35 Leading Keynote Speakers on Dismantling Hierarchy

The organisations that will thrive over the next decade are not the ones with the most layers of management. They are the ones brave enough to remove them. If you are searching for a keynote speaker who can challenge your leadership team to rethink how power, decision making, and accountability flow through your organisation, you have found the right resource.

The conversation around dismantling hierarchy has evolved far beyond a fringe experiment in Silicon Valley garages. A 2025 McKinsey study found that organisations adopting flatter structures achieve a five to ten fold increase in the speed of decision making and change implementation. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report confirmed that only 23 percent of employees globally are engaged at work, with rigid hierarchical structures consistently cited as a primary driver of disengagement. Meanwhile, Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report revealed that just 27 percent of respondents believe their organisations manage change effectively, a damning indictment of the command and control model that still dominates most workplaces.

This is not a theoretical debate. It is a practical emergency. Organisations that cling to industrial era management structures are haemorrhaging talent, stifling innovation, and losing ground to competitors who have discovered that empowering people at every level produces better results than controlling them from the top. The speakers profiled in this directory are the people leading that transformation, from the authors who wrote the foundational texts to the practitioners building self-managing organisations in real time, to the rising voices reshaping how we think about power, trust, and human potential at work.

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams who are ready to move from theory to action. Whether your challenge is building trust across a newly flattened structure, facilitating the difficult conversations that emerge when power shifts, or equipping middle managers to lead without positional authority, Jonno delivers keynotes and workshops that give teams practical tools they use from the following Monday. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your event.

Why Dismantling Hierarchy Matters More Than Ever

The traditional organisational pyramid was designed for a world that no longer exists. Frederick Taylor's scientific management, with its explicit separation of thinking from doing, served mass production brilliantly in the early twentieth century. But the world has moved on, and the pyramid has not kept pace.

The cost of maintaining hierarchical structures extends far beyond inefficiency. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in Humanocracy that bureaucracy costs major economies more than ten trillion dollars per year in lost output. That figure accounts for the meetings that accomplish nothing, the approval chains that delay decisions by weeks, the talented people who stop contributing ideas because nobody asks for them, and the quiet disengagement of millions of workers who have learned that initiative is punished more often than rewarded.

What makes this moment different from previous calls for organisational reform is the convergence of three forces. First, complexity has outstripped the capacity of any single leader or leadership team to process information and make decisions fast enough. Second, a generational shift in expectations means that younger workers are simply unwilling to tolerate environments where their intelligence is not respected. Third, the evidence base for alternative models has matured dramatically, with organisations like Buurtzorg, Morning Star, Haier, and Handelsbanken demonstrating over decades that decentralised, self-managing structures produce superior financial results alongside higher employee satisfaction.

For more on how leadership teams can navigate the transition from control to trust, check out my blog post 'How to Build a High Performing Team' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/how-to-build-a-high-performing-team.

How This List Was Compiled

This directory profiles 35 keynote speakers who specialise in dismantling hierarchy, building flat and self-managing organisations, distributing leadership, and empowering people at every level. Each person was selected based on the depth and originality of their contribution to the field, the geographic and disciplinary diversity they bring, and their genuine impact on how organisations around the world think about structure, power, and human potential. The list spans foundational authors whose books sparked global movements, practitioners who have built or transformed real organisations without traditional management hierarchies, and emerging voices who are pushing the conversation into new territory. No single country represents more than 40 percent of the list, and the selection deliberately includes voices from academia, consulting, technology, healthcare, manufacturing, social enterprise, and the public sector.

Foundational Thinkers and Authors

These are the people who wrote the books, built the frameworks, and laid the intellectual foundations for the movement to dismantle hierarchy. Their ideas have influenced thousands of organisations worldwide, and their keynotes draw on decades of research and real world application.

1. Frederic Laloux

Few books have done more to shift how leaders think about organisational structure than Reinventing Organizations. Frederic Laloux, a former McKinsey associate partner based in Brussels, introduced the concept of Teal organisations, built on three breakthroughs: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.

Published in 2014 and now translated into numerous languages with over 800,000 copies sold, Reinventing Organizations documented twelve pioneering companies that had operated without traditional management hierarchies for decades. The book gave leaders a language for what they had been sensing was possible but could not articulate, and it remains the single most referenced text in the progressive organisation movement.

