I would not criticize the authors of the article on the basis that they are most likely to fail. They want to make "a more innovative company" not a successful

I would not criticize the authors of the article on the basis that they are most likely to fail. They want to make "a more innovative company" not a successful or even profitable company. Making people do things they don't know how to do is the making innovation by definition (i.e. discovering something new, even on the personal level). For example if you give chef's job to a programmer and programmer's job to a chef both will have to innovate to make the most trivial stuff. If your investors and or customers are happy with the innovation by itself and don't mind programmer's food and chef's code - knock yourself out I say. Even better idea - fire everyone who is working now because they might have some clue what is that you are doing. Get some fresh people off the street without telling them anything, take innovation to the max (note to HR: hiring this way you might end up wit hiring somebody who actually knows how to do the job so you need to do background checks to ensure that the new hire has no previous knowledge of his or her future responsibilities).