I remember this story but I can't remember the specifics and my queries to google have maximum SEO keywords. So if someone remembers and can fill in my blanks please and thank you.

There was this CEO who was brought onto a failing US retail company. His big idea to save the company was to foster internal competition. His logic was if the free market was the most efficient way to structure a society then doing that internally in a company would make it more efficient. The company cratered for entirely predictable reasons.

Who was the CEO who was the company? Am I completely making this up?

  • JuneFall [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I did some BA courses and you remember correctly, it wasn't just one company though, but something that was tried multiple times at multiple time periods, often cause of the dogma of the Chicago school and alike. A serious wave of that was in the late 90s after the Soviet Unions fall. It lead to the things you mentioned.

    My favorite of something related, but that isn't quite the same is actually a hardware manufacturer that ended in fraud. They brought in an outside expert who took over as CEO and did increase internal competition and bet on fire, fire, fire anyone who doesn't excel and in any case the lower XX%. So that over time new people would join and the "good ones" would remain in the company or replaced by "better ones".

    Miniscribe

    https://hackaday.com/2022/04/14/weve-heard-of-bricking-a-hard-drive-but/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
      ·
      2 years ago

      So many companies do that shit where they make every employee compete for their own job based on some nonsense metrics. It's a genuinely awful idea and it fucks things up every single time, because even if your entire team is the best and brightest on the planet, one of you will perform worse than the others and get fired for it.