YouSaid · the spoken record

Ricardo Semler

lines on the record: 121
first: 2017-03-19
most recent: 2017-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“On several occasions, I've been, let's say, close to the brink of things not working to a point of undoing everything. So a few years after I started, it was the first time I ran into, we ran into such financial difficulties. I remember specifically driving to the plant and thinking what it would take and what it would mean that people have to talk to take the company and to receivership or the company was going broke and what would I do? And that was to me the closest I ever got to the end, let's say, because I was only, I don't know, 21, 22, and suddenly everything I tried to do was completely wrong or wasn't working. And we came close to the brink at that point. And so what I found, I think.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, but what for? No, you know, so that the humanity will be better. What for? Oh, what for? Because essentially, I cannot live with the idea that I'm not making the world slightly better than it was when I was born, even though chances are, and statistics tell us that it's not the case at all. But for me to feel that way, I need to go do this. So I need to do the podcast. I need to write a book. I need to speak at conference. I need to do all this. But it's not because I hope that people who now driving the car, they'll suddenly stop and get out and skip and jump to the house and say, I found new ways to do everything in my life and everything would be better from around. But it's about my feeling that I'm being useless. And so this whole what for issue is used for that as a key to try and answer really why you do the things you do.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the real geese of things, but you're also getting into real trouble. Those are the really difficult ones to ask. There's really all of us have only one question in the world, in our lifetime. And one kid of mine asked me that when he was three, the other one he was four. And one were sitting in Jacuzzi when he was three. And he said, Dad, why do we exist? There's nothing else to ask. And there's nothing, there's no other question to ask for the rest of your life. We'll never answer it and so forth. And this issue of what for am I doing this? Why am I waking up in the morning? I go do this and why am I doing a podcast for what good is this going to do and going further? Because you'll say, oh, because, you know, I want to help people and I want all these people to make their lives better.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you do the three whys in a row and so forth, you end up with process questions. And they're very good for removing obstacles and things that are silly that you do or that you're involved in doing. But it still doesn't answer the question that has to do with wisdom. And that one is, what the hell far am I doing this? And that's a very, very tough one because you could eventually even answer the three whys for a process or for a way of doing things and you can fix that by asking the three whys in a row. But when you answer, when you try to answer in your marriage with your kids in the place where you work at the chorus, you go to or the church that you attend, when you start trying to answer what I'm doing this for, then I think you're getting to the”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it makes very disappointing people out of the ones who've been seeking money as a big issue, money power and so forth. And you've seen it in all the films, you've read it and all the books. You've seen it with people you know. It doesn't end well, but it doesn't stop any of these people giving up other things in favor of that which in a money world, in a king-oriented money world people seek. And that's the bit that I think most people have found to be silly, but they're still chasing somehow. And that was the whole bit about the TOM and Donald.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're all monopoly players, you know. These guys were setting up trusts and almost everything that they did at the time would be illegal today. Now, these robber barons are people that we somehow or other are very impressed with. We'd love to be today called to dinner by one of these robber barons. Is there a dramatic difference today, Tim, when you think about it? biggest corporations in the world and these people, many of people who started writing code and doing wonderful things and so forth, which are now all about monopolies and trusts and suddenly a guy like Trump says come to Washington and play with me and everybody says, where's my play? And I'm ready to play. There's something wrong with this whole process because money keeps calling money.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are always looking in India at people who are untouchable and so forth and finding levels of happiness that are high. And so I think people kind of But I think the feeling inside is always okay, but if I had only 200 grand more, if I had only this, then everything would be okay. And I think that that isn't going away, Tim, in the sense that I don't think humanity is getting wiser and slower, we'll realize. But intellectually was the first step, which I think humanity took. And now starts to accept every time more, that there's something dramatically wrong with zero 1%, it's not even the 1%, but 01% having such tremendous wealth in this whole amassing wealth because the wealth is going to the smarter guys. And the smarter guys are the smarter guys who are able to siphon money away from everything else into their own pockets. It's a very dismal situation. And you come to think about it today. You think about reading and thinking about the past a little bit, Tim, you think about the Robert Barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Vanderbilt. These guys...