Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace

Semler inherited his father's Brazilian manufacturing company at twenty-one and proceeded to dismantle almost every feature of conventional industrial management — no organisational chart, no dress code, employees setting their own salaries, managers being reviewed by their reports. The company not only survived but thrived, and Maverick is his account of the experiment. For product direction the book is useful not as a playbook (Semler himself says it is unrepeatable) but as a case study in how radically organisations can be restructured if the experiment is pursued seriously. Read alongside McCord's Powerful and McChrystal's Team of Teams for complementary radical restructurings. The book is dated in places but the argument is not.