I think what the GP was referring to was the "new" owner of Sears, who reorganized the company into dozens of independent business units in the early 2010s (IT, HR, apparel, electronics, etc). Not departments, either; full-on internal businesses intended as a microcosm of the free market.

Each of these units were then given access to an internal "market" and directed to compete with each other for funding.

The idea was likely to try and improve efficiency... But what ended up happening is siloing increased, BUs started infighting for a dwindling set of resources (beyond normal politics you'd expect at an organization that size; actively trying to fuck each other over), and cohesion decreased.

It's often pointed to as one of the reasons for their decline, and worked out so badly that it's commonly believed their owner (who also owns the company holding their debt and stands to immensely profit if they go bankrupt) desired this outcome... to the point that he got sued a few years ago by investors over the conflict of interest and, let's say "creative" organizational decisions.

This happened at a place where I worked years ago, but not as 'on purpose.' We were a large company where most pieces depended on other pieces, and everything was fine - until a new CEO came in who started holding the numbers of each BU under a microscope. This led to each department trying to bill other departments as an enterprise customer, who then retaliated, which then led to internal departments threatening to go to competitors who charged less for the same service. Kinda stupid how that all works - on paper it would have made a few departments look better if they used a bottom barrel competitor, but in reality the company would have bled millions of dollars as a whole...all because one rather large BU wanted to goose its numbers.

to put a finer point on it, it wasn't just competition or rewarding-the-successful, the CEO straight up set them at odds with each other and told them directly to battle it out.

basically "coffee is for closers... and if you don't sell you're fired" as a large scale corporate policy.

Yes, this is what I was referring to. I should have provided more context, thanks for doing so.

That was a bullshit separation of a single horizontal cut of the market (all of those segments did consumer retail sales) without overlap.

The part about no overlaps already made it impossible for them to compete. The only "competition" they had was in the sense of TV gameshow competition where candidates do worthless tasks, judged by some arbitrary rules.

That has absolutely no similarity to how Samsung is organized.