Why “They” is The Most Dangerous Word at Work

It also describes another classic: the story of Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke, and the rise of the AES Corporation.

AES was a global electricity utility company that owned and operated power plants across the world, employing roughly 20,000 people worldwide.

A long history (but no longer the pioneer)

Manz & Sims (1993) were among the first to provide a deep dive into the AES case and put the company on the map of progressive organizations.

Later, Dennis Bakke himself published an extended account in his book ​Joy at Work​ (2005), before Frederic Laloux brought AES to a much broader audience through ​Reinventing Organizations​ (2014).

Sadly, AES is no longer the progressive powerhouse it once was.

(After the Enron collapse, regulators demanded tighter oversight. For AES, this meant that from the mid-2000s onward, the company gradually moved back toward a more traditional, centralized management model.)

Nevertheless, it remains a case worth sharing. And it introduced a practice worth revisiting.

One that surprisingly few people are familiar with.

Again: start with four values

At its high point (the 1980s-1990s), AES was a global, asset-heavy, publicly listed utility company.

And it was run as a radically decentralized organization.

And just as we saw at W.L. Gore, everything at AES started with four simple guiding values.

As Bakke put it:

“The only thing that we hold tightly as to what has to be done are the four values.”

Where people at W.L. Gore were guided by the values of Freedom, Fairness, Commitment, and Waterline, people at AES were guided by a different (but equally simple) set of four values:

1. Fun Create an environment where people have fun in their work. Not party fun. But an environment where people can use their gifts and skills productively, help meeting a real need in society, and genuinely enjoy the time spent at work. Quite simply, AES believed it was not worth doing things unless you were having a great time doing them. If something wasn’t fun, people wouldn’t just push through. They would either want to quit, or change the thing they were doing.
2. Fairness Treat people (employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, governments, and the communities in which the company operates) fairly. This sometimes meant that AES would not try to get the maximum possible out of every negotiation or transaction at the expense of others. A simple test guided decisions: Would I feel just as good being on the other side of the table as I do on this side, given the outcome of this decision?
3. Integrity What people say and do in all parts of the company should fit together with truth and consistency. The key question people asked themselves was simple: What did we commit to?
4. Social responsibility Be a citizen of the world. Try to do the things you would like your neighbor to do. In practice, this meant taking responsibility for contributing to broader social benefits: lower costs for customers, high levels of safety and reliability, increased employment, and a cleaner environment.

The honeycomb organisation

Following these principles led to the emergence of what AES called the honeycomb organization.

Where W.L. Gore decentralized the organization as a lattice (a company-wide social network of autonomous associates who form multiple ad-hoc groups, with associates able to join several groups at the same time), AES took a slightly different approach.

AES organized itself as a radically decentralized federation of several hundred autonomous operating groups.

These groups were permanent, and people were typically part of only one group at a time.

They dubbed this structure the honeycomb.

As a result, at AES the individual was not seen as the basic building block of the organization (as it was at W.L. Gore).

Instead, the group (or unit, typically a power plant or a country business) was the basic building block of the company.

(Some years ago, I wrote a ​long read ​explaining this difference, and why it matters. It is also an important part of our ​Masterclass Progressive Organizational Design​)

At AES, each unit functioned as a small, self-managing team with responsibility for day-to-day operations, staffing, safety, community relations, and financial performance.

Corporate headquarters remained deliberately small and exercised minimal direct control. So, rather than relying on managerial authority or centralized control, the autonomous units coordinated through their shared values.

The result was a dense network of autonomous units (much like the cells of a honeycomb) each strong enough to function independently, yet interconnected enough to support learning and stability across the whole system.

The advice process

One powerful practice that emerged at AES was a decision-making alternative to the consensus decision-making approach used at W.L. Gore: the advice process.

This practice evolved naturally from AES’s guiding principles and has arguably had one of the biggest influences on the broader field of progressive organization (also on many companies in the ​Rebel Cell network​).

A lot has already been written about it, including a concise and excellent book by Dennis Bakke himself, ​The Decision Maker ​(2013).

(It’s also part of our on-demand course Make Better Decisions on the Corporate Rebels community platform.)

Because the advice process is already so well covered, I want to spotlight another practice that emerged from the same principles. But that is far less well known.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a practice. It was one of the most important rules in the organization.

The "Anti-They" rule

Although progressive companies are generally not fond of introducing many formal rules (they prefer to rely on shared values), they often do have a small number of deceptively simple, but powerful, ones.

One such rule at AES was the so-called “Anti-They” rule.

The rule was based on a dynamic that exists in almost every workplace.

It goes something like this:

The moment you say “they,” you’ve stopped being part of “us.”

This dynamic is especially fertile in the space between top leadership and the people “at the firing line.”

You’ve probably heard it many times before in offices everywhere:

• “They didn’t communicate it properly.”
• “They made the decision without us.”
• “They should fix this.”
• “They don’t care.”
• “They don’t want to do this.”

Often, it isn’t even clear who “they” are supposed to be. Just someone out there. Always someone other than ourselves.

As such, “they” becomes a convenient abstraction. A way to outsource responsibility.

The power of language

This reveals the power of language.

Every “they” signals a disconnection. A small retreat from one’s own responsibility (where every “we” is a reclaiming of agency).

Each “they” creates an invisible wall between “us” (the good guys) versus “them” (the idiots in charge).

And with that, the workplace becomes divided.

But radically decentralized companies can’t afford that wall.

Because when authority is decentralized, there is no longer a middle manager to escalate issues to. There is often no manager left to blame.

And that is precisely the point.

"They" are us

AES didn’t want a divided workplace.

They wanted an unified group of people. One that took responsibility for its own work.

And because the organization was structurally decentralized (and therefore fragmented by design), it became even more important to be socially unified.

That’s why the “Anti-They” rule mattered so much.

AES didn’t want “they” in the organization. AES wanted only “we” and “us.”

As a result, large posters appeared throughout the workplace with the word THEY crossed out.

People were encouraged to speak in terms of "we" and "us." And people were trained to listen for it.

When someone used “they,” others would simply ask:

"Who's they?"

It is such a small question. Yet, such a powerful one. It pulls the conversation back to reality, back to responsibility.

And by doing so, it invites a mental shift from victimhood to ownership.

Reciprocal visits

To cultivate a strong sense of ownership AES also emphasized the importance of regular, reciprocal visits between company leadership and the operating units.

Every leadership member voluntarily spent at least one week per year at an operating plant. Not as a visitor, but as a colleague.

The leadership member did whatever their plant colleagues needed them to do. Not just to “get their hands dirty,” but more importantly to create space for honest conversations. For people at the plant to tell them what was working, and what wasn’t.

Groups of plant employees made reciprocal visits to the company’s headquarters in Arlington.

These visits served a clear purpose: to show that every job mattered, and that no one was too important to do any job. No matter how hot, dirty, or rough.

More importantly, these encounters humanized the organization. People began to realize that colleagues in other parts of the business were no different from themselves.

All colleagues had the same motivations, the same concerns, and cared about the same things.

In those moments, “they” slowly became “us.”

A classic. Not a blueprint.

Sadly, AES is no longer the radical pioneer it once was.

But that doesn’t make these lessons obsolete.

And sometimes, the most powerful organizational insight can be as simple as crossing out a single word:

They