MAVERICK - some notes.
June 13, 06 by BharaniSome notes from ‘Maverick’ book….
Hepatitis Leave
When people tell us they don’t have time to think, we ask them to consider what would happen if they suddenly contracted hepatitits and were forced to spend three months recuperating in bed. Then we tell them to go ahead and do it.
Self-set Salaries
Why not let our managers set their own goals and, when the year was over, decide the extent to which they had met them. From there it would be a relatively simple matter to award themselves the appropriate bonus. And no one would dare complain about the fairness of the system, since the managers would determine their own salaries.
“How much money do you need to earn to live comfortably’, I asked her, watching her face flush and her brown eyes cloud over with bewilderment. “How much money do you need so that you will leave for work in the morning with the feeling that you are fairly paid; so that you won’t be tempted to look for another job.” A few days later she told me she wanted to be paid $20,000 a year, which was a shade higher than she had been making!
Semco refines the criteria further:
We asked them to consider four criteria: What they thought they could make elsewhere; What others with similar responsibilities and skills made at Semco; What friends with similar backgrounds made; and how much money they needed to live. To help them with the first two, we gave them a salary survey from Semco as well as national surveys compiled by leading consulting companies.
At the end of the exercise, Except for half a doze people, everyone set salaries that were in line with our expectations. In five of six exceptions, people set salaries lower than we had projected. It wasn’t easy to get them to raise their figure, either!
As a matter of corporate philosophy, we try to keep our top salaries within ten times our entry level pay,which is in stark contrast to the rest of the country, where a top manager’s salary can be 80 times as much as a worker’s.
Our people know salaries account for most of our operating costs, and they thing about our six-month budgets when they set them. It is easy to solve a budget problem by eliminating a salary that seems too high, and no one wants to stick out.
Obviously, our people are keeping their salaries in check because of their concern about Semco’s welfare. In good times and bad, self-set salaries have encouraged our workers to take that rarest of corporate perspectives, a long-term view. And they have the added virtue of eliminating complaints about pay, which are always among a company’s most contentious issues.
When business is good, people in the programme make a lot more money. When it isn’t, they are helping us cut expenses and lowering their profiles in case cost-cutters are called out.
Lost in Space:
Every year, we choose at least one young person from among our applicants from business or engineering schools or even high schools. These extremely fortunate souls have no job description, no boss, no responsibilities. They are free to roam through the company for a year, so long as they work in atleast 12 departments and try to generate enough revenue to cover their salary. At the end of the year, they are free to negotiate a more permanent arrangement with any of the departmens in which they served.
You don’t believe me? Try this test at your next meeting. When some important item comes up, say that it’s better not to discuss it now because a related issue was decided that same morning that will change things considerably. Then after a few moments of apprehensive silence, say that you just can’t discuss it now. I’d be surprised if you haven’t become the most powerful person in the room. You know something the others don’t - atleast that’s what they think!
Time Management:
1. Begin at the end. Set a certain hour at which to leave the office and obey it blindly. If you take work home at weekends, establish a 60-day programme to halt this insidious practice.
2. Sift through that stack of papers on your desk and decide which are most important. (Deciding that everything is important is cheating. Start again). As you go through, divide the papers in to three categories:
- Priority items, which require your personal attention and represents matters of indisputable importance. Don’t put more than five documents in this.
- Items that can only be handled by you, but can wait. Think hard about whether you are really the only one who can deal with the item. Practice “Test of seventies”. Ask yourself: “Is it possible that someone else could do this task at least 70% as well as I could?”. If the answer is yes, then let him.
- Items you think would be good to look at, but never quite get around to.
3. The key to self-management is self-esteem. You must maintain it even though you may not be as well informed about some essentially meaningless report or arcane issues as your associates. You must be prepared to got a meeting and endure comments such as, “You mean you didn’t read”. Better to suffer the humiliation of saying you didn’t and ask someone else to be kind enough to summarize it than to have had to read all the articles that cross your desk.
I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about 20 to 1. With that in mind, my advice is to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Start being proud of not being aware of everything. The reward will be an opportunity to THINK.
4. Think hard before accepting that invitation to lunch or to visit a supplier or to make a speech.
5. Rationalizing time during meetings:
- Begin on time.
- Don’t start a meeting without first setting a time to stop.
- Go over the agenda in front of everyone.
- Delegate to one or more people any item that might take more time than is allotted for it.
- Don’t have meetings that last longer than 2 hours.
- Be a bear about interruptions. The only excuse for breaking into a meeting is a customer with a problem.
- Transform as many meetings as possible into telephone calls or quick conversations in the hall.
