As Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, wrote in Harvard Business Review last November, frontline workers are probably a company’s most valuable, yet undervalued, asset.

Now a professor at Harvard Business School, George wrote: “In my experience, frontline workers are making the greatest difference in terms of customer satisfaction, innovation, product quality, and service excellence. Yet they’re commonly treated as a cost to be managed rather than an asset to empower and support.” His suggestion: “flip the org chart” and “put frontline workers on top” where they belong, “with corporate staffers, executives, and CEOs beneath them to reflect their proper roles of coaching and supporting the front line rather than controlling its members.”

I’d like to kick off the new year by offering a more radical take on this theme.