How to Lead with Purpose | Full Speech

so here is how this is going to work I think that Jen is going to give us some more perspectives on that but we will start with a conversation here some questions we will talk about the process overall and then we will open for Q a okay so get prepared get your questions ready and once your map here everybody's going to join the Q a is that right yep that's right Michelle um well thank you both for joining us for this conversation Simon I want to start with you um you're a big believer in purpose why what do you see the power of purpose for an organization like ours so my love and my focus on purpose had nothing to do with business it came from my own Journey where I had lost my own passion for my own work and superficially my life looked fine and good I owned my own business we had good clients we did good work but I didn't want to wake up and go to work anymore um and so that was embarrassing quite frankly I was embarrassed to like admit that I was unhappy when superficially things looked looked well and so most of my energy went into pretending that I was happier more in control and more successful than I felt um which is not a great place to be and uh it wasn't until a dear friend of mine came to me came to me and said something's wrong um was I able to take all of that energy that I was going into lying hiding and faking and to find a way to restore my passion and what I discovered was based on the biology of human decision making this little this little model why how and what and I realized I knew how I did things and I knew what I did but I didn't know why and so the idea of purpose has nothing to do with business it's a deep-seated human need our need to belong is deeply ingrained in us and if you consider the company as just the modern day tribe and the more we feel like we belong to our tribe and the more that we feel that our our company and our our work has um has meaning Beyond just the money we make in the product we sell it actually is incredibly fulfilling and Incredibly joyful and um it just so happens it's exceptionally good for business organizations that um have a clear sense of purpose use that sense of purpose to make decisions higher to that sense of purpose build structure incentives around that purpose tend to outperform tend to out innovate their competitors over the long term almost almost always thank you and Michelle you know looking a little bit about why now is the right time you know hearing Simon talk about the power of purpose for an organization and what it can bring to the table for our people and how we operate you know we've had a couple conversations over the last few years about who we are as a company and where we're going and how we want to be perceived not just by our employees and our colleagues here but more broadly by our competitive set and by people outside of the industry why was now the right time to tackle this so I don't think that there is like a right time but we actually had a great opportunity and I always had like this healthy dissatisfaction with the way that we were communicating our purpose in the way that we were talking to people and there was this never-ending conflict of people like me that are for more than 20 years in the company and that we share this passion and immigration uh sense of Noble mission for doing what we do and get confronted all the time by people that are joining the company that were great people asking us questions of why do we exist what would the company Miss if the ABI would not be here and I always thought that our our answers were like sometimes either superficial or they were not really well thought to address the changes in society and the reason why people are asking this question it was because they deeply care about this purpose was not just a question in there but we were trying to give answers that were very shallow and that thing was like was inside me growing for the years and I had this conversation with Britt what I said it cannot keep trying to to answer this if averages the average opinion of everybody I want to to give a try and bring the best people that we can and try to get to an answer to that that is massive transformational that mobilizes people that brings more is Miles than uncertainty and that people really engage with and then a lot of people came together it was super funny it's even a question that I have for you by the way I will link this on the question because one of these minutes of insanity when we were talking about that I said I want everybody that knows how to build this that is really any specialist and is good at that I want to bring Simon sinek and then there was this silence at the table and people said what are we talking about how are you going to bring this guy here and then I said yes I want to bring him and then I think that we we set Marcel on a mission together we fighting Kennedy and we start talking to people here and there and someone found a way that is always a way to talk to you and it was super funny because at Prince at the beginning people came and said oh he's going to join you for like a 30-minute session but we we have to to let him know that one he doesn't do this job two he doesn't engage on companies whatever he talks about the topic but he's not going to do the work with you and then I was incredibly frustrated and say why not if this guy is the good one he's going to come here to say okay so give me one meeting with him give me the 30 minutes and I'm sure that we can sell him the passion and bring him along and he's going to engage and help us if he does not we go for the second choice third choice we find a way to do this ourselves and then I was always curious to to understand the perspective from your side because was this this group of crazy people talking all together trying to convince you to join and I'm so happy and so glad that at the end you you helped us and we continue to engage and talk after all these months sounds so like like I'm hidden away that they don't let me out of my box the the uh the reason is was um a long time ago I made a strategic decision that I when I realized the power of this little idea I had a I had some choices to make right where I could build a business around it become a consultant you know make good money build a consultancy around this idea that was option number one and option number two was to to become a preacher for a new way of thinking about business and to work and devote my life to undoing everything that Jack Welch did um and and I made a strategic choice that I would that I would that I would preach and so it and my goal was to get to as many people in as many organizations as possible um to spread this message um and so I would often get invitations to come and like become a consultant but what I always viewed it it would take me away from spreading the message you know rolling up my sleeves for two years to work with one company is amazing but I I'm trying to change the way we think about business the great news is is that the movement is growing you know when I started first started talking about purpose a bunch of years ago it was a it was like hippie dippy stuff you like you know you didn't talk about purpose at work um work was serious um and uh and now I love the fact that major corporations at the highest levels are talking about the power of purpose because you felt it you felt like it was superficial I love that it's deeply human you're sort of reinforcing what we said a moment ago um and quite frankly a lot of companies pay purpose lip service because it's fashionable right and so every company has a purpose statement on their website but the question is do they use that purpose statement to make decisions are they using it to build their strategies and the answer is woefully small um I'll give you one silly example you know uh and I I think it's one of the ones I wrote about um which is a pharmacy for example you know uh if you go to Walgreens their purpose statement is to help our customers be healthy and what something like that you know whatever it is and then you walk through their stores and they sell cigarettes and other really bad things and if you ask them why do you do that they're like well I mean the margins are great you know it's like but what about your purpose in other words they never meant it it was never serious and quite frankly when we met I was just blown away by your honesty and your passion and the fact that you that you do recognize that there's new ways to run business um uh yeah I was just I was just completely just drawn to the people and that you really really do believe in this stuff and I find that very attractive and if you can change the way you do business you can influence the way other people do business um at the risk of talking for too long um you know GE back in the day was the leadership Factory in the world that if you had GE on your resume that was enough to qualify you to go run any other company you know um well that didn't work you know the model many of those Executives drilled those companies into the ground GE is a shadow of its former self and it wasn't built to last um and no one has replaced GE as the leadership Factory for the world because the old models if you think about it we all came up with with the Jack Welch thinking we all grew up and became Executives in that world and so the talent pool for a new way of thinking a business is zero foreign exciting is that it is a there's an amazing opportunity for a large company to reinvent literally how business is done just like GE reinvented it for those strange times my question is why not Abi like why not ABI that the way that you will imagine purpose the way that you'll imagine leadership the way that you will run your business will be not based on Old thinking but based on new thinking and that Simply Having ABI on your resume qualifies you to be the CEO of absolutely any company in absolutely any industry no one has replaced GE my question is why not you and that's what drew me to you Simon following on from that um I think we've we've all had the benefit of hearing Michelle talk about our purpose we dream big to create a future with more cheers um and we've heard the passion in his voice and we've heard him refer to our purpose specifically as magical is that something that you feel is unique to ABI in terms of having a CEO as well as a company and employees that feel so passionately about our purpose the simple answer is yes um the simple answer is yes I'm um and I'll you know refer to the answer I gave a moment ago which is a lot of the leaders of major public companies came up through the old system and so you know what got me here may not get me there but the fear of changing what I was raised to believe over a 20 or 30 year career you know it's largely