Maverick
Imagine a company that gave you absolute freedom to do what you want – you determine your salary, your boss, what you wear to work and also your work timings. There are no fancy titles like General Managers, Vice Presidents, etc. Sounds too good to be true? Well thats what SEMCO SA is all about.
Ricardo Semler is the CEO and majority stake holder of SEMCO SA, a Brazilian organization known for its radical management structure and industrial democracy. SEMCO religiously follows a democratic work atmosphere with very few management levels. Its not surprising then, that SEMCO is one of the most profitable and admired companies in Brazil today and Ricardo is often considered to be amongst the top management thinkers in the world. Semler’s book – Maverick tells you about all this and more.
The basic premise of the book is about empowerment. When you empower people to take their own decisions and give them absolute freedom and responsibility for their work, they will almost always deliver the best. One of the best lines from the book, that captures its essence is as follows -
To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow.
A truly inspiring read and one that I would recommend to all the “bosses” out there.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Hi Adel, Ramzan mubarrak good the see you back to your old blogging ways, (For a long time PRADA was the only post in your blog) I hope you are settled down at NID and back on circuit of doing great initiatives.
Fuente Systems (www.fuentesystems.com) has recently acquired stake in a major storage portal http://www.filecrunch.com and come november we are releasing services in indian regional languages . In case you have any requirement in terms of premium space and bandwidth for your initiatives at NID like posting videos of events and so on pls let me know we would be happy to help out.
Have a nice weekend fasting ! I remember you everytime i listen to the song ” Dust is my bed ” . That blog post has changed something in me .
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:13 am
Thanks Syed. Will certainly look forward to using filecrunch.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:03 am
way back when the Brazilian economy was in the trough Semcor with less than 100 employees took this radical move, now they are around 3000.
This could be considered for companies of that size, but im very skeptical whether such a system could gain acceptance in companies with a larger workforce..