Last week I had the fantastic opportunity to attend a one-hour presentation by Ricardo Semler. Semler is very popular with management gurus (people like Charles Handy - one of my heroes) as the man who took a traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control business and turned it into a textbook team-based, democratic, fully devolved organisation while seeing profits grow healthily through national recession. Semler has written two books about his experience, tours the world giving lectures, and teaches at leading business schools around the world.
Semco's website contains a nice flash presentation of their corporate principles - check it out.
Semler said that hierarchy and systems are designed to restrict employee choice. A general does not want to ask the left flank if they want to be sacrificed in order to win the battle - managers have simply taken on the paradigms of military management without asking whether they are the best for the workplace.
At Semco, all top-down rules are questioned - unless there is a demonstrable need for a rule, it is scrapped. So over the last 25 years, Semco has ditched:
uniforms,
fixed working hours,
5-day weeks,
management authority by right,
titles,
and set itself up around project-based teams who
write their own budgets,
allocate their own wages,
and - get this - interview, appoint and appraise (anonymously) their own managers, up to and including Semler himself.
25% of profits are paid into a fund which is distrbuted by a committee elected by the workers.
If this model is so good, how come so few companies are doing it? (Handy says "no-one else is doing it")
1 Few medium and large companies are owned by their CEO. Semler had total authority to make these changes happen.
2 Semler suggested that managers in traditional companies would not have the skills to survive the worker review process. Imagine a certain entrepreneur's entire workforce turning around and saying "You're Fired!"
3 Semco makes pumps for marine applications and other large, expensive, bespoke, complex, technical items. Is there so much scope for workers in a call centre, or a biscuit factory, to work in six-month project teams, choosing a new team and new manager every time they reform around a new customer order?
While the Semco model may not be easy to apply to our own businesses, there are principles of transparency, trust, delegation and fair reward that we can all apply to some extent with our teams. What can you change this week to sweep away an unnecessary rule?
Some other blog entries on Ricardo Semler:
Quote: Keep asking "Why?"
Review of Semler's book Maverick
All the best,
Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com
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1 comment:
Thanks for your comment, Matt.
With Handy it's a question of whether you want "management" or you want "meaning of life". On management he's written a fantastic summary of all the main theories called "Understanding Organisations" If you want "mening of Life" any of his later stuff will be very thought provoking.
A colleague of mine has based his entire suite of management development programmes around Jim Collins' 5 level of leadership!
For all of Covey's attempts to sound scientific, he's fundamentally a "pop" psychologist. While I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I can see your chum's point. He's about as scientific as Zig Ziglar while trying to sound like a real brain professor. Having said that, most of his stuff is basic common sense (most pop psych is, I suppose) and as such has value.
I'd be very interested to hear about any other blogs / sites you've come across?
All the best,
Dave
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