Ricardo Semler Quotes

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

But Zeca already felt something the older executives had yet to learn—that status, power, and even money are sometimes not enough to make a job interesting.

Ou seja, total capitulação da empresa à força da greve. A empresa começa com cara de Rambo e termina com jeitinho de Clodovil.

At Semco, you are what you do, not what or whom you control.

Intuition, luck, mistakes, serendipity—there you have four vital business concepts that every manager should know.

But uncontrolled variables are what make dreams come true. If we change the way work works we can live the dream of work-life balance and sustainability.

The stress-free workplace that is most productive is the one where workers respect each other’s differences.

Profits must be judged as moral or immoral by how they are earned and how they are disposed. Without a new barometer, we are left with the old barometer—profit for its own sake, regardless of whether it is sustainable or ultimately ruinous. But over the course of a seven-day weekend when a reservoir of talent is tapped, a calling is found, a true, well-rounded definition of success is established, people may realize they’re working not for the money but literally working for and on themselves. And what a liberating realization that is.

One good question and one good answer are services to all. A sure sign of a troubled company is one where employees don’t care enough to ask and, if that’s the case, they’ll never care enough to fully deploy their talent. Just as curiosity is an antidote to boredom and indifference, the informed are more likely to remain interested, engaged, and alive with purpose.

Este grupo (que inclui supervisores, chefias e diretores) tem uma particularidade unica - é um grupo constituido de profissionais que deixaram de ser empregados, mas não chegaram a virar patroes. Sao os Roberta Close da empresa.

So we did what we always do when there is dissent: nothing. We believe blindly in the virtues of dissent. We don’t want a crowd of brainwashed workers. We don’t want them to sing company songs, memorize company mission statements, and learn to speak only when spoken to.

Exchanging the old boss for a new boss is not situational leadership. True situational leadership—flexible, effective, evolutionary—can only arise from self-management. And that means that situational leadership doesn’t change fundamentally with circumstances. It is always about giving up control.

It’s the same with people. Purging dead wood inevitably creates another predicament. People soon find themselves working in a reign of terror, their creativity and conscientiousness smothered by fear. It prevents an organization from learning from its mistakes. Process is paramount to knowledge, and mistakes are powerful catalysts for the process.

On two occasions, the person I had chosen as airplane captain came through as environmental leader in this second exercise. These exercises reinforced my belief that leadership indeed depends on the situation. As circumstances change, leadership must change. A certain set of skills, instincts, and personality traits may be perfect today, but useless tomorrow.

What lubricates the process for us is faith—faith supported by experience—that employees can pursue their self-interest and fulfill the company’s agenda at the same time. If there’s a match or alignment between what we want and what they want, the results will be twofold: While they’re busy satisfying themselves, they’ll satisfy the company’s objectives, too. They succeed, we succeed.

The acting CEO cannot be blamed or credited for the company’s performance, and that makes the system independent of the CEO. Blame or credit falls on each manager and employee. The CEO should be the quarterback, not God. In a sense, it makes us like Switzerland, where many citizens have a hard time remembering their President’s name. Solidarity comes as a consequence of collective action, and not from one personality.

Even so, these symbols still cause quite a fuss. Thirty percent of all issues in organizations are what I call boarding school stuff: rewards and punishments, how to dress, what time to show up, how to address superiors, how to behave properly. Even worse, they include fodder for the “green-eyed monster,” jealousy, things like why somebody got a raise and somebody else didn’t, why she got the better client account, or why he was asked to join the board.

