This model seems limited to companies that are staffed with highly motivated, highly skilled people. I don't think you'd want, say, a branch of McDonalds or a nuclear power station to be run on this model.
Maybe a nuclear power station, as we currently design them, requires very rigid procedures. But that probably also reduces internal information flow, punishes people for noticing problems, and so on. So perhaps that's really an argument against nuclear power as we know it.
McDonald's isn't designed the way it is because people are stupid. It's designed to maximize returns on capital investment. Workers are made to be interchangeable, and the product is uniform and predictable. For 300,000 years, humans self-organized to take down caribou or whatever to make our own dinner. Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made?
Is it really likely that we need a system like McDonald's to get a burger made?
I make a pretty fine burger, myself. And my own bread, for the buns.
But if you want to deliver a consistent product across thousands of stores for a reasonable price, you need standards, managers, guys behind the counter performing to task and standard. So you can walk into a restaurant in Bangor or in Spokane and know what you're getting.
Yet .... I can't deliver a home-cooked burger without the same structure McDonald's uses.
I get my meat from a butcher who gets it from some other guy and so on on back to Bossie in the pasture. That's one thing out of hundreds of bits that make up daily life.
We all of us depend on millions of others doing things to task and standard just to exist - it's baked into the bones of our society.
I don't think you can just get rid of it without building a system to take it's place.
Maybe this tells us that the staff of a McDonald's restaurant could conceivably be replaced by software, whereas Valve will always require human beings to do its work?
But I don't see it, or not real soon. Automation even in a controlled environment is tricky, and random customers are _random_. You have people there to handle exceptions, which are many.
100% yes you do need a system like that to get a specific kind of hamburger made for you in a short amount of time as you drive through their store during very busy hours while fulfilling various quality standards.
It's not about getting any burger made, it's about getting a McDonald's burger made.
AES is an energy company that was run on similar principles for a while.
My knowledge of it is purely based on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joy-At-Work-Revolutionary-Approach/dp/... book</a>, which was written by a co-founder who was later deposed. (The book goes into that story but tldr is company prospers, economic crisis hits, company suffers along with all other energy companies, CEO is blamed, fired and replaced with more conventional executive.)
But to give you a sense of core techniques, IIRC pretty much all staff - incl power plant maintenance staff - had major expenditure authority but before they could make any major decision they had to consult with at least two other employees. As long as they could demonstrate that they had done that, it was assumed that they had made a reasonable decision.
