Interview Ricardo Semler

well you know I had a I had this unsuccessful career as as rock guitars which was wonderful I mean it was wonderful period of my life and as I started playing with all these people it became obvious that there wasn't the need for organization and discipline all of these things that the other organizations had but it was done because people wanted to and so I think my big quest from that day to this has always been to identify what it is that transforms people from someone that need to be processed in organization to people who actually want to and when they have their own Drive and their own decision to do it how does that change entirely so what I've done is basically what I do in all this is the same thing which is how do you change or remodel organizations so that they set people free to do whatever they wanted to do I would assume always that these constraints which we removed which in the businesses I call the boarding school rules you know which is what I'm have to be here how you have to dress how you have to talk to people how you go forward in life etc these have been lightened and hopefully removed but in most cases at least they have been like this person is now left in a situation where they decide I think to a great extent how they're composing their life and so they're not stuck to they're not doing things because of a given rule fernanda my wife she says many times that she thinks that in some respects it's more difficult to work in a situation like that because instead of someone saying look I want you here at 1:00 I want you at the meeting force and give me this at 6:00 and then you're free people are saying solve this for me somehow and you end up taking the problem home as you would let's say if you're in a rock band in your plane for six hours but there's a note there's something there which you don't like and you wake up at 2:00 in the morning you try to fix it you don't wake up at 2:00 in the morning if you're playing in an orchestra where it just says just play those notes and then go home you know home that the problem has gone away so I think in some respects the big change is that the responsibility falls squarely on your shoulder to see do you actually want to do this are you doing this because you want to and in this case we don't have much control over leaving you free from doing these things this is a difficult aspect of and this is true I think even for the children at school I don't think there's any if there's any profession I can think of where people would not prefer to have control over their destiny and their work so that if we said look you have an option to do three films which I gave to you which are fully funded and I tell you exactly what they are and you're bored to death with doing it you don't like the subject sort but you're going to do it and would you rather do one film which has been your dream to do with half the budget and taking four times longer to do it you would always choose the second one and that's I think the essence of this whole issue of what what it is that people want is such that when you think of the kids who are to school with you who at 14 knew they wanted to be a violinist or a doctor these kids never come up with these problems they became a violin so they became a doctor and they are a doctor who is called at 3:30 in the morning woken up from sleep to rush to a hospital to solve something and you say my god how did how did someone choose that for their lives so there is something in them that drove them there the business world or the world of organizations basically is left over with everyone else and the everyone else is the people who did not have a specific talent who did not recognize a specific need and who fit in to an organizational world where people are telling them what to do so if you say what I want to do is I go to the restaurant I work I get out of five but what why because at night I go to aquire because I like to sing so now I have to find a way as an organization to make those singing characteristics come into the job and not make the jaw something you make enough money for so that you can say when you're 32 or 41 and you realize that what you really wanted to do was to sing an acquire now you're in big trouble because now the whole system is set up so that you cannot afford the opportunity by this time maybe you've got married and I of kids you simply cannot anymore what is it that I love about a choir and part of you says I was expressing a vocal ability I have that's part of it if your vocal ability were good enough maybe you wouldn't even be in a choir you would be singing alone and you would have a career so let's suppose that it's not enough for that you're expressing yourself and you're expressing yourself in some manner which is very much from here to the outside as there are so many other expressions which are the other way around so expressing yourself from here to the outside maybe means that you've been in a job where you sit in the computer and you do certain things and now you are selling and now you're going out every day and now you're seeing different people every day and you find that a part of the expression that you had in the choir you have when you go out and visit people and have lunch with customers which you didn't know and then you find that there are other variations of the expressions that you find out that you're you're a very good joke teller and your joke telling is not that far from you're singing in a choir and so the question is how do you find these things come closer 17:18 I was still playing in rock bands by then I had already started law school there was already a dichotomy there was a bit of a shock between the two things and at the same time my father was almost 50 years older than I he was very anxious that I should start getting involved in the business and that we could be in the business together for some time so that I could take it over from him and so forth so I started much earlier than I should have and so I was at the company very actively at eighteen nineteen and so forth and going to the universities less and spending more time at the Penta business and I known one of these days we had a discussion about the problem that people came late to work and what what were we going to do about the fact that people were always late and there was a deal with the Union that people could be late five minutes a day this was the without any reduction in pay and they were discussing how they were going to increase the controls so that people would come on time and also increase the controls when people left and they were putting in more modern time clock systems and so forth and there was issues such as there was a line of people always waiting and the line itself would take long so that if the version was not late yet they would be by the time they got to the time clock and this discussion was there and I kept thinking I said I come from this rock world rationale which is I'm there because I want to be there and I don't leave at the end and it's hard to leave because I like what I'm doing there and here we're trying to force all these people from all over town to come here stand in line and and control them every time more with the tanker so I said no this this is going to be there's must be a better way to do this so on the one hand my question was why is this such a bad job or such a boring job that these people are not and they don't look very happy so I put the two things together we're doing something wrong so either we just happen to be in the most boring business in the world or maybe the business world itself is not able to find things that make people interested and so we said let's abolish all of the control over what time people come and go and how long they work and when we sat with the Union the first reaction of the universe to this to them this was very strange they thought about it and they said wait a second we have to regroup and think about this back at the Union headquarters because there's something wrong here I don't know what is you why your proposals but it can't be right they can't be trusted we don't know you but we know business people so this can't be right you know that they came back as very rich and they came back and we had a meeting and they said and this this the the two people who were there to have this discussion one of them was Lula our future who was to be our president of the country thirty years later when we sat there and one of the people called the Visayan to be centers who's been a a congressman and all this time and they said you know art people thought about this and they realize that what you're trying to do the trick here of what you're trying to do is that you're going to do away with the five minutes per day that we have a right to be late because if we can come anytime we want where are five minutes credible and I was just looking at them and saying you're on technically I'm sure they were right but I didn't know how to answer that so how do we give you five minutes to be late if you can be as late as you want and and so then we started a relationship it was very interesting because at one point we had to have a second meeting and we said well you guys came here to the plant so we'll go to the Union Network and I said but no no business