Ricardo Semler
Ricardo Semler
Ricardo Semleris the CEO and majority owner of Semco Partners, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. Under his ownership, revenue has grown from 4 million US dollars in 1982 to 212 million US dollars in 2003 and his innovative business management policies have attracted widespread interest around the world. Time featured him among its Global 100 young leaders profile series published in 1994 while the World Economic Forum also nominated him...
NationalityBrazilian
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryBrazil
I am not interested in...making sure that you (the employee) are here, that you are giving us so many hours a day. We need people who will deliver a final result.
No-one works for money alone and tapping into what people want from their careers and what they have to offer is essential.
Growth and profit are a product of how people work together.
People are too keen to follow standard preconceptions of how organisations should work. All too often, we feel that we are unable to make changes and so hope that someone, somewhere in your organisation knows what we are doing and what the overall aim is.
The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralism, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship. But there will be few companies that can afford to ignore either of them.
People have a reservoir of talent worth discovering. They just have to be given the opportunity to discover it in themselves
Human nature demands recognition. Without it, people lose their sense of purpose and become dissatisfied, restless, and unproductive.
Forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest ... concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of all challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning.
If we do not let people do things the way they do, we will never know what they are really capable of and they will just follow our boarding school rules.
People are responsible adults at home. Why do we suddenly transform them into adolescents with no freedom when they reach the workplace?
In life, we do not give employees enough leeway. If you look around Semco's office, there are plenty of empty desks. The question is - where are these people? I do not have the slightest idea, but I am not interested.
One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best.
The purpose of work is to make the worker - whether a working stiff or a CEO - feel good about life.
I once worked it out - after $12 million, all millionaires are the same. That's because we're all humans, confined to human scale. How many homes can you live in? How many meals can you eat? You can have a living room the size of a cathedral, but you won't live in it. It's too big.