Recorded at | October 16, 2014 |
---|---|
Event | TEDGlobal 2014 |
Duration (min:sec) | 21:29 |
Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
Words per minute | 212.79 very fast |
Readability (FK) | 72.75 very easy |
Speaker | Ricardo Semler |
Country | Brazil |
Occupation | businessperson, writer |
Description | Brazilian entrepreneur |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
What if your job didn't control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don't have to). It's a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?
1 | 00:12 | On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die. | ||
2 | 00:17 | I call them my terminal days. | ||
3 | 00:19 | My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, | ||
4 | 00:21 | but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer | ||
5 | 00:26 | and my parents and grandparents had it. | ||
6 | 00:29 | And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor | ||
7 | 00:32 | who looks at my exams and says, | ||
8 | 00:34 | "Ricardo, things don't look very good. | ||
9 | 00:37 | You have six months or a year to live." | ||
10 | 00:39 | And you start thinking about what you would do with this time. | ||
11 | 00:43 | And you say, "I'm going to spend more time with the kids. | ||
12 | 00:45 | I'm going to visit these places, | ||
13 | 00:47 | I'm going to go up and down mountains and places | ||
14 | 00:49 | and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time." | ||
15 | 00:53 | But of course, we all know | ||
16 | 00:55 | these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have. | ||
17 | 00:58 | It's very difficult to do. | ||
18 | 00:59 | You spend a good part of the time crying, probably. | ||
19 | 01:03 | So I said, I'm going to do something else. | ||
20 | 01:05 | Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days. | ||
21 | 01:10 | And I will do, during those days, | ||
22 | 01:13 | whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news. | ||
23 | 01:16 | (Laughter) | ||
24 | 01:18 | When you think about -- | ||
25 | 01:20 | (Applause) | ||
26 | 01:24 | when you think about the opposite of work, | ||
27 | 01:26 | we, many times, think it's leisure. | ||
28 | 01:29 | And you say, ah, I need some leisure time, and so forth. | ||
29 | 01:32 | But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing. | ||
30 | 01:35 | You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, | ||
31 | 01:38 | and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies. | ||
32 | 01:41 | It's a very crowded thing that we do. | ||
33 | 01:43 | The opposite of work is idleness. | ||
34 | 01:47 | But very few of us know what to do with idleness. | ||
35 | 01:49 | When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, | ||
36 | 01:54 | you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, | ||
37 | 01:58 | we have very little time. | ||
38 | 02:00 | And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health. | ||
39 | 02:05 | So we started thinking about that as a company for the last 30 years. | ||
40 | 02:10 | This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, | ||
41 | 02:13 | hundreds of millions of dollars of business | ||
42 | 02:15 | that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, | ||
43 | 02:22 | does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. | ||
44 | 02:25 | So this is not a simple business. | ||
45 | 02:29 | We looked at it and we said, | ||
46 | 02:31 | let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company | ||
47 | 02:36 | where we take away all the boarding school aspects | ||
48 | 02:38 | of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, | ||
49 | 02:41 | this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, | ||
50 | 02:43 | this is what you don't say, | ||
51 | 02:44 | and let's see what's left. | ||
52 | 02:46 | So we started this about 30 years ago, | ||
53 | 02:48 | and we started dealing with this very issue. | ||
54 | 02:50 | And so we said, look, the retirement, | ||
55 | 02:52 | the whole issue of how we distribute our graph of life. | ||
56 | 02:56 | Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, | ||
57 | 02:59 | why don't you do it next week? | ||
58 | 03:01 | And we'll do it like this, | ||
59 | 03:02 | we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. | ||
60 | 03:07 | So now, if you were going to be a violinist, which you probably weren't, | ||
61 | 03:11 | you go and do this on Wednesday. | ||
62 | 03:13 | And what we found -- | ||
63 | 03:14 | we thought, these are the older people | ||
64 | 03:17 | who are going to be really interested in this program. | ||
65 | 03:20 | And the average age of the first people who adhered | ||
