He fired 60% of his managers on his first day as CEO
At 21, Ricardo Semler took over his father's Brazilian factory and started by clearing out the people running it.
Ricardo Semler was 21 when his father handed him the CEO title at Semco, a São Paulo maker of pumps and mixers, in 1980. His first move wasn't a strategy memo. It was a purge: roughly sixty percent of the company's top managers were gone before the week was out.
Semler's account — and it's worth flagging that most of what's known about early Semco comes from Semler's own retelling — is that he wasn't settling scores. He'd concluded that the layer of managers his father had built was optimized for control, not results, and that the fastest way to change how decisions got made was to remove the people whose entire job was making them the old way.
What replaced them, over the following decade, was strange by any industry's standard: workers set their own hours and, eventually, proposed their own salaries; factory-floor employees voted on major decisions, including who their bosses would be. When Brazil's economy cratered in 1990, Semco's workers voluntarily took pay cuts in exchange for a bigger share of profits and the right to approve every expense — and came out the other side with inventory down 65% and defect rates under 1%.
The part worth stealing isn't the specific mechanism. It's the sequencing: Semler didn't design a new structure and then find people to run it. He removed the incumbents first and let the structure get invented by whoever was left holding the problem.