the door, run as genuine back-and-forth rather than a lecture, and closed once the specific goal is met.

Partners are where Red42's own client list carries the evidence. Bayer Bitterfeld, an Aspirin-producing pharmaceutical plant employing around 500 people, held back any public statement until its transformation was actually finished, going live in early January 2025, after which general manager Andrea Heym thanked Hermann and Pflaeging by name, crediting them for "invaluable support in structuring the transformation process." Pradtke GmbH went through its own Beta transformation in 2024 with the support of the agency. Where Red42 does put a relationship on the record, it lets the client speak for the work under its own name rather than treating the relationship as confidential leverage.

Opportunities to expand and grow show up in how quickly Red42 builds and launches a new practice once it spots a gap, rather than waiting to perfect a framework in private. When existing software-development methods kept falling short in client work, Niels Pflaeging developed Time-Oriented Software Development together with Sebastian Kubsch, CTO of Pradtke GmbH, the company that had piloted OpenSpace Beta and Cell Structure Design the year before and became the first to trial the new approach starting in mid-2025.

Since 2018, Hermann and Pflaeging have hosted the biweekly podcast News from the Beta World, built a large archive of freely available articles first on social media and now on Substack, and grown an online community of practitioners on LinkedIn. 

Rather than measuring itself by a growing roster of ongoing retainers, the company points to how completely, and how fast, its clients stop needing it as its central measure of success: a firm that could earn more by keeping clients dependent has instead built its reputation on how quickly it can leave.

None of this comes without real limits. Red42 was founded by two people, and its own transformation capacity is bound by their personal time, a constraint the company works around by qualifying outside practitioners rather than hiring at scale, and by leaning on its wider network of named collaborators for anything beyond what two founders can deliver in person.

What makes Red42 worth noticing isn't its size but its willingness to build a business model that directly contradicts the incentives most consultancies quietly follow. A company that publishes its own methods for free, prices its engagements to end rather than renew, and measures itself by how completely clients no longer need it has built its commercial model around the same principle it sells: that real capability should end up owned by the people doing the work, not rented out indefinitely by the people who taught it to them.

Rise8 

Rise8 does not pay its salespeople for closing revenue. It pays them on customer fit, scored against what the company has learned about which buyers, and which contract structures, actually let software reach the people who need it. The largest deal it has turned down was worth over twenty million dollars. Marketing is measured the same way: a lead scores well if the person engages with the ideas the company publishes, not if they look likely to sign. The reasoning is that a contract Rise8 cannot ship real results on is worth nothing to it, whatever the number on the front.

Founded in April 2019 by Bryon Kroger, headquartered in Tampa and fully remote, Rise8 is an American govtech consultancy of around 165 people that has been growing by roughly half again each year. It builds and ships software inside government, for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Space Force and the Air Force. On one Space Force programme it removed more than 34,000 hours of manual work. 

Why a consultancy would refuse money is best explained by where it came from. Kroger spent ten years in the Air Force, seven of them as an intelligence targeteer, and watched missions fail because the software was bad. In October 2015 a US airstrike destroyed a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, killing forty-two people; its coordinates had been passed to the military days earlier. Kroger had no part in that operation, but he became convinced software was a serious factor in it. He moved out of intelligence into procurement, and from there helped start Kessel Run, the US military's first software factory, which got an idea into working software in a live operation in under 120 days where the norm ran to five and eight years. He then left to build Rise8, on the reasoning that from outside he could carry the method across many agencies in a way he never could from inside one. Underneath all of it sits a single conviction: a slow software process that looks safe is not safe. It moves the risk off the bureaucracy and onto the people in the field.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what a business is for and how it decides where to go, is where that conviction turns into arithmetic. The long-range target is not a revenue figure. It is to put 50,000 outcomes into production, on missions where failure costs lives, by 2040. The unit is adapted from the Kellogg Foundation's logic model, and Rise8 is unusually strict about it: an output is the thing you built, an outcome is a measurable change in what users or systems actually do, and neither counts for anything until the software is live and in real operational use. Revenue is derived from that rather than the reverse, with the 2026 plan setting 340 outcomes alongside $54.0 million. 

Opportunities, the question of how new work is found and chosen, is therefore settled by scorecard rather than by pipeline, which is what the sales incentive at the top of this case exists to enforce. The discipline runs in the other direction too: Rise8 keeps a process for ending a customer relationship once the fit proves wrong, and moving its people onto work where results are achievable.

Customers turns on a distinction most firms blur. Rise8 separates the end user, whose behaviour it is trying to change, from the buyer who holds the appropriated money, accepts that the two frequently want different things, and works that gap in the open instead of papering over it. What it promises carries a penalty attached: a first outcome in production inside 180 days or the customer should fire them, elite scores on the industry's standard measures of delivery speed and reliability by month twelve, and new software shipping weekly by the end of year one. The method for changing the customer organisation comes from NUMMI, the Californian plant where Toyota took over General Motors' worst factory and changed how people worked before trying to change how they thought. Rise8 spends six months building before it says a word about a broken requirements process, and where a customer has engineers of its own, they are paired straight into the work.

Everyone reported to Kroger up to fifty people. Rather than appoint managers at that point, the company adopted the team captain: the team debates, a nominated captain decides, and everyone commits until the data says otherwise. That carried it to a hundred. At around 120 it added a single layer of delivery leads, each anchored to a mission domain such as Space Force, and each holding three kinds of expertise that rarely sit in one person: the mission itself, the particular bureaucracy around it, and modern software delivery.

Those delivery leads manage nobody. They supply context rather than control, break ties when a team genuinely deadlocks, and can overrule a team on one subject only, which is government compliance. Rise8's written position is that it will not have people managers, and that every request for one is a prompt to ask how else the problem might be solved. Ideas are meant to beat titles, with the highest-paid person's opinion named as the specific thing to guard against. Everyone receives 360-degree feedback twice a year, the chief executive included. In 2025 the gap between what Kroger earned and what the average Riser earned stood at 2.2 to 1, against a US average of 285 to 1.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, runs on two rules in tension. Teams are highly aligned and loosely coupled: strategy is argued out at length, then tactics execute without prior approval, to the point where two groups pursuing the same goal may not know what the other is doing. Yet nothing is settled by committee or by vote. A captain decides once the dissent has been gathered, small calls by email and larger ones in a memo that records the disagreement alongside the reasoning. Staying quiet when you disagree is itself treated as failing.

Colleagues is where the standards bite. Everyone signs an A-Player Agreement setting out the beliefs, traits and results expected of them, a document the chief executive signs as well. Coaching exists but is voluntary on both sides, and coaches are explicitly not managers and hold no administrative responsibility for the people they coach. Growth runs mainly through pair programming: engineers work in pairs for 35 to 36 hours a week, swap partners daily, and are kept out of meetings. That is cultural transmission as much as skill transfer, and it has to be, because more than eighty per cent of the roles on a new contract are filled by new hires. Since January the company has worked towards staffing each new project half from people already there, so that every newcomer has an experienced partner. Arrivals are asked to master the method before improving it, framed through the Japanese progression of Shu-Ha-Ri: follow the recipe, then understand it, then adapt it. Against that hard edge sits real security, since Rise8 carries people between contracts rather than letting them go.

Data, Tools and Skills is what keeps the outcomes currency honest. Every outcome shipped is logged in an employee portal against the name of whoever shipped it. Most Mondays the company holds not a town hall but a Prod Hall, where teams show what reached production that week. Delivery is tracked on the standard DORA measures, and improvement runs on the Improvement Kata, with value stream mapping and theory of constraints used to locate where a customer's process is genuinely jammed before anything gets built. Skill matrices are maintained in Lattice and drafted with the people working in each new specialism. Levels and salary bands are published, though the company stops short of full pay transparency.

Rise8 has a habit of treating customers as co-producers, pairing their engineers into its own teams, and a portfolio advisory arm that arrives only once delivery has proved the point.

Results and Rewards is where the logic closes. Growth of roughly half again a year has taken Rise8 to 165 people, working to a plan of 340 outcomes in 2026 on the way to 50,000 by 2040. The profit share is gated on that plan: unless the company hits its outcomes goal there is no payout at all, and only once the gate is passed does the size of the pool depend on revenue and margin. At target, about a third of profit is distributed; in 2024, the scheme's first year, performance beat target and more than a third went out. Delivery teams carry a multiplier of up to 1.2 based on team health drawn from the 360s, and a long-term plan added in 2025 pays out three years after grant, on growth in revenue and margins. Raises turn on sustained contribution rather than on bursts of intensity, and tenure is explicitly excluded as a factor.

What lifts this case above a clever operating model is what the model is for. Most organisations that remove managers soften their standards in the same movement. Rise8 removed the managers and raised the standards, then aimed the whole apparatus at the largest bureaucracy in the world, on a premise worth stating plainly: the delay between a good idea and working software is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a cost, and someone in the field pays it. Fifty thousand outcomes in production by 2040 is an odd promise for a consultancy to make, and an unusually honest one, because it can be counted and because anyone inside the company can hold the company to it. As Kroger puts it, "you can't hack a system you don't understand." Rise8 asks that of every new Riser about its own culture, and asks it of itself before telling any customer how to change. 

SchoolCraft

At SchoolCraft, the same rule for new ideas applies to everyone, even the company's owner. The idea that became Droply started when Fabian, the founder, kept seeing teachers at trade fairs struggle to move files quickly between devices. This problem wasn't related to SchoolCraft's main software for classroom worksheets. Fabian built an early version of Droply in his own time and then brought it to the company's innovation process, called the Lab, since it didn't fit the main strategy. Being the founder didn't give him any special treatment. He developed the idea, checked if it fit the company's goals, and presented it to the Lab committee just like any other employee would. He even recommended that Droply become a separate company instead of being added to SchoolCraft, and the committee agreed. Now, Droply operates independently, and an employee there, not Fabian, is in charge of it day to day.

SchoolCraft is a small, family-run software company in southern Germany. It was founded in 2012 to create Worksheet Crafter, a tool that helps teachers make and adapt classroom materials. The company became profitable in its first year and has stayed independent ever since. By 2019 and 2020, Fabian saw that as the company grew, too many decisions were coming to him. He didn't want a leadership style based on holding power over others. Instead of adding more layers of management, SchoolCraft did the opposite. They wrote a company constitution, set up clear roles instead of fixed job titles, shared decision-making power beyond the founder, and created a process where anyone can make a real decision after getting input from those affected and from experts.

The Droply story shows how SchoolCraft gives everyone a chance to pursue new ideas. Anyone at the company can spend up to 20% of their work time on projects outside the main business, using the Lab, and they don't need a manager's permission to start. But it's not a free-for-all. There's a Lab guardian and a decision process to help decide if an idea should get more time, more attention, or be stopped. SchoolCraft is open about the fact that this freedom isn't the same for everyone. Software developers have longer planning cycles, support teams follow the school year, and editorial teams have more flexibility. So, whether someone can really chase a new idea depends on their role and team, not just the policy.

The same approach applies to leadership at SchoolCraft. Fabian used to be the starting point for almost every project, decision, and approval. Now, he is just one of several people with defined roles, and he only steps in when his expertise or business perspective is truly needed. There is no management layer between frontline employees and the top decision-maker. People can make important decisions in their roles after getting the right advice, instead of sending requests up a chain. SchoolCraft is open about the fact that Fabian's influence hasn't disappeared. His experience, ownership, and knowledge still make his opinions carry extra weight, and the company talks about this openly.

You can see this teamwork in how a printed guide for teachers was created. At an education fair, staff kept hearing that teachers wanted a simple booklet to help them get started with the software. Instead of sending the idea up the chain, the people who heard the request brought in colleagues who knew about the product, content, design, and printing. Together, they made the booklet, and Fabian didn't need to start or approve the project. The same approach led to a small team of three people who look after the company's processes, feedback, conflict resolution, and role definitions, formed when people noticed these areas needed attention. There's also a Diversity Team that focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. They run regular events like Lunch and Learn and Kitchen Talk, which help build community in a remote company where people don't meet around an office kitchen.

SchoolCraft's approach to cutting out bureaucracy relies on the same consultation process instead of approval chains. Anyone can make a real decision after asking the people affected and those with the right expertise, without waiting for a manager's approval. The company has learned that self-organization doesn't mean having fewer rules than other companies. It means the rules can keep changing. The process guardian team checks regularly if a process is still working and updates it with team input if needed, instead of treating it as finished once it's written. Teams like support, editorial, and web development set their own working standards because they know their work and users best.

SchoolCraft's commitment to its mission and strategy is clear in how it handles customer support. As the company grew, it could have made support more efficient with standard replies, more automation, and shorter tickets. Instead, SchoolCraft chose to offer personal support, using plain language and whatever format works best for the person asking, whether that's a note, a quick video, a call, or a webinar. Many users work early or late hours and may not be comfortable with technology, so this approach fits their needs. The company's latest strategy update followed the same idea. The team, not Fabian, started the process. Six people from different areas volunteered to lead it, and the plan only moved forward after the whole team had a chance to give feedback or raise concerns.

The editorial team's story shows how close SchoolCraft stays to its customers. When teachers said the classroom materials weren't relevant enough, the team changed how it chose what to make. They compared their catalog to the school curriculum, found the gaps, and committed to filling them one theme at a time each year. It took four to six months to turn this feedback into a working process, and they still use it today. Customers can also use a direct channel called the wishlist to submit requests, which product management reviews and prioritizes. Several employees, including software developers, also email teachers directly, especially when testing new versions.

SchoolCraft's approach to data and tools is open and transparent. Anyone starting a new project lists who is responsible, who is involved, and who should be consulted on a shared project board. This way, everyone can see what's happening without waiting for updates to move through a hierarchy. New employees learn about self-organization, roles, the consultation process, and feedback and conflict resolution before they start using these systems. The company invests in training for collaboration and decision-making every year and offers coaching for anyone who needs help with a role, conflict, or decision. When the internal wiki stopped working well, one employee suggested a replacement and led the switch, using feedback and support to make the change, and even reduced the number of tools the company uses.

Zero distance to partners shows up in SchoolCraft's long relationship with Klett, a German educational publisher, which lets teachers edit selected Klett textbook materials directly in Worksheet Crafter instead of starting from scratch. What began with a few materials has grown over the years into a large library covering many subjects and series, with each partner bringing something unique: Klett's trusted content and SchoolCraft's flexibility. The company treats outside coaches as ongoing collaborators, not just vendors. For its latest strategy process, SchoolCraft brought in an external facilitator to help structure the discussion and make sure everyone was heard, not to make decisions for the company.

Recognition at SchoolCraft doesn't come from a manager or the founder; it comes from peers, from the people a piece of work affected, and from customers whose thanks gets passed back to whoever earned it. Accountability follows the same logic: support is not judged on tickets closed but on whether a teacher regained their footing, engineers are judged on whether the product got more useful rather than whether a feature simply shipped, and the process guardian team is judged on whether self-organization itself stays workable, not on how many documents it produces. SchoolCraft describes this shift as freeing, since nobody is waiting on a single person's approval to feel valued, but also as a real adjustment, since people have to unlearn the habit of waiting for someone above them to say the job was done well.

SchoolCraft is open about its toughest challenges. The company has learned that freedom doesn't make self-organization easier; it actually demands more clarity, self-leadership, and emotional maturity, since no one can pass tough decisions up the chain. People sometimes take on too much because the work feels meaningful and there's always more to do. Even though authority is shared, the founder dilemma remains: Fabian's history, ownership, and knowledge still influence how people hear his words, no matter how flat the organization chart looks. SchoolCraft believes self-organization needs real systems, roles, decision processes, onboarding, reflection, and sometimes outside help. It's not about having less structure, but a different kind, and building it is ongoing work.

This is SchoolCraft's first year being nominated, and the clearest evidence in its favor is the one rule that applies to everyone without exception: even the founder's own idea has to earn its place in the company just like anyone else's. SchoolCraft makes the owner pitch his idea to a committee and openly admits that his opinion still carries extra weight. This shows the company values honesty over pretending to have everything figured out. Giving away real authority and openly stating real limits is much harder to fake than any organizational chart.

SINA

In most systems built around young people in crisis, the people furthest from the problem design the answer, and those closest to it are told to wait. The Social Innovation Academy, SINA, sets out to close that gap, what it calls the distance between a person and their own power. Young people arrive at its communities carrying labels others have used for years (refugee, orphan, school dropout) and rather than being treated as beneficiaries, they are handed the roles that run the place. One carries the food budget; another holds procurement and learns why a single missing receipt can break a team’s trust. The work is real, not a simulation: if a role goes unfilled, everyone feels it. That, for SINA, is the deepest form of Zero Distance.

Founded in Uganda in 2014 by Etienne Salborn, SINA has grown to 23 self-organised communities across nine countries, with roughly 150 social enterprises born from its ecosystem and around 2,000 jobs created to date. The rethink behind this year’s case traces to 2024, when SINA first won a Zero Distance Excellence Award and visited Haier in Qingdao. At first Haier’s RenDanHeYi (RDHY) vocabulary did not map onto what SINA already did: authority was distributed, scholars held real roles, communities ran themselves. So the useful question became not how to copy Haier but what Zero Distance helped the team see that they had been missing. When SINA started digging deeper into RenDanHeYi in 2025, everything changed. Slowly, the learnings started to crystalised. 

What they saw was that a strong focus on impact had sometimes left the economics an afterthought; roles existed, but few asked who they served or how they knew they created value. Working with researcher Sylvia Guan at the Haier Model Institute, SINA translated the language into its own, a reinterpretation, it stresses, not a copy. Haier’s “user enterprises” became “user circles” kept in direct contact with whoever they serve, and SINA widened what a “user” means: a scholar is a user of the community, a donor a kind of customer seeking impact for their money. Change follows the same logic: anyone close enough to feel a tension can raise a proposal, which others judge on harm rather than preference, through a Holacracy-style governance. 

Zero distance to customer is SINA’s strongest dimension. The same instinct that hands a refugee the food budget also lets a scholar who lived through a hardship build the enterprise that answers it. The community is treated as a teacher, not just a customer. For example, if an offer goes unused, SINA reads that as missing trust or a wrong solution, not a sales miss. Learning from RDHY, it pushes Zero Distance further, asking whether an enterprise should outlive the problem it was built for and talking now about the “dissolving enterprise”; one willing to close, change shape, or move once its original gap has been met rather than quietly start serving itself.

Zero bureaucracy is also strong. Authority sits at the edge, and the proposal-and-objection process pushes decisions to whoever feels the tension first. SINA is candid about the risk self-organisation carries, roles hardening into jargon, circles into administrative units, governance into a system kept alive because it exists; and treats naming that risk as the way to guard against it.

Zero idle resources is the dimension SINA has opened most this year, and the easiest to overlook. The team realised it was sitting on unused capability: a pool of internationally certified coaches, two dozen communities, deep facilitation expertise. It is now building earned-revenue micro-enterprises, purpose-aligned retreats, a Social Innovation Museum, immersive learning journeys with corporate and university teams, e-commerce, internal ventures in order to put those assets to work and lean less on donors, while a new pathway lets contributors build ventures from within the network. 

