Business is an INFINITE GAME | Full Speech

please welcome back Mohammed khande and welcome Simon sinek [Music] [Applause] all right Simon Phoenix oh this is going to be fun as I told you yesterday I have no idea what it's going to go but you know your team told me that I had to say something controversial no we don't sorry Simon many men in this room know who you are right you're quite famous but uh let me attribute to a brief intro of Simon so Simon you have studied 100 greatest leaders are currently running the organization organizations today and what behaviors they display you're also best-selling author right start with why Leaders Eat Last together is better and the infinite game four books huh that's pretty good okay do you have another one coming or that's it my publisher would like me to yeah okay just asking so we have a lot of things to talk about so listen for all of you in the audience uh you can ask questions to the PWC Live app okay so we are going to just have a conversation with Simon but any questions you might have I'll try to uh to filter them and you know and we go and you know into a conversation and that's how we do it and you'll see also in the PWC Live app the last book that was written by Simon the Anthony game you can now order a free copy of that book to the PWC Live app so everybody here will have the benefit of wonderful I didn't get a book from you so so Simon let me give you a little bit of background on PWC first before we get into the questioning and the team that you have here so we are a people business okay under all the folks that you have here we have about 30 000 people they are all leaders in this room and we have 30 000 people that are not here today that we have been given the privilege to lead okay we are growing very fast we have a very diverse team we have different practices that are represented here but also we have folks that come from outside that John Peter received a couple of hundred of them in this room during the pandemic so imagine very diverse team growing fast putting different businesses together in addition to that we have to constantly reinvent ourselves because of the not pressures but the opportunities that we have in the market with our clients today so the need for reinvention is important right so it is going to be playing very good for us to understand what you mean by the Anthony game I know you wrote that book I watch a few videos also about the infinite game but tell us what do you mean by this infinite game in the mid 1980s philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr James cars to find these two types of games finite games and infinite games a finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and an agreed upon objective football baseball there's always a beginning middle and an end and if there is a winner then necessarily there have to be losers then you have infinite games infinite games are defined as known and unknown players which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are and new players can join at any time the rules are changeable which means every player can play however they want and the objective is to perpetuate the game to stay in the game as long as possible we are players in infinite games every day of Our Lives whether we know it or not there's no such thing as winning education you can come in first for the finite amount of time you're at school where we agree upon the time frame and the metrics grades but nobody wins education and though we can keep learning for our whole lives nobody wins Health Care nobody wins global politics and there's definitely no such thing as winning business but if we listen to the language of so many leaders it becomes abundantly clear that they don't actually know the game that they're playing in they talk about being number one or being the best or beating their competition oh we said that too yeah but okay but the question is the question is the question is based on what based upon what agreed upon objectives metrics and time frames clearly your competitors the other players in the game haven't agreed to your metrics time frames uh or you know or objectives nobody's agreed what winning looks like you know and so this is a problem because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game when we play to win in a game that has no Finish Line uh there are some very predictable and consistent outcomes the big ones are the decline of trust the decline of cooperation and actually the decline of innovation and so there's a great irony in companies that are trying to reinvent themselves and stay ahead of the curve while Simon simultaneously trying to beat their competition and win and be the best those two are incongruent right um uh I'll give you an example a silly example um when Circuit City went bankrupt Best Buy didn't win anything right it didn't win anything there's nothing their number one competitor fell out of the game because they ran out of the will and resources to play but Best Buy didn't win anything they had to keep playing in fact with the rise of Amazon the entire rules of how they played the game had to change and so the reality is is when you play with an infinite mindset you play Not To Beat anyone but ultimately you play uh the only true competitor is yourself which is how do we make our products better this year than what they were last year how do we make our services better this year than they were last year how do we make our culture stronger this year than it was last year and it's a game of constant constant Improvement but there's no such thing as winning but you mentioned five attributes right of yeah creating that infinite mindset because I'm sure that is something that we have to practice Yeah right what are the five attributes so you so to to convert to an infinite mindset or Embrace an infinite mindset as you said there are five uh there are five practices uh number one is you have to uh Advance adjust cause the second one is build trusting teams uh the third is study your worthy Rivals your fourth is have a capacity for existential flexibility and the final one is to um uh have the courage to lead so really quickly um you know a lot of companies have vision statements or mission statements and they usually sound similar and they're not helpful to be the best damn to be the most respected the most preeminent blah blah blah the highest value for our clients blah blah blah can you can you shut down the monitors please shut them the slides you know [Laughter] it's very nice being here thank you very much um and it's not wrong it's just not useful like nobody nobody oh man no I mean like I mean no one no one in your practice a total of zero is waking up every morning and thinking to themselves today's the day like I'm gonna Advance the mission right it's he said that yesterday laughs so when I talk about advancing a Just Cause right um a just cause is something a lot more idealistic it's a statement of the world that you wish that the the way the world you wished it worked the it's a world that you imagine like we imagine a world that's PWC we imagine a world in which and then we devote our practice we devote our energy we devote our resources to advance towards that cause and we're going to bring our clients with us the work that we do takes us closer to that course so I'll give you an example so my just cause our organizations just cause we imagine a world so you can see there's that Forward Thinking which as an aside which is why we call it vision is because you have to be able to see it right so we imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired feel safe wherever they are and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do that is our cause that is a cause so just that we would be willing to sacrifice in order to advance closer towards that ideal we will never get there it is an ideal okay and you can look at organizations or leaders that have made profound impact in their Industries or in the world you'll see these just causes whether it's all men are created equal right it's a just cause imperfect in all in its own way but you can see a nation striving um I have a dream literally imagining that