Ricardo Semler

Born in São Paulo in 1959, Semler took over his father's industrial company, Semco, in 1980, at 21. He decided that strict hierarchy and control from the top were the problem, not the solution, and rebuilt the company around participation, transparency and autonomy.

Surprise: it worked. Semco grew from a small manufacturer into a diversified enterprise, from roughly $4 million in revenue to more than $200 million, with thousands of employees. But the deeper question that drove him was never only about business. It was about how people learn, choose and grow.

So he founded the democratic Lumiar schools in Brazil, later the international NovaLumi network, and spent decades studying education from the inside: the research, the testing, the arguments with educators that a real method demands.

He has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow, 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 School is the distillation of thirty-five years spent asking what school is for, and eleven years building the platform, Relevance-Based Learning, that finally makes a better answer practical.