Zero time to market is, by SINA’s own account, the lightest of the four. Self-organisation can be slow; the team’s own phrase is “going slow is going fast.” Waiting for the whole group can frustrate when a partner wants an answer now, and the reflex to let one person decide returns quickly. SINA frames this as a deliberate trade, some speed surrendered to keep authority with the people closest to the work, and as the dimension with the most room to grow.

The numbers point in a healthy direction. SINA reports around 2,000 jobs and roughly 150 social enterprises to date, up from 20 communities and 1,639 jobs in 2024, when SINA-linked ventures raised over US$450,000 in external capital and enterprises like the Nunu Fund helped 1,200 students stay in school. The clearest 2025 milestone is the partnership with the IKEA Foundation (SINA’s largest to date) which is funding ten Ugandan communities across 2025 to 2027 toward refugee self-reliance. In 2026 SINA won the ZeroDX Incorporated Transformational award in Beijing. SINA also reports alumni earning around three times their peers, with over half running their own enterprises.

The momentum is real, and so is the unfinished work, which SINA frames as the next stretch of road that is keeping the organisation’s vision on track and focused. Balancing value-as-money against value-as-empowerment is, in its words, still in progress; optimise too hard for revenue and the empowerment could distort. The incentives for internal ventures are not yet built. Immersive learning journeys, one of the most promising revenue ideas, were stalled by a regional Ebola outbreak. And decentralising further from SINA Global (a shared operating system, a governance platform, mobile replication teams, stronger safeguarding) is a multi-year build.

What makes SINA distinctive is that it treats Zero Distance not as a technique imported into Africa but as a way to keep power close to those who have least of it. Its guiding image is a tall tree falling in a forest: when it comes down, light reaches the smaller trees beneath, and they grow faster than expected. SINA’s wager is that removing distance, even when distance would be easier, keeps that light reaching further. Still learning, by its own cheerful admission, it is growing from exactly where it already stood.

Smartive

In 2025, its best year on record, Smartive, a Swiss digital agency now fourteen years into its history, started giving its own equity away. Not to outside investors, and not as a one-off bonus, but to its own people: the plan is for every employee to eventually hold shares roughly in proportion to how much they work, aiming over time for an even split between salary and stock. Most companies protect concentrated ownership hardest in their strongest years, when the temptation to keep the upside is greatest. Smartive chose the opposite moment on purpose, reasoning that the longer it waited, the pricier a stake would get for whoever bought in later. That decision, still working its way through the company as this is written, says more about how Smartive actually runs than any org chart could, mostly because it doesn't have one to show.

Decisions at Smartive don't move through committees or a chain of sign-offs; they move through something the company calls the ‘Advice Process’. The rule is deliberately simple: anyone can act on almost anything, a new tool, a client contract, an office lease, provided they first talk to whoever the decision would affect and genuinely take that in before acting. Nobody files a request and waits for a manager to approve it, because there is no manager positioned to do that. What substitutes for oversight is exposure: the bigger the call, the more visibly it gets written down and shared, so judgment is checked by the whole company watching rather than by a single person signing off. It sounds like it should collapse into chaos. Smartive's case is that it has instead had fourteen years to prove it doesn't.

Zero distance to leaders is usually measured by counting the layers between a frontline employee and whoever sits at the top. At Smartive that count is genuinely zero, not because the company is small, but because leadership was never rebuilt as a set of people to begin with. Functions that would sit with a management team elsewhere, resourcing, strategy, finance, exist instead as defined roles, filled by whoever has the interest and the ability, with authority that stops exactly at the edge of what the role covers. Nobody outranks anyone by title, and the working relationship isn't employee to boss but colleague to whoever currently holds a role, a seat that changes hands as circumstances do rather than staying attached to a person.

Zero distance to colleagues asks whether a company behaves like a hierarchy or like a genuine network of small, self-directed teams. Smartive currently organizes itself into four Communities, mixed groups of engineers, designers, product owners, and salespeople who each decide which clients and projects belong to them, how to plan their own people and time, and whether to combine with another Community, break apart, or shut down entirely, without needing anyone's sign-off. A Delegate from each Community meets the others regularly to trade information on workload and need, which is how the company keeps a shared sense of capacity without a central scheduler. This structure has already rebuilt itself once, from an earlier model called Islands, where a central sales and project meeting handed out assignments, to the current Communities, which pushed that planning authority down into the groups themselves. Even the name change is a tell: an island is a place you're posted to, while smartive talks about a Community as somewhere you actually belong, which is a different claim entirely from simply tracking who's staffed on what.

Zero distance to data, tools, and skills is supposed to mean people have the information and the standing to run their own corner of the business, not just permission to. Smartive built toward that in stages rather than all at once: whether the company was financially healthy came first, a formal profit-sharing logic followed in 2020, and a fully open salary formula arrived roughly five years later. A founder's favorite illustration of why sequencing mattered is almost comically small: for years, people would seek him out over a purchase as trivial as a replacement keyboard, less because a rule demanded his sign-off than because nobody had yet given them enough financial context to trust their own call on something that minor. The permission had existed the whole time. What was missing was the information to use it. The company also weighed a simpler stoplight summary at one point, green, amber, red, and turned it down, reasoning that a clean signal hides more than it reveals and that people decide better from real, unfiltered numbers than from someone else's interpretation of them. That access cuts both ways: the engineers running the AI-Core toolkit can set the company's technical standards on their own precisely because they're reading from the same books as everyone else, and full visibility has made the place argue more, not less, since anyone can now challenge a call on its merits instead of hearing about it afterward. Smartive treats that friction as proof the transparency is real rather than as something to smooth over.

Zero distance to opportunities is usually claimed by companies that run an innovation lab somewhere off to the side. Smartive doesn't have one, because the side project is just how ideas normally start. A cluster of engineers first sketched a shared AI toolkit, common libraries, review support, security guardrails, during an open strategy session with no mandate to build anything at all. That sketch is now a standing role, held by five engineers under the title AI Dev Enabler, who set their own monthly priorities and argue their own time and budget against ordinary client work, answering to no one above them because there isn't anyone above them to answer to. The company's second office followed an identical script years earlier: three people who wanted a shorter commute ran the same advice-based process everyone else uses, then signed the lease themselves, with no leadership role anywhere in that decision, since none existed to include.

Smartive doesn't route customer contact through a support layer to begin with; every project team deals with its own client directly. When the team building a platform for a wealth-management client heard straight from that client that delivery had sped up but support tickets had piled up alongside it, the fix was an AI agent to absorb first-line requests, and the client ended up helping decide how development and support time should now be split, rather than being told the answer once it was already made.

Zero distance to action is the dimension companies claim with a mission statement and rarely back with an actual decision made under pressure. Smartive has one on record: when support demand spiked without warning during a summer campaign and no policy covered the situation, the team on the ground simply chose to pay extra for the extra hours itself, and told everyone else afterward rather than asking first. The same logic runs through smaller things: company credit cards go to anyone who wants one, spending decisions left entirely to the cardholder's own read of what the business needs, no receipts audited, no sign-off chased, and the only evidence the company offers that this works is negative, years without an incident that made anyone reconsider it. Even the move toward formal ISO 9001 certification came from below: the three people holding a role called Quality Catalyst, who already own the company's quality records and client feedback day to day, decided on their own that certification was worth chasing, partly because competitors already had it and partly to lock in habits they wanted anyway. Nobody above them signed off, because the role closest to the work was the one that got to decide whether to formalize it.

Zero distance to partners mean outside relationships get treated as shared value rather than managed for margin. Social Income, a Swiss nonprofit that wires unconditional payments straight to people below the poverty line under its own phrase, "income, not aid," is technically just another paying client on Smartive's books. In practice the company has kept the engagement for years at a rate well below what other clients pay, a real hit to profit taken because the team believes in what the nonprofit is doing. That gap in what the relationship earns would trigger a business case review almost anywhere else in the industry; at Smartive it didn't need one, because the people doing the work were also the people trusted to decide it was worth doing anyway. Membership in the wider Corporate Rebels network, alongside other self-managed organizations, works the same way in a different direction: less a badge than a place to compare notes with companies that have already run into the same structural puzzles, like how to do strategy at all without a management layer.

In relation to zero distance to mission and strategy, Smartive tests its purpose against live decisions instead, inside a recurring open forum called the Strategizing Container, run by two people whose entire job is to convene the room, not to steer what comes out of it. The format has carried genuinely uncomfortable conversations before, friction between the company's two offices, an open debate about how pay should track performance, without any obligation to resolve either one on the spot. 

Zero distance to results for Smartive is a bonus pool, fixed at 55 percent of after-tax profit each year, split among everyone according to how much they work, tied to whether the business made money at all rather than to whether any one person hit a target. The ownership shift now under way is the harder version of the same idea: a move toward every employee holding stock roughly proportional to their workload, cushioned by a discounted buy-in mechanism, called internally the Sonderbonus, running from 2025 through 2027, and carried under a banner smartive renders as "Gemeinsam profitieren. Gemeinsam tragen": profit together, bear the consequences together. What makes it more than a slogan is the timing. It is unfolding the same year the business turned in its strongest results yet, precisely when the shareholders who already hold the most equity have the least reason to give any of it up, and it is being finalized through the same open, advice-based process as a lease or a keyboard, not announced from a boardroom.

None of it has been tidy, and Smartive doesn't pretend otherwise. Two people who joined years apart, holding wildly different stakes in the company, were never going to agree on what a fair split even looks like, so the bar the company actually set for itself was lower and more honest: a plan enough people could live with, not one built to flatter everyone's sense of what they're owed. Even reaching that took open argument over how much risk the company could absorb and where the line for "enough" ownership sits, arguments run through the same advice-based process as everything else, on the belief that people trying in good faith toward the best answer will eventually land on one worth keeping.

The mechanics behind all of this are unglamorous on purpose: a request for advice, a shared canvas, a vote among whoever happens to hold shares. What's notable is what Smartive chose to point that machinery at. Fourteen years in, in the one year the business was worth the most, it used its own decision-making system to hand more of itself to the people who run it, rather than let the handful who already owned the most quietly keep the difference.

Sonic Garden 

In March 2026, Sonic Garden made Claude Code mandatory on every project, the same way it had long required Ruby on Rails and AWS. For the whole month of May, its programmers took turns publishing a daily post about how the change was reshaping their work. One engineer wrote about finishing a 40-hour technical exam in ten hours with an AI pair. Another described feeding five juniors' mentoring notes into the assistant until it could help draft their one-on-ones. For a company built on the idea that no one needs a boss telling them how to work, choosing a shared toolchain for every engineer was a rare company-wide call, and a clear step toward zero distance between every engineer and the tools and skills the work now requires.

Sonic Garden is a software development company headquartered in Setagaya, Tokyo. Its business runs on what it calls "no-delivery contracted development" (納品のない受託開発): clients pay a flat monthly fee, and in return a programmer stays on indefinitely as engineer, consultant and adviser, continuously building and improving the software rather than handing off a finished project and moving on. The company has also done without a fixed head office for years, working fully remote across Japan, an extension of the same idea that staying close to the work matters more than sticking to a fixed structure.

That closeness reflects something Sonic Garden has held since 2011: the company runs without managers, keeping mission and strategy close to every programmer, who acts as engineer, consultant and adviser to the client they serve. The bet has always been that autonomy, backed by direct access to strategy and to customers, produces better software than hierarchy does. In 2025, as generative AI began handling more of the small, low-stakes tasks that junior engineers had traditionally used to build their skills, the company treated this as a reason to invest further in that model rather than move away from it. Its answer was to make the informal parts of the model explicit, so autonomy could keep working even as the way people learn to code was changing underneath it.

The result, formalized this year and submitted for outside judging, is what the company calls a Modern Apprenticeship System (モダン徒弟制度). It reframes the mentor's role away from "boss" and toward 親方 (oyakata), a craft master who stays close to the person he or she guides rather than managing headcount from a distance. That closeness takes physical form in "Oyakata Houses," bases near a mentor's home where, despite Sonic Garden being fully remote, an apprentice works alongside a small, paired team in person for a stretch, coding together and running daily retrospectives so the mentor can observe and coach directly. Pay and progress run through calibration, a conversation rather than a fixed scale, confirming what someone can already do and agreeing on what comes next so each person can act at their own full capacity, with fewer rules standing between them and the work. Because mentoring is demanding on its own, the company built support around the mentors themselves: regular check-ins with leadership, HR support for apprentices running in parallel, and back-office staff handling the logistics of running a household turned classroom.

Judges for the Career Ownership Management AWARD 2026, chaired by Hitotsubashi University's Kunio Ito, recognized the approach, naming Sonic Garden an Excellence Award winner in the mid-size and small enterprise category. It was one of 68 companies honored this year at a ceremony in Tokyo in May.

The Claude Code rollout doubled as a live demonstration of how the company surfaces opportunities from the frontline and turns them into shared skill. Rather than issue a single top-down playbook, Sonic Garden let each engineer explore the tool on real projects and publish what they found, so a technique one person discovered, such as running Claude Code in parallel sessions or building a custom skill for code review, became available to the whole team within days. Folding a new tool into every project as shared infrastructure meant what one engineer learned compounded for the rest instead of staying with just that person.

Zero distance to customers and partners took an unusual, concrete form this year. In August 2025, Sonic Garden and its long-time client Kurashicom, operator of the "Hokuo, Kurashi no Dougu-ten" e-commerce brand, where Sonic Garden founder Yoshihito Kuranuki has served as director and CTO since 2024, signed a capital and business alliance. Sonic Garden accepted 86.95 million yen through a third-party allotment of stock warrants, exercisable only if Kurashicom's consolidated revenue tops 20 billion yen sometime between fiscal 2035 and 2037. The arrangement ties Sonic Garden's own upside directly to whether its client's business actually grows, turning a long client relationship into a shared stake in the outcome rather than a fee for services rendered.

The year brought other signs of momentum. Sonic Garden's headcount reached 66, including officers and full-time contractors, up from about 60 in mid-2025. Capital was increased to 43 million yen in June 2025. The company earned ISMS (ISO 27001) certification for its core contracted-development business in December 2025. In April 2026, it welcomed its first cohort of new hires straight out of technical and correspondence high schools, a concrete step toward opening the profession to talent earlier.

None of this changed the underlying bet on autonomy that Sonic Garden has run on since 2011. What changed is that the company formalized the informal parts of that bet: how craft gets passed from one generation of engineers to the next, and how a trusted client relationship can grow into a shared financial stake. Both moves point the same direction, toward an organization that keeps closing distance: to its mission, to its colleagues and leaders, to its craft and skills, and to the customers and partners who depend on it.

Sravni

By the time Sravni reached the local’s regulatory short list of recognised financial-platform operators, one of its own product owners was quietly doing three jobs at once: keeping the technology running, bringing in customers, and deciding what the product should be. Elsewhere, two people could spend a week on the same task without ever discovering they were duplicating each other. From the outside, Sravni looked like a top-tier fintech; inside, no one could say clearly who was responsible for what. That gap, between external standing and internal disorder, is the real subject of this case.

Saran is an online financial marketplace founded in 2009, where users compare and buy loans, insurance, mortgages and credit cards across many providers. It is a mid-sized firm, roughly 450 employees. The account here draws on an interview with Evgeny Korotaev, Sravni’s Business Development Director of eight years, who led much of the change he describes.

The strains showed up as Sravni scaled. Investment came in, headcount rose, new products launched, and management did not keep pace. Choices were made ad hoc and hinged on whichever manager was in the room. Teams had little authority, so operational, financial and strategic calls all funnelled upward, and work crawled. A cultural rift opened between newer hires raised on banking-sector norms and the original startup crew. Most tellingly, customer focus existed mainly on paper: the structure claimed to put customers first, but only financial metrics were tracked. The pandemic, which pushed the company remote, turned these slow-burning problems acute. Korotaev found an alternative in Evgeny Shchepin’s book on VkusVill.

The thinking he brought back belongs to Clientocracy, the model VkusVill codified and now teaches through its spin-out, Beyond Taylor. Clientocracy pulls in the same direction that RenDanHeYi (RDHY) does. RDHY ties each person’s worth to the value they create for users, and the Zero Distance framework reads an organisation by how close it has brought its people to nine things companies tend to hold at arm’s length: its mission, new opportunities, customers, leaders, colleagues, data, partners, the authority to act, and the rewards for results. Sravni’s troubles were really a set of those distances that had crept open as it grew, and the work that followed reads as an effort to close several of them.

After borrowing pieces on its own with mixed results, Sravni enrolled with the consulting firm Beyond Taylor and worked through its method. Early sessions surfaced the company’s and its customers’ real pain points, then narrowed Sravni to a handful of core values defined not as virtues but as the specific thing each product does for a customer, an attempt to give every team a strategy it could state in plain terms, which is what zero distance to mission and strategy asks for.

Naming that customer value and finally attaching customer metrics to it began to close the distance to customers that the old finance-only scorecard had hidden. Clarified team promises and roles, and managers who stopped signing off on every decision, shortened the distance to leaders and to action, pushing authority toward the people doing the work, the way the framework expects of self-managing teams. The finance team built individual profit-and-loss reports so each team could read its own costs and revenue, a direct echo of the data dimension’s default to transparency and the results dimension’s insistence that a unit own its economics rather than a bundle of KPIs, which Sravni has set about eliminating. Departments that had planned in isolation began planning together.

Sravni started with two products, Education and Loans, about a quarter each, before extending the model across the company from the start of 2023.

What stands out is how fast those distances narrowed once Sravni gave its teams something to aim at. In little more than a year it went from a company where authority pooled at the top and customers were a line in the finance report to one where teams hold their own promises, read their own numbers, and answer to the people they serve: real progress across the customer, leader, action, data and results areas of the Zero Distance map. That is the heart of what RDHY argues, that closing one distance makes the next easier, because a team that owns its decisions and can see its own economics is already equipped to spot opportunities, choose partners, and share in the rewards. Sravni is still early on that curve, but it is unmistakably on it, evolving from a student of the model into a company that increasingly runs by it. Widening the rollout from two products to the whole business is exactly how that evolution compounds.

Superbloque 

Superbloque Soluciones says its purpose is to eradicate the housing deficit in Latin America, and it has built a literal test for that promise. For two years the company has set aside blocks and steel, the same materials it sells to homeowners and builders, toward houses it plans to donate. It has now banked enough material to build twelve of them. But before a single block leaves the warehouse for someone outside the company, Superbloque decided to look inside first. Two colleagues are currently going through the process: one is remodeling a home that had stopped being fit to live in, the other is working through the permits to build one from nothing. Only once every need found this way is met does the company plan to start giving houses away beyond its own walls. It is a disciplined, almost literal way of reading a purpose statement: fix it at home first, then take it to the region.

The company was founded in Costa Rica in 1997 and became a pioneer of modular masonry construction there, developing three building systems, Superbloque, Econoblock and Legoblock, used for one- and two-story houses, walls and pools. What began as a materials business grew, over nearly three decades, into a full-service one: architectural design, permitting, budgeting and hands-on client support now sit alongside the original construction systems. Superbloque employs 65 people across eleven areas, from marketing and engineering to its own production plant. Owner Pedro Ulibarri traces the company's first experiments with self-management back to 2019. The effort gained real structure in 2021, when the leadership team began studying Teal Organizations and the Semco Style model in earnest, and Ulibarri later joined Semco's own Experts Program to go deeper.

