Maverick notes

"When asked the reason for their success, entrepreneurs are fond of saying, "A lot of hard word". Sounds good, doesn't it? It plays well at home, too, to families who have been ignored for years. But if great entrepreneurs were to answer the question honestly, most would probably list such factors as a finely tuned sense of timing, the ability to recognize opportunity, friends in the right places, and occasional moral lapse, and luck"

"If you fell confident about it, go ahead. If they don't like it, your rating as marketing manager will suffer, and next time you will be sure to consult them. We are not against mistakes here. If you are not making some mistakes, you probably aren't taking enough risks."

"There are similarities between this system and the Japanese approach to organizing manufacturing operations, but also important differences. In our groups, younger members didn't automatically submit to their elders. Moreover, once a team decided an issue, it stayed decided. There was no approval needed to make a change. Then again, there were no special rewards for new ideas. It was spontaneous process. People participated only if they wanted to."


"With few exceptions, rules and regulations only serve to:
	0.	Divert attention from a company's objectives.
	0.	Provide a false sense of security for executives.
	0.	Create work for bean counters.
	0.	Teach men to stone dinosaurs and start fires with sticks.
"

"(Remember, Order or Progress.) Rules freeze companies inside a glacier; innovation lets them ride sleighs over it."

"A great business is really too big to be human" — Henry Ford

"Human nature demands recognition. Without it, people lose their sense of purpose and become dissatisfied, restless, and unproductive. Stalin understood this. Prisoners in his gulags were obligated to dig enormous holes in the snow, then fill them in. It broke their spirits."

"This much seems clear: either you can adapt sophisticated, complex systems to try to manage the complications, or you can simplify everything."

"There is no way to treat employees as responsible and honest adults unless you let them know and influence what is going on around them," Vendramin told us when he returned from his world tour. "And there is no way to let them become involved in the decisions that affect them if the plant they work in has too many people.

"Yes, there are schemes and mechanisms to convince people that they matter, but they don't work for long. At some point the workers notice that they are never consulted about the really important decisions. The only way to change is to make each business unit small enough so that people can understand what is going on and contribute accordingly. "

NOTE: Uncle Bob in "agile back to basics" could not explain how agile suppose to work in large corporations, but Ricardo Semler seems to have simple and direct answer.


"Usually, though, people will perform at their potential only when they know almost everyone around them, which is generally when there are no more than 150 people."

"From all this I have come to believe that the economies of scale is one of the most overrated concepts in business. It exists, of cause, but it is overtaken by the diseconomies of scale much sooner than most people realize."
"I believe Taylor's (Frederick Winslow Taylor) precise job descriptions limit workers' potential and constrain the possibility of job enrichment, which dampens their motivation. Just think how much better job description would be if they included not only what employees do but what they want to do."

"The point is, facts can be almost irrelevant. What matters is how they are presented."

"Trouble is, it could still be read in as many ways as there are readers, as the story of the mayor and the school bus proves.

If you really want someone to evaluate a project's chances, give them but a single page to do it - and make them write a headline that gets to the point, as in a newspaper. There's no mistaking the conclusion of a memo that begins: "New Toaster Will Sell 20000 Units for $2 Million Profit.

And so Semco's Headline Memo was born."


"The pyramid, the chief organizational principle of the modern corporation, turns a business into a traffic jam. A company starts out like an eight-lane superhighway - the bottom of the pyramid - drops to six lanes, then four, then two, then becomes a country road and eventually a dirt path, before abruptly coming to a stop. Thousands of drivers start off on the highway, but as it narrows more and more are forced to slow and stop. There are smash-ups and cars are pushed off onto the shoulder. Some drivers give ip and take side roads to other destinations. A few - the most aggressive - keep charging ahead, swerving and accelerating and bending fenders all about them. Remember, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear."

"Bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they suspect they aren't"

"The heart of her problem is the pyramid, the basic organizing principle of the modern corporation. It gets narrower as it rises, rewarding the few who keep climbing but demoralizing a far greater number who reach a plateau or fall by the wayside. What can be expected from the employees on the lower levels, whose opinions are never sought and to whom explanation are rarely given? They know that the decisions that matter, the decisions that will affect them, are made on high. Is it reasonable to ask, year after year, for a special effort from these people, and then reward them with a few public thank-yous and perhaps an extra month's salary, while the lucky few at the top enjoy fancy offices and shiny new cars, not to mention bonuses that can exceed the combined salaries of a hundred or even a thousand ordinary workers?

Those who make their piece with the pyramid and develop specialized skills - accountant or engineers of various persuasions, for example - can expect job security. But their fate can be to enter and leave at the same time every day, doing what they done for years or even decades. Is it reasonable to suppose that they will continue to be motivated?

