We've been looking around for inspiration about how to make School of Everything an amazing place to work. One fantastic story is that of Semco in Brazil. When Ricardo Semler inherited the company in the early 1980s he began to wonder why democracy was something that was talked about in relation to government but never to companies.
Early on, he tried things like letting the employees choose the colour of paint in the factories. But as the workers starting taking control of more and more, Semco began to experiment in startling ways. The company started to let employees choose their own salaries. They said there should only be managers where employees deemed they needed them. They did away with secretaries and as many 'menial' jobs as they could. And perhaps most importantly, they did away with the traditional hierarchical pyramid of decision making. Almost no decisions were taken by the company board - they were taken by the employees themselves.
Of course there are some big differences between Semco and School of Everything so it doesn't all apply to us. When Semler took over Semco it was a large, established company with very simple metrics of success. School of Everything is a very small, start-up company. In many ways that gives us an advantage because we don't have to convince anybody that the old ways of doing things need to change. But it also means that at this stage we're really just setting the conditions for future growth. So what are we doing?
Well first of all, we have a policy of having open books. All the company finances are available for anybody in the team to look at. Then anybody can come to our Monday meeting with an idea for spending money. If they can convince the team it's worth a try, we go for it. All our salaries are also open. Everybody knows what everybody else is getting paid. And finally, later in the year when we do a salary review, salaries will be set and agreed by the whole team, not by the management.
There are a few other things we do that help - mainly to improve communication. Perhaps the most successful is that we have lunch together every day. It's amazing how much information you can share just by spending some time together away from the screens.
It's just a start, and we know we will sometimes struggle to blend decisiveness and democracy. But we think it's important to make School of Everything a place where everybody shares responsibility for decision making.
What else do you think we should we be doing? Or are we mad to be trying to put Semler into practice in a start-up?
- Ricardo Semler's book Maverick is available here
- You can download a Demos pamphlet I wrote called Disorganisation for free here
- Read about Pat Kane's Play Ethic (which was a massive influence on Disorganisation) here.
- And you can find out more about workplace democracy in this article by WorldBlu's Traci Fenton.
Comments
This is a great and interesting debate!
Totally agree with the spirit of openness, shared responsibilities and collaboratively building a company.
I think one key challenge is to enable a structure that can scale, as opening or closing up can become complex once specific processes are already in place. The hope is that one day School of Everything will be a team of hundreds: so the question could be: will practice X work with 100s of team members?
In general, I think the core of building a company that is open, fun and "disorganised" and that can remain such in time, is within the need of pinning down a set of guiding principles, which both reflect the company's vision, but also act as a beacon in terms of everyday decision making: "does X matter - is it coherent with our guiding principles?".
And to then deeply embed these principles clearly into the company's DNA, beyond it's founding team members, so that in time decisions, initiatives, developments and strategic direction can naturally flourish and do not always need to be taken by committee, as they are driven by a company DNA that and embraced within a team, and shared as the team grows.
I think you highlight an important point when you say that Semco was a big, established corporation while SoE is a small, growing startup. My experience from a number startups is that growing almost unavoidably means changes in how the organization works (while for established companies inducing change is often the problem).
This is for several reasons:
- There are more external partners to work whose requirements unavoidable shape the internal workings of an organization
- You cannot find big enough table to accommodate all the employees for a lunch and thus some coordination and control mechanisms must change
- The original innovation the company is founded upon matures and thus requires different kind of nurturing.
This does not have to mean that SoE has to lose its distinctiveness as an organization, but I think it is important to find the DNA of that distinctiveness behind surface impressions. It is about asking again and again: "Why does this organization exist?" and then working out what does it mean in the current situation. If openness is part of the company DNA and at the moment it means having open books, what does it mean in the future?
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