'Idleness is good' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
'Idleness is good'
His staff choose their own managers, set their own salaries and take breaks in the office hammocks. So how did businessman Ricardo Semler ever become a millionaire? He explains all to Stephen Moss
Thursday April 17, 2003
The Guardian
It's not every day I get to meet a Brazilian millionaire businessman. Nor does G2 usually focus on their activities. This is more Fortune magazine territory. But Ricardo Semler is our kind of capitalist. His company, Semco, has been called "the world's most unusual workplace," he has just produced a book called The Seven-Day Weekend, and, best of all, he advocates idleness.
"The bad rap that idleness has is a real problem," he says, "because idleness is really the time when you solve problems. People say idleness comes close to sloth, which is not true at all. It is from idleness that the best things I've ever done have come." Semco's offices in Sao Paulo are fitted with hammocks.
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The Seven-Day Weekend, a follow-up to the bestseller Maverick! which he produced a decade ago, is a paean to inactivity. Semler, who is 43, has a four-year-old son and likes to spend a lot of time feeding the ducks. He dislikes email; likes long holidays in remote places; thinks you should be able to "buy" retirement time in your thirties and forties which you can work out in your sixties and seventies; and resists boundaries between work and pleasure.
At Semco, meetings are voluntary (if no one turns up, whatever is supposed to be under discussion must be a terrible idea), employees are allowed to set their own salaries and choose who their managers should be, there are no receptionists or PAs (who would want to do these support jobs?), and titles, business cards and all the rest of the paraphernalia of office life are frowned on. It sounds like anarchy, but Semler says it works. "Freedom is no easy thing. It doesn't make life carefree - because it introduces difficult choices. It's much easier for people to give into a familiar system in which they don't have to make any decisions."
Semco used to be a nice, straightforward engineering company that made marine pumps. It was founded by Semler's father, an Austrian exile who came to Brazil in 1952 via Argentina, but when the 24-year-old Ricardo took over in the early 1980s he set about transforming it. It is now a "federation" of 10 businesses: it still produces pumps but much more of its $160m-a-year turnover, generated by 3,000 staff, comes from site and inventory management.
Semler is not a fan of growth for its own sake. "There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success," he says. "For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?"
He refuses to make long-term projections. "If someone asks me, 'where will you be in 10 years' time?', I haven't got the slightest idea. I don't find it perturbing either if we said, 'look, in 10 years' time Semco could have 500 people instead of 3,000 people'; that sounds just as interesting as 21,000 people. I'd hate to see Semco not exist in 10, 20, 50 years' time, but what form it exists in, what business it's in and what size it is are not particularly relevant."
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more information in the original article or here:
http://positivesharing.com/2006/05/book-review-the-seven-day-weekend
