What if your job didn’t control your life? Radical wisdom from Ricardo Semler | Hacker News Reader

What if your job didn’t control your life? Radical wisdom from Ricardo Semler

ted.com

3 pointsukigumo6 comments

All the inventions in robotic automation and office automation has given huge improvements in efficiency the last decades, and will continue to improve efficiency. It's only appropriate to let workers have more spare time.

Absolutely. But we will need to change our leadership style, or our leaders if that's what it takes, to reap any benefits from innovation.

Okay, if we didn't report vacation days, how would it stop me from taking 3 months of vacation and using the time to work on my startup?

In essence, two things:

- Your ability to do your job and meet your obligations. If you can take 3 months off and still meet the expectations set for you then that might be ok. It might also be a sign that you need a bigger challenge, but that's a different topic.

- Yourself. If you transform yourself from a serf that works for money into a key contributor in an enterprise, then the quality of your engagement with your employer changes to a level where you feel responsible and accountable for both your own success and that of the company.

"Yourself. If you transform yourself from a serf that works for money into a key contributor in an enterprise, then the quality of your engagement with your employer changes to a level where you feel responsible and accountable for both your own success and that of the company."

If this is the case, will "key contributors" also take the risk as well? So if a company starts losing profits, will they have a variable monthly income? My guess is no, which is why we don't have more business owners.

Don't we already take a risk by trusting our income (for most of us, our financial security) to a single company?

If profits go down for your employer, your job may be at risk even in companies that operate in a rigid post-industrial revolution management style where you are forced to be at least 40h in the office.

As to why we don't have more business owners, I think that is caused by cultural and educational pressures to conform which then causes us to believe there will always be someone else who will take initiative for us, lead us, or give us a job. But, this is just my opinion of course.

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