Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

Decentralized acquirer Amitech maintains a central team of "black belts," who are experts in operational excellence. These specialists are deployed to subsidiaries to run "Kaizen events," helping them eliminate waste and improve processes. This model combines the autonomy of decentralization with the benefits of centralized expertise.

Amphenol runs as a federation of autonomous business units. This structure is key to its M&A success, as acquired companies retain their brand, culture, and customer intimacy. Sellers prefer Amphenol because they know their business won't be suffocated by a monolithic corporate hierarchy.

Nestle avoids a rigid top-down approach by fostering a "hive mind" mentality. While a global strategy exists, local markets like Brazil and Mexico have autonomy to adapt to their unique cultures. The key is constant cross-market communication, where teams share successes and failures to ensure everyone evolves together.

Sears' decline was epitomized by a CEO who felt like a "stranger" in his own stores and pursued abstract corporate strategies. In contrast, Home Depot mandated that every executive spend time on the floor, ensuring that strategic decisions were grounded in the reality of the customer experience.

Create a clear hierarchy of spending authority to eliminate decision bottlenecks. For example, any employee can spend up to $50 to solve a customer problem, managers up to $500, and directors up to $5,000, no questions asked. This empowers the team to make swift decisions without waiting for approval.

Large corporations can avoid stagnation by intentionally preserving the "scrappy" entrepreneurial spirit of their early days. This means empowering local teams and market leaders to operate with an owner's mindset, which fosters accountability and keeps the entire organization agile and innovative.

To solve misalignment, the company cascaded OKRs from the CEO down. Critically, regional leaders were made 'champions' of key pillars like user acquisition. This gave them ownership and a direct voice in shaping product solutions, turning potentially adversarial relationships into collaborative partnerships.

Initially, 6AM City hired two editors per market. Over time, they discovered a more efficient model: empowering a single, autonomous local editor and centralizing all other operations (marketing, sales support, design). This streamlined the process, reduced overhead, and allowed the local editor to focus purely on creating a high-quality, localized product.