full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Ricardo Semler: How to run a company with (almost) no rules

Unscramble the Blue Letters


CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other qsntuoies for us, for TED, for this group here?

RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three oardwns. So when you snepd time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an otroganaziin and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their detah beds said, boy, I wish I had senpt more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.

Open Cloze


CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other _________ for us, for TED, for this group here?

RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three _______. So when you _____ time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an ____________ and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their _____ beds said, boy, I wish I had _____ more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.

Solution


  1. spent
  2. questions
  3. death
  4. spend
  5. organization
  6. onwards

Original Text


CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here?

RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
terminal days 4
wife fernanda 2


Important Words


  1. asked
  2. beds
  3. boy
  4. bureaucracy
  5. company
  6. courage
  7. death
  8. driven
  9. exist
  10. extraordinary
  11. find
  12. fuel
  13. group
  14. jacuzzi
  15. life
  16. lot
  17. months
  18. office
  19. onwards
  20. organization
  21. people
  22. process
  23. question
  24. questions
  25. sitting
  26. son
  27. spend
  28. spent
  29. stop
  30. stuck
  31. ted
  32. time
  33. variations
  34. week