The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

In the end, it’s an exchange that works: Out go mission statements, credos, and the control they exert; and in come self-interest, principles arising from practice, and a developing set of values. As control wanes, creativity and shared values bloom. An army that fights for what it believes in arises from this harvest of ideas, varied practices, an

Organizations rarely believe they’re to blame when an employee underperforms, but if the organization doesn’t provide the opportunity for success, it’s their fault when people falter.

Wisdom is what you get by asking why….”

Besides, every one-year plan that I see has all the good things happening in the second half.

Each group of six to ten people, once every six months, puts together the numbers for their unit.

To keep turnover low, we remind Semco employees to make sure that they are where they want to be, and to make sure that they are doing what they want to do. If they’re not sure, we’ll bend over backwards to find a completely different area or completely different type of work for them, just as we did for Lucia Kobayashi.

The fact is, you don’t have to like people to work with them, and finding compatibility of purpose at work does not require surrounding yourself only with those you like. You can admire people, even if you don’t like them.

The first Human Resources departments date to the turn of the century and blossomed because managers were uncomfortable dealing with personnel issues. Over time, it became accepted that managers couldn’t recruit, train, place ads, hire headhunters, do career plans or employee reviews, and serve as an objective third party.

If workers weren’t working at the same time, the assembly lines would grind to a halt. Okay, we knew that, but so did the adults who work on it. And why would they jeopardize their output, their jobs? If they didn’t care if the assembly line moved or stopped, then we’d have a much graver problem, and the sooner we found out the better. I was confid