owner has ever been to the Union hear this it doesn't matter what were there and we sat there and they took approached the picture they said the unit has existed here for 50 years and in 50 years no businessman has ever been here and so we sat there and we the conversation further after a while they realized that this was not a trick and slowly people started giving in to this rationale that the relationship was from then on was always first class we never had a problem with them and we had in on our businesses we have this business metallurgical business machinery business has an average of 2.1 strikes per year there two or three moments per year and I think now this they were telling me I think that this month we completed 20 years without a strike once your mother believes in you and things you can do anything then you can do anything and my mother lost seven births between pregnancy and some that were born and so when I was finally born I was a bit of her Messiah you know the prince who could could not do anything wrong and my whole life everything I did was always perfect and so I had a build up of confidence which helped which I thought anything can be done and no matter what goes wrong we'll fix it somehow and so far so there's a bit of that but the other part was that it seems so obvious that I was not going to be able to spend fifty years of my life coming from a rock group making people come on time and working against there and it just seemed like this was so wrong and so awkward and so and so unproductive for everyone that any of these moves were just natural and they didn't require any courage whatsoever you know that George Bernard Shaw said that everyone in their life only has one good idea you know and the idea that started that maybe before but was impersonated in Samko which then moved to other organizations is it's just one central idea that if you tilt at the windmills and you're a bit too short ask about not accepting that the windows have to stay as they are it's hard work but but someone has to do it and and there are people doing this of course in many walks of life but it's really the essence of saying if you throw yourself at it enough you can undo the anthropological structures which make life so difficult and which makes life so difficult to reach a linear level of satisfaction or happiness etcetera at work starting at school in in a question of environment and question of a new town or a city etc the fact is that we've fallen into a structure where organisations and money are the structure which we have to be underneath which are the umbrella of our life it's basically and since the eighties even more it's a world that finds it easier as humanity or from a sociological standpoint finds it easier to accept that organizations are structured and stiff in government in businesses in schools in churches in hospitals and that there's really no other way but to take your life within these structures and there are some people who are iconic lasts let's say by nature who rebel against this so they either end up in prison or they sell coconut on the beach but it's people who say I don't I can't do this I can't believe this and then there are some people which I consider myself a part which are the iconoclast who would rather fight within the system and being within the system saying this is not an intelligent way of life this is not something that can generate satisfaction so you look at people in line waiting to punch the clock and they don't look very happy and it's very early in the morning and you say it's not possible that this is what they want so finding a way to negotiate with the Union so that they could take their kid to school first and show up anytime they want has to be a better way and so taking these organizations and saying let's look at this from an intelligence standpoint and say is this the only way that we know how to organize a hotel or a school or something so that the guest and the kid and everyone is secondary because it makes it easier and are we not necessarily generating a level of civilized society that is generically unhappy the I think the answer to whether I know it's better or not is one that I've never tried to answer myself and that's why I very much like the idea of trying to set something up and then go away because how people are going to maneuver that in the future is probably more correlated to what they think happiness is so we've tried to ask these people whether they like this better than what was there before if enough people are saying they do I have to assume that it is better and not just in a narcissistic response which is I like it better because I'm not there see any conflict between having to do something and wanting to do something it's just they're very difficult to put into the same place but they're and if you work on it and if you remove structures the chances are pretty good that they'll end up in the same place and and exercising it has shown me every time that people would rather put these things together there very few people who would rather do things that is not connected to their talent or to their Drive etc and so we tried a few things for example we had a program called lost in space lost in space was a program that lasted many years where we would hire college graduates and we would say look now you're going to spend one year here and for one year you do whatever you want to do don't even tell us and then after a year we'll tell you whether we want to hire you now you want to come late you wanna leave early it doesn't matter because after a year we'll tell you whether we want you for something or not and that way we started increasing the chance that they would find what it really what they really want to do or what has some connection with these hidden talents of theirs it works for everyone in the sense that people even the ones who left and there were some who said I don't want to work here and it doesn't work for me at all they also discovered something that they didn't want to work here at all that it doesn't so yes it works for everyone it doesn't work for the company always one thing that we had with the lost in space program which was interesting was that we lost a lot of these people very early in the next 2-3 years and a study that we did a few years ago showed that eighty percent of these had become CEOs or managing directors in other companies and so we chose to well some of these people we weren't able to retain them I think was wrong in the sense that we were we were picking too high and I think that this is this is a very interesting case that we had we had a joint venture partner which was in the environmental consulting field and they were headquartered in the World Trade Center and on September 11th they lost 92 percent of their company and of their people on the same day and this is as tragic as it is it's a terribly interesting sociological exercise which is the question if I have a company and ninety-two percent the company dies instantly do I have the same company after that and how long after that and this is an experiment that the world has never has never had and so we watched this very carefully and the fact is that some eight or ten years later this was the same company all over again now if this is true it's not a very good not very good news for the corporate world and and I had said before ready that if you take a big company that actually once in in a in a convention in The Hague and we were talking to people from Shell and from Philips and I said look you pride yourself that you're you go to the best schools you try to find the best people you women but I would say that if you stop here in Amsterdam on the Princeton glut on this corner and you hire the first 75,000 people who come here you're going to have the same Philips as you have today and this was this is crazy for people because they're saying no wait a second I'm looking for the best no you're not in Reverse when you take the best they and they are too good for you they leave you need a cut of humanity 5% to Philips has to be lazy 5% has to be extraordinary genius 35% have to be happier in the choir and the bowling school in it than they are here because it is that is the essence of stability what is at offer really there is not this first illusion of lots of money and so forth because in essence your stability your ability to be happy is very very small ability too heavy in an organization like that your the chance that you're going to be happy is very very remote it's it's a catalyst to the things that disintegrate in your life but it's not because you're an investment banker making eight hundred thousand dollars it's also because you're a cashier at the post office in a small village both of them are our places where your capacity to find happiness are very remote and the organization's didn't have to do that they don't have to be that way so I guess this is the whole essence of it school does not have to be boring and difficult learning is absolutely magical every one of us is always excited with the idea of learning school just takes that excitement completely away and transforms it to something that's terribly boring but it doesn't have to be the act of learning is wonderful the act of working seems to be very necessary to human nature the act of producing