Maverick- Ricardo Semler

Last week I read a great book- Maverick by Ricardo Semler. He is also the author of 7 day weekend.

So many things at Semco- Semler’s company, are similar to what we do here at Redmond. They are organized into many small companies to allow them to be nimble and decrease bureaucracy. They also believe that making a profit is not the goal of business although it is essential.

A few good quotes from the book…

“It’s so easy to blame employees when a business does badly, but often they haven’t had the freedom to work or the motivation to perform as if the business were theirs.”

“it took us almost a decade to learn that our stress was internally generated, the result
of an immature organization and infantile goals.” We should probably ask ourselves
where our stress originates from.

He also told the story of the three men working. One said he was laying bricks, one was
building a building and one was building a temple. How often at work do we have the big picture and realize we have the opportunity to build temples in our own realm of responsibility.

“We simply do not believe our employees have an interest in coming in late, leaving early, and doing as little as possible for as much money as their union can wheedle out of us. After all, these same people raise children, join the PTA, elect mayors, governors, senators, and presidents. They are adults. At Semco (Redmond) we treat them like adults. We trust them. We don’t make our employees ask permission to go to the bathroom. We get out of their way and let them do their jobs.”

Some beliefs that Semler held the he found was faulty…

1- The belief that effort and results are directly proportional
2- The gospel that the quantity of work is more important than the quality of work.
3- “Things are a little irregular at work right now, I will just need to work a little longer until they straighten out.”
4- “Fear of delegation and it’s cousin, fear of replaceability. – we sometimes do not delegate things that we probably should…
5- I no longer wear a wrist watch- it struck me that life should be measured in years and decades- not minutes or hours.

“Without rules, all answers are suggested by common sense. No, I can’t define what common sense is, but I know it when I see it..”

“Growth through acquisition is exciting, cancerous and ulcer-inducing.”

“Much about growth is really about ego and greed, not business strategy.”



“It is not worth it to me to have a company at which you do not trust the people with which you work”

Semco changes their team leaders responsibility every few years. It would be akin to Kyle and Boyd switching jobs and Sammy and Deran changing roles at the end of the year.

Some things that I do not agree with that Semco does- they subsidize employee lunches for some employees- treating them as inferiors. On one hand they tell their employees that they are adults and that they want them to succeed, and on the other hand they caudle them and do not treat them like equals.

They also vote on all decisions making it democratic. I feel that everyone should be heard- that everyone should have a say in decisions. But in the end the decision should not be left to a popular vote. Popular vote assumes that everyone with a vote has the same amount and quality of information and in some instances this is not the case.

One of my favorite quotes…

“At the heart of our bold experiment is a truth so simple it would be silly if it wasn’t so rarely recognized. A company should trust its destiny to its employees.”

"Communication"

We had a good discussion in our Shared Experience meeting about the relativity of truth. I do not espouse the idea of moral relativism and believe that there are absolute truths. I appreciated our discussion, because since then I have been thinking about the fact that even though absolute truth exists, we may sometimes err in thinking that because we are aware of and believe in a truth that our actions are in alignment with that truth.

As in most areas in life, when it comes to absolute truth, the errors come in the application. When we see a thing, we assume that we are seeing it correctly, when in reality we have filtered it through the lens of our experiences and beliefs and made it into something that is only real to us. We get in trouble (at least I do) when I project my “truth” onto someone else and not only expect them to see it, but to abide by it.

I think (here I go, with my own version of the truth again…) this is one of the fundamental problems with communication- that when we speak to someone, we expect that they hear what we say. They do not hear what we say they hear words that they filter through their own lens and then nod politely as if they actually understood what we were getting at.

I really like the quote- “ The problem with communication is that we think it has actually taken place.” With my new learning I will try to do two things…
1- be more tolerant of other people’s truths.
2- assume less in communication. It is very hard to over-communicate, and being busy, I too often err on the side of just expecting that the other person understood- understand?