Ricardo Semler

1. What are the personal and organizational reasons that led to Ricardo Semler change in his leadership style  so markedly?

After the father of Ricardo handed over the entire organization to Ricardo, he tried to transform Senco in a modern way. He immediately hired his own people and began modernizing the company. He tried to make the company  productive.

But his new leading strategies did not work. The bad results of this leading style made Ricardo change his style radically.

 The organizational reasons of changing the leading style;

The People were not willing to work for Semco because of classic authoritarian solutions, long hours working, serching for ways for to speed up workers, compelling to wear plastic ID cards, made salespeople to fill out customer statistics. These management style lowed the moral of employee and stressed all the workers. İn this manner the quality of product decreased.

 The employees missed deadlines and did not care their jobs. ( I think the  behaviors of Grim Reaper is the evidence of this issue)

The personal reasons of changing the leading style;

Fistly, Ricardo wanted to do things in a different way from his father. Their characters quite different from each other. The father of Ricardo is a person that has a rigid schedule, excessive punctuality and hard lines about life contrary to Ricardo.

Actually it is not easy to change the management style because of drives against change. For Ricardo, the pressure of father was the main driver against the change. But Ricardo realised that his rigid leadership style (like his father did) was not suitable for his personality and trying to create an organization acording to his father’s rigid methods made him ill.

Overall; these personal and organisational reasons led Ricardo Semler to change his leadership style and put into practice his own strategies that fit his own personality.

1. How would you characterise Semler’s earlier leadership style? And how about his later leadership style?  

Semler’s early and later leadership style differentiate from each other. While the Early one present rigid and controllability system for employees, the late one motivate employees collaboration.

Early Ricardo methods base on “checking” idea. In other words it can be characterised as oppressive, tough-minded, authoritarian, rigid attitude, formalist, lasting legacy, hierarchical, data mining concepts.