66 | 03:22 | were 29, of course. | ||
67 | 03:23 | And so we started looking, | ||
68 | 03:25 | and we said, we have to do things in a different way. | ||
69 | 03:27 | So we started saying things like, | ||
70 | 03:29 | why do we want to know what time you came to work, | ||
71 | 03:31 | what time you left, etc.? | ||
72 | 03:33 | Can't we exchange this for a contract | ||
73 | 03:35 | for buying something from you, some kind of work? | ||
74 | 03:39 | Why are we building these headquarters? | ||
75 | 03:41 | Is it not an ego issue that we want to look solid | ||
76 | 03:43 | and big and important? | ||
77 | 03:45 | But we're dragging you two hours across town because of it? | ||
78 | 03:49 | So we started asking questions one by one. | ||
79 | 03:52 | We'd say it like this: | ||
80 | 03:53 | One: How do we find people? | ||
81 | 03:56 | We'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say, | ||
82 | 03:59 | look, when you come to us, | ||
83 | 04:00 | we're not going to have two or three interviews | ||
84 | 04:03 | and then you're going to be married to us for life. | ||
85 | 04:05 | That's not how we do the rest of our lives. | ||
86 | 04:07 | So, come have your interviews. | ||
87 | 04:09 | Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. | ||
88 | 04:13 | And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, | ||
89 | 04:17 | instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person. | ||
90 | 04:21 | And then, come back. | ||
91 | 04:23 | Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. | ||
92 | 04:26 | Make sure we are the bride you thought we were | ||
93 | 04:29 | and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. | ||
94 | 04:32 | (Laughter) | ||
95 | 04:34 | Slowly we went to a process where we'd say things like, | ||
96 | 04:38 | we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company | ||
97 | 04:41 | if they haven't been interviewed and approved | ||
98 | 04:43 | by their future subordinates. | ||
99 | 04:46 | Every six months, everyone gets evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. | ||
100 | 04:51 | And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, | ||
101 | 04:55 | which is many times situational, as you know. | ||
102 | 04:58 | And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent of a grade, they don't stay, | ||
103 | 05:04 | which is probably the reason why I haven't been CEO for more than 10 years. | ||
104 | 05:08 | And over time, we started asking other questions. | ||
105 | 05:12 | We said things like, | ||
106 | 05:14 | why can't people set their own salaries? | ||
107 | 05:17 | What do they need to know? | ||
108 | 05:19 | There's only three things you need to know: | ||
109 | 05:21 | how much people make inside the company, | ||
110 | 05:23 | how much people make somewhere else in a similar business | ||
111 | 05:26 | and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. | ||
112 | 05:29 | So let's give people these three pieces of information. | ||
113 | 05:32 | So we started having, in the cafeteria, | ||
114 | 05:34 | a computer where you could go in and you could ask | ||
115 | 05:36 | what someone spent, how much someone makes, | ||
116 | 05:38 | what they make in benefits, what the company makes, | ||
117 | 05:41 | what the margins are, and so forth. | ||
118 | 05:43 | And this is 25 years ago. | ||
119 | 05:47 | As this information started coming to people, | ||
120 | 05:50 | we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, | ||
121 | 05:53 | we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, | ||
122 | 05:55 | we don't want to know where you work. | ||
123 | 05:57 | We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, | ||
124 | 06:00 | and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, | ||
125 | 06:04 | to the customer that you're going to visit today. | ||
126 | 06:06 | Don't tell us where you are. | ||
127 | 06:08 | And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, | ||
128 | 06:12 | we had two people in the H.R. department, | ||
129 | 06:16 | and thankfully one of them has retired. | ||
130 | 06:18 | (Laughter) | ||
131 | 06:20 | And so, the question we were asking was, how can we be taking care of people? | ||
132 | 06:24 | People are the only thing we have. | ||
133 | 06:26 | We can't have a department that runs after people and looks after people. | ||
134 | 06:29 | So as we started finding that this worked, and we'd say, we're looking for -- | ||
135 | 06:35 | and this is, I think, the main thing I was looking for | ||
136 | 06:37 | in the terminal days and in the company, | ||
137 | 06:39 | which is, how do you set up for wisdom? | ||
138 | 06:43 | We've come from an age of revolution, industrial revolution, | ||
