What value do middle managers play in large corporations? Are they indespensible? Could you manage without them? Corporate Rebel shares amazing stories about companies that have used alternative management approaches to grow and build successful businesses. Their videos are bursting with ideas. I use them as sparks to ignite my creative juices.
Buurtzorg
Imagine if you were going to start a company for in-home nurses.
As the company grows, how would you manage the business? Many of us begin with a top-down organizational structure in mind with a CEO. Then an executive leadership team focused on finance, marketing, sales, operations, human resources, and IT. And then a lot of managers. Regional managers, district managers, corporate managers and so on.
Can you imagine a company with 15,000 employees and only 50 people in their corporate office managing the business?
Fifty managers to run a company of 15,000 employees.
I can’t even…
But you can learn about the unique way a Dutch home care nursing provider is organized in this animated video about Buurtzorg. They set up an alternative business model based on freedom, trust and autonomy.
Not Wanted: Middle Managers
They use self-managing teams – pods of 12 nurses. And when they get above 12 nurses for a neighborhood or region, they divide again and create two new pods of six people. This allows exponential growth without layers of buracracy. They do all the work – nursing, hiring, firing, recruitment, etc.
There are 900 pods of 12 and 50 managers. Pretty remarkable.
Videos like this open the mind to new ways to think of challenges. Instead of building something like everyone else, the three founders took their core principles and built an organization to maximize the key benefit. These founders believed that a command and control business model would only screw up home health care so they thought small – pods of 12 nurses.
Their mission is to help people live meaningful and autonomous lives. And their guidelines are humanity above bureaucracy, simplicity above complexity and practical above hypothetical.
How might this video be helpful to you as you think about problems and challenges you are facing. Are you defaulting to ideas that have become the rule.
Maybe it is time to think about the exception – to find a new approach to your challenges.
Exceptions, Not The Rule
Check out Corporate Rebels to learn more about how companies are rethinking their business organizational structure to deliver greater value to their customers, employees and stakeholders.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Video and image courtesy of Corporate Rebels.
