Spike 28 Nov 05

Looks awesome. Ordered.

Rimantas 28 Nov 05

Agreed. This and the sequel “The Seven Days Weekend”.
Highly recommended, indead.
At first it may look like too good to be true, but later you are convinced.
Many things Semler talks about are mentioned in Collins’ “Good to great” and “Built to last”…
If even a tiny bit of corporations would follow… But it takes guts.

Benjy 28 Nov 05

Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve been starting to compile my vacation reading list and like to mix novels with business books… This has been added to the list.

Rob Sanheim 28 Nov 05

Thanks for the heads up, looks very interesting. It reminds me a bit of the story of Patagonia (see _Let My People Go Surfing_) and, to a lesser extent, Gore (of Gore-Tex fame).

Chris Wright 28 Nov 05

An acquaintance of mine was promoted to general manager of a medium-sized white collar business several years ago. He was an advocate of the practices displayed in this book, and changed around the culture from being a rigid hierarchical organization to a flat, close-knit team with a host of extended benefits (flexible working hours, free gym memberships, etc). Considering this happened over a decade ago in Australia, it was a new experience for staff and they felt great knowing the directive for such changes had come from the GM, not a HR rep.

The result was a massive sustained increase in performance, and many of the people there later said those were the best working years of their life. Unfortunately the parent company was eventually bought up and the team was absorbed into a corporate giant, but there are definitely some lessons that can be applied to white-collar businesses despite Semco being more industrial.

Dhrumil 28 Nov 05

Dude, Seven Day Weekend, Semler’s second book is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better!

jonathan segal 29 Nov 05

Semco and Ricardo Semler’s approach to business was and is a driving factor towards the creation of our company. We’ve been working at building in some of the exact same principles.

Although it hasn’t been easy, the approach is so radically different that it has resulted in a lot of random attention in such a small market as Fiji.

It’s a learning and growing experience, for sure…quite simply, it’s based on employee and business trust.

Bill Seitz 29 Nov 05

those amazon-inside pages have expired - could you give us a snippet to search for?