2. Gary Hamel

Named by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential business thinker, Gary Hamel has spent the last decade waging a public campaign against bureaucracy from his position at London Business School. His keynotes are electric, data driven, and unflinching in their diagnosis of what hierarchy costs organisations.

His book Humanocracy, co-authored with Michele Zanini, makes a passionate case for replacing bureaucratic structures with organisations that are as capable, creative, and resilient as the people inside them. The second edition, published in 2025, includes new case studies from companies like Haier, Nucor, and Handelsbanken that have achieved sustained superior performance through radical decentralisation.

3. Michele Zanini

As co-founder of the Management Lab and co-author of Humanocracy with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini brings the operational rigour that turns the anti-bureaucracy argument from inspiration into implementation. His work focuses on the practical tools and methodologies that allow organisations to dismantle hierarchy without descending into chaos.

Zanini developed the Bureaucracy Mass Index, a diagnostic tool that helps organisations measure the true cost of their management layers. His Harvard Business Review articles, including "The Social Case for Busting Bureaucracy" published in September 2025, provide leaders with evidence based frameworks for making the case for structural change within their own organisations.

4. Brian Robertson

Brian Robertson did not just write about dismantling hierarchy. He built a complete operating system to replace it. As the creator of Holacracy and founder of HolacracyOne, Robertson developed a comprehensive self-management framework that has been adopted by hundreds of organisations worldwide, from startups to major corporations including Zappos.

His book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World provides the detailed constitutional framework that organisations use to distribute authority, define roles dynamically, and make decisions without traditional management hierarchies. Robertson describes himself as a "recovering CEO" who discovered that even well-intentioned leaders become bottlenecks.

5. Aaron Dignan

Aaron Dignan founded The Ready, a global organisational transformation practice, after recognising that bureaucracy was silently killing the organisations he worked with. His bestselling book Brave New Work, which Seth Godin called "the management book of the year," provides a practical twelve domain operating system for reinventing how organisations function.

In early 2025, Dignan converted The Ready into an Employee Ownership Trust, putting the principles he advocates into practice within his own company. His keynotes and the Brave New Work podcast have helped leaders at organisations including Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft, Airbnb, and charity: water adopt new forms of self-organisation and dynamic teaming.

6. Isaac Getz

Isaac Getz, Professor at ESCP Business School in Paris and former visiting professor at both Cornell and Stanford, has been instrumental in the corporate liberation movement that has transformed hundreds of companies across Europe and Canada. His concept of the "liberated company," introduced in the award winning book Freedom, Inc. co-authored with Brian Carney, describes organisations built on freedom and responsibility rather than command and control.

A 2016 study by the French National Foundation for Management Education ranked Getz as the fourth most influential living management author globally. Major organisations including Michelin, Airbus, and Decathlon have adopted the corporate liberation principles his research documented, and his latest book The Caring Company, co-authored with Laurent Marbacher and published by Wiley in November 2025, extends his work into how businesses can serve the common good.

7. Ricardo Semler

Ricardo Semler is the original corporate democracy maverick. When he took over his father's manufacturing company Semco in Brazil at age 21, he fired 60 percent of top managers on his first day and spent the next four decades building one of the most radically democratic companies in the world. His bestselling books Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend documented a workplace where employees set their own salaries, choose their own bosses, and participate in every major business decision.

Semco grew from 90 to 5,000 employees and from four million to over 200 million dollars in annual revenue under Semler's non-hierarchical leadership, with an employee turnover rate of just two percent. Through the Semco Style Institute, now active in over 30 countries, Semler's management philosophy continues to influence organisations worldwide.

Practitioners and Movement Builders

These speakers have not just written about dismantling hierarchy. They have built organisations, communities, and movements that demonstrate what is possible when traditional management structures are replaced with trust, autonomy, and distributed decision making.

8. Jos de Blok

Jos de Blok is the founder of Buurtzorg, the Dutch home care organisation that has become the most cited example of self-management at scale in the world. Starting with just four nurses in 2006, Buurtzorg now employs over 14,000 professionals working in more than 900 self-managing teams across the Netherlands, with a central back office of fewer than 50 people.

