Relation Between 'the Maverick' and 'the Corporation'

Organizational behaviour is the study of what people think feel, and do in and around an organization. This could be at an individual level, team/group level, or organization wide. The book and movie combination chosen are: Maverick, by Brazilian author Richardo Semler, and the movie The Corporation by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bankan, to look at two different perspectives of organizational behaviour in businesses.

The word maverick means a lone nonconformist, as an intellectual, an artist, or a politician, who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates. This is truly what the book represents in how differently an organization can be structured, run, and managed. The novel touches on almost all the organizational topics such as motivation, employee involvement, decision making/creativity, power influences, and corporate culture. Ricardo Semler believed in diversification, autonomy, participation, democracy, and transparency for his newly inherited Semco marine pump manufacturing factory.

Semco was owned and created by his father, Antonio Curt Semler who was a traditional business man. He built it from the ground up. Having orthodox views on the company, with typical hierarchy, standard factory rules, lack of diversification, and little involvement Ricardo Semler changed the organizations corporate culture. However, before all of these radical changes Semco was like any other organization with strict procedures, many steps and supervision, much diversification and acquisition, as well as a full load of stress at the age of 25. This was his epiphany moment, when he went on a business trip to Boston and visited the hospital there. He received a full check up, and was found fully health just with an advance case of stress. The doctor told him he should take 2 aspirins every 4 hours, however this would not cure him, just remind him he had a problem that Ricardo needed to fix on his own. When he got back to brazil he created