The man who ruined management for me

The Ricardo Semler question I’ve carried into every leadership role I’ve held

I was in my late twenties when I first read the business autobiography Maverick! The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler.

I wasn’t looking for a revelation. I was still in the infancy of my career, chasing the next target, learning the standard playbook of how to make my way in the workplace. Structure. Hierarchy. Sign-off. Headcount. The comfortable machinery of how organisations operate.

Then a Brazilian I’d never heard of casually explained that almost all of it was optional.

I finished the book and immediately went looking for the next one. The Seven-Day Weekend did the same job, even more bewilderingly. Between them, those two books did something I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time.

They ruined conventional management for me.

Not in a way that made existing within modern workplaces unbearable; I’ve spent the years since delivering results in senior leadership roles within a wide array of companies, big and small. But in a way that meant I could never again sit in a leadership meeting and accept “that’s how it’s done” as an answer.

Once you’ve watched someone dismantle the assumptions and end up more profitable, not less, you can’t un-see it.

So who is Ricardo Semler?

If you’ve not come across him, the short version reads like fiction.

Born in São Paulo in 1959. Poor student. More interested in playing guitar than in textbooks.

He eventually went to work for his father Antonio at Semco, a company making marine pumps. They clashed constantly. Antonio was an autocrat by instinct. Ricardo wanted something decentralised and participative. The arguments got bad enough that Ricardo threatened to walk.

In 1980 his father blinked, stepped down, and handed the majority stake to his 21-year-old son.

On day one, Ricardo fired 60% of the senior executives.

Then, at a pump factory in New York state, he collapsed. The doctor’s diagnosis was stress, and the prescription was rest. That moment turned out to be the hinge of the whole story: the changes he went on to make at Semco weren’t abstract management theory, they were a man rebuilding his own relationship with work and then extending the same offer to everyone else.

What followed is one of the most radical organisational experiments of the last fifty years:

Employees setting their own working hours
Workers voting on major decisions, including where a factory should be located
Staff evaluating their managers — and the results being published
People choosing, in some cases, their own pay
Financials opened up so that everyone could read the numbers they were being asked to move
Satellite business units spun out of an internal innovation programme, eventually accounting for two-thirds of the workforce and portfolio

When Brazil’s economy collapsed under their government’s liquidity restrictions in 1990, the Semco model faced the test it deserved. Rather than a round of unilateral redundancies, the employees agreed to a pay cut; on the condition that their share of profits rose to 39%, top management gave up 40% of their income, and staff got the right to approve or reject company spending.

The company came through it with inventories down 65%, delivery times improved and defect rates below 1%.

Semco went from around 90 people and roughly $4 million in value in the early eighties to about 3,000 people and $212 million in sales by 2002, and a valuation north of $240 million by 2016.

He was named Brazilian Businessman of the Year in 1990. The World Economic Forum called him a Global Leader of Tomorrow. The BBC made a series about the company. He wrote Maverick! the best-selling non-fiction book in Brazil’s history, originally published in Brazil in 1988, and followed it up by continuing his story in The Seven-Day Weekend.

And in 2003 he did the same thing to education, founding the Lumiar School in São Paulo, no fixed curriculum, children shaping their own learning.

His most quoted line is the one that still makes boards flinch:

“The key to management is to get rid of the managers.”

The Adult Assumption

Here’s the idea I actually took away, and the one I’ve carried into every senior role since.

Semler’s sharpest observation was never about hours or votes or profit-sharing. It was a question. People run households, raise children, take on mortgages, manage complicated lives…and then walk through an office door and get treated like adolescents who can’t be trusted to choose their own start time.

I call it the Adult Assumption. It’s the single test I run on any policy, process or piece of leadership behaviour:

Does this assume an adult, or does it assume an adolescent?

It’s a brutally efficient diagnostic, because organisations rarely lie about this. The assumption is baked into the mechanics.

You can put “we trust our people” on the wall and then require a countersignature for a $40 taxi. Only one of those is real.

What I’ve actually seen

I’ve now worked in senior leadership across some very different organisations — different sectors, different sizes, different cultures. The specifics changed enormously. The pattern didn’t.

Almost every serious dysfunction I’ve watched up close traced back to an adolescent assumption somewhere in the plumbing.

Disengagement wasn’t usually a motivation problem. It was people being asked to care deeply about outcomes they had no authority to influence.

Burnout wasn’t usually a workload problem in isolation. It was workload combined with a total absence of control over how, when and where the work got done.

Poor decisions weren’t usually a talent problem. They were decisions made three floors above the information.

And the “we can’t do that here” reflex (my personal favourite) was almost never a genuine constraint. Sector, regulation, scale, shareholders, our industry is different, our people aren’t ready. I’ve heard every version. Semco was a heavy-engineering manufacturer in a hyperinflationary economy with government contracts and unions. If anyone had an excuse, it was him.

I’m not naive about this. Semler had something most leaders don’t: a controlling stake and the freedom to be wrong for a decade. Most of us are working inside constraints we didn’t choose and can’t unilaterally remove. I’ve never run an organisation where I could have put pay-setting to a vote on a Tuesday afternoon.

But that’s exactly the wrong lesson to take from him.

Semler isn’t a blueprint you copy. He’s proof that the ceiling is a lot higher than where you’ve stopped.

The bit that keeps growing

What surprises me most is that this hasn’t settled into a nice, finished belief. Many years of working life on (too many to mention as I contemplate a milestone birthday), the Semco ideas are still doing active work on how I lead, because they operate at the level of practice, not philosophy.

The practical habits I’ve stolen and kept:

Give away the decision, not just the task. Delegating work while retaining the authority is the most common form of fake empowerment in the modern workplace, and people see straight through it.
Open the numbers. You cannot ask for commercial thinking from people you keep commercially blind.
Ask the three-whys question. Every process that irritates people should survive being asked “why does this exist?” three times. Most don’t make it past two.
Let people rate you, in public. Nothing has improved my own management more, and nothing has been less comfortable.
Watch what you measure people on when things get hard. Anyone can be participative in a good quarter. The Semco crisis deal is the standard, and it’s a high one.
Treat people like adults. Nothing earns respect like treating others with respect. You’ve hired them to do a job, trust them to get it done without over prescribing how to get it done.

None of this requires a controlling stake. It requires being willing to lose a bit of control, which is a different and much more difficult thing.

So, the questions

Every time I revisit these books I end up asking myself the same set. I’d offer them to you too.

Where in your organisation are you treating capable adults as though they can’t be trusted?

Which of your processes exist to manage risk, and which exist to manage your own discomfort?

What information are you withholding from people you’ve asked to think like owners?

And if you removed a layer of management tomorrow, genuinely removed it, not renamed it…what would actually break?

I read two books in my late twenties, now mid-career, they are still asking me hard questions about my own leadership and contributions to building high performance teams. That’s about as good a return on a paperback as I can imagine.

Go and be a maverick about something small this week.

Then see what happens.

Dom Petrus, CEO teambleu.com

DOMPETRUS.com