Ricardo Semler

Born in São Paulo in 1959, Semler took over his father's industrial company, Semco, in 1980, at 21. The business operated like most firms of its time: strict hierarchy, rigid rules, control from the top. Semler decided that approach was the problem, not the solution.

During his first year as CEO he fired much of the senior management team and began experimenting with a radically different way of running a company: employee participation, transparency, and autonomy. Workers helped choose their managers, set their schedules, and gained access to company financials, ideas that sounded borderline reckless at the time.

Surprise: it worked. Semco grew from a small manufacturer into a diversified global enterprise: from roughly $4 million in revenue to more than $200 million, with thousands of employees across multiple industries.

Semler has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow and named Latin American Businessman of the Year by the Wall Street Journal's regional publication. He founded the democratic Lumiar schools in Brazil, was a visiting scholar at Harvard, and taught leadership at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

He is the author of the bestsellers Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend, and remains an adventurous world traveler, playwright, musician and raconteur who narrowly escaped a career as an attorney.