Who is Semler by Ricardo Semler

He is the CEO of the Brazilian company Semco, but he likes to be redundant;

He is not even a fixed CEO;

He remains loyal to his employees. The highest degree of trust and respect;

He believed his job was to muddy the waters, even poking a few holes in the boat and letting his crew figure it out;

He To promote a more thoroughgoing democracy, the result of this is that he no longer owns Semco.

Which star are you from?

Employees can voluntarily participate in any meeting in the company. There are always two vacant chairs on the board of directors, and all employees can "first come, first served"; the company has no business plan, no mission vision, and no long-term budget. There is no human resources department, no vice president of IT, no chief operating officer, no permanent CEO, no employee dress code, no job description, and no one to approve expense accounts.

Younger employees can spend a year moving around the company to find a job they like, and can choose their own training programs instead of having their bosses or human resources decide for them. Also, employees can take up to three consecutive years of vacation for any reason...

Is this still a company? Many business people even asked the boss: "Which planet are you from?"

Ricardo Semler would never be surprised by such a question, because it is he who leads Semco - Brazil's "most successful" diversified company, which offers a wide range of products and services from office air-conditioning spare parts to inventory management and environmental planning, has grown from 35 million in annual revenue in just a few years The US dollar increased to US$212 million, and is expected to continue to soar to US$1 billion in the next few years.

Semler was keen on free management rather than giving orders, and he never tired of it. He doesn't even want to admit that he is the CEO. He hated titles, both for himself and for other company executives. Salem's father was an Austrian immigrant who founded Semco more than 50 years ago to produce patented vegetable oil centrifugal separators. By 1980, the company had developed into a supplier of shipbuilding equipment.

This year, Semler Sr. made up his mind to hand over the factory to his son and let him run the company in his own way. Once in power, Salem fired 60 of his top managers in one afternoon. Those managers who left took with them much of the company's expertise, and Semler withstood considerable pressure.

He quickly hired many tough managers and launched a series of strategic acquisitions in order to reduce the company's overreliance on the shipbuilding industry. Soon, Semco achieved rapid growth, but new problems arose. The company's employee relations continued to deteriorate, and the stressful life brought Sammler's physical condition to the brink of collapse.

He wrote in his later book: "Semco's organization at the time seemed very efficient, and its employees were well-disciplined. However, their performance could not meet our expectations, or they did not like their jobs. I couldn’t help but wonder: How could we eliminate the need to spend so much time monitoring what time employees came to work? How could we remove all the red tape and artificial chores? What would a company look like if we ran it in a simpler, more natural way? ”

In order to find the answer, Semler read a lot of books, but his inspiration came from a non-master figure-Silvabo Kikain. This person was once the principal of a normal school and worked successively at the management training center of the Brazilian subsidiary of Ford Motor Company and KSB, a competitor of Semco. However, the model of autonomous management and self-directed learning he promoted was not recognized by these two companies. Later, when he and Sammler met for the first time, they hit it off. Their core belief is that employees who participate in important decisions will naturally be more motivated and make better decisions than those who only passively accept orders from others.

After overcoming the urge to transform Semco overnight, Semler and Kickane decided to start small.

The company's cafeteria had received numerous complaints from employees, so they decided to hand over the restaurant to a group of employees who would run the restaurant themselves. From then on, there were no complaints.

The next step is the issue of working hours. In Sao Paulo, a city of 1.5 million people, traffic jams are a daily occurrence; some wealthy people even commute by helicopter. Semco’s working hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the time workers spend commuting to and from get off work is long and full of uncertainty. Semler and Kikain simply let employees set their own work hours to avoid rush hour traffic.

Many in Semco management suspected that this would bring the assembly line to a standstill, but this never occurred. "The employees held many meetings to figure out how to solve the logistics problems of this new workflow. When the day came, they had made arrangements to ensure that several groups could work in the factory at the same time."

Then they even decided to let employees set their own salaries. This is a more complex process that involves hiring an analyst to determine baseline salary levels for multiple positions at 35 different companies. Semco's salary level is increased by 10% based on the average salary of comparable companies to reduce the company's job-hopping rate. Everything from the janitor guarding the factory gate to Semler's salary is publicly released.

The participatory management promoted by Sammler brought the company's internal unity to a considerable height and enabled the company to safely survive an extremely dangerous era. In 1990, the Brazilian government froze citizens' bank deposits and confiscated their property, pushing the country to the brink of collapse. This makes Semco consider layoffs for the first time. Since the company's financial situation and board of directors meetings have always been disclosed to employees, employees are well aware of the difficulties faced by the company. In this case, they even voluntarily proposed employees who wanted to be "layoff". At that time, many companies with better financial conditions than Semco disappeared, but Semco survived. Like many CEOs, Sammler used to wonder what his company would be like if he himself were in a car accident. He found the answer one night in February 2005 while driving on a Brazilian highway at 85 miles per hour.

This is a miracle: He encountered an extremely tragic car accident, but luckily escaped death with the car windows shattered and the car body collapsed 20 inches. But what's even more amazing is that during the months when he lay in the intensive care unit and underwent multiple neck and facial surgeries, Semco Group's operations were not affected at all.

Over the past 20 years, Semco became a real laboratory for Semler’s radical leadership approach. If you had invested US$100,000 in Semco 20 years ago, you would have received a generous return of US$5.4 million today. This rare high return on investment can be said to be the fruit of Semler's participatory management.

Now, just visit the Semco pump factory located outside Sao Paulo to see how Semco applies this management method in practice. The factory doesn't look much different from a traditional factory building in appearance, but here the walls are rainbow-toned, a choice of employees. There are no foremans barking orders at employees. Every day, lathes can decide whether to run a grinder or drive a forklift, depending entirely on the needs of the job.

