Case Studies

What has already worked elsewhere?

All Etymologies Inventions Case Studies Thinkers
Case Study
42 School
A French billionaire spent €70 million to build a coding school with no teachers and no tuition.
France
Case Study
Aboriginal Australian Songlines
Sung verses encode a continental navigation system that predates written maps by tens of thousands of years.
Australia
Case Study
Agile methodology
Seventeen developers frustrated with their industry's documentation-driven processes met at a ski resort and wrote a manifesto.
United States
Case Study
Amazon fulfillment centers
Sensors track each worker's productivity in real time.
United States
Case Study
B Corporations
They sold their company and watched every social commitment vanish within months.
United States
Case Study
Basecamp / 37signals
A company of a few dozen people avoided venture capital, overtime, and most meetings.
United States
Case Study
Brazilian landless workers movement (MST)
The MST has settled roughly 370,000 families on land they occupied and claimed.
Brazil
Case Study
Bretton Woods system
Forty-four nations sent delegates to a hotel in New Hampshire to redesign the global economy.
United States
Case Study
Buurtzorg
Four nurses quit their jobs and built a 15,000-person company with zero managers.
Netherlands
Case Study
Chinese Imperial Examination
For 1,300 years, any man in China could theoretically become a government official by passing a written test.
China
Case Study
Chinese Special Economic Zones
Shenzhen grew from 330,000 residents in 1980 to nearly 18 million within four decades.
China
Case Study
Coworking spaces
More than 35,000 spaces in over 100 countries operate on the same premise that the office is optional.
Global
Case Study
Denmark's flexicurity
Employers can dismiss workers with relative ease, and workers rarely fear unemployment.
Denmark
Case Study
Design thinking
IBM trained more than 100,000 employees in a methodology whose first step is to listen.
United States
Case Study
Dynamic Adaptation
A psychoanalyst in 1941 explained why people come to want what the system needs them to want.
Germany
Case Study
East India Company
A trading company became a government, with its own army and tax system.
England
Case Study
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
Employee-owners had 92 percent higher median household net worth than non-owners in the same age group.
United States
Case Study
Enclosure movement
Enclosure turned England's cottagers from laborers with land into laborers without land.
England
Case Study
Estonia's E-Residency
A country of 1.3 million people offered digital citizenship to anyone on earth.
Estonia
Case Study
Finland's education model
Finnish children start school at seven, take no standardized tests, and consistently outperform most of the world.
Finland
Case Study
Florentine bottega
Leonardo da Vinci spent ten years learning in a workshop before anyone called him a master.
Italy
Case Study
Four-day work week
Iceland reduced hours for 2,500 workers, and within four years, 86% of the country had followed.
Global
Case Study
Foxconn
In 2010, the company draped its dormitory buildings in safety nets to prevent suicides.
China
Case Study
Gap year
A gap in what? The phrase only makes sense if life runs on a fixed schedule.
United Kingdom
Case Study
Germany's Codetermination
German law puts workers on the same board as shareholders.
Germany
Case Study
Germany's dual vocational training
Seventy percent of Swiss ninth graders choose apprenticeship over traditional school.
Germany
Case Study
GitLab All-Remote Model
GitLab grew to over 2,000 employees in 65 countries without a single office.
Global
Case Study
Grameen Bank
Muhammad Yunus lent $27 to 42 villagers and built a bank that served nine million.
Bangladesh
Case Study
Gulf state labor migration
In Qatar and the UAE, around 90 percent of the population are foreign nationals.
Gulf States
Case Study
Hawthorne experiments
Productivity rose whether the researchers brightened the lights or dimmed them.
United States
Case Study
Homeschooling Movement
A left-wing education critic and a conservative pastor arrived at the same conclusion from opposite ends.
United States
Case Study
Indian IT industry
India exported $150 billion in IT services by 2020, from a city that had one international phone line in 1981.
India
Case Study
Japan’s Lifetime Employment
One company from graduation to retirement, with seniority determining everything. It peaked in the 1980s.
Japan
Case Study
Japanese shu-ha-ri
Three stages of mastery: follow the form, break the form, leave the form behind.
