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Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace

Ricardo Semler · 15 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
Semler turned his family's business, the aging Semco corporation of Brazil, into the most revolutionary business success story of our time. By eliminating uneeded layers of management and allowing employees unprecedented democracy in the workplace, he created a company that challenged the old ways and blazed a path to success in an uncertain economy.
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
There is an excellent book called 'Maverick' about a Brazilian manufacturing company that, while not owned by the workers, gets much closer than almost any other business. I highly recommend that all founders read it

https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workp...

Cyph0n
Very interesting.

The first successful non-hierarchial company that comes to my mind is Valve.

I recall reading that Valve has a higher revenue per employee than any company in the world...

Edit: profit, not revenue

jessriedel
Seems to me the causality works the other way. Industries where companies are formed from a small number of employee who are individualy quasi-millionaries (elite SV talent) are more likely to function well without a heirarchy than industries built on coordinated entry-level manual labor (Walmart).

Also, I don't really get this claim. Valve has ~360 employees with annual revenue under a billion dollars,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

whereas there are ten companies in the S&P 500 with over $3M in annual revenue per employee.

https://priceonomics.com/which-companies-have-the-highest-re...

Perhaps the comparison is only supposed to be to other tech giants like Apple, which are roughly $1-2M per employee.

Cyph0n
> Also, I don't really get this claim. Valve has ~360 employees with annual revenue under a billion dollars,

Looks like I was wrong: Newell claims that Valve has the highest profit per employee.

I'm sure the numbers are not accurate, but that is still a very impressive figure for revenue/employee.

Semco. You may want to read Ricardo Semler's book http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl... it's 20 years old but for some reason it's not a classic in startups or US business environments (edit: oh I see someone mentioned it). He wrote a more recent book I haven't read: http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-... anyone with comments on this one?
'Maverick', by Ricardo Semler, was written in 1988 and is well known among business types:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553/

SEMCO, to me, is the best example of this. While they haven't fired all of their managers, they are a very large company doing self-management in a whole bunch of different verticals.

Books by the SEMCO founder, Ricardo Semler:

Maverick - http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

The Seven Day Weekend - http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works-...

I think what he's saying is he read this [1] instead and then decided to put it in practice... again.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

You're not alone. Here's an early variant of such a policy. SEMCO, a Brazilian company run by Ricardo Semler, has since 1980s had the policy where people could set their own salaries.

Some excerpts off his book on 37signals: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/945-excerpts-from-ricardo-sem...

His book: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

Holacracy is an instance of organizational democracy, but it's not new - I took a holacracy seminar 6 years ago. Kudos to Medium for using the framework though - it's one of the few that lays out, soup to nuts, how to run a democratic company.

There are many companies that operate using democracy as an organizing principle - Semco is the great-granddaddy of them all (two books - Maverick[1] and the 7 Day Weekend[2] - were written by Semco's founder, Ricardo Semler, about how Semco operates).

Other well-known democratically-run companies include Zappos, WL Gore, DaVita (a $12B company), and Dreamhost.

If you're interested, take a look at WorldBlu[3] for more - they've been building a community of these kinds of companies, have tons of resources on their site, and even have a conference on organizational democracy.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Works/d...

[2] - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0446670553

[3] - http://worldblu.com/

Feb 12, 2013 · eitally on Think Like a 5-Year Old
I'm pretty certain this article is a ripoff of Ricardo Semler's "3 Whys" technique he described in his book from 1995 (http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...). Not that this is a bad thing, but there are many more, better articles describing this using more clinical language and providing guidance for real management application.

Here are a couple of top Google results: http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/forget-empowerment-ai...

http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/personal/ebihari/

and even a version of The Art of War: http://www.worldmarkacademy.com/moodle/file.php/1/3.pdf

Ricardo Semler has done this with his business(es) in Brazil. His book about this, 'Maverick' is a decent read. http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...
Has any tech company used fully disclosed salaries as described in Mavrick [1][2]? It's an intriguing idea.

Mavrick describes how all salaries were publicly posted. People see exactly where they are in relation to others. Of course this created tension at first, but eventually things settled. The magic happens during hiring. An open position's salary is also public, and everyone on an interview panel naturally ranks candidates versus current employees. Is the candidate better than Joe? She better be because she'll be making more than Joe.

Has anyone heard of a tech company doing something like this?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

Jul 13, 2010 · zackola on Good to Great
This book is one of the worst pieces of business writing I've ever read. Not that I've read a ton, but read this instead: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

Good to Great features abstract bullshit with virtually no concrete practices. If you're not a details person, by all means read good to great and use a divining rod to try to steer your company to success.

I'll echo the recommendation for Maverick, I believe that it was (maybe still is) the top selling book in Brazil. http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...
If you've never read it, I highly recommend the book that details his company Semco. According to Amazon it is the best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil's history.

http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

rimantas
And I would recommend his another book "The Seven-Day weekend" even more. It was written later and ideas are better tested ant crystalized there. If "Maverick" leaves someone doubtful that this can be true then "The Seven-Day weekend" may convince those :) But anyway it takes some guts to run business this way.
I don't think it's fair to measure work by any standard other than "I feel what I'm doing is productive."

Wonderful statement. Only in extreme cases does it seem untrue for thought-workers.

If you're interested in the idea of people simply declaring their productivity (and worth), Maverick by Semler is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553

"Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem."

I would say Mediocre hires hurt you THRICE. Twice for the reasons you mention, and the third one is all the good folks leaving since they can't stand mediocre people.

One big company that seems to do well, at least from the outside is Semco in Brazil. Watch Ricardo Semler's "Leading by Omission": http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/ and read his book "Maverick": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553. This is of course an anomaly since most companies don't work this way.

arvid
I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can check out their website: http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/
rms
Something about that design and the icons makes me feel vaguely happy. That's a good emotion for an industrial equipment manufacturer to elicit...
neilk
One of my favorite books.

And note, this company (originally) had nothing to do with hacking or technology. If it works for a manufacturer of heavy equipment, in a unionized shop, how much better can it work in software?

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