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mind about your worries about the future and the monies and the mortgages and so forth, that, oh boy, if you could have at least that bit, you'd be okay. This 12 million almost parable rationale was to say, look, let's put at least an upper limit on this at a point where to have a house here, an apartment there, and something on the beach and something in the mountain in heaven and do anything you want and go to long vacations in Paris, that was at that time that you have to bring it up to date, but it was $12 million did everything. There was nothing you could not do with them. From then on, this was an issue of ego, vanity, or obsession. It was something else. It no longer had anything to do with money. On the lower end, you see all these guys who are doing work on finding happiness levels and serotonin levels and what it takes to be minimally happy.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the full rationale. And so there's something wrong with people who have a lot of excess money, of course, because you're saying, let's find someone who's already trampsing around Africa and meeting tribes and trying to give money to AIDS and so forth. But the fact is that once you start accumulating, you're caught in this collection mode, which is you'll always find a reason for thinking you need more of that. But it is taking away from something. It's taking away from your kids or it's taking away from sitting in the backyard and reading another book. Or it's taking from somewhere. There's no such thing as I will work harder for a time and then I will have the money and then everything will be all right because that moment never arrives. And I think people realize that ever more. In general, of course, feel that there is a level of comfort that in Europe...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people, you know, I have to give back. When you think about this and you say, you know, one of your is not your neighbor, he's in Seattle, but let's say Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett says, boy, you know, I've been so good at this stuff that I've now made, according to his calculation a few years ago, I've now made $30 billion more than I need. Okay, so what am I going to do this? Let me give it to people who really need it. And so forthwith, he gave it to Bill Gates, right?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“bite them off for dinner and they were to accept i would have at my dinner uh the wealth equivalent to half of the population of the world so i could have and at that dinner people who have more money than three or three and a half billion people around the world now that is money is king rationale taken to its most logical extent and uh and i started asking myself and i asked this in on a ted talk and it was the line that got most reaction from people over time which was if you're giving back it's because you've taken too much and”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is how it comes down, let's say, after so much time thinking about this. Basically, we're in a world post 1989, let's say when the Berlin Wall came down, we're in a world that says, oh, capitalism has won. So there's no such thing anymore as Soviets and communists and so forth. This stuff we've now proven, the world has proven that money is the real king. The world is a monarchy and the king is money. Of course, guys who do this better than other people have now taken this to new proportions, which is natural. It's just doing more and more and more and more of the same. If my house were big enough to huddle two, 300 people and these were some of the people from around your house, let's say, and some of the most people in the world. And I word it.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think nowadays when you, and this is about 15 years old or something, yeah, a little bit less, yeah, I think in this last decade and a half, I think that the number of people who have come to realize or to accept the intellectual concept that money doesn't buy happiness and growing for girl's sake and comparing yourself to everyone else ends badly. And I think a lot of people have accepted this as a thought. something in the back of their mind says yeah but you know if i had 12 or 20 or 50 million dollars everything would be a lot easier and it's only these guys who really have the money who keep bullshitting about how money is not important so this is the right this is where”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To every seven years do anything because, of course, nothing else comes in, anything I get we throw out as it comes in, anything that has my name or is about me or is from me, et cetera. We just, we don't keep it. And that way it keeps relatively clean.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never taken them to a company. I've never told them that one day this could be yours. And so it's never entered their mind. They know that we have money because they can look around, but they've also learned from the very beginning that they've gone to public school with kids who have nothing whatsoever all along. They go to the house of these kids who are very humble. And they've just learned to accept that there's luck. There's luck when you're born in a family that has money. There's other things that are talent and the kid plays soccer 10 times better than you. And they've found that there are other variations. But the one of your fathers and this or that, that one, they've never caught up on it. That was the whole rationale back there. And I'm very happy that I did it. Now, I don't need...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they didn't call the firemen. So we just spent hours burning all this stuff. I mean, it takes a hell of a lot longer than I thought it did. And VHS tapes don't burn very well. A lot of black smoke. So we did hours of this. And so it's now been seven years since there is no shred of anything of mine in the house anywhere in that respect. And the good part about is my five kids. They really don't have the slightest idea what I do. And if you ask them someone might say, I'm a writer, some might say I don't do very much.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The trip that's in front of me and that I can look at things from scratch and say, let's forget all that would I do now and how do I kind of zero base my life from here on? And two, I didn't want these kids to be burdened by the idea that your dad this, your dad, that. What we did was we started a bonfire in the backyard. It took us about five or six hours to burn everything. We just burned 100%.