YouSaid · the spoken record

Ricardo Semler

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121
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2017-03-19
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2017-03-19
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1
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  1. “We could give this out as a year end gift from the company. Wouldn't that be nice? 300 copies or something. And I said, you know, my ego is not small enough for that. I can't do that. And then I... I found a publisher who's the ninth. And I said, this is not possible. You've got to publish this formula in a small version. You can't lose all that much money and so forth. So finally, the guy said, sure, I'll do it. And we had a very interesting discussion about royalties because he said, you know, what you get is 10% royalties. And I said, oh, that sounds good. And I said, what if it sells more than 5,000 copies? And so he laughed and he said, I don't know. It's okay, 11%. Anyway, we had this whole table because I kept asking, I said, what about 50,000? And then he'd almost fall off the table laughing. He said, let's make that 15%. Anyway, so I got 20% over the years out of a million sales. But what happened was I really never thought, of course, that I knew what I was doing.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Nine days riding. And that was it. And it's interesting because I consider that book so belonging to the thin air and not to myself that I never corrected any grammatical mistakes. And it came to me from that publishers many times, you sure didn't want to correct that. This is silly what you wrote here. And there's stuff that I'm not at all proud of anymore, of course. And there's a lot of mistakes. And I said, no, you can't touch it. It doesn't belong to anybody. And so what happened was I sent it out. I finished it ink and it was 900 pages of pen and ink. And I took it. I had someone type it. And then I sent it out to the eight big publishers in Brazil. And the eight rejected it. And it didn't take them very long either. The eight rejected and they said, you know, nobody wants to hear anything from a Brazilian businessman. They're buying Lee Ayacoca and Aquiomorita and all these guys. And nobody wants to hear from Brazilian businessmen. And then one of the guys talked to me and he said, you know what we could 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

  3. “You'd rather write VP regional sales manager instead of trainee. I don't care as long as he buys from you and he trusts you and you deliver the product. And off we go. And so we started doing this with everything. And so we threw out the organizations, are we throughout job titles? Very quickly, we started asking questions. Why doesn't everyone know what everyone else makes here? Why can't people set their own salaries? And nothing resisted three wives in a row. But to make a long story short, suddenly the company started doing well. And then instead of 100 people, we had 200 and then 500 and 1,000 and then 2000. And then at a point, we said people started saying, oh, you've got to write a book. You know, you've got to tell this story in a book. And I said, no, I don't have the book. But at a certain point in time, I said, I think I'm going to write a book. So I started on a Friday and I ended on the other Sunday. So I spent”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “No, because this is the same with almost anything you ask of business rules. There was a reason. Sometimes somebody was concerned with something, but it wasn't really essential to what you're trying to do. And so we would say, if we can't answer the three whys about anything or about any rule, let's just throw it out and let's see what's left. And we were left with absolutely nothing or anything of really important. And so we started organizing ourselves around this new way of if you can't justify it absolutely, let's try to do it without. And that went for organization charts and boxes and titles. And we were asking things like, why can't you just set your own title, choose any title you want, put it on a business card? And if the guy who wants to, who's going to buy from you and you put”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And I always say that, you know, I have five kids and the smallest one is seven. And I always say that, you know, when you have the three wives and you ask them, they ask you something, anything. They said, Dad, why is it this way? And the first question, the first, why is easy to answer? And then they'll say, but why that? And then you start getting into a little bit of trouble. And you say, well, you know, really by the third why you have only one option, which is to buy them an ice This is what happened to be there. So I'd say, why do we have to come at the right time at the same time? Or we'd say, why are we all dressed the same way? Why are we wearing suits and ties? Oh, you know, so that will look more like.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah. And some people say, why do people have to be here at the same time? And they'll look at you and say, oh, poor kid, look, little dunce. Let me explain to you. If the guy comes here and the guy next to him on the assembly line is not here, the assembly line does not move. That's the first set of wise. And it just becomes more sophisticated, but they did the same thing to me. Law school at the Harvard Business School. Everywhere I heard the same condescending response to, oh, let me explain it to you. So the first why is the easy 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

