Today, at my office, we had a TV film crew in from Chan­nel 4’s Richard and Judy Show.
The inten­ded pur­pose, accord­ing to an email sent round the com­pany was

“They are plan­ning to run a fea­ture around a Brazilian ‘guru’ who has some rad­ical views on work­ing prac­tices, includ­ing hav­ing ‘rest’ ham­mocks in the office, and would like to obtain the views of a selec­tion of indi­vidu­als on what they think of this and his other ideas.”

“All we ask is for a bit of co-operation from a few of you to answer a ques­tions on camera.”

A second email was sent to cla­rify the situ­ation fur­ther:

“Just to add to my pre­vi­ous e-mail, the sort of ques­tions they will be ask­ing tomor­row are:
1. If you could set your own work­ing hours/perfect day what would it be? (eg come in at 7am, 2 hour lunch etc)
2. If you could set your own salary what would it be? (all bonus-related? etc)
3. What would you do if you were the boss for the day?”

OK. That all sounds fine. Quite reasonable.

But what happened, as far as I can see, is that they faked a lot of stuff! They were film­ing scrip­ted parts for people, they had a bunch of people put on their coats and filmed them walk­ing in through the front door as if it was morn­ing! At one point they turned the lights off in one part of the office and filmed one guy pre­tend­ing to be work­ing late! Appar­ently a couple of people were taken off to a local pub at lunch­time and filmed, pre­tend­ing to have an after work drink.

Now, it may be that the inter­views also went on, and people were able to give their opin­ions, but I find the whole thing rather bizarre.

Had I done a little research I’d have found this page (third art­icle down: The Joy Of Work: Ricardo Semler) on R&J’s site which per­haps goes some way towards explain­ing what was going on.

“We will also see a short film of what happened when people empower­ing happened for a day at web design firm, Zendor, in Manchester.”

Inter­est­ingly, if you look at the third art­icle on this page you will see a dif­fer­ent emphasis:

“We talk to Ricardo about how he makes this work and will see an amus­ing short film of how such prac­tises worked when tried out at a web design com­pany in Manchester.”

On top of all this, it was very dis­rupt­ive, des­pite the ori­ginal emails prom­ise:

“I will do my best to ensure the crew go about their job whilst caus­ing as little dis­rup­tion as pos­sible to your day.”

What with doors into the office being blocked off because of film­ing; and the turn­ing off of the lights affected a large num­ber of people. I had to wait for one per­son to get to a meet­ing because he was ‘film­ing’. Plus there was a gen­eral ‘buzz’ around the office which made it quite hard to con­cen­trate at times.

Edit: I should note that the show will be going out on Monday’s Richard and Judy show. It’ll prob­ably be on in the office (we have sev­eral TV’s scattered about which are always on) — another dis­trac­tion, but I’ll have to try and tape it.

Second Edit: There is an inter­est­ing art­icle on Ricardo Semler’s man­age­ment prac­tices over at the BBC World Ser­vice in a com­pletely unre­lated art­icle. His philo­sophy looks very inter­est­ing, and has worked very suc­cess­fully in the case of his own com­pany. Worth a read.