Extraordinary Organizations: $170M company with no titles except “plant” manager

http://venturehacks.com/articles/extraordinary-organizations

by wheels • 18 years ago

16 17 18 years ago

venturehacks.com

wheels• 18 years ago

This seems to be patterned after the Brazillian organization, Semco.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/apr/27/theobserver.o...

lazyant• 18 years ago

Yes, I wonder why Ricardo Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler and Semco is not mentioned more frequently.

I enjoyed his book "Maverick" a lot: http://tinyurl.com/7l6mfp , the newer 'Seven day weekend" is not bad either.

byrneseyeview2• 18 years ago

Officers and directors: Ferdinand E. Megerlin Ph.D. > Chairman of the Board

Allen J. Carlson > President, Chief Executive Officer, Director

Tricia L. Fulton > Chief Financial Officer

Jeffrey Cooper > Officer

Peter G. Robson > General Manager of Sun Hydraulics Limited

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=sun+hydraulics

I guess they don't have many titles.

gruseom• 18 years ago

But aren't these simply reporting requirements for a public company?

byrneseyeview2• 18 years ago

I didn't think of that!

But it appears not to be true; Royalty Trusts (e.g. http://finance.google.com/finance?q=pbt) list very few executive officers.

Edit

And here's a non-Royalty Trust with fewer executive offices than Sun Hydraulics:

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AMEX:SOC

But it does seem that they have fewer executives than any operating company of a similar size.

jsrfded• 18 years ago

Their employment page also lists jobs titles that they are hiring for:

CNC Machinist / Senior Product Design / Outside Sales Engineer

Clearly they have titles. Perhaps the vagueness of the article is actually indicative of it not being very accurate or telling the whole story.

dgabriel• 18 years ago

My first instinct was also to verify the "no titles," thing at the employment page.

nivi• 18 years ago

Thanks for the diligence guys. I pinged the original author of the article. He says:

http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/01/no-titles-exc...

"They do have the handful of titles required as a public company... CEO, CFO, and the like. As of last January when we visited, that was it. Presumably they also have to "title" job postings so people know roughly what skills they're asking for!"

stella• 18 years ago

What is it called when a blog reposts 80% of the content from another site?

Anyway, this is the original article: http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/01/no-titles-exc...

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

DaringFireball?

gjm11• 18 years ago

Er, no. John Gruber posts a lot of links, but what he doesn't generally do is to copy-and-paste someone else's stuff and try to make it look like he wrote it.

wmf• 18 years ago

Blogspam.

It would be interesting if HN could reparent/merge votes and comments in the case where two links to the same thing get submitted.

pmorici• 18 years ago

sounds a bit like the company that makes GoreTex...

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/WL-Gore-amp...

aditya• 18 years ago

Reminds me of Nucor. It is twisted and surprising that companies that think about their employees' happiness first are not the norm, what we do have is megacorps with CEOs that make billions and let everyone else suffer, especially customers.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982075....

diN0bot2• 18 years ago

industrial democracy is awesome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_democracy

diN0bot2• 18 years ago

"The company recently held a party to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the last time [Semler] made any decision at all. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/apr/27/theobserver.o...

jderick• 18 years ago

It makes some sense. It seems to be to be a sort of "fine grained capitalism". Not too different from the Silicon Valley, if you think of that as one big company. What I wonder is what prevents more companies from going this route?

Extraordinary Organizations: $170M company with no titles except “plant” manager

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