How a Turkey Voted for Xmas: Ricardo Semler on Why One Boss Wants the End of All Bosses.

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. My guest today, Ricardo Semler, is a rather unusual fellow. He started his life as a corporate executive. He ran all sorts of Brazilian companies, and yet he's known as a Maverick. In fact, one of his book is called Maverick, The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace. He's also the author of Seven-Day Weekend and the upcoming pamphlet, The End of the Boss. So here we have a boss who is predicting, forecasting the end of the boss. He is joining us from Sao Paolo Airport. Ricardo, nice to have you on the show. Would you describe yourself as an anti-boss boss?

**Ricardo Semler** (1:18)
A bit of an iconoclast in the sense that I never saw much rhyme and reason to the way people run businesses. So I think I started very early at 17
My father was already 70-something, and I just jumped into the business world from a rock group that had been with us for five years. And I said, this is very silly. We're controlling people, seeing what they're wearing, what time they're coming to this, putting booklets together about what they should be doing. And so I think from the very start, I was saying, this just seems wrong.

**Andrew Keen** (1:53)
So tell me your full story. You, I wouldn't say inherited your business, you were thrown in the deep end by your father. This was in Brazil, right?

**Ricardo Semler** (2:02)
This was in Brazil. He had come from Austria as an immigrant, started a manufacturing business in the shipping business and made all these equipment pumps and so forth. And he was always expecting me to take over. This was his thing, you know? And so when the time finally came, it was early for me. I was 17 to 18 He was already close to 70 and he was ready to go. And I just kind of dropped in out of nowhere and it was all very strange to me.
And after about, just shortening the story, after about two years, I realized that nobody was going to let me do my thing, which was to take away the constraints and the boarding school aspects of school, of business. And he, I then said, let me go do something else. And I, I'll come back and I'll stay on your board and so forth. Um, and I went and started, tried to buy a ladder company, which had 200 employees. So I had a little bit of that entrepreneurial drive already. And when I was signing a contract to buy this other company for one dollar because it was terribly indebted, he came to the law office and says, stop, stop, stop. I'll give you majority of the company. And at that time it had 110 employees. It was in a bit of trouble.
And then, so we had to diversify very quickly. And long story short, about eight years later, we had 5,100 employees and 14 offices, and we were on our way.
And it took me about 20 years or more to prove that you can run a business with any of the boarding school aspects. So we started saying in the beginning already of the 80s, work at home, and people would say, but wait a second, I need all kinds of things. What do you need? I need a Telex machine. So we bought 60 Telex machines, which were 150 pound machines. And we would send it to people's homes and say, put it there. And one of our guys actually put it into his bathroom. And that's where he sent his Telexes from. So we were in the mid 80s. We had shown very easily that there's hybrid work, there's all kinds of silly things that we're concerned with, which were really military structure that was in place and weren't necessary. To this day, they are not. If you look at the military structure that we know, it's in business everywhere because it came from West Point to the railroad long time ago.
And since World War II, nobody's done anything of any good with that pyramid, not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran. Now, it's useless. That pyramid is long gone. And so when I talk about The End of the Boss, I'm just saying that the idea, the pyramid is no longer useful nor valuable. And so you have to pay the one, the number one person every time more. So when you look at, let's say, Elon Musk's package and it's equivalent to the sum of all of his employees together for five years, you say, oops, right? And then someone who's a snake charmer goes to the stock market and says, hey, we've been doing this for five years, a trillion, five trillion, a million people on Mars. And you say, sure, why not? But that is the fault of a system that is not based on anybody anymore, except one person who's telling a story at the top. And a lot of people who are spinning it in Wall Street for somebody's interests. That's kind of silly.