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't even know how I would play that, but I had. And I said, there's something wrong with this stuff. One, I don't need it anymore for my ego. I think I'm all set or I need to figure it out with my therapist, but not here. And two, I have these five kids. You know, we're going to run around. And suddenly they're going to find that I'm larger than life and people are going to say, well, are you going to follow your dad's company? And I said, that's a terrible imposition to make on them, you know. And so I thought there were two things holding me back. One of them was that if I remember that I did this and I did that and I have this and I have that award and I have that, I have a very wrong sense of very superficial sense of who I am. So I thought that if I get rid of all this stuff, I'm also a lighter for the...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was when I turned 50, so I'm 57 now. So when I turned 50, I looked at my library and I looked around me and so forth and I said, shit, there's a lot of stuff on me here. You know, I have my books and all these languages, 38 languages. I have a thousand articles. I have DVDs. I have CDs. I have even, you know, of course, a video cuz.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's a wonderful exercise in realizing that each of these doors that you did not go through were only for you and everything that we're comparing ourselves to all the time and the size of our businesses and the health of the disc and the wealth of that and how good our family is and how good our life is, where is happiness, where is wisdom, et cetera. It all really answers this one issue that this door is there only for you and if you don't cross it, it'll close when you die, you know?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether he can go in. He says, sure, you can go in. The door is open. But don't forget that further on there's another door with the guy who's scarier than I, and then there's another door and so forth. And then the guy says, well, wait a second. I think I'll just wait a bit here. And this goes on and on until this guy's getting older and older and older. And then finally, when he's about to die, he's lying there on the floor. And then the guy, the guard bends down and he says and he asks the guard. And he said, now that I'm about to die and I have no more forces to go through anyway, what is beyond that door? Or what's going to happen? And the guard says, well, this door was only for you. And since you are now going to die, I'm going to close it.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one that I used always there, which is wonderful. It's a collection of parables. There's only one. And there's a set of parables. But one of them is especially interesting. It's called Before the Law. And before the law is only three pages long. And I used to sit on top of this teacher's desk there in Cambridge and read this to the kids, you know, the NBA kids. And this was really interesting because I really felt like I was reading to my small kids. And I'd sit there and I said, let me read this to you. But the fact is it's only two and a half pages long. But it just tells the story of a guy who sits in front of a door, which is open and has this big guy who is guarding the door. And he's a Cossack and he's full of these big fur coats and he's enormous and he's scary. And the guy asks him.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around you do what they want to do, how they want to do it, and get out of their way. And that is a philosophical issue that I think would solve a lot more issues if people went from that filter onwards, you know?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Undemocratic organization or business environment in the world or to find one wise company as a company, et cetera. These are all almost impossible to find. So answering your question, I would say that the books that stop to think about why the heck do we do the things that we do which are in Kafka, in Freud or in Jung or in Thoreau? I think that those will answer a business world much closer than people think when they say, okay, that's all very good and well, but that's all philosophy and that's all Airy Ferry and Touchy Philly. But I need to get down to answer this. How come which people how and so forth? But this process, I think, is much, much stronger from a philosophical point of what makes you want to get up in the morning and how you let the other people.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jung book on synchronicity and so forth. And so these kinds of books, and Kafka, I think is extraordinary. These kind of books, I think, give you an enormous insight into the people who are doing things or why they're doing things rather than the whole set of how-to's. And when you run away from the how-tos into the issue of how do you get to real wisdom, you know, we've been at this for a long time. We've been in this agricultural, and then we were in the industrial area, and then we were in the information age, and we were in the knowledge age. But we don't get any closer to the age of wisdom. And something is terribly wrong for a population and the humanity that's been around for so long and doesn't get closer to wisdom. You know, when you think about organizations and I ask you to show me one.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got out of Summer Gun. And inside doesn't remind us that this intuition and this insight was growing inside you already. We're just waiting for some clarification of it. But that kind of answers the second bit, which is I taught for several years at the Sloan School at MIT, and I had a group of MBAs, and this was a very fun group, and I used to go there in the fall quarter. I tell them, look, this is what you have to read to understand business and organizations and so forth. And I was obliged to make this available on the MIT side anyway and so forth. And then the books that were there were Marco Podo's Travel, one book, Kafka parable.