Quotes from Ricardo Semler

Semco adds yet another dimension. You receive a voucher for work after your retirement. So if you took off a hundred Wednesday afternoons, you are now entitled to redeem the vouchers after your retirement by showing up with them and saying, "I'd now like to redeem my vouchers to work one Wednesday a week for two years and receive proportional pay." You've effectively exchanged early retirement for later work.

This is why the culture that arises from daily acts takes the place of corporate policies. Instead of writing ourselves down in a set of rules, we evolve slowly based on what we do.

Managers aren't looking for ten- or twenty-year change programs—they want simple, objective goals: profit, growth, healthy quarterly reports, trained people, orderly markets, competitive advantage. Until these organizations face reality, give up the futile quest for control and begin to respect such concepts as workplace democracy, the need to question everything, and the search for a more balanced existence, even the most modest goals will be beyond reach.

Our constitution is of course not written; it just conceptually encompasses the basic values and culture that are currently in place (and that change with time).

Dissent and democracy go hand in hand. It's also good management technique. What traditional executives don't consider is that decisions arising from debate are implemented much more quickly because explanations, alternatives, objections, and uncertainties have already been aired. As a result of democracy, employees have had their say, and projects or ideas have been analyzed from every point of view.

No one knows where this will lead, and what power sharing or cohabitation it will carve, but it will certainly bring us face-to-face with our own inconsistencies, and give our employees a chance to feel effectively empowered—with a strong voice. We should never be scared of our own people, whatever it is they have to say or demand—the result is always vastly superior to the ostrich approach of looking for subtle ways of keeping their demands subdued.

Organizations rarely believe they're to blame when an employee underperforms, but if the organization doesn't provide the opportunity for success, it's their fault when people falter.

At Semco we accept that every individual wants and needs a worthwhile pursuit in life. It's up to us to provide the environment and opportunity for their gratification.

We resort to a series of programs and practices like job rotation, reverse evaluation, and self-management. They're intended to help people tap their reservoir of talent and to preclude the need for weeding out. We never assume there are weeds among us.

NEVER MIND THE CHEESE —who moved my weekend?

We have to find a better way for work to work. The seven-day workweek is shaping up as a personal, societal, and business disaster. It robs people of passion and pleasure, destroys family and community stability, and sets up business organizations to ultimately fail once they've burned out their employees and burned through ever more manipulative and oppressive strategies.

However well these mild-mannered intellects do on the tests, lack of air time unfairly implies that they are not suited to the rough-and-tumble world of big business. On the contrary, they may be brilliantly equipped to quietly outmaneuver a bombastic opponent, yet as a result of the air time yardstick, they may lose out to peers who tend to be openly aggressive, individualistic, and terror-tested, yet underexposed to teamwork, ego control, soft tactics, and compromise.

Semco, we abolish manuals, procedures, and policies so that people are free to improvise, to soar, and to collect the moments of happiness that constitute genuine success.

Man is by nature restless. When left too long in one place he will inevitably grow bored, unmotivated, and unproductive.

Human nature demands recognition. Without it, people lose their sense of purpose and become dissatisfied, restless, and unproductive.

One good question and one good answer are services to all. A sure sign of a troubled company is one where employees don't care enough to ask and, if that's the case, they'll never care enough to fully deploy their talent. Just as curiosity is an antidote to boredom and indifference, the informed are more likely to remain interested, engaged, and alive with purpose.

The acting CEO cannot be blamed or credited for the company's performance, and that makes the system independent of the CEO. Blame or credit falls on each manager and employee. The CEO should be the quarterback, not God. In a sense, it makes us like Switzerland, where many citizens have a hard time remembering their President's name. Solidarity comes as a consequence of collective action, and not from one personality.

On two occasions, the person I had chosen as airplane captain came through as environmental leader in this second exercise. These exercises reinforced my belief that leadership indeed depends on the situation. As circumstances change, leadership must change. A certain set of skills, instincts, and personality traits may be perfect today, but useless tomorrow.

Exchanging the old boss for a new boss is not situational leadership. True situational leadership—flexible, effective, evolutionary—can only arise from self-management. And that means that situational leadership doesn't change fundamentally with circumstances. It is always about giving up control.

Even so, these symbols still cause quite a fuss. Thirty percent of all issues in organizations are what I call boarding school stuff: rewards and punishments, how to dress, what time to show up, how to address superiors, how to behave properly. Even worse, they include fodder for the "green-eyed monster," jealousy, things like why somebody got a raise and somebody else didn't, why she got the better client account, or why he was asked to join the board.

At Semco, you are what you do, not what or whom you control.

The stress-free workplace that is most productive is the one where workers respect each other's differences.

If we do not let people do things the way they do, we will never know what they are really capable of and they will just follow our boarding school rules

Intuition, luck, mistakes, serendipity—there you have four vital business concepts that every manager should know.