I’ve had the joy and privilege to observe closely the trajectory of one of the most inspired entrepreneurs and company builders in the world, Brazilian Jorge Paulo Lemann. Lemann and his two partners, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, started with a tiny brokerage firm and from there built one of the most successful investment banks in Latin America. And while the partners were smart and accomplished at managing money, they discovered they had a peculiar genius for building a culture filled with hungry, fanatic people who thrived on meritocracy. They became so good at building culture that they eventually began to consider buying entire companies outright and then running them based on their cultural operating system with the goal to build and grow them forever. “If we believe in our culture,” they said to themselves, “why not bet big on it?

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.

In every respect, Ballarin’s approach to responsibilization met the critical tests that face any attempt to upend the bureaucratic status quo:

1. It was anchored in timeless human values

1. It provided ample space for improvisation

1. It routed around points of resistance

1. It invited, rather than demanded, leaders to reimagine their roles

1. It minimized risk and disruption

For all these reasons, responsibilization gained enough runway to reach takeoff speed.

Like Michelin, every company must chart its own path to humanocracy. Nonetheless, it’s reassuring to know that you don’t need a legion of consultants, or a massive corporate change program, to get started. In fact, as we’ll see, those may be the last things you need.

Disruptive technologies, Christensen had observed, often grew out of hobbyist communities. They were developed using “bootlegged resources” in which “off-the-shelf components” were redeployed for something other than their intended purpose. They started out wonky but rapidly improved along attributes of performance that established players ignored.

But even once you had absorbed this lesson, it wasn’t easy to implement. Pursuing niche markets cost profits, making investors question your sanity. This, too, Christensen had foretold: “One of the reasons managers at established firms find it difficult to serve emerging markets is that their investors and customers tell them not to.”

That was the real secret of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which readers often missed. It was not a book about how to succeed; it was a book about how not to fail. Christensen’s book wasn’t a how-to for start-ups but a counterinsurgency manual for senior managers at stagnating firms. Thirteen years in, Huang felt that Nvidia was at risk of becoming such a firm, and it was as much paranoia as optimism that led him to pursue the mad-science market.

The nearest approximation I have found is Li Ka-shing, a refugee from China who is now Hong Kong’s richest man. Li left school at the age of fifteen and set up a small business manufacturing plastic flowers. From these modest beginnings he developed the massive Hutchison Whampoa group, of which Eversholt, another rail rolling stock leasing company, is a subsidiary. None of the, admittedly small, sample of railway employees I interviewed had ever heard of Li, far less experienced resentment at his oppression or exploitation. If they did express resentment, it was – appropriately – directed at the management of First-Group and most of all at the Department for Transport. Li is svelte, noted for his relatively modest habits and second only to Bill Gates for the scale of his global philanthropy.