Out of this world: Doing things the Semco way

Management controls, heterarchy and innovation: a case study of a start-up company

“…This lack of formal budgets at TechCo (where there was no external financing) is consistent with Dávila and Foster (2005) who found a positive relation between the introduction of external financing and the use of formal budgets. There is also evidence that it is possible for even large organizations to succeed where managers have made a conscious choice to never introduce formal controls such as budgets (O’Grady and Akroyd, 2016) or to discontinue their use (Semler, 2007; Lindsay and Libby, 2007; Hope and Fraser, 2000). Therefore, the lack of budgets at TechCo was not driven by the size of the organization, its age or its lack of external funding but rather, by strategic considerations, reflecting a desire to be innovative (cf.…”

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“…The education system, therefore, employed a process that conditions students to compete with each other for grades Kohn (2006); the teachers lecture students for an hour or less even if they are not interested, while students are expected to shift their focus to another subject as soon as the bell rings, several times in a day (Gatto, 2010); the knowledge is compartmentalized into disciplines to the extent that the big picture is obscured in the process (Gatto, 2010); the teachers are often told by some authority what exactly needs to be taught in the class irrespective of what teacher's or student's curiosity may aspire at any given moment (Grusky, 2019); the students are required to remain obedient to the demands of the teacher throughout their educational experience even if these demands make no sense to the students (Javaid et al, 2021). Such a system has been considered inapt by experts (Semler, 2007) for developing students who are, for example, visionary, self-aware, self-learners, collaborative, self-driven, creative, intuitive, and entrepreneurial, simply because the internal processes within this British-made education system are designed to do the very opposite, that is, to turn students into obedient workers of a bureaucracy (Fukuyama, 2011;Mitra, 2015).…”

“…A huge body of literature has been discussing how exactly the modern education system is problematic even from the standards of liberal democracy. Many experts have come up with alternative designs which fall into the categories of self-directed learning (Mitra, 2015) or project-based learning (Semler, 2007), or a combination of both. The individual teachers can be the same in the alternative design, but due to the rules and processes deployed, the outcome can differ substantially.…”

Control in holacratische organisaties: een verkennend onderzoek naar de controlmechanismen achter zelfsturing

“…Bijvoorbeeld: de bestseller van Frederic Laloux gaat over holistische organisatie ontwikkeling en evolutionaire zelfsturende bedrijven, waarbij de Nederlandse thuiszorgorganisatie Buurtzorg en Holacracy worden aangehaald als voorbeeld (Laloux 2015). Of de Semco Style van Ricardo Semler met zijn organisatiemodel van platte organisaties met ruimte voor autonomie en vertrouwen (Semler 2007). Of, recenter, Humanocracy (Hamel and Zanini 2020), met als doel organiseren zonder bureaucratie.…”