Why My Former Employess Still Work for Me

"Why My Former Employess Still Work for Me" by Ricardo Semler

Some stuff from this article:

• I don't think a comapny's success can be measured in numbers, since numbers ignore what the end user really thinks of the product and what the people who produce it really think of the company.
• Semco could govern itself on the basis of three values: employee participation, profit sharing, and open information systems.
• As I put it in an earlier article in HBR, participation gives people control of their work, profit sharing gives them a reason to do it better, information tells them what's working and waht isn't.
• We've had a few employees take wholesale advantage of our open stockrooms and trusting atmosphere, but we where lucky enougt to find and prosecute them whitout putting in place a lot of insulting watchdog procedures for the nine out of ten who are honest.
• i don't really believe in cost-cutting. I like to think we don¡t waste money even when we've got it. And who can say how many sales we lose when we play Scrooge with the travel moneyor penny-pinch the phone bills?
• Instead of giving contracts out to strangers, we decided we could just as well give contracts to our own employees. We would encourage them to leave the Semco payroll and start their own satellite enterprises, doing work, at least initially, for Semco.
• The first principle holds that information is the ultimate source of virutally all power. For this reason, we try to make all of it available to everyone. All meetings are open.
• The second principle is that the responsability for any task belongs to the person who claims it.
• Thinking about the future is a useful, necesary exercise, but translating such conjecture into "Strategic Planing" is worse than useless. it's actual barrier to survival. Strategic planing leads as to make things happen that fly full in the face of reality and opportunity.
• What goes for planning goes equally for culture, vision and responsability. We find that fragmentation is strength in allthese areas. Semco has no corporate credo, for example, and no mission statement.