I spent some time yesterday watching interviews with Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler, after watching his TED talk. Somehow a lot of the people I’ve been learning from lately have been businessmen, which is interesting. I think as business has become one of the central activities of modern life a number of the smartest and most effective people are drawn there. Whether or not this is the way society should be is debatable, but it’s the way it currently actually is, so there are things to learn. Semler expresses in his personal ideology a very interesting blend between control and freedom. Early on in the business he took over from his father in Brazil he abolished the concept of working hours or forcing people to come to an office, or generally tracking and understanding what everyone was doing all the time. He found that minimizing worker alienation was a key driver of productivity and unleashed a highly autonomous model, within the framework of capitalism. The company grew from 3 million in revenue to 212 million, with all appearances of success and business sustainability.
The idea of relinquishing hierarchical control to allow people to make enlightened local decisions is in my opinion a powerful one. The people close to the ground always know what needs to happen next, whereas distant management rarely does. The model that Semler proposes, and uses, is to set goals like “we need x by x date” and then leave it to the people executing to figure out. Maximizing individual autonomy within a framework of shared goals seems to lead to less alienation, and to me appears more humane. The mechanistic industrial model proposes that workers be treated like interchangeable widgets that can be easily replaced. It is organized for the benefit of those at the top, it collapses complexity and forces everyone and all activities into the same mold. This is of course at odds with the heterogeneous nature of humanity. People are probably more varied and different than we have the capacity to understand, so trying to simplify them into uniform robots is bound to lead to alienation. Alienation of course leads to friction, resistance and loss of productivity. By allowing workers greater agency and autonomy, the goals of capitalist owners can still be realized, but alienation can be decreased.
I think this type of model of highly autonomous organizing is worth exploring further. One of the insights that I received from Ray Dalio’s book is to look for situations in which there are two opposing outcomes and try to find the solution that provides as much as possible of both good outcomes, rather than accepting a single binary option. In the context of the problem of alienating hierarchical capitalism vs totally engaged anarchy, I think Semler is onto something. He has created a system which provides better outcomes for the involved humans, without rejecting or overturning the existing capitalist system. I think if we pursue some of these ideas further and perhaps layer in concepts like the benefit corporation, which does not have the same fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits and grow, or worker cooperatives or ownership then maybe we can move towards a model of organization which can exist in the current system while minimizing harm to it’s members. While many of us on the left agree that unfettered capitalism is destructive and predatory, I believe we still need to engage with and understand it’s workings in order to create the systems and structures that may lead to it’s eventual replacement. I think Semler’s concepts make a valuable contribution in this regard.