something with your talent is wonderful doing that in the post office by stamping the envelopes is what's wrong so the one that's there the school that's there the hotel is there is a variation of this invitation to look at things and say don't accept things they are because they are because they've always been that way I'm always imagining myself as someone who as an enzyme opens the architecture of an organization and then themselves the people who are there they then structure this in a way that they feel comfortable with and it's a way of acting to demolish obstacles always that the the schools are set up for the comfort of the parents and by extension the people who run the school and that the essential object of school which is to make learning a magical experience and to increase the retaining of knowledge that that is almost impossible within the structure that was created the structure is created is one that makes it easy to manage large groups of kids but managing large groups for kids something that a club does a concentration camp does the prison does and so that's why so many elements of these other entities are are prevalent in a school and the one which is to make it magical to discover new things that's a minority issue in school so the structure is obviously wrong I think basically when we after this some of the programs we had such as lost in space where we were taking in from the schools kids who had been taught to be submissive from very early on and we're coming to us and asking us what am I supposed to do when am I supposed to is how am I supposed to do this as more of this happened and as we grew it became obvious to me that we needed to start earlier than the business because the business itself we changed enough that it had some of the constraints were gone but this influx of kids were coming in already with all of these constraints so we thought oh now we need to go back do we need to go back a few years and as we looked at it became obvious we need to go back to 2 year olds because already at 2 we're starting to create all these constraints so if we're going to undo them let's undo them already in the very beginning so it became obvious that school was the next was a next natural step once you'd looked at how you can re reorganize a business but it was useless with your continuous influx of people who were just learning to stay within the box I had an opportunity to take over one of the largest hospitals in some part it was a public hospital so I was very seductive the idea that I went through the hospital I kept thinking I can fix this you know that and why are we doing this I didn't do it because because it was juggling was competing with other with other opportunities I never had any doubt that that if I threw myself at the hospital for four or five years and was there 20 hours a day etcetera that it would work I don't have that I don't have that doubt and Norman or much the need to prove it I'd very much like to incentivize these people some people to do it on their own another one was the state penitentiary system for youngsters and they wanted me to be there but I got invited to be the president of that entity and that entity had at a time seventy-five thousand juvenile delinquents in juvenile prisons it's obvious to anybody that that's a very stupid system that it's not difficult to fix but it's very hard work it's very complex it's very risky but it's not difficult and the same thing when I had the the opportunity to run for mayor of San Paolo so these are all just variations of the same thing to say oh I'm going to fix the hospital I'm going to fix the penitentiary they're going to fix the city there's an enormous amount of arrogance in the idea that you can go out there and fix it on your own and it's going to be a venues so one I very much the very present the idea that these are very complex structures very sophisticated structures that are there for historical reasons have an enormous amount of pressure around them from other groups and tentacles and that undoing it is a big big job and you have to give up everything else just to do that second it's it's almost obvious that even if you do that for some time if it is because you are putting force into it and you're you're questioning everything and changing everything it is also true that once you step away that entropy will bring it back very close to what it was before it started with this feeling that I would have loved to do something at the hospital I would love to take over the penitentiaries I would have probably joyed the experience of running one of the largest cities in the world but some of this has to do with vanity so this has to do with the ego you know the feeling I'm going to be the mayor I'm going to do in this this is a dangerous territory which I'm always careful about the other one is that if it's not sustainable in the end because a new mayor will come in and undo everything you did because the people who are funding the hospital that are not you the governor is going to the new governor is going to change and abolish everything you did but these are very frustrating experiences that I don't want to start with because I don't want to give in to my ego to such a point that I'll do it for a while and then see it all oh now the consequence of of many projects has taken me to this to this to this feeling to this will an outdoor project of starting a village is a village of the future or a living area that fixes some of the of the issues as they exist today and that we called for a time I don't think we call it city in the future but we're talking about a an area that affects all of the aspects of living together because the business does one the schooling does another the hotel does a little bit the environment does the other one but now it's a it's a very ambitious project I think to try and put this all together in one city in one village and say if we were to design from scratch a living situation what would it be like over time something where you are able to slowly bring people in who on their hand influence all of this and then generate something which is not your own it is my experience with Samko and with the school and so forth if I go I mean I haven't been to the school and some power for two years the the factory you're going to go visit a temp I've never been to I don't know where it is and so I don't have I don't have a really interest in the retail version of these of these of these thoughts because they're going to be developed by local people and the people there will make it theirs it will always everything will always boil down to what my my three-year-olds when with me he was sitting in the bathtub one day and he asked me a question with a three he said why do we exist and this why do existed three is the same a question we asked at 93 and it's the question we never answer and one of them is surely to have a feeling that you've left something that you're creating something not left behind as a legacy but that you're creating something that is of some use to anyone so sitting putting together a city that solve some of the problems that cities have putting together a school that solve some of the issues that schools have is useful to somebody somewhere it's it's a vicious circle you you have a feeling that you contribute to your tribe wherever it is and however you define it but you're contributing to your tribe and on the other hand there is a hospitality of the tribe and yourself which is what we do with our lives and so in the end it is for the feeling that you're doing something of any use is is the essence of this of this meaning of life I would have to be enjoying the fact that they are paying homage to me I have to I've never gone in my life to receive an award and people put all the words all the time and again I look and I receive an email and said please come here and receive your award I've never got to receive an award it's it's of no relevance to me here now we're going to find here as I said you don't find any award in this house we won't find any of my books in the house because I'm ready to move on I don't want to carry this weight of the past and of people that recognize or that give value to this I'd be very unhappy if five years from now you come back to this hotel in people say I know Ricardo Semler the hotel is why so that I want people to forget that completely in the beginning it's not easy to do but over time it is because I don't there if you think about me sitting here up in the mountain thinking up a new hotel or new city or something that I think is of some use some fun and some good use also of whatever talent I think I have it makes absolutely no sense for me to do this and not any let anybody know that it exists once it exists however I'm not looking for the recognition that that is mine but every time the few comers and I want to give you a price window I want the price now I want to have dinner about it I don't have dinner about it yeah of course I mean everybody wants to change the world in that sense or wants to leave behind a world that's slightly better than it was there and very few people have the good fortune of being able to do it and it's a combination of things among other things people are having to work the whole day for their subsistence have much less of an