This is pretty brilliant. I hadn't accounted for this, despite doing a lot of thinking in this area, but this sort of issue, where the business focuses upon forming itself around the mentality of the employee rather than the other way around, makes total sense. As we move away from repetitive physical labor to mental work (I prefer that to the term 'knowledge work' because very often the work has very little to do with actual knowledge which can be explicitly codified but instead relies upon workers mental faculties), it's obvious that we will need to change a lot of the structures and practices of business. Many of the things that businesses have focused on are derived from things that were very important in factory work. The ability to reduce your work to a checklist of verifiable, quantifiable, and (very importantly) transferrable tasks, the ability to 'sell' (not always actual sales, but extroversion, self-promotion, etc), and things like that are all very possible and beneficial when a business consists of a factory floor, a front office, a sales force, and a back room with accountants and the like. When the factory floor disappears and instead the business is tackling intellectual challenges that require different strategies for every one, problems that are poorly defined, etc... the difference is so substantial that any adequate changes will have to be similarly substantial.
It's a big change. It impacts far more than the company office. It affects what society views as valuable. It changes what society sees as success. It basically shoots off in an orthogonal direction from everything society has been structured around for the entire 20th century. I am reminded of things like the recent book 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking' and the documentary 'The Century of the Self.' It really is a sea change and social changes of that magnitude are messy, slow, and usually come with a good amount of strife. Substantial changes like these being tried by this company are stressful and induce anxiety most especially in anyone who has invested in or succeeded in the older model, so the psychological hurdles are high. But, substantial changes are necessary and since this is a novel situation, our best chance of finding the successful solutions are trying and evaluating substantial changes.
It's a big change. It impacts far more than the company office. It affects what society views as valuable. It changes what society sees as success. It basically shoots off in an orthogonal direction from everything society has been structured around for the entire 20th century. I am reminded of things like the recent book 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking' and the documentary 'The Century of the Self.' It really is a sea change and social changes of that magnitude are messy, slow, and usually come with a good amount of strife. Substantial changes like these being tried by this company are stressful and induce anxiety most especially in anyone who has invested in or succeeded in the older model, so the psychological hurdles are high. But, substantial changes are necessary and since this is a novel situation, our best chance of finding the successful solutions are trying and evaluating substantial changes.