externalidades (por Diego Mariño)

Redesigning the sustainable workplace

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). Technology hasn’t freed more time for leisure. On the contrary, it has eaten away at the weekend and left it devoid of the power to restore strength and happiness to the souls of those who toil.

Global companies don’t practice democracy. You might argue that the shareholding structure is democratic, that each share contains the right to vote in an annual assembly of investors. But that’s not democracy, and you can tell by sitting at a shareholder’s meeting—just look at management’s grip over companies, the board’s lack of small shareholder representation, and the dictatorship of stronger investors over weaker ones. Add to that all the family businesses and companies that have one majority partner each, and you’ve got an overwhelming number of organizations that dispense with democracy as an unnecessary and senseless constraint. In its place, a structural hybrid has taken root that mutated out of the crossed genes of war and of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Global capitalism today fits Winston Churchill’s view on democracy: It’s the worst system, except for all the others. But that’s hardly reassuring. As a consequence, the number of poor people in the world is increasing steadily, despite constant increases in GNP and lip service about the benefits of globalization and shared wealth. I believe the time for organizations designed on the twentieth-century model is over, especially those based unknowingly on the Communist or military models. Redesigning the sustainable workplace for the twenty-first century means letting in fresh air and giving up control.

That’s easy to say, and hugely difficult to do. Asking why is terribly distracting for most CEOs. 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.

Semco’s case history and its consistent performance ($100,000 invested in Semco twenty years ago would now be worth $5.4 million) vouches for our financial success. If this book has planted the smallest seeds of doubt in anyone inclined to be wedded to the past, and more substantial kernels of hope in those actively looking for a better way, writing it will have been worthwhile. Readers who are not managers may be intrigued with what they find here, but I fear that many will be frustrated because they won’t believe it applies to them. Adopting the Semco way seems out of reach; they have no power.But they are wrong.

We all have enormous amounts of latitude, be it with our children, in social gatherings, or at work. Ideas underpinned by values are living things and forces to be reckoned with. Let’s apply them to the workplace too. Let’s understand and reject the temptation to bow to the command-and-control legacy. People who trade rush hour for idleness or who think about what they are doing in a new light—in other words, people who start living a seven-day weekend—can make a dramatic difference for themselves as well as for others. People who have two employees working for them can change two, five, or ten lives. That’s a lot of significant, sustainable change.

I remember reading about a company where employees came up with practical solutions to a difficult situation. The director exclaimed: “Ah, I can see you’ve come up with a plan that works in practice…. But will it work in theory?” Good question.

Ricardo Semler - The seven-day weekend