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The Evolving Role of the Business Leader: From Commander to Value Guide.

August 3, 2025/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

In the past, the goal of the corporation was profit maximization. It became the singleminded focus of management and resulted in a specific kind of business leadership. Leaders were those with the superior command of strategy tools and tight stewardship of fiscal resources, which they allocated with precision through the mechanisms of planning and budget control. The organization structure that best fit this planning and control regime was the hierarchy of authority, implemented through rank and title. Leaders climbed to the top.

Today, the goal is value creation for customers and colleagues. Value creation is the emergent result of collaboration and interaction, bubbling up from all the talent and tools assembled within the firm, and those connected through external partnerships. Orchestration of a complex system replaces the command of the hierarchy.

In this mode, leaders are no longer directing, and can no longer act merely as strategic architects or fiscal stewards. They are called upon to facilitate and enable value creation throughout the enterprise network. They are no longer commanders of compliance but champions of contribution. Their role is Value Guide.

Philosophical Foundations: Austrian Economics and Decentralized Action

The philosophical shift from profit maximization to value creation is significant and welcome. It draws on the understanding of value from the 250-year tradition of the Austrian school of economics, particularly the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this worldview, value is not created by executives at the top but by customers – they are the ones who assign value to producers’ goods and services. Value is revealed via the interaction in the marketplace. Consequently, a primary value creation role is played by individual team members who are closest to the customer, the problem, and the possibility. Austrian economics classifies these roles as entrepreneurial – actively engaged in the pursuit of new value. Leadership becomes less about control and more about cultivating the conditions for value to emerge freely and authentically. As Hayek argued, knowledge is dispersed, and only when decisions are made locally can systems truly thrive (Hayek, 1945).

Contemporary Voices: Entrepreneurial Teams and Organizational Freedom

What is the function of leadership when value creation decisions and actions move to the edge of the organization where it interfaces with customers? What form would leadership take if every individual in the organization were trusted to think, decide, and act based on their interpretation of the purpose of value creation, rather than waiting for permission from authority?

The authors have explored new forms through the lens of Kinetic Flow State Organizations, where barriers to individual entrepreneurial behavior are removed, so that harmony emerges from the dynamic adaptation that’s enabled by individual autonomy to act (Béliczky, Hastings 2025).

KFSO’s are manifestations of a broad movement towards entrepreneurial organization with individual freedom given cohesion via the enabling guidance of purpose, value management, customer obsession, and the ambidextrous combination of impeccable execution within a purposeful system of exploratory experimentation.

Implications for Today’s Leaders

Value creation is a function of dynamic harmony. It can’t be fixed in best practices, or framed in established norms and reusable processes and methods. The exploration requires the role of guidance – knowing the way without being fixated on a lockstep march to a predefined destination, aware of the obstacles and pitfalls and equipped to navigate them, and sufficiently agile and capable to deal with unexpected new challenges.

What does this mean for business leaders today? It means stepping back from the illusion of control and leaning into the responsibility of freedom. It means creating ecosystems where trust is the currency and experimentation is the norm. It means recognizing that leadership is not a position but a presence—felt when leaders ask more than they tell and listen more than they speak.

Reframing The Leadership Role

A Value Guide is not the hero at the top. They are the designer at the center—framing conditions for others to lead, decide, and create. Their influence doesn’t come from authority—it comes from presence, clarity, and trust. They don’t seek control. They cultivate flow.

This shift is more than philosophical—it’s operational. It requires a fundamental rewiring of how leaders behave, how organizations function, and how value is defined and created.

Becoming a Value Guide requires four fundamental leadership shifts:

1. Recalibrate the Lens
Value Guides start by shifting how they perceive their role. They stop leading with certainty and start leading with curiosity. Instead of offering answers, they ask better questions. Instead of positioning themselves as the focal point, they become clarity-builders who help others connect purpose with progress. This lens invites discovery over direction and cultivates an environment where people feel safe to explore, challenge, and contribute.

Prompt to self: “Am I creating clarity—or just issuing direction?”

2. Design for Flow
Friction is a leadership responsibility. Value Guides examine every process, policy, and pattern with one core aim: to free up energy. They rethink how time is used—starting with their calendar—and remove the legacy systems, rituals, and inefficiencies that slow people down. Flow isn’t just a state of mind—it’s an operating condition. And it can be designed intentionally.

Prompt to self: “What’s slowing us down that doesn’t need to be here?”

3. Distribute Autonomy
Agility doesn’t live at the top. It lives at the edge—where the real work, real context, and real insight reside. Value Guides trust the people closest to customers and problems with the autonomy to act with their own sound judgment. This requires more than freedom—it requires structural shifts in decision rights, open communication, and systems that reward initiative over compliance. Distributed autonomy is not chaos—it’s alignment without micromanagement.

