Teal Unicorn are not alone in these results. There are thousands of organisations globally on the journey toward what we call Open. Some are well-known, like:
🏆 Haier. Thousands of micro-companies make up this whiteware giant.
🏆 Unilever. This giant has baked in agility. As a result they went from idea to market in 6 weeks in 7 formats in response to COVID. Also “Unilever is widely acknowledged as a leader in the shift to net positive… total shareholder return was close to 300%”
🏆 Roche pharmaceuticals adopts Agile across the company.
🏆 Mayekawa. A Japanese heavy industrial “holonic” company made up of hundreds of entities emulating an organic organism.
🏆 Michelin. Half a billion dollars’ worth of manufacturing improvements by pushing empowerment to the frontlines.
🏆 Anheuser-Busch . Another global giant with a culture of adaptability and customer centricity , responding quickly to COVID.
🏆 SpaceX vs Boeing. Their agility is whipping the old-school butt.
🏆 Volvo scaling Agile to the whole company, to make “computers on wheels”.
🏆 Buurtzorg. A Dutch self-managed home-care organisation with 14,000 employees and no conventional managers.
🏆 Corporate Rebels. As well as being one of the leading thought leaders in this space, Corporate Rebels put their money where their mouths are, by buying and improving other organisations. In October 2024, they announced the results of their first year with their first purchase, aerospace engineering company INDAERO, now a “bossless company”.
🏆 Semco. A Brazilian manufacturer with profit sharing, employee-selected managers, and employee-set salaries. The CEO, Ricardo Semler, wrote the influential management book Maverick.
🏆 NUMMI is one of our favourite examples. General Motors screwed the factory up, Toyota made it blossom. With the same people.
🏆 NUCOR Steel is a featured company in Humanocracy for empowerment of workers and their democratic management system.
🏆 Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat wrote the excellent book The Open Organization about their culture of meritocracy.
🏆 ING Bank transformed the whole bank to be agile.
🏆 WL Gore are one of the featured companies in Matt Parker’s excellent book A Radical Enterprise.
🏆 And, most famous of them all: Toyota has been leading the way for nearly a century. Today, their Toyota Flow System (TFS) takes them from Lean to Agile.
(For how not to do it, see Boeing, Nike, Starbucks, and Qantas.