one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children imperfect in its own uh in in reality but you can see a a nation striving um when Apple and Steve Jobs used to talk about empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother you can see the attraction to the personal computer because it literally gives power to an individual to compete against a corporation imperfect but a striving and all of these things become striving that become incredibly inspiring for for a Workforce because they feel like they're contributing to something bigger than themselves but when you think about innovation if you say provide greater value for our clients and it's not wrong I have to stress it's not wrong but but when you say innovate around that The Innovation tends to be more features and benefits it tends to be tweaking and efficiencies when you say be the best I don't even know how you innovate around that right you can't say some to say somebody you know make innovate so but when you say innovate a way to advance this the ideas can come from anywhere inside the organization and the ideas tend to be a lot bigger okay so it's not that those things are wrong that what I'm what I'm offering are what a a clearer path to embracing an infinite mindset okay right it's not that the other doesn't work it doesn't have value it just has less value in the infinite game okay right so that was the first one just go just cause advancing or just advancing you'll never achieve it it's an idealized State and even when you hear me say it when you hear people sit it sort of feels like it has more gravitas and it's proprietary you know it doesn't sound like every other company's mission statement okay um uh then I talk about building trusting teams which is essential um because especially when you're operating at scale 300 000 people trust is absolutely essential senior leadership has to trust uh middle management that has to trust the front line that that they not only understand what we're here to do but I don't have to micromanage you right one of my favorite examples of what a trusting team looks like it happened a few years ago when I was on a business trip I went to Las Vegas and they were very nice to put me up at the Four Seasons out there are you sure about business yeah it's a lovely Hotel um just asking what's that it was for business right it was for business yes it was it a real business trip um and uh they happen to have a coffee bar in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Vegas and so one afternoon I went and bought myself a cup of coffee and the Barista working that day was a kid named Noah Noah was funny and charming and engaging and I spent far too long buying a cup of coffee because I just so enjoyed talking to Noah so as is my nature I asked Noah um do you like your job and without skipping a beat Noah said I love my job now in my line of work that's significant like is rational I like the people I like the I like the work you know I get paid well I like my job love is emotional it's a higher order connection right like do you love your wife I like her a lot right hahaha it's clearly clearly a different standard right so when Noah said I love my job my ears perked up this kid has an emotional connection to his work so immediately I followed up and said tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me you love your job and again without skipping a beat Noah said throughout the day managers will walk past me and ask me how I'm doing ask me if there's anything that I need to do my job better not just my manager any manager and then he said I also work at another hotel and there the managers walked past us and catch us when we do something wrong they're the managers are always trying to drive performance and make sure we hit our numbers he said there I'd like to keep my head below the radar get through the day and just collect my paycheck only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself now this is the exact same human being working at two different companies and yet our experience of him will be profoundly different not because of him but because of the leadership environment in which he works you know I get this question all the time you know Simon how do we get the most out of our people people are not a towel that you ring them out to see how much you can get out of them you know it's it's a it's it's it's it's that's a good one right it's a flawed question the question is how do we create an environment on in which our people can work at their natural best and that is the art of leadership it's creating environment in which relationships can thrive in which trust can Thrive and we all know what it feels like to be on a trusting team right um it means that we feel psychologically safe enough to raise our hand and say um I made a mistake or I need help or I'm having trouble at home and it's affecting my work or I'm scared or I don't know what to do without any fear of humiliation or retribution but rather to say these things with the absolute confidence that someone on our team will rush to support us unfortunately we also all know what it feels like not to work on a trusting team where admitting any of those things could hurt your chances of promotion could hurt your chances of it you could be humiliated and so when we when we work on teams where leadership is creating an environment where there's where trust is a at a premium we force our people to come to work and lie hide and fake where they're pretending that they've made no mistakes they're lying hiding and faking and eventually things will crack and things will eventually break and and when you talk about reinvention and you talk about Innovation and you talk about challenging the status quo or whatever it is necessarily there's risk and necessarily there are mistakes and necessarily there's stupid ideas and you have to create an environment which that's good the alternative is everybody playing it safe which is not the way that leads to to best or significant Improvement so this is this is absolutely essential if you want to play in the infinite game because ultimately every single person here will leave the organization or die at some point you know uh circle of life and you'll be replaced by new people and so the opportunity is to create a company with vision and teams that can Thrive and Outlast every single person here and that is part of the responsibility of leadership is to leave the organization in better shape than you found it which means grooming the Next Generation like one of the primary responsibilities of any leader is to make more leaders and so building trusting teams is absolute is absolutely core to that I find the worthy rival one studying where the arrivals is actually the easiest one to embrace and Implement and I find it kind of fascinating as well in business we talk about having competitors who are your competitors the problem is is that notion of competition is a very finite mindset because competitors are there to be beaten right you beat your competitors in baseball but in the infinite game there are no competitors there's other players for sure um but unlike in football or baseball in an infinite game you can have two companies that offer relatively the same set of services for you know relatively the same price relatively the same quality and you know a plus and minus here and there and both can do profoundly well make tons of money at the exact same time right in other words there's no winning or losing and so this is why we talk about being the best based on what um and so to to try and beat our competition what we're doing is we're spending too much time focusing on what they're doing and not enough time focusing on what we're doing and so rather to embrace this concept of of worthy rivalry where you view all the other players in your industry as Rivals and some of them are worthy of comparison in other words there are other players in your industry other players in the game who do one or many things better than you respect that and admire that because their strengths reveal to you reveal to you your weaknesses and if the if the true only true competitor in the infinite game is yourself then knowing where your