Sometimes, your self-organizing company reaches an equilibrium. Your workers refuse to do anything productive, and no matter what experiments you try, or individuals you hire, nothing gets shipped for years. What do you do?

Simple - you acquire an entire successful company. For about 1-2 years, the newly acquired company will remain productive until they get absorbed into the self-organized company and become unproductive, or until a large number of the newly acquired workers are fired.

In the mean time, you are shipping products again. If you keep acquiring new companies every few years, you can make your self-organizing company appear productive from the outside.

The newly acquired workers will at first be extremely happy, and super focused on being excellent self-organizing workers. They will make wonderful recruiters and Developer Marketers for your company. It'll take a few years before their morale becomes impacted by the acquisition.