Death is universal, but not everybody lives life. You realise this when you are gunning down a chute in the Rockies trying to get your skiing buddy off your back. You realise this when you stand on the Duomo and look over the red tiled rooftops of Florence. You realise this when you look at the blood red African sun, setting over the Magaliesberg mountain range in South Africa. It is said to be the second oldest mountain range in the world, second only to the Lebombo, which is also in South Africa. Point being that if you haven?t seen an African sunset you are missing out. Maybe it?s time you speak to your travel agent?

So, there I was enjoying the African sunset and chatting away with a friend of mine. His 26-year-old stepdaughter came for a visit a wile back and six months later she is still ?visiting?. My advice to him was to deal with the situation pronto. This was one of those unavoidable situations in life. He could either sit her down and ask her how long she planned to stay, or he could wait until the situation eventually deteriorated to a point where he asked her during a shouting match.

Now back to SEMCO in Brazil. Ricardo Semler was also bearing down on one of those unavoidable situations in the life of a family business: the official handover of control from father to son. Although this can be done fairly painlessly, it almost never happens. There is usually a simmering power struggle that erupts in some kind of final confrontation. Ricardo?s came over a number of months. His father knew that the day was coming closer for him to hand over control. However, he was dragging his feet. Ricardo realised with the passing of every day that he might never get control of the business. So, he started looking around for a business to buy. Eventually he found a ladder manufacturer and with his father?s backing decided to buy. Yet, once again his father dragged his feet when it came to the signing of the cheque. He knew this was a defining moment and that he was actually just putting off the transfer of control to Ricardo. So one day he just called Ricardo in and told him that he was transferring control to him. He also told him that he was leaving on a three-week break and that Ricardo had to make all the changes in that time.

Ricardo took to the challenge immediately and fired 60% of the board. This might be regarded as a bold or maybe stupid move. It helps to remember that Ricardo had been with the company for several years by this time. He had also been pushing for change at SEMCO and knew which directors were proponents of change and which were resisting it. Once again, it was one of those unavoidable situations. Ricardo could either sit down and deal with the problem immediately or prolong the agony over several weeks or months. You might want to take a bit longer than Ricardo, who did it in one day!

Nevertheless, he dealt with the problem and then continued to diversify

SEMCO. Contrary to what many believe, SEMCO did not set out on its democratic and freethinking ways right from the start. It rather went down the traditional route initially. Ricardo hired the energetic Ernesto Gabriele. Ernesto was an ex-Firestone, ex-Case, ex-Sharpe and ex-Xerox man. He charged up the corporate ladder via the traditional routes and was a true corporate animal. It took him no time to get proper systems and controls in place at SEMCO.

SEMCO diversified, bought two new companies and generally raced down the highway of corporate growth at breakneck speed. The growth was largely due to the ?never-say-die?-attitude of sales manager Harro Heyde. As Ricardo puts it ?Harro was a strange duck. He was very tall, balding and wore spectacles with lenses like the bottoms of Coke bottles. He didn?t own a suit and his clothes seemed pulled at random from the bottom of some dark, dank closet?.

Although we would all like to think that we could live a life without rules and borders, it isn?t really possible. Simply, this is because we are part of nature, which operates on very well defined rules that CANNOT be broken. One of these rules is that a system must have balance. As Ralph Wanger will remind you, trees cannot grow to the skies because eventually they will collapse under their own weight.

Eventually the stress induced by SEMCO?s success began to show. You can only speed along at full throttle for so long before imbalances start to appear. In very short succession Harro got hired by another company, Ernesto left after falling out with Ricardo and Ricardo collapsed from exhaustion during a factory visit. Suddenly the brakes got slammed on very hard.

In this time an important character to the SEMCO story, Clovis Bojikian, entered the fray. One of the SEMCO directors who got fired by Ricardo went to work for an outfit called KSB Pumps. Clovis was employed by KSB at the time and the ex-SEMCO director didn?t get on with Clovis. So, he engaged a headhunter to find Clovis another job. Ricardo happened to have employed the same headhunter to look for someone like Clovis, and before Clovis new it he was working at SEMCO. This is the truth. Promise. Ask my grandmother?s dog.

From next week we will look at the resurrection of SEMCO and the important role that Clovis played.

Whatever you are up to, I hope it is profitable and ethical!

Mr. B

mail_mrb@yahoo.com

Posted: 2003/05/05 09:38 View Archive