Leadership workshop at Highbury Hall

Leadership - Maverick Style

A few weeks ago, I facilitated a session at Highbury Hall on Leadership, focusing on the experiences found within exemplar companies and the experiences of those in the audience. At the end of the session, I recommended a book- Maverick - by Ricardo Semler, though at the time, I had only heard Semler give a talk I hadn't actually read the book myself. I knew from his talk at Harrogate and articles I had read about him that he has a unique approach to leadership when it comes to running a company.

Now I have read the book and would still recommend it. For those who want more of an understanding of what he's about, here's a brief review of the book.

In the first eight chapters, Semler gives the background to Semco, his family business and how he came to work there in the early 1980s. He was a young man, previously a rock musician; he put on a corporate suit and tie and set about to grow the company. And he did - in all the traditional ways, setting up systems, putting in measures of efficiency, acquiring new businesses, firing has-been executives. This way of life came to an end when he was taken seriously ill on a business trip. Extensive tests let him know there was nothing physically wrong with him - he was just completely stressed out.

In Chapter 9, Coming About, he tells of the start of the transformation. A concert by an elderly musician, who has witnessed decades of change through the 1900s, inspires him to think that he (we) shouldn't be looking at life by the minutes but should be measuring time by years and decades. This led him to remove scores of bookkeepers and accountants from the business and exhaustive accounting systems from the office. Budgets were now based on thinking about the company business, not just putting forward last year's figures with an additional percentage on top. He woke up to the fact that employees were working without enthusiasm or interest in the business and this led to doing away with security checks and dress codes, executive perks, literally breaking down walls and instilling democracy into the workplace.

The next few chapters tell us of the continuing transformation - the setting up of factory committees - initially concerned with pay and conditions and which moved on to do something about the company's products, services and profitability.

Some of the more radical ideas Semler and his staff instated were the hiring of managers by their subordinates, the evaluation of managers twice a year by their subordinates, people establishing their own salaries, throwing out the rule book and allowing commonsense to prevail, encouraging people to stay no longer than 5 years in any one job, getting rid of clerical jobs (forcing managers to make their own coffee, send their own faxes and greet their own guests, while encouraging receptionists and secretaries to take up more rewarding jobs), and setting up think tank units within the organisation.

During the transformation, Semler came to think that work in a very large organisation loses something - that once people work in an environment that is too large to be able to know everyone, something about job satisfaction gets lost. He broke down the company into several separate business units to overcome this, each one not having more than 150 employees. Then he restructured the organisation - with the consensus of staff- doing away with the traditional pyramid hierarchy and substituting a circle. Now there are only 4 grades of staff and much more fluidity in people's positions.

More recently, he has rethought about the size of the organisation and doesn't see the point in a large organisation for its own sake. He has acquired more flexibility by encouraging and helping employees to start up their own businesses and become suppliers to Semco and anyone else they wish.

For people who are sceptical that Semco ideas will not be applicable elsewhere, Semler gives examples of how they have been applied. His conclusion is that a business that exists solely for profit will not be a long lasting one. People should have good reason to want to go to work and a company should be able to trust its destiny to its employees.

The book is an easy read. Semler tells us the mistakes he made and then what he set out to do to get things right. It is quite a challenge for anyone else to pick up and see what they can do about putting democracy into the workplace.

Article by Carolel Manship. Photo by John Hipkiss - Fri Sep 06 10:03:21 2002