$20B manufacturer has no bosses, just an internal currency called Will
ft.com
ft.com
For over a decade, a $20bn manufacturer has been conducting a radical experiment. No one has a boss or takes orders. Their decisions are guided by one thing, an internal currency system called Will
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It’s the start of another day for an ordinary Tokyo salaryman. On a rain-drenched Monday morning, the engineer stows his plastic umbrella in the entryway of one of the many vast office buildings in the suburban metropolis that stretches between here and Yokohama. The umbrella locks into place and the engineer’s phone beeps.
He straps a mask over his face, as everyone who enters the building must, and heads straight to the smoking room on the third floor, thinking about how much his habit is costing him before heading into the fug. He opens his smartphone and scrolls through the company app to decide what he is going to do at work today. There are plenty of options on the menu:
Translate 52-page legal document: 5mn Will
Test semiconductor grinding tool: 2mn Will
Join hiring interviews for graduates: 200,000 Will
Process invoices: 80,000 Will
Deliver technical training seminar at factory: 1.5mn Will
The engineer clicks “bid” on “Translate 52-page legal document”. The amount of Will on offer for the task is too big to turn down. Once the cigarette has burnt out, he heads up to the general administration department. On entering, he glances down. A knee-high soft-toy horse has been plonked inside the door. It serves as a reminder that his team is the worst performing and the biggest drain on the business of the precision tools maker. A cartoon tear drops out of one of its eyes.
“Ohayo gozaimasu,” the engineer says, greeting his team manager, who stopped instructing anyone to do any work 14 years ago. She asks him if he can organise the end of year work party, offering him 15,000 Will for the task. The engineer turns down the measly offer and books a meeting room for a briefing with lawyers about his translation. He checks his app again and lets out a sigh. His Will balance has dropped into negative territory, down from 50,000 when he last looked at it, during rush hour on the train. Hanging up his umbrella, using the smoking room and booking a meeting have all cost him Will this morning.
[Preview ends]
It sounds like a huge group of coordinated freelancers.
Ludwig von Mises wrote extensively about how the organizational structure fails in his writings dating back to the 1930s-1950s.
There's a slightly indirect reference to it in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, with regards to the 20th Century Motor Corporation's fall.
The associated writings by Mises are largely aggregated in book form today under the title "Socialism", published by the Liberty Fund, for those that care to read first-hand.
While these system structures fail, they can do so quite slowly, especially if any kind of money-printing/non-reserve debt issuance is occuring (leveraging the currency through inflation as a whole to prolong the isolated system parasitically). When they do fail, the failures include properties of mathematical chaos, preventing differentiation or isolation of issues in time to act and resolve.
There are also issues with objective valuation that touch on other fundamental failure domains also described in said book.