All 250 + episodes to date can be found at tim.blog/ podcast and itunes.com/ timferriss Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories (# 124)—tim.blog/ jamie The Scariest Navy SEAL I’ve Ever Met . . . and What He Taught Me (# 107)—tim.blog/ jocko Arnold Schwarzenegger on Psychological Warfare (and Much More) (# 60)—tim.blog/ arnold Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer (# 117)—tim.blog/ dom2 Tony Robbins on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 37)—tim.blog/ tony How to Design a Life—Debbie Millman (# 214)—tim.blog/ debbie Tony Robbins—On Achievement Versus Fulfillment (# 178)—tim.blog/ tony2 Kevin Rose (# 1)—tim.blog/ kevinrose [If you want to hear how bad a first episode can be, this delivers. Drunkenness didn’t help matters.] Charles Poliquin on Strength Training, Shredding Body Fat, and Increasing Testosterone and Sex Drive (# 91)—tim.blog/ charles Mr. Money Mustache—Living Beautifully on $ 25–27K Per Year (# 221)—tim.blog/ mustache Lessons from Warren Buffett, Bobby Fischer, and Other Outliers (# 219)—tim.blog/ buffett Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss—Dr. Rhonda Patrick (# 237)—tim.blog/ rhonda 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day (# 105)—tim.blog/ rituals David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken (# 195)—tim.blog/ dhh Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers (# 173)—tim.blog/ chrisyoung The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training (# 158)—tim.blog/ gst Becoming the Best Version of You (# 210)—tim.blog/ best The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline (# 55)—tim.blog/ pavel Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (# 38)—tim.blog/ tony How Seth Godin Manages His Life—Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (# 138)—tim.blog/ seth The Relationship Episode: Sex, Love, Polyamory, Marriage, and More (with Esther Perel) (# 241)—tim.blog/ esther The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency—Nick Szabo (# 244)—tim.blog/ crypto Joshua Waitzkin (# 2)—tim.blog/ josh The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg (# 61)—tim.blog/ matt Ricardo Semler—The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules (# 229)—tim.blog/ ricardo

If the people aren’t motivated, they don’t need to sign up for motivation training – they need a different job! They might rotate to another position, go to work in a different office, participate more in project meetings or find another way to work for us on a part-time, commission or representative basis. We can adapt if they can.” – Ricardo Semler

NEVER MIND THE CHEESE —who moved my weekend?

Ricardo Semler wrote a most interesting book about an including business culture (1995). He describes a Brazilian company that manufactured customized pumps.

An idle, wandering mind is not the devil’s playground, as the Puritans believed, but a garden of rejuvenation, growth, and contemplation.

When I asked once at a medical conference if anyone knew of an organism that enjoyed perpetual growth, someone said cancer and pointed out that it eventually kills its host.

What’s important to understand about the seven-day weekend is that by redesigning the architecture of time, we can make room for work, leisure, and idleness. All three can coexist and harmonize together to produce happiness and a sense of purpose.

This may not seem like leadership in action, but it is. Successful leadership isn’t dictatorship. It injects fundamental ideas and processes into the bloodstream of an organization and of individuals who see things the same way but lack the leverage to carry them out on their own. As a one-man or one-woman protectorate of a humane, sustainable business process, the leader sees to it that new ideas emerge and bloom when the timing is right. Dictators come and go, and when they go the dictatorship goes with them. When a true leader departs, the company he leaves behind is healthy, self-governing, vibrant, and intact.

I explained that when we hire a worker he or she is told simply that we think it’s a wonderful thing that they have two eyes and that we hope they’ll keep both of them. But we add that it is up to them to take the necessary precautions, and we will never mention the subject again. The BBC journalist said he was amazed that he never found one Semco worker on the floor without glasses, whereas at factories sporting warning signs it was just the opposite—workers seemed to go out of the way to disobey and not wear the glasses. That observation gave me the opportunity to expound on the idea of treating workers like intelligent adults and, of course, to extol the virtues of self-management.

Moreover, in my view, obtrusive and intrusive leadership becomes counterproductive by interfering with the free interplay of individual talent and interest.

We’re in favor of a hierarchy of self-interest and talent and opposed to the symbols of power and control that come with it.

do is make the revenue and profit projections rise 5 to 10 percent per year. If this seems simplistic or silly, just look around for a company that forecasts it will grow 7 percent, then drop 4 percent, then merge with a competitor, then rise 8 percent, and then fall another 11 percent. I’ve never seen a business forecast like that, even though that’s how most end up. They all show their numbers getting bigger every year, rendering the exercise useless.

Information supports intuition, and that’s why we make our facts and figures available to everyone, from assembly line workers to senior executives. Businesses usually want such information to project numbers into the future, but precise facts and numbers are only helpful if they’re used to enhance decision-making, not as the basis for it.

Winning the lottery isn’t luck, it’s an accident. Spending the proceeds wisely is luck.

Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).

Managers aren’t looking for ten- or twenty-year change programs—they want simple, objective goals: profit, growth, healthy quarterly reports, trained people, orderly markets, competitive advantage. Until these organizations face reality, give up the futile quest for control and begin to respect such concepts as workplace democracy, the need to question everything, and the search for a more balanced existence, even the most modest goals will be beyond reach.

