Seven Day Weekend [Hardcover]

Semco, Ricardo Semler's privately held Brazilian company is hard to describe, mostly because it looks and acts so different from what we expect a company to be. That's why Semler devotes the first chapter of Seven Day Weekend to telling us what Semco is and does and what makes it a different place to work. At the end of the chapter, he says this:

"Although I still can't definitely answer the question about what Semco does do, I can say we've changed the way work works and improved the quality of our lives - and so can you."

After reading Seven Day Weekend, I still can't tell you exactly what it's about. But I can say that it will change the way you think about work and open up new possibilities for you.

There's a lot of talk these days about changing the workplace and making it more democratic and self-organizing and participative. We've seen pieces of this at places like WL Gore and, more recently at Best Buy. We've read the business press articles and pundit opinions.

But the fact is that if we are going to see significant workplace change on a large scale, there will need to be more companies that act like Semco. The owners of those companies will have to try things out and show us. That's what Ricardo Semler has done.

If you want to see how the wisdom of crowds works out in a company, it's in here. If you want to see how democratic principles work out in management, that's here, too. And if you want to see things about self-organizing and self-managing work groups and chaos theory, that's here too.

But Seven Day Weekend is not a how-to manual. You won't come out of it with a bunch of checklists or bulleted lists of sure-fire techniques. You will improve your understanding of a few key points

* People can be trusted to make decisions that are not only in their best interests, but in the company's best interest.

* In most cases, following the natural law of things works at least as well and often better than trying to control and direct.

* Strategy Semco-style is about building on talents and following ideas and not about master plans.

You will want to know if Semco has been successful in a traditional business way. It has been extravagantly successful, growing revenue and profits at 40 percent per year for two decades. Not only that, the company survived the convulsions in the Brazilian economy in the 1980s and 1990s.

And you'll want to ask Ricardo Semler about how he works as CEO and how he controls things. Here's his answer.

"I don't. I let the system work for itself."

The bottom line is that you should read this book because it will give you a window into a very different way of working and organizing a business. It's a system that's uncommon as well as uncommonly successful. And it's a system we can learn from.

Seven-Day weekend is the second (English) book by Richardo Semler, the CEO of Semco. Semco is a weird Brazilian company known for it's modern HR practices. The history of Semco and Ricardo Semler was explained well in his first English book: Maverick.

The author makes a point that the workweek has invaded the weekend via internet and email. Now it's time to abandon the standard week/weekend thinking and have weekend whenever we want and have week whenever we want. So we'll have a seven day workweek AND a seven day weekend.

The book is a collection of stories and opinions by Richardo which are organized according to the days of the week. Every day a couple of stories, mostly about Semco but also about other activities in which Richardo was involved in.

Some of the more interesting points and stories are, for example, where the author is questioning the need to always grow. In business it seems to be the purpose of the business to grow bigger. Richardo questions this purpose and asks why this is. Cannot companies stay small and then still be successful?

Seven-day weekend is certainly worth reading. It's a small book it takes maybe a day to read it. Its well written, it keeps you awake and the stories are interesting. Though, I personally found it less interesting than Maverick (which I had read first). If you need to chose between the seven day weekend or Maverick, I'd go for Maverick. If, after Maverick, you still do not have enough of Semler, then the seven-day weekend is for you.

Written with engaging enthusiasm and frankness, the 14 essays in this book have titles like 'Let the Followers Lead', 'Do it your Way - See if I Care', 'Too Much Talent is as Bad as Too Little'.

Collectively they demonstrate the enormous business success - over 20 years - of a philosophy, culture and practices that are totally radical in comparison with 'conventional' business.

Yet they are based on the commonsense principles of democracy, trust, transparency, a shared search for new opportunities and better ways of doing things, and guardianship by the community of a shared set of values, beliefs and principles.

In the process of explaining how these principles work in practice, Semler blows apart just about every piece of conventional wisdom underpinning the behaviour of large public companies - Semler's Semco remains privately owned. It is reasonable to question to what extent it could operate as it does if it were a public company - and whether it could be as successful as it is. Is the classic joint stock form becoming a 'dead hand', rather than a driver of progress?

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 20 reviews  4.8 out of 5 stars