fear because this is what I know I'm really good at this I perfected it it got look where it got me why would I change you know and I think it takes tremendous courage to say yes that was great but that what got us here will not get us there and to challenge oneself and challenge one's company is is pretty rare in especially for large public companies and so sort of following on to that I I I assume and you can both maybe speak to this that you both see purpose as a major driver or a catalyst for opportunity for a company I mean yes I mean the simple answer is yes I think we all agree uh and you and I definitely agree um but I think it's also um if you just look at if you look at this Young Generation who's coming up you know remember that they grew up in the old in the old model more important their parents worked in the old model and so I hear so many people complain that this Young Generation shows no loyalty to the company they're in and out well remember they watch their parents get laid off because the company missed its arbitrary projections the company was profitable just not as profitable as they promised and so their parents lost their jobs right so why should they be loyal to the company that's what they saw no loyalty to their parents and it was not a meritocracy their parents had woodworking were working hard and so I don't blame them and so they organically are challenging the old systems because it doesn't feel right um and they're looking for companies to respond to that and most companies either pay it lip service or or just don't and so I think any company that ignores changing tides of the world will find themselves playing defense and playing catch-up in a few years as that generation gets older because they're demanding it and they're not wrong thinking through kind of the opportunity here um one of the things that we had talked about when we were creating the purpose statement was that it would be something that was true today but also would live in through the future can you talk about why that's so important for an organization like ours so I'm a I'm a devotee and complete fanatic for the infinite game and having an infinite mindset and very quickly um just a quick definition so you know what I'm talking about um Dr James Carson the mid-1980s defined these two types of games find out games and infinite games a finite game is known players fixed rules and agreed upon objective football baseball there's always a beginning middle and an end and if there is a winner necessarily they have to be losers then you have infinite games infinite games are defined as known and unknown players which means new players can join any time and you don't necessarily know who all the other players are I mean you definitely don't know every Brewery in the world you know 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 um turns out business is an infinite game you know when Circuit City went bankrupt Best Buy didn't win anything um uh they had to keep playing uh companies come and go and yet the game continues with you or without you and there's no such thing as winning nobody wins business it doesn't exist um but if you listen to the language of too many leaders it becomes abundantly clear they don't always know the game they're playing in they talk about being number one or being the best or beating their competition based on what you know and I love it when Executives come to me and say you know we are number one and I always say for now you know um and so and so um the idea of building a company that can survive every single employee in this room after you've long gone and that that company remains true to its purpose um is a very very powerful thing a great example is right outside the front door you know the Walt Disney Company um you know the purpose that Disney founded and they've they've gone through you know trials and tribulations for sure um ins and outs but for the most part you know when they are at their natural best they are they hearken back to their founding purpose and I love that I love that uh you know you ask me is it essential I mean depends on what kind of company you want to run um if you want a company that that can continue to innovate and set set the course for what business should look like Define what Innovation looks like in your industry long before you're all you know long after you're all gone then build that company but if you want to build a company that just um sucks the life out of people who work there and does damage the you know to the industry all the name of it does damage to the the communities in which we work all in the name of short-term gains you can build that company too and it'll come at a much steeper cost um in terms of Love loyalty you know Etc et cetera so yeah maybe I'm just a crazy idealist so I think Simon as far as the infinite game is concerned um and I think yeah I know we have one zone for example that has fully adopted the infinite game um and I imagine we as ABI knowing Michelle we want to be infinite players but we've heard from speakers yesterday and today that have talked about sort of the tension between you know needing to meet short-term metrics and having our eye on the long-term strategic objective and those metrics having everything to do with quarterly earnings as well as you know the annual targets that we set for ourselves and we live and die by so and this question is both for Michelle as well as for you Simon you know I guess from an ABI perspective how can we be an infinite player and align that tension yeah so we can still meet our metrics as well as have that sort of long-term growth strategy so the the infinite game is not the absence of finite games um you can absolutely have arbitrary goals and remember most of the financial goals we set a few people sat in a and said what do we want our annual goal to be and somebody says let's make it this number and somebody goes no let's make it this number and that becomes the number right there's nothing wrong with that absolutely nothing in fact it's necessary human beings are very tangibly driven animals we like counting things it's actually important can you imagine running a marathon without mile markers it would actually be unnerving so metrics help us measure speed and distance which is very very important but we have to remember that when we hit a metric or don't hit a metric the game has not been won or lost they're markers right and and that's the important part so stop thinking we have to stop thinking about business like a race or a game and start thinking of it like a lifestyle so for example I want to be healthy right so there are many things I have to do to be healthy I have to eat right I have to exercise I have to you know get enough sleep I have to nurse my personal relationships there's probably 15 or 20 other things can't do all of those things well all the time it's a striving same in business we have you know we have product we have marketing we have sales we have leadership can't do them all right all the time it's a striving but we can set arbitrary goals like I want to lose x amount of weight by X date right and every day I'm going to stand on the scale some days I'll feel good and some days I'll feel bad and when I hit my goal I'm excited um but the problem is I have to keep exercising for the rest of my life like it hasn't ended simply because I hit a goal and that's important to recognize but what I find more interesting is what happens if you miss the goal and the answer is nothing nothing happens in fact very often we just miscalculated the the time it'll take to achieve it so if you're doing all the right things and you you see the trend data is is on path and you just lose that weight in a month later or two months later okay you're healthier now even missing the goal than you were before the the bad news the where it gets dangerous is when we're so obsessed with that goal that I'll starve myself and stop drinking water to hit the goal and I'm actually unhealthy and companies do that so the goals are good and celebrating the wins are great and there are wins that's fantastic but we have to remember that if we miss the goal the question is what's the trend data like are we a healthy company are we taking care of each other and I'll just go back a few years ago um uh uh Ginny remedy uh IBM missed its numbers and Ginny Romiti made of an internal video which of course leaked made an internal video that was spread out set up to the entire IBM that basically all over the sales team publicly and I remember talking to somebody at IBM and I'm like What's with that video and they're like oh so glad I'm not in sales right and basically berated them for missing the numbers this was the first time IBM had missed its numbers the first quarter in 69 quarters and the CEO's response was to berate a team the rate and higher division right after 69 quarters they missed their first one guess what happened after that berating the team and what happened to the culture and guess how many times they missed it after that it continued in other words it's fine it's fine to miss it it's a game it's a long game so I think that's where we get confused which is we become obsessed with we missed our numbers once we're we're doing fantastic you know so I think that's where it's just about keeping things in perspective that's why the infinite mindset helps it's just about perspective can I just compliment on that because they think that in our case we've been discussing this in the last two days and it's a very important topic for us because sometimes we set ourselves the wrong goals or even if we set the right goals the right targets to simplify the way that we measure then we get too obsessed with that Target in the behavior that follows is the wrong Behavior so we've been talking here for example about the Beyond beard space which are these liquids that they address needs that consumers have but that beer does not serve them because they like sweeter liquids or higher alcohol liquids or mixed liquids and this is an incredible opportunity for us one target can be a given number of net revenue but this is not why we are going Beyond beer we are going Beyond beer because we want this future with more cheers we want to attract more consumers to our franchises so we need to expand penetration bring more consumers into the category and the net revenue is just a consequence of that it's just a milestone a mark but if people start trying to achieve that Target so hard and so obsessed then they would do like unhealthy sales that will not turn in the point of sales that will leave retailers upset with our product with the wrong impression that the capital is trapped there and then we lose the long-term game which is attracting more consumers to the category and we have made like a huge change on