Bo Burlingham of Inc. Magazine has written a tremendous article on entrepreneur Nick Sarillo, and it reminds me of some of the ideas undergirding the post-bureaucratic age.

Sarillo has built his company’s culture by using a form of management best characterized as “trust and track.” It involves educating employees about what it takes for the company to be successful, then trusting them to act accordingly. The alternative is command and control, wherein success is the boss’s responsibility and employees do what the boss says. Think of the Navy SEALs versus the National Guard. Both approaches can work, but they produce very different cultures. If done right, moreover, trust and track can allow a company to be nimble, flexible, and productive enough to perform at the highest level through good economies and bad.

And there’s a story behind Sarillo’s thinking.

Sarillo is the first to admit that he is an unlikely spokesman for the benefits of a strong company culture. When he launched Nick’s, he had never heard of company culture. A former construction worker, he got into the business, he says, because he had three young children and there was no restaurant in the area at which families could get together, kids could play, and parents could relax and have fun. He didn’t have a management philosophy — at least not one he could articulate. He did believe, however, that he had a choice about how the business would be run. “Everyone I knew who’d had a business told me, ‘No one cares like an owner. No one works as hard as an owner,’ ” Sarillo says. “They said, ‘Watch out. People are going to steal.’ I set out to prove them wrong. I wanted a place where everyone worked hard and cared a lot; where people enjoyed coming to work, felt good afterward, and weren’t motivated to steal. If I couldn’t have that kind of business, I didn’t want to have a business.”

Read this article. It’s people like Nick Sarillo who change the world, not Scott Browns or Harry Reids.

My favorite part of this story is below — but read the whole thing and buy the magazine if you get a chance.

The system is an important mechanism for creating a trust-and-track culture and for breaking the habits of command and control. “Managers trained in command and control think it’s their responsibility to tell people what to do,” Sarillo says. “They like having that power. It gives them their sense of self-worth. But when you manage that way, people see it, and they start waiting for you to tell them what to do. You wind up with too much on your plate, and things fall through the cracks. It’s not efficient or effective. We want all the team members to feel responsible for the company’s success.” Some people would no doubt find such a regime unbearable, but Nick’s employees appear to thrive under it, especially the high school students. “Parents tell me, ‘I don’t know what you did to my kid, but whatever it is, keep doing it,’ ” says Sarillo.