Most companies do not become traditional corporations overnight.
It happens slowly.
A startup grows. The team expands. Functional departments appear. Then managers. Then more managers. Then approval flows, reporting lines, escalation paths, HR processes, strategy decks, and internal rituals that start to feel like “the normal way” a company should work.
At some point, the organization puts on the corporate suit.
Not necessarily because someone made a conscious choice. More often because this is the model we have inherited. It is the structure we see everywhere around us, so we treat it as inevitable.
But it is not inevitable.
The 8-hour workday, the 5-day workweek, and the modern corporate hierarchy were all created in specific historical moments, for specific industrial needs. They were choices. Useful ones, in their time. But still choices.
And once you see them as choices, the next question becomes unavoidable:
What do we choose now?
That question sits at the heart of Ocean Evolution – our long-term journey toward building Ocean Investments as a decentralized entrepreneurial ecosystem. It is also the question behind some of the most fascinating decentralized companies in the world: Semco, Morning Star, Buurtzorg, and Haier.
Different countries. Different industries. Different decades.
But one shared belief: companies do not become resilient because of hierarchy. They become resilient when people closest to the customer have the context, autonomy, and responsibility to create value directly.
What are decentralized companies?
Decentralized companies are organizations where decision-making, ownership, and accountability are distributed closer to the people doing the work and serving the customer.
That does not mean there is no structure.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about decentralization. A decentralized organization is not a company where everyone decides everything, hierarchy disappears completely, and people simply “figure it out” as they go.
The strongest decentralized companies are not structureless.
They are differently structured.
Instead of building the organization around control, approval, and escalation, they build it around clarity, autonomy, transparency, and customer value.
In traditional organizations, decisions often move upward before action moves downward. The larger the company becomes, the more distance appears between the customer, the person doing the work, and the person making the decision.
In decentralized organizations, that distance is deliberately reduced.
Teams are smaller. Responsibilities are clearer. Financial information is more visible. Decision-making rights move closer to the people with the most context. Leadership becomes less about permission and more about direction, rhythm, alignment, and support.
That is why decentralization is not chaos.
It is a different kind of order.
4 examples of decentralized companies
Semco
Semco is one of the classic examples.
Founded in Brazil in 1953 and originating as a conventional industrial manufacturer, Semco became globally known under Ricardo Semler, who took over the company at 21 and began rethinking almost every assumption about management. The company reduced layers of hierarchy, opened financial information, allowed people to influence their own work arrangements, and treated trust as an operating principle rather than an employer branding message.
Morning Star
Morning Star, founded by Chris Rufer in 1970, and based in California, took an even more radical path.
The tomato processing company operates without traditional managers. Instead, colleagues coordinate through personal commitments and peer-to-peer agreements. Each person defines their mission, responsibilities, internal customers, and measures of success through a document called a Colleague Letter of Understanding. Accountability does not disappear. It becomes direct.
Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg, founded in the Netherlands in 2006 by Jos de Blok, brought self-management into one of the most complex sectors: healthcare.
Instead of building a heavy management system around home care nurses, Buurtzorg built small, self-managed neighborhood teams. These teams organize care, planning, hiring, learning, and client relationships themselves, supported by a remarkably small central office. The model proved that self-managed teams are not only possible in operational environments, but also in deeply human, high-responsibility work.
Haier
And then there is Haier.
In 1984, under the leadership of Zhang Ruimin, the Chinese appliance company transformed from a struggling refrigerator factory into one of the world’s most studied examples of large-scale decentralization. Through its RenDanHeYi model, Haier broke the traditional corporate structure into thousands of micro-enterprises, each operating close to users, with its own responsibility for value creation.
The principle behind the model is simple and demanding: zero distance to the customer.
That phrase matters.
Because it captures the deeper logic behind all these examples.
8 characteristics decentralized companies have in common
Semco, Morning Star, Buurtzorg, and Haier are not copies of one another.
Their models are different because their contexts are different. A tomato processor, a healthcare provider, a Brazilian industrial company, and a global appliance manufacturer cannot operate in exactly the same way.
But when you look beneath the surface, several patterns repeat.
1. Fewer layers of hierarchy
Decentralized companies reduce unnecessary management layers.
That does not mean leadership disappears. It means fewer people exist only to approve, delay, or translate decisions that teams could make themselves. Leadership becomes more focused on direction, context, coaching, and alignment.
2. Radical transparency
People cannot act like owners if they are kept in the dark.
That is why decentralized organizations tend to make more information visible: financial data, performance metrics, customer feedback, team results, and strategic context. Transparency gives people the ability to understand the consequences of their decisions.
3. Small autonomous teams
Instead of large departments and distant divisions, decentralized companies often work through small autonomous teams.
