I don't manage anyone. I designed the business so a manager's job was never necessary in the first place. The coordination a manager usually owns lives in automated systems, and every person I bring in fills a gap those systems genuinely cannot close.
The founders and CTOs I coach hear that and assume I'm describing a five-person shop. I'm not, and neither are the companies in this piece. Morning Star processes close to a third of the tomatoes grown for food production in the United States and has never had a manager. W.L. Gore has run for almost 70 years without a single boss. Both prove the removal works at real scale. Zappos and GitHub also removed their managers, and both had to walk it back. The difference between the two groups comes down to what each company built to replace the job it deleted.
TL;DR: Morning Star, W.L. Gore, Valve, Haier, and Buurtzorg run at real scale with no traditional management layer, while Zappos and GitHub tried and reversed course. The companies that held the change rebuilt the coordinating work (feedback and priority-setting) into a new system before removing the title. The ones that failed deleted the job and left the work undone.
About Marissa Brassfield: Marissa has coached 500+ leaders over 20 years, including fractional CTOs and founders scaling technology companies past the point where a single person can hold every decision. She has worked three and a half days a week since March 2023 and built her own practice to run on systems rather than supervision. Her work with CTOx and other executive teams centers on the same question this piece answers: what replaces a manager's function when the manager is gone.
Two companies have run without managers for decades, not quarters, and both replaced the job with a written agreement instead of a boss. Morning Star, the tomato processor Gary Hamel profiled for Harvard Business Review, has no titles and no promotions in the traditional sense. No one tells anyone else what to do. Every employee writes a personal mission statement, then negotiates a Colleague Letter of Understanding, or CLOU, with every colleague whose work touches theirs. The CLOU is the manager's job (setting expectations and resolving overlap) written down and owned by the two people doing the work instead of a third person supervising them. The company has grown by double digits most years for two decades on a model built entirely from these agreements.
Gore runs on a version of the same idea with a different name. The structure, which the company calls a lattice, has no chain of command and no assigned managers. Nearly everyone shares one title: associate. Instead of bosses, Gore has sponsors, people who mentor a new associate without the authority to direct their work. Leadership at Gore is earned by getting other people to follow you, not by being appointed. Gore-Tex came out of that structure, and so has nearly 70 years of profitability without a conventional org chart.
Valve and Haier solved the same problem with the same instinct: instead of a manager deciding who works on what, they built a system where the work itself makes the decision. Valve's handbook tells new hires there is no one to assign them a project. Desks are on wheels so employees can physically move to whatever team is doing the most valuable work, and a project survives by attracting people, not by being ordered into existence.
Haier took the same logic and ran it through 4,000 internal microenterprises. CEO Zhang Ruimin split the appliance giant into small, self-managing units: "user" units that sell directly to customers and "node" units that supply them, each accountable to the other through internal contracts instead of a manager's sign-off. A user unit can fire an underperforming node unit and hire an outside vendor instead. Hamel and Zanini, writing in Harvard Business Review, credit the model with 18% average annual revenue growth over a decade and $2 billion in market value created by new internal ventures. Valve and Haier moved accountability out of a person's job title and into a market that runs inside the company.
Buurtzorg answers the hardest version of this question, because home nursing is not a domain where you can afford ambiguity about who is responsible. Roughly 15,000 nurses in the Netherlands work in teams of about 12, and each team owns its own scheduling, hiring, budget, and care planning. A regional coach supports somewhere between 40 and 50 nurses, but the coach has no authority to direct care; the coach's job is closer to a resource than a boss. In 2013, Buurtzorg clients received an average of 108 hours of home care per year, well under the 168 hours logged by traditional providers, while patient satisfaction and staff retention both ran ahead of the industry.
The nurses hold each other accountable because they answer to their patients and to their own team, not to someone several rungs removed from the actual care. That's the piece most flat-structure conversions miss. Buurtzorg relocated accountability to the 12-person team doing the work.
Zappos adopted Holacracy in 2013 and eliminated every manager for roughly 1,500 employees, replacing job titles with a constantly shifting set of "roles" employees defined themselves. By 2015, annual turnover hit 30%, about 10 points above the company's typical rate, and by January 2016, roughly 260 employees, 18% of the workforce, had left after CEO Tony Hsieh offered severance to anyone unwilling to fully commit to the new system. Zappos dropped off Fortune's Best Companies to Work For list that year, having appeared on it every year since 2008.