Prompt to self: “Where have I held onto a decision that someone else is better equipped to make?”

4. Embody the Mindset
Lead with emotional clarity and grounded confidence. Don’t perform leadership—be real. People can sense when trust is authentic and when it’s just theater. Value Guides model humility, curiosity, and conviction in others’ potential. They don’t rely on charisma or authority—they lead through presence, coherence, and the courage to believe in people even before results are guaranteed.

Prompt to self: “What would I do right now if I truly believed in my team’s capacity to lead, decide, and create value?”

This isn’t a leadership upgrade. It’s a transformation. A Value Guide doesn’t scale themselves—they scale the system. They create clarity instead of control. They inspire ownership instead of compliance. And they define success not just by performance, but by a meaningful purpose, and outcomes that move people and missions forward.

The leaders who thrive in this era will be those who make this shift—not perfectly, but persistently. One decision, one conversation, and one act of trust at a time.

Value Creation as Competitive Advantage

When companies adopt this model of leadership, they don’t just perform better—they matter more. They become magnets for mission-driven talent and generate value that extends beyond shareholders to include customers, communities, and ecosystems. This is not a sacrifice of profitability but a redefinition of it. In a world where meaning drives performance, the most valuable companies are those that create meaning at scale.

Case Examples and Business Model Innovation

You can see this shift playing out in organizations that once would have seemed unlikely candidates. Morning Star’s self-management model – guided by the simple principles of the founder without formal structure or management – frees team members to initiate commitments and drive accountability without formal bosses. Buurtzorg, a Dutch home healthcare organization, has achieved global recognition for its decentralized, nurse-led model that delivers both quality patient care and team member satisfaction. W. L. Gore & Associates fosters innovation through lattice-based management, where teams self-organize around opportunities. And at Patagonia, team member agency and environmental purpose are deeply embedded in operational decision-making, sustaining both loyalty and profitability.

Historical Precedents of Value-Guided Leadership

History, too, gives us examples of leaders who operated as Value Guides long before the term existed. Think of Mahatma Gandhi, who led without formal authority, yet galvanized collective purpose. Or Eleanor Roosevelt, who redefined the role of the First Lady by championing justice, dignity, and human rights with relentless grace. More recently, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland, has promoted trust-based governance and collective wellbeing as a national strategy, while Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, became a global icon for empathetic, inclusive, and purpose-led leadership.

Cultural and Structural Shifts Required

The shift from commander to Value Guide is not without friction. It demands a willingness to let go of power and a readiness to embrace vulnerability. It requires rethinking incentives, redesigning systems, and redefining what success looks like. But for those willing to lead differently, the payoff is profound: cultures of trust, organizations that adapt rather than stagnate, and teams that thrive not because they’re told to—but because they want to.

Tactical Shifts for Business Leaders Today

To evolve into a Value Guide, business leaders will need to reorient their priorities and practices. Begin by reframing KPIs to reflect outcomes that matter to customers, colleagues and stakeholders—not just shareholders. Create spaces for team members to propose, test, and own initiatives without fear of punishment for failure. Rethink the role of meetings from decision platforms to listening sessions. Shift language from “managing people” to “enabling potential.” Recognize and reward contributions that advance purpose, not just performance. And most critically, embed feedback loops that surface value creation opportunities from every corner of the enterprise.

A Call to Value-Guided Leadership

As it’s often said—and widely attributed to Peter Drucker—“The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things.” That starts with leadership that inspires rather than imposes.

Now is the moment to lead with intention. To champion agency, not authority. To measure success not by how many people follow orders, but by how many are free to create.

This is the new leadership frontier—a place where business is humanized, where value flows from every level, and where legacy is built not through control, but through contribution. If you are a business leader, the question is no longer whether this shift is coming. It’s whether you are ready to make it.

The future belongs to those who free their teams to lead, to question, to co-create. If you embrace the role of Value Guide, you won’t just lead organizations—you’ll spark movements.

Step forward. Be the reason someone says, ‘I get to do work that matters.’ Be the one who shows that purpose and performance are not at odds—they’re inseparable.

Co-Authors: Mark Beliczky and Hunter Hastings

References

Béliczky, M. (2025, April 5). Unblocking the flow: A leadership guide to eliminating organizational friction in the 21st century. LinkedIn.

Béliczky, M. (2025, March 4). How to enable a Kinetic Flow State Organization. LinkedIn.

Hastings, H. (2025, March 4). Episode 57: How to enable a kinetic flow state organization[Podcast episode]. *Value Creators*.