  7. “Maybe the five, six years after this mass firing, let's say, in which we started redoing things, we started asking questions. And I don't know, it seems a very simple process, but actually when you do it, you realize the potential, which was the whole process of asking three whys in a row. That was the only thing we were doing. I said, since we're starting this again, tell me again, why do we search people on the way out? Why do all people have to arrive at the same time, et cetera? When you ask three whys in a row, the first why, people have a very good answer for. They've been thinking about this for a long time, or they've been living this for a long time. Or they've been practicing 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

  8. “Literally means turning your own tables, but it's basically turning the tables with your stuck in the middle there to make it more self-fessy, you know. But it was really about, in Portuguese, it makes a little bit more sense, but it is in the same vein, which is to say turning everything upside down and so forth, which was this whole process of starting from scratch and changing the rules entirely. And it was really just because, let's say, from”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And I felt in many respects that on top of it being Rash, I felt I really had no option, there was no time, and we needed to do this very quickly. Now, of course, that gave me an opportunity to have a startup, let's say, on Monday from a business that was already 30 years old on Friday.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, I'm imagining that there must have been And I can think basically, I think, one or two people who from the beginning I felt would be on the right side and who maybe I tested it with slightly, but I already knew as well that I couldn't tip off the system or the wrong people and I didn't know enough people. I remember talking to my dad a few days before because he was about to go on a trip to Europe. And I said, you know, I have to do a few things here and it might involve some of the. And he said, I imagine, I imagine, do everything while I'm gone. And so as soon as he had to get travel, he traveled on Thursday and I called everybody in on Friday. But I think it was knocking around inside my head in the sense that, geez, you know, if I try to do this the old-fashioned way or the soul cycle, this is going to be 10 times as hard, but also the chance that I actually get to the end of this is smaller.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Right. But I think in the end it made us change direction, of course, very quickly so that 60 days in, we were a completely different company. And then it was possible to throw out the whole rule book from nothing and say, wait a sec, what part of this do we really need? And what part of it has just been here forever? And doing that slowly, I think, would have killed me and the other guys as well.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I took a rash decision, which may be only a 19 or 20 year old would do, and I probably wouldn't have the courage to do that today again, but I looked out there and I said, we just pulled a band-aid off this thing so that I can start the next day. And so on one Friday afternoon, I just called people in one day. I'd never hired anyone, much less fired anyway. And then I fired, I don't know, 16, 17 managers and directors. And that included the CEO, the CFO, anybody who mattered. And these people went home Friday and didn't return on Monday. And we spent the whole weekend going through these people's filing cabinets. This was all paper and going through the filing cabinet and trying to figure out what the hell was going on in this company. And we would look at it and we'd see a customer name and we'd say, I wonder who this customer is. We had no idea. And it was really quite a roller coaster.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “To turn these people around and to deal with the unconscious sabotage that everyone who is in place applies to everyone else. Anyone who's coming into something is always new and hasty and doesn't really understand. And so it takes a heck of a long time. And the business at that point was not doing well enough to withstand alongscale. And then I realized that the amount of sabotage that I'd have and the amount of interactions, the permutations of firing three people who then create an alert and panic in the other six people who talk to the other five behind our backs and so forth. That seemed like we didn't have the time for that and it seemed obvious that these people were terribly in place and completely calcified with all these years been there.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “We had 100 odd people, so maybe 20 of them, a little bit more were either managers or supervisor or somebody were in a leading capacity. And I looked out at these people and I'd already had a little bit of experience with trying to change things. And people were always explaining to me why it can't be done. So they would listen very patiently and then they would say, yeah, okay, but you're new, you know, you're 19, you've just arrived at this. And the fact is we've been in this business for so long and there's this and there's that and 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

