Ricardo Semler

Shoaib Ul Haq
Purpose of work
• Making money TO making the workers feel good about life
• Employee participation
• Profit sharing
• Free flow of information
• Build and maintain employees’ sense of personal worth

• Develop a responsible ecosystem in which employees can

continuously learn and grow as individuals.
Semler’s principles
• Trust
• Reduce control
• Self-management
• Extreme stakeholder alignment
• Creative innovation
Quotes
• “If we do not let people do things the way they do, we will never
know what they are really capable of and they will just follow our
boarding school rules”.

• “People are responsible adults at home. Why do we suddenly

transform them into adolescents with no freedom when they reach
the workplace?”
Lattice organizational structure
• Self-managed groups
• Direct lines of communication – person to person – with no
intermediary.
• No fixed or assigned authority
• Sponsors, not bosses
• Natural leadership as evidenced by the willingness of others to follow.
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.
Lattice ways to build careers
Workplace
democracy
Semler’s innovation
• Profit-sharing plan
• 25% of the profit will be distributed to divisions
• Work teams are autonomous
• Hire and fire co-workers and bosses with a democratic vote.
• Free flow of company information

• Increased responsible management

• Ethical transparency
• Authority sharing
• Continuous learning and growth for employees
Matrix organizational structure
Case questions
• Will you join Semco? Why or why not?
• Choose any large Pakistani firm. If you had to implement Semler’s
ideas in that firm, how will you do it?
• What are the boundary conditions for Semler’s ideas? What are the
background conditions needed to implement Semler’s ideas? Can we
only implement these ideas in Brazil?