>If this lead to more successful companies, we'd see more successful democratic companies.

If something hasn't been tried at a wide-scale I wouldn't say you can conclude that.

Concluding democratic systems don't work in the 15th century would be somewhat similar, because you're living in one of many successful kingdoms, with not many successful democracies to point at.

There were some past democracies, like the Greeks, but naysayers would say, if that system worked so well, we'd see more of it.

I think it might be worth a try. It might fail.

I personally think it's a question of scale. We know from high-level politics that usually for large nation-states, democracy works better long-term than dictatorships. Dictatorships often work well in the short-term due to faster decision making, but long-term they lack the error-correction and accountability of a democracy.

A company that executes too slowly might not be successful. So I can imagine that small companies work better as dictatorships. They need fast decisions, they need a vision.

But big corporations? They move slowly anyway. They have a lot of subdivisions. One part doesn't know what another is doing. It could be that a bit more error-correction through democratic participation helps.

> If something hasn't been tried at a wide-scale I wouldn't say you can conclude that.

I dunno; there are things that require herd adoption to succeed, but something like this doesn't need scale to show improvement.

> A company that executes too slowly might not be successful. So I can imagine that small companies work better as dictatorships. They need fast decisions, they need a vision.

> But big corporations? They move slowly anyway. They have a lot of subdivisions. One part doesn't know what another is doing.

Big corporations move slowly through decision-making because they are sampling many inputs. Yeah, things fall between the cracks because that is the nature of a large body of people, but in big companies especially, every company-wide decision is made after sampling input from almost every department (HR, Legal, Accounting, Marketing, Operations, etc).

No big company CEO decides on something like changing suppliers, changing supplied products, changing production (and produced products) without having the information from dozens of other executives, who, in their turn, are sampling information from HoD, senior management, and more.

All the executives, before board meetings, need to have their deck up to date. They never appear before the board (or the CEO) without data.

It almost looks, to me, like a federated democracy or a republic already.

Just as US citizens don't provide direct input to who the president is, they provide a representative who represents them, in big companies managers represent the people under them. The people under a manager can't vote for line-managers, but in every case that I've seen where a manager was unpopular with their subordinates, they were replaced.

> It could be that a bit more error-correction through democratic participation helps

I dunno what "errors" this error-correction would take when performed by foot-soldiers. As important as janitors are, should they have a say in determining what next years product line should look like?

I think you (or maybe me) has a view on how decisions are really made at large companies that is divergent from reality.

Yeah of course each layer has a understanding of "their" area, but the point is that if they decide to screw over their constituents then the constituents a) don't necessarily get to find out, b) cannot do anything direct about it c) face reprisals if they do

Those three points are the basics of democracy- not is my congressman faithfully representing the views i voted for.

Put in place open budgets, in-house journalism and reporting, and if the board director chooses an approach they cannot adequately explain then yes I think voting for different boss may well be an effective measure.

Will it work? It's not clear. Is the current system perfect? No? so what range of options we have, this is in that Overton window.

>>> As important as janitors are, should they have a say in determining what next years product line should look like?

I mean, apply that to Janitors having a day in who should be their next President, and let it rattle around in your brain for a bit.

Wow. I genuinely did not imagine someone would "grok" it like this.

Yeah agreed :-)

We have seen so many companies happily go bankrupt, while top managers cash out big time. Few people give a shit if company is successful or not as long as everybody can make bucks until the party ends.

Democracy keeps those with power honest and in-check. Especially with technology you can enforce top-down mechanisms unlike in previous human times. Regardless of whether your policy makes sense or not.