These teams are close enough to the customer, patient, market, or operational problem to understand what is actually needed. They are also small enough to move fast, learn quickly, and collaborate without unnecessary complexity.
4. Roles instead of static job descriptions
In traditional companies, people are often defined by fixed job titles.
In decentralized companies, work is more fluid. A person can hold several roles. Roles can change as the work changes. Contribution becomes less about “this is my job description” and more about “this is the value I am responsible for creating”.
5. A clear operating rhythm
Autonomy does not work without rhythm.
Decentralized teams need clear spaces where work is coordinated, decisions are made, tensions are addressed, and progress is reviewed. Without that rhythm, autonomy can quickly turn into scattered calendars, duplicated effort, and invisible problems.
6. Explicit decision-making protocols
Many companies say they want ownership, but never clarify how decisions should actually be made.
Strong decentralized organizations define the rules of the game. Who can propose? Who needs to be consulted? What counts as a serious objection? When can the team move forward?
This is where consent-based decision-making often becomes important. The goal is not for everyone to love every decision. The goal is to make decisions where no one sees a critical risk that would harm the team, customer, or business.
7. Metrics connected to customer value
In traditional hierarchies, performance can easily become tied to internal approval.
In decentralized companies, the focus shifts to visible measures of value. What did we create for the customer? What changed in the market? What improved operationally? What result did the team actually produce?
The best decentralized organizations measure more, not less – but the metrics are connected to real outcomes, not just reporting.
8. Shared value creation
When the company wins, the people creating the value should feel it too.
That is why many decentralized organizations include some mechanism for sharing value, whether through profit-sharing, team-based financial participation, or other forms of ownership. It turns the relationship from “employee executing tasks” into something much closer to “builder contributing to the result”.
These eight characteristics are not a universal recipe.
But they are a useful lens.
Because they show that decentralization is not a mood, a slogan, or a nicer version of management. It is a set of structural choices.
Why Ocean Investments is building a decentralized entrepreneurial ecosystem
At Ocean Investments, decentralization is not an abstract topic.
Ocean Evolution is our own long-term transformation from a hierarchy-based corporate group toward a decentralized entrepreneurial business ecosystem. The goal is not to copy Semco, Morning Star, Buurtzorg, or Haier. Their examples matter because they prove something important: another way of building companies is possible – and it has already worked across industries, countries, and decades.
Our own model is being shaped around three foundations:
small autonomous teams, zero distance to the market, and clear team agreements that define the boundaries of autonomy.
This means teams are designed to be small enough to move fast and collaborate well. They are expected to understand their customers directly, not through second-hand assumptions. They work with clearer financial visibility. They make more decisions at the level where the context exists. And they operate through explicit agreements, not vague expectations.
This is harder than hierarchy.
Hierarchy is often inefficient, but it is familiar. People know where decisions go. They know who approves. They know who carries the final responsibility.
Decentralization asks for a different muscle.
It asks teams to think beyond tasks and own outcomes. It asks people to speak directly when there is tension. It asks leaders to stop being the bottleneck. It asks the organization to replace control with clarity.
That is not easier.
But it is more resilient for sure.
This is why Ocean Evolution is not a one-time internal initiative. It is a long-term redesign of how value is created inside Ocean Investments. Because we love to build. And we want to make sure our foundations are built to last.
*(You can read more about the start of our journey in Ocean Evolution Kick-Off: Setting the Course for a New Way of Working, our broader vision in Ocean Evolution: Redefining the Future of Work from Bulgaria, and the first practical examples of the model working in What Happens When Employees Start Thinking Like Builders.)
Built to keep evolving
And so, the future of work is often discussed through tools, policies, and workplace trends.
Remote work. AI. Four-day weeks. Flexible benefits. New productivity systems.
All of these matter. But they sit on top of a deeper question:
How is the company actually built?
Because structure is not neutral.
It either creates distance – or removes it.
It either concentrates responsibility – or distributes it.
It either slows people down – or gives them the context and autonomy to act.
That is why the history of decentralized companies still matters today. Not because every organization should copy Semco, Morning Star, Buurtzorg, or Haier. And not because hierarchy is always wrong.
But because these companies prove that another way of building is possible.
One where people are closer to the customer.
Closer to the problem.
Closer to the value they are responsible for creating.
And maybe that is what resilience really looks like.
Not a company that is perfectly designed once.
But one that is built to keep evolving.
Watch the full Ocean Evolution Chronicles episode
This article is based on the second episode of Ocean Evolution Chronicles – our video series exploring what it takes to build a decentralized, entrepreneurial ecosystem right here, in Bulgaria.
In the full episode, we go deeper into the history of decentralized companies, the examples of Semco, Morning Star, Buurtzorg, and Haier, and how these ideas connect to the transformation we are building at Ocean Investments. Watch it below.