our compensation and rewards model to rebalance short and long term in a way that people get free of this Obsession of this 12 months targets and trying to get there and the other thing that I I agree 100 here my example is a much uh shallow one but I love like sports and I love all type of sports and one of the sports that I follow is like martial arts and that is this fighter which I think that's one of the best ever his name is khabib and this guy came up with one idea that is like he always talks when he's fighting the other guy's Trash Talk he talks like serious stuff and he was saying in one of these world championship fights like win or lose doesn't matter I know how much I put into I know that I'm giving it all here today and if God helps I will win if not I will lose and I'll come back because this guy he is focused on that fight but he knows what he wants for the long term yeah so winner lose it today circumstance when in the long term I know where I'm going to and I think that this is a little bit of this idea of quarter by quarter there will be win and lose and we need to get used to that because you learn a lot when you lose but if you are training hard yeah if you are exercising every day if you are attracting more consumers every day if you are working together with your community retailers each and every day then in the long term I have little doubts that you can win yeah right and this to me is this this beauty of the idea of the infinite game which I think that fits super well for purpose because there is no final milestone for a future of Marchers yeah it really comes together very well on the idea and what you're capturing beautifully with that story is the ultimate the the ultimate competitor in an infinite game is yourself it's fundamentally a game of constant Improvement that's all it is because you know as we said before if a company goes bankrupt nobody else wins anything it's also a game where two organizations who sell similar products at similar price and similar quality can both be wildly successful at the same time you know even if the numbers are like this um uh and so I think what you're talking about is exactly right which is the game is constant Improvement and the losses reveal to you opportunities to improve well I think constant Improvement is something that we always strive for at ABI um you know Michelle it sounds like you're really talking about the fact that if we all focus on bringing our purpose to life you know focused on dreaming big to create a future with more cheers that we'll all see the benefits from that can you talk a little bit about how you want everyone in this room to help bring that purpose to life yeah I think that the the first point on that and I I like to repeat this over and over again I think that we had like a couple of amazing moments when we were working on this purpose and one came from one question that you asked which was what is that very own thing that defines your culture and that is there since the foundation as you do this Soul search you always remember that that was part of the company and we came up with this monster this is dream big and this was in our face all the time right and then there was the idea we dream big to something and this is really how we create more opportunities to people how we have a higher impact in the society how we help the economies of this community where we operate our business how our retailers grow their business so we can grow together with them and this is a job that's like it's easy to Define come up with the purpose of the direction but the execution is very granular right the execution depends on each and every country in each and every region and in the leaders that we have here at the room that's why every time that I go to visit a different country to talk to people I want to know what they are doing that is related to our purpose so I can come back and tell these stories right so I think that what I expect is people really walk the talk and leave what we are discussing and trying to build together because there are plenty of opportunities out there and no one person can execute all of them so we need everybody to work together but maybe you can also compliment and tell me how do you see the role of these people here we have them not the top one percent of the company we have the top 0.1 percent of the company in the room and they are the people that really drive and manage the company in the day-to-day because they are very close to the operations to the communities to the suppliers to the the customers that you have so how do you see their role in making this purpose now come to life and really have the full impact that we expect to have they offer the most they first of all they have the most um wonderful job in the world which does to take care of people I mean you know the responsibility of most senior leaders is that not to actually do the work of their departments but to take care of the people who are doing the work in their departments and that new skill set that that growth opportunity to become a great leader is magical and when you see people do things when you see people dream big to do something that creates a world with more cheers like when you see them do that it's like a parent catching you know you're catching your kids doing something wonderful or sharing or helping another child it's like you realize oh my God it's all worth it all the sacrifice all that time it's all worth it so leadership is a magical thing and to be a student of leadership is is wonderful so that's one the other thing is is there's an opportunity for massive creativity you know the the the thing that I like about your purpose statement and and I would from I would do one slight thing which is to drop the we I mean you can keep it up obviously I'm just saying practically um uh when you say dream big and it becomes an instruction right like you you literally can go back to your people and say dream big I mean that that's what I want you to do and and understand what it means so how I interpret the cheers is I mean there's the obvious one right you know the the there's beer but but cheers is is it's more than celebration it's it's it requires at least two people and what I love about it is it's about it's about Community it's about people coming together whether it's happy or sad it's about people taking care of each other and and I love how you're pushing people to to rethink how we do things so that people come together and produce something that's worth celebrating at some point um and it doesn't have to do with product I mean as I said before I'm realizing as I'm as I'm thinking this through you know that challenge of you know if if GE was the leadership Factory in the past why not ABI for the future like We're Dreaming big and coming up with a reason to say look what we've accomplished in the world we've changed the course of global business I mean that has nothing to do with beer but it has everything to do with your purpose and I think that's the challenge and opportunity everybody here has which is some of what you are able to bring to life with your purpose is in product absolutely and in sales and marketing and all the things that you'd expect um but some of it is actually how you actually do business and your ability to interpret that cause that purpose through the actual business I think is is what makes your purpose actually have longevity which it's it's more than just a product statement or a statement of like what we want to achieve in the world you know based on numbers or metrics it's actually a statement of how we think and how we approach problems and how we tackle problems and I think that's the most important thing and the most important thing is you have to practice it meaning um you have to come together and work together and help each other because this is about Community it is about cheers well and I think to that point Simon one of the five pillars of your book is specifically trusting teams and when you talked about IBM for example missing their target um you know among other things it sounds like a culture issue and a communication breakdown so when you look at ABI I think everybody can agree we're really far along on you know purpose otherwise known in your book as just cause trusting teams and culture is hugely important to ABI when you look at ABI or you look at other companies what are sort of the key elements to building those trusting teams and I would ask Michelle as well what does he want to see from us as far as you know the leaders of the company in terms of how we build those trusting teams so number one trust is a Feeling you can't order people to trust you um and simply being smart or getting something right does not produce Trust let's be Crystal Clear what a trusting team is we've all been on one in the past maybe and I hope you're on one right now um we've all been on trusting teams where we have psychological safety to say out loud I made a mistake or I need help or I don't know or I've got some stuff at home and I'm struggling and it's affecting my work product and I need help without any fear of humiliation retribution and it'll affect your promotability that's what being an interesting team is and that's what we have to build for the people who work for us not being on a trusting team we've also all been there unfortunately where we're afraid to say I made a mistake we would never say I don't know something or don't understand something we would never ask for help because it's we're either going to get humiliated publicly or we're going to affect our promotability um and the opportunity to build trusting teams is what leadership is all about um that's that's where the the strength of culture comes from so uh so yeah it's it's it's it's essential to building any kind of business short term or long term um but definitely definitely a long-term company for sure and all the stuff you talk about challenging and pushing boundaries means if you're pushing boundaries and you're thinking big you're going to fall a lot it happens there's no such thing as innovation without experimentation and experimentation inherently requires failure and I think a lot of companies that are too finite-minded they fear failure they fear well let me let me restate I actually don't like the word failure you know you hear you hear it a lot which is you know uh we have a fail fast culture you know I I think the problem with the word failure is it's like the word cancer which is there's a huge difference between stage four liver cancer and melanoma and a mild melanoma but they're both called cancer that's the problem and there are failures which are minor and overcomeable and there are failures that are catastrophic but the problem is they're both called failure I like the word falling failure we