A KPMG study showed that Buurtzorg achieved a 50 percent reduction in hours of care while improving quality, and Ernst and Young documented a 20 to 30 percent reduction in per patient costs. The model has been implemented or piloted in more than 24 countries. De Blok received the Thinkers50 Ideas Into Practice Award in 2019, and his keynotes challenge audiences with a deceptively simple proposition: trust professionals to manage themselves.

9. Joost Minnaar

Joost Minnaar co-founded Corporate Rebels in 2016 after leaving his corporate job, frustrated with the bureaucracy, inertia, and lack of motivation that characterised traditional workplaces. Together with Pim de Morree, he has spent the years since travelling the world visiting the most progressive organisations and sharing everything they learn through their platform, which is read in over 100 countries.

Listed on the Thinkers50 Top 30 Emergent Management Thinkers in 2018 and winner of the 2019 Thinkers50 Radar Award, Minnaar is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the Amsterdam Business Research Institute. His book Corporate Rebels: Make Work More Fun, co-authored with de Morree, distils eight radical lessons from over 100 of the world's most inspiring companies. He also co-founded Krisos, a private equity company that acquires businesses and transforms them into self-managing organisations.

10. Pim de Morree

Pim de Morree is the other half of Corporate Rebels, bringing the content creation, speaking, and community building energy that has made the platform one of the most influential voices in the progressive organisation movement. His keynote presentations inspire organisations to radically change the way they work, drawing on firsthand research from hundreds of pioneering companies.

De Morree's LinkedIn presence is one of the most active in the self-management space, with regular posts that challenge conventional management thinking and share practical examples from organisations that have successfully dismantled hierarchy. His work with Minnaar on the Corporate Rebels Summit has brought together leaders including Frederic Laloux, Jos de Blok, and Lisa Gill to share their experiences.

11. Lisa Gill

Lisa Gill is an organisational self-management coach, author, and host of the Leadermorphosis podcast, which the co-founder of Loomio called "the absolute gold standard of conversations about organisations." Named on the Thinkers50 Radar 2020 list for her work with self-managing teams, Gill facilitates leadership courses with Tuff Leadership Training across more than 20 countries.

Her book Moose Heads on the Table, co-authored with Karin Tenelius, shares stories and insights from nearly twenty years of coaching organisations in Sweden to become self-managing. Born in the UK and raised in Southeast Asia, Gill brings a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to the challenge of building organisations without hierarchy, and her podcast guests have included Frederic Laloux, Amy Edmondson, adrienne maree brown, and dozens of other leading practitioners.

12. Karin Tenelius

Karin Tenelius is one of Europe's most respected pioneers of self-managing leadership and co-founder of Tuff Leadership Training. Since the 1990s, inspired by Ricardo Semler's work at Semco, she has been experimenting with employee driven organisations, developing a distinctive approach that involves "giving all of the authority away" and then coaching people in higher level communication skills.

Her practical training methodology, honed over more than 20 years, has been delivered to over 5,000 participants in more than 20 countries. Tenelius developed the Strengthening Dialogue method now used in job centres across Sweden, and her track record includes transforming struggling organisations into high performing self-managing teams, including Frey's Hotel in Stockholm, which saw profit rise by 26 percent within eight months of removing its management hierarchy.

13. David Marquet

Former US Navy Captain David Marquet took command of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe when it was the worst performing boat in the fleet and transformed it into the best by doing something no submarine commander had done before: he gave up giving orders. His Intent-Based Leadership model, documented in the bestselling Turn the Ship Around!, has become one of the most widely cited examples of dismantling command and control hierarchy in any context.

Stephen R. Covey spent time aboard the Santa Fe and called it the most empowering organisation he had ever seen. Fortune magazine called the book "the best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution." Marquet's subsequent books, Leadership Is Language and Distancing (co-authored with Michael Gillespie), extend his framework for replacing traditional top down authority with distributed decision making.

14. Doug Kirkpatrick

Doug Kirkpatrick served as the first financial controller for Morning Star, now the world's largest tomato processing company, and one of the most frequently studied examples of self-management at scale. He co-founded the Morning Star Self-Management Institute in 2008 and has since become one of the most prolific speakers and authors on organisational self-management, with three books including Beyond Empowerment and The No-Limits Enterprise.

