About Us · Three generations of Semco
From one company in São Paulo to a capability you keep.
Semco³ began four decades ago, when a company in São Paulo started removing the rules that treated adults like children and discovered that performance went up when control went down.
The name explains the lineage. Semco was the first generation: the company itself, the proof. The Semco Style Institute was the second: ten years of teaching what Semco learned through operations in eleven countries and nearly two hundred companies. Semco³ is the third generation: the capability distilled from the first two, installed in your company and left in your hands. No retainers, no sunset clauses. Just the compound interest of forty years.
Ricardo Semler
“Self-management is not just a way of working. It’s a way of thinking, learning and living together.”
The Semco years
1980–1993At 21, Ricardo Semler takes over his father's company in São Paulo and starts instituting new rules that treat adults like adults. Teams organize their own work, the books are opened, and Semco grows dramatically while the world watches. The company becomes the global reference for what trust does to performance.
Maverick goes global
1993The Semco story becomes an international bestseller, studied at Harvard Business School and read on factory floors.
Lumiar schools
2001–2016The same principles applied to education: students choose projects, teachers act as facilitators, learning happens through curiosity and relevance.
The Seven-Day Weekend
2003A new bestselling book expands the conversation beyond management: work-life integration, personal freedom, purpose and meaning.
Semco Style Institute
2016–2025The second generation. A global network of partners helping organizations run on trust, clarity and shared responsibility. Operations in eleven countries, almost two hundred client companies, many of them retrofitted.
Semco³
2026The third generation. Strategy and organization as one living system, transforming companies in twelve months and then handing over the reins. Long-term change run by your own people, the tools yours to keep. Introducing the self-updating company.
The people who carried it
Three generations, one lineage.
Semco³ did not come from a framework. It came from people who spent decades proving this works, then a decade teaching it, and now a team turning it into instruments. The thread runs through all three.
PROVED IT → TAUGHT IT → INSTALL IT
Generation One · Semco
1980s onward
The Five Musketeers, plus the head of HR. The originals who proved it on the shop floor, forty years each.
Generation Two · Semco Style
2016–2025
They carried the method across eleven countries and almost two hundred companies.
Generation Three · Semco³
The third generation runs the retrofits today.
Names link to LinkedIn where available.
Founding principle
You don't demolish a good building.
You retrofit it: new systems threaded through the existing structure, while the tenants stay in and the business keeps humming. We don't transform companies and leave behind a binder. We transform the people and leave behind the knowledge, insight and tools to keep transforming, which is a different business altogether.
Ricardo Semler
What Semco proved
What Semco proved.
A note before the list: Semco went further than most companies ever need to. It was the laboratory, and the extreme versions were run there precisely so your company doesn't have to run them. What survived the laboratory is below.
Decisions should go where the practical knowledge is
People closest to the work make the calls they're best placed to make, with oversight rather than control.
Numbers matter when the people who use them can see them
Each team gets open access to financials, with the CEO controlling how much is shared and when.
Participation without chaos
Safety, quality and compliance are non-negotiable. Culture and growth are co-designed.
Natural pacing
No restructuring shock. Every step is set by you, and it’s all reversible.
Built for the next generation
Autonomy, purpose and clarity, which is how people (especially young people) expect to work now. Semco practiced it decades before it was fashionable.
The capability stays with you
Every instrument belongs to the client when we go. You decide what happens next.
Semco practices, lived by organizations worldwide for four decades.