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When this happened the second time, I said, shit, this is not about me at all. So let me stop right here because, and of course, at that point, there was all kinds of campaigns for me to run for mayor and for president and become Brazil's Trump, you know, because this is people get lost along the way and they start believing in their own bullshit. And the interesting thing here was about going back to the issue of the book was that It's when you come across an insight which was already yours and you see it in writing, that's when you say this book changed my life, you know. But real insights where you go there and you say, geez, I never thought of that. And there is some of that. It has to add to something that you believe in or that jives with your moment and so forth. So I think that putting too much weight and too much importance on something that”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one that you mentioned, the seven day weekend, is a good place to, as with many other books, is a good place to poke around also inside your own head and to look for some insights. In the end, when I wrote the book originally in Brazil was still a relatively closed elite environment for business people, etc. So obviously because the book had sold a good quantity, most people had read and I kept giving autographs to taxi drivers. So it was a very, very small microcosm I was living in. But I remember the second occasion that this happened to me, which was being stopped on the street and somebody saying, you know, I read your book and it changed my life. And they would go off and quote somebody else's book entirely.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The business is there, the money is there, etc. But essentially there was nothing really of substance there. And it might take you years and years of spinning your wheels to realize it. And sometimes when something does not go through in the end, you start remembering those small comments or those people who were naysayers all along, you were just pushing out of the way in order to do what you had to do because you knew it was right. So I'd say this whole process of really poking at what you're doing, the product or the entity or the time you're taking is a disheartening process most of the time because very few things really are feasible. And most of the things will run for a while. And I think that if you could poke at that early on and be excessively transparent and humble about whether that exists.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of rationalization, a lot of Tricking yourself, you know, because, and I think that's a very dangerous Enemy that you don't really realize because whether you're going to grow or not and it's doing well, etc., what happens is that there's a point where you try some of the things that you're testing out there and that you tend to insist very much, either on an impulse, on an intuition or an early result. And you say this is going to work. This has to work. And the difference between perseverance and self-trickery is very fragile, is very delicate. And so I would say that testing impartially and finding a way to test impartially whether what you're doing is really worth what you're doing in the way you're doing it, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's a very difficult one that people sometimes take a heck of a long time to do and that sometimes the”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a startup, et cetera. And I have not to sled his ideal what he looks like. He's tall or short. I haven't a very generic idea of age and so forth. And one of these people the other day I was set up time to talk to and they said, oh, that time's not very good. And I said, why not? Oh, because I live in Australia. And I said, what? And I said, how the hell did I know that? He said, You never asked where. And so this whole process is now, I think, one in which I would highly recommend to people that they do not fall into the trap of saying I need to get organized. I need to know all of this because the essence of what people are trying to do with their lives, their businesses, and the organizations, they really don't require the amount of information, communication, and structure that you think it needs.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they really come in. I don't know if they're working harder or less than someone else, whether they should be making that. And maybe the answer to all of this is it doesn't matter if you know this or not. If you get down to the very, very few things that really matter to you being unorganized apparently, which is not knowing a lot of this stuff becomes completely irrelevant. I've had now in the last two years, Tim, I've been dealing with kids, you know, 25-year-old, 28-year-old, 32-year-olds who have started businesses with. One of the businesses, which is in Holland, for example, these guys started this business and I have some minority partners and I have some equity partners, et cetera, who I have never met. I've never met. Personally, I've never met on Skype. I have a few people who one of who is, let's say, C.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you need to get organized, I think, is much more valuable than it sounds. And people look at that and say, well, wait a second, I don't have the this and I don't have a software that does that. And if I don't give my payroll to that, I'll never know and this will be wrong and so forth. And you find that the stuff, let's say the bureaucracy that has to be dealt with is nothing like the creative effort of communicating and dealing with people and giving them freedom. And slowly you find that as you grow from 8 to 12 to 14, you just suddenly say, now wait a second, before we could do this, but now I'm not able to just hire somebody or agree and contract for something. I need to know what they're doing. And I think that when you start asking, why do you need to know, oh, because if I don't know, I can't, I'm following them on Slack, but I don't really understand what they're doing. I don't know.