139 | 06:47 | an age of information, an age of knowledge, | ||
140 | 06:50 | but we're not any closer to the age of wisdom. | ||
141 | 06:53 | How we design, how do we organize, for more wisdom? | ||
142 | 06:56 | So for example, many times, | ||
143 | 06:58 | what's the smartest or the intelligent decision doesn't jive. | ||
144 | 07:02 | So we'd say things like, | ||
145 | 07:04 | let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. | ||
146 | 07:08 | If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. | ||
147 | 07:12 | Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, | ||
148 | 07:16 | then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, | ||
149 | 07:19 | we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. | ||
150 | 07:22 | So go to the beach and start again on Monday. | ||
151 | 07:24 | (Laughter) (Applause) | ||
152 | 07:27 | So the process is looking for wisdom. | ||
153 | 07:30 | And in the process, of course, we wanted people to know everything, | ||
154 | 07:34 | and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things. | ||
155 | 07:37 | So our board had two seats open with the same voting rights, | ||
156 | 07:43 | for the first two people who showed up. | ||
157 | 07:45 | (Laughter) | ||
158 | 07:46 | And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, | ||
159 | 07:52 | which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. | ||
160 | 07:55 | And the fact is that they kept us honest. | ||
161 | 07:58 | This process, as we started looking at the people who came to us, | ||
162 | 08:02 | we'd say, now wait a second, | ||
163 | 08:04 | people come to us and they say, where am I supposed to sit? | ||
164 | 08:07 | How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? | ||
165 | 08:10 | And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. | ||
166 | 08:13 | Where do we start? | ||
167 | 08:14 | We said, oh, kindergarten seems like a good place. | ||
168 | 08:16 | So we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, | ||
169 | 08:21 | where we started asking the same questions, | ||
170 | 08:23 | how do you redesign school for wisdom? | ||
171 | 08:26 | It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, | ||
172 | 08:29 | we need the directors to do more. | ||
173 | 08:31 | But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. | ||
174 | 08:37 | The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. | ||
175 | 08:39 | Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. | ||
176 | 08:45 | (Applause) | ||
177 | 08:50 | So we started thinking, what could it look like? | ||
178 | 08:52 | And we put together people, including people who like education, | ||
179 | 08:56 | people like Paulo Freire, and two ministers of education in Brazil | ||
180 | 09:01 | and we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, | ||
181 | 09:04 | what would it look like? | ||
182 | 09:06 | And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, | ||
183 | 09:09 | and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, | ||
184 | 09:11 | and Lumiar says the following: | ||
185 | 09:13 | Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. | ||
186 | 09:17 | One guy, we'll call a tutor. | ||
187 | 09:20 | A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. | ||
188 | 09:25 | What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. | ||
189 | 09:29 | But please don't teach, | ||
190 | 09:30 | because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. | ||
191 | 09:33 | Keep that to yourself. | ||
192 | 09:34 | (Laughter) | ||
193 | 09:36 | Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: | ||
194 | 09:40 | passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. | ||
195 | 09:44 | And we use the senior citizens, | ||
196 | 09:46 | who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. | ||
197 | 09:50 | So we bring them to school and we say, | ||
198 | 09:53 | teach these kids whatever you really believe in. | ||
199 | 09:57 | So we have violinists teaching math. | ||
200 | 09:59 | We have all kinds of things where we say, | ||
201 | 10:02 | don't worry about the course material anymore. | ||
202 | 10:05 | We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. | ||
203 | 10:10 | Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? | ||
204 | 10:14 | So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. | ||
205 | 10:18 | How do we express ourselves? | ||
206 | 10:20 | So there's a place for music and literature, etc., | ||
207 | 10:22 | but also for grammar. | ||
208 | 10:24 | And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, | ||
209 | 10:27 | which are probably the most important things in life. | ||
210 | 10:29 | The very important things in life, we know nothing about. | ||
