Autonomy vs. Fairness brought up a lot of issues for people in the discussion group. Numerous doubts were raised and the ideas seemed to push hot buttons, which is not surprising -- what I suggested evokes a foundational issue in our makeup: How do we value ourselves? That subject is probably going to require several more posts and discussions, but here I'll talk about two essential issues: forming optimal teams (teams where everyone loves to work with each other) and innovation.
One of the problems with market-based analyses is that I don't think (although I'm not an expert) that they spend much time looking at the cost of change within a market. It's easy to go down the street to another store; the cost is almost nil. Changing banks is more expensive. Changing jobs is really expensive, ditto for a company firing someone. So saying "the market takes care of it" ignores the "cost of change" part of the equation. That means a toxic individual is not easy to remove; there is a lot of resistance to the cost of change in firing someone and hiring someone new.
I wonder if there's a system that can make that change a lot less expensive. Certainly making sure that a person fits the corporate culture first and foremost is important (as Zappos does). But once they're inside, if they can at least be moved around easily, or be chosen by the teams rather than having someone put them on a team by fiat. Zappos mixes the teams around on a regular basis. In W.L. Gore, the teams choose the people after some kind of observation process that I don't remember. I think Whole Foods has some kind of internal team-creation but I don't remember that either.
Innovation. Senior management is all about the innovation these days, but that's only because they're getting their butts kicked by competitors who have innovated beyond them. Companies form around a product idea, which becomes their raison detre -- so most companies have that one moment of innovation, at their inception. The corporate structure is designed to optimize repeatability, which is completely at odds with innovation -- the structure is set up to crush differences and make everything the same. And innovation comes, initially, from exploring small differences. There are outliers which achieve innovation through special efforts (Toyota, for example). But once that effort is relaxed the natural structure will flow back into squelch innovation.
What I'm trying to discover is a system that naturally produces (among other things) both innovation and optimal teams -- teams where a person who doesn't fit will naturally flow away from the team, and a toxic individual will never even get near the company. To achieve this will probably require turning a lot of the things that we "know as facts" upside down or sideways, and it might initially look sort of crazy. Fortunately, I've had enough experiences with things that seem crazy at first but end up working far better than the "sane" system that I believe I can persevere.
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