Zero distance to mission and strategy shows up in how closely the company ties its purpose to what it rewards financially. Two years ago, the same period in which Superbloque formally wrote down its purpose, it also restructured how much profit it shares with employees: ownership now contributes 10 percent of profit up to a set threshold, and 30 percent of everything earned above it. The housing program that opens this case is governed the same participatory way: a voluntary internal committee decided by consent on the rules for who qualifies for a donated house, and has so far processed help for two employees. It is the clearest evidence that the purpose statement functions as a working instruction rather than a slogan.

Zero distance to opportunity is written into a training policy that lets any team decide, on its own, what it needs to learn next. Each process gets a quarterly training budget, roughly 55,000 Costa Rican colones, about 100 US dollars, per person, and the team can spend it on a course, a conference or a book without asking anyone above it for approval. The policy's own worked examples show how little friction that involves: an employee wanting to attend a construction-materials conference simply raises it with her ten-person team, hears no strong objection, and books it. A colleague on a three-person engineering team does the same for a negotiation course. Both are asked for one thing in return, that they teach back what they learned to their team or the wider company within a month, through a short talk or a shared summary.

Zero distance to customers plays out differently for Superbloque's two kinds of client. A homeowner building a single house is walked through the entire journey, from an early design concept through architectural plans, permitting with the municipality and Costa Rica's engineers' and architects' board, known as the CFIA, and finally handed to one of the company's partner construction firms to build. A professional builder, engineer or developer instead gets a more technical, product-level relationship, buying systems and support to run projects of their own. What links both is a flexibility policy that hands employees control over their own schedule and location on one condition: it cannot come at the client's expense. Someone answering front-desk calls cannot work outside office hours if nobody else is covering the desk, and teams that deal directly with the public keep at least one person on hand throughout the day. Autonomy, in other words, is granted in direct proportion to how well the client is still being served.

Zero distance to leaders is most visible in a role Superbloque no longer has. The company retired its general manager position and replaced top-level decision-making with an approval committee, one the wider organization itself helped select. Guiding the broader shift is a piloting team made up of every process leader, alongside Ulibarri and an outside culture and agility consultant the company brought in through its own network. Ulibarri is candid that this steering structure is still finding its footing. "The piloting (also known as steering) team is recent. We're just starting with that part," he said.

Zero distance to colleagues runs through a weekly, anonymous survey called Nailed, a tool Ulibarri brought into the company himself. Every employee is asked, every week, how their week went, whether they would recommend Superbloque, whether they feel heard, and whether they have noticed anything that looks like discrimination. The answers roll up into a running internal recommendation score the company tracks month to month, and the anonymity has occasionally been broken by choice: some employees follow up their survey answers by asking for a private one-on-one, either with Talento Humano alone or together with their leader. Hiring follows the same participatory logic, run in stages: an initial interview with the leader and ‘Talento Humano’, an assessment center, a panel interview with future teammates and anyone else who wants to sit in, and an informal conversation with whoever happens to be in the office, so the candidate can judge the culture as much as be judged by it; a serious objection raised at any of those stages is heard and weighed before a decision is made. Superbloque also gives every employee their birthday off with pay, lets each team decide how it wants to celebrate on a shared budget, and keeps two named support services on call for anyone who wants them: a wellbeing coach for psychological support and a separate integral coach for professional performance, both reachable independently of Talento Humano.

That same networked instinct shows up in how work itself is organized. Rather than routing every client project through separate departments, Superbloque has grouped sales, engineering, customer service and architecture into working cells that communicate and coordinate directly with each other and manage the indicators for the projects they serve together, instead of each process tracking its own numbers in isolation. The same self-managed logic extends to paid leave: for situations like moving house, getting married or losing a family member, colleagues negotiate directly with their own process team how many paid days to take, rather than working off a fixed company-wide table.

Zero distance to data and tools shows in how often the whole company sees the same numbers everyone else does. Every quarter, all 65 employees sit through a meeting that lays out sales, profit, costs and where the company is headed next, regardless of role. Twice a year, for several years running, the company has closed its doors for a full day so employees from every level can help build the next strategic plan together, with results presented back to everyone six months later. Ulibarri is honest that a single day every six months only goes so far: the daily habits, not the twice-yearly one, do most of the real work of keeping people close to the business. Each process also built its own decision matrix, mapping out exactly who gets to decide what, with every member of that process helping draw the lines rather than having them handed down.

Zero distance to partners grew out of an unplanned connection. Ulibarri met Jorge Silva from 10Pines through a Semco Style training course, after hearing him present his own company's story in class. That contact led to an invitation to an Expedition in Spain in 2023, where the two spent enough time together that ideas from NER Group, a separate self-management network, started making their way into Superbloque's own practices. Jorge has since visited Costa Rica more than once to help run strategic planning sessions in person.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action it produces, is written down almost literally in a matrix every process built for itself. Each decision a team might face is mapped to one of five levels of authority, from a single person deciding alone to the whole group deciding together, with several shades of asking or offering advice in between. A short vacation request, two days or fewer, needs nothing more than a heads-up; asking for three days or more calls for a short conversation with someone else first. In sales, a discount under 18 percent is close to the representative's own call, something to mention rather than request; a discount above that line needs the group to decide together. On the production floor, colleagues facing a sudden problem, a power cut, a water outage, a delivery truck arriving out of turn, are trusted to decide on the spot rather than wait for someone with a bigger title to weigh in.

Zero distance to results and rewards runs through the arithmetic of the company's profit-sharing plan and the group that applies it. Superbloque only pays a profit bonus once pre-tax profit passes 5 percent of revenue; below a threshold of roughly 411,764 US dollars in annual profit it sets aside 10 percent of that profit for staff, and 30 percent of everything earned above that line. In 2025, that formula paid out dividends worth 20 percent of total profit to staff. How the resulting pool gets split among employees is not fixed. It is decided every quarter by an open committee that any employee with more than three months' tenure can join. Every vote counts the same, no matter who casts it.

The formula it has chosen has genuinely moved quarter to quarter: half in equal shares and half by salary in April 2025, seventy percent equal in July, back to an even split in October, sixty percent equal by January 2026. Last year the committee distributed close to a fifth of the company's profit this way, averaging about two and a half months of extra salary per person.

Some parts of the model are further along than others. Superbloque has already run its values policy and its benefits policy through the same open, comment-and-revise process, but a salary agreement built the same way is still being drafted. That means colleagues already see the company's full financial results every quarter, yet still lack a shared, agreed picture of how pay itself should work. The piloting team steering the wider transformation is new enough that Ulibarri describes it as barely underway. And the twice-yearly strategic day, genuinely company-wide as it is, gets described inside the company as a symbolic high point more than the place where participation really happens day to day. That work happens instead in the daily tools: Nailted, the training budgets, the decision matrices, used by colleagues without waiting for a special occasion.

Ulibarri says the nomination process for the ZeroDX Awards itself already felt like something worth having. "Just starting this process already feels like a prize to me," he said. It is a fitting note for a company that counts its own progress in houses: twelve banked so far for people outside it, two already underway for people inside it, and a five-level matrix now deciding, process by process, who gets to build what next. Superbloque is definitely in the process of assembling its own organization. It is building it the same way it builds a house: one tested piece at a time, checking that the foundation holds before adding the next floor.

Talkspirit

On 16 October 2026 Talkspirit switches off Holaspirit.

For a decade Holaspirit was the company's governance platform. It mapped circles, roles and accountabilities for organisations running Holacracy and Sociocracy, and was usually described as a sister product to the collaboration suite. It is not being sold or abandoned. Everything inside it moves across: structures, roles, circles, meetings, projects. Governance becomes one module among seven. As the company puts it, the offer is not changing. Only the platform delivering it.

That switch-off ends a consolidation which began earlier than most people noticed. Holaspirit was absorbed into Talkspirit as a legal entity in March 2023. In January 2025 the two brands became one, sharing a single website, with a plan to converge the products over the following year. What has emerged is what Talkspirit now calls an organisational operating system: seven modules covering structure, objectives, a cockpit, meetings, projects, a newsfeed and chat. The English positioning is blunt about the ambition. The European platform for organising work in the age of artificial intelligence.

The company was registered in France in October 2004, and its founders, Philippe Pinault and Olivier Ricard, launched the platform in 2008. Pinault is still chief executive, Ricard still chief technical officer. No foreign investment has ever been taken. More than 900 client organisations and over 150,000 users across 27 countries now run on the platform, among them the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, and the Lille metropolitan authority.

Circles replace departments here, and roles replace titles. A circle holds its own budget, allocates its own resources, and reshapes itself as its work changes. Talkspirit has run this way since adopting Holacracy in September 2014, which puts the governance model years ahead of the governance product. Colleagues work remotely and gather each quarter in Paris or Montpellier.

Leadership inside that arrangement is stewardship rather than command. Responsibilities stay visible, decisions stay recorded, and performance is examined by checking the system rather than by appraising individuals. Leaders are accountable to the structure they serve. A new senior role surfaced in the company's 2026 material: Chief Catalyst Officer.

What turns a decision into work is the machinery Talkspirit now sells. Authority sits in the role, so the role holder decides. Before deciding, they run an advice process, consulting the people affected and the people who know. Proposals then move by consent, going ahead unless someone raises a reasoned objection. Every decision is logged in the platform, so nobody has to reconstruct later what was settled, or why. That is Action here: no approval queue, and no ambiguity about who held the pen.

For a company this size, the distance to a customer is unusually short, and short by design. Every employee spends two half-days a month on support. Not a rotation for new joiners, but everyone, which means the people building the product regularly answer the people using it. The user community supplies a second channel, testing features and arguing over roadmaps in the open. The governance module is what that arrangement produced: governance coaches and consultants using the software shaped it, down to its terminology and its workflows. 

Open books are the precondition for all of it. Financial data, objectives and governance changes are visible to everyone inside Talkspirit, on the reasoning that authority over a decision means little without sight of what the decision costs. Monthly retrospectives and open sessions carry what one circle learns across to the others. And because roles and accountabilities live inside the product, the company's own structure sits documented where a customer's would be. 

Opportunities are open to anyone. A person can propose an idea, test it and document it, and several of the platform's features started as internal experiments before reaching customers. The largest of them now is Spark, the artificial intelligence layer at the centre of how Talkspirit describes itself. Its premise is narrow and specific. Most assistants read an organisation's documents; this one is built to read its roles, responsibilities, decisions and projects. The company had been piloting generative artificial intelligence with customers since 2024, and duplicated that work onto European models so the result would stay compatible with French and European qualification. 

Rewards are the part still being designed, and the company says so. It has been exploring profit sharing, equity participation and steward ownership, with the aim of staying independent and spreading the value it creates. Its most concrete recent move runs in the opposite direction, towards removing work rather than paying for it. Talkspirit is hiring a founding engineer to build an artificial-intelligence-first support function, with agents expected to close around 70 per cent of first-line tickets in French, English and German. That is a statement about where the company wants its people's hours to go.

In October the last seam closes. Talkspirit adopted Holacracy in 2014 and went on to sell the tooling for it, so for a decade the company and its product have been two versions of one idea kept in separate boxes. Now there is one box, and the circles Talkspirit runs on sit in the same fields, on the same screens, as any customer's. That is also the condition Spark depends on. An assistant cannot read an organisation's roles, decisions and accountabilities unless somebody wrote them down, and most companies never did. Talkspirit has been writing its own down for twelve years. It sells clarity about who decides what, and it has been its own first customer since before it had anything to sell.

Target Agro

At Target Agro, a promise to a customer survives contact with reality no matter what. If the agreed shipment is a set volume of soy meal, that is what gets delivered, whether the harvest runs short, a truck breaks down, or logistics fall apart along the way. That specific, almost stubborn definition of what the company calls agreed volume is one of five customer values a Far Eastern grain and soy group wrote down for itself in 2024, after its founder decided the business needed a fundamentally different way of knowing what its customers actually wanted.

The group, built around grain supply, soy processing and crop cultivation, posted 7.1 billion rubles in revenue in 2023, of which 1.3 billion came from exports to buyers in China, South Korea and elsewhere. Founder Stepan Inyutochkin is candid about where that puts Target Agro nationally. "For the region we are a significant enterprise," he says, "but in the national context we are still a relatively small company." Set against players such as Miratorg, which reported around 257 billion rubles in revenue in 2023, or RusAgro, at about 277 billion, Target Agro and its roughly 350 employees are growing considerably in an industry of giants.

Inyutochkin completed Clientocracy training in the methodology's sixth in-person cohort, taught by Andrei Krivenko, Nikolai Popovich and Valera Razgulyaev among others. His implementation plan had three steps: train the team on the CustDev module, form a Board of Leaders and put it to work, then train Target Agro's roughly 45 leaders in Clientocracy, closing with a strategic session to define an evolutionary goal. All three steps were completed, and the Board of Leaders became the practice that stuck.

Zero distance to mission and strategy took shape at that first strategic session in April 2024, when the full team worked out a definition of the customer, a raw material processor supplying food and feed producers, and wrote an evolutionary goal together: "all products are made from safe and high-quality agricultural raw materials." The goal was written to hold both halves of the business at once, an export operation with its center of gravity still at home.

Zero distance to partners ran through the second strategic session, held in China over two weeks in July 2024 and led by Beyond Taylor. The team conducted CustDev interviews with clients in Qingdao and, separately, in South Korea, and used the trip to visit Haier's global headquarters, also in Qingdao. Haier, which runs on its own self-management principles, walked the Target Agro team through its practices directly.

Zero distance to customers came out of that same trip as five explicit values: a quality standard matching what the client agreed to, delivery at the exact time needed, constant availability, a market-appropriate price and the agreed volume promise described above. CustDev has since become routine at Target Agro, run with counterparts ranging from large international buyers to single-city trading firms.

Zero distance to opportunities shows up in Target Box, a monthly all-team session built around three questions: what went wrong (the black box), what could improve, and what new idea is worth trying. A book club running for the past year works through the reading list behind Clientocracy itself, with ideas from each book discussed and some adopted immediately.

Zero distance to colleagues had to survive an uncomfortable adjustment first. Support functions such as administration, which used to sit near the top of the org chart reporting straight to the general director, found themselves repositioned lower under the new structure, and some of those employees felt the change as a demotion. Target Agro's answer was to redefine the frame rather than the org chart: those teams are the foundation the rest of the business stands on, not a lower tier of it, language the teams have since accepted without resentment.

Zero distance to leaders is measured in what no longer reaches Inyutochkin's desk. With the Board of Leaders active, a meaningful share of decisions that once required his sign-off now don't. He describes his own role now as "an ambassador of Clientocracy," a leader among the Board of Leaders and a mentor drawing on thirteen years of running the business.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills is visible in who Target Agro lets into the room. Every employee, including warehouse workers and loaders, was added to a single company-wide messenger group, a move Inyutochkin expected some resistance to. Instead, unexpected readers emerged, people getting through as many as twelve books a month, and the group now doubles as where the company reviews its monthly financial results and news with everyone at once.

Zero distance to action and zero distance to results and rewards converge in the Board of Leaders' compensation model. The group first equalized base salaries across its members, then agreed that 15 percent of the group's quarterly net profit would go to the Board as a bonus, with base salaries cut in half once that bonus started paying out. The vote to accept the new split was unanimous. Elsewhere, the same shift toward team-level authority reworked finance and legal, cutting the time needed to process payments and sign contracts, and changed how the whole company thinks about spending, trimming outlays nobody could justify.

Management costs at Target Agro fell by 100 million rubles in 2024, a figure that tracks with everything above it: fewer decisions bottlenecked at the top, fewer unnecessary approvals, fewer costs nobody was watching closely enough to question. The following spring, that operational capacity showed up as output. In March 2025, Target Agro's plant processed 10,648 tons of soy, a new company record, according to the company's own reporting.

The agreed volume promise that opens this case, deliver what was promised no matter what breaks along the way, now describes how Target Agro runs itself, not just what it ships. Management costs are down 100 million rubles, the Board of Leaders takes a real cut of the profit it delivers instead of merely reporting on it, and the company's record processing month arrived without a single one of those tons needing Stepan Inyutochkin's sign-off to move forward.

Ten23Health

Before Ten23Health had a bank account or a single dollar of revenue, founder Hanns-Christian Mahler bought two tons of plastic trash. He purchased it through Seven Clean Seas, which pulls waste off beaches and out of oceans across Southeast Asia, and sent the bill to his own investors. They paid it, then asked how he'd found the company. That transaction, made before the paperwork caught up with the idea, says more about ten23 than its balance sheet does. Five years on, the Basel based developer, manufacturer and tester of sterile injectable medicines has grown from a founding team of roughly 15 people to more than 270 employees across two Swiss sites, BASE in Basel and VIVA in Visp, both still expanding.

Mahler spent decades inside large pharmaceutical corporations before building one of his own. What wore him down was an accumulation of small moments, among them a request to rank his team on a forced performance curve so a share of them would lose a raise. His answer was blunt: "Choose me, but I will not give you a name." Discovering Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations and the Corporate Rebels community showed him other companies were already working this way. He left without a plan, and an investor found him. Mahler pitched not a return timeline but a company built on purpose instead of carrot and stick, one that would also become a B Corporation. The investor said yes.

That purpose came first, literally. In September 2021, with the team still at around 15 people, ten23 health ran a purpose Olympics: pairs of colleagues debated what the company should stand for, one representative advancing each round until a single statement survived. "Collaborating for a healthy life and planet" became the mission, now anchoring ten23.OS, the operating document every hire reads and signs. The document avoids the word policy, since policy implies policing, using frameworks instead, wide enough for autonomy, defined enough for confidence. A formal Mission Lock goes further, writing that social and environmental purpose into the company's own governing structure, so impact on people and planet is a legal condition of decisions, not a slogan. That is zero distance to mission and strategy, built into governance rather than left to rhetoric.

Underneath sits an organization of roles and circles rather than job titles. Most people carry several roles, with one main role typically filling about three quarters of their time. A lab technician in Operations also coordinates biosafety and leads the LGBTQ+ agenda as Diversity Lead; another colleague moved entirely out of the lab into the Business circle because that is where his strengths fit, and is visibly happier since. Every role, circle membership and governance change is logged in Holaspirit, visible to any employee who looks. Small networked teams built around genuine strengths, with full transparency over how the organization runs, is zero distance to colleagues and zero distance to data, tools and skills working together.

Decisions run through Integrative Decision Making: anyone who senses a gap between what is and what could be brings a concrete proposal, tested through clarifying questions and an objection round, not a vote. The test isn't agreement but whether a proposal is safe enough to try, measured against the same guiding questions each time: is it in patients' interest, is it safe for them, what would the planet say, is it financially sound, is it reversible. Outside formal meetings, the operating principle is simpler: treat the company's money as your own. Work time follows the same logic, with no mandatory clock in or out; people own their output, not their hours. That is zero distance to action, decision rights pushed to where the work happens.

Patients top that same list of guiding questions, and the priority stays concrete on the production floor, where colleagues weigh every syringe against one question: would you give this to your own kid or parent. It is zero distance to customers made plain, in an industry where the patient rarely gets a voice in how a medicine is made.

