Small talented teams that own their decisions need few rules, even at scale

When Luca Ferrari, the co-founder and chief executive of Bending Spoons, which buys and operates digital businesses, was asked how he keeps control as the company grows from 50 people to 500 to 5,000, he rejected the premise.

"We don't control it, really," he said. Then he offered his alternative: "The best antidote to handle complexity and scale is the combination of talent density and extreme ownership."

Ferrari argues that dense talent plus ownership beats rules, processes, and centralized decision making. In his telling, each Bending Spoons business and platform team has, in Ferrari's words, "a complete mandate to do whatever is needed to help" the whole company succeed, usually by starting with running its own business well.

He says he and other senior leaders monitor progress by sitting in Slack channels and watching dashboards and analyses, but almost nothing needs their approval. Only a tiny set of decisions, for example around pricing and made perhaps once a year, goes to the top. He estimates that teams are trusted to take 99% of decisions on their own. He jokes that the company buys established companies and brings them back to startup mode, meaning small teams with high talent density and massive mandates to go and get it done.

Ferrari believes centralized decision making fails for several practical reasons. It is slower because people wait, and the central decider often lacks context. A confident boss may think brilliance compensates for that missing context, and often, he says, it does not. But the largest cost, in his view, is that waiting for a stamp of approval deprives people of ownership, and makes it hard to feel excited and responsible for the work.

He applies the same logic to rules, which he sees as a way for managers to impose their decisions at scale. The result, he argues, is bureaucracy. He tells teams not to write reports to make him happy, but to use Slack to talk to their own team, and he will read the same material. The one thing the company does standardize is the toolkit, the shared technological foundation that is installed after an acquisition. Even there, he says, "we are like an open source community internally," where any team that finds a bug or missing feature can build the fix for everyone. The rest is principles and lessons learned, offered as guidance, not prescriptions.