FOREWARNING “Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits.”
—SATCHEL PAIGE
NEVER MIND THE CHEESE—who moved my weekend?
I’m serious. Where did it go? One minute Saturday and Sunday formed an oasis for rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation. The next thing we know the cell phone is ringing, e-mail is piling up, and the fax machine is vomiting paper onto the floor. Paradise lost. Welcome to the seven- day workweek.
I’ve got a much better idea, though, one that I’ve been road testing now for many years: the seven-day weekend. If the workweek is going to slop over into the weekend—and there’s no hope of stopping that from happening—why can’t the weekend, with its precious restorative moments of playtime, my time, and our time, spill over into the workweek?
It can and, I believe, must happen. In fact, the seven-day weekend is already happening at Semco, an unusual company that I’ll introduce you to in the pages ahead. What you are about to read is a combination of a political manifesto, a business case history, and an anthropological study. Before you shudder, groan, and heave the book across the room, I’ll hasten to add that it’s also a road map to personal and business success. We have to find a better way for work to work. The seven-day workweek is shaping up as a personal, societal, and business disaster. It robs people of passion and pleasure, destroys family and community stability, and sets up business organizations to ultimately fail once they’ve burned out their employees and burned through ever more manipulative and oppressive strategies.
The seven-day weekend approach is an alternative that bridges the gap between the airy theories of workplace democracy and the nitty-gritty practice of running a profitable business. I warn you, it’s messy, inefficient, and hugely rewarding. I’ve chosen the metaphor of the seven-day weekend as an anchor. You’re welcome to take the turn of phrase literally or figuratively. But don’t kid yourself: I’m not talking about abolishing work. A seven-day weekend, however pleasant a fantasy of endless strolls on the beach, will mix work time with personal time in new and possibly disconcerting ways. Don’t worry, though—it also doesn’t imply that you’ll be forever tethered to your laptop. Your first reaction may be dismay at the loss of your conventional weekend; after all, we naïvely define weekends as free time, personal days, idleness. But that definition is outdated. The traditional weekend and workweeks ended long ago. This book faces that fact and explores ways of making work more fun, and of finding a balance between work and private passions, so both can be significantly gratifying.
To do that, we must reorganize the workplace, both physically and culturally. At Semco, we’ve spent twenty-five years doing just that, primarily by constantly questioning the way we do things. When we started, everyone said we wouldn’t last. Now Semco employs three thousand people working in three countries in manufacturing, professional services, and high- tech software. But even now, I continue to hear that our experiments could never work anywhere else. Yet we go on proving that in redistributing the weekend across the workweek, our employees find balance and Semco makes money. In that regard alone, we are an excellent business case study. We fit neatly into any MBA examination of success.
It’s very simple—the repetition, boredom, and aggravation that too many people accept as an inherent part of working can be replaced with joy, inspiration, and freedom.
That’s what I wish for everyone who reads this book.
Ricardo Semler
(Lying in a hammock with a laptop and my little boy, having fed the ducks at a nearby pond)
On a Monday in May
ONE
ANY DAY
n Ask why?
n Give up control.
n Change the way work works.
I’M A CATALYST, AND that’s why I was on a ten-hour Varig flight from Sao Paulo to New York, fastening my seat belt and making sure the tray table was in an upright and locked position for landing.
You read that correctly the first time—catalyst. By definition a catalyst, usually an enzyme, initiates a reaction. The way I handle the role is by broaching weird ideas and asking dumb questions. Strictly speaking, I’m a highly evolved CEO, as in “Chief Enzyme Officer.”
As such, I was fated to make the trip the moment I casually said to my Semco colleagues, “I bet we can get the phone number of the Rockefeller Group by calling information. It must be listed, don’t you think?” It was. Like a good enzyme, I even offered to dial the number, too, since I was perched on the front edge of my desk, a favorite spot that allows me to get to my feet quickly to end meetings that start to drag.
“Oh, Mr. Mirante, you mean,” the company operator said when I blandly asked the name of Cushman & Wakefield’s president, pretending that I had just suffered a slight memory lapse.