What you are essentially advocating at Semco is harnessing the wisdom of people,” a friend once told me. “Their reservoir of talent, the natural wisdom of the system, the wisdom that only comes from freedom, the wisdom that emerges however unevenly from democracy. Wisdom is what you get by asking why….” I wish I had said that first, but I didn’t so I’ll second it.

Semco’s most precious asset is the wisdom of its workforce, and our success grows out of our employees’ success.

Advertisements with Semco’s name at the top ran in several newspapers asking for résumés via e-mail. Four hundred people replied. There were no rules for narrowing down the respondents. We didn’t want a list of requirements to limit our options, so the idea was to make the process highly intuitive and to follow our gut reactions.

At times, intuition can lead to mistakes, although maybe less often than numbers-based decision-making. We’ve made our share of intuitive mistakes at Semco. Life is full of mistakes. But you won’t catch me subscribing to the new age management mantra—to err is human, but erring twice is not so hot. I don’t buy the notion that we must carefully study our mistakes in order not to repeat them.

Another source of stress and disappointment is the expectation that the workplace is an extended family. People want their jobs to provide a sense of belonging, to feel they’re taken care of, to bond with colleagues. But they’re looking for things the company can’t supply. They should keep the company role in perspective. The first expectation to kill is that big families are fun and supportive. Romantic, but untrue. Anyone with a big family can tell you there are always people they don’t like among their own relatives.

Again, all it takes is confidence that employees are responsible adults, not ignorant newcomers who know next to nothing about what their jobs require. This system would also reveal an individual’s real interests, which in turn could make business far more efficient.

To date, I don’t know what changed in her. Could I have found out, by requesting information or talking to her in the corridor? Maybe. But could I have done that and not gotten involved? Process is king, I believe, and so these things have to play themselves out; there’s no right answer. Sure, it takes some organizational cold-bloodedness, and it might leave the reader, as well as many Semco employees, miffed or unconvinced. That, however, is the price for giving up policies, procedures, missions, and credos. Just as our aversion to long-term analysis is based on the realization that it can be a waste of time and energy to attempt to foresee every possible twist and turn of the road ahead, finding the root cause of every problem can also be unproductive.

Companies respect conformity and uniformity, but they fail to see how limiting both are. Without change and innovation, companies cannot adapt to new realities. At one time, Singer was one of the biggest companies in the United States. Today, we’re not using Singer cell phones because the company was unable to adapt.

Diversity is more than a politically correct buzzword. There’s a place for everyone at Semco, including those who are not impressed or in any other way moved by the Semco system. And there is also a place for those who find that a job is nothing but a job, and participation imposes a weight they’d rather not carry. Even those kinds of people are welcome because our culture finds them valuable. They teach us important lessons—e.g., how to listen, compromise, and communicate, and how to be patient, tolerant, and resilient. By making a place for the oddballs, the malcontents, and the incompatible, we accept the consequences, both positive and negative. Things may not go as smoothly or as fast, but maybe slowing down will let us catch our breath and see new opportunities instead of the usual blur.

Our constitution is of course not written; it just conceptually encompasses the basic values and culture that are currently in place (and that change with time).

No one knows where this will lead, and what power sharing or cohabitation it will carve, but it will certainly bring us face-to-face with our own inconsistencies, and give our employees a chance to feel effectively empowered—with a strong voice. We should never be scared of our own people, whatever it is they have to say or demand—the result is always vastly superior to the ostrich approach of looking for subtle ways of keeping their demands subdued.

Semco, we abolish manuals, procedures, and policies so that people are free to improvise, to soar, and to collect the moments of happiness that constitute genuine success.

Corporations go through cycles of growth and retrenching, what I call corporate yo-yo dieting. Companies that expand continually are companies that grow fat. Then they’re forced to diet, or downsize in “corp” speak, until they can grow again and reengineer (a new body in ninety days!), merge and acquire other companies (weightlifting and muscle training) until the cycle starts anew, and they’re forced to reduce again (lose twenty pounds in six weeks!).

A neighbor of mine in Sao Paulo built a house that reminds me of a South American dictator’s compound. He may have spent his entire allotment of $12 million on the house. But now his problem is Leonardo, who points out that a human cannot possibly feel at ease in such a disproportionate house. Certainly my neighbor can live there, open it to photographers from design magazines, and be admired from afar. But in winter he’ll huddle in the tiny TV room on the second floor, withdrawing from the cavernous rooms to seek a more human scale.