opportunity so many of these opportunities that are available to me with relatively ease is something that I make use of and there is there's a there's obviously a vanity concept or there's it there's an advantage to ego to do anything that you think is good and by looking and seeing out there but the small vanity of just making this come back to you in terms of record that's the one that that that's unnecessary to me but the barrier want to feel that your life was worthwhile and that you did something which somebody used somewhere for someone that one's good so I'm much more interested in getting it started and seeing how people are going to make it so that with this thought the chance that is going to go wrong doesn't exist because I wasn't comparing it with right I think that the the criticism which is not in the sense of negative just people want to be critical but the critical evaluation even of the very intelligent people who look at this is one that there's a that there's a megalomania involved with everything because the the ideas and the projects are big and so people's Island has a megalomaniac Amata know whole cities in the whole world and the whole universe and so forth but no I don't think so I mean I don't mind the idea of my government because Mayor Menino is is really associated with doing something in a big way and I don't have I think enough time available to do everything in little ways and so take making it bigger is about the same effort as tomato small the fact that the business itself that Semco makes money to the Conservatives Bunch is just uncomfortable because it would have been more much more comfortable as it was in the beginning to say this is never going to go anywhere these crazy ideas soon the company won't exist anymore and the fact that it's been there for thirty years doing that is uncomfortable it's not a reason to say I will he's doing this just because he made money because when it started it wasn't it wasn't big at all it started with a hundred workers with small value and so forth and people were just saying no this crazy idea to hear what the worker wants to do comes anytime you want so of course this is going to go bust the fact that it didn't go bust people kind of you know over looking at dancing I don't know why that didn't go bust but this school is not going to go anywhere if you think also about what what are the issues the problems the obstructions we have in our world of business or in the school or in the hospitals are they're very similar then and they are the same in a village or in the city or in the place you live they are a balance finding a balance between your personal life and somebody else's these spaces that are between you how do you together manage something when you have very different worldviews how do you respect the context but at the same time know that you are a predator and you're going to have to make use of that to survive as a human being how do you have the use of money with the freedom to do whatever you want with it and at the same time create a respectful lower barrier for the people who have nothing so it's the balance between all of these elements and the city is the final and the largest variation of how human beings find the balance between all of these conflicts and these conflicts are there and and you say can I use money to distribute it in a way that is not anarchic is not Marxist and is not right-wing which is each one solves his own problem can we build something that is a political financial and neighborhood situation that makes people live together better in in this new world as we know it because there's a enormous amount of information of our legacy that is not useful for this but the nature of how we live together is fundamental so can we make security an issue of everyone exactly the same can we do that if I have big walls or large walls in my property and if I have two guards protecting me and one of those guards lives in the slum that I'm trying to protect the people from and these these inequalities of rationale of concept that are in place are they necessary and so my feeling is the same is in the schools is it necessary for the kids to hate learning the question is can you set living conditions that on a human level have the same level of dignity for everyone so can I live in a town in a city where security is everyone's problem and it's shared equally so that my walls can be destroyed so by doing that by any contribution we can through the foundation we diminish that gap now is everyone closer to buying Jaguars no but the fact is that they're further from not being able to pay for their own food and so this diminution this gap is is what we can do we start running out of possibilities of doing things because we don't want to be paternalistic because if we said let's just take these hundreds of people here that are the village and let's distribute our wealth among everyone what is left after ten years is probably nothing because again if you took you say were in the world we're competing with the story of the 1% if you take the wealth of the 1% and you distribute it among the other 99 there's a calculation from Rubina that it's a 7-year fix and in the eighth year you're exactly where you were before but having money in a country or in a place where people have much less and where the state doesn't make up for that difference is always one where you are being called constantly to be paternalistic and to be the one who says well you see I did this it creates the new pressure to be paternalistic to continue this and to be accepted and it's a mutual game with with that village as well which we don't want to play so when we go into the church or we go into the bar nobody knows who we are and they have not the slightest idea that that school is only there because gave the money and now it works it works well for everyone we all know that the value bonds have to do with balance finding a balance for yourself between the things you think you have to do the things you want to do the things that you controlled around your life that balance issue there's that whole elusive word of happiness which no one no one is able to describe well but it has to do with a certain or most ASUS and that's why I'm connecting a bit to balance to feel that the changes you make around you they always creating a balance that is higher that is lower etcetera but that there's a feeling that you're in the place where you should be or the place that you like and I've been falling out for years of study from from the University of Chicago that is trying to measure happiness that's been a very interesting exercise because people by being subjective about it they say well you're not happiness everyone has a different definition and so it's not important I can't do it then and so it's very personal but the fact is that when you start measuring contents of dopamine of endorphin of serotonin when you start measuring physical and physiological aspects of people you can start giving numbers to what you would call happiness and that the same way as animals that are safe and that are content no stress yeah no stress they move a different amount of hours per day they sleep a different amount of and that is also true for us as I for me the the idea of success power money together has never been a motto it was just a realization that this was so important to people in general but success the idea that success is connected to money to me is already a strange combination it's there's a very small correlation between success and money in any case there's a strong correlation between money and power because we've configured society in such a way that so many things can be bought but success fits into another the other Trinity of balance of security certainly because it's much more secure in our society to have a bank account than to have none but it's not by any means that this will enable you in any of the other in any of the other factors but I think the people that imagine that success money power etcetera are useful only believe in this for a while it's very difficult to imagine that somebody believes in this over the long run because there's so many opportunities and examples to see that there are so many important things that you can't buy with any of this the the balance issue if you think about Chinese medicine the balance issue is the one that solves the health issue which so many people bring up and start bringing up every more as life goes on to say that health is one of the fundamental aspects there is no no amount of money that will solve a healthy issue even if it brings you more comfort but the health is that same issue of how did you get out of balance it's not really how the Chinese see you've got out of balance because you didn't trust someone or because you're the structure of what you thought was important in your life wasn't true and it was about it was about seven years ago I think and I was coming up here to the house from Sao Paulo and I was at about 110 120 km/h was relatively fast but nothing out of control and and a truck crossed the road by mistake the truck looked and it was dark didn't see me and thought there was enough time or something and crossed the road in time and so I started braking but the fact is I hit to the last 1 meter of the track and it was a sand