The 3,000 employees at the Semco factory set their own working hours and salary levels, and subordinates hire and evaluate their superiors. After lunch, workers can hang up hammocks in the factory and take a nap. If employees work at the factory on Saturday afternoon, they are encouraged to relax at the beach on Monday morning. There are no organization charts, five-year plans, corporate value statements, no dress codes, written rules or policy statements, just a slim "survival guide" manual. This comic-book format introduces Semco's distinctive management methods to newly recruited employees. Employees vote for their leaders and decide whether to enter new business areas or exit old ones. At this time, Semler's vote was just one of 3,000 votes cast by the company.

Semler believes that if company leaders treat their employees like generals treat their soldiers, the result will be a widespread sense of frustration. It’s hard for people to feel satisfied with the work they do.

He thought that any organization, even a very large organization, can be subdivided into small departments composed of 10 or 12 people, but power must be transferred to that level. When more than 12 people work together, it becomes difficult to communicate effectively. "You can observe sports teams and families, it's the same."

From 1999 to 2000, Semco began to cooperate with some IT professionals in business. At that time, Samler took a fancy to two young men in San Francisco. They don’t have a secretary or a front desk person, or even an office, just two dogs. But no matter what, Samler plans to cooperate with these two young people who are only 28 years old. Their page lists one of the dogs, a lab, and two job offers they already have! Semler later told them, kids, you're the ones I'm going to work with.

But when Sammler went there again six months later, they had a beautiful office with two secretaries and a front desk, but the two dogs were gone. Some bankers and investors have already stepped in. Suddenly, everything changed.

Semler returned to Brazil and told his employees: "We are in trouble, this won't work." In the past, the young man could explain the conditions of both parties with him in eight points on a piece of paper. . Now they're stuck with one of San Francisco's largest law firms. They had to wade through 700 pages of documents before signing them.

“The size of an organization is not the main factor that determines its future destiny. Size is affecting the way the organization operates. In fact, it is very important for employees to work in small teams.” Alignani is a subsidiary of Semco Cushman & Wakefield Real Estate Company's CEO, during his six or seven years in office, the company achieved great success. In its heyday, growth was slower, but still growing. However, Semler held discussions with U.S. shareholders and proposed that Alignani leave, as he believed the slowdown in the company's growth was due to the leader's personal abilities reaching the end of his rope.

"Are you crazy?" Everyone asked Sammler, "He started his business with three people, and now he has more than 1,000 people!" Sammler replied: " Yes, but his era is over and his cycle is over. He can't adapt to the new market." Everyone was stunned when they heard this.

In fact, before letting Alignani go, Samler once sent him an email: The first meaning of the expression is that your era is over; second, despite the fact that your The era is over, and it's time for new people to take over. There are few people in the world who can see the good in others and improve themselves. Are you one of them? We'll give you 6 months to find out.

After six months, he came back and said that I could no longer stay on. Semler appointed a girl in her 20s to take over his position. She restructured the company and the business grew by 30% in one year.

Of course, Semler did not actually fire Alignani, but assigned him to the place where he first started his business to engage in Semco's manufacturing management. He tripled operations over the next two years. The traditional method of company training is, "I want to train you to become the person I need." But what Semco promotes is: learn what you want to learn, and I am sure I can find a suitable job for you.

The turnover rate in various industries is growing slowly, increasing by 0.8 or 0.9 every year, which means that people will generally get bored of the work they have done for a period of time. Before they actually resign, they are already dead. This creates a reality-avoidant approach to curbing the tendency to become bored with work.

How difficult it is for companies to adapt to employees spending 10 or 20 percent of their workday being distracted. In the worst case, we have to hire 10 more people to make up for it. And, strategically speaking, this diversifies the risk of having to hire people to work who are not needed in the first place. And they may also become stumbling blocks in the future.

So, for absent-minded employees, Semler actually allowed them to take leave for up to three years for any reason. Some of them may leave forever, but others want to come back to work a year after they leave. He believes that this is a management system that is very in line with human nature and can often enable employees who take leave to regain their passion and confidence while taking a break.

Regarding the sensational "retirement-retirement" policy, Sammler believed that it was essentially a one-time cash transaction: "I will sell you your Wednesday, and you can also sell it to you at a certain date in the future." Buy that Wednesday back in one day."

Semler even believed that GM's famous Jack Welch's practice of firing the bottom 10 employees every year was a kind of "mini-terrorism."

He felt that Welch was losing a huge investment because these people could continue to be useful by changing their job positions, or could be utilized in another way. Today's creative business world requires the integration of hundreds of talents, free thinking and leaps of faith. Sammler resented companies having core figures, which he felt would weaken the company's ability to move forward on its own. The only way he found to avoid this problem was to stay as far away from management as possible. Therefore, he did not set up an office at the company's headquarters for 10 years, and could be absent from the company for two to three months in a row.

Semco managers have never been afraid of Semler. For example, he was recently expelled from the strategy committee. He was asked before, "Why are you on this committee?" and his answer was, "I don't know, because I always have been." Samler was later told that you were rejected from the strategy committee because of this stupid answer. Outside the door.

One of Sammler's most critical concepts is that core people are not conducive to business and stability, because the state of employees is the true state of the company. What Samler did was reduce his own importance, but the result was that employees remained loyal to him.

Because of his tolerance for employees, employees never mind the mistakes he has made. The employee said to him, "That's not your fault. Everyone makes mistakes. Our losses are already much less than other companies."