Maverick [antikvár]

1 NATURAL BUSINESS Every Wednesday afternoon dozens of men and women file through the front gate on their way to a third-floor meeting room at Semco, the company I lead in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The guard at the entrance has been expecting them. For years now, executives from some of the biggest and best-known companies in the world, IBM, General Motors, Ford, Kodak, Bayer, Nestlé, Goodyear, Firestone, Pirelli, Alcoa, BASF, Chase Manhattan, Siemens, Dow Chemical, Mercedes-Benz, and Yashica among them, have been making an unlikely pilgrimage to our nondescript industrial complex on the outskirts of the city. Semco manufactures an impressively varied roster of products, including pumps that can empty an oil tanker in a night, dishwashers capable of scrubbing 4,100 plates an hour, cooling units for air conditioners that keep huge office towers comfortable during the most sweltering of heat waves, mixers that blend everything from rocket fuel to bubble gum, and entire biscuit factories, with 6,000 separate components and sixteen miles of wiring. But it's not what Semco makes that has executives and management experts the world over waiting months for a chance to tour our plants and offices. It's the way the people of Semco make it. When I took over Semco from my father twelve years ago, it was a traditional company in every respect, with a pyramidal structure and a rule for every contingency. But today, our factory workers some-