truck with a metal chassis and it came through the car and it hit me here and then the the seat broke and then the car turned over and and it was a very very interesting sequence because there was complete silence after this the car wheels turn it's evident everything stops and it's silent I was already in the asphalt on the concrete itself because the cover of the car had gone and I was stuck between this carpet azúcar was on my back and and then I passed out and then when I came to apparently about 20-30 minutes later I heard a conversation I was I woke up because I heard a conversation of these police men outside the car and they said no no he's dead you can call the you can call the morgue just have the morgue send the car over and so I thought I'm dead that's strange and I'm sure that I'm dead and I had my my face was in this tubes own glass and it's blood flow and so forth and then I tried to move my finger and I said my show so I'm probably not that and then I did this and then the guy said oh he's moving soon as a but is going to be dead in a few minutes don't worry we'll just call the morgue so then I thought about that and I said listen what what could be happening here then I said let me try and move my toes then I have a good idea whether at least I'm going to be a tetraplegic what's going to happen here and I moved and it seemed like I was moving my toes and moving my fingers and then I've relaxed a little bit and then the car went down some more with another two three centimetres the old car came though and at one point they realized that the situation was different and then they showed up with saws and electric thing in welding equipment and it took three and a half hours to pull me out of the of the car and when I got to hospital there the guy took me to the Diagnostics and so forth and then he sat with me he said look you have 13 important bones in your face here the toes the draw that isn't it and I said which one's the brake he said all 13 he said so now this is going to take a while is that we have to operate on different portions and so forth we have five different specialties of surgeons here and so forth and so they start a process it is 14-hour surgery to reconstruct and so forth and then he said I'm going to take from your hip because you've lost your global google continent which is the eye has fallen and so we need to put it up with parts of your hip and I said how am I going to play tennis no you're never going to play tennis again it's and stop let's find another solution and then he went to media came back and he said well there's a titanium which has never been tested I said that's the one I want okay so we put the titanium and so he put in I have 27 large pieces of titanium in our face 43% of faces is titanium and so we put it all together and then finish this operation and then and the next day I said I'm going home he said no you're my home when I'm going to do for 10 days and said you're not gonna do anything here I'm going to become sick what it showed me was that one I was never meant to die in this thing you know I would I'd look at it it was it was obviously and they as doctors of course they say well this they missed by 2 millimeters that by 4 you would have lost it you would another but the fact that it wasn't wasn't meant to be but what it what it did for me was to realize that my life was at an enormous speed I was busy I was doing everything I was on two phones I belong all the boards and things and so forth and that that what I understood that to be was that it was time to stop and pay attention to the to the essential things in life so I stopped for three or four months everything and no more contact with the company with anything whatsoever because I wanted to understand what this meant and then I I started moving away and I'm doing things I left all of the boards that I was on I gave up the day-to-day of almost everything I was doing I didn't have an identity or cell phones I didn't have a car for years which was just to pay attention to what was what was basic this these issues of this balance which wasn't there this issue of security of being part of a system or being part of a family being part of something that's in place and this issue of loving and that's when that's when Fernanda showed up in my life shortly after and she do it already I don't think I knew her I think I knew her yes but basically it came to mind very quickly that this is what this would this was this meant and within three months after I met her we were married after we realized that we were we were going to be together and so forth and that created a complete new microcosm there which left some of these other experiences as things that had a sequence and that could be dealt with but which were not the the only origin we'd been we'd been living for a few years already in the country with kids growing and so forth and when one moment I'd had some years before when a birthday when I was in teaching in Boston that I'd gone to a cemetery and walked around and it was very beautiful cemetery and I went through one time around the cemetery and I looked at all of these tombstones and there was a description of this and this person what they'd been and what they'd done and so forth and when I came around I thought to myself you know what do I want to be remembered for and I started walking again and by the time I'd come around the second time my question is why do I want to be remembered at all and how do I change my life depending on the fact that I do want to be remembered and so they or whether it's not that important to be remembered and this came to me much clearer when I saw the the kids and I kept thinking if the if I have a around the house if I have mementos if I have reminders for myself and for the of things I've already done is this a is this an advantage or is this a weight that I'm carrying that makes it much more difficult for me to start new things from scratch so the fact that I had books in 38 languages I had thousand and something articles I had video cassettes of 20 years ago of TV programs I'd done and the house was was pretty much full of this and I thought this is going to be a weight over the kids because they're going to have to compare to this and there's no reason for compared to this because there's nothing there for them and I myself I'm looking at this and I have to and I'm reminding myself that I did this I did that I was they thought this they thought that as I said I need to free myself of this of this burden in order to start or look at things completely fresh and to look at these kids also completely fresh so with Fernanda we decided to put up a large VAT which is which is still there and we put in an enormous amount of wood and we spent hours and hours throwing everything into the into the fire anything we could find all of the books in any of the languages we knew that they would never find them again because some are Slovak or in Chinese or and so forth only editions videos of 20 years ago radio programs that I've done and so we threw it in and we watched all of this burn for hours and hours and it was a very it was life-changing in the sense that it was it was a great relief to realize that I don't have to carry this around I'm not putting this as a pressure on my on my kids even the older ones they don't know what I do and one of them the nine-year-old thinks I'm a writer the other one thought I was a rock guitarist which was great of course he could never see me on YouTube so something was wrong but he probably thought it was a record I was not very good and the other one thought it was a writer but the fact I've never taken them to the company to the factory to do anything because I don't want them to live with this idea that somehow they they should be become businessmen or they should become writers or as it should become something so paid through the ones who's nine until recently always wanted to be a cab driver so that sounds good there's going to be a taxi driver and they'll leave you at the very little one she's always cleaning everything so he agrees he decided that she was going to be a cleaning woman and then he'd be the taxi driver to pick her up at the end of the day of work so they live with these variations which are theirs but the fact is that not having this weight of certificates or of things of what you were in the past makes it much easier to move on I was very I was very convinced that it would it would do good there's some nostalgia involved every time anyone cleans out their closet and gives away some 30% of their clothes to someone else then there's a nostalgia of you remember when you use that jacket and so forth but there's the second one which is more important which is the feeling that that's going to do somebody good considering you're not using it anymore and so I think it's a similar feeling that there's a nostalgia of knowing that that book will never be seen again by anyone but on the other hand that I'll be free of the idea that that book will not be seen by anyone because it doesn't impose on me it doesn't define me in any respect I was very serene it was something we we agreed to do it was not a super of the moment that I think it took us a few days to organize it so it was a bit premeditated it was not an impulse every time I get close to operating