A CEO broke the Rules!

"... Ricardo Semler is a CEO who decided to break the usual rules of coroporate decorum.  At age 21 he took over Semco, a family business in Brazil.  Semler promptly threw out all sorts of rules.

There would be no dress code.  No one would check expenses.  "Spend what you need to, and the company trusts you."  There would be no storeroom padlocks or audits of petty-cash accounts for veteran employees--people who'd grown to be trusted by Semco.  Workers would come and go according to their own schedules.  They would even choose their salaries and their own supervisors!  

This makes no sense to me, and I'm sure control freaks in human resources departments (Semco has no HR department) had heart attacks.  Ricardo's ideas sounded absurd by normal business standards, but it was a big boost to morale, and the company has done well.  Even during Brazil's recession, profits increased 500 percent.  Sales grew from a few million dollars per year to more than a billion dollars."