Semco a case study

I was just trying to nut out something for work, and it's so expansively fragmented I thought I may as well chuck it down here and see what happens.
The 'normal' career is a serious of positions, followed by milestones, followed by a promotion to a new position, followed by a milestone and so on.
Paths can be predefined, flexible, individually tailored.
Now the earliest turn off with my employer occured in my job interview where my prospective manager started talking about the 'ten year plan' for me, and what the career path was. You know how you progress through the organisation and when you start earning the big money.
Fortunately said career path fell to pieces after one year, after another one we scrapped my job title as meaningless and have just worked on my personal development ever since.
So anyway I am trying to figure out a way to make the recommendation that we move away from a mentality of pre-designated career paths.
I was going to start out something like this:

We should move away from pre-designated career paths.

Now the reason I say this is a matter of focus. I'm assuming people if they are developing in their current role will eventually outgrow it and move into a bigger better position. Not essentially different. However I feel a mentality that requires a focus on a career path allows us to blindside the development process, stunt growth or miss opportunities.
It's leaning towards being inflexible. Furthermore there are limited avenues in a pyramid organisational chart for all those on the bottom to rise to the top.
Eventually at least two people will contend for one formal position.

Okay so where I'm stuck is that surely shifting the focus from career paths to 'personal development' that is focusing on the gap between promotions (increasing an individuals ability and therefore value) instead of the process of the promotion itself. My reason being that a promotion is seen as a contest, a contest seems to draw in percieved competitive advantages such as politicking the process.
Now the only way I seem to be able to figure to do this is to make the development of an individuals value aligned with the incentive rather than the promotion to be the incentivater.
Rewind that, that is to say what's the pain that the current system causes - being passed over for the promotion.
It's fine to compete and win a promotion, it hurts to compete and lose a promotion. It feels like ones progress, ones momentum is lost. Its hard to then go back to one's existing role and continue to develope (which is precisely what should be done regardless, the other option is to leave the company in pursuit of opportunities).
But an assumption oft made is that a promotion is attractive. Usually related to pay/rewards, whereas developing one's current role has less dramatic effects on our reimbursement, it can often be seen as a requirement of the job.

So that leads me to think:..... break the relationship between reimbursement and promotions.

Which pragmatism tells me isn't as easy as management saying 'Now your position in the company, your job role has nothing to do with your pay.' people don't trust this sort of thing. My experience tells me people say 'bullshit' because such bold claims by management have to be taken on trust. Unless, unless you openly display wages for all to poor through the books and see that it is the case.
But this too pragmatically has it's problems. This is where some people's palms are sweating because people will see the big pay gap they were previously privy too. Other people's palms are sweating because they will see that after 50 years loyal service their pay will be for all to see, less than the pimply teenage kid sitting next to them.
Which means people have to justify to their community what resources they are taking out of it.

Transparency is a good thing except for the problem of how unfair it is for people to have to justify their wages when they have only a part say in what it is.
In most positions of most companies, the HR department has gone and come up with a valuation of exactly what that person contributes. And said person may have had some variable degree of success in negotiating higher or lower reimbursement than the norm.
Most pay negotiations are indeed made from behind a fog of war (though employers generally make the first offer so you can't lowball yourself unintentionally) however, the salary can be based on numerous distractions unrelated to how much share of the value your work creates you take with you as opposed to the value retained by the company.
Said distractions can be: how much you think you need, how much you think someone else is worth, benchmarks, how much you think the company has etc.
The only real thing you should be contributing is how much you think you are worth.

And the most advantageous way to increase that is if you develop personally to be more valuable through a greater skills base, better effeciency, better integration etc. stuff that isn't related to the position.

So: reimbursement is not related to job description, but the value contributed by the individual employee.

But leaving it there would be half arsed because some people will feel hard done by by such a situation. these people we refer to as hard workers. These people have a conscious association that 'hard work pays off' despite all evidence to the contrary.
Take pistol pete, was required by his father to shoot 100 free throws after dinner each night. Child abuse: maybe. But pistol pete would sometimes get to 99 consecutive shots before deliberately missing so he could continue playing (by his own account).
Now Pistol Pete is listed as one of the 50 greatest players of all time. It would seem his hardwork paid off? Yes & No. Being a great free throw shooter is useless if you never get fouled taking a shot at the basket. There's no more reliable way to get to the free throw line. Pistol Pete was forced through a relentless training regime but he developed all the skills necessary to be a great player, he was not only an excellent scorer (before the introduction of the 3-point line) but one of the best passers and team players in the league.
Now the standard hard work sort of mentality is actually more akin to Syssero's eternal punishment of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll down the other side as soon as his task was complete.
That is people engage relentlessly in a task and never develope their efficiency or skills. What was the marginal improvement in Pistol Pete's free throw shooting from shooting an arbitrary number such as 100? what if he had only shot 80 in a row? what would his accuracy have been shooting 1000?
We don't know. Similarly what if he had taken one night off a week? how much would this have diminished his ability. A hard worker is unlikely to risk answering these questions, and thus unlikely to increase their value.
Which is an extraordinary leap in logic, but it follows like this - to learn effectively you have to be conscious of what it is you want to learn, this requires an evaluation or reflection on current circumstances (determining A the present situation and B the destination) then time & resources need to be dedicated to the journey.
If you work hard all day there is no capacity left to dedicate to development. This means you can't get beyond that initial learning curve of becoming efficient at the initial process. A big difference to making the process more efficient.

So look at Semco for a working example:

condition one: The companies finances are displayed publicly, and all employees trained to read profit and loss statements, therefore all employees know the financial circumstances of the company.
condition two: all salaries are disclosed publicly, for any employee to refer to.
condition three: the organisational chart is based on concentric circles rather than a pyramid and their are only four titles for job roles within the company.

Semco thus have the capacity to allow self-set pay. They have removed dead end jobs and people are responsible for their own training and development and thus can pursue their careers in accordance with their own ambition.
They add in many other factors over this starting point to remove other problems such as ambition exceeding natural ability.
But i don't need to go into that now... thanks me it's been helpful cognating with you.