Seriously, you said almost word-for-word exactly what I was going to. If you have an organization of highly motivated, highly intelligent individuals, then your only real problem is making sure they’re coordinated and wrangling personalities. But *eventually* every hiring process will deteriorate, and some mediocre employees will seep into the mix. How you deal with that (and I think Zappos has a great first step, but Beemer points out another potential alternative, which is somehow trying to make mediocre employees better (though in my experience, that’s extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible for some roles) determines how robust your organization is.

A lot of essays about how to build great organizations start with a statement along the lines of “start with great employees”, which, while true enough, strikes me as kind of like cheating. If everyone in an organization is a smart, resourceful go-getter, all the organization really needs to do is stay out of the way. You mention that this organizational scheme is meant for talented knowledge workers, and that demands the question: does it require them?

In terms of social tech level, I think what we’re lacking are systems that let us construct organizations that behave intelligently even when half of their constituent employees are below average in terms of ambition, competence, initiative, and so on. This is important for two reasons. The first is practicality, in that it’s unrealistic to think that a company can grow beyond a small handful of people and expect to be able to maintain super-high quality in its hires. The second is that I would argue it’s ethically irresponsible to focus too much on systems that will only accommodate elite participants. You can’t get a good Civilization Awesomeness score unless all the bumblers, slackers, wallflowers and fuzzy thinkers can have meaningful and fulfilling jobs, too. (*I myself often fall into the ‘slacker’ category, I freely admit.)

Now, the nice thing is that these attributes aren’t fixed. Humans learn and grow, so if you have an organization that doesn’t just encourage intelligent behavior, but will help its employees to become smarter, more competent, more productive, and so on… then you’ll really have something.