As a Forbes Speaker, TEDx presenter, and consultant through D'Artagnan Advisors, Kirkpatrick has keynoted and presented to audiences across the United States, China, Brazil, Norway, the United Kingdom, Australia, and dozens of other countries. His unique perspective combines firsthand experience of building a genuinely self-managing company with practical frameworks that any organisation can apply.

15. Traci Fenton

Traci Fenton founded WorldBlu in 1997 and has spent nearly three decades pioneering the concept of Freedom at Work and organisational democracy. Her research identified the 10 Principles of Organisational Democracy, and WorldBlu certified Freedom-Centred Organisations have achieved an average of 700 percent greater revenue growth compared to S&P 500 companies over a three year period.

Named a Thinkers50 Radar award winner, an Inc. magazine Top 50 Leadership Thinker, and a Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coach, Fenton has worked with hundreds of companies in over 100 countries including The WD-40 Company, DaVita, and Zappos. Her book Freedom at Work provides the leadership handbook for shifting from fear based hierarchy to freedom centred democracy.

16. Niels Pflaeging

Niels Pflaeging is a self-described "management exorcist" and founder of the BetaCodex Network, a global open innovation movement dedicated to replacing command and control management with complexity robust organising. Based between New York and Wiesbaden, Germany, Pflaeging is the author of eleven books including the bestselling Organize for Complexity.

Together with Silke Hermann, Pflaeging created the Org Physics framework and the social technologies OpenSpace Beta, Cell Structure Design, and Relative Targets. His work provides organisations with a rigorous theoretical foundation for understanding why traditional hierarchy fails in complex environments and what to replace it with. His provocative LinkedIn presence regularly challenges management orthodoxies with sharp, visual content.

17. Samantha Slade

Samantha Slade is a cultural anthropologist, author, and the co-founder of Percolab, an international co-creation firm she has run as a non-hierarchical organisation since 2007. Her book Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time provides seven concrete practices for flattening existing hierarchies, drawn from over 20 years of applied ethnographic research.

Based in Montreal and working internationally, Slade brings an anthropological lens to organisational design that few other speakers in this space can match. She also co-founded one of the first coworking spaces in Canada and regularly delivers Going Horizontal training workshops around the world, including recent sessions in Canberra, Australia.

Emerging Voices and Specialist Practitioners

These speakers represent the next generation of thinking on dismantling hierarchy, bringing fresh perspectives from diverse disciplines, industries, and geographies.

18. Silke Hermann

Silke Hermann is co-founder of Red42 and co-creator, with Niels Pflaeging, of the Org Physics framework and several social technologies for organisational transformation including OpenSpace Beta and Cell Structure Design. Based in Germany, Hermann brings a systems thinking approach to the challenge of replacing hierarchical structures with complexity robust alternatives.

Her co-authored works with Pflaeging, including the OpenSpace Beta handbook, provide organisations with practical tools for initiating transformation without relying on top down change programmes. Hermann's consulting work spans organisations across Europe and the Americas, helping leadership teams understand the three structures that every organisation contains and how to work with them rather than against them.

19. Rob Pierre

Rob Pierre built Jellyfish, a global digital marketing company, into a nine figure business while deliberately dismantling traditional hierarchy to create a model of distributed accountability. His keynotes draw on the practical experience of scaling a flat organisation under real commercial pressure, proving that the principles of self-management work not just in theory but in high-growth, high-pressure environments.

Now an investor and founder supporting underrepresented entrepreneurs and social impact ventures, Pierre helps leaders design organisations that can grow without limits. His framework for a "modern operating system" translates the principles of decentralisation into actionable strategies for talent, accountability, and performance in fast-changing markets.

20. Perry Timms

Perry Timms is the founder of PTHR, a fully remote HR transformation consultancy that operates as a WorldBlu certified Freedom-Centred Organisation. Based in London, Timms is the author of Transformational HR and The Energized Workplace, and was named on the HR Most Influential Thinkers list. His organisation practices radical transparency, open books, a four day workweek, and democratic management of schedules and priorities.

Timms brings the HR perspective to dismantling hierarchy, helping organisations understand that structural change requires a fundamental rethinking of how people are recruited, developed, rewarded, and empowered. His keynotes bridge the gap between progressive organisational theory and the practical realities of people management.

