The Frontline CEO: Turn Employees into Decision Makers Who Innovate Solutions, Win Customers, and Boost Profits

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LEAD FROM THE FRONT LINES

Since the first industrial revolution, large corporations have operated in a top-down leadership model, in which decision-making resides with the senior leaders and there’s limited engagement and information exchange with the frontline employees who do the work. While that model led to many successes through the end of the twentieth century, it is too slow and bureaucratic to keep pace with change in the twenty-first century. Top-down companies fail to innovate fast enough and struggle to compete. Most go extinct or, at best, lose market share. In fact, of all the companies that were part of the Fortune 500 in 1955, by 2020 only 51, or just over 10 percent, remained.* This statistic hints at an important truth: top-down ...