As he [Ken Iverson] explained in his book, Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick,

Most of today’s corporations were conceived as command-and-control organizations. The founders of integrated steel mills, for example, clearly assumed that the “genius” of the organization resided almost completely in management … In contrast, we built Nucor under the assumption that most of the “genius” in our organization would be found among the people doing the work. 2 3 From the outset, we shaped our business to let employees show management the way to goals that once seemed unreachable.

Each division is also responsible for creating the demand for its products by winning and retaining customers. Unlike other steel companies, Nucor’s plants aren’t mere manufacturing sites, but end-to-end businesses. Accordingly, each division has its own P&L, which is entirely free of corporate cost allocations.

PROFIT SHARING FOR ALL. Nucor’s profit-sharing plan is another mechanism for building commitment. Each year, the company contributes at least 10 percent of its pretax earnings to the plan. In 2018, Nucor paid in $308 million, which worked out to about $12,000 per employee. Teammates receive a small portion in cash and the remainder goes into a retirement account, which, for many employees, constitutes their largest financial asset.

True to the spirit of humanocracy, Nucor’s model isn’t about pushing employees to do more, but giving them the opportunity to be more—more than blue-collar workers, more than order takers, more than mere operators, more than employees. Nucor’s frontline team members are experts, innovators, risk takers, and owners.

Vinci is divided into three thousand compact business units, two-thirds of which have fewer than a hundred employees. So strong is the commitment to disaggregation that businesses are frequently split in two as they grow.