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. Along the way, Semler kept asking a bigger question, about how work, school and life should actually be lived.

He has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow, 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.

The End of Forever grows out of that same restlessness, now aimed at the second half of a human life: the marriages, careers and identities we're told to defend forever, and the freedom that comes from letting them run their natural course.