Maverick

Buy at Amazon.co.uk    Buy at Amazon.com    Explore at Bookweave

Imagine a manufacturing company where the workers set their own production targets, clock-in when they want, and are given a vote as to where the factory should be located. By conventional wisdom, this is a recipe for disaster. Surely workers will set absurdly low targets and only turn up when they feel like it? Imagine a company where management set their own salary and benefits package. Surely they’ll award themselves astronomical sums of money? According to Ricardo Semler, the boss of Semco, conventional wisdom is wrong, and in Maverick he sets out to detail exactly why.

Semler took over the Brazilian manufacturer Semco from his father, and in the subsequent years set about dismantling the traditional pyramid scheme that was in place, along with everything else associated a traditional company. At the time the revised edition was published (1999), Semco was one of South America’s fastest-growing businesses and had been named as the best company to work for in Brazil. Thanks to the unorthodox working practices instituted by Semler, sales had grown to $160 million from $35 million in 1993 (when the book was originally published).

Many of the ideas in this book have now begun to become more mainstream, such as slightly more flexible working hours and “hot-desking”, but there are more that still haven’t come through, such as the fact that Semco’s books are open to reading by every employee (the company is still private) and the fact that employees set their own targets and wages. Semler argues that allowing employees to set their own targets works because people are, in the main, honest, and they don’t want to let their colleagues down, or be seen to be greedy. Having such an openly democratic company could be seen as massively risky, but Semler seems to set the tone perfectly, allowing people to flourish within the business. You could also argue that having a closely controlled company is also risky, because people will always feel as though something is being hidden from them, leading to suspicion and distrust. I know what kind of company I’d rather work for.

This is a provocative book on company design, and I think this quote sums up Semler’s ideas perfectly:

We’ve all learned how to answer email on a Sunday, but none of us has learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon.