I never really thought about it this way. Nothing will probably ever stop Valve from being successful, but I do think they would be more successful if they contracted out half of their work (i.e. the boring/uncreative jobs).
The only thing that works is deliberately cultivating a culture where driving out the old bads is as important as creating the new goods.
Put another way: for self-direction to work, the culture needs to rank improvements as highly as novelty. Possibly higher.
Which it never does. At least, I have yet to experience or hear of a (software) engineering culture in which that's true.
I'm not sure if cultures like Toyota or the Nuclear Navy can be considered under this heading, as they mostly worked at a procedural-improvement level, rather than a product-improvement level.