Book Review: Maverick! by Ricardo Semler
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by Todd Bowles – 3 CommentsMaverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace
Personal Binary Review: 1
Entertaining, easy to read, interesting ideas, storybook format.
Business Binary Review: 0
Lessons more applicable to large manufacturing corporations struggling with outdated organisational structures and ideas, less applicable to younger, more agile organisations not run by dinosaurs masquerading as men.
The basic point of the entire book, is that Semler is a renegade, who implemented the idea of empowering his employees (in Brazil of all places) and actually treating them like people, and it paid off. I know, shocking, right?
Still, some interesting points:
- Complete transparency to the inner workings of the company, including employee salaries. Everyone knows everything.
- People set their own salaries, which allows for voluntary cuts during hard times, and raises and bonuses during good times. System isnt open to manipulation, because everyone knows everything from the point above.
- Challenge anything, anywhere, anytime and have people in power who will listen.
In summary, interesting, entertaining story but business lessons not really applicable to us.
[...] the fact that I read the book 15 years ago now, my recollection is that this was one of the core points in Semler’s book – i.e. it’s a big step beyond just being nice to employees (and in my view it’s not even the [...]
[...] a Leader/Managers core role is really just to help others within the company to deliver (a bit like Richardo Semler’s philosophy).
[...] As part of our commitment to Life-Long Learning, I asked Todd to have a read of this book as well.