weaknesses are is essential because then you can improve upon them and so ask yourselves like who are the other players who when their name comes up it actually makes you insecure angry it's probably because they're doing something better you know is their leadership better is their sales team better you know whatever it is their implementation better what new is their marketing better and instead of trying to beat them or get angry respect them learn from them and then go apply the lessons to yourself a game of constant Improvement you can do it tomorrow and by the way your worthy Rivals can change out because sometimes they're no longer worthy of comparison anymore uh because they've screwed up their own business for whatever reason too much finite mindset I guess um uh yeah so you know we had a conversation yesterday with everybody around who our competitors are today yeah and about not fearing our competitors right because to your point be grateful for them yeah be grateful for them sure no let's not fear them but also understanding that whoever we assume we are competing against today might not be who will be competing against tomorrow right because you always have new players coming to the game that's what you're saying well this is the great irony in business because the the funny thing is the competitors that you select it's an arbitrary list right because no none of the big competitors of the companies that take you down like Myspace didn't even know Facebook existed you know uh you know all the publishing houses didn't they ignored Amazon they turned down investing in Amazon you know all the movie companies and all the television stations thought Netflix was cute right they were NBC CBS and ABC and fox were so focused on each other they literally were ignorant so the threats coming from outside and it's because old thinking with old players and again it's only because they're doing what's familiar you're taking somebody who's a senior executive at a company who's come up through an industry who's been doing the same thing for 20 or 30 years and now you're going to say stop all of that there's new ways of thinking I need you to completely unlearn everything and it's not that that can't be done but as human beings we say to ourselves well what I've been doing has worked perfectly fine for 30 years I think I know what I'm doing I'm okay thanks very much and that's dangerous and um I mean Netflix is such a great example because the then CEO of Blockbuster remember them and Blockbuster was the 800 pound gorilla I mean it was the only significant uh National video rental chain in the country right huge company um and we knew this new technology called streaming was available and it wasn't quite good enough yet which is why Netflix was experimenting with a new pricing model if you remember it was subscription and you could get the DVDs keep them for as long as you want send it back and then they'd replace them and then eventually they knew they knew eventually that would become streaming and the CEO back then uh saw that this was significant and he went to the board and said I think we should experiment with a subscription model and the board would not allow him to make that change you want another reason because 12 of their revenues came from late fees oh wow and they were too afraid to lose 12 of their revenues so instead they lost the whole company and that's the problem which is sometimes you have to take a short-term hit to innovate especially when it comes with experimenting with new models and the joke was it wasn't an experiment because another company had already proved that it had validity was working that's the Folly the Folly was there was no risk they were just short term uh finite thinkers that were thinking about the the all they could think about was losing that 12 percent now the whole company is down and now it doesn't exist and Netflix is literally redefining the category and I did not invest in Blockbuster so you talked about how do you call it uh organizational flexibility right or agility oh the existential flexibility existential flexibility okay existential flexibility is not like the normal flexibility the day-to-day that you need to do work it is um it is a a business's ability to make profound 180 degree strategic shift in order to advance that just cause um I think one of the single best examples of what an existential Flex looks like happened back in the late 70s early 80s so I mentioned apple and Steve Jobs Steve Jobs had this vision of empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother he saw the personal computer is the perfect technology to do that um and uh the jobs in apple had was already a big company ready fast growing company one of the first unicorns um they'd already had success from the Apple One the Apple II jobs was already famous and as is the practice of a lot of Executives they went and visited other companies and jobs and a few of his senior guys went on a tour of Xerox Park out in Menlo Park and Xerox showed them a new technology that they had invented called the graphic user interface which allowed people to use a computer by clicking on a mouse and moving a cursor across a desktop and jobs looked at this new technology that they didn't invent and said this is profound because right now if you want to use a computer you have to learn how to you know you have to learn a basic code right which means a very small percentage of the population can actually use it and if my ambition is to empower as many individuals as possible then this graphic user interface is something I have no choice to advance my cause it's obvious that we have to invest in it and so he said to his senior Executives who were with him we're going to invest in this graphic user interface thing and one of them let's call him the voice of reason uh said Steve we can't we we cannot invest in this we've already invested millions of dollars and countless man-hours on a completely different strategic Direction uh if we take that money away and reinvest it in this graphic user interface thing we're going to blow up our own business to which jobs actually said better we should blow it up than someone else and that decision led to the Macintosh the Macintosh so profoundly changed the course of computing that the entire software of Windows is designed to act like a Macintosh and the reason a computer is now a household appliance uh is because of that decision um and they did take a short-term loss and they did take a hit um because that's what happens necessarily when you reinvest um but that's an existential Flex profound strategic shift in order to advance your cause and you know the funny thing was with covet a lot of companies were forced to do it in most in most careers you'll do it once two at the absolute most but most most people go through their careers without having to make an existential Flex it's a pretty significant shift and it causes a lot of pain and stress to the organization which is why you need trusting teams and why you need to just cause because if you have a just cause this shift is like of course we have to make this change and if you have trusting teams they go all right this is going to suck but we're on board and if you don't have the just cause you don't have the the trusting teams you'll you'll probably break the company well I'm thinking at this time what this would mean for us but I don't know I well I mean no this is good thinking by the way because listen none of us have the answers here about what the future is going to be of course type of pivot what what it might be for us in the future now that's the thing that we need to think about well I mean so there's some there are some Clues um uh David Marquez work talks about this where he talks about the people at the top of the organization have all the authority but the people at the bottom have all the information you know it's a lot of your Frontline staff who are day-to-day with your clients and it's the people at the top who aren't day-to-day with the clients but they're making all the Strategic uh decisions and so it's not about um necessarily pushing all the information up but sometimes it's about pushing Authority