This is why the culture that arises from daily acts takes the place of corporate policies. Instead of writing ourselves down in a set of rules, we evolve slowly based on what we do.

Dissent and democracy go hand in hand. It’s also good management technique. What traditional executives don’t consider is that decisions arising from debate are implemented much more quickly because explanations, alternatives, objections, and uncertainties have already been aired. As a result of democracy, employees have had their say, and projects or ideas have been analyzed from every point of view.

Another element of job satisfaction is stress, and stress levels are highest where balance is lowest. It often reflects the difference between expectation and reality. If an organization sets expectations too high and then fails to meet them, employee stress levels will obviously skyrocket. The carefully cultivated balance between individual aspirations and company goals will be upset. That’s less likely to happen if people can set their own expectations for themselves and for the company.

Even so, at times stress is inevitable, and seven-day-week-style activities, such as golf before a conference call, or a break on the beach between inventories, help reduce it to reasonable levels. Executives who are embarrassed to take these breaks or companies that frown on them are shortsighted. Stress is a major disruption; and its effects, such as burnout, are grim reapers for talented people.

The fact is, you don’t have to like people to work with them, and finding compatibility of purpose at work does not require surrounding yourself only with those you like. You can admire people, even if you don’t like them. There are several managers at Semco that I would never have lunch with—I don’t empathize with them at all—some I downright dislike. But that is irrelevant, because I still respect their style and performance.

The sad conclusion is that when you’re most fit to realize your dreams, you don’t have the money or leisure time for them, and when you have the most time and money on hand, you no longer have the physical stamina. Shouldn’t this system be replaced with one that allows employees to redraw those lines to square the life cycle with a career cycle? Let’s shift some of the strengths of youth to the days of old age, and vice versa, and use the business organization to do it.

Flexible benefits are just becoming an option for some workers. But more creativity is needed to take benefits to their natural end in organizations looking for self-determination and self-management. Employees should be able to customize their health plans, pension fund contributions, insurance, meal tickets, and even health club or collective purchasing programs. By letting the employees make their own calculations and freely choose their own health benefits, we transfer responsibility to our people. We hand them their freedom.

By giving up or sharing control of small, nettlesome issues like dress codes, and of graver matters like factory closings and security, management creates a culture of self-government that has more resilience than any my-way-or-the-highway dictatorship.

Arguably, Semco’s most controversial initiative is to let its employees set their own salaries. Pundits are quick to bring up their dim view of human nature, on the assumption that people will obviously set their salaries much higher than feasible. It’s the same argument we hear about people setting their own work schedules in a seven-day weekend mode. The first thing that leaps to mind is that people will come as late or little as possible—and this has never been our experience.

However, before the collective interviews begin, we create a template for the job. This is a draft list of the qualities sought, along with numerical weightings that should be attached to each of these. Employees help design the template. They can log on to the company intranet and suggest the qualities and qualifications that we should look for in a candidate, and then assign scoring points to each attribute. Basic qualifications, like international experience or schooling, fluent English, and a firm command of financial technique, are not a part of the template.

They’re using a hundred-year-old system to choose their people while we respect a time-honored, hundred-thousand-year-old method of admitting members to the tribe. Cavemen and fellows in medieval artisan guilds worked no differently. They all based decisions on a newcomer’s acceptance by an established group.

people spend less time in the office and have more time to themselves. Their need to belong to a tribe can be satisfied with hobbies or in community activities and doesn’t have to be met in the office.

Organizations rarely believe they’re to blame when an employee underperforms, but if the organization doesn’t provide the opportunity for success, it’s their fault when people falter.

At Semco we accept that every individual wants and needs a worthwhile pursuit in life. It’s up to us to provide the environment and opportunity for their gratification.

We resort to a series of programs and practices like job rotation, reverse evaluation, and self-management. They’re intended to help people tap their reservoir of talent and to preclude the need for weeding out. We never assume there are weeds among us.

However well these mild-mannered intellects do on the tests, lack of air time unfairly implies that they are not suited to the rough-and-tumble world of big business. On the contrary, they may be brilliantly equipped to quietly outmaneuver a bombastic opponent, yet as a result of the air time yardstick, they may lose out to peers who tend to be openly aggressive, individualistic, and terror-tested, yet underexposed to teamwork, ego control, soft tactics, and compromise.