21. Keith McCandless

Keith McCandless is the co-creator, with Henri Lipmanowicz, of Liberating Structures, a set of 33 practical interaction methods that make it easy to include everyone in shaping the future of an organisation. The Liberating Structures approach provides a direct, accessible way to dismantle hierarchy in everyday interactions without requiring a wholesale organisational restructure.

His book The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, co-authored with Lipmanowicz, has been adopted by organisations ranging from hospitals to tech companies to government agencies. McCandless's keynotes demonstrate how small changes in meeting structures and decision making processes can produce dramatic shifts in participation, innovation, and distributed leadership.

22. Henri Lipmanowicz

Henri Lipmanowicz is the co-creator of Liberating Structures and a former executive who spent over 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including a decade as president of Merck's intercontinental operations. His transition from corporate executive to advocate for distributed leadership gives his keynotes a credibility that resonates powerfully with senior leaders.

The book The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, co-authored with Keith McCandless, provides 33 alternatives to conventional meeting formats that distribute control and engage everyone simultaneously. Lipmanowicz's work demonstrates that dismantling hierarchy does not require blowing up the organisational chart. It can start with how people interact in their very next meeting.

23. Rich Sheridan

Rich Sheridan is the CEO and co-founder of Menlo Innovations, a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that has become one of the most visited examples of a joy-centred, hierarchy-light workplace in the United States. His bestselling book Joy, Inc. documents how Menlo built a culture of paired programming, open space work, and shared leadership that produces consistently high quality software.

Menlo Innovations has been a WorldBlu certified Freedom-Centred Organisation and is regularly featured on lists of best places to work. Sheridan's keynotes are grounded in the daily reality of running a profitable business without the traditional management layers that most software companies rely on, making his message particularly compelling for technology leaders.

24. Chuck Blakeman

Chuck Blakeman is the founder of the Crankset Group and author of Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea and Making Money Is Killing Your Business. Based in the United States, Blakeman advocates for what he calls a "participation age" in which stakeholders, not employees, drive organisational success through shared ownership and distributed decision making.

His Distributed Decision Making process gives organisations a practical framework for pushing authority to the people closest to the work. Blakeman's keynotes challenge the fundamental assumption that organisations need employees at all, proposing instead a model of adult partnerships where everyone participates as a self-managing contributor.

25. Abhijith HK

Abhijith HK is the co-founder, with Vidhya Abhijith, of Codewave, a digital innovation company in India with over 200 employees and zero hierarchy. Their peer-based feedback system called Peerly and their scaling model of "Fractas," essentially mini startups within the company, represent some of the most innovative approaches to self-management emerging from India.

Featured on the Leadermorphosis podcast and profiled by Corporate Rebels, Codewave demonstrates that non-hierarchical models work in rapidly growing technology companies in emerging markets. The couple built the organisation from intuition rather than imported frameworks, making their story particularly valuable for leaders who want to develop their own approach to flat structure rather than copying a Western template.

26. Etienne Salborn

Etienne Salborn is the co-founder of SINA, the Social Innovation Academy, a network of social enterprise incubators in Uganda and neighbouring countries that supports marginalised young people to create their own solutions to social problems. SINA operates as a self-managing organisation that has catalysed over 70 social enterprises across more than 10 communities.

Salborn's keynotes bring a perspective on dismantling hierarchy that most speakers in this space cannot offer: the experience of building non-hierarchical structures in contexts of extreme resource constraint and cultural complexity in East Africa. His concept of "freesponsibility," combining freedom with responsibility, provides a memorable framework for audiences.

27. Bob Davids

Bob Davids is a serial entrepreneur and co-author, with Brian Carney and Isaac Getz, of Leadership Without Ego. His career includes founding and leading six companies across multiple industries, in each case applying the principles of egoless leadership that he now speaks about globally. Davids argues that the single biggest barrier to dismantling hierarchy is the ego of the leader at the top.

His keynotes are grounded in decades of practical experience as a CEO who deliberately chose to give power away rather than accumulate it. The book Leadership Without Ego provides a philosophical and practical framework for leaders who want to liberate their organisations but must first liberate themselves from the need to be in charge.

