What Would Today's Workplace Eckart Wintzen’s “Cell” Company?

Wintzen’s model anticipated at least four themes that continue to dominate today’s organizational thinking:

Autonomy as a performance accelerant : Research has and continues to consistently correlate autonomy with motivation, creativity, and retention. Decentralized teams are able to make faster decisions and act more aggressively on customer problems (PMC) 

Replication instead of scaling hierarchy : “By simply ‘copying’ small successful units into new markets, companies experience the benefits of retaining the entrepreneurial urgency of the market place and not layering management or hierarchy, which slows decision making” (Corporate Rebels) 

Cross-functionality centric to employment : Cells will often use a hybrid of skills to achieve an outcome (Sales, Delivery, Support) that fit modern product-team thinking (squads, pods, squads), without heavy cross-functionality against a company mandate to a customer (Atlassian) 

Values and environmental purpose : Wintzen expanded the model with a strong ethical posture: investing in green initiatives and promoting environmental accounting. Today, ESG and social impact and mission-led companies fit his insistence that companies must account for broad impacts beyond profit. (extent.nl) 

Together, these collectively demonstrate why a decentralized first design can both give meaning to the workers and create resilient globally distributed organizations.

Scaling it: BSO/Origin’s Story (1973–1996)

Wintzen took a seriously under-utilized playbook and executed it doggedly. BSO emerged from a management buyout and purposefully replicated the cell model to penetrate new geographies and market segments. By the mid-1990s, BSO/Origin was a global services firm with thousands of employees and offices in dozens of countries; contemporary reporting places the company at approximately 6,500 employees in 1995 and 10–11,000 employees at the time of an affiliation with Phillips in 1996, depending on which count (direct versus affiliates) you accept. What is consistently reported across disjointed sources is that BSO expanded internationally, as a global services firm, while preserving a decentralized structure. (WIRED) 

Two pragmatics allowed scaling to happen: (1) cells were financially accountable – they managed the invoicing and local finance (accounting), and (2) while all units needed to have shared services, they were intentionally designed to be lightweight and consumable versus creating a centralized structure to funnel services through a corporate center. These elements allowed the organization to expand without having to build up a corporate center . (reinventingorganizationswiki.com)

The significance of the model during Wintzen’s time remains relevant today.

Wintzen’s model predicted at least four contemporary organizational thinking trends : 

1. Autonomy as a performance lever : There is ample research that demonstrates the links between autonomy, motivation, creativity, and retention. Decentralized teams can react more quickly and engage in experimentation more boldly in service of solving customer problems. (PMC)
2. Replication rather than scaling hierarchy : In terms of “copying” small, successful units into new markets, we have at least preserved entrepreneurial urgency as a key motivator — in contrast to traditional scaling, where “decisions take time” because layers of bureaucracy between the management above and the team below multiply (Corporate Rebels).
3. Customer-focused cross-functionality : While Wintzen describes what he calls “cells,” they often combine skills (e.g. sales delivery & support ) necessary to own the outcome, similar to what is happening if companies are moving towards product teams (squads and pods and squads) to assume end-to-end product or service responsibility (Atlassian).
4. Values and environmental purpose : Wintzen extended the model to represent a strong ethical posture of social responsibility – and he later invested his earnings into green businesses and called for environmental accounting. Today’s ESG, social impact, and mission-driven companies are similar in insistence that companies measure the impact of their actions beyond profit (extent.nl)

As a whole, they illustrate Wintzen’s point that adopting a decentralization-first design was both an empowering model for workers and a resilient organizational design/global distribution of the workforce.

Contemporary versions and complementary examples  

Wintzen’s notion has not disappeared; it has resurfaced in various forms in various settings :  

Buurtzorg (nursing care) :  Buurtzorg is a well-respected Dutch example of decentralization in action. Teams of caregivers coordinate local nursing care on their own, and manage local autonomy with the smallest possible central office. Buurtzorg is demonstrating great outcomes with minimal overhead costs. Corporate Rebels and others are explicitly linking Wintzen-type cells with Buurtzorg-type cells. (Corporate Rebels)  

Morning Star (tomato processing) : Morning Star is arguably one of the more famous examples of a self-managed organization in which workers co-organize into autonomous units that negotiate their responsibilities and commitments without hierarchical managers. It is a notable example in which the idea of a “cell” has been shown to be viable in a non-technology and non-service-based setting. (Academy4socialskills Flux Change)  

Spotify model & modern “squads” : The product teams (squads, tribes) that Spotify popularized have adapted this autonomy + alignment pattern for software development, offering some ideas about how autonomy might be coupled with light structures for coordination across teams. (Atlassian)  

The academic and management literatures appear to be recently revisiting the notion of decentralization as we note that reviews and empirical studies are showing that decisional decentralization is on the rise — as organizations seek to be more adaptable and agile in increasingly turbulent markets and environments. However, the literature caution us to not regard decentralized approaches as a panacea, as they require appropriate systems to support them.

