The Seven-Day Weekend Quotes

“Profits must be judged as moral or immoral by how they are earned and how they are disposed. Without a new barometer, we are left with the old barometer—profit for its own sake, regardless of whether it is sustainable or ultimately ruinous. But over the course of a seven-day weekend when a reservoir of talent is tapped, a calling is found, a true, well-rounded definition of success is established, people may realize they’re working not for the money but literally working for and on themselves. And what a liberating realization that is.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“One good question and one good answer are services to all. A sure sign of a troubled company is one where employees don’t care enough to ask and, if that’s the case, they’ll never care enough to fully deploy their talent. Just as curiosity is an antidote to boredom and indifference, the informed are more likely to remain interested, engaged, and alive with purpose.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“It’s the same with people. Purging dead wood inevitably creates another predicament. People soon find themselves working in a reign of terror, their creativity and conscientiousness smothered by fear. It prevents an organization from learning from its mistakes. Process is paramount to knowledge, and mistakes are powerful catalysts for the process.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“But Zeca already felt something the older executives had yet to learn—that status, power, and even money are sometimes not enough to make a job interesting.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Managers aren’t looking for ten- or twenty-year change programs—they want simple, objective goals: profit, growth, healthy quarterly reports, trained people, orderly markets, competitive advantage. Until these organizations face reality, give up the futile quest for control and begin to respect such concepts as workplace democracy, the need to question everything, and the search for a more balanced existence, even the most modest goals will be beyond reach.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“But uncontrolled variables are what make dreams come true. If we change the way work works we can live the dream of work-life balance and sustainability.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Intuition, luck, mistakes, serendipity—there you have four vital business concepts that every manager should know.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“At Semco, you are what you do, not what or whom you control.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Even so, these symbols still cause quite a fuss. Thirty percent of all issues in organizations are what I call boarding school stuff: rewards and punishments, how to dress, what time to show up, how to address superiors, how to behave properly. Even worse, they include fodder for the “green-eyed monster,” jealousy, things like why somebody got a raise and somebody else didn’t, why she got the better client account, or why he was asked to join the board.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Exchanging the old boss for a new boss is not situational leadership. True situational leadership—flexible, effective, evolutionary—can only arise from self-management. And that means that situational leadership doesn’t change fundamentally with circumstances. It is always about giving up control.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“On two occasions, the person I had chosen as airplane captain came through as environmental leader in this second exercise. These exercises reinforced my belief that leadership indeed depends on the situation. As circumstances change, leadership must change. A certain set of skills, instincts, and personality traits may be perfect today, but useless tomorrow.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“The acting CEO cannot be blamed or credited for the company’s performance, and that makes the system independent of the CEO. Blame or credit falls on each manager and employee. The CEO should be the quarterback, not God. In a sense, it makes us like Switzerland, where many citizens have a hard time remembering their President’s name. Solidarity comes as a consequence of collective action, and not from one personality.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“So we did what we always do when there is dissent: nothing. We believe blindly in the virtues of dissent. We don’t want a crowd of brainwashed workers. We don’t want them to sing company songs, memorize company mission statements, and learn to speak only when spoken to.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“The stress-free workplace that is most productive is the one where workers respect each other’s differences.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“What lubricates the process for us is faith—faith supported by experience—that employees can pursue their self-interest and fulfill the company’s agenda at the same time. If there’s a match or alignment between what we want and what they want, the results will be twofold: While they’re busy satisfying themselves, they’ll satisfy the company’s objectives, too. They succeed, we succeed.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“An idle, wandering mind is not the devil’s playground, as the Puritans believed, but a garden of rejuvenation, growth, and contemplation.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“When I asked once at a medical conference if anyone knew of an organism that enjoyed perpetual growth, someone said cancer and pointed out that it eventually kills its host.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“NEVER MIND THE CHEESE —who moved my weekend?”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“What’s important to understand about the seven-day weekend is that by redesigning the architecture of time, we can make room for work, leisure, and idleness. All three can coexist and harmonize together to produce happiness and a sense of purpose.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Semco’s most precious asset is the wisdom of its workforce, and our success grows out of our employees’ success.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“What you are essentially advocating at Semco is harnessing the wisdom of people,” a friend once told me. “Their reservoir of talent, the natural wisdom of the system, the wisdom that only comes from freedom, the wisdom that emerges however unevenly from democracy. Wisdom is what you get by asking why….” I wish I had said that first, but I didn’t so I’ll second it.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“At times, intuition can lead to mistakes, although maybe less often than numbers-based decision-making. We’ve made our share of intuitive mistakes at Semco. Life is full of mistakes. But you won’t catch me subscribing to the new age management mantra—to err is human, but erring twice is not so hot. I don’t buy the notion that we must carefully study our mistakes in order not to repeat them.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Winning the lottery isn’t luck, it’s an accident. Spending the proceeds wisely is luck.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Information supports intuition, and that’s why we make our facts and figures available to everyone, from assembly line workers to senior executives. Businesses usually want such information to project numbers into the future, but precise facts and numbers are only helpful if they’re used to enhance decision-making, not as the basis for it.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“do is make the revenue and profit projections rise 5 to 10 percent per year. If this seems simplistic or silly, just look around for a company that forecasts it will grow 7 percent, then drop 4 percent, then merge with a competitor, then rise 8 percent, and then fall another 11 percent. I’ve never seen a business forecast like that, even though that’s how most end up. They all show their numbers getting bigger every year, rendering the exercise useless.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“We’re in favor of a hierarchy of self-interest and talent and opposed to the symbols of power and control that come with it.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“Moreover, in my view, obtrusive and intrusive leadership becomes counterproductive by interfering with the free interplay of individual talent and interest.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“I explained that when we hire a worker he or she is told simply that we think it’s a wonderful thing that they have two eyes and that we hope they’ll keep both of them. But we add that it is up to them to take the necessary precautions, and we will never mention the subject again. The BBC journalist said he was amazed that he never found one Semco worker on the floor without glasses, whereas at factories sporting warning signs it was just the opposite—workers seemed to go out of the way to disobey and not wear the glasses. That observation gave me the opportunity to expound on the idea of treating workers like intelligent adults and, of course, to extol the virtues of self-management.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

“This may not seem like leadership in action, but it is. Successful leadership isn’t dictatorship. It injects fundamental ideas and processes into the bloodstream of an organization and of individuals who see things the same way but lack the leverage to carry them out on their own. As a one-man or one-woman protectorate of a humane, sustainable business process, the leader sees to it that new ideas emerge and bloom when the timing is right. Dictators come and go, and when they go the dictatorship goes with them. When a true leader departs, the company he leaves behind is healthy, self-governing, vibrant, and intact.”
― Ricardo Semler, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works