Office boy became president of multinational – 04/15/2023 – Market

Ricardo Leptich’s work gained extra volume in recent weeks. The executive has dedicated precious time to resolve bureaucratic issues in order to assume a new position on July 1st: president of the Iberian division of the Austrian-German multinational AMS Osram, specialized in lighting solutions.

Since 2016, Leptich has been president of the company in Brazil and main sales executive in Latin America. But to accumulate the position of president of AMS Osram for Portugal and Spain, he needs to provide the “Hague Apostille” – the authentication of public documents so that they are also valid abroad.

“It’s a lot of work,” says Leptich, 44. “I miss the office boy at these times”, jokes the executive, who started in this role exactly 28 years ago, at the same company, when she was just Osram (the pronunciation is ósrram).

Since 1995, when he arrived at the multinational at the age of 16, until today, a lot has changed in the company and in the role of office boy, celebrated on April 13th in the country. The job of office boy or office girl, which is formally called “continuous”, was very common in companies until the early 2000s to ensure that corporate communication flowed.

In a time when cell phones and the internet did not exist (or were just in their infancy in companies), much less messaging, video and document signing and authentication applications, those who guaranteed the exchange of information between the different departments of a company were the ” boys”, who also performed all the bureaucratic part of the company with banks, notaries and Post Office.

Based on the figures from the Brazilian Occupation Guide, compiled by the MTE (Ministry of Labor and Employment), it can be seen that the role has been losing ground in companies as digitalization progresses. In 2021 (the latest data available), there were around 115,000 in the country (just over a third of them women), which represents a drop of almost 40% over the total number of professionals in 2015. Salaries are around Rs. $1,700 and the professionals are concentrated in São Paulo, but there is also a relevant presence in Minas Gerais, Rio and Pará.

The role was immortalized by the singer Kid Vinil (1955-2017), who released the song “Sou Boy” in 1983 with the band Magazine. “I walk down the street, pay the bill, get in line / I’ll take a photocopy and fight some dick / I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy, boy, I’m a boy”. At the time, work was at the base of corporate organizational charts, being the entry point for many young people in organizations.

“But today I think that many of the functions I performed as an office boy no longer make sense in the day-to-day of companies”, says Ricardo Leptich who, in the absence of the president’s secretary (his direct boss), was in charge of serving the main executive of the company, a German. “A cup of coffee with milk and brown sugar, accompanied by a bottle of São Lourenço sparkling water”, recalls Leptich. In his spare time, the office boy was also responsible for walking the president’s rottweiler through the streets of Alphaville, a condominium in Barueri, in Greater São Paulo, where the boss lived.

Leptich’s arrival at Osram itself is unusual nowadays, when one thinks of a multinational or large company.

“My father was a chemical engineer at Osram and he appointed three of his four sons to work for the company”, says Leptich. “I arrived to take the place of an older brother, who had been promoted to the technology department”, says the executive, ensuring that apparent nepotism did not save him from an admission interview at the company, which at the time was headquartered in Osasco. , in Greater São Paulo.

“There was a certain expectation, because the brother I replaced was very popular in the role”, he says. “But I practically had no contact with my father, who worked in the industrial part and I in the administrative part.”

At the time, there were two office boys at Osram: one to take care of the company’s internal demands (Leptich’s role) and the other to take care of the external part. “There was a letter franking machine: I weighed the correspondence, defined the value, adjusted the date of dispatch and sealed the letter. The Post Office did the collection and distribution”, he says. “It was like a branch of the Post Office within the company.”

In the absence of emails and chats, what worked were pouches. “It was the mail cart, I delivered communication from one department to the other twice a day”, she says. “All signatures and document exchanges were done manually”.

In the nearly two years that he worked as an office boy, Leptich had a macro view of the company, which at the time employed around 1,500 people. “My favorite department was marketing, seeing their ideas in direct mail and catalogs,” he says.

“I thought that was where I would like to work, I wanted to be an executive or, then, a rock star”, says Leptich, who at the time had a band and took advantage of the head secretary’s knowledge of English to help him compose some letters. “To this day I play guitar and I’m into Metallica, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple,” he says.

The artistic vocation took a backseat, while Leptich gave impetus to his corporate career. He left the technical course in programming he was taking in high school and took the entrance exam for Advertising and Marketing. Once in college, he heard that Osram’s marketing department was looking for an intern. More than quickly he applied for the position.

“It was a rush, because they needed the intern urgently and I had to resign as an office boy, hired under the CLT regime, to be admitted as an intern”, he recalls. “Throughout my career at Osram, it’s always been like this: I outlined where I wanted to go, prepared myself with all the attributes to occupy the position and ran after it”, he says, for whom Osram values ​​meritocracy.

“In the corporate world, preparing and being attentive to opportunities is not always enough”, he says. “You need to find a structure that allows you chances of advancement and people who value your personal effort. I had that at Osram”, says Leptich who, after being an intern, went through the marketing and sales areas in the positions of analyst, coordinator, manager , director and finally CEO.

According to him, only the last promotion –the president of AMS Osram for the Iberian Peninsula– was by appointment, without him having applied for the position. “It was a surprise. But I believe that Brazil and Latin America have been delivering good results and that was valued”, says he, who will be the first Latino to command a division of the company abroad.

Today, AMS Osram has a global revenue of 4.8 billion euros (R$ 26.05 billion) and employs approximately 22,000 people. In 2016, the company sold its consumer unit, responsible for residential lighting, to the Chinese consortium MLS, which is making the transition from the Osram brand to Ledvance.

In 2021, the Austrian AMS bought the German Osram, giving rise to the world’s largest group in the field of optical solutions. Among the main markets are automotive and cell phones. Another big business is LED modules for lighting manufacturers (digital system division). The company also operates in the segments of health (hospitals and sterilization of environments), security (airport runways) and entertainment (lighting for cinematographic productions and cinema chains).

The company’s strength in Brazil is the automotive division (75% of sales). “The used vehicle market is on the rise, which requires greater replacement of parts,” he says. The digital system division accounts for another 20% of sales, while the remaining 5% is distributed in other areas.

Brazil no longer has the Osasco factory, the stage for Leptich’s first job. The Brazilian branch, now headquartered in Alphaville, only imports and distributes products and today has a much smaller team of 50 employees, including outsourced workers. “The function of office boy ceased to exist a long time ago, we only have two young apprentices now”, says the executive, who only goes twice a week to the company’s headquarters.

“After the pandemic, AMS Osram instituted remote work globally, people only come to the company once a week”, says Leptich, who misses the conversations in the cafe a lot. “I managed to fish several ideas for HR from these conversations”, he says, giving as an example the paternity leave of 20 working days, the day off on the anniversary date, in addition to the improvement of the benefits package. “When we start from the bottom, we better understand what makes a difference in an employee’s life.”