Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/61389
Ricardo Semler is looking for a few good artisans—self-directed, highly motivated employees who will work together creatively and harmoniously to create great products in his industrial factories. And he's willing to completely restructure his company to find them. THE a business that produces marine and food processing equipment. In fact, he thinks he may already employ them. He just has to struc- ture his company in such a way that they feel free to devote their considerable talent and energy into making Semco a cathedral among corporations. That wasn't his first thought when he took over R 16 Maverick icardo Semler, CEO of Semco Inc. in São Paulo, Brazil, likes to quote a parable about three stone cutters who are asked to describe their jobs. One views himself merely as a man who cuts stones. Another thinks of himself as a craftsman who painstakingly cuts stones into specific shapes. The third says, "I build cathedrals." Semler wants to attract some of the people in that third group to Semco, by Sharon Shinn of turning over more and more responsibility for the business to the people who were actually doing the day-to-day work. According to his reasoning, medieval cathedral builders pro- duced magnificent works of art virtually without supervision. Why couldn't the men and women of his workforce—adults who made complex and far-reaching decisions in their daily lives—be trust- ed to choose the colors of their uniforms and decide when to start their workdays? Come to think of it, why couldn't they organize their pay scales and approve their bosses? Why couldn't they decide what new ventures Semco could invest in and veto plans proposed by the CEO? No reason at all. Over the next few years, Semler and a radical management team completely upended traditional business theory at Semco, BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004 the business from his father in the early 1980s. At that time, Semler—young, eager, and ambitious— wanted to make Semco a model of efficiency. He hired hard-driv- ing managers, installed new technology, and worked extraordi- narily long hours to achieve that goal. The result was a restless workforce at the factories and poor health for Semler. Gradually his mindset changed as he began considering ways photographs by J. R. Duran CEO doing away with conventional organizational charts while allow- ing employees more and more freedom to choose what products they would work on and how they would produce them. The evo- lution, engagingly detailed in Semler's 1993 best seller Maverick, was hardly a smooth one. Many employees were eliminated by job reconstruction or left because they couldn't handle the turmoil. But those who remained became passionate about Semco and their place within it. They became cathedral builders. Today, Semler spends much of his time away from the corpo- rate offices, giving lectures or merely traveling with his family. His new book, The Seven-Day Weekend, stresses the value of free time away from the office and time for creative thinking in the office. Such priorities, he notes, have raised Semco's revenues from $35 mil- lion to $160 million in the last six years. Semler is still an evangelist for worker empowerment—and now he also advocates taking time to rest in the company hammock and feed the ducks down at the pond. He believes that, even at the busi- ness school level, budding CEOs can learn valuable lessons about what's really important in the workplace. You received intensive executive training at Harvard Business School. What were the most valuable lessons that you learned there? I enjoyed my stint at Harvard Business School and found it helpful as a cross-reference—getting to understand what peers think and testing my ideas in an intellectual atmos- phere. Also, the specific concepts of professors and the lively drive toward learning and re-thinking were all very useful. What do you think is overlooked in the education of typical business students? I think business students are insufficiently prepared, because