AES let a coal handler and a maintenance tech negotiate its Treasury-bill rates.

AES, co-founded by Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke in 1982, grew from a two-person startup into a global power producer running plants in more than 30 countries and employing roughly 40,000 people, while its Arlington, Virginia headquarters stayed at around 100 staff. The founders built the company on a principle that decisions should sit with the people closest to the work, not with a specialist layer at headquarters reviewing proposals from plants its staff had never set foot in.

AES organized itself as what it called a "honeycomb": small, largely self-managed teams of roughly 10 to 20 people running each function of a plant, separated from the CEO by only a few layers of hierarchy. The company deliberately built no legal department, no human resources department, and — most unusually for an energy company — no central corporate finance department to handle treasury operations or capital raising.