Fearless leadership: what happens when a CEO tears up the org chart at peak performance
In 2014, Var Group was an Italian IT company with €154 million in revenue and 700 people on staff.
Last year, it reached €909 million with 4,463 people across 16 countries, including Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia, and India.
Halfway through that journey, its CEO decided to tear up the org chart.
Most stories of fearless leadership start from crisis. A collapse in sales, a founder burning out, a competitor stealing the biggest customer. Pain does most of the persuasion, and afterwards someone calls it courage. Francesca Moriani had none of that. She had a chart pointing up and to the right, the kind you frame and hang on the reception wall. And she blew it up anyway.
So what is fearless leadership, really? It's the willingness to dismantle what works before it breaks.
What is fearless leadership?
Fearless leadership is a way of leading marked by courage, decisiveness and a willingness to take calculated risks: challenging the status quo, deciding without waiting for certainty, and treating failure as information instead of something to hide. It is not recklessness, and it is not the absence of fear. What sets it apart in practice is timing. Most leaders find their courage after the crisis arrives. A fearless leader intervenes while the numbers still look good, because they read the design of the organization instead of only its results.
Why change what isn't broken?
When Francesca looked at that chart, she saw something the numbers could not tell: a structure designed for a slower world. A few people at the top collected information, assessed it, and decided what everyone else should do.
That machine once worked beautifully. But today the world changes three times before the information even reaches the top.
The word she uses for this kind of hierarchy is fragile.
Changing a company that is hitting its targets is the hardest sell of all. No one thanks you. Everyone asks what the problem is.
I think you now understand why her book is called Braveship.
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Before all this, Francesca raced on skis. Ask any athlete what the mountain teaches. When the course gets steep and fear arrives, every muscle in your body wants to pull you back. Pulling back is exactly what sends you into the safety net. The only way through is to move forward, over your skis, past the point that still feels manageable.
Many managers spend an entire career pulling back. Things accelerate, so they tighten their grip, add one more approval layer, ask for one more report. It feels responsible. It is the corporate version of sitting back on your heels at 80 kilometers an hour.
The version that failed
Francesca leaned forward. And she fell.
She removed hierarchy. Erased org charts. Told thousands of people that decisions were now in their hands.
They stood there, hands open, looking for something to hold on to.
These are her words: "At first, I made mistakes. I thought freedom meant the absence of rules."
This is the trap that catches most leaders attempting a real shift. You strip away authority and assume autonomy will fill the gap. It doesn't. Take away hierarchy without giving people something else to work with, and you get hesitation, not ownership. Freedom without structure creates chaos.
Then Francesca got back up and built the second version.
Freedom designed through structure
The rebuild started from a different assumption: freedom needs rules and clarity to work.
At the base, she put Holacracy in place, so everyone can see the purpose and accountabilities of every role they hold. On top, she layered Haier's rendanheyi model, so teams operate as micro-enterprises with their own profit and loss and autonomy to decide where to invest.
She calls it the Open Platform Organization.
Clarity of roles from one, entrepreneurial ownership from the other. Neither works well on its own inside a company this size. Together they give people something to hold on to while also handing them the keys.
The results are the numbers at the top of this article. From roughly €500M to €909M. 4,463 people. 16 countries.
You could study that structure for hours, and it deserves that kind of attention. What's more interesting to me right now is why she was willing to put thousands of people through the adventure of getting there in the first place.
The real reason behind the change
If you ask her, she starts from a place you might not expect.
I lived that split for years too, and I suspect you have as well. You put on a slightly different face somewhere between the parking lot and the desk, and after a while you stop noticing you are doing it. Then you carry the leftover frustration home, where it creates subtle but damaging ripples.
Francesca leads a company of 4,463 people and considers all of this a flaw in the structure itself. Not a personal weakness. Not something a wellness program will fix. A design problem.
This is also where most companies reach for technology. Buy the tool. Introduce the platform. Let AI take on the work. Francesca sells that technology for a living, and here is her verdict:
"If we do not change the organizational model and decision-making processes, AI remains marginal."
Fearless leadership is acting before the crisis arrives
Most leaders wait for the fall. The sales dip, the star engineer quitting, the acquirer knocking. Then they act, and everyone calls it brave.
Francesca acted while the chart was still pointing up.
That's the pattern worth stealing. Not the specific model. Not the Holacracy plus rendanheyi combination. The willingness to intervene in a system that appears to work, because you can see what the numbers can't tell you.
She fell once. She got up. Then she rebuilt for 4,463 people.
What are you seeing in your own company that the numbers aren't showing yet?
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