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Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler
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It can if you think like Ricard Semler, the maverick CEO who turned his own company into a model for the 90's and beyond. In MAVERICK, Semler will tell you how he changed his company and how you can change yours...if you dare! The extraordinary true story of 34-year-old CEO Ricardo Semler and of the rebirth of his family owned Brazilian manufacturing company, Semco. MAVERICK is a chronicle of corporate change--a change so vast and successful that Semco has been visited by over 400 corporate representatives from around the world who want to see it in action. In 1980, 21-year-old Ricardo Semler took over the reins of the company his father founded and built. Ricardo proceeded to break every rule of doing business, firing an entire echelon of upper level managers. Once he opened the floodgates to change, Semler never--even when he was tempted to--closed them again. Semler's management system allows employees to work at home, study and discuss the company's financial statements, make corporate decisions, take over the cafeteria kitchen, start their own business with company assets, and redesign the products Semco builds and how they are built. The result: in 10 years of constant experimentation--a time period in which Brazil's economy faltered--Semco has achieved a growth rate of 600%! In chronicling Semco's inner revolution, Semler shows how his radical ideas and strategies, as well as his nuts and bolts specifics, can be applied to any company anywhere.
- Sales Rank: #510811 in Books
- Brand: Warner Books
- Published on: 1993-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 6.25" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 335 pages
Features
From Library Journal
First published in Brazil in 1988 as Turning the Tables , this book was the all-time best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil's history. Semler, the 34-year-old CEO, or "counselor," of Semco, a Brazilian manufacturing firm, describes how he turned his successful company into a "natural business" in which employees hire and evaluate their bosses, dress however they want, participate in major decisions, and share in 22 percent of the profits. Semler believes that Semco is different from most companies that have participatory management because employees are given the power to make decisions--even ones, with which the CEO wouldn't normally agree. Semler claims, "This is not a business book. It is a book about work, and how it can be changed for the better." Highly recommended.
- Mark McCullough, Heterick Lib. , Ohio Northern Univ. , Ada
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
What makes for a successful company? In a sometimes breathless, often boyish manner, Semler, a counselor of a Brazilian company (Semco), relates the transformation of a traditionally structured business into one quite literally without walls and rules. Semler details his not-so-easy steps in the metamorphosis: abolishing dress codes and regulations; decentralizing plants; getting rid of paperwork and titles (hence, his appellation as counselor, not CEO); and creating a consultative democracy in which employees set their own salaries and work hours and vote on managerial candidates, among other responsibilities. If it sounds too much like utopia, Semler admits that Brazil's economic downturn has impacted Semco and that, yes, being born with a silver spoon certainly colors his vision. Nonetheless, his is a philosophy that merits some serious thought by managers and workers alike. Barbara Jacobs
Review
"The way that Ricardo Semler runs his company is impossible; except th at it works, and works splendidly for everyone. I relish this book. It revived my faith in human beings and my hope for business everywhere" -- Charles Handy "In this book, Ricardo Semler tells how Semco, Latin America's fastest growing company, uses a revolutionary way of working to run a profit-making company with a work force who love their jobs." The Sunday Times "Are there real-life lessons to be learned? The answer is yes...Pragmatic, inspirational and intriguing advice." The Times "Ricardo Semler is our kind of capitalist" Guardian "Semco takes workplace democracy to previously unimagined frontiers" The Times
Most helpful customer reviews
71 of 71 people found the following review helpful.
Dr. Dickie's Good Ideas
By Andrew Schonbek
Shortly after Ricardo Semler took over Semco, his family's moribund manufacturing business, employees began referring to him as Dr. Dickie. In the context of a hardened and confrontational union work environment, this nickname signaled the changes that were about to come.
Maverick tells the story of the transformation of Semco into a radical and high performing organization.
Here's a sampling of Dr. Dickie's good ideas...
* Make each business unit small enough so that those involved understand everything that is going on and can influence the outcomes.
* Implement a rounded pyramid organization structure with floating coordinators. Coordinators are the only supervisory level and are all at the same organizational level but different pay rates.
* Demonstrate trust by eliminating symbols of corporate oppression as well as the perks of status.
* Share all information and eliminate secrets. You can't expect involvement to flourish without an abundance of information available to all employees.
* Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted.
* Salaries are public information unless the employee requests that they not be published.
* Allow employees to set their own salary. Consider these criteria: what they think they can make elsewhere; what others with similar skills and responsibilities make in the Company; what friends with similar backgrounds make; how much they need to live on.