Leadership is built to answer to people, not command them. A Circle Lead skips the traditional review and instead guides each person's own self-evaluation, built with sounding partners and feedback from across the organization, deliberately stripped of centralized authority. Mahler holds a one-to-one with every new hire, and tries to do the same with people who leave. He now calls the board built to hold him accountable some of the best coaches he has. For four straight years running, the leadership circle has taken zero salary increases of its own, redirecting that budget elsewhere, a choice colleagues only thought to thank them for in 2025. That is zero distance to leaders, measured in what leadership gives up.

Compensation carries the same instinct toward shared fate. The gap between the highest and lowest salary is capped at roughly six to six and a half times, far below large-corporation norms. The annual bonus tracks company performance, not individual ratings, and through an Employee Equity Purchase Program, colleagues can convert part of that bonus into real shares and become co-owners, a benefit usually reserved for executives elsewhere. Mahler is candid about the ceiling: "I don't want to be in an organization where there's greediness." That is zero distance to results and rewards, backed by a number rather than a slogan.

None of it arrived finished, and the company treats that as normal. When colleagues from an acquired firm first faced open-ended travel spending with no fixed rules, anxiety flooded in rather than freedom; the fix was better frameworks, not more rules, the same logic behind a fenced playground that lets children roam further than an open one does. Some new joiners still skip cultural onboarding sessions under workload pressure, flagged as unfinished business rather than ignored. A more distributed, peer-informed salary process sits deliberately in the drawer, because Mahler isn't yet convinced the organization, or its bias toward less confident colleagues asking for less, is ready for it. Treating each as an open tension rather than a settled rule is zero distance to opportunities in practice.

Outside relationships run on the same trust. ten23 health is the only startup that 3i, its UK private equity backer, has funded from inception, a relationship built from day one on unusual alignment rather than standard scrutiny. Its partnership with Seven Clean Seas sits alongside a formal UN Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals commitment, and supplier selection weighing social and environmental criteria alongside price. The numbers back it: 100 percent renewable electricity, a 65 percent cut in scope 1 and 2 emissions per revenue since 2021, a silver EcoVadis medal in the top 3 percent of its industry, 49 percent women employees with zero gender pay gap, 27 nationalities on staff, 84 percent employee satisfaction, and a leadership team 80 percent female. That is zero distance to partners, built on alignment rather than convenience.

Growth this fast hasn't been friction free. Integrating a company acquired in late 2021 took longer than expected: a 12 page contract became a two pager, job titles gave way to the word fellow, and mandatory time recording ended, landing on people for whom none of it was familiar, introduced without a vote. Some colleagues never fully adjust to the autonomy on offer and have left because of it, including one circle lead who reverted to running competitive, command-style town halls between the two sites before parting ways with the company. ten23 health treats none of this as embarrassing, but as the ordinary cost of building something genuinely different, and keeps going.

The bill Mahler sent investors for two tons of ocean plastic, before ten23 health had a name on a bank account, has scaled into a company running on renewable electricity, cutting emissions by nearly two thirds, and growing from 15 founders to more than 270 people across two sites in five years, all while capping its own pay gap and freezing leadership salaries for four years running. Asked whether any of this is a phase to grow out of, Mahler doesn't hedge: "There is no plan B. This is the plan." On the production floor, the standard hasn't moved an inch since day one: make the syringe you'd hand to your own child.

TiER1

When a major client invited TiER1 to bid on a sweeping overhaul of its training programs, the consulting firm arrived quoting three times its nearest competitor’s price. It still won the work. What closed the deal was not a discount handed down from headquarters but the account team itself, which, working with the firm’s in-house AI hyperstudio, redesigned the solution, rebuilt the pricing and landed a significant, repeatable contract, all without an executive sign-off. For a firm that has spent more than twenty years dismantling conventional hierarchy, it was the argument in miniature: the people closest to the client held the authority, the tools and the context to act.

TiER1 Performance, based in Covington, Kentucky and founded in 2002, helps organizations improve performance through strategy, learning and change. It is 100% employee-owned, and it runs on a model its leaders call Dynamically Distributed Authority, or DDA, which gathers people into adaptive teams around specific customers and challenges rather than fixed reporting lines. 

A year ago, the test was simpler: survival. Through the economic uncertainty of 2024, TiER1 declined to follow rivals into layoffs, choosing instead to protect trust and long-term thinking. It invested in cross-functional leadership gatherings built around the neuroscience of trust, and it rebuilt its onboarding into a year-long journey to help new hires absorb a culture that no longer transmits itself automatically in a hybrid workplace. Artificial intelligence, at that point, was only beginning to shape the firm’s strategy.

A year on, that groundwork has matured into momentum. The AI experiment has become a capability: a dedicated AI Solutions team, an AI center of excellence and the hyperstudio that reshaped the three-times-price bid. The firm has opened a new front in its market through an Impact Partners program, taking trusted independent consultants to market alongside its own delivery muscle, work that brought in more than $1 million from clients it had not known a year earlier. And, borrowing an idea directly from a Haier presentation, it has carved itself into group portfolios, small teams that own a cluster of clients and answer to a new portfolio margin figure.

The evolution maps onto four ZeroDX dimensions. On zero distance to customer, most of TiER1’s consultants face clients directly, so feedback reaches the people doing the work without passing through a management layer; when one client wanted staff on site, the firm used a travel-bonus incentive to embed two leaders full-time. 

On zero time to market, the three-times-price win stands as proof, with the solution and pricing reshaped and closed by the account team itself, while AI has compressed research and first drafts from days into hours.

On zero bureaucracy, the firm keeps decisions close to the work even under strain, leaning on clear roles, shared priorities and transparent metrics that Harmeyer describes as a way to align people without heavy-handed control. 

On zero idle resources, its refusal to cut staff is also an operating choice: being private and employee-owned, it redeploys talent rather than discarding it, and it used quiet capacity to build the AI practice ahead of demand. An internal tool, Proposal Stream, publishes the entire pipeline so people can pull themselves toward the next opportunity.

The results are visible in the market. Beyond the marquee win, the firm has taken work from a competitor on the strength of its responsiveness, and a Fortune 10 client repeatedly singles out TiER1’s ability to adapt as its biggest differentiator. The company tracks a transparent set of measures, from employee net promoter score and turnover to EBITDA, utilization and the new portfolio margin, alongside a “Thrive” model that gauges employee wellbeing across six areas. Through a turbulent 2025, it transformed and recovered while remaining wholly employee-owned.

TiER1’s leaders are the first to say the work is unfinished, and that the firm is still learning how to balance autonomy with alignment. But the discipline of returning to its founding principles is what its executives count as the real differentiator. 

Transa

Transa, the outdoor and travel retailer based in Zurich, has a leadership position with one explicit rule attached: no pay, no formal duties, no seat of power. It is called Stewarding. The company's compensation materials describe it as an honorary status, one that goes to people whose only currency is decades of earned trust and judgment. Someone in this position is expected to hold what the company calls tension arcs: ongoing organizational strains that never fully resolve, sometimes for decades at a time. They are not managing anyone. They are simply trusted to remind the company that everything is connected, and that nothing stands alone. It is an unusual thing for a retail company to formalize: a kind of leadership that money cannot buy and a title cannot confer.

Transa Backpacking AG has sold outdoor and travel equipment out of Zurich since 1977. It has grown into the leading retailer of its kind in German-speaking Switzerland, with eleven stores and around 380 employees today. At some point before the middle of 2026, the company began a wide-reaching redesign of how it organizes work and how it pays for it. That redesign rests on two things. First, Circles: self-governing teams that make many of their own operating decisions. Second, an outside framework called the re:nature Compass, a seasonal wheel-of-life model licensed from the Re:nature institute. 

Zero distance to mission and strategy at Transa runs through a purpose stated in nine words: "We connect to be nature. Because it's human." The company did not leave that line to sit on a poster. It built a seasonal rhythm around it instead. The re:nature Compass divides the year into four seasons, and each one carries its own cluster of organizational themes. Summer is for connectedness, care and shared productivity. Autumn is for reflection, letting go and gratitude. Spring is for curiosity, experimentation and autonomy. Winter is for silence, intuition and a sense of purpose. The idea behind it is simple: a company, like any living system, moves through cycles rather than pursuing permanent, linear growth. Strategy, in this model, should follow the season the organization is genuinely in, rather than pretending it is permanently summer.

Zero distance to leaders is where Transa's design gets most specific, and it starts from a simple idea: authority should be earned through contribution, not handed out by job title. To make that concrete, the company maps six distinct positions describing how someone shows up at work, independent of their title. Engaging is where everyone starts, a newcomer taking their place and learning the culture. Shaping comes next, when someone develops an entrepreneurial spirit and takes responsibility inside their own circle or branch. Exploring is a different kind of contribution: bringing fresh, outsider curiosity to the wider system rather than to one team. Integrating means holding emotional and organizational tension across teams under stress, staying the person who keeps everyone connected when things get hard.

The last two positions describe the most experienced kind of contribution. Navigating through Presence means guiding people through earned authority rather than a formal role, someone who can hold a difficult organizational tension for a year or two. Stewarding, the honorary and unpaid position described at the start of this case, is the final stage: authority earned not by role, but by how long someone has proven they can hold the organization's hardest, unresolved tensions. Read together, the six positions form a path. Where someone stands on that path says more about their authority at Transa than any title on a business card would.

Zero distance to colleagues shows in who gets to decide how people are recognized at Transa: not head office, but the circles themselves. Each circle can distribute its own bonus pool. Each circle also redefines, every year, the exact logic it uses to split that pool. The amounts and the reasoning behind them are kept transparent rather than confidential, so nobody has to guess how a decision was made. Fit matters just as much as fairness here. The company maps seven distinct requirement areas for its roles, covering things like how repetitive the work is, how comfortable someone needs to be making decisions without a clear rulebook, and how many new relationships a role demands building each day. The goal is to match people to work that fits how they naturally operate, rather than sorting them purely by job title or seniority.

Zero distance to data and tools appears in how Transa built its own salary system to resist gut-feeling bias. Rather than setting pay by internal opinion alone, the company benchmarks part of every salary against Salarium, the Swiss government's own wage calculator. That produces a market factor drawn from the retail sector's published figures, not a manager's private sense of what feels fair. That external, checkable number sits inside one transparent formula alongside two internal factors: a role's requirement level, and a contribution score reflecting the skills and attitude a person genuinely brings to it. None of it is decided behind closed doors.

Zero distance to partners runs through where this entire redesign came from. Transa did not build its compensation and culture model from a blank page. It licensed the re:nature Compass from the re:nature institute, credited by name to its creators, Ursula and David Seghezzi. It also brought in an outside transformation partner to adapt the framework for a retail business. Pairing an external philosophical model with an external government statistics tool for pay benchmarking points to a company more interested in importing good ideas than reinventing everything internally, even on something as sensitive as how people get paid.

Zero bureaucracy, and the zero distance to action it produces, is visible in how differently Transa treats decision-making across its own roles, instead of forcing one rulebook onto everyone. Some roles run on simple, repeatable decision trees, where the path is already mapped out. Other roles are deliberately built around emergence: no decision tree exists, and the person holding the role is expected to set the frame themselves as situations unfold. The company is explicit that its strategy-focused role carries the heaviest version of this. Decisions there are described as carrying real financial risk, with consequences serious enough to threaten the business's survival and reputation, playing out over years rather than days. The underlying rule matches the size of a decision's authority to the size of its real consequence, instead of routing everything through a fixed hierarchy. It is the same idea this case keeps returning to, just written into role design instead of an org chart.

Zero distance to results and rewards is built on what Transa calls the Compensation Wheel. It is based on psychologist Daniel Pink's argument that people are driven less by reward or punishment and more by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Pay is treated as a fourth, equally deliberate ingredient, not an afterthought. The resulting salary system blends a market-benchmarked base with two elements built specifically for how Transa works: a Kollektivteil, or collective bonus, that each circle distributes and redefines on its own terms every year, and a company-wide bonus tied to how the whole business performs. "When we have a strong year: we celebrate together. Success is shared," the company says of that shared bonus, a rare piece of plain language inside an otherwise technical compensation model.

What makes Transa worth watching is not any single rule inside its pay system. It is that the company keeps choosing to rewrite the whole approach rather than settle for one version of it. Naming a leadership role that pays nothing is a bet that real trust outlasts any paycheck. Building a compensation model around the seasons is a bet that a company, like the people inside it, is allowed to keep changing shape. That is not a company still finding its footing. That is a company that has decided the work of building itself never has to stop, and made peace with the idea that its most honest answer will always be a work in progress.

Tsekh

Ildar Arslanov has never promised design work with fixed deadlines or budgets. Each day brings a fresh set of client requests to Tsekh, and the volume is unpredictable. Even Arslanov cannot anticipate what tomorrow will bring. This daily uncertainty, as he describes it, has long been part of the studio's rhythm. Yet as Tsekh doubled in size over the past year, what once felt like a manageable quirk began to reveal itself as a deeper structural challenge.

Founded in Tolyatti in 2019, Tsekh has quickly established itself among the country's top five design studios, according to Tagline, with a client roster that includes Yandex, MTS, T-Bank and Alfa Bank. Annual revenue growth has ranged from 30 to 60 percent, and the studio has set its sights on reaching 1 billion rubles by 2027. That pace of expansion has not come without complications. The team grew from 56 people at the start of 2023 to 104 by early 2024, forcing Arslanov to repeatedly redraw the organizational chart just to keep up. Seeking a more sustainable solution, a structure capable of evolving alongside the business, he turned to Beyond Taylor, enrolling in its Strategic Leadership School in April 2024 after an online search.

The pivotal shift came from an idea that is easy to state and far harder to live by: prioritize the client, not the organizational chart. Tsekh had always aimed to satisfy its clients, Arslanov says, but the training gave that instinct a concrete framework. The studio's core unit is now the cross-functional client team, assembled around the specific needs of each client rather than by design discipline, a mix of graphic, motion, 3D and UX/UI specialists alongside account and client managers, configured differently for every project. Once formed, these teams operate with a high degree of autonomy. It is zero distance to customers and zero distance to colleagues at once, small units organized around one relationship instead of one function.

Not every part of the model fit seamlessly. Clientocracy recommends a Management Council with named leaders for each client value, but Tsekh's cross-functional teams deliver every value simultaneously, making it difficult to allocate responsibility among council seats. Arslanov acknowledges that this remains unresolved, a candid gap in an otherwise thorough rebuild, and a reminder that zero distance to leaders is still a work in progress at Tsekh.

Where the rebuild did take hold was in how the studio measures itself. In autumn 2024, Tsekh brought in an analyst and built a CEO dashboard tracking utilization, revenue, deal and team margins, eNPS, client NPS and hiring needs, with the numbers visible to the teams generating them, not just to leadership. Teams now watch a weekly hour-utilization rate and act on it directly: above 80 percent means hiring quickly, below 70 percent means moving a designer from an underloaded team to an overloaded one. That discipline lets Tsekh forecast revenue with less than 10 percent error across a full year, and to decompose its 500 million ruble 2025 target across every client team so each can see its own progress in real time. It is zero distance to data, tools and skills doing real work: judgment calls that once relied on instinct now run on numbers everyone can see.

The new approach was tested with one of Tsekh's oldest clients. The client's business changed quickly through 2024, Tsekh struggled to keep pace, and task volume from the account began to drop. In May 2025, the team applied what Arslanov calls the Black Box Principle: logging errors, prioritizing them, and testing ideas against Lean Startup and CustDev methods before folding whatever worked into standard practice. Arslanov calls the broader habit "the Van Damme splits," a practice of making small fixes while also hunting for bigger structural answers. By October, task volume from that client was up 150 percent. It is zero distance to opportunities in action: the team closest to the client found and tested ideas quickly, rather than waiting on a strategy review.

The business results moved in step. Revenue grew 60 percent in 2024 and another 38 percent in 2025, net profit margin reached 24 percent, and client NPS rose from 58 to 64 in the final quarter of 2025. Teams can now see their own margins and utilization in real time, a meaningful step toward zero distance to results, though Tsekh hasn't yet linked pay directly to team performance the way the model eventually calls for, so how far that dimension extends remains an open question.

Daily uncertainty is still part of life at Tsekh, and that's by design, not despite it. What's changed is how the studio handles it: a weekly number on a shared dashboard now, instead of everyone guessing alone. The team that used to keep redrawing its org chart is working toward a fixed target, 1 billion rubles by 2027, with the tools in place to track exactly how it gets there.

Tunafishe

The team was installing water purification systems in 73 Ugandan schools, on a budget that allowed about 840 dollars a school. At one of them there was nowhere to put the system, and the school had roughly four times the pupils of an average Ugandan school. The installers decided to build a house for it. That took the cost at that school to 5,600 dollars, meant fewer schools would be reached with the same money, and involved the organisation in construction work it had never done before. Nobody at Tusafishe asked management first. Management found out afterwards.

Tusafishe installs low-cost water purification systems for marginalised communities in Uganda, in refugee settlements and rural schools. It was founded in 2017, has eight full-time staff, and counts 568 members in the schools where it works. Its purpose is to democratise access to safe water, and the way it works owes a good deal to where its people came from: the entire first team was formed at the Social Innovation Academy, the Ugandan organisation whose self-organised communities teach young people to build enterprises from problems they have lived through.

Mission and Strategy, meaning what an organisation is for and how it decides what to do next, changed shape in the past year over a question of what happens after the installers leave. Tusafishe used to train a community and move on. It now selects eight members in each community who become an extension of the organisation itself. The system stays behind, and so does a group of people with a standing relationship to the people who built it. That is the difference between installing equipment and leaving a capability, and it is why the membership figure of 568 is a more meaningful number for this organisation than a count of systems.

Opportunities, the question of whether a good idea can become real without permission, produced the design the organisation now uses. Mathias was a new plumber when the larger team was committed to a major project in Western Uganda, so he was asked to lead a smaller one in Mbale, in the east. He was given a budget to run it. Working with a physics teacher at the school, he changed the design of the purification system. That design is the one Tusafishe installs today. A new hire with a budget and a free hand produced the organisation's core product, which is not something that survives an approval chain.

The ‘customers’ dimension is where the design actually came from, and the sequence matters. Mathias had already installed a system at the teacher's school, and the school had complained that the filters were clogging. Rather than log the complaint and pass it on, the teacher asked to work with Mathias on the next installation. The person who reported the fault and the person who built the thing sat down together on the following job. The complaint did not travel up a chain and come back as a specification; it turned into a better product on the next site.

Colleagues at Tusafishe are organised as groups by craft rather than as a hierarchy. Technicians, masons and trainers each sit in their own group, and when a project comes in each group decides its own budget and how it will carry out its part of the work. The leaders are told what has been decided. That is the ordinary sequence here rather than the exception, and it is what made the house at the overcrowded school possible: the people standing in front of the problem had the authority to solve it.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and what they do with it, is answered by the organisation in one line: there are no layers. The team members are the experts in their roles, and the leader's job is to facilitate. Decisions about what Tusafishe offers come from the people holding the roles rather than from the top. Henry Othieno, a co-founder, is on the receiving end of that as much as anyone. When Wycliff Muhwezi Manson told him that the organisation had grown and the product needed to reflect it, the message was not a request. Muhwezi Manson said he would not leave without building the drainage he had proposed for the project.