Having discovered that a lot of effort has to be put in by Semco into deprogramming adults, we at the Semco Foundation started an Institute for Advanced Learning called Lumiar (Portuguese for “to shed light on”) and a school for children. It is based on the same tenets as Semco—freedom, self-determination and self-discipline, passion and love. This may sound woodstockish or summerhillian but its goal is the utmost of practicality and excellence: to effectively teach some of the accumulated knowledge of humankind to free-thinking children.

Now Semco employees are free to customize their workdays, to come in earlier or later than traditional schedules. The hours they work are determined by their self-interest, not by company dictates. They’re the best judges of the amount of time and the proper place necessary to get their job done.

The second error is the assumption that business or the work environment is the only tribal affiliation people have. By sheer proximity, the workplace tribe may seem to dwarf all the others, but anyone who works at home will find they actually belong to four or five major tribes—starting with the family and extending outward to the neighborhood, the garden club, library volunteers, church, and the like.

Companies hoping to recruit the best and the brightest must demonstrate that they trust their employees with the freedom to work anywhere. They must assume that they’re buying talent and dedication, not what the Brazilians call “butt-on-chair time.

Here’s a counterintuitive idea for you: For a company to excel, employees must be reassured that self-interest, not the company’s, is their foremost priority. We believe an employee who puts himself first will be motivated to perform.

Moving around limits tribal affiliations that are detrimental to democracy, communication, and innovation.

Semco adds yet another dimension. You receive a voucher for work after your retirement. So if you took off a hundred Wednesday afternoons, you are now entitled to redeem the vouchers after your retirement by showing up with them and saying, “I’d now like to redeem my vouchers to work one Wednesday a week for two years and receive proportional pay.” You’ve effectively exchanged early retirement for later work.

We have to find a better way for work to work. The seven-day workweek is shaping up as a personal, societal, and business disaster. It robs people of passion and pleasure, destroys family and community stability, and sets up business organizations to ultimately fail once they’ve burned out their employees and burned through ever more manipulative and oppressive strategies.

I don’t want to know where Semco is headed. It doesn’t unnerve me to see nothing on the company’s horizon. I want Semco and its employees to ramble through their days, to use instinct, opportunity, and ingenuity to choose projects and ventures.

Once employees feel challenged, invigorated, and productive, their efforts will naturally translate into profit and growth for the organization.

The secret? If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock for all our practices, it may be this: Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row.

The lack of challenge, meaning, and purpose would be suffocating. Human beings thrive on being productive, on working toward goals, on providing for their families, on building a future—just don’t ask them to do it all the time and without the freedom to say, “Now, I need time for me.

Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner of the Brazil-based Semco Partners, practices asking “Why?” three times. This is true when questioning his own motives, or when tackling big projects. The rationale is identical to Derek’s.

Las burocracias están construidas por personas y para personas que se mantienen ocupadas demostrando que son necesarias, especialmente cuando sospechan que no lo son. RICARDO SEMLER

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace BY RICARDO SEMLER

But sometimes the committee members complained that in our effort to be equitable we dragged out the process, talking too much, agonizing too long, and increasing the pain. Perhaps that was the unavoidable price for corporate democracy.

Fernando was gone, but his tough-guy philosophy was alive if endangered. “You’ve taken away my powers,” supervisors would complain when they bumped into me in halls. “i can’t even tell if my people are arriving on time.” Or: “How do you expect me to meet this month’s sales goal when I don’t have control anymore?” They would tell me they were confused. They wanted me to explain Semco’s policy. I kept thinking that was what was wrong. There was too much policy at Semco, and not enough thought, judgement, and common sense. But I understood why our managers were scared.

We could write a completely new manual incorporating all our new policies and spelling out the emerging philosophy behind them. Or we could do away with the old manual and not just replace it. That way we would force people to make decisions based on common sense…We tried to write new rules. We really did. But at every turn we found ourselves wading into a swamp of minutiae.

Over the next three or four months we simply collected all our procedures manuals…People would ask us from time to time when the new manuals would be ready. Eventually, some began to suspect that an update wasn’t going to appear and asked us why. Only then did we say aloud what we had been thinking: that we were trading written rules for common sense. And that is the system we have today, which is barely a system at all.

According to Ricardo Semler, “Growth and profit are a product of how people work together.