“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won’t let their workers vote on them

Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father’s São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instead of HR — and grew the company from 110 employees to more than 5,000. In the mid-Eighties he was already inventing hybrid work, shipping Telex machines to his workers’ homes. One of them even squeezed one of these 150-pound machines into his bathroom.

Now, in his upcoming e-book The End of the Boss, the author of the iconoclastic autobiography Maverick argues that the corporate pyramid — an inheritance, he says, from West Point via the railroads — is as dead as a cuckoo bird (as the Swiss would say). Nothing good has been done with it since World War Two. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, his native Brazil, and certainly not in corporate America where Elon Musk’s current pay package equals the wages of all his employees for the next five years.

Semler’s alternative is disarmingly simple: groups of ten who validate their leader every six months. Fail the vote and you’re not fired — you go back to being one of the nine. His Netherlands-based consultancy has brought versions of the idea to 208 companies, including the giant Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which agreed to do away with 399 branch managers. So why don’t more bosses follow? Because, says Semler, asking executives to be elected from below is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. Even the self-styled “fearless” Elon Musk would be terrified to end up as the roasted centerpiece of the Xmas table.

That same maverick idea (his first ex-wife joked he’s only ever had one) runs through everything Semler has ever proposed — from the rotating district presidents of São Paulo, to the untethered MBA whose cohorts hire their own professors, to the schools that grade Call of Duty and map it to the curriculum. Switzerland, he points out, has been governed by seven rotating nobodies since the fourteenth century. No, The Third Man’s Harry Lime was wrong. Rather than the cuckoo clock, it’s this anti-boss invention which explains Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace.

Five Takeaways

• The Pyramid Is Dead. The hierarchy came from West Point via the railroads — nothing good since World War Two. Company lifespan on the stock market: 61 years down to 21.

• Turkeys Voting for Christmas. Cells of ten validate their leader every six months; fail and you’re back to being one of the nine. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg would be terrified.

• Cycles, Not Failures. An eighteen-year marriage with three kids isn’t a failure — it’s a cycle that ended. Count valid days against dues days; when dues days win, it’s finished.

• The Untethered MBA. Business school is “outmoded, outdated, obsolete.” Semler’s cohorts hire professors on demand and study the case of the day — is SpaceX worth a trillion, or nothing?

• AI Is Electricity. Semler runs everything through four LLMs and admits he now struggles to keep up when his AI pushes back. His hope: we don’t become “domesticated pets.”

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Get The End of the Boss: endoftheboss.org

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: the anti-boss boss
00:01:19 An iconoclast at seventeen
00:02:03 From 110 employees to 5,100 — and a Telex in the bathroom
00:05:38 Did the pyramid ever work?
00:07:06 Who’s doing it differently?
00:07:40 Amsterdam, 1983: the birth of “social responsibility”
00:08:59 Groups of ten: validating the leader
00:09:54 ABN AMRO and 399 branch managers
00:11:09 An endless referendum on authority?
00:11:34 The gentle system: back to being one of the nine
00:12:49 Switzerland vs Singapore
00:13:04 Three crises: school, work, marriage
00:13:43 Relevance — and redefining success
00:15:30 Third marriage, five kids
00:16:45 A cult of failure?
00:18:05 Valid days and dues days
00:19:25 When the marriage is finished
00:20:39 A father at Freud’s clinic
00:21:26 Sixteen of seventeen publishers said no
00:22:56 Almost mayor of São Paulo
00:25:41 There is no Trump — there is thirty percent
00:26:19 The one idea
00:27:21 Bureaucracy: people as cattle
00:28:13 A radical humanist?
00:30:49 The real gamble: 61 years down to 21
00:31:55 The untethered MBA
00:34:17 AI is electricity — and grading Call of Duty
00:37:38 Greatest regret
00:39:16 The cattle aspect of fear
00:40:48 Marco Polo, two aspirins, and the monastery
00:43:22 Thanks and goodbye