Maverick

Ricardo Semler's account of running Semco, his family's Brazilian manufacturing company, describes one of the most unorthodox workplaces in business. In 1980, at 21, he took over the firm his father founded and dismissed an entire echelon of senior managers. He then let employees set their own production quotas and schedules, study the company's financial statements, take part in decisions and share in profits down to the factory floor. A twelve-layer hierarchy became three concentric circles, and a Semco Lexicon explains practices such as job rotation and sabbaticals. First published in Brazil as Turning the Tables, it became the best-selling nonfiction book in that country's history.

Buffer co-founder Joel Gascoigne put it on his list of 50 books that transformed his business and life, valuing how Semler questions assumptions such as whether growth is even good.