Book Review: Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler
As with Maverick, I really like this book. It is actually a little bit more insightful and answers a lot of questions that people might have about his management style. If you didn’t know about Ricardo just yet, read my review of Maverick first.
Now to this one. He starts the chapters with a few sentences to get you in the thinking mood. For example the first one:
_1\. Why are we able to answer email on Sundays, but unable to go to the movies on Monday afternoons?
2\. Why can’t we take the kids to work if we can take work home?
3\. Why do we think the opposite of work is leisure, when in fact it is idleness?_
Now I will try to get you in the thinking mood a bit more by a quote about Semco from the book: _Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy — no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget…_ For a new employee coming in from Arthur Andersen they paid a handsome salary but did not give him a desk, or a title, or business cards.
I am actually at a loss in relation to summarizing this book because it needs to be read and appreciated. I will give you more to think though be quoting a few more of his introductions.
_Success and Money are Distant Relatives_ _
1\. Why do people have to stick to a career choice they made as an unprepared adolescent?
2\. Why doesn’t money buy success if almost everyone measured their success in cash?
3\. Why do billionaires greedily accumulate money, only to donate it to ethereal concepts such as world peace?
__Management By (O)mission_ _
1\. Why do we tell our employees that we trust them, then audit and search them when they go home?
2\. Why does our customized and carefully crafted credo look like everyone else’s?
3\. Why do we demand and go to war for democracy as nations, yet accept with docility that no one has the right to choose their own bossed?
__A Long Line of Pied Pipers_ _
1\. Why do we have a flock mentality and follow rams that turn out to be wolves?
2\. Why do we think we are equipped to choose schools, doctors and mayors, but don’t trust our capacity to lead ourselves at work?
3\. Why do we continuously look for saviours and hereos to lead us?
__Rambling into the Future_ _
1\. Why do we think that the future ‘is in God’s hands’ and then pre-plan every moment of it?
2\. Why do we think intuition is so valuable and unique — and find no place for it as an official business instrument?
3\. Why do we agree that living well is living every moment, without reinforcing past or future — but then spend most of our work lives dealing with historical data and future budgets?_
All this might sound weird from time to time, and you might think you have an answer (and sometimes you might even do) but the papers between these lines hold a lot of insight into how we can think differently if we just dare to do so.