Product Description

Email and paperwork have invaded homes. Most people know how to work on Sunday evening. But no one yet knows how to go to the cinema on Monday afternoon. A new way to work is needed. Since "Maverick!" was published, the growth and success of Semco have been explosive: it's now five times bigger than it was four years ago. It has embraced the internet world, expanded in services, and employs 2,300 people, compared to 350 when "Maverick!" was written. A new way of working has emerged at Semco of which the tell-tale signs are: hammocks where people rest during the day, Retire-a-Little Plans, the end of the head office, the abolition of control and boarding school mentality. The results: inordinate success for 20 years, practically non-existent staff turnover, and an organization that covers an enormous range of business activity, from machinery to environmental consulting, and from real estate advisory services to new business start-ups, smoothly and coherently. It's time for a new way to work to be created, and Semco is leading the way. "The Seven Day Weekend" tells the fascinating and unlikely story of how this can be achieved.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51918 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

The Sunday Times
'Ricardo Semler tells how Semco uses a revolutionary way of working to run a profit making company with a work force who love their jobs.’

Rocco Forte, Management Today
‘The Seven-Day Weekend will certainly encourage managers to look very carefully at their management practices.’

Guardian
‘Ricardo Semler is our kind of capitalist.’

Customer Reviews

Threat to civilisation as we know it....
Ricardo Semler tells great ripping yarns. His book 'Maverick' is an honest account of a young man taking control of the family business and steering the company through most of the management fads of the 20th century. He has great people skills, finely tuned intuition, self confidence and the ability to admit mistakes. The journey turned the company into a massive success through a group of businesses, which thrived even during the worst crashes of the Brazilian economy. His main claim to fame is the sociological experiment with his people.

This book takes us further. Semler has focussed on aspiring to workplace democracy. That means relinquishing control. He may own the biggest chunk of the business, but he doesn't exercise power of veto, but goes along with consensus.

He still tells ripping yarns and ranges widely across philosophical tales, great thinkers and writers of our age and forecasts for the future.

What makes him different from Peters, Handy and Harvey-Jones? Semler isn't one to recycle the same old stories from book to book, nor put together stuff from elsewhere. He tells tales from recent history including dot.com mistakes and learning. He considers his own balance and focus on wisdom.

He advocates revolutionary stuff that only a handful of companies worldwide (mostly privately owned) practise. He dismisses corporate window dressing of mission statements and employee consultation and points out how far we go to war to defend democracy, but practice Eastern bloc centralisation in our workplace.

He tells a great tale about CEO egos that refused to recognise the writing on the wall of their dot.coms and allowed their companies to lose megabucks instead of joining forces in humility.

He encourages people to start where they are and affect the few people under them, instead of moaning that it's impossible in their context. He notes how many business schools and consultants preach empowerment, but run autocratic, tightly controlled organisations themselves.

He writes about how he works constantly to pull back from being placed in the role of saint/leader with the Midas touch, ensuring that the business is sustainable through the mass of employees rather than the one with a reputation.

He challenges macho latino stereotypes for men in other ways including his admission that he's never sure how his parallel parking will work out and that he wishes car companies would invent swivel wheels. There is a lot of space devoted to creativity and innovation, as well as a discussion of forces that work against change.

The 7 day w/e is a study of how to make the whole of life balanced and enjoyable.

Dangerous stuff. Read and enjoy.

A Quiet Revolutionary
Ricardo Semler tells a convincing tale of life at his company Semco, where they have dispensed with the rigid distinction between work life and personal life and his staff enjoy a seven-day weekend. Traditional management by hierarchy has been dispensed with in favour of self-managementa and implicitly staff being trusted to organise their own lives.

He is at his best when giving detailed accounts of how he puts his philosophy into practice, acknowleging failures as well as successes. He gives vivid accounts of the characters and circumstances of his staff and how they have fitted in (or not) into this model of organisation. These accounts have an appealing honesty and show a good deal of affection towards those he employs. This is much more effective in getting his point across than the usual buzzwords and abstract philosophising of management textbooks.

Semler is at his weakest when he leaves the specifics of his own experience and occasionally digresses into generalised comments about business, politics and whether his system is socialism or capitalism or neither. In this, he regales us with nothing more than the trite simplisms of "third way" politics - we in the UK are more than familiar with these in the variants of "New" Labour, from Tony Crosland in the last century to Tony Blair in this.

He also shrinks from dealing with the unpleasant flipside to his system of blurring personal and work lives - whether his seven-day weekend could just as well be described as the seven-day working week! It's difficult to argue, however, with one of his contentions: if we know how to read work emails on a Sunday night, why don't we know how to go to the cinema on a Monday afternoon?

Overall a fascinating and wholly convincing read, well argued and full of personal charm. And a must-read for anyone interested in challenging the Western military style of hierarchical management in favour of a more democratic, adult alternative.

A Quiet Revolutionary
Ricardo Semler's latest book is probably bound to be another bestseller. Drawing heavily on his practical experience of running the Semco corporation in Brazil, he argues strongly and convincingly for a more democratic workplace. One where staff are encouraged to manage themselves and co-operate with each other, rather than following the dictates of superiors and predetermined business plans. Thus the rigid distinction between the working week and the weekend is transcended and we all enjoy the seven-day weekend.

He is at his most persuasive when recounting personal examples and anecdotes of how Semco actually works. He displays huge amounts of charisma, commitment to real worker empowerment and belief that this is the route to business success. And also a charming amount of modesty and humility about his own role in his business's growth.

The weakest parts are when he digresses into more general discussions about the business world and whether this is capitalism or socialism. These verge on the trite and simplistic Third Way homilies that we in the UK are all too familiar with from the philosophising of New Labour. He also never fully addresses the potential downside of the blurring of our personal and professional lives - the seven-day working week as opposed to the seven-day weekend - that can all too easily happen in the hands of business leaders less scrupulous than himself.

But it's difficult to find fault with one of his beautifully pithy observations - if we know how to answer work emails on a Sunday evening, why don't we know how to watch a movie on a Monday afternoon?!

All in all, thought-provoking material for managers tired of the hierarchical/military model and looking for a more democratic and human alternative.