Japan
Case Study
John Lewis Partnership
Every employee is a partner, and every partner shares in the profit. It has operated this way since 1929.
United Kingdom
Case Study
Kerala's literacy and education model
A state with a per capita income below the national average achieved a literacy rate above 90 percent.
India
Case Study
Kibbutz Model
Children slept in communal houses while their parents worked land that nobody owned.
Israel
Case Study
Maker movement
Make magazine launched in 2005 and its first Maker Faire drew 22,000 people.
United States
Case Study
Māori ako
In the Māori tradition, the same word means both to teach and to learn.
New Zealand
Case Study
Maquiladoras
Young women filled 78 percent of the earliest maquiladora jobs along the border.
Mexico
Case Study
Marshall Plan
The U.S. transferred $13.3 billion to rebuild sixteen Western European economies in four years.
United States
Case Study
Medieval guild system
A fourteen-year-old entered as an apprentice and might not become a master until forty.
Europe
Case Study
Minerva University
Students rotate through seven countries in four years. There is no campus.
United States
Case Study
Mondragón cooperatives
80,000 workers own the tenth-largest company in Spain.
Spain
Case Study
Nordic Model
Five countries rank among the happiest in the world while paying the highest taxes.
Scandinavia
Case Study
Open source movement
Millions of contributors build software together without a single employer organizing their effort.
Global
Case Study
Patagonia Ownership Transfer
In 2022, a billionaire gave away his $3 billion company to fight climate change.
United States
Case Study
Platform cooperativism
The workers who drive, clean, and deliver own the platforms they work through.
Global
Case Study
Portfolio careers
Charles Handy predicted in 1989 that a single employer would stop being the default.
Global
Case Study
Project-based learning
William Kilpatrick argued in 1918 that children learn by doing, not by listening.
Global
Case Study
Pseudo Self
Erich Fromm argued in 1941 that most people mistake a borrowed self for their own.
Global
Case Study
Remote / distributed work
GitLab operated across sixty-five countries with no office before remote work was fashionable.
Global
Case Study
Rwanda's Economic Transformation
GDP tripled in two decades in a country rebuilt from genocide.
Rwanda
Case Study
Sabbatical
Harvard granted the first modern academic sabbatical in 1880, borrowing the idea from Genesis.
Global
Case Study
Scottish Enlightenment
Eighteenth-century Edinburgh produced more intellectual giants per capita than any city in Europe.
Scotland
Case Study
Singapore’s SkillsFuture
Singapore gives every citizen over twenty-five $500 to learn anything they choose.
Singapore
Case Study
South African labor under apartheid
Over 17 million Africans were arrested or prosecuted under pass laws between 1916 and 1984.
South Africa
Case Study
South Korea’s 52-Hour Work Week
South Korea legislated a maximum work week after ranking among the OECD’s most overworked nations for decades.
South Korea
Case Study
Soviet Stakhanovism
He reportedly mined 102 tons of coal in a single shift, fourteen times his quota.
Soviet Union
Case Study
Structural Adjustment Programs
From 1980 to 2004, structural adjustment was imposed on 129 countries.
Global
Case Study
Susu / Chama
One in three Kenyans belongs to a savings group that predates the banking system.
West Africa and East Africa
Case Study
Swiss apprenticeship system
Two-thirds of Swiss teenagers choose apprenticeship over the university track.
Switzerland
Case Study
Taylorism in the Soviet Union
Lenin called Taylorism "refined brutality" in 1914, then ordered its adoption by 1918.
Soviet Union
Case Study
Trabajo Informal
In many Latin American economies, the majority of workers have no contract, no benefits, and no legal recognition.
Latin America
Case Study
Triangle Shirtwaist fire
The stairwell doors were locked, and the fire ladders reached only the sixth floor.
United States
Case Study
Universal basic income experiments
Finland gave 2,000 unemployed people 560 euros a month with no conditions attached.
Finland
Case Study
West African griot tradition
Griots memorize genealogies spanning seven centuries without writing a word down.
West Africa
Case Study
Worker cooperatives
80,000 worker-owners run the tenth-largest company in Spain.
Basque Country, Spain
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