The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

Is there a bigger headache in business than follow-up?

monthly and addresses practices by management that may be at odds with the current values of Semco as a whole. Two of these board of trustees members have a seat and vote on Semco’s board of directors, and an agenda time allotment to bring up and negotiate whatever they find necessary.

Employees must be free to question, to analyze, to investigate; and a company must be flexible enough to listen to the answers. Those habits are the key to longevity, growth, and profit.

We circulate questionnaires and ask them whether they feel like coming to work on Monday morning, whether they trust their leaders, and whether they believe everything we say in our internal and external communications.

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

Got a problem? Change. Still got a problem? Change again. Change has become the all-purpose solution.

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

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

No one learns to think beyond the instructions in a manual if there’s no room for intuition.