should work very hard to avoid but Falling we should encourage because you can get back up I know of one large gaming company and I love this um that they they don't have parties when they hit their goals they have parties when they fail they have they have parties when a game completely is a complete blowout because they're trying to acculturize being comfortable with missing a goal or or complete abject failure and they have a party and they have their own champagne which it has a label on it um their own label I think it's called they're called lessons and on the back of those champagne bottle after the party they actually write the lessons they learn from the failure and so it's a comfortable it's very comfortable it's a company that's very comfortable with failing which means they try again very easily and they're super innovative so creating a culture where falling is is part of the game right I think it's wonderful it has to be celebrated I love it and interestingly I'll tell you when I interviewed with Michelle Michelle you spoke to me about how specifically special the culture of ABI is can you talk a little bit about that and I also both have had the privilege of being offered help and been told to ask for help by you how did you come to this sort of way of leadership so if I go back to to the previous question before answering that I think that trust is that the the very center of building teams and having engaged teams and trust is earn it is not given it's not because you are the direct or the vice president that people trust you and you need to earn every day because every day you have a different situation today I'm happy tomorrow I have a problem at home that day after tomorrow I made something right and the next day I did something wrong so people need to one earn the trust second I really think that this idea of exposing the vulnerabilities talking about things that do not work not having a theater of just greens and success in things that you achieve it is super super important in build interest I love the conversations that I have with people when people come to talk to me and say let me share with you the things that are not working and here is what you are trying to learn and get organized so we can fix that so this is like the best way for it to start any conversation because then you can really focus on what matters in getting the business to be better and sometimes you see people trying to handpick and choose kpis to tell you a story in which everything is beautiful but the numbers and the data and in today's world we have visibility of everything you know what's working what's not working in terms of culture I always like to to think that our culture is very simple travels everywhere I actually always spoke about that so I had the chance to manage our business in China and find the amazing people that understand our culture and live through the same principles and perform at very high level in China or in the United States or in Latin America simple is a high performance culture so people they like to think that they can run it well lose weight compete and party and do everything at the same time so people are very active and it's a culture that when people like they really feel good about and they want to have a contribution when they don't like it's very hard for you to be in that place because if you'd agree too much if you don't want Candor if you don't want to talk about problems if you want to hide yourself is very difficult because you don't have like closed offices because we have performance targets because we do perform as appraisal and my my recommendation for people from outside is what I told you is speak up look for people to help you every time that you have an idea bring this forward don't let people just shut you down and at the end they always tell people if you have any issues that you cannot solve come to me or help you uh and it's a simple culture that's what I like it's like I like to think that we are all like athletes we want to perform and improve our own marks and we can do this with people that are in the same team as us so that that's what our culture is about great that's nice I want to make sure we have time for audience questions um so we'll ask one more question here and then we'll go to the audience love it um Michelle you talk a lot about how reputation isn't is a driver for us from a commercial strategy perspective can you just touch on how you think our purpose really helps bring that to life and what you see it going forward helping us build to yeah I'll go quick so we can open up I'm sure that you guys are craving to ask questions for Simon we've been seeing each other already for like 24 hours but I think that the the very simple thing it is we have an amazing company we are part of an incredible industry and an incredible category so be it is a big category I repeat this all the time one out of a hundred jobs out there is related to our industry from farming to the retailers and bars and restaurants one out of a hundred we have a huge impact in the communities where we operate we have a categories very inclusive men women young old it doesn't matter where you come from you can always sit drink a beer talk and that's gonna serve you in many different purpose shapes and forms it's very natural for ingredients right so badly East Water Hops and you have these incredible beers in this very local right so different from other companies we are not like designing Palo Alto and produce it in Bangalore and in Bangladesh or somewhere in China so we have businesses across 50 plus countries several factories and people and communities that rely on the work that we do but we have not been telling our story out there all the time and because of that others start to tell our story and build the reputation that we need to live with because we don't have the courage to go there and tell our story and say what we stand for and what we do and the most incredible thing is that when people get to know us the more they know the more they like so we're wearing this event that they just was sharing here the the the result of the work that you all do and I start talking to people in Washington and you can imagine the conversations the audience and people and the conversation was two minutes five minutes 15 minutes and was Unstoppable at one point in time we were talking for more than an hour and people continue to ask questions about what we do in Africa how do you support the retailers in Mexico how is this thing of Designing the seeds that we use for bodily in Argentina in Brazil and people don't really know the beauty that exists inside the bi and I think that as we work together collectively to tell our story to build a reputation then it's always easier to open any door to do business to bring Partners in to have more people sharing their dreams with us because we'll never be able to realize all the dreams only by ourselves we need Partnerships we need expansions of the company we need to bring people to work with us and help us to achieve what we want to achieve and this is what reputation is it takes a life to build what you need to build and you need to take care because if you lose for one moment it's gone forever right then if not us to bring the reputation of the beer category if not us to build the reputation of ABI who then right so we need to tell our story I'm living proof of that by the way which is you know of course I know Anheuser-Busch you know I knew some of your Brands not all of them and like whatever beer you know and when I got to know you you know I fell for something and saw something that I didn't know and and understand that that there's something really pretty magical going on here and narrative really matters um and your ability to tell your story that goes beyond product is is I think an amazing opportunity so that people shouldn't have to get to have them they shouldn't have to have a meeting with you to know how magical you are you know um uh it only reinforces it if I may um you know I talk about the concept of worthy rivalry which is the other companies out there who you know do things better than you so you can learn from them and the way that Phil Knight used to talk about Nike I don't know if you've ever heard the story um he was speaking at a large conference a thousand someone people whatever it was and you know the most CEOs as you know and they show up to talk about their companies they talk about revenues and market share and you know and he stood up and he said to the audience if any of you have ever run for exercise can you please stand up most of the room stood up he said um if you run at least once a week please keep standing everybody else sit down most rooms sits down he says if you run on you know twice a week please keep standing he says we run three times a week rain or shine regardless of the weather or the temperature please keep saying there's now a smattering of people in the room and he looks out at them and he says the next time you're out there before the Sun is up it's dark it's cold and it's wet and you're running by yourself we're the ones standing under the Lamppost cheering you on that's how he described Nike in an instant you understand what just do it means just do it has nothing to do with winning it has to do with trying and if you look at the history of their advertising Bo knows this and all of those things it had nothing to do with it my favorite one was the kid who takes the steak did you ever I don't know if you remember this whole TV commercial you know kid in somewhere in Latin South America it takes a takes a soccer ball puts it on the kitchen table takes a red raw steak out of the fridge and wipes the blood all over the soccer ball and then he goes outside and puts it on and all the dogs in the neighborhood sniff the blood and they start running and chasing him and he's kicking the ball it has nothing to do with winning it has everything to do with trying it has everything with doing and his story his ability his narrative captured that so exquisitely and when Nike's at their best they celebrate the ones who do not the ones who win and yet ironically it's one of these major sports brands and I think you have an amazing opportunity for people to fall in love with you the same way we fall in love with Nike let's get to the audience well we have some time for some audience questions so if I believe we've got some mics around the room thank you Simon thank you for sharing your personal story and why purpose is important for each of us not only for companies really move and touch with your comments um in this company we call responsible drinking promoting responsible drinking we call it smart drinking how do you see the role of my drinking into our purpose going forward um I I don't think so smart