This Danish Company Went Bossless. Should Your Supply Chain Follow Suit? 

Justin Gillebo

June 24, 2026 • 6 min read

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In an era where “efficiency” has become code for cost cutting, companies have gotten really good at trimming headcount, but terrible at clearing the path for actual work. 

Danish EV firm Clever recently made headlines with a radical solution to this dilemma: it abolished all bosses and middle managers, effectively making the CEO role obsolete and entrusting 500 employees with the business. Clever’s core thesis is one that should resonate with every supply chain leader: layered organizations are paralyzed because every meaningful choice must wind through a suffocating chain of approvals. 

It’s an intriguing story, but let’s be clear: burning the org chart isn’t a viable strategy for most complex global enterprises. The lesson isn’t that we should abandon leadership; it’s that structure should exist to serve decision speed, not to enforce hierarchy.  

I personally saw this tension play out firsthand at Microsoft when Covid struck. When the cost of delay spiked, our traditional reporting lines faded into the background. In a high-stakes environment, what mattered most was not where someone sat on the org chart, but whether people could make better decisions, faster. And it’s not just my own experience – Bayer and Haier, for instance, offer examples of what it looks like to take a radically new approach to the legacy org structure.  

But how can leaders eliminate approval friction without descending into organizational chaos? 

The Goal: Eliminating Coordination Friction 

For years, operations teams have lived with the assumption that better data, tools, or models would naturally produce better performance. Those things absolutely matter, but they do not remove friction from an operating model that still routes every meaningful decision through a maze of functional seams and unclear ownership.  

In a healthy operating model, AI can sharpen judgment, speed response, and help teams see around corners. But in an unhealthy one, it produces more recommendations that sit waiting for somebody to decide whether they are allowed to move forward. This is the same tension and thinking behind Clever’s move: to eliminate the friction, or coordination cost, that comes from layers of hierarchy and decision making. Structure should serve decision speed, not hierarchy.  

Our data shows that when planning is sponsored by the CEO/COO, for example, 55% of organizations can update their plans in under a week vs only 19% for those without executive ownership. In other words, what matters is not fewer bosses per se, but clearer authority and faster decisions. 

Fusion teams show how to apply this principle.  

From Function to Workflow with Fusion Teams  

Fusion teams are built around a shared outcome, not a temporary committee charter, and they bring together the operational, technical, and Translator capabilities required to move that outcome forward without constantly throwing work back over a wall.  

What we’re seeing among Zero100 members is that the unit of competitive advantage is shifting away from the function and toward the workflow. This avoids duplicative work across teams, makes ownership clearer, and prevents useful experiments from getting trapped inside one function or one market because no one has designed the path for scaling them.  

For one FMCG company, the issue wasn’t a shortage of agentic ideas but the difficulty of deciding who owned them once they had to operate beyond local context. In another, it was the unresolved question of which decisions truly belong at the center, and which need to move closer to the edge. Everyone wants more speed and more autonomy, but those things only create value when paired with clearer decision rights, sharper workflow ownership, and stronger mechanisms for alignment.

This is a profound shift because workflows force much harder questions than org charts do. When demand changes, supply tightens, or a geopolitical shock occurs, who has the authority to act and under what guardrails? As the COO of a Fortune 10 company said to us recently, not everyone can have a pocket veto. It means clarity here is vital. 

Answering these questions enables leaders to stop asking who reports to whom and instead uncover where decisions should live, how fast they should move, and when people should intervene. This becomes a new way for the organization to function, where people are involved in cross-business-unit, end-to-end workflows. Work is allocated dynamically, and cross-functional movement becomes the norm. 

Barrierless, not Bossless 

Ultimately, the aim is an organization that is barrierless. This doesn’t mean leaderless, and it certainly does not mean structureless. If anything, it demands more intentional structure, because the more authority you want to push closer to the work, the more disciplined you must be about where guardrails sit, how metrics are shared, and who can decide what when the tradeoff gets real.  

Teams with flat hierarchies can move painfully slowly due to unclear decision rights. Equally, hierarchical teams can move fast if they have clear and trusted paths. The difference isn’t bosses; it’s whether the operating model lets intelligence turn into action without unnecessary friction. 

For operations leaders, this leads to three practical questions: 

1. If you mapped your most important workflows, rather than your reporting lines, where would decisions stall?  

2. Are your decision rights explicit enough that local teams can act without creating confusion or risk?  

3. Do you have enough Translator capacity in the system to connect technical possibilities to operational reality in a way that reduces friction instead of adding to it? 

Clever’s model works for Clever. For the rest of us, it’s a wake-up call to sharpen decision clarity on the most critical workflows, synchronizing speed, judgment, and accountability.