RICARDO SEMLER
THE ORIGINAL FUTURE OF WORK EXPERT. ORGANISATIONAL CHANGEMAKER. FORMER CEO AND PRESIDENT OF SEMCO. FOUNDER OF SEMCO STYLE & THE LUMIAR INSTITUTE.
RICARDO SEMLER
Ricardo Semler is the first speaker to talk about employee happiness and wellbeing. He spoke about The Future of Work long before it became a trending topic due to the effects of COVID. He is the former CEO and president of Semco, which under his leadership grew from $4 million in revenue to over $160 million in about 20 years. He achieved this by being the catalyst for employee-empowered leadership.
Long before the pandemic, Ricardo also recognised that how work gets done is also changing due to emerging technologies. He realised that at an early stage the only way for the company to be profitable was to put the responsibility back into the employees hands, this was done with less management from above and more flexibility which meant a better workplace, happier employees and bigger profits. For Ricardo Semler’s Full Bio see below. We are his exclusive Agent.
Topics:
- Remote Work and Globalisation – How can companies make remote work work? How is productivity, inclusion, and innovation affected as companies shift to distributed models? And will Covid-19 usher a third wave of offshoring?
- Post-Pandemic Employment – How will labour markets adjust to the opportunities generated by digitalisation and the green economy Automation and the Future of Work – How is artificial intelligence reshaping the world of work? What kind of jobs will people do, what skills will they need, and will there be enough jobs as automation accelerates?
- How to thrive in this current world of work.
- The Future Company Millennials in the workplace at Work: Crossing the Generational Divide.
- Happiness at Work.
These are topics that have proven valuable to customers in the past and are meant only to suggest Ricardo’s range and interests. Ricardo researches each and every company he speaks to and for and the final topic is always finalised that works best for the needs of the audience.
Media:
Leaders: It’s Not Their Performance You Should Be Worried About, It’s Yours
Three steps to the “best next” workplace
The company where colleagues decide your salary
Understanding ‘The Five Whys’: How To Successfully Integrate This Tool Into Your Business
Companies & Projects:
Semco Style Institute – Training programs for consultants, corporate change makers and entrepreneurs who want to realize a Semco Style workplace.
Lumiar – An innovative, future-oriented school.
Semco Partners – Joint-Venture Catalysts for expansion in Brazil.
Books:
The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works
Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace Paperback
BIOGRAPHY
Ricardo Semler is the former CEO and president of Semco, which under his leadership grew from $4 million in revenue to over $160 million in about 20 years. He is best known for his radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering, Ricardo Semler is internationally recognised as a catalyst of change for employee-empowered leadership and this was long before the world of work changed so dramatically due to COVID-19.
When he became the CEO of his father’s company, he reorganised it with the belief that less management and more flexibility meant a better workplace and bigger profits. Little did he know that his innovative business management policies would attract worldwide interest. Not only has Ricardo successfully transformed his organization to adopt innovative management practices to advance leadership and organizational effectiveness; under his mentorship, companies from a spectrum of industries have reshaped their companies to be more dynamic, innovative and people-centric.
As the best-selling author of the classic Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend, Semler advocates for leadership to rewrite their corporate narratives to be driven by values of trust, self-management and creativity. Semler has reached thousands of international and corporate audiences through his guest lectures at MIT and Harvard and fostered a digital community of fans with his popular TED Talk: How to Run a Company with (almost) no rules and commentary and video shorts on social media.
Passionate about providing avenues of change for youth, Semler also spearheaded the Brazil-based Lumiar School which infuses radical corporate democracy into early education.
Semler admits that his own company’s management agreements was not for everyone (managers determine their salaries, staff choose their bosses), but it was a success. Semco is now a $400 million business with additional minority interests in companies that add up to $9 billion in market value. Over the span of the last five years, Semler has helped reinvent several industries through his corporate innovation including: ETH, BrasilAgro, Tarpon Investimentos, Juritas and NGO.
Ricardo encourages audiences to question ideas, to take a realistic look at what works, what’s possible, and what makes sense in today’s world, given our technologies, the rapid pace of change and the increasing failure of current practice to adapt. Technology that was supposed to make life easier — laptops, cell phones, e-mail, social media — have taken away much of our free time and destroyed the traditional 9 to 5 workday. Why, for instance, haven’t we learned to go golfing on Monday morning when we’ve learned to take our work home on Friday night?
For bold innovators, Semler proposes a way to run a workplace that leads to greater productivity and greater flexibility for managers and employees alike. And for business leaders everywhere, he offers fresh alternatives to business as usual that inspire creative solutions to modern management problems.
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