drinking is a practical necessity for the product that you have because it has alcohol in it right like there there is actually a healthy and there's a safe and unsafe component to to your product right like any product like you know if you make a car we want you to drive not like a crazy person like you have to drive responsibly you know um uh and so your if your purpose is about community and taking care of each other if your purpose is about dreaming big and and creating a world where there's more cheers I think one of the things that um instilling responsible drinking or smart drinking actually is a is actually less about the individual because if they got the point where they drank too much I don't know you know they don't usually stop uh it's about our friends it's usually our friends who say I'll drive it's our friends who say I think you've had enough it's our friends who say just one more I actually think smart smart drinking is it is very much built in your purpose when it's done the best um and and I think to say that every individual person has responsibility for themselves at all misses the point of what it means to be a human being so I think if we can inspire people to take care of their friends who've reached the limit I think that that really captures your purpose thank you Simon do we have additional questions I'm sure we do I see see a hand on the back there there you go it's Carla Carla great hi hi Simon thanks for sharing everything with us I have a question on vulnerability we have a massive Cultural Revolution going on and we see like here High leadership uh really engage with that yeah there is a difficulty like we we say that we are not leaders anymore that know all the answers but we learn everything but it's difficult in practice to be vulnerable and to accept and not being able to have all the answers so if you can share with us more on how to exercise vulnerability and how us as we as high leaderships can also influence middle management to to to exercise vulnerability yeah thank you um it's a great question and that word scares a lot of people you know when we're told you have to be vulnerable right it's it's scary to a lot of people it doesn't mean you have to walk through the Halls crying every day that's not what it means and what vulnerability means simply is I'm willing to share um as I said before I made a mistake I don't understand I don't know I need help because that is a position of weakness right because as leaders we think we have to know all the answers we think we have to have we have to be right all the time and the problem is is when we when we project that it actually has a has a it actually has a negative impact which is we now put pressure on people that they always have to be right and they have to avoid the answers because I'm always right and I have all the answers in other words you'll never get the truth out of anybody because that's the example that you set being vulnerable when you say in a meeting I you know I don't know or I don't understand can somebody explain that to me again what you're doing is you're creating an environment where other people can say I don't know can you explain it to me and you get more information that way but even I think even expressing how we feel right um I think people are afraid of that and I think covid covet was a little bit magical um because we saw people at home we saw people in sweatpants we saw people with their kids running through the screen and their cats jumping across and it was imperfect and things you know you lost the sound and we had bad connection and it was all fine everybody was patient and I really appreciated that we learned to be patient with people's Humanity but how many leaders talked about when they were really struggling during covet um I went you know at the beginning of covid I called a friend of mine we had to Pivot our organization we had because what we made most of our money from in-person events and I called a friend of mine whose active duty military and I said how do you compartmentalize your emotions so you can stay Mission focused because I gotta stay Mission focused I don't have time to worry about what's going on and he gave me a very Stern warning he said you can't he said no one can compartmentalize their emotions he says at best we can do it for a short period of time but every single one of us will suffer the trauma of combat he says the hard part is you may not suffer it in the moment you may suffer it four or five or six months later after you've been home already he says so the stern warning is you're going to suffer the trauma of covet at some point and I called all my a-type personality friends and said we're going to be hit there's no avoiding it no matter how you know strong we think we are it's going to hit us and we all made a deal to call each other if we started to struggle and sure enough one by one four five six months into covid the phone started to ring and people were really struggling and we all made a deal that there's we never cry alone if you have to cry you call somebody that was the deal we made with each other and um sure enough almost on schedule about four or five months in I started to go through my depression didn't was did struggle to recognize it right was afraid to call it depression because you know I'm a happy-go-lucky guy I don't have depression I don't want to be a diagnosed right but that's what it was I was suffering Trauma from covet and um one of the first things I did was uh talk to my team uh well actually the first thing I did was I called active military friend and said what are your symptoms when you suffered the trauma of [Laughter] and he said he answered my question he said well um I my my sleep pattern gets really screwed up he said I go to bed really late for no reason and I don't want to get out of bed in the morning and I was like yep and he's like I I don't really want to talk to anybody I become really anti-social and I'm definitely not asking anybody for help and I was like yep and he's like and um I'm unproductive he says I'll have an unproductive day and he goes that's okay I'll I'll rationalize it that's okay you're fine you've been busy it's okay and they'll have another and another in another and I'll keep trying to hide it and I was like yep and that's when I realized I was in it and so one of the first things I did was I when I had we had an all you know an all hands team as we always do we had one of our company uh All Hands meetings I said I'm I'm going through it guys I said I'm really struggling hard I said my sleep pattern's off I'm not motivated I'm struggling to ask for help I'm going through this and I just need you to all be a little patient with me I'm figuring it out I'm sorting it out I'm asking for help but I'm I'm not going to be very good right now and I just need you as a team I need you to be patient with me that I did that to my team made it possible for them to do that to me if I had pretended that I was happy throughout all of it I would have put pressure on everybody who is struggling to pretend that they were being happy and the worst part about that as a leader is then how can I help if I don't know and we make the mistake very often that when somebody's High performing that they're fine because some people the way they manage stress is to double down at work so their performance will actually be through the roof and they're struggling really hard so performance is no indication of someone's stress and so I think when the ability to be vulnerable is one of the greatest and most difficult Leadership Lessons any of us can learn but it is so important to building trust when people see us as human because it allows them to be human too do we have another I see in the middle of the room and if that whole story scared you if you feel like you're going through something like that call one of each other I assume you have friends in the room and do it to one person you know I'm struggling what do I do and you'll find that you can produce tremendous courage when you have at least one person who's got your back I think I have Craig there right hello I'm here thank you Simon for the inspiration and and also thank you for the challenge you know about GE be in the leadership Factor the past and how can ABI become the new one right I wanted to ask you can you give us two or three examples of what GE and Jack Welch got wrong and how API should think about it differently overcome the new leadership factor of the future yeah absolutely um uh so in the in the without in the mid to late 1970s of an economist by the name of Milton Friedman offered an entirely new definition of the purpose of business he said the purpose of business is to maximize profit within the bounds of the law that's a very low standard like what about ethics right but this new definition of business which was simply to maximize profit believe it or not that wasn't the definition of the responsibility of the business prior right it was more uh Adam Smith which is to produce great product and great product is how we you know take care of the consumer and that's what makes us Thrive and all of that stuff um and it shifted the the focus of business inwards and a lot of Executives embraced it and you started to see that miltonian embracement of uh really start to gain momentum in the 80s and was full-fledged in the 90s and 2000s so it has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat we saw it Fly and we saw policy change to embrace that definition so for example there was no such thing as using mass layoffs on a regular basis to manage the numbers there was no such thing as mass labs to balance the books prior to the early 1980s it did not exist it was used as a last resort when the company was really losing money right did not exist that's number one number two the whole idea of rank and yank that Jack Welch popularized where you rank the entire company based solely on performance you promote the top 10 and fire the bottom 10 every single year with no assessment as to are they stabbing each other on the others High performers bad for the culture stabbing each other in the back for their individual performance and of the low performance struggling with other kinds of issues maybe they're under stress maybe it's market conditions who knows didn't matter you get ranked you get fired you get promoted guess what that did to the culture everybody was stabbing each other right um the um the imbalance of shareholder Supremacy taking care of our shareholders was always a thing that's not an issue but it wasn't considered more important than the customer or the employee we now live in a world where the shareholder is now considered more important than the customer in the employee employee and you hear bankers and CEOs talk they're talking nonsense when they