This is a bit of a weird take IMO -- CEOs already need to persuade most employees (human capital) and most investors (financial capital) that their manifesto is

This is a bit of a weird take IMO -- CEOs already need to persuade most employees (human capital) and most investors (financial capital) that their manifesto is the best option, or the employees will quit and the investors will take their money elsewhere. With some exceptions, no one is really forced to invest / remain employed as they might be in an actual dictatorship. Observe the benevolent-dictator-for-life phenomenon in open source software -- I fully support democracy but it's not obvious to me that its benefits scale down (or perhaps transfer sideways) to corporations; if they did, wouldn't we see a lot more organizations structure this way? Most of government is already not organized around democratic norms, with one extreme being the military. I'm curious -- what convinces you of the need for this shift?