Ricardo Semier is the CEO of Semco Partners, a Brazilian company that takes a different approach. Ricardo has also written several books, one of which is highly recommended by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Notes
- Tues and Thurs are terminal days
- he does the things he would do if he had learned he had a terminal illness
- When we have money, we don’t have time
- when we finally have time, we don’t have money or health
- at his company, they took away all the boarding school rules
- we’ll sell you back your Wed for 10% of your salary
- why are we building these headquarters – is it an ego thing?
- we don’t want anyone to be a leader unless they have been interviewed and approved by their future subordinates
- why can’t people set their own salaries
- everything is public
- don’t tell us where are, when you come in, etc
- we had two people in the HR dept and thankfully one of them has retired
- how do you set up for wisdom? We’ve come from an age of industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we’re not any closer to the age of wisdom.
- set up 3 schools – how do we set up schools with wisdom?
- what we do with education is entirely obsolete.
- the teachers role is entirely obsolete
- going from math class to biology to 4th century France is very silly.
- New school
- divide role into two
- tutor: look after the kid (don’t teach) – the little you know compared to Google, we don’t want to know – keep that to yourself.
- bring in people who have passion or expertise
- and we use the senior citizens which are 25% of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore
- teach these kids whatever you really believe in
- how do we measure ourselves?
- place for math and physics there
- how do we express ourselves?
- music, literature, and grammar
- thinks that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most important things in life. The very important things in life, we know nothing about. (love, death, why we’re here).
- digitally track 600 tiles of a mosaic of things we want to expose these kids to by the time they are 17. If they are not interested now, we try later.
- kids are in groups that don’t have an age category
- eliminates all the gangs and groups
- 0-100% grading
- divide role into two
- graph and distribution of life
- Now is the time to give back – if you are giving back, you took too much
- his financial counselor told him: you would have had 4.x times more money if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go
- I like sharing as you go better
- walk in cemetary
- what do I want to be remembered for?
- why do I want to be remembered at all?
- spent an afternoon throwing records of everything he ever did into a large fire
- did two things: 1) freed our 5 kids from following in the steps/shadow of – they don’t know what I do – which is good. I’m not going to take them and say one day, all of this will be yours … 2) I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement. I’m free to start something new and decide things from scratch.
- ask three whys in row
- leads us to why am I doing this?
- when asked why more companies don’t take this approach when it clearly works: takes a leap of faith about loosing control, and almost no one who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. It will have to come from kids and other people starting companies.
- why do we exist? – there is no other question?
- having courage now to ask why am I doing what I am doing