The Value Creators

Episode #57. How to Enable a Kinetic Flow State Organization: A Conversation with Mark Beliczky

How can businesses shift from rigid, hierarchical structures to agile, fast-moving organizations that adapt to change effortlessly? What if businesses could remove bottlenecks, eliminate bureaucracy, and enable knowledge to flow freely—boosting innovation and engagement…

Listen now

4 months ago · 2 likes · Hunter Hastings

Hastings, H. (2025, April 3). The need for a new organizational model in the 21st century. The Value Creators Podcast / Substack. In Organizing for emergence [Series]. Retrieved from

The Value Creators

The Need For A New Organizational Model In The 21st Century.

The 21st-century business environment is defined by rapid technological advancements, globalization, and shifting customer expectations. These are exogenous changes, not brought on by the activities of any individual firm but a change in the environment surrounding firms. Firms are tasked with responding to and adapting to these changes. It is discomfit…

9 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Hunter Hastings and Mark Béliczky

Hastings, H. (2025, March 4). Episode 57: How to enable a kinetic flow state organization: A conversation with Mark Beliczky. The Value Creators Podcast / Substack. Retrieved from

The Value Creators

Episode #57. How to Enable a Kinetic Flow State Organization: A Conversation with Mark Beliczky

Listen now

4 months ago · 2 likes · Hunter Hastings

Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530.

The Dawn Of The Post-Managerial Era.

June 3, 2024/0 Comments/in Articles, migrate /by Hunter Hastings

In Aberrant Capitalism, Steve Denning and I chart the ascent, dominance and now decline of managerialism, the approach to running business corporations through bureaucratic systems of management control. Happily, we see the end of the managerial age and the dawn of a new post-managerial era.

Aberrant Capitalism begins with a quote from economist Ludwig von Mises:

Those who confuse entrepreneurship and management close their eyes to the economic problem. The capitalist system is not a managerial system; it is an entrepreneurial system.

Ludwig von Mises (Human Action 1949)

Business has been confused about this problem for over 100 years. In the golden age of entrepreneurial capitalism, which we can locate in the second half of the nineteenth century, at least in the US, the great corporations were led by entrepreneurs, not managers. The unicorns of their time, these fast-growing corporations harnessed new technologies on behalf of customers to elevate the quality of life. The entrepreneurial leaders of the time saw the market-generating potential of steam engines, railroads, electricity distribution grids, oil refining, long-distance communications, mass manufacturing, packaged food, and advertising. They turned these inventions into commercial innovations and built an audience of happy customers enjoying new experiences ranging from affordable illumination to trans-continental travel. The range of goods and services available to customers expanded, quality went up, and prices went down.

This was a pre-managerial age. The individual owners and founding partners of the great corporations were visionaries who imagined a great and happy future of high achievement and fulfilling lives for Americans. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, for example, consciously aimed at producing and distributing “the best illuminator in the world at the lowest price” because “we are refining oil for the poor man, and he must have it cheap and good^[1]”. He viewed the kerosene he manufactured as a civilizer, “promoting among the poorest classes …a host of evening occupations, industrial, educational and recreative …(carrying) more cheap comfort into more poor homes than almost any discovery of modern times” (The Myth of the Robber Barons, Burt Folsom)

This is the entrepreneurial mindset: placing the highest priority on customer needs and devoting the entire supply chain to their purpose. Standard Oil required staffing and organization, of course. Rockefeller paid higher than market wages and gave long vacations so that he could attract the right people and then delegate responsibility to them. He knew that good work and good ideas were priceless.

In the twentieth century, the entrepreneurs exited their businesses due to old age or death or via a sale. Professional managers took over, ushering in the managerial age. They changed the function of management from the mass production and mass distribution that made civilizing innovations and the experience of well-being available to all. They focused instead on control, which is a benefit for managers, not for customers. The tools of control included:

Central planning: managers believed that business plans and resource allocation decisions should be made by a planning and budgeting committee or group following the direction of the top officers of the company. There were some feedback loops, but they were slow and data science was not far advanced and so the feedback was low in information and high in noise. Nevertheless, central planning advanced, even though CEO’s like Reginald Jones of GE admitted that he “could not achieve the necessary in-depth understanding” of his own planning department’s plans. (Aberrant Capitalism, p37)

Hierarchy: The transmission mechanism for the centrally-developed plans was hierarchy. The top officers told the VPs reporting to them, who communicated to their directors and managers, and front-line employees. Dissent (which we might also call creativity or what John D. Rockefeller called good ideas) was discouraged. Hierarchy was the reason for slow, noisy feedback.

Bureaucracy: To administer both the implementation of plans and the management of the hierarchical organization, management introduced bureaucracy, which had, hitherto, been a method of government rather than business. The purpose of bureaucracy was not customer service or satisfaction, or even an observable contribution to corporate profits, but compliance with rules and regulations. There are no rewards in bureaucracy for initiative or innovation. The goal is not to adapt to changes in the marketplace, but to try to constrain the marketplace to follow the bureaucracy’s rules.