28. Stanley McChrystal

General Stanley McChrystal commanded US and international forces in Afghanistan and is the bestselling author of Team of Teams, one of the most influential books on dismantling hierarchy in military and corporate contexts. His central argument, that rigid hierarchies cannot defeat networked, adaptive threats, transformed how organisations think about structure and agility.

The McChrystal Group now consults with Fortune 500 companies on building adaptive organisations, and McChrystal's keynotes draw on the dramatic real-world stakes of his experience to make the case for shared consciousness, decentralised execution, and radical transparency. His speaking fee typically exceeds $100,000, reflecting the demand for his unique perspective.

29. adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown is the author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds, a book that applies the principles of complex adaptive systems to social justice organising and has profoundly influenced how progressive organisations think about structure, power, and collective intelligence. Her work challenges the assumption that effective action requires centralised control.

Featured on the Leadermorphosis podcast and widely cited in the progressive organisation movement, brown brings an intersectional, justice-centred lens to the conversation about dismantling hierarchy that most business-focused speakers do not address. Her concept of emergent strategy, in which small intentional actions create large systemic shifts, resonates with leaders seeking alternatives to top-down transformation programmes.

30. Margaret Wheatley

Margaret Wheatley is the author of the groundbreaking Leadership and the New Science, which applied chaos theory and living systems science to organisational leadership and fundamentally changed how a generation of leaders thought about control, hierarchy, and emergence. A former professor of management and a fellow of numerous leadership institutes, Wheatley has been writing and speaking about self-organising systems for over three decades.

Her work laid the intellectual groundwork for much of what the current self-management movement is building. While her more recent writing has taken a more sombre tone about the state of organisational culture, her earlier books remain essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why hierarchical structures fail in complex environments and what the alternatives look like.

Power Distributors and Organisational Designers

These speakers specialise in the practical mechanics of distributing power, redesigning organisational structures, and implementing the systems that make flat organisations work at scale.

31. Natacha Neumann

Natacha Neumann is the co-founder of Freche Freunde, a leading children's healthy snacks brand in Germany with around 80 employees. She led a two-year transformation journey to convert the company into a self-managing organisation, a process she describes as the hardest two years of her life. Her keynotes offer a rare founder's perspective on the emotional and practical realities of dismantling the hierarchy you built.

Featured on the Leadermorphosis podcast, Neumann shares candid insights about what transformation actually requires of the person at the top, including the willingness to give up control, sit with discomfort, and trust that the organisation will find its way. Her story resonates powerfully with founders and CEOs who are intellectually convinced by self-management but uncertain about the personal cost of the transition.

32. Vineet Nayar

Vineet Nayar is the former CEO of HCL Technologies and author of Employees First, Customers Second, a book that documents how he turned the command and control culture of a 100,000 person Indian IT company on its head by inverting the traditional organisational pyramid. His approach placed frontline employees at the top of the priority structure, with management's role redefined as serving the people who create value for customers.

Under Nayar's leadership, HCL Technologies grew from $700 million to $4.5 billion in revenue, with a six fold increase in market capitalisation. His keynotes demonstrate that dismantling hierarchy is not just a philosophy for small startups but a scalable strategy that works at the largest enterprise level, even in industries and cultures traditionally dominated by top-down management.

33. David Burkus

David Burkus is the bestselling author of Leading from Anywhere and Under New Management, and one of the most popular management speakers in the United States. His research on the science of teamwork, leadership, and organisational design has been published in academic journals and featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and USAToday.

His TEDx talk has been viewed over two million times, and his books provide accessible, research-backed arguments for eliminating open office politics, removing non-compete agreements, sharing financial data transparently, and other practical steps that flatten hierarchies from the inside out. Burkus brings an academic rigour to the conversation that appeals to leaders who want evidence before they act.

34. Lorna Davis

Lorna Davis is the former CEO of DanoneWave and a senior advisor to Danone, where she championed the B Corp movement at one of the world's largest food companies. Her TED talk on collaborative leadership, viewed over two million times, argues that the myth of the solo heroic leader is not just outdated but actively harmful, and that the future belongs to leaders who build interdependent organisations.

Davis's keynotes draw on her experience leading a $6 billion business unit within a multinational corporation while advocating for stakeholder capitalism, radical transparency, and distributed accountability. Her perspective is particularly valuable for leaders in large enterprises who want to challenge hierarchy without dismantling their entire corporate structure overnight.