A pragmatic playbook: actualizing the cell idea — in steps

What follows is a pragmatic series of steps for trialing Wintzen-type cells in a contemporary work organization.  

1) Define the unit of work and limit the size

You must articulate the specific work circumstance/effort that qualifies as a “cell” in your environment (e.g., customer segment, product line, geographic region). Then, specify an upper limit/number on the cell size being considered. Most modern examples keep teams to under 12–50 /make size decisions based on function. How to prevent the unwanted managerial behaviors is by building in the idea of splitting: Once the limit is reached, the “cell” can automatically trigger splitting. This will then prevent potentially negative outcomes of perceived managerial roles occurring when you have OUTGROWN the original cell size.(Corporate Rebels)

2) Provide cells with P&L ownership and customer ownership 

It is critical that clear financial and customer-focused accountability metrics are assigned at the unit level. Every cell should understand the financial implications of their decisions in terms of revenue, gross margin, and cash. Aligning ownership to positive outcomes allows for a culture of accountably entrepreneurial behavior. (reinventingorganizationswiki.com)

3) Create a shared-services marketplace instead of gatekeeping

Offering modular templates, legal playbooks, finance tools, and HR playbooks is a way for cells to consume every resource on demand. The centre’s focus should be about making it easy to transact as opposed to gatekeeping. Provide coaching and one-click services as an option and not required approvals. (extent.nl)

4) Institute light-weight governance and interfaces

While autonomy is enacted, it must be done in the context of protocols. The interface contracts provide cells with (APIs for) the information and decision flows giving cells opportunities for coordination without applying for each action. Use established federated standards (e.g., this data field must exist) not require heavy compliance burdens. (reinventingorganizationswiki.com)

5) Instrument the outcomes including non-financial criteria

Develop the metrics that must be collected for customer loyalty, lead-time delivery, employee engagement and social/environmental (i.e., energy used, waste) and profit margins and other financial considerations. Wintzen pushed for environmental accounting practices; modern teams should use comparable social criteria as operational levers…not for PR efforts. (WIRED)

6) Coach for culture, don’t compliance

Deploy leadership coaching, peer review practice, and cross-cell learning. Culture binds the brand consistency without micro-managing. Train for onboarding for new cells so the effective practices become the normal practice. (LinkedIn)

Measurement of success, what to measure cell-level and enterprise-level

Examples of cell-level metrics: customer NPS or CSAT, revenue per employee, cash runway, sprint/iteration throughput, a defect/quality rate, employee engagement, and a small set of environmental/social consideration.Metrics at the enterprise level include aggregate customer satisfaction, brand consistency metrics, nonsensical costs/duplicate work, total costs of shared services per cell, and systemic risk (e.g., one supplier concentration). Keep reporting simple and straightforward – short dashboards on a frequent basis for cells and quarterly synthesis with executive teams to ensure health monitoring. 

Why both? Because decentralization eliminates many bottlenecks, but it introduces variance, and measurements will recognize when variance turns into fragmentation and allow for light-touch remediation. 

Risks, trade-offs, and mitigation strategies

A cell design introduces trade-offs. The biggest risks with a cell structure and potential solutions to mitigate included: 

• Fragmentation and duplicate work

Mitigation: invest in knowledge sharing tools, and develop incentives for reusing work (i.e., credit systems, shared royalties, or otherwise compensating reused IP).

• Brand and experience inconsistency

Mitigation: set standards for customer-facing work and non-negotiable language, and designs, and provide a template and brand library that cells must use. 

• Scale complexity on the infrastructure side

Mitigation: centralize commodity infrastructure (i.e., cloud, payroll, compliance, etc.), but keep local authority to make decisions.

• Coordination costs and energy for cross-cell initiatives

Mitigation: use “ambassador” roles, federated councils, and time-bound cross-cell projects with an explicit set of criteria for success.

• Short-term financialism and outcomes at the cell level

Mitigation: govern via balanced scorecards with long-term investment and sustainability metrics instead of focusing on short-term gains. 

Wintzen knew that in order for decentralization to be effective, he would have to invest in “plumbing,” that is, the shared systems, coaching, and cultural scaffolding to make autonomy productive rather than chaotic.(reinventingorganizationswiki.com)