Some interesting ideas from Ricardo Semler’s Ted Talk: How to run a company with (almost) no rules:

What if your job didn’t control your life?

  1. Start working through your bucket list now. Don’t wait until you are in dire straights to do so.

Instead of going mountain climbing when you’re 82, why don’t you do it next week?

  1. Employees are given freedom over what they ware, when they work and how they behave.
  2. Employees can buy back one day of the week for 10% of their salary.
  3. Employees are contracted for a piece of work and given autonomy.
  4. All leaders in the company must be interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. Every 6 months everyone gets anonymously reviewed as a leader. If existing leaders are graded poorly they are replaced.
  5. People are allowed to set their own salaries given three pieces of information:
  • How much money people make inside the company.
  • The market rate for a similar position in a similar company.
  • Whether the company can afford to give them the salary they want.

How do we design, how do we organise, for more wisdom?

  1. If an employee finishes all their work early they get to take the rest of the week off.

We said things like, we don’t want to see your expense report, we don’t want to know how many holidays you’re taking, we don’t want to know where you work.

  1. Information is open and democratic. The board has two vacant seats with the equal voting rights. Any two employees from the company can show up and vote on company issues. This keeps the board honest. Eg. Cleaners voting on the direction of the company.
  2. We know nothing about the important things in life:
  • Love
  • Death
  • Our purpose

If you say “I have to give back”, then you took too much.

  1. Free yourself from past achievements. Give yourself the freedom to start something new.

We’ve all learned how to work from home on Sunday night, but very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon.

  1. Ask yourself: “Why am I doing this?”.