down however there's another component to that which is when you have your brainstormings are you actually asking your team what they're seeing are you bringing in junior people and if you go to your middle managers and you say who are your Hot Shots you know who's the 25 year old 27 year old who's just like blowing like just blowing everybody's mind smart like you they know who they are grab them borrow them bring them in and say tell me what you're thinking tell me what you're saying now it doesn't mean you do what they say but you're going to get information and you're going to get a quality of idea that for good reasons and bad reasons that have that the senior folks just don't have that perspective they don't have the perspective of Frontline they haven't been there in a long time and they also don't have the perspective of of Youth and new technology so so reinvention all the ideas on what you could do and what you could become exist in your business the question is are you inviting the people to contribute some of those ideas no great Point great fun let people don't know to the concept of trust that you mentioned yeah I mentioned to you we are very diverse team many of us in this room are new colleagues yep because we are just getting to work together yeah we haven't done anything uh a lot because it's a new organization that we build together we are growing very fast we have newcomers coming from uh competitors okay other players other players okay yeah I learned something today yeah it's good that's good other players so what are you seeing out there about some of the best practices around building trust in organizations that are so diverse and so so fast growing like so so trust in a company is not that dissimilar from trust in our personal relationships and and friendships you know it's a human experience um it's a Feeling um uh and as we've all experienced during covid it's more difficult to build trust uh virtually it's not impossible but it requires a lot more work and a lot more intention you know Isaac Stern the famous violinist said music is what happens between the notes well trust is what happens between the meetings right it's the conversation walking into the meeting and the conversation walking out of the meeting it's the bumping into somebody in the hallway and being like Oh I meant to tell you you know it's the hey you want to grab a coffee that over the course of time those those little moments of Truth those little innocuous experiences that by themselves count for zero but over time they start to build relationship and they start to build trust the hard thing in a virtual environment um is those things are gone you don't have between the meetings you only have the meeting yeah and so what you have to do is create those opportunities artificially right prescriptively you have to force it to happen so one easy thing to do we even we've embraced in our company is a Monday morning huddle where you know it's encouraged that as many people show up as possible of course if you have client stuff you go do that but as many people on an operating team come together and uh and just check in with each other and it's not about work there's zero discussion of work it's what's on your heart and mind and then we answer a funny or provocative question that whoever's leading huddle that month will will pose to the team and it's an opportunity for us to connect as human beings where we say this weekend was a hard weekend you know my dad was admitted to hospital or this weekend was a great weekend because I got to spend some time with the kids I didn't even know you had kids and we get to see each other as human beings um and it's it goes a long way it's it seems small and silly but over the course of time we start to learn about each other and see each other as people rather than just as as co-workers and you know or encouraging people to have work sessions with each other where you turn on FaceTime or Zoom or something and although you're not having a meeting you just have them there while you're doing your work or having drinks together or you know I'm a huge fan of using the telephone because I actually think you can connect even better over the telephone than than sometimes over Zoom um and like if you have an issue instead of sending an email pick up the phone and call somebody because very often you'll solve the problem quicker and it's not 55 backwards and forwards but you'll probably learn something new and you can hear it tone of voice which is all goes to building relationships so uh we already know how to do it it's just a matter of doing it and and in the real world when you talk about diverse teams and new teams you know it's great leaders have the have the patience to sort of have a little empathy ask somebody how are you learn something about them were you from how do you find yourself here what's your career path it's it's human stuff it's human stuff it's just doing it at work that's now thank you that's pretty good so you know we talk about trust let's talk about teaming building high performance teams okay what are you seeing out there about some of the best practices around teaming and collaboration we are an organization that the only shot we have in the market if we all work together right because as individuals when we look at many of the other players yeah they also have good people yeah or Secret Sauce you hired some of them yes we hired some of them yes we did there's good people everywhere I mean that's the reality right but then the our secret sauce yeah we believe is teaming and collaboration because it gives us the ability to solve problems in a way that is unique and differentiated to get to outcomes to get to Solutions much better yeah I think that's partially true and uh no no no no no no it's okay no no you're absolutely my bubble just like poof no no no I didn't say it was wrong it's what I think that's partially true which is teams are essential trust is essential the the teaming the ability to come to Solutions is essential but if you take a group of people and put them in a team even if they get along and you have some decent leadership and there's no sense of purpose or cause or just cause to give them to advance then what it does is it creates it's it's you you can get myopic and so if you take a great team and you give them something to strive towards that's when you're going to get those really big wonderful ideas so I think you're 100 right which is you've got to have those teams they're essential but that give then then give that team um uh make them feel that their work is is worth more than the money you you make from it right that that it's having impact in the world or in your clients businesses um that is that when we look back at our careers and say that was a life worth living you know um so I I think it is definitely part of it and and we're in San Diego and just across the bay you have Coronado in Coronado is the home of the Navy Seals I've had a chance to visit Coronado and visit with the Navy Seals and uh I had the opportunity within the seals there is a more Elite group they have video games named after them they have number the number six in their name which is technically a secret so we kind of talk about it but the development group but SEAL Team Six yep Dev crew the dev group is uh is an elite team within within the seals I had the opportunity to work with and get to know the head of training for Dev group for SEAL Team Six and I asked him how do you choose who gets into this group I mean they're all incredibly High performers and he drew a chart an x y axis and on the vertical axis he wrote the word for performance and on the horizontal axis he wrote the word trust um and the way he defined it is performance is how good are you at your job trust is what's your character what kind of person are you and the way he put it is I may trust you with my life but do I trust you with my money or my wife right there's seals um and the what he explained say that one again yeah I may trust you with my life by do I do I trust you with my money or my wife so you might be great on the battlefield you might have a you might have good aim but like do I trust you off the