It's easy enough to understand this applied to fast food, but I get the impression other industries would rather not believe it to be true.
Thing is, I think it's clearly evidenced in tech by every "I went through two days of interviewing on algorithms and distributed systems to hack on PHP boilerplate?" story. Tech might go to the trouble to select for brilliance, but they aren't necessarily using or paying for it.
Further it's readily admitted by folks like a16z [1].
"Thus software itself becomes the driving force of leveling the ability to write software to solve problems. This is a good thing: As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people."
1: http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engin...
Anyone who choose to take a job accepts this.
Real brilliance - creativity - requires you to embrace the unpredictable. That section of society are the inventors, who are willing to face long odds and do what they want.
The system works only for its survival. It is not interested in giving you a wholesome life.
You can argue that if your business model is so good that you don't need to innovate to stay in business then by all means milk it for what it's worth but that doesn't feel like a long-term strategy. Microsoft and friends have R&D departments that rival the best research institutions in the world and they pay a premium for it. If some of that was a natural byproduct of their core business operations then maybe they wouldn't need to pay a premium for it.
For a sufficiently large business, it's important to be stable/robust -- that is, to be able to withstand change. A business that's heavily reliant on individual brilliance across the board has the disadvantage of potentially collapsing if enough brilliant people leave without training equally brilliant replacements.
Yes, you want some brilliant people specifically in R&D / innovation. You want brilliant people overseeing the entire system. Brilliant people in key positions might improve your overall efficiency by an order of magnitude on a particular project -- but you don't want the whole project to fall apart just because Joe moved out of state or Jane went on long-term maternity leave or Jake was hit by a bus.
Microsoft does have a world-class R&D department, but they also have a lot of average code monkeys and average janitors and average HR people.
Merica!