Book Review: Maverick!
Posted on January 1st, 1994 by Paul McArdle – 5 Comments.
I was initially bought (or was given?) a copy of this book back in 1994-1995, when I was working back at Stanwell Power Station (in the last days of the QEC).
The reason I had the book back then was that it was aligned with some of the principles being trialled/implemented at Stanwell station at the time.
I read it back then, and have not since, but some main points still stick out for me…
Binary Review
I appreciated the opportunity to read it back then.
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The Book |
What we thought |
 “Maverick”by Ricardo Semler |
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A good read at the time |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
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As part of our commitment to Life-Long Learning, I asked Todd to have a read of this book as well. Todd has already posted his comments about the book here.
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Additional Comments
Todd’s already given you the general idea.
The specific points I want to bring out are as follows:
1) Ricardo inherited the company at a young age and introduced massive change. There was an economic crisis at the time which contributed to the need (and probably made acceptance to change easier) but there may have been other stimuli as well.
(a) My reading of the book is that he went way beyond mere lip-service to buzzwords like “empowerment” – he actually did it.
(b) What that meant, in a nutshell was that he (as a leader):
i. Gave responsibility to his employees to deliver
ii. Allowed them to determine what to deliver and how;
iii. Gave them the authority to make investments, changes, etc as necessary to achieve; and
iv. Stepped out of the way and really entrusted them to deliver.
2) Coupled with the true nature of empowerment was the fact that he also allowed them to set their own salaries (which, coupled with the fact that all salaries are publicly known within the company, achieved great alignment).
These are the ones that I still remember, 15 years after reading…
(We have already started down the path of the 1st point – not without hiccups – and the guys have been charged with implementing the 2nd at a recent Beer O’clock Session)
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[...] As one example - the station sent a number of employees to a seminar in Brisbane at which Ricardo Semler was speaking (I did not go, but somehow ended up with his book) [...]
[...] a Leader/Managers core role is really just to help others within the company to deliver (a bit like Richardo Semler’s philosophy).
[...] that talking about salary is a sackable offense. This is very different from the viewpoint given in Maverick (see the earlier book review), in which the author promoted the viewpoint that everybody should [...]
[...] in general; 2)
[...] In two prior articles on this blog, we have highlighted two different mechanisms which (in my view) achieve the same objective: 1)