Data, Tools and Skills is what makes the autonomy safe to grant. The frontline team runs its own financial accounts for operations and shares its records for reconciliation when a project closes. Knowing what money is actually available at any moment is what allows a team standing at a school to weigh a house against a number of other schools and make the call, rather than guessing or waiting. Skills are built through feedback rather than through a training programme, which for an organisation of eight people is a practical choice as much as a philosophical one.

Partners are treated as people who need to understand the work rather than as suppliers who need a specification. One partner came to Uganda and went into the field to install systems in the refugee camps alongside the team. A year later, when Tusafishe needed technology built to digitise its processes, that same partner built it with very little consultation, because he had already seen at first hand how the work is done and what it needs. A year spent in the field removed the requirements-gathering that would otherwise have stood between the need and the software.

Action, meaning how far a team can go without asking, is illustrated by the house at the overcrowded school, and the organisation is clear about how it makes that possible: it gives financial resources to the team doing the work. Authority without money is advice. The team that built the house could build it because the budget was in their hands, and the decision to accept fewer schools in exchange for serving a much larger one was theirs to weigh.

Results and Rewards follows the same pattern of pushing the decision outward. For every project, each team draws up a plan against the budget and the scope, and that plan includes the team's own bonuses at the end of the work. The people doing the job set what completing it well is worth. Tusafishe is also working on a structure to reward the team with equity, which for an organisation of this size and legal shape is a more consequential step than it sounds.

The external view is consistent with the internal one. Peter Mugarura, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Prudential Uganda, which has partnered with Tusafishe to bring clean water to students in Mbale, describes what he sees as an organisation where "everyone implements and everyone makes decisions."

What makes Tusafishe worth reading is the size of the decisions it pushes to the edge relative to the size of the organisation. Eight full-time staff, a product designed by a new plumber and a physics teacher, budgets held by the crews, bonuses set by the teams that earn them, and a group of installers who could look at one crowded school and choose to spend nearly seven times the allocation on it. The safeguard is not an approval step. It is that the people making the call are standing in front of the school, holding the money, and answerable to the 568 members who live with what they build.

Two Hills

At the ZeroDX Awards in Beijing in September 2025, a New Zealand consultancy collected an award in the Emergent Excellence category. So did two of its clients. A third client took an award in the Transformational category, standing in a list of eight that also included Bayer and GE Appliances. The firm that had guided all three has two people in it, and they are married to each other.

Two Hills Ltd works out of Paraparaumu, a coastal town north of Wellington. Its principals are Rob England and Dr Cherry Vũ, partners in life and in work, and when the two of them collaborate on better ways of working and managing, the practice they call Open Management, the work goes out under the Teal Unicorn brand. Almost all of it happens in Vietnam, eleven time zones away.

The firm works because the two halves of it are unalike. England came up through IT service management and business agility and thinks in systems, in how the parts of an organisation produce the behaviour everyone complains about. Dr Vũ holds degrees in public policy, law and culture, and spends her time translating management principles into arrangements that survive contact with Vietnamese working life, which is a harder and less glamorous task than importing a model. Between them they run coaching, simulations and long advisory relationships rather than programmes with end dates, and what they are usually asking a company to do is decentralise authority, make information visible, and let teams carry a whole result instead of a fragment of one.

They have never advertised and do little marketing. Clients arrive by word of mouth and social media, and more are waiting than the two of them can take. That last fact is the interesting one, because every incentive in consulting says to hire. Two Hills has declined. England states the position in seven words: "we grow ourselves not our scale."

Mission and strategy, meaning what an organisation exists to do and how it settles where to go, follows directly from that refusal. The stated aim is better results, better lives and better society, and success is measured by what happens inside client organisations rather than by what happens to the firm's own revenue. A consultancy structured to grow has to keep selling work to fill a bench. A consultancy of two can leave when the client no longer needs it, which is exactly what Open Management asks leaders to do with their own authority, and which would be difficult to teach while doing the opposite.

Customers, in the ordinary sense, are the clients, and the evidence sits in what those clients became. The pattern goes back several years. At Wind, a Vietnamese property company where individual commissions had built silos, team leads were removed and people began forming around each deal instead, self-selecting and sharing skills; within months staff reported faster decisions and better income, and the chief executive backed what had started as an unsanctioned experiment. At EVN Finance, a former state-owned enterprise, chief executive Nguyễn Hoàng Hải introduced co-created strategy and team-based performance, made the work visible through Kanban and Obeya, and saw double-digit credit growth inside six months.

The current cohort is more emphatic. Golden Communication Group unified five subsidiaries into one, cut from 175 people to 109 across seven micro enterprises, and reported profit up 80 per cent with labour productivity per employee up 110 per cent in the year that followed. AIT, a family manufacturer of signage and displays, took its working day from eight hours to seven and a half and gave staff Saturdays off in a market that standardly works five and a half or six days, while revenue rose 30 per cent and overtime costs fell by more than half. CareHome, an appliance repair business, went from one maintenance station, twenty staff and a loss in 2022 to four stations, a training academy, 41 staff and profit above 10 per cent by August 2026, with customers up from 6,000 to 23,000. Baki Food, a Hanoi confectionery maker, took mooncake output from 5,000 cakes a day to 40,000 and roughly quadrupled seasonal revenue in three years while its full-time headcount fell from more than 30 to 27. PCS, now PCS Logistics, merged its separate companies into one entity in January 2026 and is building a micro-enterprise model across its operations.

A pattern runs through those numbers that is easy to miss. In four of the five, output rose sharply while headcount held flat or fell. This is what Two Hills sells, and it is also how Two Hills is built.

Leaders is the dimension the firm actually works on, because in every one of those cases the first thing that had to change was the person at the top. Dr Vũ's long-standing observation is that the hard part of a transformation is never the new tools; it is a leader letting go of control, and the space that opens when they do. Her clients' accounts bear it out with unusual candour. Nguyễn Ngọc Quốc Thịnh at Baki says the hardest part was not changing his employees but abandoning management habits built over years, and describes worrying about whether staff should be allowed to see the company's revenue and profit at all. Đào Hồng Hà at CareHome found that the more she controlled, the less proactive her team became, and had to learn to ask questions rather than supply answers. Her conclusion is the plainest statement of what Two Hills is selling: "leaders don't have to be the ones with the most answers." A striking number of the leaders the firm works with are women running businesses they want to make more humane as well as more productive.

Action, meaning how change actually gets made, is deliberately incremental and deliberately un-templated. Two Hills does not install a model. Clients start with small experiments under the principle of being safe enough to try, and expand what works, which is why Thịnh's second lesson after three years is that no single model transfers intact to every business and that forcing one would contradict the whole idea. CareHome began with minor improvements and meetings so quiet that staff were afraid to speak, and arrived at a point where technicians propose changes because they are the ones standing in the customer's house. The firm's method is closer to invitation than to instruction: listen to the situation, then co-create the smallest next step that unlocks something.

Data, tools and skills make up a small kit used consistently. Kanban and Obeya make work visible; short daily stand-ups surface blockages; and the Shu-Ha-Ri technique models team capability, moving a person from mastering a practice, to understanding and adapting it, to setting better ones. What makes Shu-Ha-Ri more than a training ladder is what clients attach to it: Baki now reassesses capability after every season against actual effectiveness and mastery, and pays against that rather than against a fixed grade.

The firm also runs its own artificial intelligence. Om is a language model trained on Two Hills' own writing, used for research, content, strategy design and facilitation, and it co-authored parts of their book Leading the Open Enterprise. For a two-person practice it is the nearest thing to a third colleague. England and Vũ describe it as a force multiplier rather than a substitute for thinking, something that frees time for what they call the slow art of wisdom-making, and they insist on keeping humans in the loop for any AI-assisted decision that affects people, which is a narrower and more useful commitment than most published AI principles.

Colleagues, for a firm of two, means the network it works through rather than a payroll. Two Hills works alongside consulting collectives, sits inside the ZeroDX and Business Ecosystem Alliance community, and keeps close ties to Corporate Rebels. Its practice arrived at decentralised decision-making, user focus, end-to-end accountability and team autonomy by its own route, which is a stronger endorsement of the model than adoption would be.

Which brings in the opportunity the firm took this year, and which nobody would have predicted. Two Hills has bought a large villa near Wellington and runs it as a bed and breakfast, Cherry Villa, so that England's time is better used while Vũ stays full time in consulting. The couple run the guesthouse on the same Open principles they teach, and it holds consistent five-star reviews. It amounts to a demonstration as much as a business. Open Management is claimed to work on any organisation, and a guesthouse is about the smallest organisation there is, in an industry neither principal came from, with customers who publish their verdict. The verdict has been unanimous.

What comes next is chosen on the same principle. Two Hills will keep exploring new opportunities without expanding, taking the clients its two calendars can serve properly and letting the rest arrive as they always have, by word of mouth. That there are more waiting than can be taken is itself a measure of what the method has come to be worth in Vietnam.

The argument holds together in a way it rarely does in this industry. Consultancies almost universally sell their clients growth while measuring themselves by headcount and billings. Two Hills has spent the year telling manufacturers, agencies, logistics firms and repair technicians that more output does not require more people, and its clients keep proving it: Golden with a third fewer staff, Baki with three fewer, AIT with a shorter week. The firm applies the same arithmetic to itself and has stayed at two. From Hanoi to Wellington, its ambition is not to become larger but to become, in its own word, ever more teal: better results, better lives, and a better society.

Uganics

Joan Nalubega had seen a soap-cutting technology at a manufacturer in Germany and brought the idea back to Uganics. Her production team and Operations Manager, working with a local fabricator, decided against it. They wanted knife-like cutters instead of the wires she had described. The decision sat inside their area of responsibility, so she let it stand. The machine arrived at the factory, damaged products, and broke its own knives, after the company had spent significant money building it.

What happened next is the real learning. Nalubega did not take the problem back. The team that had chosen wrong stayed accountable for fixing it, did more research, visited other factories, and eventually built a cutting technology that processes more product than the German design she had originally proposed. Her conclusion is unusually precise about what ownership costs: if responsibility is granted only when decisions work and withdrawn the moment one becomes expensive, it was never given in the first place. 

Uganics is a Ugandan social enterprise selling household products, principally soaps and repellents, that protect against malaria. It operates in Kampala and Butambala with 26 employees. The model is cross-subsidy: higher-margin sales to the tourism industry and urban higher-income customers fund affordable malaria protection for low-income households. That model exists because the first product failed a specific test. It was designed for a rural mother with children under five earning less than a dollar a day, and when it was finished, she could not afford it. Nalubega founded the company in 2016 while she was at the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) and registered it formally in 2017. SINA's approach, which hands marginalized young people responsibility for running their own hubs and expects them to build enterprises out of problems they have lived, is where her instinct for pushing decisions outward came from, and she names it as the influence on how she has built the company since.

Mission and strategy at Uganics are visible in packaging sizes. The company had been adding products that increasingly suited its higher-end customers rather than the households it was founded for. Returning to those communities, the team heard mothers ask for something gentle enough for young children's skin that also repelled mosquitoes, and cheap enough to buy often. That became the mosquito-repellent petroleum jelly. The first version was 100g; customers said they liked it but could not spend that much cash at once. A 30g version followed, and a 20g version is in development. Margin logic points the other way, toward larger and more expensive products, so each downsizing is a decision the mission influenced.

The opportunities dimension is best shown by a crisis the founder did not have to solve. A contract manufacturer producing Uganics lotions closed with a few weeks' notice. Nalubega's own thinking went to long-term capital: find funding, buy equipment, remove the dependency. Meanwhile her Production Manager, Kato Kaganda Shafic, had already contacted roughly five other manufacturers, reviewed their formulations and processes, shortlisted two, and gone directly to the company's lawyer, whom relevant team members can reach without going through her, to begin drafting an agreement. Six weeks later a bulk order arrived. Nalubega was worried about fulfilment; Shafic told her the alternative manufacturers were identified and the contract nearly ready, and production moved within days of signature. He also did not stop at one replacement, having concluded that single-supplier dependency was the actual defect. Uganics now has three contract manufacturers onboarded. 

Closeness to customers runs through people who do not hold customer titles. When the Kampala store opened, the Store Manager began hearing from regular lotion buyers that a preservative in the formulation was causing reactions; one customer explained that her brother could not use the product at all. The Store Manager took it straight to the Production Manager rather than upward. Production and Finance decided between them to investigate, brought in the company chemist, tested alternatives and reformulated the lotion. The founder saw it at final approval. Most of the rest of the company saw it at implementation.

Leaders at Uganics have moved, by the founder's own description, from running things to setting direction, and she is candid that this took years. Until roughly two or three years ago the company ran on founder dependency, with employees accustomed to asking her before acting. One or two layers now sit between a frontline employee and the CEO, though anyone can speak to her directly, and team bootcamps deliberately mix everyone regardless of position. The measure she offers is concrete: she can go months without visiting the factory while production continues, formulations and processes adjusting to supply and demand without her, and she learns about many of these decisions through reporting systems or quarterly business reviews.

The colleagues dimension surfaces when something breaks. Four or five months before the submission, lightning destroyed the power supply and backup system while a bulk petroleum jelly order was being prepared for shipment to Congo. Production was down about three days, leaving two days to finish an order with a truck booked to depart at a fixed time. People from across the company came to the factory to help with branding and finishing, the founder included, without anyone formally reorganizing the team. This is a habit rather than an emergency measure: regular meetings carry a standing "call for help" item where any person or department can ask for support and others volunteer.

Stock levels from the store and factory are shared weekly with the relevant people, and KPIs are tracked weekly and monthly and reviewed together. Agreed minimum stock levels mean the Kampala Store Manager restocks when the number says so, communicating directly with the factory, without asking the Operations Manager or the CEO. Production submits requisitions on the same logic. The company has built thresholds that carry the authority, so managers are not asked to re-approve the same decision every month.

Partners are brought in before the product exists. Rimka was already distributing mosquito-repellent products and wanted to carry a Uganics line. Rather than finishing the petroleum jelly and handing it over, Uganics spent almost a year developing it with them: Rimka took early samples to market, tested them, and fed back what retailers and customers said about the product, packaging and pricing, while Uganics gathered its own community feedback and the two streams were reconciled. Rimka still supplies market intelligence that shapes sizes, pricing and distribution. The women farmers who supply raw materials are treated the same way, as part of the supply-chain team rather than as vendors, and they now provide roughly 70% of raw materials and earn at least USD 75 per month each.

On action, the sharpest example involves the founder's own relationships being ended without her. Formalising supplier arrangements across more than 12 suppliers, the Production Manager and the procurement team set the requirements, reviewed existing relationships and decided which to keep. Some of the suppliers cut had been personally brought in by Nalubega during the company's early years. She was not asked to approve the cuts and saw the final list afterwards.

Results and rewards are more developed here than at most enterprises of this size. KPIs exist by department, role and business, covering production efficiency, volume, quality, lead time, cost savings, and waste and cut-offs against standard operating procedures. Performance bonuses are assessed roughly twice a year, salespeople earn commissions that step up at defined targets, and sustained performance can raise salaries. In production, bonuses are calculated partly against the losses the company would otherwise have absorbed from inefficiency and waste, and some processes that used to generate cut-offs now run days without any. Nimaro Christine, the Finance Manager, describes the arrangement as being trusted to take the risk and live with the consequences.

Nalubega is direct that the journey is unfinished. Strategy, fundraising and major financial commitments still run through her. Her reading of the last few years is that telling people they are empowered achieves nothing on its own; what changed behaviour was clearer roles, explicit ownership of decisions, access to information, and accountability that survives a bad outcome.

Uganics stands as a testament to what is possible when determination, shared purpose, and true accountability guide a team. The journey is not defined by easy victories, but by the willingness to learn, adapt, and trust one another in moments of uncertainty. As Nalubega and her colleagues continue forward, they prove that empowering others is not a destination, but a daily practice; and that lasting impact is achieved by those who dare to build, together, through unfinished chapters.

Univio

Univio calls it Step Zero. Tucked inside a planning document on leadership reorganization, the Polish commerce transformation company spells out, in plain terms, that is working towards reducing its reliance on the founder. Few companies are willing to put such an intention in writing, let alone act on it, while the founder remains present. Grzegorz Kuczyński continues to lead Univio’s top team. Yet this year, for the first time, that team has a name, a clear mandate, and a reporting line that no longer runs solely through him.

Univio’s journey here has taken nearly three decades. It began as a small IT consultancy in Poland in 1997 and steadily evolved into a partner trusted with complex, multi-technology commerce projects across industries. The real turning point came in 2016, when Univio left behind conventional management in favor of self-managed teams, distributed leadership, and a firm commitment to transparency. 

That commitment faced its toughest test last year, as Univio brought in a private equity investor to fund international growth, with the explicit condition that self-management would remain intact. Binding outside capital to the preservation of internal culture is itself a quiet demonstration of zero distance to partners. With the deal now settled, the company faces the more demanding, less visible challenge: proving that the model can scale beyond its founder, not just beyond its old org chart.

The most visible sign of change is Univio’s new leadership structure. The company has retired its Operational Leaders team, along with the previous Executive Team and Executive Leadership Team labels, and replaced them with a nine-person Strategic Team reporting directly to the Management Board, not to any single line manager. This team is charged with setting strategy, prioritizing investment, and safeguarding the health of the wider organization, rather than running departments.

Beneath this, day-to-day coordination now flows through a role Univio has intentionally defined as something between a leader and a facilitator. This person ensures decisions move forward and information circulates, without taking ownership of delivery in every area. This is zero distance to leaders, pushed further than most organizations attempt: a company deliberately designing itself to avoid dependence on any single person at the top, even its founder.

Below the Strategic Team, Univio has structured itself around three function teams, each with a distinct purpose. Growth is designed to move quickly, taking raw ambition to a minimum viable idea in what the company calls special-force mode, before passing the baton to Execution to scale the work. Germany is already named as the next market to win. Here, zero distance to opportunities is built directly into the organization, not left to chance.

The Execution Team, by contrast, is built to safeguard what already works. It brings operations, delivery, sales, and finance together into a single accountable system, ensuring that what Univio sells is delivered on time, at the right quality, and on margin. Client satisfaction is tracked as a real metric. This is zero distance to customers, made structural.

The People Team sits alongside both, responsible for culture, structure, and the health of the organization as a whole. This team balances the pace of growth the business seeks with what its people can realistically absorb. This is a clear example of zero distance to colleagues.

Together, these three teams directly address a challenge Univio named openly in its own planning: too much consensus, not enough speed. Streamlining decision-making, in the company’s own words, means more responsibility at the area level and fewer decisions bogged down in committees. Zero distance to action is now explicit.

The new structure operates within Holaspirit, the platform Univio has long used to make roles and responsibilities transparent, so anyone can see who owns what and why. Skill-building has kept pace with the industry’s technological shift: Univio now names AI literacy as a future competency and tracks AI adoption as a real metric for its People team, not just a leadership talking point. This is zero distance to data, tools, and skills: measured, not assumed.