211 | 10:33 | We know nothing about love, | ||
212 | 10:35 | we know nothing about death, | ||
213 | 10:37 | we know nothing about why we're here. | ||
214 | 10:39 | So we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know. | ||
215 | 10:44 | So that's a big part of what we do. | ||
216 | 10:46 | (Applause) | ||
217 | 10:51 | So over the years, we started going into other things. | ||
218 | 10:54 | We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids | ||
219 | 10:57 | and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. | ||
220 | 10:59 | We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, | ||
221 | 11:03 | which meets once a week. | ||
222 | 11:04 | And we'd say, you put the rules together | ||
223 | 11:06 | and then you decide what you want to do with it. | ||
224 | 11:09 | So can you all hit yourself on the head? | ||
225 | 11:11 | Sure, for a week, try. | ||
226 | 11:13 | They came up with the very same rules that we had, | ||
227 | 11:17 | except they're theirs. | ||
228 | 11:18 | And then, they have the power, | ||
229 | 11:21 | which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids | ||
230 | 11:26 | so that we're not playing school, they really decide. | ||
231 | 11:31 | And then, in this same vein, | ||
232 | 11:34 | we keep a digital mosaic, | ||
233 | 11:36 | because this is not constructivist or Montessori or something. | ||
234 | 11:40 | It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum | ||
235 | 11:44 | with 600 tiles of a mosaic, | ||
236 | 11:46 | which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. | ||
237 | 11:49 | And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing | ||
238 | 11:52 | and we say, you're not interested in this now, let's wait a year. | ||
239 | 11:56 | And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, | ||
240 | 12:01 | so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, | ||
241 | 12:04 | that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups | ||
242 | 12:07 | and this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. | ||
243 | 12:11 | And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, | ||
244 | 12:13 | which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. | ||
245 | 12:17 | Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, | ||
246 | 12:21 | so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. | ||
247 | 12:26 | And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. | ||
248 | 12:31 | And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. | ||
249 | 12:36 | Now, try to build a bicycle without knowing that pi is 3.1416. | ||
250 | 12:40 | You can't. | ||
251 | 12:42 | And try, any one of you, using 3.1416 for something. | ||
252 | 12:47 | You don't know anymore. | ||
253 | 12:48 | So this is lost and that's what we try to do there, | ||
254 | 12:51 | which is looking for wisdom in that school. | ||
255 | 12:53 | And that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life. | ||
256 | 12:59 | I accumulated a lot of money when I think about it. | ||
257 | 13:01 | When you think and you say, now is the time to give back -- | ||
258 | 13:05 | well, if you're giving back, you took too much. | ||
259 | 13:08 | (Laughter) (Applause) | ||
260 | 13:16 | I keep thinking of Warren Buffet waking up one day | ||
261 | 13:19 | and finding out he has 30 billion dollars more than he thought he had. | ||
262 | 13:22 | And he looks and he says, what am I going to do with this? | ||
263 | 13:25 | And he says, I'll give it to someone who really needs this. | ||
264 | 13:28 | I'll give it to Bill Gates. (Laughter) | ||
265 | 13:32 | And my guy, who's my financial advisor in New York, | ||
266 | 13:35 | he says, look, you're a silly guy | ||
267 | 13:37 | because you would have 4.1 times more money today | ||
268 | 13:40 | if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. | ||
269 | 13:44 | But I like sharing as you go better. | ||
270 | 13:46 | (Applause) | ||
271 | 13:49 | I taught MBAs at MIT for a time | ||
272 | 13:54 | and I ended up, one day, at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. | ||
273 | 13:56 | It is a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge. | ||
274 | 13:58 | And I was walking around. It was my birthday and I was thinking. | ||
275 | 14:01 | And the first time around, I saw these tombstones | ||
276 | 14:04 | and these wonderful people who'd done great things | ||
277 | 14:06 | and I thought, what do I want to be remembered for? | ||
278 | 14:10 | And I did another stroll around, | ||
279 | 14:12 | and the second time, another question came to me, | ||
280 | 14:14 | which did me better, which was, | ||
281 | 14:17 | why do I want to be remembered at all? | ||