talk about their fiduciary duty right it's completely made up um and that all was popularized by Jack Welch he was the poster child for all of these new ways of running business that are now completely standardized one of my favorite stories is actually from Gary Ridge is the CEO he just retired CEO of WD-40 which is a public company and he was on his analyst call and his analyst said Gary you missed your numbers and Gary said um no I missed your numbers my numbers are just fine um uh but uh but that all of that you know the that that that that companies are making decisions based on the 27 year old analyst telling you that what you need to do so he can get his bonus like that thanks we can thank Jack Welch for all of that I think we have Greg Boss Of course I have strong opinions by the way I'm also the first to admit that the pressure is very very difficult and overwhelming from the public markets I don't mean to minimize it that it is very difficult to find the courage to do the right thing that you know is right for your company despite all the pressures from the external markets from the external uh from the outside I don't mean to diminish the pressures I know it's huge but but uh there's already a movement to start to push back and I really I love that so the same as a follow-up to that you're talking about incentives in the short term mindset so what's the right incentive structure when you think about the infinite game of business sure so it has to be balanced there's no such thing as a perfect uh Professor there's no such thing as a perfect company let's start there just like there's no such thing as a perfect person despite what we think about ourselves right that was a joke the um it's always a striving and it's always constant Improvement and going back to some of the stuff that Jack Welch did which is the incentive structures became too lopsided where the performance of the company actually was not how Executives were compensated it was only the the performance of the equity of the stock and we think about that for a second you know when a company announces Mass layoffs the stock price usually goes up and when they announce a huge investment in r d the stock price usually goes down right which if you think about business it's the opposite and so it's about a rebalancing you know which is I think a performance of company needs to be included I think that long term needs to be included um I think that adherence to values needs to be included so that's all fine and good you're you're a high performer and your numbers are great but nobody trusts you you stabbed a thousand people in the back to get to the numbers you're doing and you are actually damaging our culture no you don't get a promotion you know um there's one company I know out there who does what they call 50 50 bonuses 50 of your bonuses based on your numbers and 50 of your bonuses based on contribution to culture so if you hit your numbers and you ignore culture 50 if all you do is walk around and check on everybody but you don't actually do any work 50 you know the point is and it goes back to what I was saying before unfortunately there's not a lot that exists out there about companies that have profoundly changed these things especially in the public markets you know um it's very much the old ways and there's companies that are experimenting here and there with bits and pieces but like really robust trust measurements that can be included into somebody's compensation package kind of doesn't exist and so this is where I'm chat where I challenge ABI to think big which is the metrics need to be invented and just like Jack Welch either invented new or created such an imbalance for the metrics that have become standardized today we need to invent new and re-re recalibrate but I wish I could tell you which company has done it but it hasn't been done not on mass anyway right over here thank you um hello so Simon thank you very much for for the thoughts and the comments and Michelle and Kate and Jen thank you for this session I I will say I find it very valuable and took a lot of notes and words already but I'd like to pull out one word Simon that you said which was preacher at the very beginning and ask a little bit about that word and to dig into it because when I hear the word preacher you know there has been a lot of lack of trust in the world within religion between countries media government neighbors between you know almost every every indication yep so we're almost in a low trust world that's here and yet we're trying to create a high Trust Company and culture that's centered around the purpose itself yeah so my question is is when you think about how you be an effective preacher particularly for kind of this leadership group where we are all tasked with that very much and the purpose and living that purpose and talking about that purpose how do you be an effective preacher not a false prophet and really make it live and breathe in the organization right what have you found that works well so you you so the word authenticity is bandied around a little too much you know so it's kind of lost its meaning a little bit but the true definition of authenticity is that you say and do the things you actually believe um and I believe these ideas the core of my being and the reason you can tell is because I talk about them with great Passion that's not you can't manufacture passion like I can't give you a passionate you know presentation about the migration patterns of European swallows because I don't care right and so um to be passionate is is finding connection passion is an output not an input I always love that we only hire passionate people well how do you know that the passion of interviewing but not for working you know passion is an output like when I'm a part of something bigger than myself when I love my team when I feel supported what you get is passion you know working hard for something we don't believe in is called stress working hard for something we love is called passion and so number one you have to you yourself have to connect with the purpose of the organization if you find it corny or cheesy then this may not be the place for you like you you actually have to find personal connection in it and and as Michelle said before like in the past it felt superficial and I've seen that a lot in companies where it com where executives are expected to go you know preach but they don't even believe in it I ask them in private like do you believe in like no no really you know they can't even like they have to read it they don't even know what it is you know they kind of remember it um so you have to find connection at it and more important you have to look for examples that bring it to life both in culture um but even outside you know it's not always product related as I talked about before you know you know uh dreaming big to to produce more cheers could be it's an opera it's a mindset it's an operating principle um and so I think people are smart you know you can you can fool them for a little bit but eventually they catch on and people ask me all kinds of questions and what they find is consistency in my answers and sometimes I'll say things that are unpopular or sometimes that I'll say things that you know maybe I shouldn't say in public I am polite but I still say the truth like I remember I spoke at a large company we'll leave their name out to protect the innocent or the guilty and uh the one of the c-level executives came up to me before and he says listen I know you talk a lot about layoffs and don't talk about them in your session because we have an unannounced uh round of layoffs that's coming because we missed our numbers right so don't don't talk about it he instructed me and I said to him very polite like listen I'm not gonna Target you I'm not going to humiliate you and I'm not going to bring it up but if somebody asks me a question about it I'm going to talk about it and he says I don't want you to I said then you shouldn't have hired me like like you know who I am and this is what you get like I I'm not your monkey you know um I didn't say that um he asked me to think about it and somebody asked the question and I answered it you know and I told them my opinion about about what they do to a culture and I understand that sometimes they happen but they have to happen for the right reasons and they can't happen on a regular basis because the cost is dramatic the damage we do to the culture is dramatic so it's really really really has to be worth it to do that much damage and that much cost you get the point and so um I think to be effective preachers which um some of you will be naturally better at than others it's not a problem this is why we have each other we're Partners but part of your job in senior leadership is to is to is to embody love of the brand which doesn't necessarily mean you know being a preacher it doesn't you don't have to necessarily stand on stages but you do get to find fun ways to bring it to life like starting a meeting like you can start every meeting talking about it like dick Robinson who used to run Scholastic they had an amazing cause which is to inspire children to love reading and he would bring it up in every meeting remember what our cause is it's to inspire kids to deliver and he was constantly reminding people and people loved it and believed in it it's why they worked there I bring up our cause 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 I talk about it constantly I bring it up in our own meetings with our own team I make no assumptions that everybody knows it no matter how many times they've heard me say it and I think I think that's what it means to be a preacher which is look at real preachers you know people who talk about their um their faith it it people people who talk about their children right it's like Ugh more about your kids right it's like people when they have love for something all they want to do is tell you about it and that's what it means to have that's what I think it means to be a preacher it means to have love can you wait for the mic one second question here in the back in your books and conferences you talk about the generational Gap especially for newcomers into the workforce as senior leaders here what advice can you give us in practice to become more self-aware foreign and this younger generation seems to be getting harder because they're way more activists millennials were difficult but this younger generation they're more activist which when it's you know when it's like climate change we love it but like when you're like the intern and you're sending an email to the CEO going I don't think that you like it's like you know there's other ways to do that um uh it starts with empathy it starts with empathy and we have to understand it doesn't it's For Better