Valve Corporation is a game developer that has 400 employees, no bosses, and is very successful.
How can you have a structure that flat? The company, a spawn from Microsoft, seems to be doing just fine thank you. The information at the following seven web links (including a podcast and the employee handbook) contain all of the raw material required for a live case:
- From the editor: Valve’s handbook and the trust phenomenon
- Valve’s employee handbook (pdf)
- How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays
- Podcast: Varoufakis on Valve, Spontaneous Order, and the European Crisis
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world?
- Valve website: Our people
- Valve Wikipedia entry
I think you could probably just give these seven web links to students, say “discuss,” and get out of the way.
Contributed by Rich Makadok
However, the many of our best examples of cost advantages pay their employers higher wages. In groceries, Aldi comes to mind – they chased Wal-Mart out of Germany because Wal-Mart couldn’t match their prices. Wayne Cascio writes about 
in-class exercise was for them to write their own BHAG for their career 5 years from now, along with a vivid description of what a day in their professional life would be like (as they might describe it to a former classmate in five years). For some of them, this is the first time they thought in concrete terms this far into their professional futures. I got very positive feedback from the class on this exercise and some of them did a remarkably good job with it. I read two of them aloud to the class (anonymously). I sometimes find it difficult to craft meaningful exercises early in the semester before we have gotten into the “meat” of the concepts of Strategic Management, and was glad to get a good response from my students on this one.”