something to put in something together it affects my comfort level very easily and my frustration level rises very quickly because I don't have much of a patience I end up changing things as we go along and that's very disturbing for the people who are trying to do something sequentially for an in ordered fashion so I try to keep away from putting things together because my frustration level rises very fast when I feel that either people are not paying attention or not doing this as they had promised to do or people are not keeping their end of the bargain and that drives me out of my comfort level but I think basically promised something or under let me understand that they're going to be doing something and not do it and not in a sense not do it right or wrong because making the mistakes and do it completely wrong I don't think I don't think frustrates me it's when I'm my feeling that the person knows that they're not planning to do it and they're just trying to get to stage where I just shut up or I go away that's the part I think that that rises my frustration a lot people making let's say mistakes is not that important because I'm not sure about mistakes and I'm not sure in any of these situations that I I for sure know the right answer I know what I believe in but the fact that people take it in a complete different direction doesn't bother me if there's an explanation and some of them there are some of the explanations are not are not either technical or mathematical or logical which is why I love to go into sacred areas and temples and churches etcetera because there is nothing to there's nothing to change because that is that's an evolution of a rationale to greater view with no I find it interesting just to just to look at that you know I keep thinking why isn't there a format of church where anybody is able to go and is not subject to the rich rules or the strictures of any one given Church and so you say well do you accept the idea that there's a larger being as well I do okay well is there a church where you can go where you don't have to kneel first and do this later or cover your header and do your head or no is there one that does not is not subject to humans interfering in the process so that you can have a direct line with divinity in a temple so you know this is the the process that that that I go through but then understanding why the Muslims do it this way in five days five times a day it's all very interesting but you can't build this in your own City I could build one from our own end if somebody shows up that's fine and if no one shows up it's equally fine we have a ethanol business which is the it's one of the largest national companies in the world and it started with me writing a little paper and saying you know it's not possible that Brazil is not able to produce a large scale at the Nall plant so we had that data put in some people together went around the world and got a lot of people involved to put up the money this was four years ago Bill Clinton put in when all kinds of people putting money around the world the guys who started America Online and so forth the guys from Sun Microsystems Oracle a lot of people put money into it so we started and it became a big ethanol business based on the idea of a cluster of ten plants in the same place with an enormous alkyl duct and by three percent of the port of rotterdam and three percent of the product of the Port of New Jersey so this was a marijuana and coke plant of taking over the whole world and as soon as it started going places and people said well do you want to be on the board you're gonna be I don't want to be I just want to watch this happen it then became a very big company and was a company with worth two or three billion dollars a year and a half or two years ago and I went to have lunch with the president and we had learned should we talked and so forth when the luncheon finished I had set up with for another to go to the movies at 4:00 and this was about 2:30 so he said don't you want to run over here and see the company you've never seen the company it's only two blocks away we have a we own the whole building we have 2,000 people don't you want to see them as I have no interest with R and C in the company I'm going to get there and I'm sure there's floors and floors with people with computers they're going to ask for my identity to get in and I'm going to go up and say hello hello hello are people people people computers computer it said well let me show you this the photographs of the of the of the places of the factories of the mills as I know what a Mills looks like it's also but ours now sure something different I have no interest whatsoever so this company which is now a nine billion dollar company which we have a small part is the company I don't know exactly where they're they've many times they've offered they have company planes let's just go from in an hour you can go see this just see it from the air I have no interest whatsoever and I never was at the headquarters there's been a new president for three years who I don't know is your company it's partially my company at that time was only my company but I have no I have no interest in in how things look at the end you know I have very little interest in going and seeing the kids you know you go to the school and now they're gonna sing for you and they're going to show how they don't bit over nor how they use the iPad it's not relevant to me you know I just want to create a situation an opportunity a vehicle for people to do their thing in a better way this is my research room here well you know I had a I had this unsuccessful career ISM as a rock guitarist which was wonderful I mean it was wonderful period of my life but it was very interesting because it showed where where the limitations are and why sometimes you want to do something because you want to but the combination of talent and time is not right and letting it sit there and not doing it as an important part that playing for myself of course is is interesting it's not meant for third parties but it became an exercise a bit of a research into finding out how to perpetuate a little bit or how to extend the life of classical music which I loved very much and I'm using a modern rock world or a contemporary music world to try and find the DNA of musicians of classical musicians that are losing their space and that are dying out slowly and so trying to answer the question of how do I take a piece of Mendelssohn or of Hyden and how do I create some kind of a mechanism an enzyme again that could be used by people who really do have talent or who have audience to recycle some of the genius of classical music that's dying slowly and so I take pieces of like medicine for example and I try to pull out of there mathematically a new score that answers tries to answer the question of if Mendelssohn were here in 2012 in this studio with electric guitars and drums how would he produce that same music not something else how will you produce that same music but not simply by taking a guitar playing his his his notes on a guitar the question is in his DNA of this mathematical permutation of his score how would Mendelssohn create the same music today I think I'm looking for genius in that sense you know I'm looking for his genius which which touches me already immediately intuitively but I'm thinking how can that could that genius be made contemporary the contact with genius in all of these fields is enlightening its insights that are available to you and that I could do by going to a college and hoping that one of the professors has these genial insights into the world but it's for sure that Mendelssohn does and he's available right here youngest running person would come to mind as a person I think understood or completed or defined man in the way that I find most genial you were probably the one person that I can think of that that has an unending sequence of insights into the into the human mind and nature itself you guys always I think the idea that you're not alone and that this integrated consciousness and the fact that you're doing something which somehow is affecting someone else and that people who are thinking something together affect you in ways that you don't know and that you accept the idea that there's a something that's not esoteric but at the same time it's completely untouchable that this has to be respected because this has an enormous impact on your life and you don't realize why so you call it destiny or you're called unconscious what he knows that you've under the Jewish the collective maybe that but because you no one knows that you funded the church there's some feeling there's some thought of someone who went into that church that is going to come back to you but you have no idea how and this this movement of energy and so forth which is so way beyond our capacity to understand that when I think young is one of the people who had the the greatest genius to understand that that exists and to try and put words to it which religion does in a much simpler fashion and which is of course subject to all kinds of boxes but the idea that there's something there's always something there and that things happen for a reason that people show up in your life at a certain time for a reason this I think youngest I think had the