“Yes, Mr. Mirante. Would you ring his office please?” Cushman & Wakefield is the commercial real estate arm of the Rockefeller Group. When Arthur Mirante’s secretary picked up the phone, I told her that I was calling from Brazil. For some reason that worked magic— maybe she had a secret fantasy about attending Carnival in Rio—the next thing I knew President Mirante himself was on the line.
It took about three minutes; record time, considering he didn’t have a clue about me or my agenda. I explained who I was—leaving out the bit about being a catalyst—and suggested that we get together face-to-face to discuss a business proposition. My new friend, Arthur, agreed without pressing for details.
Now, standing in the cab rank at JFK Airport, having been stranded by a no-show limo driver, I experienced my latest pang of misgivings: “Cushman & Wakefield is going to agree to partner with an obscure Brazilian company? Get serious, Ricardo. This is one weird idea that’s about to fizzle.”
A cacophony of Indian sitar music provided the sound track for my trip through Queens to midtown Manhattan. I asked the cabbie to turn it down, but he couldn’t hear me over the noise. Ears ringing, I got out on Fifth Avenue, wended my way past the famous ice-skating rink (in springtime hibernation), noted the façade of Radio City Music Hall with its flashy neon marquee, and entered the high-rise domain of one of the world’s largest real estate management firms.
I whisked through the revolving door and sailed straight past the security desk without stopping, affecting the bearing of a Rockefeller scion (Rocky Ricardo?), a little game I used to play prior to 9/11. I was pretty good at looking like I knew where I was going; guards rarely stopped me for ID or destination checks. (Alas, those days are over in the United States.) The elevator ride to the thirty-sixth floor gave me just enough time to review my predicament without triggering full-fledged qualms. Surrounded by hundreds of engineers, brokers, and high-end property managers, I was about to propose that Semco, a company with zero experience in real estate, join forces with the Rockefeller family to handle the nitty-gritty business of facility management in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.
I introduced myself to the receptionist and moments later was sitting on an opulent silk- covered sofa wondering if I had been wise to wear jeans and a blazer. The doubts about my attire were almost instantly reinforced when into the office suite strode Arthur Mirante II, tall and stylishly draped in an elegant, Italian-designer suit that reeked of many fittings by cadres of attentive artisans.
His firm handshake and warm, open smile put me at ease. I reminded myself that I was supposed to be having fun and so, presumably, was he. I noticed that he gave my jeans a quick sideways glance of appraisal. We bantered a few moments about not usually setting up meetings based on a three-minute phone call, or flying ten hours on the same flimsy pretext, and then quickly got down to business. I summarized my proposal, emphasizing Semco’s background in manufacturing and maintenance, but Mirante looked disappointed.
“I’m sorry you came all the way for this, then,” he said. “The problem is we don’t make much money in that business. It mainly supports our other real estate interests.”
I countered that I was confident we could make a business out of it in Brazil. Mirante asked if I really wouldn’t be more interested in the brokerage business. I confessed that my knowledge of real estate started and ended with buying my home.
With that the executive shrugged and took me to see his facility management people. Afterward, I suggested that each of us put up $2,000 to cover the legal expenses of establishing the venture. We’d be fifty-fifty partners. Arthur agreed, we shook hands, and off I went in a hurry to pick up tickets to the New York Philharmonic, have lunch with the writer Peter Carey, and hit the legendary Strand bookstore for three hours of browsing their stock of used and remaindered books.
That was April of 1993. A year later, the Semco Cushman & Wakefield joint venture employed 150 people and did $4 million in business. Today, it employs 1,300 people and has gross revenues of more than $65 million.
Why am I telling you this story, much less starting a book with it? For one thing, you couldn’t concoct a more outrageous and unlikely combination. Staid, proper, blue-blooded Cushman & Wakefield united with casual, off-the-wall, planning averse, nearly anything goes Semco. Talk about an odd couple! But I contend the strangeness is its strength. There’s resiliency, flexibility, and sustainability to the venture that would be lacking in a more conventional pairing.
Even so, my purpose is much more subversive than merely recounting an unlikely success story. I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it’s dead and buried the better off we all will be. Incendiary words, yet Semco’s alliance with Cushman & Wakefield, as well as other joint ventures that I will...