Ownership is also starting to show up in paychecks. For years Univio ran on flat compensation and non-financial motivation alone. With an investor now involved, the company has begun redesigning how success gets rewarded: work is underway to let each team share in the profits its own area generates, and select people have been invited into an incentive program tied directly to the growth of the company's overall value. As Kuczyński put it, “working in a more progressive way simply makes more sense and enables better business outcomes.” He has said much the same about resilience: that the model holds up better precisely when markets get harder.

What Univio is proving, quietly, is that a founder's fingerprints do not have to fade for a company to outgrow him. Kuczyński shaped every part of the culture now coming into its own, and Step Zero may be his boldest move yet. He is making his daily presence less essential, not because the company needs him less, but because it is finally strong enough to carry forward what he began. Nine people now share the responsibility for strategy that once rested with a few. 

Vagas

Vagas.com's Vaga Inteligente service reads a live vacancy, finds the professionals on its database who match it, and contacts them directly by email and WhatsApp. The company reports that for more than half of the vacancies it handles, potential finalists reach the recruiter within seventy two hours.

The company that built the service has no managers, and nobody in it decides anything alone.

Vagas.com is a Brazilian recruitment platform founded in São Paulo in 1999 by Mário Kaphan and Sidney Monreal Martin, and launched at Conarh, the Brazilian human resources congress. More than 32 million professionals are registered on it. It handles around 300,000 vacancies and about 20 million applications a year, and has processed over a billion applications since it opened. It has taken no outside investment, and says it did not grow by less than 24 per cent in any of its first fifteen years.

The horizontal structure was not the plan at the outset. By the company's own account the word entered its vocabulary well after it was founded, at the end of a long run of invention, experiment and correction. In 2010 the founders had contact with Gary Hamel and Philip Kotler, both of whom lectured in Brazil that year, and the company says the conversations and its own market benchmarking produced the insights behind a decision to become consciously horizontal. In 2014 the model won the Unlimited Human Potential Challenge, run by the Management Innovation Exchange, at a ceremony in New York. The company then had around 160 employees, organised in teams by function, with committees and temporary commissions formed around eight strategic drives. Nobody at Vagas.com is designated a leader or carries a title such as director, supervisor or manager.

Action, meaning how a decision becomes work, has a defined procedure. When something needs deciding, the company convenes what it calls a GACC, a group suited to building consensus, made up of the people who know the subject. That group works the question through and publishes its conclusion on the internal network, which opens a period in which anyone in the company may object. A substantive objection, which the company calls a controversy, returns the question for reconsideration and brings more people into it until agreement is reached. There is no vote and no deciding voice. The test the company sets itself is that if one person's view carries the final decision, then what it has is not horizontal management.

Colleagues carries both halves of that arrangement, which the company sums up as each person doing what they want while everyone else has a stake in it. Hiring is collective and needs the agreement of everyone who dealt with the candidate. Ending an employment is likewise settled by discussion rather than by a manager's decision. There are no predefined targets and no annual budget. Strategic objectives are worked out together and then pursued by the teams closest to them.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and how it is used, is where the structure has most recently been added to. In 2020 the company created an orchestration role, to keep strategies better aligned across the organisation. The orchestrator supports rather than directs. In 2021 it established an Organizational Design Circle to identify and correct systemic problems in the management model itself, and launched Vagas Coletivo, which it describes as its first knowledge hub on diversity and inclusion.

Mission and Strategy has held steady while the product beneath it has changed. The company describes its purpose as creating worthwhile matches between professionals and companies, and it has stayed within hiring rather than diversifying.

Opportunities are handled through the same consensus procedure. Products at Vagas.com are developed into proposals by the group that knows the subject and are open to objection before they are built. Kaphan has said that the discussion can be very large to begin with, and that with time they learn.

Customers can be assessed here against an independent public record. On the Brazilian consumer complaints platform Reclame Aqui, Vagas.com holds a reputation score of 8.9 out of 10, in the platform's highest band. 

Data, Tools and Skills is where the company has set out how it uses artificial intelligence, and the arrangement is in the name of the product. The matching engine is called IA+H, artificial intelligence plus human. The recruiter shapes it for each vacancy, setting criteria of their own beyond the standard requirements, such as particular software, languages or previous employers, drawing on more than 140 criteria for defining what a role requires. The system returns matched candidates and the recruiter decides, and the matching improves as the tool is used. The same division of labour extends to candidates, through an assistant called VC_CV that helps people build a CV.

Partners takes a technical form here. The company's outward connections are in distribution, publishing a vacancy across multiple channels from one dashboard, and in integration, through a product that runs the matching engine inside a client's own applicant tracking system so the client does not have to move to a new one.

Results and Rewards, read at the level of the business, is a long accumulation. Twenty seven years of operation, more than 32 million registered professionals, over a billion applications processed, and a commercial model running from small companies making fewer than ten hires a month through to enterprises making more than a hundred, with IA+H matching included at each tier. Recognition has come for the way the company is run as well as for what it sells, from the 2014 award in New York to a top-of-mind ranking as a recruitment tool in 2016.

Two things sit alongside each other in this case. Vagas.com has built a matching engine in which the system proposes and a person decides, and it runs an organisation in which no proposal becomes a decision until the objections have been heard. It has operated the second of those for more than a decade and a half, and has now applied the same division of labour to the first.

Vaiva

In most companies the person who speaks for a team is the one who holds a position above the team. At Vaiva, however, the team chooses this person openly and if anyone puts their name forward their vote is counted twice since having the desire to take on the role is part of the qualifications. The person chosen is referred to as a voice and a voice is not a boss. Their role is to keep an eye on what each person is doing and to make sure that the work is shared fairly. They act as representatives of the team but do not make its decisions or take responsibility for its results. Elections also take place upwards: the voices from the service teams elect a cluster voice, the cluster voices in turn elect a domain voice, and the domain voices operate at the strategic level. Although any team can initiate a new election at any time, it is asked not to do so every month.

Vaiva is an automotive software company that is part of the Volkswagen Group, the latter of which is itself a subsidiary of a different software business within the group. The company designs software for autonomous driving and for in-car safety, always following the principle of safe mobility. Among its clients are the Volkswagen Group, Audi, BMW and the suppliers of the group. The company's operations are based in Germany, about two thirds of its employees being located in Ingolstadt near Audi, the rest in Wolfsburg near Volkswagen, and there is also a presence near Stuttgart. At the start of the transformation it had 230 employees; currently the number is about 180. Vaiva is also moving into defence products and is currently developing its first product that is proprietary.

The aims and strategy behind Vaiva’s transformation were clear: to strengthen customer proximity, improve cost efficiency, and deepen market understanding. Each of these objectives was designed to counter a real and existing weakness. For many years tasks had been assigned automatically by internal customers in the group, and Vaiva had carried them out. The lack of a sales function had been a matter of comfort until industry growth came to a halt. Three years into his tenure and having already changed the company to a matrix structure, the chief executive realised that the automotive sector was changing and felt that Vaiva needed to be built in a different way, so he decided to show that a new approach was feasible.

Everyone was given the opportunity to influence what happened next rather than being told about it. It was up to the employees whether or not they wished to take part in the design work. Around fifty of the 230 employees joined a core team, a supporter group, and a sounding board, with at least one individual from each department included so that the ideas could be discussed with colleagues before being turned into decisions. This group met on site for at least two days each month. The meetings were intended as working sessions and not as meetings for approval, with the implementation taking place in between. The criterion applied to all proposals was that they had to be safe enough to try, and this standard has been maintained ever since. Teams have already been merged and split as the circumstances required. About one fifth of the workforce had been responsible for building the structure in which they now work.

The thing they constructed has three levels and includes no form of traditional management. At the bottom are the service teams, each of which offers a service, has worked out for itself the purpose of that service, and has named customers who can be either inside or outside the company. Teams are not allowed to have more than twelve members; if they exceed this number they are divided. There are 35 such teams. A number of service teams make up a cluster and a number of clusters then form a domain. There are five domains, one of which is engineering, the oldest, and it covers work in the automotive area including testing solutions; there is also a product domain; a shared services domain; and defence, which was deliberately kept separate from engineering so that a business being built from scratch could move at its own pace. Positions have been replaced by roles and individuals hold up to three of them. 

Each team began with a full day of face-to-face meetings during which it worked on defining its service, purpose, roles, stakeholders and customers, followed by at least three months of team coaching. The voices that had been elected were to represent rather than to direct. The responsibility for the people was transferred entirely to six home bases, each comprising between thirty and forty people, and these home bases cut across the delivery structure. The home base lead held the formal responsibility for those people and took on no technical matters at all, instead acting as a mentor and coach and holding at least one one-to-one conversation each month and preferably every two weeks, preparing a development plan for every individual. Since most of them had previously been team leads, the change required them to give up their role in making technical decisions and to focus on the people aspect. 

Those managers who did not assume such a role continued to do so, working within the teams just like everyone else, and the only three top-level positions are still there because the company is answerable to its shareholders. The most obvious benefit is the speed with which action is taken in response to a new request; when a new project or subject is posted in the company's Teams channel, people apply for the posts. Since the home base leads have a development plan for each individual and know their strengths and aspirations, they can be asked for immediately. The roles are then filled and a team is established within hours. Previously, the process went from team lead to manager and then to department head.

The kind of autonomy in question requires skills which a hierarchical system never requests, and these were deliberately taught. When teams asked who they should consult, they were told to make their own decisions and shown how to do so. Consent was widely used as a method in order that everyone might be genuinely involved and no one could later claim they had known it wouldn't work. Feedback mechanisms were also a standard feature. The coach took part in the team's weekly meetings and provided special support to those people for whom the role was entirely new. Likewise with data and the tools which carry it: the rule is that information should be held where decisions are made. Financial transparency now extends to the cluster and domain levels, and the figures are made publicly available when the domain representatives and the top management meet.

Vaiva did not develop its model, and the partner relationship at its heart deserves to be mentioned. The company has adopted the Living Organization framework created by Guido Fiolka, who had previously put his method into practice with another supplier within the Volkswagen Group. Their aim had been to take 80 per cent of the framework and add 20 per cent of their own; in reality they have taken nearly 90 per cent and are now adjusting it by using it. The company has also carried out a detailed comparison of its approach with Bayer's dynamic shared ownership model and has found the two approaches to be similar enough that the main difference lies only in the vocabulary.

A check carried out internally shows that decisions are now faster since the teams take them themselves, because people know the responsibilities they have and the positions they hold, and because they feel more closely linked to customers; the most difficult kind of operational evidence is the time it takes to put together a project team, which used to go through three levels of approval but now takes only a few hours.

The difficulties are genuine and have been admitted. The German car industry has shrunk, the company having reduced its workforce from 230 to 180, and some employees are currently on short-time work. Teams continue to react differently to former managers than to their peers, a matter relating to psychological safety and not to the organisational structure. The most important lesson relates to sequencing: the team capabilities that this approach relies on, open communication and the ability to give critical feedback, were introduced after the structure had already been put in place rather than being developed alongside it.

What makes Vaiva stand out is not the fact that a small software firm went flat, but the circumstances in which it did so: within the Volkswagen Group, in a national industry that was shrinking, in a company whose customers are its own corporate relatives, at a time when having done nothing would have been the safest option. Rather than that, it passed the design on to fifty of its own employees, limited each of its teams to twelve members, made its representatives elected and capable of being replaced, and appointed a coach rather than a commander to lead every group of thirty colleagues. The company has already decided who will be the ones to make the decisions.

Vertia

In December 2023 the Finnish construction market fell off a cliff and Vertia's revenue dropped by nearly half in a single month. What followed was the worst period in the company's history: restructuring negotiations, staff reductions, and a real question about whether the business would continue at all. In the middle of that, the company spent its reserves building a software product it was not certain anyone would buy. Years of moisture measurement had shown the same fault over and over: conditions on building sites are not controlled, so concrete does not dry to plan, schedules slip, work gets rushed, and the defects arrive later. Cutting costs would have kept the lights on. Vertia cut costs and made the bet as well.

Vertia measures and assures construction quality, and its purpose is stated without much decoration: to improve the quality of building, and through that the quality of the homes people live in. It was founded in Helsinki in 2011 by Topi Jokinen, Heikki Jussila and Miska Jylhä, works across Finland with around thirty people, and has never had middle management. Jokinen, the chief executive, described the model in the trade press some years ago in a single line: "Our staff make all the decisions and there really are no supervisors at all."

Mission and Strategy, meaning what a business exists to do and how it works out where to go next, is treated here as continuous calibration rather than an annual document. There is a strategy day each year and a mid-year recalibration, a monthly strategy meeting, monthly board discussion, and weekly strategy check-ins with elected employee representatives. Notably, the company has moved back from where it once stood. It used to aim for a pure bottom-up model in which employees shaped strategy as independently as possible, and concluded that this left the board and management contributing too little of what they actually knew. The model now runs in two directions at once. Teams still experiment freely in their own work, and a local experiment that shows real promise can climb into company strategy, but nobody is expected to hold the whole company in their head. The test is narrower and more useful: can people influence their own work, and does their view reach the place where direction is set.

Opportunities, the question of how new ideas find time and money, runs on an advice process. An idea does not need permission. Anyone can set out what they want to do and why, ask the people affected and the people who know something for input, and then decide. The chief executive can offer advice like anyone else and holds no automatic veto. Most of it never travels that far, because teams are small business units carrying their own profit and loss alongside agreed health measures, and inside those boundaries they decide how to spend their own time and money. A team can simply agree that one person will spend time developing something while the others absorb the work.

The clearest example is a group with a deliberate name. After a strategy day, one frontline employee said out loud that Vertia talks a great deal about strategy and the things it agrees do not always happen. Rather than raise it and wait, they formed a group, recruited the members themselves, and called it DOVE, the Department of Vertia Efficiency. It meets about monthly and its job is not to generate new work but to make sure that things already decided, particularly the ones that matter to the people doing the work, actually move. One of its projects has been better respiratory protection against quartz dust. 

Customers is less a process here than the shape of the organisation. Almost everyone is customer-facing by design, with teams built to carry a client from start to finish, so there are very few internal functions at all; even the finance assistant who runs invoicing and payroll sits inside a business team and hears customer problems daily. Feedback therefore arrives through the work rather than through a survey, and a team of ten can act on it in an afternoon. When the condition management service was first designed, the plan was to sell it as one package at one price. Customers said they would rather see it broken into parts so they could choose what to do themselves and what to hand over. The service became modular almost immediately, because the people designing it were the people hearing it, and there was no approval chain in between.

Leaders, the question of who holds authority and how they use it, has moved twice. Vertia was low-hierarchy from the start, though in the early years the three founders made the big calls. Then it went very far the other way, to a point where Jokinen believed the chief executive's word should carry no more weight than anyone else's. It has since settled between the two. He intervenes very little in daily operations and teams run their own work, but he now takes clear responsibility for the overall picture, for strategic direction, and for making sure the board and management have a genuine role. There is no management chain to climb: responsibility roles exist, such as sales lead or people lead, but they carry no supervisory authority and no status. The measure that matters is not how close people feel to the top but how rarely they need it.

Colleagues coordinate laterally as a matter of routine, by phone, by direct message, or in a shared channel when something affects several teams, to the point where it is genuinely difficult to name an occasion when something had to go through management. Teams have deliberately become more stable than they once were, after the company found that constant restructuring exhausts people; moving between teams now needs agreement on both sides, and temporary swarms form around specific problems instead. Turnover is low, and people have left for better-paid roles elsewhere and come back.

Data, Tools and Skills, meaning the information and capability people need to decide well, is the machinery that makes the autonomy real. Almost everything is open by default. Teams read the same financial reports as the chief executive and the board, because the company wants one shared version of the truth rather than a different one at each level. Salaries are open too. The exceptions are the obvious ones, personal data and confidential customer sites. Openness alone would not be enough, so the reports have been simplified and people trained to read them, on the principle that anyone who can manage a household budget can understand a company's finances if they are presented properly. Each team is expected to know the economics of its own business, watched through a traffic-light model: green and the team runs itself, yellow and it is expected to react or ask for help, red and management may step in. On tools, roughly nine in ten choices sit with the person doing the work. Moisture sensors are the exception, standardised because Vertia has built its own calibration system around them, and that is about reliability rather than control.

Partners are called partners rather than subcontractors, and treated that way. They share a WhatsApp group in which they have come to know each other and help one another out, sometimes on things that have nothing to do with Vertia; when a site needs someone urgently, a message there can produce an answer in minutes. Email is avoided where a faster and more communal channel will do. The company increasingly describes itself as a platform, with its own resource planning system developed into the mechanism through which work is brought in, organised and distributed among teams, partners and services. When BuildStat was designed, the software supplier was in the room from the beginning.

Action shows up most honestly in a decision the chief executive disagreed with. A team decided to hire someone while Jokinen was unconvinced. He did not block it, because the decision sat inside the team's authority and he does not expect everyone to agree with him. Whether it proves right is still open, which he treats as part of the point: authority carries the duty to live with the consequences. Teams set their own local practices too, down to a team that decided on a short check-in every Monday and a longer meeting fortnightly, which is nobody's company policy.

Results and Rewards changed with the same logic. The bonus was once based on the whole company's result and partly allocated by length of service, which felt too far from anyone's own work. It is now based on the result of each business unit, shared on the same terms by everyone in it in proportion to hours worked, and paid monthly on a rolling three-month average rather than once or twice a year. The connection between the work and the money is now short enough to feel, and it has made teams noticeably more direct with each other, because a colleague who is struggling affects a result everybody shares. Base pay works similarly: the board sets the total salary budget and an employee salary working group largely decides how it is distributed. And the strongest result of the past year came from the same move. Through the crisis Jokinen was deeply involved in selling; afterwards he stepped almost entirely out and handed the people responsible for sales end-to-end ownership of it. They won a significant number of new annual contracts.

The hard part is what the company has learned about its own idealism. Vertia went a long way towards maximum freedom and found that freedom on its own does not hold. It has since brought back things it once regarded as suspect: clearer responsibilities, strategic direction set jointly, business health thresholds, a stronger board. 

What makes this case worth reading is that it is not a story of a company discovering self-management. It is a story of a company being tested on it. Vertia held its structure through a year that halved its revenue, kept teams deciding their own hiring and their own spending while the ground moved, and came out with a clearer view than the one it started with: that autonomy is not the absence of structure but the reward for handling it well. Freedom, boundaries and responsibility turned out to be one thing rather than three. The version of Vertia that exists now is considerably harder to knock over.

Viisi

Most people who co-found a company at 43 and turn 58 start thinking about handing over the keys. Tom van der Lubbe took out a loan instead. “Other people who are 58 are thinking about retiring and playing golf,” he said. “I don’t play golf. We are really back into business.” In the first quarter of 2026, the three remaining owners of Viisi borrowed against future earnings to buy out a departing fourth founder, rather than let an outside investor buy in. It is the kind of decision most companies never have to make twice in a lifetime, and Viisi’s leadership just made it, deliberately, with their eyes open.

