[extropy-chat] Semco

[Emlyn]

On Sat, 21 Aug 2004 08:23:55 -0700 (PDT), Adrian Tymes
<wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> --- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > People here may have heard of Ricardo Semler and
> > Semco, a $300
> > megabuck Brazillian company that is organised along
> > lines of
> > democracy. Not the sickly doppelganger
> > "representative democracy" that
> > we all live under, rather its a direct democracy
> > that looks a lot more
> > like anarchy than anything else.
> >
> > I'm reading "The seven day weekend" at the moment,
> > written by Semler.
> > It's a jaw dropper. He makes the current corporate
> > leadership of the
> > world's great companies look like feudal warlords
> > (well, really they
> > already looked that way). Buy it. Read it.
> >
> > Here's a good recent interview with Semler.
> >
> http://www.conference-board.org/articles/atb_article.cfm?id=255
> >
> > Has anyone else read any of his work, or had any
> > experience of Semco? Thoughts?
> 
> I would say that a lot of small businesses in America
> are organized the way he envisions, in part because
> they have not (yet) attracted large capital, or the
> providers of such who want security at the expense of
> potential growth.
> 
> That said, I see one potential problem, if American
> businesses tried to implement his model: slacker
> employees.  A lot of the controls he objects to were
> put into place to make sure the work gets done; I've
> seen failure to enforce these controls result in
> employees failing to (arguably becoming inable to)
> meet agreed-upon deadlines.  In theory, one could
> reduce pay or fire said employees - but one then has
> the problem of completing the promised project for
> one's customer anyway, and then there are the
> lawsuit-happy types who will sue you for improper
> termination (or whatever the legal term is).
> 
> I'm sure he has a solution to this.  I'm just not sure
> that solution would work (or be correctly applied)
> elsewhere.

It must be that Brazillians are so infused with the work ethic. :-)

Seriously, he talks about this quite a bit; his big point is that
responsibility and power are linked. I think people get fired, *by
their collegues*, when they fail to perform.

-- 
Emlyn

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