282 | 14:20 | (Laughter) | ||
283 | 14:22 | And that, I think, took me different places. | ||
284 | 14:25 | When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon, | ||
285 | 14:29 | we had a big pit with fire, | ||
286 | 14:31 | and I threw everything I had ever done into that fire. | ||
287 | 14:35 | This is a book in 38 languages, | ||
288 | 14:37 | hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was. | ||
289 | 14:41 | And that did two things. | ||
290 | 14:42 | One, it freed our five kids from following in our steps, our shadow -- | ||
291 | 14:47 | They don't know what I do. | ||
292 | 14:49 | (Laughter) | ||
293 | 14:50 | Which is good. | ||
294 | 14:51 | And I'm not going to take them somewhere | ||
295 | 14:53 | and say, one day all of this will be yours. | ||
296 | 14:55 | (Laughter) | ||
297 | 14:57 | The five kids know nothing, which is good. | ||
298 | 15:00 | And the second thing is, | ||
299 | 15:02 | I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever. | ||
300 | 15:07 | I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch | ||
301 | 15:11 | in part of those terminal days. | ||
302 | 15:13 | And some people would say, | ||
303 | 15:15 | oh, so now you have this time, these terminal days, | ||
304 | 15:17 | and so you go out and do everything. | ||
305 | 15:19 | No, we've been to the beaches, | ||
306 | 15:22 | so we've been to Samoa and Maldives and Mozambique, | ||
307 | 15:24 | so that's done. | ||
308 | 15:26 | I've climbed mountains in the Himalayas. | ||
309 | 15:28 | I've gone down 60 meters to see hammerhead sharks. | ||
310 | 15:32 | I've spent 59 days on the back of a camel from Chad to Timbuktu. | ||
311 | 15:36 | I've gone to the magnetic North Pole on a dog sled. | ||
312 | 15:40 | So, we've been busy. | ||
313 | 15:42 | It's what I'd like to call my empty bucket list. | ||
314 | 15:48 | (Laughter) | ||
315 | 15:51 | And with this rationale, I look at these days and I think, | ||
316 | 15:55 | I'm not retired. I don't feel retired at all. | ||
317 | 15:57 | And so I'm writing a new book. | ||
318 | 15:59 | We started three new companies in the last two years. | ||
319 | 16:03 | I'm now working on getting this school system for free out into the world, | ||
320 | 16:08 | and I've found, very interestingly enough, that nobody wants it for free. | ||
321 | 16:12 | And so I've been trying for 10 years | ||
322 | 16:14 | to get the public system to take over this school rationale, | ||
323 | 16:17 | much as the public schools we have, | ||
324 | 16:20 | which has instead of 43 out of 100, as their rating, as their grades, | ||
325 | 16:24 | has 91 out of 100. | ||
326 | 16:27 | But for free, nobody wants it. | ||
327 | 16:29 | So maybe we'll start charging for it and then it will go somewhere. | ||
328 | 16:33 | But getting this out is one of the things we want to do. | ||
329 | 16:36 | And I think what this leaves us as a message for all of you, | ||
330 | 16:40 | I think is a little bit like this: | ||
331 | 16:42 | We've all learned how to go on Sunday night | ||
332 | 16:45 | to email and work from home. | ||
333 | 16:47 | But very few of us have learned | ||
334 | 16:49 | how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. | ||
335 | 16:52 | And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. | ||
336 | 16:56 | And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, | ||
337 | 17:00 | is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. | ||
338 | 17:03 | Because the first why you always have a good answer for. | ||
339 | 17:06 | The second why, it starts getting difficult. | ||
340 | 17:08 | By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. | ||
341 | 17:12 | What I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, | ||
342 | 17:18 | you will come to the question, what for? | ||
343 | 17:21 | What am I doing this for? | ||
344 | 17:22 | And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, | ||
345 | 17:25 | I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, | ||
346 | 17:28 | you'll have a much wiser future. | ||
347 | 17:31 | Thank you very much. | ||
348 | 17:33 | (Applause) | ||
349 | 17:45 | Chris Anderson: So Ricardo, you're kind of crazy. | ||
350 | 17:51 | (Laughter) | ||
351 | 17:52 | To many people, this seems crazy. | ||
352 | 17:56 | And yet so deeply wise, also. | ||
353 | 17:59 | The pieces I'm trying to put together are this: | ||
354 | 18:02 | Your ideas are so radical. | ||
355 | 18:04 | How, in business, for example, these ideas have been out for a while, | ||
356 | 18:10 | probably the percentage of businesses that have taken some of them | ||
357 | 18:13 | is still quite low. | ||
358 | 18:15 | Are there any times you've seen some big company | ||