* Share 23% of pretax profits. Employees vote how the pool will be split. They must vote to determine the manner of each quarterly distribution. In practice they always vote for equal dollar shares.
* Substitute the survival manual for thick procedure manuals. Eliminate policies and rules wherever possible.
* Job rotation; 20% of managers shift jobs each year.
* Set up workers in their own businesses as suppliers to the company.
* Eliminate the wearing of wristwatches whenever and wherever possible. It is impossible to understand life in all its hugeness and complexity if one is constantly consulting a minute counter.
* Either you can create complex systems so as to manage complexity, or you can simplify everything.
My company used Maverick as assigned reading for a management retreat some years ago. The result was a change of direction that it's hard to imagine would have been arrived at otherwise. Highly recommended for those open to having their organizational paradigms shifted.
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Remarkable and important
By Dadi Ingolfsson
Semler recounts the evolution of his family's company, Semco, from being a paternalistic, strictly hierarchical one, when he takes over the reins from his father, to a company like no other.
The book reads like an autobiography, and it is, but only with the focus on the transformation of Semco and how Semler and his colleagues evolved through it. The reader is escorted through the many gestation periods of Semler's organizational theories. It's an amazing trip that you can hardly believe took place.
Instead of paraphrasing Semler here I want to use a pretty long quote from one of the last pages of the book. There Semler has such a succinct description of his core theories and the way he put them into practice that I feel his words summarize the plot of this book far better than I ever could:
"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. At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the "hows" and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question, and disagree. We let them determine their own futures. We let them come and go as they wanted, work at home if they wished, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses. We let them change their minds and ours, prove us wrong when we are wrong, make us humbler. Such a system relishes change, which is the only antidote to the corporate brainwashing that has consigned giant businesses with brilliant pasts to uncertain futures."
I truly enjoyed every page of this book and I highly recommend it.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Profound Lessons about Work and Life
By Graham Lawes
Maverick, written by Ricardo Semler, is one of the most powerful and inspiring books I've ever read. It takes the idea of participative management to new levels and demonstrates, through the evolution of his company, Semco, that a completely new way of working is possible, a way in which workers decide when and where they work, who gets hired, and how much they get paid. And it gives a vivid account of Semco's story so that we see the way of life and hear the voices of the people who created it.
Clearly, the ideas in the book didn't come out of a vacuum. Semler read and studied widely, building on the ideas of people like Robert Townsend and Peter Drucker. But he has elaborated and improvised on those ideas to create an entirely unique, collaborative work culture at Semco in S�o Paulo, Brazil, that he has then sustained over a period of 25 years. Astonishing!
Semler inspired me to look at some of his sources like Robert Townsend's 1970 book, "Up the Organization," a similarly contrarian and original creation. Semler shares a kindred spirit with Townsend and his book is just as entertaining, and as concise and full of important ideas about governance and leadership. Townsend calls his style of management "Participative Management" and puts into practice many of the principles from Douglas McGregor's Theory Y (as proposed in his 1960 book, Human Side of Management). But whereas Townsend simply orders his ideas alphabetically, Semler's book is organized chronologically. Each of its thirty six chapters tells a story from the history of Semco, and each contains at least one important lesson. At the end of the book, as if in homage to Townsend, Semler encapsulates all his key ideas in what he calls his ABC's, which includes an alphabetic glossary of management ideas, as well as his ideas for time management and his "Survival Manual," which is given to new hires at Semco and contains just twenty-one cartoons illustrating its governing principles -- amplified by just one or two sentences -- that constitute Semco's only policy manual or rule book.
Just to give you a flavor of "Maverick", here is the story from one chapter, in which Semco gives up control to energize the workforce.
"By the middle of 1984 we were...ready to buy another company," starts Semler. "Hobart Brazil's Ipiranga plant, near S�o Paulo, had a long but less than glorious legacy, endured by a weary band of employees, some of whom had invested as many as forty-five years there."
Some months after the acquisition, Fernando Lotamorro, who was Semco's executive in charge of operations, became convinced that the Hobart plant lacked organization, ambition, and controls and insisted that some action should be taken.
As Semler relates, "Clovis [Bojikian] and I discussed it often and, in the end, agreed with Fernando. We were worried about his hard-edged style and lack of experience as a general manager. But Fernando had the aggressive personality that we then believed a successful business required, especially one in a slump."
