Ricardo Semler > Quotes

“Profits must be judged as moral or immoral by how they are earned and how they are disposed. Without a new barometer, we are left with the old barometer—profit for its own sake, regardless of whether it is sustainable or ultimately ruinous. But over the course of a seven-day weekend when a reservoir of talent is tapped, a calling is found, a true, well-rounded definition of success is established, people may realize they’re working not for the money but literally working for and on themselves. And what a liberating realization that is.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“It’s the same with people. Purging dead wood inevitably creates another predicament. People soon find themselves working in a reign of terror, their creativity and conscientiousness smothered by fear. It prevents an organization from learning from its mistakes. Process is paramount to knowledge, and mistakes are powerful catalysts for the process.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“The stress-free workplace that is most productive is the one where workers respect each other’s differences.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“At Semco, you are what you do, not what or whom you control.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Intuition, luck, mistakes, serendipity—there you have four vital business concepts that every manager should know.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Este grupo (que inclui supervisores, chefias e diretores) tem uma particularidade unica - é um grupo constituido de profissionais que deixaram de ser empregados, mas não chegaram a virar patroes. Sao os Roberta Close da empresa.”
― Ricardo Semler

“What lubricates the process for us is faith—faith supported by experience—that employees can pursue their self-interest and fulfill the company’s agenda at the same time. If there’s a match or alignment between what we want and what they want, the results will be twofold: While they’re busy satisfying themselves, they’ll satisfy the company’s objectives, too. They succeed, we succeed.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“So we did what we always do when there is dissent: nothing. We believe blindly in the virtues of dissent. We don’t want a crowd of brainwashed workers. We don’t want them to sing company songs, memorize company mission statements, and learn to speak only when spoken to.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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”
― Ricardo Semler

“Ou seja, total capitulação da empresa à força da greve. A empresa começa com cara de Rambo e termina com jeitinho de Clodovil.”
― Ricardo Semler, Virando a própria mesa

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“But uncontrolled variables are what make dreams come true. If we change the way work works we can live the dream of work-life balance and sustainability.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“The second error is the assumption that business or the work environment is the only tribal affiliation people have. By sheer proximity, the workplace tribe may seem to dwarf all the others, but anyone who works at home will find they actually belong to four or five major tribes—starting with the family and extending outward to the neighborhood, the garden club, library volunteers, church, and the like.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Diversity is more than a politically correct buzzword. There’s a place for everyone at Semco, including those who are not impressed or in any other way moved by the Semco system. And there is also a place for those who find that a job is nothing but a job, and participation imposes a weight they’d rather not carry. Even those kinds of people are welcome because our culture finds them valuable. They teach us important lessons—e.g., how to listen, compromise, and communicate, and how to be patient, tolerant, and resilient. By making a place for the oddballs, the malcontents, and the incompatible, we accept the consequences, both positive and negative. Things may not go as smoothly or as fast, but maybe slowing down will let us catch our breath and see new opportunities instead of the usual blur.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Corporations go through cycles of growth and retrenching, what I call corporate yo-yo dieting. Companies that expand continually are companies that grow fat. Then they’re forced to diet, or downsize in “corp” speak, until they can grow again and reengineer (a new body in ninety days!), merge and acquire other companies (weightlifting and muscle training) until the cycle starts anew, and they’re forced to reduce again (lose twenty pounds in six weeks!).”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Companies hoping to recruit the best and the brightest must demonstrate that they trust their employees with the freedom to work anywhere. They must assume that they’re buying talent and dedication, not what the Brazilians call “butt-on-chair time.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“We’re in favor of a hierarchy of self-interest and talent and opposed to the symbols of power and control that come with it.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Flexible benefits are just becoming an option for some workers. But more creativity is needed to take benefits to their natural end in organizations looking for self-determination and self-management. Employees should be able to customize their health plans, pension fund contributions, insurance, meal tickets, and even health club or collective purchasing programs. By letting the employees make their own calculations and freely choose their own health benefits, we transfer responsibility to our people. We hand them their freedom.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“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.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“This may not seem like leadership in action, but it is. Successful leadership isn’t dictatorship. It injects fundamental ideas and processes into the bloodstream of an organization and of individuals who see things the same way but lack the leverage to carry them out on their own. As a one-man or one-woman protectorate of a humane, sustainable business process, the leader sees to it that new ideas emerge and bloom when the timing is right. Dictators come and go, and when they go the dictatorship goes with them. When a true leader departs, the company he leaves behind is healthy, self-governing, vibrant, and intact.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“I explained that when we hire a worker he or she is told simply that we think it’s a wonderful thing that they have two eyes and that we hope they’ll keep both of them. But we add that it is up to them to take the necessary precautions, and we will never mention the subject again. The BBC journalist said he was amazed that he never found one Semco worker on the floor without glasses, whereas at factories sporting warning signs it was just the opposite—workers seemed to go out of the way to disobey and not wear the glasses. That observation gave me the opportunity to expound on the idea of treating workers like intelligent adults and, of course, to extol the virtues of self-management.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works