[kragen]

The alternatives to meritocracy are organizing relations of dominance and submission around some other criteria other than competence (typically reproducing established hierarchies of privilege from one generation to the next) or anarchy (in the very general sense of having nobody in charge). We know they didn't choose anarchy — it's not even clear how that would be possible inside a shareholder-owned corporation — and we can see from the results that they didn't put the most competent people in charge, but people outside the company can only guess who they did choose to put in charge.