359 | 18:18 | take on one of your ideas and you've gone, "Yes!"? | ||
360 | 18:21 | Ricardo Semler: It happens. It happened about two weeks ago | ||
361 | 18:24 | with Richard Branson, with his people saying, | ||
362 | 18:26 | oh, I don't want to control your holidays anymore, | ||
363 | 18:29 | or Netflix does a little bit of this and that, | ||
364 | 18:31 | but I don't think it's very important. | ||
365 | 18:33 | I'd like to see it happen maybe a little bit in a bit of a missionary zeal, | ||
366 | 18:37 | but that's a very personal one. | ||
367 | 18:39 | But the fact is that it takes a leap of faith about losing control. | ||
368 | 18:43 | And almost nobody who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. | ||
369 | 18:46 | It will have to come from kids and other people | ||
370 | 18:49 | who are starting companies in a different way. | ||
371 | 18:51 | CA: So that's the key thing? | ||
372 | 18:52 | From your point of view the evidence is there, | ||
373 | 18:55 | in the business point of view this works, | ||
374 | 18:57 | but people just don't have the courage to -- (Whoosh) | ||
375 | 18:59 | RS: They don't even have the incentive. | ||
376 | 19:01 | You're running a company with a 90-day mandate. | ||
377 | 19:04 | It's a quarterly report. | ||
378 | 19:06 | If you're not good in 90 days, you're out. | ||
379 | 19:08 | So you say, "Here's a great program that, in less than one generation --" | ||
380 | 19:12 | And the guy says, "Get out of here." | ||
381 | 19:14 | So this is the problem. | ||
382 | 19:16 | (Laughter) | ||
383 | 19:19 | CA: What you're trying to do in education seems to me incredibly profound. | ||
384 | 19:24 | Everyone is bothered about their country's education system. | ||
385 | 19:29 | No one thinks that we've caught up yet to a world | ||
386 | 19:31 | where there's Google and all these technological options. | ||
387 | 19:34 | So you've got actual evidence now that the kids so far going through your system, | ||
388 | 19:38 | there's a dramatic increase in performance. | ||
389 | 19:41 | How do we help you move these ideas forward? | ||
390 | 19:43 | RS: I think it's that problem of ideas whose time has come. | ||
391 | 19:48 | And I've never been very evangelical about these things. | ||
392 | 19:52 | We put it out there. | ||
393 | 19:53 | Suddenly, you find people -- | ||
394 | 19:55 | there's a group in Japan, which scares me very much, | ||
395 | 19:57 | which is called the Semlerists, and they have 120 companies. | ||
396 | 20:00 | They've invited me. I've always been scared to go. | ||
397 | 20:05 | And there is a group in Holland that has 600 small, Dutch companies. | ||
398 | 20:10 | It's something that will flourish on its own. | ||
399 | 20:13 | Part of it will be wrong, and it doesn't matter. | ||
400 | 20:15 | This will find its own place. | ||
401 | 20:17 | And I'm afraid of the other one, which says, | ||
402 | 20:20 | this is so good you've got to do this. | ||
403 | 20:22 | Let's set up a system and put lots of money into it | ||
404 | 20:24 | and then people will do it no matter what. | ||
405 | 20:27 | CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. | ||
406 | 20:30 | It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. | ||
407 | 20:33 | Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here? | ||
408 | 20:39 | RS: I always come back to variations of the question | ||
409 | 20:43 | that my son asked me when he was three. | ||
410 | 20:47 | We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" | ||
411 | 20:51 | There is no other question. | ||
412 | 20:52 | Nobody has any other question. | ||
413 | 20:54 | We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. | ||
414 | 20:58 | So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization | ||
415 | 21:03 | and you're saying, boy -- | ||
416 | 21:05 | how many people do you know who on their death beds said, | ||
417 | 21:07 | boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? | ||
418 | 21:10 | So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- | ||
419 | 21:15 | not in a week, not in two months, | ||
420 | 21:17 | not when you find out you have something -- | ||
421 | 21:19 | to say, no, what am I doing this for? | ||
422 | 21:22 | Stop everything. Let me do something else. | ||
423 | 21:24 | And it will be okay, | ||
424 | 21:26 | it will be much better than what you're doing, | ||
425 | 21:28 | if you're stuck in a process. | ||
426 | 21:31 | CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end | ||
427 | 21:34 | this penultimate day of TED. | ||
428 | 21:36 | Ricardo Semler, thank you so much. | ||
429 | 21:37 | RS: Thank you so much. | ||
430 | 21:39 | (Applause) |