The fourth founder, one of four people who had built the mortgage and financial planning firm together since 2010, realized he missed the earlier, more hands-on phase of the business. His three co-founders felt the opposite: they preferred the company Viisi had become. Rather than force an answer, they negotiated an earn-out agreement, financed partly from reserves and partly from future earnings, and kept ownership entirely inside the circle that had built it. For Tom, that meant committing to another ten years at the helm. 

Ask most private companies how they handle a founder’s exit and the answer looks the same everywhere: find a buyer. Bring in private equity, sell to a competitor, let someone else’s capital decide what happens next. Viisi did the opposite, and paid for it out of its own future earnings to avoid exactly that outcome. 

Tom is candid about the stakes. Outside capital typically wants an exit within seven to ten years and revenue multiplied five or ten times over, terms that push decision-making back toward a boardroom and away from the people doing the work. “If you build a company,” Tom asked, “would the company also survive if you were not there anymore?” That question, more than any org chart, is how Viisi thinks about mission and strategy: not a plan defended from the top, but a live test the founders keep setting for themselves.

The same question shapes how Viisi is handing off its future. Three colleagues in their thirties, all with a decade or more at the firm, recently told the founders they intend to stay for the rest of their working lives, an unusually direct signal from a rising generation that the model is worth inheriting. That prompted Viisi to formalize its governance more clearly than ever before. The result is Visigroup, a general company circle of six permanent members, three founders and three colleagues, who take strategic decisions together under a consent principle. For the first time, Viisi held a dedicated shareholder meeting to separate long-term investment and liability questions from day-to-day strategy. 

Where a typical family business hands power down through inheritance or a boardroom vote among shareholders, Viisi gave equal formal standing to colleagues who own no equity at all. The company’s long-standing hierarchy of stakeholders is now written down more plainly too: people first, clients second, shareholders last.

Regarding Viisi’s clients, its zero distance to its customers has always been close to instinctive. Tom compares it to a good restaurant, where a diner expects one person to handle their evening, not to be passed between departments. “Everyone wants to help a client,” he said. “No one wants to see them dissatisfied.” Most banks split a single client across a mortgage advisor, a wealth planner and a call center; Viisi keeps one advisor accountable from first conversation to final signature, which is the zero distance principle in its purest form, authority sitting with whoever is actually closest to the customer, not scattered across departments to protect internal turf. What is new in 2026 is where that instinct led. 

A mortgage consultant realized that many of Viisi’s clients, highly skilled professionals relocating between Amsterdam, Zurich, Barcelona and London for firms like Booking.com or international banks, needed help finding an apartment before they ever needed mortgage advice. Rather than route the idea through a strategy committee, Viisi gave the consultant a time budget and let him test it. The pilot succeeded so quickly that the company is now rolling out Viisi Real Estate across the whole organization, activating an entity it had quietly registered a decade earlier but never used. It is a clean example of opportunities surfacing at the edge of the business rather than from a planning department, and of action taken without waiting for permission from above.

The same logic guides how Viisi is preparing its people for a market that AI is starting to reshape. Over the next four years, every advisor will become a Certified Financial Planner, extending the firm from mortgage advice into wealth planning, insurance and pensions, a direct response to the risk that narrow mortgage advice becomes commoditized. 

On tools and data, Viisi draws a firm line: AI can draft documentation and speed up back-office work, but a person still checks and signs every piece of client-facing advice, both because regulation requires it and because Viisi believes the human relationship is the asset worth protecting. That belief is paying off in an unexpected way. Because the firm has spent a decade publishing transparent, substantive content, including a public calculator that lets anyone estimate their own salary at Viisi, AI-driven search now surfaces the company far more prominently than its size would suggest. 

Despite holding under one percent of the Dutch mortgage market, Viisi now ranks second nationally in visibility, behind only a bank twenty-five times its size. National broadcasters have approached the firm directly, having discovered through search that Viisi was the first company in the Netherlands with a fully transparent salary model, years ahead of new EU pay transparency rules.

Where Viisi’s culture shows up most vividly is in its people. The company has had zero staff turnover for three years, a fact Tom attributes to more than automatic, top-quartile pay rises and the absence of bonuses. Investigating why anyone might still consider leaving, Viisi discovered the last remaining driver was not work at all, but private life: divorce, illness, burnout, midlife crises. So the firm began fully covering external coaching or therapy for any employee, no questions asked about the topic. 

Where much of the financial sector still rewards individual bonuses that, in Tom’s words, end up “privatizing the profits and socializing the risks,” Viisi ties pay to tenure and trust instead, and has the retention numbers, and the client scores, to show for it. Fifteen years in, Viisi’s biggest news of the year was not a product or a market move. It was three owners deciding, once again, and at real personal cost, that the company, and the next generation waiting to inherit it, was worth committing another decade to.

VIVA! Conversion

A lot of founders keep their own salary a closely guarded secret. Toni Fernández Lázaro posts his where every one of his roughly fifty employees can read it. At VIVA! Conversion, his Spanish digital-marketing agency, an employee who wants a raise does not lobby a manager behind a closed door, they file an application, set down an honest account of what they have contributed, and let a peer-elected “council of wise ones” weigh it in full view of the team. It is a startling way to handle money, and that is precisely the point. Fernández is several years into what he cheerfully calls an “eternal evolution”: a deliberate, still-unfinished attempt to build an agency that runs on transparency and trust rather than hierarchy.

It did not begin this way. Fernández founded VIVA! Conversion in 2017, after a stint at Google, and for years ran it like any other shop: pay-per-click advertising first, then SEO, conversion optimization, marketing automation, and web development, each new service adding another layer of management as the team climbed toward fifty people. Then, in 2023, a book got under his skin. Reading Frédéric Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, he started pulling at assumptions he had never thought to question. “It makes you start to question everything,” he said. An uneasy curiosity hardened into a multi-year redesign of how the company shares its money, makes its decisions, and defines a career.

The most visible change in 2026 is how the organisation evolves in the financial aspect. VIVA! had already opened its books (profit-and-loss statements, cash flow, revenue by business line) and Fernández records a short video each month walking the team through the numbers. 

This year the company raised the share of profit distributed to employees from 28 to 35 percent. More significant than the size of the pool is how it is now split. Roughly 40 percent of the distribution rests on performance, with the remainder divided among equal shares, salary level, and tenure, a weighting that has itself become a point of internal debate.

To make performance-based pay feel credible rather than arbitrary, VIVA! built a process around it. Employees write a self-assessment. The team then nominates the colleagues who know each other’s work best to sit on a temporary “council of wise ones” which, together with the compensation circle, sorts contributions into four performance levels, from steady value-generators to internal reference points. Anyone can apply for a salary review; a council validates the request before the compensation circle weighs in. The company has even used AI tools to synthesize the self-assessment documents and speed the analysis.

Alongside pay, the organization itself keeps shifting toward holacracy. Traditional hierarchy is giving way to circles that set their own accountabilities, with several circle leads chosen by peer vote rather than appointment. Because much of the team works remotely, VIVA! rotates people through virtual teams to preserve a sense of belonging and keep circles coordinated. New circles have emerged from the bottom up: one around user-generated content, another a creativity line, an earlier one focused on fashion and e-commerce (each started by employees who spotted a demand and opened space to serve it). 

Spending follows the same logic of trust: staff carry company cards and buy what they need without sign-off.

Zero bureaucracy is where the company is furthest along. Authority sits close to the work: circles govern themselves, leads are elected by peers, salaries (including the founder’s) are visible to everyone, and routine spending needs no approval. The pay redesign deliberately moves the most sensitive decision in any company out of a manager’s hands and into a transparent, peer-shaped process.

Zero time to market shows up in how quickly new service lines appear. Because an employee can open a circle around a need they have spotted and act on it without climbing an approval ladder, ideas like the user-generated-content and creativity lines move from observation to live offering without waiting on headquarters.

Zero idle resources is becoming more evident as the compensation pilot matures. Tying a large slice of pay to demonstrated value , and naming categories such as value-generators, pushes the company toward rewarding contribution over presence, while rotating virtual teams move people to where they are needed. These are early internal-market mechanisms rather than a finished system, but they point in the right direction.

The company keeps employee turnover below industry norms and has been recognized among Spain’s most engaged workplaces in independent surveys, while holding margins in the region of 20 to 25 percent and projecting growth of around 30 percent. These figures do not prove the operating model caused the numbers, but they suggest the experiment has not come at the expense of performance.

The hard parts are real and openly acknowledged. Open salaries invite comparison, and the company has had to manage the emotions and conversations that follow. The tenure weighting in the profit split is contested. Some roles still concentrate too much dependency, which limits genuine self-management. 

What makes VIVA! Conversion distinctive is not that it has arrived, Fernández is the first to say it has not. It is that the company keeps treating its own structure as a product to iterate: shipping a version of profit-sharing, gathering feedback, adjusting the weights, and shipping again. “Holacracy is just something we are testing, not an end in itself,” Fernández said. In a sector built on optimizing other companies’ conversions, VIVA! has turned the same experimental instinct on itself.

VkusVill

VkusVill’s story began in 2009, when Andrei Krivenko opened a single dairy stall in Moscow, investing about a million rubles of his own savings in milk and cottage cheese he trusted enough to serve his own children. From that modest start, the business grew into one of country’s largest grocery chains. By 2016, with the company already established as a serious player, VkusVill set out to reinvent its management approach entirely. The impact has been striking: revenue has surged from roughly 18 billion rubles in 2016 to 329 billion rubles in 2024, an eighteen-fold increase. 

Today, VkusVill operates more than 2,400 stores in 157 cities, delivers to hundreds of thousands of households daily, and holds the top position in the online grocery market. In 2025, Haier recognised VkusVill with its international Zero Distance Award, not for adopting a management model, but for inventing one.

The instinct behind all of it goes back to the beginning. Krivenko left a stable job as a food distributor's CFO because he wanted to sell dairy products he could trust completely, and that same instinct scaled into a company-wide philosophy. "The customer comes first," he has said, "their interests must matter more than profit or investor interests." He has argued that a company that truly satisfies its customers cannot end up financially weak, and VkusVill built its entire assortment strategy to prove it: product ratings from shoppers decide what stays on shelves, and anything that drops below 4 out of 5 stars is removed outright. It is zero distance to mission and strategy, taken almost literally.

That system runs on a scale most retailers would find alarming. Millions of product ratings and half a million customer comments arrive through VkusVill's app and website every month, and a hotline logs up to half a million more contacts, all funnelled into a CRM system that assigns real responsibility. When several customers called in the same week to say a favourite condensed milk cookie tasted different, the complaint reached the product manager, the food technologists and the manufacturer directly, and the case stayed open until the recipe was actually fixed, not just logged. It is zero distance to customers running at industrial scale without losing a personal thread.

The organisational engine behind all of this is what VkusVill calls Clientocracy: a structure built around autonomous teams, where each team and each role makes an explicit promise, a specific outcome a customer can expect, backed by the authority to actually deliver it and measured against real metrics rather than internal targets handed down from above. Teams are not graded on whether they hit a number set for them; they are graded on whether the person they made a promise to actually got what they were owed. It is zero distance to action and zero distance to colleagues at once: small, accountable units replacing a chain of approvals with a chain of commitments.

How fast that structure can move was shown most clearly in 2020. When the pandemic made new store openings impossible, the teams responsible for launching physical locations pivoted, on their own initiative, into building online grocery delivery instead. "In March, we had zero couriers. By year's end, 2,800 employees were working in online sales," recalled Yuri Alasheev, a member of VkusVill's Management Council, noting that unlike others in the market, the company did it profitably. Four organisational changes happened that year, driven by teams adapting in real time rather than waiting on a restructuring memo from above. VkusVill leads Moscow's online grocery market to this day. It is zero distance to leaders and zero distance to opportunities at once, proof that authority sitting close to the work can move faster than a plan sitting on someone's desk.

Achieving this level of responsiveness means letting go of the illusion of complete control. VkusVill deliberately maintains at least four suppliers for every product, ensuring that no single partner can dictate terms. The company works with more than 1,900 producer partners and limits the storage of fresh goods to no more than 12 hours before they reach the shelves. About three-quarters of VkusVill’s assortment is fresh, and 60 percent of it is sold the day after production. The principle behind this is what the company calls optionality: always keeping alternative paths open instead of locking into what appears most efficient. This is zero distance to partners, and zero distance to the data, tools, and skills that underpin a supply chain designed for flexibility rather than the illusion of savings.

VkusVill's leaders were confident enough in the system to try exporting it. In 2023, the company's founders started Beyond Taylor, a consulting firm built specifically to teach Clientocracy to other businesses. "VkusVill once found its blue ocean," says Nikolai Popovich, chairman of VkusVill's Management Council and Beyond Taylor's co-founder, and its management system is what lets it keep finding new value for customers and adapt quickly to what buyers need. The company kept investing in the same idea internally too: 2025 brought a new master's program on Clientocracy project management with Plekhanov University, an R&D centre at ITMO where students work directly on VkusVill's own problems, and a food-tech incubator that drew 85 student teams from 25 universities, with almost every prototype now moving into development. It is zero distance to results and rewards taken to its logical end: a system confident enough in its own outcomes to teach itself to others.

What began as one man selling milk he trusted has, sixteen years on, become a blueprint for business transformation. In an industry notorious for red tape and inertia, VkusVill tore up the script, putting power in the hands of those closest to the customer, and delivering results that speak for themselves: eighteen-fold revenue growth, and a management system now exported globally through BeyondTaylor. From a single Moscow stall to a force shaping how companies everywhere think about trust and speed, VkusVill’s story is proof that customer obsession, not control, is the real engine of scale.

VMMGAME

Egor Kravtsov expected human-centric management to work like rocket fuel: "fill up the tank and take off fast." Running VMMGAME, the gaming furniture brand he co-founded with his brother Alexei in 2018, taught him something closer to the opposite. Today the company employs more than a hundred people and operates in three countries, but adopting the Beyond Taylor management model did not free Kravtsov from the business. It pulled him further in.

The brand did not start out as a furniture company. The Kravtsov brothers set out to open a chain of e-sports clubs and needed to furnish them, so they ordered gaming chairs from China. Few competitors were selling anything like them locally at the time, and what began as outfitting their own clubs turned into a product line, then a manufacturing contract in China, then, once pandemic-era shipping problems made importing unreliable, a factory of their own, starting with computer desks and expanding into chairs and accessories. It was not their first attempt at building something: an earlier taxi fleet and a small coffee-shop chain with Alexei had both failed, and at one point the brothers were juggling five to seven ventures simultaneously before deciding to drop everything else and commit fully to furniture.

Nearly every company Kravtsov studied before that ran on the same model: a leader holding tight control and little patience for anyone who didn't deliver. "If you didn’t deliver, you’re out," he says of that culture, "no one is going to be gentle with you." He had already been drawn to the idea of teal organizations, connecting with people through shared values rather than rigid hierarchy, partly from his own time at a bank where, he says, the toxicity was impossible to miss. Running VMMGAME day to day left no real room to act on that instinct, until Beyond Taylor arrived carrying the credibility of VkusVill's founders, credibility that made the brothers willing to trust an unfamiliar approach.

Zero distance to mission and strategy began with groundwork most companies skip. Before forming a Board of Leaders, VMMGAME built a values map, traced a line from customer pain points to a single core promise, and built a system of promises underneath it, with success metrics still the hardest part to get right. That work happened at the top, among the Board of Leaders, then cascaded down through senior managers to every team. Zero distance to customers runs through the same chain: pain points converted into a core promise, the promise translated into metrics the company now checks weekly to see whether it is actually being kept. 

Zero distance to partners shows up in who VMMGAME brought in to make the shift work. VkusVill founder Andrei Krivenko sat in on meetings and strategy sessions directly with the brothers. Beyond Taylor's Andrei Tokarev spent time immersed in VMMGAME's own business processes before proposing anything, rather than arriving with a template. Fyodor Yakovlev and Sergei Zaytsev of the 3 STREAMS investment fund helped the company move fast and sidestep mistakes other companies make on the same path. None of them ran the transformation for the Kravtsovs but all of them helped shape it.

Zero distance to leaders lives in the Board of Leaders itself, made up of the heads of VMMGAME's autonomous teams and paid identically: a fixed base plus 20 percent of net profit, split evenly. Reading a colleague's contribution is harder at that level than it is on the shop floor, where people say plainly when something isn't working, so Board members are still learning to give each other feedback with more care than the factory requires. Kravtsov used to push underperforming people himself; now that Board members share the same stakes, they push each other, because everyone understands that one person's work shows up in everyone else's results. That same shift is where zero distance to colleagues lives more broadly: an authoritarian structure left little incentive to surface conflict and plenty to hide it, and Beyond Taylor's emphasis on solving problems early, because delay costs the whole team, has cut down on how many disputes reach a breaking point.

Zero distance to data, tools and skills came from admitting a blind spot: VMMGAME's management reporting, which outsiders had praised for years, turned out to leave a lot to be desired once the company started checking, weekly, whether its numbers actually showed what mattered, both the metrics tracking customer promises and the financial indicators showing whether the business model works.

Zero distance to action and zero distance to results and rewards meet on the factory floor, where nearly the entire company, except the warehouse and logistics teams still waiting on more automation, now works on piece rate. A team's daily output converts into money by a fixed formula, and everyone on it takes home a share proportional to hours worked; workers now set their own per-shift earning targets instead of waiting to be told what to produce. Teams get whatever resources they need, but only once they ask for them, which frees leadership from managing tasks and hands teams the job of managing outcomes.

Zero distance to opportunities followed once people stopped bracing for judgment. Employees describe the Kravtsovs less as bosses ready to hand down a verdict on every mistake and more as teammates who share what they know, and that shift alone has made people more willing to experiment and take initiative. None of it delivered what Egor Kravtsov expected going in, though: he thought Beyond Taylor would let him step back from operations, and instead it required him to get more involved, spending less time on the financial models and motivation systems he used to build himself and more time simply working with people, which he now considers the real job of a founder. Letting go of control, he says, "is one of the most frightening things you can do”.

The rocket fuel metaphor turned out to be a bit different than what the founders thought at the beginning, but it gave them three major shifts that helped the whole company. Beyond Taylor did change how fast VMMGAME could move: a Board of Leaders that hasn't lost a member in six months, a shop floor that sets its own earning targets, a company that finally checks every week whether its promises to customers hold up. 

Volvo Construction Equipment 

Volvo Construction Equipment is a division of the wider Volvo Group, where Volvo Trucks remains the largest business area. On its own, Volvo CE reported net sales of roughly 81 billion Swedish kronor in 2025, employs around 13,000 people across 85 nationalities, runs 14 production facilities worldwide, and sells through a network of 289 dealers in 180 markets. A company that size does not usually shed most of its management structure in five years. Yet since 2020, the number of layers standing between the chief executive and a machine operator on a customer's jobsite has fallen from more than nine to a standard of two below the Executive Management Team, with room made only for exceptions at the largest sites and dealer organizations.

That shift did not begin as damage control after a crisis. It began in 2020, when Volvo CE started building what it now calls the Volvo CE Philosophy: a purpose, to build the world we want to live in, backed by a handful of working convictions rather than a rulebook. The company bet that a clear purpose moves people further than a detailed plan does, that principles travel better than instructions, that a business can be run so every stakeholder gains over time, and that people show up wanting more than a task list, they want to grow, be trusted with real decisions, and be recognized for it. Some inside the company found this abstract at first. What has since made it feel necessary, rather than a nice idea, is a market moving fast enough that speed, flexibility, and how well the company draws on its own people's judgment now matter as much as capital or technology.