battlefield and so that you may trust somebody to do good work with a client but do you want to spend six hours with them stranded at an airport waiting for a flight yeah it's a different app it's a different that's what I understand yeah yeah thank you yeah oh yeah I'll translate why right yeah so um as he explained it to me uh clearly nobody wants this person the low performer of low Trust of course clearly everybody wants this person the high performer of high Trust of course what they learned is that this person over here the high performer of low trust is a toxic team member and they would rather have a medium performer of high trust sometimes even a low performer of high trust it's a relative scale over the high performer of low trust and if you think about most businesses we have a million metrics to measure someone's performance and we have negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trustworthiness and I think this is a huge opportunity for you as a business quite frankly which is if you can develop objective metrics that you can help companies Implement you will profoundly change the course of business right because it's not that companies aren't interested in it they just don't know how to measure it right there is an irony which is actually very easy to identify the the these high performers of low trust if you just go to any team and ask them who the is they'll point to the same person uh laughs and by the way equally so if you go to any team and you say who's always got your back when the chips are down you know they're always there for you they'll also all point to the same person who's probably your most gifted natural leader who may not be your your your highest performing individual uh you're hyper it may not be a high performing individual on the team but they get they get more out of the rest of the team so uh that's interesting I don't think that there is any metrics that we know about no there's not very much I mean they exist but they're not very good and they're not they're not easily comparable or or objectified and and the military knows how to do this I mean the military is actually much better at measuring trust because uh for them it's trust is life and death right that if you don't and I've had so many experiences getting to work with Marines or SEALS or whoever where the way they talk about trust um I'll give you a a another example just to so I had the opportunity to visit Quantico which is where the Marine Corps selects its office and I had a briefing by the colonel in charge of of of OCS officer candidates school um and he showed up late for the briefing now Marines don't show up late you know if you're on time you're late that's their belief and um uh and he showed up late he said I'm terribly sorry we've had an incident on base that we're considering throwing out one of our students ending their career throwing them out of the Marine Corps and of course Curious George here is like what happened you know and he said to me um he fell asleep on watch and I said that's it like he fell asleep on watch in the woods of Virginia and you're going to throw him out of the Marine Corps and he I like you guys are pretty tough he said no you don't understand he said when we asked him about it he denied it when we asked him about it again he denied it again and when we gave him irrefutable proof then he said I want to take responsibility for my actions and the problem we have is you take responsibility for your actions at the time you perform your actions not at the time you get caught he said we had another Marine who fell asleep on watch he owned up to it immediately we punished him and we have no problem with him and then the colonel went on to explain to me says you have to understand if I take this person and I put them in a leadership position and if his Marines doubt for one second that their leader is being honest with them or if if his Marines think that he's doing something just to advance his own career and protect himself with the sacrifices of his Marines trust will break and people will die and so when in a combat situation when there is chaos and by the way command and control is not as not a leadership uh um mentality or philosophy that you can engage on a regular basis and it's not so in the military but it is essential in chaos covet is a great example like when we went into covid that was chaos every plan went haywire everything went haywire and you do need leadership that does actually go into command and control but the thing is that command and control only works when you have spent time building the trust up until that moment because when I tell you to follow my orders blindly don't question me just do it there has to be the undying belief that you're making this decision for the right reason and you're not going to needlessly sacrifice me and I know that you will make mistakes so the Marines know that mistakes will get made and people will die because of those mistakes but we're not doing them on purpose and we're not needlessly sacrificing people and they will follow those orders blindly now that's an extreme example because it's the Marine Corps and it's life and death but the same is true in business which is you can come out and control all the time that's micromanagement and that wears people out but but good leaders who are empathetic and spend the time building trust and care about their people in chaos in crisis they have the opportunity to convert into in into short-term command and control and it's highly highly effective and the team comes together in remarkable remarkable ways but the trust has to be built first you know we have one of our colleagues in the audience who knows command control Sean Joyce where are you he knows command and control because it was a deputy director of the FBI and also he was part of Hostage rescue so he knows yeah he knows about it yeah he doesn't listen to me yeah ever what's up with that we need to talk Sean okay so uh so tell us about the no the whole thing about teaming and metrics what gets in the way of good teaming what have you seen out there what gets in the way of good teaming why I don't think it's you know I think it's the stuff that you'd expect I mean I think it's Egos and insecurities I mean we're human beings and I think we forget that I you know that that business is a very human Enterprise I mean it's called a company for heaven's sakes I mean it's literally a collection of people um and you know um passive aggression and you know I've seen this in other companies where everybody's so nice but there's no healthy uh there's no healthy mechanism to release tension or have a fight or have a disagreement and I think one of the big challenges that modern business faces quite frankly is we want good leadership but we don't teach people how to lead you know when someone's Junior in their career we give them tons of training to be good at their job some people get Advanced degrees you know mbas or accountants you know lawyers they get Advanced degrees to be good at their jobs and when you get somebody who's new you give them you know training and you'll let them Apprentice with someone and Shadow with somebody more experienced and we give them huge amount of patience to learn what it's like to be at this company why because we want them to be good at the job and if they're really good they'll get promoted and eventually they get promoted to a position where they're now responsible for the people who do the job they used to do but most companies are very bad at giving those people any training for their new job which is called leadership right and the reality is we have to make this conversion where we're no longer responsible for the job we're now responsible for the people who perform the job and it's a different skill set and the other problem is is because you're good at what you do you know you actually do want to tell people how to do their job because you actually are better at their job that's what got you promoted but probably that's not your job anymore and so there's a huge gap in the market again fill this Gap you'll have a profound impact on the business world as we know it because companies are dying we