But back in 2013, when I first met Chip, Airbnb was still just getting started. Though we had nearly four million guests staying in homes around the world, most people saw us as strictly a technology company. But Joe, Nate, and I knew we had more to offer. We knew that we weren’t just in the business of home sharing. We envisioned a community that helped people with not only where you stay, but what you do—and whom you do it with —while you’re there. In other words, a complete end-to-end trip. What we were actually selling was hospitality.

Our messaging allowed our customers to see benefits and value that were not being articulated by our competitors. The concept of e-business galvanized our workforce and created a coherent context for our hundreds of products and services.

Scenes like this played out across the country. And they did because BBBK's incentives to excel not only worked for individuals, but they also worked seamlessly with the rest of its employee management system. We're not suggesting that the company's approach is somehow universal, although its deliberate balance of "trust and verify" shows up in the management systems of many other successful service companies.

The intellectual backing for the leveraged buyout movement was explicitly disciplinary, and the use of debt as both as technology of control and as a way of serving the interests of capital-owners is clear as the moral of the case studies. Companies would pay out huge dividends and take on self-consciously risky Antoine’s of debt in order to ‘create a sense of urgency’ among their management, or to communicate management’s confidence that their accounting policies weren’t as aggressive as they looked.

Scenes like this played out across the country. And they did because BBBK's incentives to excel not only worked for individuals, but they also worked seamlessly with the rest of its employee management system. We're not suggesting that the company's approach is somehow universal, although its deliberate balance of "trust and verify" shows up in the management systems of many other successful service companies.