Holacracy removed the manager's title. What it left unbuilt was the function underneath it: someone to have the career conversation, and someone accountable for whether a person was growing or stalling. Several analyses of the rollout point to the same gap: the framework replaced the org chart but left the human coordination work homeless, and people who couldn't find who was supposed to catch it left.
GitHub started in 2008 with no managers by design; employees picked their own projects and answered to no one. It held through roughly 600 employees, and then it stopped holding. Without anyone whose job was to have a hard conversation, harassment allegations against senior leadership went unresolved for too long, the CEO resigned, and in 2014 the company gathered its entire staff to tell them they were all getting a manager. GitHub now runs with VPs, product managers, technical leads, and a standard reporting structure.
GitHub failed at a specific size: past the point where the informal network could still track who was struggling or stuck. Below that size, that network covers the gap on its own. Above it, something has to replace it on purpose, and GitHub hadn't built anything to do that yet.
A manager's title covers several jobs at once: setting priorities, giving feedback, resolving conflict, and deciding who is ready for more responsibility. Most companies that try to copy the label without rebuilding the mechanism stall out and quietly hire the manager back within a year or two. Removing the title relocates those jobs. It raises a different question: who does them now, and through what mechanism? Morning Star answered with the CLOU. Gore answered with sponsorship and earned followership. Haier and Valve answered with an internal market that rewards the units and people who deliver. Buurtzorg answered by keeping the work small enough that a team of 12 could hold each other accountable directly. Zappos and GitHub answered with nothing, and the coordinating work fell on the floor until someone got hurt by the gap.
That's the same design decision behind why I never became my own team's manager. The systems in my practice carry the same priorities and feedback a CLOU carries at Morning Star; the humans I add fill whatever the systems genuinely can't reach. It's the same instinct that led me to get rid of the annual performance review in my own company rather than keep a ritual that had stopped doing its job. And it runs on the same logic as what happened when 61 companies compressed the work week instead of the headcount: the companies that held the change rebuilt the mechanism first and cut the old structure second. The ones that didn't found out, expensively, what the old structure had been quietly doing all along.
If you're looking at your own org chart and wondering whether a layer of managers is load-bearing or just familiar, that's the actual test: name what the manager does today, then name what would do it instead. Building the replacement takes the real work. Removing the title is the easy half of the job.
Yes. Morning Star, a roughly $700 million tomato processor, and W.L. Gore & Associates, maker of Gore-Tex, have run for decades without a traditional management layer. Both replaced the manager's function with a formal peer agreement (Morning Star's CLOU, Gore's sponsorship system) instead of deleting the role outright.
Holacracy is a governance system that replaces job titles and managers with self-defined, shifting "roles." Zappos adopted it fully in 2013 and lost 18% of its workforce by January 2016, largely because the system removed the manager's coordinating function without building a clear replacement for it.
Yes. Haier's roughly 4,000 self-managing microenterprises, split into customer-facing "user" units and supporting "node" units, have run since the mid-2000s and are credited by Harvard Business Review with roughly 18% average annual revenue growth over a decade.
Buurtzorg proves it can at scale. Roughly 15,000 Dutch home-care nurses work in self-managing teams of about 12, supported by a regional coach for every 40 to 50 nurses, with higher patient satisfaction and lower average care hours than traditional providers.
The coordinating work a manager does (setting priorities, giving feedback, resolving conflict, and deciding who's ready for more) has to move somewhere specific: a written peer agreement, a market mechanism, a small enough team to self-monitor, or an automated system. Companies that removed managers without building a replacement, like Zappos and GitHub, had to add the layer back.
Only after naming exactly what the manager currently does and building a specific mechanism to do it instead. A team small enough for direct peer accountability, Buurtzorg's model, can often skip formal management. A team already past that size needs the replacement built before the title disappears, not after.
The companies that held this change didn't get lucky, and the ones that reversed it weren't undisciplined. They ran the same experiment with a different amount of preparation. Before you flatten anything in your own organization, write down what the manager is holding together right now. If a system or a peer agreement can hold it instead, remove the layer. If nothing can yet, that's the work to do first.
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