or For Worse the changing nature of what work has become in our lives if you go back a bunch of decades it used to be that you got your sense of purpose from church you got your sense of community from bowling league you got you had you you knew your neighbors you barbecued with them on the weekends and work we were I was loyal to work and work was loyal to me at some point I'd get a gold watch aside there's an entire generation that when I talk about the gold watch they have no idea what I'm talking about right that's how much the world has changed um and and work was simply a place that I made a living to pay my bills but there was I still enjoyed my you know I I it was still loyalty over the course of time attendance church attendance is down bowling clubs don't exist anymore we don't talk to our neighbors we become very insular and what's happened is all of that pressure is now being put on the office I now expect my company to be the place where I get my purpose the place I get my friendships the place I get my community at the place I get my social life now we've also added the place you have to agree with all of my politics right that's a new one and it's even now especially during covet it's gone up even higher especially for this young group where you also have to be my my therapists my therapy I'm going to bring all of my problems to work and where we the idea of emotional professionalism seems to have gone away you know where you actually see people sitting in meetings like this you're like what's going on having a bad day right that's emotionally unprofessional right you can I want you to bring your emotions to work I want you to bring whole your whole self to work but but for the same reason that we exercise emotional professionalism in other aspects of Our Lives we also do it at work so one of the struggles of this young generation is they are not equipped on how to deal with stress they're just less equipped than previous generations for various reasons including social media internet and all that and you know parenting and all the rest of it there's many reasons for it but they're really not good at dealing with stress they're really bad at dealing with confrontation they're so confrontation avoidable that they would rather ghost someone then break up with them after dating them for six months right that they would rather quit their job than ask their boss for a raise and usually in spectacular fashion like you don't value me you don't pay me enough you're like if you just asked I would have given you a raise we love you but they quit because they're just afraid of the conversation so they're very intimidated by confrontation they're ill-equipped to deal with stress there's an emotional immaturity emotional and professionalism right and this it's not a good thing or a bad thing it just is and so us having empathy and understanding that is important and so it raises the question how are they dealing with their stress not well and so there's a new phenomenon that I'm seeing happening in a lot of offices where especially young people are finding the one or two empathetic the empaths on the team and they're going to them with all of their problems and it's not the traditional I hate my boss I hate my job venting about work is fine I have no issue with that but it's I hate my mom I don't know what I want to do with my life when am I going to leave my house what I you know my boyfriend's not working out my girlfriend's not working out like every problem in my life on this one or two people at work and we've had it happen on our team we had three people quit and I got a little team I got three people who quit because they said they were burnt out and I was like I know how much work you do what do you mean you're burnt out so I'm like do you have another job on the side how can it be burnt out you know [Applause] what I discovered is they were the impasse on the team and everybody was calling them to unload they were burnt out because they were taking on everybody's stress and they were exhausted they couldn't take it anymore and they just quit and when I talked about this publicly I had a 23 year old come up to me in one of the companies and said I do that and so we have to recognize they are struggling in a changing chaotic crazy world right now where there's so much uncertainty in this world like like the world is always uncertain but my God it's War and the countries added each other's throat and there's Challenger and the global warming and it's just insane these poor kids and they have no outlet they don't know how to deal with it so my my big challenge my big uh it's a challenge for all of us is how do we hold space for them and the problem is is they don't even recognize when we're doing the right thing for them that's the hardest part a lot of anger um but it's it's gonna the problem is it's going to take a bit like we're in a period of extreme flux and it's it's not going to settle for a little bit where it's going to be very bumpy a very bumpy road for the next few years there's no right answer and you will be you will be um you know no good deed will go unpunished you know but but but just keep trying because they're people they're humans and they're struggling sorry for the long answer hello hello first of all Michelle and Simon I I I've been around here for a long time and I just want to say thank you for having the courage to open up the space to even have a conversation like this in a group like this so number one thank you for for that that's very encouraging I think my question is is um you know having Simon and James back to back is very interesting right because we we have to manage the the quarterly earnings and yet we have to have the the faith to invest and make the right decisions for the long time so Simon how do we better manage that that that inevitable tug of war between those those two very important things that we have to do the and versus the or and again I'm tension is fine there's nothing wrong with tension um there's but it's recognizing that and it goes back to the analogy I gave before which is hitting a number doesn't mean the game is over and missing a number doesn't mean the game is over you know and recognizing that that that we have to survive is more important that we have to we have to one of the fascinating things during covid was because most companies went into such survival mode that literally zero companies were concerned with what their competition was doing literally zero no one cared about their competition they cared about survival well that's the right attitude regardless of what the economy is like don't worry about what your competition is doing they're doing great right worry about what you're doing the only time you worry about your other competitors is if they do something better than you and you can learn from them because their strengths reveal to your weaknesses and so there's nothing wrong with the tension between the short term and long term as long as you know that it's not equal it's it's this long term is always more important always because if you focus successfully in short term you're building a short-term company look at GE it's a shadow of its form of self and it's leadership you have permission from the highest levels to think that way you have permission of the highest levels to dream big and reimagine how we think about our business and um and inevitably if you're going to challenge the status quo which is in challenge the way the public markets currently work where you're forced to make decisions from the outside that you know are bad for your business every every senior executive of a public company knows that big Open Secret like we all know that right um that if we're going to start pushing against those tensions we're not going to do it an angry and aggressive way but we're going to start pushing and there's plenty of examples of companies that are starting to push you know CVS when they took all the cigarettes out of their um out of out of their aisles because it didn't align with their purpose Wall Street had a conniption turns turns out all the ebitda although the um not the the uh yeah it's the I've forgotten the specific margin but the everything came back within a week and the stock price went crazy and the thing that the analysts didn't know is loyalty from customers and employees skyrocketed skyrocketed that people would chose to spend more money at CVS they didn't lose any money um when American Airlines decided to give uh pay Rises to their flight attendants and their pilots out of contract where Wall Street demanded that they asked for something in return or not do it wait till the contract expires and American Airlines said no they're the lowest paid employees in the in the industry we have to do right by them and ask for nothing in return American Airlines actually does something that's very sophisticated that I really appreciated um they have bifurcated their their shareholder community so when they say that they're shareholder driven they've actually bifurcated the group into long-term holders and short-term holders and they actually Focus exclusively on the long-term holders because the short-term ones are fair weathered fans they don't actually care what kind of business you're running and if you're doing well they invest in you anyway and so what what American Airlines did is they literally ignored this group of investors and they pay attention to these so when they called those investors and said we're about to give this this big pay rise those investors went it's the right thing to do go ahead and do it we believe in you we know the Stock's going to get hammered for a short period but that's okay do it though that's being shareholder driven in a healthy way I thought that was very clever but again they're pushing up against the limits they're not they're not coming in with a sledgehammer Simon let me just make one question here and then I'll go to you and helica uh one thing that to me is interesting I'm just wondering if you can give us some ideas on that I was in can uh and we saw that for the first time like majority of the Lions and awards they were given to brands that presented work related to purpose sustainability causes so it's it's almost like if this dominated the creative environment and there was a lot of creativity but linked to a purposeful execution and this morning here we were talking to an analyst that was saying that for the first time in many many months and quarters majority of the conversations that he has been having with investors is not moving around escg sustainability and things like that so what do you think that the the current situation of recession War economic crisis and this new generation coming uh we will provoke as a change so one thing that are emerging Trends and disruptions