  15. “And it's interesting what I told you a little bit about now connects to that, of course. And it's interesting the thought process when you say your listeners want to know this one or that. And I just started our guys been sitting and doing a little podcast and we've called it leading wisely. And leading wisely is all about this issue. How do you make some decisions like that firing most of the people? And how do you know that it's folly or wisdom when you start, you know? And so I'd gotten to that point where it was either him or me in the sense of there were two ways of trying to run this. And at that point, the business wasn't doing very well, which gave me an opportunity. But as I looked out at these people, maybe, 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

  16. “Office to sign the purchase of this company, which was really very high negative worth, of course, because it had big debt province. But the guy wanted to get rid of it, and I said, give it to me. And suddenly my father burst into the law office and he said, what does it cost to pay the fine to undo this deal at the lawyer San, I remember it was $200,000, which seemed like an enormous amount of the time. He paid it and we paid the fine and didn't sign the agreement. And then I started with the company. So it was a very interesting beginning.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Startups or anything of the sort. So, if you wanted to start a business, this was all very hardware oriented. So I went out and I talked to people who were in the consulting business. I said, you know, I want to buy a company, but I don't actually have any money to pay for it. And if I were going to pay for it, it would be my dad's idea. Of course, that makes no sense whatsoever. And then I finally found a consultant at Price Waterhouse of all places who helped me. He said, no, we have to do the following. We'll look for companies that are broke, that have no money whatsoever. They have big debt. And if you're not scared of taking on that, you can buy these companies for a dollar. And I said, the dollar I have, let's go do that. And so we looked at dozens and dozens of companies finally got to one, which was a ladder company, made metal and wooden ladders. And I got to the point of signing, it was 200-page contract. I was sitting at the lawyer.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Having to come to the company and be surged on their way out and have exact times. And if they were five minutes late and docking pay and this is an extraordinary world compared to what I'd seen up to then, let's say, in the world of rock. And so when I started looking all that, at a certain point I told him, I said, this were incompatible here. This is what I would do here is so different. And probably you're saying it would never work. Let me go do something else. And for a while, he just kind of took the bluff and said, sure, go see what else you can do. And I found at that point that the business world was more interesting than I thought and that I could do something with it. And I went out and started looking for opportunities to do something on my own. And that was not a world 35, 40 years. It was not a world of...”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Was your Because this was my grandfather's watch, and my father wore one in his pocket with a little gold chain and pulled that out every so often. You know, I was ready to start smoking pipes, you know. This is the world that was staring me in the face. It was very, very curious. And of course, this was all colliding with the rock guitarist and bassist, which I thought I was. I had hair down to the middle of my back until a year before, you know. So this was all very strange and it was a very strange world. And I saw people getting...”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “All this will be yours because of a manufacturing plant which makes pumps and very heavy equipment. He was very engineering oriented. There were about 100 people there. And this wasn't had been there for a long time and doing relatively well, but then it started deteriorating. So by the time I was 19 or 20, the whole business, the whole industry for that was in very bad shape. At that point, I had decided to do law school because I didn't want to do, I thought business school in general was very restrictive and very much turned to the past and so forth. And I wanted more humanistic background. I did that and then joined the company. And when I joined the company, kind of following his wishes while I was still doing law school, I realized that we had a big difference in the way we saw the world or how we would run things. It was very traditional and he was wearing a three-piece suit. And I was wearing a three-piece suit with a”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And when I got to about 1213, I got involved with rock bands and then I I spend a lot of time as a Rhodian, then playing. I was never terribly good, but enough to kid and enough to trick all my friends into thinking I was very good and going on stage here and there, which is, I think, probably the most important part of it, you know. So by the time I was 17 or 18, I was very much in that mode. But my father then, who was 50 years older than me. And it was very interesting also because I kept looking at it. I said, 50 years older, man, this man is almost my grandfather. And I said, I could never do that myself and so forth. And so promptly, I had a son now when I was 50. So he's now seven. So some of this stuff comes back to bite you in the ass. But the fact is that then I was 17. He wanted me to, you know, he kept taking me to the plant and saying Sunday.”

    2017-03-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #229: Ricardo Semler -- The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT