There's a lot of space between "Don't be 5 mins late" and anarchy. My firm is "10-5 is encouraged, but there's some flexibility, and be available early morning or late night to accommodate customers and employees in other locations."
You're assuming that people prioritize anything above work. I work at a "come when you want" company and I always aim to have at least four hours of overlap with my team, even though we have a seven hour time difference.
I think you mean "prioritize everything". I am not making that assumption. I am doubting the general ability of teams to self-organize as you describe, even though some teams can do it.
Teams certainly need the flexibility to adjust their organization in order to best accomplish their goals. Most of the problems with large corporate bureaucracy come because someone up the chain wants to impose control by dictating how every group organizes.
However, at some level there needs to be a team of people working together to accomplish goals, and that team needs a program to get with. Now, if all that is meant by "come when you want" is that each team is free to determine what their own program is, then I misunderstood the point being made and my original comment on it does not apply. There does need to be some sort of accountability, though, or the team dynamic collapses. In the context of a company, this has to be integrated with whatever policies the company as a whole has.
In my experience, teams will figure their programs out very quickly by themselves, so this hasn't been as big a problem in practice for me as one would think.
