Ricardo Semler - 2: Leiderschap & uitbuiting

how is it possible that in these days the search for leadership or control gets bigger if you think about the fact that our democratic values are the ones that say look we we need leaders nothing wrong with needing leaders and choosing them where did they become autocratic when there's a lot of fear you don't find a Hitler or Stalin and Idi Amin Dada a matzah Tony in in countries where there is no fear there's a lot of fear and suddenly you give power to people who are very autocratic about using it and you say ok well now we're in hands of somebody who's going to solve this problem that is generating fear we all give an enormous value to democracy when we say no I have to choose my local mayor I have to determine the school I want I want to choose my future etcetera I have never seen a democratic workplace I've never heard of a democratic rich so the place where we spend the most amount of time there's no democracy at all and so someone says this is your new leader this is a new CEO this is the new boss who then has a clique of people that he believes in and sends them you must do this you must do that and so forth so why is the markets is so important and everything else is so irrelevant to us inside an organization and so what we've been doing for example at semcon now for 30 years is that the people have to approve their future leaders or the subordinates have to get together interview and say yes but this is a person we want as a leader and then every six months they really value it to see whether the person is still right for that situation and that's completely different from a situation which I say here is the successor to this person and he will be here for 10 or 15 years the chance that he will be a good leadership situationally for so many changes of situation is very very small and so the fact is that the that the companies go through these enormous cycles of doing very well and it suddenly very badly and then they're trying to fix this all with that one person that's because there is absolutely no involvement of our Democrat principles in the way we look we organize ourselves at work but it's then your whole idea isn't that an illusion because you cannot eradicate fear no there's no reason it's how you deal with fear fear will always be there but if your reaction to fear you say give me give everything to one strong leader who'll do whatever he needs to do it's where you give up anything and you say democracy is really just hoping that somebody will take care of this for me and in this Russia now where you change leaders and when you you anonymously evaluate them every six months a person if fear is the new issue you choose someone else that has to do with fear but six months later or a year later you again review that and say this is not the right person anymore and you have to have a structure in which this person who was promoted is able to go back into the organization and in most places once the person is up to the pyramid they can never come back and so they need to go somewhere else which is a tremendous waste it's not wise to throw away everything the person learned just because you promoted them one step above I have a book here by which was called the Peters principle which I put out here somewhere which was very interesting because Peters principle in 1969 he came with the idea that people rise to the level of their own incompetence and once they've reached their own incompetence there's no going back and that's very seems to be a smart way which I promote people until I find that they no longer are the right person but then I have to kick them out and a wiser way would be to say look if you've gone a bit above your level of competence let me find a way to bring you back into the organization to make less or to work in a different way so that I don't throw away the wisdom that's there the same thing is true with people who retire when you think our society is getting every time older we now have a distribution in life which no one is really thinking about when you think that our kids and let's say my five kids with the the economic situation they have and the moment in which they were born there are kids who could easily live 100 to 105 years this with with biological changes that are there underway and this is nowhere in our system there is no educational system that takes into consideration that they could leave school at 17 spend four years as an architect as training to be an architect spend 20 years working as an architect come back to school do five or six years of medicine spend 20 years as a doctor come back spend four or five years doing engineering spend 20 years and there's still 10 years left for retirement and there's nothing in education there's nothing the way we're talking about our future in which we're preparing our kids for three careers for two careers for completely different distribution and so it is very unwise it just seems to be very smart to prepare kids to go better in mathematics and to compete with the Koreans and the Chinese in math and in men once they get to the company that's all useless when you think of this and you think about what we were doing with books and with wisdom was we didn't have anyplace to keep this except inside our head and so when you take Illuminism and you take the 1200 1300 1400 as an era people said wait a second let's illuminate and let's get some people understanding and developing their minds this all had to be in people's minds it all fits into a little pen drive now and anything you want to know is thirty seconds away on Google who is the teacher who knows anything compared to new Google nothing and so the fact that we're asking these people in these teachers to be the ones who are going to fill the heads of our kids with this information is irrelevant we need to get them to think about how it is that they question how they put together their different things which are going to be different all the time anyway but the fact is the teaching them this and say let's go to history now the pyramids this was this with what's the name of this was Tutankhamun 14 when he died who the hell cares it takes seconds to find out how Tutankhamun died and hold he was and so we're still trying to cram all of this into the very few people who then have information that someone else doesn't have and when you think about power in organizations it always belongs to the people who know something that the people below them don't know that is the only thing and this information is available to everyone it's just if you're good at keeping it to yourself is that you rise in a very illegitimate form of power which is very unnecessary nowadays and again is a very unwise way of doing it can you show me that book again and then show it and then try to explain as simple as possible the principle of Peter yeah we take this book of 1969 it's called Peters principle what what it says is that people rise to the level of their incompetence and this comes together with other incompetence people go go by their competence competence competence and a certain point they're promoted beyond their level of competence and then we have to get rid of them it's a very silly idea the fact is that we need to find a way that once that's happened for people to come back to move sideways to find different ways of working and all we have today is a pyramid again like like the Egyptian one which says you rise rise rise and then suddenly you go beyond what you what you know how to do and then we fire you and we start