Vinci’s buccaneering spirit is illustrated by its entry into the airport business. A decade ago, the company was about to sell off two Cambodian airports it had acquired as part of a larger deal. Nicolas Notebaert, then a business development director working in France, thought the airports could be the launching pad for a new business. After lobbying successfully to keep the airports, he moved to Asia to run them. The experiment validated the opportunity, and today Vinci employs 14,500 airport staff who support 240 million passengers a year. Huillard notes that as CEO, “My sole merit was that I provided [Nicolas] with the conditions which helped him to demonstrate his enthusiasm. In other words, I let ‘wild grass’ grow.” At Vinci, ambitious young leaders can be entrepreneurs without having to set up in a garage.

Each of these companies—Nucor, Haier, Handelsbanken, and Vinci— has built an organization that is, at its core, a league of owners. Over the decades, each company has demonstrated conclusively that distributed ownership…

• Reduces turnover and creates a smarter, more experienced workforce

• Unlocks reserves of discretionary effort

• Increases the incentives for innovation

• Creates more cohesion and camaraderie

• Strengthens the connection with customers

• Produces faster, better-informed decisions

• Leads to a flatter, leaner organization

• Yields above-average returns

And just as no cell can be too far from the blood supply, no team can be too far removed from the action of the marketplace — or so big that it becomes unwieldy and unresponsive…

Divide big teams into smaller ones aligned around projects, product lines, customer segments, geographical locations, etc., based on the idea of getting everyone in the organization into small teams and as close to his or her respective customers as possible. This is a way to increase the surface area of the company, giving the maximum number of employees a chance to interact with the marketplace.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.