"Fernando changed everything about the Hobart plant in his first few months...I would soon have cause to wonder whether all this movement was taking it in the right direction. We thought we were more organized, more professional, more disciplined, more efficient. So, we asked ourselves with a shudder, how come our deliveries were constantly late?"
Semler became dissatisfied with the way things were going and says in the book, "During this time I often thought of a business parable I had heard. Three stone cutters were asked about their jobs. The first said he was paid to cut stones. The second replied that he used special techniques to shape stones in an exceptional way, and proceeded to demonstrate his skills. The third stone cutter just smiled and said, "I build cathedrals." This story, which is probably centuries-old, seemed to be a catalyst for a deep change in Semler's behavior.
"I was particularly distressed by the malaise that was all too apparent in our factories, both old and new. Workers just didn't seem to care."
Semler decided that he needed to take over Hobart and show that "improved performance and touchie-feelie style were not mutually exclusive." So he fired Fernando and took over the job of running Hobart.
"Every few weeks the Hobart plant's managers would spend a lunch hour talking to the workers, who would gather in the cafeteria, 200 strong, and talk about anything on their minds. No subject was taboo -- salaries, profits, new products, hiring and firing policies were all fair game...Everyone could be a cathedral builder."
"The pot soon began to boil and before long the old Hobart plant was unrecognizable...Workers who had for years -- even decades -- reported to the plant and promptly turned their minds off became full-fledged industrial citizens, making decisions not only about their jobs but also about the products they were making and indeed about their company."
With its new philosophies and policies, Semco had one of the highest growth rates in Brazil and Semco became No. 1 or No. 2 in each of its markets. The Hobart plant became successful with Hobart scales going from 3 percent of the market to 23 percent in three years, despite many strong competitors, but it had to face many crises, and this was just one of the stories and one of the transformations that it underwent.
The concept of participative management and trust in employees is central to Semler's achievement. This is hard work and Semler is critical of other managers who pretend to this philosophy while failing to fully embrace it: "What people call participative management is usually just consultative management. There's nothing new to that. Managers have been consulting employees for centuries. How progressive do you have to be, after all, to ask someone else's opinion?...It's only when the bosses give up the decision making and let their employees govern themselves that the possibility exists for a business jointly managed by workers and executives. And that is true participative management as opposed to merely paying lip service to it."
Semler has not rested on his achievements at Semco, going on to work on environmental issues and founding the Lumiar International School, a progressive school that serves all segments of S�o Paulo society.
Larry Fisher, writing in the Winter 2005 issue of strategy + business magazine, is respectful, but expresses some skepticism that Semler's ideas would work elsewhere, giving doubting quotes from Warren Bennis and Charles Handy: "I just wish that more people believed him," laments Charles Handy, the British management guru and social philosopher. "Admiring though many are, few have tried to copy him. The way he works -- letting his employees choose what they do, where and when they do it, and even how they get paid -- is too upside-down for most managers. But it certainly seems to work for Ricardo."
True, the model is idealistic, but it is no easier to apply in Brazil than in America. Robert Townsend, back in the 1960s, made participative management work at Avis -- and Dennis Bakke was similarly successful at AES in the 1980s. In fact, it seems to me that there is an inevitable movement towards participative management and democratic practices in the workplace simply because it consistently produces better results than more traditional autocratic styles of management.
Nor should people make the mistake of thinking that participative management is necessarily a worker's paradise, or that the workers at Semco have it easy. This model can only work if it motivates people to perform at very high levels. This happens at Semco because workers have to compete in a global marketplace and there is zero tolerance for low performance. As Semler puts it, "The pressure is greater at Semco because we truly believe in the market. We don't protect anybody from the vicissitudes of the business cycle or the crazy Brazilian economy. This is not for everybody."
Semler is ahead of his time. His ideas are consistent with the needs of the future. Eventually, they will not seem as radical as they do today. (See, for example, Drucker's "Management Challenges for the 21st Century," written in 2001, which argues that management will need to change radically to accommodate changes in society and particularly the aging populations of the world.)
In conclusion, this is a book full of profound lessons about how people can be motivated to work together in an organization and how the productivity that is hidden inside each of us can be unleashed. It reaches both to an organizational level -- making us question common business assumptions -- and to a deep personal level -- making us question whether we are doing enough to create meaning in our work lives. Semler points a way to a better workplace and ultimately a better life.
Graham Lawes
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