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Ironically, Valve also operates "by the means of some non-price [...] mechanism". I wonder how an even more radically free-market organization would look like
by tomp 12y ago
Ironically, Valve also operates "by the means of some non-price [...] mechanism".
I wonder how an even more radically free-market organization would look like - where people are literally trading services for money within a company. I think that several industries already operate in a similar manner, where you have "rain-makers" who bring in the money, and "support staff" (everybody else). For example, traders/portfolio managers in hedge funds, and partners (who bring in new clients) in law and private equity firms. But there still is a lot of hierarchy and no transparent market within the company.
- matt4077 12y agoThat's actually very common. Large organisations need a way to track how departments consume various shared resources, so they start some sort of internal billing/cost assignment system. It also allows support departments to measure their efficiency. Sometimes, the "support department" starts selling to external clients as well. Lufthansa Sky Chefs, for example, now delivers food to many airlines. I believe their maintenance operation works similarly. The opposite also happens – where some department chooses an external supplier over the internal one, because the latter is too expensive (low-quality/inflexible/whatever).
- rst 12y agoA doctrinaire Ayn-Rand-ian got control of Sears a few years ago and tried it: http://www.alternet.org/economy/ayn-rand-sears-and-eddie-lampert http://www.alternet.org/economy/ayn-rand-sears-and-eddie-lam... Didn't work out too well. Some units needed to work together for the organization as a whole to function -- but being forced to compete against each other for corporate resources gave them incentives to sabotage each other instead, and the overall bottom line suffered greatly.