Quotes from Ricardo Semler

The key to management is to get rid of the managers.

But sometimes the committee members complained that in our effort to be equitable we dragged out the process, talking too much, agonizing too long, and increasing the pain. Perhaps that was the unavoidable price for corporate democracy.

people spend less time in the office and have more time to themselves. Their need to belong to a tribe can be satisfied with hobbies or in community activities and doesn't have to be met in the office.

Companies respect conformity and uniformity, but they fail to see how limiting both are. Without change and innovation, companies cannot adapt to new realities. At one time, Singer was one of the biggest companies in the United States. Today, we're not using Singer cell phones because the company was unable to adapt.

We could write a completely new manual incorporating all our new policies and spelling out the emerging philosophy behind them. Or we could do away with the old manual and not just replace it. That way we would force people to make decisions based on common sense…We tried to write new rules. We really did. But at every turn we found ourselves wading into a swamp of minutiae.

do is make the revenue and profit projections rise 5 to 10 percent per year. If this seems simplistic or silly, just look around for a company that forecasts it will grow 7 percent, then drop 4 percent, then merge with a competitor, then rise 8 percent, and then fall another 11 percent. I've never seen a business forecast like that, even though that's how most end up. They all show their numbers getting bigger every year, rendering the exercise useless.

Over the next three or four months we simply collected all our procedures manuals…People would ask us from time to time when the new manuals would be ready. Eventually, some began to suspect that an update wasn't going to appear and asked us why. Only then did we say aloud what we had been thinking: that we were trading written rules for common sense. And that is the system we have today, which is barely a system at all.

Information supports intuition, and that's why we make our facts and figures available to everyone, from assembly line workers to senior executives. Businesses usually want such information to project numbers into the future, but precise facts and numbers are only helpful if they're used to enhance decision-making, not as the basis for it.

When I asked once at a medical conference if anyone knew of an organism that enjoyed perpetual growth, someone said cancer and pointed out that it eventually kills its host.

I don't want to know where Semco is headed. It doesn't unnerve me to see nothing on the company's horizon. I want Semco and its employees to ramble through their days, to use instinct, opportunity, and ingenuity to choose projects and ventures.

By giving up or sharing control of small, nettlesome issues like dress codes, and of graver matters like factory closings and security, management creates a culture of self-government that has more resilience than any my-way-or-the-highway dictatorship.

Even so, at times stress is inevitable, and seven-day-week-style activities, such as golf before a conference call, or a break on the beach between inventories, help reduce it to reasonable levels. Executives who are embarrassed to take these breaks or companies that frown on them are shortsighted. Stress is a major disruption; and its effects, such as burnout, are grim reapers for talented people.

Once employees feel challenged, invigorated, and productive, their efforts will naturally translate into profit and growth for the organization.

Winning the lottery isn't luck, it's an accident. Spending the proceeds wisely is luck.

What you are essentially advocating at Semco is harnessing the wisdom of people," a friend once told me. "Their reservoir of talent, the natural wisdom of the system, the wisdom that only comes from freedom, the wisdom that emerges however unevenly from democracy. Wisdom is what you get by asking why…." I wish I had said that first, but I didn't so I'll second it.

But Zeca already felt something the older executives had yet to learn—that status, power, and even money are sometimes not enough to make a job interesting.

Semco's most precious asset is the wisdom of its workforce, and our success grows out of our employees' success.

An idle, wandering mind is not the devil's playground, as the Puritans believed, but a garden of rejuvenation, growth, and contemplation.

The secret? If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock for all our practices, it may be this: Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row.

Again, all it takes is confidence that employees are responsible adults, not ignorant newcomers who know next to nothing about what their jobs require. This system would also reveal an individual's real interests, which in turn could make business far more efficient.

The fact is, you don't have to like people to work with them, and finding compatibility of purpose at work does not require surrounding yourself only with those you like. You can admire people, even if you don't like them. There are several managers at Semco that I would never have lunch with—I don't empathize with them at all—some I downright dislike. But that is irrelevant, because I still respect their style and performance.

At times, intuition can lead to mistakes, although maybe less often than numbers-based decision-making. We've made our share of intuitive mistakes at Semco. Life is full of mistakes. But you won't catch me subscribing to the new age management mantra—to err is human, but erring twice is not so hot. I don't buy the notion that we must carefully study our mistakes in order not to repeat them.

What's important to understand about the seven-day weekend is that by redesigning the architecture of time, we can make room for work, leisure, and idleness. All three can coexist and harmonize together to produce happiness and a sense of purpose.

Advertisements with Semco's name at the top ran in several newspapers asking for résumés via e-mail. Four hundred people replied. There were no rules for narrowing down the respondents. We didn't want a list of requirements to limit our options, so the idea was to make the process highly intuitive and to follow our gut reactions.