The 4-Hour Workweek

This book can help shake up your persepective on work!  You’re programmed to view work a certain way (aka 9-to-5), and Tim Ferriss challenges all kinds of work and life assumptions here in the book.

It’s well written, and you may not look at work the same way again.

Tim has a great blog at www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog.

The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

I LOVE this book – even more than the 4-Hour Workweek (sorry Tim!)  This company’s amazing – an example of how values like trust, commitment, enjoyment and freedom can create an amazing culture and $300 millino company.  Work doesn’t have to be ‘work’!

Even if you don’t want to recreate this kind of culture (which is an extreme form of self-determinism), it has a lot of great nuggets that any business owner could use as ideas in improving their own business.  Here’s a taste of how things are different at Semco:

• Employees determine their own working hours
• Employees hire their bosses
• All employees rate their bosses twice a year and all ratings are published
• HR has been almost abolished, because leaders need to be able to treat their employees right themselves
• Employees choose their own salaries / comp structures
• ALL meetings are voluntary and open to everyone
• The Board meetings are open to everyone, and include employee representation

Excerpt / Chapter One on FastCompany

CEOFlow (though it’s early) will be a roadmap to the Seven Day Weekend.

UPDATE: AAAAGH!  It looks like this book is out of print!?!  Look around on Amazon for it…there are various versions, paperback, Kindle, etc., that aren’t $50+…do some digging.  But get it!  If you can’t, his prior book is almost as good: Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace

The Four Agreements

This is one of those rare books that people buy extra copies of just to have on hand to give to people.  The day/day after I read The Four Agreements, I looked at people and the world a different way.  In order to really create the 4-Hour Workweek or Seven Day Weekend, it helps to have the right attitudes when dealing with yourself and others. The Four Agreements is a short, well written book that helps you get a better understanding of, well, life. Read it!

I think most people will need a certain amount of life experience in order to be ready to really connect with this book, so if you’ve read it before and didn’t love it – try it again every few years.

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