5 min read

Trust Over Control: The Quiet Revolution in Business Management

Trust Over Control: The Quiet Revolution in Business Management
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“Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing that there is a solution paves the way to a solution.”
The Magic of Thinking Big - David J. Schwartz

Whenever someone mentions "revolutionary management structures," my mind usually glazes over. But then I discovered companies like Handelsbanken, Buurtzorg, and FAVI, and... well, they're actually doing something rather extraordinary without any blockchain nonsense.

These aren't tech startups trying to "disrupt" anything. Handelsbanken is a Swedish bank that's been around since 1871. FAVI makes brass fittings in northern France. Buurtzorg provides home nursing care in the Netherlands. Proper, boring businesses—except they've completely flipped traditional management on its head.

The Swedish Bank That Ditched Budgets

I first heard about Handelsbanken from a colleague who couldn't believe what he was reading. This bank—a bank, mind you—hasn't used budgets since the 1970s. No annual targets, no sales quotas, no elaborate forecasting exercises that everyone knows are fiction anyway.

Instead, each branch operates almost like its own small business. Branch managers decide who to lend to, what services to offer, and even what hours to open. The only real measure? Be more profitable than the average of your competitors. That's it. Handelsbanken describes it as focusing on "long-term value" rather than short-term speculation, but what struck me was the sheer trust involved.

They don't even pay bonuses to individual bankers. There's a profit-sharing scheme, sure, but you can't touch it until you're 60. Imagine telling that to a London investment banker—they'd probably faint.

The maddening thing? It works. Handelsbanken has been more profitable than the average of its competitors for over fifty years straight. Through financial crises, recessions, the whole lot. Turns out when Handelsbanken lets local managers who actually know their customers make decisions, rather than following edicts from head office, good things happen.

Dutch Nurses Who Manage Themselves

Then there's Buurtzorg. Jos de Blok started this in 2006 with four nurses who were fed up with the Dutch healthcare system. Too much bureaucracy, not enough actual care. So they tried something radical: small teams of nurses (maximum twelve) who handle everything themselves. No managers, no support staff, no complicated IT systems.

Each team decides their own schedule, hires its own colleagues, and manages its own budget. They rent their own offices—usually just a small room somewhere cheap. One team I read about meets in a converted garden shed. The nurses handle all the admin themselves, spending maybe 93% of their time with patients versus the 35-40% that's typical in traditional home care organisations.

Again, you'd think it would be chaos. It's not. Patient satisfaction is through the roof. Costs are about 40% lower than those of traditional providers. The model has spread to twenty-five countries now, though I gather some struggle to replicate it—probably because they can't quite believe you really don't need all those managers.

The French Factory That Runs on Trust

FAVI is perhaps the oddest of the lot. It's a brass foundry in Picardy that supplies car parts to Volkswagen, Volvo, and the like. Not exactly where you'd expect management innovation.

Jean-François Zobrist took over in the 1980s and basically dismantled everything. No HR department, no quality control, no purchasing department. Teams of about twenty-five workers handle everything for their specific client. They talk directly to the customer, manage their own equipment, and hire their own people. If they need a new machine, they buy it. If they think working different hours makes sense, they do it.

The workers even set their own salaries—sort of. They propose what they think they're worth, and unless it's completely mad, it gets approved. There's no clocking in, no monitoring. Zobrist's philosophy was simple: either you trust people or you don't. If you don't trust them, why did you hire them?

What's Actually Happening Here?

The pattern is hard to miss. These companies have all decided that treating adults like adults might actually work. Mad concept, I know.

But it's not anarchy. Handelsbanken has its strong culture and that simple benchmark of beating the competition. Buurtzorg teams have to stay within budget and meet care standards. FAVI teams know that if Volkswagen isn't happy, everyone suffers. The constraints are there, they're just different.

What they've removed is the suffocating middle layer—the bureaucracy, the politics, the endless meetings about meetings. Corporate Rebels calls Handelsbanken a "budgetless banking pioneer," but I think it's more than that. They've essentially said that people closest to the work probably know best how to do it.

Why Isn't Everyone Doing This?

Here's where it gets tricky. These models require massive cultural shifts that most organisations simply can't stomach.

Take trust. Real trust, not the "we trust our employees" rubbish you see in corporate mission statements. Handelsbanken genuinely trusts branch managers with millions in lending decisions. Buurtzorg trusts nurses to manage budgets. FAVI trusted workers to talk directly to Volkswagen's procurement team. Most managers would break out in hives at the thought.

There's also the control issue. Traditional managers derive their power from, well, managing things. Budgets, targets, performance reviews—that's their currency. Asking them to give that up is like asking them to become professionally irrelevant. Which, in a way, it is.

And let's be honest—not every organisation can do this. If you're running a nuclear power plant, you probably need quite a lot of hierarchy and rules. If your workforce genuinely doesn't want responsibility (and some don't), forcing it on them won't help. These models work in specific contexts with specific types of people.

The Uncomfortable Questions

What fascinates me isn't just that these companies succeed—it's what their success says about everyone else.

If Handelsbanken can run a profitable bank without budgets, why does every other company insist they're essential? If Buurtzorg can deliver better care at lower cost with no management layer, what exactly are all those healthcare managers doing? If FAVI workers can handle customer relationships directly, why do most factories insist on keeping workers and customers apart?

The cynical answer is that management structures often exist to benefit managers, not organisations. But I think it's more complex than that. We've been trained to think that complexity requires complicated solutions. More rules, more processes, more oversight. These companies suggest the opposite might be true—that trust and applying first principles thinking to simplify processes can handle complexity better than bureaucracy ever could.

Where This Leaves Us

I don't think we're going to see a sudden revolution where every company abandons traditional management overnight. But something is shifting.

Younger workers increasingly expect autonomy and purpose, not just a salary. Technology makes coordination without hierarchy easier (though you don't need blockchain for it—Buurtzorg uses a simple web platform that costs pennies to build). And examples like these three companies make it harder to argue that conventional management is the only way.

What strikes me most is how human these approaches feel. No jargon about "empowerment" or "agile transformation." Just a basic recognition that people generally want to do good work and, given the chance, usually will.

The irony is that while tech companies chase DAOs and algorithmic management, some of the most radical organisational innovations are happening in banking, healthcare, and manufacturing. Places where you'd least expect it. They're not trying to eliminate human judgment with code—they're trusting human judgment more than ever.

Maybe that's the real lesson. Not that we need fancier systems or newer technologies, but that we need to remember what we seem to have forgotten: most people, most of the time, can be trusted to do the right thing. Even in a bank. Even in a factory. Even without a manager watching over their shoulder.

Revolutionary? Perhaps. But also oddly obvious once you think about it.