the greater genius of accepting that this could be classified in terms of science and not understood or defined but classify to say that there are energies that they're collective in consciousness that affect things that you thought you were doing whether it's not really your doing that car came out of nowhere that truck that came out of there that they're all there for a reason which is not as simple as one white haired bearded god who's sending the truck all the time after you know that there's something there which could also be that no one knows but the fact that there is something there that is much greater than us that the whole project of the Mallos development which we want to do a list of the new city or a township etc it has to be anchored on some on some attractions and some things that have economic sustainability so here 80% of the people that work at the hotel live in a very short radius around the hotel so that's very unusual no hotel normally does that and we have I think eight or nine people only who come from outside and we wanted a little bit of people from the outside tool to a oxygen put some oxygen in the system but the amount of people who are from here and have never done anything like this before is the great majority of the people so the first thing is of course that it generates a whole economic environment around the hotel it brings up the level of the people who live here and therefore it will affect their family and then their kids and not or not these already kids people who work there and whose kids might be studying it at the lumière school and so it develops for this sense of place and for the township it develops a cornerstone of an economic activity which then makes it possible to start the other developments I'm very concerned always about being paternalistic you know I don't give out things I don't receive people to give out favors so that's why we have the foundation which is very was trying to be run always very professionally the the thing that I'm trying to avoid is that you have a small village situation you have an enormous difference in wealth you can easily have a situation or feudal kind of situation where you have the guy on the castle to top of the mountain and the village down there and you give out favors and you give out money and you prefer these people and if the person's not good to you and so what we did was by creating the foundation which has professional people which runs along lines that are not paternalistic and always tries to create jobs it tries to create the ability for these people to create their own value in their own jobs over time in five years or in 10 years or 15 or 20 years people will realize that the foundation is there for for a structural reason institutional reason and they'll learn to dissociate it from us the fact that I have this with my with my kids though they'll realize for example it's something they do realize that they have things which other kids don't so for example Pedro is 9 he spent three years at the public school the public school there are lots of people there who whose parents make per month what he spends in a day we try to make them and us live without any effort to dis simulate the fact that there's a large difference in wealth but in the way we live in the way they live there are items there are a lot of issues which are absolutely common to us there are security issues or how clean the water is or whether there is a postal system in the village or whether the road and so forth so there's a lot of items that are common and that there are other ones that we can work with or together that do not have to do with wealth but the ones that have to do with wealth we don't ever pretend and we don't and I never make an effort to downgrade our life or our expenditures etcetera so that other people will feel better about the fact that they don't have I'd love to upgrade the lives other without downgrading mine which is a different it's just another way of bridging the gap but bridging the gap by saying I'm going to be Franciscan and a monk in my tea and I'm going to give up everything with me here is sorely useless from a social standpoint it's it's nothing from an economic standpoint and it's just the way things were set up the fact that I if I spend sixty or seventy percent of my income to try and and make other people raise their base that's fine too but I also don't want to get involved in a sense of a recognition I don't want recognition for word that the amount of other things that we do in terms of philanthropic work or expenditures that they don't know about that nobody knows about is very big and they will never know about it it's totally irrelevant and so even if there's a little bit left there's a little left because I'm very much in there's their eyesight in many respect and that I can't do very much about that but the fact is that it is not it is not a paternalistic relationship even if they they still don't understand the difference entirely because it takes more time for them to see to have the one school which is here and to give money to that and immediately make it better would be paternalistic based again the guy on the hill who gave the money that's why the school is better so what we're trying to do is to prove that there's already enough money in the public school system and that if the concept were changed the education would be much better with just the same amount of money with the same teachers what we're trying to do with the public schools is to make the public schools much better than they are this public school that we took over is what you need to go raise yours now we took over the management of it from with a contract with the local authors so we have an extended period in which we are responsible for running the school from a pedagogical standpoint they have their teachers they have they run the schools from a from an economic standpoint along the lines of our concept this this school has a number of advantages over there are other schools and has a relatively long waiting list at that one school and if we were able as we're planning to do to increase that to ten schools or 100 schools or 300 schools we end up bringing up the level of this of a public school very much and so hopefully we diminish the gap that way I was remembering that I went to Amsterdam in 1983 so this would have been almost 30 years ago right and I went to address a conference and in Amsterdam about which was about social responsibility and there was no the term didn't exist it started in the late seventies people started using it and this was the first world conference on social responsibility at the Cosmopolitan attempt and I remember I went there and there people from body shop were there Anita Roddick and the people from Patagonia and Ben and Jerry's ice cream and so forth and people from all over Europe talking about social responsibility I remember saying that I thought that what was going to happen was that the big corporations were going to kidnap the cliche for themselves and then set it up in any way that makes sense the same ways they paint themselves green any colour you watch was abort rate okay I was bending over and so that I think that some of the things that we started doing that we were doing 30 years ago in 1983 about letting people chose their bosses choose their time to zero we're nothing but common sense but the fact is that common sense is a very difficult thing to to perpetrate because the organization's they they have a needs to feed themselves and so corporations are essentially entities that are looking to maximize economic gain to a relatively small number of shareholders or people who are more talented or more able in commerce or in production than other people and most of them start with things that are very valuable such as new product ideas new services where the surface is always a fabulous start at a certain point in time the organization becomes more important how you're organized then the original idea which is lost somewhere along the line as it is at the hotel and who started a small Inn for a stagecoach in effect now 300 years later is a chain of three stars small where you have to check-in and check-out and weather then and follow all the rules of the hotel so um in these 30 years social responsibility green awareness all of this has been forced upon the entities and the corporation will attend to that by creating a department by giving it to their marketing department to say say how terribly green I am and whatever they want to hear tell them and they're very sophisticated very complex machinery and there isn't the big bad guy in the back who's just smoking cigars and trying to make as much money as you can by oppressing the people this is something that that has gone away a long time ago it's also very complicated exercise the managers are not very good at it it's a very difficult process 92% of the companies do not survive more than 20 years so it's not a successful process as a whole and so I think about what we did 30 years ago was just to be very simple when this started the social responsibilities to say that it's obvious to us that if you don't solve the issue of your context and you don't solve the issue of making it interesting for the employee or making him feel like getting up on Monday morning