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Once you say what business you're in, you put your employees into a mental straitjacket and hand them a ready-made excuse for ignoring new opportunities. So rather than dictate his company's identity, Ricardo Semler--the majority owner of Semco in Sao Paulo, Brazil--lets his employees shape it through their individual efforts and interests. "I don't know what Semco is," he writes in this first-person account of his company's expansion from manufacturing to Internet services. "Nor do I want to know." The author shares some of the lessons he has learned: Forget about the top line. Never stop being a start-up. Don't be a nanny (treat your employees like adults). Let talent find its place. Make decisions quickly and openly when it comes to reviewing proposals for new businesses. And partner promiscuously: "Our partners," Semler says, "are as much a part of our company as our employees."

Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian industrialist whose company, Semco, manufactures marine equipment, food-service machinery, and other highly differentiated products. Semco has long practiced unusual but successful management innovations, but when the Brazilian economy took a turn downward in 1990, empowerment, profit sharing, self-set salaries, and other policies were no longer enough to ensure survival. The only solution was to cut permanent staff and contract out more work. But instead of contracting it to strangers, Semler gave the contracts to his own workers, setting them up in business with generous severance settlements and an offer to lease them Semco's equipment, on- or off-site, and to defer lease payments for two years. The transition was painful, but only one satellite has failed, while most ex- and semi-employees do very well with ad hoc compensation systems.

Semco S/A is a manufacturing company in Brazil where workers make corporate decisions, set their own hours, and have access to monthly financial figures. The company's management philosophy is antihierarchical and perhaps unorthodox, but its profits are handsome. The company operates on the basis of three key principles: work force democracy, profit sharing, and free access to information. Democracy lets employees set their own working conditions; profit sharing rewards them for doing well; information tells them how they are doing.