that will come so what are we going to see five years down the road in can what's the new big thing coming so I think we forget that companies are living breathing animals and you know the ones that thrive over the long term are able to adapt uh with changing politics changing tastes changing culture changing Technologies and we've seen entire Industries disappear because they were incapable of adapting to new technology the internet's the best example like literally didn't know what to do they just went out of business um or like if you look at television or movies or music uh or or publishing they're all still playing defense still trying to catch up and figure out this internet thing because they have these old business models um and I think it's a it's a powerful thing when Larry when the uh The Business Roundtable you know makes a public statement about the importance of the importance of purpose weirdly signed by you know Jamie dimon you know the CEO of Johnson Johnson the CEO of of progressive you know Johnson Johnson had to pay 550 million dollar fine for its role in the opioid crisis you know Jamie dimon you know thinks purpose is how much you give back to your community like they don't they're not really good Representatives what purpose is but the point is the pressure from from the market the pressure from from young people and employees that this really matters to us is actually forcing these CEOs who they may have had to come to Jesus moment that year all three of them simultaneously may have happened but uh uh but I just love that it means that the thing that we stand for the things that we're talking about here are actually shaping business and where for too many years it was those folks who are forcing us to do it their way now we're actually applying the pressure and they're starting to talk like us even if they don't believe it and so I I I'm less concerned about what the advertising looks like in a five years because I think the advertising is a reflection I think the advertising simply reflects what people want to hear so the fact that they want to hear that I think is fantastic um my aspiration is that companies actually start doing it and not talking about it that that it's one thing to make a piece of marketing about it uh a piece of advertising about it it's quite another thing to make a strategic decision back at your company about it so I'm hoping that the the actions follow the words um uh more um but yeah no it seems to be going in the right direction a moment ago Judy's cost about the relevance of the narrative um my question is if you have any advice or a benchmark on how to do this in a very bold manner outside how to position a good Narrative of our purpose that you've helped us to create outside so there's many ways to do narrative there's no right way I mean one of the ways it shows up obviously isn't going to be in some of your marketing especially your brand work of course I think there are some very clever things you can do at a product level and this is what I love about purpose when you have clear and compelling purpose it starts to make you creative right at every level um so for example and again learn learn from your worthy Rivals do you remember a bunch of years ago one of the soda companies I think was Coca-Cola they put people's names on cans and you just remember just for a while it was just a marketing thing I mean you could write things on cans um uh that that capture the spirit of what cheers means I mean you could write cheers but but you can actually write statements like this is for this is because I this cheers because I love you choose because congratulations like you can write those things on the cans and you can start to do it in product that's that's narrative you're starting to tell your story through your product also the way you talk about um your jobs quite frankly you know if if I ask the average employee at ABI if I were to sit next to them on a plane and say what do you do the dreaded question right what do you do oh I'm a marketing manager at Anheuser-Busch okay right um what it what would it mean if they were to actually say something at high at a higher level than that oh um I get to help find new ways to bring people together to celebrate each other and take care of each other that's amazing how do you do that I'm actually a marketing manager at an Azure bush right where when narrative starts to seep into the into the culture people start talking about the cause before they start talking about their jobs you know um uh Marines if you ask if you ask somebody in this in the Army what do you do to say oh I'm I work in the Infantry blah blah blah if you ask Maureen what do you do this I'm a Marine that's what comes first it's the global right it's it's the membership um I think I think every time you go give a every time you show up on television and every time you you know you give a public speech goes back to that story of um Phil Knight and I'm not proposing you you know you tell Phil Knight Phil Knight type story but the point is is like you're going to go on Squawk Box and they're going to say they're going to ask you a question and your ability to talk about your cause not you know sometimes the literal words but sometimes in interpretive words um and how you imagine the company coming to and what bold means you know what what dreaming big means and sharing some of those dreams and like we're a company that says we dream big let me tell you what we mean by let me tell you some of the dreams we have and you can talk about how you're you're changing your incentive structures you can talk about how you're challenging old Notions of business you can talk about how the world is changing and you're not going to follow the change you're going to lead the change this is all narrative and it all is based on the same the same core so to answer your question there's no right answer but if you listen to all of the different narratives they all have a flavor you know it's like somebody asked before like what what is how am I an effective preacher if you go watch any video I've made and if you go read any book that I've written you can you can feel that there's a theme that theme is always there and people are smart people can discern themes and so the more consistent you are in all the different ways you bring it to life people start to understand what that theme is like Disney it's always there I think we have time for one more right that's right I see Philippe there nope Simon um how do you see companies measuring success towards the purpose like usually how our company is measuring or like if they are far enough far or close to to achieving an up your purpose or your dream you know so purpose is always idealized right like as I said before I imagine a world in which right I know I'm not going to get there like when Martin Luther King said I have a dream like one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children right like all of these things they're all striving and the the Milestones that we pass make us feel like we're making progress and that's why metrics are really important and Milestones are really important and the most important thing is context there's nothing wrong with quarterly numbers annual numbers the only question I would ask is to what end to what end like you know I was talking to a young entrepreneur last night and she's looking for investment and one of her potential investors said um how long is it going to take you to hit a hundred million dollar revenues and I said don't take that person's investment show me one article one I just need one show me one article in hbr one study I don't care that demonstrates that hyper growth or high speed growth is good for is good for the company on any level the answer is there are none the pressure comes from that person trying to achieve their financial goals so they put pressure on you to make your short-term goals right and so um and so there's nothing wrong with goals as long as we understand the context and the purpose of that goal right um I like to think of money like fuel right and a car is the company and the purpose is the destination right and if money is fuel it makes the car go you absolutely have to money to make the company go you have to have you have to there is no dreaming big if you have no fuel you can have the most beautiful car in the world and yet if you've got no fuel it's pointless but we don't own a car to buy fuel right we don't own we don't have companies simply for the money right it's the destination you want to be able to go somewhere and the and the passengers are the employees and they're excited not about the fuel in the car how much fuel do we have no one gets excited by that we get excited where we're going we're going to Alaska are we near and it's and and that's the analogy and when there's a roadblock if you're only driven by by uh the metrics then the way we think about money the way we think about corporate goals the same way we think about our goal is to drive 200 miles a day our goal is to make x amount of money right that's how we think about it well what happens if you drive 150 miles is that a problem what happens if there's a roadblock do you know what to do you start freaking out and panicking because you're going to miss your numbers we're Purpose Driven companies that know their destinations in the idealized state they take detours and to the outside world that looks like you're going sideways or slowly but you know you're just going around and that's how companies actually look you know it's circuitous and messy and purpose helps us keep focused on the very far distant future so we know we're going in the right vector even if somebody can't tell we're going the right direction and so people have to understand the purpose of the goals you're setting and how they're contributing to something and start talking like we and our p l I don't have the word profit on my p l it doesn't exist on my p l it says freedom I damn well want more freedom this month than I had last month right freedom to say no to things that I want to do freedom to give it away freedom to take care of my people I want freedom because profit means nothing so I'm trying to contextualize all of these words that have no inherent inherent magic to them so yeah think of money like Fuel and fuel drives your purpose be Purpose Driven and talk about the place you're trying to get to and talk about the world that you imagine and you damn well better make a lot of fuel to get there because it's going to be expensive and it's going to take a long time thank you both thanks so much okay

Channel: Simon Sinek

Views: 37,278

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

Id: 0HOagqnERlA

Length: 90min 12sec (5412 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023