A CEO tries to turn his company into a nice little r-selected environment of free and equal resources for all.
When Dan Price, founder and CEO of the Seattle-based credit-card-payment processing firm Gravity Payments, announced he was raising the company’s minimum salary to $70,000 a year, he was met with overwhelming enthusiasm.
“Everyone start[ed] screaming and cheering and just going crazy,” Price told Business Insider shortly after he broke the news in April.
Sounded great, until people began to actually operate under it.
The New York Times reports that two of Gravity Payments’ “most valued” members have left the company, “spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises…”
“It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”
But according to the Times, even employees who are “exhilarated by the raises” have new concerns, worrying that maybe their performances don’t merit the money.
K-strategists will always want a competitive atmosphere, where ability, effort, and determination determine outcomes, and they will often feel this way because they see themselves as being more capable than others. As a result you antagonize your best workers by forcing r-selection upon them, and you do so at the risk of driving them to your competitor.
Only the less capable r-strategists will embrace such a scheme, and as the text above shows, even many of them may be uncomfortable with it for deeply imbued, evolutionary reasons.
It is why all leftist governments fail miserably.