then the rest will never work the rest is just terribly hard work and so we for a long time the only thing we asked our employees was do they feel like getting up on Monday morning and going to work and if the answer was mostly yes then the company was in great shape everything else would take care of itself it's not surprising that the people who have control never give up control on their own if no instance in history if no instance in religion or no instance in positive no situation in which the people who have control look at a concept and decide to hand over the control and hope that everything is going to be okay and in my case I wasn't hoping anything I was absolutely sure that these people if they wanted to get up on Monday morning they went to do it they would find a good way of doing that it's just to be it was always human nature it was always a an assumption that nobody think about it I don't know anybody I've never met and people say there are such people but I've never met anybody who goes to work only for the money it even looks that way sometimes when you think about it it might be someone who's going for the money to exchange it for something else they need for a barter for freedom or for their family or for something of the sort but the person who is there just for that salary and doesn't care about anything whatsoever is a rare very rare person I don't think I've ever met one like that we have a few hundred and now over the years many thousands of people have gone through the process some of them have not bought into it have not believed in it have stayed a while this is enough for me a lot of people don't feel well with so much responsibility because it's also true that when you tell a person that you're not interested in how much they work or when they work as long as they get it done - a lot of people that's scarier then saying you have to be here by 8:05 otherwise I'm going to find and and a lot of people have been conditioned which is why we were always interested in going back to the schools because people in the in the business world have been conditioned in schools already to sit down and shut up and listen and I tell you this about American history and you spit it back to me in the test and then I let you go and so when they get the company say what you want me to do be here at 8:00 then leave at 5:00 5:00 okay and but I think when you start freeing even these almost I think the entire humanity you start freeing them of this and saying I don't care anymore what time you come and go can you do this for me and I'm not going to follow you around to know whether you did it that the great majority of people will and the ones that don't that's why humanity is so interesting and so diverse there's lots of people who want the this the society that we live in today especially since 1989 is one theme only it's really economic it's really money oriented in all respect and so this this has been set up so that it requires a leap of faith for you to give up control of the economic certainty and to me it never did because I thought always that the economic sum of a collective amount of people who are doing what they want has to be much higher in the long run than getting people to do what I want them to do I remember when when my son was three we were sitting in the bathtub and he asked me said daddy why do we exist and it's very interesting there at three you have a question like that this is a person that will stay for the rest of your life the very important question which is why do you love how you love why do you exist that you exist how how do you make how do you make a balance between the things you want to do the things you need to do the people that need you the people you need these are all the very important questions of life until those I have no answer whatsoever what what do we use our time for you know how do you make your your life worthwhile for what you need to do and not what other people recognize or what you're going to leave behind or what kind of legacy what kind of a name but how do you manage the time that's given to you on earth that's the one that's the difficult one for me so I'm constantly changing direction and trying out new variations for myself of how do I make this the most valuable and the most valuable that really has nothing to do with production or money or number of projects or effort or hard work but also I don't know how to make good use of this time that's available and to manage into this balance between the family and love and happiness and work and projects and so whether this is the difficult thing that I'm constantly constantly weighing again and again I always come up with a different answer which means that the answer is not clear at all and the fact is that the way we run life in a Veyron a very economical sphere and an axle that is really economic in many respects it's very easy to leave love for later and that's a silly thing when you already have that's a very and it's a very silly mistake that a lot of people do because there's they feel they have no choice and when they realize they've now spent too much time at the office and at the end Rafic hoping that with the two-week vacation they'll be ok now I think that that Holland is in an example in so many in so many different ways that I think that Holland Scandinavia maybe eight ten countries around the world are especially ready and prepared and mature for their own historical reasons to abduct change in organizations and it is still a leftover of the legacy and the fear of control that holds it back when you look at all of these statistics and you put them together you look at the social net you look at the at the health system you look at the pension system you look at the amount of giant corporations for such a small country you realize that all of the stakes are in place if there's an economic downturn and there's a temporary crisis it doesn't say very very much about the structural situation of Holland but one that has this disposition to understand what a post-capitalist society could do is certainly Holland is is among the few countries that could make use of this leap of faith could make use of this giving up control because it already has so many cultural aspects and so many economic aspects to it from history that doesn't want to go back to running Batavia you know it doesn't run run back in black suits and black hats and velvet things in the tropics that's that's long long gone for for Holland and it's ready with this amount of Montessori schools with this amount of corporations that have a tremendous impact per employee per GDP etc it's socialized enough its capitalist enough that it can find the best variations of this together and I think what stops it still is just the fact that there's a cultural backlog build-up a cultural bill that has to do with control still and that's the very last one that that has to go but as a society it's probably one of the ones it's closest to books like you need a little bit of its past has to go still because there's still a very strong force which is either mercantile or patrician in the sense of all of this religious build-up that became a very structured society and and it's done so much in the 50 60 70 s to undo this that there's a very few of these clusters left but they're still strong enough to maintain control and this giving up controls a very difficult difficult thing to do but I'd say that the holidays positioned to do so much earlier than most other country still is easy definitely I just think that it doesn't look that way because you again you're in the middle of a crisis when fear takes over and people pull the reign of the horse you know anybody who's a horseman knows that the you're going down the hill for example and suddenly the horse starts going too fast and you're afraid you pull the reins that's the very worst thing you could do because the horse now has to go down with his head up when he needs the free floor of his head to become stable and then suddenly the horse slips and you say see I told you it's a dangerous place a rock but it's you who pulled the reins and so this is the way it is I think in Harlan the the whole crisis the euro this should I be in the middle God how did we get into this what's happening to Philips where's Freddy Heineken what happened to this whole world is the one that's scary people say where is ABN AMRO what happened to rubble Bank but the fact is that in the course of Dutch history this is all very relevant it's just all very very it looks very urgent when you read the paper today but the fact is that this is all very a very small effect on the long term decision the judge had made long time ago to give up a lot of this structural hierarchical control stiffness which is in the corporate world which is in the political which is in the religious world and which is not necessary for the Dutch mentality and it's been and slowly over the years this will become appear it's just not a good moment for you to take a picture

Channel: vpro extra

Views: 93,516

Keywords: semler, semco, nieuw werken, werk, arbeid, tegenlicht, vpro, coach, work, ricardo semler, maverick, working, training, career, business, management, interview

Id: USC1RE8jE50

Length: 87min 20sec (5240 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2013