don't teach active listening we don't teach how to give and receive feedback we don't teach empathy we don't teach how to have an effective confrontation we don't teach how to have a difficult conversation and we saw the lack of the skill set really show up you see it happen in more extreme circumstances but it's available all the time but after the murder of George Floyd it's a great example after the murder of George Floyd there is a lot of leaders who did nothing it's not because they're bad people it's because they didn't know how to have a difficult conversation about race with their team and they were so afraid of triggering someone or inflaming a situation or saying the wrong thing that they opted to do nothing right that's a skill set that isn't and we can teach that skill set and it's it's it's and it's it's not necessarily difficult it just requires practice so for example I need to have a difficult conversation with you what did you say I I like I need to have a difficult conversation with you I don't want to have this a conversation because I'm afraid that I'm going to say the wrong thing I'm afraid that I may uh trigger you but I think it's more important for us to have this conversation than not have this conversation so I'm going to need your help as we Wade through this together that's how you start a difficult conversation and so I think there's a massive Market opportunity to teach the skills of leadership to people who are becoming leaders because if we want good leaders we have to teach them how to lead as a skill like any other wow okay no this is good good I was watching one of your videos around goal setting and performance measurements when you look at the trend lines not looking at oh right yeah specific so tell us more about your your views around goal setting performance evaluation how do you look at high performance so um this is sort of when you learn to embrace an infinite mindset and remember business is an infinite game there's no winning business so to ignore it is to literally play with the wrong mindset for the actual game you're in so the more one learns to embrace an infinite mindset the more you start to see opportunities for the way that we run our businesses so for example goal setting is a great one um there's nothing wrong with setting goals human beings need goals we're very visually driven animals we need metrics it's like you can't run a marathon without mile markers it's actually unnerving right we need to know how fast and how far and that's what good metrics do they tell us how fast our company is going and how how far we've gone but metrics need to be dials rather than absolutes right so for example um goal if you're a retail establishment for example goal we want to open uh 200 stores next year right great and the problem is is you're hiring so quickly and you're not spending enough time training because you've got to hit that 200 store goal that you end up having um a poor customer experience in most of the stores and so they they'll underperformer do badly and so when you realize that you're hiring too quickly and you're not training properly is it more important to hit the 200 goal or is it more important to dial it down and say let's open 30 stores we overestimated because let's be honest most of our goals are arbitrary a bunch of people sit in the room and go wouldn't be great if we did 200 stores this year and that's the corporate goal you know um and worse and worse and worse and worse we'll incentivize everybody to hit that number you know okay I need to make sure to say something by the way they're clapping we are not changing the forecast okay all right they're saying so there's nothing wrong with goal setting goal setting is great people like ambition we like difficult goals we like we like I believe in overestimating capabilities but I also believe in tracking what's going on as you're driving towards that goal and if you're breaking the thing as you're going to hit the goal okay congratulations you hit 200 stories and you bonus everybody who's responsible for that but you end up with 200 broken stores and when you think about the infinite game if the goal is to stay in the game as long as possible that's not a good strategy and so it's okay simply dial it back and do it right right and you're more likely to stay in the game longer so that's one thing the other thing is I think Trend data is really important you know I we've over indexed and you and I were talking about this backstage in the United States especially but the rest of the world has kind of followed along we over indexed on rugged individualism we over indexed on uh short-termism and we over indexed on heroizing Jack Welch and GE right and if you look at some of the things that came out of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s you know the rise of shareholder Supremacy wasn't really a thing prior to the late 70s right it was really popularized in the 80s and 90s the rise of incentivizing executive based on the price of inequity rather than the performance of the company wasn't really a thing using mass layoffs to balance the books just think about that for a second I'm going to tell you that you no longer have a job go home and tell your family that you're that you've lost your job not because you did anything wrong it's not a meritocracy you've been a great employee for 20 years but we missed our arbitrary projections we're still profitable just not as profitable as we promised so I need you to sacrifice so I can tell someone else we made our numbers that philosophy which is normal in business today so no normal that CEOs go on television and talk about oh we just announced layoffs to meet our numbers and everybody goes you know and the stock price goes up figure that one out but when and when we announced increased spending on R D stock price goes down figure that one out um but I digress um uh the point is the point is is that um uh uh that did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s it actually didn't exist and these philosophies of business that are very very short-termism and very very finite minded we're popularized in the 80s 90s and 2000s and I think we're seeing a shift now we're seeing a Young Generation that's scratching their heads and saying is that really what we want you know companies companies uh complain about how their Young Generation these young kids aren't loyal and they State you know and they quit and they leave and they're not lo you know this is but think about how they grow up they grew up watching their parents get laid off through no fault of their own why should they trust companies right and so and I and so I think we have a massive opportunity um to reinvent the way in which business works and to to push aside some of the things that you know Jack Welch built a company for the short term GE is a shadow of its former self who knows if it's even going to survive it'll get chopped up and sold off for spare parts right um it wasn't a company built to last ironically and I think there's a massive opportunity and there's a massive vacuum right now there used to be a time where GE was the leadership Factory that if you had GE on your resume you could go run any company you wanted and drill it into the ground it happened actually yeah it did happen I mean it was the leadership Factory I mean and and the GE way and Jack Welch way was the standard and since that's gone out of favor because we realized it was good for the short term not good for the long term it's what what it was proved to be and did a lot of damage to our economy along the way and a lot of damage to corporate cultures along the way you know the average lifespan of a company used to be 60 years now it's 17. um uh there is a massive gaping hole that there is no leadership factory in America right now there is no company that is the gold standard for what leadership should look like in a modern new economy it's not GE that's for sure you know tech companies steal from each other but there's no leadership Factory so my challenge to you is why not you like why not why not PWC that why not you that you develop a style of leadership and a curriculum of leadership that you have a leadership