Financialization: Over the course of the twentieth century, managers became more reliant upon the financial sector for debt and credit, and delegated some of their control powers as part of the trade. The short-termism of quarterly earnings targets, the allocation of funds to share buybacks and dividends rather than to R&D investments, and the adoption of the mantra of shareholder maximization – which stands in sharp contrast to the customer-first ethic of entrepreneurship – are all consequences of ceding primacy to the financial sector.

Management Slack: Nobel prize-winning economist Oliver Williamson used this term to describe the discretion acquired by management organizations to use resources for their own benefit rather than for the customer or for company profits. The range of slack is wide, from oversized offices and managerial perks, to lavish salaries and pension, to the use of corporate jets. Williamson suggested that managers would deliberately add costs to hire unnecessary staff because the increased size of a department would result in more prestige and power for the department head. Management slack became a form of insider self-dealing: more for the managers and less for customers, investors and employees.

The late twentieth century demise of big, bureaucratic corporations like GE and IBM can be attributed to internal developments along these lines: the accumulation of greater weight of bureaucratic, hierarchical management eventually over-burdens the creative engineers, operators and salespeople. They can no longer function as well as they need to for the benefit of customers.

What will change in the 21st century

The end of the managerial era is a consequence of the new business models that are made possible by digital enablement. Customers are now directly connected to the firm – think of amazon or Airbnb as examples – in such a way that their wants, desires and preferences are instantly and effectively implemented. The customer is the boss, not in the sense of sitting atop an authority hierarchy, but in the sense of controlling the fate and operations of the firm. Economists have always recognized this role for customers in theory: here’s a passage from economist Ludwig von Mises in 1949:

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of the market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction.

This is a passage of incredible vision. It has taken 75 years for business practice to catch up to Mises’ theory of the market system. The mechanisms for the catch-up are digital enablement of the direct connection to the customer, A.I. processing of the resulting data flow, and the interconnection of people and functions in the firm who can respond to the insights from the data flow with hyper-personalized service and precise targeted innovation.

In this digitally enabled world, there are three new dimensions of the economist’s “boss customer”:

The customer can command and receive a personalized experience.

The old management method was to try to predict what customers might want in the future, by asking them questions about their dissatisfaction with today. But customers are not in a position to imagine and design the future; they don’t have the expertise or the information.

The new method is to deduce the customer’s preferred personalized experience from their present-day behavior: the searches they conduct, the purchases they make, the websites they visit, their offline behavior as they work, shop and travel. All these activities generate behavioral data, and hyper-automation can instantly energize a supply chain to deliver on the needs highlighted by the resultant data patterns. It is digitized customer behavior data that provides the energy for the system, not their expressed attitudes or opinions.

The customer can add many layers of expectation to their desired experience.

Through their behavior, customers can express not only what they want but many other dimensions of how they want it: where and when and how fast, in what kind of packaging, using what kind of delivery method, accompanied with what level of messaging, with what kind of service wrapper (e.g. insurance), with what kind of return policy and what level of ease-of-return process. These and many more expectations are to be met, or the customer might look to alternatives on all those dimensions. The customer is the selection engine for best service and best experience, and operates with the confidence that alternatives are available.

The customer is the creator of value in the new value system.

The hyper-personalized experience plus the continuous layering and raising of expectations constitute value for the customer. It’s an ever-changing value benchmark because the customer is able to change it. They feel that they can always raise the bar.

So now, when we talk about value creation, we must reverse the mental flow model that that term usually suggests. Value creation, traditionally, has been defined as firms creating value for customers. Today and tomorrow, customers will create value in their personalized experiences, based on their own requirements and expectations.

The role of the digitally- enabled firm is facilitation, making the value experience easier, more convenient and closer to expectations. The concept of ’the digital friend”, a digitally enabled brand that knows the customer well and demonstrates empathy via a hyper-personalized experience, will be the model for value facilitation.

Central facilitation replaces central control.

Traditional management is a control concept. In this concept, resource allocation is controlled through the planning process, and then hierarchical organization structures and the command authority of title and position are deployed to ensure that subordinate employees follow orders to deploy the resources through implementation. Value creation resides in the plan, and the role of implementers is simply to ensure that value is not eroded through imperfect action.

This control-through-command won’t survive. The customer now commands. The structure of the firm must be flat and networked so that the customer’s commands can flow to where they can influence internal functions. Those functional centers respond to the customer, not to an authority structure.

The post-managerial era has arrived, only 75 years after economists predicted it.

^[1]