From a famous investor on where self-management in business begins

I have just found a diamond of self-management implementation from the dusty emails of the owner of one famous holding company:

We give each a simple mission: Just run your business as if: 1) you own 100% of it; 2) it is the only asset in the world that you and your family have or will ever have; and 3) you can not sell or merge it for at least a century. As a corollary, we tell them they should not let any of their decisions be affected even slightly by accounting considerations. We want our managers to think about what counts, not how it will be counted.
— Warren Buffett, Letter To the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, 1998

Oh, Alexei, this is all your imagination, it’s impossible in real business

I disagree, because, firstly, in the companies of my clients (for example, mindbox.ru) everything is either just like that, or at a more advanced level, when self-management is brought down to the lowest ranking employees (for example, they set their own salaries). And secondly, precisely for the same thoughts as Buffett’s, but for much more evidence and research two fine gentlemen Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström have been awarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2016 (for their contributions to contract theory).

A Lecture by Oliver Hart about Incomplete Contracts

In a very simple manner, using the example of two business entities (a coal mine and a power plant), he talks about what a plant should do if it has bought a mine and does not want the mine managers to become discouraged, etc. He also discusses mechanisms to protect the plant’s investment if the mine management starts to make a lot of mistakes and errors in the way they do business.