all over again and we throw all the wisdom of the 20 or 30 40 years away and it's useless because suddenly you've gone beyond can you tell a little bit more about the book maybe show it again so we can see it we can really see the book maybe you can turn it to the camera yeah yeah so what is about this book it was published in 69 you say yeah this book was 69 and basically it came to realize that people when they rise rise rise from they want to be promoted within that pyramid all the time more more MORE but there's a point where they reach they're no longer competent to do that but the only solution for the pyramid or for their organization is to fire the person and so all the wisdom that went into training in and everything that was learned he's lost immediately and this is 1969 and today so many years later we're still doing the same thing and the company still looks like a pyramid so actually what you are saying is that in a modern company which is organized like we used to do every people in a management position or any leader in the company is no they're they're reaching a point sometimes they're spending most of their life in their area of competency for example but at some point because it's a pyramid and we're pushing people and they have to rise every time because we're promising them that later they'll make more their office will be bigger their car will be larger they need to move to that level of competence and we need to move them to another company and try and get someone else in the place of that when you think about that pyramid and how it was organized and how people organized the building of a pyramid thousands of years ago it was always there's a pharaoh here which sends a Grand Vizier who then orders the guy down or the neighborhood then has a slave and there's an enormous amount of slaves if you take you think about Sir Edmund Hillary and the first time he reached Mount Everest in the 50s he and one other guy Tenzing Norgay got to the top they had 605 Sherpas taking supplies up and down the mountain those 605 people are they different from these slaves who were in the in the pyramid no they were the ones who really ran an enormous amount of risk when you go to the Everest and you see the khumba Falls which is one area you have to go through it's enormous pieces the size of buildings of houses that fall of ice the people who go and pay $100,000 to go up Mount Everest and who leave the trash and all the problems and create the traffic jams with Japanese explanations in the middle of the mountain these people don't buy the chromophore ones but the Sherpa who took the oxygen I think goes by 15 times with that risk and so the slaves these Sherpas this structure that's at the base of the pyramid this has never been used intelligently it's used on a control basis of I'm the one who's been at it a lot so you run the risk here's $1,000 for you to cross the falls 15 times and run the risk of your life how many people fell under each of these rocks of this beautiful pyramid that we look at today and so that explains why the 60 poorest countries in the world don't exist for us they're nothing they're not more important than any of these people were - the Sherpas or the slaves etc we're a society that has all of its merits all of its eyes trained on that one Steve Jobs but not those 60 countries those really don't matter at all and when you think about the corporations the organizations this the way we're organized around you know the the the the when you think about the their sigh or the or the new Versailles or early 15th at cetera you say the monarchy that today reigns over the world is that of cash and its king cash and and the slogan is cash is king and that is the monarchy we all pray to and we all bow down to nowadays when you think about the East India Company's you think about vo see back when Batavia was a place to create or Indonesia place to take over what what happened at the time the state came and said look I can't do this myself it's too far it's too complicated so I'm gonna give you the power and you can take church people and Protestants you can take armies if you have to kill the people there that's that's okay and then just settle with me at the end in cash because this is a commercial thing and so the first public corporation really that anyone can think of was the vo C and the vo C had stock and had shares and had the power of the state to go out there and do that what is the difference between that and svm today who leaves Holland and goes out and corrupts people to be the plan offshore platform in Brazil for example the same rationale is there Petrobras in Brazil for example company that's BM they do offshore rigs and offshore drilling platforms and so forth but they were just one of many examples but what I'm saying is if you take vo sea at the time and you take today today the state says look here is your right to go out and do business and make money if you go out and you do something illegally in order to do that you I'm going to settle with you in cash so it comes back to cash it's like this Suisse settled in cash with the United States over two billion dollars because in the end it's people sitting down and saying you know you're right it was illegal it was immoral it was ethical everything you say so how much and you pull out a checkbook and you say is it two hundred fifty million dollars okay here you are and so that is not different to that time hundreds of years ago in which a corporation had all the rights to go and do something but there was no personal responsibility there was no personal ethic the ethic was religious on top which is Calvinistic or protestant which is work hard to do everything you can etcetera now if you have to kill 2,000 Indonesians to do it they're not really people like us and if you have to corrupt people in Brazil to the platform well that's in Brazil so how much is it and you give me a check and we'll be okay and so this monarchy is still in place that's some kind of shocking news for us Dutch people I suppose it is there as it would be for Swiss as it is for Brazilians but the fact is that cash is still the ruling matter and it's become more and more the ruling matter but the more we realize that we're that's the only thing that we're revolving around as humanity the more we realize that it is a false God it is a false idol and people would repeat all the time that money doesn't bring happiness beyond a certain stage and so forth but the fact is that were built around an exchange a barter system that has to do with cash which necessarily eliminates about half of and half of humanity cannot play and we say oh what a shame you know I'm terribly I feel terribly for these people or I'm late for my very sighs let me who's bring in the champagne this is the only thing we can do people don't have the capacity as a person to say I'm gonna spend my life in mid-sentence on frontiere I'm gonna work with poor people etc no matter what it costs me you know it's not reasonable and so we've come around this Idol this totem pole which has King cash at the very top and we have to undo this with something that's wiser it seems smart but it's it's obviously not wise

Channel: vpro tegenlicht

Views: 13,587

Keywords: tegenlicht, vpro tegenlicht, vpro documentaire, tegenlicht documentaire, vpro backlight, Ricardo Semler, VPRO Semler, Tegenlicht Semler, Kees Brouwer, Brazilie, Melos Brazilie, Wijsheid van Semler, Wijsheid van Ricardo Semler, nieuwe wijsheid

Id: zaX3NKFYeOI

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 06 2015