I grabbed a copy of CIO Insight magazine at the NetWorld+Interop show last week and was pleasantly surprised to see an interview with Ricardo Semler.
As an extra bonus, the online version of the magazine also has an interview with Tom Malone. I've mentioned both Seven Day Weekend and The Future of Work, but haven't reviewed either of them yet.
I am about 3 chapters into Seven Day Weekend and it's more radical and thought-provoking then I even expected. It's definitely not just about flextime, as the title may suggest. It's about totally rethinking every assumption about how business operates from someone who's done just that and built a $212M (and growing) company. Nothing is a given or "that's the way things are" for Semler or his employees.
Check out the interviews at CIO Insight (have only had a chance for a quick skim myself):
- Expert Voices section on "Ricardo Semler: Set Them Free".
- Web Extra section on Tom Malone and his book The Future of Work.
Snippet from Semler's interview:
Last week CNN spent four days with a bunch of our guys probing in all directions, and they concluded that our people balance their lives much better, and that there's an unusually high number of people who take their kids to school, etc. But a recent statistic of ours shows that 27 percent of our people are online on Sunday at 8 p.m.— 27 percent. So they probably do work hard.In some ways it's an unforgiving system, because you have to figure out your own answer for how to best spend your time. When you don't come in on Monday morning, absolutely nothing happens. But when you're sitting on the beach Monday morning at 11 o'clock, and you're the only one on the beach—that's a different story. Maybe then it's worth it to work a little harder. No one really knows how to measure the value of that moment.
From Malone's interview:
The right answer in nearly every economy is some combination of centralized and decentralized. The art of the future will be to know which things to centralize and which things to decentralize.
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