Those who maintain a smidgen of ambition expect gradual increase in power, responsibility, title, and money. Because of the constraints of the pyramid, organizations are not ready to promote them fast enough to satisfy them, so many firms take the easy way out and create an extra level or two for their overachievers. What harm does it do? It's just a few more lines on the organizational chart.

But soon there is such a pollution of title and levels - and a diffusion of responsibility and authority - that much of management's time is spent dealing with the inevitable conflicts, jealousies, and confusion. Six or seven levels are common even at a time when flattening the pyramid has become a fad. Bigger corporations have twelve or fourteen tiers. Given the typical executive's respect for hierarchies, how is it possible for anyone five rungs from the factory floor to know what's going on there? He can't, so he distracts everyone around him with memos, phone calls, and meetings trying to find out. "

4 title at Semco: counselor, partner, coordinator, associate


In Brazil, we call this: "creating difficulties to sell simplicities."

"Any alley cat can stay lean when food is scarce, the trick is to stay lean during the good times."

"If you want something done well and cheaply, do it yourself". That was the mantra of bigger-is-better companies. But how many businesses have lost their way as they grew? Henry Ford was so fond of verticalization he raised trees to make the sideboards of his Model T's, bought iron mines and cargo ships, even searched the Amazon for a site for a rubber plant for tires. The company's official history doesn't play it up, but Ford had to fire 60000 workers because of this rampant do-it-yourselfism. "

"Above all, people act differently when they own their own business. Workers who fight fit every extra minute of a coffee break will toil into the night and on Saturday and Sunday if it means keeping their own company alive. At Semco, we succeeded largely because we had increased our employees' stake in their jobs. Our people already worked late and on the weekends of course, and they didn't need any prompting from bosses. But by encouraging them to start their own businesses, we would raise their sense of involvement even higher. "

"At Semco we initially pursued the acquisition of companies because a good part of our own potential had been fulfilled. We studied more than a hundred firms, negotiated with fifteen, and bought four. I can summarize in three sentences the hundreds of hours and millions of dollars we invested:

Growth through acquisition is exciting, glamorous, and ulcer-inducing.
The company you buy is not very similar to the one you thought you were buying, and never like what they told you.
Buying small, family firms is a certain way to skip the ulcers and go straight to bypass surgery.

In our case, we incorporated subsidiaries of multinationals, which mostly honour commitments, God bless them. They usually have accurate books, unlike family-owned firms, where the closets are typically full of skeletons. But when you buy any company, you must be willing to watch it and learn from it, at least for a year, before putting your paws in the soup. "

James Taylor song: "The secret of life and a to enjoy the passing of time". Most people live either in their memories of the past or their hopes for the future. Few live in the present.

"Persistence is a virtue only when it is pointed in the right direction."

"But at first my columns provoked the worst of all responses, which was no response at all."

"I ended up as a Vice President, which confirmed a lesson I had learned through the years of change at Semco: it's always better to seek forgiveness than ask for permission."

"Transporting Asian values to, say, Smyrna, Tennessee, is like wearing a kimono to a Tupperware party. Nothing is less Western than the notion of total loyalty to a company, except possibly the belief that age should come before competence. If you must borrow from Japan, don't forget to fill a 747 with enough Japanese to populate your factory."

"Except that this textile factory existed in 1633. And the moral of the story: our advances in technology have far outstripped our advances in mentality."

"The conflict between advanced technology and archaic mentality is, I believe, a major reason why the modern workplace is characterized by dissatisfaction, frustration, inflexibility, and stress.
If only minds were as easy to change as machines. I'll wager that it's easier to invent a new generation of microchips than get a generation of middle managers to alter the routes they drive to work every day. Technology is transformed overnight; mentality takes generations to alter. Who can blame us for thinking technology will cure all that ails the workplace. It's so much easier to acquire."

The issue of tribal coexistence is, I believe, critical for survival in modern times. Up until now it had been easy enough for the First World to keep its distance from the Third World and view Southern Hemisphere as very far away. But technology is drawing everyone and everyplace close. Like lava from a huge volcano, tribes are moving toward ares where the standard of living is higher. In few decades all that will be left of the First World will be few ghettos of the super-rich, islands of luxury surrounded by misery. There will be a lot of Cairo in Paris, Mexico in Colorado, and Syria in Switzerland. And as the Third World makes its glacial movement north, it will leave behind places like Somalia, Bangladesh, and the Ivory Coast, which will become an even more abject Forth World.

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, let's 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 structure that dictates the "hows" and created fertile soil for differences. We have people an opportunity to test, question and disagree. We let the determine their own training and 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.

Aristotle, who didn't subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, once said, "Thinking requires leisure time." If you are not in possession of leisure time, you can't be thinking all that much.

If you have to meet with someone, do it at the office. The surroundings discourage people from drifting from the subject. But don't provide visitors with a cup of coffee: it's an invitation to an easygoing, unproductive conversation. By leaving an intruder uncoffeinated, you are contributing to his health, and he may not be so quick to return, either.