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Workgroup 3OB
Individual Assignment: Semco Style
Back in the early 80s, Ricardo Semler was nothing but a spoilt brat: He was the son of
Antonio Curt Semler, who owned Semco, one of Brazil’s most successful manufacturing
companies. Ricardo took over from his father while still a law school student and barely 21
years of age. He walked around the company, making observations and completely
disapproving of how Semco worked. As the new boss, he had tremendous power and very
little respect for conventions.
Semco then was an autocratically styled company. The powerful ruled, and the wise obeyed.
There was a fixed hierarchy, huge power distances, and no room for people to use their
creativity. Highly bureaucratic in nature, Semco had lots of “confidential” information that
the privileged few used to play power games. In short, it was a “regular” company. Ricardo’s
entry signalled a new chapter – full of daring actions and transformation. Way back in the
80s, Semco was one of the first companies to experiment with democratic management
principles: principles that put people before processes.
What is the Semco Style? The 5 Pivotal Principles of Semco Style are:
Building trust and transparency as the core of your organization model and treating
adults as adults;
Busting silly bureaucracy with common sense and minimum alternative controls to
help leaders be in control rather than controlling;
Creating the space for self-management to flourish by empowering people and
giving them autonomy to make decisions;
Fostering extreme stakeholder alignment between all players through clear
definition of roles, expectations and perspectives in daily work and, finally;
Allowing creative innovation to flow from anywhere in the organization, supported
by experimentation and continuous learning.
Today, the Semco Style reflects the learning from 35 years of trial and error. Their
impressive growth rate (average 46.5% for the past 20 years), and extremely low employee
churn rate (less than 2%), are testimony to the success of the new style.
1. Please conduct a ‘quick and dirty’ scan on the internet and/or (grey) literature to get
a clear picture of what the Semco Style entails.
It focuses on humans rather than processes. It aims at finding a healthy balance between
work and private life. It wants its employees to be happy and work with satisfaction. They
give trainings to consultants and companies on how to improve their work to be more
satisfying for the employees.
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