That philosophy now runs through how the company sets strategy, not just how it talks about itself. The stakeholder model it describes is a standard input to investment decisions today, and after years of keeping strategic ambitions deliberately spare, on the grounds that too much detail would smother them, the company recently swapped in a more structured, granular format because the sparer one had started to feel too vague to act on. The clearest proof that the philosophy shapes real decisions, rather than sitting above them, came out of Asia and China, where teams facing a weak run of business built their own turnaround strategy through a highly involving, cross-functional process, then carried it out themselves with leadership spread across the group instead of issued from one office.

The same logic drives what Volvo CE calls 100 percent involvement, its answer to widening who gets to bring ideas forward. Every co-worker is expected to hold one task beyond their normal job that feeds the wider purpose, on top of the ordinary work of performing and delivering. A welding team at one of the company's Swedish sites gives the clearest picture of what that produces in practice: they engineered a fix that cut welding fumes by 67 percent, won a health and safety award for it, and are now watching the same solution get adopted at welding stations elsewhere in the world. Progress has been slower on the wider shop floor, where operators have long been boxed in by fixed takt times. The company is starting to use gains in takt time to open up room for exactly this kind of improvement work, though support functions still sometimes step in and take over instead of simply making space for operators to lead it.

Customers get a version of that same freedom most visibly in product development, where teams now work directly with customers, suppliers, and internal experts instead of routing decisions through the usual sequence of functional handovers. One such project cut product cost, development cost, and time to market by a meaningful margin while still meeting the customer's quality bar, and the same approach is now being tried elsewhere with encouraging early signs. Volvo CE does not pretend this scales easily. Horizontal, cross-functional ways of working sit uneasily against decision structures that remain mostly vertical, and the company is still working out how to spread the model without recreating the bureaucracy it is trying to remove. Headcount in roles that don't face the customer directly has meanwhile been held deliberately tight, a choice that has caused some internal frustration but has also forced support functions to keep raising their own productivity instead of growing to match demand.

The delayering already described is the structural side of what leadership is supposed to look like now; the cultural side shows up in how individual leaders choose to run their teams. Volvo CE points to one member of its Executive Leadership Team as an example of what that looks like when it works: someone who moved from a demand-and-control style toward a more self-aware, involving one, visibly enough, including sitting alongside far more junior colleagues in a personal development program, that his example has changed how people around him lead. The company is equally frank that this is not evenly spread. People's appetite for a more human style of leadership arrived faster than every leader's ability to deliver it and the organisation is still working on this aspect.

Below that leadership layer, colleagues are organized around three separate ideas the company keeps distinct on purpose: work happens inside mission or value-based teams built around a shared task, initiatives such as service or go-to-market are led horizontally across functions rather than owned by one department, and the organization itself is built mainly around competence, so the right capability can be pulled together wherever it sits rather than wherever the org chart says it should. An internal Advanced Facilitation program now trains people drawn from four so-called lighthouse projects in the relational side of running a business, turning them into change agents who can map dependencies and solve problems across team lines rather than escalate them. Volvo CE says the effect is starting to show up in recruiting too, with candidates increasingly citing the company's less hierarchical, more informal culture as a reason for choosing it over other parts of the Volvo Group.

None of that works without people having the information to act on it. Volvo CE's approach to data, tools, and skills leans more on leadership behavior than on new systems: the explicit ambition from the top is to stay approachable and talk with the organization at eye level rather than down through the layers. Every employee has a computer login and email, so access to information is broad even where not everyone carries a company phone or tablet, and in several countries local teams have built their own workarounds, using tools like WhatsApp or WeChat to keep information moving where the formal systems don't reach. The gap the company points to is less about technology than confidence, helping people actually use the information they already have access to, and it is starting to close that gap through peer coaching that employees run for each other rather than a program handed down from the top.

The same ecosystem thinking extends outward to partners. Volvo CE now works noticeably closer with its dealer network than it did a few years ago, when the relationship ran on a strict arm's-length principle; Asia was again the region where the closer model was learned and proven first. Being part of the wider Volvo Group is treated as an advantage here rather than a constraint, echoing a line Volvo Group's president and chief executive Martin Lundstedt has used publicly: partnership is the new leadership.

Action inside Volvo CE is framed less as a fixed rule than as a constant negotiation between alignment and autonomy. Early in the journey, some decisions made autonomously exposed real gaps in people's understanding of the wider business, and the company treats that as a genuine lesson learned rather than a failure to paper over. The one thing kept off the negotiating table is the philosophy itself: decisions are expected to support every stakeholder winning over time, keep work flowing, and honor the expectation that everyone both performs and develops. Making that workable day to day, the company says, falls to leaders, whose job is to help people understand enough of the wider system that they feel safe acting on their own judgment inside it.

Results and rewards are moving in the same direction, toward recognizing performance, collaboration, and the ability to create real value rather than activity for its own sake. Volvo CE ties this shift to a specific business outcome: the company has now come through two rough patches in its business cycle without the kind of damage that would once have followed, something it says had not happened before, while being careful to credit distributed leadership and new ways of working only as contributors to that result, not its sole cause. Much of the everyday evidence behind that claim sits in an internal series of 100 percent involvement stories, published openly on the company intranet, that the organization uses to track where the model is actually changing how people work.

Volvo CE is unusually candid about what still isn't solved. By its own account, the hardest thing has been keeping the change alive once the initial energy fades and the people who championed it move on to other roles, since the organization considers itself still in a forming phase where that kind of continuity is a genuine risk rather than a settled fact. A related difficulty is that the clearest evidence of change, in how people talk to each other, how much they trust their leaders, how mature the leadership actually is, tends to show up in behavior well before it shows up in any dashboard, which means the company has to keep looking for that evidence deliberately rather than waiting for a metric to confirm it. Getting the balance right between alignment and autonomy is also still a work in progress rather than a solved design problem, and the company is candid that shedding habits built up over decades of industrial-scale operation takes longer than any single program, describing the whole effort as organic and ongoing rather than something with a finish line.

What makes this case worth telling is the size of the bet behind it. A 13,000-person division of one of the world's largest industrial groups looked at nine layers of management standing between its chief executive and the person running a machine on a customer's jobsite, and chose to close that distance anyway, years before any crisis would have forced the question. Backing a purpose like building the world we want to live in is easy to say; giving up layers of control to make it real is not, and Volvo CE has done the second part, not just the first. It hasn't finished, and it says so without flinching. What comes through in the end is something simpler than any framework: a company willing to trust that the people closest to the work know best how to do it.

Westernacher Consulting 

Westernacher Consulting has no personal incentives. Individual bonuses go into a single company-wide pool instead. The mechanism is precise: the firm sets a profitability target, then adds up the variable, profitability-driven portions of every salary. That sum, currently around fifteen million, counts as 100 per cent. What any individual receives depends on how the whole company performed. Last year the pool reached 85 per cent, meaning colleagues in a booming region were paid at the same rate as those in a region that did not.

Westernacher is a global consulting firm specialising in SAP and business consulting; it was established in 1969 and has its head office in Heidelberg. The company has expanded from an initial staff size of about 270 to just over 1,200 employees, spread among 26 legal entities. In India there are almost 100 people, Poland also has more than 100, while Germany, the United States and Canada account for the rest of the top-ranking countries, and all the other entities have fewer than 40 employees. The entire growth has been financed by the company itself, and each share in the company is held by an active employee.

That ownership is where mission and strategy stop being words. Shares are not given away: people buy or earn them. Eligibility rests on staying about two years, fitting the culture, and intending to commit long term. The result is a firm financed by the people doing the work, growing fast by its own history and slowly by industry standards. The strategic push now is to put the action closer to the customer. The current reorganisation aims to achieve this: rather than one person owning operations globally, each region has an owner. Those owners align on what is done while the how can differ locally.

This structure is matrixed, and in some cases it is multidimensional. The work carried out for clients is done by project teams which are formed on the basis of capability and which continually change. Inside the organisation, people are members of competency areas, these matching geography in certain instances and cutting across it in others.

Opportunities are shaped rather than assigned. Development planning is deliberately co-active, starting from what kind of puzzle piece a person is and what they want to become. Then it looks for work that fits, rather than laying down a corporate track. Making that work at this size is a data, tools, and skills problem. The firm is working on it: staffing planners who cannot know everyone personally should still see what a person is capable of, interested in, and wants to learn next. The company is testing how far AI can help with that matching. New feedback tools are being introduced to give a triangulated view of someone's contribution rather than one manager's opinion. A quieter piece of work matters just as much: building a shared language across borders so colleagues on an international team mean the same thing when they say a project is at a given phase and a deliverable is done.

Here, leadership is defined in terms of what it does not include. There are six levels, deliberately referred to as levels not as layers. The first three of these do involve consulting. At the fourth level individuals either go deeper into a particular capability, working as solution architects and work stream leaders, or take on people responsibilities, usually both, with their billable target being reduced as a result. The fifth level consists of client partners and those who manage countries or regions with responsibility for profit and loss and for the legal entity. The sixth level is global management, which has twelve people whereas a typical C-suite has about five. The CEO is the first to remark on how difficult it is to achieve outcomes from a meeting of that size.

A team lead's job is to ensure their people are learning, growing, and happy. Budgets are not theirs. Salaries are not theirs to set either: they have a role in the process, but the number comes from banded ranges. The CEO is trained in co-active coaching and views a leader as someone who moves in front, behind, beside, or at a distance depending on what the mission needs. The same reflex runs below the CEO: colleagues bring decisions to the enterprise architect for approval, and he hands them back because the person with the client knows the client better than he does.

For a company whose product is judgement, its main partners are usually its clients and the broader technology ecosystem within which its work is carried out; what is more recent is a conscious desire to learn from other organisations carrying out the same thing, especially consultancies of a similar size that operate in many countries, since the questions that this firm is now asking have no textbook answers and no external investor to provide them.

The results show up in the reward system as much as in growth. Salaries sit in market-based bands per country, positioned initially on competency and starting point, and increasingly on project contribution, competency development, and the qualitative signal of whether a team is better for having that person. Within a level, a senior consultant facing clients may have a higher base than someone in a management role because the management role carries the higher profit share. This is based on the reasoning that a manager has more influence over whether the business succeeds. In the order profit is allocated, depreciation, shareholders, and the savings target come first. The shared pool is the first to absorb a shortfall. Everyone is exposed to the same result, and everyone can see the mechanism producing it.

The difficulties come with growing quickly. Changes intended as process clarity are read internally as added hierarchy. The CEO is working against that reading rather than the change itself. Roughly a fifth of the company is new each year. Many arrive from traditional employers expecting someone above them to decide. People who wanted freedom when hired can freeze once given it. The planned response is a set of role descriptions with playbooks that spell out what a role holder should do without becoming a checklist. This is followed by peer sessions to build shared understanding. India, the largest entity, is a market where titles and years of experience are widely treated as entitlements. The answer there has been years of patient recruitment and development rather than an announcement.

Westernacher is worth studying because of the consistency between the way it is financed and the way it operates. A company in which the employees are the owners, financed by its own profits, drawing all variable costs from a single fund, asking team leaders to develop people rather than telling them what to do, and bringing client decisions to the person nearest to the client, is not simply adopting a series of progressive practices. Rather, it is putting into practice on a large scale a single proposition that a consultancy functions most effectively when the people who carry out the thinking also take on the consequences.

Zabota

By the spring of 2023, something had happened at Zabota that had never happened before in the organization's history: nearly every one of its home care teams was covering its own costs, no subsidy required. Getting there started with a lunch Irina Smolyakova can still describe in physical terms, unable to lift a spoon to her mouth without working through a staffing problem in her head at the same time.

Smolyakova arrived at the non-profit sector after 25 years in business. She stepped away specifically to escape what she called the nightmare of KPIs, and in 2019 she opened Zabota po Sosedstvu, meaning ‘Care by the Neighbour’, in Chernogolovka outside Moscow, with four people and a direct connection to Buurtzorg, the Dutch home care organization that pioneered the small, self-managing nursing team as a global standard. A second team followed within a year in Zvezdny Gorodok, then more across the Moscow region and out to Noyabrsk in Yamalo-Nenets, the whole network held up almost entirely by government grants and sponsors.

Two teams, held together by shared values, is a manageable thing, but a dozen is not. As Zabota expanded, Smolyakova's own capacity was the first casualty, then the sense of common purpose: she still believed Russian home care could be rebuilt around the person receiving it, but her teams had quietly swapped that ambition for what she called the language of stability, a phrase she uses to mean stagnation. Underneath the sisterly warmth the organization was known for, disagreements had piled up unspoken, because nobody wanted to admit that a family and a business are not, in the end, the same thing.

The fix came from an unlikely direction, a grocery retailer. Smolyakova signed up for Beyond Taylor's leadership program largely because she trusted the VkusVill team running it, and found herself doing six to eight hours of homework a week. She came out of it with one hard rule: no new teams and no scaling for six months, time to, in her words, change the wheels while the car kept moving. What stuck with her wasn't the theory but watching other organizations work through the exact problems she had, case by case, rather than being told how to fix them from a stage.

Within a week of finishing the course, she had already rebuilt Zabota around three things: a Board of Leaders, teams with real control over their own budgets, and a set of numbers the organization had never had before. That third piece landed hardest. Zabota had spent years running on words like good, humanity, and helping people, real, but impossible to measure. Beyond Taylor gave the team a way to turn those words into figures tied to what the organization actually promises its patients: how many recover after a stroke, how often an ambulance gets called, how many need a repeat doctor visit.

None of this was really new territory for Zabota. Long before Beyond Taylor, the organization's multi-year relationship with Buurtzorg in the Netherlands had already trained it to borrow proven methods rather than invent its own from nothing, and the twelve-person cap on every team, small enough to function as colleagues rather than as a rung on a ladder, came from that same Dutch model, carried town by town from Chernogolovka into Yamalo-Nenets.

The numbers arrived fast. Zabota adopted Clientocracy right after the new year, and within two and a half months, by March, every team but one was covering its own costs for the first time ever, a sharp turn from late 2022, when subsidies had still made up around 40% of the budget. The client roster grew 17% over the same stretch, government contracts climbed to 20% more of total revenue, and spending on nurses' transport cards fell by a third, proof, in miniature, that teams left to manage their own money will find the fat to cut.

One team was still short of break-even, though the route there was visible, and a mobile app giving patients' families a direct, structured line back to the organization was already being built. Trickier was what came next: teams were now splitting their own bonus pools every month. The first two rounds, they split it evenly, putting off the harder conversation about who had actually contributed more, a conversation years of conflict-avoidance had made unfamiliar. Leadership's answer was to stay out of it entirely unless asked, the same restraint that let Smolyakova disappear for three weeks after the Board of Leaders took shape and come back to an inbox with nothing in it.

What Smolyakova wants now goes past her own organization. She wants social care as a whole to answer to the people it serves rather than to the bureaucracy that built it, on the theory that no system designed around an institution instead of a client will ever be worth much.

Zabota's real lesson is that care and solvency were never actually in competition, distance was the thing standing between them. A Board of Leaders shortened the distance between leadership and teams. Twelve-person teams shortened the distance between colleagues. Patient-outcome metrics shortened the distance between what the organization believed about itself and what was actually true. Handing teams their own budgets and bonuses shortened the distance between the work and the reward. And a founder who could vanish for three weeks without a single phone call is proof that even the distance between Smolyakova and the thing she built has closed. She never set out to balance a budget. She set out to prove that care doesn't have to be outgrown to survive, and Zabota is now the argument for the rest of social care to make the same trade.

Zalevsky Group

For thirteen years, Irina Zalevskaya built her companies on a motto borrowed from the Olympics: "faster, higher, stronger". Then she noticed what all that speed was quietly pushing out of the picture. Zalevsky Group had grown into four very different businesses, the Babyboom maternity and children's clinic, the Cesare beauty space, the Laviani cosmetology and dental clinic network, and the Lucky Duck gastro-bistro, and somewhere in the rush of a thousand daily tasks, the reason any of it existed had started to fade into the background. The patient. The client. The guest. The person the whole business was built to serve. That return to purpose is where the mission and strategy dimension of this case begins, and where the customers dimension never really leaves it.

Zalevskaya always learned by watching companies she genuinely admires, and for years that meant following VkusVill and its founder, Andrei Krivenko. So when she heard Krivenko had started something new, a programme called Beyond Taylor, and heard it recommended by Tatiana Rumyantseva, one of the medical directors she most respects, at Klinika Fomina, the decision made itself. During the training, she says, it felt like a puzzle finally coming together in her mind, every question she asked connecting theory to practice a little more. That path into Beyond Taylor, built on admiration and a trusted recommendation rather than a cold pitch, is an early sign of the partners dimension: growth that travels through relationships worth trusting.

Zalevsky Group moved quickly once the training began. Boards of Leaders went in almost immediately, built on a structure the group already had in place, which made the transition easier than starting from nothing, an early marker of the colleagues dimension, small groups coordinating without a single hierarchy running through them. A practice the team calls "the black box" followed right behind it, where errors are used as important learnings without pointing fingers. Meetings and team sessions are now run against the promises made to customers, keeping the customers dimension close to daily practice rather than a slogan on a wall. About half the team has already been trained in the principles behind this operating system, with the rest expected to finish by the end of the year, real movement on the data, tools and skills dimension. Moreover, the group has written its own internal guide, twenty core points, under the title 'Working by Clientocracy' in Zalevsky Group, that its leaders return to again to check what is done, what is still hard, and what hasn't been touched yet.

The tool Zalevskaya credits most is the metrics system Beyond Taylor introduced, a combination of promises, economic results, and success measures that lets her see the company in three dimensions instead of one, another clear step in the data, tools and skills dimension. For example, every Board of Leaders now tracks how many hypotheses it is testing and how fast they move from idea to result, the opportunities dimension in motion, turning ideas into initiatives without waiting on permission. Because the group spans a maternity clinic, a beauty space, a dental network, and a bistro, no two boards look alike. Each business is finding its own version of the same discipline rather than forcing one template onto all of them, a practical expression of the action dimension: local autonomy shaped around local reality.

The clearest change in the organisation might be in Zalevskaya herself. She describes staying quieter in Board of Leaders meetings now, resisting the urge to arrive with a ready-made answer, asking questions instead so the team reaches its own conclusions. For someone who says she naturally loves inventing, launching, and generating new ideas, learning to protect her team's autonomy has become her newest and most important discipline, one she says she must practice every single day. That is the leaders dimension taking root at the very top of the organisation, authority measured by how well it enables others rather than how visibly it directs them.

The organisation is still working on specific financial results by the end of the year, tracking the new projects and directions that emerged after the training. Their thinking is that the model built entirely around the customer's experience cannot help but show up in the numbers eventually, the results and rewards dimension as the chapter still being written. The obvious effect this training has had is a team visibly more energized, driven not by slogans but by concrete steps whose effects people can actually see, proof, for now, that the customers dimension sits exactly where Zalevskaya always meant it to: at the center of everything.