The Seven-Day Weekend
Summary
Semler ran Semco, a Brazilian industrial company, and had already described his management approach in Maverick. This book extends it, arguing that the separation between work and life is arbitrary and that a company should let people decide when, where and how they work.
The practices at Semco are the substance and they are genuinely unusual. Employees set their own salaries, with the figures published internally so that anyone setting an implausible one faces their colleagues. Workers choose their own working hours and locations. Teams interview and select their own managers, and evaluate them twice a year with the results published. There are no organisational charts, no written policies, no mission statement, no human resources department and no fixed offices. Business unit decisions including new ventures are put to a vote of the people affected. Semler describes hiring and firing decisions made by teams and strategic decisions made by whoever cares enough to attend the meeting.
His argument is that adults who are trusted behave responsibly, that control systems cost more than the behaviour they prevent, and that a company which gives people freedom over their time gets more from them than one that buys their hours.
The evidence is Semco's own record, reported by Semler, and it is not independently verified. Few companies have adopted the practices and those that have tried have generally found them difficult outside particular conditions. The book is repetitive and rhetorical, and readers should treat it as one company's experiment described by its owner rather than as a validated model.
Key takeaways 7
- Employees who set their own salaries with the figures published internally do not set them unreasonably, because peer visibility does the work that approval processes do badly.
- Teams that select and evaluate their own managers get better managers than an appointment process does, since they bear the consequences.
- Control systems and policies cost more than the behaviour they are designed to prevent, and most of them exist for the small minority who would abuse freedom.
- The separation between work time and personal time is an industrial convention, and removing it produces more output rather than less.
- Publishing all financial information internally, including salaries, removes the information asymmetry that most workplace conflict depends on.
- Decisions should be made by the people affected by them, and putting business decisions to a vote of those people produces better outcomes than management judgement.
- An organisation without a written strategy or mission statement can operate, and the documents mainly serve to constrain adaptation.
Who should read it
Founders and executives interested in radical decentralisation, read as one company's documented experiment rather than as a transferable model.
About Ricardo Semler
Former chief executive of the Brazilian manufacturer Semco, where he removed most management controls and let staff set pay and hours.
Maverick documents what happened at Semco when workers elected their own managers, read the full financial statements and set their own salaries, and how the company performed through Brazilian hyperinflation while doing it. The Seven-Day Weekend extends the argument to scheduling and to how a company without a fixed strategy department decides which businesses to enter.
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