program that's simply having worked at PWC literally when you apply for a new job somewhere else like literally just having PWC on your resume makes you the number one candidate to run another company and imagine what happens when you create a leadership Factory that your best people even your mediocre people because they're so much better than everybody else go on to run the future of American Business which is what happened in tge which is why that model perpetuated imagine the impact that you can have in the future of business simply because you embrace it for yourself you know I didn't see this one coming I like it a lot that's what I'm talking about yeah I had to make up for accidentally sitting on your vision statement it's right there in front of you laughs [Laughter] so the first book that you wrote yeah was start with why right so actually a colleague in this room gave me the book you know many years ago so why did you write a book and what are some of the key takeaways from that book so start with why I wasn't supposed to be a book and it wasn't supposed to be a TED Talk it was born out of my own pain my own journey I had what appeared to be a superficially good life I was living the American dream I started my own business I had a little marketing consultancy we did good work we had great clients um well-liked you know things were fine but I completely fell out of love with my own work and people gave me stupid advice like do what you love I'm like I'm doing the same thing and I don't love it anymore you know follow your bliss thank you um it's perfectly true it's just not actionable um and so I was very embarrassed by the fact that I didn't want to wake up and go to work anymore because superficially everything was okay so I didn't talk about it and all of my energy went into pretending that I was happier more successful and More in control than I felt and that is exhausting and uh it wasn't until a dear friend of mine came to me and said something's wrong that I did I come clean um and explained her what I was going through and it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders and all of that energy that was going into lying hiding and faking I redirected and finding a solution to ReDiscover my own passion and there was a Confluence of events and I'll spare you the Gory details but there was a Confluence of events and I made this discovery based on the biology of human decision making that every single one of us knows what we do you know the products you sell you know the job you do some of us know how we do it call it your unique selling proposition or the things that you think are your strengths but very few of us can clearly articulate whether corporately or personally very few of us can clearly articulate why we do what we do what's your purpose cause or belief that under underlies everything I knew what I did I knew how I was better than everybody else but I couldn't tell you why I was doing it and I realized that missing piece was the source of my malaise I became obsessed with understanding my why and the most important thing was I learned how to help other people find theirs and I just started helping my friends and my friends started making profound profound life changes and they would invite me to talk about it with their friends I would literally stand in someone's living room and talk about this thing called the Y and I would help people find their why for 100 bucks on the side true story um and people just kept inviting me to talk about it and I just kept saying yes and somebody said you should write a book and I shrug my shoulders and said okay and before you knew it it sort of became a thing and I think the reason that both the Ted Talk and the book gained such uh sort of organic popularity because it was driven not by marketing it was driven by people saying you should read this or you should watch this it's completely organic um uh is because I think it resonates I think it's a deeply human thing it wasn't designed to be to fill some Market opportunity it was it was something that was deeply deeply personal to me and remained so and do takeaways where you need to start to understand you need to know why you do what you do and have that be the foundation for everything that you do whether as an individual or as an organization yeah you know it's funny because when we thought about this this event today my team actually asked me that question what's your why what's my why yeah and why are you asking no and by the way it's it's a it's a very difficult question to answer not because we don't know it it's because it and this is the biology of it it exists in the part of the brain that doesn't control language you know our neocortex which is our Homo Sapien brain is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language but it's our limbic brain that's sort of old mammalian brain which is responsible for all of our feelings it's also responsible for all of our decision making but it has no capacity for language that's why we have gut decisions I know all the advice I'm getting tells me to do X but it doesn't feel right I think I'm going to do why and you ask all the most successful leaders or entrepreneurs you know what's your what's your secret they'll all say the same thing I trusted my gut now there's no part of your stomach that makes decisions what they're attempting to say is I couldn't put it into words but I could feel and and so we have a sense of our why and if you have the confidence to trust your gut it goes you know we've all done it we've all ignored and we've all followed it um the opportunity to put that why into words makes it no longer simply a feeling that only you can follow it now makes it puts into words that a gives you greater confidence in those decisions it serves as a filter but more important is you can share it with other people so that they understand the context of why you're making the decision even though all the data and advice as we should do the opposite so I would tell you so I thought about it because sometimes somehow I thought I was thinking you will ask me that question um I I didn't you yeah you're right right but I would tell you though it was uh it took me some time to answer your question to your point right because it's not it's hard it's a hard thing yeah it's a very simple but hard question and the answer was really soft words as shoes the profession that I'm in today I choose to be at PLC for three things a every day when I come to work I learned something new and I become a better person second thing I get energy I don't know how to price energy it's not making more money less money it has nothing to do with this I get energy from all of my colleagues and the third thing a very very strong belief that the future is bright for all of us that's my way so that's magical and I'll tell you why it's magical because it has less to do with you working at PWC and it has everything to do with who you are as a person and I can guarantee you that the reason your friends love you is because of that it's not just professional and a good why isn't just professional it's who it's the foundation of who you are and so I and and there's when you say it's soft as if it's as if you're apologizing for it I I think it's it's it's the complete opposite I think it's a statement of absolute confidence and it makes you unbelievably beautiful and appealing to to friends and and colleagues alike because we know who you are and what you stand for I think it's wonderful thank you so you know I'm actually blushing but you can tell but you're radiating so what other questions true I've been asking you what would you like to tell my colleagues what's in your mind coming out of kovid not completely out but you know right the last two years have been difficult yeah leadership styles have had to change yeah or evolved yeah the Millennials made decisions very differently than how they made decisions before yeah why should we pay attention to I think that we we've become so as a society especially in business we've become so obsessed with numbers that we forgot about people and the for me there was a magic that happened when kovitz showed up it was there was a little