35. Jonno White

The people profiled in this directory are the thinkers. Jonno White is the person you bring in when you are ready to act on what they say, to build the team culture, have the difficult conversations, and lead the change. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator delivering the world's fastest growing team assessment, completed by over 1.3 million people globally in less than five years, Jonno helps leadership teams understand why certain types of work energise them while others drain them, creating the shared language that makes distributed leadership practically possible.

Jonno is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries, and founder of The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders. He achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating at the ASBA 2025 National Conference and works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session on building teams that lead themselves, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered for the final 35 but did not make the cut. Jean-Francois Zobrist, the legendary former CEO of FAVI in France who pioneered self-managing mini-factories in the 1980s, was omitted because his current public speaking and content output has slowed significantly, though his legacy remains foundational. Deborah Frieze, co-author of Walk Out Walk On with Margaret Wheatley and now leading the Boston Impact Initiative, has shifted her focus away from organisational design toward community investment. Helen Sanderson, founder of Wellbeing Teams in the UK, is doing groundbreaking work applying self-management to social care but her speaking profile remains primarily UK-focused. Edwin Jansen, who led the transformation of Fitzii into a self-managing hiring company within the Ian Martin Group in Canada, has stepped back from public speaking. Simon Mont, co-founder of Harmonize, is producing exceptional work on comprehensive organisational development but focuses primarily on consulting rather than keynote delivery.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The first and most common mistake leaders make when exploring the dismantling of hierarchy is confusing flat structure with no structure. Every self-managing organisation in this directory has more structure than a traditional hierarchy, not less. The structure is simply distributed rather than concentrated at the top. Holacracy has a detailed constitution. Buurtzorg has clear protocols for team formation, conflict resolution, and financial management. Morning Star uses Colleague Letters of Understanding to define every professional relationship. Leaders who announce that the company is "going flat" without implementing rigorous alternative structures invite chaos.

The second mistake is attempting to dismantle hierarchy through a top-down change programme. The irony is obvious but the pattern is remarkably persistent. As Aaron Dignan puts it in Brave New Work, "You cannot blow up bureaucracy with a bureaucratic change process." The most successful transitions documented by the speakers in this directory involved leaders modelling new behaviours, inviting experimentation, and creating conditions for change to emerge rather than mandating it.

The third mistake is focusing on structure before culture. Karin Tenelius of Tuff Leadership Training has observed this pattern repeatedly: organisations rush to remove management layers without investing in the communication skills, conflict resolution capabilities, and trust-building practices that self-management requires. The structural change is the easy part. The human development work is what determines whether it succeeds.

The fourth mistake is giving up too quickly when the transition gets uncomfortable. Natacha Neumann described her two-year transformation at Freche Freunde as the hardest period of her career. Every organisation documented by Corporate Rebels experienced a difficult transition phase. Leaders who expect dismantling hierarchy to feel smooth and linear are setting themselves up for premature retreat. Hire Jonno White to facilitate the conversations your team needs to have during the messy middle of transformation. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how he can support your leadership team.

The fifth mistake is copying another organisation's model wholesale rather than developing your own. Jos de Blok's Buurtzorg model works brilliantly in Dutch community nursing but cannot be transplanted directly into a manufacturing company in Mumbai. Brian Robertson's Holacracy provides a rigorous framework but may not suit every culture. The speakers in this directory would all agree on one principle: every organisation must find its own path to self-management. What they share is not a template but a set of principles, mindset shifts, and practical experiments.

Implementation Guide: Taking Action

If you are convinced that dismantling hierarchy is the right direction for your organisation, the path forward is not a single dramatic restructure but a series of experiments that build capability and confidence over time. Start by identifying one team or one process where you can test self-managing principles without risking the entire operation. Use that experiment to learn what works in your specific context and culture.

Invest heavily in communication skills before changing any structures. The speakers in this directory would overwhelmingly agree that the single most important capability for self-managing teams is the ability to have honest, direct conversations about performance, behaviour, and accountability without a manager mediating. Karin Tenelius and Lisa Gill's work at Tuff Leadership Training, Jonno White's Working Genius facilitation, and Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz's Liberating Structures all provide practical starting points.

