Maverick
This is an account of an extraordinary company turnaround achieved by the ultimate in participatory management. Ricardo Semler inherited his family company, Semco (manufacturer of marine pumps, industrial dishwashers, truck filters and mixing equipment), when he was aged 19. By 1980 it was on the brink of bankruptcy - but a decade later, during a period of savage recession in Brazil, it had been transformed into a rapidly growing company with profits of 10% on sales of $37 million. This was achieved by Ricardo Semler throwing out the rule book: getting rid of all manuals and written procedures.
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26recommend
44mentions
38people
2007–2024years
73% recommend27% neutral
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- This may not help directly, but at least you'll get a couple of good reads out of it. See "Maverick! The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace" (1993) and "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works" (2003) by Ricardo Semler.
Info about him is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
Right now I'm going through 37 Signals books just for the fun of learning..."Getting Real" (2006), "Rework" (2010), "Remote" (2013), "It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work" (2018), "Shape Up" (2019). Might be something in there.
(I'm now retired, but still trying to figure out what the right way of living and working should have been. Luckily, I'm financially OK despite a lifetime of bumping into walls and dealing with shitheads at exactly every job I've ever had. At least I knew how to live frugally and save money, so I'm free now.)
- I am not an entrepreneur (yet) but I still want to share a few titles with you:
- "Maverick or The seven day weekend" by Ricardo Semler
- "Rework" by Jason Fried and David Hansson
- "Startup - an insider's guide to launching and running a business" by Kevin Ready
- "Bookkeeping and Cost Accounting for Factories" by William Kent (1918)
- "Practice what you preach" by David Maister
- "Don't oil the squeaky wheel" by Wolf Rinke
- "Selling The Wheel: Choosing The Best Way To Sell For You Your Company Your Customers" by Jeff Cox
- "The power of stupidity" by Giancarlo Livraghi
- "How to write a good advertisement" by Victor Schwab
- "How to Make Money Out of Thin Air" by Brian Sher
- "Good manners and business etiquette. Illustrated Guide" by Elena Ber
- "Don't just roll the dice: A usefully short guide to software pricing" by Neil Davidson
- "Message to Garcia" by Elbert Hubbard
- the TopLeaf course of 36 video lectures on management by dr. Izhak Adizes can be purchased on https://vimeo.com/ondemand/topleaf or found on ru tracker (if you have access)
- +1 for Creativity, Inc. (haven't read the others on the list).
I also liked both books by Ricardo Semler a lot (Maverick and Seven Days Weekend).
- If you don't know about Ricardo Semler, he is a brazilian industrial leader, who has a company called Semco that runs on egalitarian principles.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules
His books "Maverick!", "The Seven-day Weekend" is full of examples and instances of why,how Semco functions the way it does.
It is a company which had stuff like profit sharing etc, and its run in democratic fashion where participation of employees is needed for many functions.
- Maverick, by Richardo Semler. I must have given away a dozen of this book to various people. Very inspiring if you are looking to build an organisation.
- Ricardo Semler's is indeed a true visionary, he started applying the principles of democracy and trust to industrial production decades ago, his first book Maverick[1] was written in 1995, it is full of interesting anecdotes on how he implemented his ideas in his father's business. I find his methods very similar to what is now being called Holocracy [2].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Ricardo-Semler/e/B000APW260 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=holocracy&sort=byPopularity&pr...