bit of real magic which is when it when we first went into lockdown which is almost two years to the day today when we first went into lockdown um a lot of leaders whether they were effective or ineffective prior to covid a lot of leaders just sort of leaned on their Humanity they picked up the phone and called their team one by one they said are you okay and they actually cared about the answer and that's called good leadership um uh you know and it it was an organic and human reaction to crisis but I would have loved to have seen a prior to covet and I hope that practice remains after covid you know empathy is a magical thing and and I think we forget that we are human beings working with human beings that's all it is whether they're colleagues or clients you know it's it's it is a human Enterprise and and empathy in the workplace I'll show you what it looks like because and by the way please stop saying soft skills we talk about hard skills and so there's nothing soft about them number one and number two hard and softer opposites and I would hate to think that hard skills and soft skills are working against each other it's hard skills and human skills and for somebody to truly perform I'm going to teach you hard skills which are the skills you need to do your job and I'm going to teach you human skills which are the skills you need to be a better human and if you can Master both of those you will Thrive at this organization um and I and I think that we need to double down on those on those human skills so what does empathy look like in the workplace again nothing soft about it incredibly human so the old system prior you know a non-empathetic uh scenario fairly normal you walk into someone's office and say um your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row um we've had this conversation before um if you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter I don't know what's going to happen right that's a fairly normal scenario we don't do that here no amongst your clients yeah that's good um better here's what empathy looks like your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row we've talked about this before are you okay what's going on I'm worried about you right and the injection of humanity in a human Enterprise pays dividends and this is the thing that's I think so fascinating about leadership in general is we actually don't know the things that we say or do that actually have an impact positive or negative I might add you know and they're moments of Truth like every single one of us has had an experience uh that we've done to someone or someone's done to us that we thought well that was so innocuous we didn't even realize that for example you know somebody did that somebody asked me how I was how I was doing they thought nothing of it went about their day and 10 years later we still carry that gratitude to that person and that loyalty um and and and I think we forget you know just just how important showing up and in in our messy imperfect human way trying to be a version of our best selves amongst each other every single day and by the way all the talents and skills you teach at work about good leadership the act of listening the how to have difficult conversations all these things every single one of those will translate back home you'll see marriages the quality of marriages improve you'll see the quality of relationships between parents and their children improved because of the skills that the the the office is teaching them how to better you know interact with clients and colleagues it it's how to interact with human beings and so all of the companies that I know that teach these skills the the number one feedback they get is my marriage is better and my relations with my kids is better and you believe that if there is more of it in the workforce today we will be faced with less issues around people resigning and people going to other places I mean yes I mean the great resignation um I think is um it's a market correction you know we know what happens to public markets when they become unbalanced right laws of nature intervene and there is a correction that's what happens and I think what we're experiencing is a massive correction in the labor market where for too many years uh let's be honest companies have taken advantage of their people especially uh low-level employees because they could and they actually had attitudes like if you don't like it here get a job somewhere else you know um uh and um and we didn't treat people as human beings we treated them as line items disposable line items and the front lines suffered the most you know and um and that balance got more and more and more tipped and now what we're experiencing is a great correction we're now uh uh uh labor has much more influence and says and thanks to covid says I don't want to be treated this way and I'd rather have no job than this job now remember prior to covid fear of the unknown was enough to keep somebody in an okay job doesn't mean it was toxic it was just fine right um but like who wants to be in a fine relationship you know I mean a fine job either like how was work that's fine you know how's your marriage that's fine right um but the fear of the unknown was too scary why don't you quit I would but I mean I don't know right and then covet happened and some people were furloughed some people lost their jobs some people didn't lose their jobs but they were filled with fear and we made it through and so all of a sudden the unknown a lot less scary because I made it and so when you give me fine and you offer me unknown I'll take unknown and I'm really surprised by how many people are leaving look you're going to have a small percentage of people who are leaving because of government checks that's a very small percentage and that goes away you have a small percentage of people who like you know what I want to be a singer and I want to follow my dreams we love that right and that should continue but there's a large percentage of people saying I just don't want this and and I don't even know what I want but it's definitely not this and they're choosing the unknown and so I think it's a huge shot across the bow to most companies that you've not focused on culture and Leadership for far too long and you better fix that because this is this is kind of an environment of your making and um and it's and it affects all ranks as you know it's not just Junior ranks but I think it's a great opportunity and again I think it's an opportunity for your practice that to help companies who are concerned about this to double down on culture and give people a place that they want to go to work that they feel seen that they feel heard that they feel like they have a voice they feel like their work contributes to something bigger than themselves that their energy is not just about helping somebody else uh make money but rather they get to share in in the joy and the spoils um I think it's a huge huge opportunity for your practice to teach companies how to do this I think they've you know you're used to solving business problems while ignoring cultural problems and look at look at a lot of the Unicorn you know whether it's Groupons or or Ubers or you know or GameStops I mean pick pick your not game stuff I mean uh Robin Hood Robin Hood yeah pick your pick your pick your uh your unicorn almost every single one of them the reason things got shaky had nothing to do with the business model had everything to do with the leadership and the culture and the fact that they were completely ill-prepared for anything going other than perfectly according to plan which as it turns out you know no plan ever goes according to plan I think it's a huge opportunity for you to actually change the face of of of how business Works uh and React to what companies are we know struggling with thank you thank you great remark Simon sign it thank you thank you very much appreciate it thank you thanks great job man good job thank you

Channel: Simon Sinek

Views: 169,497

Keywords: simon sinek, start with why, inspiration, motivation, leadership, career, inspire

Id: cdT_jEX-mEY

Length: 67min 50sec (4070 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023