Build transparency into every system. Self-management fails when people do not have access to the information they need to make decisions. Open the financial data. Share the strategic priorities. Make performance metrics visible to everyone. Morning Star, Buurtzorg, and Semco all demonstrate that transparency is not a nice-to-have but a prerequisite for distributed decision making.

Redefine the role of existing managers as coaches, mentors, and facilitators rather than controllers and approvers. This transition is often the hardest part because it requires people to give up positional authority and develop influence based leadership skills. Many former managers discover that their new role is more satisfying than the old one, but the transition requires genuine support and training.

Set a realistic timeline. Based on the experiences documented by the speakers in this directory, expect the transition to take two to five years for a meaningful cultural shift, with the first twelve months being the most challenging. Book Jonno White to facilitate your leadership team's first offsite on building a culture of distributed leadership. Email jonno@consultclarity.org and mention this blog post.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled?

This directory was compiled through extensive research into the global ecosystem of thought leaders, practitioners, and keynote speakers who specialise in dismantling hierarchy, building flat and self-managing organisations, and distributing leadership. Each person was assessed against criteria including credentials, genuine impact on the field, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and the quality of their contribution to how organisations think about structure and power.

What is the difference between a flat organisation and a self-managing organisation?

A flat organisation has fewer management layers between frontline workers and senior leadership, but may still operate with traditional top-down decision making. A self-managing organisation goes further by distributing decision-making authority, accountability, and leadership responsibilities across teams and individuals rather than concentrating them in management roles. Most speakers in this directory advocate for self-management as a more comprehensive approach than simply removing management layers.

Can dismantling hierarchy work in large organisations?

Yes. Buurtzorg operates with over 14,000 people. HCL Technologies transformed under Vineet Nayar with over 100,000 employees. Haier, the Chinese appliance manufacturer, reorganised its 80,000 person workforce into over 2,000 autonomous micro-enterprises. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have documented numerous examples of large organisations that have achieved radical decentralisation with sustained superior performance.

Is dismantling hierarchy the same as having no leadership?

Absolutely not. Every speaker in this directory emphasises that self-managing organisations have more leadership, not less. The leadership is simply distributed rather than concentrated. In Holacracy, every role holder leads within their domain. In Buurtzorg, every nurse team self-organises. In Morning Star, every colleague is the CEO of their own mission. The goal is not to eliminate leadership but to multiply it.

Can I hire someone to facilitate workshops on dismantling hierarchy for my team?

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, delivers keynotes and workshops that help leadership teams build the trust, communication skills, and shared language required for distributed leadership. Whether your team needs a half-day workshop, a full-day offsite, or an ongoing facilitation partnership, email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your needs. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers.

What is the biggest risk of dismantling hierarchy?

The biggest risk is doing it badly, specifically, removing structure without replacing it with something better. The second biggest risk is underinvesting in the human capabilities required. The speakers in this directory have all seen organisations fail at self-management because they changed the structure without developing their people's capacity for honest communication, conflict resolution, and mutual accountability.

What is the best book to read first on this topic?

For a comprehensive overview, start with Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. For a practical implementation guide, Aaron Dignan's Brave New Work is excellent. For the anti-bureaucracy argument at its most compelling, read Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini's Humanocracy. For a military perspective, David Marquet's Turn the Ship Around! is unmatched. For a hands-on, practice-by-practice approach, Samantha Slade's Going Horizontal is ideal.

Final Thoughts

The speakers in this directory represent the most important voices in one of the most consequential conversations in modern leadership: how do we build organisations that are worthy of the people inside them? The answer, demonstrated across every industry and geography represented here, is to replace the industrial-era pyramid with structures that trust people, distribute authority, and empower leadership at every level.

The evidence is overwhelming. The case studies are abundant. The frameworks are proven. What remains is the courage to act. Whether your starting point is a single team experiment with Liberating Structures, a full Holacracy adoption, a Working Genius workshop with your leadership team, or a frank conversation about what hierarchy is costing your organisation, the most important step is the first one.

Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD), delivers keynotes and workshops that equip leadership teams with the practical tools they need to build cultures of trust, distributed leadership, and honest communication. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, executive offsite, or MC engagement, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on building leadership teams that function without relying on hierarchy, check out my blog post 'Working Genius Assessment for Teams' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-assessment.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

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