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start realizing that people are interested or there's more volume, more expansion possible, that's when you start looking around and say, oops, I need more people. But very soon after, and you might have eight or you might have 12, and then suddenly you say, oops, now wait a second, we're going to go, we're going to become bigger. I need to get organized. I think this is probably the single riskiest point because it doesn't seem like such a big assumption. You might ask someone who supposedly knows or you'll spend some time on the web looking at literature of organization. And then suddenly you're stuck in a world which starts ascribing and prescribing and describing how you should be doing things. And I think that that is the original sin, let's say, of organizations. And so I would say resisting the rationale that is being handed down to you.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that undoing your first urges to become organized are a great place because when you have the two, three and you're in your backyard or in a garage and suddenly something seems viable and you're writing code or you're put together a small object which suddenly a shop wants. You're in your most primitive creative stage. It's not beautiful and romantic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all around it or Thoreau. It's really your first urge. When you start going places slowly and you”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your seminal line that a good time could come anytime they wanted, they could leave their kids to school, they could stay longer in bed. Of course, for a time, the assembly line suffered and we didn't deliver some products and people were pulling their hairs out. But then a few weeks later, suddenly these people realized and they'd say, well, wait a second, you're not here. This assignment is going to move. So what time do you think you're getting here tomorrow? And a whole new schedule started coming into place. So I'd say ultimately if the process decision is to trust people or to believe in people as people, the issues go away with time and they just look like mistakes in the short term.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the whole process was, if we're showing you here and there that we don't trust you and sign this and locked this and so forth, and then we're just making sure you don't steal, it's a crazy situation. It's always a very small minority of people. And as we put the process in place, people started saying through a form where they would come together at a meeting and decide who they needed in their area for the next six months. And slowly the system expelled the people who were just stealing. And I don't know what happened over the years. You've seen these 35 years of people stolen more or less, et cetera. We don't measure it. We have no idea. We've never had any idea, but it's never become an issue big enough to worry about since, you know. And so what I meant to say was that we made a lot of mistakes in every one of these processes when we started telling people.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's getting worse. And my reaction to that at that point was do we keep this inventory safe and locked up and people have to requisition it? Yes, yes. Okay, well, let's give up that process as well. And just leave the stores completely open, the inventory, and anybody can take anything. And then for the first time, we had a decrease until the problem went away.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm going back here 35 years, of course, and in Brazil. This was a big issue because everyone kept checking the stocks and there was always something missing from inventory and this was all very expensive stuff which was easy to take. We worked and the motors were all copper wires and then there was silver this and then there was components and so forth. And I was saying the process here is that I cannot work with people that I interact with or we try to do things together with. I have empathy with. And then I search on their way out to find out whether they're stealing from me. It's just not possible. It can't be done. And so for some time, that didn't work at all because slowly we had a lot of inventory problems and the amount of losses that we had in the months following was obvious and people would look at us and see here silly guy.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a very big issue because we had all these electronic components. We had all kinds of stuff which people said, it's crazy. People take this in their purses and in their hair and so forth. And we said it doesn't matter.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah. And I can think of a few and I'll tell you. But the main thing is that The enormous amount of mistakes that one makes in organizations with your wife, with your kids, at the church, in a group Italian, and so forth, is so humongous that you have to consider a bit the Babe Ruth permutation that if you just hit more home runs than you missed the ball. But can you think, how many times did Bee Ruth miss the ball? And here we have very little in general, we have very little patience for these mistakes. And my thing is really to brush aside the mistakes and say, okay, that's great. That was wrong. Let's try this again. Now, if we're wrong again and again and again, that's really no problem. We just have to be batting in the right direction. So there's a lot of things that we started that we thought was really smart. We figured all of this out. And for example, with the whole search thing.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to create an enormous problem for engineering and manufacturing and consumer have to go out and buy another company and another. Don't do this before we thought it through. Sell your 56, where you're going to do it from, how you did it. It's none of our concern. Don't tell us. Just sell the 56 widgets and we'll always be fine. And this is true for everything else. It's true for accounting. It's true for marketing and so forth. And so the process of how you're going to do this is necessarily yours. And we don't want to be in the way. So here are 14 different places you can go to if you want. You can stay in bed. We don't care. Don't tell us how many hours you worked or how hard it was to sell the widgets because we don't have any place to put that information. That was the whole focus on process.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we did, of course. And so we ended up, of course, with people who didn't want to come at the same time, who didn't want to work there anymore. We went from one building, which was when we started asking this question, we had one central building, and everybody came to us. And this was the obvious solution. Within maybe a year, year and a half, we had 14 different places around town. And so we would say, go to the place that's nearest your house or nearest the customer you want to visit, or don't go anywhere, but don't even tell us because we don't want to have anyone who keeps tabs on you because your process of how you want to do this is the most important thing. And let's negotiate you and us. Let's contract for something you're going to do. Are you going to sell 56 widgets a week? Oh, great. So if you sell 56 widgets on Wednesday, please go to the beach on Thursday and Friday. Do not show up and sell more widgets because you're”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way, or people aren't stopping to think about why the heck should I take subway and a bus and go to a place downtown and so forth. This is the stuff that is undermining your whole opportunity to have the right process. So I would always start with, is this really what you want to do? Oh yeah, I love doing it. Okay, but you love doing it at this time of the day? No, not really, actually. If I could take my kids to school first, right? This is the stuff that I would tick off. What's the stuff that you're doing or how you're doing it, which somebody asked for or somebody thought was going to be smart or was a good idea four years ago?”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when you think, Tim, about what you write about and what inspires you and how you go into the issue of a work week or a chef or a workout or how to live life wisely, you're basically concentrated on process. The process by which you do all of this is the one that makes sense. So I would definitely start by the process that takes us out of bed, the bit that makes you get up and go somewhere to do something, that that process is the first one that needs to be changed. So how often you want to work? How many hours do you want to work? Who do you want to work with? In what place you want to work? That is the one that to me would be the number one issue because if you have people in your company organization, wherever you are that are doing this because you told them to or somebody told them to or it's always been done that way.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Humored about this, or you'll find that getting up on Monday morning and coming to do this isn't as fun as it used to be. Let's cut all this at the root and give you a real chance of finding something that makes you a lot happier. And normally I'll say that this is here may seem like something you do well, but let me tell you this doesn't work, but this that you're good at, you should be able to find a way to do that. And normally it ends relatively well because it is so based on transparency, you know”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel right, it's not good for the person nor for me to continue. And so I'll sit the person now and say, this isn't working. And for many respects, the person I didn't realize or I didn't think so. No, wait a second or this and that, but it's all about being very, very exceedingly frank and saying, you know, most of the time it's a situation which I say you can definitely count on good references. Let me see if I can help you. Let's think about it where you could go from here, et cetera. And mostly, I think that's the bit of why people in the end don't feel so bad about it is because I look forward a bit a few months or a few years and I say, you're going to be stuck here. I want this from you. You're not, you're obviously this isn't fitting your profile entirely. And you're going to keep at it, keep at it at it, but slowly, we're going to start abrasion will set in, you know, and I'll be more ill.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, sometimes my wife says that it's so nice being fired by you that I keep thinking this was a very positive thing that you did. And I see all these people getting up here after you signed, I really have to fire this person. Then they get off and they're smiling and they're patting me on the back and say, what the hell are you doing with this firing process? But the fact is this, that when you get close to it, some people are surprised, but most people have an inkling already that things are not doing well. I have this, if someone's working close to me, and that's the only situation, of course, where there's a firing situation, but person's working close to me and it's not going places early on. I do very little of that. Let's do this again. Let's do another chance, another way, another cycle, etc. So it's highly, highly intuitive. To me, if it doesn't...”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to think about a different way of doing things. And so they took the book forward. And nothing happened at all because he put the book out. There was no publicity. There was nothing. And about a week later, somebody found it and somebody wrote a review. And then it spent 200 weeks on the bestseller list of which 150 weeks in number one. It was very simple. It just went mouth to mouth. And apparently it hit a moment, a nerve, a time in which it went off on its own. But so that's a long-winded response to it's called turning the tables because of this whole turning things upside down and finding out that it works just as well in our case a lot better.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing, and I knew this book was very necessary. No, no, I'm sorry, but I just wanted at least to get it out there. But apparently it was a bit like a surfboard, you know, that you're sitting there and suddenly the big wave comes. The wave I didn't make. People were apparently ready.”
2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT